PARALLEL UNIVERSES

THE PARALLEL UNIVERSES OF EDUCATION,
MEDICINE, ART, LAW, WAR & FINANCE

AS THE GREAT DEPRESSION PROVED, international banking is the culprit else a Wall St. shutdown would not have affected the rest of the world even unto the Orient. Everything is interconnected, especially now with computers. Wouldn’t Genghis Kahn and Alexander the Great have loved internet communications and drones? It’s the simultaneity factor between cause and effect, the interactivity creating the concatenation that we are focusing on herein.
Isolating each course of study or activity we find dualities and multiplicities within, offsets to the cause and symptoms, middle range statuses of getting from here to there. In medicine the rostrum of illness to detection to cure to recovery is a labyrinthine business requiring many institutions and facilities with many specialists, technicians, nurses, nurse aides and the attendant building and cleaning crews and delivery personnel. But an illness in and of itself may be reduced to cause and solution, a leap from midrange tactics to before and after. A neurogenic bladder, for instance, requires an emergency room visit, temporary relief, follow up clinic visit, minor operation, self-catheter application for an indeterminate time, further checkups, resolution or continued catheter use. To condense this process one might be apprised of the catheter use and be done with the intermediate steps. This is usually not so because of the setup at hand for determining and dispensing of health care. We are apprised that the ancient Greeks had means of catheter so it’s hardly a new procedure. We therefore wittingly or unwittingly support the hierarchical system for its own sake, not for immediate sake of healing or ministering expeditiously. The medical system thereby costs more and takes more time.
Parallel universes exist in all walks of life, that is, the offset to what is applied against what is deemed in need of repairing or fulfilling. Money for another instance comes through acts and activities monitored by a worldwide system of finance based on labor and commerce and increasingly with the addendum of communications and of course transportation. Every issue of contemporary commerce requires many layers of endeavor. Democracy itself proves this. Representative Democracy means having others do our negotiating for us because there are too many people to have a sit-down resolution session as to how best to run the country. So we elect representatives to do this for us but the many-tiered arrangement becomes so unwieldy that one can’t see the steps taken to arrive at consensus of laws. We are informed of decisions by others that have nothing at all to do with our wishes or welfare, in fact want no input but for votes and campaign dollars.
In the arts and entertainments this plurality is apparent. To get from here to there in art or entertainment one goes to the middlemen agents, directors, publishers, arbitrageurs, critics, galleries, museums, showcases, promoters &c, a hierarchy in itself that promotes product instead of sensitivity. Art has become “the painted word” as Tom Wolfe describes it, commodities for view and sale as if packaged goods, hence advertising and reviews intervene.
With law, politics is naturally entwined, the layering being complex beyond most of mankind, thus the need of lawyers, law-yers, literally bargainers of law tactics following set standards though not always with rectitude. The tomes of legal writ are beyond the consumption of ordinary people because the history of law extends back through centuries of precedents and the linguistics cryptic and arcane. There are many laws which actually contradict other laws in the same state or federal compilations, a conundrum which seems to cause no great concern. A hypocritical society is accustomed to Catch-22 schizophrenics. War naturally arises out of law as extension of legal means. When this process is corrupted such as the ruse to mount attack in Iraq in 2003, the offset becomes crystal clear as to cause and effect being totally out of the realm of rationale, actually rife with corruptible conversion. Or considering the legal case against O. J. Simpson, exoneration from one charge led to civil conviction on the same charge – double jeopardy – and hence criminal conviction on a separate future charge, but all hearkening back to failure of prosecution to convict on the original charge of murder, the old adage of getting him for the crimes he got away with settles in as the cause-effect ratio in real terms but labeled otherwise for sake of legal procedure and recordkeeping and of course public relations.
Finance being a worldwide congeries affects all other issues. International banking is the issue that is mostly overlooked but again, downturns in major financial centers have ready affect upon most of this world. Even the most remote communities feel the result of financial failures. Since finance is involved in arts and entertainment, war, education, medicine et al, the marketplace operates basically as computerized cash registers, self-perpetuating until the inevitable crash reoccurs due to rapacious greed by moneychangers.
