The World Staggers

 The globe staggers as the strongest country, previously the strongest democracy in the world, flips to fascism and probably, given Trump's apparent preferences, a totalitarian state in the style of Hitler.  

This is a colossal, defining moment for all of human civilization--forever.  And yet, however, that forever is likely to be short.  

The instability and massive ego of our new dictator, a malignant narcissist, tends toward ceaseless spin and recklessness, which is likely to spark sporadic travails, scourges and, yes, wars, such as Putin expanding into Poland.  And China going into Taiwan.   

General mayhem and chaos.  Power-grabs everwhere because the global police force led by the US is gone.  World War Three is likely and with it nuclear launch.

Trump, himself, our new dictator here in the USA is mainly interested in being worshipped, so perhaps he will not invade Mexico or Canada or seize Greenland (he has expressed interest in 'buying' it).  

Maybe this evil man is content to destroy the greatness of the USA and shrink it down to a theater of one:  A golden T, akin to the golden Calf of Baal,  constantly in the spotlight, with severe punishment for those who dare to challenge his authority and total control.  

In a sense, all Americans will soon live in the equivalent of a very abusive, violent household, where the police and military will be the abuser's fists.  And the abuser's voice will grate our ears, demeaning us along with the very fabric of country and culture, a suffusion of sickness from every angle of the media kingdom the dictator now controls.

A little segue.  I am grading papers, and may not write poems for a while.  (indeed, this may be my last semester ever grading papers, because the university has not as of yet offered me any classes next year).  But it isn't just about having no time due to grading--

I stagger.  The whole world staggers.  We knew the power of demagoguery.  Of hate and fear when wielded as psychological tools to turn masses of human beings into ignorant hordes.  But Trump, being so odious and disgusting, so generally awful, many of us, perhaps, still clung to some hope that the US citizen wouldn't be that gullible, so hate-bound,  and straight-up self-destructive.  So obsessed by the need to maintain the racism and sexim inveterate and essential to the US "caste system" (Wilkerson).

But no.  

And so ... 

Behold the Idiocy.  Behold the Darkness in the human soul. ugly and bared on full naked display.  The Orwellian gambit.  Hate is Love.  War is Peace.  Slavery is Freedom.  Let me add, Ignorance is Wisdom.

It likely now damns us, our concession to worship a man so vile and disgusting that political satirists lamented he was impossible to caricature.  He is a living caricature.  A walking extreme of everything vicious and rotten with vice. 

Can those of us who resist survive? Can we choose the Light?  Lincoln talked of "better angels."   Will you surrender yours?  Will I mine?  

How will we find a way to preserve our own inner Light?  To keep love and compassion in our core, as Trump's henchman, Stephen Miller, beings the construction of the 'camps' that he has vowed to build across the country?  How will we keep our souls as immigrants and others--potentially people like me, seen as political enemies--are put in those camps?

There has to be a way, even in hell, to not bow down to to devil.  

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

It's My Father's Birthday: "Keep Your Goodness"

 

Today is my father’s birthday.  Kit would’ve been 91.  He died in May last year at the age of 89.  As my grief continues, a process of remembrance across decades of philosophical discussions, as well as our time analyzing countless games of chess together, browsing through bookstores, eating at a range of restaurants, going to movies, taking hikes, and so much more, the whole odyssey of joys and pains that family share, and too the simple habits and routines that fondly demarcate individual quirks and preferences, I am feeling considerable relief that he did not live to witness what just happened to our country:  the election of a fascist to the office of the president, an egomaniacal man without conscience, who will do whatever it takes to become a full-fledged dictator and destroy the Constitution which founded the United States in liberty and human rights.

My father was a strong advocate of democracy and a foe of fascism.  He spent the last few decades of his life working on a book that not only laid a foundation of philosophical arguments for the importance of what he considered the only decent form of government, but which in addition developed an outline for its most ethical and effective expression [1].   One could quibble about specifics, whether Kit was right about this or that, but there’s no doubt that he took up the call of Enlightenment values.  The dignity of humanism.  It is a hopeful perspective, one that ennobles and frames the human condition as a stimulus for great and beautiful deeds.

