DESPARATE AMERICA

DESPARATE AMERICA

Metaphysics of the Catastrophic Enantiodromia

(Please read last line to connect what was written first immediately after…)

This is a pathological psychic condition described by the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in several early works, but spelled out in full alchemical symbolic detail in his last, Mysterium Conjunctionis. It results from a one sided conscious approach having been carried to such an extreme that it is openly confronted by its unconscious opposite at every turn.

The pervasiveness of this condition defines the desparate situation America finds herself in today. The following Three Steps set out the analysis of the situation in terms of sign-use, through which its existence is sustained.

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First Step in analyzing the situation: Irony and Beyond

The eye of this psychic hurricane, not unlike that which struck Hitler’s Germany in the 1930’s, is a DUPLICITOUS WAY OF BEING, in which the truth is turned inside out and upside down. It was organized in national discourse by neocon Republicans when, in l996, they promulgated a document called “clean break”, referring to the position of swapping land for peace which had historically been US policy in the Middle East for settling the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They changed the policy agenda, meanwhile pressing a weakened, soon-to-be very stressed out President Clinton to work, work work for a settlement, later presented by PM Barak and himself to Yasir Arafat under hurry-up conditions, which he had to refuge. The ironies there were: Arafat gets blamed for not signing the deal he had no part in shaping; suicide bombs begin in earnest, after Ariel Sharon waddles across Jerusalem’s Temple Mt. in 2000, in open provocation of Muslims, to which the site is sacred. One of the documents signed off on by the little neocon coterie of to-be American policy setters added the provision: “Using such force as to make any opposition suicidal.” That particular irony has been the hallmark of the ensuing process. “The suicide war” Tom Friedman dubbed it. Among other things used to describe America’s road to Baghdad.

The sheer quantity, if not quality of the prevailing ironies are proofs of something that goes beyond them. That would be the psychic condition in which they originate. The storm does not appear overnight; except, if a historical span of thousands of years is used as a scale, it can be adjusted to make it appear to emerge overnight. Just like Katrina did. And Ophelia hovered off the Atlantic coast threatening to do. One came out of nowhere; the other went nowhere. Stange dyad. Ophelia wandered off into the northern sea. These were continental/global weather events. They intervened in a political situation rapidly developing between the president, the public, and the disappearing neocons into an ultra-sticky, stinky mess, and I do mean Karl Rove, Guckert/Shiavo queer-death glamour, and the sudden insertion of (rumor has it) gay Catholic John Roberts up the arse of the U. S. Supreme Court as Chief Justice for Life. Here we are beyond irony, over with Mel Gibson’s crucified Jesus, of whom more later.

…Taken over by a DUPLICITOUS WAY OF BEING that arises suddenly at this end of history, like a psychic storm that, from the ground, has been brewing up for a long time. Our meager 200 years or so; the Pisces/Christian age 2000 years or so; 4000 to the First New Age (recorded in human history as such: Z. Sitchin) as the sun began rising in Aries following its Taurus residence … seen from this end, if Katrina really is an act of God, the same one the Bible speaks of as causing the great Flood (Gen. 6.17 “And behold, I Myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on earth shall die.”), it will look like two storms, psychic and cyclonic, have suddenly come together like three convoluting low-pressure systems to blow out America’s Atlantic rim. As the tsunami did the Indonesian ocean.

As historical irony, nothing could be greater than what has happened to America and oil as a result of the Iraq war. The sub-text of going to war, openly discussed across all blogboards, was it would bring the flow of oil under US company control. Now Katrina and Rita have taken away just this which it had. One can call it irony, but calling Katrina an act of God goes further.

The irony of ironies was marked by the shift of signs from “St. Rita”, to just plain Rita, as events carried the public mind from the tragedy of New Orleans parish nursing home drownings,…. to 24 old, incapacitated nursing home victims incarcerated when their oxygen canisters exploded, fleeing the wrath of “Rita”. Learning from google that the 15th century saint was patron of “impossible cases”, and caring for the abused, having been abused and suffering greatly herself, overcoming it with a life of devotion to Christ in a Benedictine nunnery. It was said that she desired sharing Christ’s passion so fervently a thorn from His crown pierced her forehead as she prayed one day, leaving an unhealing wound the rest of her life. If “she” is a personification of the force of Mother Nature, the flip-side of “St.” would be the natural girl, woman, person returned after abuse by parents, husband, system, church, for revenge on them all. If “God” according to masculine Archetype is the one under which the neo-con Bushes invaded Iraq for oil, then the double irony of including Rita under “act of God” is: 1. “He” goes over to “She” – as in Dan Barry’s comments (NYTimes, below. 9.28); even as 2. the real result of America’s announced project to bring women more “rights” in the Arab world (carried out yesterday by Karen Hughes in Saudi Arabia) is a reversal: fewer rights, under stricter religious-conservative rules. Rita, without the “St.” could be taken as representing* that, too (*vorstellung).

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Second step in analysis of the Catastrophic Enantiodromia situation, Beyond Irony):

Psychosemiotic sin: Absolutizing the Relative.

This phrase stuck in my mind, I think, from reading Reinhold Neibuhr in the 50’s. He, as a German pastor in Henry Ford’s Detroit in the 30’s, had seen the dehumanizing effects of assemblyline work required for America to enjoy its monumental automobile fetish. “Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932?) argued brilliantly through the major social-educational-religious texts of the day that liberalism won’t save America. It won’t be possible to educate the effects of original sin out of man (that’s what he called people in general) by teaching them the social sciences and waiting for the muddy water to recede on its own. Man has a moral nature; nations do not. It’s metaphysical. They are ego, only; no soul. But the temptation to claim their particular historical ego formation absolute is a constant. As a practical theologian, he wouldn’t give “God” to Henry Ford, or General Motors, capitalism, communism, even Eisenhower. Neo-orthodox theologians, he and Paul Tillich (who had been a student of Heideggar’s in Germany before escaping with Neibuhr’s help), kept “God” communicating something on the token (existential) side, after it text had been drained by science.

Sin (of nations) in these terms would be violation of this rule not to ansolutize the relative. It amounts to equating one side (one’s own) with the totality.

The process goes with idolizing the ideal, though the connection is not on the surface. Idols are projections of a higher spiritual content onto an external material form. Talking statues is the paradigm. Once made of stone, today talking statues are called “Movie Stars”. YHWH’s prohibition of graven images (Exodus 20.4) conveys that. It is the second commandment, violation of which is a “sin” in the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition some honor. That is a very deep authoritative sanction. It divides the contents of experience into two kinds, one communicated only through word/speech tokens, the other through picture/material tokens. This distinction is incorporated into formal psychosemiotics as that between the upper (7-6-5) and lower (3-2-1) triads of content under sign-use. The upper triad is cognitive/spiritual, wholly contained in consciousness through the sign; the things under the signs of the lower triad are completed outside consciousness (in matter; phenomenality; neuropsychic reaction).

As the notion of “object” is to things in the material world, as unities predicated through names associated with sense-quality repetitions (lower triad, presupposed space and time of three-dimensional radii around the body), so the notion of “God” is to things of the inner, or spiritual world: names associated with things independent of sense-quality repetitions (“ideas”, “forms”, “Archetypes”). (This is generally neo-Platonic, but with definite staged forms of emmenation from The One to the Many qua ultimate multiplicity. )

Idolization, then as explained, consists in universalizing the particular: taking a statue as God. This would mean identifying a Spiritual, God-content with a material one, as if “He”, or what “He” is, could be handled, poked, sorted, destroyed, etc. The universal belongs to one realm of being (the upper triad); the particular belongs to another realm of being (lower triad). When the particular thing is related to as if actually contained, or were, the universal, which is detached from qualitative instances by memory in any case, is absorbed into the divisible: “finitude”, was the metaphor medieval philosophers used. After Jesus introduced the notion of the “kingdom of God” as a reality to which it is possible to be connected, the sharp division, as well as finely threaded juxtaposition of the two triads stood out: The Godly, above, through the Spirit, aligned with things heavenly; the unGodly, gross material, despiritualized things below, aligned with Hell-demons, in esoteric tokenspace, about which more cannot be said at this point.

The distance between them is as the distance from plane 7* of sign use (God*, predicate of all predicates), to plane 1* (neuro-reactive anatomical pulse). The continuity between the polarities are the planes of the ordered hierarchy of sign-uses according to logical type of tokens. These correspond to the psychosemiotic categories of individuals given in experience under sign-uses. One who can say to himself “Was that dream from God?” is connecting the circuits on the conscious side that are hypothesized to be connected on the unconscious side, through the discharge of energies in the way sing-use differentiates. (Not: that it is recommended as self-consultation!)


The other side of universalizing the particular is particularizing the universal: taking one thing among others (uniquely related to the ego, on the psychological side) which is relative value – value it has only in relation to other things of thef same order, as if it WERE the value all had.

This is the reverse of idolization; idolization introverted. When conscious, it is narcissim of the ideal. The ideal here, now. Immanentizing the eschaton. This refers to the psychological attitude and condition Jung called “inflated”. (In Freudian terms: “fantasy cathected”; also, “full of him/themselves”, “self-imporatnt”, DeMause: “identified with traumatic childhood experiences as a returned psychic state”.)

Both these sins are a source of being-illusion prohibited by proper hierarchical ordered in the use of sign. “God” directly governs or controls the upper triad, only, as a spiritual force. That is why, after Christianity, this token of the completing totality is present in form as a grace, and in response to it as a free will. Its use calls for mastery and control over the body, while at the same time calling for energies the body must be maintained with great care to provide. The new man in Jesus called “Christ”, in Pisces, refers to the Three Crosses in esoteric astrology (Alice Bailey). As Aquarius comes marching in. The signs in astrology are part of the great illusion themselves, she points out. There are no real marks in the sky through which the sun passes each year mapped by “The Zodiac”. However, on the esoteric side, on the map the Three Crosses on the Great Wheel of 12 houses correspond with the three crosses in 0 a.d at Jesus’ crucifixion: The Hidden Christ: -- the cross of the unrepentant thief; the Fixed Christ: the esoteric Cross of Jesus, himself; and the Risen Christ – the cross of the repentant thief. This touches a point in projected cosmic unity beyond human comprehension. The metaphysical objection – and it is an obstacle – to the Way of Legal Duplicity (Third Step) is its foreclosing the reality completion loops onto the lower triad, to maintain physical at the expense of spiritual existence.

