In the wake of our stunning and historic victory, the Democratic Party of which I am an elected representative must now give answer to two existential and strategic questions; What are our policy goals, and who will lead us into the future?
First we must pursue Trump and all his filthy pervert minions til the end of their days, and make each moment of their lives a hell. Let us found a Tribunal as in Nuremberg, outside of state control if necessary, and bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
Second, as our last two elections, including the one that brought rump (a typo, but I’m keeping it) to power again, were in large part simply referendums on America’s relationship with Israel and our despicable history of the abandonment of our universal human rights. To win a better future for us all and immediately to unify the Democratic Party as a guarantor of our humanity, we must enact Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of the state of Israel and bring her war criminals including Netanyahu to trial.
Third, we must purge from the Democratic Party any and all representatives who are controlled by Israeli interests or in the service of AIPAC and not of the American people, including the loathsome Chuck Schumer and Hakim Jerries.
Let us no longer buy the deaths of children with our taxes.
Beyond this simple defense of our humanity and our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and as human beings which should be an unquestionable principle of action and of democracy, what policies can unite us as guarantors of each other’s rights?
To this end I have offered my Plan 2028 which follows, and I believe we may need an open congress of all members of the Democratic Party in virtual session to create and vote on the policy guidelines with which we will seize the Presidency in 2028.
July 19 2026 Plan 2028: A Vision of Transformative Change For America and the Democratic Party, Part One of Nine A Postmortem of Our Failure to Stop the Trump Fourth Reich’s Second Capture of the State in 2024
July 20 2025 Plan 2028 A Platform For Change Part Two: Disarm and Abolish Police, Dismantle the Carceral State and Its Prisons, and Abandon the Social Use of Force
July 23 2026 Plan 2028 A Platform For Change Part Five: No Human Bodies Are Property of the State, and No Women Are the Property of Men; On Women’s Rights of Bodily Autonomy
July 27 2026 Plan 2028 Part Nine: What Does It Mean To Be An American, and Where Do We Go From Here? Balancing the Legacies of Our Past With the Dreams of Our Future
Hakeem Jeffries has repeatedly failed to offer a serious opposition to Trump, while remaining hostile to socialism, unreliable on labor, and deeply committed to U.S. support for Israel. Democrats should not reward that record by making him Speaker.
Our revels now have lasted fully twenty four hours, and bids fair to run for days as my neighborhood like our nation explodes in joy at the Fall of the Trump Regime and the Fourth Reich, as We The People have seized back our power from those who would falsify, commodify, dehumanize, and enslave us.
We have turned the tide of fascist tyranny and terror, and now that power is ours we must seize the momentum of this historic victory and bring the Restoration of Democracy both here at home and throughout the world, where ever men hunger to be free.
Last night and this we gathered round a bonfire leaping fifty feet into the darkness, a small band of us who have placed our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, and without regard to divisions or authorized identities of race, gender, faith, or nation, some of whom I have fought alongside for decades in liberation struggles throughout the world, and many strangers whom we welcome as allies in the realization of the American Dream of the equality of all human beings. We share our stories, envision possible futures, and make our plans for solidarity actions in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and of how we choose to be human together, and I know one true thing which I cherish and will forever hold in my heart as a hope for the future possibilities of becoming human; this is happening throughout America, in networks of alliance large and small, and this is a genie which cannot be put back in its box, because in this election we have proven that victory against the Fourth Reich is possible.
We have created a new America and a new future, friends; let us run with it as far as possible, so that the state can never again be captured by a hostile enemy.
Much work remains to be done; but for now in this liminal moment let us celebrate our triumph and our humanity. Tomorrow begins a new stage of the mission of being human as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, of the Restoration of America, of the Repair of the World, and of bringing healing to the flaws of our humanity.
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled The death knell of Trumpism has finally sounded; “There’s a certain freedom in low expectations. Going in to Tuesday’s midterm elections, forecasts were so grim for the Republicans that poll watchers started trading a kind of knowing joke: that the results would either mean the end of the Trump era, or the end of the polling profession.
Amid those sorts of predictions, any Republican victories would have seemed like a minor miracle. The expectation was that Democrats would have a blowout; Republicans, counting on the final tally to be a bit more mixed, would therefore almost certainly have the freedom to claim that they’d done better than anyone had thought they would.
It will be difficult to credit those spins today. The electorate issued the president a message of dissatisfaction with the second Trump term, and voted decisively to curb his power.
Now, with a Senate majority, Democrats will be able to investigate the president and his cabinet members, draw public attention to their own agenda items, assert Congress’s constitutional prerogatives, and block Republican judicial appointments.
In the coming days and weeks, Trump will alternately say that the Republican losses were fake – the result of fraud by a nefarious but ill-defined conspiracy of Democrats and illegal immigrants – and that they were real, but somebody else’s fault.
His administration has signaled over the past weeks that it could make efforts to contest the certification of especially close Senate races, notably Alaska.
But the wind may have gone out of the sails of that plan for now: for what it’s worth, which isn’t much, Trump told the New York Times on Tuesday night that he would accept the results of the midterms. What’s certain is that he will rail into microphones and complain in all caps on social media. But it is not likely that any of that will go anywhere. Because Tuesday night – almost exactly 10 years after he won the presidency in an upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 – the Trump era effectively came to an end.
The next two years will look nothing like the previous two. In the first several months after his return to power, when he controlled a unified government and was said to have won a restoration in 2024 on the heels of widespread cultural discontent and anti-“woke” sentiment, Donald Trump seemed momentarily as if he might succeed in his efforts to consolidate an authoritarian regime in America.
He purged the federal bureaucracy, eliminating hundreds of jobs and stuffing thousands more with his loyalists and incompetent cronies. He imposed his will and social agenda on non-governmental institutions, from large tech companies to major universities, which complied in part because they feared retaliation from a strong Trump regime if they refused.
He snatched the power of the purse away from Congress like a thief yanking a pocketbook away from an old lady, and reappropriated taxpayer money as he saw fit, disregarding the intentions of the people’s elected representatives.
And he did all this – he was able to do all this – because he seemed powerful, and his opposition seemed weak. For the first year of his second term, he bet that he could get people to obey him because he could threaten consequences for refusal, and because the Democrats could not credibly threaten consequences for complicity.
That credibility has flipped. Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024 seems, now, less like a broad cultural realignment and more like a product of material factors, namely inflation. Those same material factors have come back to bite Republicans now, as staggering gas prices, consumer disempowerment, persistent unemployment and visible, egregious inequality outrage voters.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, seemed indifferent, if not oblivious, to these concerns – that is, when he was not actively making them worse. His reckless and needless war on Iran is broadly blamed – largely correctly – for driving up gas prices.
Donald Trump will enter 2027 with a hostile Congress, noticeably diminished cognitive power and physical stamina, a cratering approval rating, and a term limit
Meanwhile, Trump busied himself by draping large banners of his own face over federal buildings, remodeling the White House in gold, and making bizarre diatribes on rally stages about male politicians’ backsides. He seems frivolous and out of touch, like Marie Antoinette in a bad toupee.
Donald Trump will enter 2027 with a hostile Congress, noticeably diminished cognitive power and physical stamina, a cratering approval rating and a term limit.
Moreover, he will enter the new year with a fractured coalition: his decision to pursue a war with Iran has split his inner circle and destroyed his credibility with the Republican rank-and-file for whom his “no new wars” pledge in 2016 had signaled a break with the neoconservative establishment.
Ambitious Republicans – younger Republicans – will sense blood in the water. They will begin to turn on him in an effort to shore up their own prospects; he will rage at their betrayal and rally his base against them, like some sort of stupid King Lear. But his efforts to crown kings and exact revenge may be severely diminished after tonight.
Trump’s strength was always the hold he seemed to have over the Republican base, the degree to which his charisma could compel voters to follow him anywhere. If the margins of the Democratic victories on Tuesday night are any indication, they are not following him any more.”
As written by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian, in an essay entitled New Beginnings; “Landslide. Tsunami. Earthquake.
In this historic night, Americans took their country back, making epic changes to the political map, putting blue back in places that had been solid red for decades. Everyone I knew was almost afraid to hope, auspicious though the polls and other signs were, afraid to set themselves up for disappointment, and then last night came report after report of almost unbelievable victories, the Senate retaken, the House retaken.
It is a profound repudiation of Trumpism, helped along by Trump’s unerring ability to pick truly despicable candidates, from Texas’s criminal Ken Paxton to Ohio’s creep Vivek Ramaswamy to South Carolina’s inane Darline Graham.
In that it’s the end of something, and when the celebration is over, it’ll be time to remember it’s the beginning of something, of rebuilding this country in all the ways it’s been broken and corrupted. So tonight there was a finish line, and tomorrow or the day after it’ll be our starting line.”
As written by Robert Reich in The Guardian, in an article entitled The great sleeping giant of the US has awakened; “The great sleeping giant of the US has awakened, taken a hard look at what’s become of the nation, and roared a thunderous “NO!”
What occurred on Tuesday was not – as some are saying – the inevitable midterm swing of the pendulum against the party in power. Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988. The last time Kansas elected a Democratic senator was 1932.
Nor was it just the economy. Americans are unhappy with high prices, to be sure, but inflation isn’t out of control. The country is not in a depression or recession. Unemployment remains quite low.
Nor, finally, was it all due to Donald Trump. Despite Trump’s repeated efforts to get voters to “pretend” he was on the ballot, he was not. Most Republican candidates barely mentioned him and many Democratic candidates stressed local or statewide issues rather than fixate on him.
Something much larger is responsible for what occurred: anti-establishment populism. It’s burst forth against the mammoth corporations that have scored record profits while most Americans have had to pay more. Against the mega donors and super Pacs that have flooded US politics with more campaign money – legalized bribes – than ever before.
And against the big tech billionaires who have become the most powerful force in the US economy and society – as well as Trump’s and the Republican party’s most visible backers.
The irony is that anti-establishment anger propelled Trump into the presidency in 2016 and again in 2024. Many Americans had found his politically incorrect rants and “America first” nativism to reflect their own anger at being disrespected and left behind. “I am your warrior,” he told supporters when he announced his candidacy for the 2024 election.
But during his second term, Trump has morphed into the very establishment he had railed against. He gave tax cuts and subsidies to tech billionaires. He’s promoted their AI, pushed their datacenters, put Elon Musk in charge of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), advocated their crypto, and went to war in the Middle East – not only causing gas prices to soar but making big oil billions (or, as Trump bafflingly boasts, “we’re making an absolute fortune in our country”) and enriching big tech weapons makers and investors, including his family.
Many who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024 have now abandoned him because of this blatant corruption, crony capitalism and eagerness to be on the gilded side of the US’s new Gilded Age. According to CNBC’s late October poll, corruption was the top issue on voters’ minds.
Meanwhile, anti-establishment populism has taken firm hold in the Democratic party. “The biggest divide in this country is not left versus right,” said the newly elected Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. “It’s top versus bottom.”
Sherrod Brown regained his Senate seat from Ohio largely due to voter anger at datacenters and the big tech billionaires behind them.
Abdul El-Sayed never tired on the campaign trail of reminding Michigan voters that his opponent, Mike Rogers, was backed by big corporations and mega donors.
Even Kansas’s victorious Adam Hamilton – who during his run for the Senate adamantly rejected the leftist label his opponent wanted to impose on him – campaigned on making datacenters pay for their own energy, banning lawmakers from trading stocks, expanding Medicare drug-price negotiations, and cracking down on price-gouging.
Hamilton also rejected money from corporate Pacs, as did most Democratic candidates for the Senate.
The real question in my mind is whether, come January when they control Congress, Democrats will take advantage of the new populism to enact measures most Americans need, such as Medicare for All, and reforms most Americans want, such as tougher anti-monopoly laws and limits on campaign contributions (even if this requires a constitutional amendment).
Trump is likely to veto any such initiatives, of course, but at least they’ll lay down markers for the 2028 presidential election – which, judging from what we’ve seen in the midterms, is likely to be a populist doozie.”
Armed white supremacist terrorists in mock-military camouflage uniforms stand guard over our ballot drop offs while Trump’s Department of Justice minions fire a barrage of bogus lawsuits to intimidate election officials in a campaign of vote suppression far beyond the normal gerrymandering of districts to erase nonwhite votes while assassins hunt our elected officials, as once again Musk the Troll King lavishes a fortune in dark money to rig the elections in tandem with his propaganda campaign on his platform x, and all of this in a diabolical plot to steal our citizenship and enslave us to the will of plutocrats and once more capture the state; welcome to America in the time of democracy’s greatest peril.
This was not in the mirror of remote history but today as it was during Trump’s Second Stolen Election two years ago, though the mechanics of totalitarian state terror and tyranny were codified by Trump’s idol Hitler long before, and the social divisions exploited by both have been with us since Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar.
We are now turning the tide of fascist terror in America and globally, when for many years we have been losing the battle for the soul of America and the future of humankind because we are playing a game by rules which no longer exist, as our opponents intend to subvert and destroy democracy as our terms of engagement.
As humankind awakens to its peril, we must diagnose the flaws of our political system and our society which have brought on this existential crisis, and through reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value bring change to how we choose to be human together.
Rules may be what make us the good guys, but good cannot win if evil has no rules but merely goals, and those of our subjugation to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and the centralization of power to authority and a carceral state of force and control.
Unless we too enter the space of play where there are no rules; for all Resistance is War to the Knife. Should we fail to seize back our power and reclaim our nation, this may be the only course left to us.
Our institutions of government are designed to balance forces which are both committed to the ideals, values, and structures of democracy; but this system functions only when democracy and a free society of equals founded on freedom, equality, truth, and justice are goals common to all, when we share a definition of terms as well as respect for the institutions and deliberative process of our government.
What today is true, just, equal, and free? Our political tribes no longer mean the same things when they speak of these values and ideals. We have lost democracy as a Forum of Athens when we can no longer debate how to be human together.
This is the true goal of the Republican Party, in our elections now and since its 1980 capture by the Fourth Reich. And we must cede nothing to the enemy; no ground of struggle, no symbol, no history, no idea.
We must win our adversaries back to the debate as partners, for if we cannot democracy is lost and America fallen, and we devolve to an age of tyrants and centuries of war from which we humans may never emerge, if against all odds we survive.
We have an excellent example of the costs of failure in the anniversary of racist terror we remember today, the Ocoee Massacre. It is a future we must avoid at all costs.
So today I have two kinds of policy guidance to share with you as thesis and antithesis, for which we must find synthesis. First, who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none, and we must bring a Reckoning as War to the Knife to those who would enslave us; and second, that we must avoid this fate and the Second Civil War and global civilizational collapse it will trigger by making democracy and our elections real, meaningful, just, and true.
God Bless America; we’re going to need it.
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 terror 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 in a parking lot between our local mosque here in Spokane and a Middle Eastern grocery which sometimes functions as a community center 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 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. And fascism has a primary strategy of power and the manufacture of consent to be governed in claiming to speak and act in the name of those they would enslave; so also with the perpetration of atrocities and unforgiveable crimes against humanity which makes us complicit and creates walls of identity controlled by authority. 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 theocratic-fascist 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 its predecessor in Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement by 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 written by Harmeet Kaur for CNN; “On November 2, 1920, African American residents of Ocoee, Florida, went out to cast their ballots in the presidential election — no small task at the time.
In the decades since Reconstruction, Florida politics had been dominated by White Southern Democrats, who fought to preserve slavery in the 1850s and had since obstructed African Americans from exercising their constitutional rights through violence, intimidation and legislation.
But in the run-up to the 1920 election, Black people in Ocoee were registering to vote in droves — a reality that threatened the grip of white supremacy, wrote Paul Ortiz, a history professor at the University of Florida, in a 2010 essay.
“State and local officials — along with the Ku Klux Klan — understood that white supremacy was in trouble,” Ortiz wrote. “They responded mercilessly.”
In an attempt to prevent Black people from voting, a White mob in Ocoee killed dozens of African Americans, set fire to their houses and drove them out of the community.
It was “the single bloodiest day in modern American political history,” Ortiz wrote.
It stemmed from one Black man’s attempt to vote.”
“According to several histories of the massacre, it started when Moses Norman, a prominent Black landowner in the Ocoee community, turned up to the polls and attempted to cast his ballot.
Norman was turned away by poll workers who told him that he hadn’t properly registered or paid the poll tax, according to a 2014 article in the Florida Historical Quarterly. So he took the issue to a prominent Orlando lawyer and Republican Senate candidate, who advised that Norman return and demand he be allowed to exercise his right to vote.
Norman returned, with some reports indicating that he had a gun with him as he went up to the poll workers and others saying that White people found the gun in his car. Ultimately, he was again driven away by White residents and went to take refuge at the house of his friend July Perry, another prominent Black man in the community.
A White mob formed and set out to find Norman, eventually arriving at Perry’s home, where a group of African American residents had assembled. It’s unclear who fired first, but violence broke out, leaving two White men dead and Perry injured, the authors of the Florida Historical Quarterly article wrote.
After the initial gunfight, the mob called in reinforcements and came back with a vengeance.
More than 250 White people, among them members of the Ku Klux Klan, torched rows of houses where African Americans lived, and set fire to other community buildings. Perry was lynched in Orlando. It’s not clear how many African Americans were killed, though estimates range from about 30 to as many as 50.
Despite their efforts to fight back, nearly all of the African Americans in Ocoee were driven out of town and didn’t return to live there for decades.”
Here in our celebration of the Day of the Dead my hopes and fears for the future of humankind become manifest and dance with us in the streets, and speak to us in our dreams of secrets and the silences of our history.
