Dirigible

2006-08-24T20:20:00.000-07:00

A Long Night
(where our intrepid blogger attempts to discuss the universe without the aid of drugs or a higher education)

I wrote almost a year ago about my aim for this blog. On one level, I wanted to give my gut opinion, and on another level be ignorant while still holding on to a key that (only tenuously) unlocks doorway to high mystery. I can be accused of the ultimate relativism, but I do believe (as all explorers do) that my ideas will be borne out to some degree in the future.

Why? Because I like to grapple with infinity. Infinity is probably the most dangerous of meditations, because one has to walk into that light clearly. I can't say that I've been successful because I am still too human and flawed to attain the necessary serenity.

I picked the name Zipperupus from a story by Stanislaw Lem. Zipperupus is the name of a robot king. His vizier seeks to kill him and creates a dream machine that King Zipperupus can attach himself to and experience his secret hopes and fears. In each dream he discovers a new adventure or delight, but continually evinces an rectitude and pride that acts as a guardian angel. Every time death approaches, he stops himself in the nick of time. Until the last dream, a dream where he is trapped in a replication of his own antechamber, and all doors lead back. He believes it real, endlessly real, and thus can never leave. The reinforcing nature of consciousness.

In an infinite universe of space and time, all things are not only possible but are. I envision an nth dimensional prism, most appropriately called Da'ath--knowledge. Above it is a white light that contains all frequencies and possibilities simultaneously. This light interacts with the prism, which refracts the light into its component parts and laws. I see this as real and unreal, as an actuality or a metaphor, or both. Buddha called the resplendent white light Nirvana. You attain Nirvana by transcending knowledge and attaining non-conscious alignment or return to a state of infinitude... to be infinite and not be broken back down into component parts. To be a flower is to be the sun because sharing is connectedness is being.

Given that the universe is infinite, life is a zero sum equation as anything less than infinity is zero. We are conscious entities, prisms that refract light. We are bits of the transcendent light that wandered into the prism and participate in the prism, live small and think large. Because we are conscious we can shape reality. Because we are conscious, we shape ourselves. Because we refract and break things down as an act of consciousness, we confuse consciousness with power. Power is an antinomy, because even as it exists it is actively opposed and consequently meaningless. Power being coequal is shapeless. What is power in the face of infinity?

We assume simply by predicting and controlling phenomenon we are attaining power, when in fact we are actually breaking away from consciosness. The most conscious beings are the least among us. Take, for example, a squirrel. It is overwhelmingly conscious, with a small worldview limited to particulars, alert yet prone to standing still. How much more conscious the virus or the chromosome? They do their small acts exceedingly well and exemplify the process of death and life, respectively.

Humans are less conscious. More prone to metaphor and abstraction, which are acts that dwell on possibilities and interconnectedness. We think we are more conscious due to free will, but free will is simply a void in the prism where we perceive on a fundamental level the possibilities inherent in infinity.

The question what is that, or what does that mean, is a lapse in conscious awareness because while the question is asked the object being observed is recognized but not yet defined. Look at a pen. Remove your mind from it and ask yourself what it is. Hold it, palpate it, scrutinize it with a clear mind, and ask yourself questions about the pen. Now try that same act of open contemplation on your body some day. Or on the face of a loved one.

“Truly I tell you, unless you return and become like children, you can’t enter the kingdom of God.”

2006-08-15T08:09:00.000-07:00

V For Vendetta

I'm slow on the uptake when it comes to film. I don't go to the theatres anymore. The wife and kids make filmgoing an expensive experience. The wife and kids want some kind of snack, and all told I can walk away robbed of at least seventy bucks for tickets, a box of popcorn and some Mike n Ikes. I was spoiled as a teenager by a local theatre that played late night shows for two dollars.

I wait until moveis come out on DVD, and I won't feel too ripped off if it sucks. And, you know it, most films suck. They suck even worse if you've blown a substantial part of your paycheck to have your sensibility and intelligence insulted for 90-180 minutes. Ten minutes of commercials, 10 minutes of previews voiced by the same fricking guy (In a world, in a place, in a town... it's as if he's made a career of reading mad libs at the viewers' expense), and the inevitable tall guy in the immediate row. It's enough to make me want to put on a smiley mask and be a pithy ninja terrorist.

Which leads me to V For Vendetta. I can't comment on the original graphic novel. I haven't read it. I shy from graphic novels because they have to employ a staccato mise en scene. It's all Eisenstein, all the time. A graphic novel's version of an extended take is a page-sized illustration. So, they tend to rob the imagination of legwork. While they themselves are often beautiful and well-crafted, I prefer the deep vision of the written word and the subtle vision of cinema. So my bias is on my sleeve.

I enjoyed the first few scenes, especially Guy Fawkes being martyred. The line is neatly drawn between man and idea, soul and symbol. This is the core conflict of the film, although it is disserviced by a flimsy veneer and weakly wrought dystopia. I cheered its subversiveness, but was dismayed by its pretense and cliche.

My favorite subversive story is "Repent Harlequin! Said The Tick-Tock Man," by Harlan Ellison. In a scant few pages, the author manages to paint a realistic dystopia that controls society through time micromanagement. Everyone is a slave to efficiency, so the rebel is an adept of Bob Dobbs the subgenius. The harlequin pursues slack, and disrupts the control of time. It is a simple and effective revolutionary tool, one whose ramifications are astounding.

V is a living idea, a superman tempered by fire and disease into a smarter, faster, and conveniently powerful hero. He manages to control media, abandoned trains, fenced goods singlehandedly without pesky logistics. Once more I find myself watching a movie locked into the "one man against all" propoganda that infests our cultural mythology. It is one thing to present a hero's journey, it is another to give the story a fully formed superman capable of sticking it to The Man. He is able to completely subvert the government, destroy its architecture, and finally sacrifice himself as part of the denouement.

