What a mediatic week!
First, we were witness to a Royal farce which main purpose is to prevent the further stultification of a society that has recently taken part in the biggest bank bailouts of the financial system in Britain’s history. The Royal Wedding takes place at a time of crisis, which is seen by Labour Lord Maurice Glasman as one that has been witness to ‘the biggest transfer of wealth from poor to rich since the Norman Conquest’, renders the marriage - to put it euphemistically - as a hypocritical anachronism. The biggest paradox is its symbolic significance. The marriage represents a public relations stunt whose latent objective is to prop up and bolster an already down-trodden and badly damaged middle class; the logical resultant of an aristocratic and plutocratic national economic policy. The discursive use and interplay of words and symbols boggles the mind. The magic of it all is displayed when a ‘Middleton’ marries a Royal, thus opening up the fantastic possibilities for a meritocratic but illusory boost to a socially mobile but moribund middle-class. What a great way to try to influence the public mind by espousing myth in the midst of uncertainty and unreason!
Next, we had the canonization of a new saint for the Catholic Church. Nothing new under the sun. In a sense this is myth as usual. But the underlying motives are very obvious for the critical mind. The intention is of giving credence and legitimacy to an institution that has come under severe criticism and loss of adepts resulting from an acute information-age scrutiny of its medieval and incongruous practices. The worldwide child abuse scandal landed a scathing blow to the organization. So what is needed is to remind the public that myth needs to survive, and that its assertions towards the transcendent are more important than contemporary reason, empirically justified claims or plain common sense. Ultimately, the canonization follows a modus operandi that tries to prove that good (and God) can still be objectified in the world, by conveniently locating HIM inside some benevolent institution and near to close-to-divine human beings. In short, the Catholic Church’s main goal is to maintain an image that is mythically tantamount to a ‘force of good’.
Last, but not least, is the death of Osama Bin Laden. What a romantic way to terminate one of history’s better groomed scapegoats! Bin Laden – the CIA’s and Washington’s Frankenstein - comes to an abrupt end in a week of symbolic victories for civilizations’ saviours –the western Anglo-American and Christian union. This representative of ‘evil’, whom paradoxically was taken out by terrorism itself, albeit state terrorism, occupies our mind at a time when the same western axis, including liberal democratic capitalism, is under threat from a civilisational transference of wealth and power from West to East (China, India, Asian Tigers, etc).
But it is in the end the media – that presumably seems invisible and non-participant - the part of the axis that in the end is the most powerful of all. It is in fact the piece that colours and occupies the whole inside of the triangle. Our television and computer monitors project a magic-mythological reality in a warped intention of modifying our consciences even further, and far away from the empirical reality that we face. The state is getting bigger, the corporation is swallowing up more tracts of land and power, and finance is lubricating the machinery by enlarging the credit servitude that the middle classes and population at large harnessed eons ago. On the other hand, organised religion just does not go away. It functions today as it did back then in the Middle Ages - as the glue that cements the whole system together - regardless of its intrinsic injustices. In the end the media is having a blast making fun of everything they can in the process.
Ultimately what is reinforced is a magic and mythical view of discourse that is manufactured by those in power -the real kind of power- to keep us all in a childish state of permanent ignorance. This takes place at a time of paradigm shifts like the aforementioned shift of influence –in many ways to the East - largely due to western power elites who took history at face value and forgot that Imperialism and sovereign wealth (including the peoples that help to amass it, and not just aristocrats at the helm who spend it) must be kept in check if you want to survive as a republic, to say the least. Imperial jousts for power keep reminding civilization - and the human race – of its fragile arrangements in the face of adversity and collective annihilation. But do not hesitate, and open your eyes wide and look at the new scapegoat in the making! It is too bad that Global-Warming and Material Resource Depletion are both unluckily very difficult to pin down to an individual person or ethnic scapegoat, like Bin Laden or a rising Islam.
Natural organic restoration is on the way…
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