FLAG DAY '08
FLAG PLACENTA
POLE PHALLUS
STICKPIN FETISH
Requiem for Russert, Beloved War Pimp
Post-Vietnam Father-Son Reconciliation Sans Remorse
Flags as Symbolic Placentas (Thesis)
Each fetus arrives wrapped in its placental sac, 'Bursting out' is the last act of natural childbirth, enabling oxygen to be drawn into the infant's own lungs for the first time. This event is the epic, once-in-a-lifetime Birthday Moment, imprinted in every individual's neuro-psychological narrative. And, taking flags as symbolic placentas, the epic Moment marking the Birth of Nations (or other collective beginnings). Flags carry this linkage -- individual births and the birth of nations -- in two ways: A. by tokenizing the moment achieving individual freedom; B. eliciting the shared unconscious group-fantasy of fetal siblings contained in the same womb-surround.
Confirmation and Elaboration
1. Experiences. a. Seeing Old Glory waving elicits pride (flashback to shared moment of victory); b. Touching the flag elicits a special kind of 'shock' to the psychic system (re-establishing original closeness to the container). These feelings, pride and sacrality, are similar, both being brain 2 arousals, but distributed in different contexts in a manner that leaves them textually dissociated in actual discourse.
2. Symbolic Acts -- separate
a, The Salute (palm-at-brow symbolizing total brain 1 visual-intellectual focus, merging inner and outer horizons)
b. Pledge of Allegiance (right hand movement folded over heart, then extended toward flag; symbolizing power merger)
c. Draped over Soldier's Coffins (re-wrapping the original sheath)
d. Displayed Properly (The act of 'showing' the inner common fetal origins; cf. also, waving. )
e. Flown on poles (The pole is associated in unconscious fantasy with the erect penis, or phallus, though this includes post-Oedipal content retrojected onto earlier childhood fascination with stick, poles, straws, swords, etc. The Flag Pole, itself then, forms an independent symbolic object to which the flag is conjoined, as if discharging the "we" seed of sibling spermata, triumphantly in the air, "our" womb-surround.)
3. Major Group Symbolic Act --
-Carried aloft in battle. This is the primary group-psychological use. "Battles" are re-staged re-birth rituals, always fighting an enclosing, dark, suffocating, unrelenting and overpowering THING, preventing us* from filling our lungs with precious oxygen. This THING/seque/MONSTER is the fantasized placenta returned as 'poisonou' (the "POISONOUS PLACENTA" -- every mysterious "Enemy" the Group-Fantasy Leader (=>fetal Hero) is compelled to "deliver the people" from is a symbolic phantom placenta.
Note: In current Group-fantasy discourse, the Poisonous Placenta is named "al Queda". One remarkable thing in the representation of "al Queda" as most, most vile, demonic, abominable 'terrorist network" is they have, or have been given, no flag. This goes with the group-fantasy thought (mostly unconscious) "They have no inner bond of unity to anything higher than themselves as a group (subtext: like we do); they are not giving birth to anything." It is altogether unique, a First Time, for ANY nation, or people, to wage war an Enemy unmarked by any bond except "terrorist". It is the moment of deconstruction of the iblical Patriarchal Group Process.
*****
4. Symbol of Our National Unity - what happened
The WWII fathers sinned against the flag by ordering soldiers into the war in Vietnam they did not personally lead. This violated the unspoken social contract bonding the military segment, at least in America, up the chain of command of authority to public political figures. Thus elected officials with military records, such as John Murtha, or who have sons in the military, such as Jim Webb, speak with more gravity than others because of this unspoken bond of understanding. The self-evident and ineluctable justification for honoring this rule is to prevent the group from sliding into a mode of youth sacrifice -- taking advantage of their youthful trust and idealism to bring them gold.
