The Messenger of God

“Freedom … ? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that’s my freedom. Free? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch him the moment he shows he is not one of them.”
D.H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature)

“As the descendants of the Puritans and other godly Protestants, they will submit to religious teaching, but as Republicans they will have no priestcraft. … They say their prayers, and then seem to apologize for doing so, as though it were hardly the act of a free and enlightened citizen, justified in ruling himself as he pleases. All this to me is rowdy. I know no other word by which I can so well describe it.”
Anthony Trollope (North America, 1862)

“In these days, one is either a patriot or a traitor, in the cause of Jesus Christ, in the cause of the country.”
Rev Billy Sunday (sermon, 1917)

“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”
John Milton (Paradise Lost)

The U.S.under the titular leadership (sic) of Trump, just decided to attack Iran. Illegal on several fronts. But of course this has long been a wet dream of the Zionist fanatics and Bibi Netanyahu. This is the ‘Greater Israel’ project. And it includes elaborate covert ops and false flags (see Gulf monarchies). But never underestimate the labyrinthine mind of the Mossad. They may well have wanted the false flags recognized as such. But there are plenty of others writing about this illegal Imperialist war. I wanted to more look at the less discussed influences involved, and how culture and art have been changed.

And that the Evangelical Christians now in U.S. government present a problem. Not just their desire for the Second Coming, but the general provincialism and lack of education. Many were taught in Christian schools. Trump plays along. Maybe, though, he has come to believe it. Believe he is anointed by God. The messenger of Divine instruction.

“Evangelicalism is a trans-denominational movement within Protestant Christianity. { } What I will say lastly here is this: because Evangelicalism is a trans-denominational movement, it is not confined to its own doctrinal space. This means that even within adjacent denominations (i.e. Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist), individuals very well may primarily identify as Evangelicals. { } Far more than any other Christian denomination, Evangelicalism’s most prominent early players saw the power and influence that came with controlling the cultural, social and political narrative of the time. “
AT (Medium: A Short History of Evangelical Christianity in the U.S.)

The are claims that 35% of Americans identify as Evangelicals. A staggering percentage.

“When I looked at the personal and collective narratives of Evangelical Christians who supported Trump, I didn’t see a group of citizens supporting just a political candidate. I saw a group of individuals who had bought into a “faith warrior” narrative — who had decidedly aligned themselves on the side of “good” and their political opponents on the side of “evil” — who had bought into a mythic understanding of their place in the world and the political duty required of them as patriotic Americans. I, and many others, saw something akin to cult-like behavior — an absolute unabashed allegiance to a man who had done and said many things that seemed not only to run counter to their professed beliefs and values but which seemed, in many ways, to supersede their religious beliefs — nay, morph and form them into something altogether different, which included propping up Trump as a leader sent by and ordained in power by God.”
AT (Ibid)

But this is not just about Trump (although its staggering that 82% in Sioux County Iowa voted for Trump in 2016, a mandate no other candidate in recent memory can compete with). But still, the story is not really about Trump. This goes back to the Second Great Awakening, early in the 19th century. The time of Westward expansion. The height of the Industrial Revolution. The rise of evangelicalism was as much, or more, social than theological.

“Not only had religion become more democratic, it was in itself a democratizing force. Evangelicalism reinforced the growing sense of the sovereign power of the individual: it made the individual’s own religious experience — not the clergy’s learning and authority, not formal creeds and doctrines — the ultimate spiritual arbiter. Moreover, for evangelical converts, self-esteem came not from secular social status but from spiritual standing, measured by intensity of feeling and dedication to evangelical disciplines. The respect of their brothers and sisters in the faith was more important to them than external social standing. They counted themselves in no way inferior to any person who possessed mere wealth and secular prominence.”
Nathan O. Hatch (The Democratizaton of American Christianity)

A bit later, after 1850 say, splits occurred in the Evangelical movement (mostly between north and south). Some of this was around slavery but there were other less obvious tensions.

