Tag: writing

Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, FLASH!, Popular & established authors, USA

Butterfly Farm

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

It had been years since she’d been to the butterfly farm. She had to stop going because the butterflies were too beautiful. She would sit and weep as their soft wings skimmed overhead and grazed her tiny ears. Their grand wings veering wide in flight and showing her prints like African batik.
       She didn’t like being the one who always cried, sitting on the bench and looking down and over to the side. She was trying to hide the tears that rolled out like curling butterfly tongues. The butterflies didn’t know she was crying for them. They were too busy landing on velvety flowers and sucking sweet liquids out of squeaky golden stems.
       The last day she spent at the butterfly farm was the day she cried the most. She was sitting on a bench and she was talking to them. She told them they were “sweet and gentle” in a very loud voice, which surprised even her. Suddenly a slow-moving man wearing dirty beige cover-alls and holding a heavy glass jar began to walk toward her. He came and took her four favorite butterflies. She didn’t know how he knew. He stuffed them with his rough hands through the top of the jar and quickly screwed on the lid, their tiny wings wilting. Dogs barked and birds screeched and the sky turned grey with sadness. Some big bowl of hunger grew up in her and puffed her size up to the clouds. Swollen hands moving like giant wings. Her love was that big. She took the man’s bulbous arm and threw it behind his back and arrested him and took him back to the pork farm and the butterflies now sit on his shoulder and eat from dog bowls for all the rest of their days.
Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Germany, Popular & established authors

On the Fear of the Future (extracts from the upcoming book: #1) by Tadzio Mueller

!Epic Tomorrows

Republished with permission from the blog of Tadzio Mueller, Peaceful Sabotage

On the fear of the future

Everywhere you look, fear is rampant. Fear of war and climate catastrophe, fear of reptilians and migrants, fear of job loss, rent increases, and all-powerful billionaires (sic!). The rich are building bunkers, the European Union is adopting asylum procedures where no one in Europe actually has to see the asylum seekers, global military spending is reaching new record highs, and politicians are driven by the fear of the coming fossil fuel revolt, which is as inevitable after the Iran war and the global energy crisis as the sausage porn photo on Markus Söder’s Instagram account.

But can this really be true: that fear is something that “we all”, or at least many of us, “share”? The statement doesn’t seem entirely coherent, even counterintuitive, when we look at the political discourses of our time. With the exception of the political discourse of the AfD and other right-wing extremist forces (more on that later), we find very few stories about fear. Even in the 2025 federal election campaign, the Greens plastered their posters with the slogan “Confidence!”, and while the narratives told by the current federal government do contain some references to complex crises, major dangers, and difficult challenges, (as I write this, a massive “reform package” is being negotiated within the coalition) nothing about it should cause fear; it’s all solvable, they claim, if only the right reforms, tax cuts, and gifts to capital were implemented. Sure, it’s a crisis, but crises have been ongoing ever since the global financial crisis of 2007, then the Euro crisis, then the “migration crisis,” then the Corona crisis, then the first energy crisis (2022) and the second… So, crises are constant anyway, and so far, we’ve always managed to get through them somehow. Why, then, be afraid, or at least, why admit to it?

The middle class’s fear of division

The search for “fear” in political discourse must therefore necessarily be indirect, because fear of collapse is rarely articulated; it is repressed, hidden behind other issues, anxieties, and accusations. It is a bit like a solar eclipse, an event that produces so many extreme effects that looking at it directly would be too dangerous, too confusing, too destabilizing. Or like dark matter in space, which we cannot see directly because it does not interact with light (in our analogy: rational reflection), but which has all sorts of gravitational effects in the real world from which we can draw conclusions about its existence.

One example of this is the discussion about a possible “division” or “polarization” of German society, and how this could be prevented or, if it truly existed, reversed. For example, the well-known sociologist Steffen Mau, the author of *Trigger Points of Time* says that “division (is) a fear scenario,” then explains to the German upper middle class in its courtly Pravda that the deep fear of society falling apart is unfounded, that “most people” still “group themselves in the broad middle.” What appears to be a narrative about sociological facts is actually, on the far more powerful level of emotional communication, a kind of paternal “no, dear child, you don’t need to worry, things are still as you know them, as you like them to be.” This is at least as much therapy as sociology, because when we feel fear, we seek out discourses, choosing from the various political discourse products offered to us in the highly mediated world we live in precisely those that make us feel the least bad.

