Politics & Power Quote by Brian Moore

It lands like a deadpan cymbal crash: the ceremony is over, so now comes the ceremony. Brian Moore’s line pricks the balloon of public ritual by treating “formalities” as a mere prelude to the most formal, most reverent bit of pageantry a state can muster. The joke isn’t loud; it’s bureaucratic. That’s what makes it sting. In one brisk sentence, Moore exposes how official life often works: procedure piled on procedure until meaning is replaced by choreography.

The subtext is skepticism about nationalism’s emotional machinery. National anthems are supposed to feel spontaneous and sacred, the crowd rising as one. By announcing them in the same tone you’d use for clearing your throat or reading safety instructions, the speaker reveals the anthems as programmed cues, not eruptions of shared feeling. Moore’s wit turns patriotism into a scheduled item on the run sheet. The irony is that the “real” moment of collective identity arrives only after we’ve been told it’s time to feel it.

Contextually, it reads like the voice of a master observer of institutions and their quiet absurdities: the MC, the official, the competent functionary who believes in order more than in awe. Moore, a novelist attuned to displacement, power, and the stories nations tell about themselves, compresses that critique into a single emcee’s line. It’s not an argument against anthems so much as a diagnosis: modern belonging often comes packaged as protocol, and protocol is how belief survives when certainty doesn’t.