Education is a money game and essentially always has been but former education bastions were much more affordable than those to follow. What was once a $300 year of tuition is now $30,000. Getting from here to there requires huge debt. Education itself, the desire to think or act acutely through study and research, is still viable though one can accomplish this without a formal school, especially now with computers and internet capability. Formal education now means a job. One can’t get a job as an art teacher, for instance, without a master of fine arts degree (MFA) in art from an accredited university which traditionally does not produce the greatest artists. Though it is well known that savants that may come from disparate venues with little or no training can come up with revolutionary ideas, this has no bearing upon the standards set by universities and governments. Vague categories are devised to try to accommodate this potential, “honorary” degrees and such, but the hoops are designed to be prohibitive since other intermediate parallel universes come into play requiring acquisition of status garnered by the marketplace.
Government spending allocations, both mandated and discretionary, are likewise fickle and bound in red tape administrated by career college-educated personnel who, for the general public, take umbrage at much of what they are paid to allocate and hence bitterly refuse all recipients they are capable of refusing while otherwise attending to recordkeeping as justification for their time clock hours. Hence have come the linguistics of bureaucracy, substantiating ineptitude with euphemistic slogans and formulae. This is of course how a country such as this becomes mired in debt and deficit with no end in sight.
Corruption. Corruption comes due to the parallel universe syndrome. With all stratification inherent in all walks of life the opportunities are rife for tweaking the rules. In effect the tweak becomes the rule simply because of the stares decisis acceptance of the courts, i.e. to stick with former decisions even when they might not be entirely within the framework of original draft. This leaves boundless room for reinterpretation to further tweak the tweak, so to speak. This is most apparent in politics but the politics of anything also is affected by this method via stratification. When we find offsets between cause and effect we may know that parallelogram design is at work. Hence rectangles are tweaked to trapezoids, squares to cubes, cubes to tesseracts, extended geometrically to truncated tetrahedrons, on and on unto infinity. When simplicity is lost, corruption metastasizes.
With crime, law and order soon complicated things. Formerly a fellow caught with his hand on something that didn’t belong to him lost his hand, done deal. Then came litigation to fill in all the steps between crime and punishment until now it is become a culture unto itself, a syndrome that repeats endlessly, predictably: cops, courts, corrections in that order. Thence when the crime rate actually dropped in the 1990’s in America the incarceration rate stayed the same. The system saw to that because it was already in place and quotas were arrived at through new statutes and enhanced sentencing. Crime is good business. The for-profit prisons should illustrate that well enough, capitalizing on that which requires quotas, with obvious ramifications inherent. Rehabilitation is a sham but suffices to justify the system of parole and recidivism albeit in name only, rhetorical bombast without meaning as if a screenwriter’s plot to be cast upon star struck cattle-call wannabes whether theatrical or public hearing parole proceedings, all parts of the concatenation leading from here to there and back again, there to here perpetually. The culture of cops has evolved itself to set standards within this framework which singles out the Ockham’s Razor suspect in formula mode, i.e. the husband killed the wife, the ex-con did the B&E, whatever the most easily identifiable relationship might infer, thence the task becomes one of corroborating evidence and testimony to fit the “person of interest”. Naturally some erroneous and wrongful convictions are extant.
This parallel multiplicity assuredly extends to the realm of cops, courts and corrections subdividing each. The layered structure of this triptych is such as to allow vagaries and vicissitudes to proliferate in Mad Hatter style, absolutely bizarre and oxymoronic. Everything becomes inverted. Case in point reiterated: a sexual offender convict must receive Sex Offender Program (SOP) psychological therapy sessions, usually group gatherings with a psychologist monitor. If such a prisoner, however, has received a Life sentence any such therapies are precluded since the inmate will never get out, or so the theory goes. In other words, why bother if the guy’s going to die in prison where he’s not so likely to reoffend? And if he should, it’s only other prisoners anyway, prison rape not being a category of consideration except in the outside world looking in from a safe distance. The Catch-22 though comes in the fact of what is known as “Lifer Parole”, also an oxymoron though accepted blandly by staff and court. Thus the stratification of prison plateaus becomes irrational yet ensconced as daily routine. Even when pointed out, the absurdity of this is dismissed as if negligible. The Parole Board will absolutely not consider a CSC prisoner for parole without these types of therapeutic classes yet though the Department of Corrections insists the inmate complete them will not allow it under terms of Life imprisonment even when parole potential is stipulated. Such illogic is tantamount to worldwide détente.
