Showing posts with label emotional plague. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emotional plague. Show all posts

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Consumption=Death

Today is Buy Nothing Day....yesterday was Black Friday....and it lived up to its name as frenzied American consumers like rogue elephants stomped to death a worker in order to get in on the discount prices. Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death

Like the rush to make a quick buck off the housing boom, this rush to consume is part and parcel of the psychopathology of capitalism. It is the current variation of the emotional plaque; whereby the world is going to hell in a handbasket, so lets consume ourselves to death.

At least one writer suggests that the alternative to these two faces of the same coin(Buy Nothing Day/Black Friday), is to actually produce something, to make your own toys or at least consume locally made goods.

The great myth of the middle class was a social construction of post WWII capitalist economies, especially the growing service based economy, is that we are not producers/workers but consumers. After 9/11 George Bush told America to consume, it is this consumption that results not only in the death of workers in shopping frenzies but the mass exctinction of species on the planet and the climate crisis.

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Saturday, January 19, 2008

Bobby and Howard

There is a passing similarity between the decent into madness of social isolation that Bobby Fischer suffered and the decent into madness of social isolation that affected Howard Hughes. Given time perhaps Martin Scorsese will make a movie about this Brooklyn kid. He remained Bobby through out his life, never Robert. Perhaps his madness was that of never really growing up after having grown up too soon.

Or perhaps his paranoia was justified,given how he went from Red Diaper Baby to American Chess ChampionWho Defeats The Reds.


For it turns out from now declassified FBI files that Bobby’s biological parents, Paul Lemenyi and Regina Fischer (née Wender), were for many years spied on by the federal government, which feared they had pro-Soviet sympathies. Her husband, Gerhardt Fischer, whom she divorced in 1945 when Bobby was 2 years old, had in 1939 been permanently barred from entering the United States on account of his suspected Commie sympathies, and according to the FBI never did so. Short of also being possessed of magical powers of impregnation by a process of thought or telepathy, he could therefore not have fathered young Bobby.


His paranoia was the same as that of the culture of Cold War America in which he grew up. A paranoid culture of the American Military Industrial Complex which also impacted on Howard Hughes. And it is a culture that continues today Post 9/11.That Bobby Fischer like Hughes saw conspiracies running the Chess World and then America even if he mistook the source, is understandable.

Unfortunately his criticism of the Israel US domination of the Middle East was tainted by his own self loathing of being Jewish and by holocaust denial in effect the denial of his own parentage and heritage.

Such social schizophrenia resulted in a very personal madness of social isolation. He went from Cold War Prodigy to Social Pariah in a few short years resulting in his further break down. As a result he is another victim of the emotional plague.

Influenced as he was by the Cold War propaganda of American Culture such social schizophrenia is understandable, it still exists today on the right. A right which sees Bolshevism and Communism as a Jewish conspiracy and even attributes that same conspiracy to the development of the anti-communist/anti-Stalinist neo-con movement of the Sixties being that it was made up of former leftists from the New York Jewish intellectual circles.





BOBBY FISCHER: 1943-2008

By the end of his life his eccentricity and paranoia had come to overshadow his achievement.

Even in his strange exile from the chess scene, however, Fischer continued to haunt it. He became the Howard Hughes of chess, with fans eager for his return reporting sightings at tournaments and continuing to analyze his games years after other champions had taken his place.


On the day after Bobby Fischer’s death it was clear that Icelanders felt they had lost a friend. Many had grown accustomed to seeing this bearded man in central Reykjavík. Even though he was a very private man who kept to himself it is clear that he had a small group of very good friends. Those remembered him yesterday with fondness even though they made it clear that he had been very difficult at times.

Remembering Bobby Fischer, chess's Cold War warrior

An Appreciation From an Heir

Q: What was Mr. Fischer’s place in chess history?

Mr. Kasparov: Definitely, Fischer’s contribution was the most revolutionary. He made chess more professional in terms of overall chess strategy and proper education in chess, in bringing everything he had into the game.

Q: What do you mean?

A: He exhausted himself, his opponent and all the resources at the chess board. He was a real fighter, at a time when short draws were often agreed. Fischer was unstoppable. They [other top players] had nothing to offer to conquer his dedication to the game. He also added an element of psychological warfare.

Q: Did he influence your career?

A: I was seven, eight, nine in the early 1970s. We didn’t know much about the Cold War, of Fischer being the symbol of individualism and freedom fighting the great Soviet machine. Only later when I worked on [writing the book] “My Great Predecessors” did I realize the full impact of the Fischer revolution. He was a unique combination of a great researcher and fierce fighter and great chess player — a man with tremendous chess capacity.


Excerpts from Associated Press coverage of the Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky Match of the Century in 1972


Chesstest
Fischer-Spassky, 1972, Game 6

Click on the diagram to replay a crucial game from the tournament.

After losing the first game and forfeiting the second, Bobby Fischer had stormed back to tie the match after five games. In Game 6, he played an opening he had never played before, and in which Boris Spassky had never lost. In a masterful display, Mr. Fischer pushed Mr. Spassky off the board, took the lead in the match and never looked back.


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Sunday, October 28, 2007

Doom IV: Kandahar

A cynical ploy or child abuse? Taking advantage of young boys who play first person shooter video games to entice them to fight and die in Harpers War.
It is obvious that the Canadian Armed Forces are desperate for new recruits.



Teenagers who enjoy first-person shooter video games can now test their aim at Canadian Forces recruitment drives.

It illustrates mock battle scenarios, inviting users to take hold of a variety of realistic-looking military weapons and shoot at a large, nine-foot screen when an enemy appears. The weapons are made of plastic, and make no sound.

It's been set up in the Regent Mall in Fredericton since Wednesday, close to a food court, video arcade and children's play area.

"Their eyes are drawn to the screen and guns. They all want to try it out," said game designer Brad Hetherington.

Players have to be at least 16 to pick up the guns and need parental consent if they are under 18.

The danger is that some of those who play these games and are recruited may get rejected by the military and end up doing this.




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Friday, June 29, 2007

Procreation To Save The White Race

Behind the attacks on immigration, abortion and birth control, from the Christian right lays the underlying belief that this is the result of the permissive sixties, which introduced no fault divorce, the birth control pill, common law relationships, and a materialist culture that through public education, in particular educational access by women, decreased the birth rate.

Now right wing pundits are claiming that the declining birth rate which results from capitalist production and social liberalism is not just a threat to Western Civilization but to White Civilization.


Fight illegal immigration with procreation

If politicians won't find a way to deport illegals, then it is time for Americans who care to take matters into their own hands. By having lots of babies.

America will have to shoulder the responsibility of being the only Western democracy left; at least the only one big enough to give the remaining "whites" a geographical location to call "home," and – here is the important part – a place relatively free from hostile cultures.

While this is addressed to an American audience in an American publication its author is an influential Canadian Evangelical; Tristan Emmanuel.

Behind the attacks by the Christian right on womens rights, reproduction freedom; which attacks birth control as well as a womans right to abortion and promotes abstinence instead of sex education, their attacks on gay marriage, which is simply an extension of their attacks on our right to no fault divorce, common law relationships, open marriage and free love.

Its all about a return to the not so distant past when America was white, middle class and happy. The mythical 1950's.

As a local Christian (Baptist) church pamphlet I came across says;

A Christian Home. So many precious children are growing up in a home filled with hatred, strife, poverty, and neglect. It is no accident that the devil fights hardest in his attack on the home, using tools such as homosexuality, abortion and divorce. The nuclear family of the 1950's with its working dad, stay at home mom, and 2.3 kids is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. A Christian home, with a loving atmosphere, a happy marriage, a providing father, a teaching mother, and obedient children is even more rare.


2.3 children? The teaching mother exists, women are cast into the pink ghetto of working as an extension of their housework; nursing, teaching, day care, elder care, etc.

The reality is that this idyllic family is as much a the myth as the rest of the Christian belief system.

The Christian right wing wants to social engineer society backwards. As such they deny the liberal progressive nature of the very capitalist system that they defend.


Demand for children is affected by four principal classes of factors: "direct economic costs and benefits of children" [(1) P: 766] costs with regard to time, income and wealth, preferences and norms. Modernization has implications for all the factors mentioned above. With modernization, the costs (economic and time) of children increase, the benefits decrease and preferences and norms change. Money tends to be used for the purchase of consumer goods rather than for having and raising more children.

