It's A Crool World Welcome To Your Post-Electoral America
Tree Roots, Vincent Van Gogh's Last Painting; July 27, 1890
Not A GBCW
I'm considering ending this Blog, partly in reaction to what has just happened -- but also because there's nothing worse than a creative effort which, ultimately, is little better than what that cat shit person shovels into the digital universe.
I've been posting for 16 years, "masquerading as a Medium-Sized White Dog". It's provided an outlet for aspects of myself -- mostly, not that positive -- and releasing a large amount of sarcasm and anger all had some direct benefit for me, but not necessarily for any readers. I've dropped 1,257 posts over those sixteen years, but -- small wonder -- few people have read Before Nine, and few people follow it. No sour grapes; that's just how it is.
Most of those posts have been doomscrolling. I'm not an original thinker; I know facts, but in context of being a writer or social observer, I don't analyze them well. Before Nine never had a wide readership, never moved opinions, or educated, or persuaded; I don't know what other result I could have been expecting: If you make cookies that taste like cardboard, no one wants to eat them.
Recently, I deactivated my Twitter account. It served much the same purpose as this blog, on a daily basis. I hated what Musk did to the platform; I hated his reinstatement of users who were effectively nazis; his opinions and behavior are personally repugnant. When he announced Twitter would eliminate the Blocking function (making it easier for Rightist crazies, scammers, and some persons with real pathological intent to stalk and harass others) that was all the motivation I needed to leave.
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Half of the United States electorate just shouted, " Ja ! Ein Volk, Ein Reich; Ein Fuhrer! " They have said, We want Fascism. Unfortunately, 'democracy' worked -- very unfortunately for migrants, People of Color; gay and transgender persons; women; liberals; the elderly; children. If you have been a vocal, visible critic working against That Person, writing and posting and speaking -- were I you, I'd leave the U.S. for relative safety abroad.
Also, it will be very unfortunate for Ukrainians, Taiwanese, the Baltic States, the EU and collective European security; Japan, South Korea, AUS, NZ, and the Pacific Basin. Unfortunate for Palestinians, for Israelis. It will be unfortunate, eventually, for France, Germany; for any country whose nationalist political parties are hungering to seize power -- now bolstered and energized by That Person's election.
A majority of adult voters in America want That Person in power. They voted for Project 2025. They voted for everything that's about to happen. They voted in favor of lies, violence, and corruption, and I am trying without much success to comprehend it.
A general election in 1932 in Germany resulted in gains for the nazis and the KPD (German Communist Party). Any coalition government had to include both. The nazis maneuvered in the background for months, until Center parties and Rightist parties in Parliament agreed: Hitler could be appointed Chancellor, in January, 1933. He could be managed, controlled. We know the rest of the story.
Now, we've had our election. That Person has been elected president. I fully expect the next 24 months to seem much like the story of 1933 (only That Person may no longer be president -- I expect J. D. Vance, courtesy of the 25th Amendment). America will be run for the benefit of our Oligarchs and old-money Wealthy; and fuck the Peasantry.
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There will be no resistance; no unravelling of the fascists and theocratists; no calling the fascists to account. No justice. No major media, revealing events. There will be some marching, protesting, but America -- the one I grew up in, served -- is done. January of 2025 is a red line -- and once crossed, the America that exists now, right now, will never come again.
I can offer my own opinions; but there are better thinkers, writers, observers, than I am. My points of view are similar to some, but not adding anything positive to the sum of human experience in this blog. There don't seem to be reasons to continue -- I haven't decided; not yet. Some of that dithering is simply technical.
According to The Great Curmudgeon, there is an internet tradition known as the Good-Bye Cruel World post (GCBW), where a content creator (nominally, a keyboard warrior type, like the cat shit person) writes a swan song of criticism and grievances, full of acid and bad language -- why not; you're jumping off the ledge, right? -- to explain why they're leaving.
This is not one of those; not really -- but, we're all living in Interregnum America.
Yet One More Barking Rant To Begin An End-Times Laugh Riot Week
Mikey Johnson Reminds: Church Attendance Is Mandatory
This Might Replace Rodin's 'The Thinker'
This post seems incomplete, like two relatively unconnected essays thrown up on the wall which stuck, barking about the Middle East, and the omnipotent, they-are-always-with-us Rich. You may think this is low-hanging fruit, but it's not.
Not that it's important; if this blog's observations had any impact in the public discussion of serious issues, then this post would have more meaning. But, it's only unsourced opinion by one individual with no agency beyond their own existence.
I am as singular as, and no more important than, any of the dead uncovered at Pompeii whose names we'll never know, all events and actions and experiences in their lives -- for what? -- unknown, lost.
Some of my observations offered will, in all probability, cause the few readers of this blog to say yeah, eyeroll, whatever the fuck, but this is what happens here in downtown Earth. Be well.
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I Have Wanted To Say This
Listen to me: Fuck all you motherfucking fucks; you murdering fuckers you.
The Middle East's history is woven in the interactions of generations -- families, clans, tribes; all part of religious sects, now become modern political movements and governments. This geography is steeped in misogyny, cruelty; art, science and spirituality; and blood feuds millennia old.
Comedian Don Rickles inadvertently summed it up on his first album, a live recording of his heckling standup routine in Las Vegas, which I heard in 1969: "What's your name, sir -- Habib? ... You got to laugh about people, Habib. I've met you before, haven't I? That's right, you hung my uncle."
Rickles' joke was a rough equivalent of the history of Palestine and Israel, which was just 20 years old, then. It hadn't even been a year since the 'Six-Day' War, where Israeli troops occupied the West Bank, the Golan, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai.
The casino crowd on the Strip laughed at Don's joke -- but Habib might easily have pointed the same joke at Rickles ("Yeah; didn't you hang my uncle when you took his house and orchards?"), and few would have understood. It was all happening so far away, and Vietnam had everyone's attention. Including mine.
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Everyone knows what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023. It was more than a massacre by Hamas; it was an obscenity. And everyone knows what happened next in Gaza, and what is still happening; more monstrous brutalities. War crimes were committed and are still being committed.
And all the participants -- Hamas, Hezbollah; Islamic State, Iran; the Houthis, the Saudis; the IDF, the Israeli government; the United States government; Netanyahu, Biden; members of Knesset and Congress -- are guilty. No one is clean.
I condemn every threat, every act of violence, of thuggery, viciousness; every calculated political decision allowing more violence and more suffering to continue: No one is clean. To argue that one side is more monstrous, more brutal than the other, is the comparative mathematics of lunacy.
It has to stop. The maiming and the killing, the abuse and enforced suffering. Stop bombing, stop launching rockets, stop seizing territory, stop starving refugees. You are all complicit. And questions of land, of statehood, of security, can't be addressed so long as anyone raises their voice or a hand in any way against any Other.
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During the 2006 Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon, I wrote a post on a still-new Daily Kos, then republished it here six years later during another spate of regional violence. You may consider its conclusions simplistic and naive. I would argue the horror in Israel and Gaza passed beyond nuance, rhetoric and sophistication long ago.
There is a point where the amount of death and misery is so great that nothing matters, except that it ends. And damn anyone willing to sacrifice more children, use all the blood-feud deaths of generations, to justify more violence.
... look into that child's eyes. ... Look at the expression written there: Where are you taking us? Why are you doing this? What will happen to me?
Will you tell them, when you put your pistol to their head, burn them alive, drop your 500-pound bomb on their encampment, kill their siblings and friends in front of them, that it's for a greater good? For the glory of a faith? Because your wife or husband, brother or sister, your parent or cousins or friends, were killed and revenge demands that now this child's life has to end?
I do not care about the political or religious "dimension" in all this. I swear to you because I know: a dead child is an utterly final answer to all the puking, screeching human argument justifying our species' ability to commit murder. It all must stop -- followed by a final resolution to all questions of Palestinian statehood and Israeli security. Period.
No one is clean; and It has to end. Stop killing the children, then make peace -- because the alternative is nihilism and obscenity, the blood-feud, forever. Agree and then act. It really has to be that simple, because every other convoluted attempt at peace has twisted around the axle of pride, history and hate. Enough.
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Bring My Car, And Be Quick You Fucking Proles
I'll just say it: American / Western society is essentially owned by a vicious, arrogant layer of wealth -- call them the 0.001 % -- principally Old Wealth, maintained in the same families for generations. I've actually been around these folk, a bit, and they are just as venal and clueless, as well of course I should have this as I wish it arrogant, as if you'd lifted a cultural stereotype from a comedy-of-manners and dropped them into Real Life. They truly exist.
They own multiple homes, in neighborhoods which, if you don't live in them, you'd better have a verifiable reason to be there. They move in a cyclical progression from home to home, seasonal vacations at resorts and private hotels. Their children attend preparatory schools, a tight circle of European and American universities; eventually, sliding into sinecures at law and investment firms. They are members of clubs we wouldn't be allowed to join. They do not know how to build a fire, make coffee, set up a tent or cook a filet of sole: they hire others to do that sort of thing.
Most families know (or are at least aware of) each other. They intermarry. Their children grow up with each other. They are supported by accountants, financial and investment advisors, personal assistants, tax and estate attorneys, physicians and surgeons, tailors, chefs and valets. Their children walk in comfort and anonymity along the same private, manicured paths as their predecessors in generations before them.
Within their class, maintaining their family's fortunes is the critical priority ("You don't love it as I do," Lord Grantham explains to his cousin as they regard Downton Abbey. "But I am merely a steward of all this"). There's also a certain amount of social Darwinism between players, a jockeying for position: It's Edith Wharton and John Cheever with a touch of Voltaire (see "Discrete Charm Of The Bourgeoise", and The Ruling Class).
They tolerate the Zucks, the Musks, the Jobs' and Bezos' and Thiels and Andreesens; all the Tech Bro billionaires, as nouveau riche arrivistes; pool boys, waiters and office workers who somehow struck it rich. Not the right sort -- no history, no breeding- -- but, they can afford to live well, and, if the past is any guide, eventually they and their money will disappear. Or, they'll be around for a few generations and finally become acceptable.
They have serious class solidarity: depend on it. Even if Claus von Bülow appeared to have attempted to murder his wife, members of their class might disapprove, but would "support the side", "maintain common cause" against a greater mass of humanity: We are the Owners, and Fuck the Peasants (see 'The Draughtsman's Contract').
These persons are not accountable under any law in the same way, or to the same extent, that you or I are. They don't wait in line, don't submit to passport control or customs checks; aren't required to appear in court for all but the most serious charges (if they appear at all). They are anonymous to all but each other.
And collectively, they own you whether you believe it, accept it, or not.
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You Are Pwned -- A Dream Coda
Years ago, I had a dream which stands out in memory -- because I don't often dream with details that I recall so completely.
I was some kind of mountaineering guide, taking wealthy persons up -- not Everest, but some similar peak. I was "inside" myself in this dream (sometimes dreams allow you see yourself in 'camera view'), looking out on a snow-covered slope -- a right triangle of pure white, from upper left to lower right -- against a sky of deep Cobalt blue.
A man in his late twenties / early thirties stood a few feet in front of me, wearing an orange parka with the hood pulled back. He had a light stubble of beard, curly, reddish-blonde hair, and wore a pair of aviator-style sunglasses. He was completely at ease, smiling, and spoke with an accent (French, I remembered). He wasn't arrogant or emphatic with his delivery, but matter-of-fact, as if describing the weather.
"I will tell you how it is," he said. "My family is thirteen hundred years old. One of my ancestors was knighted by Charlemagne. We've survived plagues, wars, financial collapse, revolutions, occupation. We've had our black sheep, our idiots -- but mostly, we have made fortunes and passed them down to the next generation. We've been good at it, and lucky.
"If you can't trace your family back more than a few generations? I don't care. You've always worked for pay -- but maybe you get lucky, win some lottery, and your children inherit that money? I don't care. In one, maybe two generations, it will be gone, absorbed into banks, financial houses, and by taxes. Perhaps my family owns some of those financial houses.
"We own forests and mines. We own companies" -- he waved at me with one hand -- "Maybe you have even worked for us. But some day, you will be dead, and that will be the end for you. Your name will be forgotten, as if you and everyone in your family line before you had never existed. My family will still be here.
"And if that's unhappy for you, if it makes you angry, I don't care," he said, and smiled again. "And that is how things are."
This is a topic never far from my mind in These Days. Not only am I chronologically closer to death, it seems the circumstances in life I've taken for granted may be changing to include a higher level of risk; a lot more rapidly than I'd thought.
I've been in immediate danger of dying, of death right in my fucking face, four times. In each case, it was only clear immediately after: Holy Shit; that almost took me out. I didn't have time, in the moment things were going down, to realize, this is Last Day. I checked in with the Last Of The Old Unit about this and their experiences are roughly the same. So: I not crazy.
In terms of death as loss, I've had my share. Only one or two had coincidental events, what I think of as 'echoes', after, which might appear to some like a message or a parting word. But I'm not sure -- so I use the word 'coincidental' as a hedge, a cheat; an out. Because there isn't any way to know.