Speaking of which, the reason for détente is the WWIII factor, that which would likely destroy enough of this Earth to render it barely livable for a much reduced population. Rogue states like North Korea might even take a chance on this so the US and Allies try to ensure that it won’t go that way. Thus we find the labyrinthine entanglements between nations based upon balance of power, which is of course never an equal balance but one based upon caprice of the school yard at recess, sort of monitored for peace but unpredictable and subject to trends, quirks and copycats. Thence came the secret services, NSA, 007 spies, drones et al.
What we think we see is not what we get. We are missing acknowledgement of the shades, the gradations, of how we get from here to there. This is why politics and business become illicit: too many side deals are cut. This erodes the principle and practice of any organization. What results is a compendium instead of a straightforward cause and effect, an itinerary in lieu of an ideal. With disparate parts the whole is weighted with dross, unavoidable because the syllabus has taken into account too many variables. This is clearly seen in bureaucratic circles wherein no one can clearly state anything but must refer you to another department. None are responsible in this circuitous cycle that even when something is accomplished the route getting there is obscured in rhetoric and avoidance. The Affordable Care Act of 2013 is such an imbroglio, a zugzwang. For-profit insurance companies are opting out and canceling policies that the public was promised would increase coverage and reduce cost.
Likewise with education, the intensity of higher learning is reserved for specialization or advanced degrees, or indeed private study outside the university or laboratory. Albert Einstein needed no school or university or laboratory to come up with his theories of relativity, only arriving there through his private intuition. Philo T. Farnsworth at the age of 13 foresaw the television set of the future in 1930 while a farmhand. These are direct examples of a leap forward without the intervening layering of input from various sources that eventually scrambled the effort into diffuse areas and personal squabbles as we see in the various branches of science derived from Einstein’s theories and the potential yet vast wasteland of television as it evolved. Egocentric individuals and groups focused on subdividing these inventions of mind have succeeded only in limiting and diluting the principles of purity they began with. In France and French Canada it is said that education is a focused process, not the well rounded survey it is in the United States. A broad base of information may work well for politics but is nonessential for business or the arts, nor for medical expertise, languages and linguistics, or scientific development.
Substrata of bureaucratic plateaus have been put in place to subvert all efforts. One must always do many steps unneeded to arrive at the place one wants to achieve. This has become ensconced to the degree that it becomes imperative to go through the motions in order to arrive at the desired plateau, in effect causing many to abandon the cause due to the overriding necessity of dealing with the cogs in the process. The hoops have become the goal, hence no goal but for some distant tunnel of possibility, the light at the end flickering.
Once it was not so complex. The inevitable mucking of progress though often diffuses the original intent. The social order with all its exigencies of money, time and space confuse the issue of exploration unless a directive from a consortium dedicated to a specific idea or ideal. Even then the differing factions will argue and subvert the greatest of ideas in their commercial or simple petty notions. As has been referenced, a newspaper may contain a great number of “less than stellar talent” on its staff. So it is in all organizations. The filler, or workforce, student body, teachers’ union, police forces, armies, corporations &c are peopled with homunculi by and large, people who are listless and opportunistic, conniving and untalented. This often leads to subversion toward those who are ingenious and motivated thereby cancelling out the impetus to create and perform. The more steps and impediments placed between extremes the lesser becomes the result, weighted by incompetence, rivalry, pettiness &c.
This is probably most apparent in political issues but spills over into most of life’s activities. When once ossified into a specific organism the result is always inefficiency, waste, sloth, corruption, embezzlement and so on, the usual array of torpor that accompanies any group effort. This also has the characteristic of inhibiting the individual since rules and regulations are created around the group efforts, making hoops and hurdles for the individual. Therefore when anyone wants to accomplish anything involving official approval the steps must be taken to arrive there with stamped signed-off finality. This of course limits creativity to uniformity. The results of this are apparent everywhere, art, architecture, law, entertainment, education, medicine, war and finance. All is uniform and legally formally standardized.
Then come the anomalies both staged and erratic. Medical breakthroughs though stifled most often such as the stem cell research, technological discoveries, astronomical developments, educational theorems, social prognoses also stifled by social problems of implementation and resistance, arts and entertainment prodigies, all of which are hampered in some way by the existing order. Only in disorder can anything new come into being, hence the internet innovations prior to controls yet to come. “Surplus order” otherwise, as Alvin Toffler has espoused, has become the way of life, easily illustrated in the advent of preemptive wars, police state “stop and frisk” laws, bureaucratic lockdown and even shutdown, sameness of entertainment, artistic ennui, even gay marriage and divorce, all is programmed, even the seemingly erratic. Example of this would be the composed assassination of Osama bin Laden. The setup was elaborate yet hokey. Intense tight-knuckle, fixed stare drama intended to grip the audience as if a cliffhanger resolved in an operatic swan song with nary a shred of evidence to substantiate. A staged anomaly minus only the Saturday Night Live crew. One might even anticipate Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Serling to appear at the final wrap-up before fading to applause.