In sum: the consequence of violating the second commandment, sinning against the distinction between universals and particulars, predicates and individuals, in the logic of sign-use – taking universals as particulars, or particulars as universals – is self-contradiction, antinomy, paradox, reversal, breaking out everywhere. This completes the second step in elaborating the metaphysics of the situation “beyond irony”.




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Third Step in analysis of the process of Catastrophic Enantiodromia

Introduction of the Catholic Way of Being. Sealing the development of sign-use loops under the Hidden Cross (of perpetual suffering), preventing emergence of energies of the Fixed and Cardinal Crosses. Thus, it stands against the tide of history in this New Age.

If the implication of Allan’s analysis are drawn out, the gap between the wrongly absolutized ideal and the allowances judges are required to make for human nature in the breach (read: … the crud and corruption he will allow for to protect cronies) is scheduled to be filled by enlarging his discretionary powers. He will have to decide individual cases that could go tough, or go easy on the defendant, on the basis of his personal honor and integrity, as a Solomon-like human being. To repeat: the system of Duplicitous Law – “Here is what the law is; we know you won’t follow it.” – winds up giving supra-ordinate discretionary power and authority to precisely those who have abused the law to get in that position.

The legal way of thinking of the Italian/Catholic ideal is set forth by John L. Allen, Jr. “At the Vatican, Exceptions Make the Rule”, NY Times on-line 9.27.05). Here is an except:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/opinion/27allen.html

September 27, 2005
At the Vatican, Exceptions Make the Rule
By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
Rome
THE forthcoming Vatican document on gays in seminaries will unleash a wrenching debate about Catholicism and homosexuality, but one thing it is certain not to mean is that in the future there will be no gays in the priesthood. The continued presence of gays in the priesthood will be the product not just of difficulties in enforcement, or the dishonesty of potential candidates, but also of design.
Although this is a difficult point for many Anglo-Saxons to grasp, when the Vatican makes statements like "no gays in the priesthood," it doesn't actually mean "no gays in the priesthood." It means, "As a general rule, this is not a good idea, but we all know there will be exceptions."
The categorical difference between these two approaches to the law from the religious side is profound. The way of the Catholic I call “deliberate duplicity”, and expect them to defend it, although I shall not do it for them. It calls for defining the ego-ideal (Freud’s original term for the super-ego) over against a forever-unattainable standard of perfection, so that “saint or sinner” is the destiny dividing mankind.

The other way, credited to “Anglo-Saxon” heritage, does not posit this metaphysical separation. It does not judge and punish itself for falling short of perfection – then delegate to a ‘judge’, or priest, the authority to make things right. It is not up to society to set norms of personal being, but to reflect the norms individuals establish by their own best efforts. No. That is not the way. It imposes a limitation on psychological development by decreeing all to be under a system of legal sanctions they had no hand in framing, cannot influence the enforcement of except by extra emoluments, and are at the mercy of judge’s discretionary rulings for borderline cases.

One point in Mr. Allen’s otherwise very perspicuous remarks stood out in contrast. He is citing “British historian Christopher Dawson ..describ(ing) the “erotic” spirit of cultures shaped by Roman Catholicism. Catholic cultures are based on the passionate quest for spiritual perfection, Darson writes, unlike the “bourgeous” culture of the United States, which, shaped by Protestantism and based on practical reason, gives priority to economic concerns.” So, to get this straight: here is Mr. Allen, Jr., announcing out and out duplicity in sign-use as the rule –‘AT THE VATICAN, THE EXCEPTIONS MAKE THE RULE’ – “Statements like ‘no gays in the priesthood’ don’t actually mean “no gays in the priesthood” – Quoting people who say they don’t mean what they say, but brazenly putting down money-mad “bourgeous”, sexually repressed New England Protestants ?


: -(


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At this level of discourse, at this juncture of time, with the vote on John Roberts pending this week, this succinctly stated philosophy of practical law, has the effect of installing the product of the duplicitous way of being responsible for the punishment of Katrina, Ophelia, Rita in the highest seat of law, whose mind oversees how we think of ourselves “under law”, by those speaking in the name of law. It is the ultimate penetration of American spirituality and way of being, in its innermost precincts – Ironic Reversal Theologized in History.





…the truth has been turned inside out (and upside down)

Catholicism: anti-American

Catholicism: anti-American

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/opinion/27allen.html

September 27, 2005
At the Vatican, Exceptions Make the Rule
By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
Rome

THE forthcoming Vatican document on gays in seminaries will unleash a wrenching debate about Catholicism and homosexuality, but one thing it is certain not to mean is that in the future there will be no gays in the priesthood. The continued presence of gays in the priesthood will be the product not just of difficulties in enforcement, or the dishonesty of potential candidates, but also of design.

Although this is a difficult point for many Anglo-Saxons to grasp, when the Vatican makes statements like "no gays in the priesthood," it doesn't actually mean "no gays in the priesthood." It means, "As a general rule, this is not a good idea, but we all know there will be exceptions."

Understanding this distinction requires an appreciation of Italian concepts of law, which hold sway throughout the thought world of the Vatican. The law, according to such thinking, expresses an ideal. It describes a perfect state of affairs from which many people will inevitably fall short. This view is far removed from the typical Anglo-Saxon approach, which expects the law to dictate what people actually do.

While Italians grumble about lawlessness, fundamentally they believe in subjectivity. Anyone who's tried to negotiate the traffic in Italian cities will appreciate the point. No law, most Italians believe, can capture the infinite complexity of human situations, and it's more important for the law to describe a vision of the ideal community than for it to be rigidly obeyed. Italians have tough laws, but their enforcement is enormously forgiving. Not for nothing was their equivalent of the attorney general's office once known as the Ministry of Justice and Grace.
The British historian Christopher Dawson has described this as the "erotic" spirit of cultures shaped by Roman Catholicism. Catholic cultures are based on the passionate quest for spiritual perfection, Dawson writes, unlike the "bourgeois" culture of the United States, which, shaped by Protestantism and based on practical reason, gives priority to economic concerns. As one senior Vatican official put it to me some time ago, "Law describes the way things would work if men were angels."

This value system means that while Vatican officials often project a stern moral image on the public stage, in intimate settings they can be strikingly patient and understanding. Policymakers in the Vatican tend not to get as worked up as many Americans by the large numbers of Catholics in the developed world who flout church regulations on birth control, for example. It's not that Vatican officials don't believe in the regulations. Rather, they believe the very nature of an ideal is that many people will fail to realize it.

Of course, one can debate whether a ban on birth control, or on gays in seminaries, ought to be the ideal. The point is that although Vatican officials will never say so out loud, few actually expect those rules to be upheld in all cases.
Some in the Anglo-Saxon world see this as a form of hypocrisy: the church apparently issues laws while winking at disobedience. But Vatican officials view it instead as a realistic concession to fallen human nature.

On background, some such officials have said that the point of the forthcoming document is to challenge the conventional wisdom in the church, which holds that as long as a prospective priest is capable of celibacy, it doesn't matter whether he's gay or straight. Vatican policymakers and some American bishops believe that's naïve. In an all-male environment, they contend, a candidate whose sexual orientation is toward men faces greater temptations and hence a greater cause for concern.

That's a debatable proposition, but it does not add up to an absolute conviction that no gay man should ever be ordained a priest. Rather, it means that bishops should take a hard look at such candidates, but in the end, they'll still use their best judgment.

Those determined to apply this decree in uncompromising fashion will be able to do so. But while the Catholic priesthood of the future may include fewer homosexuals - and it will certainly have fewer gay seminarians and priests willing to speak openly about their situation - it will not be "gay free."
On the ground, as bishops and seminary teams make decisions, many will still draw on that classic bit of Italian clerical casuistry: "If the pope were here, he would understand."
John L. Allen Jr. is the Vatican correspondent for National Catholic Reporter. *****/
Religious deficit: this is the religion of perpetual crucifixion – Jesus on the cross, never risen. Constant call to sacrifice. Humanity ever caught between lust and holiness. Under judgment, always; never fully reborn in Christ. (The unrepentant thief.) This is the result of wrongly connecting sexuality and sin.

Political sub-text: Not to worry about sinfulness under a Catholic social regime. It offers as much “grace”, compassion, etc. as any other system; just holding out a “higher” (unrealistic) ideal.

It is an attitude and way of being that puts the ideal on a plane beyond anything reachable by human striving, unless it becomes fanatic to the point of “St. Rita” – thus generating deep hatred and impulses of revenge by its highest and best products.

It leads to corruption of being by denying standards people require of themselves internally as law. This is what happens when the source of validity of law is located outside the person.

Social deficit: Any system of law promulgated and enforced on the basis of this moral attitude would be soft on “evil squared”: the pursuit of what is proscribed for its own sake, as in a rebellious teenager defying authority for thrills (third world macho). (This becomes merely “boys being boys”; human nature always being the same (under the Catholic system).

It encourages the existence of an entire underclass of Guckert/Shiavo devotees: one calling for others to punish what they are, the other drawing sympathy for obedience unto death. Even the worst sinner is “helping God” indirectly, by providing example of what not to do.

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It is the creeping influence of this religious, moral and social deficiency that has killed real spirituality in America, leading to God’s punishment and Rita’s revenge.

Beyond Irony

BEYOND IRONY


When: It is the way of being (of person or group) that has caused the ‘ironic’ wipe-out …(as I was predicting would happen: use of the ideals represented by , , to seize Iraq’s oil resources by force; ….matched by hurricane force of greater scale of magnitude taking its own oil…

And: the irony of that situation is signaled in Sign-use –call it coincidence if you must – by the name of a Catholic saint applying, first, to the horrific deaths at the New Orleans nursing home, then, as if suitably dropping all pretences at holiness, ‘returning’ as just Rita to wipe out more Texas-Louisiana Gulf coast shore humanity and oil rigs. The irony of 24 old folks killed in a bus by exploding oxygen canisters escaping Rita … about the same as perished in St. Rita’s parish home.

