Ethics Review: Anora and the chauvinist gaze

 

Ethics Review:  Anora and the chauvinist gaze

 

Anora is a masterwork of movie-making, with superb acting that morphs through a sophisticated, multi-stage plot.  This exceeding feat required protean skills from Mikey Madison, who won an Oscar for Best Actress playing the movie’s namesake.  Anora avoids shallowness, sleaziness and pornocentricity despite multiple scenes of nudity and graphic sex.  It opens a somewhat nuanced window into the world of sex workers, touching on some of the challenges of the job.  It doesn’t go into detail, however, about how rude or abusive the male customers at strip clubs can be, which isn’t all that surprising, as I’ll get into below.

The movie has some absolutely horrific ethical failures.  As Anora, who calls herself Ani, says in the movie, multiple felonies are inflicted on her, including imprisonment and restraint, but no one even comes close to being punished for this.  Why?  The inflictors are enforcers and fixers for a Russian oligarch.  The oligarch gets his way, even in New York City .  What does Ani get? $10,000 for keeping quiet, not only about her annulled marriage to the oligarch’s son, but for being manhandled, confined and gagged.  At the end of the movie, she is emotionally broken and has sex with one of the perpetrators of the crimes against her.      

Anora sends the message that men rule the world and that the ‘male gaze’ is inevitable.  Men’s bad behavior is backgrounded, belittled and forgiven throughout the movie.  There’s no hint of the #MeToo movement that had been embraced by Hollywood since 2017.   Ani has to accept felonious violence with no recourse in the courts or from police.  By focusing solely on women’s role as sex workers, and disempowering the lead female character’s voice or options, the movie underwrites the misogynist idea that women earn attention and money when they maximize their sexual appeal and physical attractiveness to men.  When they step out of that pleasing role, they get stepped on.

Another problem is that the movie glamorizes the lifestyle of Russian oligarchs.  They are portrayed as above the law, royal in how they act, dress, and arrogantly express.  Although Hollywood has worshipped materialism for a long time--the endless theme of the lifestyles of the rich and famous-- Anora takes it a step further by normalizing Russian crime bosses.  For one thing, we never learn what the oligarch does to reap so much power in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.  

Not discussed in the movie is the fact that Russia wantonly invaded its neighbor Ukraine and is still fighting a vicious war there, including multiple war crimes, such as mass execution.  The powerful oligarch we see in the movie wears a simple coat and looks mild and professorial.  He laughs instead of sneers.  His thugs are portrayed as comical and, in one case, secretly sensitive and kind.   This secret kindness, though, doesn’t prevent the thug from wielding a baseball bat to smash up a store.

Can it be coincidence that the movie’s belittlement of women and valorization of Russa concurs with the election of Donald Trump?   Trump who loves Russian strongman Putin, and dictators in general?  Trump who has been convicted of rape in civil court and accused by over twenty women of sexual assault?  Trump who played the song, “It’s a Man’s World” at his election events? 

Trump, as well, attacks the LGBTQ community, and it is worth noting that an anti-gay slur is used repeatedly in Anora--not in a way that criticizes the slur, but in a way meant to make the audience laugh at its target.

Artists, including film-makers, often argue that art is above and beyond ethics.  The producers of Anora could say something like, “We’ve pulled off a masterpiece.  We speak to the human condition beyond today’s issues.”

But great works of art that deal with representations of human life and society inevitably make statements about right and wrong, statements that can be evaluated for their own merit.  Many movies once thought to be great are now in disfavor.  A classic example is Gone with the Wind, which won three Oscars.

We live in a time where dictators are on the rise, and where two sets of standards, one for most of us, and one for the rich, are being mainstreamed.  It is a dangerous era, similar in the rise of ethnonationalism before WWII.   Understandably, we want to hide from a threat that provokes such tremendous anxiety.  Movie-makers might prefer to acquiesce instead of retort, lining up their message with the preferences of the bully in power. 

Yes, acquiescence brings money and favor, in the short term, anyway, but this is not the noble or decent path.  Producers who bow down to fascism make their movies a shadow vehicle for male chauvinism and all the violence, cruelty, oppression and ignorance it bears.

This is not the time to kiss the ring of people like Donald Trump, especially given a recent horror--the ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza, supported by US weapons.  I close with the words of Elie Wiesel:  “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”

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Poem: Knight

 

Knight

 

a small and uncertain halo

glorifies my curse,

the gold of my epaulets

tinged with dusk.

 

once,

i pervaded adoration.

i took bets and jubilated

on the course of my scars.

 

mine was a brute valor then,

the sort that censored sorrow,

conquered the hesitant,

and misery upstaged.

 

it was said that all roads led

to the pinning-on of my medals,

a glitter of low-hanging

gilded fruit.

 

theaters reveled in the havoc

when my sword went forth,

hungry as a gargantua,

to swill the blood of war.

 

i courted death, when i swung,

all glisten and crimson,

curved just that right amount,

like a lady-in-waiting’s smile.