When “the center” discusses polarization or division, it is expressing its deep, fundamental fear of losing control over society, of heading towards a future with likely far fewer, or at least far more contested, privileges. The narrative of the center, that one must combat “societal division,” is primarily the fear that there is no longer enough “common ground” to hold society together and maintain the center in its rather comfortable position of power. And since, from the perspective of bourgeois society, “division” can best be combated with “reason” and “communication,” which are then contrasted with the perpetual “culture war” from the right and “identity politics” from the left—communication that thus distinguishes the center from “the extremes”—we ultimately arrive at a discourse that simply says: no matter what the problem is, we just need to do more of what we already considered right, and then we’ll solve it. Yes, we are afraid that the world is changing, but if we simply don’t change anything and just remain as we are now, then we no longer need to be afraid.

My favorite and cautionary example of such discourse comes from the intellectual doyen of the black-green wing of the taz newspaper, Peter Unfried: the asserted. Not too long ago, he claimed that “without a functioning democracy, a market economy, and a strong center… there can be no climate policy,” that global warming doesn’t fit into the concept of “either the far right or the far left,” and from this he concluded that it was finally time for some reasonable (i.e., centrist) adults to sit down and find a rational compromise: “’compromise is the new progressive.’” This is quite clever: the potential division of society is identified as a problem—the fear of it is real and cannot simply be ignored by producers of political discourse—but then it’s immediately rolled back into the paternalistic reassurance that the adults will now sit down together again and solve things the way they’ve always been solved up there: through the ideology-free, reasonable, universally Habermasian discourse of societal elites. Here, too, the mode of dealing with fear in the democratic political discourse of our time becomes apparent: the problems are briefly acknowledged, there is a brief nod towards acceptance, only to then return to a narrative in which things do not have to change fundamentally, will not change fundamentally, in which, as is usual in fairy tales, everything turns out all right in the end.

The affective surplus

The problem with these pragmatic, fatherly political discourses, in which every problem can be solved by a little more of what we’ve always considered right anyway—leftists, for example, believe that a little redistribution would solve the climate problem, pragmatic Greens believe that building, buying, and driving a few more electric cars would solve the climate problem, precisely what has been demanded for decades—is that they fundamentally go against the emotional impulse of those they are meant to convince. Yes, we seek discourses that alleviate our fears, but when these discourses almost obsessively assume that problems can be solved, they easily give listeners the impression that it’s not about their feelings at all, not about them, but rather about communicating to them that their feelings are unnecessary, exaggerated, or even part of the problem itself. This leads to people turning away from these narratives because those experiencing strong emotions usually don’t want their feelings (fear) to be reversed (reassured) in communication – they want their feelings reflected and validated; they aren’t initially looking for a solution. When a good friend constantly told me about her boy troubles , she didn’t want to hear how she could overcome them; she simply wanted to be heard and seen, and not put under pressure to find a solution.

The collective emotional states—or affects — that underlie politics produce an “affective surplus” in relation to the political discourses that articulate them; they cannot be fully captured by these discourses, especially not by those whose stated goal is to deprive people of precisely the feeling that currently shapes their perception. If the everyday perception of many people is increasingly dominated by fear—I mean, why are more and more people, even full-time political professionals I know, increasingly engaging in news avoidance ? Because the world is increasingly filled with fear and negativity – and because the political narratives of our time only superficially acknowledge, reflect, and validate this feeling – the sense remains that the unreflected feeling is somehow shameful: that having “fear” is a sign of one’s own “defeatism”, that “fear” is an emotion that is primarily exploited “by the right”, and which we therefore shouldn’t feel all the time, that fear is, in a certain sense, an infantile turning away from the world, while the enlightened person (preferably a man for the sake of simplicity) faces the certainly solvable problems of our time without fear and with a great deal of rationality.

And as every good sex worker knows: the simplest way to manipulate people, to build a relationship with them in which they feel accepted and comfortable—more comfortable than in other contexts—is to acknowledge and validate their real but hidden feelings and desires. Someone who constantly has to suppress a strong feeling and then finds a place where that feeling is “accepted” will always gladly return to that place. At that point, it doesn’t really matter whether a remotely realistic solution is proposed for the problem that triggers the feeling, because, as already mentioned, for people, their feelings aren’t primarily about resolution, but rather about their acknowledgment. And since global ecological collapse triggers strong negative feelings, political discourses that cannot truly acknowledge the collapse, its insolubility, or the resulting fear leave behind an easily manipulated affective surplus that can now be articulated by political entrepreneurs and steered in a desired political direction…

Donald Trump, or: how does political communication work?

…from political entrepreneurs, such as… Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is without question the greatest political communication genius of the postmodern era. Seriously , the fact that this repulsive orange-skinned baby man was elected twice to the most powerful political office in the world—the second time as a convicted coup plotter with significant health problems, and after announcing his intention to rule as a dictator right at the start of his term (but “only for a day”), and still with a respectable majority—has by no means been sufficiently reflected upon in terms of what it means for our understanding of effective (and affective) political communication.

Of course, one could simply say that politicians always lie, people fall for these lies, and Trump’s lies cater to the reactionary views of his supporters. That may be true for part of his base, but it certainly doesn’t apply to all Trump voters. And it ignores a fact already described in 2016, during his first presidential run : “Many of his supporters don’t believe Trump’s wild claims—but they don’t care,” as the Washington Post wrote. They support him not because of, but in spite of, his positions. They aren’t concerned with ‘substance,’ which in turn explains why it never hurts Trump to be “exposed” in a lie (although, frankly, the very category of “lie” seems somewhat anachronistic when discussing and trying to understand Trump).

This is about much more than a lying politician. Trump’s political discourse is a prime example of what is called post-factual politics in Germany. The English term ” post-truth politics” goes further, however, because truths are more than just facts. While the German term gives the impression that only certain facts are being questioned, and the bourgeois-Enlightenment context in which they exist remains intact, the English term indicates that the entire conceptual framework within which facts make sense is being shaken. Trump’s political statements no longer articulate classical claims to truth. Therefore, they cannot be combated with the traditional weapons of ideological critique. For a situation in which Trump can say whatever he wants, only to claim the opposite in the next breath—and in which this doesn’t harm him— the comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term “Trumpiness” on his satirical show “The Late Show.”

Trump’s supporters don’t follow a candidate who rationally justifies his political program, who appeals to their economic interests. They follow someone who feels what they feel: the anger and the disappointment, but above all, and more importantly, the yearning for recognition, for belonging again, for being someone—for having agency. “Make America(ns) feel great again.” For Colbert, Donald Trump is therefore the politician of our time: “an emotional megaphone for voters full of anger.” His actions create affective resonance. His supporters don’t cheer the content of his words, but the fact that there is someone standing there who gives them a sense of strength and relevance they haven’t felt for decades.

This means that political communication, contrary to what hegemonic West German Habermasianism suggests, does not function through substantive agreement, or even as a Popperian process of constantly falsifying hypotheses. Instead, it functions through the construction of emotional resonances, sympathetic vibrations between subjects. Of course, this analysis is not particularly new; Spinoza already argued in his Tractatus Politicus that people are “led more by passion than by reason,” and the most effective form of communication of our time, capitalist advertising, has long since internalized it. But we still seem to have largely failed to understand this fundamental fact of political communication, to have not yet integrated it into our strategies. For the only political actor with mass appeal who seems to take seriously how much fear people in this country have of an increasingly bleak future is, unfortunately, the AfD.

