Eros Rising

The Anti-Patriarch Dream

2008-02-01T12:57:00.000-08:00

Watching the “debate” between Clinton and Obama last night, I had the growing sense of witnessing a historical breakthrough in the collective consciousness of our bushwhacked, neo-conned republic. As if by magic, the two erstwhile combatants appeared suddenly transformed into a dream team Democratic ticket. Apparently all that was needed was the withdrawal of the third serious contender, John Edwards, to create the “frame” through which we saw them last night. And what we saw was a political epiphany of sorts. A cosmic “duh!” Of course! Unless I was hallucinating, it seemed to me that this epiphany was hitting the two contenders at the same time it was hitting me, Wolf Blitzer, and just about everybody in the studio audience--judging from the reaction to Blitzer’s sudden proposal, as if from out of nowhere, that they were indeed a “dream team.”

Why are they a dream team? The two obvious reasons: one is a woman, the other an African American. But beneath that façade of gender and race lies a more profound reason: in Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama we see two leaders who are almost divinely equipped to end the stultifying patriarchy that has had America in its grip since the ascension if Ronald Reagan--a reign of tyranny against working people that Bill Clinton and his centrist administration was able to briefly tame, but not quell. In the last seven years, however, the full reality of Republican philosophy, vis-à-vis working people, has come glaringly into view. The Republicans, in fact, are almost Soviet in their belief in two types of people: the professional-managerial-capitalist class, and everybody else--the mass of workers who the Soviets call the Proletariat. For Republicans and their Corporate bedfellows, just as for the old Soviets, workers are commodities first, and only human beings when an attentive media is doing its job. But since Republican patriarchs have come to own so much of the media, we almost seemed in danger of losing even that safeguard.

But I digress. IMHO, Obama and Clinton are much closer to one another than their campaign squabbles ever indicated. I believe that each one of them wants passionately to be president. But I think we saw last night that each of them would also be open to a higher calling: the redemption of this country through a unity that they themselves would embody magnificently as the Dream Team of the century. Frankly, their differences are piddling, when viewed against the backdrop of Republican tyranny. Pray for their well being, brothers and sisters. They are the anti-patriarchs.

Global Feudalism

2007-06-26T17:20:00.000-07:00

A multitude of cases could be made “against” economic globalism--a material assault on the world by (primarily) one state: The United States of America. Here we will concentrate on just one case. The present state of health in the developing world is our indictment against this greed-driven ideology. We tell you that right up front, so you will “know where we are coming from.”

The current issue of National Geographic Magazine, my old employer, features a story on Malaria, with the grim statistics that “nearly half a billion people get malaria each year,” and that “more than a million die” from the disease.

Let us stop there for a moment, and ask what exactly is globalism, and what is its “promise?” The first question is “objective,” since it invites each of us to define the phenomenon as we see it. The second question is purely rhetorical, since it asks the globalists to tell us why they do what they do. They do it, they say, to spread prosperity from the developed world into the undeveloped. In other words, their motives are "noble." That is the promise. The elimination of the extreme disparity between haves and have-nots on the global stage, in a great leveling out of the world economy.

Now. What is globalism as I, Jonathan Light, see it? (Each and every one of us should conduct this thought experiment, since this is a phenomenon that is altering our lives as we speak.) In my opinion globalism is the push by the wealthy classes in America (and to a lesser degree, Europe and the rest of the developed world) to increase markets for the goods and services that are making them richer by the nanosecond. By eliminating tariffs and other import restrictions, the primary means by which counties protect their workers from foreign exploitation, globalists are able to double, triple, and quadruple their wealth. Why would not a class of people steeped in greed not want to do that? But that’s just my take. Perhaps I’m just an old hippie with axes to grind. So let’s go back to the “promise” of globalism, which ostensibly is to eradicate the extreme dichotomy between haves and have-nots on the world stage.

If globalism were in any way even approaching its noble goals, then we would be seeing signs of its success…amongst the working people of the world. Instead what we are seeing is the creation of pockets of extreme wealth in formerly poor countries like India and China. As for “the people,” they are either as bad off as ever, or worse off. Take the continent of Africa. At a time in human history when Americans are debating which expensive techniques will produce armies of centenarians, the people of Africa are still dying in droves…as children and young adults. What is even more of a global “scandal,” a million (mostly young) people a year are dying from a disease that is extraordinarily easy to treat…Malaria. As the fat cats of America get so bloated with wealth that they have to hire people to help them spend it, the people of Africa--the continent where human life began, according to many National Geographic stories that I worked on--don’t even have the resources to treat this easily treated disease. Here we see the “success” of globalism in all of its ugliness.

Now we ask: what should a “proper” globalism be all about? Have we not been promised, at least implicitly, that we are about to become a global village, one big planetary economy with benefits and caring for all? Hah! I challenge anyone to show us that this is happening. Globalism, as it is turning out, means only one thing: that a wealthy and privileged "global" class gets even wealthier and more privileged. Globalism is a way for American feudalism to become global feudalism. Plain and simple. And as African children die of a disease that could be treated for the small change left by Globalist billionaires as tips for their concierges, the American media continues to treat this phenomenon as if it were just another story of political “equivalence,” wherein each side of the argument is granted “respectability.” And virtually all of America’s political leaders, including most Democrats, and most notably Ms. Hillary Clinton, are solid defenders of the globalist juggernaut.

Wake up Americans of conscious. Wake up! If Senator Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, then form a third party and reclaim your human dignity. Let us, people of good will toward their fellow human beings, pursue our own dream of Globalism. The kind of dream that a benevolent God might approve of. Not the god of Mammon, which currently runs our benighted two-party system of “SO CALLED” democracy.

The New Scapegoats

2007-06-09T08:55:00.000-07:00

More on Paris Hilton, double standards, and our demonizing system of government:

Tell me, someone, please. Is it better to demonize people for their natures than it is to demonize them for their race or ethnicity (as was done for example by the Nazis)? Times change, and with them scapegoats change. Since ruling classes need scapegoats to thrive, here in the United States of Draconia our "fathers," our beloved Patriarachs, have turned to the Bible--a wonderful handbook for demonization if ever there was one--for new scapegoats. In this holy book, which is quickly replacing the American constitution, we discover that all of us have criminal natures. All one has to do is equate "sin" with crime, which our leaders now do at every opportunity. Has this passed your notice?

Here in the United States of Draconia each and every one of us is subject to a knock on the door, and ruination by law. Law in America is a disgrace to the loving and caring human race. If one believes in Karma, one must believe that the coldblooded patriarchs who have seized our young democracy and made a mockery of political freedom will see their judgement day.

Paris Hilton & The United States of Draconia

2007-06-09T08:19:00.000-07:00

So back in the clinker she goes, perhaps to serve the kind of sentence "real people" in the USA serve for DUI. I knew a guy who spent six years in prison for a DUI, despite the fact that nobody was hurt. Most Americans--those who do honest work for a living--are now subject to the most draconian laws in modern history. (Draconian - 1. of or designating a law or code of extreme severity; 2) Exceedingly harsh; rigorous.) If this is not a word in your vocabulary, please master it now, because it's come to describe what Franz Kafka might call Amerika, where the prisons are burgeoning with people who have been demonized, criminalized and ruined by the United States of Draconia. Under the patriarchs who rule this so-called democracy, our own human nature is being shamelessly and systematically commodified and exploited by the ruling professions. Constantly we are being given the message: The only lifestyle suitable to us is the Walt Disney one that squares with fundamentalist Christian beliefs. Slowly but surely they are finding ways to send every free spirit in America straight to jail....except, of course, for free spirits with lots of money and clout. The question is not "why did Paris get such privileged treatment?" The real question should be: "Why are the rest of us being treated like dirt?"

The Republicans & Their Cheap Symbols

2007-06-07T16:29:00.000-07:00

Why has no one asked the question of those taking cheap shots at John Edwards' $400 haircut why they are letting Hillary off the hairblower? She undoubtedly spends far more on her hair; some have suggested she travels with a hairdresser. Sexist as this lampooning may be, it's utterly typical of Republican besmirching. Why should they bother examining their opponents' professional qualities when they can gain so much political mileage off sophomoric sexist jokes about their personal behavior?
It's been said that our characters are formed in high school. If so, then you can all remember the kind of a**hole that relied on that kind of humor. Those were the Neanderthals who started taking over government back in the 80s. Sadly, there were far more of those types than we ever feared.

Letter to Dr Sanjay Gupta on Ending AIDS

2007-05-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

Dear Dr. Gupta:

This is a very belated letter, responding to the TV special on "Ending AIDS in our Lifetime" that you hosted a year ago. Eros Rising was on hold all of last year, while I worked on a book, so excuse me for the delay.

I remember tuning in to that special with bated breath. Because the show promised an end to AIDS in our lifetime, I assumed there had been some breakthrough on the development of an AIDS vaccine. How disappointed I was, therefore, to see that what you were hosting was a piece of fluff designed to make people feel good about their commitments to fighting AIDS. Listening carefully, I heard only one fleeting mention of the word "vaccine." There were CEOs from some major pharmaceutical corporations there, and they spoke glowingly of new treatments and initiatives to make current treatments available to poor nations at reduced prices. Then there were lots of personal testimonials from citizens who had obviously been flown in to add to this festival of hope that you were sponsoring. So what is my gripe? You offered not a scintilla of hope for ending AIDS in our lifetimes. You offered not even a hint of information as to why, two decades after this plague began, the world still does not have an AIDS vaccine. As a doctor, you must know that the only way to "end" AIDS is with a vaccine.

I invite the readers of this blog to first read your Big Pharma promotional piece (with the link above) and then a paper put together by Michael Kremer and Christopher M. Snyder, two researchers at Harvard, entitled "Why is There No AIDS Vaccine?" Young people may be forgiven for assuming that AIDS is a permanent curse on the human race. As a young journalist back in 1986, I remember reporting on the work being done at NIH to develop a vaccine, and learning that many researchers--including Dr Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the HIV virus--were optimistic that a vaccine would be developed within a reasonable time frame--perhaps within five years. Today the American media, which is largely financed by Big Pharma adverstising, doesn't even talk about the development of a vaccine. Instead they simply buy into statements such as: “the enormous genetic diversity and other unique features of the HIV envelope protein have thus far thwarted attempts to identify an effective candidate.”

The above statement comes from a recent abstract in the New England Journal of Medicine. Journalists are lax in challenging such statements, and demanding specifics. There are many intelligent people out here who could understand those specifics, if the media did their job and reported on them. All viruses mutate. What is so special about the AIDS virus that it should defy 21 years of efforts to develop a vaccine for it? Please, big Media, don't give it to us in a soundbytes: spell it out, challenge by challenge, and stumbling block by stumbling block.

I would humbly suggest that what is thwarting the development of a vaccine is exactly what Kremer and Snyder conclude in their important (but ignored) paper: It is not in the financial interest of Big Pharma to end AIDS. AIDS has turned out to be one of the industry's fatted calves. They decided long ago that it was far more profitable to treat AIDS than to end it. Six years ago, AIDS drugs were a $300 billion business. Today it would be reasonable to guess that that has mushroomed into a $1 trillion dollar business. That, Dr. Gupta, is what you should be reporting on. Shame on you for buying in so completely to Big Pharma's propogranda. Shame on you for exploiting the hope and despair of hundreds of thousands, now millions, of AIDS victims to advance the cause of the corporate virus that keeps AIDS alive. The virus has a name: it is called Greed.

The Drug War and the New Prison Class

2007-05-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

Every now and then an idea illuminates the cranium like a switched on light bulb--a metaphor discovered long ago by cartoonists. I had one a few days ago. How do we explain the huge number of people behind bars in America? Why does this society imprison and disenfranchise so many of its citizens? The easy answer is the drug war, which artificially criminalizes human behavior that through the ages has been considered normal--the desire to alter one's conciousness a bit in order to cope with the stresses of life. Up until my light bulb moment, I was attributing the drug war to two things: 1) American Puritanism, and 2) a judicial system that needs to create work for itself. Now I have a better idea: Our patriarchs have decided that there needs to be a class lower than the working class. No class of people likes being the lowest of the low. By creating a huge criminal class, the patriarchs have given the working class--which essentially "builds" everything of real value in America--a large scary group to look down upon. What a great strategy, no? It's a good morale booster and it reminds the workers that they still have a way to fall, if they step out of line. The other two reasons for the drug war--puritanism and judicial turf protection--are no doubt still factors in America's war against its own. But something so insidious must surely have a number of converging and reinforcing causes. I'd appreciate your comments on my little epiphany.

The Pope Gets One Thing Right

2007-05-17T13:56:00.000-07:00

As readers of this blog can easily deduce, I am no fan of the Catholic Church, nor any of what I call the patriarchal religions. But during his trip through Latin America this past week, Pope Benedict did get one thing right by denouncing both Capitalism and Marxism in the same breath. At this stage of history, to denounce Marxism is tantamount to whipping a dead horse. As for Capitalism, he gets his criticism partly right when he says that it has failed to bridge the “distance between rich and poor.” He gets it wrong, however, when he blames Capitalism for “giving rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness.” While Capitalism most certainly fosters deceptive illusions all across the board, drugs and alcohol are hardly its most noteworthy manifestations. For a survey of its most insidious faults, read Benjamin R. Barber's new book, Consumed, in which he describes the capitalist process of infantilization that has been steadily degrading the nation's adulthood by keeping us forever trapped in a state of arrested development.

A more astute observer of the ideology known as Capitalism might note that not only does it fail to redress social inequality, but it doesn’t even try. In fact, Capitalism as it has emerged since the death of Communism has absolutely thrived on inequality. As the capitalist media has itself been forced to admit, all of the recent gains in American productivity have gone directly into the pockets of the rich. The harder American workers work, the less they earn as a share of their own sweat. Work hours are lengthening, as benefits evaporate like dew in the capitalist dawn of a glorious new age of Feudalism. So thanks Pope for getting things half right. Unfortunately in your earlier capacity as a Vatican policy maker, you squelched the Latin American movement known as Liberation Theology. You tried to explain that stunning bow to Latin American Feudalism by stating that “This political task is not the immediate competence of the church.” Yeah, Pope, of course it's not. Except, of course, when your American bishops tell their parishioners how to vote, as they did during the last election.

When it comes to keeping neocon patriarchs in office, the church eagerly undertakes just the opposite of Liberation Theology. Call it Subjugation Theology, in which all the sheep are scolded into minding their neofeudal bosses. What can one say about a form of spirituality that doesn’t even want to address social justice? I’ll answer that for you: it ain’t true spirituality. It’s iron-fisted Patriarchy, through and through. If you want true spirituality, dear reader, go straight to God and bypass the gatekeepers, who in the darkness of their own souls worship their own Higher Power: Mammon.

Wake Up America. Stop Prohibition!

2007-03-28T14:36:00.000-07:00

In the 20s booze was like marijuana. The cops were running all over the place trying to bust people for selling and using it, even though it was being imbibed in the highest quarters (like the White House). After 13 years, prohibition had nothing to show for itself other than the creation of an organized crime network that is still with us today. Finally, in 1933, Americans had had enough of this puritan folly. Yielding to popular pressure, the government passed the 21st Amendment, recinding the prohibition against alcohol. But contrary to conventional wisdom, prohibition did not end in 1933. Thousands of government agents were at risk of being thrown out of work. And so one of them, Henry Anslinger, bullied and hectored Congress into naming a new scapegoat to replace the demon alchohol. The choice, marijuana, was politically correct, since it was a ghetto drug, the drug of choice for America's politically impotent black community. In an act of adroit propoganda, Anslinger and his cohorts besmirched cannibas by associating it with such lowlife drugs as heroin. And once "mary jane" was added to the prohibited list, it became the target of choice for America's drug warriors.

Though in the beginning it was demonized as a "black drug," in the 60s marijuana became the drug of choice for America's college crowd and everyone even remotely connected with the emergent counter culture. America's mainstream was terrified of the hippie movement. Since marijuana was like mother's milk for hippies, the best way to stop the counter culture was to lock up as many people as they could for possession and dealing. (The distinction between those two activities, by the way, is a red herring. When a drug is illegal, the only way people can get their hands on it is through the mutual assistance of small time dealing between friends.) In short, the war against marijuana went into overdive during the 60s and 70s. Now it's estimated that at least half the nation's multi-billion dollar drug war is aimed at destroying the lives of those who imbibe this virtually harmless herb. Now the Latin American drug lords and the American judical system are locked in a mutually beneficial embrace. They support each other's existence. They fill America's prisons with the largest population of political prisoners in the world. For that's what the prohibition against marijuana is: it's a political crime. There should not be political crimes in the world's leading democracy. Wake up, America.

The War against Horror

2007-03-24T12:59:00.000-07:00

The New York Times today reports on a tsunami of blood and gore flooding our land, from the distant shore of Hollywood. A few years ago, in the wake of Columbine, the government considered stepping in to regulate violence in films. Instead, they decided to let The Fox regulate our henhouse of newly hatched souls--our children. In America, violence is good--even Godly--while sex is nasty and bad, and should be criminalized with every demonizing opportunity. What if you succumbed to some wild entrapment scheme, and against your better judgment downloaded an x-rated film with a 17 year old in it? Or what if you didn’t even download said film, but merely hit a link put there to entrap you by the likes of Andrew Vachss, the hyper-Zealot prosecutor who would lock people up and throw away the key for anyone found guilty of simple possession of pornography that crossed the 18-year-old line? (Vachss would have sent my 19-year-old father to prison for conceiving me when my mother was sixteen.)

The United States of America, once the bastion of natural Human Rights, has in the course of a generation been turned into a Fortress of lost souls…the more lost souls the better for Mr Vachss and his ilk, which also includes literally hundreds of thousands of Americans who make their living off of demonizing people for something less harmful to their health than a martini: marijuana. The neocons who hijacked our country during the last two elections are the most dangerous breed of patriarchs to have ever emerged from the Wilderness of Evil and Sin. Under there stewardship, the American prison system has swelled to the point that we now have four times as many of our citizens incarcerated as our good friends in Europe. Almost all of this is due to the neoconservative's hardcore stance on sex and drugs. To understand why they demonize sex, consider this statement found on a Catholic website:

“Now, the problem with sexuality, from the Catholic perspective, derives from the fact that God gave us the gift of sexuality in Paradise, but that in our fallen, sinful state we simply cannot manage sexual pleasure without strict limits. It’s a bit like realizing that a firearm, if not kept locked up, can cause terrific damage in the hands of a child. In fact, with respect to sexual pleasure, we are all children—psychologically.”

This is red meat for the demonizers of God’s greatest gift, sex, which is actually celebrated in the Bible's Song of Solomon (a section of the Bible the Church would expurgate if it could). As for violence: it is celebrated throughout the Bible, which is just one reason I have so little respect for this work of patriarchal propaganda. No, I’m not an atheist--though I’d rather be friends with atheists than many Christians. I’m a spiritual guy who prays directly to the God of my understanding (or my Higher Power, as I prefer to call It), without recourse to any prophets and patriarchs. The church would call this paganism, and who cares?

