INTERNAL POLITICS

Being shamed for having a naturally unclothed body with its too free flowing functions communicated by affections withheld by parents raised the same way, a child’s earliest abstractions would seem to be, “I must learn to be other than I am to be loved.” The lie of original sin that we are innately flawed was originated by the same agent that claims to be able to represent us more perfectly to the creator of our imperfection for the fee of our faith in the infallibility of the church, no samples available. And we send children out to seek a role to play in whatever fairy tale we tell them life is.

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P. T. Barnum never dreamt of the extent to which his observation on the constant supply of suckers would be taken by the ringleaders of the Greatest Bank On Earth as we gobble up the cotton candy whipped up in the D.C. side show of plausible deniability spin doctors and fiat monopoly money to mindlessly follow the Madison Avenue barkers’ mythical shills, the Joneses, to eagerly pay and be counted by the Wall Street ticker tape ticket takers on our way to yet another more vicarious, vacuously artificial freak show distracting us from the covert agenda and the overt banality of life in the ovine option. Awaken o ye gullible big city yokels, look about you and see that the truest thing beneath this big top is a pile of elephant shit being danced in by a mule — the rest is a sham we promised not to mention in front of the children we remain.

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The haves and the have nots depend on each other to define themselves and thereby weave the very fabric of our culture. Wealth, the word, is like a pure note when sounded alone and able to evoke unique thoughts and feelings when combined with other notes like money, or talent, or beauty, or wisdom. or strength, or power, or fame, or luck, or ability, or health, or friends, or happiness to begin different songs sung and heard differently by the ears of those who consider them selves and others as the haves or have nots. The warp, the woofer and the tweeter — the cacophony of society that weaves its cover story.

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The stage upon which such sound and fury ensues is inhabited by such players parading in costumes by the emperor’s clothier for today’s performance of “The Real World”, which society insists it is. To realize it for a play, yet remain as audience, to watch a dog fetch its leash believing he is a man tying his own tie, one must play their chosen part well enough to avoid detection by the director and unwillingly being drafted into the role of heretic, criminal or lunatic. The alternative is to leave the theater. There’s a catch there too. Any affordable land away from the stage is already chopped up into predigestable chunks for the precongested maw of the urban sprawl spread to the wilderness every day by well meaning nature lovers with their cultural contagion of convenience following right along. Twenty-five years ago Oregon declared all its cities’ limits to be quarantine lines with an insight and decisiveness quite rare in the politics of the USA.

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Happiness comes from within our deepest nature. Believing happiness must be sought in approval is the lock stitch of self denial whose weave makes the artificiality of civilization seem so natural, necessary, seamless, safe and unsatisfying. Taking children over from their parents the larger shame of not knowing enough outside the house is then imprinted on the developing minds by their teachers. Education is primary, inevitable and designed to produce obedient producers who can color inside the lines. It would almost seem that subjugation to the machinations of civilization must be experienced for the texture of the extremes between internal happiness and external anxiety to become sufficiently exotic and chaotic to pierce our personal defensive shell and evoke recognition of our subtler, happier inner nature so long buried. A baby neither knows how happy it is or how it is happy. Happiness is expressible only in preverbal terms, words necessarily evoke the dualism of relief from misery. Self-realized survivors of the “real world” play, by realizing this indefinable quality of pure happiness, are free to tune in to the song life sings around them with no sense of otherness or lack, no need for words or rules or roles.