The Sins of the Fathers of the Vietnam war inflicted an OBEY! or DISOBEY AND DISHONOR ME! alternative on the generational sons and daughters coming of age during the '60's. The youth culture energy at the time was out of control of anyone's sanctions but their own, mediated by sex, drugs, rock 'n roll and war protest. Old WWII America was dissolving, as detente with Russia, The Pill (for morning after defertalization), and Betty Friedan's deconstruction of Feminine Mystique combined to deconstruct the Daddy's. All this posits a psycho-historical era, a duration of collective experience each person participates in in their own way through the grammar of "we", and common national-group self-reference. When "war"\ is injected by collective group-action (action of a group through individual 'we' participants) into necessarily shared mainstream communication, a token of father-son sacrifice, the "sons" are put in the position of responding to an alternative which is uninvited and unjustified. It provokes a reaction of resistance, as to a total way of being; or knuckling under.
This is what those of us who spear headed the intellectual resistance knew was happening. It was Freudian -- but not in them (acting out rebellious 'kill father' brat fantasies); Rather, in the
deep unspoken psychology of the guilty fathers. It was more than sin. Deconstructed in the 1970 Kent State shootings, it templates the group fantasy of delegate priests committing blood sacrifice (lambs, bulls, children -- libido-Id containers),
The problem in confronting this was that it rested squarely on the distinctive mythopoeic world view of Western Patriarchy, specifically, mediated by The Bible* (as a text-token sign-use* here) as a form of consciousness. It still is. To come to terms with THAT as a worldview, a weltaungshuung, as 19th century German philosophers called it, requires coming to terms with the most enduring, all-pervasive, omni-present positive energy flux claiming its right to access and control higher-level functions of the psychic apparatus. This energy impulse through particular localizations in the body is taken by some esoteric teachings, and by the sexologist Wilhelm Reich, to be consonant with a cosmic process which fills the whole universe (like an 'aether'), The energy template of this Father-Son sacrifice theme has been actually played out, historically, in forms too numerous to elaborate. The demand that it be played out on America's youth by the Vietnam War Hawks was this same old same old; another chorus of the same old song.
For those of us who led this resistance, the spectacle of post Vietnam war Sons*, in the group historical sense, knuckling under to the demand they give up their lives for the Fathers, who have sinned, is revolting. When those who do the reconciliation then turn around and moralize the Vietnam war as an American plus+ ('or the 53,000 will have died for nothing, like liberals want to see')they have bitten a chunk off the bodark tree. And that is exactly what has happened.
POLE PHALLUS
STICKPIN FETISH
Requiem for Russert, Beloved War Pimp
Post-Vietnam Father-Son Reconciliation Sans Remorse
Flags as Symbolic Placentas (Thesis)
Each fetus arrives wrapped in its placental sac, 'Bursting out' is the last act of natural childbirth, enabling oxygen to be drawn into the infant's own lungs for the first time. This event is the epic, once-in-a-lifetime Birthday Moment, imprinted in every individual's neuro-psychological narrative. And, taking flags as symbolic placentas, the epic Moment marking the Birth of Nations (or other collective beginnings). Flags carry this linkage -- individual births and the birth of nations -- in two ways: A. by tokenizing the moment achieving individual freedom; B. eliciting the shared unconscious group-fantasy of fetal siblings contained in the same womb-surround.
Confirmation and Elaboration
1. Experiences. a. Seeing Old Glory waving elicits pride (flashback to shared moment of victory); b. Touching the flag elicits a special kind of 'shock' to the psychic system (re-establishing original closeness to the container). These feelings, pride and sacrality, are similar, both being brain 2 arousals, but distributed in different contexts in a manner that leaves them textually dissociated in actual discourse.
2. Symbolic Acts -- separate
a, The Salute (palm-at-brow symbolizing total brain 1 visual-intellectual focus, merging inner and outer horizons)
b. Pledge of Allegiance (right hand movement folded over heart, then extended toward flag; symbolizing power merger)
c. Draped over Soldier's Coffins (re-wrapping the original sheath)
d. Displayed Properly (The act of 'showing' the inner common fetal origins; cf. also, waving. )
e. Flown on poles (The pole is associated in unconscious fantasy with the erect penis, or phallus, though this includes post-Oedipal content retrojected onto earlier childhood fascination with stick, poles, straws, swords, etc. The Flag Pole, itself then, forms an independent symbolic object to which the flag is conjoined, as if discharging the "we" seed of sibling spermata, triumphantly in the air, "our" womb-surround.)
