THE UPSIDE OF THE DOWNSIDE - PART ??
Aristophanes Got it Right: Lysistrata
I’m jumping the gun here, inserting a comment that belongs in a later part of my THE UPSIDE OF THE DOWNSIDE series. But with Trump being named Time’s Person of the Year, I couldn’t resist. Here goes:
Cartoonist Michael DeAdder captured the essence of the present moment brilliantly:
Do you get the feeling we’ve stepped into an episode of The Twilight Zone? Or maybe a remake of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil? Or anything by George Orwell?
Heather Cox Richardson’s December 13th Substack post, limned the grim wackiness of Trump’s reelection as reported in the interview accompanying Time magazine’s Person-of-the-Year cover story:
Time magazine’s interview with President-elect Donald Trump, published yesterday, revealed a man who was so desperate to be reelected to the presidency that he constructed a performance that he believed would woo voters, but who has no apparent plans for actual governance.
The Time interview suggests that, now that he has won back power, Trump has lost interest in the promises of the campaign. [e.g. Bringing down the cost of groceries, forcing transgender women to use men’s bathrooms, denying protections for transgender children.]
Trump’s planned appointments to office reveal that the actual pillars of his presidency will be personal revenge, the destruction of American institutions, and the use of political office for gain, also known as graft.
The third pillar of Trump’s presidency appears to be graft for himself, his cronies, and his family.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta handed over $1 million as well, as did both the chief executive officer of OpenAI and AI search startup Perplexity. [Not to mention likewise Jeff Bezos, after killing The Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, as did the L.A. Times; ABC’s $15 million capitulation; and Joe and Mika scurrying down to Mar a Lago for dinner.]
Trump appears willing to reward cronies with positions that could be lucrative as well . . .
Trump is also putting family members into official positions. . .
If there is one major continuity between Trump’s campaign and plans for his administration, it is that his focus on shock and performance, rather than the detailed work of governing, still plays well to the media.
Incredulity over this culmination of the political surrealism of the past decade prompted me to reply to Heather’s piece with the following one-line comment: “The election of 2024 provides incontrovertible evidence that the U.S. is no longer a serious country.” It got more “likes” than most of my lengthy posts on Substack (www.davidlsmith.substack.com).
By coincidence (or maybe not), I’ve been watching One Hundred Years of Solitude on Netflix, based on Nobel prizewinner Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s 1967 novel by the same name. I’ve reached the part of the story where civil war intrudes on the solitude of the peasantry in the fictional Latin American town of Macondo, several generations after its founding in a remote location between a swamp and a mountain range. The liberal townspeople revolt against the unwanted intrusion of the distant, conservative central government whose corrupt “Corregidor” (Corrector) official steals the town’s first election and imposes harsh restrictions and taxes enforced by brutal soldiers. The liberal townspeople’s revolution succeeds in displacing the Corregidor and his troops, replacing them with a liberal government headed by Arcadio, the illegitimate grandson of the founding Buendia family. However, power goes to Arcadio’s head. He affects a Napoleonic uniform and, commanding an armed militia, imposes taxes and restrictions much like his predecessor did. The horrified townspeople cower, and only Ùrsula, the Buendia matriarch angrily stands up to Arcadio.
As I toggled back and forth between One Hundred Years of Solitude and accounts of Trump’s behavior in the New York Times and a slew of Substack writers, it seemed like Marquez’s “magical realism” and the theme of political violence infused both narratives. The feeling of being trapped in a nightmarish American Macondo overwhelmed me and set me to thinking beyond “How will we get out of this mess?” (I had already worked that out in Part I of this UPSIDE OF THE DOWNSIDE series.) So, that left the remaining question: “Who will lead us out?” Who will be the new FDR?
My thoughts drifted back to Úrsula, the Buendia matriarch who seemed to be the only one with her wits about her and the gumption to stand up to her autocratic grandson. How about a woman as the new FDR? Democrats already agreed to the idea by nominating Kamala Harris in 2024. In fact, the idea of women leading a polity out of man-made messes has been around for more than 2,400 years since Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata. It was a comedy then but deadly serious now.