One cornerstone of a humanist ethic is the idea that we can elevate each other, moving forward together, to sculpt better a world, by championing our unique human ability to reason.

Fascism, conversely, champions ignorance.  It blares the cultish call of a charismatic dictator, whose aura of might strives for two things:  (A) to dominate and direct the minds of about one third of the citizenry (this seems to be the average, on historical analysis) through a zealous rhetoric of divisive propaganda, and (B) to wield the resultant obedient herd as a weapon to menace and bully the dismayed and disorganized majority.

The championing of a cult versus the championing of reason.  These are the two paths.  Deceit or truth.

It’s a well-worn platitude that one’s character is an expression of one’s soul, manifesting in behavior that shapes the environment.  The person is known by their deeds.  Metaphorically, the tree is known by its fruit.  As it stands, the American people have chosen the tree of fascism.  In the USA, this is to submit to the superiority of the White male, and the inferiority of all others.

Isabel Wilkerson, in her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, argues that the USA has always had a caste system, similar in some ways to India’s caste system.  She discusses how Martin Luther King, Jr., after arrival in India in 1959 and while receiving accolades, was shocked to hear himself described as a member of the “Untouchable class” of America.  At first offended, King accepted the label upon reflection.

So, here we are.  Embracing our traditions of racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ and similar embedded otherisms.

Humanity could go on forever being ignorant and fanatic, locked in oppressive hierarchies, except for one thing:  the weapons we have evolved over millennia of war are now capable of annihilating civilization itself.

If not for this fact, we could go on being prisoners of our own ignorance and the dark karma it generates.  We could simply continue the cycle:  to fight and war and fear and butcher and slaughter and enslave and hate from our various hilltops, marked with our little flags of prejudice, always seeing the other sides as less human, more stupid, more sinful, more animal or even as insect, as when a scapegoat group is referred to as "cockroaches."  

One might say, we deserve an eternal fate, similar to crabs in a bucket, always pulling each other down.  And yet the children are innocent.  And very many adults desperately want change, and they do their best to be good and kind, not just to people of their own skin color, but to everyone.  And yet the innocent cannot stop the demagogic kings who control the police and the military and who can impoverish, jail or otherwise torment anyone they choose.  

Hitlerian propaganda, such as the Elders of Zion, saw the Jews as cannibals who fed on infants during Satanic rituals.  Recently, in a case dubbed “Pizzagate,” a man fired a rifle inside a pizza shop because he believed the shop hosted satanic pedophile rituals performed by Democrats:

 

“The unfounded "Pizzagate" Internet rumor at the center of this case accused the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria of being the home of a Satanic child sex abuse ring involving top Democrats such as Hillary Clinton. "Speculation and fabrications tied to the bizarre conspiracy theory have been relentlessly circulated by politically motivated fringe sites," as The Two-Way has reported.”  (NPR.org)

 

This level of ignorant violence and cruelty has an ancient history.  Long ago, humans proved their susceptibility to superstition, so much that we have stained our history with many battles, atrocities and oppressions of the utmost horrible nature due to the darkest, most irrational reactions of fear, outrage and hate.  

And yet these sorts of irrational reactions are a perverse mana-from-heaven to the mentally deluded men who sit atop thrones and proclaim themselves gods.  Such weaknesses--the exploits in the human mind-- are the reins they tug to steer the herd, to determine where it goes and grazes; and where it tramples.

It was a truly fantastic, beautiful moment in history, only hundreds of years ago, when a few countries began to break out of tyrany to advance democracy.  This change led to hundred of years of slowly improving conditions here in America.  An increase in fairness and equality. In the quality and dignity of our lives. 

Slavery was made illegal.  Black men gained the right to vote.  And then all women, too.  In 2015, gay marriage became legal, something I never thought I would celebrate in my lifetime.

But it is all crumbling away.  All America’s ethical advances are sliding down the slope of a sandtrap, which is the widening maw of fascism.  Once again, a disgusting, macho dictator with no conscience will lead us into a dark place of White male superiority in counterpoint to the inferiority of everyone else, with corresponding privileges or privations, powers or degradations, elevations or segregations.