The short, sharp shock -- out of the Blue; into the Black -- is how death happens for so many people around the world, in These Days. It's only by the luck of the draw that I've lived more than seven decades and have the capability to contemplate my physical end from a smallish apartment in a major Blue city at the western edge of the North American continent, beside the broad Pacific, now heating up like oceans everywhere.
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And when I think about life, all our lives, how brief some of them are (and, let's face it: It's always going to seem too brief) I remind myself about the Iceman.
In 1991, the preserved, effectively mummified physical remains of a Bronze-Age human were found on a glacier. He was dubbed "Ötzi The Iceman". Ötzi. It sounds friendly, like a nickname for some your slightly daffy uncle, if you come from a German family; an attempt to turn this fellow -- preserved by chance and climate -- into a mascot for tourists, a name to print on tee-shirts and mugs and lunch boxes.
Ötzi died 5,300 years ago (about 3,300 BC) in the mountain pass where his body was found, between current-day Italy and Austria, shot with an arrow by an unknown assailant. He was found with possessions and clothing. His body was found with intact genitalia, but at some point between discovery and transport to a climate-controlled environment, some modern-day fuckwad stole his penis; of course they did.
Eventually, his facial features were reconstructed -- as forensic anthropologists do with modern-day murder victims -- and we found he looked, more or less, like Charles Bukowski:
Ötzi (Not His Real Name)
The man with this face lived and died Five Thousand, Three Hundred Years Ago. This places him in the Prehistoric era (from ~3 million years BC until 1,200 BC). Specifically, in the Bronze Age.
He died 3,000 years before Greek civilization developed, or the Roman empire -- and hundreds of years before the 'Old Kingdom' Egyptian civilization began and the first Pyramids built.
He died four thousand years before the Buddha. At least 2,300 years before either Jesus or Mohammed are reported to have lived.
When Ötzi was alive, the earliest human written languages had just begun to appear.
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My Dog Trainer advises that packs of Ibex meat were found in Ötzi's carrying bag -- and, while he was in excellent physical shape, his arteries showed significant Atherosclerosis. Some Vegans have said this is evidence that a presumably meat-based, Prehistoric 'Paleo' diet, eaten by an actual Bronze Age human, is a bad idea.
And: He was discovered because the glacier which had held his body over thousands of years was melting.
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Thanatology:
Study of death and practices and beliefs attached to it
1. Life is finite. Every single one of us will die.
The Population Reference Bureau estimates the current population at 7 billion humans. They estimate only 107 billion people have ever lived -- meaning, some 15 humans have died for every person currently living.
2. We have no idea if, as individual consciousnesses, humans continue in any form after death.
Some people have beliefs, or faith, in specific outcomes. But (all the YouTubes about NDEs aside) feelings are not facts. No human being alive knows what happens to us. Anyone who says they do is comfortingly deluded.
This existential problem -- what is this, why are we, and what happens to us when we die is the Ur-question of human existence.
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3. There is a cave system in South Africa, showing proof of its use as a burial site by an ancestor species, Homo Naledi. Designs were also found scratched into the rock near the burials. We have no idea what they mean.
But it appears that 300,000 years ago, Naledi buried their dead, laying them out in a specific way, with stone tools and other items. It suggests the Naledi had concepts of Self / Something Else, and Self / Here; that they believed being somewhere else after death. We don't know. There was no written language three hundred thousand years ago.
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Neolithic Homo Sapiens buried their dead with possessions, with food, weapons and utensils, which would seem to indicate a belief that the deceased existed after death, going somewhere, though the body decayed. We don't know. There was no written language in the Neolithic.
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If This Is Friday, It Must Be The Afterlife
A. It isn't clear where the idea of an afterlife first appeared in human religion. Humans began organizing in villages, towns and cities, around 10,000 BC. Per Wikipedia, The earliest undercurrents of Mesopotamian religion developed in ~6,000 BC, coinciding with the region being permanently settled -- and the earliest real evidence of organized religion dates to roughly 4,000 BC, coinciding with the invention of writing.
The forces of nature were worshiped as providers of sustenance. About 3,000 BC, the forces and objects of worship which used to be essentially nameless were given names and personalities. Multiple divinities, each with particular functions, appeared.
Around ~2,000 - 1,000 BC, the last stages of Mesopotamian polytheism developed. It showed greater emphasis on personal religion, with the gods structured into a hierarchy; the national god of whichever (Babylonian, Akkadian) being the head of the pantheon.
Walk Like An Egyptian
B. By 2,000 BCE (or, 1,300 years after Ötzi died), the Egyptians had developed their own polytheistic religion around the notion that humans possessed a soul and, at death, that soul's place on a spectrum of good and evil would be judged.
Per Wikipedia, "Upon death, one entered the underworld, where Anubis, God of the dead, weighed the person's heart on a scale against a feather... of order, truth, and righteousness." If the heart weighed more than the feather (like the 'Witches weigh as much as a Duck' scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail), then the heart would be devoured by a waiting demon. You "would die a second death and be eliminated from existence", forever.
If your heart weighs as much as, or less than, the feather, you are allowed to pass into the Land of the Sun. This was someplace else, mythic or extra-dimensional, not a physical place on Earth. A comfortable, abundant land -- essentially, the best aspects of life as experienced in the Kingdom of Egypt.
Tewaret, Hippo Moon Goddess You Bet, Guides The Departed. Or, You Know, Not.
This Eschatology was supported by a complex set of beliefs, involving prayers and rites. At the height of ancient Egyptian culture -- the Middle Kingdom -- after death, funerary rites lasted over a month. There was an elaborate process of embalming and mummification; tombs filled with decorations and hieroglyphic ritual prayers, and items for the deceased's existence in the afterlife -- possessions, food, weapons; statuary representing servants.
Surviving family members performed regular ancestor rites to pray and make offerings to the gods on behalf of their deceased. When a Pharaoh died, they had attained status as a god; all Egyptians could pray and make offerings at their temples in the necropolis of the Valley of the Kings.
Egypt had developed all this at leasta thousand yearsbefore the rise of ancient Greece, and Rome.
Grecian Afterlife Thirst Trap
C. In Greek Eschatology, Hermes, the Messenger, delivered departed souls to the banks of the river Styx, where they waited until a boat operated by Charon the Ferryman appeared to take them across and into Hades -- which, to the Greeks, was another physical place on earth; the land of the dead. Charon demanded compensation; Greek funerary rites included putting a coin under the deceased's tongue so they could pay that last passage.
