Cutting Out the Tongue  (14)

Black John Covered by Leaves.

© Eso A. B., 2012

The mental scarring inflicted on the victims, or the witneses, or the performers of violence creates a closed system of belief out of which it is near impossible to exit. This is much like the old story about the “Face of Glory” or Kirtimurkha.

When looked at head on, Kirtimurkha’s face is almost too terrible to look at, but when looked sideways, it (also known as uroboros) is seen as a serpent biting its own tail. But if the logic of the serpent is followed through to the end, we realize that it may devour itself as far as its face or snout.

Once Kirtimurkha or Uroboros has devoured itself to its face, what then? There is but one solution: since it cannot devour itself further, its teeth or horns, the tools of its will, must continue to grow into huge incisors or horns. However, we may imagine these also as two swinging doors, doors that swing open and shut on the face of Kirtimurkha.

Once the horns or incisors are full size (whatever one’s imagination imagines this to be) , they may turn into living creatures, shear-like twins.

The book of myths is full of stories of twins who kill each other. This is what Kirtimukha does. The Greeks tell of two monster giants Otus and Ephialtes, who desire to possess the Earth Goddess Artemis. As they go hunting for the Goddess, Artemis turns into a deer. To better catch the deer, the giants separate and trap Artemis in a small forest clearing. Otus and Ephialtes, both, throw their spears at the same time, at which point Artemis vanishes, but the spears continue across the clearing. The giants spears and kills his brother.

In another Greek myth, the teeth of the serpent are represented by armed men. Prince Cadmus throws a stone between the teeth, and the teeth-men, believing that it was thrown by the other side, start a fight among themselves. Before too long, both armies lie dead.

There is yet possible a more strange and inverted outcome to the story. Instead of the face of Kirtimurkha growing incisors or horns, it grows two legs of a woman instead. In our times, we may call this a Lacanian inversion or the language of the unconscious. The face of Kirtimurkha is between the legs, and it is a man’s penis that comes to close the legs upon itself. Not surprisingly, this rather weird copulation results in a normal human baby.

In the case of the Aztecs, it was the unexpected arrival of the Spaniards that interrupted their magic circle. It was only when the conquistadores came, that those who dissented from the Aztec system had sufficient equivalency in violence to topple the Aztec King Moctezume. This is not to say that there was no opposition to the Aztecs earlier on. However, opposition to Aztecs never reached the critical mass, where it could defeat them. This may, of course, be said about our own times. The face of Kirtimurkha may be likened to the American War on Terror, where the American government attempts to kill its twin by assassinating its own citizens.

The method of inhibiting biologically motivated mimesis (one may call it  “theatre of life or nature theatre”), which in times past created space between those who are violent and those who are not, may also be accomplished through the castration of men, who raped (if not the killed) women, thus hastening the arrival of a “world order” instituted by violence.

When the methods by those committed to order by violence reached their present position and status of positive terror, many human beings are beginning to express surprise that our planet has managed to escape becoming a prison where terror is the rule.

Or is there something that we, the sheeple, have missed out on? After all, one may argue instead that the physical mutilation of men and women through violence, though effective, has not done a sufficiently  effective job.

Perhaps this failure of our civilization is one of the reasons why psychoanalytic theory grew so rapidly after Freud came on the stage. For all the negative consequences arising from repression and/or the power of advertising (images and words) sexing us with no satisfaction, the connection of physical and mental factors opened the doors to manipulation and experiment with human behavior at large. Perhaps this is why the sacred texts of past times were replaced by commercial advertising in the short span of a few decades, and—like it or not—constitute today’s spiritual cannon glossed over by some sexed image we cannot get any satisfaction from.

While advertising relativitizes and commodifies everything into money, the method of achieving this stage of “civilization” rests entirely on violence and the elimination of oppositionary violence. It is like a man and woman, both with only one leg, having sex.

As professor Carrasco notes: “The orientation [or social importance] of Tenochtitlan … was achieved through the city’s primary export: control.”

If Templo Mayor were to fail to control and the sacrificial victims rebelled, either the number of sacrificial victims would have to be increases or on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico there would have to appear foreign ships captained by one named Cortes.



Mind Frozen by Fright and Make-Believe (13)

Black John is danced/sung into becoming green.

 Copyright EA Benjamins

If a stick cannot be pushed into the ground by hand, it can be driven into the ground with a malet. This is an apt description of how Aztecs persuaded their society to accept sacrificial violence and through it become  a “cultured” Aztec.

When such violence becames accepted by a large group of people (best in an urban or semi-urban setting), it soon becomea a social compulsion. Another analogy of similar aculturation is that of a young man turned into a hunter. Once the young man is persuaded to release the arrow or squeeze the trigger, he is more than half-way to overcoming his trepidations, and is henceforth ready to to attack and kill Mother Earth if ordered. With ever more practice, the young man may become a master of destruction, and a teacher of other young men through games and rituals, i.e., acts of  forced mimesis, i.e. killing animals and humans.

As nightmarish as miming and/or enacting violence may be, and as insecure as a society may result from it, once violence is learned and becomes a tradition, a society comes to depend on it (mind frozen by make-believe) for temporary “stability”. Generally, it may take a greater catastrophe to break the mold of the catastrophe imposed earlier on.

Once the Aztec men (Gods)—were familiar with night-time violence—they were better able to steel their emotions and accept violence as a “normal” way to influence reality on behalf of whoever was able to be more violent and unmerciful. The “greater catastrophe” for Aztec men became a reality when their earlier culture became boring or tedious to them (as ours is becoming to us), once they had accepted the catastrophe/violence as a permanent condition of "cultured" life. This is when it occurred to them to create a new God. They called the new God Huitzilopochtli.

The manner of creating the “new” God of Violence was by inseminating Mother Earth (who hid inside the Serpent- or Moon-Mountain) with a ball of feathers (possibly the rib cage of a dead snake). The idea for the ball of feathers may have presented itself from seeing tumble weeds rolling across a desert landscape. The chief of the earlier proto-Aztec Gods had been Quetzalcoatl, who could also disguise himself as wind. Because wind may be imagined as a feathered serpent, his resemblance to tumble weed or a tumble of feathers stuck to a tumble of human ribs is not difficult to imagine.

When the feathered ribs germinated, Hitzilopochtli sprang from his mother’s womb and not only killed Mother Earth (probably as a result of a breech birth), but his older siblings too, all four hundred of them.

The logic of whoever practices violence does not accept rivals, be they Gods, men, women, or children. The warriors try to persuade themselves that when there is no one left to kill, and when history and violence (object and act) are seen become as one, they can make-believe that they have reached a time were history ceases—as one Harvard professor recently insisted was the nature of our own times. The place this takes place in our time is not Earth, but planet Virtual Ideal.

After his birth, Huitzilopochtli came to stand for the spirit of men, especially warriors. To keep the lofty status, the male warrior had to also learn to become an actor. The acting took place not only through the application of body paint and strutting before an audience of women and children, but through engaging in violent rituals, because only pain, violence, and death inhibit the individual from taking his-her subjective self as real and worth realizing.

Professor Michael Taussig describes how the men of Tierra del Fuego, knew of a mythical story that told, how their forebears had killed their women. The explanation why this had occurred was that the men had caught the women trying to fool them by pretending that they were Goddesses.

* * *

Though the Aztecs lived in the area that is now Mexico City and the Ona tribe lived at the far end of the South America, we cannot discount the possibility that the traditions may come by way of the same ancient root. For example, this writer was stunned when on a travel show aired on local television in Latvia, a group of travelers visiting with nomadic people east of Lake Baikal showed the nomads killing a sheep for their guests by making an incision (as four men turned the animal over and held its legs spread) in the skin near what appeared to be the urinary sack, and the butcher (the fifth man) pushed  his hand through the perforation up to the animal’s heart, and killing it by apparently squeezing shut the blood flow to the heart.

Following the murder of Ona women, it became the custom among Ona men that no women or children were allowed to enter the men’s ceremonial house, where they would see their Gods as mere men. To transgress against the custom meant death or severe punishment. One punishment (used by Amazon tribes) was gang rape of the guilty woman, another (by the Arunta in Australia) was to blind with a firestick.

The secret of the Ona or Selk’nam men was very plain: during the rites of initiation, everyone (the young initiates including) who watched  the ceremonies enacted by the initiators had to be scared to death.

Such make-believe is not surprising to “modern” man. We recently saw such belief (on pain of punishment by imprisonment) enacted by the North Koreans, during the funeral of their leader Kim Jong II. The American government, too, now claims for itself the right to arrest and assassinate any American citizen without a trial.

A Force for “Stability” (12)

An Oak  with Its Limbs Sawn Off.

Copyright Eso A. B.

When it comes to mythology, there is nothing new about men killing women. Among other things, we have the image (familiar to almost everyone) of Perseus holding the head of Medusa Gorgon by her hair in his hand.

The ancient Greeks are famous for justifying killing women by telling tales that the women they had killed deserved death, because they were or are ugly. The story about Scythian women warriors may be an invention to justify public murder of war prisoners or innocent inhabitants of a city. The women portrayed in the link look more like street demonstrators today throwing rocks, while the truly lethal arms (bow and arrows) are in the possession of men.
Where does this desire to kill women arise from?
One answer may be provided by the failure of mimesis of one sex to project itself onto the other, because of the failure by nature or social circumstances to separate the sexes in sufficiently polarized entities. In other words, a young male, home from his first kill during a hunt of reindeer or wild boar, may imagine that if he can kill a deer and boar, he can also impose on a woman himself through an unwelcome (to her) sexual act, in other words, rape. A woman may, on the other hand, extend a successful and undiscovered lie, to realize an unfulfilled desire and do violence to trust by puting the fruit of her license in her lover’s or husband’s care.

Dislike of the other sex, may be a matter of dysfunctional genes—as in homosexual men and/or women. The image projected by the mind eye of a male does not attach itself to a woman, but a man. In other words, to use poet’s (Machado) words (blog 5): “The eye you see is not an eye because you see it; it is an eye because it sees you.” The homosexual’s eye fails to be seen back by the biological eye of the other sex, but by the secreted sex. Yet again, if a woman is not desirable to a man, he may imagine her as ugly, whereas a woman may reject an impotent man as the king of her clan or tribe.

This is a good place to remember that Sigmund Freud said that: “Male and female is the first distinction that you make when you meet another human being, and you are accustomed to making this distinction with unquestioned certainty”, Hirschfeld , a famous sexologists of the 20^th century “posits (as per link) that a human being is neither man nor woman, but at the same time man and woman in unique and therefore unrepeatable proportions.” In other words, the “unrepeatable proportion” has to find a match, which may not in all circumstances be an easy thing to do.

The failure of the mind’s eye to attach itself to the opposite sex, may, if met by social disapproval, find an escape through “racial” or some other social discrimination. That is: a woman smells bad, menstruates, looks ugly, is unfriendly, is poor, is black, is white, is red, has slanted eyes, etc. The reasons for rejection may be nthed to an unnatural degree if it has support from the leaders of society.

The same projections may be used to achieve attachment rather than rejection. For example, one may persuade the mind of someone yet biologically immature (generally young children) to attach itself to an object as determinedly as a gosling may attach its affections to a bathtub. In the West, this phenomenon was exploited by the Church to instil in small children a belief in Santa Claus. To make Santa ever more compelling, a whole series of stories about Christmas evolved. The stories are made all the more acceptable by connecting them with gift giving, followed by yet another story about Santa’s gift factory on the North Pole, which gifts are produced by dwarfs disguising child labor.

It is no news, that today even the Pope is complaining about the extent that the “gift” has been commodified and turned into money.

The knowledge of how to infect and contaminate a child (and humankind) did not arrive to humankind quickly. It had not yet become conscious knowledge among the natives of Tierra del Fuego in the days of Charles Darwin or Aztecs of Mexico in the days of Cortez.

Anthropologist notes and history show that primitives or arch-humankind tended to live in a social setting, where persuasion was a result of direct violence. If one escape becoming a sacrifice him- or herself, one was nevertheless compelled to go to the public square and watch the public murders of someone having their heart torn from his-her chest cavity or (if living in Europe) to hear the screams of one burnt to a crisp on a pile of wood.

It was in Tierra del Fuego that men of the Selk=nam tribe persuaded women and children that the masked men masquerading before them on certain Festival days were Gods. To disbelieve the men’s performance and call out “There’s Uncle Charlie!”, got one his-her brains bashed. Before the arrival of the written word and written law, violence was a way to freeze the subjective mind and reduce an individual’s thought processes to a repetition of banalities.

Aztec sacrificial violence was got used to and accepted, and became a social ritual. As nightmarish as miming violence may be, and as insecure the society it creates is, once violence is learned and becomes a tradition, society becomes dependent on it. Insecurity and nightmares do not hinder the social animal, but become a force for its “stability”, one that compels it to continue its violent behavior.

Why Killing Women May Make You Wealthy (11)

White Plastic Chair, Green Plastic Plant, and A Wood Pile.

Copyright Eso A. B.