 

 

================================

Poem: Minotaur

 

Minotaur

 

in the center

a pile of the worst horrors never told,

bloody coins, corrupted jewels,

devil flowers that none must ever take,

 

and yet always, again and again,

 

a dare of memory

wanders the million doors of dreams,

risking a ferocious stalker

who would devour every last morsel

of redolence.

 

only beauty

lives in the core without insanity.

only beauty understands

such dreadful power and

why it must be quarantined--

 

so the shabby werewolf believes,

that bloodiest guardian for the ugly job,

always a struggle not to be convinced

by what suffers its teeth.

====================================

3/2/25 ... changed a line

Poem: Waiting

 

Waiting

 

geyers of lumens

spill over a furlong of darkness,

cast from two golden chalices,

both of them brimmed 

with a heartbeat of drowned bass notes.

 

the harsh spectacle

finds my alabaster face,

cheekbones pale in the bright onslaught.

somehow, it seems, all at once,

i am more important

than all the orbits

of star and astrology

above this lavish glow.

 

does some herald seek me out?

do they think i’m spectral

and so i know the path to god,

a tortuous journey

best kept secret with the dead?

 

but no door opens for me.

 

the growling glow

and its thumping speakers,

so many luminous squiggles

on the dashboard,

 

moves on.

 

i can’t help but think

this was as close as i’ll ever get

to sprouting wings--

that if i sat inside

and lowered a window,

wind would gallop across my face.

 

 

 

 

========================================

3/5/25 .. changed a word

3/2/25 ... mods

"Everyone will always have been against this" (quote)

 One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this. -- Omar El Akkad

"First off, writing is the only thing I know how to do. It’s the only thing I’m halfway good at. I was in a situation where I was watching the worst thing I had ever seen in my lifetime. Not only was I being told by my elected representatives and my institutional representation that this was necessary and needed to continue, but I was also paying for it through my tax dollars. And I had to sit with the reality that in a very real way I was killing those kids. And so I retreated into — which has always been my first avenue of retreat — the page, writing." --

https://ca.yahoo.com/omar-el-akkad-western-hypocrisy-on-genocide-in-gaza-makes-us-complicit-in-death-and-destruction-of-palestine-213221248.html

Poem: Not in a Bottle

 

 

Not in a Bottle

 

lots of bustling blue suits. 

lots of frothy letters

which hop from lapel to label.

it’s an oceanic office,

where no one grasps the comings-and-goings.

liquid sentences toss and frolic

higgledy-piggledy

unruly and uncontained.

 

there aren’t even bottles to hold the scrolls.

and yet the rolling, roiling multitudes

wait and wait and wait

for a promise that might never have been written.

 

it’s hard not to say to myself,

when i spy some distant clue,

 ‘is it that one, out there,

atop the thousandth wave or so?’

then i blink, and must add,

‘now where did it ship off to?’

 

maybe all the posts

torn and sheering in the flotsam and bluster

are blank--

nothing but

little-orphan-annie eyes

of nameless accountants

which open only to close

accounts that cannot be deactivated.

 

a long time hence,

a preoccupied letter from the ocean

pushed up bubbles between my toes.

it didn’t care about foolish things

like envelopes, postage, or an address.

 

as rapidly as i read the letter,

billions of grains of sand

gobbled up its foamy pretense.

the reveal unraveled

even as i had the urge to articulate

what had not quite been seen.

 

with a snicker,

a rogue wind rushed the last wisps of

‘Dear Whimsical Dreamer … ’

away.

========================================

3/2/25 .... mods 

The Morass of Propaganda (quote)

===

 

To save people from the morass of propaganda ... is one of the chief aims of education.  Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from fiction. 

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.  But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society.  The most dangerous criminal may be the person gifted with reason but with no morals.

We must remember that intelligence is not enough.  Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education.

                                                --Martin Luther King, Jr. 

===

Poem: Philosopher In Condo

 

Philosopher In Condo

 

all rooms superfluous

except for the cave

where bookcases lean almost upside-down,

covers pressed

leathery wing to wing,

each the faintest squeak

of an arcane title

 

and

 

the philosopher hunches under a dim cone

to scrawl jagged autistic shibboleths

as randomish as

the dust motes which curl

to drift through the air.

 

his bathrobe dates to 19-(something or other)

the terrycloth unraveled to

speak in many tongues

above Pendelton-wool shirt pockets.

a shabby-mad-genius chic.

 

his bed a mattress sagged to

the floor, his pillows two encyclopedias

and a gift he gave to his daughter,

long discarded,

when she could barely say “teddy bear.”

 

now the daughter is ‘some age’ and has a

grandchild he sometimes likes to know,

if his toilet-seat thinker’s pose

becomes too tedious,

the cerebral weight of his thousands of books too heavy,

the ideas he seeks to crack too thick,

circling up to resist as intractable as

the scum on the porcelain

of the toilet bowl

 

and yet

emeritus life

has softened four decades of

implacable intellectual regimen,

so that now--just now--

for a fleet falter of a second,

his emotions

wonder what it would be like to leap

out of concept,

what it would be like to see with eyes too misty for

Aristotle, Kant or Plato’s Theory of Forms? 

