Poetic Illuminations and Ponzi schemes

"The end unfolds with a stampede of perfume"

All I want to do is to be able to stop thinking about Trump, MAGA, and the rapacious destruction of America. I want to focus on beautiful things like poetry and art, or even polkadots and aardvarks, instead. But I find it difficult. The situation we have been plunged into is so extreme. It is getting more extreme, week by week, almost day by day. I feel most people I know are still dissociating and need to turn their attention toward this deeply upsetting hyper-object.

I’m trying to record a video essay, perhaps a series or seminar, on Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1872) and what I consider the secret relationship between Rimbaud’s masterpiece and Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), written four long centuries earlier. I also want to investigate Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Heidegger’s ideas on poetry and the “abyss,” along with examining some other poetic masterpieces. But Trump keeps getting in my way!

Like Rimbaud, Pico was an incredibly precocious teenage prodigy who encapsulated the entire knowledge of his time. Pico pointed a path forward toward an illuminated and initiated future that, sadly, his society in the Renaissance was unable to accept. The Church attacked and ostracized him, and may have had him poisoned. Similarly, Rimbaud, somehow, at a mere eighteen years old, was able to formulate an incandescent, anguished response to the entire history of European culture and civilization up to his exact moment, ending in the “death of God” and the rejection of all values. Rimbaud not only foreshadowed Surrealism, but expressed the nihilism that flourished in the Twentieth Century — which Trump and his gangster oligarchs embody now.

Everything that Trump is doing — AI slop videos where he flies across the country shitting on American citizens for protesting; razing the East Wing of the White House to build a $300 million monstrosity; undercutting Ukraine to support Putin; blowing up fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela; and so on — are acts of pure brutality. They also misdirect, distract and bamboozle us from something else that seems likely to happen very soon… something we all sense inchoately.

We must be approaching some kind of catastrophic economic cratering of the United States, some near-total leveling and dispossession of the people via mass starvation(maybe), mass poverty, and/or militarized warfare waged against us? It definitely feels like that moment in those old Roadrunner cartoons when Wile E Coyote has run off the cliff but he doesn’t quite realize it yet, as his legs pinwheel uselessly in the air. We are all Wile E Coyote now, too scared to look down.

The part of me that wants to run away from this debacle is currently at war with that part of me that feels an eerie fascination and even some kind of edge-world or end-time hope that it is only in the approaching devastation and destruction of everything that some new frequency or level of consciousness can finally emerge, like the proverbial / clichéd phoenix rising from the ashes.

I don’t even know if I am painting our situation nearly as dark as it actually is. In “The Man Who Wants You Dead: Trump’s Golem Stephen Miller Wants to See Your Blood in the Streets. Can We Stop Him?”, the courageous, non-alarmist former military intelligence expert Malcolm Nance writes “The role of Stephen Miller is now to shape the political environment to get Trump to allow him and his secret Police, ICE, to characterize the opposing party as a terrorist organization,” so they can start imprisoning and killing Democrats. They seem intent on doing this even though the Democratic Party is pathetically moderate and has 48 million members.

Nance believes Miller’s role is “to get Americans killed and then call for the Insurrection Act to be enforced and fill the Democratic city with armed soldiers.” He writes:

After the assassination of racist pundit Charlie Kirk, Miller came out and stated the ground rules for how Trump was going to treat other Americans. The New York Times quoted him, “We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile, because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you have broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

It isn’t clear what “law” Miller refers to here. Increasingly, the law seems to be anything that Trump — a narcissist sociopath suffering from cognitive decline who might live for another decade to oppress and torment the people — decides it is.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, led by two Trump appointees, just approved Trump’s right to put the U.S. military into American cities, utterly against the Constitution itself, violating the Posse Comitatus Act. According to Politico: “A federal appeals court panel has backed President Donald Trump’s authority to send National Guard troops into Portland, Oregon, concluding that though the president’s claims on social media “may exaggerate” the violence in the city, he may still have had a valid basis for the deployment.” The judicial branch seems to be following Congress toward capitulation to Trumpism.

Trump has just demolished the historic East Wing of the White House, without any Congressional approval or oversight. This is just one of countless actions that would have been inconceivable under any President before him. Meanwhile the level of personal grift Trump is engaged in while he shafts the U.S. population is staggering. He has banked obscene billions from crooked deals, phony lawsuits, and crypto shakedowns. Meanwhile the shutdown of the U.S. government continues with no end in sight. Even the pathetic Democrats can’t allow MAGA to cut health care for 15 million Americans and jack up insurance premiums to levels that will be unaffordable for many working people.

Is the U.S. Economy a Ponzi Scheme?