Recently I wrote about the role of chance and magic, and their connection to the cultivation of leadership. In essence I claimed that technology and managerialism had drained the ancient systems of enchantment, leaving us with a heartless factory capable only of churning out cardboard leaders — people bereft of the ability to draw a bridge between magic and the real.
I believe that to be true in a general sense, at least until this current age fall apart and gives way to a new era of enchantment. And yet there are things that happen that can still light that spark for millions of people at once. A shared perception of a world in which invisible hands guide events as if weaving their fingers through a stream. Such as when the most galvanizing and polarizing political figure in recent American history comes into the crosshairs of a would-be assassin, only to turn his head at the last possible moment so that the bullet misses its mark by a couple of inches.
Donald Trump’s brush with death is something out of literature or cinema. The staging of it, the aesthetics of it, the unfathomably thin margin that split one potential timeline from another. If such a thing had happened to, say, Barack Obama during his 2012 reelection campaign, it would become an event of holy significance in news media and art and entertainment for millions of people. As close to divine intervention as spiritually drained agnostic catamites are capable or perceiving. It might have even brought some number of atheistic liberals back to God.
But it happened to Trump. And so the power structure spent the ensuing months removing it from the current year narrative. Trump brought it up himself during the last debate, but the moderators were clearly ready to pretend as if the most significant assassination attempt in over 40 years had never happened.
And yet it did happen. And for millions of people prepared or inclined to see such things, it had that feel of some strange force guiding events toward….something. More chance than magic, perhaps, but in a way that really depends on perception. And perception helps guide the course of history.
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