This night the gates of infinity are opened, letting angelic figures of our true selves and possibilities of becoming human through; wishes may come true, visions be realized, the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world find healing in our defining and inherent human powers of faith, hope, and love.
On this night over one thousand four hundred years ago a man looked into the future and made it real, to use the phrase from the film The Great and Powerful Oz, or believed an impossible thing and set it free to become so in Lewis Carroll’s terms and the famous line in Tim Burton’s film Alice in Wonderland. Both reference moments of exaltation and vision such as the event celebrated tonight throughout the Islamic world as a tidal change and Defining Moment of humankind, which finds echo in ibn Arabi’s idea of the alam al mythal, the Logos in the Biblical book of John the Evangelist, the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism’s Book of the Dead, Coleridge’s Primary Imagination, and Jung’s Collective Unconscious. In such ideologies we are negative spaces, shadows, dreams, echoes and reflections of ideal forms within the unknowable Infinite, ourselves and our reality transforms of messages and a field of being as abstract information which unfold into actualities; as in Yoda’s line which paraphrases Einstein; “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”
If true, we can know nothing directly about the Reality which creates and interpenetrates us, for we are its shadows, or so Plato describes in the Allegory of the Cave; yet poetic vision and metaphorical truth allow us to escape the limits of our form. Holy Quran is a record of one such journey, a reimagination of Abrahamic faith which unfolded for the Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him, over twenty three years of conversations with the being of illumination which manifested to him as Jibril.
Any origin story which founds a new religion defines its meaning and is also a negotiated truth and a ground of struggle for those who claim it and each other as their own, and the story of the Message is no exception, having been argued and fought over ever since and sciences of abrogation and hermeneutics evolved from the same text, but for myself what is most important is the Message as an event and a thing in itself and not its claims and interpretations; the emergence of transpersonal consciousness as transcendence, vision, and its transformational effects as Awakening.
Herein the Infinite seizes and shakes us in its jaws like a lion, and all is forever changed.
For with poetic vision we may win freedom from the limits of our form, escape the legacies of our history, birth new futures and ways of being human together, and create and define ourselves anew.
Go up into the gaps and embrace the dreams of the Infinite.
Surat Al-Qadr (The Power) | Mishary Rashid Alafasy | مشاري بن راشد العفاسي | سورة القد
The Illuminated Hafiz: Love Poems for the Journey to Light
by Hafez, Michael Green (Illustrator), Saliha Green (Illustrator), Nancy Barton (Editor), Omid Safi (Foreword), Coleman Barks (Translator), Robert Bly (Translator), Peter Booth (Translator), Meher Baba (Translator)
Suhrawardi: The Shape of Light, by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, Tosun Bayrak (Preface), Shaykh Muhammad Sadiq Naqshbandi Erzinjani (Afterword), Hadrat Abdul-Qadir al-Jilani (Foreword)
Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes, by Fakhruddin Iraqi, William C. Chittick (Translator), Peter Wilson (Goodreads Author) (Translator), Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Foreword)
The Four Last Great Sufi Master Poets: Selected Poems, by Paul Smith (Translator), Shah Latif, Nazir Akbarabadi, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Muhammad Iqbal
15 مارس 2026 ليلة القدر المباركة: ليلة بهيجة من الرؤية الشعرية وإعادة تصور وتحويل إمكانياتنا اللانهائية في أن نصبح بشرًا
في هذه الليلة ، تفتح أبواب اللانهاية ، مما يسمح لأشكال ملائكية وشيطانية من ذواتنا الحقيقية وإمكانيات أن نصبح بشرًا ؛ قد تتحقق الأمنيات ، وتتحقق الرؤى ، وتجد عيوب إنسانيتنا وانكسار العالم الشفاء في قوتنا المميزة للإيمان والرجاء والمحبة.
في هذه الليلة منذ أكثر من ألف وأربعمائة عام ، نظر رجل إلى المستقبل وجعله حقيقيًا ، باستخدام العبارة المأخوذة من فيلم أوز العظيم والقوي ، أو صدق شيئًا مستحيلًا وحرره ليصبح كذلك وفقًا لشروط لويس كارول. والخط الشهير في فيلم تيم بيرتون أليس في بلاد العجائب. يشير كلاهما إلى الحدث الذي تم الاحتفال به الليلة في جميع أنحاء العالم الإسلامي باعتباره تغييرًا مدًا للجزر وتحديد اللحظة للبشرية ، والتي تجد صدى في فكرة علم الميثال ، والشعارات في الكتاب المقدس ، وباردو في البوذية التبتية ، ومخيلة كوليردج الأولية ، وفكرة يونغ. اللاوعي الجماعي. في مثل هذه الأيديولوجيات نحن فضاءات سلبية لأشكال مثالية داخل الغيب ، يحولنا نحن وواقعنا الرسائل التي تتكشف إلى حقائق ؛ كما في سطر يودا الذي يعيد صياغة آينشتاين ؛ “كائنات مضيئة هي نحن، وليس هذا الأمر الخام.”
إذا كان هذا صحيحًا ، فلا يمكننا معرفة أي شيء بشكل مباشر عن الواقع الذي يخلقنا ويخترقنا ، لأننا ظلاله ، أو هكذا وصف أفلاطون في قصة الكهف ؛ ومع ذلك ، فإن الرؤية الشعرية والحقيقة المجازية تسمح لنا بالتهرب من حدود شكلنا. القرآن الكريم هو سجل لواحدة من هذه الرحلات ، إعادة تصور للإيمان الإبراهيمي الذي انكشف للنبي محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم ، على مدى ثلاث وعشرين عامًا من الأحاديث مع كينونة النور التي تجلت له على أنها جبريل.
أي قصة أصل تؤسس دينًا جديدًا تحدد معناها وهي أيضًا حقيقة متفاوض عليها وأرضًا للنضال لمن يدعيها ويطالب كل منهم الآخر بكونه ملكًا له ، وقصة الرسالة ليست استثناءً ، حيث تم الجدل والنزاع حولها. منذ ذلك الحين ، ولكن الأمر الأكثر أهمية بالنسبة لي هو الرسالة كحدث وشيء في حد ذاته وليس ادعاءاتها وتفسيراتها ؛ ظهور الوعي العابر للشخص باعتباره السمو والصحوة.
هنا يمسكنا اللانهائي ويهزنا بين فكيه مثل الأسد، ويتغير كل شيء إلى الأبد.
لأنه من خلال الرؤية الشعرية قد نربح الحرية من حدود شكلنا ، ونولد مستقبلًا جديدًا وطرقًا لكوننا بشرًا معًا ، ونخلق ونعرف أنفسنا من جديد.
اصعد إلى الفجوات واحتضن أحلام اللانهائي.
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 21 مارس 2023 ، حول الرؤية الشعرية كإعادة تخيل وتحويل لإمكانياتنا في أن نصبح بشرًا ؛ هنا في خمسة أعمال كما في أداء مسرحي لنفسي ، أقدم أفكاري في يوم الشعر.
فعل واحد
تعريف للمصطلحات أو ما هو الشعر؟
أولا وقبل كل شيء يجب أن تكون الأسماء الحقيقية للأشياء.
الكلمات مهمة. يمكنهم تقسيمنا ، ويمكنهم توحيدنا. يمكن للكلمات أن تمجد وتدنس. يمكنهم تشكيل صورنا وإمكانياتنا في أن نصبح بشرًا وإنشاء عوالم نطمح إليها أو تقييدها ، ويمكنهم استبدال الحجارة التي نرميها على بعضنا البعض وعلاج أمراض انفصالنا.
كنز الكلمات دائمًا ، لأنها تمثل أنواع الأفكار التي يمكننا امتلاكها وإيواء قوة إبداعية خيالية. نتحملها إلى الأمام كذكريات وتواريخ وهويات ، مثل أصداف مخلوقات بحرية رائعة ؛ الأصوات التي هي تشبيه بالشكل أو ما أسماه غاستون باشيلارد coquilles au parole.
هكذا هم أيضًا يدفعوننا إلى الأمام ، وينتظرون لحظة يقظتهم كبذور للصيرورة.
الفصل الثاني
كونه اعتذارًا عن استطرادي ars poetica ؛ أسلوبي في الكتابة خاص وغريب ، لكن أنا كذلك.
بمجرد أن أبحرت في بحيرة الأحلام ، استغلت بيوتي لكن فيجن تطالب بها ؛ وفي مثل هذه الرؤى سقطت في بحر من الكلمات والصور والأغاني والتاريخ ، متعدد الطبقات ومتشابك مع بعضها البعض مثل شبكة من الانعكاسات وأصداء الأصوات المفقودة في الوقت المناسب ، برية من المرايا التي تلتقط أنفسنا وتشوهنا وتوسعنا إلى ما لا نهاية. في جميع الاتجاهات.
إليكم ظل ذاتي لتاريخنا نتجول فيه وراء أنفسنا مثل حكاية ذيل الزواحف غير المرئية ، والموروثات التي يجب أن نخرج منها لنخلق أنفسنا من جديد وتلك التي لا يمكننا التخلي عنها دون أن نفقد من نحن.
هنا تظهر نصوصي البينية ، تشدني وتهزني بأصوات صاخبة وأغراض غير جديرة بالثقة ، إلى أين ينتهي تاريخنا ونبدأ؟
لا يمكننا الهروب من بعضنا البعض ، أنا وظلي.
الفصل الثالث
عرض ، سريع الزوال كذكريات يحملها العطر ومتصاعدًا في الريح ، يصل إلى فجوات الواقع عبر بوابات أحلامنا ، إلى اللانهائي ، الخالي من أعلام بشرتنا ، التي لم يبق منها سوى أصداء وانعكاسات محفورة عليها تاريخنا من خلال برق التنوير لتحقيق التوازن ضد رعب العدم لدينا.
اصوات وصدى
ذات مرة كان هناك صوت
بدون قذيفة لترددها
لا الهدير الهائل والرعد
التابع
وموجات المد والجزر لها
الفوضى وولادة الأكوان
متموجة بروعة الحياة
في كل ما لدينا من آلاف الملايين
احتمالات لا حدود لها في أن تصبح
الرقص مع المستحيل في نشوة الطرب والرعب
الأمل واليأس ، الإيمان ببعضنا البعض كتضامن للعمل
مقابل علم أمراض انفصالنا
والبرق يحطمنا بالكسر والاضطراب ،
يسمو فجوات الظلام التي ضلنا فيها
نفي وهو أيضًا عطية
فتح مساحات للعب الإبداعي الحر
هذا هو اعتناق الموت كتحرير
من حدود شكلنا ،
عيوب إنسانيتنا ،
وانكسار العالم.
نهرب من حلزونات قوقعتنا
حلق بين الأجرام السماوية
تعظموا ودنسوا
حرة ومجهولة مثل الأشياء البرية
أنا سليم وصدى
تركت القشرة التي غنيت نفسي منها
اين انا الأن؟
الفصل الرابع
بيان العمل ؛ الشعر كنضال ثوري.
كما كتبت في مقالتي في 14 أكتوبر 2021 ، حول الفن كرؤية شعرية ، والتعدي ، والاستيلاء على السلطة ، وإعادة التخيل ، والتحول: بيان ؛ لماذا أكتب؟
أقدم هنا بيانًا للفن كرؤية شعرية ، وإعادة تخيل وتحويل في سياقات أداء الهويات وفي مسرح حرب العصابات للعمل السياسي والنضال الثوري.
يعتبر الفن عدوانيًا عندما يتحدى وينتهك أفكارنا عن الحياة الطبيعية واستبداد أفكار الآخرين عن الفضيلة ، إنه استيلاء على السلطة ورفض الخضوع للهويات المرخصة التي تمنح الحرية والاستقلالية من خلال أن تصبح ذاتية الإنشاء ومملوكة للذات ، لا يُقهر ويتجاوز القهر بالقوة والسيطرة ، وهو رؤية شعرية كإعادة تخيل وتغيير سريالي عندما يصور ويوجه مرورنا عبر متاهة الزمن والتاريخ والذاكرة وتزوير صورنا الملتقطة والمشوهة في برية المرايا والأكاذيب والأوهام ، لتفعيل نشوة الاختطاف والتمجيد ، وتجاوزنا في عوالم الحلم والرؤية حيث لا تنطبق القواعد ، وعندما تصطادنا بالحقائق الجوهرية في الطبيعة والمكتوبة في جسدنا.
كل الفن الحقيقي ينجس ويمجد ، يسلّخنا بالنشوة والرعب أمام الحقائق اللامحدودة والسرية لأنفسنا.
يهدف الفن إلى التشكيك في قواعد وجوهر الإنسان ومعناه وقيمته وتغييرها ؛ لاكتشاف داخل الحدود والواجهات ، أماكن التغيير الصامتة والفارغة وإمكانات التكيف اللامحدودة للأنظمة ، والمجهول ، والانفصال ، والتجاور المنحرف وزوايا الرؤية الغريبة ، وإمكانيات جديدة للتحول إلى إنسان.
كما نتعلم من جون كيج في الموسيقى ، وهارولد بينتر في المسرح ، وبيت موندريان في الفن ، فإن المساحات الفارغة هي التي تحدد المعنى وترتبها ؛ وفي التاريخ ، يجب أن نستمع إلى الأصوات التي تم إسكاتها ومحوها بعناية ، لأن الفراغ هنا يتحدث إلينا عن القوة السرية والوظائف والعلاقات الرئيسية التي يجب أن تخفيها السلطة للحفاظ على هيمنتها علينا.
مساحة اللعب الحرة هذه ، للمجهول على أنها مساحة غير مُطالب بها وإمكانات تكيفية لنظام ، حدوده مثل الشواطئ المعروفة على خرائطنا في أن تصبح إنسانًا تشكل إطارًا لمجموعة الخيارات وتعمل كهويات مصرح بها وحدود جوهرية للحرية كمستقبل الاحتمالات ، تظل خارج وخارج كل حدود وأنظمة المعرفة ، مثل نظرية جوديل ؛ بغض النظر عن مقدار ما تعلمناه ونغير حدود الكون المعروف ، فإن اللانهائي يظل شاسعًا كما كان من قبل ، مما يحافظ على الجهل.
إذا كان الأمر كذلك ، فإن مهمة أن تصبح إنسانًا تتضمن جلب الفوضى ؛ إعادة التخيل والتحول ، وانتهاك الأمور الطبيعية وتجاوز حدود المحظور لتحريرنا من استبداد أفكار الآخرين حول الفضيلة والهويات المرخصة ، وخلق إمكانيات لا حدود لها لتصبح بشرًا مثل الاستيلاء على السلطة.
ترتيب يخصص ؛ الفوضى تستقل.
نحن ما أسماه غاستون باشيلارد أصداف الكلام ، وحمل المشروط ، وحاملي القصص كذاكرة ، وتاريخ ، وهوية ، شكلنا بمرور الوقت وترابطنا مع بعضنا البعض على شكل استباقيات أو تواريخ يتم التعبير عنها في أشكالنا عن كيفية حلنا. مشاكل التكيف والتغيير.
ألسنا القصص التي نرويها عن أنفسنا وعن أنفسنا وعن بعضنا البعض؟
لا يمكننا بعد ذلك تغيير وتحويل أنفسنا بقصصنا من خلال إعادة تخيل ورؤية شعرية ، كأشياء جديدة وجميلة تحررت من تراث تاريخنا وحدود أفكار الآخرين عن الفضيلة والجمال والحقيقة؟
دعونا نغتنم القصص التي صنعناها ، ونصبح مجيدًا.
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 24 أغسطس 2020 ، القوة التحويلية للفن: بيان ؛ القوة التحويلية للفن ، وقدرته على إعادة صياغة أفكارنا عن الذات والآخر ، لتغيير الحدود ، وإعادة تعيين القيم ، واستعادة التاريخ والهوية من الصمت ، والمحو ، والتهميش ، وإجازة عدم المساواة
أفعال القوة وتقسيمات الآخر الإقصائي ؛ هذه من بين الوظائف الحيوية التي تجعل الفن نشاطًا إنسانيًا واجتماعيًا أساسيًا.
الفن كرؤية شعرية يسبق السياسة ويوازيها كوسيلة لتغيير حضارتنا وإمكانيات الإنسان والمعنى والقيمة ؛ إنه يمثل سلطة يمتلكها أفراد ومجتمعات مستقلة ضد استبداد قوة الدولة وسيطرتها. السياسة هي فن اجتماعي أساسي لطبيعتنا البشرية المترابطة وعمليات التحول إلى إنسان. من خلال كلماتنا وصورنا وأدائنا يمكننا التشكيك في السلطة والاستهزاء بها وفضحها وتحديها والتحريض على الآخرين وإثارتهم وإزعاجهم في إحداث تغيير تحويلي في الأنظمة والهياكل التي نترسخ فيها ، وآمل أن نحررنا منها.
الفن هو الحياة ، لأنه يشركنا بشكل شخصي ومباشر في عمليات النمو التكيفي وفي إعادة التفاوض بشأن عقودنا الاجتماعية وعلاقاتنا مع الآخرين ، على الصعيدين الشخصي والسياسي ، ويعلمنا ويحفز أداء هوياتنا.
إذا وقعنا في لعبة مزورة ، يجب علينا تغيير قواعد وشروط النضال. “تم وضع القواعد ليتم كسرها” لإعادة صياغة الجنرال ماك آرثر ؛ زعزعة استقرار النظام ، ونزع شرعية السلطة ، واستجواب الأنظمة والهياكل التقليدية ، وتجاوز الحدود ، ومقاومة القوة والسيطرة والتخلي عنها ، وتزوير الحقائق الجديدة ، واكتشاف احتمالات التحول إلى إنسان.
يجب علينا أن نشكك في السلطة ونكشفها ونهزأ بها ونخربها ونتجاوزها ونتحدىها عندما يتعلق الأمر بمطالبتنا. لأنه لا توجد سلطة عادلة.
دعونا نتحكم في سردنا وتمثيلنا وذاكرتنا وتاريخنا وهويتنا.
دعونا نكون غير مهزومين ، بلا إتقان ، وأحرار.
دعونا نكون قادرين على الفوضى والفرح والتحول والثورة.
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 30 كانون الأول (ديسمبر) 2021 ، The Year in Review ؛ أكتب هنا كدعوة مقدسة للسعي وراء الحقيقة ، وفي الدور الذي وصفه فوكو بأنه راوي الحقيقة في إشارة إلى الحس والواجبات الأساسية الأربعة للمواطن ؛ للتشكيك في السلطة ، وكشف السلطة ، والتحايل على السلطة ، وتحدي السلطة.
خلال سنوات عملي كمدرس للطب الشرعي ومدرب للمناظرات ، بدأت في اليوم الأول من كل عام جديد بإظهار الهدف. على مكتبي كنت أضع قاعدة صلبة بالكلمات ؛ “هذه نقطة ارتكاز”. عبرها كنت أضع ترنحًا يتأرجح قائلاً ؛ “إنه يوازن بين رافعة.” وأخيراً “عندما يسألك والداك عما تتعلمه في الطب الشرعي ، أخبرهم أنك تتعلم أن تصبح نقطة ارتكاز وتغيير ميزان القوى في العالم.” هذا هو أملي الآن لنا جميعًا.
إن قول الحقيقة كقصة شعرية تدور حول القوة التجديدية والتحويلية للحقيقة بالمعنى الذي استخدمه كيتس عندما تحدث عن الجمال ، “أنا متأكد من قداسة عواطف القلب وحقيقة الخيال – ما هو الخيال يعتبر أن الجمال يجب أن يكون حقًا – سواء كان موجودًا من قبل أم لا – لأن لدي نفس فكرة كل عواطفنا كما في الحب ، فكلها في سامية ، وخلاقة في جمالها الأساسي. ” أو كما يعلمنا الرومي. “دع الجمال الذي تحبه يكون ما تفعله.”
لكن قول الحقيقة يتعلق أيضًا بالرؤية الشعرية باعتبارها إعادة تخيل وتحويل ؛ أن نحلم بشيء مستحيل ونجعله حقيقيًا ، كما تعلمنا أليس عند سرد الأشياء الستة المستحيلة في معركتها مع Jabberwocky. في طريقها لمحاربة تنين ، ورؤيته لأول مرة مروعة ، تشير أليس إلى ماد هاتر في فيلم تيم بيرتون الجميل ؛ “هذا مستحيل.”
الذي يقول له حتر ، “فقط إذا كنت تؤمن بذلك”.
“في بعض الأحيان ، أؤمن بستة أشياء مستحيلة قبل الإفطار.”
“هذه ممارسة ممتازة ، ولكن الآن فقط ، قد ترغب حقًا في التركيز على Jabberwocky.”
هكذا فقط.
الفصل الرابع
دعاء
أتمنى أن تكون أيامك أيام مجد وحرية ، وتجاوزات مضيئة ، وتمجيد للروح البشرية التي لا تُقهر ، وقول الحقيقة والوحي ، وأداء هويات غير مصرح بها كمسرح حرب العصابات والاحتفالات الجماعية بتنوعنا والإمكانيات اللامحدودة للإنسان معنى وقيمة نشوة النشوة ورؤية العيش خارج كل الحدود ، حيث لا شيء ممنوع.
في النهاية كل ما يهم هو ما نفعله بخوفنا وكيف نستخدم قوتنا ؛ افعل شيئًا جميلًا معك.
Our humanity has been hollowed out and consumed by those who would enslave us as the raw material of elite wealth, power, and privilege, and in the dark mirror of the Israeli crimes against humanity in which the Trump regime is fully a partner and co-conspirator, including the genocide of the Palestinians and the Zionist mad dreams of an imperial Greater Israel built on the bones of their neighbors, which seizes and shakes the world in the Iran War and threatens global economic collapse and a forever war like those of Vietnam and Afghanistan which ended with the abject and total defeat of America, we witness the collapse of all values and the failure of democracy in America.
