Gobsmacked!

In AmerICKa, a somnolent state under the rule of the Military Media Complex, a *politician* could never speak the words of Putin, could never express any consideration of the *cost* in *civilian* life exacted by her wars.

No concern for the other can ever be shown, less the AmerICKan sense of superiority, of divine favor, be pricked. The others must remain biologically and spiritually invisible, the others must remain nothing more than tin targets to be knocked down in AmerICKa’s carnival shooting gallery wars.

Knock them all down with our smart weapons, and win a prize--Libya’s oil reserves or her sovereign wealth funds! Step right up! 3 Predator Drones for only a billion dollars! Knock down the tin Gadhafi and win the Libyan Investment Authority for your sweetheart!

If an AmerICKan politician ever hesitated over killing the others, he would be labeled weak, un-AmerICKan, liberal, ATHEIST.

Though these wars don’t materially benefit AmerICKa, and only drain her dwindling treasure, they produce a brutal narcotic the sheeple have become addicted to: blood pride. If we can kill the others, we must therefore be better than the others. That is all that sustains the AmerICKan identity: bloodshed. The priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so. . .

All that AmerICKa used to preen about before the world, her great freedoms, her great riches, are all gone. . .AmerICKa is now seen in her naked form, a harlot who gained her freedoms and riches from riding upon a beast who roams the world, seeking to steal, kill and destroy.

The Signs Of The Times

But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

Ha ha ha. . .earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, tornados, floods, economic catastrophe. . .yet world-wide the sheeple flock to a wedding of figureheads, as if everything can continue as it always has.

When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?

Not One Of Them Is Forgotten Before God

AnnArbor.com, 26 April 2011: A 19-year-old Ann Arbor man was arrested Monday night after he deliberately ran over four ducklings with a Hummer in a McDonald's parking lot, Ann Arbor police said. He was taken to the Washtenaw County Jail, where he is expected to be arraigned on felony animal cruelty charges this afternoon. At about 6:15 p.m., the man stopped at the drive-thru window in the McDonald's parking lot at 2675 Plymouth Road. Two of the man's friends were in the Hummer with him. As they were picking up their order, one of the passengers got out and attempted to pick up a duckling, police said. A duck and at least 8 ducklings had been walking around in the lot. "Employees at McDonald's yelled at him to stop," police said. The man got back into the Hummer, which left the parking lot, pulling into an adjacent lot for about 15 minutes while the men ate their food. Witnesses told police that the Hummer then returned to the lot and ran over four of the ducklings. Police said the man drove the Hummer away without stopping. Police were called and obtained a description of the Hummer. Officers caught up with a vehicle that matched the description at a nearby gas station and interviewed the three men. The driver was arrested.

A co-worker said to me:

“Man, the time and money the county will waste on this punk, getting him through the courts, housing him, all for what? A couple of ducks.”

“Apparently, you two are of the same mind, then,” I replied.

The co-worker snorted, made a face, and walked away.

It's the first time I've heard a co-worker express any sympathy for anybody in jail.

The older I get, the more I marvel how God manages to still bother about the filthy rags that constitute humanity. [And trust me, I include myself.] Garbage on earth. There have been times when I have expressed this sentiment and have had people respond: you’re supposed to be a Christian, and that’s what you think of God’s creation? That’s when I snort, make a face, and walk away. Is it really necessary to state the obvious:

God didn’t create this garbage. He created spotless mankind, male and female. Perfect specimens. Through the Fall (sin, not the season), mankind devolved into garbage. This frame of reference does not IN ANY WAY preclude one from caring about humanity any more than it precludes God from loving the world. On the contrary, when we see ourselves as the garbage we truly are, we more clearly understand our need and our neighbor’s need for salvation, and we will develop a greater appreciation for Christ’s sacrifice. That He would hang on the cross for such riff-raff!

When we commend ourselves, we only diminish the cross. Christ’s sacrifice looks smaller the higher we regard ourselves. Christ’s gift looks less expensive when we pour good inside of us. “There’s some good in everybody.” “People are basically good.” Even so-called *Christians* can be heard uttering such self-serving and dishonest platitudes. When we elevate ourselves, we make a claim of deserving Christ’s sacrifice. . .but GOD FORBID!

Anyway, back to the ducks. . .

When Almighty God, the Supreme Being, clothed Himself in human flesh (what a humbling!! Now you understand why The Human Centipede is a THEOLOGICAL film—would a human being willingly put on the exoskeleton of a centipede? God willingly lowered Himself far more, far more, when He put on human flesh), He spoke the following:

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.

