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identify the taboo or totem concepts or facts around which “the monitoring system” never “takes an holiday”:“ancient events continually held up for emulation” based on the schizophrenic “need to make the experience of the past into the present”.

Popular Yahoo France suggests what the “monitoring system” is on the lookout for:

Tout commentaire contraire à la réglementation en vigueur (et notamment tout commentaire à caractère raciste, antisémite ou diffamatoire) pourra donner lieu à la suppression de votre compte Yahoo!

Le cas échéant, certains commentaires que vous postez pourront également donner lieu à des poursuites judiciaires à votre encontre.

(Every comment going against the rules (especially racist, antisemitic or libelous comments) may lead to the termination of your Yahoo account. Whenever applicable, some comments of yours may trigger legal action against you).

If you are accused of hate speech under the [Canadian] Criminal Code, you are presumed innocent. Not so under Section 13, where the onus is on you to prove your words hurt no feelings. While the truth and "fair comment" are defences in a criminal hate-speech trial - and the Crown needs to prove intent and show how your words actually led to discrimination - none of that is true at a human rights hearing. Nor do you have a right to face your accuser or cross-examine his or her testimony. What's more, whether or not your words or website expose an individual or group to discrimination is determined by what that individual or group feels has happened to them. There is no definition of hate and no objective standard of harm. Also, at human rights hearings, rules of evidence are much, much looser than they are in courts. Hearsay evidence, for instance, is often admitted. -...-The proof of just how stacked the tribunal process has been comes from the CHRC's conviction rate: From the time Section 13 was added to the human rights act in 1977 until it began to attract the ire of Storseth (and others, such as Sun News' Ezra Levant) in 2009, no person charged under Section 13 had ever been acquitted. In other words, the CHRC had a 100% conviction rate on hate-speech 901

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complaints. (Gunter 2012: no page).

The magic show of the justice system might have failed to detect billionaire financial frauds, mafioso political rackets, and gross medical incompetence, yet in Italy in January 2014, a man risks being sentenced for libel: he pressed the button “like” on a Facebook 881 comment someone else deemed offensive in a squabble between ordinary nobodies. CBS New York reports882 about a man threatened with a defamation lawsuit after he allotted a store a negative review online: forces occultes at work or simple synchronicity? Once again, pencil-necked sweat-hogs and their rampant schizophrenia are handy crowbars the Belle Epoque nation-State Moloch uses to gain unsurpassed leverage.

There may also be disturbances that may -or may not- be conducive to the party line. A conducive disturbance consists in jokes -more or less crude- that lampoon or celebrate the indignities and/or slaughter this, that or another pariah group was historically subjected to. In spite of their insensitivity and crudeness, those jokes do restate the facts as commonly perceived (=indeed they were ultimately killed, and/or brutalized).

A counterproductive disturbance was the crass online parading -for example- of pictures of missiles, bombs and suchlike – of which a mind-boggling quantity had been “delivered” according to some press- with (often obscene) taunts 881 ANSA, 30 January 2014.

882 March 21, 2014.

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directed mostly at Muslims in general (on the occasion of the attack on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya...). It in fact ran against the party line about there being no -or very few- civilian victims (=good guys don't do those things=would we good people ever support folks doing stuff like that?):

As the lethality of our weapons has increased, the widespread use of them has decreased. Indiscriminate carpet bombing was the rule during the latter days of World War II and the Vietnam War, but now “smart bombs” target specific targets and are designed to minimize “collateral damage.” Yes, innocent people (i.e., non-combatants) are still killed in wars, but in proportionally fewer numbers than ever before. (MacNeill 2011:110).

As ultimate test of loyalty, religions may have improbable miracles presented to the believer, such as prodigious healing from terminal sickness or alterations in the Sun's course: the sacrifice of Isaac ( Genesis 22:2) as proof of ultimate loyalty recurs circularly.

Mormon founder Smith allegedly tested his followers by asking their wives as his plural wives. In one instance -possibly that of early Mormon Apostle Kimball-, Smith finally contented himself with Kimball's 14-year old daughter, upon whose family he promised to bestow eternal salvation.

The same hogwash is as old as man: tribulations and tests as prerequisite for future reward:

There are a lot of wonderful stories about the troubadours.

There's an entire volume from the twelfth century on the lives of 903

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the troubadours and their wild absurdities to win the woman's regard. One troubadour falls in love with a woman whose name means wolf. He clothes himself in a wolf skin and pretends, as a wolf, to attack a flock of sheep. Of course the sheep dogs pounce on him and tear him to pieces and he's in pretty bad shape, so he's taken into the woman's castle to be healed-by her and her husband. Another buys himself the robe of a leper and cuts off two of his fingers and then sits among the lepers. The lady comes out of her castle and says, "Well, my God, there's Gerard." So he wins her regard that way. (Campbell 1989: A Noble Heart).

Of course, Unionist General Sherman, CEKA-NKVD, GESTAPO and Khmer Rouge thugs were competing to see who would go farther in the service of what -to each of them- was the best of all causes, worthy of unsurpassed zeal:”This is the general outline for an answer to why pollutions are often used in renewal rites.”883.

Aurobindo traces this obsession with ritual sacrifice down to Hindu Vedas at the dawn of civilization:”All these associations are lost to us; our minds are obsessed by ideas of a ritual sacrifice and a material cord. We imagine perhaps the son of Atri bound as a victim in an ancient barbaric sacrifice, crying to the god of Fire for a physical deliverance!”884.

In one match in 1990, Hulk Hogan supposedly injured one knee badly; everybody could see him in agony telling the referee how “his knee was gone”, at which point commentators spoon-fed the public this story of career-wrecking knee injuries and so forth. Yet Hogan persevered and -at some point, oblivious or just annoyed- dropped the act of limping and agonizing. As he resumed using his leg 883 Douglas 1966:164.

884 MAISI003 no date: lecture note 1:1.

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commentators lectured about torn tendons and ligaments magically

snapping back into full recovery. Civil powers may present dubious explanations held up as fact:

in 1760, as we are told, Uriel Freudenberger was condemned by the canton of Uri to be burnt alive, for publishing his opinion that the legend of Tell had a Danish origin (Fiske 1882:4).

When professional wrestler Tully Blanchard suddenly disappeared, manager Bobby Heenan replaced him (in the tag-team The Brain Busters with Arn Anderson). Commentator Jesse Ventura cooked this story up about personally witnessing tensions within Heenan's stable as the reason for Blanchard's departure.

In reality, Blanchard had assertedly failed a test under the however lax drugscreening provisions. Naturally, public talks about drugs and steroids during a wrestling broadcast would be the equivalent of emphasizing corruption, skyrocketing deficits, financial meltdown, sexual or embezzlement scandals in politics.

On one hand, people are supposed to enumerate the virtues of the great sport that is wrestling, and on the other the unparalleled advantages of inclusive massdemocracy.

Of course, whatever truly happened to an obscure wrestler in the 1980s is of no consequence; other events are of a much bigger consequence, yet follow the same warped logic. If the above seems a bit excessive, it is enough to ponder why the name 'Jesus' was added to (certain transcriptions of ) a song sung in Swahili

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serving as soundtrack for a...video-game, although it was not originally present?

Some suggest that's how a certain Chrestos 885 mentioned in ancient texts became Christos and thus the 'proof' myth had -indeed- become fact.

In 1999, the Globe and Mail ran an article subtitled ”Vancouver -- A judge of the British Columbia Court of Appeal says society's attitudes toward child pornography may prove as fleeting as views in an earlier age on homosexuality. ” 886.

In 2013, newspapers announce the American Psychiatric Association pledged to amend its famous manual indexing mental illnesses: qualifying pedophilia as “sexual orientation” was an “erroneous phrase”.

The possible member of a pariah group allegedly wrote -according to an email sent to a newsgroup in 2008887-:

My fantasy at the moment is to form a [insert name of pariah group here] army, then to stage a demonstration for [the pariah group] in the middle of some big city. All those [people who hate the pariah group] bastards who come out to throw rocks at us and shoot us, and all the police who come to break us up etc. will then be legitimate targets for all of the [pariah group liberation army] snipers that are staged around the area. That way, you don't kill innocent people, -...-.

And this will only be legitimate because there is NO OTHER WAY. [members of the pariah group] do not WANT to be violent. But what other option is there. We are still RIGHT. Just because all other options for [our] liberation have been exhausted, does not mean we have stopped being RIGHT. We must continue to do something!...

885 According to different authors, a row of historical or pseudo-historical characters are argued to be the real-life incarnation of Jesus.

886 Matas 1999:no page.

887 The message's source and credibility could not be verified, but chunks of the text copied here are still available online to this day. The present writer considers it mere internet lore.

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Now back to reality. If the police came knocking on my door, I would take a few of them down with me. I think I've said this before.

The above sounds like a great piece from war resistance, the 1960s -when most outcast groups were proudly marching for their rights-, or some later masterpiece on apartheid888; yet, it hypothetically comes from a person the anonymous message denounced as being a...pedophile. Of course, great caution is advised when handling this kind of news, yet the only aspect the present writer is interested in is: it sounds like 'the real thing'; there are definitely those 'magic spots' in the human mind that always grant certain results.

Avalanches of emotion are sliding through the Devlin-Hart-Dworkin debate over moral legislation and homosexuality, or throughout the 'enlightened' international appeals to clemency towards people like say Anatoly Onoprienko, Ukrainian serial killer who had murdered 52 people, sentenced to death in 1999 but still alive and well to this day. His deeds made it to television series - and other mainstream media- introspecting upon the alleged childhood deprivations/abuse Onoprienko suffered:

Unfortunately, programs of this sort merely provide the psychopath with better ways of manipulating, deceiving, and using people. As one psychopath put it, "These programs are like a finishing school .

888 A doctrine stemming from Afrikaner Christianity tinged with XIX century Dutch Calvinism. Biblical bases for such doctrine were Leviticus 11:45 (holy translated as set apart in some translations):�I am the LORD, who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy. �. Deuteronomy 10:8 (At that time the LORD set apart the tribe of Levi to carry the ark of the covenant of the LORD, to stand before the LORD to minister and to pronounce blessings in his name, as they still do today. ) and so forth.

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They teach you how to put the squeeze on people. " They are also a rich source of facile excuses for the psychopath's behavior: "I was an abused child," or, "I never learned to get in touch with my feelings. " After-the-fact insights of this sort explain very little, but they sound good to those primed to hear them . I am constantly amazed at how willing some professionals are to take such statements at face value. (Hare 1993:199).

Cast in front of the sweet child (puppy and so forth) who suffered so much, how could the public not dive in a prompt reconciliation ritual to comfort the frail, diminutive creature who shivers in angst fearing judgment? What matters is the public -jurors etc- is required to show 'the kind of person' they are according to emotional truth as current society spells it.

Nobody really cares -or has a way to know- whether once upon a time there really was such a child, puppy or other sentimental scarecrow, or whether the entire story is the masterpiece of pen-jockeys for hire having watched too many cable TV dramas:

There's nothing here to engage the other person's imagination.

Instead of talking in black and white, learn to talk in color. Involve as many senses as you can in your conversation. Describe what things look like, what they sound like, how they make you feel and, if appropriate, what they smell and taste like (Boothman 2000:106).

Vantaggiato, who planted a bomb near an high school at Brindisi (Italy) causing huge damages, and leaving one student dead, was caught off-the-record detailing his strategy to plead insanity:�Devo arrivare al processo mezzo vivo e mezzo morto, voglio diventare come quelli dei lager, voglio uscire di qui...

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Lentamente mi debbo mettere in una condizione estrema ” 889 ( I shall appear at the trial on the brink of death, like those people from the concentration camps. I want out. I shall strive to look like a wreck):”But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. ” ( Matthew 5:39);”Let them turn the other cheek to those who strike them and accept the insults of their enemies. ”(Lamentations 3:30); “Repay not angry men in kind and win a battle hard to win” (Gautama Buddha, S I 162).

Italian politicians in Berlusconi's retinue Dell'Utri and Galan are under judicial investigation for various wrongdoings: they instantly fall severely ill, with huge medical dossiers to match. Galan is arrested in a wheelchair; Dell'Utri is apprehended in a Lebanese hospital...

In both cases, official medical reports at first allegedly state that arrest and imprisonment might prove hazardous. As the press hastens to cover the issue, and the politicized nature of the same surfaces, medical reports suddenly take a turn for the better. Galan and Dell'Utri can be safely arrested after all: no writer of mafioso novels could do any better. Once in the maws of the justice system, Galan has to judicially acknowledge his wrongdoings; friends lament his poor condition, and hint he might commit suicide.

Marine Corps Times writes on July 23, 2014:”Sen. John Walsh of 889 Bomba A Scuola...2013:no page.

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Montana said Wednesday his failure to attribute conclusions and verbatim passages lifted from other scholars’ work in his thesis to earn a master’s degree from the U.S. Army War College was an unintentional mistake caused in part by post-traumatic stress disorder. ”.

Guilty of shooting his girlfriend dead “The Paralympian [Oscar Pistorius] waits in the dock,with a sick bucket by his side in case he is hit by the bouts of vomiting and retching that he suffered during the trial”. Pistorius' social worker ”Describing herself as an expert in trauma counselling, she said Pistorius persistently broke down during initial counselling sessions after shooting Miss Steenkamp last year. 'Some of the sessions were just him weeping and crying and me holding him,' said Dr Hartzenberg. 'I can confirm his remorse and pain to be genuine. We are left with a broken man who has lost everything. ”: so many gages of common humanity.

Teleplay writers for cable TV couldn't devise a better acted story-line:“acquittal of Pistorius on the murder charge sparked anger and controversy.” 890. AGI891 confirms Pistorius might be transferred soon to house arrest after only 10 months in jail.

Tommaso Campanella, the Dominican friar, utopian thinker and Italian revolutionist tried in 1599 to establish an utopian Republic in Calabria based upon millenarian expectations. He was finally arrested, and tried under torture. Because he was an habitual offender in such matters, he simulated insanity in order to get a 890 Dont' Send...2014:no page.

891 Italian News agency, June 8, 2015.

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sentence to prison instead of a death sentence: he talked nonsense, shivered, and defecated all over himself during interrogation.

Are the countless Onoprienko, Campanella, Pistorius, Galan, Walsh, Vantaggiato and their lawyers particularly inventive? Or aren't they rather commodiously feeding the masses a salad bar of emotional truth lifted from last week's cable TV movies, or last month's tabloids? “There is pity for the human sufferer – who is actually a counterpart, in this context, of oneself. �.

I realize there is an excellent reason for the sociopathic fondness for pity. As obvious as the nose on one's face, and just as difficult to see without the help of a mirror, the explanation is that good people will let pathetic individuals get by with murder, so to speak, and therefore any sociopath wishing to continue with his game, whatever it happens to be, should play repeatedly for none other than pity. -...- And just as you or I, with practice, might become fluent in another language, so an intelligent sociopath may become convincingly fluent in "conversational emotion." -...- Any person who can observe human actions even superficially, or who can read novels and watch old movies, can learn to act romantic or interested or softhearted.(Stout 2005:108,128).

In these modern multimedia tragedies, some empathetic third party (editor, friend, psychologist, lawyer...) takes up the ancient dramatic chorus' part.

The horde shall thus know what's cooking behind the main character's attitude, or the usual doom and gloom chicanery. Pen-jockeys for hire in the press, and politicking mountebanks, may exploit the masquerade to their commodious advantage as the common man chokes, surrenders his wallet, or shakes fists.

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Such third party (lawyer, editor, psychologist...) also plays the part of the narrator in a novel or movie, or of thundering off-stage voices present in many mystical visions such as Dante's or St. Hildegard's. Popular culture couldn't lag far behind, so various shows have the physical host in a dialogue with an off-stage voice, such as it is the case with Spanish TV travel show Planeta Finito (2006-7).

Charlie's Angels (1976-81) sees a group of alluring female sleuths taking orders from a mysterious patriarch interacting only through a speaker-phone. 1992 movie Kuffs sees the C. Slater character addressing viewers on the other side of the screen as he talks to the camera:

narrating is never innocent, and the narrative that frames another allows the writer to dramatize the results of the telling. -...- there are what Tzvetan Todorov has baptized “narrative men” (hommesrécits ) (Brooks 1994:75-8).

In Jewish biblical exegesis, a heavenly voice saves Tamar and her children from death as she had slept with her father-in-law Judah:”Both of you are innocent. From before the lord is the decree”. A celestial voice also confirms Solomon's wisdom as he awarded the contended child to one of the quarreling women.

A professional storyteller by trade, Harvey comments upon persuasive strategies in a court of law:

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justifiable. -...- your audience doesn't just believe your story because you tell them the facts, -...-[but] because you make that progression of facts and events understandable, and emotionally true for your audience: this is what the emotional art does for your story (Harvey 2013: Emotional Arc And Empathy, emphasis added).

Heath and his coauthors contend that this process of “emotional selection” helps to explain the success of some rumors and the failure of others. Consider rumors involving satanic ritual child abuse, deviant sexual behavior, road rage, and flesh-eating bacteria. In all of these cases, emotions are likely to be triggered in a way that will increase the success of propagators. In the context of personal attacks, the parallels are evident. When rumors produce strong emotions— disgust, anger, outrage—people are far more likely to spread them.

One conclusion, specifically drawn by Heath and his coauthors, is that the marketplace of ideas may well fail; the rumors that survive emotional selection “may not always be those that are most truthful.”

(Sunstein 2014:51, emphasis added).

Truth, consistency, verisimilitude and even statistical probability are not necessary ingredients when a story's success with the public is to be measured:

The knowledge of what is good and what is bad for man is a large part of wisdom. In identifying press we have found it convenient to distinguish between 1, the alpha press, which is the press that actually exists, as far as scientific inquiry can determine it ; and 2, the beta press, which is the subject's own interpretation of the phenomena that he perceives. An object may, in truth, be very well disposed towards the subject press of Affiliation ( alpha press ) but the subject may misinterpret the object's conduct and believe that the object is trying to depreciate him press of Aggression : Belittlement ( beta press ) .

When there is wide divergence between the alpha and beta press we speak of delusion. (Murray 1938:122).

The neurotic fixations of the 1960s, a direct metamorphosis of war propaganda, gradually replace(d) religiosity as the universal and absolute yardstick to judge present, future and past events:”If they accurately reflect the virtues of

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Christ, then the exempla are free to be augmented to appeal to a specific audience.”892.

That's as old as man: typological reading, whereby Old Testament's salient facts were invariably interpreted as anticipating, announcing or covertly commenting upon New Testament facts. Alternatively, the same method can be applied to follow the blueprint that 'all roads lead to Hitler' (in history); or that any social, religious or political stance soever presents fiery, cogent and unavoidable links to WWII, the fixations of the 1960s and suchlike: that's typological reading.

For example, crime893 (or the more or less fatal accidents involving wild animals in another context) is the 'just payback' 894

to '(White) racism' and

'inequalities (stemming from 'White rule')', thus considering public remedial measures (enclosures, police intervention etc ) as based on 'Lynchian fantasies' “where the social imaginary discharges its fantasies.”895.

Doesn't this look

suspiciously like karma theories (=good and bad fortune one reaps now precisely mirror good and bad deeds one accomplished in a more or less remote past)?

Weren't CEKA-NKVD and GESTAPO thugs on a retributive mission?

After all, GESTAPO's ideologies claimed they were called to exact retribution upon anti-nationals,

Chandala

and internationalist Judaeo-masons. Bolsheviks

892 Hunt 2001:43.

893 Davis: Pile, Brooks&Mooney 1999:142ss 894 Davis, ibid.:141. Zukin, ibid.:44 895 Davis, ibid.:141.

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prosecuted and disposed of religionists, bourgeois, capitalists, hoarders, middlemen, nobility etc. Both CEKA-NKVD and GESTAPO wanted to vindicate the purported abuses and injustices blacklisted groups had assertedly committed against whichever constituency the dominant regime lionized.

Hegel's XIX century master-and-slave dialectic (the lackey serving the marquis under the Ancien Regime, for example) gets clouded in a devotional mist that forsakes class and regime ideology (Zhou as conquering autocrats; might makes right; Zhou triumph brought about by god-forsaken tyrants who had displeased the gods with displays of impiety) in the name of purported hijacked religious feelings (the mandate of heaven the conquering Zhou dynasty committed itself to) the newly established Zhou dynasty needed (=they couldn't sustain civil war and garrison State indefinitely).

The same jumble of vitalism, providential blueprints of history and transcendentalism the Chinese duke of Zhou invoked (about 1045 BCE) recurs in Mussolini, too, who in 1939 declared:�agli altri [popoli] ridotti a un mucchio miserabile di vecchiardi destinati a piegarsi sotto la sferza di un giovane padrone “ (once other nations will be reduced to a miserable cohort of old geezers, they shall bow under a young master's whip).

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boast gold mines or aircraft carriers as numerous as the stars in heaven. Italian Fascism in truth flirted with speed and technology: its hymn was in fact Giovinezza (Youth).

Murderous animals are sedated and brought unscathed to secluded parks; common criminals of this, that or another 'sensitive' group slip through the net. On the other hand, wasn't the incineration of civilian enemy cities the most just of all paybacks? Isn't the hunt after 'black' terrorists a fashionable pastime? In spite of the string of multi-billionaire programs all over the western world to propel social alchemy, charity/solidarity (the right and left-wing designation of the same) etc, unfazed critics can still argue �Refusing to -...- [remedy] underlying social conditions, we are forced instead to make increasing private investments in physical security �896.

It is quite an irony indeed that the NSDAP regime espoused the same thesis: unreasonable hardships inflicted upon the German people with the unjust peace after WWI justified a violent reaction against internationalist Judaeo-masons, demo-plutocrats and chandala. One example suffices to judge such hardships: victors in WWI left the war blockade in place for eight months after an already exhausted Germany surrendered in order to pressure the newly established regime into acquiescing to exorbitant demands.

896 Davis, ibid.:141.

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The problem here is that the more equalized the environment becomes, the more the burden shifts onto genetics as key to explain any issue at hand 897, which is what makes progressives and their lot groan in distress. Today's western providence States afford even the most dejected liminal group a series of infrastructures, opportunities and subsidies that were undreamt of among the middle classes just a few decades ago, yet without a corresponding decrease in dysfunctional or antisocial tendencies among the same groups:

The data showing the gap between blacks and whites for both math and reading scores is troubling because of the large size of the gap and because the gap appears to be constant with no appreciable improvement over time. There are occasional reports that the gap is closing, but the overall data doesn’t really show much if any narrowing of the black-white gap. There is virtually no disagreement about the existence of this gap; it is recognized as one of the most important problems in education. -...-Psychometric tests of intelligence consistently show average differences among racial and ethnic groups. On average, Asians score higher than whites, whites score higher than Hispanics, and Hispanics score higher than blacks. The average black-white difference is about 15 points—about one standard deviation on the normal curve, essentially the same difference as the SAT gap. -...-However, it is important to remember that this is an average difference. It does not mean that all whites are smarter than all blacks. (Haier 2013:83-4).

Lefties and progressives, of course, claim that equalization has not been implemented enough (like Chi, Num, Mana or god's grace); that the nanny State Moloch is far from being funded, thus equipped and present enough, in spite of slowly but steadily raising taxation rates: readers be the judge.

897 Hinshaw 2010:Myths And Realities Of Heritability.

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There is nothing new: above readers see just the militant, progressive version of wanting god to hold each man individually responsible for the entire world, as St. John Chrysostom did; as Mahayana Buddhism does with the theory of

Bodhicitta (= roughly: personality of an enlightened being), whereby Bodhisattvas spontaneously feel the suffering of all sentient beings and thus desire to help 898; as Tibetan Buddhism does with the idea “universal caring” in the hands of “spiritual warriors”; of karma theories in Marxist sauce; or of being scolded publicly in order for one to crawl in front of “popular morality”, “explanations or interpretations usually put forth”, “prevailing cultural trends”, “only an old Phoenician tale of what has often occurred before now in other places”, “free-floating folk beliefs”,“the audience’s pre-established set of convictions”, mos and suchlike.

Mahayana Pure Land Buddhism advises that we ought to mind our actions because we are never truly alone even in the strictest privacy: legions of Bodhisattvas and supernatural beings surround us at all times, being thus privy to the most secret details.

Brown899 dispenses with all-seeing and omnipresent father-god figures: he repackages the very same concept as “the newspaper test” he credits to billionaire Warren Buffett. In order to resist authority and peer pressure to violate ethical

898 Tibetan Buddhist master Lama Zopa Rinpoche puts it this way:”I, myself alone, am responsible for bringing happiness to all sentient beings and freeing them from all suffering and its cause. I am personally responsible for the happiness of each and every sentient being “.

899 2013: How Context Shapes Influence.

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norms, how would we feel if a newspaper ran a front-page story detailing our (mis)deeds? The present writer suggests all examples are alike: they just swap some authority figures with others in line with one's socio-political penchants.

Of course, when the odd placement

of you-know-who in certain

statistics is considered, society, ...ists, religion or some other external cause is exclusively to blame. When odd placements in other statistics are considered, genetic potential, sense of rhythm, dedication and a host of internal causes are invoked.

Studies documented students' attitude towards the performances of their local university's sport teams: “we won”, but “they lost”. If “the thing” (whatever that happens to be) reflects positively upon one, then one worked hard for it showing determination and patience. If “the thing” reflects negatively upon one, society (parents, rage, the clergy, ...ists...) made one do it etc.

The strategy can go under a variety of labels such as fordism, socialdemocracy, welfare State, redistributive democracy and others. Enraptured tenors impassion the horde in fusion about brooking less and less inequality; about the threat this, that or the other awful government pose (Thatcher, Reagan, Berlusconi...) with blasphemous (purported) tax-cutting plans.

