Many years ago I was best man at a friend’s wedding. Thereafter things got difficult for the couple and my friend would come over and unburden himself whilst I filled up on all his indignation. Eventually, much calmer now, he’d leave while I paced and fumed at what I assumed were my own feelings.
After a while he broke off our friendship on account of the ‘negative attitude’ I had towards his missus. Years later we met by chance. In a bid to repair things whilst naming what had happened we found a quiet spot to talk and I made the joke that as best man I had had to carry way more than the ring on the day of the wedding…
He agreed and yes we’re mates again..
The human psyche is like Plasticine. The individual colours can get rolled into each other. People can be made to participate in other’s lives as if they were their own. We have this weird capacity to both disown and re-home difficult aspects of self in order to avoid the dissonance of inner conflicts or the troubles of which real life is made.
In the trade it’s called ‘projective identification’, stuff you’re sold as though it were simply being returned…
If only it were no more than uncomfortable feelings being made homeless. In fact entire sets of attitudes can be made to migrate from one demographic group to another. Sometimes whole continents are needed to shoulder these projections, e.g. the ‘shit-holes of Africa’.
President Obama made a joke recently, asking, ‘Why are the Republicans so angry? They have the Senate, the Supreme court, the Presidency… yet still their angry.. how come?’.
The answer is that if you identify with an ever narrowing band width of piety you have to work all the harder to get ordinary folks to buy your narrative and shovel your shit.
Having foisted their bad conscience on you, Great Power then heaps up all the angry recriminations against bad conscience that you would expect..
which is quite a lot…
given that the bad conscience of White America is rooted in a history of lynching and genocide… The moral tirade bound to follow, once the attribution of all this murder and rape to third parties has safely taken place, is of a proportionate scale…
i.e. off the chart.
This splitting off from everything that contests the utopian dream of Benevolent White Capital, dark shards of the Collective Self which strive for inclusion with all the instincts of roosting rooks, is currently symbolized as the dangerous and contagious Caravan threatening to breach the inadequate defenses of nationalist fragility.
And so the desperate huddled masses, hungry, barefoot and tired, are magically transformed by the toxic alchemy of shadow projection into chunky Isis members, very bad guys, who somehow got lost in Honduras on their way from Saudi Arabia to Syria but not before traipsing through the thirteenth century where they picked up diseases officially declared eradicated by UNESCO.
No doubt they will stop in Sodom and Gomorrah to recruit further leprosy ridden Jihadi bum-boys before assaulting the five times greater force of professional soldiers sent to meet them with their flip flops.
If a private individual suggested to his friendly neighborhood psychiatrist that a force greater than that deployed in Afghanistan should be set in readiness against unarmed refugees still 900 miles away because they somehow threatened his way of life with their hollow frames, he’d have a prescription for Mogodon written out before you could say ‘paranoid delusion.’ Yet somehow this elite white tribe of supremacists hope for their electoral endorsement on the strength of it.
In the process Mr Trump has declared a symbolic equivalence between rocks and rifles in order to circumvent the noisome reality that this shuffling mass of human misery is somehow a worthy adversary and perpetuates the delusion that the caravan is a secret deployment of ninja warriors who can take over the pre-eminent nuclear country in the world with no more than their wily kung fu..
This old testament fantasy might have been better thought through. After all, last time an impoverished peasant went up against a trained warrior five times his size with no more than the pebbles at his feet it ended badly for the pollsters.
