Wrestling with Demons; or, Pandemonium is Now [Fiction]

WRESTLING WITH DEMONS; OR,

PANDEMONIUM IS NOW

A disclaimer. Why should I write one? You ask. My readers, my hypocrites. Here now on the ensuing pages please find a fictional essay; that is, an piece in the form of an essay set in a fictional context? Do I not know the context? Can I suspect the mind of the framer?  A fictional essayer, the Expositor, he or she, who will remain unnamed, could the expositor be it? Unattached to me, the author, just as we are supposed to separate Henry Fielding from his Foundling, Tom Jones. I, the author, convey to you, the reader, the essay of a fictional expositor. That is all. Please understand it as such. Fielding is not the narrator, you know. I hold this truth to be self-evident: You must separate author and narrator. If you can’t, consider yourself challenged.

Book One

THE FLOWERS OF EVIL

PART ONE

HOW THE JACOBINS WILL RETURN

To understand the grossness of the oppression on the people of France by the Aristocracy, to get just how deep the resentment was felt, to know how profound the contempt for the Aristocrat had become and persisted in its vehemence, how this then bred in the people a savagery in their violence, you only have to see that tanneries were set up in France to make leather out of the flayed skins of those who were guillotined. Yes, leather products were made from the skins of the aristocrats and then sold as such, quick to be bought by those with money enough to pay for such a new luxury?  A People’s luxury? Human skin was unusually tough when tanned into leather. Good for wear, lesser worn when worn for long. I wonder if the meat of the victims was ground into the slop for their pigs. If I were a French peasant in the Reign of Terror, I would have; or should I say more accurately, if any French Peasant were this man myself who would grind their flesh into slop for pigs, sell it as such to anyone who would relish the notion of feeding Aristocrats to pigs. Or maybe not–to feed the meat of slaughtered aristocrats to one’s pigs would be to alter the meat of the pigs that you would then ingest after you slaughtered a pig, butchered him and ate him. If the aristocrats were of the impure blood as the Marseillaise notes, then perhaps you should refrain from feeding the aristocrats in slop to your pigs. I do not know exactly where I stand on this point. 

 

What he says most people he knows do not listen to, do not respond to if they do listen, halfway always the way most anyone listens to anyone else; so what then do we say, can we say, if we were to think about what we could say about him, when it came about, a time when others would seek to hear what he had to say, and that’s not had to as in the past of have to, an easier way for Americans to get their ears around what they should do, if not what they must do? No one must do anything in America, that is until it is too late to do anything, even the nothing at all they had the luxury of doing for too long. He has said much; he will say more; he takes the responsibility, as he has said, seriously. But words as they are formed by him usually amount to one or another in diatribe or tirade or polemic; he would never ascent to all of them being of one piece, a string of mutually interchangeable in all contexts of use synonyms . . . murder, killing, assassination, slaughter, genocide.

When and where he speaks is of no never mind for you, therefore cannot be of any for me, what I say he says is verbatim, quoting as I do exactly what I hear when I hear it how I hear it added in what amountS to a paragraph addendum after each . . .

He does say now as he has said for some time, “Trump is a grotesque flip side of a genuinely insidious neo-liberal globalization that has had no respect for organic identities, whether they be of race, of ethnicity, of nationality or of labor, or any of these identities that coalesce in an organic democracy not geared toward running against or over individual liberty, or particularly, the four freedoms, or the Bill of Rights, anything that does not support the new global order as framed by their messiah, Milton Friedman. . . definitely designed and disseminated through conduits by those who control finance and media and have no loyalty to anything other than themselves and those like them, each other aligned by greed and a diseased love of money, impoverishing nations or large population groups in an effort to maintain the status quo for the Monied and Power Elite.

“Jefferson warned us about banks more than 200 years ago: More dangerous, he said, than standing armies. Enemy soldiers you can shoot with impunity; you can cut their occupying throats in the night; but Wall Street Bankers in suits and ties who are made into models of what we aspire to by too many in the media and the government, it becomes more difficult. Is this a mistake?” He asks, has asked, will ask again in these exact when not other words, or those loosely arranged on their theme. Is this the reason the nut cases only shoot up schools instead of Wall Street boar[d] rooms–how is it that no CEO has ever been assassinated? Or are the schools shot up by CIA or NSA human drones, assets controlled one way or another through brainwashing or other manipulation . . . I do not want to descend into conspiracy hypotheses, and that’s because none of them are theories.

