Eso’s Chronicles 153
The Thumbsucker’s War for Human Rights (2)
© Eso A.B.

Air Brush

If one is to take seriously what J.D. Salinger wrote and what Mark Chapman read to the court as the statement why he assassinated John Lennon, re: “…I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids….” (see end of previous blog), and if one is to understand the text literally and has ever seen a real field of rye http://static5.depositphotos.com/1003699/523/i/950/depositphotos_5237387-Country-road-through-rye-fieldcountry-road-through-rye-field.jpg , it makes for either an absurd picture or a scene of vandals on the loose.

A farmer coming to a field of trampled rye would swear that the next time he will come with a shotgun to punish the culprits by spraying buckshot at their legs.

If one wishes to take the sentiments of Mark Chapman as signifying more than a literal interpretation of the text, one has to re-imagine that in place of the ‘rye’ there is a wood, and that the wood stands for the Sphinx in Sophocle’s well known play “King Oedipus”. The thousand ‘little kids’ then become the sacrifices the Thebans bring to the wood to appease their near uncontrollable desire to go hedonistically ‘wild’ after spending a life time of living in a city. The pain and suffering caused by the loss of their children to the Sphinx, keeps the City of Thebes a relatively orderly city inspite of everyone being unhappy.

As some readers may already suspect, Prince Oedipus, who is fleeing the home that he has imagined as that of his parents (in the kingdom of Cithaeron), comes to a wood, better, a sacred grove—the maw of the Sphinx, so to speak—and discovers that children are wandering aimlessly and lost until they die of hunger or cold, or fall down a deep chasm that bisects the grove. The chasm is known as the “Cithaeron chasm”.

At the edge of the chasm stands a temple dedicated to the Sphinx (who stands for the mystery of the wood). When any of the lost children happen to come upon the temple, they are greeted by the priest Tiresias. Tiresias offers each child an apple. After the apple has been eaten, Tiresias gives each child two bird feathers, leads them to a platform at the edge of the chasm, stands them close to the edge of the platform, and asks them to start swinging their arms as if they are the wings of a bird. Tiresias also asks the children to close their eyes and imagine that they are flying. When the children do as Tiresias suggests, he gives each child a push, and the child loses balance and falls into the chasm.

It happens that Prince Oedipus (impersonated by Mark Chapman) comes to the wood and the temple at just the right moment. As Chapman walks up the temple path, he sees Tiresias push a child over the edge of the cliff. He hears the child (all are boy children) scream, then he sees Tiresias walk back to the temple, where he is awaited by Mark’s father—John Lennon, a well known entertainer in the city of Thebes.

Lennon is Marks father from a liaison he had as a teenager with a young woman older than he. The young woman was so taken by the teenager’s voice, that after the concert, she invited the young singer to her bedroom.

When the young woman discovered herself pregnant, her young lover was on a concert tour, and though she wrote him several letters, her letters got lost among the fan mail. Because pregnancy was not something the young woman expected, and because she came from a strict Catholic family, she sold the new born infant to a family of gypsies, who were raising children for the purposes of human sacrifice practiced by another religion in a far away kingdom on the other side of a mountain ridge known as Cithaeron Mountains.

All would have gone well, except the young woman gave her young son a name, Mark. She never forgot the name.

There is a strange word about; it is little known; and it is also not wholly understood. The word is known among linguists and artists as ‘pareidolia’. Pareidolic associations are associations most commonly found in words and images http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia . What is not so well known is that pareidolia may also happen as an event or a series of events.

It happened that the young woman was forced by circumstances to earn her living as a prostitute. This is how she met Charles. Charles happened to be the king of France. Charles fell in love with Joan and wished to marry her. Because he was also a Catholic, Charles had to ask the priests of his court what they thought about the idea. When the priests asked Charles why he had to marry this particular young woman, one with a reputation for being a sinner besides, Charles could not think of a good answer.

What King Charles eventually said was: “Because her name is Joan.”

“So, what in the hell makes Joan so different from other such?” the Council of priests wanted to know.

“You see,” answered King Charles, “Joan comes from Arc. It is said that all Frenchmen are descended from the Johns of Arc. Joan says that she knows we are in a civil war with the Burgundian English, who say that their Johns are better than our French Johns. She claims that when the French Johns hear that the Queen of France is called Joan, they all will get a rise, and I, King Charles, will win the war as a result.”

The Catholic priests had a long discussion among themselves. It was not so long ago that they had suppressed the French Johns and driven them from the wood where most of them had resided. The French priests needed to cut down the wood to fire the bricks they needed to build their cathedrals. On the other hand, it was true that the Burgundies (and English) were getting the upper hand in the civil war, and the French would soon have to ask the Germans to come help. The Germans were known to be materialists and would agree to help. But this would cost the French king many of France’s eastern provinces, and the French would be squeezed between the Germans and the English more than ever. In the end, the Catholic priests agreed that king Charles and Joan of Arc could marry.

After she was married to King Charles, Queen Joan found in the royal mail a letter from the kingdom of Cithaeron, which kingdom was on the other side of the Cithaeron Mountains. The letter offered to sell to King Charles a dozen gypsy children for the sacrificial needs of the court. Joan noticed that one of the children had a name. It was—Mark.

Queen Joan of Arc immediately suspected that Mark was her son by John Lennon, who besides being an entertainer, had invested in the lucrative business of selling children for sacrificial purposes. John was an excellent salesman, because most of his songs were not only entertaining (re: “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqXmBy1_qOQ ), but proselytized for peace. Everyone knew there could not be peace without sacrifice of life.

It is a long story of how it all worked out. There remains the story of how Queen Joan persuaded Mark to leave his home at Cithaeron Beach by telling him he was destined to marry his mother and kill his father. A rewritten version of the antique version is at http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com . However, if we want to learn about the adventures of Mark, we must—without further ado—explain that just as Tiresias was offered a wagonload of smutty children (all of who had been promised a trip to see ‘a sky filled with diamonds’), one of them shouted: “My name is Mark, and I don’t want to die. There are no diamonds in the sky! Those are only stars!”

At that instant, Mark realized that (for some pareidolic reason) he himself could be that boy. Mark instantly went into an attack mode. He managed to shoot Lennon dead in no time. As for Tiresias, Mark tied him up, and ordered him to order the temple staff to find all the children who were wandering lost in the wood. After the children were on the road and marching to Thebes, Mark took a large branch out of the bonfire and stuck and ground the burning end of the branch into both of Tiresias’ eyes.

The story would have ended there and then (as it would have if Joan had not given her son a name), except that Mark did not understand that even though he became a hero to the Thebans for putting an end to child sacrifices, he could stay a hero only if he replaced the sacrifices of children with the sacrifice of himself.

Eso’s Chronicles 152
The Thumbsucker’s War for Human Rights (1)
© Eso A.B.

Spring is not yet acumen in...

A few blogs back, I criticized Yoko Ono for bringing to the attention of the public the blood spattered eye glasses of her husband of forty-four years ago, John Lennon, the lead singer of a famous British singing group known as the “Beatles”. John was killed (1980) at the age of forty by 25- year-old Mark David Chapman (b. 1955), who insisted that the novel “The Catcher in the Rye” (1951) by J.D. Salinger was his ‘statement’ and presumably ‘excuse’ for the murder.

At a later time, Chapman also stated that he killed to gain fame, which is the media’s way of depoliticizing a possibly political act.

I personally view the ‘murder’ of Lennon as a political assassination by a Christian  of a neoliberal capitalist tilt, though Chapman was unlikely to have been aware that he was acting on behalf of a misinterpretation of a Christian God of Acts, who stands at the opposite pole from its faked substitute (theologically indefensible) God of Words.

As my own thought centers on God (the big Other or whatever) who Acts through self-sacrifice, I view killing on behalf of God to be a terrible misinterpretation of the virtual world to create which God Acts. My personal sympathies go to the Tibetans who immolate themselves in protesting the ceremonial cabal of the Stalinist Chinese government. May Anonymous keep a list of the names of the sacrifices and send governments frequent reminders of it. May the Chinese political clique slip on the burnt Tibetan flesh at their feet.

While murder is the killing of a human being by another human being for whatever reason, an ‘assassination’ realizes a murder through political motivation http://askville.amazon.com/Meanings-Assassination-Murder/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=8217765 in an antiquated Christian setting.

“The Catcher in the Rye” is a novel considered to be among the 20 best 20^th century stories written, and still sells a few hundred thousand copies annually. Its hero is seventeen year old Holden Caulfield, who as the novel’s hero enacts the alienation and angst of an adolescent and teenage America to this day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye . While I do not recall when I read the novel, 1951 was the year when at the age of eighteen I graduated from high school. I may have read the book soon after its publication. I remember it as emotive and disturbing, especially to a young person who had not yet embarked on a career, or who sees his-her career in terms of ‘fate’, or even from the point of view of an abnormally normal Doris Day singing in an Alfred Hitchcock film “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WNHNfBUFB0  ‘ce sera sera, what ever will be will be.’ It was also a time when “The Outsider” (1956), by Colin Wilson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsider_(Colin_Wilson)  attracted great attention. It was also a time when many Americans felt themselves ‘frozen in time’; alienation from the mainstream was expressed in movies like Rebel Without a Cause, The Wild One, and Blackboard Jungle. The films depicted the young generation as directionless, and unhappy. Chapman was a baby of the time.

Yoko Ono brings John Lennon’s glasses to the attention of the public in the context of a government campaign to abrogate the right of Americans to purchase guns and because she supports the gun control campaign http://www.upi.com/blog/2013/03/22/Obama-retweets-photo-of-John-Lennons-bloody-glasses-posted-by-Yoko-Ono/5201363967442/ in the context of President Obama’s “open to considerations (of repression)” policies.

