AN EXISTENTIAL CHRISTMAS MESSAGE

Oh Dear!...I made the mistake of watching an hour of commercial news and suchlike...7.30 Report, SBS News, Current Affair on local Aussie television, which is merely a distorted echo of the American perspective.

I watched for example a segment on Christmas gifts and about coloring-in books for Adults...like when we were 5 years old...seriously, it's all the rage!

Apparently these 'books' can help with that cool new buzzword : 'Meditation'.

According to the gushing Television reporter, it is just so-o Hip!

Would you like to know the best and most effective way to meditate, I mean apart from coloring-in books?

It is by Meditating....

Do it regularly, like for so many minutes everyday and then you won't need to buy over-priced, gold-leaf coloring-in books for Adults!

Gradually the sickening lack of awareness of our plight in the western material world, a complete lack of realization of the 'wrongheadedness' (terrible word but nothing else fits) of our Culture and that we are heading for calamitous times began to overwhelm me...

Hey! I've got an idea...why don't we ALL go out and buy ourselves an Apocalypse?

Or better yet, a Revolution...

And then I watched a long, obsequious report on Ted Cruz which didn't help my depression one iota...

It was a frothy, almost fawning report which questioned absolutely nothing about his policies except his quote about Carpet-bombing Isis.

This was just a tad too much for the Australian reporter, a quote which Cruz then qualified for the assembled press by saying, 'but he wouldn't bomb cities', which is absurd!

Show me one Western-occupied middle-eastern country which doesn't have bombed out cities, the result of Western bombs?

What was he thinking of doing then? Carpet-bombing the desert?

The report made good mention of the fact that Ted Cruz starts every meeting with a prayer and a tribute or offering to his 'mate' (OZ vernacular), Christ our Lord.

Apparently Presidential Republican contender Ted Cruz has a hot-line to heaven.

Christ is apparently with him at all times in a kind of visual and auditory hallucination...

this is similar no doubt, to the benighted hallucinatory vision which Dr Ben Carson of the Republicans has hanging in his Lounge at home i.e a portrait of himself the good Doctor, with his personal trainer and buddy, i.e Christ.

So please tell me Presidential hopefuls and TV evangelists, when did Christ ever preach on how to grab power and become President of anything?

Or when did he give a Sermon on the mount about how to be successful in business?

He didn't.

Source Credit:Raymond Balze, Purification of the Temple French, 1850s. Montauban, Musee Ingres

He overturned the trays in the Money-lenders temple!}

Like a real human being Christ despised Usury...

The Love of money he said, was the root of all Evil...!!!

In fact the orthodox Muslim still has that same stance towards Usury.

Charging exorbitant Interest rates by the Banks, in Iran for example, is illegal.

If Christ is our Lord, then who is GOD? Not our Lord obviously...and as for that so-called Holy Ghost?

Where the heck does he fit in and why is it a triangle and not a square or a circle? suffice it to say, I now feel more confused, and determined never to watch such effusive rubbish again.

Sigh...I felt like screaming at the screen : 'Don't you see?'

'Don't you realize that every celebration of our consumer culture is just bringing us that much closer to the final curtain call for Mankind?'

Meanwhile...every single species of Life on this Planet is already in serious and rapid decline...except maybe for the vultures?

And please don't bring up the Paris Climate Summit, as it was a huge amount of hot-air and methane from those elitist, entitled individuals, who themselves will probably never be personally impacted by Climate Change...

"We promise, that in about 5 years or so, we might look at starting to reduce some emissions by a certain percentage"...sure you do!!!

We all believe that, don't we???

After all, when has a Politician or Corporation ever lied to us?

It's like we still haven't realised that those stolen moments in the Sun, which we stole from third world countries in the 70's, 80's and early 90's were a unique bubble of prosperity which allowed us in the West to consume, exploit and pollute massive amounts of resources, far more, for our relative population sizes, than the rest of the seemingly slumbering World at that time, and all at the expense of the Third World.

Those days are fading fast...and prosperity for society collectively now sounds like Utopian idealism and an anachronism from the past.

The American Dream is fraying at the edges and our culture is looking increasingly desperate and debauched for everyone equally, all over the West.

Our Leaders, and this is all of them in the Western club, still don't have any answers!!! i.e Solutions.

You can hear it whenever they speak...they seriously don't have a clue, they are so 'out to Lunch', so out of touch with the conditions for the average Man or Woman in the Street.

Global, co-operative 'Solutions' are unfortunately something which our Leaders have not yet managed to stumble upon such as the concept of a Resource-Based-Economy...

Like the invasion of Cortez on the Sth American continent in 1519, giant galleon ships had not been invented yet in the Aztec civilization and to the Aztec people, these ships of the Spanish Armada were simply inconceivable, unfathomable, and so they were made largely invisible, by the limitations of their thinking, as just a blurry mass on the horizon.

When our illustrious Leaders speak today, it is always the same ole same ole...

In fact they do not even appear to understand the question...or the problem!

They preach and prattle on about how we need to increase the Gross Domestic Product, and stimulate more growth, or how we need to go and kill some people over there, or build giant walls here, or introduce some more cuts and austerity programs on Public Health and Education, whilst simultaneously handing out enormous 'Quantitative Easing' Christmas gifts of money to the 1%.

And they still have learned nothing from the Prohibition era of the roaring 20's and 30's...i.e that Prohibition still doesn't work!

It didn't work then, and it obviously doesn't work now...it only creates hydra-headed criminal cabals like Al Capone and the CIA and their cohorts whilst simultaneously creating a population of Privatized-Prison Slaves!

As for our enemies, and they are supposed to be everywhere, in the bushes, under our beds...apparently the art of communication is over.

Violence is how we now speak to our fellow humans on this earth.

When I was a child I learned that violence was the last resort of the least competent, and this view has never left me.

The problem is, violence is not reserved just for the wicked Terrorist.

We wear a thin veneer of civility as a persona, a mask...a facade obscuring a primitive, reptilian brain which can be easily manipulated into Fear.

This is a dangerous state of affairs; when a Reptilian mind has access to brutal military force and weaponry, and especially if he is unimpeachable...or somehow above the Law like a highly militarized Policeman.

Apparently in a paranoid Plutocracy such as America is, we are all guilty until proved innocent, potential suspects and therefore the entire population needs to be spied on and listened to, and violence, the violence of the State against, for example, Occupy Wall Street protesters and Black Lives Matter is now commonplace.

Our consumer Kulture and all of the excesses of the Past, which we took for granted as the norm in previous decades, it is all unraveling, coming to an end, and those days will not come again and are already becoming the exclusive preserve of the 1%.

Quite honestly these days I am not actually a big fan of Christmas.

I view it as a primitive, deluded mind-set, best exemplified in our materialistic culture, as the sickness that is celebrated on 'Black Friday', which says that we need to show and express our Love not with genuine emotions, hugs and warm kisses but with status symbols, plastic products and consumerist kitsch trash...which will break down in a few weeks and get tossed on the giant trash heap of western civilization so that we can do it all over again next financial year in a sick, viciously spiraling, cyclical obsession....sigh.