-Caveat Lector-
The Race to the Rainbow Bridge
The choices are clear: either tyranny or enlightenment
By John Kaminski
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
My first instinct is to tell you this has nothing to do
with current events, politics or religion, but in fact it has
everything to do with all three.
My second instinct is to say the most important principle
in human politics is separation of church and state - not to
prevent the timeless and proven principles of all religions from
benefiting humanity, but simply to preclude the bickering and
misunderstanding over terminology that diverts all arguments
about what will enable the human race to survive its own nasty
habits into frivolous sectarian hairsplitting.
As a species, we are on the brink of a passage toward a
new way of living, of existing, of organizing human society on
our planet. The old way has failed, demonstrably. Power accrued
to the hands of a greedy few does not result in trickle-down
benificence, as the inbred rich continue to insist. And we have
no knowledge that a genuine democracy could achieve a greater
degree of justice because no actual democracy has ever been
in place. But we do know that the old system produces endless
wars and toxic graveyards, so wouldn't it be worth at least
a try to attempt genuine democracy just once?
Humans are unable to resist material corruption; everyone
has a price beyond which their morality fails. We have, by
and large, abandoned the exhortations of Jesus to love our
neighbors in favor of the bogus belief that money can immunize
us from mortality.
Can we devise new mechanisms to mentally vaccinate
our minds against the temptation of corruption on a social
level? As the human species races toward a future of uncertain
outcome, these mechanisms must doubtless center on the nature
of money. Rather than continue on our present course toward a
more definitive master/slave society in which military force
is the defining commodity, we need to find a way to amplify
the psychological priority of morality and correspondingly
lessen the attraction of first-person greed.
I know it sounds like some kind of hare-brained rationale
of Mao Tse Tung (or I guess today that's spelled Mao Zedong),
but can't we rechannel our goals for happiness toward our
relationships with others rather than toys for ourselves?
It could well be that a merger of banks and churches
will one day evolve into a universal currency based dually on
morality and the welfare of the system in addition to material
worth related solely to survival/comfort of the individual.
Capitalism has failed because it relies on slums in which
to dump its failed products, as well as an unregulated fluidity
at the top with which to constantly bail us out of our busted
budgets. A socialist system has almost always failed to overcome
the temptations of privilege and authority, and tyrannical
corruption has evolved out of noble intentions for the masses
in the administrative processes of collectivized wealth disbursal.
No system of government ever devised on this planet has
ever truly placed control of its resources in the hands of
its community. Corruption has always prevailed, and quicker
minds have always managed to make off with the loot and let
the masses starve. Real wealth always remains in the hands of
the privileged few. There is no clearer example of how our
religions have failed us. They have all been bought off by
secular authorities in exchange for the state-protected right
to fleece their flocks.
We cannot authentically aspire to real freedom as long as
the money supply remains in the hands of a few rich men. As long
as it does, we have zero power over the events and processes
that control our lives.
Of course, currency is a neutral commodity. It has no
intrinsic value unto itself. It's obvious worth is what it
represents, or the material wealth that it can be traded for,
or converted into.
It may be impossible to attach a moral quotient to money,
because the very act that would link its use to the consensus
precepts of a society trying to be moral would necessarily
place limits on freedom of choice that probably most of us
could not abide.
So in improving the nature of money as a possible way to
creating a more humane and less cutthroat society, we would
probably have to limit our goals to examining the practice of
usury, and then more assisduously identify those who actually
control the money, which will probably be two of the most
difficult and elusive tasks humanity has ever undertaken.
That glittering technological marvel called Western
Civilization has been built entirely upon usury. Without
capital speculation, no skyscraper would ever have been
constructed. When will the day come, I wonder, when we
ask ourselves this question: Are skyscrapers what we want
to express excellence in our civilization? What good are
skyscrapers? They are dazzling monuments to greed, that serve
no purpose other than impress and inspire those who are on the
path to exploitation and deception at the expense of others
who are merely trying to live their lives.
