Author: White Whale

If and when Donald Trump gets back into the office he rightly won on Election Day, I would like to see a Trauma Czar, and a Survival of Death Czar, each with a first year budget of $2 billion.  That is chump change, a rounding error, in the current climate.  We spend more money on the mating habits of tree frogs, I suspect, than we do teaching doctors and teachers and parents about trauma, or in making the large volume of evidence for survival yet larger, more compelling, and more KNOWN.

In principle, as ostensible humanitarians, the Bidenistas could embrace something like this, but it’s really like all the corporations of the world–the plutocrats of the world–got together and assembled a sort of hybrid Frankenstein monster who would reliably do for them whatever made them the most money.  At this point, with his degree of decrepitude, he is more or less a living corpse providing a curtain, behind which we don’t really know what is happening, other than that none of it is good for this country, or the citizens of most other countries.

I would even include in this corporate take-over most of the nations, like China and Iran, in this.  They are about greed, too.  Don’t let the pious sounding lies fool you.  Those are all bullshit.  It is about money, sex and power, whether it is a corrupt nation, or a corrupt corporation.

It is as important to be darkness in the light of false knowledge, as to be genuine light within the darkness of ignorance.

Darkness within light, and light within darkness.  Both are relative.

https://wisdomoftrauma.com/movie/

Obviously, I don’t think Trump should be compared to Kim Jung Il, but it’s interesting that I think I have a better understanding where that comes from emotionally.

We are all of us talking past one another.  I myself am physically very healthy, and I think it is because however much I hurt I have always given myself permission for that.  I don’t hold back and I don’t lie.  These are, I see, conspicuous virtues in a world of lies and madness.

Let us continue to hope.  I have proposed more than once and will propose again that understanding and identifying trauma in all areas of our collective life and culture is the only real path forward for human civilization.  It is at the root of evil, of violence, of despair and ultimately of stupidity that persists.

And I will continue to insist that Capitalism is BY FAR the best economic system ever developed.  But the creation of wealth is only one of four cultural tasks.  Wealth does not provide meaning, it does not provide useful truth, and it does not tell us how to structure power relations in a healthy way.  On the contrary.  Obviously.

Money tells us nothing.  Money teaches us nothing.  Money creates the time and the space to begin to heal, which is to say, to begin to learn, to feel, and ultimately to hope.

And I will add that, to me, connection would logically fall with the cultural task of Meaning.  The very first connection, though, the one that matters the most, is the connection each of us forms with our self, with our emotional reality, with our own deeply felt spirituality.  That is the only reliable path out of the disconnected solipsism so many of us begin with.

I honestly think many of these Tibetan (and of course many others) who spend their lives in caves are HAPPIER, in all the ways we value, than those of us surrounded, like Tantalus, with the water of possible human connection that never reaches our lips.  So many of us choose, as U2 sang, “the poison, from the poisoned stream” (that song always makes my cry, because I GET it), because it WORKS when nothing else does.

You know, what really makes my cry is not my own pain.  It is the feeling of hope in the midst of all this.  That is what hurts me, over and over.  And I hope it always does.

As I say, please help this film become a blockbuster.  Help it move through the world.  Share it where you can.

I think all of us are born with a latent desire for great struggles, and great overcomings.  This has often resulted in wars and other turmoil. I think it often looks like masochism.

This urge has been met in much of human history simply by the struggles of life.  But urban/suburban/exurban: in America, we all have it really easy, all things considered.  Most of us have not just WASHING machines for God’s sake–for dishes and for clothes–but DRYING machines.  We have hot water for showers we can take any time we like.

I think much of the addiction to violent TV amounts to an effort to enjoy second hand the struggles of others, in a world denuded of them.  Video games likewise meet this need.

And of course lunatic politics, which has as its end aim returning most of us to awful circumstances, plays a part in all this.

It was genuinely audacious being an open Communist until recently.  It is easy now, but I think that because the 100% of most of these low spark boys and girls is so minimal, it still feels daring.

