Beyond Signaling: Emergence

Authoritarian Establishment of the Obscene

Monstrosity. The American state that was the United States of America has transmogrified into abomination. This is neither news nor noise. The shape of what once was is forfeit. It’s an open question whether or not its skeleton, the underlying structure of American character such as it ever was or intended itself to be, remains intact enough to reassert at some point in the future an upright, rectifying posture — however irretrievably misshapen its signature now is to history.

American character as it ever was or intended itself to be
albeit

recurrent resurgence
of its demons

Last summer, SCOTUS destroyed the principle that no person is above the law. Now, its shadow docket contends with the Star Chamber for historic judicial arbitrariness and secrecy. Trump sicced the National Guard on both my home town (L.A.) and my current town (D.C.), and a malignant Congress ratified massive funding increases for the masked, brutal forces of ICE. This is what a police state looks like, lives like, complete with gulag detention camps and indiscriminate arrests, kidnappings, and deportations. I haven’t even mentioned attacks on universities, science, and public health (which hit close to home personally), nor DOGE’s ongoing adolescent frenzy of arrrogance and ineptitude. Whatever we feared and warned about authoritarianism and destruction of democractic insitutions, here it is.

Humanism isn’t currently the active ethos of this fomented cultural atmosphere. The stink of hatred and fiendish glee in cruelty and corruption is everywhere. A violent society has us taking for granted the violation of everyday lives and livelihoods; we’re quickly losing any humane sense of common protection.

Whatever I was trying to do last year, before the election, in initiating this feature of P,T,WM, Signals/News Through the Noise, now seems to me to be too reflective of a state of things no longer operative. At first, the “signals” pointed to where there was still reality and substance to what was going on, despite all obfuscation. Then it was all noise all the time, emergency all the time. Now there is a new emergency, a new emergence — obscenity, grotesquerie. It’s hard to believe that what is happening is real, but only by acknowledging where we are without denial can there by any hope… and grit to forge a way forward.

Separating signal from noise is as always an essential practice. For now, though, the noise that obfuscated ill intentions on a grand scale and covered up a legion of crimes has become the birthing grunts of a monstrosity issuing forth. I’ve always loved and ponder-savored Blake’s incongruent, wtf out-of-nowhere simile from "Infant Sorrow": like a fiend hid in a cloud. Shroud ominous, the billowing of noise and haze veiled labor pains as it loomed, shapened, and gave way — released, for foothold and fascist establishment — to a form and figure of the Grotesque¹.

Emergence/Emergency of the Grotesque

The state is an abomination. Apparently a human-made apparatus, its nature when unleashed in its self-perpetuating, controlling, expansionary drives reveals a Lovecraftian cosmic primality. Emanations of the rule of Cthulhu.

Or, in a corresponding utterance, from a spiritual visionary on the order of Swedenborg in terms of specificity, Daniel Andreev describes each of the world’s great lands/cultures as rooted in paradise, yet pursued — parodied — by the demonic. Andreev’s The Rose of the World offers the mystic vision (and “metahistorical method”) he was able to scribble into preservation during his decade in prison within Stalin’s post-WWII Soviet Union. He has a bizarre image and name for his perception of entities underlying nationalist greed and belligerence: Witzraors, spiders of darkness the size of a homeland, each one able to “slither in like a mountain of mist.” An American Witzraor has currently taken over in full force.

The fiend formerly hid in a cloud now emergent.

it has taken shape this is the shape of things
when there is no grounding for a moral life
for a righteous polity
for dignity

for creative humanism

The struggle is political and moral. & creative, human. Times like these make me think we were made for this struggle. Mourning will have to wait. Now we determine how we live with — against — through — this obscene shift.

to do art

in another torrid torched / weird tortured climate / summer of atrocity

SMILE: A Clown’s Ascension by Dennis Leroy Kangalee and Magus Magnus

Artist: Dani Kriatura for Smile

Save the Dates: October 15th - 19th in Monterey, California. Tickets go on sale September 1st. Produced by J. Stock Productions in conjunction with the Henry Miller Memorial Library, based on Miller’s story, “The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder.”

Kangalee Arts Ensemble

1. So, Sasha Abramsky in The Nation 7.25.25

From KGB Cells to Alligator Alcatraz: How Authoritarians Normalize the Grotesque