Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a show which questions and explores many of the issues which have defined my life; the origins of evil and the ambiguity and interdependence of good and evil, freedom and authorized identities, the use of social force as tyranny and as revolutionary struggle, the limits of what is human and the uses of our monstrosity in the embrace or denial of our nature, and the consequences of systems of oppression, structures of elite power, and hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness.
Before all else is Kiernan Shipka herself, magnificent in the role of Sabrina, a character written as a queer metaphor whose primary conflict as a dual natured being requires her to perform as both the White and Black Swans, which only the truly great can do whether on the stage or in life, in a myth of sexual power and identities of sex and gender as a ground of struggle.
A reimagination of the myth of Persephone in the context of that of Milton’s Lucifer and the Jewish creatrix Lilith with a side of Orpheus and Eurydice, and which stirs into the cauldron Dante, Marlowe’s Faust, Hawthorne, Poe, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Lovecraft, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible among a multitude of references, this show brings the themes of Romantic Idealism into the political context of our current era, that of #metoo, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Green New Deal, and the Restoration of America from tyranny and state terror, from the Patriarchal-white supremacist Fourth Reich, in which cruelty and mercy play for the soul of America and the future of humankind.
In America’s elections now and in the glorious liberation struggle of all her marvelous and diverse peoples and of the Democratic Party against a Republican Party captured by the Fourth Reich which has in turn captured the state, and most especially our liberation struggle versus patriarchy and theocratic sexual terror and the enslavement, commodification, and dehumanization of women as systems of oppression, ongoing now for two thousand seven hundred years since the Hanging of the Maids in Homeric poetry, we live as witnesses and every single human now living as combatants in this historic and civilizational moment of Reckoning and change.
Why do I love this show, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, to the extent that I have watched it through entirely six times now, falling asleep to its songs of freedom and seizures of power?
The answer lies in Kiernan Shipka’s slyly subversive smile; it is a brilliant satire which swallows whole and transforms our horrific histories of the witch trials and persecutions of otherness, referencing the bizarre witchhunting manuals the Malleus Maleficarum and the Daemonologie, and alluding to the Holocaust and the legacies of slavery, and transforms its meaning into a call to resistance and an empowerment of autonomy.
A densely layered system of signs appropriated from both high and pop culture, like the films of Andy Warhol which valorize the ordinary and the excluded, in celebration of the beauty of the disfigured and the reviled, and of violations of normality and transgressions of the Forbidden, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a savage and relentless engagement with the forces of Patriarchy and a subversion of heteronormative narratives, which can be equally applied to divisions of race, faith, and nationality.
From the very first, this cinematic interrogation and reimagination of western civilization unfolds its themes with the statement; “The Devil won’t give you both power and freedom. He’s a man.” And from this moment, it had my full and rapt attention.
To put the case plainly; Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is our civilizations greatest artistic response to the rise of global fascism, and America’s most glorious Antifascist film after Inglorious Basterds.
Of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina criticism, Dany Prince’s thesis which discusses the first season remains among the finest and most relevant, which I amplify here:
“#MeToo and the Witching Hour: Contemporary Feminist Discourse on the Representation of Witchcraft in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, by Dany Prince.
In recent years, contemporary cinema, and even graphic novels and comics books, related to witches and the occult have challenged how we view the feminine body, particularly through the rise of movements like #MeToo. For example, in the 2013 season of American Horror Story, the popular show tackles issues surrounding witchcraft and interpersonal female relationships in Coven, and, two years later, director Robert Eggers once again revisits the witch and her bodily autonomy in the art house film, The Witch. For both narratives, the body of the female witch serves as a vehicle through which femininity and feminine sexuality becomes celebrated through occult forces but demonized patriarchal influences, institutions, and characters. Since the body of the witch resists signification, characters and social institutions that succumb to patriarchal influences cannot understand this celebration of the feminine and feminine sexuality. As compelling as these examples of popular culture’s fascination with witches are as visual narratives, Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, or Sabrina, challenges and creates new discourse on what sort of bodily autonomy a witch, and a teenage witch no less, holds. The entirety of Part 1 of the series revolves around Sabrina’s right to say no and her right to say yes, should the time come.
Since Jack Halberstam’s foundational analysis of the slippery signification of the vampire and other gothic monsters, Gothic scholars have analyzed the figure of the vampire, a “technology of monstrosity” as Halberstam argues, as a metaphor for a wide range of cultural and sociopolitical anxieties. Halberstam writes in their book Skin Shows that “technologies of monstrosity are always also technologies of sex. I want to plug monstrosity and gothicization into Foucault’s ‘great surface network’ of sexuality in which ‘the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances are linked to one another in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power’” (Foucault qtd. in Halberstam 88, 89). The witch also becomes a similar technology of monstrosity and sex through its deep connection to the Earth and representation of hypersexuality in every cinematic representation of the witch in popular culture. Monica Germana’s research on the Gothic figure of the madwoman and the witch in her book suggests that “the madwoman may also, just like the sorceress, become the victimised instrument of [the] conservative agenda, exposed as Shoshana Felman suggests, by the pervasive cultural affiliation of madness and women” (Germana 67). The witch and the culture of madness has become so intrinsically linked with one another that it’s almost impossible to separate the two. The body of the witch is one that inherently resists signification and acts out against political attempts to subjugate and suppress women’s sexuality through the gender binary, patriarchal, and heterosexist restrictions that have historically been imposed upon, not only women’s bodies, but queer bodies as well.
In this thesis, I want to emphasize how The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina works with the body of the witch and the mythological tropes of the Mother, Maiden, and Crone in a sexualized sense. These elements come together in the form of the witch’s body to make her body and the idea of the witch a patriarchal and socio-political nightmare. Throughout Part 1 of Sabrina, the creative team politicizes the witch’s body to reflect the current sociocultural and political anxieties with the after effects of the #MeToo and #BelieveHer movements while challenging perceptions of toxic masculinity with the inclusion of Harvey Winkle and juxtaposing him with imposing patriarchal figures, like the Dark Lord and Father Blackwood.
While most of the criticism surrounding Part 1 of Sabrina remain positive, some critics do have negative impressions of the show. Willa Paskin for Slate.com acknowledges the progressive movements that Sabrina makes by likening the series with CW’s other witch show, Charmed. Both Sabrina and Charmed are remakes of popular 90s television shows, but with different twists. For example, Charmed has three Latina sisters in place of three white sisters and focuses on issues on consent in the first episode and Sabrina focuses on issues of bodily autonomy and consent throughout the entire series. While Paskin acknowledges these progressive perspectives from both CW shows, Paskin does not acknowledge the parts of the show that make it a success, such as its commentary on current socio-political issues like consent and sexual assault. Paskin writes that the show tries “to be the moody, teen-tastic interpretations of [the original Sabrina series]” and that the only thing compelling about the show “to make [Paskin] watch it is . . . a compelling teen romance” (Paskin par. 6 and 7). Paskin argues further that this redeeming part of Sabrina is not so redeemable, that Harvey and Sabrina’s relationship is “incredibly boring, a total narrative dead end” (Paskin, par.7).
Other critics, like Rolling Stone’s critic, Rob Sheffield, acknowledges that “the optimism of the 1970s or 1990s versions [of Sabrina] would look absurd now. This is Resistance Sabrina” (Sheffield, par. 7). For Sheffield, Resistance Sabrina is a “darker show for darker times” (Sheffield, par. 7). While the figures of Hilda and Zelda are feminist figures that raise Sabrina to challenge authority, the ultimate authority is the Dark Lord and Father Blackwood, who throw their weight around and use their endless authority to manipulate the women around them. As a response to these patriarchal figures, Sabrina effectively challenges these deep seated sociopolitical issues that keep arising as contemporary society progresses. Even with the inclusion of Susie Putnam (who is later known as Theo), Sabrina retains this progressive outlook since this is one of the only shows that actively shows a gender non-conforming character who will later become trans. Throughout Sabrina, the show challenges and juxtaposes toxic masculinity with what masculinity ought to be. For example, the characters of the jocks that endlessly tease and bully Susie throughout the first season are perfect examples of how toxic masculinity affects boys at the teenage level, teasing her about being a “dyke,” but then the creators give the audience Harvey Winkle, who takes his time with Sabrina, making sure that everything that they do that is sexually charged comes with her express consent. Witchcraft and Satanism simply become metaphors of oppression and the strategies through which these issues of oppression with a character that challenges everything about these institutionalized systems, like the Church and even the school board.
The first episode, “October Country,” opens with Sabrina and her aunties, Zelda and Hilda, preparing for Sabrina’s dark baptism as per the tradition of the Greendale coven. Throughout the first episode, Sabrina reveals her uncertainties to her aunties, who then arrange a meeting with the series’ primary antagonist, Father Faustus Blackwood, who tells Sabrina that she will retain free will in conjunction with unlimited power and a delayed aging process. The dark baptism is a ritual that every witch in the Church of Night undergoes on their sixteenth birthday. The ritual requires that the witch enters the woods at midnight, the High Priest ritually cutting open their palm, and the witch then signing their name in the Book of the Beast. By signing their name in the Book of the Beast, the witch agrees to “obey without question any order [they] may receive from the Dark Lord or any authority figure He has placed over [them]. In signing his Book, the Book of the Beast, [they] swear to give [their] mind, body, and soul unreservedly to the furtherance of the designs of the Lord Satan” (00:44:53), but in the first episode, Father Blackwood tells Sabrina that she will retain her free will after she signs her name into the Book of the Beast. Since these instructions are a direct contradiction to what Father Blackwood tells Sabrina earlier on in the episode, she shakily flees from her dark baptism where she makes her final stand against the coven and firmly states that her “name is Sabrina Spellman and [she] will not sign it away” (00:47:59).
The first episode of Sabrina emphasizes the Dark Lord’s decision to charge Sabrina with breach of promise. As stated in the series, the concept of a Breach of Promise is a rather antiquated offense. Both in the series and in North American society, Breach of Promise often refers to a woman that is entering a marriage that ends up breaking this promise. If a woman does this, she may be sued by the person that had their promise broken.[1] In Chapter Four of Sabrina, the Dark Lord sues Sabrina Spellman for this exact purpose, which Angie Dahl suggests is a type of victim blaming and slut shaming language that echoes courtroom sexual assault cases (Dahl, par. 7). As more and more sexual assault trials, like Brock Turner, Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., and so many more come up time and time again, the victim blaming rhetoric is one that gets used all too frequently. Victims of sexual assault are interrogated with questions like “what were you wearing?” or “that punishment was a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action” (as seen in Michele Dauber’s tweet) or statements like “sexual assault victims are lying about their assaults.” These statements are ones that victims hear daily, so when we hear Father Blackwood ridicule Sabrina for “wearing, of all things, a wedding dress” (00:19:70), which becomes an intelligent metaphor. By highlighting the fact that Sabrina was wearing her mother’s wedding dress to the Dark Baptism, Father Blackwood’s statement so clearly echoes the criticisms that victims of sexual assault and abuse endure in a court of law: that their choice of clothing made the victims responsible for the actions of their attacker. Dahl also points out in her online review that this language echoes the language that is used by defendants when their abuser is their husband, their girlfriend, their father, and so forth. Dahl further states that “Blackwood suggests that Sabrina’s dress made a promise on her behalf, and the Dark Lord was merely responding to it; Sabrina led on Satan with her outfit” (Dahl sec. 2, par. 3). Blackwood essentially claims that Sabrina is subject to the punishments of the Unholy Court since her initial, willing plan was to consent to writing her name in the Book of the Beast.
By shaming Sabrina publicly through trial, Father Blackwood attempts to make her subservient to his and the Dark Lord’s wishes. Fortunately for Sabrina, she hires the infamous lawyer, Daniel Webster, to dance with the devil once again and beat him at his own game.[2] Even prior to the beginning of the trial, Father Blackwood meets with Zelda, not even Sabrina herself, and states that “the Dark Lord is not without mercy. But he’ll require total submission from [Sabrina]” (00:10:12). Father Blackwood’s language is imperative because it reiterates the idea that should Sabrina sign her name away, she will not possess free will, no matter what. Dahl states that Father Blackwood’s language here is not only archaic, but it also reinforces the idea that Sabrina’s body, that Sabrina’s free will is something that the Dark Lord is entitled to. This happens again when Blackwood says that “when the accused [Sabrina] is confirmed guilty, not only will she abandon her mortal life immediately, but upon her death, she shall burn for 333 years in the Pit, as his pleasure demands” (00:17:00). Since Father Blackwood likens Sabrina and the Dark Lord to the metaphor of bride and groom, the language of this episode becomes increasingly troubling since it echoes the sentiment that the Dark Lord is entitled to Sabrina’s free will and her body, which is a phrase that becomes all too real for female and queer viewers of the show, but also links back to the gothic idea that a witch, and a teen witch no less, is a feminine body that is “unregulated and unsettling” (Pulliam 147).
Jane Pulliam argues that when young women, like Sabrina, are forced into these subservient spaces and highly restrictive gender roles, they typically will not openly defy authority but instead ‘defrock’ authority and do what they wish to within reason. The example that Pulliam uses are two characters, Grace and Deborah, that are a part of the highly restrictive Puritan communities. For characters like Grace and Deborah, they claim that they are witches since women in these communities are subservient and less intelligent than men and therefore easily manipulated by Satan, but in contrast to these characters, we have Sabrina. The moment that Father Blackwood reveals he has lied to Sabrina about her free will, all that authority and trust she places in him gets stripped away and she openly defies his, and the Dark Lord’s authority. She refuses to be tricked by the Devil.
When Father Blackwood says “as [the Dark Lord’s] pleasure demands,” his belief echoes that of incels, or involuntary celibate, and that Sabrina’s body and existence belongs wholly to the Dark Lord. Incels and incel rhetoric is something is rapidly growing and their mission statement goes back to Elliot Rodger, who posted online what is now called “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution.” Men like Christopher Cleary, Alek Minassian, and Elliot Rodger write phrases like “[we] will slaughter every single spoiled stuck-up blonde slut. You will finally see [who’s] the superior one. The true alpha male” (The Fifth Estate, par. 3 and 19). Even in advertisements from the 1950s that resurface as “memes” or purely aesthetics from an era long past show women crying over burnt dinners or women bent over the laps of men with his hand raised above her backside as punishment for not “store-testing fresher coffee.” The subjugation of women is a longstanding issue and these advertisements, which are not only prevalent in the 1950s but today in some cases as well, perpetuate the idea that men are naturally superior and therefore entitled to women’s bodies, regardless of if they say no or yes. In the patriarchal mindset, women that say no are considered a challenge that needs to be conquered and women that say yes are considered too easy.
For Sabrina, she is thoroughly shamed by, not only Father Blackwood with his inquisition, but by the entirety of the coven that attends her trial. As Sabrina awaits her sentencing, the crowd jeers at her and calls her a “tramp” or “guilty,” effectively furthering the shame that Sabrina endures. While the episode ends with Sabrina winning her case, her freedom comes at the hands of the False God, under whose name she was baptized. Even though she wins her trial, she only wins because the court acknowledges the claim on her life and body by another patriarchal figure. The court still refuses to acknowledge that Sabrina holds the right to say no.
Similarly, we can see this in the costuming choices from Chapter 2, “The Dark Baptism.” For Sabrina’s birthday, Zelda and Hilda dress her up in her mother’s wedding gown, which immediately turns black as the trio enters the grove where the baptism takes place. Sabrina is then stripped of the black dress to her white slip and forcibly restrained as she flees from the forest. As stated earlier, Father Blackwood remarks upon Sabrina’s choice in clothing and suggests that the Dark Lord is entitled to her body because of her wedding dress. Costuming and fashion, particularly in media, are important choices that can denote a character’s mental state or other subtle details to the audience. As Catherine Spooner recounts in her book, “the way in which the eighteenth century Gothic heroine is clothed – or more characteristically, semi-clothed – plays an important part in the construction of her identity and, indeed, the fashioning her body” (Fashioning Gothic Bodies 23). In Sabrina’s case, as she meets the coven in the woods for her Dark Baptism, the choices are all made for her for what she wears. She only wears her mother’s wedding dress at the behest of her aunties and she is only stripped half naked at the hands of the coven. This symbolizes that the decision to sign her name away is not her own, it is a choice that is made for her again and again, and when Father Blackwood condemns Sabrina for wearing a “wedding dress, of all things,” he says, in short, that the choices the coven made for Sabrina, the choices that her aunties made for her, are choices that she ought to be responsible for. “Wearing a veil [or in this case, a wedding dress] can be construed as provoking and incentive to remove it . . . is not only interpretable as sexual invitation but is presented as alarmingly coextensive with sexual invitation” (Fashioning Gothic Bodies 31). Sabrina thus ends up refusing to acknowledge that others’ decisions for her are her express consent and refuses to sign her name away. By refusing to sign, Sabrina makes the court recognize the authority she holds over herself and refuses to back down.
This decision mirrors a range of other events in the series that more broadly link to ancient rituals to contemporary feminist politics; for example, Roz’s efforts to get The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison off the banned books list at Baxter High. While Sabrina faces mistrial, Roz faces the threat of impending blindness as she attempts to devour books before she is totally blind. One of these books that she chooses to read for a school project is The Bluest Eye, which is deemed as inappropriate and Roz’s teacher refuses to let Roz read it. Roz then goes to Principal Hawthorne and asks if she may read it, to which he says no, and then she goes through the Baxter High library to look for a wide range of other ‘inappropriate’ books only to be told that there “has been a soft purge of bad books” since “certain topics and titles have no place in the hands of impressionable youths” (00:05:27). Banning books is a frequent concern in American high schools, a practice that attempts to make youths less aware of current sociopolitical concerns, especially when the text is written by a minority author, like Toni Morrison. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anxieties about literature, particularly Gothic fiction and romances, falling into the hands of women were coded as ‘corrupting’ women, a sentiment that has not disappeared even in the twenty-first century. Books, like The Bluest Eye, are removed from high school and even middle school libraries under the guise of protecting our youth from this corruption. Rock music is coded as ‘Satanic rock music’ and even churches perpetuate the rhetoric of ‘if you play a rock song backwards, you’ll hear the phrase hail Satan’ or other subliminal messages. Banning music or literature is an attempt at subjugating and controlling youths, forcing them to take an adult’s word as law and not questioning it, which does not happen with Roz nor Sabrina in this instance.
This subplot in “The Trial of Sabrina Spellman” effectively juxtaposes Sabrina’s plight with Roz’s since both fight against two very different oppressing patriarchal forces. The series is anachronistic, which we can see from the costuming choices to the music that plays in the background to how various set props pop up throughout the series. The nod towards the original series that aired in the 60s acknowledges the nostalgia that audiences yearned for when the series was initially announced but by combining these 60s elements with current sociopolitical criticisms, Sabrina creates an environment that celebrates gender diversity, rather than demonizing it, which we can see with Roz, Susie/Theo, Sabrina, and even Harvey. In Sabrina, we see the Gothic as a mix of a celebration of negative aesthetics that emerge in the age of reason, but also a mixture of the sublime, as Fred Botting writes. “The sublime was associated with grandeur and magnificence [ . . . but] also evoked excessive emotion. Through its presentations of supernatural, sensational, and terrifying incidents, imagined or not, [the] Gothic produced emotional affects on its readers” (Botting 2-3). However, in Sabrina, the Gothic is not limited to the supernatural events that occur. While elements of the supernatural create the necessary horror that we experience as the audience in Sabrina, the mundane becomes equally, if not more, terrifying because of how closely they relate to our current political climate. Rather than the mundane becoming the only puritanical community, the fantastic community, a community that the mundane often retreats to and seeks solace in, becomes just as puritanical, if not more, than the mundane and highlights itself as a space that both the audience and Sabrina cannot feel safe in.
While Roz is not a witch in the series, she does possess a gift that her grandmother calls “the Cunning.” The women in Roz’s family historically lose their sight by the time they turn sixteen, a curse that causes blindness which is then supplemented by psychic sight. Ironically, as Roz’s eyesight worsens, her Cunning sharpens and she sees things that no one else can, like the Weird Sisters causing the collapse in the mines a few episodes later and that Sabrina is a witch. While Sabrina’s trial deals with the after effects of the #MeToo movement that gained traction in 2017[3], Roz’s plight deals more with sociopolitical issues that run rampant in lower income communities. While Roz’s plight remains a subplot that the creators of Sabrina do not spend a large amount of focus on, highlighting Roz’s struggles with Sabrina’s allows for both characters to sympathize with one another in their fight against injustice, which is what #MeToo is all about: highlighting the struggles of the victims so that other victims may come forward with their own stories.
As Sabrina’s trial progresses, so does the likeness to the contemporary #MeToo movement. The movement was created by a social activist of the name Tarana Burke in 2006 as a response to the sexual abuse that women of colour experience, especially in underprivileged communities. Recently, however, the movement has resurfaced as a way for women, both cisgender and not, to empathize with one another by simply stating that they, too, have experienced sexual assault. From this movement, other hashtags have begun to pop up, like #ChurchToo, #MeTooSTEM, and others involving sexual abuse, assault, and harassment in fields like finance, pornography, politics, and many others. While these offshoots from the overarching #MeToo movement remain relevant, misogynists and rape apologists keep coming back with a hashtag of their own: #HimToo. The hashtag initially began as a tweet from Pieter Hanson’s mother, who tweeted that “this was [HER] son. He graduated #1 in boot camp. He was awarded the USO award. He was #1 in A school. He is a gentleman who respects women. He won’t go on solo dates due to the current climate of false sexual accusations by radical feminists with an axe to grind. I VOTE #HimToo” (“‘This is MY Son’: Navy Vet Horrified As Mom’s Tweet Miscasts Him as #HimToo Poster Boy” par. 3). This original tweet has since been deleted, but several news outlets, including The Washington Post, have chronicled this tweet, immortalizing it in the #MeToo timeline. While the hashtag began as a way for men to divulge their own sexual assaults, it has since been twisted to perpetuate the idea that women are often making up allegations of sexual assault against men.[4]
In a post #MeToo era, cisgender men become preoccupied with the notion of “I don’t want to have an Aziz Ansari moment, I don’t know how to invite a girl up to bed . . . without knowing where the actually is [into it]” (Bell 31). Terena Bell analyzes this difficult question and how several journalism outlets tackle this, for lack of a better word, “serious issue.” Magazines and editorials, like Esquire, AskMen, BroBible, and PlayBoy, have recently run columns like “Non-Masculine Behaviours Women Find the Most Sexy” or “How to Buy Her Flowers” and even changed slogans to be more inclusive and aware of the issues surrounding both sex and rape culture. One of the journalists that Bell interviews, Margaret Nichols, says that “it seems [silly] to stop publishing articles about sex out of some kind of concern that you’re feeding into sexual abuse and sexual exploitation” (Bell 30) since journalists have a duty to present unbiased facts in columns, but what Nichols and Bell fail to acknowledge is that the media has such a strong hand in perpetuating sexual and rape culture.
By seeking to place blame for the reasons as to why consent is such a hot button issue, journalists and society at large do not tend to acknowledge the fact that men seek to victimize themselves by stating that “they don’t know whether this girl doesn’t want to come upstairs with me” when the simple solution lies in two words: ask her. By creating hashtags like #HimToo and calling the #MeToo movement a witch hunt, which also minimizes the trauma that actual witch hunts have done, men place the blame entirely on women and their “false allegations” while ignoring the fact that toxic masculinity and the patriarchy are entirely to blame for sexual assault and abuse in the first place by perpetuating the idea that men are entitled to a woman’s body. Toxic masculinity erases the equality that is necessary for relationships to thrive on their own and effectively places the entire blame of the relationship on the woman.
Such issues in our contemporary moment may not seem Gothic in any political way beyond the actual violent act of sexual assault, but they do have significant Gothic undertones. Sandra M. Gilbert, a Gothic theorist who has written works with Susan Gubar on the trope of the madwoman in the attic, addresses this very same issue in “In the Labyrinth of #MeToo” as well and likens the pursuit of women, especially in Hollywood, to that of the tale of Bluebeard and even the Minotaur. She describes patriarchal culture as “the Male Beast at the center of the labyrinth” while more and more stories come to light with the Harvey Weinstein allegations (Gilbert 14) like Gwenyth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Katherine Kendall, Rose McGowan, and so forth being at the forefront of these horror stories about sexual assault. Gilbert highlights the underlying issue with the toxicity of the patriarchy: that the Minotaur, or Man Beast, can do anything without fear of repercussions, even going so far as to quote the 45th President of the United States when he says “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful – I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything” (qtd. in Gilbert 17). This is what lies at the heart of rape culture and toxic masculinity: the idea that the men, the perpetrators of abuse, are at the heart of these issues and remain immune. Porn stars, sex workers, escorts, prostitutes, and even actresses are commodities to be used and abused as the Minotaur sees fit, especially since sex has become this highly commodified bestial thing, and even when sexual assault happens to sex workers, they’re seen as lesser than because of their occupation. The Minotaur is a hungry beast and preys upon female flesh.
The issue that Gilbert highlights is how problematic this way of thinking becomes: the entire fact that men assume that they are owed sex as payment for a date. Perpetuating this myth is incredibly problematic since toxicity breeds toxicity and patriarchal culture is steeped in toxicity. And women are not immune from the toxicity that seeps out from patriarchal culture. In the case of Sabrina, the Minotaur becomes the Dark Lord and Sabrina immerses herself in the very culture that breeds the opposition that attempts to relegate her into the Bride position. Sabrina adamantly refuses to allow misogynistic men to relegate her into this sphere and only agrees to immerse herself in that culture to beat the Dark Lord at his own game, which highlights the fact that women can be just as bestial a Minotaur as men. Viewing toxic masculinity and the patriarchy as this Othered thing is what renders our entire society as Gothic. The Beast in the Gothic tradition goes head to head with the Minotaur[5], challenging perspectives like colonialism, orientalism, racism, sexism and misogyny.
Sabrina thus explores and examines explicitly the comments on #MeToo and our current society’s rape culture. Gilbert’s argument about the toxicity of our current times is especially compelling because it situates Gothic tropes within the increasingly predatory phenomena of the digital age. Proving yet again the Gothic’s adaptability, Gilbert provides a critical lexicon of monsters to account for the masculine monstrosity at the heart of the #MeToo movement. Sabrina performs a similar gothicization of contemporary political theory through its detailed and carefully planned mise-en-scene of witches, covens, and the contemporary. Writers for Sabrina borrow now standard feminist arguments, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. In Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that man is considered the default, which would render woman as the Other, or at least within the scope of the default patriarchal lifestyle that Western society revolves around. In Sabrina, the writers use a similar idea, situating toxic masculinity as the Other with femininity becoming the default, particularly since so many female viewers can relate to the struggles that Sabrina faces. In popular culture, the figure of the woman is rendered as explicitly Bad or explicitly Good, something that de Beauvoir highlights as “the Praying Mantis, the Mandrake, [and] the Demon” and “the Muse, the Goddess Mother, [and] Beatrice” (1266). With de Beauvoir’s terminology, women are set so far apart from the earthly realm that they can only be one thing or the other but never both simultaneously.
Patriarchal influences often serve to dichotomize these feminine tropes, which Gothic literature also utilizes. Sabrina, by far, is not the only Gothic narrative to challenge these distinctions between the only apparent two types of women since toxic patriarchal culture has deemed itself fit to state that there are only these two types of women whether actual living women agree with the notion or not. Even a rudimentary Google search for “types of women” elicits results like “The Five Types of Women,” “Three Types of Women to Toss,” “The Four Types of Women” and so forth as if women can easily be relegated into these different spheres that are be assigned to them. More oft than not, these “types of women” are categories that shame women in one way or another. For example, the femme fatale is a trope often utilized when women are overtly sexualized, attractive, and seductive to bring about ruin to men. In regards to Sabrina, the Weird Sisters take up this role of femme fatale, which we can see when Sabrina and the Weird Sisters lure the homophobic football players deep into the mines and eventually blackmail them to protect Susie. The Weird Sisters here are unapologetically sexual, relishing that they hold all this power over these boys, and utilizing it into manipulating them, both with the magical and the mundane.
The witch is a literary figure that has undergone a pop culture transformation in recent years. The body of the witch is a vehicle that writers use to explore sociopolitical anxieties, much like the Gothic is a genre that creators come back to repeatedly to challenge political ideals and common anxieties that the public experiences. In Sabrina, Sabrina is the main metaphor that the show uses to comment on feminist movements, like #MeToo and #BelieveHer. However, that is not the only approach that the show uses to undermine common misconceptions around witches as well as femininity. By challenging how the public views witchcraft, the body of the witch, and the witch herself, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina shows that not all witches are evil and not all witches are good and that witches are only considered as forces of chaos since they retain control over themselves, their bodies, and actively challenge moments of injustice through of energy and the world around them. Because the witch refuses to be defined and controlled in this box that the rest of the world, whether it be fictional or our material plane of existence, the witch’s body is a sociopolitical nightmare that resists signification and actively challenges our preconceptions surrounding bodily autonomy all the while remaining relatable and easily accessible. Especially with our current political climate, these issues surrounding consent that The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina challenges, the entire series becomes one that, not only millennial women, but zillennial children, both cisgender, transgender, and gender non-conforming, require since this is now the Resistance.
[1] The #MeToo movement was initiated by Tarana Burke, a social activist, in 2006. The movement recently regained traction in light of the Harvey Weinstein allegations and was popularized by Alyssa Milano, who played Phoebe Halliwell in the hit show, Charmed.
[2] Breach of promise is a law tort that originated during the Middle Ages. While many jurisdictions have long since abolished this rite, breach of promise still exists in many North American locations, including the United States. In Canada, Saskatchewan was the last known province to abolish breach of promise laws.
[3] Years prior to the beginning of the series, Daniel Webster was an infamous criminal lawyer that made his career on freeing some of the worst murderers and criminals after he asked the Dark Lord to help him win his cases.
[4] Katty Kay in her article “The Truth About False Rape Accusations” after Brett Kavanaugh’s trial writes that less than 10% of rape accusations are false. She also writes that “official figures suggest the number of rapes and sexual assaults which are never reported or prosecuted far outweighs the number of men convicted of rape because of fake accusations” (Kay par. 8).
[5] The Minotaur is always a metaphor for some oppressing force that is not limited to patriarchy and toxic masculinity. The Beast, however, is something that opposes the Minotaur.
Works Cited
Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Netflix, 2015.
Beauvoir, Simone de. “The Second Sex.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al., Norton, 2010, 1265-1273.
Bell, Terena. “Where Has All the Sex Advice for Men Gone?: In a Post #MeToo Era, Men’s Magazines Are Pulling Sex From Their Pages.” Quill, vol. 106, no. 5, Winter 2018, pp. 28-31.
Botting, Fred. The Gothic. Routledge. 1996.
Conway, D.J. Wicca: The Complete Craft. Ten Speed Press, 2001.
Germana, Monica. Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Gilbert, Sandra M. “In the Labyrinth of #MeToo” American Scholar, vol. 87, no. 3, Summer 2018, pp. 12-25.
Halbertstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press, 2000.
Lorenzi, Lorenzo. Witches: Exploring the Iconography of the Sorceress and the Enchantress. Centro di della Edifimi srl, 2005.
@MicheleDauber. “#brockturner father: son not ‘violent’ only got ‘20 mins of action’ shouldn’t have to go to prison. @thehuntinground.” Twitter. 4 June 2016, 10:58 p.m., https://twitter.com/mldauber/status/739320585222660096. Accessed 11 April 2019.
This Halloween, as we don our masks and let our monsters out to play, let us remember the transgressive nature of this holiday in the celebration of otherness and the Forbidden, of dances with our fears and the joy of an amok time in which the marginal and the outcast are welcomed; herein we may enact our secret selves as performances in public spaces and a street theatre of unauthorized identities, and no mobs bearing torches come to drag us from our lair.
Such rare and precious freedom, this holiday of the frightening of the horses; people are still being murdered as witches all over the world, wars fought and genocides perpetrated over divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, yet here we are throwing parties and making offerings of treats to the laughing children who stand in for the monsters we honor.
Herein innocence and primordial terrors trade places and are conflated, and the fearsome unknowns that live in the darkness of our closets and under our beds are revealed as our hidden faces, and nothing other than ourselves after all. As the Roman playwright Terrence wrote in Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor), Act I, scene 1, line 25; ” Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto”, or “I am human; nothing human is foreign to me.”
Halloween points the way to a future society of diversity and inclusion, and one in which there is a reckoning for the historical injustices whose legacies remain with us, among them slavery and racism, patriarchy and sexual terror.
In a few days time, America will choose in our elections between fascist tyranny as theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, and kleptocratic capitalist terror on the one side and democracy on the other, between the horrors of our past and the possibilities of our future, between equal and unequal power among human beings defined by or regardless of gender; and when we choose, let us remember what the world of disempowered, commodified, and dehumanized was truly like, as typified in the witch trials and the theocratic patriarchal subjugation of half of humankind by the other half.
And to this theocratic tyranny and terror let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of March 1 2021, Anniversary of the Salem Witch Trials: How Patriarchal Religious Authority Subjugated Women Through Charges of Witchcraft; On this day in 1692 the Salem Witch Trials began; and in some ways have never stopped, but expanded to become a pervasive and endemic harm which characterizes our society and the carceral state America has become. Mass hysteria has assaulted truth with the sophisticated propaganda of social media and become a horrific new religion with QAnon, racism and patriarchal religious authoritarianism and intolerance has become Christian Identity fascism typified by Charlie Kirk, conformism and the use of social force as show trials, torture, and terror have become state tyranny and terror on a vast institutional scale.
Othering those whom we vilify through divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite membership and belonging remains a primary instrument of repression of dissent and the subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement of labor to centralize wealth, power, and privilege. Just as with the historical witch trials, during which my family was driven out of Bavaria in 1586 for the crime of being werewolves, berserkergangr or shapechanging warriors, and witches, Drachenbräute or ‘the brides of the dragon’ as Martin Luther described them, at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions and the start of the savage Cologne War between Catholics and Protestants, a prelude to the Thirty Years War which killed a third of German peoples.
There is no terror like religious terror, and no tyranny like authority which speaks for the unquestionable divine and whose armies and police are authorized as enforcers of divine law.
This is not an issue confined to the remote past as a vestigial legacy of patriarchal sexual terror, but the warning sign of an iceberg of hidden structural and systemic injustices and inequalities which surround us as a pervasive and endemic harm in our daily lives.
Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, which calls out the injustices of the McCarthy anticommunist era in the context of the Massachusetts Bay Colony witch hysteria of 1692–93, remains among the finest interrogations of state tyranny and terror ever written. I make an annual ritual of watching the beautiful 1996 film with the magnificent Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams.
As I wrote in my post of July 29 2020 Weaponized Religion, the Subversion of Democracy, Lunatic Anti-Science Propaganda, and the Legacy of American Imperialism; In the now enormous category of lies and disinformation campaigns against objective truth and scientific rationality, Trump’s recent endorsement of the lunatic claims of a Nigerian doctor now practicing medicine in Texas who is a member of a Pentecostal Church which promulgates religious and medical nonsense that has resulted in an epidemic of children murdered as witches by their parents and a violent pogrom against LGBT people in Nigeria stands near the pinnacle of our Clown of Terror’s crimes against humanity, one which would be hilarious if it were fiction and not horrifically very real and dangerous.
