Mene Mene Terkel

While the ancient prophet Daniel served king Belshazzar, an unprecedented event occurred. While Bel and his sycophants and lackies and wannabees were gathered in a great feast with mucho wine and viands and goodies and dancing girls and blahblah, suddenly there appeared on the wall: MENE MENE TEKEL PHARSIN Translation: God has numbered the days of your reign, and brought it to an end. You have been weighed on the scales and been found incompetent. The Pharsi Persians are coming to get you! Later. . . exactly that happened. The Persians conquered the Babylonian kingdom. Now I don’t know but I been told, these words are very old; history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. Case in point: After Euro-Emperor Charlemagne died in 814 AD. . . his domain, in what is now western Europe, was divided between his three sons, Lothar, Louis and Pepin. As the 9th century rolled on by, kings come and kings go, vassals hassle to and fro, clerics strive to illuminate the show, as vines grow and everyone knows that what goes around comes around and we all face that inevitable fate. . . the D word. . . Long story short: the Charlemagne dynasty came, by ’n by, to a bitter end. The heavy mantle of decline could be discerned when one wise guy named Boso became head honcho after his predecessors, Louis and Carloman, died in freak accidents. So then it was that Boso the Frown dragged western Europe down, down, down. As the dregs of Carolingian empire became sediment in the Rhone and the Rhine, one Charles the Fat was assigned by the powers that be and the flying fickle finger of fate to be deposed and so he—last strongman of the Carolingian empire— abdicated in 888. As he lay dying, Charles had a dream in which these ancient Germanic words were revealed to him: Raht Radollida Nasq Enta Translated to English, we find: Abundance Diminishing. Avarice End Long story short, as centuries rolled by. . . the great legacy of Carolingian leadership was transponded, through history and human avarice, scheming, manipulations and the flying ficke finger of FATE . . . westward into Germany, the so-called Holy Roman Empire, then later, Austro-Hungarian empire, which was terminated at the demise of European royal authority, beginning with the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, then subsequently WW1, then the degeneration of postwar Germany into hitler’s third reich, then unprecedented historical fight and blight, and the cold hard truth that all things must end and then something else begins again. God only know who, what and why. Meanwhile, in the sweet by and by, on the other side of Atlantica, the new kid on the block, USA, emerged from the dusty destinies of world history. . . and now we have hung on to this Republic/Democracy hybrid for, lo, these 249 years, and we helped to rescue the Europeans from the krauts in 1918 and 1945, and now we have to help them again with the new badboy kid on the block, Vlad the Mad. One more little side note: iin the above cryptic words given to Charles the Fat, we notice the third word: Nasq. Now I don’t know, cuz I’m getting old. . . Nasdaq? Just sayin’ And now the question pops up: What man, woman, or beast will be the next to be confronted with the ancient challenge of Fate/Providence: MENE MENE TEKEL. ______ (fill in the blank)

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