Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Again: What Did Lot’s Wife Turn to See? (29)
Unwrapping the Gift.
© Eso A. B., 2012

I have opined (blog 28) that though the suicide of Hitler did not save him his honour, Hitler did thereby take upon himself the blame for his determination and failure to become a Saint to his people, and that after all the horror and tragedies inflicted by his acts, the German people remained united by the charisma that only a sacrificial death assures.


Stalin, on the other hand, not only persecuted those who would doctor him in his old age, but murdered some of the doctors, then died of a stroke and is said to have experienced death as an agony. While Stalin’s ideology (communist fascism) embraced a far greater circle of people than did Hitler’s (nationalist fascism), Stalins death was a banal event. Stalin degraded with cowardice not only his death, but his murder of millions of people. In no way did Stalin’s death contribute charismatic unity to the Soviet people, who today—nearly sixty years after Stalin’s death—are all consumers of liberal capitalist Pop culture and are as dumbed-down as consumers going about near naked and in dirty underwear anywhere.


While this series of blogs (“My Wealth Virus”) is meant as a supplement to my “Oedipus Rex Rewritten”, the original of which play is said to have been written by an ‘ancient’ Greek  named Sophocles, my ‘rewrite’ centres around the idea that tragedy struck Thebes and Oedipus, because Oedipus was unwilling to pay (love?) for the privilege of being the King of his community with his life. Instead of healing it, Oedipus brought Thebes more misery, brought home to the viewers of the play through the death of more than fourteen people in the circle of the royal household.


That said, “Oedipus Rex Rewritten” furthermore assumes that the ‘rewritten’ version returns a repressed plot of the play to one that, more or less, informed its original version, i.e., that death by self-sacrifice is essential to a just and not-violent community order. At the same time, the ‘rewritten’ version assumes the currently in vogue ‘orthodox’ or ‘classical’ version of the play to be a repressed version, one that has been hid behind a simplistic plot of a son dreaming of sleeping with his mother. Needless to say, the latter ‘classical’ version perverts and degrades the theology implicit in the original.

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