Howdy, folks!
Welcome once again to the Omnium Gatherum.
Or, if you’re new here, welcome to the Omnium Gatherum.
Back when this column was a regular feature at the Comics Waiting Room, I happened to be writing during the first campaign of then-Senator Barack Obama to become president of these United States. Being the politics junkie that I was and still am, I couldn’t help but write about the politics of that election cycle from time to time. Of course I stole my title from the late, great Hunter S. Thompson, from his book Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trial ’72, with my own artistic modifications.
In the years since my fascination with politics hasn’t slackened any, even though my thoughts and feelings as a citizen of these United States did change.
But not in the how, the when, or the why anyone who had been following me on social media might think.
I would honestly say my thoughts and feelings as a citizen about our current politics really began to change in 2022, as a result of my encounter with and reading some of the works of one Julius Evola.
Julius Evola was an Italian traditionalist writer who, amongst many other ideas, thought the Nazis were not right wing enough. He was also a believer of engaging in a personal path towards enlightenment, often at the expense of any involvement with the workaday world in which a modern person finds themselves living.
It is from his works that the ideas of xeniteia and apoleteia entered my life.
According to the Academic Agent’s explanation of the terms in his “Julius Evola: Key Concepts” video, which he produced for his Evola Day marathon on his YouTube channel, xeniteia is “the condition of living abroad or being absent from one’s homeland, to live surrounded by barbarous people and customs, away from one’s polis, an exile from the world of tradition”, and apoleteia is “abstention from active participation in the construction of the human polis, an inner attitude of indifference and detachment”. I’ll leave a link to the full video below if either of the two of you readers wants to get the information straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34ffMAl6_B8&t=369s
See, despite what anyone who has paid any attention to my interests and choices of what to post on social media (which I have treated as equal parts social experiment, repository of fascinating ideas, and full contact conversation tool), I have been a lifelong Democrat, voting that way ever since I turned 18 and could vote.
Until now.
Although, perhaps the shift began in 2017.
I recently wrote a post for Facebook where I explained my prediction that Donald Trump would win the 2016 election where I recounted how I began moving away from what became the standard position for a Democrat to hold. This move was facilitated by simple examination of how the mainstream news media covered Trump’s presidency, with a decided slant against him no matter what.
Now, I’m not naive enough to believe that no particular news organization or the field en masse hasn’t lined up for or against a particular politician. The end of the first episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom features Sam Waterston telling Jeff Daniels about how various newsmen from Edward R. Murrow to Walter Cronkite had strong opinions on particular issues or politicians or people and used their soapbox to tackle them. Hell, what else is this column but my own soapbox? But what started amazing me from 2017 onwards has been the Emperor Has No Clothes nakedness of the reporting against Trump and by association nearly to half of these United States.
More importantly, I began thinking about how what was normally a nation where one side or the other would play the Loyal Opposition was beginning to turn into a real divide. I would often post various and sundry news articles with the comment of “Tit for tat” or “Battlelines are being drawn”, pointing out how each side of American politics was taking actions designed to honk off the other side and round and round it went.
What was looking like a divide in 2017, 2018 has become a chasm by this Year of Our Lord 2024 A.D., Gregorian and Julian or the year 5784 for our Jewish friends or 1445 for our Muslim ones or 1403 for our Persian friends , and so on.
Or really something like I said on Facebook a few weeks ago, that we are living in a fractalizing consensus reality.
Many but not all of us have become more tribal over the last seven years. And each tribe has its consensus reality. In other words where there was once common ground, that ground is breaking up into separate grounds that are physically connected—like fractals—yet psychologically and philosophically disconnected upon which each tribe stands and thinks contains the Laws of the Universe and any other is a bizarre fantasyland filled with dragons to be slain, monsters to be fought, and villains a’plenty..
All of which is nice, if you’re a tribal person, which I am not. And increasingly I have been leaning more into my long held feelings of this place simply not being my place.
This is where xeniteia comes into play.
In yet another recent Facebook post I talked about an experience I had as a child where I had a near mystical experience that left me with the feeling that I was in the wrong time and place somehow. That feeling never left me. And in watching the increasing tribalization of the world around me, I have never more that this moment in time and space isn’t mine than ever before.
In other words, I was being to feel like a man away from his polis, his natural civilization.
And that is where apoleteia comes into play.
See, like any junkie, the habit of watching politics is hard to give up. But today’s politics are so poisonous that it would give Holy Rollers visions of Hell that Dante would be jealous of. So the idea of participating in them has been becoming distasteful for a long time.
For example, when I voted for Biden in 2020—again, life long Democrat here, howdy!—I did so as someone who had been a fan of his from his disastrous 1988 presidential campaign, was happy to see him become Obama’s Vice President, who understood the quid pro quo that went on with letting Hillary Clinton run in 2016 even though I knew she didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning election but was glad to see him get his shot despite the circumstances that set up the 2020 campaign. And it was those circumstances—the Summer of Floyd, the Project Fear level campaigning against Trump—that began making me not want to vote anymore. Because I had worried that once the Democrats gave into using the politics of fear to get voters to turn out they would be forever bound to them. The Democratic Party, in my estimation, can’t go back to any sort of positive message politics, not without it coming from a transformative figure or after enough defeats to get the party elite to recognize the problem and make a shift.