Could it be that one day we will willingly trade our
skyscrapers and our usury for a system that produces happy,
self-reliant communities of modest means and virtues, rather
than dazzling megalopolises that impress from a distance
because you can't see the bodies of the homeless moldering
and dying in its windswept alleyways?
Then there comes the question of who actually controls
the money supply, and why is it the same people generation
after generation? Why have 34 of America's 43 presidents
descended from Charlemagne, and why is it every election the
masters of finance get to name both alternative candidates? If
you think you live in a free country and possess the right of
free speech, you are sadly mistaken.
Money rules the world. As long it does, we can never truly
rule ourselves.
But money is only a small part of the human transition
to a more humane and functional future. It's kind of like the
quality of motor oil for the collective engine of humanity. What
if riches were really accrued based on the kind of people we
could be, rather than they are now, on the kind of material
and procedural hegemony individuals can exercise on a given
commodity or process? For one thing, this kind of monetary
system would solve all our environmental problems almost
immediately.
And the principal mode of profit during the five thousand
years of organized human society - making war - would certainly
decline.
If I may continue with the engine metaphor .... if money
is the motor oil, then religion is the fuel. The performance of
the engine - humans doing what they need to survive, prosper and
be happy - can be judged by the quality of the fumes cascading
out of humanity's collective tailpipe. In most cases, it's
very toxic.
Not only is it toxic, it's quite likely that it's
so harmful because we are using the wrong fuel to produce
it. I'm not so much talking about food here (although surely
the future will allow us to radically restructure our diets
into something a lot more sensible) as much as I am referring
to the ideas that religion imbues in our minds.
Perhaps the image of the American cowboy is the perfect
contemporary metaphor for human beings (or maybe that's
because I spent much of my early childhood with a plastic
gun and holster strapped to my waist terrorizing neighborhood
grocery stores, all the time clinging to the little finger of
my mother).
With that gun in our hands (a symbol of human potency
merged with technological prowess), we can conquer the
wilderness, subdue scary wild animals, and eliminate those
beings we consider inimical to our own interests, specifically
those indigenous savages whose cultural upbringing we have
deemed to be inferior to our own.
We get these ideas directly from religion, specifically
the Old Testament, in which a wrathful God time and again urges
his faithful followers to wipe out the heinous infidels simply
because they worship other gods, or in many cases simply did not
speak the same language as the person with the more powerful
"gun" (though back in the olden days, that could have been a
lance, or a sword).
But now, in a world crowded to the attics with superfluous
souls, the gun-toting cowboy motif just doesn't cut it. The
cowboy must necessarily be replaced. But with what?
Individual rights will never disappear, no matter how they
may be tailored by the perceived requirements of the state. The
principal cornerstone of social life is individual liberty,
the conscious choice of one's own fate.
No matter how crowded this planet gets, that will never
be bred out of us, because it's instinctual. We each possess
our own individual dreamscapes.
No matter now hard the state tries to erase this desire in
individuals, it will not succeed. The recognition that each
human being is a part of a much larger animal consciousness -
call it the Ummah, if you like - must be voluntary. Otherwise,
it is tyranny, and by definition, not individual freedom.
Yet, this realization will come one day to everyone. It is
written in all the holy books, though by a myriad of different
names. And yet, in one certain, very important context,
religions have steered us in the wrong direction. Else,
otherwise, why all these wars?
Let me explain. I've noticed when I speak with a person
who insists she is religious, the sense of what I am actually
saying can never get through to that other person's brain,
because that other person always interprets my words, not
empirically and taken at face value, but in the context of her
own belief system. Thus, communication is generally impeded
when the receiver of a thought from someone else translates
it into the terminology of her own religious outlook. As
evidenced by the amount of strife in the world, this usually
means mistranslation, misunderstanding and conflict.
In addition, the tendency of most religions to dangle some
kind of comfortable afterlife concept as a carrot in front of
its potential adherents makes it easier to mobilize these same
lemmings as cannon-fodder in wars of a church's choice. Heck,
if you die, you just go to heaven, or come back as somebody
else. These concepts increase the propensity for killing,
not the other way around, as all the holy men insist.
To me, these two reasons are stark evidence of the
necessity to separate church and state.
Central to this unfortunate tendency toward confusion
and hard feelings in any society is the role of the dominant
medium of information, which today would be the news media
but in the past would have been the church or the monarch that
had defined the type of society in which the people lived.
As the needs of the people at large and the aristocracy
that rules would necessarily differ (the latter being the
exploiter who collects and the former being the victims who
pay), so too would the information they impart, and the
perception of their existence, tend to differ. Example:
the peasantry would refer to their masters as thieves who
unjustly steal, and the masters would regard their serfs as
mere zits on the complexion of their otherwise rosy-cheeked
society.) As a result, the measures taken by those in power
unfailingly offend those without power, and the response of
the poor and victimized undoubtedly produce the same feelings
in those who imagine themselves aristocracy.
I rolled out of bed this morning with the word
"bifurcation" on the tip of my tongue, as I was thinking about
these two divergent trains of thought - the perspectives of
the rich and the poor, the haves and have nots - within the
current context of creeping tyranny that seems to be about to
engulf the entire world. Maybe it was because I watched too
much of the superficial political celebrations following the
results of the Iowa Caucuses on TV yesterday, too many scenes
of forced gaiety by partisans of many candidates all claiming
portentous victory in this quirky little political ritual.
What has galled me to no end this political season is
the utter and shameful failure of the political opposition
to correctly and courageously define the colossal criminality
of the present administration in Washington, particularly the
failures to notify all Americans that the U.S. is waging wars
and squandering the lives of its own children in unjustifiable
attacks on innocent people in faraway lands. Worse, and what
seems even farther away from happening, is recognition by the
American public that its own leaders engineered the tragedy
known as 9/11 in order to profit from the frenzied fear these
deceitful attacks produced.
"Bifurcation" is the act of splitting something into
two branches. Collective human thought has always been split
into two branches: dominator vs. powerless. What I see now,
and why this word has relevance to me, is that the truth is
not getting through to the people. The picture of the world
that is presented by the news media all over the world is
simply not factually correct. The bifurcation is growing in
the United States, where everything presented over mass media
is predicated on an enemy that doesn't even exist as a separate
entity from the government that is supposedly fighting it.
Also, the information providers have a financial stake in
perpetrating the official myth. Yet this rationale is
presented daily as the justification for permanent violence
and continuing robbery.
In 21st century America, we are making war on the ghosts
of our own lies, and killing ourselves because of it.
Believe it or not, this clumsy attempt to wrap money,
media, and religion into the same thought has a purpose. The
purpose is to tell you that the bifurcation - this difference
of published perception between ordinary people and the money
masters who manipulate our lives - is about to destroy the
world as we know it.
Think about the major political events of the last 15
years, just for comprehension's sake. In 1990 we staged the
Gulf War after first luring Saddam Hussein, our former ally and
CIA lackey, into invading Kuwait. Washington honchos actually
hired a public relations firm to concoct shocking stories about
the viciousness of Iraq's intentions as a way to justify our
immoral aggression.
The mass media stormed on about how the U.S. was defending
democracy in the Persian Gulf but people with actual brains
realized we were only defending the right of rich elitists to
control more oil.
A couple of years later we had an explosion at the World
Trade Center. It was later revealed, but never widely publicized
- and certainly never widely known among the American public
- that an FBI informant attempted to stop the actual 1993
explosion, but that his "handlers" allowed the operation to
continue, for the public relations purpose of casting aspersions
on the Arab dupes recruited by the CIA for this lame plot.
Shortly after that came Waco, where almost a hundred people
were burned to death in a Texas farmhouse by the armed forces
of our country. Later stories, read by too few, revealed that
a number of those people had been shot to death. The reasons
for such rash behavior have never been revealed, but people
began to think twice about splinter religious groups.