He goes on to say that this New World Oder “had no better press-secretary-spin-doctor-carnival-barker-demagogue than U.S. President Barack Obama,” as he then adds how  “we talk about Trump denigrating the Oval Office,” something he says he does not “disagree with.” He goes on to say, and that he will in the future “wax more eloquently and vehemently in my verbal attacks on Trump than any of you who have said as much about how we might be imbalanced in our attacks on Trump if we do not have a seriously honest look at Obama; but do not imagine that Barack Obama has been good for the American Presidency in a way so unique that we now praise him as if he were the coming of a political savior.”  More self-deception, like the mass self-hypnosis he said he saw at “Obama’s two Inaugurations,” he says. The mass hypnosis performed by Hitler, Trump, Mussolini, Eva Peron even more and better than her husband Juan in Argentina.

There is no one from Europe, he says, “that I have talked with, anyone who has half a brain, who has not and does not believe that Obama had been bought and paid for by Goldman Sachs and Wall Street.” You disagree? I am not so sure I do or do not. “Wall Street is as much the enemy of freedom and identity,” he says, “as any of the oil gangsters; and there has never been a President deeper in the pockets of the Banks than Obama. And Hilary would have solved this? Trump? You imbeciles–I am appalled at how stupid we have become, en-masse.

He pauses.

He continues, “And do not imagine that Obama was not owned by Goldman Sachs because he was; but then do not imagine that the Republicans are not heinous, or that Trump is not dangerously stupid, just the useful idiot the Alt Right needs–or would that be too kind. He is insidious–and he’s German, since it is right now to point out ethnicities and race as negative, subtractive or otherwise pejorative markers of a person’s character. Methinks Gertrude protests too much about the Queen in the Murder of Gonzalgo. Everything about American politics has shifted monolithically right of center. Sanders is an old New Dealer and his Party mocked him–why? Because Bill Clinton did everything he could to destroy the New Deal and undermine the Great Society. I would love to chop his fucking head off.” He goes on to say, “Clinton was a megalomaniac bent on Party hegemony.” You disagree. I do not.

And then he says, “Check again his record. Clinton let the Banks loose on us. Clinton’s Pro-Wall-Street deregulatory actions, began while Democrats were the majority in the mid 90s, beginning with the appointments Robert Rubin and then Larry Summers in the Treasury–yes, these deregulatory measures were more responsible than anything Bush did, or conspicuously did not do, playing a game of peak-a-boo with himself. Bush II’s animus must appear as an Ostrich, his favorite thing to do?” And that is not a genuine question, he reminds us. You have to feel the sharpness of its rhetorical edge. You do not?

Does anyone recall Clinton’s dissolving the Glass-Steagall Law from the Great Depression, barring Investment Banks from Commercial Banking activities? No. I do. Does anyone recall the Commodity Futures Modernization Act,  “which left the derivatives market a laissez-faire Wild West,” according to the Columbia Journalism Review? I do. “With Riegle-Neal,’ he says, “Clinton gutted State regulations of Banks leading to grotesque bank mergers and the too-big-to-fail mind-set. And yes, responsible directly for more deregulation that lead directly to 2008 than any President . . . recall Obama blaming George W. for 2008? I do. But next to Bill Clinton, there has been no greater friend to Wall Street Greed in the Oval Office than OBAMA.”

He pauses.

“The Jacobins,” he reminds us, has reminded us, “would put Trump’s head in the guillotine along with Hilary’s, Obama’s, Bush 2 and Bill Clinton’s, all of them gleefully participating in constructing a new world according to the gospel of the socio-economic-political messianic Milton Friedman . . . an order to the detriment of everyone else.” You disagree. I can tell. “Friedman, Greenspan and Bill Clinton are in the pit of my American Inferno. Don’t worry–there are many rings in my Inferno,” he says said will say again has said many, many times,” why bring Friedman in with Greenspan and Clinton when Friedman was the most severe critic of Bill Clinton’s charades and masquerade.

“Obama and Hilary and Bill are the Middle-Class nobodies who get to rise financially through power, influence and authority and play with the monied elite, exactly the way upper bourgeoisie in France got to buy titles in the aristocracy. I wonder what a leather jacket made from whoever’s skin would look like, feel like? Clinton leather; Regan leather; Friedman or Greenspan leather?” What then must we do? I ask. Not him. he would not ask this question.

“J’acuse Messieurs Presidents Obama Bush II Clinton Bush I Regan . . . ” he says.

“Let’s throw Hilary and one of her Pimp’s into the mix,” he says.

