PICKPOCKET

Never having been filthy rich, I was a fool to suppose I knew how the excessively wealthy regarded their excesses. How was I to know that beyond a certain point acquisitiveness saturates the very purpose of living, like alcohol saturates the cells of the liver, in an accumulating toxic cocktail of fear of inadequacy to both fulfill the promised expectations such wealth engenders in competitors, investors and sycophants and protect it from a public suspected of being as unscrupulously greedy as was required for such an accumulation.

I figured that since losing a fin out a wad of bills totaling around a hundred bucks was no big whoops to me, this guy would never miss a million out of his hundred billion. What I didn’t realize was that no one gave a shit about my measly fiver while his every penny had a hundred million dollars invested in a security system and a staff of bean counters, plus millions of anxious stockholders, tax collectors and relatives checking up on their share.

Little did I know how he shuddered off the ghostly chill of envy he experienced when he passed the homeless one-legged vet panhandling at the corner of his downtown Dallas branch office building this very morning. I should have known how mean great riches had made him when I saw him stumble over the man’s only foot in his attempt to ignore his existence and give him only a dirty look as its acknowledgement.

I realized at that moment how this mutated human being had built his ridiculous personal wealth by owning the mercenary corporations' looting public funds in payment for worse than inadequate support of the fodder being made of the nation’s poor in a war of yet more acquisition. The look in this man’s eyes was the look in Humphrey Bogart’s eyes upon discovering leeches on his body in African Queen and I knew — it wasn’t the leeches that wanted some of his financially spun cotton candy wealth he so much feared, it was the ironic leeches on his ability to achieve the happiness for which such acquisition was reputed among slobs like me to be the reward. He acknowledged with his resentment that I was happier than he.

My old gal, Mabe, slapped him back to reality with, “There he goes folks. The richest man in the world kicks a fellow human being like wasn’t one his own self, but I can see his shriveled dick right through that fine three piece, pin striped suit of emperor’s clothes.”

The crowd at the bus stop and for half a block around turned their focus on the kingpin. So discombobulated by interacting with the unvarnished truth available only outside his many sycophant filled ivory towers was he that he reached in his pocket for the bills he’d just withdrawn to pay the new girl to say she understands his torment convincingly enough to give him an erection and slammed them down in my hat.

“Dinner on me and Mabe! All month.”

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: PICKLED BRAIN

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

—Volaire

Someone challenged my perception of the invisible prison within which western civilization lives by saying, “The whole thing is in your mind.”

I could only reply, "That’s the difference between you and me: it’s in my mind, so I can think about it while it is your mind and you can’t.”

Recipe for Pickled Brain — or — Thinking About What We Think With

Test for Ripeness:

1) Can answer all questions likely to be asked within 40 miles of home.

2) Hasn’t asked a question arising from curiosity for the last five years.

3) Takes authority to represent truth from pulpit, podium or plutocrat.

4) Never read a book voluntarily.

Preparation for Pickling:

1) Sever nerve paths capable of reporting unique experiences to conserve the energy normally required to ignore such messages for use in healing injuries caused by the same mistakes endlessly repeated.

2) Surround organ with an environment about which certainty is impenetrably dense.

3) Fill container with a fluid mixture of faith, trust, hope, belief and wishful thinking as a cushion against any latent instinctual resistance to the container.

4) Put on a shelf to ferment for the rest of life in isolation, within warehouses full of mindless millions pickling in their juices in the invisible prison.

Serving Instructions:

1) After aging long enough for all the heresy and doubt to be leeched, the once clear cushioning fluid will gel and turn as opaque as a proven fact. It is nowready to serve reliably.

2) Care must be taken to release the gas pressure of desiccated curiosity extracted in the fermentation process before handling individual brains.

3) Served individually they are digestible as paper pushers, bean counters, assembly lines and lifetime retail clerks. Not recommended for dealing with the vagaries of nature.