This as we rise and resist Trump’s ICE white supremacist terror force and campaign of ethnic cleansing, in what looks to be a historic Blue Wave in tomorrow’s midterm elections which will turn the tide of fascist tyranny in America.
I hope we are at the beginnings of our story of becoming human, and not at its end. I fear that our historical legacies may become traps, falsifications, assimilative and colonizing narratives wherein tyrannies of authorized identities may steal our souls. This is the problem of the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen; we are lost in a world of distorted images, captured echoes, fragmented identities, and dangerous illusions.
Divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, including those of race, gender, class, nationality, faith, and the tyranny of history, not only subjugate us to authority through the pathology of our disconnectedness from others but also alienate us from ourselves.
Authorized identities, rewritten histories, and the performance of our honored ancestors as subversions of imposed orders of being and meaning work like the discontiguous timelines of alternate histories and realities; there are myriads of such universes, and they are all right here, layered one within another. Here is a ground of struggle between falsification and authenticity, subjugation and liberation as ownership of ourselves. What has always interested me are the interfaces and boundaries between them as belief systems, and the possibilities of unknown silences and empty spaces.
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.
How may we grow into the Unknown spaces and discover, create, reimagine, and transform our true and best selves in becoming human, and in how we choose to be human together?
This is one of the true purposes and functions of our celebration of our ancestors; seizure of power as reclaiming our histories. With this is its interdependent and parallel praxis of social action; emergence from the legacies of our history as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma, among these harms and systems of oppression being racism, patriarchy, slavery, and colonialism.
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.
We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, our identities shaped by memory and history and the echoes and reflections of our ancestors. Disrupt or falsify this continuance and we become unmoored from our anchorages and set adrift; while this can be used intentionally to seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, it can also be used by others as an instrument of conquest and subjugation.
As examples we may look to the Pandemic and the generalized and overwhelming fear it unleashed, when weaponized by elite interests as a tool of division, repression, erasure, and colonization as in our border with Mexico which weaponizes disparity to create a vast underclass of exploitable labor, or one of fascism and tyranny as in America, as used by Trump and the amoral plutocracy of a theocratic, patriarchal, white supremacist, kleptocratic, and totalitarian police state he represents against humankind to centralize wealth and power.
The first day of the Dia de los Muertos festival is sacred to all children as holy innocents, whose lives are seeds like the dragon’s teeth sown by the Phoenician prince Cadmus in the earth from which warriors arise, and may bear forward and realize our dreams of liberation struggle against regimes of unequal power. Herein I honor as I have for far too many years now the migrant children stolen from their parents by order of Traitor Trump for his unspeakable perversions and those of his Epstein co-conspirators and still missing; now also do I remember the children of Ukraine abducted into slavery and torture brothels by the Russian military and the Butterfly Collectors syndicate, and the mass murder of Palestinian children in Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide ongoing in Gaza, a genocide and purchased with our tax dollars. These three regimes of tyranny and terror together represent the abandonment of our humanity and collapse of our civilization, and define the limits of the human; but sadly are far from unique in human history.
We grieve, but in this public ritual of grieving let us hold fast in solidarity to the purpose of remembrance and witness. For the dead and the past we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the future that must be redeemed.
The world does not need our grief; the world needs our solidarity of action.
As long ago, in an America which now seems remote, I wrote to Kamala Harris on the occasion of her visit to the concentration camps we maintain at our border as instruments of racist state terror and colonial exploitation;
Dear Vice President Harris,
As long as you’re going to look into the faces of our victims, whose nations we have devastated economically, ecologically, and politically and left in the wake of our greed as a shattered postapocalyptic region of blighted doom, then left abandoned to the mercies of a Mexico whose government is powerless before its criminal syndicates, you might as well end our program of genocide and enslavement, tear down the Wall, disarm and repurpose the Border Patrol to provide humanitarian aid and help refugees reach the safety of our shores, rebuild democracy, the sacrosanct rights of humankind, the inviolability of unionized labor, and the material basis of wealth in the ecologies of the Dry Corridor of Central America, enact citizenship by declaration, and restore to our nation our heart.
Very Truly Yours, Jay Lale
To this I received no reply.
We are all of us engaged in the great struggle of our time between authority and autonomy, waged in the streets and in our hearts, which will define what is human and either dehumanize and enslave us or liberate us and the infinite possibilities of becoming human.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Authority will use lies and illusions to deceive us, but their true motives cannot survive exposure, nor their legitimacy survive disbelief, nor their power withstand disobedience.
On this and every day let us remember who we truly are, dance the ghosts of those who made us possible and helped create us as informing, motivating, and shaping forces, recite and perform their stories, and renegotiate the boundaries of human being, meaning, and value which they offer us.
LA MARTINIANA | Canción de día de Muertos
‘See death in a different way’: The history of Day of the Dead and how to celebrate this year
1 de noviembre de 2026, Día de los Muertos: En honor a nuestros ancestros
En esta celebración del Día de los Muertos, mis esperanzas y temores por el futuro de la humanidad se manifiestan y danzan con nosotros en las calles, y nos hablan en nuestros sueños de secretos y silencios históricos.
Espero que estemos en los albores de nuestra historia de humanidad, y no en su fin. Temo que nuestros legados históricos se conviertan en trampas, falsificaciones, narrativas asimilacionistas y colonizadoras donde la tiranía de las identidades autorizadas robe nuestras almas. Este es el problema del espejo roto del Duende Verde en La Reina de las Nieves de Anderson; estamos perdidos en un mundo de imágenes distorsionadas, ecos capturados, identidades fragmentadas e ilusiones peligrosas. Las divisiones de la alteridad excluyente y las jerarquías de pertenencia, incluidas las de raza, género, clase, nacionalidad, fe y la tiranía de la historia, no solo nos subyugan a la autoridad mediante la patología de nuestra desconexión con los demás, sino que también nos alienan de nosotros mismos.
Las identidades autorizadas, las historias reescritas y la representación de nuestros venerados ancestros como subversiones de los órdenes impuestos del ser y el significado funcionan como las líneas temporales discontinuas de historias y realidades alternativas; existen miríadas de tales universos, y todos están aquí, superpuestos unos dentro de otros. Aquí reside un terreno de lucha entre falsificación y autenticidad, subyugación y liberación como propiedad de nosotros mismos. Lo que siempre me ha interesado son las interfaces y los límites entre ellos como sistemas de creencias, y las posibilidades de silencios desconocidos y espacios vacíos.
Como aprendemos de John Cage en la música, Harold Pinter en el teatro y Piet Mondrian en el arte, son los espacios en blanco los que definen y ordenan el significado. Y en la historia, son las voces silenciadas y borradas a las que debemos escuchar con mayor atención, pues en ellas el vacío nos habla del poder oculto y de las funciones y relaciones clave que la autoridad debe encubrir para mantener su hegemonía.
¿Cómo podemos adentrarnos en lo desconocido y descubrir, crear, reimaginar y transformar nuestra verdadera esencia, nuestra mejor versión, al humanizarnos y al elegir ser humanos juntos?
Este es uno de los verdaderos propósitos y funciones de nuestra celebración de nuestros ancestros: la toma del poder como reivindicación de nuestra historia. A esto se suma su praxis interdependiente y paralela de acción social: el surgimiento de los legados de nuestra historia como trauma epigenético y multigeneracional, entre cuyos daños y sistemas de opresión se encuentran el racismo, el patriarcado, la esclavitud y el colonialismo.
Siempre persiste la lucha entre las máscaras que otros nos imponen y las que nos imponemos nosotros mismos; esta es la primera revolución en la que todos debemos luchar. Somos las historias que contamos sobre nosotros mismos, a nosotros mismos y a los demás; nuestras identidades se moldean por la memoria, la historia y los ecos y reflejos de nuestros ancestros. Si se interrumpe o falsifica esta continuidad, nos desarraigamos y quedamos a la deriva. Si bien esto puede usarse intencionalmente para apropiarnos de nosotros mismos y reinventarnos, también puede ser utilizado por otros como instrumento de conquista y subyugación.
Como ejemplos, podemos observar la pandemia y el miedo generalizado y abrumador que desató, cuando fue instrumentalizada por intereses de élite como herramienta de división, represión, invisibilización y colonización, como en nuestra frontera con México, donde se instrumentaliza la desigualdad para crear una vasta subclase de mano de obra explotable, o una de fascismo y tiranía, como en Estados Unidos, utilizada por Trump y la plutocracia amoral de un estado policial teocrático, patriarcal, supremacista blanco, cleptócrata y totalitario que representa, para centralizar la riqueza y el poder contra la humanidad. El primer día del Día de los Muertos es sagrado para todos los niños, considerados inocentes, cuyas vidas son semillas como los dientes de dragón sembrados por el príncipe fenicio Cadmo en la tierra, de las cuales surgen guerreros que pueden seguir adelante y hacer realidad nuestros sueños de lucha por la liberación contra regímenes de poder desigual. En este día, honro, como lo he hecho durante demasiados años, a los niños migrantes arrebatados de sus padres por orden del traidor Trump para sus indescriptibles perversiones y las de su círculo de Epstein, y que aún permanecen desaparecidos; recuerdo también a los niños ucranianos secuestrados y convertidos en esclavos y torturados en burdeles por el ejército ruso y el sindicato de los Coleccionistas de Mariposas, y el asesinato en masa de niños palestinos en la campaña de limpieza étnica y genocidio que Israel lleva a cabo en Gaza. Estos tres regímenes de tiranía y terror representan juntos el abandono de nuestra humanidad y el colapso de nuestra civilización, y definen los límites de lo humano; pero, lamentablemente, no son casos únicos en la historia de la humanidad. Nos afligimos, pero en este ritual público de duelo, mantengámonos firmes en solidaridad con el propósito de recordar y dar testimonio. Por los muertos y el pasado no podemos hacer nada; es a los vivos a quienes debemos vengar, y al futuro al que debemos proteger.
El mundo no necesita nuestro dolor; el mundo necesita nuestra solidaridad y acción.
Hace mucho tiempo, en una América que ahora parece lejana, le escribí a Kamala Harris con motivo de su visita a los campos de concentración que mantenemos en nuestra frontera como instrumentos de terror estatal racista y explotación colonial;
Estimada Vicepresidenta Harris:
Ya que va a mirar a los ojos a nuestras víctimas, cuyas naciones hemos devastado económica, ecológica y políticamente, dejando tras de sí, fruto de nuestra codicia, como una región postapocalíptica desolada y abandonada a merced de un México cuyo gobierno es impotente ante sus sindicatos criminales, bien podría poner fin a nuestro programa de genocidio y esclavitud, derribar el muro, desarmar y reconvertir a la Patrulla Fronteriza para que brinde ayuda humanitaria y ayude a los refugiados a llegar a la seguridad de nuestras costas, reconstruir la democracia, los derechos humanos fundamentales, la inviolabilidad del trabajo sindicalizado y la base material de la riqueza en los ecosistemas del Corredor Seco de Centroamérica, promulgar la ciudadanía por declaración y devolverle a nuestra nación su esencia.
Atentamente, Jay Lale
No recibí respuesta. Todos estamos inmersos en la gran lucha de nuestro tiempo entre autoridad y autonomía, librada en las calles y en nuestros corazones, que definirá nuestra humanidad y que o bien nos deshumanizará y esclavizará, o bien nos liberará y nos abrirá las infinitas posibilidades de la humanidad.
Prestemos siempre atención a quien está detrás de la cortina. La autoridad usará mentiras e ilusiones para engañarnos, pero sus verdaderos motivos no pueden sobrevivir a la exposición, ni su legitimidad a la incredulidad, ni su poder a la desobediencia.
Hoy y siempre, recordemos quiénes somos en realidad, honremos la memoria de quienes nos hicieron posibles y contribuyeron a nuestra formación como fuerzas inspiradoras, motivadoras y transformadoras, recitemos y representemos sus historias, y redefinamos los límites del ser humano, el significado y el valor que nos ofrecen.
On the third of November we have a chance to take back our power from those who would enslave us, and to begin the Restoration of democracy and turn back the tide of fascist tyranny and terror of the Trump regime’s Fourth Reich.
In this historic moment, possibly the last chance to seize back our power by voting rather than civil war, let us stand together in solidarity of action and get out the vote like this was the final hope of our humanity and of America as a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights.
As Buffy teaches us in season seven episode eleven Showtime, quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Payer; “If we all do our part, we’ll be the ones left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”
As I wrote in my post of November 8 2024, Elegy For the Fall of America; In the wake of the Fall of America to the Fourth Reich and the advent of the Age of Tyrants, of the obliteration of possible futures in which humankind survives the terrors and cataclysms to come, our shared public trauma, grief, and rage gathers us all together as it generates waves of consequences which will reach their limit not in the destruction of our nation, nor of our civilization throughout the world, but only in the extinction of humankind.
We are now all of us prisoners of a madhouse run by its most brutal, degraded, perverse, and delusional inmates, the mask of the Fourth Reich which is the Republican Party, and set to enact our authorized identities and declaim our lines with gibbering whimsy by the sadistic fiend who modeled himself on Hitler, lost and won several fortunes as the kingpin of a human trafficking syndicate and launderer of Russian oligarchs secret wealth, whose mission as a Russian spy is the subversion of democracy, and worships only Moloch the Seducer, demon of lies; Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump.
This we must Resist; but how?
First, everything the enemy says is a lie. Question, seek proof, test, and share your truths as a witness of history and a truth teller, for to become human is to pursue the truth. Perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. Beware of those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary strategy of fascism. Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Speak, write, teach, organize. And remember always, silence is complicity.
Second, let us act in solidarity and as guarantors of each other’s parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and universal human rights. Such action gathers momentum and becomes an unstoppable force.
Third, refuse to submit to authority. Never stay down, regardless of the costs, the fear and pain, ostracism and brutal repression. Claw your way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. This is our victory, for it is a power which cannot be taken from us.
So, Resistance is asking questions, witness, and truth telling; solidarity of action, and refusal to submit.
All Resistance is War to the Knife; those who respect no limits and no laws may hide behind none.
Herein two warnings I give; the first is that violence and the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and always operates in both directions, so you must know precisely what consequences you are trying to achieve. My question for the use of force is simple; who holds power? Not who is innocent or the victim, for as Shaw teaches us in My Fair Lady this places a moral burden of judgement on victims, and often there are no innocent. And because we must avoid the false dilemma of moral equivalence, my rule for changing the balance of unequal power is Malcolm X’s dictum; By Any Means Necessary.
The second is to remember always Nietzsche’s principle; “He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare long into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.”
As I wrote in my literary publication Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium; Peter Weiss, on his birthday November 8; Surrealist-Absurdist narratives of Kafka-esque nightmares, the theatrical techniques of Brecht, Artaud, Ionesco, and Beckett, and a prose aesthetic developed from Genet, Robbe-Grillet, and Queneau, with a vast intellect and command of history and culture; Peter Weiss has created treasures of world literature and theatre whose power to motivate change and transform meaning will endure forever.
The great and stunning play and film Marat/Sade is an apex achievement and immortal classic of the theatre. Also, the music for the Brooks film production is a masterpiece in itself.
Peter Weiss’ magnum opus is The Aesthetics of Resistance, a thousand page historical novel of the fight for freedom, both against the Nazis and later the Communists. Only the first of the three volumes have been translated into English; hopefully this will change, but its more fun to read books in their original languages if one can. In it he argues that art prolifically generates new forms of resistance to authority, having a defensive function like a shell protecting our humanity. His many critical passages on art and literature are insightful and enliven this three volume Proustian work.
The story begins with the missing figure of Hercules in the Pergamon frieze, and three men who begin a conversation about it in 1937 Berlin, then recounts and examines the lives of hundreds of historical figures throughout all of Europe, encompassing the war and beyond. It’s been compared to Ulysses as a sea of words, and is among the most important novels of the Second World War and European history in general, but its also some of the most compelling writing about the value and meaning of art, literature, and culture I’ve ever read.
The Investigation records the testimony of the Auschwitz War Crimes Tribunal as observed by the author, who wrote this play from the actual evidence. Constructed in eleven cantos and modeled on Dante’s Divine Comedy, it is a stark and chilling interrogation of guilt and responsibility, and the rhetoric used by the perpetrators to avoid confronting their own evil. Herein we now are reflected, as the election of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump a few days ago echoes and reflects the German election of Hitler in 1933.
Holderlin portrays the iconic poet in a hallucinatory play of violence, maladaptive sexuality, class struggle, and a descent into madness. Among the characters are important and insightful portrayals of Hegel, Schelling, Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte, and the play contains a brilliant exposition of Holderlin’s play Empedocles.
Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, Trotsky in Exile, Discourse On Vietnam,
and his revised stage adaptation of Kafka, The New Trial, are all wonderful.
In The New Trial, Peter Weiss has recast Joseph K as the lawyer for an ominous corporation, which exploits his idealism to mask its true intentions in a game of smoke and mirrors.
We are lost among the systems of signs in which we wander like a Wilderness of Mirrors, propaganda and falsifications of ourselves, our images captured and grotesquely distorted as in a funhouse maze, alternate realities and conspiratorial provocations of fracture and division, and faith weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us and steal our souls.
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 Nietzsche argues in 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.
So I wrote in the wake of the January 6 Insurrection, but our nation has chosen to elect Trump once again this November 5 2024, and there will never be a Restoration of Democracy in America or anywhere on earth, as the lights go dark one by one and the Age of Tyrants begins.
But we can bring a Reckoning for the Fall of America to fascist tyranny and of our global civilization, and for the extinction of our species which will end six to eight centuries of totalitarian states and imperial wars of conquest and dominion fought with weapons of unimaginable and fearsome horror.
