The Provocative and the Instructive
Powerful literature reflects the world for the world. Whether we ground its conception in Aristotlean mimesis or the romantic ideal of subjective expression, what we see are versions of the world with human beings at the center. Sometimes in the literary reflection we see commemorated the best in our possibilities, and other times those aspects of ourselves that conscience recommends we avoid. The work of Franz Kafka, while curious, entertaining and masterful, impresses most readers with a general feeling of dread. His is seen as a literature of entrapment, one that defines our personal limits while apotheosizing from material to essence the forces that set them.
It's in this capacity that Kafka's work today is a valued tool in the labs of our leftist punditry. Whereas it could be used for learning, the left employs Kafka in order to compare and contrast his world with our own. Using his texts as a litmus test for the Horrible in the United States has its purposes. The work so keenly reflects what is happening today that it's not difficult to slip into the supernatural belief that Kafka was writing specifically for us. The correspondence between the stories and contemporary reality stoke fear, disbelief, and anger in concerned citizens. Kafka's short story "Before the Law" can be seen as less analogy than prophecy in the age of the PATRIOT and National Defense Authorization Acts, and the malignancies that have metastasized outward from the lump in the breast of the United States circa the War on Terror render the prophetic plain.
The story describes one man's futile attempt to gain access into what is presumably his country's symbolic and functioning judiciary. He arrives one day from the country to find a single doorkeeper standing at the entrance. Requesting admittance, "the doorkeeper says that he can't grant him admittance now," perhaps later, "'but not now.'" The man then waits unsuccessfully. At times, driven by anger and desperation, he tries to bribe his way in. As the years stretch on his frustrated curses thin into quiet grumblings, and in hindsight it must have seemed a singular stroke of luck that the whole while he was given a stool to sit on. At the end of his life the man asks the doorkeeper why nobody else has tried to access the Law. So the old, feeble man can hear him, the doorkeeper leans over and roars, "No one could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you. I'm going to go and shut it now."
Chris Hedges is one voice on the left who has used the story comparatively in order to demonstrate that the Kafkaesque has become a matter of American domestic policy. With regard to the current trend of Islamophobia, Hedges writes:
Justice has become as unattainable for Muslim activists in the United States as it was for Kafka’s frustrated petitioner. The draconian legal mechanisms that condemn Muslim Americans who speak out publicly about the outrages we commit in the Middle East have left many, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, wasting away in supermax prisons. These citizens posed no security threat. But they dared to speak a truth about the sordid conduct of our nation that the state found unpalatable. And in the bipartisan war on terror, waged by Republicans and Democrats, this ugly truth in America is branded seditious.
Linking US domestic and foreign policy and Kafka's nightmare fiction requires no stretch of the imagination. If we recognize the three major tropes found in the writer's work, we see just how easy it is:1) intricate networks of authority; 2) individuals ensnared in the networks; 3) the inability of individuals to respond to them in meaningful ways. With the sanctioned revocation of the almost-sacred writ of Habeas Corpus to citizens and non-citizens suspected of terrorism, the comparison is one that a child could make. However justified Hedges is in drawing the connection, and however effective it is in sounding the fascism alarums in his readers, the deeper significance of the story is undercut when we see it only as an illustration of state tyranny.
Part of the problem with using old literature to explain our present moment is we tend to cherry-pick for examination only those things that we find expedient to our cause. Hedge's use of "Before the Law" is a good example of this on multiple levels, not the least because the story is not a story at all in and of itself, but is actually cherry-picked from Kafka's novel The Trial. Those who have not read the novel are probably unaware of this, as the story is a staple in collections of his shorter works. Though whoever has read the novel will immediately recognize the story as the parable told to Josef K. by the priest in the dark of the cathedral toward the novel's end during a conversation between the two. A brief summary of the novel will be helpful here.
Josef K. is a young, respectable and successful bank official who, "one morning, without having done anything truly wrong," is arrested. Perhaps he was the victim of "slander," or perhaps, while not committing a truly wrong offense, he did in fact commit a wrong worthy of prosecution. Whatever the case may be, we never discover precisely why Josef K. is arrested and put on trial. The matter is irrelevant as the novel's primary subject is following K. during the year his trial takes place, his absurd, convoluted pursuit of justice, and the final verdict which takes his life by way of a knife "thrust in his heart." As for how the legal system works in The Trial, the court assumes anyone accused of a crime guilty. Defendant's find themselves in a battle that cannot be won. The only presumable chance a defendant has of success is if the court loses his file or his lawyers are able to defer final judgment for, ideally, the remaining years of his natural life. Note how neither scenario results in acquittals. In a sense, everyone in The Trial is guilty, but only some are unlucky enough to be prosecuted for their guilt.
