Not Without Incident: Questioning Big Brother's Platitudes

An Atrophied Body Politic: The Reign of Insect Politicians

“I’m saying… I’m saying I – I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over… and the insect is awake.”[i] Seth Brundle says this to Veronica Quaife amid his grotesque transformation into what he calls the ‘Brundlefly’. Through this line, which follows the often-quoted monologue on ‘insect politics’, Brundle is telling Quaife that he will soon complete his transformation into fly, shedding all his humanity and the awareness and consciousness that is an integral part of being human. Quaife, after saying she does not understand what Brundle is trying to say, is told by Brundle that he will hurt her if she stays, illustrating his acceptance of the monstrosity he is becoming.

David Cronenberg’s The Fly was released in 1986, at the height of the AIDS crisis. Many see Brundle’s plight as an analogy to the plight of those devastated by AIDS, however, The Fly, as Cronenberg states himself, is about the effect of aging, a process we all undergo at some point. In an essay published by The Paris Review, Cronenberg talks about Franz Kafka’s revered short story, The Metamorphosis, and compares the predicament of its protagonist, Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find that he has transformed into a beetle, to that of Brundle in his film, The Fly.[ii] On the line where Brundle declares the dream of the insect who wishes he was a man over, and the insect awake, Cronenberg writes that it is a warning to his lover, as he is now “a creature with no compassion and no empathy. He has shed his humanity like the shell of a cicada nymph, and what has emerged is no longer human. He is also suggesting that to be a human, a self-aware consciousness, is a dream that cannot last, an illusion.”[iii] He argues that the difference between Kafka’s Samsa and his Brundlefly is that Samsa is “no threat to anyone but himself”, as he is left to rot in isolation by his family, and at the end of the story, Samsa sees himself as a burden on his family and he starves himself.[iv]

As brilliant as Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is, it does not depict the transformation into insect, or monster, as a revelatory process, but instead it introduces us to Samsa fully transformed, and the entirety of the story is him and his family dealing with his new, hideous form.

Cronenberg opens his essay by remarking that he is, at the time of writing, 70 years old, and he compares himself waking to his aging reflection to Samsa waking to learn of his horrifying change. He writes that “we have both awakened to a forced awareness of what we really are, and that awareness is profound and irreversible; in each case, the delusion soon proves to be a new, mandatory reality, and life does not continue as it did.”[v] In both cases, there is a forced realization, a collision with an uncomfortable truth, that our bodies will dramatically change and eventually, decay. In The Fly, Brundle accepts his new reality and after learning that Quaife is likely pregnant with his child, tries to convince her to enter the telepod with him to merge them all into the ‘ultimate family’, “A family of three joined together in one body. More human than I am alone.”[vi] In the end, Brundle’s plan to merge himself with Quaife fails, as Stathis Borans, the other love interest of Quaife, shoots the cables that connect the telepod in which Quaife is placed by Brundle, allowing her to escape. Because of the damage, Brundle comes out of his telepod merged with the bits of metal, a sordid blend of the technology that changed and stripped him of his humanity and the result of his loss of morality and compassion, and he stumbles up to Quaife. He then holds the shotgun barrel to his head, ultimately submitting that with Brundle totally gone, the fly must be killed as it is a danger to everyone else, not just Quaife. This danger is captured by the scene just before Brundle’s plot to merge himself with Quaife is interrupted, where he vomits his corrosive secretions on Borans, dissolving his left hand and right ankle. Brundle cedes to his state of decay, though he initially enjoys the ‘superpowers’ his transformation gives him, like incredible strength, increased stamina, and the ability to walk on walls. He comes to realize that he is becoming less human, not just a different person but a different thing, a grotesque and stomach-churning thing. He is unrecognizable to himself and those who knew him at his peak. Similarly, aging changes us, ravaging our bodies and sometimes, in the case of diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s, transforming us into different people, unrecognizable to our family. Aging is a process we live in fear of, an inevitable event that we work to put off or reverse, however, it will occur no matter what cream or surgery we use to try and delay it.

