John Higgs's Octannual Manual #57a
Unsheduled extra newsletter on Twin Peaks Day
My new book Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who arrives on 10 April, which rather wonderfully is two days before the new series of Doctor Who is likely to start. At a time when most of the press that the show has been getting has been overwhelmingly negative, it feels good to stand by it and make a case for it being far stranger, more interesting and more important than the headline writers know.
I’ll be out on tour to support the book, and it would be wonderful to see you (Don’t hold me to this, but it’s looking like there will be stickers.) There some more events to be finalised - you’ll find details here - but here’s the confirmed dates so far:
Early reactions have been extremely heartening, as you can see:
If you are in a position to pre-order, that is hugely appreciated, as it helps the book in all sorts of ways. The link to your favourite shop or audiobook service is here. Any help spreading the word is very welcome!
ELSEWHERE
One of the criticisms aimed at the glut of superhero movies over the past decade or so has been that they were infantilising - they trained us to see the world through the unrealistic and simplistic perspective of goodies and baddies. In this it seems that they have been very successful, for that is indeed what the world looks like now.
Although it was not intentional, the recent CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD film plays like a fever dream of the news. The most on-the-nose section is towards the end, where the President of the USA is revealed to be Red Hulk. This is an uncontrollable id-monster who, in a mindless rage, destroys the White House - that previously dignified symbol of American values and the constitution. The monster is red rather than orange, but still.
That, however, is only part of the fiction/reality collision of this film. The ultimate villain is revealed to be Samuel Sterns or, to give him his supervillain name, the Leader. It is the Leader who engineers Red Hulk’s rise to the presidency using his super intelligence and by supplying him with the pills he needs to be powerful.
It might initially seem superficial to view Elon Musk as the Leader, supplying Trump with dollars rather than pills to make him President, but Musk’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ changes this. It’s well known that the name ‘DOGE’ is a joke name based on DOGEcoin and that meme of the dog - but it does have another, older meaning.
‘Doge’ is an existing word which means ‘Leader’, as in the Doge of Venice. In other parts of Italy that same word, from the same Latin root, was ‘Duce’. Hence when Mussolini invented fascism, he gave himself the title Il Duce, the Leader. And in turn, Hitler was such a Mussolini fanboy that he too adopted the German equivalent, which was Führer.
‘Doge’, then, is ‘Leader’ in fascist terminology. Now, I don’t for one moment think that Trump knows the real meaning of the word. But given Musk’s constant use of fascist codes and symbols, I suspect that he does. And I can imagine that he finds tricking Trump into making him Doge, the Leader, to be incredibly funny.
All of this makes the latest Captain America such weirdly specific unintentional satire - even if, alas, there is no sign yet of a real-life Captain America coming to save the day. Perhaps these films weren’t just dumbing us down, after all. Perhaps they were prophesies, preparing us for the ‘Brave New World’ we find ourselves in.
AND FINALLY
One last thing - if you are interested in Robert Anton Wilson and considering whether to get a copy of Gabriel Kennedy’s new RAW biography Chapel Perilous, then let this video persuade you. It’s an in depth chat between Kennedy, Douglas Rushkoff and Grant Morrison. Enjoy!
Until next time!
jhx
John, some day I'd love to read more of your thoughts on the evolution of Elon. I remember back in The Future Starts Here when you were still somehow admirative of him and his fantasies, and now we are all forced to admit that he indeed appears like a super villain. Although terribly scary for the near future, I nonetheless find him fascinating from a cultural point of view. He seems to me a very new kind of villain, as opposed to, say, Putin, whose behavior simply echoes the dictators of a 100 years ago, at least in my view.
On the other hand, Trump I simply find grotesque and baffling, and the fact that he would get elected a SECOND time, or that a not-unsignificant portion of his fanbase consider him "anointed by God", seems to me to say more about the state of the US in the 21st century rather than anything about Trump himself. He's almost more of a personification of everything that's wrong these days than an actual human being. The incarnation of late-stage capitalism, greed and stupidity made flesh in the most caricatural possible way. Like how this woman ends up looking like by the end of the film The Substance.
Look at the pump and circumstance of an old Nazi rally, for instance from Triumph of the Will. Then, compare with Trump's inauguration evening where instead of a speech, he played disco music. I cannot shake off of me the idea that Terrence McKenna was right, and that the world DID in fact end in 2012. Without anyone noticing, we then found ourselves in a bizarro world where everything looks just about the same, but for some minute details, which over time have been growing butterfly effect-style and now here we are. Stranger than we could have possibly imagined indeed.
Oh shit! I had no idea about the earlier meaning of "Doge." That all connects together shockingly well...
I think these guys believe that opposition to fascism comes solely from a place of compassion (which they view as weakness), and will have to rediscover, the hard way, that it also just doesn't fucking work!!
There's a legend about Kirby's New Gods, that if he was able to finish the story properly, as originally intended, it would have been revealed that Darkseid's desperately sought after "Anti-Life Equation," with which he hopes to enslave the universe, simply does not exist.
Similarly, what Musk and Trump want is doomed to fail, because it also doesn't exist, but the fallout of their pursuit certainly does...