The Applause Machine: Part Two—THE MINISTRY OF CULTURAL HYGIENE
They came during a Sunday matinee. The play was The Last Honest Man, a farce about a politician who told the truth and caused the collapse of the national economy.
Jackson was backstage arguing with an actor who refused to wear a blood bag because the corn syrup irritated his skin.
The loading door opened.
Six people entered in gray suits. No badges. No weapons visible. Government agents were like termites. You rarely saw the tools. You saw the damage.
The tallest one was a woman with silver hair cut close to the skull. She introduced herself as Director Wallace.
Jackson laughed.
“My last name is Wallace.”
“Yes,” she said. “We know.”
“That seems intentionally confusing.”
“We find confusion reduces resistance.”
“Throwing the cheese, huh?”
She handed him a document.
At the top:
NOTICE OF TEMPORARY CULTURAL DETENTION.
Below that:
SUBJECT: JACKSON ELIAS WALLACE.
CLASSIFICATION: AESTHETIC EXTREMIST.
ALLEGED OFFENSE: PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION OF DEGENERATE ART.
Jackson read the phrase twice.
“Degenerate art?”
“It is an administrative category.”
“It’s also a phrase used by Nazis.”
Director Wallace gave him a patient smile.
“Many useful administrative categories have unfortunate previous users.”
Behind the wall, the audience laughed. It was a good laugh. Deep. Surprised. A laugh earned rather than prompted.
Jackson looked toward the stage. Director Wallace noticed.
“That,” she said, “is the problem.”
They did not handcuff him. Handcuffs imply crime.
They placed a soft black hood over his head, apologized for the inconvenience, and led him through the loading door while the audience applauded the collapse of the fictional government.
The facility had no name.
Later, Jackson would remember fragments.
A hallway smelling of basil.
A room with blue walls.
A drain in the floor.
A clock without hands.
A framed poster that read EMPATHY REQUIRES BOUNDARIES.
He sat across from Director Wallace at a white table. Between them was a bowl of individually wrapped mints. This offended him more than the hood. Torture should not involve mints. It suggested customer service.
Director Wallace opened a folder.
“You believe we are censors.”
“You put a bag over my head.”
“A hood.”
“My mistake. Completely different.”
“We are not censors,” she said. “We are harm-reduction specialists.”
“You abduct playwrights.”
“We interrupt destabilizing narratives.”
“You mean plays.”
“We avoid privileging legacy terminology.”
Jackson unwrapped a mint. Director Wallace watched him eat it.
“You understand that Ministry is a bipartisan effort, yes?”
“Of course it is. When the extreme zealots of both sides decide that people are simply too dangerous to make up their own minds, bipartisanship is inevitable.”
“Do you know what art does?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you?”
“Do you?”
She ignored that.
“Art lowers cognitive defenses. It bypasses reason. It creates identification, imitation, emotional contagion. A speech may persuade a thousand people. A song can rearrange a generation.”
“Now you’re making it sound useful.”
“That is precisely why it must be regulated.”
Jackson tried to lean back. The chair was bolted to the floor. Of course it was. Institutions bolt down everything except responsibility.
Director Wallace slid photographs across the table.
An ICE protest outside a courthouse.
A man burning a cross in Grant Park.
A burned police vehicle.
A teenage girl with a sign that read “God Made Man and Woman. Period.”
A personal defense lawyer being sworn in a Attorney General.
Each image included someone wearing the black-mouth logo.
“You inspired these events,” she said.
“No. People bought shirts.”
“Influence does not require intention.”
“Neither does diarrhea, but we don’t arrest soup.”
She closed the folder.
“Humor is your primary avoidance mechanism.”
“No. Whiskey is my primary avoidance mechanism. Humor is how I pay rent.”
“The work is not immoral because it is offensive. It is immoral because it destabilizes shared reality.”
“Shared reality is usually the story told by whoever owns the microphones.”
“That sort of statement is why you are here.”
“What sort?”
“The memorable sort.”
The first procedure was called Context Exhaustion.
They strapped Jackson upright before a screen and showed recordings of his plays. Every thirty seconds, the footage stopped.
