It was in Greil Marcus' "Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan and the Basement Tapes" (1997) that I first read of "the old, weird America", this feverish realm of Christianist violence, its ghosts wandering the epochs, only at times returning to the human world, via folk songs and Appalachian despair.

This state of mind in which you are so utterly out of your mind that you don't and can't see your own derangement; in which you are untouchable in your weirdness which, in turn, enforces your sense of timeless strength and control. ("True Detectives", SE1, plays on that theme.)

I never quite understood this state of mind, although I sensed its mythological allure, as if from afar. Only now did I recognize this "old, weird America", could pin it down, and find it embodied in a Laura Loomer, and, as her drooling uncle in spirit, in a Donald Trump.

Both have no qualms with redeeming the world if they have to, and both won't give a thought about the violence that comes with that. Because it's not "their" violence but the violence inherent in the "events" they only bring about. It's not their fault.

To call them Christian Jihadists would be a misnomer, but the level of derangement is comparable to the Jihadists. And this needs attention. These people are not rational, not reasonable, they live outside of time, and, in a sense, bring a demonic world to this one. ("Buffy The Vampire Slayer" plays on that.)

They are deeply irrational, unbothered by everything, even untouched by the material wealth they happen to accumulate. They act as if they live in a bubble of paranoia, and what makes them dangerous is their ability to successfully bend the world to correspond to their psychotic dream world. (Which is why children like Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, Pamela Geller, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, the Breitbart yokels, but also Bill Maher and others, don't understand them and think they can ride them like little ponies.)

And then you watch how a Loomer or a Trump, unfazed by the discrepancies between their deranged sense of the world and the world we live in, simply keep going in remolding the latter to their psychotic dream world.

They do experience cognitive dissonance, but on a non-verbal, proto-linguistic level. So they don't verbalize or reflect but simply move aimlessly and, sometimes nonchalantly, sometimes brutish, push around people and circumstances until all fit their sense of paranoid stasis.

They don't feel much in that situation (if they can feel at all). They themselves would never see themselves as ruthless, cruel, or violent. They don't see why everybody makes a fuss. They don't feel, they just slide into manifesting a world they at the same time suffer from and have privileged access to. They are the high priests of the demons who possess them.

This is not the sphere of rational deliberation, of negotiation of conflicting interests and points of view. This is making the world part of the demonic sphere only they have access to. These people don't act rationally.

And they have no qualms using the powers at hand to bend the world to the resemblance and the liking of these ghosts. The "old, weird America" is a world whose timelessness consists in the "out-of-time-liness" of the abusive bond of perpetrator and victim. With its specific and typical language, its imagery, its specific rituals to convey meaning, purpose, peculiarity. You shouldn't vote such people into office or lend them political power. Not just because of what they will do. But because you will never understand what they do and why.

cc #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten