The Ten Humilities, or Kill What Thou Wilt

by (jk)

If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.
—Shylock

But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my
sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without
meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something
that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and
suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature,
like a treasure in a field, is Humility.
—Wilde, De Profundis

First is what people are.

It is difficult to say what people are, in any objective way. You can point to what they're made of, say certain chemicals and of those mainly a jug of water, but that's not too helpful, is it? You can point to how people seem very much related to other creatures about whose natures you also remain almost utterly ignorant (though you might claim that you've pretty well grasped their instincts, well enough to herd them and eat them). It's not even helpful to ask people what they themselves think they are, since almost nobody wastes his time in this short life trying to figure out such an obviously difficult, and questionably profitable, puzzle. So, short of ever really figuring out what people are, we employ a highly effective, though clearly arbitrary, method of determining this.

We label people.

This fellow is Chinese—that woman is a Jew—those children are Baptists—that bunch there, by the gods!, are homosexuals AND atheists!

Now, I said this method of determining the what of people is highly effective, and certainly many effects come from its employment. For example, if you're labeled something by a group of people for whom the label is seen as a virtuous thing—"Christian" by other Christians let's say—you can realize all kinds of wonderful benefits by acquiring this tag, or even promoting it for yourself as a kind of ad or flag.

On the other hand, if you are labeled (or choose to adopt a label for yourself) that isn't much liked by a group of people, especially by a group of people in close proximity to you and with ready access to weapons, you'd better consider moving on to safer places, or you'd better quickly get yourself on over to a gathering of people tagged or flagged the same as yourself. Now, why do these effects happen? Are they intrinsically tied to the labels, so if you get the label you automatically become eligible to receive the effect?

Or is it rather that people have attitudes about the labels, originating in some complex of feelings about significations, and that these are transferred to whomever is viewed by the person with the attitude as being qualified to bear that label. In other words, is it a hateful thing that makes us label people (and everything else in the world), or is it simply our trying to be accurate and orderly, and our wanting each product on the shelf to be correctly marked—and labeled?

Whatever the answer may be about this, we often find that a wealth, and horror, of justifications for our next humility follow from the first one, for once we've determined what kind of label we're dealing with, we are called upon by some autonomic process to do something about it. And so...
Second is what people do.

Now, most people in our time figure what you are is unalterably connected to what you do. Or that is, to the degree a person has a choice in the selection of his label, and its various ornaments, a key selection he will make, which will impart considerable meaning to the label telling us what he is, will be what he does. In addition, much that is done is performed BECAUSE OF labels that others bear, or that we bear, and which instruct us in our behavior towards them, again all automatically and without much or any consideration for the possibility of their being something other than, or especially opposite than, the label and its assuredly legitimate demands. And what is curious about this process is that one kind of label, one diligently nurtured over a long period of time, can be wiped out utterly by a single act of doing, and a person can end up labeled something else entirely, and his former label (and any doings he had done in support of it) forgotten and rendered invalid.

For example, a loyal employee, a hard worker, and many other pieces of the complex label—good person—can suddenly, and usually to the claimed complete surprise of his close associates and family, pick up a weapon and start whacking down everyone in sight and range, and just as suddenly his goodness, previously believed unquestionable, is extinguished. His evil is established for all future reference. He will from that time onward be a murderer, a mass murderer at that, and so no matter what good thing he does from then on, it can only be in recompense for this single, but absolutely determinative act, where his former life in essence lost all its meaning and effectiveness. In fact, what we choose to believe is that the murderer's previous deeds, done back when we thought he was good, were simply a con, performed by a murderer in the making, and so whatever virtues we may have previously thought applicable to his supposedly good acts have got to be seen as apparent only and a mask of a true evil nature.

Similarly, by accusation alone, one can go through such a process, and when a story of one's evil is created by accusers and prosecutors and persecutors, and when such a story comes to be generally believed, even to the extent that one is convicted and sent away to prison, then if the day should come that one's innocence is clearly demonstrated, this error of justice will not change most people's minds about there being something in the accused's nature that led him to be considered as most likely culpable. One's former label of goodness will never be retrieved, and he will always be thought to be that person whose nature and deeds brought him, however unfortunately, to be cast into the repository of reprobates. If nothing else, once people reach a certain conviction about who you are, on the basis of what you are believed to have done, they certainly consider your behavior at the least unfriendly, and at the worst, quite sinister, if you later on demonstrate to them that they've made an unforgivable error in your regard. For no one likes people who not only expect an apology from them, but who actually deserve one—and who won't owe anyone any forgiveness in return for it.

