Yes, it made me sad, especially the comments about women who are getting 'dumped out' of the workforce. Such adds to my sense of urgency regarding The Temple. A major part of our work is about creating a livelihood for our Sisters and other 'women in need'. I do torment myself about that 'every other day' as I said to one Sister just this morning.
And at the same time I need to own my Gratitude for my life at this moment. It is better than it has ever been; a safe and comfortable place to live, a steady income that provides what I need, the love and companionship of two wonderful women, and, most of all, a True and Noble Purpose, which is I honestly believe what all of the proceeding issues from.
My life had been full of pain and difficulty, but such has prepared me for the harsh times now upon us. I do my best to stay focused and not allow my impatience to distract me – and fail all too often.
That Sister I was IMing with this morning, she is a Goddess worshiping Witch in Istanbul, a tough life at the very least. We have known each other for close to two years. We were talking of 'things happening in The Goddess Good Time' and how that can summon moments of Madness and yet teach Wisdom and Patience. She told me how she is now 'more connected to Goddess' for her having to wait until we can bring her and her daughter here to The High Desert.
It is you, my Sisters, who give me my strength to keep going. And Goddess keeps bring you to my door, so I must have Faith and persevere.
~I've posted this unfinished piece called “Alliance” over on E Speaks. It's the one that I've been going fucking batshit over for two months now, more batshit than I usually am and that's pretty fucking batshit, ya know.
There are two other unfinished pieces that are also tormenting me, but “Alliance” is the one that's really fucking with my head. The concept sat for nearly half a year, a collection of hand written notes. Then, in the beginning of August, it suddenly burst out of me onto the page and seemed to be racing toward the finish line.
But then I had a bunch of IRL stuff come up that needed my attention and the thing stopped dead. What is presently posted on E Speaks is all that made it to the page. And I cannot seem to get going again.
It's driving me fucking nuts. This thing – and the other two – are like fucking ghosts. They whisper tantalizing details from a dark corner or just behind me, but when look right at them, the vanish.
I suppose writing about one's future self in the third person would make anyone crazy. And, to complicate matters, materiel for The Imperium has been pouring out of my head like Niagara Falls...and you know where that leads. lol
"So, GL, based upon your thesis, 'reproductive violence' is, in essence, The Male's 'default position'. I'd say that strongly validates the more radical Feminist thinking regarding The Male.
Within such a 'naturalist' paradigm as you start out with, a fetus is merely a parasite The Female can dispose of at her choice. Or even kill after its birth. Mothers of many species even eat their young if food is scarce.
And within the context of Evolutionary Psycho-Biology as outlined by you, there is no 'morality'. That's just a 'theological coat of paint' you slap on once you started talking about The Female, which is classic Male Privilege doublespeak; “We are meant to brutes by Nature, that makes us Men, but Women must always Submit and be Moral and think of The Greater Good.”
Therefore in my model of the world, the first two thirds of this lil essay makes a pretty good evolutionary case of the outbreeding of The Male and the last third psycho-culturally confirms it. My Feminist thinking is mighty radical too, mano."
"Whenever you start feeling any 'shame' over getting Food Stamps, just remember TARP and the scores of seven figure bonuses that have been, and still are, being paid out of that money to the cocksuckers that crashed the fucking thing in the first place. You can bet all your fucking Food Stamps that those sons-of-bitches not only have zero shame over that, but in fact feel smugly entitled to every fucking penny of it." ~Yours Truly...to a friend who is struggling to get by
Jill Johnston, a longtime cultural critic for The Village Voice whose daring, experimental prose style mirrored the avant-garde art she covered and whose book “Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution” spearheaded the lesbian separatist movement of the early 1970s, died in Hartford on Saturday. She was 81 and lived in Sharon, Conn.
The cause was a stroke, her spouse, Ingrid Nyeboe, said.
Ms. Johnston started out as a dance critic, but in the pages of The Voice, which hired her in 1959, she embraced the avant-garde as a whole, including happenings and multimedia events.
“I had a forum obviously set up for covering or perpetrating all manner of outrage,” she wrote in a biographical statement on her Web site, jilljohnston.com.
In the early 1970s she began championing the cause of lesbian feminism, arguing in “Lesbian Nation” (1973) for a complete break with men and with male-dominated capitalist institutions. She defined female relations with the opposite sex as a form of collaboration.
