Love him or hate him the world is glued to Trump’s Phoenix mega church play date with his worshippers. But will this slow train wreck of a Presidency finally burst into flames in Phoenix? It seems rather likely. Somehow the intersection of plague, collective denial, magical immunity fantasies and an age old need for the dying king to sacrifice his finest to the Gods in order to prolong waning power is all too tempting for Fate to leave alone.
The part of Trump who would be king is bound by convention to propitiate the Gods with the lives of his nearest and dearest. It’s a tradition. The victims are either individually chosen, mostly by being foolish enough to get within reach, or they are culled collectively, as in the Aztec Flower Wars, whose sole purpose was the capture and sacrifice of fine specimens to please the divine powers behind the throne. Deprived of the convenience of war, this need for sacrificial victims most find some other expression.
Trump is a deeply religious man but not in the way you might normally think. His is more an identification with God, conferred by much laying on of hands, massive collective Messiah projections, and a narcissistic personality disorder the size of a large house.
It may seem entirely counter-intuitive to host an indoor chanting contest during the peak of air-borne plague, especially given his trajectory after Tulsa. It’s easy to forget that we are not dealing with rational forces here and would do well to remind ourselves that Covid does more than give an opportunity to flaunt your omnipotence. Whether this is on account of being bathed in the blood of Christ or having cleverly invented some high-tech ionization gizmo, guaranteed to kill 99.9% of corona virus or your money back, er, unless you signed a waiver, or unless you were just the unlucky statistic. It also means that you might die a martyr for your cause, which does great things for your adrenal and cortisol responses, bringing you closer to God in ways unspecified by the Good Book.
In his conquest of Central America, Cortez came across captives of the Flower wars, being kept plump for some festive occasion, and set them free. They were most put out and demanded to be sacrificed… Extreme Stockholm Syndrome? Maybe. Yet examples of martyrs offering themselves up for sacrifice abound through different times and cultures.
Perhaps part of the problem is that if life’s rewards are all deferred to some future idyll it might make folk all the keener to embrace it, not to mention the Brownie points in store for those laying down their lives for the Cause, ‘Greater love hath no man, than he who would drown in his own phlegm for his white picket fence and our way of life.’
So sometimes the excoriating ego death of genuine religious experience is acted out in an all too literal fashion, permitting you a pimped eulogy at your funeral without ever having had to change and grow.
The Aztecs also had a way you could be of service without having to be captured in battle. In the spirit of being willing to die for the economy a volunteer would be dressed up like the god Tezcatlipoca. His skin would be painted and he would wear a flower crown, a seashell breastplate, and lots of jewelry.
The man would be given four beautiful wives to do with as he pleased. He was only asked to walk through the town playing a flute and smelling flowers so that the people could honor him.
When 12 months had passed, he would walk up the stairs of a great pyramid, breaking his flutes as he climbed to the top. As an adoring crowd watched, a priest would help him lie down on a long altar made of stone. Then they’d rip his heart out of his body.
Afterward, a new Tezcatlipoca would step forward and start all over again.
We think we are so different from the Aztecs and so lose sight of the way in which the deep running currents of the collective psyche operate. What should frighten us is not that Trump is stupid or uneducated but that he operates from this archetypal layer of the psyche without the trivial garnish of ego functioning, one which might mediate the Old Testament quality of either sacred immunity or risking oneself for the sake of the glorious leader so that the path way to the Gods may be kept open.
It’s not even that he doesn’t care, he needs the martyrs and the martyrs need him. They are all having a religious experience. Unfortunately, it is at the level of ‘participation-mystique’, which is all about undifferentiated mergement, a state of being utterly un-phased by the body count. The gods must be propitiated.
The pundits criticize Trump for his selfishness. Bolton claims he makes all his decisions on the basis of personal interest. More frightening still is the thought that the wish to be above the law leaves a man at the mercy of unconscious processes wherein everyone’s rights and safety are threatened. His greed is the least of our worries. For the man who would be king, everyone else is sacrificial stock. Of course testing must be stopped. People cling to their leader in times of crisis… even if twas he that caused it.. No war time President has ever been deposed….