MASKS AND SHADOWS
Dr. Eugene
Narrett, Ph.D
June 18, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
“…each
one
Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly
These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown
In autumn evening from a poplar tree...
And of this stuff, the car’s creative ray
Wrought all the busy phantoms that were there,
As the sun shapes the clouds; thus on the way,
Mask after mask fell from the countenance
And form of all, and long before the day
Was old, the joy which waked like heaven’s glance
The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died;
And some grew weary of the ghastly dance
And fell…those first from whose forms most shadows passed…
[1]
Pastiche and implausible, mediated personae; the end of integrity as a concept, then as ideology, then as pattern of governance, then as principle from personal relationships to schools to geopolitics: the McCain campaign returns as farce to imitate Dole ’96. Bob graduated to shilling for VISA and Viagra. “Viva Viagra” the ‘flip’ side of feminism, heart attacks and all. Like the Electoral College the nominating conventions are staged shows: the oligarchy that owns the media and the political party/parties decides when race begins and ends. And always the rush to get it over with and make an end.
It has come to this, the sun of enlightenment, the god of the West spitting out images of fraud and violence, of seduction and betrayal, the sweet seduction of glorifying nature and its “Shape all light.” We saw her in “King Kong” walking down Broadway toward the beast she loved, tamed and rode; like all postmodern productions, a romantic horror show. Now fall the shadows of shadows of the perennial campaign, phantoms shaped by the mages of population management, Esau and his lust to control and finish everything as if he was the Eternal and Infinite Creator, to make people and, unlike God, to micro-manage, pervert and use them up.
Sound bytes and clichés, the phantoms of ideas exhausted by superficial repetition. Images of increasingly implausible people daring you to give them the lie they embody; virtual reality and reality TV: insane and domineering women, feminized men, the faked dialectic of “Democrats” and “Republicans”; an era in which every word pertaining to public life needs quotes around it. The triumph of postmodernism’s self-glorifying artifice and power lust, its war on integrity and, thus, on the Unity of the Creator. It’s been a long time coming, the darkness of the valley in the shadow of death…
The circle of world helpers in the distraction machine is showing maps of America; there are red, blue and purple states. Readers here know it is all a pink Puglubbuh. The states are de facto fictions; representatives dissemble and spread their wares for mighty interests specializing in lawless law and cost-efficient management of human inventory. ‘Historians’ like the prophets of Baal already have explained why Barack Hussein Obama II will win the election; but the talking hairstyles and print vendors already have made this quite clear. He’s perfect; Americans will pay to “eliminate global poverty”; he thinks Jews living in the center of the Promised Land are “an open sore that infects all areas of American policy.” Thus they must be expelled. The people who empower Condi Rice and all in her position believe this passionately. If Jews build, or even propose to build apartments in Jerusalem, she says “it’s a problem”: where have we heard this language before? And as for “illegal and immoral” imperial attitudes, she has announced, yet again, “that we really ought to be determining the boundaries of the State” (Israel and “Palestine,” {sic}). That’s the Road Map to the new world disorder and “that’s the best way to resolve this” problem the global oligarchs always have had with the Jewish people, especially in their land.[2] Hadrian lives.
It was sad for the family of Tim Russert, NBC Washington Bureau chief and host of Meet the Press to lose their father. But the public coverage was remarkable in its breadth. One would think the head of a mighty state or world-changing inventor had died. The New York Times eulogized Russert as “NBC’s public face.” Competitor FOX devoted at least two hours of encomia to praising his life. Their regular guest, Newt Gingrich, new book always in hand, enthused that Russert “had an intuitive grasp of the majesty of the Catholic church.” What an interesting and poignant way for Gingrich to praise the man. The Red Sox read statements of their grief at his passing to unenlightened fans; frequent guest on Red Sox commentary shows, Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric was on FOX, extolling the goodness of Mr. Russert inoculated Mr. Bush by asking about the Skull & Bones club. Americans were saturated with the bipartisan, all-out attention and love given to those who move the product.[3] It was an impressive and instructive demonstration of media incest and its attachment to higher powers.
Like its sisters, NBC is working overtime to deepen the hole into which our culture has fallen. One had thought that screen-world had reached the limit of pitching to women. But the limit expands so long as the dominant institutions of this culture continue to churn out single-mother families, discarded fathers, schools that are masculinity –free zones and ‘teachers’ that are feminized in the coercive, punitive, dumbed-down modern style. But in the wake of Russert’s passing we learn that NBC is spending billions to bring an entire new “female-oriented channel” to the boob tube. It’s super-redundant, - the entire medium and culture is drowning in goddess rapture – but overkill denotes an era and civilization cannibalizing itself: it grinds to death.
“NBC Universal spent almost a billion dollars buying the Oxygen cable channel last year. Now it’s busy making it a member of the family. The channel is beginning to embrace its new identity as NBC’s flagship female television brand, part of a one-month-old “women and lifestyle entertainment network,” called Women@NBCU that it hopes will appeal to advertisers.”[4]
“Timed to Tuesday’s third-season debut…“Oxygen” is releasing a revamped Web site, new logo and “Live Out Loud” tagline; more broadly, it is revealing how the channel fits into the media company’s cable strategy.” It is mindlessness and death.
Be careful when you next ask for oxygen, an essential in short supply. Who of correct mind could go a day without women’s world Tori and Dean? Even in small mill towns one meets channelers of Maitreya; they thrive in this muck, a glare of false light.
“It’s a complementary piece to our cable pie because it is distinctly female and distinctly young, both in its original shows and in its potential for growth,” Lauren Zalaznick, who heads Women@NBCU, said...” Just love that nurturing analogy to cable pie. Speech decays; stop making sense. How nice that the scion of International General Electric has a special subdivision for Women aside from the media’s standard hyper-feminized programming. And whence do the billions come: “when the band plays ‘hail to the chief,’ they point the cannon at you…” Fork it over.
