My Favorite Song...right now anyway: MANOWAR-warriors of the world!

Witch Hunt?

     Wikipedia defines this concept as “…a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic, mass hysteria and lynching, but in historical instances also legally sanctioned and involving official witchcraft trials”.

      This concept is one that haunts me. It is one of the reasons I think hard every day, and work harder to make sure I fully understand just what a cultural sin this MORAL PANIC is. It is one of the reasons why I am writing this blog…to tell you all, that witch hunts happen…today, outside, IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOODS, and they are not random acts of insanity, rather, and more horrible then existing, they are SANCTIONED!


Sure…witch hunts happen in third world gutters where the hangman’s noose is tight from use, but they also exist…right here…in your backyard, in your house…even in your family.


Which brings me to my movie selection: Witch Hunt


     Witch Hunt is a modern day American disgrace, a savage sacrifice of justice and logic. Produced by fellow weirdo and idiosyncratic thinker, Sean Penn, Witch Hunt takes us on an up close and personal journey through an eighties butt rock nightmare, a Bakersfield bureaucratic bungle, in which a handful of children claimed sexual abuse, a charge coerced by ill equipped law enforcement in order to pin hideously graphic sins to the only witches worthy of such satanic sustenance…their own parents.

Mullets whimper in disbelief as blue collar couples are systematically charged, arrested and arraigned under the thunderous accusations, WITNESS TESTIMONY, and all of the non-evidence one backwards ass county can muster. Hard working, every day, people, people like you and me, suddenly find themselves hoping that its all just a shitty joke, praying that it’s all just a glitch, a wrinkle in the logic of law, laughing days away in disbelief, as they wait, for their chance in court to set the record strait…

Only problem with our legal system, a system built on numbers, and convictions, and success and money are directly attached to the amount of time wasted working diligently, filing motions, and paying county clerks, life behind bars begins to add up…there is no easy way out, even if you are “right”.


Days…and weeks…and months pass by, and all of a sudden…being an innocent in jail, in prison, IN SAN FUCKING QUENTIN!, doesn’t feel as good as say a plea bargain…

Flip, flip, turn, turn, and all of a sudden a wavering prosecutor has a pocketful of power, a handful of confessions.
Confessions?
Is it still a confession when pain, pressure, guilt and fear are applied?
Are those “confessions” worth someone’s life?

To think that every day in America, the land of the free, land of justice, we falsely imprison people, using archaic coercive techniques, techniques founded in an ancient tradition of punishment…

It seems we have no need for innocence, just a notion of blood for blood.
A tradition of witch HUNTING!
 At least the religious fundamentalists had the personal courage to rip the suspect’s guts out with a knotted cord, robbing the suspect’s life in an up close and physical way…

…now we just use a expensive court system, a legally sanctioned chop-chop square, where we can hunt, serve up, and lop off our fear, the infected limb…and so what if we might be wrong…some of the time…

RETRO REWIND 1: THE CRAZIES

The Crazies

In 1974 George Romero wrote and directed another cultural classic, The Crazies. It is a classic political diatribe about the Viet Nam war, and is both powerful and timeless. It centers on a small town in rural Pennsylvania, which unbeknownst to them, has been infected by a mysterious virus when their water system becomes contaminated. The government shows up, in force, not to help, but to contain. Anarchy ensues as the Army struggles to hold the line, and the trapped fight to escape. Making things, worse, or perhaps better, is the fact that the primary symptom of the disease is that it changes its victims into murderous psychotics. Ultimately, like all not-so efficient military operations, the shit hits the fan, forcing the wigs to push the button, and smash the problem into nuclear oblivion.

This movie reminds me of why all new shit is shit, done on a budget of less than half a million, it makes up production cost with real world locations, and real world political backdrops, not fabricated “good-ideas”. Narrative power is tied directly to the immediacy of the subject to the audience; in order for a viewer to “buy” in to you ruse, he needs to be sutured the things he his observing. Nothing, not hundred million dollar sets, or forces glycerin tears, or even pseudo under age sexuality, can guarantee authenticity…but authenticity can guarantee immediacy. Low budget, especially in film, can force truth and truth brings emotional and intellectual value.

In The Crazies, Romero rides many authentic things: real world actors, real world locales, and real world politics. All of which make this movie successful, far more successful than the shitty PG-13 Hollywood Tween mall flicks the execs shove down our throat every summer.

In particular, a scene I thought I owned, the crazed grandmother knitting, seated in her shit stained nighty, twirling, and twirling yarn, needles kneading hot air in little lobotomy-sized circles, until she ravels the yarn and has a man attached to the other end…a sick sight, one with some truth attached: we do keep old people locked up, even if they are crazy…sometimes when they’re not.

P.S. Oh yeah…one other thing…this movie also talks about military occupation…in particular…the way in which with dealt with Viet Nam. Many things about the “police Action” are demonstrated, from the way the protagonists are lead by two hi strung veterans, one regular grunt who is the more effective survivor but more unstable mind and a “Special Forces Hero” who is not all that heroic…to a complete replay of the infamous self immolation of the monk on T.V…this time acted out by a catholic under the influence of the situation. It all asks…would we be able to handle the war as solidly as the Vietnamese did…a war of occupation?



Final verdict: WATCH THIS MOVIE!

Brain Butter WORDS Version- episode #1: The Lucifer Principle

       I just got done reading "The Lucifer Principle" by Howard Bloom, and all I can say is...wow!  This book packs a punch in the gut for those who hold tightly to the notion that we are are smarter than the average monkey, it rubs raw, the brittle balloon we call "individuality" and enlightenment.  In a few hundred pages, this book, slams the shit filled ideological pampers we call 'humanity' and replaces it with rubbed raw flesh and gnashing teeth, bare, exposed, nobs of nasty nature and beastly beginings; leaving the reader rocking in unabashed hypnosis, picking at the scabs of delusion.

     It is a rough exposing uncomfortable ride into the real biological ramifications of multiculturalism and evolutionary systems.  It seems, according to Bloom, we are savage at heart, deeper than that, we are barbaric in nature...first and foremost we are out to get whats ours.  Now i know you all know that already, the idea of the savage monkey is not a new one, but that's where Bloom's specialization becomes important, he is a cultural anthropologist.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY!

      In this perspective, the biologist looks at the world as large viscous chunks, BLOBS, giant ten-member...hundred member...million member...BILLION MEMBER, organized systems of brutal dominance and death.  Bloom articulates in a hundred historical ways just how dominant our species is, dominant, organized by memes, and willing to sacrifice everything in order to sustain the gene.

     And just what does this mean to you?

     It means that while you are reading this, or praying to Allah, or beating off in those few quiet moments before the family gets home from soccer...whether you know it or not, or even want to...you are participating in the process that continues the meme.  You are PART of the process, either directly as the cop is when he stomps the ever loving shit out of the protester, or indirectly, as in when that hurried mother drives past the bleeding protester because the kids want McDonald's.

      And the worst part?

     I don't know...like a bee in bee hive, Bloom says, that we are all linked to the hive, genetically sutured to all it does, even before humane rationality, and according to Bloom, the Super Organism is the "True" shape of the human species, not the drone, or the doctor, or the bored college student.

    The SUPER ORGANISM!

     Bottom Line?   BLOOMY HAS A POINT!  Quiet few of them to be exact...

FOR ALL OF YOU WHO HAVE NO IDEA WHAT A THE SUPERORGANISM IS...WATCH AND LEARN!!!