With Iggy Azalea More Things Are Possible

     Jonas Mekas, the Lithuanian-American filmmaker, said in a film of his from 2007 that in the Cabala, evil is what doesn't change.  In the film he talks about changing one's mind, how in political discourse it's a sin to change one's mind, as in (my example) the John Kerry criticism that he "flip-flopped" on his support for invading Iraq.
     I remember Sean Hannity on Fox News, taunting a Democratic guest with the word, "flip-flop, flip-flop," like a classroom pest with a squirt gun.  Hannity now supports Trump, a candidate who's made a regular habit of agreeing with both sides of every issue, depending on the political weather.
     Mekas ends his short film talking about Paris Hilton, who had taken heat in the entertainment/news media (are the two media the same these days?) for saying she often changes her mind, not believing in something she accepted as truth even two days ago.  In Middle English, the word for change was windy.  Medieval Brits took an atmospheric everyday phenomenon and applied it to a concept with abstract dimensions.  One can change physically--lose weight or get badly injured in a car accident--but there are those many changes occurring invisibly, like the feel of no longer being in touch with a former close friend.  The special conversations had with that friend, the chemistry shared, are gone; therefore, a certain type of experience no longer exists and that change is an absence influencing the present.  I call this kind of thing, nevering.  To never is to experience that which didn't happen, but could have.  Had it happened, your life would be different.  These things that don't happen can affect us.
     I could've been with her, but she broke up with me, and I was very happy with her, but I'll never know how our lives would now be different.  George Bush could have not ordered the invasion of Iraq, and we now feel that nevering that never happened whenever ISIS-inspired fanatics with automatic weapons kill.
     Changing the mind is related to relenting.  Hardass solutions to social problems rarely work, although they break bodies.  Minds, however, don't die.  Someone's ideas can last thousands of years.  Behind The Blue Boy is Thomas Gainsborough looking at the same canvas two and a half centuries ago, standing where you are, if not in the same spacetime, but his idea lives.
     Last week four black American men were killed by cops.  Two of the killings were caught on cameraphone, one of them by the girlfriend of the man dying next to her while her young daughter watched from the car's backseat.  Imagine what that would be like.  Demonstrations across the country happened.  In Dallas, a Black veteran of the war in Afghanistan killed five cops during the demonstration there and wounded nine others.  He was killed by police, using a robot bomb.  Motive seems to have something to do with his enmity toward white cops.  Something was building up inside the man for some time, I expect.  He accumulated a large arsenal over the last two years (legally, since the NRA lobby believes every American should have an unlimited number of firearms), and planned on blowing up areas of Dallas, which he failed to do.  ISIS propagandists have praised his work.  Fuck you, ISIS, and in any event, it doesn't seem to be the case (unless future evidence reveals otherwise) that Micah Johnson committed his anti-police act out of solidarity with the kinds of people who blow up ancient ruins and set fire to their prisoners.
     It's been called by some "domestic terrorism," but mostly it's seen as a need to appreciate the good things police do for our communities.  Thus, tributes to the fallen cops have been plentiful from both political parties and candidates for president.  Some still prefer to ignore abundant cop on Black violence that sparks the protests in the first place, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani saying that the slogan "Black Lives Matter" is racist, when in fact it isn't.  If the slogan read, "Only Black Lives Matter," then it would be racist.  Giuliani, as all scoundrels of his caliber do, points out that "All lives matter."  Does he then give a shit about Syrian refugees?  Palestinians?  Poor Latinos?  Black motorists pulled over for a broken taillight then shot to death by a lousy cop?  I've heard the same arguments from Giuliani, Trump, Fox News commentators over the years; clean cocksuckers in suits wearing TV studio makeup talking big about lives and conditions they know nothing about.
     Trump today said he will be "the law and order candidate" and the "candidate of compassion," adding that "you can't have true compassion without providing safety for the citizens of our country."
     Take a moment and laugh.
     His Orwellian words mean he wants a police state, but a compassionate one.  That would be a country where everyone knows where their proper places are, like in the People's Republic of China, perhaps, post-Tianenmen Square.  It would not mean hurt and outraged citizens protesting the murders by cops of young Black men.  Such protests can get out of hand, although at Trump rallies it's been okay with the "compassionate" candidate for his supporters to commit violent acts against anti-Trump protesters.
     For Trump, "true" compassion equates with safety, but for whom?  Everyone, he claims, yet, he wishes to deport eleven million undocumented aliens.  That will, if he attempts it, involve violence, uprooting families by splitting them apart, imprisonment, return for many to wretchedly bad political and social situations in their countries of origin; i.e. some get murdered when they go "home."
     Trump could mean, bearing in mind his fame in reality TV, that he plans on appearing on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, after his candidacy ends.
     Is lack of change evil, as Jonas Mekas ponders in his film on Paris Hilton?  That the idea comes from the Cabala indicates that Jewish mystics of long ago believed that God is process.  In process, war and famine occur, giving way to peace and abundance.  The mind, positioned permanently on one idea, is said to be monomaniacal.  Is Trump such a static point in the plane of our reality, because he thinks about only one thing, himself?  Sure, one can point to his frequent praise of his daughter, Ivanka, but since he provided the ejaculation that helped make her ("It was a tremendous ejaculation, believe me!"), she is thus glorious in his eyes, but we can all be grateful, every time we see her face, that she favors her mother's side of the family.
     Is Trump the immovable spot for me?  I've written how many essays focusing on that creature?  I can't look at him without feeling contempt and analyzing his depraved idiotic blather as if it's really worth thinking about?  Did German intellectuals in 1932 contemplate the phenomenon of the rise of Hitler and his words and ideas without feeling contempt?  Dismay at some of their fellow citizens for following such shit?  Were they unmoved by the mere existence of the little blue-eyed Austrian racist fuck, spouting his crap about destiny--Make Germany Great Again?
     Maybe I'm not hip enough, but last night, for the first time, I became aware of Iggy Azalea.  I watched some concert clips and two of her music videos.  I'm enchanted; I'm glad she exists and makes the music she makes.  At the end of Jonas Mekas's little film about the importance of changing one's mind, he brings up Paris Hilton.  His willingness to accept Paris Hilton's claim of changing her mind frequently seems like a moment of an old man looking compassionately at a young woman, all the lights of fame shining upon her, and accepting her windiness, in the Middle English sense, just as I, a middle-aged man, looked upon Iggy Azalea singing and moving on her stage and saw again the welcome turning of a world too often frozen by unforgiving ideologies.

                                                                             Vic Neptune