3. Major Group Symbolic Act --
-Carried aloft in battle. This is the primary group-psychological use. "Battles" are re-staged re-birth rituals, always fighting an enclosing, dark, suffocating, unrelenting and overpowering THING, preventing us* from filling our lungs with precious oxygen. This THING/seque/MONSTER is the fantasized placenta returned as 'poisonou' (the "POISONOUS PLACENTA" -- every mysterious "Enemy" the Group-Fantasy Leader (=>fetal Hero) is compelled to "deliver the people" from is a symbolic phantom placenta.
Note: In current Group-fantasy discourse, the Poisonous Placenta is named "al Queda". One remarkable thing in the representation of "al Queda" as most, most vile, demonic, abominable 'terrorist network" is they have, or have been given, no flag. This goes with the group-fantasy thought (mostly unconscious) "They have no inner bond of unity to anything higher than themselves as a group (subtext: like we do); they are not giving birth to anything." It is altogether unique, a First Time, for ANY nation, or people, to wage war an Enemy unmarked by any bond except "terrorist". It is the moment of deconstruction of the iblical Patriarchal Group Process.
*****
4. Symbol of Our National Unity - what happened
The WWII fathers sinned against the flag by ordering soldiers into the war in Vietnam they did not personally lead. This violated the unspoken social contract bonding the military segment, at least in America, up the chain of command of authority to public political figures. Thus elected officials with military records, such as John Murtha, or who have sons in the military, such as Jim Webb, speak with more gravity than others because of this unspoken bond of understanding. The self-evident and ineluctable justification for honoring this rule is to prevent the group from sliding into a mode of youth sacrifice -- taking advantage of their youthful trust and idealism to bring them gold.
The Sins of the Fathers of the Vietnam war inflicted an OBEY! or DISOBEY AND DISHONOR ME! alternative on the generational sons and daughters coming of age during the '60's. The youth culture energy at the time was out of control of anyone's sanctions but their own, mediated by sex, drugs, rock 'n roll and war protest. Old WWII America was dissolving, as detente with Russia, The Pill (for morning after defertalization), and Betty Friedan's deconstruction of Feminine Mystique combined to deconstruct the Daddy's. All this posits a psycho-historical era, a duration of collective experience each person participates in in their own way through the grammar of "we", and common national-group self-reference. When "war"\ is injected by collective group-action (action of a group through individual 'we' participants) into necessarily shared mainstream communication, a token of father-son sacrifice, the "sons" are put in the position of responding to an alternative which is uninvited and unjustified. It provokes a reaction of resistance, as to a total way of being; or knuckling under.
This is what those of us who spear headed the intellectual resistance knew was happening. It was Freudian -- but not in them (acting out rebellious 'kill father' brat fantasies); Rather, in the
deep unspoken psychology of the guilty fathers. It was more than sin. Deconstructed in the 1970 Kent State shootings, it templates the group fantasy of delegate priests committing blood sacrifice (lambs, bulls, children -- libido-Id containers),
The problem in confronting this was that it rested squarely on the distinctive mythopoeic world view of Western Patriarchy, specifically, mediated by The Bible* (as a text-token sign-use* here) as a form of consciousness. It still is. To come to terms with THAT as a worldview, a weltaungshuung, as 19th century German philosophers called it, requires coming to terms with the most enduring, all-pervasive, omni-present positive energy flux claiming its right to access and control higher-level functions of the psychic apparatus. This energy impulse through particular localizations in the body is taken by some esoteric teachings, and by the sexologist Wilhelm Reich, to be consonant with a cosmic process which fills the whole universe (like an 'aether'), The energy template of this Father-Son sacrifice theme has been actually played out, historically, in forms too numerous to elaborate. The demand that it be played out on America's youth by the Vietnam War Hawks was this same old same old; another chorus of the same old song.
For those of us who led this resistance, the spectacle of post Vietnam war Sons*, in the group historical sense, knuckling under to the demand they give up their lives for the Fathers, who have sinned, is revolting. When those who do the reconciliation then turn around and moralize the Vietnam war as an American plus+ ('or the 53,000 will have died for nothing, like liberals want to see')they have bitten a chunk off the bodark tree. And that is exactly what has happened.
posted by Sid Thomas | 9:08 PM
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