"Dark" ambiguity

My tolerance for talking video is very low, but when Bruce Charlton sent me a link to a YouTube video of someone discussing his (BC's) ideas about Lucifer, Ahriman, and Sorath, I actually watched the whole thing.

And then, even more uncharacteristically, I decided to watch another talking video by the same guy, who uses the interesting moniker HeavyRain.

This second video begins (after a brief prologue) with the rhetorical strategy of applying the adjective dark to everything associated with President Trump.

One of [Robert] Cialdini's primary persuasive contributions we can see in liberal journalism today is the use of the phrase dark -- Donald Trump's dark vision of America, the dark future, the dark this -- it's the word dark, because dark lets you conjure in your own mind every image and terror that exists in your subconscious. Its engineered non-specificity allows you to project your own unconscious fears onto President Trump, and so creating negative emotion towards the man and preventing you from actually investigating his policies and performance in the real world.

The video then moves on to its main theme: the use of "ambiguous images" as a form of psychological warfare for the purpose of polarizing people. In introducing this idea, the video shows a screenshot of the Wikipedia page for "Ambiguous image" -- featuring, in addition to the familiar duck/rabbit and vase/faces, one of Gustave Verbeek's reversible drawings. 

This is the very same image that I used in my December 22 post, in which I related how my suddenly thinking of Verbeek for no reason had led me to discover the Grateful Dead's new music video for "Ripple" just two days after it had been released.

So, the word dark and ambiguous images. As regular readers will know, this blog has been dwelling of late on the homophony of dark and d'Arc and the ambiguity of the "dark rainbow" and the rainbow flag. In my post "Black crow, black rainbow" (Dec 28), I wrote

In 1978, the gay pride Rainbow Flag made its debut in San Francisco. While the colors officially represented various things (red for life, orange for healing, that kind of crap), in practice the rainbow stands for the spectrum of sexual neuroses and perversions, with the whole explicitly representing the cardinal sin of pride. Spiritually speaking, "all of the colors are black."

I then added in a comment, "Ah! How did I miss the Joan of Arc connection? Arc = rainbow, and d’Arc = dark. The black rainbow!" Two days later, my post "The first rainbow flag" discussed Joan's flag, and the rainbow on it, in detail. Then, in "In the cards" (Jan 1), I discussed how ostensibly Satanic ("dark") imagery contained hidden allusions to Joan of Arc.

Should we be thinking about a d'Arc vision of America? A d'Arc future? And should we think of that in terms of unparalleled spiritual purity and perfection -- or of a corrupt church burning all that at the stake? Talk about ambiguity!

Maid of Heaven, pray for us!