Guilly's Guide Day 6
The Height of Power or the Height of Folly?
Greetings beloved to Guilly’s Guide. Today is entitled “The Height of Power or the Height of Folly.”
One would assume I am referring to the current President and his power, and I am. But I am more talking about the series of think pieces that are going around today saying that this Saturday, Trump and his team are at the zenith of their power. Basically :relax guys.
We often use this to mean the height of power, but in astronomy terms, where the saying originates it means: the point in the sky directly above the observer.
Much like the all seeing eye above the saying “out of many come, one” on our dollar bills, this administration is at the astronomical zenith of his power. Directly over us like a funeral pall.
Sackcloth. Ashes. This utterly powerful amorphous all powerful being, antithetical to all that is good. While I feel the weight in the air, the worry, the fear, the shame, I realized I was the only in my people in my circle not afraid.
It took me a few days to realize this with some stunning alarm.
Perhaps the more holistically minded of you will think this is just the shell shock right? After almost a decade marching, screaming, ranting, and talking about this unique threat to American democracy it would make sense right? Perhaps I am numb to chaos. My CPTSD actually feels at home in this state.
I could join in on pathologization of myself and the rest of the America. We have all become arm chair mental health experts who ain’t never turn in one paper on the subject. You can stop diagnosing yourself, this is abnormal in any republic, and the alarm you are feeling is your bodies safety mechanism. Listen to it.
Maybe I just fucking saw this coming like most people who believe in the concepts like a growing vibrant democracy, abolition, or who just hold a deep suspicion of the State. Maybe I even went as far to open my mouth about in a book, way back in Dear Church:
“White supremacy and xenophobia experienced a resurgence after two terms of a black president. A large segment of white America (much larger than most of my progressive white friends and colleagues imagined) viewed the black man in the White House as an enemy who “illegally” held the office of the presidency. The Trump campaign tapped into the fear of many white Americans that they were losing power—creating enemies and easy scapegoats that fueled the fires of hatred which have been smoldering since the founding of this country. Only the fear of losing power can provide a population this kind of hatred. To be frank, Trump’s instincts were right. He ran a masterful campaign. He leveraged social media to spread propaganda and misinformation in unprecedented and stunning ways—strategies that are sure to have an impact on campaigns for decades to come.”
(Duncan. Dear Church. Broadleaf. 2019)
Maybe I have been talking about this way to long :
“I am on the ragged edge. The year prior was nonstop: I just completed a book tour for my first work, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US, and have spent the last year working at least forty hours a week at the church I was serving in Brooklyn while crisscrossing the country talking about systemic racism in the church. I had been to almost every region in my denomination and in this country preparing us with everything I had for a moment like this. Like the one unfolding in front of a captive audience during quarantine from the streets of Minneapolis. The macabre opera that is white supremacy in America, with its piercing falsetto shattering the thin veneer of civilization white America happily cast away at a moment’s notice in its lust to gorge itself on Black blood. And I am tired. So we came to hide me in the woods from Black trauma. It isn’t working. I have been peppered with it all morning. I am supposed to be tying in a neat little bow on this book for you, the whole point of this story. That hope, grace, and mercy are still alive and well in this country. I succumb to the text messages and open Twitter. I watch as a Black reporter from CNN is arrested while live on the air— he was Black and was covering the state troopers as they moved into the area of uprising inthe Twin Cities. I read a tweet from the sitting president of the United States suggesting the best way to deal withBlack folk when they are riled up is to gun them down. He suggests that police start shooting us.”
(Duncan. United States of Grace. Broadleaf 2021)
Maybe I have tried to make art out of the fall of an empire:
In the year of the white MAGA lord 2022
on a brisk fall day
before I head out into the Sun
I can see the shadows across everyone
in this story,
I can see america trying
to
swallow us.
From overt support of perhaps
an orange slab of meat
animated by the nether realms
if not the,
then one of European Christianity’s
vaunted “antichrists.”
With more sure to come.
What else could american evangelicalism produce
other than Donald Trump?
Name another fruit that could grow
from that vine?
What else but the music industry
could produce Kanye West?
What other vine
but this one
with its particular brand of
Black intellectual and
artistic exploitation,
destruction,
literally
pressing the rind of our bodies
to squeeze another
dollar out of us before tossing us
into the wastebasket of modernity,
could this parody of their own self grow
from anywhere else but this bitter vine?
( Duncan. Psalms of my People. Broadleaf. 2022)
Or maybe our rage is justified. Maybe it’s the time to beat plowshares into spears. Maybe the day has finally come where we will see what this country, you, me: all of us are really made of. Are we the ever expanding dream of a big tent republic making room for all, or are we still the white supremacists nation of the late 50’s?
The truth is team we are both always. There are always a few thousand of us out millions trying to do what we can, and hold the line. But we could probably use your help this time.
I won’t tell you everything will be ok. For some of us it won’t be. Perhaps for me. Perhaps I will be the victim of political violence.
I will die on my feet like the free Black, queer, trans person I am. I am not alone. They have awakened a sleeping giant of liberation. They, those who support this administration and see nothing wrong with what’s happening or proposed, think they have won. This is simply because they don’t understand grief, empathy, and not wishing harm on your enemies. They don’t know how good people of conscience must gather the will to rise, and weigh much risk and vulnerability before facing giants, monsters, and beasts.
This is alien to those in power right now.
It will make the way they get sucker punched even better.
Germany is the size of New Jersey. Wake up.
We haven’t even begun to fight yet.
Trump is at his zenith. He can look down us. But as the political, economic, and social orbits shift like they always do he won’t be at his zenith. We will never get quite as good look at his evil, petty, and gangster ambitions.
Take a good hard look. You will need it going forward. It’s folly to think he will stay there, just like it is folly to think someone else in his orbit won’t come right back around.
A zenith implies a cycle. A wheel. We must break the wheel by throwing our lives in the spokes, or we can say goodbye to the Madisonian principles we were finally seeing being handed to all, and perhaps for the republic we knew. Not because of some authoritarian rise to power, but because the character, the nature of who we are will be so scarred that authoritarianism will seem like freedom.
It’s time to break the wheel.
Written in love and liberation
Still surprisingly the rev. lenny duncan ( they/them fatale)