As the Matadors said when they rescued me from a police death squad in Brazil 1974; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
We cannot hold back the tides of history, but we can refuse to submit or abandon each other, and this is a kind of victory and of freedom which cannot be taken from us.
So once again I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand which confers our being human and Unconquered; “We swear our loyalty to one another, to Resist and ceased not, and abandon not our fellows.” He repurposed it from the oath of the Foreign Legion in Paris 1940 under circumstances very much like those we now face in America; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
And he gave me a principle of action on that day, as we were about to be burned alive by Israeli soldiers; “When there is no hope, one can do impossible things, glorious things.” For forty two years now I have lived by this rule and dared much, and though I have often failed to claw back something of our humanity from the Abyss, as I did in Mariupol Ukraine, Panjshir Afghanistan, and far too often in Palestine, I remain to defy and defend, unbroken and Unconquered, and can tell you as a witness of history that it is possible to challenge vast unanswerable force and win, as we did when we brought down the system of Apartheid in South Africa and the Berlin Wall in Europe.
The great secret of power, force, and control is that without legitimacy it is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disbelief and disobedience. And if we but refuse to submit, we cannot be defeated, subjugated, enslaved.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
“If we all do our part, we’ll be the ones left standing”
Buffy Season 7 episode eleven Showtime
Marat/Sade (1967) complete film
Gummo – The Cruel Reality Of Decay
The Aesthetics of Resistance Series, by Peter Weiss
On this Halloween let us enact reversals of order, play tricks which open the gates of our prisons to paths of change, pursue the sacred calling of the truth teller, perform the four primary duties of a citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, our society, and the systems and structures of our civilization.
Let us bring the Chaos.
What will you be for Halloween? For the rest of your life? If we can dance our true and secret selves before the stage of the world on this night, why not every night?
Celebrate with me Halloween as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of hierarchies and systems of force and control, and the violation of norms.
Normal doesn’t live here anymore.
Norm, not our old family retainer and master of curious devices but a literary figure of my invention here representing normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, is downstairs in the game room tied to an electric chair from the old McKay Carnival I call the Throne of the Sublime, because it is a forge of making angels, though wrathful ones. And it is possessed by the monstrous and deranged souls it has unleashed as an instrument of the Law and the carceral regime of torture and the repression of dissent which it symbolizes, and from which it was liberated decades ago by an Industrial Workers of the World direct action team in a raid on a prison.
Once this was an instrument of state terror, the ultimate resort of institutions of power empty of legitimacy and with only force and violence to control, silence, and erase all who refuse to submit and all Others who are excluded from circles of the elite and the god-authorized Elect, but now serves different purposes in seizures of power and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, set free in exaltation, rapture, and vision, as we are sublimed in the electric arclight of captured bolts from the heavens.
As a carnival game billed as The Tingler it was converted from terror to joy and from pain to ecstasy as an erotic electro-stimulation device, much like the reference to the game of Gentlemen, Start Your Engines in Neil Gaiman’s telenovela Lucifer, season 2 episode 11.
Is any of this story true? Maybe, maybe not. The dialectics of revolutionary struggle and state tyranny and terror in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force are a Schrodinger’s Cat problem wherein many things are both true and false at once, as Rashomon Gate Events of ambiguous and relative truths.
Such questions we must ask America, who like our ideas of what is normal is now being transformed in the crucible of our darkness and the consequences of the January 6 Insurrection and the capture of the state by a fascist cabal in America with the Second Trump Regime and by our complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, both now nightmare realms of derelict antiquities from whose historical shadows of authorized identities we must emerge.
Masks can both conceal and reveal our truths, like the oni mask of a samurai who uses it to summon his ferocious demonic power as a strategy of shock and awe, like the wolf and bear skins of the Viking Berserker warrior brotherhood. We Antifa have for years now made a game of masquerading as masked ICE agents, blending in among them and making mischief as we may, and vanishing like a rumor of gremlins who sabotage the machine of power which they serve.
In the immortal words of Mario Savio; “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
Two years ago in 2024 I was costumed as an Israeli soldier spattered with the blood of numberless innocents who have been butchered with aberrant glee in Palestine for over three years now, where American tax dollars buy the deaths of children and of our civilization. No more terrible and horrific figure of the limits of the human exits than this, the Israeli enforcer of tyranny and state terror authorized to commit genocide by a monstrous god of theocratic violence and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil as imperial conquest and dominion, nor that of his American co-conspirators in crimes against humanity.
For the Beast Netanyahu has a ringmaster, Trump, Rapist In Chief, idiot, madman, Russian proxy tyrant, slave of Moloch the demon of Lies, and who puts him through his paces as an entertainment for the hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege as defined and anointed by theocratic authority as an Elect, just as Israel is a mirage of American imperialism, and as Trump in turn dances to the tune of his own puppetmaster in the capture of the state as Vichy America, the subversion of democracy, and the fall of civilization, his old KGB handler from the simple days when Trump was merely a Soviet agent, human trafficker, and money launderer for crime syndicates, Vladimir Putin.
I find it illuminating how the meaning of our monsters changes with the context of their signs; I once wore this costume of protest against state terror, cruelty, and dehumanization to a neighborhood barbeque, like the Red Death at the Masque in Poe’s story, drawn by the music to a backyard full of Trump signs and men adorned with guns as preposterous masculine jewelry, and everyone ran away, even the bikers. I congratulate you, O Israel; if you intended to become a symbol of terror and horror, you have succeeded.
The seduction of power as security is something I understand all too well; but security is an illusion. And it comes with a price.
Some things, however, are certain and unavoidable; first among them the violence of the birth of new possibilities of becoming human and the agony of liberating ourselves from divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. As Trotsky teaches us, the violence of the slave master cannot be compared to the violence of the slave in breaking his chains.
And the second? Normality is deviant. Normal is half our nation voting for treason, subjugation to Russia, theocracy, patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and the subversion of our Constitution and the values of the Enlightenment on which it and the whole of western civilization is founded.
To fascist tyranny and theocratic terror let us say with the glorious rebel Ahab in Moby Dick; “To the end I will grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I stab at thee, I spit my last breath at thee.”
Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote in my post of November 25 2020, Using Chaos and Transgression as Revolutionary Acts to Transform Law and Order Into Liberty and Equality; I am against law and order because law serves power and order appropriates and divides us into hierarchies of elite power and categories of exclusionary otherness, whereas chaos autonomizes and empowers and transgression and the violation of norms and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty liberates and seizes power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. Law serves power, and there is no just Authority.
Rejoice with me in this time of reversals of order through the performance of Acts of Transgression and Chaos. Let us dance our best and secret selves on the stage of the world, forge new truths, destroy and create ourselves and transform the systems and structures of oppression and tyranny, patriarchy and white supremacist terror, forces of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, into a diverse and inclusive free society of equals.
Dance with us in joy, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.
As I wrote in my post of October 25 2024, A Hymn to Chaos; Tonight a window opens beyond our universe, letting angels through, or devils; and I welcome them both, figures of the twin sides of our nature and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, forces trapped within our flesh in titanic struggle or truths written in our flesh as transformative harmony.
Herein is a liminal time in which we may shape ourselves anew, reimagine our lives and grow beyond the boundaries and limits of our horizon, explore unknowns in the unclaimed empty spaces of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value marked Here Be Dragons, discover new Best Selves and be reborn, become enraptured and exalted beyond ourselves as we ascend through the gaps of the heavens to embrace the wonder and terror of our total freedom in a universe bound by no Law and without any being, meaning, or value other than our own which we ourselves create.
On Halloween night in 2020 I put a curse on Donald Trump and all who voted for him in that election after four years of subversion of democracy and sabotage of America as a Russian agent and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, robber baron capitalism and ecological disaster which may include the extinction of humankind for the ephemeral profit of elites, tyranny and state terror in the brutal and criminal police repression of the Black Lives Matter protests, and a relentless multifront campaign against our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and the institutions which serve them including a secular state, an independent and impartial judiciary, and a press free from propaganda and disinformation, especially that of authorities and their carceral states of force and control, free from hate speech, conspiracy theories, rewritten histories, alternate realities; an open public forum of debate free from identitarian politics as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and of fear and division weaponized in service to power, and an education system which produces citizens rather than slaves as a precondition of democracy.
Curses and wishes give form and direction to vast imaginal forces of poetic vision as reimagination and transformation, and may change the balance of power in the world and the fate of humankind as an unfolding of our intention and the will to become. This one has been reasonably successful from my point of view; presaging the Restoration of America in the Biden Presidency, a brief holding action against the tide of fascist tyranny and terror but one which bought us time to organize a Total Resistance, and the exposure and purging of our betrayers from among us in the largest manhunt in our nation’s history as we bring a Reckoning to the fascist infiltrators of the January 6 Insurrection and their financiers, apologists, and puppetmasters, and to all those who would enslave us.
This year as I did last, and on every Halloween to come, for evermore, I shall perform the rituals of Cursing the Tyrants and the Casting Out of the Unclean Fascists that it may become final and eternal, propagating outwards into infinity as a wave of change and gathering force as it grows, like revolutionary struggle unstoppable as the tides, and I ask all of you to do the same; but I will balance it as well with wishes of blessing, protection, and good luck for all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and those champions who stand with them in solidarity and for a free society of equals.
In this moment, with half the tens of thousands dead in Gaza and throughout Palestine being women and children as well as civilians helpless before the bombs of vengeance as blood sacrifices to fear, rage, and hate, I know who my people are, and with whom I stand even if it is only to die with them.
I will be sixty seven years old in a couple weeks, November 14 2026, and have been fighting throughout the world and in Palestine and Lebanon since the summer of 1982, and I must question how many more fights I have left in me, especially ones which cannot be won. Far too many such lost causes and forlorn hopes, yet I cannot leave Last Stands unfought. I intend to go down fighting; when you’re all that stands between a people and genocide, between resistance and dehumanization, between liberty and slavery, there is no mustering out.
No one should have to die alone, abandoned and erased from history by a fallen civilization for whom our universal human rights and solidarity as each other’s guarantors of our humanity no longer has meaning or value.
No Band of Brothers, we, but complicit in all evils we do not oppose or remain silent in witness of; especially we Americans whose taxes purchased the bombs of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Herein I claim both the peoples of Palestine and of Israel, versus the theocratic tyrants and terrorists on both sides who seek to subjugate them through fascist divisions of blood, faith, and soil and through fear weaponized in service to power. For the alt-right regime of Netanyahu has conspired with elements of Hamas in the October 7 attack for two purposes; first to stop the growing interdependence and mutual aid of the anticolonial Palestinian Independence movement with the Israeli democracy and peace movements which threatens authority in both Gaza and Israel and may yet emerge as a united and nonsectarian democracy, second to create a casus belli for Netanyahu’s conquest of the region including areas of Lebanon and Syria as a Second War of Independence, and third to delegitimize democracy as a guarantor of universal human rights by making its guarantor states complicit in unforgiveable war crimes in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians by America’s client state of Israel.
America chose to send military aid to Israel rather than humanitarian aid to Palestine, the enemy regimes of Netanyahu and Hamas won, and the peoples of both states and our own lose.
To refuse to submit is to become Unconquered, and this is a victory and a kind of power which cannot be taken from us, and through which we may find the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand.
How do we create ourselves anew and emerge from the legacies of our histories?
As I wrote in my post of May 28 2023, The True and False Crows: a Fable; A crow confronts his image in a pool of water, and as Nietzsche warned the darkness looks back. Of this I have written a paragraph on the Nietzschean idea of the Abyss, and of tragedy as failure to embrace our monstrosity and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil goes.; “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.”
It is also an origin of evil as the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; written in the tyrannies and systems of unequal power which hold humankind in their iron grip of force and control as Kristevan abjection and learned helplessness, and the ecological catastrophe which threatens our species extinction as disconnection from nature, control of nature as capitalist exploitation of resources and theft of the commons, carceral states of force and control as embodied violence, and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the Wilderness of Mirrors.
All of this requires the renouncement of love, as Wagner’s figure of tyranny Alberich the Dwarf must do to seize the Ring of power and dominion, a story more familiar to us as Tolkien’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied in his trilogy of novels which recast World War Two as an allegory of the abandonment of addiction to power. This has a corollary; the redemptive power of love, like the power of poetic vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, can free us from the Ring of Power and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
Here follows the paragraph of my thoughts on seeing this image, which if considered as a poem I now think of as the True and False Crows: a fable.
True and False Crows: a fable
Who is this imposter? If he is me, where now am I? Avaunt, my nemesis, for I shall pursue retribution for this theft of myself beyond all wrath now remembered, through death and hell and the terrors of our nightmares. Come and let us grapple for the truth of ourselves in this place where angels fear, and end not in silence but in exaltation and fire, with roars of defiance hurled against the chasms of our nothingness, supernal and magnificent as the Morningstar, and illuminate for all humankind the path of escape from this prison of illusions and lies.
To this my sister replied, Such poetry!
This is as direct as I can be, o my sister. Should I merit some kind of monument one day, an absurd fantasy as I mean nothing to history and will vanish from the world without a trace, and nothing to anyone beyond yourself as the remnants of family, Dolly my partner, and those few friends and allies who know my true identity, inscribe this therein.
I have tried to salvage something of our humanity and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world these past forty years since I was sworn to the oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet, and often failed, but this is not what is important.
What is important is to refuse to submit.
And one thing more; to act with solidarity in revolutionary struggle. As the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet from the oath of the Foreign Legion in which he once served, and given to me in Beirut 1982 in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and which I offer to all of you as a tradition to bear forward into the future; “We swear ourselves to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
In this my chosen life mission I have held true, for if each and every one of us stands in solidarity with others regardless of how different they may be from ourselves, we will become liberators and guarantors of each other’s uniqueness, and in refusal to submit will be victorious and free.
He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, the Oath of the Resistance, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.
As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”
I dream of a future something like the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations; the idea first put forth in the episode Is There In Truth No Beauty?, described in the first issue of the fanzine Inside Star Trek as; “that beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities.” As stated in the episode The Savage Curtain; “I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.”
Liberty as freedom from authorized identities and truths, and equality and its corollary solidarity; these are the personal and social preconditions of democracy as a free society of equals.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did last spring in Mariupol and in the year of the fall of Afghanistan, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must embrace our darkness and claim our truths, and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Love is crucial both to poetic vision and as solidarity in action as processes of self-construal and becoming human; Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling; plus it contains a marvelous re-enactment of the myth of Persephone.
Let us always take the risks of our humanity, and place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
My friends, please feel free to perform and enact this spell with me; A Hymn to Chaos and Transgression:
I invoke Chaos, freedom, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human against Order, Authority, and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
I perform acts of transgression by which to break the chains of law and illusion woven by those who would enslave us, to seize our power and our autonomy from hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, from authorized identities and divisions of exclusionary otherness, to create myself in the image of my own imagination and no other, and to shape human being, meaning, and value to the forms of my desires.
In this time of the turning of the tides I refuse and resist subjugation by force and control, I become Unconquered and free, I run amok and am ungovernable, and to Authority I reply with the Four Sacred Acts in pursuit of Liberty and Truth; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
By these invocations of Chaos and Transgression (Herein be free to make wishes, and to consecrate acts of defiance of tyranny, disruptions and subversions of good order and discipline, violations of normality, seizures of power, and celebrations of autonomy and living beyond all limits in the glorious embrace of our monstrosity, of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves) I curse all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, patriarchy, state terror and tyranny, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and inequalities of power.
On this night of the renewal of the world in which the old order is consumed in fire and the spirit world moves among us and is unified with our own in its reimagination and transformation, I name to my brothers and sisters of Chaos these enemies of humankind as rightful prey; first, upon all tyrants and their forces of repression of dissent and enforcement of the Law, for order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just authority; second upon Donald Trump (herein please feel free to name tyrants whom you oppose and seek to cast down from their thrones; mine include Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many others) and all who serve and support him and the cause of fascism, and all those who in voting for him in the Presidential election of November 3 2020, and in the election of November 5 2024, and who vote for any member of his Party of Treason in our coming mid terms have signed the confession of their treason and allegiance to white supremacist terror, Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror, and to the tyranny and terror of a police state.
So upon Trump, his puppetmaster Vladimir Putin, and all who claim him as their own do I place my curse and invoke ruin upon their fortunes and their lives and destruction upon their cause. May they be forgotten and become nothing.
This I balance with equal blessing, protection, and good luck upon the lives, fortunes, and causes of liberty and equality upon all who are powerless and dispossessed, marginalized by exclusionary otherness, falsified, commodified, dehumanized, silenced and erased, and those who place their lives in the balance with them in solidarity as champions and bearers of the Torch of Liberty and a free society of equals.
Tonight our wildness will eat the moon and set it free.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 2 Episode 6 Halloween
Walk Through the Fire, song from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode Once More With Feeling
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.
In This Halloween season as our midterm elections approach, remember and beware; real monsters walk among us, hidden behind human masks: Republicans, a conspiracy of white supremacist terrorists, theocratic patriarchal sexual terrorists of unspeakable Epstein perversions, and amoral plutocrats who intend to abandon mercy and our universal human rights, and all are aligned in the cause of subversion of democracy and our degradation from a free society of equals to a world of masters and slaves.
This we must resist, to the last if necessary, for all resistance is War to the Knife, and we must purge those who would enslave us from among us, by any means necessary. Vote, and bring others to vote, while we still can. Let us take our power back, friends.
Who are we Americans, with our government a captive state 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?
