THE REAL WAR

All the different reasons we declare war against one another, whether they’re as small as feuds between personalities or as great as ideological confrontations of corporations enlisting half the world‘s population in a war against the other half, are all mere skirmishes within the ranks of our corporatized civilization’s war machine set on establishing dominance over the nature of the universe as it manifests here on Orth within and without we Orthlings' hides.

Being cells in the body of the living planet, the upright Orthlings’ aggressive antagonism toward and ignorance of the well being upon which our own health depends is as though one’s left thumb nail set about converting the rest of the body into toughened keratin to set things to rights for its own good.

In the spectrum of Orthlings’ reality tunnels from scientific atheists to religious zealots there rarely arises anyone arguing against the so obvious sawing off of the limb from the tree of life whereupon we all perch oh, so precariously.

The method employed by the inciters and maintainers of our civilization’s war against nature may seem more familiar in a much more recent series of events, still being played out, that went into overt motion within the memory of anyone older than four orbits of Orth around Ra, to wit:

Needing a cheaper source of energy to enable its agenda to own lead all of Orth in the future, the corporation, Usuki Inc., made the decision to covertly provoke a war against the weakest of the planet’s energy rich corporations. It sacrificed three thousand of its own employees to rouse the remaining three hundred million to revenge. While the terror reigned, the flames enraged and the dust to which the Temple of Gold had been reduced was still settling, corporate security, in the first competent action since allegedly being caught off guard with forbidden airspace penetration by remote controlled drones terrorist hijacked ornithopters crashing into the temple twenty four minimims earlier, found the identification cards for all of the terrorists amongst the powdered rubble of stone, office equipment and three thousand Orthlings — the only things left in tact. And surprise of surprises — they all happened to be from the alliance of corporations with just the energy resource Usuki Inc. needed.

The stooge Usuki Inc. hired to be its political branch CEO lumped scattered, independent dissident groups together by his declaration of a war of retribution against All Kinda terrorists, to define the enemy and of the battle weary corporate grounds of Aghastfistan to be the beleaguered arena for their strategic war.

For protection of their own employees from the same torture they wreaked upon the enemy, their lawyers defined Usuki’s mercenaries to be “legal combatants” in a war of retribution, occupation and usurpation against any Aghastfistanis who objected, defined by the lawyers as “illegal combatants.” As impossible to justify as the war is, none of the corporations that suck up to Usuki have sucked up their guts and objected, lest they be declared “All Kinda” terrorists as well. And thus the demonization of employees of enemy corporations was successfully inserted into the mythology of Usuki’s employees’ belief system.

The much earlier example of this stragedy scenario was enacted soon after the dawn of the upright Orthlings by an embryonic corporation in the form of totalitarian agriculture needing to morally justify wholesale annihilation of vast areas of naturally evolved life forms. To get relatively symbiotic hunter-gatherer-gardener culture to accept such apparent desecration of their environment a two part fable was forged into their mythology. The first was that all of the nature with which the Orthlings had thrived by communing was a creation of an omniscient being who granted ownership to his exceptional creations, the upright Orthlings. The second part depended on this exceptional superiority to justify the demonization of the traditionally revered spirits of nature by morally prohibiting their sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. It was just such evil spirits they were to blame for the instinctual sense of evil they felt when felling a forest for a freshly furrowed field.

All the violence within the ranks any of the corporate civilizations set on owning and exploiting the nature of Orth is the karmic result of individual’s deeply intuitive acknowledgement that they are contributing to a war against universally inexorable natural forces which thwart their warp at every twist in the path to extinction. It is not really a war when the deaths at the hands of the aggressors encourage once innocent collateral damage to rise up against them whether it is other Orthlings or the entire body of Orth.

NUMBERS NATURE TAUGHT US

In the midst of writing my next post, The Real War, My dear friend Amber emailed me this beautiful video. It is particularly poignant right now because of a confrontation I've had with an earnest socialist who reminds me of the adage, "The surest sign of an impending nervous breakdown is believing what you are doing is supremely important."