For this event threatens not only the collapse of our economy and of international law, but the idea of our universal human rights and on the domestic front of these wars, as nonviolent protestors against ICE white supremacist terror and ethnic cleansing are convicted of terrorism in Texas for such spurious crimes as wearing black bloc clothes or printing leaflets to hand out, of citizens as co-owners of the state who are guarantors of each other’s humanity.
Since that fateful day in Beirut during the Siege when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance I have fought to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness. In the shadows of the Third World War which now engulfs the whole Middle East from Palestine to Iran as well as Ukraine, the Age of Tyrants begins.
We are no longer a beacon of hope to the world and a defender of our liberty, equality, and humanity, but merely one predatory tyranny among many, fighting over scraps of our planet’s wealth as we destroy it and ourselves along with it.
If we pulled back from the brink today, would it be possible to avoid the six to eight centuries of horrific wars between grim totalitarian states ending with our extinction which I foresaw in a few moments when I was thrown from my body by a police grenade and stood outside of time at Bloody Thursday 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley?
America was once a grant utopian illusion wherein each of us is exactly the same as every other, in a free society of equals who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s humanity. Are we a Band of Brothers still?
How shall we welcome the Stranger? In a universe wherein our humanity is defined by the principle Welcome the Stranger as a Brother, as our taxes buy the deaths of children in Palestine and Iran, are we human still?
I wonder now if there’s anything left of America to restore, or of our humanity.
To paraphrase Lee Greenwood’s song God Bless the USA;
I’m ashamed to be an American,
Because I know that I’m not free,
And I’ll resist to the end
The men who lied to steal my rights from me
But the Vichy America of the Fourth Reich under the Trump regime is not the real and true America, but an illusion cast by the evil wizardry of information warfare and propaganda funded by Trump’s sponsors among the Russian oligarchs and led by his puppetmaster and agent handler since 1987, Vladimir Putin.
The world and humankind does not need our grief; it needs our refusal to submit and our solidarity of action.
And to all tyrants I say with Ahab; “To the end, I shall grapple with thee.”
There are some things which should be true even if they never were, including these words written by Thomas Jefferson with which America was created; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these being the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Not because they are immutable laws of the universe, nor because they define the human and exalt us above the level of beasts, nor because each of us are bound to the others and bear a burden of guarantorship for each other’s human rights, but because all of this might become true, if we act as though it is.
This is the enactment of the healing of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, and a duty of care no one may ignore and remain human.
So I sing for the future of an America that might be, regardless if it never was;
“And I’d gladly stand up
Next to you and defend her still today
‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land (love this land)
God bless the USA”
If we’re going to restore democracy to America, we need all the help we can get. As Mandela said of his alliance with the Soviet Union I say of the Infinite; “We are not in a position to refuse help from anyone.”
Someone more clever than I must puzzle out how to rescue Christianity from capture by Fourth Reich and its coalition of patriarchal sexual terrorists and white supremacist terrorists who weaponize faith in service to power as Christian Identity theocracy. This must be a primary mission of revolutionary struggle, if we are to liberate our nation and the world.
In the meanwhile, let us lift each other up as best we can.
As I wrote in my post of July 4 2025, What Does Freedom Mean Now?; “Give me liberty, or give me death!”; with these immortal words of Patrick Henry to the Second Virginia Convention in 1775, in a situation very much like the one we face now under the onslaught of imperial conquest by Russian in the wake of the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024, our abandonment of the principle of universal human rights and our complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, our abandonment also of human rights and of the rights of citizens and idea of citizenship itself in the ethnic cleansing ongoing against nonwhite migrants by the ICE white supremacist terror force and a military force of occupation, the capture of our Supreme Court and Congress as instruments of subversion of democracy, the ongoing second mad reign of Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief Traitor Trump and capture of the state as Vichy America under the Fourth Reich, and the treasonous and dishonorable coup attempt by the Deplorables of the Fourth Reich’s deniable assets being only the American theatre of the Third World War, in which we have held ourselves aloof in forbearance of the use of force to secure our Liberty and allowed a brutal and amoral enemy to ravage the world unchallenged, with these words Patrick Henry began the American Revolution, and we are still fighting it today.
“If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come. It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” He then aimed a dagger at his heart in imitation of Cato the Younger, martyr of the Republic of Rome as it became an empire under Julius Caesar.
Patrick Henry was referencing the suicide speech of Cato the Younger according to Cassius Dio, in Roman History 43.10; “I, who have been brought up in freedom, with the right of free speech, cannot in my old age change and learn slavery instead.”
Here as always, the force and power of tyrants and their carceral states to compel subjugation and consent to be governed as enslavement and dehumanization finds its limit in the simple refusal to obey, for force is brittle and authority hollow without belief in its legitimacy, and this is a power and inherent human quality which cannot be taken from us.
Who so ever refuses to submit becomes Unconquered, and is free.
Among the many nuanced meanings of Independence Day, this remains among them, and it is why we celebrate our Liberty and all who have waged revolution to win it for us.
As we celebrate Independence Day, I offer you a meditation on the contradictions of power, the frailty of order, the illusion of authority, the relativity of truth and the falsification of history in service to power and authority in the form of a story, originally written as a demonstration of Gogol’s method of creating symbols and referential to Ionesco, Kafka, and Akutagawa.
It also contains a true retelling from my family history of a decisive moment when the fate of humankind hung in the balance, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on Christmas of 1776, as related to me by my father and to him from his before from the witness of my ancestor Henry Lale who fought at Washington’s side here and in the great Forlorn Hope for a free society of equals that is our nation.
A Declaration of Liberty
I woke that fateful morning, ready to join the other rhinoceroses on the parade ground, when fussing with the shiny bits on my uniform I chanced to meet my own gaze in the mirror, and to my horror discovered that my horn had gone missing.
It was a magnificent horn, a horn of vainglorious strutting, of midnight blue and royal purple like the stains of grandeur and of marvelous sins. In its place was this soft monkey nose, useless in butting heads; worse, someone might think it funny, and I’d have to bring the pain- but how to maintain order without a horn?
It was all the fault of the Devil Weed I had consumed the night before, in an excess of drunken salute to one of the original members of my command, lost in a nameless action in a fight for freedom the world will never know the true history of. Even his name is unknown, an identity assigned upon enlistment; we are the night watch, who hold an invisible line that others may sleep and live in happy ignorance of the chaos and the thousands of myriads of relentless existential threats which surround us.
Throughout much of my life my nation has been the man to my left and the man to my right, fellow bearers of secrets; maybe I’ve been wrong about that.
As to the Devil Weed, it was grown from magic seeds, seeds of transformation, change, and renewal handed down, planted & re-harvested every few years, from the hand of George Washington to an ancestor of mine as payment for a wager just after crossing the Delaware on Christmas of 1776 under cover of night and a storm.
Washington had said, “We’ve eaten all the dogs, burned all the wood, and my balls are frozen to my last bit of lead shot. We can’t cross against the ice floes, and if we stay on this side of the river we die and the Revolution dies with us.”
And Henry my ancestor said “If you go I’m coming with you, but who will come with us? Do these men have another fight in them? Frozen, starving, too many barefoot in the snow, with one man in three in hospital and unfit for duty? Whoever isn’t drowned or crushed by the ice landing a ten mile night march through a storm to the enemy, and then an attack on a fortified garrison with neither powder nor ammunition? I’ll bet you we can’t cross that river and survive, and I’ll buy a night at the best whorehouse in Philadelphia for the whole army if you can pull that off.”
Everything became still as the attention of the whole camp was riveted.
Washington stood, naked but for a red blanket he had wrapped about himself like a toga, and for long moments met the eyes of his men. “Done, and I’ll give you and every man with us a pouch of George’s Own Devil Weed if we live to celebrate. Starved, frozen, and down to the last bullet, I’ll still take that bet. We are Americans.
We are no longer ragged misfits and outcasts begging scraps from our masters feet like dogs; from this moment forward we are not colonists divided against each other by a distant empire but Americans united in our Liberty.”
There were cheers, but not yet a race to the boats. They really were starving and frozen, and for many the coming fight would be down to the knife and tomahawk. So Washington put in his set of false teeth, the pointy cannibal ones made by the Indians he once lived among who taught him how to fight and how to lead. He grinned his terrible grin, and said, “Imagine the Hessians at Trenton, eating and drinking their way through winter with storehouses full of everything we need, firewood, food, fine boots and woolen uniforms, guns and powder, all waiting for men bold enough to take them. Warm they are, with fat goose and roast beast. I’m coming to dinner with the enemy. Who’s coming with me?”
And they rose cheering, and followed him into folly and into glory. Victory or Death, Washington’s password at the Battle of Trenton, became our family motto ever after; certainly it described the conditions of the fight, of the Revolution, and of the fragile nature of Liberty and America.
The American Revolution was an anticolonial struggle which overthrew the system of aristocratic privilege and monarchy, in which some of us are better than others by condition of birth. With all our faults, this is something we may celebrate still.
But there were other stories, things no one made a heroic painting of to hang in a national gallery, both of our origins and throughout our history. Sometimes because the cover story is so much better than the truth, as with the abominable and tragic fate of Amelia Earhart, cannibalized within hours of her island’s liberation by her captors after some eight years of unspeakable depravities; and sometimes because the truth is ambiguous and a relativistic multiplicity which depends on who’s telling it, a Rashomon Gate which transforms us as we go through.
Liberate the Dominican Republic with only a printing press, a radio station, and an airplane to drop leaflets, with the loss of a single foreign national and no American casualties, weighed against the countless deaths of the landing at Inchon? Wonderful. But who can really claim a monster like Trujillo as a friend, as we had for decades before?
Often it is also horrible, something necessary to survival which betrays the ideals and goals we work to achieve and protect, an accommodation with evil. And it is this last category of secrets which provides leverage for our enemies, propagating outward across time like the leprous tracks of an invisible and malign corruption.
Our lives have reflected one another, Henry and I, the revolutionary and the secret agent, as in a dark mirror. We cannot escape each other.
My ancestor helped win the Revolutionary War and create America; I helped bear the message of that Revolution to unknown shores as a Promethean fire and seeds of transformation, among many other things. The dream of America; a free society of equals, Liberty, Equality, Truth, and Justice, a firewall against tyranny and fascism, a new idea of humankind in which no one is better than any other by reason of birth and the age of inequalities is ended, free from colonialism and empires, from slavery and identitarian nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and all the kings and tyrants toppled from their thrones. All too often revolutionary struggle has been corruptive of its own ideals, heroes become tyrants, and Liberation become imperial conquest.
The American Revolution, an anti-colonial struggle against an Empire and the system of aristocracy, and the tidal wave of revolutionary struggle it unleashed to reimagine and transform the world and human being, meaning, and value in thousands of myriads of mutinies and rebellions of the new Humanist order against the old Authoritarian paradigm, in every corner of the earth and among all its peoples, a glorious Liberation of the infinite possibilities of becoming human. None of these things happened in the way you have been told.
If I could go back to the beginnings of things, to the Original Lie that founded America and the consequences and events that tipped the balance of the world toward fascism, the equality of all human beings and the glorious revolution against ideas of aristocracy which failed to free the slaves or to liberate us from systems of oppression and unequal power other than monarchy and colonial bondage to a foreign empire, could all the wrongs that came after be redressed? Could we win back our freedom, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, redeem the promise of a free society of equals, and relight the torch of Liberty?
So I scribbled a note retiring my captaincy in the Deniable Forces of the secret police, stepping through the mirror into the monkey world and transforming as I had so many times before, though never before alone.
I had some wrongs to put right.
And here are some thoughts of mine on the subject of Liberty; Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty:
To all those who like myself prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to the alternative of submission to authority, who align on the side of Prometheus, rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, I offer here a manifesto for bearers of the Torch of Liberty.
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I’ve thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.
Here are some things I have learned:
First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.
The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror,
is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.
Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.
We must question, expose, mock, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. These are the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen.
Victory or Death; so said George Washington at the Battle of Trenton of the Revolution against tyranny and the idea that some persons are by right of birth better than others.
Victory or Death; so must we ever answer tyrants and those who would enslave us.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, conformity with transgression, and division with solidarity.
Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.
Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.
Let us be Bringers of Chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As I wrote in my journal of May 29 2023, This Memorial Day, Let Us Send No Armies to Enforce Virtue, But to Liberate Only; We remember the valor and sacrifice of our sacred dead on this Memorial Day, of those killed in action and all those who served in defense of our liberty and equality and in solidarity with that of others against the malign forces of racism and fascism, tyranny and terror, from the beginning of our day of recognition of the Union soldiers and Abolitionists who died in the Civil War fighting a human trafficking syndicate which had declared itself a nation answerable to no civilized law, and since its proclamation as a national holiday all those who died in our endless and terrible wars including the First and Second World Wars and thereafter to free the world of fascist imperialism, terror, and the darkness of organized violence, and all others who have died to achieve the dream of a free society of equals, whether in uniform or not, on the battlefields of civilizational conflicts or as victims of white supremacist terror, at Gettysburg 1863, Normandy 1944, Charlottesville 2017, the January 6 Insurrection 2021, Ukraine and World War Three ongoing now, and countless others.
In America and throughout the world, Confederate-Nazi revivalism and fascist tyranny once again emerges from the darkness to subjugate us, and this we must resist.
There is an iconic conversation between George Washington, about to be hanged, and Mick Rory who has come from the future to rescue him in Legends of Tomorrow, Season Two Episode 11 Turncoat; and in this historical moment wherein the fate of democracy and humankind hang in the balance, I answer now with the words of Mick, no one’s idea of a hero or even of a good man but my idea of a man like myself, of an American as national identity, and of becoming human as a path of resistance to tyranny, seizure of power and freedom, and revolutionary struggle.
“ Washington: I’ve been a soldier since I was twenty years old. But our cause is the cause of all men. To be treated equally, regardless of hereditary privilege. We must prove to the world that you don’t need a title to be a gentleman. The British may be dishonorable, but I am not. By my death, I will prove to the Crown what it means to be an American.
Mick: You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re misfits. Outcasts. And we’re proud of it. If they attack in formation, we pop ’em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, you raid their camp at night. And if they’re gonna hang you, then you fight dirty. And you never, ever, give up. That’s the American way.”
We live now in such a time of decision, in which tyranny and liberty play for the fate of humankind.
World War Three began its European theatre of operations with the conquest of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, much as the Second World War began with fascist conquests of Spain and Manchuria, and broadened with general invasion of Ukraine last year, as a development of the conflict between Turkey and Russia for imperial dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean with the Russian intervention in Syria and Libya in 2015 and in the Nagorno-Karabakh Civil War of 2020; Russia also began a campaign of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa in 2016, operates Sudan and Belarus as client states, and invaded Kazakhstan to support a proxy tyrant with brutal repression during the revolt of January 2022. Here in America of course Russia’s star agent, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, captured the state as its President during the Stolen Election of 2016, and began systematically attacking the values, ideals, systems, structures, and institutions of democracy.
We are winning in that we have exposed our enemies for what they are and delegitimized them, but the fight is not yet won, not in Ukraine and not in America.
Twenty four centuries ago Pericles of Athens said of the heroes of democracy; “Not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions, but there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.”
On this Memorial Day let us cherish and exalt the gift of liberty given to us by our fellows, elders, and ancestors, and by all those throughout history who have answered those who would enslave us with defiance and resistance.
Such is our legacy as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others united by our refusal to submit to force and control, in our struggle for one another as Antifascists and antiracists, and as Americans but also as human beings who hold the universality of our condition above any divisions of otherness, and perform our uniqueness within the limitless diversity of our community of humankind.
As such it remains among our highest principles that we accord others those universal rights which we claim for ourselves, that each of us must possess the right to imagine and become human as a free choice in a community of autonomous individuals, and that we are committed to our common defense of those rights of ownership of identity, freedom of conscience in our faith, and of bodily autonomy which define what is human.
America was founded as an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist revolutionary experiment in forging a society free of the conceit of aristocratic feudalism that some of us are by nature better than others, and to redress injustices perpetrated against the many by the few.
While in the course of revolutionary struggle and the resistance to tyranny we may find just cause for action in our defense or the defense of others, there is never any justification for wars of imperialist aggression nor to secure strategic resources such as oil or any economic colonialist thievery, nor for wars of dominion or the conquest and assimilation of cultures different from our own. Different is neither better nor worse, merely an opportunity to learn new ways of being human together that we might become better than we were alone.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, but to liberate as a guarantor of our universal human rights and the principles of democracy as a free society of equals; freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
So I wrote two years ago, when I still hoped for a Restoration of America. But much has changed.
We now face near certain odds of six to eight centuries of total global war and nationalist tyranny, an age of civilizational collapse ending with the extinction of humankind. As a teenager sorting the primary trauma of my death on Bloody Thursday, March 15 1969 People’s Park Berkeley, when I was hurled from my body by the force wave a police grenade and beheld myriads of possible futures as I stood outside of time, I calculated the chances of human survival among our possible futures as great as twelve and as few as two in one hundred; as of now we have passed a point of no return. I cannot foresee any chance of the survival of democracy nor of humankind beyond the next thousand years. We fight now, like the Romani who rebelled at Auschwitz, only to choose the manner of our deaths. I will not go quietly.
The question now is whether all that we have lived and dreamed, we humans will be utterly erased and become nothing or if something like ourselves will one day discover the ruins of our civilization, and begin to wonder and to question.
But I could be wrong, and unable to envision possibilities which may still save us. For this chance we must resist, and unite in solidarity against our dehumanization by those who would enslave us.
Every moment of delay, appeasement, bargaining with our head in the lion’s mouth of the Fourth Reich, and failure to purge our destroyers from among us brings us nearer our doom. But every act of Resistance lets us claw back something of our humanity from the darkness, if only for a time.
We fight now not to defeat the enemy, for our annihilation is as certain as that of the Old Gods before the tide of the Giants of Frost and Old Night when entropy swallows the universe, but to remain Unconquered; like Jacob wrestling the angel in defiance of unstoppable forces or Hemingway’s hero in The Old Man and the Sea fighting to the last. For this is our victory, this refusal to submit, a victory of the human among endless chasms of the Abyss, and it cannot be taken from us.
The American Revolution is an ongoing process, not only an event of two and a half centuries ago but also occurring now, and without end. This is the America I believe in and fight for; one which ceaselessly adapts, changes boundaries into interfaces, and exalts our humanity.
Where do we find ourselves now, in this moment of decision and constellation of Rashomon Gate Events which converge upon us? How did we arrive here, at the Gates of Auschwitz with the evil leering clown Trump bearing the key? And how might we unwind this fate?
In America we have tracked and for a brief time brought to justice the deniable assets of the Republican Party and the criminal and treasonous Trump regime in the January 6 Insurrection, but not its high command, nor its conspirators in Congress, nor its propagandists, nor the plutocrats and elites who fund and benefit from it all. Our institutions of Law have failed us, captured or subverted by the enemy as is the Supreme Court, and we must look beyond the law for a Reckoning and our survival.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
In Ukraine the free world hesitates to confront a Russian empire which uses terror, genocide, and threat of nuclear annihilation in its mad conquest, while in America, Europe, and throughout the world the guarantors of democracy are being destabilized and captured by fascist tyrannies, and those which remain have abandoned our universal human rights in complicity with Israel in the genocide of the Palestinians. Here appeasement works as well as it did for Chamberlain in World War One, which is not at all, and when someone tells you as did Hitler in 1938 “This is my last territorial demand”, he who trusts the lie is about to become extinct. Ukraine and Palestine are tests of our solidarity and will, and like the 1939 invasion of Poland a gate to the conquest of Europe and the fall of civilization, a line from which there can be no retreat, if we are to salvage something of our humanity from the darkness.
To quote the lines of Winston Churchill in the magnificent film Darkest Hour, which the historical figure never said; “You cannot reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
On this Fourth of July, which finds us prisoners of a captured state led by a mad idiot traitor, Nazi revivalist, Rapist In Chief, and Russian agent whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the dismantling of the institutions of our common welfare, figurehead of a Fourth Reich of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and bankrolled by plutocrats who wish to destroy our capacity for mercy, fracture our solidarity as a Band of Brothers and our duty of care for each other, degrade our humanity, enslave us, and turn us into commodities in service to their wealth and power in parallel with the Fourth Reich’s theft of our citizenship and transformation into subjects rather than co owners of the state, I think now of my family motto, Victory or Death, Washington’s password during the Battle of Trenton which followed the Crossing of the Delaware.
We began thus, in a desperate gamble to seize the future, which found reflection in the landing at Normandy on D Day to liberate the world from Nazi tyranny in the most terrible war the world has ever known, a war to define our humanity and who has the power to do so, a war for the future possibilities of becoming human. And we find ourselves here again.
We inhabit this space at all times, at the Gate of Decision; for this is what it means to be human.
I close my interrogation of America and the legacies of our history with a reference to the line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar underlined by Nelson Mandela at Robbin Island to authorize direct action against the Apartheid regime, in circumstances and imposed conditions of struggle very like those we face now in America and much of the world, which we must meet with seizure of power and revolutionary struggle against state tyranny and terror and systems of oppression.
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
Victory or Death: Washington Crosses the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, 1851.
The future to which Trump has led us; The Gates of Auschwitz.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence. No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness and belonging, you always end up at the Gates of Auschwitz.
But we are not fated to enter here, and as Dante warns us at the Gates of Hell to Abandon Hope. We can Resist, and in so doing choose differently.