 

somehow this rogue emotion seeped through,

between the ticker tape of theoretical formulations

ceaseless and anal in his perfectionist mind.

 

===================================

2/20 ... changed a phrase

Based on a real person I know well

Poem: Land of the Blind

 

Land of the Blind

 

harsh and unkempt,

smacks of greasy curses

leap from my mouth

to catch fire.

 

i discouse on ogres

who cannibalize each other,

becoming cyclopses,

who chew down onion-fat eyes.

 

that’s all there is, i proclaim,

gluttons made of cars, buildings and crowds,

who gobble as one

in singular blindness.

 

what if god

shined a spotlight on the spectacle,

captured the fierce greed

in so many gutted stares--

 

all that blood,

suddenly not so hidden,

tricklng to branch and drip

off all those benighted chins?

 

 

 

========================

The demagogue in Israel, Netanyahu, has ordered the removal of the Palestinians from Gaza, in accordance with the decree of the fascist dictator in America, Trump.   And so, ethnic cleansing and genocide are back, initiated on the global stage by Jews, who were victims of ethnic cleansing under the reign of the Nazis, and also by the USA, which helped defeat the Nazis during World War II.

Vast Evil has come around again, to threaten humanity, and the USA  and Israel are sinking in its muck.  

If there is a God, I believe that God gave the USA one last chance, under Joe Biden.  God said, "Here is Netanyahu, committig genocide and ethnic cleansing.  What will you do about it, Joe Biden?"  And Biden said to God, "I will supply the weapons for the genocide and ethnic cleansing."  And God replied, "Then you are no better than Trump, and you have damned your country to decline."  Joe Biden protested, "But I am better than Trump."  And God said, "I would have given the USA another chance, if only you had simply said that ethnic cleansing and genocide were wrong.  Instead, you commited them."

  

Poem: Puny

 

Puny

 

the billion-year run

of silverfish

mocks my lonely strum

of a soul,

 

this blip of a vibe

on a noisy sphere,

which itself is but a tremble

in the vibrissa

of a galaxy.

 

and the universe itself,

so many fugues of spirals

of orchids in a garden

of wilt and rush.

 

what muse fuels

 my puny, soon-dead words?

some flashy palp 

of swift sliding star?

 

 

 

================

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The predecessors of silverfish, along with those of jumping bristletails, are considered the earliest and most primitive insects. They evolved at the latest in mid-Devonian and possibly as early as late Silurian more than 400 million years ago.[31]”

Poem: Walking Past Horses

 

Walking Past Horses

 

mustangs mutter at my shadow.

a neuron from their ancestors

mistook me for a tiger;

but quickly i become

just another dull patch,

like the cars blurring by.

 

maybe it lasted for a second,

the clarity of equine insight. 

when i look back the beasts

are wooden again,

shaggy brown shrubs

planted in dust.

 

most of their life festers

within a 10 x 10 fate.

none seem to remember

hooves as free as wings—

 

millennia have passed

since chisels likened horses

to seraphim.

=================================

Poem: Together

 

Together

 

golf-ball-wide and rusty

a lug nut found the toe of my boot

and rode it up up up

out of a land of dust. 

it rolled to employ my toe again

hop hop hop

across an arroyo basin

simmery with soupy heat.

 

after a long bout of scampers,

among the hot rod lizards

near a single cactus that could hardly grow,

the lug nut rolled against a stone,

cheek to cheek.

it looked up at me

with an improbable angle

which signaled, perhaps,

that it didn’t want to jaunt

anymore.

 

perhaps the lug nut and the stone

would lie together for centuries

until the nut offered the last of its rusty heart

to the stone.

and the stone would wilt

through a slow gauntlet of grief

until a last raindrop melted

the shimmer of its adoring eye.

 

=================================

2/8/25 . .. changed a word, fixed typo

Poem: Up in the Foothills

 

Up in the Foothills

 

a moth wing

impaled on a cactus whispered

 

it saw my shoes

dogged by a pack of dust

 

unforgiving 

in the hideaway of the sagebrush.

 

a moth wing …

i don’t know but

 

when the Chumash prayed

in this now-White place,

 

they didn’t see thousands of cars

or the Burger Kings

 

down below

in the ‘San Fernando Valley’

 

they .. .what can i say

about what they saw or tasted

 

when they partook of

(what we call) Jimson Weed?

 

a vision beyond ‘this place’?

a sip of some sacred fever?

 

‘this place’ of constant commericals

and money and property

 

that will not, cannot, shall not escape

the shallow cruelty of LA greed.

 

 

 

==========================

2/5/25 ... switched a phrase around

Los Angeles, circa ... 1990

Poem: Plants

Plants

 

bodies of leaf and

arm and twig,

photosynthetic

green green green

gold gold gold

blooms of pollen

and money and the

clocks clocks clocks

and the tick tick tick

of quantified rain

which drives the rush

of the weedy pots

knotted and stalled

and coiled around

binds of other pots

and plots with squares

and boxes and supervisors

who explain the world

as a wargame of gardens

whose roots wrestle, suffer

and strangle to serve

the superiors of the supervisors

whose logistics battle

fiscal enemies.

