You have to see that the buildings are anorexic, you have to see that the language is schizogenic, that “normalcy” is manic, and medicine and business are paranoid.
— James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
The pain incurred by bracing awareness is crucial here:
The wound can act as a womb birthing art or will fester giving birth to the societal monster known in modernity as fascism. The latter comes into being as a result of the angst and anger created by vast wealth inequality.
What is less artless than the US’ dismal-to-the-senses archipelago of big box and Dollar stores, fast food outlets, payday loan storefronts and strip malls…all reflected by Trump’s rampage of gaudy that he is perpetrating on White House decor and his crass notions of renovation?
Trump was born out of the womb of American ugliness. Because all things societal have been reduced to manic profiteering by both exploitation and grift, the twisted, hideous spirit of the age has taken the form of MAGA fascism. The ugliness has manifested from artless MAGA merchandise to Trump’s avarice-driven compulsion to collect gaudy accouterments to his mania to erect monuments to his bloated ego.
Yet Trump’s frenzied application of gold gilt cannot conceal the rot that has taken hold beneath late-stage empire’s veneer.
Trump’s days upon this breathing earth are becoming shorter — but what manner of abomination will emerge next from out of the reeking hole at the collapsing core of the nation?
Bibi Netanyahu’s rise and reign provides a (hideous) portrait of what takes form on a governmental basis when morally bereft demagogic shit-heels form an alliance with right-wing, religious zealots. To wit, the US billionaire class’ hyper-authoritarian-reeking coalition with Christian-nationalists.
There can never be enough Big Macs to sate the hollowness at Trump’s core as there can never be enough corpses to fill the hollow core of the US Moloch’s psyche.
Vessels expose the invisible Zeitgeist, the visible formed by the invisible.
—James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology: Uniform Edition, 2009
Regarding political vessels, what of the Democratic Party’s fecklessness before looming MAGA fascist fuckery? At this point, it should go without saying, High Dollar interests corporate, Wall Street, tech oligarchic, MIC, and Israel lobbyists set the agendas of both US political parties. Moreover, a soul-defying corporate capitalist value system has been internalized, over generations, by a large portion of the US citizenry. The all-encompassing capitalist social/cultural/ milieu are the waters into which we Americans were born. The waters might have grown inconducive to the fish’s wellbeing — but water is all fish know.
Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don’t want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure.
— James Hillman
Hillman posited the assertion about a decade and a half back. He died in 2011. The death cult animus driving MAGA fascism/Christian-nationalism has accelerated the process of entropic chaos inherent, yet veiled, within all authoritarian movements. Democrats cannot offer any viable remedy due to the fact the pathological worldview of their donor class benefactors precludes said remedy.
The consequences of imperial overreach have come home.
Angst grips the citizenry as the price of goods rise steadily upward as services decline to the point of unavailability. As a matter of course, authoritarian leaders and the operatives deploy their standard slight-of-hand demagoguery: blame out-groups e.g., the culprit may be in your very yard holding a leaf blower.
Then there is, the rightist-limned caricature of the so-called soyboy — an imagined, reviled figure on whom rightists can displace their (and the nation’s) inner sense of weakness. One question: If your (imagined) enemy is such a weakling — what is with all the fear and rage directed in his direction? (This is a classic fascist trope: the enemy is a decadent, ineffectual libtard; yet the woke mind virus is destroying the will of all that is good and righteous.)
In a manner, the fascist frame of mind does not mature beyond the level of a middle school bully. The object of his abuse is the shy, bespectacled kid nibbling a sandwich alone in the corner of the school lunchroom. Tormenting the outsider serves, on a fleeting basis, to provide reprieve from his hidden-from-himself angst regarding whether he harbors the strength and endurance to survive life’s inherent uncertainties. The solution: a confederacy of bullies arrayed in seething pixel across the manosphere, ever at ready, to own the left-tards. They can just picture it: martyred Charlie Kirk, ensconced in White supremacist heaven, guiding their punching down fists to pummel to shitdust those weak-of-will decadents undermining the US empire. All bow to the bully boy enforcers of The United States Of Middle School.
Withal, fascists believe the absurd notion that through gaining absolute power they can succeed in achieving the undoable: gaining total control over the vastness and multiplicity of life.
In their crackbrained way, fascists are inadvertent absurdists.
Enter the (street) theatre of intentional absurdists: the glow-in-(totalitarian)-darkness, dissident frogs of Portland; the ribbit ensemble reveals what a reality-defiant lie MAGA fascists’ warnings are i.e., of the danger poised by scary, scary “Antifa terrorists.”
To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere.
— James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
The presence of the absurdist frogs reveals the hidden variables of the creative force rising into culture. Imaginative forms are dyadic and dynamic representations of the vastness and multiplicity of life itself. Fascists can and will beat, arrest, jail, even kill those who refuse to be silenced, controlled and dominated but, in the end, they cannot suppress, on an indefinite basis, all manner of things and at all times.
The frog chorus chants our choice, “ribbit into the totalitarian darkness or croak.”
Absurdity is the weeds that burst the cracks of totalitarians’ concretized worldview. Over the passage of time, fascists will exhaust themselves by means of overreach and become overwhelmed by the forces arrayed against them.
Revealing their (unintentional) absurdity sets the process in motion.
The Andalusian Reapers, Andre Masson