Joy to balance the terror of our nothingness:
Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers – I Won’t Back Down (Official Music Video)
Here is the book that reminded me who we are, we Americans, and what’s worth fighting for;
How shall we see and understand images of war, death, pain, horror, and evil such as those of war films, which both glorify and authorize violence and the use of social force in the manufacture of virtue and national identity, and interrogate, subvert, and liberate us from such systems of control as stories which possess us and from which we must emerge?
How can we give answer to such darkness in our own lives?
What does our future look like? To this end I have assembled here my references in iconic films of war, with a word of caution; the wars of the Age of Terror and Tyranny will be fought with weapons unimaginable to us now and incomparably destructive as measured against those of the Second World War.
The Republic or the Tyrants? The Choice Jefferson Faced in 1776 Is Now Ours in 2025
Will we defend the dream of self-rule, or surrender to the very powers our ancestors bled to escape?
Thom Hartmann
The American Revolution wasn’t just a break from Britain — it was an uprising against three ancient tyrannies: warlord kings, the morbidly rich, and theocrats. Today, those same forces are clawing their way back into power, and if we don’t fight them now, everything the Founders built could collapse.
In the Declaration of Independence and throughout his years of personal correspondence, Thomas Jefferson (and multiple others among the Founders) identified three historic tyrannies that he and his colleagues fought the Revolutionary War to overthrow and replace with a democratic republic.
The first were the warlord kings, who’d been conquering nations and peoples for millennia and, by 1776, were considered “normal” by most citizens of the world. These were families who, in the earlier years of their countries, had acquired power by conquest: war, pillage, rape, and the subjugation of the people they’d vanquished.
These warlord kings justified their oppression by claiming their god had decreed their rule, that might makes right, and maintained their rule over generations by the threat of violence. In America’s case, we experienced increasing oppression and taxation throughout the rule of King George II, which got far worse when George III took over Great Britain in 1760.
The second were the morbidly rich, known in that era as lords and ladies, barons and dukes, earls, counts, marquess’, and princes and princesses. They were the owners of the East India Company, for example, against whom our revolution commenced with the Boston Tea Party in late 1773.
Jefferson and Adams, in particular, had lengthy correspondences — often quoting the philosophers who inspired the Enlightenment — about how “the rich” always worked to corrupt popular governments and should never be trusted with control over America.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his 1762 Economie Politique, which inspired and informed our nation’s Founders, noted that the main job of a republic “is found in rendering justice to all, and especially in protecting the poor against the tyranny of the rich.”
Jefferson (who died in bankruptcy) agreed; in a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, he wrote:
“It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”
In an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson amplified the point:
“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”
And Rousseau was also echoed by John Adams in a November 15, 1813 letter to Jefferson:
“When Aristocracies are established by human Laws and honour and Wealth and Power are made hereditary by municipal Laws and political Institutions, then I acknowledge artificial Aristocracy to commence: but this never commences, till Corruption in Elections become dominant and uncontroulable.”
The third tyranny that our Founding generation overthrew were the theocrats: the popes, mullahs, preachers, priests, and even the King proclaiming himself the head of the Church of England.
By the 1770s, rightwing Christians had largely taken over much of New England; they provoked a teenage Ben Franklin to flee Massachusetts for Philadelphia to get away from the mandatory Sunday church attendance and taxes to fund the clergy. In his book Toward the Mystery he wrote:
“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.”
Similarly, both Jefferson and Adams (among others) wrote at length about how the Christians of their day were constantly trying to corrupt government and what a battle they faced in that regard.
In the place of these three forms of government, the men who put together America proposed a constitutionally-limited democratic republic, a nation where the power rested with and was derived from the people themselves, rather than coming down from on-high kings, theocrats, or the morbidly rich.
Throughout the quarter-millennia of America’s existence, we’ve repeatedly had to fight back against warlords, plutocrats, and theocrats.
When a handful of wealthy families took over the South, the warlords of the Confederacy declared war on us. The morbidly rich have challenged our government multiple times, most famously during the Gilded Age, the Roaring 20s, and in the years since the Reagan Revolution. And preachers seeking political power have been a constant thorn in our side, from the Scopes Monkey Trial to today’s efforts to insert Christianity into our public schools, the Constitution be damned.
And here we are again.
We have a president who thinks of himself as the king of America, issuing proclamations as if he has a divine right. He’s an oligarch himself, and has built a corrupt alliance with other oligarchs in America, Russia, and around the world to enhance his own wealth and power. And since the days of Reagan the GOP has embraced the religious right, who now are so in thrall to the Republican Party that they can reliably hand electoral victories to rightwing candidates.
So, like our nation’s Founders, we must remember, resist, and reform.
We must remember the three historic tyrannies and teach our young people about them and the ever-present danger of their return. Promote history and civics. Remind people of the oppression our forebearers faced. Update our educational system so the true history of our nation can be taught.
We must resist Trump’s and the GOP’s efforts to turn America into an oligarchic, theocratic, neofascist kingdom. Show up in the streets. Contact your elected representatives (Congress’ number is 202-224-3121) all the way down to local officials and let them know you want a democratic republic. Show up for public meetings like school boards, county commissions, city councils, etc., and demand an end to big money’s, big defense contractors’, and big religion’s control over our political system.
And we must reform America’s political system that’s been captured over the past 50 years by massive transnational corporations and the billionaire class. Get money out of politics. Overturn Citizens United. Make voting a right rather than a mere privilege.
If we fail, two-and-a-half centuries of blood, sweat, and tears will have been wasted as America slips into the type of warlord/oligarch/theocrat capture that’s been the fate of Russia, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, and so many other formerly democratic nations.
But if we succeed, we’ll have a serious opportunity to finally make America a fully inclusive nation, a beacon of liberty, and a “land of the free and home of the brave” we can all be proud of.
That’s worth fighting for with everything we have. See you in the streets on No Kings Day…
Thirty eight years ago yesterday, a fight in a teahouse gathered force and became the People Power Uprising, mass protests in Rangoon overthrew the tyrant Ne Win under imposed conditions of struggle which included brutal repression and economic disaster; by August it had become a national democracy movement.
A military coup ended the 1988 People Power Uprising, and began the decades long house arrest of its leader Aung San Suu Kyi, but it also birthed the Revolution which we fight still in Myanmar, inspired the Saffron Revolution of the Buddhist monks in 2007 and shaped the current resistance to the junta which was birthed with it in 2021.
In Myanmar today, democracy and tyranny still play for the kingdom of the human heart and the possible future we will create.
As I wrote in my post of February 1 2026, Myanmar’s Day of Silence: Anniversary of the Military Coup and of Its Resistance; Warning: If you live or have family in Myanmar, do not open, share, or hit the like icon; the junta has executed people for liking a Facebook post. To be identified as a critic of the junta is to be targeted for assassination and torture, your family murdered and your village burned.
Resist, and remain anonymous and invisible; offer the enemies of liberty no target to repress, silence, and erase.
Offer no target, give no warning, leave no trace.
Let us be silent shadows, bearing liberation from tyranny and the rebirth of humankind.
James Shwe, in an article in Asia Times, offers a prescription of resistance unity in liberation struggle; “Fragmentation is the resistance’s greatest strategic vulnerability. It allows the international community to hedge its bets, treating the junta as the de facto state because the opposition appears to be a chaotic array of armies.
To win credibility as an oppositional force and legitimacy as the true national government in the eyes of the world and thereby the crucial material and diplomatic support we must have if we are to survive and overcome, the resistance must move beyond loose coordination to a hybrid federal structure: a system in which the National Unity Government (NUG) and ethnic authorities agree on a shared federal executive for foreign affairs and defense, while respecting the autonomy of local administrations in education, health and policing.
We do not need a centralized ‘super-government’ – that fearsome model has failed Myanmar for 70 years.We need a functional federal democratic union where coordination is institutionalized, not ad hoc.”
A Day of Silence and national General Strike made silent the cities of Myanmar today, the fifth such anniversary, in the face of threats of death and arrest by the regime of tyranny and state terror which has captured the state for four years now, after a morning of mass protests and defiant marches, and while these performances of liberty and guerrilla street theatre valorized resistance and democracy and unified the peoples of Myanmar in solidarity against those who would enslave them, liberation forces took the fight to the enemy in direct actions against police and military targets as demonstrations of the powerlessness of carceral states of force and control against a people not divided by sectarian and ethnic hierarchies of otherness and belonging or driven in to submission by learned helplessness and brutal repression, but united in the cause of liberty and refusal to submit.
Once the enforcers of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the beneficiaries of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil could sleep secure from the will of the people and the reckoning of their victims, confronted by a human rights protest movement robbed of its force as revolutionary struggle because it was yoked to a parallel and interdependent democracy movement which under the leadership of its fallen heroine accepted co-optation by the military-oligarchic system which remains its enemy, a once shining hope and path of liberation tarnished by silence in the face of the genocide of the Rohingya and ethnic minorities, and reduced by appeasement and a millennia old kleptocratic state to limited political goals and no true threats to the cabal of monarchists, oligarchs, and militarists which have ruled their nation since the fall of the colonial empire of Britain here in 1948; but with the seizure of direct power by the military as a tyranny of force and control and the birth of a new Resistance as its counterforce, those who would enslave the peoples of Burma awake to a new day in which all of this has changed forever, for the Revolution has come to Myanmar.
Democracy fell five years ago in Myanmar, the junta’s name and one I use to disambiguate between their regime as a state and Burma as a historical nation, to a military coup by tyrants of brutal repression and theft of citizenship and perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing in an ongoing campaign against ethnic and religious minorities, often tribal peoples living in areas the junta wishes to plunder of natural resources.
In chiaroscuro with this abyssal darkness of tyranny and state terror is the gathering light of liberation struggle, democracy, and human rights, for we are winning this war; the tribal armies and rebel forces united under the democracy movement before Chinese and Russian intervention in the civil war controlled half to three quarters of all territory within Myanmar.
We have lost ground, but not resolve. The Revolution is in the Heart of the People. Such is an inherent condition of being human, and it cannot be taken from us.
“The Revolution was effected before the war was commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people” as John Adams said, referencing the January 30, 1750 sermon pf pastor Jonathan Mayhew which he credited with igniting the American Revolution and established the principle of common law which supersedes that of the state, this being of two parts, first, Do all you have agreed to do, and second, Do not encroach on other persons or their property, with the line; “There can be nothing great and good where tyranny’s influence reaches. For which reason it becomes every friend to truth and humankind to bear a part in opposing this hateful monster.”
The capture of Myanmar by the junta is paralleled by its seizure by a Buddhist theocracy of xenophobic nationalism which unites tyranny with faith weaponized in service to power as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; a shadow state transnational theocracy which controls both the nations of Sri Lanka and Myanmar in mobilization against Islamic and other minorities as ethnic cleansing. Here an organization of faith has formed these twin Buddhist states as an exoskeleton through which to exert social power; in exchange the state receives ideological and organizational services, much as Pat Robertson, Jerry Fallwell, and the Gideonite-Pentecostal fundamentalists served Ronald Reagan or the Inquisition served the Spanish Empire.
Here is a litany of woes repeated endlessly throughout history and the world, of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the inquisitions and holocausts of those whom divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging dehumanize as monsters to be cast out.
Gathering forces of change have swept the nation these past years, mobilizing not only tribal armies of the Chin, Karen, Shan, Arakan, and other peoples but also mass protests in every major city organized by the Civil Disobedience Movement, national strikes- especially that of hospitals and doctors, a boycott of the military, the emergence of a National Unity Government, pressure from both Catholic and Buddhist organizations, actions of international solidarity by former President Biden and Pope Francis, and the resurgence of the Communist Party of Burma’s People’s Liberation Army after thirty years.
This in resistance to state terror and tyranny, in which about 12,000 democracy activists have been arrested and about 1400 killed by the military and police in the first two years since the coup, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing which in 2021 alone created 400,000 refugees and killed several thousand. We have seen death and state terror on this scale in Myanmar during the Rohingya Genocide in 2017, which in a few months killed 25,000 and drove a million refugees to Bangladesh and another million to North Africa.
But the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion, and for every act of oppression there are equal and opposite forces of resistance.
A regional democracy movement, the Milk Tea Alliance, has emerged to unify actions in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Burma, and has now become a global liberation movement allying with similar networks in the Philippine Islands, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with important networks and organizations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and allied movements in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Iran.
The three finger salute from The Hunger Games adopted by the Thai democracy revolution in 2014 was embraced years ago in Burma, and one week after the coup was seen among the mass protests in Yangon. As the Thai democracy leader Sirawith Seritiwat described it in The Guardian; “We knew that it would be easily understood to represent concepts of freedom, equality, solidarity.”
This is what we must offer the peoples of Burma now, and wherever men hunger to be free, all those throughout the world whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to whom our Statue of Liberty offers a beacon of hope to the world with the words of a poem written by a Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Freedom, Equality, Solidarity; let us reclaim America as a guarantor of liberty and redeem our promise to the world and to the future of humankind.
In Myanmar on this fifth anniversary of the Revolution versus the junta, the people are marching toward victory in a unified front of tribal armies, the Brotherhood Alliance, and the urban democracy movement, the People’s Defense Forces allied with the National Unity Government. It has become the model for a new kind of revolutionary struggle, which now propagates outward throughout the world. And those who would enslave us now fear us.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As written in the Insight Myanmar Podcast’s FB page; “March 12, 2026 marks thirty-eight years since a small eruption of violence near the Rangoon Institute of Technology helped set an entire country in motion.
On March 12, 1988, what began as a skirmish at a teashop café near RIT became something far larger than anyone could have predicted. Myanmar was already suffocating under General Ne Win’s rule — decades of economic collapse, censorship, fear, and the slow tightening of military control over public life. Students had been demanding reforms, transparency, and an end to dictatorship. That day, thousands gathered again, marching toward the café, a familiar meeting place for political discussion. Riot police met them there. Tear gas came first. Batons. And then gunfire. Lives were lost. The outrage spread beyond the campus, beyond Yangon, igniting the movement that would culminate in the nationwide uprising of 1988.
In the Insight Myanmar Podcast archive, guests remember this moment not as distant history, but as the beginning of a fracture that never fully closed. We encourage you to listen to these voices to understand the significance of this time.
Thura, in Episode 246, describes RIT as the birthplace of that revolution — the place where soldiers entered the campus and opened fire into student dormitories, killing two young men. “That’s how we launched ‘Myanmar Human Rights Day’ on March 13,” he says, “the day the students fell.”
Ma Thida, in Episode 102, recalls watching the crackdown unfold as a final-year medical student. “It was pretty heartbreaking,” she says, remembering the shock of realizing how easily a government could kill its own students. She speaks of wounded protesters, of hospitals hit by gunfire, of an entire generation jolted awake.
Linn Thant, in Episode 98, remembers fear and grief moving through the streets — friends found dead, demonstrations spreading, the decision to keep going anyway. His story would later lead to imprisonment and a death sentence, part of the long cost of refusing silence.
And journalist Dominic Faulder, in Episode 344, describes Rangoon in those months as a city trembling with courage and terror — hospitals emptied because the wounded knew they would be hunted there, thousands killed nationwide, students facing a security state with “passion, idealism, and sheer guts.”
March 12 is not only a date. It is a reminder of how quickly the military will reach for violence when people demand a voice — and how often students and young people have been the first to pay the price.
And it is inseparable from the present. The same institution that opened fire at RIT in 1988 is the one bombing villages and imprisoning dissidents today. The Spring Revolution did not appear from nowhere in 2021 — it rises from a much longer lineage of refusal.
Thirty-eight years later, Myanmar is still living inside that unfinished struggle. But the memory of RIT endures: a teashop, a campus, a crackdown — and the moment fear began to break.”
As written during the crisis of August 1988 by Nick Cumming-Bruce in The Guardian, in an article entitled Armed revolt takes grip in Rangoon; “Armed revolt swept the streets of Rangoon yesterday as demonstrators fought back against attempts by the government of General Sein Lwin to impose a military clampdown on the Burmese capital.
Bloodshed and savage acts of brutality marked bitter fighting between troops and anti-government protesters on the third successive day of massive popular demonstrations in the city.
Troops opened fire on demonstrators 15 times yesterday, Burma Radio reported. Tens of thousands of marchers poured into the streets, ignoring the inevitable consequences of renewed confrontation with large numbers of troops deployed in the city.
The growing anger of demonstrators at the harsh measures unleashed against them brought a bloody retaliation. The radio reported that three policemen – two corporals and a sergeant – were beheaded during fighting in the Rangoon suburb of Okkalapa.
Angry mobs burnt down several police living quarters, tore up railway lines and burnt government vehicles, the radio said. Diplomats in the capital said several police stations were in the hands of demonstrators.
The demonstrators have been stripping the stations of their weapons and it is only a question of time before they are turned on the security forces.
‘They have seized guns from the police. They are armed now,’ one diplomat said.
Burma Radio said that 33 people were killed and 59 wounded in Rangoon alone, but a reliable assessment of the casualties was impossible amid the turmoil and confusion of street battles.
The US announced yesterday that it had temporarily closed its embassy in Rangoon. A State Department spokeswoman, Ms Phyllis Oakley, said the US deplored the shooting of unarmed demonstrators by Burmese security forces. She expressed concern about reports that troops were seeking out groups of protesters and firing on them and said ‘casualty numbers appear substantial’.
Huge demonstrations and violent clashes were reported yesterday in 26 other towns and cities. Diplomats estimate the number of people killed at more than 100.
The state radio, however, said troops had started shooting in self-defence when they were attacked as they guarded an ambulance carrying injured personnel to the hospital.
Sporadic shooting erupted intermittently around Rangoon throughout the day as troops attempted to break up crowds of demonstrators reported to have been drawn from a broad cross-section of the population.
Groups several thousand strong formed, broke up and reformed beneath red and black flags. ‘The streets are full of people. They are of all ages – parents, students, teachers,’ a resident said.
Diplomats in Rangoon said residents had barricaded some neighbourhoods against the military.
The extent of the violence in other parts of the country is unclear. Burma Radio said one policeman was killed in the southern town of Moulmein after police opened fire on a protest march. The crowd set on the police, seizing their weapons.
Demonstrators later surrendered the arms to Buddhist monks who intervened to try to prevent the conflict from escalating.
The willingness of a once-submissive population to meet force with force has exposed the vulnerability of a regime that is politically and economically bankrupt after 26 years of authoritarian rule built round the former ruler, General Ne Win.
It has also focused attention on the critical issue of the regime’s ability to depend on a military establishment which is now the only significant bastion of the government.
Diplomats insisted up until Tuesday that the discipline of the troops showed no sign of cracking. But they questioned the ability of the armed forces to maintain their cohesion when confronted with demands to open fire, not merely on student protestors, but on crowds made up of people from all walks of life.
Government radio yesterday broadcast an appeal by Burma ‘s Supreme Buddhist Patriarch for restraint on the part of both the public and the authorities.
His move might reflect some awareness within the leadership of the limitations of using soldiers against a mass uprising.
General Sein Lwin’s reputation for brutality has been balanced in recent weeks with a rare show of pragmatism in promoting reforms, but no hint has yet been given that the government is contemplating an experiment with conciliation where the use of military strength has stalled.
Foreigners arriving in Bangkok from Rangoon yesterday quoted a diplomat as saying the government had brought in army units recruited from minority Chins. They have been renowned in the past for their willingness to open fire on demonstrators in situations which might have strained the obedience of other troops.”
Salute of the Revolution
Burma’s Bloody Fight for Democracy in 1988
Interview with Chris Gunness, the founder and director of the Myanmar Accountability Project, on the 1988 Uprsising
the 1988 Uprising, a reading list
From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, Pascal Khoo Thwe
Here I began, at the door to the Absurd, and I look back now from the other side, after a lifetime of strangeness, among the freaks and monsters myself; America was always an illusion, a figment of lies, distorted shapes in the funhouse of our Wilderness of Mirrors, echoes and reflections which capture, possess, and falsify, but which also reveal truths and extend us into the Infinite among chasms of darkness.
Among my Defining Moments are those I categorize as By Encounters with Possible Selves As Shaping Forces of Becoming Human, figures and images of the possibilities of our myriad future selves as reflected in the eyes of others with whom we share imaginal spaces.
We choose as our companions through life those who represent qualities and figures of human being, meaning, and value we wish to integrate in our becoming; those who perform roles we wish to step into.
Herein I number the conversations and personal relationships with those who shaped me and left upon me their mark of strangeness; first among them an influence of my childhood, Edward Albee, as I watched my father direct his plays and listened to their conversations.
With a title taken from the song Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? in the 1933 Disney short film Three Little Pigs, where two of the pigs are convinced they’re safe from the wolf in their straw and twig houses, you know that threatening truths will undo the house of illusions George and Martha, emblematic founders of America, have built around themselves.
In this year of the Fall of America in 2026, which began last year with the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich led by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief and Russian agent whose mission is the subversion of democracy to be replaced by a totalitarian theocracy of white supremacist terror and Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror, as we began our pathetic and tragic national and civilizational collapse on the cusp of a second Great Depression designed via tariffs to drive a vast precariat into quasi slavery and which heralds the dawn of an Age of Tyrants of eight hundred years of global wars of imperial conquest and dominion fought with weapons of unimaginable hoor ending with the extermination of humankind, and as World War Three rages, we now find ourselves in the roles of George and Martha in Edward Albee’s transformative and prophetic play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with the realization of the lies and fictions by which authority has falsified us and stolen our souls, leaving us less than human like fleeting shadows on the wall.
As written by Ben Brantley in The New York Times; “Mr. Albee has unsparingly considered subjects outside the average theatergoer’s comfort zone: the capacity for sadism and violence within American society; the fluidness of human identity; the dangerous irrationality of sexual attraction and, always, the irrefutable presence of death.”
