The Goths

The appeal of Gothic Architecture for the average smelly, unhealthy, economically insecure, inconsequential, bug-ridden serf from the Middle Ages is that their lives, though lived at arm's length or less from a gargoyle, are inferred to be part of a greater system which--if they could only step back far enough--would be seen to be as immensely beautiful as a cathedral. But they can't step back and they only get glimpses of God's majesty in everyday happiness and wonder, as in nature and in the miracles of observable creation.

We, however, get glimpses of God's majesty in Trump, or such is the implication, since the grandeur is all his now and he won and he's rich and he's reputed, by himself, to have other sizable, unverified assets and he is never wrong. Characteristically of its panderers this world-view offers us an inversion of reality, that the system is defined by its parts. The whole, if you step back far enough, is already flaming wreckage, with angst-inducing hopelessness and death and disorder, the products of modern-day Republicanism. 

They dress well. They say the right things--about faith and freedom and prosperity and patriotism but, man, how they gin up the fear and attack anyone at-will and preemptively and dominate the discourse and keep everyone under threat and maniacally, narrowly, myopically focused. And intent on the near term. Why? They have turned the macrocosm into carrion. Birds are feeding on it and us--we are its accessible stuff. Don't look at their failed economic and social policies and the results of forty years of fixed ideation.

Don't look at it or they will attack and neutralize you. All the wealth and grandeur is theirs and that of their elite owners and donors by dictate and divine right. And they are owned, as surely as those serfs, by anyone but God, meaning the super-wealthy and their unseen allies. It is what they believe in, articles of irreducible faith without religious investment because, again, any kind of accountability is anathema to them and for good reason. But we all die and they will be carrion too one day. They are, by now, grotesque.