Dead Eyes

Soulless, dead eyes stare out of the screen unblinkingly. The man's suit is immaculate, and he is wearing glasses that sometimes, if the light shines at them in the right way reflect as shiny white orbs. Orwell wrote about that once in, "Nineteen Eighty Four", about party apparatchiks in a crowd whose glasses make them look soulless and dead. I'm seeing the same thing on my television screen. I once met the man being interviewed on the news channel, and I tried once to discuss the tragedy of a country with him.

At the time he was defending a new constitution which I believed to be a sham. He defended it but to my surprise I found out that he hadn't even read it. I walked away feeling angry and furious with myself. I felt cheated and angry after having spent hours poring over that drivel to point out the fallacies in it, and this man _hadn't_ even read it. He was assuring people that it represented stability and counted for reforms and yet he hadn't even read it!

But he assured me quite soberly that he was _very_ concerned; that he was on the same side as me; that he cared for the country just as much as me. I was using every intelligent argument a sane individual would accept or at least recognise, but those dead eyes just stared at me, stared at me and mocked. He was pleasant enough, friendly even, but to me he might as well have been dead. He was a walking corpse in a sharp, crisp suit, wearing expensive eye glasses. Then too, they would reflect in the light of the studio lights as shiny white discs, and for a brief moment I was talking to an eyeless automaton that was saying only what it was programmed to say.

I wanted to vomit. I felt so tired. I can't fight machines and things that are already dead. Tell me. How can you kill something which has no soul? I imagined having a magical lens which would show me the true nature of things. I half expected, if I passed it over the clean shaven, immaculate face of this man, to find sneering back at me a ghoul with a rotted visage. And the ghoul would look at me with those same dead soulless eyes.