Other important factors that determine fertility are the material and non-material costs of regulation. Monetary costs, according to the researchers cited above, do not appear to be a significant barrier to contraceptive use, rather, access to information about contraception and the psychological costs associated with access are more important. Moreover, there is also the fear of incurring health costs (especially in case of abortion).

Besides these, Bulatao and Lee [(1) P: 775] mention the importance of communication between husband and wife regarding contraception. They see this as a determinant of fertility and view it as a psychological cost.
Among the various sociocultural factors that affect demand, supply and costs of regulation are the nature of marriage and more generally the "patterns of sexual unions . . . their stability; their composition, including whether they are polygynous or monogamous and whether families are extended or nuclear; and their formation and dissolution" [(1) P: 777].

Education (in particular that of women) and residence (rural or urban) are two additional socioeconomic factors that affect fertility. However, these two factors operate through several channels, making the exact determination of their influence very difficult and allowing many possible explanations.
In addition, the mode of production (familial or industrial) is critical in determining the value of children's labour, which in turn affects the demand for children. Moreover, government policies and efforts made by governments to mobilize the mass media, to make access to information regarding contraception easier, to make contraceptive measures available, and to reduce the costs of regulation are also important [(1) P: 784].

Simmons [(2) P: 96] summarizes the effects of the individual variables considered in various research studies. He has found a strong relationship between women's education and fertility. Women's labour-force participation, sex preference, availability of family-planning services, general environment and population programmes and policies were found to have a medium effect on fertility, while infant mortality, per capita income, income distribution and preferred number of children had only a weak effect on fertility.
See:

A Tale Of Two Canada's

Abortion, Adoption, or Abandonment

Thank God for SSM

Back Door Abortion Ban

December 6 Will Live In Infamy

Marx on Bigamy

Secular Democracy


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Monday, May 07, 2007

Canadian Shooters Use Long Guns


Revisiting A Canadian Tragedy

Revisiting A Canadian Tragedy

As America grieves the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, we take you back to 1975, when a shooting spree at a school in Brampton, Ontario, shocked the country. We bring you eyewitness accounts, and we'll find out what we've learned.

CBC Sun Day report ran this amazing piece of forgotten history. I left the following comment on their web site;

"I too did not know about the Brampton tragedy and I thank you for using this opportunity to present this in light of the Virgina Tech massacre. I note that the comment made by Carole MacNeil was that the first such shooting in a school occurred here in Edmonton in 1959. "

The situation between these high school shootings and the later Taber, Dawson and Virginia Tech massacres show we do not have enough psychological counseling prior to such incidents, rather we provide it after the fact.

The other point to remember is that so far all the shootings in Canada including Edmonton, Brampton, the Lapine shooting in Montreal, the Taber shootings, and Dawson College, unlike the situation in the U.S., were all done using long guns, rifles.

The same long guns that the Harpocrites don't want registered. Because after all law abiding duck hunters and farmers use them too.


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Thursday, April 19, 2007

You Talkin' To Me

The emotional plague continues to reveal itself in America where Gore Kulture meets everyday life.

"You talkin' to me?" Alone in his apartment, Travis postures and practices his moves in front of the mirror.

"You talkin' to me?" Alone in his apartment, Travis postures and practices his moves in front of the mirror.

Kimveer Gill
A picture from Kimveer Gill's Blog The Dawson College killer.


Could "Ismail Ax" Be A Part Of This Picture (NBC)

For two days the world has been searching for the meaning of the phrase "Ismail Ax."
Those two words, written in red ink on one arm of Cho, the 23-year-old Virginia Tech student behind the campus shooting spree which killed 32 students, set off a massive Internet hunt by the public Tuesday for clues to what might have motivated the nation's worst mass killings.

And today a theory has emerged proposing an answer which shows the killer's sick sense of humour - that it is a web language term used to signify a query.

Cho was a keen internet user who dubbed himself "?" in email and web conversations.

A web-savvy source told The Daily Telegraph Online today Ismail is a term used in text tagging - a way to tag words for searchability online.

"He was already known for signing his name as a question mark," the suorce said. "And the meaning of this tag represents question. The name Ismail itself represent question."