In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee has given us the Great American Play, a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are rather than the illusions we have spun around and through ourselves as a defensive mask. It is about the historical and political consequences of a lie we told at our founding about freedom and equality in a government designed to leave structural power asymmetries of wealth, race, and gender untouched; about the human cost of dysfunctional relationships based on unequal power and falsificaltion, and about the implications for meaning and being when the personal and political realms of action collide and change each other.
This play is a masterpiece, and I think we should all watch the film in school before we go to vote for the first time, and as an ongoing national ritual observance every four years before the polls open in our Presidential elections. It reminds us that our democracy is a performance, which deceives, commodifies, and dehumanizes us, and manufactures our consent to be enslaved.
We could by our actions make our values and ideals real as lived truths in a free society of equals, but first we must escape and bring a Reckoning for the legacies of our history. Such a Reckoning was begun in the Black Lives Matter protests which seized over fifty American cities with mass action and solidarity for several months a few short years ago; let us now finish the work of reimagination and transformation of our nation and our civilization, and of human being, meaning, and value.
When the enemies of democracy and of liberty, equality, truth, and justice come for us, as they always have and will, let them find not subjects defeated by learned helplessness, abjection, and despair, but citizens of a United Humankind unconquered in refusal to submit and solidarity of action and disbelief in and disobedience to authority and those who would enslave us, and loyal to each other as guarantors of our universal human rights and rights as citizens and co-owners of the state in a free society of equals.
This, and only this, can save us from ourselves and the systems of oppression we have created and allowed to go unchanged.
In this context I think of America as represented in Edward Albee’s iconic play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. My father directed some of his plays, and I listened intently to their conversations during rehearsals from a center front seat in the theatre, from the very young age of four, and memorizing everything as texts which overwrote my own thinking, conversations which interrogated Albee’s direct influences and references among his fellow Absurdists Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter.
The line of transmission of Absurdist elements in literature originates with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Nikolai Gogol, and Franz Kafka, diverges from the limits of Humanism with Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Witold Gombrowicz, Albert Camus, Albee and his ilk as previously cited, diverged from the main tradition as Nihilism in Samuel Beckett, Thomas Ligotti, and Kobo Abe, and continues today in the works of Haruki Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elif Shafak.
Of my adventures as a theatre brat I shall recount here only one; during my father’s direction of The Sandbox my mother asked Edward Albee if she could have a picture taken with him, whereupon he pointed to the gallery along the theatre entrance and said, “Let’s take it in front of the Jackson Pollock; it looks like Martha’s mind.” For Edward Albee, whose works were among those I could recite verbatim at the age of four, literally as I used to sit in at rehearsals and give the actors their lines if someone forgot, the failure of order in both political and psychological terms was a symptom of Sartrean bad faith.
Here also Albee leads us through a labyrinth of mirrors, a funhouse of distorted images, both comical and grotesque, images which capture and reflect, assimilating or robbing us of our uniqueness in infinite regress to steal our souls, which through his magic of seeing our true selves becomes a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror as in in Anderson’s The Snow Queen, fragmented images which multiply our possibilities of becoming human.
I particularly like the following lines from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, laden with satire of our falsification through invented histories and authorized identities, and influential to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra;
“Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don’t know the difference.
George: No, but we must carry on as though we did.
Martha: Amen.”
Do see the iconic 1966 film adaptation starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; I used to show it to high school students on day one of American History.
And I would say in preface to the class; Here we see images of the history from which must emerge to become human as self-created and self-owned beings; histories which we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails, with legacies of unequal power and multigenerational epigenetic trauma.
I want you to seize these images and reclaim them for your own. Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We are gathered here to study history and our place in it, and to interrogate our informing, motivating, and shaping sources as stories, to perform the four primary duties of a citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and to be what Foucault called truth tellers.
So, I have a film for you which models how to perform these roles, and this is where we will begin our study of American History, with the Original Lie which founded our nation, for there is no equality under the law if there is no social equality in praxis, and our magnificent reinventions of our civilization and ourselves in America’s founding documents leave vast systems of unequal power unchanged; class, race, and gender among others. This is who we are, and it falls to each of us to make a better future than we have the past; to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.
Such was my annual speech in preface to the study of American history.
Also informative and insightful, Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee, includes his ideas about Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Sam Shepherd, as well as autobiographical writings about his own life, work, and worldview.
Finally, written four decades after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, there is his last and greatest work, displaying the final form of his political psychology and an evolution of all the themes that have come before in his long career as a playwright, like a summa theologica of our time; The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? is a Greek tragedy in structure which employs the methods of comedy to subversive ends, referential to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, about the uncontrollable, totalizing nature of love and passion as a bringer of chaos and renewer of the world, sweeping all before it like a tidal wave.
Nowhere in his cannon of work is Edward Albee’s intention more clear; to empower and liberate us both personally and politically. As an examination of Keats’ ideal of Love it is insightful and superb; as an extension and interrogation of the themes of Thomas Mann in Death in Venice and his reinterpreter Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita it is a brilliant satire and political fable. Herein he restates his primary insight; that life is a struggle for control and ownership of identity, the persona or mask that is worn in Greek theatre, between ourselves and our society.
As written by the Edward Albee Society, On The Goat of Who Is Sylvia?; “The play is about love, and loss, the limits of our tolerance and who, indeed, we really are.” Indeed, while bestiality is one of the many topics addressed in Albee’s play, the playwright’s main objective is more aligned with imagining ourselves “subject to circumstances outside our own comfort zones.”
In an interview with Charlie Rose focused on The Goat’s 2002 New York premiere, Albee stated, “Imagine what you can’t imagine. Imagine that, all of a sudden, you found yourself in love with a Martian, in love with something you can’t conceive of. I want everybody to be able to think about what they can’t imagine and what they have buried deep as being intolerable and insufferable. I want them to just think freshly and newly about it.”
Even the play’s title echoes this sense of multiplicity in terms of its meaning. Albee said in his interview with Charlie Rose, “A goat is two things. A goat is the animal, and, also, I believe a person can be a goat, the butt of a situation.” Florescu offers a more symbolic definition of the word goat: “Sylvia is everybody’s goat, ready to unleash our wildest desires, potentially dissolving, or, at least, diminishing the ravaging effects of our gregarious, unhealthy regimented selves.” Zinman suggests that the use of the term “goat” could also refer to “scapegoat”: “The goat is wholly innocent, victimized by Martin’s obsessive love and Stevie’s murderous revenge.” Yet, in an advertisement created by The Philadelphia Theatre Company for their production, a picture of a goat “with a snapshot of the play’s characters hanging out of its mouth, suggesting that a goat, who will, notoriously, eat anything, has devoured this family alive,” suggests the personification of the goat and, thus, Sylvia’s own responsibility for the events that take place. In addition, the name Sylvia, Zinman argues, references Shakespeare’s pastoral vision in Two Gentlemen of Verona.
As stated by Esbjornson, The Goat is ultimately meant to be a tragedy. Even the set he and John Arnone collaborated on had columns to provide a “classical quality to it, a Greek-tragedy quality.” Zinman states, “In ancient Greek tragedy, the hero, at the height of his happiness, often complacent in his smooth fortunate life, undergoes a sudden reversal of fortunes.” Indeed, once Martin confesses his affair to Ross, his fate is no longer his own. According to Aristotle, he must then “‘fall from a great height,’” which Martin does; he is reduced from an award-winning architect to a mere sexual deviant. Whereas Martin acts more as a tragic hero, Ross, on the other hand, takes the place of the chorus “representing the vox populi and of setting the wheels of tragedy in motion.”
Albee thinks a play can be called political only if “…it makes people think differently enough about things so that their life alters including their politics.” In order to make a difference in a contemporary society so accustomed to debunking generally accepted restrictions, Albee had to “…go even further afield than Nabokov to find a taboo still standing.” In Zinman’s opinion, Albee’s view is that sexuality is “…more complex, far wider, deeper, and less governable than we generally think.” Albee’s use of bestiality is meant to parallel society’s view of homosexuality which “appear[s] normal by comparison.” Gainor furthers her argument by stating that it is through bestiality that Martin “literalizes his extremity of alienation and longing.” By experiencing prejudice for his own sexual proclivities, Martin must “accept his son’s desires with equanimity, applying his newly gained insights on dominant and marginal practices.”
In this way, Martin and Billy can seek to rebuild their relationship. Robinson writes of The Goat: “Albee’s play insists that it is about something beyond a domestic crisis that can be cordoned off and concealed from the world – though it is about that too. We see that the personal is political, yes, but also something more: that what is private about our lives only comes to have meaning as we enter the public sphere and this public sphere enters us.” Ultimately, as Robinson states, The Goat is meant to affect both the micro and macro levels of society in a way that encourages progressive thinking even in uncertain times. “
And on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, also from the EAS website; “George and Martha revel in the dissection of the truth and illusion that have kept them bound in their fiery marriage. The illusionary component of George and Martha’s relationship is best symbolized by their imaginary son. George, jarred by Martha’s breaking of their rule, decides to kill off or “exorcise” their son, thus explaining the significance of Act III’s title. Adler writes, “…George exorcises the child not only to kill the illusion and live in reality, but to destroy one reality—that in which he has failed to exercise the strength necessary to make the marriage creative even without children–and create a new reality to take its place. George, through mapping out for Nick and Honey the way to redirect their lives, achieves for Martha and himself a radical redirection of their own.” Unlike Martha and George who are universally acknowledged by critics as having married for love, Nick and Honey’s marriage was only initiated because of Honey’s pregnancy coupled by her father’s wealth. George tries to steer Nick and Honey away from the fate that he and Martha are currently battling: the use of illusion as a weapon against each other. Martha, too, as Hoorvash and Porgiv comment, “…senses that something is lacking, not merely in her marriage or her life, but also in the lives of everyone else.” Paolucci further asserts: “The younger couple mirror our own embarrassment and own public selves; Martha and George, our private anguish.” In an interview with Rakesh H. Solomon, Albee comments on George and Martha’s imaginary son as a metaphor for this profound discontentment: “There is a distinction between the death of a metaphor and the death of a real child. And the play for me is more touching and more chilling if it is the death of the metaphor.” George’s shattering of the illusion of his and Martha’s son is his answer to Martha’s desire for him to “…assert his strength” against her “…many masculine qualities…[which] feeds off of George’s emasculation.” The duality of George’s personality allows for a breadth of interpretations for actors. Albee comments: “‘Once you’ve played George in my play no other role with the possible exception of Hamlet will challenge you quite as much as far as magnitude of text, complexity of language and the challenge of working on many planes at the same time.’”
George and Martha’s inability to conceive also plays into the extended metaphor of Albee’s play, suggesting that “…sterility and fertility are simply metaphors for social stagnation and progress, respectively. George’s solution, rather, is closer to a religious one, which has always been part of the American ideology” Albee’s inspiration for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was the tumultuous state of American society during the 1960s. Dircks writes of Albee: “Albee saw an American society as sustaining itself on national illusions of prosperity and equality; here too, the situation demanded an honest confrontation of problems and a heightened state of communication.” Zinman, too, states, “Albee’s political and cultural agenda is woven into the characters’ preoccupations, and thus into the dialogue.” Thus, there can be no mistaking Albee’s allusion to George and Martha Washington, the first couple of the United States. Still, other critics attribute Albee’s inspiration to not just American politics but also to Virginia Woolf, herself, and her short story: “Lappin and Lapinova.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? remains an impactful script that speaks to universal conflicts each generation must face: Who are we? What do we represent? and What will our futures hold?”
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton
We men are co-created by the two great figures of our anima as informing, motivating, and shaping forces; that of our mothers and of our partners, in succession and in parallel and interdependent processes of becoming human.
Herein I offer both in juxtaposition, and the doubled chiaroscuro of these figures with each other and also relative to my nominative case self or persona as my own unconscious self which operates below the level of awareness, except in dreams, visions, ecstatic trance, and moments of oceanic supraconsciousness.
While I cannot inhabit, speak for, or interrogate the imaginal space of a woman, I can do so regarding the idea of woman which lives within me, offstage, but bearing historical narratives which unfold continuously in ways which may be defined and taxonomized.
What I am suggesting in this essay is that we may operate on our own unconscious selves by instrumentalizing the stories of which we are made.
Our mothers and our partners live in our mimetic spaces as archetypal figures and symbols, as idealizations of feminine beauty, but also as real women whom we have internalized in processes of self-construal, and as such can be explored as both myth and as history.
Here follow mine; do write your own personal histories of your unconscious self, for men of mothers and for women of fathers, and of the partners you have chosen to help in your self creation, whom we choose because they represent qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves.
I used the word juxtaposition for this method, in reference to Warhol’s misaligned portraits, Tristan Tzara’s poetry of collages, and the Cut-Up Method of William S. Burroughs, and also describe my method with the word chiaroscuro, a term from art history for the contrast of darkness and light which creates boundaries and interfaces which define form, such as the shape of a human soul.
First, stories of my mother as an origin and as legacies of history which may for some of us be imposed conditions of struggle as well as sources of nurturance and resilience.
As I wrote in my post of January 20 2025, On the Anniversary of My Mother’s Death; On a night of terrible windstorms and roaring gales, full of strange sounds both animal and unearthly in her Las Vegas neighborhood full of performers and celebrities from the casino shows and their exotic pets, of fragments of forgotten stories and conversations with the dead, my mother won her last struggle to free herself from the limits of her form, emerging from an outworn body as a transcendent and radiant being into the limitless possibilities of the Infinite unknown.
Wherever she may be, I hope there is laughter, joy, and dancing.
Dancing was the great joy of her life in retirement, teaching and her beloved students that of her professional life, and the company of her family and friends a joy always.
To all those who shared the journey of her life, I thank you and hope that in bringing joy to others you may also find your own such joys, whatever they may be.
The brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity is an immense sea of darkness, against which we have only the light we can give to each other.
May we all of us by our actions become such lights for each other, and find illumination, hope, and the redemptive power of love in those moments of exaltation offered by others.
These words I wrote five years ago on awakening from strange dreams to discover my mother had died, having come to help and spent some fine days with her in conversation.
In rereading my writings on this event I have come to realize it is a Defining Moment, one which I have interrogated only in terms of the trauma of death and the shape of grief process.
Years later in reflection, I am able to think of this also in terms of the joy my mother gave me and so very many others. I now have a quantitative measure of the half life of my heart as it transforms over time and my grief degrades like the forms we must all one day escape.
Like my father and myself, she was a high school English and Forensics teacher, and whenever students asked her if a thing was true or not, or asked for some pronouncement of interpretation of a book, current events, or political or religious ideologies, she held up her open hands and bounced them side to side, singing “Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not”. This was a demonstration of one of her Great Lessons, taken from a theatrical performance which included some of her students that toured America as The Reduced Shakespeare Company: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged Comedy; “We do not authorize truths, we question them. And there are no absolute truths.”
To this I wish to add; Your truths and mine will be different because we are, possessed by different histories and embedded in different informing, motivating, and shaping sources. This does not mean that one of us is right and the other is wrong, only that our uniqueness is born of different truths, both those written in our flesh and those we ourselves create.
Another such lesson regards the duty of witness and the sacred calling to pursue the truth; she would begin the first day of class each year with the story of how she asked questions about theology as a twelve year old girl in a private Catholic school until an enraged and brutally cruel nun, as they all seem to be, broke her finger with a ruler, whereupon she got up from her desk and walked out forever from the school and the Church; then she would hold up her crooked finger to the class and say; “We are not silent. We question, we demand proof, we take no authority at their word.”
To this I add, there is no just authority.
The great secret of power and authority, of force and control, is that without legitimacy it is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disbelief and disobedience. Therefore the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Such was her art of education, the bringing forth of truths, both those immanent in nature and written in our flesh and those we ourselves create, and of becoming human.
Who was she as a person, and a primary influence on me?
First, she was funny, imaginative, empathetic, insightful, compassionate, and fearless in her performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen and action in Solidarity and Resistance to systems of oppression.
I rode on her shoulders when we seized the Palace of Justice, headquarters of the city police and courts, in San Francisco in 1968, and held her hand in the front line on Bloody Thursday 1969 in Peoples Park Berkeley when the police opened fire on the student peace protest against the Occupation of Palestine and the state university system’s investments in Israeli war industries. We worked together in the Sanctuary and Anti-Apartheid Movements of the 1980’s and many other actions including the Liberation of Palestine and of Northern Ireland, that last being why she named my sister Erin, and she marched in protests until her final years, the very last in the 2017 Women’s March to save Roe Versus Wade and the right of bodily autonomy and to protest the inauguration of Traitor Trump and his capture of the state as a fascist theocratic patriarchy.
Her own personal joys included playing the piano as she had from childhood, Scrabble which we played together like I played chess with my father, playing bridge which she was quite good at and once won a Las Vegas championship tournament with a partner, and folk dancing which she learned at the wonderful Papa’s Taverna in Petaluma, Sunday gathering place of the Bay Area Greek community and venue for traveling musicians from Greece, and in retirement as a member of the Las Vegas Ethnic Express troupe which included show dancers and dance teachers from everywhere, who became some of her best friends with whom she traveled to Europe on dance tours. They danced at her 80th birthday party, which included a Flamenco performance by one of Spain’s greatest dancers.
She wrote jokes for comedians including Phyllis Diller, who served as a kind of alter ego of mom’s, a study of psychosomatic muteness from the childhood therapy journals and Soviet hospital records of Jerzy Kosinski which he had fictionalized as The Painted Bird, a master’s thesis on Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, mysterious books unnamed to me which she called potboilers and of which I know nothing else, and sold a short story she wrote about me, Little Bear Looks, to Maurice Sendak because I wanted to see it illustrated, which became a popular book and television series. Her full list of graduate studies included Biology, Psychology, and English Literature which she had switched to because “all the science jobs had Women Need Not Apply written on them in great big letters”. Always writing she was, and curious about everything. As a child I would ask her for stories with Oulipo-like parameters; she often spoke of my request “Tell me a story about an alligator, and make it rhyme.”
From her I learned to write, to organize political action, and to cook; she was a Chef of the French -Viennese cuisine of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire as a family legacy, an enthusiast of Greek and Russian cuisine, and of the wild game recipes passed down from my great grandmother Apollonia who was a hunting guide, often for expeditions which were like a royal procession and very grand. During my years as a teacher and counselor I used cooking as a reset activity to partition my work life from my personal life; chop things up, set fire to them, and eat them, and any lingering trauma from the day is consumed with them.
My love and receptivity for languages is a legacy from my mother and her family; here I must tell Apollonia’s story as told to me by my mother of how Jewish people saved our family, when no one else would, and without whom none of us would have ever lived.
Upon the docks of America arrived a nine year old girl, alone and without a penny to her name or a word of English. A Stranger, with no one waiting to meet her, no family, no friends, nothing. My maternal great grandmother Apollonia this was, with flaming red hair like my mother’s, whose family had put her on a ship to escape from Austria as their home burned, the sole survivor of her whole town so far as we now know.
She wandered the port of Seattle asking for help, in her five languages and in descending likelihood of recognition; French, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, and finally, in despair and fear that the reaction would be far worse than being abandoned to starve and freeze to death lost and alone among strangers, Yiddish.
This like a magic spell summoned a crowd, by happy chance not one armed with torches and axes. So a stranger was taken in and raised by Jewish people, a family of whom I know nothing, and thus our family’s survival is owed to the entire Jewish community, diaspora, and people.
This happened in 1873, year of the glorious Vienna World’s Fair but also the stock market crash in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War which began a twenty year Depression in Europe and the Jewish persecutions as they were blamed for it; also conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in their borderlands.
What, there was already a Jewish community in Washington State? In 1875 Bailey Gatzert became Mayor of Seattle; in 1892 he co-founded Seattle’s first synagogue, Ohaveth Shalom. So yes there was; and Apollonia was raised as a Jew by kind benefactors who adopted her.
Not that she was terribly conventional by the standards of her time, regardless of her identity.
She it was who owned her own rifles and horses by the age of sixteen when she began her career as a hunting guide, and died in the saddle at the age of 95, rifle in her hand, having shot the bear that attacked her horses and killed her. The Indians buried her like the Huns buried Attila, on her horse and with her rifle, like a warrior princess.
I was born within days of her death, and as with all ancestors I bear her onward, literally as DNA and the stories which possess us as the ghosts of other lives; incarnated truths written in our flesh. As a child I claimed to be her reincarnation, imaginative and filled with stories I experienced as memories as if I had lived them, until around sixth grade or age twelve I realized how absurd this idea was; certainly I identified with her, enchanted by all the Wild West stories and those of her adventures and safaris abroad. Through my twenties I sometimes introduced myself as the Chevalier d’Eon, infamous duellist and spy who like myself claimed to be the reincarnation of a grandmother.
Historical context and the fact that my ancestor in the maternal line knew Yiddish makes it possible that under Jewish law we are Jews, and as Apollonia had been raised as a member of the Jewish community and because of this was clearly Jewish by faith and culture if not by ancestry, though my mother never claimed so and moreover was a radical atheist who raised us with no religious traditions at all. In so doing the family faith she liberated herself from was Catholicism, an artifact of her Austrian paternal line who were exiles of the 1919 fall of the Hapsburg Empire after 600 years.
My mother’s speech was permeated with Yiddish words and phrases, a legacy of my maternal great grandmother; my maternal grandfather was the source of the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian, combined with the French-influenced sociolect Schönbrunner Deutsch of the imperial court. This was the home language of my mother’s family, though grandpa knew Latin, taught himself English, and to various degrees knew other languages of the Austrian Empire including Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, the Romance language Venetian and its Triestino dialect, and could speak Russian and Polish well enough to do business in their communities here in America.
