A lotta claptrap bookended by WC quotes

Here is the next page from my book of 300 Drawing Prompts. (The last appeared on June Four.) This pic here is actually supposed to be two pics: you can maybe see that it's divided by a diagonal line. The prompts (at top left & low right) were "Stop sign" and "Piñata".

Dear diary,

I guess, like any billionaire fascist, I am obsessed with power. Cuz I can’t stop thinking about the relation between the forces that control people. You look out thru my eyes — what do you see? You see the people from my mother’s neighborhood, and my mother among them. They are hard right-wingers, they call themselves Conservative Republicans, and they watch the right-wing news shows and listen to the right-wing radio programs. (I grew up on a very tough street.) But here’s the other thing that I find strange: these people, my mom and her posse, are all strict Christians — they go to church and believe in the blood of Christ (whatever that phrase means to them). So you have politics and religion as forces which control the multitudes. And I sit here like a fool puzzling over the relations between sources of power, instead of just accepting these phenomena as givens and joining the game and playing to win. On a side note: I should write a book called How to Guarantee that You Will Lose at Life. The fact that it wouldn’t sell would prove that I know what I’m talking about.

“I think you should write a book on your theory. It’s a very interesting subject, and you seem to master it.”

—Sunshine’s wife, to Officer Duke
(from the 2013 film Wrong Cops)

So I’m thinking about power and the way that it changes. Cuz I wonder: How do people who purport to follow Jesus, who was a far-LEFT-winger, end up holding their personal religious convictions as compatible only with far-RIGHT politics? Yes, I wonder how power shifts its shape; for I’m convinced that there’s a relation between all these classes of thot (or whatever you call them): like how Darwin viewed species of animals as morphing over time; or how Proteus, from Homer’s Odyssey, can change his form to look like various items, so as to wriggle away from whoever is trying to address him (sorta like God, who’ll do anything, even become a mortal human, to avoid having to answer his prayer-mail):

. . . he can take the forms
of all the beasts, and water, and blinding fire;
but you must hold on, even so, and crush him
until he breaks the silence.

I see poetry as having been twisted into religion, and religion as having blanked into philosophy and politics.

You start with a poem, or a poetic tale, which is fancy-free: it jumps like a frog of lightning out of the mind (or like a prince, if that’s how you’re inclined to kiss it); and it pleases the imagination, and it requires nothing from anyone — or if it dares to make demands, they’re taken as inherently playful and non-binding.

So poetry is attractive to the populace, and the people follow it. Obviously a fascist like I myself who desires to inherit the earth will want a piece of this action. But poetry is just a silly thing, whose charm is of mental allure not physical aggression; so how does one use these poetic tales to lasso, corral & harness people in real time? The answer is: Devise from the poem your desired forms of worship (the ways that you wish your pets would behave), and claim that these moral statutes were the purpose of the poem: the intention of its author! Thenceforth the poem’s beauty and natural appeal will be seen as proof that these religious rules and forms that you (or rather I Bryan the fascist) from midair contrived are imperative to respect. That’s how religion is born.

(To give due credit, I’m simply drawing upon what William Blake reveals in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)

OK so we got the people controlled by way of our religion, which we clamped like a muzzle over their barbaric, yawping poetry. But then, over time, new generations of people are born — for (unlike you & I) normal humans suffer short lifespans & then expire; thus they must bear offspring while serving their time here, so that the nightmare may continue — and these new generations take the place of the old ones who are slain by our friend God. Now here’s the problem: Each successive age is disinclined to walk exactly in the footsteps of its forefathers. So the people deviate from the beliefs that we decreed; especially the poets do this (they are the worst). If you remember, we had cured the disease of poetry’s rampant freedom by enchaining everyone within religion, and we ruled the mobs from our protective shell of priesthood. We allowed them, eventually and reluctantly, a king to call their ruler, but the fellow was chosen by us, and all actual power pragmatically therefore remained ours. In the case of a rogue royal or runaway king, we could simply draw up some propaganda, and the force of our religious structure would sway the people against the troublemaker.

But I’m getting a little off the subject here — what I wanted to hit upon is how the religious rule that we (or rather I alone, Priest Bryan: the only correct interpreter of all scriptures) established became what is now called politics. With the cycles of life and death, sooner or later a generation arises that misunderstands my fascist system of religion as built for something other than people-control; so they invent a system aside from it, or maybe you could think of it like scaffolding around a mansion, and they call this additional trap, which is in certain ways the same trap all over again, I say, they call this newfangled mechanism government. Then the really laughable part of the farce comes when the people propose to keep government and religion separate. OK, whatever you want, folks. I wish I knew history better, cuz then I could say something like: Think of Rome, how it declined and fell as a country, so that today Old Rome has passed away, yet the Church that lived like a parasite in the belly of that motherland is still alive and kicking — the Church did not die when its country died. In this way, the Church resembles a trans-national Corporation, cuz it spans many mother-&-fatherlands (it outlives many countries) in time and space; you just can’t get rid of it, no matter how hard you try: it poisons everything.

