vol. 3 issue 3
HERO: CAPITOL POLICE OFFICER EUGENE GOODMAN
Greetings,
Watch this video. I warn you, you will feel chilled, emotional. If you don’t, you’re ill.
You have what I call “mind cancer”.
Last week I wrote that I hadn’t quite pegged what emotion I was feeling. Perhaps it’s impossible to distill my emotional range after the insurrection at the Capitol into one word, but I am experiencing something in common with many of you: outrage.
I have wobbled back and forth since the evidence of how deeply sick so many of our fellow citizens are, alternately feeling frightened that we are teetering on the edge of a fascist take-over. Feeling fear that with the help of their key asset, the current White House occupant, our most historically hostile enemy, Russia, has largely succeeded at bringing Putin’s “long game” plan to fruition: letting his most hated enemy tear itself up from the inside so that he and his oligarch friends like the Occupant can sell us all off for parts.
And these things are true, and my fear of them comes and goes. (See links below for sources on how true.)
But the outrage is what endures. And unlike these idiots besieging a true American hero, Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who saved countless lives with his abject bravery, I am still, I am not racing.
Theirs is an immolating enragement, derangement, a mind cancer oozing out of their gnarly orifices.
Mine is outrage: a centripetal force, pulling my reserves inward, fortifying me and focusing my attention on my heart.
Certainly, I am angry at myself, ashamed that even I haven’t fully understood how all the pieces fit together, how I still, after all the evidence that I myself have been uncovering for years as a policy reporter and as the publisher of this online journal, did not quite understand that white supremacy is not just “a thing” but an enduring, pervasive, sinister saga in which the lie of the “American Dream” and its resultant anxiety and depression, the original raison d’etre for the creation of this publication, is just a subtext.
Yet, the evidence has been there, and we have been examining it these past two, now going on three, years even if it took this attack on us all for me to finally — finally!— understand the monster I had been describing. With this epiphany about the pervasive malignancy, I am no longer angry at myself, and I will atone for the shame by giving this monster a name: mind cancer. I can fight something that has a name.
Mind cancer is the malignancy and specialness is the carcinogen.
I will fight it with my heart.
Mind cancer is multi-factorial. Fascism, apathy, reductionism, entitlement, self-pity, stupidity, infantilism, nihilism, narcissism, cynicism, hierarchy, patriarchy, mendacity, treason, immorality…it’s all in that nasty, rotting, smelly malignant tumor of a story we’ve been feeding on ever since our Reconstruction Era, that period after the first US Civil War when the losers in the South (my beloved South) began spinning their resentful and delusional tales of having been the victims of a Lost Cause, where the special godly way of plantation life was interrupted by aggressors from the North.
Rather than accept defeat gracefully, rather than face the fact that their special need to own humans so they alone could profit off the land and keep power in their cabal resulted in years of chaos, bloodshed and economic mayhem, they skillfully wove their self-glorifying strands of specialness into the fabric of our national myth, a myth that also suited the needs of plenty of the rest of us.
So deftly threaded through the tapestry of who we are is the self-pitying sickness of specialness, it has obscured the truth: our Constitution is special, but not a single one of us is.
We are equal but not the same.
That is what makes our nation special: it lets us all be equal.
Our land, this nation, is the most special place on earth, and why we have always been the place most revered, most desired as the place to go and dream true dreams and then make them real, the dreams predicated on the pursuit of our individual visions of happiness.
America is special, not me. Not you. Not your mother. Not your cult leader. Not your white Jesus. Not your pop star. Not your banker. Not your movement. Not your cause. Not your nothing.
But there was Officer Goodman — a good man, who also happened to be a black man — protecting your right, once again, to think all that shit of yours matters more than he does. And also, Officer Brian Sicknick, bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher-wielding group of rioters, because he did his duty, the same as Officer Goodman, and tried to protect the lives of our lawmakers.
I guess “blue lives” matter unless they don’t. So much for moral equivalency.
After 150 years of being fed lies by losers, no wonder why our minds are sick with the cancer of deceit and betrayal. Being told we’re special sounds and feels and tastes so sweet. It drugs us into giving away our power, our agency, causes us to outsource our sense of right and wrong, our morality — all turned into profit centers for the few.
The president a narcissist? Let’s debate that as a few (and only a few) of us make hundreds of millions. Is that a true diagnosis? How do we know? What is illness? Let’s ask the pharmaceutical industry and the prophets (profits) of insurance monopolies to tell us what sick really is.
Is he really inciting insurrection? What is insurrection? Isn’t he just the representation of the will of the people? What is a lie? What is fake news? You are the liar, because you say I am not special…yada, yada, bing, bang, the noise! The noise!
Mind cancer.
Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. Billions and billions of ka-ching.
If we still possessed our agency, if we still believed that our mission is to create one nation out of many, e pluribus unum, not to be asinine children babbling “In God We Trust”, we’d not be asking these idiot questions because our ability to know right from wrong, bad from good, sick from healthy, sublime from evil, would be inherent in us, not outsourced to profiteering prophets.
We would never have needed to let this snake in the White House show us just how vacant, how much like Zombies, we truly have become. Oh, dear God — yours, mine, and that of all the sinners among us — may we not waste this opportunity to come to our senses.
Because up until now, we have been without them. We have sold our faculties of discernment for the right to think we are special. We let have let the sweet-talkers, the true devils, suck out our senses and infect our minds with visions of our better-than-you-ness.
Mind cancer.
And by the way, is any of that ka-ching in your pocket? Really? How much? Not enough? What is enough? Why do you deserve it? How can you get it before someone else does? How much energy will you put into doing so?
Mind cancer.
The face of this insurrection might be the Occupant’s but the heart of it is ours. All of ours. And for some, like Officer Goodman, it is his only because he had no choice but to synch the rhythm of his being to it, if he ever had a chance to survive.
Mind cancer.
How do we treat it?
By nourishing our hearts. Feeding ourselves self-forgiveness, to start. And also to ourselves and one another, perspective, forbearance, hope, patience, and most of all truth. Not alternative facts. Truth. And there really is only one truth:
We are all created equal.
That is what is special. It makes me tearful with joy every time I type it.
You who hate what I say can take your fascism and cuddle with it. See how long before you feel cold and alone, trapped, mutated into a person who says and does things that once upon a time you never would have thought yourself capable.
Yes, I believe there will be more violence. Yes, I know there are those who think I am the one who is deluded, must be put down, but I am on the right side of this moment.
Democracy will win, and mind cancer will be diminished, because as democracy grows, mind cancer shrinks. Truth will out.
Which is to say: Good little heart of mine, get busy.
And also to say, Thank you from the bottom of my little heart for reading and supporting docu-mental: mapping — and healing — the american state of mind.
Peace,
Whitney
Erratum: This post was updated at 7:30pm on January 15, 2021, to say “self-forgiveness”, not “forgiveness” to clarify that “unity” is not really possible unless criminals and terrorists are brought to justice. However, forgiveness of self for not seeing the actual scope of the damage until it got this drastic, is essential, in this author’s opinion.
The Russians aren’t coming, they’re already here:
What to expect in the final fascist days of Trump’s reign
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
Hope is coming, however, and better days are too
For patron subscribers, this weekend, be on the lookout for another special guest appearance of mundane astrologer Elisabeth Grace who gives us an in-depth look at what to expect over the next week, the next year, and beyond, now that the underbelly of who we are as a nation has been exposed.
Our conversation imparts so much hope and perspective into the evils we’ve unleashed on ourselves, I think it can help you put your troubled mind at ease if you are worried the fascists will win. Spoiler alert: they won’t.
To get access to this video and podcast when they are released, become a patron subscriber of docu-mental.