Johnny Sagan aka Snowy Wilderness

Glorious, Peaceful, Nonviolent Revelation

Hello!

Judith Malina, the founder of the Living Theatre, had a wonderful literary tic in the last play she wrote and directed, The History of the World, which I was privileged to witness in rehearsal and in production at their last space, a basement theater on Clinton Street (Avenue B below Houston) on the Lower East Side. This was a play that frequently called for revolution, and as I recall it, every time the word revolution was used, it would be prefaced with a certain formula. Malina didn’t just have the play say, for example, When The Revolution Comes. Instead it would say — always, always, or perhaps I just am remembering it as an always because I saw the line repeated so many times — When The GLORIOUS, PEACEFUL, NONVIOLENT Revolution Comes.

Glorious, Peaceful, Nonviolent.

My theory was always that part of why Judith included these words was as a disclaimer, in case the Feds were listening, that she was not calling for some sort of violent insurrection. She and her husband, Julian Beck, had experienced COINTELPRO-type, J. Edgar Hoover-type harassment from the government as they plied their activist-artist trade in New York and abroad in the Sixties.

But also, I think these words were there for Judith in 2012 (I’m no Living Theatre expert, now, maybe they were always there) because she had seen a lot of progressive, at times would-be revolutionary history be made and unspool, and she sincerely wanted to compress three extra electrons into the orbit of the word ‘Revolution’ with those words as the inception of a discussion about the aesthetic, ethical, moral attributes of revolution in its sense, when it falls short of bloody insurrection, as it is almost always intended to do, of a movement for reform.

Glorious meaning a reform movement — a revolution — that exalts the human spirit, affords people a dignity of being considered capable of greatness and beauty even in our political striving for better government or a better system of government.

Peaceful being not just Nonviolent — that’s the next clause, in a seeming redundancy that I think we should instead view as advised — but literally FULL of peace. An obvious, easy play on etymology that I think is worth making. Aimed at the kind of sustainable and prolonged harmony that would be truly worthy of being called a peace, even as history shows us that all too often, perhaps invariably, peace has been the other side of war. An example of an ethic of peace: against the backdrop of a historical record full of actual religious wars and the subjugation of adherents of one religion by adherents of another, to strongly articulate that all are entitled to religious freedom in their private lives and houses of worship, but not allowed to discriminate against others’ religion in the public sphere.

Nonviolent. I think that nonviolence is the bottom line of morality in the kind of political struggle that Judith Malina had experienced in cycle after cycle in her lifetime. We are encouraged to formulate urgent movements for urgent reforms, but never to launch violent reprisals against our ideological opponents.

Revolution.

I’ve been thinking about Judith Malina’s formula, her dictum, as I see it — always specify that what you dream of is a Glorious, Peaceful, Nonviolent Revolution — because we have reached a dangerous point of governmental turmoil in this country. And I’m not even going to use the word ‘revolution’ to describe what we need, because it’s too easy for ‘them’ to portray that kind of talk as calling for violent insurrection. ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t meant mean they aren’t after you,’ in the immortal words of Joseph Heller in Catch 22. But we need an immediate revelation, let’s say, of what to do differently than knuckling under to this travesty. We need to commence an immediate reform movement to work on a new social contract and modus vivendi to protect the interests of those of us who don’t want to be subjects of the Trump-Musk Regime.

In the highly unusual exercise of power that the incoming Trump-Musk Regime has made in its first few months in office, we have in fact already undergone a revolution, one that is inglorious, not peaceful but belligerent, and not one in which open physical battle has been joined between traditional combatants as of yet on the soil of Washington, DC, but one which is violent in that at home there is a pervasive coercive physical menace that has now resulted in the first detentions, the first tortures, and the first deaths in a new Grand Inquisition, while abroad, wars useful to the revolutionaries’ worldview and consolidation of power are being perpetrated and perpetuated by their allies in an international revolution against any semblance of a striving for altruism and yes, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

There is a huge constituency of us who did not vote for anything resembling this revolution of techno-fascists, as the people have begun calling the Trump-Musk movement.

We are geographically distributed in a way that dramatically reduces the legitimacy of the Trump-Musk regime to rule in the way it has, since all of our major cities, which are our most populous and most prosperous regions and contributed by far the most to the Washington-based government as we knew it, voted for the Democrats, which we now know was the only one of our already severely limited choice between two options that held the legitimacy of promising to continue the institutional system whose periodically rotating leadership as to personnel we thought we were voting for.

The Heritage Foundation had in fact published a detailed blueprint for the carnage that has now been wrought in Washington, but Donald Trump specifically claimed to know nothing about it and not to be intending to follow it. Whether he was lying or simply didn’t care that this would be the policy manual for his cronies is immaterial now — this aspect of the situation, that he and his allies denied that this would be the plan, but then enacted it, is an exceptional act of de-legitimization that changes the landscape as irrevocably as all of the Project 2025 policy decisions that have shuttered agencies, laid off competent and duly appointed workforces of professionals, and cut off or clawed-back resources have.

The usual small percentage more people voted for the winning party in this election than voted for the losing party — an unusually small percentage at that — but the fact that the two factions of people who vote for the two major parties in every Presidential election are so close to even, and moreover, are each equaled in size at approximately one-third of the potential electorate each by an equally almost unchanging one third of the people who don’t vote at all is a strong argument that two-thirds of the American people did NOT want to give Trump and Musk the power to dismantle so much of the system of government that we rely on for our needs for governance to be met.

Like the Project 2025 blueprint, Musk was not straightforwardly presented as a part of the plan of the Trump candidacy for governance. When it was noticed that he was using the Citizens United decision, already a deeply compromised and compromising decision as to legitimacy, to effectively make unlimited personal contributions to Trump’s campaign, it was remarked upon extensively that under our constitution, he is not allowed to serve as Vice President and remarked upon that this gave the appearance of setting up an untenable quid pro quo. And as he is doing this week in Wisconsin, Musk perpetrated in plain sight of the electorate a strange scheme to generate voter enthusiasm on the Republican side that gave the appearance of bribing voters for votes that seemingly cowed legal authorities failed to address. And then he popped up as Trump’s day to day lieutenant in governing the country according to an unrelenting stream of executive edicts and unfit appointments and actions taken to not just take over government agencies but dismantle them – or not just dismantle them, but take them over. However we want to say it, this is another egregious blow to the legitimacy of the Trump Regime.

My point in going through all of this litany of the depredations of the very recent past is to finally get to what I want to say in this post, my first broadside as the modern-day pamphleteer I feel called to be in these times, a la Thomas Paine, perhaps. Which is that In the immortal words of Sun Ra, It’s After The End Of The World for the system of American government as we have known it, now that Trump-Musk have taken power and done what they’ve done. Especially because in truth what they’ve done has been facilitated by the lapses of judgment and failures of imagination in the Constitution of 1787, of which the New Deal institutions were a saving grace that held for a long time, but were hated by the revanchist movement of which Trump-Musk is the culmination.

So we need to devise a new system of government!

THAT is my point. And I want Judith Malina’s words to be our guiding light. What we need is a Glorious, Peaceful, Nonviolent…Revolution?

Well, I’m not sure we should call it a revolution.

Maybe we should call it a revelation. If we want to be poetic and spiritual and witty in our play on ‘revolution.’

Maybe if we want to be bland and anondyne, we should call it a reform movement.

But I do think we need to move now, before too much else is dismantled, before the situation deteriorates too much more.

And now that we are going to start bestirring ourselves, I think we need to include the words of Judith Malina in our explanation of what we are about: Glorious, Peaceful, Nonviolent.

This blog is called The Sleep of Reason in reference to the title of Goya’s etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

For far too long, for utterly understandable reasons of structural inertia and the brevity of the human lifespan, we kept trying, through the generations, to make the Constitution of 1787 keep on working. Through the Civil War, through the Great Depression, through the World Wars and the Civil Rights Movement(s) and the Reagan Revolution.

This whole time, in the General Relativity of the geological, glacial timescales of history in which the 249 human years of the existence of our country is one continuous cosmic day or year only, a single political and civic lifespan of the corporate person of the United States, the fatal fact of the vulnerability of the Constitution to capture and cooption by a concerted faction due to certain structural features — some would say flaws, some would say integral parts of its design — has been working itself out.

‘What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round At Last, Slouches Toward Bethlehem To Be Born?’, William Butler Yeats said in his poem The Second Coming. Well, The Sleep Of Reason Has Produced Monsters, that’s for sure. And (as I said before, but I’ll say it again) ‘It’s After The End Of The World,’ as Sun Ra said, for American Democracy, such as it was, such as we knew it. The one silver lining in this breakup, in this storm, this conflagration of the Sack Of Rome that is ending the Pax Americana, such as it was, such as we ever knew it, is that now all of our criticisms are vindicated. Now we can no longer be told that the center will hold, as Yeats put it, the great central column of American Centrism. ‘You Said I Was Childish And You’ll Say It Now,’ Sinead O’Connor sang – but we all know it in our bones. We can’t go on like this, and we can’t go on as before. Too much has already been destroyed. Now we get to give voice to all our ideas of how we really want to live – and if we really want to live, we need to work hard to make this Glorious. Peaceful. Nonviolent. …Revelation! A new reality.

Judith Malina Two Poems Poetry Project New Years Day 2012

Dominic West reads “The Second Coming” by WB Yeats | A Fanatic Heart: Geldof on Yeats, RTE One

Sun Ra - It’s After The End Of The World

Sinéad O’Connor - Black Boys on Mopeds (Official Audio)

That’s what this blog is going to be. A place to articulate the components of a new social contract for us to use to move forward. Yours Very Truly,

Johnny Sagan aka Snowy Wilderness