If one researches ”St. Rita” the story will emerge of a child forced to marry against her wishes; an abusive husband (mentioned by all accounts), raising two boys until the father is stabbed to death, and she deters them from revenge. An odd, but accepted tale, leading to her being accepted into a Benedictine order of nuns, where she lived a life of spiritual purity beyond telling: evidently overcoming (or driven by) all sentiments of resentment, perfected by acceptance of her lot, acquiring great clarity in understand and giving charity to other “impossible cases”.
If the “St.” is dropped, and “Rita” is given the raw force of wrath mother nature can inflict on humanity anytime she wishes, or is in His the plan of Intelligent Design”, unleashed in punishment for what America has done to Iraq, even the irony that women may be treated worse there due to our internvention ….

These are two major historical ironies with which America must live.

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… TO Willful , unforgivable sinfulness (The other side of irony: SKEWERED on the Fixed Cross. cf. Alice A. Bailey)

…ILLUSTRATED BY GWB’S STATEMENT TO THE Republican Jewish Coalition (NY Times 9.22.’05 A24 “Bush Compares Responses to Hurricane abnd Terrorism”…(Speaking as a luncheon for the Republican Jewish Coalition) President Bush on Wednesday for the first time linked the American response to terrorism and its response to Hurricane Katrina, declaring that the United States is emerging a stronger nation from both challenges, and saying that terrorists look at the storm’s devastation “and wished they had caused it.… By suggesting for the first time that America’s enemies were pleased to see the devastation caused bya the hurricane, he appeared to be linking the country’s natural and human challenges.”

If, instead of confronting and punishing the factor that has brought the ironic catastrophe (e.g., building a firehouse in a spot most likely to be struck by lightening) IT IS REPEATED AND REWARDED, the process is deliberately (though still not necessarily consciously - it might not have been chosen for that reason) self-destructive. IF THE REASONS FOR REGARDING IT AS IRONIC ARE IGNORED (AVOIDED, DENIED, REPRESSED) THEN THEN CONSCIOUSNESS HAS COME UNDER THE SWAY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS COUNTER-POSITION WHICH ‘KNOWS’ THE WAY IT IS GOING THE WAY WATER KNOWS TO FLOW DOWNHILL. (undeviating from its inner law)

Bush’s remark goes beyond irony. Although he cannot be given credit for achieving any consciously pursued outcome, the structure of his thought processes is the psychodynamic of self-punishment. “They wish they had caused it” implies at the conscious level, “They want to see America suffer.” Just below that, at the unconscious level, are the thoughts: that America deserves to suffer for what it has caused them; and Katrina was the punishment America deserves sent from God. Therefore, Bush statement “They wish they had caused it” is a conscious overlay of “they would do what God did (“wanted” comes from his own mind) – He was acting for them.” But THEY ARE THE ENEMY – God can’t be on their side.

But according to this analysis, that is the mental attitude of the way of being that brought America’s the ironic destruction. Only a force of the scale “She” unleashed could stand alongside the SHOCK AND AWE of the megabombs the US dropped on Iraq and rained on their heads. Is that not supposed to be remembered somewhere? The sheer ferocity of the storm stunned onlookers. “It was if she had a score to settle” one Mississippi survivor said, comparing its fury to hurricane Camille. The utter devastation staggered all imagining. As if something that had been building up a long time were unleashed. Hatred for America.

Now: we must face it. To continue down the path that has brought this end is will-to-death. It represents a conscious choice to die. More: that choice is presented as its opposite: to live. If God has punished them (us) for their way of being once, twice, with no effect except twisting His name twice and displacing the twisted reconjunt onto “the Enemy who wishes to make us suffer”, then, if there is anything to this God notion, He would be justified taking out the whole damned place.

And anyone who follows that way of thinking presented by the chimp to the Republican Jewish Coalition passes beyond irony to irredeemable self-hatred. They are not to be pitied. It will be taken as a sign of weakness. They have split the curtain of illusion that covered their inhumanity.

At Last: Metaphysics

Metaphysics

HISTORICAL IRONY, ESOTERIC ASTROLOGY, SIN
and The Theory of Logical Types.

See the connection. Understand reality. Enlightenment now.



Irony: (succinctly) Going East to arrive at the West.
When that which is set to do one thing results in the exact opposite.

I have come late to the use of this word, leaving it for lit-phil types to pad out a peculiarity in discourse into a harmless, but useless analytical conceit. Being uncommitted to concern themselves in discourse with either knowledge or being, per se, sd libbing as they go along with gestures toward each but not pausing for questions, the lit-phil’s philosophize. Somebody else does the actual thinking.

No more. I now can speak of the Irony of Ironies (HOW COULD HE DO THIS TO AMERICA? – punishment for their sin: WHEN SINFUL PEOPLE , even while sounding a bit ironic to myself for having scorned its importance. The phil-lit crowd was onto something, intuitively.

In the process of analyzing uses of signs (psychosemiotics) I had of course taken note of: self-contradictions (“this is not a sentence”), reversals (“smart…very smart” – applied to a dumb act), auto-credits (“Do I look like a liar to you?”) and the like, understanding that there would be formal similarities with things called ‘ironic’, but without the sense that these latter would form a distinct category of sign-uses ‘beyond grammar” calling for independent recognition. This opinion is reversed now, however, and the above formula – when that which is set to do one thing does the exact opposite – is a working definition to approach the topic. It is vague, of course, almost pre-textual (Plutoish), yet nevertheless quite explicit in contexts. (Ironic: when instruments -- oxygen canisters – used to supply the conditions for life explode, killing their users)

Examples cascade here from many contexts. In words, deeds, events, historical narratives. Things start out in one way, then exactly reverse direction.

Elaboration: TWO MAJOR HISTORICAL IRONIES

--IN AMERICA TODAY – 9.23.2005

Irony: df. “A method of expression in which the intended meaning of the words used is the direct opposite of their usual sense (the irony of calling a stupid plan ‘clever’ – of Bush’s “Heckava job, Brownie” in re FEMA’s head Brown after the New Orleans disaster..) … usually humorous, or subtly sarcastic

---or: combination of circumstances or a result that is the opposite of what is or might be expected or considered appropriate (an irony that the firehouse burned)
(…that the LA chief Law enforcer was Rolo Tomasi; that Mark Felt was put in charge of tracking down Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal.) (That Linda Tripp should be saying “The Truth matters”)

--that it was a CIA hire that shot down the Baptist missionary plane in Peru, 2001 (part of the drug war in Columbia – liberal Baptists were suspected of bringing it in.)


Psychoanalytic explanations: the conscious intention pursued in a course of action is inwardly opposed by an unconscious, inner drive, which breaks through --- as, with humor. The person “is of two minds” about what they are doing, but one is repressed, kept out of sight ---BUT RECOGNIZED AS HAVING BEEN THERE WHEN IT DOES EMERGE: laughing at oneself = sign of healthiness. The recognition comes from the same place as the conscious component of the unconscious sense of guilt. (--at some level, knowing one is guilty of violating the interests of ultimate concern: nothing “in” consciousness as a content signaling this, except what one can observe oneself reacting to with ‘repression”: ‘rather not consider it – makes me uncomfortable”; avoidance, denial of self-application while seeing it “everywhere” in others; frequency of ‘threats’ encountered from a source connected to the idea.


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America today:

Price of oil = $68 barrel --- subtext of the Iraq war: to secure a plentiful supply. THIS WAS UNSPOKEN, OPPOSED BY ADMITTED GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS AS ITS DESIRE. Now: the Shiite’s are grabbing Basra facilities for Iran; the North is running over with freedom fighters (“insurgents”) –

Looks like no oil coming from there at all – unless down the line.

The “sin” interpretation: the sin of greed worked against the US to defeat its project. (“God” was not it its side, but, as alive in them as a watching, judging, punishing agency (Freud’s ‘superego’: what ‘we’ like to think we are, ideally) contributed to: errors up and down the line (bad planning, ‘friendly fire’, ‘mistakes’, accidents… all showing WE WERE NOT A TOTALITY COMPLETING ITSELF, BUT PUNISHING ITSELF: BEING DRIVEN BY THE UNCONSCIOUS PROCESS.

1. IRONY OF OIL-GREED SQUARED: The double hit of Katrina in New Orleans, and Rita on Houston area has virtually wiped out oil supply from the Gulf.

CALL THIS THE OIL IRONY ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. IF: the storms were an act of God in punishment for the Iraq war (MAJOR ARGUMENT THEME OF THE SEMESTER)

-“The skies ringing with history” – Eric Francis – Mars retrograde in Taurus: 1973 (OPEC OIL CRISIS)—2005 (---OIL CRISIS). (Katrina: Struck with such ferocity one said “It was as if she had something to prove – referring to comparison with 1969 hurricane Camille)


2. ST. RITA is the Patron saint of “the impossible cases”: specifically, the abused.
--Her life was spent overcoming it by great works of suffering – wanting to share in Christ’s passion -- and charity. Mentioned also: her “clarity”: that of one who knows and takes all the abuse life can throw
--AND REMAINS FORGIVING, OBEDIENT, DUTIFUL, PERFECTED


Irony 2: RITA be the name of this most powerful destructive force in the Gulf. She and God getting revenge for her human side – against the abusers in America.

*******/





then go to the psychoanalytic explanation: the unc. Build -up of a counter-position in those who take a consciously one-sided approach too far (Jung) (Freud: a content is split-off (repressed), becomes a vortex-emotional current draining energy from daily life (this is the neurosis), then emerging in consciousness as the exact opposite of what was repressed.) THINGS DRIVEN BY WILFUL SINFULNESS TURN INTO THEIR OPPOSITE BECAUSE THEY GO AGAINST THE PART OF THE PSYCHIC TOTALITY THAT OPPOSES THEM -- THIS POTENTIATES THE REVERSAL, AND EXPLAINS WHY A PERSON WILL DO SELF-DEFEATING THINGS. (“Sin” is the quasi-qualitative organism feed-back from what Freud called ‘the unconscious sense of guilt’ – the inner agency that sends the brain the message “you are going to get it for this” in those who have conscience. – What accuses us when we do something we know better than to do.)

****/
Preaching: addressing the group as a totality from the standpoint of its completing ideal (assumption: the one preaching not only knows what that is but has participated in its inner essence until it is his/her functional default position: their conscious functions are aligned with the unconscious ones. Then they can “speak with power”, which doesn’t have to be loud or forceful – but when provoked easily passes over into these.)

