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http://edwardcurtin.com/the-masquerade/

The Masquerade

“They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.  It’s hard to explain.”

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951

There’s a reason that Catcher in the Rye, published 70 years ago, has become such an iconic book, praised and condemned in equal measure. It is because it is about lying, phoniness, acting, Hollywood, theater, plagiarism, and at its core, a society of liars.  Actors in a masquerade willing to don masks and face other faces with the veiled glances of the defeated.  It is about the massive social confusion that entered American life in an intense way following World War II, a world of propaganda and performance.  Although the book seems to be directed at adolescents, it is for adults, and while annoying many of them with its adolescent lingo, it cuts to the heart of our current life-the-movie society.  Adults have become kids, and Holden Caulfield knew that they would.  Or were.  Maybe he wanted it.  We now live in a society of costumed children, asking to be tricked.

“If you want to know the truth,” Holden keeps repeating, knowing that most people don’t, since they prefer the Show.

It is also a fall book with echoes of falling leaves in a dying land.  Football and war, Halloween and all souls drifting down in the crepuscular light of late October and the coming November remembrance of Veteran’s Day, once called Armistice Day, when the mad slow action film of WW I, the war to end all wars with millions dead in rat infested trenches, is commemorated, as if anything has changed and such memories are not secret celebrations of the heroic sacrifices the gullible make for their masters.  War is a racket; the ultimate racket.

Liam Clancy reminds us of this truth regarding the “Great” War and all the others that have followed. Millions of deaths brought on by lying government bastards.  Actors in the mass masquerade.

But it goes deeper than lying leaders.  For lying is the leading cause of living death in the USA, and the pharmaceutical companies have no prescription for it.  If they did, and if they cared, which they don’t, they would have manufactured such a drug long ago.   It would have killed them of course, but since their business is profits not suicide, they don their masks of solicitude and bank the spoils, while producing poison to shoot people with.

The great English writer, D. H. Lawrence, warned us long ago to not let the living-dead eat us up.  Yet we are still being devoured by a refusal that knows no name since it is not just them but us – victims and executioners, both in a mutual deadly game.

Death is a big hit, as everyone knows. It fascinates far more than does life.  One glance at the mass media will confirm that.  Fear, death, and disaster are the daily menu, interspersed with kitsch uplift. Propaganda feeds on it.  Up down all around spin that wheel and rattle your brains.

But the ghosts of fall remind us to beware of this necrophilia.  The dead return and wander among us, masked children wandering through the streets looking for handouts.  Adults laughing those tight grim laughs.  How cute!

Nietzsche said that “all things are entangled, ensnared, and enamored.”  I find this especially true during the autumnal season, especially the Halloween weekend of ghosts, death, and masks.  It is enchanting and disturbing if you give it thought.  Its symbolism explains the Covid propaganda and panic more than a thousand factual articles. It explains the warfare state and adults’ refusal to defiantly oppose it.  It explains the nihilistic underpinning of society and children’s fears and wishes to use a magic wand to change the world to one that celebrates life not death. That is the true treat that their unconscious playacting requests.  But the candy the adults give them conceals the poison the adults can’t face.  The poison that they have ingested.

I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask.  Another Latin word, larva, occurs to me, it too meaning mask, ghost, or evil spirit.  The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days, swirling like dead leaves in the wind.

While etymology might seem arcane, I think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well. Word usage is at the heart of linguistic mind control, and we are in a world where the minders of the public’s mind have become adept at fashioning language to their devious ends.  Orwell predicted this in Nineteen Eighty-Four with his explanation of Newsspeak:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.  It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.

A quick check of the latest dictionary updates will corroborate Orwell’s point about the future dictionary when Newspeak has been fully established, the meaning of words will be so changed that anything can mean anything, even its opposite.

Shakespeare, the ultimate wordsmith, was right, of course, to tell us that “all the world’s a stage,” though I would disagree with the bard that we are “merely” players.  It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell.  But who are we behind the masks?  Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth holes (the per-sona: Latin, to sound through)?

Halloween.  The children play at scaring and being scared.  Death walks among them and they scream with glee.  The play is on. The grim reaper walks up and down the street. Treats greet them.  The costumes are ingenious; the masks, wild.  It’s all great fun, the candy sweet.  So what’s the trick?  When does the performance end?

As Halloween ends, the saints come marching in followed by all the souls.  The Days of the Dead.  Spirits.  Ghosts walk the streets.  Dead leaves fall.  The dead are everywhere, swirling through the air, drifting.  We are surrounded by them.  We are them.  Until.

Until when?  Perhaps not until we dead awaken and see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the deadly politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us.

And while these days of the dead and children’s games can bring us to wonder whether we act like people or actors – “even if it’s hard to explain” – whether behind the double masks we realize we can be genuine actors if we go deep enough, the celebration of Veterans/Armistice/Remembrance Day a few days later should  emphatically remind us of the Masters of War and the need to see through their masks, as Bob Dylan tells us.  The evil performers who “play with my world like it’s your little toy” with their endless lies.

Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set:

Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again.  All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.

