The Fierce Circle of Power

Power in the modern State/Nation/Union runs around in a big circle.

As in a big atom-smasher, where charged-up sub-atomic particles race to oblivion, or to wherever it is that electrons and protons and quarks and neutrinos and cheerios go when they manifest at the speed of light transforming between energy and matter . . . between things falling apart and things hanging together. . .

Power in the modern State cycles around, and is transformed, into greater and greater levels of constructivity. And, unfortunately, destructivity.

On one side of the Circle is Left, and on the other is Right.

The two sides meet at top and bottom.  At these two polarities—top and bottom—Left and Right merge together in a region  where Left and Right are indistinguishable, for instance . . .

A Government in which Democrat and Republican allow neutrally pragmatic institutions for the sake of productivity and increase.

A State in which Socialist and Capitalist tolerate similar policies that do not violate  their diverging identities.

A Regime where  Left and Right achieve tolerance, mimicking each other in their tactics.

Now looking back, a lifetime ago . . .

At the top, leaders and their agents at the peak of diplomacy met with the other side to do business, but unknowingly made arrangements that passively allow harm to all the citizens of the world who would soon get caught in the crossfire.

And a few years later. . .

An Agreement in which Communist and Fascist coexisted, militarily, for about two years, by means of a sham treaty . . .

A Treaty in which, 80 years ago, a Communist and a Nazi tyranny attacked and plundered the Polish nation that lay between them.

Then, years after that initial double-sided invasion . . .

Allied  armies later penetrated the morass of Power, bringing to light of day the deplorable bottom where Nazi concentration camps were found,  and later, Communist gulags. These hellhole prisons were established by both sides, for purposes of controlling both their peoples by means of the same criminally cruel imprisonments and executions.

Because Left and Right made no difference in their tortuous abuses of mankind.

At that low point, persecution, torture, imprisonment, pain and death are the same whether they’re inflicted by a damn Communist or a damn Nazi.

More generally, however. . .

These days, at the Top

of our hypothetical circle we catch sight of moderate players who manage to do their moderating thing  in spite of the treacherous slippery slope curvature of the two sides.

And at the Bottom—in the pit of both sides’ dubious or even despicable practices, the tactical crimes common to both extremities are occasionally uncovered, identifiable as the same  atrocities.

Because Left and Right make no difference, at their extremities, in their manipulations and abuses of mankind.

At what is perhaps our present High point, everybody seems to be chugging along in a globalized quasi-peace.

But at some future a Low point, persecution, torture, imprisonment, pain and death will be the same whether they’re inflicted by a Socialist or a Fascist, a Democrat or a Republican,  by a whacko shootist or a jihadist terrorist.

At some other low point of history, armies representing Truth and Justice—if there is such a thing in this circle— will be required again, to blast their way into the cycle of hellish human history, and liberate those prisoners who are caught in the crossfire.

Even now, the widening gyre,  the next circle, gathers speed to ramp up to dizzying velocity, delivering at some dismal low point of human depravity a new deposit of deplorable arrests and atrocities, accumulating in the pit where innocent souls get caught in the crossfire, deprived of justice and mercy.

Beware. On the last go-round, the pit could be bottomless.

Get ready to meet your maker. If you don't acknowledge the Maker . . .well,  good luck with that. May the bird of paradise fly up your nose until it all hits the fan. 