Was my father, Kit, wrong to think that we could rise up above this evil?  No, he was not.  Democracy has been shown to be a plausible route.  After WWII, Hitler and other fascists were defeated.  Before that, the armies that defended slavery were overcome during the Civil War.  Despite frequent falls and failures, somehow in its broken, brutal journey the USA has managed to stumble toward the Light.

So, again, no, Kit was not wrong to champion democracy.  

Consider, too, the effect of our own individual choices, yours and mine, on our own souls.

I believe that every one of us who harbors a conscience--a sensitivity and reactivity to good and evil--is being watched by some part of their own mind, an internal judge capable of meting out sizeable sentences, whatever their mysterious nature and innermost effect might be.  Our own internal judge is immune to the denials, masks, deflections and even the self-loathing we erect to hide from the truth.  Even if we shut away the internal judge forever, still, it watches from the subconscious, and troubles the currents below the surface on which the completeness and quality of life depends. 

Whatever happens to humanity, even ultimate doom, I believe that somewhere, somehow, someone is watching us, aside from our own internal judgement.  Maybe it is aliens, though I don’t think so.  Maybe it is the Universe, whatever that means.  Or maybe it is Angels, as I like to call them.

Of course, we also watch each other and feel each others' gaze.  This fellow assessment can exert a pressure to conform.  But we are also drawn to honor the good people in our lives by acting in accord with their conscience and our own.  The alternative is to disappoint those we admire and to shame ourselves by bowing down to evil and its big lies.

My father’s last words to me were, “Keep your Goodness.” 

Thank you Kit, for your courageous philosophy.  We humans have wings that want to spread, to fly, even if it is only through the heavens of our own mind. 

 

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

 

 

11/12 ... eds throughout the day

11/11 ... This is going to need editing, but I wanted to publish it on the actual birthday of my father.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Noise

 

Noise

 

cannot be silent

in the way of a lake.

we clamor, bustle and complain.

 

no hint of the sonata of a loon,

a cricket croon,

or the ancient fugue of coyotes.

 

our lampposts blare all night.

 

don’t have it in us to succor the quiet.

our very attitudes belch

with the bravado of leafblowers,

whose tirades richochet off each other,

ostentatious in their obstreperous.

 

collective and multiplicative.

 

it’s the antithesis of the humble.

the air strains

to host so much noise.

even so, we keep on trying,

upping the density of the hoopla & rackety-clackety

to make it spread.

 

it’s the reverse of majesty.

we are each an endless whoop

against the still of the woods,

competing to take up verbal space.

 

all the other lives around us,

those inferior nuisances,

 

if they are even seen,

 

had better learn to listen,

to be meek and harnessed,

to hide.

 

 

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

11/11/24 ... mods

Poem: Thought

 

Thought

 

a hidden ruckus,

not that glib fake flow we call speech.

a donnybrook of puzzles

within a gnash of coarse

and yet complex folds.

 

a furioso, at times,

of mud, water and spark,

designed to rub some unnameable

fantastical itch--

 

an itch much more important,

in the end,

than the lifeless boasting

of all those nocturnal

dice-throws we call stars.

 

those stars worked forever, after all,

to forge this lewd internal contract,

this decillion-storm of little lights

stinging and binding and exciting each other--

 

all bubbly in a bowl of phantom soup,

a recipe cobbled together over eons

within a shell of bone

on a silly and yet oh so awesome

and cruel stage.

 

 

 

 

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

A description of thought

Poem: Another Chicken

 

Another Chicken

 

a thin neck takes blade.

the same cruel that has always been.

a predator-prey

pong game of pulsing red.

 

the hatchet crouches

between split throat

on bespattered bench.

 

ghosts of other limp plump

domesticated birds

lurk in the muck,

a succession of slaughters

over thousands of years.

 

should have been left to fly,

not bred down, whose ancestors

were once bright actors,

 under a forearm’s flex?

