Singing into the Void
"We like it well."
The void, in this case, is at least in one way facebook. A long absence from writing sometimes occasions accepting the belligerent invitation of the beasts belly to draw words forth.
-------
Singing into the Void
What stings so hard, particularly living in Canada, is the level of arrogance that comes with our discourse. Being told to learn history is not an invitation, it is a wielded hatchet of condescension. It ignores that history itself is a debate, not the certitude of a mathematical equation. History is countless framings and angles and value judgements with all the hallmarks of a creation myth. Fittingly, so many give such weight to these stories, as to naturally qualify this meta narrative with the gravity of religion. History; to know where we come from so we can know where we are and where we are going. More accurately than "where" though, it probes the question of who we come from, who we are and who we could be.
The transhumanists, the plutocracy, the fascism, it's all coursed through the lifeblood of this global civilization for a century of changing faces, just couched and shrouded in different guises the whole way through. Natural evolutions in complexity of the age old struggle between hierarchy and individual liberty.
It's as though no one slinging "read history" is capable of perceiving, or just unwilling to acknowledge the crushing perversion of the covid years, of being hunted and persecuted for refusing a state imposed injection, of not bowing to recieve the sacrament of this religion, is the lie that the bland epithet "democracy" existed here before.
And all those who say you could never possibly know the terror of genocide, of "real" persecution, of war ripping apart lives and homes and families and communities... Humans in their endless ingenuity have found ever more clever ways to kill, to maim, to persecute, to warre, to genocide. The smorgasbord of suicides; a grand kaleidoscope of inculcated self defeat!
The endless scrolling into despondency and despair, the drugs and addictions, the loneliness, the violence, to bear witness to the witch hunts, the firings, the evictions, the excommunications, the doxxing, the defamation, all in the midst of the most cosmically profound and unsleeping panopticon of what is laughingly called "surveillance". These all signal if you dare to exist in your own truth anywhere outside the deepest, most dark recesses in the sediment at the bottom of your heart, you could be exposed and have your life destroyed by the mob of modernity facilitated by governments, financial institutions, your own family and community.
Yet clearly there are other signals emerging from the noise.
The stereotype of the polite Canadian (and its shadow behind, the arrogant Canadian) is a recognition of the cultural web, the collective unconscious that thrums beneathe the surface of a country taught to kill themselves, a country leading the world in autoimmunity. It's not just the overt suicides (independent or "assisted") or the deaths of despair. Here, there is a pathological emotional undercurrent of what goes beyond a resigned submission to being dominated, and the culture reflects this in the self flagellation, the endless identity crises, the moribund regrets for our eternal damnation earned by legacy of Canadian genocide - which Nazis at the Nuremberg trials explicitly stated were the models upon which they based their own systems of extermination.
And so I shared this on a platform we're not allowed to share news sources on in Canada. If I post this on my facebook page, it could and likely would be algorithmically made all but invisible. Here I am, filtering the gasoline that is so universally impure by government mandated adulteration with GMO corn derived ethanol that it will otherwise destroy the chainsaw which cuts the firewood my family depends on to keep warm through the harsh northern winters. Ostensibly, because we must suffer for destroying the planet with co2. Such a guilt, such a shame, that it infects policy, culture, our very self conception. This unholy seed of self hatred to make prisoner and warden share one body.
Fuck all that.
I remain me. It is the utmost disservice to yourself to be so blinded by ideology to be unable to see clearly, even and especially when looking at your own worst enemies. I never liked Trump to start, and still diverge in more ways than I can account here. Yet it's obvious the world order as it was, is shattered irrevocably. I don't reflexively hate everything the man does, and never did. I look back on the cults I personally paid lip service to and can forgive myself for my mistakes and lapses in integrity which that represents. There is contradiction in that man, and that is all too human. Honestly, most signs logically seem to point to the worst outcome, from popular readings of history I can openly consider. But there exists a mythopoetic inkling that this could be a fabled redemption for the ages, if imperfect in its terrible beauty. And that possibility of beauty exists at the heart of everything I imperfectly do.
Despite the harm and autocracy, the wholesale decimation of these instruments of tyranny (as well as other arguably important things) is a rare moment when the mask slips and what you see is what you get. Increasingly, it is what once was rare, and is appearing to coalesce into something consistent. Sure, a few years going full steam like this just sets precedent to let whatever other team the pendulums backswing comes up with, to then come back full ham with abusing the same loopholes, ruling by executive order, redoubling their same lawfare. Let alone the transhumanist accelerationists within his own house handed the keys and standing at the levers of power right now.
But observe, the calculated and masterful maneuvering that continues day after day already. It is a thing of beauty, and if you hate Trump I encourage you to go deep enough to see the elegance of many of these moves. The way court precedents were manipulated expertly - let's say upholding Bidens firing of non partisan Trump appointees in 2021. A strategic defeat that created the very precedent that's allowed the absolute gutting of federal agencies 4 years later, now with tenuous legal recourse. Alot of this, although some of it quite ugly, is legally cleaner than you might first expect.
It all looks like the end for the empire from so many perspectives, so many readings of history. Despite the good natured despoilation of the beaurocratic state, absolute power corrupts absolutely... yet...
There remains a few possibilites that could turn the judgement of history from "coup d'état" to "coup de grâce".
If after all this monarchic fucking around, proceeding to use some of the same legal manuevering, and awakening the will of congress and senate, Trump moves to repeal the 17th amendment....
It would essentially be an irreversible decommissioning of so many of the very implements of autocracy he's abusing that it could restore a functioning republic with the profound limits on executive power originally intended by the founders. It would restore state power through the senate originally baked in to the constitution, now MIA for the past 100 years since the 17th was passed. Clipping Leviathans Fingers by Julius Ruechel makes a compelling case for this.
We'd still have all kinds of other problems of course... but even this alone could potentially reset the clock on the empire. And all signs point to the knowledge we are entering a multipolar world order, with a sober American understanding it will no longer be them alone at the top.
It would be swords to ploughshares and an evening of the field of play we have not before known.
I say "we" from up here in Canada where things are indeed still quite apeshit insane, despite knowing the system of governance here has no prior superior form to revert to. Maybe not quite true, since the colonies Declaration of Independence wasn't just calculated to avoid replicating the millenia long squabbling fiefdoms of the Holy Roman Empire, but on some level, for all the beauty and barbarity, was a spiritual successor to the Confederacies of Turtle Island, such as those of the Mi'kmaq or Iroquois or Anishinaabe.
Remember the very first ally of America was presented a translation before the public proclaiming of the Declaration in Boston, and proceeded to sign America's oldest nation to nation agreement, The Treaty of Watertown. "We like it well" were the legendary words of the delegates from the Wabanaki Confederacy.
History as Creation Myth indeed.
Yet these ponderings are still so fringe, so tenuous as to be way outside that so called Overton Window of acceptable discourse in Canada. There is no one on the scene in Canadian politics even close to being able to address the seismic upheaval that is underway. Maybe the necessary people need be forged by the coming years of extreme pressure that historically squeezes the unruly hinterlands on the fringes of teetering empires. But even once hardened to task, it remains questionable there is a useful way to wield any sense of timely and decisive national purpose through the glacial, hopelessly hollowed halls of the Laurentian elite.
With all that said, whatever the cards hold for us, it won't be 10 years until the Canadian state is unrecognizable. CSIS and the RCMP have already seen the writing on the wall. I suggest we all start wrapping our heads and hearts around visions that nourish peaceful transitions to a more sane place, perhaps despite our differences we'll call...
These United States of Being