The News Thing, a boat of lost souls, and the cross

This is me, ranting. Bat crazy ranting. Those who want to avoid Bat Crazy ranting, avoid this one, come back tomorrow and hear about super-heroes punching each other in their under-wear. 🙂

I don’t really do… the news thing.

I mean the major stuff I keep abreast of, if the president and congress are trying to sell first borns to big business, etc. But the 24 hour, FOX/CNN/SS constant “thought police, be afraid, believe, color coded terror, be afraid”… not really my bag.

You tell me something one time a day, that’s news. You tell me something 72 times a day, the same thing, 3 times an hour, that is not about news, that is about programming. That is about conditioning. That is about terror.

That is about you, the media, in ways deep and dreadful and not at all healthy, trying to touch me.

I watch people, sit in front their tv god… constantly just soaking up and regurgitating another man’s hate.

Older women in my family, god love women, but they are like sponges for the dreams of madmen, raised on serialized entertainment, on soap operas, so news and talk shows are just more soap operas to them. Idiocy is just more entertainment to them. And they will open up their mouths and parrot out of their mouths whatever is on television… without questioning.

“Oh isn’t it good we’re invading Libya” one recently said to me, when this nation (under God?) was committing yet another coup in a sovereign nation.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Cause of all the bad things the leader has done to his people.”

“Do you mean Gaddafi, who was supporting the civil rights movement in this country, and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, when the American government wouldn’t let great quantities of the population drink out of faucets or use a bathroom, and was siccing dogs on marchers, and bombing churches and lynching Black children? That Gaddafi?”

Needless to say I’m really popular at family reunions.

It’s just amazing to me, how few people in America, think. Not Black people, or White people, or Brown people, or Yellow people, but any people… think, beyond what the idiot box tells them.

Oh it is to be wept at, how all you victims of Rome, so gleefully are turned into victimizers.

Here’s the thing with me. You have to earn the moral high ground.

YOU HAVE TO EARN the moral high ground.

Be you a man, or a nation, you have to earn the moral high ground.

America is forever taking the moral high ground. And no country, in the history of this world, is less suited to walk that walk. America began as a terrorist nation, and America grew fat through fostering a level of inhumanity and terror, that no Iraq or Iran or Cuba or Korea or Russia or Libya, has ever come close to.

And the thing about America, is her present shows no sign of having repented of her past.

America has never stopped being a terrorist nation. It’s her one, last great product.

So yeah when the military industrial complex, pulls the strings for the 24hour propaganda show we call CNN or Fox, etc… I’m not really big, on goose stepping along.

I guess because I have a long memory, and I potentially can forgive, but I will never forget and I will never cheer you into a position to do it again. To anyone.

Now you, the tides of war, can come through me, or you can try to walk over me, but you’ll never reach your goal with me.

It’s the same reason I’ll never be a Christian as practiced in America. I have no particular issue with Christianity, I think the ideology is grand, however in practice especially in America it has been an abomination in the eyes of God.

That’s not a dig, and it’s not an insult, it is however a fact.

From the Witch trials on. The odious form of Slavery that took place in this nation, the most depraved the world has ever seen, happened not despite Christianity. It reached it’s peak of evil BECAUSE of how Christianity was practiced in this country.

Slavery, in the vile form practiced in the US flourished… because of Christianity.

That’s a hell of a thing for anyone to say, I know it… and I take no pleasure in the saying.

More hell still, because it’s the truest thing you’ll ever hear anybody tell you.

I have seen the torture devices. I have seen your abominations. I have seen ships with names like HOPE, and CHARITY, and GRACE (all we need is one named OPERATION FREEDOM), loaded down with tortured men, women, and children. I have seen the machinations of righteous men and women. Shielding their abominations under the name of Christ and god.

And I have seen one more thing, that we are our fathers even onto the 7th generation, and crimes not grappled with, not resolved… are repeated: there or there or there.

Christianity as practiced in this country, has more of Rome in it, than of Christ, and this country has the crucifixions to prove it. The cross itself, having nothing to do with a Christ, being a Roman symbol long before any such messianic birth or death, a roman symbol of power, and dominance, and torture. The devil going up and down, and to and fro.

How does a person wear a cross and not know that? Not think one minute, of one hour, of one day, of the millions upon millions who died screaming their guts out on that most sacred torture device of Rome… on the cross.

That cross.

Think about it, logically for a second. Who would carry around an idol, a symbol of a lynched man except the lyncher. Much the way lynchers in America would cut trophies from the bodies of their victims to wear around their neck.

Such… Christian people. Such, righteous people. God forbid you accuse anyone else in this world of terror.

So to, who would wear a symbol of a crucifixion around their neck, except the crucifier? For one second, think, actually think, about the dogma, the ritual that Christians do, that has nothing of Christianity in it… but everything of Rome, even onto the forsaking of the Sabbath.

I honestly don’t care what people believe.

But I do care that your choice of good or evil be informed. Whatever you choose to believe, make it an informed choice.

It’s not evil men that worry me.

It’s the masses that cheer them as they go marching by, too busy to make a choice not handed to them. The careless masses are the engine without which, the dreams of evil men… could not fly.

Try an examined choice.

I’ve done that, and I’ve found I can’t wear lynched or crucified men or the symbols of their suffering around my neck, I can’t bend my knee to bloody priests, and I can’t follow a nation of terror.

But I’m wacky that way, your examined choice may be different.

That’s been my news for today.

Cheery son of a gun, aren’t I?

But it’s past now, my mad fit of absinthe and peyote, it comes only rarely, when the spirit moves.

Perhaps even when the spirit needs,

For a man, supposedly shorn of faith, I do believe in fate.

I needed to speak.

Perhaps becomes someone needed to listen.

Who knows.

Wild is the world, and occasionally wonderful.

But the mad compulsion has left me, until the next blue moon.

Which is fitting, because I find the truth you don’t have to repeat as often as lies. If a lie, it will touch you not, without a constant barrage, and you will be unmoved by my mad ramblings.

But if the truth, it lived in you long before you read these words, and my words simply, like a stone waiting for a sculptor… revealed it.

If the truth you will know it. And if a lie you will know it.

And how you make of that news, something new…. well, who knows, the world is wild and wonderful… his miracles to perform. 🙂

A new old bluesman ditty

I get reflective sometimes on Friday, sometimes I even get creative. Hence the following work in progress ditty I came up with. It’s pretty much done to a soft folksy, bluesy wail. Some forced rhymes in there, but it get’s the job done. 🙂 Enjoy…

And how did you fall
yeahhhh
so uh
far from grace
and what did you lose
yeahhh
In this
final race
—from The Last Bluesman

So this old blues man, that I knew by sight
he prayed every day,
and his roof caved in one night
killing his wife Betsy
the light of his life.

And this old man prayed
for his child to grow well
but following sin
she went spiraling through
the gates of hell

And this old man prayed
for his health to hold
but the doctor told
cancer would keep him
from getting that old

And still he prayed
to the good of god

and that belief in god
I couldn’t see how, he could give
givin the tragedies
through which he was, tasked to live

So I asked him straight out
in the house in which he boarded
“how keep you faith,
when it isn’t rewarded?”

And he looked at me
as if I
told a joke
He pulled on the cigarette
and uh
had a good smoke

then he said to me
with a
voice past late

“little boy blue,
how else
be it faith?”

—HT

Sylvia Anderson the heart of SPACE 1999

“That’s the purpose of that… ‘Ghost in the Machine’ as it were, that sort of popped up from time to time, where things would correct themselves, [as an example]the journey through the Black Sun [episode]. There was something guiding them. We didn’t put a name to it but it was there and it came, I think, full circle [with the episode THE TESTAMENT OF ARKADIA]. Although we didn’t know it at the time, this would be the final episode of that kind of SPACE 1999. And what it was, was a question of identity. A question of belief.”

—Johnny Byrne, Main Writer, Speaking on the season 1 finale, TESTAMENT OF ARKADIA

Just got done watching the Sylvia Anderson interview on the special features disk of the SPACE 1999 SEASON 1 Bluray (Sylvia Anderson being the Co-creator and Producer of SPACE 1999). It’s a must listen. You realize exactly how right her instincts were, and what she brought to the show. Particularly this is born out by the difference in the quality of the show from Season 1 when she was there as producer fighting for it to season 2 when she was no longer with the show.

Among the things Ms. Anderson discusses in the interview is that she didn’t feel Martin Landau or Barbara Bain were right for the show. And it’s a viewpoint I can understand. While I think they work in the roles (particularly Barbara Bain brings an odd, but endearing quality to her performances), I think the show worked in-spite of the leads, not because of them.

There are some shows you look at the cast, and say ‘Well I can’t see anyone else doing those roles. That’s perfect casting!” You can say that of the first STAR TREK series (even in light of the movies etc, that first crew is perfect, seminal casting) and FARSCAPE, etc. However, you can’t say that of SPACE 1999, I think numerous actors could have done the role of Commander Koenig to equal or better effect. It’s the ambitious scripts and the [for the time] strong production values, and the ensemble performance of the actors, rather than just the leads, which makes the show.

Particularly when you hear Sylvia Anderson’s interview (which is available on the Blu-Ray) and Gerry Anderson’s commentary and the concessions they made to get Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, and the problems they had, it makes you question if the roles would have been better served inhabited by unknown actors, etc.

Well those are questions beyond the answering. What is known is that with the departure of Sylvia Anderson, at the end of season one, the show lost its rudder and its way.

Sylvia Anderson fought hard in the first season for script conferences and to give some sense of weight and seriousness and cohesiveness, a heart if you will to an admittedly fantastic show. But I think she understood that the more fantastic the show, the more important it is that the little things, the connections and reactions of people ring true and be grounded and relatable. And with her out as producer, the show also lost its voice of reason in front of the camera… Barry Morse, and ultimately the show succumbed to dumbed-downed storytelling and pandering to audiences with spectacle and rubber monsters… rather than craft and story.

And that difference is clearly seen in the first episode of season 2, METAMORPH (kindly included on the Season 1 Blu-ray’s special features). Devoid of Sylvia Anderson and Barry Morse, and anyone to fight the cliched ideas coming from the American office of ITV, the show increasingly looked like a poor man’s Buck Rogers.

But hindsight is always 20/20. Hurdles and politics and all, the 1st season of SPACE 1999 was pulled off, and flaws accepted, it’s ambitious television, it is television that tries to say something. And that is television to be proud of.

And since I’m talking about the show thirty five years after its cancellation, it seems that it is also television… that endures.

Space: 1999: The Complete Season One [Blu-ray] – Buy it here!

Some of this post has been edited into the earlier SPACE 1999 article.