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The proof -once again- is in the pudding. OECD's revenue statistics 900, comparative tables, show that total tax revenue as percentage of GDP rose from 25,5% to 42,9% (Italy, 1965/2011); from 34,2 to 44,2 (France, 1965/2011); from 25,5% to 33,8% (OECD as total, 1965/2010). The same trend registers in various tax categories, such taxes on profits (tax revenue as percentage of GDP), from 2,3% to 3% (OECD as total, 1965/2010); or corporate (tax revenue as percentage of GDP) from 2,2% to 2,9% (OECD as total, 1965/2010).

If oceans haven't turned to lemonade, mountains aren't made of polenta, and people aren't walking on streets paved with gold as of yet, it is not because taxes haven't slowly but steadily increased, but because a significant percentage of it has been diverted (wasted?) into this, that or another volatile, fancy and grandiose scheme meant to foster nepotism, governmentalization, foreign policy adventurism, absenteeism, vote-buying, political cliques and unproductive niches living

on

(in)direct State subsidies just as it was the case with the USSR, whose citizens experienced endless penury and shortages in spite of the country's immense industrial and natural potential.

An example suffices: U.N. FAO spends only about 50% of its 929.8 million budget (2008-9) on actual help to the poor and the needy. The rest goes into bureaucracy, studies, information analysis, and princely wages901.

900Revenue...2013: no page.

901 Redazione 2009:no page.

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Giornale Di Arona902 reports grievances Borgomanero's (Italy) city council made public. In spite of being a speed-trap breeding ground, the city of Borgomanero remains badly strapped for cash. Powerless administrators call the waste management agency on the carpet in matters of accountability. Waste management fees have been skyrocketing in the last decades in spite of separate collection and so forth; a new increase (between 200 and 600%) is due soon in the province of Novara (Italy).

In spite of cashing millions from the administrations it serves, the agency in charge of managing waste keeps its accounting private: only “vague answers� are offered to justify how funds are managed. Last, no tax increase could satisfy the obtuse dictates and foolish wish-lists of any of the absurd utopias people rave about, much as no living society could even approximate to the godly equality, lordly oversupply and swashbuckling feats of folklore and other myths.

The horde in fusion rallying as one behind Belle Epoque nation States really is unstoppable. Oceans shall soon turn to lemonade, indeed, if only the meek masses acquiesce to this 'modest' tax increase, and that 'well-intended' privacy breach.

Mountains may not be made of polenta as of yet, however the nanny State is a new demiurge that shall part the seas to protect the city of Venice (Italy) 902 July 26, 2013:52.

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from treacherous tides thanks to a sci-fi system of automated dams. The glorious nation of Italy shall mobilize the endless resources of its thousand provinces spanning from the Alps to the African plaque to finalize the project.

In July 2013 a row of policy makers are detained following an investigation of the project MOSE, whose works are in never ending progress since 1981. It appears that a rogue web was in place to divide the hefty spoils among politicians, administrators of a slew of contracting agencies and mafiosi; a literally endless stream of public money was diverted to silence an equally endless list of conspiring parties.

Another inflow of public money (euro 182 million) for a tram line at Bologna (Italy)903. A tram line that has never been in operation, yet recurrently refinanced over the last 10 years. 182 million: quite a pie to divide among the usual suspects, while artificial kin members lull themselves with fantasies of employment booms, ecological healing, and upcoming mountains of polenta.

The thousand provinces of the proud Italian fatherland never stop rushing to the rescue of the one that bleeds. Prefabricated settlements put in place to house people in the aftermath of the 2009 Emilia earthquake not only costed 158% more than market value according to an EU dossier, but -according to photographic evidence- started falling apart and rotting away as soon as they were 903 ANSA, 18 March 2013.

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completed while politicians celebrated mystical oneness, and congratulated themselves on air over the best of intentions.

Reuters (September 16, 2013) announces the arrest of M.R. Lorenzetti, politician of Partito Democratico (former Communist party), former president of

Regione Umbria and of Italferr, one of the many companies belonging to the State railroad company in charge of developing the epochal TAV plan (high-speed railroad lines). She's accused of corruption and criminal activities. This is what most often goes on behind the noble facade of providence States promising lemonade oceans and mountains made of polenta while they boost employment and consumerism.

Social dynamics remain for some the playground of fatalistic 'invisible hands' and inscrutable quantum entanglement seen through pathetic imagery, whereas others take a more blunt approach. In 2001 “Dr. Stephen Steinlight [who] was for more than five years Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee.” wrote (from the influential and mainstream Center For Immigration Studies website ):

Let’s throw out a few and see how many sleepers we can awaken. The big one for starters: is the emerging new multicultural American nation good for the Jews? Will a country in which enormous demographic and cultural change, fueled by unceasing large-scale non-European immigration, remain one in which Jewish life will continue to flourish as nowhere else in the history of the Diaspora? In an America in which people of color form the plurality, as has already 923

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happened in California, most with little or no historical experience with or knowledge of Jews, will Jewish sensitivities continue to enjoy extraordinarily high levels of deference and will Jewish interests continue to receive special protection? -...- Does it matter that the politics of ethnic succession — colorblind, I recognize — has already resulted in the loss of key Jewish legislators (the brilliant Stephen Solarz of Brooklyn was one of the first of these) and that once Jewish “safe seats” in Congress now are held by Latino representatives?

-...-Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly -...-. For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Jewish community is thus in a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas. -...-.Finally, I confess that I suspect that MTV, for better of for worse, will prove more powerful with young Muslim immigrants than the mullahs, and that the remarkable material and cultural attractiveness of American life will cause the new immigrants to follow (mostly) in the footsteps of their predecessors. (2001:1-15).

Steady immigration from Mexico, Latin America and Asia as well as higher rates of births among Latinos are shifting the United States' demographic makeup, making the nation increasingly non-white. The trend has been apparent in censuses from 1980 through 2010, which show a declining share of non-Hispanic whites, as well as in the Census Bureau’s projections for the period 2015 to 2060. ( “Tipping Point” 2013: no page).

While the only mention of pedophilia may trigger another of those inescapable reactions, it is worth mentioning that the once mainstream attitudes towards this, that or the other fringe/outcast minority may nowadays constitute criminal offense in several jurisdictions. Many may be familiar with the debate related to the (successful) removal of homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses; many may also be aware that some proposed to replace it with homophobia.

As well, other fringe groups replay the same drama:”there are no 924

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differences, and diversity is part of life”; it is difficult to guess whether such terrific gnostic punchlines come from a papyrus carbon-dated 3.000 BCE, or a chewing-gum wrapper's fortune. On such bases, people question assumptions, and imperiously demand that -to name one- the spreading HIV/AIDS epidemic be recast as “immunological diversity”.

Black and white British footage is famous 904, in which a British veteran relates an exchange he had with German soldiers during WWI. Both parties were burying their dead in close proximity, when the British were puzzled to discover the Germans were carving “for fatherland and freedom” on the cross of one of their fallen countrymen, because the British thought they had a copyright on the item of the fight for freedom: the care and repair of public myth905; 'the thing' is pliable, indeed.

Of course, the above conclusions might appear simplistic, ethically infantile or jaded to some, yet in 1961 “The Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare printed a report of 186 pages on 31 July 196I, "National Defense Education Act Amendment of 196I," which named folklore (pages 20, 138) as a field to be excluded from Title IV graduate fellowships under the Act.” 906.

This prompted eminent Jewish-American folklorist Dorson to plead with 904BBC 1964.

905 McNeill 1982-83.

906 Dorson 1962:160.

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a politician: “The recent critics of folklore studies are through ignorance playing directly into the hands of the Communists. Folklore is one of the most powerful propaganda weapons -...- The democracies of course do not use folklore as propaganda, but for knowledge and insight. ”907.

Later, U.S Republican New York Senator Keating 908 (at the height of the Cuban crisis and ensuing scare) in 1963 could again denounce the (mis)use of traditional folk motifs to seamlessly serve the appetites (and fit the commodious agenda) of the formerly gallant WWII ally, the now accursed Soviet regime and its domestic fifth column of radical left-wingers:”Now it seems perfectly obvious to me that if people went around singing this [Yankee Doodle] today, we would be in a pretty fix with our shipping ban against Castro.”.

Entire theories, and not only private opinions, rest on mythology and folklore. It is possible to argue that Freud lifted the thread to weave his theories from ancient literature and myths (mother-son-father triangles such as that of Kronos, Rhea and Zeus; parent-child dynamics such as the story of Hera, Zeus and Hephaestus; the seminal role of dreams such as in the Iliad, etc):

When we dismantled Olympus, we turned the gods into symptoms (C.G. Jung).

For by day vice, looking outside of itself and conforming its attitude to others, is abashed and veils its emotions, and does not give itself up 907 Ibid:161,163.

908 no page.

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completely to its impulses, but oftentimes resists them and struggles against them ; but in the hours of slumber, when it has escaped from opinion and law, and got away as far as possible from feeling fear or shame, it sets every desire stirring, and awakens its depravity and licentiousness. It ‘attempts incest,’ as Plato says, partakes of forbidden meats, abstains from nothing which it wishes to do, but revels in lawlessness so far as it can, with images and visions which end in no pleasure or accomplishment of desire, but have only the power to stir to fierce activity the emotional and morbid propensities (Plutarch no date: no page).

I think that -...- the intercourse of men with men, or of women with women, is contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was originally due to unbridled lust . The Cretans are always accused of having invented the story of Ganymede and Zeus extnote because they wanted to justify themselves in the enjoyment of unnatural pleasures by the practice of the god whom they believe to have been their lawgiver (Plato no date-1:361).

Once upon a time when Mahāpatāpa was reigning in Benares, the Bodhisatta came to life as the son of his queen-consort Candā and they named him Dhammapāla. When he was seven months old, his mother had him bathed in scented water and richly dressed and sat playing with him. The king came to the place of her abode. And as she was playing with the boy, being filled with a mother's love for her child, she omitted to rise up on seeing the king. He thought, "Even now this woman is filled with pride on account of her boy, and does not value me a straw, but as the boy grows up, she will think, "I have a man for my son," and will take no notice of me. I will have him put to death at once."extnote So he returned home, and sitting on his throne summoned the executioner into his presence, with all the instruments of his office. The man put on his yellow robe and wearing a crimson wreath laid his axe upon his shoulder, and carrying a block and a bowl in his hands, came and stood before the king, and saluting him said, "What is your pleasure, Sire?" -...- The king looked at the executioner. "What is your pleasure, Sire?" "Without further delay, off with his hands," said the king. At this moment the executioner took a sharp axe, and lopped e xtnote Because of his exceptional beauty, noble Trojan Ganymede is invariably abducted. In this version of the myth, Zeus abducts him so that he may serve as cup bearer of the gods and -in some versions- as Zeus' minion. e xtnote Is this not a texbook representation of Freudian Oedipal conflicts? Yet Jataka tales date back several centuries BCE. (note of this writer).

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off the boy's two hands, as if they had been young bamboo shoots. The boy, when his hands were cut off, neither wept nor lamented, but moved by patience and charity bore it with resignation. [the infant, or Gautama Buddha in one of his previous lives, is torn apart in death as he forgives his tormentors] -...-While [the queen] was thus lamenting, her heart broke, as a bamboo snaps, when the grove is on fire, and she fell dead on the spot. The king too being unable to remain on his throne fell down on the dais. An abyss was cleft asunder in the ground, and straightway he fell into it. Then the solid earth, though many myriads more than two hundred thousand leagues in thickness, being unable to bear with his wickedness, clave asunder and opened a chasm. A flame arose out of the Avīci hell, and seizing upon him, wrapped him about, as with a royal woollen garment, and plunged him into Avīci. (Culladhammapāla-Jātaka, emphasis added).

If we take Euripides' tragedy Bacchae, for example, the way Cadmus gently makes his daughter Agave -who had gone mad into Bacchic frenzyrecognize she's carrying her son's head in her hands, which she thought a lion's, could come from any psychoanalyst’s notebook. The early Christian tradition, too, was replete with gnostic hints that could very well come from a Freudian notebook:

[Jesus said] If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. ( The Gospel Of Thomas no date: no page n.70).

Many credit Hitchcock's phenomenal success as filmmaker to his irresistible portrayal of Marxist and Freudian situations and interplays.

(Un)surprisingly for such a master of Marxist and Freudian motifs, Hitchcock as well had been busy on the service of the best of all causes milling propaganda films during WWII at the behest of British Minister Of Information. Many sociologists -with political sympathies perhaps- recognize an identity of undertones and broad 928

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categories between the convoluted thought of venerable Jewish-European masters of thought such as Durkheim, Freud and Marx.

Writing in the I century BCE, Lucretius (5:1130ss) delivers a genesis of human institutions based on artificial power struggles and manipulation of the gullible that equals that of any postmodern pundit or hippie:

So the kings were slain, the time-honored majesty of thrones and proud scepters tumbled down in the dust, and the glorious crown that adorned the sovereign head, now blood-bespattered beneath the feet of the rabble, mourned the loss of its high prerogative; for people eagerly trample on what once they intensely feared. Thus the situation sank to the lowest dregs of anarchy, with all seeking sovereignty and supremacy for themselves. At length some of them taught the others to create magistracies and established laws, to induce them to obey ordinances. The human race, utterly weary as it was of leading a life of violence and worn out with feuds, was the more ready to submit voluntarily to the restraint of ordinanees and stringent laws.

The reason why people were sick and tired of a life of violence was that each individual was prompted by anger to exact vengeance more cruelly than is now allowed by equitable laws. Ever since that time fear of punishment has poisoned the blessings of life. Violence and injustice enmesh all who practice them: they generally recoil on the wrong doers, and it is not easy for those who by their actions violate the mutual pacts of peace to pass a placid and peaceful life; for even if their crime goes undetected in heaven and on earth, they are bound to fear that it will not remain hidden for ever. And indeed many people, so it is said, by talking in their sleep or in the delirium of disease, have betrayed their own guilt and disclosed deeply hidden matters and their misdeeds.

Buddhism had reached the same conclusion even earlier (society as Hobbesian social contract909). Freud then added then popular obsessions with altered 909“The people divided into each family and the householders started to store up the rice, instead of gathering it each evening and morning. Then the rights of property arose, and the first anti social activity, stealing, committed. Some householders kept their rice safely and took the rice of others. With this new experience, the

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states of consciousness, mesmerism, sexuality and mental illness early psychiatry (phrenologists, aliénistes etc) grappled with during the late Victorian and Belle

Epoque era.

Freud set sexuality as centerpiece. The average layman might probably credit him with inaugurating this practice. Yet Buddhism -and Hindu philosophical thought that preceded it- and Christianity had already set sexuality as core concern ages before Freud. Gautama Buddha scolded a monk who had had intercourse with his former wife in the rash terms (Vinaya III, 19) that it'd be better for the monk to “put your male organ into the mouth of a terrible and poisonous snake than into a woman”. With verbiage that closely resembles Buddhist and Jain thought (= pollution/defilement of the body through impure acts), Christian St. Paul had been equally adamant:”There can be no future resurrection, unless ye continue in chastity, and do not defile your flesh. ”910.

St. Peter Apostle imparted the same lesson911:

XXXIII. Now Peter was in Rome rejoicing in the Lord with the brethren, and giving thanks night and day for the multitude which was brought daily unto the holy name by the grace of the Lord. And there were gathered also unto Peter the concubines of Agrippa the people realized that they should establish the institution of state in order to get rid of anti social actions.”

Abeynayake in ME6208:Buddhist view of the origin and evolution of society.

910 Hone 1820: no page.

911 Various Christian groups -from Shakers to Marcionites- emphasized strict adherence to chastity and celibacy.

This -alongside persecution- heavily cooperated to the group's fading into oblivion. Creeds need as many followers as possible in order to rely less on converts and the compromises that might entail. That's possibly why the Acts of Peter and Acts of Paul and Thecla were excluded from the canon.

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prefect, being four, Agrippina and Nicaria and Euphemia and Doris; and they, hearing the word concerning chastity and all the oracles of the Lord, were smitten in their souls, and agreeing together to remain pure from the bed of Agrippa they were vexed by him. (James 1924: no page).

Should Christian St. Peter not suit one's requirements, what about Gautama Buddha? In the Tibetan tradition a tale exists about Buddha being born in a previous life as Ksantivadin (=�teacher of patience�). The ascetic Kstantivadin was meditating in the forest as a King and his noisy retinue of innumerable concubines camped nearby cavorting all around.

As the King fell asleep in his drunkenness, the courtesans wandered about in the forest, discovered Ksantivadin, were impressed by his saintly demeanor, and asked him to teach them. The ascetic preached against the defilement of lust and indulgence, and for the virtue of patience. When the King found out, he wasn't very pleased, and ordered to tear the ascetic apart in all sorts of torments 912 (with thorny bushes like Jesus; his hands were severed etc).

The Earth swallowed the impious King in an act of cosmic retribution; the King's henchmen made amends (= the turncoat motif) to the dying ascetic for torturing him as they feared divine retribution: the ascetic forgave them all. Saint Peter, too, was martyred at Rome: a champion of Christian forgiveness.

It is astounding how concepts -such as that of animus in Jung- that can't 912 Just as this writing suggests, the list of torments inflicted upon the godly ascetic varies according to sources.

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be discussed herein- find a nearly perfect enunciation in immemorial Buddhist philosophy913. It all may be explained with a Victorian revival of Oriental spirituality -and related texts in translation- among litterateurs:

To understand the general receptivity of American culture today to Asian religions, we need to understand the intellectual foundations laid by previous generations of American reformers who embraced Asian religions as an intellectual foundation for positive social change during periods when entertaining such ideas was far less accepted.

The subjects of this study include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Percival Lowell, William Sturgis Bigelow, Paul Carus, and Dyer Daniel Lum to name a few. The many connections between Asian religions and the various reform movements and activities in America are focused on these particular individuals and utilize them as case studies in order to make a larger argument. Ultimately, this dissertation contends that the interaction between Asian religions and American reform did not begin, for example, in the 1960s with antiwar protesters, but, in fact, there was an adherent to or a sympathizer with Asian religions on the front lines of most of the major reform movements in America leading back to the early nineteenth century.

(Weir 2011:iv, emphasis added).

Many deferentially argue that this, that or another author (Plutarch, Plato, Homer, Euripides...) anticipates Freud in the same way St. Justin Martyr argued that Bacchus anticipated Jesus through diabolic intervention. Readers shall individually judge whether Freud -more or less coherently, consciously and systematically- used themes and arguments from ancient literature to build his theories, or whether ancient literature prophetically anticipated Freud.

913 ““A man ponders over the masculinity in him, ponders over his masculine behavior, attire, ways, impulses, voice and charm. He gets impassioned with masculinity and finds delight therein. Thus impassioned and delighted he ponders on femininity outside, and ponders over feminine behavior, attire, ways, impulses, voice and charm. He gets impassioned and delighted therein. Being thus impassioned and delighted he wishes for external union and longs for the pleasure and joy resulting from such union. Being in love with his own sex (masculinity) he goes into union with woman. Thus he has not gone beyond his own masculinity.” ” (Somaratne, ME6101: Non-Self:3).

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As Senator Keating pointed out, people's reaction is (unconsciously) triggered by the activation of those magic neuralgic spots of the human mind. The same exempla, myths and mos can be easily customized to fit the times, aims and the circumstances of those who wield them. For example Theseus' conventional bronze dagger becomes Luke Skywalker's light saber; ancient Greek miasma (bloodguilt) takes up a new pseudo-scientific garb when coupled with psychiatric concepts. As soon as the spoke-wheeled chariot was gradually introduced in the Bronze Age (starting around 2000 BCE), the gods started riding chariots as well.

As Freud argued, the unconscious tries to get to us through images; Jung went further and clinched that psyche is image and image is psyche:

If we really get this whole idea of the imaginal level of the symptom we recognize that we need to engage the symptom with images. Our first relationship to the image is simply to engage it. To resist the impulse to interpret it, which we are inclined to do because of hermeneutic suspicion that there is something underneath, but underneath the need to interpret is this pathologizing thing. It’s like probing, and we want to do that but it is important when we do it to understand what it is that we are interpreting. Are we saying the image heals? Yes -...- The image is the primary datum of the Psyche.

Stick to the images as that is where the truth is. -...- but that archetypal images are like stars in the sky, there are a gazillion possibilities and they just are out there just living where they are and that psyche is about the structure of the relationship between those luminescences. It does not need to be explained by parenting. It is the relationship that produces the event, the consciousness. ( Archetypal Psychology Lecture 2007: no page).

A pivotal scene in the fantasy movie 914 Krull (1983) unfolds thus: the 914 Dispossessed prince and band of merry fellows (Robin Hood style) try to rescue princess a monster-magician has abducted (deliverance of the virgin + belle and the beast motif) the day of her wedding (spoiled wedding

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hero climbs a high mountain the recover a magical weapon 915 from a lava stream inside a cave916. As he reaches out for the weapon deep into the molten rock, his experience reads out of Zoroastrian lore917:

Then Airyaman, Yazata of friendship and healing, together with Atar, Fire, will melt all the metal in the mountains, and this will flow in a glowing river over the earth. All mankind must pass through this river, and, as it is said in a Pahlavi text, 'for him who is righteous it will seem like warm milk, and for him who is wicked, it will seem as if he is walking in the flesh through molten metal' (GBd XXXIV. r 8-r 9). (Boyce 1979:28, emphasis added).

Fringe criticism of hyphenated groups often voices wishes about expropriating -or appropriating- hegemonic culture's discursive power-tools. As the present writer argues, expropriation may not even needed, for the same stale image banks and obtuse emotional truth cliches can be used to indifferently champion or indict any cause, group, party, individual, country or action.

The primeval concept (often associated with Buddhism ) of impermanence and anatman (all things are without a self) may be a bit too complicated and convoluted for today's semi-literate general audiences after instant gratification. If, however, we translate the same concept in terms fashionable for today's people -who love to see themselves as tech-savvy and go-getting – as people trapped inside the 'mind' of a computer (as in 1982 movie Tron), we get them mytheme). It just reads like the index of a fairy tales' book.

915 A weapon that always reaches its target, akin to Hercules' bow and Karna's spear.

916 Climbing a mountain, caves, lava flows...it goes without saying the stuff of legends.

917 A similar scene recurs in Dune as young Paul Atreides is put to test.

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interested.

Erik Davis already termed 'techgnosis' the commingling of gnostic and technological themes, in the shared attempt to transcend existential limitations seeking some form of (meta)physical breakthrough 918. How innovative could this idea of life as unfolding within the virtual confines of an I.T environment possibly be?

Philosopher Nozick wrote in 1974:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's experiences? (644).

If we add fashionistas with fantastic faces exchanging kung-fu chops in mid-air, or the staple of 1970s Hong-Kong cinema, we get them even more interested. Besides, figures hovering in mid-air as they exchange chops recur in the engravings of popular Hindu epic Ramayana popular all over Southeast Asia.

918 “O gnosticismo histórico caracterizava-se pelo horror ao orgânico e a uma aversão ao natural. Tais elementos seriam inimigos do espírito na sua busca por iluminação. Ora, a tecnociência atual aproxima-se de tal filosofia ao propor a superação dos parâmetros básicos da condição humana: finitude, contingência, mortalidade, corporalidade, animalidade e limitação existencial. -...- Esta antiga busca gnóstica em transcender a carne parece ser o subtexto emocional por trás da eufórica reação a cada novidade em informática no mercado e a cada website ou blog com frivolidades que é lançado. -...-A partir do bombástico lançamento do Windows 95, tivemos o crescimento especulativo das potencialidades da Internet e das tecnologias computacionais. Paralelo a isso, o crescimento das técnicas motivacionais e de auto-ajuda explicitamente inspirados em modelos de programação de computadores.” (Vieira Ferreira 2009:14,16,20).

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Nods are plentiful in the Matrix movies; one character contemplates a shower of numbers on a screen and claims he can see the real world behind the programming code, much as Pythagoras claimed the world's essence to reside in...numbers and ensuing ratios.

Flannery-Dailey&Wagner919 have given an extensive lists of parallels between Buddhism, Gnosticism and the Matrix movie:



“To a significant degree, the basic Gnostic myth parallels the plot of The Matrix, with respect to both the problem that humans face as well as the solution. Like Sophia, we conceived an offspring out of our own pride, as Morpheus explains -...-The film also echoes the metaphorical language employed by Gnostics. -...-



Drawing upon the Buddhist doctrine of Dependent Co-Origination, the film presents reality within the matrix as a conglomerate of the illusions of all humans caught within its snare. Similarly, Buddhism teaches that the suffering of human beings is dependent upon a cycle of ignorance and desire which locks humans into a repetitive cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. -...-Whereas Cypher and Mouse represent what happens when one gives in to samsara, the rest of the crew epitomize the restraint and composure praised by the Buddha.

-...-Clad in threadbare clothes, subsisting on gruel, and sleeping in bare cells, the crew is depicted enacting the Middle Way taught by the Buddha, allowing neither absolute asceticism nor indulgence to distract them from their work”.

The topic scene may even be the messiah stopping or avoiding missiles

thrown at him out of his divine illumination. Yet the image of stones or arrows thrown at Orpheus or Gautama Buddha is pretty bleak to our day's 'networked society', therefore the messiah stops or avoids bullets shot at him by droll Blues

Brothers characters, or the Men in Black who haunt the imagination of proponents 919 2001:no page.

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of UFO-related doom.

It is also possible to rub elbows with the Men in Black in real life as 'secret service' or 'security' personnel consciously choose the attire. Men in Black can take up slightly different appearances and act out slightly different scripts always dealing with surveillance, stealth, mischief and ulterior motives.

They can become shadow people that obsesses enthusiasts of the paranormal, the incubi and succubi of medieval lore, or the huldufolk of Icelandic lore. If shadow entities -much as medieval incubi and succubi- love to sit on their victims' chest in order to oppress them, an Italian brand seized the immemorial obsession and offered his digestives with the catchy image of a man in his bed staring wide-eyed and aghast into the eyes of a boar sitting on his chest: a record case of poor digestion. Alternatively, shadow people might become dark matter beings from another quantum dimension: today's people are so tech-savvy and progressives they left abstruse fairy tales behind.

If we throw in a few more handfuls of popcorn philosophical gibberish -or the capsules of wisdom typical of Chinese fortune cookies in so many more words- with a music920 video as a backdrop, it's guaranteed to bring the masses on the brink of ecstasy, just as the Matrix movies did:

920 For an interesting discussion of music artfully used to induce mood, see Solomon 2006: Laughter And Music.

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O filme gnóstico parece caracterizar-se por uma espécie de autoconsciência. Procura abordar temas metafísicos ou espirituais dentro de narrativas verossímeis, procurando apresentar tais temas de uma forma plausível -...- Temos nessa primeira fase a clássica narrativa gnóstica de um mundo criado por um Demiurgo (a tecnologia) para aprisionar seres humanos. A narrativa apresenta um caráter maniqueísta -...- e vemos um explícito e dramático confronto do humano contra uma divindade enlouquecida pelo poder espiritual e tecnológico. (Viera Ferreira 2009:30,199)921.

I spoke about the transformation of emotions and there is a particular aspect of this deliberation where we look at the notion of devotional states or Bhakti grounded in a special kind of love. This particular area has key importance in a particular form of spiritual practice in the Indian tradition, a form of yoga which is referred to as Bhakti Yoga.

One way of inducing a state of Bhakti is by exposure to a form of classical music often referred to as Bhakti music. (Varma, MAISI005 no date lecture 5:9).

But from a hermetic perspective, which reads images and synchronicities at least as deeply as facts, the mythic structures and psychology of Gnosticism seem strangely resonant with the digital zeitgeist and its paradigm of information. As we'll see, Gnostic myth anticipates the more extreme dreams of today's mechanistic mutants and cyberspace cowboys, especially their libertarian drive toward freedom and self-divinization, and their dualistic rejection of matter for the incorporeal possibilities of mind. (Davis 1999:80).

Wright922 seems to confirm Varma's findings: in an experiment, people hearing “scary music” thought an ambiguous image -which could also depict a ropeto be that of a snake: 70% versus 30% of the control group. Of course: an humungous industry has been built around manipulating people's feelings through

921 a sort of auto-conscience characterizes gnostic movies. They endeavour to tackle metaphysical or spiritual argument within possible narratives in order to present such topics in a plausible manner -...-. We got in this first phase a classic gnostic narrative about a world a Demiurge created (technology) in order to keep human beings prisoner. This narrative is typically manichean -...- and embodies a dramatic, explicit conflict between man an a deity inebriated by spiritual and technological power.

922 2014:1-2.

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music:

For music is psychologically not only an audio signal attached to an event; its complexity, span of time and complex emotional triggering turns it into an excessively processed phenomenon that passes through both conscious and unconscious matrixes and outputs as a Music-image. -...-This symbol-sign dichotomy can powerfully be detected when attempting to interpret that ‘abstract’ music-image, which is made of both archetypal, unconscious affect and an individual’s or group’s signs acquired through conscious knowledge, cultural trends and other cognitive sources. (Nagari 2013:210).

These formula movies are not unique. 1986 movie Maximum Overdrive sees appliances and mechanical tools rebelling against humankind in a murderous rampage, much as in the Second Creation myth of the Maya. The movie ends as a Soviet satellite armed with nuclear weapons stops the mayhem as it destroys a large UFO in the Earth's orbit, thus administering the public a hefty dose of ancient and (then) contemporary myths alike.

The same may be argued regarding the concept of doppelgaenger (double), a 'paranormal double' of a person: the gnostic harbinger of either evil, good or psycho-philosophical truth. Duality plays a very important role in Oriental thought. Meineck writes thus about Roman culture:

Janus is one of the oldest Roman gods. His dual nature and affiliation with crossing boundaries and bridges connects him with Rome as a bridging point over the Tiber and a city with a rich mythic tradition in expressing duality (such as the Trojans and Latins, Romulus and Remus, Romulus and Titus Tatius, the plebeians and patricians, and the two consuls). (2005939

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The doppelgaenger can be understood in different ways, such as the unconscious, the logic of the dream (in Jungian terms); the guardian angel (in spiritual terms), and so forth. Olrik (in his epic laws) had already emphasized the importance of the twins mytheme.

Ancient myths had already addressed this possibility, notably with the story of Inanna and her sister Ereshkigal (known in pre-Islamic Arabia as Allat, daughter/consort of Allah923); Dawn and Night the twin sisters of the Vedas; Ahura Mazda and Andra Mainyu the twin sons of Zurvan 924 (Time); Esau and Jacob; Jesus and Satan the twins of gnosticism (alternatively Jesus and Thomas; Jesus and Barabbas925); Mani and his heavenly twin; Leda's children, who were sons of Zeus and a mortal woman, hatched from an egg (a reminiscence of the the cosmic egg, perhaps) in pairs, one mortal and one immortal: Helen and Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux; Lava and Kusha, twin sons of Rama ( Ramayana). Readers may remember Hercules and his twin Iphicles, one son of two mortal parents and the other son of Zeus; the Skywalker twins in the Star Wars fiction; Bizarro and Superman, Green Lantern and Sinestro in the comics. In Hindu Brahmanda Purana (IV-X century CE), three eggs emerged from the great goddess Adi Lakshmi (primeval Lakshmi).

923 Deity of the underworld, at times also associated with Aphrodite or Minerva under different attributes.

924 At least according to some Zoroastrian denominations, such as Manicheism.

925 Barabbas means “son of the father�. The gnostic message at hand here apparently is that the Jewish mob can choose which version of messiah they want: a meek redeemer who turns the other cheek, or a violent insurrectionist who challenges authority. It all probably constitutes a pun within then Jewish messianic sects in competition.

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From the three eggs Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva emerged with a female counterpart (Parvati, Lakshmi, Saraswati): the couples were shuffled and married to each other.

The thrown-away, pencil-necked sweat-hog and the superhero are

doppelgaengers: Donald Duck becomes the vigilante Duck Avenger; Goofy becomes Super Goof wearing a pajama and a potato sack as cape.

Popular culture couldn't lag far behind926. The Dark Half (1993);

Megaloman (1979); The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970); E' Arrivato Mio Fratello (1985); Non C'è Due Senza Quattro (1984) among others see people ( a businessman in The Man Who Haunted Himself; Brazilian millionaires in Non C'è

Due Senza Quattro; a school teacher in E' Arrivato Mio Fratello; a hero who transforms into a giant to fight outer space foes in Megaloman; an acclaimed writer in The Dark Half) grappling with the overt (1984,1985) or elusive (1979,1970,1993) presence of a doppelgaenger as harbinger of doom, confusion and so forth.

The doppelgaenger may either be summoned into one's life (1984); may enter it against one's will (1979,1985); or work supernatural havoc from out of sight (1970,1993). The nature of such doppelgaenger can be that of a sibling, either long lost (1979), or estranged (1985); of bums hired to act as doubles (1984); of a somewhat biological double (1993); or of one's “countercultural half” (1970).

926 A viewer compiled a casual list of movies with a doppelgaenger motif:http://www.imdb.com/list/ls073346343? ref_=tt_rls_5

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Young Jason is initially ridiculed as a bumbling “Bruce Lee freak”; Rocky Balboa is originally a drudging nitwit in suburban Philadelphia:”he sees himself in two roles -...- the role of the clown, that's the outer role that he plays -...- inside he's the savior and he knows it”. In the end, young Jason (No Retreat No Surrender) defeats a Soviet foe to become Seattle's hero; Rocky becomes a boxing superstar.

Sherman927 clinches that “four basic points about Doubling can be gleaned”:

1. “Doubling has a mor(t)al aspect. As Otto Rank has pointed out, the experience of encountering one's Doppelganger has become associated with mortality rather than protection. The "subtext" to many Doubling stories is a character's "hubris" of sorts which somehow generates or perpetuates fiugmentation of the Self, and thus is the cause of the conflict in the story.”.

2. “Doubling can be seen as synonymous with chaos, whether it develop within the story or be in medias res when we first encounter the characters.”.

3. “Doubling is not merely limited to division of a Self into antithetical dualistic "sides," but can be viewed as fragmentation or decomposition manifest (through multiplication, rather than division) in several characters of an attitude or "type."”.

4. “Doubles exist not merely as emblems of conflict but as manifestations of a deeper structure dealing with issues of wholeness, normalcy, propriety, and order.”.

Could popular culture lag far behind? The relentless pursuit of “hyperreal repetition” and the doppelgaenger knows no bounds. U.S doll brand My

American Girl specializes in letting girl clients create a doll that is their exact

927 1993:31ss.

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doppelgaenger according to a myriad of variables such as eye/skin color, hairdo, ear piercing, outfits, accessories etc. In Japan, robotics engineers try to improve robots in order for them to look and act progressively “more human than human”: the slow but steady progress towards hyperreality.

The same logic of an engineered hyperreality recurs endlessly in the media. Televised productions of the 1970s induced Afro- and Italo-Americans into the American dream mainstream by catering to the community's inner narcissism.

Brutish displays of physicality (dancing, boxing, singing, going native etc) were once again the hallmarks of a reversed Darwinian logic undergirding the irresistible ascent of yet another oppressed minority that suffered so much: compliments are lavished upon the same; judicial leniency never abates in an unending stream of narcissistic supply. Bestial displays of physicality seem correlated with the African diaspora. Heritage of Black slaves, capoeira (Brazil) and moringue (Réunion) mix equal parts of dance and acrobatic martial arts.

Bestial displays of physicality do not preclude but affirm immense (presumed) spiritual boons: the African diaspora and the Gospel culture, or

négritude928; the splendid spirituality of Muslim immigrants; the superb family or patriotic values of people from Southern Italy who also emigrate(d)...

Human nature is typically perceived as most authentic when most 928 A Mandela-esque interpretation of the situation of Black people fraught with contradictions; it is associated typically with French-speaking Blacks.

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bestial: vulgarity equals authenticity; authenticity triggers synchronicity. A maniac cachinnates in hyperaesthesia as he obliterates frail little creatures; frail little creatures scream, shiver, moan away...

A transgressor now in the dock grabs his sick bucket or chamber pot to indulge his foul bodily urges in a courtroom; jurors can thus join their hands in worship of such gage of common humanity. The time has come for the Zoroastrian choice: will society hold grudges, proffer harsh judgments that may prove false, or choose reconciliation? “The circumstances seem changed but the cliche is in one's psyche”.

Six-time Mr. Olympia, British bodybuilder Dorian Yates was associated with the image he would squat so much weight that it caused him to throw up afterward; people are in awe at such herculean display of manliness. Bodybuilding can be indifferently associated with brutish manliness in spite of a thick queer (for example waxing, spandex clothing) and homoerotic subtext. Vulgarity implies authenticity (ethos=credibility), and authenticity prompts synchronicity (=a notguilty verdict, refugee status etc). Nietzsche quips:”There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy ”.

In 1970, Osho Rajneesh introduced the “dynamic meditation”: frantic movement, scream, cry and laughter outbursts interspersed with catatonic moments as a way for devotees to reach the godhead.

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These attempts are often engineered masquerades (=hyper-reality) wellwishers and media people remotely control: in Italy in 2014, no individual with the family name “Balboa” is to be found on phone books nationwide. The hero of

Happy Days (1974-84) is a leather clad, blue collar Renaissance man bully named Arthur Fonzarelli. The Italo-mania of the 1970s is set in hyper-real 1950s: in 2014 no person named Fonzarelli appears in Italian phone books nationwide. Each time he starred in his 'alpha male' role as James Bond, Sean Connery wore hair replacement. While filming his blockbusting part in The Blues Brothers, John Belushi was allegedly under the influence of drugs.

The actor who won interminable accolades for playing an 'authentic' Italo-American gangster was in reality Jewish-American actor James Caan. Another icon of Italian cult movies -whether playing dysfunctional, murderous sociopaths in violent Charles Bronson copycats; or jolly nitwit-tricksters in grotesque comedy movies – was transplanted Cuban actor Tomas Milian (T.Q. Rodriguez). He represented an icon of Italianness on screen, highly proficient in provincial lingo

romanesco that voice actors -unbeknownst to the general public- afforded him: hyperreality steals the day. Informants for hire and agents provocateurs direct extremist groups enacting scripts that security agencies or minority lobbies supply: hyperreality steals the day once more.

Such controversial figures as Hercules, Alexander and so forth, could

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come to embody so many disparate qualities according to which variation of their myth people focused on. Hercules had fathered offspring all across Greece, yet had homoerotic relationships, too, and had as well served in the garb of a woman 929. He had wounded Zeus' wife Hera; he had savagely murdered his wife, children, and his mentor Linus930.

Yet, Hercules had been the one going on labors to atone for his sins; through his suffering he had become Heracles (glory of/through Hera depending on interpretation); he had delivered various people from danger; he (in the oft-repeated fable of Hercules At The Crossroad) had chosen the painful road to virtue rather than the easy way of vice. Siegel931 relates how a patient in therapy for drug and alcohol addiction was haunted by a dream in which he had to choose paths at an intersection: an easy path leading to a sewer, and a difficult path leading out.

Modern mythologies are not so different: the divine revelation made to Prophet Smith -who founded the Mormon/LDS religion- involved a set of fixed attitudes, including polygamy932, and the place of people of color in the greater

929 Achilles and Arjuna too had their stint in a woman's garb.

930 Very common mythological mytheme of transgression, trial and redemption. Yoruba god Ogun:”went into battle while under the influence of palm wine, and in a drunken rage slew friends and foes alike -...-Withdrawing to the surrounding hills, he spent his time beating swords into plowshares as a farmer (and/or a hunter). He did not give up alcohol, however, and neither do his devotees. In another version of the story, Ogun turned his sword on himself after he saw what he had done and then disappeared into the earth. ” (Prothero 2010:75).

931 2014:Interrupting Addiction And Troublesome Habits.

932 Mormon leader Brigham Young wrote in 1867:”The only men who become gods, even the sons of god, are those who enter into polygamy”.

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scheme of things933.

Alternatively, the idea of European culture as emanation of “aryan” culture of immemorial eastern origin was for a long time subject of posh and mainstream academic and cultural discussion all over the European world, before distressed scholars after WWII turned the concept into the discredited voodoo doll of pseudo-science only charlatans would take seriously. Eckel 934 states that countries as apart as Ireland and Iran derive their names from the root “Aryan”.

Again, this is not the venue to discuss the ultimate validity, veracity or historicity of Smith's teachings: readers shall think what they deem fit. Suffice is to say a collectivity believed in them as a divine truth upon which to base their own life at then considerable risk. Yet over time, polygamy was not only officially abandoned but condemned and prosecuted. In 1978, a “revelation” announced -albeit indirectly- that people of color were not only to be tolerated, but heightened within the Mormon religion.

The items of the “mark” or “seed of Cain” used in early Mormon theology to refer to Black skin color - alleged gage of a quintessential sin 935- had 933 The Mormons 2006.

934 2003: lecture 2.

935 In the Grail cycle of romances, black and white allegorically represent the admixture of resoluteness and irresoluteness that epitomize human life. In the example at hand, the improper resolve at the time of the quintessential transgression. Another connection between Mormonism and the Grail cycle exists. The witnesses that claimed to have allegedly seen the golden plates founder Smith had professedly received from the angel Moroni, from which Smith translated the Book Of Mormon, appeared to them covered with a cloth, just as the Grail appears at Arthur's court before the knights embark on their quest: divine coincidence.

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gradually faded into both political insignificance (= friendly constituency in sharp decline), and political inopportuneness (= hostile constituency in sharp increase):

And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. (2 Nephi 5:21).

And their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like unto the Nephites (3 Nephi 2:15).

Mormonism is not the only religion that undergoes major refurbishing to go along with what's popular in a given season. Not without contradiction, Pope Francis I flirts with categories of former sinners such as homosexuals and divorcees.

The Dalai Lama is supposed to have assured his U.S donors and supporters how the Twin Towers attack was in no way a karmic retribution, but mere happenstance. Others get all hot and bothered elatedly making exceptions when the notion of karma is applied to this or that group, but not to groups hostile to one's pet category: accommodated truths, indeed.

Karma proves a very handy tool when wishfully ethicizing the wrath of the righteous: a deluge of incendiary bombs, and invading troops, brought about the fall of Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban regime...just paybacks for their godless misdeeds. When karma is applied to various categories of terrorism,

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genocide or oppression victims, it becomes “blaming the victim�: that's such an unacceptable stance936; an incensed lawyer may be ready to press charges if one persists.

Professor of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, Loy also analyzes the Theravada Buddhist Pali canon. Unwelcome stances -such as the status of women or conservatism- are considered as interpolations and perversions of the Buddha's thought on the part of scribes with vested interests, for the Buddha was a true revolutionary937. Some even dispense with the notion of karma altogether.

Of course, the Pali -or Christian, Sikh, Confucian...- canon might be but a patchwork of loosely interconnected traditions claiming what they all state to be direct, but which is in all cases a rough one, filiation from a supreme sage that sources claim died at some point between the III and XI century BCE. This loose agglomeration of oral traditions was then put in writing and subjected to scribal interpolations, and various rows of authentication. At this point, what could be considered 'true'? What resonates best with who's telling the story, of course.

As it moved east into China, Buddhism confronted Confucianism, and the accusation of lacking filial piety. Buddhist doctrines were thus reworked in China in order to accommodate filial piety's pivotal role. In the Pure Land tradition, filial piety becomes the cardinal virtue from which all others strictly depend. What 936 Loy 2012.

937 2012.

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amounted to an expedient adaptation to local socio-political conditions in I century CE China was then backdated as a faithful reflection of what an Indian sage had taught XI centuries earlier.

Ven. Wuling (Pure Land Mahayana Buddhist monastic) expressly states that Theravada Buddhism did not fare well in China as Taoism and Confucianism had already shaped Chinese folkways: that's how Mahayana Buddhism thrived instead. Eastwards still, Chinese Buddhism docking in Japan had to be refurbished to coexist with cherished local religions such as Shinto (animistic cult devoted to nature spirits), Imperial cults etc.

The opposite may also happen. The U.S Republican party is construed -in today's common man's perception at least- as having markedly defended religious and very conservative values since time immemorial: the backdating strategy works.

Prothero tells a different story:

In the early 1990s a double-digit “God gap” opened up among frequent worshippers between the Democrats (now understood as the secular party) and the Republicans (the “faith-based” alternative). During the 1960s and 1970s there had been no discernible party preference among religious practitioners; religious affiliation was politically irrelevant. In 1992, however, frequent worshippers (those who attend religious congregations at least once a week) preferred Bush the Elder over Bill Clinton by 14 percentage points. That gap widened to 20 percent in the 2000 Bush-Gore and the 2004 Bush-Kerry elections, dwarfing the proverbial gender gap. -...- Since Jimmy Carter, bornagain bona fides seems to have become a requirement for the Oval Office -...- [about the concept of “family values”:] Although this term 950

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sounds ancient, it is actually of recent vintage, first used in its current sense in the late 1960s and injected into American cultural politics in the late 1970s. The Republican Party platforms of 1976 and 1980 endorsed “family values” as an antidote to what conservatives saw as the moral degradation of American society brought on by the sexual revolution, rock ’n’ roll, and the counterculture. By the early 1980s this phrase—and related ones such as traditional values and moral values—had come to serve as code for opposition to “atheistic schools, rampaging crime, God-forsaken homes, drugs, abortion, pornography, permissiveness and a sense of cynicism and spiritual desolation absolutely unprecedented in our country’s history.”extnote (2007:42,178) Gamesmanship is ubiquitous. In contemporary Brunei, and during the later stages of the Saddam Hussein regime, religion was a card played to macadamize national unity around pretended charismatic leaders experiencing difficulties. In spite of emphasizing a jumble of socialist and nationalist ideas, Chavez didn't shy away from occasional displays of Christian faith. Italian party Lega Nord was born a secular party – lider maximo Bossi had in fact been formerly active in a number of radical left-wing groups-, yet in recent years started to flatly champion Catholic identity as alleged bulwark against immigration in order to seek electoral fortune.

Quite an irony, since the Catholic Church in Italy has possibly been -rubbing elbow with the former Communist party- the biggest proponent of unrestricted immigration. Pope Francis I 938 severely chastises the Catholic Church for boiler room tactics. He calls for an end to the “the novice trade” ( tratta delle

novizie), whereby the Catholic Church fishes for prospective clergy among the dejected from the poorest countries, whose only inducement to embrace e xtnote Prothero here quotes words from Jesse Helms, North-Carolina Republican Senator.

938 ADNKRONOS, January 3, 2014.

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Catholicism is represented by free room and board. Pope Francis I also urges to raise standards for the admission to seminaries: current lax policies only create “little abominations� (piccoli mostri).

Lega Nord and the Vatican engage thus in a frantic tango mafioso, whereby they intermittently point at each other's comedies of innocence and bad faith. The Vatican can thus lambast Lega Nord as 'racist' and insensitive; Lega Nord can thus ridicule all the perfunctory atonement rituals this, that or another high prelate engage in regarding (illegal) immigration, and dare the Vatican to write a cheque to help with the costs, or to open its innumerable estates to help with the room and board to be provided to the much lionized 'common humanity fellows rightfully seeking greener grass'.

As far as the USA are concerned, Schulze 939 usefully categorized public discourse with overt religious characterization according to six pivotal points:

1. The rhetoric of conversion;

2. The rhetoric of discernment;

3. The rhetoric of communion;

4. The rhetoric of exile; or -as the present writer suggests- the rhetoric of the

939 2003:7ss.

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recapture of bygone times.

5. The rhetoric of praise.

After WWII in many quarters Christianity -which had been built in the name of the difference from, and often in antagonism with Judaism- was re-branded Judaeo-Christianity, despite the fact that Jesus had admonished his fellow Jews thus:

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

(John 8:44).

Mormons, too, started to emphasize their Christian beliefs (=we're all just Christians) in order to clip a few edges to bridge towards the mainstream. Pure Land Mahayana Buddhism also bridges towards the mainstream 940 by emphasizing how Buddhism constitutes a system of education, not a religion. Emphasis is also put on the absence of ritual and ceremony in Pure Land Buddhism as faithful reflection of Gautama Buddha's 'true teachings'.

Some consider Islam, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christianity just 'Abrahamic religions' on equal footing with Judaism. In some Muslim milieus, emphasis is put on the figure of Jesus, also a prophet of that religion, in order to bridge towards the Christian mainstream in their environment. The Dalai Lama also

940 For example as Buddhist monastic ven. Wuling (Pure Land Buddhism) described.

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called Jesus a Bodhisattva.

It is in fact fashionable to x-ray old books seeking blacklisted buzzwords – such as “lower races”, “Aryan”941 etc-; and/or unspeakable buzz-concepts:

With a reticular activator, you are simply tying pieces into your story that will remind people and pull them back into the ideas and emotion of your story at a later date.

Campbell's statement about European civilization being the oldest and not the youngest942 - to give one example - may lead to wild guesses about how many corpses were piled under the bed of such despicable people harboring such awful ideas and impure allegiances. As well, Irish-American Campbell's enthusiasm for European culture transpires as he describes stone-age caves in Europe possibly going back 100.000 years BCE: more appropriate estimates 943 suggest 15/16.000 years BCE for the notable Altamira caves.

British surgeon, hygienist and mythologist T. Inman (1820-76) refers to Jews in terms of “miserable”, “contemptible as slaves and ignorant bigots, as well as for the vice of braggartism”944. Of course, Inman heaps scorn and ridicule upon other groups as well, for he was riding the Victorian fixation with demythologization and scientism; it is staggering, however, to remark that people like Inman were their

941 Campbell (1969-3;1972-2:Man&Myth Through The Ages II) did incidentally describe NSDAP's 'aryan' mythology as disproven, unscholarly and unihistorical.

942 Concept expressed for example in Campbell (1967).

943 Hale 2009:Hunting Magic In Sacred Caves.

944 1873:390.

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time's version of today's scientistic opponents of religion a la Dawkins. In very few instances, J.Campbell refers to Hebrews as “The Jewish race” in passing and with no apparent malice, yet such opinions or wording may today not just rise concerns in polite company, but in courts of law as well.

Instant, uncomplimentary psychological profiles may be also drafted:”we call people mentally ill when their personal conduct violates certain ethical, political, and social norms.”; the subject thus becomes inherently tainted, impure, infectious... Even Hinayana Buddhist discipline codes prescribe that a monk is not liable for transgressions committed under the spell of insanity (amulhavinaya).

Religionists claim that atheists suffer from unresolved psychological issues: that's why atheists -according to Freudian categories- want to get rid of the heavenly father: an ersatz for defective or abusive earthly fathers. Atheists reply that broken families and unresolved issues are the norm nowadays: that's why religionists put a figment of their own disturbed imagination up in the clouds to serve as heavenly ersatz of father/authority figures who failed or traumatized them on earth.

Joseph Campbell (1904-87) himself did not escape such treatment945: 945 Konner et alii 1989: no page. What sparked the controversy was -as far as the present writer can guess- an anecdote Campbell told over and over about an (inopportune) question Campbell asked Jewish-Austrian philosopher Buber during a conference. As an expert mythologist, Campbell ought to have known better.

Without a significant background, Campbell's exchange with Buber remains obscure to say the least. Readers be the ultimate judges of Campbell's evident faux-pas: here the present writer examines the payback meted out through the decades. To watch Campbell recount the anecdote, see Campbell (1989) Pharaoh's Rule. An

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It is not Judaism alone indeed that visibly aroused in Joseph Campbell an anger that he could hardly control. -...- Robert A. Segal, author of Joseph Campbell: An Introduction, testifies that not only Campbell's comments to his friends but his published writing (as we ourselves have seen) make clear that he was an anti-Semite. In his books Campbell "invariably disparaged Judaism as literalistic, chauvinistic and parochial-stock anti- Semitic epithets ” -...- In this we can perhaps see the joint root of Campbell's black anger against Judaism and his native Catholicism (Friedman 1998:397-98).