Gadzooks, I’m just rambling and getting nowhere. Let me try to sum up:

So pesky poetry is tamed into religion, then government or politics snaps into action and controls the mobs when enough of them begin to doubt our True Faith.

And the church has a lot of gold, a lot of riches — why is that? Perhaps it’s becuz we patient, pious, people-loving fascists have been thieving since the beginning. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

So, there — I think that, in my roundabout fashion, very sloppily, I’ve shown how the seemingly disparate traits of modern Christian Conservatives can be reconciled. There is no contradiction between the Church System of Christianity and Right-wing Conservatism: they’re both just ways to control people. Sure, it’s messy when you start to look at the details, because the Christian Religion was built upon poetic tales, which are nastily free; whereas what the US political culture calls Conservatism stems from philosophical scams, which are a little less messy on the surface, but if you look into the source texts and actually read what these different forefathers of the movement wrote in the works that support it, you find the same old imaginative freedom, albeit severely cramped.

And yet consider poetry’s role in the modern age, this ugliest century yet: the 21st. Nobody reads poetry anymore. So how does it maintain its power over the people? The answer is: It doesn’t — its power is severely diminished: just look how religions are all crumbling or evaporating nowadays (they’re usually made out of bread or wine: the former crumbles, the latter evaporates). The ones that survive the masses’ waning interest in poetry are those religions that are closer to philosophies, like Buddhism. — What poetic tales is Buddhism based upon? What is Buddhism’s equivalent of the Christian religion’s King James Bible? I’m asking this sincerely: I want to know. (How come you’re not answering? Are you asleep?)

But I was trying to say: Today people don’t read poetry, they only listen to music: rock and rap — and they like to watch movies and laugh at stand-up comedians. That’s why, if you wanna control people the way that religion once did (and as government is SUPPOSED to do but can’t figure out how to re-brand fascism so that it appears sexy and fun again), you gotta cobble together your mob-control mechanism out of popular entertainment. That’s why it’s smart to allow still-loyal ex-presidents (as well as also-rans) high-profile influence over media services. And that’s why it’s smart to allow your intelligence agencies and your military to have sway over Hollywood. (I’m using the word “Hollywood” to stand for cinema in general, even tho that particular place hasn’t made a film in ages.) Most importantly, it’s crucial to get the edgiest comedians on your side (for, like poets, they’ll have a tendency to be against you, at first): and this can be done by offering them money and hosting spots on TV. Note how many modern donkeys get their politics from late-night comedy shows. That’s cuz the elephants still have religion — tho, as I said above, it’s losing its sway — & also they’re starting to get some traction via podcasting, which is a hip new medium: it’s not at all inferior to traditional radio.

*

& now I wonder where novels fit into this cluster-hump. I mean the literary genre: “a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism.” — I can’t think of any era that made use of novels the way the ancient priests fascisized poetry and modern corporatists use infotainment. But probably the connection is escaping me: this might be one of the great gulfs that remain fixed between the parts of my brain that think they know stuff. Nonetheless, I can’t imagine being able to do any people-control with, say, the works of Charles Dickens — he seems averse to our righteous way: he seems fascist-resistant. Perhaps novels require too much thinking from their audience, and it just spoils whatever poison you’re trying to concoct.

*

Having aired my idea so far, there’s no denying its misshapenness. I committed to laying bare the secrets of crowd control, and it’s too late to repent; but I wish to acknowledge that this entry is a flop: it’s not what I wanted it to be; and I’m miffed that I spent so much time droning about something that not only is already understood by all but that all understand much better than I. So if there’s any worth to this entry, it will be the kind that one derives from an illiterate’s review of an unread book. Or like when you meet some lying infant who was just born yesterday and thus has no clue how a combustion engine works but he still tries to sell you his crib, which isn’t even motorized and moreover belongs to the hospital, yet he goes on and on praising the qualities of its engineering: “It’s got a lot of zip to it; you barely touch the accelerator with your knit boot and it’s already racing — that’s cuz there are so many pistons inside this thing that they needed to give it a larger hood; maybe even two hoods; and all the turbochargers are oiled with antioxidants, so you never have to worry about being consumed by their fire; additionally they made the crankshaft with the same non-stick transmission pan and shock-strut gear hubs that they use for the axles on NASA (of course I’m referring to the rolling NASA, not the one that they put you to sleep in every night).” — Yes, that’s what I shoulda done: written ad copy for false crib techs. I bet I coulda significantly increased my fortune; maybe even doubled it.

“There’s enough money in here to buy weed for the next year; maybe even two years.”

—Officer Sunshine, from the film Wrong Cops