“What will it be, Rip: grim humor and satire or just plain grief?”
Regular readers know that Rip and I (that’s Rip van Winkle, a not-so-fictional character born about two hundred sixty years ago, skilled in time travel and handling the shock of ‘progress’) have been following the horse race for the White House, assessing the official handicaps the nags are carrying and those they are bequeathing to us serfs. Rip’s inclined to grim humor and even more inclined to don snow shoes, grab an axe and head off to the woods for some ice-fishing. Needing the fire and more enmeshed in the collapse of the American era, I tend to serious grieving which includes diagnosis and prescription.
We decide to compromise in terms of satire or grief, something we will not do on Super Duper Tuesday or in November ‘08.
We endured the Red debate™ at the Reagan ranch and marveled at the reassembled Air Force 1 around which the edifice was built, edifice Rex, something of which Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar would be proud. The press treated us to several views of the plane’s main cabin, an imperial masterpiece befitting an elected leader who draws the world in his train. It was far bigger than the living-dining space in which we sat, ‘but it don’t have a fireplace,” noted Rip ‘and you can’t just doze around, drink cider and worry about the way things might have been.’
Our word play is part of resistance, countering the odd angles of political speech in acts of embattled spiritual jiu-jitsu because, as noted in our previous essay, the corruption of language, and thus of thought, feeling, relationship and community is a primary means of those who degrade, rob and rule us.
‘Tell them,’ says Rip that we’ve had ‘an unusually hearty dinner’ like that fellow in the Poe story that can’t believe the bizarre events in the news.’ Here’s how we felt after undergoing the debate™, like the haze induced by reading a daily newspaper:
“After reading the editorial matter from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, I conceived the possibility of its being Chinese and so re-read it from the end to the beginning with no more satisfactory result.” [1]
That’s what it was like listening to “the Phoenix” (TIME magazine on its cover man), “statesmanlike”™ John McCain consume half of the time that might have been spent discussing the major problems of the Republic, long since become an Oligarchy with democratic trappings that always, with Oligarchy and Tyranny reduce Republics to immorality, militarism and chaos with petty nastiness about Mr. Romney’s precise degree of support for the surge. The smirking arrogance and vapid pettiness anointed by leading Red governors, mayors and other apparatchiks seems to be the mark of a frontrunner secure in his stature with those who count.
‘We don’t count,’ Rip muttered, ‘we hunt’ and dozed off, dreaming of bass and quail.
I recall that the airbrushed features of Mr. President Putin recently graced the cover of TIME and noted that Red Chief Phoenix had harsh words for the dictator with whom we share the controls in Iran. One of the few meaningful, but inchoate comments made by the Phoenix (his ‘ashes’ are a myth) was that when he looks into Putin’s eyes he sees the letters “KGB.” If only our statesmen were as concerned with rousting out illegal aliens, including the UN and its oligarchic banditry via “treaty” and securing our nation’s borders with the National Guard or militia, rather than fences, as Mr. Putin is regarding Russian borders and power.
The time allotted the four candidates to speak must have been matched to their official vote totals in the Florida primary a night before, with Giuliani’s share given to the Phoenix, the “National Security Conservative” he endorsed. About fifteen % was left for the ‘social conservative’ from Arkansas (it must be rare to administer the Clinton fief when the lord and lady now reign from Gotham and the district situated snugly between Mary’s land and Virgin yah). Of the ninety minutes, Congressman Paul was invited to speak for about five minutes.
He should have been more assertive; one can get more time and launch a few important ideas into the media ether. Yet he did speak meaningful truths (this itself is saving grace) in a major media production, to wit: that government and corporations collude against individual property owners, their lives and liberties; that running a welfare state and an Empire (like Rome) rots the currency and impoverishes people; that there seems to be no end to the new cold war the “national security conservatives” are selling and that it’s shamefully distracting for the two top dogs to be quibbling “about who said what when” about the surge when the economy and nation are going down. He stressed the importance to freedom, so much mentioned, of limiting Federal government and its taking of wealth. Did he mention securing the border?
Hint and wish: the next prime time opportunity the Congressman has he should explain “monetary policy” in a few simple words and elucidate its relation to slavery or freedom. Let him note how the government destroys families…
Mr. Huckabee wasted time repeatedly protesting (rather than just stating it once, firmly) the way the two prima donnas were allowed to hog the show, and said little though he did close with gracious words, as did Ron Paul rather than presuming to grab for the “Reagan mantle” or talk about why they should be king. But the fish, once dead, rots from the head down so in these times it’s natural to have an inverse correlation between political status and integrity.
Last week I quoted often from H.G. Wells’ horrific vision of progress and perfectibility in the Island of Dr. Moreau particularly in regard to the decay of language into bits of shapeless sound. This topic also was central to Orwell’s vision of the modern darkness in the method of its oligarchs to achieve social control, an internal reign of terror in which lies and hollowness must be accepted as truth, or else. This topic has been treated in ancient times and commented on by others who saw the emerging essence of modernist lies about man, relationships, governance and Providence: “save, Eternal One, for the devout man is gone, for truthful men have vanished from mankind. Each one speaks vanities to his neighbor with smooth speech and a double heart. And they say, “our proud tongues make us mighty, our lips are with us: who is lord over us!”
It’s like listening to the debates, like reading the “editorial matter” and news delivered from the Ministry of Truth diffused from the Oligarchy’s main outlets, the centers of commerce and life that have become generic “media markets” determining the number of sports teams in every professional league: a key sign of how the machine operates.
When do matters in human society begin to appear hopeless to those who care and retain a humane heart, humility and a sense and some awe of the Creator and His loving gifts: political discourse shows us. “The most dangerous symptom of moral corruption is the depravity of human speech,” speech, the first and distinguishing quality of a being with an immortal soul (Genesis 2:4-7, 19-20); the bond of language to truth, the truth of creation and proper use of every gift precedes and prepares man for the companionship he needs for spiritual and material reasons [2]. Those essential needs and gifts that today are obscured and deformed by our major institutions and their hazy terminology.
The corruption and decay of speech, both purposeful and from the reductive dumbing-down that is the business of both the education industry and media (that debases all it touches) thus strikes at the heart of the Creator’s wish and providence for mankind. It is not ‘simple’ dishonesty but the effluent of a culture permeated with lies.
Moreover, language, “this gift of God, rather than being used as the sacred means of binding human relationships has become the most pernicious tool in the service of ruthless selfishness.” The target of this criticism was socialist politics and materialism, already the key signature cultural change 150 years ago. “Whatever nowadays is done supposedly for the common good is actually motivated by clever calculation of the advantages of these acts of false altruism,” Hirsch wrote. As a result, “trustworthiness, faith and honesty seem to have vanished from society…even from the earth beyond recall” [3]. “The young will disrespect the old, the true man will be driven away, and a man’s worst enemy will be his own household [i.e. his wife] {4}. These lines, discussed millennia ago might as well encode a description of our divorce, education, and political industries.
Once speech becomes “polished,” Hirsch adds, “love has given way to egoism and from this follows “the absence of compassion” and “the sense of what is proper” [5]. What we endure is the triumph of Machiavelli, roiling in our culture for five centuries and now enthroned as its de facto creed: the cult of power and its methods, terror for without faith, trustworthiness and compassion a culture’s inner products, its tenor and the projection of its essence will be terror, the triumph of the will, appetites and imagination over reason, articulation, love, truth and humility. Give them credit, Governor Huckabee and Congressman Paul modeled and mentioned this quality in their brief closing remarks.
But Machiavelli has won, “speech has become polished smooth” and “can offer no firm foundation for anything,” any idea, policy, action or relationship. Cynicism and changing the fundamental laws of our being have fractured the ground on which we stand. “A social system based on lies will bring ruin to mankind more than any overtly brutal force” and thus “baseness is exalted among mortals” [6].
“From on high they loftily speak about oppression, condescendingly they speak.” This is “the peace of the wicked,” the “peace” of their peace processes and their welfare and resource management solutions to the human problem.
Late in the debate, they aired an ad for Waste Management (is this a reference to removing people, by indirect, that is, ‘environmental’ means) in which a suave female voice-over asserted the need for “us” to “live in peace together” the us, according to the visuals, being various water and wild fowl and human beings. The scene was lovely and empty of humans; a charming park for those whose eyes, lips and hips are wrapped with arrogance as their ornament (ibid 73:2-15), who “bring ruin to mankind” by ‘peace.’
“If I was to tell you how bad it [really] is, I would cause the generation of your children to rebel” against all that remains of order and grace (73:16-29). But the answer is as it was then, and given our times and mores, the very thing the ruling Oligarchs are most fiercely set against: the return of Jews to the Temple Mount and rebuilding of the Temple so the grace of the Creator most fully can restore this dark and damaged world. Opposed? Those who watched the State of the Union saw that the only time all the Blue Team joined all the Red Team, Chiefs of Staff and High Judges (cf. psalm 82) in rapturous, sustained applause was when Gog Bush declared that his administration would see a “Palestinian State” ensconced upon the heartland of the Children of Israel including all of their holiest places [7].
And so the Oligarchs intend to uproot the Tree of Life and bury its wellsprings from the world as the War of Terror pursues its multifaceted violence and lies (psalm 72:14). Orwell wrote: “the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten; the lie became truth.”
“It’s a fool’s game,” murmured Rip in his drowse, and I took a long drink and threw more kindling in the stove. The darkness and cold are almost palpable. Even as the palace of the kings of Judah is being excavated these past three years, the mighty ones have hastened to bury Zion again as Hadrian did, inventing the name “Palestine” the “non-nation and vile people,” the fiction, the big lie that plagues the world in the end of days (Deut. 32:21).
While our economy and thus our lives are destroyed around us, the Oligarchs embolden and ‘engage’ Iran in “Alliances for Civilization” and the takeover of Mesopotamia. The Islamic Brotherhood, parent group of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad writes bitterly of the degree to which Iranians control government bureaus in Syria; in the Lebanon they lament the dominance of Hizbollah, a branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Polls taken by Iranians in Persia (“Iran”) say that most people would welcome a foreign invasion to rid them of the mullahs [8]. So might many here; but “change” brought by invasion is not the way to restore grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream, to what has become the dominion of Hegel, Machiavelli and their many followers of “polished speech,” power games, the ruin of language and forgetting.
We must demand honest and meaningful discussion, truly human speech not robotics from those who would wield power; the ninth and tenth amendments must become common knowledge and parlance; mandatory public conditioning (schooling) must be repealed because parents have the natural and inalienable right to educate their children: Americans must recognize how much a Pharaonic government owns us. Those who rather send their kids to day care and stupefaction can pay for it in the private sector; leave us out of it and spare us “statesmen with momentum” [9].
In closing, Rip says beware third parties fronted by the mayor of NYC. Gov. Schwarzenegger or other puppest of the Oligarchs: these are preemptive strikes against a meaningful third party headed by Ron Paul. For now, read, study classic texts, use language well, and guard all the ‘little’ things and faculties that sustain our humanity [10].
1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Angel of the Odd” c. 1845 in Complete Stories and Poems (Doubleday 1995)
2. Commentary on psalm 12 by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, leader and expositor of observant Jews in central Europe in the 19th century. From notes he began making about 1840 to publication in 1881; first English-Hebrew edition, The Hirsch Psalms (Feldheim 1960; 1997)
3. Ibid
4. Sanhedrin 97a2-3 amid an extended discussion of Hebrew Scriptures on characteristics of the End of Days, the Sabbath of history and its length, 93 – 99a3 which mentions, inter alia that “the horses of the Medes will be tied to every tree in Babylon” that is, Mesopotamia (“Iraq”).
5. Hirsch op cit
6. Hirsch on 12:4-5, 9
7. One of the very few changes in pronunciation of Hebrew from ancient times is that the letter gimmel, our ‘g’ without an internal vowel used to be pronounced ‘soft’ like the ‘g’ in “George.” “Gog” literally means “roof” and is a synonym for arrogance. Grammar determines whether the first ‘g’ is hard or soft.
8. Search archives at www.memri.org Middle East Media Research Institute that translates from Arabic and Islamic media and archives their blogs, TV programs and other video.
9. “The freedom that I speak of is the freedom from servitude to other people…servitude to people is slavery to a multitude whose desires I will not fulfill even with my entire life… service to God is true freedom, and humility before Him is true honor”; the Sage in Yehuda HaLevi, Kuzari c.1090, Essay 5:25
10. Read Thomas Jefferson’s letter on education to his nephew Peter Carr, September 7, 1814.