Taken by itself, "Before the Law" does indeed have two feet to stand on, but it's in the context of the novel, and more specifically the conversation between K. and the priest that its meaning for a reader can reach its zenith. First of all, the parable is only delivered because K. finds the priest friendly and "an exception among those who belong to the court. I trust you," he confides, "more than I do any of them I've met so far. I can speak openly with you." In turn the priest warns K. not to deceive himself. K. wonders how he might be doing this, and the priest replies, "You're deceiving yourself about the court," and then tells K. the parable that is written in the "introductory texts to the Law."
The parable that Hedge's cites, then, is originally told in the context of deception, in particular the Accused Josef K.'s alleged self-deception either in regard to his distrust of the court or the trust he places in the solemn priest. In fact, the parable itself is classified in the introductory texts to the Law as pertaining directly to a deception of faith or suspicion. Which one is uncertain, but for a reader the parable is restricted when taken without the subsequent conversation and outside the context of the travail of Josef K..
K.'s immediate reading is similar to the one Hedges implies by juxtaposing it with the real-life story of Mr. Hashmi: Although we are provided the illusion that the Law is accessible and that it serves us, in practice it is a closed system which results in the denial of justice to the individual who seeks it. Now this reading indeed deals with deception, but it assumes that the supplicant in "Before the Law" is the one deceived by the doorkeeper, and Mr. Hashmi and the American public in Hedges' article by the United States' government.
In each case, K. and Hedges neglect the possibility that the supplicant, Mr. Hashmi and, by extension, the public are deceiving themselves. On the one hand, the doorkeeper does not necessarily lie when he tells the supplicant that admission is possible- it simply doesn't happen during his lifetime. On the other hand, old and recent laws specifying the treatment of citizens and non-citizens, or enemy combatants and non-combatants suspected of terrorism are very clear: if you find yourself suspected of such activity, your life is effectively over, for the rudiments of the traditional courts, such as a right to a fair trial, or any trial at all, are no longer available to you. While the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was bad, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 carries with it a uniquely grim weight. Under this law Americans suspected of activities of or related to terrorism can be subject to indefinite detention without the assistance of legal representation. In other words, like the pitiful character waiting a lifetime before the Law, the person unlucky enough to be trapped in this nightmare will inhabit a special place outside the legal sphere - in a society whose binding glue is law, this person is effectively vaporized.
I do not know every motivation that went into the signing of this law. What I do know is that its passage followed three plus months of Occupy Wall Street activity, which, if you crunch the numbers, implies that the law in part may have been motivated by political factors. When collectives of people demand the downfall of the corporatist state whose rules and standards are the norm of contemporary American society, you tell me the odds that any big shot holding the keys to the kingdom might not interpret this as a terrorist threat.
Hedges displays himself as a responsible citizen journalist by pointing out what is draconian in the American legal system, and happily well-cultured at that by using Kafka to accent his point. His outrage is genuine and morally, perhaps legally, justified that men like Hashmi are "wasting away in supermax prisons" for daring to "speak a truth about the sordid conduct of our nation." But Hedges' very outrage hops, skips and jumps on the assumption that the American judiciary, in seeking justice, should operate justly. His comparison is a clarion call to the true believers in American democracy, the disaffected youth and unemployed idealists who have somehow maintained faith in the grand experiment.
