Chapter 4 
The Creation of Bethlehem
© Eso A.B.

One of the questions our ‘modern’ society forgets to ask itself is: When did the first written word appear? When did the word for “Baum”, German for ‘tree’, came to be written on a piece of bark or leather, and the tree was chopped into 4 letters: b a u m? When did the ‘tree’ disappear into a symbol and cease to be a green image? When did reality become virtual? This question is not to be asked in an academic sense as to the day, year, or decade, but in the sense as to when a tree ceased to be green for most Germans and Europeans.

The question is an old one. Western society is not the first society in which the question occurs. The question of what is real and what is virtual is a question for all societies at all times. In Latin America, trees have been turning ashen http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/ashlry/bp1.jpg for several decades now; down the Amazon River no longer flows water, but banana mush.

Some of the first instances of human beings attempting to escape virtual reality and return to reality occurs in archaic communities, among so-called aborigines.

Almost all archaic societies make use of pain. Sometimes the use of pain is as obvious as looking one in the face. Anthropology books show men and women who have thrust through their noses a twig, or put under the lip a disk, have elongated their skulls, or have hanging from their ears an object that misshapes the ear by doubling its normal size. It does not appear that the process is painless.

Pain is a universal tool for making the individual more aware of him and herself. It was not that long ago, that parents or teachers in Western societies seized a misbehaving child or student by his-her ear and dragged him-her into a corner of the room, and by threatening to pull the child’s ear again make him-her stand in the corner until the reality the teacher was trying to get the child to understand was understood. This was a time when a teacher did not behave as a priest teaching moral ideals. Even so, a teacher was a missionary with a mission to alienate one from one’s ancestors, at the same time as one was aligned and subjected to the whims of prince or baron.

In our day rough methods of child raising are looked down on, and are censored in favor of “human rights”. Pain imposed on a child is known as an abusive act. Both the teacher and parent can be prosecuted in a criminal court for “child abuse”. Our society has come to a stage of development where simply by saying the magic words “rompuy-skelter-bilderberger”, a humanoid, defined by its ability to wiggle like a worm, is let create a creature with ‘legal’ rights to rule over and rape Gaia, the Earth Goddess—whether by destroying forests or bees gathering honey from chemically treated rape fields http://www.smallfootprintfamily.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/dreamstime_10490287.jpg producing tractor fuel.  

It ought not be surprising that post-modern societies, alienated from nature and reality, are societies oriented by tan-trum, a failure to see reality for what it is. This same state may cause young people, young girls especially, to “cut” themselves, means by which teenage girls try to persuade themselves that they are ‘real’, rather than balloons without a string attached. A ‘tan-trum’ is also the consequence of a desire to possess, and manifests itself when desire butts up against parental denial. The simplest example of a tan-trum is that of a child desiring a piece of candy, or money to buy candy, not getting it, throws a tan-trum in the belief that it will cause him-her to get either money or candy. A tan-trum is a primitive form of prayer in an ‘advanced society’.

When the tan-trum of a child infects an adult community, it results in aggressive behavior by a large group of grown people. Such an event can happen when urban people on a food dole discover that government has no food reserves and their streets and parking garages have not yet been converted to vegetable gardens.

If a child stomps his-her feet, rolls on the ground, and screams, an adult society caught up in a similar tan-trum will exhibit behavior that is  immanently violent. First, an immature adult will try to steal; second, the stealing may become more sophisticated through elaborate excuses why stealing is justified (usually through the creation of self-serving laws by a government clique). Moreover, stealing may be n^thed and become an act of war, the justness of which no member of a self-enclosed society will deny unless he-she has had a divine revelation that disputes the ruling class and entertains a death wish.

The manufacture of excuses in our time is at a level of sophistication that makes-believe that Western society neither steals nor makes war. Such a belief is impressed on the mind through the use of proxies dressed in swim suits made of cloth of day-glow colors. The effrontery to the eye makes the client think of sex at the same time as the bather puts one off from having sex there and then through the implicit promise being as excessive and perhaps dangerous. Still, one leaves the ‘hamburger joint’ (where meat is served with ‘relish’) believing one has got what one came to get, and will get the got as a porn movie when back home watching television from one’s bed.

Of course, product consumption is extended also to a consumption of simplistic ideas, such as, for example, “democracy is the ideal form of government” and “clean shit (though not pollution) is a product of developed nations”.

If we are allowed to think of it, democracy is most easily controlled by consumer ideology managed by a parliamentary democracy, which translates into a totalitarian democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_democracy without the public suspecting that is so. While members of a parliament may be ‘democratically’ elected, once they are elected, they own no allegiance to the electorate, but to the parliament, the body they have been elected to. This 'body' is ‘written’ and ‘legally’ created through lawful democratic elections. In our times, criticism of parliamentary democracy seldom reaches the ear of the public, because the media supports the taxes imposed on the public by the ‘professional management’ of parliamentarian politicians.