Indeed, can we make moral judgments about works of art without making judgments about the artist? Consider the antisemitism, say, of a Joseph Campbell. Surely, if anti-Semitism is integral to his works, then these works are rooted in falsehoods and evil and need be studied only as Mein Kampf is studied, that is, for their historical interest. If it is not integral, then why can we not, together with the deconstructionists, separate the writing from the man? Why can we not deal with the writings as autonomous creations? (Polak in Harrowitz 1994:278).

Another strategy that yields high recall is “hero AND myth AND Campbell,” with 2,597 results. While the strategy has to be modified, it is impossible to ignore the first relevant record: “Joseph Campbell As Anti-Semite and As Theorist of Myth: A Response to Maurice Friedman” (Segal 1999). (Tal 2006:27).

Delitzch [deliverer of a Babel and the Bible comparative mythology lecture in Berlin in 1902] veered into antisemitism many scholars would say, in which he essentially said: well, the Hebrew people are responsible for this view that the Bible is ethically superior, and therefore we should distance ourselves from the Hebrew people, and from the Old Testament (Goldman 2003: The Epic Of Gilgamesh I).

Those who track your behavior on social networks may know what you said last year, or what you did last month. Taken out of context, what you said and what you did might suggest some terrible behavior or desire, or at least an error in judgment. (Like an elephant, the Internet never forgets.) And if propagators know how people will react, especially within specified social networks, they will have an increased capacity to spread their preferred rumors. If people within episode in the first coherent video series (Campbell 1989: The World Of Joseph Campbell ) piecing together segments of Campbell's lectures over the years explicitly critiques the NSDAP regime.

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those networks have known fears and hopes, it should be simple to play on those fears and hopes to spread alleged facts and indeed to ensure that a belief in those allegations becomes a kind of ghost, hovering over its victim, or even that it becomes deeply entrenched.

(Sunstein 2014:49).

Even Jung changed his register946 after WWII to -if not to completely reflect- at least acquiesce with the updated “popular morality”, “explanations or interpretations usually put forth”, “prevailing cultural trends”, “free-floating folk beliefs”, “only an old Phoenician tale of what has often occurred before now in other places”, “the audience’s pre-established set of convictions” and suchlike.

The image, legacy and character of the popular Swiss psychoanalyst and mythologist - as this writing contends all along- can be indifferently used to make the case for a bizarre salad bar of occult themes revolving around demonic possession, altered states of consciousness and psychophonia (radio or phone talks allegedly underway with the dead) – as in an episode of Spanish TV program Cuarto 946 Chilean diplomat and Fascist intellectual Miguel Serrano, who claims to have been at some point Jung's correspondent, reports:”In my book published in England and the VS, C.G. Jung a Herman Hesse, A Record of Two Friendships, I explain the circumstances which brought me to meet Jung. He wrote the foreword for my book The Visits of the Queen of Sheeba. I think that this Swiss professor knew better than anyone else in our time who Hitler really was. In the book of Professor McQuyre, Jung Speakinqs, published by Princeton University Press, three interviews of Prof. Jung on Hitler are reproduced. One is in the Observer of London, another in an American newspaper and the third in the Radio Berlin, at the end of 1938. In these interviews Jung stated that Hitler was possessed by the collective unconscious of the Aryan race. This means that Hitler was the spokesman of the whole Aryan world. -...- Immediately after the war he started to change and made some very shameful statements about Hitler and the German people. These statements I didn't know until very recently, and have made me lose part of my admiration for the Jung personality. -...-Nevertheless, Jung was a cunning and opportunistic man, as I can visualize it today. When Hitler was in full power and National Socialism on top, Jung coined the concept of the "two unconcsious" which was a lethal weapon against the Jews and the Freudians. After the war this concept disappeared from his writings in such a way that today it is impossible to find it in his complete works. I have a book published in Argentina in 1939 under the name of El Yo y el Inconsciente ("I And The Unconscious) where it is explained. Moreover, Jung took a Jewish woman as a secretary. ” ([sic] Serrano 1995: no page, emphasis added).For actual footage of Jung's backpedaling, see Wagner 1990, where – in the 1950s- the famous thinker asserts he had been identifying -and issuing public warnings about- the rise of evil since 1919.

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Milenio-; or – as in the 1989 UK TV program Carl Jung: The Wisdom Of The Dream- to claim that Jung advocated a return to religion, and wanted to show there was such thing as a soul.

All the rage as number one public concern in Europe in the 1980s, HIV/AIDS stopped being harped on gradually in the 1990s as unchecked African 947 immigration flooded (enriched, found salvation in...) Europe. The GLBT community -to which the AIDS epidemic had originally been (in)appropriately linked- had grown stronger, and a diverse crowd of post-Communists and Catholics alike were interested in recruiting the new pariahs en masse to reverse the decline of their 'great cause'.

In 2014, as refugees from Syria land in Italy, many cases of scabies, TBC and other such infectious diseases allegedly appear among them as they are shuttled back and forth on school buses Italian students typically use: news agencies and big time press shun the topic confined to local outlets and polemic blogs. Boat people are also routinely infected with TBC, scabies and other infections that had been eradicated from European soil.

Illnesses and infections European colonizers brought to the faraway places they invaded are, however, a favorite topic for xeroxed moral outrage outbursts: what is the purpose of standards if they cannot be redefined to suit the 947 HIV/AIDS is rampant in Sub-saharan Africa according to many sources:http://www.womenshealth.gov/hivaids/aids-worldwide/.

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moment's adventitious priorities?

Prigs and dolts are thus called to make their Zoroastrian choice in another existential operetta. Politicians park their limousines and marshal their bodyguards to deliver vibrant speeches a ghost writer for hire littered with mythological images that show “the kind of person� they are. The fight against contamination is too good to let go, however, so the more 'politically correct' swine flu, mad cow disease, avian flu, chicken flu, Chinese flu, Mexican flu, Ebola and what not appear over time.

As shown above, the same pathetic images/similes can be invoked to sympathize with any and all causes, any and all groups: commercially farmed animals,

pedophiles,

illegal

immigrants,

corrupt

officials,

inept/dishonest

administrators and all craftsmen (plumbers, electricians...), serial killers and other felons...

After all, didn't this, that or another meek savior-hero preach absolute compassion, and the turning of the other cheek? Didn't he forewarn us about the hazards of rash judgments, for we are potentially as tainted as those we accuse? Of course -in the lore-, the savior-hero may also wield the rod of iron, just in case the opposite chances to apply:

Not the faults of others, nor what others have done or left undone, but one's own deeds, done and left undone, should one consider.

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(Gautama Buddha, Dhammapada) You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

(Matthew 7:5).

Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will break them with a rod of iron; you will dash them to pieces like pottery. (Psalm 2:8-9).

Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. "He will rule them with an iron scepter." He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. ( Revelations 19:15).

Ancient Sophists typically embraced a very situational view that made no room for absolute truth or established versions: every argument could indifferently be defended and/or debunked (antinomies).

To put this 'flexibility' to test, and to show his ability, famed Gorgias wrote an Encomium Of Helen to vindicate the sort of Helen of Troy; he turned the received persona of the accursed adulteress -whose profligacy had wrought so much harm on the Greek world- into a basically unaccountable victim succumbing to overwhelming forces. The same treatment could be reserved to another Helen, Eve, now a gullible victim, whose innocence the devil exploits in a constellation of apocryphal texts called Life Of Adam and Eve (I century CE or later).

It is possible to punch holes in about everything. Vandiver 948 picks apart Joseph Campbell's theories (or what she believes Campbell's main points are, 948 2000: Why Is Myth.

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anyways). Her punchline rests on the following example: snakes cannot be said to absolve the same function cross-culturally because in the Greek world they are associated with positive imagery, whereas this imagery is negative in the JudaeoChristian tradition.

It is incredibly easy to make her example collapse: in Numbers 21:9 “Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived. “; Jesus ( John 3:14) said: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up”.

According to Campbell949, the imagery of the serpent and the staff -later Hermes' caduceus- dated from 2.000 BCE ( libation cup of King Gudea of Lagash).

The serpent (as most of these mythic figures) is represented as the custodian of some 'x force' of immense power (knowledge, wealth, eternal life, etc), good or bad according to the times, cultural context and the priorities of those employing the allegory. In Hindu mythology, the serpent-King is instrumental in bringing forth the elixir of immortality. Elsewhere, the serpent-King presents the cup of the elixir of immortality 950. Later, the serpent-King rises to protect Gautama Buddha during crucial meditation; later still, serpent-beings bring Buddhist Mahayana scriptures to mankind. In the Christian world, the serpent might represent nature in its reaches farthest away from god; yet, the serpent, too, partakes 949 1968b.

950 Campbell 1967a.

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of the intrinsically 'good' nature as god's creation and can -as in the examples aboverepresent the ultimate salvation whenever god wills it. The snake, again, roams around the trees of knowledge and eternal life in the garden.

Schopenhauer reminded us:

This is chiefly practicable in a dispute between scholars in the presence of the unlearned. If you have no argument ad rem, and none either ad hominem, you can make one ad auditores; that is to say, you can start some invalid objection, which, however, only an expert sees to be invalid. Now your opponent is an expert, but those who form your audience are not, and accordingly in their eyes he is defeated; particularly if the objection which you make places him in any ridiculous light. People are ready to laugh, and you have the laughers on your side. (Schopenhauer 2004:15).

Incidentally, the motif of lifting the great man or the great boon up as clinching acts is recurring. Ancient Celts used to decapitate enemies, and to lift the beheaded bodies up as war trophy. Perseus lifts Medusa's head up to defeat the Kraken monster; Chamberlain lifts the 1938 Munich agreement up as he disembarks; Hulk Hogan lifts the championship belt up. Krishna and other saviorheroes may be lifted up in the sky in the same way supporters may carry their favorite sportsman or politician shoulder-high in a sort of secular procession.

According to certain Protestant denominations, the Christian faithful of dispensationalism951 shall be raptured in mid-air952 to meet Jesus, being thus spared 951 A movement mostly associated with British evangelist J.N. Darby (1800-82). It reshuffled the deck of biblical apocalyptic stories recombining parts of each into a new narrative.

952 “After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.� (1 Thessalonians 4:17).

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the tribulations preceding the day of judgment. Samuelsson shocked the religious world claiming that his analysis suggested that:

The Gospels do not say Jesus was crucified, Gunnar Samuelsson says. In fact, he argues, in the original Greek, the ancient texts reveal only that Jesus carried "some kind of torture or execution device" to a hill where "he was suspended" and died, says Samuelsson, who is an evangelical pastor as well as a New Testament scholar. -...-He spent three years reading for 12 hours a day, he says, and he noticed that the critical word normally translated as "crucify" doesn't necessarily mean that.-...-"This word is used in a much wider sense than 'crucifixion,'" he says.

"It refers to hanging, to suspending vines in a vineyard," or to any type of suspension.-...-He found very little evidence of crucifixion as a method of execution, though he did find corpses being suspended, people being hanged from trees, and more gruesome methods of execution such as impaling people by the belly or rectum. The same Greek word was used to refer to all the different practices, he found.-...-At the time they were written, "there is no word in Greek, Latin, Aramaic or Hebrew that means crucifixion in the sense that we think of it," he says.

It's only after the death of Jesus - and because of the death of Jesus - that the Greek word "stauroun" comes specifically to mean executing a person on the cross, he argues. (Greene 2010: no page).

It is highly significant that crucifixion was an integral component of many of the Mystery Religions -...-.In the Mystery ritual the candidate for initiation was symbolically bound or “nailed” to a cross and even, in some rites, put into a hypnotic coma, to be wakened from “death” after three days, on Easter morning. -...-The story originated in Egypt, then came to be a framework for a ritualistic dramatization of death and resurrection. One of the secrets of the transformative dynamic of the Mystery Religions was the regular use of very specific rituals, dramatizations, sounds, lights, and other effects to recreate symbolically the inner changes of consciousness being portrayed .

(Harpur 2005:148).

O mito de Zalmoxis parece, de fato, ter sido imensamente mais 963

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conhecido e influente na Antiguidade greco-romana que nos dias atuais. Sua rejeição por parte da Igreja Apostólica Romana, ao que parece, pode ter sido a principal causa de seu desaparecimento das considerações no Ocidente. A razão mais assertiva para se sugerir essa causa é a quantidade de comparações entre Zalmoxis e Jesus nos primeiros séculos desta era. A figura emblemática de Zalmoxis parece ter sido fundamental para os Gregos antigos, na medida em que precisavam reposicionar a temática que passou, aos poucos, a ter grande apreço entre eles: a imortalidade da alma. Tal tema, que foi associado a Pitágoras por alguns Gregos que viviam na Trácia, segundo se observa no relato originário de Heródoto, surge envolto a um forte etnocentrismo, na medida em que Zalmoxis é relatado como escravo do filósofo grego. Por ser o primeiro escrito que se tem conta no Ocidente sobre o mito de Zalmoxis, o relato de Heródoto será chamado, neste trabalho, de originário. -...-Opondo-se à visão tradicional da Grécia, o mito apresenta uma visão de imortalidade da alma que só seria popularmente aceita na Grécia depois das fundamentações de Platão e da crescente crença órfico-pitagórica. Heródoto relata que os Getas acreditavam que, depois da morte, iriam se juntar a Zalmoxis. (Silva Coutinho 2013:9,20).

In the video of 1996 song One&One, ordinary nobodies from all walks of life 'going on autopilot' (cognitive overload, etc) casually wake up as one chap goes around with a maguffin in his hands as he would with a grail. The stare of the chap with the maguffin is also therapeutic, triggering aesthetic arrest:”Now a man who was lame from birth -...- Then Peter said, "Look at us!" -...- He jumped to his feet and began to walk.” (Acts 3:1-8). People who undergo aesthetic arrest in the musical video are literally lifted up contemplating a white light.

Maguffin is also a name that can be used to define this elusive object or quality of little or no ultimate value, in whose acquisition so much effort is put; some contend director Alfred Hitchcock -who popularized the term maguffin964

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invented this situation:

The quest for a particular thing necessarily implies the existence of a desirable quest-object of one kind or another, and many Greek legends are structured around the idea of the quest for a rare or precious object or creature, the acquisition of which appears to be too dangerous or otherwise difficult to be feasible. (Hansen 2004:295-6) Oneness of the pack can be invoked under iffy gnostic premises such as those in the song the present writer just mentioned. A thicker political veneer is often needed. It is difficult to think of a more telling vehicle for the convergence of the multi-cultural tide and the WWII U.S worldview than Star Trek.

The show undoubtedly exerted more social influence at large the world over than most peer-reviewed works almost nobody reads. Actor/artist Leonard Nimoy describes in a conference the influence that his individual beliefs and position as engaged member of the Jewish community had on the popular “Mr. Spock” in the way he chose to portray him 953. Visibly annoyed, Nimoy quips “if the value of education is a Jewish thing, yes there is Judaism in Star Trek -...- if social justice is a Jewish thing -...- tolerance -...- these are traits that are expressed in Star Trek constantly and they are Jewish traits -...- so the answer is yes, there is a lot of -...- Jewishness in Star Trek”954.

It is opportune to caution how many orthodox Jewish groups would 953 The 'Vulcanian greeting' and accompanying gesture are derived from Jewish rites. As well, the fictional mr.

Spock is a living synecdoche for the Jewish people. In one episode, he claims that his true name cannot be pronounced.

954 Nimoy, no date, no page.

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strongly censor Nimoy's sympathy for the social alchemy Star Trek embodied. That is the point: Judaism can be 'read' in conflicting ways; “Narrating is never innocent�955. If a politicking entertainer is not credible enough, Pope Francis I 956 explains his stance in favor of the poor follows the Gospel's core believe, whereas some accuse him (a Jesuit) of being a Communist (If Communism is...then...). The Catholic Pontiff flirts with tones similar to those of the once dreaded liberation theology in terms that could have been borrowed from Nimoy's harangue (with due collateral adjustment, of course).

The Planet Of The Apes movies are another clumsily disguised critique (or parody?) of the 'swinging sixties' and their fixations:

Since the release of Planet, the Apes series has been recognized by audiences, critics, and the filmmakers as an allegory of racism, and the saga has even entered into the national discourse on U.S. racial conflict. While at times this thematic concern was the result of deliberate choices made by the filmmakers, at other times the concerns and issues of the era may have been subconsciously incorporated into the films -...-. Taken to the Ape Management complex, he is wired to a shock table designed as a conditioning device to induce a Pavlovian association of pain with the word no which is shouted at the apes as they are given an electric shock -...- A shocked Virgil reminds Abe that because the humans had electrically conditioned apes to fear the word no, Caesar has forbidden humans to ever speak the word to apes, although apes can say it to humans.

(Greene 1996:2, 104, 126).

Far from suggesting a world of flux and shifting appearance, metamorphosis, which is always to be located in the past, results in a firm natural and political order in the present. The human beings who 955 Brooks 1994:77.

956 ANSA, April 4, 2014.

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undergo metamorphosis, an emphatically final process that leaves no possibility of a return to their prior shape, do not lose the enduring aspects of their being, rather they take on a form that reveals them – an idea that closely resembles influential stoic accounts of identity (Hardie 2006:171, emphasis added).

The present writer hopes that surmising “no” stands for “the N word” doesn't amount to reading too much between the lines; in fact, people of color can use it without making a barrel of spleen burst. As well, we have another pariah chieftain named Caesar in the guise of Aphra Behn's enslaved African prince Oroonoko: “Behn's desperate attempt between 10 and 29 June 1688 to warn James II that if he continues on the path he has described since his accession, he risks suffering the same fate as his father”957.

The same imagery can still send prigs and dolts into conniptions decades after the 1970s:

The Rev. Al Sharpton says a New York Post cartoon that appears to link President Barack Obama to a violent chimpanzee is "troubling at best.". The cartoon in Wednesday's Post by Sean Delonas shows a dead chimp and two police officers, one with a smoking gun. The caption reads, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.". The cartoon refers to Travis the chimp, who was shot to death by police in Stamford, Connecticut, on Monday after it mauled a friend of its owner. It links the chimp to Obama, who signed his administration's economic stimulus plan on Tuesday. Sharpton called the cartoon offensive and divisive. (Cartoon Appears...2009: no page).

Is one to mock the party line, or to kowtow to it? It recurs circularly. In

957Kroll 2004:577-578.

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2008, in fact, Obama and monkeys had already been paired up in an inflammatory campaign when allegedly 'racist' T-shirts had been circulated with the image of cartoon character Curious George linked to the Obama campaign: it never stops paying dividends. Taking things to the logical conclusion, Peter Hoeg's 1997 The

Woman And The Ape tells about “Madelene's behavioral scientist husband brings home a three-hundred-pound ape named Erasmus, and she comes out of her drunken lethargy to become the ape's champion, determined to save him from inhumane tests, and eventually they flee together and fall in love � 958: guess who's coming to dinner, this time?

In Japan (and elsewhere), offbeat dog lovers can visit posh resorts with their pets to spend time; a wedding can eventually be celebrated between their fourlegged friends in full miniature bride and groom costumes: consumerism makes even gay marriage look so passĂŠ. If in the 'swinging sixties' it was trendy to arrange venues to congregate with outcasts, alternative lifestylers and pariahs, in Japan cafes exist to accommodate the whims of dog and cat-lovers who attend with their fourlegged friends.

The same petrified mythologies and stale allegories recur everywhere nearly verbatim. In Italy in 2013 the Letta government (former Communist Party) seeks electoral fortune by appointing a minister of color: what a step forward for all mankind.

958 From the book's page on Amazon.com.

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New faces look increasingly like old ones. Libero reports959 on on November 10, 2013 how the 'honest' politician of color -whom the former Communist party recruited- founded in 2002 -and led until early 2013- another long time favorite of the usual suspects: a charity (DAWA) in charge of raising funds for Congo all along, whose executives belong(ed) to minister Kyenge's immediate family. Journalists interrupt the minister with inopportune questions about DAWA and related activity.

'The great woman' quips she's no longer in charge of the operation, then resumes her elated speech elucidating her grandiose plans to counter racism's unspeakable evil. Of the equally grandiose humanitarian plans for Congo, to which DAWA allegedly pledged itself with donors -who paid up to dollar 60-100 each to attend galas- there is apparently no tangible trace in Africa.

Public subsidies allegedly flurry from the offices of said minister of color in the name of many blessed causes, among which euro 40.000 to organize a reunion about Rom people at Rome; euro 1.500 for a “coffee break” within a meeting regarding “GLBT asylum seekers”; euro 5.940 for seminars on the TS/TG experience.

An endless list of like-minded parties, venues and associations follow as recipients of four and five-digit public subsidies for so many blessed causes under the umbrella of anti-discrimination960.

959 Pizzanelli 2013:no page.

960 Signorini 2013:no page.

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Equally seeking (possible) electoral fortune, party Lega Nord inveighs against the minister of color, in one instance bringing apes into the comparison. The usual

operetta

of

transgression,

defiance,

repentance,

atonement,

tactile

reconciliation and all the abstruse incongruities ensue.

July 27, 2013, news agency ANSA reports how...bananas have been thrown at said minister of color, “the symbol of the new Italy� (simbolo nuova Italia); the secret service is now urged to bring the vile perpetrator of such nameless crime to justice. A montage circulated juxtaposing images of President Bush, jr., with those of a grimacing monkey: everybody thought it was hilarious. Readers shall come to individual conclusions about the standards at hands here.

Here the victim who embodies the horde's sublime values is a minister of color, there a soccer player of color (Mario Balotelli) who -as ANSA reports on February 25, 2013- during a soccer match has to suffer the sight of inflatable bananas jeering supporters displayed.

'You-know-who' and bananas prove to be an irresistible combination.

The Guardian (September 16, 2013) bemoans the nameless crime from a Russian angle: Russian MP posts online a fake picture of a banana being offered to Obama; of many such doctored pictures online, that one is singled out for a prompt political harvest to shame the Putin regime.

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In April 2014, Brazilian soccer player Alves in Spain eats a banana jeering supporters had flung on the field (how could such a pristine banana end up there is another story). The gesture catches on like wildfire: Italian Prime Minister Renzi cashes possible electoral returns as he eats a banana to fight prejudices.

According to sources, the entire situation constitutes a(nother) marketing ploy. Tshirts capitalizing on the event instantly flood the market at euro 69 apiece, while PR men nod in agreement:”Neymar [another soccer player] was supposed to eat the banana; Alves did it instead: it worked like a charm at any rate”961.

In July 2014 bananas take newspapers by storm the world over once again. Pen-jockeys “burning with determination to even up the score” call the unwashed sans-culottes to arms in the defense of the regime of the day and its stale slogans that match the circularity of those of the 1930s. The item is of such capital importance that Italian ANSA962 devotes an article to the issue not in vernacular, yet in English, new humanity's liturgical language.

Carlo Tavecchio - an executive of Italian soccer governing body FIGCreferred to a soccer player of color as someone “who was eating bananas until recently ”; FIFA imperiously demands a probe into the heinous crime. The controversy becomes more popular than Pope Francis' publicity stunts according to comments in the press. Reuters UK concludes on October 7, 2014: 961 PR man Guga Ketzer declared “'Neymar ia comer a banana. Se foi o Daniel Alves, maravilha também'” according to Brazilian news site Veja on April 28, 2014.

962 July 28, 2014.

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Italian federation (FIGC) president Carlo Tavecchio has been barred from the next UEFA Congress and from holding any position with European soccer's governing body for six months over an alleged racist comment he made in August. UEFA said its disciplinary and ethics panel had also ordered the 71-year-old to organise racism awareness event in Italy. The decision was an embarrassment for the FIGC whose own investigation had cleared Tavecchio of any wrongdoing.

With the glib recurrence of a TV ad, in February 2015 963 it is Italian celebrity trainer Arrigo Sacchi who irks party liners who indignantly rise as one in desecrated anger: Sacchi declared there are too many people of color in the Italian soccer youth section.

As If the opposite could ever apply, FIFA -who had been busy with symbolic claptrap all along – crumbles in the umpteenth corruption scandal. FIFA President Blatter, whom his third ex-wife had called “a psycho” in 2011 only to promptly recant, resigns (June 2, 2015) amidst rumors. South Africa possibly paid US$ 10 million as a bribe to be selected as venue for the world soccer cup, then celebrated as a triumph for “diversity and inclusion”. Such bribery had been camouflaged under presumed contributions to some ominous African Diaspora Legacy Programme in the Caribbean: even the most discredited party can gain gain mileage with symbolic guff.

There is no limit to outrage: the sweet human soul bleeds profusely.

Savior-heroes in the clouds wriggle in unspeakable agony witnessing the 963 ANSA, February 17, 2015.

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transgression of their sacred covenant. No matter how many Bolshevik agitators, CEKA-NKVD commissars, fifth-columnists, murderers, robbers, ...ists may be among [insert favorite group], stiff upper lips and moral indignation should never trespass into physical violence. The opposite can naturally apply at all times.

Incinerated cities and displaced populations may be a way to “let Germany find out what it means to start a war ”, as commanding officer Gen. Eisenhower had reportedly declared to the press describing the possibly critical situation in Germany after the end of WWII964.

There is never a valid reason to go that far:

Racism is rife in Russia, and black football players often face racial abuse involving bananas. In 2011, the Brazilian Roberto Carlos, playing for Russian team Anzhi Makhachkala, left the pitch in anger after a banana was thrown at him from the stands. In a separate incident, the club Zenit St Petersburg was fined the equivalent of about £6,300 when a fan offered Carlos a banana before a match.

(Walker 2013: no page).