In Hades, three legendary kings judged a soul's conduct in life. Those who had lived pure lives, or were relatives of the gods (who always seeming to be having sex with humans), went to The Elysian Fields -- green valleys and mountains, where all was peaceful, and the Sun always shone for the guiltless and connected.
The majority of Greeks, their good and evil deeds essentially in balance, or who were indecisive in life, went to The Asphodel Fields -- a sort of low-rent version of Elysium; something like Hooterville, the location of the action in TV's Green Acres, but without a laugh track.
Finally, those who had blasphemed against the gods or been consciously evil were sent to Tartarus, a place foul and stygian where they would be burned in lava or stretched on racks (definitely without a laugh track).
When In Rome, Do As The Greeks Do
D. After Rome invaded Macedonia and southern Greece in 146 BC, it absorbed Greek art and culture, the Pantheon of Greek deities and their afterlife cosmology -- with its Egyptian flavor of souls being judged, and specific levels of afterlife experience based on that judgement.
Virgil, the Roman author who created the three most important Latin poems in antiquity, described the afterlife as the Romans adopted it in his epic, the Aeneid, written around 24 BC. Virgil makes a tour of Hades, guided by his recently dead father (as Dante would later have Virgil guiding him).
(Just a note: Virgil's poetry was a Big Deal in that long-gone Roman world. The UK Guardian recently reported that a shard of pottery found at an archeological site in Spain had lines from a poem by Virgil inscribed in Latin into the clay before firing. This was in an age where poetry actually meant something.)
Because You Never Know
E.Sheol, the Jewish concept of an afterlife, began as the universal destination of the dead, a place of darkness to which both the righteous and the unrighteous, regardless of their moral choices in life, will go.
It wasn't a place of active punishment, but a land as far removed from Paradise -- from God -- as possible. And in Judaism, being separated from God (the most perfect expression of existence) is a terrible thing.
In 500 BC, Sheol was being portrayed in some Jewish texts as the place where the righteous and the wicked were separated into different afterlife regions. In other texts, it was described as a place of punishment, meant for the wicked dead alone.
In 200 BC -- roughly the same time Rome was absorbing Greece into its empire -- Hebrew scriptures were being translated into Greek in ancient Alexandria. Scribes substituted the 'Sheol' in Judaism with the Greek word, "Hades" -- and the Greek concept of an afterlife along with it.
Make The Baby Jesus Cry And Go To Hell
F. Christian Eschatology focuses on the divinity of one person -- who supposedly taught about life both physical and spiritual, and was put to death for bucking the authority of the Jewish religious order and Roman occupation -- an apostate and a terrorist. They were raised from the dead, ascended to heaven... and at our death, if we had followed their teachings, kept our noses and our hands clean and believed in their divinity, then we could, too.
By 325 AD, Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman empire. Emperor Constantine I called a council of Christian heavyweights, in Nicaea -- and over two months of arguing, agreed on what the doctrine of their now official state religion would be. This was followed in 390 AD by another council, in Hippo, to determine what official scripture would support that previously-agreed doctrine. There was editing, exclusion; other texts, like the 'Gnostic Gospels', were suppressed. The result was the Bible.
At these two councils, the streams of Mediterranean / Middle Eastern religious belief and tradition which had encountered and cross-pollinated each other -- The Babylonian and Akkadian informing the Egyptian, flowing into the Greek and then Roman; the long Jewish traditions --all came together.
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One of the most influential writings, not part of the Bible, which influenced Christian ideas about an afterlife was Dante di Alighiero degli Alighier's Inferno (Hell), one part of his 'Divine Comedy' -- a long, three-part narrative poem, published through the early 1300's.
Dante's great unrequited love, Beatrice Portinari, had died in 1290. His love for her was his north star for the remainder of his life -- and he tells his readers her death was the reason for the poem. It was a chronicle of his search for her soul, to lead her out of the Inferno, to Paradise, guided by the ghost of Virgil on the journey.
Dante took Virgil's description of the Roman Hades, borrowed from the Greek, influenced by Judaism and the Egyptians, and expanded on it. In Dante's artistic imagination, Hell was a funnel of nine descending 'Circles', each of which providing horrifying punishments for classes of sin and transgression, narrowing down to the final Circle at the bottom -- a plain of ice, where Lucifer, a titanic being with multiple faces, stood bound with chains and buried to the waist.
Dante was a deeply involved Player in the 14th century politics of Florence, his city-state birthplace -- and, he was no punk artist, but a first-wave fighter, rapier and blade, in open wars between factions. As a political person, his 'Divine Comedy' was as much subtle commentary on contemporary politics as an artistic expression, full of 'inside baseball' references -- some of those getting roasted in the hell he invented were easily recognizable to a sophisticated audience.
This is one of the most important aspects of Dante's work: His notions of Heaven and Hell were his invention, his artistic imagination. For seven hundred years, they have profoundly shaped the popular, public and secular notions in the Western world of what happens after death. And, dig it:He did that with a work of fiction!
In 1321, Dante contracted malaria and died. No one knows what happened to him after that, if anything.
(Side Note: I recommend two utterly different novels featuring the Dantesque vision as a setting -- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Inferno [1976], and Hell, by Robert Olen Butler [2009].
(The long-time Sci-Fi duo ['Mote In God's Eye', and Niven's Ringworld saga, are still popular] produced an underworld that is a bit dated but very readable. Butler's book involves a former mega-star news anchor, now broadcasting The Nightly News From Hell, on his search for A Way Out. Butler writes well; it's worth the trip.)
Dante's Big Vacation Guide:
Click To Enlarge -- It's Easy And Fun!
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Songs From The Bardo
G.The structure of Buddhist belief is too complicated to articulate here in detail. But: after death, a person enters a non-physical realm, the Bardo, where they encounter the essence of their own mind, locked by habit into a series of karmic imprints. As Ram Das once described the human mind, it behaves "like a drunken monkey bitten by a scorpion".
A person is presented an opportunity for awareness that all things are part of the great form / formlessness, all and nothing at once; are simply projections of one's own mind; and in that moment of realization attain enlightenment and become part of a greater cosmology.
Most of us, however, blow that opportunity and have to enter the Bardo of Becoming -- where we encounter our own minds: whatever we conceptualize, will be so. Basically, that scene from 'Ghostbusters', on steroids:
Stantz: What do you mean, choose? We don't understand.
Gozer: Choose; choose the form of the Destructor!
Venkman: Oh, I get it! I get it. Ohhh; very cute. Whatever we think of! If we think of J.Edgar Hoover, then J.Edgar Hoover will appear and destroy us, okay? So empty your heads... Don't think of anything. We've only got one shot at this.
Gozer: The choice is made; the Traveller has come!
Venkman: Woah, woah woah; nobody 'choosed' anything! ... what did you do, Ray?
Stanz: I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood, something that could never, ever destroy us... It's Mr. Stay-Puft, the Marshmallow Man.
Venkman: Aw; Mother Pus-Bucket... Good goin', Ray.
Buddhists spend much effort on meditation to discipline and focus the mind in preparation for death -- first, to have the best chance of not missing one of the opportunities the Bardo presents for enlightenment, and so step off the Great Wheel of death and rebirth. Second, to withstand the terrifying, anything-goes capabilities of our own minds.
Then (after one last opportunity to Get It; at almost each stage in this process of The Bardo, there seem to be multiple chances to obtain enlightenment), we may be reincarnated through rebirth. No one remembers their time in the Bardo -- as long as 49 days on Earth, so the traditions say. And, Big Wheel keeps on turnin'.
There is also a chance that you may be attracted to any of the five Realms of Samsara, illusion, and so wander in self-projection forever. Or you may continue on the cycle of birth, life, death, reincarnation, until you obtain enlightenment and step off the wheel, or perhaps if you can't will be seen as a defective part by the universe and discarded. But no one really knows.
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You Never Know
And, this is the point: No one knows what actually happens. No one. Whenever a notable person, an acquaintance, an enemy dies, I always think: Now they know what we do not -- even if what they found was Nothing, which is a possibility. And, Detective Chole speaks for many: Sure hope that old lady's wrong...
It remains my belief that, because no one knows what happens, this Great Mystery is behind almost every aspect of human existence; we simply work hard to put it as far in the background as possible. Death is the reference point by which all other experiences are measured, considered and qualified.
None of this is news. I'm just saying the quiet part, the real quiet part, out loud.
But at some point, we have to stop thinking about death, and live our lives. Savor the truth that we are alive, for the moment, and hopefully in the moment. It may even be possible (as a cab driver in Germany once said to Kurt Vonnegut, "If the accident will") to accept and experience death as an answer, as adventure. It will be our last choice in living -- how to experience our end -- so; why not.
In the interim -- because we all have to play chess with Death on the beach, or give him a Melvin -- may your time be long, your shoe leather thick; your glass full and your bowels cooperative. Be well.
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MEHR, MIT SCHLAG: This add-on from December, 2019 seems appropriate. It's what we all hope is true, one way or another, anyway.
Actor Danny Aiello passed away, age 86. He appeared in a number of films, including one on my top ten list: Jacob's Ladder (1990).
Set in 1975 New York, Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), divorced Vietnam vet with a PhD in Philosophy, is working in the Postal Service, and may (or may not) be slipping in and out of a series of flashbacks connected to Vietnam in 1971 [part of my time in the Southeast Asian barrel], and the accidental death of one of his three children (Macaulay Culkin, pre-Home Alone). He also begins seeing inexplicable things (demons, things out of a Lovecraft novel) in broad daylight. Reality appears to be shifting and he's frightened.
Singer has lower back issues, and sees a Chiropractor, Louis Denardo, played by Aiello ("...You look like an angel, Louie," Singer tells him, "Like a big cherub. Anyone ever tell you that?" "Yeah," says Louis. "You; every time you come in here").
At one point in the story, Singer is struck by a car on a New York street. His lower back seizes up, his wallet is stolen by a vagrant Exmass Santa; he's brought to a hospital that becomes progressively more nightmarish, a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
Louis shows up at the hospital ("What is this, the Middle Ages?" he yells at a nurse when he sees Singer in traction in a bed) and forcibly takes him out, back to his chiropractic office. He puts Jacob on his adjustment table and begins working on his back.
Singer tells Louis what he's been seeing, that the hospital was a vision of hell. "Ever read any Meister Eckhard?" Louis asks; Jacob says he hasn't, and Louis is surprised. "How'd you get your Doctorate without reading that guy?
"Eckhard saw hell, too," Louis continues. "Know what he said? He said the only part of you that burns in hell is the part that won't let go of your life. Your memories; your attachments; they burn them all away -- but they're not punishing you, he said; they're freeing your soul.
"So, the way he sees it -- if you're frightened of dying, and you're holding on -- you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace -- then the devils are really angels, freeing you, from the earth. It's just a matter of how you look at it. So, don't worry about it. Okay?"
Now he knows what we do not. It's a decent film. Aiello is good in it. Give it a whirl.
Let me tell you a story. It won't be short -- but it's a good story, and it has a point. You may even Get It before the end.
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In 1994, director John Carpenter releasedIn The Mouth Of Madness, his take on one of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories. Carpenter's career includes films like Carrie, Starman, "Big Trouble In Little China", They Live, "Assault On Precinct 13"; Escape from New York and "-- From L.A.".
Madness was the final film in Carpenter's 'Apocalypse Trilogy' -- The Thing (1982), "Prince Of Darkness" (1987 -- whose posters should state: "This film will not just frighten you; it will fuck you up for life"), and ended with In The Mouth of Madness.
Its script was written by Michael DeLuca (Fright Night; Moneyball; Captain Phillips), and its cinematography by Gary B. Kibbe (Robocop 3; Village of the Damned; Escape From L.A.).
Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 58% rating. In the years since its release, Madness has achieved cult status.
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It's worth an aside to note that almost at the same time as Mouth of Madness' release, a new cable network began broadcasting in the United States. It used the twelve-year-old, Ted Turner / CNN news-as-entertainment model, and also offered coverage of sports, even a new 'cartoon for adults' program on Sunday evenings.
It was the brainchild of an Australian media boss who aggressively managed a fleet of tabloid newspapers on three continents. He claimed the network would be "fair and balanced" in its presentation of news (a swipe at the "liberal bias" of the other networks), and it would be known as Fox News.
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John Trent (Sam Neill) is being transferred into a huge mental asylum outside New York City. He's admitted by a Dr. Sapperstein (John Glover) and struggles with a pair of attendants, shouting "I'm not insane!!" In the background, a radio report of "an epidemic of violent psychotic behavior spreading across the country and indeed the world".
Trent is placed in a padded cell, still wearing a straitjacket, still shouting that he is Sane. As other residents of the ward shout back ("Yeah! I'm not crazy either!"), music begins to play on the PA system: The Carpenters' We've Only Just Begun.
Later the same day, a Dr. Wrenn (David Warner) appears to interview Trent, and may work for the government (Sapperstein says nervously, "It must be getting serious out there, if they're sending you guys in"). Did Trent ask for anything? Wrenn says. Yes -- only a single, black crayon.