Defining: SIN (of a nation: America) Philosophical (metaphysics): That which defeats the completion of its totality

Psychological: Conscious choice of that which goes in a direction opposite to that required by (the ideal of) its completing totality (--its national super-ego: the star it was born under) THOSE WHO PUSHED BUSH INTO THE WHITE HOUSE BECAUSE OF HIS/THEIR AGENDA, NOT AMERICAS (which you do not represent the ideal of merely by controlling use of its name for mass communication – suffices for ‘democracy of the mob swayed by “Good News God” – aka “FRIENDLY FIRE GOD”)

In Sign-use (psychosemiotically): Absolutizing the Relaltive ..
Taking use of the word “God” in the mass consciousness (as a mere token for what America is “under” – with no text specified or SPECIFIABLE! – left open for ‘vote’? (Scalia) -- I don’t think so..

****/

Logical sin in sign-use”
Including the predicate token under the quantifier defining its extension (class of objects determined by its application).

Formally: substituting “F” for “x” in “F(x)”, where “F(x)” is the schema of a subject-predicate sentence asserting “x is F” (actual instance: “GWB is the 43rd president of the United States” when “GWB” = x and “is the 43rd President of the United States” is F). The British philosopher Bertrand Russell first diagnosed this sin of formal logic, and prescribed strict rules for stratifying the subject and predicate terms in deductive (scientific) discourse to avoid self-contradiction in mathematical logic. His 1908 article “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Logical Types” set forth rules for stratification of predicates of subjects (and predicates of predicates as subjects, etc.) to accomplish this. Formal psychosemiotics includes The stratification of tokens according to type-levels of experienced content (neuro-psychological (dreams), phenomenal (appearances), 3D spatial (bodies), moral (actions), existential (egos), semiotic (sign-uses), theological (completion of totalities): level 1 – 7, respectively) builds on this to safeguard the system against self-contradiction. The sin of taking a predicate as subject of itself in actual discourse usually goes unnoticed, or passed off as paradoxes due to human weakness, like the Cretan who asserted all Cretans are liars (ha ha – nobody stops to consider this might have been an actual campaign speech, and what it would have meant if he had got elected for his honesty).

The sin associated with this occurs most often by “suppressing the particular” –e.g., leaving out “43rd”) “THE ( ) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS THE ( ) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES”.
This gives a tautological proposition, as the sense of “is” shifts from predication to identity to accommodate the grammar of an actual assertion. –
THUS – can be inserted into communication to INVOKE THE FORCE OF THE LOGICALLY UNDENIABLE (OPPOSITE IS a SELF-CONTRADICTION), thus yielding a false “Double Undeniable” ( “What? – 1. you don’t know logic? -- F = F” ? been to Oxford? ; plus 2. you don’t know George W. Bush is the president of the U.S.?”)

THIS SIN OCCURS WHEN “GOD” HAS BEEN REDUCED TO A TOKEN, STRIPPED OF TEXTUAL MEANING – THEN IS RE-INSERTED INTO PUBLIC POLITICIZED DISCOURSE TO “VOTE ON” BY THOSE WHO COMMAND THEIR PRIVATE TEXTUAL MAJORITY.

*****/

This move in sign use – to omit the particular, assert the universal as an identity, is the logical form of absolutizing the relative (identifying the Universal with one of its own particulars). If the super-ego ideal is betrayed by one who continues to use its token for the completing totality, a dynamic is engendered that leads ineluctably to the universal becoming identified with the particular – or, when the particular is a person processing the use of signs, to them identifying themselves with the universal. Ghengis Khan made it happen.

*****/

ASTROLOGY

How did it happen that America got its Bush after 200+ years as a nation, as the cycles of the Zodiac completed their 2000+ years since Pisces? – Can any metaphysical significance to be attached to these coincidences?

I offer the flood of historical ironies, conjunct the psychodynamics of the group-process (including sins of sign-use), trined the global planetary heavens ringing with history (in Eric Frances’ words) as argument. Of course, taken as a mere triad, they prove nothing. The argument assumes a missing 4th.

Oil and Irony

"Seems like the wraith of God is going to blow a big hole in the oil business-"

Working here: Double irony: the very thing Bushies sought to take by force of arms in Iraq (oil)...
...is taken from them by force of nature in America..

plus (incredible follow-up)

...The name of God the Father (=Cardinal Cross) which Bush dared to use to get oil....

is used against him (dropping the "St. from "Rita" to restore her earth-nature -- the Common - or Mutable Cross) to take it away.

Extra ultra irony: "St. Rita" was the name of the New Orleans nursing home where 24 (? -- ) did in the flood..
...even as: 24 elderly escapees from wraith of Rita died on the bus outside Dallas when their oxygen tanks exploded...

But: some Prophets using the words of the Bible, not Freud, to interpret "God", say Katrina be da shit for pulling out of Gaza! --

http://watch.org/showart.php3?idx=71558&rtn=/index.html&showsubj=1&mcat=1

"Judgment
The replacement theology advocates and/ or believers who believe the Church has replaced the Jewish people as God’s chosen, not grafted in according to Romans 11, see Katrina as a tragic event and no connection to judgment over Israel’s recent evacuation and/or the sins of the U.S.

Those who believe the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and don’t see Bible prophecy as allegorical, see Katrina as judgment and/or the birth pangs that will lead to much more in the days ahead."

It's Perfect Storm squared

Today's Tokens

Today’s tokens

The American Experience today: 9.20.’05

TOKENS TEXTING THE National mood – and the group-fantasy situation

Gleaned from across the media – these ‘tap into’ the group fantasy: promote thought by raising emotional associatins.

1. BROKEN (JUST Prior: ‘tipping point’ reached in Bush presidency before storms) levee (17th street canal on Lake Pontchartrain)
Associations: broken bonds (of unity – umbilici holding ‘us’ together; holding back criticism of Bush adm.) bursting point (title of David Brooks NYTinmes columnist )

2. FLOOD (catastrophic devastation)
Assoc: overwhelmed (by emotionality, frustration, rage, helplessness) drowing///

3. MISSING - c

childrenen – pictures or blackened sillouettes with names on every CNN screne LEADERSHIP
Assoc: lost, abandoned (by authority; govt.; parents), isolated,
sympathy, sense of “each one counts”

4. DRAINED -- of life, energy, resolve
-ing – flood water out of New Orleans.

5. TOXIC / DISEASE
-waters, BIRD FLU cf. picture of Bush in Nation mag, overgrown with green algae,

6. RECKONING ---
watched – judged – punished: FOR SINFULNESS (cf. “unconscious sense of guilt” STORMS = THE WRATH OF GOD
For “absolutizing the relative” (see: ‘cndition’)

7. YOD, GOD AND THE MOON –
Francis; “skies ringing with history”: - moon in Pisces, opposite Sun-Mercury …. The “YOD” (triangle of planets: Mars in Taurus, Jupiter in Libra (justice), Pluto in Sagittarius) … Mars RETROGRADE IN TAURUS:
Historical connection with floods.

FRONTFACED

AMERICA FRONTFACED
(from hope to hype…. And back again via ‘faith’)

(reaction to J.D. Hayworth, on Imus 9.21.05; as to New Jersey Gov. McGreeveys “I am a gay American” speech)


Now this position of consciousness has been “UNMASKED”. But they have no fallback. They are driven to try harder with more hype and repetitions to get the same result.

What they’ve done is frontface America with its own ‘hallowed’ – hollowed -- language (for the totality – across the entire bandwidth of group-process/consciousness, shifting up and down scale). (After Clinton came from “hope”; Bush had to come from “faith”.)

Ever since 2000 election: the sleeper factor there was what it did to the consciousness of the ‘winners’: those who know they got where they are by frontfacing.

-have to live with that inwardly; and, in talk with each other (what they can’t mention or admit … and must cut each other off if they start up: John Dean in Nixon’s White House). THIS SUBTLY ALTERS THEIR DEFAULT POSITION: which they then assume IS THE SAME AS OTHES HAVE FELT BEFORE THEM, THEREFORE CAN BE FALSEFRONTED OUT TO THE END.

-as rhetorical style: going with the cliché that fits the moment;
- planting token fruit to pick for next text.

PREDICATING ON WHAT YOU* ARE EXPERIENCING ( and feeling, “if you are normal and one of us”) … while, in the process, inducing a state of openness to the hallowed events, MAKING IT NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE TO STOP!, Come to oneself, remember oneself – AND ADDRESS THEM FROM WHERE THEY ARE COMING FROM. This cannot be done at all without a ‘relearning’ preparation.

This blog is a realization. It goes with Eric Francis’ comments:

http://planetwaves.net/contents/yodandmoon1.html
So, it seems that the world is changing before our eyes. We are going through a concentrated series of collective events. Marshall McLuhan, the beloved long-gone Canadian media philosopher, used to describe the communications networks of the world as a vast nervous system interconnecting all of us in industrialized nations. In the years since he's been here, we've learned that this interconnection also includes morphic fields that interlink us psychically; astrology is connected directly to this process.

If you pay attention just a little, you can feel a lot, which is not so pleasant. There's a seeming contradiction inherent: pay attention, thus feel the pain of the world. The solution for many is to go back to sleep; but we know it's time to wake up.

There are an extraordinary number of major astrological factors conspiring to help us do just that, but two stand out right now, as in RIGHT now. But it is not simply enough to wake up; we all must go through what many spiritual traditions describe as a psychological process, or process of undoing, to make room for energy and ideas that are lighter, clearer and based on cooperation rather than competition. A lot of people play a lot of games that waste time and create needless grief.

(my add. The two are: 1. The full moon in Pisces – opposite Sun-Mercury in Virgo –polarity of feeling-intuitive aspect v. mental-creative aspect: 2. balanced by Pluto in Sagittarius – the over-riding, generic formulae, i.e., “the aim of Talk America is to bring together for comment the totality which the separate academic divisions compartmentalize (but are connected to, and with each other through, on the inner side: all who participate in the life of the nation through the communication grid” – that is the balanced overview; the ‘Pluto in Sagittarius’ description.).

The style of the media is an adaptation to this process of front-facing for false authority. It has had to take back the ‘heat’ – glares, double-takes, hatred – as the messenger





Only national or global scale events as subject of conversation –REQUIRING ALL WHO TALK ABOUT THEM TO RECALL AND COME TO TERMS WITH THE SAME THING AS UNIQUELY EXPERIENCED IN THE PRESENT, WITH ITS/THEIR OWN PREDICATES, VS. RELATED BY COMPARISON WITH: OTHER EVENTS CURRENT OR RECENT; STORIES OF THE PAST; MEANINGLESS TOKEN MULTIPLICATION

--- ONLY: Katrina, Ophelia, Rita
:
hurricane storms originating in the Atlantic ocean: -- global in scale (weather patterns), national in focused effect – could provide the reality-default required to undo (unmask, take away) ALL THE WORD REALITY THEY ASSUME FROM THEIR DEFAULT POSITON ALIGNS THEM WITH THE PAST.

. ONLY IN PREDICATING ON THESE AS UNIQUE EVENTS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE PRESENT, NOT THE PAST can contact with reality be re-established in communication. (Since only ‘GOD’ could arrange that, these hurricane’s actually prove His existence.) THE YEAR GOD PUNISHED AMERICA.


Others who have had to work through FRONTFACED situations at a personal level:

-wives of abusive husbands (Hedda Nussbaums vs. those who divorce)
-children of abusive parents

17th St canal levee on Lake Pontchartrain

September 14, 2005

The 17th Street canal levee on Lake Pontchartrain
Just Broke. Bush: “I take responsibility”

READ how The New York Times manages the Metaphysics of Meaninglessness


Page One top right-hand column New York Times quotes:

““Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government, and to the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility,” Mr. Bush said in an appearance in the East Room with President Jalail Talabani of Iraq.”

This gesture was so meaningless in real terms that reporters were obliged to note why the departure itself made news. The “No regrets” president he was known as. “Admit nothing. Deny everything. Blame the accusers.” --was the rule printed on Reagan’s Contras T-Shirts. Now seen (as if) eating humble pie? “Throughout his nearly five years in office Mr. Bush has sresisted publicaly acknowledging mistakes or shortcomings, and his willingness I this case …was evidence of how shaken his presidency has been by the political fallout from the government’s handling of the storm.”

The qualification “seen (as if)” accepting blame goes with the meanglessness of the ritual. There is actually a double-seeming going on here. One, that had prevailed as long as the levees kept Lake Pontchartrain from flooding New Orleans, despite dire warnings, seeming as if residents were safe; and the other one going on in the Oval Office as Bush speaks. If acceptance of responsibility carried real import, it would be followed by judgment and punishment. So far, only one head has rolled, metaphorically – FEMA’s Brown’s. And in fact, Bush’s public show of taking responsibility works against any penalty or retribution being exacted; while simultaneously smearing blame on “all levels of government”. But in this case, responsibility falls on particular policies by particular parties within government, not government per se --already perceived as punishing enough. This smearing of all “government” – token of authoritarian control necessary for everyone to recognize – for the ‘mistakes’ made by these parties and policies is one of their favorite rhetorical ploys. “Hide behind the universal, after it has been particularized.” --would be a Rove-revised T-Shirt update. “Transparency” means never having to take responsibility for anything in particular, while claiming credit for everything in general.

These reflexions on what meaninglessness is, under a psycholinguistic regime that stages penitence sanctioned by mock punishment to avoid real culpability, were spinning through my head as Tom Friedman’s article “Singapore and Katrina” snagged my eye like a PacMan’s sprog. Quoting Janadas Devanm, a Straits Times columnist explaining to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing:

“Today’s conservatives differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday’s conservatives: the latter believed in small government but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.
“The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government it does have….”

………..then comes the clincher:

“(But) it is not only government that doesn’t show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn’t show up either, sacrifice doesn’t show up, pulling together doesn’t show up, “we’re all in this thing together’ doesn’t show up.”

It is to confute the double meaningless of not taking responsibility for the levee that busted, while appearing to do so, that Katrina as an Act of God must be insisted upon. It is judgment of their ways, even as the flood deaths bring judgement against those who didn’t properly fix the levees.

The social energies mentioned above, traceable to psychological sources, don’t show up when: those in government use government ritual for show, to keep in power those whose ways contributed to the devastation for which they are taking responsibility (not:) … as well as for the devastation of Iraq. These are eerily, if indelibly linked by the presence of the puppet president Talibani in the Oval Room. Doubling up the “good-news/bad news situation” to neutralize the bad, one supposes. That’s the way they do.

Meanwhile, doubling up THIS analysis of Managing Meaninglessnes, it can be reported that one’s eye could not fall on the New York Times page 1 article on Bush eating humble pie without being virtually assaulted by a 7” close-up picture of John Roberts rugged face: blue eyed, open mouthed, clam-clamming it up on the abortion issue, the President’s pick. Oh, how the neocons adore Roberts. An entire thread on the OD board is devoted to it. (Not to mention how they ‘love’ Bush’s other Reagan-era appointments.) The blatant symbolic message on the minds of the Times’ editors: “Anxious about the breakdown of authority (17th st. canal levees collapsing)? Here is your next father figure … seque to Roman Catholic Judge Roberts, sitting on the bench up there, judging on the side of the Unborn.

Getting one’s mind around all this involves making that final symbolic loop – the unconscious displacement (seque) of group-cathexis from blame of Bush, to blame of authority in general (accepted), to Rescue From Punishment (for original sin, committed in the womb before they were born) by Roberts. Its, like, “BUSH! BUSH! HE’S OUR MAN! IF HE CAN’T DO IT, ROBERTS CAN.” This is the next big sea-change movement of historical group fantasy, as I see it. Robert’s is America’s Catholic Group-Fantasy Father.

Many other symbolic associations are linked to this, such as the “monotheistic moralizing masochistic trend” (Freud, l923). Massive homosexual anxiety in American males is cathected with, through, “threat of anal rape” as deep underlying terror patch in the psyche. This “threat” is projected onto Arab/Islamic males, represented by Saddam Hussein, and “war on terror” is the massive delusional group-psychological defense against this psychological threat (“terror” in themselves).

AQUARIAN PHILOSOPHY - God use in

AQUARIAN PHILOSOPHY

TO WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO COMMIT YOURSELF IN COMMUNICATION?

…check the names you predicate on to answer. They show your metaphysical commitment. (Context: pitch to go with the poll question “Do you think Katrina was an Act of God”?)

From opinion, plus reasons, comes judgment. From judgment, plus will, comes commitment (assertion, action, further predication).

Opinion – judgment – assertion: this is the sequence of rational being-manifestation. Philosophy is love of rational being-manifestation.

****/

Before the sequence begins there must be communication. No people exchanging information, sharing mental states and contents of every sort, no opinions based on reasons, judged to justify acts of will in assertion. No philosophy.

There is one and only one constant in communication of whatever kind: use of signs. A “sign”, by definition, is something that stands for something other than itself. But, as content, signs ARE things themselves – lines of print, sound sequences, signal-movements, etc., as well as all pictures. Some signs standing for things besides themselves that include themselves; the word “word”, for instance. Such forms of sign use, though noticed, for example by Bertrand Russell in his remarks on illegitimate totalities, have not been previously put in their proper logical space, as structuring discourse. The TEXT/TOKEN congruencies that natural spoken words coin for us – remembering to remember; the signs of time signs (Zodiacal gyyphs) – are highly valuable windows into the unconscious. This is only one of many formal dynamic structures shaping new communication.

The FORMAL d/s are those that are metaphysically grounded: the way things have to be. Laws dictating necessity at the higher level define the limits lower order processes must observe. “Even God can’t trump the Ace” in a bridge game. It’s not a “limit on his power”. The notion of “his power” isn’t relevant to the rules defining game situations.

Introduction of the word “God” here is propitious, for the AQUARIAN PHILOSOPHY will be distinguished from the PISCEAN, in general outlook, by a new use. That is, if “ACT OF GOD” is predicated of Katrina. That is the metaphysical challenge of the new age. The fact that the term IS USED certainly cannot be ignored. Dwelling on it, as a fact in its own right, as religionists are often given to doing (“if God didn’t exist, all history would be a lie”), goes over to the relation of psychology to anatomy in macro-totalities. Musn’t God-use have survival value? On what terms and assumptions?

*****/

The metaphysical basis of a “Yes” answer to “Was Katrina an Act of God” is, that the act of commitment to seeing it from a total national perspective, through which it is brought into psychological relation to Iraq war guilt, will itself create a channel through which the will-to-assert passes over into fact. This is NOT the same as saying “believing makes it so,” though closely akin. The denial of the proposition is, according to the argument, commitment to a lesser metaphysical perspective, ex hypothesi bereft of the feed-back resonances and other karmic determinants that go with committed participation. That cannot be consistently willed from/as totality. Therefore totality of will can be directed only toward tokens of completion; that is, toward signs functionally equivalent with English God-use.

This argument agrees with what I understand to be the over-lapping points of John Calvin – the dimension of free will as metaphysically ultimate; Immanuel Kant – moral argument for the existence of God; J.P. Sartre – false consciousness denies it’s freedom … and, in fact, to capture the inescapable logic of the reality of modernism; magnified now in the post-modern, New Age of sin most grievous.

Wanna Play the Blame Game?

PLAYING THE BLAME GAME?


(YOU BET. In spades..)


https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=w050905&s=cohn090705

Pressure Point
by Jonathan Cohn
Only at TNR Online | Post date 09.07.05

President Bush and his allies have a new answer to criticisms over the government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina: Now is no time to play the "blame game." Bush himself has made this point, most recently in yesterday's Cabinet meeting. Joining him in this chorus are fellow Republicans like House Speaker Dennis Hastert, conservative commentators like Max Boot of the Los Angeles Times, and (surprisingly enough) even former President Bill Clinton. ...

Comment. This gimmick -- “Now is no time to play the ‘blame game” – is a prime example of mind-set Katrina punished. It takes what is coming to them, the government authorities (blame) and puts it on those who would bring it up. Blaming them for “playing the ‘blame game’” when there is important work to be done. Frivolous liberals.

This is but another instance of the now all-too-familiar twistedness of the invert psychosis. At the “end of day”, when the chickens are coming home to roost, and the swinging fickle finger of fate has stopped dead-aim pointing to them, there will always be such a line. “Now’s not the time to play the blame game.” “They always blame America first.” Or maybe a terrorist act. Or catastrophe. The psychic condition that can maintain that as a conscious split-off attitude is manifest demon possession. “God” is used as a gloss to cause OTHER PEOPLE’S COMMITMENT TO ITS PROPER USE to be politically neutralized. This is the metaphysical essence of anti-God -- what sinfulness is.