King of Soul

What People Dotoeachother

Seems like folks these days are gettin all wound up about politics and stupid stuff like that. Democrats v. Republicans. Progressives v. Conservatives. Extremists v. Moderates, blah blah blah.
And to make it worse, with the intensifying effects of cellphones and pads and pods and whatnot and so-called social media blather, what we are barreling toward is a vast dumbing-down, barbarizing of all public discourse.
What was called debate in earlier times now has degenerated to knee-jerk bluster hubris yada yada blahblah hatred the-loudest-loudmouth-wins trouble. 
People take sides on every little controversy that rears its ugly little head in the public domain. Seems to me more like, as William Faulkner or William Shakespeare might have called it, sound and fury signifying nothing.
My studies of human history indicate some recurring characteristics of the tactics employed by extremist diehard yahoos: Such people want to push public discourse farther and farther toward extremist tactics so they can impose their great radical-fringe remedies on the rest of us who want only to live in peace and security with a little justice, mercy and neighborly good will toward our fellow-man thrown in.
I was born in the middle of the 20th-century, 1951. Looking back on all that happened during that century, I’ve noticed a few alarming things, such as:
The two worst 20th-century assholes who ever came along the pike and pretended to be great leaders—Hitler and Stalin—both of them manipulated evolving political institutions, and the idiot people within them— to make a grand bloody mess of their two nations and the whole damn world at large.
Both dictators, Hitler and Stalin, were idealogues. Historians call Hitler a Nazi, which is a type of Fascist. They call Stalin a Communist.
What’s more important, however, in the historical classification game is this:
Both Hitler and Stalin were mass-murderers. They did not do justice to the people they claimed to govern.


This factual identification is more important than the ideological label by which each of these two demagogues manipulated their bloody way into absolute power.
And they weren’t the only ones. In the 20th-century, there were others: Pol Pot, Idi Amin. Some would say Mao. And onn a small scale. . . Jim Jones, Charles Manson?
This scenario to which I make reference— this human behavior attribute of folks being swept up into murderous behavior by a maniacal leader driven by ideological or religious frenzy that results in mass murder—it could be right around a historical corner now.
If people do not allow the practice of mercy, decency, compassion, reason— and most of all forgiveness— to overpower imminent institutionalized manipulations of bloody power-mongers, then we’ll have another terrible round of mass murder on this planet.
Religion (old-school) and Ideology (new school) are both, when carried to extremes, cut from the same extremist cloth, and can drive people to endorse mass murder.
Don’t go there.
Ideology is a big circle. On one half of the circle is the arc of conservatism, which in its extremism leads to fascism; on the other half is the arc progressivism, which in its extremism leads to communism. They both start their movements at the top of the circle going in opposite directions. But at the bottom where they collide, we find extremism so lethal that it requires mass-murder as a so-called final solution.
You know what I’m talking about: “Somebody needs to kill them bastards!”
Religion, same thing. “Somebody needs to kill them _____” (fill in the blank)
Which is why we must harken to the greatest clarion call of all, the one spoken by the man from Galilee who stood on a mountainside and taught us:
“Whatever you would want done to you—do that for everybody else.”
This is the most important principle of all. Far greater  than communism or fascism, far more effectual than Democratic or Republican power-mongering, far more spiritually effective that the Church or the Caliphate.
Peace on this planet ultimately comes down to what people are willing to do--or refuse to do-- to each other in the name of _______.
You fill in the blank.
 
King of Soul

The Ambiguous Shirking Syndrome (ASS)

It started with like.

"I was like, watching this show, and this guy was trying to, like, jump on a trampoline, but it wasn't a trampoline; it was, like, a stack of foam rubber cushions with whipped cream all over it and there were these other people standing around trying to, like, keeping him from falling, to keep him from. . ."

In the above example, we see that the incredible versatility of the the like filler-phoneme phenomenon has rendered that little word weary and wornout from overuse, and so a linguatic trainer was sent in to give, like, a break; they sent in two second-stringers to replace him. Like was, like, the only filler word ever, who it took two other words to replace him--he was that famous--and so the trainer sent in you know. . .

"and these other people standing around are trying to, you know, trying to keep him from falling off the stack of foam rubber pads. They were supposed to keep his feet from touching the ground because if his feet touched the ground then he would be, you know, eliminated and they would vote him off the show or, you know, something like that. It was so funny--how he was trying to keep his feet up on the pads so his feet wouldn't touch the ground. But some of the people that were supposed to help him started licking the whipped cream off of him just for, you know, a joke or something and so finally while this one weird guy was like getting into the whipped cream thing and he wasn't paying attention and so the guy's feet touched the ground and the facilitator blew the whistle and everything stopped and all the people were laughing except for him because he was, you know, out of the game and he could never come back. It was sad in a way but it was, you know. . ."

Now the meteoric rise of another Celebrity utteral excloratory filler has, within our lifetime, added yet another star-quality persona to the filler-phoneme phenom:

". . .kinda funny. It was sad in a way, but it was kinda funny."