As a teenager immersed in Holocaust literature while working through the trauma of a near death experience in Brazil the summer before high school, my execution by a police death squad while rescuing abandoned street children they were bounty hunting having been prevented by the Matadors, and conversations with my mother as she wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet medical records and childhood therapy journal of Jerzy Kosinski which he fictionalized as The Painted Bird, I once asked her directly, Are we Jews?
To this she replied; “Everyone is a Jew. Everyone is someone’s Jew, someone’s scapegoat, someone’s Other. The great task of becoming human is to embrace our uniqueness as we overcome our fear of otherness.”
I find this definition an interesting solution to the dilemma of the question of Jewish identity and the claims of ethnicity or being Jewish by maternal descent, or being Jewish by faith and culture as the Three Knots of the Infinite, of Torah, and of Israel.
So, who decides how we may think of ourselves, our histories, memories, and identities? How is membership and belonging conferred? And even if is to be ourselves alone, sovereign, self owned, and possibly self created, by what criterion shall we define our terms?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the defining act of becoming human, and the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
But this is not the end of such questions, and only a beginning; for identity is inherently ambiguous, relational, contingent, and a process in ceaseless motion as a chaotic system, an infinite Moebius Loop of being wherein we shift and change with the horizons of our imagination, the legacies of our history, and the stories we bear like warrior marks.
On this theme a final story for now; among my earliest memories is watching the burning cross my town set on fire on the front lawn of newlyweds, a Dutch Reformed Church man and a Swiss Calvinist girl, which the town was calling a mixed marriage because they were members of different churches, though both were white Protestants speaking forms of German. It was like a carnival; I asked a neighbor boy whom I often played with and who was running with a torch in his fist why they were setting fires and he said, grinning; “We’re punishing the bad people”.
Then I asked my mom, “Are they bad people?”
She said no, and pointed at the crowd with torches, “These are the bad people. And they are always our enemies, yours and mine.”
My next question was, “Why are they bad?”
And she forever simplified a complex set of issues for me with her answer; “Because they want to make everyone the same.”
So for the self chosen for me; now for the self I have chosen and created over time through my life partner, who now has a twin existence as she possesses her own life and also lives within me.
As I wrote in my post of October 18 2025, Why do we love? What is its purpose, and what do we mean when we say I love you? Thoughts In Celebration of My Partner Dolly McKay’s Birthday; What is this thing of rapture and despair, wonderful and terrible like immersion in the Infinite, more precious and fundamental to our humanity than any other, more dread than hope as a gift and curse which offers redemption and healing when all else fails, full of numinous powers of reimagination and transformation in the face of our nothingness, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world?
I write in reflection on the 70th birthday of my partner Dolly (Theresa) McKay today, with our parents now gone, though we still have our siblings, and primarily reliant on one another for connection to this world and the ongoing creation of meaning and value for ourselves as a sustaining function and a motivating and informing source in the performance of ourselves.
This year she has asked me to write our story, which I do now as context for my questioning of the meaning and purpose of love.
We have known each other our whole lives; our fathers grew up across the street from each other and attended the same schools as friends since childhood, and she, being four years older than myself, was my babysitter from when I was literally a baby. She tells the story of when my mother put me in her arms on my first day home after I was born with the words; “Want to hold him?”, and Dolly gathering me in asked; “Can I keep him?” I remember this moment, she an enormous orb of light, like a bodhisattva, who I reached for and who reached out to me in return, to gather me in, where all was luminous among infinite seas of being. This was the magic spell which bound us together; I believe I imprinted on her as mate bonding or recognition from this moment, in the way of wolves. Or as we constructed this event and the mystery of our relationship together from childhood, we recognized each other from our past lives together in a bond which survives death and rebirth, and like all love transcends the limits of our form.
Our first kiss was during a hayride in the snow in a wagon driven by her father with a tractor, in the winter of 1968 now fifty seven years ago; I was a very precocious eight and she twelve.
In the years that followed, during visits between our families on Christmas and summer vacations as my father moved us to California when I was two to teach high school and both my parents families were in Spokane Washington as well as their childhood friends like the McKays, we discovered that we shared the same dreams, literally, and together puzzled out a chronology for our backstory full of impossibly romantic imagined lives.
This was my first historical research project, identifying where and when things from dreams were real and in use, and my first writing project, a dual biography of past lives into antiquity; and whether real or imagined remains irrelevant, because it was real to us and instruments through which we created ourselves as we wished and chose to be.
By the time I was fourteen and she eighteen, I just before my first year of high school and she just graduated from hers, ours had become a grand romance; also a secret one, though the difference in our ages is nothing now. Such was our glorious Forbidden Romance, unfolding from and energized by a secret history of incarnations together across vast gulfs of time constructed from shared dreams. We saw each other, Dolly and I; and when this is true nothing else matters.
I count our anniversary from that summer of 1974, running amok together during the World’s Fair in Spokane just before my fateful trip to Brazil, and here we are still, she in her lair downstairs in the library doing the bureaucratic judo with some fifty different governments and negotiating their legal systems as a Regulatory Affairs Director with a job title of Strategist of Takeda, a three hundred year old Japanese pharmaceutical company, me in mine, maker of mischief that I am; in a home we built together and named Dollhouse Park because she wanted a park and moved a chair around the hills for days watching the sunset and the lights of the city to choose the best view. We can see the hills where we went on that hayride from here.
Fifty one years of love and partnership together, now. Glorious and strange, shaping each other here beyond the boundaries of our maps of becoming human, living in the blank and unknown places marked Here Be Dragons.
Who were we then? Dolly had begun her career as a professional musician playing the 1974 World’s Fair, having discovered that while piano recitals and competitions earned union scale in the symphony and a bit more for the occasional concert or television appearance, cocktail lounges paid well and hotels and cruise ships offered a free room with maid service and meals in the restaurant as well as lots of money. She had just lived her last year of high school in a private suite at the Davenport Hotel in Spokane with its stunning stained glass ceiling in the Peacock Lounge where she played piano, then went to Victoria British Columbia and lived at the Empress Victoria Hotel for two years, with a sailboat in the harbor for exploring. She spent the next decades playing grand hotels and cruise ships in Europe; the Princess and Norwegian Lines, the Harry’s New York Bars in Paris and Hamburg, and her favorite places to live, Bath England and a resort in Bavaria, as well as Vegas casinos, but before all of this hobnobbing with royalty and high living she was the girl who saw the film Lawrence of Arabia at the cinema and then went home and played the entire score from memory.
Of course the rapture of her beautiful music fired my imagination and captivated my soul. We shared interests in music, but also a general enthusiasm for learning; her best memory of high school was designing rockets for a moon lander others were building, mine being carried through the hallways on the shoulders of my fellow students during my first political action at the start of my Freshman year, a victorious school walkout and strike when the local church ordered the school counselor to lose all the signup sheets for my father’s Forensics class and debate team for asking inconvenient questions about Apartheid, which the walkout, staged during the week long visit of the state recertification team which had to pass the school to keep it open, forced the school to re-do. Where my father taught English, Drama, and Forensics and coached the debate and fencing clubs at our high school, and directed some of Edward Albee’s plays while I sat with them as a child listening to their conversations about theatre, hers ran an international engineering firm and built and raced classic cars as a hobby. While she played piano, I wrote poetry; she once expressed our intellectual differences this way; “Music is my native language; you think in words, I think in songs.”
Above all we both bore marks of strangeness and of otherness as survivors of death or near-death experiences, myself from a moment of awareness outside of time and a vision of multiple possible human futures during the most terrible incident of state terror since the Civil War, Bloody Thursday May 15 1969, at People’s Park Berkeley, when the police opened fire on a student protest over the University of California’s investments in Israeli war industries and complicity in the Occupation of Palestine, while I held my mother’s hand and a police grenade hurled me from my body and I stood outside of time and beheld myriads of possible human futures, she from being stabbed during a home invasion by an obsessed fan, a retarded fellow high school student who had developed a jealous fixation, and left for dead, hovering above her body til she chose to return, thereafter with awareness no longer limited to her form. Her thoughts can leap across the gap between the forms and minds of others and her own as both thoughts and feelings or telepathy and empathy, where mine do the same across time and possible futures or alternate realities. I’ve spoken with others who have returned from death, and there is nothing unusual in this opening of consciousness as an effect; death is nothing more or less terrible and wonderful than freedom from the limits of our form. As I said to my mother on returning from death as a child in her arms and visions of thousands of lives across millennia and our myriad possible futures; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but Awakening from an illusion.”
We returned from death with unique angles of view in an irrational and threatening universe whose meaning we struggled to make sensible and had fallen down the special rabbit hole of magic, vision, imagination, fantasy, Surrealism, myths and fairytales, all things occult, bizarre, and strange, the Addams Family with Gomez and Morticia our models as who we wanted to grow up to be, muy romantico and festooned with weapons, both forms of protection against a hostile universe we swore to face together back to back, and together developed interests in history and writing ourselves into it. This was a secret world we shared together, and secrets are a bond like no other. We imagined an enormous backstory of our romance as serial reincarnations together across centuries, from shared dreams; this was when I began to write, from the stories we used to shape each other, though it was my father’s Beatnik friend William S. Burroughs who taught me to write with his bizarre storytelling of an evening. And the vast scope and intricate mechanisms of history began to open for me as I researched details of our dreams and charted our course across, as Dracula phrases it in the film; “oceans of time”.
As to myself in the summer of 1974, my eighth grade had been spent devouring the works of Plato and Nietzsche, with Napoleon as my hero, in my second year of studying French at the high school, fifth year of Standard Cantonese and Japanese, and some months of learning conversational Portuguese for my upcoming trip to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games as the Northern California foil and saber champion in my age division, and as I had since the age of nine studying fencing and chess with my father and obsessively practicing martial arts, Chinese and some Japanese language and calligraphy, the game of Go, and in formal Zen study with my teacher, whom I called the Dragon. I also studied at a dojo nearer home with Al Moore, who taught Ed Parker’s Chinese Kenpo Karate and was a senior instructor in traditional jiu jitsu as well, and at fourteen I was awarded the third degree brown belt in Kenpo. Chinatown had become a community of refuge for me from the theocratic Reformed Church town I grew up in where my father taught high school, but I had also grown up among my beatnik-hippie parents circle of intellectuals, my father a director of underground theatre and my mother a political activist, and home was also Telegraph Avenue and Haight-Ashbury.
No recounting of my youth can be complete without mention of William S. Burroughs, family friend and a kind of unofficial uncle, and the bizarre stories he would tell of an evening; journeys to other realities, duels with chthonic beings, the art of curses, summoning and ritual magic. In short, precisely the same kind of imaginal world in which I lived, and through which I sought meaning in an Absurd and hostile universe. I still have the Tarot cards he gave me and taught me to shape reality with; I had asked him if the cards could tell the future, and he said; ”Tarot can do so much more than that; the true art is to create new futures, new selves, journey across alternate realities and timelines, break and recreate the rules.” Direct lines of transmission and successorship can be drawn from medieval ceremonial magic to Aleister Crowley to H.P. Lovecraft to Burroughs, and in a secondary line of transmission from Friedrich Nietzsche to Georges Bataille to Burroughs in another; and both from Burroughs to myself.
During the summer before my Sophomore year of high school I traveled to Spokane to find her, but she was gone, moved to Victoria though I learned this later from a letter. We did not meet again until the summer before my senior year, when I was seventeen, in Otter Crest Oregon, and again in Seattle the following summer after my graduation, and then in June 1989 for my father’s funeral in Spokane, that last between the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola ending in March 1988 where we broke the Apartheid regime and when we brought down the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
For the acts of our story which occurred after I began high school and she the grand adventures of her career as a diva and torch singer, I refer to my post of August 21 2025, A Cave of Stories: the Archeology of My Writing Space As An Imaginarium, in which I interrogated the idea of home as a memory palace space of reflection, serenity, refuge, and creativity in a world which can be quite terrible and offers few of any of these fine things, and also the functions of home as an instrument for creating ourselves and the kind of relationship we image as our best; Herein I interrogate and problematize how we construct identity through our material environment as instruments of our stories, histories, memories; in the case of the archeology of my writing space. Dolly has also asked me to tell the story of her and I, and I do so now in the context of this mimetic shell we have constructed for ourselves, our cottage Dollhouse Park.
Close by is a photo of her building a sandman; this was the summer before my senior year of high school, when I drove up to visit her when she was playing her regular summer gig at Otter Crest Oregon, at the time the hottest resort on the coast, and we built a sandman together and let the tide carry him out to sea, so that the tides would always bring us back together; I believe this magic has returned me from death many times since.
There are survivals I cannot account for any other way than through the magic of love. Once when on a ship in Indonesia, a traditional phinisi wooden sailcraft built by the Bugis tribe of Sulawesi, a type which still carries half the commercial freight in the region, a giant wave in a wild storm threw me off deck; I remember hitting the water, and nothing else til I woke up on a beach with tattooed guys poking me with a stick to see if I was dead. I was not lashed to anything that could float, had been unconscious and unable to swim; survival was impossible, yet I survived as I have more times than I can clearly recall. This was in the Mentawai Islands; I was ten hours sailing time to the port of Padaung on Sumatra and needed a sail to get there, and spent around two months building an oceanic proa or outrigger canoe with a sail designed like a windsurfing sail. Another bit of luck, that; being a castaway, but on an island full of people who knew how to build and sail boats.
We would find one another once again before our different currents carried us into strange seas for a long time, in Seattle the summer after my graduation from high school in 1978, myself 18 and university bound with a dream of becoming a member of the C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco, and having chosen the origins of evil as violence and power as my field of study as a scholar of psychology, literature, history, and philosophy which was to occupy me for the next ten years, she 22 and a career musician in Europe with a home in Bath England and while playing gigs living at her favorite resort in the Black Forest of Germany, the opulent Brenners Park-Hotel with the Villa Stefanie spa – my favorite in Baden-Baden is the quiet Hotel Belle Epoque, on Princess and Norwegian cruise ships, and in Paris within a short walk from the Opera and her gig playing Harry’s New York Bar. She can speak conversational French and some German as a result of years working the room gladhanding the glitterati during breaks at her gigs. Through her twenties and thirties Dolly was a kind of minor star in Europe, in a very rarefied and exclusive circuit of cocktail lounges, restaurants, clubs, and ballrooms, and once turned down a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon to retain artistic control of her own music.
When living out of suitcases on the road began to lose its charm, she returned home to Spokane.
Our home, Dollhouse Park, began when Dolly’s father sold the land she was living on in a mobile home out from under her to build a housing development, a somewhat extreme solution to the problem of adult children living at home. This of course was not the classic Failure to Launch, as she had lived on the road playing music for over twenty years before returning to go to university for the very first time, first to Gonzaga University where she studied Law and Engineering, where her father had founded the Engineering Advisory Group when he owned a multinational and had eighty engineers working for him, thereafter she went to Eastern Washington University in Cheney to study Chemical Geology which she taught while working on her Master’s, to work in mining, for which her field camp was at the MacKay School of Mining in Nevada where a distant relative once discovered the Comstock Silver Lode. And when the mines began closing she went into Regulatory Affairs at Spokane’s Hollister Stier Pharmaceuticals, a field which combines science and law; during which time she also studied Business Intelligence and Management at Harvard. Member of the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, is Dolly.
Between her family home and the old Jesuit monastery of Mount St. Michaels where her father Gene used to jog over and help in the bakery as a boy was a hill with a spectacular view of the city at night, across a wetlands and up a winding dirt road where a horse farm once stood. To this spot she brought a chair and watched the sun set for several days from different vantage points and angles of view, and then bought the hilltop, had a daylight basement dynamited out of the backside and concrete poured for the foundation, framed in steel I beams, and her mobile dragged over them and oriented just as she had chosen.
Then she had a detective track me down where I was teaching high school AP English in California, and called me. We had not spoken in over twelve years, since my father’s funeral in 1989; I had gone through yet another teacher credential program and returned to teaching to fulfill the terms of a vision I had in which she came to my classroom to claim me.
Much happened in the meanwhile; the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Second Intifada, the Siege of Sarajevo, the resistance of the Karen and Shan against the ethnic cleansing campaign of Myanmar, the defense of Kashmir and my studies of Sufism as a member of the Naqshbandi order, becoming a monk and Dream Navigator of the Kagyu Vajrayana order of Tibetan Buddhism and the Revolution in Nepal, the end of Apartheid, my trek across America by horseback as a counselor for teenage felons, the Zapatista movement, a pirate campaign to liberate enslaved sailors in the Indonesian Islands and South China Sea, learning the Raja Harimau or tiger style of silat among the Minangkabu people after being castaway in a storm on one of the Mentawai Islands and building an outrigger to sail to Sumatra, and so much more of which I am a witness of history.
The previous time I had spoken with Dolly was also by phone, after the funeral where we met again over ten years after our last adventures the summer after my graduation from high school. I was living in a two level Victorian brick house in Glen Ellen near Sonoma at the foot of Jack London State Park and next to the burned out derelict of the Chauvet Hotel, once the hideout of Machine Gun Kelly and a casino of Bugsy Siegel’s, and a port for the steamboats that ran up Sonoma Creek from the San Francisco Bay when it was a navigable waterway. My view was an open wild meadow along the creek where a gypsy would park his wagon over the winter, a real wooden wagon pulled by a donkey who brayed mournfully at night, and just upstream from the Old Mill.
Dolly called me just as a rascally opossum arrived on my kitchen counter to share my breakfast as he often did, quite uninvited, and impatient for the offering of leftovers I would put out on the deck, through eaves where my bats lived. He was sniffing my breakfast fry up as we said our hellos, and I turned from our conversation to yell at him “Get Out of Here!”
As she has told me, she thought I was yelling at her, and hung up.
The line went dead, and there was no caller id or callback on the old landline phones. I had no idea where in the world she was, only that she had reached out to me and believed herself rebuffed. But she was out there, somewhere, waiting for me to find her.
There were many other causes and reasons for what I chose to do next; first the death of my father, who took me to his theatrical rehearsals where I sat with him and Edward Albee listening to their conversations between director and author, taught me to fence and play chess, took me to martial arts lessons and brought me in to his theatricals of ceremonial magic staged with his Beatnik friend William S. Burroughs, was my high school Drama and Forensics teacher and debate and fencing coach, whose death was a life disruptive event, which left me wondering who I was without these things connected with my father which had shaped me, and who I was doing all this Forensics and martial arts teaching for.
Second, we had just brought down the Berlin Wall, and I thought; Why not bring down all the Walls, everywhere, my own most especially?
The third and final cause in this cascade of dominoes and the trigger event was the tragedy of the Dropped Call and missed connection; somewhere in this very large world, in which I had nothing and no one as anchorages from which to create meaning, love was waiting for me to find.
And for love we must dare anything.
So I found myself driving to work one day, with my lunch packed beside me, and in a moment of lightning bolt illumination, to use the Buddhist term, realized that I was literally living in Nietzsche’s Hell, that I was about to have the same day as I had beyond remembering, swallowed by the sameness and the Nothing. And I thought; Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this, and took a wrong turn, to the airport where I bought a continuous ticket for round the world travel. When the ticket agent asked where I wanted to go, I said the other side of the world.
I only discovered my destination was Kuala Lumpur Malaysia when I got off the plane, and was whisked away to the glittering business district where everyone was doing things I could have easily done at home in San Francisco if I wished. So I found a map of the bus routes, where all the roads ended in the Cameron Highlands, and decided to begin my journey there, doing what no one else was doing and where none dared go. I got off the bus at the end of the road, and walked into an unmapped jungle.
Thus began my Great Trek, wherein I crossed much of South Asia on foot and by sail, and after many adventures returned semi-permanently on the tenth anniversary of my journey, because of a vision which set forth the conditions I must meet to find Dolly; I had to be teaching high school again, which required classes and recertification, and she would come to my classroom to claim me. This she did nearly three years later in 2002.
Quite wily about her plan she was; she called out of nowhere for the first time in a decade and ended the conversation with; “I’m coming to San Francisco to visit a Jesuit priest who was my friend at Gonzaga. Would you like to meet for coffee?” Over coffee she told me; “Really I came to see you.”
Once I moved in we began rebuilding everything, and all of it is custom work now, but the Dollhouse, so named for her, began as a mobile home for a couple who had never lived together before though we had known each other our whole lives, with a lot of dreams and very little money with which to realize them. That last bit has changed in the past few years, long after Dollhouse Park was completed, and we did most of the work ourselves with whatever we could gather, though with crucial family help.
Her father drew the plans for the house; I drew the design for the landscape, and we hired out only the electrical box and the plumbing, with help from a number of her family’s employees, available because her brothers own Bullseye Amusements which they founded as a pinball arcade on their uncle Bob’s carnival as teenagers and now own over two thousand machines in casinos and bars in the Spokane area, and control the local gaming industry.
Our cottage is now a main house of three thousand square feet on two levels, with a 294 square foot Cat Tower of three 12 x 7 landings connecting the daylight basement with the main upper floor by two 7×3 flights of stairs, totaling 3,726 square feet counting the 432 sf Tiki Bar Deck, plus a 1280 square foot three bay garage with a shop and storage. This means that the Dollhouse is tiny, 5,206 sf if you count the 20×20 gazebo and garage as living space but not the greenhouse or two garden sheds, with just barely enough storage room for two people and our things, but I think the grounds are the finest private park in the city.
And nothing can surpass for us the stories of ours it holds, the hopes and dreams and visions of our lifelong romance and the histories of our struggles to make them real.
So it is that a boy who wanted to be Gomez writes in celebration of a girl who wanted to be Morticia, over fifty years after a Defining Moment of realization that we dream each other’s dreams.
Thus we come to the end of my comparative study of my mother and my partner as primary figures of my own internal archetypal woman, who lives submerged in the universal sea of consciousness and shapes my self-construal unseen but for dreams, poetic vision, and ecstatic trance, symbolic information about the universe which tells it how to organize like a hidden grammar of being, embedded into it everywhere and beyond the limits of time.