In answer to my visits to his blog I have gotten replies like, "There are a million blogs out there all about butterflies and silky clouds. This one is about what needs to get done but isn't.” and "Maybe you should write a poem about it and send it to the Universe." And on a visit to this blog commented, " opting out. SELF sufficient, the privilege of distance, so that one may critique free from risk or consequence. Unless the very radiance of ones enlightenment somehow enters the universal stream and bestows a bit of glow on everyone?"

Well Troutsky, here's one of the million blogs who appreciate nature for what it has always been without needing to get anything done about it.

WORK

It begins at childbirth. Labor pains. It will always be a laborious process, but whether it is painful has much to do with the variety of creature giving birth. In all of nature, one species has evolved a physical characteristic that pretty much ensures its birth will involve the excruciating pain of passing its cranium through its mothers birth canal.

The surest sign that civilization has become part of human evolution is the unusually large brain to body ratio and its effect on our pain to pleasure ratio. Civilization is so counter to the natural course of life on earth that humans have evolved an over sized organ to keep track of the arbitrary vagaries of civilization’s regulations imposed on the behavior of otherwise natural creatures.

My favorite metaphor for this phenomenon is that of a morbidly obese businessman on vacation, mounted upon a scrawny, wise burro assigned him at the Rubber Rose Dude Ranch, reading from his traveler’s guide he pontificates upon the beauties and developmental possibilities of wherever the steed takes him. When he returns from his ride he must refer to the travel guide to recall his adventure to others, while the burro knows every evolving inch of the same territory by heart.

The Cajun comedian, Justin Wilson, tells a similar tale of a young barefoot boy walking along a two rut road in the swampland of Louisiana overtaken by a Cadillac driving, ten gallon hat wearing, cigar smoking, diamond ring wearing big shot who demands, “Hey, boy. Where’s the Post Office?”

“I don’t know.” replies the lad.

“Where’s the County Courthouse?”

"I don’t know.”

“Where’s the highway to get me out of this God forsaken hell hole?”

"I don’t know.”

“You don’t know shit, do you, boy.”

“I know I ain’t lost.”

In both instances the appropriately named, over-sized modern brain assigns its own values and priorities to an environment that the lean, essential primitive brain understands with the genetically evolved, intuitive understanding of millions of years hanging out on the planet.

Only humans make a job of getting from womb to tomb. The rest of the natural world follows the path of least resistance. Engineers know that work is measured in units of energy spent in overcoming resistance by the nature of the universe. Conquering, containing, exploiting and mutating the nature of individual humans and the environment in general is the proud purpose of civilization’s mission, ostensibly assigned it by the creator of it all. With the exception of the minuscule portion of mankind that remains naturally indigenous, the natural evolution of man has been arrested by belief that he is an exception to the laws of nature granted by an imaginary inventor of it all. Authorities, pushing man’s laws on every newborn, promise that living outside its protection is to risk annihilation by a wilderness whose savagery can only be described in terms of the atrocities man has perpetually perpetrated in the name of his self righteous exceptionality.

The foregoing is to give some depth to my chuckle at the comment on my previous post, Does Not Work Well with Others, offered by one whose life is dedicated to making man’s laws to his own liking, to wit, “… opting out. SELF sufficient, the privilege of distance, so that one may critique free from risk or consequence.” And later on his blog, "…kindly fuck off and crawl back into your hole...or get off the fucking fence you fucking pussy and get into the fight!"

Such a staunch upholder of civilization knows intuitively that the real danger in life is found within the fight to make civilization as convenient to human exceptionality as nature is to the rest of life on Earth.

It is a wry chuckle, I’ll admit.

•

I realize that this post is in violation of my vow to post only fiction on this blog, but I figure that since civilization is the epitome of an ongoing revision of a fiction, perpetuated by those with faith in it and by the faithless unable to envision doing more than going along to get along in the anonymity of mobs relying on quantity over quality, it was within fiction’s purview.

