Cockaigne Adieu?

'Cockaigne' Vincent Desiderio

The title is a reference to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Land of Cockaigne" (1559), a moral allegory set in a land of plenty where the houses are tiled with cakes, the fences are made of sausages and the fowl fly roasted and ready to eat. The targets in Bruegel's painting were gluttony and sloth; Mr. Desiderio's version is a critique of what he calls "cultural bulimia" — our compulsive consumption of images that only leaves us hungry for more. It is also a comment on the predicament of painting in the 21st century: faced with such a plethora of styles and formal idioms, how is it possible to create something new, something distinctively relevant to our own time?

We live in a political world, | Love don't have any place. | We're living in times where men commit crimes | And crime don't have a face.

Shelley

Anger and sex. Anger, sex, and absolutes. Just listen to the opinions, right and left. If we lined up all the online pundits, end to end, their perceived influence would stand ten times as tall as the actuality. Not only that, but their crap would provide enough ethanol to light the planet.

It’s not that people have opinions about the US President or the election or the war in Iraq–it’s just that they’re so damn sure they’re right. We’ve been talking about how polarized the upcoming election in the States is but on a good day nowadays, I’ll take polarized over what we’ve got. Everyone is so damn angry.

Look. It made me angry.

If we could have just one day per week when we all talked softly and quietly; when we listened to others views, and actually listened, not filtered; where we didn’t shoot from the hip, bringing out the verbal axes at first word; maybe where we even acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers–I can’t help thinking that we’d all be richer for the experience. more...

There are not a lot of countries who are very happy with the United States now, but much of the anger has been directed at the President and his staff. After all, Bush did not win the popular vote, so we can’t necessarily be held accountable for his actions. But what happens if Bush gets re-elected? At that time Bush’s actions will be seen as following the mandate of the people of this country, and how is that going to alter other country’s views of each of us?

If Bush is re-elected, can we still be friends?

Even when I share much of the same views as those who would condemn our actions, I have found myself experiencing tension, more than once, with someone I consider friend, primarily because of condemnation of our actions has been balanced, precariously, against condemnation of the nation as a whole. And good or bad, I am part of this nation. more...

Yule

What will continue unabated, whether it’s Kerry or Bush next year, is the reduction of everyone in America (in the industrialised world) to a mass bereft of the dignity of differentiation. The pace might change – under Bush, it’s been breathtakingly brisk; perhaps a Kerry administration will allow shades of difference or make for some slow-downs – but continue it will. “My country, right or wrong,” beliefs largely homogenised (and marketed!), and Individuality a Brand available at Walmart. That too is a sure sign of any kind of totalitarianism, soft or hard, governmental or corporate: it reduces the citizenry to an undifferentiated mass, even if we’re all yelling our heads of in support of this or that ideology. In that sense, if we want to prevent atrocities and stop wars, we have to fight to protect civil rights and freedoms, oppose Patriot Acts and infringements of civil liberties, insist on and defend the separation of Church and State, fight for freedom of the press, insist on pointing out conflicts of interest in government and business, protect whistle-blowers: those rights are fighting tools, which is probably why crooks of any stripe are so interested in taking them away.

Your friends abroad can prove their friendship by resisting that reduction to sameness, by insisting on seeing the differences, and making the arguments within their countries that there have always been and always will be different Americans, and that it’s a trick of criminal leadership to make all citizens appear the same and therefore equally responsible for what the criminals in power do. Today, criminals the world over are scheming to consolidate their power so that all over the world, everyone will soon look guilty: they want us all to be the same, tearing each other apart so that we don’t line them up against the wall. They do it through government power, they do it through corporate power, they do it through military power. And if the occasional leader does get lined up against the wall, it’s considered a small sacrifice that keeps the whole scheme going. But they can’t smooth over the pointy wedge of steady, resolute insistence on the dignity of difference.

[...]

Perhaps there’s more hope in infiltrating the system slowly but surely: get strategically-thinking individuals placed in positions of power in government and industry, people who will show some ability to resist. There’s more potential in that strategy, we need to make it our own again. It’s what our enemies have been using to bring us to where we are now. Key problem is that it’ll take time, which we’re getting panicked over running out of. more...

