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Something’s Happening Here – Strange Days: Facing Square Our Apocalypse — For the Heroic and Most Caring Only
Apocalypse No! Chapter Six: Strange Days
Wtf? Strange Days, The End Being Nigh … Facing Square Our Apocalypse—For the Heroic and Most Caring Only
Something’s Happening Here
“Nobody Told Me There’d Be Days Like These” – John Lennon
We live in unprecedented times—times in which the possibility of ending our species in our lifetime,
even eliminating all life on this planet, are very real possibilities. No other time has been like this. And the effect of this possibility of the actual end of days, so to speak—while so horrifying that we are in denial of it and hardly speak it—hangs over us and affects us in ways unique and fantastic.
We will either heroically, somehow, save our species and our planet, which will require a change of our human nature unlike anything that has been asked of our species ever before, or we will be witnesses to the elimination of
life on this planet in some way that we cannot imagine but can only be horrific in the extreme. This book is about facing, not denying, the uniquely dire character of our times and finding out what it says about us and requires of us. But it is also about what it is about our species that we—of all the other species here—are the ones, the only ones, who would bring about such a possibility. [continued after video]
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading of this chapter click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:
Why Do We Poop Where We Sleep?
Just what is it about us that could allow us to so violate our home as to make the death of us all possible? This is something that somebody should be addressing, don’t you think? I will begin that here. Come along, if you dare.
But this is not for those who would prefer to keep their heads in the sand and to sleepwalk through life. Certainly that is part of the reason we could get to this pass But it is doubtful that such people, in such deep denial of the signs around them, would be able to hear what is here being brought to light. If instead you are of the type that would wish to look fiercely at the truth, no matter how horrifying it might be, and to truly witness and be awake in these most fantastic of times, then listen up.
Gaia’s Calling You.
There is much here to see, and so much of it the mainstream would never touch for fear of creating a panic.
Still, to survive our species must face our problems, not look away. And there is a nobility in doing that, which is unlike any kind of nobility or heroism that has been asked of our species before. I hope, for the sake of us all, that you are one of those heroes. For we will need many noble souls to reverse our current downslide into oblivion.
“Strange Days, Indeed. Most Peculiar, Mama!” – John Lennon
Something’s Happening Here
What it is ain’t exactly clear.
“Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” So goes a hugely popular song from the sixties by Buffalo Springfield. Meanwhile Jim Morrison of the rock group The Doors sang, “Break on through to the other side.” [Footnote 1]
A decade later John Lennon sang “Strange days, indeed…most peculiar, mama!” That was in the late seventies; not long afterwards Lennon was murdered. In the nineties, the group R.E.M. enjoyed enormous success singing, “It’s the end of the world, as we know it”; then, singing parenthetically, “and I feel fine.” [Footnote 2]
Break On Through to the Other Side.
My point is that there is something happening here…something unprecedented in the entire history of this planet, as far as we are able to know. There are powerful factors and influences at work in our world now that have the capacity to change us and our world in radical ways…for good or ill. My point also is that this unprecedented situation, like the “break on through to the other side” lyric indicates, has something to do with birth feelings, birth trauma—an emerging perinatal unconscious. [Footnote 3]
What I have in mind in the ensuing parts on this topic is to attempt to reawaken you to the unique character of our times. Then I expect to persuade you that this unprecedented era in history is rife with the perinatal, that is, with things having to do with the time around our births.
“We Ain’t Born Typical.”
This contemporary age is permeated by perinatal symbolism, elements, evidence, behavior, rituals, and situations—in other words, I expect to show that the events of these “strange days” are being sculpted by an emerging perinatal unconscious—an unconscious that was created out of the trauma of our entering into this world, our birth trauma. The Kills, with their release in 2008, enjoyed huge success singing, “You are a fever. You ain’t born typical.” That’s what I’m talking about. [Footnote 4]
Finally, I intend to say a few words about what might be the outcome of these emerging perinatal trends—Earth rebirth or apocalypse.
Wtf? The End Being Nigh – Strange Days
The End Being Nigh – Strange Days
Strange Days
For most people, I would assume I am not saying anything new in pointing out that our times are unique. For that matter, all times are unique—unlike any other. But what no other time has seen is the actual—not imagined—possibility, even likelihood, of the “end of the world.” That is to say, we are facing the end of our species and maybe all life on this planet along with us. Considering just one scenario, we have the capacity, with only a minuscule amount of our nuclear weapons, to wipe out all life on this planet. We all know this.
“The End Is Nigh!”
I used the phrase, just now, “end of the world,” deliberately. For I expect that it will evoke in some a reaction that what I am going to say from here on will be a drawn-out verbal version of a familiar cartoon, depicting a bearded and bedraggled man on a street corner, carrying a sign or wearing a clapboard proclaiming, “The end is near!” and that what I will say will have just about as much credibility as that man’s would.
I take that chance to make my first point…which is: The fact that we can so easily dismiss, ridicule, and smugly deride such ideas of apocalypse points to our complacency with these strangest and most precarious of days. In fact, we have lived with this unprecedented situation—dangling on a thread, as it were, above the abyss of nuclear annihilation, to name just one of the possible forces of extinction…we’ve lived with it for so long as for it to seem commonplace—as part of the normal and familiar furniture of our daily lives.
Wtf?
