FIVE RING CIRCUS
Twenty seven whirling dervishes don't want to stop. They are perhaps guarding something, or maybe just passing the time. A recent image, offering some explanation for this, occurred in a BBC clip showing the changing of the guard, illustrating what ordinarily happens but isn't just now, because the country has gone Critical after the Manchester attack. Greater Manchester Police are “furious,” the BBC understands, because suicide bomber Salman Abedi's identity was leaked to US media 24 hours after the attack. The problem with that? – Manchester Police would prefer a delay of 36 hours so cohorts of the bomber can be arrested before they know they're on the lam. There are rules. Victims deceased are not to be identified prior to notification of next of kin.
The dervishes are swirling in red capes, it's somewhat of a ballet. When I was a kid we learned to get high this way. Didn't cost anything, did no harm, worst possible aspect, “Stop doing that!” yelled from the porch. This Greater Police point of view has always, if unreasonably, affected my opinion of the dervishes. Why should they get awe and respect for doing a harmless, useless and pointless thing, and we should get busted for it?
Red capes are a not very subconscious yank of the chain. In American forests the shout was: “The red coats are coming!” Sort of an off-hand calculation based on military inflexibility. Our native revolutionaries blended into the under brush while the Brits marched in stiff formation, dressed to be targets.
As an informed, and possibly obedient or at least herdable citizen, I might be expected to not see things this way. Which here becomes as polite a denial as seems necessary.
It makes as much sense as going to Israel to proclaim Peace after calling for more nuclear weapons. Or righteously declaring that Iran shouldn't have any. Affirming that “it won't happen” in the face of North Korea's unmistakable demonstration that it has. Climate change caused by burning fossil fuel? A hoax. EPA? Don't need it. Paris Agreement? An impediment. Human rights? Coddling the enemy. Dervishes. Dust devils. Social Justice = National Debt.
It's an unclever joke. Like the hole in the ozone. A big hole in the sky, dip that in your coffee. Dip your toes in the ocean around Fukushima. Fly your drone over the sarcophagus at Chernobyl.
On the other hand there is Serentripity. Click Here.
Or the Mute Messenger. Here.
News is not entertainment. Life can be fun, possibly for everyone when enough of us get that having fun is OK and not the point, not a side effect. “Are we having fun yet?” becomes a meaningless question. It's a realization.
How cost effective is Thermogeddon? That question might be the trump card. It might be a MAD game changer. But I think, to politely change the metaphor, that the game could be chess. Overturn the board and say Oops! Hey! There go the dervishes, red squares, black squares, void squares swingin' down the lane. And yes, I'm makin' fun, makin' whoopee, call the FCC. The hole in my doughnut is obscene. To put it politely.
To put a point on it – profit is a description, not a reason. It's an accumulation of value, not dished by an invisible hand, which might have escaped like the sorcerer’s apprentice to swamp its own fiction. It is no justification for selfishness. Ignorance does not relieve its burden of responsibility. Are torturers born or trained, nature or nurture? Is there a line in the sand? Do they wear embossed badges: Rights Enforcers? Becoming leaders we should follow? Oh, the accumulation has piled up on this dune or that. Let's go there. It moves like water for concrete, water for chocolate, it's gaining mass, overruns everything in the way -- rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river, place your bets on the felt covered table. The point has gotten dulled, iteration after iteration.
Somewhere along the way green trees got reduced to green felt tables, green banker's lamps, studious avoidance of who we are, our galactic home and fellow creatures. The great wonder of realization is being flooded in repositories of nuclear waste, to shame the centuries. And to say this is impolite?
Impoliteness is not incommensurate with self realization, with planetary realization, realization of bee swarms and grazing bison. It will even fit in an elevator or a board room meeting. It spells calligraphy, a digging stick, cave paintings, ideographs as well as this, speaking precisely in words that escape their boundaries.
Might I win the lottery? All the more reason to run the other way.
