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# Future Dread
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/anthony-hawley-future-dread-2017/
- Published: 2017-10-14T15:00:57.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:26:26.000Z
- Description: Twitter, in the hands of Trump and the Republicans, is a way of postulating speculative fictions, — the worries and woes of possible future perfects.
- Author: Anthony Hawley
- Tags: Art, Drawing, Weekend, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:30(2016, 2017, part 3)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2017/10/hawley-september-19-drawing-for-hyper.jpg)

Anthony Hawley, “September 19, 2017” (2017), ink on unique silver gelatin print, 7 x 5 inches

I never quite feel like I’m in the here and now. Most of the time, I feel like I’m living in the future perfect.

It’s an odd state of being — a Janus-faced way of thinking and speaking. A looking at transitions and possibilities, but also at endings. Arguably, the future perfect contains a great degree of foresight, a perspicacity and sorcery of sorts. But at the same time, there’s a little foreboding as well.

The future perfect is a verb tense composed of the future of the verb “to have”, i.e., will have, plus the past participle of a verb: “I will have spent all my time doing nothing” or, “I will have lost all my hope.” It indicates that something will be completed in the future.

*What will have come to pass* — treaties? Peace? Us? A planet?

When the leader of the country you live in daily spouts heedless, caustic rants, it’s hard not to think in terms of the future perfect. Cowardly lashings out; whimsical sociopathy coupled with ingrained narcissism; one-word excremental shrieks splayed across the screen like fight words from the 1960s Batman: BLAM! POW! ZAP! One can almost hear the horn-heavy soundtrack with each of his cries: BAD RATINGS! LOSER! REPEAL!

At its best, Twitter seems to have been built to sharpen our wits; at its worst, it disseminates the politicized fears of the future perfect. *What will have been done* should he keep up his off-kilter rants? *What will not have been done* should Obamacare and other social safeguards continue to linger?

In either case, it’s all a sci-fi horror show. Twitter in the hands of Trump and the Republicans becomes a way of postulating speculative fictions, all the worries and woes of the possible future perfects. *What we will not have been able to do; to have done?*

**\~**

Twice in my life I’ve found myself in cities where I wasn’t allowed to take pictures. The first, in 2004, was St. Petersburg, Russia, where I tried to photograph the exquisite architecture inside a subway station, only to be accosted by two police officers who wanted to confiscate my camera. They claimed I was photographing a state building, something that according to lingering Cold War era fears, I wasn’t allowed to do. In reality the thuggish duo just wanted to pilfer some cash and were easily warded off with a little chump change.

The second, in 2017, was Harare, the busy capital of Zimbabwe, where I was warned repeatedly by locals and foreigners not to tote a camera around the streets. I was told, not lightly, that I could be taken in by the police for photographing any state-related building or simply for acting without government approval. Obviously an extremely cash-poor economy partially motivates excessive ticketing, policing, and tariffs. But Robert Mugabe’s indefinite presidency and suppression of opposition looms large over everyday activity. In the end, a student guide took me around, giving me a subtle nod of the head yes and no as we walked the vibrant Harare streets. She abruptly stopped me when I was about to take a photo of the opposition party’s building.

**\~**

I keep coming back to an image I took there: a view of Harare from my hotel room, its luscious public gardens in the distance, a curtain with an out-of-fashion pattern at the edge of the window frame. There’s a strong sense of the materiality of things in the image — the lush, humid foliage outside; the industrial metallic window frame; the heavy curtain from another era.

Setting up to take this shot in the hotel, I kept thinking about all the pictures I would not be able to take. *I will have missed all my opportunities.* I kept thinking about all windowed places we will have been inside of; all the access that will have been barred. *Have you seen the encyclopedia of our future ruins being writ before us? Will you have you seen us growing farther and farther apart?*