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These are the New Guard of America, the conjoined twins, authentic leadership of a truly diverse and whole (holy) nation. This is masculinity and femininity suspended between the opposites, wedded in balance, mature, cleansed, conscious. Fight Club�s victors have already passed through their respective hells, through the nigredo of Genderwar. They have met the devil, and it was them. Serene amidst the destruction, they share a vision of a far greater nation and world spreading ahead.

But Fight Club�s tough-love eschatology shows us the end zone, and right now America is stuck on its own two-yard-line. This isn�t the time of healing and peace, this is the war that comes first, the dismantling of what is not working, the revelation of what is occulted. America stumbles, in a raging stupor, down the seven spirals to Hades, eyes closed in terror, desperately conjuring external enemies.

The last attempt America made at authentic justice, righteousness, and spirituality was crushed by the Powers That Be in the late 1960�s. How desperately we now need a revival of that spirit! How desperately we need our bath in the river Styx, a dose of brutal, purifying self-reflection!

When Haight-Ashbury was at its zenith, blazing with holy spirit, tourists from around the country flocked to the revolutionary enclave above Golden Gate Park�s Panhandle in order to observe the �freaks� firsthand. After a few months of being stared at by Midwestern farmers and their wives cruising up and down Haight Street in tour buses, the locals devised a just solution.

Haight Street is a narrow, crowded, two-way thoroughfare, festooned with traffic lights. Even today the cars crawl along it at snail�s-pace. As the good folk trundled back and forth in the Americruisers, gawking at the zoo, locals took to jogging alongside the Greyhounds holding large mirrors against the outside of the bus windows. Pretty quick the human sightseeing tailed off.

Soon enough, of course, the free spirits were incarcerated or otherwise crushed. A few fled to the hills, where they remain deep underground while the country declared war on its own citizenry, a war that worsens each day. Now, when we most need a giant mirror held up to ourselves, we have only a propagandistic media, a totalitarian academy of ideological fascists, and a corrupt military/industrial Machine to force-feed us their self-serving �truths.�

It took an apocalyptic event of numinous proportion and design to get our attention, and more is undoubtedly on the way, because rather than review our mistakes, we have chosen retreat into the unconsciousness of victimization � the state of moral superiority and denial that we have embraced for decades as our guiding ethos.

Eventually, however, much as we wish to deny our own wrongdoing, similar events will bring the nation to a crucial pass. Can America find new kingship in the midst of matriarchal regression? Will we continue down the path of vengeance, avarice, repression, and intolerance? How much longer can we afford, and endure, our condition of domestic terrorism, environmental degradation, corporate rape, and collective psychosis?

Will America pass through Hell? It�s hard to say. After almost forty years of descent, we have yet to reach the heart of the Pit. Every great civilization has made the attempt to establish a Millennial nation, and a Millennial world. Some went deep indeed. But to date, only individuals have survived. The Grail is yet unfilled, the Stone yet unmade. Adam is unborn. First Man has yet to walk this Earth. We think we�re such hot shit! But we are only the meta-monkeys that precede true human being.

The implosion of the Towers brings America one step closer to confrontation not with the external �evil� of Islamic extremists, but with the horrors of our own dark heart, the corruption in our individual and collective selves, the inner toxicity and deterioration of a once-great nation.