Challenging the Media Myth of Latino Machismo

HEY CISCO, HEY PANCHO

by Roger D. Harris, Becca Renk, and John Perry / July 14th, 2025

Patriarchy is alive and well throughout the world. But the English-language media flatters itself by one-sidedly portraying machismo as a particularly Latin American malady, all the while overlooking significant feminist gains made in the region.

Take, for instance, the entry under “machismo” in the latest edition of Britannica which asserts: “It has for centuries been a strong current in Latin American politics and society.” But the encyclopedia makes no such recognition for its own Anglo society.

An article in the AP on sexual bias in Mexico blames “Mexico’s ‘machismo’ culture and strong Catholic roots,” calling out patriarchy as a defining and harmful feature for the whole of Latin American culture.

Citing the attacks on feminism by the ultra-right president of Argentina, Javier Milei, The Guardian generalizes, how misogyny is “a very serious problem for Latin America.” The article continues: “Of course, Latin women continue to learn from those in the west,” implying that benighted Latinas should take tips from their more enlightened western sisters. The article concludes: “Women in Latin America need women in the west to work with us to put an end to this violent oppression.”

In a worldwide report on last International Women’s Day, Al Jazeera first highlighted Latin America with the examples of Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia as places plagued by gendered violence and only then added: “In many European countries, women also protested against violence.”

Verywell Mind, a US-based health website, targets “Latino culture” as patriarchal. They report on “generations of women who live or grew up in Latin American and immigrated to the United States truly believing that their happiness depends on a man.”

The Washington Post, describing Mexico as a “bastion of machismo,” marveled how it got their first woman president before the US.

Mexico

Feminists celebrated Claudia Sheinbaum’s electoral victory in June 2024, making her the first female to accede to the presidency in Mexico. However, had she lost to the nearest runner-up, Xóchitl Gálvez, Mexico would still have had its first woman as chief of state. Gender was simply not an issue in the contest, with both main challengers female.

Digging deeper into the stereotype of Latin American machismo, we see that Mexico having women as the top two contenders for the presidency is notable but not anomalous. In fact, women have held presidencies in several Latin American countries over the past half century.

Most Latin American countries have been influenced by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. This international treaty was adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly and unanimously ratified or adhered to by all of the Americas with the notable exception of the US, which signed but did not ratify it.

That international treaty had been catalyzed by Mexico, which held the World Conference on Women back in 1975. Marking a significant moment in the global movement for gender equality, this UN meeting was the first to focus exclusively on women’s rights and equality. It produced the World Plan of Action for legal and institutional reforms to combat discrimination against women.

Some revealing comparative statistics reflect differences in the social realities in the US and in Mexico. For example, as of 2025, Mexico achieved gender parity in both chambers of its national legislature. In comparison, women hold only 29% of the House seats and 26% of the Senate in the US.

Since 2014, Mexico has constitutionally mandated gender parity in candidacies for federal and local legislative elections. Going back further to the Mexican Revolution, there were literally thousands of soldaderas, female combatants. And even further back, women held leadership roles among the Zapotecs, Mixtecs, and Maya.

Fast forward to June 1, Mexico popularly elected five women and four men to their 9-person supreme court, consistent with the 2019 constitutional reform known as paridad en todo (parity in everything).

Electoral gender parity

Mexico is not alone in promoting electoral gender parity. A number of other countries in Latin America has established “gender quotas” in electoral lists. The gender quota is 50% in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Panama, and Venezuela. Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, and Paraguay have lesser quotas. However, lax enforcement and loopholes to circumvent them continue.

Cuba does not have mandatory statutory gender electoral quotas. Rather, the socialist country has a strong commitment to equity, where its Communist Party promotes women, youth, and racial minorities. Fully 56% of its national assembly is composed of women.

A recently published chart (below) from Latinometrics shows that Cuba, Nicaragua and Mexico are indeed the leaders in female parliamentary representation, not only regionally but globally.

Contrary to what the English-language media’s hype about machismo would have you believe, Latin America has made great strides in gender equality in recent years and now leads the world in female political representation.

Nicaragua

“Women are not fighting for space anymore,” declares Nicaraguan National Assembly Deputy Flor Avellán. “Now we have that space and we are empowered every day.”

Nicaragua may be one of the region’s smallest nations and came just 19th out of 23 Latin American countries in a recent “prosperity” ranking, but it is one of the leaders in establishing the role of women in public life. Just last year it was judged by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to be sixth in its global index for closing the gender gap. This was the highest in the region (WEF does not include Cuba) and was higher than many “developed” countries such as the US and UK.

Since that index was compiled, Nicaragua has taken a further step in creating a unique male/female co-presidency. Nevertheless, and with little explanation, the 2025 gender gap index dropped Nicaragua from sixth to 18th, putting it third in the region, behind Barbados and Costa Rica. This may be because metrics used by bodies such as the WEF are rooted in first-world metric inapplicable to Nicaragua. For example, firms with female majority ownership and female top managers are metrics, but there is no metric for women running their own businesses, let alone micro-businesses, which is Nicaragua’s strength.

Nicaragua is ranked first in parliament and in political institutions by the WEF, achieving parity between male and female representatives. The 2012 law requiring this was initially met with hostility from some men. But now it has become accepted as successful: “having so many women in leading positions has changed the culture,” according to Nicaraguan feminist Abigail Espinoza (pers.com). Nicaragua’s unique approach mandates 50% female leadership at all levels – from city council to municipal leaders to parliament and right up to the presidency.

Empowering women is seen not only in terms of political participation, but as a multidimensional process to achieve societal change, and in particular to improve women’s daily circumstances. There are many instances of this.

For example, over 23,400 small businesses have been formalized in 15 years, the majority owned by women; over 500 new women’s cooperatives have been formed. The “Zero Hunger” program has significantly improved women’s earnings. The program provides livestock, seeds, fertilizers, and building materials to women in rural areas, benefitting one in every six families in the country. Contributing to the nation’s food sovereignty, Nicaragua now produces 90% of the food it consumes.

In the field of health, maternal deaths have fallen by almost 80%, while infant mortality dropped by 58% between 2006 and 2024. Credit is due to the government’s massive extension of health services; specifically the establishment of 201 casas maternas, where women can go in the weeks immediately prior to giving birth.

Until recently, Nicaragua had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the region. Now most Nicaraguan women are having their first child at age 27, and Nicaragua ranks number one in the world for educational attainment for women and girls. Those young women who do get pregnant now have many options for continuing their education while also raising their child.

Violence against women remains a problem, but Nicaragua has reduced its incidence to the lowest in Central America, having established more than 400 women’s police commissions where only female police officers (40% of the national force) attend women and children exclusively. They even make home visits to identify and help resolve domestic abuse. Nicaragua has passed laws against femicide and violence against women, allowing for stricter sentencing and swifter justice.

The feminist movement in Nicaragua, mobilized mainly through the Sandinista National Liberation Front, is a class-based feminism that fights not only against patriarchy but also for an anti-imperialist and socialist class consciousness.

Nicaragua’s “National Plan to Combat Poverty and Promote Human Development 2022-2026” is fundamental to this goal. Its detailed programs, backed by nearly 60% of the national budget, aim to establish women’s rights by guaranteeing access to free, quality education at all levels and in all modalities, access to health care, access to the means and forms of production, and food security. Reduction of poverty and inequality is therefore seen as absolutely key to women’s empowerment.

The geopolitics of machismo

 To characterize Latino machismo as mythic is in no way intended to suggest that it does not have a basis in reality; it does. Despite achievements, Latin America still has a long way to go to end patriarchy.

For instance, femicide, the intentional killing of women or girls because of their gender, has been identified as a particular abomination in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, where “incredibly high rates” prevail. It is no coincidence that this gendered form of viciousness is found in societies that suffered from the US-backed dirty wars in the 1980s and onward, which left a culture of impunity. Guatemala and El Salvador were targets of counter insurgencies and Honduras was a base of operations. Conversely, revolutionary Cuba, followed by Chile and Nicaragua, has the lowest rate of femicide.

Progressive administrations in Mexico, Honduras, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have launched campaigns against machismo. Reactionary administrations, such as El Salvador and Argentina – both fully backed by the US – are dismantling feminist advances.

Regionally, feminist gains are being advanced under progressive administrations pursuing greater independence from the US. In contrast, reactionary, Washington-aligned regimes are actively rolling back those gains. As a result, the struggle against machismo in Latin America cannot be separated from the broader struggle against imperialism.

This dynamic helps explain why feminist advances in countries like Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua are often ignored by corporate media – or when acknowledged, are reduced to the actions of individual leaders like President Sheinbaum. What is overlooked is the broader social transformation taking place – one that challenges patriarchal norms and offers a model from which others might learn. Once again, it is the “threat of a good example”– this time led by women.

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Roger D. Harris is with the Task Force on the Americas and the US Peace Council. Becca Renk works in sustainable community development with the Jubilee House Community coordinating the Casa Benjamin Linder solidarity project in Managua, Nicaragua. Nicaragua-based journalist John Perry writes for the London Review of Books, FAIR, and CovertAction. All three authors are active with the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition. Read other articles by Roger D. Harris, Becca Renk, and John Perry.

 Stop Israel’s Dystopian “Humanitarian City” Plan—Before It’s Too Late

by Medea Benjamin / July 14th, 2025

The ruins of the city of Rafah. Photo: Getty Images

The Israeli government has just put forward one of the most brazenly genocidal schemes in modern memory—and unless we act immediately, the world will once again let it happen.

As reported in Haaretz, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz is proposing to force some 600,000 Palestinians—and eventually the entire population of Gaza—into a fenced-in “humanitarian city” to be built on the ruins of Rafah in southern Gaza. The plan is to “screen” the population, separate out alleged Hamas members, and then pressure the remaining civilians—men, women, and children—to “voluntarily” leave Gaza for another country. Which country? That hasn’t even been determined. The point isn’t relocation—it’s erasure. This reflects a long-standing goal among many Israelis, especially on the right, to take full control of Gaza and clear it of Palestinians.

The UN has warned that the deportation or forcible transfer of an occupied territory’s civilian population is strictly prohibited under international humanitarian law and “tantamount to ethnic cleansing”.

While all eyes are focused on a possible ceasefire, Gallant is not interested in peace—he’s interested in a “final solution.” A speeding up of the second Nakba we have been witnessing for the past 20 months. In fact, he has  stated that construction would begin during a 60-day ceasefire. So what’s the point of a ceasefire, if it’s used to build a concentration camp?

Once Palestinians are herded into this camp, they will not be allowed to leave for other parts of Gaza. They won’t be allowed to return to what’s left of their homes, their neighborhoods, their farms, their schools. They will be trapped inside this militarized zone, under constant surveillance, held at gunpoint until Israel can arrange their deportation.

Just think of the tragic, unbearable irony: the Israeli government—founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust—is now building a massive concentration camp for an entire population.

If that sounds unthinkable, look at what Israel has already gotten away with.

For the past 20 months, the world has watched—and largely enabled—a genocidal campaign in Gaza. Over 55,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered, the majority of them women and children. Israel has bombed hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and mosques. It has flattened entire neighborhoods with AI-generated kill lists. It has assassinated journalists, targeted ambulances, destroyed bakeries and water systems.

It has used hunger as a weapon of war, deliberately blocking aid trucks, attacking convoys, and starving the population into desperation. And in a cruel twist, it has created the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—a scheme to funnel aid through Israeli-controlled routes and sideline the UN and experienced NGOs. Its so-called “distribution points” are really death traps, where desperate people have been shot day after day as they risk their lives to get a bit of food.

This engineered starvation is not an accident. It is a strategy—a form of collective punishment on a scale rarely seen in modern times.

We have already failed the people of Gaza—again and again. We failed when we looked the other way as children were buried in rubble. We failed when we allowed our tax dollars to fund the very bombs that wiped out refugee camps. We failed when we kept pretending there was still a line Israel wouldn’t cross.

Now Katz is telling us—explicitly—what comes next: mass internment and forced expulsion. And unless we rise up with every ounce of outrage we have, we will fail again.

Let’s be absolutely clear: the infrastructure for this plan is already being built. Netanyahu and Trump are lobbying corrupt governments in the Global South to accept the deported. This is not a negotiating tactic to strengthen Israel’s position in ceasefire talks—it is the next phase of a genocide we’ve been watching in real time for nearly two years.