And then right after that, the Oklahoma City Federal
Building came tumbling down, with the onus placed on a truck
bomb that didn't even knock down a tree right next to the truck.
Yet this obliterated building and 168 dead was used as a
pretext to curtail our civil liberties and make those hardy
individuals who advocate self-reliance appear as criminals
for talking about personal freedom.
And Oklahoma City, of course, was the test run for
World Trade Center 2: 3,000 Americans murdered in the heart
of our biggest city, with the dirty deed blamed once again on
dark-skinned foreigners, and the event triggering a massive war
against the whole world as well as the most serious crackdown on
the individual liberties of U.S. citizens in American history.
Can you see the bifurcation? Can you perceive the
difference between what is actually happening, and the tailored
facts that are presented to us by the predatory dominators
who control our money and our thought processes?
To me, this is the great opportunity of examining the
9/11 question. In realizing that this astonishing tragedy was
engineered by our own leaders, it opens up a window to see
how American foreign policy has always been predatory. Lies
have been crafted as justification for conquest and plunder,
and the American people have smugly bought into them, all the
while preaching freedom and manifest destiny. It is the same
reason we used to slaughter all those Indians.
Now, I said all that to say this. We are racing toward a
turning point. Events such as the degradation of the biosphere,
the centralization of food production and prescription drug use,
the decay of capitalism, and the increasingly sophisticated
evolution of weapons are all leading us toward a point of no
return, where something really bad is going to happen that
we will not be able to undo. And it is happening because of
this bifurcation in public perception, where the journalists
who profess to be objective are either unable or unwilling
to confess they have covered up the true facts about so many
things that it is no longer possible to recover any consensually
authentic vision of what is actually happening to us.
We stand now at a momentous fork in the path of
human history. One road, the one we are on, is paved with
gold. To proceed down it means more of the murder, tyranny
and exploitation that have become the hallmarks of the history
of our species. The other path is pure dirt, and, believe it
or not, leads to ourselves, and a renewed understanding and
appreciation of the relationship between ourselves and the
planet that sustains us. The choice is clear: it is either
tyranny or enlightenment. Pick the gold or pick the dirt. It's
the classic devil's bargain.
Norse mythology tells the tale of Ragnarok, in which
Loki the Trickster God, representing ordinary people of
ancient lineage, meets Heimdall the Priest, representing
all the pious and corrupt religions in the world, in a final
battle on the Rainbow Bridge, after which the entire world is
destroyed. Typically, redactions of this myth manhandled down
to us by religious transcribers through the ages have depicted
Loki as the evildoer and Heimdall as the pious upholder of
tradition. Even from the mists of prehistory we see this
deceptive bifurcation of thought, and misrepresentation of
intent in pursuit of profit and power stifling the innate
human quest for self-knowledge.
If we are to avoid our own Ragnarok, whose specter is
imminent in a world besieged by depleted uranium ammunition,
genetically engineered food, and psychosis producing medicines,
we must perceive the bifurcation - we must see that what our
masters are telling us is meant to kill us, not enrich us.
We stand on the brink of Armageddon. It's no
exaggeration. Curing the disease of money and recognizing that
the master's information is nothing but sweet poison are the
two main obstacles to what could be a fortunate and fruitful
future for all of us, if we could but recognize and detoxify
those obstacles blocking our path.
Otherwise, one day soon, the two ancient protagonists
will meet, certain in their duty, on that fateful Rainbow
Bridge. Right now the best guess is that the Rainbow Bridge
is located between Jerusalem and Ramallah. And as at Ragnarok,
the spark that will ignite will consume the world in flame.
==============================================
John Kaminski is the author of "America's Autopsy Report,"
a collection of his Internet essays. For more information,
or to make a contribution to a writer who otherwise derives
no income from these essays, click http://www.johnkaminski.com/
For other samples of his essays, click
http://www.rudemacedon.ca/kaminski/kam-index.html
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