A new month and another chance to make some real progress in this study of The Prophetic Imagination. Distracted by the politics of the week, I missed how important this next passage is for us right now as Trump and his party of neo-royalist thugs tries to rig his own eternal rule over us, even against the will of the voters. The temptation to break into it and point out what must be obvious to anyone who is watching what is happening to us, right now but I won't.
In considering the Solomonic achievement I have been speaking of the fate of the royal consciousness as "numbness" even though I have not used that word. The Solomonic establishment embodies a loss of passion, which is the inability to care of suffer. One has only to compare the grief, anguish and joy of David (2 Samuel 1:19-27, 3:33-34, 12:15-we, 18:33, 19:4, 23:13-17) with the one-dimensional narrative of Solomon to realize something decisive has happened from the father to the son. Here the discussion of numbness concerns apathy, a-pathy, a-pathos, the absence of pathos, whereas in the reflective statement of Ecclesiastes the same experience is expressed as vanity:
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
then they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done';
and there is nothing new under the sun. (Eccles. 1:7-9)
In the language of R. D., Laing, people must simply practice the proper behavior because thy are no longer able to experience their own experience. Clearly the regime is interested not in what people experience but in their behavior, which can be managed.
More specifically, the royal consciousness is committed to numbness about death. It is unthinkable for the king to imagine or experience the end of his favorite historical arrangements, for they have become fully identified with his own person. Indeed they are his person, as much as he is or has a person. And therefore his historical arrangements must be invested with a quality of durability if not eternity. Kings need to assign the notion of "forever" to every historical accident over which they preside. Thus it is not thinkable among us that our public institutions should collapse and we must engage in deception and self-deception about our alienations. So we must practice the royal game with our marriages and all serious relations, with our bodies, our age and our health, our nerve and our commitments.
I went on my occasional though somewhat regular look around the lefty media and saw lots of the same lassitude among some of them, especially those who are more out of the world of show-biz than journalism - Sam Seder's comments after the "debate" in particular disgusted me. I will use him as an example of how the secular "left" is really not disinvested in the royal consciousness that the Republican-fascists are steeped in. On the left, that secular, hipster oriented left, nothing is ever good enough, not even the best available to be had, which reminds me of how close he has also claimed to be to the circles that spawned Gavin McInnes who, a failure in his great ambition to be a comedian, turned to a fascist variant of what some others have, such as those I've written about extensively, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Maher.
There's a reason that that kind of stuff is often considered "cool" which is what the "anti-political-correctness" stuff was marketed as being, edgy, "controversial" "transgressive" but cool, which traffics in the same kind of "free speech" cult that values that more than the lives of victims of hate speech and the hate-acts that it promotes.
I am hoping to step up the pace of posting on this in October.
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