Closets and Caves

So there I was, minding my own business, reading my political blogs and not expecting anything particularly interesting because Bhutto's assassination has used up all the news oxygen, when I read this:

A Rudy Giuliani campaign booster is standing by his comments that the U.S. needs to defeat "the Muslims" - or "chase them back to their caves."

And this:

John Deady, co-chair of the New Hampshire Veterans for Rudy group, told The Guardian of London, "We need to...keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them."

Asked if he was referring to all Muslims, Deady said he was.

"I don't subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims," he told the TPM Election Central Web site.

"When I say get rid of them, I wasn't necessarily referring to genocide," he said.

In the last thirty years, there have been a lot of closets left empty, because the country has become liberal and open-minded enough that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people could find acceptance and be (largely) left alone.

Can we maybe fill those closets with these fucking conservative republican bigoted pinheads, and nail the closets shut? I thought we were well past the era when it was acceptable for people to spew vile shit like that in public. I couldnt care less if they want to sit in their darkened cross-filled abodes and rant and rave like rabid dogs, (freedom of speech and all) but when this stuff is spewed forth in a political campaign, the response should be derision, laughter, and rejection. I am not talking about laws here, I am talking about what OUR response should be. The LISTENERS.

Our 200+ year long national conversation about freedom of speech has almost always focussed on the speaker and her/his rights. The listeners to speech have no rights except the right to not listen, to change the channel, turn down the volume or walk away. But don't the listeners have an obligation? Especially if those listeners are journalists, there is an obligation (in my opinion) to point out the vileness, repeat it, satirize it, shout it from the fucking rooftops, "Did you hear what this guy said?"

For years the press has refused to call Bush a liar, even when it was obvious and incontrovertible that he was, in fact, lying. Now Rudy, who wants to run the whole country the way he ran New York -=twitch, shudder=- has hired a guy who wants to "get rid of" the Muslims, and is anybody shouting about it? Anybody but me and a few DFH bloggers? Not that I can see. And as of this morning, this dangerous microcephalic moron STILL WORKS for Rudy.

I am a bit of an amateur historian, concentrating on the consequences of the fall of the roman empire. How does this relate to anything? After Rome collapsed, the Catholic Church basically burned every bit advanced scientific knowledge they had gathered, plunging most of the west into what we now call the Dark Ages. But they couldn't get everything, because Spain was ruled by - you guessed it - the Muslims. If it were not for those Muslims and their innate love of knowledge and reason, we would not have the works of the ancient Greeks. You know, unimportant shit like Logic, Reason, Coherent argument, Medicine, Astronomy. Aristotle, Plato, et al. The folks who pretty much invented western thought. When the Muslims conquered someplace, they didn't BURN books, (like we ignorant, unwashed and illiterate white Europeans did) they COPIED them. Translated them. Distributed them. Taught from them. Saved them.

Islam today is not what it once was, and a small (but very very loud) minority of Muslims have abandoned reason, logic and science for fanaticism and self-immolation. Much like Europe did under Catholic domination.

We don't need to fight Islam, we need to fight stupidity, ignorance and generalized race-hatred. Stuff them in the closets and see how THEY fucking like it.

If I had the time, I suppose I could have found a better way of saying this, but I am too angry, too upset, and too scared to really pay attention to literary merit. The idea that one of the Rethuglican candidates might win the next election (and the more chaotic the world gets, the more likely that is) leaves me with a fervent desire to move to Greenland.

Family Holidays

They sit together,
mother, father, son and daughter
enjoying each-other's company
a bond of love
apparant and tangible.
They like each-other,
as well as loving.

It is a thing I have no memory of,
and do not understand.
but I know that once I did,
because seeing it in others
clenches my teeth to breaking,
and lights me with hate and anger
that I can barely stand.

What I remember is an absent father.
And a mother and daughter
eager to find any excuse to banish me to my room
so that they would not need to deal with me
while they sat together
mother and daughter,
enjoying each-others company
while I cried, alone and confused.

At Christmas, they made an effort,
and usually let me stay for an hour or so
but it was forced, uncomfortable,
and when she had had enough,
my mother would create the opportunity
to send me away
crying.

And hating.
A fury so strong and loud within me
that it bursts forward and engulfs me
if I am not very careful.
It sits inside me,
scheming, planning revenge
on people I don't even know anymore.

And now I am the father
and I am not absent.
and I like my wife, and I like my son,
and of course, I love them both
and there are no people I would rather spend my time with.
I have broken the line of anger and hate
I will not pass it to my child,
as I believe it was passed to me
as it was passed to my mother from hers.

Later there were beatings, whippings.
humiliations unending, isolation and total control,
and all of that is forgiven, all is past.

In a strange way, this means I must keep it.
I refuse justify the harm done to me
by passing it on to my child
and forgiving my mother by it's inevitability.