DOES NOT WORK WELL WITH OTHERS

It was the verdict of a two-day battery of psychological tests given him to judge his fitness to work for the earth moving machinery manufacturer known as Caterpillar. In his last semester, with nothing but liberal arts electives on his class schedule, Russ indulged himself in the perks being showered upon graduating electromechanical engineers in the age of the punch card Fortran computer industry’s embryonic stirrings before Silicon Valley was a sparkle in Douglas Englebart’s eye. Trip to Pratt & Whitney in Florida, to Boeing in Seattle, ah yes, this was what it was all about.

He had snorted at the verdict with the understanding that his four-year stint in the Marines before college were experiential evidence that he could work well with others under the direst of circumstances. He’d hated the whole enlistment for the blatant bullying psychology boot camp employed in shaping the minds of killing machines and so spent the rest of his stint observing the culture maintained within the indoctrinated mindset of such unquestioning patriotism. He took the best offer from the best company and entered the private sector as an acquisitive yuppie apolitically against the Viet Nam War.

Several years later, when his eldest entered school he began to recognize a parallel indoctrination in public education as he watched her, and recalled himself, dumbing down her beautiful natural curiosity to satisfy the demands of obedience to the certitude of authority in their idea of what constitutes correct answers to twelve years of probationary examination. The difference between the purpose of the simple military, “my country right or wrong” ethic and the “my truth right or wrong” being pushed by the public education system was one of magnitude not only in scope, but in inscrutability.

The military shouldn’t question orders or they might hesitate fatally and become wasted fodder — at least that’s the modern justification for the withdrawal of direct human participation in the slaughter of humans by the use of drones as we, the “legal combatants,” methodically rub out beings we deem “illegal combatants,” along with the smudge of acceptable collateral annihilation of the civilian population amongst whom they live cravenly hide.

Citizens shouldn’t question authority or they might — what — think for themselves — become an enemy of the state — become unexploitable — invulnerable to usery? The National Security Agency protects the authority of the government by hiding its ways, means and purposes from the very people being manipulated into sycophantic obedience while claiming the secrets are kept from the always potentially envious enemy jealous of our superior standard of living. He could only conclude that they consider citizens to be a likely enemy; if they knew. He never liked secrets.

The correlation of these two parallel Pavlovian processes piqued his curiosity about the human vulnerability to considering information transmitted by words as more valid in describing experience than one’s own information transmitted by bodily sensations. To vanquish all foes was the purpose of the military’s mindless obedience, but what was the purpose the military enforces and protects so mindlessly — against what?

Such ponderings lead him to a conversation with a gorilla named Ishmael who asked him to find the myth of his culture. How had man felt justified in departing from the relatively symbiotic ways of the hunter-gatherer to begin disrespectfully wiping out all local lifeforms to establish agriculture and the ensuing urban aggregation around the food getting places?

He felt like a cicada molting in the spring as he slowly detected the cicatrix of a shell within which he’d lived his entire life. The discovery reawakened observations of the natural world he’d long denied for their stark contrast to the cultural norm of going along to get along. The expansion of his vision formed cracks in the wall of the invisible prison the myth of western civilization is. The husk hangs clinging to his memory of civilization while he carefully extracts his natural genetic memory from the muffled existence it had survived.

He found that, ultimately, he did not work well with others and Caterpillar’s psychological testing was spot on; he would have eventually ceased cooperating with the purpose of an earth moving equipment manufacturer, just as he has the purpose of the earth owning corporation known as western civilization, US branch office.

SHOT IN THE DARK

He died of lead poisoning. He was an avid hunter. He died with his faithful black Labrador, Fetch, at his bedside. No one ever expected to see Gus “Butch” Wayhemming leave this life in anything less violent than combat, capture or taming of some species of animal much larger or wild than himself.

Butch was famous world wide for his daring-do, whether it was wrestling gnu-swallowing crocodiles, hog tying a two ton water buffalo whose heart he cut out and took a bite of while it was still beating, milking the venom from an Anaconda he’d bred from Anaconda and Black Momba parents just to up the hazard of the feat, bagging and stuffing the last remaining mating pairs of fifteen endangered species, or the world’s largest collection of mounted heads in his huge trophy room including three women from PETA. He’d climbed Everest naked, swum the English Channel towing the boat carrying the press, flown over the Sahara desert in a pedal powered flying craft and defeated the Greenbay Packers by himself wearing only a jock strap. There was nothing he couldn’t have accomplished — if he’d conquered death.

