Poem: Snatchers

 

Snatchers

 

animate posters,

as if propaganda had bred

a living gel, cheeks, chins

of mistrust rubberstamping  

a shellack of custardy

fatalism.

 

this dinge of streets.

this tarnish of behaviors.

this unthought guile thin as office paper

while it wades through days of sloggy hours,

wan from cosmetic mold--

 

a rouge unnoticed

in city after city of hollowed cheeks,

despite the long-toothed force

it took to inject so many spores of mediocrity

into so many hearts

and corrupt the very dream.

 

what an integral invasion.

to pump silence

into the mainstream blood vessels. 

what a disease of bipedal blemishes,

rampant within a warming

of cement vegetation.

 

hotter and hotter,

the skinlike fungus of the mask.

no one can peel it off,

even from their own face,

not without jeopardizing

their weak, fearful name.

 

 

 

 

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

7/6/26 ... mods throughout the evening.. .night

Invasion of the Body Snatchers theme 

Poem: PPM

 

PPM

 

the sky hammered, day in and out,

as if making its own Ark. 

 

it must have hated us,

we who had billowed coal for so long,

we who choked the sapphire,

sooting both Hesperus and Phosphorus--

 

we who didn’t bother

to care about the force of storms.

we who failed to honor

the realms uprooted and ruptured,

sacrificed like Iphigenia

to gods of plunder and ego.

 

the sky hammered.  on and on.

it wanted to end all this.  it knew

the clicks and likes and taps and swipes

of our electronics would not save us.

we who had taken and expanded,

only to become small.

 

even before the start, had it been set?

a predestiny of thugs

who wolfed all the food?

to harness fire, with tools and lust,

was it, in the end,

a harbinger of damning rain?

 

but no.  it need not have been.

the world could have been adored.

heaven in intent. virtue.  trust.

a rulership of truth, not wicked men.

not lied to.  not devastated.

and so the sky hammered.

 

 

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

7/5/26  "sooting" replaces "sooted"

Noah's Ark, Greek mythology, old Western culture stuff... 

Quote: "A republic does not survive because its people praise it ... "

 

I’m in no mood to ‘celebrate’ America. Our country is broken and needs repair

 

I’m not in the mood to celebrate “America 250” … Sometimes a sour mood is simply clear vision … Nearly 250 years later, the US is not a finished monument, but a structure still under repair, still contested – and in places being quietly stripped for parts …

Repair is not nostalgia … Repair is the unglamorous work of keeping a structure standing: protecting democracy and civil rights, building enough homes for people to live with dignity, limiting the power of money, and preserving the public memory that tells a country what it has broken and why …

A republic does not survive because its people praise it. It survives because they repair it.

Jamil Smith, Guardian US columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/03/america-250-celebration-under-repair

======== 

Poem: Supine

 

Supine

 

from a blur of fiery earth

the sky opened up downward,

calm gulp of angelic whale.

 

why not fall in,

escape this salt-burning crucifix

of disastrous sand?

 

this desert flesh of lying cross?

 

sideways

was to confront a viper

which floated like a standard 

military-issue automatic rifle.

 

it was to joust with cartwheels

of spear-like tarantulas

nude as the scalded sun. 

 

why not go down to come up,

to sink to levitate

beyond gravity’s logical stakes?

 

so high so deep

so bright so honest so attentive so blue.

so huggable.  more steadfast

 

than breath.

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

6/30/26 eds all day

Ethics Review: Levy Rozman (GothamChess) on Alekhine and the Nazis

 

Ethics Review:  Levy Rozman (GothamChess) on Alekhine and the Nazis 

Welcome to another Ethics Review, where ethics, as it should always be, is number one!

Lionizing collaborators

Today I am reviewing a YouTube video that purports a “historical deep dive” on world chess champion Alexander Alekhine (1892-1946).   I argue below that the video is an egregious failure, for it unabashedly and enthusiastically celebrates and lionizes someone who was a widely influential propagandist for the Nazi regime at the highest levels.  In this role, Alekhine befriended and accepted a well-paying job from Hans Frank, a genocidal war criminal.

Why a chess video?

I have written before on chess [1] and my father was heavily involved, winning the State championship of North Carolina several times.  More importantly, the entrepreneurial attitudes expressed in the video are symptomatic of a larger cultural problem.  The ubiquitous norm in our social-media era is to prioritize attention:  likes and views over what is just and true. 

For influencers, who ply the trade of charisma, it is very tempting to push decency to the side.  The power of persuasion translates into money and fame, reaped from an anonymous, scattered internet audience.  If accumulating the most clicks becomes the focus, far above, or even to the exclusion, of the humane norms necessary for social stability, the consequence is a devil’s bargain.

 Most important of all -- 

Never Forget!

The evils of the Nazis should never be forgotten is an essential, axiomatic moral claim.  Nazism should never be downplayed, normalized, minimized or dangled as ornamental click bait.

“Never Forget” and “Never Again” are mottos on many Holocaust memorials.  The latter originates from prisoners freed from Buchenwald.  Sadly, instead of what is clearly right, our glitzy culture fixates on sales.  Coin and adoration.  The result is a primitive level of ethics, buried below an avalanche of logos and commercials, accompanied by moraines of resplendent barkers, who arrest our attention and broker our trust. 

Considerations of right-and-wrong track with the health and compassion of a society, the overall quality of life.  The lower the level of ethics technology, the more barbaric, greedy and cruel the country.  The worst case scenario is might-makes-right under a malignant narcissist, which results in a pyramid of ogres atop a mountain of broken wings.

 

Forgotten horrors

Many people are completely uneducated on the horrors of Hitler, including the delusional, narcissistic, macho toxicity which dragged the globe into World War 2. 

We have forgotten the hate.  The cruelty.  The sadistic bullying and beating of people in the streets.  The shameless, ubiquitous vandalism.  The castigation and mockery.  The raping.  The burning of books by jeering, rabid crowds.  The knee-bending pall of fear, punctuated by spikes of terror.  The juif badges, the consignment of human beings to ghettos, then slave labor and death. 

Perhaps we remember the concentration camps and the arid stench from the crematories, but only as plot-twists for the assembly line of the entertainment industry, where the main goal is adrenal hedonism for mass consumption.

 

It can happen again

We must embrace advanced ethics technology [2].  Otherwise, decadence and complacency seduce and dominate. Without the guardrails of a mature conscience, we walk in a vulnerability of social landscapes prowled by opportunists:

It is all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration.  It’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people.  But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong.  What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters.  It’s that they were ordinary human beings.[3]

 

Who is GothamChess?

Levy Rozman, known as GothamChess, is am influencer with global status.   Since the pandemic, chess has surged in popularity.  As the game expands, so does the clout of its spokespeople.

In his wikipedia entry, Rozman is given an impressive title:

Often referred to as “The Internet's Chess Teacher,” he produces content on the online platforms Twitch, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Rozman began streaming on Twitch in August 2018. His YouTube channel gained rapid popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic and the release of The Queen's Gambit in 2020. His YouTube channel became the first chess channel to surpass one billion views.

 

A video on Alekhine

About a month ago, Rozman put up a video on Alexander Alekhine, titled “The Most Notorious Chess Player of All Time.” [4]  At the time of this writing, it has approximately 305,000 views.  Part of being notorious, Rozman tells us, is the chess champion’s “alleged” ties with Nazis and authorship of antisemitic newspaper articles, which circulated across Europe.

One problem with this video is that the behaviors in question are not up for serious debate. Overwhelming evidence is easily available on the web.  Rozman pedestals a man who was highly complicit in the spread of Nazi propaganda on a massive scale.  Calling Alekhine “notorious” is more than inaccurate.  Try monstrous.  Diabolical. 

As well, Alekhine accepted a well-paying propaganda job arranged for him by Hans Frank, the leader of occupied Poland.  Frank, a chess enthusiast, was responsible for sending millions of people to concentration camps, such as Auschwitz.  He was sentenced for these heinous crimes at the Nuremberg Trials and hung to death. 

In addition to millions of Jews, Frank murdered hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens.  I am going to quote extensively from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum website.  It’s painful to read, but Nazism must be faced, not swept under the rug:

 

The Nazis considered Poles to be racially inferior. Following the military defeat of Poland by Germany in September 1939, the Germans launched a campaign of terror intended to destroy the Polish nation and culture and to reduce the Poles to a leaderless population of peasants and workers laboring for German masters.

In the weeks following the German attack on Poland, German SS, police, and military units shot thousands of Polish civilians, including many members of the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia. In the spring of 1940, the German occupation authorities launched AB-Aktion, a plan to systematically eliminate Poles considered to be members of the “leadership class.” The aim was to remove those Poles seen as most capable of organizing resistance to German rule and to terrorize the Polish population into submission. The Germans shot thousands of teachers, priests, and other intellectuals in mass killings. Nazi officials sent thousands more to the newly built Auschwitz concentration camp, to Stutthof, and to other concentration camps in Germany where non-Jewish Poles constituted the majority of inmates until March 1942.