What Cronenberg calls the ‘new, mandatory reality’ is inescapable, though, as we learned recently in the case of Joe Biden, many worked overtime for years to pretend that the reality we were seeing with our own eyes was not in fact reality, and that it was nothing more than the work of the right-wing press and dastardly ‘cheap fakes’.[vii] Biden has not changed into a fly, like Brundle, but he has evidently decayed and rotted to the point of being unable to function without 24/7 supervision, to the point where he apparently needed aides to remind him where the steps are located on stages where he delivered speeches.[viii] He is clearly a shell of his former self, which was already inhumane and amoral. He is like Brundle in his inhumanity and his moral vacuity. Brundle says of ‘insect politics’ that “Insects… don’t have politics. They’re very… brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can’t trust the insect. I’d like to become the first… insect politician. Y’see, I’d like to, but… I’m afraid, uh…”[ix] Is Biden the first insect politician? He is brutal, or at least, the policies he has advocated for his entire political career are brutal, and he acts without compassion or compromise. Where he does claim to, it is obviously feigned.

Biden’s decay symbolizes the atrophy of the US body politic- stripped of its veneer of humanity and claims to morality, it is brutal and uncompromising. Donald Trump and his ilk are the epitome of it. Underneath this guise of humanitarianism is a truth that many foolishly deny that the government who controls US policy, both domestic and foreign, is the permanent regime.

This scandal, coverup, conspiracy, of Biden’s age and decay doesn’t just prove the dishonesty and cravenness of the corporate media and the Democratic party elite, it proves the existence and power of what I have been referring to as the permanent regime. This is the new, mandatory reality we must see and realize as truth. Many, even conservatives who happily criticize Biden and his regime, will not tirelessly explore the question, “Who is running the government?”, as much they should.[x]

In an interview with NewsNation, Lindy Li, a DNC member, claimed that a “shadow presidency” is making decisions on his behalf, steering his regime.[xi] She also said that “There are people in the White House running things while the president is being shielded from the reality of his own condition.”[xii] Li is just openly admitting the reality of the permanent regime, a shadow presidency is eerily close to what Tom Englehardt calls the ‘shadow government’, a cabal of unelected officials who have their tentacles suctioned firmly on the levers of government.[xiii]

The American people, and the entire West, should be outraged about this, especially those who claim to love democracy and hate despotism. A handful of people no one voted for are running a government that, as written in the constitution, is supposed to be elected by the people. Commentators and ‘experts’ fret at the control that Elon Musk will have in the incoming Trump presidency, but if the news that Biden, a literal zombie, is not controlling the government does not worry them, then they should not be too concerned about Trump 2.0, as aside from tariffs and trade deals it is unlikely that he will be able to instill dramatic or lasting change, as was true in his first term.

The conspiracy theorists who posit that we are all under the control of a reptilian elite who are descendants of an ancient alien race who have lived on earth of thousands of years may be hilariously wrong and misguided, but they are not wrong to assume that those in power in the West are not human, as, given their coldness and callousness, it is inconceivable that someone with even a sliver of humanity could say what they say or do what they do, from justifying mass slaughter to deposing governments it does not approve of. We are of course not ruled by literal reptiles, nor are we ruled by literal insects. However, it could be that we are being ruled by insect politicians who operate in the shadows, unaccountable as the corporate press are also members of the colony. The latest Biden scandal will not raise the questions it should, about the reality and power of the permanent regime. This is what everyone, no matter their political ideology or affiliation, should be outraged about. As he mumbles and shuffles his way out of the White House, pompously trying to channel Dwight Eisenhower in a faux ominous warning about a rising oligarchy (one which he has served his entire life), we must believe what our eyes see, despite those who spent years telling us our eyes were lying.[xiv]

American citizens are spitting venom in each other’s faces, while the permanent regime chuckles and switches puppet strings, though Trump has already proven to be a rogue agent. Biden is a literal puppet, a withered costume. His time in the spotlight may be over, but we now know with certainty that he was not an actor, he was a prop.

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[i] The Fly. 20th Century Fox, 1986.

[ii] Cronenberg, David. “The Beetle and the Fly.” The Paris Review, January 29, 2019. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/17/the-beetle-and-the-fly/.

[iii] Cronenberg. “The Beetle and the Fly.”

[iv] Cronenberg. “The Beetle and the Fly.”

[v] Cronenberg. “The Beetle and the Fly.”

[vi] The Fly. 20th Century Fox, 1986.