 

another thoughtless tensor

brought to us by the scourge of hunger

in a global abbatoir

of unthought whys.

 

 

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

Essay: Downward Slope

 

Not all that surprisingly, the American people have chosen a downward slope of ominous Darkness.  They have chosen Whiteness and patriarchy instead of equality; thuggery over decency; and violence over justice.  This is a country that only 165 years ago fought a war with itself because about half the States wanted to keep Black people enslaved.  The South went to war with the North to defend their freedom to keep Black people as chattel.   Needless to say, when the North won, the hatred of the South for the victors didn’t dwindle, nor did its will to oppress.  It festered instead, ambient in a culture of extreme and barbarous racism, including legalized segregation.

As well as its legacy of enslaving Black people, who built much of the country on their backs, America was founded in genocide of the Native Americans and continued that practice of murdering and herding entire peoples from the 1700s onward.

In sum, the core culture of America embodied in its ruling White class has a repugnant history of claiming manifest destiny while trampling on other peoples, territories and countries. Even today, right now, the USA, under its liberal president Joe Biden-- and this is not its right-wing fascists, who will soon take dictatorial power--is participating in ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.

Cruelty and chosen ignorance has been the ceaseless standard of White patriarchy, ever since the inception of the country.  Even so, America stumbled along for over 230 years, maintaining its republic and avoiding the tyranny it was founded to escape.  The Constitution itself was designed around the idea of protecting against takeover by a tyrant.

In his Farewell Address on September 17, 1796, George Washington warned against the dangers of political parties.  They could divide the people and lead to dissolution of the union:

 

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

 

This is exactly what culminated on November 5, 2024.  On that day, which is yesterday, as I type, the republic of the United States died.  It was replaced by “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men.”

Despite its horrible entanglement with genocidal blood and slavery, the USA managed to evolve ethically.  For two hundred years, faltering and awkward progress was made.  Slavery became illegal.  Women gained the right to vote.  In the last sixty years or so, we continued to approach a standard of general equality among people.  We still had a long way to go, but the progress was real.

Feeling a shudder to its pillars of dominance, the White patriarchy fought back.  And won.

Now commences a most brutal, unstable time for all of humanity.  I myself am an old man, pretty jaded.  I’ve had a good life, all in all, and was blessed to be born in and experience a democracy.  It hurts me a great deal that children born in the USA will now be taught to worship a repugnant man of no moral fiber whatsoever, and to revere him, perversely and with full Orwellian irony, as ‘the greatest man who ever lived.’ 

By separating greatness completely from morality, we shame ourselves completely.  We thereby alloy ourselves by definition with the Dark, not the Light.

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

Poem: Healed

 

Healed

 

skin of  ice

thick with scars,

i wore it for so long

it ached,

uppng the numb.

 

touch couldn’t be

more empty so i

sought candles

of fingertips,

 

only these to possess me

and i quaked, at first,

in their stirring,

how the bliss

 

crept through,

trembling drops of water

which braved my eyelids.

 

such pilgrims! i thought,

how and why did they

find this mental tomb,

and bless the fallen?

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

The world hangs on the pivot of November 5th.

 

Regarding the Poems--And the Fate of Humanity

 

I may not be posting poems for a while.  I am busy grading a huge stack of virtual papers.  Just as importantly, I am stung to my core by the upcoming election, one that will determine if America loses its republic to a fascist dictatorship under the most disgusting human being I myself have ever encountered in a public figure within my country.   

What’s most disturbing to me, even more than his conviction on felonies, is that Donald Trump has been found liable for rape in a court of law twice and, as well, dozens of women have credibly accused him of sexual assault.  I will leave aside the many other reviling aspects of this racist, sexist malignant narcissist, who has wallowed in greed and fraud all his life; otherwise, I could write all night.  I will instead conclude with the most heartbreaking aspect of all of it:   despite his crimes, sins and unrepentant hate and demagoguery, his psychopathic lack of conscience, his bankruptcies both financial and moral, even so, despite all this, and despite overwhelming documentation disproving his big lies, such as that the 2020 election was stolen, about half the population of the United States, millions of people, even after ten years of exposure to the chaos--to his dysfunction, abuse and incessant spew of lies--are still going to vote for him.