I really wanted to like this film, and tried to be on its side. I enjoyed the skewering of the media/government symbiosis, and the masonic "black-bagging" of dissidents. Valerie's story is heartbreaking as it brings home that a "rendered terrorist" is also a human being with a story. The Benny Hill homage is also grand. But dammit if I can't help feeling that the film ultimately serves authority rather than undermine it.

We sit around waiting for a hero to pull the strings and make the bad guys fall... this savior complex shuts down our own capacity to make change. The ease with which V the savior toys with the government belittles the difficulties inherent in the task of changing society. And the government apparatus is not fleshed out with sufficient clarity. It is a hodgepodge of borrowed ideas from better works that lend an air of credibility.

The challenges of our times demands much more from our art. The Matrix trilogy offered a gifted reinterpretation of many classic themes, and is an interesting subversive roadmap, but falls under the weight of a false choice directed by the all-seeing eye of the Architect. The fact that Neo is manhandled by the shallow pomposity of a mock-God shows how somnambulisitc he truly is. An awake sage would have made a monkey of that psuedo-Ptah. I think the filmmakers knew that but were reined in by that truly western religion: romantic love.

I'm all over the place today, but I promise to syncretise some of these core ideas in the near future.

2006-08-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

What does every mainstream opinion journal and talk show have in common? None of them are calling for a comprehensive peace plan for the Middle East. None of them are discussing solutions for our energy dependency. The debate raging over our foreign policy centers on how to wage the ongoing war, with no intention of entering a "treaty phase." That is considered "capitulation" and "appeasement." When, in fact, the treaty phase is a necessary part of war. Without it, the war never ends.

If you look on the back of your dollar bill, you'll see the eagle clutching arrows and an olive branch. The eagle is looking in the direction of the olive branch. I believe, in the wake of empire, a new logo should be adopted. The same eagle clutches a contract that reads, "cheap labor and imports," and the other claw holds an ammo belt. The eagle looks up to a banner that reads, "apareo fatum."

When Bush says, "they hate us for our freedoms," he has a point. I think that we are despised and loathed for our freedom of commerce backed by the illusion of invincibility. I think we can all agree that the conflict has upended moral considerations. The moral rhetoric is so much lipstick on a pig. Let's take a Happy Meal from McDonald's. The beef is harvested from cattle in South America. Many acres of pristine land, much of it rain forest, was devastated so as to make room for the grass and grain the cattle devour. The slaughter of the cow is in and of itself an automated nightmare. Its remains are chopped and packaged by cheap foreign labor working for pennies on our wage dollar. The buns are equally foreign and cheap, as is the cardboard, wax paper, and sesame seeds. The produce is US-grown, mostly, and genetically modified. If the produce is foreign grown, then the produce must be harvested using agribusiness seeds and machinery under specific guidelines, also powered by cheap labor. The toy is most likely made by a prisoner or child at an extremely low wage, so low that even working 18-20 hour pays insufficiently for the basic needs of life. Can you even visualize a child fitting together plastic toys for even one hour? So that your kid can play with it and lose it the next day? And this child isn't working in an office, a cubicle, or even a safe factory floor. This child is subject to a hazardous work environment, abusive senior personnel who act as pit bosses, a lack of sanitary conditions, and other factors that American workers gave their lives to overcome.

This is the great underneath. Underneath our prosperity is a cottage industry of misery. And our prosperity isn't even all that prosperous. We've been perpetually terrified for sixty years of commies, drugs, gangs, the bomb, and radical muslims. We're in debt, own land that we actually don't own, pay taxes into an inefficient and corrupt system, and our sages and holy men have been co-opted as commercial entities who more often than not peddle hate. If anything, we are starting to become the very culture we oppress abroad. the pool of resources is being collected by fewer hands.

This is the elephant in the living room. We consume too much and produce too little. The rest of the world is sacrificing themselves for our trinkets and baubles under the penalty of occupation. What do you expect as the logical outcome? This can not persist. We will be attacked within and without by fiscal, combat, and psychological pressures until we unravel. You either sacrifice voluntarily or involuntarily. The sacrifice is pre-ordained because we are addicted to an unsustainable lifestyle that offers no meaning or clarity. We are compulsive, empty, and increasingly loveless.

More later. Gotta run.

2006-08-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

There's a Spider On Your Back!

The Kids In The Hall had a sketch about a horror writer whose best-selling work contained one line: "There's a spider on your back!" When you read the book, you experienced the horror of having a spider on your back.

There's a Terrorist On Your Plane!

In a world where it's a given that drug-traffickers regularly hide balloonfuls of drugs in their stomach or colon, we can still be fooled into thinking that terrorists have masterminded a plot involving mixing explosive ingredients together on their pullout table in coach like a poor man's Mr. Wizard. Mix a little shampoo with your conditioner and voila, death!

I would imagine, in a true blue terror plot, all flights would be grounded pending results from this string of arrests. Grounding flights ensures that no one will explode in flight. Instead, more security state precautions are administered while we are told to not panic, but be reasonably calmly terrified for our lives. Then again, this could be a true blue terror plot, and the heads of state are merely responding to a genuine problem with a political paranoiac solution that engenders fear without actually solving anything.

I want these mother----ing snakes off this mother----ing plane!

Isn't it odd that the press is telling us, "this is the real deal." This is the threat we just have to be afraid of! Seriously... hey, don't walk away!

That's all for now. This is exasperation talking. I don't know if this is serious or not. The internet has people freaking out about the timing, other people are chiding everyone for being conspiracy theorists. All I can say is that once again our government and its media apparatus are failing us. God help us if it's a "real deal," because this response is all hat and no cattle.

2006-08-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

I never expected this blog to have any readership. I took a few months hiatus. My wife gave birth to my first child, and there's a deployment scheduled through my section. I come back and discover that I have an audience. And a member of the audience had a request! And the request ties into politics! I am grateful.