And what is the U.S. government doing? Still issuing meaningless statements about “Israel’s right to defend itself.” Still shipping weapons. Still blocking accountability at the United Nations—and even sanctioning officials like UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for daring to speak out.

President Trump could stop this today—by cutting off military aid, backing the International Criminal Court’s investigations, and declaring that forced displacement of Palestinians will not be tolerated. But instead, he’s still dreaming of turning Gaza into a Middle Eastern resort for the ultra-rich.

Meanwhile, more Arab governments stand ready to normalize ties with Israel, making deals with war criminals while their fellow Arabs are starved, bombed, and now threatened with mass exile. Where is the outcry from Cairo, Riyadh, Amman? Is there absolutely no red line?

One bright spot on the international scene is the Hague group, which will convene an emergency meeting in Colombia on July 15–16. This growing bloc of nations has joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. These countries are taking a courageous stand to uphold international law and defend Palestinian life. Every nation that claims to value justice must join them—immediately.

And here in the United States, every member of Congress must be pushed—loudly, relentlessly—to take a public stand. No more vague language. No more hiding behind mealy-mouthed scripts. We demand immediate, public opposition to this “humanitarian city” plan—and a full cutoff of military support to Israel. This is a moment of moral reckoning. Choose a side.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking this can’t happen. It is happening. The groundwork is being laid. The walls are going up. The deportation flights are being negotiated.

There is no neutral ground. This is not a policy debate. This is genocide—on camera, with diplomatic cover, and with our tax dollars.

The time to stop Israel’s dystopian plan is not tomorrow. It is now.

Rise up. Speak out. Flood the streets. Bombard Congress. Demand accountability.

Stop the plan. Save Gaza. Before it’s too late.

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Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. She is the author of 11 books, including War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, coauthored with Nicolas J.S. Davies. Her most recent book, coauthored with David Swanson, is NATO: What You Need to Know. Read other articles by Medea.

Israel’s Demographic Project in Gaza: An Assault on the Palestinian Future

by Anthony Fulton / July 14th, 2025

Twenty years ago, Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza after the post-1967 years of occupation and settlement. An overriding factor governing the decision to withdraw was the issue of demography. With a population of over two million Palestinians, Gaza has always represented a significant part of a broad demographic problem facing the self-declared ‘only democracy in the Middle East.’ Within Israel and the occupied territories (the area that has been under direct or indirect Israeli control for 58 years) there are over 14 million people. Approximately half are Israeli Jews, the other half, Palestinians. This underreported reality stands sharply at odds with the notion of a Jewish and democratic state, especially one which aspires to the land borders of a Greater Israel.

Twenty-one months after Israel re-entered, Gaza stands in ruins — obliterated, to use the current Trumpian term. The State of Israel has unleashed terror upon the Strip on an unprecedented scale. The different elements of the collective punishment of Gaza have become familiar but still make for shocking reading: the indiscriminate bombing; the sniper and drone attacks; the withholding of aid; the domicide; the ongoing forced displacement; the restriction of access to water, food, healthcare; the targeting of civilians and razing of infrastructure.

That these things add up to genocide is hardly a matter for debate anymore. Instead, we need to ask where all this is headed. We can’t simply accept the hasbara narrative that Israel only wants the return of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas. The current state of the Strip cannot support this. There is no access to Gaza, but we can look at satellite photographs. We can look at the footage provided by Palestinians. We can also listen to Israelis in public, political and media spaces. More is going on here. This is a war that is going way beyond the oft-repeated objectives.

It seems perverse on the part of many Western commentators not to link the devastation of Gaza to current public discourse in Israel and to Zionist concerns about demography and Palestinian fertility. There are two aspects of this genocidal tragedy that suggest a renewed drive on Israel’s part to tackle a perceived ‘demographic timebomb.’ Firstly, Israel is manifestly engaged with the idea of the ethnic cleansing of the population and secondly, it is waging a war on the Palestinian future through the daily targeting of women and children.

