Black Friday, Redux

Once again, the joyous celebration of peace on earth and goodwill to all has resulted in death. The desperate mob seeking the perfect 'gift' at the perfect price have the innocent blood of at least one person on the soles of their heedless feet. Black Friday is the distillation of the true spirit of X-Mass, which in turn is a distillation of the excesses of our corporatist-consumerist-theocratic society into the annual Black Mass in which we stuff ourselves and each other to the gills with hoarded food, wasted electricity, meaningless gifts, and gaudy displays of festive piety.

Practically everything about X-Mass is offensive to my aesthetic, spiritual, and moral sensibilities. Somewhere under all the larding of false cheer and compulsory gratitude is a small nugget of communion with family and friends and loved ones; a last vestige of the Pagan yule-tide huddling together against the chill undeath of winter and lighting the night in anticipation of the coming rebirth of spring, which I am happy to celebrate. But I'm offended by the debauched abomination that the Solstice festival has become. I'm offended by the notion that beggaring oneself to shovel toys and trinkets into the ungrateful maw of altruism is a sign of one's 'goodwill to men'. I'm offended by the disgusting competitive display of blazing mismatched primary colours, the plastic glowing holy symbols, the artless rendition of rigorously selected standard ballads in whatever vapid sugary 'musical' style the titans of consumer culture have approved for this year. I'm offended by the frustration, the anger, and the violence inspired by the 'necessity' of accommodating these corporatist demands, and I'm deeply offended by the fact that a single word of complaint regarding this decadent orgy of X-Mass consumption gets one labelled as a 'scrooge' and a 'grinch' (names utterly stripped of their original context by annual repetition of these fables to the point of meaninglessness) by cultish celebrants determined to force all and sundry into conformity with the illusion that they are preserving the True Meaning of X-Mass.

But above all, I'm offended by theocrats who demand that we 'keep the Christ in Christmas' (as if Christmas was ever anything but propaganda designed to lure the heathens from their own seasonal celebrations, the carrot to the inquisitorial stick); who declare war on 'Happy Holidays' and 'Season's Greetings', who demand that their child-god in his mass-produced stable be given pride of place in the public square, and who fulminate with indignance at the commercialization of the 'sacred holy day' even as they mass at the gates of Wal Mart for the annual trampling of the designated human sacrifice. Because this, friends, is the cancer that lies at the root of the festering X-Mas tree with its choking tinsel and eye-gouging lights, and runs through its core straight to the angel or Bethlehem Star that adorns its heaven-piercing crown. Christ-Mass is a celebration of sacrifice and guilt, the reasonable expectations of reciprocal giving inflated into a harrowing duty to provide not even for the needs but for the mere wants of others. It is only this devotional obligation that has allowed the corporatist manipulators to build a festival of mutual love and shared gratitude up into a colossus of anxiety, bathos and waste.

In X-Mass we find demonstrated that the obligation of self-sacrifice is the transmutation of human sacrifice, and nowhere is that fact made clearer than on Black Friday, when desperate men and women will literally step on their fellows in their quest to shove one more cheap toy into the bloated stocking that hangs on their wall. Maybe, just maybe, if you can afford one more present it will be enough to make your cold, dead god show how much he loves you.

And people wonder how I can hate X-Mass.

The Crash is Coming

We humans are creatures of short lives and shorter horizons. We make plans for the next year, for at most the next five or ten (assuming that nothing significant changes in our lives). We act as though we'll live forever, one year, one day, one hour at a time. We romanticize the past, take the future for granted, and let the present moment slip through our fingers.

We watch every tick of the stock market with baited breath, heedless of what our debt-leveraged credit default swaps will be worth within the next 1/100th of our life span. We invest based on quarterly projections and earning reports, and assume that bubble prices will keep booming forever (or at least until we manage to come to our senses and bail as they come come crashing down). The US$ is set to spiral into hyperinflation, and the Federal Reserve is still inflating it even more to prop up businesses 'too big to fail' for yet another six months. We're facing a new Great Depression, and the Canadian government responds by slashing public funding for political parties in a desperate, cutthroat attempt to preserve its chance at yet another minority government 2 or 3 years down the line. We're facing the possibility - better yet, the probability - of our climate changing to the point where our largest cities are no longer habitable; we're seeing massive ocean die-offs and the melting of the polar ice caps, right this minute; and the korporat state is still fighting tooth and nail to continue their business as usual, slurping up oil like crack cocaine and spewing poison into the environment without cost or heed, because it might slow down the economy. Wall street multi-billionaires, imperialist warhawks, entertainment-industry pirate busters, anti-civil rights crusaders - we're all building castles in the sand in hopes of turning back the tide.

WAKE UP.

