Reflections On A Day Of Cursing The King Of Empire's Dung Heap
"When the righteous thrive, the people rejoice; when the wicked rule, the people groan" (and the terrorist frogs of Antifa rise up)
“When the righteous thrive, the people rejoice; when the wicked rule, the people groan”. — Proverbs 29:2
Absolutely no kings, despots, tyrants, dictators, Big Brothers, Dear Leaders, Il Duces, oligarchs, plutocrat CEOs, fairytale princes and vain princesses, grandiose techbros, galactic emperors, wrathful sky gods, princes of darkness…I am all in for protest marches to oppose despotic power e.g., No Kings events. All the best to you. Yet a march as day excursion…simply marching, hoisting witty signs, and chanting slogans into indifference air will not stop the extant and fast approaching fascist juggernaut.
An individual — my wretched, narrow ass included — must commit oneself mind, body, and soul to the challenge of resisting entrenched, ruthless, and treacherous power. The revolt begins within…against despair. Create something funny, beautiful, and heartbreakingly true. Bring it to the struggle—and keep bringing it.
The largest measure of living is: to continue showing up.
On my Facebook page, a rage-gripped commenter snarled at me in pixel, insisting the above passage was love paean to The Liberal Class and the DNC.
I suspect below the rage, there is honest despair evinced in the commenters lament,
“It’s all theatre.”
Indeed, we are witnessing theatre — yet the Dionysian arts create civilization. Theatre attendance was mandated in the classical Greek era. Poseidon and his sons brooded in the depths but their scorn was broken by the Athenian shore.
I am speaking of soul-making art. Not fascist spectacle nor capitalist grift. One example: the music of the 1960s transformed hearts and minds as it fed the soul of the world.
Through the purple haze, the soul grew alert.
Fascism is an affliction of the collective soul. When the heart is shattered by the dying of hope, a death-urge takes hold. When the soul-fecund thoughts of the heart whither from neglect, the spirit of the times compensate by soul-defying mania. In capitalist modernity the phenomenon manifests as said spirit of the times outpacing the soul of the world by said fascist mania.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” WB Yeats, The Second Coming
One feels as if one is struggling to proceed against a hurricane force wind of fascistic fuckwit. Reason has been churned to brain spittle.
As monotheistic capitalism collapses into its corrupt core, the mania of the greed-rancid kings of finance and the dissembling motor-mouths of rightwing influencer griftosphere authoritarian compulsion will not abate but grow more shrill and violent in their repressive agendas. Their god is dying, and we are witnessing its ugly death. Among its Christian-nationalist wing, the true believers concept of Jesus Christ is closer to an Old Testament style Angel Of Death and/or comic book supervillain.
Yet it is their belief system’s concomitant hyper-authoritarianism that is the plague on the land and, ultimately, the agent of their undoing. But not before they inflict great harm. Rather than honest despair, the radical right will go the psychical route of a violent, compensatory mania. Displacing their sense of impairing weakness, they, as we have seen, through MAGA, continue to lower the (militarized) boot of state on the powerless elements of the nation and make war (by contrivance) on “enemies” abroad.
In their deranged fantasies: A terrorist army of Antifa frog personages comprise a phalanx of fifth columnists as Venezuelan drug cartel operatives slither through Wall Street and, by stealth, insert cocaine into the nasal cavities of the US financial elite, all as Zohran Mamdani, upon being sworn into office, plans to present the Bolivarian revolutionaries/ Bolivian marching powder kingpins with the key to the City and stage a commie parade of triumph, tossing, as they pass, cocaine-filled balloons to spectators on Fifth Ave., like Mardi Gras beads on Fat Tuesday.
Am I being unserious in regard to facing a serious threat? Granted, the threat is serious but do fascists engage in earnest debate and attempts at discourse? Instead, they act on mindless will and rule by intimidation and brutality.
Is it possible to reach by reason and by positing the tenets of understanding inherent to our mutual humanity, for example, Christian-nationalist soldiers of the God of Death. Is it in itself a delusion to dissuade Christian EndTimers of their crackbrained notion that Jesus Christ, on the day of Judgment, is not going to ascend (with Charlie Kirk, at his right hand brandishing a military assault rifle) from the clouds because libtards blaspheme the god-bestowed 2nd Amendment then libtard-owning Jesus will dispatch to lakes of chthonic fire those sinner squatting amid the rising of the New Jerusalem on the shores of the now heathen-cleansed Potomac.
No Kings rallies…in the divine face of the King of Kings, huh? The Christian-fascist multitudes would laugh in your hell-bound face but not a single fundamentalist Christian has indulged in a belly laugh since the Protestant Reformation.
Thus their version of The Kingdom of Hilarity has arrived:
“They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” –- 2 Thessalonians 1:5
The founder of the Post-Jungian School of Archetypal Psychology apprehended the concealed-from-awareness forces roiling within the Judea/Christian psyche and the culture at large:
“We all have identity crises because a single identity is a delusion of the monotheistic mind” – James Hillman, Healing fiction (ed. 1983)
The old, dying king becomes a monomaniacal (the key word is mono e.g., monotheistic) agent of repression, immiseration, and cultural/societal devastation. To wit, the murderous madness attendant to monotheistic fantasy follows:
“From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.” —Revelation 19:15
In stark contrast to the blood-lusting, praying for the end of the world — as a means of opening up the narrow, stultifying confines of their dismal belief system as embodied by Christian-nationalists — Hillman posits:
“Dionysian [a multiplicity of] consciousness understands the conflicts in our stories through dramatic tensions and not through conceptual opposites; we are composed of agonies not polarities. Dionysian consciousness is the mode of making sense of our lives and worlds through awareness of mimesis, recognizing that our entire case history is an enactment, “either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-pastoral,” and that to be “psychological” means to see myself in the masks of this particular fiction that is my fate to enact.” – James Hillman, Healing fiction
In conclusion, from within one’s own imagination and into the Dionysian theatre of street protest, one confronts a corrupt-on-a-gilded-throne king and the wasteland of landscape and collective mindscape his hideous reign engenders. In the dismal thrall of it all, one will experience his dying as soul-bracing despair.
“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! ah fie! ‘tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely.” —Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii
“I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable with Tree
I hear you. One foot placed before the other. One word follows the next across the page. A song stirs the stagnant air. Your kind words arrest the harrowing spiral into the howling abyss.