FLASH!, Many feminisms, Popular & established authors, USA

Bonanza keep digging

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

Bonanza was a scary girl, all backwards in her thinking. Five years old and she didn’t like anyone. No-one liked her either. She often wondered which came first, did she like no-one and then did no-one like her, or was it the other way around?
       “Shut up and keep digging,” cried her mother, while Bonanza was busy burying the bony remains of her ten last, best and only friends. “Shut up and keep digging,” mouthed Bonanza in a sour, mocking voice, hoping her mother didn’t hear but secretly wishing she would. Bonanza was digging and stacking, digging and stacking, and burying her little toy dolls, one on top of another, digging and stacking and burying them all in the backyard.
       “There goes Frances,” she said, one by one patting them on the soft tops of their heads. “Little Limp Suzette, Astrid, Lingafore, Penitence, Rye Bread, Amber Ocean with the Amazing Marble Brown Eyes, Lori Fred the Beast, Marmalade.” And then there was The Ancient One, who kept bobbing her loose plastic head back and forth, stacked flat on her back on top of Marmalade, in the ruddy brown dirt. “Stay still,” said Bonanza through stinging tears.
       These were the days of no return. Her mother was right. If she couldn’t be a friendly, polite girl, then she would be liked by no-one. And so it was that her mother, with resounding voice, descended heavily down the porch stairs, thick ankled, to the backyard to supervise Bonanza’s burial of the word F-r-i-e-n-d-s-h-i-p.
       All the summer light grew dim, darker, until Bonanza was just a small speck of dust beating away at the backyard air, then, her self, buried. Fell in with the rest of them. Fell right flat on top of The Ancient One.
Ecology of the absurd, FLASH!, Popular & established authors, USA

Chipper Dale

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

Charles Chipper Dale stood dressed in the full regalia of an eight-year-old on his front lawn in Xenia, Ohio. The air was hot, and black, and sweet. Charlie jumped nervously from one foot to the other, nostrils flaring like a hunting dog’s. “The tornado will hit without warning!” prophesized Chipper to his audience of six children, one dirty sparrow, and a beat-up red Tonka Truck. “We will all be dead, taken up into the wormlike mass, cold faces pressed against one another in the brutal raging wind!” The children all sighed and began to shake and cry. “I have to go home and get my Snoopy Roo-Roo.” cried Ellen, who looked like a ringing bell in her oversized green dress. “Well the clouds will suck you up like a milkshake into the sky if you do, Ellen! I forbid you to go anywhere, Ellen.” said Charlie. “Where are the parents? Where are the parents?” asked Jake Lacky, who had a wide chest just like his pot-smoking dad. “My teacher said I’m a latchkey kid. What’s a latchkey kid?” No one knew. In the distance the raw smell of rain drew closer. The children could taste the mist as it slipped on their lips like hard candy. They could feel a rumble in the earth under their hot tennis shoes. “What do we do, Charlie?” asked Rainbow, one of Jake Lacky’s three siblings, latchkey kid and daughter of the pot smoker. “Look to the wind.” said Charles Chipper Dale, fingers twitching, eyes veering off into the far distance. “It’s here, it’s coming, and it won’t be long. We won’t wait for the sirens to go off. We’re children. We can feel things. Let’s head on down to the root cellar, one at a time. Single file.” “I love you all so much,” whispered Rainbow, as she held her brother Jake’s hand and followed him down the stone staircase. Cars and their drivers drove past the children on the street. Faces and heads and necks propelled forward on their way back to work after lunch break. All of them ignoring the twisting sky in the distance and the staunch smell of darkness. The tornado would hit without warning. The latchkey kids would be safe in Charlie Dale’s root cellar, listening to the roaring sounds of the King of Winds. All of them holding hands and Rainbow mouthing I love you I love you and I love you all into the dark green landscape.

Canada, Exclusive to COTW, Reflections

About shame

!Epic Tomorrows

Submitted to COTW anonymously from QC, Canada; translated from the French using ChatGPT

Shame is the emotion associated with the feeling of being inadequate, defective, or unworthy of belonging to the group. A painful, even debilitating emotion, it is fundamentally social in nature. From as early as age 3–5, it brands with a hot iron the behaviors deemed socially reprehensible. It is the ultimate physiological punishment for having “acted wrongly.” The sentence: exclusion from the group and the anticipated loss of one’s humanity. For the nervous system of a social animal, exile is death. Shame, therefore, is the feeling of imminent death. No wonder we constantly pass it around like a hot potato — both a source of power when imposed on others (symbolic murder) and a source of deep suffering when endured ourselves (living is killing me).

The physical consequence of shame is the inhibition of the motor system, the protection of internal organs (shoulders curving inward), and a painful tightening in the chest or stomach. The internal message is: if I keep acting, I will die. In its primary function, shame is essential to social regulation. It is likely the first regulator of our instinctive violence. We will all experience shame many times throughout our lives. As long as it is felt occasionally, in response to deviant, violent, or destructive behaviors, it is an emotion that has its place in the normal conditioning of human beings.