I want to discuss the Tarot trump, "Judgment." This trump, along with "The Hanged Man," are relatively uniform in illustration. The trumpeting angel in the sky, the dead rising from their grave, with living people prostrate, their arms upraised like the dead's in adulation. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn Tarot had the dead person make the symbol of 2=9, which is the first rank of initiation. In their "Z" documents, the initiation ritual is written down and explained. It is an elaborate judgment cribbed from the Egyptian papyrii of coming forth into the light. The initiate is hoodwinked (the hoodwink is wrapped thrice), bound, naked, and led before a tribunal. I won't get technical, but the initiate is essentially "killed" and reborn. He assumes a new name, self-chosen.

It's a high-falutin costumey version of what everyone goes through when they enter any group, brother/sisterhood, job, etc. When you enter into anything that someone has entered before, you go through judgment. You receive an announcement, get a title, and begin training. The more rarified the initiation, the more difficult the process. On a spiritual level, the two initiations we all go through are birth and death. I have meditated on the image of Judgment, and have sometimes seen the dead fall into the grave rather than rise.

So "Judgment" could just as easily be called initiation or Rite of Passage. But it is called Judgment, because annunciation comes from without. You do not wake up and decide that you are such and such, be it fry cook or prophet. That is not Judgment. You may be a good cook, but you are not a chef.

They key is, the trick is, when you are on a path, to learn how to recognize Judgment. On some levels it is simple. A job interview, an election (which I will discuss later re: Lamont/Leiberman), your deathbed, etc. When you are on a spiritual journey, the ground beneath you begins to lose its sturdiness. You must take off your shoes, for you are on holy ground. That is why humility is essential to spiritual growth. Because when you say, "I AM THAT," you are invoking the primal incantation, which changes 1 to 2, 2 to 3, and 3 into all things. It is the ego's favorite trick, but the ego has no say. Judgment comes from without. Written accounts of mystical experiences involve specific criteria for this Judgment, which lead to a direct and true revalation which opens the mind. Some report the pealing of bells (which is like the standard ringing in your ear, except it is both ears, high-pitched, multi-tonal), transcendental vision (beyond the third dimension), blissful feeling, and oneness. Without becomes within, and the dead rises.

The rising and falling of the dead reflect the Lieberman/Lamont election. Ned Lamont ran a campaign based on issues, and took a stand based on what he and his campaign recognized as a missing element in the national debate. Not anti-war, but anti-Bush... saying that the policies of the adminstration are reckless and have failed. This is humble, and it is reflected in the result. He was a nobody, and is still no one. He represents, whereas Joe Lierberman is infantile. He conflates the interests of the state with himself, l'etat c'est moi. The loss was a misunderstanding... obviously the people were fooled because there is nothing wrong with him or his Finlandized behavior. This misunderstanding, a profound ignorance driven by his infantile red star ego, will see him fading into the grave. Ned Lamont's egoless, hoodwinked campaign based on the will of an increasingly disillusioned people, will rise. The sound of the trumpet is clear, so clear that all attempts to distort the sound will ring hollow. You cannot spin Judgment.

Until next time.

2006-08-08T09:07:00.000-07:00

I promised a part two about TIA, but I took so long between posts that the Israeli-Lebanon conflict has popped up and played 3-card monte. The whole moral equivalency conundrum has taken front and center, so I am compelled to write about that.

Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly used the phrase "gift" to describe the wholesale devastation in Lebanon. Two soldiers were kidnapped and a tank was destroyed by Hezbollah. Israel retaliates by bombing civilian infrastructure. The two have been in a state of war, having never formalized a peace treaty, much like North and South Korea. Stagings took place during Sharon's tenure that reflected the kidnapping incident. Hezbollah fired rockets, attacked outposts, staged incursions and behaved in other ways like a military at war. Israel staged retaliatory strikes and both sides rattled their sabers. The situation was far from stable, but was not the disaster taking place. The difference this time is both distinct and subtle.

Ariel Sharon suffers a stroke, in which hours passed before he was taken to a hospital. He was allegedly on a medication for cholesterol that should not be taken with high blood pressure, especially with a history of strokes. I don't know the name, but I know that Lipitor and its facsimiles carry that warning. Ehud Olmert takes over. Ehud Olmert is a minor political figure thrust into the kingmaker position. This was not uncommon during the Roman Empire, which leads me to think this was a quiet assassination. Sharon had no propensity to lay into Hezbollah. Lord knows he could have with Commodius Bush at the helm. Since the region needed a spark to keep an attack on Iran on the table, Sharon needed to go so as to bring in a more pliable and untested asset. I have no proof for any of this, and I am not being anti-semitic. This is human nature. Assassinations and untimely deaths have been given the veneer of isolated incidents by historians... yet all of them have led to radical changes in policy, often war.

Israel and the United States have a symbiotic relationship. We do each others dirty work and give one another the appearance of respectability. This is also a Roman invention. The Celts were systematically dispersed and cleansed by competing barbarian tribes acting on the tacit approval of the Romans. You could say that the official handbook of western empire came from the diaries of the Ceasars. Israel is a sovereign nation on one level, and on another level a caged nation, indebted to Britain and the US, beholden to pressing needs for water and oil, rife with religious and sectarian divisions, and beset on all sides by an angry culture held in check by other US and British clients. Without that enemy at the gates, they would be entangled in their own internal tribal conflicts which occasionally rear their head regardless of the outside threat.

I am still dancing on a spider's thread of theory, so forgive me. But it appears to me that Bush and Olmert have formulated a hail mary strategy fit for Norton and Kramden. Israel devastates Lebanon long enough to seize the Litani river, enough land for water and a pipeline that bypasses Iran. That is objective one. Objective two is establish pretext for an attack on Iran by October. Clausewitz's theorem indicates to me that the attack on Iran is war as an election strategy. Objective 3 is the create a client buffer from Iranian land and oil fields that can be temporarily seied by the US, and then turned over to Iraq, which will be broken into three sectarian states... leaving Kurdistan the lucky winner of the Iranian land, which also creates a new boundary seperating them from the Turks. All of this has to be done with the complicity of Saudi Arabia, which will be bestowed so long as we direct the bloodshed on the Shia.