The perpetual question I hear, and many of us hear, is why?  Why are so many people going for Trump?

Kamala Harris is obviously highly competent, whereas Trump is obviously incompetent, even leaving aside his disgusting, wretched disordered soul.  Many of his followers, in fact, say they don’t like him as a person; and yet are going to vote for him anyway.  What is going on?

 

My answer, which I have expressed on this blog before, is this:  White Protestant heteronormative patriarchy has always ruled this country.  A change would be as dificult as it would be profound.  It would be an historic, even epochal, accomplishment. 

Trump is the spearhead of the longstanding entitlement of Whiteness to keep the throne--and so many people want this, want Whiteness to reign, that it doesn’t matter that Trump is a grossly wicked, egregeiously unfair man, or that he is incapable of sane management.  Indeed, he has been professional diagnosed by numerous psychologists, who have written a best-selling anthology titled, "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump."

Isabel Wilkerson explains the situation with far more clarity, detail and insight than me.  Wilkerson does so in her book, “Caste:  The Origins of our Discontents.”

 

Here’s how a New York Times book reviewer started off his review of it:

 

A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives. He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Kennedy wasn’t far off. 

I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.

I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/books/review-caste-isabel-wilkerson-origins-of-our-discontents.html

 

In short, according to Wilkerson, America has been saddled with a caste system ever since its earliest roots, going back to the revelations of the 1619 Project.  Kamala Harris represents the decline of our traditional caste system.  Trump is its continuation and fortification.  Trump takes the hate and rage of the caste system’s racism, sexism, homophobia and other oppressions and turns them loose on those who would challenge the old ways. 

 

Trump is attempting to do what the White-ruled system has always done:  shut down protest with fear, terror and the threat of violence.  Once he gets full power, he will use actual violence, and so will his followers across the country, down to the smallest town and village.  In my tiny town of 1000 population, there are a number of Trumpers who are filled with rage, stoked by Trump’s words, and who own assault rifles, these being easy to purchase in the USA.

 

Wilkerson says that people support Trump--support the caste system--because they see it as being in their own selfish best interest.  Mostly, these are White people, and mostly White males within that group, that is, the males who are at the very top of the caste structure.   Black and brown people who support Trump do so because, like everywhere in the world and throughout history, some people in oppressed groups will serve the ruling class dutifully to get ahead, even and perhaps especially by turning on their own.  Turning on your own is required and rewarded by a segregated slot in the hierarchy. 

So, America is at a crossroads.  One of Trump’s slogans is “Bring American Back.”  One of Harris’s slogans is, “Not Going Back.” 

Because America is still by far the strongest country, both militarily and economically, the result of the upcoming election will tilt the whole world--toward either fascism under Trump, or democracy under Harris.

I’ve argued many times on this blog that rulership by a cult-charisma dictator is an ancient, primitive form of governance.  Its essence is nothing but 'might makes right.'  

Democracy, on the other hand, is an advanced form of ethics technology.  Democracy embraces the concepts of humanism--equality, human rights and rational decision-making--to advance the pursuit of happiness for everyone. 

If Trump wins, the world will slide toward cult-charisma dictatorship even more that it already has, and the result will be a primitive global standard of government, one that is centered in the irrational chest-thumping of a few insecure males. 

If Harris wins, the world has a serious chance of advancing its overall ethics technology.  This is critical, because without advanced ethics tech, humanity will not have the maturity to properly manage its other advancing techs, such as weapons, robots, and AI.

Again, either we evolve our collective conscience--by advancing our ethics tech--or we perish under the rule of petty tyrants. 

I believe everything--not just for America, but for the entire human world--rests on this election.  We will either be ruled by ignorance, or by reason. 

