The Time of Ashes

America, drawing from its deep collective unconscious, has elected the Shadow King. (1) This person represents what is regressive in human nature and in our twenty-first century culture: greed, misogyny, racism, hatred, ignorance, and negligence – this, in a time of great need, especially the need to restore wholeness to nature and creation.

     We need not document here what the man has said and done to deserve the above description. It is all part of the public record, including his first term as president. We do not need to wring our hands and wonder what his intentions are. He has stated these clearly, and his early appointments to important positions document the destructionist purposes.

     The Shadow King brings not strength, harmony, order and justice, but rather its opposite: weakness and vanity, disharmony and disorder, chaos, injustice, and retribution. The Shadow King is indecent. (2) Norms of decency are violated as a matter of course, and the society falls out of civility and cooperation.

     Thus, with the civitas having elected him, many of us have arrived at the time of ashes. (3) This is a time of reckoning, when positive aspiration and ambition have come to nothing. Good intention, great effort, and the propagation of compassion have ended in failure. This is where we are now. Here, in 2024, after so many people working for decades to increase tolerance, understanding, and appreciation, and to improve life conditions for all, and to save the planet from our own excesses, it has come to this. The time of ashes may include grief, but above all, it is the recognition of reality. The fire has gone out.

     The above comes with the realization of personal failure. The fact that the majority of the people of America, my present home and adopted second country, have selected the Shadow King as president, tells me that I have been mistaken. I am out of tune with the world. I must be at the wrong place at the right time, or I’m in the right place but it must be the wrong song. (4)  In my life – with more mistakes than I care to admit – I have carried out a flawed effort, through study and learning, community work, and teaching, to make the world a little better, to nudge myself and human consciousness in general toward greater caring. Of course, it can’t all have been in vain. I trust that these efforts by myself and so many others has done some good.

     Still. Here we are: time not just to rake ashes, but to eat them.

     But what else is to be done? As a holder of two citizenships, my first impulse is to flee with my wife, because I can. But there are reasons not to: a lovely home on an acre of paradise, a loving companion, dear old friends. And Canada itself is highly likely to elect its own shadowy populist leader in the next year. There is no escape from these people. They are everywhere.

     The second option is to be part of the resistance. Picture the French Resistance after June in 1942. Certainly this is a noble and right thing to do: to resist the negation of civil life at every opportunity. This is happening; already the little local band of Democrats in our small township are talking and organizing themselves, bless them.

     The third and perhaps most important option will be just to do what you do, and to keep the lights on in a dark time. The writer and social philosopher Morris Berman saw that at the turn of the century, American culture was entering its equivalent of the medieval ages. It is in the twilight of its culture, when knowledge would give way to superstition, when enlightenment values and understandings would be lost to ignorance. (5)

     Clearly in the age of social media, he was not wrong. Consider, for example, an armed militia group, fuelling itself via their Telegram Messenger chats, planning to attack the U.S. military for its role as an accomplice in the Democratic administration’s directing of hurricanes at Florida and other parts of the South – this government weather-directing having been carried out in order to ensure control of lithium deposits in a “planned Ashville SmartCity.” Apparently “chemtrails” are part of it – and, oh right – the military also is poisoning citizens. (6)

     The task then, in our modern medieval period, is to be like certain monks of the Middle Ages: to keep the light of knowledge and reason alive. Just as these monks, in the glow of candles, copied by hand the manuscripts of the more enlightened Greeks and Romans, we must keep the understanding alive until the time comes for our own Renaissance.

     This last is what I hope to do. That is, in my own twilight, to embody the ideals of compassion, caring, understanding, and gratitude for the beauty of our planet, and to act accordingly, every day. To be sure, I will have to sift through the ashes. But I will not allow the dark forces to take away my joy in daily life, my peace of mind in my old age, and the love that I share. No matter what, they cannot have these.

     I am not depressed. I am pissed.  We will resist. We will fight. We will keep the lights on. The darkness will not prevail.

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1. Moore, Robert, and Douglas Gillette. King Warrior Magician Lover: Recovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. HarperOne, 1990. 

2. Frankl, Viktor. Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility and the Meaning of Life. Beacon Press, 2023. Frankl, based on his surviving the Nazi concentration camps, says there are just two “races:” the decent and the indecent.

3. Bly, Robert. Iron John: A Book About Men. De Capo Press, 1990. The road of ashes involves facing the failures of one’s dreams and aspirations – facing the reality that these have come to little or to nothing at all.

4. Forgive the misquote, Dr. John, wherever you are. Malcolm John Rebennack, Jr. (Dr. John). Right Place, Wrong Time. Warner Chappel Music, Inc., 1973.

5. Berman, Morris. The Twilight of American Culture. W. W. Norton and Company, 2000. 

6. Wilson, Jason. “Far-right militia targets US military over baseless hurricane ‘weather weapon’ claims.” The Guardian, 19 Nov. 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/19/ far-right-militia-targets-military-weather-manipulation. Accessed 21 Nov. 2024.