I don’t want to hear Theresa May going on about “our values, our country, and our way of life” as though there are a bunch of other places in the world where everyone thinks it’s just fine when children get blown up. Her values, her country, and her way of life were always going to set that myth in motion. They were always going to crown mourning with some jingoistic patriotism. Perhaps this can illuminate, negatively, the last use of political melancholy: to render interminable and material the mourning that would otherwise float away in the endlessly reverberating chatter of the blitz spirit.
Blitz spirit is a phrase that maybe gives away too much. It makes me think not only of the idiotically hopeful will forged under bombardment while all around lie dying, but also the spirit that has turned entirely to brief, striking and stupid reflex, the dim and terrifying lightning flashes of prehistory from which we have not ripped ourselves. History is not easily measured. In the last year the smallest parts of my daily chores have seemed to weigh more heavily as ritual: bathing takes on the character of some ceremonial ablution, shaving makes me feel violent and primaeval. These are, even though almost entirely private, mass phenomena – or at least the weight with which I feel them is somewhat shared. I’m sure people meant well when they rushed on to the streets this morning to give blood, but the whole performance was a piece of archaic myth that certainly goes as far back as Abraham and Isaac. Those who shudder at the thought of children sacrificed offer instead themselves to let blood. But the whole thing remains part of a terrible and terrifying sacrificial economy.
Today unusual words seem enchanted in the media: “cowardice”, “resilience”, “inspired”. The news has become a grim parable of realist fortitude. Brave enough to let her tell us what our values, our country, our way of life should be. To get on with it without moaning, as long as it is draped in a union jack. To me there is bravery only in that mourning which doesn’t use the deaths of children to prop up the edifice of a desperate political project.