In early 2017 Bob predicted Trump’s “Triumph” This Week.
How can Bob Do This?
HOW PRESIDENT DON TRUMP HAS BECOME
THE FIRST EXECUTIVE POLITICAL LEADER
TO PUT ON THE SHAMANIC TRADITION
Posted in Spring, 2017
No previous President of the USA has ever used the Office of the White
House to provide a training in perception. In Western Art there are two
schools or approaches to the creative act as spelled out by Marshall McLuhan:
For that school of thought for which the external world is an
opaque prison, art can never be regarded as a source of
knowledge but only as a moral discipline and a study of
endurance. The artist is not a reader of radiant signatures on
“materia signata” but the signer of a forged check on our hopes
and sympathies. This school has supported the idea of the
function of art as catharsis which, as G.R. Levy shows in The
Gate of Horn, was a preparation for the lesser Greek mysteries.
But if the world is not opaque and if the mind is not of the earth
earthy, then this moral view of art should yield to the cognitive
view. However that may be, the cathartic, ethical view of art has
led to a doctrinaire hostility to the use of discontinuity in art (the
theme of Arnold’s preface to Poems, 1853) and indifference to
all popular art. And in the past century with every technological
device advancing the discontinuous character of
communication, the stand taken by the cathartic and ethical
school has enveloped the entire world of popular culture in a
haze of esoteric nescience, disguised, however, as a profound
moral concern with the wider hope and the higher things. Joyce
had a phrase for this anti-cognitive attitude, “the cultic twalette.”
—THE INTERIOR LANDSCAPE, pp.12-13, 1969
Bob: I start off this essay with the article I did three and a half
years ago just as an introductory statement: “HOW DON TRUMP
HAS BECOME THE FIRST EXECUTIVE POLITICAL
LEADER TO PUT ON THE SHAMANIC TRADITION”, that
says there are two schools of thought and aesthetics, one that’s
“ethical and moral,” and the other is “cognitive and technical.”
One’s sort of conceptual, the ethical view, and then the cognitive
approach is perceptual. I’m saying Trump is representative of the
“amoral perceptual” school, the cognitive school—which gets into
his living by “percept” and “quadrophrenia” (see definition
below). So, an ethical criticism of Trump doesn’t work today. All
right, you can attempt it, you can start revolutions around it, but it
won’t get anywhere.
That’s supposed to be pretty outrageous! Nobody thinks Trump‘s a
shaman! Nobody thinks he’s even human, or he has any
intelligence, but the important point is I knew you could not apply
ethics to the Trump administration; that was not an issue anymore,
and there were lots of reasons why that we’re going to get into.
But forget the ethical view, which is all that we have in the CNN
world—the outrage of Trump’s lack of ethics. They can’t keep up
with the more charismatic, cognitive style of art that Trump does.
That’s why I’m calling him a shaman expressing “percepts” over
“concepts”.
Trump uses Twitter as a daily reminder to his global audience of the
environments surrounding and engaging our perceptions. This is the role of
the artist of the cognitive school. He is not providing guidance for the world
of concepts and ethics, the cathartic view.
Many creative people have fantasized how they would act if they ever had the
opportunity to be President—myriad examples of which are provided in
UNSHACKLED: THE DUSTBIN OF DONALD TRUMP.
And many smart and ambitious people have even become President. But they
never had the autonomous medium, like Twitter, to present a program for our
perceptual edification. Trump has realized this opportunity to present challenges
to our very organs of sensory apprehension rather than just to the world of ideas
and social reform. All shamans, gurus, and seers attempt to reveal environments
that their fellow motivated somnambulists aren’t noticing. In a world of
multitudinous claims from conflicting cultures, memes, and values, most
Presidents withdraw from providing an anti-environment to the Android Meme
and do nothing. And they never thought of using the most powerful cliché
environment in the world to bypass social engineering issues and engage citizens
on a level of sensory challenge—the plateau of great artists and scientists from
Picasso, Einstein, and Frank Zappa to Mae Brussell, Marshall McLuhan, and Dr.
Carolyn Dean. To the cathartic school, this seems an irresponsible abandonment
of duty and commitment to honored institutional purposes as expressed in a
recent broadcast of MORNING JOE.
With all their sneering ethical superiority, note how they miss the probing and
prompting by Trump in a style they regard as trivial. But new art always
appears ugly. And Trump the para-media maven has created a new role in the
Beltway Bubble that bypasses the percipience, classifying, hasty accusation,
and warm rejoinder of the alt-left, alt-center, and even the alt-right.
As a result of what you are hearing described here first, I regard Pres. Trump
as the Greatest Artist/Scientist/Para-Media Ecologist alive today.
I end that short statement by saying: “As a result of what you are
seeing described here first” in the spring of 2017, “I regard Pres.
Trump as the Greatest Artist/Scientist/Para-media Ecologist alive
today.”