The forced transfer of the Gazan population is now openly discussed, an entirely possible endgame legitimized by Trump’s plan. A new infrastructure of resettlement (with a nomenclature betraying a nostalgia for Gush Katif) is being prepared by the IDF’s D9 Caterpillar bulldozers. Palestinians have been uprooted and are continually being displaced within the Strip. The GHF aid ‘system’ is exacerbating this. Their homes have been destroyed and the areas that Palestinians can move in are now extremely limited, the conditions intolerable. It is in this context that we are presented with the current idea of a ‘humanitarian city.’ As Trump himself has put it, Gaza is a ‘hellhole.’ It might seem to some that the world will not stand by and let the ethnic cleansing of Gaza happen but, of course, it’s already happening. The uncomfortable optics of forced transfer won’t be an issue when conditions have become so bad that people beg to leave and their ejection from their own land can be spun as an act of mercy.

Bad enough, you may think. But what should be equally as outrageous to the outside world is Israel’s sustained assault on Palestinian children and women. At the point of writing, a figure of over 57,000 fatalities in Gaza includes 17,000 children and 9,000 women.

South Africa’s ongoing case at the ICJ includes the accusation that Israel, in contravention of the Genocide Convention, is imposing measures intended to prevent births within the Gazan population. A recent U.N. report by the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory criticizes Israel for deliberately targeting health facilities in Gaza, destroying ‘in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group.’ The WHO has warned of a health system at breaking point. Cesarean sections are being performed without anesthetic in those few hospitals still operating and newborn children are dying due to a scarcity of incubators and medical staff. The weaponization of aid means that, according to UNICEF, 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women currently require treatment for acute malnutrition in Gaza. Doctors have described a critical shortage of baby formula as being a direct result of Israeli aid restrictions.

This onslaught on children and mothers is a key component of this genocide which can be linked to a long-held Zionist obsession with Palestinian birthrates. Mandate Palestine was not, of course, a land without a people, as pioneers of the state such as Israel’s first Prime Minister, Ben Gurion, knew. The country has always worried about the need to manufacture and maintain a Jewish majority. A chief architect of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Arnon ‘the Arab Counter’ Soffer, long warned of the danger for the Jewish state of the Palestinian womb, Arafat’s ‘biological weapon.’

Evidence of the intent to target women and children can be seen in statements by Israeli public figures, collated in South Africa’s petition to the ICJ and freely available elsewhere. These senior figures include not just the usual suspects like Ben Gvir and Smotrich but also the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog who responded to Oct 7 with the declaration that there are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza, ‘an entire nation’ is responsible.’ This normalization of genocidal discourse, particularly in relation to women and children, is enabled by a national political consensus and an indifferent Israeli public. It seems that there is not one righteous man in Gaza, or indeed, woman or child. ‘The children… have brought this upon themselves’, as one opposition member of the Knesset put it.

Barring international intervention, it seems certain that at the end of this latest phase in Gaza there will be fewer Palestinians. The demographic facts will have changed; they have already changed. The numbers are appalling enough, with 57,000 fatalities likely being an underestimate. But there are also names. For those who care to seek them out.

Indiscriminate blanket bombing has killed thousands of civilians and rendered Gaza unlivable. This is a war of homicidal excess, not one that is being waged to recover hostages and eliminate a terrorist organization. It is difficult not to conclude that it is part of a longer-term project to change the ethnic balance between the river and the sea.

Such are the ongoing demands of Zionism and its insatiable hunger for land, that it is not enough to erase the Palestinian past and present. Ethnic cleansing can only be part of a wider strategy. The demographic threat of tomorrow must also be addressed.

The facts are available, as is the evidence of intention. If the hostage situation is resolved, if Hamas is somehow ‘defeated’, who seriously believes that the expansionist, frontier state of Israel will leave Gaza alone? Or the West Bank? If Zionism is to avoid a death spiral, the demographic timebomb must be defused. The project demands land, and it demands a Jewish majority on that land.

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Anthony Fulton covers issues relating to Israel-Palestine Read other articles by Anthony.