When will humanity wake up the the great Spiritual Hijacking that took place in Rome two millennia ago? When will we finally break the bondage of the “Fathers” and turn to each other as Brothers and Sisters, liberated and empowered? This is what started to happen in the Sixties. And, well you know what happened. The anti-hippies grew up to be the neocons who are now throwing our freedoms to the wolves. If they have their way we will all be criminalized, like the citizens in a Kafka novel. Like the Catholic spokesman quoted above, the neocons view everyone as children--except themselves, who are well represented by the harrumphing figure of Dick Cheney. Brothers and Sisters, WE ARE ADULTS, not children. It is time to send our patriarchs packing. What they are selling is not true spirituality. It is pseudo-spiritual Tyranny. And oh Yes: In their view, the more blood from Hollywood the better. In their view blood is good, sperm is bad--unless it produces another crusader for the virtual world of sin.

Virtual Worlds: Death of Baudrillard III

2007-03-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

Post-Modern philosophers are near unanimous about one thing: modern society has become a “virtual” culture. Which is to say: it is manufactured, artificial, and arbitrary. Anthropologists still entertain us with visions of a genuine human past, in which “real needs” motivated our ancestors’ every action. But now we are so over our “noble savage” history that we might as well be considered a “virtual species,” running almost totally on the hot air of ideas. But the ideas are being written for us by armies of lawyers in order to legitimate the virtual worlds conveniently crafted by our bosses for their own enrichment. While they were asleep at the wheel, however, the People built their own Virtual World: the Internet. To a large degree, it’s a world without “matter.” The hardware, of course, is very “real,” and you can see it in the great server farms whose main function is to convert “real” energy into the interlocking networks of “unreal” ideas that constitute Cyberspace. But the real substance of Cyberspace is the algorithm, which is pure disembodied information, capable of creating multitudes of virtual non-material worlds. Though the real significance of this latest Information Revolution remains hidden beyond the horizon of our understanding, we are filled with wonder over its possible implications. Perhaps…just perhaps, it is in the nature of our species to create and occupy virtual worlds? Perhaps it is our Virtual Destiny?

If that is the case, then Baudrillard has hit his grave spinning, for he was among the first to glimpse the emergence of our Virtual World. What he saw freaked him out. He was too early on the scene, and thought he was witnessing a crime against human nature. Lacking a vocabulary for this new reality, he coined his own: He called it the Simulacrum, which normally just means a “representation,” but in his usage takes on scary dimensions. His views on the emergent Simulacra paint a grim dystopia, brilliantly depicted in the movie The Matrix. The skin crawls, on reading those views. But, again: he was too early to the show to enjoy a fulsome view of this new world. What he saw instead were its foreshadows--and it is in the nature of foreshadows to be ominous and frightening. All of us who were young adults back in the 70s, when Baudrillard was imagining this “Brave New World,” should be able to remember the fear and loathing that colored our views of the future. Young philosophers of that time can be excused for looking into the glass and trembling. So intimidated was Baudrillard by the coming of a Virtual future that he spied Simulacra everywhere, and always through a prism of resigned despair (a specialty of French intellectuals). This would explain why, before his death, he called the events of 9/1l the ultimate Simulacrum. The airline bombings of the twin towers, in other words, were not the “real” result of “real” problems, but a manufactured event, in which both the terrorists and the U.S. government were playing parts in a staged drama.

Now that Baudrillard has entered the pantheon of dead philosophers we can begin to discern his place in it. Those with early vision often (perhaps always) get things wrong. The idea that human beings might, in any way, return to their “natural” roots has become absurd. Love it or hate it, we are a species driven by our ideas, and our minds are virtual reality machines. Yes, we create our own worlds. And perhaps we will end up being too creative for our own good. The real danger we face, however, continues to be old-time Patriarchy (see my earlier postings). Our “fathers,” by creating God in their own image, have sought to keep all human creativity under their thumb. Even now, corporate lawyers are circling in Cyberspace like great birds of prey, intent on making it just another Capitalist infrastructure. But as the Internet has already proven, popular creativity is a force that far outshines the plutocratic or corporate kind. Now it is our sacred duty to keep this new and democratic force--the Internet--in our own free hands.

Retreat into Irony: Death of Baudrillard II

2007-03-19T07:40:00.000-07:00

Like most French intellectuals of his time, Baudrillard turned to Marxism for a solution to “the problem” of Capitalism: Wrest control of production from the Capitalist Plutocracy and put it in the hands of “the people.” But this solution was never adequately thought out. Most lacking was a vision of the “content” of life--a content liberated from the mastering classes. If we stop marching to the drumbeats of “produce and consume,” then what will inform the rhythm of our lives? What startling new purposes will fulfill us? Marxism didn’t answer that, and Baudrillard--in a late-life wake-up call--glimpsed the problem: Marxism was not really a revolutionary movement at all: It was part and parcel of Capitalism itself, as he argued in The Mirror of Production (1973). Capitalism actually needed Marxism to validate itself, he claimed. If that’s difficult to wrap your head around, think of how celebrities so often rely on bad publicity to maintain their economic privilege. The more the Marxists railed against America, the stronger the American creed became. One reason for this was that the Marxists wanted the same thing: They wanted Things. They just wanted to trade in the old Board of Directors for a new one: the Central Planning Committee. Government bureaucrats would replace Corporate plutocrats in the critical task of filling the social pantry, closet, and garage with Things. Looking back, this was hardly as revolutionary as it seemed. “See the new boss? Same as the old boss.”

In the end, “Democratic Capitalism” (woefully misnamed) won out over “State Capitalism,” since it was far more efficient at producing and consuming things. Now we are so enslaved by our things that we don’t have a clue what marvels of human fulfillment might lie within our reach--if only we had the courage to curb our material addictions, and the vision to see a better way of life. Despite everything, awareness of the problem of Materialism is alive and well, and growing. So far, however, it’s a rather impotent kind of awareness--lacking both political and revolutionary zeal. Choirs of the likeminded sing their blues, and then go dutifully back to their cubicles, where the only defense against dehumanization is: IRONY! But wait. There is one lone ray of radical hope on the horizon, and lo and behold, it encompasses much that Baudrillard feared the most. It’s a Virtual World, and it’s called The Internet.

The Death of Baudrillard

2007-03-19T06:55:00.000-07:00

Last week the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard died. Philosophers are not household names in America, which has an aversion to deep thinking. Especially the kind dished up by Baudrillard, whose specialty was Materialism--the American creed, in other words. Never in our short history as a species have we human beings been so preoccupied with our "stuff" as we are right now. To say that this renders us “shallow” misses the point. It renders us inhuman. In glorifying “the thing,” we denigrate our humanness and turn ourselves into mere units of production and consumption. Produce and consume. Produce and consume. These are the drumbeats that inform our every waking moment. Whatever God’s true purpose for us may be (or Nature’s "will" if you will), it will sadly have to wait for some future generation to uncover it. But Baudrillard had his eye on the present, not the future. He was the supreme critic of the new Materialist status quo. He uncovered the problem, but not the solution. Without solutions, philosophical critiques become mere harangues. Poor Baudrillard. He died, choking on his own harangues. Like most philosophers, he didn’t seem to understand that people can’t deal with problems that lack solutions. This is why he (along with most philosophers) hasn't become a household name.

Evil Doings in Nigeria

2007-03-08T07:27:00.000-08:00

An editorial in today New York Times tells how Nigerian legislators are setting a "treacherous example" for the rest of the world by proposing not just to criminalize homosexuals (which the country has already done), but all political and social activity that could be construed as supportive of gay behavior. Under this law even sympathetic heterosexuals would be imprisoned for showing support for gay unions. This legislation goes far beyond demonizing gay sex, and even criminalizes pro-gay social sympathy. Christians are fond of saying: "It's not the sinner, it's the sin. We actually love the sinner, while hating the sin." In Nigeria they apparently hate both. Sadly, this legislation, which was proposed by the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo, finds its strongest support (probably also its source) from Nigeria's powerful Anglican Church -- the very church that wants to serve as a model for the so-called conservative elements of the American Anglican Church.

It should come as no surprise that as organized religion takes heat from The Tolerant amongst us, it would revert to the primitive forms of its Medieval past. So gay men in Nigeria will be thrown into prisons where they will be raped and infected with the AIDS virus. I see this as every bit as primitive and evil (to use the religionist word) as the Medieval practice of death by burning--not just for homosexuals, but for all those who would defy the powerful priesthoods, and the secular patriarchs who pander to them.

When is the civilized world going to open its eyes to the "anti-Christ" that hijacked our spiritual world two thousand years ago? Jesus, a TRULY spiritual human being, was the most tolerant person in the Bible. And according to the Eunuch Parables in Matthew, he appararently understood and accepted homosexuals (see my earlier blog on Jesus.) But the church hijacked Jesus' history and created a Sin Mafia--a virtual industry that feeds off the exploitation of sex-guilt every bit as much as a porn king would profit from frustrated sexual desire. How has the church managed this neat trick?