[vii] Crawford, in this Face the Nation panel, says the biggest media failure of 2024 was the cover up of Biden’s mental decline: Crawford, Jan, Robert Costa, Scott MacFarlane, Ed O’Keefe, and Caitlin Huey-Burns. “Full Transcript of ‘Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,’ Dec. 29, 2024.” Cbsnews.com. CBS News, December 29, 2024. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-full-transcript-12-29-2024/.

[viii] Linskey, Annie, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes. “How the White House Functioned with a Diminished Biden in Charge.” WSJ. The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/politics/biden-white-house-age-function-diminished-3906a839.

[ix] The Fly. 20th Century Fox, 1986.

[x] Geraghty, Jim. “We’re Already Talking about Joe Biden in the Past Tense.” National Review, December 20, 2024. https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/were-already-talking-about-joe-biden-in-the-past-tense/., Goodwin, Michael. “Michael Goodwin: White House Aides Were Hiding Biden’s Mental Decline, but We All Saw It in Plain Sight.” New York Post, December 22, 2024. https://nypost.com/2024/12/21/opinion/michael-goodwin-white-house-aides-were-hiding-bidens-mental-decline-but-we-all-saw-it-in-plain-sight/., Klavan, Andrew. “Confused Biden Wanders off and Starts World War III.” Dailywire.com. The Daily Wire, November 22, 2024. https://www.dailywire.com/news/confused-biden-wanders-off-and-starts-world-war-iii., and Klein, Philip. “Vote for Biden: Don’t Worry, Other People Are Running the Country.” National Review, July 8, 2024. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/vote-for-biden-dont-worry-other-people-are-running-the-country/.

[xi] Palmer, Ewan. “Joe Biden Not in Charge, Advisers Running ‘Shadow Presidency’—DNC Member.” Newsweek, December 23, 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-shadow-presidency-lindy-li-wall-street-journal-2004992.

[xii] Palmer. “Joe Biden Not in Charge, Advisers Running ‘Shadow Presidency’—DNC Member.”

[xiii] Engelhardt, Tom, and Glenn Greenwald. Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2014.

[xiv] Cancryn, Adam. “Biden Warns of Rising Democracy-Threatening ‘Oligarchy’ in Grim Farewell Speech – POLITICO.” POLITICO. Politico, January 15, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/15/biden-oligarchy-farewell-speech-00198565.

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References

Cancryn, Adam. “Biden Warns of Rising Democracy-Threatening ‘Oligarchy’ in Grim Farewell Speech – POLITICO.” POLITICO. Politico, January 15, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/15/biden-oligarchy-farewell-speech-00198565.

Crawford, Jan, Robert Costa, Scott MacFarlane, Ed O’Keefe, and Caitlin Huey-Burns. “Full Transcript of ‘Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,’ Dec. 29, 2024.” Cbsnews.com. CBS News, December 29, 2024. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-full-transcript-12-29-2024/.

Cronenberg, David. “The Beetle and the Fly.” The Paris Review, January 29, 2019. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/17/the-beetle-and-the-fly/.

Engelhardt, Tom, and Glenn Greenwald. Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2014.

Geraghty, Jim. “We’re Already Talking about Joe Biden in the Past Tense.” National Review, December 20, 2024. https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/were-already-talking-about-joe-biden-in-the-past-tense/.

Goodwin, Michael. “Michael Goodwin: White House Aides Were Hiding Biden’s Mental Decline, but We All Saw It in Plain Sight.” New York Post, December 22, 2024. https://nypost.com/2024/12/21/opinion/michael-goodwin-white-house-aides-were-hiding-bidens-mental-decline-but-we-all-saw-it-in-plain-sight/.

Klavan, Andrew. “Confused Biden Wanders off and Starts World War III.” Dailywire.com. The Daily Wire, November 22, 2024. https://www.dailywire.com/news/confused-biden-wanders-off-and-starts-world-war-iii.

Klein, Philip. “Vote for Biden: Don’t Worry, Other People Are Running the Country.” National Review, July 8, 2024. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/vote-for-biden-dont-worry-other-people-are-running-the-country/.

Linskey, Annie, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes. “How the White House Functioned with a Diminished Biden in Charge.” WSJ. The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/politics/biden-white-house-age-function-diminished-3906a839.

Palmer, Ewan. “Joe Biden Not in Charge, Advisers Running ‘Shadow Presidency’—DNC Member.” Newsweek, December 23, 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-shadow-presidency-lindy-li-wall-street-journal-2004992.

The Fly. 20th Century Fox, 1986.