Democracy?

The DNC; betting that parties should be able to browbeat voters into complicity with their demands instead of courting voters by bending to their interests; has lost again.

Hominid Skull, Graphite on paper

Or have they….

It’s been increasingly obvious that the Duopoly has been acting in ways that make the World Wide Wrestling Federation seem honest and transparent. The DNC won over more Republicans in 2020 than they did this time. So much for the Cheney Democrat’s Party.

Do the owners care? Beyond being incapable of the simplest forms of compassion their blindness to reality; the greatest bug/feature of wealth being that it makes you stupid; and extreme wealth makes you extremely stupid; they believe their own fantasies and truly expect to continue to rule from the depths of their bunkers.

Have we seen the last sham election in this shit-hole country? I’ve been expecting that for years. Time to stop payment on the band’s salaries and charge all the crew’s families for their lost uniforms. The Titanic has gone down.

During the “Election Cycle” the most telling assumption is that all potential political value can only be expressed and contained within a campaign’s spending. That all such spending from whatever flavor on the political spectrum must be funneled through the same recipients, advertisers, mass-media outlets; is never addressed. Likewise, and we’re seeing this now; after an election, an election where it seems both duopoly parties lost voters; we hear the results touted as, “The People™ Have Spoken!” This, along with all the red & blue maps showing vast swathes of unpopulated land in red.

Around 23% of voters does not represent, the People. Well, maybe the pseudo-mythic fiction behind the residual beliefs in a “Democratic Process” that was born with colonization and was always perfectly happy with slavery. After all, “Somebody’s got to do all the work….” Democracy has always been comfortable with exclusion and only counting those who “matter” and to Hell with the rest.

Of that 23% how many actually understood in some meaningful way what they were supporting? When the entire process is geared to create a firestorm of emotional manipulation as a toxic simulacra of “decision-making;” no one is actually acting out of agency. Everyone is tossed into a maelstrom of disinformation and manipulation and then pressured into “choosing.” Most eligible voters actually choose not to. Of those who do, what percentage are true believers? For any of the “choices” on offer.

“If you were able to overlook a genocide and cast a vote for Harris, you already know how a conservative was able to overlook Trump’s extremism and vote for him.”

Historian Robin D.G. Kelley

And then in the aftermath we are lectured on how we “failed the party” that assumed we had no other choice but to accept whatever they wanted to do; whatever they were doing anyway; whether they had any public support or not.

The Bankruptcy of Thought. That’s what we’re living through. The Edifice of Thought driving itself off the cliff. Its greatest ambition is now to find ways to profit on the En-Gaza-fication of the entire built world it has created.

I remember a snippet from when I was maybe four years old. I was at the Post Office, waiting in line with my father. The stone floor and high-vaulted, New Deal architecture of the Provincetown Post Office echoing; decorated with actual frescoes and cast-bronze details. Lost in revery in this “Hall of the People.” I kept track of my place by following the great, dark overcoat looming to my left. At one point, I was startled when my father; who’d already posted his letters; grabbed for my hand from off on my right. Glancing left, the overcoat I’d been dutifully following was still there. Looking up higher, I now saw that it belonged to a stranger.

This was my introduction, at least in its most memorable form, to the pitfalls of perception. We see what we want to see. Believe what we want to believe. It takes effort and patience to question our perceptions, our assumptions, and recognize how fragile and fleeting any sense of certainty must be; needs to be; if we are to avoid being swept off in some alien direction.

Who knows what would have happened if I’d kept following that overcoat? That “dilemma,” an example of the absurd double-binds I would discover to be the conditions of my life in that family. That there would be any question that maybe going with the one who brought me was not the best choice?

Yet, today I find that as a people, we are in a similar situation. Whoever we are. Whatever our proclivities. We find ourselves being led by someone we don’t recognize. Or, we discover, slowly and to our horror, that we’ve been led off by the wrong one. The one we were “supposed” to go with; but the wrong one non-the-less.