“…by the end of the century, united Evangelical Protestantism was in sharp decline. Protestant churches became divided over new intellectual and theological ideas, such as evolution. Those who embraced these newer ideas became known as modernists, while those who rejected them became known as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists defended the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and adopted a dispensationalist theological system for interpreting the Bible.”
AT (Ibid)

I think its important to recognize this was happening against the cultural backdrop of American individualism. A backdrop formed out of Puritanism and the myriad cultural forces that came from a number of immigrant communities. I am always reminded of the oft quoted DH Lawrence description of the American character.

“essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”
D. H. Lawrence (Classic American Literature)

Joyce Carol Oats noted…“except for “stoic,” this description is as accurate in 2007 as it was more than 80 years ago…”

This from an Atlantic essay she published on American exceptionalism.

“American exceptionalism makes our imperialism altruistic, our plundering of the world’s resources a healthy exercise of capitalism and “free trade.” From childhood, we are indoctrinated with the propa­ganda that America is superior to other nations; that our way of life, a mass-market “democracy” manipulated by lobbyists, is superior to all other forms of government; that no matter how frivolous and debased, our American culture is the supreme culture, as our language is the supreme language; that our most blatantly imperialistic and cynical political goals are always idealistic, while the goals of other nations are transparently opportunistic. { } Perhaps the most pernicious of American ideas is the revered “My country, right or wrong,” with its thinly veiled threat of punishment for those who hesitate to participate in a criminal patriotism. “
Joyce Carol Oats (The Human Idea, Atlantic 2007)

By the turn of the century, amid many social changes, the role of men, or more correctly the idea of the masculine, had started to change.

“In response, white Evangelical Protestant men began to establish a new Christian masculine identity. This new masculinity seemed to double-down on the masculinity of the past — an overcorrection out of fear of the changing times.”
AT (Ibid)

And the avatar for American manhood was Teddy Roosevelt.

“It was on the frontier, that a new masculinity would be forged. A place where white men brought order to ‘savagery’ — where men served as armed protectors and providers. Where violence achieved a greater good. If the Wild West could mold the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt into a rugged, masculine specimen, perhaps it could do the same for American manhood generally.”
KristinKobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne)

Roosevelt was concerned with his image to an extraordinary degree (I think Kirsti Noem probably admired Roosevelt). His politics (militarism) was disproportionately concerned with his image — the Rough Riders etc. But Roosevelt was mostly cosplaying, as they say today. The frontier was already conquered by his Presidency (we should genuinely thank him for the national parks act he got passed, however: The Antiquities Act of 1906,). The industrial revolution had changed the idea of what men ‘do’. And Evangelicals were tuned into this — even if unconsciously.

“By the early 1900s, Christian men were attempting to “remasculinize” the faith. They insisted that Christianity was essentially masculine, militant, warlike. White Southern Evangelical Protestantism had actually already laid a framework for this, which necessarily coincided with their brutal treatment of minorities and strict adherence to traditional gender roles in both private and public spaces. Initially, this confluence of Southern manhood and Evangelical Christianity seemed untenable, even diametrically opposed. However, they found a way to morph their faith in such a way as to prop up their own dominance and justify violence (particularly around issues of race).”
AT (Ibid)

In a sense WW1 was a precursor for Evangelical Christianity under Trump. There were splits, but the movement was in agreement on the sanctity of the War. This was a crusade. Muscular Christianity was forged permanently in WW1.

“Studies show that two out of three adults in America still maintain fairly strong religious beliefs. In a recent Gallup poll that asked how important religion should be in life, 41 percent of young Americans (ages eighteen to twenty-four) answered “very important.” In France, Germany, and Great Britain, fewer than 10 percent of young people gave the same response. On any given Sunday morning, over 40 percent of the population in the United States attends religious services. In Canada and Australia this number tails off to about 25 percent; in England to about 10 percent; and in Scandinavia to around 5 percent—despite the fact that 95 percent of the Scandinavian population is confirmed in the church. Statistically, at least, the United States is God’s country.”
Nathan O.Hatch (Ibid)

Following WW1 however, the Evangelical movement remained a minority movement. The believers were ever more ‘masculine’, in a sense, and deeply committed, but the world was racing past them. (AT has an interesting aside on the 1925 book The Man Nobody Knows, by Bruce Barton, positing Jesus as the world’s greatest salesman). But it was the 1940s that saw a resurgence of Evangelical growth. The reasons are complex, I think. Billy Graham was the avatar for 40s christianity, and he served as a huge factor in this evolution. But it was also the foreign policy of the U.S. at the time. And by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal — and the growth of the fight against communism. The anti communism of US foreign policy only served to emphasize the muscular nature of Evangelicals. In 1942 they formed the National Association of Evangelicals.

