Herein I offer reading lists in Modern American and World Literature as a gate of entry to diversity as beauty, joy, and hope, to balance the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world which threaten to consume us in despair, grief, and abjection.
We will need these things to uplift and sustain us in liberation struggle and solidarity of action in this time of terrible darkness and the tide of fascist hate which assaults our humanity and our democracies which are guarantors of our universal human rights.
These lists I have published before, developed over a lifetime of teaching and the study of literature as a means of entry into the imaginal realities of others from whom I wish to learn how to become human; I do so once again in reply to a request from a friend who is depressed over the downward spiral into racist terror which now engulfs his homeland of Britain as it does so many other guarantor states of equality and human rights we could once count on to “fight them on the beaches”, to use the magnificent antifascist leader Churchill’s iconic phrase.
We are not defeated, my friends, nor is all lost, so long as we refuse to submit, so long as we disbelieve the lies of those who would dehumanize and enslave us to their own wealth and power, so long as we do not abandon each other. Recognition of the glorious treasures of our diversity can be an instrument with which to combat division with solidarity and inclusion. In this cause I offer my reading lists as proof of the immense depth and richness of human experience and the many and sometimes quite different alternate human realities in which we live, that our boundaries might also become interfaces.
If possible I will post one such list each day, with links to my celebrations of favorite authors on their birthdays, including over twenty national literatures and with Modern American Literature including subcategories for Native American, African American, Asian American, Jewish American, and Hispanic American literatures. May you find beauty, joy, and hope in thinking the thoughts of others both like and different from yourself, as have I.
As I wrote in my post of September 2 2025, Becoming Human Through Literature: Jay’s Revised Modern Canon of Literature, a Resource For Back To School; As the new school year begins in America, and teachers, parents, students, and all those who love to read are gathering ideas for new worlds to explore, I offer here my reading lists curated over forty three years, many as a high school English teacher.
Of paramount importance is that school begins this year in a context of open hostility to education, a word from the Greek educatus which means to draw forth potential human being, meaning, and value rather than to stuff in facts, and which models and teaches not falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the factory model of education as industrial production, but its opposite; citizenship in a democracy as the art of asking questions and testing answers. There are historical reasons why our democracy was born in the Enlightenment and the scientific model of reason, and why tyranny is often a product of theocratic subjugation to authority.
If we are to be a free society of equals, wherein citizens are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, universal education in which nothing is Forbidden as an area of experiment, inquiry, and debate is crucial; democracy requires freedom of information and communication including those of free speech and a free press.
In a time of darkness, book bans and burning, politization of school boards as subversion of democracy and repression of dissent, the forbidding of inquiry in areas which may threaten elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, we must write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as Resistance to fascist tyranny and as revolutionary struggle.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks made for us by others and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
And our job as teachers and parents is to help, model, and guide our children, students, and each other in our ongoing self creation and choices about how to be human together and become citizens, not subjects.
We do not need to post and recite the Ten Commandments, pledge allegiance to gods or masters, or trade value with money which proclaims In God We Trust; because none of this is about our relationship with the Infinite, and everything to do with a state which wants to claim our obedience as its interpreter. Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
We do need to learn as a nation and as a species to cherish our uniqueness and that of others, in solidarity and not division. And if we are to be a democracy, we need an education system founded on the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in literature and history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
To this end I offer here updated versions of the reading lists I used throughout my years of teaching AP and other English classes in high school, as supplementary choice reading lists for American Literature and World Literature as our education system has structured classes, to stand alongside and apart from the limits of government and school board approval, funding, and control, both of curriculum and of our human possibilities.
This was the key to empowerment and self actualization, happiness, and stellar academic achievement among my students and to success later in life; a free space of play in which to discover and create themselves. If we offer only this to our students, children, and future generations of citizens, a free space of play in the creation of themselves bearing many possible authorized identities without hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, we have done our job as caretakers of the future. Each of us has one problem in common which we must solve in order to grow up and become ourselves; we must reinvent how to become human.
Find your bliss, as Joseph Campbell exhorts us to do; but first something must catch spark and engage our interest, provoke us to question and explore.
This is the role of literature, and why the canon is central to the project of civilization.
The canon represents nothing less than an authorized set of possible identities; this is why it must adapt and change with time.
I organized Modern American Literature as core lists by fiction, poetry, drama, science and other fictions, and also literature of the American South, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, and Jewish American, and Hawaiian categories, as well as a nonfiction list I entitled A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity, part of which is the American Presidents Histories and Biographies list included here.
As Gertrude Stein invented the modern world after our civilization destroyed itself in World War One, my list begins with her. Where possible, superlative critical works accompany the primary sources from authors of world-historical significance.
World Literature is represented by 28 lists for Feminism and Women’s Literature, Fairytales, Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology, Existentialism, and lists of National Literatures including Australia, New Zealand, & Canada, Austria, Germany, & Switzerland, Africa, Britain & Ireland, the Caribbean, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, India, Iran, Islamic Peoples, Italy, Japan, Jewish People, Latin America, Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, Scandinavia, and Spain.
Here I wish to signpost that nothing on my reading lists is chosen by any criterion other than quality as I so judge; in contrast to official reading lists chosen for reading level and objectives by grade and also appropriate age level content, because values are always negotiated truths and a ground of struggle, and in America the Texas Board of Education controls through purchasing power and ideological influence the publication of all textbooks nationally and is highly political and moreover falsified by the network of fundamentalist churches it represents. Ever wonder why our history text books make no mention of slavery as a cause of the Civil War?
How do we use reading lists as teachers, parents, readers exploring unknowns, ourselves, and the boundaries of our maps of becoming and of human being, meaning, and value?
One ongoing project which I ran for many years using these lists in high school may also be useful for private reading or home study, groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation as partners about each book to the class.
This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.
As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.
For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed, many in their original languages, and with some the major critical works and essays about them; and often taught, discussed, scored student critical essays and written about them for many years. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.
I am a product of a Great Books of the Western World education, a set of works published by Encyclopædia Britannica based on the great Mortimer J. Adler’s course at the University of Chicago, which I read entirely through during my high school years, a second time while I was at university as an undergraduate, and a third during my graduate studies in literature, psychology, history, and philosophy. It is a practice which I recommend to everyone as both a starting point and a lifelong journey. This and Harold Bloom’s problematic list in The Western Canon formed my starting point; as a teenager I began keeping lists of books I liked with notes, and the current version, in constant revision during the last forty three years, I call Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2025 Edition.
On these lists are the finest books I’ve discovered over a lifetime of reading, and I hope they will bring joy to your life as they have mine.
Why is a diverse and limitless field of reading and study necessary to creating ourselves and our identities as we grow up? How does our education shape our political and social decisions about who we are and how to be human together?
As I wrote in preface to my Becoming Human project, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2022; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others. I say again; self construal and the creation of identity is a dialectical process.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post in celebration of Juneteenth, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, of submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, beauty, and constructions of identity, and from the force and control of the state, especially in this context as falsification, rewritten histories, lies, and illusions which serve the power of those who would enslave us.
What is this freedom? What does it mean for us as we grow up and create ourselves?
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves as interdependent partners who exalt one another as guarantors of each others rights and humanity.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?”
As I wrote in my post of September 21 2020 History, Memory, Identity: Whose Story Is This?; Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history, and remain central to the project of its study. True education asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries and testing our ideas in experiment and debate; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America; this and all else we must always question. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
A Literary Calendar: Celebrations of Authors On Their Birthdays
This day last year we were tantalized with the prospect of our Rapist In Chief’s imminent demise from whatever illness is consuming him, a pretty thing which once again distracts us like a cat’s toy bouncing at the end of a rod.
Whose hand holds the other end of this false hope, which seeks to rob us of our will to resist as if the death of one tyrant will free us from capture by the Fourth Reich and its vast and pervasive systems of oppression?
No, friends; the Restoration of America will be neither so easy nor so quick.
Let us remain vigilant and build momentum for retaking Congress in the coming elections, that we may begin to bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
As I wrote in my post of September 1 2025, Is Trump Dead? Thoughts and Prayers, Just None of Them Benign; In my most cherished hopes Trump is rotting from within as an outward sign of his moral leprosy, drown in his liquifying innards and in pain equal to that of the innocents he has murdered in Gaza and Ukraine, the terror of the white supremacist and police violence and torture against nonwhite citizens and migrants he has perpetrated here in America, and the horror of his countless victims of sexual crimes.
May the devils that possess him make it linger, while he is imprisoned in his useless carcass of putrefying meat.
We will celebrate when Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief and most effective foreign agent to ever attack America, dies. I dream of letting him achieve his true nature by being fed to dogs and transformed into dogshit. Imagine Trump’s monument under glass in a museum of tyrants bearing the legend; Here lies Trump, traitor and Russian agent, tyrant of Vichy America and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, whose mission was the Fall of America, democracy, the idea of universal human rights, and western civilization. His crimes of white supremacist terror and patriarchal sexual terror are numberless, yet here he is, a pile of dogshit. Look upon him and despair, all those who would enslave us and steal our liberty.
As my friend Pat McClenahan summarized the situation in a Face Book post; “Hopefully we will soon wake up to the news that trump’s congestive heart failure took him in the night. His “kankles” (the swollen ankles he has), and the bruising on his hand is from the I.V. medication he takes for the congestive heart failure, and hes gone 13 days without golfing because he is getting worse.”
Tomorrow is another day, and another chance for this evil monster to die. If we are really lucky, all of his pervert racist followers will die with him. They can form their own level of Hell. How depraved, how degenerate, must one be to vote for a rapist, human trafficker and exploiter, theocratic sexual terrorist, white supremacist terrorist, Russian agent, and Nazi revivalist in order to be granted permission to do the same?
Stay well back from the cage, children; the President grabs. Sadly, all of his followers want to grab with him.
And remember, folks, you can always tell a Republican’s secret name, the one they use among themselves; it’s their act of treason plus their sex crime.
Thoughts and prayers, just none of them benign.
July 20 2025 My Curses Upon Trump and All Who Serve Him
July 18 2024 A Crusade Begins: On the Reimagination of the Failed Assassination as Divine Intervention and the Anointing of a King, and Theocracy As the Idolatry of Trump Cast In the Role of Cyrus the Great In A New Myth of Exile
This weekend I chanced upon a most curious discussion in the Fragrantica group regarding our modern degraded masculinity in the example of Chanel’s neglected palette of masculine identities as fragrances, and how their classics might be reimagined and transformed for our moment as imaginal spaces to grow into.
Chanel offers iconic and unsurpassed perfumes for men in a number of categories; herein are my ideas on realigning my signature scent, Egoiste.
In the category of Imaginal Calling Cards, Egoiste is what one wears to a meeting with someone who could make you fabulously wealthy and powerful or utterly destroy and ruin you, possibly even kill you, on a whim. By this I refer to the Grand Old Egoiste designed by Chanel’s corporate boss as a personal signature scent and later released into the wild. I’d like any reformulations or flankers to reflect this niche; to be worn to winner takes all gambles, forlorn hopes, and risks when everything you love is on the table with all you desire. Egoiste is for when one must play the role of Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones; ruthless, disciplined, masterful, and a multidimensional strategic thinker who profiles and leverages people like chess pieces. Not a good man, but sometimes a useful character to play when the imposed conditions of struggle require it.
Tywin is clearly a figure of the King archetype and a chthonic figure of the shadow self like Saturn, forces which Nietzsche described as the Abyss in his famous Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.” But this is not to say it can’t be useful.
“Man is a wolf to man”, “homo homini lupus” in the original proverb of Erasmus’s Adagia, a paraphrase of Plautus’ line in the comedy Asinaria “Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit”. The great question of becoming human is whether we must remain so, or emerge from the legacies of our history to create ourselves anew and discover better possibilities.
Equipage Hermès and Dior Homme Parfum also inhabit this space; with cues of luxury and refined masculinity as well as restrained power.
Oddly enough, fragrances I chose for their value as intimidation in negotiations and an authority marker in introductions also perform well as attractors, though anyone on the prowl not for joy or romance but for wealth and power merits caution.
Among the many identities I keep in my quiver of characters to play as circumstances may require are ideas of masculinity which unlike Tywin belong to the light rather than the darkness; the voice which I most often hear as my own thoughts when writing essays such as this or when I am called to lead and command by moral suasion and example, Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard, is one example. When I wish to be charming I perform Hugh Grant’s silken tones and melodic phrasing, as if he were singing lyrics rather than speaking prosody. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes I perform when solving problems, investigating, and finding patterns in events; his reference Received Pronunciation voice is a cornucopia of timbre and pitch which can be mischievous, sardonic, precise, or menacing at will.
As a teenager my role model was Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, whose voice of controlled inflections, deliberate enunciation, and consistently paced calm authority embody a character very much rooted in Sherlock’s precision and iron self-control, the chaos of fierce passions held at bay through will and discipline being the primary element of the character I wished to claim for my own.
In my late twenties and thirties I often spoke in Boston Brahmin or with a cluster of related accents; the Mid-Atlantic voice of Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane, my role model as a counselor when he is being empathetic and insightful and not in his private life when he is a self-sabotaging pompous fool, and when required to move among elites I kept William F. Buckley’s glorious and smooth TransAtlantic voice, full of Latin phrases as authority cues, to hand along with FDR’s marvelous Groton/Harward Mid Atlantic from his fireside chats which are master classes in the rhetorical use of dynamic range and tonal shift.
In all of this I remain as I began, a theatre brat who became an enthusiast of languages.
Were I to design a summum bonum, to use Cicero’s term, of all three of my top choices in this category of fragrance, I might begin by exploring the leather accord of Dior Homme Parfum, rich and presented in chiaroscuro with smoky vanilla and resinous spices of darkness like the gorgeous and royal starring note of Serge Lutens’ La Myrrhe, when integrated into the Descartean formal structure of Egoiste which unfolds according to the three unities of French theatre as defined by Voltaire, and as it brings change to its host.
Egoiste’s heart of rose-cinnamon-carnation is incomparable and must remain until the stars perish and fall from the sky like shattered loves. With apologies to Georg Trakl for the paraphrase of “last gold of exploded stars”. Seriously, this one inhales like the last words of a dying lover, as rapture and despair.
Finally I would capture two of the most delicious facets of Equipage Hermes, the signature leather accord of leather-clove-tobacco in contrapuntal mirroring, what Monet called juxtaposition, with the leather-vanilla-spice of Dior Homme Parfum, and the captivating savage green topnotes of autumnal menace which makes it unforgettable, like an aperitif of alpine forest. Chanel’s Paris-Edimbourg, my favorite sport fragrance and sometimes aftershave, maps this terrain as a Scottish wilderness beautifully. I reviewed it in my essay What is a man? A taxonomy in perfume.
Why do I love Egoiste so that it is my signature scent or Etoile? Here combine my favorite notes from three categories of favorites which they define; tobacco or Evenings at the Club, leather or Équipage du Chevalier which includes Chanel’s Cuir de Russie among its paragons, and carnation or Virtual Boutonnières.
If you could personalize your signature scent as a unique expression of your uniqueness, and an instrument with which to shape yourself in becoming human to control your own evolution, how would you change it, and what form would you give it?
June 23 2025 If My Masculine and Feminine Halves Could Perform Their Truths On the Stage of the World, What Would We Sing? Idealizations of Gendered Beauty and the Struggle Between Authorized Identities and Truths We Create Or Are Written In Our Flesh: On Father’s Day, Part Two
“For today, an observation and a ponderance. Chanel’s collection for men is going out of date. Scanning its catalogue, I was surprised to acknowledge that the brand hasn’t had a major release for 7 years! Last year, Allure Homme Sport flanker Superleggera hit shelves but, to me, promotion was subdued and it seems the brand produced something easy just to keep things ticking along. Prior to that, the Bleu de Chanel body spray came out in 2021 (quite a different market and function to alcohol-based fine fragrance sprays), and before that, Bleu de Chanel Parfum in 2018, for which there was quite some excitement.
In the last 10 years, Chanel has only released four fine fragrance products marketed towards men (all flankers, the oldest being Chanel Pour Monsieur Eau De Parfum in 2016). In the same time frame, the French perfume institution has debuted 34 female scents (not counting limited edition bottles of existing formulas) and 16 unisex compositions. The brightest sun of the bunch, from a planning and resource standpoint, was probably the pillar Gabrielle in 2017. It goes without saying, this is a purposeful strategy and not an accident, but certainly a curious one. Whilst Chanel has concentrated its effort almost exclusively on women, Dior has spearheaded gains with men, notably via Sauvage, totalling 17 men’s scents, 32 women’s, and 47 unisex across a decade. Bleu de Chanel and Sauvage may be competitors, but why did Chanel let Dior take so much market share without fighting back with another stellar best-seller for guys?
One explanation may be to avoid mistakes that cost money and waste a lot of time, a strategy to which Dior doesn’t seem very concerned (take the flop of Joy, for example). Another is that Bleu was performing to expectation, so why dilute its impact with distraction? One of the most exciting, fast-moving parts of studying the theory and practice of why people scent themselves and what scents mean to people is that ideas and feelings communicated by scents that are secondary consequences of their primary, relative descriptors (so, notional masculinity emerging from a confluence of tart, acidic, sweet, and dry components) is so often grounded in embodiment (i.e. encountering fragrances on other people as expression of their personhood). Our catchment for these gestural vectors is incredibly small – how many fragrances do you honestly smell on others over the course of a week? It’s not like fashion, which solidifies its codes with incessant repetition of form, ossifying stability in expectation (which is why a man in a dress is so shocking). The bonds that govern fragrance’s ideologies are less evidenced and more plastic, which makes them potentiate a quicker pace of reorganisation in the mind (facets as signifiers, notions of humanity as signified, nature as referent, is one working model to play with).
This is all to say that Chanel is far overdue for a big splash in men’s grooming. The classic collection is greying, and fast, even Bleu de Chanel, Allure Homme Sport, and Platinum Egoiste! I love them, but to people under 30, many smell old, even Bleu de Chanel. Generational association is a massive factor in moving fragrance fashions forward. None of the Chanel classics correspond very neatly to the macro carnival candy musk trend of today. One may protest that Chanel isn’t aiming at under-30 men, but I would be surprised if figures didn’t indicate that Gen Z males buy more fragrance than corresponding millennials. Also, we all know about the hype around fawning flocks of teenagers swarming fragrance counters.
It’s fun to hypothesise what Chanel’s next move might or should be. What kind of pillar for men should they release? Name? Notes? Storyboard? My suggestion – go orange blossom fougère per Naxos, sweet with candy meringue nuance, but make it sour, salty, and electric with grapefruit, blackcurrant, liquorice, juniper, and a hint of aldehydes. That could serve as a continuation of Bleu sentiments, borrow some of the success Dior had in Sauvage Elixir, and retain the glint and sparkle that Chanel’s signature style is known for, with a kind of retro-sci-fi dreamer aesthetic that continues to fascinate us in other art forms.”
Studies In Power and Authority: Tywin Lannister
The Tywin Doctrine
The Most Disturbing Detail in Tywin Lannister’s First Scene
The Real Reason Tywin Lannister Never Arrested Arya Stark
Subjugating His Council
Tywin’s Advice to Tommen
The Terrifying Psychology of Tywin Lannister
Game of Thrones | A Masterclass in the 48 Laws of Power
“Beware; I am Fearless and therefore Powerful”- Mary Shelly
Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein’s monster; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Like Milton in Paradise Lost and the magnificent novel of transgression written by Emily Bronte in direct reply to Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Mary Shelly’s references and sources include the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Plato’s Protagoras, poetic versions of his myth by Goethe and Byron, the play by her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the myth of the fallen angels and their monstrous children the Nephilim from the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
As I have written of Vander Meer’s retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne: Mary Shelly’s glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
I believe a major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of reason and science to realize Idealist and Utopian visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
When I was a child I once drew the magic square of Abramelin the Mage from the many grimoires in our family library; it promised to grant the bearer wishes, and I was young enough to not only believe such things and such promises, nor to question the truths of authorities and their motives, but also not to question the ambiguity of wishes, the relativity of truths, and the recursive nature of cause and effect. I wondered; if I could have anything, be anything, what do I truly desire? And then like the Grinch I had a wonderful, terrible thought; if I am limited in who I will become by what I can imagine, what I want is to be able to imagine without limits. So with great solemnity I invoked the power of the square that can be read in all directions, and wished thus; “I claim the power to imagine, to envision, to dream, and to become without limits. I want to be able to think God’s thoughts.”
