bob's blog

War as Menstruation Envy...........

This is not a declaration of war. War is a male “menstruation envy” ritual slaughter carried on against humanity in the twisted psychic belief that it will make men whole. It doesn’t. War is a negation, a suppression, not an affirmation. It seeks to eliminate what exists not supplant it, learn from it, make it part of the conscious movement toward justice, equality and liberty.

The subconscious is a powerful force. It drives men’s actions even as they attempt to deny it’s existence. Jung showed us how powerful the collective unconscious is, by looking at Culture’s highest artistic achievements and mysticism and relating the symbolism to the underlying nature of the human psyche. It transcends language both written and spoken and is seen most clearly in the images created in stone carvings, sand paintings, and more contemporary visual arts. The psyche is not culture bound, and has at it’s very root the germ plasm that supports consciousness, language and literacy.

What happened on the way to the forum after 9/11 that framed the dialogue of healing that we needed in the language of war? The epic battle of good versus evil, of winning against an amorphous public enemy, of using all the weapons at our disposal to eliminate once and finally the need for weapons. Hasn’t it become exceedingly clear that weapons and the use of force will never end violence? It is violence.

The dialogue that we need today is a tool not a weapon. It is a way of dredging our inner beings in search of the unseen forces that are driving the human animal, and to harness those forces to lift us to higher planes of consciousness. The kind of tool that has raised us over the animal kingdom to recognize the “I” within, and how it relates to “You” and “We”. The dialogue is not simply an Oral dialogue of “he said, she said”. It is a Written dialogue expressed in the future tense. According to Barry Sanders, professor of English and the History of Ideas at Pitzer College, the alphabetic wholeness has the effect of spreading authority throughout a collection of individuals, a democratizing shift capable of transforming an entire society. We come to our collective identity in the written word. The “Emily” principle, the voice of an agoraphobe, spoken with so much power so many years after her passing. It didn’t matter that she never wandered far from home, she traveled the world with her words and changed it in the process.

We’re searching for that transforming principle today, expressed in twelfth letter terms, love, liberation, longing, legitimacy. The darkness that we want to illuminate with words exists in every individual. We can collectively share the power of illumination by affirming our authority to move “Us” past violence. To bring literacy and the “identity” that is really only possible in literacy to all the people through World Institutions.

That is a big undertaking. It is moving forward. It is progressing from the self imposed limits to the world where borders, the separation between “Us” and “Them”, is eliminated. It is a positive affirmation of a struggle to liberate that portion of the world that lives in darkness. It is the road that leads away from Armageddon, where Women walk without fear, and Children discover truth.

Bob

Posted by Bob at 05:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Teco had instructions, a game plan with a wide open strategy. If was up to him to implement it any way he could. These were unchartered waters. No one had answers, only pertinent questions. Given the nature of the beast, you couldn’t open a manual and follow a prescribed course of action for the desired results. He was well suited for the job. He made free association his stock in trade. He didn’t think outside the box, the box didn’t exist.

One day he would muse about Air Drive Gondolas, personal means of conveyance that could be hoisted on cables and pulled along by a ten knot breeze. He devised fanciful contraptions to “sail” over the treetops using wind energy and solar energy to power lightweight personal cocoons. You could sleep in it, use it to get from place to place, and store it easily when you got to your destination. His personal solution for the age after petroleum. He liked to follow those ideas in a dream state just to see where they took him. He would spend hours giving his mind free reign and letting it soar to places no one had ever imagined.

Other days he would think up a money gun letter. “Dear Sir; I work for the Nigerian Government and I have access to a large pool of capital and a strong desire to place some in your country. You have undoubtedly heard of me, Mamoud El-Khodor, of the Ministry of Defense.” The letter of course was a front for the real purpose which was to swamp the Carnivore with semi-plausible terrorist e-mail. He had a facility for sending 10,000 bulk e-mails faster than you could blink. He wanted to pepper the Carnivore Sniffer with “zero hour” messages and render the entire counter espionage establishment meaningless. Each message would insert a different nonsense phrase like, “one week, Topeka, Federal Street.” or “Call tomorrow, Abdul”. One of his favorites was “pink, ninety eight, railroad.” What could they make of that?

He had a great program for adding a subject line and sending a totally garbled message with his bulk mailer. Each message changed the recipient, the subject line, the return address and a different garbled message in the body. The routing was different even if the message was identical and so trying to run that back was as close to impossible as you could ever get.

How could you defend against piracy with a standing army? Armies are for killing enemies you can identify. Piracy is carried out by ordinary guys, someone that looks like your neighbor, who steals your daughter from her sleeping bed, or shoots from a moving car in broad daylight. Random targets, seeking nothing but the end of sanity.

That was his instruction, and he took it very seriously.

Bob

Posted by Bob at 07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)