One of the photographs in the Virginia Tech killer's "multimedia manifesto" may have been inspired by a bloody South Korean movie.

"Oldboy," from the respected director Chan-woo Park, is about a man unjustly imprisoned for 15 years. After escaping, he goes on a rampage against his captor. In one scene, he dispatches more than a dozen henchmen with the aid of a hammer.

In the package of materials that Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC News, one photo shows the killer brandishing a hammer in a pose similar to one from the film.

"Oldboy," the second film in Park's "Vengeance Trilogy," won the Gran Prix prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

The connection was spotted by Professor Paul Harris of Virginia Tech, who alerted authorities, according to London's Evening Standard. The similarities have prompted speculation, especially in online forums, that Cho's entire massacre may have been inspired by "Oldboy.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.

“What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”


"We see that the compass of the emotional plague coincides approximately with the broad compass of social abuse, which has always been and still is combatted by every social freedom movement. With some qualifications, it can be said that the sphere of the emotional plague coincides with that of "political reaction" and perhaps even with the principle of politics in
general. This would hold true, however, only if the basic principle of all politics, namely thirst for power and special prerogatives, were carried over into those spheres of life which we do not think of as political in the
usual sense of the word."

"Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly, and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as to primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power."

The Emotional Plague /Listen Little Man by Wilhelm Reich
"

See:

Nazi Gay Killer Wanted to be a Cop

The Real Crime In Canada



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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Gore Kulture

No not Al Gore.

Gore as in Grand Guignol as in a specific sub genre of horror movies; slasher films, blood and guts movies like Saw, Hostile, etc.


The Peculiar Charms of the Grand Guignol

by Gideon Lester

"At one performance, six people passed out when an actress, whose eyeball was just gouged out, re-entered the stage, revealing a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull. Backstage, the actors themselves calculated their success according to the evening's faintings. During one play that ended with a realistic blood transfusion, a record was set: fifteen playgoers had lost consciousness. Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals."

-- Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol:
theatre of fear and terror.

We can go back to Shakespeare to find the first real case of Grand Guignol in theatre;

Titus Andronicus is a play with "14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3, depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity and 1 of cannibalism--an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines."


We seem to have moved from a rash of horror films to gore films in four short years. The gore phenomena is specific to the current mass culture we are experiencing.

We have seen an increase in horror films, just as we did during the depression and again during the Viet Nam war, horror films reflect the need for social catharsis during times of cultural stress.

The Gore film on the other hand was an underground phenomena, much like Grand Guignol. It first appeared not in film but in the fifties as crime and horror comics.

It existed since the early sixties, as a b-film phenomena in particular the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, but became popular in the eighties with the works of Stuart Gordon and Sam Raimi. It expanded in the nineties with the work of Clive Barker, in particular the Hellraiser series, now coming to the small screen as a computer game.

But these were horror movies, there was gore, but there was also humour, atmosphere, the gore was incidental, there to frighten you as much as the thing that jumps out of the dark.

But today the movies are Gore for gore's sake. In that they hearken back to Herschell Gordon Lewis work and Romero's Night of the Living Dead. But unlike them they are major studio releases, a popular film phenomena on the big screen and the producers of the goriest of the gore films; Saw I, II and III are Canadian.

It is reflective of the current social crisis of sociopathology that is in the headlines.
Man kills and BBQs girlfriend

Take for instance the Picton murder case and its Edmonton counter part the serial killing of prostitutes, or this recent Edmonton case that was in the news for weeks;

Michael Briscoe, acquitted in the rape and murder of Nina Courtepatte, is haunted by his failure to intervene and try to save her when she was brutally attacked 2 years ago

Edmonton, with its record-high murder rate, is quickly losing its reputation as a safe city.

But it's not just the creeping crime wave that's spooking people. It's the grim reality that we are now known for one of the most odious killings in the country.

Malls are supposed to be places where young people hang out, shop and flirt - not where a strikingly pretty 13-year-old girl is chosen at random to be raped and slaughtered for kicks.

I fear we are raising a society of sociopaths - kids who are so adrift, amoral and inured to violence that they have become completely indifferent to evil. They are drawn to it, it seems, out of twisted curiosity and sheer boredom.

