Baby Steps


Today I'm suffering from allergies, like most everybody else in town. It was summertime for a couple of days, here in the mile high city, where the pine forests have begun a retreat and the junipers are advancing. Of course this is a slow process, and can be borne by the population with the same fortitude as somebody else's cancer.

On CSPAN a House oversight committee heard testimony from a top scientist that the White House was taking their science papers and making them conform to their belief system.

Sometimes I like to practice the guitar with CSPAN on so that when something catches my ear I can stop and listen, and when they're just yammering about procedure or something I can pretend to be a 1950s era Nashville balladeer. So I'm singing a country classic, "If they gave gold statuettes, for tears and regrets, I'd be a legend, in, my time ..."

... and I catch this Representative asking the public relations guy who represents the White House approach, which is to put reality in a suppository and hide it in a cool, dark place suitable for growing mushrooms:

(I'll put quotes around it but it's a facsimile)

"Did you bypass this scientist and go for somebody who'd suck reality's extenuating circumstances, because you knew this man had compared the Bush administration to Nazi Germany?"

"... yes, thank you for the softball, that's why I did it I guess."

And everybody knows he did it because the dog whose ass is in his face told him to do it. And I had two beautiful patterns explode into mandalas. One of them was the perfect form of authoritarian government. It begins at the top and moves down in a perfectly disciplined pyramid. It is the instinctual maleness that drives sled dogs and construction projects and armies.

These are beautiful things, and they are the conscious part of the masculine. Without them we couldn't organize ourselves. There would be no anti-war movement for example, because there would be no war. To have a war you have to organize an army, with all the attendant logistics, supplies, training, uniforms, and of course weaponry. You can't just field an army of testosterone pumped teenagers hopped up on drugs. You have to feed them and quarter them. This takes organization.

But there is a shadow to the tendency of the masculine to organize itself into an army, or a political party, with strict adherence to the top dog principle. The shadow of the strict organizational model is the cooperative, which to those who see the lock step model as "right masculine" is characterized as socialist or liberal. The concentration of taking care of the women, children and old people, with universal health care and elderly care and free education for the young, is denigrated as "socialism."

If you see this, then you aren't confused as to why Ann Coulter called Senator Edwards a "fag." She is part of the hyper-masculine right wing, which is always with us. The problem in a political party is the same problem as in an individual: If you make the masculine, or "right" thinking, exclusive, it inflates. Anything which inflates eventually runs out of energy, because of the effort involved in keeping the shadow unconscious. Eventually it collapses back. This is demonstrated in the myth of Icarus:

He had wings with which he could fly from Crete to the Greek mainland, which is the journey from the matriarchy to the budding democracy, a positive aspect of the masculine patriarchy. But the journey required Icarus keep a prudent course, between the sun (masculine deity) and the sea (feminine unconscious). He got all full of himself and flew too close to the sun. The wax melted, his wings fell off, and he plunged into the sea.

(His father, Daedalus, was a designer of labyrinths. He'd been brought to Crete to design one. He was the one who made the wings, and the one with enough sense to not fly into the sun with wax wings. I was just searching the internet for a site which relates "The Labyrinth Myth," but I can't find it. I did save it in my files, though, and am going to reprint it below. If I find it I'll just link in and erase the copy, because I'm possibly infringing on somebody else's work, which I cannot attribute. But it was a few years back when I found it, and now, even exactly quoting the beginning I can't get it to come up again.)

The scientist who worked for NASA and who is the chief expert on global warming isn't exactly a dumb person, or one who doesn't have some basis for his comparisons. What he was referring to in his comparison of the current government and the Nazi administration was the ideological similarity. The Nazi administration didn't start out murdering six million Jews. It started out as a conservative revolution, and began to emphasize it's own right wing ideology, and minimize what contradicted it.

I was watching Bill Moyers' exceptional documentary on the Abramoff affair, "Capitol Crimes," and found it sobering to hear these guys talking, not about winning an election on issues, but about wiping out people who are opposed to them. They were using war analogies, as if anyone who didn't agree with their politics was an enemy from the outside, and deserving of death. I think most people listen to these things and think, "It's just a figure of speech. They're just aggressive talking people."

Well, that kind of talk desensitizes the worth of other people, which allows progressively extreme measures which are justified by the lesser worth of those who are sacrificed. And with a high rate of interest it doesn't take long for the investment to get to six million. The first step is to gain your complicity in belittling other people, then in torturing them, and ... well, it's just one step at a time. That's why you have to watch that first step.