The Serpent Mountain that serves as a home of Mother Earth is a dangerous place. The most obvious danger for whoever visits there is snakebite.

There are also less obvious dangerous elements than snakes about Mother Earth, too, which is why we must pay attention to the descriptions of what She wears, how She looks, and what She does. For example, Mother Earth is said to be a Lady with the Serpent Skirt, which is to say, She is also the flayed or, more accurately, the self-flaying one. Like a chameleon, she may metamorphose into a human being.

A serpent is a snake, and a snake is noted for shedding its skin. This is what causes us to find her as having similarities with the waxing and waning moon. This permits us to say that the moon, too, wears a serpent’s skirt. If the moon is associated with a woman, we are certain that once a month she also sheds blood.

Women sacrifices at Templo Mayor (now Mexico City) were often flayed, and the flayed skin was worn by the high priests. One may argue that such a sacrifice is an all too literal presumption on the part of the priest and the society that he serves. The all too great literalness and directness is what may cause us to forget about the symbolic aspects of the ritual. It is this that causes the sacrifice to become suspect of being overdone, therefore a possible fake, and despite the charisma of the cruelty, suggestive—over a period of time—of overreaction because of a fundamental lack of faith in the action by the sacrificer.

Over a period of time, the resentment by the public over priestly overbearingness is likely to demand that the ritual cruelty is redressed, or the priests themselves may become sickened by it and desist from fulfilling all the demands of the ritual. Writes David Carrasco (“City of Sacrifice”, p. 77): “While many city-states were securely integrated [by means of war and terrifying sacrificial rituals thereafter] into the Aztes sphere, some were alienated to the direction of other kingdoms, and the capacity for rebellion increased. So, when the Spaniards came, Indian allies were not hard to find, and, in fact, played vigorous roles in the conquest of Tenochtitlan.” Indeed, the foregoing may equally describe the story of the Sphinx (re Sophocles ”Oedipus Rex", where in this writer’s opinion children were sacrificed, and Oedipus is the hero who rescues the City of Thebes from this sacrificial ritual).
As discussed in earlier blogs, Coatlique or Mother Earth is identified with the underground of Earth, the world of black dirt, worms,  and the dead. For this reason, when Mother Earth conceives Huitzilopochtli, a warrior God engendered from the moon-shadow of an imaginary penis, (possibly visualized as a feather falling from the sky), Earth conceives him as an armed male—a symbolic manner that replicates an erection. When born, Huitzilopochtli’s birth-appearance as an armed child outrages the Gods of the South, the realm of the Sun. These Gods (four hundred in number), incited by Earth’s eldest daughter, Coyolxauhqui, all agree to go kill Hitzilopochtli, the phantasm of violence.

If we think at the symbolism of a feather, we may see it as a result of a dream, possibly a nightmare, the latter especially, because it falls from the sky at night time and drifts and enters the deepest chambers within Mother Earth. In short, if we stay with the idea (blog 9) that the art of war and violence is learned at night by a full Moon, a ball of black feathers (Quetzalcoatl disguised as wind and the shadow of the moon) may be imagined as symbolizing men on a surprise night time raid—penetrating the camp of their enemy, they may have taunted as womanish and, thus,  learned to despise it. Even today, it is not uncommon for bullies to taunt their opponents as being weaklings and womanish in behavior.

Be that as it may, the siblings of Hitzilopochtli stand no chance against his violence. After Huitzilopochtli is born, he commences with killing his mother and all his siblings. The act establishes violence and war as what the Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung called “a permanent Revolution”, except in ancient Mexico, the “permanent Revolution” manifests itself in rituals of permanent human sacrifice. This suggests that violence is taught and learned, in the same manner that a young boy is taught to overcome “buck fever http://www.buckfever.com/ ” by being urged not to fear to shoot to kill, then skin the game, and as was custom at the Norman court, presend the rectum of the stag to the king or some other high ranked lord.

It is thus how by killing a harmless creature, one steels one’s self. And killing—of game and men (or women and children), becomes ever easier to accomplish, and the slaughter of millions but increases the glory of some CIC (Commander in Chief). When thus trained men are bunched together in a ball of feathers, they form a military company able to put fear into other men, the womanish kind, who have not gone through such a barbaric training schedule.

As professor Carrasco notes (p.67), for Aztecs the ability to go to war and be violent served as a tool for the accumulation of wealth.

Gifts may become a 'tribute' : “…the Templo Mayor was the symbolic gathering place of the great tribute network of the Aztec empire. Not only was [Templo Mayor[ the material expression of Aztec religious thought, it was also … a ritual container of sacred symbolic gifts from many parts of the unstable, shifting, political geography of the empire.”

Given the scenes in preceding blogs, we can now see how for the Aztecs violence became a learned compulsion. Having learned to shoot the buck, attack and kill Mother Earth, violence was henceforth taught to the rest of society through all sorts of rituals of forced mimesis. As nightmarish as violence may be, and as insecure the society it creates, society comes to depend on violence, nevertheless; and insecurity and nightmare are not hindrances that may cause one to desist. Instead, violence becomes a form of dependency on pornography.

Just as big or small game hunters cannot tolerate criticism of their bloody sport, a society habituated to watching human sacrifice, will react with shock to any suggestion that such sacrifice creates a society unable to hold together through love and self-sacrifice.

Even though sacrifice is needed to escape virtual reality, that is, virtualism must be replaced by actual reality, this necessity is misused by teaching and then practicing compulsive murder, which then ckauns to be sacrifice and, therefore, a good on behalf of love and unity.

How This Book Began.  (1)
These blogs in the process of being edited.

The SAW-CROSS. FOR SALE HERE to like minded parties. Patented. Send inquiry to blog address.

© Eso A. B., 2012

This blog site is a consequence of my wish to discover the labyrinthine pathways of human desire “to become wealthy” and live life for free and without responsibility. The wish is not because I am wealthy, but at two points in my life, I was close to what most people close to me considered to be so. Since I no longer have anything to do with ‘wealth’ and am personally of the opinion that ‘acquiring wealth’ has caused and is continuing to cause social disaster, a personal and subjective look into the matter may be of some interest to people with analogous experiences.
In my personal case, the .beginnings of the wish are sourced many years ago, back to the beginning of World War II, when violence was the deux ex machina that disrupted the childrens’ play then being staged on the Main stage of the world, and necessarily reflected in the sandboxes of the children of the ‘main’ actors.
In those early days of my life, the separation and exclusion from my sandbox of children of the poor was obligatory and taken for granted. Until the age of eight, I had met no one who was poor, unless it was the hurdy-gurdy man cranking his music box in the yard five floors below our family apartment. Such parent enforced distancing from ‘real’ life, was part of a training program that would raise children thinking themselves ‘better’ than children of parents of lesser wealth and ambitions.
The stage of this ‘Adult’ Children’s Theatre and my sandbox, however, was closely linked to the governments then ‘ruling’ the world and encircling the grounds of my personal world.
The lead actors’ roles in the world of the 1930s belonged to the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Reich. Hitler’s Reich was socialism for Germans. Because the relatively small group of people involved in the Reich were also those of one nation, this form of socialism became known as fascism, from the Italian word for ‘group, association,’ and from the word for ‘bundle’ (fasces http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fascist ). The political ramifications of the word were, however, more complex, because it could include both the political right and left  http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070717094941AAKC99Q .
