Another Day in the Maelström

“And all this time,

in travail, sobbing, gaining on the current,

we rowed into the strait—Skylla to port

and on our starboard beam Kharybdis, dire

gorge of the salt sea tide. By heaven! when she

vomited, all the sea was like a cauldron

seething over intense fire, when the mixture

suddenly heaves and rises.

The shot spume

soared to the landside heights, and fell like rain.

But when she swallowed the sea water down

we saw the funnel of the maelstrom, heard

the rock bellowing all around, and dark

sand raged on the bottom far below.

My men all blanched against the gloom, our eyes

were fixed upon that yawning mouth in fear

of being devoured.”

(THE ODYSSEY by Homer;  Translated by Robert Fitzgerald;  Book Twelve, lines 280 – 290)

 “In five minutes the whole sea, as far as Vurrgh, was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it was between Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion — heaving, boiling, hissing — gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents.

  In a few minutes more, there came over the scene another radical alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the whirlpools, one by one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam became apparent where none had been seen before. These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly — very suddenly — this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray ;  but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.

    The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked. I threw myself upon my face, and clung to the scant herbage in an excess of nervous agitation.

    “This,” said I at length, to the old man — “this can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelström.””

(A Descent Into The Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe)

The folks in the dissident right and more and more even normies like myself talk about the chaotic world that the Left has generated as Clown World or The Narrative or whatever term of unreality we can summon to describe this never-ending crisis that they’ve created and we live in.  And it is this.  It is a vertigo inducing environment that just keeps getting weirder and weirder and worse and worse.  Logically I know that there will be a bottom but what I haven’t thought too much about is how bad that bottom will be.  But I ‘ve been starting to do just that.  I look at the players that have been creating these conditions and I think they are willing to go a lot further with this stuff.

Back at the end of Obama’s second term he organized the beginning of BLM by instructing the Justice Department to both intimidate city police forces and empower street thugs by selectively enforcing federal laws.  Four years later we had the George Floyd riots as the next larger wave of this kind of federally sponsored street violence.  My guess is that the next wave will occur after the mid-term elections.  And I don’t think it matters whether the Democrats or the Republicans win.  Biden or Harris’s Justice Department will still be calling the shots and they will be looking to beat down the people living within their power.  One caveat, it’s possible it won’t wait for the end of 2022.  If Biden continues to lose power and fails to move his legislative objectives, I could see the powers that be deciding to flex their muscles sooner.

The question then is how bad could that get?  What I’m thinking is that street violence will be used as an excuse to push those stalled objectives.  They’ll use it to get slavery reparations, redistribution through confiscation of 401K accounts and other outrages.  They also want to pack the Supreme Court to allow some extremely unconstitutional actions.  Those probably include gun seizure and curtailment of freedom of speech.

Am I painting an overly grim picture?  Maybe.  But I no longer think of any of these things as unthinkable.  The people in Obama’s circle are as revolutionary as Lenin or Stalin were.  And a lot of the Republicans are less than impressive.  So far, no heroes have emerged to push back against the coordinated strength of the Left.  If our enemies hadn’t become so transparently devoted to destroying our world it would be even harder to rally the Right.  Very few useful people can have missed what’s going on.  But that being said our backs are pretty tightly up against the wall.  There is precious little time to reverse these things.  If we don’t change course, we will hit bottom.  And after that there won’t be much left.

And that’s the metaphor of the maelström.  If you get sucked down into Charybdis and dragged across the rocks on the bottom there won’t be much left.  It would be better to steer toward Scylla.  She’ll take a few lives but the ship will survive.  I’ll leave it to the readers to figure which course of ours is which.