Enter Billy Graham. Straight out of North Carolina. And a perfect Ayran version of masculinity. Those who remember the older Graham forget the image and power of the younger preacher. Billy Graham was the rock star preacher.

“After his conversion, he continued to hold to his preference for a strong, masculine identity, even saying going as far to say that Jesus was “a star athlete” and leaning into the more militaristic monikers, such as “Christian warriors.” Graham did his best to meld ideas of muscular masculinity into his preaching.”
AT (Ibid)

And on cue came Pearl Harbour and WW2. Graham preached war. This was patriotic Christianity. And decidedly masculine. But Graham really rose to prominence when he was friended by Dick Nixon.

“Graham found that political surrogate in Richard Nixon. Graham was excited about Nixon’s own support of continuing the war in Vietnam and had thrown his support behind Nixon during the 1968 campaign for that very reason. In fact, once Nixon came into office, Graham went from being just his spiritual advisor to being a a more significant political advisor — he began to relay detailed messages to Nixon with advice on military operations and peace talk negotiations. The two were in regular contact. In fact, in 1972, Nixon, under increased scrutiny from the news media due to the Watergate scandal, confided in Graham about his belief in “Jewish domination of the media.”
AT (Ibid)

And it was the Vietnam war that marked a significant increase in Evangelical organizing. I remember young white Christians at the time, showing up at anti war protests handing out leaflets and criticizing protesters as anti American. The organizational energy was acute and while they were laughed at by the Sixties counter culture the organizing continued unabated.

AT quotes a Politico article from 72

“A lot of Jews are great friends of mine,’’ Graham said. ‘’They swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them.’”
Politico (1972)

The post war (Vietnam) era saw Evangelicals aligning themselves officially with conservative Republicans. And they appealed in dog whistle fashion with Southern segregationists. (see Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’). The pro war position of Evangelicals marked something like a turning point. Not that Evangelicals were not already hyper Patriotic in the 40s, but Vietnam allowed for a focus on media and organized marketing. Evangelicals were marketing their religion.

Now, the real beginnings of radical Protestantism goes back to the Puritans (as so much connected to the United States does) and to the writings of other protestants like Jonathan Edwards in the 1740s. This was the First Great Awakening. Something happened when Protestants crossed the Atlantic. Maybe (if Charles Olson and Melville are correct) it was ‘space’. The enormous space of America. If you look at American painting in the 17th and 18th centuries, and on into the 19th, you see the most common theme is the landscapes of the West. And this sense of space has its own spiritual dimension, certainly. Its apparent in literature, too.

Perhaps Jonathan Edwards deserves a good deal more attention in terms of influence than he has received. Sinners in the Hands of Angry God is a remarkable sermon, really. And his book Justification by faith Alone is probably the greatest work of American puritanism written. This is the bedrock culture of the United States. I don’t think you can understand the U.S. without understanding Edwards and Puritanism.

Edwards married 17 year old Sarah Pierpont and they had eleven children. Edwards was the origin of masculinity in the pulpit. But later Protestantism split, in a sense, between Churchly practice and revivals. This is very simplified but the point was that Evangelicals sought a practice that was more outside than sitting in pews in the Church. The American landscape again. Space.

But not only space, of course, but also something born in the writings of Edwards, and that is a kind of authoritarianism. Preachers were not quiet — being outside lent itself to that — but even in Churches the Preacher was more salesman, more fascist Orator.

“An equally distinctive feature of the religious scene in modern America is the presence of a remarkable set of popular leaders, persons who derive their authority not from their education or stature within major denominations, but from the democratic art of persuasion. These gospel ministers, remarkably attuned to popular opinion, continue to rise from obscurity to command significant audiences and to organize movements and churches around them. Modern American populist religious leaders such as Billy Graham, Kathryn Kuhlman, Oral Roberts, Robert Schuller, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson continue a long tradition of democratic religious authority. The significance of these individuals is less their own rise to prominence and more the decentralized, grassroots, and populist religious cultures of which they are the most visible representatives. ”
Nathan O. Hatch (Ibid)

Baptist, Methodist, Mormon, and even Jehovah’s Witnesses share a populist ethos, a belief in de-centralized power (rugged individualism, i.e. masculinity) and an implied anti intellectualism. The anti intellectualism took root firmly in the 20th century. The Evangelicals I have known never felt alien to the fascist sensibility.

