WASHINGTON (CNN) March 12, 2003 -- The cafeteria menus in the three House office buildings changed the name of "french fries" to "freedom fries," in a culinary rebuke of France stemming from anger over the country's refusal to support the U.S. position on Iraq.
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NYTimes March 8, 2003--One of the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time. Apparently he has given similar briefings to top officials of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.
Maybe we're all a little too desperate these days for a simple formula to explain how our safe world came unhinged. That, as much as anything, may explain one of the more enduring conspiracy theories of the moment, the notion that we are about to send a quarter of a million American soldiers to war for the sake of Israel.
{well. I mean gee. what do normal people do in spots like this? just ignore it, it'll go away? it won't.
what I'd really like is to feel there was continuity here, I mean here in this thing I'm writing in, where these words are. but it always feels like the first time, mostly. no background, all the basics have to be covered each time and layer after layer piling on from the outside.
so.
I keep seeing the little guys, my side, us, the good guys, nice people, sane people - choose a description that works - responding to nonsense like the above 'Biblical' prophecy, and 'de-frenchifying', as though because it's obviously horseshit, it somehow should go away once it's been called horseshit. but just like real horseshit, it doesn't matter what you call it, until somebody comes along with a shovel, it stays right where the horse left it.
my advice to those who are confused by the madness and the nonsense is don't get hung up on the 'logic'. it's biology that's taking place there, and the lessons of the natural world must be applied before things begin to make sense again. 'things' are fighting for their lives. some of those things are human beings, some of them aren't. that shouldn't be anymore scary than sleeping in the woods, which many of us have done, but it is, because most of us have been raised in this human-dominated landscape where the only dangerous life-forms besides ourselves are in zoos or under microscopes, or far away someplace 'else'.
that is a set-up.
the idea that evolution was frozen, or could be frozen, is a feint, a move by the thing that struggles out of the womb of human presence. I've been harping on this for years but nobody listens. imagine the thing we were that separated from the pre-chimpanzee line, there was a moment when it was joined and then a moment when it was 'alien'. those moments are cusps, and they exist all along the timeline, branches of possibility appearing and disappearing as circumstances shift and change. it's so complex, it bogs down the adrenal response to the very real and present danger, these madmen rising to their final moments. but it must be understood, if not intellectually, then emotionally, or deeper, in the meat and bones of our animal selves.
we are fighting a creature that lives both within and outside of our experience of time.
these prophecies, some of them are real, in the sense that descriptions of events are real, bystanders talking to a cop, children playing telephone, the 'media' reporting. but the mistake that gets made, understandably, is, because someone has described something you didn't even know existed, and described it accurately, then everything they say after that gets imbued with the gloss of truth.
see the ancient priests pointing to the sky and threatening to darken the sun. and people laugh. and the priests say, 'alright, Sunday, ten o'clock. you watch.' and people laugh, and Sunday the sun goes dark at ten.
yikes. do whatever they tell you.
well no.
no
it's just that there's more here than meets the eye. and every grasping little son-of-a-bitch either side of the line of metaphysical tangibility is taking credit for whatever he can. in order to survive.
that's it. I'm sorry if they told you there was a way out of all that, the only one I've seen is non-existence. which is under these circumstances maybe a little cowardly mm? we're here. we're in a death-lock with something that exists in relation to us like a ten year-old boy with a stick to a line of ants. in the same way, there's much more going on than just that one boy, but as far as the line of ants is concerned, he's what's happening.
I keep hearing people point to the obvious hypocrisy of fundamentalist positions. as though that's all it takes. maybe at the dinner table at your house when you were a kid. in the real world, sorry, it's not about the truth, it's not about fair play, it's not about anything other than what works. violence works. co-operation works. lies work. honesty works. you see? it isn't just circumstantial. but the idea that there's something here that will get rid of all that evil ugly garbage while you just stand there and point your finger, well think about it. isn't that just more of that same infantilizing trap? didn't we already cover that? aren't cattle in a similar state of dependence? dogs? sheep?
that's what's up.
the old names have all been perverted. so that talking about 'God' now means that thing that did all this. as though 'God' prefers fat selfish people driving SUV's to Inuit honed in the long Arctic day.
the true light, the real grace, are hidden from most of us.
but we all want the same thing, to live. everybody wants that.
even the worm wants to live.}