Thus, the “blame” goes to their way of being (illustrated in/by the use itself). It – the karmic totality – it is a guilty way of being, not seen, not confronted, continuing to bring deserve further punishment. And nothing The Convuluted Beast can do, positively, at this point, that won’t make it worse. (Ex. another trip to New Orleans by Bush.)

What this mentality is to which I am always referring it needn’t be taken esoterically or psychoanalytically to be grasped. Paul Krugman devoted an entire column to “Point Those Fingers” (NY Times 9.9 A25) laying out “the chain of mistakes” resulting in Katrina deaths “was perfectly in character – there are striking parallels between the errors the administration made in Iraq and the errors it made last week.” After detailing instances, he asks “Why did the administration make the same mistakes twice? Because it paid no political price the first time.” And the reason for that, here argued, is because it wrapped its perfidious contortions in God-talk. As if He would always be there, forgiving, when the Saints Go Marching in. Knocked out of the metaphysical box now by “Katrina”.

Monday 9.12 he follows up: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/12/opinion/12krugman.html

All the President's Friends
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 12, 2005
“But what we really should be asking is whether FEMA's decline and fall is unique, or part of a larger pattern. What other government functions have been crippled by politicization, cronyism and/or the departure of experienced professionals? How many FEMA's are there?”

What Krugman is documenting here – the pattern that has never been confronted – is the same phenomenon (psychic condition) I analyze the inner side of through its use of signs. Metaphysically, it might be viewed as a phenomenon, or entity, existing in the networks of consciousness linked by signs used to communicate. It is completed outside and beyond particular consciousnesses, yet it is among other contents also wholly contained, some completed therein and some not. If there were a “pattern” it would manifest in the spontaneous agreement on the ‘tacits’ in which the act of one (the Leader), as delegate for all, establishes a congruent mind-set, as Hitler harranging the German crowds. “It” would respond through its “members” as a One, as in a Church, without extensive checking needed. This kind of command power, where the voice of the leader is speaking with the authority of All, to All, is of course the Holy Grail of “Under One God” Nationalists. And the situation is such that The Children are obliged to rise up against these New anti-God Fueherers, Marduk against Klingsor, to remove them and this grail from our land.
It is an entity the scale and dimensions of which could only be confronted in kind by an event with the power of authority of a category 5 hurricane. At the unconscious level, there are lateral associations to “killer mommy” themes, as Cindy Sheehan represented in right-wing group-fantasy.

God-use in America - the short story

“God” – use in America : the short story. (used to define the post-Katrina theological situation)

1… first period: by advanced psychoclass, circa 1800 (matured sons of the new world colonials, “founding fathers” setting the spiritual stamp on historical group process)

Use of “God” would be centered in churches, mostly Protestant. But schools, public service organizations (police, firefighters, city/town administrators, law courts) would be ‘toned’ to religious tokens. The McGuffy readers took words to spell, ideas to ponder and passages to quote from the King James Version of the Bible. It could be said the use was strong – highly cathected – but muted: as background for shared assumptions, expectations, feeling states, ritual ceremonies. Religion would not be flaunted, nor pressed – no cultural holier-than-thous. The rejection of idols went over to recoil against regarding ANY material thing as sacred, and Roman Catholic statues, prayer beads, regalia, and Latinisms were looked down on.

America’s political discourse was the political child of Westphalia, the treaty in 1648 that settled the bloody 30 years war between Protestants and Catholics over control of Europe. It was agreed (though Catholics always signed agreements with crossed fingers, as it were, since no emissaries have the right to cancel what The Church is) to eschew confessional language for matters of state. The colonials curried this grammatical secularism, perhaps in the South even more than the North, where abolitionists began their ranting in God’s name.

2. Second period --

(by-passing oceans of river-time, slogging through the increasingly militaristic 20th century i America)… NOW, in 2000, first with, Lieberman’s pop-off use to anoint Al Gore; second, with GW Bush’s “faith” switch, after election, from “compassionate conservative” campaign bait …pre-Wesphalial confessionalism was shoved into politics and public discourse big time. 9/11, which was immediately framed as Muslim/Arab/Islamic peoples striking like cowardly terrorists at the Judeo-Christian western civilization. Bush announced the first few months that Catholics and Jews would be targeted as ’04 swing vote groups – meaning, they are the ones he would be aiming to please, to get re-elected. These are only a few ways that confessional faith-talk has become embedded in national discourse. The ’04 election ways saturated with references to “family values” (sub-text anti-gay marriage (sub-sub-text: anal sex, which God hates). It doesn’t take much of a cynic, just an observer of the scene, to judge that THIS WAS MONGERED AS AN ‘ISSUE’ PRECISELY IN ORDER TO USE THE SPIRIT OF RELIGIOUS CONDEMNATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY TO ELECT REPUBLICANS. Those who were voting AGAINST queers were also voting FOR the war. It only takes recollection of the pictures of naked bodies stacked at Abu Ghraib, plus a dash of hot salsa from Freud’s analysis of sado-maschistic “God” psychosis, always harboring a narcissistic homosexual trend, to see that DEFENSE AGAINST HOMOSEXUALITY ‘AT HOME’ = (at the unconscious level) DEFENSE AGAINST ANAL RAPE = DEFENSE AGAINST (…threatened by) SADDAM HUSSEIN’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION = THE WAR PSYCHOSIS MENTALITY DRIVING REPUBLICAN’S USE OF ‘GOD’

This “God”, who is punishing America for sinfulness of “liberals”, in their group-fantasy, is, however, not the God of Love (nurturant placenta), but God of Hate (poisonous placenta, returning uncleansed, de-oxygenized blood to the drowning fetus). This is the result of the aging, hardening, coarsening of the super-ego functions. The colonials, it was noted, represented an exceptionally advanced psychoclass: fathers whose formative childhoods were matured under a new, free land. Such people do not need, shouldn’t stand for punitive God-posturing by political preachers (or preaching politicians). The affairs of state should be discussed in non-confessional state terms. We do not vote “ON”, but “UNDER” God…an elementary point that has escaped many, e.g., Justice Scalia.

Hate, Freud found, was love (libido cathexis) meeting a barrier of abuse: turned back by fists, torture, cruelty. What continues to be felt -- the more so as these are less actually severe and merely imagined -- as Love toward the Father, is tinged, to that extent, by “reaction-formation”. “NO! NO! (dismissing thoughts of hatred, urges for revenge) I DON”T HATE HIM! I LOVE HIM!” This was a major mechanism Freud showed went into compulsive “Love of Father” – even when, or sometimes because, they are abusive. For those whose “Love of Father” is a compulsive reaction-formation, repressing the urge to kill Him (as Oedipus did his), the ingression of “God” –use into public discourse set them up with a psychosemiotic bridge, from gaynxiety to war for Israel. But this gets far ahead of the story.

Situation: The original use of “God” in the ultra-liberal spirit of the colonials, empowering cooperation, growth, developing of strength through positive bonds of unity, deserving not just fear, or respect, but Love, has been implanted in politics to shape partisan issues in confessional discourse.

Republicans have done this. It is where what they have done confutes them. By trying to show now that they know what the original God was all about, they become more false: to themselves, and “Him”. Yet that is what the situational context requires them to do. Condemned and punished for their guilt by Katrina, they can only cry GOD! GOD! LOUDER .. or get someone to do it for them. The point of this writing, and of its counter-movement in tokenspace, is to hold the Sound-Mirror up in front of such talkers. “Look at yourself saying…”

Only God explains fully

GOD: the only complete explanation

ONLY through (P*: Katrina (seen as) Act of God)

….is it possible to read the times* truly, consistently, objectively, wholly, as a completing totality. Without seeing it this way, it is impossible to see these times truly, consistently, objectively, as a completing totality.

(*incl.: the objective epic narrative of American history)

Argument: Without commitment to “act of God”, the hurricane can be seen only in general, comparative parameter, as an instance of a causal law.

This by-passes (though it does not deny) “Katrina’s” particularities – indicated first of all by this name-personified sign-use in reporting and commenting. As if there were an “it” that could be shrunk in communication to a single token. “She”, the grammar then goes, “picked up speed and took off like a guided missile,” one storm watcher put it. After “She” suddenly turned on Florida, up Florida’s, the newspapers anticipated weakening back to tropical depression over Gulf waters. Instead, almost overnight Wednesday/Thursday, a deep, distinct, huge hurricane formed around a well defined eye. The Eye. It was riveting, and returned in iconography. Then, when She slammed ashore near Gulfport, Miss., one man said “it was if she had a score to settle”. Referring to hurricane Camille, l969, also CAT 5, but not nearly as vicious.

This description is unapologetically projective. It uses “Katrina”, as name of the storm, with the images of its particularity. It projects, or calls attention to the projection of, what is left out of any purely scientific description. For the weatherman, for instance, “Katrina’s Eye” is a vortex center, surrounded by a wall of wind/water whirling with great force around it. Through ‘projections’, the group-fantasy content of the experience is expressed. Group-fantasy contents are wholly contained, but not completed, in an individual’s private tokenspace. Thus, I know Katrina as an Archetype, and can discuss Her/Its symbolism (as death mother), but these contents are by no means completed in my grasp of them. They are psychologically intelligible objects

The completed reality contains these Archetypes. Ignoring them may remove them from consciousness, but it cannot negate, only aggravate (by relating to) their dynamic impact. Conscious projection, or what Jung called “active imagination” closes the gap between conscious and unconscious, spirit and instinct. Seeing ourselves momentarily as if being seen from the standpoint of higher totality. Some have used “seeing themselves as through the sun” for such projective purposes – acting out the projection on a literal level – with loss of eyesight (actual story).

These contents are the metaphysical umbilici connecting people on the inner side – “our” group-solidarity, as an entity reproduced through use of signs. They are “there”, functioning, at work, supplying the synthetic transcendental unity of apperception (“blue-wall” of Group TokenSpace ), whether recognized or explicitly related to, or not. “God”, itself, used as a token of the psychic totality completing Him/Itself in history, is such an Archetype. Sigmund Freud recognized this same content under (one meaning of) the Super-Ego (or: Group Ego-Ideal; Ego Group-Ideal). It is (used as) the Token of all Texts, the completion of totalities in One* (*being-word). It would project the First Object of experience (=the placenta, struggling with the fetus, in utero) , as the actual continuously functioning neuro-physical background, imprinted under trauma (of birth)….continued in the Group-fantasy of phantom placenta, a “God in heaven” projected “outside” the limits of our space and time, but “looking in”, watching: judging, punishing. Such is a Freudian Group super-ego. This is being written a. to certify that as a fact: It’s Freudian Group Super-Ego has brought punishment on America. And b. to distinguish this metaphysics, as a commitment, from that of the classical theory of universals, briefly sketched below.