When we consider these words of our Lord and Savior, we understand man is, indeed, of more value than animals. But man is not of infinite more value. . .a measure can be made. And I would imagine, if God were to reveal the measure, most would be surprised by the low yield. Most would suppose an ark to carry off the beasts as payment for one human, when I would wager a U-Haul would do the trick.

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings? In our measuring, animals come cheap. We buy them, and then we eat them, or turn them into BLING, and, unless their heads are stuffed and mounted on a wall, they are quickly forgotten. BUT not one of them is forgotten before God. We forget the animals, but God does not. So we must understand God values the animals more than we do. LISTEN, this ought to be evident, as God accepted animals as sacrifices in shadow of Christ—there is value in the blood of animals. . .not the value of human blood, but more than most realize (and, of course, there are those who go the OTHER WAY).

My co-worker returned for Round Two:

“Let me see if I got this right. This guy ran over some ducks at a McDonald’s parking lot, and ends up in jail—but if he shot the same ducks in hunting season, they’d be just as dead, but he’d be free? So what’s the difference?”

“Well, though both sports are of dubious merit, the difference is the degree of cruelty in the duck hunters. At least, I hope there is some difference in degree of cruelty. And there surely is a difference in the degree of cruelty in the spectacle. Imagine some poor little boy or girl, sitting by the window in McDonald’s, delighting in their toxic Happy Meal, and then, lo and behold, right before their eyes, cute little baby ducks being squashed under the wheels of a Hummer, duck blood and entrails spurting everywhere.”

The co-worker snorts, makes a face, and walks away.

Just as humans can convince themselves there is such a thing as a *just war,* they can convince themselves there is such a thing as a *just duck hunting*—and thus in the one instance killing is a crime, and in the other, killing is not a crime.

Human justice is completely arbitrary. . .

This young lad who ran over the ducks certainly deserves to be in jail. . .I doubt this was his first violent act, and there is every statistical reason to believe it won’t be his last, and that he will, if he has not already, *graduate* from ducks to humans (probably women and/or children).

This fellow, who killed ducks with a Hummer (and the Hummer is another indicator of aberrance), is NO angel. LISTEN, I can tell just by looking at his dumb face. Wait a minute, and I’ll tell you exactly what kind of dumb face he has.

So this kid is in jail? So what? Bums go to jail for *canning*—taking pop bottles and cans out of the trash bins in University of Michigan classroom buildings. . .it doesn’t take much to end up in jail. . .and it doesn’t take much to get out of jail, either. This duck molester will bond out in a few hours, and will no doubt join humanity’s fastest growing social club—the SELF-PROCLAIMED VICTIM’S club. That’s the dumb face on this kid. The dumb “I’m the victim” face. The dumb face of dumb fucking people who think there is *some good* in everybody and don’t believe they need the blood of Christ to escape Hell.

Ha ha ha. . .this kid’s Hummer-rich parents will get him a lawyer, he’ll be pampered, coddled, he’ll get therapy and a shiny brand new Xanax prescription for his jail trauma. No matter what the ultimate court outcome, the coddling and pampering he will receive from his family and friends will ensure his cruelty remains unchecked. He’ll never realize there’s something wrong with himself. . .

Human garbage. Why have sympathy for this one, and not for that one? That’s what I should ask my co-worker. Either have sympathy for all of them, or none of them. They are all human garbage. We are all human garbage. We all deserve to be in jail. Is it fair that a brat in a Hummer with a dead conscience who kills ducks for his own amusement sits in jail, while most of the rest of us remain *free?* Ha, there’s no point in even bothering about fair when we’re all choking in a garbage dump stinking of Hell.

UPDATE: 4 May 2011

The dumb “I’m the victim” face, proof:

Lawyer says man accused of running over ducklings with Hummer has received hate mail