Woman is taught that men are oppressors, boring, superfluous and violent nerds. Woman grows sick of husband; woman lifts phone, calls police, says she is “in fear.” Police arrive and remove husband /father from home. Wife’s attorney arranges for husband to become wage slave to wife who becomes, as in abortion matters, the owner / custodian of the chattel (fetus-children – slaves – prisoners). Advertisers recognize that women and lawyers have all the money. Television is a tutorial mirror that refracts the masks and shadows emanating ceaselessly from a culture built on smoke and mirrors, on lies, on the biggest and original lie that God’s word can be improved by centuries of editors and burial of the witnesses. Sordid buccaneers muscle in, trampling the inheritance and establishing bigger and yet bigger empires with the “emperor of ice cream” holding the “keys to the kingdom” that he professes to lock and unlock. If you doubt it, his legions will crush you into “belief.” Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace…”[5]
“Pape Satan, Pape Satan, -- aleppe!” blurts the “clucking voice and bloated visage” of Plutus, “the accursed wolf” as Dante and his guide pass into the circle of the avaricious and prodigal.[6] Shakespeare calls appetite “the universal wolf” and there is none more insatiable than that whose totem are the wolves on the Tiber. It has ruined the world, made it a mockery of personae and shadows befitting the birth pangs of the end of days. Like Shakespeare after him, Dante understood that this avaricious prodigality will “consume itself with rage” after first consuming the entire world and the ability of most people to reason, establish and maintain distinctions and deference. In our world, all these qualities have been disintegrating a long while.
From the President to K-12 we are told, “Islam is a religion of peace.” Dante describes the battlements of the infernal city, Dis as surmounted by “its mosques, red from the eternal fire that burns within them.”[7] As his cult of personality swells, a non-citizen promising “change” is being anointed as President. Mr. Bush “saw god” in the eyes of the Pope.
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On Friday 13, President Bush met the Pope at a tower in Rome “to discuss globalization and peace in the Middle East.” As Secretary Rice stalks Jerusalem again, for the eighteenth time during her tenure ordering the Jews not to settle Jerusalem, sin lays waste the West. Seeing the shades and “the malign gray slopes of the gloomy stream,” Dante, “pierced to the heart” gave voice to the gloom that Shelley perceived as the terror and despair of those enticed by the dream of Rousseau, the divinity of nature, love and progress; he felt “struck to the heart by this sad pageantry” as he beheld the multitude pursue shadows of shadows, desperate at having worshipped human gods and the god of self, broken by worship of the “Shape of Light,” the goddess of forgetting with her intoxicating cup, the lie of “perfectibility” mediated by godless elites. [8]
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We live to experience if not fully understand this process though a review of this writer’s archive may teach much. The upshot of an ethos of personae is death education: “The grove grew dense with shadows…the earth was gray with phantoms, and the air was peopled with dim forms…phantoms diffused around, shadows of shadows, and sat chattering” like the banal aliens of screen land, battering and numbing minds “till they become habituated to accepting unreality as reality.”[9] In the end, humans flee to the gray swamp and shadows live everywhere.
Footnotes:
1.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Triumph of Life” (1822), 526-41;
“car” is short for “chariot,” cf. 86 ff.
2.
www.israelnationalnews.com
item #2, “Rice on the Rampage against Housing in Jerusalem,”
Hana Levi Julian, June 15, 2008
3.
'Anybody
who thinks they can replace Tim Russert is kidding themselves'
--New York Times
Whom
would you like to see replace Tim Russert as host of 'Meet the Press'?
-- --WND
Brokaw: ‘His voice has been stilled,’ 'Meet the Press'
warmly honors Tim Russert --AP
Friends remember Tim Russert Tom
Brokaw anchors special 'Meet the Press' after Friday's death of host
--MSNBC
Chris Matthews uses Russert tribute Accuses
'guys who wanted war' of using WMD to sell it to 'patriots' like Tim
–Breitbart
4.
Brian Stetler & Chester Higgins, New York Times, June 16, 2008
5.
“Man of Peace” on Infidels, Bob Dylan (CBS/ Columbia records,
1983)
6.
Dante Alighieri, “Inferno” in The Divine Comedy, translation
John Sinclair (Oxford University Press 1939; 1961), 99-108, Canto
VII.
7.
ibid. Canto VIII, 64-84
8.
Dante “Inferno,” VII. 21, 36, 101-10; Shelley op. cit.
176, 343-66 ff; Shakespeare, Troilus & Cressida I.iii.86-126;
when the order of creation and providence is shaken or overturned,
“the enterprise is sick”; communities, schools, cities,
families, marriages, sovereignty, “justice all lose their names
and everything include itself into power, power into will, and will
into appetite…which first consumes the world, and then eats
up itself. Chaos follows the choking…”
9.
Shelley, op. cit. 480-93; Maimonides, Book of the Commandments, II.
32 on necromancy, “capturing the eyes” and “stealing
the mind”; these were prohibited but an ambitious Hellenist
taught that the laws of the Eternal were “outdated.” Behold
the result of believing in a corporate fiction and taking professions
of belief for fact and deed… at last, one gets the media, nickname
of Aphrodite, Philommedea.
And
still her feet, no less than the sweet tune
To which they moved, seemed as they moved to blot
The thoughts of him who gazed on them; and soon
All that was seemed as if it had been not,
And all the gazer’s mind was strewn beneath
Her feet like embers and she, thought by thought,
Trampled its sparks into the dust of death… (TL 382-8)
© 2008 Eugene Narrett - All Rights Reserved