Commitment, universals, and karmic particularity

Why God* (*as completing totality) is necessary:

.. because the totality can be seen as completed only through commitment (to the totalities as complete, that is, “God”). This is the principle of appropriation through participation: what can be known by appropriation through participation cannot be known otherwise, except at a distance. (“You learn by doing. If you don’t do you won’t learn. If you don’t compete you can’t win.”) Commitment to a perspective defined by a true, consistent etc. assignment of names deepens the reaction to objects called by those names, thus adding a dimension to the interaction otherwise lacking.

****
Brief history of how classical and modern metaphysics have favored the universal over the particular (“realism” of intelligible objects), now swept away by post-modern, new age historical singularity, aka New Age Consciousness …

First in classical times came metaphysical commitment to knowledge through reason -- the real as rational.

Since what is rational is what is thought, and what is thought is by general ideas, and causes, this (commitment to the real as rational) leads immediately to the question of the existrence of universals: general names standing for contents wholly contained in consciousness through the signs defining them. For instance, spacial areas enclosed by three straight lines are triangles. “Triangle” is the general name for all such. Truths can be known of all through the definition that states their essence. It has been known since early Sumerian times that the sum of the base and side of a right triangle is equal to the square of its hypotenuse. Triangles are known as “intelligibleectual objects,” because much can be deduced from them as pure geometrical constructs. Determining some of its predicates – for example a right hand triangle with base =3, side=4 – determines others – will have a hypotenuse = 5 (9 + 16 = 25 = 5x5). Similarly with circles. The number called “pi” is the ration of length of the diameter of a circle to its circumference – always 3.142 (approx). So on for other shapes and figures. But these in particular, plus squares, globes, pyramids, cones, tetrahedrons etc., were basic to both ancient and modern science.

What of general names for natural kinds? – living (biological species), inert (chemical elements and compounds), or celestial (sun, moon, planetary beings, and ‘stars”) As objects, these were not wholly contained or completed in consciousness under sign-use, though their formal-definitional meanings were. They were not wholly intelligible objects, but, as demonstrated by regular reproduction of form in the infima species -- like breeding like -- individual life trajectories following some ‘inner’ law-like pattern that was ‘intelligible’ to its material, as purposive order pervades causal. The philosophical position knows as “realism” holds forms exist independent of material instantiation, even for natural kinds. It can be seen that massive experiential evidence supports this view. For one thing, even into modern science, almost defining it, one might say, Descartes was declaring that what was “clear and distrinct” in knowledge of the material world was what was known of it through the “abstract general ideas” projected in the Cartesian space-time projectile co-ordinate schema for all motion.
Through this metaphysical conceit, “universals in the mind” are linked to “universals in nature”. Where our finite minds grasp only the formulae of things that are simple, clear and distinct. The formulae for natural kinds, and all external material causation that manifests a telic totality-completing form, are in the mind of God. (If there is one. Descartes pretends the question can be left open, all the while confidently using the rational human reasoning resources only God’s existence vouches for.) (Textualist clinging to theological umbilicus.)

Two things brought in by (so-called) modernity to break down this metaphysical conceit. 1. Establishment of the genetic basis of biological reproduction. The “inner design” is in the unfolding nucleic acid molecules (DNA, RNA). This replaces the notion that general names, as wholly contained mental content under ANY definition can be used in the manner of token-talisman to gain insight into the text of natural law, except by experiential observation. (Dislodges pseudo-rationalist “scientism” based on occultation of “abstract general ideas in God’s mind” as objective basis of predication.)

2. More generally: the logical analysis of “clear and distinct ideas”, and “necessary truth” as formal conditions of knowledge even in mathematics and geometry, removed the metaphysical foundations of any pretense of general knowledge apriori (apart from experience). This is the Sword of Logical Positivism, in essence: the “elimination of metaphysics’ at a stroke. But only as a projection of alleged synthetic apriori laws into the rational material order. Against that, Logical positivism remains as perpetual bulwark. The day of projectively riding God-commitment piggyback on the machinery of logical and mathematical truth is over. The language of science as intersubjective, verifiable discourse is operationally defined.


*****/ tbc. These old, refuted, false umbilici must be exhumed to be put aside, and make way for New Age re-adoption of God use with proper commitment.

Science and Religion reconciled thru S*

In reply to my friend, defending my claim...

Bill,
Actually, when re-reading your statement, "Katrina was an act of God", Are you one of those vengeful god guys?, just wondering.


Getting more so by the day. I am following Kant’s lead, as well as I understand it, in his moral argument for the existence of God: what it could possible mean, to Reason (as a faculty of knowledge), to predicate of the universe as a totality that there “is” “One” (the “Parmenidean instance”)? His answer to this is something I had never understood, and totally neglected, until now. Katrina has sealed a new deal, if you can follow that.

I’ve posted detailed argument for attaching “Act of God”, as a predicate, to “(the hurricane) Katrina”, as subject term, on my www.sidthomas.blogspot.com. A long read, but I’ve tried to keep it peppy. So anything outside the terms and scope of that argument, such as the kind of guys we are, is irrelevant TO THE OBJECTIVE SITUATION IF THE ARGUMENT HOLDS. Though not, of course, irrelevant to what we MAKE of the situation with such an argument holding in it. Which does go to the kind of guys we are. Which I now understand to be Kant’s point. “We” get to buy and sell God-use products like snifters, according to our own judgment. But look: the price tag on this one is pretty high (metaphysical – cf. John Calvin).

If the increase in hurricane activity is due to global warming and global warming is a result of human's ignorance (1), then wouldn't God be connect to human's ignorance and not to their knowledge? (2)
….
….

1 –

I’ve thought (perhaps mistakenly, I’ll admit) that THIS causal link was a “textualists” metaphysical conceit – something we can see with our new technology, crunching numbers and extrapolating events, therefore a situation we can use our new technology to fix, like heart transplants. Long-term global warming/cooling cycles have occurred before. I am always suspicious of schemes based on new science that will intervene with natural planetary when a. they will cost a lot of money; b. probably get Halliburtoned in execution; c. emerging as proposals without a karmic retributive context now built into the objective historical situation by the sinfulness of neocon Republicans and whoever have accommodated their particular way of being, which I hold to be the chief causal dynamic factor in the psycho/physical decimation of America.

This is not to say that the nation is not under a totality mandate to bring its entire operation under control, as it relates to planetary processes. The possibility of that, as I think is self-evident, means 1. bringing business (and the philosophy of the relation of state to corporations: should they be taxed?) under control of a planned economy, a la Marx (Stalin: United States of Soviet Union – like that?); 2. bringing foreign policy under control of a mass media exercising responsibility to the public for complete, unfineigaled, real-time, behind the scenes, out in the open presentation of alternatives, presented for discussion in a timely manner before ANY big unalterable, irreversible decisions affecting all citizens are made by the U.S. government; 3. A ritual of purification, like the lynchings ordered by West Texas Judge Roy Bean for horse thieves and others deserving it, of which Katrina is a token (for me).

*****

Note on Metaphysics and Sign-use. a. belief v. commitment; b. science v. religion; c. universal v. particular (as causes): d. text v. token

a. Commitment is a mental act regarding use of signs distinct from and not entailed by rational cognition. What is objectively factual, given through true textual sign-use, can be understood and surveyed, as if ‘turned’ under alternative descriptions, independently of haw a person chooses to relate to the situation as an individual. This is the metaphysical space of free will, existential choice, karma, each person’s responsibility ‘to be’. It’s denial is false consciousness (J.P.Sartre: ‘the devil* made me do it..” -- *genes, social order, “God!”, etc.). Commitment carries with it responsibility for the way we are.

b. Science goes with belief. It arrives at truth through causes. If A (given instance of an event, e.g., Katrina) is linked to B (as regular effect of antecedent causes “continguous in space and time” (Hume), then (rational) belief in A. will bring (rational) belief in B, and it be said that “A explains B.” The use of “explanation” has passed to science from religion and theology -- where it once held sway with “God” – due to lack of predictive value in regard to the latter; and to logical analysis of what the notion of an “explanation” is, for us humans, in dealing with common, natural processes concerning the former. “Science”, as rationally organized empirical knowledge, describes, does not dictate, what external, necessarily shared reality is. It is self- correcting by S* looped through the community’s perceptions and processes.

Because its language is used for the totality of factual discourse, it contains no terms for the particularities of being: actual names. Name-tokens are required wherever actual text is applied. As textual formula “(x)(Ax implies Bx)” – analyzed logical content of “All A is B”, or “As are B’s” – requires a “This (Katrina) is a B (weather-cycle, global-warming caused event) to get applied to reality. Science is all text unless and until somebody adds the tokens to apply it. They are the human contribution to “knowledge”. And, as already noted, their application WHEN THE TOKEN IS INSISTED UPON carries commitment. It is determined not just by belief but commitment. The metaphysics is in what things are called, and this cannot be pre-determined by the person. Adam was given the power to name. The connection between God (religion), man and nature is through the token. The connection between science, man and nature is through the text (of Sign-use).

c. “Why me, Lord?” -- Job’s question – takes on a new significance. The distinction between text and token, universal and particular, in the use of signs, can be used to answer it.

Is this question the result of the way Job uses signs? – as if it would go away if he stopped calling on God? – as experts and friends advised; to spare himself and them. .

Reflection: In the particular instance of sign-use, memory is a mediating causal factor. Are we responsible for what we do, or don’t, remember?


If “Why me?” is applied to the scale of particularity relevant to human actions, it’s external situation is determined by causal processes, but it’s use loops expectation of an answer through memory- mediation, as if something was taking note of one’s inner continuity. That little touch of egoism always seemed to me to argue against the attitude of looking for causes of particular events. The essence of superstition: our inner, subjective impulses act in concert with external, occult controlling forces. On this assumption, “God” is the occultist’s final cause. Which empirical science had to beat back, to claim dry land for human consciousness. But that is a misuse of “God” if (as I hold) it stands for the completing totality. It disallows the full use of reason (science) in ark building.