Third is what people can reasonably be said to be because of what they do.

So, we label people to determine what they are, and one of the key ways we do this is by labeling people according to what they do. We assume by this that the external actions of people are somehow reflective of an inner truth concerning their being. Sometimes of course we believe that the external actions may not merely reflect a person's being but may conform it to the external works they perform. The unreflective person may simply and even nobly be precisely what he does, and what he is labeled. But, are these readings of ours reasonable? Are they projections (of ours) more than reflections (of theirs)? What can we reasonably say about people on the basis of what they do? Is reason even helpful in this regard? Or are we always and only talking about emotional content when it comes to saying anything about the nature and meaning of what people do?

Let's say a person does what most people consider a horrible thing—eating babies on a bun for example. Most people would agree this could only be the act of a deranged lunatic, or perhaps someone actually and purely evil. Certainly, the judgment about such a person would be that he needed to be removed from free association with others and either imprisoned or otherwise confined for the wellbeing of the community. But, if devouring young children is such a terrible thing, a monstrous thing, a thing almost no one would argue could possibly be the act of a sane or a good person, what about roasting children alive, blowing them to pieces with land mines, spraying toxic chemicals on children, all to pursue international political interests that you, as a taxpayer, support? And don't ask who am I talking about—you know damned well who I'm talking about—the United States of America (in other words, YOU if you're an American), which has done all those things to children all over the world. But, you say, you don't really choose to do anything bad to children, they simply become victims of their evil regimes which won't bow down to our imperial will. Sure, that must be the explanation for how you're not an evil monster, and not just like the insane person who eats babies on a bun—that's the ticket. It's the children's bad luck to be in your righteous way. That's all. Like I said, reason doesn't necessarily help much in making these determinations. But hey, you're not such a bad-looking monster, and you certainly look very well fed.

Fourth is what people will be said to be because of what they do—no matter whether it's reasonable to say these things about them or not.

In the end, for most people, it is the fear of what others might say about them that holds them back from action. It is the fear of a deeper kind of humiliation than that they suffer each day by being one of the myriad props of the play. For if this foam stone or this paper shrub were to obtain a spine, rise up and become a real man or woman, fully capable of acting in accord with what he or she viewed as the just and right thing to do, what terrible consequences might ensue? As people age, their experience combined with the fact that they continue to become older than more and more people tends to make them bolder, more assured that they might be able to act without too much fear of being exposed to the deeper kind of humiliation. They come to feel they know their way in the world, and that they know what should be done in it. Sometimes they find themselves in accord with how things are being done and in those times a person is at peace with his world. In other times a person finds himself in conflict with how things are being done and in those times a person is faced with the decision to be a prop, or to go to WAR!

But what justification is there ever for going to war? For what we do when we go to war is to label people—"enemy"—no matter whether it is reasonable to say this about them or not. For a Christian, or one who claims to be a Christian, to do such a thing is quite simply anathema—which means a thing consecrated to evil. If in fact a Christian locates an enemy in the world, one who opposes his will, or that of God, Jesus is very clear about what the Christian is supposed to do: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, LOVE YOUR ENEMIES, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." Fortunately, for foam stones and paper shrubs, few people in the United States are actually Christians, or have ever read their Bibles.

But you say—you're NOT a Christian, just like most people are not Christians, in fact you're an atheist—no god commands you for there is no god—why can't you love war!

Obviously, you can love war if you're an atheist. But the more interesting point is that atheists can also despise war, and often they will see it as a function of the mortal illness of the theocratic domination of the world. So, for example, you get atheist (or anti-theist) Mark Twain's famous (but of course seldom read) "To the Person Sitting in Darkness", in which Twain suggested a redesign of the flag of the United States to one better signifying our increasingly imperial behavior in the world: "We can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones." As the United States prepares to conquer Iraq (once and for all the props hope), one wonders what would happen to Twain today, should he be around to make this same suggestion.
jk's version of Mark Twain's United States Imperial Flag

Now, you can say that there's a big difference between Saddam "Hitler" Hussein, who B41 left in power after justifying attacking him by calling him the H-word, and poor brave Philippines, which the United States so thoroughly fucked in the ass that the Japanese couldn't believe, maybe to this very day, they didn't welcome Japan as a liberator in WWII. Twain's complaint a century ago is however apt in the present situation. The problem, as he saw it, was that the US wasn't behaving according to its national and natural inclinations, but was acting like a European colonial power—a pirate nation in other words. Of course if the US truly had no natural piratical inclinations, there would be no United States of America, a nation built on the European virtues of piracy. So Twain's remarks were meant to only tug a little on the reins of the charging imperial warhorse, not to altogether put it out to pasture—or send it to the glue factory.

When Aleister Crowley wrote The Book of the Law, he claimed a new spiritual sheriff was in town, one that didn't go for that peace and love shit of the Christians, but who was more a war and hate kind of guy. Now, he claimed this god, who Crowley decided to call Horus, Egyptianizing his pout, would gradually make his way known in the world. Soon, nations would war against one another for sport, the blood of the sacrificed would run in Nile-sized rivers in every land, the flames of war would sweep away whole nations, as if they were vast patches of woodland blackened to ashes in the wake of a great cleansing forest fire. People would understand an Age had ended and another, more exuberantly violent one, had begun. Yet, if one examines the behavior of that great Western empire, whose proximity to Hell revolted and enchanted even Crowley, one can see that Horus (or whatever the demon's name may be) has always been in charge in the United States of Antagonism, where war is worshipped to a degree unknown since the time of ancient Rome. Those paltry and hamfisted pretenders to America's throne, Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, were obviously mere amateurs, managing to inflict as many horrible defeats upon themselves as glorious victories. And the poor, hapless Soviet Union couldn't even pay or feed its soldiers at the end of America's icy blast of war against them. Odd, the Russians frozen by somebody else's frigid flatus! No, the great and horrible beneficiary of the carnival carnage of the past 100 years, the nation that has pledged its very soul to the worship of Crowley's god of war, and which (nearly) has gained the world in return for its loyal devotion, is the United States of America—not the Ayatollah's Great Satan—but the Baphomet's Great Horus!

And what does this mean? Yes, you've got it! What this means, unbelievably but true nevertheless, is that George "Dubya" Bush is the true outer head of the Ordo Pee-Pee Orientis, the high priest of Thelema, the mindless (and perhaps brainless) conduit for the Aeonic Apocalypse, the Vannic turner of the Dharmic Letters!

So, next time you think to yourself—Jesus, how can this stupid motherfucker be running our country!?—just remember, he's not merely the people's choice (or the Supreme Court's anyway), but he's Horus' boy as well.

So show some respect, asshole.

Fifth is how much pain inflicted can be exchanged for entertainment experienced by saying things about what others are—no matter whether it's reasonable to say these things about them or not.

"Everyone else there will be standing around while their ashes fall off."

If war couldn't be packaged and programmed, there probably wouldn't be much of it—not these days when arms sales go with the promise of free ads for the armsmakers supplied by the 24-7 Ministries of Truth. Televised misfortune, reality television, is now the great staple of the world's entertainment diet. And war is the best reality television there ever could be (short of the Second Coming, which probably wouldn't pull as well as the best wars, but would do OK—well, unless it was up against a Super Bowl or something). Once the propagandists get going, extending the military gambit by shaping and revealing the "enemy", the heroes, the theater of the glorious victory, then the table is set, the mouths start watering and nobody is going to disappoint that ravenous multitude.

In the years preceding this present spate of American imperializing, the US had gradually developed an appetite for something called "reality television", the reality being that you could watch "real people", not actors (usually), going through circumstances by choice that most people would hope would never happen to them by any possible twist of cruel fate. But the national appetite for consuming other people's humiliation grew and grew in the last years of the 1990s and into the new century. All this prepared an audience very ready to interpret warfare and carnage and slaughter—not to mention rape, pillage, and plunder—as good, wholesome, American entertainment. The American sense of humor has always tended toward the savage side of course. Our most popular comics are the ones with an "edge", preferably one which cuts somebody's jugular. We don't even mind if we get sprayed with a little of the blood—after all, we like souvenirs. Political campaigns often use caustic, even offensive, humor to negatively portray opponents and this bashing works, because the truth is Americans would rather watch a good train wreck than a political debate any day. If you can combine the two, then we get our civics lesson fortified with a yummy coating of sadistic voyeurism.