“In the wake of Sept 11 Islam replaced communism as the enemy of America and all that was good, at least in the world of conservative evangelicalism. “The Muslims have become the modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire,” explained the NAE’s Richard Cizik. Evangelicals’ pro-Israel sympathies had fueled anti-Muslim sentiments even before the terrorist attacks, and in the 1990s, as evangelicals looked for alternatives to a foreign policy agenda long framed by Cold War categories, many had turned their attention to the persecution of Christians in other nations, attention that often ended up focusing on the oppression of Christian minorities in Islamic countries. After September 11, the long history of Christian Zionism and heightened interest in the fate of global Christians became intertwined with evangelicals’ commitment to defend Christian America.”
Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Ibid)

The racism triggered by 9/11 took on a somewhat subtle shit. Arab replaced Muslim in many critiques. Hatred of Arabs mnade it racial and not religious. There was still plenty of anti-Muslim sentiment, but directing the anger at Arabs more than Muslims also allowed Evangelicals (and most of America) to see Zionists more in line with Christianity. More like ‘America’.

One should note here the links today between Evangelicals and the U.S. military. And that begins with Colorado Springs and the U.S. Air Force Academy. The military grew in the Rocky Mountains post WW2, but Evangelicals made a conscious decision to occupy the Air Force Academy, and so they have. If you aren’t evangelical, don’t bother to apply. The American Air Defense Command also is situated in Colorado Springs. Not to mention today literally hundreds of churches.

“ The Christian life wasn’t to be compared to war, it was war, and Christians needed to engage in “an all-out offensive assault.”
Jerry Vines (Sermon, SBC Megachurch)

“The Vietnam War was pivotal to the formation of an emerging evangelical identity. For many Americans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam demolished myths of American greatness and goodness. American power came to be viewed with suspicion, if not revulsion, and a pervasive antimilitarism took hold. Evangelicals, however, drew the opposite lesson: it was the absence of American power that led to catastrophe.”
Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Ibid)

Evangelicals closed ranks after the war. They focused on military influence and organized politically. But behind it all was this rugged indivualism and core Puritan tinged masculinity.

“For evangelicals, the problem of American manhood was at its heart a religious one, properly addressed within the Christian family. Fundamentalist megachurch pastor Jack Hyles made this case in his 1972 book How to Rear Children. ”{ } “Hyles’s book included a section on “How to Make a Man Out of a Boy.” Boys needed to be taught to be winners: “This is how we get our General MacArthurs. This is how Billy Sundays are made.” Teaching boys how to be good losers left you with a generation of young men who didn’t want to fight for their country and were instead “willing to let the strongest nation on earth bow down in shame before a little nation like North Vietnam.” It was up to Christian parents to rear a new generation of men, and to this end they should make boys “play with boys and with boys’ toys and games,” with “guns, cars, baseballs, basketballs, and footballs.” Boys who engaged in “feminine activities,” he warned, often ended up as “homosexuals.” A boy must be taught to fight, to “be rugged enough” to defend his home and those he loved.”
Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Ibid)

A little nation of skinny gooks beat America. Cant let that happen again. Skinny COMMIE gooks at that. I think the echo of Jonathan Edwards lives on in this. Go forth and conquer, oh and propagate. There was a paranoia that crept into Evangelical rhetoric around this time. Jack Hyles being a perfect example. A paranoia that was born out of fear of women, of female sexuality and the loss of control that Evangelical Christian men had started to feel. The interrupted Oedipal process was having clear concrete repercussions. This was a pivotal era for American self image. You see it in film (stuff like Who’ll Stop the Rain, a remarkably good film and Ray Hicks is maybe the quintessential Vietnam protagonist and Rolling Thunder, French Connection, and One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest et al). By the end of the 70s, and certainly the 80s, American film was all but dead. There were ever fewer great diectors then, fewer actors — but mostly a sense of aimless directionless ennui had started to undercut projects.

