Up In Flames

An incendiary ritual

Back in high school, a period now known as the Dark Ages, we had an annual bonfire to launch the homecoming ritual, because in Texas, high school football season is a form of religion, and that’s what folks did before carbon dioxide was evil.

After high school, I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I took part in an annual ritual called “Zozobra,” or burning of Old Man Gloom, a tradition started in 1924, by Will Shuster.

Later, living in London, I experienced Bonfire Night, in which an effigy of Guy Fawkes is incinerated in a quasi-political purge to commemorate the Gunpowder Plot. Of course, this was long before England became a Muslim country, so I’m not sure if the 300-year-old ritual is still practiced these days.

When I moved to Barcelona, there was an occasion when some friends grabbed me and dragged me to Valencia for the Las Fallas festival, the highlight of which is La Cremà…the burning of a large figure called ninots.

I then moved to Munich, where I vaguely recall taking part in a spring ritual called Scheibenschlagen, where once again, effigies are burned, beer is served, and memories are few and far between.

In the course of my epic backpacking journey around the world, I found myself in some little town somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, which is somewhere in northern India. Once again, I found myself liquored up and participating the Vijayadashami festival, where demons were ritually carbonized to re-enact Rama’s victory in the Ramayana. Of course, this one may have been a fever dream. I’ve never really been sure.

A little over a decade later, I found myself on a converted school bus called Our Lady of Perpetual Combustion, on an absinthe-fueled journey to the Nevada desert to witness the Burning Man, a neo-tribalist ritual, upon which I tossed a few items abandoned by an ex-spouse, to exorcise a few personal demons.

Needless to say, when I watched the Demonrat Neural Conversion, I immediately recognized the ritual. Thanks to Global Swarming, they couldn’t actually immolate their demon, but they spent four days sticking pins in their virtual effigy of Donald Trump that was ever-present and roasting on the mental grill.

In lieu of a bonfire, they instead offered bloody human sacrifice and self-sterilization in a perverse anti-fertility festival. It was a sight to behold. Instead of defining their political agenda, they chose to identify themselves by their hate for a single human being. The entire event seemed to swallow light and life, and elevate as eucharistic rite the anti-virtues of gloom, spite and abhorrence.

In keeping with this odd sort of anti-everything celebration, the Demonrats nominated a creature who was not a natural born citizen, did not appear on a single ballot, had not been vetted in a primary process, had not received a single vote, and who was thus eminently qualified to “defend democracy” against the Orange Ogre, who had met all the above democratic criteria.

In the aftermath of this neo-paganist orgy, RFK abandoned the organization that has identified his family for the better part of a century, in the course of a speech that shredded the party of his ancestors. Even more shocking (to some) was his endorsement of the Orange Ogre that the Demonrats had just spent four days barbecuing.

I found this move inevitable, since in my view, Kennedy and Trump are both actually paleo-Yankee liberals. The goal posts have moved so far now, that they aren’t even in the same stadium with the political ideologies of generations past.

There is no such thing as a conservative candidate, as I would define one. The “choices” this round are Really Big Government, or Shockingly Humongous Government. In either case, we can be sure that the Leviathan will send “…hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

Even from my perch 10,000 miles away, I still feel dirty for having watched even a small part of the Demonrat Neural Conversion. It’s like the morning after an Art Car Tribal Honk, slathered in body paint, reeking of burnt wood, and nursing a raging hangover, more afraid of what I don’t remember, than what I do.

When I say that the 2024 US election cycle is strange, I don’t mean in a weird sort of way, though that is certainly applicable. What I mean is strange in a foreign, not-from-around-here kind of way. I don’t recognize these symbols, rituals and incantations. I’ve witnessed some strange things in my life, but I am left dazed and flummoxed by the images and sounds that spewed forth from my global comm center. I feel like Jean-Luc Picard listening to the Tamarians — I hear the words, but the meaning is beyond my ken.

I must say, though, that it’s all perfectly in keeping with that bizarre event in Paris a month ago, complete with burning torches, corpulent Christs and humans denying simple reality. The Western world has become a neo-pagan tribalist culture warp, complete with Frankenfurters and floor shows, and I’m Eddie roaring out of cold storage on my non-DEI hog demanding to know what in the hell is going on around here.

Maybe I’ve just become one of those cranky old men throwing rocks at kids in the yard, but I rather think not.

The film du jour is Liquid Sky (1982), directed by Slava Tsukerman and starring Anne Carlisle in a dual role as both a male and a female. At the time, this was a bizarre experience, but now it seems like coverage from the floor of the DNC. I particularly like the film’s score that takes Philip Glass, Brian Eno and Mike Oldfield, and puts them in an Osterizer on the puree setting. Enjoy!

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