 

all those soul-drained lillies,

tulips, poppies and irises,

browns blues hazels emeralds

oranges and tourmalines,

bobbing in bustles

bent in downpours of seconds

black black black their coats--

what can they possibly see

in the stride and stress

of the hedges and pledges

of a kudzu destiny?

===============

1/29 ... eds, fixed typos

Poem: For Us

 

For Us

 

 we muddles of flesh

can’t fathom the insouciance of the sun,

prefer the wallows of shadow.

 

our priss-froze secrets

loathe the gnaw of dawn,

seek cloaks of ghasted rain.

 

noon practically stabs us.

lawful the bright candor

of its accurate purity.

 

the stars, heaven’s wards,

dog to mock our torn trellis

of bestial myths.

 

for us

 

to look at a sweet blue sky

is to vomit in fear

at how stupidly we bleed.

 

we carve and crave this darksome path,

in a flawless universe 

of beauiful math

 

and could have miracles for wings.

and yet any hint of hopeful feather

we claw to pluck,

 

lowering our heads to whine.

 

 

=================================

Today, or yesterday, Trump said Gaza should be "cleaned out," thereby sanctioning the gross and obvious international atrocity of ethnic cleansing.  Such is the world now, a place where genocide is back, despite all the warnings.  Despite all the "Never Again."

Poem: Mantra of Web

 

Mantra of  Web

 

a sage ponders near ribs of silk

which catch light to draw wings

 

and concludes

 

there’s no stopping

life’s sweetsour trysts,

 

this truck

of flirt and declension.

 

gossamer, they conclude,

is no meaner than the moths

who scourge apple trees,

 

or the verdigris

on molded tangerines;

 

for even plants

have delicate sense

in wound, plight and savor.

 

more so,

 

in this beautiful orgy

of the world’s sucked and plumped,

 

who splices whom,

which ‘how' grafts onto what ‘why’?

 

a gardener, it is said,

is led along

by the bridle of a peach tree:

 

heated from the toil

for golden succulence

under the yoke of cultivation.

 

maybe, even, 

in the end,

 

the sparkles

in the halo of a spider

are the most innocent,

 

mere sequins

aside the sharp jewels

and fiery spangles

 

of much more.

 

 

 

 

 

=======================

1/24/25 .. "mantra" replaces "philosophy" ... other mods

Poem: Here

 

Here

 

playfulness of light,

a skitter a scatter

of dapples atumble

alert beyond lesson

and quick as a wow!

immersed in riches

too valuable to possess;

and so soon gone

sifted into the next

casual roll of sun and sparkle

of moon and speckle.

still,

here we are, you and i,

the two of us,

for the briefest of infinite joys

afloat.

=========================================

Essay: An Inauguration that Befouls the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday

 An Inauguration that Befouls and Defiles the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday

A theme on this blog over the years is that the United States is poised to become the shortest-lived dominant Empire in Western history.  It might be the shortest lived empire in all human history,  Full disclosure:  I am not an historian and my reference base is only the Roman, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and English empires, all of which owned the global stage for significant stretches.  According to Wikipedia, England was the “foremost global power” for about century.  One could argue that the US became the dominant empire after WWII, when the previous great empires slaughtered themselves into subordination in an orgy of stupidity, violence, cruelty and greed.  For the US empire to exceed Britain’s reign, it would have to endure until the year 2045, which marks a century since the end of WWII.  But such endurance is highly unlikely.

 

The primary reason is the country’s internal rot, its extreme corruption.  On that front, we can apply the classic saying:  the fish rots from the head.

 

11/5 was one of the worst days in the history of human civilization.  On November 5, 2024, a fascist dictator Donald Trump took the White House in the United States.  It was a close election, and though America deserves to be condemned for its cruelty and vice, which I will get into below, I want to point out, underscore even, that 48% of voters backed Kamala Harris, a Black and Indian woman who deeply believes in human rights.  The election of Harris would have put a major dent in 12,000 years of patriarchy and, as well, over four hundred years of American racism and misogyny. 

If Harris had won, the maturity of the collective consciousness of the human species would have continued.  Our ethics technology might have advanced, improving our chances of escaping the petty, insecure warlordism that has reigned for millennia.

 

Speaking as a US citizen myself, tens of millions of us are truly horrified by what happened on 11/5.

 

Now, though I dread to write about it, onward to the awful topic.  Today Trump is inaugurated as President, an act that befouls and defiles the other meaning of this date:  a national holiday to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.

 

A Defining Moment

 

The majority of US voters went for Donald Trump, a man who has been found liable for rape in civil court, and accused by over twenty women of sexual assault; a man who has been caught on tape saying that he could “just grab them by the pussy” and get away with it; a man who has been found guilty of 34 felonies; and who has been indicted on charges of treason in federal court, and who was in the process of being tried for them; a man who had been publicly diagnosed by dozens of professional psychologists and psychiatrists as both a psychopath and a narcissist; and a man who, for all his life, reveled in multiple vices, suffered six bankruptcies, and who earned money, not from business acumen, but as an actor on a TV show who played merely what he is:  a meretricious paragon of vanity, insecurity, falsehoods, and greed. 

 

The racist, sexist Trump does excel as a con man.  He has plied cult-level demagoguery to amass a cult-base constituency of zealots who worship him.  Copying the classic tactics of tyranny, he proclaims that those outside of his base are the enemy, who deserve to be hated and who need to be destroyed. 

 

And so the noble momentum in the USA for true equality--for people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community--has been shattered by a fierce, violent backlash of willful, gaslit ignorance.  Trump’s followers sacrifice their own health and financial well-being, the very stability of their own country, for one essential purpose:  to maintain what Isabel Wilkerson rightly calls the American caste system---more simply, traditional White macho patriarchy. 

 

Will Trump fix America’s corrupt healthcare system?  No.  Will he end the financial imbalance that hands a tenth of a percent of the population 90% of the country’s wealth?  No.  And yet he will ensure White male rule.  This includes, as it always has, a system of rewards for women and people of color who accept and serve the White patriarchy, granting them perks over those who refuse to bow.

 

Dredging up the words of Lyndon Johnson, the 36th President of the USA:

 

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/trump-immigration-white-supremacy.html

 

Adding more context, the United States is a country that only a hundred and sixty years ago fought a four-year Civil War because the Southern White patriarchy refused to give up its Black slaves.  After the South lost the war, they hated the North with pure, raw animosity.

 

Here are the lyrics of the song, Good Ol’ Rebel Soldier, written right after the Civil War:

 

Oh, I'm a good old Rebel soldier, now that's just what I am;
For this "Fair Land of Freedom" I do not give a damn!
I'm glad I fit against it, I only wish we'd won,
And I don't want no pardon for anything I done.

 

I hates the Constitution, this "Great Republic," too!
I hates the Freedman's Bureau and uniforms of blue!
I hates the nasty eagle with all its brags and fuss,
And the lying, thieving Yankees, I hates 'em wuss and wuss!

 

I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do,
I hates the Declaration of Independence, too!
I hates the "Glorious Union" -- 'tis dripping with our blood,
And I hates their striped banner, and I fit it all I could.

 

I followed old Marse Robert for four years, near about,
Got wounded in three places, and starved at Point Lookout.
I cotched the "roomatism" a'campin' in the snow,
But I killed a chance o' Yankees, and I'd like to kill some mo'!

 

Three hundred thousand Yankees is stiff in Southern dust!
We got three hundred thousand before they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot,
But I wish we'd got three million instead of what we got.

 

I can't take up my musket and fight 'em now no more,
But I ain't a'gonna love 'em, now that's for sartain sure!
I do not want no pardon for what I was and am,
And I won't be reconstructed, and I do not care a damn!

 

 

This attitude of hate extended to stubborn, vicious embrace of the idea that slavery was absolutely fine.   Perhaps, at some point, the South let go of the idea of Black slavery.  I’m not really sure it has frankly, speaking as a White person myself, whose ancestry is Southern and goes back many generations.  My ancestors owned slaves. 

 

Nevertheless, this is certain:  a virulent racism plagues the USA; and alongside it a great hatred, embedded in White culture, for anyone who dares challenge it.  Racism hides these days behind a mask of deceit.  Since the Civil Rights Movement, it has become the norm, even in the South, to deny in word that racism is acceptable (Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!) even as it is advanced in subterfuge and deed. 

 

In back rooms, no doubt, the ‘N-word’ continues to be used in full contempt and rage.  My grandmother used it all the time and frequently went on rants.  “Bean, those N-s are smart,” which was the beginning of a long tirade against Black people.  “Bean” was my nickname as a child.

 

Such is the ‘United’ States.  Infected with bigotry, misogyny and homophobia.  The “Manifest Destiny” movement learned early on--in its genocide of Native Peoples, in its use of Black slavery to build the country--that violence and Darkness can win out over the Light.

 

And now, in the form of Trump, Darkness has won control of the soul of America.  Darkness was wrested control from America’s other side, the wonderful one that brought us the first Black President in Barack Obama, the one that championed the rights of women to vote, and which continues to fight for the rights of women and LGBTQ people. 

 

Darkness has won over Light.  I don’t know if the war between Selfishness and Ethics is completely over, but it could be.  Why?  Because physical violence is an extremely effective tool of social control; and Trump has the military and the police under his authority.  Trump also has power to inflict heavy economic damage in the form of lawsuits, the outcome of which will likely be determined by judges under his thrall.

Battened on decades of consumerism, slathered in its petty, shallow vanities and insecurities, the American people have little ethical spine.  We have been trained to be materialistic and needy, insecure and pathetic, not the sort of noble citizen who is worthy or willing to fight for anything higher, such as Justice.  Our penchant is to obey and lap up frivolous gifts, perks, discounts, coupons, sales--on and on, while we are commercial-whipped to rush to get cheaper products and to show them off with the vulgar awe of a shill in an advertisement.  

If our neighbor has some socially invented status symbol that we don’t have, we fret and pout, never thinking about the deeper levels of life, only the validation of our own voracious, product-hungry ego.  For decades, under the banner of "free market capitalism," the purchasing power of the US citizen was considered the 'economic engine' driving the world economy.  It has forged shackles of vice and voracity in our psyche.

 

Maybe, if we are lucky, the American people still possess the seeds of righteous determination, and can rise up from this moral trench.   But it would be absurd not to consider the likelihood that the USA, with its mightiest military, under the mercurial control of a narcissistic psychopath, will spread forth its Dark Shadow to encompass and devour as much as it can, straddling latitudes and longitudes, along vectors of greed, power-lust, malevolence and malignancy.

 

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1/21 eds... 

Poem: Rambler

 

 

Rambler

 

near a rose in a hydra,

i watch the long naked

azure odalisque of the sky

and wondered

at the thinness of the human ‘us’:

our cramped lives sandwiched

between spheres and fossils,

our cities never to reach

the height of dinosaurs

over their millions of long years

of rise and recline.

 

and yet when the Earth dies

it will be from our thinness.

how we prowl among the atoms

like dangerous specks.

we hold the cards

too big for our brief hands,

and don’t worry about the rosebushes

and azure odalisques,

and the rest so beautiful,

like our children,

while we bet them all

on a sliver of a green table

supported by tiny strings

which we tug to herd and control

and do our best to puppet the universe.

 

 

==================

Poem: Without Mocking

 Without Mocking

a violent wall stares

at the failure of my body to move.

no communication.  a crushed essence

the opposite of wings.

i place a palm on the wall’s faceless mask,

and recognize how i fled and hid.

not only from my heart’s poisoned love

but from its hurt conflagration.

 

i understand this consignment

to a random braille of irrevelant

physics in tiny bumps of plaster and paint.

this alphabet designed to hide and lie.

 

i understand  

 

that i was once strong and numb,

as muscular as the grey wall.  as impregnable. 

before shame broke the mirage and judged--

 

judged with an expression

which mocks without mocking,

like this wall.

 

yes,

i earned this fate from my lack.

 

i should have swooned, instead,

in the aftermath of deceptions.

i should have preened

under the bright lights.

 

i should have survived.

 

 

 

===============================

Poem: United

 

United

 

clothed

by the misery of the poor,

our minds false and small,

one half lying to the other,

we smile

 

and go

 

to the big fat stores,

where we care more

about saving a dollar

than the fate of the poor,

 

the world,

 

give us liberty

which means let us be fooled,

give us freedom

to send our soldiers

to take your freedom away.

 

 

=============================

Poem: Leader

 Leader

 

boys cheer

till their necks blush from the words

of a great white man

who burrows into the dark

to extract their reddest essence.

 

the cave that is the speech

of that bottomless mouth

plucks all those jugulars

to throb and swell

with hate ripe enough to reap

 

until

 

it is cast down

on the shame of mothers

when they mourn the loss

of a fly-speckled son

turned into another corpse of war.

 

a brag of fireworks like gunshots

accompanies the golden plane

of the great white man

as the wings drag the sunset along,

adding its fresh blood to the pile.

 

 

====================================

1/20 ... "from" replaces "to"

Inspired by the work of Denis Johnson

Poem: Comforter

 

Comforter

 

this paradox of marvels

flirts with the sculpt of my fingers,

 

cowls and cloaks

in a cuddle of oblong ghosts,

 

or the warmth of tongue-savored vanilla

as it melts away,

 

or weaves of humpbacks and dolphins

swimming from a churn of tourists,

 

or the throne

of cumulus-plump, Elysium-worthy pelts,

on which i soar

 

toward the rolls of a much desired

deliquesce of sleep.

 

would this comforter 

wrap me entire in its orchestra,

 

waists of cellos and violins

alert with cylinders and cymbals

 

to the flare-lip of fate's

most blissful horn?

 

i can see it now, almost,

 

hips of kettle drums and bassoons

on waves of harps and flutes,

 

rapture’s most fantastical music,

passionate of metamorphosis,

 

till dawn.

 

 

 

==============================

1/13/25 ... "fantastical" replaces "fantastic"

1/7/25 mods

Poem: Brooding

 

Brooding

 

the blank page swallows me

into its unfortunate underbelly,

tangling me

in the plaintive maze of its teats.

how to free the mind

from the violence of the creative milk?

now it’s all about sex

and the struggle for warm,

young tastes, among

the corridors of blue ink

which precisely line the white road

to god.

================================

1/8/25 ... "maze" replaces "zugzwang" ...

Poem: White Xmas

 

White Xmas

 

the plow-shoved streets

boast wounds

from the tramp of boots,

scabs of dirty snow

left by angels

in a world of broken feathers

fallen too far down to look up

and see heaven’s dome.