In this Halloween season, as we enact seizures of power through embrace of our monstrosity and dancing our demons, let us remember and witness, expose and call out the real monsters who walk among us beneath their human masks; the secret Nazis who call themselves Republicans, loathsome and degenerate conspirators in theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, moral lepers consumed and disfigured beyond the limits of the human by an ideology which infects and destroys its host like zombies or vampires.
Among the true horrors of the Trump regime’s Fourth Reich is the awareness and certainty that they live and are real, and may be anyone anywhere; a stranger in line behind us at the grocery, or next to us at a family dinner. But knowing this, we may be on guard and ready when those who would enslave us attack.
And when we go Trick or Treating, let no one go alone.
Of the Trump regime carnival freak show I have written in my post of January 31 2025, Trump Unfurls His Tongue of Lies; Trump unfurls his Tongue of Lies like a red carpet for celebrities of wickedness, marked with the sigil of the demon he worships and is possessed by; Moloch the Deceiver.
Pestilence comes forth wearing the zombie form of Robert F Kennedy Jr the Truly Awful, his brain eaten by a swarming mass of worms and bearing his Plague Doctor’s mask at the ready.
Here follows his comrade Civil War possessing the leering and drunken Christian Nationalist Pete Hegseth, dragging behind him the shadows of the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, patriarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings, bearing the Cross he wishes to nail us all to.
Famine appears as Tulsi Gabbard, Russian spy, collaborator in Assad’s regime of torture in Syria and in Putin’s atrocities of imperial conquest in Ukraine, whore of tyranny who seeks our ruin for the benefit of her evil paymasters, not to protect American interests and markets but to undermine and sell them off as we wither and become Hollow Men, gaunt and starving, consumed from within by the hunger and avarice which consumes them like the cannibal Wendigo while our enemies fatten as we die and become nothing, bearing a wizened apple doll like the picture of Dorian Gray as a sign of our future ruin and moral collapse and hissing serpentine curses like the figure of Hunger in the film Pan’s Labyrinth, a perfect allegory of the Trump regime.
Death of the state and nation of America arrives with the fanfare of trumpets as an all-conquering shadow of our darkness, fears and self-hatred and internalized oppression made manifest in the figure of the fake Jethro of questionable pronouns and tattooed eyeliner JD Vance the Bearded Lady, whose mission is the fall of the world order of democracy and as his Sith master Peter Thiel envisions the renouncement of mercy as a weakness which bars the master race from dominion of the world, the dismantling of the American state, and its replacement with a plutocracy of tyrant CEO’s wherein citizenship is meaningless and we are all slaves of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and white male privilege, bearing the manacles which symbolize terminal stage capitalism as it seeks to free itself of its host political system.
A parade of fools follows the Four Horsemen of Our American Apocalypse, each representing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, their praises sung by the multi-headed beast of fascist propaganda led by X CEO Elon Musk and others yapping in chorus and jostling for position.
And after, crawling on his belly like a submissive dog, comes the husk of Rudy Giuliani, utterly vacuous and eaten from within by the demons he serves. Wailing and covered in ashes follow the shades of Trump’s co-conspirators Charlie Kirk the apologist of theocratic patriarchal tyranny and white supremacist terror, and Jeffrey Epstein his partner in global human trafficking and unspeakable perversions, both useful fools to whom a Reckoning has been brought. Such is the fate of all who serve and are loyal to Traitor Trump, who serves and is loyal only to himself.
Truly, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here” as Ariel’s line in The Tempest goes, prancing and capering in their many guises.
In the audience the treasonous and dishonorable brutes of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror who voted for a Rapist In Chief that he may grant them permission for the same and of white supremacist terror who voted for a Nazi Revivalist and multigenerational KKK fanatic that they may imagine themselves superior to anyone else in their wretchedness and degenerate villainy and enact genocide and slavery, both forms of power as subjugation and dehumanization of others born of fear and weaponized in service to the centralization of authority to a carceral state of force and control, hooting and champing and each bearing a sign and flaw of their subhuman degenerate nature, a tail or a horn, seize upon the prancing embodied lies with avarice and eat them up in the primary ritual of a Trump rally black mass.
Thus for an America and ideals of human being, meaning, and value rendered meaningless by misdirections and distortions of the truth, captured and lost in the myriad reflections, echoes, and false images of Trump’s funhouse mirrors of lies.
Lies are all Trump has; strip him of his Cloak of Illusions and Lies and his true nature as a monster and predator is revealed to the world. So with all who align themselves with him, his regime, and his aberrant plans for us all as written in Project 2025.
One year ago this week Trump and his clown show caused a nationwide panic by defunding, deregulating, abolishing independent oversight, trying to force mass resignations of federal workers, and shutting down the government. Among the first side effects of the federal spending freeze was the medicare portal for payments going down which shut down our nation’s hospitals and healthcare system and the crash of a jet in Washington DC because no one was in the flight control tower or at the helm of the FAA. This is only the beginning of what a nation which abandons the institutions of state entirely looks like; the nation falls apart. And this is exactly what the Trump regime wants, as capital tries to free itself of its host political system.
We see you, enemies of democracy and humanity, and we will neither believe your lies not obey your commands.
And while our systems of oppression and unequal power are doomed and must inevitably collapse, our seizures of power and liberation struggle cannot be defeated while we disbelieve and disobey, refuse to submit and unite in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
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?
In all the madness of the ICE white supremacist terror force campaign of ethnic cleansing, repression of dissent, and theft of meaningful citizenship and our inalienable and universal human rights, 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; having in the No King’s Day events held the most massive series of protests in our history other than Black Lives Matter, engaged in electoral process and solidarity actions as guarantors of each other’s rights, 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.
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.
In this time of darkness, 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 January 21 2025, Horror On Opening Night As Deranged Idiot Clown Show Returns to White House; Depravities, violations, sadism, monstrosity; the horrors of opening night spew forth from the diseased and rotting mind of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief of a fallen America as our deranged idiot mascot of fascism and theocracy returns to the White House with his Theatre of Cruelty.
Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes typify the minions of the Clown and will be remembered forever as a symbol of the Party of Treason and the Deplorables who voted it into power, who slavering and ululating with mindless abandon cheer him on to greater performances of the grotesque and the bizarre.
After preening before the crowd and dropping his pants so that various wellwishers could kiss his grublike white butt, Trump grinned, leered, grunted like a pig and hopped up on a table to squat and excrete a mass of Executive Orders which like Thing One and Thing Two immediately set about creating chaos.
Then he summoned one of the migrant children he had stolen from their parents, cleverly tied up Shibari style and prodded along by handlers in KKK hoods with fireplace pokers, who made their prisoner jump through hoops like lion tamers to resounding applause. “Here’s my very first Executive Order, ladies and gentlemen; we’re going to round up all the migrants, only the ones who aren’t white mind you, just so nobody worries that we’re treating people unfairly because they’re not people, and we’re selling the bond of their labor on an open exchange so you can all buy some, everyone can buy some slaves, and you can do anything you want with them, anything at all, because I said so just now, and it doesn’t matter anyway because only our kind are really truly human. And you can forget about legal and illegal immigrants, or if they were born here or not, because it’s the bad blood I’m worried about and not what it says on paper, we’re just starting with the immigrants but don’t worry, we’ll get to the rest of them eventually”.
And the crowd laughed and threw money, which Trump snapped out of the air like a dog catching treats.
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, a vessel of rage and vengeance, 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, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and 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.
As written in my post of October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: parallel lives and reflections; As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
Both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.
Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
Also out of order per a timeline but next in thematic rank, October 19 2019, Trump the predator exposed in All the President’s Women; How do you spell Trump? Treason. Racism. Untruth. Misogyny. Predator.
Hey Republicans, thanks for showing us what’s under your masks.
You know, I can understand how the Fourth Reich conspiracy of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Nazi-Klan white supremacists, and their plutocrat and foreign puppetmasters might claim the first four parts of the Trump program of subversion of democracy with defiant pride amongst themselves, but that last one baffles me. Its as if the whole Republican Party decided to adopt a new nickname on their first day of prison, and started introducing themselves as Short Eyes.
Its all recounted in horrific detail in All The President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Barry Levine & Monique El-Faizy; the casual sexual assaults committed in an arrogance of power and privilege which echoes the aristocratic Right of Seigneur, perversions of cruelty and ownership of others as a form of dominion which are extensions of his psychopathy, and among the most terrible signs of his inhumanity and amorality his acquisition of a beauty pageant monopoly for the purpose of access to underage girls.
Trump’s whole life purpose and goal is to perv Miss America. Republicans, are you really going to claim that legacy as your own? Are the rest of us going to let it go unchallenged?
Let us unite together in this purpose; to restore the honor and morality of America, and vote Trump out of our government.”
And as I wrote on September 13 2019, Trump’s foreign policy: sabotage of America’s global hegemony of power and privilege; “After three years of idiocy and madness, pathological lies and perversions, what is the legacy of Trump and his monkeywrenching of America?
Childstealing and whatever Trump and his Epstein buddies did which required the disappearance of witnesses and hundreds of missing migrant children.
Use of white supremacist terrorists as deniable assets to enable the theft of our freedoms and the transformation of our democracy into a police state of totalitarian force and surveillance.
Campaigns of racist ethnic cleansing and genocide against nonwhite immigrants and Muslims.
I could go on, but what is the point? What norms and values of America have Trump and the Republicans not violated? In domestic policy the Trump administration has been a disaster it will take a generation to recover from, if America survives at all.
As regards foreign policy, Trump has alienated our allies and emboldened our enemies, damaged our credibility and poisoned our diplomatic relations.
We have surrendered our ideals and our leadership of the world as its primary guarantor of democracy and human rights, and won nothing in return. I’m surprised anyone accepts our money; certainly the words of our President are meaningless and worth nothing.
In my post of September 16 2019, Trump’s New World Order: madness and tyranny; “ In a brilliant thumbnail analysis of Trump’s impact on the state of the world in terms of foreign policy, Simon Tisdall writing in The Guardian describes his policy of vacuous sound bites, staged publicity images, the diplomacy of a man totally ignorant of human relationships beyond the golf course and of any strategy of action to achieve goals other than grabbing the world by the crotch and hanging on while gobbling and ululating meaningless bestial sounds as if negotiating for slops in a hog trough.
Trump has discovered it’s not as easy to rape nations as it is to corner little girls in the dressing room of a beauty pageant, or even an adult one at Bloomingdales.
Not if we unite together in Resistance.
America now has a common cause with many nations of the world in overcoming fascist tyranny and rescuing democracy and the rule of law, of defeating the imperial conquest and subjugation of the earth by Trump and other figureheads of the Fourth Reich, and in the liberation of humankind and the restoration of the sovereignty of citizens.
And finally, herein is the text of my post in celebration of the start of the Impeachment process on September 24 2019, America rediscovers its values: the impeachment of Pennywise; ”Jubilation in the streets as America rediscovers its values and begins the impeachment of Pennywise, demonic clown and cannibalistic monster who dwells beneath the human face of Trump, a mask of flesh stolen from the abducted and enslaved women in the brothels his grandfather built the Trump family fortune on during the Alaska Gold Rush, and who today carries forward the legacy of terror and misogyny he was raised with, whose election should be de-certified as the coup of a foreign power and whose Presidency has no legitimacy.
History will remember Trump as the standard bearer of the global Fourth Reich and its assault on democracy, stealer of children for his vile and twisted purposes, author of genocidal ethnic cleansing and builder of concentration camps, pathological liar and ignorant fool, whose alliance of xenophobic racists and white supremacists, Christian Identity fanatics and other Gideonite fundamentalists who dream of the restoration of the Patriarchy under medieval Biblical law as a tyranny of the Elect, and amoral Plutocrats out to loot America for all the wealth they can send offshore while sabotaging our economy and driving our nation into collapse, thereby removing the major guarantor of freedom and human rights in the world and opening everything to exploitation.
A full accounting of the treasons and crimes of Trump and his Republican conspirators would fill a thousand pages and more, would roll on like the endless night litany of the death of God during an Orthodox Easter service; but this is the moment of its end, wherein the chanting turns to rapture and joy at the break of dawn, for Nancy Pelosi and the power brokers of the Democratic Party have rummaged around in Pandora’s Box and found at last our hope, calling for impeachment and the restoration of the rule of law just at the point of no return, before the legitimacy of our government and the values on which it is built, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, are forever lost and America falls to fascism and tyranny, and with it the world descends into a second Dark Age.
It took a millennia to emerge from the last one; civilization may not be recoverable again, should it fall under conditions of fascism and totalitarian regimes of absolute state power and surveillance, war, ethnostates and genocides, and unbridled extractive plunder of the earth. And this we must resist.
Therefore celebrate with me the call for impeachment, and prepare ourselves for the great struggle ahead to make it real, to reawaken America’s values and to save democracy and universal human rights throughout the world.
As I wrote in my post of August 27 2025, Behold the Monster: Anniversary of the Mug Shot Which Defines the Trump Era; 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, 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.
Half our nation remains under its spell, 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 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, 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 planned military occupation of our cities and the ICE racist terror campaign.
As we unite in solidarity and organize Resistance and liberation struggle, we may well mark the occasion of Trump’s surrender to justice two 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 and our duty of car 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 two 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, 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.
Portraits of the Trump Regime: a gallery
(American Horror Story: Freak Show Season 4 Trailers)
Trump’s regime: Pan’s Labyrinth trailer
We Enter Now the Wilderness of Mirrors:
The Psychedelic Puppets String Theory Gang and the Cyberdelic Dream Pen
Who is this Absurd fellow Lovecraft, with his gorgeous phraseology and peculiar allegiance to British rather than American English, his Surreal strangeness, bizarre Sadeian transgression, Freudian horror, and poetics of fear?
The Lovecraft Mythos remains an iconic study in fear as the organizing principle of an invented mythology of Absurdist Nihilism; it also reveals how we use fear to shape ourselves and others. What are its methods and purposes in Lovecraft, and in horror literature in general? Why do we need fear as an instrument of identity creation?
Above all in this age of political polarization and historical culture and identity as a ground of struggle, how are we to understand him?
Is he a fascist? Nowhere in literature will you find a more useful case study of fascist psychology, and in nonfiction only the book I discovered while a senior in high school in the wake of studies of Holocaust literature and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, which led me to a lifelong study of the origins of evil through the intersections of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, a multidisciplinary analysis of Hitler entitled The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite, is more illuminating.
Lovecraft is a conflicted author who mocked Hitler as a clown but also admired his performances as a hybrid form of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Pirandello’s Theatre of the Grotesque; many Americans thought of Trump in this way as parallel figures of public spectacle. Hitler’s famous maxim “Politics is the new art” marks the turning point of an unknown artist into a monstrous tyrant, and of our civilization to an age of darkness. From this moment on, image has replaced content and public life has been a nihilistic theatrical performance wherein values are irrelevant.
Lovecraft’s paranoid delusions of alien conspiracies and ancient cults can be read as antisemitic allegories derived from propaganda like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of which Umberto Eco wrote so beautifully in Prague Cemetery, but for the fact that he was a madman who believed them to be literally true; humanity is a tenuous and illusory quality for Lovecraft, whose world is filled with monsters wearing human masks who might reveal themselves at any moment, a precarious reality under constant threat.
His only known romantic relationship was his brief marriage to a Jewish woman, to whom he incessantly muttered dark imprecations, poisonous metacommentary, and racist characterizations about virtually everyone they passed on the streets of New York as monsters from his stories in disguise, as he did in his hundred thousand letters to his literary proteges.
He is not a fascist, which requires submission to authority and the abandonment of all meaning other than power and all value other than wealth. Fascism weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power and operates as tyranny; Lovecraft’s work is filled with elite hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness as images and figures which may be read as racist, and he shares many of the obsessions of fascism, but nowhere does he long for authority or imposed meaning; instead he signposts and calls it out as cruelty without meaning or value, and his narratives are driven by existential dread and terror of authority.
His is a poetics of rebellion and nihilism like that of Camus in a universe wherein the gods are not merely dead as in Nietzsche’s reimagination of the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us, Thus Spake Zarathustra, but are actively hostile to humankind, mad idiot superbeings whose motives are utterly alien and predatory, who created humankind as slaves and food, a radical Absurdist Nihilism like that of late Samuel Beckett which has its political form as anarchy. The Anarchist slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World, “No gods, no masters”, coined by the socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui in 1880 and popularized by Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent in 1907, might have been written for him.
Is he a racist? Yes and no, as we may say of fellow Surrealists Djuna Barnes and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His fears of otherness, miscegenation, contamination, devolution to an animal state, and of the monstrosity of others is often expressed in racist terms, but he neither begins nor ends with unselfcritical racism. It remains ambiguous whether he is calling it out or employing such tropes to advance his themes; the first interpretation ascribes intentionality and self awareness which is unprovable but aligns with his themes, the second miscasts him as a Warhol like mocker of expectations whose images are deliberately discontiguous and unaligned, or a fabulist without a cause which he was not.
He was instead a profoundly wounded and savaged soul who fears his own monstrosity most of all, and this is why he is useful to us. In the literature of madness only the works of Akutagawa and Philip K. Dick are true equals, both authors who like Lovecraft were fighting a losing battle against madness, and aware of the degeneration of their skill and artistic control. We may say of him as Renfield says of himself in Dracula; “I’m not a mad man. I’m a sane man fighting for my soul.”
Why should we read Lovecraft now?
Like the Hanging of the Maids in Homer’s Ulysses, the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, his writing becomes meaningful for us when it is relevant to problems we face in our own lives, and literature is useful when it helps us solve problems of adaptation and change, such as confronting and interrogating implicit privilege as patriarchy and racism. What else is literature for? Purge it of its power to disturb, incite, and provoke, and it becomes meaningless and worthless.