In the perfect world of theory, this is flawless. Everyone gets what they want and the Shia get the shaft. In the real world, this all stinks of desperation. Once again I am reminded of farce, but on a macrocosmic level. For all of Lucy and Ralph Kramden's escapades, they never put the world in danger. You, as the audience, may have cringed, but never were you terrified. So the Bush regime had a magnificent vision for a new world order that would rely on military might to recarve the middle east so as to make it truly safe for investment and pillaging. It's like bold move in Chess, where you see the board clearly and make an ! move with your queen. She's protected by a knight and bishop. Your opponent has no choice but to move the king and sacrifice the rook. You sit back, put your hands behind your head and watch as he takes your queen with a pawn.

In the Marseilles version of the Tarot, "The Lovers" depicted a man who had to choose between two women. One was seductive, carnal, and lascivious. The other was pure, chaste, and wise. It reflections the extremely difficult predicament of free will. You divide everything into this or that, develop a dogma that chooses on over the other like a committed lover, and view the results. I would redraw the card to show either Alexander severing the gordian knot with his sword, or Hegel pointing at a blackboard with the words "analysis" and "synthesis" while he teaches to room filled with black and white students. The United States and Israel lead with their diplomatic military foot, their scarlet lover, and are now stuck in the mud. Now instability is the rule, and the fundies are orgiastic for the end times.

Is it a bluff? Do many of us really want oblivion? Fuck it... no more work, no more bills, no more arguments with the family, concern over the sexuality of my children, retirement problems, trick knees, adultery, hangovers, or unanswered questions. Either heaven or hell, and if the atheists are right, then just the sweet comfort of eternal nothingness. To be or not to be... Hamlet can take over for me.

2006-06-21T15:39:00.000-07:00

Total Information Awareness

The very fact that I wrote those words down could mean that my site will be flagged. If this ISP is in any way connected to other ISPs that are producing similiar content than the flag could be upgraded from purple, say, to red. What if one or more of these ISPs was read or commented upon by a suspected terrorist (terrorist being the ad hoc definition of whomever the government deems sufficiently terrible)? Would that light up the other connected users like a Christmas, er, holiday tree?

I know that when I worked as an ersatz dataminer back in the early 90's, we interconnected users based on demographic similiarities. If so and so collected comic books and dug Tool, they might be interested in the local band from Topeka, Kansas that plays a prog rock cover of the theme song to Spiderman. This was an effort at connectivity, and only used information submitted to us in our customer surveys. Our system made plenty of mistakes. There is a margin of error when accounting for taste. That same so and so could have stumbled onto an old recording ofThe Specials and decided to become a Rude Boy. It is good, I believe, to emphasize the plasticity of consciousness. By recognizing this plasticity, we can be more forgiving, loving, understanding, and compassionate. People grow, diminish, change, and respond to suggestion. I don't think we are as stubborn and set in our ways as we'd like to think. We have only been a civlized race for a few thousand years, and it was only a few hundred years ago when someone finally stumbled upon cogito ergo sum.

I think that the neoconservative junta recognizes this plasticity and has deliberately cultivated an atmosphere of suggestion. Watch Fox News and see how they suggest and infer more often than they present facts. Modern punditry is a haven of hypnotic suggestion. Rush Limbaugh employs a very deliberate cadence that emphasises certain keywords negatively and positively so that one unconciously associates terms. This allows for his singular rhetorical ploy: conflation. The action of a single person he labels "liberal" colors the whole group, whereas anyone labelled "conservative" is a singular entity that does not represent the ideology.

I will continue this in part 2 tomorrow.

2006-02-08T15:10:00.000-08:00

Rending the distinction between good and evil.

I operate from the principle that life and art not only imitate but communicate with one another in a fashion not unlike symbiosis. I further hold that the creative mind or logos is the inner light that shines forth and reveals the outer material world. Life is an imperfect reflection of Spirit. I know... how very Plotinus of me. I could be wrong, but my experience validates this premise.

There have been a pair of events in recent US history that blend art and life to such an extent that they have dreamlike overtones. Those two events are the assassination of Kennedy and the destruction of the twin towers and Pentagon attack. In Kennedy we have a grail legend, the killing of the King of Camelot by his son, born of sin (Mordred). In his death we have an official story and an overabundance of evidence that could portray several possibilities without a solid footprint. I think I can safely say that every piece of evidence in his murder was tampered with or fabricated--even his corpse and brain. In a dream, such a death and confusion portrays a psychic collapse, as the murdered man presents a self-image, one's connection with life being mercilessly destroyed and manipulated by invisible forces. Shades of King Arthur, Osiris, the Pueblo corn god, Quetzalcoatl, and part of the Masonic initiation ritual known as "Hiram, the Widow's Son." The reason why I say part, is because in the Masonic ritual, the initiate is "killed and dismembered," and the ritual is finalized by the rending of the veil of Isis that takes place between two pillars.

If you could actually play the correspondence game, you would find that there is so much connection between these two events and myth that it bears the imprint of prophecy. The literal-minded could see an overarching conspiracy, the illuminati... but that (to me) is simply a projection of our own collective unconscious. We, in essence, are judging ourselves. The agents responsible for these events will remain mysterious... do they even exist?

Samson, a Judge of God, waged something of a one man war against the Phillistines. In reality, he was at war with Dagon, the Phillistine God who was a fish with the head and hands of a man (Like the much older God Oannes, lord of Capricorn). Samson was betrayed, sapped of his strength, and bonded between two pillars that supported a gallery where he was to be executed as a sacrifice to Dagon. Samson was a Judge of YHVH... not a fool. He prayed to YHVH, and his strength returned to him long enough to shatter the pillars and kill all 3000 people inside. An interesting number... 3000.

