There is something of the apocalyptic in the image above of Trump supporters wrapped in the flag outside the Trump residendence in Florida, as if the official worship of power and the rule by the idiom of ‘might is right’ had been established, or as Gladstone said of Bourbon rule in The Two Sicilies, ‘ the negation of God made into a system of Government’.
Of course, I must not exaggerate. Systematic is not what Trump is, and that may be our downfall as he substitutes boasts of divine power over life and death with his finger hovering over the nuclear button and his terrible paranoia substitutes for a brain.
As he destroys all global agreements about international action on climate and environmental action, the Armageddon may be slower but far more sure and not as slow even as it seemed once. AT HIS VICTORY speech, much like the one he gave when defeated but planning civil unrest after the last Presidential election that everyone but him knew he had lost, TRUMP claimed his victory was based on an act of love arising from the United movement of the whole American people and expressing adoration of its daimon.
Spenser in The Faerie Queene represented the enemy of Truth as Archimago. He personified Truth, on the other hand, by the names of both Una [the One] and Astraea [Virgil’s representation of divine justice in the government of the Earth under Emperor Augustus in the Fourth Eclogue]. The latter were all images used to represent Elizabeth I in state propaganda and myth and court masques. Archimago, the apex of the club of all necromantic magicians and appearance makers, sometimes stood for the Pope, the enemy of the true Church in England, the heir of the Imperial Church of Constantine in Elizabethan ideology, but was also allegorically Satan, the Father of Lies, a fiend who relied on fictions of being the true representative of God on earth with his lies passing as substantial truths. Archimago in Spenser also represents the Beast of the Apocalypse in St. John’s Revelations – the chief of all false prophets speaking with the tongues of doves and angels but really a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Archimago conjures up a simulacrum of the one Truth, Una, whom he and Spenser call Duessa, or duplicity.
But this is what Trump’s actions in the past have shown him to be too, a man who did much to build up the confidence of Israel that it could finally destroy anything that might lead to Palestinian statehood and strengthened Putin’s claims against Nato defence of Europe. Whilst he talks about unity, he promotes division and borders between people. When he speaks of love, he fosters hatred against ‘immigrants’ and the socially marginalised; when of peace, he promotes bloody war; when freedom, only freedom for those who wish for the enslavement of others to their buying power.
If Trump is the Father of Lies, then Elon Musk is the True Son of that False Father. Musk says that he wants the USA to continue to pursue growth, whatever the cost of the environment to finance his space-buses he has already trialled. In tbese fictional fantasies, he imagines that the rich will free themselves from the polluted world they are destroying and leave the remnants to those they persuade to vote for them whilst they still allow voting.
Whether democracy itself in the USA will survive Trump and Musk, we have yet to discover. MEANWHILE, Sir Keir Starmer could not wait to send a message to Trump, even before he attained a majority in the electoral college, although at that time to be fair, Trump was only four delegates away from victory. Starmer wrote:
As the closest of allies, we stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of our shared values of freedom, democracy and enterprise.
From growth and security to innovation and tech, I know that the UK-US special relationship will continue to prosper on both sides of the Atlantic for years to come.
The rhetoric is that we have come to expect Starmer to use. It is a rhetoric he continues to learn as he bows daily to the Tony Blair Foundation. All good in the world is attributed to economic growth; the be-all and end-all of capitalist production, consumption, and excretion of waste resources. That this growth will choke the world it finances is certain. No doubt Starmer has his place booked on an Elon Musk space bus already sitting shoulder to shoulder between Benjamin Netanyahu and Melania Trump’s layest shoulder wings. If he and Trump both speak of growth and security as symbols of the free world as the values they share, it is becoming increasingly clear what the world of changed Labour is to be and worse what it will become as Starmer becomes ever more desperate for personal power at the cost of very thin principles that he wears on his sleeve and cedes control to the private sector and big business.
The only more fulsome welcome came from Benjamin Netantahu, who now knows that he can obliterate Gazans without even the pallid objections of Biden getting slightly in the way.
I feel so puzzled and distressed about the world we are actively building out of Brexit, with Starmer now the champion of that, too.
With love and bewilderment
Steven xxxxxxx
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