Even if it kills me, it is mine
and I will never pass it to anyboy else.

But I know that once, we were happy together.
I don't remember it, I was too young,
but I know it was there
because it's ending maimed me
apparantly for life.

I cannot celebrate holidays,
no matter how hard I try
because the hate and rage are too close to the surface,
too near to my mind, my tongue and my temper,
too raw, too real
because it was just yesterday,
even tho I can't remember it.
The hate and rage have never forgotten it.

Patriotism, and two movie reviews

This is hard for a good bleeding heart liberal to say, but I am a patriot. Not a pinhead-patriot like the jingoist flag-waving conservative christian dipshits that have rallied around America's Stupidest President, but a Patriot more along the lines of Earl Warren (Chief Justice of the supreme court in the 60's and before) who understood that his DUTY as a powerful American was not to lie subservient to the past, but to see the shortcomings of our country and try to address them.

We are not perfect. We engaged in genocide against the natives, war crimes against the Vietnamese and the Iraqis (and probably the germans (dresden) and the japanese (too many to name, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki cover it) and mass oppression against the Africans, Chinese and others that we brought here to build our country, willingly or otherwise.

How can a patriot say such things? Because they are true, and to refuse to say them is, well, intentional idiocy. MY Patriotism is not mutually exclusive with honesty.

What am I a patriot about? The rule of law, political, religious and expressive freedom, and a free press. We have none of these things, but we are closer to them than any other country. But we ceaselessly try to be as close to those ideals as we can.

I saw two movies recently that really exemplify what I mean when I say Patriotism. they are:
"Swades", and "Chak De India". Obviously, they are not American movies.

"Swades" (rooughly translated as "homeland") is the story of an American resident Indian engineer who works for Nasa. He retuns home to bring the woman who raised him (nanny, foster-mother) to the U.S. so that she can have a comfortable old age. In the course of his travels, he falls in love with India, and the small villiage in which she lives, and, of course, a woman. This film is about the beauty and majesty of India, but it is also relentlessy critical of Indian culture, especially the caste system. Mohan (the engineer) confronts the villiage elders with their own hypocracy in several well-written and superbly acted dialogues and monologues. I will not go further into detail because I hope I can convince somebody to watch the thing.

Also in Swades is a musical scene (this is a Bolleywood movie, there is ALWAYS a musical scene) that is very descriptive of the Animist philosophy, and is very beautiful.

Shah Rukh Khan stars, and I can give no higher praise than this: he emotes so well that I ocassionally let the subtitles flow by just to watch the performance, not really caring about the words. 'course, I downloaded the movie, so I can watch it several times. My son CrowBear asks for me to play the songs repeatedly.

The second movie, also starring Shah Ruhk Khan, is "Chak De India" ("Come On India") and is a -- wait for it-- Women's Field Hockey movie. It is a fairly standard sports flick, with training montages and motivational songs (really good ones. Bolleywood kicks everybodies ass at musical scores). This is a lighter, less meaningful movie than Swades, but it is great fun, where Swades is sometimes brooding. It has a men-versus-women riot in a MacDonalds that is quite enjoyable, and a lot of the Field Hockey action is well planned and VERY well filmed. This movie is also very critical of Indian mores and culture, in the way women are treated, and in the way India is fragmented into many different and frequently fractious states. The girls (I was never able to really tell how old these women were, and the film itself refers to them as both girls and women) are presented as strong, independent and intelligent, and some are presented as noble, some as manipulative, some as jealous, some as megalomaniacal, but all of them real characters.
Khan is generous with screen time, surprising in a bolleywood megastar.

Both of these films are works (in 'swades' case, masterworks) of patriotism in the sense that I use it: these films are, in the course of loving India, trying to fix it.

I wish these were American films, because they express a sentiment I find very lacking in our cinema.

I have had a long obsession with Bolleywood films, but these are the first two I am not embarassed to like.

So I'm Evil. Whoop-de-fucking-do

I got expelled from another pagan forum.

Seems they don't much want to defend beliefs that are different from theirs, and animism is too anarchic.

The issue at hand: a small piece of verbiage spewed out of the vile, drug-addicted, incredibly brilliant mystical comedian named Aelister Crowley. You wont hear him described this way by anybody else who knows about him, I am distinctly alone in my belief that he acted as a comedian all his mystical life (mystical slapstick combined with literary brilliance, acerbic wit and an ability to produce bullshit on demand and in quantity that dwarfs anybody in history with the posible exception of L. Ron Hubbard. I refer anybody with questions to The Book Of Thoth, the most incomprehensible mystical guidebook ever written)

The verbiage: "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole of the Law, love is the law, love under will"

Many Wiccans and many other pagans have adopted a creed which truncates Crowley's statement and ads a perfectly rediculous caveat "An it harm none, do what thou wilt" and in the course of modifying it, made it into vacuous bullshit.

