November 19
America has two Presidents: one who was apparently elected after the weirdest campaign ever, by the slimmest of margins in a few key swing states; and the poutty lame duck. The US electorate is in the moment a mono-binary, the Janus. It is certainly more complex than that, but reducing American political reality to Us Versus Them serves the purposes of key players and their syndicates. In one dimensional configuration, a rudimentary narrative rooted in causality, the two “sides,” colored blue and red, appear to despise one another, behaving like warring tribes or British football clubs. So much media attention is pointed in the direction of this horse race tale, the urgency of matters beyond tabulation and candidate performance exist barely as talking points, when they do face any scrutiny among the exclusive expert elite who are assigned the task of commenting, critiquing, analyzing, etc., the Important Issues. If there is a single takeaway more significant than the rest, the system as it operates now does not serve democracy. It is the simulation of democracy. Its figureheads are totemic, simulacra. If it is assumed the electoral system in the USA illustrates an objective, then, in one man’s humble opinion, that objective is to subvert the will of the people for anything that is not in alignment with the will of the .0001%, their minions, and the artificially enlivened apparatuses they possess to maintain power, wealth, (re-)production and prestige. Infinite Jest approaches the factual, as the Constitution drifts toward fiction.
JANUS Pattern
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The pandemic is resurgent, and the death count in this country surpassed a quarter million last week, with three million contagious infections amongst the living, according to the most recent reports. Halloween was cancelled, and now Thanksgiving is too. The ambient social anxiety is pervasive, and one often wonders what effect all this uncertainty and chaos will have on the individual and collective. It is hard to know where to begin a transmission, a blog post, charting the moment, and I have been doing this for a couple of decades. The exercise is ponderous, and I think that sensation is a function of prolonged isolation IRL, compounded by excessive immersion in the virtual. The hype - that software-based worlds, shared via fast communications, experienced through screens and electronic devices could produce enhanced simulations, by which actual interactions improve thereby, until they maybe become obsolete, boring even by comparison - has been debunked. Virtuality, when you need it most, is inadequate, over time. The false promise of the World Wide Web is exposed. Or perhaps, the truth about the Net is exposed and clarified. Whatever it might have been (or somehow could yet be?), for now the online universe is a representation of the worst impulses of the global command and control complex. Brutal economy for inequality and anti-democracy are winning cyberspace. In light of these unfolding developments, which overall are confusing to most and certainly complex and convoluted, which is to say, dimensional, a moderately illustrated contemporary poem is the best textual approach.
JANUS
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PERFECT VISION [2020 AD]
His name rings across the Hebrides and Highlands like a Liberty Bell. For America his vision represents half-Hell, sending Antifa pell-mell, while inspiring prayerful Patriot hearts to swell. The effect is simultaneous. In China, sabres rattle at Taiwan. Hong Kong is under the boot. A pandemic is unleashed. The war criminal overtures of Nixon’s Kissinger bear fruit in a 100-year Globalist Reformist movement toward a New World Order. At the USA Southern Border, the Wall only partially materialized. The Stock Market BOOMS, breaking a record almost daily. The K-shaped “recovery” on the COVID-19 trade deepens the malaise of economic inequality. Evictions and restrictions are prevalent: as the Winter of 2020 brings a surge in new cases, more death; and no relief for any but the Banker, and his beneficiaries; Like Bezos. Evidence of despair is everywhere to be seen. Bernie is defeated and so the looting is repeated by the ticker. The fog of burning trees has lifted, but the cataclysm is only in remission. Horror in some other shape is what one comes to expect. “We are all in this together,” we are told, but the rallying cry is tinny, and short-ended. The optics of the moment, no matter how well-managed, fail to convince even the casual observer. The Image fails to reflect the Fact. For the vast masses, the prospects are dimming, as the seas swell with melted ice. News of Terrible Unraveling is suppressed. …Overdoses, breadlines, suicides. What is the Vaccine for the ills of the Age of Indifference. The clicks of Social Media are impoverishing the imagination of a generation. Isolation creates its own platform for suffering, made invisible, undocumented, unfathomable. The scale of it is monstrous, huge. No medicine is being speedily invented to fix the condition. The metaphor is crumbling, or decay, or dissembling. I do not recognize the scenes I am witnessing. Memory is collapsing, and experience is compressed. Donald! Donald! No one is home. Everyone behaves like a suspicious stranger, a Watcher. We are outlaws in these masks, in shivering complicity. Protest must be total, resistance all-directional, on the civic level. Economics is nothing ideological, post-Piketty, if not an indicator of power and force, the central issue of history itself. Dreams in flasks, or bundled in robes, the hero and the mob are streaming from virtual to flesh. The pretense of normalcy has been sacrificed at the altar of winning, and the victor is an electrified eel whose shock is data, and novelty. The noble and the henchmen and dames are bound to the slaughter of a suicide called Epstein. We haven’t the means to ignore the gory Truth in the predicament shared by all. Wars are endless. It’s a matter of time fracture. Score well on your test, boy -- it is of no statistical consequence whatsoever, to Management. The Struggle is reduced to illusion in the mind of a servant, once again. It’s a question of logistics, of manufacturing consents and in turn dissent, synthesized in concentricity. The patterns are repeated until mutation destroys the line, so everything begins to spin, again. “Once we were free,” the voice recites in the dim light of another dusk. “Except for you.”
JANUS 2 Pattern
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