 

A merry tone

Even if it were actually the case--which it is not--that there is uncertainty regarding Alekhine’s behavior, Rozman’s flippant tone is wholly inappropriate in dealing with the issues that he dangles before his audience.  The talented influencer does not take a single moment to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust.  Not one sentence to warn us about the evils of the Nazis and their collaborators.  “I love this story!” he effuses in his video, describing Alekhine’s life.  Near the end, he perkily remarks, “Yo, Netflix, pick this up, man!” and calls for “movies and documentaries” to be made about “one of the most fascinating chess players to ever walk the Earth, if not the most.”

With a silver-tongued wand of insouciant eloquence, Rozman buries the lessons of history and becomes a de facto apologist for a man deeply connected with a war criminal.

 

A not-so-deep dive

In the video, Rozman claims, more than once, to have done a “historical deep dive.”  With an upbeat tone, he describes the chess champion’s associations with Nazis as “alleged,” and suggests they are moot. But there is a solid bed of evidence for Alekhine’s malevolent acts.  Evidence that is excellent, unchallenged, and easily available on the internet.

Rozman is either unaware of the strong evidence against Alekhine, or chose not to present it. He spends a lot of time in the video chortling about roguish trivia.  Things like Alekhine’s four wives.  His lying about a PhD.  His cat named “Chess”  …

 

Parroting Alekhine’s own excuse

Rozman flippantly suggests that perhaps Alekhine aided the Nazis only to protect his wife and, as well, his “wealth and properties in France.”  Leaving aside the repugnant idea that it is acceptable to aid the Nazis to protect your foreign assets, the idea that Alekhine was focused on protecting his wife is contradicted by the in-depth research of Christian Rohrer, presented below. 

After WWII, Alekhine mobilized this very excuse--that he was protecting his wife (and protecting himself).  And yet it should go without saying that someone’s own denial is not a reason to exonerate them.

 

How could Rozman miss the evidence?

If I could find the information so fast, why not Rozman?  Rozman brings up a point that was first uncovered by Dr. Rohrer; namely, that Alekhine lied about having a PhD [5].  It's odd.  Was Rozman unaware?  It is standard research practice, as well as common sense, to know your source.

Rohrer’s work is  a tour de force, nonpareil on the topic of Alekhine and the Nazis.  He provides trenchant, meticulous, comprehensive coverage, over a hundred pages.  It comes up easily on an engine search.  So, again--

 Why did Rozman’s “historical deep dive” leave it all out, while including a single tidbit about Alekhine's fake PhD?

 

A deeper dive

It only took me only about five minutes on Google to find the Rohrer article and get a feel for its professionalism.  With a little more digging, I was able to see the respect and credibility the Stuttgart professor has garnered in the chess world, since publication in 2021.    

The launchpad for my investigation was simple.  I typed “Alexander Alekhine nazi articles,” into the search engine. 

 

Vetting Christian Rohrer’s work

Because Rohrer is the ultimate source for the damning claims against Alekhine, I took some effort to check the level of respect and acceptance it has received.  Within twenty minutes or so, I found several supportive articles.  At the same time, I found none whatsoever in rebuttal. [6]

 

For instance, in a 2021 article titled, “The wrong side of history:  racism, gender, Alekhine and the Nazis,” Raymond Keene writes:

Great controversy has arisen over the question of whether Alexander Alekhine, World Champion from 1927–1935 and again from 1937–1946, was a Nazi. Vast amounts of ink have been expended on this question, but now Dr Christian Rohrer of Stuttgart University has published a paper which must surely represent something approaching the last word on this sensitive matter.  [7]

 Keene goes on to discuss Rohrer’s analysis, including extensive quotes.

 

Ripples from 2021 to the present

Rohrer’s influence ripples beyond 2021 to the present.  In 2025, Jennifer Shahade cites Rohrer on her site.  While describing the contents of a linked video, she writes: 

Fabian and I [in the video] also talk about Alekhine’s unfortunate final chapter, in which he collaborated with Nazis and then died in mysterious circumstances in 1946. Alekhine claimed that he was compelled to align with Nazi ideology to survive. But 2021 research by historian Dr. Christian Rohrer, tells a detailed, evidence-rich story, which led me to another conclusion. [8]

 

The Johannes Fischer article

Again, in my quick vetting of the academic value, the intellectual heft, the chess-world cred of the Rohrer article, I found it has been accepted as impressive and definitive.   No one has outed it as wrong, or challenged the meticulous research.

The first article I found in relation to Rohrer was in Chess News, by Johannes Fischer.  It is titled, “Alekhine and the Nazis:  a historical investigation by Dr. Christian Rohrer” [9].   

It took me a moment to realize that this was indeed an article on an article, the former praising the latter.  Why write so specifically?  Johannes Fischer says of Rohrer’s work that it is “detailed, fascinating and well-worth reading.” 

In the summary, he remarks, “After research in archives all over Europe, Rohrer comes to a number of new insights into Alekhine's fate and personality … and at the same time provides a fine example of how the study of chess history can help to gain insights into larger historical contexts.”

 

Key points distilled by Fischer

The Rohrer article is actually the length of a short book, 99 pages without the bibliography and 123 pages with it.  The research is well-organized and fine-toothed.   This broaches a question:   What did Fischer choose to highlight in his article in praise of Rohrer?

The title of Rohrer’s article is “World Chess Champion and Favorite of Hans Frank? Assessing Alexander Alekhine’s closeness to the National Socialist Regime” [10].   Not surprisingly, Fischer focuses on the Nazi criminal Hans Frank, drawing from the analysis by Rohrer:

In 1941, Alekhine played a tournament in German-occupied Krakow in Poland and came into contact with a number of influential Nazis, most notably Hans Frank, the Governor General of Poland. As Governor General, Frank was largely responsible for the persecution and murder of millions of Jews, and after the war he was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and executed on 16 October 1946.

Frank was a great chess fan who maintained a friendly relationship with Alekhine, and these contacts helped Alekhine to get a well-paid job at the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit (Institute for German Work in the East), IDO for short.

 

Another point Fischer chose to emphasize was Alekhine’s willing participation in Nazi propaganda, various articles which reached audiences all over Europe and the world.  In regard to Alekhine’s guilt, Fischer choose a direct quote from Rohrer:

Alekhine, whether every word is his or not, bears responsibility for these articles. They appeared under his name in the German-language press and were able to develop their effect there with the weight of his name. I consider it impossible that the articles appeared against Alekhine's will. Alekhine himself boasted in Spanish newspapers in September 1941 about his treatment of chess from the 'racial point of view'.

 

The Rohrer article itself

Rohrer’s article linking Alekhine to Hans Frank is a nonesuch on the topic, a treasure trove of elaboration, enumeration, and well-supported conclusions.  Insights build through exacting steps, accompanied by punctilious use of references.  The main goal  is none other than the revelation of Alekhine’s intentions.  We can’t get inside anyone’s head, but Rohrer comes close.  What he concludes is that Alekhine was motived by two factors:  a desire to brandish his status as a chess champion and, secondly, to maintain the highbrow lifestyle he had enjoyed before WWII. 

In short, Alexander Alekhine worked with the Nazis for fame and luxury.

 A sample from Rohrer:

Like many of his colleagues, for example, players from Becker’s team, who remained there until 1945 and sometimes beyond, Alekhine could have waited in South America with his wife for the end of the war or gone north to the USA.  However, he returned to Europe in February 1940. Alekhine first stopped off in Portugal, where he gave simultaneous displays, still accompanied by his wife  Grace.  When he returned to Paris, his plans continued to revolve around chess. (p.17)

 

There are many other points of such nature, accumulating and connecting as Rohrer reinforces his thesis.  A full enumeration of the evidence is beyond this review, and would expand it by dozens of pages.  The following is from the concluding section of the article:

Leaving all open questions aside, the results of the present study provide a changed picture of Alekhine’s closeness to the National Socialist regime. Not least, the hermetic shield that first Alekhine himself and later his apologists had forged to exonerate him for his actions …  has been broken … This shield was a fallback position when other arguments were not convincing, and consisted of the diversely varied narrative that Alekhine had acted under duress from the National Socialist regime. This, of course, can be used to justify basically anything. … With source material used for the first time in this study, this fallback position can be considered obsolete: Alekhine certainly had room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis the National Socialist regime, and he used it … He did not behave like a prisoner of the National Socialist regime, but rather tactically and in the face of the GSB [Greater German Chess Federation] and Generalgouverneur [Hans] Frank, he sought the best solution for himself.

 In view of his room for manoeuvre, Alekhine’s anti-Semitic outbursts also appear in a different light. Such passages by Alekhine are nowhere to be found as programmatically as in the articles dated March–April 1941, which were first printed in the Pariser Zeitung. But they were also not an isolated case. Rather, with the exception of Portugal, such statements appeared in newspapers everywhere Alekhine stayed for a longer period of time … If Alekhine had room for manoeuvre, then he could at least have avoided publishing anti-Semitic passages from autumn 1941 onwards.” (p.97)

 

Hopefully, the admittedly terse summary above gives a sense of Rohrer's judicious rigor.

Too erudite to count?!

For the sake of argument, someone might try to defend Rozman, aka GothamChess, by claiming that Rohrer’s work is voluminous and erudite, and as such has yet to be properly investigated for its accuracy.  

In response to such a conjectural argument, I would say it is harder to build a case than to dispute one.  Similar to scientific experimentation, where a single empirical test can refute a hypothesis, all it would take to create skepticism for Rohrer’s claims is a well-researched counter to a single point. Since 2021, when the article was published, no one has presented a disputation, none that I could find.  

Moreover and critically, as discussed above, Rohrer’s work has been accepted as a worthy source by a number of well-regarded online authors, who publish on reputable sites like Chess News.

 

Wikipedia Fail

Perhaps Rozman used Wikipedia as the main source for his “deep dive.”

The Wikipedia entry on Alexander Alekhine does not include Rohrer’s discussion of Nazism or the authorship of the antisemitic articles.  Strangely, however, it includes Rohrer’s assertion that Alekhine lied about having a PhD--a point that Rozman includes in his video. 

Hans Frank, the war criminal hung at the Nuremberg Trials, is not even mentioned in the Wikipedia entry-- except in one place:  the title of Rohrer’s article, buried in the footnotes.  This amounts to a fail on Wikipedia’s part.  That said, dedicated scholars consider Wikipedia a starting point, a mediocre reference at best.

If Rozman relied on Wikipedia, I would say this to him:  using a site designed as a starting point as your end point is poor scholarship, a negligence of significant proportion.  

Whatever his methodology, Rozman missed the Rohrer material, easily available--it is, in fact, the source of one of Rozman's own claims--and so became a de facto apologist for enormously malign behavior.

 

Concluding Section

I was able to find a translation of one of the antisemitic articles that circulated widely with Alekhine’s blessing.  Whether Alekhine wrote the bulk of the racist articles or not, or whether instead it was the job of the Nazi official he worked with, Alfred Linder, is unknown [11].   That said, and as Rohrer argues, it makes no difference in terms of culpability.  Alekhine was willing and he boasted about it. 

The visual of the antisemitic article is here:

https://museum.fide.com/exhibits/jewish-and-aryan-chess-article-and-alekhines-open-letter-regaring-his-alledged-authorship

The link includes two images.  The first is Alekhine’s protestation, written in 1946, claiming he was coerced by the Nazis.  As discussed above, this has been debunked.  The second article, written in 1941, is titled, “Jewish and Aryan Chess.”  Here is a sample:

 

Reti was applauded by the plurality of Anglo-Jewish intellectuals for his work, “Modern Ideas in Chess” .. and these people were particularly impressed by the absurd cry Reti invented, namely “We, the young Masters (he was 34 then) are not interested in rules but in exceptions.” … This cheap bluff, this shameless half-attempt at self-boosting was swallowed without a struggle by a chess world already doped by Jewish journalists, the exulting cries of Jews and their friends.

 

 It pains me to include even this terse snippet.  You can feel the swell of hate, the gargantuan animosity that permeated the Nazi movement. 

Note well:  according to the Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia, Hitler, Himmler and other top Nazi officials decided to “physically annihilate the Jews of Europe” in 1941, around the time this article was circulating. 

A dreadful, ultimate legacy, relevant today

This is Alekhine’s dreadful and ultimate legacy.  The world of chess was right to ban him from participation after World War 2.

Levy Rozman either didn’t do his research, or he chose to omit major evidence for Alekhine’s guilt.  The latter is worse, but both are perilously negligent.  Both fascism and antisemitism are grave and exigent subjects.  Indeed, here in 2026, we are looking at the rise of a White Nationalist Movement in America.  Masked police have begun to round up people.  Concentration camps have begun to be built.   It is a deeply dangerous time. 

We can’t allow ourselves to dismally forget the past.  We should trumpet the similarities and learn its lessons.  One obvious resemblance is our own versions of saber-rattling, egotistic, bigoted, macho leaders, the sort of authoritarians--parasitic dictators--who drove humanity to World War 2 and its infernalities. 

If we don’t wake up and change course, World War 3 will be far worse, with a significant chance of the end of civilization itself, forged in detonations of nuclear fire.

Mention means responsibility

Rozman wove the Nazis into his glib narrative, and thus he took up a responsibility:  the moral requirement to warn his audience about fascism and antisemitism.  Instead, buoyed by a happy-peppy cadence, Rozman implied that he was oblivious or didn’t really care. 

Perhaps Rozman would argue that he was ‘just doing his job,’ which he might consider, in large part, to be maximizing audience for his own personal gain.  He could espouse the philosophy that one doesn’t have to be ethical while at work, only obey the law. 

Only obey the law.  Just follow the rules.  This is similar to “I was just obeying orders.” 

We all have a responsibility to keep culture and country from degrading into Darkness.  Powerful influencers have outsized responsibility.  In his “historical deep dive,” Rozman shirked easily obtainable evidence.  From the vital view of human rights--the baseline that protects each and every one of us from depravity--the “Internet’s Chess teacher” failed the chess community.  Indeed, by posturing gleeful and jolly over the history of the Holocaust, he failed the world.

 

===========

Footnotes

(1) https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2024/02/ethics-review-game-of-chess.html

(2) I’ve theorized and elaborated on ethics as technology in numerous essays on this blog.  A good place to start is the Lightcraft essay (5/20/25).

(3) David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human:  Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others.

(4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9zG1AhmgK4

(5) https://en.chessbase.com/post/alekhine-and-the-nazis-a-historical-investigation-by-dr-christian-rohrer.  Wikipedia also attributes Rohrer as the source of this information.

(6) There are, of course, comments that anonymous people make under various articles on Alekhine and the Nazis.  From the perspective of legitimate and effective research, the value of such comments is negligible.  

(7) https://www.thearticle.com/the-wrong-side-of-history-racism-gender-alekhine-and-the-nazis

(8) https://jenshahade.substack.com/p/deepreads-the-capablanca-alekhine

(9) https://en.chessbase.com/post/alekhine-and-the-nazis-a-historical-investigation-by-dr-christian-rohrer.

(10) https://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/d83480dc-6de4-4b35-ad70-1aea8a861156/content

(11) https://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/d83480dc-6de4-4b35-ad70-1aea8a861156/content (p.34 et. al)

 

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

7/5/26... "pedestals" replaces other verbs

Poem: Faux Pas

 

Faux Pas

 

i laughed as if there

were nothing worse than to laugh.

to be free on the wings of an answer

that no one else wanted to find in the code.

nothing in my effrontery

could be kind or even stable;

and the ceremony behind the dinner plates

and the places at the table

simply played on--mouths as broken records,

living to thwart new ways to exist;

the rubber stamp of the tongue

sealing to encrypt, to entomb,

the supplications of the mind.

i had had to laugh.  and in that act,

for a faltering second of minutiae,

the course of the mundane

was broken.

an ephemera of ripples

marred cold cheeks and chins,

making it obvious--down inside

those hidden ponds of still wounds--

i was a stone.

 

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

6/25/26...changed a line

Poem: Blur

 

Blur

 

years of confusion

gloss the cut of my lips,

beauty without control of its mazes,

a panther wooing lengths of neck

with invisible claws.

 

through forests of scrolled birches,

i lope like a spellcaster,

wishing on and on

the whip of the branches would absolve me,

or fashion at least a less brutal

musculature.

 

rain fistfights down,

pinning dew to my dramatic fits--

and so they rail all the more,

into the curse of the fluid shrapnel,

castigating ghosts in the clouds 

which somehow tear themselves more recklessly

than i

am torn. 

torn and abated.  but heat

seethes again in the depths of the

cuts, a hidden accuse,

so much like long ago,

when a child scraped his bed,

afraid to leave.

 

will i continue this tired effort?

will i hug

 

these hundred seasons of spiral

within the pit of my memory?

these victims ...

long taken root,

holdfasts of hurt kelp, to whirlpool still

in spectral waters, so tangled and twisted

by a seductive blur 

of surface?

=====

6/20/26... flip-flopping edits on which word to use... ... getting old... grey of thought...

6/19/26 lots of mods

Quote from A Future of Angels

 ===

Life is only a blip in a vast void.  But that blip is full and the void is empty.