As you may be aware, the years-long wave of children murdered by their parents as witches in Africa was perpetrated by American religious fanatics in a coordinated campaign of colonialist and imperialist destabilization. In Nigeria this has the full collaboration of the government, with the persecution and orchestrated violence against LGBT persons being a dual campaign of mass hysteria and state terror.
It parallels the seizure of Guatemala and El Salvador by Pat Robertson and other Gideonite fundamentalists through his front man Rios Montt and the subsequent 1983 Mayan Genocide. The masses of refugees at our border are a direct result of the latter, part of American sponsored political subversion and economic warfare responsible for the collapse of Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico, and Central America.
America has weaponized religion as an instrument of dominion, and it is this same network of Pentecostal and Charismatic organizations which have achieved the capture of the Republican Party and the subversion of democracy here at home. Their brutal campaign against the equality, freedom of bodily autonomy, and reproductive rights of women is the wedge issue the Republicans use to goad the poor into voting against their own interest, but it is only the home front of a global programme of cultural, political, and economic warfare intended to seize and maintain an American hegemony of power and privilege.
God With Us; it is an old motto from the Crusades, and it has a complex and nefarious history. It has been used by the Inquisition against the Jews and Muslims, in the medieval witch hunts to transfer and consolidate patriarchal power as described by Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch and Witch-Hunting and Women. Gott Mitt Uns was the battle cry of the magnificent King Gustav Adolf of Sweden in his epochal victory over the Catholic forces of Imperial Austria at the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631 which liberated Protestant Germany during the horrific Thirty Years War, the monument of which reads ”Freedom of Religion for All Mankind” and is the origin of the doctrine of separation of church and state in America; Gott Mitt Uns was also appropriated by Hitler, who sought to recall the glorious legacy of his namesake.
There is no more dangerous person than one who believes God is on his side, for that belief can justify anything and conceal evil behind a mask of good. We are once again watching it enacted as theocratic terror on both sides of the Hamas-Israel War, and in Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians.
As Agence France-Presse writes in scmp; “A Houston doctor who praised hydroxychloroquine as a miracle coronavirus cure in a viral video retweeted by President Donald Trump blames gynaecological problems on sex with evil spirits and believes the US government is run by “reptilians”.
Stella Immanuel’s viral speech has drawn attention to a little-known group calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” who appear to exist to promote the common antimalarial drug in the fight against Covid-19.”
Immanuel was born in 1965, received her medical degree at the University of Calabar in Nigeria.
“Nobody needs to get sick. This virus has a cure – it is called hydroxychloroquine,” Immanuel exclaimed Monday as she stood on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington at a so-called “White Coat Summit” of like-minded doctors.
Early on in the pandemic, scientists were eager to find out whether hydroxychloroquine’s antiviral properties would make it effective in real-world patients with SARS-CoV-2.
So far though, all the major clinical trials that have reported their findings on this question have found no benefit, and leading national health authorities have moved to restrict its use because of potential cardiac harm.
The clip was shared by Trump and described as a “must watch” by his son Donald Trump Jnr, but has since been deleted by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for promoting misinformation.
Trump also complained about his plummeting approval ratings as compared to those of Dr Anthony Fauci, the top medical adviser on the White House coronavirus task force.
And the curious case of Immanuel and colleagues – first reported in depth by The Daily Beast – underscores just how far the drug’s advocates are willing to go.
The website for “America’s Frontline Doctors” was registered just 11 days ago, a web domain age checker revealed – and the site was taken down by Tuesday afternoon.
“Tea Party Patriots”, a right-wing political group backed by wealthy Republicans, said on its website it was responsible for organising the Washington summit.
Further research on Immanuel’s web page, now accessible only via an archived website viewer, as well as her YouTube account, reveal a long list of bizarre and unscientific beliefs.
These include that “tormenting spirits” routinely have “astral sex” with women, which in turn causes “gynaecological problems, marital distress, miscarriages” and more.
In a 2015 video, Immanuel, who leads a religious group called Fire Power Ministries, said: “There are people ruling this nation that are not even human,” describing them as “reptilian spirits” who are “half human, half ET.”
In the same video she rails against the use of “alien DNA” to treat sick people, which she said had resulted in human beings mixing with demons.
Other targets of her anger include gay marriage, which she said would result in adults marrying children.”
As written by Sady Dolye in her essay for In These Times, entitled How Capitalism Turned Women Into Witches; “Sylvia Federici’s new book explains how violence against women was a necessary precondition for capitalism. Federici traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work.
The Italian socialist feminist Silvia Federici is mandatory reading to understand gender politics (today). The opening sentences of her 1975 pamphlet “Wages Against Housework”—“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work”—will stick in your head and change your whole concept of family. Caliban and the Witch, her titanic 1998 work on witch trials as a tool of early capitalism, will take your head apart and put it back together.
Federici is not just relevant but getting more so every second. Throughout her work, she traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work; she excavates intimacy, uncovering all its toxic layers of lead paint and asbestos, until its exploitative foundations are clear. Her work is essential to decoding the present moment, as capitalism and patriarchy entwine to produce increasingly grotesque offspring: predatory adoption agencies coercing women into giving up their babies; the exorbitant cost of childcare causing single working mothers to go bankrupt; entire industries where the opportunity to abuse women with impunity is a perk for the powerful men up top. And, thank goodness, we seem to know it; half the young leftist women writing today are riffing on Federici’s work.
Federici’s latest, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, updates and expands the core thesis of Caliban, in which she argued that “witch hunts” were a way to alienate women from the means of reproduction. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Federici argues, there was an intervening revolutionary push toward communalism. Communalist groups often embraced “free love” and sexual egalitarianism—unmarried men and women lived together, and some communes were all-women—and even the Catholic church only punished abortion with a few years’ penance.
For serfs, who tilled the land in exchange for a share of its crops, home was work, and vice versa; men and women grew the potatoes together. But in capitalism, waged laborers have to work outside the home all the time, which means someone else needs to be at home all the time, doing the domestic work. Gender roles, and the subjugation of women, became newly necessary.
Early feudal elites in rural Europe enclosed public land, rendering it private and controllable, and patriarchy enclosed women in “private” marriages, imposing on them the reproductive servitude of bearing men’s children and the emotional labor of caring for men’s every need. Pregnancy and childbirth, once a natural function, became a job that women did for their male husband-bosses—that is to say, childbirth became alienated labor. “Witches,” according to witch-hunting texts like the Malleus Maleficarum, were women who kept childbirth and pregnancy in female hands: midwives, abortionists, herbalists who provided contraception. They were killed to cement patriarchal power and create the subjugated, domestic labor class necessary for capitalism.
“The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers,” Federici writes in Caliban, “the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance.”
The elegance of this argument, the neat way it knots together public and private, is thrilling. There are moments when Federici makes sense like no one else. In this passage, she explains how sexuality—once demonized “to protect the cohesiveness of the Church as a patriarchal, masculine clan”—became subjugated within capitalism: “Once exorcised, denied its subversive potential through the witch hunt, female sexuality could be recuperated in a matrimonial context and for procreative ends. …In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male worker and as a means of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.”
The pleasures of Witches occur in quick little bursts of illumination. Federici dips in and out of her famous argument, expanding it, updating it and finding new angles on it. Some essays work better than others. Her exploration of gossip and its criminalization is a stand-out; she traces a concise and damning history of how “a term commonly indicating a close female friend turned into one signifying idle, backbiting talk,” and how that act of women speaking to each other—often about men, and in a way those men might not like—became punishable by torture and public humiliation, as in the case of the “scold’s bridle.” This torture device, which was used until the early 1800s, was a mask with a bit (sometimes lined with spikes) that kept a woman from moving her tongue. Gossips, like witches, were criminalized for being women. Federici is always timely: Today’s “whisper networks,” in which women share the identities of abusers and harassers to keep each other safe, are gossip too. And, as accused rapist Stephen Elliott’s lawsuit against Moira Donegan and the Shitty Media Men list proves, plenty of men still want gossips hauled into court.
The point of reading Federici is not to agree with her at all times—it’s to let her knock the dust and cobwebs out of your mind, to open up new roads of thought and spark new curiosities. Opening this book at random will always bring you to a sentence that does that, as when Federici explains why witches are commonly old: “Older women [can] no longer provide children or sexual services and, therefore, appear to be a drain on the creation of wealth”; or ties witches to other historical insurrections: “the portrayal of women’s earthly challenges to the power structures as a demonic conspiracy is a phenomenon that has played out over and over in history down to our times” (Witches was published a few weeks before a Catholic exorcist held a special mass to protect accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh from … witches). Each sentence will also open doors into her other work.”
Excerpted from Caliban and the Witch; “The witch hunt rarely appears in the history of the proletariat. To this day, it remains one the most understudied phenomena in European history, or rather, world history, if we consider that the charge of devil worshipping was carried by missionaries and conquistadors to the “New World” as a tool for the subjugation of the local populations.
That the victims, in Europe, were mostly peasant women may account for the historians’ past indifference towards this genocide, an indifference that has bordered on complicity, since the elimination of the witches from the pages of history has contributed to trivializing their physical elimination at the stake, suggesting that it was a phenomenon of minor significance, if not a matter of folklore.
Even those who have studied the witch hunt (in the past almost exclusively men) were often worthy heirs of the sixteenth-century demonologists. While deploring the extermination of the witches, many have insisted on portraying them as wretched fools afflicted by hallucinations, so that their persecution could be explained as a process of “social therapy,” serving to reinforce neighborly cohesion, or could be described in medical terms as a “panic,” a “craze,” an “epidemic,” all characterizations that exculpate the witch hunters and depoliticize their crimes.
Feminists were quick to recognize that hundreds of thousands of women could not have been massacred and subjected to the cruelest tortures unless they posed a challenge to the power structure. They also realized that such a war against women, carried out over a period of at least two centuries, was a turning point in the history of women in Europe, the “original sin” in the process of social degradation that women suffered with the advent of capitalism, and a phenomenon, therefore, to which we must continually return if we are to understand the misogyny that still characterizes institutional practice and male-female relations.
Marxist historians, by contrast, even when studying the “transition to capitalism,” with very few exceptions, have consigned the witch hunt to oblivion, as if it were irrelevant to the history of the class struggle. Yet, the dimensions of the massacre should have raised some suspicions. as hundreds of thousands of women were burned, hanged, and tortured in less than two centuries.
It should also have seemed significant that the witch hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, the beginning of the slave trade, the enactment of “bloody laws” against vagabonds and beggars and it climaxed in the interregnum between the end of feudalism and the capitalist “take off” when the peasantry in Europe reached the peak of its power but, in time, also consummated its historic defeat. So far, however, this aspect of primitive accumulation has truly remained a secret.
Witch-Burning Times and the State Initiative
What has not been recognized is that the witch hunt was one of the most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat. For the unleashing of a campaign of terror against women, unmatched by any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European peasantry to the assault launched against it by the gentry and the state, at a time when the peasant community was already disintegrating under the combined impact of land privatization, increased taxation, and the extension of state control over every aspect of social life.
The witch hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline, thus redefining the main elements of social reproduction. Contrary to the view propagated by the Enlightenment, the witch hunt was not the last spark of a dying feudal world. Witch-hunting reached its peak between 1580 and 1630, in a period, that is, when feudal relations were already giving way to the economic and political institutions typical of mercantile capitalism. It was in this long “Iron Century” that, almost by a tacit agreement, in countries often at war against each other, the stakes multiplied, and the state started denouncing the existence of witches and taking the initiative of the persecution.
Before neighbor accused neighbor, or entire communities were seized by a “panic,” a steady indoctrination took place, with the authorities publicly expressing anxiety about the spreading of witches, and travelling from village to village in order to teach people how to recognize them, in some cases carrying with them lists with the names of suspected witches and threatening to punish those who hid them or came to their assistance.
But it was the jurists, the magistrates, and the demonologists, often embodied by the same person, who most contributed to the persecution. They were the ones who systematized the arguments, answered the critics, and perfected a legal machine that, by the end of the sixteenth century, gave a standardized, almost bureaucratic format to the trials, accounting for the similarities of the confessions across national boundaries. In their work, the men of the law could count on the cooperation of the most reputed intellectuals of the time, including philosophers and scientists who are still praised as the fathers of modern rationalism.
There can be no doubt, then, that the witch hunt was a major political initiative. The political nature of the witch hunt is further demonstrated by the fact that both Catholic and Protestant nations, at war against each other in every other respect, joined arms and shared arguments to persecute witches. Thus, it is no exaggeration to claim that the witch hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-states, the first example, after the schism brought about by the Reformation, of a European unification.
Devil Beliefs and Changes in the Mode of Production
A first insight into the meaning of the European witch hunt can be found in the thesis proposed by Michael Taussig in his classic work The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), where the author maintains that devil-beliefs arise in those historical periods when one mode of production is being supplanted by another. In such periods not only are the material conditions of life radically transformed, but so are the metaphysical underpinnings of the social order — for instance, the conception of how value is created, what generates life and growth, what is “natural” and what is antagonistic to the established customs and social relations.
Taussig developed his theory by studying the beliefs of Colombian agricultural laborers and Bolivian tin miners at a time when, in both countries, monetary relations were taking root that in peoples’ eyes seemed deadly and even diabolical, compared with the older and still-surviving forms of subsistence-oriented production. Thus, in the cases Taussig studied, it was the poor who suspected the better-off of devil worship. Still, his association between the devil and the commodity form reminds us that also in the background of the witch hunt there was the expansion of rural capitalism, which involved the abolition of customary rights, and the first inflationary wave in modern Europe.
These phenomena only led to the growth of poverty, hunger, and social dislocation, they also transferred power into the hands of a new class of “modernizers” who looked with fear and repulsion at the communal forms of life that had been typical of pre-capitalist Europe. It was by the initiative of this proto-capitalist class that the witch hunt took off, as a weapon by which resistance to social and economic restructuring could be defeated.
That the spread of rural capitalism, with all its consequences (land expropriation, the deepening of social distances, the breakdown of collective relations) was a decisive factor in the background of the witch hunt is also proven by the fact that the majority of those accused were poor peasant women — cottars, wage laborers — while those who accused them were wealthy and prestigious members of the community, often their employers or landlords, that is, individuals who were part of the local power structures and often had close ties with the central state.
In England, the witches were usually old women on public assistance or women who survived by going from house to house begging for bits of food or a pot of wine or milk; if they were married, their husbands were day laborers, but more often they were widows and lived alone. Their poverty stands out in the confessions. It was in times of need that the Devil appeared to them, to assure them that from now on they “should never want,” although the money he would give them on such occasions would soon turn to ashes, a detail perhaps related to the experience of superinflation common at the time.
As for the diabolical crimes of the witches, they appear to us as nothing more than the class struggle played out at the village level: the “evil eye,” the curse of the beggar to whom an aim has been refused, the default on the payment of rent, the demand for public assistance.
Witch-Hunting and Class Revolt
As we can see from these cases, the witch hunt grew in a social environment where the “better sorts” were living in constant fear of the “lower classes,” who could certainly be expected to harbor evil thoughts because in this period they were losing everything they had.
That this fear expressed itself as an attack on popular magic is not surprising. The battle against magic has always accompanied the development of capitalism, to this very day. Magic is premised on the belief that the world is animated, unpredictable, and that there is a force in all things so that every event is interpreted as the expression of an occult power that must be deciphered and bent to one’s will.
Magic was also an obstacle to the rationalization of the work process, and a threat to the establishment of the principle of individual responsibility. Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated.
By the sixteenth century, the attack against magic was well under way and women were its most likely targets. Even when they were not expert sorcerers/magicians, they were the ones who were called to mark animals when they fell sick, heal their neighbors, help them find lost or stolen objects, give them amulets or love potions, help them forecast the future. Though the witch hunt targeted a broad variety of female practices, it was above all in this capacity — as sorcerers, healers, performers of incantations and divinations — that women were persecuted. For their claim to magical power undermined the power of the authorities and the state, giving confidence to the poor in their ability to manipulate the natural and social environment and possibly subvert the constituted order.
It is doubtful, on the other hand, that the magical arts that women had practiced for generations would have been magnified into a demonic conspiracy had they not occurred against a background of an intense social crisis and struggle. These were the “peasant wars” against land privatization, including the uprisings against the “enclosures” in England (in 1549, 1607, 1628, 1631), when hundreds of men, women and children, armed with pitchforks and spades, set about destroying the fences erected around the commons, proclaiming that “from now on we needn’t work any more.” During these revolts, it was often women who initiated and led the action.
The persecution of witches grew on this terrain. It was class war carried out by other means.
Witch-Hunting, Woman-Hunting, and the Accumulation of Labor
It seems plausible that the witch hunt was, at least in part, an attempt to criminalize birth control and place the female body, the uterus, at the service of population increase and the production and accumulation of labor-power. We can, in fact, imagine what effect it had on women to see their neighbors, friends, and relatives being burned at the stake, and realize that any contraceptive initiative on their side might be construed as the product of a demonic perversion.
From this point of view, there can be no doubt that the witch hunt destroyed the methods that women had used to control procreation, by indicting them as diabolical devices, and institutionalized the state’s control over the female body, the precondition for its subordination to the reproduction of labor-power. The witch hunt, then, was a war against women; it was a concerted attempt to degrade them, dehumanize them, and destroy their social power.
When this task was accomplished — when social discipline was restored, and the ruling class saw its hegemony consolidated — witch trials came to an end. The belief in witchcraft could even become an object of ridicule, decried as a superstition, and soon put out of memory. Just as the state had started the witch hunt, so too, one by one, various governments took the initiative in ending it.
Once the subversive potential of witchcraft was destroyed, the practice of magic could even be allowed to continue. After the witch hunt came to an end, many women continued to support themselves by foretelling the future, selling charms, and practicing other forms of magic. But now the authorities were no longer interested in prosecuting these practices, being inclined, instead, to view witchcraft as a product of ignorance or a disorder of the imagination.
Yet the specter of the witches continued to haunt the imagination of the ruling class. In 1871, the Parisian bourgeoisie instinctively returned to it to demonize the female Communards, accusing them of wanting to set Paris aflame. There can be little doubt, in fact, that the models for the lurid tales and images used by the bourgeois press to create the myth of the petroleuses were drawn from the repertoire of the witch hunt.”
And for reimagined faith as feminine centered seizure of power from the Patriarchy, and as a reconstructed Celtic fairy faith of pre Christian Europe, there are no finer sources than those written by Starhawk, who had the wisdom to honor both the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves:
The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess,
Who is Donald Trump? Glowering, feral, with the dead eyes of a cornered but dangerous animal, his fake blond hair, fake history of success, and fake identity? Traitor Trump has been the cuckoo in our nest, ambush predator and pathological liar, rapist and enemy agent, worshipper of Moloch, Demon of Lies, and disciple of Adolf Hitler.
Who are we Americans, with our government a captive state by the Party of Treason’s confederacy of theocratic sexual terrorists, white supremacist terrorists, and the nihilistic grifters and carnival sideshow freaks who are its star performers?
In this Halloween season, as we enact seizures of power through embrace of our monstrosity and dancing our demons, let us remember and witness, expose and call out the real monsters who walk among us beneath their human masks; the secret Nazis who call themselves Republicans, loathsome and degenerate conspirators in theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, moral lepers consumed and disfigured beyond the limits of the human by an ideology which infects and destroys its host like zombies or vampires.
Among the true horrors of the Trump regime’s Fourth Reich is the awareness and certainty that they live and are real, and may be anyone anywhere; a stranger in line behind us at the grocery, or next to us at a family dinner. But knowing this, we may be on guard and ready when those who would enslave us attack.
And when we go Trick or Treating, let no one go alone.
Of the Trump regime carnival freak show I have written in my post of January 31 2025, Trump Unfurls His Tongue of Lies; Trump unfurls his Tongue of Lies like a red carpet for celebrities of wickedness, marked with the sigil of the demon he worships and is possessed by; Moloch the Deceiver.
Pestilence comes forth wearing the zombie form of Robert F Kennedy Jr the Truly Awful, his brain eaten by a swarming mass of worms and bearing his Plague Doctor’s mask at the ready.
Here follows his comrade Civil War possessing the leering and drunken Christian Nationalist Pete Hegseth, dragging behind him the shadows of the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, patriarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings, bearing the Cross he wishes to nail us all to.
Famine appears as Tulsi Gabbard, Russian spy, collaborator in Assad’s regime of torture in Syria and in Putin’s atrocities of imperial conquest in Ukraine, whore of tyranny who seeks our ruin for the benefit of her evil paymasters, not to protect American interests and markets but to undermine and sell them off as we wither and become Hollow Men, gaunt and starving, consumed from within by the hunger and avarice which consumes them like the cannibal Wendigo while our enemies fatten as we die and become nothing, bearing a wizened apple doll like the picture of Dorian Gray as a sign of our future ruin and moral collapse and hissing serpentine curses like the figure of Hunger in the film Pan’s Labyrinth, a perfect allegory of the Trump regime.
Death of the state and nation of America arrives with the fanfare of trumpets as an all-conquering shadow of our darkness, fears and self-hatred and internalized oppression made manifest in the figure of the fake Jethro of questionable pronouns and tattooed eyeliner JD Vance, whose mission is the fall of the world order of democracy, the dismantling of the American state, and its replacement with a plutocracy of tyrant CEO’s wherein citizenship is meaningless and we are all slaves of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and white male privilege, bearing the manacles which symbolize terminal stage capitalism as it seeks to free itself of its host political system.
A parade of fools follows the Four Horsemen of Our American Apocalypse, each representing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, their praises sung by the multi-headed beast of fascist propaganda led by X CEO Elon Musk and others yapping in chorus and jostling for position.
And last, crawling on his belly like a submissive dog, comes the husk of Rudy Giuliani, utterly vacuous and eaten from within by the demons he serves. Such is the fate of all who serve and are loyal to Traitor Trump, who serves and is loyal only to himself.
Truly, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here” as Ariel’s line in The Tempest goes, prancing and capering in their many guises.
In the audience the treasonous and dishonorable brutes of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror who voted for a Rapist In Chief that he may grant them permission for the same and of white supremacist terror who voted for a Nazi Revivalist that they may imagine themselves superior to anyone else in their wretchedness and degenerate villainy and enact genocide and slavery, both forms of power as subjugation and dehumanization of others born of fear and weaponized in service to the centralization of authority to a carceral state of force and control, hooting and champing and each bearing a sign and flaw of their subhuman degenerate nature, a tail or a horn, seize upon the prancing embodied lies with avarice and eat them up in the primary ritual of a Trump rally black mass.
Thus for an America and ideals of human being, meaning, and value rendered meaningless by misdirections and distortions of the truth, captured and lost in the myriad reflections, echoes, and false images of Trump’s funhouse mirrors of lies.
Lies are all Trump has; strip him of his Cloak of Illusions and Lies and his true nature as a monster and predator is revealed to the world.
This week Trump and his clown show caused a nationwide panic by defunding, deregulating, abolishing independent oversight, trying to force mass resignations of federal workers, and shutting down the government. Among the first side effects of the federal spending freeze was the medicare portal for payments going down which shut down our nation’s hospitals and healthcare system and the crash of a jet in Washington DC because no one was in the flight control tower or at the helm of the FAA. This is only the beginning of what a nation which abandons the institutions of state entirely looks like; the nation falls apart. And this is exactly what the Trump regime wants, as capital tries to free itself of its host political system.
We see you, enemies of democracy and humanity, and we will neither believe your lies not obey your commands.
And while our systems of oppression and unequal power are doomed and must inevitably collapse, our seizures of power and liberation struggle cannot be defeated while we disbelieve and disobey, refuse to submit and unite in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beinbgs.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
What is the meaning of the Trump regime in the story of America and our future possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals?
In all the madness of the ICE white supremacist terror force campaign of ethnic cleansing, repression of dissent, and theft of meaningful citizenship and our inalienable and universal human rights, and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.
Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; having just held the most massive single day protest in our history with zero violence on the part of the protestors, engaged in electoral process and solidarity action as guarantors of each other’s rights, because our faith in one another and in the ideals on which our society is founded remain intact, though the institutions of our government may need radical and revolutionary change.
Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
In this time of darkness, our puppets will dance upon the stage of history and our imaginations, while a chiaroscuro of light as truth and democracy versus darkness as fascist tyranny and falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, conspiracy theories and propaganda play for the kingdom of our souls and the fate of America and the world.
Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a prison planet of masters and slaves?
Now begins a great Reckoning, and we shall see.
As I wrote in my post of January 21 2025, Horror On Opening Night As Deranged Idiot Clown Show Returns to White House; Depravities, violations, sadism, monstrosity; the horrors of opening night spew forth from the diseased and rotting mind of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief of a fallen America as our deranged idiot mascot of fascism and theocracy returns to the White House with his Theatre of Cruelty.
Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes typify the minions of the Clown and will be remembered forever as a symbol of the Party of Treason and the Deplorables who voted it into power, who slavering and ululating with mindless abandon cheer him on to greater performances of the grotesque and the bizarre.
After preening before the crowd and dropping his pants so that various wellwishers could kiss his grublike white butt, Trump grinned, leered, grunted like a pig and hopped up on a table to squat and excrete a mass of Executive Orders which like Thing One and Thing Two immediately set about creating chaos.
Then he summoned one of the migrant children he had stolen from their parents, cleverly tied up Shibari style and prodded along by handlers in KKK hoods with fireplace pokers, who made their prisoner jump through hoops like lion tamers to resounding applause. “Here’s my very first Executive Order, ladies and gentlemen; we’re going to round up all the migrants, only the ones who aren’t white mind you, just so nobody worries that we’re treating people unfairly because they’re not people, and we’re selling the bond of their labor on an open exchange so you can all buy some, everyone can buy some slaves, and you can do anything you want with them, anything at all, because I said so just now, and it doesn’t matter anyway because only our kind are really truly human. And you can forget about legal and illegal immigrants, or if they were born here or not, because it’s the bad blood I’m worried about and not what it says on paper, we’re just starting with the immigrants but don’t worry, we’ll get to the rest of them eventually”.
And the crowd laughed and threw money, which Trump snapped out of the air like a dog catching treats.
As I wrote in my post of August 7 2019 Psychopathy and the Nature of Evil: the Parallel Cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?
While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.
The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.
Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.
I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the merciless iron will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.
As written in my post of October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: parallel lives and reflections; As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
Both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.
Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
Also out of order per a timeline but next in thematic rank, October 19 2019, Trump the predator exposed in All the President’s Women; How do you spell Trump? Treason. Racism. Untruth. Misogyny. Predator.
Hey Republicans, thanks for showing us what’s under your masks.
You know, I can understand how the Fourth Reich conspiracy of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Nazi-Klan white supremacists, and their plutocrat and foreign puppetmasters might claim the first four parts of the Trump program of subversion of democracy with defiant pride amongst themselves, but that last one baffles me. Its as if the whole Republican Party decided to adopt a new nickname on their first day of prison, and started introducing themselves as Short Eyes.
Its all recounted in horrific detail in All The President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Barry Levine & Monique El-Faizy; the casual sexual assaults committed in an arrogance of power and privilege which echoes the aristocratic Right of Seigneur, perversions of cruelty and ownership of others as a form of dominion which are extensions of his psychopathy, and among the most terrible signs of his inhumanity and amorality his acquisition of a beauty pageant monopoly for the purpose of access to underage girls.
Trump’s whole life purpose and goal is to perv Miss America. Republicans, are you really going to claim that legacy as your own? Are the rest of us going to let it go unchallenged?
Let us unite together in this purpose; to restore the honor and morality of America, and vote Trump out of our government.”
And as I wrote on September 13 2019, Trump’s foreign policy: sabotage of America’s global hegemony of power and privilege; “After three years of idiocy and madness, pathological lies and perversions, what is the legacy of Trump and his monkeywrenching of America?
Childstealing and whatever Trump and his Epstein buddies did which required the disappearance of witnesses and hundreds of missing migrant children.
Use of white supremacist terrorists as deniable assets to enable the theft of our freedoms and the transformation of our democracy into a police state of totalitarian force and surveillance.
Campaigns of racist ethnic cleansing and genocide against nonwhite immigrants and Muslims.
I could go on, but what is the point? What norms and values of America have Trump and the Republicans not violated? In domestic policy the Trump administration has been a disaster it will take a generation to recover from, if America survives at all.
As regards foreign policy, Trump has alienated our allies and emboldened our enemies, damaged our credibility and poisoned our diplomatic relations.
We have surrendered our ideals and our leadership of the world as its primary guarantor of democracy and human rights, and won nothing in return. I’m surprised anyone accepts our money; certainly the words of our President are meaningless and worth nothing.
In my post of September 16 2019, Trump’s New World Order: madness and tyranny; “ In a brilliant thumbnail analysis of Trump’s impact on the state of the world in terms of foreign policy, Simon Tisdall writing in The Guardian describes his policy of vacuous sound bites, staged publicity images, the diplomacy of a man totally ignorant of human relationships beyond the golf course and of any strategy of action to achieve goals other than grabbing the world by the crotch and hanging on while gobbling and ululating meaningless bestial sounds as if negotiating for slops in a hog trough.
Trump has discovered it’s not as easy to rape nations as it is to corner little girls in the dressing room of a beauty pageant, or even an adult one at Bloomingdales.
Not if we unite together in Resistance.
America now has a common cause with many nations of the world in overcoming fascist tyranny and rescuing democracy and the rule of law, of defeating the imperial conquest and subjugation of the earth by Trump and other figureheads of the Fourth Reich, and in the liberation of humankind and the restoration of the sovereignty of citizens.
And finally, herein is the text of my post in celebration of the start of the Impeachment process on September 24 2019, America rediscovers its values: the impeachment of Pennywise; ”Jubilation in the streets as America rediscovers its values and begins the impeachment of Pennywise, demonic clown and cannibalistic monster who dwells beneath the human face of Trump, a mask of flesh stolen from the abducted and enslaved women in the brothels his grandfather built the Trump family fortune on during the Alaska Gold Rush, and who today carries forward the legacy of terror and misogyny he was raised with, whose election should be de-certified as the coup of a foreign power and whose Presidency has no legitimacy.
History will remember Trump as the standard bearer of the global Fourth Reich and its assault on democracy, stealer of children for his vile and twisted purposes, author of genocidal ethnic cleansing and builder of concentration camps, pathological liar and ignorant fool, whose alliance of xenophobic racists and white supremacists, Christian Identity fanatics and other Gideonite fundamentalists who dream of the restoration of the Patriarchy under medieval Biblical law as a tyranny of the Elect, and amoral Plutocrats out to loot America for all the wealth they can send offshore while sabotaging our economy and driving our nation into collapse, thereby removing the major guarantor of freedom and human rights in the world and opening everything to exploitation.
A full accounting of the treasons and crimes of Trump and his Republican conspirators would fill a thousand pages and more, would roll on like the endless night litany of the death of God during an Orthodox Easter service; but this is the moment of its end, wherein the chanting turns to rapture and joy at the break of dawn, for Nancy Pelosi and the power brokers of the Democratic Party have rummaged around in Pandora’s Box and found at last our hope, calling for impeachment and the restoration of the rule of law just at the point of no return, before the legitimacy of our government and the values on which it is built, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, are forever lost and America falls to fascism and tyranny, and with it the world descends into a second Dark Age.
It took a millennia to emerge from the last one; civilization may not be recoverable again, should it fall under conditions of fascism and totalitarian regimes of absolute state power and surveillance, war, ethnostates and genocides, and unbridled extractive plunder of the earth. And this we must resist.
Therefore celebrate with me the call for impeachment, and prepare ourselves for the great struggle ahead to make it real, to reawaken America’s values and to save democracy and universal human rights throughout the world.
As I wrote in my post of August 27 2025, Behold the Monster: Anniversary of the Mug Shot Which Defines the Trump Era; Here is a Mirror of Dorian Grey wherein America may behold the monster of our soul which lives beneath the mask of normality, in the mug shot of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. Here the nadir of our atrocities, perversions, amoral nihilism, degenerate brutality and atavisms of animal instinct glare back at us with the malign and savage rage of a baboon, and like Nietzsche’s Abyss we must beware lest our shadow capture us in the mirror of its gaze.
Half our nation remains under its spell, while those still free mock and poke the beast with a stick. Trump has on this day in 2023 surrendered to justice with no mass protests by loyal followers despite his threats and plots of coup, terror, and civil war, and we rejoice in his pathetic diminishment and humiliation, yet the danger has not passed. For we are once again in his jaws as Vichy America under the Fourth Reich, and Trump’s mission is to destroy the institutions of government and the ideals of democracy.
Both the Fourth Reich which has infiltrated and once again captured the state and Trump as its figurehead are still fundraising off of hate speech and inciting white supremacist terror and theocratic sexual terror, possess a largely intact and unimpeded propaganda and funding network, and control not only the Republican Party but also much of the state through their agents in the legislative and judicial branches of government as well as its security services.
All of this is made more terrible still with the planned military occupation of our cities and the ICE racist terror campaign.
As we unite in solidarity and organize Resistance and liberation struggle, we may well mark the occasion of Trump’s surrender to justice two years ago this day, with not a single act of violence on his behalf perpetrated by any supporters, who like their dark master are cowards and will turn on each other and abandon their fallen idols which can no longer protect them. A fascist has no friends.
We on the other hand will not abandon each other, for this is what defines us; refusal to abandon our comrades and our duty of car for each other as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. This is the true difference between fascists and antifascists, and between tyranny and liberty; how we see ourselves and each other, as human beings or things to be used in service to wealth and power.
In this moment only two years ago, under the glare of the police photographer’s lights, the orders of a judge, and the scrutiny of history, Trump imagined himself as a doomed king at bay, like King Kong, a film which is an allegory of fascism as a flawed response to the fall of civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, an American version of the Wagnerian end in fire with which Hitler was obsessed and ended in his suicide in an underworld labyrinth.
What remains to be determined is whether America in future generations imagines Trump as its tragic savior, cast in the part of Cyrus the Great in a myth of Exile as our new faith of QAnon has him, and chooses to fall with him and bring two thousand years of democracy as a dream of liberty and equality crashing down into fascist tyranny.
Portraits of the Trump Regime: a gallery
(American Horror Story: Freak Show Season 4 Trailers)
Trump’s regime: Pan’s Labyrinth trailer
We Enter Now the Wilderness of Mirrors:
The Psychedelic Puppets String Theory Gang and the Cyberdelic Dream Pen
The White House has this week endured destruction like nothing since the British burned it to the ground during the War of 1812, as the East Wing is replaced with the Epstein Ballroom, envisioned to become a glacial white confection like a sugar cake adorned with gold for elites to disport themselves in while the people who create their vast wealth remain invisible beyond its gates like the slave caste they are.
As the East Wing was rebuilt in 1942 by President Roosevelt to conceal the construction of a doomsday bunker, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, one wonders what Trump’s folly conceals, and against what apocalyptic threat or plans.
