The prologues are over. It is a question now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.    [1]

Thus the West’s anchor of Judaic sobriety gave another sign of letting go. Grand arbitrary gestures, a rhetoric of the egotistical sublime by which the magus sweeps away the past with his fictions triumphs: one must choose ‘counter-factual history’ or the grand cynicism of postmodern dogma, life as artifice, as assemblage and construct. This is the madness toward which the art-cult rushes, the simulations of an “insatiable actor” seeking his identity that Macbeth, disenchanted at last but only to despair, identified as “a poor player who struts and frets… and then is heard no more.” The “tale told by an idiot,” a curse of life aimed, glancingly at the Creator, pinions the modern masters of de-personalization who reach back for the original pagan magic and, wishing to “jump the life to come” with their “vaulting ambition” find G-d only in involutions and terror. Read the rest of this entry »

PREFACE

The West is defined by its artifice complex, a compulsion to represent and fix its identity in images, likenesses, statues and representations. But as the root suggests, images derive from magic and magike tekne, “the weaving of images,” art, leads to apparitions, ghosts, shadows and madness. Neither a person nor a culture can create or clarify an identity through representations; it only can lose itself in reflections, shadow worlds and enchanted bowers. Essaying the magic of the semi-divine Perseus, a cult of images winds up on an endless, circular shield of art, fleeing from the gorgons it would charm, the gorgons that are all the ambiguities in its soul [1]. Read the rest of this entry »

“The United Nations Organization must immediately be equipped with an international armed force… a force for action, a true Temple of Peace.”
 

“We are engaged in the process of creating a European unit in the world organization of the United Nations… one of several continental units, the pillars of the world instrument for maintaining security.” [1]
 

When those now worrying about “Social Security,” State – managed health ‘insurance,’ and dogmas like global warming or “a new world money, a contrived currency” to advance “a collectivist world order” were young, they read about the bold leadership and heartening rhetoric of Winston Churchill, elder Statesman of the Allied powers and champion of “the fraternal association of English-speaking peoples” [2].  An eminent example of his tutelary ‘prophetic’ status was his celebrated speech about Russia’s clamping an “iron curtain…upon Europe from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic.” Amid his soaring rhetoric, including poignant mention of “mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamt,” and ample self-praise, the august Churchill cannily presented a goal little discussed in mass media or typical school texts. Read the rest of this entry »

I asked some students that question and they didn’t know, thus, don’t be surprised if familiar tragedies keep recurring as farce, like a broken record and effluvium of a bad meal. 

The big bad hologram wants to make a meal out of Israel again; those damn Jews still won’t get out of Arab-occupied central Israel, and idiot Jews won’t stop giving them jobs within the green line. And now this dude, an ostensible victim of racism wants the Jews out: in ‘his’ defense, he’s just an image on a screen, a talking head, a façade, albeit a grimy and unpleasant one. Read the rest of this entry »

The media distraction machine has been drowning its target audience in the dazzling bathos of the illustrious “freak,” Michael Jackson, a cynosure and epitome of modern genius and disease. A constructed person whose identity was a mélange of sentiment, desire, toxic trends and, perhaps, serious fiddling he was an avatar of postmodernism, an “idol of the theatre” in Bacon’s sense as well as literally. Read the rest of this entry »