Long Live the Simple

Nothing spreads faster and more effectively than stupidity, the simple, uncomplicated. Simple viruses and bacteria can devastate the complex human organism and whole communities, as can bullets and knives. No wonder that simplistic slogans wedded to simple destructive objects can sweep the country like the plague.

We Gladly Die for Thee!

Nazi slogans like “Blood and Earth” could infect and devastate the minds and lives of still untold millions. So can slogans like “life begins at conception” tied to a single cell (“since I have the mind of a single cell, what is the difference between a fertilized egg and a human being?”) Or “get rid of government” tied to the right to dispense bullets.

To point out the simple-mindedness of such diseases is to miss the whole reason for their effectiveness. The simple, like the drunk, are under the spell of stupidity and proud of it, they are God’s children.

Phallic Symbol

A German high court just ruled that the 1.4 million servants of the Lord in Germany may indeed go on strike, if the spirit moves them. How many legions are doing God’s work in America we can only guess, given that 80% of Americans are said to pledge allegiance to some religion; that probably requires a lot of service personnel.

Now, at the same time it has been announced that the Catholic Church just excommunicated one of their priests (with the oddly contradictory name of Roy Bourgeois) for having ordained women. You got to have that there thang between your legs to be of service.

Our Boss who art in Heaven

Even more exciting, the Church of England just ruled that women cannot become bishops, although here they can become priests. This is all the more intriguing as the head of the Church of England and of the bishops is a woman, the Queen (and no, this is not a slanderous word for one of the male bishops).

What all this can make us wonder is how we can have assured access to the deity. Obviously, the current servants of the Lord know that a woman will not have the same access to his Highness as a man. Yes, God is a sexist: get over it. But far worse is now on the agenda: all servants of the gods may refuse to grant us access by going on strike!

Sins

Since the Lord provides for his own and answers all their prayers, including winning elections, exactly who is the target of these strikes? When factory workers used to be allowed to strike, they were striking against the boss. When servants of God strike they therefore must not be satisfied by what He has given them, in answer to their prayers.

In the meantime, the lay persons have to do without.. without what?

No wonder America has opted for as much union-busting as possible! Not only do unions finance the wrong political party and advocate for equal rights for women, they may actually shut down religious wars like our most recent favorite, the holy bloodshed now blossoming in Gaza.

If all religious servants went on strike, would there be eternal peace?

On Strike

Schiller, in his famous Ode to Joy, declared that joy is the divine spark in all of us. Beethoven centered his last great work, the 9th Symphony, on this theme. Yet there is, at present, not a single entrance in the English Wikipedia under “joy.” It’s become a somewhat quaint concept, at the same time at which beauty has become largely siliconized.

Do the current presidential elections have any room for beauty and joy? Well, yes, in the sense of the German “Schadenfreude” – malicious joy in slandering, maligning, and foreseeing the defeat of other Americans, and then the world.

What if we tried to rebuild a sense of joy, creating moments of submerging our whole being in beauty, to be truly born again, not by polluting clear waters with our dogmatized sins, but by contributing the only worthy gift back to our universe, beauty and childlike joy in beauty, this moment, not in the past nor planned for a better future, but now? It is an old idea, offered by the wise from many cultures and historic periods. Why is it so difficult to retain beauty and joy in our daily lives? Why do we prefer the ugly and the nasty, the lies of the hard sell, the desperate pleading for a chance to corrupt whatever beauty there may be?

According to a report by Spiegel magazine, strip bar owners in Tampa expect lucrative business during the Republican convention, this coming week. One wily stripper even held a press conference because her act consists in stripping as a Sara Palin double, who, the stripper points out, also liked to wear rather suggestive clothing, to focus public attention on her preferred assets.

One bar owner elaborated that Republicans spend much more money on strip bars, including tipping three times as much as Democrats (some of whom obviously need their pound of flesh, as well). One might of course wonder, why such staunch exploiters of religious dogmas would want to view women in their god-given attire. It obviously is not because they regard covering up God’s beautiful creation with human garments as a sin, which it clearly must be, from God’s point of view.