It’s sad to watch.
It’s even sadder to participate in, because of all the fear and loathing about in The Land Of The Free, Home Of The Brave.
Of course both sides are guilty of it and both sides are making it worse, with their respective tribes now locked into their particular reality tunnel and fractal consensus reality.
What sensible sentient life form wants to participate in that sort of politics?
Definitely not yours truly for one.
It won’t be that big of a loss for the Democrats because I live in The Golden State. Although I have my hedge bet on this state flipping from blue to red this time around—again, I’m a politics junkie and I keep looking at the polls and trends despite my better judgment—I highly doubt the loss of my one piddling vote would cost Biden the election.
Of course that’s under the assumption that I’m one of few.
And like my hedge bet above, I have a hedge bet that I’m not. That there may be a distinct lack of Democratic Party voters who turn up at the polls this year, this cycle. If there are, it won’t be because of GOP efforts to suppress the vote. It will be more likely because a chunk of people who voted Biden in the first time simply can’t bring themselves to do it again.
Why?
Remember what I said about fractalizing consensus realities?
That’s why.
In other words, to the party faithful, either there from hope or fear, there is no other choice. Besides, everything is going as well as it can. The economy is doing great. Sure, there’s war in Europe, courtesy of Russia, but it isn’t spreading. And the whole Israel/Hamas thing is just a thing they go through every few years. And, and…
One steps into another consensus reality where prices have never been higher while paychecks run shorter. Where the days of even what has been treated as the Greatest Plague To Befall Man since The Black Plague don’t look so bad in terms of what one paid at the grocery store or on his or her utility bill or their rent. And the elements of that consensus reality are what I have picked up from conversations had with and overheard from fellow Democrats.
As I have said numerous times since 2020, I can’t be the only one seeing this.
Not when there are news reports saying there’s a swing of Black and Hispanic voters, generally more male than female, switching to Trump.
And I’m not even talking about the protest voters who have shown up because of the Biden Administration and therefore the Democrats’ support of Israel.
I’m talking about regular voters. The same people I thought would stay away from the polls in 2016 with Hillary as the nominee.
If I’m not the only one seeing this, then there has to be someone in the Democratic Party apparatus who sees this movement of voters into the abstention category. Hopefully.
In conversations with my mother over the last few years, I’ve often imagined a guy working for Biden who at every turn asked the most obvious questions when faced with certain situations, like, “Are you sure you want to do this?”, “Why do we want to be president in the years after Corona-Chan Came To Town? It’s going to be a mess”, and “Who’s bright idea was that?” At least I hope there’s such a person or group of people.
Just as I’m afraid there may not be.
As I’ve said in conversations with folks from 2019 forwards, it’s been harder and harder for me to keep a grasp on what’s going to happen. For most folks, they general don’t think about that beyond paying next month’s bills and possibly how to pay for kids’ college. For me, I’ve always prided myself on being a good predictor of events. As I wrote about Trump and 2020 elsewhere, I had figured that cycle was so contentious that one side or the other would be rioting in the streets on Election Night or thereafter, depending on who won. This is the basis of my conclusion that I was right about my prediction and my attitude that the Summer of Floyd was one side simply being too early and January 6th being the other side being too late.
Unfortunately both of those events have left lingering effects on everything surrounding politics in 2024.
As I have heard, courtesy of Dr. Karlyn Borysenko’ s Socialism Saturdays livestream on her YouTube channel, there are activists already planning for some sort of action this coming summer. I have seen a flyer put out by the Revolutionary Communist Part of America asking for folks to gather in Chicago for this summer’s Democratic Party convention, with the goal of reviving the energy of 1968. I can imagine that all sorts of crazy militia and other groups on the right are making similar plans for a better executed (pardon the word choice) January 6th action in the event of Trump losing the election.
Or as I said on Facebook, we are in a complete hot mess of hot messes.
I for one have no interest in any kind of hot mess. Not unless it involves my acquiring super powers and nobody wants that besides myself.
So I will be on the sidelines for this election and possibly every election cycle going forward.
The only thing I can see that would be interesting me enough to get back into voting is a candidate that’s pro space exploration and colonization, pro police, pro business, pro free speech, pro nuclear power, pro nanotechnology and genetic engineering. And I don’t see such a candidate coming on any horizon anytime soon.
But, like a good politics junkie, I will be watching events unfold.
Let’s hope they unfold in a way that doesn’t spark more fear and loathing, especially not of each other.
And yes, the Watchmen piece is still in the works, I promise.
Until next time, folks.
Namaste, y’all!
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