 Beauty Betrayed, from Global Militarism to Alligator Alcatraz

Fascism is imperialism turned inward

by Phil Rockstroh / July 14th, 2025

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”

Great effort (and amounts of money) are required to churn out arguments justifying actions that cannot be justified by standards of common sense and human decency. For example, billions upon billions spent to maintain pro-Zionist and pro-capitalist institutions. In a nation where the agendas of the state are underwritten by billionaires — if a singular truth happens to enter public discourse it would have had to have come about by accident. Extreme amounts of money have been invested to prevent such occurrences of democratic happenstance.

Hence, the US Congress, by means of outright unconstitutional legislation, legislates: anti-Zionist speech is anti-Semitic hate speech. Hey, people against genocide – where are your billions to counter: condemnation of Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza and ethnic cleansing operations in the West Bank are in fact constitutionally protected speech? You say, you don’t have billions at your disposal. Then you have been shut up and shut out of the conversation.

From global militarism to Alligator Alcatraz: Fascism is imperialism turned inward.

ICE ahead…slippery slope to totalitarianism.

The rise of ICE thuggery is the policy wing of the Right’s xenophobic “Replacement Theory.” ICE’s mission is, to aid in returning the US to be, in their fantasy-rancid words, the “White Christian nation” it was founded to be, and to achieve the goal by means of policies of ethnic cleansing.

Have you noticed this about people driven by odious intentions: they have an intense bearing of certainty; they posit a ready answer for everything? Have you noticed this about people bearing insight: they approach life as a mystery? They have a tolerance for ambiguity. The best teachers teach students to ask good questions. The worst among us lead us to doom by becoming intoxicated by their hell-pitched certainty.

Are you suffering emotional pain due to the trajectory of the times? Pain is a warning proffered to pull you back from the abyss. When there is sickness in the collective soul, you will experience the symptoms. If the culture is drunk on lies, you will experience the hangover. Sanity will entail you sobering up.

Yes, you are powerless over the stupidity of the times: the bacchanal of bullshit, cupidity, and cruelty. Therein, there is a hint of a higher power than the degraded power structures of the present. Where there is bullshit — there can be a cleansing current of the heart to wash away, like Hercules’ labor of cleaning the Augean stables, the piles upon piles of excrement. Cupidity can be superseded by a generosity of spirit. And what about the homunculi of cruelty that has been unloosed upon the land as if a portal from Hell has been opened and hordes of lower order imps have emerged to become hirelings at ICE recruitment offices?

Where they trod they leave a wasteland, yes. A landscape as barren as their own inner life.

“The merciful man does good to his own soul, but the cruel troubles his own flesh.” — Proverbs 11:17

They will attempt to dine on power; yet, they will continue to suffer a famine in their soul. They will hunger for more and yet still hunger for more and more control and power thus are driven further into their wasteland within. The totalitarian personality signs a murder/suicide pact with itself. History reports, while it is tragically true they will cause much suffering as they destroy the essential qualities that sustains life, in the end, they have laid the path of their own undoing. ICE thugs (MAGA, in general) to IDF predators (to the Zionist state, in general) you have numbered your days.

“Righteousness leads to life, but those who pursue evil find their own death.” Proverbs 11:19

In diametric opposition to the above line of Biblical verse:

Regarding the ghosted Epstein files: MAGA cultists i.e., grifted, cretinous dupes, were moved to clamor to the polls to bring down the Deep State cabalists, by the enthronement of (Epstein’s best friend in predation) Donald Trump. Stupid, of course, is the calling card of the plebs but witnessing their cope and contortions is a sight to behold.

The cultists were convinced the Democratic Party’s confederacy of perverts would be exposed in all its hideous iniquity. What happened: well, it turned out perversion crosses party affiliation. Republicans and Democrats fingerprints alike are all over the crime scene. Trump’s fat, stubby digits were the most prominent in view.

The crime itself is this: the manner the wealth inequality inherent to capitalism enables the covering up of the iniquity of those who serve the system. In fact, what they will receive for their crimes will be massive tax cuts.

As for the rest of us: We are not even allowed in sight of the VIP (Very Iniquitous Pervert) rope line. The entrance fee: the obscene amounts of bribe money it requires to own the political class.

Epstein et al. thrive in a landscape wherein everything within reach that can be commodified will be relentlessly subjected to exploitation. It is an ugly business. There is not anything that can exist for its own sake: truth; beauty; a sense of integrity.