“Only one hundred and forty years have passed since factory work began in earnest in the West, and we see in each generation poorer bonding between father and son, with catastrophic results. A close study of the Enclosure Act of England shows that the English government, toward the end of that long legislative process, denied the landless father access to free pasture and common land with the precise aim of forcing him, with or without his family, to travel to the factory. The South Africans still do that to black fathers today. By the middle of the twentieth century in Europe and North America a massive change had taken place: the father was working, but the son could not see him working.”
Robert Bly (Iron John)

This was written before Trump, in 1990-

“When the son no longer sees that, what happens? After thirty years of working with young German men, as fatherless in their industrial society as young American men today, Alexander Mitscherlich, whom we spoke of in the first chapter, developed a metaphor: a hole appears in the son’s psyche. When the son does not see his father’s workplace, or what he produces, does he imagine his father to be a hero, a fighter for good, a saint, or a white knight? Mitscherlich’s answer is sad: demons move into that empty place—demons of suspicion. { } In the next decade we can expect these demons of suspicion to cause more and more damage to men’s vision of what a man is, or what the masculine is. Between twenty and thirty percent of American boys now live in a house with no father present, and the demons there have full permission to rage.”
Robert Bly (Ibid)

The hyper ruthless super ego.

“ We might look now at the disappearance of positive kings. The patriarchy is a complicated structure. Mythologically, it is matriarchal on the inside, and a matriarchy is equally complicated, being patriarchal on the inside. The political structure has to resemble our interior structure. { } The death of the Sacred King and Queen means that we live now in a system of industrial domination. { } Some sons fall into a secret despair. They have probably adopted, by the time they are six, their mother’s view of their father, and by twenty will have adopted society’s critical view of fathers, which amounts to a dismissal. { } Other sons respond by leaping up and flying into the air. The deeper the father sinks in their view, the longer their flights become. More and more evidence comes out in newspapers and books each day about sexual abuse perpetrated by fathers, inability of fathers to relate in a human way, the rigid promilitary stance of many fathers, the workaholism of fathers, their alcoholism, wife-beating, and abandonment.”
Robert Bly (Ibid)

And child sexual abuse, so it seems.

It is worth a side bar to discuss briefly the emergence of Charismatic Christianity in the 1960s. It originated at St Marks church in Van Nuys, California. But it was also in the process, or versions of it, emerging in Latin America. There are something like 65 million followers of Charismatic Christianity in the U.S. Roughly one in four Protestant Churches is Charismatic, and 30% of Catholics identify as Charismatic. The majority of charismatics are found in the South and among Latino populations. 54% of Catholics in the U.S. are charismatic (or Pentecostal).

The fastest growing religion in Latin America and Africa is Charismatic. The belief centrs on a connection to the Holy Spirit which is found with the speaking in tongues, a belief in prophecy and in miracles, in healing and accompanied by music and physical movement. One can see cross-over with earlier Southern baptist revivals. Immigrant communities in the US tend to have charismatic churches, often just converted store fronts. This is a decidedly lower working class movement.

I mention it because 62% of all charismatics voted for Trump. And this suggests resentment as a huge huge factor in Trump’s win.

Now, the contemporary American is also infantile to a stunning degree. Narcissistic and infantile. Jungians see a form of Puer Aeternus. The ascending boy, the flight from earthly responsibilities. Peter Pan. Marie Louisa von Franz saw this connected to ambivalence toward the mother. Others connect it to a kind of revolt against the father.

“Some sons have always been ascenders, but never so many as now. A man may of course pursue spirituality too early in his life. The ascension, then, I add to our list of imbalances brought about by the diminishment and belittlement of the father. Society without the father produces these birdlike men, so intense, so charming, so open to addiction, so sincere, as those great bays of the Hellespont produced the cranes Homer noticed that flew in millions toward the sun.”
Robert Bly (Ibid)

I wrote last time, a bit anyway, on the Buddhist notion of the ‘hungry ghost’. They are third cousins to the aging bird like men Homer describes. There is a cruelty that creeps into those who never grow up. Bly dissects the fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk (in his Sibling Society). The subtitle is ‘the Giant with a Large Apetite’.

“This tale sounds like the tale of a contemporary mother with her teenage son whois “indolent, careless, and extravagant,” with no fatherly limitation on him. But it also has a third element: the overwhelming energy of the Giant, whose headlong greed eventually dominates the lives of both mother and son. Something in this pattern of energies—a parent, a child, and a third presence in the house that seems barbarous—is familiar.”
Robert Bly (The Sibling Society)

Nobody knows where the original tale of Jack and the Beanstalk comes from. The first published version came out in 1807. The Giant is hungry, is greedy, and already has been granted access to Jack’s mother’s house. Does he have access to the Mother, too? I am reminded here of Moretti’s Dialectic of Fear where he discuses Frankenstein and Dracula. They came out only ten years later.

“Born in the full spate of the industrial revolution, they rise again together in the critical years at the end of the nineteenth century under the names of Hyde and Dracula. In the twentieth century they conquer the cinema: after the First World War, in German Expressionism; after the 1929 crisis, with the big RKO productions in America; then in 1956-57, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, directed by Terence Fisher, again, triumphantly, incarnate this twin-faced nightmare. Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital: ‘the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.’ That ‘must’, which for Marx is a scientific prediction of the future (and {68} the guarantee of a future reordering of society), is a forewarning of the end for nineteenth-century bourgeois culture.”
Franco Moretti (Dialectic of Fear)

Trump’s America leads backward directly to these years of the Industrial Revolution. And Trump himself is a deformed version of the boy who never grew up. But he has a malformed psyche. His father a malignant proprietor. The dark force of patriarchy.

“The literature of terror is born precisely out of the terror of a split society and out of the desire to heal it. It is for just this reason that Dracula and Frankenstein, with rare exceptions, do not appear together. The threat would be too great, and this literature, having produced terror, must also erase it and restore peace. It must restore the broken equilibrium — giving the illusion of being able to stop history — because the monster expresses the anxiety that the future will be monstrous. His antagonist — the enemy of the monster — will always be, by contrast, a representative of the present, a distillation of complacent nineteenth-century mediocrity: nationalistic, stupid, superstitious, philistine, impotent, self-satisfied.”
Franco Moretti (Ibid)

An anxiety about the future. Two hundred years later. The future is here. I continue to have this feeling, the feeling of living in a fairy tale.

“It’s clear that we are now in “the other world,” the place where all time is present time, where all historical periods exist together, and certain actions take place over and over.”
Robert Bly (Ibid)

The psychoanalytic aspect of Imperialism includes repetition. The compulsive repetition that cannot escape death. My dreams of late have taken on a dark fairy tale quality. I dreamed the other night of walking down a residential street. It was evening. And I heard something behind me and turned around to see two men, carrying shotguns, and they were calmly shooting into the houses. I was not afraid but I hurried my pace and they kept up with me, but calmly. Shooting and reloading their twin barrel shotguns.

“Unknown to Jack there has always been some large and cruel being in his story, behind the scenes, although very much involved in everything that has happened. We can say that during the Woodstock period, a large and cruel being lurked just out of sight, and those listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash did not see him. Perhaps the obvious brutality of the Vietnam War occupied all our attention. We saw brutality everyday on television, and it distracted us from the invisible being nearby. The savage acts taking place overseas with their napalm and Christmas bombings were so engrossing that people’s attention to dark things nearby faded; little energy was left to see beings close to us whowere part shadow and part god. We recall how the invisible beings in The Iliad are both seen and unseen: they float down from mountain peaks and secretly aid either the Trojans or the Acheans. Goya’s canvas The Giant offers an image of a “god” such as this. The bottom of the canvas shows refugees, huddled in caravans like displaced or fleeing gypsies; there’s a sense of suffering, hastily cooked meals, chaos, and poverty. Rising high above these preoccupied miniature people is an enormous being, two or three hundred feet tall, a giant that none of the human beings seems to notice. The painting hints at the human inability to see it even when it is close.”
Robert Bly (Ibid)

The Epstein files, and this is true even if the more lurid tales within are not, is a kind of fairy tale. The crimes are certainly real, and yet all the dark societal forces of scapegoating (not a surprise Rene Girard is Peter Thiel’s favorite thinker) and projection are taking over the story. The audience for this drawn out serial story — given to the public in installments — has become a fairy tale. Much as burning witches was real when it should have only been symbolic. Witches don’t exist but their symbolism does. And yet real women were burned. Jeff Epstein exists (or maybe existed, though I doubt it) but the reality of Trump and dozens others appearing in this story has created a curious quality I associate with fairy tales.

“We can take the Giant to stand for our archaic, brutal underpinning. On our human plane, we live among sunlit windows with red geraniums on them; we live surrounded by cows and milk and kindness, by conversation and codes of politeness, by loving parents and cared-for children on the second and older plane, which is firmly ensconced at the top of the beanstalk, at the base of the skull, there are stones that have never been shaped, piles of dirt loosely thrown together, and, most of all, appetites on a scale that is not human; there are immense hungers, and gigantic angers, and cages where people are kept to be eaten a little later. Children are especially favored as food there. And if a human being should wander into that instinctive plane, he or she had better be ready to hide.”
Robert Bly (Ibid)

The Epstein story — like all things connected to Trump, is reproduced by Hollywood in a never ending stream. Hollywood today is projecting the mind of the Imperialist. It is a story of Capitalism. Every film, every TV show is about Capitalism. And increasingly they are hollow and lifeless, hence they must depict more violence, more rape and more crashes. The inner life of executives in the culture industry is hollow. It is venal and blood thirsty, too, but still hollow. In some sense, Jack and the Beanstalk is a tale about a fatherless boy. Yet, the Giant is the Father as well. The Giant represents authority. Irrational authority driven by greed. By hunger. By a rapacious appetite. The allegorical aspect of a Trump, as opposed to the pinched stupidity of a Biden, is he literally is building cages to house immigrants. These are the Giants children kept until slaughtered for dinner. Trump is the literalization of earlier Imperialism. And therein lies the enigmatic aspect of today’s Evangelical movement. The impact of marketing changed Evangelical culture, and then TV and media created a new revenue stream. Church was run like a Hollywood studio. The TV evangelist was ‘acting’ the role of Evangelical preacher. This era went beyond Evangelicals, and one saw Hindu marketed gurus and Buddhist — the Dalai Lama is a CIA asset as well as a performer. The megachurch evolved an aesthetic akin to what an ad agency would come up with. What a studio would come up with. Bigger, louder, more ostentatious. TV preachers as weird pimps. Gone was any idea of humble pious poverty. But the audience ( in their homes watching TV or in the church itself) wanted performers. They wanted entertainment. And this goes back, really, to the beginnings of Protestant preachers. It is the dialectic of Puritanism, in a way. One cannot recognize Jesus as a poor man unless you first know him as a rich one.

Most televangelists and Evangelical orators resemble used car salesman or Texas high school football coaches. Its the hair. Trump got his hair from televangelism. He just did it bigger, brighter, louder.

This segues into my first remarks about art and the current moment of Imperialist desperation. And about the psychology of the American supporter of Imperialism. And by extension the psyche of these Imperialists. For there is nothing if not bad taste in MAGA supporters. The public today, at least in the U.S., know fewer words than a hundred years ago, they talk less, they *read* faces less accurately, and they are having less sex. The unconscious is sluggish, I think, today, and one wonders if this public dreams as much as they once did.

“The Background Presence, in the larger scheme, furnishes the setting of the dream, and the setting of thoughts by day as well. In object representations, the symbolic images of objects are the furniture of thoughts—the tables, so to speak, on which raw thoughts (thoughts without a thinker) are placed to be examined from multiple points of view. The Background Presence becomes the housing and container for these object representations. It guarantees the continuity of space and containment through all transformations of dimension and relationships. It is the principle of continuity, which in religious terms can be called God and in natural science, the guiding principle of natural laws. In Taoism, it can be seen as the unifying, hovering spirit of Oneness that binds all existence. “A finger flicks and a star quivers!” would be the Tao way of expressing this idea. The Background Presence can also be identified with the mystic sense of God (as distinguished from the Godhead) and with the neoplatonic and Gnostic concept of the Demiurge, the active aspect of God that created the universe. The concept of the “God within” (which I refer to as the Ineffable Subject of Being and Agency) has always “the “God within” (which I refer to as the Ineffable Subject of Being and Agency) has always been heretical in both the Jewish and Christian religions, except for the Kabbalah, the mystics, and the Gnostics (Pagels, 1979).”
James Grotstein (Who is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream?)

