There is a peculiarly American expression for a peculiarly American mode of discourse: “speaking truth to power.” As far as I can tell, it’s actually a recent invention; the Quaker origin story seems plausible. This is the mode of expression typically ascribed to people like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Hicks. It’s considered unequivocally positive: it withholds nothing, it exposes the buffoonery and villainy of the mighty, it puts them in their place. It’s also absolutely worthless. What does Power care for truth? It’s got plenty of that already, and can manufacture more as needed. The whole point of Power is that its naked material might is cloaked in pervasive epistemic control. The bloodthirsty feudal warlord rules by divine right; the international philantropist and predatory financial speculator pulled himself up by his bootstraps; the abusive husband is just subject to the tempestuous whims of male biology, which require a gentle and submissive handmaiden. Those who make a career of gently mocking the order of Things Believed to be True realize this; they stop just short of unsettling conclusions, “unreasonable” claims and, yes, disturbing truths. Truth to power? You may as well go fart into a hurricane. This is the third thing, and the most important. Antigone doesn’t “speak truth to power.” Antigone calls Power to account. Actually, it’s even more than that; everything she says to Creon, the agent of Power, can be distilled down to just one word: no. She is wronged by Creon, and she disobeys. Feel free to posit that Creon transgresses against the primal and ultimate reality of Love; it’s a nice sentiment, but not one I can share in good faith. I think all the reasons she gives: love, tradition, the divine order, begin to coalesce and “make sense” only after the no, which is itself a response to Creon’s exercise of perfectly legal and eminently reasonable state violence.