A profane tarot spread

there's a shit mother fucker fuck shit situation

There’s a scene from Sex & the City where Samantha exclaims “shit! Mother fucker, fuck, shit!” And Miranda replies, “there’s a shit mother fucker fuck shit situation?”

I can’t recall what the context was, certainly nothing as dire as your country re-electing a racist sexist wannabe dictator. Probably like, a brunch scheduling conflict, lucky them… Anyway, this line has been echoing in my head since the US election concluded last week because my friends, indeed:

There is a shit mother fucker fuck shit situation.

So, I made a tarot spread because that’s what I do (this one is sort of a spiritual descendent of the WTF Tarot Spread created by Interrobang Tarot in 2016).

Let’s try it together, using the Hayworth Tarot, and you can try it on your own, too. You don’t have to use it specifically to process the election, either! That’s what I’m focused on today, but you could try this for any shit mother fucker fuck shit situation you find exploding around you.

To clarify what happened (or the first SHIT, if you like) I have the Two of Pentacles. The imagery in this deck shows two hands emerging from clouds, or maybe sand. The Hands exist within a void, without the context of the rest of the body. The Pentacles themselves appear to be black holes, or even wounds within the hands. Perhaps this is projecting too much of my personal response to the election on to the cards, but I can’t help but read this as people harming themselves without the full context of what they’re doing.

As an example, exit polls showed the main reason voters chose Trump was the economy. But why on earth does anyone believe that he will actually help the economy? The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-partisan non-profit organization, ran an analysis before the election and projected that Trump’s proposed policies would increase the national debt more than Harris’s. And 23 Nobel Prize winning economists signed a letter endorsing Harris, stating Trump’s policies would “lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.”

I rarely use clarifiers these days but I felt like I was missing something with the Two of Pentacles so I pulled another card to go along with this and got the Three of Swords. This confirms the direction I was already going in my interpretation. People harming themselves without the full context of their choices.

The Three of Swords also shows that pain was a big factor in how the election panned out. Not to give too much credence to the economic argument, but it’s one thing to see oh hey this economist endorses Harris and it’s another thing to see oh hey I can’t afford groceries and child care. So I’m trying to be generous and say maybe some of this pain is justified.

Isolation is a key word that often gets thrown around with the Three of Swords and I think that’s applicable here, too, on multiple levels. First, the isolation of only voting on one issue. I can’t remember where, but I saw a post on social media alluding to this by saying “I hope you enjoy your eggs being ten cents cheaper while your girlfriend is dying of sepsis.”

And on a broader level, isolation already has been and continues to be a huge issue in American society. It’s easy to see your own problems. Maybe not so easy to imagine what things are like for people of a different gender or age or skin color or tax bracket.

So, what happened? People voted out of pain and isolation and maybe without the full context of what their vote would mean.

The Seven of Wands gives consideration to who or what carries blame in this situation. You know, I normally don’t like blame. It’s not a great energy. And this is an interesting card to see here because the message that comes to me with it is “blame itself is to blame.” White people blaming immigrants and/or people of color for the ills of this country. Leftists blaming liberals. Liberals blaming leftists. And on, and on, and ON. If there’s one thing we don’t have a shortage of in this country it’s blame flying in every god damn direction.

Look, I’m not immune to this. It feels good to blame someone or something. And it’s not always entirely inaccurate. We do need to identify the root causes of problems in order to fix them, right? But perhaps the Seven of Wands is a reminder that this process isn’t always so simple. There are many factors, coming from many directions. Not a dissimilar message from the traditional interpretation of the Two of Pentacles.

For advice on processing my initial reaction here I have Justice. This deck has an unnerving illustration for this card, but it feels spot on in this situation. One of the concepts I associate most closely with Justice is Integrity. And a phrase that has been thrown around a lot the past few years is Election Integrity. And as far as we can ascertain so far, there was not widespread ‘election interference’ at play here.

Of course, the system itself is extremely fucked up. The electoral college is bullshit. Gerrymandering is bullshit. There’s all kinds of voter intimidation and measures that make it more difficult for people to vote. We should have ranked choice voting. And on and on. I’m not saying our system itself has actual integrity.

But in theory, this election was won within the realm of “integrity” in our current political system, no matter how broken that system is.

That is unnerving. It’s like this menacing specter on the ceiling coming toward you with a knife and knowing others in your country fully and willingly opened the door to invite it in. It didn’t have to sneak in. It was welcomed by half the population. This card is supposed to help me process my initial reaction, and I guess in a way having that clarity that other people willingly chose this, as unsettling as it is, does inform how I will move forward.

On that note, the Hanged Man offers insight on planning for the future. The idea that comes to me here is avoiding falling into the default energy that may be expected of me/us. I recently came across this quote:

"The key to taking effective action in a Trump world is to avoid perpetuating the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion and disorientation." -Daniel Hunter

The Hanged Man makes me think I may have to be more liminal than ever. To take a broader perspective, which is certainly easier said than done. Natalie Wynn summed this sentiment up on a recent episode of Conspirituality (recorded before the election but still relevant, perhaps even moreso now):

“Everyone has the potential to feel like something uniquely apocalyptic is happening…like some unspeakable doom is imminent. That seems to be a common feeling people are susceptible to… You can go back to a lot of points in history and if you were there and didn’t know how it turned out it would seem apocalyptic…. Part of what’s scary about the present moment is you don’t know how it’s going to end and you put nightmares into that uncertainty…. taking a ‘zoomed out’ view of things is helpful in understanding that you are not some unique sufferer… there’s a difference between productive fear and unproductive fear and I’m trying to train myself to understand that difference.”

That zoomed out view is the realm of the Hanged Man, and I’m going to attempt to find some (any, even a tiny scrap) of comfort within that discomfort as we face whatever comes next.

Take care of yourself, and take care of others. Until we meet again…

Carrie