It seems to me that Albert Camus was right, and that we should aspire to be neither victims nor executioners.  To do so will take a serious reevaluation of the roles we play in the ongoing national tragedy of lie piled upon lie in aggressive wars around the world and in election farces that perpetuate them.  The leading actors we elect are our responsibility.  We produce and maintain them.  They are our mirror images; we are theirs.  It is the danse macabre, a last tango in the land of bad actors, our two-faced show.  This masquerade ball that passes for political reality is infiltrated by the ghosts of all those victims we have murdered around the wide world.  We may choose not to see them, but they are lurking in the shadowy corners.  And they will haunt us until we make amends.

“Do you not know there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask?” warned Kierkegaard.  “Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked?  Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this?  Or are you not terrified by it?”

“Whenever I take up a newspaper,” Ibsen added, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”

Yet the children and the eloquent voices of the genuine actors I have so liberally quoted here remind us of what is possible if we chase the light and stop the masquerade.  That would be cause for a real holiday celebration.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/you-know-what-they-sayin/

You Know What They Sayin’?

Do you marvel, as I do, at this malignant hive organism — arguably worse than the Covid-19 chimera virus — that calls itself “Joe Biden”? The personage of that name is a mere effigy, of course, like one of those grotesque mummies hoisted above the mob in a religious procession from some primitive cannibal kingdom. It’s the mob itself that actually matters, though, the twerking parade of Woke-Progressive Democrats, because it is bent absolutely on rooting out, punishing, and torturing its perceived enemies, which in this case are about half the people in the country. That’s really all it seeks to do. It has never been about anything else, because, get this: the Woke mob is insane.

But now this other half of the country has raised a war cry, “Let’s go Brandon,” in objection. In case anyone does not know what the phrase means, peruse the actual lyrics from one of four rap chants topping the Apple music charts right now: this ditty by entertainer Loza Alexander:

Let’s go, Brandon (fuck Joe Biden)
(Let’s go, Brandon, fuck Joe Biden) you know what they sayin’, hoe
Let’s go, Brandon (fuck Joe Biden)
(Let’s go, Brandon, fuck Joe Biden) you know what they sayin’, hoe

Is that too subtle for anyone? Do you catch the drift? (Know what they sayin’?) The sentiment is timelier and apparently more popular than “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was in 1963. America has had enough of the Woke religious cult and its cavalcade of depravities. America is about to bum-rush the darn thing, seize the ghastly mummy from its skull-bedecked palanquin, and knock the living sawdust out of it.

Doings in the Loudoun County, VA, school board lately became the rectified essence of the wild, irresponsible, Woke derangement overtaking the land. The board authorized a sex education booklet that instructed teenage boys how to perform oral sex on each other — with explicit illustrations of one boy on his knees servicing another boy standing — while the board backed the sowing of maximum gender confusion among high schoolers who, under the best conditions, have a tough time adjusting to the hormonal storms of adolescence… all in the name of promoting a Woke brownie-point-collecting exercise called “Pride Week.”

And guess what? The parents of Loudoun County began to object to this… meshugas. And then the school board proceeded to squash and evade their objections, and even enlisted that degenerate troll Attorney General Merrick Garland to intimidate objecting parents with the FBI and federal writs against “domestic terrorism.” For his trouble, Mr. Garland was unmasked as a prevaricating tool in a US Senate hearing this week, nicely captured by the TV cameras so the citizenry could see him in weaselly operation.

It also came out that twice this fall a teenage boy wearing a skirt — ostensibly gender-confused in exactly the way promoted by the school board — committed two rapes of teenage girls in the girls’ bathrooms of two Loudoun County schools, to which he was granted access as someone pretending to bethink himself a girl — though it turned out he knew quite well how to deploy his male generative organ. The crimes were reported to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and shared with the County School Superintendent, who covered it up… not a smooth move, as things turned out, because now the country can see exactly how criminally dishonest the Wokesters are.

And as all this rolled out, Woke-Progressive Democratic candidate for Governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, made the supernaturally doltish utterance that “parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach.” His campaign even put out roadside signs under his name repeating the statement-of-principle, in case anyone missed it. The result: McAuliffe dropped about eight points almost overnight in the polls. The voters are about to pop him out of the political universe like a watermelon seed between their fingers.

Meanwhile, the mummy known as “Joe Biden” has ventured abroad, first to Rome to be feted, his handlers thought, by the Pope. But his excellency Pope Francis ordered the TV cameras turned off, apparently unwilling to be seen consorting with the inanimate, disintegrating graven image of a US president — anymore than he would want to be caught conversing with a statue of the Medici Pope Leo X in his Vatican garden.

Also meanwhile, the stage managers back at the White House, Chief of Staff Ron Klain and Susan Rice, shadowy Director of the Domestic Policy Council, floated an initiative to give half-a-million dollars to each family member of children and parents who had gotten separated while attempting to enter the US illegally. That ought to warm the hearts of US citizens thrown out of their jobs and their livelihoods for demurring to take a vaccine that doesn’t work and which causes havoc in the organs, blood vessels, and immune systems of many who have taken it — against a disease the engineering of which was paid for by their own tax dollars.

Now, cue the Mother of all Migrant Caravans marching north to the wide-open US / Mexican border — because “Joe Biden” wants it that way — just what millions of broke, thrown-out-of-work, soon to freeze and starve US citizens will be treated to watch on their flat-screens before the cable service is switched off for non-payment. “Joe Biden” just wants to rub their faces in it, or rather the folks behind him pulling his strings want to do that. Maybe the time has come to cut “Joe Biden’s” strings. And just maybe it’s time to put an end to the Woke march through our history.