According to Pearce and Littlejohn, opposing sides in moral conflicts tend to describe the issues using “incommensurate language”; that is, they talk about the issues in terms that just don’t compute with the other side. This tendency leads to us to view our opponents on moral issues as villains or enemies. At the same time, these scholars tell us that people often oversimplify moral issues and speak about them in absolutes, which can sometimes justify a move to violence. (Dues 2010:73).

Apparently, not only apes but everything remotely associated with apes -in the collective imaginary, that is- triggers the the same shtick, unfolding nearly 964Policies&Principles...1945: no page.

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on a monthly basis: quite a sellable commodity as irresistible as training montages in action movies.

The circular civic liturgy, whereby the horde in fusion celebrates its sublime values as the priests of acceptable discourse officiate, may provide -at least to some- relief from the doom and gloom scenario of economy going down the drain, rampant family disintegration, commercial activities folding by the thousands, stock market crashes and swindles unfolding seasonally, unemployment rates slowly but surely rising as new taxes and due diligence provisions loom large on the horizon. As prigs and dolts ire, march, sulk or shake fists to make an ethically supercharged statement about themselves, it matters little whether PR con-men and histrionic celebrities laugh all the way to the bank, cash counter or ballot box.

Culture can often be used as a gauntlet to score political points. In most of his works, the marquis de Sade – a full-fledged Enlightenment litterateur contrary to popular opinion- exorcised -at times humorously, at times bitterly, with or without obscenity- the long-lived conflict between the two intertwined halves of French nobility, noblesse de robe and noblesse d'épée965.

More's imaginary (artificial) island realm Utopia is divided into 54 city States, much as then England was divided into 53 counties (plus the city of London).

965 The terms noblesse de robe and noblesse d'épée designate two intermingled, interlocked but very dissimilar halves of nobility. Robe, as the term explains, identifies nobility mostly serving the crown in the financial or judicial branches of the public administration; Epée designates nobility entirely grounded in ancestry and peerage and typically serving in the military.

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The shire is an administrative division in real-life England and Australia, and one in Tolkien's fictional Middle-Earth, a place in turn already existing in Nordic folklore; Shirriffs are magistrates in Tolkien's nowhere, which sounds just too much like reallife English sheriffs.

Mythical nowheres do not have to exist in the land of the imagination only. However hard to believe, Mr. Spock's native planet Vulcan, a planet much closer to its own sun than the Earth is, is not a gem from the mind of some more or less gifted sci-fi writer. The planet Vulcan was -in fact- sighted a few times by amateur and professional astronomers alike, such as Mr. W.F. Denning corresponding with the Astronomical Register in 1870, and Rev. S.J. Perry writing to the Royal Astronomical Society in April 1877.

Vulcan represented the intramercurial planet (orbiting between Mercury and the Sun) Newtonian physics needed to account for anomalies in Mercury's orbit. Vulcan disappeared when Einstein's theory of gravitation offered a new explanation for said anomalies.

Otherwise put, contrary to expectations, the public is spoon-fed not the more or less otherworldly gem, eccentric hallucination the seer/writer/activist channels through his supposedly unique sensibility, but a grotesque, scrambled image of the society of the day, its schizophrenic fixations and grotesque phobias.

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Campbell966 explains that in a collaboration with psychiatrists, it emerged how the psychiatrist's collection of imagery haunting (or coming from) schizophrenic patients matched the same mythological images he had dealt with in his career.

Even if we want track back the more postmodern fixations, in some accounts Parsifal’s half-brother's complexion is mottled black and white because his parents are Gahmuret and the Black Queen of Zazamanc. Just as it happens in today's movie theaters, a deluge of allegorical and/or politicized pseudo-gnostic flapdoodle can be mixed -thus validated- with historical tidbits:

Wolfram places his scene in the world of the medieval battlefields - not just a fairyland, as you have in many of the other Arthurian romances, but right on the ground. Many of his characters have been identified. The name of the Black Queen of Zazamanc is Belak. If you translate that into an Oriental language, it's "Belakane," which means she was the widow of a warrior named Belak, who was killed in the battle of Aleppo.

They're actual historical characters (Campbell 1989: In Search Of The Holy Grail).

Allegorically, black and white represent the admixture of resoluteness and irresoluteness that epitomizes human life; black might also symbolize - among other things - hell, monastic virtue, and royal pomp. If black came to be associated with Fascism in the 1920s, it had formerly been associated with Bakunin and anarchism.

There is an increasing corpus of literature devoted to the study of 966 2002-a:Interpreting Symbolic Forms.

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hybridity in social and cultural studies; hybridity can then be understood as a province of freakery, best epitomized by Victorian traveling shows putting the performance and/or representation of otherness on stage to entertain enthused visitors. The freak, hybrid or monster -following St.Augustine- epitomizes some allegorical or moralizing truth as the Latin root of the word monster ( monstrare) documents.

The present writer, however, suggests the human mind has another weak spot in the fascination for hybridism: composite creatures resulting from the fantastic conflation of different animal, human, physical and metaphysical forms, such as dragons, centaurs, echidnas, chimeras and sphinxes.:

In short, Renaissance understandings of the body as fluid and dynamic militated against fixed or stable categories of racial distinction. (Seth 2010:175).

Hindu

and

Egyptian

gods

combined

human

and

non-human

characteristics: animal heads (Egyptian gods; Ganesha the Hindu god with an elephant's head...); skin color (Hindu Shiva's skin color is blue); composite animality (Egyptian Ammit “the devourer of the dead� was part lion, hippopotamus and crocodile); or the entire thing (the Hindu god Hanuman is a monkey):

These figures are imaged in theriomorphic (wholly animal) or therianthropic (a combination of human and animal anatomies or a human form wearing animal dress) forms in addition to their anthropomorphic representations. The deities and demons included in this study are Aesculapius, Charu(n), and the Genius Loci, who 977

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are depicted with ophidian imagery, Aita, Faunus, Silvanus, and Apollo Soranus with lupine imagery, Faunus (again), Pan, and Juno Sospita with caprid, the Minotaur and Achelous along with a discussion of the possible representation of Dionysos in taurine form, Picus and three unidentified divinities with avian. (Rupp 2006:xiii).

Alexander once deified appears on his coins with the ram-horns 967 of god Ammon (alternatively Zeus-Ammon), again a mixture of human and non-human characteristics:”co-host Blake Smith, an incisive skeptical investigator, speaks as well of the tantalizing sense of plausibility that gives cryptozoology its spice—even for doubters: “-...- I doubt most of these monsters or cryptids are real—but it’s the

what if that keeps me excited.”968.

Alternatively, human characteristics may be enlarged to superhuman level: Titans, Cyclops and other breeds of folkloric giants are superlatively big, strong, fierce, hungry; Hercules' virility is bottomless, and so is Genghis Khan's.

Every epoch is haunted by a slightly different array of freaks and hybrids:

[In XVIII century France] As explained by Jay Thomas in his study of the Beast of the Gévaudan, unknown animals, hybrids or suspected hybrids such as the Lake Fagua Monster held a special place both in the popular imagination and in contemporary scientific inquiry as they appeared both at fairs and in the discussions of academicians 967 Zeus-Ammon is not the only god the horns allude to, for example in the case of deified Alexander. The Sun god (Helios) is another candidate:”As Alexander-Helius he was represented with the corona radiata symbolizing the sun.-...- A parallel to this is furnished by Moses in Exodus XXXIV, 29, 30, 35, Hebrew having the same word for horn and ray. Michelangelo in conceiving his Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli took these horns literally according to the Vulgate of St. Jerome, and reduced them to two, with the loss of their luminosity -...-.In passing we may note that the name Two-horned, by which Alexander was known in later days, is the literal translation of -...-one of the titles of Amen-Ra ” (Anderson 1927:100-1). The horns as symbol of irresistible royalty were borrowed both by some among Alexander's Hellenistic successors, and Roman Emperors.

968 Cit. in Loxton&Prothero 2013:ch.7.

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(Langellier Bellevue Halbert 2011:32).

Moreover, such freak show figures were remarkably well-known across the classes of Victorian society. Their biographies and advertisements appeared in middleclass publications like the Strand Magazine and Chamber’s Journal, in working-class papers like The Illustrated London News, and also in medical journals such as The Lancet and The British Medical Journal. Throughout the century, moreover, the authors of these elite medical journal articles and puff pieces in the popular press had only to mention the stage names of human oddities to conjure specific images in their readers’ minds.

(McHold 2002:5).

But the marriage of two freaks—whether real or staged as a publicity stunt—kept audiences wondering about the bodily logistics of sexual activity, much in the same manner that people speculated about sex between circus animal ‘‘couples.’’ Bodily deformity, like animality and racial nonwhiteness, was a license, an acceptable avenue through which to discuss sexuality -...-. Still, the presence of the family could also be sexually evocative. Audiences perhaps found the domestic scenes especially appealing, because they offered ‘‘proof ’’ that the freak still had functional genitalia, practiced sexual intercourse, and produced children. Audiences surely imagined the logistics of sexual activity -...-. Euroamerican-made freaks and ‘‘novelty’’ acts were often in racial disguise. -...- Euroamerican sword swallowers were variously called Arabs and South Sea Islanders -...- Whereas tattooed women were marketed as victims of forcible abduction, the tattooed man’s ‘‘color’’ was the mark of his travels around the globe, like those of the sailor or soldier. His tattoos were a permanent record of his rites of passage into manhood, a living memento of his physical contact with faraway people. -...- Other forms of willful bodily mutilation further transmogrified the male body.(Davis 2002:141,179, 181).

To the Egyptians, animals were not considered inferior species, primitive and gross . Such a way of seeing has come about by looking with an exaggeratedly Darwinian eye that places all beings in a hierarchy. This is the kind of thinking which In forms a theory like Piaget's , whose developmental ideas of intelligence, still enormously influential, suggest that a child's mental processes of growth recapitulate a centuries- long cultural evolution from primitive iconic processes or picture-thinking to formal abstract ones. Strictly applied, the theory prescribes the n ìature of intelligence in such a limited way 979

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that not only are many rich and subtle cultures denigrated, by virtue of their imaginative, picture-thinking capacities , as 'unintelligent' , but the very possession of 'intelligence' is restricted to scientists in Western cultures. To understand the Egyptian view we also have to summon Thoth and reimagine intelligence in a way that does not encourage us to look down on animals as somehow earlier and primitive. For the Egyptian, the special characteristics of animals meant that they were more likely to be revered than disparaged. In this view, each animal species is understood to embody a specific and supreme ability which it expresses to the full, and which is used as a symbol in the hieroglyphs denoting the gods. (Angelo 1997:15).

But if monstrous species did not provoke fear, the same could not be said of monstrous individuals. Monstrous individuals (conjoined twins, a child born with two heads, and so forth) spoke not to the benign magnificence of God but to his vengeance and anger. Monstrous individuals generated horror less because of their form than because of their signification: They were warnings, portents of the evils to come if sinful Christians did not return to the path of God. (Seth 2010:178).

As this writing contends, myth(ologie)s tend to coalesce: freakery is no exception. As the blurred imagery of mesoamerican civilizations (Maya/Aztec) caught Victorian imagination, P.T. Barnum promptly boarded the bandwagon putting on itinerant display “the Aztec Lilliputians”. The pair from Salvador was presented as living inhabitants of the lost city of Iximaya, probably modelled upon Palenque. Colonial escapades to a mythical Eldorado home to a fabulous race: the hottest commodity for the popular culture of the day.

In 1849, a deposition in support of the story 969 was read before the Ethnological Society Of England, whereas in 1851 the Boston Society Of Natural 969 An explorer in flight had allegedly captured the “Lilliputians” after the massacre of his expedition at the hands of Iximaya's ferocious natives (Altick 1978:284-5). Readers won't be hard-pressed to identify a bundle of cherished motifs such as the hero's journey; the desecration of the mystical body; the perilous flight; the boon to be brought back and so forth.

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History received reports of a different kind: the “Lilliputians” descended from Indio tribes and -in the specific- from deformed and imbecile parents, as their intellectual abilities warranted970. Deceit notwithstanding, the “Aztec Lilliputians” met the English royal family: ads claimed 400.000 visitors had come to see them during their London exhibition in 1853-4. Still in the Victorian age, a renewed interest in Atlantis bloomed. U.S politician Donnelly in 1882 published a theosophical Atlantis, which he described as the antediluvian abode of a “root race” of Aryans with Germanic traits.

Popular culture kept the 'miniature men' and the colonial escapade item alive in recent decades: 1961 Japanese monster movie Mothra, and its many sequels.

Myths tend to coalesce. In Mothra, an expedition sails to a remote island to document atomic tests' aftereffects. Natives seem in good shape, and the island is blooming thanks to a mysterious cult presided over by two one-foot high singing priestesses, whom are spirited away by rogue expedition members in order to become a freak show attraction: a sacred monster finally comes to their rescue.

Mothra shows how cold war scenarios easily meet the deliverance of the virgin, and Iximaya scenarios.

Yet, it is not always a matter of more or less preposterous and/or politicized folklore. Outsiders, whether metaphorical or otherwise, often save the day. To name just a few, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the controversial Canadian 970 Altick 1978:284-5.

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statesman, was considered to be in a privileged position to disentangle the Canadian bi-cultural dilemma because his parents afforded him both Francophone and Anglophone origins.

Eamon De Valera was born in New York to an Irish mother and a Cuban father: he became a pivotal leader in the Irish independence movement, and an Irish chief statesman. Bob Marley, the reggae star who became an enduring idol of lefty hippies as embodiment of colored Jamaica, was born to an European-Jamaican father, and an African-Jamaican mother; another herald of the new humanity pelted with unrelenting admiration is U.S President Obama.

Roberto971 extols what he characterizes as W. Churchill's unparalleled gift to come across to Americans in 1943 as “one of their own” -just like Hitler had told the German Siemens crowd- (“a child of both worlds”) because his mother was American. Just as third-rate novels or movies of colonial or exotic flavor may predict, the liminal figure, the outsider, the scout guide who went native, the mestizo turns into a messiah to save the day as native, in-bred nincompoops can't figure it out after all.

Heralds of the new humanity are indeed ten-a-penny. Rock star Lenny Kravitz (born 1964) claims in an hagiographic interview:

971 2011:Give And Take.

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Growing up the way that I did, seeing my parents’ struggles and what this country has been through regarding race and prejudice, Obama’s election was just such a huge moment -...-my mother told me, “Look, I’m African-American and your father is a Russian Jew, and you should be proud of both sides, neither more than the other. But understand this: Society is not going to see both sides. They are going to see your brown skin, and assume you are black. (Barna 2011:no page).

While many consider these occurrence as the mere actualization on the earthly plane of quintessential, independent values, it is more likely to see brute political expediency at work, such as when Alexander tried to forge a new ruling class for his intercontinental empire strongly pushing for intermarriage between his Graeco-Macedonian and Persian subjects972.

In other words, the hybrid might at times play the part of the hero, whose power can be bequeathed to the people or group incorporating him. The Romans celebrated magna mater (great mother) Cybele. In a dies sanguinis (day of blood= obsession with blood), Roman devotees whipped themselves, and some even underwent ritual castration to emulate the sacrifice of Cybele's mystical spouse Attis, whom eunuch priests (Galli) served.

Although under the attack of secularization and Americanization, Zapotec Muxes (Southern Mexico), Hijras (India), and recently mainstream Burmese -often but not always transsexual or transvestite- nat ladies ( celebrating animistic spirits called Nats) used to retain traditional sacred powers based upon their status as 972 The Persian Empire in those times included even Egypt and reached India on one end, and Thrace on the other.

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third gender, which today increasingly falls within the conventional realm of GLBT lifestyles:�Thus sexual abnormality is reported in the lives of many shamans, in accord with the trickster constellation.�973. The blurring of sexual boundaries may also embody a fight against oppressive authority, most often masculine.

As this writing contends, different strands of myth easily coexist, and TS/TV Burmese nat ladies not only generate good fortune and reconciliation with the gods, but actually shower the faithful with (some of the) money they just received as ceremonial offering; they also perform bawdy dances, and indulge themselves with food and drink as proxies for the spirit being honored: Nats are human to a fault (=we are all tainted).

An equivalent exists among the Muslim Bugi people of Muslim Indonesia, whereby transgendered priest-shamans (bissus) bridge between the human and the spirit realm. To prove they are one with the spirits, bissus try to stab themselves with sharp knives: drawing no blood is an auspicious sign (=the blood connection again).

Hybridity and politics are never disjointed, for even in the XVIII century France:

Political events of the decade then made use of these ambiguous creatures, playing on their allegorical potency in part derived from 973 Hansen 2001:67.

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classical mythology to caricature destructive ministers and queens. -...conceptions of monsters like the harpies did not develop in a vacuum-...- social critics used the harpy to speak to numerous concerns and issues. -...- By way of their fantastic combinations and mixtures, hybrids and hermaphrodites could serve to help define the reasonable or normal. (Langellier Bellevue Halbert 2011:2,32) Men were men and beasts were beasts. Monsters sent shivers down the spines of many because they found a loophole in this separation.

They combined civilization and the wild. in their physical form as well as their actions. They mocked the partition between the human and the animal, bouncing from one realm to the next or settling squarely in between the two. Even the high ideas of good and evil, the most contradictory of all man's categories, were not safe from the monsters' corrupting touch. (Kovatch 2008:24).

When fully understood, the vulgarity of the Other stands as a manifestation of the inner tension all people experience at the heart of their own humanity. In his appreciation of the liberating potential of vulgarity, Sartre envisioned the possibility of a reappropriation of otherness that would ultimately bring about a reconsideration of the problematic categories of self and other. (CharmĂŠ 1991:8).

As far as Feirefiz (Parzifal's half-brother) goes, he converts and relocates with his spouse (the Grail bearer, no less) to the East where he preaches the gospel to heathens.

His son is Prester John 974, King of a Christian Kingdom European Christians will be in search of for centuries as an ally against Muslim invasion, as documented in real travel diaries and maps. The myth of Prester John presents much of the same ambiguities -as a Christ-mimetic figure- as William Tell and other millenarian figures do:� After this, it is not surprising to find that no two authors

974 The Grail legend seems to have incorporated the legendary figure of Prester John.

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who describe the deeds of William Tell agree in the details of topography and chronology”.

According to the Dutch version of Lancelot, Parsifal is John's father, whereas in other variants he is John's heir975. John the priestly (=prester) King brings back Judaeo-Christian suggestions of kingly messiahs. In Mahayana Buddhism, too, many Buddhas can wear a crown (=kingly power over this world) and a monastic robe (=priestly duties).

No surprise, for even such eminent Christian writers as Lactantius and Eusebius give avowedly first-hand -yet widely diverging- accounts of Constantine's mythical vision that pushed him to adopt Christianity. The Emperor was either asleep (Lactantius), or awake leading his army, also a witness (Eusebius 976); even dates mismatch, for the vision avowedly took place just before the Milvius Bridge battle for Lactantius (28 October 312), or quite earlier in Constantine's Italian campaign for Eusebius.

The content of the vision was disputed as well:

Constantine had a reputation for defining his actions in terms of religious visions and dreams. According to Eusebius, “God often honored him with a vision.” Two in particular have become famous.

One was a vision of Apollo in 310. After defeating the emperor Maximian in southern Gaul, Constantine stopped at a temple during 975 Ramos 1997:38.

976 While in his writings Eusebius implies to belong to the Emperor's inner circle, he possibly met Constantine only four times.

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his march back to the Rhine frontier. There he had a vision of Apollo, or more likely of himself as Apollo. -...- Eusebius presented his History as a straightforward, unitary narrative from beginning to end-...-. In fact, his narrative was a pastiche of segments that included numerous additions and modifications from different moments in his life. (Van Dam 2011:11,83).

In 832 CE, Scottish Angus -King of Alba- received the vision of St. Andrew's cross over the blue sky: he thus defeated invading Angles and Saxons.

That's how the Scottish flag was born, and how St. Andrew became Scotland's patron.

Miraculous visions that avert disaster were rather common: in 395 CE uprising Goths fail to pillage Athens. Greek historian Zosimus has it that Pallas Athena and Achilles materialized on the city's walls to dissuade the invader; alternatively, large sums were paid to bribe the Goths into withdrawal. In 1655, the Virgin Mary avowedly appears on the walls (=threshold motif) of the Czestochowa monastery (Poland) to defeat invading Swedish armies.

As with all those recurring figures in iterated situations, Prester John was avowedly located in several distant places. As with other such elusive figures, Prester John from time to time surfaced from the achronotopos of legend. John might be indifferently associated -or superposed- with St. Thomas Apostle ( St. Thomas=Prester John of the Indies977), whose presence is also linked to Christian 977 Medieval legends suggested that St. Thomas' body rested in the Kingdom of Prester John. To choose the new Prester John (=death and life become one), a procession would take place around Thomas' relics, until his hand -that had entered Christ's wounds- would point to a successor.

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communities in exotic locales such as India -where Mar Thoma Christians believe St. Thomas evangelized them in the I century-, Sri Lanka etc.

John assertedly contacted several monarchs offering an alliance against the Muslim world: Pope Eugenius III in 1145; in 1165 Pope Alexander III and Emanuel Comnenos Emperor of Byzantium among others at various points in time978.

They tried to establish communication with the providential ally but in vain:

What lies behind the letter? It has been long recognized as the work of a European, for the author's background peeps out in many places.

Most of the wonder stories introduced are from classical authorities of a 'scientific' character whose works were then available in Europe.'

Other marvels are lifted from the Alexander Romance, composed in the second or third century by an author usually called PseudoCallisthenes. Some of the ideas expressed are new, however, and clearly fit the European picture of about 1165. The essential question is whether our author, using Prester John as his mouthpiece, deliberately fabricated a ruler and an empire for his own purposes or whether he wrote in behalf of a monarch he regarded as to some extent real. To answer our own question at the start, he did both.-...- To summarize the three theories: the first identifies Prester John with one person in Asia, the second makes him a series of sovereigns in Africa, and the third turns him into an allegory which the all-too-literal Westerners insisted on endowing with flesh and blood (Nowell 1953:436-7).

Belief in the medieval fantasy of Prester John -...- drove military field decisions that propelled the Fifth Crusade to abject failure in the thirteenth century; in the fifteenth century and after, the fantasy of John’s existence beckoned to those who sought to open up new routes 978 Prester John seems to be another of those evergreen, immortal figures ala Pindola or (count of) Saint Germain that myth cannot do without.

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and territories, leading the way to settlement and colonization—new empires—in postmedieval eras. The fantasy of the medieval past itself, constructed and reinforced by postmedieval periods, delivers material effects: The fantasy of a pre-political, pre-racial, pre-nationalist, and pre-imperial time that is the Middle Ages—a zone of freedom evacuated of the dispositions bedeviling modernity and capital—has enabled the production of the very identities we know as modern, but at a distinct cost, and with material consequences for our understanding of race today. (Heng 2003:14-15).

Some contend all there was to it were sensationalized rumors about a clash in which Turkish (possibly Nestorian 979) chieftains

had defeated Muslim

chieftains near Samarkand in 1141. For a while, invading Mongol tribes were equated with Prester John's providential armies. Genghis Khan in the 1220s had become David, Prester John's son.

Alternatively, Marco Polo mentions a clash between Genghis Khan and Prester John, whereby

in the end Chinghis Kaan obtained the victory. And in the battle Prester John was slain. And from that time forward, day by day, his kingdom passed into the hands of Chinghis Kaan till the whole was conquered. (cit. in Brooks 2009:276).

Since the myth ought to have become fact by all accounts, Prester John reappears in the St. Ursula's church at Cologne (Germany), whereby the mythical Prester John materializes as a gilded XV century bust. John was assertedly in Ursula's retinue, the IV century Christian princess pagan Germans slaughtered along 979 A Christian heresy. It preached the disunion of human and divine nature in Christ to the point of hypothesizing two persons coexisting in the same body. After being excommunicated and prosecuted, Nestorians moved eastwards into Persia, later China and beyond.

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with the 11.000 (=surfeit that boggles the mind) virgin maidens in her retinue.

What's more, the bust contains a skull, allegedly John's, which experts discard.

Beside the heart of Asia, Prester John's realm could be located elsewhere, for example in Ethiopia or on a number of exotic islands, such as the kingdom of Oponia -somewhere between India and the Pacific islands-, which some identify with Japan. Alternatively, the Portuguese docking in India – or later trying to reach Tibet- thought for a while they had found the mythical, elusive Christian kingdom.

The heart of Asia (Kara-Kitai) is also offered as John's abode under the name of Ye Liu Dashi980 who defeated Muslim armies at Samarkand. Alternatively, the Caucasus would be John's abode as the historical IvanĂŠ Orbelian, a Georgian chieftain who defeated Muslim armies in 1123-4.

Alternatively, a sort of Prester John figure could be identified with Sophus, a mythical Persian King who had defeated the Ottomans according to XVI century European chronicles that struggled with the correct identification of eastern ethno-cultural milieus: Persians were Muslims after all.

The Ethiopian version of Prester John didn't fade into oblivion, but is allegedly still present to this day, as one of the three magi 981 honoring the infant 980 Chimeno Del Campo 2006:135. Possibly a Sino-Mongolian region. Kara-Khitans were sinicized Khitans who migrated towards the steppes of central Asia.

981 In another interpretation, the three Magi represented the three ages of man. Popular culture keeps the item fully alive. In Italy, a commercial brand of saffron features three chefs in its logo: a White man, a Chinese, and an African one.

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Jesus is a Black African, or the distorted image of the Ethiopian version of Prester John, whose ambassadors had approached Pope Clement VI in 1351 at Avignon.

In his letter to Comnenos, Prester John bewilders his readers with a depiction of his fabulous realm, its magical wonders and riches (=the surfeit motif):

I, Prester John, who reign supreme, surpass in virtue,riches and power all creatures under heaven. Seventy kings are our tributaries.