 

lords, journeymen, wretches

relegated and designated,

surly prancers, comets, vixens and cupids

as liable to moods

as the cold-warm, Fahrenheit-fickle sun.

 

watch them strain and falter

under snowflake-reins of diamond and grit,

maybe glimpse the Great Hobo,

the subway his sleigh now,

as he ho-ho-ho’s for the happy child

born under a privileged star.

 

 

 

=============================================

Essay: The Power of Ideas and Projection, for Evil or Good

Ideas, Projection, Evil and Good

 

The human brain, feeble in its grasp, struggles to comprehend the vast change soon to steer the direction of the planet Earth, afflicting all animals and ecosystems, including that dominant greedy species, the human being.  An historic tsunami has launched, its origin point one of the most cataclysmic days of recorded time, 11/5.  On that day, Donald Trump attained the office of the Presidency of the United States.  The cultish obedience of his core followers, tens of millions of citizens, will propel him to claim total power for himself.  He is likely to succeed, given the lessons of history concerning the social infection that is fascism.  Anyone who stands in the way will be terrorized by his core followers, who at this point are similar to Hitler’s Brownshirts (Sturmabteilung), their violence abetted by laws that make it legal for citizens to own military-grade assault rifles like the AR-15.

 

Below I offer two angles from which to consider this grim transformation of the course of fate.  The second angle elaborates on the first.

 

Part One:  The Power of Ideas

 

Our starting point is the sheer power of simple ideas.

 

Consider an example from the past, the Curse of Ham.  This simple idea fueled great evil for centuries:

 

For almost 500 years, priests taught their flocks that a Hebrew prophet had condemned millions of Africans to slavery because they were descended from Ham’s son Canaan. The curse of Ham thus formed the core religious justification for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

https://theconversation.com/the-curse-of-ham-how-people-of-faith-used-a-story-in-genesis-to-justify-slavery-225212

 

The Curse of Ham did not on its own secure the legalization of  slavery.  But it was a crucial member of a set of ideas related to race and racism.  Note that, very obviously, the Curse of Ham is a cruel, irrational, faith-based idea.  Note, as well, that its lack of rationality or morality didn’t matter at all.  Why?  Because human rationality is easy shut down by cultures of ignorance, that is, cultures that support a rich upper class which not only benefits from general ignorance, but ferociously and actively fosters it. 

If there is a God above, that God created a universe where cruel, irrational, brutal ideas, a mentality of evil, can take over and drive a cattle call of stampeding multitudes, who bring ruin on themselves and others.  Their seduction by darkness changes the nature of society with slaughterous permanence. 

Some claim that divine punishment occurs after death, in some preternatural realm beyond our reckoning.  “There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.”  And yet there is zero scientific evidence for such empyrean justice.  The universe in which we dwell, though, is analogous to a purgatory:  a place where either evil or good can reign, depending on our own choices, a place where we consign ourselves to a living hell, or lift ourselves to cultivate a decent, happy society.  Whatever the outcome, it is leveraged by the collective state of the masses, who can be influenced to trample and stampede, or to behave in accordance with moral laws of fairness and equality. 

 

Some Inoculants

In our universe, where the gods have abandoned us to our own stupidity, knowledge is the best inoculant against the spread of hellish social systems.  But the people in power who benefit from ignorance--for instance, by proclaiming the Curse of Ham to be the divinely ordained truth--do everything they can to prevent the spread of knowledge. 

 

Another way to protect society from hellish social systems is to develop ways to identify demagogic psychopaths, such as Donald Trump, who rise to power as dictators.  But this would require teaching the discipline of psychology to young students, starting at least in high school, probably earlier.  And yet an enlightened curriculum would require that local school board officials be rational, instead of dogmatic in service to politicians who benefit from ignorance.

There is solid basis behind Mark Twain’s quip, “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

And so, despite potential inoculants to ignorance and folly, various Catch-22s hold us hostage in cultures designed to be unfair and cruel.

 

A Simple Formula

 

In general, ideas affect behaviors, which in turn affect the world.  A handy heuristic:

 

I > B > W

 

Power is another element, because you need power to impose your beliefs:

 

P > I > B > W

 

Let’s employ the above formula.  The vast power of the USA, with the strongest economy and military in the world, can be mobilized to impose certain beliefs.  Those beliefs will be those of the dictator.  And they will include core concepts of fascism:  a Master Race; Superiority of the Male over Female; and the Call of Conquest.  Vini Vidi Vici.

Given the bully fist of the United States, which can be held up to the face of other countries with aggressive clout, fascism is soon to stagger and immiserate the entire world. 

Donald Trump is our messiah now.  Ecce Homo!

 

Part Two:  Through a Dark Mirror

 

However, fascism is not merely an idea, any more than Donald Trump is a rational actor.  Fascism is a mental sickness, a crippling social dysfunction.  This closely intertwines with the psychiatric disorders that Mr. Trump suffers, namely, narcissism and psychopathy [1]. 

