Free Americans Proclaiming Total Emancipation and Working Towards
Democracy.
American Satyricon - part 2
You can run, but you can't hide - what will you do?
By John Kaminski
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(See part 1 at http://www.rense.com/general42/amsyt.htm )
"Vivamus, dum licet esse."
("Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.")
- Petronius, Roman satirist, A.D. 27-66
� �� Petronius wrote the original "Satyricon," a scathing lampoon of
debauched Roman society that still intrigues readers today. The more
familiar reference of "Fellini Satyricon" derives from the 1969 movie by
the famous Italian director about the same subject.
� �� Petronius was adviser to the emperor Nero (the infamous fiddler) in
matters of� conspicuous consumption. A high society bon vivant, he was a
dilettante of all things luxurious, and known to turn a phrase without
regard to whom it might offend.
� �� Nero's court was notorious for its immorality and extravagance.
Everyone's primary goal was making lots of money. Life at court was
uncertain because Nero was capricious. Literature was used for flattery,
personal advancement, and destroying your opponents.
� �� Perhaps Petronius spoke out caustically once too often. In a court
intrigue, a rival's jealousy turned Nero against him, and he was forced
to commit suicide. However, before his death, he lampooned Nero in his
will and sent the emperor a copy.
� �� In Roman days, all it took to mete out capital punishment was for
the emperor to order those who offended him to off themselves. The
preferred formula was slit veins or proven poisons administered or
consumed in the comfort of a hot bath. The big sleep, Roman style.
� �� It seems incredulous to us now in our synthetic age that anyone
would accept this fate and actually do the deed as ordered. Most of us
fail to remember that two thousand years ago, Rome WAS the world, the
entirety of every civilized portion of it, and to think of fleeing the
emperor's command was as futile as thinking of escaping Ashcroft's
military tribunals or howling that you have a right to a lawyer when you
no longer do.
� �� Echoing the same outspoken fears as Petronius, many questions I've
received lately come from people fearful of freely speaking their minds,
and yearning to flee these United States to escape this integrity-free
zone that America has become. At least in matters of unchecked spending
and truth telling, the Bush White House is not unlike Nero's court.
� �� As our cities disintegrate into crime and chaos and the government
eliminates many of the freedoms we have become accustomed to enjoying,
those with sensitivity are checking out - and bolting to - idyllic
venues with less fear of how the hysterical propaganda known as the
Patriot Act is turning America into a new Soviet Union.
� �� But as in the days of Petronius, there are plenty of places you can
run to, but almost nowhere you can really hide.
� �� Still, judging by my e-mails, many enterprising expatriates seem
content and successful. I hear from Starguy, living the jungle high life
on the Magic River in Malaysia, revelling in the availability of
multicolored women and blissful aromatics; from the world-wise Ponz,
doing his Paul Revere thing from an exquisite beach near Phuket on the
sumptuous coast of the Andaman Sea; from a Canadian refugee firing off
insightful essays from his unusual sanctuary in mysterious Tashkent; and
from a couple of British escapees who set up their paradise gained at a
beach house in Kerala complete with masseuse and cook.
� �� There are definitely delicious niches to be found in out-of-the-way
places around the world: teaching tennis in downtown Hong Kong, tutoring
English in Guangdoc province; breaking bread among the friendly farmers
of Rondonia.
� �� Some have truly found their paradises, however temporarily; others,
no matter where they have gone, still look over their shoulders, as we
do here in America, constantly paranoid about seeing stressful shadows
of the emperor's long and irrational arm.
� �� Like the fishing guide I know in Patagonia, who told me a decade ago
about the curious influx of New York Jews. More recent news brings the
dispatch that Israeli commandoes have been sighted on a pristine fjord
among the snow-capped mountains of southern Chile.
� �� Or the couple from New Jersey who set up shop in remote Guatemala
and keep seeing their neighbors winding up dead in the dirt. Or the
bureaucrat pushing paper in the filthy cauldron of the Azeris, wondering
when the whole scene will collapse and oil wells
go up in flames. Or practitioners of permaculture on the shores of
British Columbia wondering about those black helicopters beyond the next
mountain range.
� �� All made their escape; all still look over their shoulders for the
ominous shadow of the emperor. I envy these folks their adventures, but
not their shadows, which are similar to the ones that frighten us here.
� �� Some travelers in search of new vistas and safer harbors, however,
hear the echoes of Emerson, and the questions of why we are traveling
and what road we are on.
� �� The 19th century American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson saw only
frustration and futility in traveling because he perceived "the
indifference of places" and the ultimate irrelevance of new vistas.
� �� "Traveling is a fool's paradise ... " he wrote. "I pack my trunk,
embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and
there besides me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
identical, that I fled from."
� �� And where your paradise dwells also resides your question: what are
you running from, or to? And, is what you found more relevant than what
you left behind?
� �� In the case of America 2003, you are undoubtedly running from the
capricious oppression that kills people simply because they are in the
way of some larger, ugly scheme. There is no real redress of grievances
in America anymore, or at least not without huge amounts of money. But
is abandoning the struggle for freedom really realistic, or even
beneficial, or are you just trading one set of oppressions for another?
Especially since it's an illusion that you can actually get away from
the ubiquitous toxin that the American capitalist consumption machine
has become?
� �� With satellites and computerized bank records, with missiles that
reach every corner of the world and money-hungry natives who can be paid
to do anything, do you really think there is any place to safely hide on
this shrinking sphere called Earth? Answer? Not for very long.
� �� Putting large distances between yourself and your oppressor is a
proven way of improving your own safety.� Then, of course, there are
those who don't escape geographically, but find their way to safer
havens through more mental methods of seeing what's going on, by
immersing themselves in traditional dogma, investigating UFOs, or
following the instructions of mass market manufactured angels.
� �� Inner escapees rather than outer exiles. Candidates for lamaseries,
or, in more extreme cases, pursuers of passing comets wearing new
sneakers. Those who think the world is all in your mind.
� �� All religions are really posited on the Buddhist model, which
convinces its adherents that a special somewhere else is really more
important than the actual here and now. Although Buddhism isn't the
oldest of the world's extant religions, it nevertheless encapsulates the
attitude of all of them that this world is to be endured, but there is a
better place to strive for, even if you need an ikonic object like Jesus
to focus on.
� �� The Buddha we know (Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha Sakyamuni who
lived c. 550 B.C.) taught that ignorance produces desire, unsatisfied
desire is the cause of life, and life results in old age, disease and
death, i.e., suffering. To overcome suffering, therefore, it is
necessary to escape the cycle of life and death; to escape the cycle of
life and death, it is necessary to extinguish desire; and to extinguish
desire, it is necessary to destroy ignorance.
� �� All too often the magic formula many religious people use involves
denigrating someone else as their designated bad guys, infidels, or
cattle.
� �� I think that someplace or other in most of the holy books (although
the only place I'm certain of it is in the works of Mohammed - peace be
upon him) is a recommendation that says other religions unfamiliar to
you should be respected. Even Krishna says it: all who pray to any god
also pray to him.
� �� Of course, the Western religions that have come down to us have
pretty much lost that flavor, as a wrathful Jehovah bellows out his
murderous commands that those who don't follow him are no better than
grasshoppers (check the popular lists of Jewish names for non-Jews for
the definitive glossary in this matter).
� �� Throughout the world religious elitism remains one of the chief
causes of murder, mayhem and hatred, even if only used as a pretext for
criminal plunder and is not a doctrinal order, as is so often the case
with American evangelicals in foreign countries. Fear of the stranger is
not relieved by these vicious religious codes so pornographically
articulated in the Judeo-Christian Old Testament (also known as the
Pentateuch and the Torah), and the killing continues unabated.
� �� Among the enervated rhetoric I hear so often during our troubled
times is a noticeable increase in this hateful religious condescension.
One only need focus on Belfast, or Ahmedabad, or Ramallah to understand
my point. A slight difference in language of the divine description or
skin pigmentation is all that is needed to trigger shouts to murder the
dirty stranger, even though the actual customs of the enemies are not
really very different .
� �� The Jews, of course, are everyone's top target for vilification, and
justifiably so for their continuing torture and extermination of the
hapless Palestinians (which for a half century has been the world's most
egregious atrocity), their perverting of the governments and media of
countries not their own, and the growing realization that Jewish
influences have fundamentally altered the character of all societies in
which they have achieved a significant foothold.
� �� The most regrettable aspect of criticism about the Jews, however, is
that most of it comes from other denominations whose own histories are
not exactly spotless when it comes to human decency and open-mindedness.
� �� Jewish depredations in the areas of media and government cannot be
successfully exposed by those espousing other creeds that may only
replace one brand of social manipulation and spiritual coercion with
another.
� �� The difference is that Jews don't practice what they preach, as is
evidenced in the internal policies of Israel, which are racist in the
extreme, contrasted with practices of diversity they champion in other
countries. What is becoming obvious in the world is that Jews preach
assimilation of minorities in other countries but strictly resist such
notions in their own.
� �� One other significant Jewish manifestation in other countries in
recent years has been the appearance of "hate" laws. In many countries
in Europe, it is a crime to question the official version of the Nazi
Holocaust. Why has this clear violation of freedom of speech been
permitted?
� �� If Holocaust deniers can't prove what they say, let them be exposed
and ridiculed in the
court of consensual public opinion. Don't prevent them from speaking
their pieces.
� �� Preventing anyone from speaking about anything only reveals that
those making such restrictive laws definitely have something to hide,
which is exactly the case with their Jews and their pathological passion
to hide in their own victimhood as a ruse to conceal their exploitation
of others.
� �� So those who seek to escape from the venality and bestiality of our
present version of petro politics should stand forewarned that by
escaping into religious dogma they run the risk of becoming part of the
very problem they wish to flee.
� �� Just as those who flee to foreign lands in search of Shangri-la may
encounter something far worse than they might run across in their
present, depressed neighborhoods where neighbors will snitch on each
other for money.
� �� I myself have need for neither of these crutches, agreeing with
Emerson that traveling long distances to romantic destinations only
takes us further away from ourselves and our loved ones, and adopting
esoteric spiritual practices only takes us further away from the
troubled, three-dimensional world right in front of our eyes that
desperately needs our compassionate and intelligent help.
� �� One of the great hoaxes of history is that people need holy men to
guide them to do what is right. All holy men really do is make money off
people's real fears and provide their sacred sanctions to a demonic
kaleidoscope of crimes.
� �� This so-called need for spiritual guidance and how humans are
essentially spiritual beings reminds me of the recent story from Africa
in which a herd of passing elephants freed a collection of antelopes
imprisoned in a corral by local farmers who planned on having them for
dinner.
� � All animals have compassion as long as they're not hungry. Hungry
animals necessarily kill for food. It's nature's way of maintaining her
balance. But kindness and justice are not necessarily human traits. We
are only animals trying to make our way through this short journey
called life, and we don't want to hurt anybody if we don't have to. Not
unless we've been taught to.
� �� People intrepid and ingenious enough to manage to wander around the
world in search of their own nirvanas, or those motivated to seek more
resonant explanations of why we are all passing through this existence
at this time, are both exactly who we all need providing input in this
frightful era in American history, when bribery has replaced honesty and
kids grow up seeking the big score rather than trying to build rewarding
and purposeful lives. We need that questing honesty to repopularize
morality and compassion in this current culture of pious thieves and
hypocritical holy men.
� �� So, for those out there on foreign beaches or seeking out new
dimensions with either ecstatic mushrooms or eloquent epistles to the
Ephesians, this is a call to come home, to come back to earth, to return
to the here and now and fight for what is honest and good. The people of
Earth simply can't afford to have their best and brightest wandering off
disillusioned in forlorn forests or lost in imaginary battles with
ancient gods of questionable intent.
� �� Come home soon. We need you here now.
======================================================================
� �� John Kaminski is the author of "America's Autopsy Report," a
collection of his Internet essays. To order a copy, click
http://www.johnkaminski.com/
� �� If you can't afford a copy, you can find your to archives of most of
Kaminski's essays by clicking here:
http://www.rudemacedon.ca/kaminski/kam-index.html
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