A panel of specialists asked what he meant.
“Why did the nurse kill the patient?”
“Why was the senator naked?”
“Why did the puppet say consent was complicated?”
“Why did God apply for unemployment?”
“Do you endorse or condemn the character’s actions?”
“Could viewers imitate them?”
“Could a vulnerable person misunderstand?”
“Could a child enter the theater accidentally?”
“Was laughter an endorsement?”
“Was silence violence?”
“Was applause coercive?”
For every answer, the panel asked him to clarify.
For every clarification, they asked him to define his terms.
For every definition, they produced an exception.
After seventeen hours, Jackson could no longer explain the difference between depicting a thing and supporting it. After twenty-six hours, he apologized to a fictional character for writing him. After thirty-one, he began to suspect metaphors were weapons.
They let him sleep and they woke him to sign a statement denying he had been deprived of sleep.
The second procedure was Audience Replacement.
They recreated his stage inside the facility. The dimensions were exact. The roof even leaked in the shape of South America.
Jackson stood under the lights and read his plays to an audience of mannequins.
Each mannequin wore a small speaker in its mouth. When Jackson delivered a joke, one mannequin screamed.
Another wept.
Another said, “My brother died that way.”
Another said, “This rhetoric makes me unsafe.”
Another asked for the manager.
The speakers never repeated in the same order.
Jackson tried changing the text. The mannequins reacted anyway. He removed the jokes. They screamed at the absence of humor. He added disclaimers. They accused him of condescension. He apologized. The mannequins said the apology centered his experience.
On the ninth performance, Jackson attacked the front row with a metal chair. The mannequins had no heads by the time the guards entered.
The Ministry charged him for damages.
The third procedure was Productive Empathy.
This involved electricity. Director Wallace explained that electricity was an outdated description and that the current term was somatic feedback.
They attached sensors to his wrists, chest, scalp, thighs, and the skin behind his ears.
They showed him images.
A burning church.
A lynching.
A bombed city.
A starving child.
A dead soldier.
A crying comedian being fired for an old joke.
A politician smiling beside a body bag.
Each image was followed by one of Jackson’s lines.
If he laughed, pain.
If he did not laugh, pain.
If his pulse increased, pain.
If his pulse remained steady, stronger pain, because lack of response indicated dissociation.
The machine was built to discover guilt and guilt was guaranteed.
Weeks passed. Or months. Time in institutions does not move forward. It fills out forms.
Jackson lost weight.
He lost a tooth.
He lost the ability to hear applause without smelling basil.
He held onto jokes.
Jokes that were small enough to hide.
When the guards removed a fingernail, Jackson asked whether the manicure was covered by his insurance. When they forced him to watch a sitcom about a quirky family learning to communicate, he begged for physical torture. When a therapist named Evan told him anger was a secondary emotion, Jackson said, “Then fear should stop sending interns.”
One day Director Wallace brought him a newspaper.
The Wound had closed. The city cited electrical violations, unpaid taxes, public-safety concerns, and improper storage in an emergency corridor.
“You know what I hate most about you?” Jackson said.
Director Wallace folded her hands.
“You don’t think you’re cruel. A torturer who enjoys torture is simple. A sadist is a weather condition. You see the clouds, you carry an umbrella.
“But you people bring pie. You use soft voices. You say safety. You say wellness. You say community. You put a basil smell in the hallway so the man being dragged down it will associate his terror with cleanliness.
“Every censor in history thinks he is holding back the night. Nobody burns a book while imagining himself the villain. He burns it to protect the children, preserve the nation, defend the faith, prevent disorder, honor the dead, respect the living, save the fragile, purify the strong.
“The censor is always a lifeguard. The artist is always the drunk swimming beyond the ropes.
“You believe the problem with power is that the wrong people had it before. The kings, the priests, the fascists, the corporations, the patriarchs, the mobs. They abused language. They punished dissent. They controlled stories.
“So now you will control the stories correctly.
“That is the oldest joke in government. You tell yourself censorship has evolved because you no longer ban the forbidden thought. You diagnose it.
