A Twist of Hate
Take a walk with your hatred—learn all of its secrets and spells.
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REMEMBER WHEN TRUMP was inaugurated in 2017?
Hated it.
How was your nervous system during his first four years, which, appropriately enough, crescendoed into COVID, where everyone, finally, officially lost their minds? Only a plague could crown MAGA v1.0.
Yeah, I hated all of that shit too.
So, it’s back! Hatred is the new black. However, this time, I’m going to approach it differently. Here are some of my hot takes.
The first thing I’m minimizing is gawking. In How To Survive Being Online, Mike Monteiro wrote the other day:
“The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.
Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends.”
Uhm, I am doing a bit of the ‘head in the sand’ thing, for a spell. I’m a Cancer, and my survival-security instincts oversee most of my life decisions.
It’s why I live on an island, on the water, and can immediately, if need be, dive into the Sound to merge with my element and its harkening back to the origins of all life. A tadpole, once again. Or so I dream.
I know I’ll resurface. The ongoing pressure to engage (and the fact that I write about these themes) will land me back onto the chessboard—especially its black squares.
So, right now, it’s about waiting to see what my imagination hatches as a means to carry on. And allowing my hatred to participate, full-throated, in that exercise. The hatred will be crucial to what comes next for me. Of that, I’m sure.
How about you?
OK, here’s another take from the other side of the coin: This year, I will start conversing with younger folks for my newsletter on Substack.
I’m interested in how they will approach the next four years, especially those who will remain engaged online as a form of activism. People like meme maven who wrote in his recent post Don’t Log Off:
“My limited optimism comes from the conviction that we can develop the vocabulary and the political structure necessary to shift power to a digital public. The internet has radically changed several times before, so why can’t it change in a democratic direction rather than an authoritarian one? Nothing is inevitable, especially online. People thought AOL and MySpace would last forever.
This is the only option left. Open, online-based democracy is the sole humane and rational response to the current situation. The liberal institutional response failed in this past election, proving itself more radical and uncompromising in temperament than any democratic socialist.”
This line of thinking fascinates me. It’s an approach coming more from the future than the past. As media philosopher Marshall McLuhan pointed out, the problem for people attempting to adjust to rapid technological changes is that they begin viewing life in the rearview mirror.
This happens as people age. Their faces keep getting closer to the mirror until they obfuscate the glass entirely. Then, ala Alice, they pass into the mirror and inhabit a world out of synch with the present reality. Soon, they’re living in Florida.
Speaking of relics, I’m very much an eye for an eye sort of person (did that come from being raised Catholic with some of its historical roots in Italian paganism? I dunno). My point: I do allow hatred to carry me to places that are verboten to most people. I’ve learned how to welcome that unlovely place.
There is a bizarre frozen-heat quality to hatred—a clenched-teeth focus that can crack diamonds in half. Hatred has a lot of power tied up in it. This is most likely what you sense (but don’t allow yourself to register completely) when encountering our new generation of oligarchs.
Of them, the author wrote the other day:
“…why can’t they just make their money and fuck off?
Why do we have to be subjected to their opinions, their ideas, to them telling us what our future is going to be like and for us to be grateful for it, to see them bowed down to on podcasts like they are some god-like immortals, to see them standing on the stage with the Trump exerting political influence?
They're not good people. They're not cool people. They are not even interesting to listen to. They don't offer anything these days that isn't clearly self-serving. And yet, we give them the oxygen they crave so badly.”
Right, we give them the oxygen they crave because we’re conditioned to be dazzled by people who are so balls-out, self-serving, and hateful. I mean that in a literal way. Also, there’s the thing about their sickness, which I’ll explain in a bit.
These are not people interested in your well-being or that of our country. They just aren’t. They are damaged souls with no conception of the social contract unless it benefits them: tax breaks, subsidies, overseas money stashing, etc. They are the kingpins of the American Hustle, the worst the country has to offer.
When a healthy animal observes a diseased animal, a spellbound assessment occurs. And that is what’s happening to us now; we’re stunned by the grotesquerie. It’s so fucking freaky. Imagine the books that will be written about this cultural moment. Books I’ll never read because I will have lived through this shit.
A remedy?
Consider how much power is tied up with hatred. Consider ways for you to access hatred’s concentrated force. And don’t lie to yourself. Hatred is part and parcel of the economy of life. To deny your experience of hatred is to become hypnotized into submission and live a sort of obedient ‘half-life.’
It helps to reconsider or reframe the word, stripping away its societal associations. Now, what do you have? A one-pointed laser beam that can blast through inertia. It’s natural, and it’s a good thing.
This is why the Tibetans have all those crazy ass deities in their pantheon. They know something like the Mahakahla (The Great Black One) force is necessary in life. Ultimately, its job is to protect and defend what is true and good.
When you push away the cultural admonishments against feeling hatred, you’re offered the chance to ‘take the bull by the horns.’ What you do with the bull is up to you, but you’ve gotta get a hold of the horns first.
When the wealthiest man in the world throws Sieg Heils around, well, there’s a big ball of hatred on display for you to start considering. Let Elmo’s skyward salute illuminate your dark place, where you can begin working with your hatred.
Take a walk with your hatred, seriously. Go out, walk around the block with it, and see what you see, what you unravel and gain access to. I promise you’ll be in a better state of mind when you get back home.
Picture the Great Black One tagging along with you, sharing all its secrets and spells. We’ll need all of them in the four years ahead.
Love,
Opening graphic via Tumblr. No attribution is listed.
⭐️ My new book, I Love You Jeffrey Dahmer arrives soon! ⭐️
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Here I am again, she who never comments on the articles/blogs she reads. But as has been said ad nauseam: "these are unprecedented times." And once again I am commenting due to another synchronicity. This afternoon, I was taking a walk with my wise and delightful canine divinity "Krishna" down a bucolic road on Rhode Island's Farm Coast where I live and in my head, I was yelling at my 85-year-old,Trump-supporting farmer/neighbor Bill about what a democracy-destroying stupid sucker he was! And then I stopped myself, because my ego-exhilarating tirade was profound proof of just how far I was from being truly "enlightened." While anger is a legitimate temporary emotion, sustained hatred is seriously deleterious not only to the level of one's consciousness, but also to one's immune system, not to mention the social system as a whole. Plus, I actually LOVE Bill, even though politically he is an idiot, and has refused to listen to any of my political and personal arguments, which is shocking as I have a degree in philosophy from Yale! LOL (Heidegger one of my favorite philosophers was a NAZI and Sartre was an apologist for Stalin. So much for egg heads!) As a former New Yorker, I have told him I know people who knew this Queens-born fuhrer back in the day when he was just "The Donald." He was despicable then, too, but in a more innocuous, dworky way.
Growing up I always wondered what it would be like to have lived in Germany in the late 1930s and detested the Nazis, who may have been your friends and family. And now, here I am in a similar situation. If there is a spark of the divine in all of us, however, can we really settle into hating those we deeply disagree with? If the universe, as revealed by the current configuration of the planets, has ordained us to experience another four years of a monster as president is focusing on hating him going to improve the situation? That's not what Martin Luther King did. Or Gandhi. Or even, so recently and tragically, Alexei Navalny. They all encouraged vigorous, peaceful, courageous ways to change the political status quo, but not by focusing on hatred. In the case of my buddy Bill, he is, ironically, a very good neighbor with a big heart and a strong sense of decency. He has been mislead because of the limitations of his education, experience, and his love of NewsMax and Fox. While his flawed beliefs could lead him to do evil things, they haven't yet. Beyond the fact that he voted for a tyrant, which was his democratic right.
As Tom Paine once said, "these are the times that try mens' souls." And I believe we in the opposition are being required by the universe to rise to a higher level of consciousness in dealing with this godawful situation. We are not meant to fancy ourselves as "the great black one," but to bow before its truly divine and awesome wrath as it annihilates the world we knew. And the whole point of Mahākāla is he shows no mercy. If we believe ourselves to be spiritual, to be "good," then we must steer toward the light no matter what as this new world is born. That, as I see it, is our karma and our dharma as humans living now. And it is clearly going to be hell!
Why they have to make a big noise about the money instead of just going away and enjoying it --- I don't think money is all that much fun after a while. If you have a pair of shoes that cost $5,000, don't you kind of have to make everyone look at your shoes with envy? Jealousy? Hate, even? What's the point of paying $5,000 for a pair of Jimmy Choos if no one else is jealous? Just sayin.'
Love you, as always . . .