His best friend, doctor, masseuse, tattoo artist and publicist, “Smiling” Jack Kelly, was the only person who knew the cause of his death. Although the lead poisoning was public knowledge, no one knew the source beyond the rumor Jack allowed to circulate of his biting the casings off depleted uranium ammunition because that’s what Butch and his vicarious fans would have preferred than the ignominious truth of the matter. Fetch knew too.

He’d retrieved the mallard Butch shot during his daily wake up routine, right after repelling down from his cliffside sleeping sling and just before his ten mile jaunt over the glacier. At the end of that fateful day, Butch was so ravenous he tore into his evening meal with an abandon that ignored the swallowing of a few pellets embedded in the poor duck’s thigh muscles. So stuffed was his esophagus that the pellets reembedded themselves in his flesh.

Yes, Smiling Jack was the only one who knew that Gus, “Butch” Wayhemming was brought down by his own shot in the dark meat of a harmless duck.

CORRUPTION OF EVIDENCE

They found the file on a CD hidden between pages of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass after ransacking his apartment searching for anything they could use to “put this guy away for good.”

It was juicy enough to get him several life sentences without using any other evidence against him. Emails back and forth with Bin Laundri himself, proof of connections they’d considered inventing just to make their case against the terrorists; it was all there. The only ones disappointed were the ones who wouldn’t be needed for torturing him or for computer graphic diagrammatic "proof" of weapons of mass destruction. Yusef ben Haden was the guy who would prove once and for all that the millions killed on and since 7/11/2407 were not victims of a megalomaniacal administration of profit driven war criminals.

The trial was in the highest courtroom in the land with global television coverage. It was Amiracle’s day to shine as the justifiable protector of planetary virtue once again.

When the head prosecutor handed the CD to the court clerk Yusef’s defense lawyer said, “Your honor, if it please the court, I would like to present my client’s confession as to the evidence you are about to witness as a preliminary to such a hearing.”

“I object, your honor. It is out of order and may prejudice the jury.”

“He’s confessing!”

After another half hour of trying to show how his eagerness to show the evidence was ignoring any help a cofession might present for his prosecution, the prosecutor relented and the judge said, “With no further objections from the prosecution, I’ll allow it.”

Sworn in, Yusef began, “My name is Herman Freeborne and I am a patriot who believes he must sometimes defend his country against its government. Rather than the sacrifice of innocent lives such evidence as is contained on this CD could cause in a civil war, I reasoned that if irrefutable evidence of criminal activity were exposed to the world in the highest court in the land justice could not fail to be done in a civilization for which our constitution is intended to stand.”

“The way I have accomplished that goal is to bait the criminals with juicy red meat they could feed the beast they’re breeding for endless wars. The red meat has razors in it. The evidence the prosecution brings before this court is Trojan horsemeat, your honor. All pleasing to the administration on the outside with the evidence I intended to get admitted to this court encrypted within the evidence they imagined existed and I invented just to get it this far.”

“It can be shown that the evidence I bring, when deciphered will begin uploading files for printout from all over the world collated in a coherent trail of massive use of our citizenry as fodder for the military-industrial complex’s colonization by occupation of the entire world for the purposes of owning the natural, commodifiable resources including the indigenous populations.”

“As a backup on what I have just said, the process I described began the moment the clerk received the CD and according to my iPhone is complete along with a time record of how many of the source sites for my evidence began trying to disconnect from the internet once I announced my purpose here. They were all too late, but if you’ll check the evidence to those particular sites, I think you’ll find them the more damning the higher up the chain of command they go.”

And everyone lived happily ever after, except the ones who weren’t needed for lying or torturing.

ODE TO MORDICAI JONES

“Taught me erythin’ I know ‘bout gettin’ rich.”