One of the beauties of Gaslighting is that when the abuser’s victim discovers they are being manipulated it is just beginning to do its malevolent work. Domination insists on humiliation. “It’s not enough that you do what I want. You must know that I’m manipulating you and you must know there is nothing you can do about it.”

Our political manipulation runs on a four year cycle. It begins with the brow-beating for how we have “failed.” It takes power from getting us to believe that we, the People, are hopelessly divided and that; anyway, the faction that won has a great mandate from The People!™ Glossing over the fact that these two statements are hopelessly contradictory. Then the “Transition.” The “Honeymoon.” The work in “the trenches of government.” “Stalemate!” “Victory!” The inevitable increase in incoherence and violent destruction is again palmed off as being our fault. After all, we’re so divided! Then the new campaign cycle begins.

This is where we might begin to notice we’re not still following the same overcoat. For the last twenty years at least, the whole process of primaries and conventions and general elections fought “on the issues” has been hacked away leaving a barely recognizable shell of what was envisioned in our mythical past. Candidates who might have built actual constituencies of supporters have been cut off at the knees. Those same personalities have been given a choice too. Either continue a charade, wicking off the overflow of disturbance amongst the electorate, knowing that your candidacies will be marginalized and ignored outright as our owner’s agenda sees fit.

When was the last time a primary was allowed to run its course and create a mandate around a set of policies? I can’t really tell. Another case of frogs in a warming pot….

Let’s be clear about what is justifiably to be mourned after this election. It’s not that the nice Nazis lost and the meanie Nazis won.

What’s to be mourned is the same thing we’ve had to mourn for my entire lifetime and longer. A living, breathing, organically whole fabric of life has been destroyed and at this late stage we are entering this Bankruptcy of Thought bringing about the final solution of all Final Solutions. We are reaching the only possible outcome of a system, Thought, that can only destroy everything until all that is left is us and then it destroys us.

Of course, it has been destroying “us” all along. Rending the fabric of relationships and connection and calling the resulting poverty wealth; because that’s what it looks like from the perspective of those who follow their lust for power. It’s just that now that us is increasingly and uncomfortably getting closer and closer to home. It’s coming after the scraps of an us that we alienated, atomized individuals still recognize as us.

And this, the fact that we are, have for a very long time, been willing to look the other way as most of the fabric of life was torn to shreds, are now sorry that it’s starting to look like this system; which has brought us the comfort and ease to be sitting here in front of an expensive electronic device and have the time and inclination to gaze at its surface; is finally coming after us. All while telling us that; it’s our fault; and, it’s the “will of the People!™” And we continue to reel from each humiliation, each forced complicity. And, we continue to believe them. We continue to put all of our humanity, our creature-hood, to the side and accept the tyranny of pragmatism that stacks everything in the favor of those who chase after power and enables all the ongoing destruction.

The first and mandatory step in breaking out of double binds is recognizing how entrapped we are. It’s not really a double-bind if there’s a way out visible from within the system that created the situation we find ourselves in. We need to be totally – And I’m using this word specifically because of its roots in Todt, Death. – disabuse ourselves of our illusions. We need to acknowledge and accept the futility of all our “strategies.”

No -ism is going to save us. No gun either. Every -ism is totally embedded in the Bankruptcy of Thought. Every gun is a symbol of the lust for power and is contaminated with all the “unexpected consequences” that have littered the history of power. Neither will strategy…. No strategy; where we rely on an accumulation of fossilized remnants of past insights that pass for knowledge and where we then concoct fantasies of how we will follow this ten-point list or that set of tactical techniques torn out of any meaningful context and simply believed in because, well, “That’s what we do!” No strategy can save us. Right down to the depths of believing that any creature can simply will itself out of the consequences that generated its conditions.

And this is where Thought has always compelled us to stop. Upon glimpsing the abyss we slip back into intoxication. It’s all simply too much.

And this is why Nemesis, that ally to Grief; both working to re-establish balance; simply up the ante. There is no choice. Those who refuse to accept what-is and insist on maintaining hyper-destructive fantasies will destroy themselves. They may take everyone along with them. “Those who we are about to destroy we will first drive insane!” said the gods. If the fantasies are so deep that they threaten all; then all is at risk. All is in danger until the source has been eliminated.