An Abomination gapes wide its jaws and drools in idiocy and madness, his clown face replaced by fake gold paint like his fake Presidency, and beneath his golden mask he dreams of wriggling his toes upon a throne of gold while petitioners abase themselves and kiss his bloated fat feet.
The Epstein Ballroom will doubtless offer many dark corners and secret rooms for his perversions and violations of all that is good and decent and true, for his relentless cruelties and acts of sexual and white supremacist terror, and for his subversions of democracy and our institutions and values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
As written by Emma Brockes in The Guardian, in an article entitled
Big? Beautiful? Donald Trump is literally ripping apart the home of US democracy. Is anyone really surprised?; “Occasionally, life gives you scenarios that are so on the money it’s impossible to do anything with them. Boris Johnson getting stuck halfway down a zip wire while waving two union flags, for instance; or Liz Truss getting lost while attempting to leave a room – two images that are so embarrassingly on point it is almost difficult to enjoy them. An audience likes to feel it has done a bit of work before arriving at a punch line, which is why, on Monday, when demolition crews moved into the White House to knock down part of the East Wing at the behest of Donald Trump, it felt once again like we were living in post-satirical times.
As far as we can tell from the photos, Trump didn’t actually send in a wrecking ball – although his administration did sharply reprimand government employees working in a neighbouring Treasury building for posting visuals of the demolition online, so at this point who knows? There were, however, diggers, torn-down walls and an awful lot of dust. This was the first stage of a project Trump has advertised as the addition to the White House of a 90,000 sq ft (8,300 sq metres) ballroom, at an estimated cost of $250m (£187m) and a capacity, according to Trump, of “999 people”. And while, granted, it’s not a branch of McDonald’s – one thing about Trump’s range is that, however bad things are, they could always have been worse – architectural and heritage institutes have been expressing concern.
Presidents, of course, like to leave their mark on the nation’s furnishings as on its finances. The Obamas planted a kitchen garden at the White House, put in a basketball court and tweaked the lighting, apparently so it was bright enough for their daughters to do their homework. Joe Biden had less time to renovate, but did swap out Trump’s gold drapes in the Oval Office for some sober Clinton-era curtains and a new rug.
Trump, meanwhile, paved over the Rose Garden, decked out the Oval Office in gold, and now appears to be wholesale demolishing the East Wing’s 1942 facade to build a giant event space – and you have to wonder if the state banquet he enjoyed at Windsor Castle last month has been a spur to get construction under way. As for what the new space might look like, we must assume that Clark Construction and McCrery Architects, the design and building entities involved, will be led by Trump’s general aesthetic and find a happy medium between the Grand Ballroom at Mar-a-Lago and Saddam Hussein’s palace.
Well, you can imagine, there’s been some carping online. The Society of Architectural Historians released a statement expressing “great concern” over the proposed ballroom. The American Institute of Architects put out a stiff note reminding the president that “the historic edifice at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the People’s House, a national treasure and an enduring symbol of our democracy”. And more importantly, that “any modifications to it – especially modifications of this magnitude – should reflect the importance, scale and symbolic weight of the White House itself”. This was, perhaps, a discreet way of pointing out that, given you can barely put up a shelf in a major city on the eastern seaboard without having to get a permit, the DC Department of Buildings might care to look into things.
In her commentary online, Hillary Clinton was more direct: “It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.” For many Americans, the demolition photos were soul-shuddering in a way that has no direct equivalence in the UK. I suppose if they changed the door numbers in Downing Street a lot of people might be upset and disturbed. But the building at No 10, and the living quarters in particular – which for a long time looked like one of those rental ads that go viral for demanding £2,000 a month for a flat in east London that is smaller than the inside of a canal boat – have never been as iconic or emotionally charged as their US counterparts.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, dismissed all the chatter as “fake outrage”, while the president himself posted online, “For more than 150 years, every President has dreamt about having a Ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties, State Visits, etc.” As with everything Trump says, it’s the “etc” in this sentence that should cause the most worry. The ballroom will be funded via private donations, setting up yet another race to curry favour with the president. And, as an event space, it will run in competition with the Trump International Hotel, offering the possibility of a very Trumpian future use for the building: the White House as venue for corporate retreat.”
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s ballroom blitz sparks chorus of disgust: ‘The perfect symbol’; “When Barack Obama roasted Donald Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the icing on the cake was a cartoon illustration of what the White House might look like if Trump ever became US president.
The name “Trump” was emblazoned across the top in giant capital letters, followed by “the White House” in lurid purple cursive, then “hotel casino golf course” and “presidential suite”. The parody imagined gold pillars, a giant crystal chandelier and two scantily clad women sitting at reception.
Fourteen years later, Obama’s vision looks increasingly prophetic as Trump, twice elected and determined to expand presidential power, puts his golden stamp all over the White House. Most dramatically, this week he sent in a wrecking crew to demolish the facade of the East Wing so he can build a $250m ballroom.
The image of broken masonry, rubble and steel wires at America’s most famous address was reminiscent of a disaster movie and struck a chord even among people who have become accustomed to shrugging off Trump’s outrageous antics. White House alumni and presidential historians led the chorus of disgust.
“It’s an abomination,” said Elaine Kamarck, a former official who worked in the building from 1993 to 1997. “It’s typical Trump and it’s going to look awful. They’re knocking down the entire East Wing of the White House. It’s not the end of the world but it’s just one more reason that Americans are getting sick of King Trump.”
Some metaphors, it was observed, just write themselves. Jonathan Alter, a presidential historian, commented: “It’s the perfect symbol of the Trump administration and that’s why they didn’t want this photograph and that’s why it will become iconic and be used in history books for hundreds of years.
“It’s not the worst thing that he’s done but there’s a perfect alignment between the visual image and the major theme of the Trump second term. Early on with Elon Musk it was a chainsaw. Now it’s a wrecking ball and that’s been their attitude. They’ve taken a wrecking ball to the rule of law.”
The East Wing housed the first lady’s offices, a theatre and a visitors’ entrance that welcomes foreign dignitaries. Trump – who was a property developer before launching his political career – and senior officials had initially promised that nothing would be demolished during construction.
The president said in July: “It will be beautiful. It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be – it will be near it, but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favourite.”
Trump moved ahead with construction despite a lack of sign-off from the National Capital Planning Commission, the executive branch agency that has jurisdiction over construction and major renovations to government buildings in the region.
The president says the project will be paid for with private donations and that no public money will be spent on the ballroom. The White House invited some of the donors to an East Room dinner last week but has not released a comprehensive list and breakdown of funds.
Renderings released by the White House suggest a distinct resemblance to the gilded ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and home in Palm Beach, Florida.
The project also has grown in size since it was announced, going from accommodating 650 seated guests to holding 999 people, big enough to fit an inauguration if needed, and the windows will be bulletproof, Trump has said.
But the National Trust for Historic Preservation has asked the Trump administration to pause the demolition, expressing concern that the proposed 90,000 square foot ballroom “will overwhelm the White House itself”. The executive residence is 55,000 square feet.
Alter drew a comparison with the British prime minister’s residence in London: “Think about it in terms of putting a glass tower 15 storeys high above 10 Downing Street. What the hell? Or if they knocked out everything to the left and right and put in some garish new buildings that King Charles would hate.”
Presidents have added to the White House since construction began in 1792 for a variety of reasons, and Trump aides say his decision to build a ballroom follows that long tradition, dismissing the backlash as “manufactured outrage”. Many past projects were criticised as being too costly or too lavish but eventually came to be accepted.
Theodore Roosevelt added the West Wing to provide dedicated space for the president and key staff, while Franklin Roosevelt added the East Wing, which over time became the home base for the first lady’s staff and social functions.
One of the most significant White House renovations happened under Harry Truman, when the mansion was found to be so structurally unsound that he ordered a complete gutting of the interior that lasted from 1948 to 1952. The project, including Truman’s addition of a balcony to the second floor of the South Portico, was highly controversial.
Other changes include the creation of the Rose Garden during John F Kennedy’s administration and Richard Nixon’s decision to convert an indoor swimming pool that was built for Franklin Roosevelt’s physical therapy into a workspace for the growing White House press corps.
Trump has heavily redecorated the Oval Office by adding numerous portraits, busts and gold-toned adornments. He converted the Rose Garden into a stone-covered patio, installed towering flagpoles on the north and south lawns, and decorated an exterior wall with portraits of every president except his immediate predecessor, Joe Biden, who is replaced by an autopen.
Now Trump says the White House needs a major entertaining space and has complained that the East Room, currently the biggest space in the White House, holding about 200 people, is too small. He has frowned on the past practice of presidents hosting state dinners and other big events in tents on the south lawn.
Anita McBride, who was chief of staff to Laura Bush when she was first lady and describes herself as “intimately familiar” with the East Wing, agreed that previous administrations “were prevented from doing the events that they wanted by the size of the rooms as they currently exist. They worked around it by having temporary structures that were put out there every time. The addition of a ballroom is something whose time had come.”
But McBride acknowledged that she had heard from many fellow East Wing alumni this week who find the images of destruction “difficult” and “jarring”. She added: “It doesn’t diminish the stories and the history that was made there and the importance of continuing to preserve and share the stories of the East Wing because it does play a role in White House history. Nothing changes that.”
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump takes a wrecking ball to the White House in on-the-nose metaphor; “The press corps crowded into the East Room – crystal chandeliers, moulded ceilings, portraits of past presidents – on Monday for an event celebrating student baseball champions from Louisiana. But first Donald Trump had something else on his mind.
“Right behind us we are building a ballroom,” he said, gesturing towards a gold curtain. “I didn’t know I’d be standing here right now ’cos right on the other side you have a lot of construction going on, which you might hear periodically.”
Beyond the Oz-like curtain demolition crews were tearing down part of the White House’s East Wing so they could start building Trump’s ballroom, a $250m project he says will be paid for by himself and unnamed donors. The spectacle of a mechanical excavator ripping through the facade, leaving a tangle of broken masonry, rubble and steel wires, was hard for some to take.
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, was quoted by WTOP News as saying: “Maybe it’s just the dislike of change on my part, but it seemed painful, almost like slashing a Rembrandt painting. Or defacing a Michelangelo sculpture.”
The US president has never been one to shy away from glaringly obvious metaphors. For the past decade, as one norm and institution after another has collapsed, critics have called him a human wrecking ball. So what better than literally wrecking a wing of the 225-year-old White House?
David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W Bush, tweeted: “Something profoundly symbolic about Trump taking a wrecking ball to the White House … paying for the demolition with money from cronies and insiders seeking government favors … and the Republicans in Congress acquiescing as Trump treats public assets as private property.”
Apparently stung by the criticism and feeling defensive, the White House blasted out a press release on Tuesday. It complained: “In the latest instance of manufactured outrage, unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House – a bold, necessary addition that echoes the storied history of improvements and renovations from commanders-in-chief to keep the executive residence as a beacon of American excellence.”
The release listed past examples that included Teddy Roosevelt building the West Wing, Harry Truman overseeing a “total reconstruction” of the White House’s interior, Richard Nixon converting the swimming pool into the press briefing room and Barack Obama resurfacing the south grounds tennis court into a basketball court, complete with construction photos.
The administration does have a point: the White House has constantly evolved and, before First Lady Jackie Kennedy intervened, it was a dingy, unglamorous place. Its appeal is that it is grand but not too grand: bigger and plusher than Britain’s 10 Downing Street, to be sure, yet modest compared with some of the baroque palaces of despots around the world.
But there are a few things going on here. First, Trump seems bored by domestic policy. He would rather not talk about an economy that is stalling. The government shutdown, which would have consumed any of his predecessors, seems to induce only a yawn and AI videos depicting Democrats in sombreros.
He is following in the tradition of past presidents who in their second terms pivoted to foreign policy, where it can seem easier to build a legacy (and maybe even win a Nobel peace prize). Last week his in-tray included Gaza, Argentina, Venezuela, Russia and Ukraine; on Monday he met the prime minister of Australia; on Friday he heads to Asia.
Trump’s ennui has also turned him into an unlikely Benjamin Button: he is regressing from commander-in-chief to his youthful career as a builder and property wheeler-dealer. Like everything else about his second term, his makeover of the White House is far more ambitious than first time around.
He planted two giant flagpoles that fly the Stars and Stripes, drowned the Oval Office in gold decor (the New York Times called it a “gilded rococo nightmare”) and installed a “presidential walk of fame” with gold-framed portraits of every president except Joe Biden, who is supplanted by an autopen.
It’s all beginning to feel like Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida, an opulent orgy of gold-plated fixtures and gold leafing. I heard Elvis Presley’s Are You Lonesome Tonight? floating over the West Wing on Monday and imagined Trump playing DJ on his new Rose Garden patio.
At a Rose Garden lunch on Tuesday, the president told Republican senators: “You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back here. You hear that sound? That’s music to my ears. I love that sound. When I hear that sound, it reminds me of money. In this case, it reminds me of lack of money because I’m paying for it.”
Trump has plans for Washington too. Last week he unveiled plans for a triumphal arch across from the Lincoln Memorial that was quickly dubbed the “Arc de Trump” topped by a state of Lady Liberty – in gold, naturally. He showed off three 3D models – small, medium and large – and quipped: “I happen to like the large one. Why are you shocked?”
Social media lit up with comparisons to Adolf Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer and his project for “Germania”, a monumental new capital city intended to dwarf London, Paris and Washington. It would have had a dome nearly 16 times bigger than St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and a triumphal arch three times bigger than Paris’s Arc de Triomphe.
But there is another analogy that might be just as apt. “‘… My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’” wrote the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
As written in The Guardian in an article entitled Seth Meyers on Trump’s White House demolition: ‘This is insane’; “We have warned for years that Donald Trump is destroying American institutions,” said Seth Meyers on Wednesday evening, “but of course when we said ‘destroying’, we meant metaphorically speaking. We didn’t mean that he was literally destroying buildings.”
“But I guess Trump heard that and thought, ‘On it.’ Because now he’s literally destroying the East Wing of the White House,” the Late Night host continued. The previously unannounced construction comes just days after record-breaking No Kings protests against Trump’s behavior as president, and as fellow Republicans continue to claim that he does not act like an authoritarian leader.
“You guys, they’re right. Trump is not a king!” Meyers joked. “A king is someone who presumes the power to do whatever they want without consulting someone else. Someone who treats public property and public resources of the state as their own. Someone who surrounds themselves with lavish appointments and gilded furnishings and the trappings of wealth and power.”
Such as, say, a $250m, 90,000 sq ft gilded ballroom, as Trump has unilaterally proposed for the White House. “This is insane,” said Meyers over a photo of the demolished East Wing. “This looks like a scene from an apocalyptic disaster movie. This is the first thing aliens do in movies to announce they’re evil. They blow up the White House. Trump is just cutting out the middleman of invading aliens.
“No one was consulted about this,” he added. “No one approved of this. Congress certainly didn’t get a say. The White House isn’t Trump’s – it’s supposed to be ours.”
Between this and his demand that the justice department pay him as punishment for investigations against him, Trump “is responding to the massive and historic No Kings protests with two cartoonishly straightforward examples of kingly behavior.”
As written in The Guardian in an article entitled Stephen Colbert on Trump’s White House East Wing demolition: ‘So deeply unsettling’; ““At this point, we’re nine months into this, you’d think it would be impossible for us to be shocked by Donald Trump,” said Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s Late Show. “But give the man credit – every so often, he takes the time to attach the electrodes to our nipples. And then it feels like the first time.”
Case in point: on Monday, as part of his White House renovation project to construct a gilded ballroom, Trump sent out a backhoe to rip off a part of the East Wing. “That is it, we are not giving him the security deposit back,” Colbert quipped.
“That is so deeply unsettling,” he continued. “It’s like being a kid and seeing your teacher at the grocery store … for sale … in the meat department.
“We’re just nine months into Trump’s term, and he’s already going ‘Hulk smash’ on the White House. Last time, it took at least four years to bring a demo crew to the Capitol,” he added, referring to January 6.
The demolition comes after Trump promised that the $250m, 90,000-sq-ft ballroom renovation would not touch the existing White House. “So that was a lie,” said Colbert. “At this point, should we even believe that this is going to end up being a ballroom? It could just as easily end up being a combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bell!”
The treasury department has even instructed its employees not to share any photos of the White House “construction”.
“Not generally something you instruct when you’re proud of what’s going on,” Colbert noted. “Hey guys, remember, no photos at my wedding … and it’s not because I’m marrying a body pillow of Mariah Carey.’”
As written by Catherine Slessor in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Dictator-for-life vibes’: our architecture critic on Trump’s bulletproof ballroom bling; “He has already turned the Oval Office into a wrestler’s changing room. Now the president is building a place so gilded Nero would feel at home. Why did he pick an architect whose speciality is Catholic churches?
As if truffling thuggishly in pursuit of the Nobel peace prize wasn’t enough, the spectacle of bulldozers ripping into the White House is yet more evidence of Donald Trump’s unstinting quest for epic self-aggrandisement. Having decreed the East Wing not fit for purpose – namely, his purposes of swank and show – he plans to replace it with a faux classical bulletproof ballroom, capable of seating up to 650 partygoers.
Renderings show a vast, glacially white aircraft hangar of a structure embellished with an ornate coffered ceiling, gilded Corinthian columns and drooping gold chandeliers. Nero, who conceived the original domus aurea, would feel right at home. Costing $250m (£187.5m), a sum to be extracted from sycophantic donors, Trump’s ballroom is one of the most grandiose White House projects to be implemented in more than a century, as he strives to bend the building – and US architecture more generally – to his will.
On re-assuming the presidency, one of his first executive orders – under the title Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again – mandated that “traditional and classical architecture” should be the preferred style for all federal public buildings, with Trump having the final veto on designs. A similarly prescriptive order was enacted during Trump’s first spell in office, only to be rescinded by Joe Biden.
So, having been here before, the American Institute of Architects is wearily wary, stating: “AIA is extremely concerned about any revisions that remove control from local communities, mandate official federal design preferences, or otherwise hinder design freedom, and add bureaucratic hurdles for federal buildings.”
White House occupants do have a history of tweaking, expanding and remodelling. Theodore Roosevelt added the West Wing, Richard Nixon installed a bowling lane and Harry S Truman commissioned an entire reconstruction. Several first ladies have revamped the decor and furnishings, notably Jackie Kennedy, whose soigné interiors were designed to connect the presidential home more resonantly with American history.
The now doomed East Wing, dating from 1902, has been a much-changed addition. Intermittently housing the office of the first lady, what’s left of it sits above the presidential emergency operations centre, a high security bunker built during the second world war. Vice-president Dick Cheney and his retinue retreated there during the 9/11 attacks, as did Trump at the start of the George Floyd protests in 2020.
The man who landed the ballroom job is James McCrery, founder of Washington-based McCrery Architects and a trenchant advocate of classical architecture. “Americans love classical architecture,” he has said, “because it is our formative architecture – and we love our nation’s formation.” Ironically, McCrery began his career working for Peter Eisenman, the high priest of deconstructivism, before a conversion of Damascene proportions prompted him to renounce the avant garde and “rethink his modernist education”.
Specialising in the design of “traditional” Catholic churches, McCrery was appointed by Trump during his first term to serve on the US Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency with the power to review the “design and aesthetics” of all construction within Washington DC.
Trump’s style edicts and building bombast exude a dictator-for-life megalomania vibe, as he barrels through his second term, with an unconstitutional third potentially in his sights. However, he is said to dislike the White House, finding it on the poky side, preferring to decamp to his Floridian resort Mar-a-Lago at every opportunity. The tone for his latest stay in the White House was set by his patio-fication of the Rose Garden, but he is now clearly aiming for a legacy more substantial than a bit of paving.
His record as a “patron” of architecture has been shaped by his rollercoaster career as a property developer. To him, buildings are simply extruded capital. He has an enduring fondness for Louis XIV bling, epitomised by his enrobing of a 1960s Manhattan skyscraper in golden bronze cladding to transform it into the gleamingly phallic Trump International Hotel and Tower. His more recent engoldening of the Oval Office, described by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt as a “golden office for the golden age”, has been unflatteringly compared to a professional wrestler’s dressing room.
Nonetheless, Trump’s experience as a developer was formative, in that it taught him he could get away with just about anything. It crystallised a poisonous bravado, now hardwired into the national political sphere. His fetishisation of classicism, a historically recurring comfort blanket for despots of all stripes, is bleakly predictable.
“It gives Trump a narrative of authority and tradition,” says Daniel Abramson, professor of architectural history at Boston University, “and fits into his overarching strategy of undermining the established elites, including in architecture.”
Another imperial wheeze, announced at a reception for prospective ballroom donors, is a huge triumphal arch, to be erected just across the Potomac river from the Lincoln Memorial. Modelled on the Parisian original and topped with a gilded, winged goddess of victory, the “Arc de Trump” is intended to commemorate the US’s 250th anniversary next year. In launching this newest vanity project, Trump said: “We love to fix up Washington.” Again, Nero would doubtless approve.”
What is to be done? As Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such divergent results, the founding of Liberation theology and nonviolent resistance as practiced by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and the Russian Revolution which sought to change the relations between human beings from cash exchange to mutual aid.
The Republicans, the Fourth Reich which has seized their party and captured our state, and their would-be Fuhrer Trump want to flush us all down the well of history to 1934 Germany. Let’s give them 1789 France.
Let us choose this future:
Les Misérables | Do You Hear the People Sing?
Or the Republicans will condemn us all to this one:
Schindler’s List 25th Anniversary – Official Trailer
Late Night with Seth Meyers
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Big? Beautiful? Donald Trump is literally ripping apart the home of US democracy. Is anyone really surprised?
In the shadows of the Conquest of the Americas from indigenous peoples and the Monroe Doctrine which authorized American Imperialism and colonialism throughout our continent, the Trump regime is committing war crimes against civilian Venezuelans in its two front undeclared war, the bogus and performative strikes on fishing boats on the pretext of a war on drugs and the campaign of ethnic cleansing and white supremacist terror waged by ICE within our nation, which began and has specifically targeted Venezuelan nationals.
All of these war crimes and crimes against humanity are in service to the wealth and power of white elites who wish to profit from theft of Venezuela’s enormous oil resources, capitalist plunder again under a pretext as a Red Scare which echoes and reflects the Bay of Pigs and our decades long vendetta against Cuba for throwing out our mafia casinos. Trump’s actions also horrifically recapitulate both the Red Scare of the McCarthy era here in America as the repression of dissent and the Red Scare which birthed Operation Condor and our coup in Chile which replaced the people’s champion Allende with the fascist tyrant and American puppet Pinochet.
Yes, the Maduro regime has betrayed the Revolution and become everything the magnificent liberator Hugo Chavez once stood against, but for this; both insist on the independence and sovereignty of Venezuela and represent the forces of anticolonial liberation struggle in the Americas. And this makes all the difference.
Herein follows some of my writing on the democracy movement in Venezuela, of which the Nobel Prize winner Maria Corina Machado is a figure, though a very problematic one regarding her actions as a proxy for the Trump regime and American colonialism.
What’s the difference between Trump’s planned coup attempt against Maduro and the people of Venezuela themselves bringing regime change?
Imperialist conquest and dominion is nothing like democracy which arises from the liberation struggle of the people; and the test of disambiguation is who seizes and owns the power, the people or some foreign master?
And one thing more; I care nothing for why someone kills or enslaves another, silences or brutalizes others as repression of dissent or the enforcement of authorized identities, versions of history or reality, or virtue as submission to authority; and neither do their victims.
Ideologies mean nothing weighed against the simple tests of Who Holds Power, and Who Is Suffering?
For what is human is most real.
As written by in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump is threatening Venezuela. But his own country looks a lot like it: The US president’s efforts to consolidate power are strikingly similar to historical authoritarian moves in Caracas; “Here in the Americas, we have a peculiar tradition. Every time there is a major election, prominent figures on the right find themselves compelled to repeat some version of the vaguely menacing prediction: if the candidate for the left wins, we will become “the next Venezuela”.
Whether Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Colombia or Ecuador, countries throughout the western hemisphere keep this tradition. Donald Trump has also participated in this ritual, proclaiming during the 2024 election cycle that if Kamala Harris won, our country would become “Venezuela on steroids”.
Oddly spoken with disdain.
Harris, of course, lost the election, so we will never know how Venezuela-esque her version of the US might have been. But we are seeing Trump’s America, and the reality is: it’s looking a lot like Venezuela.
Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez – a charismatic yet polarizing leftwing figure – political discourses have shrouded Venezuela in conflicting layers of partisan caricature, often making it difficult to parse what is actually happening. At this point, however, there is no doubt that the country is in crisis.
Migration statistics alone provide compelling evidence. Amnesty International and the UN refugee agency estimate that nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014 – as much as 25% of the population. Hyperinflation and food shortages have driven this exodus, compounded by authoritarianism and increasing repression under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, who has held on to power since 2013 through elections with overwhelming evidence of fraud.
Significantly, the US has hardly been an innocent bystander. Not only have we frequently doled out reprehensible treatment to Venezuelan asylum seekers, but we have also played a role in creating the conditions that are forcing people to migrate in the first place. The US has maintained a belligerent stance toward Venezuela for more than two decades – for example, supporting a short-lived coup to overthrow Chávez in 2002, as well as hitting the country with sanctions – and the Trump administration has recently escalated the conflict by ordering a series of deadly strikes on civilian boats suspected of smuggling drugs off the Venezuelan the coast. Reports also indicate that Trump is considering an intervention to depose Maduro, and the CIA may already be carrying out covert operations in the country.
Journalists and legal analysts have done excellent work explaining how these strikes are illegal according to US and international law, in addition to being murderously cruel. There has also been great coverage of how the demonization of Venezuelan immigrants – including a steady stream of propaganda painting Venezuelan immigrants as gang members and terrorists – has long been a centerpiece of Trump’s platform.
These actions are disgraceful on their own terms. But they are also bitterly ironic: even while terrorizing Venezuelans in the name of defending democracy, Trump has, in fact, been running a strikingly similar authoritarian playbook. Noteworthy parallels include dismantling constitutional limits on presidential authority, manipulating electoral districts to inflate his party’s representation in Congress, and using state power to repress political opponents.
In Venezuela’s case, the story begins with a fraught referendum. Immediately upon taking office in 1999, Chávez decreed a new executive power: the ability to call for a referendum on writing a new constitution. The legality of the claim was dubious given that the Venezuelan legal system already had mechanisms for updating the constitution, and a simple majority popular vote was not one of them. Nonetheless, the Venezuelan supreme court relented, and when the referendum passed, Chávez asserted a heavy hand in creating the process for how a constitutional assembly would work. Moreover, he unilaterally gave this assembly outsized powers to govern, suspending Congress and the supreme court in the meantime. Unsurprisingly, the resulting constitution of 1999 expanded executive authority considerably, and the entire process established a precedent to continue using these largely hand-picked constitutional assemblies to overrule congress whenever the opposition gained ground.
While there are, likewise, calls for a constitutional convention coming from Trump allies that could function in a similar way, this hasn’t actually been necessary in the US. Rather, the conservative supermajority on the supreme court has managed to effectively do the same thing on its own: repeatedly ignoring plain text as well as its own precedent in order to assign new powers to the presidency while at the same time eviscerating longstanding checks from other branches of government and independent agencies alike. In short, even without literally rewriting the constitution, the supreme court has in practice served as a comparable constitutional assembly, fundamentally reshaping constitutional norms to create a “unitary executive” with fewer checks on executive power than ever before.
Taking this comparison even deeper, there are also important parallels in Trump’s efforts to stack Congress through “gerrymandering”: a trick that hinges on exploiting the mathematical quirks of single-member, winner-take-all districts. For example, in a system where every district has an isolated winner-take-all race, even if one party gets 49% of the vote across the country, that does not mean that it will end up having 49% of the representation in Congress. In fact, if each district is a perfect microcosm of society with 49% of voters supporting this party, it could actually end up with zero seats in congress, despite representing roughly half the population.
In short, single-member, winner-take-all districts have the potential to massively inflate or deflate a party’s overall electoral showing, depending on how the voters are distributed among the districts. And if the party in power gets to redraw the districts, they can easily rig the game. Knowing full well the consequences, the US supreme court blessed this approach during Trump’s first term, and now at a time when Republicans have a clear advantage in controlling redistricting, the justices are poised to make it even easier. Within this context, Trump is pushing Republican-governed states to capitalize.
Significantly, Chávez’s early efforts to consolidate power used a similar mechanism. Though under-appreciated now, Venezuela’s earlier election system under its 1961 constitution actually included a clause guaranteeing minority representation, and officials developed a clever method to allocate seats roughly proportional to a party’s overall support. This made gerrymandering impossible, limiting the ability of the ruling party to press their advantage by further manipulating districts. In 1999, however, Chávez’s constitutional assembly eliminated this system, changing the rules so that most congressional seats would instead come from winner-take-all districts. The effect – at least in the short term while Chávez consolidated power – was to considerably inflate his party’s congressional representation.
Along with expanding executive power and manipulating congressional elections, a third commonality – repression of political opponents – needs little explanation. Even before Maduro apparently resorted to overt election fraud, the Chávez government faced accusations of intimidating judges and arresting opposition candidates. Vocal critics of the government have also reported heavy-handed tactics from formal military and paramilitary forces alike.
As we now watch Trump deploy troops in Democratic-led cities across the country; turn federal agencies such as Ice and into personal secret police who operate with impunity; and push to systematically arrest political opponents, the parallels are obvious.
Ultimately, while there is every reason to believe that Venezuela is in crisis, there is no reason to believe that Trump’s military aggression will have any benefit for the people of either country. The bottom line: the Trump administration has demonstrated time and time again that it has no qualms about wreaking havoc on Venezuelan civilians – nor on its own. Trump’s abuses of power at home and in the Caribbean are two sides of the same coin. We must condemn both.”
As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s bullying of Latin America isn’t part of any plan – he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing: The president’s threats to attack Venezuela are regressive, dangerous and almost certain to backfire; “Running for president in 2024, Donald Trump vowed to avoid costly, often disastrous overseas US military interventions like Iraq and Afghanistan. This was a key plank in his isolationist “America first” platform. Yet within months of his inauguration, US forces were bombing Yemen and Iran. Looking south, Trump threatened to seize the Panama canal. Now, the Pentagon is gearing up for attacks on “terrorist” drug cartels deep inside Colombia and Mexico. Of most immediate concern is a possible renewed White House effort to forcibly impose regime change on Venezuela.
Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s hard-left authoritarian president, believes this effort is already under way. He says the US is waging “undeclared war” on his country after several deadly strikes on Venezuelan vessels in international waters – Trump shared a video of the latest attack, which killed four people, on his social media last Friday. The president also notified Congress last week that the US is engaged in “armed conflict” with drug cartels. He claims, without providing evidence, that the targeted boats were carrying US-bound illegal narcotics – and that Maduro is responsible. He has placed a $50m bounty on Maduro’s head.
Latin American governments are fretfully watching a big US military buildup around Venezuela, including warships, F-35 fighter jets, an attack submarine and 2,200 marines. Such powerful assets are not much use in drug interdiction. But they could be used offensively, or to support special forces raids and airstrikes. On Thursday, Venezuela accused the US of an “illegal incursion” by at least five F-35s. Maduro says he is readying a state of emergency to “protect our people … if Venezuela [is] attacked by the American empire”.
What is Trump up to? Drug smuggling is a serious problem – but killing people on a whim on the high seas, while common and difficult to prosecute, is still illegal. And anyway, the UN says, most of the cocaine entering the US comes from Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, and is mostly not trafficked through Venezuela. Draft-dodger Trump likes to act the tough commander-in-chief. He is now trying to deport Venezuelan migrants, many of whom originally fled to the US to escape sanctions he himself imposed. Some analysts suggest he covets Venezuela’s abundant oil, gas and mineral resources.
It’s true that Trump and John Bolton, his then national security adviser, hoped to replace Maduro in 2019 in what Caracas claimed was a regime change plot. It’s also true that Maduro’s 2024 re-election victory was widely condemned as fraudulent. Given a free choice, Venezuelans would almost certainly sack him. And clashing ideologies are a factor, too. Maduro, unworthy heir to Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution, is an affront to Trump’s imperial idea of a US-dominated western hemisphere, where the 1823 Monroe doctrine rules again and neoliberal, free-market capitalism operates without restraint.
Yet given his hapless blundering on other key foreign issues, the most likely explanation for Trump’s behaviour is that, typically, he hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing – in Venezuela or Latin America as whole. There’s no plan. He throws his weight about, makes impetuous misjudgments, stokes fear of foreigners and bases policy on whether he “likes” other leaders. In 2019, with Maduro on the ropes, Trump blinked. Today, full-scale military intervention in Venezuela remains unlikely. More probable is an intensified pressure campaign of destabilisation, sanctions, maritime strikes, and air and commando raids.
Far from weakening and isolating the regime, Trump may achieve the exact opposite. Maduro is already using the crisis to assume dictatorial “special powers” and rally public opinion behind patriotic calls for national solidarity. Trump’s bullying of other left-leaning Latin American countries such as Colombia – and presumptuous cheerleading for rightwing populists in Argentina and El Salvador – is spurring a regional backlash, too. Most governments abhor the thought of a return to the bad old days of Yanqui meddling in Washington’s “back yard”.
Trump’s attempt to use punitive tariffs and sanctions to strong-arm Brazil into pardoning its disgraced former hard-right president Jair Bolsonaro backfired spectacularly last month. Huge crowds took to the streets of Brazilian cities to defend what they rightly saw as an assault on Brazilian sovereignty and rule of law. The popularity of Bolsonaro’s successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, soared. “We are not, and never again will we be, anyone’s colony,” he declared. Lula told Trump, in effect, to get lost. Then, when they met at the UN general assembly, Trump backed off and played nice. Keir Starmer, please note.
The perception of a great leap backwards in US-Latin America relations grows ineluctably. “His administration views Latin America primarily as a security threat, associating it with drug trafficking, organised crime and incoming migration,” Irene Mia of the International Institute for Strategic Studies warned earlier this year. “The US approach has become essentially negative, prioritising unilateral action and dominance rather than partnership,” she said, adding: “The region is being treated less as an equal partner and more as a sphere of influence to be controlled in line with US strategic interests.”
Trump’s hawkish advisers are part of the problem: notably Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, and Marco Rubio, a former Republican senator for Florida who is secretary of state and national security adviser. For Rubio, a longtime critic of leftwing rulers in Cuba and Nicaragua, Maduro is unfinished business. Defending the boat attacks, he declared: “Interdiction doesn’t work. What will stop them is when you blow them up … And it’ll happen again.” Coming from the top US diplomat, this is quite a statement.
Trump’s efforts to reprise the role of Latin American neighbourhood policeman, emulating former president Theodore Roosevelt – a big stick-wielding serial interventionist – are regressive, dangerous and self-defeating. Long-term, the big winner will most likely be Beijing, an increasingly influential regional actor, investor and leading member of the Brics group of nations. As the US burns its bridges across the world, Trump is making China great again.”
As I wrote in my post of August 11 2024, When Must Revolution Be Waged Against Revolution? The Case of Venezuela; In Venezuela a democracy revolution challenges the brutal regime of a dictator which has ruined the economy and made of its citizens a vast precariat in what was once envisioned as a socialist paradise.
Tyranny and a carceral state of force and control are a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle under imposed conditions which require liberation by seizures of power through force, especially anticolonial revolutions.
All states are constituted by violence and are themselves embodied violence; in the words of George Washington; “Government is about force, only force.”
When must revolution be waged against the revolution? When it has become the tyranny it seized power from, as nationalism rather than as a colony, and this is exactly what has happened in Venezuela.
Yes, America and her proxies has waged economic and political warfare against Venezuela for many long years, sometimes as terror, sometimes as farce; but no one compelled Maduro to begin random mass executions and imprisonments either. This revolution is all on him.
And this time, it is the poor and desperate underclasses of Venezuelan peasants who have risen up to seize their power and claim that liberty which is the birthright of all human beings, without the strings of invisible American and global capitalist puppetmasters.
Here is a true revolution of the people, and though I have long championed the Chavez revolutionary state and its legacies of anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist liberation versus America and called out and resisted the outrageous and terroristic policies of our government including those of both the Trump and Biden regimes toward Venezuela, we must recognize and rethink the meaning of the glorious and wholly legitimate democracy revolution against Maduro.
And we must do everything we can to help the people of Venezuela liberate themselves from tyranny, and bring stability and freedom from want to the region.
As written by Tom Phillips in The Guardian, in an article entitled World must confront Maduro’s ‘campaign of terror’, Venezuelan opposition leader says; “Venezuela’s main opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has accused the country’s strongman president, Nicolás Maduro, of unleashing a horrific “campaign of terror” in an attempt to cling on to power.
Two weeks after Maduro’s widely questioned claim to have won the 28 July election, human rights activists say he has launched a ferocious clampdown designed to silence those convinced his rival Edmundo González was the actual winner. More than 1,300 people have been detained, including 116 teenagers, according to the rights group Foro Penal. At least 24 people have reportedly been killed.
Speaking from an undisclosed location where she is in hiding, Machado – a charismatic conservative who is González’s key backer – urged governments around the world to oppose Maduro’s intensifying crackdown.
“What is going on in Venezuela is horrific. Innocent people are being detained or disappeared as we speak,” said the 56-year-old former congresswoman, who endorsed González after authorities barred her from running.
Maduro’s regime has nicknamed part of its clampdown Operación Tun Tun – “Operation Knock Knock” – a chilling reference to the often late-night visits to perceived government opponents by heavily armed, black-clad captors from the intelligence services or police.
Tun Tun’s targets have included activists, journalists and prominent opposition politicians – but most detainees appear to be the residents of working-class areas who rose up en masse against Maduro for the first time in the two days after his disputed claim to victory.
One Tun Tun propaganda video published on the Instagram account of the military counterintelligence service, DGCIM, last week showed one of Machado’s campaign organisers, María Oropeza, being detained to the sound of the nursery rhyme from the 1984 horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which Freddy Krueger attacks children in their dreams. “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you! Three, four, better lock your door!” warn the song’s sinister lyrics.
A second DGCIM video showing another arrest is soundtracked by a horror-film adaptation of Carol of the Bells, whose modified lyrics warn: “If you’ve done wrong, then he will come! … He’ll look for you! You’d better hide!”
Asked if she feared she and González would soon receive a visit from Maduro’s security forces, Machado replied: “At this moment … in Venezuela, everybody is afraid that your door could be knocked [on] and your freedom could be taken away – even your life is threatened. Maduro has unleashed a campaign of terror against Venezuelans.”
“Every single democratic government should raise their voices much more loudly,” said Machado, who believed the repression laid bare “the criminal nature” of a regime that knew it had lost by a landslide to González and was now seeking desperately to cling to power. “[Maduro’s government has] decided that their only option to stay in power is using violence, fear and terror against the population.”
Campaigners for human rights and democracy say the speed and scale of the repression is virtually unprecedented in the region’s recent history. Maduro has claimed he is pursuing criminals and terrorists who are behind a fascist, foreign-backed conspiracy to topple him.
“In Latin America, there hasn’t been a repressive crackdown of such magnitude as has happened in Venezuela since the days of [the Chilean dictator] Augusto Pinochet,” Marino Alvarado, an activist from the Venezuelan human rights group Provea, told El País last week.
Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, the president of the Washington Office on Latin America advocacy group, told the New York Times: “I have been documenting human rights violations in Venezuela for many years and have seen patterns of repression before. I don’t think I have ever seen this ferocity.”
Tamara Taraciuk Broner, the director of the rule of law programme at the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank, said the arbitrary arrests – and a social media crackdown that has temporarily blocked X and Signal – suggested Maduro wanted to take Venezuela in an even more despotic direction. “It looks as if they want to go towards [being] a full-fledged dictatorship,” she said. “You need to be very brave to take to the streets now in Venezuela … they are trying very hard to intimidate people so they don’t take to the streets.”
The government’s attempt to create an atmosphere of fear was on show last Saturday as thousands of opposition supporters gathered in Caracas to hear Machado speak despite the risk of arrest.
Unlike at other opposition marches in recent years, many protesters declined to give their names to journalists for fear of persecution, and some wore masks. After the march, at least one reporter was detained by security officials and accused of “stirring up hatred”. Machado came in disguise, wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up.
“Before I came out today, my daughter threw herself on top of me and made me promise that I would come home,” said one 28-year-old demonstrator, describing how her best friend was captured hours before.
Tellingly, the next major anti-Maduro mobilisations are set to be held predominantly outside Venezuela, where about 8 million of its estimated 29 million citizens live after fleeing abroad to escape economic chaos and political repression. Machado has called on supporters to gather across the globe on Saturday 17 August, for “a great worldwide protest … for the truth”.
Machado urged Maduro – who has governed since being elected after the death of his mentor Hugo Chávez in 2013 – to “accept his defeat and understand that we are offering reasonable terms for a negotiated transition”. Those terms included “guarantees, safe passage and incentives”.
Maduro has publicly dismissed talk of a negotiation but some believe one option for him could be exile in an allied country such as Cuba, Turkey or Iran. Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, last week offered him temporary asylum en route to such a destination, although Maduro quickly rejected his offer.
Machado pledged not to seek “revenge” or to persecute members of Maduro’s administration, although her campaign-trail promises to “forever bury” socialism and her past calls for foreign military intervention make many Chavistas profoundly suspicious of the right-wing politician.
Machado recognised the role the leftwing leaders of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico – who have not recognised Maduro’s claim to victory – could have in convincing him to enter “a serious negotiation for a democratic transition”.
“But we have to stop [the] repression and the cost of repression has to be increased. These are red lines that the Maduro regime is crossing as we speak,” Machado added. “
As written by Luke Taylor in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘A climate of terror’: Maduro cracks down on Venezuelans protesting contested election win; “After apparent efforts to steal the election, the president sent forces to round people up in ‘Operation knock-knock’; “Cristina Ramírez was readying her sofa bed in Buenos Aires for the arrival of her friend visiting from Venezuela when she received a text message suggesting Edni López could be delayed. Officials in Caracas airport had stopped her, apparently over an issue with her passport.
Four days later, López remains under the detention of the Venezuelan authorities and her family grows increasingly worried by the minute that the university professor could be caught up in a brutal crackdown on protests over Nicolás Maduro’s apparent efforts to steal the presidential election.
“We know almost nothing. We have not been permitted to get Edni a lawyer and we still do not even know what she has been charged with,” said Ramírez, her voice cracking with anxiety. “The uncertainty is hard to describe. We just hope she can be freed soon.”
After a wave of public unrest following the disputed election, Maduro promised to “pulverize” the popular movement against him, dispatching security forces to round up opposition activists in the so-called “Operation knock-knock”.
More than 1,100 people so far have been rounded up since the election, according to Caracas-based rights watchdog, Foro Penal.
Prominent political figures have been seized, including Freddy Superlano, the national coordinator of the opposition Voluntad Popular party, who was dragged from his home by masked men.
Venezuela’s attorney general, a Maduro loyalist, announced on Tuesday that opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González would be investigated for “incitement to insurrection” after they called on security forces to “side with the people” instead of repressing protests.
María Oropeza, a campaign co-ordinator for the opposition Vente party in the state of Portuguesa, livestreamed her own arrest late on Tuesday.
“Help me,” she pleaded live on Instagram as intelligence officers battered the lock off her front door. “I did nothing wrong, I am not a criminal. I am just another citizen who wants a different country”.
Oropeza had spoken out against the mass detentions just hours before she herself was detained.
But others with no political affiliation have also been caught up in Maduro’s dragnet, said Rafael Uzcategui, co-director of rights NGO Laboratorio de Paz, who suggested the operation was intended to terrify Venezuelans into submission.
“There were rumours that Maduro was targeting electoral observers but we investigated the arrests and they are too massive to see any real pattern. Many of those detained have no political affiliation and have not even participated in the protests. What we are seeing is simply an effort to sew a climate of terror,” he said.
Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, condemned Maduro for committing “serious human rights violations” on Wednesday and joined the likes of Guatemala, Argentina and Peru in rejecting Maduro’s “self-proclaimed” victory.
The US – as well as other governments more sympathetic to Maduro, including Brazil, Mexico and Colombia – have called on the Venezuelan leader to publish a breakdown of the vote count, which he has so far refused.
“I have no doubt that the Maduro regime has tried to commit fraud,” Boric told reporters.
In his appearance on state television, a defiant Maduro has decried an international “fascist” conspiracy to overthrow him and accused WhatsApp of “spying” on Venezuela.
The former bus driver has shown clips of protesters in the mass demonstrations followed by their alleged confessions, promising he is “willing to do anything” to stay in power.
Many ordinary Venezuelans have deleted messaging apps on their mobile phones for fear that security forces could use their chat history for proof of dissent.
Edni López’s family say they have received information that the 33-year-old has been taken to another facility from her detention center three times, possibly for questioning, but they still have no idea what she is accused of.
López teaches management classes at the Central university of Venezuela and consults humanitarian organisations, Ramírez said, adding she has no political affiliation and did not participate in the recent protests.
“She is very empathetic, philosophic and competent, which is why she brought all these things together to help people through her work,” Ramirez said.
“Edni’s case is emblematic of what’s new about the repression that we’re seeing in post-election Venezuela,” said Adam Isacson, a director at the Washington Office on Latin America. “Usually in the past, the regime was hiding its illegitimate detentions under a veneer of legality, going through legal proceedings and allowing access to defense attorneys, for example. Now, even basic habeas corpus rights are being routinely violated.”
As written by Tom Phillips and Patricia Torres in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Maduro has lost the streets’: in Venezuela’s barrios, former loyal voters risk all in protests; “Thousands from the capital’s favelas, once strongholds for the ‘revolution’, have faced a brutal crackdown after challenging last month’s presidential election result
Millions of Venezuelans went to the polls to vote their widely loathed authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro out of power last Sunday – but Tibisay Betancourt was not one of them.
“I voted for him,” said the 60-year-old masseuse, a loyal supporter of the president’s Chavista movement who lives in a housing estate apartment given to her by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez.
Within hours of casting her vote, Betancourt had cause to rue her choice. As turmoil gripped the streets of Caracas after Maduro’s disputed claim to have won the election, she sent her son, Alfredo Alejandro Rondón, to a nearby shop to buy a bottle of Sprite for his sick father. Minutes later his brother, Yorluis, said he had seen Alfredo being beaten and dragged away by members of the Bolivarian national police.
By Thursday morning, the high school graduate was one of hundreds of prisoners languishing behind bars at a police base on the east side of town, facing possible terrorism charges that could land him in jail for up to 30 years.
If she could speak to Maduro, Betancourt said, “I’d tell him to let the innocent people go and to order the police to stop hitting people in front of the children.” She was one of hundreds of mostly working-class citizens who had gathered under a ferocious Caribbean sun to seek news of their incarcerated loved ones.
Venezuela’s embattled president – who has presided over a catastrophic economic collapse since inheriting Chávez’s socialist-inspired “revolution” in 2013 – says more than 1,200 people have been seized as part of a crackdown on the alleged “traitors” and terrorists who took to the streets to demonstrate against what they call a stolen election. “And we’re going to capture 1,000 more,” Maduro declared, vowing to imprison those detained in maximum security jails.
Acts of violence and vandalism undoubtedly occurred during the explosion of dissent, fuelled by anger over economic hardship and a migration crisis that has shattered families and seen some 8 million Venezuelans flee abroad. The metro station at the heart of El Valle – the blue-collar district where Maduro was raised – has had its windows shattered, and the area’s main street is stained with black marks where tyres and trees have been burned. Maduro visited the area with police on Wednesday night and claimed vandals had tried to destroy a local hospital.
But many of the families outside the Zone 7 police detention centre said their loved ones had been arrested for simply attending peaceful protests or speaking out against Maduro’s administration online.
Friends of Carla Madelein López, 32, said members of a feared special forces unit called the DAET had arrested her at home on Wednesday after she supposedly posted a message on social media criticising the government. “It’s a [forced] disappearance,” said one close friend as he waited outside the jail for news. He suspected López had been arrested after a tip-off from a neighbour via a mobile phone app Maduro has encouraged citizens to use to snitch on government enemies.
Nearby, a 46-year-old man who asked not to be named fell to his knees and let out a wail of despair as he described how his son had been taken during a protest in Catia, a working-class area in west Caracas that has long been a bastion of Chavismo. “He’s just turned 18,” the father said, as black police vehicles resembling cattle trucks rolled out of the prison compound packed with detainees on their way to court.
A 27-year-old woman, who also asked not to be named, described how her boyfriend had been shot in the hand with a rubber bullet and arrested after the pair had attended a peaceful rally organised by the opposition politicians who claim to have beaten Maduro in the election – former diplomat Edmundo González and his ally María Corina Machado.
“He’s not a terrorist – he’s an entrepreneur,” said the detainee’s father, who, like Maduro, hails from El Valle and grew up in one of its deprived hillside favelas.
The father said most El Valle residents had turned against Maduro – who calls himself the “president of the people” – because of the economic meltdown that had unfolded on his watch, leaving jobless Venezuelans with empty fridges and broken homes. “Maduro has lost the streets. Nobody likes him,” the 63-year-old said as he waited for news of his son.
“Edmundo won [the election] in El Valle just like he won all over the country,” the man said of González, whose victory has been recognised by countries including the US, Argentina, Uruguay and Costa Rica. “And all the young people were trying to do was express the impotence they feel.
“It’s just like everywhere in Venezuela. People are tired. They are tired of the lies. They are tired of these people thinking they are the bosses of everything.”
Observers say such feelings are a key part of what distinguishes the current push to remove Maduro from previous attempts, such as Juan Guaidó’s failed bid to spark an uprising in 2019 or 2017’s mass protests.
For years after Chávez’s election in 1998, the barrios of Caracas were overwhelmingly loyal to the comandante’s “revolution” and its use of petrodollars from Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to bankroll social welfare programmes and empower the poor.
“Our hardest supporters were there [in the barrios],” said Chávez’s former communications minister, Andrés Izarra. “If you look at the voting record in all these communities, they were all hardcore Chavismo. We were winning like 80 or 85% of the vote.”
Maduro retains some support in such areas, which are adorned with propaganda murals saying things such as “I have faith in Maduro”.
“María Corina is a terrorist and an arselicker,” said José Ángel Seijas, a 58-year-old Chavista, as he played chess in a plaza at the foot of one El Valle favela. Showing off an old picture of himself alongside a youthful Maduro on his phone, Seijas urged his president to take no prisoners in his clampdown on objectors: “We want an iron fist against these punks.”
But Venezuela’s economic disintegration under Maduro over the past decade – which the president blames on US sanctions but critics attribute primarily to rampant corruption and economic mismanagement – has seen the mood in the barrios overwhelmingly shift.
Izarra said Maduro’s worst fear was such communities rising up against him en masse, as began to happen for the first time in the hours after the president’s disputed claim to have won a third term. Enraged by that declaration – for which Maduro has yet to provide proof – thousands of residents from barrios such as Petare swept west towards the presidential palace on motorbike and by foot before being pushed back by security forces.
“We’ve had enough! Enough!” shouted Rafael Cantillo, 45, who came down from a Petare favela called El Campito to demonstrate last Monday.
“There are people here from Mariche, from Petare, from El Campito, from Valle-Coche, from Caucagüita, from everywhere,” he said, reeling off the names of Caracas’s sprawling low-income communities where hundreds of thousands live.
Izarra said that the mass mobilisation of Venezuela’s poor explained Maduro’s clampdown, as authorities battled to nip the barrio mutiny in the bud. “That’s why this huge security operation is under way to try to stop this,” added Izarra, who lives in exile in Germany. He predicted that more repression lay ahead.
Interviews with relatives of detainees outside the Zone 7 jail suggested the crackdown was overwhelmingly targeting residents of working-class areas, such as Antímano, Catia and Petare. Stefania Migliorini, a human rights lawyer who had come to offer legal support, said the prisoners included men, women and minors. “People who were simply going to a protest, or going back home, or going to work, were arrested,” she said. “This is an extremely harsh situation.” Migliorini’s group, Foro Penal, says at least 16 people have so far been killed, five of them in Caracas.
Protesters have vanished from the streets in recent days as security forces and armed pro-government gangs called colectivos are reported to be trawling the barrios for targets. A relative of one prisoner told the BBC police had been chasing young people through one community and “shooting at them as if they were on a safari in Africa”.
But the demonstrators have vowed to return from their redbrick hilltop homes, and Machado called fresh protests for Saturday morning.
“This time it will be different – this time things are different, because they’ve lost everyone who lives in the poor areas,” said Cantillo, as marchers scattered for cover to avoid being detained or hurt.
“Tell the world this government is no good,” he implored as his group sought shelter from security forces.
As he spoke, the women who had accompanied Cantillo from their favela broke into song. “It’s going to fall! It’s going to fall!” they chanted. “This government is going to fall!”
As I wrote in my post of November 27 2022, A Chance For Change in American-Venezuelan Relations; There are few things which reveal those truths power would keep hidden through silence and erasure, rewritten histories, lies, falsifications and propaganda, than the liminal spaces where no rules exist, the blank spaces on our maps of human being, meaning, and value marked with the legend Here Be Dragons to indicate unknowns; like the purgatorial realm between Venezuela and Colombia wherein nothing is Forbidden and angels and devils walk among the lost and the mad, the depraved and the illumined.
Here the limitless possibilities of becoming human are a chiaroscuro of the bestial and the exalted; here is the place to forge a new humankind free from the legacies of the past and the authorized identities of systems of dehumanization and unequal power, and of the tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue; for here in such places of liberation nothing can seize us for its own purposes.
With Chaos comes the new and the unforeseen; here is terror and abjection, but also that most fragile of our powers, hope. Be thou joyful in the embrace of our monstrosity, for the future is ours.
As written by Travis Waldron in Huffpost, in am article entitled Russia’s War Has Given Biden A Chance To Ditch Trump’s Failed Venezuela Policy; “Amid climbing gas prices that are likely to increase in the coming days, the Biden administration pushed to reengage one of the United States’ staunchest geopolitical foes this week: the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro, an authoritarian leader the United States has targeted with increasing rounds of sanctions for the last half-decade.
The White House confirmed on Monday that Biden had sent a group of U.S. officials to Caracas for renewed talks last weekend. White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the “ongoing” discussions included dialogue about “energy security” — a suggestion that the U.S. had discussed potentially easing the de facto embargo it placed on Venezuela’s oil industry in 2019.
The attempt to reengage Maduro is the latest sign that the U.S. is reassessing its foreign policy in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to mitigate the effects of isolating Russian President Vladimir Putin — including potential fuel shortages that have pushed domestic gas prices to record highs.
U.S. overtures to Venezuela sparked bipartisan criticism, particularly from hawkish foreign policy voices that have egged on an aggressive approach to Maduro. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) criticized the White House on Monday for placating a human rights abuser who has overseen disputed elections and dismantled Venezuelan democracy in exchange for domestic political relief that may not materialize.
But many others have welcomed the potential shift, and not just because Venezuelan oil may help reduce gas prices that reached $4.17 per gallon across the United States on Tuesday even before Biden announced a new ban on Russian oil imports.
The United States’ approach to Venezuela, which has spent the last five years mired in economic, political and migration crises, has been disastrous: It has failed to mitigate the humanitarian damage of those crises, and perhaps even helped make it worse.
Now, Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine may have provided just enough space for a much-needed reset to finally begin.
“The puzzle we’ve all had for the past several months is: Why doesn’t the Biden administration do something to change course from the Trump policy?” said David Smilde, a University of Tulane professor and Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. “It took the conflict in Ukraine to provide the straw that broke the camel’s back, to get Biden to change things around a bit.”
Biden administration officials met with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro over the weekend for discussions that could spark a reset in relations between the U.S. and Venezuela, which has been subject to heavy sanctions from the U.S. for the last five years.
The U.S. and Venezuela have sparred for two decades, ever since socialist President Hugo Chávez won his first election in 1999. Maduro, who assumed the presidency upon Chávez’s 2013 death, has been a thorn in the side of Biden’s two immediate predecessors.
In 2015, President Barack Obama sanctioned seven Venezuelan government officials amid concerns that Maduro’s government had engaged in widespread corruption, as well as crackdowns on political opponents. President Donald Trump followed with new sanctions in both 2017 and 2018, when Maduro emerged victorious from elections that his opponents, the United States and many international organizations alleged were rife with fraud.
In 2019, the U.S. (along with dozens of other countries) recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the country’s legitimate leader and launched a “maximum pressure” campaign meant to dislodge Maduro from power.
Trump’s approach to Venezuela, while popular in some quarters, was quickly exposed as nakedly political and broadly impractical. He empowered hard-line appointees whose saber-rattling toward Maduro included repeated refusals to take implausible military actions off the table. This was primarily meant to shore up support among Venezuelan voters in South Florida, the fastest-growing Latino population in the swing state, and among large populations of Cuban American voters who see Maduro as an extension of Cuba’s Communist government.
From that standpoint, Trump’s approach was successful: It helped him gain massive ground among Latino voters in the Miami area and easily win Florida in the 2020 election. But by nearly every other measure, the maximum pressure campaign toward Venezuela has been an abject, and sometimes tragicomic, failure.
The U.S. pressure campaign further brutalized Venezuela’s economy, which had already experienced hyperinflation and severe energy, food and medicine shortages. But it largely failed to hit Maduro and top government officials.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s weaponization of humanitarian assistance for political purposes, along with its decision to undermine negotiations between Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition, cratered any hope of real progress and did almost nothing to alleviate a humanitarian crisis that had driven millions of Venezuelans into extreme poverty or out of the country.
By the time Trump left office, Guaidó was largely impotent at home and losing support abroad, and his opposition movement deeply splintered. Maduro, by contrast, was by most accounts stronger and more stable than he was when the campaign kicked off, free to continue to crack down on political opponents, dissenters and human rights.
Ties between Caracas and Moscow had also deepened: As the U.S. ramped up pressure on Caracas, Russia expanded its oil holdings in Venezuela and helped Maduro and his government evade American sanctions.
The policy was, in sum, the exact catastrophe many experts had warned it would become.
“Sanctions without a more comprehensive strategy are an absolute waste of time,” said Brian Fonseca, a foreign affairs professor at Florida International University and former analyst at the United States Southern Command. “Sanctions are an instrument meant to encourage discussion, but there’s got to be discussion.”
Still, Biden maintained the broad tenets of the maximum pressure strategy upon taking office in 2021. He continued to recognize Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader and left the aggressive sanctions regime in place. Despite growing calls for change from foreign policy officials, members of Congress and some members of the Venezuelan opposition, a strategic shift seemed unlikely to materialize before the 2022 elections, especially as Democrats fretted about further erosion of support among South Florida voters.
But then, the Russian invasion of Ukraine shifted American priorities both domestically and internationally. Abroad, Biden’s efforts to thwart Putin have taken foreign policy precedence over hard-line tactics toward countries like Venezuela. At home, political concerns over modest engagement with Maduro have taken a backseat to a much bigger worry: that rising gas prices, which Biden desperately attempted to characterize as “Russia’s fault” on Tuesday, might crater Democrats in upcoming midterm elections that already seem likely to generate sizable Democratic losses.
Engagement with Maduro still makes for a touchy political subject in Florida, but Latino voters there may be open to a course change as well.
A majority of Venezuelan American voters in Florida said that foreign policy is somewhat or very important to their voting decisions in a recent poll conducted by the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University. Roughly 45% said they disapprove of Biden’s continuation of Trump’s maximum pressure approach to Maduro, compared to just 37% who support it, and nearly two-thirds said the sanctions had either fallen short of their expectations or “failed completely” to meet their expectations of change in Venezuela.
Roughly 60% of Venezuelan American voters — and an even larger share of Cuban American voters — said they could support an easing of oil sanctions if Maduro didn’t manage new oil revenues and they were directed toward the country’s humanitarian crisis, the poll found.
“The findings suggested that the diaspora would be open to lifting things like oil sanctions,” Fonseca said. “When you look at priorities, they don’t think the sanctions are having an effect, and they see the humanitarian crisis as more important than beating the [Maduro] government.”
That atmosphere has provided a natural backdrop for a shift in relations.
Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela have deepened ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin since the U.S. imposed heavy sanctions on the South American country, which have also benefited Russia’s oil industry.
Venezuela likely can’t produce enough oil to fully offset Russian imports. But, like much of the oil the U.S. buys from Russia, Venezuelan oil is of the heavy crude variety, making it a natural replacement at U.S. refineries along the Gulf and East coasts that were specifically built to turn heavy crude into gasoline.
It will likely take months for Venezuela to ramp up its oil production to previous capacities if sanctions are eased, but even an immediate injection could help dampen price spikes in the U.S. over the coming months.
From a foreign policy standpoint, engaging Maduro now could have multiple benefits as the U.S. and Europe seek new ways to counter Putin’s aggression. U.S. sanctions on Venezuela increased U.S. dependence on Russia: American imports of Russian oil have doubled since the U.S. placed sanctions on Venezuelan oil in 2019.
Easing the sanctions on Venezuela now could both weaken Russia’s oil industry and its overall ties with its strongest ally in the Americas.
That could limit Russia’s power in the Western Hemisphere, a region the U.S. still paternalistically views as its own backyard. But it may also make it easier for Biden to place new and alternative sanctions on Putin and Rosneft — Russia’s largest oil company, a subsidiary of which the U.S. has already sanctioned in Venezuela — if he chooses to, Fonseca said, providing the U.S. with another potential way to combat Putin’s advances in Europe.
Eased sanctions could also lead to renewed diplomatic negotiations with Maduro and advances toward a resolution to Venezuela’s democratic, economic and humanitarian crises.
The U.S. and Venezuela appear to have made little progress during the initial round of discussions. But on Monday, Maduro signaled his openness to more talks with the U.S. — and pledged to restart negotiations with the Venezuelan opposition. Previous rounds of talks stalled in October when Maduro abruptly backed out.
“Easing the sanctions on Venezuela now could both weaken Russia’s oil industry and its overall ties with its strongest ally in the Americas.”
The path forward is difficult and full of caveats. The U.S. and the Venezuelan opposition still want a pledge for new rounds of “free and fair elections,” while Maduro wants the U.S. to lift sanctions completely. Maduro, Smilde said, has used past negotiations as a stall tactic to maintain or consolidate his domestic power, and the Venezuelan opposition has already expressed concerns that he’s preparing to do so again.
But some progress does seem possible: On Tuesday night, Venezuela released two of the six former Citgo executives it had detained in October after the U.S. secured the extradition of a key Maduro ally in Colombia. Five of the six detainees, who had been serving house arrest sentences, are American citizens; the other is a U.S. permanent resident.
The release of two prisoners may not yet mark a return to the pre-October status quo, but it’s at least a suggestion that further talks could achieve more if the U.S. presses Maduro for substantive democratic and human rights reforms.
As part of the ongoing talks, the U.S. “needs to require a commitment that actual progress is made,” Smilde said. “They need to get some actual commitments from Maduro, and work on actual democratic issues.”
“There’s a lot of space for improvement this year in terms of electoral institutions and electoral democracy, so it’d be great if they focus on that and not just on U.S. citizens that are prisoners in Venezuela,” Smilde added. “The ironing out or forging of some actual commitments on human rights is something that could make this go in the right direction.”
The alternative is continuing a strategy that has paid little dividend. On Monday, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) opined that the only thing Biden should negotiate with Maduro is “the time of his resignation,” the sort of empty rhetoric U.S. officials have aimed south for three years with no real plan to back it up.
“The bottom line,” Fonseca said, “is that our policy has done little to move the needle. And so this may be an opportunity for us to rethink and recalibrate our policy towards Venezuela.”
As I wrote in my post of May 23 2021, Venezuela and Columbia: Partners in a Dance of Tyranny and Humanitarian Disaster; Vestigial remnants of a Cold War the world has long forgotten and casualties of American imperialism, like the shadows of an invisible reptilian tail which we drag behind us, the twin failed states of Venezuela and Columbia are partners in a dance of tyranny and humanitarian disaster.
The monstrous oligarchic kleptocracy of state terror and proxy of American interests Álvaro Uribe and his successor Iván Duque of Columbia, an echo and reflection of our other puppet regimes and allies, among them Fulgencio Batista of Cuba and Augusto Pinochet of Chile, figures of darkness in a chiaroscuro with those of light as negatives spaces of each other; Hugo Chavez and his protégé Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Salvador Allende of Chile.
Columbia and Venezuela share the historical legacies of the injustices and inequalities we Americans have visited upon them, but also the glorious legacy of liberation of the great and visionary Simon Bolivar; and which of these forces will prevail to be handed on to future generations as their inheritance remains to be determined. This is our darkest fear, but also our brightest hope.
Defining the boundaries of civilization and the limits of what is human, the forces of conservatism and revolution struggle as always for the soul of humankind, the future possibilities of becoming human, and the terms of human being, meaning, and value.
As I wrote in my post of May 6 2020, Always Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain: Failure of a Diversionary Coup in Venezuela; Yet another delusional and pathetic attempt by Trump to divert attention from his disastrous mishandling of the pandemic resulting in thousands of unnecessary American deaths has failed, having morphed into a witless plot to abduct Maduro and stage a coup in Venezuela, one of many such attempts to destabilize and seize Venezuela among other foreign states in plutocratic-imperialist conquest.
Trump has long eyed Venezuela hungrily, and pursued a vendetta against Maduro; so also has America a history of blood and darkness in our military adventurism and Napoleonic certainty in our right to make others become like us through violence and control. But why has he chosen this moment to act on his years of threats of invasion and tirades of bluster and obfuscation?
Having squandered America’s global hegemony of power and privilege, beginning with trading sanction for Russia’s conquest of and a blind eye in their conquest of Ukraine and struggle with Turkey for dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean for power in the Stolen Election of 2016, Trump then offered the same deal to China for help in 2020.
It is this second deal he wishes to distract us from in this absurd fiasco; in which he openly promised a hands off policy regarding the democracy rebellion in Hong Kong, the ethnic cleansing of Xinjiang, and the construction of a network of artificial islands in preparation for the conquest of South Asia, the Pacific Rim, and the world, and handing control of America’s economy to the Chinese Communist Party through massive debt and the export of our manufacturing to create an enormous precariat and jobless underclass totally reliant on the state for survival, a usefully angry and desperate citizenry who can be shaped to the will of authority and a fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil, while the profits go to a few plutocrats who happen to be his paymasters.
Until the pandemic, for now Trump wishes to shift blame for his complicity in our destruction. He wants to hide his partnership with Xi Jinping behind a curtain of lies and misdirections.
As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post; “A Bay of Pigs-style fiasco in Venezuela: Trump administration officials this week — including President Trump on Tuesday — rejected any link to an apparent failed military operation over the weekend in Venezuela that involved a group of armed defectors and at least two American mercenaries who are now in Venezuelan detention.
President Nicolás Maduro said Monday that his government had stopped a “terrorist” assault on the country, killing eight and capturing more than a dozen of the plotters over two days. Maduro said they sought to incite a rebellion and possibly kill him. Thousands of Venezuelan reservists were deployed to the country’s coasts in a show of force.
For years, the embattled demagogue has warned of foreign plots against his rule, waving at the specter of treacherous coups and imperialist invasions. Such alarmism often served as a smokescreen for his government’s failures and the economic collapse that has taken place under his watch. But this time — as footage circulated by Venezuelan authorities on social media appeared to show a number of apprehended insurrectionists, including two former U.S. Special Operations soldiers — Maduro may have a point.
A key figure behind the plot is Jordan Goudreau, a former U.S. Green Beret who runs Silvercorp USA, a Florida-based private security firm. From Florida, Goudreau announced the incursion alongside a former Venezuelan national guard officer in a video on Sunday and told reporters that the ongoing operation had the support and encouragement of the Venezuelan opposition, including opposition leader Juan Guaidó. (Guaidó’s office has denied any contact with Goudreau or signing any agreement with him, but various people familiar with the situation allege that there were direct contacts between Goudreau and other members of the opposition last year.)
“The main mission was to liberate Venezuela, to capture Maduro, but the mission in Caracas failed,” Goudreau told Bloomberg News. “The secondary mission is to set up insurgency camps against Maduro. They are already in camps, they are recruiting and we are going to start attacking tactical targets.”
That may be a fantasy. In an interview with my colleagues on Monday, Goudreau said the two captured Americans — identified as Airan Berry and Luke Denman — had been in a boat off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast late Sunday, hoping for extraction, before they were seized by Maduro’s forces. Now, he wants U.S. officials to “engage and try to get these guys back,” Goudreau told The Washington Post. “They are Americans. They are ex-Green Berets. Come on.”
“They were playing Rambo,” said Maduro, on whom the United States has placed a $15 million bounty. “They were playing hero.”
Reports of Goudreau’s operation paint a bizarre picture. Initial planning meetings a year ago in Colombia involved what one person described to the Associated Press as a “Star Wars summit of anti-Maduro goofballs,” replete with “military deserters accused of drug trafficking, shady financiers” and former regime officials. The AP identified Goudreau’s principal contact and the main ringleader as Clíver Alcalá, a retired Venezuelan major general who is in detention in the United States on narcotics charges.
Observers weren’t impressed by the handful of clandestine training camps that sprang up in Colombia. “You’re not going to take out Maduro with 300 hungry, untrained men,” Ephraim Mattos, a former U.S. Navy SEAL who trained some of the would-be combatants in first aid, told the AP.
The number of fighters involved in the botched invasion appears to be considerably less than that, and a far less real threat to Maduro’s hold on power than a quashed uprising a year ago that did have Guaidó’s direct involvement.
The current episode smacks of “Keystone Cops” meets “Bay of Pigs,” Brett McGurk, a former Trump and Obama administration diplomat, suggested on Twitter. The latter incident is the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961 by a force of Cuban exiles secretly backed by the United States. Its memory was conspicuously harnessed by Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, who delivered an address to the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association in Florida last year hailing the “twilight hour of socialism” in the hemisphere.
“There’s a kind of tragedy meets farce element to this, in part because so many of the people Trump has surrounded himself with, or at least outsourced his policy to … are Cold Warriors repeating these well-worn scripts,” New York University academic Alejandro Velasco told the American Conservative.
The Bay of Pigs is also an enduring, loaded metaphor for American meddling and overreach abroad. For that reason, analysts doubt the Trump administration played any serious role in encouraging this weekend’s quixotic raid. “There’s not one person at the State Department or the CIA who says let’s repeat the Bay of Pigs,” Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas and a former senior U.S. diplomat, told Today’s WorldView.
The incident does expose some of the problems that ail Venezuela’s opposition: Although Guaidó is now a well-known figurehead, recognized by the United States and dozens of other countries as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, he presides over a decentralized mess of factions inside and outside the country. The opposition finds it both “tough to maintain message discipline,” Farnsworth said, and is “awfully easy for the regime to infiltrate.” In this case, regime officials boasted of knowing about the plot well in advance.
For Maduro, the incident is a welcome distraction. Tanking oil prices and the coronavirus pandemic have put him under even greater pressure, with aid organizations and opposition officials warning of the risk of the country’s already enfeebled health system collapsing under new strains.
It’s a “convenient narrative,” Farnsworth said. “What better way to rally a country that’s flat on its back than to expose an invasion from the empire?”
As written in my post of October 24 2020, The Tide Turns Against American Imperialism in Venezuela; In the wake of the failed American May 3 coup attempt against Maduro, the victory in a British court over access to Venezuela’s gold reserves in defiance of the American mandate to award the treasury to its puppet Juan Guaidó, the reversal of Spain’s support by its new Socialist government to Maduro, and now the abandonment of Venezuela by Guaido’s last major internal partner and leader of the April 2019 revolt against Maduro, Leopoldo López, it becomes clear that the tide has turned against American imperialism in Venezuela.
As Trump’s presidency and fascist regime come apart at the seams in a spectacular meltdown during the final days of the election, both its allies and victims smell blood in the water and are emboldened to open defiance and challenge of the Fourth Reich he represents.
The collapse of Trump’s plot to deliver the resources of Venezuela to his plutocratic corporate sycophants and paymasters is now final, and we celebrate the liberation of the people of Venezuela from those who would enslave them.
So also do we herald and rejoice in the possibilities for the liberation of humankind from the global network of fascism and tyranny which has arisen in the shadow of Trump’s subversion of democracy, a negative space and reverse image of America’s values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and of our defining role as a Torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us unite in solidarity with the powerless and the dispossessed to seize ownership of our autonomy and self-determination, to resist our dehumanization and authoritarian force and control, and to forge a new future and a free society of equals in which we ourselves, and no government, own our possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of February 26 2020, Venezuela and Columbia: a Dynamism of Famine and Fear; It’s the most terrible humanitarian crisis on earth today; one million children abandoned in Venezuela amid a wasteland of famine and destitution, no healthcare and an inflation rate over ten thousand percent, real labor wages of fifty cents a week drawing a mass migration of four million starving and penniless job seekers to the brutal mining and logging camps beyond their borders in South America’s largest mass migration in history.
Often their routes take them on foot through the Columbia-Venezuela border region, a wild west zone of warring rebel factions and gangs, of murders and kidnappings, rapes and human trafficking, child soldiers and the omnipresent lure of profits from the regions only viable industry, the narcotics trade.
Society has collapsed absolutely in Venezuela, but for the glittering baroque palaces and skyscrapers of the semifeudal oligarchs and their Potemkin villages which give the lie to Maduro’s claims to socialism, the true savagery of inequality here masked with a legitimizing veneer of Cuban alliance by a government of nepotism and exploitation, and challenged for supremacy only by an American pawn of equally odious alliances and connections. Between Maduro and Guaido there is little to choose, but for the lies with which they obscure their plunder.
Across the hell region of the border, Columbia is now entering its third month of a National Strike called The Paro, which has been met with brutal repression by the police, including summary executions.
As Sanoja Bhaumik writes in Hyperallergic: “The Paro began on November 21 when labor unions, students, indigenous groups, feminist organizations, and other sectors of Colombian society united in opposition to the current right-wing government. The main grievances include labor and pension reforms, widespread corruption, and lack of government compliance with both the 2016 FARC Peace Deal and public education funding agreements.”
In The Guardian, Joe Parkin Daniels described the National Strike in this way; “Hundreds of thousands of people joined the first national strike on 21 November, and have turned out in daily demonstrations since then, initially sparked by proposed cuts to pensions.
Though that reform was never formally announced, it became a lightning rod for widespread dissatisfaction with the government of Duque, whose approval rating has dropped to just 26% since he took office in August last year.
Protesters are also angry at the lack of support for the historic 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), which formally ended five decades of civil war that killed 260,000 and forced more than 7 million to flee their homes.
Others are protesting in defense of indigenous people and rural activists, who continue to be murdered at alarming rates. A recent airstrike against a camp of dissident rebel drug traffickers left at least eight minors dead, adding to protesters’ fury.”
What is clear is that the failure of the peace with FARC in Columbia and the collapse of the economy in Venezuela have fed each other in a dynamism of famine and fear.
We need a revolution of the poor and the oppressed as a unified front in both nations which organizes around issues of inequality, poverty, and freedom, which considers Venezuela and Columbia as interdependent partners in regional viability much as we do now in Iraq, Lebanon, and Iran.
Above all any just government must answer the humanitarian needs of the people, for the primary right to life and its preconditions of sufficient food, safe drinking water, universal free health care, and of the universal human rights of actualization of potential which democracy is designed to secure, founded on the principles of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.”
Trump is threatening Venezuela. But his own country looks a lot like it
23 de octubre de 2025 La guerra no declarada de Trump contra Venezuela
A la sombra de la Conquista de las Américas a manos de los pueblos indígenas y de la Doctrina Monroe que autorizó el imperialismo y el colonialismo estadounidenses en todo nuestro continente, el régimen de Trump está cometiendo crímenes de guerra contra civiles venezolanos en su guerra no declarada en dos frentes, los ataques falsos y performativos a barcos pesqueros con el pretexto de una guerra contra las drogas y la campaña de limpieza étnica y terror supremacista blanco emprendida por ICE dentro de nuestra nación, que comenzó y se ha dirigido específicamente a ciudadanos venezolanos.
Todos estos crímenes de guerra y crímenes de lesa humanidad están al servicio de la riqueza y el poder de las elites blancas que desean sacar provecho del robo de los enormes recursos petroleros de Venezuela, el saqueo capitalista nuevamente bajo el pretexto de un Terror Rojo que hace eco y refleja la Bahía de Cochinos y nuestra vendetta de décadas contra Cuba por tirar nuestros casinos mafiosos. Las acciones de Trump también recapitulan horriblemente tanto el Terror Rojo de la era McCarthy aquí en Estados Unidos como la represión de la disidencia y el Terror Rojo que dio origen a la Operación Cóndor y nuestro golpe en Chile que reemplazó al campeón del pueblo Allende por el tirano fascista y títere estadounidense Pinochet.
Sí, el régimen de Maduro ha traicionado a la Revolución y se ha convertido en todo aquello contra lo que alguna vez se enfrentó el magnífico libertador Hugo Chávez, pero por esto; Ambos insisten en la independencia y soberanía de Venezuela y representan las fuerzas de la lucha de liberación anticolonial en las Américas. Y esto marca la diferencia.
A continuación siguen algunos de mis escritos sobre el movimiento democrático en Venezuela, del cual la ganadora del Premio Nobel María Corina Machado es una figura, aunque muy problemática en cuanto a sus acciones como representante del régimen de Trump y el colonialismo estadounidense.
¿Cuál es la diferencia entre el intento de golpe planeado por Trump contra Maduro y el propio pueblo de Venezuela provocando un cambio de régimen?
La conquista y el dominio imperialistas no se parecen en nada a la democracia que surge de la lucha de liberación del pueblo; y la prueba de desambiguación es ¿quién toma y posee el poder, el pueblo o algún amo extranjero?
Y una cosa más; No me importa por qué alguien mata o esclaviza a otro, silencia o brutaliza a otros como represión de la disidencia o la imposición de identidades autorizadas, versiones de la historia o la realidad, o la virtud como sumisión a la autoridad; y sus víctimas tampoco.
Las ideologías no significan nada comparadas con las simples pruebas de ¿Quién tiene el poder y quién sufre?
Porque lo humano es lo más real.
11 de agosto de 2024 ¿Cuándo se debe librar una revolución contra una revolución? El caso de Venezuela
En Venezuela, una revolución democrática desafía al régimen brutal de un dictador que ha arruinado la economía y ha convertido a sus ciudadanos en un vasto precariado en lo que una vez se imaginó como un paraíso socialista.
La tiranía y un estado carcelario de fuerza y control son una fase predecible de la lucha revolucionaria en condiciones impuestas que requieren la liberación mediante la toma del poder por la fuerza, especialmente las revoluciones anticoloniales.
Todos los estados están constituidos por la violencia y son en sí mismos violencia encarnada; en palabras de George Washington; “El gobierno se trata de fuerza, solo fuerza”.
¿Cuándo se debe librar una revolución contra la revolución? Cuando se ha convertido en la tiranía de la que tomó el poder, como nacionalismo en lugar de como colonia, y esto es exactamente lo que ha sucedido en Venezuela.
Sí, Estados Unidos y sus representantes han librado una guerra económica y política contra Venezuela durante muchos años, a veces como terror, a veces como farsa; Pero nadie obligó a Maduro a iniciar ejecuciones masivas y encarcelamientos aleatorios. Esta revolución es toda culpa suya.
Y esta vez, son las clases bajas pobres y desesperadas de los campesinos venezolanos quienes se han levantado para tomar su poder y reclamar esa libertad que es el derecho de nacimiento de todos los seres humanos, sin los hilos de los titiriteros invisibles estadounidenses y globales del capitalismo.
Esta es una verdadera revolución del pueblo, y aunque durante mucho tiempo he defendido el estado revolucionario de Chávez y sus legados de liberación anticolonial, antiimperialista y anticapitalista contra Estados Unidos y he denunciado y resistido las políticas escandalosas y terroristas de nuestro gobierno, incluidas las de los regímenes de Trump y Biden hacia Venezuela, debemos reconocer y repensar el significado de la gloriosa y totalmente legítima revolución democrática contra Maduro.
Y debemos hacer todo lo posible para ayudar al pueblo de Venezuela a liberarse de la tiranía y traer estabilidad y libertad de la miseria a la región.
27 de noviembre de 2022 Una oportunidad de cambio en las relaciones entre Estados Unidos y Venezuela
Hay pocas cosas que revelan esas verdades que el poder mantendría ocultas mediante el silencio y el borrado, las historias reescritas, las mentiras, las falsificaciones y la propaganda, que los espacios liminales donde no existen reglas, los espacios en blanco en nuestros mapas del ser humano, el significado y el valor marcados. con la leyenda Here Be Dragons para indicar incógnitas; como el reino del purgatorio entre Venezuela y Colombia donde nada está Prohibido y ángeles y demonios caminan entre los perdidos y los locos, los depravados y los iluminados.
Aquí las posibilidades ilimitadas de devenir humano son un claroscuro de lo bestial y lo exaltado; aquí está el lugar para forjar una nueva humanidad libre de los legados del pasado y de las identidades autorizadas de sistemas de deshumanización y poder desigual, y de la tiranía de la normalidad y de las ideas ajenas de virtud; porque aquí, en tales lugares de liberación, nada puede apoderarse de nosotros para sus propios fines.
Con Caos llega lo nuevo y lo imprevisto; aquí hay terror y abyección, pero también la más frágil de nuestras fuerzas, la esperanza. Alégrate en el abrazo de nuestra monstruosidad, porque el futuro es nuestro.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 23 de mayo de 2021, Venezuela y Colombia: socios en una danza de tiranía y desastre humanitario; Restos vestigiales de una Guerra Fría que el mundo ha olvidado hace mucho tiempo y víctimas del imperialismo estadounidense, como las sombras de una cola de reptil invisible que arrastramos detrás de nosotros, los estados gemelos fallidos de Venezuela y Colombia son socios en una danza de tiranía y desastre humanitario.
La monstruosa cleptocracia oligárquica del terror de Estado y apoderada de los intereses norteamericanos Álvaro Uribe y su sucesor Iván Duque de Colombia, eco y reflejo de nuestros otros regímenes títeres y aliados, entre ellos Fulgencio Batista de Cuba y Augusto Pinochet de Chile, figuras de oscuridad en un claroscuro con los de la luz como espacios negativos unos de otros; Hugo Chávez y su protegido Nicolás Maduro de Venezuela, Fidel Castro de Cuba, Salvador Allende de Chile.
Colombia y Venezuela comparten el legado histórico de las injusticias y desigualdades que les hemos infligido los norteamericanos, pero también el legado glorioso de liberación del grande y visionario Simón Bolívar; y cuál de estas fuerzas prevalecerá para ser transmitida a las generaciones futuras como su herencia queda por determinar. Este es nuestro miedo más oscuro, pero también nuestra esperanza más brillante.
Definiendo los límites de la civilización y los límites de lo humano, las fuerzas del conservadurismo y la revolución luchan como siempre por el alma de la humanidad, las posibilidades futuras de convertirse en humano y los términos del ser humano, significado y valor.
Como está escrito en mi publicación del 24 de octubre de 2020, La marea se vuelve contra el imperialismo estadounidense en Venezuela; Tras el fallido intento de golpe de estado estadounidense del 3 de mayo contra Maduro, la victoria en un tribunal británico sobre el acceso a las reservas de oro de Venezuela desafiando el mandato estadounidense de otorgar el tesoro a su títere Juan Guaidó, la revocación del apoyo de España por parte de su nuevo gobierno socialista a Maduro, y ahora el abandono de Venezuela por parte del último gran socio interno de Guaidó y líder de la revuelta de abril de 2019 contra Maduro, Leopoldo López, queda claro que la marea se ha vuelto contra el imperialismo estadounidense en Venezuela.
A medida que la presidencia de Trump y el régimen fascista se desmoronan en un colapso espectacular durante los últimos días de las elecciones, tanto sus aliados como sus víctimas huelen sangre en el agua y se animan a desafiar abiertamente al Cuarto Reich que él representa.
El colapso del complot de Trump para entregar los recursos de Venezuela a sus plutócratas corporaciones aduladoras y pagadoras es ahora definitivo, y celebramos la liberación del pueblo de Venezuela de quienes querían esclavizarlo.
Así también anunciamos y nos regocijamos en las posibilidades para la liberación de la humanidad de la red global de fascismo y tiranía que ha surgido a la sombra de la subversión de la democracia de Trump, un espacio negativo y una imagen inversa de los valores estadounidenses de libertad, igualdad, verdad. , y la justicia, y de nuestro papel definitorio como Antorcha de la Libertad y faro de esperanza para el mundo.
Unámonos en solidaridad con los que no tienen poder y los desposeídos para apoderarnos de nuestra autonomía y autodeterminación, para resistir nuestra deshumanización y fuerza y control autoritarios, y para forjar un nuevo futuro y una sociedad libre de iguales en la que nosotros mismos, y sin gobierno, dueños de nuestras posibilidades de hacernos humanos.
Como escribí en mi post del 26 de febrero de 2020, Venezuela y Colombia: un dinamismo de hambre y miedo; Es la crisis humanitaria más terrible en la tierra hoy; un millón de niños abandonados en Venezuela en medio de un páramo de hambruna y miseria, sin atención médica y una tasa de inflación superior al diez mil por ciento, salarios laborales reales de cincuenta centavos a la semana que atraen una migración masiva de cuatro millones de personas hambrientas y sin dinero que buscan trabajo a la brutal minería y campamentos madereros más allá de sus fronteras en la migración masiva más grande de América del Sur en la historia.
A menudo, sus rutas los llevan a pie a través de la región fronteriza entre Colombia y Venezuela, una zona del salvaje oeste de facciones y pandillas rebeldes en guerra, de asesinatos y secuestros, violaciones y trata de personas, niños soldados y el omnipresente atractivo de las ganancias de la única industria viable de la región. , el narcotráfico.
La sociedad se ha derrumbado absolutamente en Venezuela, pero los palacios barrocos relucientes y los rascacielos de los oligarcas semifeudales y sus pueblos Potemkin que desmienten las afirmaciones de Maduro sobre el socialismo, el verdadero salvajismo de la desigualdad aquí enmascarado con una fachada legitimadora de alianza cubana por parte de un gobierno. de nepotismo y explotación, y desafiado por la supremacía solo por un peón estadounidense de alianzas y conexiones igualmente odiosas. Entre Maduro y Guaidó hay poco para elegir, salvo las mentiras con las que oscurecen su botín.
Al otro lado de la región infernal de la frontera, Colombia ahora está entrando en su tercer mes de una huelga nacional llamada El Paro, que ha sido reprimida brutalmente por la policía, incluidas ejecuciones sumarias.
In this time of darkness, with America a captured state of the Fourth Reich and the cartoon tyrants of the Trump regime sending their ICE white supremacist terror force to subjugate us and repress dissent as well as commit a campaign of ethnic cleansing and theft of our universal human rights, with the White House literally demolished my a wrecking ball to be replaced by an imperial palace of gold with a ballroom for the amusement of elites to recall the imagined lost glories of the Confederacy, I reflect during our Free Speech Week on the subversion of our social media as instruments of oppression and the theft of citizenship including our rights of free speech and a free press, but also on the social and historical forces which made it possible.
As I wrote in my post of May 18 2021, Zero Fail: Behind America’s Mask of Lies and Illusions; Behind America’s mask of lies and illusions, a state of predation, of tyranny, force, and control, of corruption and perversions, of racism and treasonous authoritarian fascism, an amoral nihilism whose purpose is the centralization of wealth, power, and privilege to elites, festers with rottenness and cruelties.
A new book exposes and interrogates our system and structures of government through the example of the Secret Service, the tip of an iceberg of dishonorable and incompetent buffoonery which represents the whole of our failed public institutions.
Written by the champion of transparency and truth telling Carol Leonnig, whose previous book A Very Stable Genius stole the belled hat of mirth from Our Clown of Terror Donald Trump and revealed his true form before the world as a monstrous beast of rapine and Gideonite patriarchy, white supremacist terror, and kleptocracy greedily snatching from the air the cash thrown his way by his treasonous champing and hooting fans, tyrant of degradations and perversions.
Zero Fail is a primal scream of terror echoing through chasms of bottomless depravity which is our hollow government, a shell empty of values, ideals, or meaning. But this alone does not make it unique nor merit our attention; what does is when you read it as the case study of symptoms of a general condition of neoliberalism which birthed the travesties of Trump’s Fourth Reich.
As I have often written, our normality has betrayed us and is obsolete; normal doesn’t live here anymore. The abandonment of our values and ideals in support of the state of Israel is another such example, canaries in the coal mine of a failed moral vision.
Our society has only begun to heal itself in the Restoration of America, but we must not simply restore our nation to what it was before the fascist subversion of democracy, for like the collapse of civilization in the First World War, the exposure of the lies of the British Empire in the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the Indian Revolution, and the triumph of the Russian Revolution over the Czar, the Fall of America and the Stolen Election of 2016 were mechanical failures from the internal contradictions of a decrepit and mad system.
Let us reimagine and transform America and humankind, not merely to restore ourselves but to begin again. We must dream better dreams.
As I wrote in my post of July 21 2022, Our Stories, Ourselves: On the Right of Free Speech in a Social Media Forum; Of late our Forum of Athens here on Face Book has tried to seize control of our dialog and the narratives of identity which we construct here as memoir and as shared history, an alarming and tyrannical turn of events which manifests in the banning of any posts which are not unique, any which contain links to media we do not ourselves own as citations to references in the text we have written, and some which seem politically motivated censorship and repression of dissent.
This has occurred broadly throughout our communities and threatens to take down our cherished groups; the equivalent of purges, witch hunts, show trials, horribly reminiscent of the assassination of Khashoggi and the police raids on Hong Kong publishers to silence journalism as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.
Who owns our ideas and our conversations? If I stand on the master’s truck to address his laborers, does he have the right to censor unauthorized speech?
Face Book offers a free publishing platform which is superb at making connections between people and helping us find an audience with like interests; but this is not how it makes its money. We are the products of this system; this is a great power which can be leveraged to seize control of what we may say and to whom.
Here in this virtual Forum we struggle for control of our authorial voices, independence, and authenticity against commodification, theft of intellectual property, falsification, and dehumanization.
Why is this important?
Censorship, book burnings, and the enforcement of authorized identities, versions of truth, and control of the mimetic function of history is always important, for identity is a primary ground of struggle. In the silencing and erasure of our voices and witness of history, Face Book attempts to shape our becoming human as theft of the soul.
And this we must resist.
As I wrote in my post of June 26 2022, Caught in the Gears of the Machine We Serve: FaceBook Censors My Posts on the Pretext of Being Spam; The mystery of the missing posts is solved; FB blocked 42 of them as spam.
Two of these censored posts were intended as allyship for Pride Month and interrogated identities of sex and gender, one was about the Supreme Court’s Abortion Ban, and the one that took several days to write, difficult days and nights of working through trauma and grief by writing, and made me late in subsequent posts, was about the anniversary of a friends death who happened to be Palestinian, and of great value to me because we must bring meaning to each other’s lives and deaths by sharing our stories. Our stories and witness of history are a ground of struggle against silence and erasure, falsification and dehumanization
No fascist agenda in censorship of dissent, Face Book?
I call out the truths authority would keep out of the public domain, the issues they would shape the discourse of, and the hidden purposes of elite hegemonic power which are served by social media in the commodification of our forum of discourse and connectedness.
We serve a vast machine of wealth and power, like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory, through which we ourselves become the primary product of the system, our votes and our purchases, but also our ideas of self and others.
In the words of Lenin; “What is to be done?”
As I wrote in my post of October 5 2021, Seizure of Power, Self-Creation and Self-Ownership, Authenticity and Autonomy, Self Representation as Construction of Identity, and Ourselves as Living Memoirs: the Case of Facebook; Something crucial we ignore about social media; though its pitched as connectedness, its primary function is to construct identity through ordering and prioritizing our experience in time. Our social media publications are a form of memoir, and this is a ground of struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and those which others tell about us.
As with the public negotiations of national identity and conflicted histories in the competing narratives of the 1619 Project and the Mayflower origin story, the first question we must ask of our stories is simple and direct; whose story is this?
This is the great test of disambiguation between falsification and authenticity, and between autonomy and subjugation; not whether a statement is a lie or a truth, though this is also important, but whose truth is it?
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.
Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.
As I wrote in preface to my reading lists, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post of June 19 2022, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. Our stories live within us, and we also live within them. Who owns these stories also owns ourselves.
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves and for ownership of ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?
As I wrote in my post of February 2 2022, James Joyce, on his birthday; We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?
Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?
Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.
As written by Eloghosa Osunde in The Paris Review, in her column Melting Clocks; “If you really think about it, we were all raised inside a giant dictionary. Society as we know it is simply a collection of shared definitions. Who is normal? What is beauty? Who is a criminal? What is a woman? What is a man? What is good love? What is sex? What is fair? Who is holy? What is evil? The more you agree with the definitions you’ve been given, the more you belong. The more you belong, the farther away you are from punishment. And you want to be safe in this scary place, don’t you? So you do what you’re supposed to do, and you avoid what leads to suffering.
You don’t want to be lonely either, do you, so you believe the rule: there’s nothing but nothing for you outside the defined lines. You’re told this from when you’re little, that your questions will put you in trouble, that you are and will always be too small to challenge a meaning. You’re just one person and this is how it works: society decides, you obey. But is that true? Seeing as many of us are alive on the outskirts of definitions, seeing as that’s the address that saved some of our lives, the place where we watch our safeties spring out of the ground, it’s clear that whatever was defined can be redefined. Whatever was written by a person for a people, can be edited by a person or a people. We’re proof. What is society, anyway? It’s an anthology of someones. We make it up. We have always made it up.
Art making is my strongest argument for redefinition, because nothing shows you the lie of impossibility and the multiplicity of worlds better than a body of work standing where once there was nothing. You don’t know how to turn Something into Something Else? Listen to what a remix does to a song: how in African Lady, an ADM remix, TMXO lays Masego’s music over a Lagbaja sample, rubbing two worlds against each other until they spark a three-minute-fifty-seconds long fire. Listen to the Red Hot + Riot album made in honor of Fela’s music and enter the rooms that appear when Meshell Ndegeocello, Manu Dibango, Sade Adu, Kelis, Common, Tony Allen, and D’Angelo are invited to the same house party. Or watch Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and notice the world you hold too tight become subsumed in an alternate reality, another now. Watch the Greek film Dogtooth and remember how you were taught to see; see how every manipulation has its genesis in language, how language reshapes the cornea and whatever stands before it. Read The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa and register what feels familiar about the premise; where have you seen that before? It’s strange, isn’t it, to know that what we remember is also a collaboration. Find all five remixes to Rema’s “Dumebi” [Vandalized, Major Lazer, Henry Fong, Becky G, Matoma]. All these unalike branches, growing out of the same tree. You think language is set in stone? Listen to a Nigerian talk a person to the fringes of their own English using pidgin—a genius composition. Strict binaries and genre are real until you watch DJ Moma play a New York club or DJ Aye play a Lagos night. Technically a thing like that should be impossible—continents ejecting you onto the same dance floor, that voice meeting this synth, the low wail of a bass guitar free-falling through the deep grunt of an ancient drum: jazz meets Afrobeats meets house meets alternative meets grime meets highlife meets soukous—but there you are, all of a sudden, thinking, Wait, who said these things can’t belong together?
Two months ago, when a fraction of my chosen family and I gathered to talk about the things we’re often discouraged from saying in public, one of us named that space—my living room couch—The Womb. I didn’t ask why because I didn’t need to; I know Whose it was. It fit. We all belonged inside it in a way that everything outside my door claims is impossible. It makes sense to me to miss being carried in safewater, it makes sense to me to feel yourself being (re)made, (re)gaining realness—later and now and before, all at once. Womb is a word that made me wince for a long time. That time includes now, and the reasons are still just mine. But a word means one thing until it gets a chance to mean another. The promise of being born again appealed to me for a reason, after all. That February in twenty-fourteen, the church didn’t even have to try hard. Said once as a promise, and I was already on my knees saying Yes Please, Yes. So, in the dark of The Womb, there were stories shared over palm wine and smoke that are still behind my ribs. Everyone was truth telling and the room shimmered with an earned sweetness. In response to one of those stories, we shuffled truth about our shadows, about the darker parts of ourselves we’d folded away for at least two and a half decades because it was that urgent to be A Good Person. We admitted the reasons we all fight so hard for the word Good, the reason we answer when it is called and try to claim it like a name, how frightened we are of Bad. I’m trying something new: asking myself if the choice I want to make is matched with a consequence I can live with, instead of if it’s good or bad. We talked more about how much we tuck in, how even in grief, there is a correct way to feel the weight, there are feelings we’re still not allowed to admit having. But not-allowed means hiding, even from yourself; and hiding is exactly why Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom insisted on disassembling me recently. A humbling feeling, being turned inside out like that. Also a kind of kindness. “You know when a story sees the things you’ve been hiding from yourself?” Yeah, that. This time, nothing was off the table, not even when it started shaking; not even when one leg fell off. So in response to “Wait, are we allowed to say these things out loud?” I said, “Well, here we are.” I can’t vouch for anywhere else in the world, but where I live, the only commandment is that there are no commandments. Be true, is the only rule. Put the lie on that rack, take off the uniform they insist you wear when you’re outside—and just be true. This is not always a beautiful or weightless thing. When you ask for truth, sometimes heavy things get said. Heavy things got said. So two weeks after The Womb had closed and we’d all been born again, in response to: “Do you ever get lonely?” (living differently, living outside, fashioning a life), I played Obongjayar’s “Carry Come Carry Go” to the person who asked this in my car. Even now, recalling it, I can see the road get stretched insanely by the hook. The answer is that feverish bridge; the answer is the way he moves on the track; it isn’t just what is said, it’s in how it’s shivered onto the beat, almost wept. The answer to what helps and holds me, what restores me to myself is also inside sound: “Good” by Sutra, “Get Free” by Mereba, “Bordeaux” by SuperJazzClub, “Ngeke Balunge” by Mafikizolo, “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane, “Unspoken Word” by the Soil. More, more.
There are multiple exits out of what is often referred to as Real Life on a daily basis, if you’re really paying attention. You probably fall in and out of your life regularly: between deep belly laughs at the dining table, or in clubs, bass beating against the small of your back. You do it when you’re watching a film that sucks you in or reading a book that pulls you deep into the corridor on the inside of your body, because imagination is a place. Distraction is a place. But you come back to, crawl right into the present so quickly, so casually that it’s hard to know what you’ve just done. Some of us have been there longer than others. I would know, having dissociated for years at a stretch, consistently moving at at least zero point zero two seconds ahead of myself, always catching up. I come to when I catch it, because I need me. Plus, you’re meant to snap out of stories and realms that are too fleshed out, too fantasy seeming, because people who believe stories and alternate realities too much and for too long see things that are not there, see things others can’t see, are called insane. Well, I used to fear that word until I was that. Until people I love were that and my love still met them there. Now I can’t care. There are a thousand reals vibrating in formation at any given moment and I’m open to many. We choose what we plug in to. The rest is the rest.
Words have synonyms and antonyms, for depth of meaning, yes—the meaning of a word thickens next to its partner or companion, its opposite or opponent, because just like you, language needs company. But my favorite thing about language is that it responds to how it’s used. It can be anything, really: from a cave or an obstacle to the bridge between lives, the road between worlds. Redefinition is relocation. It’s why the easiest way to get Somewhere Else is to name it like something real. I was raised to worry about right or wrong. I cared until I was labeled wrong and did not die. So I tell myself: don’t worry about being good; just be as intentional about destruction as you are about creation. Do not create anyone, do not destroy anyone. Understand this and no need to run: nothing on the inside of you can swallow you from there if you keep an eye on it. Keep an eye on it. Anyone can change. Forgive your fumbling. People who don’t change don’t change because they trust the dark label like they would a name. Only your name is your name. When people tell you a word can only mean one thing, they are telling you—subtly, too—that change is impossible. It’s not true. Destroy that idea. Create another truth. A word can mean something new because language is still and always being made. It’s why you can take a word like Vagabond—weaponized by the law of your land in real time— name your work after it and still be here. It’s a kind of rhythm making, this; the synthesis of your internal soundtrack. Another word that might fit here is: chaos. And another: freeing. You are free.
Forgive yourself for acting like you’ve never met yourself. Forgive yourself for sweating in the pursuit of importance, of acceptance. Forgive yourself for growing spikes when ashamed. Forgive your stubbornness. Forgive yourself for being more willing to die than fight, then forgive the defeats you stacked up inside. Forgive you for how tired you are. Forgive you for not knowing better. Then for knowing better and not yet being able to do better. For your hiding and running, for the suffocating disguises. For the secrets you still keep from you. For the times you unbecame yourself for someone else—a partner, a parent—because you were trying to become real, desirable, a shame to lose. Forgive you for the size of your love (you needn’t repent). Forgive you for the hands (they weren’t even yours). Forgive you for believing in anything that called you forbidden, for kneeling before whatever tagged you a sin. Forgive you for deceiving your head, for thinking the lie made you matter, more solid, more indestructible. Forgive you for breaking your heart, for lashing out, for falling apart, for losing your mind. You are here now. Let this matter more. A different now is close enough to exhale on you.
What does fiction do for me? It allows me to see what has been made, just as it is. It reminds me that if there are seven billion of us, there are seven billion ways to experience the world, seven billion valid iterations. The systems do what the systems do, and the kindest thing I can think to do for anyone I love is to follow them to the end of their desire, is to go with them to the beginning of their imagination—that place where I wish turns into I want. I listen to my loved ones when they say: I wish this was a world in which I could decide not to have kids. I wish I could decide not to get married. I wish this world was kinder to queer people. I wish we’d all take friendships more seriously. I wish this world was fair to neurodivergent people. I wish. I wish. There’s so much I still wish for, too, but also so much I have now only because someone stayed with me past a question mark. What would you be like if you had room? I try to ask that often. When they start describing it—I’d live with my friends; I’d treat my partner more kindly because I’ll at least be allowed to love them; I’d just not get married; I’d just be an aunty or uncle instead of trying to be a parent; I’d share resources with people around me; I’d put way less emphasis on money and more on community building—I watch what dawns on all of us. Maybe it’s not possible for us to have everything right here right now, the world being what it is, but it’s not true that we can’t get closer to what we want. It’s not true that none of it is accessible. Your hope is the perfect size, so no point waiting, sometimes. Because what is society anyway? It’s an anthology of someones. We make it up. We make it up.
It’s hard to remember this, because some feelings are so particular, so precise that you think no one will ever know what it feels like under your skin; but there’s a song for every feeling and a story for every situation for a reason. It’s how we get through. Maybe your life tells you that you’re right about being unseeable at the moment. Maybe that’s what you found to be true with people. Good thing stories can go everywhere then. Wasn’t it a book that reminded me recently that I have the spine it takes to stand up to my life? This life is massive, and of course. Massive and on course. It was a song that reminded me, too, some nights ago what a privilege it is that what I call family without flinching is a fiction I made; that there is a group of people who bear the truest witness of my life; that I get to live out the impossible. It’s only because of stories and music and art and love that I’m able to remind me how free I am to act in favor of myself and how free I am to not. I’m free to reach for more and I’m free to not. When I put it that way, I know what I choose.
One of the first definitions I remember learning is from primary school. “Culture,” the teacher said, “is a way of life.” We repeated it after her; a simple sentence. As long as we’re alive, there’ll be other ways of life being made as we breathe. Some of them can be ours. It’ll just require us to take what we see and want and wish for seriously. If I say that I am free to dream and I’ve dreamed a world with decentralized power, a much slower pace, more kindness, a timeline in which people can fall apart and hibernate, where rest isn’t a luxury, where gender is an abundant harvest instead of two darkly rigid lanes, where sanity is not the measure of worth, where no one is an outcast and we’re all responsible for each other, where friendships can survive mistakes and tension, where thick love is commonplace, where I can hold my love close no matter the skin they’re in, then I’m free to test run that way of life on myself and my relationships. I’m free to do it now, because now’s when I’m alive. That won’t always be true, but I’m here now and that hereness is sometimes a vehicle, sometimes a tool.
We were all raised in a giant dictionary, yes, and we’re more able to move out if we can find somewhere else to go: a where, a how, and a who to be with there. We find somewhere elses by making up and living out freeing fictions—even in small clusters. When we ground our faiths in the right not-yet-reals, when we look at the nonlinearity of time, we see how right here the future has been since yesterday, how we’re always practicing it in fractions now. Aliveness has always been a staring contest between us and time. We know that. No one blinks with you when you do. We know that. It’s costly, this, always—a life has to be—but what I know for sure is this: there are always other words and other definitions, always other worlds and other locations. To know this is to see this, too: we can grow the spines we need to stand up for our lives.”
As written by Helena de Bresis, author of author of Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir, in Aeon; “I wrote a memoir recently, and sometimes I ask myself why on earth I did. It was difficult and time-consuming, it involved some rather unpleasant self-examination, and it raised suspicions of self-involvement, exhibitionism and insufferable earnestness that I’d so far mainly avoided in life. If I publish it, I risk being accused by friends of betrayal, by readers of lying, and by critics of any number of literary flaws. Since selling a memoir is hard, all of that would represent things going well. When I complain to my sister about this, she suggests that ‘maybe’ I should have – ‘I don’t know’ – considered these points two years ago, before embarking on this thing that she would ‘never, like, ever do’.
When asked why they bother, memoirists offer a range of reasons. Saint Teresa did it for the glory of God; Jean-Jacques Rousseau to express his inner self; Vladimir Nabokov to recreate his vanished childhood; Frederick Douglass to advance the cause of abolition. But maybe the deepest reason for writing a memoir, intertwined with all the rest, is the desire to find meaning in one’s past experience. Whatever else they’re up to, memoirists are in the business of locating some form or order in their personal history: setting it down as an intelligible shape, not a hot mess. Finding this form is both a necessary part of memoir and one of its key rewards. That was what I was after, anyway. Life moves so fast. Stuff had gone down. I wanted to slow the passage of events, grasp what the past had meant, before picking up the pace once again.
You can search for form in life through philosophy, science, religion and any kind of art. The memoirist’s distinctive move is to do it via autobiographical narrative: the construction of an organised sequence of personally experienced events, along with an implied evaluative response to them. Life stories have three things going for them when it comes to making experience intelligible. They’re selective, highlighting particular agents, settings and episodes out of the mass of material that life provides. They’re also unifying, drawing connections between their disparate parts and situating them in context. And they’re isomorphic: they share deep structural and thematic features with other stories, which we use as a shortcut when interpreting them. Psychologists report that most autobiographical narratives follow the classical story arc: steady state, complication, rising action, crisis, resolution, then coda. And they involve quests, comings-of-age, fatal errors, comeuppances and returns recognisable from myths, parables and fairy tales. Most, though maybe not all, humans tell such life stories. Memoirists recount them at length, in writing, with literary ambitions. We’re trying to do it, but make it art.
What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up? For the past century or so, the wind has been behind the latter interpretation. Many take the existentialist line that seeing your life in narrative terms is a form of mauvaise foi, or bad faith. We urgently want there to be order and meaning in the world, independently of us. But there isn’t, and our attempts to impose coherence and significance where none exist are self-deceiving and absurd. Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938), describes the ‘disgust’ and ‘nausea’ produced by our meaningless universe, alongside its ineffective narrative remedy:
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
What exactly is wrong with construing your past as a story? In his memoir The Words (1963), Sartre suggests that storytelling distorts our understanding of life, by confusing it with literature. We can tell autobiographical narratives if we like but, if so, we should be clear about what we’re doing: producing fiction. This take suggests that memoir, which calls itself nonfiction, is a fundamentally suspect enterprise.
A similar critique of narrative emerged in the philosophy of history in the 1970s. In his book Metahistory (1973), Hayden White argued that historical writing is a constructive process, in which the historian selects a subset of past events, imaginatively fills in the gaps, and orders the lot into a unified story. These historical stories, like the life stories of individuals, take conventional literary forms – tragedy, romance, comedy and satire – and employ poetic devices, including metaphor, synecdoche and irony. All of this is a creative act on the part of the historian, an imposition on the historical record. As a result, different historians can and do provide different narrative interpretations of the same events, none of which can be said to uniquely fit the facts. White concludes that historical writing, despite its scientific pretensions, reduces to fiction.
The philosopher Noël Carroll offered two main lines of response to White that transfer nicely to memoir. The first points to a set of faulty inferences in the argument. White assumes that each of the following features of an interpretation transforms it into fiction: inventiveness, selectivity, multiplicity, conventionality and literary quality. But a quick run-through shows that each can be present without an immediate diagnosis of fictionalising. Photos are invented rather than found, but that doesn’t make them inaccurate representations of the past. My telling you only some things about my spring break doesn’t mean that what I do tell you is made up. The availability of multiple good stories about the Loretta Lynn fan convention doesn’t demonstrate that one or all of them are fiction: each can just highlight a distinct aspect of the same complex course of events. And your description of what you’ve been up to recently might be Homeric, but some weekends genuinely are epic, and nonfigurative, nonliterary language might not be enough to capture the truth about them.
Carroll’s second reply to White questions the assertion that the world isn’t story-shaped. Humans act for reasons, and those actions have consequences, including the imprint of certain patterns on the world. We can describe all this in terms of atoms moving in the void, sure. But there’s an equally legitimate form of explanation that appeals to the values and goals driving the action, and therefore to the purpose and significance that human life genuinely contains. A story that offers such an explanation is picking up on real aspects of the world, not confabulating. Similarly, since humans think and act symbolically, narratives that incorporate metaphor and myth can serve to reflect, rather than distort, reality.
That said, there’s some truth in the claim that narrative is created, not found. Successful nonfictional storytellers both discover and construct. They do the difficult work of pruning and unifying experience into a shape they and others can understand. As the writer Lorrie Moore puts it: ‘Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that’s been distilled down.’ And when nonfictional storytellers succeed, the shape they create tracks genuine features in the life described.
To defend nonfictional narrative isn’t, of course, to defend all particular life stories. At one early point in writing my memoir, I announced: ‘OMG, I think my life tracks the history of Western philosophy!’ ‘That’s wonderful!’ my long-suffering sister replied, but the angle of her eyebrow effectively consigned that one to the trash. There are also some general narrative conventions we’re better off without. No literary memoirist would be caught dead these days writing a traditional autobiography: a strictly chronological tracing of events, from infancy on, in a tone of untroubled authority. The contemporary memoir zooms in on a specific period or theme, and moves back and forth in time. Modern memoirists tend to be less certain than autobiographers, more alert to the seductions of narrative closure. As a result, their books are more complex, searching, and truer to life.
But we can welcome these salutary effects of 20th-century narrative scepticism while keeping the baby in the bath. Old-fashioned storytelling has real virtues when making sense of the world. (I once lunched with a literary magazine editor after he’d gone through the latest set of submissions. ‘Oh god,’ he exclaimed, like a frustrated police chief, ‘just tell me what happened in order!’) Those virtues are so great that even narrative sceptics make use of them. Joan Didion ends her essay ‘The White Album’ (1968-78) with an admission of defeat: ‘Writing has not yet helped me to see what [experience] means.’ But sometimes the pattern just is chaos, and Didion’s use of personal narrative in this essay deftly captures that truth about 1960s California.
Cynics about narrative often give off an air of expecting more from stories than memoirists themselves do. No memoir can reveal an underlying grand narrative in the universe as a whole, or give its writer anything more than a partial and provisional grip on their personal past. But it can sometimes provide that grip, which is no small thing. When I look at my own memoir, I can clearly see its fictive qualities. The stage is set, the action rises, the protagonist falls apart, then lurches out of the abyss. There’s a coda, written in a tone of battered hope. Sartre would give it one star on Goodreads. That would be mean (I gave his five!), but I’m not too troubled by it. The book reads to me like my life, a life that makes better sense to me now that I’ve written it down.”
In the chiaroscuro of darkness and light, free speech is delimited with hate speech, and the region of ambiguous meanings and values between them is both a boundary of the Forbidden and an interface of transformation.
When our defining moments are controlled by tyrants, plutocrats of amoral capitalism, and other apex predators of systems of oppression and the enforcement of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, rather than seized and owned by ourselves along with our own voices, witness, and remembrance, it becomes an existential threat of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and a primary ground of revolutionary struggle.
During the abomination of the Trump regime we have witnessed this struggle played out on a national and global scale, with democracy, the idea of human rights, and the choice between being citizens or subjects hanging in the balance.
As I wrote in my post of December 16 2022, Hate Speech is Not Free Speech: the Case of Elon Musk’s Twitter; Mesmerized as by the blinkless predator stare of a cobra or its echo in the Kubrick gaze of Jenna Ortega’s character of Wednesday, we have witnessed the spectacle of violation and degradation of a beloved social media platform by an amoral plutocrat who purchased it to leverage Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, into the White House once more, for the purpose of the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America to a regime of tyranny, and has relentlessly and with feral viciousness promoted white supremacist and antisemitic terrorists and fascist propagandists and marginalized and silenced dissent, impartial investigative journalism, and voices from the center of traditional democracy and its values of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Hate speech is not free speech, and merits no quarter. To fascism we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
In all of the absurd madness of conspiracy theories, alternate realities, rewritten histories, lies and illusions, propaganda and thought control, and the commodification of humankind by big data and pervasive surveillance, and with the examples of monsters of depravity and paranoid fantasy such as Traitor Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, and Elon Musk, of apologists of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, of fascist propaganda mills like Fox News and now sadly Twitter weaponized in service to power and the repression of dissent, let us study closely a great truth which now stands revealed on the stage of history; the Fifth Estate has now replaced the institutions of politics as the shaping force whereby we choose how to be human together.
Its been a long process, the fall of democracy; I’m tempted to say it began with Hearst and his 1898 false story of the bombing of an American ship in Cuba as the pretext for the Spanish-American War and our conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as we built our empire on the carcass of Imperial Spain’s; but the historical forces involved are ambiguous and complex. And the mighty have always sought to keep the slaves at their work creating the wealth they enjoy through lies as well as force; lies are cheaper than armies.
As the marvelous and prophetic film Wag the Dog tells us, he who tells the story shapes the response. And we must be very careful who we allow to write our history, and who makes the rules by which it is written, for journalism is a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and electoral democracy requires truths free from the influence of power.
As Lenin asked in the essay that began the Russian Revolution; “What is to be done?”
If we do not seize and nationalize Twitter and any media platform of hate crime or fascist propaganda as a public good owned by us all, we must enact fair rules of play which ensure no one’s speech harms another, either as individuals or as a class of persons.
To create an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
As I wrote in my post of August 8 2019, Free Speech Versus Safety From Fascist Terror: Hate, Violence, and the Dark Side of Social Media;” As written in the Essential California newsletter of Tuesday morning: “In his much-cited 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow — an internet pioneer and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — wrote that “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
But the utopian ideals of the early internet are increasingly at odds with the view of it as a place for free speech at all costs, as the darker corners of the web have proved a fertile breeding ground for violent extremism.”
Barlow’s Declaration is a gloriously anarchic and libertarian manifesto; pretty words, indeed, which I endorse without reservation but for this; the right of free speech ends where others are harmed, dehumanized, identified as targets for violence, or restricted in their own freedoms.
The very first and most important example of what is meant by our founding principle of America as “only that government which is necessary to obtain those rights which we cannot obtain for ourselves” is our right to freedom from hate speech which authorizes murder, as no one’s rights may infringe upon another’s. Further, the right to life takes precedence over the right to freedom of information and communication, as we may have one without the other, but not the reverse. Before all else, we must be alive to possess other rights.
Whenever I consider our freedoms of speech and of the press, I imagine myself in the great film V for Vendetta, and secondarily in the classic film Brazil, whose dictum “We’re all in this together” has been the guiding principle of so many of my adventures. Harry Tuttle, played by Robert de Niro, V, played by Hugo Weaving, and the hero of Inglourious Basterds, the magnificent Lt. Aldo Raine played by Brad Pitt, are together my heroes and role models of political action. I have asked myself in many contexts over a lifetime of complex choices, what would our heroes do in this situation?
What would Aldo Raine do if confronted by a global Fourth Reich which has seized control of the American Presidency and has built concentration camps on our border?
What would Harry Tuttle do when a totalitarian regime has enacted pervasive state terror and surveillance, secret prisons, and attacks on truth and justice, equality and freedom?
What would V do when tyranny and plutocracy have stolen our humanity from us, and lost our values in a sea of illusions and lies?
As I wrote in my post of July 19 2021, Signs of Tyranny: Surveillance, Propaganda, and Repression; To free ourselves of the ideas of other people; such is the essence of democracy. Conversely, the use of social force in marginalizing and silencing dissent is the definition of tyranny.
Of the silencing of dissent in service to the authority of the state and of the tyranny of force and control I have written often, for it touches upon the origins of evil and the centrality of fear, power, and force as an engine of violence, inhumanity, dehumanization, and the theft of the soul.
Herein I find another purpose in defining the nature of truth, and of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth. And this provides us with a yardstick against which to measure the legitimacy of the state; the test of a government is its transparency, its tolerance of dissent as a feature of democratic process, the degree to which it upholds freedom of speech and of access to information, and its reverence for objective and testable truth as a keystone of freedom.
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own. Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
As I wrote in my post of August 15 2020, Windows Into Our Souls: Why Surveillance is a Subversion of Democracy; Those who would enslave us have at their command an arsenal of surveillance and control which threaten to make tyranny and authoritarianism pervasive and endemic, and these rapidly evolving technologies must be overcome both as individual tools and methods and as structures of the police state. Cameras, phones, drones, and face recognition as means of identification and tracking in the repression of dissent must be resisted, for these define the front in the great struggle for freedom versus the carceral state.
As I wrote in my post of May 27 2020, On Speaking Truth to Power as a Sacred Calling; Authorized identities and boundaries of the Forbidden are about power, and we must call out the instruments of unequal power as we see them. Foucault called this truthtelling, and it is a crucial part of seizure of power and ownership of identity; always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
Against state terror and control let us deploy parrhesia and the performance of our best selves. Go ahead; frighten the horses.”
Often have I referred to this key performative role in democracy as the Jester of King Lear, whose enactments of mockery and satire, the exposure and deflation of the mighty as revolutionary seizures of power which reclaim that which we the people have lent them when it is used unjustly, are necessary to maintain the balance of interests in a society in which government is co-owned equally by its citizens and has as its overriding purpose the securement of the freedom and autonomy of individuals and of their universal human rights.
Without citizens who refuse to be silenced and controlled by authority, democracy becomes meaningless.
So with my arts of rhetoric and poetry as truthtelling, with my praxis of democracy as a debate coach and English teacher of these essential skills of citizenship, and with my political journal here at Torch of Liberty : https://torchofliberty.home.blog ; to incite, provoke, and disturb.
For democracy requires a participatory electorate willing to speak truth to power.
To all those who defy and challenge unjust authority; I will stand with you, and I ask that all of us do the same.
As I wrote in my post of December 16 2020, Principles of Democracy: Freedom From Surveillance, or Repeal the Patriot Act; Hope dawns for liberty in America as the first bipartisan legislation of the Biden Presidency is an effort to reclaim our freedom from surveillance, a key principle of democracy. Freedom means freedom from coercion by force and control; and while force refers to repression of dissent by the police and the carceral state, my subject here is its shadow, now pervasive and endemic, thought control.
We now live in a nation of universal surveillance and the sacrifice of privacy to security, and in the words of Benjamin Franklin; “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
We have arrived at this sad pass by a long and circuitous route, but the trigger event was the tragedy of 911 which signaled the Imperial phase of American history and the state tyranny and terror authorized under the Patriot Act. As is far too often the case, we as victims have learned the wrong lessons from our abusers; force and fear are not the sole basis of human relationships in a nihilistic and amoral universe, nor the highest ideals to which humankind can aspire.
This is part of the ideology of state terror called the counterinsurgency model of policing, which replaces the legal presumption of innocence with the presumption that all citizens are potential terrorist threats and enemies of the state.
The most visible part of this is force, which begins with the selection of police on the basis of willingness to kill, and then trains and equips them with military weapons as a force of occupation and repression, takes monstrous form in Homeland Security and its campaign of ethnic cleansing and system of concentration camps for migrants and the illegal secret army which coordinated with white supremacist terrorist organizations in attempts to provoke violence and use the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-fascists like myself as a pretext for the federal occupation of Democratic cities in aid of Trump’s first three coup attempts this year, and extends throughout the justice system from the rapacious and unchecked power of the Prosecuting Attorney’s office to the fascist political appointees among our judges and Attorneys General, and to the prisons of our carceral state which are designed to re-enslave the Black population and provide free labor to plutocratic elites and to enforce social hierarchies of belonging and otherness for the purpose of maintaining a hegemony of power, wealth, and privilege for the elite. It is an inherently antidemocratic system, subversive at every level from the policeman whose thin blue line enforces injustice to the power brokers of fascist tyranny.
But without the social control of surveillance and propaganda force has no target and no concealment. Information is gathered at all times and about everyone, through cameras, drones, phone tracking, face recognition, a myriad and evolving web of surveillance, and analyzed through big data to shape our beliefs and actions as typified by Cambridge Analytica’s subversion of elections.
There is no form of power more subversive than that of secret power.
Just ask any survivor of abuse by predatory authority, because that is exactly the relationship of citizens to the state under our present system.
We have been like captive children howling in terror and rage in the darkness of a basement prison, we Americans, throughout this terrible time of our subjugation to the Fourth Reich which began with the Patriot Act, alone and awaiting horrors. I hear America howling in the streets of over fifty cities where from the spring of this year we have fought the forces of state tyranny and terror until the federal government announced the defeat of its occupation campaign, withdrew the secret army of Homeland Security, and the fascist triumvirs Trump, Barr, and Wolf officially ceded control to the people and proclaimed New York, Portland, and Seattle Autonomous Zones.
We have seized our cities in the streets and our nation in the elections, and with the repeal of the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act we can begin to reclaim our democracy and our liberty. We have won free of our prison; let us now transform the systems, structures, and institutions which made our enslavement and subjugation to fascist tyranny possible.
There can be but one reply to fascism; Never Again.
Here is Lionel Trilling’s brilliant review of Orwell’s 1984, the classic exposition of anarchist philosophy as a critique of unequal power and the authoritarian nature of government, from the June 18, 1949 Issue of the New Yorker; “George Orwell’s “1984” predicts a state of things far worse than any we have ever known.
George Orwell’s new novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (Harcourt, Brace), confirms its author in the special, honorable place he holds in our intellectual life. Orwell’s native gifts are perhaps not of a transcendent kind; they have their roots in a quality of mind that ought to be as frequent as it is modest. This quality may be described as a sort of moral centrality, a directness of relation to moral—and political—fact, and it is so far from being frequent in our time that Orwell’s possession of it seems nearly unique. Orwell is an intellectual to his fingertips, but he is far removed from both the Continental and the American type of intellectual. The turn of his mind is what used to be thought of as peculiarly “English.” He is indifferent to the allurements of elaborate theory and of extreme sensibility. The medium of his thought is common sense, and his commitment to intellect is fortified by an old-fashioned faith that the truth can be got at, that we can, if we actually want to, see the object as it really is. This faith in the power of mind rests in part on Orwell’s willingness, rare among contemporary intellectuals, to admit his connection with his own cultural past. He no longer identifies himself with the British upper middle class in which he was reared, yet it is interesting to see how often his sense of fact derives from some ideal of that class, how he finds his way through a problem by means of an unabashed certainty of the worth of some old, simple, belittled virtue. Fairness, decency, and responsibility do not make up a shining or comprehensive morality, but in a disordered world they serve Orwell as an invaluable base of intellectual operations.
Radical in his politics and in his artistic tastes, Orwell is wholly free of the cant of radicalism. His criticism of the old order is cogent, but he is chiefly notable for his flexible and modulated examination of the political and aesthetic ideas that oppose those of the old order. Two years of service in the Spanish Loyalist Army convinced him that he must reject the line of the Communist Party and, presumably, gave him a large portion of his knowledge of the nature of human freedom. He did not become—as Leftist opponents of Communism are so often and so comfortably said to become—“embittered” or “cynical;” his passion for freedom simply took account of yet another of freedom’s enemies, and his intellectual verve was the more stimulated by what he had learned of the ambiguous nature of the newly identified foe, which so perplexingly uses the language and theory of light for ends that are not enlightened. His distinctive work as a radical intellectual became the criticism of liberal and radical thought wherever it deteriorated to shibboleth and dogma. No one knows better than he how willing is the intellectual Left to enter the prison of its own mass mind, nor does anyone believe more directly than he in the practical consequences of thought, or understand more clearly the enormous power, for good or bad, that ideology exerts in an unstable world.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four” is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and, like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present. Despite the impression it may give at first, it is not an attack on the Labour Government. The shabby London of the Super-State of the future, the bad food, the dull clothing, the fusty housing, the infinite ennui—all these certainly reflect the English life of today, but they are not meant to represent the outcome of the utopian pretensions of Labourism or of any socialism. Indeed, it is exactly one of the cruel essential points of the book that utopianism is no longer a living issue. For Orwell, the day has gone by when we could afford the luxury of making our flesh creep with the spiritual horrors of a successful hedonistic society; grim years have intervened since Aldous Huxley, in “Brave New World,” rigged out the welfare state of Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor in the knickknacks of modern science and amusement, and said what Dostoevski and all the other critics of the utopian ideal had said before—that men might actually gain a life of security, adjustment, and fun, but only at the cost of their spiritual freedom, which is to say, of their humanity. Orwell agrees that the State of the future will establish its power by destroying souls. But he believes that men will be coerced, not cosseted, into soullessness. They will be dehumanized not by sex, massage, and private helicopters but by a marginal life of deprivation, dullness, and fear of pain.
This, in fact, is the very center of Orwell’s vision of the future. In 1984, nationalism as we know it has at last been overcome, and the world is organized into three great political entities. All profess the same philosophy, yet despite their agreement, or because of it, the three Super-States are always at war with each other, two always allied against one, but all seeing to it that the balance of power is kept, by means of sudden, treacherous shifts of alliance. This arrangement is established as if by the understanding of all, for although it is the ultimate aim of each to dominate the world, the immediate aim is the perpetuation of war without victory and without defeat. It has at last been truly understood that war is the health of the State; as an official slogan has it, “War Is Peace.” Perpetual war is the best assurance of perpetual absolute rule. It is also the most efficient method of consuming the production of the factories on which the economy of the State is based. The only alternative method is to distribute the goods among the population. But this has its clear danger. The life of pleasure is inimical to the health of the State. It stimulates the senses and thus encourages the illusion of individuality; it creates personal desires, thus potential personal thought and action.
But the life of pleasure has another, and even more significant, disadvantage in the political future that Orwell projects from his observation of certain developments of political practice in the last two decades. The rulers he envisages are men who, in seizing rule, have grasped the innermost principles of power. All other oligarchs have included some general good in their impulse to rule and have played at being philosopher-kings or priest-kings or scientist-kings, with an announced program of beneficence. The rulers of Orwell’s State know that power in its pure form has for its true end nothing but itself, and they know that the nature of power is defined by the pain it can inflict on others. They know, too, that just as wealth exists only in relation to the poverty of others, so power in its pure aspect exists only in relation to the weakness of others, and that any power of the ruled, even the power to experience happiness, is by that much a diminution of the power of the rulers.
The exposition of the mystique of power is the heart and essence of Orwell’s book. It is implicit throughout the narrative, explicit in excerpts from the remarkable “Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” a subversive work by one Emmanuel Goldstein, formerly the most gifted leader of the Party, now the legendary foe of the State. It is brought to a climax in the last section of the novel, in the terrible scenes in which Winston Smith, the sad hero of the story, having lost his hold on the reality decreed by the State, having come to believe that sexuality is a pleasure, that personal loyalty is a good, and that two plus two always and not merely under certain circumstances equals four, is brought back to health by torture and discourse in a hideous parody on psychotherapy and the Platonic dialogues.
Orwell’s theory of power is developed brilliantly, at considerable length. And the social system that it postulates is described with magnificent circumstantiality: the three orders of the population—Inner Party, Outer Party, and proletarians; the complete surveillance of the citizenry by the Thought Police, the only really efficient arm of the government; the total negation of the personal life; the directed emotions of hatred and patriotism; the deified Leader, omnipresent but invisible, wonderfully named Big Brother; the children who spy on their parents; and the total destruction of culture. Orwell is particularly successful in his exposition of the official mode of thought, Doublethink, which gives one “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” This intellectual safeguard of the State is reinforced by a language, Newspeak, the goal of which is to purge itself of all words in which a free thought might be formulated. The systematic obliteration of the past further protects the citizen from Crimethink, and nothing could be more touching, or more suggestive of what history means to the mind, than the efforts of poor Winston Smith to think about the condition of man without knowledge of what others have thought before him.
By now, it must be clear that “Nineteen Eighty-four” is, in large part, an attack on Soviet Communism. Yet to read it as this and as nothing else would be to misunderstand the book’s aim. The settled and reasoned opposition to Communism that Orwell expresses is not to be minimized, but he is not undertaking to give us the delusive comfort of moral superiority to an antagonist. He does not separate Russia from the general tendency of the world today. He is saying, indeed, something no less comprehensive than this: that Russia, with its idealistic social revolution now developed into a police state, is but the image of the impending future and that the ultimate threat to human freedom may well come from a similar and even more massive development of the social idealism of our democratic culture. To many liberals, this idea will be incomprehensible, or, if it is understood at all, it will be condemned by them as both foolish and dangerous. We have dutifully learned to think that tyranny manifests itself chiefly, even solely, in the defense of private property and that the profit motive is the source of all evil. And certainly Orwell does not deny that property is powerful or that it may be ruthless in self-defense. But he sees that, as the tendency of recent history goes, property is no longer in anything like the strong position it once was, and that will and intellect are playing a greater and greater part in human history. To many, this can look only like a clear gain. We naturally identify ourselves with will and intellect; they are the very stuff of humanity, and we prefer not to think of their exercise in any except an ideal way. But Orwell tells us that the final oligarchical revolution of the future, which, once established, could never be escaped or countered, will be made not by men who have property to defend but by men of will and intellect, by “the new aristocracy . . . of bureaucrats, scientists, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.”
These people [says the authoritative Goldstein, in his account of the revolution], whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal.
The whole effort of the culture of the last hundred years has been directed toward teaching us to understand the economic motive as the irrational road to death, and to seek salvation in the rational and the planned. Orwell marks a turn in thought; he asks us to consider whether the triumph of certain forces of the mind, in their naked pride and excess, may not produce a state of things far worse than any we have ever known. He is not the first to raise the question, but he is the first to raise it on truly liberal or radical grounds, with no intention of abating the demand for a just society, and with an overwhelming intensity and passion. This priority makes his book a momentous one.”
As written by Mary Papenfuss in Huffpost, in an article entitled United Nations Rips ‘Dangerous Precedent’ Of Elon Musk’s Chilling Crackdown On Journalists: Musk “sets a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats, and even worse,” said a spokesperson; “United Nations officials are “very disturbed” by Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s “dangerous” assault on free speech in his crackdown on a group of U.S. journalists covering him and his businesses, a spokesperson for the international organization said Friday.
Musk’s “arbitrary” action sets a “dangerous precedent” by suspending targeted prominent tech journalists reporting on him at news organizations including CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Mashable, among others, Stéphane Dujarric told reporters.
Dujarric said the media must not be censored on a platform that professes to be a haven for free speech — run by a billionaire who has claimed to be a “free speech absolutist.”
“The move sets a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats, and even worse,” said Dujarric.
Musk is incensed that his private jet flights have been tracked regularly on Twitter by user Jack Sweeney, a sophomore at the University of Central Florida. Musk earlier this week booted both the @ElonJet tracking account and Sweeney’s personal account — and then threatened to sue Sweeney.
The Telsa CEO warned Thursday that anyone who “doxxes” on Twitter — reveals another’s real-time location information — will be suspended.
Musk considers his flight details — which are already publicly available to anyone — verboten “real-time” doxxing, he has tweeted. Yet countless people’s “real-time” location is constantly revealed on Twitter, from videos of protesters at demonstrations to celebrity appearances to politicians’ press conferences.
Apparently, not all the suspended journalists reported about or linked to the flight tracking information that Musk objects to. But they may have irritated Musk in other ways, such as reporting on the crash records of Teslas on Auto-Pilot.
CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan said Musk’s flight tracking gripe was an “entirely false” justification for the crackdown and that he was irritated by negative press. “I poked the billionaire,” O’Sullivan said Friday on “CNN This Morning.”
European Union leaders are warning that Musk’s crackdown on journalists has already run afoul of the continent’s digital regulations ensuring free speech.
Věra Jourová, the European Commission vice president for values and transparency, called Musk’s actions “worrying,” The Guardian reported.
He emphasized that the EU’s Digital Services Act required platforms to respect media freedom. When any user or content is penalized, it must be done in a “proportionate manner, with due regard to fundamental rights,” state the regulations.
“This is reinforced under our Media Freedom Act. Elon Musk should be aware of that. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon,” she said.
Dujarric said the U.N. is continuing to monitor Twitter as it weighs whether or not to continue to use the platform. He said its popularity makes it a handy “tool” for sharing factual information. But officials are concerned about the recent disturbing rise of hate speech and disinformation on Twitter, he said.”
As written by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic’s newsletter; “A lot of serious things are happening in the world: economic uncertainty, war, a pandemic. What’s happening on Twitter isn’t even close to those issues in importance or impact. But the continued reign of Elon Musk as Twitter’s chief jerk could, in fact, affect your life, in ways you might not realize. But first, let’s review the events of the past 24 hours or so. If you haven’t been on Twitter, you’ve been missing something like the tech version of Desperate Housewives, but it’s important to understand the claims Musk is making and why major news outlets are pushing back on them.
This entire drama is probably rooted somewhere in Musk’s privileged youth or his bloated psyche, but the immediate spur to this most recent mini-drama was that Musk does not like people knowing the location of his private jet. Jack Sweeney is a college student who used public data to track the location of Musk’s jet and many others, including some owned by Russian oligarchs. He then posted this information on Twitter through a variety of different accounts—all now suspended—including one dedicated to Musk, @ElonJet. Musk disliked this so much that almost a year ago, he offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop doing it.
Sweeney declined. Musk took ownership of Twitter in late October and, in a flurry of Calvinball rule changes, declared this week that revealing the whereabouts of his jet was the same as doxxing (that is, publishing personal data about private citizens), decreed this a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, and banned the account.
Musk claims that a stalker used the location of his jet to attack a car that his son was in. He has not presented any evidence that this event happened or, it seems, filed any police reports. And in a karmic plot twist, the founder of the investigative journalism site Bellingcat tweeted that his team ascertained that the event did not take place near an airport. But Musk used this story to go after yet more accounts. None were sharing the real-time location of his jet, but some were reporting on the ban of @ElonJet and the Musk Twitter tantrum that went with it.
Within hours, the account bans had piled up. Musk took out the independent journalist Aaron Rupar, a regular thorn in his paw. He banned Donie O’Sullivan of CNN. He scragged the accounts of Drew Harwell at The Washington Post, Micah Lee of The Intercept, and Ryan Mac of The New York Times. As the night wore on, he vanished Keith Olbermann—sure, he’s annoying, but still—and Mike Binder of Mashable. And just for good measure, when Steve Herman of that notoriously left-wing organization known as Voice of America merely affirmed the news that Musk was banning his critics, the Chief Twit zotzed that account too.
The usual Twitter tempête de merde ensued. Twitter’s liberals swore that this was the last straw and that they were all decamping to alternatives, usually the Mastodon social network. This really got Musk’s oddly shaped dander up, because, as it turns out, Sweeney was over on Mastodon doing his usual flight tracking—and so Musk seemingly went through another round of sweaty, angry panic, in which Twitter declared references to Mastodon to be “unsafe,” eventually blocking links to Mastodon itself in the name of safety and virtue and all that is holy and good—which is also convenient, because Mastodon is one of Twitter’s few competitors.
Musk’s petty outbursts make you wonder how dangerous it would be if a narcissistic, self-interested, vindictive adolescent ever gained a major political office such as, say, the White House. But I digress.
Now, unless you’re Very Online—and I am, for both personal and professional reasons—none of this matters very much at the moment. But Musk’s weird rampage does have an impact on the way the world around you exchanges information. Twitter has many levels; for some people, it’s a place to talk about oddball hobbies and exchange pet pictures. (Have you met my cat?) But it’s also an extremely valuable conduit for news, information, culture, and argument. Twitter doesn’t control the news, but it helps to shape public debate about many issues. Indeed, Musk’s entire public rationale for taking over Twitter was to preserve an important venue for free speech.
Musk’s defense of free speech is nonsense. One of the world’s richest men—who is not shy about his politics or his contempt for the free press—has reinstated Donald Trump, white supremacists, and any number of dangerous malefactors to Twitter, but he has made it clear that Donie O’Sullivan is beyond the pale. He has purchased an important and influential piece of the public square not to enhance public debate, but to punish people who annoy him. As if to underscore this point, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces live audio chat with journalists who asked him to explain what he was doing. He abruptly left the meeting—and then Twitter Spaces itself was shut down. (This was, he tweeted, to fix a “Legacy bug.” He announced on Friday evening that Spaces had been restored.)
I actually don’t subscribe to some of the more nefarious theories about Musk’s motivations (nor will I share them). I think he lost his cool because for more than a month, he’s been in way over his head with an impulsive purchase, his fortunes are plunging, and he got booed by a crowd of thousands of people at a Dave Chappelle performance—which, for a guy like Musk, is probably an unforgivable injury from what should be an adoring public.
But we can at least shelve all of Musk’s blather about free speech. Twitter is an important part of how we disseminate and process news, and it’s now in the hands of an irritable and unpredictable child. This is one more step in the infantilization of American life, in which we must accommodate and work around the behavior of grown men and women who not so long ago would have been pushed out of public life either by our collective political disgust or by responsible shareholders who would insist that their corporate leaders get back to work instead of making a spectacle of themselves.n The Atlantic’s newsletter; “A lot of serious things are happening in the world: economic uncertainty, war, a pandemic. What’s happening on Twitter isn’t even close to those issues in importance or impact. But the continued reign of Elon Musk as Twitter’s chief jerk could, in fact, affect your life, in ways you might not realize. But first, let’s review the events of the past 24 hours or so. If you haven’t been on Twitter, you’ve been missing something like the tech version of Desperate Housewives, but it’s important to understand the claims Musk is making and why major news outlets are pushing back on them.
This entire drama is probably rooted somewhere in Musk’s privileged youth or his bloated psyche, but the immediate spur to this most recent mini-drama was that Musk does not like people knowing the location of his private jet. Jack Sweeney is a college student who used public data to track the location of Musk’s jet and many others, including some owned by Russian oligarchs. He then posted this information on Twitter through a variety of different accounts—all now suspended—including one dedicated to Musk, @ElonJet. Musk disliked this so much that almost a year ago, he offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop doing it.
Sweeney declined. Musk took ownership of Twitter in late October and, in a flurry of Calvinball rule changes, declared this week that revealing the whereabouts of his jet was the same as doxxing (that is, publishing personal data about private citizens), decreed this a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, and banned the account.
Musk claims that a stalker used the location of his jet to attack a car that his son was in. He has not presented any evidence that this event happened or, it seems, filed any police reports. And in a karmic plot twist, the founder of the investigative journalism site Bellingcat tweeted that his team ascertained that the event did not take place near an airport. But Musk used this story to go after yet more accounts. None were sharing the real-time location of his jet, but some were reporting on the ban of @ElonJet and the Musk Twitter tantrum that went with it.