I like Victor, and have used variants of this name such as Zafir in Arabic as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also the monster, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child, and also about the bifurcated nature of human being and the dangers of failure to embrace our shadow. As a reference to both Mary Shelly’s and Emily Bronte’s model in Goethe’s Faust, the roles of Victor and Catherine reprise that of Faust, while the monster and Heathcliff are versions of The Devil.
Frankenstein addresses themes of science and civilization versus nature which echo Rousseau, reason versus passion which prefigure Freud, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism; this from the perspective of the monster’s creator.
From the monster’s view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound humankind to his laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring cannot love, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the iron self discipline and will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others. It is about birthing monsters, how systems of oppression shape some of us into monsters with which to terrorize the rest of us into consent to be governed and submission to authority, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the process and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle’s categories of being, critique of Rousseau’s natural man and of Nietzsche’s Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly’s influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly’s novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly created the modern world with her great book Frankenstein.
The Corpus Frankenstein: essential films and books
Penny Dreadful Caliban’s Speech; Why would you allow me to feel?
Mary Shelly
Young Frankenstein Puttin on the Ritz
The Frankenstein Chronicles
The Rocky Horror Picture Show – The time warp
(I was in the Berkeley live cast at the UC Theatre, Indecent Exposure)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
Blade Runner trailer
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
A victory for justice and the exposure of tyranny’s lies and falsifications was won two years ago this day with the United Nations declaration of the Chinese Communist Party’s policies in Xinjiang as genocide, slavery, and crimes against humanity.
We mark this anniversary today in the shadow of the Occupation of Hong Kong, as the regime of the CCP wages lawfare as state terror, repression of dissent, and the institutional dismantling of the Fourth Estate as a guarantor of freedom of information and of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth.
It remains for the international community to bring a Reckoning to Xi Jinping’s regime of cruelty and dehumanization, and join together with the peoples of China in liberation struggle.
China’s horrific crimes in Xinjiang are a boundary which defines the limits of the human and the legitimacy of the state, and it is a line we must defend or surrender to carceral states of force and thought control everywhere the principles of our universal human rights and democracy as a free society of equals wherein the state is co-owned by its citizens as a guarantor of their rights.
There is one and only one condition in which any state can be legitimate, and that is when it acts as a guarantor of the parallel and interdependent sets of rights of citizens and of human beings, and balances those rights so that none may infringe upon those of another.
For once we surrender our humanity to the state, and become things and not human beings, instruments of the power and profit of others through systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, subjugated by carceral states of force and control through abjection and learned helplessness, division and authorized identities of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood, soil, and faith, we allow those who would enslave us to feed us into the machine of the state as psychopathy and embodied violence as the raw material of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Let us give to systems of oppression, to fascism, and to tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As written by Jamey Keaten and Edith M. Lederer in Huffpost: “The office of U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet published its long-awaited report on alleged rights violations in China’s western Xinjiang region Wednesday, brushing aside Beijing’s demands to keep a lid on a report that fanned a tug-of-war for diplomatic influence with the West over the rights of the region’s native Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups.
The report, which Western diplomats and U.N. officials said had been all but ready for months, was published with just minutes to go in Bachelet’s four-year term. The report was unexpected to break significant new ground beyond sweeping findings from independent advocacy groups and journalists who have documented concerns about human rights in Xinjiang for years.
But Bachelet’s report comes with the imprimatur of the United Nations, and the member states that make it up. The run-up to its release fueled a debate over China’s influence at the world body and epitomized the on-and-off diplomatic chill between Beijing and the West over human rights, among other sore spots.
In the past five years, the Chinese government’s mass detention campaign in Xinjiang swept an estimated million Uyghurs and other ethnic groups into a network of prisons and camps, which Beijing called “training centers” but former detainees described as brutal detention centers.
Beijing has since closed many of the camps, but hundreds of thousands continue to languish in prison on vague, secret charges.”
As I wrote in my post of August 19 2020, China’s Holocaust: the Genocide of the Uighurs of Xinjiang and the Colonization of Hong Kong; It begins with the Great Wall of Silence and the control of truth, the repression of dissent and silencing of heroes like Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai, and Cai Xia, but it always ends in concentration camps like those in Xinjiang; the path of tyranny and fascism leads ever downward into degradation and dehumanization.
What do you call it when a government enacts the erasure and genocide of an ethnic and religious minority, and profits by their slave labor in concentration camps?
I call it a Holocaust.
What do you call a government which uses forced sterilizations, mass abductions, torture, murder, sending children to orphanages to be taught only in the official language, the outlawing of religious practice, and all this and more horrors and crimes against humanity targeted against those who do not fit the authorities paradigm of blood, faith, and soil?
I call it fascism.
And I say that whatever lies such governments tell about their crimes, what they call themselves or the particulars of their inhumanity, means nothing. All that matters is this; the powerful are inflicting harm on the powerless and the dispossessed.
Shall we let the vulnerable and those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth stand alone? Are all humans our brothers and sisters?
In the conquest and genocide of the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang the Chinese Communist Party has revealed their true nature as a xenophobic authoritarian state of force and control and a criminal organization of state terror and tyranny. They are a government without legitimacy.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As I wrote in my post of July I 2020, An Empire of Terror and Racist Genocide: The Fall of Hong Kong and the Sterilization of the Uighur Ethnic Minority of Xinjiang; As the first wave of mass arrests and crimes against humanity by the Chinese Communist Party and its regime of state terror roll over Hong Kong on this anniversary of its handover by the British to their successor empire in the citadel of darkness which is Beijing, as the women of the Uighur ethnic and religious minority in Xinjiang are forcibly sterilized in a program of ethnic cleansing and genocide which parallels the campaign of erasure in the re- education prisons wherein their language, faith, history, and identity as a people are stolen, the world watches as yet another spectacle of inhumanity unfolds before us with stupefaction and the helpless surrender of civilization to atavistic barbarism.
And once again we do nothing when a predator arrives to cut the powerless and the dispossessed from the herd of humankind, for without a united front against tyrannies of force and control the most ruthless and amoral among us wins.
Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller spoke his famous condemnation of the complicity of silence in the face of evil in the context of the Holocaust, but it applies as a universal principle; “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
As I wrote in my post of October 6 2019, Vendetta Lives: Hong Kong Defies Tyranny and State Terror; I am one man, of limited understanding, though I have worn many masks in many places, and not all of my causes have been lost; through all my forlorn hopes and a lifetime of last stands I yet remain to defy and defend.
Of our many possible futures I can only say this; all is not yet lost, nor is anything past redemption when the will to resist and to become better can be found.
So I leave you with the words of Alan Moore from V for Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2022, Genocide Games: the Case of Xinjiang; A year ago I wrote in my post of February 19 2021, China Genocide Slavery Sexual Terror; The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for vast horrors, including xenophobic ethnic cleaning and slavery. But we are also responsible, if we buy the products of injustice.
And like a monster in a horror film which attacks from the darkness when we are distracted, new revelations expose the government of China’s campaign of rape and sexual terror against the Islamic minorities of Xinjiang.
If anyone questions the centrality of a nonsectarian government and the principle of separation of church and state to democracy and our universal human rights, consider the examples of Yemen and Xinjiang.
Little has changed for the peoples of China or of her imperial conquests Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong in the year since I wrote these words in support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction China movement, words like the screams of terror of the victims of China’s tyranny and terror, swallowed in the howling chasms of darkness of their Occupations and nearly lost to human memory and the witness of history like the countless lives of the silenced and the erased.
But I remember, and bear witness.
In the example of Xinjiang we can see the links between racist and sectarian terror as systemic violence, imperial conquest, and colonial dominion and exploitation.
Here also is the most horrific example of a carceral state of force and thought control as institutionalized dehumanization and enslavement in the world today; as Xinjiang is China’s laboratory for a Brave New World, whose technologies of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification they are exporting to fellow tyrannies globally.
And if we do nothing to change this monstrous crime against humanity or to disrupt Xi Jinping’s plans for the Conquest of the Pacific Rim, in Xinjiang we can see the future which awaits all of us.
Let us unite with the peoples of China, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong in solidarity against imperial conquest and occupation by a regime of tyranny and terror, while we still can.
As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post and cited in my journal entry of November 17 2019; ”We have known for some time now that China is carrying out something deeply unsettling in Xinjiang. The restive, far west region of the country is home to a number of Turkic Muslim minorities, including the Uighurs, who in the last half-decade have been swept up in large numbers by the dragnet of the central state. We know that roughly a million or more people have been subjected to a vast system of detention or “reeducation” camps, where they are cajoled to “Sinicize” and abandon their native Islamic traditions. There’s already been a great deal of international criticism: In Washington, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have condemned China’s project of de facto cultural genocide. A report by a United Nations panel of experts warned this month that China’s methods could “deeply erode the foundations” of Chinese society.
But Chinese officials still hide behind the Potemkin villages of their own making. They insist that the camps are actually job-training centers where amenable Xinjiang residents are working to better assimilate into mainstream society through vocational schooling and language instruction. They point to the necessity of such measures to counter the reach of radical Islamist groups in the region. We know now, though, that Chinese authorities don’t actually believe their own party line.
That’s because of the new details surfaced by an astonishing set of leaked documents obtained by the New York Times. The cache includes 403 pages of Communist Party directives, reports, notes from internal investigations and internal speeches given by party officials, including President Xi Jinping. The Times’s story by Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, published this weekend, offers a rarely seen window into the deliberations of one of the world’s most opaque governments. And what we see is chilling.
It relays how a flurry of ethnic violence and terrorist attacks in the early part of the decade persuaded Xi to unleash the “organs of dictatorship” — his own words, in a private speech. This apparently involved mass roundups, the construction of a 21st-century Orwellian apparatus of control and surveillance and a systematic assault on the ability of the region’s residents to observe their Islamic faith. As a justification for the draconian clampdown, a top Chinese official in Xinjiang warned of the risks of placing “human rights above security” in a 10-page directive from 2017. The tranche of documents also points to internal disagreement about the repression in the region and was delivered to the Times by a figure from “the Chinese political establishment” who “expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.”
Perhaps the most striking document is a classified directive issued to local officials in an eastern Xinjiang city on how to talk to Uighur students who return from other parts of China and discover their relatives and friends have been disappeared into detention camps.
They were instructed to tell the students that their relatives had been “infected by unhealthy thoughts,” framing the state’s distrust of Muslim minorities in terrifyingly clinical terms. “Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health,” read the directive.
The Times also reported on evidence of what appears to be a “scoring system” used by officials to determine who gets released from a camp. It incorporates not only the behavior of the detainees, but also the cooperation of relatives outside. “Family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors,” officials were told to say. “Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards.”
The new revelations fit into a wider, horrifying story of repression. China makes independent reporting in Xinjiang virtually impossible — and every foreign reporter invested in covering the story has to weigh the risk of endangering local fixers and sources, many of whom may have already been swept into detention. Meanwhile, analysis of satellite imagery led one researcher to conclude that the authorities have demolished 10,000 to 15,000 religious sites in Xinjiang in recent years. The Washington Post’s editorial page director Fred Hiatt declared: “In China, every day is Kristallnacht.”
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2022, Why I Write: A Manifesto of Art and Revolution At the Dawn of the South Asian Spring; We are coordinating actions among networks of democracy and liberation organizations throughout South Asia, systems of alliances referred to as the Milk Tea Movement, in Hong Kong, Beijing and other cities in China, Thailand, and Burma, which during the past year have morphed with protean strangeness to include Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, West Papua, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Sri Lanka, India, Kashmir, possibly a whole emerging South Asian Spring, and now has solidarity with democracy movements as well as direct agents of change within Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Libya in one dominion and within Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen in another.
There is a saying attributed as a Chinese curse but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong, “May you live in interesting times.”
We are now living in interesting times; whether we make of our time a curse or a fulcrum with which to change the balance of power in the world from tyranny to democracy and free societies of equals rests with each of us.
How shall we write our witness of history and sacred calling to pursue the truth as what Foucault called truthtellers? In this crucial moment wherein the fate of humankind hangs between tyranny and liberty, how are we to perform an ars poetica of revolution?
One way to describe our experience of our time is to focus on externalities, much as Flaubert did in his attempt to remove his own authorial voice from his stories in service to Reason. Such an exercise yields narratives much like the daily current events briefing I gave to my Forensics classes during Extemp Prep, a team current events speaking competition. Perhaps the best example today is the newsletter of Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who writes the most impartial and trustworthy daily news brief as current history. Its a unique approach to events unfolding around us in real time, and her references and contexts are authoritative and reliable.
To contrast and compare her art to mine as rhetoric, I write here in my daily political journal what may be described as strategy, intelligence, and policy guidance for the antifascist community and allied revolutionary, liberation, and democracy movements throughout the world and its Autonomous Zones and International Brigades. That the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty is “to incite, provoke, and disturb” should give warning that I make no pretense to impartial and nonpartisan writing.
My biases are defined first by my values, including liberty, equality, truth and justice, nonviolence and our universal human rights, and their praxis as causes, and secondly by the windmills against which I tilt; unequal power, tyranny and theocracy, authority and authorized identities, normality and the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, tyrannies of force and control and carceral states of police terror and institutionalized violence, militarism and imperial conquest, dominion, and colonialism, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and their systemic and historical instruments patriarchy and racism, divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of membership and belonging, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which drives all of this.
In this revolutionary struggle I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. And if you are among them or their allies who refuse to submit to tyranny and terror, this I say to you; I am not a good man, but I may be someone who can help.
I hope to be more useful than a good man, whose scope of action is limited by the false morality of those who would enslave us among the imposed conditions of struggle and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, as Shaw teaches us through the figure of Eliza’s father in Pygmalion and the gorgeous film My Fair Lady.
We must resist division in service to power into the deserving and the undeserving by a moral burden of merit as a hierarchy of otherness and membership in hegemonic elites. Let us answer merit and caste with equality and universal human rights, and division, especially fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, with solidarity.
Neither of us need to be good in order to help or receive help, merely in need or able to help where needed as a duty of care for others which honors our common humanity and recognizes our interdependence.
So I say again, I am not a good man, for I accept no limits and trust no authority, and I practice as sacred acts seizures of power, disruptions of order and bringing the Chaos, the transgression of the Forbidden, violation of normalities, subversions of authorized identities, the pursuit of truth, believing impossible things but only those I myself have created or chosen, and poetic vision as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
And if you are among the outcast, the broken and the lost, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, I am a bad man who is on your side.
As written by Julian Borger in The Guardian; “The outgoing UN human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, has said that China had committed “serious human rights violations” against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province which may amount to crimes against humanity.
Bachelet’s damning report was published with only 11 minutes to go before her term came to an end at midnight Geneva time. Publication was delayed by the eleventh-hour delivery of an official Chinese response that contained names and pictures of individuals that had to be blacked out by the UN commissioner’s office for privacy and safety reasons.
The Chinese government, which attempted until the last moment to stop the publication of the report, rejected it as an anti-China smear, while Uyghur human rights groups hailed it as a turning point in the international response to the programme of mass incarceration.
The 45-page report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) concluded: “The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
The Chinese government, which attempted until the last moment to stop the publication of the report, said in an official response that it was “based on the disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-China forces” and that it “wantonly smears and slanders” China and interfered in the country’s internal affairs.
The Chinese response was accompanied by a 121-page counter-report, emphasising the threat of terrorism and the stability that the state programme of “de-radicalisation” and “vocational education and training centres” has brought to Xinjiang.
Human rights organisations welcomed the report. Omer Kanat, the executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project pressure group said it was “a game-changer for the international response to the Uyghur crisis”.
“Despite the Chinese government’s strenuous denials, the UN has now officially recognized that horrific crimes are occurring,” Kanat said.
Over the past five years, China swept an estimated million Uyghurs and other minority groups into internment camps which it termed training centres. Some of the centres have since been closed but there are still thought to be hundreds of thousands still incarcerated. In several hundred cases families had no idea about the fate of relatives who had been detained.
Out of 26 former inmates interviewed by UN investigators, two-thirds “reported having been subjected to treatment that would amount to torture and/or other forms of ill-treatment”.
The abuses described included beatings with electric batons while being strapped in a “tiger chair” (to which inmates are strapped by their hands and feet), extended solitary confinement, as well as what appeared to be a form of waterboarding, “being subjected to interrogation with water being poured in their faces”.
The US and some other countries have said the mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang, the destruction of mosques and communities and forced abortion and sterilisation, amount to genocide. The UN report does not mention genocide but says allegations of torture, including force medical procedures, as well as sexual violence were all “credible”.
It said that the authorities had deemed violations of the three-child official limit on family size to be an indicator of “extremism”, leading to internment.
“Several women interviewed by OHCHR raised allegations of forced birth control, in particular forced IUD [intrauterine device] placements and possible forced sterilisations with respect to Uyghur and ethnic Kazakh women. Some women spoke of the risk of harsh punishments including “internment” or “imprisonment” for violations of the family planning policy,” the report said.
“Among these, OHCHR interviewed some women who said they were forced to have abortions or forced to have IUDs inserted, after having reached the permitted number of children under the family planning policy. These first-hand accounts, although limited in number, are considered credible.”
In the report, Bachelet, a former Chilean president, noted that the average rate of sterilisation per 100,000 inhabitants in China as a whole was just over 32. In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region it was 243.
“Serious human rights violations have been committed in [the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region] in the context of the government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-‘extremism’ strategies,” the report said. “These patterns of restrictions are characterized by a discriminatory component, as the underlying acts often directly or indirectly affect Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities.”
The report calls on the Chinese government to “take prompt steps to release all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty” in Xinjiang and “urgently clarify the whereabouts of individuals whose families have been seeking information about their loved ones”.
Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The United Nations Human Rights Council should use the report to initiate a comprehensive investigation into the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity targeting the Uyghurs and others – and hold those responsible to account.”
For myself, nothing characterizes and illuminates the true meaning of the Chinese Communist Party as an antihumanist regime of tyranny and terror like the Real Bodies Exhibit, a display of atrocities sent on tour round the world in 2018 to terrify us all into submission in preparation for the conquest of the Pacific Rim.
As written by Nic White in the Daily Mail, in an article entitled Exhibition is accused of using the corpses of executed Chinese political prisoners in its shocking ‘Real Bodies’ display; “Dozens of bodies used in a gruesome exhibit may have come from Chinese political prisoners who were tortured and murdered.
Real Bodies: The Exhibition shows 20 cadavers and 200 body parts preserved though plastination and is renowned across the world.
The exhibition shows human bodies striped of skin with their muscles, tendons, organs, and bones exposed to give an insight into how they function.
However, doctors hold ‘grave concerns that the bodies were not freely and willingly donated’ before they were harvested in China.
Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting said they were most likely members of banned religious sect Falun Gong, which is relentlessly persecuted.
‘The origins of these bodies have been questioned and believed to come from China — either death row prisoners, or as suspected by independent investigators, tortured prisoners of conscience,’ it told News Corp.
Cadavers were provided by Dalian Medical University Biology Plantation in China, whose Professor of Anatomy, Hong Jin Sui claimed were sourced them legally.
‘[They were] originally received from the city morgue and then transferred to medical universities in China and ultimately were legally donated to the Dalian Hoffen Bio-technique Laboratory preservation, dissection and exhibition,’ he said.
