A New and Darker McCarthy Era Descends with the Night, by Edward Curtin

Nobody has an exact fix on what’s going on or what’s coming, but there’s a widespread feeling that it won’t be good. From Edward Curtin at edwardcurtin.com:

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see. . . . What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? . . . . A steady storm of correspondences!”
– Theodore Roethke, In a Dark Time

We are all obscurantists now, deep in crepuscular propaganda, looking for light. “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there,” as Bob Dylan’s sings in “Not Dark Yet.” “Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain.”

It’s a sentiment more and more people can identify with as dark, dangerous, and duplicitous news reports loot the public’s mind of any sense of logical understanding by presenting stories that contradict themselves, while inducing great anxiety. Double-binds, Catch 22s, contronymal cages meant to trap the public in impossible conundrums.

(A contronym is a word having two definitions that contradict each other. Two examples are the word bolt, which can mean to lock with a bolt and to flee, and clip, which means to attach and to detach.)

Chaos reigns, as it is meant to do, as the Bill of Rights is stripped, Palestinians are slaughtered, nuclear war becomes more likely, and the crackdown on dissent increases dramatically under the second Trump administration. Today’s operation chaos, with its spying on American citizens, etc., makes the CIA’s previous illegal Operation Chaos (1967-74) spying operation seem quaint by comparison. Today’s surveillance is synonymous with the Internet and digital technology. It is getting very dark indeed.

The American oligarchic political system that is endlessly debated and fixates people’s attention is a contronymal system that contains positive and negative poles that cancel each other out while keeping the believer frozen and frustrated. It is essentially Orwell’s Doublethink with a twist, which is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accept both as true; such is a mainstay of effective propaganda. Once you are in it, you are trapped because there are no outside references – the simulated system of thought is your cage. Biden vs. Trump is an example of this cage, a cage created to keep people ensnared in confusion.

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