The marching music of the next century will undoubtedly be religion and nationalism. The choir practice has already started. Children of light and children of darkness are already being sorted out everywhere. Brutality, violence, and inhumanity, as Simone Weil knew, have always had an immense and secret prestige. We now only require a new superior morality to justify them.

– Charles Simic, writing in a 1995 essay “Orphan Factory,” from his collection of essays, The Life of Images