The Human Centipede

The Human Centipede: First Sequence: Though it begins with the clichés of the so-called *horror* film (a mad German doctor living in an isolated retreat, two dumb AmerICKan tourist girls stranded with a flat tire in the middle of the woods who happen across the mad doctor in his isolated retreat), The Human Centipede is, nevertheless, an entirely NEW kind of film. Checking its shockingly low score on IMDb, and scanning a few of the reviews, I must conclude this NEW kind of film was vastly misunderstood by the contemporary *torture porn* habitué cretins. This is an almost entirely asexual film—no one is killed while having sex, no one is raped, the doctor’s unusual deed lacks sexual motivation. The only character who wants to fuck is on screen for about a minute-and-a-half, a fat old degenerate who mistakes(?) the AmerICKan girls for porn actresses and wonders if they aren’t always wet between the legs. When the old wanker realizes there are no cheap thrills to be had, he drives off, disappointed and bored. I assume the filmmaker included this character to be a *stand-in* for the typical stinking chum who choke the cineplex horror theater shouting stupidities at the screen, and who no doubt feel *cheated* The Human Centipede exhibits only a form of *torture,* and no porn—or rather, a pornless porn—as the film’s notorious ass-to-mouth suturing is THEOLOGICAL, not coprophagical.

While The Human Centipede’s two dumb AmerICKan tourist girls wait for help that will never arrive, they attempt *small talk* to ease the tension created by the doctor’s negligible social skills. One of the AmerICKans remarks: You have a really beautiful home. Do you live here with your wife? No, the doctor replies in his guttural monotone, I don’t like human beings. This serves as The Human Centipede’s thesis statement, which shows the prior use (and further uses) of the *horror* clichés as smokescreens meant to provoke and then disorient the Pavlovian dogs who bark at the multiplex screens—while signaling to the one or two sentient in the audience this will be a NEW kind of film, a film of sublime cruelty and hate, a hate not tainted by any frustrated sexuality, but a purely *Satanic* hatred of humanity, which is expressed by the film’s *mad* doctor.

Dr. Josef Heiter, celebrated surgeon, renowned as the world’s most skilled at separating conjoined twins, is now retired and living in seclusion on his forested German estate. The doctor has a vision for transforming ugly humanity into a form more befitting its fallen nature. Indeed, Heiter has the strongest aesthetic sense of any character in *horror.* His oddly beautiful villa abounds with objets d’art—both classical and what one might call *modern surgical.*

Heiter is a bitter, angry, hateful man—why? No answer is given in this memorable NEW film. The viewer is confronted by a man disgusted with humanity, for some unstated reason (which perhaps reflects the filmmaker’s assumption that disgust is the only rational reaction to humanity, and therefore this disgust ought to be self-evident?) and feels duty-bound to transform it.

The duty-bound Heiter has NO CHOICE. Though his work is exhausting and thankless, the doctor, who would be labeled *psychotic* by our modern *psychologists,* cannot shirk the responsibility of his calling, a calling our modern *psychologists* would label a delusion of grandeur. The doctor has been called to sculpt with the tools of his former trade a new human creation.

The doctor has judged humanity guilty, and for this, he will PUNISH humanity. He will strip humanity of INDIVIDUALITY, and cripple its sense of FREE WILL. He does this by severing the knee ligaments of the two dumb AmerICKan girls and one highly-agitated Jap male, leaving them only the ability to crawl. He then removes several of their teeth, and completes his transformative surgery by joining our new Adam and Eves mouth-to-anus. The three can no longer act upon whatever STUPID NOTIONS enter their minds, as they had previously done, and which most of humanity currently does. The three are SENTENCED to spend their remaining mortality daisy-chained together ass-to-mouth. They are COLLECTIVELY punished, stripped of their former IDENTITY, made a reduced form of humanity, with only a limited ability to manifest the sins of their untouched minds. Their remaining days are spent in an ass-eating shadow of DAMNATION, examining their former lives for the evidence which convicts them as human centipedes. This is exposited in the final statement of the Jap male, the head of the human centipede, and therefore the only one capable of speech. He confesses his sin to his new god, but, still showing a retarded sense of justice, wonders, Job-like, if his sentence wasn’t too harsh. So we say The Human Centipede is a THEOLOGICAL study, and thus beyond the limited grasp of the lobotomized masses who warm the theater seats, and are unable to respond to anything other than the most base sensory stimulation.

We must applaud the performance of the German actor, Dieter Laser, who plays Dr. Josef Heiter. Laser has delivered one of the great *horror* performances. With his emaciated, ascetic’s appearance, his weary barefoot gait, his guttural monotone punctuated by occasional violent ravings, he embodies the wilderness prophets of old. The ever-severe doctor allows himself one moment of exultation, and Laser cuts loose with a scene of loonily joyful adoration. He celebrates himself after successfully completing the human centipede by dancing to the sound (only he can hear) of a worshipful choir, admiring and kissing himself in a mirror, then, as the merciless Satanic god he is, he uses the mirror to taunt his creation. In The Human Centipede, guilty humanity must live under his Law, with no hope for grace.

Red Desert

Red Desert: Made in 1964 by the great greaseball director Michelangelo Antonioni, Red Desert hasn’t held up quite as well as some of his others. The clip below shows all the greatness of the film (it’s beautifully framed and colored, an artistic masterpiece) and all the weakness (nothing much happens, except clumsy monologues). Though a decidedly mixed-bag of a movie, we can give Antonioni credit for making perhaps the first green movie, as this ponderous and head-scratching (there’s a bizarre pseudo-orgy scene in which a group of five Italians and one pseudo-Italian [Richard Harris] assemble in a squalid dockside shack and get ready to fuck, and then, for some reason, instead of fucking, they break apart one of the shack’s flimsy walls and use the boards for firewood) existential psychodrama depicts all the ugliness of the techno-industrial modern world. . .the film features shot-after-shot of industrial waste, belching smokestacks, rusting pipes, mud-ravaged landscapes, filthy, toxic water and polluted skies. And Antonioni is also ahead on the modern neuroses curve, as the main character, Giuliana (played by big-nosed, thick-lipped Monica Vitti) displays many of the traits that mark the contemporary female: chronically fatigued, chronically depressed, suicidal, nail-biting, restless legged, ever picking at herself, rife with anxieties--but clueless as to their origin). The only 21st century symptom missing from Giuliana’s catalog of disorders is wrist-cutting. What little plot there is involves Giuliana wandering around the bleak industrial wasteland or through sterile rooms with shifting wall colors crying out for help to a cast full of deaf ears. Giuliana is beyond hopeless, she suffers countless breakdowns, and during one gargantuan anxiety attack has to endure a laborious date rape from the pseudo-Italian Richard Harris. Even Giuliana’s son is indifferent to her loosening grip on reality, as he preys on his mother’s already-severely frayed nerves with a fake polio attack!! Vitti tries hard to make her character a believable embodiment of all the trademark Antonioni existential angst and alienation, but it’s almost an impossible task when given scenes such as the one in which she stares dazed at a map and must muse aloud I wonder if there’s some place in this world where people go to get better. Probably not. The most favorable point-of-view from which to look at Red Desert fifty years later is to imagine the film as the forerunner to David Lynch’s Eraserhead, with Giuliana’s son, inheriting his mother’s anxieties, growing up to be Henry Spencer.

Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass: This is a one joke movie. . .but it’s a pretty good joke. An eleven-old-girl (played by a kid named Chloe Grace Moretz, in the best tween girl performance since Natalie Portman in The Professional) is a potty-mouthed, conscienceless killing machine Super Hero-ette named Hit Girl who, costumed in plaid schoolgirl skirt with pink utility belt, black mask and purple wig, mows down (in hyper-speed) rooms full of colored drug dealers and mafiosos to a blaring Banana Splits soundtrack. The story of how this kid became Hit Girl (and all the rest of the film’s Super Hero-cum-teen angst back story, which encompasses more than a few uninteresting characters), isn’t worth bothering with. Asian filmmakers wouldn’t even have tried to construct a story line, they would have just shot 90 minutes of school girl mayhem, flavored with a more potent blend of the pedophilia that is clumsily half-hinted at here. Excepting the presence of Nicolas Cage, who gives a retro-Cage quirky performance as Hit Girl’s Adam West-imitating faux-Batman Big Daddy dad (which I guess elevates this movie to one-and-a-half joke status), the movie becomes an exercise in tedium whenever Hit Girl makes an exit. In fact, I almost gave up on this thing as just another overdone post-modern comic book movie. . .at least 40 minutes must have passed before Hit Girl made her genuinely spectacular entrance, and I was just about to hit the eject button on the dvd, but then, well, Hit Girl happened (see the crappy video copy below), and I stayed for the rest. . .though drumming my fingers through all the non-Hit Girl and Big Daddy scenes. Is there enough here to keep most mature viewers *engaged?* Probably not. But then I’m the type who gets all mushy for the expressionistic family sentimentality that sustains the Hit Girl/Big Daddy relationship (nicely contrasted with the sterile relations between Kick-Ass, the movie’s teen boy Super Hero, and his parents), and the Big-Daddy-burning-to-death scene nearly moved me to tears. . .so, you have to be sick-and-tired of what passes for AmerICKan screen realism (see the lifeless-but-critically-lauded Winter’s Bone, for example, with features the soul-less family love which the critics must experience in *real life*--the love which is posed) to enjoy this kind of thing. Let’s just hope Kick-Ass II resurrects Big Daddy and sends all of Kick-Ass I’s tiresome teen angst straight to Hell.