The tragic flaw of Lovecraft is also that of our civilization; a blindness to our own privilege and a failure to embrace our monstrosity and otherness. Such lines of fracture can be read in our borders with their concentration camps of migrants and our prisons whose purpose is the re-enslavement of Black people as contract forced labor, in our wars of ethnic cleansing in partnership with the state of Israel as a proxy of imperial conquest and sectarian division through it Apartheid policies and the Occupation of Palestine which give the lie to our claims of universal human rights, and in our democracy which has been infiltrated and subverted by fascists and transformed into a carceral state of imperial force and control, though the casting out of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and the subsequent Restoration of America in the Biden Presidency, misfire though it was, holds out the hope of a counterforce of democracy which may one day rise to liberate us from fascist tyranny.
We must claim our monstrosity, 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.”
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!”
Any serious scholarship of Lovecraft begins with Michel Houellebecq’s stunning debut and manifesto, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, whose chapter titles suggest the ars poetica of Lovecraft; “Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness. Then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnamable architecture of time”.
Next comes the definitive biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volumes 1 & 2, by S.T. Joshi, Joshi’s An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, and the volumes he edited in the Black Wings series of Lovecraftian horror anthologies. Finally there is Thomas Ligotti’s manifesto The Conspiracy against the Human Race, and his darkly luminous fictions.
How has the influence of Lovecraft shaped me as an informing and motivating source, what are my origins in successorship from him, and what is our relationship now?
As I wrote in my post of June 15 2025, Gods of My Father: Father’s Day Act Two; Let us claim and embrace our monstrosity, the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves: Our Monstrosity as Nietzsche’s Toad; Here is a nested set of puzzles like the evils of Pandora’s Box or gateways to otherness opened by Clive Barker’s Lament Configuration, bearing wonders and terrors in equal measure, and we can never grow wise enough to truly say which is which.
Can we open the secrets of human being, meaning, and value without angels and demons, potentialities of darkness and light, reflections of each other, escaping together into our lives?
How can we explore the numinous within us, unless we embrace both dimensions of our wholeness? All true art exalts and defiles.
Herein I look to the figure of the werewolf in Burrough’s novel The Wild Boys as controlling metaphor of our wildness as beings of nature, and like nature anarchic, chaotic, and utterly free. In a universe without meaning other than that which we ourselves create, the terror of our nothingness is balanced with the joy of total freedom.
The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization through systems of Control but which also has the power to redeem and liberate us, the final part of Burroughs’ Anarchist Trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature, an extension of Rousseau’s Natural Man and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil.
He did claim to be possessed by the Toad as a chthonic spirit, identical with Nietzsche’s Toad which the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra, a novel I later adopted as a counter-text to the Bible, feared he must swallow as a symbol of our animal nature. Burroughs claimed to be Nietzsche’s successor on this basis, as avatar and priest of all that is reviled, disgusting, loathsome and bestial within us, which he identified with Lovecraft’s Tsathoggua and transferred to me as a successor and avatar.
As I never conceptualized or ascribed negative qualities to my own shadow self, this containing nothing which is not me, I experienced this simply as a seizure of power as an avatar and not as possession by a malign entity; exactly as practiced in Voodoo and in the Shaivite-Tantric cult of the Bhairav as I explored it in Nepal during my time as a monk and Dream Navigator of the Vajrayana Kagu order of Tibetan Buddhism. For myself, from childhood and in a family utterly free from the consequences of Freud’s father as lawgiver or from Abrahamic ideas of God as Authority, I imagined nature as truth and freedom, and nothing to be feared.
The magic Burroughs and my father practiced was based equally on his friend Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche called Acephale, the mythos of his model H.P. Lovecraft, and elements of shamanism, traditional ritual magic from grimoires, and the occultism of Aleister Crowley. A decade and more later, Burroughs would be claimed by admirers as a founder of Chaos Magic, and his host of invented literary methods designed to destroy systems of Control represented an ars poetica which was also a personal faith, including the cut-up method, playback, dreams, out of body travel, mandalas and gates to alternate realities, ecstatic trance and vision, curses, demonology, tarot; I still have the deck of tarot cards he gave me and taught me to use, not to predict futures but to change them.
To this my father brought the family Voodoo, werewolf mythology, ancestral history interwoven with versions of Grimm’s fairytales, and his brilliance as a theatre director; he directed some of Edward Albee’s plays, and I grew up from the age of four listening to them discuss drama during rehearsals from a center front seat in the theatre, which often interrogated Albee’s direct influences and references among his fellow Absurdists Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter, but included sources in Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud, and Eugene Ionesco.
As Burroughs wrote The Wild Boys during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from my father’s ideas and the claim of our family history that we are not human but werewolves, and had been driven out of Europe for that reason; Martin Luther referred to my ancestors as Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon, and we were driven out of Bavaria in 1586 at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions. He was writing it during the Stonewall Riots, which may be a more direct context as a fictionalization of the witness of history. Like much of his fiction, it is also filled with episodes both historical and imagined and set in mirror worlds of exotic locations like Mexico and Morocco transformed as Orientalist fantasies or gateways to underworld realms he called the Interzone.
When I asked him, at the age of ten or so, if I was in his book and what he was writing about, he said; “Freedom, nature as truth and civilization as addiction to wealth and power and theft of the soul, and how our pasts get mixed up with our futures.”
The Wild Boys reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, of which fellow Surrealist and poet Philip Lamantia was a scholar and a source for Burroughs, also the subject of his final novel The Western Lands as is its direct model H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, references Octave Mirbeau, Bataille, Genet, and extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as restraint or binding and limit of our nature which he called libido control. David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; wildness as nature and freedom here mingle and intertwine.
All the works of William S. Burroughs are masterpieces of anarchist liberation and transgression, Surrealism and occult mysticism, even if difficult because they are told in collages of random and nonlinear episodes which he described as vaudeville turns, with an iconography that is bizarre and obscene. In spite and possibly because of this, they remain among the great classics of world literature, revealing endless chasms of darkness and infinite possibilities of rapture and illumination.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Go ahead; swallow the toad.
The Toad is summoned by performance of that which is loathsome to you; as embodiment of disgust, horror, degradation, and what Freud called the Uncanny. Jung described possession by the Shadow as a theriomorphic figure; “A manifestation of the Beast Within which seizes the soul with nameless shuddering; in that moment one becomes transformed and exalted six thousand feet beyond good and evil.”
It is a type of the Guardian of the Gates of Dreams who must be eaten, embraced as a lover, or defeated in battle in three of the major forms of the Great Rite of Becoming to transform it into a Guide and ally or protector in underworld journeys. In the Dreaming one may assume its Battle Forms as one imagines them, which for myself as a child included a Grendel-like water dragon which lies dreaming in the darkness of its sea caves and the chiropteran raptor soaring among abyssal chasms of darkness as depicted in the film Dracula, and other forms. Here I signpost that the ancient shape changing magic of the Berserker involves the crafting of Battle Forms, originally from trophies of the hunt, and ecstatic trance dances which summon their ferocious powers.
As a chthonic figure of underworld illumination the Guardian and Guide confers powers of insight into others secret desires similar to Lucifer’s power in the Netflix series which fictionalizes the great question of Lacan, What do you desire?, as well as the ability to enter the dreams of others as does Freddy Kruger in the Nightmare films based so faithfully on the cult of the Bhairav in Tibetan Buddhist-Shaivite Tantric faith. I discovered much parallelism between the magic of my childhood and that of the Vajrayana Buddhist Kagyu order of monks in Kathmandu of which I was once a Dream Navigator.
Burroughs had a whole pantheon and system of magic worked out from Lovecraft and Crowley, but that is a different story. What I find interesting is that like Crowley’s mirror image angels and demons who are really aspects of the same being, Burroughs’ reimagination of Lovecraft’s mythos has his Others as both good and evil, like wrathful and beneficent aspects of Tibetan gods.
In the end all that matters is what you do with your fear, and how you use your power.
Why is Lovecraft relevant to us now?
H.P. Lovecraft investigates the failure of our civilization to protect us from our animal nature, the shadow which grants us depth and limitless passion; the purpose of our invention of civilization according to Camille Paglia’s magisterial Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.
His writing is filled with images and themes which have been misread as racist, but his intent is the reverse; to name and disempower the forces which destroyed civilization in World War One as fear of otherness, exactly as did his model T.S. Eliot. Together with Vladimir Nabokov, they are the greatest, and perhaps the last, of our true conservatives.
But this, too, is ambiguous, for he is equally a revolutionary; Lovecraft’s vision of Western civilization is that of a colony of ants mining the waning power of a dead god’s carcass, a horror without purpose which confers rulership on the most ruthless and degraded among us. He shares the critique of Idealism with Eliot, Nabokov, and especially Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, but also of traditional society as structural and systemic tyranny and authoritarian force and control with his fellow Absurdists and Surrealists, to some degree of normality as a basis of the power of church and state with de Sade as a literary provocateur and the valorization of transgression as liberation from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and above all of formal power itself with the great visionary for whom he was a direct model with Genet and Bataille, William S. Burroughs.
Burroughs’ conspiracy of Venusian insects to conquer humankind through drug addiction as a metaphor of capitalism, summarized in his formulation of Marxism as The Algebra of Need, is an appropriation of Lovecraft. The master and his disciple were also both serious scholars of the occult obsessed with dark magic, who saw in mysticism a tradition of counterculture and dissent, as with the martyrdom of the Templars and Jacques DeMolay.
Anyone who has read my literary criticism or my political commentary will be aware that I despise and abjure fascism above all else. Why, then, do I love and admire particular conservative authors as a treasure, and acclaim any quixotic defense of Idealism against the onslaught of atavistic barbarism and dehumanized modernity?
Let me clarify; fascism is an intrusive force of destruction and no part of the Western Civilization which I champion, born as self-criticism in the Forum of Athens. Conservatism in America or indeed any free nation founded on the values of the Enlightenment begins with a free society of equals, a secular state, objective and testable truth, and a system of justice which is impartial to class, race, or gender, founded on the Rights of Man, scientific rationalism, and Humanism. Our civilization began when the French Revolution toppled the Catholic god and raised up a statue of Reason in its place; this is our true legacy as Americans.
Any philosophy of totalitarian authority which centralizes power to a state of force and control, either monarchist-aristocratic, communist, or fascist, is anathema to myself and to democracy and freedom. I am an American and a bearer of the Torch of Liberty. This is why I am on the side of rebellion, revolution, anarchy, chaos, and the frightening of the horses.
Regarding the themes of existential dread of otherness and the terror of alien civilizations, of being overrun by a zombie apocalypse of mindless cannibal brutes which has always been a metaphor of nonwhite immigration, H.P. Lovecraft explored this territory of fear as a cause of the collapse of our civilization. He interrogates rather than valorizes the causes of monarchy and fascism as forms of colonial imperialism.
Lovecraft asked a simple question; what happens to humankind and to human being, meaning, and value without Freudian control of our animal instinctive nature? Throughout his works he recapitulates and extends Nikos Kazantzakis’ masters thesis on Nietzsche in The Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist critique of state power based on a legal reformulation of the Doctrine of Original Sin; that without the restraining force of law man devolves into a subhuman condition and the most ruthless and amoral wins and becomes king, originally formulated to limit the divine right of kings and crucial to the Enlightenment project and the birth of modern secular democracy.
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s savage morality play which examines concepts of state power, justice, and the theology of the depravity of man on which our legal system is founded, is luminous with Kafka-esque Absurdism and Freudian horror.
Here are Lovecraft’s primary sources and references; Shakespeare and classical Greek theatre which are common sources, Nietzsche, and Freud. What he did with them, however, was utterly unique and a luminous work of genius which interrogated the failure and collapse of our civilization in World War One from its internal contradictions and forged from his vision an ars poetica of Absurdist-Surrealist Nihilism which prefigured Existentialism.
This line of transmission originates with Dostoevsky and Gogol, was codified by Kafka, and finds realization in Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Kobo Abe, and Thomas Ligotti as Absurdist Nihilism and in William S. Burroughs, Jorge Borges, Philip K. Dick, Haruki Murakami, Andre Breton, Philip Lamantia, Allen Ginsburg, Jonathan Carroll, Jeff Vander Meer, and others as Surrealism.
It is his Surrealism for which I love him; Lovecraft’s principal stories form an
Initiation cycle of Jungian shadow work and the confrontation with ones own darkness as the Other, like Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood or Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue, culminating in his reimagination of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, William S. Burrough’s model for his own final masterwork The Western Lands. Fellow Surrealist Vladimir Nabokov articulated the principles of poetic vision and dreams as transcendent imaginal journeys through time and other dimensions to seize control of our own evolution in his great novel Ada, Jung models them in the Red Book, and Philip K. Dick was consumed by them, but Surrealism as a transhumanist project to become a god or to unite with the Infinite draws on myriads of esoteric, mythic, occult, and mystery traditions, many of which inform Lovecraft’s work. Like Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Lovecraft can be read as a summa theologica and codex of the whole Western mystery tradition.
Like his models and sources, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, Gogol’s Dead Souls, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and those for whom he became a model and reference in turn, Jung, Nabokov, Burroughs, Lamantia, and Philip K. Dick, and aligned with the works of Akutagawa in Kappa, Leonora Carrington, Djuna Barnes, and Jerzy Kosinski in The Painted Bird, the works of Lovecraft are also a therapy journal which documents his struggles with madness.
Like Baudelaire he realizes it is the world and not himself who is mad; but he is also mad, and his great works chart the course of his degeneration and unmooring from consensus reality which was also a liberation of the spirit and of the imagination, a madness and rapture which transformed him into an angelic figure, combining in one being illumination and darkness, depravity and exaltation.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As a figure of Orpheus and Milton’s Rebel Angel Lovecraft struggled to escape the limits of the human and the legacies of his history, his madness a consequence of unresolved internal conflicts and the massive trauma of being an emotionally abandoned child whose parents both died of madness in an asylum, a madness which he shared and feared he could not escape, which made strange his vision as a unique genius but also marked him with a sign of otherness, robbed him of self control and reason at times and crippled his ability to bond or even socialize in person with others, making him a reclusive hermit without sexual interest of any kind.
Lovecraft bore the wound of the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; he married at age 34 having never even kissed anyone before, and his wife remarked that she had to initiate sex as he was uninterested; the failure of their marriage is unmysterious in this light. This and lack of interest in eating which may have been attempts to starve himself to death and resulted in his Nosferatu-like gauntness make me suspect that he was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, who hated his body and feared his desires. He may also have been held prisoner in isolation during his formative years, under the strict regime of his mother and female guardians, and the tortures he survived are described in symbolic and allegorical form in his works.
Here is a great secret of the mechanism of unequal power as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma and internalized oppression; the son is shaped and deployed as the vengeance of the mother, and the victim by the abuser who is a tyrant and also a survivor of powerlessness and victimhood, and so the system of oppression perpetuates itself. Patriarchy and racism are persistent because they create some of us as monsters with which to subjugate the rest of us.
Lovecraft suffered from what I call Dr Moreau syndrome, fear of devolution to an animal state; also of ones own animal nature, like the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and could not and which William S. Burroughs gloried in being possessed by, which he claimed as a lineage and as the successor of Nietzsche.
This coupled with the xenophobic fear of being overwhelmed by representations of parental authority as an ancient and superior civilization which renders our own insignificant, and robs us of culture as a control mechanism of our id or shadow self. Hence the existential horror of the Western scholar confronted by elder and superior alien civilizations such as Eqypt, as in the Randolph Carter stories which were brilliantly reimagined in The Mummy films starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.
As regards his style; Lovecraft extends Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and like his model Burroughs reimagines the nihilism and transgressive eroticism of Georges Bataille as Surrealism harnessed to the project of Romantic Idealism; to paraphrase the words of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, to break through the mask of our material existence and seize the Reality it conceals. That the quest of Ahab was also his is quite evident; “to the end I shall grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I strike at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee” as Ahab declaims to the White Whale, figure of authoritarian tyranny who stands in for God and for his abusers. Whether he was able through his stories to leave us a map of the journey to the unknowns which lie beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden is another matter, proven only in the doing.
As to the stylistics of his rhetoric and ars poetica, Lovecraft has lost his adjectives, which are running amok and taunting their substantives. His howls of desolation are a cause of great merriment among the several grammars he employs, and this is the only thing on which they are in agreement.
His words are formed of scrabble pieces, randomized by being shaken in a dice cup in a game against the gods of madness and the ravening dark, the future of our emerging humanity wagered against the barbarism of our past.
What can be saved, and what dreamed anew? For the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu is once again revealed as an illusion, a palace of memories and lies which in their dance of chaos cannot be limited by their classification and taxonomies of value, but frangible and hollow do betray us.
Mirrors and false images which capture, distort, and falsify us, a wilderness of lost meanings which steal our souls, sound and fury signifying nothing but which seizes and shakes us with the terror of our nothingness like a rag doll in a lion’s mouth, and the signifying monkey who lives at the Buddha’s foot to denote the inherent animal nature of all humankind as a theriomorphic representation has harnessed and is riding him like a pony.
Sometimes our demons must be let out to dance.
What can we learn from Lovecraft now?
One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre or a Lovecraftian one, referential to classical sources which include Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign and hostile to humanity, rests with our solution to the paradox of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?
Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen, of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith as did T.S. Eliot. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bears the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation. Hope in this context is subjugation to authority.
Let us embrace the Hell of total freedom, for nothing is there which does not live within us. “No gods, no masters” as Auguste Blanqui described it in the title of his newspaper in 1880.