Occupy Wall Street, for which Hedges' ideas have become a guiding light, is an outgrowth of this selfsame outrage. The movement does not merely imply, but religiously embodies the Spirit of '76, much like the Tea Party believes it does. Its members consider the OWS a corrective to an unhealthy diet of corporate greed, war, surveillance, and rankly rugged kill-or-be-killed individualism. They see themselves as the modern day Jeffersons, Adamses and Paines who will burn the corrupted fat from the nation's corpulent diabetic body driven on by the assumption that somewhere under the varicose veins, cheese-fried arteries, and mayonnaise-dipped jellyrolls Columbia's trim figure cuts a fiery burning light. Hedges points out the madness, and in demanding that people do something about it, implies something can be done. He believes that if only 'the people' were awoken to the principles of their democratic legacy in order to reign in the obscenities of the Larry Summers and Loyd Blankfeins and Barack Obamas and Robert Rubins and Jeff Imeltses and John Ashcrofts and Condoleeza Rices and George Bushes and Bill Clintons and Ronald Reagans and Richard Nixons and Gordon Geckos (J), etc., then the global market wouldn't … and GITMO might … and the coming Iran war couldn't … and Palestinians could … and Social Security would … along with social spending … organized labor … universal healthcare … right?
Wrong.
Before returning to The Trial to explain precisely how and why Hedges is wrong, let's point out a few circumstances that directly concern the United States: interminable recession and doggedly high unemployment, militant partisan obstructionism, the downgrading of US credit, the financial destabilization of the Euro zone, the formidable rise of market-savvy China, domestic resistance to corporate pet projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, the militarization of domestic police forces, drone surveillance for the home front, a presidential campaign, and the triple XXX ménage-a-deux in the Strait of Hormuz, a rancorous tangle of bruising love which reads like a prelude to war with Iran. Of course this is but a partial list of circumstances, each one connected in some integral way, all of which increasing the anxiety of the Empire.
And with this anxiety in mind, let's now remember that Mr. Hashmi is "wasting away in a supermax prison" for, according to Hedges, critiquing the United States' foreign policy. Next, we should recall that Bradley Manning, unless he cuts a deal that directly implicates Julian Assange in encouraging his leaking of classified documents, will never again see the light of day, which should remind us of the broader context of Obama's war on whistleblowers of all stripes. Finally, it's worth our while to recognize the timing of the National Defense Authorization Act and consider it in the context of the ongoing political upheavals of 2011, beginning with what has come to be called the Arab Spring (add to this the protests in Wisconsin) and ending with the American Autumn, inaugurated by the OWS movement, which I might add promises a spring offensive. For good reasons anxious, the Empire that many say is in decline is arguably more powerful than ever, because within its weaknesses materializes the fear that makes it a serious danger to any person or organization that threatens it.
Chris Hedges tells us that we are morally obligated to resist the Empire. His deficiency of hope for meaningful change does not subtract from his conviction that to save our democracy and our planet we must be ready to put our bodies on the line, to endure prison sentences, ostracism, possibly death. I for one am convinced that those of us who participate in serious movements to affect change in this country will be granted one or more of these miserable rewards. And perhaps it would be worth it, in the end, if the change we imagine and dream of was possible in our lifetime or our children's lifetimes or their children's, but our civilization is on a collision course with straight Hell and the major players, the politicos, the bankers, the institutions, are replaceable instruments in an implacable system of paranoia, power and greed that even they, had they the will, are impotent to change. I am a great admirer of Chris Hedges. When I read his words my blood quickens and in me the feeling is revitalized that good people who are willing to do the right thing exist. But Hedges is out of his league here, not because his passion and vitriol are small, but because his heart is great. And although it pains me to say, participants in Occupy Wall Street are out of theirs, and Kafka can tell us why.
"Before the Law" read side-by-side examples of US power terrifies and outrages readers. If a writer like Hedges wants the piece to function as propaganda, it fulfills its role gainfully by way of providing a hyperbolically banal view of the opacity and inaccessibility of American state power. Although the story used in this way is provocative, it is not instructive. We sympathize with the supplicant because since 9/11 it's become clear that we can relate to him. We ridicule the doorkeeper because we recognize a dumb bureaucratic slave when we see one. And we condemn the Law itself, because the manner in which it functions contradicts all that we believed it stood for. In short, we are enraged that big power crushes the weak, so we sympathize with the weak, and accept as a given their weakness in the face of the Law's, or the corporate government's unconscionable strength. Makes us want to organize, level the playing field, take the power back.
But are we as individuals so weak? Are collective movements like Occupy Wall Street so strong? Can engagement with "the system," whether individually or collectively, bear fruit?
