How did America fall into a complete state of authoritarian psychosis? Slowly at first, then all at once.
It's all happening so quickly, and I really don't know how much longer I'll be able to blog anywhere at all. So why don't we sift through the rubble of a nation's sanity and see what we can learn while we still can. We've got a lot to go over this coming week, so check back frequently. We'll start with that absolute shrieking madness...
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The spectacle of having a woman -- who was kidnapped, brainwashed and sexually abused for a year by a dime-store Jeremiah Sand when she was a child -- dress up as a moth on television is a new benchmark of hallucinogenic insanity for this rapidly collapsing empire. All the more so given it's on a nightmare tableau of a TV shitshow that even Sara Goldfarb could never imagine in her deepest depths of amphetamine psychosis.
All I can think of is the old saying, "Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad." The ruling elites have been drunk on their own hubris for a very, very long time, but now it's reached the delirium tremens stage. Nemesis has been cleared for takeoff, doubt it not.
How dystopian was this display? So much so that even Twitter couldn't countenance it. Here's just a small sampling of the scorching reception The Masked Dancer received:
"This has the most powerful "fake game show set in a dystopia" energy I've ever seen""We all died in that plane crash didn’t we""Gotta say this is some next level dystopian shit""Giving me Hunger Games energy by having the literal victim of a high profile kidnapping in the 90s on as a musical guest of a bizarrely popular tv show"Casting: “How about Elizabeth Smart?”Writers: “The kidnapping victim?”Casting: “Yes!”Writers: “Wasn’t a huge part of her captors indoctrination strategy making her cover her face and assume a different ID so people wouldn’t recognize her?”Casting: “She can be a moth!”"What the actual fuck is going on in this country""It’s like we saw every over-the-too dystopian and cyberpunk criticism of the American future and said 'Yes please gimme it ironically.'""Feels and looks like a Black Mirror episode""This is the bad place, isn't it?""The United States is having a stroke.""How— and I cannot stress this enough— THE F*CK is this real""I 100% feel like I have dementia"
The moth costume is mind-mashing for so many reasons, one of which is the strange language used in this widely-circulated story on the trial of her captors:
Temple Square attracts religious wackos like moths to a flame. They stand outside the wall yelling condemnations, calling for repentance, quoting from the Bible. Or they pose quietly in costumes, such as the young man with his face painted silver and dressed as Little Bo Peep. Or Worm, who sat naked below the Brigham Young statue with the letters W-O-R-M tattooed across his forehead. Or Brian David Mitchell, the man who dressed like Jesus Christ and stole 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart from her bed in the middle of the night.
We knew him as a temple moth and thought he was crazy but harmless. This is why we didn’t suspect him, even when he walked around downtown with Elizabeth in tow, her face covered by a veil. It’s about the strangest thing that’s ever happened in Salt Lake City, and it could only have happened here, in this place and time, perhaps caused by the aura emanating from the temple itself.
Mitchell seems to have been an increasingly familiar type in this day and age, a type now reaching their apotheosis. Or metastasis, if you prefer:
The prosecution’s strategy was to show that Mitchell could change his persona at will, such as when he was confronted by the homicide detective, and was therefore a narcissistic and sadistic actor who manipulated people in order to obtain sex with children.
For instance, they called Mitchell’s stepdaughter from his marriage with Wanda, and she testified how, when she was 14, Mitchell cooked her pet rabbit for dinner and fed it to her saying it was chicken, and that he also made her look at pornography while he prayed.
Of course the question on everyone's mind was how Elizabeth could have been regularly seen in the company of her captors not more than a mile from her home on a regular basis. The answer seems to be mind control. Kidnap a young girl, rape her several times a day, drug her, threaten to kill her family? That would do in someone twice her age.
Nothing makes sense anymore
In that light, please note that Smart danced to "Sway" by Michael Buble, a singer/actor who appeared on the X-Files Season Three episodes "Piper Maru" and "Apocrypha." The X-Files prefigured the Elizabeth Smart story that same season with "Oubliette," itself based on the horrific Polly Klaas case. A case which Winona Ryder became involved in, offering a reward for Polly's safe return.
Speaking of mind control, Jennifer Connelly performed "Sway" in Dark City. And, because Reality has done and left the building for good, she was imprisoned in an oubliette in Labyrinth.
But maybe there's something else at work:
But then what about the time, shortly after the party on Second South, when Mitchell, Barzee, and Elizabeth were confronted by a homicide detective in the library downtown? The detective had been told of a report that Elizabeth Smart was in disguise at the library. He approached the three and asked Elizabeth to take off her veil, but Mitchell stepped in and somehow Jedi mind-tricked the officer into backing off and leaving them alone by telling him Elizabeth was his daughter and it was against their religion for her to show her face or speak in public.The officer said Mitchell stayed calm through 15 minutes of questioning, and so he could find no reason for doubt or suspicion. In this scenario, Mitchell clearly understood the nature and quality of the situation and that what he was doing was wrong, because he was able to lie about it, successfully, to a detective who was looking for him. So he was not insane, for sure.
Well, OK. Maybe an experienced professional investigator actually was "Jedi mind-tricked." But I just think back to how an open predator could have been grooming young boys in my old middle school, a documented case which I write about in The Endless American Midnight.
Considering said predator was arrested -- after being at it for 22 years-- on a 52-foot cabin cruiser he somehow wrangled on a teacher's salary in the 1970s, maybe there's some Braintree-type (or Rotherham-type) cooperation at work between authorities and people like Brian Mitchell in Salt Lake as well.
And I can't help but think of how much the veil Elizabeth was forced to wear looks like the mouth diapers we're all being forced to wear every time we step outside our front door nowadays.
Then there's the association of the moth with women held captive by psychotics burned into the world's consciousness by Silence of the Lambs, starring UHFF Jodie Foster. From Hamish Spencer:
Perhaps the first image people came in contact with, when the movie premiered in 1991, was the poster. It shows Jodie Foster’s face with a moth covering her mouth. Her eyes, usually blue, are red. Close examination of the faux skull markings on the moth’s head, reveals the skull to be made up of 7 naked women in apparent homage to the master of illusion and the unconscious, Salvador Dali.
The moth and its cousin the butterfly are probably the most important thematic symbols of Silence of the Lambs and visual prominence on the poster underscores this for the viewer before the picture even starts.
The metamorphosis from grub into flying creature sees the moth or butterfly as a traditional symbol of transformation. Indeed, there are many references to butterflies and moths, death and transformation, especially when it comes to Buffalo Bill.
And we all know how that story goes.
And guess what just got Shimmered into this timeline? That actress there? Brooke Smith? Guess who she had a relationship with, at least in another timeline that just intersected with our own?
Here we go again...
Such a real-time apocalyptic tableau as we saw with Elizabeth Smart on The Masked Dancer would naturally draw in another deeply sexually-traumatized Elizabeth. Namely, the unquestioned Oracle of this Apocalypse and poet laureate of dark incantations about moths (and butterflies) such as "The Spangle Maker," "Plain Tiger," "Great Spangled Fritillary," "Melonella," and of course, "When Mama Was Moth."
The lyrics to the latter are interesting in the light of the overall themes here, since one could easily be forgiven if they believe that they're a first-person narrative of a young girl traumatized by unmodified electroshock therapy:
Sunburst and snowblind
I've seen the fear, write it down in my book
When mama was queer, one hard peak
Chills, all start screaming
Ribbed and veined
The sunburst and the snowblind
I've seen the fear, running down my brook
When mama was moth, I took bulbed form
Body electric, writhe in vain
My blue electric ...
My blue electric ...
My blue electric ...
My blue electric ...
My blue electric ...
Note that moths are universal symbols of transformation, as well as symbols of night, the Moon and witchcraft.
Which makes their presence in this head-kickingly blatant new JLo video all the more interesting. We'll be getting to this-- oh boy, will we be getting to this-- but suffice it to say it makes her "Medicine" video look subtle and ambiguous by comparison.
Suffice it to say someone's really trying to rub off some magic from the otherworldly one, if you catch my drift. For reasons you're probably aware of by now.
And of course we have The Mothman Prophecies, a docudrama (in my view, at least) about the paranormal being a harbinger of tragedy, which created real-life tragedy for director Mark Pellington:
That heart was broken in 2004 when Mr. Pellington’s wife, Jennifer Barrett-Pellington, died abruptly of complications from a ruptured colon, leaving behind her husband and their 2 ½-year-old daughter; it was, Mr. Pellington said, “the unthinkable.” That he should resurface on the big screen four years later with “Henry Poole Is Here,” a fable that wears its heart so brashly on its sleeve, is a tectonic style shift for Mr. Pellington, a commercial Hollywood director (“Arlington Road,” “The Mothman Prophecies”) who had built a career making sleekly imagist music videos for Pearl Jam, U2 and Alice in Chains.
Were the producers of this appalling freak show processing all of this symbolism in some sick, sadistic fashion? Maybe not consciously, but we're way past the days of conscious intent making anything other but a marginal difference with these things.
The entire fabric of Reality is unstitching and reconstituting itself on such a scale that only the most obstinate determinists can deny it anymore. It's freaking a lot of people the fuck out, especially people deeply invested in the old patterns. They're starting to lash out now, and things could get very ugly in the days ahead.
But the good news is that it's already too late for them. We're in the wind-down for this Age, and no force on this earth can stop that. The transition period will most certainly be unpleasant for everyone, but I think it will probably be a lot shorter than it's been in times gone by.
Prophesy darkly in The Den of Intrigue
Answer to this week's puzzle: Jlo->Babalon presents her "Medicine"->the vaccine bringing on "Time Baby III"->Third Aeon of the Crowned (Corona) and Conquering Child