This trapezoidal enigma is reproductive and extends itself like a spore. In this modern world – with appendage vestiges harking back to medieval times – the apostasy from established principles is spreading in decadence and alienation. The wars, the prisons, the schools, social issues, housing, transportation, communications, all have the worn sense of decay from which spores develop. Thereby we can expect and anticipate more of less as civilization continues its decline even in the face of supposed innovation. Certainly there is and has been innovation albeit clouded by reservation and inhibiting factors and factions. This world could be a much better place with the institution of what has been summed up as the Philosopher King, a Platonic anagogic representative of a purer state of existence devoted to peace, prosperity and philosophical attunement. As it is, great ideas are postponed and occluded with rhetorical hesitation through the machinations of bureaucracy and the expedient of policing and securing what has been wrought. Security has not brought satisfaction or even safety; security brings insurrection as effect of suppression.
Worldwide atrocities festoon the airwaves daily. Outrageous acts even here in the home country mark the US as barbarous and ignorant, vindictive and silly. The case of Mike’s Hard Lemonade in Michigan serves the ludicrous issue well, the thousands of slain children and grandmothers in the Middle East tell the rest. Any leadership that can justify killing randomly is bad leadership. Surely it’s Machiavellian in terms of power and control but in this 21st century is anachronistic to say the least, though this is symbolic of the distance between ideal and reality. The modern world is not so modern after all. We only have drones instead of catapults. Torture chambers remain quite the same. The “banality of evil” is consistent. Loyalty is easily garnered; all that needs be done is call it “bravery”.
A person may have abilities to transfer to a well-paying job but unless he has worked his way up the ladder he won’t have it. Another person may call a bureaucrat with a question, be transferred six times and end back at the first official he spoke with and no answer. It’s the syndrome of repetitive angst that accomplishes nothing that has become the norm. As they say, no wonder nobody gets anything done, there’s no time, because time is taken up by inefficiency. This system, this syndrome, is getting worse, more convoluted. Soon we’ll be helpless. But for war perhaps we already are. Machiavelli would corroborate. Thereby have the conservative elements come to intervene as chaos becomes more the standard. The gridlock tightens. The parallel universe is extended the more, the layers become the norm with increasing ineptitude and oxymoronic conundrum until the cause and effect is lost in hyperbolic rhetoric.
Enantidromia, running counter to, yin-yang, coined by Karl Jung, initiated by Heraclitus and Plato, cause and effect mirroring diametrically in rotation, the tendency of revolutions to return to the cause for revolution, is the effect of bureaucracy, war, suppression of any kind, the opposite effect from that desired and carried out. Tis always thus. This holds true for good ideas and acts as well, the inverse coming to the fore. This is the folly of good and evil since all acts produce their reverse intentions. Government bureaucracy tries to iron out this anomaly but fails miserably in protracted regulations and endless tomes of social engineering dialect interpretations. All becomes convoluted and meaningless, senseless, irrational and perplexing. This is the norm for America circa 2013. It appears to be getting worse, which implies that it could get better. No guarantees there though. Like a whirlpool the suction is insistently centripetal retrograde.
Students and scholars of the US Constitution argue that the document was written in the 18th century and not relevant to the 21st. Indeed the legislature seems dysfunctional, the Supreme Court a 5-person autocracy, the executive a schizophrenic. The Electoral College falls neatly into the diffused stratification theorem, basically a distrust of the public workaround method created to benefit the ruling class, not the rural class. If anyone takes the time to scrutinize the
Articles and the Bill of Rights, such as I have, it is unmistakable that large parts have been superseded and even rendered moot. Constitutionality is still used as rhetoric but in figurehead status only. This is outlined elsewhere. The pretense of constitutionality is a canard. The document has largely been usurped. Barack Obama who taught constitutional law for ten years does not follow tenets which he taught. This is either schizophrenia or hypocrisy, double standard at the least. In any case, the breaking up of the short document has evolved into tomes of strata that do not resemble the original. There is talk of writing a new one but the result would ineluctably be determined by those in power, which in turn would be challenged by succeeding powers. The document remains perhaps only for purport of that very issue. Superseding it entirely might create anarchy. This is basically the situation in this state of Michigan. If the US triumvirate wants a new template let them look to Michigan for true dysfunctional stratification.