We continue to insist on defending what remains of our privileged conditions. While the Zionist’s Right to Self Defense rings hollow as its abuse and the poverty of imagination that holds it up refuses to see that it is only accelerating its own destruction. The same is, sadly, true of the Palestinian’s, or the Iranian’s. For the entire history of History we’ve been able to say that an extreme situation warrants a violent reaction. We’ve always been able to kick that can down the road.

Our Moment is different. No one has ever lived in a time when the total Bankruptcy of Thought was visible. It was always obscured by distance, by time. By the way existing pockets of vitality would bring about some healing. Wounds did heal. Destruction could be an opportunity for regrowth. Living at the time when all this is no longer possible gives us this one slim, bitter advantage. There is no way to continue hiding from the consequences of remaining trapped in Thought.

The most difficult part of all this is that from within Thought; all our habits and incoherent confusions over cause & effect and our incapacity for Proprioception; it seems impossible to imagine an alternative. It is so much easier, and also already deeply ingrained in our habitual patterns, to fall back on platitudes, “It’s human nature!” “It’s too late anyway!” “What can I do?” And so, Thought returns us to its prison. We remain locked in the humiliation of almost knowing better. Of seeing through the abusers tricks and still feeling we have no choice but to comply in our own destruction.

Why isn’t Gaza fitting all the expectations that an anarchic situation brings on a “Zombie Apocalypse?” Why do we see people quietly struggling in impossible circumstances and maintaining a level of community caring that brings every “developed nation’s” efforts to shame? We can’t even manage to reach our own deaths without bankrupting our families and they still run daily efforts to pull victims from the rubble and treat horrific wounds in the most dire circumstances. We have propagandists we pay to lie to us and they have citizen journalists who risk their lives simply to inform the world of their people’s plight.

Those images of comfortable DNC operatives going, “La-la-la!” covering their ears to avoid hearing the names of the martyred come to mind. The most hated thing about the Palestinians in the minds of their destroyers is that their reality shows the profound dis-truth behind all the claims of self-defense. That when destruction and abuse reach a certain level they no longer work. Humanity, creature-hood, rebounds. People find themselves outside the strictures binding them to this bankrupt system and they act. Not as we would expect. Not as a Zombie Horde. Not the way the powerful and their henchmen keep treating our own poor when immersed in disaster. When “looters” are everywhere and the “forces of good” must defend the rotting freezers in flooded supermarkets to protect the right to profit insisted upon by our owners.

What needs to be done cannot be outlined in any plan.

Read between the lines.

Find the whispers of alternative. They do appear. If we just stop long enough and listen.

Even just allowing ourselves to pass through disillusionment. Sit with it long enough to discover that losing one’s shackles allows for the possibility of Joy.

What’s at stake is our position within the Enormity resulting from our domination within this Edifice of Thought. What got us here is longer than any election cycle. It goes back thousands of years. We have no more than fleeting scraps to show us that this is not “how life is;” but the result of an establishment of ways of being in the world that refuse to engage what-is and have us chasing after Chimeras. The whole Edifice is Bankrupt and this corruption and willful self-impoverishment; that has been central to its machinations from the beginning; is finally entering our numbed awareness.

I write this on a day in Southern New England as November takes hold and it is 70º F. And, the nice Nazis have lost power. We await our fates at the hands of the nasty Nazis.

Every ounce of inertia our Edifice of Thought can bring to bear will have us congratulating ourselves on such a “lovely warm day!” While simultaneously working to get us to cycle from immediate despondency into a returned learned helplessness.

Orwell missed one important point. The Party does have us celebrate our “Two Minutes of Hate.” What he missed is that we would do this in shifts. Not just Oceania hating on Eurasia, or East-Asia, in turn; but within our “own Republic.” We take turns hating on the other “half.” Each “half” amounting to less than a quarter of us all. Each half getting to plot and take its revenge out on the rest of us in turn.

There’s a lot to mourn. It’s perhaps just not that obvious where to start.

Salt Pond Sunset, oil on canvas