The Evangelical today, so I have come to believe, actually has no mystical sense of God. They have only the performance of a God. And this is why an absurdity like Trump as a messenger of God has any traction at all. Trump has accrued all televangelists into one perfect orange/yellow sweep of hair. He is the first public figure to appear souless that I can think of. And this accounts for the appeal he holds within the Evangelical community. You cannot go from Jimmy Swaggert or Pat Robertson to Ho Chi Minh or Mao, or Sankara. The cultural background today has been gutted. It is denuded and barren. It is the neighborhood of the Giant, the monster at the top of the beanpole. That is the land of the Hungry Ghosts and Naifs (Sufi version of same).

The fanatics in Israel made Gaza into this landscape. The near sexual appeal of war to these people is obvious. Some, like Lindsay Graham or John Bolton are visibly aroused when discussing it. The Evangelicals surrounding Trump are believers in dispensationalism, and premillenialism — believe in ‘the Rapture’, and the Second Coming (again literalizing what should be symbolic). And hence the Evangelical attachment to Israel. Again, literalizing Biblical text. In one way, these beliefs are not that important (in spite of the Evangelicals themselves being fanatically attached to them).

For this is social and not theological. Evangelicals are part of the Society of the Spectacle. They are commodified. There is also a growing tinge of irony in all this. Nobody in their right mind, not even the most rabid MAGAite takes John Hagee or Paula White-Cain seriously. This is kitsch religion even for the followers. And in a strange inverted sense, it is camp. The most homophobic demographic in the U.S. are the Evangelicals, and yet their presentation of ‘faith’ resembles a gay disco.

“A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sen- 1sibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban clique.”
Susan Sontag (Notes On Camp, 1964)

Camp is exaggerated bad taste and irony. It sees everything in quotation marks. Evangelical Christianity does the same. It is unconciously camp. Just as Lindsay Graham is camp. Same as Aubrey Beardsley drawings or Swan Lake. But there is a dialectic that has emerged out of Camp. And it has to do with style. In a society bent on eradicating good taste, intentionally or not, the question of style becomes something else, I think. The Trump appointments are actors in this macabre and unwholesome show — and reality creeps into style, even if the players try to hide it. There is a sense of everyone involved resembling damaged children, and the laughter (Kash Patel in the US hockey team locker room) is stunted. Mouths open but no sound comes out.

“Of course, as everyone knows or claims to know, there is no neutral, absolutely transparent style. Sartre has shown, in his excellent review of The Stranger, how the celebrated “white style” of Camus’ novel-impersonal, expository, lucid, flat—is itself the vehicle of Meursault’s image of the world (as made up of absurd, fortuitous moments) . What Roland Barthes calls “the zero degree of writing” is, precisely by being anti-metaphorical and dehumanized, as selective and artificial as any traditional style of writing.”
Suasan Sontag (On Style)

Increasingly the literary unconsciously imitates ChatGPT. In fact ChatGPT imitates ChatGPT. The Trump presidency dragged Evangelical values across the goal line (sic) to a world, aesthetically, closer to Drag Queen Story Hour. It is not an accident that Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn. Or that Mar a Lago resembles The Hunger Games. So when I say the Epstein story is a fairy tale, I am both creating a pun of sorts, but also pointing out that aesthetics matter, and Little St James island is a literal version of the ‘primal scene’, an unconscious projection of our guilt and ambivalence.

“As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Examples: the swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; the thin, flowing, sexless bodies in Art Nouveau prints and posters, presented in relief on lamps and ashtrays; the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one’s sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.” .
Susan Sontag (Notes on Camp)

The darkness and morbidity of Trump suggests an end of taste altogether. This nightmare resembles nothing so much as Mad King Ludwig. Only this is the more dehumanized version, Ludwig in the landscape of the Giant. The landscape of Bosch or Milton. And it recreating his kind of hell around the planet now.

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