Very soon - indeed the time is already upon us - forces far stronger than any mere individual psyche will be carrying the day, swaying uncountable millions in the United States in their surging tide. Collectively they are called the presidential campaign season. Mimetically they have names I have already mentioned and the reader can examine in the sidebar under the labels "Girard n Girardians" and "Mimetic theory" (and also, of course, "Paganism").
I may soon be blogging less ostensibly on the political venue here in America simply because the rhetoric is becoming so polarized and ripe for scandal that inferences and conclusions are leapt at with the lightning speed of the accusatory gesture.
I will, however, say this: if people were dismayed at the way the present administration came into power and arrogated to itself a whole new prerogative and precedent for governing, one has seen nothing compared to what will happen when and if the Democratic left assumes office in January 2009.
The difference will be the flip-side of the Dionysian mandate: for the former think Pentheus of Euripides' THE BACCHAE; for the latter, think the priest of Dionysus, the Theban women (the bacchae), or Dionysus himself. Ostensibly magisterial and even-handed; surreptitiously seeking new fodder for the victimary mechanism at the heart of all pagan cultures.
So my final word on presidential politics in the United States of America is: carry out Eliot's injunction - prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action - and do not fall into either camp easily.
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