Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
The Ballot or the Bullet?
It's time now for you and me to become more politically mature and realize what the ballot is for; what we're supposed to get when we cast a ballot; and that if we don't cast a ballot, it's going to end up in a situation where we're going to have to cast a bullet. It's either a ballot or a bullet.
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz ("Malcolm X" at the time), The Ballot or the Bullet, April 3, 1964, Cory Methodist Church, Cleveland, Ohio. (Boldface added)
I began this months ago and never really finished it, but it's still relevant, so I publish it now, with some additions. It's somewhat wonky, but not all that bad....
In the past few years a few of my ostensibly pacifist, liberal American friends have purchased firearms, specifically because of the increasing presence of firearms at right-leaning protest marches and rallies. They figure if the right wing is going to be heavily armed, they themselves should be prepared to defend themselves. Some of these friends are LBGTQ, some are merely Democrats. But they admit that the Trump years left them scared. I only recently learned of groups like the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA) and Redneck Revolt, leftist groups advocating training with firearms. This trend does not bode well.
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| SLA Banner |
If the hard (and even the not-so-hard) right and left are arming themselves, not for hunting or sport but for political fears, one wonders how long it will be until the shooting starts. I've read of course about groups in the 60's and 70's like the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Weather Underground (left wing). And I've lived through the rise of the 90's militia movement, and more recently the birth of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys (right wing).
In the 90's, right-wing rage was fueled by two standoffs during which excessive force by the ATF resulted in a large number of civilian casualties. The first was against the Weavers at Ruby Ridge (1992) and the second against the Branch Davidians at Waco (1993). A rage that is perfectly justified. At Ruby Ridge, ATF agents killed, among others, a 14-year-old kid, Sammy Weaver, and a woman, Vicki Weaver, while she held her baby in her arms. At Waco, aggressive tactics led to a fire which resulted in the deaths of 76 people, including 25 children. I remember the outrage I felt.
The Waco incident begat even more violence; on the second anniversary of the tragedy, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. At least 168 were killed and over 680 were injured. McVeigh didn't trust the ballot, so he chose the bullet.
These militias didn't get as motivated by the MOVE bombing (1985), in which an incendiary device dropped from a helicopter by the Philadelphia PD caused a fire that left 6 adults and 5 children dead, but hey, the victims weren't white. And if that seems too "woke" an interpretation, I say horse-hockey. McVeigh, the militias, the Proud Boys, and perhaps to a lesser degree the Oath Keepers, all adhere to varying degrees of a white nationalist ideology.
I'm not saying that all the people killed in these standoffs were peaceful innocents, but the police responses were an almost guaranteed recipe for catastrophe. At the MOVE bombing, for example, 500 police officers were mobilized and fired over 10,000 rounds at the MOVE compound in the exchanges of gunfire that preceded the bombing. The Weavers and the Davidians were also heavily-armed. But there are ways to deal with these kinds of situations that need not result in firefights and loss of human life, it's just that American law enforcement doesn't yet seem to have mastered the art of de-escalation. We are a violent society. Always have been. The American public is armed to the teeth, and our police look more and more like GI Joe than Officer Friendly.
Neither "side" of the left/right spectrum can claim innocence when it comes to political violence: the Weather Underground, SLA, and Panthers were not just waving guns around for street theater. I know my history. The right-wing militias talk a lot of talk, but those leftist groups of the 60's were no shirkers when it came to planting bombs, robbing banks, and many other acts of violence.
It has seemed that in recent years a 60's-style storm is brewing. The internet has intensified existing political divisions, as Google algorithms lead people to websites that correspond to previous searches and essentially serve as a tool for confirmation bias. People are increasingly living within separate "infospheres" and it's making political discourse increasingly difficult to meet in the middle.
The protestors/mob/insurrectionists/patriots (take your pick) of January 6th sincerely believed that the 2020 election was stolen, as that is what their President and choice of media were telling them. Fox pundits still say the election was stolen, CNN calls that narrative "the big lie." I was aghast at what I saw that day, but if ordinarily decent people genuinely believed an illegitimate election pushed Biden into office, it's understandable they'd want to do something about it. People had lost faith in the ballot, and they resorted to the bullet.
I don't want to start a political shouting match. This post is not about who's right and who's wrong, just some observations about the increasingly different "reality tunnels" into which we're being led, and how people are increasingly choosing to arm themselves because of it. It's a tunnel through which a dead-end road runs.
I remain hopeful, but it's hard not to be pessimistic about it all. It's hard to debate an opinion when the very facts are in question. We have an ex-President who for years has uttered easily-refuted lies on a daily basis, yet people still believe him. The "lamestream" media, the "enemy of the people," are not considered trustworthy. Healthy skepticism is not a bad thing, but when the truth becomes lost among a daily deluge of "alternative facts" -- Orwellian Newspeak for "demonstrable falsehoods" (aka "lies") -- we've gone beyond healthy skepticism into the realm of paranoia and a reactionary complicity with the dishonorable manipulations of self-serving con-artists. If half of the American population no longer trusts the ballot, how long will it be before they again decide to cast the bullet?
And what happens when a good chunk of one half decide they need to arm themselves against a good chunk of the other?
If "civil war" does come, it won't be fought by armies, but will essentially be terrorist acts, street-fighting, murder, and assassination. I don't think we've reached the point of no return, but despite a seeming lull in domestic political violence, I fear more of the same on the horizon. I'm sure people felt the same in the 60's. Maybe it will pass, and our "anni di piombo" are behind us. I lived in Italy in the late 70's, and recall having to learn about what mail not to open, not to linger too long in front of the windows, to be alert for strange cars in the neighborhood. I recall vividly General Dozier's kidnapping. It wasn't 24/7 fear and paranoia, but it was a fact of our lives. I just hope that it won't become like that in America's most certainly "interesting times" to come. If we make it through 2024 without a repeat of 2020, maybe I can stop holding my breath. My face doesn't look so good in blue.
Be safe people, and read the news with all the critical might you can muster. Am I being overly alarmist? I hesitated to use the term "civil war" earlier, but "civil conflict" or "political violence" didn't seem to fit for a future scenario because as I see it, we're already living it. I believe a lot of our current problems boil down to unresolved political issues between the Federalist/Anti-Federalist factions during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and which was part of the rhetoric used in Congressional debates in the years just before the Civil War. The very name of the Tea Party movement evoked the Revolution, but what we seem to be witnessing today is a younger, more radicalized phase arising out of that discontent, which, though angry, remained mostly peaceful despite the sometimes violent rhetoric ("2nd Amendment solutions," for example). I was always alarmed by that kind of talk, a kind of sewing of seeds which today are bearing such bitter fruit.
For some reason all this makes me think of that skit on SNL where Tom Hanks plays a
Trump supporter on "Black Jeopardy" who discovers he has more in common
with his black competitors than moneyed whites. Left, right, black, white. Perhaps our emphasis on these divisions obscure the fact that what we're really dealing with is an ongoing class struggle. And though I understand the temptation of the bullet, I'm still willing to try to push ahead with the ballot. But for it to work we need to start by rejecting lies and make an honest attempt to agree upon the truth, or at least the facts. Maybe I'm just naive, but I'd rather not just yet resort to buying an AR-15.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
We'd like to stop being reminded of this quote now, please
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| He who bestirs himself is lost. |
[C]et acte que je dis le plus simple, il est clair que mon intention n'est pas de le recommander entre tous parce qu'il est simple et me chercher querelle à ce propos revient à demander bourgeoisement à tout non-conformiste pourquoi il ne se suicide pas, à tout révolutionnaire pourquoi il ne va pas vivre en URSS.
--André Breton
The simplest Surrealist act consists of hitting the street, revolvers in one's fists, and firing wildly into the crowd as much as one can. He who hasn't felt, at least once, a desire to thus end the petty system of abasement and cretinization in effect clearly belongs in this crowd, with a gun-barrel at his gut.
A footnote adds:
This act I call the simplest, it is clearly not my intention to recommend it from among all others because it is simple, and to look for a quarrel with me about this is like condescendingly asking every non-conformist why he doesn't commit suicide or every revolutionary why he doesn't go live in the USSR.
--André Breton
Getting lost in Mexico City after nobody had turned up to meet him at the airport, Breton famously declared: "I don't know why I came here. Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world". This was in 1938, so he can be excused for not predicting that in 2012, by his own definition, this dubious honor would clearly belong to the United States of America.
This despite the curious time I saw two wild dogs, like something from a film by Buñuel or Jodorowsky, fighting over a severed burro's head in the unpeopled desert somewhere between Monterrey and Matehuala. But that's another story.
For a bit about the Francis Picabia quoted on Breton's sandwich board.
Monday, August 6, 2012
Cold, dead fingers
This is a follow-up to 20 rosy fingers, which included a brief, less-than-half-serious post-script about the famous "Obama as Joker/Socialist" poster, riffing a bit loosely, just tossing some ideas about....
I thought of the gun control debate immediately upon hearing about the Aurora shooting, as I do with any mass killing, and wondered if this event is in some way a kind of political "bonus" for people who might not go out of their way to exploit this tragedy, but who wouldn't feel too concerned if at some level, even if subconsciously, people made the connection between Obama/Joker and Holmes/Joker.
Well, someone has made the connection, explicitly....albeit without the whiteface.
The text says: "Kills 12 in a movie theater with assault rifle, everyone freaks out" next to a photo of Obama with the words "Kills thousands with foreign policy, wins Nobel Peace Prize." It appeared in Caldwell (cold well) Idaho, a state with its fair share of firearms enthusiasts.
The CCTV camera is a nice Orwellian touch which in it's own way adds fuel to the fire heating up libertarian rhetoric these days. I wonder if this electronic sign was chosen precisely for that reason; the Smeed Foundation, the billboard sponsor, is a libertarian think tank. Are they implying that as you watch Obama pilloried, Big Sis is watching you? (Big Sis being Drudge's nickname for United States Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.) Or maybe not. I've just read they actually own the sign
Of course, the Smeed Foundation has a point and a right to express it as they wish. Maurice Clements, president of the board, is quoted as saying: “We don’t want to offend people....We’re trying to gain friends for our message.” Apparently the sign has been almost universally panned in Caldwell.
The billboard has angered many, but Smeed is certain to get some positive feedback from the large and vocal anti-Obama crowd. Be that as it may, the Smeed people seem to have had a change of heart, or perhaps realized the sign is a bit too much; either way, the sign is coming down Not to wag fingers, as with some liberal responses I've read; plenty of people who detest Obama don't approve, and the left certainly doesn't shy away from shock-value tactics and cries of "fascist" and the like. Being offensive in politics is not the exclusive domain of one political stripe or another.
I also realize full well that LoS could be seen as exploiting the events in Aurora, another reason I won't point my finger and cry "poor taste"....not too loudly anyway. I don't have to. Seems pretty evident that the billboard is a bit over-the-top. Not the sentiment necessarily, but the context. A private dialogue or even a speech allows one to elaborate, nuance, contextualize, set an argument up correctly. A billboard just knocks your eyeballs for a loop with an offensive bit of jingo. I actually agree with the sentiment expressed here. Why isn't there more universal anger at the ongoing death and dismemberment in Afghanistan, for instance? Why is that 12 American lives are a tragic and senseless murder, but literally thousands of Iraqi civilians are acceptable collateral damage? Yeah, I know, out of sight out of mind and all that. But hell, I don't think it takes a bleeding heart to decry the death in great numbers of people halfway around the world, especially when your tax dollars are at work.
I'm not surprised by this billboard at all and said as much in my original post about Aurora; here though, someone has actually gone and explicitly made the connections media outlets such as Drudge and the Examiner were making implicitly (much as other right-of-center media indirectly linked Obama to the recent spate of cannibal attacks!) Usually they do in such a way as to have plausible denial, to make the very accusation seem absurd. Kind of like the way Drudge headlines stories about crime and corruption in Chicago. They can reasonably deny they're targeting Obama....they're merely reporting on outrageous evidence of US decline. But they're most certainly doing it to tarnish Obama. Guilt by association.
This time, there is nothing subtle about the tactic at all. And although I'm obviously not a rabid anti-Obama fan, I would add that for me, his Nobel Peace prize is as an absurd and offensive bit of propaganda as this billboard; the Nobel had very little to do with peace and everything to do with something else entirely. I disapprove of Obama in a lot of important ways, I just don't share the ad hominem vitriol.
Despite mentioning the war, I believe this sign actually revolves around the politics of guns. The Smeed Foundation didn't even bother use the NRA's preferred use of the word "firearm". Here it's "Assault Rifle," a term which to me is so loaded (no pun intended), so evocative of the gun control debate that it's hard for me not to think the billboard is as much about gun control as it is about Obama's foreign policy--which is after all essentially a re-hash and prolongation of Bush's, just with happier allies (hence the Nobel). But the Tea Party and the libertarians, the Republicans and other assorted political partisans lined up against Obama probably don't care too much about that. They're more concerned with guns, taxes, immigration and creeping socialism. The wackier ones wonder whether or not Obama is a secret Muslim or foreigner bent on destroying America from within, guns of course being the necessary defense against the coming dictatorial state, perhaps led by the minions of the Antichrist. Not to unfairly imply everyone against Obama is an extremist or a lunatic, though they're out there too.
Bottom line is that we're in an irreconcilably polarized political culture, and the tone will certainly only get worse as November draws nearer. This billboard is just another questionable bit of propaganda in a recent string of violent rhetoric and images.
Meanwhile, the bullets are actually flying and everyone keeps wringing their hands and asking, "why"?
Addendum, appx. 13:00 Paris time.
The day after writing this, I learned of the Sikh temple shooting in Milwaukee. Six victims, three wounded. The killer is described as an Army veteran, heavyset, white, with lots of tattoos, including perhaps, a "9-11" themed tat. I remember the hue and cry when a Homeland Security report listed disgruntled vets as part of a restive potential demographic from which domestic terrorism could arise. Vets and conservatives had a field day denouncing Janet Napolitano, but I think against the background of Timothy McVeigh (Gulf War, bronze star), John Muhammad (Gulf War), even Oswald (US Marine), there's some interest in researching whether or not there's some merit to this analysis, which was at the time characteristically distorted and simplified by the conservative press as an accusation against all veterans and the entire military establishment.
