Of Bears and Presidents.

You might have seen J K Rowling’s reply to Mr Trump’s recent tweet,

‘..are now fighting back like never before… blah blah ..DO SOMETHING!.’.

She says, ‘Nothing expresses calm confidence better than a caps-lock scream of ‘DO SOMETHING,.

which is nicely tounge in cheek, not quite sarcasm but more bite than irony, though it does beg the question of what he might mean, given that the order is not directed at anyone in particular let alone devoid of content.

My inner conspiracy theorist, who is is rather unreliable, says that he’s wanting to mobilise his base into open revolt, a call to arms for white supremacists, further doubling down of the police state.

The first bit conjurs images of beleagured trenches, the hand to hand kill or be killed of desperate combatants…’are now fighting back like never before’.. It is a call for backup, mobilising the Reserves…

and there are lots of them….

But the fact that the ‘DO SOMETHING’ is more of a bear growl than anything else is important. Bears are dangerous. They can swipe your head off.

They say that a grizzly’s personal space is 55 feet. If you’re that close it is gonna come at you teeth first. It’s a rather precise figure and makes you wonder how such data was retrieved. After all, the bear has to be sorely provoked in order to find out.

When I was a kid I really wanted to find out how fast I could ride my bike down the hill and still make the bend at the bottom. It never occured to me that finding out could be that painful.

Testing stuff to destruction seems to be a thing with us white folks, or perhaps better said, with any Single System System. The reason is that a ‘holier than thou’ attitude is rooted in First and Only, being so special that you lose sight of where you begin and end so great is your Wonderfullness, so seeped in They that I and Me no longer talk and know themselves thereby…

So boundaries have to be fortified, built and tested to destruction to claw back some sense of Self, even if you get scragged by the bear or come off your bike in the process.

Knowing where your edges are can feel more important than longevity, or a full term in office…

..which is why having leaders who are not magical and know enough about bears to go round them can be extremely useful.

You could also say that ‘DO SOMETHING’ is a kind of magical invocation of the breast by one whose symbiotic omnipotence with mummy is so great that her teat still constitutes personal property.

Since the spotlight is always fixed on the Narcissist in the equation, as you would expect, its often missed that Narcissism is a folie a deux, a game for two, a collusion of exclusive shared specialness whose fin you might indeed expect to see as it breaks the surface in stressful moments.

And you’d be right to scoff at a president who calls for his Mama just because the other kids won’t play nicely, but then what do you expect from a culture that idealizes youth and condenses it into a narcissistic value system built on the values of adolescence?

While we subscribe to fantasies of eternal youth, endless choice, perrenial summer nights and exotic destinies, how can our leaders not be petulant and demanding brats?

And you can’t really call the tyrant out for behaving like a two year old if you spend half your time playing by the same rules, even if its as petty as being ashamed of your ride or are losing sleep over what you don’t have.

A culture of Instant Gratification and bottomless pit must produce First and Only, all imbued with the feeling of having been cheated in some way despite being top of the heap.

Which is why, to paraphrase Socrates, Democracy must recind itself. The freedom to be a kid all your life is a burden, the endless sweeties, the eternal  preoccupation with goodies and treats wears thin. And so when you’ve everything of what you’re told and believe you want… and still you nurse a gnawing pit…

then that is the moment when either your paradigm collapses rather painfully or you reach down to that last resource, the promise of symbiotic omnipotence, the magical covenant that lets you be a bear.

Do Something. Make the magic happen. Make the frustration go away. We had a deal. I would let you pour all your expectations into me, be the golden child and long for nothing but would triumph over my enemies in return as promised.

Do Something!

Release the Behemoth of Zaldar!

Convene the Satanic Hordes of Gilgamesh!

Cast a binding spell with the sacred amythest of Middle Earth.

What is so scary about neo-Nazis is what motivates them, a secret fascination with power that can be conjured, something that sets the seal on any questions about supremacy and silences any quibbling at the back of the class.

The way you have to deal with both bears and malignant narcissists has its own kind of magic, an apotropaic gesture which has the power to stop a half ton ball of spitting fury in its tracks.

Don’t run.

You won’t get far.

The trick is to stand your ground, but in a very particular way. You have to face the bear and hold up your arms full stretch to say..

i am big and i am here…

but you also look down at an interesting bit of grass as if to say ‘I show you respect. You are the boss.’

a bit like taking a knee.

Gestures and objects that contain opposites are magical. They are both of this world and yet not. They confirm what you know whilst including something new, so change occurs, which is a kind of magic.

Death from Above.

Having mad leaders has been par for the course for longer than you think. In fact its been a fashion accessory for any truly civilized nation ever since Nebuchadnezzar went bonkers and spent seven years in the desert eating grass.

Emperor Justin liked to bite people, and sometimes quite large chunks, an arm or a leg, a habit that could only be tempered by him being driven about on a mobile throne..

you mean a pram..

er..