We all need a Crusade of some sort.  I think this splinter of an insight should be added to the woodpile of ideas with which I am trying to warm up the world.

As I ponder this further–and in some respects I can’t stop it, since images and ideas just come to me–I really do think Lynch intended a commentary on Life writ large.

Peter Gabriel, 1982: Working in gardens, thornless roses, fat men play with their garden hoses

That album, the whole thing, had a big impact on me at the time.  It was both sinister and alluring, both hopeful, and an prophet of despair.

But unmistakably Lynch chose to bookend the movie with the same scenes–the flowers, the firetruck as if on a 4th of July parade on Main Street.

And unmistakably the fat man, when he fell, revealed a dark subterranean terrain of conflict.

Actually, though, now that I think about it, the robin eating the bug could be viewed as Love eating Evil, couldn’t it?  I am so cynical sometimes I miss the good things.

But the whole thing is a circle, or if you will, the Cycle of the Hero.  I looked up the Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell PBS series, and it was slightly after Blue Velvet, but Campbell was, I think, in the air.

What you have throughout this movie is good mixing with evil.  Kyle MacGlachlan “put his poison” into Isabella Rosellini.  He starts with Laura Dern, loses his virginity (presumably) to Isabella, then returns to Laura Dern.  Innocence, violence, then wiser innocence, as mediated by the robin eating the bug.

I will point out the obvious, too, that the scene where MacGlachlan first tells Laura Dern about what he has seen happens in front of a church.  That framing was unmistakable, where they both talk about how life and people are funny.  I forget the exact phrasing, but I remember him asking why there are people like that.  This whole scene happens with lit church windows in the background.

I read some reviews on that movie.  I was curious what other people saw.  Roger Ebert seemed to think it wasn’t kinky enough.  The rest were throwaway.  That movie WAS a long time ago.

To me, the sex was really a symbol for emotional realities.  Sex, in important respects, is ALWAYS a symbol for emotional realities.  It is cold for cold people.  Cruel for cruel people.  Loving for loving people.  Sex is not the most important reality.  Never.

I myself have not been laid in forever, but not because I couldn’t get something basic if I wanted to.  I could.  I am a good talker, not bad looking, and in any event that is about persistence.  There is always some drunk girl at the end of the night, if you are willing to lower your standards and your self respect.

My issue is it would be impossible to have the sort of sex I would want AS I AM NOW.  I am not emotionally available the way I would want to be.  What I truly crave, what would be healthy for me, is precluded.  Not forever, but for right now.  And integrity prohibits pretending otherwise.

No doubt those sex scenes were shocking back in the day.  Now, with the ubiquity of porn all of have seen any sort of scene that interests us.

To my mind, the urge for Isabella Rosselini to be hit was very simply understood: she was severely traumatized.  She was used to being hit.  And until she was hit, she felt the anxiety that she was ABOUT to be hit, which is what created in some part of her a desire not just to get it over with, but an active pleasure in the release of anxiety.

As I have said before, there seem to be two sorts of pleasure in this world: the release of anxiety, and the positive energy of enjoyment.  I think most evil comes from those who can only feel the former, due to trauma and its following emotional handicaps.  They crave power because not being in charge fills them with anxiety.  They crave money, because lacking anything fills them with anxiety.  They become cruel, since, paradoxically, their numbness fills them with anxiety.

And I thought the home where Bennie lived was interesting.  You had the same sorts of babushkas there as MacLachlan had at his home.  But there the “father” was an obvious homosexual (in a time when open homosexuality was very, very uncommon in cinema, to the point that portraying it was almost guaranteed to get you good reviews).  It was sort of visual equivalent, but psychologically and morally inverted picture, and intended, I think, as a sort of picture, a static situation, a fixed reality, since everyone was just sitting there.  You wondered how these matrons participated in this horrific captivity.

This was structurally in the middle, as one commentator noted.  And then, what?  The hero’s journey?  The trip far, far outside the bounds of the normal, where the hero met the monster fully for the first time.

And of course in the climax, the hero kills the monster.  All returns to normal, but the robin shows up, with the insect–symbol of primitive conflict in the beginning–in its mouth.