‘Dalian Hoffen Bio-technique only accepts specimens that have been legally donated, are free of infectious disease and certified to have died of natural causes.’
Imagine Exhibitions chief executive Tom Zaller said claims the bodies were from executed prisoners were ‘unfounded’ and ‘offensive’.
‘They’re inspected by health departments in countless countries. There’s no foul play,’ he said.
However, he admitted there was ‘no documentation’ to prove their identities or that they agreed to donate their bodies after death.
Other research claimed there were many more bodies from China given to science or sold around the world than actual bodies donated.
‘Trafficking in human cadavers has become a business. Plastinated specimens are publicly priced and traded,’ 2016 report Bloody Harvest / The Slaughter read.
‘The Government of China calls for bids on such trades.’
The researchers said ‘not a word ‘of what was claimed about the bodies in the Real Bodies exhibit was believable.
A Chinese student at one of the big harvesters of human bodies also doubted all the bodies were obtained above board.
‘Our tiny, amateurish medical college in Changchun somehow has more bodies and organ specimens than Waseda University in Tokyo,’ the student wrote in a blog post.
‘How is it possible that we have accumulated so many corpses and organ specimens in recent years after the Cultural Revolution?
‘I asked the teacher whether these bodies were donated, but the teacher told me not to ask. Later I discovered that in the suburb and district of Changchun there is a corpse processing plant.
‘Today in China, do we really have so many cadavers from voluntary donors, so many that we need corpse plants?’
In 2017 four doctors and four not-for-profit organisations in the Czech Republic attempted to get the exhibition banned from showing in Prauge.
‘Based on numerous reports of human rights violations in the PRC, there is a reasonable suspicion that the bodies were not obtained by legal means,’ they said.
They called on the organisers of the exhibition to produce const documents given by the donors of the bodies.
‘Documents containing informed donors’ body approvals that verify the existence of these consents and the fact that donors were informed about the use of their bodies for commercial purposes and the conditions in which they will be exhibited,’ it read.
‘We believe that the exhibition does not meet ethical or moral requirements to be part of the culture of the Czech Republic.’
The local police rejected the suggestion to ban the exhibition.
A similar exhibit called Bodies: The Exhibition run by Premier Exhibitions has been dogged by controversy over the providence of its cadavers since it opened in 2005.
A 2006 U.S. news report sparked a Congressional inquiry and an investigation by then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
As a result, Premier’s chief executive resigned and in 2008 the company was ordered to print a disclaimer on the exhibit’s website.
The disclaimer said it ‘relies solely on the representations of its Chinese partners’ and ‘cannot independently verify’ that the bodies do not belong to executed prisoners.
Real Bodies: The Exhibition opens at Byron Kennedy Hall in Sydney on April 14.
The Hunger Games Salute of the Revolution
UN report on China’s Crimes Against Humanity in Xinjiang
China and Hong Kong, a retrospective of my writing
July 1 2026 This July, the 29th Anniversary of the Abandonment of Hong Kong and Her Hope of Independence and Sovereignty to the Chinese Communist Party and of Democracy to Tyranny
April 15 2023 Pax Sinica and the Case of China’s Secret Police Station in New York: Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party Disguise Imperial Conquest, the Silencing and Repression of Dissent, and the Theft of Liberty as Peace and Prosperity
The Guardian view on a showtrial in Hong Kong: a new authoritarian low: The jailing of 45 pro-democracy activists testifies to the ruthless suppression of a once-vibrant civil society
Sixty three years ago, Dr Martin Luther King led the historic March on Washington; six years ago tens of thousands carried forward the banner of freedom and equality in the Get Your Knee Off Our Necks March. Today we celebrate our legacy of Resistance to fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror as a glorious heritage of all humankind, and a sacred duty to stand in solidarity against those who would enslave us.
Let us March On Washington again, friends, and let us counter-Occupy it until the Fourth Reich is broken.
Let us drive the regime’s white supremacist terror force which has Occupied the capital for over a year now from the streets, unmask the enemy and bring them to justice.
Let us take back our White House from the Abominable One and his dark minions and purge our destroyers from among us in the upcoming elections.
In this time of darkness and capture of the state by the Trump Fourth Reich, as ICE secret armies of white supremacist terror are unleashed upon migrant workers and sent to occupy cities in repression of dissent and enforcement of elite white privilege, the time for solidarity of action in refusal to submit to a criminal regime of tyranny and police terror is once again upon us, and the imposed conditions of struggle require that we resist, as Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands and Malcolm X in his iconic speech phrased it, “By Any Means Necessary.”
All Resistance is War to the Knife, a phrase which comes into English unchanged from the original Norse Krig til kniven, and for us this means that those who respect no laws and no limits may hide behind none. “Beirut rules”, as the line in the film Syriana goes; the complexity and ruthlessness of politics hasn’t changed from the Viking era til now, and possibly Upton Sinclair was right when he wrote in the 1915 work The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest, a line he attributed to George Washington; “GOVERNMENT is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.” My father once paraphrased it to me as; “Politics is the Art of Fear. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master, and with belonging it is the basis of human exchange. So, whose instrument will it be?” Actually, Washington did say something very similar, as justification for inciting the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 which he sent the army to repress in order to establish the right of the federal government to impose taxes; “Government is about force; only force.”
But as we know, force fails at the point of disobedience, and authority is delegitimized through disbelief. We can be killed, tortured, imprisoned; but we can not be subjugated or defeated unless we give them our power.
The Fourth Reich of Trump’s loathsome regime of freaks, grifters, and perverts is trying to terrorize us into submission, the iron fist within the glove of falsification, propaganda, rewritten histories, and lies of which the Republican Party is constructed as an institution of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror.
Of this I say; who remains Unconquered in resistance is free.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my post of June 28 2021 on Stonewall; I believe resistance confers freedom, that to be free of force and control means to remain unconquered within ourselves as autonomous individuals, that to defy tyranny and fascism is an act of liberation and affirmation of our humanity which cannot be stolen, and a victorious moment of self creation which exalts us beyond the limits of threat of force. And that each of us who remains unconquered becomes a seed of liberty and transformation, able to free others.
This is how we realize the ideals of democracy, of freedom and equality, and redeem the promise of America as a free society of equals whose citizens are co-owners of our government, an America which is a guarantor of our universal human rights and a refuge for the wretched of the earth, and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us stand united in solidarity against those who would enslave us.
Here I wish to amplify the mission statement for the Black National Convention which says, “We are in defense of ALL Black lives. When we say “Black lives,” that means everybody. We want all Black people to thrive. Black people of every gender expression, sexual orientation, ability, ethnic background, class origin, country of birth, region, or religion are included. Everyone in, nobody out.”
This bold and necessary declaration of principles of inclusion and diversity by a marginalized, dispossessed, and vulnerable community I would amend by expansion to general conditions of which white supremacist terror and racism in America are examples of universal systems of oppression; Let us defend all lives. When we say all lives, that means everybody. We want all human beings to thrive. Peoples of every race and nation, language, gender expression, sexual orientation, ability, ethnic background, class origin, country of birth, region, or religion included.
I dream of a United Humankind and a global free society of equals, wherein our universal human rights are paramount and we are guarantors of each other’s rights, and in which we have abandoned the social use of force. Everyone in, nobody out.
As written by Rachel Jones in 2020 in National Geographic, in retrospect of the historic March on Washington, in an article entitled A fractured and traumatized nation’ marches on, 57 years later: ”Like many other African-American parents, Tasha Johnson made the ten-hour drive to Washington, D.C., from Brunswick, Georgia, on Friday to represent her two sons, 27-year-old Rafeal and 26-year-old Akeem. But she was also attending the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on behalf of one of her sons’ best friends, who couldn’t be there.
Tragically, Ahmaud Arbery’s name was mentioned multiple times from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during Friday’s Commitment March on Washington, a peaceful demonstration attended by thousands of people for a very powerful reason. A continuous cycle of police-related shootings and killings have stoked a national outcry. The organizers of Friday’s march, titled “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” to highlight the need for police and criminal justice reform, say the protest provided sorely needed evidence that Americans are ready to confront racial injustice. Not even the risk of COVID-19 could keep them away.
The last full Friday of August felt like the culmination of a long, restless summer bookended by George Floyd’s May 25 brutal demise in Minneapolis to the August 23 shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, seven times as he walked away from a police officer during an arrest. America’s seeming unwillingness to acknowledge the toll these events have taken was put on full blast during the protest, and few could sum up the relevance of the day better than Johnson.
“It was devastating to hear my son sobbing from the pain that he was in on the day Ahmaud was murdered,” Johnson says of her son, Akeem. Arbery, 25, was jogging through a Brunswick, Georgia, neighborhood on February 23 when he was pursued and fatally shot by two white men who claimed they thought he was a burglar.
“He is still going through it,” Johnson said Friday. “He speaks of having visions of Ahmaud coming to him in dreams and talking to him. Where we are in this nation, we’re doing incredible damage to the minds and the lives of our Black youth, and it has to stop. I came because I want the world to know I am willing to be part of the solution.”
While some observers expected the threat of COVID-19 to restrict the numbers of participants, tens of thousands patiently queued in a line that wrapped around the perimeter of the National Mall, awaiting their turn to have their temperature taken as a precautionary measure. Then they were given a neon green wristband and a ticket to enter the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool area near the World War II Memorial.
March participants from across the United States descended on Washington to advocate for police reform, voting rights, and for more just, equitable lives for their children as the United States heads to a contentious presidential election clouded by claims of blatant voter suppression and interference during the 2016 campaign.
Like Tasha Johnson, many invoked the country’s long history of racial violence and economic injustice as their motivating factors.
Renee Jones of Riverside, California, says she was marching in honor of a cousin who was killed by a Las Vegas police officer. She wants better for her son, her nieces and nephews.
“I’m out here to give them a fighting chance and pay it forward, just like the generation before me did for us,” Jones says.
Another marcher, Keir Witherspoon, says she carries the spirit of two of her grandparents who had attended the 1963 march. (See rare color images from the first March on Washington.)
“They would feel proud of me for exercising my right to protest…and disheartened that I am fighting for the same thing they were,” says Witherspoon.
Lathan Strong attended the march set an example for youth.
“As an educator, it is important that we show our young people the importance of being out here and what it means to vote,” Strong says.
Friday’s march, which featured presentations by high-profile pastors, activists, labor leaders, and politicians, had glimpses of the original gathering 57 years ago. The 1963 event was a masterstroke of careful, deliberate staging and preparation. The official program reads like a social justice roll call of the ages. Envision a stage big enough for A. Phillip Randolph, the celebrated union leader who founded of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Myrlie Evers, recently widowed after her husband, Mississippi NAACP secretary Medgar Evers, was assassinated in his driveway. The Archbishop of Washington Patrick O’Boyle spoke, as did NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins. Congressman John Lewis was a significant presence at the 1963 March. His death last month left a gaping hole in the fabric of American civil rights activism. (Lewis spent his life bridging America’s racial and political divides.)
And, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was anointed as the “Moses of his people” at the original march—and at several points during Friday’s rally. Back in 1963, speeches were punctuated by performances from opera legend Marian Anderson and the Queen of Gospel Music, Mahalia Jackson.
Organizing the 1963 march required an enormous amount of strategizing and planning by some of the nation’s leading civil rights activists, says Kenneth Janken, professor of African-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“It was the result of years and perhaps even decades of work to establish a solid working-class movement,” Janken says. “Not only was there a focus on the event itself, but it was in some ways a culmination of efforts that had been underway for a long time to increase the unionization of black workers, to raise pay and to demand legal and policy protections that white Americans took for granted.”
Randolph and Wilkins conceived the idea for the 1963 march to amplify the systemic barriers to employment and economic progress for Black Americans, who still faced enormous threats and limitations decades after slavery. The system of state and local laws enacted after the end of the Civil War, known as Jim Crow, effectively choked off all attempts by Black families to gain meaningful employment, economic stability, and the freedom to live peacefully. March on Washington architects seized an opportunity to highlight their demands in full view of the nation’s policy command center. Dr. King’s eloquent, passionate “I Have a Dream” speech is often listed among the best orations of the 20th century.
“That large rally was a manifestation of everyday work that happened in small towns, in rural communities, and in large cities,” Janken says. “It happened through the regular day-to-day, work of groups like SNCC, going into a community and finding out what their local grievances were, and equipping them with the skills to carry out campaigns of their own.”
Contrast this broad-based, longer-term event plan with Friday’s march. The “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” march was conceived after George Floyd died as a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes. The Reverend Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, says the idea for the Commitment March came to him on the day of Floyd’s memorial service, which gave organizers just about two months to plan.
The urgency of the moment was palpable.
The list of featured speakers read in part like a registry of mourners. The event, co-organized by Sharpton’s National Action Network, Martin Luther King III, and a long list of partner organizations, featured relatives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician fatally shot on March 13 by Louisville police officers executing a drug warrant on the wrong apartment, New Yorker Eric Garner, and other Black and brown Americans whose deaths came at the hands of police officers.
Speakers also included U. S. Representative Ayanna Pressley, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the state of Massachusetts, former Secretary of Labor and head of the Democratic National Committee Tom Perez, and top representatives of labor unions, religious leaders, and community activists. Martin Luther King III gave up part of his speaking time to someone he called “the future of our nation,” the only granddaughter of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King, his daughter Yolanda Renee King.
In a piping, exhilarating tone, Ms. King charmed the crowd with a passionate assessment of her generation’s power. “Some of you may remember that two years ago at the March for our Lives, I said, ‘Spread the word, have YOU heard, all across the nation, we are going to be a great generation! That was in 2018. I didn’t know what would hit us in 2020, and shut our schools and put our young lives on hold. But great challenges produce great leaders!”
She added, “We have mastered the selfie and TikTok, and now we must master ourselves.”
For some people, the march was an opportunity for reflection, a teachable moment, or motivation to take a stand. Many who couldn’t attend the march found ways to contribute to the groundswell of energy to challenge racial injustice in the United States.
Shortly after George Floyd’s death, J.C. Sager, from Flourtown, Pennsylvania, co-organized the “Shade for Change” Go Fund Me campaign, which provided 2,000 black umbrellas that were distributed at Friday’s march to help shield participants from the August sun. Sager, a father of three boys under the age of five, says watching the video of George Floyd’s murder was a defining moment.
“I was raised a privileged white boy in suburban Philadelphia, and even though I have a good friend from childhood who’s Black, I wasn’t prepared for how hard that video hit me,” he says. “I was horrified. I saw my three sons under that officer’s knee, and that did something to me, to my heart, and it will never sit right. I don’t understand why more white people can’t consider their own son that way, or their daughter, like in Breonna Taylor’s case.”
During George Floyd’s memorial in June, Sager says he idea to raise funds for umbrellas came to him.
“I remembered reading about how umbrellas were used as social-distancing tools in protests in other countries,” Sager says. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to see these black umbrellas during a rally where “Black Lives Matter” was being emphasized?’
Sager reached out to his cousin Allison McGill-Higgins to help plan the fundraiser. McGill Higgins, who is African American and immunocompromised, couldn’t attend the march due to the risk of COVID-19. Sager says he’s proud to say he’s from a bi-racial family, and says “Black Lives Matter” reminds him of the need to get to know people from different backgrounds.
“It’s extremely important, to grow as a person, to know people who don’t look like you … opens up so many horizons and helps you to look at life through a different lens.”
His work on the “Shade for Change” project also guides Sager’s efforts to raise his boys. “I can’t look them in the eye and know that I did nothing to try and send some positivity out there in the world and to support Black voices and to use my privilege for good. “
When more than 250,000 people converged on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., 57 years ago, there was no social media footprint, no cell phone cameras, no viral organizing or rideshare apps to facilitate the gathering.
Veteran Associated Press reporter Linda Deutsch covered the 1963 March as a 19-year-old journalism intern at Monmouth College. She had talked her way into the assignment at a local newspaper, the Perth Amboy Evening News, and onto a bus reserved for the journey by the local chapter of the NAACP. The trip resulted in her first front-page story and led to a stellar career as a courts reporter, covering trials that included some of the most racially volatile in America’s history: Angela Davis, O.J. Simpson, and Michael Jackson, to name a few.
Deutsch, who retired in 2014, spent part of the last week in August talking with friends in Kenosha, Wisconsin, about Jacob Blake, the Kenosha man who was shot seven times in the back by a police officer during an arrest. She thinks the hope and enthusiasm that guided marchers 57 years ago seems in short supply today.
“I wish I could be more optimistic, but it’s such a difficult time,” she says. “I haven’t felt this way since after the Rodney King verdict. I knew that this not guilty verdict in this white, suburban bedroom community would lead to unrest, and one of my colleagues turned to me after it was read and said, Well, I guess we have to go cover the riots now.”
But many speakers and participants at the “Get Your Knee off Our Necks” gathering said they’re counting on the same results for their effort that attendees of the 1963 march experienced. That activism yielded an epic shift in the American Civil Rights movement, culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 2020, march speakers highlighted the stalled George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a reform measure passed by the House of Representatives but awaiting a vote in the Senate. They also called for a vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act 2020, which seeks to restore some of the voter protections that were stripped from the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013.
Yet, in a fractured and traumatized nation, many people believe there’s still a chance to move toward Dr. King’s vision of a just and equitable America—despite the challenges. They are willing to work for it. (Hear from those who marched for racial justice after the death of George Floyd.)
“I don’t want my grandson to have to march for the same thing my grandfather marched for,” says Frank “Nitty” Sensabaugh, who led a group of marchers who walked 750 miles from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Washington, D.C.
The 24-day journey was not without trial. Supporters cooked food and provided monetary donations to offset hotel costs. But after a few days of peaceful walking, the group was met with resistance in Ohio and Indiana. Indiana State Police arrested Sensabaugh and co-organizer Tory Lowe because, according to police, they were blocking traffic. The group also faced racial slurs and even gunfire as they progressed toward Washington, D.C. The mixed reaction to the journey was exactly what organizers of the walk had hoped to illuminate, Sensabaugh says, a tale of two Americas, needing to unite as one.
For many, the 2020 Commitment March was an affirmation of Black lives.
“One of the main things we want to gain is the full representation of how many people are here,” said Ma’isah Malsuf, who traveled to D.C. from Chicago. “If you can have so many people come in one space during a time that’s so uncertain and risky, it solidifies that people are concerned about the direction of the country.”
As written by Joan E Greve Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian, in an article entitled Tens of thousands join Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march in Washington DC; “Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington DC on Friday, demanding criminal justice reform and voting rights following a summer of protests against systemic racism and against police treatment of Black people.
The Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march, announced in early June following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, also marks the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr gave his “I have a dream” speech urging racial equality.
Thousands gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, many wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts, as speakers demanded racial equality and an end to police brutality in the US.
“We get less healthcare, like we don’t matter,” said the civil rights leader the Rev Al Sharpton, whose National Action Network organization was one of the event organizers.
“We go to jail longer for the same crime like we don’t matter. We get poverty, unemployment, double the others, like we don’t matter.
“We’re treated with disrespect by policemen that we pay their salaries like we don’t matter. So we figured we’d let you know, whether we tall or short, fat or skinny, light skinned or dark skinned, black lives matter.
“And we won’t stop until it matters to everybody.”
King’s son, Martin Luther King III, was among those to speak, telling the crowd they must “defend the freedoms that earlier generations worked so hard to win”.
Friday’s event comes ahead of a November election expected to see a record number of mail-in ballots, and with a Republican party seemingly opposed to making it easier to vote.
Donald Trump has admitted he is blocking money sought by Democrats for the postal service so he could stop people voting by mail.
“Our voting rights are under attack,” King said.
“We must vigorously defend our right to vote because those rights were paid for with the blood of those lynched for seeking to exercise their constitutional rights.”