“Once I understood the feminist doctrines, a lesbian separatist position seemed the commonsensical position, especially since, conveniently, I was an L-person,” she told The Gay and Lesbian Review in 2006. “Women wanted to remove their support from men, the ‘enemy’ in a movement for reform, power and self-determination.”
At a debate on feminism at Town Hall in Manhattan in 1971, with Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos of the National Organization for Women sharing the platform with Norman Mailer, the moderator, and with a good number of the New York intelligentsia in attendance, she caused one of the great scandals of the period. [Nebs: Which in retrospect seems awfully tame.]
After reciting a feminist-lesbian poetic manifesto and announcing that “all women are lesbians except those that don’t know it yet,” Ms. Johnston was joined onstage by two women. The three, all friends, began kissing and hugging ardently, upright at first but soon rolling on the floor.
Mailer, appalled, begged the women to stop. “Come on, Jill, be a lady,” he sputtered.
The filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker captured the event in the documentary “Town Bloody Hall,” released in 1979. Mary V. Dearborn, in her biography of Mailer, called the evening “surely one of the most singular intellectual events of the time, and a landmark in the emergence of feminism as a major force.”
Ms. Johnston continued to write on the arts but took a strong political line with a marked psychoanalytic slant evident in “Jasper Johns: Privileged Information” (1996), which explored the artist’s works as a series of evasions and subterfuges rooted in conflict about his homosexuality, and in the two volumes of her memoirs: “Mother Bound” (1983) and “Paper Daughter” (1985), both of them subtitled “Autobiography in Search of a Father.”
Jill Johnston was born on May 17, 1929, in London and taken to the United States as an infant by her mother, Olive Crowe, after her father abandoned them both. She was reared by a grandmother in Little Neck, on Long Island.
Throughout her childhood she believed that her parents had divorced, but in 1950, when The New York Times ran a short obituary about her father, an English bell maker named Cyril F. Johnston, she learned the truth.
Her mother informed her that she and Johnston had never married. A lifelong fascination with this absent figure, whose company, Gillett & Johnston, supplied bells and carillons to churches and cathedrals all over the world, motivated her to write “England’s Child: The Carillon and the Casting of Big Bells” (2008), a biography of her father and a history of bell making.
After earning a bachelor’s degree from Tufts in 1951 and studying dance at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, she began writing for The Dance Observer. She was soon hired by the fledgling Voice to write the weekly column Dance Journal, which ran until the mid-1970s.
The revolutionary currents of the time found expression in her increasingly wayward Voice column, which soon took in all aspects of the counterculture and by the late 1960s had become a freewheeling series of dispatches about her adventures in the arts and on the road.
“Now I was a chronicler of my own life, by 60s standards perhaps not too egregiously adventurous and experimental, but in a newspaper in full public view, in the most fractured Dada style of work I had admired as a critic — a rather wild spectacle in those woolly times,” she wrote on her Web site.
She developed a singular prose style — what the writer Pattrice Jones, writing in the Web magazine LesbiaNation.com [defunct] in 1999, called “part Gertrude Stein, part E.E. Cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown for good measure.”
One 1964 column began: “Fluxus flapdoodle. Fluxus concert 1964. Donald Duck meets the Flying Tigers. Why should anyone notice the shape of a watch at the moment of looking at the time?”
Ms. Johnston would soon shed this style and her amorphous politics, which she described in “Lesbian Nation” as her “east west flower child beat hip psychedelic paradise now love peace do your own thing approach to the revolution.”
In 1969, members of the Gay Liberation Front, correctly intuiting that the unidentified companion on her weekly adventures, chronicled in The Voice, was a woman, invited her to a meeting. Her political conversion began, and “Lesbian Nation” was published in 1973.
Her marriage to Richard Lanham in 1958 ended in divorce six years later. Besides her spouse, Ms. Nyeboe, whom she married in Denmark in 1993 and in Connecticut last year, she is survived by her two children, Richard Lanham and Winifred Lanham, and four grandchildren.
Since the 1980s Ms. Johnston often wrote for Art in America and The New York Times Book Review. She also wrote other books, including “At Sea on Land: Extreme Politics” (2005).
Although she later said that she regarded “Lesbian Nation” as “a period piece,” Ms. Johnston held fast to her version of feminism and reaffirmed it in “Admission Accomplished”(1998): “The centrality of the lesbian position to feminist revolution — wildly unrealistic or downright mad, as it still seems to most women everywhere — continues to ring true and right.”
“Great republics do not last. Vast wealth and power corrupt. It incites dangerous ambitions and will bring the republic down. It will run down the Congress and crush the people’s voice. This has been a strange panic. It’s like a blight, a paralysis, in which a mighty machine has slipped its belt, and is still running and accomplishing nothing. A creepy and awful stillness has given us an atmosphere of apprehension. The phrase ‘lay-off’ has become common. The laying off of two and three thousand men has has become familiar. But there’s a far greater and disastrous laying off all over this land – the discharging of one out of three employees in all the humble and small shops and industries across America. A blight has fallen upon us. And the monarchy of the rich and the powerful is author of it.” ~Mark Twain
~First, a basic scientific fact: the entire Universe is made up Energy, every fucking piece of it. So saying we face a 'energy crisis' any time in the next billion years or so is outright horseshit.
What we actually face is a 'systems management crisis' with two major components. A: over population and B: operating within a closed resource system aka Planet Earth. In simple terms, too many people and not enough resources where said people happen to live.
Which brings me to my mantra, “Population Down/ Industry Up”, the latter being shorthand for 'all heavy industry off world'. That paradigm is really our only path to survival as a species. [Whether such is warranted is the subject of another discussion.]
What I am addressing here are The Doomers, who reject any such notions of the above nature with both contempt and vehemence. They are not End Timers in the classic sense, like The Rapturites and The Twenty Twelvers. Those types want Death and The End of The World. Their motivations are much like the Addict and the Alcoholic; they 'want the pain to end' and do not care who suffers in the process.
Doomers on the other hand are essentially people who just want Modern Technological Civilization to end. Generally speaking, their high profile spokespersons are educated white males [So what else is new?] who have never been able to truly adapt to Modern Technological Civilization. In that, I am much like them, being an educated white male and seeing that significant portions of said civilization are insane and destructive.
Where I part ways with them is that I do not blame the technologies created by civilization for its basic ills, but rather place responsibility upon its fundamental psycho-social underpinnings, which are grounded in Masculine Egotism aka Patriarchy.
Let me state clearly that I do not believe Masculine Egotism to be inherently evil, though it can certainly manifest in that fashion. It is simply an expression of male psycho-biology and has actually been key to creation of this civilization, the irrepressible male drive to Become. And, like certain childhood behaviors which served us well as children, now that we are passing through our species adolescence with its increasing capacity for large scale destruction, that behavior not only no longer serves, but could be the death of us all.
But most Doomers are steeped in Masculine Egotism. Jim Kunstler and John Michael Greer, two of the most important Doomers, both advocate a return to a semi-medieval social order that would make men essential once again. And as such reveal fully from where their unabashed hatred of Modern Technological Civilization truly originates. Such a civilization has no real need of males; it would actually be better off without them.
We must grant that contemplating ones own extinction, even on such an esoteric level as the last sentence, is an uncomfortable thing. But true wisdom means taking ones own ego out of the equation. In my own experience and observations, that is where most humans, of either gender, fail at achieving such an outcome and withdraw to back to 'safe' territory.
We humans tend to operate within an envelope of emotional safety, often in contradiction to our own intellectual observations. If something makes us genuinely uncomfortable, we rationalize our way around it, through, or over it. That process can range from blowing off simple life style change like giving up a favorite food that is bad for us [”Eh, what could it hurt?”] all the way to the ideological justification of active genocide [”The Jews are responsible for my failure as an artist.”].
I personally understand that, being a diabetic who loves cake and a writer whose substance abuse damaged his art much more than his insane family, though Goddess knows they tried their damnedest. The latter was particularly tough to swallow. We love to 'blame someone else' for our shortcomings, especially when they are those who rejected us when we sought their acceptance. 'If only' is so often spoken.
Very recently James Kunstler noted that he had voted for Barack Obama and was now 'disappointed'. This is a clear example of operating from within the aforementioned 'envelope of emotional safety'. Though Jimmy has written and spoken extensively upon his firm belief that the paradigm of 'peak resources' – specifically oil – is going to take Modern Technological Civilization over the brink of catastrophe, when push comes to shove, he tried to vote his way out of that.
For all his tough talk, Jimmy is still a bourgeois urban intellectual at his core and I personally don't think he has the stuff to really face the world he claims is nigh.
I call him 'Jimmy' because that is how I knew him as an assistant camp councilor nearly half a century ago. He was a pudgy adolescent [about fifteen I'd say], sensitive, Jewish and intellectually precocious, which back then was read as 'fag'. [still is in many places] Even though I was not even eleven, I could see how much he wanted to be accepted by the older councilors, men in their early to mid twenties, masculine, athletic, Gentile.
America was still a Golden Nation, prosperous, confident – though the Cuban Missile Crisis had scared us – and in the last summer of JFK's Camelot. Those older councilors were very much what I call True Men. That some of them were alcoholic brutes and degenerates was not so apparent, though I later discovered that quite intimately.
That last summer I had already entered puberty and, while I too had been pudgy, sensitive and intellectually precocious, for whatever reasons, I was far more cynical than Jimmy seemed to be. By then I knew that Violence was an essential component of Masculinity. I suspect that while Jimmy has discovered that by now, he has never truly accepted that in his heart.
And so, somewhere inside, he still tries to earn the respect of those long dead True Men of his youth by advocating a world were they would once again be essential. I consider his work a series of 'love letters' to them, albeit cloaked in genuinely legitimate concerns, many of which I also share.
But while Kunstler may be a 'romantic' Doomer, Greer has turned out to be an Evil one.
For quite a while I though of Greer as being the more reasonable of the two. Kunstler's words are scathing and razor edged. His contempt springs off of the page like a rabid dog. Greer, on the other hand, though obviously sharing Kunstler's feelings and opinions, speaks in far more measured tones, almost Olympian in their detachment.
But then he crossed a line. I do not think anyone else noticed, but it struck me in the face like a blow.
In his June 9th, 2010 post, Waiting for the Millen- nium/Part One: Peak Oil Goes Mainstream, he speaks with great insight and eloquence about 'cultural myths' – read 'envelopes of emotional safety' – and how a number of them are specific to Modern Technological Civilization. But I had noticed a trend to disparage what he called 'revitalization movements' and to do so with a hint of desperation.
'Revitalization movement' is the label he applies to any and all types of solutions that could possible prevent the socio-economic collapse that both he and Kunstler firmly insist is coming, no matter what. But then he crossed that line.
Now, for those who are not metaphysically inclined, what he did may seem silly, but that is not the point. Greer is an Archdruid after all and a serious believer in the meta- physically, so what he advocated was, in his model of the world, quite real.
I quote him here:
“For the moment, though, I want to pass on the counter -spell against incantatory thinking that I mentioned at the conclusion of last week’s post. Like the magic spells in fairy tales, it comes with a taboo that limits what you can do with it. The taboo is this: you can use it to guard yourself from incantations, if you think about it and understand it, and you can pass it on to someone else who’s ready to receive and understand it. If you give it to someone who’s not willing to accept it, though, it will cause exactly the flight into incantation and fantasy it’s meant to prevent. Here it is:
There is no brighter future ahead.
Keep it secret; keep it safe.”
That is a fucking Evil Meme at the very least and pure Black Majick at the very worst. In his need to bring about his Desired Outcome, he has Invoked Darkness and Disaster and all the Death and Pain that would surely follow. But this is the essence of Masculine Egotism. The Male must be right even at the cost of bringing down endless and unimaginable suffering upon the lives of billions. Nothing must be allowed to disrupt his little ego maniac empire.
I can see the path that led him there, and that is largely 'paved with good intentions', and how such transformed him into a vest pocket version of Sauron. I can see it because it is a course that I worry about taking myself. Power is the most sublime addiction and Greer has obviously succumbed to it, though the taste he has gotten is actually still quite small. But already his Masculine Egot drinks deeply of its well.
And it is Masculine Egotism, not Modern Technology, that our species must eschew if we hope to survive. The semi-medieval societies these males and their kind seek to establish is as much an evolutionary dead end as any Father/God theocracy. And would be just as brutal and mean-spirited...
And so I Swear by The Ten Thousand Names of The Goddess that I will do all in my power to prevent either of those from manifesting.
Now let me propose a 'counterspell' for the Archdruid's monstrous Invocation, one uttered by a far better man than I:
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darksumomo posted in The Recession. It got me thinking of course; that's my demographic.
