Dream of the sadist, Otto Dix
The Epstein abominations, to state the obvious, are revealing, in lurid detail, hidden in plain sight, unnerving aspects of human nature; withal, what transpires during human sexuality is an analog, sublime and grotesque, redemptive and soul-decimating, of all things human. Epstein and his billionaire boys club exploitation of their victims are a microcosmic reflection of the capitalist macrocosm. According to the creed of the global economic elite, all things on planet earth and beyond into the cosmos (Elon’s maniacal fantasies involving his clown car rocketry) are fodder for exploitation.
Due to the fact that the economic elite believe they possess the entitlement to throw the planet’s human life sustaining climate into exponential runaway because they cannot run their life-defying existence without fossil fuel – how is it conceivable that they would regard teenage girls and women from lesser socio-economic backgrounds as anything less than fodder for exploitation? We, of the lower economic orders, are regarded as commodified, disposable consorts on everyday, capitalist Epstein’s Islands, albeit with a scenery comprised of stripmalls in decline and health-decimating, fast food outlets.
In short, we are not talking so much about sexuality but the violation of human beings, body and soul. Born into economic privilege, globe-trotting Ghislaine Maxwell scoured trailer parks in search of economically desperate teenage girls to service Jeffery Epstein’s hebephilic mania. Isn’t it obvious, from their insular perches of luxury, they view the entire planet as a trailer park?
Donald Trump, to protect his adult diaper-draped hind, has transferred Maxwell to a Club Fed facility where the warden complains he is pressured to act as her luxury hotel concierge.
The only way out of this dehumanizing setup is to break the cycle of exploitation — that is, molecule structure to insular, gated mansion, the capitalist order itself.
First, there is not an inherent right to be a billionaire. Look at the depravity engendered within the psyches of individuals whose vast wealth, in essence, allows them to defy the tenets of basic human decency.
They have lost their souls because they believe they own us and they have purchased us on the cheap; to retain our souls we must resist them. First step in recovery: Believe this: They do not possess any entitlement to own you – or our planet for that matter. My soul does not come with a sales tag, and, I suspect, neither does yours.
It appears Noam Chomsky contains a sales tag while Norman Finkelstein told Epstein to go piss up a golden rope line.
Be like Norm.
So many people are depressed…the realities of life as life plays out under the heel of a capitalist dictatorship of money/military empire presses down on the psyche — one’s sense of hopelessness turns earthly sadness into a paralyzing depression or into a compensatory mania to succeed (to what end?) and/or to consume (there can never be enough; hence, the consumer becomes consumed).
There are going to be portions of necessary and sublime sadness in life. Learning — thus enlarging one’s horizons — delivers feelings of expansion and grief. I know the world; therefore, as the poet posits, I am sad. To love is to experience heartache, and, in the end, endure loss. And what of the pursuit of happiness? What kind of damn fools instruct, to be gratified in life one is advised to fall in with a parade of phantoms, to walk in lockstep through a mirage-haunted landscape? Happiness arrives and departs; one might as well attempt to pursue a ghost into the afterlife.
Hence, we are confronted with an epidemic of the mental affliction known as normality. There exists a demon of the mind that induces one to conform to a degraded social reality, to silence the voice within that asks, “Are you fucking joking? You are attempting to convince me that normal entails submission to a system that is, in essence, a hierarchy of soul-sucking ghouls whose agenda is to exploit my fleeting hours as I dwell in this world of perishable forms?”
To believe that, I would have to be bughouse crazy.
Max Beckmann, Descent from the Cross, 1917
Headline: Trump Says He Ordered 700 Agents to Leave Minnesota
Collectively, the people of Minnesota, or at least a viable portion of them, refuse to accept the inertia concomitant to feelings of aloneness and being powerless before mindless, brutal power and through actions, individual merged into collective action, have escorted ICE thugs to the exits of their state. In essence, our aloneness – our rage into the silence and at those who are mindlessly complicit — can resound and shake the very air — when a million voices become as one.
For way too long, we have been hypnotized into paralysis. We have internalized the lie-of-convenience that freedom is the dominion of the elite, that our inner lives were devoid of value, and our sense of worth was derived by how we could serve the masters of the capitalist/militarist order. All too many, pummeled by the noxious grift that the gods of the present moment — the gods that the economic and political elite bow down to on an exclusive basis — the God of Money and the God of Death — have surrendered to the present order’s daily rituals of exploitation and their cult of violent death.
What the fallen and forsaken neglect to notice: They only take your essential being if you grant them permission to do so. Vampires cannot enter your place of dwelling without your consent. They cannot rob you of your freedom to think creatively. To seek out affinities with other like minded souls who refuse to be consumed in the meaningless flames of a consumer-based inferno of empty desire, be self-incarnated in a prison of mundane thought, be dispatched to and rendered a corpse inside the charnel house appropriated for the casualties of perpetual war for perpetual profiteering.
ICE thuggery embodies the soul-defying, dream-shattering dominion of the capitalist/militarist deathscape. The very moment an individual accepts the sight of a so-called “illegal” person, brutalized, facedown, and cuffed on city streets and sidewalks — that is the moment that individual has forsaken his own life. He has internalized and made a tacit agreement that the state is at liberty to grind his being to shitdust under the boot of capricious authority. Here, we regard a person whose mind has been churned into fascist spittle. An individual who has become convinced that freedom is being granted the freedom to forsake freedom. The moment one gives the state/the corporate structure/a military order the power to strip the least among us of their rights and dignity — then and there one has signed away those life-vivifying qualities of their own.
This is the principle that is at stake in Minnesota, and wherever, at the moment, ICE is trampling the soul of humanity, one power-devoid individual at a time, and wherever the MAGA thugocracy will deem to deploy their Brownshirt bully boys next.
Birds’ Hell, 1937–1938, Max Beckmann
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “New England Reformers,” Essays: Second Series, 1844.
Therefore, we are given to ask what it is that conservatives are trying to conserve? The Trump Reich thugocracy, in regard to the type of people they are stopping in public places, arresting and detaining, makes it clear: The White supremacist order, and, on the international front, they are attempting to preserve the fantasy that US military imperium remains a viable enterprise.
Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.
— Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1983.
Yet the Trump Reich is not even attempting to fake it. They do not make the gesture to evince being educated and to fake that their agendas include the liberation of the oppressed of the earth. A cupidity to plunder is the feature of their rule.
They do not care whether their lies are transparent; the point is, the intoxication concomitant to the lie. In the social dynamic of the inner circle of MAGA, their sycophants and operatives — social status is gained by the audacity of the grift, the wealth gained by mendacity and plunder.
Their creed is: the false self is the best self possible. Mimicry of conviction – not heartfelt, mind-affirmed conviction – is appropriated for mercenary purposes, and for mercenary purposes alone. Sincerity is for suckers.
It is a mistake to appeal to the MAGA authoritarian’s humanity…their ballast of the soul was discarded as encumbering weight long ago. Yet, the mind of the Universe, has a relentless mercy, thus flights borne of the fuel of ego-intoxication will be lifted skyward on shoddy wings. Yet gravity is a loving force. The Spirit Of Cruelty can only outpace the Soul Of The World in short bursts of self-reinforcing mania. MAGA fascists will meet the kiss and embrace of the inexorable ground.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, detail
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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Phil Rockstroh.