-...-Honey flows in our land, and milk everywhere abounds. In one region there no poison exists and no noisy frog croaks, no scorpions are there, and no serpents creeping in the grass. No venomous reptiles can exist there or use their deadly power. In one of the heathen provinces flows a river called the Indus, which, issuing from Paradise, extends its windings by various channels through all the province; and in it are found the emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls, sardonyxes, and many other precious stones. Between the sandy sea and the aforesaid mountains, is a stone in a plain, of incredible medical virtue which cures Christians or Christian candidates of whatever infirmities afflict them, in this manner. -...- For gold, silver, precious stones, animals of every kind and the number of our people, we believe there is not our equal under heaven. There are no poor among us; we receive all strangers and wayfarers; thieves and robbers find no place among us, neither adultery nor avarice. (Cit. in Brooks 2009:251-3).

Confusion of colonial flavor was present everywhere. Originally imported from the Americas, corn was described in Renaissance herbals as coming from Turkey, another fabulous land of colonial flavor, whence the Italian name for the plant: granoturco (Turkish grain). Maize could also be dubbed “wheat of Portugal�, which Iberian powers were spreading all over their colonial empires.

As this writing contends, myths tend to coalesce as duration wins over

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linear time. In contemporary Sikkim (India), certain Christian Churches portray Jesus dressed as a Tibetan Lama as he carries the cross. The quintessential sparagmos of Judaeo-Christian hero-founders nods at the hot contemporary commodity -in high demand in Sikkim, abode of a sizable Tibetan community- of Tibetan irredentism. In Cambodia, Jesus is at times represented on the cross without the lower portion of a leg in order to reflect the plight of peasants dealing with the threat minefields still pose decades after the Vietnam war ended:“a Rorschach test of ever changing sensibilities�.

In Islamic sources Jesus -also a prophet of that religion- is typically represented enveloped in fire, wearing a turban, and often with oriental traits reflecting the community that produced such representation. In Mormon iconography, Jesus is depicted with strong Caucasian traits as a blond Scandinavian hunk. The Mexican patroness Virgin of Guadalupe is hailed as virgen morena (dark virgin= mestizo virgin), just one in a long list of Black Madonnas982.

John Frum, the mythical Melanesian hero-savior, can equally appear as a U.S soldier in military fatigues, or -as he first appeared in 1939- a mestizo dressed in European style. Alternatively, John Frum's worldly identity can be denied in favor of a transcendental one: John Frum as a sort of holy ghost.

982 Although the virgin's skin color was in Mexico associated with the peculiar mestizo phenotype, other Black Madonnas existed, such as Monteserrat's (since the IX century, Spain), nicknamed la morenata, the little black one. The legend want this holy statue to have been originally recovered by shepherds in a cave: mythemes galore. The origin of the color may be manifold: oxidation of an originally white statue (Montserrat); nods to immemorial mother goddesses such as Isis, and so forth.

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It'd be easy to lump it all together and dump it as folklore (at best). Still writing about hybrids and prodigious creatures, dragons were sighted, fought and slayed in historical times -as mentioned in numerous chronicles- and not in antediluvian golden ages, much as the hybrid of social, cultural and minority studies has allegedly been equally identified.

To name just a few, the Italian monastery Convento Di Santa Fiora is home to part of the cranium of one such dragon a local landlord allegedly killed in 1488: experts have determined it to be the cranium of a Nile crocodile. At Verona, the centre is home to Arco Della Costa (arch of the rib) built in 1470; it's home to another relic some consider a whale's rib, others a dragon's. In the Bergamo province in Italy (in churches at Almenno San Salvatore and Paladina), giant ribs are presented as remains of a dragon, which some have identified as remains of a whale and a mammoth.

Sardinian folklore mentions a dragon called Scultone, whose stare could kill. At Baunei (Piana Del Golgo, Italy), a fissure is presented as the historical evidence of a battle between St. Peter the Apostle and the Scultone, whereby Peter fought using a mirror to avoid the dragon's lethal stare; it won't escape readers how that's just a retelling of the Perseus myth. At Leonidio (Greece), fishermen are rumored to have slain a giant serpent that terrorized the region: a fossilized portion of such monster's tail is preserved in the Agios Nikolaos monastery.

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The “alligator in the sewer” is considered as one quintessential urban legend embroidering upon anxieties the density and diversity of the city implies (=sewer system=the underground abode of the unholy); yet on March 3, 2011 the latest sighting of a crocodile in urban settings comes from Le Conce area at Foligno, Italy983: a woman assertedly saw one attacking a duck to feed.

Many crocodiles have been sighted in Italy in recent years:



In the Enza river (May 2005);



At the Falciano lake (April 2010);



At the laghetto di Villa Bolasco (March 2011);



In a creek at Torrano Lodigiano (May 2013);



In the Po river (April 2014)...

The explanation put forth is that the crocodile might have been bought as a pet, and disposed of in the wilderness as he grew too big: precisely the explanation tied to the urban legend.

The sewer system -or another edition of the chthonic imagery like wells, the terra cava of theosophic and NSDAP imagery- can regurgitate all sorts of things.

983 Umbria 24 2011: no page.

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For example -according to Associated Press on May 28, 2013- a Chinese baby (“baby n.59”) was still alive after an ordeal in a 10 cm wide L-tube. As expected in those cases, hundreds of sources copy the news the world over with diverging details:”After this, it is not surprising to find that no two authors who describe the deeds of William Tell agree in the details of topography and chronology.”. The baby would have spent in the sewer system any amount of time from 2 hours to days (2, 3...it varies).

Sick or endangered children -and related paraphernalia- are a preferred fuel to propel viral hoaxes over the internet. Well-meaning pencil-necked sweathogs would click on and spread gut-wrenching stories about sick or endangered children. Con-games, scammers, bogus MLM subscriptions, and worthless personal pages await those gullible enough to believe that forwarding the hoax far and wide enough would translate into the sweet baby (which may not even actually exist) being finally rescued, adopted, soothed, hospitalized, and so forth:”When we pity, we are, at least fur the moment, defenseless”;”we’re so caught up in the drama of what happened to so-and-so that we don’t have the cognitive resources to disagree.

We’re so engaged in following the narrative that we don’t have the energy to question what is being said. ”.

The end of the story either consists in baby n.59 being well in a Chinese hospital incubator, with the optional horde in fusion competing to either visit the

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baby, or to offer plentiful help in the form of diapers and consumer goods.

A Catholic nun at Rieti gives birth in 2014 to a child -named Francis after the Pope-: she claims she never had sexual intercourse, but was hospitalized due to “stomach cramps�. Elated masses rush to send clothes and donations, despite all the perplexities the event ought to rise for many reasons.

It looks suspiciously like another edition of the adoration of a divine child who barely escaped death (was born dejected, and so forth) complete with gift-bearing witnesses, today podcast live via cellphone. Of course, the myth can be inverted: the divine child may be brutalized, thrown away in a garbage bin or public bathroom, or murdered. The three wise Kings bring gifts and devotion, whereas Herod brings mayhem to the divine child. At Mazzarino (Italy), a woman 984 tries to get rid of her 10 month old daughter by throwing her into the sewer system.

Once again, the 'divine child' shtick -worthy of either consecration or desecration- is not the reflection of some celestial blueprint of what allegedly happened in a time before time, but a warped projection of human mind's recesses.

In Japan, a slow but steady decline in birthrates accompanies a rise of the toy dog phenomenon as an ersatz, possibly rented out for so much an hour in specialized shops catering to lovelorn, frazzled inner city dwellers.

984 ANSA, February 17 2014.

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Toy dog breeds are manipulated to look increasingly child-like in appearance so that maladjusted humans can enact the same old routines folklore prescribes: lucky dogs are pampered like princes, wheres unlucky ones are thrown away, abused or neglected, just like the non-existent children they replace.

Obtuse allegories, and petrified myth(ologie)s, never stop paying dividends:

People are more willing to give when they know that a specific, identifiable other personextnote will benefit from their actions. This isn’t necessarily a good approach to charitable giving. When a child’s suffering makes the national news, spontaneous donations to that one child might total hundreds of thousands of dollars. Such giving is very generous, but it helps only one person or one family—at the expense of many others who might have similar needs. In addition, people are often less willing to give when many thousands or millions of people need help, as when famine afflicts an entire region or when war or genocide tears a country apart. In a general sense, the larger the problem, the less likely it is to elicit charitable giving. (Huettel 2014:134).

From the sewer system, or the ventilation shaft, all sorts of threats may come. CBC News (August 5, 2013) reports that a rock python would have killed by constriction two boys at Campbellton (Canada) after it escaped through a ventilation shaft. Large, exotic and potentially lethal snakes on the run crop up all over. At Seriate (Italy), a boa snake is purportedly found on a...third floor terrace, as e xtnote That is why most charities, whether genuine or fraudulent, prefer to solicit the public -for example in ad banners online- with the image of -say- one infant of color, or one stray dog at a time, with some trivia attached, such as the child's name and age. As with most ads in the online dating industry, the person in the picture may not even exist. Online dating services -just another party that wants your money- are known for displaying stock or professional photos (note of this writer).

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Italian site Yourreporternews reports on august 6, 2013.

Mythical or monstrous creatures can -as hypothesized earlier- take up human form; or humans can be provided of animal characteristics. The vagina

dentata (vagina with teeth) legend is also long-lived. However based on anatomical impossibilities, it persisted in tribal myths and immemorial folklore the world over.

Such odd legend was last alive and well according to official statements given by U.S soldiers involved in late wars such as that of Vietnam. Different categories of hostile women (prostitutes, fifth-columnists...) avowedly put objects inside their genital area in order to maim, incapacitate or kill U.S soldiers985.

The item co-existed with rumors detailing fatal venereal diseases always spread by potential enemies or fifth-columnists. The fantastic hybrid devil-woman of the lore mixing human and animal characteristics -and her anatomical impossibilities- takes up the garb of wartime fifth-columnist: the legend is scaled down just enough to fit the storyline.

Western lore is replete with outcast or liminal group members ( homosexuals, Jews, women...) allegedly busy poisoning wells, stirring magic cauldrons or “greasing� doorstep with noxious ointments. It is an historical occurrence that itinerant processions of medieval flagellanti whipping themselves to atone in order to avert the catastrophic plague in Italy possibly contributed to 985 Gulzow&Mitchell 1980.

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spreading the virus as they shed blood everywhere.

Contemporary Catholic pilgrimage sites warn against the possible spreading of diseases as countless pilgrims kneel or crawl their way towards altars along predetermined paths, thus possibly coming in contact with infected blood stains previous pilgrims might have left behind.

As suggested above, hybridity goes along with other mythemes quite well. In Italy in the early 1990s, party Lega Nord cashed for a while enormous electoral returns upon the collapse of the political establishment in the wake of Communism's political desuetude; a row of judicial investigations and scandals wiped out the biggest ruling party Democrazia Cristiana, and its much smaller postwar allies (Partito Socialista, Partito Liberale, Partito Socialdemocratico, Partito

Repubblicano).

Irrespective of the salt that any political propaganda may -or may not- be worth as clumsy stage act, Lega Nord back then pined for a newly found unity among Northern Regions, whose social and ethno-cultural fabric massive internal migrations from Southern Italy had defaced; an exploit that then beginning unchecked Third-World immigration promised to repeat.

Lega Nord's nativism hit a nerve with the exogamic majority. Books started filling the top shelf announcing how Nostradamus -or any such other for the

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matter- had predicted 'the great nation' would implode (the USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia...).

Op-eds

circularly

foretold

ethnic

hatred

would

lead

(=manipulation of the time-line in the public mind) to the mass-execution, deportation etc of both transplanted Southern immigrants, and their panic-stricken, exogamic offspring; Belle Epoque nationalists frothed at the mouth wanting to march in the defense of the artificial kin of 'Italianness' (=fusion of the horde).

Pedlars at a radio station rode the white horse of oneness with a new slogan: “one nation, one station�, flaunted nativism, and paraded pride in exogamic backgrounds in what looked like a re-edition of the gay rights movements of an earlier period. Lega Nord partisans -although mostly either in, or issued from, exogamic relationships percentage-wise - lulled themselves into a newly found sense of unity based upon meta-historical unbroken Celtic lineages.

Anxieties regarding one's bloodline are not confined to peculiar countries like Italy, Portugal or Spain object in the middle ages of extensive Muslim colonization (in Italy one might add slaves from Asia imported in late antiquity; Byzantine Greeks; Albanian Christians fleeing en masse from Muslim invaders...).

Nor are they the exclusive province of those who contemplate with unease their foregoers who might include boat people and other dispossessed, marauding gogetters in search of greener grass.

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(Not so) oddly enough, Spain would produce the concept of limpieza de

sangre (blood cleanliness) that -after the Reconquista- allegedly parted those of immemorial, unbroken Christian ancestry from those who had Jews and/or Muslims in their family tree. Under the Francoist regime, the party line was that Arab Muslims came to Spain, stayed a while (some 7 centuries), then were surgically removed.

In northern Italy, party Lega Nord proposed Padania in the 1990s, a name given to an imagined homeland that encompassed Italy north of the Po river.

Padani (=inhabitants of Padania) would thus be of pure, unbroken Celtic lineage.

This despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of people in Northern Italy – including Lega Nord's tenors and honchos- are either in -or issued from- exogamic relationships with transplanted immigrants from Southern Italy that flooded northwards in the 1950-60s. In the Iberic pensinsula as well, anxieties regarding broken lineages can be soothed exploring Celtiberia, or the Celtic (once again) bedrock of the Iberian stock.

German Kaiser Wilhelm II -Queen Victoria's grandson- declared “I wish I had not a drop of English blood in my veins”, or – as a student- he wished “ he could drain all the 'damned' English blood from his veins.”. Wilhelm's detractors -especially during WWI- lampooned him, and made fun of the “little English blood” the Kaiser (Queen Victoria's grandson after all) possessed. Just a few years earlier, 1001 DOLT

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however, The Times (February 6, 1901) had greeted a Wilhelm grieving the loss of his grandmother Queen Victoria thus:”Your English tears for love of England's Queen - England will not forget ”.

WWI exploded among a coterie of consanguineous monarchs (the royal houses of England, Spain, Norway, Germany, Russia, Greece, Denmark, Romania etc were all consanguineous). Edward VII of England was named “the uncle of Europe” as he was related to almost all royal houses. If this network of blood relations seemed a pledge for peace, this clique of ill-assorted relatives plunged the world into a catastrophe because extended family struggles were camouflaged under the fig leaf of Belle Epoque nation States and their imagined community rhetoric.

As an ominous joke, Edward VII disliked his younger relative Wilhelm II, who in turn embodied the German bid to rival with Britain's maritime power.

Wilhelm II in turn admitted he was interested in maritime exploits on account of his English blood as son of Queen Victoria's eldest daughter.

It was as well known party Lega Nord consulted with a series of intellectuals from various provinces of the political spectrum -from a Catholic down to a Spenglerian right; from a libertarian to a Social-communist left- in charge of weaving the party's line offering rows of suggestions that the leadership might -or might not- incorporate in the 'recaptured eternal truth' fed to the masses. While

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nativism revealed itself as short-lived political charade based on untenable premises986, it occasioned -as a reaction to the same- the birth of possibly the major, longest-lasting post-war political success in a major western country: Berlusconi's party Forza Italia.

Years later, U.S wrestler Eddie Guerrero plotted the same trajectory:

viva la raza. Guerrero enlivened pride in Hispanic/Mexican (=la raza) heritage as he presented himself as a champion of the same; he also emboldened exogamic members of the audience to literally parade pride in their mixed parentage by holding signs that read -to name one- “I'm half Mexican�.

The hybridity psychosis recurrently gives rise to well-orchestrated -according to op-eds and media headlines that conveniently start heckling in the opportune direction well ahead of time- pop-culture phenomena social alchemists, progressives and their ilk sing as heralding the 'spontaneous rise' of the new humanity.

There is little difference with the artificial suspense, perfunctory storylines and 'accidental' events lined up to introduce and groom new wrestlers; the behemoth (Canadian) Earthquake in fact initially appeared as a meek member of the public 'casually' asked to step on the ring to assist with the main event. In Italy,

986 As repeatedly pointed out, most party leader were themselves either in -or issued from- exogamic relationships.

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such was the case the election of an Italian mulatto national beauty queen (Denny Mendez in 1996987); and -as of late- Black soccer player Mario Balotelli.

Pen-jockeys for hire cannot hold both their enthusiasm for the 'great ideas', the hybrid Ozymandias of the moment, and their execration for those who think otherwise:

After two goals Thursday that catapulted Italy to the Euro 2012 final, Italians immediately anointed a new national hero: Mario Balotelli, whose biography neatly encapsulates the changes that have swept Italian society in the past 20 years — as well as its contradictions.

Born in Palermo from Ghanaian parents but raised by an Italian family in Brescia who legally adopted him when he was 18, Balotelli has become an icon of a country still struggling with notions of citizenship and legal rights. Even as fans and commentators have cited Balotelli as a symbol of Italy’s new multiethnic society, there are some Italians who still believe that nationality is a question of color. -...Yet while he was still playing in Italy, Mr. Balotelli, like other black athletes who play here, was subject to racist episodes. When newspapers reported that he had revealed in June after a visit to Auschwitz that one of his adoptive parents was of Jewish heritage, an Italian extreme right group posted unprintable slurs on its Web site.

(Povoledo 2012: no page).

Balotelli's case is not unique. Born in the USA to recently landed Philipino immigrants, Michelle Malkin has become one of the loudest poster women for reaganite conservatism and anti-immigration policies: divine irony.

The fixation with hybridity truly is as old as man; even Buddhism identified a strand thereof. Much older examples are also common, such as the 987 Media headlines started politicizing the item and prophesying the 'providential' outcome to settle political scores well ahead of the actual event in what looked like a Fujimori or Obama event ahead of time.

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paleolithic Sorcier Des Trois Frères (France, about 13.000 BCE), a creature with human and animal characteristics (wolf, owl, deer, bison...opinions differ):

Now recall those ancient cave paintings and artifacts showing chimerical images that blended humans and animals together —believed to have been created by shamans. Initially, I only suggested that these hybrid images resembled contemporary shamanistic art, but -...- we can now move towards defining this artwork as religiously iconic. The oldest of these hybrid images, the lion-man statuette, which is a little over 30,000 years old, represents the first evidence of humankind’s fascination with violations of ontological categories and could therefore provide clues as to the specific date when hominid brains acquired religion. Notice that mere strangeness does not result in a religious idea. Bizarre or randomly put-together ideas will not seem religious unless they take on Boyer’s specific cognitive form. -...- The distinction between magicoreligious themes and more generic bizarre ideas also applies to psychosis. Contrary to popular belief, psychotic experiences are not a random assortment of non sequiturs, but have their own intrinsic structure. Although no consensus exists on their precise form, it appears to me that many common psychotic ideas resemble Boyer’s religious forms. Examples include demonic influences, voices from God, telepathic communication and nihilistic delusions (such asfeeling one is missing their vital organs). (Polimeni 2012:171-2).

The journeying founder storyline may merge with the hybridism storyline: Khmer people claimed as mythical ancestors a Hindu sage having reached Cambodia, who married the daughter of the serpent-king, whose race ruled over fantastic underwater kingdoms (the kind of place portrayed in recent Star Wars movies, by the way).

‘hybridity’ is often misunderstood as a purely contemporary concern.

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The genealogy of the term is, of course, more accurately associated with the development of the natural sciences and in particular botany and zoology, where it referred to the outcome of a cross between two separate species of plant or animal. In the eighteenth century, when classification of the natural world and its material products became a veritable obsession, the concept of the hybrid was expanded to incorporate humans. Even before Social Darwinism had permeated nineteenth-century society the categorization of different human populations into taxonomies of ‘race’ was already a central theme within Europe -...-. the postmodern celebration of hybridity risks replicating the populist promotion of syncretism and miscegenation that has been central to much post-independence Latin American nationalist discourse, which set out to construct a seamless, unified national body via the assimilation of cultural and racial differences (Brah&Coombes 2000:3,56).

I suggested that mestizaje offered an alternative -...-. In two poles of the debate over multiculturalism — assimilation and separatism.

Assimilation, seeks to amalgamate diverse cultures into a universal, uniform model. By contrast, separatism strives to preserve the integrity of cultural traditions, contends that cultural traditions are incommensurable to each other, and argues that appeals to universal norms are simply one culture superimposing its tradition over another.

Instead, I argued that a mestizo democracy entails that cultures can intersect and mutually transform each other in ways that ultimately seek to overcome the conqueror-conquered dynamic. In so doing, I contended that our public life will be much richer than one in which "one size fits all" or one that is an agonal contest between tribal enclaves (Burke 2008:34, emphasis added).

Today, eccentric bozos online may congregate in the “therian community”. Transgenderism becomes passe: a diverse cohort of lefties, neo-pagans, spiritualists, and other odd birds nowadays claim to be non-human animals, just as their neolithic forefathers used to think with their totem animals: personal discovery journey or mental illness? The ambiance is pretty much that of a Star Wars or Star Trek convention, where people often masquerade as -or identify with1006 DOLT

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the fabulous races of on-screen fiction; therians, on the other hand, take themselves very seriously.

It is difficult not to remark the fashionable solutions the social alchemist wearing the red or rainbow armband of hybridism proposes are perhaps inverted in comparison with the unfashionable proposals of the alchemist wearing the black or white armband of purity, but not different in their degree of cunning manipulation and cynical treatment of humans as commercially farmed animals.

In today's torn apart Middle East, some Arab groups claim to descend from either ancient Egyptians, or groups from the historical lore such as the Philistines; Jewish groups oppose them claiming to descend directly (=unbroken immemorial lineage mytheme) from the Hebrews of Biblical times. The long and strong appendage the human mind raves about this time is an illustrious, unbroken family tree, and not a colossal erection.

Farther south, orthodox Ethiopians claim the authentic heritage -both Hebrew and Christian- as their own, for -among other supporting evidence- the famous Hebrew ark of the covenant would allegedly be found on Ethiopian soil; Ethiopian rulers in fact claimed to descend from mythical Solomon, and the equally fabulous Queen of Sheba, whom they take to be Ethiopian 988:“narrative entwines 988 Alternatively, she might have come from a southern kingdom in the Arabian peninsula. In preference, the Ethiopian sites might have been a colony or outpost of the civilization of Saba that existed in Southern Arabia/Yemen. Be it as it may, her -and Solomon's- son was considered the first Ethiopian ruler, who brought the ark along.

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different time-lines in order to empty the notion of chronological time in favor of that of duration ”989.

Rastafarianism also (born in the 1920s) cherished the idea that Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie -whom many Rastafarians consider mystically alive even if he officially died in 1975- would spearhead an hermetical comeback or repatriation of all Black people coming together as one people, both in Africa and in the diaspora because he was a living god. Ethiopia was seen as the ideal place that had preserved the authentic worship of Jah (=Hebrew Yahweh) as a modern Zion.

The ideal NSDAP city might have looked like mid-town Bavaria in the 1910s; ideal cities according to the contemporary mainstream look like 'diverse' defiled Latin-American shanty towns or megalopolitan U.S slums:

Spanish colonial discourse was no less racist than its British counterpart but its belief in white superiority was articulated differently, in a way that allowed Spaniards – and post-independence Latin Americans – to convince themselves that they were not guilty of the racism that so visibly characterized the segregated societies of Britain’s past or present empire. Miscegenation was thus regarded as ‘normal’ or even, with the influence of Darwinist theory in the postindependence period, as a way of ‘improving the stock’, though in practice it was generally accepted only outside marriage and between white ‘master’ and female Indian or black, maintaining hierarchy. In reality, of course, this was a normalization of rape, resemanticized in Spanish colonial discourse as the myth of the white male generously donating his seed to the woman of colour and thereby founding a new hybrid race in which differences were transcended or redeemed. -...This colonial model of miscegenation as a means of incorporating 989 Vieira Ferreira 2009:146.

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racial ‘others’ allowed the Spanish fascist intellectual Giménez Caballero, in his political tract The Genius of Spain (1932), to argue for the return of Don Juan as the Spanish ‘Superman’ or ‘Messiah’ who would subdue the (feminine) populace through sexual conquest, casting domination as love (and conversely casting love as domination). Giménez Caballero’s blatantly sexual rhetoric (embarrassing to those used to the puritanism of British colonial discourse) proposes as national ‘Saviour’ a Great Inseminator who will redeem the wayward race, as the Spanish conquistadors had earlier done in the Americas, by planting in her his redemptive seed: the ‘genius of Spain’ is its virile, genital and (re)generative capacity. -...For the insistence in Spanish colonial discourse on the incorporation of the colonized via miscegenation gives identification itself the double function of disavowing (affirming/denying) racial difference: incorporation involves making part of the self that which is not part of the self. (Labanyi in Brah&Coombes 2000:57-58,60.).

It is in fact problematic to part commercial farmers engaged to preserve a particular race or attribute, and those busy interbreeding and experimenting for the sake of 'improvement'. It was in fact -once again- the (Victorian) XIX century that saw massive eugenic ( term appeared in 1883 according to the MerriamWebster dictionary) efforts deployed to create the most diverse variety of canine and livestock breeds. The obsession with breeding simply tapped into human mind's schizophrenic obsessions with blood, lineages, contamination and purity of all sorts and degrees, for example among ancient Hebrews.

An eurocentric perspective isn't pivotal, either. Chinese reformer -and imperial adviser (1898 Hundred Days' Reform) - Kang Youwei (1858-1927) prophesied a future utopia based on well-known, ever returning ideas: centralized world government, communist principles of social organization, technology, and 1009 DOLT

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massive worldwide exogamy/interbreeding leading finally to the rise of one thoroughly homogenized -culturally, racially, phenotypically- human race; in spite of this, contemporary controversies point out Kang's possibly impolite opinion about people of color. It all goes back to blurred fantasies of Eden, or to historical antecedents: Sparta, a society of equals.

