What We're Up Against, When We're Up Against trimp

Of course, the majority of people who voted for trimp did it DESPITΕ his ignorance, racism, misogyny, manifest dishonesty, obscene immaturity, and overall vileness. (The bulk of THOSE did that for “religious” reasons...)

But an alarmingly large minority of those voters (and current “dead-ender” supporters) are for trimp precisely BECAUSE of his racism and misogyny. But they actually do what they do mostly BECAUSE of his outrageous propensity to wreak havoc and spread dismay by undermining the rule of law and norms of civil discourse even if it‘s only for the purposes of pursuing both venial and mortally corrupt ends. This is “The Joker” mentality.

The ”Joker Mentality” is a mindset that has despaired of the idea of making sense of the world. It lives in an anaerobic hall of distortion mirrors where sense and sensibility is rejected for the seductions of sensation and futility. It is especially allergic to the strenuous and frustrating work of building habits of mind and institutions that might be able to limit the dangers of tyranny and exploitation. It rejects all meaning--or the possibility of such.

Many who succumb to the Joker Mentality have long felt acutely marginalized and alienated from our bewildering and rapidly changing culture. Many have been subject to unconscionable abuse themselves whether or not, in their thrashing reactions to insults, betrayals, and violations, they have sometimes (or often) found themselves brutalizing others.

Yes, this mentality is turbocharged by anguish, resentment, bewilderment, and a desire to “spread the pain”. Sometimes, it is also bolstered by outlandish fantasies of absolute domination and mastery. Other times, the ability to spread confusion and undermine meaning has become habitually subsumed into a useful strategy for achieving selfish (idiotic and psychopathic) ends.

Some of us who occasionally succumb to the Joker Mentality are capable of shame and self correction. Others may have inured themselves to any semblance of influence from any possible “better angels of our nature.” trimp, himself, is likely one of those who MAY, for all ”practical purposes” be ”irredeemable”. But THAT might only be part of their (his/our) sick fantasy. To view anybody as “irredeemable” is, in a true sense, to grant them another futile, self stimulating victory.

One of the many overwhelming tasks of our civilization, if it survives the throes of climate change and avoids the holocaust of nuclear war, is to examine (and try to correct for) how it creates the conditions that lead so many to succumb to this mentality and then perhaps to act out in irresponsible ways relating to racism, misogyny, and various forms of cultural vandalism--or physical violence. There is, after all, much to be learned from these tortured souls especially in their caustic reactions to so called “norms” that are too often, in themselves, sleazy manifestations of aggression, domination, neglect, and exploitation.

Hitler never won more than 40% of the votes of those who bothered to turn out. 

But that was more than enough.

Attention must be paid.

Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass.  He is currently working on his second novel I Wanna Be Evil.

Our Brothers Our Executioners

The idea that ideas are dangerous . . .

 is dangerous itself.

Because it’s true.

Because everything is dangerous.

Even moderation can be carried to extremes.

Albert Camus spoke of limits.

But in an ever expanding universe with no edges . . .

where twisting turning space and time may be continuous or riddled with gaps . . .

where do limits come from?

Only clashes and interminglings?

Manifold vectors spinning through algorithms?

The statistical calculus of entropy?

exhaustion?

Or whitehole bursts of identity?

Our Brothers

Our Executioners

Our Ourobor0s 

Slurping the dredgy runoff murk of the Pierian

Simmering in its piss

Their brains joltified by comicbook zaps of current 

in dungeon basement lavoritories

sealed off from dark electric skies

mostly hairless nodes

emptied by resentment and rejection

waiting for the swelling pulchritude of Eureka!

but condemned to strap on travis bickle heat

and turn

and stride

away from foggy mirrors

toward eyeballs full of ardor.

They are

Our Brother

Michael Agonistes and The Fear of Eating Dust

To be clear, the real hero of the public Cohen hearings in the House of Representatives was Elijah Cummings who, if he persists with the majestic demeanor demonstrated by his official conduct so far, will have his memory enshrined along with those of Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis, and Barack Obama as Black men who are also stirring role models for minority children who need encouragement to engage in the gritty pitfalls of a career of public service. 

