BUSH AND THE HOLY GRAIL

Bush likes to call his deeds in the Holy Land a "Crusade" which just goes to show how far outside of our modern time zone he and his Christian backers in America govern from. And, in another throwback to ancient, superstitious times, Bush likes to think the voice in his head is a god's voice, speaking personally to him and not to the rest of us (that's opposed to Sam's voice which another famous lunatic heard). Frankly I don't hear voices, and when I do, I know myself well enough to know that the voices inside my own skull are the voices of my own thinking which I then take responsibility for. It kind of scares me that Bush doesn't know the difference. Most people with his condition are pretty well sedated, but, then, you can't lead the Republican party under the heavy dose of sedation Bush would require. Can you see what Bush's obvious insanity implies about the Republican Party's leadership that can follow a madman? Makes me think of Nazi Germany.

Actually, the one real situation that Bush is responsible for is the loss of traditional democratic values that allowed American blue collar workers to prosper. Current conditions for the average American seem an awfully lot like the conditions of peasants in the corrupt, medieval, ecclesiastical culture from which grew the tales of Tristan and the search for the Holy Grail in, as Campbell says it, "a land torn between honor and love." Bush holds up all the duty and honor braggadocio, with a lot of church mixed unconstitutionally in, while those of us who are real people hold up the troubadour's painful love end. What we Americans (those who are still sane) really have beneath our loamy feet is a land owned and operated by BIG BUSINESS CHURCH just as in Tristan's time it was owned and operated by BIG MOTHER CHURCH...

Joseph Campbell, unbeknownst to himself, has described America's current corrupt condition under Bush's Republican leadership in yet another passage from (MYTHS TO LIVE BY, p. 167): "Every natural impulse in that period of ecclesiastical despotism was branded as corrupt, with the only recognized means of 'redemption' vested in sacraments administered by authorities who were themselves indeed corrupt. People were forced to profess and live by beliefs they did not always actually hold. The imposed moral order held precedence over the claims of both truth and love. The pains of Hell were illustrated on earth in the torture of adulteresses, heretics, and other villains, torn apart or set afire in public squares. And all hope of anything better was pitched high aloft to that celestial estate of which Gottfried spoke with such scorn, where those who could bear neither grief nor desire were to be bathed in a bliss everlasting."


SATAN SO LOVED HIS GOD THAT HE WENT TO HELL FOR LOVE

Joseph Campbell relates a marvelous Persian tale about a Satan (probably the idea of Satan which the Habiru borrowed for their own mythology) who so loved his god that he couldn't obey god's command to bow down in worship to the humans he'd created. Thus, Satan goes to hell for loving god too much. Now there's a real puritanical twist on love for you.

Read it and weep. (MYTHS TO LIVE BY, pp. 152-153):

"One of the most amazing images of love that I know is Persian—a mystical Persian representation of Satan as the most loyal lover of God. You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of his works, and Lucifer refused because, we are told, of his pride. However, according to this Moslem reading of his case, it was rather because he loved and adored God so deeply and intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else. And it was for that that he was flung into Hell, condemned to exist there forever, apart from his love.

"Now it has been said that of all the pains of Hell, the worst is neither fire nor stench but the deprivation forever of the beatific sight of God. How infinitely painful, then, must the exile of this great lover be, who could not bring himself, even on God’s own word, to bow before any other being!

"The Persian poets have asked, 'By what power is Satan sustained?' And the answer that they have found is this: 'By his memory of the sound of God’s voice when he said, ‘Be gone!’ What an image of that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and the anguish of love!

Another lesson from Persia is in the life and words of the great Sufi mystic Hallaj, who in the year 922 was tortured and crucified for having declared that he and his Beloved—namely God—were one. He had compared his love for God with that of the moth for the flame. The moth plays about the lighted lamp till dawn, and, returning with battered wings to its friends, tells of the beautiful thing it found; then, desiring to be joined to it entirely, flying into the flame the next night, becomes one with it."


As an atheist and writer, I can't tell you how appealing and satisfying I find that mythological tale to be. The writers who most influenced me in my youth were the more mysterious writers, the ones who were less meat and potatoes and more symbolic, existentialist or absurdist—anything but straight forward narrativists (ps: I think I made up a perfectly nice word there). So though I now find most superstition abhorrent, I can still partake of the magic of imaginative writing with an open heart. Also, by reading this tale and knowing that it is made up and not of the Bible, I can add one more link to the proofs that most of the Bible is made up too. There, in Persia, the Bible myths lived also, in the imaginations of humankind outside the Bible.


DON'T MISS THIS SHOW

"Bush's Brain: A Documentary About Karl Rove"

"'Bush's Brain' has been cracked open and exposed for the world to see. we
learn that Rove had his eye on the White House long before Bush ever did."
—Christy Lemire, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

"Karl Rove. Hard to find a more compelling documentary subject: the
Svengaliesque, ruthless, remorseless, cold-blooded but brilliant political
puppet master whom many credit with masterminding not only George W.'s
improbable ascent to the governorship—and, even more improbably, to the
presidency—but also with the end of bipartisan government itself." —Anne
S. Lewis, AUSTIN CHRONICLE

"BUSH'S BRAIN—is sure to be one of the most explosive documentaries about
American politics in a decade." —Nancy Shafer, TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change
the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has." —Margaret Mead, Anthropologist