Trump, indeed, denies that global warming even exists.  The vast body of scientific evidence, and the climate change happening right before our very eyes, the mutating of the continents and the oceans, mean nothing to Trump, simply because they conflict with what he arrogantly opines.   He sees himself as a god.   A messiah.  And he has surrounded himself by those who will fawn before his fake omniscience, a retinue of lickspittles who will tell him that he is always right, always wearing the emperor’s new clothes.

I personally believe that it will be very hard for Harris to win.  She is up against the White male caste system that has existed for hundreds of years.  It is also fair to say, given the seamlessness of misogyny, that she is up against 12,000 years of patriarchy.  Harris, if she wins, will be the strongest person in the world.  A woman.  A non-White woman.  And she will not be a placeholder for patriarchy, as were the sprinkle of women in the past who ruled over various city and nation states.  It’s not as if Elizabeth or Cleopatra worked in great portion, if they did at all, to advance women’s rights.

Harris and everyone behind her is up against patriarchy.  And the cruelty of patriarchy has always been at the top.  It has never ruled with logic, or with fairness.  But instead with a fist. 

Still, Harris might win.  And what a fantastic victory that would be.  Not only for the Democratic Party, but for people everywhere, in every country across our barbaric, wretched, struggling yet hopeful, naturally wondrous globe. 

It won’t be a final victory, not by any means.  The battle to advance the collective human consciousness will go on.  However, if Trump wins, I believe we will be stuck with patriarchy and all its ignorance and cruelty until the end of civilization.  I predict that this end will come fairly soon, probably within decades.  We’re on track for WWIII, after all, with startling similarities to Europe in the 1930s.  Putin invading Ukraine.  China eyeing Taiwan.  Israel expanding a war in the middle east, while committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.

'Never Again,' the motto meant to ward us from another Holocaust, has fallen before Netanyahu's genocidal appeal to 1 Samuel 15:3, where the Amalekites are not only slain, down to the last woman and child, but also their animals slaughtered and lands salted.

Yes, we hover on the edge of the end.  Full war.  Full Fascism.  But there is still a flicker of candlelight in the dark.  A hope that we can walk out of this underworld labyrinth and find our way, eventually, onto a full-bodied path of light.

I hope and pray to the Angels.  The Angels, as I see them, are non-religious.  The Good transcends any one religion.  Religions are simply different mythic routes to approach the Good, but must be shorn of the biases and dysfunctions which lead their adherents astray.  There are Angels for all of us.  Good beings, somewhere, even if only in our minds, beyond us.  Call them by some other name, if you wish.  The Good is real.  If Evil is real, and it is, for we can all see it in the crystallized, maximized hate of ethno-nationalist political movements, then so is the Good.  And so, too, are Angels, at least as I have framed them.

We can as a species approach the Good together, down a reasonable, loving path.  But  we must dare to embrace the truth of equality, a simple truth underscored so long ago in that immortal statement:  Do to others as you would have them do to you.

I pray for all of us.  I pray to the Angels.  I pray for all of human fate.  This is a turning point for Civilization, one way or the other. 

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

11/1 ... eds

Poem: Wind Ode

 

Wind Ode

 

listen to the wind,

a festival of hugs

defying loneliness,

calming and stroking,

 

listen

as it shatters and unshatters,

an ethereal liquid sculptor

never to die, always regenerate,

 

to uphold the sky and spill it,

to moan and pray,

sacred and as well

effulgent and sexual.

 

the wind is always an embryo

rushing toward the faintest hints

of the most venerable

understanding.

 

art and soul,

the clues are in the wind,

flirting and somersaulting,

answering

 

what we crave to know, 

the wind, incantata,

a bard beyond words,

a mirror of what is.

 

 

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

10/23 ... changed last stanza and a line above
spellbinding

Poem: Old Tree

 

Old Tree

 

i want to hug you,

shimmy up your shorn smooth sheath,

past branches gone as cobwebs,

the knotholes a cuneiform

whose bruises inlay my chest,

so when i descend

every lesson of weather,

every breath and teardrop

known to the sky,

goes with me.

 

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

10/20 ... "goes" replaces "comes"

Exhausted.  Praying that fascism doesn't win the upcoming election.  The ugly prejudiced violence of a cult of hate.