How else to explain how a group of young people could lure Nina Courtepatte from West Edmonton Mall on the pretext of inviting her to a party, only to rape her and beat her to death on a golf course?

Brutality, savagery, gore, and cannibalism all underlie Grand Guignol and the Gore film today, as it does the headlines in your daily paper.

AN ALCOHOLIC who strangled his friend and then told police he did it so he could be sent to prison to exact revenge on a cannibal killer who murdered his girlfriend, was yesterday jailed for life. Alan Taylor said he never got over the murder of Julie Paterson, who was beheaded and partially eaten by psychopath David Harker in 1998.

New Delhi, Mar 22: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Thursday gave a clean chit to Mohinder Singh Pandher, co-accused in the gruesome Nithari serial killings in the outskirts of Delhi. CBI blamed his servant for the macabre killings and also confirmed cannibalism in him. It said Pandher's servant Surinder Koli was a psychopath and blamed him for the killings

A religious cult leader who raped, murdered and ate at least three women in Papua New Guinea has been captured by a group of villagers.

Steven Tari, 35, who called himself the "black Jesus" was beaten by locals from the village of Matepi before being handed over to police.

The failed bible student had gathered around six thousand followers as he travelled through mountain villages promising disciples gifts from heaven if they joined his congregation.

But communities discovered he was indulging in cannibalism, sacrificing young women, drinking their blood and eating their flesh.


The Gore phenomena begins with Slaughter of the Lambs, and its overwhelming popularity. It is about the brutality of a serial killer who skins his victims, and the anti-hero is a cannibal; Dr. Hannibal Lecter. It coincides disturbingly with pig farmer Robert Pictons brutal murder and dismemberment of women in Vancouver, and its implication of cannibalism.


The disturbing fact is that our fascination with the Picton case is the same as our fascination with Dr. Lecter. Cannibalism being the final taboo leading to the mass media phenomena of Hannibal the Cannibal.

I'm not alone in my fascination with cannibalism — why else would there be five Hannibal Lecter movies? Soylent Green is made of people; the living dead will eat your brains at any time of dawn, day, or night; and the biggest blockbuster of 2006, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, featured droves of flesh-hungry islanders.

In fact cannibalism is American as Apple Pie. Even before the infamous Donner party case, the founders of America engaged in cannibalism and capitalism.

Jamestown aims for historic reign over Plymouth

JAMESTOWN, Va. -- The first permanent English settlement in North America has more personality than many other historic attractions.
Capt. John Smith, the pint-sized adventurer, left a breathless narrative of his exploits.
Commerce took root here, and so did tobacco and slavery.
Then there was the cannibalism.
Still, as the country prepares to commemorate Jamestown's 400th anniversary in May, many see this swampy outpost on the James River only as a coming attraction to the Pilgrims' arrival at Plymouth Rock about 13 years later.
New Englanders, for example, point to the Thanksgiving feast, the Pilgrims' pure pursuit of religious freedom and the Mayflower.
Jamestown, on the other hand, "is the creation story from hell," Karen Ordahl Kupperman writes in her new book, "The Jamestown Project." Conflict, disease, horrific killings and starvation are all part of the back story of Jamestown, founded in 1607 as a business venture.
But if not for Jamestown, scholars say, there may not have been a Plymouth, and we all might be speaking Spanish. The Spanish, intent on spreading Roman Catholicism, were turned away twice from the nearby Chesapeake Bay during the early years of the Protestant Jamestown settlement.
"There's no question that Jamestown throws down the gauntlet to the Spanish," said James Horn, who wrote "A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America."
Now, during an 18-month commemoration, Jamestown finally could outshine Plymouth and fully embrace what historian and writer Nathaniel Philbrick calls its proper claim as "the rightful birthing ground of America."
"Not only was the [Jamestown] settlement found more than a decade before, but the colony that developed from those beginnings was, in many ways, more quintessentially American since it was all about making money," said Mr. Philbrick, the author of "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War."



Another gore phenomena in media is the popularity of the Zombie. Zombie parties are occurring across North America. In Edmonton there is a Zombie club of folks who dress up in gory zombie costumes and wander the streets groaning and moaning.

At the University of Alabama they are offering a course on Zombies.

Do you hope that when you die, your corpse will return to life and shamble around, wreaking havoc? Have you ever wanted to taste human flesh? Or do you just want to be able to live your life without that crippling fear of someone eating your brains?

Those who said yes to any of those questions will find a kindred spirit in Sean Hoade, a UA instructor currently teaching creative writing, literature and English. In May, during the interim, he will be teaching EN 311-001, titled, Zombies! The Living Dead in Literature, Film and Culture.

Hoade said zombies are the perfect choice because they are the ultimate metaphor for human life.

"Anything that you look at," Hoade said, "the way we know people by sight but don't really know our neighbors ... race relations and class warfare - all of that is reflected in zombies. And that's why they've become so incredibly popular. [There are] zombie movies, zombie books, zombie graphic novels, so I think that it's only right for the English department to offer a class looking at all things zombie."

Hoade said the class will also discuss what zombies being reanimated corpses indicates about people's fears.

"Death is so sanitized now that [even] being around a dead body that isn't reanimated is incredibly spooky. So we're going to look at how the fear of the zombie is actually a fear not just of death, because we're all afraid of death, but a fear, actually, of the dead also."

The class won't strictly focus on the intellectual aspects of zombies. Students will also be able to participate in a variety of zombie-related activities.

"We're going to engage in mock cannibalism," Hoade said. "We're going to [have] human-flavored tofu. It's based on what people who had to resort to cannibalism, like the Donner party and that plane crash and things like that, what they said human flesh tastes like.

"I ordered putrescine, which is the chemical that dead things give off," he said. Putrescine, which is a chemical compound used by the body for cellular division, is responsible for the smell of rotting flesh.

"We're probably going to do a zombie walk, which is we're all going to get made up as zombies and walk around campus and terrorize it. I'll have to see if that's allowed. We're also going to eat Jell-O brains. [The purpose of the activities are] just to try to get into the zombie mindset ... We might go over to the graveyard and lie down on the graves."

Zombie mindset? Zombies have no brains, no minds, thats why they eat brains, they lack intelligence. Just like the folks at PETA.

The folks in charge of PETA love all of God's creatures—with a few notable exceptions. Asked by BlackBook whether the animal-rights group opposes human cannibalism, Dan Mathews, the group's outrage-provoking vice president, quips, "No, as long as the person being eaten is Anna Wintour." It's far from the first time PETA has gone after the Vogue editor in chief, whom it accuses of doing more than anyone else to keep the wearing of animal pelts in style.


The aristocracy has a history of fascination with death and haute coutoure, they go together like art and suicide.

WHEN Victoria Beckham heard that the flamboyant fashion guru, design muse and socialite Isabella Blow had attempted to kill herself in 2005 by throwing herself off a bridge in London, she remarked, "What genius!"

After school, Blow lived in a squat in London and took cleaning jobs. Then she went off to New York, where Brian Ferry, an old friend - introduced her to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Blow hung out with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, who wanted to know her when he saw she was wearing one pink and one purple shoe.

But for all the name-dropping, there have been two main role models in Blow's life. The first is the Duchess of Windsor, of whom a stylised portrait hangs in her hallway. "Wallis was ugly, like me, but she made the best of herself. I wish I'd lured a king." The other is Blow's aforementioned flesh-eating grandmother, Vera Delves Broughton, a photographer, explorer and big-game fisher. Until recently she held the record for catching the biggest fish in European waters (a tuna, which took 16 hours to reel in).

As for the cannibalism, Blow explains, "She was once in Papua New Guinea. She had some dinner and said, 'God, that was delicious. What was it?' It turned out to be a poor local tribesman who had been grilled up. In her Who's Who hobbies, my grandmother listed 'Once a cannibal'. Ha, ha! I'm so like her. Very wild!"
Christianity itself is based upon the disturbing concepts of cannibalism of its God and the idea of the Living Dead; the resurrection.

Or was Pope Benedict biding his time? Last week he published an Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, Sacramentum Caritatis — The Sacrament of Love. In part it is a summary of the conclusions of the Synod of Catholic Bishops held in Rome in October 2005 — the start of the liturgical Year of the Eucharist promulgated by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II — and as such carries the authority of the whole Church. But it is also a theological tour de force showing the clarity and cogency that are particular to the writings of Joseph Ratzinger.

Sacramentum Caritatis opens with a lucid exposition of the Catholic belief on the Eucharist. The priest’s words of consecration during the Mass turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ — a transformation Pope Benedict describes as ‘a sort of “nuclear fission” which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world’.

This belief, with its connotations of cannibalism and human sacrifice, has always been hard to take. Even in Christ’s lifetime, many of his disciples, according to Saint John, regarded the idea as ‘intolerable ...and stopped going with him’. It was a defining bone of contention between Catholics at the time of the Reformation. Luther downgraded the change from transubstantiation (the bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ) to consubstantiation (bread and wine remain bread and wine but co-exist with the flesh and blood of Christ), and Calvin disbelieved it altogether.


The recent rash of zombie and gore films reflect a culture inundated with death. Senseless death, be it wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and through out the middle east, vast unimaginable death from starvation, mass rape and murder in Dafur, or disasters such as Tsunamis , hurricanes and earthquakes that slaughter thousands and decimate cities.

Our fears of death and the unknown are now amplified by our fear of pain. Gore movies are about pain. Blood and guts, yes but the Saw phenomena is about pain, torture and self inflicted pain.

It is Abu Gharib and Gitmo brought to the large screen. We know not what torture Arar Mehar went through, or those held in CIA black prisons. But when we watch Saw we get a gleaming, an inkling of what it feels like to be held incommunicado and tortured. For no good reason. What does the torturer want? Like those held in sensory deprivation in Gitmo, we do not know.

The horror film since its origins in the silent era was fear of the other, the monster. Today with the advent of the Gore film, the monster is us. We suffer the emotional plague of isolation and alienation in a capitalist culture out of our control and dashing headlong into oblivion.




See

Gothic Capitalism Redux

Jack the Ripper

Emotional Plague

Rape

Serial Murder


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Thursday, February 08, 2007

Abortion, Adoption, or Abandonment

While fetus fetishists like to claim that they are protecting the unborn, they forget the mother who gives birth.

And while they denounce abortion and promote adoption there is another alternative for those women whose upraising is such that it denies them sex education or teaches them abstinence through fear of sex.

It is called infanticide. In this case it was abandonment, but it could have ended tragically.

The mother of a newborn baby girl found abandoned in sub-zero temperatures in Saskatoon is a confused, isolated teenager with no family support, police say.

The 18-year-old abandoned her newborn in sub-zero temperatures on the back step of a house Saturday morning after giving birth through the night.

Saskatoon police described the mother as a student living on her own, who comes from "a very difficult background" and has no family in the city.

"You have a very confused 18-year-old girl, without support, without friends in town, and she felt isolated, I think that probably describes her attitude or confused state -- not knowing what to do, clearly not being in a position to care for a child," Staff Sgt. Kirby Harmon told reporters Tuesday.

It is clear to me that we need to have comprehensive sex education and family life education not as voluntary programs but as compulsory in public schools.

Cases like this cry for the licensing of people to be parents. Just because you can procreate does not mean you are suitable to be a parent as the thousands of cases of child abuse prove. We license cars, guns, doctors, pilots, lawyers, teachers, etc.

Parenting is not natural it is learned there is reason for the saying "it takes a village to raise a child", because prior to the rise of the nuclear family, it was the village or extended family; tribe, clan that raised children as a collective effort.

Nor should birth be forced on women as being natural, their fate due to biology. Not in this day and age of birth control. Even if we are still waiting for a male birth control pill after forty years.

But the same folks that oppose abortion as a choice, oppose sex education also oppose birth control and in Canada and the United States they are the dominant special interest lobby.

Which is why their anti-sex politics are an emotional plague that infected this poor woman and led her to be wracked by guilt. Guilt for having sex, for having the baby, for giving birth. And she disposed of her guilt on someone else's doorstep.


Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings

can master their sadistic destructiveness.

Wilhelm Reich, on Sigmund Freud's hope

See

Infanticide

Abortion

Sex education

Family

Emotional Plague


Wilhelm Reich

Feminizing the Proletariat

Kids Are Commodities



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