EC 465 GoveRment is an aLien People
© Eso A.
The ‘Yankee’ Declaw Machine / 2

I don't write about what I know: I write to find out how I put to use what I know, which lets me know what I think.

Take that one fake word borrowed from the days of the American Wild West as portrayed in novels and movies: “freedom”. The word almost instantly summons to our minds Indians and cowboys, all shooting at each other for all its worth, but with the Indians always losing, because they deserve to lose, because, well, they scalp cowboys and federals alike. Still, I never saw a western movie with a real scalp dangling from an Indian’s belt or saddle.

This is not to say that some artists did not picture scalping scenes that made the blood of the western European invaders of America boil. It is not surprising that today ‘scalping’ has been replaced by scenes of ‘decapitation’ by a unique mutation of Eastern Christians, who we now call Islamists, who are followers of one called Mohammed, but whose name is likely but a misspoken version of Johanman, which is but another name for John, who was the holyman who was substituted by Jesus, a creation of by the frankish Germans of the Holy Roman Empire.

If we think it through a little, it is rather amazing that humankind could be made to forget the name John, which originally was a word with two meanings: 1. a human, a herder of animals (the feminine version is still retained in the Russian language by a word that means ‘young woman’: Zhenchina, of which Joan as in Joan of Ark; and 2. a holy man. Yet we are living witnesses to the method of how the forgetting is done: First, you take John, a holy man, decapitate him, and/or burn him at a stake, or stretch him on a T; second, you replace John with a name that closely resembles the original (re: John < Jesus); and third, you tell a story about Jesus that subtly yet significantly differs from that about John. As we know, Jesus made friends with tax collectors, whereas John most likely cursed them. There is evidence that the followers of John knew what their elites were up to, but though they offered resistance, they did not prevail. The violent atmosphere in which we live today is evidence that government umbrage over taxation remains a total one.

The word ‘freedom’ is now expressed through the dictum: “individual liberty”, whereas a long time ago ‘freedom’ was perceived not as a right, but the responsibility of an individual to be ‘second’ born. The chief difference is that ‘individual liberty’ refers to the development of individual caprice which is of a great advantage to a consumer based civilization and careerism (encapsulation of mind), while ‘second birth’ refers to the goal of maturation and overcoming of the fear of death, which (spiritual birth) is the aim of a humankind tending toward the realization of a Kingdom Under God.

The desire for a Kingdom Under God was what the early Americans, the Pilgrims, brought with them to America. Their dream is captured in the painting called the “Peacable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks, a Quaker from Pennsylvania. Though the animals portrayed in the painting are presented in unlikely relationships, and the figures seem better described as human beings clothed by diverse animal appearances, a sense of interdependence among these life forms projects itself unmistakably and with inspirational force.

What happened that today all of this should be is lost? Did we become bored with it? Is it not fashionable enough for urban life, which is a desert of dissatisfactions? Or is the question really why did urban life come about in the first place? Is it because the federal government of America began to centralize wealth, used violence to centralize it, broke treaties with the Indians and its own constitution, and now our paradises are hanging gardens of science with atheists and slum artists as gardeners?