Because the crash is coming. If we act now, and act united, and make big changes and hard choices, we might - might - be able to preserve some form of the society we have grown in, thrived in, and come to take for granted. We might be able to get through this without massive die-offs, civil wars, catastrophes, and reversion to the mean in the state of nature throughout the 'developed', affluent western world. If we are vigilant and proactive and have the will to overcome the beurocratic inertia and the bloated majoritarian dictatorship of the consumer class, we might just be able to get through this perfect storm of economic, environmental, and social collapse without becoming the new Africa. If we manage to cope as well as post-Communist Russia, or even post-colonial Latin America, we'll be doing great.

But don't count on it. Humans are creatures of short lives and shorter horizons. They won't believe in the crash until they can see it, until feel it, until they are holding it in their hands. They'll keep working their day jobs and vegitating in communion with the omnibox, driving their cars to the super market to buy food and clothes and gadgets made half a world away. They won't start their victory gardens until long after food rationing and food riots have become every-day reality. They won't start thinking about how to defend their homes until everything of value has already been taken from them. They won't invest in solar panels and home diesel refineries until every last drop of crude oil has been sucked out of the tar sands and wildlife refuges, until the air is black with smog and the sea is rife with poisonous weeds. They won't change, and they won't sacrifice, and they'll keep painting anyone who tells them they must as a lunatic, an alarmist, a fringe moonbat nutbar.

And the crash will come, and we are none of us prepared. And those who survive it will be the quick and the clever, and the brutal and cruel, and the lucky, and perhaps the rich (if their money is still worth anything and their servants don't turn on them in an orgy of looting and rape). The ones most like to emerge unscathed from the chaos will be those who planned ahead - 5 years, 10 years, 20 or 30, not on the assumption that all would remain in stasis, that the economy would keep on growing and their faerie-gold 'investments' would keep quietly ticking up, but on the insane and irrational belief that sooner or later it all had to collapse.

And I'm not one of those people, and the odds are neitehr are you. And it scares me, and it should damn well scare you too.

Reaping the Whirlwind

I can't help but laugh when I see people ranting about the backlash against people who supported California's Proposition 8 - the essentially anti-gay marriage amendment. These people seemed to think they could use lies, media manipulation, and the tyranny of the majority to deprive a visible, vulnerable minority population of an equality right already granted to them by the process of judicial review. This is a step beyond even other United States' anti-gay marriage amendments, which 'merely' confirm the denial of a right that gays already did not have. They fought, and fough hard and fought dirty, to revoke the right of gay partners to state-approved marriage and state-sanctioned marrigae benefits. And somehow they thought they could just walk away and go back to their cozy little lives.

Now the fires of retribution have come unto them. Their businesses are being boycotted, their places of worship vandalized, their names are made public on the internet and they are the targets of personal abuse. And they and those who choose to defend their actions have the temerity to call this 'bigotry'. Are they incapable of seeing the irony?

These people want to be immune from the consequences of their actions. Whatever you may believe about the ethics or technical legality of what the Proposition 8 campaign did, it's a fairly standard principle of democracy that those who involve themselves in the politics of the state can and should be held publicly accountable for their actions. For decades, not only have non-heterosexuals been persecuted and denied rights ranging from equal marriages to guarantees of personal safety and security; those who choose to campaign publicly for their equality and equal rights have set themselves up for an extra helping of threats, intimidation, harassment, and lost opportunities. Over time it's become less and less acceptable (in some places) to publicly slander or advocate discrimination against gays and lesbians; but those who supported the legal machinations of the anti-homosexual agenda, especially those who used the relatively quiet medium of monetary donations, have enjoyed a full measure of public support and have suffered harsh but restrained criticism at most. Now they're seeing the other side of the coin, and boy does it make them squeal.

It's a fairly standard tactic of the God Given, to demand from others what they refuse to supply themselves - respect; tolerance; freedom of speech, of thought, of worship. To paint others' demand for equality as a quest for 'special rights', as some sort of 'tyranny of the minority'. To demand special rights like freedom from criticism, freedom from consequences, freedom to define others' rights as they see fit. The right to cause offence, and never to be exposed to that which might cause them to take offence. The right to recieve respect when no respect is given. And when the tide of opinion begins to turn against their soft majoritarian bigotry, they howl to the four corners of the earth that they are the ones being persecuted! Your religious freedom ends where my personal liberty begins.

Well, congratulations. Your prayers have been answered; your campaign of lies and slanders and appeals to the lowest common denominator of mob democracy has succeeded. Same sex marriage is once again illegal in the United State of California (for the time being). Thousands of families have been stripped of their rights by the court of public opinion, which apparently trumps the court of law. But you will find this victory to be of the Pyrrhic variety. This is the tipping point; this is the most significant moment in the history of the LGBT rights movement since the Stonewall Riots. I can't even get mad at the screeches of indignation, the cries of 'GAY FASCISM' and 'RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE' that rise thick and furious, because I'm too happy at seeing these bigots finally get a taste of their own medicine. This is not discrimination; this is righteous vengeance.

"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up." (Hosea 8:7 KJV)

Suck it up, douchebags. You brought this on yourselves.