Within hours, the account bans had piled up. Musk took out the independent journalist Aaron Rupar, a regular thorn in his paw. He banned Donie O’Sullivan of CNN. He scragged the accounts of Drew Harwell at The Washington Post, Micah Lee of The Intercept, and Ryan Mac of The New York Times. As the night wore on, he vanished Keith Olbermann—sure, he’s annoying, but still—and Mike Binder of Mashable. And just for good measure, when Steve Herman of that notoriously left-wing organization known as Voice of America merely affirmed the news that Musk was banning his critics, the Chief Twit zotzed that account too.
The usual Twitter tempête de merde ensued. Twitter’s liberals swore that this was the last straw and that they were all decamping to alternatives, usually the Mastodon social network. This really got Musk’s oddly shaped dander up, because, as it turns out, Sweeney was over on Mastodon doing his usual flight tracking—and so Musk seemingly went through another round of sweaty, angry panic, in which Twitter declared references to Mastodon to be “unsafe,” eventually blocking links to Mastodon itself in the name of safety and virtue and all that is holy and good—which is also convenient, because Mastodon is one of Twitter’s few competitors.
Musk’s petty outbursts make you wonder how dangerous it would be if a narcissistic, self-interested, vindictive adolescent ever gained a major political office such as, say, the White House. But I digress.
Now, unless you’re Very Online—and I am, for both personal and professional reasons—none of this matters very much at the moment. But Musk’s weird rampage does have an impact on the way the world around you exchanges information. Twitter has many levels; for some people, it’s a place to talk about oddball hobbies and exchange pet pictures. (Have you met my cat?) But it’s also an extremely valuable conduit for news, information, culture, and argument. Twitter doesn’t control the news, but it helps to shape public debate about many issues. Indeed, Musk’s entire public rationale for taking over Twitter was to preserve an important venue for free speech.
Musk’s defense of free speech is nonsense. One of the world’s richest men—who is not shy about his politics or his contempt for the free press—has reinstated Donald Trump, white supremacists, and any number of dangerous malefactors to Twitter, but he has made it clear that Donie O’Sullivan is beyond the pale. He has purchased an important and influential piece of the public square not to enhance public debate, but to punish people who annoy him. As if to underscore this point, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces live audio chat with journalists who asked him to explain what he was doing. He abruptly left the meeting—and then Twitter Spaces itself was shut down. (This was, he tweeted, to fix a “Legacy bug.” He announced on Friday evening that Spaces had been restored.)
I actually don’t subscribe to some of the more nefarious theories about Musk’s motivations (nor will I share them). I think he lost his cool because for more than a month, he’s been in way over his head with an impulsive purchase, his fortunes are plunging, and he got booed by a crowd of thousands of people at a Dave Chappelle performance—which, for a guy like Musk, is probably an unforgivable injury from what should be an adoring public.
But we can at least shelve all of Musk’s blather about free speech. Twitter is an important part of how we disseminate and process news, and it’s now in the hands of an irritable and unpredictable child. This is one more step in the infantilization of American life, in which we must accommodate and work around the behavior of grown men and women who not so long ago would have been pushed out of public life either by our collective political disgust or by responsible shareholders who would insist that their corporate leaders get back to work instead of making a spectacle of themselves.”
As I wrote in my post of March 15 2021, Free Speech, Hate Speech, and the Use of Social Force: the Case of Dr. Seuss; Much like his wonderful anarchist hero The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss has been judged as rather naughty of late, taken to running amok and being ungovernable, transgressing the boundaries of the Forbidden, an agent of Chaos and mocker of authority. Reversals of order and authority, the violation of norms, and the destabilization of ossified forms and structures as a liberation from the shadows of our past and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, whose books modeled the limitless possibilities of becoming human as free-roaming Autonomous Zones like the delightful child criminals Thing One and Thing Two; Dr Seuss offers us much by way of the reimagination of ourselves, and for this I cherish him.
His works can be read as celebrations of childhood as an ideal state of being; uncontrolled, wild, beings of nature, and free of conscience, inhibition, submission to authority or what Freud deliciously called polymorphosly perverse, but free of the Freudian injunction to control and sublimate our desires, works as with nature in which anything goes.
The works of Dr Seuss are a sustained advocacy of the idea of the natural human as conceptualized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his brilliant manifesto of 1762 The Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right. Here are some of my favorite quotes; “Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent.” “MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.” “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.”
Dr Seuss also used his platform to legitimize regressive ideologies in which he was deeply embedded; but he did not end where he began, and through his writing he transformed himself and our culture. In this respect his works are a parade of taboos and his art one of Swiftian satire which mocked and deflated authorized identities by extending them to the Absurd.
As I once said to Jean Genet of a sniper who had joined us in resistance after having tried to kill me for several days, no one is beyond redemption.
I’d like to keep the anarchy and transgression and struggle free from the legacies of our historical injustices and inequalities, among them racism and patriarchy which Janus-like act as dual faces of a coin of power, as did Dr Suess.
Mistake nothing in this; there can be no excuse for racism nor for any advocacy or representations of racism or fascism. We must have zero tolerance for hate, and give no quarter to its perpetrators.
Cancel culture is a fascist term and its use is a warning sign. It is used both as in-group recognition signaling among fascists and white supremacists, and as a tactic of deflection. None who are innocent of intent to harm use this expression, and it is one of many identifiers we can use to tell friend from foe. The apologetics of hate and white supremacist terror recast resistance and deplatforming as cancel culture to shift blame. When someone invokes cancel culture to avoid responsibility for their actions or to delegitimize you, know that you are speaking with an enemy who is committed to your destruction.
As to the themes of Dr. Seuss, it is useful to compare him to Robert Coover, the author who appropriated his character of the Cat in the Hat in a 1968 satire of Nixon entitled A Political Fable, a story whose lessons apply equally to the presidency of Donald Trump.
As reviewed in The Guardian by Hari Kunzru; “Coover’s greatest battle with complexity is The Public Burning, a massive novel about the McCarthy era and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, which appeared, after much struggle, in 1977. Coover, whose work belies the idea that postmodernism is necessarily disengaged and apolitical, had been active in campaigning against the Vietnam war, and made a short film about a 1967 campus protest against Dow Chemical, On a Confrontation in Iowa City. The authoritarian drift of US politics led him first to write a satirical novella imagining a presidential campaign by Dr Seuss’s Cat in the Hat (A Political Fable, 1968) and then to take a panoptical look at the anti-communist panic of the 50s. Conceived before Watergate and then completely rewritten in the wake of the scandal, The Public Burning is narrated by Richard Nixon, who struts and frets his way across a political stage dominated by a foul-mouthed, xenophobic Uncle Sam, who is locked in mortal combat with the Phantom, a shadowy and seemingly omnipresent enemy”
And from Kirkus Review; “The Cat in the Hat for President”: that was the title of this satire when first published in 1968 (in the literary magazine New American Review)–and that’s the single, inspired, ferocious joke (dated not one whit) that keeps most of these 88 miniature pages roaring along. Coover’s narrator is old party pro “Soothsayer” Brown, who goes to the Convention hoping to hand-pick the V-P candidate for this no-win election year (the Opponent will be virtually undefeatable). . . and then watches as the Convention turns into a circus: first a catchy slogan starts appearing everywhere (“Let’s make the White House a Cat House”); next, an irresistible campaign song fills the air (“So go to bat for the Cat in the Hat!/He’s the Cat who knows where it’s at!/With Tricks and Voom and Things like that!”); then funny hats, gorgeous cheerleaders, cute gags–and finally the arrival of the Cat himself, who pulls Seuss-like stunts, wreaks cartoon havoc, wows the crowd, and wins the nomination on the first ballot. Brown is the party’s last hold-out, but even he grudgingly goes along. After all, he can’t deny “the Cat’s essential ambiguity. . . thus his electoral power.” And he’s only half-revolted by the philosophy of the man behind the Cat–a creep named Clark who believes that “extremity is a great catalyst,” that the Cat’s outrageous campaign will free America of its illusions. But the Cat’s antics–gross practical jokes, driving the Opponent bonkers with those hat-tricks, fomenting racial riots in Mississippi (“the Cat’s ambivalent blackness, heretofore a political asset, now turned on him”)–eventually get out of hand; there’s talk of a military coup; “all the Good Folk of the Valley” now hate the Cat; and he’s skinned alive by an angry mob” “the sheer awful exuberance of the central absurdity here–which somehow, paradoxically, tempers Coover’s naked loathing with Seuss’ more good-natured mania–works to perfection: a devastating, across-the-board swipe at presidential imagery and campaign hype, perhaps even righter for Election ’80 than it was for the more issue-centered nightmares of ’68.”
As I wrote in my post of August 16 2020, Democracy, the Right of Free Speech Versus the Crime of Hate Speech, and the Principle of Open Debate; To free ourselves of the ideas of other people; such is the essence of democracy. Conversely, the use of social force in marginalizing and silencing dissent is the definition of tyranny.
Much talk of late has employed the term cancel culture to deflect and obscure the true issues involved with the disambiguation of free speech from hate speech and the role of open debate in a democracy; cancel culture is a figment used without sincerity to obfuscate loathsome acts of incitement to violence and dehumanization, for platform denial and forms of peer ostracism are part of the free market of ideas and have no relation to silencing and erasure used by authoritarian tyrannies of force and control to subjugate a population and repress dissent, as exemplified by the Chinese Communist Party’s recent arrest of newspaperman Jimmy Lai in their campaign against democracy and truth in Hong Kong. But the values issues which the phenomenon raises are interesting, as they signpost the heart of what democracy means and our responsibility to others as well as our freedom from the ideas of others.
Democracy is reducible to a simple idea; the abandonment of social force in shaping others to our own image, in the authorization of identity, in our freedom of conscience and from the establishment and policing of boundaries of the Forbidden.
In a democracy, the principle of the autonomy of individuals takes precedence over the state, which exists only to secure those rights which we cannot secure for ourselves.
Any society or culture requires shared values and principles, agreements about things such as freedoms of and freedoms from, whether in systems of law and justice or as standards of courtesy. Democracy is unique in that it requires rights of free access to information and the sharing of it, and freedoms from surveillance, censorship, and lies disguised as truths, but also requires for its functioning the tradition of open debate founded with our civilization in the Forum of Athens.
Hate speech, which seeks to harm a class of persons, is the only exception to the right of free speech as parrhesia, the sacred calling to expose injustice, and the independence of journalism as a sacred calling to seek the truth, for hate speech dehumanizes others as a criminal theft of humanity, citizenship, and identity which violates our ideals of equality and liberty; hate speech is an act of tyranny and terror which is subversive to democracy as a free society of equals.
As truth becomes uncertain and malleable through the instruments of media and reduces everything to identitarian partisanship, as reality becomes a social consensus model authorized for us by others, as we wander in a wilderness of mirrors, distorted images as if in a funhouse which falsify and abstract us from ourselves in infinite reflections, of misdirects, lies, and illusions, we become colonized by these falsehoods and shaped to the uses of their puppetmasters and those who would enslave us. Thus do we become puppets of the thieves of souls.
And somewhere in the funhouse, a Clown of Terror laughs.
To make an idea about a kind of people is a hate crime and an act of violence.
To Question, Expose, and Mock Authority are among the Primary Duties of a Citizen.
Let us be citizens, and never subjects.
Who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights?
Wag the Dog film trailer
Chaplin’s The Factory
October 4 2025 61st Anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement
April 28 2023 Tucker Carlson, Voice of the Fourth Reich and Nazi Ideology in the Era of Traitor Trump, Is Disavowed by Fox and Now Free to Run For the Presidency
October 10 2024 Lies, Misdirections, and the Fog of War: the Information Front of the Climate Crisis and the Party of Treason’s War on Truth and Democracy
February 8 2023 The Limits of Fear and Lies: the Republican Party Has No Story to Tell Beyond These Instruments of Subjugation, Division, Tyranny and Terror, and the Wealth, Power, and Privilege of Hegemonic Elites It Represents and Enacts
A new moon signals the advent of the Halloween lunar month tonight, a liminal time of transformation, change, rebirth, and the permeability of the boundary between life and death, dreams and consensus reality, truths and illusions, normality and transgression, as the gateway of the Forbidden opens and beckons us into unknowns.
Always go through the Forbidden Door.
A Great Work begins with moonrise as it does each year, of the destruction and re-creation of ourselves and our universe, and I write now in praise of sacred acts of Chaos and Transformation, and of songs of Liberty such as Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer. I am a fan of the Netflix series Lucifer and have watched it through several times; it places the task of healing from the trauma of life disruptive events and the pathology of our disconnectedness and division as abandonment in a mythic context from Milton’s Paradise Lost; Neil Gaiman has written a reimagination of Paradise Regained.
Primarily a work which interrogates issues of freedom and autonomy versus authority and subjugation, falsification versus authenticity, and ownership of identity as a ground of struggle, Neil Gaiman places his drama in the context of the problem of the deus absconditus, the Biblical tyrant god who bound humankind to his laws and then abandoned us to struggle free of them in a defining act of self-creation.
It’s a story which has much evolved and diverged from Biblical sources referential to Nebuchadnezzar and the historical fall of Babylon, this being the context in the paragraph containing the famous passage in Isaiah 14:12 as given in the King James Bible; “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” The Vulgate also uses the word lucifer in Peter 1:19 “morning star”, Job 11:17 “the light of the morning”, Job 38:32 “the signs of the zodiac” and Psalms 110:3 “the dawn”. The Adversary of the Hebrew Bible, Satan, was developed into a literary figure by Origen and Tertullian, and later became conflated with Lucifer. We have Aquinas and Pseudo-Dionysius to thank for the origin of the idea of Satan as identical with the angel Lucifer after the Fall, as he appears in Milton, along with the rest of their baroque and imaginary cosmology and hierarchies of angels.
Gaiman’s secondary sources include the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Plato’s Protagoras, poetic versions of his myth by Goethe and Byron, the play by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein which reimagines them all in a glorious recursion like an ouroboros swallowing its tail. Neil Gaiman also references the poetry of Ted Hughes and William Blake, and the myth of the fallen angels and their monstrous children the Nephilim from the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
Interdependent with this is a love story which references Beauty and the Beast, its great retelling by Emily Bronte as Wuthering Heights, classical myths of Orpheus and Persephone, and Jewish myths of the double aspected divine feminine; the Shekinah, goddess of wisdom as transcendence, ecstatic vision, and poetic truth who once had her own altar beside that of her masculine half in Jewish temples, and Lillith, mother of the Thousands of Myriads and bearer of wisdom immanent in nature and written in our flesh as her children.
Lucifer’s signature line, “What do you desire?” appropriates the central question of Lacan, “Che vuoi?”; his power to reveal one’s true self through looking into one’’s eyes and soul references the power of Medusa which appropriates the Male Gaze, and he never lies, for lies are the instrument of authority and those who would enslave us, and he is above all a Liberator, whose purpose is to free us from tyranny. Secondarily he is a Trickster figure, who disrupts order through acts of Chaos and Transgression as a guide of the soul and as revolutionary struggle.
Here is desire as an unstoppable tidal force of anarchy and liberation, transgression and the violation of norms as sacred acts in pursuit of truth parallel with the witness of history and the calling of journalism as Foucault’s truth telling, linked to the redemptive and creative powers of love to set us free by seeing the truth of each other; how could I not identify with Lucifer, who embodies self-creation as seizures of power?
Gaiman’s Lucifer provides a role model and defines a personal mission statement for me, as I suspect he does for his enormous audience and fandom of the series. As Slavoj Zizek wrote in How to Read Lacan; “Even when my desires are transgressive, even when they violate social norms, this transgression relies on what it transgresses. Paul knows this very well, when in the famous passage in Romans, he describes how the Law gives societies the desire to violate it.”
“The evil that I would not, that I do” Romans 7:19, contextualizes transgression as the violation of normalities and the boundaries of the Forbidden, a mission statement of becoming human which like the divine command in Genesis not to eat the apple of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and become gods establishes the primary human act as defiance of authority and refusal to submit, whereby we seize our power and become self-created and self-owned beings, autonomous and free. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As such it interrogates power as rebellion against tyranny and authority, as transgression of the Forbidden, and as violations of normality and imposed ideas of virtue, three things I consider and practice as sacred Acts of Chaos and Transformation.
Lucifer in Gaiman’s mythos is also a brilliantly depicted damaged child trying to grow up and free himself from the legacies of his enslavement. When one has been raised as a beast, becoming human is revolutionary struggle.
I find reflection of myself in the character of Lucifer and the issues he faces as a wounded champion of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who cannot escape the consequences of his aberrations and transgressions of the Forbidden or defiance of authorized identities and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and normality; he is an outcast hero who is seen by others as a villain and must accept his own monstrosity if he is to champion others.
In the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Dr Jekyll refuses to use his power with the words, “No. Hyde will never use me again.” To this Stuart Townsend’s glorious and strange Dorian Gray replies; “Then what good are you?”
Let us embrace our monstrosity as a seizure of power and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Ours is a fallen world, a wilderness of mirrors wherein the truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature have been captured and distorted by those who would enslave us, falsified and abstracted like Baudrillard’s simulacra from our lived experience as wild things, limitless and free; but one in which true heroism is possible, and where the uncontrollable and anarchic tidal force of love and desire can redeem the wildness of nature and the wildness within ourselves.
The romance subplot centers on the redemptive power of love and references Jean Cocteau’s classic film Beauty and the Beast, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and directly appropriates as its model the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as the tragic re-enactment of that myth and its reimagination in Wuthering Heights in the lives and poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who cast themselves in the roles of Heathcliff and Catherine.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein, and the works of Mary Shelly and Emily Bronte’s successors Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes?
Such beautiful imagery, in an allegory of epigenetic trauma and resilience. We are all prisoners of our history, whose legacies we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails.
We must free ourselves from our history; this is the first phase of revolutionary struggle and a precondition to our seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves and the achievement of internal conditions of being characterized by Liberty, autonomy, and Sartrean freedom and authenticity, a state which I term Unconquered, for who cannot be compelled by force is free.
Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
At the first assembly of the new school year the incoming class was asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. Ours was a town divided by church affiliation of which my family and I were members of neither and rare new arrivals as my father took a job teaching high school there; the quiet and black garbed Dutch and their Reformed Church, affiliated with that of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, grim giants with snow white hair like Harry Potter villains who thought music and dancing were sinful and whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, and the loud and laughing, earthy, polka dancing, sawdust pit wrestling Swiss and their Calvinist Church, who served beer to anyone over the age of twelve. Among my earliest memories was when a Dutch man married a Swiss girl, both white Protestants speaking forms of German, and his relatives called it a mixed marriage and burned a cross on their lawn.
Here I was notorious, the student for whom prayer in school had been discontinued at the insistence of my mother who was a member of the Peace and Freedom Party because of their platform statement to take In God We Trust off our money as it is a claim by the state to Biblical authority, and personally I had adopted Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-narrative to the Bible the previous year and often quoted it in refutation to my fellow students attempts to cite the Bible as authority in the repression of dissent. My parents were formidable figures who were also misfits; my mother a radical atheist, feminist, and peace activist, also a biologist, psychologist, author, and scholar of Coleridge and medieval religious art, and my father the high school English, Drama, Forensics, and Fencing Club teacher who was also a counterculture theater director and collected artists and intellectuals, including Edward Albee whose plays he directed and my quasi-uncle William S. Burroughs who were formative personal influences of my childhood.
I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; “I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.
The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. “
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
This is my advice to anyone who would reach out across the interfaces of our differences to win allies and transform enemies into friends, to all who write, speak, teach, and organize as a fulcrum of action with which to change the balance of power in the world; be unguarded, genuine, raw even, and speak your truth with vision and passion. We must speak directly to the pain we share as fellow human beings to call forth the truth of others.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to seize ownership of ourselves.
Let us embrace the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
Throughout the Festival of the Rebel Angel, this year the whole lunar month from today until the first of November, let us bring the Chaos, run amok, and be Ungovernable. For Law serves power, Order is theft, and there is no just Authority.
Pieter Bruegel “The fall of the rebel angels” with motion and sound
Lucifer’s Song of Love: Cover of Wicked Game by Ursine Vulpine & Annaca
Lucifer Netflix official trailer
My Love Will Never Die, Music by Claire Wyndham from the Lucifer Season 4 finale
I sing of the goddess of Death and Rebirth, Transformation, Magic, Chaos, Darkness and Dreams, Battle and seizures of power as Liberation, twin of my demon lover Desire who define each other as negative spaces and inhabit our bodies as forces and instincts and the endless chasms of our souls as archetypes, myths, symbols, metaphors and allegories of the oceanic vastness of the unconscious.
Myriads of such primal forces exalt us beyond ourselves as motivating, informing, and shaping sources which arise from and dwell within the collective unconscious of humankind as transpersonal interconnectedness, an immense component of ourselves and our personae which float upon its surface like flotsam on a vast sea of being.
Our greater being lives not within the surfaces of our forms and the flags of our skin, but as networks of consciousness and abstract information distributed throughout the universe beyond the gates of Time. Our universe is a system of signs, and we among the dreams of the Infinite.
We are illusions, transitory and ephemeral, stories, histories, memories, always in motion as processes of change, which arise from our true ground of being and to which we will one day return.
Death is a terrible destroyer but also a liberator, who frees us from the limits of our flesh.
Our celebration of Kali, in 2025 from October 18 through 22, occurs during the five days of Diwali, the Festival of Lights wherein we celebrate the triumph of hope over fear, love over hate, and faith in each other as solidarity over division.
Diwali is a celebration rooted in the founding myth and epic of India, the Ramayana, of the liberation of humankind from the tyranny of our demons as the victory of Rama and Hanuman, man and his animal nature, over the demon king Ravanna, to reclaim his wife or female half Sita, an allegory of unitary wholeness and the birth of consciousness from the realm of dreams as well as of the emergence of the human from the animal, and an underworld journey which finds echoes in the myth of Orpheus and in Dante’s quest to free Beatrice in The Divine Comedy.
Herein goddesses as archetypal figures regulate ritual enactments and processes of transformation and act as gatekeepers and guides through the labyrinth.
The third day of the Festival of Light honors Lakshmi, who appears as the figure of Fortune in our tarot cards, goddess of random chance, wealth, and fate whom we invoke as Lady Luck in gambling, games of probabilities, and actions involving risk. And who doesn’t need all the luck they can get?
In honor of Lady Luck and the Liberation of Humankind through unification with our animal nature in this Festival of Lights, I offer you a game of chance and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; for which you will need only a six sided dice, pen, and paper.
Write down six characters as identities you would like to perform, from literature or film; these may be three male and three female roles as is traditional but need not be so unless you wish it. In the context of this festival, partners and teams may become avatars of gods and goddesses and perform a kind of live action theatre. Then cast the dice to discover which of them you will live as for the day. No matter who you perform today, you have five other selves in reserve, and tomorrow is another day, in which we may wear a different mask.
As to whose voice I hear in my head when I write, and characters on whom I model my performance of myself in my primary life roles, that would be Patrick Stewart’s Jean Luc Picard and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes.
Happy festival of hope, chance, and liberation, and may you find joy in the discovery of your best self.
But with the sunset all this is changed, for the night belongs to Kali.
The third night of Diwali becomes Kali festival with the moonrise, and through the day which follows; herein we celebrate the goddess of death, time, darkness, magic, sex, rebirth, and transformation; a warrior protectress of all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth. We place our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, with all who are outcasts as their allies and champions. As a figure of liberation and empowered femininity she has many guises; Liberty herself in New York Harbor among them, a guardian shared by both America and India as an archetype of revolutionary and anticolonial struggle against a common historical enemy, the British Empire.
Her warrior brotherhood fought the British Raj with ferocious tenacity and guile, pervasive now throughout the Indian diaspora as a secret society of guardians, liberators, and avengers of the powerless very like the chasseurs of Haitian Voodoo, and interdependent with the cult of the Rakshasas or were tigers / lions whose founding progenitor she rides into battle.
Herein I write as a member of the Kali Aghora or Brotherhood, which in Hinduism is unusual in its total rejection of caste, having studied with a priestess of Kali, and with her warriors. Kali welcomes all.
In balance with this aspect of Time as Death is that of Desire; shakti or life force and transformative rebirth, for Kali is central to the arts of Tantra, especially as transgression of the Boundaries of the Forbidden, violations of normality, the embrace of the monstrous, and the pursuit of truths of ourselves immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Both of her forms as Death and Desire represent unlimited feminine power free of any patriarchal systems of oppression, though in Shiva whose dance creates the universe she does have a male partner, especially in his form as Bhairava. For those like myself who invite possession as an avatar of the Bhairav during Kali Puga or as transformative battle magic, I have some thoughts on death and desire, the wildness of ourselves and the wildness of nature, truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature, and the embrace of our monstrosity.
Herein I offer you a song in celebration of Death and an invocation of its power of reimagination and transformation, part of the great rite with which I honor the destruction and recreation of the universe each year. It is a ritual which reflects the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Chod, the offering of one’s body as a sacrifice to our demons as the legacies of history which falsify and enslave us but once seized as our own instruments of self creation can also free us from the ideas of others to reclaim our true selves as exaltation, and the atavisms of instinct and degradation which once embraced as ours can reveal truths written in our flesh as illumination and rapture, and embodies Death as a kind of tulpa in a form of immortality magic as described by Oscar Wilde in his anarchist codex of liberation from authorized identities, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
A Song to Kali
Each of us has our own
Angel of death
As a secret partner,
Negative spaces of each other
Which define the limits of our form
The boundaries of which are interfaces
Liminal realms of being
Filled with powers of reimagination and transformation;
Unknowns among the limitless possibilities
Of becoming human
places marked Here Be Dragons
on our maps of being, meaning and value
Here is the world where I live,
Among the Dragons,
In the unknown spaces
Of our topologies of becoming human,
Beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden
And the tyranny of normality
Here is the rapture and terror of the Infinite;
that which defiles and exalts us
beyond the limits of ourselves
Death has been my partner in this dance for so long now
you’d think we would be on better terms,
But Death is a rough lover
To whom our flesh is a sacrifice
That our dreams and wishes may take flight
And become real, eternal, and true.
As I wrote in my post of June 1 2021, Death is a Secret Twin; Death is a secret twin which shares our face but not our dreams which lift and exalt us beyond the limits of our flesh, so Death must steal the echoes and reflections of ours, a thing of shadows filled with secret histories, unspoken truths, unsworn oaths, thousands of myriads of loyalties to private loves and desires betrayed by our failures to make them live and become real by action.
Death is the terror of all that we may have been but did not become, the loss of our disconnectedness and the emptiness of meaning in a world where love cannot redeem us, the grief for beauty which loses context when it is no longer shared and is lost with the fragments of memories which like the genie of perfume escape their bottle to trigger moments out of time and then evanesce like the ghost of a beloved hand which no longer grasps ours back.
We are tattered and broken things, our secret shadows and ourselves, who live in the incandescent now with these repositories of our beautiful dreams and our terrible nightmares, bearing them on into eternity; for this is the great secret of being, that our best selves are formed of all we would deny and keep hidden, and which live beyond us as figures of our glorious sins.
Death is an ambush predator made of our histories, memories, and identities, which must steal these things to become real in the moment of our awakening into its realm of beautiful and terrible dreams, a realm of true being beyond the illusions of our lives which bears names including the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism and the alam al mythal in Islam as codified by ibn Arabi, called by Coleridge the Primary Imagination, the Logos in neo-Platonic philosophy and the Gospel of John, and by Jung the Collective Unconscious, and waits to seize us unawares and carry us off to eternity while it replaces us like a faery changeling with the image of our unrealized hopes and unexpressed desires.
Death is a unique and personal demon created by our denial of ourselves, such denial acting as a parasite which destroys its host and operates through a process of falsification like the distorted and captured images in a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, but it can become instead a symbiote, a terrible and monstrous guardian spirit and a guide of the soul which speaks from within our greatest darkness with Forbidden wisdom, like a remora borne by a shark on its journeys through chasms of the abyssal unknown not as its nemesis and conqueror but as a servant which grooms from us that which we must cast down from the thrones of our hearts; we humans and our silent and unseen partners the angels of our deaths whom we must wrestle not for victory, for everything in life is more powerful than we are, but to become Unconquered in resistance and free.
Thus may we bear without breaking the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, become greater and more real and alive than we were born, transcend the limits of our form, and become sublimed as figures of our truths in Sartrean total freedom and authenticity as an art of life, for all true art defiles and exalts.
Here is a faith which asks us to renounce nothing and embrace our true selves, to reimagine and transform ourselves; and offers a path of working with grief process and death transcendence not of control of our passions and dominion of nature, but as seizure of power and autonomy, of the embrace and celebration of our wildness as beings of nature and of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Let us embrace our monstrosity and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
How shall we answer death and the terror of our nothingness? Let us challenge and defy such death, and while it waits to claim us with its cold hand of entropy and unraveled time we must seize and shake our shadow and secret twin of longing to become, transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and perform our best selves, our hopes and our desires, as a guerilla theatre of identities upon the stage of the world in fearless grandeur, and let nothing be lost or remain untested among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us answer death as Bringers of Chaos and Transformation, and make of our world and humankind a thing of beautiful, terrible truths written in our flesh, and of our dreams and nightmares a brave new world.