This slangified stripped-down contraction of the classic "kind of" adjectivo-preppisitionative filler has really taken over. I mean, it went viral a couple years ago, gettin' a thousand hits a minute because its like, you know, well who wants to go to all that trouble and say "kind of" when you can just blurt out kinda whatever you're feeling at the time or whatever floats your boat, or maybe you can't think of the right word because, well, you know. . .

whatever. That's another one: whatever. Absolute epitome of the ambiguous shirking syndrome. Perfect example of an ASS.

But I digress. . . You can call it whatever you want. Fuhgedaboudit. I mean, it's all over the map with this stuff. But it IS, you know, a class thing. I mean . . . you won't hear the elite saying it. No way Hozay. Their philler-phoneme of choice is:

sort of

This euphemistic philler-phoneme is a highly favored linguatic device among journalists and talking heads who don't have all their ducks in row, which is to say, they, sort of don't have all their facts. Or else maybe they just don't want to appear to, sort of make value judgements that aren't politically correct or something like that. An example from a recent talking heads discussion could be:

"These extremists were posting their gruesome executions online and the videos would immediately go viral, and people didn't know what to make of it because it was, like, unprecedented. I mean, nothing like this has ever happened before. People in the West were getting sort of freaked about it."

They might even be worse than them fundamentalist right-to-lifers who are so OCD about preventing infanticide. Or maybe they're like them wild-eyed IRA guys in Belfast back to their old tricks, or the new IRA guys who want to value of their IRAs and 401-Ks.

Actually, history is full of this kind of thing. It's called the depravity of Man. The difference just now is that this video-promoted beheading practice--in all it's full-blown barbarism--has gone viral online. And this development is . . . sort of, a bad sign of what may be coming. There could be, like, trouble or something.

Some of the talking heads were recently talking about this viral video beheading phenomenon, and the fatal terrorist shootups in Paris and San Bernadino, and wherever else this type of jihadic atrocity is about to happen. The journalists were trying to decide among themselves what the correct nomenclature would be, whether the shooters and head-choppers should be called terrorists, or political extremists or jihdists or. . .and these people all claim to be . . . sort of, Islamic, but that doesn't, of course, make them Islamic terrorists. So you can see what the problem is here.

What to call them. And our dedicated, professional infomatic journalistic commentators are addressing the problem. For more about this, tune into News at 11.



In signing off from this edition of the Linguatic Report, I'll leave you with our Definition of the Week. This week's word is:

um

Um is a filler-phoneme word that sharpens and clarifies the classically hesitant, filler adverb, uh, which has for many decades been in common use. Found most frequently among academics and well-informed opinionators such as Noam Chomsky or Barak Obama, this very concise, procrastinative filler excloratory is solidly packed with a well-understood but unspoken message, the content of which is:

I'm not finished with my very weighty proclamation yet, so you other members of the panel and you students and so forth who are hanging on my every word please don't interrupt me until I'm done speaking this important next word, which is, um. . . this never should have been what is has become.

Be that as it may, and that said. . . that's the history of the world for you. Never should have been what is has become. Nevertheless there it is . . . whatever you call it. If it was a snake, the damn would have bit you already. Ask Churchill or Eisenhower about it.

But they're not answering the phone.

Smoke

Dover Breach

The air is mad tonight
electric with fright
but drugged with fluff and flight:
hear no evil, see no blight.
America in cyber slumber swoons
while England grooms jihad goons
like 1937 fascist blackshirts
deflowering 2014 democratic skirts.
France ( peace be upon her)
seethes with same old same old stir--
that angst witch discontent doth incur
from yonder barricaded former age
now slit with new jihadi rage.

The air of Faith
so thin of late
as most prefer to flirt with fate
now cringes in this new birth of hate;
its melancholy, long withdrawing gasp
retreating fast, like slithering asp
unable now to grasp
with slipping grips unfurled
the naked idols the world.

Ah, good Christian, let us be true
to one another! for the world, which casts its spell
of rebel chaos and decadent hell,
has no power when all's said and done
to set our ancient faith upon the run,
though the infernal note of madness floods every byte
while polar extremists clash by night.

(This poem's form was adapted from Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach.)

Smoke