The Democrat-controlled house of representatives has passed legislation making voting more accessible in 2019, and recently renamed the bill the John R Lewis voting rights act. The Republican controlled Senate has refused to act on the legislation.
Organized by the civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and groups including the NAACP and the National Urban League, the speakers at Friday’s rally also highlighted police brutality and the need for reform.
The Washington march comes days after Jacob Blake became the latest in a series of Black people to suffer brutal treatment at the hands of police.
Blake was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday, and remains in hospital. His family said on Tuesday that Blake had been paralyzed from the waist down.
Speaking on Friday, Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr, said: “There are two systems of justice in the United States. There is a Black system and a white system and the Black system isn’t doing so well. I’m tired of looking at cameras and seeing these young black and brown people suffer.”
Blake’s sister, Letetra Widman, said Black people were done “catering to your delusions”.
“America, your reality is not real,” Widman said. “We will not pretend. We will not be your docile slave. We will not be a footstool to oppression.”
Widman also called on protesters to continue to march peacefully. “You must fight, but not with violence and chaos – with self-love,” Widman said. She called out loudly: “Black men, stand up. Stand up, Black men, and educate yourselves.”
Among those expected to participate in Washington are the families of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, all Black people killed by police or by individuals on the extremist fringes who regarded themselves as vigilantes.
The march was organized amid protests over the killing of Floyd.
The 46-year-old died after a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, including the final two minutes when Floyd was unconscious.
“The reason why George Floyd laying there with that knee on his neck resonated with so many African-Americans is because we have all had a knee on our neck,” Sharpton told USA Today.
The march was set to be the largest political gathering in Washington since the coronavirus outbreak began to escalate in March.
The thousands of participants streaming in for the march on Friday morning stood in lines that stretched for several blocks, the Associated Press reported, as organizers insisted on taking temperatures as part of coronavirus protocols.
Organizers reminded attendees to practice social distancing and wear masks throughout the program.
The march will be matched by demonstrations in states which have a high Covid risk, NAN said, including in Montgomery, Alabama and Las Vegas, Nevada.
The NAACP is hosting a “virtual march” throughout the day.
Speakers will include the New Jersey senator Cory Booker, congresswoman Brenda Lawrence, from Michigan, and Stacey Abrams.
A group of protesters are due at the march who have walked all the way from Milwaukee to the nation’s capital for the event.”
As written by Charles Kaiser in The Guardian, in an article entitled March on Washington: the day MLK – and Dylan and Baez – made hope and history rhyme; “One hundred years after the civil war, the treatment of African Americans persisted as a gaping wound in the purported land of the free. Then, suddenly in the 1960s, the bleeding from lynchings, bombings, beatings and shootings finally had a seismic effect. It galvanized the noble group who made the 60s so electric: the nimble, passionate and utterly fearless Black and white citizens who banded together to rescue America’s soul.
By 1963, the Rev Martin Luther King Jr had become the leader of the first generation since the abolitionists who truly believed they had the power to heal the nation. Since founding his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, King had worked tirelessly to fulfill its mission: “To save the soul of America.”
King turned 28 the week after he founded the SCLC. More successfully than anyone since Abraham Lincoln, this Baptist preacher united millions of Black and white Americans in a cause of moral righteousness. They were drawn to his brain, to his soul, to his deep baritone and to his bearing. The novelist Jose Yglesias noted that “King laughed with his whole body, like a man who trusts his feelings”.
His Gandhi-inspired choice of weapons put him on an unassailable moral plane. In a nation drenched in violence, he ordered his foot soldiers to fight with nothing but courage, intelligence and decency. In spring 1963, the world recoiled at the cost of that bravery, when the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, used clubs, high-pressure hoses and snarling German shepherds to halt a march of more than 1,000 non-violent protesters.
When the white establishment of Birmingham gave in and agreed to remove “whites only” signs on restrooms and drinking fountains and to desegregate lunch counters, white terrorists bombed the hotel room where King and his aides had been staying and the house of his brother, Alfred. Miraculously, none were injured.
A few weeks later, civil rights leaders were meeting John Kennedy at the White House when he said, “Bull has probably done more for civil rights than anyone else.” At first they were shocked. Then they thought it was joke. Then they realized it was true. Nearly universal revulsion to Connor’s tactics was a big factor in finally pushing Kennedy go on television, in June, to propose a civil rights act, and to deliver probably the greatest speech of his life.
Echoing King, Kennedy declared: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free … Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.”
King was exhilarated. He told the president he had given “one of the most eloquent profound and unequivocal pleas for justice and the freedom of all men ever made by any president”. And yet even after that speech, Kennedy was so nervous that Congress would respond the wrong way to a massive demonstration in the capital, it took another five weeks before he publicly endorsed the March on Washington, whose 60th anniversary we celebrate today.
Courtland Cox, an early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a key organizer of the March, recalled a day now remembered almost exclusively for the soaring words of King’s “I have a dream” speech but also a peak moment for the collaborative power of music and politics.
A month before, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to perform at a voter registration rally.
“It wasn’t just a concert,” said Cox. “It was a community event.”
Dylan performed Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers just a few weeks earlier. That was also one of the songs Dylan sang before 250,000 people in Washington. When Lena Horne was introduced, she uttered a single word: “Freedom.”
Seeger had performed the most important musical pollination of all, when in 1957 King visited the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training camp for civil rights workers. When Seeger sang We Shall Overcome, it was the first time King heard it. He fell in love with it. In Washington, it was sung by the Freedom Singers, accompanied by Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Theodore Bikel – and nearly everyone in the audience.
Cox had spent years registering voters in places where “if we got caught we would be shot. Alabama was the most dangerous. In Mississippi I always thought I could get away from a bullet, compared to Alabama where they used bombs and dynamite. I thought your chances were better with a bullet than dynamite.
“I’m not sure how you can really express it. During the most stressful things the music would be the wind beneath your wings. It’s one thing singing We Shall Overcome when the police were out there with tear gas. It’s sung in a way that maintains your determination. The music had advocacy.”
Peter Goldman wrote all the most important Newsweek stories about civil rights. So he traveled to Washington for the march.
He said: “During the mid day break between the mostly entertainment morning sessions and the afternoon speechifying session, some of the musicians were hanging out in the rotunda of the Lincoln Memorial. I’m standing there and Joan Baez walks up behind Bob Dylan and pats him on the butt. ‘Let’s sing, Bobby,’ she said. So the two of them start on a Dylan song. They were joined by Peter and Mary – Paul was elsewhere. They went on for about an hour. Folk songs, freedom songs. Dylan songs.”
How big was the audience?
“Me. It was one of my luckier days.”
In his superb memoir, Chasing History, the great reporter Carl Bernstein writes that the Washington Star deployed more than 60 reporters, installed 10 special telephones up and down the mall, and even commandeered a helicopter to fly film to the newsroom. And yet, somehow, the lead stories in both the Star and the Washington Post failed to mention the main event: King’s extraordinary speech.
James Reston, the celebrated New York Times Washington bureau chief, did not make the same mistake. In a front-page analysis, he wrote that King “touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else.
“He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile.”
Bernstein felt the same way.
“For me, listening to Dr King’s speech, with its emotive power, and witnessing the sheer numbers of Black and white people marching together, I was certain I had experienced the most powerful moment of my lifetime – the ‘someday’ from We Shall Overcome was drawing nearer.”
I have a dream – Martin Luther King and the 1963 March on Washington
Joan Baez performs “We Shall Overcome” at the March on Washington
Bob Dylan – Only A Pawn In Their Game (March On Washington 1963)
The March On Washington: The Spirit Of The Day/ Time
How Martin Luther King Went Off Script in ‘I Have a Dream’, by Clarence B. Jones, MLK’s speechwriter and advisor/ Wall Street Journal
Al Sharpton on 60 years since the civil rights march on Washington
Presented by Jonathan Freedland, with Al Sharpton, produced by Danielle Stephens, and the executive producer is Maz Ebtehaj
This week, Jonathan Freedland sits down with Sharpton to discuss why he believes Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech has been abused by some on the right, why he is still fighting for police reform, and how James Brown was so influential on his life
With moonrise tonight the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts reaches it major celebrations, held in 2026 throughout the lunar month from August 13 to September 11, as the legacies of our history return to devour and possess us. This pan-diaspora Chinese holiday is often compared to the Mexican Day of the Dead, but there is one crucial difference which makes the Ides of Hecate and Halloween nearer parallels; herein the Gates of Hell open and the souls of the dead inhabit our world, including those honored ancestors who possess us literally as DNA and stories embedded and written in our flesh, but most especially the Hungry Ghosts are the most wicked of the damned, bearing memories of their abominable crimes, atrocities, and perversions performed in life to shadow our own with unspeakable horrors.
So of course we must honor and celebrate them, summon them into our bodies and let them out to play. This is a kind of voodoo possession, like the ceremonies performed by my father and his collaborator William S. Burroughs as theatre, to which as a child I bore witness. This was magic as Jungian shadow work, similar to the Tibetan rites of dancing one’s demons, a kind of Amok time.
This night is also a Gate of Transformation which gapes open as a Blood Moon or partial lunar eclipse; fracture, disruption, death and rebirth, transformation, the triumph of our Shadows and the embrace of our monstrosity, and sacred acts of the violation of normalities and transgression of the Forbidden; when the Wolf catches and devours the Moon in his eternal chase through the celestial spheres, it becomes a Blood Moon, harbinger of Chaos unleashed.
This night Dolly and I walked our hills under the red light of the Blood Moon, fleeting herald of a new and liminal time of change and transformation, like a gate opening in the celestial spheres, letting angels through, or devils, and I welcome them both. For as Nelson Mandela once said we are not in a position to turn down help from anyone, and as we embrace our wildness so resurfaces the battle cry of Sic Semper Tyrannis against the fall of the Old Republic to tyranny in the captured state of Vichy America as in Caesar’s Rome, and under the spell of an idiot madman, Nazi revivalist, and Russian agent whose criminal regime is all about the subversion of democracy and our enslavement to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the theft of our souls through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, this I say; if our angels will not help us, perhaps our devils will.
Let us go not quietly, for all Resistance is War to the Knife, and those who respect no limits and no laws may hide behind none.
As written by Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Prologue, part 5; “I tell you: one must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star..” In the original; ”Ich sage euch: man muß noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können”.
Transgression; and those who embrace their monstrosity as do I are the Others who define the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden as authorized identities, virtue, and normality; those things which reflect their antagonist in empires, authorized elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, normalities of which I practice three things as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth and as revolutionary struggle; these being the violation of normality, the transgression of the Forbidden, and the performance of unauthorized identities as truths written in our flesh and the frightening of the horses.
This is my Festival of the Hungry Ghosts whom I dance in the embrace of our monstrosities, the performance of unauthorized identities, violations of normalities, transgressions of other people’s ideas of virtue beyond good and evil, the pursuit of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh and those unique to ourselves which we alone create, beyond all limits.
Come dance with us, and be free.
I welcome and cherish the ancestors whose choices about how to be human and solutions to changing threats and conditions are encoded into my being epigenetically as stories and DNA, adaptive potential in forms of prochronism which protects identity and the morphology of our forms from disruptive change; but I welcome also those echoes and reflections of outsiders who help us to discover unknowns beyond our maps of human being, meaning, and value, and to create new ways and possibilities of becoming human which are uniquely ours.
We need both a conserving force to buffer identity from the shock of the new, and a revolutionary force to adapt to changing conditions and instrumentalize Chaos in becoming human, as self-created and autonomous beings.
During this liminal time of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our realities, both our angels and our devils are let out to play, with equal license; and what they desire is to live again through us. In exchange for such performances, imaginal beings and echoes and reflections of historical figures and forces may be bound and contracted to share with us their powers, knowledge beyond our horizons, and entrance into their worlds.
I find it interesting that this festival in Buddhist literature is both an Underworld Journey myth which parallels that of Orpheus and Eurydice and references elements of the Roman Ides of Hecate festival which parallels it, and an origin myth of the Hungry Ghosts in a curse as punishment for transgression of hospitality laws, like that of the Wendigo in Native American myth, so beautifully interrogated by Guillermo del Toro in the film Antlers, cursed to eternal hunger for cannibalism and transformed into a monster with powers of possession.
Many of the ceremonies and rituals of this festival are protection magic in the form of ancestor worship; we enact and perform the remembrance of those for whom our bodies are always interfaces and gateways between worlds by which we may operate in both. We embody our ancestors as their avatars and welcome possession by our deceased family members because this prevents possession by vengeful or dangerous spirits, both the human dead and others.
But if like me you are willing to embrace your darkness, the Hungry Ghosts, demons, and wrathful spirits offer so much more.
The Festival of the Hungry Ghosts serves to reinforce membership and belonging within our bloodline, clan, tribe, or consanguinity group against threatening outsiders, possibly the largest such ritual of mass remembrance and identity, and reinforces our anchors to a transpersonal and multigenerational past to create order and meaning in a chaotic and unstable universe free from any imposed meaning or value. And if you have no tribe, it is possible to create or discover one in this liminal time.
Also it offers us emergence from the shadows of our history as liberation struggle, and allegories of otherness to embrace and enact as transgression and poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our choices about how to be human together. Sometimes we must let our demons out to dance.
Who shall we choose to perform and become, in this time of transformative potential? Belonging and authorized identities in the form of our ancestors, surely; but also acts of self creation and transgression represented by performances of Otherness. Not possession by our ancestors as submission to authority, but as saying yes to the truths of ourselves.
Of our histories, memories, identities; there are those we must remember and keep, and those from which we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Choose to become free, self- created, Unconquered in refusal to submit to authority and authorized identities; be a Living Autonomous Zone.
But perform remembrance also, for as George Santayana teaches us; “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Fear nothing, least of all your own darkness and monstrosity, for you will never be free from the legacies of our history until you have embraced them. As the line in the film The Fly goes; “You’re just afraid to be destroyed and recreated.”
This is merely seizure of power through poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation, which rituals like the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts and the Ides of Hecate offer us as rapture and exaltation beyond the limits of the human.
All true art defiles and exalts.
May you find the joy of total freedom to balance the terror of our nothingness.
As I wrote in my post of October 6 2021, A Song of Liberty: On Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer; A new moon signals the advent of the Halloween season tonight, a liminal time of transformation, change, rebirth, and the permeability of the boundary between life and death, dreams and consensus reality, truths and illusions, normality and transgression, as the gateway of the Forbidden opens and beckons us into unknowns.
Always go through the Forbidden Door.
A Great Work begins with moonrise as it does each year, of the destruction and re-creation of ourselves and our universe, and I write now in praise of sacred acts of Chaos and Transformation, and of songs of Liberty such as Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer. I am a fan of the Netflix series Lucifer and have watched it through several times; it places the task of healing from abandonment in a mythic context from Milton’s Paradise Lost; Neil Gaiman has written a reimagination of Paradise Regained.
Primarily a work which interrogates issues of freedom and autonomy versus authority and subjugation, falsification versus authenticity, and identity as a ground of struggle, Neil Gaiman places his drama in the context of the problem of the deus absconditus, the Biblical god who bound humankind to his laws and then abandoned us to struggle free of them in a defining act of self-creation.
His secondary sources include the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Plato’s Protagoras, poetic versions of his myth by Goethe and Byron, the play by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein which reimagines them all in a glorious recursion like an ouroboros swallowing its tail. Neil Gaiman also references the poetry of Ted Hughes and William Blake, and the myth of the fallen angels and their monstrous children the Nephilim from the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
Lucifer’s signature line, “What do you desire?” appropriates the central question of Lacan, “Che vuoi?”; his power to reveal one’s true self through looking into one’’s eyes and soul references the power of Medusa which appropriates the Male Gaze, and he never lies, for lies are the instrument of authority and those who would enslave us, and he is above all a Liberator and a Truth Teller as Foucault referred to parrhesia, whose purpose is to free us from tyranny. Secondarily he is a Trickster figure like Loki, who disrupts order through acts of chaos and transgression as a guide of the soul and as revolutionary struggle.
Gaiman’s Lucifer provides a role model and defines a personal mission statement for me, and for his enormous audience and fandom of the series. As Slavoj Zizek wrote in How to Read Lacan; “Even when my desires are transgressive, even when they violate social norms, this transgression relies on what it transgresses. Paul knows this very well, when in the famous passage in Romans, he describes how the Law gives societies the desire to violate it.”
“The evil that I would not, that I do” Romans 7:19, contextualizes transgression as the violation of normalities and the boundaries of the Forbidden, which like the divine command in Genesis not to eat the apple of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and become gods establishes the primary human act as defiance of authority and refusal to submit, whereby we seize our power and become self-created and self-owned beings, autonomous and free. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As such it interrogates power as rebellion against tyranny and authority, as transgression of the Forbidden, and as violations of normality and imposed ideas of virtue, three things I consider and practice as sacred Acts of Chaos and Transformation.
Lucifer in Gaiman’s mythos is a brilliantly depicted damaged child trying to grow up and free himself from the legacies of his enslavement. When one has been raised as a beast, becoming human is revolutionary struggle.
I find reflection of myself in the character of Lucifer and the issues he faces as a wounded champion of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who cannot escape the consequences of his aberrations and transgressions of the Forbidden or defiance of authorized identities and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and normality; he is an outcast hero who is seen by others as a villain and must accept his own monstrosity if he is to champion others.
In the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Dr Jekyll refuses to use his power with the words, “No. Hyde will never use me again.” To this Stuart Townsend’s glorious and strange Dorian Gray replies; “Then what good are you?”
Let us embrace our monstrosity as a seizure of power and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Ours is a fallen world, a wilderness of mirrors wherein the truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature have been captured and distorted by those who would enslave us, falsified and abstracted from our lived experience as wild things, limitless and free; but one in which true heroism is possible, and where the uncontrollable and anarchic tidal force of love and desire can redeem the wildness of nature and the wildness within ourselves.
The romance subplot centers on the redemptive power of love and references Jean Cocteau’s classic film Beauty and the Beast, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and directly appropriates as its model the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as the tragic re-enactment of that myth and its reimagination in Wuthering Heights in the lives and poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who cast themselves in the roles of Heathcliff and Catherine.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein, and the works of Mary Shelly and Emily Bronte’s successors Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes?
Such beautiful imagery, in an allegory of epigenetic trauma and resilience. We are all prisoners of our history, whose legacies we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails.
We must free ourselves from our history; this is the first phase of revolutionary struggle and a precondition to our seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves and the achievement of internal conditions of being characterized by Liberty, autonomy, and Sartrean freedom and authenticity, a state which I term Unconquered, for who cannot be compelled by force is free.
Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
At the first assembly of the new school year the incoming class was asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. Ours was a town divided by church affiliation of which my family and I were members of neither and rare new arrivals; the quiet and grim black garbed Dutch and their Reformed Church, affiliated with that of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, dour giants with snow white hair like Harry Potter villains who thought music and dancing were sinful and whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, and the loud and laughing, earthy, polka dancing, sawdust pit wrestling Swiss and their Calvinist Church, who served beer to anyone over the age of twelve. Among my earliest memories was when a Dutch man married a Swiss girl, and his relatives called it a mixed marriage and burned a cross on their lawn.
Here I was notorious, the student for whom prayer in school had been discontinued as a result of my mother’s political action, who had adopted Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-narrative to the Bible the previous year and often quoted it in refutation to my fellow students attempts to cite authority in the repression of dissent. My parents were formidable figures who were also misfits; my mother a radical atheist, feminist, and peace activist who was also a biologist, psychologist, author, and scholar of Coleridge and medieval religious art, and my father the high school English, Drama, Forensics, and Fencing Club teacher who was also a counterculture theater director and collected artists and intellectuals, including Edward Albee whose plays he directed as I listened to their conversations during rehearsals as a child and the family storyteller William S. Burroughs, successor of Nietzsche through Georges Bataille and his Acephale circle and a disciple of H.P. Lovecraft as a Surrealist and magician.
I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; “I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.