Given my recent exchange with Loren Coleman about what it means to be a Fortean synchromystic, that the suspect lived on Holmes Avenue is very startling indeed. One thing which has struck me about this case is the local police position--Oak Creek police chief John Edwards has said the FBI will lead the case because it's being treated as "domestic terrorism". This is why, exactly? Because the alleged shooter was a vet or because the victims, Sikhs, are often confused with Muslims? I don't recall the phrase "domestic terrorism" used for John Holmes. Odd that terrorism is evoked here and not in other contexts....although I do seem to recall that when Jared Loughner shot Rep. Giffords, there was some discussion of whether or not it was "terrorism". As in the Oak Creek shooting, there is some talk of a "hate crime". How the media gels around a label is an interesting process and we'll soon see what the consensus opinion regarding Oak Creek will be.
A little later, 20:30 Paris time.
Wade....is the English name for a common Germanic mythological [personage]...His heritage is uncertain - he is referred to as giant, dwarf, demi-god....or king - but he is always associated with water. [As in a Creek?]
These references [from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde] show that the tale of Wade and his boat were well-known at Chaucer's time and it has been suggested that Wade and his boat were synonymous with trickery.
Wade (folklore)
In medieval times, a page was an attendant to a knight; an apprentice squire. A young boy served as a page for about seven years, running messages, serving, cleaning, and even learning the basics of combat, and the lord he was working for would usually treat him fairly but they went through intensive training. The lord sometimes gave the page private combat training from the age of seven until he was fourteen. At age fourteen, he could graduate to become a squire, and by age 21, perhaps a knight himself.
Page (servant)
Synonymous with trickery? A knight's attendant? As in a Dark Knight? Note the 7 and its multiples, numbering three. Both significant numbers, with a multitude of Biblical association. Including Pages, there were seven deaths as a result of the Milwaukee shooting, and three wounded. There were 12 victims of Holmes' attack, yet another Biblically significant number. I'll repeat that Page lived on Holmes Avenue. Add to that a name of a trickster, or Joker, and the name of a servant to a Knight....synchronicity galore.
Page was a singer in a Neo-Nazi band called End Apathy. Source: He served part [of his military service] in "psychological operations," [!] but left the military with a Less Than Honourable Discharge, shortly after having been mysteriously demoted from sergeant to specialist.
Source: At a news conference at 10 a.m., authorities said they were attempting to identify another person, a white male, who they described as "a person of interest."
A man matching the photo officials showed was seen by Journal Sentinel reporters at the scene of the temple Sunday, possibly video taping what was going on.
...
Heidi Beirich, director of the [Southern Poverty Law Center's] intelligence project, said her group had been tracking Page since 2000, when he tried to purchase goods from the National Alliance, a well-known hate group.
The National Alliance was led by William Pierce, who was the author of "The Turner Diaries." The book depicts a violent revolution in the United States leading to an overthrow of the federal government and, ultimately, a race war. Parts of the book were found in Timothy McVeigh's getaway car after the bombing of the federal building Oklahoma City in 1995.
A lot to digest. I'd had a lot of doubts about the validity of this post, which up to the adendum was written before I learned of this event, but sadly, these revelations only add weight to my speculations and musings. The circumstances will certainly add grist to the conspiracy theorist's mill, but with facts such as these, who can blame them?
I thought of the gun control debate immediately upon hearing about the Aurora shooting, as I do with any mass killing, and wondered if this event is in some way a kind of political "bonus" for people who might not go out of their way to exploit this tragedy, but who wouldn't feel too concerned if at some level, even if subconsciously, people made the connection between Obama/Joker and Holmes/Joker.
Well, someone has made the connection, explicitly....albeit without the whiteface.
The text says: "Kills 12 in a movie theater with assault rifle, everyone freaks out" next to a photo of Obama with the words "Kills thousands with foreign policy, wins Nobel Peace Prize." It appeared in Caldwell (cold well) Idaho, a state with its fair share of firearms enthusiasts.
The CCTV camera is a nice Orwellian touch which in it's own way adds fuel to the fire heating up libertarian rhetoric these days. I wonder if this electronic sign was chosen precisely for that reason; the Smeed Foundation, the billboard sponsor, is a libertarian think tank. Are they implying that as you watch Obama pilloried, Big Sis is watching you? (Big Sis being Drudge's nickname for United States Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.) Or maybe not. I've just read they actually own the sign
Of course, the Smeed Foundation has a point and a right to express it as they wish. Maurice Clements, president of the board, is quoted as saying: “We don’t want to offend people....We’re trying to gain friends for our message.” Apparently the sign has been almost universally panned in Caldwell.
The billboard has angered many, but Smeed is certain to get some positive feedback from the large and vocal anti-Obama crowd. Be that as it may, the Smeed people seem to have had a change of heart, or perhaps realized the sign is a bit too much; either way, the sign is coming down Not to wag fingers, as with some liberal responses I've read; plenty of people who detest Obama don't approve, and the left certainly doesn't shy away from shock-value tactics and cries of "fascist" and the like. Being offensive in politics is not the exclusive domain of one political stripe or another.
I also realize full well that LoS could be seen as exploiting the events in Aurora, another reason I won't point my finger and cry "poor taste"....not too loudly anyway. I don't have to. Seems pretty evident that the billboard is a bit over-the-top. Not the sentiment necessarily, but the context. A private dialogue or even a speech allows one to elaborate, nuance, contextualize, set an argument up correctly. A billboard just knocks your eyeballs for a loop with an offensive bit of jingo. I actually agree with the sentiment expressed here. Why isn't there more universal anger at the ongoing death and dismemberment in Afghanistan, for instance? Why is that 12 American lives are a tragic and senseless murder, but literally thousands of Iraqi civilians are acceptable collateral damage? Yeah, I know, out of sight out of mind and all that. But hell, I don't think it takes a bleeding heart to decry the death in great numbers of people halfway around the world, especially when your tax dollars are at work.
I'm not surprised by this billboard at all and said as much in my original post about Aurora; here though, someone has actually gone and explicitly made the connections media outlets such as Drudge and the Examiner were making implicitly (much as other right-of-center media indirectly linked Obama to the recent spate of cannibal attacks!) Usually they do in such a way as to have plausible denial, to make the very accusation seem absurd. Kind of like the way Drudge headlines stories about crime and corruption in Chicago. They can reasonably deny they're targeting Obama....they're merely reporting on outrageous evidence of US decline. But they're most certainly doing it to tarnish Obama. Guilt by association.
This time, there is nothing subtle about the tactic at all. And although I'm obviously not a rabid anti-Obama fan, I would add that for me, his Nobel Peace prize is as an absurd and offensive bit of propaganda as this billboard; the Nobel had very little to do with peace and everything to do with something else entirely. I disapprove of Obama in a lot of important ways, I just don't share the ad hominem vitriol.