The terror of our nothingness, meaninglessness, and powerlessness in a hostile universe wherein the gods are mad and depraved monsters, a universe empty of imposed meaning or value, may also become the joy of total freedom, autonomy, authenticity, self-ownership and self-creation, as it was for Sartre; a universe in which the mould of man is broken and we are utterly without authorized identities.
Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop lightningbolt Awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”
It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.
Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.
Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.
Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their interdependence. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history. Much of our sorrows originate in the conflicts between the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, nature and nurture, the historical and social informing, motivating, and shaping forces of identity.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.
Is Lovecraft such a figure of heroic struggle against authority, like Icarus, Milton’s Rebel Angel, or Victor Frankenstein, fallen but great, a tragic bearer of the Torch of Liberty?
Great authors are a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, which like the fragmented images of the Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror in Anderson’s Snow Queen reflect and reveal aspects of ourselves and come alive in their readers; which Lovecraft shall I describe?
The poet of chaos whom I adore, of madness and the existential terror of our nothingness in a universe of dethroned authority, a visionary and tragic hero?
The survivor of abandonment and abuse who forged beauty from their trauma, a flawed and very human man whose fear of otherness was expressed in allegories of dysmorphia, dehumanization, and degradation which are horrifically filled with racist figures and images and can be read as illuminating case studies of fear and of the dyadic origins of evil in overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized by authority in service to power and the systemic inequalities of power and privilege in hierarchies of elite belonging and otherness?
Lovecraft understood the principle of dancing ones demons; the monstrous figures he describes as shuggoths can be read as racist metaphors, but are also unflinching descriptions of actual childhood night terrors, manifestations of sexual abuse, which invaded his dreams and his flesh to “tickle” him awake. It is this relentless engagement with his fear and darkness, with the legacies of his victimization, this willingness to see the abominable and not look away, and to witness the truth as an author, like Camus to refuse to submit, which makes him useful to us and places his work among the literature of madness and therapy journals, with Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Leonora Carrington, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Jerzy Kosinski, Philip K. Dick, and Kathy Acker. Foucault called this truth telling, and this parrhesia as a sacred calling to pursue the truth as a witness of history, which I claim as my faith, lies at the heart of Lovecraft’s bizarre invented mythos.
How does this help us forge our future as antifascists and antiracists, citizens of a free society of equals and bearers of the Torch of Liberty?
We must speak directly to that fear which is the origin of evil; to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, and we do this best by bearing sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others. How can we engage in liberation struggle from systems of oppression if we cannot embrace our own darkness?
In the words of Karl Popper; “No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not wish to adopt a rational attitude.” Let us embrace instead the irrational, our Shakespearean taxonomies of passion as motive forces, of rapture and terror, in the great work of reimagination and transformation of humankind and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
We may say of Lovecraft what is said of Vincent Van Gogh in Doctor Who; “He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of the world; no one had ever done it before, perhaps no one will ever do it again. To my mind, that strange, wild man was not only among the world’s greatest artists, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.”
What is greatness? What does it mean to be a great author or creative genius of any kind, a great human being, in this or any time?
For myself, greatness does not require us to overcome the limits of our histories, only to engage them in authentic struggle. Like Jacob wrestling the angel, everything in life is more powerful than we are; victory lies not in defeating the forces which shape us, but in refusal to submit to them, and in reaching beyond our limits. And in this Lovecraft emerges as a tragic hero, who can teach us how to struggle with our own darkness in our journey toward becoming human.
From the darkness of the unknown and the Forbidden, our demons call to us with siren songs which echo and thunder among limitless chasms of our possibilities, and whisper secrets in our dreams; and they say, Come dance with us.
Come dance with us.
The Lighthouse
The Mummy
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houellebecq, Stephen King (Introduction)
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.”
Guillermo del Toro’s beautiful and monstrous film Frankenstein, ravishing in the Olympian vistas of its exaltation and awesome in the depths of its defilement, especially in IMAX, has been wonderfully interrogated in iHorror.com by Kirsten Saylor; “Few filmmakers working today love monsters the way Guillermo del Toro does. He doesn’t fear them, pity them, or try to redeem them — he loves them. In every film, from Pan’s Labyrinth to Crimson Peak, del Toro builds worlds that are achingly, hauntingly beautiful, but never hollow. His images shimmer with the sacred and the grotesque in equal measure. Beneath the intricate design and painterly light, there’s always a pulse, something human and hurting. Frankenstein is no exception; in fact, it might be his most personal act of devotion yet.
Frankenstein feels less like a film and more like a cathedral built from grief, stitched together by tenderness, and set ablaze by the unbearable need to be seen. From its first moments, it’s clear that del Toro isn’t just adapting Mary Shelley’s story, but rather communing with it, holding it in his hands like something precious and fragile and terribly real.
Every frame of this film is a testament to his love of monsters as beings of astonishing beauty and complexity. Del Toro doesn’t shy away from the grotesque, but revels in it. The stitched flesh, the scars, the twitching muscles of the Creature are horrific, yes, but they are also achingly human, imbued with curiosity, frustration, and an almost spiritual longing. In del Toro’s hands, horror becomes reverence. Each shadow, each artfully draped cloth, each flicker of candlelight communicates devotion to the story, to the world, to the very idea of what it means to be alive.
The Romantic poet John Keats, in an 1820 letter to his dear friend Charles Brown, says, “Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering,” and those words feel as though they were written for this Creature, for Frankenstein, for the audience watching as a man wrests life from death and death from life. Del Toro’s camera lingers on these details not as spectacle, but as sermon: suffering is real, beauty is real, and in the intertwining of both, the film’s heart beats strongest.
Setting the Stage of Science and Philosophy
The first true glimpse of the Creature arrives in 1855, not as a fully realized monster, but as a spark of foundational obsession in Victor Frankenstein’s mind. In the grand hall of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, Victor (Oscar Isaac) demonstrates his experiments with reanimating dead tissue using electrical currents. The room hums with curiosity, skepticism, and the faint tang of fear. It is here that the philosophical heart of the film begins to beat as science and creation entwine, daring to trespass where humanity perhaps should not.
Though phrenology — the pseudoscience that claimed the very character of man could be mapped through skull shapes and bumps — had largely fallen out of favor by this time, its shadow lingers. In Frankenstein’s world, bodies are systems to be understood, measured, and manipulated. It is Christoph Waltz’s Henrich Harlander, Victor’s patron, who, in a quiet voice, asks, “Of all the parts that make the man, which part holds the soul?” In a single question, del Toro sets the stage for one of the film’s central inquiries: if life can be constructed from pieces of other lives, what becomes of consciousness, personality, and the soul?
These moments are not just exposition; del Toro stages them like a performance of both audacity and devotion. The filtering lights catch on metal instruments and polished wood, and the hum of electricity suggests both life and threat. The Creature exists first in imagination and in the fervent gaze of a man willing to challenge God. It is a moment that perfectly captures del Toro’s genius, showing how horror and beauty coexist while every visual choice carries meaning and hints at the wonder, terror, and heartbreak ahead.
From the moment the Creature is truly birthed into existence, Jacob Elordi commands the screen with a performance that is at once tender, terrifying, and heartbreakingly human. Del Toro’s direction ensures that we see the Creature not as a monster in the conventional sense, but as a being of curiosity, discontent, and moral intelligence. Early on, his movements are almost toddler-like — unsure and experimental. Every gesture conveys thought and feeling, allowing us to understand his frustration with his own limitations and his longing to engage with a world that largely rejects him.
Del Toro overlays this awakening with religious and symbolic imagery that heightens the Creature’s tragic grandeur. In his first moments of life, the Creature bears the wound of Longinus, a crown of thorns, and a red-purple cloth draped across his shoulders. As Victor whispers, “It is done,” the scene evokes the death of Jesus, framing the Creature as both martyr and miracle, a living icon of human obsession and divine consequence. It is a moment where horror and reverence collide — the grotesque made sacred, the sacred made intimate.
What makes Elordi’s performance so compelling is how much of the Creature’s humanity comes without words. His fascination with nature, his respect for life, and his gradual comprehension of social interaction reveal a purity and curiosity that make the humans around him seem all the more monstrous. Through him, del Toro asks yet another one of the central questions of his film: are humans inherently cruel, or does society’s structure — its neglect, fear, and vanity — create monsters?
There’s a delicate balance between tragedy and humor as well. The Creature’s awkward explorations, his attempts to understand his environment, and the visual comedy of early missteps add levity without undermining the narrative weight. Del Toro understands that horror is most poignant when paired with vulnerability, that the grotesque is terrifying precisely because it is touched by humanity, and the Creature embodies that truth in every frame.
Victor Frankenstein: Genius, Obsession, and Hotness
If the Creature is the beating heart of the film, Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein is its brilliant, chaotic mind. Isaac delivers a performance that is at once commanding, charming, and terrifying. He embodies a man consumed by genius and obsession, yet never fully untethered from humanity, even as he flirts with the edges of moral disaster. His speech at the Royal College of Surgeons early in the film is nothing short of wondrous. Radical, articulate, and utterly fearless in the face of skepticism, Isaac’s Victor exudes the arrogance of a man who believes he is rewriting the laws of life itself and confident in his imminent success.
And yes, we absolutely have to talk about the bathtub scene. Not just because it’s narratively crucial, but because it’s Oscar Isaac in a bathtub, lounging like a brooding, dripping god while contemplating the creation of life. He drifts there in quiet thought, steam curling around him, before a sudden jolt of inspiration makes him spring upright — water sloshing around him and onto the floor, running to the mirror to inspect his own naked reflection and the anatomical placement of the machinery with obsessive intensity. It’s absurd, it’s intimate, and it is so very, very hot. Isaac turns existential horror and scientific mania into a full-body display of devastating allure. Honestly, the movie would make less sense without it.
Isaac’s performance also reinforces one of the film’s key themes: the duality of man as both creator and destroyer. Frankenstein nurtures his creation, yet that nurturing is tied to pride, vanity, and fear of responsibility. His brilliance is inseparable from his ego; his admiration for the Creature is inseparable from his desire for control. In Isaac’s hands, Victor becomes a tragic figure, one both horrifying and magnetic.
Del Toro uses these moments to explore masculinity and the consequences of unchecked ambition. Frankenstein’s obsession is framed as both heroic and terrifying given that his intellect awes us, while his moral blindness unsettles us. Through Isaac, the film asks us another set of questions: can genius exist without recklessness? Can creation exist without abandonment? Can we love what we create without destroying it in the process?
Women, Red, and Fate
Del Toro’s eye for detail extends far beyond the grotesque or the scientific; he infuses the world with symbolism so precise it feels almost ritualistic. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of the women in Frankenstein. Mia Goth plays both Claire and Elizabeth, two women whose lives are marked by tragedy, fate, and the relentless presence of red.
Claire’s first appearance in a red dress and flowing veil is immediately striking — the fabric trailing behind her neck like ribbons of blood, a visual harbinger of mortality. Later, Elizabeth’s elaborate necklaces and red adornments echo that initial imagery, culminating on her wedding day when the blood from a gunshot stains her white dress, recalling Claire’s red gown in both color and doom. By casting Goth in both roles, del Toro emphasizes the cyclical nature of loss and the repetition of human suffering, suggesting that the fates of these women are sealed not by themselves, but by the men around them and the world they inhabit.
This red motif is not just aesthetic, but thematic. Del Toro contrasts the nurturing potential of women with the brutality of men — Frankenstein can create, yet he often shirks the emotional labor required to care for his creation. His genius is celebrated, yet the consequences of his experiments fall on others, particularly Elizabeth whose life intersects tragically with his obsession. It is a sharp reminder that creation without responsibility is violence, and brilliance without empathy is monstrous.
Amid these heavy themes, del Toro punctuates his vision with darkly comic moments that provide necessary relief. The logistics of body acquisition, the awkward yet absurdly human missteps in Frankenstein’s research, and the confessional scene where he quietly follows Elizabeth into the booth are glimpses of humor that reinforce the humanity in the horror.
Connection and Loneliness
At its core, del Toro’s Frankenstein is not just a story about creation and horror, but a meditation on the desperate, fragile need for human connection. The film repeatedly reminds us that love, empathy, and understanding are as vital as life itself. As Elizabeth beautifully observes, “To be lost and to be found…that is the lifespan of love.” That sentiment resonates through every scene, from the Creature’s tentative explorations of the world to Frankenstein’s fraught relationships with those around him.
Del Toro highlights how isolation shapes monstrosity. The Creature, despite being composed of human parts, is initially innocent, curious, and empathetic. It is society’s rejection, fear, and cruelty that warps his existence, reminding us that humans are often the true monsters. Meanwhile, Victor’s own loneliness — born of obsession and genius — demonstrates that isolation is not only external; it can be self-imposed, a product of ambition and pride.
In a world increasingly connected by technology yet starved of intimacy, del Toro’s meditation feels startlingly contemporary. The film asks some of its most urgent questions here: what does it mean to be truly seen by another? How can we live fully without touch, care, and meaningful connection? These questions linger long after the credits roll, echoing with the quiet horror of isolation in the modern age.
Critiques and Closing Reflection
Even a film this meticulously crafted is not without its small imperfections. One area where Frankenstein could have gone further is in its framing quotes. The film opens and closes with lines from Lord Byron, lines that are evocative, thematically appropriate, and beautifully written. Byron’s words echo the Romantic fascination with mortality, obsession, and the sublime, but they also highlight a missed opportunity. Mary Shelley, after all, is the creator of this world, the mother of science fiction itself. Her voice could have bookended the film, reminding viewers that it was a woman who first dared to ask what happens when man plays God, and centering her would have amplified the resonance of her inquiry.
Another small imperfection lies in the ending. While emotionally satisfying, the final moments between Frankenstein and the Creature feel somewhat rushed. A few more beats of direct conversation could have deepened the emotional catharsis, letting the audience linger in the raw intimacy and moral reckoning of their relationship. These are small quibbles, however, in a film that otherwise exemplifies del Toro’s genius.
Ultimately, Frankenstein is a testament to del Toro’s lifelong devotion to monsters, not as spectacles of fear, but as reflections of our humanity. The Creature is innocent and curious; man is often cruel and capricious. The film celebrates beauty and horror simultaneously, crafting a world where sorrow and awe coexist in every frame. It reminds us, painfully and beautifully, that love, connection, and empathy are the truest measures of life. And in the hands of a master like del Toro, even stitched flesh and haunted eyes can teach us how to live and how to love.”
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.
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 science to realize Idealist visions of humanity and of Utopianism to realize a society free from violence and systems of oppression, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
But in his quest to become a god, Victor also desires to be worshipped and obeyed; he wants to free himself from subjugation by Authority, but not to liberate others. Instead of changing the nature of power, force, and control in casting down from his throne a tyrant god who bound us to his laws and then abandoned us through the abolition of the Law and of the social use of force and the centralization of power and authority to an elite as would a true revolutionary, Victor’s tragic flaw of pride, like so many heroes of revolutionary struggle, compels him to become the next tyrant and enact the role of his former nemesis. Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao; a glorious and terrible company of flawed heroes doomed to re-enact the Fall of Icarus and of Milton’s rebel angel.
It is a cycle of substitutive tyranny which as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out in his novel Lolita, a brilliant critique of the failure of Idealism which led to his father’s execution in the Russian Revolution as an aristocrat, has been recapitulated throughout the world in revolutions which become tyrannies, especially under the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. Of course there is no good or evil in the sense of moral absolutes or imperative laws of the universe, for these are human words and require human actions to make them real. But our actions toward others are terribly real, especially in how we use our power and the consequences of the social use of force in the construction and authorization of virtue and identity.
How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important. The great question which democracy attempts to answer is how to balance such forces encoded as the rights and needs of individuals so that none may infringe upon another’s.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; my teenage role model Napoleon, Washington who is central to our family history and coined the motto on our coat of arms in the passcode during the Battle of Trenton, Victory or Death, when the whole Revolution was wagered on a forlorn hope, the tragic drama of fallen heroes like Robert Mugabe, the monstrous tyrants Stalin and Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the American and Napoleonic Empires, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, nearly all anticolonial revolutions which in the first period of liberty as new nations became dreadful tyrannies, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power? A question followed on by another for whose side to choose; who is suffering and in need of acts of solidarity, mercy, and compassion?
All those who hunt monsters must remember always 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.”
I like the character of Victor, and have used variants of this name, including Zafir in Arabic, as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also I admire 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.
What is important to us now, and for all of humankind, is to recognize that we are all both Frankenstein and his monster, rebel and tyrant, reason and passion, darkness and light in shifting perspectives, and that if we cannot embrace our otherness and become whole we must destroy ourselves.
Frankenstein addresses themes of science versus nature, reason versus passion, 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 us to his despicable Laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy as his proxy of success and vindication before the world, a projection of self which is inherently dehumanizing, rather than empowering the child’s own agency to discover and follow a unique bliss and personhood- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with the apex predator and ideal of patriarchal masculinity Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring must renounce love to win supremacy and power, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, a tyrant forged in the violence of the struggle to free himself from enslavement, 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, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
This is how systemic power assimilates rebels as tyrants; Mary Shelly diagnosed the history of colonialism and imperialism as diseases of unequal power long before they were to swallow the world. And this we must resist; authority and systems of unequal power itself, if we are to be liberated.
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 and as the line in the film Van Helsing goes “to disprove the existence of God”, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without re-evaluating 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.
So for hierosgamos and our embrace of our monstrosity, of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves. What of its consequences for ourselves and our world?
As I wrote in my post of April 18 2022, Our War Against Nature and Ourselves: Humankind at the Tipping Point Between Extinction and Transformation; The human war on nature is ancient, both a motive and a consequence of our civilization itself; it is also primarily a war against our own animal nature, a titanic struggle against the prison of our flesh and its dark and chaotic syllabus of needs and desires.
