The face of last stage empire on display at a Mar-a-Lago event:
The human psyche’s lexicon is imagistic in nature. The psyche speaks in visual metaphors. At empire’s end, the psyche becomes an artist of the absurd. Hence, the nature of the zeitgeist will be limned by means of fashion, form, and feature into emblems of the era.
Pictured: “The Mar-a-Lago face” i.e., human beings transformed by Spiritus Mundi into (inadvertent) supernumeraries of a Gogolian theatre of the (cringe-inducing) grotesque.
In contrast, the type of image above brings me solace, because, now, when I gaze upon my aging face, it seems as if its time-touched features are being drawn by the very hand of a redemptive force.
*****
More mingling amid confederacies of ghouls and galleries of grotesques:
Pro-Zionist billionaires are among the High Dollar donors — thus are among the ownership class — that dictate the agendas of the US political class. Said billionaires have, as of late gone, on a buying spree of corporate media properties. Their gambit being, to enforce narratives that are a litany of pro-Israel lies e.g., foremost among them prevarication e.g., the denial of genocide perpetrated on the people of Gaza.
With vast resources at their disposal their employ media operatives to intimidate and cancel critics, even for the most mild criticism of Israel. As a consequence, there has been a noxious return of antisemitic tropes regarding Jews as a whole e.g., as hidden, scheming controllers of the world.
Are the vast majority of anti-Zionists antisemites? No. Are Nick Fuentes’ and his knuckle-dragging Groypers antisemitists? You can bet your jackboots they are.
The greatest threat to power-devoid Jews such as myself in the coming years: the conflation of Zionism and Judaism by Israeli propagandists.
Regarding Israel: A schism among the religious right:
At present, we are witnessing a power struggle among death cultist Christian rightists between Christian-nationalists nativism-gripped xenophobes and Christian-Zionist End Timer zealots. The former’s ranks are comprised of young, online, Groyper types who are possessed by a Brown Shirt mindset while the latter are (far) older Jesus fetishist fantasists — who believe every Israeli transgression against humanity, from ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, to perpetual war on its neighbors, to prison guard rape gangs bring the sin-reeking earth closer to their humanity-loathing fantasy of End Times wrought salvation.
To what extreme degree does one have to hate and fear life in order to long for the entire earth to be destroyed in the name of the divine and perfect love by their Lord and Savior? From the life-loathing worldview of Christian fundamentalists, like an incorrigible child, the entire world must be whipped and punished until he displays a god-wrought purity thereby becoming deserving of the love of their demanding rage-prone Sky Father.
Outright and florid insanity, right? These fanatics cannot even prevent their own denominations from (perpetual) sectarian schisms: Constantinople and Rome split; the Protestant Reformation true believers split from Papal autocrats; in the North American colonies, there unfolded constant strife and acrimony among the various Protestant sects, so much so that if the Founders had not intervened and proclaimed the fledgling nation to be a dominion of secularism, Puritan Massachusetts would have marched on and perpetuated ethnic cleansing on Quaker Rhode Island.
The dismal trend continues right up to the present in which the Episcopal church has split into estranged sects between their liberal and conservative congregants and Southern Baptists have split between conservatives and conservative extremists.
Unspoken in all the right’s Charlie Kirk ceremonies of beatification: Groypers trolled Charlie Kirk for years because they insisted his pro-Zionist proclivities translated into an impurity of faith with Christian-nationalist ideology.
Example of Nick Fuentes’ legion of Groypers’ shitposting rampage against Charlie Kirk.
In essence, these spree killers in the name of The Lord have not changed their (blood-drench, intolerant) vestal garments of the mind. The split between Christian Zionists and Groypers anti-Zionists displays, once again, the propensity to schism.
Conversely and in brief, the mind of a god capable of omniscience over all of Creation would be infinite thus unknowable. Poets, humbled by the vastness of it all, speak of inspiration as a psychical force bestowing “miraculous influence.”
