January 3 2024 On the Manufacture of Just Causes For War: Case of the Bombing of the Anniversary Ceremony For Qassem Suleimani In Iran, America’s Greatest Ally in the Fight Against ISIS Assassinated By Order of Traitor Trump To Sabotage Iran’s Democracy Movement

     Unknown enemies of peace have in this moment of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the attacks on Lebanon as the opening move of a regional war of imperial conquest and dominion as a theocratic Jewish crusade, have chosen to put out the fire with gasoline and bombed the anniversary ceremony for one of the most beloved figures of Iran and the Shia world, Qassem Suleimani, once America’s greatest ally in the fight against ISIS, assassinated on this day four years ago by order of Traitor Trump to sabotage the anti-theocratic and anti-patriarchal Democracy movement which has spread from Shiraz, where we stormed the palace of the head mullah in 2019, to the whole of the nations Iran now controls; Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and even crossing sectarian lines to destabilize Afghanistan and her patron Pakistan.

     The design and objective of all of this is to prevent an Arab Spring which will liberate the region from patriarchal theocracy and the tyranny of military dictatorships; to create forms of casus belli or just cause for war. Totalitarian states of all kinds must create such enemies if they do not exist, and exploit divisions and fears, in order to centralize power to authority and the carceral state.

     Fear, power, force; the Wagnerian Ring by which we are dehumanized, falsified, and commodified by authority and those who would enslave us.

     So very useful for bringing the Iranian Dominion fully into the war with Israel, this; and to the secret puppetmasters of this event I now warn, be careful what you wish for, and whisper as the charioteer was so tasked to Roman emperors during their parades of triumph; “All glory is fleeting.”

     As written by Patrick Wintour in The Guardian, in an article entitled Almost 100 dead in blasts at Iran memorial for assassinated commander: Two explosions at Kerman ceremony marking anniversary of killing of Qassem Suleimani raise Middle East tensions further; More than 95 Iranians were killed and scores more injured in a terrorist attack at a ceremony in Iran to commemorate the assassination of a top general, further heightening tensions in the increasingly volatile Middle East.

     The explosions came at a memorial ceremony in Iran marking the fourth anniversary of the killing of Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s al-Quds force, and it was not clear whether either of Suleimani’s principal regional adversaries – Israel or Islamic State – were responsible for the carnage.

     Iran’s new minister of interior, the hardliner Ahmad Vahidi, did not immediately attribute blame for the attack and no side claimed responsibility for the deadliest single terrorist incident since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The US state department said it had no reason to believe Israel was involved.

     An early death toll of 103 was revised down, but Iran’s health minister, Bahram Einollahi, said many of the wounded were in critical condition and the toll could rise.

     The attack could not have come at a more febrile moment in the Middle East. Fighting between Hamas and Israel continues to rage in Gaza, and Hamas accused Israel of launching a drone attack on Tuesday that killed its deputy head in Beirut. That attack saw limited casualties in a densely populated neighbourhood of the Lebanese capital.

     Israel’s hallmark is the targeted assassination of key military and scientific figures inside Iran, as opposed to mass terrorist attacks on civilians, but it has also said its rules of engagement have changed in response to the Hamas killings on 7 October, for which Israel holds Iran ultimately responsible.

     Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, responded: “The enemies of the nation should know that such actions can never cause a disturbance in the iron determination of the Iranian nation to defend Islamic ideals.”

     He said the attacks only made Iran more determined “to dry up the roots of terror and violence”. Iran has shown no desire to become directly embroiled in fighting Israel, preferring instead to provide support to proxy groups.

     Officials said the explosions were caused by two bombs that were detonated remotely.

     Witness reports spoke of two explosions 15 minutes apart in the south-central city of Kerman tearing into the crowds that had gathered to mark the death of Suleimani, once regarded as the most powerful figure in the Middle East, and responsible for extending Iranian influence in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.

     According to the state news agency, Irna, the first explosion occurred 700 metres from Suleimani’s burial place and the second was 300 metres further away.

     State-run media in Iran cited Babak Yektaparast, a spokesperson for the country’s emergency service, as saying 73 people had been killed, but the death toll rapidly rose in the afternoon. A day of mourning was announced for Thursday.

     The blasts occurred on the roads leading to Golzar Shohada, the Garden of Martyrs cemetery in Kerman, Suleimani’s home town. His body is buried in the cemetery along with 1,024 other people regarded as martyrs, and the site has become a place of pilgrimage for supporters of the “axis of resistance” against the US and the west. Hospitals in Kerman and surrounding areas were put on alert to treat the injured.

     Mojtaba Zolnouri, the deputy speaker of the Iranian parliament, claimed: “The non-suicidal nature of the terrorist attack in Kerman shows that it is an act of the Zionist regime. We will punish the Zionist regime with a revenge that will have global operational value.”

     Kianush Jahanpur, the former spokesperson for Iran’s health ministry during the Covid outbreak, said on social media: “The answer to this crime should only be in Tel Aviv, Haifa.”

     Many world leaders, including the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, confined themselves to expressions of sympathy and did not seek to identify the perpetrator.

     Significantly in September, the Fars news agency had reported that a key “operative” affiliated with the Islamic State group, in charge of carrying out “terrorist operations” in Iran, had been arrested in Kerman. In 2017, a group of five IS terrorists attacked the Iranian parliament building and the mausoleum of Ruhollah Khomeini, killing 17 civilians and injuring 43. Tehran has claimed it has stopped other IS attacks inside Iran targeting civilians in public places.

     Others who could be behind the attack include exile groups, nationalist forces and state actors. Iran recently said it had eradicated a group backed by the Mossad, the Israeli state secret service.

     On 25 December, an Israeli airstrike in Syria killed a top commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, prompting Tehran to threaten that Israel would “certainly pay” for its actions.

     Iranian state media identified the commander as Razi Mousavi, a senior adviser in al-Quds force, saying he had been killed in an airstrike near the Syrian capital, Damascus. Fighting is also continuing on the Lebanese-Israeli border.

     At the same time, US and UK warnings to Iran to end its support for the attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea being launched by Houthi forces in Yemen appear to have fallen on closed ears. The Houthis said on Wednesday they were responsible for firing two more missiles at merchant ships travelling near the Bab al-Mandeb strait. It was the first attack since the US said it might fire on Houthi missile launchers inside Yemen.

     The Houthis have vowed to maintain the attacks until Israel allows more humanitarian aid into Gaza. Major commercial shipping lines including the Danish shipping company Maersk extended a suspension of services through the Red Sea until further notice, pointing to the threats to its crew and cargo. The UK foreign secretary, David Cameron, spoke to the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, about the Yemen crisis on Tuesday.

     Suleimani was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad in 2020 ordered by Donald Trump and was seen as the leader directing Iranian proxy forces in Iraq and Syria. His Shia forces, part of the Revolutionary Guards and more powerful than the Iranian foreign ministry, were also determined foes of the Sunni Islamic State group.”

   As I wrote in my post of January 4 2020, Cry Havoc: Consequences of the American Assassination of the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite Military Leaders; As the consequences of this event ripple outward through the medium of time, multiplying possibilities. alternate futures, transforms of ourselves and our shapings of one another, the true magnitude of the American assassination of the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite military leaders will unfold.

     It is a seed of destruction, but of who?

     Trump has cried havoc and loosed the dogs of war; but such agents of death, once free of their leash, know no master and may devour us all.

     An age of Chaos dawns, and we are abandoned to its whims and to its wantonness as it seizes and swallows the mighty, disrupts and changes power relations and structures of social form, bringer of death as an aspect of Time but also of transformation and rebirth.

     Chaos which I celebrate as a principle, but which must be wielded as a dangerous and multidimensional force with great forethought and caution as we play the Great and Secret Game, for action and reaction always strike in both directions.

     The magnificent Guillermo del Toro, in his gorgeous work Carnival Row which explores themes of racism and inequality among war refugees in the nation which failed to defend them from their conquerors and in harboring them finds itself confronted with an alien people as neighbors amid squalor, poverty, and social destabilization, much like many nations in our world today, depicts the formation of an alliance between two leaders of rival factions:

      “Who is chaos good for?”

      “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of those in the shadows.”

      Yet I cannot overstate its peril.

     As I wrote in my post of January 12 2020, A re energized democracy revolution throughout Iran brings the theocracy of the mullahs near its fall in the wake of the government’s mistaken destruction of a civilian aircraft and its lies about its responsibility for the tragedy; After more than two months of massive protests in Iran against the rule of the mullahs, larger than anything seen since the 1979 overthrow of the Shah over forty years ago which brought the Shiite theocracy into power and includes massacres of hundreds of protestors but also open battle in Shiraz and other major cities between the government’s forces of repression and the people of Iran united in the cause of liberty, that no government may stand between man and God nor enforce compulsion in matters of faith, a re-energized democracy revolution brings the theocracy near its fall in the wake of the government’s scandal of murder and failed coverup.

     The Islamic Republic’s mistaken destruction of a civilian airliner bearing 82 Iranian citizens among its dead, and the subsequent lies the government told its people regarding its responsibility for the tragedy, has redirected public outrage from America over the assassination of its national hero Qassem Suleimani back to the government and its tyranny of faith and global provocations, shattering a temporary alliance of pro and anti government forces which had aligned to resist American imperialism and the invasion expected to follow Trump’s unprovoked attack.

     There has been much speculation regarding Trump’s motive for the Suleimani assassination, both a war crime and an act of war. Sadly, the motives are obvious; Trump ordered the murder of Suleimani from personal jealousy, as well as a diversion from his impeachment for his treasonous and criminal subversion of America and a ploy for the support of the Republican politicians in the pay of plutocrats of war.

     As Trump concedes the defeat of America by the Taliban and begs peace after 18 years of pointless war in Afghanistan, he sought to inflate his ego by killing a military genius who was victorious in battle against both the Taliban and ISIS, keeping Iran free from foreign influences and who acted as an important American ally against two of our most implacable enemies.

     Telling friend from foe was never a long suit for the Republican party of war, nor the disambiguation of self-aggrandizement from our national interest for our President.

     As I wrote in my post of January 28 2020, Protests and Repression in Iraq: America and Iran are now equal ogres of foreign imperialism; As mass protests continue to disrupt Iraq in two interdependent movements, the Revolution for democracy and liberation from sectarian government corruption and the malign influence of Iran’s theocracy, and the resurgent nationalism which unites Shia and Sunni polities against Trump’s groundless and criminal murder of Iranian regional hero Qasem Soleimani and second in command of Iraq’s military forces Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, both relentless and victorious warriors in the fight against ISIS and the Taliban and the most effective allies America had in our struggle against those two greatest of our common enemies and in the regional war on terror, we find ourselves at a strange impasse, who looked to America for help in founding a true secular democracy in Iraq, free of the grip of warlords, semifeudal clan chieftains, and especially the force and repression of armed divisions of faith, for America and Iran are now equal ogres of foreign imperialism.

     Casting out both of our benefactors, who are also our adversaries, is a perilous thing and also a sad one, for there are many possible futures in which a liberated Iraq can work constructively with both America and Iran toward a better society and peace throughout the Middle East.

     Iran has not always nor in every case been a malign or oppressive force; Hezbollah especially has been a benevolent shield against Israeli militarism and conquest, and I call them my brothers as I did long ago in the days of our resistance in Beirut. This does not mean that I endorse the new government which seized power in Lebanon two days ago, in which pro-Iranian proxies have eliminated plurality of representation in an attempt to co- opt the Revolution and subvert democracy, and which the people will resist.

     Nor is America merely the plutocratic fist within the Israeli glove, acting solely from greed and commercial interests to control the strategic resource of oil. Indeed, many of us see ourselves as inheritors and agents of the historic mandate to export the American Revolution, storming the gates of our prisons to bring freedom and equality to all humankind. And primary in this is the principle of freedom of conscience and of faith, that no government may use coercion in matters of faith or in our autonomy and direct personal relationship with the Infinite.

     The difference between ally and nemesis, between a nation or any social group as a force of tyranny and authoritarian control or on the reverse side of the coin that of resistance and liberation, is often in how one uses or redirects that force.

     In the struggle of good and evil in the human heart and in the public sphere of nations and of history, that which limits us is evil. Efforts by the state to put us in a box of rules severs our connections with each other and with the Infinite, and disfigures the soul by limiting our possibilities for authentic being, which we must each discover for ourselves.

     He who stands between the Infinite and each of us serves neither.

Over 100 dead in blasts at memorial for assassinated Iranian commander

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/03/dead-in-blasts-at-memorial-for-assassinated-iranian-commander?CMP=share_btn_link

Making of a martyr: how Qassem Suleimani was hunted down

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/05/making-of-a-martyr-how-qassem-suleimani-was-hunted-down?CMP=share_btn_link

Who was Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian commander killed by a US airstrike?

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/03/asia/soleimani-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/qassem-suleimani-killed-baghdad-airport_n_5e0e958fc5b6b5a713b7ffac?ncid=newsltushpmgnews

Saleh al-Arouri: assassinated leader was Hamas’s link to Iran and Hezbollah

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/02/saleh-al-arouri-assassinated-leader-was-hamass-link-to-iran-and-hezbollah?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2cG4f-teGMFtU810RrLAZDotMhMFZKgzgTQfULclazl92BE3JT8wEVSa4
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January 2 2024 Begin We the Festival of Janus

      Janus represents the principles of change, duality, transformation, and the interfaces between bounded realms, though we know him now mainly as a god of Chaos through his portrayal in Halloween, episode six of season two, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

      He is called the Gatekeeper, a guardian and guide of the soul on our journeys through the myriad possibilities of the multiverse and its limitless futures, roles primary to dreamwork, ecstatic trance, and poetic vision, aligned with the mysteries of Orpheus, Asclepius, and Dionysius, whose role as god of beginnings and endings echoes the primary role of Ganesha as opener of the way. Janus shares with Saturn or Chronos his role as Old Father Time. 

     Plutarch describes Janus in his Life of Numa; “For this Janus, in remote antiquity, whether he was a demi-god or a king, was a patron of civil and social order, and is said to have lifted human life out of its bestial and savage state. For this reason he is represented with two faces, implying that he brought men’s lives out of one sort and condition into another.”

     Ovid writes of Janus in his Fasti; “But what god am I to say thou art, Janus of double-shape? for Greece hath no divinity like thee. The reason, too, unfold why alone of all the heavenly ones thou doest see both back and front.”

     Augustine wrote in City of God, Book seven, chapter nine; “ad Ianum pertinent initia factorum” or “the beginnings of accomplishments belong to Janus”.

    My name, Jay, is an Old Latin French form of the name Janus, though also derived from the Latin name Gaius, “to be joyful”; if we are an unfolding of our ancestor’s actions, intentions, dreams, visions, and wishes, part of the history which possesses us as DNA and inhabits us as stories, I imagine being named for the god of Chaos, time, and poetic vision, a name which also suggests states of rapture and exaltation, may have been a shaping force in becoming who I am, a kind of spell.

     Who did my parents want me to become? When as a child I asked my mother why she named me Jay, she said; “It means new beginnings. I wanted you to know you can do anything, be whomever you choose, right now, every moment, every time you hear your name. And whatever uniqueness and truth you create will be just as right and true as anyone else’s.”

     When I asked my father as a teenager, he said; “Who is Jay? You tell me.”

     Of myself in my chosen role as a Bringer of Chaos, transgressions of the Forbidden, violations of normality, and liberation from the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue I have written often, also of Chaos as the adaptive range of systems and both destructive and creative forces of nature, of fracture, disruption, delegitimation, and the collapse of order, law, and authority as revolutionary struggle. In the context of the Festival of Janus I mention here that it can also become a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.

    His startling image of wholeness as a dyadic figure with two faces which may be assigned to any oppositional forces, masks of comedy and tragedy from which developed theatre and the idea of the soul or individual personal self as personae, roles we play, from ritual performances in times of great peril and threat to discover and create paths forward into the future, but is also an image of the masculine and feminine sides of a whole person. In Janus we have at the origin and heart of our civilization a figure and festival of counternarrative and subversion of patriarchy and authorized identities of sex and gender, and a celebration of idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty which also interrogates them. Go ahead, frighten the horses.

     Herein we may perform those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and create and discover our own truths through performance of our best selves.

      To begin our Festival of Janus at the birth of the new year, I invite you to play a game with me; a Game of Possible Selves. Choose six characters you would like to perform, as for example those from films and books you identify with, traditionally three male and three female though any will do, as nature has but one rule; anything goes. If nothing else, randomizing identities as theatre and creative play will tell you what you value, and who you should be looking for in partners as instruments through whom we create ourselves. Write them down, cast a six sided dice, and let the dice decide who you will be today. No matter who you perform, you will still have five identities in reserve, and tomorrow is another day.

     That one twelfth of our year is dedicated to Janus as January, figure of the new year, should tell us of his importance in our civilization, and the centrality of Chaos, transformation, rebirth, and change to our historical constructions of identity and its legacies which we drag behind us as shadow selves, like an invisible reptilian tail.

     Here I think of patriarchy and sexual terror, white supremacist terror and the epigenetic trauma of slavery and the Holocaust, divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     And in the context of the shadows of historical and systemic inequalities and injustices, atavisms of instinct and fear weaponized in service to power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, the liminal time of the new year during the month of January, sacred to change and the emergence of the new like a serpent sloughing off its old skin, is a gate of entrance into the world for hope, that final curse or gift of Pandora, in the midst of our public trauma and grieving since the capture of America by the Fourth Reich in the Stolen Election of 2016 and the final act of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump in the January 6 Insurrection, and the endless chasms of darkness, subversions of our democracy, perversions of our values, and violations of our ideals we have all endured since.

     For the principle of change offers us a transformational moment of decision in which all things are possible, and we may escape the consequences of our histories in creating ourselves anew.

      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? 

     Here follow excerpts from some of the people who have written beautifully of Janus, for whom I am named.

     As written on the Anderson Lock website; “The ancient Romans had a specific god who held the key, so to speak, to the metaphorical doors or gateways between what was and what is to come—the liminal space of transitioning out of one period of time and into something new.

     In Roman mythology, Janus was the god of doors, gates, and transitions. Janus represented the middle ground between both concrete and abstract dualities such as life/death, beginning/end, youth/adulthood, rural/urban, war/peace, and barbarism/civilization.

     Janus was known as the initiator of human life, transformations between stages of life, and shifts from one historical era to another. Ancient Romans believed Janus ruled over life events such as weddings, births, and deaths. He oversaw seasonal events such as planting, harvests, seasonal changes, and the new year.

     According to Roman mythology, Janus was present at the beginning of the world. As the god of gates, Janus guarded the gates of heaven and held access to heaven and other gods. For this reason, Janus was often invoked first in ancient Roman religious ceremonies, and during public sacrifices, offerings were given to Janus before any other deity. In fact, there is evidence that Janus was worshipped long before many of the other Roman gods, dating all the way back to the time of Romulus (the founder and first ruler of Rome).

     And if you’ve ever wondered how the month of January got its name, you have Janus to thank. As the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, Janus is the namesake of January, the first month of a new year.

     Why does Janus have two faces? What is unusual about the god Janus is his iconic image. As the god of transitions and dualities, Janus is portrayed with two faces—one facing the past, and one facing the future. He also holds a key in his right hand, which symbolizes his protection of doors, gates, thresholds, and other separations or openings between spatial boundaries. In ancient Rome, the symbol of the key also signified that a traveler has come to find safe harbor or trade goods in peace.”

     As written by Caillan Davenport in The Conversation; “January 1 can be a day of regret and reflection – did I really need that fifth glass of bubbly last night? – mixed with hope and optimism for the future, as we make plans to renew gym memberships or finally sort out our tax files. This January ritual of looking forward and backward is fitting for the first day of a month named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings.

Doorkeeper of the heavens

     In Roman mythology, Janus was a king of Latium (a region of central Italy), who had his palace on the Janiculum hill, on the western bank of the River Tiber. According to the Roman intellectual Macrobius, Janus was given divine honours on account of his own religious devotion, as he set a pious example for all his people.

     Janus was proudly venerated as a uniquely Roman god, rather than one adopted from the Greek pantheon. All forms of transition came within his purview – beginnings and endings, entrances, exits, and passageways. The name Janus (Ianus in Latin, as the alphabet had no j) is etymologically related to ianua, the Latin word for door. Janus himself was the ianitor, or doorkeeper, of the heavens.

    The cult statue of Janus depicted the god bearded with two heads. This meant that he could see forwards and backwards and inside and outside simultaneously without turning around. Janus held a staff in his right hand, in order to guide travellers along the correct route, and a key in his left to open gates.

     War and Peace

     Janus is famously associated with the transition between peace and war. Numa, the legendary second king of Rome, who was famed for his religious piety, is said to have founded a shrine to Janus Geminus (“two-fold”) in the Roman Forum, close to the Senate House. It was located in the place where Janus had bubbled up a spring of hot boiling water in order to thwart an attack on Rome by the Sabines.

     The shrine was an enclosure formed by two arched gates at each end, joined together by walls to form a passageway. A bronze statue of Janus stood in the middle, with one head facing towards each gate. According to the historian Livy, Numa intended the shrine; “as an index of peace and war, that when open it might signify that the nation was in arms, when closed that all the peoples round about were pacified.”

     The gates of Janus are said to have stayed closed for 43 years under Numa, but rarely remained so thereafter, although the first emperor Augustus boasted that he closed the shrine three times. Nero later celebrated his conclusion of peace with Parthia by minting coins showing the gates of Janus firmly shut.

     Happy New Year

     Romans believed that the month of January was added to the calendar by Numa. The association between Janus and the calendar was cemented by the construction of 12 altars, one for each month of the year, in Janus’s temple in the Forum Holitorium (the vegetable market). The poet Martial thus described Janus as “the progenitor and father of the years”.

     From 153 BC onwards, the consuls (the chief magistrates of the Republic) took office on the first day of January (which the Romans called the Kalends). The new consuls offered prayers to Janus, and priests dedicated spelt mixed with salt and a traditional barley cake, known as the ianual, to the god. Romans distributed New Year’s gifts of dates, figs, and honey to their friends, in the hope that the year ahead would turn out to be sweet, as well as coins – a sign of hoped-for prosperity.

     Janus assumed a key role in all Roman public sacrifices, receiving incense and wine first before other deities. This was because, as the doorkeeper of the heavens, Janus was the route through which one reached the other gods, even Jupiter himself. The text On Agriculture, written by Cato the Elder, describes how offerings would be made to Janus, Jupiter, and Juno as part of the pre-harvest sacrifice to ensure a good crop.

     So if you’re feeling caught between two worlds this January 1, why not head outside and celebrate Roman-style?”

     As written by Michael Shanks of the Janus Initiative, which he defines as “archaeological perspectives on understanding and managing change and innovation”; “Our case is that being mindful of the past, hindsight, is essential to being able to act for the future. Looking back, researching and exploring, that we might be better prepared for uncertain futures.

     This is not about history – knowing what happened in the past. JANUS is about an archaeological sensibility – connecting (what remains of) the past with the future through our experiences and actions now.

     Janus? Janus was the Roman divinity associated with transition, passages from pasts through to futures, windows, doorways and thresholds.

     Simultaneously looking back and forward, Janus connects pasts and futures, gaining perspective with hindsight and foresight, finding orientation now, not by telling the story of the past, not by predicting what is to come, but by seeking relationships, passages, flows from the past, ways the past lingers to haunt, hinder, and inspire the building of the future.

      The scene offers insights into relationships between temporality and agency – our capacity to matter, to make things happen – exactly the themes we are foregrounding in our initiative.”

     The power of story: A quick recap of the story in needed to understand the connections.

     Cronos (Kronos, Cronus) was the youngest of the first generation of Titans, giant offspring of primordial Ouranos (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth). Ouranos offended Gaia by imprisoning some of their younger offspring and she sought revenge by persuading Cronos to move against his father. With a stone sickle, gift from Gaia, Cronos castrated Ouranos and threw the bloody parts into the ocean, from which Venus (Aphrodite) emerged.

     His actions haunted Cronos. Fearing that one of his own offspring would turn against him, he ate them all as they were born, devouring a threatening future. His wife Rhea eventually put a stop to this when she hid Zeus and tricked Cronos to swallow a stone instead, wrapped as a new-born. Zeus returned in his maturity, poisoned Cronos, and defeated him and his Titans with the help of his brother and sister gods, vomited up alive because of the poison emetic.

     Cronos has regularly been associated with Chronos, a divine personification of time. He cut and severed Ouranos, marking the rift between heaven and earth, a gash in eternity. The scythe or sickle has become symbol of the grim reaper harvesting mortal lives.

     Dramatis Personae

     Romano draws Chronos holding an Ouroboros. Serpent devouring its own tail, a symbol since at least antiquity of eternal return, rebirth, reincarnation. The divinity is Aion, cyclical time, unbounded, the circuit of the heavens represented by the Zodiac, the seasons, in contrast to the divisible, empirical and sequential time of Cronus, cut into past, present, and future. Aion is a god of the ages, of saecula, circling generations of life.

     Aion, god of the ages, is within the circuit of the Zodiac, (an eternal mobius strip) between a summer and winter tree. In front is Gaia, Mother Earth, with four children, the four seasons.

     The winged figure is usually taken to be Nike, Victoria, holding out the winner’s crown at the moment of success. But another interpretation is possible.

     This is a scene from the great conflicts between the Titans and the Gods. With Gaia’s help Cronos has seized the opportunity and cut open the heavens. He too will fall when Zeus in turn seizes his opportunity, poisons Cronos and releases the Olympians to overthrow the Titans. Son of Cronos, or perhaps brother, the god of seizing an opportunity to act is Kairos. And Kairos is usually depicted as a winged youth, and as weighing opportunities in a scale balanced on a knife edge.

     Kairos is time to act, or not. A central principle of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, Kairos is a passing instant when an opening appears to be driven through (there are links with shooting an arrow and passing a weaving shuttle through warp and weft). The key to agency, one’s capacity to achieve, to realize potential, is the ability to adapt to and take advantage of changing, complex and contingent circumstances. This is Kairos.

    Janus stands by, a horrified witness. Romano has modeled the god(dess) on Aphrodite, who had been born of the castrated heavens, Cronos cutting eternity. Janus is involved, part of the many stories woven in and through this group of four characters or principles, seeing the interconnections between eternity and event, birth and mortality, persuasion and action, planning and opportunity, the return of the past to take vengeance.

     Time, decision-making, persuasion, opportunity, action.

     This cast of characters and principles, this dramatis personae, takes us into an allegorical world of time eternal, cyclical, and eventful, of perception, persuasion, decision and action.

     Connections of past through to future potential, the intermingling of hindsight, insight, foresight: these are also the core of an archaeological sensibility and imagination

     Imagine a person from another time in human history, from any region, race, gender, or religion. No matter the place, time, or status, you will find differences from your present situation. However, one thing remains unchanged: the need to begin again, to follow new paths and to move forward.

     If we look at it through the beliefs of ancient times, we realize that the concept of new beginnings is present throughout the history of human beings. For this reason, I explain the relationship between new beginnings and mythology. Because by looking at the past we can better understand the future.

     In the ancient Rome, they did not escape this need either. They had their own god to whom they used to pray to give them hope and protect their efforts to start afresh.”  

Ritual of Janus as a god of Chaos in “Halloween”, the sixth episode of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; note the ritual use of masks of our true or possible selves in Halloween trick or treating in connection with Chaos as a sacred path in pursuit of the truth of ourselves

https://buffy.fandom.com/wiki/Halloween

https://theconversation.com/who-was-janus-the-roman-god-of-beginnings-and-endings-86853

https://scribalo.com/en/scribablog/new-beginnings-and-mythology-janus-the-romans-god/

Janus – hindsight and foresight, creative pragmatics
The God of Doors, Gates, and Transitions: History of the Ancient Roman God Janus
About the Roman God Janus

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/janus-words-sanction-and-cleave

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus

The Wisdom in Dark Emotions
Letting Go: Wisdom From Our Grief
Schopenhauer on Death and Philosophy
Looking Forward and Backward With Janus

Ovid, Fasti, Book I: https://web.archive.org/web/20050419220209/http://www.tkline.freeserve.co.uk/OvidFastiBkOne.htm#_Toc69367257

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January 1 2024 Imagining the Future: the Shape of Our Horizons in 2024

     On New Year’s Day we make resolutions of action for the coming year, both for ourselves in our personal lives and for the destiny of our nation, humankind, and the earth. We look to the shape of our horizons in imagining the future and ask ourselves, Who do we want to become, and what can we do to achieve it?

     For myself this involves antifascist action, turning over stones and pursuing vile scuttling things from the darkness into the light where they may burn away and vanish into nothingness, to advance the cause of our equality, and revolutionary action, both as resistance to tyranny as structural change and social transformation as systemic change, to advance the cause of our liberty.

    We are called to our causes for many reasons, among these being identification and ideology; how we see who we are in relation to others, in terms of membership and belonging, and our beliefs about how the world in which we live works and may become better by the ways in which we live in it.

     I am convinced that the central problem of humankind is power and the use of social force, and I interpret and evaluate everything by this measure.

     And though I no longer believe the Restoration of America, of our global Humanist civilization and moral order, and the ideas of democracy, human rights, liberty, equality, truth, and justice, or the survival of our species beyond the coming millennium is possible, for the Age of Tyrants has begun, I shall refuse to submit and with every day will claw my way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

      We all of us are like Clairice Starling in Silence of the Lambs now; we cannot know if our actions in Resistance and revolutionary struggle will bring an end to the horrors of unequal power and a Reckoning to systems of oppression, only that we must do so in solidarity with each other if we are to remain human.

      What Resolutions of action can I make for the coming year, and urge us all to live by?

     Write, speak, teach, and organize change; incite, provoke, and disturb.   

     Perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

     Refuse to submit or to believe the lies of Authority.

      Stand in solidarity of action and abandon not our fellows; let us place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

      To all those who like myself prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to the alternative of submission to authority, who align on the side of Prometheus, rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, I offer here a Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty.

      As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I’ve thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.

     Here are some things I have learned:

     First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.

     The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror,

is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.

     Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.

     We must question, expose, mock and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. These are the four primary duties of a citizen in a free society of equals.

     Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.

     Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, conformity with transgression, and division with solidarity.

     Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.

     Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.

    Let us evolve toward a nonviolent and noncoercive society together, become bearers of the Torch of Liberty together, and unite to achieve our dreams of democracy together.

     Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.

The Silence of the Lambs

Resolutions for the New Year Inspired by Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds:

Elevating Resolutions for the New Year Inspired by Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds – The Marginalian

Elevating Resolutions for the New Year Inspired by Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds
Elevating Resolutions for the New Year Inspired by Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds

Self-Refinement Through the Wisdom of the Ages: New Year’s Resolutions from Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds 

Self-Refinement Through the Wisdom of the Ages: New Year’s Resolutions from Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds
Self-Refinement Through the Wisdom of the Ages: New Year’s Resolutions from Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds
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December 31 2023 Greet With Me the Dawn of the Age of No Boundaries, Wherein Nothing Is Forbidden

No Boundaries!

     I greet the New Year of No Boundaries, wherein Nothing is Forbidden and all our norms have been violated and become powerless to shape us to the uses of authority, and we are free from the tyranny of sanctioned identities and other people’s ideas of virtue.

     In 2023 we broke the tablets of the Law, transgressed all limits and witnessed terrible destruction and a wonderful rebirth of hope and resistance in our public renunciation of fascism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and state terror.

     We have forced the man behind the curtain to show himself and be afraid; we are become a nation of emperors with no clothes and the truthtellers who like the Jester of King Lear expose them by speaking truth as seizures of power.

     We are a horde of squealing brutes like Circe’s Swine greedy to devour each other’s humanity and eyeing our fellows with rapacious fear and hate seeking otherness to subjugate as offerings to our demons of power and pride, wealth and avarice; but we are also a nation of liberators who safeguard our common freedom and equality.

     It may be the work of generations to reclaim the dream of America as a guarantor of universal human rights, a principle violated and savaged by Traitor Trump and now abandoned with the people of Palestine by Biden the Baby Killer, a largely fictitious and illusory America once a forge and shield of democracy and a beacon of hope to the world, and we must always be vigilant against fascism and atavisms of instinct and fear as racist and patriarchal barbarism, but the tide of history may still be turned from an Age of Tyrants to one of a United Humankind, and it is our privilege to be its champions and witnesses.

     Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his regime of madness has inverted our values and defiled our ideals, but has also revealed the flaws of our civilization and of America, exposed the treasonous predators among us, and with the Restoration of America and democracy in the Biden era we have begun to seize our power and reimagine the possibilities of becoming human; but we have far to go in emergence from the legacies of our histories, as we have seen in Biden’s betrayal of us and of our historic mission to restore a free society of equals to America after her Fall under the Fourth Reich in the Stolen Election of 2016, by making us all complicit in the war crimes and ethnic cleansing our taxes pay for in Gaza. 

    This past year we have awakened and broken the spell of our enslavement, a siren call of lies and illusions designed to drive us into abject submission to authority through learned helplessness under systems of armed and militarized police, universal surveillance, and brutal repression of dissent by armies of Occupation and loathsome Cop Cities which seek to industrialize the manufacture of white supremacist state terror, to dehumanize and feed us as raw material into the machine of wealth and power of elites; like Charlie Chaplin caught in the gears of a vast and monstrous device in The Factory we have fought for our humanity and won free.

     So also we have Resisted the dehumanization of women in the legislative theft of women’s rights of bodily autonomy which criminalizes childbearing under the guise of abortion bans, subjugates both women and their doctors to the whimsy of patriarchal and theocratic state institutions as theft of witness and authority, violates our first right of property in the ownership of our own bodies, and is a primary strategy of the subversion of democracy.

     This year they came for our children, through capture of our schools and libraries by Moms For Liberty and other organized theocratic-fascist repression. Our Resistance to this has been often victorious for now and remains ongoing, vigilant, and public, but we must enact protections and guarantees of freedom of information and of inquiry, open debate and testable truths, in our education system itself and the selection and purchasing of textbooks now controlled nationally by the purchasing power and networks of influence among churches of a fractional neo-Confederate minority in Texas whose mission is the subversion of racial equality both as a lived experience and as a principle of American democracy. Herein the ground of struggle is the system by which we create new citizens as co-owners of the state, and nothing can be more important to a society and its future.

     In this time of great peril, let us refuse to submit or our solidarity of action be divided by authorized identities of blood, faith, and soil, or our Resistance and leverage disempowered by ideological fracture.

     Now we must help others to see the conditions of their enslavement, and together in solidarity work toward the liberation of humankind from systems of unequal power.

    Nothing Is Forbidden! Welcome the new age of the unconquered human sublime. 

Chaplin’s The Factory

     And this gem from Ralph Steadman; “Twisted tendrils of time uncoil into the frenzied embrace of #NewYearsEve! Colours leach, spirits soar, and the drunken dance of seconds echo through the kaleidoscopic chaos. The cacophony of clinking glasses and maniacal laughter seeps through the night, a symphony of madness. Happy New Year, you beautiful lunatics! Cheers to the grotesque beauty of beginnings and the savage symphony of time!”

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=919037202927044&set=a.193308672166571

Bad  Moon Rising, Creedence Clearwater Revival  

Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses by John Waterhouse

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  December 30 2023 The Year in Review

      Reading again my debrief of 2021’s issues, actions, and opportunities, I find our situation largely unchanged, at least for the better.

       Only the Gaza War is truly new, though the imperial conquest and dominion of Palestine and the subjugation of the Palestinians as a colonial slave caste is older than myself, Israel’s war of ethnic cleansing and America’s complicity in her war crimes, in the abandonment of the idea of universal human rights and of our historic role as a guarantor nation of democracy and the Rights of Man, have made the tragic and horrific atrocities and acts of Israeli-American state terror since October 7 a unique kind of disruptive event as values inversion and civilizational collapse.

      Much has become infinitely worse, including Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine as the most visible theatre of World War Three which now engulfs us all and threatens the fall of civilization and the extinction of humankind, after hundreds of years of tyranny and war which now may be inevitable.

      We face in this moment possibilities in which only two in every one hundred futures unfold with the survival of humankind through the coming millennium; in the other 98 nothing remains of our species in a thousand years, and all that we have ever been and dreamed comes to nothing. If we wish some being like ourselves to look upon our ruins and wonder who we were, we must reimagine, transform, and bring change to our fate.

      Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine and Israel’s in Gaza define the limits of the human, but not the limits of our possibilities of becoming human. Though we are now destroying ourselves, we are also free to recreate ourselves.

      I hope to have lived, and written, not at the end of the human story, but at its beginning.

      To all those who have taken this journey with me, thank you for your friendship and for making me feel heard.

     Often have I translated the final principle of the Revolution, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, as Solidarity in reference to the Polish union and to labor unions in general as models of a just society and the praxis of our values, and if we are to free ourselves and each other from the systems of oppression and unequal power in which we are embedded, we must reimagine and transform not just our political institutions, but society and ourselves personally as well.

     What is friendship, and how does Solidarity function as a cohesive force in personal friendships and as community?

     As I wrote in my post of last year on this day; I think now of solidarity and our interdependence in terms of something I wrote in reference to the Netflix series Wednesday, in the context of a discussion regarding the nature of the relationship between the two main characters, relevant to the general conditions of being human and of liberation struggle, and to love and friendship as the basis of a just society as it was for Cicero when he wrote of my ancestor in his essay Laelius de Amicitia; How if love and friendship are not compartmented, but a continuum? One which reaches beyond the level of individuals to encompass whole societies as the primary ties that bind us together? Nuanced and ambiguous, wherein the flaws of our humanity make us beautiful?

      In the relationship of Wednesday and Enid we have an allegory of becoming human and questions about how we choose to be human together, questions of human being, meaning, and value born of Rashomon Gate Events and existential crises of civilization whose lines of fracture, disruptions and collapses of order and transforms of meaning and value, we have witnessed as the January 6 Insurrection, the Stolen Election of 2016 and the whole treasonous and dishonorable Trump era of the Fourth Reich, the crimes against humanity of the Ukraine Invasion and Putin’s mad gambles of imperial conquest and dominion and their echoes in Israel’s imperial dominion of the Palestinians.

      Like humankind in this definitive moment of change and crisis of identity, Wednesday and Enid must expose, entrap, and bring a Reckoning to a predator who hunts them and their fellows from the shadows, with concealment and the impunity of enablers among authority. Like the Hyde, fascism is a monster of cruelty, amoral ruthlessness, and the madness of power.

     How do Wednesday and Enid become victorious over such an enemy? Here is an epic of revolutionary struggle, in which the key to victory in Resistance is obscured by reactions to a fundamentally ambiguous relationship which may be one of amici, eros, or amore; friendship, desire, or love in a shifting Mobius Loop and/or all at once. Discussions of the show have exploded with divisive messaging which attempts to define and taxonomize the relationship of Enid and Wednesday; are they a queer couple, and Enid’s claws a Pride flag? I do relish and find exquisite the idea of a Pride With Claws, especially in its resonance with the secondary meaning of Pride as a chosen community like a wolf pack. It is also a question useful to the interests of power and authorized identities, because it sows division and misdirects us from the true question, the seizure of power and its functions.

     Enid risks death to save Wednesday in the final battle with the Hyde; this and only this truly matters, not desire, not identities of sex and gender nor the divisions of identity politics, not faith nor race nor nationality except as our stories because we own them and our membership and belonging with those whom we claim and who in turn claim us so long as nothing human is exclusionary, marginalized, dehumanized, or vilified as otherness because to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence and a hate crime, not who we are except when we have so chosen as a primary act of freedom and self-creation, but solidarity in liberation struggle beyond hope of victory or even survival. This, this, this.

     In the words of the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet, to which he swore me in Beirut 1982; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”

     Whatever the future may hold, we are responsible not for our imposed conditions of struggle, but for our actions.

     As to that and the praxis of liberty I have many plans and continuing actions, in many places; the most massive manhunt in American history is still ongoing, to bring to justice the participants, funders, propagandists, leaders and enablers of the January 6 Insurrection and the depravities and violations of the Fourth Reich and the criminal regime of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump.

     We must also liberate Russia from the regime of its tyrant and war criminal Putin and bring a Reckoning to its perpetrators and enablers, and liberate Ukraine, gate of Europe and the Black Sea from which the whole of the Mediterranean may be conquered, and the other theatres of the Third World War from the imperial dominion of Russia; Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the African Sahel and Chad region.

    Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet remain to be liberated as sovereign and independent nations from the conquest and dominion of the Chinese Communist Party and its megalomaniac tyrant Xi Jinping, whose plans to conquer and occupy the Pacific Rim must be stopped before we are fighting in the streets of San Francisco, and the Chinese people liberated as a democracy.

     Throughout the Iranian Dominion inclusive of its client states and puppet regimes Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, a glorious democracy revolution against theocracy and patriarchy has destabilized its regime and spread to Afghanistan and other Islamic states, possibly reigniting the movements of the Arab Spring. The regime of the mullahs in Iran will one day fall, and with it any legitimacy of theocratic Islamic states; Iraq and Lebanon are now contested grounds of struggle, and Kurdistan functionally independent, but when this liberation will happen is a wild card which depends primarily on whether this wave of democracy and feminism can overcome the historical divisions of the Shia-Sunni conflict to engulf Arabia and other states to the furthest shores of the Islamic diaspora in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Sultanate of Sulawesi.

      This year has seen the triumph of Lula in Brazil, but also setbacks and ominous signs of warning; the failed monarchist plot of the Nazi revivalists in Germany, the election of the first fascist government in Italy since Mussolini, the recapture of Israel by Netanyahu and his coming Final Solution of the Palestinians, and the American proxy coup against Peru’s last, best hope.

      And on top of all of this we have a golden turd of absurd vileness; the British Empire now has a King, named for a monster the people of England beheaded in 1649; good luck with that.

     This year of 2022 I have fought in Ukraine and Russia, Iran and Iraq, Hong Kong and China, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, waged antifascist resistance in Italy and anticolonial revolution in Belfast. A maker of mischief, I.

      My test for the use of social force is simple; who holds power? During my many years as a debate coach and high school Forensics teacher, I began each year with a demonstration I call Becoming a Fulcrum; placing an object on my desk I would say, “This is a fulcrum”. Across it I would place another, saying “It balances a lever. When your parents ask you what you are learning in Forensics class, tell them you are learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.”