The Irony of the Weak Individual
Whatever the reason, Kafka's parable never explains why the man desires to enter the Law. We are told that he arrives from the country, not that he was summoned to arrive. The distinction is important. It means that he does not have to spend his life before the Law. On the contrary, he chooses to spend his time there. Unlike the doorkeeper, the priest reminds K. that the supplicant is "a free man: he can go wherever he wishes, the entrance to the Law alone is denied to him, and this only by one person, the doorkeeper. If he sits on the stool at the side of the door and spends the rest of his life there, he does so of his own free will; the story mentions no element of force." If the supplicant is free to come and go as he pleases, the doorkeeper is not. He "is bound to his post by his office; he is not permitted to go elsewhere outside, but to all appearances he is not permitted to go inside either, even if he wishes to. Moreover he is in the service of the Law but serves only at this entrance, and thus serves only this man, for whom the entrance is solely meant. For this reason as well he is subordinate to him." Considering these factors, the supplicant is bound to the Law only by his desire, whereas the doorkeeper is bound by his role.
In fact, the doorkeeper is doubly bound. He must fulfill the function of his office and stand attention at the gate. He must also serve the man for whom the gate was solely designed, for whose "entreaties" he is "wearied," for whose "bribes" he "accepts," and for whom he offers a stool to sit on. When the man dies, what then will be the doorkeeper's role? We cannot presume that the doorkeeper will continue to serve the Law, for the Law, in association with the doorkeeper, is there merely to serve the supplicant, and the supplicant will be dead. Without the supplicant, there is no need for the doorkeeper, and if logic follows, no need for the Law. Doubtlessly there are other doorkeepers as well as other supplicants, so the Law will continue to exist. But the critical point here is not whether the Law exists, but why it continues to, a question the priest, perhaps unsettlingly, responds to: "The [Law] wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go."
The supplicant in Kafka's parable ruins himself on a single assumption: the Law has something to offer him. Extend the assumption a little further and we begin to glimpse like a slab of ice on the surface of a pond the supplicant's belief in the Law, his faith. It's a reasonable inference for us to make. For what other reason would the man spend a lifetime trying to access the Law if not for the belief that he could get something out of it? And from this first assumption follow others, such as if he waits it out he will gain access at some point in the future. The problem is the Law appears not to have been designed for the purpose of providing people like the supplicant what they aim to get out of it. Whatever way you look at it, it was designed to either keep people out or draw them near through the half-spoken promise of exclusion. The Law in Kafka's parable does not pursue those who have no wish to get in.
The Fallacy of Collective Strength in the Age of Digital Capitalism
For the first couple months, Occupy Wall Street was for me a glimmer of water in the desert. Loud, energetic, unwieldy and just, by awakening in participants, curious observers and sympathizers a vision of shared exploitation and misery, it inspired a genuine feeling of hope in people that they could change the system. The Arab Spring served as hard evidence the assumption that History was on its side, because History, in the end, is just, and every fascist eventually falls. Success depended on ever-growing numbers and the courage of persistence, and in order to cultivate its needs the truth would need to be spoken loud enough for even the most cynical and dismissive of listeners to hear. And many people did hear. Occupy demonstrations cropped up all over the country, and as a result, the demonstrations and demonstrators made statements loud enough to be heard by the banks and Capitol Hill. Bank of America nixed plans to charge a monthly debit card fee, and the Obama administration rejected the Keystone XL pipeline. 60 Minutes ran a pair of decent stories on the SEC's failure to monitor and pursue high-end financial crimes and congress's insider-trading schemes. Songs were written. Bumper stickers made.
The people finally had a name woven into the vernacular around which ties were made between the personal, the political, the cultural and the social. With a designation, a title, a signifier, a name, great hope abounded that, with a sudden awareness of collective self, the 99% could begin to function as one, developing meaningful strategies and effective tactics for not merely rattling the system, but overhauling it entirely. Wordsworth's lines on living in France in the era of the revolution came to mind: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very Heaven!" Youth was the buzz word for me, for the advent of the people as a People under the unifying banner of the 99% was both a birth of consciousness and of functionality and purpose.
