“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (The New Idol)
At present, according to recent polling, 52 percent of the US citizenry approve of Donald Trump’s performance in office, this is, even as Trump pulls from his bloated ass Joseph Goebbels’ grade lies e.g., Diversity hires are responsible for the recent aviation tragedy over the Potomac River. Hyperbole? The insidious declaration is right out of the Nazi era playbook. For example, the Nazi “stabbed in the back by international and internal parasitic Jews” lie, promulgated by the Nazi propaganda machine, was deployed to blame shift the cause of Germany’s defeat and the attendant economic miseries in the wake of World War I.
In my lifetime, the following varieties of shame-rancid fabulation arrived during waves of rightwing inflicted political/cultural regression. In my native city of Birmingham, Alabama, during the Civil Rights era, segregationist demagoguery went thus: The end of Jim Crow would embolden sexually feral Black men to endanger fragile flowers of southern womanhood; during the Vietnam era, pro war propaganda warned, the Vietnamese are bereft of respect for human life and will be headed westward to endanger all of freedom-loving Christendom by means of falling dominoes if the war ends before the surrender of the North Vietnamese communists; during the Reagan era, gold tooth-adored, Cadillac-driving Welfare Queens, purchasing steak, lobster, and cases of malt liquor at supermarkets, are destroying the nation’s economy; and, over the last two hideous years, Zionist propaganda warned, murderous-by-nature Palestinians must forever live with an IDF boot on their collective neck or a second Holocaust would be imminent.
“The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful…” ― Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
Moreover, on an historical basis, myths told by conquering Athenians wove tales of a sexually insatiable, Cretin witch queen who had carnal relations with a monstrous bull risen from the Mediterranean Sea, and as a consequence birthed a labyrinth-dwelling half bull/half man beast possessing an appetite for virgin youth. Across the Mediterranean, in the Levant, a tale went as follows, promised by their sky-father God, Israelites crossed the Jordan river, and, in a preview of horrors to come, annihilated the people of Canaan and claimed the land as their own.
Returning to the present toxic mythos of the present era, if I attempt to confront Trump’s true believers on the outright lies he and his clutch of sub-reality television grade grifters retail in, I suspect, my attempts at persuasion would carry the dismal degree of efficacy as when I attempt to reach my eleven year son old on his compulsion to be sucked into the storylines of Grand Theft Auto and attendant, dopamine-jacking narratives unfolding in the video game are an accurate depiction of how criminal activity plays out in the non-pixel world. I cannot compete against thrills freighted in the phenomenon known as the suspension of disbelief.
What are the cultural/political circumstances that allow prevarication to be perpetrated sans impunity? Will our destinies, both individual and collective, continue to be determined by pervasive deceit — by pernicious storylines, concocted by cadres of elitist fabulists, and perpetuated with the agenda of frightening and bamboozling a perpetually credulous citizenry?
Sadly, as noted above, there is not a granule of novelty in the great dismal of it all; nations, tribes, and families spin tales composed of sacred lies. Most of us are compelled to find rationales to live with ourselves and to tolerate the presence of those close to us. On a personal basis, such tales serve to repackage self-deception as self-confidence. Glaring case in point, the malevolent smirk and risible swagger of the present Manqué-in-Chief.
Jean Renoir, piquantly, put it, “You know, in this world there’s one thing that’s terrible, that everyone has their reasons.” — The Rules Of The Game
During times of trauma and uncertainty, we seek narratives of reassurance — even clinging to ones that are spurious — even preposterous. Trump’s resolute visage should be placed on Mount Rushmore for restoring confidence and purpose to the citizenry of the US. Sure thing, and Diddy should be feted for restoring dignity to drug-fueled orgies.
Thus, during my lifetime, decade after decade, the anxious minds of neoliberal conservatives have evinced a compulsive need to believe it is possible to return to a fictional past, to a golden era populated by well-turned out, obedient children, dutiful wives, and docile minorities. All of whom were lorded over by morally upright white men who wielded their righteous power guided by the grace, mercy, yet perpetually brittle temper of an All-Powerful, All-Knowing, Everlasting, Long-Bearded, Bony Ass White Man enthroned beyond the blazing blue sky.