                             --Naconda Who Dreamt

===

From my unpublished novel, A Future of Angels

NYT op-ed, "collective stubbornness" as resistance

====

Nearly every dissident we interviewed — whether a student in the Democratic Republic of Congo who helped pressure an aspiring authoritarian leader into stepping down or a Venezuelan mother working to validate a true ballot count in a rigged election — told us that the key to fighting authoritarianism isn’t a single political strategy or protest march. It’s the willingness of individuals to engage in what the political scientist Maria J. Stephan calls “collective stubbornness”: people working together to increase the costs of authoritarian behavior, throwing enough sand in the gears of the state that its operations sputter and eventually fail.

Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer

====

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/opinion/resistance-activist-protest-trump.html

Poem: Moonless

 

Moonless

patient as the ribs

of Pluto,

birches crowd a dirt road,

 

the last sight

tired eyes can seek

unless

 

angels swoops down,

tearful as prophets

in the belly of blindness.

 

i sit cross-legged

in a snarl of dew,

whittling tinder

 

with a knife

which cannot be seen

in this forest of dim bones

 

and i peer

into the pitch dark

as if it were a sad mirror

 

i had swallowed.

 

 

 

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

Poem: In the Flow

 

In the Flow

 

dust feasts on the heat,

revels in a way which the bodies

that it came from could not.

 

it gloms fetal laurels

incused on a penny baked with corrosion

in the flow.

 

it rides gale-stoked carousels,

arcs of torn phantoms

vast as Ezekiel’s Wheel.

 

a dead ocean’s shark tooth

bites into an extinct spine

fractured in stone the same color as

 

beige pink red chocolate drama

has always been because no ice age

ever came here,

 

no glacial scour to mute

the howls of the dead

who rear in serpentine orgy,

 

lording over slithers

of dust and the snakes and

the lines of shifting ants

 

every once in a while.

 

 

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

6/13 .. worked title in better

6/12/26 mods all day ... depression making value judgements ... difficult

'in the flow' <--> 'in the ravine'

broken on the floor...

 

broken on the floor.

what are all these dots

in the parquetry, impossible

to see when standing tall

and pretending to be

something

able to have a conscience

which doesn’t rot from misuse

or drive me to lose

everything.

so i fall, down in a mess,

and suddenly now see

all the little cracks and cuts

which have glared for so long

from the underbelly

of the shine.

they lurk somewhere

in the alphabet of my heart,

these symbols

which never found shape,

desperate still, on the brink of

nothing, yet ripe with hope,

gazing up from the gone.

 

=======

Dream Quote

 

=====

 

“I don’t think anybody who is supporting the USA’s blatantly racist agenda believes in God or heaven.  If they did, they would be terrified of going to hell.”--  Angelica Fixtrous

 

=====

Random fiction-character stuff from when I am dreaming or half-asleep. ... It sounds pretty familiar, so if I have stolen someone's quote, I apologize.

Poem: Sucked

Sucked

 

the gully had lost its tongue of water,

could not sing from broken staves

with clefs of torn bark. 

long gone hooves of whipped horses

sweated the bed in haunted cacophony;

stabbed it with their dead stampedes.

even now a few tail-eating shoes

fretted like rusty knives.

 

the only liquid was a mousy dram

snagged in the night by a cloaking owl,

or fanged from a faceless rabbit.

heatwaves chewed

on what could not be sucked,

and the jumping cholla reached high,

sihouetted kin of a crucifix,

praising their golgotha.

 

shadows outflanked a coyote,

unrolled a slow sarcophagus

over a sprinkle of paralyzed lizards.

the one cloud looked down,

bulbous gavel of an absent judge;

or the rudder of a helmsman

absconded to the pub, unable to score,

a carouse more wisp than teat.

 

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

6/10 ... took out a word

6/5/26 ... eds all day ...  

“Cylindropuntia fulgida … possesses many common names, though the most common one is "jumping cholla", which comes from the ease with which the stems detach from the main plant when brushed, "jumping" onto passing animals.”

"tail-eating"  = ouroboros = visual symbol for a horseshoe, symbol for desert, etc.

Poem: House Cat

 

House Cat

 

the pet on the couch

wears no clothes.

it walks under beds and could

through dark woods.

 

it never seeks money,

purrs in content and often

gets touched (compared

to my lack of hugs).

 

it doesn’t grasp war

or addictions or obsessions

or adulteries.

no ghosts seem to haunt it,

 

now anyways.

 

long ago, it was neutered,

its siblings perhaps discarded.

it fled the feral, meowed and

meowed at a random door

 

and stayed.

 

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

Long ago, a cat showed up at our house (me and my wife, now ex-wife), meowed till we let it in.  It was young, already neutered.  Like so, Bello joined the household.   But, like most of my poems, this one isn't 'about' the literal subject so much as it is philosophical.

Poem: Marketplace

 

Marketplace

 

never but today,

a crossroads of tomb-shaped stalls

with poppies all over them,

floating in a shiny, colorful sky of

packages shaped like crazed genitals.

 

and the carts and drays which clop and  

bubble with gourds and greens

and cascades of apples and ginger and

onions and bananas and sassafras and

all manner of basted snake-oil sheens of

pricetags shimmery.

 

and the dulcimers blooming.

and the barkers extolling.

and the children as shrill and frantic

as oversized parakeets.

 

and the razzle-dazzle of the

fortunetellers and jesters,

show bears and prancers,

casuists and priests.

 

and the burros horselaughing.

and the long wet dog tongues

whiny near the knees of fishmongers

and butchers.  so many

 

barely hidden, spicy needs

under the saunter of chaps and

straps and juts of dresses and chests and

so much sexualized confidence

riding piggyback on a finagle of finances--

squadrons of flag-tongues aflutter,

battling it out with gusto amid a fray of

happenstance and haggle.

 

and the ripe underworld

of envy and secrets and hate so red in

eyeballs yet often coaxed forth by the alehouses.

and the smear of pig guts on aprons.

and the procession of fops and tramps and

wenches and lasses and urchins and middle classers

bolstered by a pale of police.

 

and the savory and yet also sewer scents.

and the gilt wheels relentless to roll and

crush the stiff rats of yesterday’s poison.

and the loud calling from the street corners

of prophets and gigsters and

criers and hawkers and officials

who decry and declare.  and

the lack of thought and sanity and

the insatiable greed whipping it all,

the merciless gait.

 

 

 

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

6/13/26 ... changed a word

6/3/26 removed a word

6/2/26 ... fixed typos .. changed a word

Quote from "This Is How to Defeat an Autocrat"

 ====

Hungary’s economy is a mess, but post-election polling by Median, an organization that had predicted election results with uncanny accuracy, shows that voters saw corruption as the most important issue by far. Asked why they thought Orban had lost, 49 percent cited corruption, and only 18 percent thought it was the “worsening economic situation, rising cost of living.” The next three reasons cited were “lies” (15 percent); “fearmongering, war rhetoric” (11 percent); and “people got fed up” (10 percent). In other words, Hungarians seemed to see the damage that Orbanism had done to the nation as more important than any harm they felt they had suffered as individuals. They were united by a sense of moral outrage — “value choices,” as one person close to the incoming government described it to me.

--M. Gessen,  This Is How to Defeat an Autocrat, https://www.nytimes.com/by/m-gessen

====

Poem: Listening

 

Listening

 

i’m not, but who is?

cats study dogs who watch people who

don’t know they give off

so many signs.

many, many ears get shrunk

down to tiny pieces of a punished grid.

the economy cuts. 

industry slashes.

hostile hierarchies of

skeletal organizations

prowl hungry for takeovers,

capitalize on leftovers,

scramble to cannibalize.

the math says  

no fear.

justice is a product

built into the integers

of the great equation.

no guilt.

x number of workers,

y number of kicks,

z percentage of

spun-out spun-off sins.

i’m not, but who is?

maybe the pigeons and rats. 

we hear what we need

and do not listen

to anyone who cares.

 

 

 

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

5/28 ... mods.. on and on

Poem: Wish Hungry

 

Wish Hungry

 

the trees could have been

the ‘scaries’ in Where

The Wild Things Are

and the gravel was a mystical

walk in way too real fogbanks where

plummy insects whirred in magnitudes and

ecstasies of universal chime but then

an owl like six-cloaks-built-

into-the-body-of-a-warlock swooped

a sigil of defiance until one star dared to profess,

slipping through the shapeless roam of

a fluid cirrus to tilt some vagabond game. 

what rules were these, anyhow,

and could, really, a faraway

wish-hungry poet ever win?

 

 

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

Poem: Limbo

 

Limbo

 

uncertain at 4am

of a fox with the wail of a stabbed girl

or an owl who berates this asylum, 

i roll the two faces of my skull

left to bright, right to dark,

underestimating

the harlequin's paw, how drunk

with sleep my fancies seem

and yet barbed by visions

of some terrible logic.

this place

where timelines knot, where specters

could be lovers not yet born,

and paupers in gutters

speak like gods, and worse still

those infants from long ago, when lions

capsized what they devoured

right in front of you--you

witness the red depths,

not even gifted the grace of fear,

only to wonder at the giant figures,

brutish to transform,

very much unswayed by your loss,

and always, in some heart-wrung sense, once more,

wild with rage.

