I’ll keep an eye out for your writing.
Ooooh … I’m not sure that’s a good idea: the quality is horribly erratic … and I do love to engage in shock-jock offensiveness — it can get quite repetitive to the point that sometimes even I wish I’d stop, but have to keep going because it’s the ‘brand’ as it were.
I’m not saying I never say anything worth reading, but … on your own head be it 😉
re: playfulness of Dionysian tradition, well yes there’s the Disney-esque version (tipsy, fubsy Bacchus lolling in a wine-bath in Fantasia, for example)… whether it was a whole lot darker than that rather depends on how much credence we can place on Livy, whose lurid (and possibly libelous?) descriptions do read a bit like Moral Majority rants or QAnon wackery (oh dear… lately, far too many things are reminding me of QAnon).
Given the era, I’d guess there was a whole lot whole lot darker than that going on.
For all our vanity these days about how much more civilised we are … and, fair enough, in a lot of ways, we have come come a long way … at the same time, women only got the vote in Switzerland in 1971 and Scotland recently became the first nation in History to stop penalising half the population for having been born female by making sanitary products free. So, I think it a trifle presumptuous of us perhaps to claim that we are so very different from them. And if my knowledge of who we are today is anything to go by then I’m reasonably confident that we were probably no better then either: debauched and degenerate …
… after all, a people who can come up with the idea of a vomitorium, so that they can return to the party and indulge in gluttony all over again have taken matters somewhat further than Disney, I feel — even if they were inclined to paint their foes in even darker colours in the name of propaganda.
But I think I’ll agree with you that there’s a stink of perpetual adolescent self-pity and resentfulness about the Trumpsters and especially their more bizarre fringe elements. As you say, a petty, spiteful, purely malevolent schoolyard-bully aspect worthy of Shirley Jackson’s pen. Watching the mob happily vandalising the Capitol building I was thinking that they were indistinguishable from football hooligans, except that in this instance a core cadre actually had an agenda, a purpose other than revelling in transgression and destruction for its own sake.
Those with a malevolent agenda do like to stir up the mob: it gives them a false legitimacy — just like there being a “a lot of people who say” and “many people who doubt the legitimacy of the result”.
The mob itself … well, again, we haven’t really changed, have we?
It seems that the reservoir of destructive monkeyshines is always there, waiting to be tapped by some demagogue with that mysterious quality they call “charisma”. Who knows whether it’s testosterone-related (though the composition of the mob is suggestive) or what, but I suspect that every mob that’s ever sacked a city looked pretty similar.
As if there’s an Ur-mob always waiting, immanent, omnipresent, hovering invisible in the air we breathe, ready at the slightest opportunity to incarnate in real bodies, cry havoc and let slip those dogs (again).
You are Terry Pratchett and I claim my £5.
And now I’m starting to sound like I believe in demonic possession, cripes. Madness truly is contagious!
Nah, you’re not that far gone yet.
You wanna see something really scary?
Try this …
