Satan 2008

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Satan 2008

A string of recent conversations brought up what I believe to be the real problem surrounding the upcoming Presidential Election. There are only two candidates, Obama and McCain. Ralph Nader and his campaign have been working diligently to resolve this pending issue, but the truth is, no one who makes that type of decision is willing to make that type of decision. There are other third party candidates besides Nader, and many of them might even make decisions based more squarely on what you believe, but that isn’t the point. I mention the Nader/Gonzalez ticket because I have read several of Nader’s books, and I know that more than wanting to become President himself, he would like to see the political machine in this country overhauled and re-geared. And why shouldn’t it? As it stands we are doing nothing more than exchanging a few hours of our time for who we think is most likely to win based upon our own deluged ideals of what a President should be.
For many of us the decision comes down to picking “the lesser of two evils.” This argument is a self-sustaining reservoir of brackish flood water and is difficult to escape. In 2004 Bush was re-elected to a second, excruciatingly painful term primarily because many people believed that Bush was somehow the lesser of two evils since we had a war going on and a changing of the Commander-in-Chief might display weakness in the face of our enemies, etc.
The sad truth is that an election in which the leader of this great country will be chosen, not by you, the voter, but by an Electoral College, voting loosely on the premise of what they believe a majority of Americans might have at one time said or felt regarding who should be the next President. Our collective message to the Electoral College is, and has been, “Pick the one who will screw us up the least.” Unfortunately, that hasn’t sat well since the last Presidential Election. It turns out that a majority (depending on whose count you followed) of voters, and the esteemed Electoral College made a bad decision. Now we face another one.
Obama or McCain? Just pick the lesser of the two evils. The V.P. choices aren’t helping. Palin is hot. (Every pretty girl lives in fear of a bad photograph leaking out with bad lighting, so don’t jump on that one.) Biden is an accomplished speaker, if your idea of a good speaker follows Biden’s method of speaking. Besides Al Gore, can anyone tell me what a Vice President has even done that excites the memory? Probably not, but I welcome all takers.
The lesser of two evils is a way to justify that you’re going to spend a couple of hours of your time to vote for someone in whom you really don’t believe. Where else besides a Presidential election do you justify picking the lesser from a decision to be made? If you’re like most people with any amount of self respect, you probably don’t make decisions based on “lesser.” Kudos, if you’re such a person! I like to think that I am, but come election day, I wonder.
My solution seems bizarre, but no more outlandish than the two candidates I’m supposed to pick as representative of my beliefs towards politics. I say, and I can’t take full credit for conceiving of this, but I did develop it to its logical conclusion. Why settle for the lesser of two evils? If you’re going to invest your time, do it for the greater evil. My first choice was Bin Laden, but that would still be catering to the media anomaly known as “News Coverage.” No, my opinion is that we should exercise our right to write-in our vote and vote for Satan. Who is more evil than that guy? We all admit, by the arguments we use to justify our election day choices, that evil is in fact a consideration in the process of our decision making. If we are to tolerate any evil, why not go for our own jugulars and quit with the overly dramatic pinky cutting ceremony and vote for Mr. Freakin’ Evil Himself—Satan. At least with Satan we’re assured that something will get done in the next term of the Presidency.

Satan 2008. Get on board or burn.

© 2008 Le Meme War

Chasing Black Rainbows– Book Review

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Chasing Black Rainbows
(A novel about Antonin Artaud by Jeremy Reed)

Black rainbows are what Artaud sees coming from the lips of the Poet. Which Poet possesses this physical anomaly is never mentioned, though he is written to speak at other places in the text of Blake, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, etc. Perhaps the discoloration of blackness stems from the ink the Poet of Artaud’s experience uses to marry his words to the page in textual hieroglyphs.
What does this blackness really represent when bolder statements of Poetry are written with the threatening chemistry of blood?
Black is the color of all color. All colors mix in any combination to form black, just as any combination of life and choices results in the inevitability of death. White is the absence of all color. Perhaps this is semantically incorrect from the viewpoint of physics, but that is of no consequence to me, or to the intent of this writing. Black, the color of the common ink used by Poets and publishers to immortalize words and ideas, is the transmutation of mental idea into physical process through text. All ideas from the beginning of written history through the present time and beyond are captured by the blackness of the text. The blackness of rainbows formulated by Reed through the character of Artaud is not the death of rainbows as would be commonly assumed, for this would indicate the death of Poetry, and Poetry is nowhere more alive than in the ideas and actions of the Poet who breathes the trace of black rainbows. The blackness of these rainbows, rather, is the annihilation of categorical knowledge which is isolated through spectrums as the fault of man’s search for certain wisdom. The voice of the Poet in speaking the terms employed of Poetry is the authentic search for absolute wisdom and the abandonment of knowledge as a bastardized substitute for wisdom.