"An it harm none?" So, like, you can't hurt anybody. Hurting people is against the rules. Right? So people who adhere to this credo are pacifists, that would, under no circumstances, harm another? Well, no, not really. The VAST majority of the pagan community who pay homage to the drivel will tell you that harming is fine in self-defense and in due defense of another. So "An it harm none" is conditional. And kinda vague. Can I harm animals? Is that against the rules? Simply to ask the question is offensive to some. "NO!" they say, usually in leather shoes. Some talk about how it is ok to kill animals to survive, in a hunter-prey sense, and some of the animist traditions revere this (Not mine, I am an anti-hunting wuss)

With so many exceptions, I cannot swear by the damn thing, and that seems to mean much to some people, who seem to be as willing to make their own exceptions as often as they like. There is just this overwhelming fear in some circles (the more dangerous ones, the more fringe ones where I hang out and chat about mysticism and hallucinogens, ritual sex in mysticism) that unless this one principle is genuflected at, the fringe will lose the suppo0rt of the orthdox wierdos (my special term for the people who follow paganism in a much more subdued, conformist way than does the fringe)

I can't say that harming another is against my rules if it isn't. If there is a judgement call to be made, it is subjective, and thus not really subject to oaths like that. If the oath allows the oathtaker to bend the rules, IT ISN'T A VALID OATH, as nothing is actually being promised.

I am almost always then offered an out by whatever group is desiring this autodafe, "But this is a technical objection, right? You don't object to the principle"

Yes, I do. I object to you telling me what to do, and I object to bastardizing one of the most significant (in my opinion) moral statement about people who choose a path of their own design, people he called Magickians (looks aweful, no? He was attempting a designation that would differentiate between stage magic and what he was attempting to do) in order to do it.

Crowley's words are brilliant in choice and composition, and they are ion a kind of code that he used. I do not have the time here to go into the specifics, but this is MY take on the Law of Thelema:

" 'Do what thou wilt' shall be the whole of the law" -Crowley
This is his fundamental state of being. If you choose to walk a path of your own design, YOU ARE COMPLETELY RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING YOU DO. You can't claim society made you do it, you can't blame it on a god you probably don't believe in, nor can you blame it on your upbringing (all of which said NOT to tread your own path), all you can say if things don't work out right is "oops, my bad" and deal with the consequences. It is the ultimate statement of libertarianism, in large part because it is a philosophy that is completely devoid of inherent good and evil, and the lies of other men, it is a simple statement about the practitioner and nothing more. I imagine asking Crowley if I 'should' do something. the questions would, I imagine, go a bit like this:

AC - Do you wanna?
Lizard- well, yeah
AC - will you sleep well after you do this?
Lizard - Sure
AC - Go for it.

But AC would have had the same conversation with somebody talking about involuntarily sodomizing (raping) a student of theirs during a magical ritual. He was only talking to me about trying to get laid doing Tarot readings.

The idea that a philosophy could embrace such darkness with equal ease as my more mundane moral question disgusts some. But AC wasnt talking about wether something was right or wrong, he was making a statement: "The Choice Is Yours", and stands behind the philosophy whatever that choice is.

I am not a fan of interpersonal violence, I am much better with words than I am with my jump-spinning round kick. But it is my choice, and will always be, and I am comfortable with Crowley's statement as a statement of how the world works. It says nothing about morals, nor does it try, and the spin put on those words by the pagan community in general and wiccans in particular is offensive and ill-considered.

When I say these things, I get expelled, or asked ot be less aggressive in discussions, or told that discussions like this are really outside the yadda-yadda-yadda. And some tell me I am evil, dark, sick or insane. Which I kinda like.

Fuck 'em.

Animism

For me, animism is largely a deeply emotional response to the natural.

It is the feeling of a cool breeze, and feeling in it's touch on the skin the caress of a caring, loving, powerful goodness.

It is the feeling of the sun touching me gently with the warmth that gives the world life, and feeling touched with meaning, unfathomable and delicately beautiful

It is the warm feeling of my cat snuggled against me, taking my pain away, and a wonder that surpasses expression that the world would be made, at random, to allow such a thing.

It is the feeling of these things, and of that more that i can never quite say. As feelings. Not science, not belief, just input. It is how the world feels to me.

I don't, and never have, interpreted the world through these feelings, and so they have never really translated as a formal religion that would be easily recognizable as such. But I feel these things as certainly as I feel gravity.

It is the dichotomy that keeps me as sane as I am, which might not be saying much, but I cultivate this dichotomy, and NEVER try to resolve it. There should be a word for a dichotomy that is a coveted thing, but I havent seen one.