“Leonard Blankfein,” he says more emphatically.

Contra nous de la tyranie.

 

PART TWO

WHAT IS THE NEO-LIBERAL GLOBAL ORDER?

“No, liberty is not made for us: we are too ignorant, too vain, too presumptuous, too cowardly, too vile, too corrupt, too attached to rest and to pleasure, too much slaves to fortune to ever know the true price of liberty. We boast of being free! To show how much we have become slaves, it is enough just to cast a glance on the capital and examine the morals of its inhabitants.”

― Jean-Paul Marat

Do I take the world to be an insidious place? Of course, I do. Do I imagine that there are forces of control in the world that are nefarious? Certainly I do. Do I imagine Trump and Bannon, although they might be successful, are boys playing a mans game trying desperately to look like men while doing it, the reason why they are doing. The Oval Office is not the place to work out your psychological problems. Anyway, nonetheless, nevertheless, I’d be daft if I did not. Where then does this lead me? To conspiracy theories about groups or organizations? Not exactly. Do I think that elites in a society can control without having to be conspiratorial, without having to band together in thinker-than-thieves SPECTRE-like plots–yes, I do. The world is not the world according to Ian Fleming, which is not to say that everything in the novels is exactly how it was drawn in the films, especially the most outrageously made in the 70s and the 80s, or so I say in my non-critical opinion. Where then does that bring me, bring us, what I have to say about what I have seen and understood for decades, stood under in ways the intellect can, with a body we say in analogy or in metaphor, another beyond the beyond we look to when mystery is the best we handle, dissatisfying randomness, most likey. But what appears as random and may even be calculated as random does not mean it is not contingent with speculative ventures gambled by those who can afford to gamble, gambling what they have cornered by figuring out how to give back less to the societies from which they operate in order to maximize profit for the few. I know from where I speak, of what I have spoken, at when I will say again the something I know I have seen, again, to see or not to see is to know in a way we do when we carry a man for a mile, without having to wear his shoes which may not fit. I do not hesitate to become post to another’s lintel.

The Neo-liberal (New) World Order is a notion we–I–have taken from the back of our one dollar bill . . . I know others around the world have, their minds being focussed on our money, the most frequent artifact of American culture they handle? An idea we have held for ourselves as model for a long time; and all you need to look at is the Eye of Horus, which is a Masonic symbol [and I’m not pointing to conspiracies], at the pinnacle of the pyramid, and look to the bottom where is written in Latin, Novus Ordo Saeclorum, or, The New Order of the Ages. Yes, America, American, everything everyone and everywhere becoming one or another American imitation. Now, when I say Neo-liberal New World Order, I do not mean Democrat Liberal, but Neo-liberalism as a political philosophy, a term coined and defined by the anti-Messiah of everything Hilary mock-genuflects to, Milton Friedman; and a place, albeit a metaphysical one, where Regan, Bill Clinton, Bush 1 and 2 and Obama become all of piece, indistinguishable. For how long have others around the world been reading that, seeing that, trying to understand it, translating it correctly, interpreting it appropriately–appropriately? Adequately.

This New World Order of Neo-liberal Globalization is marketably multicultural so long as it is Americanist, Bourgeois and greedy Capitalist under the rainbow colored costumes of multiculturalism, the later only allowed where it is the dress up in this masquerade. It is, has been and will remain for the 1% and only for the 1% . . . just as you know the mock-Baron in the White House (and here is a bit more muck-raking racist discourse for our impostor in the Oval Office: he’s German–yes, fucking German–as in German-American Volksbund–any more ironies we care to see as coincidence? And fuck Merkel too–Obama’s bitch.)

I know that this reference to the 1% has become a cliche, which is the point of how poorly so much of our print media is allowed to be in its dissemination. Obama wanted to play with them–Michelle, for certain, not adverse to spending, spending and spending some more, or so we began to hear in the lower voices of the media . . . often times managed in comedy spin–too much of late night TV was an Obama love-fest (and Jimmy Fallon is another sycophantic schmuck puckering up to NBC Corporate assholes as they openly move to the right, but then they’ve always been right of center, and their news is cutting edge in keeping Power in the shadows . . .); and I liked him, I did, genuinely; and I still do, the man.  Now that he is no longer President, perhaps I can like him again? Who the Clintons have been playing with and how would fill a gothic novel, their past is another Castle of Otranto mixed with Vathek and perhaps Shelley’s The Cenci with Byron’s Manfred mixed in . . . but then I praise the Clinton’s too much. All of whom the Bush Oil Money is a part of–you really imagined Hilary Clinton was not the something of Babylon? Obama not the something of the Bankers’?