4) Served in mindless masses they delight the palate of the democratic process, tax base, demographic retail, preemptive war fodder, righteousness of the mostest and other forms of mob rule by deception of the willingly ignorant.

•

I always wondered how the active verb, “ignore,” lost all sense of personal responsibilitly when the adverb form “ignorant” was applied while “unaware” serves a more precise definition of the condition of not knowing. Ignorant always carries the major context of having willingly and knowingly ignored that of which they are ignorant and their situation is self induced.

•

A sure sign one is outside the invisible prison is inquiries begin searching for something truer than the answers that form the prison walls. Certainty is the border patrol around comfort zone zapping any illegal curiosity. Labels conclude the curiosity of the taught and are springboards into the unknown for those actually learning.

•

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
—Leo Tolstoy

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.

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.

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.

BELONGING

Lately I’m prone to be longing

To write of how belonging

Means I’m at home in my body

Wherever it happens to be.

It can’t have been long

Since I longed

To be needed

To feel such belonging;

To share myself undaunted,

‘Til what was wanted

Turned out never to be

Anything belonging to me.

Then I’d drool like those fool dogs

At the knell of school bells

Once the idea was seeded

That the only thing that I needed

To look like black ink’s in my logs.

The habit was strong

To sell my myself to belong

To the things I could own,

Just to belong with folks

What says they likes ‘em.

And then there are unexpected gifts;

Of unearned adulation or derisions

Offering bridges across their divisions

Or driving wedges by reading me wrong.

Belonging to me,

It has come to me

To not play that game

Of owning their name

By seeing their “Foe” is faux blame

For misery that needs my company.

Belonging to me, I can see

My wealth requires no ledger

For those belongings I haven’t,

The things I don’t own

Don’t require payments on a loan.

I belong in my body.

My body belongs in the body of Earth,

The Earth belongs in the Milky Way

The Milky Way belongs in the universe,

Not an owner in sight.

THE LOG OF THE GOOD SHIP, CURIOSITY

She shoves off from the safe harbor of Certainty, enticed by the perfumed air blowing in on the breeze from the Sea of Everything Else to explore its many secret charms her crew intuits inland while absently gazing out windows whenever inside. They are all avid volunteers whose focus long ago dissolved the slats of the bamboo curtains while reaching for the larger picture so far beyond the glass barrier. They sail in defiance of threats like, “there be dragons,” from frightened keepers of the faith in the prophecy that, if order could possibly be indisputably established anywhere, the wilderness outside won’t really matter and will go away.

She needs no recruiting posters. In the beginning so many felt wanted by the vast unknown the founding elders realized they must act to prevent an ldeaspora‘s dissolution of all they were trying to nail down. They relocated the population further inland to a territory they dubbed the United States of Absolutica, away from the temptation of doubt lapping at the entire fractalized coastline, not just their original landing site, Curiosity’s point of departure from Certainty. In recent generations Curiosity’s fleet has begun sailing other ships out of other ports; the happy ship, the Wrong, sails out of the well defended port of Fort Righteousness; the super streamlined yet slow boat, Our Desire, out of Sinisabad; the weird ship, the Anomaly, out of Normalcy; the intuitive ship, Yearning out of Comfort Corners; Question out of Patanser; Beginning out of Land’s End … you get the idea.

Moving to the heartland of the new homeland, clearing the area of wild ideas and building the great isolating wall of definition worked very well during the lifetimes of those who’d remained involved in the passionate debates about the righteousness of every rule laid into the wall and who’d invested energy in the labor of leaving it alone once put in place. It wasn’t too many generations along when the sacred wall, referred to by all as the DICTATIONARY, began revealing leaks spied by inattentive students’ wandering attention during the endlessly boring process of doubt erasure their public schools were.

The process of patching the DICTATIONARY with a new rule for every inventive infraction became a distraction from considering the impossibility of enforcing them, much less the loss to the vitality of the community of its most creative criminals by diagramming their sentences to jail. The prophecy became as threadbare as the emperor’s new clothes when the more imaginative among them recognized the similarity of their culture to the process by which innovative farmers surrounded each budding pumpkin blossom with a mold of the head of the head founding elder to harvest a lucrative commodity just in time to save everyone from the mess of having to carve them themselves and the shame of probably getting them wrong at Halloween.

The experience of being surrounded by so many mirrors reflecting one’s proper image packed so close together, sealed within the fortress walls as they were, stirred the embryo of an irritation within even the most indoctrinated among the orthodox.

Tentative attempts to escape constant reminders of such mindless conformity with forays into the wilderness were always accompanied by a gigantic vacuum/snail device that extruded an asphalt trail wherever it went to transform the land wherever it stopped by sucking it up into the mold of a road crossing with options at each corner from an approved list of necessities including bank, gas station, fast food, car wash, bar, car dealership, church, parking lot and personal technology retailer as a support for the relatively isolated, practically identical rows of individual sets of walls of personal fortress sprawl they named homes.

These adventuresome heretics were slowly granted permission to decorate their indistinguishable homes, built on the design principles of exactitude laid down so long ago, with the blasphemy of modifiers. A dab of green letters and numbers spelling the name and registration of the homeowners on the mailbox in front of one of the standard black and/or white houses was open defiance of tradition. The first person to hang an adjective on the wall in their nouning room caused a stir of controversy throughout the colony.

These outlying boxes remained connected to the fort within fortified capsules whizzing these rebels back and forth along the slime trail or virtually through the series of Ted Tubes from their homes to the trough that sustains them from within the bowels of the fort, the fountain of truth, the reward of a promise, permission to exist. Being natural entities these strangers to a stranger land gradually enacted an innate curiosity as unconsciously as the depth to which their education had buried it, but just as surely — as if "curiosity" or "why" were actual words, much less symbols for concepts they recognized and could discuss.

Ayn ran away from her stifling nest within the ironic curtain because there were no words to express to her parents’ and teachers’ satisfaction the questions she couldn’t ask about a world greater than the DICTATIONARY could behold much less cared to contain. As chance or the salt air would have it, her parents’ home was in the closest proximity to the coast of any of the fort’s outposts so that her flight away from the prosthetics and the walls and the asphalt through this garden of unexplainable phenomena was the first time any of her people had breathed unconditioned air or witnessed the environment without glass protection for three hundred generations … and it led her to a beach.

Ever since stifled reports of her survival in the wilderness without definitions began leaking into the fort, wakened curiosities have leaked out and trickled down to the coast to build this outlaw community of sea farers sailing the Sea of Everything Else and re-porting their ships to share novel words about novel experiences of larger samples of the infinitely big picture of the universe.

She’s sailing under the full moon tonight. Come on along for the endlessly interesting voyage of the good ship Curiosity. Your life will be its logbook, its entries, your direct experience; no hearsay. You won’t need words until you choose to re port.

ANONYMOUS: Mental Concrete Pt. 2

The most beneficial effect I can see the internet having on the civilization it is saturating is the growing realization that truth needs no authority. The first installment of this series, Mental Concrete, dealt with the strategic misuse of stereotypes as demon paint to rally opposition to straw men as sole bearers of a particular all-consuming characteristic that the propagandist opposes that, in reality, is found in everyone to some degree. This time I want to home in on the mentally lazy habit of needing footnotes and degree initials to recognize obvious truth or of being persuaded by them to swallow propaganda.

My strongest experiential connections to other humans (beyond realizing that we are all made of the same cosmic stuff in extremely complex variations as cells in the tissue of the living body of earth) are our love of music, the occasional display of our deep-seated instinct to know right and wrong in the unrehearsed spontaneity of the moment it is required, and the rarer examples of our ability to capture and communicate that instinctual sense alive with a series of symbols as abstract as words or paint. The truth shines through the page whether it is a venerable old acolyte’s hand drawn parchment by candlelight in a musty cloister or the soiled brown paper bag the MD 20/20 came in scrawled by the shaky claw of a junkie by barrel firelight in an alley or the canvas of a saintly artist deliriously daubing every photon of light striking his dilated pupils from that starry night sky. Hell, I’ve been inspired by things I misread – and was no less inspired for finding my mistake. That’s what this post is about. The authority required to be genuinely inspired!