Policing and monitoring have become the largest stratification extant, inclusive of all military and special agent troops. This was not foreseen other than the 2nd Amendment. Some say that this Amendment is that which solely prevents a military dictatorship since the NRA, militias, similar groups, homeowners and hunters act as a restraint upon a government which repeatedly tries to disarm Americans. America supplies weaponry to the world and it’s estimated that there are at least as many guns here as people, probably many times more. This keeps the police force busy nationwide and the armed forces busy worldwide. Can a police state be indicative of an encroaching military dictatorship? As with Russia and China, the US is not far removed from martial law. We witnessed this with the swiftness with which the city of Boston was on lockdown due to a mere two individuals who amateurishly detonated homemade bombs. True, we don’t have need of a well-regulated militia as such anymore but it’s reassuring to know that there are guns in almost every home, Canada too. A paranoid leadership is able to deploy troops anywhere but they can’t deploy troops everywhere if it came to that. Arrogant cops are edging us toward that feasibility. Militias, hunters and homeowners form the redoubt against that possibility. Disarm the people, we are under tyranny of dictatorship. This is evident from the buildup of armaments in local cop shops that police towns of pop. 2000 and less.
These intermediate rungs or plateaus between here and there have created this imbroglio that is essentially a Ponzi scheme which requires deeper and deeper debt and remediate fixes of all imaginable and unimaginable kinds. As is reiterated oft, the unthinkable has become thinkable. It’s in our faces every day with no relief in sight. It would appear that we’re beyond the point of doomsayers; it’s inevitable now, self-evident as in the Declaration of Independence, written largely by Thomas Jefferson who expressed by his very paradoxical lifestyle the schizophrenic beginnings of this colonializing of Indian lands. It’s impossible to conceive of those founders perceiving what has become of the great experiment of colonializing, that is what it has become, reduced to greater hypocrisy than could be imagined back then. As the great Indian Chief remarked drolly to Lyndon Johnson, “Be careful with your immigration laws; we were careless with ours”. And as the individual goes bankrupt so shall the federal government. No one knows exactly how or when we will be in default but it’s ineluctable. The complexity is unwieldy. The American citizen is treated as potentially criminal, the heavy hand of stricture of law being the method of government with Swat team troops distributed far and wide ready to counter any uprising and even individual expressions of frustration.
Failure to address these issues is concrete enough proof of the dysfunction of government which like all bureaucracy is hamstrung by these multitudinous parallels we exist with and within. All past civilizations have decayed and fallen; this too shall pass. The gauge lies in discerning these parallel universes inherent to all sensors of civilization, all comingling and converging on hell bent destruction. Of course we all know that Athens survived, that Rome survived, that Europe survived, but they all had their days of abject forlorn ruination from which they might not have been resurrected. Already America is largely decayed in its downtown sections large or small, empty storefronts, cracked sidewalks, shuttered factories and warehouses.
This splintering of in-betweens that govern our lives serves only to distract from the real purpose of life, that of fulfilling our personal goals whatever they be, that inner sense of what one needs to feel complete. The kaleidoscope of our modern times only inhibits because it changes in fickle style every season. Nothing is permanent including values. As the politicos posture about Nelson Mandel’s passing the world remains in negative flux anyway. There’s just too much corruption to ever weed through, too many layers of bureaucracy and détente. It probably seemed like the end time during the Second World War but here we are still prophesizing more and seemingly bound and determined to bring it about. There is no more sense of adventure lest it be in cyber innovation. Music, art, drama, dance, all have taken a dive into oblivion; politics is now disparaged and distrusted, kakistocracy expected, begotten.
These parallel universes are faux and phony, useless and extraneous because the splintering has diffused the essence into kaleidoscopic miasmas, colorful snowflakes of lesser worth, pretentious and vacuous. This is what we deal with daily, useless and extraneous appendages without benefit but for the immediate consolation of burdens possibly alleviated if the circumstances meet the criteria, a constant struggle for many or most. The government of the United States, like governments everywhere, is useless and self-destructive imminently. This is just the way of it eternally: entropy everlasting but they are the last to succumb to decimation because they hold the purses that we all contribute to like it or not. The middle ground of bureaucratic dysfunction substantiates this all too well in its everlasting incompetence and bitterness toward those they supposedly serve, automatons all those representatives of the people.