=====

5/27/26 ... changed tense of a verb

5/22/26 ... eds all day

Violence vs True Power, NYT quote

 ====

Power, Arendt argued, is collective, consensual and relational. Violence, by contrast, is instrumental and coercive, its strength evaporating the moment the threat is evaded or withdrawn. “Violence can always destroy power,” Arendt wrote. “Out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.”

            --Lydia Polgreen
             https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/opinion/trump-xi-iran-war.html  

=====

Essay: Sustenance and Darkness

=== 

Essay:  Sustenance and Darkness

 

Birthed in a fretful, restless haze, this essay turned into a peripatetic meander down a path of pain and truth, a reflection on the rise of tyranny.  It isn’t quite an omnium-gatherum; there is some organization, split into a few sections.  In the first, I reflect on the swirly chaos of global politics, centered in the corruption and darkening of the United States.  Here I seek companionship with the many people across the world who support human rights, while struggling to carve out stability and purpose.  It’s as if the bullies have taken over not only the schoolyard but also the classrooms, with the complicity of a most vile and malicious principal.  The analogy falls short, however, for the threat transcends the scholastic. We are on a mortal level, confronting the potential end of all things, delivered with a planet-busting punch of radioactive detonations. 

In the second part, I grapple with the abhorrence of bowing down to unspeakable, disgusting kings.  Following in the footsteps of far superior thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt and Erich Fromm, I find myself both revulsed and fascinated by the ways in which people morph to scuttle, belly down in obeisance.  I look at the evils of conformity from various angles, wandering in a blurry, Venn-diagram-ish place.  My labels include at least the following:   numbness, cluelessness, ‘neutrality,’ and the outright soul-sell of the lickspittle, who vocally lubricates the dissemination of a tyrant’s Big Lies. 

There are, I propose, various strains of lemming.  They have their various dispositions, but share in common the sorry trait of pushing humanity toward a cliff with nary an objection.  It could be said that those who bow down, the facilitators and collaborators, epitomize the subject matter in Bonhoeffer’s social theory of the stupid.

I reluctantly leave aside the question of how much blame should be assigned to specific persons.  This is a ‘deep in the weeds’ topic, ready for multiple disquisitions.  I seethe at the people around me who refuse to challenge what’s going on, even as our country sinks from democracy into an exigent darkness.  It is easier, though, to accuse in the abstract rather than the specific.   Are children to blame for supporting a dictator?  Teens?  Young adults? 

I will say this:  the Niemöller’s of the world--educated persons in positions of power--invite heaps of culpability.

Although I continue to blame and feel hatred for certain people, I hope it is part of a larger process of catharsis and sublimation.  The goal is to steer my rage away from people and toward the phenomenon of oppression itself.  This includes racism, sexism, anti-gay, anti-LGBTQ and other sorts of bigotry.

I strive to hate the behavioral sink, not the people down in it.   For more on this, see my essay, “On Hate.”

In the final section, I consider some virtues of resilience.  How do we align with the Good, despite the brutish, deteriorating sadness of these times?  How do we sustain ourselves? 

In this regard, I begin with an imagery of beauty and purpose, and finish with a discussion of the nature of protest itself.  When we listen to and validate our own inner angel, that critical agent of the self, nestled within bridges of conscious and subconscious, we form a lovely relationship with our intrapsychic being.  We become situated in a place of companionable joy, in alliance with honesty and Good.  In a sense, we become our own soulmate.

 

Side Note on Global Warming

 

I would have liked to discuss global warming in relation to tyranny.  But that’s yet another Brobdingnagian topic.  Suffice it to say that the leader of the USA, Donald Trump, has called global warming “a giant scam.”  This proclamation is a prime example of the Big Lies that such dictators put forward as loyalty tests for their cult base.  Meanwhile, environmental conditions deteriorate beyond red-line estimates:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/23/earth-being-pushed-beyond-its-limits-as-energy-imbalance-reaches-record-high

As I’ve repeatedly said on this blog, the so-called ‘strongmen’ like Trump are better referred to as enervators.  (strongman = enervator).  Such leaders are political parasites.  They suck the vibrancy of a nation into their glutinous, gluttonous, depthless narcissism.  Why call them strong?  They are psychologically and ethically the weakest sort.  Mental health and ethics go together.  In conjunction, these two should be society’s highest priority.  Not ephemeral profit.  Not short-lived power.  Not servitude to Mammon, Satan, or Mars (taken here as symbols for Greed, Deceit and Violence).

Civilization has advanced sharply in the last few centuries.  Women’s right to vote was the greatest invention in the entire history of civilization.   We can now begin to embrace ethics as a technology, like we have embraced medicine as a technology  (see my essay “Lightcraft: ethics as technology,” 5/20/25) 

 

I.  A Swirl Of Reflections

 

Mere months ago, Trump initiated war on Iran.  Before that, he joined with Israel to continue the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza.  This full-scale atrocity now seems to be expanding into the West Bank and Lebanon.  He ordered the US military to raid Venezuela and abduct its leader Maduro, which led to tribulation in Cuba as well.  So much wickedness has been dumped on the Earth since the President attained office in 2025 that it boggles attempt at recitation.   In addition to the considerable military violence, he has wielded a whip of economics, studded with mercurial tariffs, to stagger the stock markets and fray the global financial system. 

Trump doesn’t have the foresight to consider the risk of collapse.  He needs to be in the immediate center of all things, right now.  Dozens of psychologists and psychiatrists have pinned him as a malignant narcissist (The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump).   His own niece, Mary Trump, with a PhD in clinical psychology, labelled him the same (Too Much and Never Enough;  How my family created the world’s most dangerous man). 

 

Stupidity and narcissism

 

Still, a sizeable tranche of American voters, wallowing as they are in stupidity, to use Bonhoeffer’s concept, continue to follow their monster deeper into an abyss of ruin and depravity.  The Trumpers lap up their godking’s speeches.  An overarching factor is America's hideous history of Black slavery and Native genocide.  Con-man Trump taps into a cesspool of bigotries and frauds.  He barks and barks and barks, such a talented barker, at his primary mark:  the rural White heartland.  He has enthralled about 30% of the population, similar to the historical slice in Nazi Germany.

 

The original Big Lie

I want to mention a social weapon often ignored, and yet always used by dictators:  the original Big Lie, which started thousands of years ago.  The original Big Lie is as simple and obvious as it is unacknowledged; namely, that women are inferior to men and should obey them.  Brave women and their male allies have chipped away at this enormous deceit, making some astounding progress.  And yet the bulk of the original Big Lie stands to this day.  

 

Lies are what give Trump power

 

It’s tempting to hope that Trump’s latest evil, his choice to go to war with Iran, will sink his popularity.  After all, he ran on the promise of “no more wars.”  He also ran on “lower prices” and now gasoline prices are through the roof.  And yet sadly this latest bout of stunning contradictions is likely to bind Trump’s fawning base even more.  In their eyes, he is Napoleonic.  The ‘great leader’ will likely proclaim victory in Iran, whatever the actual circumstances, while zealots and jingoes cheer him on. 

The ongoing genocide in Gaza, it is important to emphasize, hasn’t slowed Trump down at all.  So much for the Holocaust Memorial’s motto of Never Again.  

Genocide is the greatest evil possible.  Trump’s followers deny it is even happening with the zeal of drooling dogs.  It is similar to how they are in denial about  Global Warming, despite the environmental evidence right before their very eyes.

 

Grave

 

Egomania runs a headlong race.  When it propels the belligerence of the most powerful man in the world, we court grave peril.  Trump’s rancor blows up the room over and over.  It keeps him in the spotlight, battening his delusions of godhood.  His skill at gaming bleachers of toadeaters means that everyone in the USA, and in fact the world, is  stuck on an accelerating, hell-bound train ride. 

In the sense of a Nero who gets to fiddle while Rome burns, Trump is a genius.  If escaping the verdict of decency and truth is the measuring stick, Trump is a dark god.

 

Give 'em the old three-ring circus, stun and stagger 'em
When you're in trouble, go into your dance
Though you are stiffer than a girder
They'll let you get away with murder
Razzle dazzle 'em and you've got a romance

--from the musical Chicago

 

 

Apology

 

I apologize if this essay is a scattered.  As I type these words, the deadline that Trump set to “wipe out a whole civilization,” is approaching.  Said deadline is (… drum roll…) 8pm tonight.  Such is the insanity of the times in which you and I live.

[editorial update:  no nuclear bombs have dropped ... yet …]

 

Significant probability of armageddon

A significant probability of nuclear launch can be extracted from the compulsive hustle of Trump’s disordered brinksmanship.  He has menaced Greenland and Canada.  And, again, let us never forget that the USA and Israel are engaged in a genocide in Gaza right now.   This has been affirmed by many experts, several of whom I have quoted previously on this blog. 