In the US, beauty has been banished by the zealots of expediency and profiteering. They erect temples of commercialized cacophony thus from every direction meaningless noise dominates the senses.

What price is paid for beauty having been buried deep as Hades? Stop and listen closely. Hear the lament of exquisite things cast into the cultural abyss.

When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

— John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Perhaps the sum of selfhood, the centering of self required to connect and engage the world, both material and Anima Mundi, arrives by means of an openness to experience and the garnered truth concomitant to enduring suffering.

The fear of engagement, over time, numbs out the heart; the wings of the spirit will atrophy. Beauty no longer moves a deadened heart. One’s soul exiles itself back into the collective, resulting in pathological detachment or psychosis.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! — Isaiah 5:20

Speaking on a personal basis, I need inexorable longing to engage life on life’s terms. This is serious work; the act of merging and mingling the burden of grief with a wingedness of mind. It is a feat of levitation. As in music, the dark chords caress the heart as they rise heavenward.

The mind searches for reasons life unfolds as it does. But poetic depth reveals sleeping fragments of pure being dreaming within the heart of all things. Art must invite logic to dance through the night until it goes mad beneath the morning star.

Why? What is the logic of this? Because the mind is an empire, its ideas and notions crumble and fade into indifferent air while the seasons of the heart are located in a cosmos of eternal renewal.

It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.

I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

In a depth-bereft culture where people shun reading for meme consumption, the center cannot hold in the culture because culture is a product of psyche. Sans psyche, an inferno of fuckwit dominates. Imagination is shunned; people resist being carried away into the depths of themselves hence they lose the ability to proceed into and navigate the depths of passing moments. The outer-world withers to wasteland. Cliches are the architecture of the mind. Imagination is in exile. Thus all too many experience a loss of soul.

Fascism arrives from the margins to fill in the void.

The fascist mob’s mania is borne by its by-reflex fear of experiencing human suffering… to evince god-like invincibility while swathed in the anonymity of the mob.

Yet the joys and suffering of human life make up the foundation of the self. Great books convey an affinity — a dawning recognition we connected, each to each, by suffering. Memes, being meant for the mob, are inherently fascist. Upon sight, memes should be driven off by waving a book at them in a threatening manner as an act of self-defense.

The rapidity by which information (instead, aren’t we talking about the conveyance of thought itself?) arrives is directly implicated in the US lack of political memory and its shallowness of culture. The illusion of moving at high speed is conveyed hence even the recent past seems too far in the past to be retrieved and reflected upon. History is reduced to non-linear data; connections cannot be made between the sequence of events. There is an immersion in the present but without bestowing animal vitality and grace. Therefore, we feel like animals imprisoned in a cage that is being shaken by a source unknown. .

As a result, we attempt to obtain clarity by “getting above it all.” A new form of distress follows: vertigo. You know, what goes up, comes down in flames and scattered debris like a SpaceX rocket launch.

The future must involve falling. Not the fall from fabled Eden. But reconnection with Earth. Cold data and manic memes are softened and come to rest upon the embrace of the veritable ground. At present, the mind is a cluttered mess of gibbering satellites and space junk. The earth breathes… so that you can pause and lay aside your troubles.

I am not talking about a longing for paradise: that trope was explored in the fable of the serpent, the apple, and the Tree Of Knowledge. The knowledge ended our childhood, our tromp and traipse through the glens and gardens of Eternity. Banished from paradise, we gained our humanity.

Empires, like the thoughts of the harried and vexed mind, rise and dissipate in indifferent air. Beauty remains. The tears at the heart of things are vouchsafed with deathless truths. Thus we can grant ourselves hours of restorative rest:

We sleep in the arms of an exquisitely played song that has played since the beginning of time and will play on forever.

Heart, mind, and soul restored, we can navigate life and respond with clarity to its perils; thus see through the lies piled upon lies retailed by the powerful — whose propagandists promise a return to paradise but deliver a soul-defying landscape of deprivation and perpetual exploitation.

Anselm Kiefer, “The Land of the Two Rivers”

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Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist. His poems, short fiction, poetry and essays have been published in numerous print publications and anthologies; his political essays have been widely posted on the progressive/left side of the internet.  Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website.