As I wrote five years ago in my book on sexual philosophy, The Art of Porn, sex often has to be perceived as "bad" or at least "naughty" in order for it to "work." This is a psychological quirk of human sexuality that's often even true for married couples who need to stage "naughty" behavior in order to get it on. (A sexologist would describe this behavior as "seeking novelty.") But it is exactly that perceived naughtiness that plays right into the hands of the Sin Mafia. For two thousand years now they've been brutalizing the human race with a bludgeon conveniently found in the human brain. Homosexuality, being the "naughtiest" novelty of all because of its relative rareness, was turned into the worst "sin." Immediately, thousands of male homosexuals began flocking to the priesthood, hoping to transform themselves into sin-free paragons. But the world of sin is a virtual world (i.e. unreal), invented by desert patriarchs to control their "flocks." As for the priests themselves: well read all about them in your daily papers. The virtual world of anti-sex is too impossible for even them to swallow.

Sex, Drugs & Rock-and-Roll: The Corporate Version

2005-12-01T16:29:00.000-08:00

Why were we unshocked to learn in the New York Times that Big Pharma is hiring gorgeous ex-cheerleaders to convince America's doctors to prescribe their products? When listening to a Pharma ad on TV--you can't miss them, since they now account for about a half or more of all primetime TV advertising--have you noticed how sultry, how alluring are the voices (usually female) extolling the virtues of the latest budget-busting drug to ease your heart burn, attack your toenail fungus, or ease your jumpy legs? Just listen, next time. You'll hear it. The sound of the most wondrously beguiling human voice that God has ever created, telling you "T A K E... T H I S... D R U G."

Am I the only one who has noticed the amazing similarities between Corporate Drug Pushing and the old fashioned kind? Used to be that the high priced drugs were the ones that did super serious work like fighting cancer and rare diseases. Recently I paid (well, my insurance company paid) $900 for one three-month dose of pills to combat toenail fungus. (You've seen the ads, with the little yellow gnomes diving under your nails.) It didn't work, I'm here to tell you. It occurs to me that maybe it didn't work because it was counterfeit. Prescription drugs have now become so expensive that the incentives for crooks to counterfeit them is turning into a billion dollar underground market. But guess what? The consumer has no way of knowing if his or her prescription drug is a counterfeit. I tried getting information from the FDA (that great Korporate Lapdog which exists only for the welfare of Global Drug Companies) to find out where I could have my pills tested. No response. I then asked an outfit that's in the business of testing natural products, and they wouldn't do it. The consumer who suspects that his or her prescription may be a sugar pill has NO RECOURSE.

Ah...but the new drug pushers really have it sweet these days. They've bought and paid for our politicians, who in turn have given them license to rob us all blind. Whole industries (think of General Motors) are going belly up because of skyrocketing health costs--a huge chunck of which represents pills like my thousand dollar, non-effective, fungus pill.

But the docs keep prescribing them. And no wonder. With all those hot saleswomen--those sweet and sexy cheerleaders doing their song and dance for Big Pharma. Oh yeah. It's Sex, and Drugs and Rock and Roll all over again. Only this time there's no joy in it for anyone. We hippies used to lament how the "establishment" was always "co-opting" us--you know, stealing our music, our words, our messages, and then twisting them into something altogether sinister. The new twist on Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll is just about as sinister as you can get.

IRS Presides over Marriage of Church & State

2005-11-22T09:33:00.000-08:00

What church is being threatened by the IRS for making political statements? Did you guess the Catholic Church, for notoriously telling its parishioners not to vote for John Kerry last year? Or perhaps you're thinking of the many fundamentalist Protestant churches that blatantly told their members how to vote in the same election, even going so far as to issue voters guides in praise of George Bush.

Well, you'd be wrong. No, the IRS is threatening to revoke the tax free status of a small Episcopal Church in California whose rector gave a fiery sermon before the last election against poverty and the War in Iraq. Now let's get this straight. The IRS is saying that war and poverty are political, not spiritual matters? This is most fascinating. A number of years ago it was the IRS that "sanctified" the Church of Scientology by granting it tax free status.

One has to ask if our elected leaders in Congress are aware that the Internal Revenue Service has become the self-appointed arbiter of religion in this nation, which foolishly prides itself on having separated matters of church and state. If they weren't, then let them know. Perhaps they don't have time to read papers, poor things, since they're so busy being "educated" by lobbyists for the Pharmaceutical Industry.

Sounds to me like the IRS is a hotbed of politicized bureaucrats. It was an out-of-control bureaucrat by the name of Henry Anslinger (read my former post on Anslinger), that unleashed the disastrous Trillion Dollar Drug War on America, after America righteously demanded an end to prohibition. Bureaucrats demand work. Especially nonsensical make-work.

So there are two issues involved in the IRS's thuggery toward liberal leaning churches: 1) Since they are not going after the Catholic Bishops who tried to bully their parishioners into voting Republican, the purportedly non-partisan IRS now stands naked as a Republican lapdog. 2) Partisan or not, the IRS should have no mandate whatsoever in stamping "approved" or "not approved" on churches. If Congress has given them that authority, then Congress should take it back--especially now that are abusing it so flagrantly.

Gay Friendly Jesus

2005-11-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

Though not an avid Bible reader, I was once motivated to peruse the New Testament looking for evidence that Jesus disdained homosexuals. Since the words of Christ were printed in red, this was a relatively easy task. I found nothing, and quickly forgot about it, satisfied that fundamentalist bible thumpers were "having their way" with the great book, inventing and imposing homophobia were none existed. Now, thanks to a friend whose interest in the Bible far exceeds my own, I've been directed to a chapter and verse of St Matthew in which Christ appears to actually "justify" homosexuality. My friend refers to this as one of the many "eunuch" parables in the Bible. Here it is:

Chapter 19, verse 8 thru 12: He saith unto them, "Moses because of the harness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery."
His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry. But he said unto them:
"All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it."

In Biblical times there was no word for homosexual. Clearly "eunuch" in Christ's text refers to men who do not sleep, or are not disposed to sleep, with women. Why else would he assert that there are men who "have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake." What else could he be referring to here other than priests? Did men have to undergo "actual" castration in order to become priests? Of course not. Eunuch is clearly used in a figurative fashion, except in the middle example: "some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men." And the first example, those "so born from their mother's womb?" What else could these be but natural born homosexuals?

I am not posing here as a Bible expert. But when the Bible is used as a weapon for the unfair treatment of whole groups of people, then all people--both those being judged, and those being herded into mass judgement against others-- have a right to go to the Book and cite chapter and verse against those who play so recklessly with human spirituality.

A Patriarch's Curse

2005-11-10T16:17:00.000-08:00

This just in, on the nightly news: Pat Robertson warns the citizens of Dover, Pa that when calamity befalls their community, don't ask God for help, because they've just turned their backs on him by voting to keep Intelligent Design out of their schools. Don't anyone be confused about the true significance of Robertson's warning. It's a curse. It's a biblical curse, in the same vein as centuries and millennia of spiritual violence that suurounds the dominant religions.

In a similar vein, we learned a few weeks ago that certain rabbis in Israel were putting curses on the heads of people like Arial Sharon and other Israelies who weren't following the fundamentalist line. Oh yes, said one on television. "We pray for their death. "

The truly spiritual can only look upon these violent patriarchs with horror. But they are all around us. In fact, they are the ones who get most of the "spiritual attention" in the media, which loves a good blood fight. Blood, death, guts, fire, brimstone, agonizing death--or better yet, an agonizing eternity in that mythological place called Hell, which the patriarchs invented as "God's Prison," since worldly prisons could never inflict enough pain and suffering upon their fellow man to satisy the patriarchs' insatiable blood thirst. Sic 'em Pat! Send those heathens from Dover straight to Hell.

NeoCons Against the Drug War?

2005-11-08T07:18:00.000-08:00

Once there was a time when libertarian and conservative were not mutually exclusive words. Think of conservative eminence William F. Buckley, for example, who argued valiantly against the drug war back in the '80s. In the last decade, however, only leftist libertarians have been fighting the good fight to end America's senseless war against its own people.

So imagine our surprise to pick up the New York Times this morning, and learn that John Tierney, the Times' newest conservative pundit, is on the side of the angels, vis-a-vis this subject. Probably not wanting to make too many waves, he backed into the subject, by tacking it onto the tail end of a piece entitled "The Idiots Abroad...", in which he lambasts doctrinaire Latin American socialists. After suggesting that the best way for the American government to deal with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is to "ignore him," he conceds that there's some idiocy right here at home:

"And instead of fighting a drug war in South America," he writes, "surrender. The war has been utterly ineffectual at stopping the flow of cocaine, which has actually gotten cheaper on American streets. " Noting that our drug war is only inflaming anti-Americanism south of the border, he declares that leaders like Chavez may be "economic dunces, but in this case the perfect idiots are the drug warriors in Washington helping to elect them."

Bravo, Mr. Tierney! Though we disagree with much of your politics, it is thrilling to see that some libertarian light is getting through to your side.

The Ghost of Henry Anslinger at the DEA

2005-11-04T16:50:00.000-08:00

A Modest Proposal
by A Drug Warrior
Channeling the Ghost of Henry Anslinger

Wake up America! A cancer is eating away at our great nation, sapping our substance, destroying our will, and rotting our moral fiber. We all, each and every one of us, know this disease: it is the plague known as "drugs." No disease afflicting the human race is more insidious than this. Not only does it destroy the will of those who are caught in its spiral of addiction, but it actually spreads a moral contagion among many well-meaning but misguided non-addicts who would solve the "drug problem" (as they so dismissingly call it) by turning their backs on it. By actually legalizing these cursed substances, they would open the floodgates wide, allowing a sea of misery to wash over our children, turning our playgrounds into needle parks. "The Drug War has failed," they complain, citing statistics as if the whole issue of drug control could be boiled down to a cost-benefit analysis. America, our children deserve better than this. They deserve, and the future of our great country demands, that we grit our teeth and address this matter headlong with the utmost urgency. In one respect, the legalizers are right: we have not been winning this war. But, America, it can be won. You know it can be won. To do so, however, we must first recognize the enemy for what he is: a destroyer of young minds, a threat to children more alarming than even the pedophiles who haunt the internet--a threat, in fact, to the world as we know it. Like a cancer in its advanced stages, the malignancy is spreading at a quantum rate, its tentacles reaching, grasping, strangling, the throat of an entire generation. America, it is time to act!