So I think I am perhaps projecting, now, my own issues onto Lynch’s art.  I think he did intend to create a visceral and unpleasant experience, but anchor it into what in the end amounted to Midwestern values, even after placing one of the Hardy Boys into a porn film.

But me, I look at Isabella Rossellini and I know her struggle is not over.  Her pain is not over.  Nor is that of her son, who would be at considerable risk of becoming another Dennis Hopper, although if Rosselini soldiers on in the immortal feminine way, of enduring the unendurable for love, he will be OK enough.  Today, both would in a perfect world be counseled for  long time for trauma, and in my personal view use things like Neurofeedback, Somatic Experiencing, EMDR and the like.

Here is my last thought: there is a Manichean distinction to be made between Reality and Illusion, between what Bruce Springsteen calls–in lyrics I will always like, even if I can’t figure out why he is so stupid in many ways–between “what’s flesh and what’s fantasy“.

One could argue some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism are in fact Manichean, and rather than Good and Evil, you have Satya and Maya.

As I say, I think in the end Lynch was trying to convey an essentially positive vision.  The monster was vanquished, literally and symbolically.

It was an interesting film, though.  It was unpleasant.  I now have to add those images to my store.

Actually, if I might channel my inner Baptist Preacher, one more thing: I think the use of Dennis Hopper, specifically, in this context is significant.

The 60’s intruded on the 50’s, did they not?  They rode in on motorcycles, and shot the town to pieces.  They created both good and destruction.  They changed our world in ways which we wrestle with daily even now.

As an inverted image, I would offer again Meatloaf intruding into Dr. Frankenfurter’s life in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. He represented the 1950’s and traditional masculinity.  He was hacked to pieces and eaten.

Everywhere in life, true kindness and more importantly understanding are vital.  No political task is ever worth losing your humanity.  No one can EVER accomplish anything lastingly good from a standpoint of hatred, irreconcilable difference, aggression, and lies.

All of these are being removed, allegedly as “spam”, which of course is ludicrous.  What they ARE, is EVIDENCE, that people like me were pointing out the logically and factually obvious in April of 2020.  There are no excuses for the fuck up that we just went through.  None.

And many people out there KNOW THIS.  They knew they were lying and fucking up then, and their main concern NOW is that this more or less open secret does not get out to the useful idiots.  I can only assume that is why they are retroactively deleting comments which were posted 14 months ago or more.

Just watched this for the first time.  That is my third David Lynch movie, along with perhaps the last five episodes of the original Twin Peaks series.  My verdict?  I hate all the violence, but I find him useful.  He is struggling in his own way to make sense of the world.

Note that the robin was eating an insect.  This is the world we live in.  I am very sure he did that very, very consciously, to show that not all the evil in the world had been rectified, even if those watching were too naive to see what was in front of their faces.  This was his point, in my view.

Couple thoughts.

First, it occurred to me early on that much of what we think of when we think of the 1950’s–and by we I mean people born in the mid-60’s and later, who did not touch any part of the 1950’s in America–is black and white shows like Leave it to Beaver, and the Andy Griffith Show, and the Dick van Dyke Show, and I Love Lucy.

And what needs to be said about those shows is they were under tight editorial control.  We have in our own country back then what amounted to social propaganda which was intended to counter and undermine Soviet propaganda, which even then was oozing in through every intellectual pore in our country.

And realistically, how DOES one counter something that so many people agree to willingly?  You can’t tell them “just say no”.  The only way forward is with a better vision, and as Thomas Sowell commented–and keep in mind he was a Marxist until he actually worked for the Federal government–the Left truly has a better vision, a better brochure (to use Sheryl Crow’s phrase) than we do.  We want more of the same.  But the world is filled with flaws, with cracks, with evil, with injustice, with pain.  Why would one embrace that when someone else is hawking a world free of misery, distress, inequality, loneliness, war, poverty, and all other forms of injustice?

