@alex_pearlmanYou ever google stuff to just get angrier?
“I can’t yell at the Republicans. You can’t shame them. You can’t convince them. You can’t trick them. You can’t fucking out-plan them. But Democrats? Stop pissing me off every hour with your fucking emails.”
Envision this.
WWII June 6, 1944
The Normandy Landings.
About to storm Utah Beach.And THIS is what's schniveling next to you in the landing craft…………..
This generation needs to get a grip..
Life isn't fair. Bust your ass or get left in the surf facedown. pic.twitter.com/dc3AnIYmXq
— The Bloodstone™ 🎸 (@BS2KZ) October 31, 2022
ITEM 9: Real Clear Politics now projects Republicans will keep every Senate seats they now have and will add seats from Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire for a 54-46 majority.
Washington D.C. to Legalize Public Urination | Why not? They’ve been drowning in it for years.
BIDEN: "That's what I call inflation. The end of the month. What you have left. You have no money. That's inflation. What's, what do you, the things you need. Are they going up? They are. They are." pic.twitter.com/XBIEG8l7YO
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 1, 2022
That’s the inherent futility of liberalism, in America, in a nutshell. Soft people who don’t know what they’re doing, pretending to know everything, seeking to impose their way of doing things on others who know what they’re doing. Softness trying to invade hardness. Every time it doesn’t work, and it never will, they get more and more grumpy and upset. Then they try to use their anger as an ancillary tool, to do the invading they’ve already learned they can’t do. Now you understand American politics. This is why we’re being told, with some legitimacy, every two years that “This election is the most important one of our lifetime.” It’s the liberals trying, once again, to invade the hardness with their softness, just like Sisyphus in the afterlife struggling to push his boulder up the mountain, only to see it roll back down again. That’s their struggle, and ours. It lacks even the faintest prospect of success, but they lack the understanding to realize this, so around and around we go. Their champion is a senile old man who doesn’t know where he is, who likes to eat ice cream.
How to defeat Propaganda Rags like the Arizona Repugnant:
1.) Delegitimize: Ignore them. Their words lose all power if no one reads them
2.) Defund: Cancel your subscription, stop any advertising
3.) Deface: Use leftover paper to line your dog’s kennel or bird cage, perhaps pic.twitter.com/LBFp3RdVLV
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) October 30, 2022
‘Bibi Is Back!’: Exit Polls Show Netanyahu With Majority Bloc in Israeli Elections
Playing sea soundscapes can summon thousands of baby oysters – and help regrow oyster reefs [continue reading…]
You can put that pandemic amnesty where the sun don’t shine. pic.twitter.com/NGIaMvLb5L
— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) November 1, 2022
Besides COVID, Here Are 43 Other Things Democrats Are Requesting Amnesty On |
This is all about how a song that dropped out of the email ether today came about and how it struck and stuck, coming in right on time, and picking up its cue perfectly. And this will be pretty much stream of consciousness because. [continue reading…]
The World as a Group of Fantasy Islands. A project off the coast of Dubai, 2012
“I wait for a sign to begin your work.” The voice died away. A wind had sprung up, gentle, bringing with it the sigh and whisper of leafy branches and grasses and a whiff of carrion from the dump up the road.
There was no sound but that brought on the breeze. The figure stood silent and thoughtful for a time. Then it stooped and stood with the figure of a child in his arms.
“I bring you this.”
It became unspeakable. — Salem’s Lot, Stephen King
“The unnamable vision always leads to the unspeakable crime.” — AD Commenter Gloria
In the past few decades, self-loathing has drenched many Americans of the Left and the CuckedRight. This self-loathing has reached its apotheosis in those “Americans” that love the hallucinogenic fantasy of an Islamic mosque at Ground Zero, a sanctuary California, a Hillary forcefully installed as Big Granny President for Life, a Bidenist White House Forever, and Donald Trump’s head on a stake over the main gate to DC. All so they can get back to sitting in their dark cave and watch their dream-world socialist vision screened on the back wall; a vision of a world that has always quickly become unspeakable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvI8YpNnysA
After the rise of Obama, the most anti-American American president in history, their perverted vision became rapturously anti-American. It is now self-evident what their “path to success” is in the minds of those who both embrace and live the progressive vision. It is a vision very much alive, kicking and in residence in the DNC, the Obama Vineyard mansions, the Clinton Crew’s Castles, the Petrified Groves of Academe, the Gender-Bending Bidenists, and the dark, Satanic propaganda mills of the media, news as well as globohomo advertisements and “entertainment”.
Millions of Americans, unknowing, uncaring, or not gulled by the Left cannot see this vision. This vision, as far as the masses are concerned, is unknown and unknowable. It is very much a secret.
It is “the vision that dare not speak its name.”
What is no secret is that classical liberalism, in the mold of FDR, JFK, and LBJ that reached its apotheosis in Hubert Humphrey, has long been consigned to the rag-and-bone shop of American politics. What has taken its place hates to be tarred with the brush of liberalism because, frankly, it isn’t. It prefers to be called “progressivism” even though “psychopathic and sociopathic political and social recidivism” more accurately describes it.
What now stands in the place once occupied by classical liberalism is a kind of perverted one-world idealism in which “the world as it is” is constantly measured against “the world as [we say] it should be.” Classic liberalism at least had the argument that it was being done for the greater good. The new perverted progressive liberalism variant is one in which policy and plans are made because it makes the initiators yearn to “feel good” in the manner that compulsive masturbators obsess over pony-girl fantasies implanted before puberty. Those that make and support these measures hold themselves in high regard, seeing each other as, in the French phrase popular when many of them were young, citoyens du monde, (citizens of the world).
Typically these citoyens du monde are people who have “gone beyond” nation-states in their own minds and, if they can afford it (and many can), in their personal lives as well.
These are people with access to enough money to afford private jets or enough money to pay the premium prices of a Tesla. Ten-dollar gas doesn’t even begin to slow them down. They do not dwell in the same nation as their fellow, less-fortunate citizens. Instead, they can afford to spend their time spreading a gospel whose high costs and marginal benefits are always carefully hidden from the middle of the middle class and those below. This is never seen by those spreading the progressive gospel to their poorer citizens as a kind of noblesse oblige, only as something that is “good for them.” They view themselves as like vegetable hamburger as Americans who are “Beyond American.”
Writ large we see this in grandiose projects like the Gates Foundation’s plan to “Save Africa.” Among the citoyens du monde, “Saving Africa” is a noble goal of distinguished lineage. For awhile it was all the rage for the citoyens du monde to jet over to Africa and collect a few African orphans for their home zoo in the Hollywood hills. Saving Africa has been around longer than Free Tibet. It’s been around forever and promises to continue in its need of saving for the duration of the millennium. Few can gainsay the deeply humanitarian impulse behind it, only the likely outcome of many more criminal Africans made millionaires that can leave that continent behind and buy ten-bedroom pied a terres in Paris thanks to the Gates Foundation.
On a smaller scale, we see thousands of continuing efforts to spread “correct thinking and correct behavior and correct belief” in the endless bullying of small organizations by larger “clear-headed” organizations such as the ACLU. For this once noble organization the ACLU has become all their way or the lawsuit highway; a kind of fiscal extortion racket modeled on the Southern Poverty Law Center and the deeper grifting of BLM.
The donations come in the ACLU front door and Christian Creches are thrown into the trash out the back. All done with a nudge and a wink to “the protection of liberty and diversity” at the same time that diversity of the “bad” kind is reduced. Like latter-day Leona Helmsleys, these visionaries are always at pains to “thank the little people” for letting them have it their way.
These erstwhile American citizens do not think of themselves as actual Americans (although they play them easily and glibly on TV), but as a new and better breed that only retains their “American” status for the clear and present benefits. Instead, they prefer to think of themselves as inhabiting a rarer, more personally fragrant realm of ideals that the rest of us do not see and cannot aspire to. It is a realm continually made more fragrant via Progressive flatulence such as that seen wafting out of any three minutes of “The View.”
This new and more wonderful world is the Holy Realm of The Church of the Planet; a religion whose crusade goes forward under the sign of The Gleaming Escutcheon of United Nations; not as the grotesque assemblage of thugs and thieves that it is, but as it should — in the perfect world to come — be. Indeed, nothing in this realm is ever seen as it is, but only as it should be.
There are no armies in this realm, only the zombie legions of NGOs without borders. There are no Popes or Saints, only the Gates, the Obamas, the Clintons, the Gores, the Bezos, and the Bidens, and those who can jet into the annual Green Vatican convocation at Davos. The sweet. The elite. These are the non-elected, self-appointed, and peer-selected Government of the Happy World who swap honors and awards as freely between themselves as participants in a Sexual Freedom League Fornication Festival.
In their own strangely perverse way the Green Golem Goblins of this realm, like those on the extreme lower end of the scale in imploding 3rd world countries, are still dependent on nation-states, particularly the United States, for charity and scarce resources. This need accounts for much of the funding of the United Nations, an organization whose thirst for the perfect world in the very near future (We promise) is exceeded only by its thirst for American money in the here and now. Dreams do not require food and protection, only the dreamers dreaming from their unshakable sleep; Dreamers safe in their pods like the endless ranks of the living dead seen by the awakened in The Matrix.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
— Shakespeare
Sundress Nationalism Ah yes. . . the sundress. That flowy, lightweight symbol of summertime that highlights curves and has pitched more tents than the Cabela’s catalog.
Ladies, I don’t think this is a secret. . . men love sundresses. It is our favorite item in your wardrobe.
So what’s the big deal, why do dudes go ape for sundresses? Well, according to noted sundress enthusiast, @bokoharambe: “The sundress is the perfect balance of sexy and cute. Covering more than enough for modesty, but showing your woman off enough to make sure your friends know how lucky you are.” Harambe adds that “the sundress is the perfect female article of clothing.”
I think our adoration for this warm-weather wrap goes a step beyond that, though. The sundress occupies a very special place in every boy’s mind. Most men can remember the time we first witnessed our crush roll up on the last day of school in an outfit that just. hit. different.
Cornflower blue with polka dots, cut above the knee and plunging below the neck further than we’d ever seen before, that frock made Suzy Sundress beam with confidence and seared a visage into our brains that we can never shake.
FROM THE EVERDEMENTED AND UNDERSUBSCIRBED FLAPPR
Soft-Center Dementocrats, Scary Movie, Sundresses and Shakespeare. All in one day. Where else can you find such a bizarre buffet? Nowhere. If you aren’t subscribing to The New American Digest you have to be a stage 5 Democrat and I cannot help you.
They’re soft. They hide behind each other.
We’re hard. There are consequences involved in our mistakes, so if we don’t know what we’re doing, we go get help. And then we figure out what we’re doing before we do anymore.
They pretend. They recite talking points they don’t really understand, like “Sure there was fraud, but not enough to change the results,” or “No human is illegal” or “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.”
We don’t pretend. We can’t. And we can’t compress the work we do into a slogan.
They don’t define…really, anything.
We have to define everything. If we don’t, someone gets hurt.
Big-city-center denizens who pretend to know what they’re doing when they really don’t, hiding behind others, can’t invade the prairie, orchard, or farmland. They may want to, but they’re not suited. It’s not because they’re stupid and we’re smart, or because they quit too easily and we’re stubborn. It’s the hard-and-soft thing, period, full stop. It would be talcum penetrating diamond. The softer material is going to have to yield. It’s physics. How do you argue with physics?
That’s the inherent futility of liberalism, in America, in a nutshell. Soft people who don’t know what they’re doing, pretending to know everything, seeking to impose their way of doing things on others who know what they’re doing. Softness trying to invade hardness. Every time it doesn’t work, and it never will, they get more and more grumpy and upset. Then they try to use their anger as an ancillary tool, to do the invading they’ve already learned they can’t do. Now you understand American politics. This is why we’re being told, with some legitimacy, every two years that “This election is the most important one of our lifetime.” It’s the liberals trying, once again, to invade the hardness with their softness, just like Sisyphus in the afterlife struggling to push his boulder up the mountain, only to see it roll back down again. That’s their struggle, and ours. It lacks even the faintest prospect of success, but they lack the understanding to realize this, so around and around we go.
Their champion is a senile old man who doesn’t know where he is, who likes to eat ice cream. Morgan @ House of Eratosthenes
“Safe in the living room of her Las Vegas, Nevada, home, Mrs. Jacqueline Buck and her son watch the mushrooming cloud from an atomic test blast some 75 miles away.”
EVIL DAZE: Last night I had a dream… Everyone that I knew… And everyone that you know was in my dream… I saw a vampire… I saw a ghost… Everybody scared me but you scared me the most… In the dream I had last night… — Randy Newman
Pelosi Attack Suspect Was A Psychotic Homeless Addict Estranged From His Pedophile Lover & Their Children DePape lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree.
A closer look reveals the characteristics of a homeless encampment, or what Europeans call “an open drug scene.” In the driveway, there is a broken-down camper van. On the street is a yellow school bus, which neighbors said DePape occasionally stayed in. Both are filled with garbage typical of such structures in homeless encampments. People come and go from the house and the vehicles, neighbors say, in part to partake in the use of a potent psychedelic drug, ibogaine.
Neighbors described DePape as a homeless addict with a politics that was, until recently, left-wing, but of secondary importance to his psychotic and paranoid behavior.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586693291231178753
“Sucks” and “great” are the only two ratings people even give to anything anymore.
“Hey, let’s go see that new movie. I heard it’s great.” “Really? I heard it sucked.” “How could it suck? It’s supposed to be great.” “I heard the beginning is great, and then after that, it sucks.” “Oh, that sucks.” “I know. It coulda been great.” I say that “sucks” and “great” are the exact same thing. You have an ice cream cone. Walking down the street, the ice cream falls off the top of the cone, hits the pavement. Sucks. What do you say? “Great.”– Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours To Kill (2020)
Puberty Blockers Suck My life after chemical & surgical castration has been so much more intense than I ever imagined. You think you can prepare yourself for the changes. You think that it sounds okay to be on hormone replacement. No big deal right? Until you realize you have signed up for a lifetime of this. The expense, the side effects, the constant upkeep and the unexpected serious issues that just seem to keep coming up. Our bodies were not meant to be stripped of our natal sex hormones.
I was unprepared for Jesus to have been sired by Andre the Giant https://t.co/XesSMdZiAx
— That asshole over there (@lawyerparodytx) October 27, 2022
Letter to Klaus Schwab I know how much you like playing super-villain, Klaus, but you’re really more of a mediocre-villain. C at best. Sorry to break it to you. No matter how hard I try, I can’t summon terror, rage, or even disgust when I behold your dopey, dull, doltish demeanor. The most I can muster is pity. And cringe. Lots and lots of cringe. Fawning over Henry Kissinger, for example. Like a tongue-tied seventh-grader crushing on a rock star backstage, you tumble over yer verds, a goofy smile frozen on your flushed face as you bat your eyelashes at your dreamy guru.
2020 Prediction by Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Was Correct – Republicans Are Being Hunted Down Since Biden Stole Election “The Silent Majority.” That’s the problem. They know which tactics to use and how to keep the majority silent. In “And Not A Shot Is Fired,” communist tactician Jan Kozak explains how to use the tactic of “Pressure From Above, Pressure From Below” (government pressure and orchestrated riots in the streets) to make a tiny minority appear to be the majority and taking over a country. Each member of the majority thinks, “I guess THEY are the majority and I’m really all alone. And oh, look how those who I do support are being beaten and jailed and killed. I’d better keep my mouth closed.”
MEMBERS GET THE FULL DOSE OF “EVIL DAZE” AT THE NEW AMERICAN DIGEST. THIS ONE’S FOR ALL MEMBERS, EVEN THE FREE MEMBERS. GET YOURS NOW.
¡oh noche que juntaste
amado con amada,
amada en el amado transformada!
Upon a darkened night
The flame of love was burning in my breast
And by a lantern bright
I fled my house while all in quiet rest
Shrouded by the night
And by the secret stair I quickly fled
The veil concealed my eyes
While all within lay quiet as the dead
Oh night, thou was my guide
Oh night more loving than the rising sun
Oh night that joined the lover to the beloved one
Transforming each of them into the other
Upon that misty night
In secrecy beyond such mortal sight
Without a guide or light
Than that which burned so deeply in my heart
That fire ’twas led me on
And shone more bright than of the midday sun
To where he waited still
It was a place where no one else could come
Within my pounding heart
Which kept itself entirely for him
He fell into his sleep
Beneath the cedars all my love I gave
And by the fortress walls
The wind would his hair against his brow
And with its smoothest hand
Caressed my every sense it would allow
I lost myself to him
And laid my face upon my lover’s breast
And care and grief grew dim
As in the morning’s mist became the light
There they dimmed amongst the lilies fair
There they dimmed amongst the lilies fair
There they dimmed amongst the lilies fair
[Composed 1577- 1579]
[The poem of St. John of the Cross narrates the journey of the soul to mystical union with God. The journey is called “The Dark Night” in part because darkness represents the fact that the destination—God—is unknowable, as in the 14th century, mystical classic The Cloud of Unknowing; both pieces are derived from the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the 6th century. Further, the path per se is unknowable. — La Wik]
[Sung by Loreena McKinnett] [continue reading…]
This and many others are made by Neal Foard. Why has nobody ever heard of HIM? Why does he have only 5,000 subscribers? Why does this video have only 536 views as of now?
That said, I love my subscribed members and wish I had more. Help make this dream come true.
Take us out for the weekend, Willie.
There’s a hell of a nice universe next door. Let’s go.”
For the first time in decades, the possibility of going to Mars has been brought forward and placed on the table for discussion and debate. Not only that, designs for Mars rockets have been drawn up and prototypes have been built and are nearing the launch phase.
I’ve been carrying on a conversation with a friend over the past few weeks about the immediate ramifications of Mars, The Going To. That and the larger issues that Mars illuminates. Those issues came to mind this morning when an email from the friend mentioned above said:
….if, indeed, life and intelligent life are as prevalent as we think they should be, why aren’t we (a) intercepting millions of alien broadcasts in the electromagnetic spectrum, and (b) positively inundated with alien landings?
One reason that is disturbing in a deep way is that we’re all wrong, and we’re all alone…What if, in all those billions of galaxies, we’re it?
Gives me the shivers.
….Look at us, mankind. We’ve been given the gift of intelligence, and the ability to expand our ecosystem out into space, where, with some significant but not insurmountable effort, we could spread like a proverbial virus.
“Oh heavens above,” I thought. All we need to do is figure out how to make a wheel within a wheel to take us away to the middle of the air.
But the Religion of Intelligent Life Is Everywhere (ILIE) requires proof that our Extraterrestrial Civilizations (ETC) exist and from that you get the High Church of SETI ( Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scanning the skies until their deep jungle telescope collapses.
All we need is one, just one, captured episode of some far-stars afternoon sitcom and we’ll know ILIE is the one true religion. It will show us that we are not, as mentioned above, a fluke of the universe; that we are not alone.
That said, I suspect that we are, indeed, alone. Or, if not exactly alone, alone enough that it makes no practical difference.
Many years ago I read a stirring beautiful book by Guy Murchie called The Seven Mysteries of Life. It is a complicated bit of scientific romanticism and I won’t go into it in detail. Besides I’m sure if I re-read it now it would seem antiquated, even quaint. But at some point in that book, Murchie began to take on the Googlenumber of stars – X stars = X Stars Supporting Intelligent Life proposition that forms the foundation for the ILIE Religion. Murchie’s Goldilocks argument removes stars from the board of life for being in the center of galaxies, being multiple, being too big, too small, too young, too old, too hot, too cold etcetera, etcetera, and turtles all the way down until almost none are just right. This gets you a much smaller number of stars with planets and then, through the application of other elements, makes that number smaller and smaller until you get to, well, the single planet on which we have found intelligent life, Earth. In sum, Murchie’s “countdown to one” is at least as compelling as the arguments for ILIE.
But they are both still religions and we are returned, just when we thought we’d escaped into the one true faith of ILIE, back to a situation of dueling faiths each playing a slightly different tune even if the underlying harmonic blends. But let’s boost the all-alone track for now and dampen the ILIE part of the mix. Let’s say that we are all alone and that Murchie’s argument is correct. After all, the all-aloners do have a planet to stand on. The others need at least two planets to get going.
If we are alone, if we are a fluke, then what we do will hardly matter to anything other than ourselves. Hence, we need to take responsibility for our actions as a race. If we are all that is we need to keep going — if only from the imperative that life must keep going even if it is to no purpose other than simple replication. To achieve continuity with any certainty we have to create, it seems to me, a second planet just as an insurance policy, a safe haven. This is, to my mind, the most cogent argument for Mars. Elon Musk seems to agree with me and though simple agreement is not proof of a proposition, I’ll side with Musk.
True yesterdaze. Mucho moor truer todaze.
Take a deep breath. We’re going cave diving into the Meme Sea.
Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in! pic.twitter.com/D68z4K2wq7
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2022
Trump just posted this pic.twitter.com/tu9SM72BOu
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 27, 2022
Johnny & Edgar Winter + Rick Derringer doing it southeast Texas style!
Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored
He was tryin’ to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61
Pull up a chair and sit a spell. Death’s in residence on my block
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die
To cease upon the midnight with no pain….
— Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Once upon a time, when Europe could be had at $5 a day, I found myself hitchhiking on the freezing plains of Spain just outside of Madrid. Car after car swept past me, the winds in their wake chilling me further. This was very disconcerting since I had with me my fail-safe ride generator, and a hot hippie girlfriend (Think a good-looking Janis Joplin.) My ride generator had never failed me before but on this day she was generating zero rides even though the traffic on the road was heavy. Then I noticed two things.
First, there seemed to be no trucks on the road. Second, the cars that huffed past us were filled to the gills with whole Spanish families bearing vast bouquets of flowers. And all those Spaniards looked, to the last, very grim.
After a few futile hours, we made our way — walking — a few kilometers down the road to a truck stop where, using my pidgin Spanish, the mystery of the ride drought was solved. It seemed that we were trying to get to Barcelona on one of the holiest days of the Spanish year — All Saints Day, or as we have it here in America, Halloween.
The Spanish tradition on this day is for the whole family to load up the car with flowers and other offerings and haul off to the local graveyard for a visit and picnic with the dearly departed. After that many go off to a traditional performance of Spain’s Faustian epic Don Juan Tenario in which the final act takes place in a cemetery. On this holy day in Spain, we had almost zero chance of getting a ride anywhere other than the local graveyard. Chastened, we made our way back to Madrid by bus and set out the next day with much better luck.
What remains in my memory from watching the parade of cars on that long-lost Spanish highway is just how dour and serious the Spanish were on their Halloween. They weren’t fooling around with death, but taking it at its word. They not only believed in death they also, in their prayers and rituals and their traditional play, believed that what you do in life determines how you will be treated in the afterlife. They had, at bottom, that adamantine belief that is the pearl beyond price of the Catholics. But even if you were to strip away the 2000 years of dogma, these people still had the one thing that more and more Americans lack at the core of their lives: a belief in something greater than themselves, a belief in something greater than man, greater than death.
Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.
— Dylan
In my neighborhood in Seattle, many don’t believe in anything sacred other than, at best, Obama. Their entire belief system centers on that tin god than on themselves and their “only one life to live, live, live!.” All of this makes for an empty skin sack of existential desolation that they try to fill every Halloween with the greatest of American secular concepts: fun.
“Fun” is a curiously American concept that seems to have begun its invasion of all aspects of our shared life shortly after the end of WWII. I suppose that after the Great Depression and the war, the nation felt it could use a little fun. And, as usual, that great American axiom, “If it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing,” came into play. Nowhere do we see the idea that life should be “fun” pumped up into bigger balloons of pure vanity than on Halloween.
From a minor tradition of sending kids out to pick up some free candy, Halloween has mushroomed into a major American auto-fornication festival in which we regularly — and with increasing intensity — celebrate the meat state of life while pretending to vaguely celebrate the spiritual part. If you’ve noted, as I have, the increasing lust for gruesomeness in costumes at every new Halloween, you might have reflected that dark humor has taken a back seat to darker fascinations. One new costume around this year allows you to dress us as a corpse in a body bag complete with wounds and autopsy slashes. And that’s a mild one.
Added on to costumes depicting violent death, mutilation, and the corruption of the grave, we have the increasing trend of freak show street events and private parties where this week’s perversion is served as bubbling punch; as a witch’s brew we are only too pleased, dressed as dregs, to drink to the dregs. In Seattle, of course, freak show street events and perversion parties are pretty much the order of the day, if not the daily spectacle on many blocks. But there’s something about Halloween that brings out the horror show of many inner lives like no other event. The only thing that saves us from seeing ghouls and goblins parading naked about the streets with their full-body tattoos and multiple genital piercings on display is the colder temperature, but there are clubs that specialize in that all about the city so you can see it if you wish.
It seems strange that a day for the contemplation of mortality has been turned into a carnival of corruption in this country, but perhaps not all that strange. I’d suggest that, as the country becomes more secular; as it ceases to believe in anything other than the here and now, the moment in the meat, it becomes increasingly terrified of the extinction of the self by death. It is one thing to profess a belief in the Great Nothingness, it is quite another to have to face it. The only weak weapon that can be raised up against it is its denial. . . .
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs
reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.
Gerard Van der Leun
Your Say