The socialism of the Soviet Union had ambitions to encompass the entire planet, and was, therefore, an early ideal for and of globalizers. However, socialism was no less single minded or fascist in imposing its absolutist views than nacism, because ‘actual’ vs ‘ideal’ beneficiaries of the system were the elites or core elements of the ‘fasces’ or bundle. By keeping the children of the ruling classes separated from the children of the ‘populist’ classes, rulers were hoping to create a ‘natural’ caste system that would not cause guilt among the children of the ruling classes. The goal of fascism was class separation as ‘God’ given.
After the WW2 defeat of Hitler, and the Cold War defeat of the Soviet Union, it was discovered that fascism had also cleverly and successfully hid in “democratic” America. This was made possible in the aftermath of WW2, which America won, and as a result of which victory, it had seized for itself the world as market. Nevertheless, American corporations, hiding behind their right to masquerade as individuals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation, had seized for themselves so many rights and powers that had been assumed by the public to belong to it alone, that it became apparent that the alliance of corporations (money its bonding agent) had become an organization of fascists as well. Just as the “communists” did not call themselves “fascists”, the corporationists did not call themselves “fascists” either, but went by the name of neo-liberal capitalists. The key word here—‘liberal’—expanded on its meaning as ‘permissive’ of not only in matters of  personal idiosyncracy, but became ‘permissive’ in all things economical and financial for corporate individuals.
Moreover, in the course of the latter half of the 20^th century, corporate fascism, backed by America, was able to highjack the democracy of the American people and, in the process, recast the meaning of “democracy” as understood in an earlier time. Consequently, today the globalization of “fascism” goes unopposed. One of the worst fascist organizations is Parliamentary government, where socialism for Parliament members (high salaries, career advancement up the bureaucratic ladder, health insurance, retirement privileges) is more guaranteed than for any other interest group in society.
Needless to say, the 'children's play' during the showing of which I was born, appears to have been “innocent” only in perverted hindsight. If the violence of seventy years ago is now be called state terrorism, the violence of the state today, controlled by corporations as individuals, has as much potential http://www.salon.com/2011/09/30/awlaki_6/ for violence and terror.
Even so, the public disquiet over fascist violence is increasing because it has become so ubiquitous. This blog is among the “disquieted”.
Because my personal experience with violence is from early years onward, I am not among those who believe that violence can be overcome with violence, but have advocated resistance that is not ‘non-violence’, but “not-violence” or “not-violent terror” as the way of ridding the public stage of violence.
The most effective tool of “not-violent terror” is nothing other than death itself. When I think about death, I think of it as, both, natural and unnatural.
Natural death is death as a result of natural causes: old age, incurable illness, and—I include—unfortunate accident such as falling out of a car or plane.
Unnatural death is almost always a matter of losing life to the will of some other party or agency wishing to be rid of such and such an individual or group of individuals (like soldiers).
‘Not-violent’ death is a matter of taking one’s own life to the end of political effect. The recent ‘suicide’ of a 77-year-old Greek pharmacist protesting the unilateral austerity measures of Greek government is a good example of death by ‘not-violence’. So are the self-immolations of Tibetan monks and nuns protesting the Chinese dictatorship in Tibet.
Unfortunately, government policies against euthanasia, deny drugs that make death quick and painless. This is one reason why many continue to identify suicide with pain, and pain with violence, while ignoring the fact that freedom of consciousness may lead to a culture in which political suicide or self-sacrifice is what social stability and cohesion call for and is considered ‘natural’.