“You call it harm. You call it instability. You call the person dangerous to himself, dangerous to others, dangerous to shared reality.
“Then you do not silence him. You treat him.
“The church had heretics. The state had traitors. You have patients. You have taken tyranny and given it a tote bag.
“You want art to be safe because safe art cannot reveal that safety is often the velvet glove worn by fear. Real art is not a public service announcement. It is not responsible. It is not kind. It does not use the preferred terminology while kicking in the basement door.
“Art is the thing that escapes the committee. It is the scream heard through the wall after the institution issues a statement saying no one is screaming.
“You showed me photographs of people behaving badly in my shirts. Do you know who else wears shirts? Everyone. Every murderer drank water. Every dictator enjoyed music. Every war criminal had a childhood.
“You are not protecting society from my plays. You are protecting the story society tells about itself from the possibility that somebody in the cheap seats might laugh at the wrong moment and realize the emperor is not merely naked. He is masturbating during the Zoom budget meeting.
“You call my work degenerate because it refuses to pretend the clean people are clean. There are no clean people. There are people who know where the bodies are buried and people who approved the landscaping.
“You will destroy me. I understand that now.
“You will take the jokes first because jokes are doors. You will take metaphor because metaphor smuggles contraband across the border of the literal. You will take ambiguity because ambiguous citizens are difficult to govern. You will leave me nouns. Safe nouns. Chair. Bread. Family. Soap.
“Then you will decide family is exclusionary, bread is culturally specific, soap implies contamination, and chairs privilege the seated.
“You will leave me nothing. And you will call nothing peace.”
“Record retained,” she said.
A guard pressed a button.
A speaker in the ceiling played Jackson’s entire rant back to him. Word for word. His own voice filled the room.
Director Wallace smiled.
“Thank you,” she said. “That was the baseline.”
The final program was called Commercial Reintegration.
They placed Jackson in a reclining dentist chair. Metal brackets were there to hold his eyelids open.
He laughed when he saw them.
“At least steal from something good,” he said.
Director Wallace stood beside him.
“We are not teaching you to hate violence,” she said. “Violence is sometimes useful.”
“What am I learning to hate?”
“Unmarketable thought.”
The screen came alive.
A commercial for toothpaste.
A family laughed in a white kitchen.
Bright guitar music played.
Jackson felt warmth move through his limbs.
Then the screen showed a scene from Mercy Fuck.
Pain exploded behind his eyes.
Toothpaste.
Warmth.
A joke about death.
Pain.
A golden retriever carrying a paper towel roll.
Warmth.
A line about God.
Pain.
A woman choosing insurance.
Warmth.
A metaphor.
Pain.
A child eating cereal.
Warmth.
An unresolved ending.
Pain.
The treatment continued.
Every dangerous thought was paired with nausea, electric shock, suffocation, or the recorded screams of the mannequin audience.
Every slogan brought relief.
New and improved.
Limited time only.
Made for real life.
Because you deserve more.
Jackson tried to hold onto language. He repeated lines in his head.
The job of art is to sit on your chest—
Pain.
Every censor thinks—
Pain.
There are no clean people—
Pain.
He retreated deeper. He found a tiny room inside himself. In the room was the beige filing cabinet. Inside the cabinet were the clippings.
Inside the clippings was the sentence:
THE SEA DOES NOT LEARN ANYTHING.
He held it.
The voltage increased.
He held it harder.
Then the cabinet caught fire. The papers curled. The words blackened.
Somewhere far away, Jackson heard himself say:
“Tomorrow… has a… handle.”
Director Wallace turned off the machine.
“Again,” she said.
TO BE CONCLUDED…
∞∞∞
Don Hall is a writer, storyteller, and creative mercenary whose wildly varied career—from homeless busker and Chicago public school teacher to theater producer, jazz musician, radio executive, and front-of-house manager at some of Chicago's most iconic venues—has given him an endless supply of stories and an abiding distrust of certainty.
He is the author of Belief Is a Thermonuclear Warhead, co-editor of The Literate Ape, and publisher of the Substack The Attention of Fools, where he writes about culture, politics, creativity, and the glorious absurdity of being human.