Shame becomes problematic when it is experienced systematically, with no symbolic possibility of correction, repair, or lasting return to inclusion. When one endures shame continuously, one ends up living in a state of constant chronic stress. Cortisol, at high doses and for long periods of time, becomes neurotoxic. Executive functions diminish, as does our capacity to self-regulate and return to a “rest and digest” state. In some cases, it kills. At best, it generates trauma.

As with any stressor, the nervous system will typically seek a fight-or-flight response to cope. When physical escape from the shame-generating environment is impossible — or when shame has become internalized and follows us wherever we go — two other options arise: chemical regulation (drugs) and/or dissociation (inhibition of the circuits associated with pain and emotion). On the “fight” side, it is generally through contempt or violence that one seeks to silence shame. Contempt is the psychological belittling of the person generating shame — in other words, the externalization of shame: It’s not me who should be ashamed — it’s you. Violence is the desire to subjugate, psychologically or physically, the perceived source of one’s shame: If you disappear, I will no longer feel ashamed. All of these strategies temporarily dispel the feeling of shame, but if the source of shame is not addressed and resolved, the pendulum almost inevitably swings back.

This duality of shame and contempt/violence may be at the root of the worst facets of human experience. It is a self-fueling pendulum, naturally and indefinitely oscillating between one state and the other, as long as the underlying issue — internal or external — remains unresolved. When two shame-carrying individuals live in close proximity, their pendulums tend to synchronize.

Sometimes the pendulum stays in relative equilibrium, sometimes for many years, with each party managing to counteract the other’s contempt in a roughly symmetrical way. These are painful, loveless partnerships, but relatively functional ones — not without their good moments, between each swing of the pendulum, when both parties find themselves at a standstill.

One day, however, in such dynamics, a vulnerability appears: one party cracks, asks for forgiveness, and promises to change. The pendulum, established over years, will not stop for that. This time, contempt will meet vulnerability, driving a little deeper with each swing. Contempt — the antithesis of shame, or rather, externalized shame — is strangely addictive. It confers a sense of power on the one who expresses it. Left unchecked, it tends to grow, naturally escalating into violence.

Eventually, the party in the weaker position within this dynamic will seek to flee, appease, or retaliate. Flight, without external support, will not always be possible, or at least not immediately. Flight also means the unknown. Letting go of familiar bearings, even unhealthy ones, is always a painful experience. Appeasement works in the short term, calming the aggressor’s impulses, but at the same time, by avoiding conflict, legitimizes them. Retaliation, costly in energy, becomes increasingly difficult as the victim’s resources are depleted. The experience of violence, and the shame that follows from it, is inherently incapacitating and traumatic.

It is generally through a combination of these strategies that the victimized party manages to extract themselves from the dynamic. If sufficient distance is achieved and an adequate support network exists, and with appropriate psychological help, each party’s pendulum will gradually return to equilibrium.

In the absence of such a support network or sufficient distance, the dynamic will not stop. The violent party, convinced of their superiority and frustrated at not being able to exploit the dynamic for longer, will want more. Violence, and the sense of power it produces, is addictive. If they can no longer reach the victimized party in their immediate environment, they will do so through that person’s social circle —spreading rumors, rallying as many people as possible to their cause, positioning themselves as the victim. The violence becomes communal.

In a healthy community, mechanisms would exist to regulate such processes. The victimized party could draw from their social circle the additional strength needed to provide adequate counterweight to the violent party. The violent party would be brought back into balance by their own circle, or threatened with sanctions. Eventually, if the damage was relatively superficial, after both parties had stabilized, a process of mutual understanding — and perhaps even repair — could be envisioned.

Unfortunately, we do not live in healthy communities, but in a social environment that perpetuates violence and shame across the full breadth of human experience — domestic, geographic, and in working relationships. We have become isolated, inhibited, selfish, and/or full of shame in relation with ourselves. It is no surprise that the far right, which makes its business out of channeling violence and contempt toward marginalized social groups, is flourishing in the current context. Behind the social mechanisms — capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy — that fuel this system, one constant remains: the human propensity to maintain or consolidate one’s status, and to flee from suffering. Dehumanizing the other is simply a means among many to achieve that end. To my knowledge, there is only one remedy to this psychological cancer: connection, community, and love. In the current social and economic environment, opportunities for these are fragile — but not nonexistent. They must be protected and carefully tended.