Did I seem to imply they, (the coming generation?) need this? Actually, it’s all of us who desperately need young brown men and women to be so inspired whether or not they’re moved to be part of the same push as the likes of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. And all of us urgently need “white” youths to also be so moved, under the sway (we hope) of the “better angels of our nature”.

But the darkest attraction echoed out from the glum persona of Michael Dean Cohen, now destined to be perhaps immortally disfigured in operatic pop culture portrayals as a 21st-century scoundrel now battling for redemption. His most likely emblem is the marginal law student and shady practitioner whose professional niche was taking on the types of “legal” work more ethical lawyers skirted away from. A real-life Saul Goodman.

Cohen himself was more surprising than any of his testimony which actually revealed little that was actually “news” although one can’t help but hope the evidence he provides will finally tip the scales toward some version of a just comeuppance for our current president* and his hollow enablers. Despite the childish taunting of the impish Republican placards “Liar. Liar. Pants on Fire!” (. . . ?) Cohen was as sharp and composed as he was humble.

“Fool” was one of his responses to malicious queries about how he should characterize himself. Yet the use of the word “fool” was entangled in the bitter context of a man who forthrightly confessed to shattering the "safety and security" of his family and who has been sentenced to years in a federal penitentiary which he will enter after being publicly labeled by the President* of the United States of America as a “rat” which in the criminal ethos is only a few slim nachos above the status and vulnerability of a child molester.

“I’m responsible for your silliness because I did the same thing that you’re doing now, for 10 years. I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years. I can only warn people — the more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”

Somehow Michael Cohen was able to forcefully use the words “fool” and “silliness” to get to the heart of criminal venality even when the human consequences for certain transgressions are more brutal, bleak, and savage than we can seriously bear to imagine. Michael Cohen is, as he reminded us more than once, a child of Holocaust survivors.

I think of him driving with trimp through a “challenged neighborhood” in some sleek limousine. “Only Black people can live like this.” Somehow Cohen was able to convey the painful twinges of conscience that must have flickered dimly and uncomfortable at odd moments throughout his career as a henchman.

Now Cohen’s days of joyriding with the rich and infantile are over. Now Michael is, in the words of an apt commentator, “eating ashes”. Somehow though, without excuses or pleas for sympathy, he is performing with a dignity which makes one willing to believe in the possibility of redemption. Somehow we see a man who cavorted with and served the purposes of criminals, and who did so as much because of as despite the enervating insecurity of the outsider trembling in the resounding aftershocks of the Holocaust. 

And now he is eating ash.

There was something admirable in Michael’s stance of calm opposition to his blinkered afflicters on the Republican side of his inquisition. There is a difference, after all, to mountains of documented evidence assembled in an official proceeding as opposed to the blizzards of everyday iniquity and the never-ending shitstorms of the early 21st-century news cycle. Unfortunately, no such distinction seemed to register with the Republican representatives, and perhaps it never will, complicit as they are with their president* and forced to play to the unyielding sentiments of their deplorable and demented base. Can it be lost on Michael Cohen that the spiteful refusal to contend either with evidence or honestly established ways of interpreting it is what fascism depends on?  

Isn't it ironic how this refusal is probably so entwined with the fear of eating ash?

Detractors will focus on how Michael was playing to the multiple squads of prosecutors tightening their furious circle around both the trimp administration* and the “Trump organization”. No doubt there’s something to that. But Michael had a more intimate audience packed with such an immensity of more humane compulsion. Elijah Cummings acknowledged this in his final statement addressed as much to the broken individual before him as to a tattered nation beleaguered by fruitless greed and instigated division.

Elijah Cummings specifically referenced Michael’s children, just on the cusp of adulthood. Every one of us, whether we can face up to it or not, is incessantly shaken by the reverberations of grand historical atrocities like the Holocaust and slavery, just as every one of us is made brittle by our own daily failings and venality, just as every one of us is tormented by the dark legacies of nature which transcend and predate humanity. 

But still, desperate and incomplete, we dream of making our children whole.

From Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass

  . . . Let me tell you something about injustice and why we’ll never get away. I know from this because of something she read. (to Greta) That’s right, nothing any of us say is nothing you don’t know. Remember AIDS? When it started we thought it was a scourge on the fagelas. We did. But it wasn’t and it didn’t even really start with them and their fairy ways. It came from a monkey, didn’t it? 

Greta: A chimpanzee. And I didn’t read about it, it was on NPR. 

Zeyde: That’s right. How was that? What about dis chimpanzee?  

Greta: (She joins him upstage) 
Some man in Africa ate a chimpanzee maybe right before you were even born. 

Zeyde: That’s right. 

Greta: The man killed it for meat and its blood had the virus. So, he got it.

Zeyde:  But was that how it started?

Greta: No. Maybe a million years before another chimp ate two different monkeys with two different viruses inside ‘em. 

Zeyde: And how does a big chimpanzee eat a little bitty monkey?

Greta: He just catches ‘em and eats ‘em alive. They scream and scream. 

Zeyde: The little monkeys scream and scream while the chimp gouges into them for some tasty organ morsel. 

Greta: And they scream and scream in terrible agony. And that’s how they die in merciless pain. 

Zeyde: Is that injustice? 

Greta: I dunno.

Zeyde: Is that injustice to the monkey? 

Greta:  It’s pain. 

Zeyde: To the chimp? 

Greta:  It’s food. 

Zeyde: It’s life. Does injustice exist to animals, the ones who are not human?

Abe:

​Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass for which he is seeking an agent . . .)

The Great Unfriending?

Some of us envision our universe as a jewellike globe cupped lovingly in our Savior's hands. Others see only a swirling free fall through rippling spacetime with no meanings of support except the inherited relations and loyalties we cultivate.

Each viewpoint can afford us wide measures of good-humored compassion. Either can also stir up deep cauldrons of embittered fear and fury.

Each outlook can fortify us against much that might annihilate our physical existence. But what about threats to our perceived identities? Is a protean identity (one that embraces change) more or less conducive to emotional and physical wellbeing? Are our physical and cultural environments pressing us to embrace flexible or fixed identities?

Do we even have much choice as to who and what we allow to mold our sense of "self"?

I think of the MAGA boys, especially the nervous sneerer faced off temporarily against the old warrior. I think of the culture clash over the meaning of that scarlet MAGA cap snapped into infamy by social media. I think of what it means to defend the personhood of the unborn - or the personhood of any class of human who has traditionally been ignored or denied full status.

How often is personhood part of a zero-sum game where the assertion of personhood for one group means the diminution of status to another? In the abortion debate, women are divided between those who feel their own personal integrity threatened by reproductive restrictions v. those demanding protection for "persons" with absolutely no faculties for any form of self-defense. Not all of those who defend the unborn associate themselves with the MAGA cap or the malignant magus who promotes them. But the MAGA boys did.

The snapshot battles over the MAGA boys are rarely about abortion. They are even more rarely about the churches who martial their forces to favor the unborn. Each fracas is generally focused on the extent to which the red caps signify racism, and from there whether or not the sneerers and the whoopers had "racism in their hearts". But their unformed and unfathomable hearts have nothing to do with the significance of the cap which, like it or not, is just another avatar of the burning cross, the white hood, and the Confederate flag.

No doubt the diocese of Covington has done some measure of soul searching about the symbolism. The rest of us, though, must battle it out. We must battle it out knowing that so-called established churches are willingly aligning themselves behind their modern day Cyrus to make magnificent thunder against those who battle for their own personhood beneath the bleak winter sun.

Is it a good thing when people who unfurl Confederate Flags and sport MAGA caps deny the racist significance of these symbols? Is this the homage that vice pays to virtue? Or are these the soulless prevarications of childish wraiths who would shout all of us down - or worse?

Maybe someday, with or without the help of organized religion, we can find ways to affirm and advance everyone's personhood. But to do that, we must look beyond the identities which some of us cling to like the last oak leaves in winter cling to jagged branches. We must look to whatever is true inside us which we all might be able to perceive no matter how we conceive of our "creation".



Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass for which he is seeking an agent . . .)


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