What was Dagon, exactly? A primitive materialist God that represented the primacy of nature, of vice, a being that depicted a fallen man, not rising from the fish but in fact returing to the waters. Regression and spritual emptiness. A God through whom free will is impossible. Samson judged Dagon and the Phillistines (Palestinians) bereft and destroyed them. I hope I am not grasping at straws when I compare Dagon to Pentagon.

The Tower card in a Tarot deck usually shows a single tower struck by lightning. Two figures fall from the tower, a king and a priest. It represents the sudden upset of the natural order of things... the disruption of complacency, the power of the violent and unexpected. It further represents the changes one's consciousness must make to this event, because with the King and Priest, we have no traditional laws or dogma to rely upon... there is no simple answer. Tradition no longer applies. Such was 9/11. We (not just the US... the whole world and its military/industrial model) have been judged, found wanting, and the illusion of complacency has been rent.

I hold that these events existed somewhere between dreamtime and wakefulness. They are marked equally by illusion and reality. Rational explanations don't solve them. They are above consciousness and the effects on our lives ripples outward, touching everything. If anything, our generations have been privileged to witness the awakening of Spirit on a worldwide scale.

Until next time. Ciao.

2006-02-07T08:33:00.000-08:00

I watched "War of the Worlds" last night, the updated Tom Cruise model. Steven Spielberg has always been in touch with the unconscious, sometimes more keenly than others. "Jaws" was a herald of the age-old tradition of wrestling with inner and collective demons. Intellect, primal instincts and morality attempt to slay a beast of the primordial waters that plagues paradise. The shark is best represented by its moon-shapped mouth lined with teeth... the danger inherent in repression and inadequate sublimation. "E.T." was a coming-of-age parable so stripped of gloss that the alien being directly stands in for the generative powers of uncorrupted sexual maturity.

"War of the Worlds" is at once sadistic, paranoid, and megalithic. Vehicles buried beneath the earth for eons waiting for the moment to rise and destroy our way of life is a quintessential paranoid fantasy. HG Wells foreshadowed WWI in his novel of the death of the Victorian way of life. Humanity is not destroyed, but civilization is uprooted. Wells sensed, like many artists and thinkers of his era, that something was amiss, that a beast would rise up to wreak havoc. His contemporaries Freud and Kierkegaard reached similar conclusions... that beneath our social mores lay a serpent coiled ready to strike. In the film, a question is asked more than once: is this a terrorist attack? Many of the sequences seem to reflect the detruction of the twin towers; the copious amount of ash, the floating clothes, the crowd running from the destruction. Most keenly felt however, is the realization that something is hidden beneath us that isn't acknowledged and that something is going to hurt us. Call it imperial guilt. Collectively, we are aware on a repressed level that our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness is being secured more and more through military/industrial extortion. We take that knowledge and project it onto a monster, whether in a space ship or turban so that it becomes a mythic enemy. This allows the survival mechanism to kick in and obfuscate the moral reality of western civilization. Killing the bad guys is an anger that defines our culture. It is also a projection, somewhat valid but mostly delusional, of our collective guilt.

When we were struck in realtime on 9/11/01, occult symbolism transcended cinema and invaded waking reality. I will go into further detail later. But as a primer for any readers (I doubt there are any), look up the Tarot card "The Tower," and read about Samson's death chained between two pillars as your homework for tomorrow's lecture.

2005-12-20T06:43:00.000-08:00

Human Sacrifice and Tookie Williams

We are still sacrificing humans in the name of law and order. For the commission of horrendous acts, the state kills. Their life is forfeit to the state and the families of the victims. A prosecutor argues before a judge how someone deserves to die for their acts. Argues that someone has performed and irreedemable sin. No matter what they may accomplish with their lives, the hourglass has been turned over and eventually they will be executed in the name of Justice, Queen of the Bigots.

Yet our pompous warrior-king, Commodius Bush, is allowed to market a war that has costs tens of thousands of lives... a continuation of bombings and sanctions which have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Lives of the innocent, of children. Deprived of water and food, deprived of clothing and medical care. Lives of soldiers, following orders. Sons and daughters fresh out of school and straight into a botched invasion. They walk through streets unsure about whether a trash bag or soda can could actually be a bomb. Every sewer grate, every open window, every pile of rubble could hide a sniper, an explosive, or a child. The valley of the shadow of death.

Who are the barbarians? I can't escape the image of a bird attacking its own reflection until it dies from its efforts.

2005-12-15T11:24:00.000-08:00

Random Book Reviews

I finished three books in the last month: "Lanark," by Alasdair Gray, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," by Mark Twain, and "Washington Square," By Henry James. All three were tremendous reading, all for very different reasons. Lanark was a superior work of unfettered imagination, autobiography through a looking glass. Twain's novel was spry, intense, timeless, and sad. James' work was a marvelous study of character, manners, and misconceptions.

Lanark, by Alasdair Gray

I came across this novel, at random. I know I should have heard about this work earlier, but I can be slow. I like to walk into the library and see what book jumps out at me... catches my attention. Well, with the cover art, it was hard to miss Gray's work. The reading was a pleasure, bleak and savage.

The novel is titled after one of two main characters (who are actually one and the same). Gray's artifice is to establish an afterlife (via the city of Unthank and out environs) that is a continuation of a person's character. Some aspects are allegorical, such as Unthank's welfare system, but even these tend to reflect the inner struggles of loveless, unloving Lanark. Unthank is a dark, useless city filled with equally squalid self-absorbed people. Coffee shop bohemian manners are wonderfully skewered. Lanark's advemture stems from a search for sunlight, which Unthank lacks save for an occasional dim glow. Without the sun there is no time, it is measured in breaths and heartbeats and is thus mostly ignored. You are either on the dole, in the military, or part of the ruling bureaucracy (who views mankind as either crustacean or vertebrate, useful or useless). Life bears so little meaning that even attempts at finding meaning are crushed by sarcasm and ridicule. It is more or less an artistic representation of depression where the world reflects your limited negative mindframe. Lanark meets a woman who shares his illness, dragonskin, and their relationship is the crux of half of the narrative.

The other half, which interpolates itself between Lanark's adventure, centers on Duncan Thaw, a child who experiences life as a refugee from the blitz. He is an imaginative highstrung youth who lives and dies as a neurotic virgin who may have been a murderer. His art and yearning to connect with higher truth give him a quality that allows him to more or less succeed on his own terms. But his life is a reflection of his limited worldview and neurosis, and his last days are truly sad.

The total journey, taken as a whole, is lovingly rendered and biting at the same time. If you have a need for "happy" endings where all loose ends are tied and a the main character is redeemed and rewarded, then avoid this like the plague. I found the book warm and tender because the author does seem to genuinely love his characters and wants to grapple with mortality, anxiety, and love with a refreshing candor. The epilogue is especially noteworthy, and should remind readers to not take a novel so personally and instead view it as a multi-layered work of art that reveals and conceals with equal skill.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain

Mark Twain both loves and holds contempt for chivalry and its myth. I enjoyed his frequent dollops of Le Morte D'Arthur, especially as a tale spun simultaneously with the era the main character accidentally inhabits. I think there is much meaning to the idea that the main character, Hank Morgan, enters into the sixth century through a duel with Hercules. Hank becomes a demigod in his world, and leaves having committed the ultimate act of hubris: genocide. There is so much depth in this novel that one can get lost.

What I find most enchanting about this work is the underlying hypocrisy of Hank Morgan's own character, a hypocrisy that is a necessity for all revolutionary spirits. The entire novel is such an eloquent condemnation of superstition, classism, and racism that Hank's own prejudices are overshadowed until all at once the novel is overwhelmed by tragedy. Hank Morgan equates the problems inherent in bad ideas with the people who hold them until he would rather annhilate an entire class of people than accept defeat. Enjoy the humor, enjoy the boundless quality of the author's observations, but be prepared that the denouement leaves no easy answers and Mark Twains critical brush paints everyone with equal amounts of scorn and compassion. The use of advertising to undermine knight errantry is especially funny.

Washington Square, by Henry James

This compact novel is measured by what is unsaid. Each character communicates only so much with one another that the tragedy lies in what is kept secret. The father's need to be right outweighs his ability to love an "average" daughter and this lack of unconditional fatherly love leaves a legacy of shame. A girl learns that men can be rather abominable, and some women can be just as bad. When she finally understands that her father, whom she adores, respects and trusts doesn't really care for her, the realization is so well done that it takes your breath away. The timing is perfect, and so is the delivery. The weight of it hangs on your heart. Catherine, the daughter, is heroic in her circumstances, toyed with and disrespected, because she finds a measure of strength and learns to understand the world in greater detail than her self-righteous father who thinks he knows everything through the powers of observation.

2005-12-09T08:37:00.000-08:00

Generation Flashback

We have another President who runs a loyalty-based administration based on a feudal corporate model. The previous administration being Nixon. The big difference, I feel, is that Bush really truly runs it like a business. Whosoever contributes is a shareholder; the greater the contribution, the larger the percentage of share and "interest" in the administration. The executive branch acts as the executive board which meets with the shareholders and presents a plan that outlines what they perceive to be in the interests of its shareholders. The shareholders have their vote, the board adjusts its plan, and the rest is marketing. The plan may be purely in the interest of the shareholders, but the marketing persuades the voting "base" and the opinion falls into line.

An example is stem cell research. The plan was to limit research to those industries that contribute to the RNC and keep the potential rewards in the form of patents and research grants in their hands. The marketing strategy was two-prong. The first prong was to make the general public believe that the President was struggling with the controversy. This was highlighted by his symbolic visit with the Pope, who looked as if he had better things to deal with, like impending death. This presented the illusion that Bush was listening to the religous and moral concerns inherent in embryonic stem-cell research. I mean, he took a trip to the Vatican! That must mean he's deciding.

The second prong was post-speech. This was a "befogging" strategy that is so consistent that it must be Karl Rove's. Whenever Bush makes a policy speech, the spin machines creates so much noise that truth grows hazy and finally vanishes under the strain. I take umbrage with the common perception that there is a message discipline in the GOP. I think there are many varied opinions that get aired on any given day... it is just that SO many get aired at once that the ramifications of the policy itself no longer matter. Bush made his stem-cell speech, which gave legal right over existing stem-cell lines to RNC contributors... but it was distorted by the media into a moral compromise, a cave to the religious right, a slap in the face of the religious right, a setback to science, a boon to science. And then, finally, the noise machine shut off, all at once, when this obvious game of payola was no longer an issue. What was a business decision, a no-bid contract for a select few, was shoved aside in favor of grandiose moral claptrap. Both the left and right overlooked the underlying truth and sputtered at each other.

Would I be correct in saying that this is the modus operandi of US politics as exemplified by this current administration? Would I be further correct in asserting that EVERY decision made by the Bush administration is a feudal game, participated in by the contributing few and played out as a moral crisis for the disenfranchised many? And finally, would I be correct in stating that the left shadowboxes just as strenuously as the right? This happens so often, so conspicuously, that I begin to doubt if this is just a happy accident. Public opinion is manufactured morally, where as the mechanisms of modern government are amoral. This schism allows the false dichotomy of right/left to foster. As long as I stand on one side of the fence and say "stem-cell research saves lives!" and you stand on another and say, "embryonic research negates a culture of life!" nothing is accomplished. The two sides conduct a moral argument while the real political business of shareholders and executives is conducted without any of those concerns. Their concern is the bottom line, and who profits by it.

