C'mon, Fisk! Call it a Crusade Already

The reason we are in all those countries listed by my favorite British journalist is obvious, even though he had no answer when the question was asked. And he says it himself: lunatic Crusaders, both Christian and Muslim, are still running the show.

We're being myth-jacked! Hello? Anybody else see this huge blindspot in Western secular rationalism? The very reasons we fight--our core beliefs--are dismissed out of hand as "myths," mistaken for meaningless bedtime stories, skipped over in favor of a ludicrous, outdated, discredited mechanical metaphor for life.

Are you a machine? Then why do we think of nature as such? We machine the environment, we use gunboat and cruise missile and Trident sub and ICBM diplomacy, we now even machine the human psyche, manufacturing witness testimony to order by torture.

We treat nature as a machine, then machine nature to our desire with our military. Our dominance, we hubristically believe, is all the evidence we need of our god's blessing. 'We're obviously doing the work, fighting the war, of god, so go to hell if you argue with us!' That's the sentiment exploited after 9/11. It was used to motivate that stampede.

It's a myth-jacking.

It's the machine metaphor, people! That's what makes a Frankenstein's monster of our very own Mother, that we then battle and rage and fury against, mastering here with our machines. We have moved entirely into the Newtonian cosmos-as-machine metaphor as if it were truer than true.

Jospeh Stiglitz said it: the housing and telecom bubbles were engineered. This is how we do it.

We bullshit the people into believing a religious threat to Our Way of Life is at hand, then deceive them into borrowing huge sums for overvalued assets. John Perkins calls this the MO of "economic hit men," of which he was one, and I argue it's being applied, with some twists, right here at home.

"Beware politicians peddling fables that cast themselves as the heroes." So said a Wall Street Journal opinion the other day. Oh really?

Hasn't this been Kissinger's MO, peddling the enduring myth of the Free Market, Newton's old cosmic machine, of which we are always cast as the masters? We machine Life with our mastery of the Great Cosmic Free Market Machine.

Humans are messy. We bleed, clogging up the gears of industry. So the best possible of all world's, Newtonian Free Marketeers believe, is that which arises from absolutely no "human" interference. 'No bleeding! No peeing! No talking! Get back to work! Don't you know we're at WAR!"

We worship Newton's old cosmic machine in the form of the myth of the free market. Here in the West, a small group of Crusaders, Christian and Muslim, has been myth-jacking the rest of us to hell, and sticking us with the bill, making us pay for our own enslavement, such as creating "royals" in Arabia and the recent bailout bill, since the Age of Exploration.

Right here right now, we're spending money on our military--not our defense--like pharoahs furnishing their pyramids for the afterlife. The middle-class was sold on home-ownership, an "ownership society," "the American Dream," and now we're saddled with unforgivable debt while the robber barons raid the Treasury. That's myth-jacking, baby.