Israeli rights groups, such as B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have called what is happening in Gaza genocide.  Navi Pillay, Chair of a UN Commission, called it genocide.  The International Association of Genocide Scholars called it genocide.  Omar Bartov, a genocide scholar at Brown University, called it genocide. He writes in an op-ed:

 

This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

 

And so on. 

Add to this the hell of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine under Vladimir Putin, and you get a resemblance to pre-WW2 upheavals.  Today’s crisis is worse, however, because phalanxes of nuclear missiles enshadow the globe.  Tens of thousands of ICBMs poised and armed, set to destroy the collective dreams and hopes built up over the millennia.

The Netflix movie, House of Dynamite, demonstrates that the inbound trajectory of a single ICBM could plausibly trigger an all-out scramble, the rush to detonate every warhead available.

 

“O proud death, what feast is toward in thine eternal cell”  --Hamlet

 

To fight hopeless, face painful truths

 

Here we are, those of us who embrace truth over lies, compassion over division, virtue over violence, pulled into a psychotic vortex of horror and war.  We are forced toward the cliff, despite our protests.  Our votes and voices feel impotent; and yet it is not my purpose to argue for resignation.  By acknowledging the awful realities, my goal is to counter hopelessness.  Are we menaced by bellicose, authoritarian powers?  Yes.  Is there a significant risk that the hostility will increase, past the point of no return, to the destruction of humanity?  Yes.   However, even under the gun of worst case scenarios, there are things we can and should do.

As I discuss below, there is a special sort of joy which stems from the recognition that we dared to act.  We who take the tough, courageous path of the Good in defiance of Evil.  

In addition to its inherently noble aspect, such action might well save humanity, if enough people dare to believe that 'we shall overcome.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7akuOFp-ET8&list=RD7akuOFp-ET8&start_radio=1
('We Shall Overcome' sung at the March on Washington, 1963, for Civil Rights)

 

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” -- Elie Wiesel

 

II. The problem of numbness

 

For many of us, it is tempting to tune out.  To go numb on the sidelines.  Before getting into this, I want to make clear that is healthy to take time to recuperate, to temporarily step back from the assault of miseries and travails.  A template for my own daily routine is one or two intense writing sessions, maybe a deep conversation with a friend, maybe grading papers or otherwise plying my trade as a part-time instructor; and yet then the rest of the day is a medley of life’s simple gifts:  walking, gaming, cooking, and other casual things, sometimes at random, what a friend of mine refers to as puttering.  All these ‘little things’ are miracles.  Just to look out a window and see a tree, the sky, a bird.  I try to be mindful, outside the call of my protest.  I remind myself, too, that I am lucky in comparison to the many, many people, local and abroad, who struggle through no fault of their own to merely subsist.

If you have the energy of a leader--someone who sleeps four hours a night, who constantly feels ready and active--by all means go for it.  The rest of us still have our place; and we can take comfort in the maxim that no one should judge themselves in comparison to others.  

Look in the mirror.  Strive to advance, accept and be good to yourself [1].

 

Privilege and numbness

Numbness is an ‘easy’ option for those who are privileged, that is, not in a group calumniated by fascists.  The nature of numbness is as straightforward as it is poisonous:  just let bad things happen to those targeted for persecution and reap benefits on the sly.  A pension fund can rise on a dictator’s influence, such as Trump’s embrace of oil over renewable sources of energy.  “Let’s invest in oil stocks!”

Note that this wicked mindset need hardly be recognized, if at all, by the perpetrator.  A well-practiced pawn can bask in a seamless continuity of blithe appearances. I discuss this more under “Cluelessness.”

 

‘Neutrality’

The choice to sit it out is sometimes described as ‘staying neutral.’  But as Hannah Arendt points out, neutral is simply another face of evil.  I’ve belabored this point in other essays.  Suffice it to say that neutrality is cowardice.  It is the acquiescence of quiet facilitation.  It is refusal, blatant in one’s inaction, to defend human rights as a nonnegotiable aspect of a nonmalevolent society.  If you are willing to scuttle human rights, via negligence or deed, especially in times of deep social crisis, then you are propping a depravity akin to Apartheid, Nazism or Jim Crow.

 

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil" - Hannah Arendt

 

An ‘easy’ option? 

It’s not really an easy option to sit things out.  People with a conscience, which is most of us, who suppress and deny our empathic sentiments --what classic philosophers call our “fellow feelings”-- pay a psychic price.  The internalized machinery of the Big Lie consumes a great deal of energy.  Bending a knee to Evil entrenches cognitive baggage. 

Such is the heaviness of the Faustian bent.  Doing nothing while racists lay a blanket of abominable cruelty exacts its pound of cerebral flesh.  It is a pusillanimous stain not only on the nature of one’s soul but on the very ability to function.  To sell a Big Lie is on par with an attempt at sincerity when saying something like, “the sky is red,” or “the Earth is flat.”  Hiding the falsity within the guise of sincerity requires the mind to erect smoke-and-mirror partitions and tricks.  Such is the sheer gall, the absurd norm of the blinkered Babbitry.  To flee from one's own clear-sighted analysis and replace it with murk and hedges.

 

The Era of Dumbing (3500 BCE -  present)

Society often forgives the complicity of the numb mind.  It is relatively easy to hide from the gavel of justice by huddling amid the bulk of the herd.  To the detriment of our past, present and future, ethical progress has been massively hampered.  

At the risk of oversimplification, the reason that our civilization is probably about to go down is what I call the Era of Dumbing:  the reign of ignorance-based government.  It has been going on for thousands of years.  In this primitive, immature time, this Era of Dumbing, ignorance is treated as a kind of capital, wielded by dictators, those who would be godkings, to turn the masses into political cultists.

We have the brain- and cultural-plasticity to initiate the transition to a better world.  We can escape the intergenerational propaganda of Ignorance.  To fully take this on, we need a concerted effort by a multidisciplinary team of intrepid thinkers.  This effort would be what I have called a Project of Light, something far greater and more ambitious than the Manhattan Project, that dark enterprise which lay a path for Evil's ultimate triumph. (see Lightcraft, 5/20/25)

 

Cluelessness & White males

What is happening now in the USA--the nationwide bullying, the sense of being trapped and destined to sink--is most unfamiliar and shocking to White males such as myself.  Other sorts of people have lived under oppression for a very long time. Women have been pressed down since the beginning of civilization.  The origin of racism, the oppression of Black folks, goes back to at least to the 16^th century.   We White males have only experienced the privilege side of things.  This makes us the numbest and most clueless, especially now that we are getting a taste for what it is like to be heavily targeted.

Why is cluelessness so common?  Cluelessness in the dominant group fortifies the overarching control mechanism.  A system that is invisible to those who benefit the most is harder to challenge.  One of the patriarchate's goals is to make life easiest for the males of the highest caste, which aligns with the minimization or elimination of feelings of guilt. 

Hear evil, see evil, and speak evil--but without even knowing it.  Coasting along in White-male wonderland--except for all the crippling cognitive baggage--the privileged segment reaps benefits while oblivious.  Not only the failure to speak up, but the facade of ‘all is fine,’ the suavity of the gaslighter, is damnable.  Worn in a manicured neighborhood, distant from the poverties and brutalities of the oppressed, the masquerade of denial, no matter how deeply entrenched, neither absolves nor exculpates. 

This 'talk about the weather' mentality is beyond cruel.  Total denial in the face of hate.  The choice to stay blind is made over and over, day after day, in a continuous, deadening stream of failed ethical choices, greased by the complicity of social institutions at every level.  Without that grease, how quickly would the masquerade become untenable and fall?  

I bring this up not to mitigate what we White males generally do, 'talk about the weather,' but to emphasize that we damn ourselves by basking in the grease.  We yield in our broken hearts to the mental massage of the social machinery, the financial and power benefits offered to us by the institutions of injustice.  These institutions have staggered at times, and could be broken through--if only we joined the brave souls leading the charge.  If we dared to raise our heads out of wonderland,  we could be part of the solution, not components of the problem. 

 

Active Complicity

There are, of course, those who vocally endorse and enforce a dictator’s virulence and truculence.  To take this route is to shirk even a trace of disagreement and become something vile, a quisling inside a shill, a mouthpiece for monstrosity.  There is income and power to be had for those willing to sell out, those who worm their way into the hierarchy.

It is a temptation, not only for the privileged, but for members of targeted groups as well.  The minions who served the British Raj.  The Schafly-ites who fought against equal rights for women.  Vichy France.  Quisling Norway.   

“Every minority and every people has its share of opportunists, traitors, freeloaders and escapists.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

 

A side note on sociopathy

A small percentage of human beings do not have a conscience.  This does not make such folks bad by nature.  They can lead noble lives.  Many jobs are easier for them, such as social work that involves trauma assessment.  Sociopaths frame life differently, outside the presence of guilt or that special joy which comes from doing what’s right.  Given their lack of internal guide rails, the choice to follow an ethical code can be a crucial moor.  Good Psychiatric Management (GPM), a professional therapeutic technique, centers on establishing such a moor.

