2006-06-16 - 1:24 p.m.
This society protects life to a ridiculous degree, we always go out of our way to protect people from dying. The current administration had the infamous John Ashcroft going out of his way to try and override an Oregon law to protect the terminally ill. You can't have a state that starts to look too much like Sweden. Another example is the constant push from their right wing constituents to ban abortion. Interesting, what little I remember from Russian History, that early in the Bolshevik revolution when Trotsky and Lenin were running the show, they abandoned their law against abortion but when Stalin took power and to help kick off his first 5 year plan, one of the things he did was reinstitute the abortion ban, why? He wanted to have a bigger labor pool to draw upon. I once found a speech by Stalin in a history book and compared it to a George Bush transcription. Amazing similarities, both were the land of the free, wanted to spread freedom, constant invocations of the nationalistic duty, invocations of God, hints of a God with a protection wing for certain nations etc. Really this is no different than what all the leaders have always been telling their peasants from on high, various attempts to whip up a frenzy, to become conscious of a collective conflict, oritginally interpreted by subjective states and then use the data/emotion etc. for "The Cause."
As much as individuals have instincts for life, they have instincts for death equally but rarely equally acknowledged. Historical and Sociological circumstances proscribe the accentuations of any given instinct. You don't perform suicide, the word chosen to precede suicide is commit. "Where's Johnny?" "I'm not sure, he's been thinking about suiciding," has a different hue than "Where's Johnny?" "I'm not sure, he's been thinking about commiting suicide." The choice of wording directs the way we can respond, usually manifested as a type of limit, to an event or imagination experiment.
Life is a gift. Life is a blessing. "Where was you underwear made?" "Indonesia, why do you ask? Because life is a gift from above." If only the Christian God lived in the soil and not the clouds.
There's a book I was reading yesterday and it was saying how if in the fall story, if the object of forbidden fascination had not been a sort of plant, say another human being or something, then devoloping western civilization might not have been permanently severed from an ancient shamanic traditions of ritualized plant taking. We have been cut off from the things of the earth, the things of the earth can be seen as evil and laws with their origins in religious bans, still support some of these "unfashionable" ideas today.
You might say or Harold Bloom might say that a bad story, can sometimes be a really bad story. As a Reader Response Critic might say, the author makes it up, but she really makes nothing up, it's the reader who must do the work, the reader decides what it means.
Aztects, Greeks, Germany many civilizations fully realized the need for ritualized sacrifice. Our inherited Judeo-Christian society seems to recognize, to at least give it a passing nod when we are constantly hounded about the blood-sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We also have executions, especially executions of retarded people is a very good start, George Bush knows more about this when we give him credit for, but he forgot the most important thing- to beam the event, this orgiastic celebration rite to our modern oracles, those Zenith televisions.
Thanatos is the forgotten or shadow instinct. Until we are fully able to acknowledge it and then exploit it, for it's energy resources are largely untapped, I think kindness will remain as pussy as it has always been throughout time. "going to the movies with a woman? Don't forget your whip."
