Religious Mania

The woman's behind was plush. Her buttocks flexed like a champion horse as she strode the Catskills street. A slightly more natural pace might have signaled the tear in her shorts less. As it was, every step forced shining panty silk, and a good crest of gluteus maximus, into the breach. Her bottom winked at the world. I had tried to get my mouth near her ear to whisper, "Miss, you're pants are ripped," but even my runner's stride made discretion impossible. After a couple such attempts I stood my ground and watched her ass send its signals over diminishing distance. "She knows," I told myself: that's why she wouldn't pause to hear what I was telling her. It wasn't that she was being rude, it wasn't that she didn't hear me; she knows. She's fleeing: and thereby broadcasting her embarrassment the more. Female flesh.

I've remembered her distress since then not because her rump was classic so much as because her humiliation at the world seeing her underwear – and the health of what it covered, was so pronounced. She reminds me of me. Her manic modesty reminds me of my vain imitation of Christ: indeed it reminds me of Jesus' own passion: and of the publicity-conscious contortions of many a religious nut.

Mania: obsessive activity to no visible result. It's religious when the disconnection between action and result becomes manifest: the shaman praying over the cholera victim, the congregation praying for Hitler to be kind: Jesus going to the cross as a magical ritual of redemption for mankind: pk's paroxysms to warn his fellow man against state power. The state isn't saving us; it's making life impossible.

The woman with her heaving ass fled my attempts to tell her of her display. Mel Gibson showed a Hollywood Jesus getting scourged, persecuted, crucified – and even his own disciples denied they had anything to do with it. I protested the school silencing my alarms, and my family, the whole society, told me, "Shut up, Go back to school (the same school that doesn't listen, won't learn), Never mind that it's counter-intelligent, subversive of survival: Submission is the path to making money.
"Survival is not our object; money is."

Survival is not our object;
money is.

If the woman had slowed down, she might have gotten back to her car without the entire population noticing her ass. For two thousand years the whole world has had Jesus-on-the-cross shoved in their eye. A lot of good it has done. Where's the salvation? Where's God's kingdom? Can God really still love us? when we haven't learned a thing?

The "holy man" in India standing on one leg, living on a pole, sticking needles through his balls ... What's transformed? Did spring come? Sure: but then winter followed. Did it rain? Yes: but then it got dry. People are the same: only there's billions more of us: all the more addicted to submission before the state.
Before 1870 we all had to bow down before the war lord, but we didn't all have to go to school: where teachers mindlessly repeat rituals of the state – I pledge the legions of the flag – never mind the farm chores.

Everything I've said to the public since junior high has just gotten me in trouble. The Temple would have left Jesus alone if he'd just practiced the same hollow hypocrisy the priests were already master of. No: it was Jesus actually cutting close to the bone that riled them, stirred them till the rabbis actually got the secular power, the Roman governor – according to the stories, to defy Roman laws to persecute the Jewish savior for them.

Today the United States dispenses with promises of spiritual salvation. It's claims are secular (Rome's were both sacred and secular). The US claims freedom: while abrogating it. It promises, it pretends to guarantee, freedom of speech.
How can I have freedom of speech and simultaneously be compelled to be in school x hours a day y hours a week? Wouldn't freedom of speech mean that the state couldn't interfere not only with my ability to speak but with what I said and where and when I said it?
The condemned can scream all he wants – down in the dungeon, where no one can hear.

But even if such impossibilities were possible: what good is freedom of speech when no one understands what's said or written? by key people? I tried to explicate Jesus. Rots of ruck. I tried to show that our reading of Shakespeare missed much of the potential. Uh uh, the professors were impervious. And the state backs the egregious experts.
So I tried to tell the public. I offered digital librarianship, an internet, that the public could have protected from the state. Major institutions blinked: IBM, Ma Bell, TIMELife. Might as well try to train chickens to juggle.

But, me – like the guy standing on one leg, like the girl jiggling full stride, me, still trying, four decades later, the US put me in jail! for what I'd written! They were embarrassed that I hadn't done anything. But that didn't stop them. And the media? Simply reported my satire by rote: as extortion: and forgot about it.

Jesus was convicted of blasphemy – translated as insurrection! I was convicted of extortion. Mocking my rapists is extortion!

Pad the Alarm

People who've padded the alarm so it can't be heard, who've drugged the watchman, replaced humans with robots ... can't be saved. People who stand by while their saviors get poleaxed sure don't deserve to be.
Understand: the Romans weren't atheists: they believed in Jupiter, and Mars: and Caesar. But the pope who put a contract out on Martin Luther, he had to be an atheist. He had to have disbelieved that God would judge! He had to have believed that the Church would do the judging, that he'd be exempt from judgment, that God would back the Church: a rotten church.
My contemporaries don't believe in God. Or, like the Pope, they believe that God won't hold the US to any standards the US doesn't volunteer to be held accountable to.
Atheism. Lawlessness.
(And never mind God: use Truth as a synonym!)

Back in her car, I hope that woman drove home safely, got changed into other pants without accident. That tush was still hers, ripped pants or whole: not quite all is evil in the world.

St Peter denied Jesus once he was arrested, getting mistreated by official power. Maybe he should have been crucified upside down for that. But the story tells it that he was crucified upside down for trying to tell people they could be saved. By the time he was crucified upside down, might he have learned that the state kind of didn't cooperate?

Every day I encounter people who don't have a clue who I am: despite my articulateness, despite my dozens of short stories, three novel attempts, thousands of essays, my public trail of offering community data bases, social networking, cybernetic alternatives to school, to government, to the Fortune 500 ... despite my having been jailed and censored!

That woman shouldn't have ignored my message. She'd have been less embarrassed had she slowed down, walked normally. Now I'm glad that my ministry was received no better than Jesus'. My lifelong behavior is manic: trying to save people even while being tormented for it. It's religious: totally removed from reason. I don't learn from my experience, so you don't have to learn from yours. That's mania, religious mania.

It's in vain. And I'm glad. Hooray for futility.

Jesus' suffering was over in a day. Mine too is evanescent. I'm seventy-two, I'll be gone soon. But human suffering is just getting a-going.

2011 06 23 Note the comment. Thanks, Buddy, glad to help, wish I could help more: also wish I'd gotten some help, a lot of help. Meantime though, please know that my PKnatz is gathering my dozen blogs into one coordinated place, and recreated my fed-destroyed domains.

related post at pKnatz blog