Heads in the Sand
It has become so much a part of our daily lives, in fact, that we hardly give it any thought anymore. But for a moment, let us just imagine a person from a previous time in history being somehow transported into this time and being made to understand the impending forces: environmental collapse, species extinction, nuclear threat, population explosion, virulent epidemic, possibly human-created earthquakes and thus tsunamis, planet poisoning, and so on.
Unless this person was Nostradamus, we can imagine this person would be hugely alarmed, to say the least. This person might well wonder at our nonchalance, or should we say apathy, in the face of such likely, not just potential, apocalypse. [Footnote 5]
So I won’t waste time pointing out the statistics that prove the premise that the current trends we are following are apocalyptic.
We need simply to look to our daily headlines. Need I remind of the dangers from catastrophes like Fukushima and the Gulf Oil Spill? [Footnote 6]
Care for Some Radiation with that Milk?
We have radiation mixing into the world ecosystem as I write. Fukushima alone is spreading radiation that’s off the charts into food, air, oceans, and has made it to the East Coast of the U.S. and beyond in just a short time. We also know that nuclear waste needs to be guarded for 25,000 years because of its toxicity…it is still deadly for 250,000 years. Yet we continue to excrete massive amounts of it into our globe and even after the Fukushima meltdowns to push for building more plants. [Footnote 7]
Dead Zones and Dolphins
We have watched baby dolphins by the hundreds washing up on Gulf coasts and the creation of hundred mile dead zones in our seas. BP stupidly used toxic chemicals to disperse the oil rather than to collect it. The dispersants themselves are toxic, but the much bigger crime was to make sure the even more toxic oil, which depletes the oxygen in the water and thus creates the dead zones, would be spread far and wide throughout the global water. Good for BP shares looking like they could fix it, bad for survival of oxygen-breathers on Earth.
So BP’s egregiously criminal move was the equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug to clean up.
Unfortunately there is no “away” in which it can “go.” So we have, in this incident alone, precipitated greatly the dying off of the life of the oceans—the oxygen-producing plankton—and, hence, the basis of all life on this planet.
*Cough, Cough*
To this ravaging of the lungs of the planet add worldwide runaway deforestation, already in full swing. I am practically choking as I think how we then stink up the air with industrial emissions and auto exhausts. Living in the LA area, I can tell you that I feel my mouth is sealed to the end of an exhaust pipe most of the time. So to the dangers bringing on our demise we need to add globally increasing air pollution.
Forget Your Sunscreen, We’re All Gonna Fry.
Environmentally also, we have the greenhouse effect—global climate change or warming—the depletion of the ozone layer, and so on. [Footnote 8]
Al Gore is owed the gratitude of the world informing us of climate change in his book and documentary of the same name, Inconvenient Truth.
Meanwhile lots of folks think we have solved the ozone layer problem. We banned fluorocarbons, and we don’t hear much about this problem anymore in the media. Environmental nay-sayers are arguing that we “fixed” this problem, as part of their stance that we need not worry about what we’re doing to the planet. But not long ago—April 2011—CNN broadcast the news that the ozone had been depleted by 40% in the last two months alone! They immediately then turned to an item of dire importance—a snake had gotten loose in New York! [Footnote 9]
Only One Earth, Don’t Blow It!
Nor need I elaborate on the the nuclear threat–whether precipitated by terrorists, rogue nations, or accident. We know, but don’t want to, of the possibility of any one or more of these mad actors employing weapons of mass destruction,
possibly leading to ever-mounting rounds of retaliation with eventually no one left standing. Relatedly we push out of our minds the threat of other kinds of weapons–such as biological weapons–getting out of control and creating a worldwide epidemic or holocaust.
Eight billion and Counting…Now Let’s Attack Planned Parenthood! *sarcasm*
Need I mention the continuing explosion of the world’s population leading to likely famine, wars, diseases, and so on? We have twice as many people alive now as the combined total of all humans who have ever lived! We are no different from bacteria who overrun their petri dish only to die off. We certainly aren’t showing ourselves to be any smarter than that. [Footnote 10]
Outbreak
How about the possibility of virulent epidemic that cannot be cured? Does that catch your fancy? Strains of micro-organisms are evolving that are immune to our much-touted antibiotics.
You Sure You Should Be Reading This?
What Island Were You Stranded On?
But why go on? If you are not aware of these things, you are from some other planet. If you are dismissing these facts, you are in actual psychological denial of your dire situation. If you are not paying attention, you are spending your life desperately running away.
No, I won’t go into stats and figures to support the premise. The evidence and statistics are there for all to see, crying for attention, put out, published, and promulgated by the best scientists of our time, mixed in with the more mundane messages of our daily newspapers and nightly newscasts, though we mostly turn our ears from them.
We’ll Try to Save You, Too.
In fact, if you are not already aware of the global crisis that besets us, I do not think you will get much out of reading further in this book and would probably better spend your time doing something else. There will always be those that will have their heads in the sand and will be cast about like flotsam upon the waters by the events swirling around them–impotent in the face of them and dependent upon other’s actions for the result. If you are one, know we’re trying to save you, too.
Facing Foursquare the Darkness – Not for Cowardly or Uncaring Humans – Strange Days
Facing Square Our Apocalypse—For the Heroic and Most Caring Only
There will always be those that will have their heads in the sand and will be cast about like flotsam upon the waters by the events swirling around them – impotent in the face of them and dependent upon others’ actions for the result. If you are one, know we’re trying to save you, too.
Assuming you are not one of them–a good bet, if you’ve managed to get to this paragraph–there is much to say about the current apocalyptic trends.
Facing Foursquare
But even those of us aware of this crisis hardly think of it. Of course it is our normal psychic defenses that operate to keep this huge awareness out of our daily minds; we must do this in order to be able to function.But perhaps, for some of us, our defenses work too well–so much so that we unthinkingly participate in and contribute to our own demise. This is classic neurotic self-sabotaging, self-destruction on a macro scale.
However, psychologists, historians, psychohistorians, and scholars and the educated public claim not to be like that. It is their job, or their claim, to be looking squarely into the face of these forces of denial and potential apocalypse and to be seeking to understand the human condition and human psychology in light of them. It is their duty then to inform the rest of us about what they see so that we might have a chance of reversing our self-destructive tendencies.
If You’re Not Alarmed, You’re Not Paying Attention.
Whether the educated public and the multitude of scholars actually are fulfilling their mission in these times is debatable.
Regardless, my thesis is that when we do this, when we look foursquare into the face of the global crisis and its accompanying denial, we find that these unprecedented global factors contribute to a unique and unprecedented human condition and psychology. I have seen a bumper
sticker around, in California where I live, that proclaims, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention!” It could as easily say, however, “If you’re not alarmed,” fearful, anxious, depressed . . . you name it, “You’re not paying attention!”
To Face These Maddest of Days and Minds
So then let us pay attention. This book is about facing foursquare into the fantastic circumstances and situation in which we find ourselves, watching,
like a photograph emerging in solution, as the face of these times slowly comes into view, and then waking up to the meaning of the message, perhaps the warning, it brings us, so that we might live most fully and take up our roles consciously amid these unprecedented unfoldings. What is required of us now, then, having turned to receive the message, is to look deep into the features of our age. Let us begin.
Continue with Apocalypse – No! Chapter Seven:
“We Ain’t Born Typical””
Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Five: Death Wish – Thanatos Walking
Strange Days. Apocalypse? Or Earth Rebirth?
by SillyMickel Adzema
For the author’s reading of a version of this chapter, click on the link to youtube above or click the video player here:
Footnotes
1. Stop, Children, What’s That Sound – Buffalo Springfield – Lyrics
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me i got to bewareI think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downThere’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behindI think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downWhat a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our sideIt’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going downParanoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you awayWe better stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, now, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
2. It’s the End of the World as We Know It – R.E.M. – Lyrics
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds,
snakes, an aeroplanes, Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn – world
serves its own needs, dummy serve your own needs. Feed
it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength, Ladder
start to clatter with fear fight down height. Wire
in a fire, representing seven games, a government
for hire and a combat site. Left of west and coming in
a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck. Team
by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing! Fine, then. Uh oh,
overflow, population, common food, but it’ll do. Save
yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs,
listen to your heart bleed dummy with the rapture and
the revered and the right, right. You vitriolic,
patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty
psyched.[Chorus:]
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.Six o’clock – TV hour. Don’t get caught in foreign
towers. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself
churn. Locking in, uniforming, book burning, blood
letting. Every motive escalate. Automotive incinerate.
Light a votive, light a candle. Step down, step down.
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh, this means no
fear cavalier. Renegade steer clear! A tournament,
tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer me solutions,
offer me alternatives and I decline.[Chorus 2x]
The other night I dreamt of knives, continental
drift divide. Mountains sit in a line, Leonard
Bernstein. Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester
Bangs. Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom! You
symbiotic, patriotic, slam book neck, right? Right.[Chorus 2x]
3. Break on Through to the Other Side – The Doors – Lyrics
You know the day destroys the night,
Night divides the day
Tried to run, tried to hide,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side, yeah.We chased our pleasures here,
Dug our treasures there,
But can you still recall the time we cried?
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side.Yeah!
C’mon, yeah.Everybody loves my baby,
Everybody loves my baby.
She gets
She gets
She gets
She gets higghhhh!I found an island in your arms,
A country in your eyes,
Arms that chained us, eyes that lied.
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through, wow, oh yeah!Made the scene week to week,
Day to day, hour to hour,
The gate is straight, deep and wide,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through to the other side,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break on through,
Break, break, break, break,
Break, break, break, break,
Break.
4. U.R.A. Fever – The Kills – Lyrics
Walk you to the counter
What do you got to offer
Pick you out a solder
Look at you forever
Walk you to the water
Your eyes like a casino
We ain’t born typical
Find a piece of silver
Pretty as a diagram
And go down to the Rio
Put it in my left hand
Put it in a fruit machine
Everyone’s a winner
Laughing like a seagull
You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical
You are a fever
You are a fever
You ain’t born typical
Living in a suitcase
Meet a clown, fall in love
went down to have you over
Going ’round a break up
Take you to a jukebox
That’s the situation
Pick you out a number
And that’s our arrangement
Dancing on the legs of a new-born pony
Left right left right
Keep it up son
Go ahead and have her
Go ahead and leave her
You only ever had her
When you were a fever
I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical
I am a fever
I am a fever
I ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
We are a fever
We are a fever
We ain’t born typical
5. An example of what we should be doing. These are the kind of public figures and pundits we need.
If the bees disappeared, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man. – Albert Einstein
Vanishing bees is “just a sign” of what is going on, as they point out. The canary has died, and we cannot just leave the coal mine.
So we owe gratitude to Ellen Page and Bill Maher for setting an example for the kind of discourse we could and should be having in the media.
6. Gulf Oil Spill, Fukushima meltdowns, nuclear radiation, toxic nuclear waste, HAARP, killing off of the ocean–destroying oxygen in it, dead zones with no oxygen, dolphins washing up, birds falling out of the sky, bees disappearing, ozone depletion at the rate of 40% in the last two months alone, and a massive 50% species extinction in the next few decades, i.e., in our lifetimes! (now, enjoy your hamburger.)
7. Helen Caldicott compares our complacency in the face of these dire happenings to the parents who respond emotionless when she has to tell them their child has leukemia. She says, “Get mad. Get emotional.” She urges us to take back our governments from these mad perpetrators of the darkest doom imaginable. And, in the least, occupy! She proclaims,
It’s time you took your country back…. Use your bodies like they did in Wisconsin. Do a Tahrir Square here. Take back New York. Take back the Congress. Invade the Congress! Those people belong to you. They are your representatives, and you are their leaders. But you’ve got to have some guts! And stop being so goddamn polite all the time! And don’t need approval. Step up to the plate….
We’ve got to be emotional…. It’s time we used our emotions and become incensed! Otherwise we’re not going to make it.
8. “We’re all gonna fry.” With appreciation to Scout Niblett, “We’re All Gonna Die/ Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death”
9. “We Lost 40% of Ozone Layer Last 3 Months” proclaimed CNN in April, 2011 — “Ozone Depletion Over Arctic ‘Unprecedented’ This Winter“
My take on this: CNN reported this month that 40% of the ozone layer over the Arctic was depleted from December 21st, 2010 to March 31st, 2011–roughly three months. I heard a CNN anchor report this, with some alarm. I also watched as this anchor continued, after a few sentences on this, to another news item–about a snake getting loose in New York, if memory serves me. Guess life on this planet not as big a deal.
Btw, if you want to dismiss this by consoling yourself that it is “only” happening over the Arctic, consider what is happening in parts of the globe that aren’t being actively monitored. Seems to me if the lake goes down on the other side, the water is lower on my side as well. [return to text]
10. John Leslie, The End of the World.
Continue with Apocalypse – No! Chapter Seven:
“We Ain’t Born Typical””
Return to Apocalypse No! Chapter Five: Death Wish – Thanatos Walking
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Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Twenty-Four: Prenatal Irritation/ Revulsion Has Us Invent Scapegoats for Loss of “Golden Age” … Racism, Bigotry, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Immigration
“Get Away From Me, Bum!” … Replaying a Prenatal Narrative, We Create “Filthy” Others and Blame Them for Loss of Our “Golden Age.” 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 24
“Get Away from Me, Bum!” … Riff-Raff … Hippie … Scum
Immigration – They Are Dirty, Polluted and Keep Filling Up the Space Around Us
So, because of these prenatal formative experiences, we place some folks “outside
our circle” and see them as irritating, even revolting. They are “disgusting” (poisonous) abominations of bloodlines …abominations … whether they’re Jews (not like the pure Aryans) or
blacks (filthy, lazy, dirty, immoral), who want our fresh pure blood
(blood libel), our resources.
By contrast, we’re the “real” Americans. They, on the other hand, want to take all that is good (about America, for example) and destroy it; they’re dragging us down. And they keep coming across our “borders” (placental barrier) and “overrunning” the country.
They are everywhere! We can’t get away from them. They surround us! And they are taking over. They are “poisoning” our way of life. So this is how these early imprints have us seeing others and our society in ways conducive to horrible intolerances and anti-immigration sentiments.
But We Keep Re-Creating This Situation in Our Actions/Decisions Insuring That We Will Continue to Feel This Way
These feelings are irrational and not based in fact, of course. We show this in that at the same time as we hate and fight off this incursion into our surroundings,
we create overpopulation and a buildup of people who can’t be cared for…who will therefore be the “unwashed,” surrounding us. We fight abortion policies and contraception and so create overpopulation
and thus increasing toxicity in our environment.
While we expend our energy fighting reflections of our pain, in the form of other people we create to hate, we create the conditions that will keep us feeling the way we do. We create pollution in our environment. We even wish to keep our scapegoats downtrodden and filthy, even though around us and “polluting” us. Our desire is to keep them “dirty,” to keep them as “slaves” and riff-raff.
We Create This Situation and Then Engage in the Drama of Acting Out Against Them By Wanting to Punish Them With How They Are Making Us Feel
We experienced our environment as yucky and irritating back then in the womb. So some of us humans have concocted the idea of tarring and feathering these “unclean” others.
The Nazi mind was riddled with this prenatal trauma. They rounded up Jews, ethnic others, and the “undesirables” of their society They stuffed them (crowded womb) into cattle cars where many were forced to stand uncomfortably, and where they could only defecate on themselves and wallow in their own waste matter (buildup of waste matter in the womb).
I recently saw the movie—Sarah’s Key, based on an actual event during World War II—where 13,152 Parisian Jews were rounded up and placed in the Vélodrome d’hiver, a sports stadium, for eight days without sanitary facilities until
they were processed into even more dire “facilities” at Auschwitz … and murdered.
About the conditions at the stadium, it is written,
The dark glass roof, combined with windows screwed shut for security, raised the temperature inside the structure. The 13,152 people held there [9] had no lavatories; of the 10 available, five were sealed because their windows offered a way out, and the others were blocked.[10] The arrested Jews were kept there for eight days with only water and food brought by Quakers, the Red Cross and the few doctors and nurses allowed to enter.
They had no recourse but to fill their own surroundings with waste matter; it was said the stench outside in the surrounding neighborhood was unbearable, quite foul. We see manifest here a pathological imposition of
prenatal pushes about being crowded, given very little in the way of resources (oxygen deprivation), in a hot environment (prenatal stuffiness and irritation/burning), and forced to wallow in waste matter (toxic womb).
I’ve already mentioned how many Jews were eventually shunted into gas chambers where they were forced to inhale poisonous fumes as a re-creation of prenatal poisoning trauma. (See also bad blood.)
Ultimately, We Want to Eliminate Them, Seeing Them as the Obstacles to Returning to That “Golden Age
At any rate, we feel we need to eliminate them for they want our resources (oxygen). We feel they will use up everything and leave us wanting
(deprivation), and left with nothing (oxygen starvation, death). Never mind that in going after them we are looking away from those in society who are actually causing us to struggle for the necessities and to feel deprived. But this has nothing to do with rationality.
This prenatal mind has us seeing everything through the fetal narrative: Once upon a time, there was harmony, bliss, perfection. Everyone was happy; we were strong (BPM I).
But then came change in our lives. Our surroundings became increasingly filled with strange and alien others at the same time as we felt less free and more unhappy (BPM II crowdedness), our strength waning, and that times had gotten tough: There was less money and we felt unfairly deprived (BPM II oxygen deprivation).
We felt that these alien others were infecting our purity of life by imposing upon and inserting themselves into our lives (BPM II bad blood).
Everything around us seemed dirtier and more foul and they were around us in increasing numbers
(amounts), so it was their fault; and their continued presence would eventually kill us (BPM II poisonous placenta/ prenatal irritation, revulsion). It was they
who were responsible for the loss of our pristine way of life.
So to do anything about it, it was thought necessary to fight back against this incursion, defend our way of life, family, and the innocents from this “filth,” and shore up the goodness (good blood) and resources (oxygen) we still had.
In America this narrative is played out by the right wing and Tea Party folks: Essentially they see the world as having gone downhill since a 1950s-style “golden age” when everyone was serene, happy, and prosperous. Never mind that the wealthy at that time paid their fair share of taxes to contribute to a
general prosperity,
and these conservatives seek to return to it by having the wealthy pay little to no taxes now. Never mind either that it never really existed the way they think they remember it and that what they want to reinstate is a pasted together collage of childhood
hurts and hopes, bad TV and movies, even worse advertisements and commercials conveying an image of the way Americans really had it (but did not),
prenatal imprints, and wudda cudda shudda beens. They see liberals, bleeding hearts, hippies, immigrants, and minorities as responsible for preventing a return to that truly mythical golden age. So, these elements are scapegoated for the crimes of the 1%.
In Germany, the same narrative was played out, but their golden age was before World War I. Hitler got power by promising a return to that time of prosperity, and he scapegoated Jews and other minorities for their “fall from grace” by pointing to them as blocking a return to national strength and purity.
So sometimes how humans dealt with these threatening incursions of “poisonous” others was with all-out attack…and destruction.
Those others were seen to be in the way, so it followed they would need to be eliminated. But in the process those “filthy” others would be made to feel the kinds of feelings that their presence was stimulating in the pure ones—the real Germans…nowadays the real Americans.
Remember, these others irritate us and just “burn” us (prenatal irritation/burning). Some say, “It just burns me to look at them!” And folks will act out horribly by killing these others by fire: by burning witches, Jews, enemies in general.
It continues to this day. In a previous section I mentioned the Baptist preacher—the one who
got “pukin’ sick” at the thought of gays and lesbians—who wanted to surround them with an electrified fence! Not exactly like burning witches, but close enough.
And ultimately…the “Ultimate Solution”… we wish to remove them altogether by burning them up in fires or
ovens (prenatal burning/ irritation). This we do either by concentration camps, pogroms, or by the highest tech means of raining fire down upon the undesirables in third world countries.
I
n modern times, we have rained fire down upon them from aircraft. We have used napalm—liquid fire—and Agent Orange—one of the most toxic compounds created—on these others, who we’ve called “gooks” and other derisive terms.
To Summarize
Basically it comes down to the world being divided into filthy and disgusting things that want our resources (oxygen) and our pure white threatened selves (substitute corresponding contrasts for other cultures). This is bottom line our feelings of fetal malnutrition. It is unfortunately for us projected onto the outside world so strongly we can’t know what is really going on behind that perinatal veil.
Now let us turn how this prenatal screen, twisting the reality we see, has us defiling our own homes and aiding our own self-destruction. For toxic womb has been re-created as toxic planet.
Continue with Toxic Womb ~ Toxic Earth: How We Manifest Prenatal Irritation and Burning in Environmental Destruction and Why Humans Are Compelled to Poop Where They Sleep. 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 25
Return to “Don’t Bug Me!” … Culture Wars, Hating Hippies, and Having Obsessively Clean Homes, But Tolerating Pollution – Prenatal Irritation/Revulsion. 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 23
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Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Twenty: “Don’t Want Your Kind Around Here!” Prenatal Imprints for Xenophobia, Racism, Medicine, and More
“We Don’t Want Your Kind Around Here!” … Acting Out Prenatal Feelings of Sickening – “Bad Blood” – in Racism, Xenophobia, Elitism, Homophobia … and Medicine: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 20
How “Bad Blood” Manifests in Our Actions
This brings us to the psychotic acting out of these thoughts and feelings—rooted in unconscious discomforts and repressed memory patterns—by insane societies.
Bloody Games—War
In this aspect of fetal discomfort, a reduced blood flow to the placenta is experienced as a build up of carbon dioxide and toxins, since they are not removed as efficiently as they were before. Lloyd deMause explains how this womb situation is universally expressed among humans as a fear of being “poisoned” by “bad blood.” He has found that feelings of being trapped and at the same time “infused” with bad blood or toxic energies of some sort precede the outbreak of all wars.
For these wars are the unconscious way humans try to “break free” from these uncomfortable feelings, which are for the most part just early unresolved memories from our beginnings in life. We see
“bad blood” as coming from the enemy; We see the
enemy as an attacking many-headed monster “encroaching” on the “home”land … a threatening multi-veined placenta, aging and filled with toxins, “filth.” So we wish to attack and destroy the enemy—this placental “monster”—so we can “breathe free” again and escape their “poisonous filth.” (See BPM IV)
How We Act Out “Bad Blood” – Xenophobia, Blood Letting, Smoking
The perfect example, however, is the xenophobia that resulted in the Nazis treatment of the Jews around the time of World War II. I have already pointed out how these walking psychotics injected poisonous gas into Jews in gas chambers out of these prenatal feelings, which they framed in adult thoughts of being themselves infected with tainted money from these Jews. Let us now look at other act outs of this.
Racism, Xenophobia, Classism, Elitism, Homophobia, Intolerance—We Don’t Want “Your Kind” Around Here! Keeping Racial “Lines” “Pure,” Keeping Out “the Unwashed,” Affecting the Gene “Pool”
This is the basis of racism … blacks are pollutants, as are Jews. They want to take away our purity—our pure children…blood libel; our women’s pure virtue. And so
we need to dress in white, indicating “pure” blood, to defend against these incursions (the Ku Klux Klan) of “bad blood.”
These feelings of being “sickened” at the end of our womb existence are the root of all xenophobia with its creation always of a toxic Other
which cannot be allowed to infect the virtue and purity of people of “our blood.”
We see it in intolerance of others of all kinds. A few days ago, on May 21st, 2012, a Baptist preacher from the South made headlines everywhere by announcing from the pulpit that all gays and lesbians should be “rounded up,” placed in an “enclosure,” surrounded by an “electrified fence.” He imagined they could have food air dropped to them until they died (obviously an insufficient…oxygen starvation…or poisoned…bad blood…amount.) At this point, I don’t believe I need to unravel the prenatal qualities of the morass his mind was thinking in.
And why all this? His exact words are, because “It makes me pukin’ sick!” what homosexuals do. Need I say more? [Footnote 1]
But this thinking is found in classism as well, where royalty calls itself “blue bloods” and only allows marriage between others of its class—from one’s own nation or another, interestingly—and will not allow its “blood” to be mixed with the polluted blood of the masses and
“riff raff.”
University intellectuals have a more “refined” take on this primal disgust: They set up barriers to academic entrance in order to “keep out the unwashed,” without a clue they are coming across like scared fetuses inside a virtual womb (academia) trying to protect their continuing flow of blood (money).
This fetal malnutrition gives rise to bigoted ideas of keeping racial lines “pure.” It insists upon no mixing of the races … or ethnicities…for fear of affecting the gene “pool” (pool of
blood), but it is always described in terms of “blood” that will be mixed, tainted,
polluted, made impure, or degraded. Can you see how these are all instances of fear of encroachment by another from which one senses a threat of pollution and in conjunction which one feels suffocated, made helpless, unable to move freely?
Blood Letting
For a long time in Western culture, it was thought that when one got sick that one had “bad blood” coursing through one’s system. The idea was that by bleeding a person one would rid the body of some of this impure blood and the person would get better. This bloodletting was employed for hundreds of years in the face of the evidence to the contrary wherein folks got paler and sicker from this “treatment.” But such is the power of these sorry thoughts rooted in unconscious dynamics.
Smoking Itself
I’ve already mentioned how we re-create the atmospheric imbalance of oxygen—carbon dioxide in the womb through burning stuff. The smoking of tobacco and other vegetation I likened to our pushes and pulls to re-create the bad air. But in ingesting this air into one’s lungs, we have a most perfect example of the drive to re-create the
uncomfortable feeling of ingestion of “bad blood,” in this case, inhaling, bad air. With all rationality set aside, we are compelled to poison, infect ourselves again and again with bad air (bad blood). Again, of such depth is the grooves of the imprint created in our prenatal times and along whose lines we make our self-destructive decisions.
How We Make It Worse
(“Give Us, Oh Lord”) Our Daily Toxins—Drugs, Food Additives, Polluted Air
How we add to this today…how we make it worse: smoking and drinking, taking drugs. We create and imbibe toxins in our food, our air…through the medications we use… The whole idea behind “medicine” is that a toxin (all drugs are) administered in a tiny amount will alter our blood flow in just the exact way to affect some currently felt experience of our blood being bad (sickness).
And in doing these things we reinforce the bad blood experience of fetal malnutrition the fetus will experience out of its being human. We insure we will pass along our bad blood experience to the next generation…we will multiply it even. For the mother’s ingestion of these compounds into her system—smoke, drugs, food additives, air toxins,
water pollutants—
are felt as receiving bad blood by the fetus, even worse than it would be otherwise just from pressure on the arteries restricting blood flow. Again we create that which we need to resolve, only this time it is the unborn child who will be “infected” with the bad blood and need to face these feelings later in life, again and again.
How We Make it True, Create It
Food Pollution/Genetic Engineering and Propaganda
I can’t leave this without pointing out that, as in environmental pollution and in political oppression, it is all not just a figment of a past memory,
as there are those of us acting out this feeling complex by coming up with such odd creations that end up polluting the food of others (as in the tainted food coming out of corporations like Monsanto, with its Frankensteinian concoctions)
and that seek to inject alien ideas in others to make us do things we would ordinarily not do—whether that is to buy some unnecessary thing to fatten the wallets of these others (advertising) or to surrender one’s self interest or hand over one’s power and rationality of thought to these others for their political ends (propaganda…in America, Fox News).
.
Continue with Ewww! Prenatal Irritation, Revulsion … Toxic Environment, Touch, Sex, Preadolescent “Creepiness” and Early Roots of Rape and Sexual Abuse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 21
Return to “Bad Blood”—Poisoned, Infected … Prenatal Roots of Paranoia, Sado-Masochism, Alien Mind Control, and the Evil Queen: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 19
Footnote
1. Pastor Worley’s actual words were
Of our president getting up and saying it was all right for two women to marry, for two men to marry, I tell you right now, I was disappointed bad. But I’ll tell you right there, it’s as sorry as you can get. The Bible’s agin’ it, God’s agin’ it, I’m agin’ it, and if you’ve got any sense, you’re agin’ it.
I had way, I figured a way out, a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers, but I couldn’t get it passed through Congress. Build a great big large fence, 100..50 or 100 miles long. Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. And have that fence electrified ’til they can’t get out. And feed ‘em. And you know what? In a few years they’ll die out. Do you know why? They can`t reproduce.
If a man ever has a young ‘un, praise god it’ll be the first one. All of these… It’s just as well…I’m gonna preach the hell out of all of them. Hey I’ll tell you right now. I ain’t gonna vote for a baby killer and a homosexual lover!
You said, ‘Did you mean to say that?’ You’d better believe I did!
God have mercy it makes me puking sick to think about…I don’t even know whether you ought to say this in the pulpit or not. Could you imagine kissing some man? My god I love you fellas, but not that much.
Continue with Ewww! Prenatal Irritation, Revulsion … Toxic Environment, Touch, Sex, Preadolescent “Creepiness” and Early Roots of Rape and Sexual Abuse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 21
Return to “Bad Blood”—Poisoned, Infected … Prenatal Roots of Paranoia, Sado-Masochism, Alien Mind Control, and the Evil Queen: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 19
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21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 5: Blueprints of Human Nature and Four Earliest Roots of War, Bigotry, and Pollution
Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Five: Psychological and Political Repercussions of the Four Parts of Prenatal Pain—Crowded, Stifled, Disgusted, Irritated
Four Blueprints of “Human Nature”
These imprints on our psyche caused by uncomfortable experiences in late gestation that are molds for and roots of a great deal of the later experience and behavior of humans can be put in four categories:
Crowded … “Back Off!”
First, we experience crowded, restricted conditions in the womb as we get larger and no longer enjoy the blissful uninhibited freedom of the previous time of our short lives.
I discussed in a previous section how we manifest this through overpopulation and then react to or run away from those feelings through activities like swimming and dancing.
For now, suffice it to say we act this out as nations through wars in general (pushing back “lines” of the enemy), especially wars of “expansion.” Environmentally, we feel the need to push back and pave over Nature all we can. We’ll get more into these sorts of things soon.
Stifled… Gasping … “They’re Sucking the Very ‘Life Blood’ Out of Us!”
Second, because of pressure on arteries we experience a reduced blood flow and get less oxygen, therefore we experience “stuffiness,” suffocating feelings, feelings of need, want, and lack…and deprivation.
Later in life as individuals we are driven to gobbling up more resources than we need—greed. As nations we are compelled to exploit resources from those conquered territories we “expanded” into—colonialism and imperialism. It is fascinating how we act this out on both sides of class war and revolution also; that part is coming up soon. For now I just want to give you an idea of the critical importance of the understandings just ahead.
Disgusted… Poisoned … “Don’t Feed Me That Bullcrap!”
Third, the blood we do receive is not as good as it was, so we feel what we do get is “poisonous”…deficient, unhealthy, harmful…even deadly and threatening as in the feeling we might be being poisoned to death.
It is “bad blood.” This sounds like the deprivation/gasping feelings, but though it is related it has a different quality: The difference is between
gasping for breath as in being held under water and feeling one will die for lack of oxygen, versus being in a gas
chamber and feeling that the air we breathe is foul, unhealthy, smelly…and is deadly because of its toxicity. They are considerably different in that in one we feel we will die for lack of resources—the outside is withholding something we need. In the other the outside very much is impinging on one but in a bad way; it is forcing itself on us, and it is felt as an assault.