It may well be that some of these so-called conservatives are so bored by their own lifestyle that they have to get aroused by the very same titillations which they try so strenuously to forbid, against all reason.

However, a more likely explanation is that for them, as good capitalists, everything is for sale, is only of value to the extent in which that value can be given a dollar sign. “Since everything is for sale, nothing has any value.” So they use churches to sell more cars and life insurance; they use nationalism as a way to sell more weapons; they use the trauma of unwanted pregnancy to collect more campaign contributions… Trusting only in the dollar sign, they have to remind themselves that they should advertise instead on each dollar bill “In God We Trust.”

Having cheapened everything beyond recovery, they try to regain some sense of direction by spending their ill-gotten money on cheapening the human body over and over again, to prove to each other that they are real men, after all, and therefore can be trusted to fight against the evils of human compassion.

As we drift more and more toward a society of listless hypocrites, the banking powers frantically try to stimulate us into new buying frenzies by charging practically no interest to the big boys, so that that they may get out of the strip joints and off the bully pulpits and start exploiting American workers again. The biggest success stories these days seem to come from innovators of advertising, from Google to much of the computer industry and the tax experts, who can show ever new ways of extracting revenue from people who otherwise would not know what to spend their dollars on.

Our world is so numbed by all the hype about what we should be interested in, including what should be forbidden, so as to make it all the more interesting, that the greatest exploiters of “I know the value of a dollar and nothing else” have to return to dingy places  in which a semblance of a mother’s breast is for sale, to get back to basics, perhaps.

The silliness of it all can make one laugh. It is the ruthless propagation of their species of shallowness that is chilling.

fulfillment from long knives

There is a rumor that some members of our political system are against everything, therefore they must also be against America. When any sense of justice, weighing what is fair and sustainable, on one hand, and what is blind greed, exploitation, and nearly suicidal addiction to quick profits, on the other, is no longer debated, one can wonder if another kind of energy is at work in sickened psyches.

Reading about current government initiatives to support American industrial output, I was wondering this morning if those who are against “government” (except government by anti-government vigilantes), would also be against helping American manufacturing. If past records are any indication, the answer would have to be yes, of course. It isn’t any longer a question of supporting government or industry, it is about organizing objections to all organized activity. A free-for-all is supposedly the answer, an answer shouted by highly subsidized mass movements against subsidizing anything but itself.

Now, one could still dream that a reasonable dialogue with the shepherds or sheep of these descendants of brownshirt-slogans could uncover the merits, or lack thereof, of being a pro at con, but such dreams miss the whole point.

The Againsters are not really against government or industry or the rule of the people, by the people, for the people: they are simply against. The human race appears to be balancing a sense of identity derived from what it is against and what it is for. Among Americans, at present, about half of the population seems to feel the more certain who they are, the more they can shout about what they are against.  The other half appears to be divided between those who know themselves because of what they are for and those who are content to have no clue about their sense of self (the latter often ready material for the Againsters).

Another Government Agency to Be Locked up...

The fact is that those who are addicted to a sense of self based on Againstism will feel personally attacked if one tries to change their mind to a more positive attitude. Imagine, for example, what all those people on the radical Against side would do if suddenly there were as little government as they are demanding now. What would they yell next? What would they want to be known by?

Againstism, as in “Tea Party,” can identify itself by the very substance it would throw away, creating a storm at least in a tea cup, perhaps in order to promote coffee. Or is all of this a plot against both coffee drinkers and against tea drinkers (beer would seem a better drink, or sanctimoniousness by the gallon)?  It would suggest, none of the above: it is a completely spontaneous, carefully organized reawakening of the forces against all those who are for anything. There is no weighing of what is reasonable, what is good. There is only a weighing in on the deaf and dumb side of the Spirit-That-Always-Says-No, the side of the “devil”.