Fnord

People with brains and pulses must surely find it difficult not to recognize the surreal quality of today's chaotic events.

Alternative facts, fake news, media blacklists, idealogical tests at the border (many people entering the country, after surrendering their social media passwords, have reportedly been asked what they think of President Trump and also the religion they practice as a requisite for entering) dark skinned Indians being shot in Kansas after being mistaken for Muslim arabs. Hard to dream this shit up. Where did our country go?

We have passed into a dystopian netherland that echoes our darkest history and the wildest science fiction.

Steve Bannon seems to have scripted the current narrative, very deftly too. He appears to be quite pleased with how things are going by all accounts, an end run and final destruction of what he calls the "administrative state." Whatever the fuck that means.

"Trump’s cabinet was selected for a reason, and that is the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state.’"Steve Bannon

He of course has Palantir and the data miners on his side, the racist alt-right, an obeisant Republican Congress, and a witless dupe he controls at the helm, along with a co-opted DHS and FBI that bring back memories of the Stasi and Vichi, if not Sicherheitspolizei.

Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007)

People have of course been talking about Orwell and Huxley and their presage of the present.

My brain keeps coming back to a wonderful set of books I haven't read in at least thirty or forty years, the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert's Shea and Anton Wilson and the subsequent Schrodinger's Cat and Cosmic Trigger. Stuff I read stoned in college. Strange, often fractured but brilliant.

I believe there was a malefic discordian character in the Bavarian conspiracy called Hassan a Sabbah that I recall fitting Bannon to a tee. The new eris stocracy. I think that the somewhat disjointed story is popping right up through my subconscious and shouting read me again. Perhaps I can find a clue in the wreckage?

Wilson was such an interesting fellow. I was hanging around Berkeley around the time his beloved daughter Luna was killed in 1976. Bob was an  early advocate of cryonics, she was the first person to have her brain preserved. He was a genius on the level of Phil Dick, a literary father and predecessor of Gibson and Stevenson.

I do think it is time to reread the books, at least before they immanentize the eschaton. Could we be seeing the public face of a right wing occult conspiracy? Would anyone have given them a chance of making it this far?

Do you remember the movie The Emerald Forest? There was an ancient sage in the jungle in the movie that said something that stuck with me, that when the your dreams and visions start materializing, it is not a good thing, in fact it means that it is time to start running...

Rod Steiger - The illustrated man