The Sacrifice and the Reckoning: Part One

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
-- Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I. The Sleepwalkers

"We haven't had a real-time nuclear demo since Japan, 1945, and that was with one of the prototypes. We've never had a real-time nuclear demo live on TV, but it is on their scheduling. What we can't face is that the next time, many more than 3,000 will die and a lot of the dead will be our children. Just what do you think our mood will be the morning after they slaughter not only thousands of adults at their desks like they did on the 11th, but thousands of our children as well?"
-- In conversation, July, 2004

Our enemy has not yet taken a woman or a child for a beheading, but both clearly on their programming schedule.

THE RUTHLESS DEDICATION OF OUR ENEMIES TO OUR DESTRUCTION was written across our sky with two pillars of flame and smoke in our largest city. We've seen that dedication continue, punctuated by car bombs, mortars, and random attacks against our soldiers.

Our unluckiest citizens have had their heads severed from their bodies as pilot episodes of what promises to be a long running reality television series in which American heads are held up, to our horror and for the delight of those many millions that support those that take the heads. The message beyond this madness is that they would be pleased to extend this television series to 300 million beheadings in which each of us would have his "star" turn. Our enemy has not yet taken a woman or a child for a beheading, but both clearly on their programming schedule.

All these things we know. We know the nature and goals of our enemy well. Our army is at the ready and in the field. And yet we hesitate.

We hesitate because we are having an election in which we think the outcome will somehow determine what actions our enemy will pursue. We are a foolish people grown fat and fearful during the long peace.

We stay our hand and hobble our warriors and walk on wrapped in our suburban slumber. Our President and the man who would be President cruise about the country on buses or play electric guitars surrounded by doting egoists whose own celebrity removes them from the sense of their doom.

The party in power shambles about speaking in color codes and hushed words of warning. The party that yearns for power forms lines in front of our cinema

caves to worship the lies of the most stunningly unattractive and pathological person ever emitted by popular culture and Hollywood.

We are soothed on the days when our media feeds us only thick streams of pap concerning grisly murders of obscure women by their husbands, the latest fornication festivals of the lightly talented in music and the cinema, and estimates of how long a woman famous for fingerbowls will spend in jail. We are relieved because the media's relentless focus on the tripe and detritus of our culture tells us that the day of the sacrifice is not this day.

And so we dream on. We imagine that the cliff is not really directly in our path, believing on some persistent level that merrily, merrily our life is but a dream, rather than a somnambulant march through the gates of history that is all too real and, for as yet unknown thousands of us, all too lethal.

But this world is not a dream and our awakening will be into nightmare.

Although we would pray the nightmare will dissolve into the dawn, we will not be spared it. And since we will not be spared, we must begin to prepare. To do so we need a clearer understanding of what will happen to us, and what we will do to the world and our nation in the days and years that come after.

Let us then try to wake for a brief instant to see what we might see and hear what we might hear when our screams finally shake us from this sleep.

"Either way it will be a close-run thing..."

While I knew we would slumber again, I did not foresee we would, in our deepening drowse, begin sleepwalking towards the precipice, driven like some blinded herd by the outriders of hate, while lulled by those among us that were motivated only by their ambition to restore, their abiding nostalgia for, a world lost forever in New York on the morning of September 11. Yet here we are, ambling towards that cliff.

Though the edge of the precipice looms ahead, we can also see, beyond a gap of unknown width, a far side that promises safety and a road that leads on to the uplands. It is not known if the crevasse can be bridged in time; if the whole enterprise will be forced to leap and gain the other side or, falling short, plunge down to a place where death would again draft millions into its legions as it had done so efficiently in the 20th century.

Either way, it will be a "close run thing." Either way, death will demand his tithe. In our slumbering summer of 2004, it is only a question of how many and when.

It is not, as it was in the summer of 2001, a pleasant sleep for us. It is a troubled, somnambulistic, half-waking state that holds us. From within the trance some of us see the world about us as some landscape by Hieronymus Bosch passed through a Photoshop video filter in all its stark, mad and burning fury.

Others see, dimly, the
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Still others perceive, in their mutually shared hallucinations, that the present President is cojoined Hitler and Antichrist, that his continued rule means the final end of their century long experiment with advancing the mass over the man. To reverse the clock, they will stop at nothing, even if it means the death of the nation, in order to advance the nations they worship as "united." They see themselves as "citizens of the world" even though large swathes of the world are dedicated to their death and the death of their treasured 'lifestyles' above all else.

Their counterparts in the current administration who possess the actual legitimacy of government, seek to sooth our fears and to "manage" the nightmare with money, calibrated risk, and careful diplomacy. They are the people of process and, as before, their half-measures only doom us. If 3,000 murdered citizens did not instill in them a lasting and steely resolve, it is not known what 100,000 murder would achieve.

The Un-Elected, Self-Appointed Illegitimate Shadow Government

Others whose institutions are self-appointed, self-selected, unelected and utterly without legitimacy -- whose institutions are at best a gift of the founders and maintained by the people in exchange for truth and loyalty to the Republic that permits them to exist -- seek daily to sacrifice that Republic by turning away from truth, advancing appeasement, and discarding their loyalty in exchange for circulation, ratings, posh dinner parties with celebrities of dubious distinction, and sabbatical years in quaint European towns and villages.

All these factions in aggregate form but a small, if powerful, portion of the sleepwalkers. The rest of us, that in November will decide upon our direction,
see only distant, mildly disconcerting images:

A bomb blast far away with the faces of our young dead appearing for five seconds on one evening's news broadcast;

An aircraft interior of flag-draped coffins containing nobody that we know;

A strange, bearded Satanic Gandhi forever picking his way down a rocky slope;

A severed American head held by a hand and dangled, skittering, in the choppy stream of a Web broadcast.

These things trouble their sleep but do not wake them. Instead, they sleep on, shambling towards the cliff with us and, if they speak at all, it is to discuss and decide not the fate of their nation, but who should become the next American Idol.

The sleepers stumble on in their dumb show and the cliff draws ever nearer. Within the multitudes some have come awake and send up their alarms to little notice and less effect. At most they rouse only those nearby, but they are few, separated by large distances, and their echoed alarms are unheeded.

Soon it will be too late to stop before the edge is reached. There will be neither time nor space to turn away.

The one small chance remaining will lie in getting all of us to move together, to move faster towards the edge in the hope that most can leap the gap and land safely on the far side.

To do that, to gain enough speed, means that the sleepwalkers must be awakened -- but ours is a deep sleep, a drugged sleep, the sleep of the long peace. Mere voices raised in warning will avail us.

A flash as bright as the sun upon the earth...

What might wake us -- when we have finally dreamed too long and drifted too far to stop or to turn aside -- is a flash as bright as the sun on earth, a sound louder and deeper than any thunder ever heard upon the land, and the screams of many thousands of our countrymen dying. And this time not just our men and our women at work or unlucky in the air, but many of our children as well. What might wake us is coming down, by the day, to the worst thing; an act of human sacrifice performed upon us by our enemies -- the murder of one of our cities.

That our enemies are preparing such a sacrifice has long been known. That they will, if left intact and undisturbed, murder one of our cities is a fact; a fact many of us prefer to obscure from the rest of us for reasons that cannot be comprehended.

The myths told to us by our illegitimate media government are just that, myths; are worse than that, lies. Lies that will kill thousands of us in our beds, at our desks, in our schools, parks, and playgrounds. All these things are known and yet we must, we are told, hesitate, denounce aggression and offer ourselves up meekly.

Why? Because although we know this will happen we do not know the how, the where or the when. We only know the what and the why and the who. This is, according to our unelected and illegitimate government of opinion, reason enough to do little or nothing. For this self-appointed and monolithic media government does not seek for our safety, but for our story, and for that they must wait for the how, where, when.

To the self-selected media monolith existing outside of any form of national loyalty while reaping the benefits of our Constitution, the opportunity to cover the death of one of our cities is more compelling than letting it live. And they believe that, in the wake of this disaster and the disasters that follow after, their magic media shield will save them from retribution; that the people will always see them as guardians and never as traitors. For, in advance of the death of the city, none of what they do will be seen as treason. Still there will be the aftermath when many of today's sunny social standards will be swept aside.

Not on the day of our city's death, but on the day after...

It is not known is which city will be murdered, nor when and how it will be killed. It is not known is whether even the death of a city will rouse the deeper sleepers, although it is widely believed that it will. Beyond that another, even darker unknown awaits us. What will happen across the world should such a shock awake us all at once, not on the day of our city's death but on the day after -- and the days to come after the day after?