     In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.

     As I wrote in my post of December 30 2021, The Year in Review; In these last days of 2021, my thoughts turn to the year in review; to Defining Moments, both for myself as a witness of history and for the world as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value and of memory, history, and identity, the stories of which we are made, and to the causes I have championed and the threats to our future possibilities of becoming human which remain.

     Herein I write as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and in the role Foucault described as a truth teller in reference to parrhesia and the four primary duties of a citizen; to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.

     As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty proclaims, my intent is to provoke, incite, and disturb, and I hope that you have found my daily journal useful as a resource for international antifascist action and resistance, revolutionary struggle, liberation and democracy movements, forging networks of allyship and solidarity, founding autonomous zones, and seizures of power both personal and sociopolitical.

     During my years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach, I began the first day of each new year with a demonstration of purpose. On my desk I would place a solid base with the words; “This is a fulcrum”. Across it I would set a teeter totter saying; “It balances a lever.” And finally; “When your parents ask you what you’re learning in Forensics, tell them you’re learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.” Such is my hope now for us all.

    Truth telling as an ars poetica is about the regenerative and transformational power of truth in the sense that Keats used when he spoke of beauty, “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.”

    But truth telling is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, 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 December 11 2021, Biden’s Summit For Democracy: Who Do We Want to Become, and What Are We Willing to Do to Free Ourselves From Those Who Would Enslave Us?; Biden’s Summit For Democracy opens as a watershed moment in the  emergence of a united global humankind with the question; Can a quasi-democracy in the process of a Restoration from capture by the Fourth Reich and a period as a failed state infiltrated and subverted by authoritarian interests allied in a cabal of white supremacist terror, Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror, and plutocratic-oligarchic class war against the poor, can such an America as we live in now lead the world toward freedom and equality? If others lead, can we even follow?

      Will our President’s noble aims in salvaging democracy and our civilization from the consequences of its mechanical failures and internal contradictions, and from the hostile intrusive forces of barbarian atavisms of fear and force and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, succeed in reclaiming America’s historic role as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world?

     A cursory glance at the annual reports of the Freedom House, V-Dem, and The Economist Intelligence Democracy Index reveals a world where democracy has been in regression now for two decades; an age of tyranny looms as fragile democracies begin to die like floating candles set adrift on vast seas of darkness with a wish and a prayer, and nothing suggests we will find the political will to reverse the trend.

     We must answer two questions as we choose how we will face the future, we human beings; who do we want to become, and what are we willing to do to free ourselves of those who would enslave us?

    Democracy is not the only vital measure of our wellbeing; equally important is security from threats of war and terror, especially the state terror of repression and control of dissent; the use of police, prisons, and brutal repression, and of surveillance and propaganda in control.

     As I wrote in my post of September 12 2021, Global and National Threats to Peace and Freedom; A thorough and balanced precis and interpretation of the threats we face today both globally and as a nation is offered in a New America article of last year, Terrorism in America 19 Years After 9/11, by David Sterman, Peter Bergen, and Melissa Salyk-Virk. Its publication coincided with the DHS official annual report on terrorism, and is an important codicil to it, independently researched. Both are more than simple threat analyses, and represent attempts to place the tragic events of Nine One One in historical context.

     Its authors ignore America’s police violence, state terror, and the network of white supremacist terror groups which are operating in coordination with infiltration agents within police and other security services, and the logistical support structure which enables and directs their operations linking public figures and government officials to hate crimes, but other than this misdirection is a fair and balanced report.

     What are the greatest threats to national and global peace and freedom we face today?

     America is the greatest threat to peace and democracy in the world today, though our government has been seized by the people from the Fourth Reich in Biden’s Restoration of America and we have begun the generations long process of purging our nation of its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and of our systems and institutions of racist and sexual terror and their historical legacies, but we have also as a consequence of the Trump Fourth Reich era reversed our historic role as the primary guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and become the major perpetrator of global tyranny and terror in our support of authoritarian and criminal regimes.

     One example is Trump’s miracle of imperialism in the breaking of Arab unity with Palestine using Iran as a boogeyman, a reversal of historic alliances which has won security and legitimacy before the international community for our proxy Israel, sanctioned the humanitarian disaster of the Saudi-UAE proxy war in Yemen, and secured our hegemonic control of oil as a strategic resource, albeit one which is responsible for the disasters of global climate change and possibly the extinction of humankind.

     In refusing to sanction Saudi Arabia for the state murder of Khashoggi we have also authorized the killing of inconvenient truth tellers by other brutal regimes. In this America is consistent with the silencing of whistleblowers like Snowden and Assange. In effect, there is no freedom of the press, of speech, or of information in America, and we have exported this theft of our sacred rights to the world.

     America also continues to threaten Maduro’s Venezuela, and is the primary cause of economic collapse and a descent into rule by criminal oligarchies in Latin America, resulting in a vast humanitarian crisis of refugees at our border.

     Our shifting alliances and imperialist ambitions in the Middle East have also resulted in destabilization in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, where we contend for influence with Iran.

     On the Domestic front our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, his stooges and thugs William Barr and Chad Wolf, and everyone who has abetted and enabled his fascist criminal conspiracy and subversion of democracy is also a public enemy who has thus far escaped being held responsible for the subversion and monkeywrenching of democracy, including all Republicans who have not disavowed their membership in the Party of Treason, White Supremacist Terror, and Gideonite Sexual Terror; our nation has thereby implicitly authorized and conferred immunity for future acts of treason and terror in service to fascism, racism, and patriarchy.

      Every teacher and parent knows the First Rule of Leadership; to establish a rule and grant permission, fail to consequent a behavior you do not wish to authorize and be repeated. We have now done this as a nation in failing to bring a reckoning to the leaders, organizers, and bankrollers of the January 6 Insurrection, beginning with Traitor Trump. Each and every person guilty of treason and armed insurrection against our nation should have their citizenship revoked, all assets seized, and be exiled forever. We cannot move forward until we have purged those who would enslave us from our nation.

     Who are the other major threats to world peace and freedom?

     Russia under Putin, because they were Trump’s puppetmasters and still actively seek our destruction, the only foreign enemy to openly disrupt our elections and seize our government, and because of the epic contest for dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean between Russia and Turkey which has plunged Syria and Libya into destructive Great Powers wars and created humanitarian disasters. And now, Putin’s support of tyranny in Belarus and threat of the invasion of Ukraine.

   Communist China under Xi Jinping, because of the horrific genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Muslims of Xinjiang, and because of the colonialist conquest of Hong Kong in violation of international law and the inherent right of sovereignty and independence of all humankind. Also because of the archipelago of island fortresses they have constructed as the launching point for their conquest of the Pacific Rim and occupation of the world’s port cities with Chinatowns, as under the Overseas Chinese Policy they claim all ethnic Chinese as their citizens regardless of consent, where they were born, or now  live. The CCP is the only major power which plans to enact world conquest and domination, and ultimately the eradication of all religions and the assimilation or genocide of all non ethnic Chinese peoples. They represent the greatest long term threat the world has ever seen.

     While there are many other threats to world civilization, these three empires, America, Russia, and the Chinese Communist Party, could not only destroy us utterly, but could do so accidently.

     India under Modi is waging a war of conquest in Kashmir and are playing a game of nuclear chicken with both Pakistan and China, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing internally.  

     Hungary under Orban has become a Nazi stronghold and launching pad for fascist revivalism throughout Europe.

      Israel remains an imperialist military state tyranny of Jewish tribalism and faith and an ongoing threat to Palestine, Lebanon, and other neighboring states. Israel learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis, and now imposes on others what it once survived.

     Syria under Assad has become a regional destabilization factor which invites the imperial ambitions of Russia, Turkey, Iran, America, and just about anyone who can throw a rock far enough to reach Damascus. That Assad’s brutal regime is virtually unparalleled in its crimes against humanity since Sarajevo is just the beginning of the disaster, whose refugees were driven by Erdogan to the gates of Europe and moved Europe nearer fascism as a result.

     Turkey under Erdogan, whose dreams of retaking the lands of the former Ottoman Empire are challenged by Russia in Syria and Libya, and who has relentlessly pursued the genocide of the Kurds.

     Iran and the Arab-American Alliance are equal partners in a humanitarian disaster and struggle for dominion throughout the Middle East. Iran now controls the governments of Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, where it is contested by the Arab-American Alliance, and shares influence in Syria with Russia; the alliance of Russia and Iran may one day become the failure point which triggers the fall of civilization.

     Pakistan’s seizure of Afghanistan through her proxy the Taliban has been dramatic in realigning the balances of power in the region, power captured from the American empire they have now overthrown. Why Afghanistan? How does Pakistan plan to use their new sister state, and control of the world heroin market, which they have invested in creating for over thirty years? Harken and awake, for a new global power emerges. 

     Brazil under Bolsonaro is a major source of ecological disaster and the looming extinction of humankind, and has waged both racist and class war against the mass poor of African slave descent and the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.

     Local tyrannies and atrocities which may destabilize entire regions include Myanmar under the junta and her sister state of Sri Lanka who are ruled together by a Buddhist ethno-nationalist shadow state and relentlessly pursue the ethnic cleansing of their minorities the Rohingya and Tamils, Zimbabwe under Mnangagwa, Belarus under Lukashenko, and Eqypt under al-Sisi.

      The Ethiopia-Tigray Civil War threatens regional destabilization and ethnic conflict which involves the Sudan, Oromo, and Somali border areas. This potential for regional conflagration is also true of the incipient civil war always simmering and now near boiling over in South Africa, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan which is both a civil war and a Great Powers Proxy War, the parallel socialist Revolution and Islamic Insurgency in Mozambique and Tanzania centered in Cabo Delgado, a similar Islamic Insurgency in the Sahel involving Mali, Niger, and Chad, the Venezuela-Columbia zone of conflict, the independence struggle of the Saharawi Republic against conquest and occupation by Morocco, and the reset of the Revolution in Haiti, as always the best nightmare on earth.

    Wikipedia classifies among ongoing conflicts four major wars including Afghanistan, Yemen, Tigray, and the narcoterrorist crime syndicate war in the failed state of Mexico, sixteen conflicts resulting in under ten thousand direct deaths in battle, 27 conflicts in which fewer than a thousand of us have died,  and thirteen in which fewer than one hundred lives were lost. That totals sixty wars ongoing today, in which human beings will die at the hands of others tomorrow. Must this remain true for all of our tomorrows?

     This year I have fought in the Third Intifada in al Quds, where I was shot, bayoneted, blown up, and set on fire, having avoided any serious mishaps, buried a friend assassinated by Israel in Gaza, brought the Chaos and made mischief for tyrants in Barcelona, Yangon, Belfast, Kolkata, Hong Kong, Port au Prince, and Durban, and have spent recent weeks on horseback in remote tribal areas of Afghanistan west of the Khyber Pass, fighting in the Last Stand of Panjshir. I have seen the best and the worst of human possibilities, and have lived this way for nearly forty years, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and the limits of what is human.

     This I can tell you without question; none of us are beyond the redemptive power of love, or without hope. Our future possibilities of becoming human are yet unwritten, and limitless.

     We have no shortage of tyrants who threaten global stability, or issues which could engulf whole regions in a general bonfire of the vanities. We are in short supply of compassion, vision, and solidarity among humankind in the face of existential threats to our survival and to our liberty.

     It’s time to begin thinking in new ways about our differences and our common needs and resources; we can be tribes no longer, warring for diminishing shares of the earth’s plenty, but a single United Humankind, responsible for one another, for our common resources and the sustainability of life on earth, and for our future possibilities of becoming human.

     Because we must have light to balance the darkness, and because a Revolution which cannot dance with the joy of total freedom is not worth its price, here is Jenna Ortega as Wednesday and her iconic dance scene

Laelius de Amicitia: Edited with Introduction and Notes, by Cicero, John K. Lord editor

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26416672-laelius-de-amicitia?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=jaAZHjHtVl&rank=5

FB post to which I am replying

https://m.facebook.com/story/graphql_permalink/?graphql_id=UzpfSTEwMDA0NDM2NTI3MTk2MDo3MjY5MTU0NDIxMzA2MjU%3D

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December 29 2023 Anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre

     We mourn and remember the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 on this day, in which three hundred Native Americans were butchered by the United States Army, mostly women, children, and the elderly, and mostly unarmed, for the crime of being nonwhite, non-Christian, and the original owners of the continent we had conquered and stolen.

     The details of this incident of white supremacist state terror are unpleasant, and recounted in full in the foundational works Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, and its companion volume The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer, and central to the luminous and incendiary books of truthtelling and the witness of history Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement by Richard Erdoes, and Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means.

     Among the endless litany of woes and the legacies of our historical injustices for which we have yet to bring a reckoning or make reparations, the Wounded Knee Massacre remains a symbol of the Conquest and of our nation’s systematic and institutional destruction and genocide of its aboriginal peoples.

    What did this look like in truth, the Conquest, from the point of view of its victims? Here we can see imperial conquest and Occupation in real time enacted before us in Gaza, while the world does nothing and the idea of our universal human rights is abandoned and with it our possibilities of human being, meaning, and value become nothing, consumed with the people of Palestine under a rain of fire and steel we Americans paid for with our taxes as enablers and conspirators in ethnic cleansing.      

     When will we finally bring such reckoning and reparations and begin to emerge from the long shadows of our history, and redeem the promise of our founding as a free society of equals? For we cannot achieve the dream of democracy without first engaging our inequalities in revolutionary struggle.

     As I wrote in my post of November 28 2021, Native American History and Literature: A Reading List; Freud defined civilization when he wrote; “The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” The idea of civilization as the degree to which we have abandoned the social use of force and a measure of a society’s equality, diversity, and inclusion, expressed by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek as “infinite diversity in infinite combination”, is central to the American experiment toward creating a true free society of equals as democracy.

     Both on national and personal levels we ourselves may be measured by our embrace of otherness and our solidarity in resistance to authority and the weaponization of fear in service to power, to divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, and to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.  

     So also are we forged by how we bring a reckoning for the historical legacies and epigenetic multigenerational trauma and harm of inequalities and injustices which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail, especially those of colonialism and imperialism, racism and patriarchy, and the systems and structures of oppression which still persist.

     But we are also shaped by our seizures of power and the limits of our vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization; how to be human together and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

     In the end we are defined by what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.

     As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter; “On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon; it was the only thing standing between his family and starvation. As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.

     Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.

     As the men fought hand-to-hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. The soldiers on a slight rise above the camp turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.

     But it is not December 29 that haunts me. It is the night of December 28, the night before the killing.

     On December 28, there was still time to avert the Wounded Knee Massacre.

     In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Big Foot—Sitanka—had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There, they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota’s Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

     For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka’s band marked the end of the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But, at long last, army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.

     Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.

     But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka’s band, and it didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that his band was on its way to Pine Ridge anyway, and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.

     By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn’t sit up and his nose was dripping blood. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration, and lent army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.

     And they celebrated, for they were heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again. In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Lakota encampment from a slight rise above the camp.

     For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?

     On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.

     One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.

     But it is never too late to change the future.”

https://aeon.co/videos/the-oglala-sioux-speak-out-from-the-wounded-knee-massacre-to-modern-life

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/76401.Bury_My_Heart_at_Wounded_Knee?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=3TjfqDX4CE&rank=1

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, by David Treuer

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36620482-the-heartbeat-of-wounded-knee?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=9oB09F5DOX&rank=4

Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement, by Richard Erdoes

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/613508.Ojibwa_Warrior?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=fpYziuiyqO&rank=1

Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187799.Where_White_Men_Fear_to_Tread?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=49CHW2EaQH&rank=1

https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/native-history-aim-occupation-of-wounded-knee-begins

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/wounded-knee-massacre-lakota-us-army

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/occupy-wounded-knee-a-71-day-siege-and-a-forgotten-civil-rights-movement/263998/

https://www.thoughtco.com/wounded-knee-massacre-4135729

Incident At Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story film trailer

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 December 28 2023 Can States Ban Trump From Our Next Election For the Crime of Insurrection Under the 14th Amendment?

     As the wall of his immunity begins to crumble and states ban Trump from the ballot in the next elections, and the issue of whether or not states can do so is escalated to the Supreme Court that he rigged for just such a moment, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, struts in the lights of the circus he has made of our nation, howling with rage and cheerleading his adoring sycophants in barbarisms and fascist litanies of atrocities to come.

     Our election year in 2024 will be like nothing in our history, a ground of struggle not only of fascist tyranny and democracy, but of hate and love, hope and despair, solidarity and division, madness and vision, the psychopathy of power and the mutualism of a free society of equals.

     I hope what Shakespeare wrote in Henry the Fifth is still true; “When cruelty and lenity play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”

     As written by Cameron Joseph and agencies in The Guardian, in an article entitled Why did Maine and Colorado disqualify Trump from their ballots?

Decisions stem from the US constitution’s insurrection clause and could have major ramifications for 2024 election; “Officials in Colorado and Maine have ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to run for the White House again, citing his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

     In Colorado, the state supreme court ruled 4-3 earlier this month to take the former president off the state’s Republican presidential primary ballot; on Thursday, Maine’s secretary of state kicked him off the ballot there too.

    The decisions will probably have major legal and political ramifications for the 2024 election, and stem from a rarely used provision of the US constitution known as the insurrection clause.

     Trump’s campaign promised to immediately appeal the decisions to the US supreme court, which could well strike them down. Similar lawsuits are working their way through the courts in other states.

     Here’s what we know so far, and what it might mean for the former president and current Republican frontrunner.

     What is the insurrection clause and why was it used?

     The decision by the Colorado supreme court is the first time a candidate has been deemed ineligible for the White House under the US constitutional provision.

    Section 3 of the 14th amendment, also referred to as the insurrection clause, bars anyone from Congress, the military, and federal and state offices who once took an oath to uphold the constitution but then “engaged” in “insurrection or rebellion” against it.

     Could Trump be barred under the constitution’s ‘engaged in insurrection’ clause?

     Ratified in 1868, the 14th amendment helped ensure civil rights for formerly enslaved people, but also was intended to prevent former Confederate officials from regaining power as members of Congress and taking over the government they had just rebelled against.

     Some legal scholars say the post-civil war clause applies to Trump because of his role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and obstruct the transfer of power to Joe Biden by encouraging his supporters to storm the US Capitol.

     “The dangers of Trump ever being allowed back into public office are exactly those foreseen by the framers of section 3,” Ron Fein, the legal director for Free Speech for People, said in a recent interview. “Which is that they knew that if an oath-taking insurrectionist were allowed back into power, they would do the same if not worse.”

     How did this happen?

     In Colorado, the case was brought by a group of voters, aided by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), who argued Trump should be disqualified from the ballot for his role in the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

      Noah Bookbinder, the group’s president, celebrated the decision as “not only historic and justified, but … necessary to protect the future of democracy in our country”.

     Colorado’s highest court overturned an earlier ruling from a district court judge, who found that Trump’s actions on January 6 did amount to inciting an insurrection, but that he could not be barred from the ballot, because it was unclear that the clause was intended to cover the role of the presidency.

     A majority of the state supreme court’s seven justices, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors, disagreed.

     In Maine, the secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, examined the case after a group of citizens challenged Trump’s eligibility and concluded that he should be disqualified for inciting an insurrection on 6 January 2021.

     Has this happened before?

     The provision has rarely been used, and never in such a high-profile case. In 1919, Congress refused to seat a socialist, contending he gave aid and comfort to the country’s enemies during the first world war.

     Last year, in the clause’s first use since then, a New Mexico judge barred a rural county commissioner who had entered the Capitol on January 6 from office.

    What does this mean for the election?

     The Colorado ruling applies only to the state’s Republican primary, which will take place on 5 March, meaning Trump might not appear on the ballot for that vote. The same is true in Maine – if the decision takes effect, it would only apply to the state’s ballot.

     The Colorado supreme court temporarily stayed its ruling until 4 January, however, which would allow the US supreme court until then to decide whether to take the case. That’s the day before the qualifying deadline for candidates.

     Colorado is no longer a swing state – Biden won it by a double-digit margin in 2020, and the last time a Republican won it was 2004 – but the ruling could influence other cases across the US, where dozens of similar cases are percolating. Other state courts have ruled against the plaintiffs; in Michigan, a judge ruled that Congress, not the courts, should make the call.

     Advocates hoped the case would boost a wider disqualification effort and potentially put the issue before the US supreme court. It’s unclear whether the court might rule on narrow procedural and technical grounds, or answer the underlying constitutional question of whether Trump can be banished from the ballot under the 14th amendment.

     The case could have significant political fallout as well. Trump allies will paint it as an anti-democratic effort to thwart the will of the American people, lumping it in with the numerous legal cases he faces in state and federal court.

     “Democrats are so afraid that President Trump will win on Nov 5th 2024 that they are illegally attempting to take him off the ballot,” the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a close Trump ally, posted on social media.

     Trump didn’t mention the decision during an evening rally on 19 December in Iowa but his campaign sent out a fundraising email calling it a “tyrannical ruling”, with the statement going on to say:

     “Democrat Party leaders are in a state of paranoia over the growing, dominant lead President Trump has amassed in the polls. They have lost faith in the failed Biden presidency and are now doing everything they can to stop the American voters from throwing them out of office next November.”

     Trump’s attorneys, meanwhile, have argued that the 14th amendment’s language does not apply to the presidency. A lawyer for Trump has also argued that the January 6 riot at the Capitol was not serious enough to qualify for insurrection, and that any remarks that Trump made to his supporters that day in Washington were protected under free speech.”

     How if we fail to consequent treason and insurrection, and thereby make a rule that all things are permitted in service to theocratic patriarchy and white supremacist terror?

     As written in The Guardian editorial, in an article entitled The Guardian view on a second Trump presidency: things could only get worse; Over the holidays, this column will explore next year’s urgent issues. Today we look at the danger posed by the former president’s bid for reelection; “The great spectre haunting 2024 is the threat of Donald Trump triumphing in November’s election. A second stint in the Oval Office would have grim repercussions for the US and the world. He dominates the Republican race for the presidential candidacy, while recent polls showed him beating Joe Biden in five of the six key battleground states, and besting the president on issues including the economy and national security. The Biden administration has overseen a striking economic recovery in tough global conditions, but voters don’t feel the improvement. The president’s handling of the war in Gaza is alienating core supporters. He inspires little enthusiasm.

     Democrats point out that there’s a long way to go and that November’s off-year election results point to a brighter picture. Mr Trump faces a dizzying array of legal cases, though the most significant may not move to a trial before the election. While they boost the belief of diehard admirers that he is being persecuted, some supporters say he should not stand if convicted. It’s not impossible that he might run from a prison cell.

     Mr Trump is already teeing voters up to declare a Biden victory fraudulent again. Election officials have been bombarded with death threats. Convictions for the January 6 storming of the Capitol were welcome and necessary, but his supporters remain armed and dangerous.

     What would Mr Trump’s return to the White House mean for America and the world? Nothing good. For all the volatility of his presidency, he delivered on key pledges for his followers: his supreme court appointments led to the overturning of Roe v Wade. Authoritarians don’t improve with power: quite the opposite. Mr Trump’s first term began with “alternative facts” about his inauguration and ended with the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. His recent statements make 2016’s inflammatory rhetoric look almost mealy-mouthed. He declared that he would be a dictator, though only on “day one”, because “I want a wall and I want to drill, drill, drill”. His language is not merely racist but echoes the invective of Nazi Germany: immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, while “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs” are “vermin”.

       Sycophantic state

     What is truly alarming this time is not merely that he has declared his intentions loud and clear, it is that his backers have drawn up action plans to implement his talking points, and that he faces fewer political, institutional or legal constraints. “You cannot count on those institutions to restrain him,” said former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who fears that her country is “sleepwalking into dictatorship”. Ms Cheney is a rare exception to the rule that Republican politicians have ultimately fallen into line even when they briefly balked at his extremes. A re-elected President Trump would benefit from a more compliant Congress (though there’s speculation that Democrats might win back the House while the GOP takes the Senate). And having set out his stall, he could claim a mandate from the people.

     He would not appoint those who might thwart his will this time. “The lesson he learned was to hire sycophants,” his former chief of staff John Kelly observed. He boasts that he would “dismantle the deep state”, clearing out career employees and replacing them with appointees he could fire at will. Intimidation – siccing his base on those who impede him – would always be an option. He has suggested that Gen Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, deserved to be put to death.

     Legal challenges to his policies would face a harder path – the supreme court now has a conservative supermajority, with three Trump appointees, and he similarly stacked lower levels of the judiciary. He is preparing plans to turn the power of the state against opponents and critics, and boasting of “retribution” for those who hindered his attempt to steal the last election. He has warned that he would urge his attorney general to indict any political rival even without known grounds, saying: “I don’t know. Indict him on income tax evasion.” His associates have reportedly begun drafting plans to deploy the military against civil demonstrations – as he wanted to do against Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. One would hope that military leaders would oppose this. But it would be complacent to assume that.

     Politics of hate

     On the international front, the battle against global heating would be struck a catastrophic blow. A second Trump presidency would clearly be good for Vladimir Putin and bad for Ukraine and Nato, which the US could well leave. Mr Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy puts himself first, and has only the most narrow and short-term conception of US interests. Allies such as South Korea are already contemplating their own nuclear deterrents. He would seek to hammer China on trade again, and Republicans would encourage him to go further on other fronts, but his admiration for autocrats might allow him to come to terms with Xi Jinping on some issues – notably, Taiwan’s future. Overall, his ignorance, arrogance and erratic nature could be as damaging as his pursuit of specific goals.

     The far right around the world would be emboldened by his victory. Mr Trump is in large part a symptom of our times, but he has encouraged and enabled others in his mould at home and abroad. The social fabric has been damaged by a style of politics in which hatred is the organising principle. Anti-Asian hate crime surged following his racist rhetoric about the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu”. A defeat for Mr Trump would not in itself be sufficient to defeat Trumpism. But it is necessary.

     The Democrats cannot campaign only on the threat that Mr Trump poses. They must speak to broader concerns too. But focusing on the likely consequences of his re-election is critical to ensuring that voters understand the choice they are making – including by not voting, or by backing a candidate other than Mr Biden. Think of the way that the voter backlash against the destruction of abortion rights was essential for Democrats in the 2022 midterms and has been evident in ballot measures more recently, with voters opting to preserve or expand access.

     Of course, Mr Trump might not be able to fully implement his nightmarish boasts in office. But he would do more than enough. Drive off a cliff and you might live to tell the tale. But you can’t count on survival – and you can be certain of damage. The US, and the world, cannot afford a second term for Mr Trump.”

     As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Sitting on a powder keg’: US braces for a year, and an election, like no other; “The 60th US presidential election, which will unfold in 2024, will be quite unlike any that has gone before as the US, and the rest of the world, braces for a contest amid fears of eroding democracy and the looming threat of authoritarianism.

     It will be a fight marked by numerous unwanted firsts as the oldest president in the country’s history is likely to face the first former US president to stand trial on criminal charges. A once aspirational nation will continue its plunge into anxiety and divisions about crime, immigration, race, foreign wars and the cost of living.

     Democrat Joe Biden, 81, is preparing for the kind of gruelling campaign he was able to avoid during coronavirus lockdowns in 2020. Republican Donald Trump will spend some of his campaign in a courtroom and has vowed authoritarian-style retribution if he wins. For voters it is a time of stark choices, unique spectacles and simmering danger.

     “It feels to me as if America is sitting on a powder keg and the fuse has been lit,” said Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “The protective shield that all democracies and social orders rely on – legitimacy of the governing body, some level of elite responsibility, the willingness of citizens to view their neighbors in a civic way – is in an advanced stage of decline or collapse.

     “It’s quite possible that the powder keg that America’s sitting on will explode over the course of 2024.”

     US politics entered a new, turbulent era with Trump’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. The businessman and reality TV star, tapping into populist rage against the establishment, was the first president with no prior political or military experience. His chaotic four-year presidency was scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic and ended with a bitter defeat by Biden in a 2020 election that was itself billed as an unprecedented stress test of democracy.

     Trump never accepted the result and his attempts to overturn it culminated in a deadly riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, and his second impeachment. He has spent three years plotting revenge and describes the 5 November election as “the final battle”. But he is running for president under the shadow of 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, knowing that regaining the White House might be his best hope of avoiding prison – a calculus that could make him and his supporters more desperate and volatile than ever.

     Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “This is the most astounding election I have ever seen.

     “We have never had an election where a likely major party nominee is indicted for major felony charges of the most serious nature; this is not shoplifting. He’s being charged with an attempt to destroy our democracy and subverting our national security. Both in terms of Trump’s personal morality and his incredibly serious crimes, we have never seen anything remotely like this.”

     First Trump must win the Republican primary against Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, putting the electoral and legal calendars on a collision course. On 16 January, a day after the Iowa caucuses kick off the Republican nomination process, Trump faces a defamation trial brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, who has already won a $5m judgment against him after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

     On 4 March, Trump is due in court in Washington in a federal case accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election result. The following day is Super Tuesday, when more than 15 states are scheduled to hold Republican primaries, the biggest delegate haul of the campaign.

     On 25 March, Trump also faces state charges in New York over hush-money payments to an adult film star, although the judge has acknowledged he may postpone that because of the federal trial. On 5 August, prosecutors have asked to start an election fraud trial in Georgia, less than three weeks after Trump is likely to have been nominated by the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

     Trump is hard at work to flip his legal troubles to his political advantage, contending that he is a victim of a Democratic deep state conspiracy. He frequently tells his supporters: “In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you – and I’m just standing in their way.” His Georgia mugshot has been slapped on T-shirts and other merchandise like a lucrative badge of honor.

     It seems to be working, at least according to a series of opinion polls that show Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical matchup. A survey in early December for the Wall Street Journal newspaper showed Trump ahead by four points, 47% to 43%. When five potential third-party and independent candidates were included, Trump’s lead over Biden expanded to six points, 37% to 31%.

     To Democrats, such figures are bewildering. Biden’s defenders point to his record, including the creation of 14m jobs, strong GDP growth and four major legislative victories on coronavirus relief, infrastructure, domestic production of computer chips and the biggest climate action in history. He has also led the western alliance against Russian aggression in Ukraine.

     Lichtman added: “He gets credit for nothing. It’s just amazing: I’ve never seen a president do so much and get so little mileage on it. He has more domestic accomplishments than any American president since the 1960s. He’s presided over an amazing economic recovery, a far better economy than was under Donald Trump even before the pandemic in terms of jobs, wages, GDP. Inflation has gone down by two-thirds.

     “It was Biden who single-handedly put together the coalition of the west that stopped [Vladimir] Putin from quickly overtaking Ukraine. He seems to get no credit for any of this whatsoever and that’s partly his own fault and the fault of the Democratic party. The Democratic party has been horrible for some time now – at least 15 years. Republicans are so much better at messaging.”

     The president’s approval rating has been stubbornly low since around the time of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. He is grappling with record numbers of migrants entering the country – an issue that increasingly aggravates states beyond the US-Mexico border. His refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is costing him some support among progressives and young people.

     The latest Democratic messaging salvo – “Bidenomics” – appears to have been a flop at a moment when many voters blame him for rising prices and a cost-of-living crisis. For all the barrage of positive economic data, Americans are lacking the feelgood factor.

     Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, said: “People feel that Biden overpromised and underdelivered and ultimately what it came down to was he didn’t make me feel good while he did it and he didn’t make it look easy.”

     Biden still holds a potential ace in the hole. Democrats plan to make abortion central to the 2024 campaign, with opinion polls showing most Americans do not favor strict limits on reproductive rights. The party is hoping threats to those rights will encourage millions of women and independents to vote their way next year. It is also seeking to put measures enshrining access to abortion in state constitutions on as many ballots as possible.

     The issue has flummoxed Republicans, with some concerned the party has gone too far with state-level restrictions since the supreme court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling last year, ending constitutional protection for abortion. Trump has taken notice and is conspicuously trying to be vague on the issue.

     The Wall Street Journal poll found Biden leading Trump on abortion and democracy by double digits. But it gave Trump a double-digit lead on the economy, inflation, crime, border security, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and physical and mental fitness for office. Biden still has time to reshape perceptions but even close allies concede that he is not an inspirational speechmaker like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. How can he turn it around?

     Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “My advice would be to be aggressive, go on offence and set the narrative.    They must make the contrast between a Biden America and a Trump America and ask people which America do they want to live in.

     “A year out, most people are not paying attention so the polls are meaningless in that they are not predictive of what will happen in a year. Where they do have value is what the trend line shows, which is that the American people are not getting the messaging clearly enough now, so it’s time to get up off their asses and activate the campaign at level 10 right now.”

     Setmayer, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, added: “What Donald Trump is telegraphing, what he plans to do to this country, I don’t fully think most Americans understand.

     “Use the power of incumbency, of the bully pulpit, of their record. Biden is surrounded by people who are experienced campaign veterans and so is he. Use it.”

     Should Trump prevail, numerous critics have warned that his return would hollow out American democracy and presage a drift towards Hungarian-style authoritarianism. In a recent interview on Fox News, Trump was asked: “You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody?” He did not give an outright denial but replied airily: “Except for day one.”

     Should Biden serve a second term, he will be 86 when he leaves office. Dean Phillips, 54, a congressman from Minnesota, mounting a Democratic primary challenge, is calling for a new generation of leadership. Some Democrats privately wish that Biden had declared mission accomplished after the 2022 midterm elections and stepped down to make way for younger contenders such as Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer. It now appears too late.

     Frank Luntz, a prominent consultant and pollster, said: “Democrats should be apoplectic. Donald Trump has been indicted in felony after felony. The economy is relatively OK and yet Biden is sinking every week and it’s because of something that no soundbite and no messaging can fix: his age. If I were a Democratic strategist, I would have been arrested in front of the White House for begging him to accept four years and move on. You can’t fix age.”

     Biden’s potential for gaffes was limited during the pandemic election; this time he will be expected to travel far and wide, his every misstep amplified by rightwing media. The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, is now owned by Elon Musk and populated by extremists such as Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. This has also been dubbed the first “AI election”, with deepfakes threatening to accelerate the spread of disinformation – a tempting target for foreign interference.

     It is unfolding in a febrile atmosphere of conspiracy theories, polarisation, gun violence and surging antisemitism and Islamophobia. Political opponents are increasingly framed as mortal enemies. Violence erupted on January 6 and again last year when a man broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband with a hammer.

     Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “If you have something like the last couple of elections where it’s razor thin, and people who don’t understand the American electoral process see malfeasance and misfeasance where there is none, we have a very non-trivial chance of violence.

     “I wouldn’t even presume that we wouldn’t have an outbreak of sporadic violence before that. The fact is when people see each other as the enemy, and talk about each other as the enemy, people who are mentally unbalanced and have access to firearms will do mentally unbalanced things.”

     Luntz does not foresee violence.

     But nor is he optimistic about the future of a nation torn between hope and fear. “What I do expect is a fraying no longer at the edges but at the heart of American democracy,” he said. “I’m afraid that we are reaching the point of no return. In my conversations with senators and congressmen every day I’m on the Hill – it doesn’t matter which party – we all agree that it’s not coming, it’s here, and no one knows what to do about it.”

Why did Maine and Colorado disqualify Trump from their ballots?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/19/why-did-colorado-disqualify-trump-white-house-2024-election?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2yS5XgOYJALOW8KqXdtzVl-lWXwOf6RUCU38Ako5xiEls_jhybabVXl6Y

Maine disqualifies Trump from presidential primary ballot, citing insurrection clause

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/28/maine-disqualifies-trump-presidential-primary-ballot-insurrection

The Guardian view on a second Trump presidency: things could only get worse

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/28/the-guardian-view-on-a-second-trump-presidency-things-could-only-get-worse

‘Sitting on a powder keg’: US braces for a year, and an election, like no other

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/27/politics-2024-trump-biden-election-democracy-authoritarian?CMP=share_btn_link

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December 27 2023  When Is It Good To Be Bad? Against the Heroic Ideal as Authorized Virtue

     An interesting question was posed recently in the virtual science fiction convention Concellation; “Something I’ve noticed in action movies in general, and comic book based movies in particular; the bad guy is almost never directly killed by the good guy. What are recent exceptions to that?” 

     The heroic ideal has been a subversion of democracy and the value of equality since Achilles; for the root of virtue, arete, also means superior. A hero is a champion and arbiter of moral value who is a proxy of benevolent authority, and models meritocratic hierarchies of social power, and taxonomies of identitarian belonging and otherness, which derive from sanctioned constructions of virtue.

     Our culture assigns white or black hats based on narratives of victimization, and none are grey. And since we internalized the moral paradigm which requires submission to authority, good has been synonymous with nonresistance to force and control; to be a hero is to be a figure of the apologetics of elite power. A hero is a champion, but a hero must also be good.

     We need no heroes, for they betray us to authority and those who would enslave us.

     Regardless of their personal qualities, a society is made of persons embedded in systems, often of unequal power and forces of oppression, and it is such systems which we must change as informing, motivating, and shaping sources of ourselves. As I proof I offer Biden, champion of the Restoration of America as a democracy, who in actively conspiring and enabling Israel in war crimes and ethnic cleansing has abandoned our principles of universal human rights, and Kamala Harris, whose words to the migrants in our concentration camps at the border were not those of resilience and hope under a regime of white supremacist terror but those of abjection, despair, and the collapse of all moral authority; “Do not come.”

     Ours is a nation and a civilization which has fallen, but the future of humankind  does not need our grief; it needs our refusal to submit and our solidarity of action.

     A number of dyadic forces and twinned images roil and cohere in strange ways as I contemplate our civilization’s ideals and the authorizations of values and identities which lie at its heart and power the malefic engines of our divisions and dehumanization, our commodification and falsification as theft of the soul, and the brutality and destruction of our violence and imperialism; the ambiguous and equivocal nature of heroes in our culture and their figural functions in historical narratives of identity like the feudal lord Batman and the capitalist hegemon Iron Man, the role of Christmas as an instrument of state terror and tyranny in its aspect as a system of social control and the authorization of ideas of obedience as naughty and nice, and the line between justice and vengeance in the public rage against Trump’s pardons of the conspirators of his criminal regime.

     The heroic ideal is depicted in the iconic painting by George W. Joy, General Gordon’s Last Stand; splendid in his uniform the great champion of civilization and empire stands above the black savages who surround him, a grand and defiant lion beset by lesser beasts. It typifies not the virtues of our civilization, but its flaws.

      I am on the side not of the conqueror and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege he represents nor the colonial imperialism and racist state terror which he serves, but of the nameless Black spearman who brings a Reckoning to him and to all systems of oppression.

    As I wrote in my post of December 3, The Riddle of Power, Force, and Control: When Is It Good To Be Bad?;  I find myself contemplating the riddle of power, force and control, and the problem of evil, in the context of a video which asks if General Sherman was a war criminal. These are issues central to my life and to the defining moments which have shaped me, as an antifascist and a revolutionary, and to my personal vision and mission of the liberation of humankind from tyranny, authority, normality, inequalities of power, and the enforcement of virtue and the ideas of other people as authorized identities.

     Sherman’s March Through Georgia taught us how to deal with organized white supremacist terror and fascism; leave not a stone standing upon a stone. All violence is crime against humanity and all use of social force and control is wrong in that it harms and degrades us all equally, and is also unjust when used by a government including war, surveillance, and police terror. But in conflicts where the enemy does not recognize that we are human, as with revolutionary struggles of liberation from tyranny, survival and victory go hand in hand.

     This is the riddle of force, and it lies at the heart of all political structures as organized social power. In the words of George Washington, “Government is about force, only force.” I believe we must renounce force and power to transcend to the next stage of humankind, but we must also challenge force and control when it comes to claim us, for whomever would subjugate and enslave us must be resisted if we are to become a free society of equals and of autonomous individuals. To paraphrase something my father once told me, force is a good servant but a terrible master.

      This wisdom was offered in reference to something that happened when I was nine years old and in the fifth grade, an incident which demonstrates the escalation of force and degradation of humanity which accompanies it. As I wrote on my birthday; I spent recess at the time either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked as unsafe down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. I told my father about it that night. 

    To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear as the basis of human exchange, and about power which underlies all relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.

     Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?

     Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong. Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.

     What you need is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more harm than it solves.”

     This is the origin story of my lifelong journey as a martial artist, and of the central questions which have motivated and informed my practice as an agent of chaos and transformation.

     Seizures of power and the restoration of balance are at the heart of issues of power asymmetry, inequality, tyranny and liberty, the hegemony of elites and divisions of exclusionary otherness including patriarchal, racist, sectarian, and nationalist forms of identitarian fascism.

     This we must resist, and I have found but one general principle as a guide to differentiate when we must resist by any means necessary and when we must forebear, and it is not in defense of the innocent, for as George Bernard Shaw taught us in Pygmalion and the iconic film My Fair Lady through the character of Eliza Doolittle’s father, this places a moral burden of judgement on victims of unjust authority, and often there are no innocent. No, my test for the use of force is simply this; who holds the power?

     This is why in the case of the Gaza War I say of Israel; there can be no right of self defense against a people you are Occupying.

      When is it good to be bad?

     In Nietzsche’s formulation, how do we hunt monsters without becoming monsters ourselves?

     To these questions I give a hunter’s reply; I am not a good man, who forebears to challenge unjust authority, nor do other people’s ideas of virtue interest me if they take away our power to resist evil. I am far more useful than that, if you are among the powerless and the dispossessed with whom I and my fellows place our lives in the balance.

      I am a bad man who is on your side.

3 Doors Down – Kryptonite (Official Video)

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December 26 2023 We Hear the Chimes at Midnight, Friends

      Why does the festivity of the Midwinter celebrations, days filled with light and life, feasts, gifts, laughter and the company of family and friends, devolve into darkness and the echoes of the dead?

     As the coals of the Yule fire gutter and wink out, darkness returns; and with it the terror of our nothingness in a universe utterly without any meaning or value other than what we can create, and with the joy of total freedom in such a universe, in which the possibilities of becoming human are without limit.

    Always bound together as negative spaces of each other, fascinans et tremendum, wonder and terror, awe and horror, hope and fear, monstrosity and beauty.

     As I wrote in my post of December 26 2020, America’s Interregnum as a Secular Advent; In darkness we are born and awaken, and to the darkness we return in dreams to find visions with which to create ourselves anew, and this seizure of power and ownership of ourselves is the primary power, which confers freedom and liberates us from subjugation to authority.

     This 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. And it finds echoes and reflections throughout the spheres of our relationships, both public and private.

    We dream a new America every four years as a public ritual of transformative rebirth; incubate new selves, forge new futures, and reimagine our possibilities of becoming human.

    We dream a new humankind as we embrace our darkness as a private ritual of healing and self creation; as the world descends into its longest night and emerges in renewal, and we become glorious and transcendent in the illumination of our flaws.

     Throughout the liminal time of America’s Interregnum of Presidents and of reigning ideas of ourselves, designed by our founders as a secular Advent to coincide and mirror the great festival of Midwinter Solstice with which we celebrate our darkness and the triumph of the light with reversals of order, subversions of authority, suspensions of the Forbidden, and Acts of Chaos and Transgression, we break and renew the oaths and bindings of the world and dream new truths of human being, meaning, and value, and once again journey into the unknown in the quest to make them real.

    As written by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”

    How can we describe ourselves and the futures we create together if not as works of art? This suggests processes of vision and enactment, principles of change and the exploration of unknowns, and an emergent quality of humankind as works of beauty.

     Of the beauty of our flawed humanity and its use as an instrument of transformation with which to change the balance of power in the world, I have some few brief thoughts which I offer to you here in the hope that you may discover or create a path forward for us all to a shining and brave new world, full of wonders; one which is better than the shadows of our atavistic history which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.

     Here then is my manifest of this art, entitled Running Amok: Reimagining Ourselves Through Acts of Chaos and Transgression

    The Brokenness of the world is an immense sea of darkness, against which we have only the light we can give to each other.

    We all need to let our demons out to play now and then. Especially we must dance our demons which represent aspects of ourselves which evoke fear, shame, disgust; the toad that Nietzsche feared he must swallow but could not, and say with Shakespeare’s Prospero of our Caliban; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

     Embrace your terror and claim your darkness as a seizure of power over the history which disfigures your harmony. Use it as a lever of transformation and rebirth. Dance your demons, as the Tibetan Buddhists do. Bring your nightmares into the light through your art, where you can control them and reverse the power relations of your victimization.

     All true art defiles and exalts.   

     As I wrote in my post of December 26 2022l; Illuminated only by the winking psychedelic lights of the Christmas tree, behemoth of memories in the form of ornaments, having walked our wild hills of inky darkness in the pristine snow escorted by a pair of mountain lions who have been hunting here these past few nights, a mug of spiced coffee warming my hands, while puzzling out the functions of a gift from my sister Erin, a Special Operations chronometer, I suddenly realize whose watch this was; her partner Tom’s, who was among the first deaths of the Pandemic. And like reaching into Pandora’s Box of Unknowns, everything shifts and changes.

     Tom’s story begins as an Army Ranger and Lieutenant in Counter-Intelligence stationed in South Korea, and ends with his transfer into Special Operations; his whole service file since that date is blank, erased as if he had never lived, until decades later he died of covid while stationed in Hong Kong as a federal officer.

      How can we sing of the stories which have been stolen from us?

      As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.

     Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

      We owe remembrance to the dead, for as George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason; “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it”. So also as parrhesia or what Foucault called truth telling, though for the dead we can do nothing, and it is the living who must be avenged.

     To a friend in despair, about to be evicted into homelessness and caretaker of a tyrannical, delusional, and unpredictable father with dementia, whose powerlessness in the face of life disruptive events and systems of unequal power and oppression transform them into a symbol of the human condition embedded in patriarchal and capitalist forces of dehumanization, I have this day written;

     I am so sorry for your situation, my friend, and for our nation which guarantees the right to life but does not provide the preconditions for it; free universal healthcare, shelter, and a basic living stipend for food and material requirements. We will be neither civilized nor truly human until then.

     Until that day dawns, and we are reborn as a United Humankind, I can offer only this; I see you and will remember, I will bear your story onward into the future with others beyond number, and when possible I will avenge you. As one of the Matadors who rescued me from execution by police bounty hunters in Sao Paulo during the summer of 1974 just before I began high school said; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”

     Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? Is this not the terror and epigenetic trauma of our history which we must escape, and also our hope for change, rebirth, autonomy through self creation, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human?

     As if my words were a magic spell by which I could reimagine and transform the future and heal the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity.

     Best wishes and solidarity till that day dawns; may you find joy to balance the terror of our nothingness, hope of change in the chaos of life disruptive events and the fracture and collapse of order and its systems of oppression and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the victory of becoming Unconquered in refusal to submit to systemic and unanswerable force and control.

     Words are all I have to offer the world, and they are poor medicine against its tragedies and cruelties. Mostly my dreams collapse into nightmares, and I have failed so many people as I fail you now; I could not save Mariupol nor rally the world to her defense, nor Panjshir from conquest by the Taliban, nor the peoples of Israel and Palestine from each other, failures for which countless others have died, whole cities, nations, and a people divided by the legacies of history, and that is only the last two years. Yet sometimes we triumph, we humans, and free ourselves from our history.

     What is important is not to overcome the colossal forces ranged against us and the systems of unequal power in which we are embedded, but to wrestle with them and remain unconquered. To you and all humankind I can offer only this; Resist! Win what control over your circumstances you can, but in resistance we become autonomous and free, self owned and self created; this is our victory, the victory of the broken and the lost, in which we may reclaim ourselves from those who would steal our souls.

      In your circumstances, I urge you to do what may be the most difficult thing for anyone in crisis; reach out for help to others, to every agency and institution at all levels without end, all day every day, until you find help and have what you need to survive now and a plan for the future which will bring wellbeing and happiness. So I hope for us all, without exception, in this cruel world wherein we have been abandoned and betrayed, outcast and disempowered; except by each other, and this is our great power which we must use in liberation struggle to restore to each other our humanity, this solidarity, this redemptive power to see and reflect each other, to remember and to bring a reckoning for systems of unequal and unjust power, to transcend the limits of our form and the divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness weaponized by those who would enslave us, this struggle for the ownership of ourselves .

     Be not ghosts of our past, but hopes for our future.

      May peace be upon us all.

     As I wrote in my post of December 26 2021, Reflections During the After Party; As the festivities of a wonderfully out of control after party swirl around me with raucous and dissonant sounds and the silent hungers, unanswerable pain, and strange desires of our guests press upon me like living brands, I sit among my ghosts, dreaming their dreams, both those they lived and those yet to be realized.

   The chair beside me has been left empty, and a Scotch poured untouched, for my partner Dolly’s father, where we used to sit together and talk at the end of a day, but of the dead which I carry he is far from alone.

    Full of stories of my father and he fighting side by side and growing up together as neighbors since childhood, Gene was, of his brother Bob and the fantastic carnival empire he built from scrap iron during the Depression, of his own father John McKay, Industrial Workers of the World organizer and Socialist Party politician and his great friend Eugene V. Debbs, and of his grandfather John Hugh McKay, a teacher kidnapped at Inverness by the British Navy to serve aboard ship, who killed or seriously wounded a British officer in a duel at sea and escaped hanging by swimming the St Lawrence River to America.           

     Youngest of eleven siblings and last to die, and my final connection to my father gone over thirty years ago now with both of his brothers, Gene was a friend and a bridge to the past for me, and I hope to our future as well, for though his circumstances had become more grand he never forgot who he was and where he came from, nor whose side he was on.

     He drove the hay wagon through the snow on a day much like today forty-nine years ago, when Dolly and I first kissed as children, a kiss like living fire on my frozen lips, a tidal force which bears me forward still.

    There are in this house tonight all four of his children and their partners, several of his grandchildren, his dog who has claimed me as her companion and slumbers at my feet, and de facto family members including his loyal retainer of many years Jack who continues to work for the family, and neighbor Paul Hamilton who went to high school with Dolly’s brothers and is trailed by the presence of his father Leonard who died of the Pandemic recently, and the ghost of Gene’s wife of over six decades and the mother for whom my partner was named Theresa, all of whom are expressions of Gene’s stories which must now live on through his family.

     And then there are my own ghosts, of whom there are far too many to recount. Here among my ghosts and extensions of myself across time and history are my parents, both of whom were high school English and Forensics teachers and coaches as was I. My mother, who died in February of 2020, on whose shoulders I rode as a child when we seized the Palace of Justice in San Francisco in the peace movement of 1968, whose hand I held on Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley, the most terrible incident of police terror in the history of our nation, and whose conversations with me as a teenager during her studies of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet medical records and childhood therapy journal of Jerzy Kosinski, which he fictionalized as The Painted Bird, helped direct me to my lifelong project of interrogating the origins of evil.

     So also with my father, who returned to this wilderness where he was raised to spend his final years flyfishing over thirty years ago, who taught me fencing, chess, debate, literature, and never to play someone else’s game but to change the rules and make it mine. He had me memorize the poetry of Eugene V Debbs, a legacy of his youth and his friendship with Gene, as well as the tales of the Persian humorist Nasr Ed-Din, as the basis of my rhetoric and improvisational theatre, and held me spellbound as a boy with the stories of his many dueling scars. He made it possible for me to pursue the enthusiasms of my youth, some of which became  transformational as defining moments; found me a martial arts teacher at the age of nine, who became my entrance into the study of languages, and the literature and disciplines of Taoism and Buddhism as well, guided me through my reading of Plato and Nietzsche in eighth grade and through the whole Great Books of the Western World series in high school, sent me on grand wilderness adventures and survival school, trained me to become a champion saber fencer and debater, and provided a home in which he held court like a salon, filled with intellectual discussions and the authors, artists, and counterculture luminaries he collected as a director of underground theatre.

     Not all the lives to which we are connected are anchored to ours through inheritance, for those with whom we share Defining Moments and friendships are also those we have chosen to help us become who we want to be. Thus do we become shadows and negative spaces of each other, facing the world Janus-like as dyadic and interdependent beings. From here, too, do ghosts of memory arise.  

     Of a recent such loss I have written in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change; This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.

    Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?

      I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human. She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.

    Yet she said no to authority at great peril when she could have said yes and become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.

     So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.

    Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has moved on to unknown shores.

     The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”

     For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.

     Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.

    Such is the witness I bear for the nameless heroes who have placed their lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and won for us all the chance for a better future.

   I’ve been listening to joyful and triumphant music all day, but it does not speak to me, or for me. This does, the glorious defiance and will to become of Dylan Thomas’ poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, the elegiac music of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, music full of grief, pain, and loneliness; the things which make us human, and possibly which make us beautiful. 

     On such occasions as this, surrounded by feasts and family, I am also surrounded by chasms of darkness, loneliness, disconnection, and the voices and presences of the dead which interpenetrate my flesh with the shadows of their histories, literally in the case of our genetic code as transforms of messages about how to shape ourselves to the material world and its imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle to become human.

     Our Defining Moments remain living within us pristine and entire, outside of time; I am forever crawling in utter darkness through the bloody remains of the dead in a collapsed tunnel in Mariupol filled with the sounds of the dying whom I could not help as Russian bombs shook the earth, endlessly I see two children who have been set on fire by laughing Israeli soldiers run down an alley in Beirut and collapse in blackened puddles of ruin as I pick up a fallen rifle, for all time I am spellbound by the jar of nameless and disembodied eyes on the desk of a leader of death squads in Sarajevo as we played a game of chess for the life of a prisoner.

     Always I am seized from the deck of a ship by a wave in a furious storm off Sumatra and swallowed by endless chasms of darkness, and when I awake on a beach castaway in the Mentawai Islands it is not truly as the same person whom the sea devoured, for each such moment is a transformative death and rebirth which shifts me further from who I was when I began; I bear such marks without number. 

    We are bearers of stories, made of memories and histories which echo back through the numberless unknown lives of our ancestors and others who have shaped us in becoming human, as an unfolding of human intention, reimagination, and poetic vision, prochronisms or histories expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation like the shells of fantastic sea creatures, songs which reverberate through our lives as epigenetic informing, motivating, and shaping forces which are not unique to us but part of  an immense and incomprehensible wave of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, which can seize us with dreams of being, meaning, and value we ourselves cannot imagine.

     Such is the power of vision as reimagination and transformation, and the nature of our persona and identities as performances in a theatre of which, as Shakespeare teaches us, all the world is a stage. What is important is to ask, whose stage is it? In whose story do we perform our lives? For these questions direct us not to the subjugation to authority of learned helplessness, but to seizures of power and revolutionary struggle.

     How answer we the terrible pronouncement in MacBeth,

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

     How shall we answer the terror of our nothingness and the legacies of our history? I have but one reply; to gather and cherish my trauma and pain, and make something beautiful with it. Thus may we stand against the darkness, and remain unconquered.

    My answer to the suffering of the world is to give voice to the voices which have been stolen from us, the numberless generations of the silenced and the erased.

    Welcome and embrace your pain and the terror of our nothingness as sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others.

     Dance your demons before the stage of the world; go ahead, frighten the horses.

     Forge great beauty from the flaws of your humanity and the brokenness of the world, and wield it as an instrument of reimagination and transformation in glorious change.

     All true art defiles and exalts.

     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 precedes 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. 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. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, tradition interrogated, limits transcended, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities discovered.

     Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity; let us remain unconquered and be free.