Once there was a time, in our world, when the punishment fit the crime. The Bible, in fact, records these righteous punishments in courageous detail. Over and over again the Bible tells us of how "God slew…" our tormentors. America, God still recognizes human iniquity for what it is: a blot on His divine creation. So why can’t we? Is it because we have lost our way in the humanist wilderness of psychology and sociology? Wake up America! We must face our tormentors with at least half the fierceness that they daily unleash upon our children. You know, America, what the price of our deliverance will need to be. It is the price of iniquitous blood shed by a righteous wrath. The rubber is hitting the road, America. We must act now, or the Drug War is lost.

Capital punishment. Can there be any other way? Several states already impose this righteous remedy for far lesser crimes, such as the premeditated murder of one person by another. The drug pusher, America, is a premeditated serial killer. And yet his only punishment is free rent in our prison system--usually for just a few years. Should we toil, Americans, to raise our surviving young while the drug pusher who destroyed, or tried to destroy, so many other young lives pumps iron in the prison gym and reads law books in the prison library? Wake up America!

But capital punishment for whom? Because drug abuse is largely a young person's crime, we must hold the young accountable. Allowing a grace period for the first teen year, I suggest that this ultimate punishment should be meted out to all individuals over the age of 14 who have been found guilty of offering for sale a quantity of illegal drugs sufficient for more than one "high." In the case of marijuana, for example, this would be more than one gram, which is about the quantity needed to produce one so-called "joint." Why so young, some may ask? Unfortunately, the international drug cartel has become so dependent upon inner-city teenage males to peddle their filth, that it would be a dereliction of moral duty not set the marker at a realistic age. Once there was a time, we should all remember, when 14-year-olds began moving into adulthood, holding down jobs and, by the age of 16, fighting in wars. Perhaps the artificial prolongation of human adolescence is part of the great moral problem now facing America. In a Holy War such as that which we are fighting against illegal drugs, the ancient principles of triage may have to be resurrected. Some of the infected may have to die in order that the uninfected may live. We must concentrate our sympathies upon the truly young. These would include not only the grade schoolers, whose playgrounds are turning into drug parks, but--most egregiously--the unborn, whose innocent bloodstreams are being corrupted daily by their drug-doing heathen moms. This is a scourge the likes of which Mankind has never known. Only drastic measures will save us from this devouring beast.

Wake up America! God waits upon your wisdom.

--As heard by a Fly on the Wall at the Drug Enforcement Agency, and then reported to Dorian Grayson.

Memo to Bloomberg from The City of Night

2005-11-03T17:46:00.000-08:00

Hey Mike. Why’d ya’ let your boys in blue close the Roxy last week? We weren’t doin’ anything wrong. We were just dancing the night away, like tens of thousands of other spirited New Yorkers were doing on Halloween weekend. We weren’t keeping anyone awake. The Roxy’s located in an industrial part of town, with virtually no residents to be bothered by the noise of a late-night club. Like other dance clubs, the Roxy stops serving booze at 4 am, then allows its patrons to keep dancing until the really wee hours. We’ve been doing this for years. Mike, we felt like little kids who were being sent to their rooms! Mike (I can call you that since I’m older than you), we’re adults! We’re people who work hard, pay taxes, vote, and expect to be treated like adults. Mike, a lot of us don’t want to go home at 4 am. Some of us are still trying to find a date. Others are just grooving on the spiritual experience of House Music, which is a very appropriate thing to do on Sunday morning. Mike, do you have a problem with that?

Clearly, Mike, you’re no libertarian. Well…okay, you’re an “economic libertarian.” You want to keep the government out of your pockets, so you can work on your next billion. But you’re not the good kind of libertarian, the kind most working Americans are. I’m talking about social libertarians. We’re the people who want to keep the government out of our bedrooms. We’re the people who don’t want the government telling us when to go to bed, or who to go to bed with. Or what to do when we get between the sheets. We’re the people who hate seeing our government held hostage by religious fundamentalists--you know, the American version of those guys who flew into the World Trade Center. Most of all, we’re the people who hate having the government tell us: Drink martinis, beer, and wine; Smoke cigarettes and take all the valium your doctor will give you. Eat all the cancer and fat inducing foods you can stuff down your throat, and then take all the “certified” big Pharma drugs you’ll need to cope with the damage. But don’t you dare ever smoke a joint! Or our cops and prosecutors and judges will send you straight to jail (thereby committing a million times more damage to your life and person than any drug could ever do.)

Many of us thought you were different, Mike. For a silly little minute I thought you just might be a humanist in wolf’s clothing. What a mistake. Turns out you’re just as much of a control freak as all your Republican buds. Mike, America has had enough with “economic” libertarians like you and your friends. You guys are running the country into the ground. You’ve even ruined the stock market, for God’s sake (read James Cramer, the Wall Street guru who tells us in the November 7th New York magazine that the U.S. has the worst performing stock market in the world. The WORLD, Mike! ) What Americans really needs is a radical shift to the proper kind libertarianism--the social kind. Our founding fathers were Social Libertarians, Mike. They’d never heard of laizze faire, let alone supply side economics.

Ah well. I guess we can always vote for Ferrer next week. But you’re counting on the disillusionment of us real freedom lovers to keep us from the polls, and that’s what probably will happen. But one of these days we’re all gonna’ wake up and discover that we have the power to nullify. If we’re disillusioned, Mike, it’s because the Democrats are control freaks too. But we have the power to nullify all of yuz’. Ever hear the slogan: “Throw the Bastards Out!” What New Yorkers and all Americans should start doing is nullifying all incumbents when they come up for reelection. Each November, we should vote for the opponent whoever he or she might be. Just keep rotating them out. And out. And out. Until finally, maybe, the politicians get the message that the people really do rule. That we are the true sovereigns of the United States of America. Unfortunately, we don't know that yet. But when despair follows cynicism, then we will all have to learn the true meaning of freedom--the hard way.

Who are the Real Highbrows?

2005-11-02T11:58:00.000-08:00

In the October 30, 2005 NYT magazine, its neocon writer James Traub asks under the headline Their Highbrow Hatred of Us, "How did virulent anti-Americanism become so respectable?" He cites playwright Harold Pinter's statement "Mr Bush and his gang are determined...to control the world and the world's resources. And they don't give a damn how many people they murder on the way." to make his point. I've got the answer Mr Traub is looking for.

"They" hate us for the very same reason that about 1/2 of the American people hate the gang of Republican thugs who hijacked American democracy in countless voting districts throughout the land, but especially in Florida and Ohio. They hate us for waging an obscene war under the pious headline of "Freedom," when indeed the U.S. becomes less free by each Republican year. They hate us for claiming the moral highground of Democracy, when in fact American society becomes more Feudal with each passing Republican year. They hate us for the unbridled greed of our upper classes who deserve more than any group in the world to be branded "Highbrow."

What is a highbrow? My old Webster Seventh defines it thus: A person of superior learning or culture: intellectual." However, my newer American Heritage Dictionary defines it this way: One who has or affects superior learning or culture. When neocon critics like Traub use the word to skewer what they see as anti-Americanism, they are clearly talking about the affectation to superiority, not the real thing, for clearly superior learning is something we all aspire to.

By the affectation standard, there is no group of highbrows in the world like American neo-conservative. Little known to most people (and most journalists, unfortunately) the gang of neocons who are now running our country count as one of their intellectual lights the philosopher Leo Strauss, who espoused Plato's "Philosopher King" thesis. This has often been seen as one of Plato's most charming, if totally unrealistic, ideas. Most college graduates know of it: In a perfect society, all decisions of importance will be made by a small (very small) handful of scholars--philosopher kings, if you will. I alway smiled when I read about it. But not anymore. Not since Strauss' students started taking over the U.S. of A. We are now living in a country where a tiny handful of "philosopher kings" (don't laugh) are totally running the show. We the people of the United States are now ciphers. It's a joke that we even still bother to vote.

The subject of this little philosophy lesson was the question: what is a highbrow? Could there be any people in the world who hold more affectation to superiority than the American Neocon? Affectation is the operative word. The superiority of the Neocon is an utterly unfounded pretense to superiority, which makes it "highbrow" in the most perjoritive of senses. What could be more highbrow, after all, than the belief in "philosopher kings?" Too bad Plato's not around to see the mischief his little pipedream has spawned.

The Winged One Will Prevail

2005-10-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

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.

Hillary & The God Squad

2005-10-16T12:52:00.000-07:00

An article in today's New York Times, on the controversy over a covert snippet of sexual titillation in the game Grand Theft Auto, informs us that Senator Hillary Clinton wants to make it a FEDERAL CRIME for "anyone to rent video games rated mature to people under 18." Federal crime status, dear reader, should be reserved for the worst of the worst. That our great Democratic "hope" to take back the White House should be jumping on this sexual demonization bandwagon should be cause for great distess to all social libertarians. Our prisons are already packed to the rafters. Ms Clinton wants to pack them even more. Sixteen and Seventeen year olds are having parties that would make most adults blush, but Clinton views teenagers through a lens of denial and fantasy...and most of all, sexual demonization. The entertainment industry is already reeling under the hand of censorship. Question: Shouldn't progressive minded people leave that kind of thing to the...well, the "enemy." You got that right, folks. A FEDERAL CRIME. With friends like Hillary, we don't even need the Republicans to....send us straight to jail.

Wrongful Posing

2005-09-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

Several papers, including The New York Times, reported yesterday that Private Lynddie England was found guilty in the Abu Ghraib abuse case. Except for a conspiracy count, Private England was not convicted of any misconduct other than "wrongfully posing in photographs." The nut of the case, apparently, was whether she posed on her own initiative, or was what you might call a compliant poseur.

Wow. This raises so many issues one hardly knows where to begin. The first is the mind boggling inflation in lawmaking that our authoritarian nation has gotten addicted to (or is it just the lawyers who run the country?). Did you know that wrongful posing was against the law? I didn't. Runaway Law Inflation can only lead to one thing: totalitarianism. Guess it's on its way, folks. Maybe they're giving the "wrongful posing" law a test run in the military? If it works there, then they'll inflict it on the rest of us. So you'd better dump that snazzy new cell phone-camera that you paid so much for, before it gets you in trouble (and makes some lawyer a lot of money defending you).

This particular strange new law must have consequences undreamed of...because the law itself was undreamed of (except by those who can't dream up enough laws). Define posing, will you please. Does this mean only for cameras and film? Like, for example, President Bush's posing aboard a US aircraft carrier, while declaring his war had just been won. Now I won't make judgements here. But since that was a pose that also got people riled up, then certainly the riled might make a case for "wrongful posing" by the Prez. Also, think of Paris Hilton. Recently I saw her in a home-made flick, A Night in Paris, in which she was involved in all manner of poses. Personally, I liked them (I am Eros Rising, after all). But we must admit that those poses got lots of people riled up. Do they likewise have a case for "wrongful posing" by this bold young heiress, who--let's face it--is absolutely addicted to posing.

Now if by "posing" the lawmakers have in mind the broader uses of that word, then God help us all. I, for example, am here posing a critique against legal fascism--the egregious abuse of lawmaking by an out-of-control group of lawyers and legislators (same thing) who want to criminalize everything. This "posing" of mine will undoubtedly rile our law-crazy leaders and the control freaks who keep feeding them new ideas. Thus riled, they might even come after me for...wrongful posing.

All I can say is... watch your backs, folks.

The Criminalization Industry in America

2005-08-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

Though America already has far and away more people behind bars than any other so-called democracy in the world, the criminalization industry in America continues apace. Thanks to a new police sting operation in certain southeastern states, "Operation Meth Merchant," operators of Mom and Pop stores are being arrested for selling things like Sudaphed, Kitty Litter, coffee filters, and aluminum foil. The early victims of this sting operation are immigrant south Asians, for whom the drug war is culture shock to say the least. As if the country didn't have enough salaried drug warriors, now citizens are being forced by penalty of imprisonment to serve as enforcers in this misguided war. If you're a sales clerk and you suspect your customer is going to cook up some crystal with the perfectly legal items he's buying, then guess what? You've been deputized to call the law, or go to jail yourself.

The justification for this new intrusion into civil liberties is the honorable "aiding and abetting a crime" rationale. Perhaps stores who knowingly or carelessly put carts full of Sudaphed into irresponsible hands should pay a penalty, as many of them are (Walgreen, Walmart etc). But the concept of "Equal Justice" demands....well, equal justice. Can anyone think of a commercial enterprise that puts dangerous items into the hands of criminals and gets away with it Scot free? I can. The gun industry. So powerful is the double standard of justice that permits this, that critics have almost given up the ghost in fighting it. If a store clerk in Georgia is aiding and abetting a crime by selling Sudaphed, then so is the store clerk who sells a gun to someone who goes on to use it for a crime.

Eros Rising has an explanation for the explosion in Crystal Meth use in America. It's the drug war itself, stupid. By making the virtually safe drug, marijuana, all but impossible to get for pleasure seekers in poor and rural areas, the government itself has fueled the epidemic in this poor man's drug. Am I the only one who can put this together? Eros Rising has no compuctions whatsoever in using the term "pleasure seekers" to describe the people, who he largely sympathizes with, who are at the center of this storm. Eros Rising celebrates the seeking of pleasure. Safe pleasure. And there are fewer sources of (relatively) safe pleasure in the world than marijuana. The desire for pleasure is a primal force. Only a society utterly whipped by its churches and politicians would submit in such servile fashion to the tyranny against pleasure that we see in this country. It is the people in the world who want to stamp out pleasure who will be paid back with bad Karma in the next life. Of course they have not renounced pleasure themselves. They get their kicks by kicking others, if you know what I mean.

So how many more prisons are we going to build today, Uncle Sam? Criminalizing pleasure is a super growth industry. Perhaps someone on Wall Street should pull together a speciality Mutual Fund for it. This would include not only all the prison builders and contractors, but most of the nation's law firms as well (except few of them are stock corporations).

Images, Desires, and Cave Man Morality

2005-06-28T06:03:00.000-07:00

Ever think about how glibly the Ten Commandments are evoked? Ten! Hey, that's a lot. Now quick, tell me what they are. Betcha' can't. I couldn't, and so I googled them with the "feeling lucky" button, which took me to a site wherein I learned that these commandments, far from being "written in stone," are presented quite differently by Jews (for whom they were first written), Catholics, and Protestants. But there is enough commonality between them to allow from some general comments on the move by certain Americans to turn our fair land into a theocracy, in much the same manner as the fundamentlist Islamic nations which are now perceived to be our enemies. (What a victory for those terrorists, who turned so many of us into them, right?)

I'll cut to the chase. IMHO only three of these vaunted commandements even deserve to be taken seriously as laws to live by: Don't kill, and don't steal, and don't bear false witness. (Incredibly, the commandment against murder was expunged from the list when Moses rewrote the commandments, after smashing the first stone tablets!) Anyway, what kind of a God was it who would put at the top of the list: Hold no other God above me! Gee, the Muslims say the same thing: There is only one Allah! If ever anyone wanted a clue that these commandments were written by power-hungry patriarchs, this is it. Priority number one is: Don't you dare pay any attention to those prophets across the mountains, in the next valley!

And then there's all this business about "graven images," which was written by Moses in such a way as to prohibit ALL graven images. Hello! Message from the 21st century. We now live in an image-saturated world. How could the Supreme Court, let alone serious leaders in various states, expect the population to take this seriously? What? We should close down all the image gravers--all the magazines, all the broadcast media, not to mention all of the arts, and drag our women back to the caves, where these commandments seem to have originated?

And then there's all this stuff about "coveting" in the last two commandments. As in coveting your neighbor's wife or his ass. These have been interpreted (by serious scholars, mind you) as the "psychological" commandments. This is where we are told it is just as bad to have bad thoughts as it is to do bad things. (Though apparently it's okay to think about killing someone, just don't lust after them or their property.) As ridiculous as these coveting commandments are, is it not surprising to find support on the far right for the demonization of greed, which is how the anti-property-coveting commandment should be interpreted? Hello. Is the USA not now in the iron grip of the Greed Party? A party put in place by millions of People of Faith, who would like to replace the American Constitution with the Ten Commandments? Good thing there's no commandment against strange bedfellows!

And finally, there is the commandment against adultery. This is actually the big kahuna, IMHO. It is from this commandment that stems the entire demonization-of-sex mindset that so characterizes Christianity, Judaism, and Isalm too. According to the true believers, sex should only be put in the service of procreation. Period. The more liberal-minded of the true believers might allow some recreational sex between those married folk who are lucky enough to have a "flame that won't go out." As for the rest of us: burn, baby, burn. The Ten Commandments are not only loony tune morality (as seen by one of my patron saints, Mark Twain), but they are mean-spirited to the core. They make it a crime to be human. What is a proud human being to do in the face of this kind of anti-human tyranny? Burn, baby, burn. But it's up to YOU whether you want to burn in hell, or burn with righteous contempt for the bible tyrants.

Apple Pie Exhibitionism & Tom Cruise

2005-06-17T16:30:00.000-07:00

It's just all too perfect, too ready made for the new age of right wing exhibitionism. A 42-year-old Hollywood old-timer, Tom Cruise, jumping up and down on sofas in TV studios across the world, pounding his chest like a middle aged man recently implanted with monkey glands, and proclaiming to the world: I'm as normal as Apple Pie! In the meantime, his church, to use the term loosely, continues to work at "curing" homosexuals who happen to fall into their money grasping clutchs.

Word's been around for years that Mr Cruise, along with Mr Travolta and Ms Alley, are shining example of this church's sexual rehabilitiation magic. Here's what's behind it: Certain groups of people, like homosexuals, psychiatrists, and journalists, are infected with bad vibes. Well, the church might call it "bad energy." Whatever. Bad, bad, bad. Whole groups are branded in one fell swoop. Hmm. Sounds like some other churches, right? Weird thing, though. Those other churches don't have strong footholds in Hollywood and the entertainment media, which many of us thought were bastions of enlightenment. Well, the success of this "Hollywood Church" proves just how much has been lost in that old bastion. Anyway, by shelling out lots of money to this church, and subjecting yourself to certain indoctrinations, you can get over those bad gay vibes, journalist vibes, or Freudian vibes. You can get over all that bad energy and actually become a star--just like Tom Cruise.