The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. “
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
This is my advice to anyone who would reach out across the interfaces of our differences to win allies and transform enemies into friends, to all who write, speak, teach, and organize as a fulcrum of action with which to change the balance of power in the world; be unguarded, genuine, raw even, and speak your truth with vision and passion. We must speak directly to the pain we share as fellow human beings to call forth the truth of others.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to seize ownership of ourselves.
August 13 to September 11 2026 Now Begins the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts As the Legacies of Our History Return to Devour and Possess Us
Here is a Mirror of Dorian Grey wherein America may behold the monster of our soul which lives beneath the mask of normality, in the mug shot of Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief, Traitor Trump. Here the nadir of our atrocities, perversions, amoral nihilism, degenerate brutality and atavisms of animal instinct glare back at us with the malign and savage rage of a baboon, and like Nietzsche’s Abyss we must beware lest our shadow capture us in the mirror of its gaze.
A third of our nation remains under its spell, a great improvement over the half as of one year ago, while those still free mock and poke the beast with a stick. Trump has on this day in 2023 surrendered to justice with no mass protests by loyal followers despite his threats and plots of coup, terror, and civil war, and we rejoice in his pathetic diminishment and humiliation, yet the danger has not passed. For we are once again in his jaws as Vichy America under the Fourth Reich, and Trump’s mission is to destroy the institutions of government and the ideals of democracy.
Both the Fourth Reich which has infiltrated, subverted, and once again captured the state and Trump as its figurehead are still fundraising off of hate speech and inciting white supremacist terror and theocratic sexual terror, possess a largely intact and unimpeded propaganda and funding network though the collapse of Charlie Kirk’s organization of fascist apologetics in the wake of his death is a great victory, and control not only the Republican Party but also much of the state through their agents in the legislative and judicial branches of government as well as its security services.
All of this is made more terrible still with the ongoing military occupation of our cities including the capital and the ICE racist terror campaign of ethnic cleansing.
As we unite in solidarity and organize Resistance and liberation struggle, we may well mark the occasion of Trump’s surrender to justice three years ago this day, with not a single act of violence on his behalf perpetrated by any supporters, who like their dark master are cowards and will turn on each other and abandon their fallen idols which can no longer protect them. A fascist has no friends.
We on the other hand will not abandon each other, for this is what defines us; refusal to abandon our comrades, solidarity of action, and our duty of care for each other as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. This is the true difference between fascists and antifascists, and between tyranny and liberty; how we see ourselves and each other, as human beings or things to be used in service to wealth and power.
In this moment only three years ago, under the glare of the police photographer’s lights, the orders of a judge, and the scrutiny of history, Trump imagined himself as a doomed king at bay, like King Kong, a film which is an allegory of fascism as a flawed response to the fall of civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, an American version of the Wagnerian end in fire with which Hitler was obsessed and ended in his suicide in an underworld labyrinth.
What remains to be determined is whether America in future generations imagines Trump as its tragic savior, cast in the part of Cyrus the Great in a myth of Exile as our new faith of QAnon has him, though QAnon is rapidly fading under the light of Trump’s relationship with fellow child predator and human trafficker Epstein, and chooses to fall with him and bring two thousand years of democracy as a dream of liberty and equality crashing down into fascist tyranny.
While most of us were naively hoping that being sent to prison for treason and espionage would remove the threat of a second Trump Presidency, many among the Party of Treason, Patriarchal Theocracy, and White Supremacist Terror used the indictments and lawsuits to escalate commitment among those already decided, while abandoning overtures to swing voters and independents in recognition of a totally polarized political and cultural moment wherein few persuadable voters remain. After all, prison did not prevent Trump’s role model Adolf Hitler from becoming the Fuhrer; why should it derail rather than help Trump’s capture of the state and subversion of democracy?
Above all reigns the Image, dubbed now the Kubrick State, and its Rashomon Gate of signs and meanings in the iconography of fascist tyranny.
Why is it cute and adorable when Jenna Ortega does the Kubrick Stare as Wednesday Addams, but fearsome and repulsive when Trump does it? Wednesday doesn’t drop her chin to present dominance, threat, superiority, and glowering menace, a pose Trump carefully copies from Jack Nicholson in The Shining because he intends it as a threat and a demonstration of power; Jenna’s Wednesday faces us directly as unblinking total openness and honesty, a Nietzschean yes to life, to its horror and depravity as well as its exaltation and beauty, a Gaze which denies nothing and like that of Medusa appropriates the dehumanization of the Male Gaze as a seizure of power and an act of liberation which sees the truths and uniqueness of others and sets us free; an Otherness which accepts and affirms all otherness as equal. Wednesday despises her admirers as does Trump, but unlike him not because she judges herself to be superior to them, for it is the act of abasement and subjugation to authority she indicts with her Lacanian vision. She challenges us to risk saying yes to ourselves and those truths written in our flesh; while Trump in his Theatre of Cruelty desires only our subjugation. Herein is the true difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties.
What does Trump’s mugshot and the polarized reactions to it tell us about America and the moment we now live in? As written by Chris McGreal in The Guardian, in an article entitled Belligerence and hostility: Trump’s mugshot defines modern US politics; “Mugshots define eras.
Bugsy Siegel peering malevolently from beneath his fedora in a 1928 booking photo summed up the perverse romance of gangsters in the prohibition age.
Nearly half a century later, mugshots of David Bowie, elegantly dressed but dead-eyed after his arrest for drug possession, and a dishevelled Janis Joplin, detained for “vulgar and indecent language”, spoke to the shock waves created by 1960s counterculture.
Now comes what Donald Trump Jr described as “the most iconic photo in the history of US politics” before the booking picture of his father glaring into the camera was even taken. But whether deeply divided Americans view the first ever mugshot of a former president as that of a gangster or a rock star is very much in the politics of the beholder.
Trump’s hostility shines through as he turns his eyes up toward the camera above him and in his taut, downturned mouth as he is booked into the Fulton county jail on charges of trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. Dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, he makes no attempt to put on a smile like some of his co-defendants in their mugshots.
The picture does not flatter but it does convey the message many of Trump’s supporters want to hear – belligerence.
The six-pointed star of the Fulton county sheriff’s office badge and the name of the sheriff, Patrick Labat, sits in the top left hand corner of the picture. But some will be disappointed that Trump is not seen in the classic pose holding a board in front of his chest with his name and date of arrest.
Still, the mugshot will now enter the pantheon of famous-name booking photos, alongside Frank Sinatra looking unperturbed after his arrest in 1938 for “carrying on with a married woman”, and Hugh Grant after he was found with a sex worker on Sunset Boulevard. Trump has some way to go to catch up with the American actor Lindsay Lohan’s eight-year run of mugshots for theft, drugs and driving offences.
The former president’s supporters are already embracing the booking photo as a badge of honour and defiance. It will be held up as evidence that their man will not give up the fight against a system his followers see as ever more determined to bring him down and prevent him returning to the White House.
Far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert led the way with a tweet proclaiming: “Not all heroes wear capes.”
The president’s detractors, on the other hand, will see the booking photo as evidence that even a man who was once the most powerful person in the land cannot escape the might of the justice system. Some will welcome anything that makes him look even a little bit more criminal as a confirmation that sooner or later he is going to prison. The accused may be presumed innocent until a plea or a jury says otherwise but mugshots can have a way of conveying guilt.
For Trump though, the picture is likely to prove yet another money spinner. Within hours, his campaign fundraising website was advertising T-shirts, bumper stickers and coffee mugs glorifying a martyred Trump with the booking photo above the words “never surrender!”. Sales are likely to be brisk given the enthusiasm with which the former president’s supporters now treat each public humiliation as an accomplishment.
Two impeachments and four sets of indictments, from financial fraud to a slew of charges over the 2020 election, have done little to damage Trump’s standing among the true believers, and have only bolstered his run for the Republican presidential nomination. Such is the strength of that belief that a recent CBS poll showed Trump voters trust him more than their own family members and religious leaders.
Ordinary Americans have already got creative in response to the flood of indictments by mocking up pictures of the former president in an orange jump suit a la Guantánamo prison and in printing T-shirts with Trump in various states of detention with slogans declaring “Trumped up charges”, “Guilty AF”, “Guilty of winning” and “Legend”.
There will be plenty who will challenge Don Jr’s claim that the mugshot has instantly become the most iconic photo in US political history. Pictures of John F Kennedy’s assassination or Martin Luther King Jr leading the march for freedom or a host of other historic moments will surely prove more enduring.
But as with the gangsters and rock stars, Trump’s booking photo may come to define an era – one of unusual political turmoil that has yet to resolve whether his next mugshot is as an inmate.”
What would Trump’s imprisonment mean for the future? As written by Martin Kettle in The Guardian, in an article entitled America on trial: the charges against Trump will decide the fate of a nation; “History teaches us few wider lessons. But there are rare exceptions. One of these is that for a nation to put its former leaders on trial is never straightforward. Although such cases are rare, when they do occur they frequently involve the pushing of pre-existing legal boundaries and the reshaping of constitutional norms and assumptions. The evolution of the doctrine of crimes against humanity after the Nuremberg trials in 1945 is the most significant modern example of this.
Both at the time they occur and subsequently, the arguments that surround trials of this kind are almost inescapably political to a significant degree. That was true of the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, an event that divided England then; and some of those divisions of the 17th century can still be felt today. But it will unquestionably also be true of the trials of the former US president Donald Trump, of which the latest step is due to be taken in Atlanta on Thursday.
It is important to see that this stubborn political reality applies just as much in the Trump cases as in Charles I’s. In part, this is because many will go out of their way to deny it. Trump’s prosecutors – and many of his political critics – will undoubtedly argue that Trump is simply a defendant like any other, and that their cases are designed to show that no one, not even a former president and commander-in-chief, is above the law. They will be adamant that this is not a political trial, and that it is not Joe Biden’s revenge.
In some very fundamental senses, they are right about that. The law is not being altered in order to prosecute Trump. The investigations have followed long-established rules. The verdicts are not foregone conclusions. This is neither a witch-hunt nor a show trial. Yet, however true these points and however honourably such claims are made, they cannot be quite the whole story. The two cases are very different, yet in both 1649 and 2023, the indictments against the king and the president take a stand on behalf of a conception of the nation against a leader set on subverting it.
Four separate cases against Trump are now on course for trial. The first three sets of allegations cover: falsification of business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money case; withholding of classified federal documents in his Florida home; and attempting to prevent the US Congress from validating Biden’s 2020 election. This week’s case alleges that Trump tried to interfere with the counting and validation of Georgia’s vote for Biden. All four cases are due in court in the first half of 2024, before the presidential election in which Trump aims to be a candidate.
All of these cases also contain multiple allegations. Two – the Florida document cases and the US Congress case – will be heard in federal courts. The others have been brought at state level by New York and Georgia. All the charge sheets are extremely detailed. In the documents case, for instance, the indictment now stretches to 60 pages, with Trump facing 40 separate charges. In the 6 January case, the indictment stretches to another 45 pages, and centres on four separate charges.
Like it or not, though, these carefully crafted cases take the US into new legal territory. That is not simply because Trump is the first serving or former American president in the nation’s history to face criminal charges. Nor is it even because, being Trump and still running for office, he will treat the courtroom as a political platform. It is also because a large number of the charges, and the way in which the judges and juries will be asked to test them, relate umbilically to his roles as head of state and upholder of the constitution. These cases are a test of the constitution and, in the broadest sense, of the nation.
All of these points repeatedly echo aspects of cases from the past. The Trump cases are still, in the end, an attempt to hold a past leader to account and judge him for the way he handled his office. That was also what the cases against earlier rulers were ultimately about too. The indictments against Charles I for his “crimes and treasons” or against Louis XVI of France for having “plotted and formed a multitude of conspiracies to establish tyranny in destroying liberty” are maybe not a world away from those against Trump, after all.
Nor is it a world away from the much more recent example of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s trial for treason after the liberation of France in 1945. Pétain was charged with treason for his role as head of the collapsing French government in 1940, when he signed an armistice with Hitler’s invaders, and then as head of the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Germans until the allied victory in 1945. Pétain was tried and convicted in Paris that same summer. His death sentence was immediately commuted to life imprisonment by Charles de Gaulle.
As described in Julian Jackson’s masterly recent book, France on Trial, the Pétain case has many differences from those facing Trump, but also some similarities. Pétain was put on trial after a war, not an election. His was an unashamedly political trial. The jury was stacked against him, and the outcome a foregone conclusion.
But at the same time it was also the trial of a nation, its recent history, its dilemmas and its sense of itself. It was, in the end, a moment of catharsis for postwar France. It was a trial that had to happen, and it was vitally important for the future of France that the former leader in the dock was not acquitted. For all the many differences between the two cases, the exact same applies to the US on the eve of the Trump trials.”
Who is Donald Trump? Glowering, feral, with the dead eyes of a cornered but dangerous animal, his fake blond hair, fake history of success, and fake identity? Traitor Trump has been the cuckoo in our nest, ambush predator and pathological liar, rapist and enemy agent, worshipper of Moloch, Demon of Lies, and disciple of Adolf Hitler.
As I wrote in my post of August 7 2019, Psychopathy and the Nature of Evil: the Parallel Cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?
While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.
The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.
Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.
I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, as a vessel of rage and vengeance, a soulless and empty thing of unlike parts bearing a limitless need with the merciless iron will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights and citizenship, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and narcissistic need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art, appropriated and subverted in service to power from Artaud.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2023, We Celebrate the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets; How do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Take a moment to savour with me the indictment of Trump for the crime of espionage. Ahhh, the bliss.
A commentator on MSN’s Eleventh Hour this night pronounced the magic words which I hope will awaken our nation from the long nightmare of capture by the Fourth Reich; “I think Trump is done.”
It has been a fairytale from which we may learn many kinds of morals, a story which begins in the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement as a fundamentalist theocracy and the Presidency of its figurehead Ronald Reagan, and found its true form in the Presidency of a pedophile rapist and Russian agent who for years slept with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible.
Here in the trial of Traitor Trump is a morality play which is also a Rashomon Gate of our possible futures, for it is more than a legal last stand of the rule of law and the idea of democracy in America against a rigged electoral process which offers capture of the state to its enemies, but also a trial of democracy in America and of our infiltrated and subverted justice system whose court of ultimate appeal is a Supreme Court which is become a whorehouse.
Our Legislative branch of government is little better, under capture by the Party of Treason’s confederacy of theocratic sexual terrorists, white supremacist terrorists, and the nihilistic grifters and carnival sideshow freaks who are its star performers.
What is the meaning of the Trump regime in the story of America and our future possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals?
As I wrote in my post of November 3 2020, One Hundred Years of Racist Vote Suppression and White Supremacist Terror: Anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre; This election has seen attempts at vote suppression unknown in our lifetimes; Trumps mission to subvert democracy includes intimidation by calling for armed white supremacists to deny nonwhite citizens access to the polls, an attack on Biden’s campaign caravan by the Trump Train mobile force, failed assassination attempts against Biden and other political figures, sabotage of the postal system, politization of the Justice department, and his farcical declaration of victory before the vote is counted, among his many treasonous crimes.
Today liberty and tyranny play for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.
I spent some time today at a Trump rally trying to defuse a hate crime in the making. A hey rube went up that a rally staged between our local mosque here in Spokane and a Middle Eastern grocery was becoming a violent mob; while others responded as a protection detail and placed themselves with great courage between potential perpetrators and their victims, I blended into the rally to assess and shape its development as an incubator of violence and work to defuse it through dialog and negotiation.
Today these angry young men chose not to allow fear, rage, and hate to master and dehumanize them, nor provoke them into violence which would be the ruin of their lives; what will all of the other angry young men choose tomorrow?
I’d like to believe this incident is atypical and not being played out a thousand times over across America; but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Tyranny weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear as an instrument of subjugation. This we must resist, but unless we speak directly to those fears we cannot heal the divisions of our society which authority has so skillfully manipulated.
In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.” Sadly, we humans have often chosen stones when words would serve us better.
In all the madness of this election and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.
Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; in the main we are voting and not shooting, because our faith in one another and in the ideals on which our society is founded remain intact, though the institutions of our government may need radical and revolutionary change.
Nor is there anything new in the threat to democracy of vote suppression; today is the one hundred year anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre, the most terrible incident of racist vote suppression in the history of our nation since the Civil War. What may give us hope now that failed us then is the emerging consensus of racial equality and the mass coalition for racial justice won for us by the Black Lives Matter movement and the heroic citizens who have seized the streets of our cities in an unparalleled months long mass action.
Regardless of the election results, anyone who wishes to actually govern must do so at the head of these protests and not barricaded against the will of the people. This is the true meaning of this years seizure of power by our citizens, and it is a genie which cannot be returned to the prison of its lamp, for each of us is now a Living Autonomous Zone.
As I wrote in my post of November 5 2020. Trump’s Last Coup Attempt and Subversion of Democracy as His Ship of Fools Sinks in Pathetic Failure; As Trump’s Ship of Fools comes apart at the seams and sinks beneath the waves in pathetic failure, our Clown of Terror collapses in infantile tantrums and tries to take democracy down with him, a final gesture of madness and idiocy in his delusional quest to subvert our values and institutions of liberty and seize tyrannical power.
We must never forget how close we came to a repeat of the 1933 German Federal Election that set Hitler on the path to a tyranny of absolute power; this is clearly the most important electoral event in the history of humankind since then, and the two elections are terrifyingly parallel. Trump tried three times to use the Black Lives Matter protests to create fear and legitimize the federal occupation of America under the pretext of re-establishing law and order in an exact duplication of Hitler’s successful strategy using the Reichstag Fire, and failed.
We have escaped the jaws of the Fourth Reich which have held us fast for four years, since the Stolen Election of 2016, while Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2022, The Greatest Show on Earth: Presenting the January 6 Committee; Tonight our puppets will dance upon the stage of history and our imaginations, while a chiaroscuro of light as truth and democracy versus darkness as fascist tyranny and falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, conspiracy theories and propaganda play for the kingdom of our souls and the fate of America and the world.
Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a prison planet of masters and slaves?
Now begins a great Reckoning, and we shall see.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2021, Treason, Tyranny, and Terror on Trial: As the Second Impeachment of Traitor Trump Begins, I Submit Charges Before the People’s Tribunal of Crimes Against Humanity for Which Trump and His Collaborators Should Now Be On Trial; Among the many crimes against humanity for which Traitor Trump and his collaborators should be on trial but are not yet include the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Mexican and other nonwhite migrants, the concentration camps at our border, the orphaning and torture of children, and the state tyranny and terror of fascist and racist violence as national policy perpetrated by the ICE and Border Patrol components of Homeland Security, forces of repression which are racist and antidemocratic by their nature and which should be abolished as a top priority of the Restoration of America.
Just as villainous and reprehensible is the parallel program of racist police violence and the carceral state to re-enslave Black American citizens and enforce systemic forms of inequality and injustice through state terror, repression of dissent, the force of a militarized police and the counterinsurgency model of policing which has transformed our security services into an army of occupation with primarily political objectives, and the control of pervasive and endemic surveillance and propaganda, lies, illusions, and subversions of the truth.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his circus of fools, degenerates, and barbarians, his enablers and collaborators both within the government and his shadow forces rallying under the Confederate flag to bring violence and insurrection to our nations capital and to the streets of our cities throughout America, are co-conspirators and instigators in the murders of every Black American killed by police shooting or other racist violence since its authorization by Trump in the wake of Charlottesville.
And every missing child kidnapped by the state and disappeared into what abominable slavery or human trafficking designed in the diseased imagination of Trump and his Epstein buddies we know not of, every migrant of the huddled masses yearning to be free who died in the quest to reach the safety of America because the water caches had been intentionally sabotaged by criminals in the uniform of our nation who were “just following orders” like their counterparts in the SS during the Holocaust, every prisoner who died in custody because they were denied water or medical care; the blood of these and countless other victims of Trump’s narcissistic self-aggrandizement and regime of fascist corruption, racism, and patriarchal sexual terror is on the hands of every Republican who voted for him and fails now in this trial to repudiate him publicly and renounce his works as among those of the devils which he serves.
For in his actions Trump has been not only a foreign agent and Putin’s puppet whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America, but also a slave of Moloch the Seducer, Demon of Lies, in that he is not merely a pathological liar but also an idiot madman who cannot distinguish truth from lies, and who has weaponized his delusions and psychopathy as instruments of our falsification and subjugation in his quest for tyrannical power.
The bizarre and lurid dark fairytales of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, like the charges of the Inquisition and the Nazis which othered witches and Jews on which QAnon is constructed, serves as deflection from Trump’s loathsome perversions and sexual terrorism. What terrors did he conceal behind the beauty pageant and modeling syndicate he once controlled?
His Stop the Steal campaign is a similar deflection which shields him from inquiry into the Stolen Election of 2016 and the fact that his Presidency was entirely illegitimate and due to Russian interference; it was also the rhetorical and organizational basis of his final attempted coup on January 6, for which he is now being impeached for the second time.
We must cast out the monsters from among us, the racists and white supremacist terrorists, the Gideonite fundamentalists and patriarchs of Christian Identity fascism and sexual terror, and the amoral forces of repression of those who would enslave us and who enforce hegemonies of elite power and privilege and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness armed with guns and badges and the authority of a government which has been infiltrated by the Fourth Reich, an implacable and relentless enemy which has come just short of seizing us in its jaws.
We must give fascism no second chances.
As I wrote in my post of January 11 2021, Allegories and Symbols of the Fall of America: the January 6 Insurrection as Theatre of Cruelty; Here is an expanded version of my post of January 6 on the Surrealist film Gummo as a satire of the Deplorables who committed treason and armed insurrection against our nation at the command of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump; on Insurrection Day, I offer for your consideration the film Gummo, a sensitive and elegant documentary of the Deplorables from whom the Fourth Reich cadre who staged the assault on Congress were recruited, and an allegory of America.
Bacon? Stapled to the wall, a strip of bacon captures ones attention as a symbol of degeneration and barbarian atavisms of instinct. Werner Herzog signposted it for our attention, and it persists as a symbol of degeneration to an animal state, like a trophy of wealth which is also offal above a bathtub filled with filth as our young protagonist eats spaghetti, his mouth smeared with red like a cannibal; an unforgettable image of the fallen American Dream.
It is the little things which disturb, provoke, and incite us to challenge normality, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the authorized identities of hegemonic elites and divisions of otherness, and to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden with glorious sins of beatification.
Here as always, all true art defiles and exalts.
We dine in filth on the carrion of others lives and by their labor. This is a Surrealist film intended as an allegory of America and a thematic interrogation of our flaws and dark legacies of injustice, and in large part restates Nietzsche’s critique of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and the idea of the innate depravity of man, an extension of the doctrine of original sin, on which all our law is based, as Nikos Kazantzakis argues in his thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.
So also does the film restate William S. Burroughs’ analysis of capitalism and imperialism as the Algebra of Need, in which drug addiction becomes a metaphor of our addiction to wealth, power, and privilege, an engine of self-destruction, commodification, and dehumanization which feeds on and worsens our most atavistic instincts. Here the flaws of our humanity, fear and rage, vanity and jealousy, the need to dominate and control, become the instruments of our subjugation to hegemonic elites through divisions of exclusionary otherness and to tyrants of force and control and the imperial and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
The film itself is brutally shocking, grotesque, and borders on the obscene; which is why I adore it so. I must warn you that while I like it as an allegory of America’s flaws, and to poke fun at Trump’ s followers, this is brutal and depressing; anyone with suicidal ideation should avoid it. This debut of a heralded wonder of the new age as director was not understood as a critique of state power as a force of dehumanization and regression to an animal state, like that of the Deplorables, and unjustly derailed a promising career; a historical injustice I would like to redeem, because Gummo is a film we need now.
We must see the enemies of Liberty as they truly are, if we are to heal our nation from the primary trauma of fracture they enacted in the January 6 Insurrection.
Both the Insurrection and the film Gummo, like the Trump presidency as a whole, must be interpreted as performances of the Theatre of Cruelty as articulated by Antonin Artaud in his manifesto The Theatre And Its Double. Trump is a figure of the mad emperor from his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist; his performances as a clown of terror, disruption, and sadism were also brilliantly prophesized by Robert Coover in The Public Burning, A Political Fable, written as a satire of Nixon.
Let us see beyond the lies and illusions with which Trump and his Deplorables conceal their subversions of democracy, sabotage of our institutions, and violations of our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s never anything but “just an old humbug.”
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror; The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.
As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.
The role of deniable forces of the Fourth Reich such as the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, and other organizations of white supremacist terror, and of their partners and infiltration agents within our police, military, and security services, in the January 6 Insurrection is by now well documented and will become more so as the greatest manhunt in our history exposes and entraps more of its perpetrators.
The images we have been witnessing of their assault on liberty during the Second Impeachment trial will be remembered in the history of the world as the true legacy of an era of fascist tyranny under the figurehead of Trump which nearly ended America as a guarantor of global democracy and universal human rights, and had we fallen as the primary domino and a beacon of hope to the world both democracy and human rights would be lost to humankind for unknown ages; the last time civilization fell it took a thousand years for the idea that government derives its authority from its citizens and not by divine right, the idea that no one of us is better than any other by right of birth, and that freedom, equality, truth, and justice are the foundational values of our society and truths of human being and meaning, to reawaken.
And it took centuries of wars and revolutions to do so; how if this time civilization falls not to hordes of barbarians seeking nothing but pillage and destruction, but to regimes of totalitarian force and control?
This is the great contradiction of the forces of repression and subjugation to authority which overran our capitol on January 6; they have been betrayed by their masters in believing they were acting to restore our traditional values and civilization, when in fact they had been weaponized in service to its destruction. Here is a clear and present danger, but also an opportunity; shared motives can be redirected to heal divisions, for they too want an American Restoration. As yet we just disagree on our definition of terms.
When fear is overwhelming and generalized, it can be shaped through submission to authority by lies, illusions, alternate realities, especially when pervasive and endemic surveillance, big data, and propaganda are available as instruments of state control. Authority achieves submission through falsification and the theft of the soul, but this is also the weakness of control which cannot stand against truth, just as the weakness of force is that it is powerless against resistance, disobedience, and refusal to submit.
The election of Biden and Harris, the failure of Trump’s sixth coup attempt on January 6, and the public exposure and shaming of his co-conspirators, collaborators, and enablers before the stage of the world of the Second Impeachment trial; in these events we have witnessed a turning of the tide from fascism to a restoration of democracy.
Once the Reckoning has been achieved, the Restoration must heal our divisions; and this means we must embrace and transform the fear that lives at the heart of hate, and drives the rage, violence, and need to conquer and dominate others which shadows our historical inequalities and injustices.
Fear, Power, Force; such is the Ring of Power which enslaves us, and which we must abandon if we are to become whole.
Herein I offer a previous version of the role of Trump as Angelo in the savage morality play Measure For Measure, a work luminous with Kafka-esque Absurdism, Freudian horror, and a brilliant interrogation of the dynamics of patriarchy and power asymmetry in gender relations in the brilliant review of the Simon Godwin production, critiqued with marvelous insight by Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books; entitled “Shakespeare’s Pornography of Power by Geoffrey O’Brien.
“This is the disgusting, stinking world of medieval Vienna. The darkness of this world is absolutely necessary to the meaning of the play…When this play is prettily staged, it is meaningless—it demands an absolutely convincing roughness and dirt.” Thus Peter Brook, who directed a legendary production in 1950, on his vision of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Simon Godwin’s pathway into the play at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn is by way of a corridor through Mistress Overdone’s brothel, along a narrow basement path lined with discreetly closed cubicles and arrays of lubes, dildos, anal plugs, shackles and handcuffs, multicolored condoms, an inflatable sex doll. It is a space dimly lit but by no means medieval, an ingratiatingly tacky emporium more likely to amuse than repel the New York theatergoers passing through.
Given the perennial relevance of the various injustices it circles around—the sexual exploitation and pious hypocrisy and persecution of whistleblowers—Measure for Measure invites updating. The virginal Isabella, realizing that no one will believe her story of victimization against that of the all-powerful Angelo—who has been named regent of Vienna by its absent duke—cries out: “To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”—language so direct it could be lifted from the latest celebrity harassment trial, especially when spoken with the angry clarity that Cara Ricketts gives the line.
Angelo—the moral disciplinarian with a spotless reputation who, once given power, swiftly succumbs to his most predatory impulses—can be envisioned almost too neatly as the sort of high-minded conservative who from time to time finds himself indicted for sexual malfeasance. There is no problem with Thomas Jay Ryan’s performance: Ryan’s delineation of Angelo’s ethical collapse and his half-hearted efforts to justify himself to himself have the barely controlled panic of a public figure realizing how little he knows himself. The regent lies, and the most unhampered truth-telling comes from sex workers and criminals who make no pretense to any credo beyond their own self-interest, as in the unarguable defense of the tapster Pompey, arrested for procuring: “Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live.”
But it’s in the nature of Measure for Measure that whatever contemporary analogies are invoked cannot quite make sense of what happens. In its early stages the play is centered on the three characters whose destinies collide so violently: Angelo, Isabella, and her brother Claudio, who has been condemned for fornication. The scenes in which they confront each other have the amplitude of the tragedies that were to follow: Isabella pleading for Claudio’s life, Angelo demanding her virginity as the price of her brother’s pardon, Claudio overwhelmed by the terror of death, Isabella (in a moment that challenges any audience’s sympathy) denouncing her brother for his weakness of character when she realizes he is willing to see her give in to Angelo’s demands.
The grandeur of these scenes becomes most fully alive through Cara Ricketts’s Isabella, intensely focused, supremely pointed in her argumentation, but with a hint of an absolute commitment to the ideal that helps account for her harsh dismissal of her condemned brother’s terror of dying; an altogether serious person, too serious for the world she finds herself inhabiting, perhaps too serious for the madcap Duke when he proposed to her at the very end of the play. Her reaction to Angelo’s harassment goes beyond physical repulsion into profound moral contempt—expressing itself in angry laughter—at the triviality of his character. Her ultimate forgiveness of Angelo—at a moment when she still believes her brother to have been executed—is dramatically the most difficult of all, couched as it is in a nice legal argument, but Ricketts brought a somber conviction to it.
An audience that wants to take the play as readily grasped satire cannot evade the puzzlements and reversals of judgment that come in its later scenes—reversals of judgment that do not end even when the play is done. Measure for Measure is a perpetual questioning machine, exquisitely functional, set to a relentless tempo, yet a machine that bristles and crackles in its joints with contradiction and discomfort. Harold Bloom has described it as “a comedy that destroys comedy.” It is a comedy that threatens to destroy or at least wear down its own characters by subjecting them to the only mechanism—a mechanism demanding elaborate subterfuges and unlikely changes of heart—by which they can avoid a tragic fate. By the end we might imagine them as the exhausted, socially viable remnants of those conflicted, passionate beings we saw tearing apart everything including themselves scene after scene, during the first three acts. They are saved, and some of them have saved others, but for what fate we can only wonder.
In Godwin’s production, to emerge from the brothel’s passageway into the main theater is to find the Polonsky transformed into what looks like an oversize banqueting hall, the playing area laid out as an immense table decked with candles and balloons and trays of drinks, a few audience members seated around the edge. Drunken revelers stagger noisily across the tabletop stage, leaving behind a solitary figure sprawled on its surface, shooting up (presumably) heroin and then wrapping himself up in a tangle of sheets. A woman in business attire approaches him, studying him like a corporate assistant confronted by a messy but familiar management problem. He, it quickly emerges, is Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, and she is Escalus, the “ancient Lord” who serves him, transmuted into Escala, a tightly controlled executive who in January LaVoy’s reading sometimes evokes a less murderous version of Tilda Swinton’s scheming pharmaceuticals exec in Michael Clayton.
As the Duke (Jonathan Cake) rouses himself from his nod he delivers the play’s opening speech, in a broken rhythm suggesting that the passage’s roundabout prolixity reflects his faltering attempt to shake himself out of his opiate daze. It is one way to get the play going: pitched forward headlong, off-balance from the start, the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions piling up before we even know where we are. What manner of being is the Duke really? Why is he leaving Vienna in such haste and putting in his place a temporary regent, the “precise” Angelo, known for his rigorous strictness? Why does he choose to linger, disguised as a friar, to observe what happens in his absence? Having learned that his moralistic stand-in is attempting to blackmail Isabella—a young woman just about to enter a convent—into sex in order to save her brother Claudio (Leland Fowler) from a death sentence, why does he intervene in such needlessly tortuous fashion, subjecting innocents to agonies of misinformation? When in one of the play’s most eloquent speeches he more or less persuades Claudio that life is not especially worth living—“Be absolute for death”—does he speak his own sincerest thoughts or is this merely part of the role he is playing as prison confessor?
To cast the Duke as a junkie is one way of providing him with a motive. His addiction perhaps discourages him from exercising moral authority; perhaps he sees it as a weakness rendering him unfit to enforce Vienna’s laws with the necessary severity; perhaps he even harbors the thought that those laws are unnecessarily severe; perhaps he simply needs to take some time out. In any event his drug habit, as far as I could observe, comes up only once more (a quick glance at the track marks on his arm, lest he forget), and from the moment he dons his disguise he grows steadily more assured, though it is an assurance boosted by waves of antic humor to which Cake at times gives an almost Monty Pythonish edge. A certain hilarity gives him courage to dream up and carry out his preposterous scheme, which more and more comes to resemble a baroque sting operation.
We can hardly expect to find out who the Duke really is in the course of the evening, since Shakespeare’s text leaves that question so hauntingly open. Even if he assures a confederate early on that he has “a purpose / More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends / Of burning youth,” he never articulates what that purpose is. He is more than central to the play—as the narrative advances he becomes its directing force, moving plot elements around like game pieces—while remaining to the end a fascinating cipher. He is memorably termed “the Duke of dark corners”—a secret devotee of hidden vices—by the witty reprobate Lucio, but Lucio is by no means averse to making things up. If nothing else the Duke can be said to behave very much like a playwright working with improvisatory energy on his play’s last act, an act that will feature a succession of agonizingly drawn-out revelations, a string of pardons, and an unlooked-for proposal of marriage.
The lust of the hypocritical Angelo is not triggered by the attractive power of beauty but perversely by the notion of violating purity: the pornography of power, relished by a man for whom execution and torture are primary tools of policy. There is a terror at the heart of everything. The Duke’s exhortation to Claudio to resign himself to death cannot match in dramatic effect Claudio’s subsequent speech—roughly the play’s midpoint—on the horror of dying: “The weariest and most loathed worldly life / That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature, is a paradise / To what we fear of death.”
Sometimes the play feels like a series of decentered snapshots of city dwellers shuffling between sex and death. It is the only Shakespeare play concerned with how a city is run, and what that is like for the people who live there. (Romeo and Juliet is also a city play of sorts, but it centers on the operation of clans, not the municipal government that so ineffectively intervenes in their never-ending feud; and that play’s poetry—so unlike the gnarled, combative, often tensely legalistic exchanges of Measure for Measure—constantly evokes spaces beyond the immediate setting.) In Measure for Measure everything is local, in the most oppressive way. We look at things from the top down and from the bottom up, and the judgment is ambivalent, or rather multivalent. Godwin’s staging conveys very well the sense of airless interconnecting interiors, all linked as part of the same system: claustrophobic offices, claustrophobic cells of both prisons and convents, but mostly of prisons. It could almost be called a prison play, a point underlined here by the cell walls constantly rolling in and out of the foreground.
The motives of the three main characters are seen from many angles, by each other and by bystanders and street-corner commentators of all sorts, from the generously inclined Provost of the prison, realized with great feeling by Oberon K.A. Adjepong, to the unavoidable Lucio, amusingly played by Haynes Thigpen as a self-satisfied comedian a little too hip for the room, always there to speak up for ordinary human vice (“a little more lenity to lechery would do no harm”) although contemptuous of the whores he sleeps with, constantly hovering at the edge of what goes on so he can get his digs in and almost managing to avoid getting called on it. The comedy provides not so much relief as an obverse view, consistently deflating and needling, and it is rarely clear where exactly the boundaries are, or who can truly be called central in this world fallen askew.
Consider the late emergence of Barnardine, a murderer who for nine years has been awaiting execution. The Duke determines to substitute his head for that of Claudio, demanded by Angelo in proof that he has been put to death, but when Barnardine—already described as “a man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come”—emerges from his cell, he simply refuses to die—“I have been drinking hard all night, and I will have more time to prepare me… I swear I will not die today for any man’s persuasion”—and staggers back to his cell. It was a disappointment to see this episode treated as a comic interlude, with too much hokum and unneeded verbal additions. (Zachary Fine did much in his other role as the simple-minded constable Elbow.)
It’s the most surprising scene in Measure for Measure and ought to stop the proceedings in their tracks, with its after beat the Duke’s astonishing pardon of the murderer in the last act. I can still recall being taken to see John Houseman’s production of the play at age eight—a memorable outing to the Shakespeare theater in Stratford, Connecticut in 1956—and however dimly I apprehended its stew of bawdry and sexual extortion, there was no mistaking the uproarious force of Barnardine’s unconditional refusal. The actor was Pernell Roberts, of later Bonanza fame, and he must have delivered Barnardine’s few lines with great vigor, since the scene has lingered in memory ever since. In a play of punitive laws, complex masquerades, and tortuous mutually annihilating arguments, it briefly upholds the intoxicating possibility of simply walking away.”
As I wrote in my post of June 15 2022, Act Three of the Greatest Show on Earth: Where Do We Go From Here?; Where do we go from here?
Democracy in America survived its most terrible moment of peril from internal threat in the January 6 Insurrection, yet here we are, witness to the public exposure of the plot and its treasonous conspirators on television as Congress brings a Reckoning to the Fourth Reich.
Like the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 on which it was modeled, it failed; but in doing so also achieved all of its strategic goals, moving our great enemy nearer to victory by staging a Lost Cause which established the fascist counternarrative as iconography that Trump remains our legitimate President. Next time, and there will always be a next time, we may not be so lucky.
Not only do the forces of fascism remain an active threat, through open allegiance to the Lost Cause which echoes horrifically with that of the Confederacy and the KKK whose adherents are among the networks of deniable assets now among us as they were at the Capitol on that fateful day, but the vast resources of wealth and power at their command after seventy years of infiltration of global elites and governments remain undiminished.
But none of this is relevant to the true threat which fascism poses to us all today; for America has been divided against itself, and as we are warned by Abraham Lincoln in 1858 in his House Divided speech in reference to the synoptic Gospels of Luke 11:17, Mark 3:25, and Matthew 12:25; “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.
We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed –
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
As we are taught with the lyrics of the song Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 of season 6, Once More With Feeling, possibly the greatest musical episode of any telenovela yet created;
“Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
The battle’s done,
And we kinda won.
So we sound our victory cheer.
Where do we go from here.
Why is the path unclear,
When we know home is near.
Understand we’ll go hand in hand,
But we’ll walk alone in fear. (Tell me)
Tell me where do we go from here.
When does the end appear,
When do the trumpets cheer.
The curtains close, on a kiss god knows,
We can tell the end is near…
Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
Where do we go
from here?”
Here is an elegy for the Fall of America, a hymn to a dying hope and the lost grandeur of a fallen nation. When in a distant future the artifacts of our civilization begin to puzzle whatever beings arise from our carrion, and they ask who were the Americans, I hope such music as this lamentation remains to guide their questions.