The first Gulf War was the sea change, bringing an "all war, all the time" live apocalypse to a global audience. We got to watch in real time while Israeli families struggled into their gas masks, huddled around their own television hearths, watching and waiting for Saddam's Scuds to bring Auschwitz to Israel. To call it surreal hardly did it justice. But, if you had a heart at all, and particularly if you had any historical consciousness at all, you felt you were right there with them, waiting for the Scuds, waiting with the Jews—to be gassed again! And you could hear the entertainment execs back in the US collectively exult—"What great television!"

By the mid-90's the packaging of catastrophe was becoming the main purpose and main audience-grabber for the news media, particularly the cable news outlets. All their other activities, their feigned interest in political campaigns, their increasing obsession with the Wall Street boom and eventual bust, their endless search for the OJ-transcending scandal (thank you Monica Lewinsky!), was merely ornamental cover for their main purpose—reporting the signs of the approaching Apocalypse. And this was not just about documenting the literally prophetic relevance of some weird Biblical book, but had become far better than that could ever hope to be—Apocalypse had become the best and most important genre in entertainment programming. Americans lusted for something, anything, horrible to happen in their dreary lives of monotonous comfort. While bad things certainly were happening out there to lots of people, nothing bad at all was happening to most Americans most of the time, to the point where they began to believe things might actually be getting "better"—for real. In fact, most young people (especially the poor dotcom-bubble children) couldn't recall when things had actually ever been bad.—it was as if they had gotten on a rocket ship, headed for a distant planet called Plenty, with its six gleaming moons of Excess, and were leaving poor Earth and its vast poor dregs far behind. But these pioneers of profusion still needed and demanded to hear those glorious stories of old, those hoary tales of human suffering which validated their salvation through the heaven's gate of crapulence.

Show us the true meaning of our salvation! Americans pleaded. Show us what we're missing being so god-damned comfortable and boring!

And the Ministry of Truth responded with—REALITY! And reality looked so bad most of the time, even in the game shows, such as "Survivor", built on the scripted reality of pretty vacants vying for chief viper, that people felt comforted, spiritually, by that cathartic claptrap. SEEE—we COULD be on some tiny island with a bunch of other yuppie goons all whining about only collecting the per diem for our fucking televised vacation while waiting to be permanently Warholed as the stupid jackass who voted to keep the person most likely to beat him in the final vote for the million dollars! (stupid Colby moron!!) But instead, we're safe at home, WATCHING the reality, in our endlessly unhumiliating fatuous fortress.

Again, reason need not apply. But reasons did anyway.

And when the boxcutter boys came a'knockin', the reason our knees so easily went as limp as our fortresses was that we just couldn't fucking believe the nerve of the world to fly all the way out here to our outer-space haven to try to program ITS bloody horror show in place of our own sweet shit. But you see, it's a ratings game, and a democratic thing, and the bar got lowered all the way back down into the dust so that ALL the groundlings can get in to listen and fart and toss their chestnuts at the players.

London's burning. And Strummer's ashes.

"I'm So Bored With the U-S-A—but what can I do?"

That's the question, Joe.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Now, we approach enlightenment—
via the three Realizations


Sixth is the great realization that judging the shortcomings of others is in fact the reason we have been placed on this Earth, no matter that the Bible claims that job is reserved for some obviously distant or non-existent deity.

Again, it is useful to note a consistent inconsistency: Christians are told that judgment of sin, or people's salvageability, is up to God alone. Humans possess neither the critical mastery, nor the omniscient wisdom, nor the bottomless compassion, nor the sinless nature, to make good judgments (and pass just sentences) concerning the essential worth of other human beings. The Bible says in this respect: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

It is easy for most people to believe they can readily see the mote, or even the beam, in the eye of someone like Saddam Hussein. It is not so easy, nor is it even usually thinkable, to suggest we should first turn our critical eye to our own considerable defects, face them honestly, and attempt to fix them, before offering our "healing" services to others. That is particularly true when our idea of treatment so often violates the most important directive to healers: "First, do no harm." If we treated our own people as badly as we regularly do those of other nations, we would in short order be engaged in another civil war. In fact, in many people's view, that we've not already found ourselves at each other's throats again in a domestic bloodbath is a sign of either amazing forbearance or terminal decadence on the part of the American people.