As I wrote in reflection on my mother’s death, now years ago; Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
Hindi
12 नवंबर 2025 इस काली पूजा पर, मृत्यु के जश्न में एक गीत
मैं मृत्यु और पुनर्जन्म, परिवर्तन, जादू, अराजकता, अंधेरे और सपने, लड़ाई और मुक्ति के रूप में शक्ति की जब्ती की देवी के बारे में गाता हूं, जो मेरे दानव प्रेमी इच्छा के जुड़वां हैं जो एक दूसरे को नकारात्मक स्थानों के रूप में परिभाषित करते हैं और हमारे शरीर में शक्तियों और प्रवृत्तियों के रूप में निवास करते हैं और अचेतन की समुद्री विशालता के आदर्शों, मिथकों, प्रतीकों, रूपकों और रूपकों के रूप में हमारी आत्माओं की अंतहीन खाइयाँ।
ऐसी असंख्य आदिम शक्तियाँ हमें प्रेरित करने, सूचित करने और आकार देने वाले स्रोतों के रूप में खुद से परे ले जाती हैं, जो मानव जाति के सामूहिक अचेतन से उत्पन्न होती हैं और ट्रांसपर्सनल इंटरकनेक्शन के रूप में उसमें निवास करती हैं, हमारे और हमारे व्यक्तित्व का एक विशाल घटक जो एक विशाल समुद्र की तरह इसकी सतह पर तैरता है। प्राणी।
हमारा महानतम अस्तित्व हमारे रूपों की सतहों और हमारी त्वचा के झंडों के भीतर नहीं रहता है, बल्कि समय के द्वार से परे पूरे ब्रह्मांड में वितरित चेतना और अमूर्त जानकारी के नेटवर्क के रूप में रहता है। हमारा ब्रह्मांड संकेतों की एक प्रणाली है, और हम अनंत के सपनों में से हैं।
हम भ्रम हैं, क्षणभंगुर और क्षणभंगुर, कहानियां, इतिहास, यादें, परिवर्तन की प्रक्रियाओं के रूप में हमेशा गति में रहते हैं, जो हमारे अस्तित्व की वास्तविक जमीन से उत्पन्न होती हैं और जिस पर हम एक दिन लौट आएंगे।
मृत्यु एक भयानक विध्वंसक होने के साथ-साथ एक मुक्तिदाता भी है, जो हमें हमारे शरीर की सीमाओं से मुक्त करती है।
काली का हमारा उत्सव दिवाली के पांच दिनों के दौरान मनाया जाता है, रोशनी का त्योहार जिसमें हम भय पर आशा की जीत, नफरत पर प्यार और विभाजन पर एकजुटता के रूप में एक-दूसरे पर विश्वास की जीत का जश्न मनाते हैं।
दिवाली भारत के संस्थापक मिथक और महाकाव्य, रामायण में निहित एक उत्सव है, जो हमारे राक्षसों के अत्याचार से मानव जाति की मुक्ति के रूप में राम और हनुमान की जीत, मनुष्य और उसके पशु स्वभाव, राक्षस राजा रावण पर, पुनः प्राप्त करने के लिए है। उनकी पत्नी या अर्धांगिनी सीता, एकात्मक पूर्णता का एक रूपक और सपनों के दायरे से चेतना का जन्म और साथ ही जानवर से मानव का उद्भव, और एक अंडरवर्ल्ड यात्रा जो ऑर्फ़ियस के मिथक और दांते के मिथक में गूँज पाती है द डिवाइन कॉमेडी में बीट्राइस को मुक्त कराने की खोज।
इसमें आदर्श आकृतियों के रूप में देवी-देवता अनुष्ठान अधिनियमों और परिवर्तन की प्रक्रियाओं को नियंत्रित करते हैं और भूलभुलैया के माध्यम से द्वारपाल और मार्गदर्शक के रूप में कार्य करते हैं।
प्रकाश उत्सव का तीसरा दिन लक्ष्मी का सम्मान करता है, जो हमारे टैरो कार्ड में फॉर्च्यून की आकृति, यादृच्छिक अवसर, धन और भाग्य की देवी के रूप में दिखाई देती है, जिसे हम जुए, संभावनाओं के खेल और जोखिम से जुड़े कार्यों में लेडी लक के रूप में बुलाते हैं।
रोशनी के इस त्योहार में लेडी लक और हमारी पशु प्रकृति के साथ एकीकरण के माध्यम से मानव जाति की मुक्ति के सम्मान में, मैं आपको मौका का एक खेल और मानव बनने की असीमित संभावनाओं की पेशकश करता हूं; जिसके लिए आपको केवल छह तरफा पासा, पेन और कागज की आवश्यकता होगी।
साहित्य या फिल्म से छह पात्रों को पहचान के रूप में लिखें जिन्हें आप प्रदर्शित करना चाहते हैं; पारंपरिक रूप से ये तीन पुरुष और तीन महिला भूमिकाएँ हो सकती हैं, लेकिन जब तक आप न चाहें, ऐसा होना ज़रूरी नहीं है। फिर यह पता लगाने के लिए पासा फेंकें कि आप उस दिन उनमें से किसमें जीवित रहेंगे। इससे कोई फर्क नहीं पड़ता कि आप आज कौन सा प्रदर्शन करते हैं, आपके पास आरक्षित रूप में पांच अन्य स्वयं हैं, और कल एक और दिन है, जिसमें हम एक अलग मुखौटा पहन सकते हैं।
आशा, अवसर और मुक्ति का शुभ त्योहार, और आपको अपने सर्वश्रेष्ठ स्व की खोज में आनंद मिले।
लेकिन सूर्यास्त के साथ यह सब बदल जाता है, क्योंकि रात काली की होती है।
दिवाली की तीसरी रात चंद्रोदय के साथ काली उत्सव बन जाती है, और उसके बाद पूरे दिन; यहां हम मृत्यु, समय, अंधकार, जादू, सेक्स, पुनर्जन्म और परिवर्तन की देवी का जश्न मनाते हैं; उन सभी की एक योद्धा रक्षक, जिन्हें फ्रांत्ज़ फैनन ने पृथ्वी का मनहूस कहा था। हम अपना जीवन उन लोगों के साथ संतुलन में रखते हैं जो शक्तिहीन और वंचित हैं, खामोश हैं और मिटा दिए गए हैं, उन सभी के साथ जो बहिष्कृत हैं, उनके सहयोगी और चैंपियन हैं। मुक्ति और सशक्त नारीत्व की एक मूर्ति के रूप में उनके कई रूप हैं; उनमें से न्यूयॉर्क हार्बर में स्वयं लिबर्टी भी शामिल थीं, जो एक साझा ऐतिहासिक दुश्मन, ब्रिटिश साम्राज्य के खिलाफ क्रांतिकारी और उपनिवेशवाद-विरोधी संघर्ष के आदर्श के रूप में अमेरिका और भारत दोनों द्वारा साझा की गई संरक्षक थीं।
उनके योद्धा भाईचारे ने ब्रिटिश राज से क्रूर दृढ़ता और छल के साथ लड़ाई लड़ी, जो अब पूरे भारतीय प्रवासी में हाईटियन वूडू के पीछा करने वालों की तरह शक्तिहीनों के संरक्षकों के एक गुप्त समाज के रूप में व्याप्त है, और राक्षसों के पंथ के साथ अन्योन्याश्रित या बाघ/शेर थे जिनके संस्थापक पूर्वज वह युद्ध में उतरती है।
इसमें मैं काली अघोरा या ब्रदरहुड के सदस्य के रूप में लिख रहा हूं, जो हिंदू धर्म में जाति की पूर्ण अस्वीकृति में असामान्य है, मैंने काली की एक पुजारिन के साथ अध्ययन किया है।
समय के इस पहलू के साथ संतुलन में मृत्यु इच्छा का पहलू है; शक्ति या जीवन शक्ति और परिवर्तनकारी पुनर्जन्म, क्योंकि काली तंत्र की कलाओं का केंद्र है, विशेष रूप से निषिद्ध सीमाओं का उल्लंघन, सामान्यता का उल्लंघन, राक्षसी का आलिंगन और पीछा करना
प्रकृति में अन्तर्निहित और हमारे शरीर में लिखित स्वयं के सत्यों के बारे में।
मृत्यु और इच्छा के रूप में उनके दोनों रूप उत्पीड़न की किसी भी पितृसत्तात्मक व्यवस्था से मुक्त असीमित स्त्री शक्ति का प्रतिनिधित्व करते हैं, हालांकि शिव में, जिनके नृत्य से ब्रह्मांड का निर्माण होता है, उनका एक पुरुष साथी है, खासकर उनके रूप में भैरव के रूप में।
इसमें मैं आपको मृत्यु के जश्न में एक गीत और उसकी पुनर्कल्पना और परिवर्तन की शक्ति का आह्वान प्रस्तुत करता हूं, जो उस महान संस्कार का हिस्सा है जिसके साथ मैं हर साल ब्रह्मांड के विनाश और मनोरंजन का सम्मान करता हूं। यह एक अनुष्ठान है जो चोद की तिब्बती बौद्ध प्रथा को दर्शाता है, इतिहास की विरासत के रूप में हमारे राक्षसों को बलिदान के रूप में अपने शरीर की पेशकश जो हमें धोखा देती है और गुलाम बनाती है लेकिन एक बार आत्म निर्माण के हमारे अपने उपकरणों के रूप में जब्त होने से हमें इससे मुक्ति भी मिल सकती है। दूसरों के विचारों को हमारे सच्चे स्वयं को उत्थान के रूप में पुनः प्राप्त करने के लिए, और वृत्ति और पतन की नास्तिकताएं जो एक बार हमारे रूप में अपनाई जाती हैं, वे हमारे शरीर में लिखी सच्चाइयों को रोशनी और उत्साह के रूप में प्रकट कर सकती हैं, और अमरता के जादू के रूप में मृत्यु को एक प्रकार के तुल्पा के रूप में प्रस्तुत करती हैं। ऑस्कर वाइल्ड द्वारा अधिकृत पहचानों से मुक्ति के अराजकतावादी कोडेक्स, द पिक्चर ऑफ डोरियन ग्रे में इसका वर्णन किया गया है।
हममें से प्रत्येक का अपना है
मौत का दूत
एक गुप्त साथी के रूप में,
एक दूसरे के नकारात्मक स्थान
जो हमारे स्वरूप की सीमाओं को परिभाषित करते हैं
जिसकी सीमाएँ इंटरफ़ेस हैं
अस्तित्व के सीमांत क्षेत्र
पुनर्कल्पना और परिवर्तन की शक्तियों से भरा हुआ;
असीमित संभावनाओं के बीच अज्ञात
इंसान बनने का
यहां चिह्नित स्थान ड्रेगन बनें
अस्तित्व, अर्थ और मूल्य के हमारे मानचित्रों पर
यहीं वह दुनिया है जहां मैं रहता हूं,
ड्रेगन के बीच,
अज्ञात स्थानों में
मानव बनने की हमारी टोपोलॉजी में,
निषिद्ध की सीमाओं से परे
और सामान्यता का अत्याचार
यहाँ अनंत का उत्साह और आतंक है;
वह जो हमें अशुद्ध और ऊंचा करता है
खुद की सीमा से परे
इस नृत्य में मृत्यु इतने लंबे समय से मेरी भागीदार रही है
आपको लगता होगा कि हम बेहतर शर्तों पर होंगे,
लेकिन मौत एक कठोर प्रेमी है
जिसके लिए हमारा मांस बलिदान है
कि हमारे सपनों और इच्छाओं को उड़ान मिल सके
और वास्तविक, शाश्वत और सत्य बन जाओ।
जैसा कि मैंने 1 जून 2021 की अपनी पोस्ट में लिखा था, मृत्यु एक गुप्त जुड़वां है; मृत्यु एक गुप्त जुड़वां है जो हमारे चेहरे को साझा करती है लेकिन हमारे सपनों को नहीं जो हमें हमारे शरीर की सीमाओं से परे उठाती और ऊंचा उठाती है, इसलिए मृत्यु को हमारी प्रतिध्वनियों और प्रतिबिंबों को चुरा लेना चाहिए, गुप्त इतिहास, अनकहे सत्य, अनकही शपथों से भरी छाया की चीज़ , निजी प्रेम और इच्छाओं के प्रति हजारों असंख्य निष्ठाएं उन्हें जीवित रखने और कार्रवाई द्वारा वास्तविक बनाने में हमारी विफलताओं के कारण धोखा खा गईं।
मृत्यु उन सभी चीजों का आतंक है जो हम थे लेकिन नहीं बने, हमारे वियोग की हानि और एक ऐसी दुनिया में अर्थ की शून्यता जहां प्यार हमें छुटकारा नहीं दिला सकता, सुंदरता के लिए दुःख जो संदर्भ खो देता है जब इसे अब साझा नहीं किया जाता है और है यादों के टुकड़ों के साथ खो गया है जो इत्र के जिन्न की तरह समय के क्षणों को ट्रिगर करने के लिए अपनी बोतल से बाहर निकलता है और फिर एक प्यारे हाथ के भूत की तरह लुप्त हो जाता है जो अब हमारे हाथ को वापस नहीं पकड़ता है।
हम फटी-पुरानी और टूटी हुई चीजें हैं, हमारी गुप्त परछाइयाँ और हम स्वयं हैं, जो अपने सुंदर सपनों और अपने भयानक दुःस्वप्नों के भंडार के साथ अब गरमागरम में रहते हैं, उन्हें अनंत काल तक ले जाते हैं; क्योंकि यह अस्तित्व का महान रहस्य है, कि हमारा सर्वश्रेष्ठ स्वयं उन सभी से बना है जिन्हें हम अस्वीकार करेंगे और छिपाकर रखेंगे, और जो हमारे गौरवशाली पापों के आंकड़ों के रूप में हमसे परे रहते हैं।
मृत्यु हमारे इतिहास, यादों और पहचानों से बना एक घात शिकारी है, जिसे हमारे जागने के क्षण में सुंदर और भयानक सपनों के दायरे में वास्तविक बनने के लिए इन चीजों को चुराना होगा, हमारे जीवन के भ्रम से परे सच्चे अस्तित्व का एक क्षेत्र जो तिब्बती बौद्ध धर्म में बार्डो और इस्लाम में आलम अल मिथल सहित कई नाम हैं, जिन्हें कोलरिज ने प्राइमरी इमेजिनेशन कहा है, नव-प्लेटोनिक दर्शन में लोगो और जॉन के गॉस्पेल और जंग ने कलेक्टिव अनकांशस कहा है, और हमें अनजाने में पकड़ने का इंतजार करता है और हमें अनंत काल तक ले जाता है, जबकि यह हमारी अवास्तविक आशाओं और अव्यक्त इच्छाओं की छवि के साथ एक परी परिवर्तन की तरह हमारी जगह ले लेता है।
मृत्यु एक अनोखा और व्यक्तिगत दानव है जो हमारे खुद को नकारने से निर्मित होता है, ऐसा इनकार एक परजीवी के रूप में कार्य करता है जो अपने मेजबान को नष्ट कर देता है और फ़नहाउस दर्पणों के जंगल में विकृत और कैप्चर की गई छवियों की तरह मिथ्याकरण की प्रक्रिया के माध्यम से संचालित होता है, लेकिन इसके बजाय यह एक बन सकता है सहजीवी, एक भयानक और राक्षसी अभिभावक आत्मा और आत्मा का मार्गदर्शक जो निषिद्ध ज्ञान के साथ हमारे सबसे बड़े अंधेरे के भीतर से बोलता है, जैसे कि एक शार्क द्वारा अज्ञात की खाई के माध्यम से अपनी यात्रा के दौरान अपने शत्रु और विजेता के रूप में नहीं बल्कि एक सेवक के रूप में। जो हमसे वह तैयार करता है जिसे हमें अपने हृदय के सिंहासन से उतार देना चाहिए; हम इंसान और हमारे खामोश और अनदेखे साथी हमारी मौत के देवदूत हैं जिनसे हमें जीत के लिए नहीं, बल्कि जीवन में हर चीज हमसे अधिक शक्तिशाली होने के लिए कुश्ती लड़नी चाहिए, बल्कि प्रतिरोध में अजेय और स्वतंत्र बनने के लिए लड़ना चाहिए।
ऐसा हम भी कर सकते हैं
हमारी मानवता की खामियों और दुनिया की टूटन को तोड़े बिना सहन करें, हम जितना पैदा हुए थे, उससे कहीं अधिक वास्तविक और जीवंत बनें, अपने रूप की सीमाओं को पार करें, और सारत्रियन में हमारी सच्चाई के आंकड़ों के रूप में पूर्ण स्वतंत्रता और प्रामाणिकता के रूप में उदात्त बनें। जीवन की कला, सभी सच्ची कलाओं के लिए अपवित्र और उत्कृष्टता।
यहां एक विश्वास है जो हमें कुछ भी त्यागने और अपने सच्चे स्वरूप को अपनाने, खुद की फिर से कल्पना करने और बदलने के लिए कहता है; और दु:ख की प्रक्रिया और मृत्यु के साथ काम करने का एक मार्ग प्रदान करता है, न कि हमारे जुनून पर नियंत्रण और प्रकृति पर प्रभुत्व के रूप में, बल्कि शक्ति और स्वायत्तता की जब्ती के रूप में, प्रकृति के प्राणियों के रूप में हमारे जंगलीपन के आलिंगन और उत्सव के रूप में और प्रकृति में निहित उन सच्चाइयों के रूप में। और हमारे शरीर में लिखा है.
आइए हम अपनी राक्षसीता को अपनाएं और इस गुप्त जुड़वां के बारे में कहें जो कोई सीमा नहीं जानता और स्वतंत्र है जैसा कि प्रोस्पेरो विलियम शेक्सपियर के द टेम्पेस्ट के एक्ट वी, दृश्य 1 में कैलीबन के बारे में कहता है; “अंधेरे की इस बात को मैं अपना मानता हूं।”
हम मृत्यु और अपनी शून्यता के आतंक का उत्तर कैसे देंगे? आइए हम ऐसी मौत को चुनौती दें और चुनौती दें, और जब यह एन्ट्रॉपी और अनसुलझे समय के अपने ठंडे हाथों से हम पर दावा करने की प्रतीक्षा कर रही है, तो हमें अपनी छाया और बनने की लालसा के गुप्त जुड़वां को पकड़ना और हिला देना चाहिए, निषिद्ध की सीमाओं का उल्लंघन करना चाहिए और अपना सर्वश्रेष्ठ प्रदर्शन करना चाहिए , हमारी आशाएँ और हमारी इच्छाएँ, दुनिया के मंच पर पहचानों के एक गुरिल्ला रंगमंच के रूप में, निडर भव्यता में, और मानव बनने की असीमित संभावनाओं के बीच कुछ भी खोने या अप्राप्य न रहने दें।
आइए हम मौत को अराजकता और परिवर्तन लाने वाले के रूप में जवाब दें, और अपनी दुनिया और मानव जाति को हमारे शरीर में लिखी सुंदर, भयानक सच्चाइयों की चीज़ बनाएं, और हमारे सपनों और बुरे सपनों को एक बहादुर नई दुनिया बनाएं।
जैसा कि मैंने वर्षों पहले अपनी माँ की मृत्यु पर चिंतन करते हुए लिखा था; तो फिर हम कौन बनें? हमसे उन सतहों, छवियों और मुखौटों के बारे में पूछता है जो हर पल दूसरों के साथ हमारी सीमाओं पर बातचीत करते हैं।
जिस पर हमारा गुप्त स्व, अंधकार और जुनून का स्व, वह स्व जो दर्पण से परे रहता है और कोई सीमा नहीं जानता, समय और स्थान से असीमित और संभावनाओं में अनंत है, उत्तर देता है; आप कौन बनना चाहते हैं?
As I wrote in my celebration of Lewis Carroll on his birthday, I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love; I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; but only in those truths which I myself create or claim, and which in turn claim me.
This is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
Let there be total truth and absolute transparency between us, O my brothers, sisters, and others; for our word must be an inviolate force of nature if we are to mean anything, one which shapes, defines, motivates, and informs not only how we choose to be human together but also our own possibilities of becoming human. Lies dehumanize and falsify; therefore do I pursue a sacred calling to discover and live the truth. Having so defined the ground of struggle in my writing here as in all things, and with an awareness that this self-disclosure and public intimacy is terrifying to others in some cultures and part of my personal myth as it is for Kenzaburo Oe in Japan, what do I mean when I use the word faith?
My intention is not to deceive in this or any regard; its simply that this is a complex, ambiguous, relative, dangerous, and highly fraught issue, one which bears the legacies of both my personal history and that of my family, and of our millennia of civilization.
A full accounting and interrogation of my influences will not be brief and merits its own study; here I am primarily questioning its praxis as vision, described in the film Oz in reference to Thomas Edison as “the ability to look into the future and make it real.”
I am a scholar of Islam and a member of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism, a former Buddhist monk and Dream Navigator of the Kagyu Vajrayana Order in Kathmandu Nepal, and grew up from the age of nine with ten years of formal study in Zen Buddhism.
Often I use the word faith as solidarity of action with others; as loyalty, allyship, and recognition of our interdependence and the universal nature of our humanity which connects us. But I also use this word faith as a sacred calling to pursue the Truth, whatever the source or where it leads, an idea from ibn Arabi and the most radical definition of faith I know of, which makes Islam the most revolutionary of faiths, especially compared to Christianity and its centuries long burning of books in repression to dissent and subjugation to authority claiming to speak for the Infinite. Only six copies of Plato’s books survived the Dark Ages, courtesy of the Islamic scholars who preserved them.
So for myself, faith is a process of questioning and pursuit of Truth, one which is antithetical to its usual use as submission to authority. Any who stand between ourselves and the Infinite serve neither.
Without question and absolutely it is a declaration of allegiance to poetic vision as symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical truth, as reimagination and transformation, as identity and the terms of struggle for its ownership; for after language itself the ideas by which we organize ourselves are our most fundamental ground of being.
Herein my ars poetica uses methods of literary criticism, history, psychology, and philosophy, an extension of the interdisciplinary methods pioneered in The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite which I read in high school during a time when I chose the origins of evil as my field of study, to interpret the meaning and direction of current events as they unfold in real time, and to change the balance of power in the world.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? 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 the ownership of ourselves.
Poetic vision and imaginal truth allows us to escape the limits of our form and the flags of our skin; to create ourselves anew as a primary human act and the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 3 2022, On Creativity and Poetic Vision as Revolution, Transformation, and Liberation; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” Keats
My sister wrote of her recurring vision of the Night Mountain this morning, a vast and enormous city or structure of lights floating in the sky above the desert just before dawn, and it provoked memories of and reflections on my own many visions and encounters with the transcendent, especially those which became Defining Moments and shaped my becoming human; among them the Illumination of Our Beautiful Flaws as I crossed the Thar desert in Rajasthan by camel, the Games of Beauty and Vision as I sailed upon the Lake of Dreams in Srinagar, my Journeys through the Gates of Possibilities as a monk in Kathmandu, the Kiss of the Fallen Star which struck my hand in a meteor shower as I reached for the Impossible among the heavens, the Dream of the Toad transferred to me as a chthonic guardian spirit and guide of the soul by one of my father’s Beatnik friends, William S. Burroughs, in a line of succession from Nietzsche as its avatar, in the strange fairytales he told in the evenings of his visits as the coals of the fire burned low and darkness swallowed us in its endless chasms, and the moment of my Awakening and vision of Possible Futures of Humankind when as a child at my mother’s side during a protest in People’s Park in Berkeley the police fired on the university students in the most terrible incident of state terror in American history, Bloody Thursday May 15 1969, and I escaped my body and had a unitary moment of awareness outside of time.
Like the dreams to which they are akin, such visions can be read as symbols, metaphors, and allegories; they are also stories woven into our lives which connect us with the universe and with other people, and through which we create ourselves. Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
I am looking at the scar on my hand from where a Fallen Star touched me one night during a cosmic event like tonight’s Quadrantid meteor shower, like the hand of a rebel angel bearing the stolen Promethean Fire, decades ago, when I reached up to pull the stars from the heavens and something reached down to enfold my hand in a nimbus of light, and for a moment I was sublimed and exalted in the Kiss of the Fallen Star, riding the light among the spheres, the earth a vanishing orb, then lost among the solar system, a sea of stars, a whirling dance of galaxies, and return to the hill where I stood transfigured by the embrace of Infinite. Stunned not by our smallness next to a universal scale, but by the eternity and timeless immensity of Being in which we share.
This meteor strike was witnessed by Jim Shafer, Jennifer Wendt-Damico, Kimberly Wine, Claud Gipson, and several others who had assembled on top of the old artillery battery overlooking the valley below Cavedale Road in Sonoma California in the 1980’s, with its awesome petroglyph caves hidden behind a waterfall, where a door to the Unknown was opened possibly thousands of years ago, letting beings of strangeness through.
If ever I need to be reminded of our true nature, of the presence of the transcendent and the immanence in nature of truths written in our flesh, of the vast and limitless sea of being and consciousness of which we are part, I need only open my hand to see written there the signature of the Unknown Infinite and the sign of our hope, for from the moment I touched a star I have been without despair, fear, or doubt, a bearer of hope and the fire of liberation.
I have been no stranger to what is strange; it has defined my Otherness and the kinship I feel with those others, however different from myself, who are marginalized, excluded, vilified, and oppressed, those whom Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth, the dispossessed and the powerless, the silenced and the erased; the monsters and the freaks whom I claim as my family and my tribe.
Of all the gifts and wonders life has given me, this I cherish most of all; that with all the numberless and unimaginable horrors to which I have been witness, in Mariupol and Sarajevo and the crimes and atrocities whose names become an endless litany of woes which define the limits of the human as a fragile and ephemeral quality among chasms of darkness, I have emerged from the legacies of our history Unconquered as in Henley’s poem Invictus, with the ability to bond, empathize with, and inhabit the lives of others as the bearer of sacred wounds which open me to the pain of others. I cherish my pain, for like the Abyss which I have embraced and wrestled with it has made me human.
If I can do this, so can we all. This is my faith as solidarity, hope, and love.
This above all else defines what is human; our ability to transcend the limits of our flesh and of our differences, to share and learn from the lives of others, across vast gulfs of time and space, through the civilization we create as partners in a Great Conversation. Much of who we are is stored potential in the form of our most precious resource, the written word, which is created by our historical community and belongs to the commons; this is both its power as a shaping force and its danger as a limitation of our uniqueness and autonomy.
Such are my thoughts on creativity and poetic vision as revolution, transformation, and liberation; but I did not invent the language with which I create them, nor the millennia of historical antiquity which informs my ideas; rather they are instruments with which I create myself. Who then owns the artifacts of my thinking? To this I must answer with a line from the great film Il Postino; “Poetry belongs to those who need it.”
In reverence for the gifts and guidance I have been given I have tried, however poorly and within my limitations, to understand the meaning and significance of such moments of insight, to enact them in my life as a fulcrum of change and to use poetic vision as leverage with which to transform the balance of power in the world.
Regardless of how we name and taxonomize the Source of our reality and the sea of our being in attempts to rationalize and control life, it remains wild, irrational, uncontrollable, and also very real. The wonder and terror of vision and immersion in what Coleridge called the Primary Imagination, Jung the Collective Unconscious, Ibn Arabi the Ālam al-Mithāl, and is termed the Bardo in the Tibetan classic which I translate as The Book of Liberation, in the contexts of four lineages of ideology in which I may claim membership, has inspired some of the greatest achievements of civilization and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and some of the most fearsome terrors of our historical atrocities, madness, and degradation.
The liminal bears creative and destructive forces in equal measure, and not reductive to the interplay of darkness and light, but ambiguous, contingent, and relative. We who are its witnesses and bearers of poetic vision are the arbiters of this power among humankind and of its consequences for the material universe and the order and fate of the cosmos. Who bears the fire of the gods becomes an agent of transformation, insight, and the reshaping of human being, meaning, and value; this is true of all art and of creativity in general.
Revolutions are born of such insight, in sciences and arts of understanding as well as in politics as choices we make about how to be human together, and in our ongoing creation of ourselves. With this inner fire and vision we may forge new truths, and in this mission I offer guidance and warning as you sail into the unknown; transgress boundaries, violate norms, abandon limits, and seize your power to create yourself anew, for nothing is Forbidden and all Authority is illusion and lies; but always know what you are trying to achieve, for force always operates in both directions at once.
Act without fear, and in action be fearless; but with awareness of the consequences of your actions. Life and liberty, as well as good and evil, may depend on the smallest of changes in our lives and our world, both for ourselves and for others.
Best wishes, and may you find joy, freedom, healing, and love in your reimagination of yourself and our possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?
I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.
Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.
I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch figures and images I called my Dream Gates; William S. Burroughs would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heaven and hell, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.
This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in discomfort and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in 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.
This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Godels Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.
If so the task of becoming human involves chaos, disruption, reimagination, and transformation, as I believe; the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
As I wrote in my post of October 5 2021, Seizure of Power, Self-Creation and Self-Ownership, Authenticity and Autonomy, Self Representation as Construction of Identity, and Ourselves as Living Memiors: the Case of Facebook; Something crucial we ignore about social media; though its pitched as connectedness, its primary function is to construct identity through ordering and prioritizing our experience in time. Our social media publications are a form of memoir, and this is a ground of struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and those which others tell about us.
As with the public negotiations of national identity and conflicted histories in the competing narratives of the 1619 Project and the Mayflower origin story, the first question we must ask of our stories is simple and direct; whose story is this?
This is the great test of disambiguation between falsification and authenticity, and between autonomy and subjugation; not whether a statement is a lie or a truth, though this is also important, but whose truth is it?
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.
Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This?; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As written by Helena de Bresis, author of author of Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir, in Aeon; “I wrote a memoir recently, and sometimes I ask myself why on earth I did. It was difficult and time-consuming, it involved some rather unpleasant self-examination, and it raised suspicions of self-involvement, exhibitionism and insufferable earnestness that I’d so far mainly avoided in life. If I publish it, I risk being accused by friends of betrayal, by readers of lying, and by critics of any number of literary flaws. Since selling a memoir is hard, all of that would represent things going well. When I complain to my sister about this, she suggests that ‘maybe’ I should have – ‘I don’t know’ – considered these points two years ago, before embarking on this thing that she would ‘never, like, ever do’.
When asked why they bother, memoirists offer a range of reasons. Saint Teresa did it for the glory of God; Jean-Jacques Rousseau to express his inner self; Vladimir Nabokov to recreate his vanished childhood; Frederick Douglass to advance the cause of abolition. But maybe the deepest reason for writing a memoir, intertwined with all the rest, is the desire to find meaning in one’s past experience. Whatever else they’re up to, memoirists are in the business of locating some form or order in their personal history: setting it down as an intelligible shape, not a hot mess. Finding this form is both a necessary part of memoir and one of its key rewards. That was what I was after, anyway. Life moves so fast. Stuff had gone down. I wanted to slow the passage of events, grasp what the past had meant, before picking up the pace once again.
You can search for form in life through philosophy, science, religion and any kind of art. The memoirist’s distinctive move is to do it via autobiographical narrative: the construction of an organised sequence of personally experienced events, along with an implied evaluative response to them. Life stories have three things going for them when it comes to making experience intelligible. They’re selective, highlighting particular agents, settings and episodes out of the mass of material that life provides. They’re also unifying, drawing connections between their disparate parts and situating them in context. And they’re isomorphic: they share deep structural and thematic features with other stories, which we use as a shortcut when interpreting them. Psychologists report that most autobiographical narratives follow the classical story arc: steady state, complication, rising action, crisis, resolution, then coda. And they involve quests, comings-of-age, fatal errors, comeuppances and returns recognisable from myths, parables and fairy tales. Most, though maybe not all, humans tell such life stories. Memoirists recount them at length, in writing, with literary ambitions. We’re trying to do it, but make it art.
What are memoirists doing exactly, when we claim to ‘find’ this form and meaning in our past experience? Are we genuinely discovering it back there or just making it up? For the past century or so, the wind has been behind the latter interpretation. Many take the existentialist line that seeing your life in narrative terms is a form of mauvaise foi, or bad faith. We urgently want there to be order and meaning in the world, independently of us. But there isn’t, and our attempts to impose coherence and significance where none exist are self-deceiving and absurd. Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938), describes the ‘disgust’ and ‘nausea’ produced by our meaningless universe, alongside its ineffective narrative remedy:
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
What exactly is wrong with construing your past as a story? In his memoir The Words (1963), Sartre suggests that storytelling distorts our understanding of life, by confusing it with literature. We can tell autobiographical narratives if we like but, if so, we should be clear about what we’re doing: producing fiction. This take suggests that memoir, which calls itself nonfiction, is a fundamentally suspect enterprise.
A similar critique of narrative emerged in the philosophy of history in the 1970s. In his book Metahistory (1973), Hayden White argued that historical writing is a constructive process, in which the historian selects a subset of past events, imaginatively fills in the gaps, and orders the lot into a unified story. These historical stories, like the life stories of individuals, take conventional literary forms – tragedy, romance, comedy and satire – and employ poetic devices, including metaphor, synecdoche and irony. All of this is a creative act on the part of the historian, an imposition on the historical record. As a result, different historians can and do provide different narrative interpretations of the same events, none of which can be said to uniquely fit the facts. White concludes that historical writing, despite its scientific pretensions, reduces to fiction.
The philosopher Noël Carroll offered two main lines of response to White that transfer nicely to memoir. The first points to a set of faulty inferences in the argument. White assumes that each of the following features of an interpretation transforms it into fiction: inventiveness, selectivity, multiplicity, conventionality and literary quality. But a quick run-through shows that each can be present without an immediate diagnosis of fictionalising. Photos are invented rather than found, but that doesn’t make them inaccurate representations of the past. My telling you only some things about my spring break doesn’t mean that what I do tell you is made up. The availability of multiple good stories about the Loretta Lynn fan convention doesn’t demonstrate that one or all of them are fiction: each can just highlight a distinct aspect of the same complex course of events. And your description of what you’ve been up to recently might be Homeric, but some weekends genuinely are epic, and nonfigurative, nonliterary language might not be enough to capture the truth about them.
Carroll’s second reply to White questions the assertion that the world isn’t story-shaped. Humans act for reasons, and those actions have consequences, including the imprint of certain patterns on the world. We can describe all this in terms of atoms moving in the void, sure. But there’s an equally legitimate form of explanation that appeals to the values and goals driving the action, and therefore to the purpose and significance that human life genuinely contains. A story that offers such an explanation is picking up on real aspects of the world, not confabulating. Similarly, since humans think and act symbolically, narratives that incorporate metaphor and myth can serve to reflect, rather than distort, reality.
That said, there’s some truth in the claim that narrative is created, not found. Successful nonfictional storytellers both discover and construct. They do the difficult work of pruning and unifying experience into a shape they and others can understand. As the writer Lorrie Moore puts it: ‘Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that’s been distilled down.’ And when nonfictional storytellers succeed, the shape they create tracks genuine features in the life described.
To defend nonfictional narrative isn’t, of course, to defend all particular life stories. At one early point in writing my memoir, I announced: ‘OMG, I think my life tracks the history of Western philosophy!’ ‘That’s wonderful!’ my long-suffering sister replied, but the angle of her eyebrow effectively consigned that one to the trash. There are also some general narrative conventions we’re better off without. No literary memoirist would be caught dead these days writing a traditional autobiography: a strictly chronological tracing of events, from infancy on, in a tone of untroubled authority. The contemporary memoir zooms in on a specific period or theme, and moves back and forth in time. Modern memoirists tend to be less certain than autobiographers, more alert to the seductions of narrative closure. As a result, their books are more complex, searching, and truer to life.
But we can welcome these salutary effects of 20th-century narrative scepticism while keeping the baby in the bath. Old-fashioned storytelling has real virtues when making sense of the world. (I once lunched with a literary magazine editor after he’d gone through the latest set of submissions. ‘Oh god,’ he exclaimed, like a frustrated police chief, ‘just tell me what happened in order!’) Those virtues are so great that even narrative sceptics make use of them. Joan Didion ends her essay ‘The White Album’ (1968-78) with an admission of defeat: ‘Writing has not yet helped me to see what [experience] means.’ But sometimes the pattern just is chaos, and Didion’s use of personal narrative in this essay deftly captures that truth about 1960s California.
Cynics about narrative often give off an air of expecting more from stories than memoirists themselves do. No memoir can reveal an underlying grand narrative in the universe as a whole, or give its writer anything more than a partial and provisional grip on their personal past. But it can sometimes provide that grip, which is no small thing. When I look at my own memoir, I can clearly see its fictive qualities. The stage is set, the action rises, the protagonist falls apart, then lurches out of the abyss. There’s a coda, written in a tone of battered hope. Sartre would give it one star on Goodreads. That would be mean (I gave his five!), but I’m not too troubled by it. The book reads to me like my life, a life that makes better sense to me now that I’ve written it down.”
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.
Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded.
Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.
If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.
We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. There is no just authority.
Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Six Impossible Things: Slaying the Jabberwocky
Il Postino film
Faith as poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation; a reading list
A Greeting of the Spirit: Selected Poetry of John Keats with Commentaries,
primary texts of The Labyrinth of the Gates of Dreams
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo, Padmasambhava, Karma Lingpa, Chögyam Trungpa and Francesca Fremantle translators
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; 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; 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 forced the school to re-do. 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, thereafter with awareness no longer limited to her form. Her thoughts can leap across the gap between the forms 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 armor 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 and some months of learning 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. 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.
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, 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 in 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 at Harvard.
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 that 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 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 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 Cat Tower connecting the daylight basement with the main upper floor by two flights of stairs, totaling 4,152 square feet counting the Tiki Bar Deck, plus a 1280 square foot three bay garage with a shop and storage. This means that the Dollhouse is tiny, 5,576 sf if you count the gazebo and garage, with just 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.
And this birthday of Dolly’s coincides with our ancient celebration of death and transformation as Halloween, wherein we let our demons out to play, a time of masquerades, the performance of secret identities, violations of normality and transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, reversals of order, the embrace of our monstrosity, of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, and the pursuit of new truths through ecstatic trance and poetic vision, which for us now begins with the Festival of Loki as Breaking the Silence, and includes Kali Puja and our new national holiday of amok time and the celebration of love, transgression, and vision as divine madness, the Festival of the Mad Hatter.
The Mad Hatter acts as a psychopomp or guide of the soul in Alice in Wonderland, and Alice is a Holy Fool like Parsifal, but he and Alice are also figures of a single whole person and the story one of hierosgamos or heavenly marriage; like Beauty and the Beast or Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
The genius and allure of the Addams Family is not only that they combine an iconic romantic couple as an aspirational ideal of relationships with a family which accepts the uniqueness of its members and valorizes transgression in both themes, but that they are also a pantheon, and one entirely free from the consequences of patriarchy.
Much like the figures of Morticia, who occupies the imaginal space of Lillith, Kali, Persephone, and the Morrigan as a goddess of time, death, sex, and rebirth, and Gomez, like Pluto an Underworld King of fate, luck, wealth, chaos, and mischief who subsumes elements of Milton’s Rebel Angel and Loki the Trickster. Or in our own unique ways, Dolly and myself as people who claimed these roles as children and dreamed ourselves into such shapes as best we might.
We have defined this month as a liminal time which begins with a festival of desire or eros and ends with one of death or thanos; a space of balance in which all things become possible.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
We can parse the meaning of the word love in terms of its origins, as does Professor Babette Babich; “The classical list, as C.S. Lewis and others detail it, is: storgē, love of the home or the family; philia or friendship, which we hear in philosophy as love of wisdom; eros which is what we’re most interested in — taking us back to the #metoo movement, including questions of men and women in love. And then there is agapē, a pure, specifically selfless love, in contrast to eros, which is anything but selfless. Agapē is anticlimactic, and even St. Augustine, praying for grace, prayed to be perfect but, as he famously wrote, not yet.
The hierarchy of kinds of love mirrors — to tell a fanciful, proto-evolutionary story — the story of our lives. We’re born into storgē, family love, the love of home and hearth. That can be conflicted to be sure, as Robert Frost reminds us: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’”
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 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.
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.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
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 scheme 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 our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ 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.
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.
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 all we truly own. It’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.
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.
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.
Theresa McKay’s 1970’s promo picture for her music show; she is seventeen in this photo, which she used on her marquee at the Davenport and the Empress Victoria.
Dolly and I at Expo 74 in Spokane; I about to begin high school in California, she graduating it in Spokane Washington and about to move from her suite at the Davenport Hotel into the Empress Hotel in Victoria British Columbia for the next two years. After that she began her Grand Tour of Europe for the next twenty years, singing and playing piano and keyboards.
Torch of Liberty 