As Sowell points out, only with facts.  And facts have short legs.  They can’t fly like disingenuous fairy tales.

But to conclude this point, I don’t think the people who actually lived through the fifties lived in a fairy tale world.  I think they were all very aware of how bad the world can be, and no small number of them contributed to it.

This myth of the happy, carefree, simple world of the 1950’s has all the validity to it that Communist utopias do.  Were we to “return” to that era somehow, we would all be sorely, sorely disappointed.  This form of nostalgia is its own form of Utopianism.

And I might even argue that that is another difference in myth between Fascism and Communism.  For Fascists the past is what we need to look to for our myths.  For Communists, the future.  Both lie.  Both terrorize and kill to either recreate or create something which never was, and which never can be following the methods they apply.

Secondly, his intent, obviously, was to point to the awfulness of the world, and specifically to do it within the heart of a “happy town”.  To “deconstruct” Happy Town USA, where there are flowers and birds and bees, and everyone is peaceful and happy.

It is small wonder that this film did so well in the mid-1980’s, among the Leftist intelligentsia, which was only to eager to throw mud and shit at any notions of American purity and innocence.

And to be sure, most of us really don’t know, even now, how much blood our troops have shed overseas, sometimes for very morally ambiguous or arguably even evil reasons.  They are on solid ground pointing all that out.

But they leave solid ground and float back into fairy tales when the ignore other, worse evils in the world, the ubiquity of injustice and violence all over the world for all of human history, and declare the American Project defunct because imperfect.  None of them could survive in their personal lives moral demands of the sort they place on our nation.  None of them could defend the atrocities committed by regimes they supported openly or by proxy.

It was not then and is not now inappropriate to compare evils.  To compare the good in one nation with that of another; and to then compare the evil.  America fares very, very well in that analysis.  No nation with our power has EVER used it with such restraint.  I study history.  This is clearly true.

But I would suggest that for most of these intellectuals “America” was not represented by Kyle MacLachlan, who with his gee-whiz Boy Scoutish vibe might have been one of the Hardy Boys, and who worked with persistence, daring and considerable intelligence to stop a patent evil.

No, I think for the America hating Left Dennis Hopper stood in for our ugly underbelly, for Pinochet helicopter rides, and My Lai, and Savak.  Never mind that Pinochet voluntarily relinquished power and held elections, or that the NVA perpetrated dozens of My Lai’s under orders from Hanoi, or that the Revolutionary Guard was and remains vastly more violent, and in many cases literally repurposed the same torture chambers for their own political opponents.  We are not supposed to add that context.

It is not understating the case, in my view, to see in Dennis Hopper a prototype of the White Supremacist, which haunts us today.  Never mind that literally every act of “racism” I personally have read about was a false flag conducted by an impatient Leftist.

No: he is the simple evil that simple people using grade school emotionality can direct their weak emotional energies on, and make stand in for 90 million Americans.  I really think this is true.

Thirdly, I have to wonder if Lynch was not tempted to make this a de facto horror movie, which I had some anxiety he might.  I thought the guy coming up the stairs was Detective Williams.  What if he had walked in, shot Kyle MacLachlan, and his daughter walked in, and said OH DADDY.  He just then hits her and says, “that’s enough of that.  Now we are going home, and Mike is better for you anyway.”  She then says “Yes, Father”, and follows him out.  Cue the curtain.

It had to have crossed his mind.  Someone who spends as much time in darkness as him obviously has conflicting impulses.  Such an ending would not have SOLD well.  That may be the only thing that restrained him: he needed the money.

But would that not have been a beautiful thing for the anti-American intelligentsia?   They could say SEE WE TOLD YOU SO.  That is the kind of ending these self loathing and hateful people would have celebrated.

Oh, it is tiring being me.  But I had put off watching that movie for a long time.  I can move that over to the Complete pile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UbfsmM8YXI

I’ve shared this often in many places, but can’t remember if I’ve shared this here: https://c19hcq.com/

Imagine a sane world.  No, try.  I know it’s hard.  Would not this sort of thing be the basis for public debate?  Of course it would.