The “genie” in the phrase “you can’t put the genie back into the bottle” usually points to something we don’t want to happen but feel powerless to stop once history has freed the genie from the walls of its bottle. Loosed upon the world, the genie puts peace, sanity, and health at risk.

The genie gets rapped as bad because its coming-out usually threatens the power of the makers and keepers of the conventional wisdom to make and keep the conventional wisdom that gives them their power to make…and so on and so on. A loose genie smashes that roundelay, and while the makers/keepers don’t like that outcome, for the rest of us, this is to the good, because a genie out of the bottle is the only way we can starting getting the liberation we deserve and crave.

I imagine the genie chanting Silicon Valley’s mantra of “move fast and break things” as it goes about its business. Or being “disruptive” in the way that information now melts the ligaments of the old order so that it must slink to its grave. The genie as solvent to conformist nostalgia and, at the same time, the sharp point of it, if nostalgia taken in its original meaning as the pain caused by wanting a home. Wanting a home is what the genie can cure us of, the achy-breaky hankering for a final vocabulary to tie off all our dreads, the lullaby rung on our bones by our aging, the pathetic hope that art will comfort, that ethics will light our path, that we are anything grander than the nervous, over-eating, self-inflicting animals that we are. Thanks to the genie, we can depend on nothing being dependable and that we will be one of the things broken by life moving fast.

I like this genie. I like this genie very much.

But I also think about the bottle. I think of Jimmy Tingle’s “Beer Poem” and his lush ode to alcohol. I think about the bottle and how we no longer have an untrashed language to speak about drugs and ecstasy and liberation and how the body has been turned into a bottle to bottle the imagination and how we curate this body so that we can live longer lives but in curated fashions, devaluing decadence, trading dissolution for the graded and leveled path, measured breathing the puritan split ends of the bell curve of suffocation.

No wonder the genie wants out.

We should all live as if we are genies released from bottles. We should move fast and break things, then move slow and patch things so that we can break things again. Some might argue that there is quite enough breakage, thank you very much, and that many in the world could do with some of that Jewish tikkun olam, the repairing of the world, so that they could cop a rest from the fuckery practiced against the powerless and de-voiced. Agreed – to a point.

And what if the genie is Trump? Well, so what?

Trump (not the person, because who knows that creature, but the actor playing the role) moves fast and breaks things, and it is amusing to watch the dudgeon, low and high, that people froth themselves into as he skins their sacred cows and dries them out for jerky.  He is rightly deemed a maniac, but that’s never disqualified anyone for success in America, so “maniac” can’t be the slur that will trip him up (was that not the full intention of Hillary’s “foreign policy” rantricide?) Like circular breathing, such attacks just give Trump more oxygen.

Some media machers dub him our Id so that they can look like the rational adults in the room, but they do that only to deflect attention away from their own Id, called the conventional wisdom, their sedative words steeped in a slurry of genteel violence (is that not what income inequality is?) and a brutish fear of the Other and then maquillaged with respectability and delivered on the news networks.

Sanders’ genie tries to do the same thing, but Sanders has not Trump’s gene for craziness. He is afflicted with earnestness, and while his breakage is the kind that calls for collective repairs after the bull has left the china shop, it won’t have enough traction to put him in power. Most Americans may say they want the good Christian boy who graduates cum laude, but they really want the bad boy (and it usually is a boy).

If the genies on the loose now can crack up our American sclerosis, I am all for it. I don’t want to defang them with calls for non-violence and tolerance for differing ideas and etiquette before truth. Liberation is not clean-edged, and creative destruction does not respect reason. This is the time of our shock therapy, to use Naomi Klein’s phrase, that will strip away our masks and produce the fright that may (may) make it possible to see straight.

And if it doesn’t? I think the grand noble experiment that is the United States is over.  We will have experimented ourselves into oligarchy and repression, warmongering and penury, into a gated community for the haves and a reservation for the never-will-haves, with a murky in-the-middle class with enough money for some consumption as they sing Jim Morrison’s “Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection.”

We will have what Lewis Lapham called a “participatory
fascism.” For the most part, a mix of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell will suffice to keep the existing order unbroken. For those that actively resist, the state will smash them, as usual, whether with the police (Occupy Wall Street) or with debt (Greece). That state will also keep all of its surveillance apparatus intact (sub rosa, of course) and build out the public surveillance apparatus known as social media and the internet, both as a way to gather more information and to blunt resistive thinking (what is this structure but Huxley’s feelies spread global?). At the lower
levels, the state will allow much to happen that give people a false sense of safety and community: Little League, parades,
and so on. Elections will be even more stage-managed than they are now and may even dispense with things like primaries,
with the parties going back to naming the candidates
themselves - cleaner, leaner, and less crazy-making for all of us.

Put the genie back into the bottle? The genie is our only way out of this coming mess.