Neither Reed nor Artaud dismiss the beauty of colors such as red, green, yellow, blue, orange, purple, black or even white. The Poet without such an arsenal of beauty at his disposal would hardly be able to approach the epochs of wisdom. The idea of blackness should be seen as a metaphysic rather than a conglomeration of individual meanings. To define blackness, especially with regard to rainbows, as a metaphysic is to allow the distinction between fundamental and assumed. The words and text employed by the Poet are fundamental in the sense that meaning does not reach out to individual categories of correspondence. To assume words or text is to apply a meaning separated from the entirety of human experience and to further isolate thoughts in time as significant only to that assumption of signification. Words such as orange, green, or purple retain their individualistic correspondence to the colors as related, but also apply to a fundamental sense of transcendence and are thereby options for further discourses of meaning.

Sex is also explicated through the historical context of formulated fantasy throughout the text of this book. I would highly recommend that you read it whether you like me or not.

© 2008 Le Meme War

The Fantasy of Fast

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The Fantasy of Fast

A few days ago I had the unexpected pleasure of witnessing an event I had previously thought to exist only in movies and sensationalist media coverage: The high speed chase. I was driving south on I-75 and had just left the city limits of Atlanta when I heard the spiral-gurgling whine of a crotch-rocket motorcycle behind me. I looked in my rearview mirror, then in my passenger side mirror and saw a man on a motorcycle through the glass of my windshield traveling at what I guessed to be 150mph, double my speed. He leaned heavy to the left and to the right and passed through nearly invisible gaps between cars that I wouldn’t have dared walk through had they been packed so closely in a crowded parking lot. As envy began to formulate a familiar substance in my imagination, I saw flashing blue lights speed next to me and beyond me at the pace of an elevated heartbeat, but not nearly as fast as the motorcycle which had passed merely seconds before. Only by the color scheme did I identify the car to be the Georgia State Patrol. Blue, silver, and orange are more accessible to recognition than the blurred words stenciled on the side of a rapidly moving vehicle.

Instantly I cheered for the man on the motorcycle. I can’t attribute my excitement to the archetype of the common man rooting for the underdog, no matter how powerful the connection. My first rationalization was that the speedster on the crotch rocket likely engaged in an action that caught the attentive eye of the State Patrolman. This action could have been as simple as the speeding which he was currently engaged, or perhaps involved some sort of theft or violent action towards another individual. Maybe he hurt someone, I reasoned. People who tend to root for Law Enforcement use that idea to justify their appearance of heightened morality. The same argument can be used to jeer the bullying State Patrolman– How many people has he hurt “under the guise of duty?” That’s probably an unfair question as those who dream of being perceived as having a heightened sense of morality will assert, with a whine, that the ends justify the means. If the State Patrolman hurt someone, or many people, it is because he, or she, acted in accordance with what we as a society need for law and order to be maintained. If the motor biker hurt someone, or even displayed the potential for hurting someone, then it was for selfish reasons since he does not stand for anything other than himself, as evidenced by his individuality in clothing, in opposition to the cop who wears a uniform to indicate the higher purpose of law which is served by his presence and actions.

Bullshit. On both counts. The truth is that there is no verification that what I witnessed was even a high speed pursuit. Considering the timing of circumstances, what I have described is the most likely scenario, but not the only potentiality. One scenario allows that the man on the motorcycle happened to be speeding by and the State Patrolman happened to be chasing someone else. The adrenaline junky on the motorbike may be a friend of the State Patrolman, or perhaps an off-duty State Patrolman. This is unlikely because of the irresponsibility of what their course of action could entail, but even this unlikelihood does not render it impossible. The possibilities can continue on this strain, but the key to keep in mind is that their inevitable absurdity does not render them impossible.

I cheered for the crotch-rocket-o-naut because he approached a freedom that I complain to be unattainable. The movie and news versions of this event are a reflection of what I seek, tarnished through the imagination of another. To witness such an event in a movie is to accept the understanding that the outcome has already been determined by the logic of the script and the desire of the Director. Even on the news, such an event is determined by the inevitable fact that the law must eventually reclaim its dominance, or the justification of failure of the law must result in death which is then belittled to a cosmic extension of the justice principle. My experience of what I witnessed, regardless of how I choose to define it, is not narrowed by either of these expectancies. For a brief moment I was exposed to the elements of limitless potentiality, regulated only by my imagination. I can choose to never learn or accept what the outcome proposed on the face of reality. There are no closing credits, no follow up news story. At the farthest reaches of my imagination another fantasy begins and the dream of being the man capable of projecting myself through reality at such an endangering clip is saved for the next time I feel the slow grp of reality squeezing my soul from my aging body. As far as I am concerned, the man on the motorcycle transcends my hesitancy of time and the State Patrolman represents the inevitability of my fate , not the fate of the man on the speed-bike.

My fantasy notion of freedom is the capability to go really fucking fast through life and not worrying about that abrupt stop at the end. This does not happen in movies, nor does it happen in the news. Only in the openness of my imagination is this freedom possible, and I will live there as long as possible.

© 2008 Le Meme War