Kang Youwei wasn't alone in advocating racial alchemy. In Australia, vast efforts were deployed (from the Victorian era down to the 1960s) to remove aboriginal children (the “stolen generations” issue) to forcibly insert them into European civilization. The problem of mixed parentage children -or half-castes- was particularly irksome, so that strategies were deployed to “assimilate” half-castes into the White mainstream. Interestingly enough, in recent decades intellectuals have emoted their outrage, and circularly screamed at genocide.

Beyond political expediency, however, it is difficult to see major differences between the brutalization of Australian aborigines, and the fate of innumerable cultures and ethnic groups forcibly acculturated through the relentless food-processor of Belle Epoque nation-States in their administrative efforts to mold imagined communities after the elusive blueprint long-dead hacks, bomb-dropping patriots and elated reformers provided.

Only political expediency allows to separate the forced administrative

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leveling of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English ( BrĂŠtons, Basques, Corses, Occitans,

Alsaciens...)

to

produce

the

imagined

British

(or

French...Italian...Spanish...Yugoslavian...Soviet) community from any other such occurrence.

What would politicking intellectuals think, however, if Alsaciens, BrĂŠtons and the like tooted the horn of dispossession and ethno-cultural resurgence?

Wouldn't they eviscerate such '...ist' arguments resting on fallacious tribal hallucinations, whose sole outcome are exclusion and possibly slaughter?

Such contentions aren't exactly pointless. In the aftermath of the WWI disaster, the conflation of Darwinism, eugenics, mesmerism, garrison state, statism and military catastrophe imploded. It can be safely evinced that the recourse metropolitan powers made to aboriginal colonial soldiers (India, Africa...) sparked a first wave of post-colonial (racial?) consciousness and tension destined to be long lived.

In 1920 went to press a book (which the author claimed to have penned right before the war in 1914) by T.L. Stoddard with the ominous title: The Rising

Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy . Brazilian Lobato in 1926 penned O Presidente Negro. In a future then judged remote, the White majority in the USA is divided by the criss-crossing activism of maximalist groups such as Feminists and

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Socialists. As a result of such confusion, a Black President is elected. The chaotic interlude takes soon a turn for the worst: a newly united White majority resolves to sterilize all Blacks.

It is not without interest to note that Lobato

is numbered among

progressives who challenged the deterministic, racialist version of social Darwinism in favor of an evolutionary social perspective. Brazil's social ills could be overcome through incremental policies such as that of saneamento (sanitation) in still perfect Victorian fashion (listerism990 etc):”Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale promised that national cleanliness would eradicate disease, dissent and disorder” 991:

The more deeply we go into this and similar rules, the more obvious it becomes that we are studying symbolic systems. Is this then really the difference between ritual pollution and our ideas of dirt: Are our ideas hygienic where theirs are symbolic? Not a bit of it: I am going to argue that our ideas of dirt also express symbolic systems and that the difference between pollution behaviour in one part of the world and another is only a matter of detail. (Douglas 1966:36).

The capital's century-long struggle with filth was intimately connected with its unprecedented growth. Between 1801 and 1901, the population of London soared from one million to over six million.

Suburbia replaced green fields, ‘crushing up the country in its concrete grasp’. Waste products multiplied in due proportion, whether smoke from household fires or mud from ever-increasing horse traffic.

990 “That dirt was fatal they had discovered; but why it was fatal few of them knew. At this point Lister [18271912] came forward with a scientific principle which rendered all plain. Dirt was fatal, not as dirt, but because it contained living germs which, as Schwann was the first to prove are the cause of putrefaction. Lister extended the generalization of Schwann from dead matter to living matter, and by this apparently simple step revolutionized the art of surgery. He changed it, in fact, from an art into a science. “Listerism” is sometimes spoken of as if it merely consisted in the application of carbolic-acid spray; but no man of any breadth of vision will regard the subject thus. The antiseptic system had been enunciated, expounded, and illustrated, prior to the introduction of the spray. ” Tyndall 1882:462-3.

991 Freedgood 2000:3.

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Some types of dirt posed a challenge in terms of the sheer volume of unwanted matter; others contained a real or perceived danger to public health. Nuisance and discomfort abounded. Some saw metropolitan dirt as the harbinger of moral decay. Filth implied social and domestic disorder; and, when discovered in the home, inculcated immoral habits – for it was widely agreed that working men, faced with poor housekeeping, sought refuge in the glittering comforts of the gin palace. (Jackson 2014:32).

The Victorian/Belle Epoque's collective psyche was also haunted by a threat more dangerous and closer to home: Krumm 992 establishes a parallel between the fear of what is 'other' seen as a 'beast within' and the obsessive fear of syphilis (in the UK dubbed as “the big pox”), an illness that was spreading like wildfire:

The white slave panic offers one variation on an American epic: innocent girls fall into demonic hands. The Puritan captivity narratives organized the genre.Wild Indians captured young Christian maidens and carried them into pagan savagery. The natives, in those Puritan stories, were lustful and brutal. Some of the young women fell all the way and became Indians themselves. Recall the maxim in Anthony Comstock’s preface: the danger for every generation “is not that they will be devoured” but “that they will be transformed into wolves.” (Morone 2003:262).

Everybody – thus not only '...ists' and crackpots- wanted to exploit the 'mood of the times', and to turn Victorian and Belle Epoque fads to the advantage of one's cause. Black NAACP co-founder -and U.S Black rights activist- W.E.B Du Bois 992 La hantise quasi-obsessionnelle de la syphilis est un topos repris par maints auteurs qui, tous, respectent le tabou nominatif. -...- La syphilis, documentée pour la première fois à l'orée du XVIe siécle, prend rapidement des proportions calamiteuses; la maladie est d'autant plus virulente qu'elle est nouvelle. -...-Elaine Showalter affirme, chiffres à l'appui, que la dernière décennie du XIXe siècle est l'age d'or de la syphilis: en 1880 on recense 5000 nouveaux cas par an à Paris. En 1900 20% de la population male serait atteinte, en 1902 l'estimation est à un million de cas. -...-Dans The Literature of Terror, David Punter constate que "the discovery of Darwin combined with psychological developments produced.., a fear that the Other thus postulated may relate to the bestial level which evidences human continuity with the animal world. '' Ce dont l'homme a peur c'est de la réapparition de cette bete (Krumm 1995:6-9)

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– whom Ben-Shahar elatedly quotes- wrote in 1903:

The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.

-...-Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character? Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters. The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.

This is the history of human progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few already risen; or second, that it would better the uprisen to pull the risen down. (no page).

That line of thought -incorrectly linked to the names of Spengler and others- was just another strand of XIX century morphological evolutionary thinking applied to society, of which Darwinism was one incarnation.

Today only fringe activists excluded from polite company bother with what's in store for the White race, whatever it means. Contemporary catastrophic myths have to relate to enforced “popular morality”, “free-floating folk beliefs”, “only an old Phoenician tale of what has often occurred before now in other places”, “explanations or interpretations usually put forth”, “prevailing cultural trends”, “the audience’s pre-established set of convictions”. It all may simmer in catastrophism giving rise to all sorts of accounts ranging from planetary collisions to dystopian renditions of the fixations of the 1960s.

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It shall in fairness be emphasized how catastrophes – as aesthetic (=purely formal) reality and object of contemplation outside the realm of religiontook a modern existence of their own in the XVIII century (plague in 1720; the earthquake that razed Lisbon in 1755; an earthquake in Messina in 1783). Cold war's 'nuclear holocaust'? The many re-editions of the plight, slaughter and injustice suffered by this, that or another minority or special interest group?

Evolutionism looks also suspiciously similar to quintessential creation myths from various cultures, which experts refer to as emergence myth. Opposed in nature to creations from nothing ( ex nihilo creations), emergence myths see creation as the...evolutionary parable of one breed of sentient beings that -through various vicissitudes and possibly transiting from one world/habitat to the nextgradually and incrementally transform into -or bring about- human beings. Possibly a variation upon the theme of the great chain of being without the baggage of Victorian scientism. “All cooperates for the good” is a way to see this great chain of being at work:

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for it is equally true that he [Aristotle] suggested the limitations and dangers of classification, and the non-conformity of nature to those sharp divisions which are so indispensable for language and so convenient for our ordinary mental operations -...-. in spite of Aristotle's recognition of the multiplicity of possible systems of natural classification, it was he who chiefly suggested -...- the idea of arranging -...- in a single graded scala naturae according to their degree of 'perfection' -...-. he conceived eleven grades, with man at the top -...-. in the de anima another hierarchical arrangement of all organisms is suggested -...- based on the 'powers of soul' A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A

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possessed by them, from the nutritive, to which plants are limited, to the rational, characteristic of man -...-, each higher order possessing all the powers of those below it in the scale -...- the conception of the universe as a 'great chain of being' -...- from the meagerest kind of existence -...- up to the ens perfectissimus -...-.

Among the great philosophic systems of the seventeenth century, it is in that of Leibniz that the conception of the chain of being is most conspicuous -...-. The essential characteristics of the universe are for him plenitude, continuity and linear gradation. The chain consists of the totality of monads, ranging in hierarchical sequence from god to the lowest grade of sentient life, no two alike, but each differing from those just below and just above it in the scale by the least possible difference-...-.the individuals, no doubt, unlike the species, seem to increase in numbers and to undergo change, but in reality this is a mere expansion or 'unfolding'(evolutio) of structures and characters that were already pre-delineated, on a minute scale of magnitude, in the primeval germs which lay encased one within another like a nest of boxes -...-. For one of the principal happenings in eighteen-century thought was the temporalizing of the chain of being. The plenum formarum came to be conceived by some, not as the inventory but as the program of nature, which is being carried out gradually and exceedingly slowly in the cosmic history. While all the possibilities demand realization, they are not accorded it all at once (Lovejoy 1936:58-9,144,243-4).

Evolution -whether spiritual, biological or both- may even include several planets:

Several elements of what would become theosophical reincarnation doctrine were already in place. The human soul reincarnates in order to progress spiritually. Incarnations take place not only on earth, but also on other planets. (Hammer 2004:464).

The truly revolutionary theses in cosmography which gained ground in the sixteenth and came to be pretty generally accepted before the end of the seventeenth century were five in number, none of them entailed by the purely astronomical systems of Copernicus or Kepler.

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essential to keep these distinctions between issues constantly in view.

The five more significant innovations were: (1) the assumption that other planets of our solar system are inhabited by living, sentient, and rational creatures; (2) the shattering of the outer walls of the medieval universe, whether these were identified with the outermost crystalline sphere or with a definite" region" of the fixed stars, and the dispersal of these stars through vast, irregular distances; (3) the conception of the fixed stars as suns similar to ours, all. or most of them surrounded by planetary systems of their own; (4) the supposition that the planets in these other worlds also have conscious inhabitants; (5) the assertion of the actual infinity of the physical universe in space and of the number of solar systems contained it it.

(Lovejoy 1936:108).

The same convulse obsessions where belabored on all corners of the political spectrum with similar conclusions:

One must be aware that the term [la raza] is originally from México and it was first promoted by José Vasconcelos, a respected and venerated Mexican intellectual (1881-1959). It was given shape in his book La Raza Cósmica [1925] and it was introduced as a response, based on "scientific" evidence then available as well as Catholic theology. -...- The most successful of them, José Vasconcelos, came up with a kooky concept where he claimed that the indigenous people of America had had their day in the sun but their mixture with the "better" Europeans gave rise to a new race, the mestizo. (In those days, it was common to divide Homo Sapiens into four races: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Amerindian. Thrown as evidence, he cited the lost continent of Atlantis.) He called this new race "La raza Cósmica" and argued that it would be the one that would show "the way" to the rest of the world. It is a very catchy and feel-good concept. Over the years, that concept was semi-officially promoted by the Mexican government to give "atole con el dedo" to the population (that is where the custom of calling "Día de la Raza" to "Columbus Day" came from) (Urrutia 1998: no page).

Feral children, too, (a variation on the hybridism theme) have been a long-time favorite in all sorts of guises (Tarzan, Mowgli, Romulus and Remus...): 1017 DOLT

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The Lupercal is an incredibly important site in Roman history and cultural consciousness. As we will learn in a later lecture, it was the site of the suckling of Romulus and Remus by the shewolf. Is it the most famous of all Roman myths based on a Greek cult of human sacrifice? The connections certainly cannot be ignored. (Meineck 2005-1:25).

Wrestler Kamala (a Black behemoth explorers had supposedly found in Uganda993) was named after one such feral child. The motif is incredibly popular, especially in an explosive mix:

The memoirs of a girl of eight who wandered 3,000 miles across Nazioccupied Europe searching for her missing parents was amazing enough. Add in her claims of surviving two freezing winters living with a pack of wolves and you have a truly astonishing tale.

Unfortunately the life story that earned its author £10million and was translated into 18 languages was just that. A story. -...- The money started rolling in for De Wael after she won a £10million court case that year against her American publisher for allegedly withholding royalties and not doing enough to market the book. Yesterday her lawyer, Marc Uyttendaele, said: "It matters little whether the account is real or partly allegorical, it is the product of absolute good faith, a cry of suffering and an act of courage.". (Author Who Made...2008: no page, emphasis added).

The book caused a literary sensation on release in 1997. But more than 10 years later – and just a few weeks after a film adaptation, Survivre Avec Les Loups (Surviving with Wolves), premiered in France – it has been revealed that not only did she invent the story but that she is the Roman-Catholic daughter of an alleged wartime collaborator. -...-.

"The book is a story, it's my story," said the writer, in a statement issued under her real name, Monique De Wael. "It's not the true reality, but it is my reality. There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world." -...-. The 71-yearold author also blamed her estranged publisher, Jane Daniel, for convincing her to release the book. "At first, I did not want to publish 993 The gimmick wanted Kamala (in the garb of an African tribal chieftain) being escorted to the ring by a masked man in the garb of an explorer, who instructed Kamala in some unknown African language alongside the conventional manager.

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it, but then I was convinced by Jane Daniel," said Ms De Wael. The author successfully sued Ms Daniel, and her company, Mt Ivy Press, for $22.5m (ÂŁ11.3m) in 2005 after claiming the company was withholding royalties. (Shields 2008: no page, emphasis added).

Therapy sessions that elicit false memories of sexual abuse use a number of pre-persuasion tactics. -...- Next, a jargon is promoted for interpreting events—terms such as in denial, violated boundaries, emotional incest, codependency, and in recovery. Note how these terms can be used to put a spin on virtually any given event. When the client raises an argument against the abuse hypothesis, she is in denial. The mother who will not back the daughter's story of dad's rape is a codependent. Ambiguous behavior and even acts of love can be cast in a sinister mold by claiming that the fatherly hug violated boundaries and was really emotional rape. Clients who behave in a manner acceptable to the therapist are in recovery. -...- The source of the abuse message is typically a therapist or counselor. -...- A new identity is given to the client—that of victim and survivor. The client is rewarded for adopting this new identity by the therapist and in group sessions where reporting of abuse is encouraged. And this new identity feels good. (Pratkanis&Aronson 2001:ch.5).

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) published the results of its survey of the outcomes of recent malpractice suits against therapists in its December 1997 newsletter ( False Memory Syndrome Foundation 1997). An analysis of 105 malpractice suits flied by former patients against their therapists for development of false memories revealed that one case was dropped, forty-two were settled out of court, fifty-three are still pending, and nine went to trial. Of the cases that went to trial, all ended in a verdict in favor of the plaintiff (patient) against the defendant (therapist). (Loftus 1998: no page).

In other words, prigs and dolts 'have it coming' -so to speak-. If the simpleton is ripe for the plucking, then why shouldn't the American malt liquor brand (the lefty pressure group, or any other agent one might choose) seize the opportunity right away? Should they wait until the Scotch or Irish malt liquor brand (right-wing pressure group, or any other agent one might choose) does? It'd 1019 DOLT

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make no sense:“Why fabulate ? Because if we do not, everyone else will.”;”[The public] only wanted one thing from [a given public figure]: a story. He told it so well that we forgave him almost everything. ”;“[it] helped people to believe.”;”We want -...- original content regardless of its validity. We're here for the scare, not for the plausibility”.

In the circular, ongoing rendition of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, the “"sentimentalizing and prettifying" everything that the public might find objectionable” is more than obvious as the formerly 'impure other' takes centerstage as herald of the new humanity. The 'engaged filmmaker', however, needs the talent (and looks) of Sidney Poitier in his best days impersonating a famous physician to make the allegory palatable to the majority:

There has been a shift from eugenic concerns with ‘miscegenation’ to liberal concerns with the welfare of the children born from such unions, i.e. to expressions of benevolent concerns about the children.

(Brah&Coombes 2000:77).

Alternative rendition of the same want the 'other' to be a prince or someone of that kind. The 'biracial space prodigy' mister Spock has therefore a rich gallery of predecessors; in spite of the thick political veneer, there is no more substance than in all other similar myths.

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aliens on a cosmic domination binge. His helpers include Zandor's wife, son, and a few bizarre creatures equally dedicated to upholding justice in space; among them two kind, pear-shaped, shape-shifting and invulnerable ectoplasms (one juvenile and one adult ): Gloop and Gleep. In 1970 two francophone 'creatives' concoct

Barbapapa (French for spun sugar ): a family of...kind, pear-shaped, shape-shifting ectoplasms who went around righting wrongs: quantum entanglement, indeed. The Barbapapa family, however, includes ectoplasms (male and female, adult and juvenile) of...different colors on the backdrop of ecological and interracial themes: Barbapapa himself is at first ostracized and treated as an oddity because he's 'different'.

A sensation in the 1970s, Barbapapa is the object of recent massive merchandising as well. More or less apocryphal stories circulate presenting the authors as sort of Bodhisattvas who visualized Barbapapa as an emotional response to French upheaval in the late 1960s. Is the Barbapapa family a politicized rendition of Gloop and Gleep with a fashionable armband? Why haven't the disturbing similarities been publicly discussed? Nobody noticed, perchance? Yet both series were very popular in several countries. Readers shall come to their own conclusion.

Nimoy's strategy to elude the implications of the charge of politicization of the Star Trek mythology through apology (if...then) is not new. Brigham

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Young994, Mussolini995 and Stalin's contemporary admirers 996 all adopted the 'if...then' strategy to diffuse criticism. Eminent Jewish-American politician Madeleine Korbel Albright declared during a televised interview in 1996 997 regarding the alleged huge loss in children's lives as a result of U.S sanctions against Iraq “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.”; Churchill had decades earlier commented:”We should never allow ourselves to apologize for what we did to Germany ”998, although he also commented999:”It seems to me the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed ”. Irrespective of any quarrel about estimates, biased sources, unspeakable allegiances and the exact number of possible victims, the 'if...then' strategy is very popular, and not only among 'cranks' and evil arch-dictators.

The 'if...then' strategy may also be coupled with mythic reminiscences of 994 “Brigham says, "If Joseph Smith acts like a devil, he has brought forth a doctor that will save us. He may get drunk every day of his life, sleep with his neighbor's wife every night, run horses and gamble, but the doctrine he has produced will save you and me and the whole world." ” The Mormons 2006. As with many of that ilk, Smith had been involved in at least a few controversial situations.

995 In the aftermath of the assassination by a Fascist commando of Socialist leader Matteotti, the Mussolini government tottered on the brink of collapse. At some point, Mussolini (1925) pronounced a famous harangue taking the “responsabilità politica, morale e storica” (historical, political and moral responsibility) of the events, then went on a series of 'if...then' clauses, such as “Se il fascismo è stato un’associazione a delinquere, io sono il capo di questa associazione a delinquere! ” (if fascism has been a criminal organization, then I am the leader of such criminal organization). Matteotti's death is invariably mentioned, yet Fascists, too, had earlier been assassinated in France in the tense political climate.

996“[coloro]che osano, senza traccia di morale, infangare il Socialismo e Stalin che ci hanno liberato dal fascismo di “lor signori” combattendo ” Buttafava, no date, no page. (Those who -without any trace of morality- dare to sling mud onto Socialism and Stalin who freed us from “their” fascism fighting...).

997 60 Minutes 1996.

998 Cit. in Garrett in Nolan 2004:62.

999 As reported in UK magazine The Spectator in 1979.

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the hero (typically Achilles) who consciously chose a short(er) life according to certain principles (glory for Achilles), rather than an ordinary life outside of them.

Even Matrix hero Neo -like a Zoroastrian devotee- is offered a quintessential choice in the form of pills. Both Mussolini and Gautama Buddha claimed it was 100 times better to live one day (or one year) “as a lion”, “as someone who understands all is impermanent”, rather than 100 days (or years) “as a sheep”, “as someone who ignores what impermanence is”; Jesus assured that those leaving something to follow him would get it back 100 times.

People like Drouet, the French politician -and the man who arrested Louis XVI at Varennes-, could exclaim unfazed:”Soyons brigands, s'il faut l'être, pour le salut du peuple ” (let's behave like brigands, if the salvation of the people demands it). Literary (or cinematographic) rendition of pleas sympathetic to -very broadly put- a certain cause, or simple accounts of events, or any idea soever lose their innocence, as Schopenhauer aptly shows 1000, the very moment any writer tries 1000 “If the conversation turns upon some general conception which has no particular name, but requires some figurative or metaphorical designation, you must begin by choosing a metaphor that is favourable to your proposition. For instance, the names used to denote the two political parties in Spain, Serviles and Liberales, are obviously chosen by the latter. The name Protestants is chosen by themselves, and also the name Evangelicals; but the Catholics call them heretics. Similarly, in regard to the names of things which admit of a more exact and definite meaning: for example, if your opponent proposes an alteration, you can call it an innovation, as this is an invidious word. If you yourself make the proposal, it will be the converse. In the first case, you can call the antagonistic principle “the existing order,” in the second, “antiquated prejudice”. What an impartial man with no further purpose to serve would call “public worship” or a “system of religion,” is described by an adherent as “piety,” “godliness”; and by an opponent as “bigotry,” “superstition”. This is, at bottom, a subtle petitio principii. What is sought to be proved is, first of all, inserted in the definition, whence it is then taken by mere analysis. What one man calls “placing in safe custody,” another calls “throwing into prison”. A speaker often betrays his purpose beforehand by the names which he gives to things. One may talks of “the clergy”; another, of “the priests”. Of all the tricks of controversy, this is the most frequent, and it is used instinctively. You hear of “religious zeal,” or “fanaticism", a “faux pas,” a “piece of gallantry,” or “adultery”; an “equivocal,” or a “bawdy” story; “embarrassment,” or

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to convey meaning in writing: choice of words, thought patterns, figures of speech and so forth betray biases, fears, situational ethics, allegiances.

“popular morality”, “free-floating folk beliefs”, “only an old Phoenician tale of what has often occurred before now in other places”, “explanations or interpretations usually put forth”, “prevailing cultural trends”, “the audience’s preestablished set of convictions” can either can be lampooned as priggish fantasies the hero-transgressor thankfully ignored in the service of the best of all causes, in whose name one never goes far enough; or can be taken literally, thus turning transgressors into brutes who went just too far:

Szasz (1970) emphasizes the dehumanization which follows from the "myth of mental illness If and which is produced by a pathologizing ideology in the interest of social harmony (Barclay 1990:61).

In short, when One speaks of mental illness, the norm from which deviation is measured is a psychosocial and ethical standard. Yet, the remedy is sought in terms of medical measures that-it is hoped and assumed-are free from wide differences of ethical value. The definition of the disorder and the terms in which its remedy are sought are therefore at serious odds with one another. -...- Moreover, because of the social consequences of such a judgment, both the "mental patient" and those who treat him as one become actors in a morality play, albeit one written in a medical-psychiatric jargon. (Szasz 1991:15,26).

The seventeenth-century English dramatist Nathaniel Lee spent several years at Bethlem Royal Hospital (Porter 2002). Prior to his incarceration he demurred, “They said I was mad; and I said “bankruptcy”; “through influence and connection,” or by “bribery and nepotism”; “good pay”. “ Schopenhauer 2004:12 (stratagem XII).

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“sincere gratitude,” or

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While the assumption is typically left unstated and the cat is carefully kept in the bag, it is possible to see dots being connected at times (in jargon, the “subtext”, the gist...). For example, objections against immoralities in the Yalta settlement can be discarded by ridiculing the entire concept of 'beautiful soul' and all the moral complexes associated therewith. The 'sacred cow' can be put on a golden pedestal as untouchable reminder of the divine, or turned into hamburgers following the flimsy ways of situational ethics. The same outrage, emotional meltdown and jittery protest that meets disbelief in the 'sacred cow' is replaced by laughter, scorn and parody when it's fast-food time; the course might also be reversed in motion so that people may rescue what's left from the grinder and make a wailing totem out of it for all eternity.

Wolfram's young Parsifal routinely shoots birds, then bursts into tears upon seeing them dead, tears out his own hair in despair, only to shoot some more birds later. On a completely different level, domestic violence apparently follows the same warped logic, whereby the routine outbursts of physical violence follow stages of intermission during which the (typically male) perpetrator makes formal amends, tries to put his misdeeds into a favorable perspective, and pledges to reform his nasty customs, only to unleash some more violence (=domestic terrorism 1001 in 1001 Domestic terrorism is associated with elevated level of physical abuse. It stands in opposition to more common, “normal” levels of domestic expressions of anger (aggression, hostility etc) and even physical abuse of no (serious) medical consequences, such as throwing (some) objects at, or pushing people.

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the psychologist's jargon) upon his near and dear at the first occasion (=”cycle of violence”1002). Ink never ceases to flow to dissect and psychologize the recurring outbursts of collective violence -such as industrial mass-murder-, but there is no compelling reason not to extend the “cycle of violence” model to collective actors equally busy interspersing acts of brutality with comedies of innocence, atonement liturgies and other dramaturgical acts meant to clean the collective slate.

The godly knight Parsifal and the tormentor of his near and dear rub elbows as they weep and feel remorse, only to irresistibly resume the same “cycle of violence” in good conscience as those gasps and those tears they shed somewhat afforded them a clean slate (= they settled their reconciliation bill etc):”When God created human beings, he made them to be like himself. ” (Genesis 5:1).