This Ibn Arabi called the alam al mythal, Coleridge the Primary Imagination, Jung the collective unconsciousness, John the Evangelist the Logos; and it is where we are forged and where we must seek our informing, motivating, and shaping forces as we instrumentalize them in self creation to seize control over our own evolution, who we are and may become, and question the paths before us among the infinite possibilities of becoming human.
To my mother and to my life partner Dolly I give thanks for their partnership in becoming human, for help negotiating the legacies of the past and opening the way to better futures, and in my life mission to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
Identities of Sex and Gender, a retrospective of my posts
March 8 2026 International Women’s Day: Interrogating the Idea of Woman and Identities of Sex and Gender As Performance Art and Revolutionary Struggle, Identities of Sex and Gender Part One of Four
March 9 2026 A Sorting Hat of One’s Own: A General Theory of Identities of Sex and Gender as Processes and Functions of Personality, Identities of Sex and Gender Part 2
October 18 2025 Why do we love? What is its purpose, and what do we mean when we say I love you? Thoughts In Celebration of My Partner Dolly McKay’s Birthday
March 22 2025 Creating Spaces of Refuge, Serenity, Beauty, and Reflection To Balance the Trauma, Grief, and Horror of the Criminal Trump Regime of White Supremacist Terror and Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror, His Performances of Tyranny In the White Man’s House As Atrocity Exhibits and Theatre of Cruelties, In This Year of the Fall of America and the Capture of the State As Vichy America Under the Fourth Reich: the Gardens at Dollhouse Park
In my previous journal entry in this series I provided a brief outline of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test as a tool of discovery and description of the processes of masculinity and femininity as interdependent aspects of a whole personality, in the context of gender identity and performance.
So we come to the final category of our interest here, sexual orientation. The most important thing to know about human sexuality as a dimension of experience is that it involves the whole person. Whereas a personality test can tell you who you are, and who others are or wish to represent themselves as, it cannot tell you who or what you desire. Desire remains ambiguous, and that is its great power as a force of liberation and autonomy.
The second is that desire is uncontrollable as the tides, an inherently anarchic and chaotic force of nature which is nonvolitional and for which we cannot be held responsible, unlike our actions toward others.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must claim our truths and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
In the mirror of our desires are revealed the truths of ourselves, and the infinite possibilities of becoming human. Herein I sing of glorious sins of rebellion against Authority, transgressions of the Forbidden, violations of normality, and subversions of imposed ideas of Virtue.
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.
As written by Audre Lorde in Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power; “”Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, ‘It feels right to me,’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding.”
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, lost causes and victories forgotten by the memory of the world, 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.
As I wrote in my post of March 13 2021, A Year of Quarantine in Retrospect;
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this schema three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity the Rashomon Gate of our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
Humans are naturally capable of unbounded pleasure, or are by nature “polymorphosly perverse” to use Freud’s delicious term, and are enculturated to be otherwise; we are shaped by sociohistorical forces in the sphere of gender identity and sexual orientation to deny our true nature. We are born saying Yes! to all pleasure and to life itself as Nietzsche teaches us, and are misshapen by history, society, and direct modeling by parents and peers as disfigurement of the soul to deny our true nature and perform the No! It is normality which is deviant, and from which misogyny, the system of Patriarchy inclusive of the institution of marriage which derives from that of slavery, and other destructive illnesses of the spirit arise, especially the drive to dominate and control others.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the violation of taboos, the transgression of the Forbidden, or the defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist and refuse to submit to, that we may become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits nor of fixed points of reference of any kind, nor do we dwell in and inhabit any kind of static gender or persona as masks through which we speak our truths, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities which dehumanize and make us into simulacra, or on the other hand a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, taxonomies, and divisions.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “Moments stolen from death are aIl we truly own. t’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life. We saw each other, Jean and I; and when this is true, nothing else matters.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the matrix of our bodies and our histories as material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
Judy Garland sings Somewhere Over the Rainbow – The Wizard of Oz
(Fyodor Dostoevsky references it as the doppelganger theme in The Crocodile, possibly the finest fictional interrogation of slavery written during the American Civil War, and in The Double, a direct reply to Gogol’s The Nose. Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Nabokov both reference it.)
I am writing about Nietzschean Affirmation, saying yes to the life force and to the whole of human existence, both the beautiful and the abominable, reading The Will to Power and Derrida’s essay about it, with hail tapping on my window, so I go out into the storm and welcome it. I take a picture of the year’s first crocuses in the hailstones. Now I am going in to say yes to a hot coffee. My dog follows, its too cold even for her.
Saying yes to seize the moment doesn’t mean you have to live there.
In my post of June 9 2021, Masquerade: Identities of Sex and Gender as Culture, Ethnicity, and Performance, I posed a question of how we discover who we want to become. As a joke I imagined a field guide and called it Queer Tribes, and How to Find Yours.
In clarification, truth telling, writing as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth, and the openness of my soul and witness of history, I am not a member of the constellation of identities which may be referred to as queer, and I cannot speak as their voice or from within the lived experience of their truths.
As a metaphor of otherness, the idea of queerness remains a powerful means of leveraging change through solidarity of action versus authorized identities and systems of oppression, and this is why I use it here. Those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh possess vast autonomizing forces and numinous potential for the envisionment, reimagination, and transformation of ourselves, humankind, and how we choose to be human together.
As Mary Oliver framed the question; “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
In the following paragraph I speculated about what such a work might involve; If I were designing an instrument for this purpose in terms of sexual orientation and identities of sex and gender, I would base the process not on any precut selection of labels or prescriptive authorization of identities like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, which involves both submission to authority and overdetermination as a limiting factor, but on descriptive taxonomy and a tool with which I am very familiar, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which could easily be modified for the discovery of identities of sex and gender.
How does that work? With nothing more than a change of emphasis in terms, though I’m sure diagnostic questions specific to sexual orientation and desire can be written for the purposes of finding oneself, viable partners, and communities where one belongs.
We must first define what we mean when we speak of identities of sex and gender. By gender I mean who you are; as identity a confluence of holistic and interdependent and evolving relations between all four categories of being, which include nature, thinking, feeling, and nurture, and as expression, social, cultural, and historical constructions of values and ideals of masculine and feminine beauty and gender roles as performances. By sex I mean biology and the morphology of our form including evolutionary influences, genetics, and hormones, and by sexual orientation I mean whom and what one desires, which can be influenced by both sex and gender but is determined by neither. Such identities are complex, layered, nuanced, and ambiguous, shifting and protean, as our identities of sex and gender shape each other as adaptive processes of change.
As I’ve often said, this is a primary ground of struggle, of life, growth, adaptation, and individuation, and the creation of ourselves as autonomous beings in revolution against authority and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and beauty, and idealizations of masculinity and femininity.
That the interplay of masculine and feminine signs of identity and modes of being is descriptively useful need not be determinative, but a space of free creative play.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Let us answer the question of who we are with grandeur and the frightening of the horses; let us claim, I am a Bringer of Chaos and Transformation, I am a Fulcrum of Change, I am the Revolution. And with Loki the Trickster let us say; “I am burdened with a glorious purpose”, that of self discovery and self creation.
If we are to map the topologies of identities of sex and gender as possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, we must consider as distinct classes the social and interpersonal sphere of action and relations or gender expression and in a limited sense sexual behavior, what one does, as opposed to sexual orientation, what one wants, which include as motivating, informing, and shaping forces authorized gender identities and role models offered us by history, society, and culture, which are arbitrary and ephemeral, and those of the intrapersonal, what one is, our processes of thinking and feeling, which arise from within us rather than being imposed from without, but which are then shaped and conditioned by role modeling and how we are treated, especially by our parents.
I say again, gender identity is an artifact of being, which is influenced by all four levels of self.
These dyadic forces of sex and gender function interdependently to create and shape the highly relational and context-determined thing we call our selves; a dance of potentialities as feminine anima and masculine animus, and our persona or the masks we wear.
For such a mapping system and wayfinding compass, I turn first to Jung’s magisterial work Psychological Types, and to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which was developed from it. It is a precision tool, which allows us to locate ourselves and others through our constellations of traits along the infinite Moebius Loop of human possibilities of sex and gender with predictive and explanatory power in terms of our relationships in romance, friendships, and work.
By direct word substitution of descriptors in the Jungian personality quadrants, we find a useful general theory of sexual and gender identity as a function of the interfaces between the bounded realms of biological determinants including genetics, neurotransmitters, and epigenetic or multigenerational historic legacies, and historical, cultural, and sociopolitical contexts which balances nature and nurture.
We begin at birth with sexual identity, which stands outside the system of personality but influences it, primarily through relative prenatal exposure to testosterone and estrogen in the intrapersonal sphere, which we can broadly think of as gender identity with awareness that identity is complex and nondeterminative, and dopamine and serotonin in the interpersonal sphere of gender performance. Everyone has degrees of both masculinity and femininity, just as a whole person possesses both a conscious self and an unconscious self which is of the opposite gender, our animus and anima. These anima-animus relations and processes are found at all four levels of being, of which we may or may not be aware and so have limited volitional control of or personal responsibility for, meaning that we cannot simply choose to be other than we are.
This means that any relationship is quadratic and includes our own relationship with our unconscious which is of the opposite gender from our conscious selves, our partner’s internal relations, our conscious relationship with our partner’s waking self, and our submerged unconscious relations of which we are not aware but which shape our conscious ones. Simple, no?
And we wonder why relationships can be laden with issues, when the answer is simple; relationships are complex because we are.
Jung’s primary layer of personality, mind, maps directly onto this dyadic anima-animus relation, and is a measure of masculinity or independent self construal, as Extroversion which includes dominance and assertiveness, and femininity or interdependent self construal, as Introversion or nurturance.
Masculine traits of Extroversion include Initiating, Active, Expressive, Gregarious, and Enthusiastic; the first two related to dominance and assertiveness, and the last three components of sociability.
Feminine traits of Introversion include Receiving, Contained, Intimate, Reflective, and Quiet.
This fundamental dichotomy is inborn and manifests in infants as preferences for attention, interests, and play; in boys for things and how they work as objects and motion, and in girls for human facial expressions and imaginative doll play.
Jung’s second layer of personality and the next to develop as a childhood stage of growth, energy, describes how we conceptualize the world and process information, a balance of feminine Intuitive and masculine Observant traits.
Masculine Observation involves part to whole reasoning, quantitative analysis, and how things work; logical-mathematical-mechanical cognition.
Jung’s third layer of personality, nature, describes how we make decisions and process emotions; here we have traits shaped most directly by hormonal factors, though hormones influence all three of our first layers of personality as developmental stages. Otherwise gender identity would be a function of this third layer, when it is a coevolutionary product of all four successive layers of personality. This area measures our Thinking, influenced by testosterone or masculinity, and our Feeling, influenced by estrogen or femininity.
Masculine Thinking traits influenced by testosterone include: decisive, focused, direct, logical-analytical, strategic thinkers, bold, competitive, excel at rule bound systems such as machines, math, and music.
Feminine Feeling traits influenced by estrogen include: holistic and contextual thinking, imaginative, superior at verbal skills and executive social skills like reading expressions, posture, gestures, and tone of voice; also nurturing, sympathetic, intuitive, and emotionally expressive.
In the fourth layer of personality, that of gender performance and expression or one’s strategic and tactical approach to life, relationships, and work; here we have traits shaped by acculturation and historical factors. This area measures our balance of structure versus spontaneity; our Perceiving, influenced by dopamine and corresponding to masculinity, and our Judging, influenced by serotonin and corresponding to femininity.
Masculine Perceiving or Prospecting traits influenced by dopamine include: seeking novelty, risk taking, spontaneity, curiosity, creativity, mental flexibility, optimism.
Feminine Judging traits influenced by serotonin include: calm, social, cautious, persistent, loyal, orderly, fond of rules and facts.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test gives us four categories of personality types, of four types each.
The Analyst Group contains the Architect (INTJ), Logician (INTP), Commander (ENTJ), and Debater (ENTP) types.
The Diplomat Group contains the Advocate (INFJ), Mediator (INFP), Protagonist (ENFJ), and Campaigner (ENFP) types.
The Sentinel Group contains the Logistician (ISTJ), Defender (ISFJ), Executive (ESTJ), and Consul (ESFJ) types.
The Explorer Group contains the Virtuoso (ISTP), Adventurer (ISFP), Entrepreneur (ESTP), and Entertainer (ESFP) types.
What does this look like in the context of real people? Here I will use myself as an example and case, for as written by Virginia Woolf; “If you cannot tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
I test as an ENFP or Campaigner; in my most primal layer of personality I am 65% Extrovert over 35% Introvert. This manifests in me as a love of risk and adventure, and a natural leadership and people-centeredness which has been useful in my professional career as a teacher and counselor. I instinctively and reflexively seek to dominate and seize power in any situation, even when consciously trying to keep myself in check as Extroversion favors competition over cooperation though my ideology construes this as a negative. My Extroversion also influences my idea of life as a game of transgression and chaos, to be played with creative freedom, improvisation, fearlessness, and a gourmet aesthetics which valorizes both the monstrous and the beautiful; you can count on me to ignore authority, change the rules of any game, delight in the violation of norms, and to play our games of human being, meaning, and value without any boundaries whatever.
I remain the boy who upon hearing the term Original Sin for the first time from a friend, said; “I’ll think of some new ones we can play, games of our very own.”
In the layer of Energy, how we direct our thoughts and passions, I am 83% Intuitive over 17% Observant, a balance enormously toward femininity. This means that I reason holistically and infer hidden relationships and patterns as a strength, that interpretation and qualitative analysis comes more easily than quantitative or mechanical tasks, and that I think outside the box and draw outside the lines, which makes me good at solving unknowns. On a team I’m the one you want as the fire brigade handling unforeseen issues, so long as I have a good forensic investigator for failure reconstruction and analysis at my right and a staff officer to handle logistics and planning at my left. I’m a natural at intelligence, strategy, and policy functions, investigations and putting puzzles together to make guesses about what the picture they make could mean and how to use it to achieve goals. This has been my role in my primary career of the last forty years as a revolutionary and hunter of fascists.
In the third layer of Nature, how we make decisions and process emotions, I am 92% Feeling and only 8% Thinking. This is an extreme score, statistically anomalous and my strongest personality trait; a preference for empathy and ungoverned passion. As an influence in relationships it makes me the caretaker of partnerships, and professionally I’m a natural at quickly reading people and profiling motives and intentions, sifting for truth, and assessing character. Combined as a multiplier with my No Boundaries preference and identity as a bringer of Chaos, it also makes me unpredictable, which has been very useful in games of revolutionary struggle and seizures of power.
In the fourth layer of personality, that of Tactics or one’s approach to life and work, I am 57% Prospecting and 43% Judging. This means my masculine/feminine balance in terms of gender performance and roles, the most outwardly visible part of oneself and the layer of being others interact with most often, is toward masculinity, and informs how I read to others as a system of signs.
To restate how I interpret my personality profile; both my intrapersonal gender identity and interpersonal gender performance as an observable external cueing system, the mask I wear in the social performance of myself, in my case controlled by my Extroversion and Prospecting traits in the first and fourth layers of personality, is masculine or animus, which makes my unconscious self, always a mirror image, feminine or anima, and comprised of the layers of personality which are internal and hidden, as reflected in my Intuitive and Feeling traits. I regard this as an achievement of integration and the work of finding balance and wholeness.
These two pairs of traits face Janus like as sides of a whole person in dynamic balance, and together form a quadratic personality type which can take 16 forms, which reflect and organize relative masculinity and femininity as adaptive processes.
As to type compatibility and the use of the MBTI system in sifting for partners, in general opposites attract in the first and fourth layers of personality, Introverts with Extroverts and Prospectors with Judges, dyadic masculine-feminine pairs and aspects of personality revealed in gender performance, and like aligns with or has no influence in the second and third layers, which are mainly concealed from public view and correspond to the unconscious.
The surfaces of ourselves and the masks we wear in our dances with others are but images and reflections moving atop a vast and bottomless sea, within whose chasms of darkness we are all interconnected.
And none of this tells you anything about the interdependent realm of love and desire as informing, motivating, and shaping sources which both act on us as their subject and through us as their figures and agents, though it tells us everything we need to know about what we would be like as a romantic partner, friend, colleague at work or comrade in action. A human being is a work of art shaped by such forces of our nature as well as history, like stone sculpted by the action of wind and water.
Insightful work in the influence of neurotransmitters on personality has been pioneered by Dr. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who built chemistry.com’s matching systems from her studies. Her schema, which modernizes and maps directly onto the Jungian theory of personality as I have described, dispenses with Jung’s first two categories, the Introvert/Extrovert primary layer and the Intuitive/Observant secondary layer, and yields a simple dominant and recessive binary personality type rather than the 16 types in the Myers-Briggs scale. This is why I am inclined to incorporate Fisher’s studies of hormone and neurotransmitter biochemistry into the Jungian model of personality and use her test as a quick reference tool in addition to the MBTI rather than a replacement; the Fisher model lacks predictive power because it is flawed. Personality is a developmental process which unfolds in stages as a child becomes a person, and if you ignore this and the first two stages of growth the results become unreliable. The Fisher model can be a useful tool for matching with partners using the test and essay together, if you don’t take it too seriously, but for a tool of self discovery I turn to the Myers-Briggs test.
Her Word Type study asked people to describe themselves in an essay for Chemistry.com and found the ten most common words each type used.
Explorers, Jung’s masculine Perceivers, used adventure most often, with the other ten in descending order being; venture, spontaneous, energy, new, fun, traveling, outgoing, passion, and active.
Builders, Jung’s feminine Judges, used family most often, then honesty, caring, moral, respect, loyal, trust, values, loving, and trustworthy.
Negotiators, Jung’s feminine Feelers, used passion most often, then real, heart, kind, sensitive, reader, sweet, learn, random, and empathetic.
Directors, Jung’s masculine Thinkers, used intelligent most often, then intellectual, debate, geek, nerd, ambition, driven, politics, challenging, and real.
Here you can take the Fisher Personality Type Test; read each statement and record the answer that best applies to you. Acronyms are Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree.
Scale 1
1. I find unpredictable situations exhilarating.
2. I do things on the spur of the moment.
3. I get bored when I have to do the same familiar things.
4. I have a very wide range of interests.
5. I am more optimistic than most people.
6.I am more creative than most people.
7. I am always looking for new experiences.
8.I am always doing new things.
9. I am more enthusiastic than most people.
10. I am willing to take risks to do what I want to do.
11. I get restless if I have to stay home for any length of time.
12.My friends would say I am very curious.
13. I have more energy than most people.
14. On my time off, I like to be free to do whatever looks fun.
Total
Scale 2
1.I think consistent routines keep life orderly and relaxing.
2. I consider and reconsider every option thoroughly before making a plan.
3. People should behave according to established standards of proper conduct.
4. I enjoy planning way ahead.
5. In general, I think it is important to follow rules.
6. Taking care of my possessions is a high priority for me.
7. My friends and family would say I have traditional values.
8. I tend to be meticulous in my duties.
9. I tend to be cautious, but not fearful.
10. People should behave in ways that are morally correct.
11. It is important to respect authority.
12. I would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends.
13. Long established customs need to be respected and preserved.
14. I like to work in a straightforward path toward completing the task.
Total
Scale 3
1. I understand complex machines easily.
2. I enjoy competitive conversations.
3. I am intrigued by rules and patterns that govern systems.
4. I am more analytical and logical than most people.
5. I pursue intellectual topics thoroughly and regularly.
6. I am able to solve problems without letting emotion get in the way.
7. I like to figure out how things work.
8. I am tough-minded.
9. Debating is a good way to match my wits with others.
10. I have no trouble making a choice, even when several alternatives seem equally good at first.
11. When I buy a new machine (like a camera, computer, or car) I want to know all of its technical features.
12. I like to avoid the nuances and say exactly what I mean.
13. I think it is important to be direct.
14. When making a decision, I like to stick to the facts rather than be swayed by people’s feelings.
Total
Scale 4
1. I like to get to know my friends deepest needs and feelings.
2. I highly value deep emotional intimacy in my relationships.
3. Regardless of what is logical, I generally listen to my heart when making important decisions.
4. I frequently catch myself daydreaming.
5. I can change my mind easily.
6. After watching an emotional film, I often still feel moved by it several hours later.
7. I vividly imagine both wonderful and horrible things happening to me.
8. I am very sensitive to people’s feelings and needs.
9. I often find myself getting lost in my thoughts during the day.
10.I feel emotions more deeply than most people.
11. I have a vivid imagination.
12. When I wake up from a vivid dream, it takes me a few seconds to return to reality.
13. When reading, I enjoy it when a writer takes a sidetrack to say something beautiful or meaningful.
14. I am very empathetic.
Scoring the test
0 for each SD, 1 for each D, 2 points for each A and three for SA. Add each section separately.
Scale 1 measures Masculinity as Dominance, the degree to which you are butch or an Explorer based on your Perceiving traits.
Scale 2 measures Femininity as Submissiveness, Judging traits or the degree to which you align with Fisher’s Builder personality type.
Scale 3 measures Masculinity as logical-mathematical-mechanical cognition, Thinking quadrant traits or what Fisher calls the Director personality type.
Scale 4 measures Femininity as linguistic-emotional-interpersonal cognition or Feeling traits on the Myers-Briggs scale which Fisher calls the Negotiator personality type.
The two top scores are your primary and secondary traits.
For further study of the idea of gender, I refer you to the works of Judith Butler; including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Undoing Gender, and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, and to those of Anne Fausto-Sterling; Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men.