Despite mentioning the war, I believe this sign actually revolves around the politics of guns. The Smeed Foundation didn't even bother use the NRA's preferred use of the word "firearm". Here it's "Assault Rifle," a term which to me is so loaded (no pun intended), so evocative of the gun control debate that it's hard for me not to think the billboard is as much about gun control as it is about Obama's foreign policy--which is after all essentially a re-hash and prolongation of Bush's, just with happier allies (hence the Nobel). But the Tea Party and the libertarians, the Republicans and other assorted political partisans lined up against Obama probably don't care too much about that. They're more concerned with guns, taxes, immigration and creeping socialism. The wackier ones wonder whether or not Obama is a secret Muslim or foreigner bent on destroying America from within, guns of course being the necessary defense against the coming dictatorial state, perhaps led by the minions of the Antichrist. Not to unfairly imply everyone against Obama is an extremist or a lunatic, though they're out there too.
Bottom line is that we're in an irreconcilably polarized political culture, and the tone will certainly only get worse as November draws nearer. This billboard is just another questionable bit of propaganda in a recent string of violent rhetoric and images.
Meanwhile, the bullets are actually flying and everyone keeps wringing their hands and asking, "why"?
Addendum, appx. 13:00 Paris time.
The day after writing this, I learned of the Sikh temple shooting in Milwaukee. Six victims, three wounded. The killer is described as an Army veteran, heavyset, white, with lots of tattoos, including perhaps, a "9-11" themed tat. I remember the hue and cry when a Homeland Security report listed disgruntled vets as part of a restive potential demographic from which domestic terrorism could arise. Vets and conservatives had a field day denouncing Janet Napolitano, but I think against the background of Timothy McVeigh (Gulf War, bronze star), John Muhammad (Gulf War), even Oswald (US Marine), there's some interest in researching whether or not there's some merit to this analysis, which was at the time characteristically distorted and simplified by the conservative press as an accusation against all veterans and the entire military establishment.
Given my recent exchange with Loren Coleman about what it means to be a Fortean synchromystic, that the suspect lived on Holmes Avenue is very startling indeed. One thing which has struck me about this case is the local police position--Oak Creek police chief John Edwards has said the FBI will lead the case because it's being treated as "domestic terrorism". This is why, exactly? Because the alleged shooter was a vet or because the victims, Sikhs, are often confused with Muslims? I don't recall the phrase "domestic terrorism" used for John Holmes. Odd that terrorism is evoked here and not in other contexts....although I do seem to recall that when Jared Loughner shot Rep. Giffords, there was some discussion of whether or not it was "terrorism". As in the Oak Creek shooting, there is some talk of a "hate crime". How the media gels around a label is an interesting process and we'll soon see what the consensus opinion regarding Oak Creek will be.
A little later, 20:30 Paris time.
Wade....is the English name for a common Germanic mythological [personage]...His heritage is uncertain - he is referred to as giant, dwarf, demi-god....or king - but he is always associated with water. [As in a Creek?]
These references [from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde] show that the tale of Wade and his boat were well-known at Chaucer's time and it has been suggested that Wade and his boat were synonymous with trickery.
Wade (folklore)
In medieval times, a page was an attendant to a knight; an apprentice squire. A young boy served as a page for about seven years, running messages, serving, cleaning, and even learning the basics of combat, and the lord he was working for would usually treat him fairly but they went through intensive training. The lord sometimes gave the page private combat training from the age of seven until he was fourteen. At age fourteen, he could graduate to become a squire, and by age 21, perhaps a knight himself.
Page (servant)
Synonymous with trickery? A knight's attendant? As in a Dark Knight? Note the 7 and its multiples, numbering three. Both significant numbers, with a multitude of Biblical association. Including Pages, there were seven deaths as a result of the Milwaukee shooting, and three wounded. There were 12 victims of Holmes' attack, yet another Biblically significant number. I'll repeat that Page lived on Holmes Avenue. Add to that a name of a trickster, or Joker, and the name of a servant to a Knight....synchronicity galore.
Page was a singer in a Neo-Nazi band called End Apathy. Source: He served part [of his military service] in "psychological operations," [!] but left the military with a Less Than Honourable Discharge, shortly after having been mysteriously demoted from sergeant to specialist.
Source: At a news conference at 10 a.m., authorities said they were attempting to identify another person, a white male, who they described as "a person of interest."
A man matching the photo officials showed was seen by Journal Sentinel reporters at the scene of the temple Sunday, possibly video taping what was going on.
...
Heidi Beirich, director of the [Southern Poverty Law Center's] intelligence project, said her group had been tracking Page since 2000, when he tried to purchase goods from the National Alliance, a well-known hate group.
The National Alliance was led by William Pierce, who was the author of "The Turner Diaries." The book depicts a violent revolution in the United States leading to an overthrow of the federal government and, ultimately, a race war. Parts of the book were found in Timothy McVeigh's getaway car after the bombing of the federal building Oklahoma City in 1995.
A lot to digest. I'd had a lot of doubts about the validity of this post, which up to the adendum was written before I learned of this event, but sadly, these revelations only add weight to my speculations and musings. The circumstances will certainly add grist to the conspiracy theorist's mill, but with facts such as these, who can blame them?
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
20 rosy fingers
The Aurora shooting on July 20th has excited a number of conspiratorial musings, which is par for the course, of course. What has caught my eye in these speculations is the recurrence of two themes which seem to have become almost requisite elements for any high-profile assassination, killing or mass murder.
The first theme is that of the body double, known in the trade as a political decoy; that is to say the alleged perp paraded before us on TV is not the real thing.
The second theme is the idea that the killer is a product of mind control.
These two themes are often brought together, as I've seen in the Aurora case, to construct the figure of the mind-controlled patsy.
The idea of the political decoy doesn't originate with the Kennedy assassination, but I think that as the über-myth of 20th century conspiracy literature, the assassination of JFK has become the source for the idea's subsequent application to various mass murders and killings. In what I've read about Aurora so far, an explicit connection is made to the JFK assassination--the body double is a typical tactic of a nebulous cryptocracy orchestrating events in order to further their own agenda. In this case the timing coincides with an important UN vote on an arms control resolution. Drudge actually plays into this; for several days running his page had links to articles about how in the wake of this tragedy, gun sales are actually increasing, contrary to the expectations of....(insert bugbear here). Conservative friends on Facebook have posted about how if everyone in the theater had been armed, the death toll would have been lower, also explicitly alluding to the UN vote. The conservative press, typified by the Examiner article linked to above, has been making the link unuambiguously.
The Gid, my fellow writer on this blog, provided his own take on this topic:
....it strikes me that neither Obama nor Romney nor any other big political figure in the US seems to making a gun control issue of the event (unless I've missed something). In that light, it's almost a bizzare twist on twilight language--it's totally in your face that politicians ought to be all over this in terms of gun control, but they aren't, as if it has noting to do with the topic ... The politicians have evoked The Law of Silence on the topic. It is, however, totally possible that I'm wrong since I haven't paid a lot of attention to the news over the last couple of weeks.
I first heard about the "second Oswald" in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger in relation to countercultural mystery man Kerry Thornley. Thornley knew Oswald and had written about him before the assassination. Because of this he actually testified before the Warren commission. The first book on the topic was by one Richard Popkins appropriately titled The Second Oswald (1964) (review). There is also an alleged memo from Hoover stating "there is a possibility that an imposter is using Oswald's birth certificate."