As of now, folks who looked with some degree of intrigue on the movement in its infancy assume that it's just about over. These are the people who perhaps sympathized with the movement's sentiments while likely frowning on its tactics as they were understood through the news; in other words, the very people OWS needed and need if it is to affect the changes it desires. Without headline-worthy tangible evidence like an occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge or the pepper spraying of passive student protesters, it's difficult for these types to imagine that Occupy was anything more than a passing fad. It will be interesting to see the manner in which the movement decides to mobilize this spring. Only a demonstration the likes of an electrical surge through the nerve endings of the nation can validate last autumn's efforts and vindicate last autumn's losses. And validate and vindicate it must. Were the spring to come and go without a show of compelling mass action, the birth of Occupy Wall Street will have accomplished only the creation of a sense of collective self among those poised precariously on the middle to lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. While this is a tremendous accomplishment in itself, the price for it is exorbitant.
Whether we view Occupy today as diminished, or as undergoing a period of quiet gestation, its effects are unsettling. I believe that the provision in the National Defense Authorization Act regarding the indefinite detention sans legal counsel for citizens suspected of terrorist activities would have come, if not on the last day of the past year, then some time in the near future. However, Occupy gave the corporatists something to respond to, and the NDAA was that response. Notwithstanding the battered heads, arrests, and evictions, OWS has strengthened the state against agitation.
It is an unintended consequence of sociopolitical movements with a real ax to grind the augmentation of the forces they seek to destroy. OWS was and is, for the time being, an educative moment in time. But who reaps the benefit of this lesson in manifested social unrest is not the 99%. It is the 1%, the plutocrats and oligarchs who have learned most significantly. Mayor Mike Bloomberg learned, for example, the extent to which the NYPD was his own private army. Wall Street learned that, indeed, the surging torrents of the masses turn to shallow puddles at its door; it learned that no assembly of the disaffected, however large, however righteous, needs enter and disrupt its halls of commerce. And the president is about to learn that 50% of the 99% are still willing to tow the line this fall by voting for him out of the misunderstood quadrennial fear that the Republican alternative will be worse, even after committing himself to the democratic atrocity that any thinking human being will remember the NDAA to signify. Based on this kind of electoral calculus, whether the 99% are capable of thinking at all is dubious.
The belief that Occupy-style collective action translates into strength is a fallacy. It signifies a consumerist archetypal behavior in the mind of the capitalistic god. In lay terms, it is one mode of expression among a catalogue of others. As an analogy, it is to the system what the violin is to the orchestra, a familiar and relied upon instrument that plays a part in the whole. It is also an expression of nostalgia for a past rendered and understood at the drive-in. It feeds our narcissism by allowing us to participate in reproductions of bygone moments of collective glory. It tells us that now is our time to do what our fathers did, and provides us the opportunity to inhabit a romanticized role churned out from the ad-man's factory of dreams.
And this fallacy will be fleshed out when the story of Occupy Wall Street is made into an HBO film. Already there are books that have recorded the boots-on-the-ground eye-witness history of the movement, which are essential movers in the fetishization and objectification into a commodified consumer product of what was imagined to be a genuine people's movement. Worst of all, the spirit itself which made OWS compelling is really no more than a consumer choice; whether you conform to the system or stand against it, both positions are contained in its very structure. The difference between becoming an activist and a hedge fund manager is tantamount to purchasing the red dress or the blue jeans in the cosmos of early digital capitalism. By seeking to destroy the system, movements like OWS today strengthen it, and prove time and time again that the price of denouncing capitalism is total liquidation within it.
Collective movements do not subvert the system. As a contemporary mode of expression, as a choice from within, they confirm it.
Sad
& strange
& sad again
these days
are indeed
Kafka's Way Out
The Trial concludes when two "half-mute, insensitive" men arrive at Josef K.'s apartment to escort him to his execution. After K. asks the men why they of all people were sent for him, they are "apparently at a loss for an answer." As if debased by the sheer mindlessness of his captors, K. decides that he will go no further. He reasons that he won't need his strength for much longer, so he might as well expend it now. Silently the men struggle to move him, as though trying to fit a couch through a narrow doorway. And then K.'s effort relents, as he realizes there "would be nothing heroic in resistance, in making trouble for these men, in trying to enjoy a final vestige of life by fighting back."
