Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Still Life
Page 199
Chicago
Imagine; the Ministry of Incremental Triumphs unveils its latest "purity initiative," complete with annotated euphemisms and ceremonial graphs, ostensibly designed to lessen Chicago’s murder-shooting rate and a reason to rebuke federal meddling. The Mayor first ensures that the Teacher’s Union approves, and then signs it into law.
The new and old aristocratic protagonists glance up from their aperitifs, offer a faint nod of acknowledgment, and return to debating the merits of a discontinued cologne or the proper way to fold a letter of exile. Their disinterest is not passive; it's performative, almost sacred. They bear witness not by resisting, but by refusing to care in the prescribed way.
This opens up a fascinating tension:
The Archive of Concern is a banned text, and they use its pages to line birdcages.
They host salons where the only rule is that no one may speak of the present.
One character insists that moral outrage is "a vulgarity best left to the annotated classes."