Wrenn finds Trent has decorated his cell with thousands of crosses -- drawn on the walls, floor, his institutional jumper, and himself, with the crayon. Telling Trent he "wants to help", Wrenn sits down to listen as Trent begins to tell his story.
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Trent is a Phillip Marlowe style, freelance insurance investigator in New York City -- cynical, watchful; always suspicious. After exposing the victim of a warehouse fire as an arsonist looking for a payout, he lunches with the insurance attorney -- who makes a pitch to assist with another client, a publishing company.
Trent accepts -- just as a bald man with an axe (Conrad Bergschmeider) smashes through a restaurant window and stands over him. "Do you read Sutter Cane?" he asks; looking up at the man's face, Trent can see he has two irises in each eye. The man raises the axe; police appear and shoot him down.
Trent meets the publisher, Jason Harglow (Charlton Heston). His company's multi-mega-hit horror writer, Sutter Cane, has disappeared, and blown a deadline to produce his seventh, final book in a series. No one knows where he is. Near-riots have occurred at bookstores across the country over the delay in publication.
Cane's editor, Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) joins the meeting. His six previous books had sold nearly a billion copies, been translated into eighteen languages. Harglow wants Trent to find Cane and bring the manuscript back; Trent agrees.
Styles tells him there's something different about Cane's writing -- it's "been known to have an effect on less stable readers... disorientation, memory loss, a paranoid reaction...
A year ago, Styles says, Cane's work became erratic -- "More bent, more bizarre than usual. He became convinced his work was real, not fiction." Trent chuckles; This shit really sells? "Are you surprised?"
Trent responds, "Lady, nothing surprises me. We fucked up the air, the water; we fucked up each other -- why don't we finish the job by flushing our brains down the toilet?"
So where is Cane? The manuscript? "I don't know. His agent was the last person to see it." Then let's talk to the agent, Trent says. "You already met him," Styles replies. "He attacked you with an axe."
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Styles convinces Trent to actually read Cane's novels. At a bookstore, Trent sees a man staring at him, whose face seems -- bruised; he's wearing plastic-framed glasses repaired with adhesive tape. "Do you read Sutter Cane?" the man asks Trent, then says, "He sees you."
At home, Trent reads the novels, while a TV commentator asks: "Horror writer Sutter Cane: A harmless pop phenomenon? Or a mad prophet of the printed page?
"... Police believe recent riots started because stores could not meet the demand for advance orders of Sutter Cane's latest novel, 'In The Mouth Of Madness'. When does fiction become religion?"
Trent dozes, dreaming he's walking home, posters advertising Sutter Cane horror novels on nearby walls. He sees a cop in an alley, viciously beating a kid who had been tagging a wall. The cop sees Trent and barks, "You want some too, buddy?"
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Trent realizes each Cane novel has a shape, outlined in red over the cover art. Clipped into puzzle-pieces, they form the shape of New Hampshire -- where Hobb's End, fictitious setting of Cane's novels, is located.
Hobb's End isn't shown on any map of the Live Free Or Die state -- but Trent convinces Harglow and Styles that it may be real, "another vanished town in America". Harglow agrees to allow Trent, and Styles, to travel to New Hampshire, locate the town, the author, and the manuscript.
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Trent again has the dream of the cop, beating the kid in an alleyway -- only now, a crowd of people appears behind Trent, with axes, blocking any escape. At its center is Cane's agent.
"He sees you," the agent says; the crowd hacks him into pieces. The cop stops beating the kid long enough to look at Trent -- his face mottled, diseased, malignant; "You want some too?" he bellows.
... and, Trent wakes up at home, having fallen asleep on his sofa over one of Cane's novels, relieved to find it was just a dream... until he turns to see the diseased cop sitting next to him, and wakes up, again; a dream within a dream.
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Trent and Styles drive on two-lane roads through endless late-Summer cornfields; Trent singing "America The Beautiful". Night falls. Styles tells Trent she's attracted to Cane's fiction because it scares her. And she likes being scared. Trent is amused. "What's to be scared about? It's not like it's real." Styles says:
"It's not real from your point of view -- and right now, reality shares your point of view. Reality is just what we tell each other it is. What scares me about Kane's work is, what happens if reality shared his point of view? ...Sane and insane easily switch places if the insane were to become the majority. You'd find yourself locked in a padded cell, wondering 'What happened to the world?' "
"It wouldn't happen to me," Trent says. "Oh, it would, if you realized everything you knew was gone," said Styles. "That'd be pretty lonely, being the last one left."
After an unsettling encounter with a kid on a bicycle - who becomes an old man on a bike ("I can't get out," he moans. "He won't let me out") - Trent lets Styles drive while he sleeps. On the radio, a talk show host asks, "Doctor, what are you saying? That there's this disease spreading across the country?"
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As Styles drives, the yellow centerline in the road disappears. Below the car, she makes out thick clouds illuminated by lightning -- then, suddenly, she's driving over the road planks of a New England covered bridge and out into late afternoon daylight. A sign nearby announces: Welcome To Hobb's End / The Heart Of New Hampshire / Enjoy Your Stay.
The town has a Pepperidge Farm-style quaintness, but seems completely deserted. Trent and Styles drive to a rustic hotel, which features in Cane's novels, run by a Mrs. Pinkham -- who figured in Cane's novels as an axe murderess. They check in.
Trent keeps looking for the con. If it were a Cane novel, they should see a huge, black church from the hotel ... and they can. They drive there. Trent reads from one of Cane's novels,
" 'This place had been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe... pain and suffering beyond human understanding. ... [inhabited by] a murderous race of creatures whose vile existence contaminated time itself, affecting history..."
Suddenly, cars roar up; a group of men with shotguns climb out -- one demanding Cane release his son from the church. Its doors open to reveal a little boy, then close. When they open again, a man stands just inside -- Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow).
The boy's father comes forward, but the doors bang close. A large pack of Dobermans appear, and attack. Styles and Trent are able to get to their car and flee back to the hotel.
Styles finally admits Trent was being played in a publicity game. "Only, you and I weren't supposed to find Hobb's End, but we didn't stage any of this. It's all in Cane's book. That's how I know it's real."
What's the new book -- 'In The Mouth Of Madness' -- about? Trent asks. "It's about the end, to everything," Styles says. "And it starts here, with an evil that returns and takes over, piece by piece... It's about people turning into creatures that aren't human anymore."
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Styles runs off, taking the car and driving to the church, where she finds Cane typing the last page of manuscript. "It's funny; for years, I thought I was making all this up," he says. "But They were telling me what to write -- giving me the power to make it all real. And now it is. All the Things, trying to break into our world."
Cane holds her head over the title page of the manuscript. "See the instrument of their homecoming -- the new bible -- that starts the change... helps you see..." He slams her head forward; she absorbs the entire book in a few seconds. Her eyes bleed.
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Styles returns to the hotel; Trent can see she's clearly altered -- "I'm losing me!" she shouts. Power in the hotel flickers. Trent is barely able to get to the car; he tries to leave town, but can't. Knocked unconscious, he wakes up in one side of a confessional at the Black Church. On the other side is Sutter Cane. "Want to know the problem with religion?" Cane asks.
"No one's believed enough to make [a new reality] real... My books have sold a billion copies; I've been translated into 18 languages. More people believe in my work than are reading the bible... When people begin to lose the ability to know the difference between fantasy and reality -- then The Old Ones can begin to make the journey back. The more people who believe, the faster the journey."
Cane tells Trent he wants him to deliver the manuscript for "In The Mouth Of Madness" "You take it back to the world," Cane says. "This town wasn't here before I wrote it -- and neither were you. I made all this. I made you. I am god now !" Trent tries to run, chased down a long tunnel by a pack of Old-One monsters...
-- and, Trent suddenly finds himself back in The World, on a gravel road in the middle of somewhere, New Hampshire. He drops the manuscript as if it were a box of plutonium, hitches a ride to a town, takes a motel room.
The next day, an unnamed someone has delivered a package for him. A large envelope. "But nobody knows I'm here," Trent says; the motel clerk smiles. "Well, somebody does." In the envelope is Cane's manuscript. Trent burns it in the bathroom sink of his motel room, a page at a time.
Back in New York, he meets with the publisher, Harglow, and describes everything that had happened to him and Styles over (what to him have been) the previous ten days. Harglow says, "That's a hell of a story" -- But Trent already located Cane and the manuscript, and delivered it -- a month ago. And Linda Styles? "I've never heard of her".
Trent, who knows Cane's novels are altering reality -- that Trent himself may be nothing more than a character in Cane's imagination -- is horrified that Madness has already been published; Harglow shrugs. "The movie comes out next month," he says.
Trent becomes increasingly paranoid. Finally, he appears at a bookstore, where huge lines of customers wait to buy Madness. He's dressed identically to Cane's agent, earlier, and carrying an axe. He asks a man in line, "Do you read Sutter Cane?", kills him with the axe, and is taken into custody.
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In the asylum, Trent has come to the end of his tale. Declared mentally incompetent to stand trial, he's been institutionalized -- "and, it's safer, these days, being in here," Trent tells Dr. Wrenn. "In ten years, maybe less, there will be no people. The human race will just be a bedtime story for their children. Nothing more."
Wrenn walks out of the cell. Dr. Sapperstein asks if he believes what Trent has been saying, and Wrenn slowly walks away without a word.
Conditions in the world outside the asylum begin to break down. Then, some Things begin rampaging through the wards; Trent can't see them clearly, hiding in his locked cell. The next day, his cell door magically opens, and Trent walks away from the asylum and into a world as deserted as Hobb's End had appeared.
A radio in an abandoned ambulance announces: the world appears to have been overrun with monstrous creatures, including mutating humans, and that outbreaks of suicide and mass murder are commonplace. Trent walks into a nearby urban area, sees a theatre showing the film version of Cane's novel -- the marquee mentions him, specifically, by name -- and goes inside.
Trent finds a seat in the empty theatre, carrying a super-sized tub of popcorn. The movie is precisely the film that we've all been watching, so far, and Trent begins laughing hysterically. He has ended up exactly as Styles had said ("That'd be pretty lonely, being the last one left").
Trent starts laughing as he watches himself self on screen, insisting he isn't a puppet, and that reality is concrete, knowable; the Truth. But Cane's version was believed by enough people to make Styles' description come true -- "Reality is just what we tell each other it is." There is no concrete truth; everything can be altered, with enough collective belief.
Cane allowed The Old Ones to break through into this dimension and destroy it, just for the pure gibbering delight of destruction. Was Trent ever an actual person, or just a character in Cane's novel? What is real? As the end of humankind sinks in, all Trent can do is laugh.
The central plot of In The Mouth Of Madness is the social construction of reality -- what we collectively agree is real -- and Magical Thinking: if enough people surrender to a belief in artifice and fantasy, can unbelievable things be made concrete and real, just from a sheer act of will?
What the film does not do is show what happens when that kind of magical thinking is translated -- from the personal to the societal and political.
(This, from December 20, 2011, almost a decade ago. These were the Things happening, five years before the rise of the waddling, lying grifter.
(How far you feel we have moved on as a society from the issues reported in 2011 is subjective. But it is the anniversary of the assumption of the waddling liar's unrequited love, Kim Jong Jong-Jong.)
This Chart Answers The Musical Question, "What Percentage Of All U.S. Corporate Profits Is Generated By The Financial Sector?" Answer? "Their Satanic Majesties Request", Or 26%.
...And This One Tracks Financial 'Industry' Profit As Percentage Of Overall GDP. (Source: Arbor Research, via Big Picture) Tonight at sundown (aside from its being the second night of Hanukkah), the Winter Solstice will begin. This is physically the longest night of the solar year, the Nadir, the lowest point in a cycle of one orbit of the planet around the sun. As a result, you'd expect the kind of mutant freakshow we're seeing these days.
Republicans Continue Countdown To Self-Detonation: Bob Schaeffer, CBS News Washington correspondent since the Late Cretaceous Period, noted in last night's CBS Evening News that the current (i.e., most recent) impasse in Congress is a result of "both sides trying to undermine each other". On the BBC's American version of the evening news, Clinton-era Labor Secretary Robert Reich (and former BFF prior associate of Citicorp) commented in a segment on the effect to those living on unemployment of having benefits suddenly removed or slashed, "I try hard not to be partisan, but the Republican party seems to be the one" creating the current deadlock. Some Left Blogistan sites (e.g., TPM) report that, as a result of the refusal of the Rethug-dominated House to pass a Senate bill that would extend (by two months) both a Social Security payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits, President Obama's job approval ratings have become more positive. TPM reported 46.6% Approval vs. 48% Disapproval -- "There’s now a lot of evidence that the President’s approval numbers are rising after bottoming out at the end of the summer after the debt deal debacle," Josh Marshall wrote. "But they’re rising toward an almost total polarization.
"50% for, 50% against. Very little middle ground."