The predicament K. finds himself in is the result of a rational reflex to fight back against a system that he perceived to be threatening his very being. When K. was arrested in the beginning of the book, which marked the commencement of his trial, who's to say that K. had to cooperate? Yet cooperate he does. Throughout the novel, as K.'s worry and paranoia increase, his resistance - to say participation - in his trial intensifies, and the hopelessness of a positive outcome settles. He seems to find the court, or the Law, in the strangest of places, as though no matter where he looks, whether in the loft of a tenement or under his bed, he would find the court's judgment and the executioner's blade. The very act of being accused, of being placed on trial, activates in K.'s imagination the sordid nightmare which in turn activates the court. Paradoxically, the court's aloofness to K. makes it for him that much closer. Like Bentham's panoptican, whether the court observes his every move is irrelevant, for K.'s guilty imagination ensures it's presence, hence ensuring, more gravely, it's reality to exert its will upon him. As the priest tells us in the parable, "The [Law] wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go." Likewise, as the supplicant in the parable is not forced to remain before the law, neither must K. endure the mortal absurdity of his trial. Like the supplicant, he chooses to.
There is ample evidence in the last pages of The Trial that demonstrates the significant responsibility K. bears for the trial and its outcome. If we return to the manner in which the two men escort K. to his demise, we immediately note peculiarities which, on close inspection, force us to question who is in charge of the situation. At first glance it seems obvious that the escorts wield the power, if by number alone. But as is the case with the parable, or "Before the Law," the situation is not as it appears. For one, on the way to the place of execution, Kafka makes a point of telling us that the three men walked "in total accord," the escorts "yielding willingly to K.'s slightest move." That the escorts yield suggests a degree of compliance with K., as though they are only along for the ride, and willingly at that. Next, the three men as a whole are described as "of the sort seldom formed except by lifeless matter." Again, since the men yield to K., it's fair to infer that he is what imbues the unit with any sort of vitality, however clumsy, when he stops and when he struggles, when he walks this way or that. In fact, after one such pause, K. tells the men that he "didn't really want to stop," to which the men respond with shame for their "ready compliance." They are so compliant, so docile, that when K. eventually starts to run, the two men "run with him, gasping for breath." It's important to notice how they don't chase after him, run him down, or try to catch him, but in line with courtesy and with a trace of propriety, they run with him. And where do they run but to a "small stone quarry, abandoned and desolate," where the men "halted, either because this spot had been their goal from the beginning, or because they were too tired to go any farther." Buried within this achievement in absurdity is the feeling that the men are making it all up as they go along responding to K.. Yet if they are docile bodies that compliment K.'s whim, we must ask the question as to who the actual artist is behind this dreadful conclusion.
If there is any doubt as to K.'s agency in the ordeal at this point, Kafka continues to give us more peculiarities to chew on. But from this point on, they are of a different sort than the walk there. Now, rather than the men willfully yielding to K., the opposite occurs. At the quarry K. is promptly undressed by the two men. Kafka tells us that he begins to shiver "involuntarily." The use of this adverb is odd in its redundancy, since by definition shivering is an involuntary process. Yet it could be necessary if Kafka intended to emphasize something else, which I propose to be K.'s voluntary acceptance of his disrobement. Although K. doesn't encourage the men to disrobe him, he doesn't resist either- he volunteers himself to what he presumes to be the protocols of the court. Offering his full "cooperation," he is moved around like a lifeless dummy, a puppet, a breathing corpse. He is "sat down on the ground," "propped … against a stone," and his head is "laid … down on it." He watches the "nauseating courtesies" as "one of them passed the knife across to [him] to the other, who passed it back over [him]." Most startlingly of all, K. thinks for a moment that it is "his duty to seize the knife as it floated from hand to hand above him," not to use against his assailants, but to "plunge … into himself; But he didn't do so … instead he twisted his still-free neck and looked about him," and as the knife is "thrust" "into his heart," he says of his verdict as the two men look on, "Like a dog!"
There is no reason for our lives to parallel the doomed fortunes of Kafka's personae. The American Empire is at its best when it has something to lean against, a shadow against which it can measure its own, an antagonism out of which it can discover what it is by way of what it is not. While we have little power in this nation, we have the choice of determining to what degree we are going to participate in it. We can choose to lay down our bodies, as Hedges would have it, and provide the empire another easy snack, or scurrying into the woods, out of sight, making its feeding slightly more difficult by forcing it to search more desperately for its next kill. And kill it will, because killing is what empires do, and killing is what this empire in particular is very good at.
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