The Winged One Will Prevail

A friend, who admires my postings, asks why I publish them under such a name: Eros Rising. Is that not rather limiting, she asks, with its intimations of eroticism? Though stated in my first post, perhaps I should explain my blog name again. Eros, of course, was the God of Love, son of Aphrodite. Socrates recites a famous hymn to Eros in Plato's Phaedrus, saying of him: "Mortals call him fluttering love, but the immortals call him the winged one / Because the growing of wings is a necessity to him." This was Socrates' way of saying that we mortals misunderstand the importance of romantic love (or to use George Bush's great word: we misunderestimate it.) As Socrates informs us in his hymn to the winged one, Eros is the divine madness that separates the truly alive from the half-alive. I write this blog in order to celebrate that divine madness and to cast some light on those who are its enemies. These include those who would demean it, control it, and exploit it. But most especially those who would demonize it.

Some might think: Oh, you're beating a dead horse. American culture does celebrate sex. Wrong. American culture exploits sex while continuing to demonize it. Let's not confuse sexual libertarianism in the movies and cable TV with sexual tolerance in the land. What do you think the anti-abortion debate is really about? It's about sex far more than about babies. The anti-sex crowd wants mandatory birth as a punishment for sex. You can tell this is their real agenda by the fact that they're even against birth control. You fuck, you give birth. Get used to it, bitch. That's the real message of the demonizers. Once the kid is born, however, he loses his fundamentalist friends (or at least the aid of their Republican power-brokers in Washington). Decent housing, education? Hey. That's up to the wanton who spawned him. Heck, they won't even let a woman take a morning after pill without raising holy hell. That tells you all you need to know about the sex demonizers.

They have no wings, the demonizers. They only pray they will have them in an afterlife. Here on earth they are the hopeful dead. Or to cite one of their delusions, they are "waiting for the rapture." They despise life and lust for a cloud and a harp, except who amongst them would have the musical spirit to take up such an instrument? What? Do I demonize the demonizers? Well of course. I learned my lesson well from people like Ann Coulter. (Well, okay, I could never be that vicious.) They, however, are the true demons, and the pitchforks they wield are our Republican bosses in Washington and state houses around the country. As for our churchmen. Well, all they've ever done is stick it to us with the forked instruments of religion, sin, and guilt. This is the great trinity of spiritual weapons with which a million antichrists have been controlling the human race for two millennia now. The Christ I admire was the one who overturned the money tables in the Temple. How tragic that Peter, Paul, and Harry would hijack his words and deeds, and turn him into the scourge of the natural world by making him the enemy of healthy sex and the friend of cancerous greed and tyranny. (They do this largely by glorifying poverty for the masses, who thus mollified accept the tyranny and greed of their masters--a great trick, no?)

Eros Rising thinks that it's time to ask: Why have we let the anti-fucking crowd gain the upper hand in our politics? With their newfound political power they are now angling fiercely to impose their views on the culture at large. They have to be resisted by those of us who truly love life right here on good old planet earth. The rapture is here, folks. It's all around us, just waiting to be recognized, embraced, celebrated, and fulfilled. It's manifest in our nature, in the natural world all around us, and in the real God above all the Gods of all the religions--the real God who has nothing to do with all those desert prophets and all the generations of patriarchs who have power-tripped on their wingless, loveless, fear-based, anti-spiritual screeds. This is why I call my blog Eros Rising. The winged one will prevail.