But let us look at these matters in a different way. What if in fact what we're doing in the world, to the world and its peoples, is precisely why we have been placed upon the Earth and have been given the immense power we possess. For example, the Bible Apocalyptically prophecies: "And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea [looking west from Palestine, so Rome rising up out of the Mediterranean Sea, or further west than that perhaps, a much greater beast from a much greater sea and another Aeon]...and the dragon [chief Aeonic demon, variably named, but "Devil" will do] gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority...And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies...And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations...And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him...".

And while Aleister Crowley identified himself with this very same beast, hoping no doubt for just that sort of abominable success in the world, he also pointed to the problem of those who would resist the command and the word of Horus' Law (of Change): "O my Son, know this concerning the Black Brothers, that cry: I am I. This is Falsity and Delusion, for the Law endureth not Exception. So then these Brethren are not Apart, as they Think; but are peculiar Combinations of Nature in Her Variety. Rejoice then even in the Contemplation of these, for they are proper to Perfection, and Adornments of Beauty, like a Mole upon the Cheek of a Woman."

Our problem is that we are being asked to call a peculiar Combination an "Adornment of Beauty" which however is like a cheek buried beneath the mole of a monster. Apocalypticals aside, the Black Brothers (those who worship the eternity of their own dense dark stars) are the beasts running this ghost ship of state straight into the ravenous reefs of Falsity and Delusion. And it is no Beautiful thing, but rather a complex of crimes against humanity. The point is that whether or not our dark stars amplify the beauty of a demoness, or express the true natures of monsters, they have to be explained for what they are—corruptions of our better natures.

Iraqi demon the United States will exterminate—with your blessings!
It is then obviously only a providential intervention that offers us such a brilliant validation for this corruption, that the cheeks we have been given to stain and destroy are born also to this end, both serving the Seventh Realization of community (entertainment), and the Eighth Realization of Dharmic Adjustment. And when those sweet babies melt in your mouth, when their blood streams from your twisted lips, you will praise the Devil to the depths of the Pit for making you one of his chained Imperial imps.

Seventh is the greater realization that executing our judgments upon others by way of fashioning our opinions about them into voodoo dolls that can be fed to soul-gobbling gossip is clearly the highest form of expression of our purpose for being placed on this Earth—short of getting to personally give the guilty the "juice" of course.

After judging, which is of course a direct function and consequence of labeling, then we must ACT, and fulfill the doing which follows from our judgment and labeling of the defendant—or victim. Of course, as noted above, most of us are far too fearful to actually do anything about this at all. We instead contribute to a huge fund that is used to hire actors to play these roles for us, while we sit huddled in our nests, immune to the cries of agony from our growing list of the "need-to-be-removeds", housed as they are in places less accessible or visible than Area 51. And there our hired high priests of execution regularly carry out our collective Will to Kill in stone and steel temples replicated all over the United States, and also on planets far far away from us where death and destruction is, we are told, something the diminishing populations of those lands have come to expect (almost gratefully) anyway.

So, our masters tell us, we shouldn't worry our pointed little heads about things which don't concern us—but should just keep working, keep paying, keep investing, keep that tape and plastic handy for when you might need to escape to the "safe" room. Huh? What do you mean oh great hired hierophants?! Safe rooms? Aren't we safe in any room in our nests? Nope, you see, one thing they didn't tell you, or you didn't bother to read in the fine print of your contract with Horus-Satan, but there are these little things in the Cosmos called "Adjustments". And right now our conduct in the world is reaping the beginning of a tidal wave of those terrifying little tricks of Nature. This problem, the narrow-mindedness of vision, oddly comes from the very roots of our real religion—Thelema. Unfortunately, Aleister Crowley, not exactly the best-secured cannon on deck (even on his own ship) at any time, had a peculiarly but also erroneously Thelemic view of how the game was supposed to be played. The way he figured it, you just went forth and did your will in the world, waited for the world to will back at you, and wherever you ended up was the way it was supposed to be. So, for example, he didn't think much of protecting "weaklings" from diseases, and thought vaccinations against things like smallpox were counter to the laws of Nature and to the Law of Horus. As he said: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, biologically as well as in every other way. Let us take an example. I am an antivaccinationist in a sense which every other antivaccinationist would repudiate. I admit that vaccination protects from small-pox. But I should like everybody to have small-pox. The weak would die; the strong might have pitted faces; but the race would become immune to the disease in a few generations."

Well, nobody (including himself) ever seriously accused Aleister Crowley of being scientific. Smallpox had been around for a long time before vaccinations were created (and widely used) to prevent it, and it had been regularly killing millions of humans and "the race" hadn't gotten immune to it. He left out an important point in that Philistine (or Nazi-tine) bit of compassionless crackpottery: the small-pox gets to evolve too, ESPECIALLY if we perform a bit of magick on it and make it evolve in ways that will completely circumvent any "natural" course of our attempting to strengthen the "race" against it. Nothing works quite so well we discover as a slightly altered form of a terrible disease everyone thought had been eradicated by "immunity", or even the same old disease unleashed as a weapon against a no-longer-immunized crop of the supposedly "strong". In other words, oddly Crowley seems to have forgotten about that most important practical consideration in his Law, the underlying dynamic of Adjustment. And similarly, we in the United States, Thelema's greatest modern devotees, have forgotten that "the enemy" gets to evolve too—and gets to weaponize things whose terrifying capabilities to "strengthen our race" we can only imagine (so far anyway).

Of course, in another way of viewing things, we have been, and continue to be, in league with Crowley's lousy logic on this matter. For, realizing the terrible threat that smallpox unleashed into our country (and into the rest of the world—but who cares about that!?) poses, our masters have decided to ever so slowly begin to protect a tiny percentage of the population against the prospect of this one particular form of Adjustment. Perhaps it is the knowledge they must possess, and don't wish much talked about, that they can't possibly tank us up with enough vaccinations to ward off all the Adjustments our "enemies" have in store for us, that causes them to make only this token show of subverting Crowley's dictates.

It's very true that once we've weathered the storm of biological agents (we won't mention the chemical or nuclear stuff since it's unlikely we'll evolve fast enough to "strengthen" much against them), our "race", all two or three surviving members of it, should be tough enough to beat up on any old virus or bacteria that stupidly sticks its head up. And no doubt, by that time, our own program of "Adjustments" will have severely thinned out the population of the rest of the world too. What's left of us and them, if we and they are still so motivated to win whatever arguments are left to utter from the remaining dying mouths, can probably do so with a lot less trouble and treasure than we would have had to contemplate expending before this glorious strengthening of the race had been worked on us.

But THAT'S all about the Apocalyptic nature of what most of us CAN'T DO, since we've given up our right to directly Adjust things and expect our list of proxies to do it for us. What we can and assuredly WILL DO, even as our friends and loved ones are doing their damndest to strengthen the race by dropping like flies all around us, is to gossip. Every television, every keyboard, every mouth still fluttering, will blather to its neighbors about "the horror...the horror...". So synchronous will this chant become, so overwhelming (yet in an odd withering sort of way), that in the end, when the last doofus clicks on to FoxNews to be comforted by the state's propaganda concerning the latest "unforeseen tragedy", he will hear splitting that shrill quid nunc a distant but growing counter-chant and it will build in intensity in his head and then his heart until he will grab desperately at the remote to quell the soul-stripping roar, but as the screen goes blank, the sound will still be building, for it is not from these others, these prolicidal puppets, that this terrible chant originates, but from within our own deep fear and disgust with ourselves for being such enduring and obedient fools.

Only then will he clearly hear the racially strengthening counter-chant: "And Richard Cory put a bullet through his head."
Eighth is the greatest realization that the people upon whom we pass judgments actually deserve and desire that we do this for them, to free them of the illusion that they are worth something more than dirt or trash, to give them the opportunity to get quickly back to their sulfuric spawning grounds. A little or a lot of torture first is icing or gravy for these cakes of blight. They'll bless you for it as their breath is drawn in ever blackening buzzes of delight.

"Finally, the physical damage Osama and friends can do us—terrible as it has been thus far—is as nothing as to what he is doing to our liberties. Once alienated, an "unalienable right" is apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated."—Gore Vidal

The transcendent realization, that brings us to enlightenment, is that not only are we justified, in a divine way, by our judgments and our consequent acts of sweet cruelty, but we in fact serve our victims in the most unselfish and loving manner by this behavior. In the end, as Krishna says, everything gets flushed down the shitter together anyway, so why worry about the treks of individual pieces of corn? Grind 'em up, make 'em into your cakes of blight, throw in some sex sauce to harden your resolve, and send 'em back to Hell where they belong!

Tick-tock...tick-tock...tick-tock...

Ninth is what people were.

There is a moment which arrives for all collectives, all civilizations, all peoples, when they cease to be mainly about what they shall be, and they become mainly about what they have been. This is true for individuals as well. A life, a history, Aeons of labeling and doing and gossiping (sometimes elevated to the status of literature), leave a people not any longer at a crossroads, where a decision this way or that might make some difference in the world, or even to them as a people, but they find themselves with no longer anywhere else to go along a certain path. It's either turn back and be about reflecting (upon) "the way we were". Or it's sit down at a deadend and wait to die. There is of course another possibility, to turn back a bit (maybe to some pertinent roots), to see how we ended up at this dead end, and to see if there's another way out of here, other than the two ways of reverie and death. The most frightening aspect of these times is that nobody really has the time to backtrack in this life. While you're doing that, somebody else is going to your deadend, hacking his way through to the other side you didn't have the vitality to reach, and left you literally back in the past. It gets so bad sometimes nations and peoples spend centuries remembering past glories before they realize they are doing nothing more than living with the dead.

The United States has always been good at one thing—leaving history to the other guys. We don't know any history, we don't care about any history, we figure history is what happened to people who don't count for much anymore. And, after all, it's got nothing to do with us, we who are such virulently virile presentists. It doesn't matter, does it, what we did yesterday—the market demands "what can you do for me today?" And we're always expected to reply back with something sweeter and sexier than the fig we sold them yesterday. And they'll ALWAYS be there, wanting that sweet sexy fig, even though it's really a fig we took from their own backyard, sweetened and sexified in Chinese prison factories, and then resold to them at thrice the price—always nice for us, huh?

But, they're not THAT stupid. Not forever. And they, who have deadended once or twice themselves, remember things far better than we. They hold grudges for a very long time. And more and more of them more and more wish us deadended in the most terminal fashion.
Tenth is writing the history of the dead.

Thus, then, did they celebrate the funeral of Hector
tamer of horses.

What will you say to your grandchildren when they ask you what you did in the great war? "I shoveled shit on a computer terminal in Palo Alto—but I didn't cause any trouble."?

Of course you aren't going to have any grandchildren. Either you (and your children) will be long dead before that's an issue, or the state will have gladly taken over control of reproductive services so that our brave new world can be matrixed by highly efficient and happy workers and warriors. Nobody is going to care about what you did 30 or 40 years from now, are they? And you know it. So why bother? Why move from your comfortable, terminal indolence? Why risk losing—anything? Why take action, furious action, against the monsters who gobble up little children in your name? No good reason can be given to you to say why you should act, if that reason alone—of not staining yourself with more gobs of blood of the world's children—isn't sufficient to motivate your radical opposition against the injustices of your government. Any other reasons can only well up from within whatever remnant of human decency remains in a herd of tamed horses.

Much human effort has been spent writing the history of the dead. How much time and effort has been spent writing the history of the never-will-be-borns, the ones who might have had life, and perhaps even the liberty to live it as they saw fit, if we had not devoured their parents or their grandparents when they themselves were babies? How many futures do we murder every day? How many histories do we erase? How much joy do we rob from the world? How long do you think it shall be before the world come's calling upon us to ask for an accounting of the futures we owe to it? Indeed, has this accounting not already begun? This is not about ideology. It is about a deep debt of misery and blood the world owes us for the lives we've taken from it.

Why do they hate us so much? You answer your question by the fact you need to ask it.

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought
countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send
hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield
a prey to dogs and vultures

(jk)
©2003 by J. Karlin, all rights reserved