 
I advocate that the individual be taught how to and what life-skills help overcome fear of death, which the modern neo-liberal medical industry and the doctors serving it have succeeded in instilling the individual with. The precursor to this fear is the fear of ‘lords’ to lose slaves; which is why the lords put Jesus up as an example of the ‘immortal nature’ of all human beings serving their interests. Violence may also be perpetuated by perpetuating false stories, such as replacing the auto-da-feing of Jesus at the end of 12^th century in Constantinople by Byzantine Emperor Alexis I, with a crucifixion more than 2000 years ago.  
In fact, death, because it is indeed a “natural” phenomenon is the cessation of a relay mechanism that comes into play when a biophysical object cannot sustain life due to the limitations of matter through which life projects itself from the first. While human beings have sought the “plant of immortality” since the earliest times (for example, the story of Gilgamesh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh), most early stories and myths are known as “creation myths”, and concern themselves mostly with the creation of human beings and the maintenance of community. No doubt, the “community”, too, is a relay mechanism, but encompases a greater time period than the life of an individual.
Indeed, many individuals appear willing and the community applauds their willingness, to lay down their lives so the community may continue.
No doubt, this is because when looking at and thinking about a community, we perceive it as a continuum (our past and future, parents and children) worth laying down our lives for.
Today, it is possible to also see “continuum” in the individual. Unfortunately, this continuum is achieved only through “cloning” and imagining life thereafter. Though cloned cats, dogs, sheep, and possibly camels is nothing new, the very existence of cloning predicts not only the eventual serial birth of one and the same genetic individual, but the creation also of a very different household than the present ‘nuclear family’ model.
I am basically arguing that social evolution in neo-liberal ideology dominated countries and cultures is being held back by neo-liberal economic and financial policies. The shape, size, and power of the future households of clones is of paramount importance in the shaping of a sustainable future. Neo-liberal corporations, especially its controlled media, self-consciously hold back social evolution, by telling over and over again an outdated story; re Jesus thrown into a pit of fire resurrected by a story of crucifixion and resurrection.
Incidentally, the mystery over the ‘Shroud of Turin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin ’ may go no further than wool singed by fire remaining unsinged where it was covered over a human face. The way it happened can be read about and the scene reimagined in the history book by Anna Comnena http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Komnene , Emperor Alexis I daughter belittling the Bogomils (Godlovers) of Byzantium likely late in the 12^th century. The cause? The Bogomils were standing in the way of Byzantine elites, who had captured the king away from his people, and King John Basil of the bogomil tribe protested this most loudly. The fake Emperor—bought off by his lords— built John a great fire in the centre of the hypodrome.This is the time where I see the beginnings of and spread of “the wealth virus” eroding the moral strength of an individual’s continuum. In short, we live in a time where death comes quickly, almost unexpected, best illustrated by a rocket carrying drone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMh8Cjnzen8 .
[I will return to the “cloned individual” at the end of this series of blogs.]
Here my attention will focus on the rise of the “wealth virus” and how it infected (through imitation) an entire planet.
* * *
When I was young, I knew nothing of “the wealth virus”. Though I had become infected by it by inheritance from parents, it was many years before I become fully aware of it as real and having notorious side effects on me, the social life round about me, the culture as a whole, even the planet itself.
The virus brought itself to my attention with suddenness, when the Latvian government in the hands of individuals who today we would recognize as neo-liberal sympathizers, was given a shove out the door. The Bolsheviks wasted no time making compromises. Sentences came fast and furiously. It arrived at my door and entered my room in a real-to-life physical manner. I am ever so grateful at the moment it happened, it came only as a warning of things to come.
One day in 1939, when I was six years old, my mother took me by the hand, and she and I walked to the Riga Russian Orthodox Cathedral, which was no more than a twenty minute walk from the home owned by my grandparents on School Street.
My mother had never done this or so with me before, and I was puzzled then, and remained puzzled for many years thereafter, why she did this. But when I was on in years, and hindsight was no longer a matter of guessing, I came to realize that what had impressed me most at the end of our walk, was not an accident, even less a circus.
The Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Riga is an impressive building from the outside, and it is even more impressive on the inside. While during the days of the Soviet Union the Cathedral was turned into a museum, its interior was demolished, and the present interior is far from the numenous candle-lit somberness that prevailed there in 1939, the interior of the Cathedral remains in my mind’s eye as not only a dwelling where the air smelled of bees’-wax candles, but where the interior itself reminded of a bee’s nest. That day, my mother led me along a long row of icons of holy men along the Cathedral’s walls. She left candles in the raised sandboxes that stood before the icons, until we came to a stop before what seemed to me a larger-than-man size figure. I had never seen such a thing before: a man nailed to a cross. I remember looking at the figure through a candle-lit haze and being awesomely impressed, maybe even frightened. I had never before seen anything like it. The body of the figure was yellowish brown. From beneath the crown of thorns on his head oozed paint that looked like real blood.
That is all that I remember of that time. For a long time, I puzzled why mother had taken me with her. It was a long time before I put two and two together, and realized that this was in 1939 when the Soviets first entered Latvia. It  was at that time that my mother’s father, once Latvia’s ambassador http://www.am.gov.lv/lv/Ministrija/vesture/4439/4476/  to the Soviet Union, disappeared from his estate in Priekule, Latvia.