This article by Robert Proctor is a good one, I think, because it relates the morality and scientific integrity of the Nazi period. The only problem was that the morality was based on the party ideology. I think that's what the NASA expert was referring to and that it is an objective comparison.

CSPAN eventually fades into some idiot droning on in a loud voice about something of little importance, to distract from the serious issues at hand, such as "the pleasure of the President."

I've heard that phrase so many times in the past week I'm starting to get Monica Lewinsky's image mixed up with that of a federal prosecutor in a rough sex ad.

What occurs to me today, as I watch the news, and play my guitar, is the phrase, "Baby Steps." I think of one of the great psychologists of our time, Dr. Leo Marvin, and how he taught that all you need to get where you are going is baby steps. And I think back to when this war started, and people were upset about the first casualties. But because the caskets were hidden, and our taxes were cut, and there was no conscription, they became just numbers. With baby steps, we overcame our principles and destroyed our reputation in the world.

Perhaps we can baby step our way into believing that a war against terra-ists isn't just a mispronunciation. It is the unconscious saying, "Listen carefully to what their real enemy is ..."

It might not hurt to listen to Einstein, as well: "If bees were to disappear, then man would have only a few years to live."

The bees are disappearing as we speak ...


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THE LABYRINTH MYTH


The labyrinth myth is age-old and universal, common to all ancient civilizations. It is mostly referred to as a place that is confusing and difficult to pass through, because it is very easy to lose one’s way in its intricate paths. Sometimes it interferes with a story of a majestic man, hero or mythical person who wins, solves the labyrinth and finds the key that finally leads to solution of the puzzle made in a pattern of paths. This myth goes millennia back in history, to man’s first quests for a deeper meaning of existence.

One stone next to the entrance, that was returned to its place in the Labyrinth by Mons. Josip Bandera, the parish priest of Beli, thus symbolically opening the Labyrinth, has an ancient Crete, and also Celtic, symbol engraved on it, as well as the symbol found on 7.000 year-old Bohemian ceramics. It is a hand axe with two blades which may also represent a double pair of horns: one pair turned upwards, and another downwards. United, they make a double bladed axe, an old symbol referring to a deity of the most powerful cult on Crete: the sacred bull. This axe was named Labrys, and according to age-old tradition, it was the weapon by which a god, whom Greeks called Ares-Dionysus, had opened the First Labyrinth.

Here is the story: it is believed that Ares-Dionysus, an age-old god from the beginning of time, descended to Earth. At that time nothing had yet been created, nothing had been formed. There was only darkness, mere obscurity. However, Ares-Dyonisus was sent a weapon Labrys from the above, being he must use it and create the world. In the midst of dark, Ares-Dyionisus started walking in circles. This is very interesting because contemporary science has discovered an extraordinary fact: when one is in the dark, not being able to determine the stretch of space around them, or when one wants to leave some spacious or dark place, one mostly tends to walk in circles. The path that one opens and that gets more and more illuminated is called a labyrinth. In other words, it is a path which is cleared, cut through by Labrys.When Ares-Dyionisus worked his way through to the centre of his path by cutting and clearing away, he discovered that no longer has he had as same axe as when he started off, but that it was transformed into pure light. What he held in his arms was a flame, a torch which illuminates superbly, because he worked a double miracle: he cast away the outer darkness by one edge of his axe, and by another he cut through his own inner darkness. As much as he was creating the light on the outside, he was also creating the light inside him; while he was opening a passage out, he also opened a passage in. Reaching the maze’s centre, the very heart of his journey, he discovers that he brought about light, thus reaching his own self.

This legend belongs to the most ancient Crete tradition in connection with the maze. Springing from it, other, even more known, legends emerge. The most famous is the one about a fantastic maze built by Daedalus, a famed architect and innovator of ancient Crete, whose name was also a synonym for the labyrinth, an intricate passage. Coming back to the language of Ancient Greece, Daedalus or Dactilus (this name also occurs sometimes), is one who creates, works with his fingers, one who builds. He represents a constructor, builder, not only someone who had built a complex of palaces and maze gardens for King Minos, but in a much deeper sense, perhaps the first god who had built the Light Labyrinth within darkness. Minotaur, a creature with a man’s body but a bull’s head, was entrapped in King Minos’ labyrinth. He was slain by Theseus using Labrys, a double-bladed axe, who finally managed to find his way back out thanks to a skein of golden thread from Ariadne.

Posted: Mon - March 19, 2007 at 07:53 PM