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
— excerpt from Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour — Wallace Stevens
Regarding the proclivity of the Christian fundamentalist’s worldview for dividing into warring factions: The only miracle here is: the seemly infinitesimal number of pieces that such small minds are capable of being split into.
Of minuscule minds and massive authoritarian longings:
Remarking on the obsequious, servile mannerisms of Chinese president’s Xi Jinping staff, MAGA Dear Leader Donald Trump proclaimed, “I want my cabinet to behave like Xi Jinping’s staff. I’m demanding that. I want them sitting up like that, just nice and straight.”
He continued, “I never saw posture like that. I’ve never seen men so scared in their lives.”
Yet MAGA-Reich soreheads wax psychotic about Zohran Mamdani’s coming reign of woke jihadist’s imposition of commie Sharia Law tyranny, all the while acting as Trump’s ambulatory testicle cozies due to their florid terror of drawing the petty-minded tyrant’s scorn.
Forget the “great” part: Their true creed: Make Americans Graze Ass.
With Trump’s poll numbers in free-fall we can expect the hyper-authoritarian compulsions of the US right to approach peak hysteria. In combination with Zohran Mamdani’s rise, for the first time in decades, the Zionist lobby and the oligarchic class have been subjected to profound and sustained, public pushback. Young people and the working class refused to be taken in by million dollar plus campaigns fomenting fear and slinging slander.
Of course, the oligarchs and their press corp operatives are not done. Far from it. Power, in particular power structures that have managed to remain all but unaccountable, do not concede control with grace. In fact, they, as a general rule, will attempt to destroy what they cannot dominate. Thousands of Palestinian corpses stippled beneath the rubble in Gaza testify to the tragic truth of the matter.
Not that there will come to pass ethnic cleansing and a genocidal campaign on the streets of New York City. But we will witness a full-spectrum campaign by the kleptocracy waged to undermine, paralyze, and generally render feckless Mayor Mamdani’s efforts at reform.
The ink-stained General Jack D. Ripper[s] of New York Post promulgated this (risible) augury of what is to come:
Yet by sustained resistance we can do more than hope that The City’s mayor elect’s resolve endures: Mamdani to the demagogic fear mongers and retailers in fear and slander:
“We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”
Whether authoritarianism imposes itself as capitalism’s dictatorship of money or as Zionism’s ethno-nationalism or Christian-nationalism, we can gain resolved in the knowledge the seekers of absolute power, by their mania to control what is beyond control – i.e., the vastness and intricacies of life itself – are ripe with the seeds of their own undoing.
The thoughts of the heart cannot be controlled nor dominated by their noxious will; moreover, the soul of the world is an indomitable order that will defeat all would-be conquerors.
Emblems of last stage empire: Sleepy Joe meet the Narcoleptic Don.
Still amateur stuff, Donnie. You have surpassed Sleepy Joe but at this rate you will never make the fascist Big Leagues. Take note:
“I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.” — Adolf Hitler
Out of the jaws of victory…well, we are talking about the Democratic Party:
The shutdown ends. Dems, per always, collapse into their own corruption. The Democrats only talent: a knack for capitulation and betrayal of their base.
The emerging storyline had been: Trump is in decline; the Democratic Party is entering into the initial stages of ascendancy. Yet Democrats, true to form, and in rapid order, put an end to the possibility.
The takeaway: Republicans, accurately, regard their base as imbeciles and psychos. And Democrats do not regard their base at all. Caveat: There is a base to whose agendas they heed with absolute felicity: the economic elite and the Zionist lobby.
And what of Dear Leader Trump (whose rise was enabled by corrupt Democrats)?
Here the Democrats are consistent: On every occasion that Trump begins to collapse into his exponentially increasing brain rot — the dismal Dems leap into a political abyss of their own making and reveal to the world how the art of self-undermining is performed by experts.
There is the Mar-a-Lago face then there is the Democrats’ countenance of perpetual capitulation.
Chuck Schumer, despite the glasses — emblematic of the Party’s elite — remains willfully myopic — yet Zohran Mamdani’s campaign presented a seminar insofar as the Democratic Party’s path forward.