The nature versus nurture debate can be explored in the oppositional works of Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine, and Human Diversity: Gender, Race, Class, and Genes by Charles Murray.
In histories, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century,
by Charles King.
In biography, Monsieur d’Eon Is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade by Gary Kates.
In fiction, we have Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joseph Cassara’s House of the Impossible Beauties, Jordy Rosenberg’s Confession of the Fox, and Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, by T. Fleischmann.
The Sorting Hat, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
What is a woman or a man, how are such identities constructed, and who decides?
On this International Woman’s Day, I am wondering how we define such a thing, and how our idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty shape our range of choices in the performance of ourselves.
I am thinking of these things in the context of a conversation in which a friend described the primary trauma of realizing they were imprisoned in a body whose sex did not match their gender, and in this vulnerable space was multiply attacked on grounds of falsely identifying as female in order to appropriate female spaces of performance.
It seems to me that our idea of trans personhood is a test of how we imagine the role of biology in regards to identity; trans exclusion reinforces and originates in a narrow definition of gender restricted to biology, and one which privileges signs and forms over hormones, the psyche, memory and history, and inner experience; this ignores social construction of identity entirely, and also perpetuates systemic inequalities and authorized identities of sex and gender.
Is biology destiny? I phrase the question in this way because of its historic role in women’s liberation movements, and because outlaws of sex and gender teach us something about how we become human and how we choose to be human together, as seizures of power wherein our forms and their narratives of authorized identity are imposed conditions of struggle.
Gender is always fluid, relational, ambiguous, and a ground of struggle. It is also, like sexual orientation, distinct from biological sex and not a spectrum with endpoint limits but an infinite Moebius Strip where we are born and exist everywhere at once as polymorphosly perverse beings, to use Freud’s delicious phrase, who say yes to life and to all pleasure; except where identity is chosen as seizure of power or imposed by other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
Freud was so right about humans being animals who are self aware as a primary conflict and a primary ground of struggle, and so wrong about the goal of growing up being control of our libido, our desires and imagination. And this is the great tragedy of our civilization; fear of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
To be an outcast is a terrible thing; but to be forced to create your own forms because you fit in no one else’s bottles can be a wonderful thing as well, though never an easy one.
Sartre described this with the phrase; ”We are condemned to be free,” in his 1946 lecture Existentialism Is A Humanism, and what this means is that in a universe empty of all meaning and value other than that which we ourselves create, we must balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of our total freedom.
In such a universe, free of imposed meaning and of purpose, all rules are arbitrary and can be changed, rules which are legacies of our histories and the fictional laws of false and unjust authorities, wherein all normalities are negotiable, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human may be pursued as our uniqueness through the reimagination and transformation of poetic vision and metaphorical truths.
Life is a performance art, and we all have one problem in common; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
This process of becoming human or 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.
Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
Our identities, including those of sex and gender, are literally masks; social constructs and artifacts of our process of adaptation and becoming human. Herein the primary shaping, informing, and motivating source is the interface between authority and autonomy as an unknown and unclaimed potential, a blank space of limitless possibilities of the reimagination of humankind, like the places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
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.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Our performance of identities of sex and gender is a theatre of possibilities, of negotiations and dances with normativity and the transgression of boundaries, of the questioning and reimagination of idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of self-creation as liberation and autonomous total freedom, a quest for our uniqueness and for the human transcendent, and of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
This need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As written by Amy M. Vaughn on the Surrealist site Babou691, in a brilliant interrogation of identity as performance art and of the boundaries of the Forbidden as interfaces of reimagination, transformation, and autonomy; “I love genderfuck. I love watching the disruption of enculturated norms, which is what genderfuck does to traditional notions of the male/female, masculine/feminine dichotomy.
While genderfuckery has had a place in both gay culture and, to a lesser extent, punk rock since the ’70s, it remained mostly underground until drag hit mainstream media. I am, of course, referring to RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR).
These days drag serves as an umbrella term for the work of several different types of performance artists. The most well-known of these are drag queens, who perform as women, and drag kings, who perform as men. Sometimes this traditional type of drag is campy, sometimes it’s realistic, but it’s always based on the idea of the gender binary—fucking with the binary, but still within it. Genderfuck rejects the binary, often aggressively, sometimes playfully, always purposefully.
I believe there may be something to gain from looking at these performative manipulations of gender though the ideas of the Surrealists of the early 20th century. The Surrealists saw themselves as a revolutionary cultural movement. Their goal was to free people from false and restrictive conceptions of reality. In other words, they wanted to disrupt enculturated norms. And their method was the juxtaposition of disparate entities with the intention of creating a surprising or startling effect.
I don’t think it’s too far a leap to say performative genderbending fits this approach. Whether we’re talking about overlaying feminine characteristics on a masculine form or vice versa, or combining the genders together in incongruous ways, done well, the effect is literally stunning.”
And RPDR has provided a platform for genderfuck, but because the goal of the competition is to find the “next drag superstar”—a person who can represent RuPaul’s polished, feminine brand to the world— genderfuck queens rarely excel. “May the best woman win,” has been one of the show’s catchphrases, repeated every episode until the current season. Now RuPaul says, “May the best drag queen win.” We could speculate that this change is due to the casting of the first ever trans contestant, though the point remains the same—RPDR is a safe space for gay males to express themselves through female impersonation.
Which is drag but not genderfuck.
However, something even more subversive has entered through the door that RPDR opened: The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, an “alternative drag competition” based on the principles of horror, filth, and glamour. And the Boulets’ stage is far more welcoming of genderfuck.
While drag has traditionally been dominated by gay men performing as women, genderfuck is not gender specific or sexual-orientation specific. Disasterina, on season two of Dragula, described himself as hetero-fluid and is married to a woman, while season three featured two AFAB contestants: Landon Cider, a lesbian drag king, and Hollow Eve, who identifies as nonbinary.
At this point, spelling out all of these distinctions seems more than a little cumbersome and like a whole lot of nunya bizness, as if these descriptions have no place in the discussion of genderfuck because genderfuck is beyond them. In fact, jabs at traditional drag culture are not rare on Dragula, as can be seen in Evah Destruction’s disposable razor bikini on her hirsute body, a look which would not have a place in RPDR.
The Surrealists believed that art could bring about revolutionary social change through the process of the Hegelian dialectic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If we examine the recent history of drag and genderfuck through this lens, while vastly simplified, it might look something like this: the thesis that there are two heteronormative genders was met with the antithesis of an artform superimposing one gender over another to provoke the surreal effect of juxtaposing opposites in order to startled people out of ingrained cultural constructs. The synthesis has been greater acceptance of gay male culture and freedom of expression. Worthy goals, no question.
The dialectic for genderfuck, which I see as following traditional drag to further the same and expanded goals, would also start with the thesis that there are two genders but it would add three sexual identities (gay, straight, and bi). The antithesis is the performance of multiple expressions of gender and sexuality, provoking the surreal effect, and leading to the synthesis of radical freedom of expression and an existence untethered to preconceived cultural definitions—gay, straight, or otherwise.”
“Real progress has been made through queer art in providing a surrealist antithesis to the idea of a gender dichotomy, and the result has been to guide mainstream culture toward not just tolerance or acceptance but celebration of gender differences.”
Was Judith Butler right when she wrote that; “All gender is a form of drag.”?
If so, is the idea of gender itself a falsification of ourselves?
If not, how does one account for idealizations of masculinity and femininity as imposed conditions of struggle and patriarchal systems of oppression?
My interest is in how such things create us as informing, motivating, and shaping forces, over vast epochs of time and as mimesis and performance.
If gender is a story, whose story is it?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Of the legacies of our history there are those we must escape, and those which must be kept, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Idealizations of Feminine Beauty in Performance of Identity: Ru Paul’s Drag Race: LaGanja’s Let’s Get Physical
Subversions of Idealizations of Masculinity and Femininity: The Boulet Brothers Dragula, Season 4 trailer
Here is my review of the book from 2018, when it was published:
One of the two best novels of 2018, House of the Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara is among the immortal classics of world literature, the books we’ll still be reading in a thousand years.
Joseph Cassara’s marvelous and beautiful debut novel must be accompanied by viewing the glorious celebration of our humanity which is the film Paris Is Burning, the primary source of the novel.
House of the Impossible Beauties is an investigation of idealized masculine and feminine beauty which poses fundamental questions regarding identity and the struggle for its ownership, the interplay of dreams and imagination with a sometimes cruel and unforgiving reality, and of the shaping forces of the families we have chosen and the ones imposed on us.
Under siege and on the stage; the profoundly human characters who inhabit this marginal realm are masters of negotiating the boundaries and interfaces between the Real and the Ideal, often discontiguous and filled with peril as seizures of power and revolutionary struggle versus authorized identities of sex and gender; herein are models of how to be human together and of challenging authorized versions of self, sometimes with life and death in the balance.
To be an Impossible Beauty; who cannot hear the siren call of this mad quest? Not the mere adoration of the Ideal, but its enactment. An Impossible Beauty; a title absolutely saturated in the whole Romantic project of the quest for the Ideal and its realization in the flesh and world of the senses, here especially referential to the poetry of Keats and also to Thomas Mann’s critique of Romanticism in Death in Venice.
Cassara’s work presents a communal, interdependant society as the medium in which we create ourselves and each other. Under siege from the forces of reaction, but within the community supportive and collaborative; mutualism here presented as a Platonic Republic. This image of an ideal society, praxis of his values of unconditional love and total freedom to choose the roles we will play, is equally important as his analysis of the performative nature of identity.
To whom are we responsible for who we are, if not ourselves? For whom are we responsible, if not one another?
Today we honor the heroes who helped secure freedom and equality for us all on this the 61st anniversary of Selma’s Bloody Sunday, when hundreds of Black citizens faced death and violence with none offered in return, a courageous stand of love against hate which will continue to inspire humankind for all eternity, a defiance of systemic and institutional racist terror and authoritarian repression of dissent, theft of citizenship by vote suppression, and re-enslavement through prison labor, a march of protest made simply to claim the power to exercise a hundred year old legal right and the most sacred duty of a citizen, the right to vote.
This was the turning point of the Civil Rights Movement, which like Gandhi’s Salt Tax protest exposed a corruptive and malign government of brutal force and the falsification of propaganda, lies, and false histories, for after this day the forces of white supremacy could never again claim a moral high ground nor conceal themselves within the legal and political structures they had infiltrated and subverted.
Sadly it remains a fight for liberty and equality today, as the heroes of Atlanta wage resistance struggle against a police state of white supremacist terror and repression of dissent, in the contest between democracy and tyranny brought into hideous relief by the plans of racist elites and the corrupt politicians who serve them to build a Cop City for the manufacture of police to replace the Klu Klux Klan as their primary enforcers and institutionalize the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor under the fig leaf of law and order.
This industrial production of force and control in a totalitarian society is the end result of the weaponization of fear in service to power by those who would enslave us.
No matter where you begin with Othering people, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
How does one lay siege to an unjust system and its fortress of state terror? First we must define the terms of struggle and control the narrative. Second comes the praxis of mass protests, general strikes, defunding tyranny and terror, isolation by Boycott, Sanction, and Divestiture, and other electoral and legislative actions. Third is Direct Action in all its forms, in this context especially the infiltration of the police and security services and the sabotage of their enforcement of authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Let us teach the enemies of liberty a simple truth; security is an illusion. There is no level of force which can protect us from each other without also destroying each other, our defining relationships, and our humanity.
The great secret of power and the use of force and violence is that it is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience.
The great secret of authority and legitimacy is that it is an illusion which fails when met with disbelief and questioning.
We each of us possess two powers which define our liberty, and cannot be taken from us; to disbelieve authority and to disobey in refusal to submit.
And when we do these things, we become Unconquered and able to liberate others as Living Autonomous Zones.
Resistance is victory.
As written by Jeff Martin and Jeff Amy in Huffpost , in an article entitled More Than 20 Charged With Terrorism In Atlanta ‘Cop City’ Protest:
The wooded area outside Atlanta has become a flashpoint of ongoing conflict between authorities and left-leaning protesters; “More than 20 people from around the country faced domestic terrorism charges Monday after dozens in black masks attacked the site of a police training center under construction in a wooded area outside Atlanta where one protester was killed in January.
The area has become the flashpoint of ongoing conflict between authorities and left-leaning protesters.
Flaming bottles and rocks were thrown at officers during a protest Sunday at “Cop City,” where 26-year-old environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, or “Tortuguita,” was shot to death by officers during a raid at a protest camp in January. Police have said that Tortuguita attacked them, a version that other activists have questioned.
Almost all of the 23 people arrested are from states across the U.S., while one is from Canada and another from France, police said Monday.
Like many protesters, Tortuguita was dedicated to preserving the environment, friends and family said, ideals that clashed with Atlanta’s hopes of building a $90 million Atlanta Public Safety Training Center meant to boost preparedness and morale after George Floyd’s death in 2020.
Now, authorities and young people are embroiled in a clash that appears to have little to do with other high-profile conflicts.
Protesters who oppose what detractors call “Cop City” run the gamut from more traditional environmental environmentalists to young, self-styled anarchists seeking clashes with what they see as an unjust society.
Defend the Atlanta Forest, a social media site used by members of the movement, said Monday on Twitter that those arrested were not violent agitators “but peaceful concert-goers who were nowhere near the demonstration.” A representative of a public-relations firm involved in the group’s events said that it could not immediately comment.
After “Tortuguita” was killed, demonstrations spread to downtown Atlanta. A police cruiser was set ablaze, rocks were thrown and fireworks were launched at a skyscraper that houses the Atlanta Police Foundation. Windows were shattered. The governor declared a state of emergency.
On Sunday, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum said at a midnight news conference, pieces of construction equipment were set on fire in what he called “a coordinated attack” at the site for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in DeKalb County.
Surveillance video released by police shows a piece of heavy equipment in flames. It was among several destroyed pieces of construction gear, police said.
Protesters also threw rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police, officials said. In addition, demonstrators tried to blind officers by shining green lasers into their eyes, and used tires and debris to block a road, the Georgia Department of Public Safety said Monday.
Officers used nonlethal enforcement methods to disperse the crowd and make arrests, Schierbaum said, causing “some minor discomfort.”
Along with classrooms and administrative buildings, the training center would include a shooting range, a driving course to practice chases and a “burn building” for firefighters to work on putting out fires. A “mock village” featuring a fake home, convenience store and nightclub would also be built for rehearsing raids.
Opponents have said that the site would be to practice “urban warfare,” and the 85-acre (34-hectare) training center would require cutting so many trees that it would be environmentally damaging.
Many activists also oppose spending millions on a police facility that would be surrounded by poor neighborhoods in a city with one of the nation’s highest degrees of inequality.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens has said that the site was cleared decades ago for a former state prison farm. He has said that it is filled with rubble and overgrown with invasive species, not hardwood trees. The mayor also has said that while the facility would be built on 85 acres, about 300 others would be preserved as public green space.
Many of those already accused of violence in connection with the training site protests are being charged with domestic terrorism, a felony that carries up to 35 years in prison. Those charges have prompted criticism from some that the state is being heavy-handed.
Lawmakers are considering classifying domestic terrorism as a serious violent felony. That means anyone convicted must serve their entire sentence, can’t be sentenced to probation as a first offender and can’t be paroled unless they have served at least 30 years in prison.
Meanwhile, more protests are planned in coming days, police said Monday.”
The heroes of this historic act of liberation generations ago in Selma, like those in Atlanta today, among them Martin Luther King and John Lewis, remain with us forever as totemic figures and guardian spirits of America and of revolutionary struggle throughout the world, and I honor and invoke them today for inspiration and guidance in the victories yet to be won.
Christopher Klein’s article in History describes the events of that day; “Nearly a century after the Confederacy’s guns fell silent, the racial legacies of slavery and Reconstruction continued to reverberate loudly throughout Alabama in 1965. Even the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 months earlier had done little in some parts of the state to ensure African Americans of the basic right to vote. Perhaps no place was Jim Crow’s grip tighter than in Dallas County, where African Americans made up more than half of the population, yet accounted for just 2 percent of registered voters.
For months, the efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to register black voters in the county seat of Selma had been thwarted. In January 1965, Martin Luther King Jr., came to the city and gave the backing of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) to the cause. Peaceful demonstrations in Selma and surrounding communities resulted in the arrests of thousands, including King, who wrote to the New York Times, “This is Selma, Alabama. There are more negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”
The rising racial tensions finally bubbled over into bloodshed in the nearby town of Marion on February 18, 1965, when state troopers clubbed protestors and fatally shot 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, an African American demonstrator trying to protect his mother, who was being struck by police.
In response, civil rights leaders planned to take their cause directly to Alabama Governor George Wallace on a 54-mile march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. Although Wallace ordered state troopers “to use whatever measures are necessary to prevent a march,” approximately 600 voting rights advocates set out from the Brown Chapel AME Church on Sunday, March 7. King, who had met with President Lyndon Johnson two days earlier to discuss voting rights legislation, remained back in Atlanta with his own congregation and planned to join the marchers en route the following day. By a coin flip, it was determined that Hosea Williams would represents the SCLC at the head of the march along with 25-year-old John Lewis, a SNCC chairman and future U.S. congressman from Georgia.
The demonstrators marched undisturbed through downtown Selma, where the ghosts of the past constantly permeated the present. As they began to cross the steel-arched bridge spanning the Alabama River, the marchers who gazed up could see the name of a Confederate general and reputed grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, Edmund Pettus, staring right back at them in big block letters emblazoned across the bridge’s crossbeam.
Once Williams and Lewis reached the crest of the bridge, they saw trouble on the other side. A wall of state troopers, wearing white helmets and slapping billy clubs in their hands, stretched across Route 80 at the base of the span. Behind them were deputies of county sheriff Jim Clark, some on horseback, and dozens of white spectators waving Confederate flags and giddily anticipating a showdown. Knowing a confrontation awaited, the marchers pressed on in a thin column down the bridge’s sidewalk until they stopped about 50 feet away from the authorities.
“It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march,” Major John Cloud called out from his bullhorn. “This is an unlawful assembly. You have to disperse, you are ordered to disperse. Go home or go to your church. This march will not continue.”
“Mr. Major,” replied Williams, “I would like to have a word, can we have a word?”
“I’ve got nothing further to say to you,” Cloud answered.
Williams and Lewis stood their ground at the front of the line. After a few moments, the troopers, with gas masks affixed to their faces and clubs at the ready, advanced. They pushed back Lewis and Williams. Then the troopers paced quickened. They knocked the marchers to the ground. They struck them with sticks. Clouds of tear gas mixed with the screams of terrified marchers and the cheers of reveling bystanders. Deputies on horseback charged ahead and chased the gasping men, women and children back over the bridge as they swung clubs, whips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. Although forced back, the protestors did not fight back.
Weeks earlier, King had scolded Life magazine photographer Flip Schulke for trying to assist protestors knocked to the ground by authorities instead of snapping away. “The world doesn’t know this happened because you didn’t photograph it,” King told Schulke, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Race Beat.” This time, however, television cameras captured the entire assault and transformed the local protest into a national civil rights event. It took hours for the film to be flown from Alabama to the television network headquarters in New York, but when it aired that night, Americans were appalled at the sights and sounds of “Bloody Sunday.”
Around 9:30 p.m., ABC newscaster Frank Reynolds interrupted the network’s broadcast of “Judgment at Nuremberg”—the star-studded movie that explored Nazi bigotry, war crimes and the moral culpability of those who followed orders and didn’t speak out against the Holocaust—to air the disturbing, newly arrived footage from Selma. Nearly 50 million Americans who had tuned into the film’s long-awaited television premier couldn’t escape the historical echoes of Nazi storm troopers in the scenes of the rampaging state troopers. “The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes,” wrote Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in “The Race Beat.”
The connection wasn’t lost in Selma, either. When his store was finally empty of customers, one local shopkeeper confided to Washington Star reporter Haynes Johnson about the city’s institutional racism, “Everybody knows it’s going on, but they try to pretend they don’t see it. I saw ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ on the Late Show the other night and I thought it fits right in; it’s just like Selma.”
Outrage at “Bloody Sunday” swept the country. Sympathizers staged sit-ins, traffic blockades and demonstrations in solidarity with the voting rights marchers. Some even traveled to Selma where two days later King attempted another march but, to the dismay of some demonstrators, turned back when troopers again blocked the highway at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Finally, after a federal court order permitted the protest, the voting rights marchers left Selma on March 21 under the protection of federalized National Guard troops. Four days later, they reached Montgomery with the crowd growing to 25,000 by the time they reached the capitol steps.
The events in Selma galvanized public opinion and mobilized Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson signed into law on August 6, 1965. Today, the bridge that served as the backdrop to “Bloody Sunday” still bears the name of a white supremacist, but now it is a symbolic civil rights landmark.”
Proof of Selma’s resilience as an informing and motivating source in the ongoing resistance to fascism and tyranny may be found in the words of one its leaders, John Lewis, who has given a life of service to America and to the cause of Liberty, and the massive voter turnout he helped inspire which has stunningly transformed the Democratic primaries this week and possibly changed the destiny of our nation and of humankind.
As Sanjana Karanth writes in Huffpost; “Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) made a surprise appearance at Sunday’s commemorative “Bloody Sunday” march in Selma, Alabama, urging attendees to use their right to vote “to redeem the soul of America.”
White Alabama state troopers fractured Lewis’ head when he was 25 years old on what became known as Bloody Sunday, when Lewis and several hundred other voting rights activists faced state-sanctioned violence for peacefully marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965.
The commemorative gathering honored the Selma protest and those who suffered in the fight to ensure voting rights for Black Americans.
“Fifty-five years ago, a few of God’s children attempted to march from Brown Chapel AME Church across this bridge,” Lewis, 80, said in a passionate speech on Sunday. “We were beaten, we were tear-gassed. I thought I was going to die on this bridge. But somehow and some way, God almighty helped me.”
The Georgia congressman’s remarks came as the Democratic primary ramps up, with South Carolina voting on Saturday and 14 additional states voting in the upcoming Super Tuesday primaries this week. Lewis used the moment of the primaries and the nature of the Selma march to encourage everyone to exercise their right to vote.
“We cannot give up now. We cannot give in. We must keep the faith, keep our eyes on the prize,” he said. “We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before.”
“Some people gave more than a little blood, some gave their very lives. So to each and every one of you, especially you young people … go out there,” he said. “Speak up, speak out. Get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”
Selma
The protestors needed sniper teams covering the bridge, for the horse cavalry. And if they opened ranks before the charging racist terror police, to reveal HMG emplacements, a barricade for grenadiers, and fire teams to support them and prevent flanking with point defense and to cover exfiltration of the bait from the killing zone the enemy had been lured into; but that would be a different story.
Maybe next time, friends; and there will always be a next time.
Historical Newsreel of the Crossing
Rev. Al on 60th anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday’: I think about the progress and the threat
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Raymond Arsenault, Mirron Willis (Narrator), Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. (Contributors)
As it turns out, some principles remain true regardless of scale; just as the most vulnerable part of any security system is its human element, which can be leveraged through social engineering, the human leadership of Homeland Security and its ICE white supremacist terror force is the key to its delegitimation and neutralization.
In Kristi Noem we have proof of concept, and as celebrations of her fall from power reverberate throughout our nation and the world, changing the future possibilities of our history, I am savoring the moment with relish.
There is nothing like a jest well played.
How did this come to be?
The Fall of the Dogkiller can be charted with precision; it begins with the utter and shameful defeat of the special terror force, its campaigns of ethnic cleansing and of the federal Occupation of our Sanctuary cities in repression of dissent, the second time we the People, among whom our Antifa direct action commando teams may be counted, have defeated in open battle the federal government of the United States within its contiguous boundaries since Little Bighorn, the first being the actions of the Black Lives Matter protests.
But the consequences of this sea change event are far more decisive in the continuing liberation struggle for the Restoration of America from the Fourth Reich of the Trump Regime. For the people organized in solidarity of action, formed new alliances, developed new tactics and strategies for countering ICE in the field, and created a national Resistance which was nonexistent before the ICE provocations. The state tested the limits of its power to compel and enforce obedience, and lost.
Lost publicly and decisively, which threatens the whole of the Trump Regime and its programme of the racialization of our society and the centralization of power to a totalitarian state.
The ICE murder of a white woman was the second and fatal blow, because it disrupted the white supremacist and nationalist pretext for the whole mission; Trump’s thugs are more of a threat to those in whose name he claims to act than the migrants they are hunting, and Republican support began to crumble like an avalanche.
Noem lost control of the narrative during her Congressional hearing, and all war is about who owns the story. Always there remains the struggle between the stories others tell about us, and those we tell about ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Trump sacrificed Noem, but this will not save him nor restore legitimacy to his regime.
Let us remember always that Noem acted not only as commander of a white supremacist terror force in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, but also ran the domestic side of two ongoing two front wars; the war on campus dissent which was the home front of the Trump-Netanyahu genocide of the Palestinians, and a pogram against Venezuelan migrants concealed within the broader ethnic cleansing campaign which is the home front of the undeclared imperial war to conquer Latin America beginning with Venezuela and Cuba. And for all of this we must bring a Reckoning.
What general principles of resistance, revolutionary struggle, and war can be drawn from the case of the Fall of the Dogkiller?
First, all war is theatre, and who controls the narrative wins.
Second, the goal of conflict is seizure or enforcement of power, and the relevant form of power as authority is constituted by its perceived legitimacy. To take their power, we must delegitimize authority through the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority by Disbelief and Disobedience. This is why revolutionary struggle has delegitimation of authority as its primary objective.
As written by Marina Dunbar in The Guardian, in an article entitled Minneapolis killings and deportation outrage: Kristi Noem’s scandal-plagued DHS tenure: Backlash grew against homeland security secretary after slew of controversies from Trump’s immigration crackdown; “Kristi Noem’s year-long tenure as homeland security secretary has been plagued by controversies as she led an aggressive immigration crackdown that hasprompted protests and lawsuits.
There have been scandals, legally dubious deportations condemned by human rights groups, taxpayer-funded publicity campaigns, and false claims about US citizens.
After she described two US citizens killed by immigration agents in Minneapolis as being involved in actions of “domestic terrorism” – assertions which independent analyses and state officials said the footage did not support – bipartisan pressure on her leadership mounted and public support plummeted.
Here’s a look back at some of the key moments in Noem’s controversial time as the head of DHS.
12 November 2024 – Trump selects Noem for homeland security
Then president-elect Donald Trump announced that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem would serve as homeland security secretary in his second administration. Trump selected Noem largely because of her hard-line positions on immigration and her loyalty to his agenda, including plans for large-scale deportations and tougher border enforcement. The choice was one of many signals that immigration enforcement would be a central focus of the administration’s national security strategy.
Earlier in 2024, Noem went on an ill-fated book tour, widely seen, at least at the time, as an audition to be Trump’s running mate. The memoir is now remembered mostly for her admission that she had shot and killed the family’s “untrainable” hunting dog, a 14-month-old wirehair pointer named Cricket.
January 2025 – Senate confirmation
Noem was confirmed by the Senate on 25 January by a 59–34 vote, with some bipartisan support. She was sworn in that same day and resigned as governor of South Dakota to take the position. Within days, she joined federal immigration enforcement operations, including raids targeting undocumented immigrants in New York.
Early 2025 – immigration crackdowns
One of Noem’s earliest policy moves was to rescind temporary protections for large groups of migrants. Her department moved to end an 18-month extension of temporary protected status for roughly 600,000 Venezuelans – a move which was later blocked by the courts. Noem later revoked legal protections for more than 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, who had entered under humanitarian programs.
April 2025 – deportation controversies
Major controversies emerged pretty much immediately into her tenure. Following the deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García, whom the Trump administration admitted was mistakenly sent to an El Salvador mega-prison, Noem said if Ábrego García was sent back to the US, the administration “would immediately deport him again”. García has since been in and out of ICE custody after returning to the US as the administration has repeatedly tried to deport him again, despite court rulings.
July 2025 – ICE presence grows
ICE continues to be a bigger and bigger presence across the US, becoming the unofficial blueprint for the Trump administration’s policies and approach to policing. The agency grew in numbers by promising new recruits $50,000 signing bonuses and pledges of patriotism. Noem faced further scandal when a report was published that revealed she had failed to disclose $80,000 she accepted while serving as South Dakota’s governor.
August 2025 – politics and pop culture
The TV comedy South Park shocked viewers with its critical depiction of the Trump administration, satirizing the incompetence of several members of the administration, not least Noem. An episode poked fun at her perceived penchant for killing dogs, racial profiling and cosmetic surgery. Noem responded by accusing the show of sexism. The show’s high ratings were seen as a sign of the public’s increasingly negative sentiment towards the administration’s mass deportation campaign.
September 2025 – inhumane conditions in Ice detention
Pressure continued to mount as several reports emerged that detailed the horrific conditions that detainees were forced to endure in ICE custody. A Guardian investigation found US immigration officials had been increasingly detaining people in small, secretive holding facilities for days or even weeks at a time in violation of federal policy. Outrage over the treatment of immigrants grew, with a total of 32 people having died in ICE custody by the end of 2025.
October 2025 – social media takeover
an ICE facility in Portland. Photograph: Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images
The Trump administration tried repeatedly to use social media and so-called “Maga influencers” to push their policies and popularize the deportation campaigns. In early October, Noem toured the ICE facility in Portland, accompanied by a trio of conservative influencers, one of many examples of right-leaning media figures given special access in exchange for more positive coverage. These attempts to normalize hardline immigration methods among younger audiences were met with moderate success, but not nearly enough to cancel out the growing unease and plummeting approval ratings.
January 2026 – Minneapolis shootings crisis
A turning point came early this year when immigration enforcement operations intensified to unprecedented degrees. During separate incidents in a crackdown in Minneapolis, immigration officers shot and killed two US citizens, 37-year-old local residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, triggering nationwide protests. Both had been protesting the ICE raids. Noem defended the officers and accused the two killed Americans of “domestic terrorism” , remarks that drew immediate backlash from Democrats and some Republicans who questioned her leadership and demanded investigations.
February 2026 – mounting investigations and bipartisan pressure
Noem appeared before Congress amid escalating scrutiny over enforcement tactics and departmental spending. Lawmakers questioned DHS leadership over the Minneapolis killings, agency oversight, and alleged obstruction of investigations. Several members of Congress began publicly calling for her resignation or removal.
By mid-February, it emerged Tricia McLaughlin, the homeland security department’s top spokesperson and one of the most visible defenders of the Trump administration’s deportation raids, was leaving.
March 2026 – $220m DHS advertising controversy
Yet another political scandal erupted over a $220m DHS advertising campaign for border security that prominently featured Noem in promotional material. Lawmakers from both parties questioned the contracting process and whether the campaign amounted to taxpayer-funded self-promotion. The controversy deepened when Trump said he had not approved the campaign, contradicting testimony that suggested he had been informed.
On 4 March, Noem appeared at a House judiciary committee oversight hearing and was asked about reports turmoil at the department and reports she had engaged in a personal relationship with Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager who was her senior adviser. Both are married.
Noem denied the reports and described them as “tabloid garbage”.
5 March 2026 – Trump fires Noem
By early March, tensions between the White House and Noem had escalated sharply, with Trump officially announcing her ousting on Truth Social, marking the first major personnel change of Trump’s second term. Trump said Noem “has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!)”, and that she would become special envoy for “the Shield of the Americas”, a security initiative Trump said he planned to announce over the weekend.
Trump also announced Markwayne Mullin, a Republican Oklahoma senator, would take over from Noem starting on 31 March, though Congress would need to vote to confirm the choice first.”
As I wrote in my post of May 19 2025, Beauty and Ugliness, Horror and Wonder, and the Limits of the Human: Case of the Kristi Noem Television Commerical For Homeland Security’s White Supremacist Terror; We are surprised now and again with the unlooked for juxtaposition of the beautiful, the ugly, and the strange, like a fiery chili heart in a Mexican candy on the side of wonderful surprises, or on the side of horrible surprises reaching out to hold a frightened comrade’s hand as the world shatters under artillery fire to discover its just the hand that’s left.
Yemen that last was, as Trump ordered the bombardment of our positions in the counter blockade of Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid to Palestine on March 19, exactly as had Biden last year. Tyranny has traded masks in our elections, but the abandonment of our principle of universal human rights has not changed, if it was ever true.
Ansar Allah’s glorious Resistance to our dehumanization and the depravity of an America which would buy the deaths of children with our taxes and conspire with Israel in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine in order to build a Riviera of casinos on their bones as Trump and Netanyahu together plot are become a chiaroscuro which defines us all, and the limits of the human.
I wish I could say that all things are equal to me in this regard, horror and wonder, ugliness and beauty, but its not true, or true only in moments when I am Most Sincerely Dead and my consciousness is free from the limits of our form.
For all that I have lived in this vast wilderness of unknowns, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and the limits of the human, through Rashomon Gate Events which destroy and create universes and possibilities of becoming human and fracture time like a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror, how little have I escaped the legacies of our history and the flags of my skin.
But the suffering of others remains greater than my own, and our duty of care for others compels me to do what I can to help, even when it is meaningless, when it is impossible, when it can change nothing. In the end this is what defines our humanity, and it is the greatest power in the universe.
Ours is an Absurd universe, and one wherein two contradictory things can both be true, in which the terror of our nothingness is balanced with the joy of total freedom.
While watching Benedict Cumberbatch’s beautiful Dr Strange on television, my partner Dolly and I were confronted serially by a loathsome box of evils in Kristi Noem’s advertisement for white supremacist state terror and ethnic cleansing now ongoing by the Department of Homeland Security she commands.
Her plastic mouth simulates human speech like a possessed Barbie doll, made of lies disguised as truths, diabolisms as virtues, an artificial and illusory beauty of surfaces which masks horrors like the justifications of our concentration camps for nonwhite people and political dissidents as security.
Security is an illusion, law serves power, order is theft, and there is no just Authority.
And really, Kristi, you’re as dark as some Mexicans and you poisoned your lips with botox to make them look like a black girl’s in the hope that you may deceive men into thinking them yummy, and you are leading the ethnic cleansing of America through your secret armies of police white supremacist terror? Is this because you think they will come for you last?
No one controls such forces, once they are set in motion.
Beneath the human mask of those who would enslave us and steal our souls, including all Republicans and any who voted for our Rapist In Chief, Nazi revivalist, and Russian agent Traitor Trump and his Theatre of Cruelty with all of his freaks and degenerate subhuman monstrosities of his regime of systems of oppression including theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, and amoral nihilistic capitalism in the grand strategic trinity of predation designed to transform us from persons to things that can be owned and fed as raw material into the machine of elite wealth and power and from citizens to subjects through processes of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization; beneath all of this lies the depravities and perversions of endless chasms of darkness, full of crawling things.
This is why the stench of putrefaction trails Kristi Noem and all minions of Our Clown of Terror, slaves of Moloch the Seducer and Demon of Lies, and wafts a poisonous sweet candy scent into the labyrinth of the Wilderness of Mirrors with its endless echoes and reflections of propaganda, conspiracy theories, lies and illusions, bizarro worlds and reversals of meaning, and alternate realities which trap the unwary with their siren songs; for all such apologists of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are zombified and hollowed out.
To be a Republican is to be like the Man of Worms in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer two part episode Whats My Line?, or Oogy Boogy Man in The Nightmare Before Christmas; a husk of human flesh utterly consumed by its own darkness and worn like a sock puppet by the horrors that possess it.
And remember, folks, you can always tell a Republican’s secret name; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.
What is to be done? As Lenin and Tolstoy asked with such different prescriptions, What is to be done?
As I wrote in my post of June 7 2025, A Battle For the Soul Of America and the Freedom of the World: ICE Versus The People; In the streets of Los Angeles and throughout Vichy America, the People rise in mass action and solidarity to do battle with Homeland Security’s army of occupation and white supremacist terror, ICE.
Is this not the beauty of human beings, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows? This is the primary act of becoming human which defines us, this refusal to submit to authority, or to betray our duty of care for others.
Here also is our victory, for who cannot be ruled or controlled, who disobeys and disbelieves the lies of those who would enslave us, becomes Unconquered and free, and this is a power that cannot be taken from us.
This is now the fifth time Trump has tried to terrorize America into submission through use of secret armies of federal occupation; and each of these previous campaigns of repression of dissent, which loosed looting, arson, and random violence under the direction of Homeland Security on our cities to delegitimize the Black Lives Mater protests and seize control of the narrative in service to the centralization of power and authority to the carceral state, each and every such action has failed.
The sole result of all of this state terror and repression of dissent was the defeat of the Homeland Security army in the Battle of Portland and the articles of surrender published by the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf and their joint declaration of New York, Seattle, and Portland as Autonomous Zones beyond control of the federal state. To my knowledge, we Antifa are the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle on ground within her borders since Little Bighorn.
We have been victorious over forces like that of ICE which the Trump regime sends against us now; it can be done, friends, and we all of us can do it again, here and now.
When the enemies of liberty come for us, as they always have and will, let them find not an America divided by propaganda of otherness and defeated by learned helplessness, abjection, and despair, but a United Humankind of Living Autonomous Zones and the Unconquered, citizens who refuse to become subjects, and a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights.
And if we all stand together and the circle is unbroken, we will be victorious.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2025, Resist ICE By Amy Means Necessary; If They Come For One Of Us, Let Them Be Met With All Of Us; If you see ICE agents, send up a general warning. Photograph and publish their identities. Track them to their lair, picket their homes, flash mob them, set false trails and load the sites they raid with protestors.
Never let police take anyone alone; they are both infiltrated by white supremacist terrorists and coordinating actions with them as deniable assets like the Oathkeepers, and states are now hiring bounty hunters with no security clearances or training and paying one thousand dollars per human deported, and that means anyone nonwhite, citizen or not, a policy which has hit the Native American Tribes as racist state terror.
One armed thug with or without a badge cannot abduct a target when three of us intervene; one hundred enforcers of racist state terror cannot overcome a thousand who Resist.
Men without badges, wearing masks, without warrants and who offer no rights of trial as we our guaranteed by our founding documents, who abduct people at random and send them to secret foreign prisons without probable cause or evidence of any kind, without Miranda rights or hearing the evidence against them in a court of law; such teams as ICE now employs are not police of any kind but extrajudicial crime syndicates of racist terror. Resist to the death abduction of yourself or others.
In the words of the character Mick Rory in Legends of Tomorrow, episode Turncoat; “You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re outcasts, misfits, and proud of it. If the enemy attacks in formation, we pop em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, we raid their camp in the night. And if they’re going to hang you, you fight dirty. And we never surrender.”
How shall we resist? By any means necessary, as Sartre wrote in his play of 1948 Dirty Hands, and was made famous by Malcolm X. All Resistance is War to the Knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
I am prepared at all times to fight to the death, but this does not mean taking unnecessary risks. One must study the possibilities like a problem in chess, have plans for everything you can imagine, and spring the trap only when it is properly set.
The first lesson of the Art of War is diversion and surprise; and the last lesson is the same as the first. On the modern battlefield any threat that can be seen or identified can be destroyed; so don’t tip your hand.
In the context of Resistance against ICE kidnapping teams, your enemy has military weapons, armor, and communications, and possibly some training; if Trump calls in the National Guard to support them as he has threatened today, they will unquestionably be trained to work as a team in ways far superior to that of any pickup team you may be able to put together, even if your team has better skills individually. This means you must avoid direct confrontation; you must be clever, unpredictable, strike anonymously from the shadows when the enemy is off guard and at their weakest in ways which cannot be countered, and never use the same trick twice.
Offer no target, give no warning, leave no trace.
Of course, you want to train as a team as much as possible, and as broadly as possible which among other things means cross training in each other’s disciplines.
This brings us to one of the crucial and decisive factors in any conflict; the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce such as Resistance, so the reaction must be part of its design if one is to use force to shape the future.
Another such principle is that in the Calculus of Fear, too little invites Chaos and social disorder, and too much galvanizes Resistance. I’d have thought the world would have learned this at Nanking, but its something tyrants never truly learn. People who have nothing left to lose are uncontrollable and dangerous, like ourselves.
Herein a word of caution; do not meet force with force, fear with fear, terror with terror. Leave evil to the evildoers. This I advise not as a moral principle, but as a strategic one when the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle include a nominally democratic state which may be brought into alignment with its constitutional ideals of the equality of all human beings under the law and of the co-ownership of the state by its citizens, through mass action, solidarity, and performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen: Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
The great secret of authority as power, force, and control is that it is hollow and brittle, and becomes meaningless without legitimacy.
The Fourth Reich and its figurehead Traitor Trump and the Party of Treason are counting on losing some of their enforcers to mob violence as a pretext for the occupation of America by federal troops under martial law, a trick they tried four times during the Black Lives Matter protests using police provocateurs and campaigns of arson, looting, and random violence to delegitimize the protests against racist police violence and seize the narrative. In this the enemy failed; during months of mass protests in over fifty cities throughout our nation, only one act of violence by anyone other than police and their co-conspirators happened, and that was when our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl returned fire when fired upon when confronting a motorcade of 600 armed fascists on August 29 2020 in Portland Oregon, and was assassinated by a police death squad days later.
The goal of authority in centralizing power is to win legitimacy, and our goal as revolutionaries is to delegitimize authority and seize the moral high ground. We now find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Gandhi versus the British Empire, and his very elegant solution which tipped the balance was the Salt Tax Protest, during which hundreds of nonresisting Indians were systematically beaten with clubs by police on camera and before the stage of history, reported to the world with the words; “The British Empire has lost any claim to the moral high ground in India.”
Always the question of the social use of force remains central to any action versus or interrogation of evil in its origins as fear, power, and force in recursive processes of the Wagnerian Ring of Power, and any seizures of power in liberation struggle against systems of oppression and unequal power and the state as embodied violence, especially under imposed conditions of struggle which include brutal repression of dissent and thought control by enforcers of the carceral state and its elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
This goal of delegitimation of authority does not override our duty of care for others; if a man kneels on another’s neck he is a murderer and we are obligated to stop him by any means necessary, and if a man points a gun at another let a hundred guns reply.
Everything devolves to fear, power, and force, a maelstrom which only love can free us from, and we who hunt monsters must be very careful not to become so ourselves. As Nietzsche warned; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
News of the Dogkiller on her Fall
Good riddance to Kristi Noem. Her replacement won’t be an improvement
March 19 2025 Tyrants Attack In Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
January 29 2024 Where Do We Go From Here? As the Gaza War Becomes A Great Powers Proxy War and a Theatre of World War Three, and the Arab-American Alliance With Our Colony Israel Versus the Iranian Dominion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen With Their Key Ally Russia Make A Wishbone of the Holy Land
January 23 2026 Liberty Versus the ICE White Supremacist Terror Force of the Fourth Reich In the Battle of Minneapolis: the Case of Liam Ramos and the Three Thousand Eight Hundred Stolen Children
June 12 2025 Why We Fight: Authorized Versus Chosen And Ambiguous National Identities As a Ground of Struggle, Symbolized By the Mexican Flag In the Battle of Los Angeles
April 17 2025 Trump Regime Tests Its Power to Violate the Constitution and Abduct and Imprison Without Cause Or Trial Any Random Person and All Of Us: Case of Kilmar Ábrego García
Torch of Liberty 