HOWEVER, and this is big …

There are psychic powers (imho), and psychically gifted people who are in simpatico with them at different times, situations, dynamics – more than I even ever want to think of grasping… totally out of my league. By them I only hope to be ignored.

WHAT IF … America was possessed, as even the psychologist Carl Jung came to say of Germany under Hitler? – by those who knew then, and can use more adeptly now, to bring it down to the level of a psychotic default-position military armed camp?

THEN … ONLY some event of the scale of magnitude of hurricane Katrina has the authority, in its manifestation, to deliver a rebuke equal to what America deserves for Iraq. The voice of reason, or “reality”, for instance, is trumped by ‘idealism’. (see column of NY Times columnist David Brooks, pre-Kat,) Except when it isn’t. (see post-Kat. columns of Brooks.) Some guy ringing up 9/11 in Detroit claiming he’s Anu from the planet Nibiru, “the One you lulus”, he called us, “call ‘God’. I have an announcement…” – just not gonna cut it. It took a (Fludd?)
UNLESS ….Katrina, the hurricane, is used under this predicate, “act of God”, it will have particular effects on the grammar of subsequent uses of “God” for the group. 1. It (“God”) will be USED ANYWAY, AT A LOWER, SPLIT-OFF LEVEL (applied to the disaster without seeing it as punishment), ONE NATION, ONE GOD, ONE PROCESS, TWO DISASTERS. 2. … and (second consequence) it will be used to align those fighting insurgents in Iraq, with those providing relief, aid, and law enforcement for New Orleans and the Golf Coast. Who would, or will deny that either or both are on God’s side? (( Check square X for (OTHER) – check square Y if prepared to answer “What, then?”))

THUS …. The consequences will be to extend further the same twisted processes for which America has just been severely punished?



****/

2.

Because of the added dimension to reality made by commitment, it is impossible for knowledge of explanations through science, alone, to complete the human relation to it. Application of commitment-language (as if it were a part of ‘our’ inner metaphysical history) seeks non-universal confirmations – particularities of the instant case that mark it as consonantly related (as if to an external intentionality).

In particular, knowledge of the global warming/ weather patterns etc., brought to bear on this hurricane would ignore: its timing, psychological context, strange behavior,
archetypal symbolic clarity. This includes the terrifying, sudden eye-wall deepening in “the Gulf”, “powering up and taking aim”. It is O.K, not to be assailed, to point out that all this is perfectly explicable by the prevailing high-low pressure, hot-cold temperature, straight or swirling wind currents, etc.. That is the descriptive causal context. But this is not the level of sign-use to which commitment is anchored. For that, the particularities come in marking a deeper historical-causal connection.

The claim that events are explained ONLY under universal causal law, if extended to the totality of what exists, is itself a metaphysical position. One that goes beyond accepting science as the only (or best) GUIDE to realty, to scientISM: the view that only what is subsumed under true scientific text IS reality. If commitment through the tokens carrying text becomes part of the reality, fed-back (re-looped, by a particular self-monitoring process) through and as a result of communication, scientISM can become an obstacle to full, complete knowledge, if it is made a metaphysical dogma (as opposed to defended by philosophical argument)

---cutting to the chase in replying to your last comment: (not sure I see fully, but..)

The way of being manifested by the neo-con Bush/Republican party is self-contradictory, in the particular way that creates a vortex of negativity around itself. It is a way of being has ingratiated itself into the grammar of national discourse, thus corrupting the mentality of whoever would relate to America in old ideal terms. The particular form of self-contradiction is use of “God” for political purposes – preempting the token of the Spirit that would move human free will the opposite way than they have taken. Their inversion, itself tokened by the prominence of homosexuals everywhere – Freud called them “inverts” – is the eye of the hurricane. As above, so below.

(This by no means answers all the questions you raised. But it’s a start.)

-Sid

Program 1

PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT

TALK AMERICA ….. (on/about) AMERICA TALKING

Binghamton University campus radio station
WHRW Public Affairs dept presentation

GUEST crank and Talk Show host – Sid Thomas

DOING PSYCHOHISTORY OF THE PRESENT
-Unhurried: got a full hour TIME: 4 – 5:00 pm Fridays (tentative)
-interactive: if *you* want to call in
-documented: from print, TV, artefacta
…and collected together into a single, continuous, story-line of events making up the epic narrative of our time. The Semester through Sign-Uses, I call it. What we are living as told in pictures and words -- the topic as well as content of discussion. All coherent viewpoints invited.

Format ; chief aim – to achieve a dynamic aesthetic/emotive resonance with the contemporary situation, mixing: the university’s larger outreach mission in informing the public; the need of the campus community for a connected supra-academic department narrative spontaneously grammatized in the common argot – so people will know such a thing is going on, if for no other reason. It hasn’t been, up to now. Enriched associations to what is happening in broad terms enriches synchronicity in TokenSpace*. (*the space “we” are given for communication = background of aesthetic as well as conceptual resonance.)

Open with Music -- mood/theme
Ex. for Program 1. Open with “Muddy Water Rising” (Nick Cave and The Bad seeds, Kicking Against the Pricks) … Talk: Water, as a token.

Proceed with acknowledgments;
-Introduce documents of items for the week’s discussion

Segment I. – first 20+ minutes --- exposition-oriented remarks on what the docs are saying.

(then) Music interlude -- To break one mood and set another; followed by:

Segment 2. –second 20+ minutes --- more interactive-questioning-improvised. Readings, perhaps. Call-ins normally accepted anytime, second segment preferred.

Closing Music ---
*****
*For those interested in pursuing topics introduced here more fully, please visit my site www.sidthomas.blogspot.com. Comments welcome.

.

Program 1 Muddy Water Rising

Segment 1. Was Katrina an act of God? (Yes) America has brought punishment for its wrongdoing in Iras and elsewhere.

Supplement on S* (Sign-use): The True, The False
And the Utterly *Reversed

(aberrant S* types: sight-gags, images of irony, *Reversals, BIG DOG WAGS – all in play today)

Music Interlude – Muddy Waters, black fold guitarist

Segment 2. The Gardner …

A Tale from Rhudyard Kipling

Closing music -- Keith Jarrett

Sid Thomas

Confirmation Contingencies

Posted on The Nation, under Corn thread, 9.6.05

capt

On the new justices? It is out of our hands. If there is resistance to Roberts then the nuclear option will be triggered, it a few democrats roll-over and confirm Roberts the democrat votes will be portrayed as evidence Roberts is a moderate. Then we will see a real nutcase ideologue nominated for associate, if challenged the GOPhers will just pull the nuclear trigger calling democrats obstructionists."

I read that, capt. Loud and clear. Except....

What if...the U.S. Congress actually gets involved in the confirmation process. Ted Kennedy gets a crack at John Ro... no, wait. Kennedy is Catholic too. Make it...? hmm. TANCREDO! ...? umm.. whoever; new face ...Cable TV nets grinding....
"lets go into whether your religion, Roman Catholic, right? ('right?' ...receives confirming nod from the man in the chair down front; who reads prepared statement about how far he'll go down this road...threatening to pull a "hi-tech Pope Crucifixion!" hystrionic if crossed ...presence of clergyman identified by distinctive collar with law degree from Notre Dame University leaning into the near mike).

"Right. Would you object to a law that required all federal employees to swear an No Higher Loyalty oath to the God the U.S. Constitution was signed under?"

(Distributes copy of oath forswearing signers of owing any debt of any sort to any power, authority, organization of any sort that trumped the absolute debt they own the God of the U.S. Constitution. ...

Pointing out particualr places, for example the interpretation of abortion by John O'Connor as equivalent to Nazi's gassing Jews, where there has been deliberate injection of Catholic teachings, as such, into the American democratic process. And point out that any candidate judge not willing to sign such an oath cannot be presumed, on their word, not to harbor hidden intentions or impulses to violate it, therefore cannot be confirmed. etc., This last is in consideration of R.P. Hanssen's penetration into the FBI hierarchy.)

scenario tbc

*****

There is such a thing as "the dynamic", capt. A little stunt like that -- off the top of my head, but pretty good, don't you think? -- or another hurricane or two up America's wang -- or maybe (I don't wan't to say it)...and suddenly all the nice little pre-programmed scenarios look like corpses floating in the bayou, where they belong.

Remember, Katrina was a punishment meant for them -- the ones that blessed America with Iraq.

Here was Sen. Joe Lieberman (Dem, Con.)on CNN just a few hour ago, railing! I tell you!.. railing! "Our investigation is going to ask those TOUGH questions. UNRELENTING! NO LAME 'MISTAKE' EXCUSES!" I'd call it the "couldn't be more outraged than I" Jewish number (seen 'em all) if it weren't so non-PC. I can't speak for anyone else on this, but it didn't sit well, for me. Here's the '00 "God loves Gore" campaigner, which very likely cost Gore the election, since who could stand the thought of a Lieberman just a heartbeat away? still slinging his shlong. How long before we see Netanyahu and Madona sending red threads relief convoy concerts. But I wax cynical.

Here's the deal.

What used to be "liberalism" as the core of American politics goes over to Stalinism: as in Soviet-style control of the economy to benefit the people...

plus ....

the illiberalism of aroused folkish political milieu goes over into Hitleresque cleansing of worshippers of false Gods from the life blood of national communication (oath of No Higher Loyalty - introduced into the Senate by Hillary Clinton, and Maurice Henchey, upstate Rep.).

THE UNITED STATES OF SOVIET NATIONALISM (USSN -- like it?)

It (this cleansing) won't have to be Hitleresque in the sense of actual pograms, heaven forbid, if only it is carried through at the upper spiritual, intellectual and existential levels of national group life. As Above, So Below.

It is time for true Americans to call for a reckoning, from both "Left" (anti-national globalists) and "Right" (neocon Zionist Christian false-G-d 'conservatives), in the Name of the One whose heritage their cabals dared usurp.

I do so stand. It is the exact centre point, on the flip side opposite Katrina's Eye. THAT is the dynamic of the karma of their self-contradiction. That's how far 'right' the (false) "centre" has moved. They think it's where "God" is, but a vast gulf separates them.

Now, all say: America for Americans.

amen

Posted by JONES 09/06/2005 @ 4:54pm | ign