Power never calls, never writes…
It doesn’t introduce itself.
It doesn’t explain what it’s about to do.
Most of the time, it sounds like the opposite.
It sounds like common sense.
Like safety. Like, “Well, obviously something had to be done.”
By the time you notice it, the naming has already happened.
The response is already underway.
This isn’t a bug in the system.
It is the system.
The Simpsons, Season 8, Episode 10: “The Springfield Files.”
It opens quietly.
Night.
Trees.
Crickets.
The kind of stillness where nothing important is supposed to happen.
Then something moves.
Not fast.
Not dramatic.
Just wrong.
A tall shape wanders out of the woods.
It glows faintly—an unhealthy green, like something that shouldn’t be luminous but doesn’t know that yet.
It stumbles.
It groans.
It looks confused.
It’s not attacking anyone.
It’s not chasing anyone.
It doesn’t even seem to know where it is.
The episode lingers here longer than it needs to.
Long enough for unease to arrive before fear.
Long enough for the viewer to start filling in gaps—imagining motives, bracing for something bad.
Only after that does the town name it.
Monster.
I like to imagine an argument breaking out right there.
Žižek is animated, saying this is why the show works: violence doesn’t arrive as chaos; it arrives already folded into normal life, waiting for a name.
Foucault is calmer, slightly irritated. Power doesn’t need to shout. It waits. Once a category exists, everything else falls into place.
Agamben pauses, then says something colder: once the word lands, whatever that thing was no longer matters. It becomes something the system is allowed to act on.
Homer, chewing something, looks around and says,
“I think it’s funny because everyone freaks out before anything even happens.”
And somehow, they all keep chewing…
Because once the word monster is spoken, the rest of the episode writes itself.
Sirens.
Guns.
Helicopters.
Men with authority who look relieved to finally be necessary.
No one asks what it wants.
No one asks if it’s hurt.
No one asks if it’s a person.
The question isn’t who is this?
The question is how dangerous is it?
Once that’s the question, the ending is already decided.
Here’s the joke.
The monster turns out to be just a guy.
Confused.
Harmless.
Covered in glowing junk because of something dumb.
By then, it doesn’t matter.
Because the response was never really about what he was.
It was about what he was called.
That’s the move we keep pretending not to see.
Now leave Springfield.
Go to Minneapolis.
Federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security flood city streets as part of ICE enforcement. Armed. Empowered. Operating under authorities most people only encounter as headlines or footnotes.
Two people die in confrontations with those agents.
Public deaths.
Visible deaths.
The kind that rupture whatever numbness everyone has been carrying.
People protest because they understand exactly what they’re seeing.
And almost immediately, the language arrives.
Kristi Noem, as Secretary of Homeland Security, says:
“When you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons… that is the definition of domestic terrorism.”
That sentence does a lot of work.
It shifts the frame away from a dead body and toward a threatened state.
It classifies the event before the facts have settled.
It signals, quietly, that the response was already justified.
Once the word terrorism is in play, the system no longer needs to explain itself.
It only needs to defend its perimeter.
This is not a new move.
In 1933, after the Reichstag fire, the German state issued a decree with a name that sounded calm, protective, almost boring: The Decree for the Protection of People and State.
It authorized “measures necessary for the protection of the people and the state” to counter acts of violence endangering the Reich.
Different century.
Different country.
Same rhyme.
Violence is no longer defined by harm done, but by opposition to the state.
Necessity is assumed.
Extraordinary power becomes routine.
This isn’t about equating moments.
It’s about recognizing a recurring structure in political language—the way threat gets named so force no longer needs moral justification.
This is what people mean when they talk about biopolitics—not as theory, but as practice.
Life managed through categories so efficiently that harm starts to look like administration.
Once someone is reduced to a category—threat, obstruction, agitator, terrorist—force stops being shocking.
It becomes reasonable.
You are still inside the law.
You’re just no longer protected by it in any way that matters.
Žižek would call this objective violence: harm that happens before anyone pulls a trigger, built into the rules that decide who counts as dangerous in the first place.
The violence isn’t invisible to the public.
People see it.
That’s why they protest.
The blindness is bureaucratic.
Inside the system, violence doesn’t look like violence.
It looks like risk management.
Operational necessity.
Acceptable loss.
Once harm is translated into that language, it stops being a moral problem and becomes a management problem.
And management problems don’t end systems.
They get reviewed.
There’s a move that happens right after the funerals and right before anything real might change.
It’s the moment when politicians decide to act without acting.
Someone says we should block the DHS budget.
Someone else floats impeaching Kristi Noem.
Panels convene.
Statements drop.
Everyone adopts the tone of courage.
And none of it touches a single lever that matters.
Because this isn’t accountability.
It’s rehearsal.
Budgets they know will pass.
Impeachment talk they know will die quietly.
Outrage measured so carefully it never spills into consequence.
It’s theater.
It’s choreography.
It’s fuckin’ Chuck Schumerism—
the politics of ironic humorism.
The joke where everyone pretends the performance is the resistance.
Refusing to pass a budget now doesn’t undo the laws already written.
Impeaching one official doesn’t touch the authorities, the discretion, the architecture that made all of this predictable.
They don’t want to dismantle the machine.
They want to scold the person standing nearest to it.
Because dismantling would mean admitting they helped build it.
Naming their own votes.
Owning their caution.
Facing their fear.
So instead they offer symbolism.
They posture.
They emote.
They argue loudly about the hood ornament while the engine keeps running.
That’s not opposition.
That’s cowardice with better lighting.
This is why protest keeps hitting the same wall.
Protest says, “This should not have happened.”
The system says, “We agree—and we will investigate.”
Everyone gets to feel serious.
Nothing upstream changes.
Because the real question is radioactive:
Why do we keep building systems where armed confrontation is normal, protected, and expected?
Why does escalation feel inevitable instead of alarming?
Why does the state keep producing monsters—not by accident, but by design?
Back in Springfield, the episode ends the way it always does.
The government leaves.
The town resets.
The machinery that decided monster stays exactly where it is.
That’s not lazy writing.
That’s the point.
The monster was never the problem.
The problem was how quickly
a person became a category,
fear became authority,
and authority became unquestionable.
Different city.
Different body.
Same rhyme.
First as tragedy, then as more.
And Homer, still glowing, looking around at the wreckage, just says:
“I don’t get it. Yesterday this was fine.”
So it goes.
Nothing's Sacred 