We seem to be so conditioned by our education to respect authority that we are paralyzed without its approval of our behavior and beliefs, religious or not. The internet is instant access to virtually anything anyone has ever wanted the world to see, and much of what they didn’t, for an entire spectrum of reasons. It is possible with very little effort to assemble every word, song or videotape relative to any subject, except those redacted by the government’s black ops authority over anything too amazing for the common man they swore to serve.

With such a plethora of information one may surmise the popularity and profundity of any subject by the quantity and range of the variety of views from every reality tunnel and camera ever applied, with scattered attempts to establish “facts” about the subject denoted by the particular acronymic symbol following the names of that particular specialty of authorityhood who’s word dare not be questioned. A comparison of the great, unwashed, unlettered, anonymous’ synthesis against the officially accepted facts always yields interesting, often intriguing insight into the agenda of such official versions; especially when the difference is great.

The idea of authority in both audacity of assumption and specter of surveillance makes of any system based on it fraught with little Caesars polishing their act, to expand their sphere of influence among the lowly gullible, and their apples for those whose rules school those fools who would achieve their stool with lickspittle obedience. Some shit.

It seems to me that western civilization is brewing a situation where the authority resides in a collective tower of mental masturbation at some floor or other. Authority requires levels; what else is left to achieve when you know it all? Outside that tower is the chaos of independent reality tunnels based on the individual life experiences of people who don’t assume they know anything about how or why civilization exists, much less perpetuates the establishment of edifices and new rules. Nor do they care except when intruded upon in their daily, relatively symbiotic lives in local nature, so far as authority permits.

It appears axiomatic that the strength of influence one assumes for one’s authority will proportionally disable the possibility of experiencing life as it actually is. Authority distorts perception whether the observed even knows authority is there or not. When authority asserts itself, the subject must as well, whether it wants to or not.

Authority is officially recognized and rewarded for accomplishments in furthering religious, political and scientific snow jobs that keep the people praying, obeying and paying. The most ubiquitous source of recognized authority is the initial “$”; able to buy the obedience of political whores betraying their constituents, the forked tongues of Madison Avenue snake oil salesmen on infotainment mainstream media and the guns of mercenary mobs to force fear on the unpersuadable priceless that remain. This collection of stereotypes I just used is marbleized throughout civilization; no one is absolutely evil or without a price.

Ah, well, they litter the internet, those authorities. I try to stay away from them, but I guess it doesn’t even pay to talk to it without “doing” something that qualifies, much less question it any more – to its face that is. I guess I’m as guilty of stereotyping as anyone; I question all authority but that which I perceive self-evidently shining through another’s unqualified behavior like truth on a page. Is it me, or does that sort of authority seem to be most likely found in people who prefer remaining anonymous?

MENTAL CONCRETE

Frustrating encounters with certain blog buds and commenters recently have brought Jung’s and Campbell’s role of symbology controlling the way we think into sharp focus for me. It seems that no matter how sublime, ethereal, abstract, profound, enlightening an insight may be, the conveyance of the exquisite point of light into this realm of push and shove demand for clean edged certainty, assured by dictionary and blueprints, condenses, compacts all possibility of expressing any thought from outside it into the sharpest relief with the pressure between the press plate and the paper leaving black ink letters in rows as its symbolic proxy. Only the finest poets can build such structures with just the right crack left in to allow enlightenment to shine in —— “that’s how the light get in”.

In conversation, body language does a lot to fractalize the edges of the spoken word to meld the context from which the thoughts arose if they are vivid enough, imbued with the speaker’s spirit, to suspend the hearer’s belief in his own set of definitions long enough to go along to the end. Body language, if the eyes are ignored, can reinforce the tendency of a partisan audience to personify positive and negative abstraction into concrete allies and foes with a certitude only the eyes betray. Some can even lie with their eyes, but only by believing their own lies.