 

The tsunami of Darkness about to hit the world, then, is not so much about ideas as it is about a disordered mind getting to do whatever it wants wherever it wants.  In other words, the world will become a dark mirror of Donald Trump, someone who is infinitely insecure and infinitely ugly.  Someone who perpetually hides from his own bottomless self-doubt by doing whatever it takes. 

In the field of psychology, projection is often understood as blaming others for what you yourself inflict or suffer.  It can, though, also be understood as a reshaping of the environment.  If you have enough power, you can mold the world to the interior of your mind.  In this case, it is a high-powered form of self-fulfilling prophesy.

Unfortunately, it is easier to spread fear and loathing than it is to spread love.  The reason is that it is easier to beat others into submission than to build healthy bonds.  To quote Milton in Paradise Lost, "To create is better than created to destroy."  

To destroy, all it takes is weapons.  And the USA has plenty of those.

 

Similar To Domestic Abuse

 

Consider the psychology of a domestic violence perpetrator.  This abuser controls his partner and children through many kinds of force and mental manipulation.  He terrorizes them with insidious strategies and tactics, and so gains full control to shape the home.  The home comes to reflect the broken, atrocious, disgusting mental state of the abuser’s psyche.  It is a place of fear, of brutal force, of total control, and of loyalty tests that require accepting lies as truth.   It is a home where a single insecure man obsesses on every detail of his partner’s behavior, always working to maintain and increase his power over her and the children.  

 

Donald Trump will remake the United States in ways akin to the domestic-violence abuser.   Now, some people might object to the use of “evil” to describe a domestic violence perpetrator.  But such a perpetrator is a ruthless, brutal coward, who takes advantages of emotional connections to the people he attests to love and, instead of loving them, terrorizes them with methodical and precise calculation.  He destroys his victims' self-esteem and keeps them in perpetual fear.  He beats them with objects, and with his fists, but this is only part of the greater insidious manipulation [2].

 

To shatter any resistance from a victim, the perpetrator will threaten to kill the children and the family pets.  This cruelty goes on and on, day after day.  Endless surveillance and menace. Always--always--the threat of force. 

The word “gaslighting” comes from a loyalty test that a fictional domestic abuser inflicted on his partner.  The light on a wall-mounted lamp might be shining bright; but if the abuser says it is turned off, the victim knows full well that they better convince him that they believe it is turned off as well.  The victim knows that they will be scrutinized, all the time, every inch of their body language, for any perceived deception and, as well, to ensure fully obedience, body and soul. 

 

Here is part of a description of what life was like under the dictatorship of Al-Assad in Syria, who was recently forced to flee the country, after 20+ years of methodical, calculated control:

 

At school, I learned that if you wanted to get anywhere, you had to be part of the informant system that Syrians have lived with for decades. If you handed in your list of names of your classmates who spoke badly about the teacher, you’d be made head of your class. Everyone thought everyone else was reporting them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/opinion/al-assad-syria.html

 

This is a plausible future under the cultish dictatorship of Donald Trump.  Total surveillance.  Total control.  Including the minds of every child.  Trump’s evil will be far worse than that of a domestic abuser, because he has the power to kill or jail people, en masse, and get away with it. 

 

For instance, the genocide in Gaza, for which the USA is supplying the weapons, will accelerate.

 

The Good News

 

I’m going to end on a positive note, which, I know, is a shocking turnaround.  The good news is that enlightened ideas can drive the world, too.  Likewise, a virtuous mind can project health and harmony.  The idea of human rights follows the heuristic above:  rights affect behaviors, which alter the world.    The world has changed, for the better, quite a bit in the last few hundred years.  Our ethics technology climbed to levels never before seen. 

 

Tragically, however, we have taken a sad turn into a Lord of the Flies scenario.  Those in power, such as Trump, are as immature as 14-year-old boys who find themselves able to do whatever they want, with no adults around to stop them.

 

We’re in a dark place.  But don’t stop trying.  When you act out of Good, you are doing something special and rare, and it will affect the collective human consciousness more than you know. 

The way to counter Evil is Good.  The simplest little act can be resplendent with ethical light.  Send your message up to the universe.  Maybe you will even shock the gods, who seem to have abandoned us.

If we act as ants, we are ants to the gods.  This statement came to me in a dream.

 

And yet, ponder this:  what happens if we do not act as ants?

 

 

====================

 

 

Footnotes

(1)  The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Brandy X. Lee, Editor

"In THE DANGEROUS CASE OF DONALD TRUMP, twenty-seven psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health experts argue that, in Mr. Trump’s case, their moral and civic “duty to warn” America supersedes professional neutrality. They then explore Trump’s symptoms and potentially relevant diagnoses to find a complex, if also dangerously mad, man."

(2) Domestic violence occurs frequently without actual physical violence.  However, it is absolutely still fully abuse.  'Words hit hard as a fist.'  They shred self-esteem and perception of reality.  A great movie to watch on this, which just came out on Netflix, is Alice, Darling.

============