Within these kaleidoscopic parallel universes there are to be found persons of integrity, sometimes groups, occasionally even politicians, that try to balance the load. It’s always an uphill climb but since all politicians have to relate to the public in some ways even if only rhetorically, the semantics spouted tend to tilt toward the beneficent. The rightwing radicals that actually come off like Rush Limbaugh in public speaking are mercifully few and soon silenced by media spotlight, proliferated via internet, “gone viral” as the spin goes. There is still some semblance of decency left in the country albeit wavering in view of political ads that confuse and confound. The internet is no less guilty of this. That’s why we have spam and scam catchers, virus detectors, firewalls, junk mail boxes &c. By and large though, there is an underlying sense of freedom inherited from the Constitutional implementation, WWII, and a few of the leaders who managed a respectable stance.
It is only this strand, this thread woven through the fabric of America that salvages us though this thread is wavering and thinning, broken in places. Of course one can’t count on solidarity which is why there are red states, blue states and now purple states. Hypocrisy rears its ugly head all too often simply because saying the right thing is imperative even when doing the wrong thing. All these various and variable factions are stacked one on top of another and make up the collective we call America – coincidently a less-than-revered status with the rest of the world. We’re still considered the cowboys amongst civilized nations. Now and then comes a cowboy of intelligence and integrity but s/he’s riding in a posse of bandits.
There are factions dedicated to regression of American policies, even the stupendous ones concerning human rights. The freestanding man, rugged individualist, is pitted against the recipient of social engineering. And it’s true that some are opportunistic, lethargic and listless under government handouts. But as long as CEOs get millions in pay raises while line workers remain underpaid inequality will continue. Naturally those protectors of assertive energy will say that raising the minimum wage will discourage business but this is unproven fantasy.
It is these stratifications that stand in the way of real progress, these myriad factions that interfere with every attempt to encourage civility, fairness, progressive ideas, for sake of what can only rationally be termed bigotry and greed. But the ingrained presence of such cultural blockades is near impossible to extricate from, as legislative conundrums illustrate, unionized cultures of the multitudinous agencies of business and government all dedicated to their particular methodologies stolidly insisted upon. Unionized police officers for instance are not about to break their codes garnered through training and the thin blue line solidarity. The factions nonetheless vie for power plays and keep the idea of cooperation at bay, a factor attributed to the 9-11 failure of intelligence surveillance, a “limited hangout” as it is known when authorities want to assuage public ire.
In keeping with the topic of title it’s the midrange of all endeavors that inhibits and often precludes what one seeks since obscured in stages that others have built as barricades. Government is no innocent party in this but business surely takes its cut. The military is government – or is it? Some maintain that the military is linked to industry, a complex, yet a complex would indicate three or more components, not two. Hence we arrive at the military-industrial-legislative complex. Overriding that we become aware of the international banking elites, the Rothschilds and spinoffs who possibly run the whole show. The Federal Reserve is not a federal institution but a private bank cleverly designed to appear official with its own portcullis, columned, stately edifice of granite standing as a Parthenon frieze emulation for dignity and respect. Appearance is everything. When once the ignorant are convinced by the clever they maintain their dogmatic mumpsimus ways. It’s unlikely this system can be broken down to basics ever lest some great upheaval takes place.
Let’s face the facts: colonization took from other peoples, separated itself from former fealties, manipulated the land and the peoples, set up a separate government, which in turn allowed for segue to further tweaks as the young country struggled with its unequal distribution of rights and freedoms. But even with all that heritage as basically outlined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, there is great animosity and greater inequality through these multitudinous aggravated factions that utilize supposed immutable writ of law for nefarious purposes. For even when laws are ratified they may be modified and reinterpreted. Within the myriad morass we get some stark reality but it’s mostly covered up with the spin of rhetoric and propaganda. With the Orwellian approach to reportage and politics, certainly military jargon, we don’t get the stark reality point blank; we get it in installments of euphemism. Enhancement is a ploy that covers all manner of illicit deeds and schemes. There still exist those that harbor nothing but ill will toward many people. And many of these are in positions of wealth and power.
