I fail not to preach and to rant

Here is the back side of the newspaper clipping that accompanied my “Standard report on a muffed repair.” Since that earlier image has the word Christmas featured prominently, the significance of the present image is that I AM BEYOND THE HOLIDAY: even tho it is scheduled to occur four days from now, I have already breezed over and sped past it.

Dear diary,

Christmas. Now that I mentioned it, I better say a word about it, if only to get it out of my mind. How do I see it? Do I love it or hate it? I guess I kinda like it. It feels as if a 1950s sitcom version of pleasant society is trying to be born in our dystopia after everyone’s already learned that our show is rigged. But it’s interesting because people genuinely keep trying to make it work. And amid this month of “fake it till you make it,” much is actually made. I mean, much real cheer results from the sham celebration. How can I not be happy when I step outside and see everything draped in garland? It’s golden and silver and sparkling, and there’s bells and lights... like a fool’s-gold paradise. What’s not to like!

And Christmas music: I enjoy the pseudo-traditional stuff, again from the 50s (I’m guessing the era carelessly, in ignorance; maybe it’s the 40s–60s: I just mean loosely not modern), not the newer trendy renditions lazily repackaged into alt-rock or techno templates…

What is it about the 50s? Of course I don’t mean the actual decade; I mean the universe of propaganda that we know from TV and movies… that great 50s brainwash. Both world wars are over and it’s time to start the generation-long process of destroying society on behalf of the ultra-rich. Murder the New Deal’s welfare state in its cradle.

Brainwashing: why is it frowned upon? It sounds like a good thing: to wash one’s brain. Keep it clean. What’s the opposite: brain-dirtying? That sounds fun too.

I don’t want to wilt into a cliché university professor, but I can’t help hating the direction that my country has gone since its inception. And I sort of hate its inception as well – or I should say rather: If my country’s inception equals freedom and democracy, then I love it; but if my country’s inception equals slavery and plutocracy, then I hate it. And how much truth must one ignore to see the former not the latter in the beginning?

Wealthy landowners: what have they to do with Christianity? What has Christianity to do with Christmas? These things are on my mind because I was raised by a nutcase who claimed “This country was founded by Christians, on the principles of Christianity, in order to be a Christian nation.” OK, then who gets to define that operative term?—cuz it’s not clear that any of the Jesuses OR Pauls of King James’s Bible would embrace the U.S.

Wasn’t Rome sort of like the U.S. of “New Testament” times? How did that country treat Jesus? How did that country treat Paul? What were either of their attitudes towards this empire?

Then we have Karl Marx. He wrote The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels. It was first published anonymously in 1848. So this happened just a century before America’s glorious 50s. One hundred years—is that a long or short time? Apparently it’s long enough for my country to conclude that the system of communism is evil. Its arch-nemesis capitalism has been booming-and-busting for centuries, in various models; and we’re still dominated by its ideology – no matter how many economic bubbles pop; no matter how many depressions and recessions leave populations ruined; we keep donkeying forward, assing forward, under capitalism. Center on money NOT people… For the good of the few NOT the many: privatization, ownership…

Ugh, don’t you hate when you wake to find yourself in the midst of composing an anti-money rant? The only reason I mentioned Marx is that I wanted to note something about how words are used. I loathe politics, I loathe economics; I only love language... All my life, I’ve heard the followers of Marx’s ideas referred to as “Marxists.” But then the other day I heard an economist use the word “Marxian” as an apparent synonym. (This is common, by the way – I’m just ill-informed.) At first I recoiled in disgust, as I always do when confronted by anything new; but then, after thinking about it, I realized that I kind of like this name. Marxian: it sounds like a duck made of pretzels. So I started brainstorming about suffixes, and the rain from this storm washed my brain, and my sins were forgiven.

Think of Christ. First we have a regular Nazarene who is interested in Buddhism. So this fellow, say his name is Joshua or Jesus, goes around injecting Buddhism into everything—into the passersby, even into his ancestors’ religion. Now a man named Saul, a quisling and opportunist from the establishment, sees our Nazarene threatening the status quo, threatening to break down the system that supports Saul’s nefarious behavior. Saint Saul is no creampuff: he does not plan to relinquish his crony-corporate power without a fight. Now, as the Nazarene is baptizing with fire, Saint Saul aims to fight this fire with fire: and since, to Saul, Joshua’s new Buddhistic way seems to consist simply of renaming, reclassifying, playing with concepts, adjusting words, enhanced allegorization techniques, Saul’s first move is to change his own name to Saint Paul – this rebranding is necessary for the sake of P.R. (public relations, A.K.A. propaganda); for the first king of Israel was named Saul, and he was a BAD king, so everyone prefers his successor David, the GOOD king, whose airbrushed memory we desire to be our forever-after SUPER-KING…

A boss eternal and supernal. Mega leader. King of kings. Not Christ Saul to be followed by Christ David, but a Christ of Christs: one who will have no successor: the apotheosis of totalitarianism. So Paul re-brands Josh the Nazarene as Jesus the King. Now, although this Christ Jesus is henceforth guaranteed world-dictatorship, the trick is that you can only access his favors at Saint Paul’s Church.

But I need to get back on topic; this is an important blog post I’m writing here, and it’s all over the map...

If a follower of Marx is a Marxist, then why is a follower of Christ not a Christ-ist? Instead he’s a Christ-ian. Likewise, the preferred term should be Marxian. I also like this label because it sounds like Martian, yet I wish that it could only mean “green extraterrestrial”; for that’s what I always think when I say it. But, because the same angry planet, in addition to bringing forth lime-flavored whatchamacallits, also compelleth onward Christian soldiers, thus we’re left with martian and martial ALSO meaning “of the military.”

I’ve already mentioned elsewhere these facts about Mars. Why do I repeat such decidedly stupid material? I must think that I am clever. OK here’s another habit that I fall back on when I’m out of ideas (why settle for rock bottom when you could hit below sea level?) – direct address to my upcoming readership (extremely amusing):

Now I’d like to say a word to our alien successors. In this age in which I’m writing, we citizens of the globe – humans / homo sapiens / earthlings / shaven apes / what you will (upright pigs? depleted gods?) – find ourselves in a state of distress; our masters are addicted to warmongering & usury, so we’re stuck with a system that leaves the majority in poverty while a handful have more wealth than the mind can imagine. Some say the numbers work out like so: 99% of us are doomed, and 1% own the world.

The 1% are not bad people: they’re just, like I said above, wealth-addicts; and no one will intervene, no one offers them any help.

More rehash: I’ve stolen this idea from Nietzsche before, and I’ll steal it again. (I’ll keep repeating it till somebody implements it.) Limit both the bottom and the top. No one can sink past a certain level of poverty; no one can rise past a certain level of riches. The poverty level, at its lowest, will meet every person’s basic needs; so even if you encounter economic ruination, say by way of reckless behavior, you’ll always have food, clothing, shelter, health care, etc. And if you manage to snatch more than twelve times the average worker’s salary, everything above the 12x point is pure aid. Aid to all the people of the world! Enough of this nation-centered exclusivity: it’s just the same old selfishness and truly Anti-Jesus-ist.) I chose the top-limit figure out of the blue: perhaps a number other than twelve would work better; but it’s gotta hover around about ten, otherwise things get ridiculous, as they are at present, with executives earning THREE HUNDRED TIMES the pay of laborers.

