"fingers pointing to the moon"
Consider Baal - the Great Baal - and his father El. Last night it occurred to me that Baal was probably an anonymous blogger. That was before I knew of his father El. Now I am almost sure that it was El who blogged in anonymity and Moses, his first reader, was entirely taken in by what El carved on the stone tablets in that antepixelian era.
El had been messing with the minds of the sons of Shem for ages before Moses went up the mountain. And it would make sense that he was doing it anonymously and pseudonymously, blaming the most bizarre stuff on his pen name Yahweh. Since most of it was outre dominance schtick who could tell if he was kidding? Long before podcasting and vlogging the gods had flame casting and tablet logging.
The blood of the zealots has been thinned significantly over the millenia and today instead of wholesome sacrifice and idol worship, this is the kind of thing we are left with. And Quakers and Unitarians. The "good news" (if I may borrow the phrase) is that communism is on the run and the pure land sect of postmodernists, the "post-ironic Zizekians" cling earnestly to the early Derrida. Recently "profound interpreters of numinous phenomena and cagey hermeneuticians of phenomenal numina" were at work, and when I read them folks, it struck a chord… it struck a chord. That is the good news.
The corporation, the academy and the church have this in common: they are endowed with a will to live, a survival mechanism that is quite life-like. Dissent is stifled. If funding, profits, tuition, and tithes are the life blood of these institutions then anything that might interrupt the flow is quickly isolated and expelled or encysted.
The 21st century corporation, academy, and high church are institutional symbiotes, thriving together in a culture where necessity and possibility are so narrowed definitionally that love, altruism, and truth are second order concepts rather than biological imperatives.
That is the bad news.
Ever the ironist it behooves me to observe that the seeds of institutional destruction are sewn in that very symbiosis of kollege/kapital/kirche. Pesticide research funding increases. Non-hodgkins lymphoma increases. Budgets for doctoral programs in history nose-dive. Right wing christian dominionists increase their political influence, while neo-Victorians expand a global empire. Chaos theory is ascendant while the very number of the beast has declined.
It seems obvious that the seventies funding of post-modern "theory" soaked up cash that would otherwise have suported left activist academics. The navel gazing within the dominant christian sects detracts from a house cleaning that would engage the fundamentalists, and have the gay bashers and the child molesters thrown out in the street. The business/academic incest of the modern university drives quality out of production and human values out of workplace organization.
But…
Rock and roll never forgets.