Though the above link informs that Karlis Ozols was arrested in August of 1940, in fact, he disappeared from the sight of his family a year earlier. Transferred to Moscow, he was sentenced to be shot on June 21, 1941. Thus, my last contact with him, even though indirect, is this visit to the Cathedral in 1939.
I was lucky to be that young, that unknowing, and that not understanding. I saw the marching soldiers, and the fear of being visited by police. Fear was in the air and it was not there for no reason. Eventually events converged and disappeared from my extended family altogether  sight eight people.
After WW2 there was no time to look at this or that family photo. No photo spoke as if by some miracle. But they reminded. All that I was left of the past was a vacuum, an empty place. Unlike in photos, which one sees in history books, for me the past has left its traces in bleaching photos.
The fascistic orientation that I attribute to the German Reich, the Soviet Union, and American corporations, is—in its idea form—the moving force behind tribes, households, and even families, the latter especially if it has dynastic pretentions. Fascism, is “us” against “them”, we exclude them, and “they” shall not exclude us.

* * *
It was not just my family, who were among the one’s on who Bolshevik egalitarianism invited itself over to cause trouble. It was a notable occupation event fuelled by the resentment of not-haves against anyone living beyond his and her means. Among the latter were most Latvians, and if one includes dreams included the Bolsheviks.
At that time history was not yet a matter for slow turning. It was thought of and performed as if it all happens in a flash. The mindset of military generals ruled. One could change from one ‘religion’ to ‘another religion’, one could go cross from neo-liberalism to communism in one violent moment—until the death of Mao Tse Tung.
The opera (its movie version) “Nixon in China” is a neo-liberalist’s song of triumph http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tv3hrZmcEk in the guise of of a Pop Culture style religious ritual.
In an urban environment, everyone lives beyond their means. While one may have a job and an income, an urban environment is inherently unstable and everywhere one smells and breathes insecurity. While Nixon sought to soothe the gonads of “the Wealth Virus” in America with the promise of a market among China’s billion, China exchanged the loss of ideological principle and its leadership the humiliation the loss brought into a Pop style secularist heaven for hundreds of millions Chinese.
In Latvia, neo-liberalist fundamentalism rules: not one minister is not a neo-liberalist, while the story about the sweet teat of Mary, the mother of God, now has for its address Bruessels, ECB, and Washington, IMF.
I read somewhere that the giving of gifts http://books.google.lv/books?id=hGpeQ9lhWm0C&pg=PA144&dq=giving+of+gifts+ended+in+the+sixteenth+century&hl=lv&sa=X&ei=e7hHT7LQJsrZ4QTcnP3SDg&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=giving%20of%20gifts%20ended%20in%20the%20sixteenth%20century&f=false , a natural phenomemon among humans, ended in the West sometime in the sixteenth century. In Latvia today giving a gift is called “giving a bribe”. This is because a “gift” no longer is a live hen, a rabbit, or eggs, but fiat money, which, due to its inherent instability, exists in a virtual environment and perverts therefrom natural human tendencies and relations. Thus, fascism, a natural tendency among people who know each other well, is an unmentionable in meta repressed and virtual societies of today.
* * *
When I was still age seven, my family left its urban environment and moved to live with relatives in the countryside.
One of the first things that I did when at the farm was to give the two farmboys who I met there, a small jigsaw and hammer set. When my father discovered what I had done, he not only gave me a dressing down, but insulted the father of the boys for raising children who stole. When the Soviets arrested my father some months later, the boys said to me (probably in the words of their father): “He got what was coming to him”.
This is probably why the idea for this series of blogs came to me: because it has ever been on my mind. I was not yet on my mind at an age when I was not prepared to lie to myself.

* * *

Not long ago, I received in the mail an old photograph of my rather corpulent grandfather and pretty godmother. The sender was a relative of an old acquaintance of theirs, a lutheran minister now gone his way. Grandfather and godmother are now many years dead, too, but the photograph [from ninety years ago] reminded me that my experience with the couple, though personal, was never an intimate, nor, for that matter, a happy one.


1922. My grandfather's (c) "other" family, that of my godmother to his left.


One cause for the unhappiness is that grandfather left his first wife, my grandmother, and five children, for a much younger woman. They both married for a second time. As my godmother was not my grandmother, she was slated to become my godmother even before I was born.

One of the reasons why my grandfather and godmother married, was that they were both in the newspaper business then. If one had luck, it was a very lucrative business in those days. And luck was theirs. In just a little over a decade, they became one of my country’s (Latvia's) richest and most influencial people. While it appears that my grandfather was a workaholic—he had been a school principal and a choir conductor for twenty years before he began his newspaper career—he gave no signs of enjoying wealth more than passively. My godmother, twenty years younger, was unmistakeably infected by the “Wealth Bug” or Virus.
Because the 'Wealth Bug' did not leave without causing consequences, it came to mind that I should call this series of blogs “The Wealth Virus”’.

The name, “Wealth Virus”, is not a novel term, but the idea of the content for these blogs came to me spontaneously enough. The seventy plus years which have passed since the outbreak and early stages of WW2, have increasingly suffered from the infection by the Wealth Virus, it being apparently incurable. One wealthy man whom I happen to know in passing, after a long interval of going our separate ways, upon a meeting recently, asked if I had not become "a capitalist" after all. He appeared disappointed, when I indicated 'no'.

It is not that I am against being wealthy, but the problem is that I like to spend my money as soon as I have it and, especially, if there is more behind it. I have never felt compelled to become rich. I like to give money away, as a "gift", because I like the feeling and refuse to think of myself as incapable of working.

My forebears had done the trick of becoming wealthy by going into newspaper publishing. In their days (at the beginning of the 20^th century in Eastern Europe), “a penny newspaper” was a novel idea.
The idea was that everyone had or could find a penny. And if the product, the newspaper (hot gossip, families broken up by war and seeking to reunite, and the latest news) was interesting and captivated, then why not spend a penny on it?

For Sale: the Saw-Cross sign. “Save the Forests”. In Riga. For store and address see:  http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/  xxx