Joel

I need to speak to this from the place of gentle horror, where we have paved over the sufferings of the Iraqi people like we have paved over and channeled the streams gushing from the canyon mouths. For my antiwar views on this blog, I have suffered, not only from the Right but from members of the Left who one year and one month ago, were telling me that there was nothing to do but go along. A year ago, I spoke to the war. A year ago, I protested loudly against it. I questioned and I questioned the weapons of mass destruction. One year later, everything that I thought would prove true has: we breezed into Baghdad, then entered a long period of occupation where our soldiers were picked off one by one. One year and one month later, we have not found a single weapon of mass destruction. We've caught Hussein and it doesn't matter. We haven't found any links between Hussein and Al Quaeda. The economy totters and we need more money to keep this "operation" going. This butchery that we class as a surgery.

One year later, this critic of the Bush Administration is tired. He's tired not only of Bush, but of the Democrats who have gone along and gone along with the war in Iraq. He's tired that the majority of the population of this nation doesn't see beyond the Walmart greeters and the pretty products lined up on the shelves. He's tired of all the people who have closed their doors on him, whose votes and decisions perpetuate the evil he sees.

The war isn't the only issue we have to face here, Mike... more...

We're All Americans Now

'Land of Cockaigne' Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1559)

We live in a political world | Where peace is not welcome at all, | It's turned away from the door to wander some more | Or put up against the wall.

George W. Bush is an alien. I kid you not. Were I to be interviewed by a lurid U.S. tabloid I'd swear on any holy book that I was abducted by the U.S. president, impregnated with his foul seed and returned to Earth to sow carnage, discord and general mayhem. I would make a packet from my story and live high on the hog for the rest of my days. Sadly, the tabloids have yet to come knocking. But, as they say inside the Beltway, my door is always open.

Ah, yes, the Beltway. I believe the beltway constitutes the roads circling, ringing or locking in the cocooned goons now charting their stocks and our global descent into a madness beyond compare. The tabloids would find much to write about were they to root around the head of the average DC functionary performing lewd acts in the capital of the New World Order. Perhaps the toxicity levels emanating from the cesspit are too high for lowly scandal rags; I don't know. Either way, the skin-sheets persist in searching for people like me, people born of lizards or abducted by strange and twisted life forms up to no good.

According to my friend David Icke (he of the lizard king and the warbloggers' conventions in the secret chamber under the Lincoln Memorial), both the above descriptions apply to George Walker Bush. A friend sent me an e-mail pointing to a Glenn Reynolds' (Instapundit) post. He asked me what I thought of Reynolds. I have no idea to which entry in this blog I should point him. Needless to say, they all involve Mike Sanders, Howard Owens, Nick Denton, secret warblogging conventions in the antechamber of the secret vault under the Lincoln Memorial and, of course, the poor donkey. As a scholar though, David refuses to speak to the tabloids and therefore retains me as his spokesperson.

He's an easy customer compared to some of my other clients. One-time Brigadier General and torturer-in-denial Janis Karpinski is proving a real pain in the butt (the pun is not intended and I apologise to all Iraqi citizens sodomised by instruments of the U.S. global law-and-order machine). Janis is as guilty as all hell. Then again, aren't we all? As George Paine points out, "You knew." Indeed we did and do. There is no way out of this one, Bubba. You know what they say... you can run, but you can't hide. We will hunt you down and beat you like swine before putting the muzzle to your medulla. You too will know fear. I will show it to you in a fingerful of lead.

Way to go... death to the Yankees... Eh, shit, wait, this wasn't supposed to go in this direction... Let me start again. Scrap the dead Yanks bit... Gah! Blogging... Give me a fucking break. It leads me to places I really don't want to go. Which is where I started this; being abducted by George W. Bush. Look, you know what I think. As far as I'm concerned, we are all vile, wicked and depraved. There is no hope of redemption and we are all for the Lake of Fire. It's obvious, innit? I mean, look about you. Look at yourself. You deserve Nirvana? Does anybody else? Why? See my point? Good. Okay, now that there's no hope, we'd better make the best of the time allotted us, i.e. three score years and ten (more if you're a widow living in the States and a hell of a lot less if you're Joe Soap living in Africa, but let's not quibble). Frankly, if I'm to live out my life with some dignity and any measure of peace, I can do without George W. Bush, his buddy General Ariel 'Arik' Sharon, their minions and all those supporting them (Republicans, Democrats and Likkudnics).

Okay... wait. Back up a bit. Why the hell am I writing this incoherent piece of babble? It's all Shelley's fault. She's thinking of breaking up with me. Well, she doesn't put it like that, but I can always tell what Shelley is thinking. I mean, look at the title of her blog entry. Can We Still Be Friends. I kid you not. This is a line I am supposed to use. I'm telling you, never fall for a feminist. They'll make a mess outa you and have you believing that they're somehow justified in terminating what you thought was a deep, meaningful and lifelong friendship. I mean, fuck it, I'm not going anywhere. I've always regarded Shelley as my friend in the same way as I do many others I take for granted around here. I think of Jeneane, Elaine, Tish, my mentor Father Christopher (there's a funny smell coming out of the Jesus Bunker), Tom Shugart... in other words, the multitudes contained within, too numerous to mention.

We Hate America

'The Land of Cockaigne' (after Bruegel) Chris Gollon

We live in a political world, | Wisdom is thrown into jail, | It rots in a cell, is misguided as hell | Leaving no one to pick up a trail.

Take my advice. Never blog about friends and George W. Bush in the same entry. It's a killer. The one cancels out the other. Don't get me wrong; George W. Bush is far easier to write about, but friends are far easier to lose. Shelley's justifiably concerned that much of the acrimony directed by some (ehem) at the United States of America will jeopardize friendships now and in the future. They might... I can see it happening, but I can't see it happening to people who share pretty much the same views on the Boy Wonder's plans to destroy Earth and all who sail in her. The confusion arises because of the propensity of some (ehem... okay, so I'm speaking of Chris Kovacs here) to lump good people like those mentioned above, many others on our blogrolls and perhaps half the population of the United States, with The Other Half. The Other Half, of course, comprises all those representing that which is sick, repulsive and morally reprehensible. In other words, George W. Bush, his crazed administration, and its brain-dead collaborators. These people are evil and deserve to be shot like wild pigs but, in the United States, where Janet Jackson's boob is a big deal and Bill Clinton's blowjob is an impeachable offence, they are treated with kid gloves.

Naturally, because these bozos are blowing up the world and its relatives, many Americans and most foreigners are in what one might politely call a state of high dudgeon. We are seriously pissed off. We are perhaps a bit beyond pissed off and might even be said to be hoping that somebody will shortly land a sizeable aircraft on the White House. It would do wonders for world peace, the interior decorating business and newspaper sales. And, just to appease those who might believe I am advocating terrorism here, I'd like to state that I am merely considering the possible benefits of a Tokyo option. Or Hiroshima. Or Nagasaki. Y'know how it goes. Destroy the White House in order to save the world. Actually, put like that, it makes a lot more sense. Yes, we'll run with that.

Sometimes, especially when a sub-normal, dim-witted, inbred piece of white trash rises to the most powerful office in the world (I've told you how George Jr. was lumped on Bush Sr. after a Houston Convention trailer-park tryst with Sweet Melinda, Sister Annie and Angel, who'd just got back from the coast), there is a need to be blunt. Look, I know many Americans take to the streets to fight for civil liberties, peace, choice and all good things now being savaged by the rabid dogs of Christian Fundamentalism. We see them on the TV. They march sedately in carefully designed protester suits under carefully designed flags of convenience and are tracked by legions of carefully designed Darth Vader police. It all looks kind of unreal. And that's where I have to admit to a lack of understanding. Where're the guns, the riots, the blood, the bodies, the burning buildings? I don't see 'em. Look, even Old Europe has these things. A good protest isn't a good protest without a burning building or two. Y'know? Shit. Sometimes axes are called for. I mean, the post below originated somewhere. It has a basis in reality; a link to something that is happening. If it's not enough to get people to go ballistic, what is?

Yup. I'm in two minds. Somehow, I can't help feeling that if I knew I were doing more than taking time out to contemplate and justify my indifference to an ongoing and savage reality, I'd rest a lot easier. But, as I say, I'm in two minds. It's always a tough one.

The thing is, George W. Bush and his pus-headed followers are doing more than messing with my friendships, sodomizing Muslims or blowing Arabs to bits from here to Kingdom Come. They are messing with my blogging and I don't like it one bit. There was a time, before George put a cork in it and started taking that mad dog Rove and his rabid bitch Rice seriously, when I could blog away about life in general while registering my strong opposition to mindless acts of thuggery supporting commercial greed, e.g. the invasion and obliteration of Afghanistan. No more. Afghanistan showed Bush to be capable only of dancing to Bin Laden's tune. He was sucked in and chewed up. It was only a matter of time before he was spat out. As I have stated before, 9-11 signalled the end rather than the beginning of the war. Osama said, "Welcome to the world. You lost." Now, if George W. Bush had listened to his electorate in much the same way as Jacques Chirac, Gerard Schroder and others listened to theirs... well, we'd be living in a different world today, wouldn't we?

