This morning’s New York Times all-vaccine-all-the-time pornshow had in its lineup this shot, which looked for all the world like a scene out of Woody Allen’s Sleeper or perhaps a Yes Men stunt.
But even the Yes Men have tragically shifted from irony to compliance, their satirical moniker now altogether un-satirical. They have gone totally mute in the face of the tsunami of cultural compliance to Corona Time tyrannies.
That zany Trickster suggestion is not a commentary on the mass psychosis of Corona Time, but an old brainstorming suggestion from years ago. Though these brilliant gonzo activists – who even found an institutional home in recent years at New York University – turned one jaw-dropping truth-to-power trick after another in years past, they have gone mute about the fact that one of their satirical tropes came true – not just for a single city, but for the whole world. You will search high and low on their website for even a feeble peep of protest about the global wave of totalitarianism unfolding before our eyes.
Cultural historians of the future will surely wonder about Earth Year 2020’s conspicuous absence of irony and satire. Take for example, this neat graphic from today’s Time’s Op-Ed piece, “Who’s Next in Your State’s Vaccine Line?”:
Those blue figures in the front of the line are police, the sepia ones grocers. The article sought to make a point about how according to the CDC, both are considered critical workers with maximum exposure to the virus, but the police received preferential access to the mRNA injection “vaccine.” Living in a city with a police force (35,000+) larger than most nations’ armies, I see that graphic as a canary-in-the-coal mine telltale both of how militarized our communities are, and of how fearful the propertied class was long before plandemic-induced economic catastrophe arrived.
In a time of crisis, every billboard, every subway poster, every slogan-of-the-day, every newspaper headline and infographic becomes an arcanum shimmering with significance – if we can but raise ourselves out of the Yes Men/Women sleep of received wisdom into the wakefulness of independent thought and feeling and willing. For many years, as a tour guide and history teacher both, I have taught a simple trick of enlivening perception: stand on your head and look out at the world. The instantaneous shift of perspective is a gift that opens us up to see how routinized and complacent our outlook is.
When the world has turned inside-out and upside-down on its own, one need not do a handstand to enliven and sharpen perception. The world has gone ahead and done that for you! As these coming days warm up, as the world itself exhales again into green life after holding its breath all winter (and you have been holding your breath all year), practice this inside-out/upside-down trick, and see what happens.
From the microcosmic molecular level to the Macrocosmic Galactic level, inside-out/upside-down is the Cosmos’s fundamental method and gesture of creation. If the Cosmos has made such Beauty, Truth, and Wisdom with that method, why would we not emulate it?
I offer here for your consideration three Arcana, that have everything to do with humanity’s current crisis. Sit with them awhile. Turn them upside-down and inside-out, with your mind’s eye.
Do these three Arcana remind you of anything? Where do you find them inside you? Where outside you? From your unique place on the planet, your individual destiny, can you come up with a “trick” – an elegant, intelligent, gesture and method – to turn these three images into powerful healing tools for yourself and your brothers and sisters in a Time of Plague?