Semiotic Politicobabble
14% of Americans (26% of Republicans, 6% of Democrats) apparently believe Barack Obama is the Antichrist. [Gallup poll, March 2011]
Do the math: over 200 million eligible voters (150 million registered) … so between 21 and 28 million people may actually be going through their days – right alongside you and me on the highway and everywhere else – holding (with clenched teeth and fists?) their core belief that the president of the US actually is the contemporary manifestation of an evil force several millennia old, fulfilling ancient Biblical prophecy on the threshold of Armageddon from his Oval office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
What must they think of anyone who voted for Obama? One shudders to suppose.
Is voting like choosing between death by firing squad vs. hanging, gas, electrocution, or lethal injection? Do those final outcomes differ by a difference that makes a difference? As if the sentence stands a chance of being pardoned or commuted either way?
From a doggerel protest song co-written with a dear friend during Iraqi-ww1:
VERSE:
Well they shot and killed the dream again in 1963.
In ’68 they killed two more for free.
But when all is said and done Uncle Sam still has the gun,
and the truth is buried deeper than the sea.
CHORUS:
If 10% is good enough for Jesus it oughta be good enough for Uncle Sam!
Yeah, If 10% is good enough for Jesus then it oughta be good enough for Uncle Sam!
You may think you can reliably infer my politics from this sophomoric lyric. You’d be wrong. And you’re not going to find out from this blog post either.
What I do believe is that the signs of our times indeed are of Biblical proportion: we are on the brink of exactly the sort of globalist elite world order Christ and all the prophets foretold. We turn blind eyes and deaf ears and closed minds to those signs while oxymoronically acting out our enslavement to that plutarchy and convincing ourselves that their rape of the planet and murder of all its species and our own consumerist gluttony really aren’t the two sides of the same coin of their global realm.
Who can blame us? Our language lost the ability to rationally articulate political reality long before Orwell predicted it would. It was gone before I penned the doggerel lyric above with my friend in the 80s. Yet we rage, rage against the dying of the light with the overwhelming and ridiculous hypocrisy that such quaint terms as ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, ‘moderate’, ‘libertarian’, ‘Republican’, ‘Democrat’, ‘socialism’, ‘fascism’, and all the rest still have any connection, however surreal, to socioeconomic and political truth. In our time the ruins of Babel have transformed into a politically insane pseudo-language wherein we all act and pose (often with rabid intensity) as if we have privileged access to the truth of it, when in reality no truth whatsoever can be syntactically or semantically captured in language lacking any genuine sense and reference. Like money worldwide it is fiat currency standing for specific meaning and truth value that are always owed and never delivered but universally taken for granted.
The cacophonic nonsensical sounds we make in this charade of meaningful dialogue nonetheless yields a hypnotically subliminal chaos – certainly evil in nature – that enthralls us ironically with ourselves, such that we live out our vain lives in a death march that we perceive as a circus and military parade in honor of our own personal fun and patriotic glory. As if glib banter, sanctimony, and puffed-up quasi-patriotism driving superheated political mockrage were the stuff of rational discourse. Is the terror of the underlying truth so pure as that?
Whether this cycle of evil is at last the final rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem and Armageddon remains to be seen. Hasten the day, I pray, just as Jesus tells me. Is there any truth greater than blood? Especially His?
Other than that, Jackie, how was Dallas? [Or LA, Ethel? Or Memphis, Coretta?]
You may think you can reliably infer my politics from this brief commentary. But you’d be wrong. We don’t access a language sufficient for the message.
I beg you nonetheless: listen with new ears and hear that still, black, semantic void next time. Then look with new eyes at the circus and the parade. Finally, alone, gaze into your own eyes in a mirror when your next political thought or feeling surfaces and see if that same void isn’t lurking and smirking in the darkness of the heart that used to be yours but is now marching to the cadence of an unholy other drummer. Break the spell. You may discover your own true rage against the dying of the light, perhaps at last truly with liberty and justice for all.