“Having placed him on it, his chamberlains drew him about, and ran with him backwards and forwards for a long time, while he, in delight and admiration at their speed, desisted from many of his absurdities.”John of Ephesus

Across the other side of the world but about the same time, Emperor Quinfei of China kept order by forcing random attendants to have sex with each other in front of him. Anyone who refused had their family killed..

along with anyone that cleared their throat in protest…

Madness ran in the family. Mostly because the family ran in the family. Special people, utterly confused by their parentage, its illustriousness and nine yards of tree diagrams not withstanding, were raised in an atmosphere of continuous terror and emotional neglect, but then suddenly given weapons and armies.

Its not going to turn out well.

But it seems from our foray into alternative forms of government that one need not be born to power to abuse it and in equally colourful ways.

John Quincy Adams thought the Earth was hollow. He attempted to prove it at the taxpayer’s expense.

It all started with John Cleve Symmes Jr, a U.S. Army officer who spent his life advocating his hollow-Earth theory on the literary circuit and gained quite a few followers. What he proposed was the 1800s equivalent to sending people to the moon to find cheese. He wanted to mount an expedition to silence his critics and also to trade with the Mole people…

ahem..

As luck would have it, Adam’s successor, Andrew Jackson, was a man who thought the world was flat. Naturally, Jackson promptly canceled the expedition and along with it, dashing  all hope of contacting the wily Mole people.

We seem to have developed a way of ensuring that whoever holds the reigns of power in any Single System system you care to name, if not already mad, is soon to become so with the absolute corruption of absolute power. What’s so funny is that we continue to promote ideals that create would be Emperors, as though at some point it is bound to work, like the magical novel written by the hundredth monkey.

One thing that most mad leaders have in common irrespective of their path to greatness is a preoccupation with their Nobs. Christian VII of Denmark wanked so much it interfered with his stately duties. Eventually his physician, Johann Streunsee, usurped power..

“as well as boning the queen behind Christian’s back. Presumably he was too busy jerking off to notice.” Kyle Stevens.

It seems that being given permission to live above the rules gives much needed perspective, as though something were trying desperately to impress upon us how unsophisticated and uncultured we really are.

“In a mercifully off-the-record moment at the height of America’s entanglement in Vietnam, reporters asked Lyndon B. Johnson to explain, simply, “Why?” Unable to conjure a suitable answer, LBJ instead produced his veiny avatar.

“This is why!” Johnson declared, presenting his penis to the press pool like Excalibur.” M. Judson

Apparently, Johnson’s passion for his Johnson went so far as to name it, Jumbo, apparently a sizeable trunk that he would regularly take out for everyone to admire….

pointing the way to death for 3.3 million people.

who didn’t share his pre-occupation.

The tragedy of LBJ’s madness was not just the numbers killed but the symbolic equation between his penis and his foreign policy, or perhaps between the Vietcong and his wife.

Equating one thing with another is the preserve of infancy. Mother’s milk is her love. Her arms are the world. Unfortunately it is also the preserve of the Gods. Our amusing list of mad leaders with their dicks out makes it easy to forget that they feel divinely inspired into the bargain.

But, by what pray?

and we have to go further back than National Socialism to find the answer.

Supremacist ideals are lodged in European antiquity like currants in a bun. They are expressed in epics later condensed into Wagner’s Ring Cycle way before Christianity brought in its own brand of First and Only.

At the back of an already malevolent and warlike Yahweh, is his big brother, Wotan, whose deal it is to renounce Love for the sake of Power. The film ‘Lord of the Rings’ re-crafts much of the ancient story including a cursed Ring of Power.

The original specifies this curse in detail..

“The Ring itself as described by Wagner is a Rune-magic taufr (“tine”, or “talisman”) intended to rule the feminine multiplicative power by a fearful magical act termed ‘denial of love’ (“Liebesverzicht”). wiki

some form of sexual/emotional witholding.

The love of power costs the power of love. You get to be all pumped up but also incomplete..

which is frustrating..

because in a world where you can have and do whatever you want, happiness is not something you can do for yourself.. So Wotan is a grumpy bastard and any man identified with such power isn’t really going to feel in the pink unless he is coming his load over an entire nation.

So, the Las Vegas shooter, was it gambling debts? Or could it be that a man placing daily wagers of $30,000 simply has more than he knows what do with and has devised a cunning plan to throw it all away…

except its supposed to be fun and its not. And you’ve achieved all the goals Life has set but the glittering prize…

crumbles as it is bestowed.

You are living the Dream but actually its a cruel and empty hoax, which might unhinge you just a bit and make you feel that if the attainment of earthly things is not enough then becoming a god and raining death from above will do the trick.

“Imagining that we have left all these Gods far behind, we are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians which disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world. ” CG Jung.

When they are perpetrated by Jo Citizen they are act of pure evil, when atrocities against civilians one thousand fold are contemplated by Presidents, all nicely sandwiched in a neat dossier with a fancy seal, it magically becomes the foreign policy of having no choice.