All of us are tempted at times.  But for the sociopath, it can be constant and compelling.  Can I get ahead by stealing and cheating?  Yes, I can.  Does it bother me?  Not at all.  Is it adrenal?  Absolutely.  Are the people around me trusting and vulnerable?  Yes, they are. 

The sociopath is put in a very tough situation.  Our primitive society gravitates toward profit, power, status and trophies.  Our institutions ‘talk the talk,’ claiming to be honorable; and yet in deed, it is greed and ignorance which hold the reins.  The sociopath, lacking the experiential rewards associated with conscience, easily gets caught in a sand trap, sliding down a slippery-slope on a no-holds-barred ride in pursuit of shiny things and fleeting thrills. 

Maybe you end up getting ahead by being unethical--this time.  But the more you ignore the stability of moral principles, the more your behavior corrupts.  Chaos is ready to pounce, just one bad dice roll away.  The need for more and more gets riskier, tilted by the short-term benefits of nihilism.

An example of someone with no conscience who has completely fallen is Donald Trump.  He is all in on the grand deceit of an endless, immediate power trip.  Compulsive insecurity goads him on as he plies his trade of outrage, seizing at adulation and godhood.  From outside the bubble of his cultish sphere, he seems an empty shell, incapable of real relationship, not only with others, but with self, art, beauty, environs, animals, the universe, or any aspect of the Good.   There is no awe, reverence, love or spirituality in the man.  His bottomless craving seeks to break everyone and everything--people, ideas, structures and situations--and reconstruct them as puppets in the black hole theater of an empty heart. 

 

III. How to Stay Ethical

 

An Inspiring Image

 

The original impetus for my essay, buried now in the unruly growth of this ponderous screed, is the following image:  the Earth as the beautiful Bulb of a Cosmic Flower.  This Great Bulb has already blossomed many ways; and yet, as it now stands, we humans are at its germinative core.  You and I may feel puny.  But we have a part to play in the evolution of ideas, what is in effect a vast social-mental web, which will craft the future of the planet.  

Human choice, one way or the other, will shape everything.  Why?  

The advance of technology provides tools both physical and psychological, both architectural and ecological.  Humans distill the best and worst from nature, from kindness to cruelty.  In so doing, we  produce social systems with elements of Good and Evil.  Due to our power to both rarify and magnify, the future will suffer the lens of our choices.  It will bear either the liberation or the destruction of our self-fulfilling prophecy, which is a manifestation of the status of our collective consciousness. 

We will soon have the power to create a veritable heaven or hell.  The content of the driving prophecy will derive from the wisdom, or lack thereof, that we possess.  Our level of inner awareness alters Gaia’s fate, whether to blossom or wilt, invoked by the transformative effect of our own psyches.

There are many varieties of knowledge, all of which relate to various kinds of power.  Mere physical power alone, without the emotional competence to wield it, is what Omar Bradley warned us about, when he spoke of “ethical infants”:

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

Not only is physical tech not enough;  it is, by itself, a route to total destruction.  We need psychological prowess.  We need to deal with our passions and emotions in conjunction with advances in ethics tech.

It would behoove us to embrace that ancient axiom of the Greek Oracle:   

tement nosce -- Know Thyself

 

The Metamorphosis of a Flower

How will the beautiful Bulb of the Earth bloom?  One possibility is that it spreads petals to other planets, or even galaxies, invigorating the whorls of nebulas.  Although the expansion of civilization into outer space feels distant to us, we are part of an ongoing evolvement of ideas.  It is a laborious process, a struggle whose outcome will follow us into outer space (should we survive, that is, our own stupidity to reach such a marker). 

We could, in grand egocentricity, exploit other planets to resemble the polluted environs of Earth, and pepper them with idolatrous statues of males like Donald Trump.

Ideas affect our behaviors, which in turn shape the relevant environment:

I ==>  B ==> E

As technology increases, we gain more power, whether wielded consciously or unconsciously, to alter things:

I ==> T x B ==> E

 

(see my discussion of the "Mind-World Lemma" for more on this, 1/1/26)

 

An analogy

Consider the analogy of an alcoholic.  All things being equal, the (non-sober) alcoholic alters their household in ways that encourage chaos, whether they intend it or not.  This is also true of someone who is virtuous, though the effect is opposite, toward health and harmony.  Who we are, not only physically but psychically, manifests in the places we touch.

I ask again, with a soupçon of rhetoric, How will we, as bearers of Earth’s Blue Bulb, curate that Blossom?  How will we nurture the Great Flower and trellis its vibrance into outer space? 

Millions of years await our evolving civilization, much more than the puny ten thousand years that have passed already--if only we find a way to travel in the Light--not the dooming Darkness of myopic greed and manufactured rage.

 

Two worldviews compete

 

When it comes to how to rule and lead, there are two competing worldviews.  One started around 10,000 BCE with the Agricultural Revolution.  It is a way of living grounded in force and ignorance.  In the Republic, Plato assigned this view to Thrasymachus:  "Justice is the interest of the stronger.' 

To exemplify this worldview:  think hordes of slaves who haul and chisel stone to build a Pyramid so that godly pharaohs can travel with style into the afterlife. 

The other way to rule, more recent and less practiced, embeds in reason and humanism.  This path champions dignity, fairness, rights, and enough time for each and every person to expand their potential, that is, the freedom to self-actualize.    

Under the auspices of such freedom, citizens would be taught to Know Thyself. They would not be raised to bow down in fearful, conformist collectivization.

We can progress on a course of reason by raising our level of ethics tech:  wield psychology, humanities and science to better achieve and define harmony, happiness and health as goalposts of the Good.  

Or we can stake ourselves to the idolatry of petty godkings.  

 

The Purgatory Principle

As I discuss in the essay, “The Purgatory Principle,” when technology reaches a certain point, humanity will embrace one of two idea-systems.   Ignorance-based government.  Or truth-based government.  Truth and Ignorance struggle against each other.   When technology reaches a certain point--enough to assert overwhelming control over mind and environment--then one or the other, Good or Evil, will win out.  

Light seeks to eliminate Darkness.  Darkness seeks to eliminate Light.  Ignorance and truth cannot co-exist in a government that has the power to optimally embrace one or the other as its driver of function and purpose.  

Technology will determine when such optimal force is achieved.  As I’ve discussed in other essays, one dark scenario is the following:  a computer chip in every human head, monitored by AI and policed by robots.  

Within a few hundred years, this kind of totalitarian dungeon will be feasible.  

Whether it happens or not depends on the type of government in play.  If insecure men with bottomless egos enthrall the world at the crucial moment, an unspeakable level of meta-enforcement will lock in place.

The dark genius of fascism is that it combines monarchy, the authority of a king, with the charisma of a celebrity.  This dangerous fusion gives the dictator full-throttle carte blanche, even to the point of ordering people to implant a brain chip in themselves or their family members.  

Think televangelist on steroids.

If Hitler had 'brainware' technology, he would have inspired the most fanatic of his cultish base to implant a chip in their head.  Many if not all of them would have complied.  Once the most loyal accepted the literal invasion of their skulls, others would follow.

I am witnessing firsthand how fascism operates when it seizes power.  It happens increment by increment, step by step.  Divide the people, choose a select group, choose the lowest lickspittles among them, then inspire this starry-eyed claque to obey in the most radical fashion, employing that obedience as a bellwether.

 

The armageddon cycle

The ultimate victory for Evil is a scenario in which humans doom themselves to nuclear war, over and over.  It happens when a small percentage of humanity survives a nuclear holocaust, then proceeds to rebuild society along the same old worldview.  The hard-bitten survivors  establish the same system that cursed ancient Sumer:  slavery, patriarchy, bellicosity.  War follows, on and on, mimicking our own historical pattern.  Society rebuilds on the theme of combat and weapons.  At some point, nuclear warheads get manufactured.  Predictably enough, some tyrant pushes the button.  The missiles launch and a nuclear holocaust ensues.  Once more, a small sliver of the population survives.  And so the cycle starts all over, rinse and repeat, through the infernal, repulsive cosmically stupid trap of doom-by-war, a planet-damning tragedy that is as avoidable as it is disgusting. 

The way out would be for us to reject ignorance-based government.  If people accept truth--a marriage of science, psychology, humanism and ethos--we can walk together toward a heavenly world.  Given our brain- and cultural-plasticity, it is certainly possible that we someday eliminate war entirely.

 Possibility of course, is not probability.  We need to put ethics first.  Not money.  Not power.  It's a colossal change of culture, yes, but approachable.  We've made unbelievable progress in the last few hundred years toward human rights.  Gay marriage was made legal in the USA in 2015.  What a wow! of a breakthrough.

