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Preface

This poem, Elegy for the Automatons, was inspired by George Packer’s article The Hollow Men, which appeared in the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic. Packer’s article examines the political and moral collapse of certain American officials—Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who, once defenders of democratic principles, surrendered themselves to the inverted realities demanded by Donald Trump’s authority and his increasingly Orwellian authoritarian state.

Echoing the pivotal scene in Orwell’s 1984 where a Party orator is handed a note and instantly redirects his vitriol toward a different enemy “mid-sentence, without a pause,” Packer documents how key Republican figures performed their own breathtaking reversal on Ukraine policy, and describes how these officials pivoted instantly from celebrating Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s aggression to denouncing Ukraine as the enemy—all in service to Trump’s shifting personal allegiances and contempt for democratic values.

Packer also invokes Henri Bergson’s insight that the mechanical within the human evokes both laughter and horror. Yet what he describes transcends mechanical reflex: it is the slow hollowing-out of conscience itself. Once-thoughtful men become fluent automatons, mouthing words disconnected from belief, loyalty, or memory.

This poem seeks to render in elegiac form the sorrowful descent of a free polity into ritualized untruth, and the transformation of human beings into instruments of submission.

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“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
— T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Elegy for the Automatons

In the year when the hollowing began,
and Orwell’s warning stirred too late,
it came not by fire nor iron decree,
but smiling, in the face of one man.
He bore no heavy crown, no burning sword;
only the gift of inversion:
truth was a lie, loyalty a whim,
freedom the mask of power.
A man for whom cruelty was a virtue,
and truth a broken toy at his feet;
a man who measured loyalty by abasement,
and called the strong weak and the weak strong.

Under his gaze, the names of enemies blurred,
history curled back on itself like smoke;
words, having lost their anchor, floated
as banners torn from any mast.
And a people once proud of remembering
forgot that they had ever known another day.

From this hour of unmooring
emerged the hollowing of men.

Johnson, first among the fallen,
fumbled for strength among hollow phrases,
mouth heavy with the weight of borrowed words.
Behind his thickened glass, a flicker died—
and he mistook its ashes for light.

Graham, quick to find the favor of the wind,
circled the ruin with the laughter of forgetting,
shedding oaths like old garments,
spinning from vow to vow as a moth to a dying flame,
faithless to all but the empty crown of belonging.

Rubio, once proud in the defense of liberty,
sank into the yellow chair of forgetting,
listening to the slow departure of his own voice.
Once he cried for the dignity of nations;
now he stitched the banners of surrender with empty hands.

Thus were men unmade,
not by terror, nor by war,
but by the patient grinding of truth into noise,
by the slow machinery of convenience and fear.

And we, who watched,
sang no hymns for these men,
built no statues to mark their days.
They passed like shadows over a broken dial,
automatons grinding down the hour,
till even the dust forgot their tread.

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