Ode to Hubris

You look at me as you shuffle by. More to the point, you look down upon me—with contempt, with pity, with malice. Some of you spit at my feet. A few of you are bold enough to relieve yourselves on the damp newspapers that serve as my blanket. One or two drunks even defecate on me, muttering curses as they stumble away.

I sit there and take it. I have no choice.

My eyes are swollen from the beatings, blood is matted to my face, dried and hanging from my shattered nose like some stalactite of horror. My fingers are wrapped in dirty, dank cloth bandages in a poor attempt at trying to get my broken bones to heal. Even the dog—the half-starved, mangy mutt that had been hanging around me for a while—looks at me and takes pity. He may have two weeks of life left in him, and he pities me.

My feet are bare, infected, reeking of rot. Maybe I too only have a short time left.

Finally, a good break.

It wasn’t always this way.

Once, not long ago, I was a man of influence. A man of wealth, power, prestige. I had a secure job, a loving wife, children, and grandchildren. My name carried weight in boardrooms and backrooms alike. Women wanted me. Men wanted to be me. My words moved markets, toppled corporations, built empires. Captains of industry sought my counsel; world leaders took my calls. A single breath from my lips could make mountains crumble or economies soar.

Power is a drug—sweet, intoxicating, and inescapably fatal. I was too drunk to see it. Too blind to recognize my own delusions.

So when he announced his candidacy, I didn’t hesitate.

He had been disgraced before, ousted in scandal, laughed out of office as a failure. But I had a personal vendetta against the current president. It wasn’t that the man had done anything particularly wrong. No, I despised him because he was ontheir team. And I was on mine. That was all that mattered.

My convictions were not about policies or principles—only sides.

I threw my full weight behind our candidate. I rallied, I spoke, I wrote. I painted him as a misunderstood genius, a necessary force for change. Out with the old, in with the new, I told myself. How bad could he really be?

The answer came too late.

There are some basic rules of nature that should be remembered. Shit flows downhill, free advice is worth what you pay for, and most importantly—a lion never has to tell you it is a lion.

But we are human. We have biases, and we will always see our way as the right way.

And God gave us dominion over the earth? Sometimes, I think He moonlights as a comedian.

I often find myself wondering if this is how the German people of the 1930s felt about Hitler. More to the point, I can’t help but wonder how all the Jews that supported Hitler in the beginning felt when they saw what they had done. When they saw exactly what their hubris had unleashed upon their own people.

Did they lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling, sick with guilt? Did they whisper to themselves in the darkness, trying to justify their early belief in him? Did they tell themselves that theycouldn’t have known, that no one could have foreseen what he would become?

I tell myself that sometimes. That I couldn’t have known.

But the truth is, I could have known. I should have known.

And so we got him elected.

The celebrations were wild, euphoric. We toasted to a new era, to a return to greatness. But in the drunken haze of victory, none of us realized what we had truly done.

We had not won a war.

We had unleashed a plague.

He learned from his past mistakes, corrected them, overcompensated for them. The moment he took office, he moved with surgical precision. He crushed his opposition before they had a chance to resist. By the time we understood the scale of his ambition, it was already too late.

The government? Subjugated.

The military? Loyal only to him.

The press? Silenced, then repurposed.

Private industry? Absorbed into the state.

And we, his most ardent supporters, were the first to be discarded.

I lost everything. My wife and children were deported despite being citizens—their productivity deemed insufficient for the new order. My businesses were seized, my assets confiscated. The wealth and power I had once wielded like a weapon were now hollow echoes in a broken world.

They marked me as one of his early disciples, my unwavering support a stain that could never be erased.

When the soldiers came, they didn’t even grant me the mercy of a bullet. Instead, they carved my sin into my flesh, tattooing my forehead with the name of the tyrant I had helped create.

A soldier strikes me with the butt of his rifle. The crack of bone is like a gunshot in the empty streets. The world dissolves into blackness.

And then—

I wake with a start.

I am in my bed.

My silk sheets are damp with sweat. My wife stirs beside me, murmuring in her sleep. The morning sun filters through the curtains, golden and warm. The air is still, calm.

The scent of coffee drifts from the hallway. The soft hum of the television buzzes in the corner of the room.

It is still Election Day.

The news anchor announces early voter turnout. The candidates' faces flash across the screen, their smiles frozen in carefully calculated charm.

My heart is pounding. My hands tremble.

It was all just a dream.

Or was it?

The images still linger in my mind, vivid and sharp. More than just a nightmare—this was something else. A warning. A prophecy.

There is no doubt—there can be no doubt—that this man is cut from the same cloth as Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. The tyrants of the past whisper his name, their souls dancing in delight at his rise.

I can see the ancient Druids with their celebrations of fire and sacrifice, dancing in the cold darkness. The flames illuminate their faces in that haunting way only fire can.

He thrives on the cult of personality, basking in the blind devotion of those who see him as a savior. And why wouldn’t they?

History has been rewritten, sterilized, stripped of its horror and warnings. Schools teach versions of the past so sanitized they may as well be fairy tales. Gone are the lessons of true tyranny, the tales of oppression, the slow death of democracies. They have been scrubbed clean, replaced with comfortable lies.

He is the perfect storm—stepping into a world where people are too ignorant to recognize him for what he is.

Maybe he is evil.

Maybe we deserve this.

Maybe this is hell, and we are only just beginning to understand it.

How will the future ever forgive us?

I stare at my reflection in the mirror. The deep lines in my face seem darker than before, my eyes sunken, my skin gray.

I have done so much, so wrong, that even death has turned its merciful back on me.

Outside, the city stirs to life. Polling stations open. Lines form.

I already know the outcome.

I already know what comes next.

But this time, maybe I can stop it.

Or maybe fate is already written.

Maybe this is a second chance.

Or maybe—

I never woke up at all.

—-Keith