Tis the season of anarchy

But is it stronger than the coming oligarchy?

If you’re like me, which you’re not, you have longed for revolution since you came back from Nam. (See, I told you, you weren’t like me.) You tried in the ‘60s. You protested the war. You marched down Woodward Avenue with the rest. You took philosophy from a professor who was in the Weather Underground. You breathed the air of revolution which oozed from the pages of the Fifth Estate (an alternative newspaper in Detroit at the time). You spent the entire week of the May Day protest sleeping in a tent by the reflecting pool in D.C. You created a barrier of branches and tree trunks on a road coming into the capital so the office pogues would know, something was happening here. You sang songs. You danced. You beat drums and you swore at Nixon when he flew to Yorba Linda to avoid the hundreds of thousands of us who were out to confront him. You seethed and bubbled and eventually when absolutely nothing happened and the war went on and on and on, you slowly sank into conformity like all your friends who wondered what the hell you were doing in the first place.

So that’s me reiterating, I ain’t you.

Since that time I have never not wanted revolution; I just didn’t tell anybody.

So when Jan. 6, 2021 came along I was amazed to see a motley cadre of freaks from the right doing my bidding. Only it scared the hell out of me. This was violent. This was bloodshed. This was shit shed. This wasn’t what I wanted, and yet it was. I was confronted by my duplicity. I still am.

But now it seems that the American public, certainly more than the 49+ percent who voted from Trump, wants the same thing. What I see, how I interpret this moment in history has taken some time to fabricate, enunciate and/or eviscerate. The largest picture I can see is this:

The process from hierarchy to heterarchy, if not governed with long traditions of practical how-to, goes through anarchy. We do not have long traditions of practical know-how as did the ancient indigenous people who lived here before us. I believe any anthropologist worth his or her ‘anth’ would agree, most of the people of ancient America for most of the time lived an egalitarian heterarchical life where individual freedom was not only paramount but a birthright. There were long periods when hierarchies of governance were formed in civilizations like the ancient Mayan and latter day Cahokian, but they fell. And when they did there was a period of anarchy before the long, slow hum of heterarchy reestablished itself.

Anarchy is the period of transition from hierarchy to heterarchy, and that my dear Jacks and Jills, is where we are now in my humble opinion. Protest against the hyper-hierarchy we find in America today is the common thread between the peace and love protests of the ‘60s and the hate and wrath protests encapsulated in the Jan. 6th rioters of today. It is one coin and it continues to flip. And I don’t think it matters much whether it turns up heads or tails. It’s the flipping that matters.

Don’t get me wrong. The system of oligarchy which the United States is entering is not a step towards heterarchy, that equality which if attained is or could be Devine. It is the hyper-hierarchy (thank you clc) coming to a head like a teenager’s whitehead pimple. It will burst and in that bursting will spew anarchy across the land, but not necessarily in that order. (You can only stretch a metaphor so far before it de-metabolizes.)

It seems to me while the oligarchy rises we also have anarchy rising with it. Now the question is, which is stronger the rise of the billionaire aristocracy or the destructive power of the great tearing down? My money’s on anarchy, unless we demand otherwise.