Michael Sheen performs ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ by Dylan Thomas

Simon & Garfunkel – The Sounds of Silence

Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah (Live In London)

Why I Read King Lear Each Advent: Seeing darkness is as crucial as seeing light.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/why-i-read-king-lear-in-advent/617472/?fbclid=IwAR2v8xGcE8E6Ghf4xh6OE3rTrSK98j_yfFoCWOBCHvTaPxEYxfi94uKvKUo

Against the Illusion of Separateness: Pablo Neruda’s Beautiful and Humanistic Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

Against the Illusion of Separateness: Pablo Neruda’s Beautiful and Humanistic Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One, by George Santayana

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/403278.The_Life_of_Reason?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=mBrq5uQBAn&rank=11

Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, by Michel Foucault

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18631427-discourse-and-truth?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=RBCafaaWzV&rank=2

Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, by Michel Foucault

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13593181-wrong-doing-truth-telling

Silence: Lectures and Writings, by John Cage

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/765651.Silence?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=7Pu8m5nQ3S&rank=2

The New Art–the New Life: The Collected Writings Of Piet Mondrian, Piet Mondrian, Editors Harry Holtzman, Martin S. James

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13291.The_New_Art_the_New_Life?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=UIZ1GvswB3&rank=12

Understanding Harold Pinter, Ronald Knowles

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2526220.Understanding_Harold_Pinter?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=c8PhNtXqbx&rank=53

Everybody In, Nobody Out, article in Counterpunch written by Liz Theoharis                   

Everybody In, Nobody Out
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 December 25 2023 Washington Crosses the Delaware: the Christmas Victory That Saved the American Revolution

     We celebrate Christmas today as a universal secular holiday which has largely shed its historical legacies as a religious festival, like a serpent shedding its skin, or reawakened its ancient origins as a midwinter rite of renewal while accumulating layers of meaning which have now become traditional in our culture; the adornment of a sacrificial tree of life with beautiful decorations which once represented wishes and now confer status as tokens of wealth, the baking of idolatrous Gingerbread Men in mockery of the Biblical prohibition against human images which are eaten as parody of the substitutive sacrifice and ritual cannibalism at the heart of the myth of Christ, the figure of Santa Claus marketed by Coca-Cola but originating as a symbol of the hallucinogenic amanita muscara mushroom in the shamanic rites of the Sami people with their reindeer driven sleighs, feasting and gifts which echo the carnivalesque elements of the cult of Saturn and his proxy the Lord of Misrule, the annual family viewing of a performance of the Nutcracker Ballet which depicts the death of a child as a battle against mice and the journey of the soul through the gates of dreams as an American Book of the Dead, and listening to some of the most beautiful music ever written.

     For myself and in the historical tradition of my family, Christmas Day has another meaning as well, for on this day in 1776 General Washington dreamed an impossible thing and made it real, and in his victory at the Battle of Trenton saved the American Revolution and reclaimed the idea of a free society of equals lost since the Fall of Rome.

     Beyond the peculiarities of its historical stories, Christmas may come to mean one thing more to humankind, as it does for myself and the descendants of those who stood with Washington on that fateful day, or on any of countless other days throughout history and the world wherein a single individual, as flawed as any other, refused to submit to tyranny against impossible odds and in so doing changed the fate of humankind and won the hope of a better future for us all; so long as we remain Unconquered, the possibilities of becoming human are truly limitless.

     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 July 4 2021, What Does Freedom Mean Now?; As we celebrate Independence Day, I offer you a meditation on the contradictions of power, the frailty of order, the illusion of authority, the relativity of truth and the falsification of history in service to power and authority in the form of a story, originally written as a demonstration of Gogol’s method of creating symbols and referential to Ionesco, Kafka, and Akutagawa.

      It also contains a true retelling from my family history of a decisive moment when the fate of humankind hung in the balance, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on Christmas of 1776, as related to me by my father and to him from his before from the witness of my ancestor, Henry Lale, who fought at his side.

A Declaration of Liberty

     I woke that fateful morning, ready to join the other rhinoceroses on the parade ground, when fussing with the shiny bits on my uniform I chanced to meet my own gaze in the mirror, and to my horror discovered that my horn had gone missing.

      It was a magnificent horn, a horn of vainglorious strutting, of midnight blue and royal purple like the stains of grandeur and of marvelous sins. In its place was this soft monkey nose, useless in butting heads; worse, someone might think it funny, and I’d have to bring the pain- but how to maintain order without a horn?

     It was all the fault of the Devil Weed I had consumed the night before, in an excess of drunken salute to one of the original members of my command, lost in a nameless action in a fight for freedom the world will never know the true history of. Even his name is unknown, an identity assigned upon enlistment; we are the night watch, who hold an invisible line that others may sleep and live in happy ignorance of the chaos and relentless existential threats which surround us.

     Throughout much of my life my nation has been the man to my left and the man to my right, fellow bearers of secrets; maybe I’ve been wrong about that.

     As to the Devil Weed, it was grown from magic seeds, seeds of transformation, change, and renewal handed down, planted & re-harvested every few years, from the hand of George Washington to an ancestor of mine as payment for a wager just after crossing the Delaware on Christmas of 1776 under cover of night and a storm.

     Washington had said, “We’ve eaten all the dogs, burned all the wood, and my balls are frozen to my last bit of lead shot. We can’t cross against the ice floes, and if we stay on this side of the river we die and the Revolution dies with us.”

      And Henry my ancestor said “If you go I’m coming with you, but who will come with us? Do these men have another fight in them? Frozen, starving, too many barefoot in the snow, with one man in three in hospital and unfit for duty? Whoever isn’t drowned or crushed by the ice landing a ten mile night march through ice and snow to the enemy, and then an attack on a fortified garrison with neither powder nor ammunition? I’ll bet you we can’t cross that river and survive, and I’ll buy a night at the best whorehouse in Philadelphia for the whole army if you can pull that off.”

     Everything became still as the attention of the whole camp was riveted.

Washington stood, naked but for a red blanket he had wrapped about himself like a toga, and for long moments met the eyes of his men. “Done, and I’ll give you and every man with us a pouch of George’s Own Devil Weed if we live to celebrate. Starved, frozen, and down to the last bullet, I’ll still take that bet. We are no longer ragged misfits and outcasts begging scraps from our masters feet like dogs; from this moment forward we are not colonial subjects divided against each other by a distant empire but Americans united in our Liberty.”

     There were cheers, but not yet a race to the boats. They really were starving and frozen, and for many the coming fight would be down to the knife and tomahawk. So Washington put in his set of false teeth, the pointy cannibal ones made by the Indians he once lived among who taught him how to fight and how to lead. He grinned his terrible grin, and said, “Imagine the Hessians at Trenton, eating and drinking their way through winter with storehouses full of everything we need, firewood, food, fine boots and woolen uniforms, guns and powder, all waiting for men bold enough to take them. Warm they are, with fat goose and roast beast. I’m coming to dinner with the enemy. Who’s coming with me?”

     And they rose cheering, and followed him into folly and into glory. Victory or Death, Washington’s password at the Battle of Trenton, became our family motto ever after; certainly it described the conditions of the fight, of the Revolution, and of the fragile nature of liberty and America.

     But there were other stories, things no one made a heroic painting of to hang in a national gallery, both of our origins and throughout our history. Sometimes because the cover story is so much better than the truth, as with the abominable and tragic fate of Amelia Earhart; and sometimes because the truth is ambiguous and a relativistic multiplicity which depends on who’s telling it, a Rashomon Gate which transforms us as we go through.

      Liberate the Dominican Republic with only a printing press, a radio station, and an airplane to drop leaflets, with the loss of a single foreign national and no American casualties, weighed against the countless deaths of the landing at Inchon? Wonderful. But who can really claim a monster like Trujillo as a friend, as we had for decades before?                 

     Often it is also horrible, something necessary to survival which betrays the ideals and goals we work to achieve and protect, an accommodation with evil.  And it is this last category of secrets which provides leverage for our enemies, propagating outward across time like the leprous tracks of an invisible and malign corruption.

     Our lives have reflected one another, Henry and I, the revolutionary and the secret agent, as in a dark mirror. We cannot escape each other.   

    My ancestor helped win the Revolutionary War and create America; I helped bear the message of that Revolution to unknown shores as a Promethean fire and seeds of transformation, among many other things.

     The dream of America; a free society of equals, Liberty, Equality, Truth, and Justice, a firewall against tyranny and fascism, a new idea of humankind in which no one is better than any other by reason of birth and the age of inequalities is ended, free from colonialism and empires, from slavery and identitarian nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and all the kings and tyrants toppled from their thrones. All too often revolutionary struggle has been corruptive of its own ideals, heroes become tyrants, and Liberation becomes imperial conquest.

     The American Revolution, an anti-colonial struggle against an Empire and the system of aristocracy, and the tidal wave of revolutionary struggles it unleashed to reimagine and transform the world and human being, meaning, and value in thousands of myriads of mutinies and rebellions of the new Humanist order against the old Authoritarian paradigm, in every corner of the earth and among all its peoples, a glorious Liberation of the infinite possibilities of becoming human.

      A turning of the tides which changed the order of the world, and the consequences of the triumph of liberty over tyranny in the end of the age of kings and the fall of colonial empires, and its echoes in our victory over fascism in the Second World War, the emergence of an American imperial global hegemony and dominion, and the Fall of the Soviet Union. None of these things happened in the way you have been told.

     If I could go back to the beginnings of things, to the Original Lie that founded America as a free society of equals without changing its systems of unequal power and the consequences and events that tipped the balance of the world toward fascism, could all the wrongs that came after be redressed? From the failure to renounce slavery and bring a reckoning to inequalities in the leveling of all social classes and of patriarchy, the centralization of authority to a carceral state of force and control from the Whiskey Rebellion onward, the rise of imperial global dominion and wars for control of strategic resources and the elite hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege, the history of America has been one of the subversion of democracy by forces of unequal power behind the smoke and mirrors of America as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world.

     Could we win back our freedom, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, redeem the promise of a free society of equals, and relight the torch of Liberty?   

     So I scribbled a note retiring my captaincy in the Deniable Forces of the secret police, stepping through the mirror into the monkey world and transforming as I had so many times before, though never before alone.

    I had some wrongs to put right.

     And here are some thoughts of mine on the subject of Liberty; Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty:

      To all those who like myself prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to the alternative of submission to authority, who align on the side of Prometheus, rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, I offer here a manifesto for bearers of the Torch of Liberty.

      As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I’ve thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.

     Here are some things I have learned:

     First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.

     The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror,

is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.

     Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.

     We must question, challenge, mock, and subvert authority whenever it comes to claim us. For there is no just authority.

      Victory or Death; so said George Washington at the Battle of Trenton of the Revolution against tyranny and the idea that some persons are by right of birth better than others.

     Victory or Death; so must we ever answer tyrants and those who would enslave us.

     Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, conformity with transgression, and division with solidarity.

     Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.

     Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.

    Let us be Bringers of Chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.

    As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her wonderful daily newsletter of December 19 2021; “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

     These were the first lines in a pamphlet called The American Crisis that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low. Just five months before, the members of the Second Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence, explaining to the world that “the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled…do…solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”

     The nation’s founders went on to explain why it was necessary for them “to dissolve the political bands” which had connected them to the British crown.

     They explained that their vision of human government was different from that of Great Britain. In contrast to the tradition of hereditary monarchy under which the American colonies had been organized, the representatives of the united states on the North American continent believed in a government organized according to the principles of natural law.

     Such a government rested on the “self-evident” concept “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Governments were created to protect those rights and, rather than deserving loyalty because of tradition, religion, or heritage, they were legitimate only if those they governed consented to them. And the American colonists no longer consented to be governed by the British monarchy. 

     This new vision of human government was an exciting thing to declare in the heat of a Philadelphia summer after a year of skirmishing between the colonial army and British regulars, but by December 1776, enthusiasm for this daring new experiment was ebbing. Shortly after colonials had cheered news of independence in July as local leaders read copies of the Continental Congress’s declaration in meetinghouses and taverns in cities and small towns throughout the colonies, the British moved on General George Washington and the troops in New York City.

     By September, the British had forced Washington and his soldiers to retreat from the city, and after a series of punishing skirmishes across Manhattan Island, by November the Redcoats had pushed the Americans into New Jersey. They chased the colonials all the way across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.

     By mid-December, it looked bleak for the Continental Army and the revolutionary government it backed. The 5000 soldiers with Washington who were still able to fight were demoralized from their repeated losses and retreats, and since the Continental Congress had kept enlistments short so they would not risk a standing army, many of the men would be free to leave the army at the end of the year, further weakening it.

     As the British troops had taken over New York City and the Continental soldiers had retreated, many of the newly minted Americans outside the army were also having doubts about the whole enterprise of creating a new, independent nation based on the idea that all men were created equal. Then, things got worse: as the American soldiers crossed into Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress abandoned Philadelphia on December 12 out of fear of a British invasion, regrouping in Baltimore (which they complained was dirty and expensive).

      “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

     The author of The American Crisis was Thomas Paine, whose January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense had solidified the colonists’ irritation at the king’s ministers into a rejection of monarchy itself, a rejection not just of King George III, but of all kings. In early 1776, Paine had told the fledgling Americans, many of whom still prayed for a return to the comfortable neglect they had enjoyed from the British government before 1763, that the colonies must form their own independent government.

     Now, he urged them to see the experiment through. He explained that he had been with the troops as they retreated across New Jersey and, describing the march for his readers, told them “that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centered in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back.”

     For that was the crux of it. Paine had no doubt that patriots would create a new nation, eventually, because the cause of human self-determination was just. But how long it took to establish that new nation would depend on how much effort people put into success. “I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake,” Paine wrote. “Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”

     In mid-December, British commander General William Howe had sent most of his soldiers back to New York to spend the winter, leaving garrisons across the river in New Jersey to guard against Washington advancing.

     On Christmas night, having heard that the garrison at Trenton was made up of Hessian auxiliaries who were exhausted and unprepared for an attack, Washington crossed back over the icy Delaware River with 2400 soldiers in a winter storm. They marched nine miles to attack the garrison, the underdressed soldiers suffering from the cold and freezing rain. Reaching Trenton, they surprised the outnumbered Hessians, who fought briefly in the streets before they surrendered.

     The victory at Trenton restored the colonials’ confidence in their cause. Soldiers reenlisted, and in early January, they surprised the British at Princeton, New Jersey, driving them back. The British abandoned their posts in central New Jersey, and by March, the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia. Historians credit the Battles of Trenton and Princeton with saving the Revolutionary cause.

     There is no hard proof that Washington had officers read The American Crisis to his troops when it came out six days before the march to Trenton, as some writers have said, but there is little doubt they heard it one way or another. So, too, did those wavering loyalists.

     “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” Paine wrote in that fraught moment, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

What is to be done? Alice Slays the Jabberwocky:

Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings

by Thomas Paine, Sidney Hook (Introduction), Jack Fruchtman Jr. (Foreword)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99955.Common_Sense_The_Rights_of_Man_and_Other_Essential_Writings?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=6YxakOY2eG&rank=4

The pasts we have escaped:

The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick

1632, by Eric Flint

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16967.1632?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=FMhTHbX95U&rank=1

The future we must win:

     Here Be Dragons, for the future is an empty space of unknowns on our maps of becoming human. Each of us must create our own.                      

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