Your New Stratoliner: The One Per Cent, And Their Hats One interesting note: Little Rupert's Wall Street Journal, the "Tits 'n Tattle" scandal sheet of Rupert's empire for the financial class, ran an editorial criticizing Republicans for blocking the two-month extension in the House -- and mostly criticizing it as a poor tactic, rather than for the effect it would have on taxpayers and unemployed Americans. Heaven forbid that Little Rupert or Fat Roger would give a damn about the people they treat with such barely-disguised contempt. Rupert, that crafty ol' Aussie, is sending America's Rightist politicians a message: I Am Not Amused. Get Your Shit Together.
But as much as he criticizes them, he has to support the Rethugs, and his NewsCorp will have to get behind whichever candidate, drooling, brain-dead and barking, it hoists for president in 2012. So, whatever scribbles are published on the editorial page of the WSJ tabloid don't really matter. Little Rupert is as much a hostage of a self-destructing political party as the Rethugs are hostage to their addictive love for Little Rupert's propaganda.
MEHR: Not that long ago, the House Minority Whip, Stenny Hoyer walked to the floor of the House Of Representatives, and asked the Speaker Pro Temp, Michael Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania (standing in for President Boner), to grant "unanimous consent" for an up-or-down vote on the Senate bill the Rethugs deep-sixed yesterday. House Republicans on the Hill were with Speaker Boner at a photo-op. Meanwhile, as Hoyer made his request to the Speaker's chair on the House floor, Fitzpatrick simply ignored Hoyer and walked away... all broadcast on CSPAN. "As you walk off the floor, Mr. Speaker," Hoyer said to Fitzgerald's back, "You’re walking away, just as so many Republicans have walked away from middle-class tax payers, the unemployed, and very frankly as well from those who will be seeking medical assistance from their doctors — 48 million senior citizens.” In and of itself, business as usual in the United States Congress. But, providing the Democratic party with a telling image of Rethugs who don't give two hoots about The People, and which can be rebroadcast over and over and over? Priceless.
Global Banking Structure Aims Free Money Nozzle At European Banks: The European Central Bank has loaned a massive 489 billion Euros ($639 billion US) to over five hundred European banks, at one per cent interest, for what the War Criminal Post reported as "an exceptionally long period of three years" in the ongoing attempt to keep the EU from dissolving into a bad fusion between "Apocalypse Now" and "Mr. Hulot Opens A Hedge Fund". It was the biggest infusion of credit by the European Central Bank in the 13-year history of the Euro; in a response I think is best termed 'irrational exuberance', the DJIA rose over 330 points. The ECB's move allows its client banks to borrow money, essentially, for free: 1 Billion Euros borrowed can become loans, and any interest charged on those loans above one per cent is pure profit. The problem is, these loans will act as life support for some financial players whose books are sagging with toxic debts that these ECB credit lines can't repair; the amounts of debt are too huge. It's just another means of postponing the Day O' Reckoning, kicking the can down a road paved with good intentions. But, hey; Little Angela's happy. So, s'all good. Right?
Rethugs Say, VOTE FOR PLAYER TO BE NAMED LATER! Replicating the internal epic battles within the Rethug, Red-State World (something like Rodan vs. Monster Zero), it appears that Thugs will nominate MitzyPerryGrand TurtleBearRu PaulMitzyRandymanPerryRu Paul "Somebody Else" as their candidate for president in 2012. No kidding; a poll recently reported by CBS showed Republicans pretty evenly split between three potential candidates, so far: Romney and Gingrich, and "Somebody Else". It's a ringing, star-spangled endorsement of -- well, somebody. A write-in candidate who embodies true, conservative principles, like Lil' Bernie Madoff, or William Stafford, or the Zombified Ronald Wilson Rayguns-ah. The ever-tasteful Alicublog reports that the Special Bus Kidz at RedState are enthusiastically arguing in favor of... a Rick Perry candidacy.
Fellas, there's probably a robot somewhere that would govern in the most consistently conservative fashion -- it wouldn't be hard to program; just get it to yell "More tax breaks for the wealthy!" and "I hates me a faggot!" at intervals, and to fart loudly when France or higher education is mentioned -- but it doesn't mean anything unless you can get people to vote for it.
...Perry makes George W. Bush look like Pericles. Nobody, but nobody, is praying, "Oh Lord, send us someone just like George W. Bush, only stupider." Just the other day... Perry misread Kim Jong Il as "Kim Jong the Second". That's like something out of a Cheech and Chong movie. Most observers... have moved on to wondering if Perry can tie a shoelace without coaching.
I enjoy flailing, particularly when it reinforces stereotypes I have of conservatives as retrograde, Troglodyte morons, beating each other bloody with Wal-Mart shopping bags filled with The Collected Works Of Ronald Rayguns: "They fought so fiercely because the stakes were so small". Keep it up!
Tubby Twentysomething Becomes New Leader Of Starving, Heavily Armed North Korea: A few days ago, this short, pudgy guy with weird hair and glasses died -- some say on a train: Kim Jong Il, ruler of the upper half of the Korean peninsula and a leader of a totalitarian, repressive state... and was reportedly someone who loved dogs and western porn, and really in his heart was kinda, sort of, a good guy. "The Kim Nobody Knew". His twenty-something son, Kim Jong Fat Boy, short, pudgy, with a very bad haircut who reportedly likes dogs, food and western porn, and in his heart is kind of a good guy, replaced him.
The CIA apparently had no idea that Kim Jong 2 had passed away until it was announced by North Korea's official media (there is no other kind). There immediately commenced massive (and in the last Stalinst, cult-of-personality culture on the planet, we mean massive) shows of public grieving. Thousands gathered publicly to cry and cry and rend their hair and fall weeping on the pavement, each attempting to outdo everyone else to show how sad they are that a totalitarian freak, who wore shoes with three-inch lifts and created policies resulting in starvation of his people and nuclear weapons, was dead. Kim Jong Well went to see his father lying in state, bowed without much expression, then reportedly went for pizza and some XBox action.
There's one other thing about The Winter solstice to keep in mind. This is the last of the old solar year, the bottom of the wheel, the Appogeian, farthest point out in Earth's orbital motion. The planetary pole is tilted back; this is the longest period of darkness in a full turn around the sun.
And from midnight tonight, the Days will become incrementally longer, the nights shorter. From this long night we will all enter what I like to think of as The Season Of Rising Light -- from one point of view, the darkness being reduced a degree at a time, each day forward, until the top of the wheel, the Apex, next June. And while waiting for someone to start singing "Here Comes The Sun", in the meantime, we'll still have the unfolding, everlasting clown show to watch.
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