Welcome to the present

 

As tech progresses, the worldview we adapt will affect who we are, what we are, and how we live.  Will it be a petaled metamorphosis? Or will we continue the vector of the Era of Dumbing? 

These are the times in which you and I live in.  Rapid change and yet also great possibility.  As I said above, the greatest invention in human history was universal suffrage:  the attainment of equal voting rights by women.  This overturned ten thousand years of the original Big Lie.   It was a monumental step.  It demonstrated that ‘human nature’ does not limit us.  Our potential to adapt has been demonstrated. 

 

The Ignorance Vortex

What stands in our way now, as it has for so long, is the Era of Dumbing.  The brain of every infant is fed the same pattern of lies, things like women are inferior, macho is best, and war is inevitable.  Not a single person ever born to human civilization has known what it is like to be raised in a Good world.  Not you.  Not me.  Not anyone.  We don’t know what it would be like, because all of us have been indoctrinated to perpetuate the reign of Ignorance.  We continue to be indoctrinated every day--saturated by cultural messages, many of them 'innocuous' and subconscious, such as micro-expressions on a role-modeling face.  At other times they are blatant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0GVm-wYBXs
(sexist commercials from the 20^th century and some ... commentary)

 

I call this intergenerational acculturation trap, this trojan horse of false beliefs for the human brain, the Ignorance Vortex.  The Ignorance Vortex has adapted to diasporas of humans across the globe, but in so doing, it has retained the core elements of its virus-like curse of brain-programming.  (5/20/25, etc.)

 

Sustenance

 

Below, I approach the question of ‘how to stay ethical?’ from some other vantages, such as how best to engage in protest.  Protest itself, however, requires perseverance and strength; and in support of these necessities, I like to emphasize a vision:  joy can arise from the simple idea that you and I are part of Earth’s Beautiful Flowering.  From this purview, we can feel a wealthy sense of place and purpose.  Around us hovers the vast inky void of outer space.  Within a backdrop of millions of empty lightyears, the Earth stands out, a beacon and origin point which holds great promise for a procreative Good.

If the galaxy is a garden, the Earth is one of its first blooms.

 

Perfect is the enemy of ethics tech

We are, of course, frail, faltering creatures. We humans will never be perfect.  Our very nature has vampiric elements, because we must devour other life to survive, even if it is a vegetarian’s choice to eat only plants.  We will do bad things.  We will sometimes fail to understand ourselves when we look in the mirror.  In that sense we are a bit werewolf.  It is part of life. 

And yet, to stretch the metaphor a little more, even a vampire or werewolf can choose the path of the Good (as in the Twilight series).  We can learn not only to acknowledge our dark emotions but to dance with them.  The strength to face our own behavior, both individual and collective, and to work with our own emotions, to nurture virtue, while steering a course away from harm, is how we grow beyond the status of “ethical infants.”  

 

When I Choose To See The Good Side Of Things, I'm Not Being Naive. It Is Strategic And Necessary. It's How I Learned To Survive Through Everything  

        --Waymond, ‘How I Fight,’ Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

 

Variety within circumstance

 

We may be powerless to stop the procession of Evil.  But it doesn’t mean we should give up.  This begs a question:  how do we tread in a realm checkered by bullies, where our basic ‘fellow feelings’ for others are menaced and hurting?   In these fraught times, even a peace sign or a rainbow motif elicits rage.  How do we wisely and effectively make a statement?

History offers countless paths to effective social protest, many of which are nuanced.  Due to the brutal cruelty of police states, a protestor sometimes must stand up without actually standing up.   A Black porter uses body language to signal resistance in the fight to end segregation.  A women works as a maid to pay for her daughter’s college.  The queer community opens a door to expression in 1980s pop music culture.  None of these are failures to speak out, even though they don’t directly confront inequality.  Sometimes social movements, before bursting into the risk of direct challenge, incubate in undercurrents of unrest.

 

Cautious or not?

That said, caution can be feckless.  We should never forget the message in “A Letter from the Birmingham Jail”:

I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the … Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

 

A definition of protest

Drawing on Martin Luther King Jr’s words, we can approach a definition of “protest.”  A final definition, of course, is no more possible than it is for the word “love.”  This does not undercut the value of such ‘secondary order’ concepts.  Discussions of life and reality go far beyond the Euclidian precision of linear math.  They are far more elaborate than even nonlinear applications, though they share with them the traits of uncertainty and chaos.

Using the quote above, we see that effective protest creates tension in order to spotlight injustice.  It challenges the way people listen and feel.  It marshals discomfort to thaw the freeze of complacency.  “Good trouble,” to use the words of John Lewis, aims to disrupt oppressive law.  It seeks to interrogate the norms of order in the quest for decency and justice. 

"No justice, no peace."  (there is no peace in oppression)

 

A good will is not enough

To protest effectively is to have more than a “good will.”  Intent needs to be mobilized.  What is the best route for civil disobedience?  Everyone must answer this question for themself, with the full engagement of their conscience and the passions of an open heart.

A few months before the war with the USA, the Iranian government killed six thousand protestors, opening fire on the crowds.  People paid with their lives for challenging the tyranny.  You could ask, Did they choose the wrong form of protest? 

This question can't be answered by an armchair philosopher such as myself.  I will say this, the victims probably weren’t thinking, “I’m going to die today."  Most likely, almost surely, however, they recognized the immediate danger.  They made an informed choice.

To stand up to tyranny in this way, so boldly accepting such fatal risk, is resounding.  It is a choice that sings of moral beauty, of the bravery of conscience, while shining a light of hope for all of us and for the future of the Earth.  It is a statement that embodies a timeless spirit, addressing not only a nation, or even the globe, but the universe itself.

 We should embrace this immortal statement and never forget it:

 

Life doesn’t have to be this way.

 

Goodness provides its own sort of sustenance

As I said above, choosing Good over Evil brings a kind of joy that is sui generis .  To choose Good is to accept yourself, to work with your emotions as allies.  It is to ‘Know Thyself’ and employ that knowledge for self-respect.  It is to grapple richly with your own unique personality, to initiate dialogues with yourself.  You come to know your depths in many ways, enveloped by a treasury of memories, dispositions and dreams.   In this way, you become your own soulmate.

This inward relationship-building goes outward too.  When you introspect on your own exquisite being, you are drawn to the uniqueness of others.  Your inner empathic embrace facilitates rich relationships across a spectrum:  with other people, animals, the environment, ideals, Earth and Cosmos. 

As sociologists are fond of saying, the many sorts of relationship invent each other via interactive effects. Maybe the only sentence worth pondering in this whole essay is the following:  the individual self is defined through the quality of its relationships at all levels.    

 

Psychic happiness, not material

Listening to one's conscience can spark a surge of psychic happiness.  A lovely self-validation.  And then to go on and engage in protest against darkness, to cast your own ripples into the sea of social interaction, is yet another quantum leap.

I don't mean to belittle the difficulty.  To boldly 'hear' yourself is to admit your failures and to confront weaknesses--and learn from them, falteringly, slowly, struggling along.   It is to listen to your traumas and wounds, to participate in debates with the sides of your being.  Such an heroic course invites meanings and passions deepfelt throughout layers of consciousness.  Pain, yes--but as a path to fruitful ecstasies and the decimation of loneliness. 

 

“We are a totality made of many interlocking parts. This is why we must remember that our individual healing is directly connected to our collective healing” -- Lorena Saavedra Smith

 

“The personal is political” -- Women’s Movement rallying cry

 

Meaning

What is the meaning of life?  Ignorance-based systems, like fascism, answer this question with pathetic, simple bifurcations.  This and That.  Black or White.  What is ‘Evil’ to the fascist?  Anyone or anything that is a useful scapegoat to fuel the 'will to power.'  What is it to be ‘Good’ in a fascist system?  Simply this:  obedience over everything, full loyalty at all costs, even--especially--at the cost of your soul. 

A fine future awaits us, beyond villainous bullying and titanic dumbing.  The path of honesty is painful, yes.  It can be agonizing.  But there is also joy.  There is happiness in a vision of the Earth as a Great Colorful Bulb ready to Blossom.  You and I can be part of the unfurling, nestled in the profound Beauty of a vision of the Good.

========

Footnote

(1) I know this isn't easy, I struggle across a span of self-love and loathing constantly, which is good in a way, we should be humble, but it also brings anguish--but again, this is not necessarily bad (maybe especially for poets like myself who saturate ourselves with the stormiest of passions).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 6/28/26 ... clarified a sentence, namely "The dark genius of fascism is that ... "

 5/25 monstrous essay ... esp III

 5/24/26 more edits in section III .. maybe finally it is relatively okay

 5/20 ... etc.

5/19 ... way ambitious and self-absorbed

5/18... I'm just .. 

5/17/ ,,, more edits, ... I say too much and know too little

5/16 ... Lots of ongoing eds...