I Put A Spell On You - The Left's Hilarious Racist Sorcery

N'gomo M'bele was a sorcerer, a shaman who practiced his black arts in a small village far up the reaches of the Congo River.  He was known for miles around as a witch doctor, a man who could cure ailments with incantations and herbs and who, legend has it, raised a man from the dead. 

M'bele, like most African witch doctors not only cured disease but to put spells on enemies -  a primitive voodoo-like ceremony that called upon spirits from the netherworld to do his bidding.  These hexes could make the victim blind, deaf and dumb, and reel with madness; and and as such were in great demand. M'bele, a smart businessman who can as easily assess supply and demand in the deep forest as a canny investor could on Wall Street, demanded a heavy price for such sorcery - fifty capybaras for death, ten howler monkeys for crippling illness, and five tail feathers from a Bird of Paradise for temporary insanity. 

This price structure could only be applied, of course, if the hexes worked; and the local community was convinced that they did.  Now, whether M'bele only took commissions when the victim already had a history of mental febrility, a weakness in his limbs, or bad eyesight was a moot point in a credulous, primitive society.  Whatever the mechanism, the man was respected and sought after. 

He lived simply but well, never one to display his wealth, and never tempted by impossible tasks.  Mrs. Liasso, for example, had asked for her husband to disappear into thin air, gone without a trace as though he had never existed while her neighbor asked for the return of her son, dead and gone for ten years. 

M'bele of course was not one of a kind.  Shamans, witch doctors, and sorcerers have existed in every culture since the first human settlements; and despite the not unexpected discovery that such sorcery was hogwash, villagers flocked to them with regularity. 

There was some perspicacity involved.  Shamans knew that they could frighten a stutterer to speak properly, give a natural tranquilizer to a hysterical woman, and to jumpstart a depressive with concoctions of jungle wood ear and baobab bark (scientifically proven stimulants) but attribute the results to their dark powers.  In some cases these simple men were able to practice Freud's 'talking cure' and by marvelously intricate psychological insights, cure impotency, frigidity, and lack of sexual interest 

Haiti is perhaps the best-known country for sorcery.  Voodoo is widely practiced, and has become the national religion. Tom-toms and howling can be heard in the hills above Kenscoff as exorcisms are practiced nightly.  The living dead prowl the streets looking for peace, demons live in the underground below Les Cayes, and winged devils occupy souls at will.  How an entire country can be so credulous has always been a mystery - but the African traditions which came with the first slaves and mingled with Caribbean Indian black magic were indelible. 

 

Now, it might be surprising that any Anglo-Saxon culture, especially one founded on the principles of the English Enlightenment like America, could be given to such fantasy; but a version of African sorcery is here, alive and well.  Of course there are no tongues of newt, eyes of lizards, and dried bones of coot and no wild midnight animal sacrifice - nothing so crude and primitive - but the practice of putting spells on people is not unheard of.  In fact it is common and universalized. 

The American Left, the legatees of a once proud progressive tradition, has nothing left in the hamper but sorcery.  Their entire ideology, political platform, and policy agenda has become empty of any substance and refilled with incantations, hexes, and spells.  'Racist', they shout at the slightest imagined offense.  'Bigot, black-hating, soulless crypto-Nazi' they yell at Donald Trump again and again until it becomes a litany, a chorus repeated again and again until it is believed. 

'Anti-democratic tyrant, elitist dupe of the wealthy, pseudo-aristocrat, scurrilous imposter' they go on until the chorus is taken up by more and more people.  The rhythms, the power of repetition, the deep resonance of the chant become irresistible. 

In Orwell's Animal Farm the ruling animal junta repeats the chant, 'Four legs good, two legs bad' over and over again until it is taken up by all animals, made angrier and more revolutionary each time it is repeated.  Over time it becomes more than a slogan or a chant, but a sorcery, a hex, and a spell. 

Another way at looking at the Left's hexing is tautology - a thing is because it is obvious that it is.  Trump becomes racist the more he is accused of it. A thing repeated enough times by enough people create its own reality.  Donald Trump becomes Adolf Hitler the more he is called a Hitler. 

As an extension of tautology and repetition is conflation.  Before long, the term 'racist' becomes a universal catch-all for anything contrary to received wisdom or political canon.  Crying 'racist' means that a person espouses all the wrong, antithetical, mean, and inconclusive political positions.  The term becomes a stand-in, a linguistic surrogate, and by that time the hex is complete. 

America had become no different than Animal Farm - the Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad slogan was replaced by 'Racist, misogynist, homophobe', chanted everywhere, tarring every naysayer, every opponent, every critic.  Logic was drowned out by rhetoric.  Non-believers had no say, the drumbeat was deafening, the roar became the nation's voice, reality was transformed. 

Everything that Trump did was an expression of his racist hatred and nothing was exempt. His closing of the Southern border, dismantling of foreign aid, insisting on voter ID, rolling back DEI and affirmative action, restoring the ethos of talent, intelligence, and ambition, support of Israel were all racist by definition.  The intellectual infection fulminated.  Political discussion was terminated - if evil exists, then there can be no debate.  The end of history, the demise of good...

Wrong.  These very initiatives gave lie to the fantastical assumptions of the Left and showed the emptiness and vacuity of their claims.  Their shouts, howls, and hexes were outed as nothing but aimless, baseless imaginings.  Shouts of 'racist' only identified the shouter as an intellectual poseur, a groundless claimer, a barnyard cackler. 

Finally and remarkably after only eight months of the Trump presidency, the outrage of the Left has been muted if not silenced.  Trump's actions have demanded attention. Substance requires consultation, debate, decision.  The time of empty, feral howls is over. 

The Left is on the run, still animated but more like whirling dervishes and St. Vitus' mad dancers than anything else.  They are groping, grasping, fiddling for a response to the conservative reforms instituted by Trump but have come up with nothing.  Ten years of hexes, spells, and sorcery have left them with an empty closet.