[I would be remiss, as they say, if I did not mention the disturbing *The Passion of the Hit Girl* scene near the movie’s end, wherein our little hero-ette becomes a mafia punching bag. In a movie full of obvious comic book violence, this short scene degenerates into something ugly. . .it’s a nasty little scar on an otherwise happy bit of nonsense.]

Do Ye Even So To Them

It turned out the night I learned my brother died, in fact, at almost exactly the same time I learned my brother died, the two-year-old son of a Sergeant who works at the very same jail I am employed at, in fact, a Sergeant who had been my supervisor when I worked on the day shift, the two-year-old son of this Sergeant was drowning in a bathtub. The child died. The details of the terrible event are unknown, although from jail gossip it is considered certain no *foul play* is (or was) suspected.

It is a terrible event. A parent’s *worst nightmare,* as is said. Upon hearing the news, I had tremendous, and, I believe, genuine sympathy for the Sergeant. I prayed for the Sergeant and his family (a wife and three other children). Yet as I felt this sympathy, which I believed to be genuine, and as I prayed for this Sergeant and his family, I was always aware I had never really liked this Sergeant. I had found him to be an overly *fussy* supervisor--a little too eager to run a *tight ship,* in, I suspected, an attempt to gain favor from his supervisor, a deranged Lieutenant who *lives in a jail of his own.*

An example of this Sergeant’s fussiness: as part of my jail clerk’s duties, I have to write tickets to released inmates who cannot pay their twelve dollar jail booking fee. I would fill out the ticket completely and accurately, yet this Sergeant would complain my handwriting could be neater. Consider the work environment: telephones are ringing off the hook, jail gate intercoms are buzzing constantly, you have a belligerent perpetrator of domestic violence in your face unhappy at the dumb booking questions you must ask (“do you believe that other people know your thoughts and can read your mind?), you have a backlog of other new arrests waiting to be booked, releasable inmates are whining “what’s taking so long?”, arrogant lawyers are demanding their inmate clients be brought down for interviews, and here is this Sergeant interrupting the barely functioning process to nitpick about handwriting. Go back into your fucking office and stop bothering me--those were my near-daily sentiments concerning this Sergeant.

And as each day passes, I have less sympathy for this Sergeant, and he is no longer named in my prayers.

God, of course, knew my true heart at the first moment I heard of this Sergeant’s tragedy. God knew those first moments of sympathy, the first prayer, when I had heard the awful news, those first *seeds* of sympathy and prayer, were akin to the seeds from our Lord’s famous parable: the seeds which fell upon the stony places, where they had not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth, and when the sun was up, the seeds were scorched, and because they had no root, they withered away.

My sympathy and my prayers for this Sergeant had no root, and they withered away.

The human soul, at the least, my human soul, can be a stony place. . .

What a horrible *thing*--to have your child drown in a bathtub! Besides the cruel death itself, impossible enough to deal with, imagine all the recriminations (whether voiced or not), the guilt, the never-ending *if only. . .* A remaining lifetime shadowed by a grievous death.

I suppose in a week or so this Sergeant will return to work. Return to work with all the so-called *emotional baggage* of a truly dreadful death of a child. Returning to work would be bad enough in an ordinary job--but to return to work in a JAIL? Which is, after all, nothing more than BABY-SITTING society’s worst children. This Sergeant now has to baby-sit our worst brats, those of us who haven’t grown up enough to sufficiently conceal our wickedness. JAIL is a depressing place to work--24 hour DAYCARE for madmen, drunks, deviates, the violent and the rapacious. While this Sergeant considers the atrocious fate of his small son, he must listen to grown men throwing temper tantrums over missed sack lunches and being allowed only one free phone call. . .

To be depressed and then have to work in a depressing place--this thought revives my sympathy for this Sergeant. . .for a moment or two. . .then I remember his grating personality, his absurd obsession for a fastidious jail house.

I know I won’t be able to say a caring word to this Sergeant when he returns to work. I will not be able to manage anything more than a slight nod of the head and a “morning, Sergeant.”

The only self-justification I can manage for my hard heart is wrenched from our Lord’s command:

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. . .

If I were in this Sergeant’s place, I would not want my sympathy. . .