Thursday, January 06, 2005
Merry Christmas
Orthodox stylee
Serbia, A Nation Marinating In Its Own Self-Pity®, has a penchant for necrophilia.
Fuck the past!
According to popular myth, only unity can save Serbs, as the crooked crescent quadrant sorta spells out in Cyrillic, and mourning unites like nothing else. Blood and soil and all that machismo. Sweaty Slava is a broad church, however; Mother Russia's holes will take a lot of filling. Step forward Alexy for the sale of sanctified martyrdom disguised as tidings of comfort and joy:
"[M]oral ideals are alive in the people: facing death, many people manifested high examples of sacrificial love for their neighbors, laying down their lives for their friends, as the Holy Scripture says," the patriarch said.
Easy, brethren. Dem waters been risin' again. Take a leaf out of Mohammed's book, "Peace be upon him":
"Once the floodwater subsides and the corpses are buried or burned, there will be nothing else to obstruct our daily normality of killing each other and funding the war machine's exorbitant costs. It'll be time to resume our 'man-made disasters,' which we have learnt to accept with blissful disinterest and without much intellectual chattering about God and 18th-century philosophers. How pompous and full of condescension we humans are."
Not being a God-botherer to start with, the recent debate about why He/She/It allows such tragedies to befall us has failed to reactivate my metaphysical cold turkey. So it was refreshing to see rationalism trump superstition on the BBC for a change, as A Viewer notes:
"There really wasn't anywhere rational for the faithful to hide. The God lie could only be held up by the 'nice heaven afterwards' lie. But even thinking within the lie, surely such pragmatic forward planning is the trademark of human terrorists such as Bin Laden, Rumsfeld and Blair? 'We must slaughter babies now for the sake of future babies!'
"Deserted by rational argument only hollow platitudes were left: 'People will always return to faith', 'Faith in the afterlife provides comfort'. The first speaks nothing of eternal truth, it just describes a sad situation in the current intellectual climate. The second is just a rephrasing of 'Ignorance is bliss' with all the earthly hell that standpoint promotes."
What to do? Turn off, tune in and freak out; like the American guru says, It Was Written. So make a fuss.
"The New Year is here, and as we take stock of the state of the world and our nation, we must put media reform even higher on our priority list. The movement to fix our badly broken media system is gathering momentum, but the decisions made this year could resonate for decades to come.
"The frustrations of millions were echoed in Jon Stewart's no-nonsense critique of corporate media for 'hurting America,' shown live on CNN's Crossfire. People are tired of the media's partisan hackery, celebrity obsession, failure to hold government accountable, narrow range of debate, unchecked commercialism, and lack of investigative journalism."
To change the record or hang the DJ? It's too close to call. So rather than trouble you with the details, let's cross to Bethlehem for some chinstroking instead of all that cock-in-hander crap masquerading as analysis. It is Christmas Eve, after all, except for all those unorthodox contrarians with their satanic verses and qabalistic number-crunching:
BETHLEHEM, West Bank (Reuters) - Christmas cheer is undergoing a renaissance in the town where Jesus was born.
Yes, yes, y'all, who got the vibe? It's the scribe corps. Still fronting en masse for the Pharisees, if only between the lines? Heaven forbid. All just part of the collective self-delusion known as groupthink, which really ought to beg the question: who gets it? As usual, the answer is what. Confused? You will be.
So, cruel world, what does one do to get in the mood for an orthodox Christmas? Brace yourselves: Santa won't come emptying his sack down your chimney tonight. So you might as well polish off your pistol with some undrinkable meths and shoot the moonshine before bedding down with a Badnjak for a long Balkan love-in. You got it, it's time to come out as a tree-hugger.
Ziveli! And three of the finest hos to you all.
Serbia, A Nation Marinating In Its Own Self-Pity®, has a penchant for necrophilia.
Fuck the past!
According to popular myth, only unity can save Serbs, as the crooked crescent quadrant sorta spells out in Cyrillic, and mourning unites like nothing else. Blood and soil and all that machismo. Sweaty Slava is a broad church, however; Mother Russia's holes will take a lot of filling. Step forward Alexy for the sale of sanctified martyrdom disguised as tidings of comfort and joy:
"[M]oral ideals are alive in the people: facing death, many people manifested high examples of sacrificial love for their neighbors, laying down their lives for their friends, as the Holy Scripture says," the patriarch said.
Easy, brethren. Dem waters been risin' again. Take a leaf out of Mohammed's book, "Peace be upon him":
"Once the floodwater subsides and the corpses are buried or burned, there will be nothing else to obstruct our daily normality of killing each other and funding the war machine's exorbitant costs. It'll be time to resume our 'man-made disasters,' which we have learnt to accept with blissful disinterest and without much intellectual chattering about God and 18th-century philosophers. How pompous and full of condescension we humans are."
Not being a God-botherer to start with, the recent debate about why He/She/It allows such tragedies to befall us has failed to reactivate my metaphysical cold turkey. So it was refreshing to see rationalism trump superstition on the BBC for a change, as A Viewer notes:
"There really wasn't anywhere rational for the faithful to hide. The God lie could only be held up by the 'nice heaven afterwards' lie. But even thinking within the lie, surely such pragmatic forward planning is the trademark of human terrorists such as Bin Laden, Rumsfeld and Blair? 'We must slaughter babies now for the sake of future babies!'
"Deserted by rational argument only hollow platitudes were left: 'People will always return to faith', 'Faith in the afterlife provides comfort'. The first speaks nothing of eternal truth, it just describes a sad situation in the current intellectual climate. The second is just a rephrasing of 'Ignorance is bliss' with all the earthly hell that standpoint promotes."
What to do? Turn off, tune in and freak out; like the American guru says, It Was Written. So make a fuss.
"The New Year is here, and as we take stock of the state of the world and our nation, we must put media reform even higher on our priority list. The movement to fix our badly broken media system is gathering momentum, but the decisions made this year could resonate for decades to come.
"The frustrations of millions were echoed in Jon Stewart's no-nonsense critique of corporate media for 'hurting America,' shown live on CNN's Crossfire. People are tired of the media's partisan hackery, celebrity obsession, failure to hold government accountable, narrow range of debate, unchecked commercialism, and lack of investigative journalism."
To change the record or hang the DJ? It's too close to call. So rather than trouble you with the details, let's cross to Bethlehem for some chinstroking instead of all that cock-in-hander crap masquerading as analysis. It is Christmas Eve, after all, except for all those unorthodox contrarians with their satanic verses and qabalistic number-crunching:
BETHLEHEM, West Bank (Reuters) - Christmas cheer is undergoing a renaissance in the town where Jesus was born.
Yes, yes, y'all, who got the vibe? It's the scribe corps. Still fronting en masse for the Pharisees, if only between the lines? Heaven forbid. All just part of the collective self-delusion known as groupthink, which really ought to beg the question: who gets it? As usual, the answer is what. Confused? You will be.
So, cruel world, what does one do to get in the mood for an orthodox Christmas? Brace yourselves: Santa won't come emptying his sack down your chimney tonight. So you might as well polish off your pistol with some undrinkable meths and shoot the moonshine before bedding down with a Badnjak for a long Balkan love-in. You got it, it's time to come out as a tree-hugger.
Ziveli! And three of the finest hos to you all.
