Theme of the Assassin and the King OR Schelling’s Aquarium
History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute.” Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
In the advent of these new red flag laws and upcoming abrogation of both the first and second amendment, I want to create a dialogue with the agent monitoring my public communications. There’s really no need to introduce myself to you, I mean what more is there to say? You already know my resting heart rate, bank account assets, the store where I bought my burner phone, even the password to my cryptolocked email address.
In essence we are reversing the confession booth aren’t we, in which the parishioner knows his priest but has some charade of anonymity? You are a mystery, but maybe I can empathize with you if I put together a composite. It needs details, workshopping, dialogue—many parts of your story will never be revealed to me. At timestamp 11:04:56 PM CST on 11/5/2019, here is how I see the story playing out:
The action takes place in an agency in bland yet authoritative North Virginia city---the NSA, the FBI, Homeland Security. For convenience’s sake; the NSA. Let us say you are a man named Ryan, and you are the son and grandson of Boston law enforcement agents and on your mother’s side the ancestor of Barney McGinniskin the first Irish policeman in the United States, whose tenure was cut short by the Know-Nothings and whose gravestone stands high upon a Suffolk hilltop, far from the red Irish bogs of his homeland.
Ryan’s job requires him to get on social media and maybe over multiple platforms and generate a persona of sorts. There are lower level guys that pick the low (IQ) hanging fruit, they rabble rouse and appeal to the lowest common denominator and rope in patsy “willing to do something and not just talk” and tell him to bomb the Washington monument, only to find out the fuse doesn’t work.
But Ryan has the more difficult task of actually preventing domestic terrorism. Thus, he finds himself between the N-towers and persistent calls to nix the 19th amendment he finds that in many of these chat rooms, most of these personas with anonymous and strange avatars were not only NOT basement dwelling, but were working professionals with arcane, esoteric, and vast knowledge. Long threads about the possibility of prehistoric Aryan expansion into Peru, ensuring that the conquistadors were merely a reunion of high R1b haplotypes. Single point mutations in the germline as a result of delaying motherhood. Discussion of Fomenko theory of lost history, that several centuries were fabricated of whole cloth. Lamenting the lost opportunities of the Khoisan tribes to ally with the Dutch to prevent the Bantu expansion. The amount of study of genetics, linguistics, history and philosophy became too time consuming for Ryan to follow any one thread and so he put in a budget request to expand operations.
Ryan as a lapsed Catholic begins the Inquistadors, a portmanteau of “Inquisition” and “Conquistadors” and percolates a chat room filled with theologians too autistic for the seminary with the occasional Dad and Catholic Welder. Frequent topics of discussion were the woman question, and Catholic Arian vs. Manichean heresy, and the solfeggio frequencies in the Gregorian chant align with healing harmonics that allow immune system to attack cancer cells.
Ryans then hires Dieter McFarland, a former football center from Missouri who managed to keep his frame in decent shape and understands the locker room antics of the “poast fizeek” forums, even though a bit soft from mid-career of law enforcement pastry. Dieter’s task was to head up Heraclitus’ heroes, a series of online forums which focused on BroScience issues of health and fitness. Often discussed were microchimerism and reverse microchimerism, persistent and escalating environmental xenoestrogen, the anti-estrogen blocking properties of cabbage. Characteristics of J2 and R1b and the Norman conquest of Rome allowed for the continuation of the Roman empire far beyond. Some distribution maps show settling of R1b genotype as remotely as Benin, where even today Beninites have narrower nares than their sub-saharan brethren.
National Academic studies were often sited in these terrorist chat rooms discussing facial bone structure, and the influence of birth control over female facial features and baseline testosterone levels. The lack of pair bonding and oxytocin levels induced in career mothers was another common topic. There was also discussion here on the use of glycine supplements, and whether pork rinds, which have rather high levels of glycine, would be sufficient to produce enough glycine without the gastrointestinal side effects of amino powder. But even Dieter became frustrated by the apathy of the men, for all their weightlifting they seemed so unwilling to, and I apologize for the cliché here, “do something” despite Dieter’s subtle but persistent goading.
