Now is the time of monsters
POEM: Everyday trauma creates malicious moral offense. I read out this new poem last night.
Now is the time of monsters Oh cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right. The world of men is all a-tilt, Where up is down and clean is filth. Now is the time of monsters. Oh cursed lies with surveillance spies. No privacy with ICE cold eyes. The place of truth is a shithouse cry with little mice and louder sighs. Now is the time of monsters Oh cursed times to be alive, Commie ghosts and capital easy in the nest. Solidarity to be where unions thrive and we take risks to organize. Now is the time of monsters. Oh cursed state, that looks back and says, make it great. Coal and iron don't know they're late. Robber Barons - the poor castrate. Now is the time of monsters. Oh cursed men, ICE are dressed like Black-and-tan's. It's strange, they have brown skin and arms. Covered face with ugly charms. Now is the time of monsters. © John Munnelly July 2025
Trauma Bonding USA Style
What is going on now in the United States government is similar to or exactly like the injury resulting from dealing with a pathological Narcissist. The pathological narcissist creates a state of chaos and confusion for their victim(s) that creates an addictive vulnerability in the victim. A trauma connection. These trauma bonds are attachments formed through repeated abuse and intermittent reinforcement (occasional reward or temporary let up). The occasional release of the chaotic pressure temporarily makes the victim feel a serotonin jolt of relief. The same Narcissist or force that is causing the hurt is the one then stepping in to say they are saving you. It's a bizarre, yet real control thing. There’s a cartoon that illustrates this - a guy sets the fire round the back of the house and is selling you fire insurance at the front door. This control is called a trauma bond and is akin to Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe why fox viewers stay watching. People ask why cult members don’t escape - it’s because they actu ally can’t. Why do cult members seemingly choose (vote for) something that will make their lives immeasurably worse and goes against their supposed morality or religion? They don't choose to, they are controlled and obedient. It’s the cult leader pattern of control. It is the same as asking a beaten wife “why didn’t you just leave?” There's a dependency established. And they are thought captured.
Moral Injury
The entire country is suffering a moral injury. It is similar to how Catholics had to put up with terrible internal offenders. Literal predators of children. Daily we see similar predatory men prowl around in strange half-baked khaki uniforms to perpetuate offenses against our human friends and neighbors in our ‘political parishes’. Instead of sexual abuse by the trusted priestly authority figures - we are getting politically offended against. And the narcissist has no boundaries, so we are mostly powerless to prevent it. We thereby lose our trust in the entire state because we are being politically abused. In this scenario Party one (Republican/GOP) is the metaphorical out of control alcoholic abuser and party two (Democrats) - the conflicted meek spouse. The Democrats are somewhat complicit and out of practice, they have been playing nice bipartisan games for too long. So they have retained no hard left-wing skills to acknowledge and manage the needs of their flock. So they perform as a cosplay opposition, and now they can’t seem to manage even that. Chuck Schumerous changes the name of the butcher's knife on the wrapper but not a whit of the big butcher bill itself. The Democrats or the media are not coming to save us.
It is not a question of which is the abuser. That is a given. The GOP apparatus and system. The lack of empathy is the tell. It was the banality of evil after the Nazis. There is unfortunately another trap Democrats have gotten into, trying to be conciliatory; you cannot make deals with a narcissist. The malignant Narc sees bipartisanship as a weakness and takes advantage. You can only have bland and strong enforceable boundaries and I don’t know how that works on a national governmental level dealing with a systematic pathology, when they pathology is in the system of checks and balances. One recalls the McCarthy era lack of dignity and what seemed a sudden break of the spell. McCarthys “windy speeches, his endless interruptions, his frightening outbursts, his crude personal attacks” [Oshinsky, A Conspiracy so Immense] all sound very contemporary and similar to the Trumptator.
“Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
The democrats however are not taking organized radical difficult steps to protect ‘the family’ - the children - us voters, the citizens. We the people. Party two (Democrats) has grown over fond of their wealthy donors ‘fur coats’, the trips abroad and the many trinkets of power. They have tried to be conciliatory (centrist/bipartisan) for so long they have forgotten how to play offense. So instead of seeing the right wing political wretchedness for what it is and doing something. Anything!? They don’t have the willpower or the remnant of policies or the argumentative language skills of the real economic left, having sold their working class birthright or credibility to similar right wing economic policy, Neo-liberalism, acronym policing and the free markets.
We are now being battered into a 50 state communally applied PTSD with daily violations of our trust in previously accountable agencies and agents. The supreme court, the senate, the political parties, the gaslighting media, the fawning law firms, the greedy corporations, foreign governments; all and everyone is genuflecting and kissing the ring of power. That's simikar to how the power of the gloating beast of the antichrist is referred to - no one can resist. So it’s probably or possibly only a spiritual battle we can wage now because ordinary folks are outgunned literally by the paramilitaries et al. So yeah say a prayer, light a candle. It’s hypocrisy all the way down. No more than a child in an intolerable abusive household has any power to ‘fight back’. The ‘children’ in this USA crazy house have no decision making power and there is no fighting back against a narcissistically demented mammy and/or daddy psycho-political figure. The power dynamics are off; reasonableness, decorum and the external guardrails are gone or disappearing.
“Be local, be present, be creative.”
So hopelessness is another layer of pain to be absorbed. How long will this last? We don't know, I’d say decades at least but I feel it's a major shift into a privatized technocratic ownership of the levers of power and authority. No more - for the people. Why suffer under the government remit when you are the richest few in the world and can buy to own and then rent it back out to the original owners. Will the entire country be some form of enclosure? Walls keep people in as well as hypothetical threats out. We can only fear the worst, because what else is being planned for? We the people need a named and numbered project plan to gird our loins against corporate tyranny too.
The privatization of every government thing is at least one of the political conflicts that I feel is stymieing a coherent response from the supposedly political binary alternative, the democrats. For a top down, cloth-eared neo-liberal corporate based party (the Democrats) - Government privatization is a kind of continuation of existing Democrat policies of markets and privatization but only now done by other violent and sudden means. So how long might it take Democrats to repent and come back to listening and learning from the economic left? Judging by the NY mayoral primary they are still lost in the fog, the same right wing funders pitched in for their standard issue right wing candidate against a popular peoples candidate running on bread and butter life issues. We see now that Mamdami frightens Democrat, Republican and NY Times alike. Why so? We know why.
Our governing political authority figures are demented, irrational and showing every indication of evil group tendencies. They want no kindness: no social safety net, no public goods. No middle class. No nothing for the people.So if like me, you are feeling overwhelmed too, that is normal- despair is probably a reasonable response. Myself, I’m writing here to manage something impossible, while I can. I heard the following coping advice last evening: “Be local, be present, be creative”. We need to build our new safe communities off-line, away from the doom-scroll of online tech bro-thorities and the neo-colonizing security surveillance state. We are mad but not going mad. We are on our own, but we are not alone. We have each other. Say yes to new horizontal and fraternal connections and organize a way out of this chaos.
“In traumatic or unusually stressful circumstances, people may perpetrate, fail to prevent, or witness events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs and expectations…A moral injury is an injury to an individual's moral conscience and values resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression on the part of themselves or others. It produces profound feelings of guilt or shame, moral disorientation, and societal alienation. In some cases it may cause a sense of betrayal and anger toward colleagues, commanders, the organization, politics, or society at large.”
Veterans Affairs: National Center for PTSD