By Patrick Jamieson, Victoria

When a political figure like Donald Trump comes along, it’s best not to take him straight on. Better to look for what he symbolizes in the unconscious and make that conscious. Bob Dylan’s song Jokerman pretty well nails him as a post apocalyptic figure. Trump manifests the symptoms of a failing empire. He operates largely on the unconscious level, rarely surfacing into logical rationality. I have had a few crazy rich friends and acquaintances. If Trump were indigent, he would be locked up. Wealth or the illusion of wealth keeps these people out of the grasp of the usual authorities, but their instability eventually leads to their demise.

Someone like Trump has been on the horizon since the early 1960s, certainly since Kennedy’s assassination. If you think I want Barry Goldwater to move in next door and marry my daughter, you must think I am crazy, sang Bob Dylan in an early song. Nixon was an earlier monarchal type, and all his men came tumbling down. Ronald Reagan’s imperial presidency flashed a false face of friendly fascism. Now the masque has been torn away.

When 911 happened, Marnie Butler was trapped in Montreal. I was staying at her place during her absence, the phone rang and she greeted me with ‘turn on the TV it’s happening,’ the penetration of Amerika we had expected since the 1960s. It’s been unfolding at an accelerating pace ever since. In 2016, Marnie and her friend Henry turned to each early in the year and said that fool is going to beat Hillary Clinton.

As former editor of ICN Marnie distinguished herself with an uncanny prescience.

The regular media and mainstream politicians are still trying to figure out Trump in conventional terms, and planning responses accordingly. Forget it, the man is right off the map. Michael Higgins calls Pope Francis ‘The Disruptor’, which belies a preference for the established order, something that needs protecting. Trump will destroy what he is seen to be trying to protect, late stage national security corporate capitalism, the national business class.

In my circles we have long employed the metaphor that Americans are all crazy and the inmates are in charge of the asylum. Now this is literally true.

Best to view Trump through the looking glass, via artistic lenses. A paradoxical figure who has taken warmongering to a stage of accidentally allowing peace perhaps, a capitalist who has only lost fortunes, a criminal like Dashiel Hammet predicted in Red Harvest, where the whole society turns criminal. It goes on and on.

Trump is a symbol of the disintegration of the American empire, expect that to happen, plan accordingly. Every four hundred years a massive paradigm shift occurs in history. We are in the middle of such a shift. Trump is a symptom of collapse; expect the worst prepare for the best to come out of it…unification against his madness, a new way of perceiving the enemy through the lenses of artists like Dylan and collapse of the established order under the weight of its own inner contradiction such as Trump manifests. A new synthesis is the result of such a dialectic, this is the moment of opportunity that is implicit in every existential crisis. Such is the Grace of the moment.

Jokerman by Bob Dylan

Standing on the water casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing
Distant ships sailing into the mist
You were born with a snake in both of your fists
While a hurricane was blowing
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with truth so far off, what good will it do?

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

So swiftly the sun sets in the sky
You rise up and say goodbye to no one
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread
Both of their futures, so full of dread, you don’t show one
Shedding off one more layer of skin
Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within
You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds
Manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister
You’re going to Sodom and Gomorrah
But what do you care? Ain’t nobody there would want to marry your sister
Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame
You look into the fiery furnace, see the rich man without any name

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face
Well, the rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame
Preacher man seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain
Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks
Molotov’s cocktails and rocks behind every curtain
False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin
Only a matter of time ’til night comes steppin’ in
It’s a shadowy world, skies are slippery gray
A woman just gave birth to a prince today and dressed him in scarlet
He’ll put the priest in his pocket, put the blade to the heat
Take the motherless children off the street
And place them at the feet of a harlot
Oh, Jokerman, you know what he wants
Oh, Jokerman, you don’t show any response

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman