The Big Bads Don't Announce Themselves
Friday Flashpoint June 5, AD2026; RIP Anthony Head
Welcome to Friday Flashpoint where I analyze and expose important historical and social developments impacting America’s place in the world.
Happy Friday. First, as many readers may know, I am a bit of a nerd, and so I must begin with a tribute to Anthony Head, a renowned actor and singer known best in the USA and Canada for his portrayal of Rupert Giles on the iconic Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series and also as an excellent Uther Pendragon in the BBC series Merlin. In addition to his role as the prime minister in Little Britain, contemporary audiences are perhaps familiar with him as Rupert Mannion in Ted Lasso. RIP Anthony Stewart Head (20 February 1954 – 5 June 2026), who passed “peacefully of complications from pneumonia, surrounded by his family.”1
The late Mr. Head specialized in playing figures who wield institutional authority to a purpose, slaying vampires or ruling Camelot with an iron fist. But there was always a purpose to their actions, and he brought that forth in his performances. The current performance of the American state is not quite at the marquee level. And the world can tell.
This week’s current events all run in the direction of international resignation and domestic agitation over American corruption. Both tell us something about the nature of abused power in the American system. The genius of any successful oligarchy lies in its ability to sell status in place of equity. Think of the Southern oligarchy before the rebellion against the Union, or the Putinist Russian elite before the debacle in Ukraine.
A population does not need to own a piece of the system to be possessed by that same system. This is especially true when the media of that society refrain from scrutinizing a corrupted elite, which becomes the case when such an elite realize that it is wiser to buy and monopolize information rather than ban it using the state. People are more likely to recognize 1984’s Big Brother if he comes wearing a party uniform and less likely if he is divided into a dozen corporate suits with the same agenda of controlling the flow of information.
Part of this is robbing the citizens of their democratic philology, the vocabulary by which a free people name what is being done to them. Liberty has a language, one that includes the ability to articulate grievances and identify maladministration, injustice, and tyranny. It is the legacy language of denunciation and also of learning from past example. When we are robbed of this legacy, when despite the massive amounts we spend on our school systems, we do not take the time to educate our fellow citizens about figures like Sejanus of Rome, Dionysius of Syracuse, Pisistratus of Athens, or Oliver Cromwell of England, we lose our ability to collectively identify a growing problem.
Without that shared language of warning, we are left to rediscover, and rename, at great cost, what previous generations had to suffer through to learn. Unfortunately, in reality, the big bads do not announce themselves. They rely on our forgetting.
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