Théodore Géricault's "The Raft of the Medusa"

He stands before La Balsa de la Medusa in the Louvre, motionless, arms hanging limp at his sides, as if the painting itself has robbed him of the energy to gesture. Around him, tourists murmur, shuffle, pose—but he doesn't hear them. His gaze is fixed on the heap of bodies, the frantic limbs clawing at air, the bloodless skin, the flailing desperation straining toward the faintest promise of salvation on the horizon.

It hits him like a wave: this isn’t just a relic of post-Napoleonic incompetence, of colonial blundering and bureaucratic callousness. No—this raft is now. Right now.

The desperate men are the dispossessed: Gazans clawing through rubble, Ukrainians sleeping in underground stations, Sudanese fleeing civil war, Alaskans watching the permafrost melt beneath them. The man hoisting the cloth to signal rescue might as well be a striking public sector worker, ignored, unpaid, screaming into the void of algorithmically curated outrage.

That pitiful scrap of sail might as well be stitched from shredded social contracts—torn apart by a billionaire on a bender, snorting policy decisions off his dashboard, broadcasting half-formed decrees in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, tariffs slice through economies like errant waves; once stable industries break apart like timbers. Trust in systems—government, media, truth itself—has rotted from within, just as the Medusa’s survivors turned to cannibalism.

And in the upper atmosphere? Popstars, fashion icons, tech bros—they ascend in phallic rockets, 30-minute escapades paid for with fortunes that could have restored entire cities. They wave down from above as though they were gods, oblivious or indifferent to the storm below. The raft is sinking, and they are sightseeing from orbit.

He doesn’t cry—he's too numb for that—but something in him gives way, like a muscle relaxing only because it’s beyond exhaustion. For the first time in months, maybe years, he feels that someone, at least, has painted the truth. Not a literal truth, no—but a visceral one, a psychic map of the modern world: adrift, abandoned, tearing at one another for space on a raft with no rudder, no rescue, and no time left.

And still—still—that tiny flag in the corner flaps upward. Not hope, exactly. Just the stubborn, foolish instinct to keep waving.