The last time the Mannequin Cult wished everyone a happy holiday, it was 2019, when all we had to worry about was an increasingly-violent fascist movement and climate change. But that was a different time — perhaps a simpler time. Now we have an increasingly-violent fascist movement, climate change, a global pandemic, the fallout from the pandemic and the boat that did nothing wrong, and the Damoclean — if slightly more distant — threat of student loans!

Hands down, one of the best things to happen in two thousand twenty-one CE. Image via Forbes.

Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling anything like the same kind of pressures surrounding the holidays in 2020 as I was in 2019. It was a long and terrible year, and honestly, mailing things to my friends and family, or dropping them off on doorsteps — with maybe a few minutes of carefully socially-distanced conversation — was kind of nice, as was the disappearance of family-oriented social obligations. But what was there to say? Everything was still awful, a fresh hell every fucking week, and it’s hard to feel the “holiday spirit,” whatever the fuck that means, when it’s an open question whether or not the then-outgoing president would accept the election results. (He didn’t, and has so far suffered almost no real consequences.)

But now we have a different useless octagenarian in the White House, who got a new puppy for Christmas or something, I don’t know, and workplace conditions have deteriorated so much for so many that labor is finally flexing its muscles. We’ve got a political party so dedicated to its receptive posture that even with a majority, they refuse to do literally anything, and those goddamn fascists are still out there, roaming free despite doing a Beer Hall Putsch almost a year ago. (History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme, as they say.)

Fuck it. Let’s get to the mannequins.

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The leg, finally in its holiday place of honor, featuring a card by one amazing artist and a candle by another one.

The Mannequin Cult stands much as it did previously, except I haven’t yet put the golden leg into the child’s arms because I’m very tired and it’s all the way over there. The other night, when it was finally like, cold, Cameron and I did our little cold-weather sometime-around-Christmas-or-New-Year tradition, which is making colcannon, mulling wine, and then consuming those things while watching The Lion in Winter (1968), in which some of the finest actors to walk this earth spend over two hours doing incredible emotional violence to each other, but in a funny way. It’s a cathartic movie — about politics, about history (fictionalized), about family — and watching it in the comfort of my home with someone — or someones; we’ve done it party-style before — I love is a gift that I give myself every year.

Not last year, though. Nothing was coming together; nothing was working (much like the title of this piece, which is a half a joke about music theory, about which I know nothing). This year, though, we made a point to do it. Meaning is where you find it, but also where you make it.

There’s a lot of trash from the last year — a lot of trash, and a lot of trauma. Whether as a direct result of COVID-19, or from many civil demonstrations that over and over turned into police riots, or from the dull, creeping horror of still having to fucking go to work through all of it, as the billionaire class has seen their wealth grow faster than mold in a warm, damp cupboard, many people — yours truly no exception — are feeling the strain. There was already a mental health crisis, caused in large part by conditions that the pandemic as a whole has exacerbated; it would be an insult to fools to say that only one of them would expect it to get better in light of that.

The lionization of “essential workers,” too, has died down entirely, not that anyone was really acting right to begin with. Once again, we’re relegated to the status of obstacles to a customer’s quest to get whatever they want, no matter what. Functionally, the “essential worker” is more trash of the consumerist society — mere detritus, impeding a million Mad Maxes as they navigate the wasteland. There may be a “labor shortage,” but it’s worth noting that many of us no longer wish to put up with that shit, and many of us fucking died.

The CDC’s recent announcement that asymptomatic COVID-havers can return to work after five days instead of ten really only hammers this home. It’s possible that there’s some science underpinning the decision; I’m a language guy, not a STEM guy, and am ill-qualified to comment. But statements avow that the decision is at least partially motivated by the impulse to quell disruptions in the workforce (thanks, Delta Airlines specifically) which feels pretty damning.

The message is clear: we’re disposable. As long as the billionaire class continues to profit obscenely, we will all be thrown into the furnace like so much paper trash.

But it’s not just paper: it’s plastic, and plastic, burning in an enclosed system, will poison everyone else in the room.

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The mannequin cult is a trash cult. It too is detritus, weird bits of stuff shaped like bits of people. But people are not trash; people are not disposable.

In this interim period, as 2021 death-rattles into a new year that looks unpromisingly like the previous two, let us embrace and complicate these things.

If the world would make us trash, mere automata and mannequins — fine. Let us propitiate ourselves, so we can once more sally forth to fight anew. Let us make of ourselves gods, to protect and keep our homes, our loved ones, the causes we must continue to insist are not ignored. We are, after all, the nightmares of those who seek to see us burned; once again, we will disturb their sleep, and do our best to wake them screaming.

Plague Cadence: a Holiday Message from the Mannequin Cult