“To me, the King doesn’t look as if he wants to do anything at all. Except incur debts – but that’s also our fault.”
Elfriede Jelinek’s sombre, meandering text focuses on kings governing worlds and the prophets/prophetesses who comment on their rule. Both are afflicted by blindness. The author takes a look at current global developments, letting motifs from mythology and western cultural history shine through, paraphrasing, counteracting and lampooning them as “visionary poetess” who eternally passes comment. “King” Donald Trump, who owes his supremacy to his activities as a property dealer, casino operator and reality TV performer, stands in the context of a world system whose power and ownership structures are based on credit and debt. Jelinek prophesies that those who have always accompanied civilisation as poets and thinkers will eventually fall silent.