As security chased after him, Noteboom held out a plastic bag and dumped its contents onto the field while sprinting away from his pursuers.A newscaster, I think it was CNN's Cavuto but I'm not sure, went right from a clip of this brightly ghoulish event to a viewer poll asking "Where would you like to go?" or something like that I'm not sure what the phrase was, the question being I guess if it was your ashes, where would you like to be scattered etc. No editorial comment other than the default of "Hey, we're okay with that if you are." Not one scrap of recognition that there might be something so thoroughly appalling about that sight that most non-literary viewers of it would find it unspeakable. It's the victory dance of the swine.
Philadelphia police released a statement saying that the suspect "spilled a powdery substance from a container onto the field. The substance was that of the defendant's mother's cremated remains."
Once the bag was empty, Noteboom dropped it, made the sign of the cross, fell to his knees, then plopped flat on the ground.from comments to this article:Arizona Republic"...scripture confirms that the dead don't see the living."
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"Marmitons Etrangers fous!!!" (tran.)
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"The man who was arrested after spreading his mother's ashes at Lincoln Financial Field during Sunday's Eagles game returned to Arizona yesterday to overwhelming support, the Arizona Republic reported."
Philly.com
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Just before or after that, I'm not sure, on a different channel Seymour Hersh was on Hardball essentially saying though not explicitly except that Matthews threw up a quote from Hersh in I think 2003 that said essentially that Cheney and Rove were keeping Bush in a state of religious dementia/megalomania.
In order to manipulate him, and through him, the country.
And just now some kind of panel, I'm not sure what it was called, but the way the guys I heard talk were talking it was some kind of Catholic panel, on C-SPAN, concerned with the now amazing 5 Catholics on the U. S. Supreme Court - first time in history, etc. - and whether this was an event or a non-event.
First the less mediagenic one was saying things about how Earl Warren, a "liberal" and not a Catholic, was the most scripture-quoting judge the S.C. has had yet, or maybe has had yet in modern times, I'm not sure - the idea being I guess that tolerating Earl Warren's scripture-quoting should lead right into tolerating religious delusions in men and women who will shape the country's future more directly and immediately, and for longer, than any elected official will.
The mediagenic one said something to the effect that expecting a man or woman charged with the duties and responsibilities of adjudicating from the highest court in the land to set aside his or her religious beliefs in order to perform as a fair and impartial jurist was not an unreasonable expectation.
That's when I turned it off.
The hypocritical absurdity of saying that - that someone could believe in eternity and the immortality of the soul and Biblical commandments and infallible Papal directives etc. etc. - yet put all that aside because a set of human laws that are less than 250 years old requires it, is nauseating. Almost as nauseating as the deranged smugness behind the superstitious beliefs themselves.
A really great example of that is the lack of concern in the President for the souls he's been releasing into the next world.
"Who cares? We're all immortal! Their problem if they aren't right with God! Yee-haw!"
These three phenomena, the ashes, the President's delusions, the Catholic mumbo-jumbo, are one phenomenon.
And the bogus debates about "evolution" and "I.D.", and the virulent arguments about abortion, and the fascist drug laws, and the bigoted discrimination against gays - they're all part of the same thing.
It will be evil to those it doesn't benefit, and good to those it does.
Evil is like any other form of moral distinction, when there's a war the winners write the new definitions.
And the next conflict takes its form and essence from that. It keeps refining and repeating itself. Cleansing and purging its environment.
And when the valence is the self evil and good are much easier to calibrate than when there's some kind of other, outside the self, at the center of things.
It's that we're trained not to think of these groups and institutions as being capable of selfishness, or of an existence independent from their current memberships.
But of course they are, any sin, any crime, any flaw that individuals can have can be seen in the churches and nations that humans create around themselves to insure their own survival; and they exist through time on a scale human lives can't match.
The illusion persists in the names of the groups and institutions seeming to describe what's there. This allows an invisibility and adaptive rebirth, a shucking of the old shell, casting aside identities that outlive their utility.
Protestantism emerges from the corrupt cess of what was "the Church". Fundamentalisms emerge like larva from the nest of that, and out of them come splinters and sects and amorphous groups whose identities shapeshift as required.
Trying to speak to that is impossibly complex. What kind of morality that doesn't come from outside the system could possibly work?
This may seem arcane and bizarrely tangential but I'll suggest a look at how acceptable the deaths of individuals become when ordered by a centralized human agency like the government or the church militant or any other of the large vague creations of human coming-together. Especially when the deaths themselves are "collateral".
The simpler point is that groups can be as selfish as individuals.
And selfishness is the prime of all evil.
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It's no wonder evolution is such a disturbing topic. It's what the antagonism against the concept's really about - the struggle for control of the human evolutionary process, itself now entirely, or very nearly, in human hands.
That's an irony that just won't go away for me, that the erstwhile champions of science and reason, stripped of wishful thinking and received fantasy, can never acknowledge that evolution itself has been beaten into submission, that the processes that sculpted our intelligence and adaptive grace, our social cohesion and communicative strengths, have been broken - and replaced by the formative pressures of human agencies.
But then that might involve accidentally waking people up to what's been done to them, and is being done, and then there might still be enough of us left to resist.
The dominance plan won't be as easy to accomplish if people wake up to it.
So keep them thinking there is no truth, no logic behind anything.
Just "scripture" and a vague presence outside the frame - and keep them strung out on timid daily comforts and the steady possibility of gratification - acceptable desires and the needs of the organism.
With a backdrop of eternal joy that can be turned on and off at will, so that immediate human concerns can be exaggerated or trivialized as necessary - the death of a baby in the womb a grotesque criminal nightmare, the death of a child under a rain of white phosphorus the price of "staying the course" and "finishing the job".
