cell913blog.com #5

 Recently I listened as a discussion began among friends about human hatred and this comment jumped out:

“Well, haven’t the Americans also hated the Russians, too?”

Bells went off in my head…of course, I thought, the Americans have a long history of tension, contention and conflict with the Russians. Ironically, following World War II, when the Russians were America’s allies against the Third Reich, there has been an escalation in the political rhetoric, as well the brinkmanship of the Bay of Pigs, when Khrushchev attempted to install cruise missiles on the Russia-friendly island of Cuba. Even with the ‘calm’ of the Reagan-Gorbachev talks and the ‘fall’ of the Berlin wall, a brief interlude in an otherwise tempestuous relationship, the Americans have, as a matter of foreign policy, military preparedness, and political rhetoric adopted a ‘hard-line’ approach to Russia. Occasional friendly vodka toasts, for example between Clinton and Yeltsin, while providing photo-ops for both leaders, can be seen as another brief interlude in an otherwise ‘tense’ relationship.

There is, nevertheless, a canyon of difference between these chapters in U.S.-Russian, diplomatic and even threatened military exchanges from the kind of political vermin coming out of the mouth of the twice-impeached, and multi-charged ex-president, these last few days and weeks. To put it bluntly, (and this is definitely not rocket-science; it is clear to all!) trump is bereft of anything that remotely resembles a consciousness about geopolitics, diplomacy, and international relations as both an academic pursuit and a practicing professionalism. There is only a ‘personal dimension’ to everything about trump: like a pre-adolescent school-yard bully, (the antithesis of Peter Pan!), trump sees things from the lens of how he can and will manipulate others into his ‘orbit’ or destroy those who resist such manipulation. From such a reductionistic, simplistic, extraordinarily immature perspective, (not to mention its narcissism!), only a zero-sum game’s rules, regulations and protocols can and will apply. ‘Since I must win, you can choose either to be a part of my victory, or you can lose, and in losing you will lose everything, including your character which I will assassinate!’

The vermin of racial contempt pours out of trump’s mouth, openly, loudly, brazenly, and tragically with impunity and even applause; it is indiscriminate in its choice of targets: refugees, migrants, ‘spoiling the blood of the nation,’ and within the country, Blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQ+, and all variations of ‘difference’ in racial colour, religion, geographic origin. White supremacy run amok! All trump needs is to don a KKK sheet to finally identify himself as he truly, and heroically, sees and believes himself to be. And, immediately adjacent to such poisonous rhetoric (and belief), there is a kind of pre-pubescent adulation for tyrants, dictators, and autocrats.

The world still is attempting to wrap its head around the bare fact that some 74 million Americans voted for this trash in 2020. (So is this scribe!) Why would so many sentient human beings be so easily seduced, manipulated and lulled into a form of voluntary submission, if not outright intoxication and dependency on this wannabe dictator? There are so many layers to this political, anthropological, psychological, and even ‘religious’ phenomenon…that it is only with a sense of abject dismay and desperation, knowing nothing one either induces or deduces will suffice. Whatever kind of analysis one attempts can only fail miserably, leaving a gigantic mystery to be more fully unpacked over the ensuing decades, if not centuries.

The pursuit of the goal of achieving the top rung of the nation’s financial and fame totem poles, at least in his own mind, might be a ‘too-kind’ lens through which to interpret his motives. And the acquisition of wealth is a goal to which many of his countrymen and women both aspire to acquire and to be inspired by models with a high public profile. That public profile, too, is another potential obsession of the ex-president (and never-to-be-again!), in a culture in which ‘fame’ both for laudable, ethical, moral and altruistic motives, as well as for infamy of the anti-hero, is a national cultural meme, aspiration and human-motivator-magnet, especially for the young.

Fake it until you make it,” however, is the oxidation that rusts all metals. And it is the fakery, the obsessive embrace of the ‘trickery’ of ‘pulling the wool over the eyes of everyone’ that is one of, if not the most compelling driver of this kind of mind-set. If we peer into Greek mythology, in an imaginative search for a ‘god’ or voice that might come close to a symbol for this kind of chicanery, we might find Hermes, messenger of the gods. In Roman mythology and religion many of Hermes’ characteristics belong to Mercury, a name derived from the Latin merx, meaning merchandise and commerce. Hermes began as a god with strong underworld associations. He was a psychopomp, leader of souls along the road between ‘the Under and the Upper world’….Hermes has been understood as a chthonic deity (heavily associated with the earth and/or underworld. (Wikipedia.org). That lens may, however, be less incisive than choosing the Greek goddess Ate, the goddess of mischief, delusion, ruin, and blind folly, rash action and reckless impulse who led men down a path of ruin. She also led both gods and men to rash and inconsiderate actions and to suffering. (Wikipedia.org). Generally, in mythology, a trickster is a mischievous or roguish figure in myth or folklore who typically makes up for physical weakness with cunning and subversive humor. The trickster alternates between cleverness and stupidity, kindness and cruelty, deceiver and deceived, breaker of taboos and creator of culture. Tricksters pla8y an important role in the folklore and culture of the United States. (Library.rcc.edu.) (Library of Riverside City College)

Legendary among indigenous peoples, tricksters represent the paradoxes of human existence, prompting thoughts and images of gods and spirits who play pranks on both humans and other gods. However, in a culture drowning in a literal perspective, deploying language exclusively in literal terms, manipulating ‘physical reality’ as it’s primary if not sole ‘function’ which easily morphs into ‘purpose’, the national capacity to perceive trickster as symbol, as image, as a character in legend and folklore, through the active imagination has been so deflated, even drugged with empiricism, moralism, and perhaps even anaesthetized. There are not only the literal ‘drugs’ on the streets and in the gangs. There are also cultural drugs, like the drug of “power” and the obsessive pursuit of extrinsic power, through the willful conditioning, training, manipulating and rewarding of the personal ‘ego’ that has become the Achilles Heel of the American culture. “Power” is like an aphrodisiac, another ephemeral, ethereal, odorless, tasteless, invisible gas that glides through the conversations at all levels of the American life.