This is not to say that I am against gun control. However, as such a campaign usually puts the issue in terms of ‘all’ or ‘none’, and in this instance also in the context of the 2^nd Amendment of the Constitution which allows American citizens to bear arms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution , I do not sign on to the campaign. The gun control campaign, which—given, both, the corruption of the American government (surrender to private interests) and its neoliberal aggressiveness (fueled by banks with little collateral) at home and abroad—give pause for reflection. While such a stance may seem contradictory to my advocacy of self-sacrifice, the example of the Tibetans illustrates that only ‘by example’ (a certain spiritual elitism with cultural breadth) can overcome the Darwinist “survival of the fittest” doctrine http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/340400.html  embedded in the Thousand Year Reich theology of Wordy Christianity.

As I have written before, my concerns tend to cluster about the casualness of violence by governments. I am concerned over the fact that government abrogates the right to do violence for itself, and refuse to ask sacrifice of its own elite unless it is of a soldier specifically recruited for the purpose of killing (the terrorist-enemy) and dying in the process if chance and the enemy wills it. While today governments recruit for its military from among young people who feel lost and expendable, in times of an all out war and general mobilization, such recruitment does not differ significantly from the Politburo issuing arrest warrants for the young and sending them off into an uncertain future identified with the gulags north of the Polar circle.

According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_David_Chapman “In 1971 [at the age of sixteen…] Chapman became a born again Christian …” As a reborn man, Chapman “…is said to have been angered at Lennon's claim that The Beatles were "more popular than Jesus.” While at that young age, Chapman worked with young people as a camp counselor, aided in the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees, and was an entertainer (he played the guitar) at church gatherings, he in some ways bore a resemblance to Holden Caulfield, the hero of J.D. Salinger’s novel, “Catcher in the Rye”.

In 1976, Chapman entered as “…a student Covenant College, an evangelical Presbyterian liberal arts college in Lookout Mountain, Georgia”. He entered the college together with his then girlfriend, but had a sexual affair outside the relationship, and succumbed to profound feelings of guilt, which led to thoughts of suicide. In 1977, Chapman does attempt a suicide by carbon asphyxiation in his car, but fails.

In previous blogs, I have pointed out that Western Christianity (originally Catholic, and sponsored by French kings and princes) was designed to act as an agent-pacifier of the general populace against the accumulation of wealth by elites. A tactical tool used by Catholic Christianity and meant to distract the populace from the stealing of its wealth by elites was the fostering of anti-sexual phobias of all kinds. The American fundamentalist movement, most of its recruitment done among the poor and uneducated, has taken over the phobia, by allowing the preaching of wealth accumulation from the pulpit. Many 19^th century Americans preached it. Among them was Russel Conwell, Horation Alger, Andrew  Carnegee, http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h849.html . In America, its natural resources unexploited, the ploy worked, provided jobs for many ‘media people’, fostered magazines, and did indeed make some people wealthy.

This soup of criss-cross ideas, sometimes contradictory, worked its wonders by confusing the mind of Chapman as it had confused millions of others before him. By 1980, Chapman had transferred his internal suicidal tendencies to considering murder of ‘happenstance’ others, which included “…Johnny Carson, Elizabeth Taylor, George C. Scott, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,” (see Wikipedia) and John Lennon.  All of the mentioned were not only in the public eye, but were in one way or another ‘Moneyed’. However, of them only John Lennon proved to be an outright ‘peacenik’ (a non-Christian vociferously preaching peace, taking the ‘Word’ away from traditionalist Christians, and in every way playing the role of one holier than Thou), yet brazenly self-confident and unguarded.

Following his failed suicide (1977), Chapman turned from being a victim of his own will to becoming the victim of the Law by murdering another. With his sexuality blocked and denied with the help of a Christian tradition many centuries old, Chapman unwittingly rediscovered the true enemy of sexuality, i.e., Money. Whether Chapman knew of the story as told by the Daily Mail  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1335479/Was-John-Lennons-murderer-Mark-Chapman-CIA-hitman-Thirty-years-theres-extraordinary-new-theory.html#ixzz2Oqt4xYcd , I do not know, but it appears Lennon was aware that he was letting himself be used as a front man for capitalism: When Lennon was grumbling about business expenses, an aide reminded him by quoting from his song ‘Imagine’: “Imagine no possessions”…. Lennon shot back: ‘It’s only a bloody song!’”

In short, being taught to have a guilt feeling about lust means to be taught to be free from guilt feelings about accumulating lute. This is not to say, that Chapman had suddenly turned into a political scientist, but had become such with the help of the unseen side of his brain. When he surprised his lawyers by changing his plea from “guilty” to “it was the will of God”, he was consistent with his habit of letting another source than himself dictate his actions. When given the opportunity to speak for himself, Chapman quoted from Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”:

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.”