This crops up later…these feelings have fractals at all levels…as the difference between a child being hurt because he or she is ignored, abandoned, unloved, or left alone versus a child getting
“attention” but in the form of assault, abuse, violence, sexual assault. The first is a lack of
something; the other is an unwanted getting of the opposite of what one wants/needs. It is the difference between being “starved” for knowledge and being “fed” propaganda, not the “pure” truth.
An interesting aside and look forward into what is coming up is that it is because the Nazis in particular were so caught up in this kind of
“bad blood” matrix of feelings in the policies they carried out that they even created the manner of death for Jews that they did—gas chambers. In other words, because they felt the “blood” (money) they were receiving was “poisoned” (tainted, manipulated) by the Jews, it made the most perfect sense then, when it occurred to them, to fight back against these sources of “tainted blood” (Jews) by forcing “tainted blood” into them also, until they died (gas chambers). [Footnote 1]
Irritated… Dirty … “Eeew!”
Fourth, there are feelings caused by the fact that the decreased blood flow caused by pressure on the arteries providing blood to the placenta means that there will be reduced efficiency in removing the byproducts of oxygen combustion by the fetus.
These are waste products or toxins of the biochemical process of food conversion into energy that are normally removed by the blood through the veins…to be expelled eventually one way or another back into the environment.
So there will be a backflow caused by the reduced blood flow, and the fetus experiences a buildup of toxins…think stuck in a traffic jam and breathing in the exhausts of all the vehicles around…any wonder road rage? The prenate feels increased “yuckiness” in its environment that is greater than anything experienced previously.
Oh, the garbage man still comes to take out the trash…but think of it as the garbage man coming less often and one still puts out the garbage just as frequently. Imagine how one feels watching from one’s window as it piles up on the sidewalk. Perhaps you lived in New York during the huge garbage strike; you’d have an even better idea.
So, finally, there is the pain and discomfort of being surrounded by these toxins, forced to live in an environment that is felt to be dirty, “creepy,” ugly, toxic, threatening, filthy, slimy, yucky. And again this is related to the previous feeling complex but is different. For one can be forced to take in something noxious, or one can be immersed in something that is painful or uncomfortable like a bath that is too hot. In other words, this pain is on the surface of the body, not being forced inside, like the other.
How this noxious environment feels to the fetus can be that of irritation, uncomfortable heat, burning, and feelings of threat to one’s survival—thus alarm and panic—which those outside “impositions” bring up in a fetus. Historically this has been acted out on Jews and witches: They were placed like wood in heaps and burned to get rid of them as the threat they were felt to be. As in the gas chamber example, they perpetrated on the victim the sort of
suffering the murderers felt was actually coming at them…witches and Jews were seen as a source of burning…if nothing else in that they could be responsible for one burning forever in hell.
And parts of this complex later on can be those of annoyance, yuckiness, being continually distracted by sensations (ADD), creepiness, dirtiness.
We feel bugged, irritated. We overkill pests and
overclean our houses, using an abundance of toxic “product” which only adds to the overall toxicity of our environment. This is the perinatal underpinnings of what Freud called anal compulsion. It actually leads to us employing strict toilet-training, if you think about it.
We feel “imposed on” by others, especially “visitors” who come to our “house.” We feel surrounded by “dirty” hippies… Jews… blacks… immigrants…. You name it.
Roots of War, Bigotry, Pollution….
These feeling complexes sculpted by our early, uniquely human, prenatal discomfort and pain mold our politics, shape our wars and conflicts, determine how we treat the environment, and color how we see and treat each other. We will now deal with each of these in turn and discuss the way we act them out as adults politically, environmentally, and interpersonally.
Continue with Imprinted in the Womb for Wars of Expansion, Deforestation, Cities, Imperialism, and Road Rage—Crowded—”Back Off!”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 6
Return to Air Pollution, Fetal Suffocation, and Human Nature: Profound Sculpting of Who We Are Occurs at a Time We Cannot See : 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 4
Footnote
1. It would be interesting to find out what in particular was the cause of such inordinate fixation on this aspect of early prenatal pain…. For example, did Germans have more of this kind of pain as fetuses because German women did much more standing…being hard workers, perhaps…in the late stages of pregnancy than others? Such are the kinds of things that can make such differences.
And if women doing standing work right up to the time of birth correlates with excessive fetal malnutrition, what of women in primitive agrarian cultures working—in the fields or wherever—until practically the time of birth?
Does this have anything to do with the increase in war and conflicts we observe in agrarian
cultures over nomadic ones?… is there a corresponding increase in psychosis, ritual, and superstition…scapegoating
and sacrifice…as, for example, with the Mayan and pre-Colombian New World cultures? No doubt there are many factors involved in these things, but are these prenatal contributing factors some important overlooked ones? If so, how important?
Continue with Imprinted in the Womb for Wars of Expansion, Deforestation, Cities, Imperialism, and Road Rage—Crowded—”Back Off!”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 6
Return to Air Pollution, Fetal Suffocation, and Human Nature: Profound Sculpting of Who We Are Occurs at a Time We Cannot See : 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 4
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