Why don't I mention the name of the church? Simple. I'm scared of them. They are mean motherfuckers. Why should I take on a cult that the Internal Revenue Service validated as a legitimate church a few years back. Yes, you heard that right. We have now entered an age where tax collectors are in effect "licensing" our religions. Isn't that just like our Brave New America, where money has become both the measure and the reward for everything, including our spirituality? The IRS legitimized this church, part of whose program is to demonize large swatches of the American public. Apparently those swatches--queers, journalists, and shrinks--aren't valued too highly at the IRS, nor for that matter are they much loved by the nation's dominant political party and (critically) the all-powerful Catholic Church. Mr Cruise's church is politically savvy at picking its enemies!

In the meantime, Cruise himself continues his media blitz of nonstop Apple Pie Exhibitionism. According to the polls, movie goers are unimpressed. People don't especially like to see normalcy making a spectacle of itself. Not only does it seem gutless, it is downright boring. Most movie stars in heat prefer to keep us guessing about their hormonal states. They can intuit that true love is best unexhibited. To make a show of it encroaches on turf that more rightly belongs to fantasy and the risk-taking fringe--which by definition shuns normalcy. For a true look at exhibitionism's real domain, see Jonathan Light's groundbreaking book, The Art of Porn, which--title aside--is a nonpornographic existentialist study in sexual economics. There you will discover not only a chapter on exhibitionism, but on voyeurism as well.

Nietzsche & The Body Snatchers

2005-06-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

Eros Rising celebrates the human body in all its pain aversion and pleasure seeking. Those who would enforce a stoic denial of the body's demands were treated with proper scorn by Nietzsche in his greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

I wish to speak to the despisers of the body. I would not ask them to
behave differently, but only to cast off their own bodies--and thus become silent.

Saying that there is "more reason in your body than in your best wisdom," he makes the bold assertion that it is our bodily pain and pleasure that causes us to think (and to thus be human). Moreover, those who despise their own bodies are those who have lost the creative instinct that is the hallmark of humanity itself. A right-wing libertarian philosopher like Ayn Rand might have called such people "death wishers," and in this instance she would have been right on. Says Nietzsche:

O despisers of the body, your self wants to go under. That is why you have become thus! You no longer are able to create beyond yourselves.

Zeroing in with Zarathustran psychology, he delivers the wallop:

This is why you are angry with life on earth. And an unconscious envy speaks out from your squint eyed contempt.

Thus spoke Nietzsche. Amen.

The Supreme Court & The Body Snatchers

2005-06-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

Today the Supreme Court upheld the Federal government's longstanding tyranny over its citizens' right to decide for themselves how to manage their pleasure and their pain. Who would have thought, back in the '60s and '70s, that the thoroughly demonized herb, marijuana, might someday stage a comeback as "medical marijuana" and as a pain manager? Back then, after all, the issue was pleasure. But back up even further for a moment. In the '40s the people's government caved into the bullying tactics of a fanatical bureaucrat named Henry Anslinger, and put marijuana on the controlled substance list. They couldn't stand his nagging anymore, and ended up giving him what he wanted--a newly prohibited drug to replace the recently liberated drug, alcohol. The profoundly asinine substance of Anslinger's case against marijuana has been enshrined in the camp movie, Reefer Madness. Though we look at that movie as a comedy, the truth is it represent an American tragedy--a drug war that has ruined more good and decent lives than all of our real wars combined. Compared to the legal drugs, alcohol and nicotine, marijuana is about as harmless to human health as baloney. Yet it remains the drug of choice for DEA enforcement, representing the lion's share of arrests, imprisonments, and tax dollars squandered against a sadly misbegotten ideological demon. Marijuana is a virtually harmless herb. You shouldn't drive under its influence. But hey! The same is true with alcohol, right? Reasonable laws can protect us against stoned driving without criminalizing the safe and pleasurable feeling that this herb imparts for harmless activities like listening to music. As for harmful effects on "our" bodies, it has been connected to breast enlargement in men. Is this the reason that tens of thousands of truly non-criminal people have had their lives uprooted and virtually ruined by a government that is as fiercely ideological as the old Soviet Union, and just as adept at inventing enemies in order to maintain its inordinate hold on power? Americans today live in a bizarre atmosphere of loony toon morality that rivals anything Franz Kafka conjured up in his book, The Trial, in which virtually all citizens are subject to a knock on the door and incarceration. Nothing cements power like that kind of ubiquitous government control. But I drift. Perhaps today's Supreme Court decision will help to crystallize the picture of what's going on here in Kafkaesque America. Eros Rising will leave you with this thought: Your body is your castle, and your castle alone. They can take everything else from you, all your belongings, your savings, your social dignity, even your sons and daughters. But your sacred body should be your own business, your one sovereign claim to freedom. If you have no freedom over your own body then you have no freedom at all. Period.

Sex Primers, Biblical Smiters & Other Mixed Signals

2005-05-31T12:28:00.000-07:00

According to an article in the New York Times this Sunday, how-to sex guides have become all the rage in the publishing industry. One publisher explained the phenomenon as being fueled by "the need to seem relevant in an increasingly sexualized culture." One wonders whether all of this sex education is actually leading to more and better sex, or whether instead it's all publishing and no action, all commerce and no fun. A look a the titles in this article leads one to worry that here in this new millennium there are actually large numbers of people who don't know how to do it. And the fact that these books are selling best in the bible belt supports that idea. Dorian's Law: Wherever there is sexual repression there is sexual obsession. But again I ask: do people really need primers on how to have good sex? Or rather, do they simply need permission? I suspect the latter. If you see it on the cover of a book in Barnes and Noble then it must be alright. Right? Then, buying the book and skimming through it will offer even more of a sense of sexual entitlement, and that, after all, is what people really want. Sex rights. Not sex ed. Sex rights. But whatever works toward the furtherence of those rights, I applaud. Keep those books coming, publishers of America.

What's weird about all of this is the cultural backdrop. We just had a nasty election in which the "family values" people really kicked ass. The old patriarchal God that would have us cut babies in half, murder our sons, and smite nations to prove fealty and faith--that God seems to have staged a powerful comeback in America circa 2004. The threat of married "sodomites" got the culture so freaked out, in fact, tht it was better to vote for a war candidate whose war nobody believed in than for a candidate who might look kindly on sexual heresy.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is providing solid backup for all those sex manuals with their erectile enhancement drugs, Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra. Strength when he wants it matches know-how when she wants it. Bookish women and their athletic men. The librarian and the jock. Don't you just love it! Strangely, nobody in the bible belt finds fault with any of this. As long as the fiction is maintained that all this know-how, backed up with all these drugs, is being put into the service of baby-making, then hey...it's A Okay. Is there not a thread of unreason that winds through all these mixed signals? Well, it's not really unreason. What it is, is conflict. We have huge conflict here in La La Land. And the side that want's us all to be good little boys and girls is the most conflicted of all. Meanwhile, the industries--publishing, pharmaceuticals, big media, and God knows which next (see previous post)--are cashing in. Because repression means obsession, and nothing fuels the economy like obsessions.

One sex guide, by the way, that is off the beaten path, is Jonathan Light's The Art of Porn. It is Light's thesis that sex is a human right, that video porn--born of the 70s sexual revolution-- is a revolutionary form of "virtual sex," and that the next wave of that revolution will usher in the development of adult entertainment as a true, aesthetically refined, performing art. For anyone "into sex" as a liberating experience, it's hard to imagine a more foreward looking book than this.

Red Lights along the Yellow Brick Road

2005-05-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

An article about sex and commerce in the Wall Street Journal yesterday got my attention (see link below). Sex may be the procreative force behind human life itself. But what about business and commerce? Traditionally that's been reserved for material necessities--things like food and shelter. But what would happen if our species should evolve to the point where our material requirements had been satisfied? (I speak of course for those who have money to spend, not the masses who don't.) With the 21st Century that day of capitalist reckoning may have dawned. It may no longer possible for material neccesities, nor even material luxuries, to drive our economy. But the American system is premised on one big factor; Growth, GROWTH, and yet MORE GROWTH. If companies don't grow, then nobody will invest in them. So we gotta' have growth, folks, and lots of it. But if those of us with money have all the "things" we need, how are we going to keep growing? That question seemed to be answered in the '90s, when--like a prince in shining armor-- along came the New Information Age. A new "primary need" was mercifully invented, something upon which a saturated economy could continue to grow. But here again a problem arose. The people could only absorb so much information. For a while we were kept busy in abosorbing information about information, as we poured our hearts and souls into the task of learning all the new technology of information. But that phase could not go on forever, now could it? What's more, it became clear that we were soon going to reach our thresholds on "content" absorbtion. We can get the entire Encylopedia Brittanica on a few cheap CD-ROMS. Visually, we can now view details on all the streets of our fair land with a few zooms on our computer screen. With amazing speed, we've become victims of INFO GLUT. So what's left? Well, friends, it seems it's back to square one. Back to Sex, where it all began a few million years ago, with the first upright walking homonids, who once lifted from the ground began to grunt intelligently, and then to speak, and eventually to write. Yeah, sex got us to where we are today. And now that we seem to have shot our wad on intelligent things to do, it's time to get back down on the floor of our caves to procreate some more real growth for our stalled economy.

