Gods, Kings, Heroes, Men, Clowns, and Chaos

In my opinion, if the western world should ever lose its religious moorings -- which is well on the way to happening -- it will be the end of the western world. I would put it this way: the West is the only hope for the world; America is the only hope for the West; the conservative movement is the only hope for America; and a proper understanding of religion is the only hope for the conservative movement.

As our founders realized, the whole existentialda is rooted in the perpetuation and renewal of the universal values embodied in our Judeo-Christian heritage. It is no coincidence that in the writings of the founders, 34 percent are to the Bible (nearly 1100 out of 3154; cited in Novak).

Thankfully, in this enlightened day and age, we have mental giants such as Bill Maher to explain to us that the Founders were a gang of credulous fools for relying on an arbitrary compendium of primitive fairy tales to found a nation.

No wonder the United States didn't survive. If only the ACLU had been around at the time, they could have set the Fathers straight, and inculcated them with Marxist values after first informing them that "Founding Fathers" was sexist and offensive. If our Founding Androgynes and Metrosexuals could only have seen a pre-screening of Religulous, their eyes would have been opened. Who knows, perhaps they could have even prevented our civilization from being destroyed by global warming hysterics.

To cite one superstitious -- not to mention, appallingly ethnocentric -- idiot by the name of John Adams, "I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the world."

This arrogant, Jew-loving neo-con tool of the Israel lobby also wrote that "I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations." The Jewish people preserved and propagated "to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the greatest essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization." Amazing. This clown sounds like he could be Sarah Palin's speech writer.

At any rate, in each step of my little scheme, you will notice that the left is the Adversary, as they not only devalue and undermine the classical liberal values upon which America was founded, but they also denigrate the West in general. And they obviously hate God and are at war with religion.

Now, if my little schematic is true, then everything hinges upon God and religion. For example, I don't suppose for one minute that democracy or capitalism in and of themselves create decent and wise people, or are even capable of perpetuating the conditions for their own survival. There is certainly nothing sacred about democracy, which is just as likely to bring about a tyranny of stupidity, or to propagate the weak and vile Last Men of the left -- or the demagogic politicians who flatter and seduce them -- who are happy to barter away their freedom (and therefore, humanness) for the pseudo-security of a large and intrusive state.

Unlike Perry, I am not a monarchist, but I can certainly appreciate his point. Of course it would be preferable to have a wise leader who combined and balanced the attributes of wisdom and mercy, intellect and action, discrimination and justice, heart and mind, contemplation and discernment.

In short, who wouldn't want the be led by the archetypal Perfect Man, whose intrinsic authority radiated like the central sun? To recognize such a man would be to spontaneously bow down in service to him, whether it be in war, commerce, education, art, whatever. To be in his presence would warm the heart and illuminate the mind, and give force to whatever inchoate virtues one possesses. It would make the brave man more courageous and self-sacrificing, the wise man more eager to impart knowledge to others, the artist more desirous of transmitting celestial beauty through song, color, or word. He would loosen the strictures of the ego with the mere force of his presence, simultaneously merciful and severe.

They say that George Washington was such a man, which is why we no longer celebrate his birthday. Likewise, Lincoln.

I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel;
“As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on.

It reminds me of one of the recurring cyclical themes that informs Finnegans Wake, which Joyce borrowed from the philosopher Giambattista Vico. In his New Science, Vico argued that civilization develops and declines through a "recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human," or the ages of Chaos, Gods, Heroes, and Men, followed by another age of Chaos.

I suppose the question for us is whether we are at the end of the age of Men and only just entering the age of Chaos. If that is the case, then the economic and political crises of the day are truly only the opening strains of a precipitous descent into Dark Night. Place your bets on a great depression and terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons.

Alternatively, if we are already in the age of Chaos, one would look for signs of a new religious revival, only at a higher level on the ascending spiral, a la my book, which of course playgiarized both Joyce and Vico, so that the whimper of our present age of wimps will end in a new bang of Superior (but freakishy humble) Men, or a democracy of souls worthy of democracy.

For the man of the left, this will appear as an oppressive tyranny of truth and virtue, from which he will run like a man on fire. It is in this context that we should understand the Atheistic Idiot movement led by the inglorious likes of Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the rest of the flatland dolts who wish to evilangelize their spiritual inadequacy to the susceptible masses.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave;
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on.

Now, regarding the ontological status of time as it bi-sects politics, Novak writes that the Founders "did not believe that time is cyclical, going nowhere, spinning in circles pointlessly. They believed that history had a beginning and was guided by Providence for a purpose."

Of course, our Founders lived in the age of Heroes, so perhaps they can be excused for not foreseeing the Age of Men, followed by the Age of Leftist and Atheistic clowns and Maherons. In other words, organismic time can never be a straight line. Rather, it must be spiroidal, or a sort of creatively destructive "learning curve" which goes through phases of death and renewal, catabolism and anabolism, or what Bion called PS<-->D. You don't even have to know what PS<-->D stands for, since it is intended to be a sort of existential algebraic abstraction anyway. The point is, as I put it in my book, in order to ascend spiritually -- whether individually or collectively -- some disassembly is required.

Now. Now what? I have no idea. I'm just free-associating again, and here I am at a hyperdimensional crossroads. I could take this post in one of any number of directions -- over, under, sideways, down -- or even end it right now and say "to be continued," even though there is a fifty-fifty chance I never will.

Hmm. I never really got around to the point I wanted to make at the outset of this post, which has to do with the type of religiosity I envision, as we transition from the Age of Chaos back around to a new Age of Gods. This comes back to the very essence of the Raccoon projeKct, which is to speak to that remnant of spiritual seedlings who are beginning to sprout beneath the soil of this age of chaos and darkness. You, know, to gather the lost tribe of Raccoons by using the internet to establish a mycelial astralnautwork of meshrooms or menschwombs able to grow and even glow in the dark.

Terence McKenna once said that there were two possible mushrooms that await man at the end of history-- either the mushroom cloud of atomic annihilation, or the mushroom of Amanita muscaria. I don't think we need to take him literally to know that he wasn't just being psilly.

What are the conditions that will allow the soil of this global neural network to facilitate interconnection and compliexification? Let's go back to our superstitious founders, and see what they had to say about our pneumanautical adventure through the colliderescape of time.

According to Novak, they generally felt that time "was created for the unfolding of human liberty, for human emancipation.... Time was created by a God who 'humbled himself,' by reaching down to dramatize full human potentialites by 'providential signs' among the human beings He had created." As such, history "is a record of progress (or decline), measured by permanent standards, God's standards, as learned and tested by long experience." Prior to the arrival of the Jews, everyone believed in cyclical time, and no one believed in progress, but "for Jews and Christians, by contrast, history is heading somewhere new: toward the New Kingdom of God."

So, this is why America could never be governed by a monarch. Rather, it must become a democracy of divine Kings -- of upright "pontifical men" -- or else descend further down into a new Age of Chaos ruled by an anti-coonfederacy of dunces named Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and Dean.

The past has an objective existence in the present which lies in the future beyond itself... Cut away the future, and the present collapses, emptied of its proper content. Immediate existence requires the insertion of the future in the crannies of the present. --Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas