Prose for the Season

1. Vicarious Idylls

Food Network, Travel Channel and various Real Estate Shopping programs are all the rave. Fantasy Consumption viewing is overtaking real consumption. Add lotteries and you have a society of pipe dreamers who vicariously enjoy the conspicuous consumption of their masters.

2. Identity and Bondage


I do not know who I am. Identity is tautological. A=A goes nowhere. Here we see the eternal presence and self-indentity of God( Old Testament and St. Augustine). The only vestige of selfhood one can hold to is the perceptual illusion of a contained body. Rimbaud makes it clear with “Je suis un autre”. Have we, the fabled “I’s”, ever had it?

Identity, the Self, is one of Humanism’s more endearing forms of Deification(reification). Every God is born through a statement of self-identity. Name a man and he will view it as a contractual bond with the Cosmos constituting his “Selfhood”. Culture is the nominal disintegration of Humanity into Selfishness.

Consumption based societies devote every mode of production to serving selves. Communal standards are abandoned and a Freudian Dystopia is instaurated. The Superego serves the Id. It creates controls to facilitate consumption. The value of human liberty dwindles and eugenic ideologies of racial and ethnic identification grow. The Id craves security for its own excesses. Identity stands as the Fortress of Selfish excess. What is the principle of all security? We defend national identity, liberties and protect property for one cause—->”To further our self interests.” Writ large it is the marketed suppression of class struggle via media to all “I’s” who sell themselves into bondage for their “own” self interest. Adam Smith’s invisible hand promises liberty but forges shackles.

The assertion of self is the first step towards bondage. Who legitimizes names and identity? States preach identity as strongly as the God of the Old Testament. There is no other I am but I am. And it tells you who you are–>A series of letters and numbers on various ID’s. It devolves, like States and the Judeo-Christian God, into Sociopathology. Every master births sons to die in his place for everyone’s sins. War propaganda has always been a process where we build up martyrs to die for masters in a battle against evil.

3. Bankers as Jealous Gods

Bankers really do “God’s work”. They place a plague on many houses. Especially upon those who do not appreciate and honor their value with sufficient sacrifice. We all know they abhor Golden Calves.

4. Luxuriant Wastrel

I am the proud scion of a Rentier. It underlines my antipathy to religion. God created the Universe aeons ago and has done nothing since but collect rent. Jesus was Cosmic QE1. His blood flowed to pay the “debt of our sins”. Amazing how elastic religious narratives are. It seems they are hidden in language as a Divine Grammar. Too bad the divination is mostly practiced by devils.

I live as a luxury. Therefore I take pride in being waste. I revel in wasting time as much as time wastes everything. Rest is the highest form of rebellion. It helps me fashion a home in this abominable world. Graciously love, a selfless utopia of shared sentiments, gilds the dross enough that life still holds fair.


5. News Cycle Poesy

The bad infinity of news cycles
buries minds in triviality
and time stamped
quantums of concern.

6. Cyber Sharecropping

Facebook is an Alienation machine. It offers a formatted hyperreality in lieu of a world diminishing in human value.
One could say the same of Google and its relation to knowledge.


7. August in Paris

August days in Paris scald like a sauna. Dusk’s cool reprieve feels transcendent.At night the perfume of the Tuileries charms a gallant breeze to steal across the silky black Seine.

Paris is certainly worth a mass. I miss everything except Sacre-Coeur. It is a white headed zit on the forehead of Paris.

8. Athens not Rome

US decline comparable to the Imperial Roman decline meme, and the forest of echoing epigones, is tiresome and sloppy. A better comparison would be the meteoric rise and quick decline of Athens from the 6th to 4th Century BCE. The rise after the Greek Allies beat back the Medean(Persian) invasion to the Delian League and collapse into Imperial folly-- the campaign against Syracuse(Sicily). A period in which an extended Oligarchy started as a “Democracy” and concentrated to a traitorous few who aligned themselves to the majority’s enemies(Sparta and Persia) in the reign of the “Thirty Tyrants”. Later Philip’s Macedonia bought out a broke and eviscerated Athens with Silver. Socrates was long dead and the Sophists reigned.