During the long cold war, both sides had the power to destroy many of the world's cities many times over, but the day for that never arrived. It was, during those years, our policy to never be the first to strike at our enemy's cities, but only to promise an overwhelming response. This "no first strike' policy is still, if not our present posture, at least our historic default. But when we have our city killed, then we will find our nation in the position of being the one who was struck first. Policy, politics and the people will then line up behind the option of the overwhelming response. The selection of targets will not be ruled by our present leaders habit of daintiness, but by a nation awakened into a state of readiness and willingness for total war. Of this we dare not speak, even though we know the plans are made and the target co-ordinates already given.

"We are here. Akaba is there. It is only a matter of going."
-- Lawrence of Arabia

Several years ago we came awake briefly as 3,000 of us were slaughtered at our desks on a bright September morning. For some time after we were united in our horror, mourning and anger. For almost 18 months we stayed awake enough to roll back some of the gains we had freely given our mortal enemies during the long peace. For awhile we prevailed even if we could never quite reconcile ourselves and our image of ourselves with the sterner measures necessary to eradicate the enemy.

Their Ancient Intellectual Insanity

As the fresh horror faded and the images of the burning towers were no longer allowed to remind us, many among us reverted to their ancient intellectual insanity.

They proclaimed that the enemy who had sworn to destroy them root and branch was not an enemy at all, but only a misunderstood and oppressed people that, offered love, understanding, compassion, tolerance and control of the world's oil supply, would consent to kill no more and retire quietly to some distant picturesque desert -- an indigenous people pursuing the colorful old ways.

This faction among us grew and came to believe -- had never ceased to believe -- that our enemy had a value worth preserving even if it meant our own destruction. They believed that respecting their lands (Where the black stone that commanded them to conquer the world in the name of their psychopathic god was kept beneath a black cloth and asking only to be kissed by each the faithful once in a lifetime.), that respecting and leaving their lands would render them harmless to others and themselves.

It mattered not that the enemy told them, in escalating words and deeds across decades, that his goal was to convert and kill them all. They heard this as saying he only wanted to be left alone. He gave them death by fire and decapitation and they responded with "What is wrong with peace, love and understanding?"

This bankrupt mantra, or one of its infinite variations, is now repeated and repeated from multiple sources without and within the mass of the sleepwalkers until many actually begin to believe its soothing promise and drift back into their trance of "if only..." and "What can we give them to make them leave us alone?" Indeed, they sleep with us, but their sleep is even deeper and it is a drugged sleep.

The preparations for the sacrifice continue...

Meanwhile, the enemy's preparations for the sacrifice of our designated city continue with only minimal disruption and delay. All eyes and forces are trained abroad since few can muster the courage to look about them here at home. All believe that the sacrifice will happen, but most cannot bear to contemplate it. An evil few among us even actively look forward to it as a final proof of the corruption of this nation that has nurtured within them the freedom to despise it. Why those among us that hate what we are do so is not really knowable, nor need we be concerned for the pathological. Perhaps they believe that they will, should our enemies prevail, gain some sort of prestige or power. While it is much more likely that they would be the first to be put to the sword, they will not be a factor in what is to come. After the killing of the city, what they are will become, at last, clear to the rest of us. This summer it is, it would seem, both profitable and popular to be a quisling. It will not be so on the day after.

Our enemies' instruments of war that will be used to kill our city are either already hidden on our shores, or stored within one of the surviving nations hostile to our existence awaiting transshipment to the target. The specific nation that creates these instruments of our destruction may not be known, but the group of nations is.

Our enemies' programs to purchase or manufacture other weapons of mass destruction continue around the globe at an ever faster pace, hidden behind a screen of the usual international commissions, and a bodyguard of fresh denials heaped on the mountain of yesterday's lies. The authors of these denials and lies are also known.

Our enemies' dispersed cells of suicidal agents continue to thrive within our cities, protected and sheltered by their relatives, neighbors and fellow travelers that we have graciously assumed to be "moderate" and "loyal." They move among us, clad in their false histories, secure in the knowledge that our own institutionalized rules of decency decree that having the appearance of a suspect group is the surest protection against being suspect. But this is a but a temporary quirk of our society and subject to rapid revision.

Our enemies' efforts to recruit from within our criminal and pyschotic classes increase as his chief organizing tool, his "religion," is welcomed into our prisons, and allowed to flourish as a means of keeping those prisons quiet. And it does, as any place in which men undertake the serious study and planning of wholesale death becomes quiet.

All these things we know. All these things we see. That one of our cities will die we accept. None of these things awaken us. In this deepening night we have made a dark bargain with ourselves to let a city die. All we are doing now is waiting on the day.

Next: The Sacrifice

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Posted by Vanderleun at October 22, 2004 6:52 AM | TrackBack
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