The buffoon that Donald Trump has been, as I have said, as I have seen in the media, especially here in New York, is the Court Jester of Satan (or so others have said in the past; I always mistrust anyone who wants to be President of the United States; I would immediately hold my brother in suspicion, if I had one and he had become President). No one of us escapes our Puritan past, our Puritan images, the frames too we put around those collective unconscious motivations from Salem to today. No one of us in New York took this draft dodging solipsist seriously–and I am not going to, so fuck all the people who say we have to get behind our President–the way he has gotten behind us the way some prisoners or guards get behind other prisoners in the Prison House of America; one and only one, the whole fucking place; every State a kind of prison managed by the government. Someone should grab him by the balls and shake some sense into him, but then Putin might have him by the balls.

Will Trump become a fool for the Millennium? Or is he the useful idiot of the Alt Right? Only time will tell–I have the suspicion it will be a lot earlier than anyone could believe. I do not see the Devil in him; he’d be a slicker operator if he were. Compare God in Paradise Lost with Milton’s Satan in the same.

Trump’s administration–and I do not believe the claims about their IQs, unless we want to believe that someone needs a high IQ to make a lot of money when most of what he wants to do is make a lot of money and that that motivation subsumes all other motivations, including a conscience for people, for the People, the People of his nation (these people have no nation, no national feeling), or the country wthin which you operate with the overriding desire to make a lot of money and even more money than the already far too much you and several of your future generations will never spend.

If I may heap on the images, Trump will be a grotesque flip side of a genuinely insidious globalization that has had no respect for race or ethnicity or nationality, anywhere . . . and whose images and ideas were designed and disseminated through conduits by those who have no loyalty to anything other than themselves–and you know that they care more for their international comrades in ledger books . . . their profits are what they care for the most or exclusively at all . . . and only others like them helping each other to make more money insofar as they can do work together in trying to . . . Wall Street CEOs will always care more for the rich of Russia or China or Saudi Arabia than the poor of America–what kind of people are like this–what kind of men, what kind of man, what person thinks like this. I do not know anyone like this. How could I?

I cannot believe this carnival barker of a man is still playing in his reality TV show, only in the Oval Office. Donald Trump is President of the United States. I’m embarrassed.

All of the elite in seats of power, influence, authority or investment are aligned by their greed and a diseased love of Monied control of government policy, corruption,corruption by even more corruption, and corruption does not need conspiracies to thrive or multiply, anymore than mildew needs conspiracies to thrive. They care for how Trump will make them more money or hurt them in making money, and only when the latter happens will they say anything, and even then, it won’t be for the people, of course not, who could imagine that Power and Money do anything except think, sometimes together, at other times in concert, but never really conspiratorially, on how to make even more money while acquiring more poeer. If selling us all into slavery would be the prime way for them to continue to make a whole lot more money, there would be little hesitation. The elites of power and money are linked through a contempt for anything traditional or national anywhere,  our grossest mistake, as part of their largest deception; perhaps with the exceptions of play-acting at traditions they have never been a part of at any time–Jefferson warned us about banks more than 200 years ago, how they were more dangerous to a People and their Liberty than standing armies. Occupy Wall Street because Wall Street is occupying us?  That is US as in the U.S. Wall Street is as much the enemy of freedom and organic identity as any of the oil gangsters. And do not imagine that Obama was not owned by Goldman Sachs because he was; and don’t imagine that the Republicans are not heinous devisors of a new corporatocracy because that is just what they envision, and Trump’s Cabinet is the beginning. You fools–all of you idiots who voted for him . . . forgive my outburst? NO–do not. I am unyielding in this.

An idiot, Aristotle reminded us 2300 years ago, is someone with no general or deeper social concerns. Everything about American politics has shifted monolithically right of center; just as Israel’s has, and it seems so many other places in the world.Sanders is only an old New Dealer and his Party mocked him–why? Because Bill Clinton did everything he could to destroy the New Deal and undermine the Great Society, the truly oiliest man ever to occupy the Oval Office; a bigger liar than Regan could ever have been. The peculiar thing about Regan is that he did not lie as much as some imagine him having done. He actually said what he meant and meant what he said. He was a disciple of Milton Friedman as much as Peter and Paul were of Jesus. All anti-messiahs have their disciples too.