Is anyone else experiencing the sense that one feels when nearing the end of a pattern of life?
The previous templates no longer apply.
The old patterns seem inapplicable…jejune.
One longs for the unseen to be disclosed…The Epstein files…UFOs…There are moments in which it all feels as inchoate as dreams, yet unfolding amid moments of the tangible nightmare of war and the catastrophes wrought by a humankind-altered climate.
It feels as if some kind of an earthquake, of both the individual and collective psyche, is on hand…that is rattling skeletons in the closet who are disturbing the monsters under the bed.
The increasingly unhinged displays by dementia-ridden Donald Trump and his Greater Israel (death cultists) benefactors have broken the old order. For the foreseeable future there will not be a future that is foreseeable. There will not be enough normal to constitute a new normal.
Do we lean into the unknown…as the poet advised, live our way into the mystery…thus transforming oneself and the world? This all feels so alien to the mind…to wit, the pervasive feeling of alienation — thus there are those who long for disclosure of aliens while others caution of ontological shock.
We have all been shocked by “the new” for what seems – in fact is – a lifetime. Oil shocks. Falling towers. Perpetual wars sold by perpetual liars. Crashing literacy rates as we are buffeted by relentless, ever-proliferating barrages of media imagery, ranging from AI slop of bipedal cats brandishing musical instruments to shrouded corpses of primary school girls, their parents kneeling in lamentation at their gravesites.
Ontological shockwaves to the heart as the earth feels as though the ground is shifting beneath our feet…as, all the while, the leadership class dwells in a landscape of mirages; their pronouncements, a cacophony of phantoms; their voices shrill but fading.
Storm-tossed oceanic heart…how do we begin the soul-work of dreaming the world anew?
Yet the state of things as of the present:
Trump careened from greeting the world with threats of committing massive war crimes but, by evening, he was swooning in the fumes of his own adult diaper stench about how he had heralded in the advent of a “Golden Age,” both at home and in West Asia, when, in fact, he has lost his war of aggression and has lost his Adderall-fueled mind as well.
Trump would be fired, in a matter of weeks, at most, if he was the manager of an off the interstate Applebees, if he exhibited the combination of mania, idiocy, and disastrous mismanagement, he displays as the head of a nuclear weapon possessing empire.
Hence the polls below are disconcerting — to outright mortifying — for this reason: by a cautious estimate, at the very least, one out of every three people you happen upon during daily US life – and far more in MAGA-ridden states — can be described as authoritarian tools, unreachable, noxious fools, and cruelty intoxicated sadists, even to the point of manifesting psychopathic tendencies.
The thought is unnerving…so many citizens of the foundering US empire are unreachable insofar as an openness of heart, being in possession of an inner architecture of conscience, and the presence of soul.
The following apocryphal dictum is unnerving in its terrible lucidity, one third of the citizenry would kill another one third while one third watches.
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One third of the population revels in ICE’s theatre of cruelty, regards the genocidal aggression against the people of Iran viable, and would kneel and slurp Dear Leader Trump’s testicular perspiration, and call it heaven-borne manna.
This is the everyday, potential catastrophe of so-called normal life…the treacherous state of mind was not limited to Third Reich era Germans and Italian fascists but, at any given time, driven by certain circumstances, we, homicidal hominids are capable of unconscionable evil. Rebecca West captures the phenomenon in prose:
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
― Rebecca West, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon”
Is not West’s passage alluding to, albeit with far surpassing eloquence, this deranged mode of mind?
“[A] whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again…”
One is tempted to aver, the Psychotic-in-Chief was referring to the US – of which he is expediting its demise…but the US has never been a civilization. Persia/Iran has been a viable civilization for 7000 years.
Heraclitus posited: Everything turns into its opposite. There is a Jungian concept termed enantiodromia that asserts psyches possessed by one-sidedness will swing over to its opposite side.
Coined by Carl Jung to describe “the emergence of the unconscious opposite over the course of time.” The principle states that when a one-sided worldview dominates the life of an individual, the unconscious will, over the course of time, build an equally powerful opposite that breaks through and dominates the psyche.
The Christian mythos limned in the Book of Revelation relates a lurid tale of a figure known as the Antichrist, a pulp horror story that is taken as unfolding prophecy by the present death cultists known as Evangelical Christians.
If one searched the Earth, it would be difficult to find an individual who fits the billing of character whose nature is the opposite of the teachings of the radical rabbi Jesus and his followers known in the lexicon of the times as The Way (HaDerech in the original Hebrew) — than one Donald John Trump. In short, he is the emblem of Evangelical Christians’ collective enantiodromia.
In a manner, we are witness to the End Times. Trump is the emblem revealing the one-sided, grotesque nature of the present, rightwing, end-stage of US empire-style Christianity.
Evangelical Christians have met the Antichrist and he is the warped nature of their own psyches.
Trump, a man, in word and deed, is antithetical to the Christian conception of their Messiah, waxed psychopathic, the US would bomb a civilization that has endured from 550 BC to the present “back to the Stone Age.”
Instead, Iran ended US imperium.
Who are the club-wielding, knuckle-draggers again?
In successive posts made to his Truth Social account that serves as his pixel diary of a declining mind, early Sunday morning, Trump ranted, the United States will interdict every vessel in international waters that had paid a toll to Iran to pass through the world economy sustaining shipping route.
“No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas…We will also begin destroying the mines the Iranians laid in the Straits. Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!”
Trump’s last stage of US empire, death cult has entered its season of murder/suicide.
“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
― T.S. Eliot, opening stanza of “The Wasteland”
If the world (in this case Iran) does not turn in deference to the mentally deteriorating, wanna-be emperor’s will then he will attempt to destroy what he cannot control.
Attempting to avoid Trump’s raging and malevolent sense of humiliation — an over-scaled, gaudy ballroom is under construction, his name is stenciled upon the facades of public buildings, grotesque monuments are erected in his homage, tributes are proffered in golden bric-a-brac and pricey, ostentatious gewgaws. Yet all the strained and grotesque efforts prove palliative. Over time the humiliation is personified as an inner hellscape haunted by ravenous ghosts who can never be sated. He is convinced it would be better for him that he set the world ablaze than for it to witness his undoing thus to be privy to his collapse into his hollow, fetid center.
The crucial question arises: How to we bystanders survive his rage for relief by murder-suicidal impulses? Trump is the capitalist paradigm’s embodiment of a phenomenon the novelist Percy Walker termed the ‘“death genes.” In the years proceeding up to US empires undoing we have been held in the thrall of the culture’s death genes. Trump has violently exposed and expedited said phenomenon:
Death in the form of death genes shall not prevail over me, for death genes are one thing but it is something else to name the death genes and know them and stand over against them and dare them. I am different from my death genes and therefore not subject to them. My father had the same death genes but he feared them and did not name them and thought he could roar out old Route 66 and stay ahead of them or grab me and be pals or play Brahms and keep them, the death genes, happy, so he fell prey to them.
— Walker Percy, excerpt from The Second Coming
The coming trouble and tumult will unmoor the Judeo/Christian values and capitalist verities (both of which have been in slow motion collapse for more than five decades) that we regard as the foundations and touchstones of normal life.
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal —
— T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”
This is key to enduring capitalism’s death genes: Unlike Trump and the ruling capitalist elite, allow the coming chaos to decimate your vanity – not destroy your heart.