But no, George wanted revenge, Dick wanted oil, and St. John of Ashcroft wanted the Rapture produced and directed by Donny Rumsfeld and his neo-con goon squad.

Rather than answer that nagging little question, "So, what do you think they have against us?", George and his idiot friends set about bombing the world in accordance with plans sketched decades ago by deviants and perverts employed by the Pentagram to dream up enriching things for presidents to do. The Constitution of the United States? George was not told to read it before being assigned his position, but nobody minded. It was when George slipped effortlessly from his newfound belligerence to a state of pure hate and started tearing up the constitution of the globe that I got seriously pissed off. That was the moment evil clouded the air. Everybody was afraid. 9-11 hadn't changed the world, but George sure as hell was going to. Whereas the invasion of Afghanistan represented naked imperial aggression against a defenseless state, the invasion and occupation of Iraq was (and has repeatedly proven to be) a crime against humanity. We screamed about it. We ranted, raged and vented against it. We spent an awful amount of time arguing with the shit-for-brains mob sailing under the warbloggers' flag. Well, that sure as hell was about as counter-productive as one could possibly be (I'll never speak to those bastards again) and George launched his illegal and morally repugnant campaign.

Bang went my blogging.

But I digress. We were speaking of the Wonderchicken. Now, we all know how testy, bad-mannered and socially ill-equipped Chris Kovacs is. I'd ask that you overlook his grievous shortcomings for just a short while and try to understand this ghastly Canadian expatriate who proudly professes his hatred of America. Read the essay to which he alludes in a comment he appends to Shell's post, Anti-America. He says he's proud of his article. I'm sure he is, but I wonder who he got to write it. Not that Kovacs is incapable of cobbling together an occasional piece of lucid prose, you understand, but this piece is just... well... so... moi. There, I said it. I didn't write it, but I might have. So now you'll never know who did write it, will you? Mind you, I don't know The Clash's music that well... heh... or do I? Okay, let's give this one (just to speed things up) to Stavros. He is, after all, the only wonderchicken I'll ever allow inside my house. If waeguk's not a soup, I want to know what the hell it is. After a long-winded explication of his childhood as an anti-American Eskimo punk, Kovacs gets down to brass tacks. Here they are, for lazy sods:

I love Americans, many of them. I hate America because through those who lead that powerful nation, it seems to be hellbent on making a world that is worse in every way that's important for most of the people in it. And I feel this way not because I am Canadian, or 'lefty', or religious, or anything else other than who I am. I hate America because I want so desperately to love it.

But, bar constituting an important statement, that's not the half of it, so if you're sick enough to want to crawl into this self-admitted kindergarten sociopath's mind, you'd best read the whole thing.

Against the Wall?

'Land of Cockaign' Johannes Phokela

We live in a political world | Where mercy walks the plank, | Life is in mirrors, death disappears | Up the steps into the nearest bank.

Joel is a sucker for punishment. He lists many of the things that irk him about our Western or, to relocate to my neck of the woods, Western-ized approach to regulating life. In other words, and like Yule, he fights the inexorable march to sameness and is therefore fiercely protective of the individual. Hey, I agree with all Joel's stated views. More, I believe that if you protect the individual, you protect the people. Frankly, it's self-fucking-evident, but try telling it to the freaks promoting insidiously divisive concepts like multi-culturalism. Hell, a small example. I remember watching 'multi-racial' soccer during the late 70s in South Africa. Blacks playing whites (or vice versa). What a sick joke. It was labelling, stereotyping, and story telling at its worst. It was divisive and extremely dangerous. To us, as South Africans, the lie was obvious and we set out to expose it.

Today, we see the same corrosive logic employed by the social engineers of yesteryear dividing the States. I remember watching a film called Hardball. Starring Keanu Reeves, it told the story of a bum coaching a Little League Baseball Team. A predictable enough story line, eh? But this was different. First, Reeve was believable. A gambler, he owed big and he played his role believably. You could see the greasy sweat on his forehead and feel the pit in his stomach. Secondly, Cabrini Green and the ABLA housing projects reminded me of Cape Town's Lavender Hill. "So this is the democracy being exported to the world," I thought. Segregation, whether one calls it multiculturalism or multiracialism is racism by another name.

It's not that we took to the soccer pitches in protest. We continued fighting (more through talk than action) that which was at fault. As is the case in the post-constitutional United States today, South Africa's system of governance was corrupt. Anything coming out of it reflected that corruption. And here we find the reason why Americans today have so many causes for which they see a need to fight. They should not lose themselves inside the causes. They merely represent a system incapable of producing anything but that which is rotten to the core. Look, systems are pretty neutral. It's we who corrupt them. When we reach a stage where both are bent beyond recognition, there's a need to bring about change in both. Besides fighting the small battles (institutionalised barbarism in the U.S. armed forces, for example), we need to tackle the system making these potentially devastating injustices inevitable.

George W. Bush and his minions are not my primary concern. They are pimples on the skin of America, easily cleansed by time. It's the system that endures and, through it, global suffering. George W. Bush and his goons, as the leaders of the most powerful nation (guns and money) on Earth, currently represent a system in dire need of a drastic overhaul. George W. Bush is odious, sure. But, to me, he is also a person. I like some people. Others, I do not. I do not like George W. Bush. Nor do I like his puppeteers or those who vote for him. Besides representing a corrupt system, they seek to profit from it. But I'm okay separating them out from the system they represent. That system, rooted deeply in the American psyche, generates the problems of which Joel speaks. It does this as a natural consequence of itself, the way it works. Sexism, racism, religious intolerance, materialism, ignorance, prejudice and their children, e.g. the wars we fight, are natural consequences of an organising principle determining how we live our lives or look at the world.

The list of possible battles is endless, but the source remains the same. To tell you the truth, Joel, I'm tired too. The enemy is never without; always within.

Note Again redefining "prolific", the indefatigable scribe at Pax Nortona takes issue with the nut of most of that which corrupts; our much-favoured "isms". Read Post-Modernism vs. Democracy and take it from there...

Eating Dirt — Affirming Friendships

'Land of Cockaigne' Pieter van der Heyden (1570)

We live in a political world | Where courage is a thing of the past | Houses are haunted, children are unwanted | The next day could be your last.

We blog on many levels. Nothing illustrates this better than the many blogs listed on my blogroll. They range from the intensely personal to the stridently political. Some, and I hope I can include myself here, try to straddle the divide, blogging the best and worst of both worlds. Not getting much time at my machine and being living proof of Father Christopher's famous blog maxim "Where we write at night when we should be sleeping", I've not maintained a steady flow of entries for the past eighteen months. I've also tended to focus on that which preoccupies most of us, U.S. imperialism. I don't believe myself to be anti-American. Like Stavros, "I hate America because I want so desperately to love it." He certainly has a way with words, that boy. I've asked my mother about him. She says she had a miscarriage when first she fell pregnant, but I don't know...

Shelley's post made me think. Why the hell should bloggers focus their energies on the Iraqi Occupation? What are blogs for? Are there other ways to voice dissent? How many blondes does it take to change a light bulb? I'm buggered if I know the answer to the last question, but I realize how foolish I've been in ignoring the answers to the first three. If truth be told, they leave me feeling more than a little abashed and acutely embarrassed. If anything, they tell me this. I value George Walker Bush and Ariel Sharon, whose obdurate intransigence I admit to occasionally adopting, far less than I do any single online friendship.

I do not believe my being 'for' or 'against' the United States or its citizens as a whole is at issue here. Shelley puts it bluntly. Friendships are at stake. I've been mulling this over. She's right. They are. Why? I believe it's all about the tone we adopt on our blogs and the respect we show for others' views and realities. Anger affects the first and does away with much of the latter. So, what is my tone? Born of anger, it's self-righteous, prescriptive, arrogant, and cocksure. With just a couple of words, I transform a justifiable anger into a demand that others adopt my thinking, change their lives and man the barricades. Doing that reduces even anger to little more than a vituperative and impotent frustration. Hell, even I can't accept that. Motivated by anger (but fuelled by frustration), I become dogmatic. I assume the right to tell others how and what to blog. In other words, I become prepared to ride roughshod over others' views and realities. In short (and in tone), I become Bush. It's my right to want to do that but what conceit would make me want to exercise such a right? No sensible conceit that I can think of. Anger, poorly expressed, can do great harm.

Others have similar rights to me. They can tell me to go screw myself. I'm surprised none did. Fight fire with fire? Sometimes it's necessary.

Not that it'll stop me speaking exactly what's on my mind, of course...

We live in a political world. | The one we can see and can feel | But there's no one to check, it's all a stacked deck, | We all know for sure that it's real.

Bob Dylan | Political World