Authoritarian rightists go round-heeled for this kind of hokum. In the 1980s, they swooned, gazing upon Ronald Reagan’s stiff, Pomade-lacquered pompadour — which he held high and steady against the changes that blew in from the odious 1960s; then, as now, with Trump, his klavern of looney muffin smitten insist The Gipper’s 1940-era coiffure should be carved into Mount Rushmore. Next, as noted, MAGA cultists swoon, Trump’s combover disaster coiffure should be chiseled in glory upon the (stolen) mountain’s rock face – where the two television grifter ubermenschs’ (closer to uberdouches’) visages would defy rain, snow, and lashing wind — and would be, axiomatically, impervious to the reality of change.
But all monuments to delusion need not be as epic in scale as the above. Even objects as quotidian and seemingly innocuous as the naming of places can and will deceive us. Moreover, these everyday — seemingly trivial — misapprehensions can waylay the citizenry into internalizing false mythos.
“Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.” — Plato
For the next case in point, I’ll travel southward and back in time, a number of decades.
I was born in the Deep South industrial city of Birmingham, Alabama, another example of a locale in possession of an origin myth as fraudulent as it was odious.
Birmingham was founded by steel and coal barons from Pittsburgh, PA, who, in an attempt to ameliorate the worldwide perception of American southerners as being dumb as dirt, backwoods, genetic retreads, too-ignorant-to-hit-the-ground-with-their-own-piss yokels, christened their colonial creation, Birmingham, in order to brand it with a proper “city of industry” cachet.
Subsequently, the bloodsucking Yankee bastards (I mean, visionary captains of capitalism) known in Birmingham as the “Big Mules” went about the business of exploiting — rather, in their words providing gainful employment — to said dumb-as-dirt, backwoods, genetic retread, too-ignorant-to-hit-the-ground-with-their-own-piss yokels — i.e., impoverished but hardy specimens who possessed the requisite physical stamina required to sacrifice their bodies and souls for the sake of substandard wages.
“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (The New Idol)
As the riches, plundered from the Appalachian Hills, flowed northward to banks in Pittsburgh and New York, the compensation the laboring class received in return was a life of ceaseless toil and perpetual debt. These harsh realities made the people of Birmingham hard and mean. In the early 1960s, the city was unofficially re-christened “Bombingham.”
Birmingham had been transformed into a hateful, little colonial outpost. If a white man, for example, my father, complained about low wages and poor working conditions, the bosses told him, “If you don’t like your job — there are ten n-words (but they didn’t clean up their racist lexicon for public consumption) who, right now, will take your position for a fraction of your pay.” It’s self-evident why Birmingham was not exactly known as a beacon of racial harmony.
Nonviolent Black student demonstrators were met with fire hoses and dogs in May 1963 during the 10-week Birmingham desegregation campaign organized in part by Martin Luther King Jr. (Frank Rockstroh / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)
When in the mid-1960s, my family moved from Birmingham to Atlanta, Georgia i.e., a city (or more precisely, a contrived collection of corrupt zoning practices and real estate developer larcenies) we settled again into a city bearing a contrived name. Whereas Birmingham’s fraudulent name was meant to evoke an aura of industry, Atlanta’s was contrived to conjure an image of the ancient grandeur of a great city of antiquity. Call the theme: Classical Age Cracker.
By illustrating the types of cultural confabulation and communal causitry defining White dominated Atlanta of the time and many still refer to “as their way of life” — I will digress, a bit. I will attempt to limn in prose the lives, fates, and legacies of two famous residents of the city: Blind Willie McTell and Margaret Mitchell, both of whom resided there in overlapping intervals during the first half of the twentieth century.
I first heard the music of Blind Willie McTell, in the mid-1960s, when in tow of my father, I visited friends of his who comprised the dozen or so members of Atlanta’s “beatnik” community.
They were flopped in a run-down, mafia-owned building at the intersection of Peachtree and Tenth Street, and bizarrely enough, in the building that contained the apartment that Margaret Mitchell had christened “The Dump” — the location where she had conceived and written Gone with the Wind.