Turns out the great internet bubble at the turn of the millenium has left us with something more than hundreds of thousands of shrunken retirement accounts. Left standing, and girdling the earth, was a splendid system of internet highways collectively known as the Broadband. A slick consortium of "telecosm" con men persuaded millions of us to plunk down our savings to build that highway, by buying stocks like Global Crossing and scores of other super inflated stocks like it. (In this they were aided and abetted by the American business media, which assured us these stocks weren't really inflated when one considered...the future.) We were assured this splendid Yellow Brick Road (for that is what it was) would immediately fill with profitable traffic, and the value of our investments would grow as the gigabytes turned to petabytes, and yet more magical fiber would need to be laid across continents and ocean floors to handle the demand. Such was not the case, and the rest is history. But the Yellow Brick Road is still there, hugging the ocean bottoms as it circles the earth, waiting, waiting, waiting for some...traffic. Any traffic will do, so long as it tosses coins into the toll booths and finally starts making some real money for the old con men who, thanks to the bankruptcy laws, are now free to make fortunes on the road that people like you and I built with our "dumb money."

So how are these new Highway Toll operators going to start raking in some cash, at long last, on our stolen road? With sex, friends, with sex. For some time now we've known that sex peddlers have been a primal force in getting the internet off the ground. Now with a glut of unused broadband waiting for users, waiting to make some money, sex is moving off our computers and onto our cellphones, as reported yesterday in the Wall Street Journal .

An Orgasm a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

2005-05-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

Sex is good for you. Something we long suspected was finally ratified on a cover of Time magazine last year. When something makes the cover of Time, it leaves the realm of controversy and enters the kingdom of fact. Yes, sex is good for you. It boosts your healthy hormones and it reduces stress. Pardon the naivety, but one must ask: What is Sex? Is it the kind of "strength when he wants it" missionary job that your typical erectile enhancement ad promotes as apple-pie normal? No. Turns out it's much more encompassing. In effect the experts are telling us that having an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away, and it doesn't matter how you have it! Aha! Then all of us can be healthy, and not just the lucky married folk for whom the flame never goes out. Now it can be told: even the solitary jerker is doing something healthy to reduce his or her stress and live longer. What's more, even the philandering wife or hubby who ain't getting any at home can now know that there is some "good" to be had in her or his action. Many, after all, believe that solitary sex can never be the super vitamin that "real" sex is. (There will be more on that in a later post.)

America, we've got some mixed signals here! I know. Imagine that. Mixed signals right here in the U.S.of A. I mean it's not just the sexual Taliban, and their demonizing ways, that is confusing us. We also get anti-sex messages "lite" from more moderate types--you know, the kind of people who run for politics or who appear as talking heads on TV. These more balanced types also promote abstinence as the best way to go for the young and unmarried because of AIDS, teen pregnancy, and general well being. But we all know, don't we, that their naysaying is due to the "Cover Your Ass" (CYA) syndrome that has so infected this good land of ours that it is near impossible to find an honest answer to any important question, especially as it pertains to sex. In the Time article, it was actually doctors who were 'fessing up up that Sex is Good for You! Imagine that. But when push comes to shove, these same doctors would probably fall back to a CYA position and say: "Don't do it unless you're married and you know for sure your spouse is faithful, and it would probably be a good idea to even then use a condom, unless of course you want to make a baby. Whew! Poor doctors. They have so much Ass to Cover.

But at least many of them are admiting something that most of us have long known. That sex is good for us. So what, then, exactly is the problem with sex? Why are the sexually free constantly on the defensive in this land of ours? I know. I know. Turn on the TV, you say, and you see sex everywhere. So who's on the defensive? But that's popular culture as reflected and distorted through the media, and that has little to do with political-corporate America. Carrie and her buds on Sex in the City are not only fictional phantoms, but even in their fictional world they are sexual outlaws dreamed up, many think, by gay male writers projecting their whoreishness onto straight women. To get a better read about what "official" America still thinks about sex, consider the governor who had to resign last year when the truth began trickling out that he was gay. Or far more dramatically, consider the torturous moral meatgrinder that America's politicians and pundits were thrown into over the Clinton affair just seven years ago. With amazement, I would read one distinguished liberal pundit after another gassing away about how the President's agony was deserved because he had had the gall to lie about his blowjobs. One wonders how America's gay citizens, many of whom have spent their lives "lying" about their sex, felt about that impeachment--especially since it is the official policy of the U.S. military to encourage its gay soldiers to lie about their sexual practice in order to maintain a sense of denial-based decorum in the barracks.

Yea. We're conflicted about sex, alright. But at least now we know that it's healthy to get your rocks off. Now perhaps we can start having a sensible debate about the healthy (and therefore) acceptable ways of getting it on.

This is the Age of the Dawn of Aquarius

2005-05-06T13:18:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my webnest. The theme here is sexual. It will not be pornographic, only occasionally explicit, but intensely social--political, if you will. And philosophical. Yes, especially philosophical. Underpinning all social and political theory is philosophy, the mother of all disciplines. But what underpins our thinking on sex? A small amount of half-baked psychology and a huge foundation of over-ripe theology. True, psychology is a spinoff of philosophy, and some might therefore think that to view sex through that prism--especially as polished by Sigmund Freud--is philosophy enough. I disagree. The disciplines that have broken free of philosophy, like psychology, have all left speculation behind and embarked on paths of certainty, even when--as is often the case--that certainty proves ultimately unwarranted. What is needed now to rescue sex from the most recent upsurge in demonization coming at it from religionists of all stripes is some healthy "speculation." In other words, some philosophy. Some sexual philosophy. And that is the purpose of this blog.

My name is Dorian Grayson, and I spend a lot of time thinking about sex. Well, yes that too (i.e. doing it). But I mean thinking about sex, as opposed to fantasizing about it. Thinking about sex might be something you do après-sex, in the same way you might have a cigarette après-sex. (A lot of us do both!) But recently I've started thinking about sex at the damnedest times. Like, for example, when I'm watching a politician spout about values. I would like to make a radical suggestion: People who enjoy sex, either as a life style (i.e. your average college freshman), or in a "balanced" way (your average viagra user), should "get political" about it. I know. I know. "Is nothing sacred?" you ask. Well, once sex was sacred--sort of. Like back in the days of John F Kennedy, when world leaders were permitted to have all the consensual sex they desired, without being harassed by the press, let along impeached. To a certain degree, a decent degree, your sexual business was your own business back then. But then the anti-sex types arose from their slumber, like some great hairy hibernating beast, reached for their bibles, and started dragging sex back into the media and the halls of congress. By the time President Clinton was impeached in 1998, sex had been totally politicized by America's radical right. So sudden and out of the blue was this assault upon one of our most cherished private rights, that liberty-loving lovers are still in a state of confoundment as to how to respond.

So my suggestion is this: Gird your loins, grab your spears, and face the challenge like the virile men and women that you are. Hurl back into the face of these sexual demonizers their claims of moral supremacy. Ask yourself: Why is America ceding its moral high ground to its home-grown Taliban? Why are we allowing spiritual medievalism to seize the reigns of power here in the land of the free. And what is it that we are spilling blood and fortune to export to the medieval middle east--our own brand of medievalism? I say to the sexually free: take up the challenge, define morality on your own terms (which are bound to be far superior to the Johnny-One-Note morality of our Taliban: NoSex, NoSex, NoSex.) Ask yourself: why should the denial of sex, undoubtedly one of God's (or Nature's) greatest gifts to humankind, be the foundation of morality? This, my friends, is pure medievalism, and in our day and age is has become--to use their own favorite word--pure evil.

Back in the Sixties there was something called the Sexual Revolution. All of a sudden, almost overnight, it was as if an asteroid had hit planet Earth--an asteroid loaded with testosterone, the hormone of desire for men and women alike. Suddenly people were discovering that desire was not evil, that is was as natural as crunchy granola. The Seventies, in turn, were a celebration of this new found freedom. Then (conveniently for the forces of sexual oppression) along came AIDS, and the party was over, so to speak. Well, it was never really over. It just moved underground. People cannot suppress something as natural as their sexuality. We can't suppress it now, just as the people of the middle ages didn't suppress theirs (read Boccaccio's Decameron). All that really happens when the sexual demonizers are in charge is that "they are in charge." They demonize, while we make love. Sounds harmless, but it isn't. When Clinton was impeached, an ordeal that consumed an entire year of America's political energy and social vitality, the country had to drop the ball on all manner of vital issues, like anti-terrorism initiatives that an administration under constant fire simply could not deal with. Medieval morality will continue to take its toll on America, if the forces of reason and true morality do not fight back, and fight back hard.

The Sixties was only a glimmer of what was to come--of humankind's true liberation--and the forces of oppression and control needed time to reconnoiter and strategize. This they have done, thanks to the group of "philosopher kings" that have come to be known as the neocons. (Neo-conservatives who rationalize their anti-democratic behavior with one of Plato's most egregious notions--that a small handful of "philosophers" should wield all power in an ideal state.) Though mostly a secular, worldly gang, the neocons have been brilliant at rallying the forces of ignorance and fear to the side of their real political agenda, which is to transform America from the world's bastion of freedom into its absolute ruler, to create a world empire even greater than that of the Romans, to create in effect a New Rome. The faggot that is being thrown on the fire in order to achieve this end is sexual freedom. It worked for the Church, which inherited the power of Rome thru adroit demonization of sex, so why shouldn't it work for the neocons?

As always, it takes time for groups of people to see what is happening and react. But it never fails. True freedom is contagious and unstoppable. And true freedom most certainly includes sexual freedom. This was first realized in the Sixties, which were hailed as The Age of the Dawn of Aquarius. I say no. That was a false start. The real age of Aquarius is just about to begin.

This is a new blog. Please bear with me as I navigate the learning curve. Comments are not only welcome, but vital to the mission of Eros Rising.