Voting for Shapes

     I lay in bed for a while listening to birdsong moving towards me from the east.  I went to bed earlier than usual, woke up at 1:54 A.M.  I read the second half of Jean Genet's play, The Blacks, and then a chapter of The Devil in Massachusetts by Marion L. Starkey.  The latter is a good history, published in 1949, of the hunt for witches in and around Salem in 1692.  Sitting up in bed, my room the only lit space in the house during the quietest period of the night, reading books engaging to the imagination, makes me feel like an enchanted island.  Words of others making neurons spark in my brain, giving me new knowledge, stimulates hunger for more ideas, stories, and moments experienced  by those who are dead.
     During my reading of the Salem book last night, I was most struck by the brief account of the execution by hanging of the first "witch" to be so condemned:

     "On June 10, High Sheriff George Corwin took her [Bridget Bishop] to the top of Gallows Hill and hanged her all alone from the branches of a great oak tree.  Now the honest men of Salem could sleep in peace, sure that the Shape of Bridget would trouble them no more."

     Bridget Bishop was a tavern keeper accused by the prepubescent and adolescent girls who started the whole thing of being a witch capable of projecting her "Shape" to others, especially men who offered testimony about being visited by her in the night while lying in bed.  To us, this sounds like they were having sexual dreams.  Simple things that bother us not can, in another time and place, seem unnatural or demonically derived.  Differences in cultural mores can mean that in one country a woman driving a car is as mundane a sight as hearing a lawnmower in the distance.  In Saudi Arabia, a woman driving a car risks severe punishment by the state.  Some women of that country nevertheless defy the law and drive, a political act in a nation in sore need of an effective civil rights movement.
     Bridget Bishop, the first person in Salem executed (murdered) for the crime of witchcraft, "had," continues Starkey on the same page as the passage quoted above, "been convicted for little more than wearing scarlet, countenancing 'shovelboard,' and getting herself talked about..."
     Her death beneath the oak tree was a way of getting the devil out of her.  It never occurred to her executioner, or those ordering her persecution, imprisonment, and death, that hanging her by the neck was an effective way of inviting devils into their own hearts, having snuffed the life of an innocent woman, first of many, while in thrall to imaginary prods derived from a belief system suspicious of nature, with the vast seventeenth century continent sprawling before them, a land still quite wild and mostly untainted by Christianity's Manichaean judgments.  I recall Bruce Beresford's film, Black Robe.  The lead character, a young priest, has a hell of a time coming to grips with the New World.  He's in Quebec in the seventeenth century.  In one scene he looks at a river, jagged cliffs, trees, all untouched and undeveloped, and he decides it's a land controlled by the Devil.
     Otherness.  That person's religion is strange.  Those people have dark skin.  Irish Catholics are scum.  Haitians are lower than dirt.  Anyone who opposes the state of Israel is in league with terrorists.  Walls will keep out the criminals crawling from the south like beetles.  They're not prisoners of war, they're enemy combatants, so we can treat them like sides of beef.  Bridget Bishop's Shape sat on my cock while I slept.
     Worrying about things that don't exist is a real motivator in human affairs.  Three nights ago I lay in bed fretting for a half hour about whether or not my health insurance provider had gotten everything taken care of when I called to renew, as I must do each May.  With my insurance working, my medications are very cheap.  A few days before I'd gone to the pharmacy and was unable to get one of them, since that medication's expensive without my co-pay.  The pharmacist had said something about my insurance not paying for it until some date.  When he said this, I was in a mental fog for some reason, so later on, lying in bed a few nights later, I couldn't recall what, exactly, the pharmacist said.  I imagined my insurance wasn't working since I'd failed to do something vital to keep it going past the end of May.  I created an imaginary situation, as real as Bridget Bishop riding my cock, involving a misunderstanding when I spoke on the phone with the woman at the insurance organization.  She'd missed something when updating my information, perhaps, or had said I had to do something to finalize the renewal and I just forgot about it.  I couldn't call the pharmacy at two in the morning to get a clarification on why I couldn't obtain my drug, so I lay there, ensorcelled by a fantasy generated from my own head.  The next day I picked up my medication, with regular co-pay.  There was a bit of a delay since I had renewed my insurance when I did.  That's the reality of that story.  The noose around Bridget Bishop's neck was also real, but she was not a succubus.
     On June 6, 2016, honoring, with a tweet, the "fallen heroes of D-Day," Donald Trump, the tackiest piece of shit who's ever lived, accompanied his message with an archived photo, supposedly an image of the Normandy landings.  A Getty image, the picture is not from D-Day, but from a January 1943 training exercise.  This man, who wants to "build a wall," to "make America great again," to tell China where they can put their chop sticks, to create jobs, strengthen infrastructure, restore national pride, make the U.S. military "the greatest in the world," can't even do a basic search (a matter of seconds) for a real photo of the Normandy Invasion.
     Now that Hillary Clinton has established herself as the Democratic presumptive nominee, the race is on, and Trump's support in the Republican Party is shaky due to his pride.  Between the two of them, illusions will clash as in a battle between a witch and a warlock.  Both of them have highly developed abilities to bullshit people.  Their manipulations of belief systems felt by and shared among Americans should not be seen as remarkable.  Presidential candidates always work with illusions.  Hillary Clinton's carefully constructed public life has withstood decades of attacks from adversaries.  Donald Trump is just a liar who doesn't give a shit about anyone.
     An image comes to my mind of Bill and Hillary Clinton at Donald Trump's wedding to his third and current wife, Melania.  They're very friendly and amiable in the photograph.  At that level of social power, do such humans play a game based mostly on the flow of money?  Trump, a past contributor to Hillary Clinton the politician, has to be hidden somewhere in her mind's memories as a man who's helped her in the past; given her some attention in the never-ending orgy attended by the kinds of people who run things.

                                                                              Vic Neptune