zombie time

About 2700 years ago, some obscure blogger posted this, although my translation is a little bit off:



He was despised and forsaken, a man of sorrows, living with the worst of all human feelings--he was, like, the guy you look away from while passing in the street.
We didn’t like him.
But somehow he carried the terrible weight of our pathetic existence; this God-forsaken wanderer was afflicted with the worst fate that any humans have ever inflicted on their-fellow-man.
As it turned out, we discriminated against him, pushed him down as if he were the lowest of the low. Even so, he didn’t raise a big stink about the maltreatment that was inflicted on him. He didn’t whine about the injustice that he ended up getting.
He got screwed-over like the worst of the worst, even though he had done nothing to deserve such a judgement.

I mean, he never hurt anybody, never raised his hand against any person; he was no bully. In fact, he told the truth about everything everywhere he went. He was known for it. In fact, that’s what got him into such deep shit. He was a truth-teller . . . didn’t sugarcoat anything.
He was, like, a good guy. Looking back on the whole damn torrent of events, it doesn’t make any sense. The events of that terrible time just escalated far beyond any reasonable justification for what they did to him.
I mean, if there’s a God in this universe, he just, like, didn’t care at all about the devolution of events that, like, seemed to conspired against this man.
His fate was cast with the common criminals, but some rich guy showed up to deal with the corpse.



Go figure. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense to me. Sometime I wonder if anybody in this life ever gets what they deserve. The one-percenters get to set themselves up all high and mighty, while homeless folk just get shoved into the dead-end corners underneath freeways, and dumpster-diving and hitting people up for handouts on the street.
But this guy didn’t do any of that. I don’t think he even had a place to crash at night, although he was one of the smartest people I ever heard railing on the street about this God-forsaken planet that we’re trashing worser and worser every day that goes by.
Now that they’ve disposed of him, no tellin’ what’s gonna happen next.



 I mean, it’s like zombie time, but we can’t even go see a dam movie any more. No more Saturday night at the movies for us. Who’d’ve thought you couldn’t even catch a flick on a Saturday night? What the hell is the world coming to? All the worst stuff is going viral, while the best are clueless. Who knew?

King of Soul

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

Torture

Torture is evil.
What, you don't believe there is such a thing as evil? You think that everything that happens is just random, in the midst of a universe where evil and good do not exist except in the souls of naive humans who dream this stuff up?
Well, you're wrong there. Believe me, torture is evil--wherever and whenever it is practiced, whether by KGB, CIA, or SLA.. It is never justified.
We in the civilized world have due process of law and trial by jury. You believe in evolution? This is it. Due process supplants torture as the genomically improved means for highly evolved humans to establish truth in a world plagued by evil.
Is waterboarding evil? Yes.
Is torture evil when Jack Bauer does it? No, because Jack Bauer doesn't really exist. He's just a character that some tv writers dreamed up.
But the implicit advocacy of torture in Jack's character is evil. And I say that being a fan of 24. But life ain't simple and shit happens, and I'm confused by my own predilictions to be entertained by action shows with twisty plots and timely themes that take on our 21st century grappling with evil.
Torture is evil, spite of the fact that Jack Bauer seems to make good use of it. Don't believe everything you see on tv.
Hamas men torturing their own comrades in a prison--that's evil. And that's the depravityl that Mosab Hassan Yousef discovered when he was in an Israeli jail. That revelation of evil to young Mosab drove him to the awareness that something is rotten in Hamas. Something is rotten in the world.
Yes, Virginia, there is evil in the world.
And torture is it, among other things, like for instance concentration camps.