The media is complicit in the lie of parliamentary democracy. Though it takes no Einstein to figure this out, the media calls parliament a 'democracy', because, while technically true (a parliament is a ‘democracy’ unto itself), the media also makes a living off the lie. This is why most editors know that if there were to be a revolution, they would be shot along with the politicians. This is one of the reasons why print media editors like to see the internet censored or otherwise restricted.

Short of a natural catastrophe, it is virtually impossible to exit a parliamentary society and reinstate a radically different government system, such as, for example, a monarchy. The reason is that “the law” is written in such a way that a corporation, too, is presumed to function as ‘democratic’ management http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation. This makes the corporation not only an immensely wealthy individual, but also a powerful and ‘wonderful’ individual. If an individual ever becomes wealthy enough to be the equal of a corporation (this sometimes happens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws21GbIaNsE ), his-her interests by then are more like the interests of a corporation than the average citizen and the magic word “rompuy-skelter-bilderberger” is no longer a strange mantra for such an oligarch.

This political situation (a disastrous one for democracy) forces the unhappy electorate to ask: When and how did the idea of democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_democracy emerge as one among the most desirable of political systems?

The simplistic answer contains the word, Athens. As if to assure us that this is no lie, we are shown a photograph of the Acropolis—refurbished and scoured clean so as to be attractive to tourists, people who consume distance as if were the tastiest of tapeworms. Even if the picture of Athens is a photograph, the viewer will note that the Acropolis stands for an urban environment. Like it or not, it stands on a hill in the middle of a spatial desert.

The question arises: What was the political environment like before fictional urban ‘democracy’ came to dominate our social space? Is it possible that ‘Athens’ as a democracy in a conceit? Is it possible that ‘democracy’ was truer to itself in an environment of the field, or perhaps the wood?

To those who are worried about the direction the question is taking, the comforting reassurance states that ‘Democracy’ did not arise in a rural or farming environment, because it is the rural environment that lends itself to the exploitation of tax collectors working for princes and boyars.

At the same time, it is the peasant who is the author of most rebellions (if not revolutions) against the landlords. [Parenthetically, the precursor of the modern electric chair is the “heated iron chair” which served (1514) to punish the Hungarian peasant rebel Georgy Dozsa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_revolt_in_late-medieval_Europe (see link and note 3rd illustration from the top)].

Why and how did “peasant” become a reviled word? Stalin, the extreme Christian* (peasant) secularist, went so far as to invert reality and called peasants “capitalists” (kulaks), then proceeded to slaughter these creatures (enslaved to tax collectors and/or boyars) by the millions. Can it be that what we have here is a tragic misunderstanding of the forces that created the peasantry? Stalin, a Georgian brainwashed by Western ideas, was no intellectual and had no clue.

The peasant [a pa-gan or pa-j(y)an, originally meant to be a humiliating word, has been replaced since the 17^th century by the written name “farmer” http://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=farmer] . The pa-yan is the Sphinx's riddle that goes unanswered in modern politics. However, an intelligent guess is that a pa-yan was, originally, a garden keeper in the wood, who was later forced (and tricked) into growing grain and was, thuly, habituated to slave labor. It is the pa-yan or peasant who is that “…rough beast [that] slouches toward [the wood of] Bethlehemto be born (again).”

If only climate change and earthquakes could be directed to destroy just enough of the urban environment to make such destruction constructive (Both Tokyo and San Francisco are candidates). Perhaps survival would then come to mean a renewal of subsistence economy. But such survival would dwarf the catastrophe that engulfed the Ukraine under the Bolsheviks and Stalin. If the Christians (peasants) and their horses died in countryside ditches, the skeletons of the urban dwellers will line the hallways of sky rise apartments and it will be decades before someone throws the jacketed bones out a window.

Such as are able to survive are likely to return to the renascent wood, where borders along vegetable gardens will display the skulls of one’s not so fortunate urban cousins. Somewhat ironically, the skulls are likely to ring to the famous inscription at Oxford, re “Et in Arcadia ego” (even in Arcadia, I, death, am present). In this instance the ‘Arcadia’ the skulls refer to is not found in ancient woodland pasture http://www.goroadachi.com/etemenanki/eg5-arcadia-Guercino.jpg, now long turned into a desert, but is found among the rubble of the Financial Bethlehems of our times http://www.stillad.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/ftcityscape.jpg .

* krepostnoi krestyanin (крепостной крестьянин), does indeed translate into a ‘serf’ to a baron or boyar’. However ‘krestyanin’ without the prefix translates as peasant, a farmer without negative connotations attached. Of course, one may consider whether ‘krestyanin’ may then mean a forest pastoralist transiting (krest or crossing over) to a life as a peasant.