On the occasion of the conclusion of the G7 dark sabbath of the demons held on the altar dedicated to the victims of nuclear war named Hiroshima, I am right now trying to write a proper essay detailing the horrific breakdown of thinking and living that permits these “world leaders,” caught in a nightmare of their own creation, to lament the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and to vow through twisted lips “never again” while at the same time holding classified meetings to discuss how Russia would be brought to its knees by the threat of nuclear war.
Could these leaders, and the corporate heads who yank their chains, be so insane as to believe that they must risk their own destruction to preserve their status and power?
There can be no doubt that this is precisely what they intend to do. There can be no suspicion that they are not that insane.
Let me quote first W. B. Yeats visionary poem “The Second Coming,” a poem written at another moment of massive institutional and moral failure, which sums up perfectly the spiritual crisis of the moment that is beyond the capacity of the fetid media, and the flaccid policy makers, to comprehend, let alone to respond to.
The Second Coming
1919
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I would like to add a section from my essay
“An American Psychopathocracy” from February, 2019 to bring Yeats’ vision up to date.
Silent spring, summer, fall and winter
We have gone far past the warning signals that inspired millions to protest in the streets and form a counter-culture in the 1960s. Things are much graver today. We face the prospect of nuclear war, of extinction-grade climate change and of a criminal concentration of wealth. Yet few are able to get off their asses and discuss these matters with their friends and neighbors, let alone to take action.
Perhaps we are going through a period of decadence, like that of the late Roman Empire. Could it be that Donald Trump is a reality TV version of Emperor Nero, or perhaps a knock-off of Emperor Caligula? Certainly, Trump’s decision to float the name of his daughter Ivanka as a candidate for president of the World Bank would fit in well with the late Roman Empire.
The fashion house Viktor and Rolf (founded by Dutch designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren) goes out of its way to find challenging images that can blaze new trails in haute couture. A poster from one of their exhibitions was so striking that they chose it for the cover of a retrospective.
The viewer is confronted by a confusing image. A wealthy white woman appears as if she were lying on a bed, with a luxurious red blanket wrapped around her and her hair spread over an indulgent pillow. She is positioned vertically relative to the landscape behind her, cradling a blond-haired baby in her right arm, in the fashion of a Renaissance Madonna and child. Her blase facial expression suggests sexual indulgence, luxury and indifference.
But the image of wealth is set against a disturbing background. The mother and child are standing in front of the debris from a demolished home, perhaps from the aftermath of a Hurricane Katrina or of a Hurricane Michael.
Her wealth and her privilege are made more appealing, more intriguing, by their contrast with the sufferings of ordinary people that result from collapsing infrastructure, climate change and austerity policies. The fascination in image is that it allows the super-rich (and those who envy them) to experience the sufferings of ordinary people vicariously, much as Marie Antoinette enjoyed the experience of being an ordinary peasant by building a little farm on the grounds of Versailles.
Taking aesthetic pleasure from this image is quite simply a psychopathic act. After all, those rich are dependent on extractive industries and on fossil fuels to provide their big quarterly returns. Their search for profit has led to the climate change that makes such catastrophes and made it impossible for the citizen to generate his or her own energy.
They delude themselves into believing they will survive climate change by buying bunkers and vast land reserves, a movement vividly described by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker article “Doomsday Prep for the Superrich.”
This sick culture radiates out throughout our society. Youth are forced to watch advertisements (whether they want to or not) in which bored rich kids lounge around, lost in a world of bored narcissism. Such images are presented to them as role models by marketers, suggesting that the only escape from of social inequality is through the worship of those who have the most.
