Chris Carter the creator of The X-files is a modern day Shakespeare – poet and prophet. I first watched his program many years after it had gone into syndication. I was up late one night, as I often am, and I turned on the TV, as I usually do. This lunatic was chasing a human size fluke worm through the sewers of Boston or someplace. Following him was a stunning redhead, brilliant and clearly his keeper. I finished that episode and watched the next two. I was instantly addicted.
I don’t like Science Fiction. I am a realist in my own work and have very little use for fantasy. It took me a while to figure out why I was so enamored of The X-Files. One morning around 3 am, in the middle of my fifth episode, I got it. The X-Files isn’t Science Fiction at all; it is a contemporary morality play with many layers of meaning similar to Hamlet. The aliens, alien abductions, super solders, black helicopters and government conspiracies are metaphors fused together in a mythology to form a field of ideas for Carter’s Knight Errant, Fox Mulder, to pursue a quest for the Holy Grail – in this case the Truth.
Carter consistently reminds us that “The Truth is Out There.” While Mulder speaks of it as if it is more than human, less than divine, a living, breathing entity waiting and sure to return. In his estimation Truth has been relegated to the darkness by a pack of bold liars operating in unison.
Like all great writers Carter routinely engages in prophecy. It is the mark of his kind of genius to be able to stare at the past and see through it to the future. He certainly glimpsed ours. Today we are inundated with liars and they truly have no trepidation about the truth. They seem to believe that if they deceive, dissembled and distort well and long enough the Truth will never be seen again.
It is the Grail Quest of every reasonable, caring and thoughtful person on the Left, in the Middle, and on the Right – if there are any still in attendance – to call, invite, pray for, go out and seek the Truth. The liars would have us believe that they can better protect our future and the future of our children. They cannot. The prevaricators would have us trust them to protect this Planet. We must not. Their sword is greed, their standard hate, their avatar apathy to anything other than their own self interest. They breed corruption and decay. They care more for the smallest bill in their wallet then they care for all of humanity.
I have just called my Senator Bennett, my Congressman Polis, and the White House. I have insisted upon the following:
1) Social Security is a return on an investment, it is not a hand out. Please treat it accordingly. The rich have no monopoly on investments.
2) Many of the people in the House and Senate have large even vast personal fortunes. Let us dismantle their retirement. They won't need it. In fact many of them shouldn't even be collecting a salary.
Perhaps others would like to call as well.
I was a young woman when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. I wasn’t yet old enough to vote - you had to be twenty-one back then. I was volunteering in Denver in one of his campaign offices with three other women that night when we got the news on the radio that he had been shot in the head like his brother the President of the United States, John Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, shot in the face two months earlier. Goddess, it was a season of death, and we all tried to wrap our minds around another atrocity – a third great man felled by some monster with a gun where his humanity should be. Sobbing and chocking on our tears we started moving campaign literature from one table to another aimlessly. One of the women sunk to her knees, and another woman and I got her up and into a chair. It seemed like a long time, but it couldn’t have been, before my over protective Italian father, Goddess bless him, called and said, "You are coming home now. Tell the ladies that you are locking up, and I am taking them home too." No one argued with my dad, and home we went.
It was June and there was no one in the streets of Denver. No kids were playing; no young guys were showing off their hot rods; no Italian ladies were sitting on their porch gossiping. A vibrant ethic neighborhood had simply ceased to exist as time stopped and the Earth halted in its orbit. Bobby died the next morning, and time came back with the spinning of the Planet from night into day. We had lost something in the emptiness of no time and nonexistence. Something we never got back.
Political assassinations in this country are always carried out with guns from the attempted assassination of Roosevelt that resulted in the death of the Mayor of Chicago to Bobby Kennedy bleeding out on the floor of a kitchen in a Los Angeles hotel and many more. The butchery of massacres is consistently committed in this country with guns from Columbine to Tucson and so many more. When are we going to get it – some people can’t have guns. Some guns are only killing machines and shouldn’t be in the hands of anyone except people trained to kill for military reasons. Maybe some guns shouldn’t be in anyone’s hands. When are we going to decide that the NRA has absolutely no right dictating social policy around guns either to our Congress or to us? When are we going to start insisting loud and long that our politicians stop behaving as if they worked for Heidi Fleiss and stand up for the people who elected them? When are we going to realize that life is first among our freedoms – after all if we are dead what good are the others? Consider the NRA’s reaction to the monstrous events in Arizona. They instructed us to focus on praying for the victims and not to distract ourselves with anything else. Works for them. They are like a person watching another cut their wrists, and rather than taking the straight razor they hand out Band-Aids.
The word Gestalt is German in origin. It refers to a concept of wholeness. The wholeness of a life or the wholeness of a family. In examining the wholeness of our society including its discourse and extremes one has to take into consideration the fact that as the monstrous events in Tucson are part of the Gestalt, so is the shooter and so is the culture of well sanctioned gun violence exhibited by people like Sarah Palin. Just because Loughner did not rage into the Safeway parking lot with a Sarah Palin tee-shirt on it doesn’t follow that he wasn’t directly or indirectly influenced by the far Right’s extremists and incendiary rhetoric - some level of cross contamination is obvious.
Today in order to extricate herself from public scrutiny Palin chose to invoke a horror that can be traced back to antiquity, Greco-Egyptian times specifically. Blood libeling is a false accusation leveled against religious minorities, usually Jews, asserting that children are murdered in order to use their blood in Jewish rituals. This accusation is insane, born of ignorance, born of stupidity it is not mitigating. Once again Sarah Palin is engaged in using blind, over the top and brutal accusations to accuse people she has no right to accuse. Thus allowing her to continue her program of malice and fear mongering toward anyone who dares question or oppose her. In my opinion this is why it is reasonable to assume that the negative and vicious influence this woman asserts on the whole of this society might be a contributing factor in Loughner’s deadly rampage.
Palin is the essence of our Gestalt right now, the mistress of our nightmare. It is time for public opinion to silence her.
In the wake of the monstrous events in Arizona Dr. Deepak Chopra has just been on Dylan Ratigan's program. He asks that each of us get on our social network(s) and leave a message of peace. There is a meadow in my heart where the hills roll away in greens, terra cottas and majestic blues. Wildflowers and roses cluster near a tiny tinkling stream. Sun moves in reds and golds toward her rest. Moon rises in silver splendor. In this meadow where the scent of rose flows like honey I sit with the Goddess and listen to the sweet song of the Fairy children on the side of the hills. This is peace to me and I wish each of my friends a place in this meadow. I wish the haters, the violent and the sick a chance to glimpse this meadow.
Goddess bless you all.
