vol. 2 issue 27
Window over Washington is the docu-mental newsletter normally reserved for patron level subscribers, but I am making it available to all subscribers today.
Greetings,
Let’s discuss the helicopters. Someone, though oddly no one seems to know exactly who, used military craft to “rotor wash” protesters here in the District on Monday night. CBS News’s Major Garrett suggested in no uncertain terms that doing so was to “normalize” such actions, scare citizens from exercising their First Amendment right to protest peacefully, and to get the military ready for more such maneuvers.
What is rather curious is that while the craft has been identified as a Lakota medevac chopper, part of the DC National Guard fleet, no one can seem to figure out who authorized its use, and frankly, it’s not even clear who was piloting it. The DC National Guard’s commanding general has ordered an investigation.
Long-time readers will know that last summer, I wondered aloud why there was such an uptick in military aircraft traffic here in the National Capital Region, and have continued to track it, occasionally reporting what I see in this newsletter.
Several readers said there was no way that the military was planning to use helicopters or other aircraft against US civilians, but I have never been so sure. For one reason, when this POTUS makes threats, I believe him. From the very beginning of his campaigning, I was struck by how much he moved like Mussolini, and of course, have always detected the menace and evil in his tone and actions.
In the back of my mind, I have always held the possibility that such militaristic fantasies of his would have to come true. As a reality television star, POTUS definitely has the mojo to create fantasies that seem real, and now, as psychologist and A Duty to Warn co-founder, John Gartner has suggested, we are all trapped inside his fantasy.
But there is another reason that I have not ever dropped my guard about this possibility, and that is not because of a perception I have, but an actual stated message from the Pentagon that they have been preparing for the day when the battleground shifts to urban streets. Which urban streets? They don’t say. Could be here, could be anywhere. I have shared that video before, but here is the link once again:
And now, there is this: a military-facing publication, Defense One, is reporting that the members of the DC National Guard doesn’t even have stores of tear gas and rubber bullets, and neither does Park Police – both of which were “seen” as the ones quelling the crowd, in picture after picture, so the prevailing stories that they were the ones responsible for attacking the protesters is falling apart.
If not them, then who?
Might POTUS and his posse have their own band of mercenaries masquerading as legitimate troops? It’s a theory, one made stronger in my mind since it seems unclear whether the Pentagon has been practicing how to use our military aircraft against us for its “urban warfare” games.
All of this is now coming together: the president’s fantasies are being made real, and although as I write this, I am hearing that the Secretary of Defense Mark Esper does not support the law which prevents POTUS from sending troops into our American streets, when has the law stopped our self-proclaimed “Law and order president” before?
We do know where this is going. We have known from the very first day, during POTUS’s inauguration, when we were put on notice about “American carnage” that he wanted to be entertained with military force. That carnage, he said, would end with him, but no one was sure what the hell he was talking about: What carnage? It was all in his mind, and in his deft talent for double speak, he would end it, but really he is apparently committed to creating it, as I have considered here before.
This is going to end in flames, for us, for him, for someone.
And I think that it was inevitable.
The president is only the focal point of nihilism in this country, he is not the one who brought it to town. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and others such as Senator Ron Johnson (R, Wis.), POTUS’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows (R, NC), and so many others who can’t bring themselves to condemn a stitch of what happened here in the District on Monday evening, when peaceful protestors were treated with violence, they are all self-absorbed hypocrites.
They embraced Trumpism, not acquiesced to it. In their case, this is not sycophantism. It’s like meets like. Did they fund and approve the Pentagon’s odd exercises? It would be in keeping with their modus operandi of power at all costs.
But they are there with our permission. They have leveraged their connections and money, but we didn’t protest that, and we didn’t vote in large enough numbers to oust them.
Now, the protests have taken POTUS and his ilk by surprise. They’re accustomed to the rest of us doing as we’re told, to stay asleep and indifferent so we can be slaves to their system.
POTUS’s nihilistic, amoral narcissism has never been in doubt for me, but using it as the leverage to oust him by declaring him mentally unfit by way of the 25th Amendment is and has always been a fool’s errand because he is the avatar of us. We could depose him and then what? Another just like him would fill the void.
POTUS is not just “a” narcissist. He is our narcissism. He is the end game of extremes where we place not our individualism but our specialness at the center, and break our connections to one another, resulting in extreme chauvinism, extreme hierarchy, extreme racism, extreme materialism, extreme hate. He represents our self-deluded belief that we can consume ourselves into oblivion and still somehow survive. He is what happens when we let the nihlists lull and keep us asleep.
This is a moment in our nation’s history where we will either claim or forfeit to evil our collective soul.
And we do have a soul. We do have an innate Americanism, but we’ve been so shut down by apathy, lack of agency, fear, anxiety, depression.
Soulfulness is key to our democracy. Our soul is inextricably linked to freedom. Souls like to be free, not enslaved, either tethered to material goods or in service to an unquestioned sense of identity.
To hell with the clinical definition of narcissism. It exists in a space and time beyond diagnosis. Narcissism is evil, and evil is real. It is a dark force that arises when we refuse to love and be kind, which is what happens when we are pushed to embrace the extremes. I am through pretending otherwise. Evil rushes to fill the void that abandoning our connection to what is actually real, not fantasy, creates. What is real? Dominion, not domination. Dominion is to know we are all connected, equal but not the same, neither superior nor inferior.
A reckoning with our darkness was inevitable. We had to see it to own it, own it to transcend it, and transcend it to create something new. That the man to make it so would be named “Trump” is so poetic. All that domination – it just can’t be sustained.
And neither can he.
And yet, the future is not decided. Our failure to connect might be embodied in what we see around us now, but we are not our failures. If we accept that our apathy and indifference is what allowed our evil to spread, then we can feel the impulse to stay awake and to care again. I see it happening. That is why the protests are largely peaceful and why they are growing, not shrinking. It is also why they are a threat to the true terrorists – the nihilists who seek power over us, not in concert with us, at all costs.
Recognizing and owning our evil is the only way to discard our evil and create something new, something ensouled.
What will we do when this portion of our new world, post-pandemic, post-racism, post-delusional self-importance is behind us?
The choppers, the tanks…it’s all happening. For how long depends on our resolve to commit to what is new and different, to walking away from all that winning. What comes after?
We do have a choice.
Whitney
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