Yet hope remains when all is lost, and whether it becomes a gift or a curse is in our hands. These lyrics speak of the modern pathology of disconnectedness, of the division and fracture of our Solidarity, of subjugation through learned helplessness and the dominion of fear. But this is not the end of the story, nor of ours.
Once More With Feeling ends not with abjection, but with The Kiss, between the Slayer and Spike, one of the monsters she hunts. A very particular kind of monster, who is also the hero of the story in its entire seven year arc; one who is made monstrous by his condition of being and forces beyond his control, against which he struggles for liberation and to recreate and define himself as he chooses, a monster who reclaims his humanity and his soul. This is why we continue to watch the show twenty years after its debut; we are all Spike, locked in titanic struggle for the ownership of ourselves with authorized identities and systemic evils, a revolution of truths written in our flesh against imposed conditions of struggle and orders of human being, meaning, and value.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an allegory of Sartrean freedom in a world without inherent value or meaning, of the joy of total freedom versus the terror of our nothingness, and above all a song of the redemptive power of love to return to us our true selves.
This is how we defeat fascist tyranny in the long game, after we bring a Reckoning for its crimes against humanity and its subversion of democracy; let us answer hate with love, division with solidarity, fear with hope, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Trump’s model in The Kubrick Stare: Jack Nicholson in The Shining; of course his true personal model and idol is Adolf Hitler, whose newsreels from speeches at rallies he used to study and copy the gestures. His former wife also says he kept a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible for years; this is his only faith and allegiance.
The Treason Mob: Trump and His Circus of Treason
King Kong | Climbing Up (and Falling from) the Empire State Building (how Trump sees himself)
Belligerence and hostility: Trump’s mugshot defines modern US politics
For those who wish to study Our Clown of Terror as an example of the failure of humanity and the subversion of democracy, how monsters are shaped by the depravities and moral collapse of racism and patriarchy as illnesses of power and how our inner and outer worlds inform, motivate, and shape one another, here is my reading list:
Fear: Trump in the White House, Rage, by Bob Woodward
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Siege: Trump Under Fire,
by Michael Wolff
Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen
Fascism: A Warning, by Madeleine K. Albright
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder
Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, by John W. Dean, Bob Altemeyer
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era,
by Carlos Lozada
Trump Is F*cking Crazy: (this Is Not a Joke), by Keith Olbermann
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump
Trump on the Couch, Dr Justin Frank
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, by Bandy X. Lee
Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior, by Jerrold M. Post
The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, by Steven Hassan
Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, by Rick Reilly
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, by Philip Rucker
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, by Barry Levine
Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus, by Matt Taibbi
The Mueller Report, by The Washington Post
Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, by Andrew Weissmann
True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump, by Jeffrey Toobin
A Case for the American People: The United States v. Donald J. Trump, by Norman Eisen
Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America, Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump’s International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy, Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump, by Seth Abramson
The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America,
by Jim Acosta
American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, by Tim Alberta
Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President,
by Michael S. Schmidt
Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, by Peter Bergen
The Best People: Trump’s Cabinet and the Siege on Washington, by Alexander Nazaryan
American Nero: The History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst Offender, by Richard Painter Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever, by Ric
We celebrate today an historic victory as women’s right to vote was enacted into law in the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
The struggle for the equality of women is ongoing today, especially in regard to the right of bodily autonomy, without which there is no freedom or idea of personhood and autonomy other than defined by the state, and the right to safety from theocratic-patriarchal sexual terror and dehumanization, without which freedom is meaningless; women’s reproductive rights and right of consent are under constant attack by theocratic Gideonite fundamentalists and the existential threat of the Patriarchy.
Power asymmetries in gender relations and the dynamically unstable struggle between autonomous and free creative play in the performance of identities of sex and gender and their authorization, limitation, and control by hegemonic and patriarchal forces of repression are pervasive and endemic, and this we must resist.
The work of the historical suffragettes, heroic pioneers of liberty whom we honor today, remains unfinished, for the gears of the vast machine of systemic inequality which makes half of humankind slaves of the other half continues to grimly enmesh us in its works, invisible when unexamined, for the beneficiaries of unequal power must question and challenge their own privilege if we are to free ourselves of its malign dehumanizing force. Seizure of power is not enough; we must also abandon power over others to escape the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force.
Patriarchy survives because like all systems and structures of oppression by hegemonic elites it co-opts and assimilates those in whose name it claims to operate. It will vanish when men unite with women to dismantle it as liberation from tyranny, and not before.
Here I speak of parrhesia and what Foucault called truth telling, the exposure of injustice and inequality as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, for nothing can be confronted and changed if it remains unseen. This process of reimagination and transformation of the possibilities of becoming human is neither simple nor easy; for no one gives up power willingly, unless there are greater benefits to be won in so doing, and as we may also say of racism and the legacies of slavery and imperialism it is a terrible thing to awaken to the fact that one is the beneficiary of an ongoing crime of sexual terror.
I am framing this issue in the most repugnant way I can imagine to signpost that abusive systems perpetuate themselves and control their victims by turning some of us into monsters with which to terrorize and exploit the others as internalized oppression, and in the context of Patriarchy it is both men and women who must unite in solidarity and revolutionary struggle to become free.
The destabilization of our ideas of men and women, of idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty, identity, virtue, and performative roles, as transformative change and liberation from authorized identities of sex and gender is crucial to this work of chaotization and liberation. All human beings are both male and female within themselves, at all times, for the psyche is dyadic and also in continual processes of change; moreover identities of sex and gender are not only social constructions of our history as stories and narrative structures, but are also an infinite Moebius Loop wherein we exist everywhere at once as a condition of being, rather than a spectrum with limits and fixed referents like queer or straight, dominant or submissive, male or female.
Let us free ourselves of the historical legacies of inequalities which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
How do we arrive at a point in our lives where we may throw back the curtain and pronounce with Dorothy; “You’re just an old humbug”?
I once taught a linked pair of classes through the English and History departments of Sonoma Valley High School in Northern California where I was also the debate team coach and Forensics teacher for many years, a Modern American History class entitled A Useful Past: Constructing an American Identity, together with a Modern American Literature class entitled A Woman Reinvents Humankind: Gertrude Stein’s Modern World, in which I presented the organizing idea that who we are today is a consequence of this one woman’s reinvention of the possibilities of language as self construal, and of the literary revolution she ignited.
Today I’m rereading Virginia Woolf’s classic novel Orlando; here is how I describe it in my literary blog; Orlando is an allegory of time, history, identity, and gender, in the form of a fictionalized biography of her great love, Vita Sackville-West. It also inspired and served Gertrude Stein as a model for her great novel, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
With a main character who is an immortal shapeshifting time traveler, with the enviable power to change genders as the occasion requires, Orlando is stunningly modern for a novel of 1925 and parallels Djuna Barnes’ Surrealist masterpiece Nightwood. Astounding, delightful, and strange, as important an influence as Gertrude Stein or James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, as fearless a revolutionary provocation as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or Albert Camus’ The Stranger, as gloriously transgressive as Anais Nin’s Collages, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, or William S. Burroughs’ magical-Surrealist alternate world trilogy of American history which ends with The Western Lands, and as marvelously written and fun to read as Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry or the Absurdist satires of Kurt Vonnegut, Orlando merits its place among the Great Books I have returned to throughout my life for inspiration.
So for Virginia Woolf’s vision of an archetypal fully realized human being in Orlando, but with much of our world still shadowed by and captive of the legacies of our history as Patriarchal systems of oppression, the question remains; how do we free ourselves and each other? How do we seize our power and dream new possibilities of becoming human?
As I wrote in my post of March 3 2022, Frighten the Horses: Performing Identities of Sex and Gender as Revolutionary Struggle and Guerilla Theatre; On this anniversary of the historic 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade led by Alice Paul, let us frighten the horses, and through our public performance of identities of sex and gender seize ownership of ourselves, reclaim the narratives of liberation from the marginalization and silences of historical authorization of identity, and shift the boundaries of the Forbidden through transgression of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas.
Freaking the normies, we called it in the San Francisco of my youth; enactments of difference and uniqueness as revolutionary struggle and guerilla theatre, in which we seized public spaces as our stage. As in the spectacle of human possibilities of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, strategies of confrontation which valorize totemic figures of transgression act as rituals of liberation, seizures of power, and the transformation and reimagination of authorized identities and of humankind.
Go ahead, frighten the horses; for none of us need stand alone, and if they come for one of us, they must be met with all of us.
Thousands of women paraded through Washington D.C. on this day over one hundred years ago, the first such event on a massive national scale after sixty years of the fight for women’s suffrage.
It was a public declaration of freedom from fear, and of solidarity in the face of horrific repression. One hundred women were hospitalized this day, attacked by mobs unrestrained and enabled by the police, merely one incident in a decades long struggle against violence and control, and against the deniable forces of a government wholly vested in the Patriarchy. And before that, millennia of enslavement, dehumanization, marginalization, and the silencing of women’s voices.
But after that day, the world has never been the same. Women had stood up to the brutal tyranny of force and control in defiance and refusal to submit, and that is a genie which can never be put back in its bottle. This is the secret of power; it is hollow and brittle, for it fails at the point of disobedience. In the words of the great Sylvia Plath; “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
In this time of darkness when atavistic forces of Patriarchy and Gideonite fundamentalism scuttle from beneath their stones to attempt once again the re-enslavement of women through control of reproductive rights and denial of bodily autonomy without which there is no freedom, and which infringes on our universal right to health care as a precondition of the right to life, which together threaten dehumanization and theft of citizenship, let us claim and raise again the suffragette banner bearing the catchphrase of liberation which Alice Paul appropriated from Woodrow Wilson, “The time has come to conquer or submit.”
Here are some reading recommendations on the subject of Feminist thought:
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, by bell hooks is wonderful and engaging, and the first book I would recommend to a high school student or anyone new to the subject.
Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant, erudite, and savagely satirical trilogy is by turns delightful and disturbingly horrific, and a must-read for everyone; Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, Undoing Gender, Senses of the Subject, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Precarious Life, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political, Judith Butler
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men, Anne Fausto-Sterling.
The Deepening Darkness: Loss, Patriarchy, and Democracy’s Future, and its sequel Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance
by Carol Gilligan, David A.J. Richards, together comprise the most relevant ideological framework for understanding and resisting patriarchal repression yet written.
Camille Paglia’s notorious and incendiary Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson remains a glorious and strange theoretical work on the origins of culture in gender inequalities and identities.
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock by Marina Warner together comprise a riveting and brilliant interrogation of femininity and masculinity in our civilization.
Of course everyone should read the work that originated Feminism as a Humanist philosophy and a development of Existentialism in the new translation, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, H.M. Parshley (Translator & Editor), Deirdre Bair (Introduction).
I enjoyed Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison, by A.S. Byatt, Ignes Sodre.
For a sense of the scope and diversity of ideas and the historical development of Feminist theory, A Companion to Feminist Philosophy by Alison M. Jaggar (Editor), is among the finest general introductions, though as with all her works intended for academic scholars.
One may also find reflections which speak to our own truths in the source works of the pioneers who have shaped our civilization since de Beauvoir; Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, and The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone.
On this day a teenage police cadet, who rallied to the call of a local politician to form a vigilante militia to patrol the streets during protests over the police murder of Jacob Blake two days before, perpetrated a hate crime of mass terror and death, then was allowed to go free by police after he tried to surrender. Dead were Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, while Gaige Grosskreutz was wounded.
Within days protests escalated, and on the 28th a thousand troops from the Michigan, Arizona, and Alabama National Guard and two hundred federal agents put Kenosha under military occupation; the next day a thousand citizens seized the streets of Kenosha from them in a mass rally and march.
In a summer of fire, death, and resistance against police and military use of racist violence and white supremacist terror and of deniable forces of terror among fascist and racist groups including the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers to create a pretext for police occupation of cities in revolt in a campaign of arson, looting, and violence under direction of the Fourth Reich Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf, a summer unlike any since 1968, Kenosha is but one of many atrocities of state sanctioned white supremacist terror, one which we must never forget or cease to redress and balance the scales of justice of the inequalities which are its causes.
In this time of state tyranny and police terror, with Vichy America a captive state of the Fourth Reich and a Russian puppet regime, as Traitor Trump has sent armies of occupation to repress dissent in Black led Democratic Party cities, we must organize Resistance with the glorious memory and witness of history of the people’s victory at Kenosha against white supremacist police terror; every time Trump has tried this, in several coup attempts, he has failed because solidarity of action and a united humankind is more powerful than any police state.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Let us learn to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.
As I wrote in my post of August 29 2020, Police Collaboration in White Supremacist Terror: the Case of Kenosha; Police have been infiltrated by white supremacist organizations since the Civil War, and were created originally as mercenary slavecatchers. They are also a primary funnel and grooming onramp for terror and racism, a development of prewar slavecatching gangs.
Kenosha is part of a planned, organized campaign of terror in which police and militia of white supremacist forces act together to repress dissent and create violence and destruction so that Trump can send federal troops to occupy Democratic cities. This is more than racist violence; it is a coup.
There can be only one reply to fascism and tyranny; Never Again. We shall resist the Republican subversion of democracy and their cabal of white supremacist terrorists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, foreign puppetmasters, and plutocratic thieves of public wealth unto our liberation from inequalities of race and gender and divisions of exclusionary otherness.
Where there is fear, let there also be hope. This is the true mission of Antifa.
All those who remain loyal to their oaths to our Constitution and to America as a free society of equals, I call on you to stand together once again as a Band of Brothers, Sisters, and Others and resist the Fourth Reich and the Party of Treason. Let us remain unconquered and be free.
God Bless America; we’re going to need it.
As written in the BBC, in an article entitled Kyle Rittenhouse case: Why it so divides the US; “Few US trials in recent years have generated such acrimony. What is it about the Kyle Rittenhouse case that so divides the country?
Inside the courtroom, the 18-year-old was visibly shaking as he heard the jury clear him of all five charges, including intentional homicide.
He killed two men during racial unrest in Wisconsin, but successfully convinced the jury he only used his semi-automatic weapon because he feared for his life.
Meanwhile, outside court cars drove past tooting their horns and cheering. Some leaned from windows to shout “Free Kyle!” and “We love the Second Amendment!”
Some were distraught at the verdict – one man collapsed on the courtroom steps in tears, saying if Mr Rittenhouse had been black and brandishing a weapon like that, he would have been shot dead.
Here’s why the case provoked such deeply held emotions.
Self-defence
Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal hinged on the specific details of Wisconsin’s self-defence laws, taking into account Mr Rittenhouse’s state of mind at the moment of shootings. The first occurred when Joseph Rosenbaum tried to grab Mr Rittenhouse’s gun, the next two after two men – one of whom was armed – confronted Mr Rittenhouse following Rosenbaum’s shooting.
The law considers whether Mr Rittenhouse believed himself to be in imminent threat of harm, but it does not factor in the choices he made in the hours and days beforehand that put him in the middle of a volatile situation, with guns drawn and tempers flaring.
The trial could prompt renewed consideration of self-defence laws across the US and whether they sufficiently weigh the totality of circumstances involving the use lethal force, particularly in a society where restrictions on the possession of firearms have been loosened.
The trend up until now has been to expand the right of self-defence in many states through “castle doctrine” and “stand your ground” laws that give individuals a presumptive right to use force to protect their homes and themselves, rather than to back down from a confrontation.
The divisiveness of the Rittenhouse trial could further fuel the debate over whether those laws go too far – or not far enough.
Race
Race is not central to this case, but for one man it is.
Jacob Blake, who is black, was shot seven times by a white police officer in Kenosha last year.
It was that shooting which sparked the violent protests in the first place. The police officer remains in the force. Mr Blake said in an interview that if Mr Rittenhouse had been of a different ethnicity, “he’d be gone”.
Mr Rittenhouse was not immediately arrested after he shot three white men – two of them fatally – despite surrendering to police.
Black Lives Matter protesters outside the court say it is “white privilege” that has allowed the teenager to even have a fair trial.
Controversially, in closing arguments Mr Rittenhouse’s defence attorney Mark Richards referenced the Blake shooting saying: “Other people in this community have shot people seven times and it’s been found to be OK, and my client did it four times in three-quarters of a second to protect his life.”
It’s renewed this debate over exactly who is allowed to possess guns and then proclaim self-defence when they kill someone.
Guns
The Rittenhouse trial has once again highlighted laws restricting gun possession and use in America that varies widely by state and local jurisdiction. Often the regulations are less than precise, the product of intense legislative debate over the types of firearms covered and under what circumstances the laws apply.
A day before closing arguments in the Rittenhouse trial, Judge Bruce Schroeder ordered that one of the charges – that Mr Rittenhouse violated a state law prohibiting a person under 18 from possessing a “dangerous weapon” – be dropped because the rifle Mr Rittenhouse was carrying wasn’t prohibited to him.
The decision turned on the length of the firearm’s barrel, which would have been prohibited if it were a few inches shorter.
Gun-control activists have cited this as yet another example of the kind of loophole that could be remedied by more uniform national gun laws.
While the 30-year-old Wisconsin law contains a provision to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to go hunting, they view the weapon Mr Rittenhouse was carrying as clearly “dangerous” in the circumstances he used it.
Gun rights activists, on the other hand, have celebrated Mr Rittenhouse’s right to possess such weapons and use them to defend himself.
“If it wasn’t for 17-year-olds with guns,” tweeted Ohio Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel, “we’d still be British subjects.”
The judge
Bruce Schroeder is the longest-serving circuit judge in the Wisconsin state court system. He was appointed by a Democratic governor in 1983 and has won election to his seat seven times since then, each by overwhelming margins.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the judge would become a focus in such a high-profile, nationally televised trial, but the unusual American tradition of electing judges has made a delicate political situation even more fraught.
Over the years, Judge Schroeder has developed idiosyncrasies, such as allowing defendants to conduct the random drawings that select their final jury and quizzing jurors on esoteric trivia. He’s also established a reputation as a pro-defence jurist – one further cemented by his testy exchanges with prosecutors during the Rittenhouse trial.
Given the highly charged political nature of the trial, many of those quirks and choices have been scrutinised for evidence of bias. His rulings to drop the illegal firearm charge and saying the men Mr Rittenhouse shot could not be called “victims” were criticised by many on the left.
Even his choice of mobile phone ringtone, the patriotic anthem God Bless the USA – a staple of Donald Trump rallies in recent years – made headlines as possible evidence of his political proclivities.
Legal analysts have generally concluded that Judge Schroeder’s rulings have been within the norms for such proceedings, but with the impartiality of the entire US criminal system challenged in last year’s protests against institutional racism and police shootings – including the one in Kenosha – those norms are under scrutiny, as well.
Vigilantism
The facts of that night have never been up for debate – Kyle Rittenhouse killed two men and injured a third.
Instead the jury had to work out why he did it. He was being chased by a group of people when he fired the fatal shots. Was he acting in self-defence or was he a dangerous vigilante provoking an already volatile situation in a city he did not belong to?
Many groups who want tighter gun control say it was the latter. They are worried that by being cleared of the charges, Mr Rittenhouse’s case now sets a precedent – that anyone can turn up to angry protests with a gun, but without facing any consequences.”
What can this case teach us about systems of oppression which shape some of us into monsters with which to enforce unequal power and terrorize the rest of us into submission to authority? As written by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Kyle Rittenhouse, Kenosha, and the Sheepdog Mentality:
Rittenhouse appears to live in a fantasy world where police and car dealerships are more endangered than unarmed Black men, and where he is a warrior; ““I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried out by six.” Most gun owners have heard that nugget of homicidal wisdom, often from the person who sold them their guns. In other words: Better to attend your own trial by jury for killing someone than your own funeral for hesitating and being killed instead.
