Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Eso’s Chronicles 195/ 5
Peqd America (5)
© Eso A.B.

The death of the capitalist monstrosity may be dramatic and tragic, but even more notable is its inevitability. These last five blogs have given a rough sketch of the rise of capitalism from the vikings (raids) of Vikings to secure themselves women and slaves to its present end in bankruptcy.

True, my view is somewhat unconventional, in that I see its success in having had the perception to organize itself from the very first around an old folk religion that lent itself to being rewritten into a religion, which through the power of the letter could be interpreted to be law. That religion is Christianity as contained in the story of fiction known as The New Testament.

The trick the writers of this fiction used was to build a new story plot around old and traditional values: deep respect for all nature as the creation of the same forces that created humankind, and agape, love and respect that goes far beyond the sexual urge. The fiction was written as a spectacle: a just man (Jesus) unfairly accused of working against the government by the very forces that represented the old and traditional values, which were specifically identified as of the Jews, though this was done but to divert the anger of the common folk on the Jews rather than the capitalists, the princes who were the real power behind the tax collectors. In some ways, the plot behind the ‘Christian’ spectacle reminds one of Thornhill (Cary Grant playing the folk), who is/are introduced as the non-existent ‘Kaplan’ (Judas) in Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest. Eva Marie Saint plays Mary Magdaline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRfmTpmIUwo.

In a ‘rewritten’ story of my own (actually—if you include the original-- the 3rd  rewrite of the story when you think of it), http://OedipusRexRewritten.blogspot.com , I reinstate the original values that likely guided the plot of the play over what we today are led to believe is a story of incest. I suspect that both the New Testament and Oedipus Rex were written and rewritten sometime in the 13th or 14th centuries.

The problem with the power of impotence vis a vis the impunity of power, is that impotence cannot unseat capitalist impunity by force. It must wait for “…no one knows the day or hour….” Fortunately, impotence weighs heavy on the heart, which is why there are writers who expose the story through writing. Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” is one such story and is brought to our attention by the commentary of Chris Hedges at Truthdig: 
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/we_are_all_aboard_the_pequod_20130707/ .

Herman Melville has no doubts about the fact that he lives in an age where religion is Capitalism. He puts the words in the mouth of Ishmael (speaking for himself and us): “If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.”

And then again there are impotencies that are impatient as those of Iahn Basil and Jesus, who decided to express the power of their impotence through self-sacrifice. Apparently this power of impotence is so powerful that even the impudent powers dared not overwrite this factor from the last words of Psalm 22:1 attributed to both: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me!?”

The way of Iahn Basil the Bogomil, who did not shirk being thrown into a pit of fire (see Anna Comnena’s “Alexiad”), remains open for all of us. Yes, it is to enter upon another “…so long a voyage”; but then the mercy over those asleep and dead is that time does not exist; and the reward may be an awakening with a foot on the step out of the grave of religious Capitalism and its way with Christiany.


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