You will notice the same smoke and mirrors regarding the war. The "doveish left" will eventually agree to a compromise that allows for a continued military presence in the middle east with a lot less troop bloodsehd. The "hawkish right" will eventually agree to a continued military presence in the middle east with US bases in Iraq for troop deployment and greater bloodshed. The racketeers will continue to profit, and the murder of a people who did not attack our country will continue. And the taxpayers will act as if the decision is out of their hands.

In a way, Ralph Nader was correct, but he played the fool, and tilted at windmills. There is no moral difference between the two parties... the difference lies in the attitude of its powerless base. That difference is crucial, because their moral attitudes are the illusion which allows the men behind the curtain to conduct business as usual. Left and Right are an illusion. If government has become a business, then we should behave as majority stockholders and contribute time, money, and votes to individual candidates (or become a candidate yourself) who represent your interests. Start local and work your way up. Claim your share and lobby. If you want the war to end, and that is your primary goal, then contribute a few dollars from your paltry paycheck to those in your local, state, and federal governments who want the war to end. Don't listen to the rest of their opinions... yet. If you come to the table with a list of demands, no candidate will meet them, you will be disappointed, and nothing gets done. If a libertarian or a green, a donkey or an elephant have a chance to win and they support a withdrawal from Iraq... support them. Your support contributes to the candidates attitued. A donkey will become and elephant or vice versa whichever way the wind blows. There is no messiah of the left or right... there is no bloodless revolution. Progress or conservation come from your own actions.

2005-12-08T06:27:00.000-08:00

Joseph Liebermann (Is that not German for "lover man"?) has taken a handful of trips to Iraq over the last year and a half, and has come back with a rosy scene. One in which Iraqis have DirecTV and Cingular... yet most of the country still has no electricity or running water. One in which victory looms ever closer, in spite of the fact that the administration's own roadmap to Victory necessitates a capable standing Iraqi army... which does not exist... unless you count the insurgency.

Senator LoverMan obviously has an agenda. Had it from the start. Was a hawk on Iraq on the campaign trail, and has always stood by his peculiar vision of victory. A victory filled with cable, phone calls, and a thriving republic that magically votes in the best interests of the United States and its oil/gas junta. A land where we moved in, opened up the land to tax free zoning and no-bid contracts, with a constitution that favors a western kleptocracy, and dotted with US military bases surrounded by barbed-wire and filled with the latest laser-guided killing machines. A permanent launching pad for the United States to launch business ventures and the occasional deadly flyover. This is the democracy certain individuals wish to bring to the Middle East. An udpated colonialism borrowed from our past ventures in Latin and South America. An Iraq led by a business-friendly strongman with no compunction against disappearing and terrorizing the plebes. A strongman who loves the US military presence, who praises the bold vision of US leadership, and rattles his saber at Damascus and Tehran.

Senator LoverMan represents many important interests, including his muddled constituency. Why does he sell out? Most of the United States is turning against the war... so why does he stand firm? Because the opinion, while slanted towards a speedy resolution to the Iraq debacle, would change if it worked. That simple. It worked in Haiti. It worked in Hawaii. It worked in the Phillipines. It worked in Chile. It worked in... etc. It failed in Viet Nam, but has since worked in Guam, Panama, and Kuwait. And, if truth be told, it worked in Bosnia. Our successes outweigh our failures, so why not continue to gamble on this venture? The benefits of an oppressed, stable base of operations from which to intimidate the world, grip oil reserves (and fix prices), and keep the overall costs of imports low outweigh the costs of a few flag-draped coffins and some sleepless nights knowing in your heart that the history of warfare has not been dedicated to the spread of decency and goodwill.

Why do we pull the wool over our eyes time and time again and fall for the blather that unprovoked wars and cool state-sponsored dictatorships (the colonial roadmap to Victory) are democratic endeavors? Because we reap the rewards as a nation. Imperial regimes last because of the rewards for the commonwealth. Low prices, controlled inflation, positive economic indicators justify pre-emptive war and mass graves. The cries of conscience are salved by cheap goods and easy living. Why has the current right wing been able to achieve such a stranglehold on political discourse in spite of the obvious lies, incompetence, corruption, and malignance. Because we don't give a shit if it isn't in our backyard. We can stare at the flag, cheer at the fireworks and delude ourselves into thinking that because we are America, everything we do is inspired by God, goodness (for the secular types), and reason. Senator LoverMan understands this, and follows the path of least resistance. The ends justify the means in his mind and he knows that historically the odds are in his favor.

That is what real progress has always been up against: complacency. A person tends to believe in whatever hokum to which they are encultured unless circumstances overwhelm the senses. The foolish rely on terrorism to shock the masses, and those who terrorize would only become the enslavers of the next generation if they were ever victorious. The wise rely on art, good deeds, kind words, and the revelation of truth.

This isn't Demo/Republican. That is the dialectic myth, the Hegelian/Manichean error. This is a simple problem: wake people up. The dreams of the comman man are but binds and stocks. Images and words are needed, symbols and ritual, that awake the dreamer and rend the veil.

2005-11-30T06:02:00.001-08:00

I like the holiday season, at least when I am properly insulated. No cable television, no newspapers spilling their advertising guts on the living room floor (are they designed to commit seppuku?). I drove to Ventura county the day after Thanksgiving, and drove by South Coast Plaza. I know the Web is World-Wide, and plenty of you haven't the faintest what this place is. Well, it's a mega-mall stocked by primarily high-end shops. It is flanked by a trio of stip malls where Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and a few other foreign import stores live. Is it just me, or are strip malls primarily a home for Asian and South American imports? I don't know what Wal-Mart would do if we ever had a re-awakening of isolationism and imposed a tarriff. I shudder at the thought.

Anyhow, every store, and I do mean every store, had a line that stretched at least two dozen souls long. Fry's had a line that snaked through its parking lot. I was reminded of the maxim from A Brave New World: "Consume and Produce"

This isn't where I wax superior. I do have the consumer bug. I love media, and I am dumb enough to buy the occasional DVD, even though I may watch it only once or twice (Anchor Bay Distribution sent me an unsolicited catalog). I'll go to Borders and unless I am on budget, I will go apeshit buying books and CDs (I look through The Flaming Lips' rack twice just in case they have something new or rehashed). If I had my druthers, I would purchase the fanciest new computer on the market knowing full well that it would be outdated within 90 days.

But I just can not, truly and verily CAN NOT abide Black Friday. I looked at those lines, the people bundled up, many with strollers, and wondered at just how misguided Christmas has become. I've read that the Rev. Falwell is waging a crusade against stores who use "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" for their in-store marquees. As if that could possibly restore his mythical Christian superstate. I think he's trying to restore the feudal monarchy where the common man owes his life and lands to the noble dynastic few out of a fear and reverence of God and Church, and this campaign is merely his way of flexing Church power in corporate affairs... and that his City of God is merely a re-introduction of the Dark Ages, which weren't so dark for Pardoners like the Rev. Falwell. This whole living in fear of Terror that only the Imperial Christian Superstate can save us from (provided you tithe your earnings and possessions to the ICS and pray with sufficient obeisance, and even then if a dirty Islamic bomb kills you it is the Lord's Will) smacks of reptilian reversion. In their minds, a crafted message of fear, loathing, and lies can reduce the average person to the supplicant position to which they belong. Rev. Falwell, Rev. Robinson and their sycophantic moneychanging henchmen earn noblesse oblige while the rest of us live on their land and pay them rent.

So I looked at this long line and thought about debt. Most of us debt our Christmas. In order to be a happy family and prove that this year has been fruitful, we swipe our plastic and rob Peter to pay Paul. if anything, this Christmas will be one of the busiest in spite of the dark economic horizon, because the darker the Winter the heavier the celebration. But all of this money is doled out at interest, almost all of this money is not something we can truly afford. So Christmas has become a banker's holiday, and Rev. Falwell's crusade only sheds light on the fact that instead of preaching family values he is extolling his parishioners to shop till they drop. And here you thought Jesus threw out the money-changers.

But this debt runs deeper. Our country is in debt. Other nations buy up our debt, and now we owe more to the world than we can pay. In so many ways. When we attempted to erase our debt, our society became so emboldened by surplus that we were talked into forking over that surplus to the plutocrats. Now we are even deeper in the hole. Saudia Arabia, China, the EU, Russia... they own our debt, and the banks utilize this debt for leverage.

My Christmas wish is the abolition of debt and the Fed. If I were to run for President, I would have only two planks. If this truly is a "Christian" nation, then we the people should have a jubilee. Every seven years, all debt should be erased, and it should be a holiday. The second plank would be the abolition of the Federal Reserve, with a Government paper currency (not a treasury bill of debt, which is all the dollar is worth) run on a gold standard. All else socially and financially would stem from these two fundamental changes.

If I were to run on this simple platform, I would be killed, probably by a lone gunman with shadow ties to every Islamic/Communist/Cuban/Mafia terror group that could be mustered. He would be crazy with a walletful of membership cards to these groups and the ACLU; a schizophrenic uber-liberal with an unregistered sniper rifle. It would be a tragedy, and nothing would come of it.

2005-11-01T13:00:00.000-08:00

This site is named after our planet as well as our consciousness, both of which are ponderous, difficult to steer, and subject to natural forces. Blogs are more or less like diaries. You can make them personal so that few, if any, eyeballs land on your site. Or you can use them to great effect, like DailyKos. I am going to use this forum as an echo-chamber.

I am a skeptical kook. I feel that there is more to life than what is observed (science!), what is believed (religion!) or what is imagined (art!). If the universe is infinite, then all things are not only possible, but are. The masonic/kabbalist Atziluth (or, according to Gene Rodenberry, the Vulcan IDIC: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination) applies in that possibility without the retriction of time is Godhead. Prometheus unbound. (Luciferian ego equates this with POWER, but POWER is just a baby crying for more milk)

I use the word feel because I know nothing (I don't even know if I actually know something or not). This is a conceit, because I spend most of my life acting as if I have knowledge and sometimes this act overcomes my skepticism and becomes fact. We live in a culture that has a horrible relationship with truth. Deception is the American way. That is, of course, a value judgment, in the vein of my first post. I think it is because we value truth so highly as an abstraction and a virtue. We place this burden of truth like a yoke on our shoulders and discover that we somehow become the least honest culture on the planet, an amnesiac culture whose right does not know what the left hand is doing. I think it has something to do with the belief that human nature must somehow conform to dogma and taboo, the twin glues of civilization.

Anyhow, I will post some comments, criticism, and empty ruminations. I will discuss crop circles, clairvoyance, television as reality composer, Mahler, dialectic politics (otherwise known as US Democracy), Kafka, cults, conspiracy theory (such as the conspiracy of evolution which teaches that all lifeforms conspire to survive and/or destroy competition), Bad Choices, and redemption as it applies to theists and atheists.

Until Next Time!

2005-10-31T15:47:00.000-08:00

George W. Bush pointed his finger at Samuel Alito, in an attempt to return the court to the era of the robber baron. Or even further to a time before trial by jury, before even the magna carta, when a few were divinely appointed landlords, and the rest were serfs. While on one level he is a self-flagellating Catholic Borkbot, a programmed terminator sent into the past to destroy civil liberties before they have a chance to mature... on another level is he values corporate liberties beyond any human life. A business needs no oversight, but 10 year olds can be strip-searched. In order to sue a corporation, you have to establish an overwhelming case, but police can search without even a probable cause.
The mass mind has inalienable rights... the individual only has rights insomuch as they are quietly attached to the mass-mind.