The Priesthood of Lies

Confronted with the harsh reality of an imperial world order on a dumpster run to annihilation:

Some people retreat into fantasy:

"...If time is an illusion, can consciousness ever truly be extinguished? The fear of death is a universal concern, yet once we abandon the random, physical-centered cosmos and start to see things biocentrically, the verisimilitude of a finite life loosens its grip. The contemplation of time and the discoveries of modern science suggest that the mind is the ultimate reality, paramount and limitless...

...Physics tells us that energy is never lost, and that our brains -- and hence the feeling of life -- operates by electrical energy, and this energy simply can't vanish. The biocentric view of the timeless, spaceless world allows for no true death in any real sense. Immortality resides outside of time altogether. Eastern religions have argued for millennia that birth and death are equally illusory. Since consciousness transcends the body -− "external" is a distinction of language alone −- we're left with consciousness as the bedrock of existence. Death has always meant only one thing: an end with no reprieve. If we're just our body, then we must die. But if we're our consciousness, the sense of experience, then we can't die for the simple reason that consciousness is expressed in manifold fashion and is ultimately unconfined..."

Note to the stupid doctor:

While you play footsie with hope, that most vicious of perennial afflictions, telling your middle and upper class cosmopolitaines that their greedy, acquisitive, bourgeois existences will survive even death, actual death reaps a whirlwind of flesh and life all around you.

You eat and drink it every day, doctor. Your comfortable gold plated, HuffPo celebrated existence depends upon the death and squalor you refuse to admit.

Some of us have faced this reality and chosen a real culture of life. One that premises itself on the truth of death. We see with our eyes that people die. We see that people murder, rape and destroy. We see them get away with it. And we have decided - we've judged, Doc - that this will not stand.

Something has to give.

It ain't gonna be us, anymore, doctor.

So, peddle your swill while you can. Some of us dirty, lousy tramps have given up on hope. Looking for the palaces of the rich, instead. And you court jesters don't get immunity from the blowback. You might have a more esoteric version of the stupid, to sell. But what difference between you and Krugman, Yglesias or Klein, really?

Nothing.

You all need the drones to keep on keeping on. The priesthood always does, nu? Your very lives depend on it. But while you, doctor, prefer the older con, the one where the rubes get to believe they'll never ever die, Ezra transfers all the glory onto his imperial daddy:

"President Obama's remarks at various Michigan automobile plants today get to the heart of the task facing the administration as we enter the 2010 election. The White House doesn't lack for accomplishments. What it lacks is popular accomplishments.

The auto bailout is a perfect example. By and large, it worked. The automobile sector stabilized. GM, Chrysler and Ford are all posting profits. Millions of workers who would've gone down with the car companies still have their jobs. America retains an automotive industry that's both competitive in developing markets like China and starting to scrap with the Japanese and German automakers in the high-tech, green-car market...

...Obama doesn't have to invent accomplishments for Democrats to tout in the 2010 election. Rather, he has to convince the public to also consider those policies accomplishments."

See, doc. You may come out better by comparison. Sure, body parts and broken lives follow in the wake of the war machine, feeding the existence that makes you possible. Sure, never ever actually dying seems pretty nifty in the face of all that. You must have a blast believing you create reality with your "consciousness."

Some kind of priest has had that market cornered for the better part of twenty centuries.

Your kind of priest, though, always had a whiff of independence about you. I don't know if you have it, personally, doc. But Becket paid for Henry II's sins. Romero took a bullet for speaking truth to power. Max Kolbe died in Hitler's bureaucratic charnel house. And Bonhoeffer matched his words and his deeds, taking the wire garrote around the neck before he'd ever submit to tyranny.

Not so, the other kind of priest, the Ezra, Yggie and Krugman kind. They know what side of the bread gets their butter. And which big daddy gives them the butter, in the first.

They wouldn't dream of letting the reality of death and imperial destruction sully the image of their devotion. They labor mightily towards the same sort of disconnect that you peddle, doc. The one where belief and reality never meet. They too dream of a better world. One where the lies they tell take on a conscious reality. One where the drones might get a pay raise and the franchise, but where the priesthood gets to improve upon them, free to save the rest of us from ourselves, from our refusal to believe...