In 2004, conspiracy theorist John Armstrong published a book entitled Harvey and Lee, which claimed to have identified a Lee Harvey Oswald double who had impersonated Oswald as part of an intelligence operation. Armstrong bases his claims on photographs which appear to show discrepancies in Oswald's physique and facial features. Armstrong cites contradictory eyewitness testimony from the Warren Report, placing Oswald in two different locations at the same time. (Wikipedia: Political Decoy)
Which is exactly how I first heard of the James Holmes patsy theory--a photo comparison. The only inexplicable difference I can make out in this photo is the shape of the nose, which is much more flared in the first picture. This could in fact be due to the angle of the head and the lighting. The general contours of the face, the eyebrows, the ears, the slope of the shoulders....all look pretty much to same to me. The mouth and eyes can be explained by the different expression. I concur though that the overall impression is that we are looking at photos of two different men, albeit very similar in appearance. I'm not going pass judgement, but the idea is out there whether I pass judgement or not!
My co-blogger, the Gid, looking at the same photos, was more judgemental:
I have to say that they look like different people to me. I find myself trying to convince myself that, yeah, sure those might be the same eyes, laughing then afraid, even though they look so different; that might be the same mouth, the same beard pattern, the same cheekbones, etc. Quite frankly, it's a lot easier for me to see these as two different people than as the same person.
On LoS, the political decoy has come up in the context of the death of Saddam Hussein and the death of Bin Laden. In the latter case, the internet was awash with forgeries rather quickly; total confusion and further conspiracy theories were spun off of the evidently faked photos of the dead Bin Laden.
While not exactly the same thing as a body double, the idea that Oswald acted alone is doubted by even the most non-conspiratorial of people. Likewise, some doubt has been cast on Holmes' lone-nut profile. According to one witness, some minutes before the shooting, a guy got a phone call inside the theater and went to the emergency exit, propping it open. A few minutes later, Holmes burst in and opened fire. This would suggest a partner. The name Holmes is evocative in this regard, for where Holmes goes, his partner Watson goes. Kind of like Batman and Robin.
(That said, the Police narrative is that the person who propped the door open was Holmes, who'd entered legally after buying a ticket. One would imagine this was so he could prop open the door, retrieve his weapons and return to carry out the attacks. The police believe he acted alone. The cell phone story could easily have been a ruse used by Holmes--an excuse to get up and go to the door. I think this is very plausible.)
John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy kind of bookend the period of major sixties' assassinations; both were noticably similar in appearance, both excited wild optimism. In and of itself, the brothers reinforce the theme of the double. Bobby was like a reincarnation of his older brother....and met the same grisly fate. This leads us to the second theme: mind control. It's with RFK that I recall first hearing mind-control allegations against an assassin. Sirhan Sirhan, his own name a double, is often seen as a kind of "Manchurian Candidate" a term taken from a 1959 novel by Richard Condon of the same name. In his novel (first adapted to film in 1962), a man is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist plot. Conspiracy theorists have had a field day with the "coincidence" that a book about a brainwashed assassin would appear in print a year before a real assassination so rife with suspicious inconsistencies that even the least paranoid among us smell something rotten in the official story.
In Holmes' case, people cite three things to build their case for mind control. The first is that Holmes acted inconsistenly. Why go on a murderous rampage and then meekly surrender to the police? Why rig one's house with explosives then warn the police that they are there? I've read it suggested that this indicates a kind of mental struggle in Holmes' mind, that his programmed mind was in conflict with the part of him that knew his actions to be wrong. I'm no mental health expert, but let's use the razor here. A man walks into a cinema and kills 12, injures dozens more, dressed like a character in the film about to play. I think it's fair to say the man is mentally unbalanced. So do we really need to ask why he was acting inconsistently to our rational minds? I mean, really? A crazy man acting odd? You don't say!
Other "evidence" is that Holmes was a student of neuroscience and that Aurora is home to a large military community. Although these are tantalizing facts, their presence in the story is indicative of nothing unless some concrete info can be found which makes it relevant. I've heard that suicide is quite high among psychologists; this doesn't mean they've been mind-controlled. To me it indicates that troubled people might actually want to go about investigating the way the mind works. Could this also be true for neuroscience? Was Holmes pushed in that direction by inner doubts about his own mental health? Who knows at this point.
As long as we're hound-dogging untenable theories, let's pause to make some connections between the movie and real (or least our conspiratorially-imagined versionion of real) life. The second of these three Batman flicks included the bad guy Two Face. Half his face was normal; the other was twisted and evil. He flipped a coin to decide who would live and who would die. Note, too, the "Sons of Batman", vigilante killers in Miller's Dark Knight Returns comic--surely nightmarish dopplegangers.
Two Face also appears in the Dark Knight Returns storyline, his face repaired and to all outward appearances, normal; he does remain Two Face in his head though, and he continues to terrorize Gotham City in disguise.
But that's not all! Consider, too, that Batman was a doppleganger of Bruce Wayne, created by death, the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents, who were murdered returning home from a movie, a Zorro film. Zorro is, of course, a doppelganger of Don Diego de la Vega. Bob Kane has described how Batman was influenced by Zorro in both look and mission.
As a last note along these lines connecting the films/stories with these conspiratorial musings, The Gid mentioned to me that he's always wondered if Bruce Wayne didn't kill his own parents. He seems to think that the whole mythology works much better that way. Of all the superhero franchises out there, Batman writers question the sanity of the hero the most. In the second installment of the Nolan trilogy, Batman comes across as crazy as the Joker, something alluded to in other stories as well I think. Batman is a man obsessed, leading a double life, one identity slipping into another. What is Two Face but a more grotesque version of the Batman? The Joker doesn't seem to have this inner dichotomy, however, being simply bat shit crazy.
Let's go back to the Manchurian Candidate and consider the question of why conspirators would go around announcing their intentions. In the synchromystic strain of conspiracy theory, the cyptocracy uses cues (called twilight language) to activate certain ideas and feeling to create a sense of recognition; they're fucking with us, basically, in order to heighten the fear and increase a sense of powerlessness before them. Another example cited is the Dark Knight Returns, a graphic novel which greatly influenced film director Nolan's vision of Batman in The Dark Knight Rises. In the comic, a red-haired guy goes into a theater and starts shooting people up, killing three. Of course, reason would suggest that Holmes was life imitating art. For others, the book was a blueprint, a kind of forewarning of what "they" had planned.
Aurora would actually be a good choice for "them" to execute their plan if this were (is) true. Aurora is the Goddess of Dawn. I, like many other Americans who were obliged to read it as kids, will no doubt think of Aurora in the Odyssey (recalling Odyssey Dawn, the name of the US operation in Libya), the rosy-fingered one who appears at transitional moments in the epic; symbolizing our hero's ongoing transformation. What better way to evoke a sense of awe than to subliminally trigger thoughts of a story where human strength is often crushed under the weight of divine intervention? In God(s) We Trust. And just as the gods control peole in the Greek epics, so do people mind-control people in the conspriatorial-epics of today. Aurora is also the name of dozens of municipalities across the US and the anglophone world; what better way to bring a distant event a little closer to home?