And why do we have nukes? Nuclear weapons. Atomic arsenal kept within reach of a small gang of butterfingers which, in a heartbeat, could leave Earth uninhabitable. Will the existence of these bombs ever stop haunting us? The answer is no. Because the nations of this planet would rather combust than confabulate. I imagine it’s the way that sharks go about doing business. Or jackals. Animals that are neither willing nor able to articulate their thoughts. But here we are, humans who can listen and speak—that is, we are able to transfer brilliance from mind to mind—not to mention, we now possess the ability to render one language into another, easily, instantly; so nobody’s really “foreign” anymore; and our satellites and cameras have mapped the whole globe, so there’s no place for “enemies” to hide—there’s no hilltops for the neighboring nation to spill down during a sneak attack—we’re all in this together, therefore…

Might the world be better off without militaries and arsenals? Who’s protecting who from who? If the dreaded communists had won the so-called Cold War, would we U.S. citizens really have it worse than we do now? We’re a single step away from the next Great Depression – does the “free market” expect us to see our plight as a blessing? Now I imagine a heckler saying “Hey, we got the best system ever created!” Really? By what mode of measurement? “The invisible hand of the market always saves us.” From what? Invisible hand, invisible God. I’m sick of phantoms. I think I would’ve been one of those wilderness wanderers who complained against Moses: Why can’t we speak to the Deity directly? “And the LORD said unto him, Away, get thee down, and thou shalt come up… but let not the people break through to come up unto the LORD, lest he break forth upon them.” [Exodus 19:24-25] I’m sick of elite managers, both economic and metaphysical, blocking our way to the Volcano God. I’d rather that the LORD “break forth” upon us, than to keep groveling for crumbs like dogs at the table. Think of the bailouts. (Now I’m referring to a detail of this recent epoch—your past and our present, dear glowing green Marxians—which will have long been forgotten; but humor my outburst, I’m too heated to care about what might be relevant to future minds; so add your own parenthetic explanation, if my words don’t connect.) Save the banks, and the banks will in turn save you. Everyone’s always trying to save us from something. Just as Saint Paul rescues us from the sin and hell that he himself invented, the banking system saves us from the money troubles borne of its own rules. Get saved? Maybe it’s time we got lost...

& we’re told we must combat the universe’s inhumanities, even if it means relinquishing our humanity. Thus we perpetrate unthinkable terrors, in the name of fighting terrorism; and, in the process of eradicating fascism, we ended up fascist. This proves that we can do bad all by ourselves, thank you very much; we don’t need your help to starve to death. In the land of independence, of rugged individualism, we “save” ourselves from ourselves. We enslave ourselves, lest we overdose on freedom.

I want to know what the alternative would’ve been. Are we supposed to be thankful that our military occupies countless countries while our own fellow states slide into poverty? Thank God that some other nation didn’t take us over…?

God I’m preach-prone today. Forgive me, I hate this type of ranting. In fact, I disavow everything I wrote in those paragraphs above. I side instead with the critic-as-artist Harold Bloom, who says, in his “Elegiac Conclusion” to The Western Canon:

I am your true Marxist critic, following Groucho rather than Karl, and take as my motto Groucho’s grand admonition, “Whatever it is, I’m against it!”

But if one cannot move in any direction without encountering disaster, then…

I mean, I, too, want to be “against” everything, like Groucho; but even THIS is an attitude that requires capital-centeredness to flaunt. At least it does where I live. In a system based on capital, everything either must join the gray act or suffer imprisonment.

I’m not being clear. Let me try again. If you want to get educated, you must pay for your schooling: you take on debt; then your debt must be paid, so you are forced to take a job, and all jobs are horrendous corrupt crony affairs; therefore you’re done: you’re one of them. Either that or you refuse to join the cult; thus you make no banknotes; thus you cannot pay your debt; thus you end up incarcerated. All Roman roads lead to jail.

How can the luckless masses make an effective change in this world without resorting to violence (this is crucial: non-violence is the ONLY way), and without treating the lucky rich as unfairly as that coven treats the herd?

Mass suicide. I mention this only half-jokingly, but I like to consider it. What if all of us ninety-nine-percenters simply chose a moment to collectively give up the ghost? It wouldn’t work unless each and all participated. The one-percenters would not be too inconvenienced—there’s only a handful of them, remember—but whenever any of their clique members wish to travel, they’d have to wade through stinking corpses clogging the streets. And not only the streets...

So, if we’re imagining the result of a massive and voluntary sign-off, especially if I am counted among the participants, the thought of a corpse-riddled landscape makes me snicker; AND YET I recoil in horror from the very same notion, if the imagined result is due to nuclear war. How do I reconcile these reactions? Well humankind doesn’t mind tragedy, as long as we can claim that we willed it to happen. It’s the same logic that allows us so cheerily to accept fascism over fascism [sic: I intend this to be as blank as it sounds]. At least it was our Christmas principles that prompted this hell-on-earth.

But why compose texts instead of making video games or movies? Because text lasts longer. I routinely read texts that are more than a hundred years old. Some are thousands of years old. When’s the last time you played a video game made in 400 BC? Or a movie filmed in Pre-Socratic Athens? None of the youngsters today have any desire to watch even black-and-white “classics,” let alone silent films. And my encyclopedia claims that the first commercially successful motion picture featuring synchronized sound was released in 1927. As I write, that’s not even a century ago. Speaking broadly, the phenomenon of the “talkie” film is therefore young enough to be the sibling of Communism. Or even its offspring, if the system’s sufficiently promiscuous. This may be why the latest generation of vipers denounce and reject these things. They’re obviously evil: they’re old.

But if old equals bad, then why does Capitalism find favor?—for, as I said above, it is far older than its competitors. The answer is that it’s timeworn. Lying never goes out of style.

So we’re left with our dutiful, semi-voluntary self-imprisonment—that is, life in rented apartments, obediently watching audiovisual “entertainment”—as opposed to literal imprisonment, in debtors jail, for daring to breathe. You can feel that you are at liberty, however, without needing much resources: Simply shop online for virtual-reality goggles. Or just read a book.

Alright; did I touch on everything I wanted to speak about? Let’s see…

• Class struggle; collective leadership; common ownership...
• the scoring of silence...
• the first full-length Indian feature film...
• the degree to which Socrates was consumed by his disciple Plato, and how this helped to establish the salvation-damnation cycle of the religion of Pac-Man...

[again I’m just plagiarizing the encyclopedia to populate this list, in case you couldn’t tell]

• Exodus 19:21 “And the LORD said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the LORD to gaze, and many of them perish.”
• that gap grew even more frightening in the moments since we first mentioned the date (from 2014) showing that CEOs earned 373 times the pay of the average worker...
• how the red tape of bureaucracy rescued reindeer Rudolph from the manger...
• the professional maintenance of a favorable public image by Herod the baby-killer…
• offspring of a hybrid plant or animal (strictly, a male donkey + a female horse), typically sterile and used as a beast of burden…
• how a theory in capitalism which posits that the only goal of a business is to make money—“the profit motive”—functions on the “rational choice theory” or the idea that individuals tend to pursue what is in their own best interests…
• repeat: in your own best interest
• how the 1711–1720 British South Sea Bubble was one of the earliest modern financial crises…
• the League of the Just was founded by German émigrés in Paris in 1836. This was initially a utopian socialist and Christian communist group devoted to the ideas of Gracchus Babeuf rather than the teachings of Christ (Babeuf was a political agitator and journalist of the French Revolutionary period; his newspaper Le tribun du people—“the tribune of the people”—was best known for his advocacy for the poor and calling for a popular revolt against the government of France; he was a leading advocate for democracy, the abolition of private property and the equality of results)…
• how all these features resulted in the creation of one of the world’s most ubiquitous novelty disguises: a one-piece mask consisting of horn-rimmed glasses, large plastic nose, bushy eyebrows and mustache.

Yep, It looks like I hit all the bases. By the way, yestereven I asked my mom what she expected to happen during the... oh wait, I should put this in a postscript:

P.S.

Yestereven I asked my mom what she expected to occur on the high holy panic of December 25, and she said that she and my sister are planning on attending the church service; she said that my sister is interested in seeing what Pastor Tim has to say. —So, if I can’t think of anything to write for my next entry here, remind me to compare and contrast my mom’s & sister’s pastor’s views with my own. My own are much better. I already sketched out the new type of church that I will invent in my entry from November 11 (which is my boss’s birthday); now all I need is a loan from the bank, to start it up. And I should also mention the recent movies I’ve watched.