Through a literal lens of proving the existence, value, relevance and significance of everything and everyone, the national active imagination has been, and continues to be rendered lifeless, and, as many have declared ‘we’ killed God, ‘we’ have collectively also ‘killed’ the active imagination. Busily engaged, if not actually consumed, by the pursuit of recognition, achievement, public adulation, trophies, scholarships, legacy admissions, investment portfolios, high office, ‘we’ have dedicated our personal, family, educational and even occupational and professional energies to ‘climb higher’ and to reach the mountain top, however we perceive that mountain top to be. “Exceptionality” for Americans is nothing less that ‘the best’ in the world. And the price of exceptionality, well whatever it might be, it pales in comparison with the actual achievement. While that may be one approximation of the cultural mind-set, it fails to acknowledge the actual costs.

The competitive impulse, while universal, can be said to have roots in a ‘survival’ instinct, if we are to relate to our ‘animal’ origins. And even Darwin did not champion the ‘strongest’ in his theory of the survival of the fittest; he championed the one most adaptable, flexible, open to and accepting of change. Have we misread another of the seminal thinkers of our era, in our obsessive-compulsive drive to be the most ‘alpha-male’ image we can achieve? Have we also failed to take account of the mythic relevance of voices, gods and goddesses, (not actual men and women), in our headstrong pursuit of literal, empirical, and thereby unquestioned and unquestionable ‘victory’. This image of victory is currently impaling the government of Netanyahu, in is ‘mad’ commitment to erase Hamas from the face of the earth.

Is this “erase Hamas” goal, a vindictive and echoed chant in response to the ‘erase Israel from the face of the earth’ chant of the Iranian leaders and their proxies? Another of our ‘aspirational’  yet clearly unachievable, unattainable and thereby imprisoning us on the horns of our own psychic dilemma…hoisted on our own petard, as it were. Putin too is engaged in an obsessive-compulsive ‘erasure of fascism’ in Ukraine, knowing fully well that not only it such a goal unachievable, unattainable and thereby embodying his own self-sabotage. The “power” drug, is ubiquitous in its multiple iterations, capsules, photo-ops, press conferences, bombings, drone attacks, imprisonments of the likes of Navalny and Kara-Murza, as well as the multiple iterations foaming and fuming from the mouth of trump himself.

And the consumers of this ‘power-drug’ are those of us, who, for our own personal, political, psychological, economic, idealistic perceptions and aspirations, whether for or against something called ‘the public good’ or for a more intense, and nefarious ‘iconoclasm’ of the trickster, personally, nationally and perhaps even globally.

There is a clear and unmistakable ‘madness’ to the American, if not also the world political theatre at this period of history. And the madness cannot and must not be attributed solely and exclusively to the name of a single man or women. We all share in this madness! And, if James Hillman is right, not morally, or religiously, or intellectually, but rather psychologically, in his inseparable linkage of the anima mundi (the soul of the world) to the psyche and soul of the individual (for Hillman the soul is a way of seeing), and Hillman notes that ‘in our madness lies our essential myth’….then it is only if we are prepared, patient, deeply reflective and highly and openly imaginative will we be able to begin to wrestle with the madness that is gripping us all.

How and why are so many of us seduced and tricked by the trickster model, the ‘pot of gold (power)’ at the end of every imagined personal, national and global rainbow? Is our own trickster so repressed, muzzled, and considered so defamed and depraved morally, that we no longer even know what happened to that voice? Are we so overwhelmed with our own pursuit of ‘an identity’ of success, in the eyes of the world, through the active and disciplined engagement of our ‘personal ego’ that we have lost sight and sense of our many other voices, and myths, and gods and goddesses.

In our marriages, for instance, are we blind to the tension that has to exist and also to emerge, between a view of marriage as a kind of joyous coupling party (Eros) and a view of marriage (Hera) that holds to the responsibility of a healthy commitment to continue and enhance the civilization of which we are all intimately a part. That simple example, mostly out of reach of many couples, is fraught with tension between two people who, while having known each other for various time frames, have never had a conversation about their reconciling of those two notions….perhaps until it is too late to recover the relationship.

Heroism, whether in the form of athletic, academic, artistic performance, military victory, political victory, financial ‘victory,’ has so many winners, and so many millions more who are still struggling for a meager portion of the whole ‘pie’ of necessary resources like clean water, enough food, sanitation, the dignity of work, education and health care. We are so committed and embedded in the convention of championing the ‘winners’ (defined in our shared terms of the hero), and so loath to confront the 600,000 plus (in the United States) and millions more around the world living on the ‘street’ as it were.

Drunk on the chicanery of the trickster, immune to even our own angst (complicatedly seen as ‘unworthiness, failures, rejects, misfits, miscreants, colonized, segregated, alienated, fired, obsolete, too old, too stupid, uneducable…etc.) we are hardly in a position to confront the vortex of obvious and dangerous existential threats.

Waking to our mythic voices, both personally/individually and collectively/culturally, might be another ‘sight-line’ to a different kind of consciousness, based on the real, authentic and totally renewable resource of our active imagination, whose limits we have barely even noticed let along begun to mine.