We are that monster and its creator, mad god of reason and his degraded figure of vengeance and uncontrollable and free but twisted and destructive passion. Ours is the future modernity she warned us of, a civilization which consumes itself through the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions as is ongoing now in our Third World War.
When I think of the destructive effects on the environment of our mad quest to control and impose order and human values on nature, I do so in the context of a specific ideological lineage which I share with one of the great public intellectuals of our time, whose works reflect the themes of Mary Shelly.
In her foundational classic Sexual Personnae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Camille Paglia, trickster figure and provocateur, whose many masks include a Guide of the Soul which echoes Ariadne, a chthonic figure of the Queen of the Underworld which recalls Persephone, and a truth teller like the Jester of King Lear, provides us a definition of Beauty as the apotheosis and motive force of human civilization, one which references her major influences among the British Romantic Idealists, Keats and Coleridge; “Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.”
Hers is a vision which extends Nietzsche’s thesis in The Birth of Tragedy that human civilization is an artifact of the struggle between the Dionysian and the Apollonian as oppositional forces which together create human being, meaning, and value. Civilization is thus a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
She refers to Beauty as a cypher of the Infinite, in reference to Keats, as does Umberto Eco in his magisterial On Beauty. Compare her definition to that of Keats, in the phrase which I quote when asked to identify my faith; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
Her traditional identification of Apollonian rationality and the will to impose order with the animus or masculine side of a whole person and the Dionysian or ecstatic principle as feminine and equal to chaos and nature is found in Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism; “Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.”
Here is the rotten heart of our corruption which consumes this fragile ark of life, this earth, to destruction and humankind to annihilation; our need to control and impose order on a fundamentally irrational universe and the conquest and dominion of nature which flows from it.
Thus far I share with Camille Paglia the three ideological lineages from which this analysis develops; British Romantic Idealism, Nietzsche’s aesthetics of ontological politics, and Jung’s transformational psychology. Where we diverge importantly is her total rejection of postmodern critical theory, which she calls out as Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault; here I am more aligned with Iris Murdoch in balancing classicism with modernity as a complementarity. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces; both T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Flannery O’Connor.
And to complete my image of the cosmos and the place of humankind in it, we must add one thing more; Holism as expressed in Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, and explicated in Morris Berman’s The Re-Enchantment of the World. A reimagination of Schiller’s idea of “the disgodding of nature”, Bateson’s work rewired my brain when I encountered it as a graduate student, and for this I shall be eternally grateful. Only Godel’s Theorem and the poetry of Blake and Rumi struck me with the force of lightning as did he.
What does all this mean?
As the earth dies in fire and ice and humankind with it, victims and slaves consumed by the fathomless greed of a handful of oligarchic and plutocratic czars of a global hegemonic elite, we witness the horror of our extinction with helpless submission to our destroyers but are able to describe it with great beauty, a beauty and vision which nonetheless fail to transform our fate.
Unless we act to seize our power and liberate ourselves and the common heritage of our resources from our destroyers.
I, monster, shall forever dance with I, Victor, who in creating us together stole the fire of the gods.
FRANKENSTEIN Official Trailer (2025) Guillermo del Toro
July 30 2026 A Mirror of Our Civilization and Its Perils: Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Its Parallel and Interdependent Text and Primary Source To Which It Was Written In Direct Reply, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and the Limits of the Human
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a show which questions and explores many of the issues which have defined my life; the origins of evil and the ambiguity and interdependence of good and evil, freedom and authorized identities, the use of social force as tyranny and as revolutionary struggle, the limits of what is human and the uses of our monstrosity in the embrace or denial of our nature, and the consequences of systems of oppression, structures of elite power, and hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness.
Before all else is Kiernan Shipka herself, magnificent in the role of Sabrina, a character written as a queer metaphor whose primary conflict as a dual natured being requires her to perform as both the White and Black Swans, which only the truly great can do whether on the stage or in life, in a myth of sexual power and identities of sex and gender as a ground of struggle.
A reimagination of the myth of Persephone in the context of that of Milton’s Lucifer and the Jewish creatrix Lilith with a side of Orpheus and Eurydice, and which stirs into the cauldron Dante, Marlowe’s Faust, Hawthorne, Poe, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Lovecraft, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible among a multitude of references, this show brings the themes of Romantic Idealism into the political context of our current era, that of #metoo, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Green New Deal, and the failure of the Restoration of America from tyranny and state terror, from the Patriarchal-white supremacist Fourth Reich, in which cruelty and mercy play for the soul of America and the future of humankind.
In America’s elections now and in the glorious liberation struggle of all her marvelous and diverse peoples and of the Democratic Party against a Republican Party captured by the Fourth Reich which has in turn captured the state, and most especially our liberation struggle versus patriarchy and theocratic sexual terror and the enslavement, commodification, and dehumanization of women as systems of oppression, ongoing now for two thousand seven hundred years since the Hanging of the Maids in Homeric poetry, we live as witnesses and every single human now living as combatants in this historic and civilizational moment of Reckoning and change.
Why do I love this show, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, to the extent that I have watched it through entirely six times now, falling asleep to its songs of freedom and seizures of power?
The answer lies in Kiernan Shipka’s slyly subversive smile; it is a brilliant satire which swallows whole and transforms our horrific histories of the witch trials and persecutions of otherness, referencing the bizarre witchhunting manuals the Malleus Maleficarum and the Daemonologie, and alluding to the Holocaust and the legacies of slavery, and transforms its meaning into a call to resistance and an empowerment of autonomy.
A densely layered system of signs appropriated from both high and pop culture, like the films of Andy Warhol which valorize the ordinary and the excluded, in celebration of the beauty of the disfigured and the reviled, and of violations of normality and transgressions of the Forbidden, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a savage and relentless engagement with the forces of Patriarchy and a subversion of heteronormative narratives, which can be equally applied to divisions of race, faith, and nationality.
From the very first, this cinematic interrogation and reimagination of western civilization unfolds its themes with the statement; “The Devil won’t give you both power and freedom. He’s a man.” And from this moment, it had my full and rapt attention.
To put the case plainly; Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is our civilizations greatest artistic response to the rise of global fascism, and America’s most glorious Antifascist film after Inglorious Basterds.
Of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina criticism, Dany Prince’s thesis which discusses the first season remains among the finest and most relevant, which I amplify here:
“#MeToo and the Witching Hour: Contemporary Feminist Discourse on the Representation of Witchcraft in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, by Dany Prince.
In recent years, contemporary cinema, and even graphic novels and comics books, related to witches and the occult have challenged how we view the feminine body, particularly through the rise of movements like #MeToo. For example, in the 2013 season of American Horror Story, the popular show tackles issues surrounding witchcraft and interpersonal female relationships in Coven, and, two years later, director Robert Eggers once again revisits the witch and her bodily autonomy in the art house film, The Witch. For both narratives, the body of the female witch serves as a vehicle through which femininity and feminine sexuality becomes celebrated through occult forces but demonized patriarchal influences, institutions, and characters. Since the body of the witch resists signification, characters and social institutions that succumb to patriarchal influences cannot understand this celebration of the feminine and feminine sexuality. As compelling as these examples of popular culture’s fascination with witches are as visual narratives, Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, or Sabrina, challenges and creates new discourse on what sort of bodily autonomy a witch, and a teenage witch no less, holds. The entirety of Part 1 of the series revolves around Sabrina’s right to say no and her right to say yes, should the time come.
Since Jack Halberstam’s foundational analysis of the slippery signification of the vampire and other gothic monsters, Gothic scholars have analyzed the figure of the vampire, a “technology of monstrosity” as Halberstam argues, as a metaphor for a wide range of cultural and sociopolitical anxieties. Halberstam writes in their book Skin Shows that “technologies of monstrosity are always also technologies of sex. I want to plug monstrosity and gothicization into Foucault’s ‘great surface network’ of sexuality in which ‘the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances are linked to one another in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power’” (Foucault qtd. in Halberstam 88, 89). The witch also becomes a similar technology of monstrosity and sex through its deep connection to the Earth and representation of hypersexuality in every cinematic representation of the witch in popular culture. Monica Germana’s research on the Gothic figure of the madwoman and the witch in her book suggests that “the madwoman may also, just like the sorceress, become the victimised instrument of [the] conservative agenda, exposed as Shoshana Felman suggests, by the pervasive cultural affiliation of madness and women” (Germana 67). The witch and the culture of madness has become so intrinsically linked with one another that it’s almost impossible to separate the two. The body of the witch is one that inherently resists signification and acts out against political attempts to subjugate and suppress women’s sexuality through the gender binary, patriarchal, and heterosexist restrictions that have historically been imposed upon, not only women’s bodies, but queer bodies as well.
In this thesis, I want to emphasize how The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina works with the body of the witch and the mythological tropes of the Mother, Maiden, and Crone in a sexualized sense. These elements come together in the form of the witch’s body to make her body and the idea of the witch a patriarchal and socio-political nightmare. Throughout Part 1 of Sabrina, the creative team politicizes the witch’s body to reflect the current sociocultural and political anxieties with the after effects of the #MeToo and #BelieveHer movements while challenging perceptions of toxic masculinity with the inclusion of Harvey Winkle and juxtaposing him with imposing patriarchal figures, like the Dark Lord and Father Blackwood.
While most of the criticism surrounding Part 1 of Sabrina remain positive, some critics do have negative impressions of the show. Willa Paskin for Slate.com acknowledges the progressive movements that Sabrina makes by likening the series with CW’s other witch show, Charmed. Both Sabrina and Charmed are remakes of popular 90s television shows, but with different twists. For example, Charmed has three Latina sisters in place of three white sisters and focuses on issues on consent in the first episode and Sabrina focuses on issues of bodily autonomy and consent throughout the entire series. While Paskin acknowledges these progressive perspectives from both CW shows, Paskin does not acknowledge the parts of the show that make it a success, such as its commentary on current socio-political issues like consent and sexual assault. Paskin writes that the show tries “to be the moody, teen-tastic interpretations of [the original Sabrina series]” and that the only thing compelling about the show “to make [Paskin] watch it is . . . a compelling teen romance” (Paskin par. 6 and 7). Paskin argues further that this redeeming part of Sabrina is not so redeemable, that Harvey and Sabrina’s relationship is “incredibly boring, a total narrative dead end” (Paskin, par.7).
Other critics, like Rolling Stone’s critic, Rob Sheffield, acknowledges that “the optimism of the 1970s or 1990s versions [of Sabrina] would look absurd now. This is Resistance Sabrina” (Sheffield, par. 7). For Sheffield, Resistance Sabrina is a “darker show for darker times” (Sheffield, par. 7). While the figures of Hilda and Zelda are feminist figures that raise Sabrina to challenge authority, the ultimate authority is the Dark Lord and Father Blackwood, who throw their weight around and use their endless authority to manipulate the women around them. As a response to these patriarchal figures, Sabrina effectively challenges these deep seated sociopolitical issues that keep arising as contemporary society progresses. Even with the inclusion of Susie Putnam (who is later known as Theo), Sabrina retains this progressive outlook since this is one of the only shows that actively shows a gender non-conforming character who will later become trans. Throughout Sabrina, the show challenges and juxtaposes toxic masculinity with what masculinity ought to be. For example, the characters of the jocks that endlessly tease and bully Susie throughout the first season are perfect examples of how toxic masculinity affects boys at the teenage level, teasing her about being a “dyke,” but then the creators give the audience Harvey Winkle, who takes his time with Sabrina, making sure that everything that they do that is sexually charged comes with her express consent. Witchcraft and Satanism simply become metaphors of oppression and the strategies through which these issues of oppression with a character that challenges everything about these institutionalized systems, like the Church and even the school board.
The first episode, “October Country,” opens with Sabrina and her aunties, Zelda and Hilda, preparing for Sabrina’s dark baptism as per the tradition of the Greendale coven. Throughout the first episode, Sabrina reveals her uncertainties to her aunties, who then arrange a meeting with the series’ primary antagonist, Father Faustus Blackwood, who tells Sabrina that she will retain free will in conjunction with unlimited power and a delayed aging process. The dark baptism is a ritual that every witch in the Church of Night undergoes on their sixteenth birthday. The ritual requires that the witch enters the woods at midnight, the High Priest ritually cutting open their palm, and the witch then signing their name in the Book of the Beast. By signing their name in the Book of the Beast, the witch agrees to “obey without question any order [they] may receive from the Dark Lord or any authority figure He has placed over [them]. In signing his Book, the Book of the Beast, [they] swear to give [their] mind, body, and soul unreservedly to the furtherance of the designs of the Lord Satan” (00:44:53), but in the first episode, Father Blackwood tells Sabrina that she will retain her free will after she signs her name into the Book of the Beast. Since these instructions are a direct contradiction to what Father Blackwood tells Sabrina earlier on in the episode, she shakily flees from her dark baptism where she makes her final stand against the coven and firmly states that her “name is Sabrina Spellman and [she] will not sign it away” (00:47:59).
The first episode of Sabrina emphasizes the Dark Lord’s decision to charge Sabrina with breach of promise. As stated in the series, the concept of a Breach of Promise is a rather antiquated offense. Both in the series and in North American society, Breach of Promise often refers to a woman that is entering a marriage that ends up breaking this promise. If a woman does this, she may be sued by the person that had their promise broken.[1] In Chapter Four of Sabrina, the Dark Lord sues Sabrina Spellman for this exact purpose, which Angie Dahl suggests is a type of victim blaming and slut shaming language that echoes courtroom sexual assault cases (Dahl, par. 7). As more and more sexual assault trials, like Brock Turner, Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., and so many more come up time and time again, the victim blaming rhetoric is one that gets used all too frequently. Victims of sexual assault are interrogated with questions like “what were you wearing?” or “that punishment was a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action” (as seen in Michele Dauber’s tweet) or statements like “sexual assault victims are lying about their assaults.” These statements are ones that victims hear daily, so when we hear Father Blackwood ridicule Sabrina for “wearing, of all things, a wedding dress” (00:19:70), which becomes an intelligent metaphor. By highlighting the fact that Sabrina was wearing her mother’s wedding dress to the Dark Baptism, Father Blackwood’s statement so clearly echoes the criticisms that victims of sexual assault and abuse endure in a court of law: that their choice of clothing made the victims responsible for the actions of their attacker. Dahl also points out in her online review that this language echoes the language that is used by defendants when their abuser is their husband, their girlfriend, their father, and so forth. Dahl further states that “Blackwood suggests that Sabrina’s dress made a promise on her behalf, and the Dark Lord was merely responding to it; Sabrina led on Satan with her outfit” (Dahl sec. 2, par. 3). Blackwood essentially claims that Sabrina is subject to the punishments of the Unholy Court since her initial, willing plan was to consent to writing her name in the Book of the Beast.
By shaming Sabrina publicly through trial, Father Blackwood attempts to make her subservient to his and the Dark Lord’s wishes. Fortunately for Sabrina, she hires the infamous lawyer, Daniel Webster, to dance with the devil once again and beat him at his own game.[2] Even prior to the beginning of the trial, Father Blackwood meets with Zelda, not even Sabrina herself, and states that “the Dark Lord is not without mercy. But he’ll require total submission from [Sabrina]” (00:10:12). Father Blackwood’s language is imperative because it reiterates the idea that should Sabrina sign her name away, she will not possess free will, no matter what. Dahl states that Father Blackwood’s language here is not only archaic, but it also reinforces the idea that Sabrina’s body, that Sabrina’s free will is something that the Dark Lord is entitled to. This happens again when Blackwood says that “when the accused [Sabrina] is confirmed guilty, not only will she abandon her mortal life immediately, but upon her death, she shall burn for 333 years in the Pit, as his pleasure demands” (00:17:00). Since Father Blackwood likens Sabrina and the Dark Lord to the metaphor of bride and groom, the language of this episode becomes increasingly troubling since it echoes the sentiment that the Dark Lord is entitled to Sabrina’s free will and her body, which is a phrase that becomes all too real for female and queer viewers of the show, but also links back to the gothic idea that a witch, and a teen witch no less, is a feminine body that is “unregulated and unsettling” (Pulliam 147).
Jane Pulliam argues that when young women, like Sabrina, are forced into these subservient spaces and highly restrictive gender roles, they typically will not openly defy authority but instead ‘defrock’ authority and do what they wish to within reason. The example that Pulliam uses are two characters, Grace and Deborah, that are a part of the highly restrictive Puritan communities. For characters like Grace and Deborah, they claim that they are witches since women in these communities are subservient and less intelligent than men and therefore easily manipulated by Satan, but in contrast to these characters, we have Sabrina. The moment that Father Blackwood reveals he has lied to Sabrina about her free will, all that authority and trust she places in him gets stripped away and she openly defies his, and the Dark Lord’s authority. She refuses to be tricked by the Devil.
When Father Blackwood says “as [the Dark Lord’s] pleasure demands,” his belief echoes that of incels, or involuntary celibate, and that Sabrina’s body and existence belongs wholly to the Dark Lord. Incels and incel rhetoric is something is rapidly growing and their mission statement goes back to Elliot Rodger, who posted online what is now called “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution.” Men like Christopher Cleary, Alek Minassian, and Elliot Rodger write phrases like “[we] will slaughter every single spoiled stuck-up blonde slut. You will finally see [who’s] the superior one. The true alpha male” (The Fifth Estate, par. 3 and 19). Even in advertisements from the 1950s that resurface as “memes” or purely aesthetics from an era long past show women crying over burnt dinners or women bent over the laps of men with his hand raised above her backside as punishment for not “store-testing fresher coffee.” The subjugation of women is a longstanding issue and these advertisements, which are not only prevalent in the 1950s but today in some cases as well, perpetuate the idea that men are naturally superior and therefore entitled to women’s bodies, regardless of if they say no or yes. In the patriarchal mindset, women that say no are considered a challenge that needs to be conquered and women that say yes are considered too easy.
For Sabrina, she is thoroughly shamed by, not only Father Blackwood with his inquisition, but by the entirety of the coven that attends her trial. As Sabrina awaits her sentencing, the crowd jeers at her and calls her a “tramp” or “guilty,” effectively furthering the shame that Sabrina endures. While the episode ends with Sabrina winning her case, her freedom comes at the hands of the False God, under whose name she was baptized. Even though she wins her trial, she only wins because the court acknowledges the claim on her life and body by another patriarchal figure. The court still refuses to acknowledge that Sabrina holds the right to say no.
Similarly, we can see this in the costuming choices from Chapter 2, “The Dark Baptism.” For Sabrina’s birthday, Zelda and Hilda dress her up in her mother’s wedding gown, which immediately turns black as the trio enters the grove where the baptism takes place. Sabrina is then stripped of the black dress to her white slip and forcibly restrained as she flees from the forest. As stated earlier, Father Blackwood remarks upon Sabrina’s choice in clothing and suggests that the Dark Lord is entitled to her body because of her wedding dress. Costuming and fashion, particularly in media, are important choices that can denote a character’s mental state or other subtle details to the audience. As Catherine Spooner recounts in her book, “the way in which the eighteenth century Gothic heroine is clothed – or more characteristically, semi-clothed – plays an important part in the construction of her identity and, indeed, the fashioning her body” (Fashioning Gothic Bodies 23). In Sabrina’s case, as she meets the coven in the woods for her Dark Baptism, the choices are all made for her for what she wears. She only wears her mother’s wedding dress at the behest of her aunties and she is only stripped half naked at the hands of the coven. This symbolizes that the decision to sign her name away is not her own, it is a choice that is made for her again and again, and when Father Blackwood condemns Sabrina for wearing a “wedding dress, of all things,” he says, in short, that the choices the coven made for Sabrina, the choices that her aunties made for her, are choices that she ought to be responsible for. “Wearing a veil [or in this case, a wedding dress] can be construed as provoking and incentive to remove it . . . is not only interpretable as sexual invitation but is presented as alarmingly coextensive with sexual invitation” (Fashioning Gothic Bodies 31). Sabrina thus ends up refusing to acknowledge that others’ decisions for her are her express consent and refuses to sign her name away. By refusing to sign, Sabrina makes the court recognize the authority she holds over herself and refuses to back down.
This decision mirrors a range of other events in the series that more broadly link to ancient rituals to contemporary feminist politics; for example, Roz’s efforts to get The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison off the banned books list at Baxter High. While Sabrina faces mistrial, Roz faces the threat of impending blindness as she attempts to devour books before she is totally blind. One of these books that she chooses to read for a school project is The Bluest Eye, which is deemed as inappropriate and Roz’s teacher refuses to let Roz read it. Roz then goes to Principal Hawthorne and asks if she may read it, to which he says no, and then she goes through the Baxter High library to look for a wide range of other ‘inappropriate’ books only to be told that there “has been a soft purge of bad books” since “certain topics and titles have no place in the hands of impressionable youths” (00:05:27). Banning books is a frequent concern in American high schools, a practice that attempts to make youths less aware of current sociopolitical concerns, especially when the text is written by a minority author, like Toni Morrison. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anxieties about literature, particularly Gothic fiction and romances, falling into the hands of women were coded as ‘corrupting’ women, a sentiment that has not disappeared even in the twenty-first century. Books, like The Bluest Eye, are removed from high school and even middle school libraries under the guise of protecting our youth from this corruption. Rock music is coded as ‘Satanic rock music’ and even churches perpetuate the rhetoric of ‘if you play a rock song backwards, you’ll hear the phrase hail Satan’ or other subliminal messages. Banning music or literature is an attempt at subjugating and controlling youths, forcing them to take an adult’s word as law and not questioning it, which does not happen with Roz nor Sabrina in this instance.
This subplot in “The Trial of Sabrina Spellman” effectively juxtaposes Sabrina’s plight with Roz’s since both fight against two very different oppressing patriarchal forces. The series is anachronistic, which we can see from the costuming choices to the music that plays in the background to how various set props pop up throughout the series. The nod towards the original series that aired in the 60s acknowledges the nostalgia that audiences yearned for when the series was initially announced but by combining these 60s elements with current sociopolitical criticisms, Sabrina creates an environment that celebrates gender diversity, rather than demonizing it, which we can see with Roz, Susie/Theo, Sabrina, and even Harvey. In Sabrina, we see the Gothic as a mix of a celebration of negative aesthetics that emerge in the age of reason, but also a mixture of the sublime, as Fred Botting writes. “The sublime was associated with grandeur and magnificence [ . . . but] also evoked excessive emotion. Through its presentations of supernatural, sensational, and terrifying incidents, imagined or not, [the] Gothic produced emotional affects on its readers” (Botting 2-3). However, in Sabrina, the Gothic is not limited to the supernatural events that occur. While elements of the supernatural create the necessary horror that we experience as the audience in Sabrina, the mundane becomes equally, if not more, terrifying because of how closely they relate to our current political climate. Rather than the mundane becoming the only puritanical community, the fantastic community, a community that the mundane often retreats to and seeks solace in, becomes just as puritanical, if not more, than the mundane and highlights itself as a space that both the audience and Sabrina cannot feel safe in.
While Roz is not a witch in the series, she does possess a gift that her grandmother calls “the Cunning.” The women in Roz’s family historically lose their sight by the time they turn sixteen, a curse that causes blindness which is then supplemented by psychic sight. Ironically, as Roz’s eyesight worsens, her Cunning sharpens and she sees things that no one else can, like the Weird Sisters causing the collapse in the mines a few episodes later and that Sabrina is a witch. While Sabrina’s trial deals with the after effects of the #MeToo movement that gained traction in 2017[3], Roz’s plight deals more with sociopolitical issues that run rampant in lower income communities. While Roz’s plight remains a subplot that the creators of Sabrina do not spend a large amount of focus on, highlighting Roz’s struggles with Sabrina’s allows for both characters to sympathize with one another in their fight against injustice, which is what #MeToo is all about: highlighting the struggles of the victims so that other victims may come forward with their own stories.
As Sabrina’s trial progresses, so does the likeness to the contemporary #MeToo movement. The movement was created by a social activist of the name Tarana Burke in 2006 as a response to the sexual abuse that women of colour experience, especially in underprivileged communities. Recently, however, the movement has resurfaced as a way for women, both cisgender and not, to empathize with one another by simply stating that they, too, have experienced sexual assault. From this movement, other hashtags have begun to pop up, like #ChurchToo, #MeTooSTEM, and others involving sexual abuse, assault, and harassment in fields like finance, pornography, politics, and many others. While these offshoots from the overarching #MeToo movement remain relevant, misogynists and rape apologists keep coming back with a hashtag of their own: #HimToo. The hashtag initially began as a tweet from Pieter Hanson’s mother, who tweeted that “this was [HER] son. He graduated #1 in boot camp. He was awarded the USO award. He was #1 in A school. He is a gentleman who respects women. He won’t go on solo dates due to the current climate of false sexual accusations by radical feminists with an axe to grind. I VOTE #HimToo” (“‘This is MY Son’: Navy Vet Horrified As Mom’s Tweet Miscasts Him as #HimToo Poster Boy” par. 3). This original tweet has since been deleted, but several news outlets, including The Washington Post, have chronicled this tweet, immortalizing it in the #MeToo timeline. While the hashtag began as a way for men to divulge their own sexual assaults, it has since been twisted to perpetuate the idea that women are often making up allegations of sexual assault against men.[4]
In a post #MeToo era, cisgender men become preoccupied with the notion of “I don’t want to have an Aziz Ansari moment, I don’t know how to invite a girl up to bed . . . without knowing where the actually is [into it]” (Bell 31). Terena Bell analyzes this difficult question and how several journalism outlets tackle this, for lack of a better word, “serious issue.” Magazines and editorials, like Esquire, AskMen, BroBible, and PlayBoy, have recently run columns like “Non-Masculine Behaviours Women Find the Most Sexy” or “How to Buy Her Flowers” and even changed slogans to be more inclusive and aware of the issues surrounding both sex and rape culture. One of the journalists that Bell interviews, Margaret Nichols, says that “it seems [silly] to stop publishing articles about sex out of some kind of concern that you’re feeding into sexual abuse and sexual exploitation” (Bell 30) since journalists have a duty to present unbiased facts in columns, but what Nichols and Bell fail to acknowledge is that the media has such a strong hand in perpetuating sexual and rape culture.
By seeking to place blame for the reasons as to why consent is such a hot button issue, journalists and society at large do not tend to acknowledge the fact that men seek to victimize themselves by stating that “they don’t know whether this girl doesn’t want to come upstairs with me” when the simple solution lies in two words: ask her. By creating hashtags like #HimToo and calling the #MeToo movement a witch hunt, which also minimizes the trauma that actual witch hunts have done, men place the blame entirely on women and their “false allegations” while ignoring the fact that toxic masculinity and the patriarchy are entirely to blame for sexual assault and abuse in the first place by perpetuating the idea that men are entitled to a woman’s body. Toxic masculinity erases the equality that is necessary for relationships to thrive on their own and effectively places the entire blame of the relationship on the woman.
Such issues in our contemporary moment may not seem Gothic in any political way beyond the actual violent act of sexual assault, but they do have significant Gothic undertones. Sandra M. Gilbert, a Gothic theorist who has written works with Susan Gubar on the trope of the madwoman in the attic, addresses this very same issue in “In the Labyrinth of #MeToo” as well and likens the pursuit of women, especially in Hollywood, to that of the tale of Bluebeard and even the Minotaur. She describes patriarchal culture as “the Male Beast at the center of the labyrinth” while more and more stories come to light with the Harvey Weinstein allegations (Gilbert 14) like Gwenyth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Katherine Kendall, Rose McGowan, and so forth being at the forefront of these horror stories about sexual assault. Gilbert highlights the underlying issue with the toxicity of the patriarchy: that the Minotaur, or Man Beast, can do anything without fear of repercussions, even going so far as to quote the 45th President of the United States when he says “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful – I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything” (qtd. in Gilbert 17). This is what lies at the heart of rape culture and toxic masculinity: the idea that the men, the perpetrators of abuse, are at the heart of these issues and remain immune. Porn stars, sex workers, escorts, prostitutes, and even actresses are commodities to be used and abused as the Minotaur sees fit, especially since sex has become this highly commodified bestial thing, and even when sexual assault happens to sex workers, they’re seen as lesser than because of their occupation. The Minotaur is a hungry beast and preys upon female flesh.
The issue that Gilbert highlights is how problematic this way of thinking becomes: the entire fact that men assume that they are owed sex as payment for a date. Perpetuating this myth is incredibly problematic since toxicity breeds toxicity and patriarchal culture is steeped in toxicity. And women are not immune from the toxicity that seeps out from patriarchal culture. In the case of Sabrina, the Minotaur becomes the Dark Lord and Sabrina immerses herself in the very culture that breeds the opposition that attempts to relegate her into the Bride position. Sabrina adamantly refuses to allow misogynistic men to relegate her into this sphere and only agrees to immerse herself in that culture to beat the Dark Lord at his own game, which highlights the fact that women can be just as bestial a Minotaur as men. Viewing toxic masculinity and the patriarchy as this Othered thing is what renders our entire society as Gothic. The Beast in the Gothic tradition goes head to head with the Minotaur[5], challenging perspectives like colonialism, orientalism, racism, sexism and misogyny.
Sabrina thus explores and examines explicitly the comments on #MeToo and our current society’s rape culture. Gilbert’s argument about the toxicity of our current times is especially compelling because it situates Gothic tropes within the increasingly predatory phenomena of the digital age. Proving yet again the Gothic’s adaptability, Gilbert provides a critical lexicon of monsters to account for the masculine monstrosity at the heart of the #MeToo movement. Sabrina performs a similar gothicization of contemporary political theory through its detailed and carefully planned mise-en-scene of witches, covens, and the contemporary. Writers for Sabrina borrow now standard feminist arguments, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. In Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that man is considered the default, which would render woman as the Other, or at least within the scope of the default patriarchal lifestyle that Western society revolves around. In Sabrina, the writers use a similar idea, situating toxic masculinity as the Other with femininity becoming the default, particularly since so many female viewers can relate to the struggles that Sabrina faces. In popular culture, the figure of the woman is rendered as explicitly Bad or explicitly Good, something that de Beauvoir highlights as “the Praying Mantis, the Mandrake, [and] the Demon” and “the Muse, the Goddess Mother, [and] Beatrice” (1266). With de Beauvoir’s terminology, women are set so far apart from the earthly realm that they can only be one thing or the other but never both simultaneously.
Patriarchal influences often serve to dichotomize these feminine tropes, which Gothic literature also utilizes. Sabrina, by far, is not the only Gothic narrative to challenge these distinctions between the only apparent two types of women since toxic patriarchal culture has deemed itself fit to state that there are only these two types of women whether actual living women agree with the notion or not. Even a rudimentary Google search for “types of women” elicits results like “The Five Types of Women,” “Three Types of Women to Toss,” “The Four Types of Women” and so forth as if women can easily be relegated into these different spheres that are be assigned to them. More oft than not, these “types of women” are categories that shame women in one way or another. For example, the femme fatale is a trope often utilized when women are overtly sexualized, attractive, and seductive to bring about ruin to men. In regards to Sabrina, the Weird Sisters take up this role of femme fatale, which we can see when Sabrina and the Weird Sisters lure the homophobic football players deep into the mines and eventually blackmail them to protect Susie. The Weird Sisters here are unapologetically sexual, relishing that they hold all this power over these boys, and utilizing it into manipulating them, both with the magical and the mundane.
The witch is a literary figure that has undergone a pop culture transformation in recent years. The body of the witch is a vehicle that writers use to explore sociopolitical anxieties, much like the Gothic is a genre that creators come back to repeatedly to challenge political ideals and common anxieties that the public experiences. In Sabrina, Sabrina is the main metaphor that the show uses to comment on feminist movements, like #MeToo and #BelieveHer. However, that is not the only approach that the show uses to undermine common misconceptions around witches as well as femininity. By challenging how the public views witchcraft, the body of the witch, and the witch herself, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina shows that not all witches are evil and not all witches are good and that witches are only considered as forces of chaos since they retain control over themselves, their bodies, and actively challenge moments of injustice through of energy and the world around them. Because the witch refuses to be defined and controlled in this box that the rest of the world, whether it be fictional or our material plane of existence, the witch’s body is a sociopolitical nightmare that resists signification and actively challenges our preconceptions surrounding bodily autonomy all the while remaining relatable and easily accessible. Especially with our current political climate, these issues surrounding consent that The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina challenges, the entire series becomes one that, not only millennial women, but zillennial children, both cisgender, transgender, and gender non-conforming, require since this is now the Resistance.
[1] The #MeToo movement was initiated by Tarana Burke, a social activist, in 2006. The movement recently regained traction in light of the Harvey Weinstein allegations and was popularized by Alyssa Milano, who played Phoebe Halliwell in the hit show, Charmed.
[2] Breach of promise is a law tort that originated during the Middle Ages. While many jurisdictions have long since abolished this rite, breach of promise still exists in many North American locations, including the United States. In Canada, Saskatchewan was the last known province to abolish breach of promise laws.
[3] Years prior to the beginning of the series, Daniel Webster was an infamous criminal lawyer that made his career on freeing some of the worst murderers and criminals after he asked the Dark Lord to help him win his cases.
[4] Katty Kay in her article “The Truth About False Rape Accusations” after Brett Kavanaugh’s trial writes that less than 10% of rape accusations are false. She also writes that “official figures suggest the number of rapes and sexual assaults which are never reported or prosecuted far outweighs the number of men convicted of rape because of fake accusations” (Kay par. 8).
[5] The Minotaur is always a metaphor for some oppressing force that is not limited to patriarchy and toxic masculinity. The Beast, however, is something that opposes the Minotaur.
Works Cited
Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Netflix, 2015.
Beauvoir, Simone de. “The Second Sex.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al., Norton, 2010, 1265-1273.
Bell, Terena. “Where Has All the Sex Advice for Men Gone?: In a Post #MeToo Era, Men’s Magazines Are Pulling Sex From Their Pages.” Quill, vol. 106, no. 5, Winter 2018, pp. 28-31.
Botting, Fred. The Gothic. Routledge. 1996.
Conway, D.J. Wicca: The Complete Craft. Ten Speed Press, 2001.
Germana, Monica. Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Gilbert, Sandra M. “In the Labyrinth of #MeToo” American Scholar, vol. 87, no. 3, Summer 2018, pp. 12-25.
Halbertstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press, 2000.
Lorenzi, Lorenzo. Witches: Exploring the Iconography of the Sorceress and the Enchantress. Centro di della Edifimi srl, 2005.
@MicheleDauber. “#brockturner father: son not ‘violent’ only got ‘20 mins of action’ shouldn’t have to go to prison. @thehuntinground.” Twitter. 4 June 2016, 10:58 p.m., https://twitter.com/mldauber/status/739320585222660096. Accessed 11 April 2019.
October 24 2026 Aspirational Families, Chosen Versus Authorized Identities, Transgression of the Forbidden, the Violation of Normalities, and the Limits of the Human: the Addams Family