I then remembered writing the following in my 2013 book, The Predicament – How did it happen? How bad is it? The case for radical change now!:
With more women than men now graduating from college, we have reason to hope women will succeed in reversing the traditional ratio of men to women in positions of power, thereby quenching the testosterone-fueled fires of perpetual war with a much-needed tidal wave of estrogen. Sara Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Ann Coulter notwithstanding, I have long supported the premise that if the world is to be saved, it will be up to women to do it, bringing to bear their qualities of empathy, intuition, cooperation, nurturing and determination in a world now dominated by fear, greed, and aggression. We’re trending in the right direction. But will women make it in time?
Today I’m wondering when the day will come when Americans will vote for a woman because she’s a woman and not in spite of it.
Whaddya say, America?
The whole point of Kamala Harris' campaign was to demonstrate the difference between female spirituality and masculine competition. Harris' inclusivity, compassion, ethical toughness and humor was overwhelming. She also did something I've not seen any other politician do: look another human being in the eyes, directly, and say, "How are you?" and mean it, then listen completely to the response.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton was cast and cast herself in the male model, and was all the more unbelievable, because she promised "the same old shit." When she said, a propos of Ghadaffi, "We came, we saw, he died," I wanted to throw up. I was a Sanders supporter then, and when Bernie saw he wasn't going to win and asked us to support Clinton - the very reason we were supporting him - I looked elsewhere. Jill Stein wasn't on the ticket, in Georgia, so I thought, "I'll vote for that asshole, Trump, because the Republicans will get rid of him within six months." That was my second mistake. The first mistake I made was not to follow my first and principal rule: how many Supreme Court positions are open, in the next administration? Vote Supreme Court. I knew nothing of Trump at that time, except that he was a mediocre clown playing daytime tv against standard Republican fare. I wasn't aware how many daytime tv viewers there were and are in America. I thought he'd lose - or if he won, the weight of the Republican Party would smother him.
In my conversations with my Flora of Botticelli fame, She said, "The last battle will be between the women themselves." She meant, the women who bought the masculine bollocks, as opposed to the women who trusted their own nature and spirituality.
Spiritual women collaborate, they don't compete. There's a marvelous documentary about a world competition for female conductors. The finalists who didn't win decide among themselves to work together, and do concerts together. The terms that the judges used in the competition were clearly male-dominated, including turning the baton into a penis...!
All of my writing has followed the teaching of a muse and the underpinning of civilization - all of which is dominated by a Muse figure. From a pop male misreading of a teenager in SHE LET HIM CONTINUE, to a mysterious dance figure who enlightens a young choreographer in JOOP'S DANCE, to an evisceration of the male competitive urge in PIT BULL, and most recently, in my latest and unpublished novel, KASHIMI, which deals with the next human and hypernatural evolution, with the greater understanding and use of of gravity in our physical and spiritual worlds - through the eyes of a young film-maker, and three extraordinary women. (Later, I was happily surprised to see part of the idea dramatized in the final duet inWICKED - "Defying gravity".) It dramatizes that the next evolutionary leap is the sacred feminine --- all the more obvious with the backsliding Neanderthal bullyboys of Trump and his minions.
My response to Kamala, and what I believe she means politically, I describe in the second half of an essay I'm sending to you - about growing up and believing in The Fireside Book of Folk Songs as the world. I was only six.
My daily nausea is a result of Kamala's defeat at the polls. I thought she'd win by a landslide. What kind of choice could there be between her (female spirituality, world cooperation, love) and Trump (psychopathia, narcissism, and that moment, the last week of the campaign, in which he stood before his followers and tv viewers,and pretended to jerk off the mike, then blow it..._Are you serious? You mean, there is a choice? His complete contempt for democracy, America, his followers was apparent in that gesture). The vote was between maturity and
Nazifascism, American style. And of course maturity would win.
Each day I awaken to spiritual nausea, and the confusion that the nightmare will dissipate---lbut it doesn't. We're living it. The equivocation of ABC to Trump was probably the most disturbing peekaboo of the future: fear by the Press and Social Media of being bullied by the Orange King and his billionaire minions...
Then I think of Flora, Kashimi, and what I have seen, and I know that the bastards can be pushed back, and buried, and will be, eventually. And that's our daily role, to bury them, while we honor what we've always honored, and make sure we've opened all the doors and windows to the inevitable breath of Spring, which is the sacred feminine.