Upon the turntable of a battered record player, belonging to the building’s resident manager, the late Bud Foote, a professor at nearby Georgia Tech, author, poet, musician, and all around Beat polymath, spun rare and exquisite LPs. It was at The Dump that I first heard the works of Mctell and other Blues, Folk, and Jazz greats. The building was located a short distance from where, on Ponce De Leon ave., according to local bohemian (all seven of them) lore an aging, increasingly disconsolate from poverty, racism, and his own obscurity, McTell used to busk for change from redneck Babbits and country-come-to-town parvenus, shortly before he gave up playing the blues and took up lay preaching and gospel music.
The Margaret Mitchell House, as it has been subsequently christened by the Atlanta Tourism Board, is now a city landmark. Both obtuse locals and gullible tourists seem oblivious or indifferent to the fact that the building, thrice burned to the ground and rebuilt by the city, doesn’t, at present, in any way, shape or form resemble the original structure where the epic racist, bodice-ripper, Gone with the Wind, was confabulated onto the page.
“We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Not far down the road exists, to this day, a bar named Blind Willy’s, a place that, on any given night, by populated who scant few would have knowledge the joint’s namesake, a man spat upon when he was busking on Ponce De Leon Avenue, a few blocks down the street.
Perhaps if we were to take a closer examination of these sorts of everyday misperceptions, distortions, and cultural based false mythos it would reveal a great deal about our present day lives within the duopolist, high-dollar hack-conjured narratives and concomitant Trump era griftathon of the present day.
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I’m gazing out the window
Of that old Saint James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell — Bob Dylan, Blind Willie McTell
So where does this leave us? Are we condemned to live out our lives in the enthralling dazzle of these glittering fragments of self-serving lies?
Is it for the bards of the extant dictatorship of wealth and attendant Trump-tide of pummeling shitwit — a psychical landscape of lies as banal as they are noxious — to wail out the blues into the obtuse face of the present era — for blues-mans, scions of their times, born of the hybrid lawn-seeded soil of our nation of vast suburban subdivisions and weaned on its pharmacological subsistence crops, perhaps going by the moniker Medicated Willie McMansion — to sing out,
“I got the medication blues/ from my iPhone head to my sweatshop-shod shoes…”
Conversely and finally, what would a soul-driven resistance look like. In what kinds of forms would a propitious mythos arrive? Where do seeds of effective defiance brood?
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke posited, I’m paraphrasing, every individual has a letter written to themself, dispatched from their own heart. The letter warns, if you fail to live the life your heart was demanded by destiny to live — you will not be allowed to read said letter before you die.
Ask yourself, is there a dead letter office within you piled with letters from your heart? Query your heart, is it mortified by the extant culture reeking of Nazi-level lies? The heart is not merely a pump — it is a reservoir of visions, that are dispatches from Anima Mundi I.e., the soul of the world. Step one: Stand up and confront believers of the lie. Crash the comfort zones of denialists. Regard the confrontation as a love letter from your heart, thus you cultivate and allow to rise from within you an elan vital serving as an antidote to the banality of normalized insanity.
Hang a hammock between Death and the Abyss, take sanctuary in the space between musical notes, greet as a steady friend the evening air, listen to the brooding of seeds and soliloquies of stone, and the parting words of dying stars…
Give deference to empty spaces; therein, the impetuous present pauses to breathe, thus the future is provided with the solace required to dream the world into existence.
When some insistent fool demands that you explain yourself, strike fear in him by brandishing flowers of infinity, their efflorescence rages into the world your true name — your immutable destiny chanted by troubadour heartbeats — and the fool, if he possesses a scintilla of dignity, will withdraw the question.
…Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.
― Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
![Affected Place [<i>Betroffener Ort</i>] (1922)](https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfPMGlvmOc1KSyiW0JGiAOhdJUOG3w2210bn7hyLoyNTjg4uc7j5-tpNHjQYTVJtsOaO_xCDVZiTMjukfGQZsPrZxnNOsQ_36eDD8D17YFf1WKC2NemcmasJe7yDxm4WDq1XQ2a?key=afIfLXqj5oSeKfzgH-Q0MAlS "Affected Place [<i>Betroffener Ort</i>] (1922)")