The struggles of the young country America are still with us. That which was not addressed in the beginning remains to be dealt with. Yet attempts at fixing anything are challenged and blocked. Even the arts and entertainment industry is a hierarchy that precludes far more than it includes. As with government they like to say No. Television is still the vast wasteland it always was. Movies, that American standby, are mostly inept and standardized. Who knows where the computer and internet are going? And who knows to where the energy business will go for fuel of the future? It is these imbroglios that keep us in suspense, all the while taxed and repressed by law. America is still basically free as long as you keep a low profile and act dumb. One can’t be outrageous anymore or you’ll draw the heat. Then the system shifts into gear and fulfills its destiny with your help.
The system of government set up in 1787 with addenda in 1791 purposefully allowed for slavery to continue, indigenous tribes to be considered superfluous, women to hold no rights, lands to be bought and sold discriminately, and the usual array of privileges granted to this superior race of oligarchic landowners. Bad beginnings even though a remarkable document by essentially wealthy middle aged white men of recent European descent. It’s ludicrous to view history in any way other than the essentials, the true story, not the whitewashed Columbus version. But this is the grade school indoctrination method, i.e. teach them the cover-up, not the terrible truth. Even with the newer versions of history the old ways remain. Don’t expect government bureaucrats to help us out of any situation. All they can do is follow orders from headquarters, augment them or decrease them according to current pressures but basically maintain the lowest common denominator of parlance and allocation. Most promises by government are rhetorical and not to be taken as truth. As George Carlin once said, it’s acceptable but he wished it were a little more respectable. This it is not. And likely never will be. These incomprehensible layers of governance can never untangle to get back to the simplicity of the original Constitution and Amendments.
It’s fault of parallel universe duplication that things are so unwieldy. They can mobilize troops anywhere in the world but they can’t take care of the simplest bureaucratic chores without complicating them beyond all rationale. It’s not getting better and it likely never will. The more they try to clarify and simplify, the more complex it becomes. Excepting some cataclysm we’re stuck with this system. The entirety of this universe is in parallel with another largely unknown, that of destiny beyond materiality. Simplicity in either case would be appreciated but one has to find it on one’s own; we’re not about to be apprised by any others. It doesn’t have to be that hard; it’s people that make it so – which is precisely why it continues to get worse.
Every writer I think comes to realize it’s all one writing, a concatenation, a stream, life, as Thoreau said, the stream I go a-fishing in. Why there is so much negativity is a question that begets as many answers as there are people. We can’t get from here to there unless we reduce the span to birth and death. The dash between dates is life as they say. It is also said that books offer a beginning, a middle, and an ending whereas we don’t get that with life because we’re never sure of the ending. That’s for others to record or analyze. Dr. Daniel Levinson worked out his sociological study of a man’s life in stages which sums up the normal life of an American male to satisfactory perspective as “Seasons”, plagiarized by Gail Sheehe in “Passages” and sued. The struggles go on.
There was a song in the 1960s, “C’mon people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now” that seemed to have summed up that decade of anti-war marches, peace and love, flowers et al. We seem about as far away from that again as militant automatons can get. It really doesn’t have to be this way but the resiliency seems always to default to this. The question of meaning, eschatology, of life is answered in various ways or not at all. Spiritual gurus of differing philosophies, some genuine, some fabricated, have bestowed cryptic knowledge upon humanity, those that seek to hear consolation. Apart from living a life of accomplishment and a peaceful demise there is nothing else to attract a living being to the experience of life but for the quest to find meaning in it. Most do not it would seem other than the vague contentment of a heavenly realm. Others, it may be said, seem to have no care for such vagaries, take what they want any way they can. Conscienceless oblivion does not appeal to most of us so most seek some compromise with life and a hereafter that they know not the reality thereof or even if there is a hereafter. Presumably the majority of Earth’s population holds some version of religious experience even if it’s elucidated by secular name. Redemption would be a synonym for this. It’s true that not many who expire return like Jesus to tell of the journey.