But this knowledge certainly seemed like it could be put to dangerous use, and so a specialist in semiotics was added to the team. Lane Edwards was a humble old stock patriot from Western Massachussetts with an English major but lacked the ambition to go to law school and instead took the civil servant exam. He retreated into massive novels of Pynchon and would insist that Pale King was actually better than Infinite Jest, Lane was the student that actually read Ulysses rather than pretend to like his classmates and more prestigious of his cohort. Lane infiltrated Pnin’s corner which focused on Metanarratives and hyperreality which had massive autistic threads on literature and art consumption mediums. Lane posited, and discussed within Pnin’s corner, that what was considered unique in Borges’ time, that being a revolutionary event can be modeled after a work of fiction, is now commonplace. Specifically, it means that visual media is often used as predictive programming to prime the acceptance of certain events. Basic directives can be sent to head writers and the details can be worked out by media producers completely unaware of the event they are priming and audience to believe. By metaphor it is like fixing a football game by having assistant coaches tell each other what plays are occurring while the head coach and players retain a modicum of plausible deniability.
But no one on the team had access to the purveyors of this most dangerous ideology, which espoused a toxic kind of German idealism which ran rampant among these forums. Ryan would have to go hat in hand once more to the WASPish asexual blob with promises that he was onto something that could threaten the President. The agency would have to seek outside help and recruited Marvin Greene. Greene hosted a weblog for ten years on neoreaction forums and his own blog before publicly “retiring”. Marvin was subcontracted by the technology firm, the CEO was a fan, he even contributed some revisions to the Presidents speeches in the first election. He was rebranding anonymously for the agency and building up his chat room “Schelling’s Aquarium” with a mixture of esoteric posts from the famed aquarist Takeshe Amano. Topics discussed ranged from an encyclopedic discussion of Indo-aryan linguistic migration patterns into the Indus valley and how the entire caste system revolved around this invasion. Esoteric discussions of Japanese terrariums and the comparison to, lets just say modern American design. Many of the chat room denizens say that Takashe Amano was in fact an intuitive disciple of Schelling, who broke from Fichte and Kant by insisting their starting point of the mind was too elevated, too top down. To begin with the human mind and look back on creation is to ignore the evolutionary, or, let’s say iterative cycles of creation and destruction that Schelling posited.
The groups drill down, really get into character. Heraclitus’ heroes issue a dictum stating no more donuts for the team, much to Ryan’s dismay. They alternate between Chicken Breasts and Wild caught Salmon. Ryan once saw a bottle of aromasin, which is odd because it’s used to treat breast cancer. Deiter has everyone doing desk dips, then pull ups, and eventually the team puts in a request for a Russian-style gym to “get into character” complete with kettle bells and tractor tires and standard barbells (no machines). Lat pull downs, bench presses, OHP, Romanian Deadlifts. Jugs of orange juice and syringes begin to show up.
Lane and Marvin, the more bookish duo of the squad, begin lectures and group discussions on perfecting the system of German Idealism and whether or not it was the true heir to LOGOS or natural law. Fichte was a theologian, but Schelling was more of a natural scientist and promoted early in his career, he was the youngest professor in the Wiemar, by none other than Goethe himself. The Lutheran theology grates on Ryan and he complains most about Hegel, who never realized that Lutheranism was the anti-thesis to Catholicism that Hegel himself never sought to synthesize. But they all agreed to remain civil and focused on the task at hand, namely, to maintain this experiment of America.
In order to get into character Ryan starts attending Tridentine Latin Mass and convinces his wife Karen to convert from Episcopalian and attend RCIA classes.
“It’s important to infiltrate an institution in order to influence it, this has career implications” he tells Karen.
Ryan joins the Knights of Columbus, further infiltrating the Church and even volunteers for pancake breakfasts and fish fry’s. He also starts actively reaching out to Irish Catholic Law enforcement agents throughout the country, police chiefs of large and mid-sized cities he thought may be friendly to the cause. Ryan renews his membership to fraternal order of police.
Deiter begins making similar connections to independent gym owners, meeting through assorted contests and conventions of strength and pageantry of male physique. He begins keeping a database of friendly sites throughout the country and starts getting involved with gun ranges after watching hobbyists put three 6.5mm Creedmores in a quarter at 300 yards.
Lane begins channeling communications of basic tenets of philosophy, Aristotle and Augustine, through video game mods. Marvin funnels money into online patronage accounts of ASMR video streamers with the instruction to read certain passages of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”. A sultry blonde pronouncing “apodictic” in a Czech accent gets a million views in a week. Broad teachings on leadership and passages from Aquinas and Schelling are taught through game moderators, for the favored son ( “SlovenianHapsburg88”) by the members of the aquarium.
Finally the VP team gets the call, the McKinley play they call it. The President had made too many enemies among the Chinese communist party and Mexican warlords and the Chamber of Commerce and frankly too many projects in the Middle East have been put on hold and are ready to be unleashed. The campaign was ramping up and it was clear that one way or another Wall Street would take a beating, and the VP was ready for his chance to be the next Teddy Roosevelt. When these kind of play calls come from intelligence, Ryan knew he had to act fast. He had recruited a second-generation Latinx from the lower IQ caste and through backchannels Ryan suggests a hangar rally in St. Louis, ostensibly chosen as a pivotal electoral state but for Ryan the setting was much more symbolic. Marvin and Lane write and re-write what is meant to be the Presidents final speech while Ryan and Deiter join the secret service detail on the perimeter in the hangar and keep a sharp eye on the patsy.
The President gets up to give his speech, “Thank you, thank you, I tell you I love being back in St. Louis, Missouri. The Show-Me State. You know anyone can promise the moon, but Missourans want you to “show me” the results. Thank you very much. You know I want to say something a little different today. This great country was founded on the “pursuit of happiness”, but the founders in all their wisdom did not define happiness for us. They did not define happiness as the pursuit of pleasure, but that happiness was based in morality, and morality is not the properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves WORTHY of happiness. Happiness is not an ideal of reason but an ideal of imagination. And each American contains their center of happiness within themselves, as a bullet the center of gravity. But it is important to note that history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history. For now, …”
Ryan and Deiter lay in wait for the patsy to make his move. As that fateful phrase comes up, “a powerful, hostile government is growing, and is at war with all the others,” Ryan squeezes. One Creedmore in the quarter was sufficient, a pink mist captured by five hundred cameras livestreaming to an audience of billions.
The reverse Mckinley.
Deiter’s jaw dropped. “You called an audible.”
Never in US history was the VP assassinated in an operation. The Patsy’s gun held blanks, as you can’t trust an errand boy with such matters. Secret service converges on the President as Ryan is willingly apprehended, and in his confession, he cites many of the recent anti-American Jesuit teachings, in an attempt to secure a suppression of that order. Ryan’s contacts in several PDs begin invading television stations and ad hoc artilleries begin stockpiling in gyms and churches. Survival of the “Jesuit-led” coup leads the President to consolidate power, including a massive purge at the top agencies. Several in the Fraternal Order of police communicate with the generals.
Communications team led by Marvin and Lane (who have since publicly disavowed their former partners) begin operation “Slovenian landslide” by coordinating efforts from Mongolia to Spain, the end of America as “island nation” to a one with the heart of the steppe. Strange tribute begin to show up; esoteric manuscripts of divination, a thoroughbred from Mongolia, centuries old magnums from Bordeaux all for SlovenianHapsburg88 as foreboding omens for the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.
In the Presidents speech the passages taken from German Idealists are the least dramatic ones: Marvin suspected that someone in the future would be able to stumble onto the truth. Ryan, that is the one reading this, may even realize that he also is part of Marvin and Lane’s plot.