THE JACKSONIAN MOMENT
POLITICS, DEFIANCE AND THE BAY
LEADERSHIP AND THE BODY
The mythos of Prometheus is famously that he was chained to the mountain side and his body ripped to pieces every day. It is a vivid torture which enunciates that loyalty to Man, loyalty to his self-ownership and inborn ability to shape the world is not a joke. It takes a violent toll on we the living.
Prometheus is tempted by Hermes to recant his loyalty to Mankind in order that he be set free, which Prometheus refuses. He refuses to turn his back on the people. This is the statement that it requires physical courage to lead – putting your body on the line. We know this lesson very deeply: the ability to shape the world, the build the Anthropocene, requires physical pain and degradation, physical earthly sacrifice. Mere ideology cannot save us nor unite us and the end of the day.
Physicality and leadership are inextricable. We know this instinctively. This is also why, for example, the bizarre aggrandizement of sexual peculiarity and fragile psychology is the hallmark of modern Marxist statism. This aggrandizement is a deliberate and conscientious affront to the instincts of the polity. A kind of foppish, indignant condescension of the realities of leadership and our instincts. The foppish Olympians, flaneuring in their skyward temples, are similarly set against the muscularity, grit and self-determination of Man. Prometheus wrests the flame from Olympus because the Olympians themselves, while boasting about their divine status as fire-owners, were too soft and stupefied to harness the very fire for themselves into great, creative achievements. The fire of technē — of craft, knowledge, and the ability to shape the world, required Man’s doing. Man wrested and repossessed his rightful flame and bested the gods.
In a bronze age Kurdish/Iranian version of the mythos, the blacksmith Kaveh teaches the people to forge weapons against a tyrant king Zuhäk. This king who, like a hydra, had serpents coming out of his body, sends forth demands that the people sacrifice their youthful, vitalistic sons for him to eat their brains and devour their intelligence. Zuhäk is likewise as stupid as totalitarian Zeus, and must consume the deep, ingrained, vitalistic intelligence of the people.
By imbuing fire to humanity, Prometheus equipped them with the means to resist fatalistic tyranny, not through brute force, but through ingenuity and mastery over nature. Zeus aimed to keep humans weak, stuck in leeching and entropy, dependence, and ignorance. But Prometheus’ gift enabled the building of civilization itself, of challenging fate. This act of defiance set the stage for an eternal struggle between human ambition and fatalistic constraints — where Zeus physically tortures Prometheus, but humanity who has wrested this flame of techne, can never be fully subdued.
Last July’s assassination attempt on the President demonstrated this very physical courage. And like taking a page out of the mythos, the President instead went on to praise courage of the people at the rally instead.
SENTIMENTALISM AND POLITICS
We suspect the President possesses a great sentimentality toward San Francisco. Despite not growing up in the Bay, it’s more than reasonable he possesses a greater sentimentality toward it than many current residents of San Francisco with parochial attachments.
In his inaugural speech, the President praised the spirit of Manifest Destiny in a touching and heartfelt way. San Francisco is at the forefront of the history American Manifest Destiny. From the Gold Rush to the great technologies, San Francisco is THE American city. It was built on the dreams and leadership of entrepreneurs, pioneers, and risk-takers such as he.
It was the resuscitation of these Promethean qualities within the Americans’ spirit that was the primary motivation for the President to run for office in the first place. In the past, the President has credited the lessons of early self-improvement mentor/minister Norman Vincent Peale with much of his success. These ideals have much in common with a sense of Promethean confidence. This reflexive moment of courage after the assassination attempt was, no doubt, drawn upon the same spirit. They are the pillars of the President’s aspiration for American greatness. Defiant courage is a mainstay of these Promethean qualities.
More personally, the President’s family assets were first generated by his grandfather during the Klondike Gold Rush. These men who often passed through San Francisco and that built the city in the first place exemplified these ideals. The black, sodden, snow-covered forests of the Klondike full of bears and wolves is a hard deal, especially if leaving requires a) succeeding first in finding gold and b) waiting months for a ship. The kind foresight and vision upon one must rely for that fortitude is both vivid and defiant, and often hard to image in today’s abundance. One must impress onto “reality” the outcomes they desire and go ever forward – this never alters no matter what the Age. A burning of the ships. The President’s personal attitudes and the Faustian wilderness explorers and builders all share their roots in the archetypal Prometheus.
Peale ministered that a defiance of difficulties is a traditional kind of grace – failure to live by the tenet that God is on our side is a blasphemy. There is something both exhilarating and brings a rare, almost religious gratitude at the moment of overcoming. A St. Crispin’s Day feeling. The President demonstrates great sentimentality and fidelity toward actual Americans to achieve this kind of knowledge, experience and successful overcoming. San Francisco is the great symbol the Gold Rush. Not the Gold Rush for the venal, thieving and greedy, but the Gold Rush of those who would not take NO for an answer. “There can be no golden age without the Golden State,” he described in January. Revitalizing California is essential to the American project.
Despite the accusations of gaudy Bronx taste and bread-and-circus WWE/UFC, the President is an American romantic about this subject. San Francisco’s history as an example of bold, rugged individualism clearly appeals to a sense American greatness. It is a Jacksonian act to retake the Gold Rush City, the harbor of Manifest Destiny – like Jackson did at New Orleans. And it is in many ways the exact same globalist, British/City of London enemy that is to be evicted as well. The President’s bronze of Jackson’s New Orleans statue in the Oval Office, the Jackson portrait sitting above the bronze figure of cowboy on a bronco says much about his attitude.
When he paternalistically has talked about “our miners,” “our construction workers,” “our scientists,” he has demonstrated just as much a personal care and affinity for San Francisco which indeed supersedes the materialist ideology of many who live there. Likewise, Reclaiming and reviving San Francisco’s past prosperity, cleanliness, and global reputation as a beautiful, thriving city is right down the fairway of MAGA.
A junior read of the politics sees new Republican support from Silicon Valley is a wedge in the state. San Francisco is home court for Harris, for Pelosi who stood-down the National Guard on 1/6/2021, and for Newsom as the next obvious challenger. It is ground-zero for the CCP’s opium war which may soon precipitate a freezing of PBoC’s US Treasury holdings – done only once before by Biden toward Russia as an act of war. Meanwhile, Alcatraz is in the final analysis very small when compared to Greenland, renaming the Gulf of America, the bulldozing and restoration of Gaza, etc.
The American Colossus, The Flame of Manifest Destiny, is the call to Mankind to wrest the flame. It is the single clearest embodiment of the ideals, principles, poetic sentimentality which have guided the President’s life also. And among past American presidents, he is certainly among the most possessing of these qualities. This monument is as necessary as it is inevitably natural for this place, these people and this moment in time.
Man Also Rises.