(Blog author's note: I alter this fabulous and perceptive author's titles not out of disrespect, but respect at the unexpected and prescient phrases, themes, and ideas that catch my eye in his brilliant essays. Once again, he doesn't disappoint )
"Waiting for Dawn in the Graveyards of Night
I was a big fan of Oswald Spengler. I thought The Decline of the West was one of the most prescient books ever written. Everything does come and go in cycles. You can think of the world as a big washing machine doing the same load of laundry over and over. Eventually the spin cycle comes and everything gets pressed into everything else. Some of it may even get hung out to dry. Somehow the laundry always gets dirty again without ever leaving the machine. There are different kinds of dirt and then there’s filth.
If you’re like me you’ve been walking long stretches of bad highway more than you’ve been drinking Martinis at The Ritz. Half of the world hasn’t even had the good fortune to be on my stretches of bad highway. Most of them might have considered themselves fortunate to have been able to. It’s selfish to complain when the low points in your own life are uniformly higher than the high points in the lives of so many others. Most of us lack perspective. Every level of comfort accommodates some degree of denial about the world around you.
If you were free of self interest and… very few of us can make that claim... the world would look like a seething madhouse of runaway appetites. The plague of vanities would turn you into a recluse unless the state did that for you. I push hard and harder to see more clearly but I cannot. I am limited by my own personal darkness and sometimes I can’t even help myself, much less anyone else. I’ve come to see that there’s no point in looking at the world and its serial injustices with anger. A blinded world is feeling its way along an endless wall to nowhere. They encounter each other in the darkness and having no capacity to see or understand, they tear each other to pieces.
Most of those who read here know by now who the enemy is. At least we know the face of the enemy. We’ve seen the handiwork of the politicians, the bankers and the corporation heads and most certainly the Zionists who are one of the premier criminal organizations on Earth. We’ve seen the religious peacocks parading around as if they were the thing they were meant to represent. Yes, the juries out on whether there’s a God or not but I’m pretty sure he/she doesn’t wear a Rolex.
We’ve seen the apparent face of evil in David Rockefeller and his protégé, Henry Kissinger. We’ve seen it in Bush and Cheney. We’ve seen it in Rupert Murdoch and his diligent armies of orcs and trolls who pander to the lowest common denominator in everything they do. We see it in the former heads of Lehman Brothers and A.I.G. We see it in the ruthless mimicry of every hustler who wants to be like them and who move among us everywhere we go.
These are the faces but they aren’t the source. Sometimes I imagine that there is a malevolent spider, like a massive Shelob that squats in the darkness of the collective human mind, spinning out dark fantasies that the individual imagines are his own.
I like physic and metaphysics. I enjoy history for the lessons and the books of arcane wisdom that tell me there is something more than what we see. Something tells me that there is a bright land somewhere whose rays seldom fall upon us here. Because I have seen great art and heard great music; because I have read great poetry and books along with various media that bespeaks a powerful inspiration and genius that appears here and there, I know there is a wellspring in the human heart that continues to awaken and inspire so many of us who come across the evidence of its presence. I’ve seen the evil but I have seen the good as well. The origins of both of these are shrouded in mystery.
The biggest problem we have is Materialism with his consort, Glamour. They bring out the worst in us... they do. They blind us to the requirements of what makes us human. What makes us great and truly human is our capacity to see the circumstances of others and to have compassion for them… and to demonstrate it when we can. The Honorable Rupert Murdoch and all of those who operate according to that ancient software of Corruption 1.0 are busy as bees, informing us that we are not human but beasts and that the fulfillment of appetite is our appointed destiny.
They’re old hands at this. They know how to manipulate our attention and activate our desires. It’s the medium of the marketplace to make us consumers of things which need to be replaced. The first rule of the propaganda mill is that a stiff dick has no conscience and the second rule is that the enjoyment of any hard to obtain item is increased in direct proportion to the amount of people who do not possess it.
Now... everything is a business. Art is controlled by business which means the well goes immediately dry. Business knows as much about art as I know about business. Religion is a business. Charity is a business. That’s why they have Charity Balls. It’s their business to ball Charity and often not in the primary opening.
While some few build dream empires for themselves like Henry Nicholas and show us what comes with the package… most of the rest of the world waits for their turn and even when they see the consequences... well… consequences be damned. That’s insanity but you can’t fix it without destroying the system that made it happen and that brings us back to Spengler and even this post is cycling… cycling back to the point.
Today in Palestine and in
I realize that my passion here has given the impression of occasional anger on my part. I’m not really angry. Anger is futile and the best weapon that I can give the enemy against my own peace of mind. As Lao Tzu said many centuries ago, “Compassion is a weapon from the sky against being dead.” There’s no future in anger. There’s no future in what we’ve built because we built it wrong and it all has to come down and be replaced by something that better reflects what we intrinsically are and not what we have become. Whether we will accomplish this or see some of the better dreams that are possible is not a call I can make. I can say that our track record isn’t good but I am forever optimistic and I know that even if I can’t have the world community that I long for, I can certainly have one of my own as time goes by.
What I want to say is that, yes, the faces of evil are obvious to the opened eye that processes for the awakened mind but that is not the primary evil. Those are merely the instruments that were weaker than us and became what we still have the dignity and self respect to refuse. The essence of the evil lies in the shared ignorance seated in the hearts and minds of every one of us and until we root that out we will do no good in this world. You might say that that is the greatest good we can do and the real meaning of Jihad and other terms that have been perverted for the manipulation of those who were most inclined to twist the landscape out of shape.
The sooner we do our own laundry, the sooner these people won’t be doing it for us while we’re still wearing it.
Gone Too Far in Front
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