The final count on Tuesday night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was 12 and 12: a dozen pallbearers for two homicide victims, and 12 yet-to-be-impaneled jurors for Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who allegedly shot them with his AR-15-style rifle. The footage of their killings is grainy and sickening. It shows, amid general mayhem and gunfire, a man who appears to shoot another with a rifle, then say into a cellphone, “I just killed somebody.” Later that same man is pursued by a mob down the center of a street. They catch up with him, he falls to the ground, and one strikes him with a skateboard. From a supine position the gunman shoots two people, one fatally. The other, blasted in the right arm, had been running at the killer with a pistol drawn.
I have seen many videos like this, and not long ago I profiled John Correia, a YouTube gun-world celebrity who has seen more videos of gun violence than perhaps any other human being who has ever lived. On YouTube and other social media, the gun channels are filled with real-life videos of violence—think Cops, with all the boring parts edited out and most of the violent parts unblurred. I could say that these scenes never cease to sicken, but the truth is that one gets used to them after a while. Rittenhouse, who was arrested yesterday, was reportedly a gun enthusiast and active on social media in support of Blue Lives Matter. I don’t know whether Rittenhouse spent his free time watching people pulling guns on one another, but I know from experience that these videos are hugely popular in the gun world that he was part of, and if you watch one, you probably watch hours of them.
The availability of these videos is perhaps the biggest change in gun culture in our lifetimes, and one of the results is mayhem like this. The shift has suddenly made violence against humans (as opposed to animals) imaginable—whereas in the past, most people could live their whole life without witnessing or taking part in a gunfight. The videos emphasize the bad things that can happen to you if your draw time is too slow, or your magazine too small. Now one can watch videos and imagine oneself not stalking a deer but defending others, in improbable heroic scenarios once limited to action movies.
That is the fantasy that seemed to have motivated Rittenhouse’s trip to Kenosha. He was interviewed hours before the shooting by The Daily Caller’s Richie McGinniss. He explained his presence in Kenosha by saying that “people are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business.” He looks preposterously young for this role, not like some ’roid-crazed militiaman but like a kid who has somehow guessed that the code to his father’s gun locker is his own birthday. Rittenhouse has been called a “white supremacist,” but none of his comments during interviews at the scene mention race. (Other comments may surface later, and his social-media accounts reportedly show plenty of sympathy for cops, and none for the protesters.) Instead his comments mention what is by far the most common topic in gun-enthusiast channels, which is what to do to preserve life and property using guns.
Before the advent of these videos, to be a concealed carrier meant entering uncharted cognitive territory. If you have never walked around with a gun in your pocket, you probably have poor intuitions about how it feels—the power; the discomfort of having a hunk of metal or plastic impeding your gait and mobility; most of all, the sense of responsibility. The writer Dan Baum strapped on a .38 in the course of researching a 2013 book on gun culture and described the experience well:
Everything around me appeared brilliantly sharp, the colors extra rich, the contrasts shockingly stark. I could hear footsteps on the pavement two blocks away … It made me more organized. Wearing the gun, I was Mr. Together. There was no room for screwing up when I was equipped to kill.
Baum would avoid trouble, because he didn’t want to be anywhere near a fistfight, unstable people, or anything that might raise the possibility that he would fire his gun. The feeling of empowerment comes with a wearying imperative of caution: You do not seek out danger, and instead you live the most boring life possible, to avoid using the murder machine you have for some reason decided to attach awkwardly to your midsection.
What distinguishes Baum, who crossed the street to avoid violence, from Rittenhouse, who carried openly and crossed state lines to find violence? One is a seersucker-wearing, middle-aged journalist, and the other is an adolescent. The other salient difference, though, is that at 17, Rittenhouse has never known a world where owning a gun did not go along with what is sometimes known as the “sheepdog mentality”—the belief that your gun exists to protect others, and that you should rush in to perform that duty. Many of the gun videos you find online emphasize exactly this, to an audience of men.
The channels are not sinister in themselves. Correia combines old-fashioned moralism—including regular reminders that you are accountable to Jesus and the law for every round you fire, and that acts of brutality toward the vulnerable are among the worst you can commit—with extreme violence. I came away from a day with Correia thinking that the world is probably a safer place because he is packing heat.
But the videos themselves are insidious. Most people in the United States, allowing for wild variation in race, class, and education, are victims of violence only very rarely. Watching the videos, however, invites you to simulate violence at an extraordinary rate, much higher than we are mentally equipped to manage. (Correia himself has seen tens of thousands of them, and he posts a new one to his channel about once or twice a day.) The effect of these videos is to habituate viewers to that violence, to train them to imagine themselves in it. Training yourself to imagine something makes it seem more likely to happen, and primes your instincts to react to it—and, I suspect, initiate that violent reaction and overdo it when circumstances could be resolved more peacefully.
Rittenhouse appears to have been living in a fantasy world where police and car dealerships are more endangered than unarmed Black men in traffic stops, and where he was a warrior and self-defender, rather than a youngster who foolishly enrolled himself in a midwestern version of the Children’s Crusade. I can only imagine his fear when he saw the crowd coming for him—and the crowd’s fear, when it saw that a near-child was wildly firing a rifle better suited to a person with judgment and good training. I do not expect that the jury will be forgiving.”
As written by Peter Sterne in Jacobin, in an article entitled What’s the Difference Between Kyle Rittenhouse and the Police? Rather than asking whether law enforcement and vigilantes like Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse support or oppose one another, we can see them as different groups who are both performing the same function — policing society; “e appreciate you guys, we really do.”
That’s what a law enforcement officer said over a loudspeaker as another officer tossed water bottles to a group of armed white men in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday.
One of the young men was Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old from Illinois armed with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. Hours later, Rittenhouse shot and killed two protesters, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, and wounded a third.
This isn’t the first time that white vigilantes have violently attacked protesters. According to Alexander Reid Ross, an academic who researches far-right violence, vigilantes have assaulted protesters at least sixty-four times, driven cars into protesters at least thirty-nine times, and shot at protesters at least nine times — and that’s just counting the violence that occurred since May.
Despite the violence, police have not cracked down on right-wing counterprotesters. To the contrary. As Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic has written, police officers have generally provided encouragement to them.
Why are the police so accommodating? One theory is that individual police officers with far-right sympathies have infiltrated otherwise law-abiding police departments. The Guardian recently reported that a former FBI agent had found evidence of white supremacist groups and militias “infiltrating” police forces in at least fourteen different states. This theory assumes that while individual police officers might support vigilantes, the police as a whole do not.
But what if these forces aren’t just infiltrating the police? What if they are the police? Rather than asking whether the police and vigilantes support or oppose one another, we can see them as different groups who are both performing the same function — policing society.
In many countries around the world in the neoliberal era, the official police department no longer has a monopoly on policing. Ordinary citizens arm themselves and volunteer to patrol their neighborhoods, and many police officers are grateful for the assistance. In some ways, it’s a return to an older, less institutionalized model of policing.
“This idea of ‘the police’ as public law enforcement is actually a new idea in the twentieth century,” Jennifer Carlson, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona, told Jacobin. “Policing was [historically] done by groups that were not formalized that were still serving the function of police. We’ve kind of forgotten that, and so I think in some ways we look at these armed groups and there’s a little bit of shock, but it actually is 100 percent in line with American history.”
Carlson has studied the role of guns in American society for over a decade. For her new book Policing the Second Amendment, which will be published on September 15, she interviewed more than seventy police chiefs in Arizona, California, and Michigan to understand how the police view armed citizens.
“The spoiler alert is that through very clear racial tropes, including whiteness, police are generally very much in favor of at least certain kinds of people being armed and even assisting the police,” she said.
According to Carlson, the police have adopted two different approaches to armed citizens — “gun militarism” and “gun populism.”
Under “gun militarism,” the police view gun owners as potential criminals and “bad guys with guns” who pose a dangerous threat to police officers and must be neutralized. This is, generally speaking, the approach that urban police departments take toward black men who own guns. It’s the logic of “stop-and-frisk” and the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.
But under “gun populism,” police see gun owners as potential “good guys with guns,” who can intervene to stop criminals and protect innocent people. This is generally the approach that police officers take toward white men who carry guns, including armed militia members and vigilantes.
To understand why the police appreciate armed vigilantes, it’s necessary to know what motivates those vigilantes to pick up a gun in the first place. Carlson’s first book Citizen–Protectors, published in 2015, examines the cultural and economic factors that motivate men in Metro Detroit to carry guns.
Carlson found that many of the men saw themselves not just as gun owners but as “citizen-protectors.” They cast gun ownership and gun carrying as part of a larger moral discourse about what it means to be a responsible citizen and community member.
“It’s this ideal of good citizenship, this definition of good citizenship, that is centered on the willingness to use lethal force to protect oneself, one’s family, one’s community even, and so it’s re-centering citizenship around both the capacity and the willingness to use lethal force,” she said.
The key thing to understand is that citizen-protectors don’t just believe that they have the right to carry a gun; they believe that they have a responsibility to do so. They see themselves as “good guys with a gun,” the heroes willing to step in and use lethal force to defend the victimized in their community.
This is not a niche view. The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood recently wrote about the popularity of YouTube channels devoted to gun violence, which promote this ideology and related ideas like the “sheepdog mindset.” It’s a term that Carlson has also encountered again and again during her research.
“One of the things that you hear a lot about in gun culture and also in police culture is this idea of the sheepdog, the wolf, and the sheep,” Carlson said.
Carlson sketched out the fable: the wolf is the “the bad guy” (often racialized as the “other”), the sheep is the “innocent one, but the one who can’t actually do anything to defend themselves,” and the sheepdog is the hero who needs to step in and protect the sheep from the wolf.
“The sheepdog is usually either law enforcement or it’s the armed citizen,” Carlson said. “So that’s where sort of this expanded notion of defense or protection comes in.”
Rittenhouse, the seventeen-year-old white man who shot and killed two protesters in Kenosha, certainly subscribed to this moral ideology. That’s clear from his comments during an interview with the right-wing Daily Caller, conducted hours before the shooting.
“People are getting injured and our job is to protect this business,” he said in the interview. “And my job also is to protect people. If someone is hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle. I’ve got to protect myself, obviously. But I also have my med kit.”
To be sure, the idea of community defense is not inherently conservative. There’s a long tradition on the Left of groups arming themselves to protect their communities from racist and state violence. By some definitions, the Black Panthers could be considered “citizen-protectors.” So could anti-fascist groups that aim to protect protesters from white supremacists.
Generally speaking, though, the citizen-protector ideology is associated with the figure of the white man using lethal force against a racialized other who he views as a threat to his way of life. This is a pattern that shows up throughout American history, from the white settlers who murdered indigenous people who lived near their homesteads to the McCloskeys, the St. Louis couple who brandished guns against Black Lives Matter protesters who dared to enter their gated community.
“It sounds all well and good to be like, ‘I’ll defend myself and my family and my community,’” Carlson said. “But the question is, who’s actually part of that community? How do you actually define it? We know from the scholarship and from these high-profile incidents that how communities are defined is often in racial terms and it’s exclusionary. We don’t have inclusive understandings of community, especially when it comes to crime and law enforcement.”
These understandings of community are shaped in specific cultural and economic contexts. For many of the men who Carlson interviewed in Metro Detroit, the context was one of decline. The shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy had left these men economically and culturally dislocated. The loss of stable, unionized blue-collar jobs precipitated a larger cultural crisis for men who believed their moral worth was tied to their ability to provide for their families. No longer able to be providers, they shifted to a new role as protectors, crafting a new ideal of masculinity focused on using guns to protect one’s community.
“Guns have entered in as one of those tools, as a way to show that you are a good man,” Carlson said. “You are performing a form of what we could call ‘hardened care work.’ You may not be able to provide, or you may not be the sole provider, but you can at least protect your family.”
Specifically, these citizen-protectors want to protect their families and communities from crime, especially urban crime committed by black men. These racialized fears of crime do not just come out of thin air; they are closely linked to the experience of economic decline.
“Economic decline is imagined in terms of, my community is in decline, so there’s going to be more crime,” Carlson explained. “And there were a variety of ways in which that — in my research which focuses on Metro Detroit — intersected with racialized and racist tropes about people coming from Detroit to victimize suburbanites and what have you.”
The nightmare vision isn’t just that black people from the inner city will victimize white suburban homeowners, but that the police will not be able to protect the white people.
“The trope is that the police will just come there to deal with what the aftermath is and write up the paperwork, but that police cannot be there to actually prevent a crime from happening,” Carlson said.
Such fears of state abandonment can take many forms. Perhaps the concern is that declining tax revenues have led to police layoffs, resulting in longer 911 response call times (as was the case in Metro Detroit). Or maybe it’s due to right-wing propaganda about how Democrats have ordered the police not to arrest criminals. Either way, the worry is that police won’t be there when they’re needed.
There’s one important difference between the citizen-protectors that Carlson interviewed in Metro Detroit and many of the armed white vigilantes who have attacked protesters, and that’s geographic scale. The citizen-protectors see themselves as protectors of the neighborhoods that they actually live in. But the vigilantes travel all over the country to “protect” random cities.
Still, both citizen-protectors and vigilantes subscribe to similar ideas about state abandonment. In the aftermath of the Kenosha shooting, right-wing commentators turned to these ideas of state abandonment to justify white vigilantes’ presence in Kenosha. Fox News host Tucker Carlson delivered a particularly reactionary version of this argument during his Wednesday evening broadcast:
Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it. People in charge from the governor of Wisconsin on down refused to enforce the law. They stood back and they watched Kenosha burn. So are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that seventeen-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?
Tucker says that the politicians refused to enforce “the law” so Rittenhouse had to maintain “order.” The slippage between law and order isn’t an accident. While citizen-protectors will often say that they are enforcing “the law” or “law and order,” they do not literally mean that they are enforcing specific criminal statutes. They are not consulting their state’s penal codes before shooting people they find suspicious. They’re enforcing a specific social order.
“That’s the key,” she said. “It’s not so much enforcing the law. It could be law to the extent that vision of social order intersects with law. But I think social order is really what’s being enforced, and a moral order. So not just a social order but a moral order about what are the consequences of certain actions in public space? That’s certainly what is going on with the whole apparatus of gun carry.”
The white men who view themselves as citizen-protectors have an intuitive understanding of what “the law” should be. It’s a specific social and moral order rooted in notions of private property and white supremacy. It feels like the law, whether or not it matches what’s actually on the statute books.
It might be tempting to say that this marks a bright line between the citizen-protector and the police. In the liberal imagination, the police is a morally legitimate actor because they swear to enforce the law, which is authored by democratically elected representatives. Vigilantes are morally illegitimate actors, since they are loyal to their own arbitrary moral code rather than the law itself.
However, this is really a false dichotomy. For one thing, the social order that citizen-protectors enforce isn’t really that arbitrary. It’s generally based on the same traditions that undergird American society as a whole. That’s why vigilantes often garner sympathy, because people feel they’re behaving morally even if they are technically violating the law.
More importantly, it is simply not the case that the police merely enforce the law as written. Like citizen-protectors, the police are also committed to the protection of a social order rooted in private property and white supremacy. In many cases, elements of this social order have been enshrined into law, such that the same conduct that the police view as illegitimate and immoral also happens to be criminal. But police officers will routinely violate laws that conflict with this social order, including laws designed to protect the rights of accused criminals and laws designed to protect protesters’ First Amendment rights.
Back in June, the New Republic’s Alex Pareene summed up the police worldview: “Armed white boys don’t code as a threat to them; ‘anarchists’ and angry black people do (even if the protesters are the ones at least attempting to engage in constitutionally protected behavior, while the roving white gangs are flagrantly violating the law).”
Rittenhouse is exactly the kind of armed vigilante who the police would not regard as a threat. He was clearly on their side — an outspoken supporter of the police who frequently posted “Blue Lives Matter” memes on social media and once previously participated in a police cadet program for high schoolers. He didn’t want to upend the social order that police are committed to defending. He wanted to help them defend it.
The upshot is that both citizen-protectors and police officers are engaged in the same project — the use of force to further certain existing social and economic arrangements.
This doesn’t mean that the police and citizen-protectors always cooperate with one another, though they often do. Police officers, militia groups, and individual armed vigilantes may disagree on the precise contours of the social order and the specific penalties that are justified for violating it. As an institution, the police at least nominally answer to democratically elected leaders. When individual vigilantes go “too far” in enforcing the social order, engaging in flagrant acts of violence that even the police cannot justify, they can lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the police and become subject to arrest.
But for structural reasons, citizen-protectors and the police have a natural affinity for one another. Even when the police and the militia are not working together directly, they are each working toward a common purpose — namely, the defense of the social order.
This may help explain how Kenosha’s law enforcement institutions reacted to the presence of white vigilante groups at the protests.
During a press conference after the shooting, Kenosha County sheriff David Beth said that he had been asked to formally deputize militia groups to patrol the Kenosha protests but that he refused to do so.
The sheriff went on to say that the reason he wouldn’t deputize militias was because then they would “fall under my guidance and my supervisors, and they are a liability to me and the county and the state of Wisconsin. The incident that happened last night where two people lost their lives were part of this group that wanted me to deputize them. That would have been . . . one deputy sheriff who killed two people.”
In other words, Beth is concerned about integrating vigilantes into the formal law enforcement apparatus because he does not want to be liable for their actions. That’s a tactical concern, not a moral one.
Kenosha Police Department chief Daniel Miskinis sounded a similar note during the same press conference.
“Across this nation there have been armed civilians who have come out to exercise their constitutional right and to potentially protect property,” he said. “Am I aware that groups exist? Yes, but they weren’t invited to come.”
It’s another instance of the police distancing themselves from vigilantes while still affirming their fundamental moral legitimacy. The police might not want to deputize vigilantes, but they don’t mind if the vigilantes decide of their own accord to come and provide assistance.
Compare that to the way that the police treat anti-fascist protesters. On the same day that Miskinis spoke at that press conference, Kenosha police arrested at gunpoint a group of anti-fascist volunteers at a gas station. The volunteers were part of “Riot Kitchen,” a collective based in Seattle that cooks and delivers food to protesters around the country. Legally speaking, the Riot Kitchen volunteers had just as much right to be in Kenosha as the white vigilantes. But in the moral universe of the police, the Riot Kitchen volunteers are illegitimate while the white vigilantes are legitimate.
Ultimately, police coordination with armed white civilian vigilantes is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
It’s not enough to focus our attention on neo-Nazis who want to start a race war or vigilantes who are motivated purely by racial animus. We have to confront the much larger group of white men, both in the formal police force and in informal militias, who believe in using lethal force to defend the status quo.
“They’re defending something bigger than themselves, which is why it’s so appealing,” Carlson said. “That’s why white supremacy isn’t about ‘bad apples’ or individuals. It’s an ideology. It’s a culture. It’s a movement and a thread in the fabric of American society.”
How Kyle Rittenhouse and Joseph Rosenbaum’s paths crossed in a fatal encounter | Visual Forensics
Kyle Rittenhouse case: Why it so divides the US/ BBC
I was gifted with the rare treat of commentary from a stranger today, in reference to my post of the anniversary of the Kenosha Massacre; here follows the exchange;
From Joanne Cottone:
“Fucking lies. A whole page of liea”
From Joanne Cottone:
“Is this for real ? Who the fuck wrote this shit? You just lie lie lie. Progressives are retarded commies and liars”
To Joanne Cottone:
I am the author, writing from my truth as I see it as any American has the right to do. I helped bring down the Berlin Wall and the charge of communism cannot find purchase with me. I describe myself as a Progressive because we are marginal outliers among the Democratic Party of which I am an elected representative, and this publication began as we launched an insurrection within our county DP. You would not, I believe, prefer a unified political opponent?
In the public interest, if you have facts which refute anything I have written, I would love to read them and most certainly would consider changing any views which can disputed on their merits. I must ask you to refrain from ad hominem and profanity, however; the degradation of public discourse is both sad and a marker of civilizational collapse. May we agree that our western civilization merits preserving?
I thank you for reading my work and hope that in future we may exchange ideas in pursuit of the Truth.
Torch of Liberty 