National leaders largely excuse themselves from this postulation and dwell upon the exigencies of détente, sovereignty, economies, infrastructure and the like in this world of commerce and balance of powers. They, like most others, are concerned with the steps between here and there. The message of such as Jesus skipped most of the in between and got to the essence of life, sort of like the 60s song aforementioned. Gautama Buddha opted out of the process with his stipulations of the Four Noble Truths followed by the Eightfold Path. It’s unknown whether the contemporary Chinese incorporate Buddhism into Communism. There are always spiritual seekers in the Earth at all times but just now there is no call for them. Nelson Mandela was the most recent one to pass to sanctification. The Tao (dow) of Lao Tzu guides Zen thought still. Confucius apothegms still apply though the world seems little interested in such wisdom currently but for the ritualistic reveries given to such as Mandela in obligatory tribute. Such tribute does little or nothing to change the ways of mankind.
Possibly it’s age, this feeling of immanent doom, not palpable, more visceral, like the Commies are coming, the Nazis organizing, the great battle of Armageddon looming. When younger and roaming the country it didn’t seem so volatile, more tolerable though many of us surely knew the burgeoning storm was nigh. Then there were no computers, even no interstate highways in most areas though they were encroaching. As I and so many others hitchhiked out west the two-lane roads were being slowly usurped by freeways with their humongous overpasses and bridges, massive steel and concrete structures obliterating the fields and small towns, roadside Mom and Pop stores, changing everything into a grid of uniform conformity.
Now that the surveillance crews have actually arrived in earnest, it may be ventured that the fabled Big Brother is upon us. The sense is of Jews in Germany or Poland or Austria in 1939, those that didn’t have the wherewithal to leave in time. I can go to Canada anytime since I was born there 70 years ago. But the cost of living is higher there and Canada is no stranger to maintaining order being essentially a British subject colony despite its formal vote of independence in the 1980s. This must be similar to the tension in the air before The Great War broke out. Little skirmishes within the US borders such as the Boston bombing indicate the potential for continuing violence a la terrorism but the plethora of other senseless massacres is even more disturbing. The 9-11 disaster initiated this buildup but comparatively the death toll was small considering all other mortalities combined. Authorities do not, however, mount great assaults on drivers of vehicles or sales of weaponry such as they do on potential lands inculcating terrorism. This is what has made the template for security so tense with apprehension.
This in turn has nonetheless spilled over onto the American people with increasing statutes that inhibit, Bill of Attainder oriented laws that confine Americans to new lows in monitor via police and other bureaucrats. The young may feel the crunch of money matters but the old feel the encroaching police state as well as the attacks on financial security garnered by the New Deal and medical care via the Great Society acts. These are under constant attack increasing in frequency.
It is perhaps prudent to remain rational since none know with certainty if or how the escalation of this feeling may proceed. There are some that prepare rural self-sufficiency domains but most find it inconvenient or unaffordable to change lifestyles at this juncture. We must remember that Hitler’s troops were enlisted from the German people, Stalin’s from the Russian people, Japan and Italy alike. American police and military forces are our neighbors. Signs are found everywhere that mirror atrocities of the past that are now analyzed and understood but not attributed to what we are seeing now in America even as we watch the advance in repressive tactics.
These parallel universes we see burgeoning about us, precluding the simpler lifestyles we formerly knew, have the potential to create a takeover of immense proportions. As said, the concentration of discourse on the social issues of the day becomes as one writing simply due to the intense magnification felt as forces combine to repress, distress, regress. This can’t be avoided yet mustn’t be a catalyst to paranoia – that is what the totalitarian mind conjures.
As education falters for many, especially in grade schools and some college curricula, statutes burgeon, wars proliferate, finance teeters, arts perish, entertainment cheapens, medicine cost inflates, it can’t be ignored that the country approaches some sort of crisis, narrowly sidestepped periodically through negotiations but recurring perpetually. One can extrapolate to any degree of rationale but still the future remains unclear. As it appears the president bears the burden of prejudice against him personally in dignified aplomb with some legitimate reason but widespread societal and official racial discrimination still lurks suspiciously.
Simplifying lifestyle appeals in such times as these. Complexities of society are difficult to avoid however for convenience of amenities has incorporated most all of us into the greater grid. The pressure is building. This metaphoric volcano may explode. We can’t say we haven’t been warned albeit Krakatoa 1883 gave little advance notice although there were some indications. Skies were darkened worldwide at that conflagration, as is prophesized and foreshadowed now in social, military and economic terms. Signs of adumbration seem foregone conclusions whereas The Great Being is the rarity. We can pray, we can demonstrate, or we can meditate but the only way of truly exposing evils is through mendicancy or martyrdom. 