David Alfaro Siqueiros, The New Democracy, 1944-45
I’m simply going to posit, without a dollop of varnish applied, the following declaration outright: The foremost and defining reason for the present miseries of US culture: Generation after generation have internalized the grift perpetrated by high dollar capitalists predators and blood-drenched war profiteers: the citizenry has been induced into believing, in fact, defining their lives by the soul-sucking lie: that which does not make a profit is devoid of value.
A hidden agenda is veiled within the capitalist work ethic: those who do the day-by-day work enrich the coffers of those are, in essence, on a cultural basis, high-end proprietors of a cut-rate cultural carnival and their clutch of con artist barkers and grift artists i.e., creators of garish illusions and enervating distractions designed to render those within the carnival grounds bamboozled and poorer.
Pull back for a cosmic view: Even night, on our planet, has been banished by constellations of industrial and commercial artificial light. From space, Planet Earth appears festooned with carnival lights.
Enter the rise of the MAGA sideshow that has become the centerstage attraction. And what is retailed at traveling carnivals? A panoply of illusions retailed to separate carnival attendees from their money.
The age of MAGA, and its obsessive insistence that the noxious illusions of the nation’s past must be the prologue of all futurity, will, by their totalitarian mania, enervate the remaining and foundering raison d’etre of the nation. The fantasy of the land of personal freedom and individual innovation will flame out in a Götterdämmerung of the grift of it all.
When a belief system is on the verge of self-immolation, the artifice contrived by its elites bloats into absurdity. Unlike the modus operandi of a traveling carnival that arrives, is assembled, and decamps, the grotesque has become quotidian.
Nebuchadnezzar turned into an animal, Nebuchadnezzar in Rudolf von Ems, Weltchronik (World Chronicle) ca. 1400–1410)
Yet monuments to the power holders’ egos, erected in empty air, are vaporous. The winds of time will blow in and the gasbag Trump’s malevolent words will dissipate. In the meantime, bearing witness to the extant hideousness engenders a state of emotional agitation.
Angst and pain feels as though it cannot be contained and endured. The agonies can be endured — but suffering must be given voice; and the more creative/musical/poetic all the better.
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” ― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
The world is alive within. Soul overcomes vanity because vanity lives for artifice while the soul endures terror and it allows itself to be undone then restored by beauty.
O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night,
By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous’d, the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.
— Walt Whitman, excerpt, Out The Cradle Endlessly Rocking
First, divest yourself of the notion that culture proceeds by reason. Resist the lie that people getting hurt are some way deserving of the pain inflicted upon them.
Day to day living under unfettered capitalism, de facto wage and debt slavery, is antithetical to its apologists’ declaration that the system promotes freedom. Internalized, the collective psyche of the culture transmogrifies from gaudy carnival to howling madhouse.
Said apologists declaration can be revealed as insanity by the simple act of noticing the condition of life in the nation. Take a gander: The present dehumanizing economic order reduces everyday life to an endless (futile for many) struggle to keep one’s heart alive — to prevent reservoirs of hope within the psyche from being rendered into an arid wasteland.
The Quest, 1938 by Cecil Collins
First step out of the wasteland, the notion of the oasis of a commercialized comfort zone is a mirage. Complacency serves to expand the system’s brutal and heart-decimating reach. In times such as these, the banality of evil is embodied by the act of going along to get along. The social peacemaker becomes a force of tacit aggression in the service of powerful interests.
Yet, when a calling arrives to resist the mundane tropes of coping that allow evil to flourish, there is a chance family members will withdraw affection, even become estranged; bonds of friendship might be broken, perhaps, irrevocably.
We long for companionship; the longing has become a hollow ache in our era of atomization. We ache for the numinosity freighted in social interaction. The mind becomes sharper; awareness is heightened; the heart awakens to life. We crave to be within the thronging mass. The world is aglow. Purpose regained, we have the feeling of traveling into a light-festooned city, teeming with eros and mystery.
But, at present, we confront an economic/political system devoid of heart, a system that refuses to acknowledge that human suffering is inevitable, and the suffering will grow to the point of becoming unbearable if remedy is not delivered. To wit, a nation’s survival depends on the type and degree of relief brought to bear on the suffering of its citizenry.
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Echo of a Scream, 1937
Fools will ignore the pain. The wicked will justify cruelty. And the worst among the populace will spread and exacerbate pain, deprivation, and misery. The role of the just becomes: an attempt to create an environment that not only promotes survival but creates health, meaning, and purpose. In short, promotes a life worth living for the citizenry and not a carnival of cruelty.
The hidden story of corrupt, war-like nations is: predatory birds come home to roost.
An indication collapse is coming: There was a time when members of the US political class displayed eloquence and wit, even in their mendacity. Now listening to the palaver of our present day political elite inflicts the nausea experienced onboard low-grade carnival rides. The political class of old, corrupt as they were, would vomit at the sight and sound of our present day, sub-literate, cut-rate carnie clowns.
With a nation, as in life itself, and, as with love, demands for perfection are not necessary. Attempting to create a just society proves to be the most propitious approach. As opposed to the banality of evil, this is the stuff of everyday redemption.
Conversely, in a nation ridden by vast wealth inequality and engaged in perpetual militarism, cruelty becomes quotidian: a president-as-bully-in-chief deploys demagogic blame-shifting, directed at cultural outsiders, to gain and maintain power; the homeless shuffling the streets are condemned as mere losers and deemed a public menace, as opposed to emblems of the society’s lost sense of humanity; war profiteers amass obscene wealth by manufacturing weaponry used for genocide.
The character of a nation is defined by its challenges. When its challenges are ignored, when speech addressing the fact is suppressed or, worse punished, tragedy results. The nation’s writers, poets, artists and activists must act as emissaries of remembrance and renewal.
As a writer I must turn inward before gazing outward. I must endeavor to, by reflex, not avert my sight from the criteria that causes me to experience discomfort or even mortification. I suggest everyone make the attempt. It is the work of being human. To embrace one’s imperfections, oddly enough, improves the world. There is less need for fakery, of addiction to approval, or for truckling to authoritarian power. Self-justifying bullshit transforms into tales of soul-making. The everyday grifts inherent to the false self expand in a personal form of Homeric hymns. What is shed is shame. What is gained is an affinity with other imperfect, confused beings. Over a period of time, the heart is enlarged as your view of others and the world is enlarged.
Diego Rivera – Indian Warrior
No, you do not shamble into paradise. The dilemmas and struggles of everyday life must be confronted. Trudging through valleys remain; the mountaintop of enlightenment, reserved for the holy, is a domicile reserved for few of us.
The process will be slow. Every tree must use the life-force to, imperceptibly, navigate its branches sunward. Here we are not encountering the capitalist/consumer state addiction to manic distractions and endless growth. For, at times, leaves of belief must fall, decay to hummus, thus contributing to the silent (to us) living cosmos of earth at ground level.
When the capitalist/consumer empire hits bottom, perhaps, root systems of humanity can take root. The brave at heart must proceed to ground level in order to plant seeds that will bear new understanding as to our perceptions of ourselves and of the world. Of course, we will remain human thereby be prone to folly. But our life regret will not involve making the same tragic-in-consequence mistakes over and over again and justifying it as “our way of life.”
Belief in a past that never was reduces the present to a wasteland, dry of hope; revisioning of belief thus becomes the grail that will heal the suffering land.
“Resist much, obey little.” ― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar