cell913blog.com #65

The Monday morning after the attempted Saturday night massacre of the former, twice-impeached, convicted president leaves the U.S., Canada and the world in confusion, anger, ambivalence, fear, anxiety and bewilderment.

Nevertheless, let us first put aside any and all attempts to find false equivalences by conflating the words, actions, attitudes, beliefs and needs of the two presidential candidates. There was an open round of bickering between and trump campaign spokesperson and David Axelrod on CNN yesterday, after Axelrod invoked the January 6 insurrection as an example of the ethos of violence in the United States. Immediately, the trump sycophant jumped on his words: “You can’t tell me that what happened in this event is caused by the events of January,” (or words to that effect). “I didn’t say that…so let’s start to turn down the rhetoric by not putting words in my mouth!” retorted Axelrod. (again, or words to that effect).

And in that moment, the political rhetorical swords were unsheathed….again, and seemingly forever. This battle for the Oval Office, now indisputably elevated to what can justifiably be termed an epic and an existential battle for the future of the country, and to some extent, of the world is scheduled for a vote on November 5, and irrespective of the outcome, will extend protractedly months and years beyond.

All public voices, of political opponents, history scholars, ethicists, security strategists and tacticians, speak glowingly of ‘turning the temperature down’ on the rhetoric of violence. And yet, they and we all know that violent rhetoric, violent images, and apocalyptic images of the ‘end of democracy’ and take-over of oligarchy, the elimination of human rights, especially women’ s rights and the rights of LGBTQ+ citizens, as well as minority rights of blacks, Latinos, Indigenous, Jews, Muslims, have become the ingredients of politics. The ‘identification’ of politics (as if it were a person) is the zero-sum game, that dictates, in order for me/us/our side to win, you/them/the other side must be destroyed.

To weaponize, terrorize, demonize the enemy, however that enemy is perceived, conceived, imagined and pontificated, constitutes the heart-beat of war. And we have examples, in Ukraine, Gaza, and the political ‘killing fields’ of the American political landscape, that point to this demonization.

And in the ‘elevation’ of the rhetoric, and the concomitant emotional and threatening attitudes and the hardness of the convictions that sustain the elevation, one of the more hidden aspects of this flint-upon-flint hardness and coldness of the feelings and the tone of the debate is that the elevated ‘desire to transgress’ carries with it a kind of transcendence… James Hillman writes: Transgression as transcendence; lifted out of your circumstances, filled with the power or the ‘glamour,’ and in touch with the transcendent origin of the calling urge…..Iago (from Shakespeare’s Othello) made tragedy out of nothing—as if a sport, a game. (Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p. 235)

Of course, the national campaign for the Oval Office comprises much more than a sport or a game. One of the dynamics in all such political campaigns is the inevitable ‘vision’ and the adherence to it of the candidates. If the candidate identifies with the ‘vision’ and becomes so ‘invested’ in its reality and the need for its full execution, there is a danger of what psychopathology calls concretism. That is taking psychological events such as delusions, hallucinations, fantasies, projections, feelings, and wished as actually, literally, concretely real…..Megalomanic emperors, from Nebuchadnezzar and the Egyptian pharohs through the Roman rulers to Napolean and Hitler, construct in concrete what the daimon envisions. For this reason, megalomania haunts the actual architect—as the Bible warms with the Tower of Babel, which is not only about the origin of language but also about the megalomania inherent in all attempts to make concrete the grandeurs of fantasy, especially in architecture. Tribal peoples are usually careful to keep their sacred altars movable, their architecture vernacular, but their visions otherworldly. (Hillman, THE Soul’s Code, p. 240 and 242)

For this kind of concretism to exist and prevail, there is a kind of prevailing innocence that ‘permits’ and perhaps even extolls the vision. Hillman’s insight here seems cogent:

Innocence is America’s mystical cloud of unknowing. We are forgiven simply by virtue of not knowing what we do. To wrap ourselves round in the Good—that is the American dream, leaving place for the evil nightmare only in the ‘other,’ where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented and sermonized about. A history of this habit of the heart has been exposed by Elaine Pagels (in her important study The Origin of Satan) as a disastrous, perhaps ‘evil’ essential, an inherent bad seed, in Western religious denominations, making obligatory as countermeasure their relentless insistence on ‘love’. A society that willfully insists upon innocence as the noblest of virtues and worships innocence at its altars in Orlando and Anaheim and on Sesame Street, will be unable to see any seed of any kind unless it be sugar-coated. Like Forest Gump eating chocolates and offering sweets to strangers before he ever looks into their eyes, stupid is indeed as stupid does. (Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p. 247-8)

The hardness, and the coldness and the deep and unrelenting conviction of a ‘vision’ renders both the vision and those whom the ‘vision’ holds tightly, in a place where rational evidence and argument will not penetrate. The critical parent of a ‘super-ego’ as self-righteous, absolutely-correct judge of such conviction only emboldens that conviction. Similarly, a co-dependent, pseudo-empathic dismissal of the ‘secret documents case’ against Trump is only going to fan the flames of the conviction of the ostensible ‘super-ego’ of the Democrats. The argument of ‘transparency’ put forward by Trump lawyers, to expose the presence of a Department of  (federal) lawyer present in the New York (state) fraud trial, is so demonstrably thin and specious as to be dismissible. Even a non-lawyer layman can see that the implications, evidence, and ethos of the New York trial would have implications for any other potential trial against the former president. And real-time knowledge, perceptions, and insights available inside the New York courtroom would be legitimate and necessary for any federal prosecution. Indeed, it would have been unprofessional NOT to have an observer in the New York coutroom.

Historian Tim Naftali, on CNN with Fareed Zakaria on Sunday morning, termed Trump ‘now a juggernaut’! Such a monumental image, while authentic and coherent only hours after the attempted suicide, only underlines the fantasy of invincibility, invulnerability and ultimately foreshadowed victory of Trump on November 5.

And any scenario in which such invincibility is moderated and reduced to a less transcendent and ‘unapocalyptic’ dimension, at this moment, may seem unpatriotic. Is it reall?

To have spent years painting the nation as a tragedy of violence, crime and victimizing of the American people, and telling them, “I alone can fix it!” while also repeatedly declaring, ‘They’re coming after you and I am standing in their way!” and “I am your retribution!” belies and defies any expression calling for national unity from the podium of the Republican National Convention.

E.G. From The Texas Tribune, March 25, 2023, in a piece by Robert Downen and William Melhado, entitled, “Trump vows retribution at Waco rally: ‘I am your warrior, I am your justice’…we read:

I am your warrior, I am your justice, ‘Trump said in a nearly 90-minute speech, most of it focused on perceived enemies and slights. ‘For those who have been wronged and betrayed…I am your retribution.

There is doubtless no person, especially one attending a Trump rally, who does not consider him/herself to have been wronged and betrayed. The agency of those betrayals, and those wrongs is different and unique for each person. Retribution, vengeance, in the form of ‘justice’ is a contamination of the whole concept of justice and a very veiled obscuring of the notion of the saviour.

And here is vortex in which the Christian notion of a personal saviour Jesus intersects with the secular, political, state determination to bring about a Christian society as an act of Christian discipleship. As a high-profile leader of the MAGA movement, Speaker Johnson, a devout, conservative ‘Christian’ on a podcast, Truth be Told,’ with his wife, as reported by abcnews.go.com, October 27, 2023:

Johnson said on the podcast that generations of Americans have falsely been told ‘religion has no place in the conversation.’ ‘People have been convinced wrongly that their religious viewpoint is not welcomes in the public square, not welcomed into the conversation, and not welcomes in even a discussion in class. And that’s not right. That’s not what the law says, ‘he said in the September 2022 episode. ‘It’s had a tragic effect because people are separating what is ‘religious’ with ‘real life.’ And that dichotomy was never intended by the founding fathers-it is a tragedy and it has made now a lot of people assume that religion is almost a bad word…..Some Democrats have signaled that the influence religion has on Johnson’s politics is troubling. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in a post on X that Johnson’s speakership ‘is what theocracy looks like.’ ‘Speaker Mike Johnson? Anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, anti-gun safety, anti-democracy. This is what theocracy looks like,’ Raskin wrote.

Whether overt or covert, the Christian right’s attempt to marry politics and their religion imitates Islam’s marriage of the two. ‘The Saudi Arabian constitution, for example, declares that it is the state’s duty to protect Islam and implement Shari’a. The result is a country where a typical year sees roughly 50 public beheadings, many for petty crimes such as marijuana possession, in accordance with strict interpretations of Shari’a.  (From hoover.org, The Advantages of Mosque-State Separation, by Alexander Benard, January 29, 2008)

And whether the Christian ‘right’ in U.S. is competing amicably with, emulating, imitating or considering itself under threat from the surge in Muslim immigrants seems open to debate. What seems clear, however, is that the separation of church and state, as a foundational cornerstone of American governance, like the principle, ‘no man is above the law,’ is eroding, or disappearing.

Following the attempted assassination of the former president on Saturday, July 13, 2024. There are harrowing words, attitudes, perceptions and adulation being heard and reported from the Republican convention in Milwaukee on Monday, July 15, 2024. They include chants of  ‘king of kings and lord of lords.’ Also ominous is the CBC analysis from Alexander Panetta, July 15, 2024, in a piece entitled, ‘Quasi-religious figure’: Republican faithful celebrate Trump’s return’ from which we read:

In the euphoric early hours of this week’s Republican Convention, one delegate suggested chiselling Donald Trump’s likeness into America’s ultimate secular shrine: Mount Rushmore. Others looked beyond the secular. To some participants in Milwaukee, Wisc., this convention has transcended the realm of earthly political gathering, into something imbued with religious significance…..The convention was abuzz with talk of miracles. From the stage to eh hallways, attendees spoke of Trump’s survival as the produce of a divine plan for America. ‘There is so much energy (here) now,’ said Zina Hackworth, an attendee from the St. Louis area. ‘We actually see the hand of God has protected former president Trump.’….I believe that God wants Trump to bring the United States back to where it’s supposed to be,’ said Craig Basile, a 62-year-old Wisconsin man, after Sunday mass. Trump also described his survival as miraculous.

Are we witnessing the triumph of ‘transgression as transcendence’ in a nation wallowing in innocence, defiant and denying both old age and death, evil and megalomania? And if there is some grain of truth and reality to that potential, then how can such a complex brew of forces undergo its own exposure without the predictable backlash of venom that, again, defies truth and reality, lost in the exuberance of its ‘sanctity? And, even if fully exposed, can those who expose the fragility and the dynamic of its risks and dangers escape the promised ‘retribution’?