The title of the film is evocative in a similar sense to the name of the town, evoking the transition between night and day. The Dark Knight Rises could be read as a pun....dark night rises. Yet it's day which usually rises, with Aurora Night usually falls. These metaphors stem from what appears to the be the literal rise and fall of the sun each morning and evening--which coincide with humans rising and falling from sleep and from beds. Of course this inversion within the title of the film could mean just about whatever someone wanted it to mean....the world tuned upside down, for example. My co-blogger, The Gid, suggests that the title of the film is also meant to evoke the title of Miller's 4th book, The Dark Night Falls.
Dawn is of course a symbol we've looked at many times: the rising sun is a new day, a new world order, Luciferian illumination. Another god LoS has examined is Janus, in a post we called Blood and Fire. Janus was a two-faced god, a god of doubles. Like Lincoln's double visage in our last post, like the double-headed eagle we keep running across linked to black-ops by private mercenaries, it's an obssession of ours. As we said in the last post, the body-double idea evokes Janus, who in addition to his doppelgänger role, also served as the god of gateways; what is dawn but a kind of gateway?
Indeed. Aurora is called "The Gateway City". The interview with the guy claiming to have seen someone prop open the door was interviewed at Gateway High. Not so far from Columbine, as initial reports reminded us. And Columbine is the mistress of Harlequin....a kind of clown. And Harley Quinn, in some versions of the Batman story, is the female sweetheart of....the Joker. This female villain incidentally, was once Harleen Quinzel, Arkham Asylum psychiatrist....
Michael Hoffman, whose essay with James Shelby Downard entitled King Kill 33, is a classic of the twilight language texts, proposes that the JFK assassination was part of an elaborate Masonic Killing of the King ritual which culminated in the moon shot a few years later,. He's now written an article on the Aurora shooting entitled Predictive programming and ritual stagecraft: Batman movie shooting synchronicity. (The comments are intriguing as well).
In this essay he asks: Where's Watson?
Where indeed? At least, the conspiratorial rumblings suggest that Holmes did not act alone. The use of mind control and political decoys is a more fantastic proposition, the kind of stuff that in times past was grist for the fringe elements of the frings. But with the internet, the fringe has lept into the center. More correctly speaking, there is no more center, it's all fringe, arranged like knots in a vast net which is cast wide and harvests every detail, no matter how trivial, and hauls it into the boat. Looking at the squirming mass before us, it doesn't make "sense" in the traditonal way; merely appearing together is a kind of proof of something. History and journalism, the documented and demonstrable, are no longer part of the process. We simply throw around ideas, half-elaborated "facts" and hearsay, then run with it. There are so many narrative threads we can pull out of the tangle of facts, whatever suits our fancy.
The idea of twilight language is convenient because if nothing concrete ever comes of it, the ideas are still planted, the lack of follow-up is part of the process. As the theory goes, the plotters show us just enough to remind us they are there, but not enough to do anything about it. There will always be reasonable doubt. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, just as sometimes there are crazy people who go off the rails and commit horrendous, senseless crimes. Sometimes our need to make it sensible leads us to believe strange things, to make us wonder why a crazy person would do crazy things. We assume people are like most of us, who do things for a reason, try to escape punishment for our misdeeds, attempt to have some kind of consistency in our lives. When we see someone acting otherwise, it's hard to process, we are, perhaps, bewildered and alarmed for our own security. Or perhaps, for our own sanity. Could that, we ask, be me or my children in the theater, either victim or perpetrator? And it's in this state that we are susceptible to believing in conspiracies, especially a theory suggesting that an innocent person has been highjacked by mind control or a doppelganger.
If the world's a stage, and we are but actors, it's no wonder we're often curious to know who the director is. Of course it helps that in this case, it all took place in a theater showing a film in a franchise which has already given us a dose of real-life death. Even before the release of the last installment, Heath Ledger, Joker actor, was dead in an apparently accidentally overdoese of legal medications.
P.S.
I wanted to work the following image in somehow, but I'm not quite sure how it works in. One "right-wing" theory is that this is a staged event by the cryptocracy to further a gun control agenda. What if it were in fact a right-wing conspiracy to make it look like a gun-grabbing conspiracy? Wouldn't it be nifty to suggest this was a staged event, then point out that it isn't working and then link the shooter as Joker to the gun-grabber in Chief? I don't advocate this at all, but after I thought of the image below it crossed my mind that this was a pro-gun conspiracy disguised as a blatant anti-gun conspiracy.... This is how crazy this kind of stuff will start making you. Oddly enough, for some that's proof enough of a successful....conspiracy.
Obama is evoked, perhaps in a long and roundabout way, but so is Romney. The villain of this latest Batman film: Bane. What company, often seen as villainous, did Romney once lead? Bain & Co....
The first theme is that of the body double, known in the trade as a political decoy; that is to say the alleged perp paraded before us on TV is not the real thing.
The second theme is the idea that the killer is a product of mind control.
These two themes are often brought together, as I've seen in the Aurora case, to construct the figure of the mind-controlled patsy.
The idea of the political decoy doesn't originate with the Kennedy assassination, but I think that as the über-myth of 20th century conspiracy literature, the assassination of JFK has become the source for the idea's subsequent application to various mass murders and killings. In what I've read about Aurora so far, an explicit connection is made to the JFK assassination--the body double is a typical tactic of a nebulous cryptocracy orchestrating events in order to further their own agenda. In this case the timing coincides with an important UN vote on an arms control resolution. Drudge actually plays into this; for several days running his page had links to articles about how in the wake of this tragedy, gun sales are actually increasing, contrary to the expectations of....(insert bugbear here). Conservative friends on Facebook have posted about how if everyone in the theater had been armed, the death toll would have been lower, also explicitly alluding to the UN vote. The conservative press, typified by the Examiner article linked to above, has been making the link unuambiguously.
The Gid, my fellow writer on this blog, provided his own take on this topic:
....it strikes me that neither Obama nor Romney nor any other big political figure in the US seems to making a gun control issue of the event (unless I've missed something). In that light, it's almost a bizzare twist on twilight language--it's totally in your face that politicians ought to be all over this in terms of gun control, but they aren't, as if it has noting to do with the topic ... The politicians have evoked The Law of Silence on the topic. It is, however, totally possible that I'm wrong since I haven't paid a lot of attention to the news over the last couple of weeks.
I first heard about the "second Oswald" in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger in relation to countercultural mystery man Kerry Thornley. Thornley knew Oswald and had written about him before the assassination. Because of this he actually testified before the Warren commission. The first book on the topic was by one Richard Popkins appropriately titled The Second Oswald (1964) (review). There is also an alleged memo from Hoover stating "there is a possibility that an imposter is using Oswald's birth certificate."
In 2004, conspiracy theorist John Armstrong published a book entitled Harvey and Lee, which claimed to have identified a Lee Harvey Oswald double who had impersonated Oswald as part of an intelligence operation. Armstrong bases his claims on photographs which appear to show discrepancies in Oswald's physique and facial features. Armstrong cites contradictory eyewitness testimony from the Warren Report, placing Oswald in two different locations at the same time. (Wikipedia: Political Decoy)
Which is exactly how I first heard of the James Holmes patsy theory--a photo comparison. The only inexplicable difference I can make out in this photo is the shape of the nose, which is much more flared in the first picture. This could in fact be due to the angle of the head and the lighting. The general contours of the face, the eyebrows, the ears, the slope of the shoulders....all look pretty much to same to me. The mouth and eyes can be explained by the different expression. I concur though that the overall impression is that we are looking at photos of two different men, albeit very similar in appearance. I'm not going pass judgement, but the idea is out there whether I pass judgement or not!
My co-blogger, the Gid, looking at the same photos, was more judgemental:
I have to say that they look like different people to me. I find myself trying to convince myself that, yeah, sure those might be the same eyes, laughing then afraid, even though they look so different; that might be the same mouth, the same beard pattern, the same cheekbones, etc. Quite frankly, it's a lot easier for me to see these as two different people than as the same person.
On LoS, the political decoy has come up in the context of the death of Saddam Hussein and the death of Bin Laden. In the latter case, the internet was awash with forgeries rather quickly; total confusion and further conspiracy theories were spun off of the evidently faked photos of the dead Bin Laden.
While not exactly the same thing as a body double, the idea that Oswald acted alone is doubted by even the most non-conspiratorial of people. Likewise, some doubt has been cast on Holmes' lone-nut profile. According to one witness, some minutes before the shooting, a guy got a phone call inside the theater and went to the emergency exit, propping it open. A few minutes later, Holmes burst in and opened fire. This would suggest a partner. The name Holmes is evocative in this regard, for where Holmes goes, his partner Watson goes. Kind of like Batman and Robin.
(That said, the Police narrative is that the person who propped the door open was Holmes, who'd entered legally after buying a ticket. One would imagine this was so he could prop open the door, retrieve his weapons and return to carry out the attacks. The police believe he acted alone. The cell phone story could easily have been a ruse used by Holmes--an excuse to get up and go to the door. I think this is very plausible.)
John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy kind of bookend the period of major sixties' assassinations; both were noticably similar in appearance, both excited wild optimism. In and of itself, the brothers reinforce the theme of the double. Bobby was like a reincarnation of his older brother....and met the same grisly fate. This leads us to the second theme: mind control. It's with RFK that I recall first hearing mind-control allegations against an assassin. Sirhan Sirhan, his own name a double, is often seen as a kind of "Manchurian Candidate" a term taken from a 1959 novel by Richard Condon of the same name. In his novel (first adapted to film in 1962), a man is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist plot. Conspiracy theorists have had a field day with the "coincidence" that a book about a brainwashed assassin would appear in print a year before a real assassination so rife with suspicious inconsistencies that even the least paranoid among us smell something rotten in the official story.
In Holmes' case, people cite three things to build their case for mind control. The first is that Holmes acted inconsistenly. Why go on a murderous rampage and then meekly surrender to the police? Why rig one's house with explosives then warn the police that they are there? I've read it suggested that this indicates a kind of mental struggle in Holmes' mind, that his programmed mind was in conflict with the part of him that knew his actions to be wrong. I'm no mental health expert, but let's use the razor here. A man walks into a cinema and kills 12, injures dozens more, dressed like a character in the film about to play. I think it's fair to say the man is mentally unbalanced. So do we really need to ask why he was acting inconsistently to our rational minds? I mean, really? A crazy man acting odd? You don't say!
Other "evidence" is that Holmes was a student of neuroscience and that Aurora is home to a large military community. Although these are tantalizing facts, their presence in the story is indicative of nothing unless some concrete info can be found which makes it relevant. I've heard that suicide is quite high among psychologists; this doesn't mean they've been mind-controlled. To me it indicates that troubled people might actually want to go about investigating the way the mind works. Could this also be true for neuroscience? Was Holmes pushed in that direction by inner doubts about his own mental health? Who knows at this point.
As long as we're hound-dogging untenable theories, let's pause to make some connections between the movie and real (or least our conspiratorially-imagined versionion of real) life. The second of these three Batman flicks included the bad guy Two Face. Half his face was normal; the other was twisted and evil. He flipped a coin to decide who would live and who would die. Note, too, the "Sons of Batman", vigilante killers in Miller's Dark Knight Returns comic--surely nightmarish dopplegangers.
Two Face also appears in the Dark Knight Returns storyline, his face repaired and to all outward appearances, normal; he does remain Two Face in his head though, and he continues to terrorize Gotham City in disguise.
But that's not all! Consider, too, that Batman was a doppleganger of Bruce Wayne, created by death, the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents, who were murdered returning home from a movie, a Zorro film. Zorro is, of course, a doppelganger of Don Diego de la Vega. Bob Kane has described how Batman was influenced by Zorro in both look and mission.
As a last note along these lines connecting the films/stories with these conspiratorial musings, The Gid mentioned to me that he's always wondered if Bruce Wayne didn't kill his own parents. He seems to think that the whole mythology works much better that way. Of all the superhero franchises out there, Batman writers question the sanity of the hero the most. In the second installment of the Nolan trilogy, Batman comes across as crazy as the Joker, something alluded to in other stories as well I think. Batman is a man obsessed, leading a double life, one identity slipping into another. What is Two Face but a more grotesque version of the Batman? The Joker doesn't seem to have this inner dichotomy, however, being simply bat shit crazy.
Let's go back to the Manchurian Candidate and consider the question of why conspirators would go around announcing their intentions. In the synchromystic strain of conspiracy theory, the cyptocracy uses cues (called twilight language) to activate certain ideas and feeling to create a sense of recognition; they're fucking with us, basically, in order to heighten the fear and increase a sense of powerlessness before them. Another example cited is the Dark Knight Returns, a graphic novel which greatly influenced film director Nolan's vision of Batman in The Dark Knight Rises. In the comic, a red-haired guy goes into a theater and starts shooting people up, killing three. Of course, reason would suggest that Holmes was life imitating art. For others, the book was a blueprint, a kind of forewarning of what "they" had planned.
Aurora would actually be a good choice for "them" to execute their plan if this were (is) true. Aurora is the Goddess of Dawn. I, like many other Americans who were obliged to read it as kids, will no doubt think of Aurora in the Odyssey (recalling Odyssey Dawn, the name of the US operation in Libya), the rosy-fingered one who appears at transitional moments in the epic; symbolizing our hero's ongoing transformation. What better way to evoke a sense of awe than to subliminally trigger thoughts of a story where human strength is often crushed under the weight of divine intervention? In God(s) We Trust. And just as the gods control peole in the Greek epics, so do people mind-control people in the conspriatorial-epics of today. Aurora is also the name of dozens of municipalities across the US and the anglophone world; what better way to bring a distant event a little closer to home?
The title of the film is evocative in a similar sense to the name of the town, evoking the transition between night and day. The Dark Knight Rises could be read as a pun....dark night rises. Yet it's day which usually rises, with Aurora Night usually falls. These metaphors stem from what appears to the be the literal rise and fall of the sun each morning and evening--which coincide with humans rising and falling from sleep and from beds. Of course this inversion within the title of the film could mean just about whatever someone wanted it to mean....the world tuned upside down, for example. My co-blogger, The Gid, suggests that the title of the film is also meant to evoke the title of Miller's 4th book, The Dark Night Falls.
Dawn is of course a symbol we've looked at many times: the rising sun is a new day, a new world order, Luciferian illumination. Another god LoS has examined is Janus, in a post we called Blood and Fire. Janus was a two-faced god, a god of doubles. Like Lincoln's double visage in our last post, like the double-headed eagle we keep running across linked to black-ops by private mercenaries, it's an obssession of ours. As we said in the last post, the body-double idea evokes Janus, who in addition to his doppelgänger role, also served as the god of gateways; what is dawn but a kind of gateway?
Indeed. Aurora is called "The Gateway City". The interview with the guy claiming to have seen someone prop open the door was interviewed at Gateway High. Not so far from Columbine, as initial reports reminded us. And Columbine is the mistress of Harlequin....a kind of clown. And Harley Quinn, in some versions of the Batman story, is the female sweetheart of....the Joker. This female villain incidentally, was once Harleen Quinzel, Arkham Asylum psychiatrist....
Michael Hoffman, whose essay with James Shelby Downard entitled King Kill 33, is a classic of the twilight language texts, proposes that the JFK assassination was part of an elaborate Masonic Killing of the King ritual which culminated in the moon shot a few years later,. He's now written an article on the Aurora shooting entitled Predictive programming and ritual stagecraft: Batman movie shooting synchronicity. (The comments are intriguing as well).
In this essay he asks: Where's Watson?
Where indeed? At least, the conspiratorial rumblings suggest that Holmes did not act alone. The use of mind control and political decoys is a more fantastic proposition, the kind of stuff that in times past was grist for the fringe elements of the frings. But with the internet, the fringe has lept into the center. More correctly speaking, there is no more center, it's all fringe, arranged like knots in a vast net which is cast wide and harvests every detail, no matter how trivial, and hauls it into the boat. Looking at the squirming mass before us, it doesn't make "sense" in the traditonal way; merely appearing together is a kind of proof of something. History and journalism, the documented and demonstrable, are no longer part of the process. We simply throw around ideas, half-elaborated "facts" and hearsay, then run with it. There are so many narrative threads we can pull out of the tangle of facts, whatever suits our fancy.
The idea of twilight language is convenient because if nothing concrete ever comes of it, the ideas are still planted, the lack of follow-up is part of the process. As the theory goes, the plotters show us just enough to remind us they are there, but not enough to do anything about it. There will always be reasonable doubt. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, just as sometimes there are crazy people who go off the rails and commit horrendous, senseless crimes. Sometimes our need to make it sensible leads us to believe strange things, to make us wonder why a crazy person would do crazy things. We assume people are like most of us, who do things for a reason, try to escape punishment for our misdeeds, attempt to have some kind of consistency in our lives. When we see someone acting otherwise, it's hard to process, we are, perhaps, bewildered and alarmed for our own security. Or perhaps, for our own sanity. Could that, we ask, be me or my children in the theater, either victim or perpetrator? And it's in this state that we are susceptible to believing in conspiracies, especially a theory suggesting that an innocent person has been highjacked by mind control or a doppelganger.
If the world's a stage, and we are but actors, it's no wonder we're often curious to know who the director is. Of course it helps that in this case, it all took place in a theater showing a film in a franchise which has already given us a dose of real-life death. Even before the release of the last installment, Heath Ledger, Joker actor, was dead in an apparently accidentally overdoese of legal medications.
P.S.
I wanted to work the following image in somehow, but I'm not quite sure how it works in. One "right-wing" theory is that this is a staged event by the cryptocracy to further a gun control agenda. What if it were in fact a right-wing conspiracy to make it look like a gun-grabbing conspiracy? Wouldn't it be nifty to suggest this was a staged event, then point out that it isn't working and then link the shooter as Joker to the gun-grabber in Chief? I don't advocate this at all, but after I thought of the image below it crossed my mind that this was a pro-gun conspiracy disguised as a blatant anti-gun conspiracy.... This is how crazy this kind of stuff will start making you. Oddly enough, for some that's proof enough of a successful....conspiracy.
Obama is evoked, perhaps in a long and roundabout way, but so is Romney. The villain of this latest Batman film: Bane. What company, often seen as villainous, did Romney once lead? Bain & Co....
Thanks to The Gid for his suggestions and additions, as well as copy editing. Some very great observations and clarifications are integrated into the text. Also some rearrangement of ideas. He had a lot to add about the Batman comics I'd forgotten. Some of his ideas are introduced with phrases such as "The Gid suggests..." written by the man himself. Hmmm. Writing about yourself in the third person? Talk about your double-mind....
Sorry Gid, that I nixed your PPS about Snoop Dogg. That's gonna be a post of its own....
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Trijicon responds!
Statement from Trijicon, Inc.
Monday, January 20, 2010—For two generations Trijicon, a Michigan-based family owned business, has been working to provide America’s military men and women with high quality, innovative sighting systems for the weapons they use. Our effort is simple and straightforward: to help our servicemen and women win the war on terror and come home safe to their families. As part of our faith and our belief in service to our country, Trijicon has put scripture references on our products for more than two decades. As long as we have men and women in danger, we will continue to do everything we can to provide them with both state-of-the-art technology and the never-ending support and prayers of a grateful nation.
Update Jan. 24: Trijicon will no longer ship sights to the military with the scripture references. Their statement.
LoS sent a question about the company name and logo as well as a comment that we respectfully disagree with the practice of putting scripture references on taxpayer-funded property. We'll keep you posted as to the reponse.
Monday, January 20, 2010—For two generations Trijicon, a Michigan-based family owned business, has been working to provide America’s military men and women with high quality, innovative sighting systems for the weapons they use. Our effort is simple and straightforward: to help our servicemen and women win the war on terror and come home safe to their families. As part of our faith and our belief in service to our country, Trijicon has put scripture references on our products for more than two decades. As long as we have men and women in danger, we will continue to do everything we can to provide them with both state-of-the-art technology and the never-ending support and prayers of a grateful nation.
Update Jan. 24: Trijicon will no longer ship sights to the military with the scripture references. Their statement.
LoS sent a question about the company name and logo as well as a comment that we respectfully disagree with the practice of putting scripture references on taxpayer-funded property. We'll keep you posted as to the reponse.
Monday, January 18, 2010
"spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ."
The company that makes the sights in question, Trijicon (another triangle logo!) makes no bones about the fact they put 'em there. Which is their prerogative, of course. But Bible verses on guns? Doesn't do much to counter the charges that the US is on a "crusade" in the middle east. (Remember the claim that Blackwater (now Xe) are Christian supremacists?
I dig the "about" page:
TRIJICON'S VISION
Guided by our values, we endeavor to have our products used wherever precision aiming solutions are required to protect individual freedom.
and
• Morality
• Morality
We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals.
Praise the lord and pass the ammo!
I suppose this is where Pat Robertson would have bought his gun sights if he were on a mission to assassinate Hugo Chavez....
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