We could light the world forever if we could tap, cross the internet, the energy frittered away in frustrated miscommunications due to the use of abstractions as absolutes such as stereotypes taken as complete descriptions of single entities on the part of the speaker, or when the listener cherry picks the dictionary definition of certain word to refute the entire contextual meaning expressed.

In the first instance the abstract characterization of stereotypes is wasted on those who think in the black and white absolutes of righteousness. If such a thinking process were to hear the term, Jim Bob Lunchpail, they would picture a laborer eating lunch on the jobsite watching the propaganda of the opposing party on TV and swallowing it all, hook line, sinker, sandwich and bullshit; a real living entity; whole herds of such entities; hell, there’s so many we gotta organize against ‘em! That may be what the speaker intended, if he wanted to rouse the Jim Bob’s on his side to go out and get the others in some fashion.

But, as likely as not, they meant to describe just such black and white, with us or against us, lack of curiosity as characterizing lazy thinking wherever, in whatever proportion of whomever, it occurs. This phenomenon is exemplified by such thinking being unable to recognize satire’s mockery of such concretized stereotypes to realize that Colbert Nation is not a right wing utopia, or that Sarah Silverman doesn’t necessarily have a 48” TV as described in her video a few posts back, or that Glen Beck and Bill O'Reily aren't really news reporters, but Bullmoose bullshit dispensers who authored best sellers because right wingnuts bought bulk to get their books on the list; they don't even care if they're read, just so the mindless interpret sales as representing authority.

Sometimes the reaction of such thinking becomes stretched beyond permissible limits such that it snaps back with, “Arguing what truth means is irrelevant. Look up trust in the dictionary. Problem solved." in a comment earlier. To which I answered, with this "this is this and that is that" refusal to understand the context in which a word is used as an indication of what is meant, there's probably very little poetic license with which you won't argue, because that's not how the dictionary dictates it to mean. Pretty sad. Problem perpetuated.

No one IS Jim Bob Lunchpail or his idol, Colonel Bullmoose but they seem like real people to the degree one fits the description themselves. You get the idea. Or not.

THE GIFT OF GIVING

Whenever I discover a fascinating phenomenon in nature, realize a profound aspect to perceiving reality or find a meal’s worth of garden goodies ready for the plate, something within longs to enhance the moment by sharing it. Whenever I read of the depletion of diversity in nature, of reality tunnels demanding to be taken as absolutes or of the million starving products of heedless procreation and agribusiness excesses, something within shrivels any desire to contribute energy to the culture that perpetuates such atrocity.

Blog Bud, Pisces Iscariot, posted a profundity which speaks directly to this divide this morning:

The Key

The jailer to an imprisoned mind may find his release when he realises that he is, in fact, alone.

The anonymity justified by consensus within groups relieves individuals from responsibility for their actions to the extent that if one claims adherence to the proper cocktail of group ideologies one may ignore personal responsibility altogether. The key sought in the quote above releases such imprisoning reliance on consensus by recognizing ones own unique capacities as a valid contribution to the welfare of the preexisting family of life on Earth beyond the exclusivity that defines any collective.

SISYPHUS SHRUGGED

Life begins as an instinctual pursuit of pleasure and the satisfacion of curiosity. As soon on the heels of birth as civilization can manage, this freeborn adventure must struggle against unpleasant limits on where its pursuits lead it. The limits are justified by being for the child’s own good.

As an infant, “their own good,” means for the convenience of the parent; sleeping all night and tiny, tidy rabbit pellets in the assbag, please.

As a toddler, “their own good,” means safety from the dangers inherent in the artificial prosthetic devices their parents cannot live without; seat belts for trips to the mall.

As a precocious preschooler, “for their own good,” means getting ready to enter the world of the big people; not aping parents’ language and behavior; the initiation of the public persona’s façade replacing self-reliance and self-respect by maintenance of favor and accumulation of rewarded toys.

During public education, “for their own good,” means preparing to succeed in the world of the big people; maintaining favor and buying your own accumulation of toys as status.

At all stages of life the individual is inundated with demands for behavior not only acceptable to but supportive of a civilization that mutates human babies and environments into fitting its myth as deeply as it has yet learned to do. All sense of right and wrong is based on benefit to the system being enforced regardless of the effect on the natural world to which it insanely refuses to adapt, making enemies, criminals and victims of not only its opposers, but of indifferent nonparticipating indigenous people assumed to be within its jurisdiction as well.

It was into such a culture our hero, Steve Adore, was born. As an infant the only comfort through the night was a diaper full of nice warm shit. As a toddler he shot his father with his unattended, loaded pistol. As a preschooler he entertained friends with stand up comedy mocking grownups. In school he was called "Sissy" and "Pussy" because he was interested in neither the debate nor football teams, but rather in collecting various wasp, bee and hornet’s nests that seemed to fit a pattern he'd detected. In college his nickname became "Sissy-Puss" until a mythology major redubbed him Sisyphus, which stuck with him through graduation and five years into a life waged from a cubicle.

At which point, Sisyphus finally caught on. He and everyone he knew labored every day on projects that abetted civilization’s war on nature by either conquering, taming and exploiting it or repairing the faulty armor of culture's myth of human exceptionality by sealing its gaping loopholes by demonizing nature's viciousness, euphemistically referred to as "progress" against the anarchy of entropy. There was no way Sisyphus or any quantity of men would ever be able to roll that boulder far enough up the hill against the gravity of nature’s constant change to establish civilization permanently as master of all it surveyed. So he shrugged.

He walked off the job, into the woods and began eating the weeds and grubs he’d noted all the other earthlings always have. After overcoming withdrawal from TV, air conditioning and automobiles, his diet developed into the healthiest it could ever have been back in the city, his beer gut and manicured nails became things of the past and he settled in for a life of daily ecstasy in the dance of life offered freely by his rediscovered host, his mother, nature. Steve Adore reverted from pointless laborer against his better instincts back to the lover of the symbiosis they led him to share with the other parts of the body Earth is.

PREEMPIRICAL

Cain's campaign mission for Sarah, "Bring me the head of …"

Just as Bush rushed the US to war as a preemptive strike against entire nations suspected of being either the hiding place of the terrorists suspected of the September 11, 2001 attack in NYC or being led by an evil dictator we trained and armed, the fine point of conclusions based on empirical evidence, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic, seems to have gone missing in almost all faith based actions. From George Bush’s oil grab covered in God’s will to creationists expecting atheists to accept faith as empirical evidence since they have preemptively accepted a cooked book as conclusive fact.

Just as the overwhelming majority of the population can nod in toady agreement at the “melting steel beam” theory offered by the culprit’s excuse finding commission while watching video of three simultaneous, expertly engineered implosions of three huge skyscrapers at freefall speed from every angle, no one in the entire UN, when Colin Powell presented pictorial representations of the rolling-weapons-of-mass-destruction-laboratory as proof positive that Sadam Hussein's evil deserved the obliteration of his country, no one stood up and said, “Hey, wait a minute, ‘Ceci n'est pas une pipe’. Neither is it proof of anything but the skill of a computer graphics artist to follow the dictates of a hidden agenda!!!” Authority is taking us for much more than granted, it relies on its obedient little lickspittles like hyena’s follow lions for the scraps, with apologies to the hyenas.

Hearing amens in unison, whether for a preacher’s or a politician’s certitude in delivering preemptive promises against all contrary, empirical evidence, sounds like steps in the gradual approach of empire. Preempirical, you might say.

Sometimes the roots of language are able to tangle up the realities of literate people — remember they are not the truth — just versions of it, the most anyone can ever express. Empirical evidence over logical theories over faith-based fear of the empire are the levels of being able to even visualize the truth, much less express it. The truth requires no crib sheet.