When Eflim waxed nostalgic about the role model he took from George C. Scott’s character in a movie about the sporting life to be had on the fringes of society, his eyes glazed over as they gazed off at the castles in the sky he’d learned to construct for his marks.

He’d always considered himself a mere humble practitioner of the snake oil arts, like any number of salesmen, lawyers and politicians, until he watched a breakthrough television dramatization of a character he took to be his new role model, a serial killer who restricted his victims to serial killers by circumventing any restrictions on their legal pursuit, capture, trial and execution by the police force for which his overt occupation is a blood spatter analyst. Imagine that.

He changed his name from Tolliver Dolittle to Eflim Flame, charged a new suit to the credit card of someone who’d never notice anything larger than $10K on her statements and began making a priority list of the most destructive liars on the planet upon whom to wreak his dastardly deeds. His research quickly uncovered the prior existence of an organization of people with the same idea who had already begun perverting carefully orchestrated public relation lies to publicize the truth intended to be hidden. They call themselves the Yesmen. He joined them.

Ridicule can shake mountains built by confidence men. Like earthquake victims learn, it is not the quake that kills it is the castles one builds in the sky that crumble when faith in liars is shaken. Without liars, would faith ever be a requirement for anything?

These days Eflim is retired from dealing with anything that can be lied about. What lies can you tell a chicken to get more eggs or a garden to get juicier tomatoes or a friend to gain more love for who you actually are?

•

This thinly veiled fiction employed the literary style I found used extensively by Stephen King, which is to reference previous dramatizations rather than indulge in the descriptive creativity of one’s own, which I find for the purposes of blogging suits the goal of keeping it short. At the same time I realize I have lost people unfamiliar with my references just as Stephen loses me referencing scenes from movies I haven’t seen. It’s the compromise of using pop jargon to express classic problems just to get the most pop oriented out of the rat race long enough to think about more than the next hustle.

DOORS OF PERCEPTION UNHINGED

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there. -Eric Hoffer

Based on the notion that displeasure with the happenings of the present is the basic motivation for action to “do something about” whatever changed us from being happy to experience life just as it is, I began breaking down the kinds of sensations that discomfit me in an attempt to analyze the difference between cultural and genetically inherited preferences.

Genetically resisted sensations are those signaling threats to one’s existence by triggering some variation of fight or flight reaction, the most immediate means of survival in nature. Within the only culture I have experienced, this basic survival instinct has been conscripted into the service of a basic status achievement instinct where it is no longer enough of a gift, much less necessary, to be conscious of existence and the ways of nature; where who and what the world perceives one to be describe the entity upon whose survival, nay, thrival such purpose oriented instincts focus, reducing the reality of one’s being to a totally dependent sycophant to their own reputation’s facade.

Herein lies the madness driving western civilization. Much collateral damage

Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like. Will Rogers

I was in the midst of a post to my other blog when AWAD sent be the Hoffer quote for today. Having just typed “Heren lies the madness…” I was persuaded by the synchronicity to justify posting it here as comments on the observations of others.

REFLECTIONS ON "THE FAR QUEUE"

I have long been a fan of Pisces Iscariot's Far Queue and now find myself in somewhat more than agreement with his perspective of the human condition in that my evolving approach to expressing my thoughts has taken on a preference for the cushion of fiction, or better yet, the expressions of others' perceptions to illustrate my own, as my last couple of posts have.

This time he has simply posted a Matt Groening "Life in Hell" cartoon that evoked this comment,

No one escapes childhood unbroken, either by being made part of the culture or by becoming obsessed with the system by revolting against it — never examining the myth which makes it appear necessary. It takes a rediscovery of our preexisting connectedness as parts of one nature at birth to discover the myth behind our cultural filter on reality, "family" values and assumed ownership granted by a creator.

As stated earlier, this blog will be devoted to fiction and quotes. For more direct discussions of the human condition I have begun a new blog, Dualitytilaud, for those who can discuss the myth curiously rather than in offended defense and the threshold without choosing sides for winning.