All obsessive-compulsive1003 people do that: after he gets plastered once again, the alcoholic pledges to give up drinking for good; after she loses everything at the casino, the gambler pledges to give gambling up for good...until the next time alcoholic beverages or a gambling hall may be within reach.

Is it not a bit surprising that these violent, obsessive-compulsive misfits look exactly like the (culture) hero (also a savior in his aggrandized form) mythologies and positive psychologists alike lionize? “the trickster traffics

1002 Walker 2006.

1003 Behavioural, not clinical statement.

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frequently with the transcendent while loosing lewd acts upon the world. -...- all of such lewd acts or objects -...-[become] occasions of insight, vitality, and new inventive creations. ”.

It would be absolutely inconsistent to expect culture heroes, saviors and swashbuckling founders to abide by the fossilized, crass morality of any Hebrew code, or the Hammurabi code (XVIII century BCE) the Hebrews derived their commandments from. After all, the savior-founder-hero is on a mission to vindicate a manifest destiny according to a vision; transgressions in pursuit of higher good(s) shall be disregarded as the hero/savior/founder delivers the ultimate boon:

Our normal affinity for the occasional thrill can make the risktaking sociopath seem all the more charming -...-. Let us take your credit card and fly to Paris tonight. Let us take your savings and start that business that sounds so foolish but, with two minds like ours, could really take off -...-. Let us lose these boring friends of yours and go off somewhere by ourselves. Let us have sex in the elevator. Let us invest your money in this hot tip I just got. Let us laugh at the rules. -...-Let us live a little. Such is the flavor of sociopathic “spontaneity”and risk taking and "charm," and though we may chuckle about the obvious come-ons when we read them, the overall approach has met with noteworthy success time and again (Stout 2005:89).

The endless shades of transgression, atonement and reconciliation pantomimes serve the basic purpose of reconciling one with oneself by rebuilding emotional integrity that society -in its capacity as generalized other- affords. The very act of shaking those fists, shedding those tears, donating to those charities, or

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any other course of action one engages in as persuaders play on human mind's obsessions, affords one a clean slate emotionally speaking.

No matter which dissonance or transgression s-he might have chanced to get into, the very act of voting for -or against- that candidate or agenda, buying that product etc shows one is “not the kind of person” (hence all the washing away of sins, atonement and rebirth claptrap) as the former self who committed those transgressions, and experienced that dissonance: do all religions not showcase felons, bohemians, prostitutes, sociopaths and half-wits as primeval vanguard?

The human mind also has an irresistible proclivity towards abstract, personified qualities seen -with the usual variations across regimes, cultures and epochs- as quintessential. In politics or business, mister immigration amnesty; the honorable mister homeland first; doctor twenty-percent-net-interest rate bloviate in front of an adoring crowd ready to make allowances, vote, donate, subscribe, march:”the brand or product benefit is integral to the story. When it’s woven so deeply into the narrative that people can’t tell the story without mentioning it.”.

Giornale Di Arona1004 reports how consumer advocacy groups are on the war path. Consumers who subscribed to State-issued, 30 year interest-bearing postal bonds issued in the 1980s shall find out how the hefty interest rate (9 to 14%) printed on the same bonds no longer applies thanks to an elusive 1986 executive 1004 January 30, 2015:25.

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order 'nobody could have possibly known about' until recently. Signers find out the total amount they are entitled to receive after 30 years is about half of what the State had promised in writing. Mainstream media do not even devote scant attention to this insignificant detail: wonders of the free press.

Among the Romans, the elevation to divine status involved not only the city's personification (Dea Roma), but abstract qualities (Virtus, Clementia,

Pietas...virtue, clemency, filial piety)- whose list later Emperors expanded (Tiberius added Moderatio, moderation; Claudius Constantia, resilience...1005)- documents how myths were made fit for particular purposes1006.

Jaczynowska1007 discusses deities the Roman army honored: those connected with the imperial cult; the cult of signa, or the insignia of particular units that -according to Tertullian- ranked higher than all other gods; those connected with military ethos (Bonus Eventus, Honos, Disciplina...). Is it then so strange that Christianity took to unprecedented levels this fixation with the personification of abstract qualities? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1).�

Augustine accepted Christianity only after he listened to Ambrose's neoplatonic (idealistic, transcendental) interpretation of the Old Testament stories he 1005 Almost 20 centuries before positive psychology emerged.

1006 Jaczynowska 1989, passim.

1007 1989:175ss.

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considered nonsense:

In early Greece, this instinct was purely religious, not allegorical.

Later, in Hellenistic Greece, the credibility of myth faded among intellectuals and their anthropomorphism became a consciously figurative means to a rhetorical end. It was only then that the "personification of an abstract concept was deliberately invented, and that its creator had a clear distinction in his mind between the philosophic notion and the human shape in which he chose to attire it." (Guthrie 1993:137).

The same development towards personification of abstract qualities occurred in Buddhism, too. If Mahayana Buddhism in general endorsed supernatural themes1008, and construed the constellation of celestial Buddhas as benevolent deities, Mahayana Chinese Pure Land Buddhism 1009 went further and construed all the Buddhas as representing abstract qualities such as wisdom, perseverance, loving kindness, help to the damned etc.

Even Buddha Shakyamuni (a designation of Gautama Buddha) is taken to mean abstract qualities and not -according to prevalent versions- “the enlightened lion of the Shakya clan”1010, or “the awakened sage of the Shakya people”. The four 1008 Several Mahayana monastics preaching to the public describe Gautama Buddha in Theravada terms: an ordinary human being who achieved enlightenment; supernatural themes or connections are either minimized or disclaimed. Della Santina (ME6102 no date: lecture 5) claims that the government of Singapore instructed him not to include any miracle stories as he was working on a Buddhist educational project.

1009 As Ven. Wuling, Pure Land Buddhist monastic, pointed out.

1010 A solar symbol. The lion is often associated with the sun. Vishnu and Parvati are often associated with the lion. Hercules kills the divine Nemean lion to subsequently wear his skin (=solar connection) as an armor. Also, Hercules in his journeys might be construed as reenacting the sun's course. The Sun is also associated with the symbol of the pyramid (in religious and masonic lore the capstone is often used). Following biblical imagery, Jesus too is also likened to a lion (“Then one of the elders said to me, "Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals." ” Revelations 5:5).

Jesus is also likened to a corner stone ( Ephesians 2:20; 1 Peter 2:6, akrogoniaios in Greek), the symbol of the Sun by the proxy of the pyramid.

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great Bodhisattvas of the Pure Land Buddhist tradition are interpreted metaphorically as well.

In the lore, Gautama Buddha is born of Queen Maya, and raised by his aunt (and step-mother) Maha Prajapati. If readers follow Aurobindo, the scholar of traditional Hinduism, they easily learn that Maya means either “illusion” (of this world, as in Vedantic philosophy), or -as Sarvadekar explains regarding the Gita“own power of becoming”1011. Prajapati (maha just means “great”) is also “the origin of all creatures” or “the original progenitor” in Vedic thought.

Gautama reads as “dispeller of darkness”, and Siddhartha as “one who has accomplished a goal”. The great allegory thus reads: the one who has accomplished the goal of dispelling darkness, born of the great worldly illusion (=power of becoming) and raised by the original progenitor: Siddhartha Gautama born of Maya and raised by Maha Prajapati.

It is tragic irony indeed how obsessive-compulsive misfits and rogues, too, blight people in the name of abstract concepts. Honor killing -among Muslims, for example- unfolds in the name of honor; domestic terrorism unfolds in the name of discipline, for example.

How is the line drawn between good and bad? According to situational

1011 MAISI014:audio lecture 4.

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priorities. Our guys are always good; the other regime's guys are always bad:

When the cheater is part of our social group, we identify with that person and, as a consequence, feel that cheating is more socially acceptable. But when the person cheating is an outsider, it is harder to justify our misbehavior, and we become more ethical out of a desire to distance ourselves from that immoral person and from that other (much less moral) out-group. -...-our experiments don’t show any real differences in dishonesty among various countries and cultures with the very strong personal conviction that people from different countries cheat to different degrees(Ariely 2012:102,120).

Research in the realm of relationships documents how the same characteristics that drew one more or less irresistibly towards a given person as potential or actual partner ( for example he's thrifty; she's always jolly; he enjoys a healthy dose of sexuality...) most often become the crux as the relationship falls apart when the honeymoon phase is gone forever (he's a penny-pincher; she's childish and irresponsible; he's a sex addict...).

Society at large just encourages this affiliation of often irreconcilable traits with a barrage of Romeo&Juliet, Cinderella and taming of the shrew (=the Pygmalion situation) 'sentimentalized and prettified' stories. Society's goal is the ongoing reproduction of its segments. If people endlessly chased after ideal partners who might not even exist, society would never reproduce.

People are therefore conditioned into settling for lesser evils, third best options and anything -or anyone- at hand as epitomized in grotesque 1665

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Portuguese azulejo O Casamento Da Galinha1012 (the hen's marriage): a hen in a nuptial cortege joins her groom the monkey in order to get married. The hallucinatory belief to have a 'rendezvous with destiny' playing a role in some warped Pygmalion story: how -in the example above- could the marriage between a monkey and a hen really end up like? Divorce/family court, police and counseling records are a staggering indictment of such flawed logic.

Nevertheless, clinical psychologist Welwood1013 rhapsodizes about the trial and tribulation aspect that constitutes the bulk of intimate relationships in terms of a “sacred combat� leading to spiritual evolution. He embroiders thereupon with a barrage of quotes from Sufi sages who yearn to be torn apart, pierced and impaled for true love's sake.

Welwood's projection might be as inspiring as a training montage in one of those mimeographed action movies of the 1980s; police, divorce/family court, and counseling records are nevertheless a damning indictment of such bizarre logic that only endeavors to keep the societal machine running. Just as it is the case with anthills and beehives, society shall prevail no matter how many ants or bees perish in the process.

Even the duality between those on the right or wrong side of the myth,

1012 At the Palacio Fronteira in Lisbon.

1013 2009.

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good believers and bad disbelievers, evokes images of the mystical community of the faithful in mainstream religion, of the primeval horde in trance honoring the animal master. According to Janis,1014, group-think is characterized by:

1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.

2. Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group's assumptions.

3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.

4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.

5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of "disloyalty".

6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.

7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.

8. Mind guards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

It isn't really different from most teenagers' leanings towards 'blending in', perhaps by wearing the 'right' shoes or listening to the 'right' music etc. In New Zealand, many proposed to rename the landscape to honor The Lord Of The Rings movies; of course, some remarked that would make no sense as in twenty years nobody would probably remember what those weird names ever stood for.

Bauckham1015 argues that the beast berated in Revelations is no other than Nero. Koester1016 debunks the myth of the harlot Babylon riding a beast with seven heads, which would amount to a parody of a coin then depicting the goddess

Roma (personification of the city of Rome) sitting atop Rome's famous seven hills.

1014 1971,1983.

1015 1993:384ss.

1016 2011:The Harlot And Imperial Economy.

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Koester again1017 suggests that the image of the heavenly city in Revelations is but a commonplace, metaphorical nod to what constituted the axis of citizenship and cultural identity in the Hellenistic world, or the city-state (polis).

Godly cities cropped up all over: “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. ” (Matthew 5:14). The present writer also adds “the city of Zeus”, a concept antedating St.Augustine and Revelations and attributed to Musonius as cosmopolitan fusion of sacred and mundane as a model for life.

Mahayana Buddhism, too, features the image of the shining city as teaching detour (Mahayana); or the parable of the old city abandoned in the jungle (Hinayana). The concept didn't die with antiquity, but prospered through the various Città Del Sole (City Of The Sun Italian utopist Campanella wrote in 1602), down to Kennedy's and Reagan's “shining city up on a hill”: it never stops paying dividends.

The notion of the community of the faithful as “friends of god” is typically associated with Islam, yet -already around 420 CE- Christian Bishop Palladius had written both The Lives Of The Friends Of God , and – as he was apparently widely traveled- about asceticism in India. It went further back in time.

As Hellenistic Kings (323-30 BCE) styled themselves as “ god made manifest”, Mauryan Kings in India called themselves devanampriya (friends of the gods), much as Hellenistic chieftains termed themselves philos ton theon (friend of the gods).

1017 2011: New Creation And New Jerusalem.

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Later, Plutarch (I/II century CE) claimed -following Plato- that all good men were friends of the gods.

Hellenistic Kingdoms reached as far as India and Afghanistan. Greek -earlier as language and last as a script- was a lingua franca extending its reach from the eastern Mediterranean to Afghanistan, the Persian gulf and North-Western India through commercial exchange networks lasting into the first centuries CE: well after the collapse of the Roman Empire as a unified political entity.

In the present writer's assessment, the above go beyond happenstance and mere trivia. They reflect the human psyche's circular obsession with hobnobbing with the almighty in one's chosen frame of reference (friends, sons, brothers, cousins... ):”The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” (Exodus 33:11). In Zoroastrianism, Zoroaster ( Yasna 46) pleads with the righteous god Ahura Mazda:”To thee I address my lament: attend Onto it, O Lord, And grant me the support which friend would give to friend.”.

Krishna (almighty Shiva's incarnation) is Arjuna's friend, counselor and charioteer. The Ramayana is also the story of the unshakable friendship between the monkey god Hanuman (the perfect devotee), and Rama (again Vishnu's incarnation). Gautama Buddha (Upaddha Sutta) reproaches his chief disciple Ananda over claiming that “admirable friendship” constitutes half of the noble life

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(necessary to attain nibbana or ultimate liberation). Buddha claims instead that “When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, & comrades, he can be expected to develop & pursue the noble eightfold path. ”.

Over the internet, celebrities are seemingly one click away. To barely make the point, one might mention that the 'official' website of popular mythicist Jordan Maxwell has been for ages property -and under the control- of people other than Maxwell. As well, the site of controversial proponent of “Actonite libertarianism and White liberation” Bryant is still active. The site explicitly invites to “send a letter” or “a donation to John”, although Bryant passed away in 2009. The practice is not limited to oddballs on the fringe. Most 'official websites' linked to celebrities are in reality operated by PR people; most people are unaware of that as they send emails and donations.

The chivalric Supremo Ordine Della Santissima Annunziata -established in the XIV century by the future royal house of Italy ( Casa Savoia)- in fact posited -beyond tax exemption and a series of honours- that recipients -chosen at the sole discretion of the house's head- would be officially considered cugini del Re (King's cousins), and allowed to address the King on a first-name basis ( dare del tu).

Popular culture had appropriated this item, and Mussolini – prime minister and dictator- was said to be the King's brother.

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This conversely reflects in the inveterate braggart's seriatim claims about his fabulous wealth, possessions, connections, and sex appeal. The omnipresent media are taking grunt workers and rat race professionals for the ride of their life:

Most sitcoms ultimately serve as lifestyle advertising. They present alternate worlds full of intense friendships, interesting jobs, and razor-sharp cheekbones—often occurring in spacious, miraculously affordable housing. Last year, we took a look inside the interiors some of these famous sitcom characters live in to see how they would match up with reality. (Berkowitz 2014:no page).

Most sit-com and TV show characters, however, would either never be able to afford their lifestyle, or they would go broke trying to finance it, an unspoken assumption in today's West.

This also reflects in the critique of other people's religion. One's religion is authentic, intimate and uplifting fostering communion with a compassionate deity; another's religion consists in mere rituals, folklore, vile praise devoted to remote, self-absorbed ghosts etc. This kind of reassuring double standards and improbable comedies of innocence do not concern only semi-literate hobos, or clueless masses brainwashed by propaganda.

Scholar Della Santina1018 said:

You can be a awful person, a terrible person, you can commit endless crime, but before you die, if you get the right moment, not being too late and develop faith in Jesus then you go to heaven even if you have 1018 ME6102 no date: Lotus Sutra part 3.

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killed hundreds of people and are a awful person. So there are fundamental flaws in Christianity that is why I gave up Christianity when I was thirteen. It has some precious nuggets like love your neighbor and so forth, but it has so many defects.

Della Santina forgets about various characters in the Buddhist lore, who used to be arch-transgressors - such as Angulimala, said to have killed 999 people; or courtesans Ambapali1019 and Utpalavarna-, later converted and became holy persons much in same the way Della Santina finds so awkward in Christianity.

To this day, Angulimala Paritta are sacred verses recited for the protection of expectant mothers. In the lore, Angulimala as a repented Buddhist monk -with Gautama Buddha's consent- healed a woman who was having childbirth problems. A transcendental Angulimala is also associated with his own Buddha-land.

In a Buddhist story, Mattakundali is the young son of a wealthy yet stingy miser. Abandoned to die alone when he's ill, Mattakundali (in this version) beholds the Buddha who's passing by; putting all his faith in the Buddha, he's reborn in heaven. As repeatedly stated in this writing, originality seems to play a lesser role than generally believed. It appears that the colossal deployment of means and greater or lesser talent are long-winded excuses to indulge in one's time's old, 1019 This female transgressor wished to offer the Buddha a meal. Gautama Buddha -contrary to public opinionaccepted her offer. She finally converted and became a saintly nun. The parallel with Jesus' encounter with female transgressors couldn't be more striking. Is one story true, or the other false? The present writer contends neither. Such stories -in all their local, culture-specific variants- only cater to the hollow cravings and circular proclivities of the human mind.

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circular monomania.

Since groupthink emerges from basic considerations about human psyche's basic blueprint, it is no surprise that both Hinayana Buddhism and Mormonism1020 -religions established more than twenty centuries apart in completely different circumstances and locales- request that their most committed members – Buddhist monks, Mormons on a missionary assignment- respect a long list of rules and taboos, including

1. early wake-up and bed calls (6h30/22h30 for Mormons).

2. No contact with the opposite sex in either social, romantic or otherwise ambiguous, unchaperoned situations.

3. No frivolous or idle pursuits. Buddhism emphasizes how inappropriate idle chatter and gossip are; it values silence, and keeping one's mind clean (Mormons) or focused (Buddhism). Mormons – and Buddhist monks- expressly extend the above to a series of rules covering modern day situations: no TV, radio, etc.

4. Emphasis on grooming and hygienic practices, yet disregard for vanity and personality issues.

1020 Anecdotal evidence gathered from sparse LDS websites and publications.

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5. Emphasis on the group (never being alone for Mormons on missionary practice), and severe limits or bans placed on communications/interaction with outsiders.

6. Both Buddhist doctrine, and Mormon rules make ample allowances for situational constraints, such as abstaining from political activity, and/or criticism, respecting local customs, laws and beliefs etc.

7. In some Theravada Buddhist countries, and in Mormonism, being a monk for a while (Buddhism), or going on a mission (typically 2 years for Mormon males) can act as rite of passage. Informal advice among both Thai Buddhists and Mormons suggests that males shall not start seeking a mate for the sacrament of marriage until after completing their religious duties (mission or a period of ordination). Tribal rituals1021 the world over see young males -at different ages and in different settings according to culture- going on retreats and/or undergoing ritual assignments that signpost their transition into adulthood.

At some point Vandiver criticizes Campbell's approach by first labeling it as a mere series of examples and then by dismissing the strategy entirely, as lists of examples in no way demonstrate the point, for example psychic unity of mankind.

Her objection is not tenable: it is not possible to use electronic microscopes or DNA

1021 It isn't difficult to recognize here the hero's journey, the labor motif and other well-known mythemes (=building block of myth).

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testing to prove anything about say the idea of the dying/rising savior, the journeying founder etc. Besides, the recourse to technology in no way shelters from hoaxes and inconclusiveness.

The Y2K bug that was supposed to bring us back to the stone age frying every computer's CPU (all computers down to the last one in all possible universes); or the Mexican flu, Chinese flu, avian flu, mad cow disease etc that ought to have obliterated nine sevenths of the human race in a matter of weeks did in fact -so the story went- find support from findings at the electronic microscope, culture dish etc. Finally, even courts of law use a series of often unrelated proofs and evidence -statements, camera footage, DNA, fingerprints, daily schedules- to convict people all over the world.

Discourse is the only tool at our disposal to make sense of whatever remains we get (monuments, events, writings, rites...). The plural of anecdote is indeed not data, yet discourse can basically be(come) whatever we want it to be.

Some scholars defend -on the basis of both literary and archaeological evidence- the thesis that Nero engaged in important building activities in his first five years; others flatly deny it saying Nero didn't build much during that time.

Onto another example, discussing a book on WWII by an historian ( professor N.Davies ), The Sunday Times wrote on November 5, 2006 “In reality, in

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the first 22 months of fighting when the Wehrmacht attacked and occupied eight countries, the Red Army attacked and occupied five. ”1022. Inversely, professor of English and Holocaust Studies B. Blackwell wrote in 2005:”Hitler crossed every border around Germany. Stalin did not. -...- American foreign policy since Roosevelt explains why we stormed the beaches of Normandy and Omaha, but never raised a finger to Stalin.”1023.

When news reached the Czar that his fleet had been wiped out (Battle of Tsushima) during a war with Japan in 1905, alternative accounts exist:



Nicholas would have ignored the news playing tennis heedlessly.



He would have shivered in angst, while the Empress cried (as Olga, Nicholas' daughter, related).

It isn't rare to see equally credentialed specialists champion opposite theses in unambiguous, direct terms. After all, they know “the facts” as they examined cablegrams, clay tablets, warehouse lists etc. Quite often, specialists are promoted or demoted according to the axes they grind, much as Hegel -one of the capstone philosophers of the West- was in high favor in Prussia because his philosophical approach squared with the socio-political climate of his time (=Hegel as antidote against student radicalism): 1022 How We Didn't... 2006:no page.

1023 2005:9,13.

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That is exactly what the essence of historical remembrance boils down to: identification and psychological proximity, rather than historical accuracy let alone political depth. The question of whether historical remembrance is constructed, imagined, manufactured out of whole cloth or willed is, quite correctly, of profound importance to professional historians but, as the best of them realise full well, it is also beside the point. Nationalism is an emotion but the love in question is self-love. -...-But remembrance is about self-love, and selfrecognition, or it is about nothing. -...- Remembrance in its paradigmatic form is permanently adolescent, and proceeds as if gravitationally drawn to suffering, conflict and sacrifice.(Rieff 2011:19,97,101). le istanze di comprensione entro la mentalitĂ vi sono riportate dall'appartenenza psicologica del ricevente al gruppo sociale all'individualitĂ del messaggio. (Instances of understanding within a given mentality are made possible through psychological allegiance the individual pays to the social group, thus rendering the message in individual terms) (Zorzetti 1980-1:149, free translation).

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When a real person/event does not exist, on which to focus the mythmaking, spurious alternatives can be manufactured for the purpose of political intrigue: what virtue is there in telling made-up stories rather than true ones? Let's read some opinions first.

They all roared out in a mighty laugh, and I told some other anecdotes, equally amusing to them, and believing I had them in a first-rate way, I quit and got down, thanking the people for their attention. But I took care to remark that I was as dry as a powder horn, and that I thought it was time for us all to wet our whistles a little; and so I put off to the liquor stand, and was followed by the greater part of the crowd. (David Crockett 1834:no page).

The myth -...- has outlived the thoughts of all its defenders and of all its adversaries. It is the myth that gives life. -...- Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens-at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris , dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. (Lewis 1970:40-42) One idea is that of the messiah, the homo novus, that obsessed the ancient world. Another popular prophecy after WWI announced the rise of a 'German messiah' of unspecified background; this was just another edition of the ever-present longing for a leader that will lead the faithful out of the present predicament, whether it be the dire years after WWI, the heavy taxes that burdened 1045 DOLT

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the medieval peasant, etc:

I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites, and I will put my words in his mouth. He will tell them everything I command him. (Deuteronomy 18:18).

The various 'national unity' governments of our day supposedly coalescing to counter the financial, industrial meltdown and decommissioning decades of policy making triggered make ample recourse to both that theme and the primeval unity theme. Heraclitus (VI-V century BCE) proposes enantiodromia, or a sort of confluence of opposites. For Sade, literary aventures (adventures) consist in the unusual interaction on paper between diverse and opposed characters (caractères).

The same minestrone1024 of caractères recalls not only XVIII century

romanesque literature, but the zenith and nadir of contemporary TV or theater productions. For example, Miracle Detectives (2011) is a show that presents some sort of eerie X-Files (1993-2002) kind of atmosphere to introduce a female scientist and a male religionist (=the caractères) examining purportedly mysterious events to reach a verdict regarding the supernatural nature of the same. For all it matters, even Afrocentric comedy series The Jeffersons (1975-85) relies on a string of opposing caractères.

Popular culture follows suit with the slew of Black&White; cop&crook; 1024 Italian soup made from pasta, and a variety of vegetables.

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German&Jew buddy movies. Viewers delight not only in mainline U.S productions, but in a chain of swinish regional copycats such as 2011 Irish The Guard, a Black versus White buddy cop movie, which offers the complimentary clash between U.S and Irish slang.

Boondoggle affairs among cliques of opposing politicians piled up in 'national unity' governments as they divide the public spoils receive their management lettres de noblesse as “a team of rivals”1025: a man of destiny, Abraham Lincoln summons politicians from left and right to fight his 'just war'.

According to Reuters (November 13, 2012), French President Hollande exhorted the French to “Nous devons faire nation, c'est-à-dire faire bloc dans un moment particulier ” (we shall behave as a nation, that's to say to come together as one at this particular point in time).

In many cases the messiah would represent a return or reincarnation of a traditional hero (King Arthur, the Emperor Redbeard, Charlemagne, Marko King of Serbia...) considered to be meta-historically “asleep” in some sacred place 1026 but ready to help his kin in times of high distress.

This concept was generously applied to the fallen heroes of WWI as well1027: 1025 Roberto 2011:Building And Leading Teams.

1026 Lecuppre 2003.

1027 “The resource of medieval funerary statuary was mobilized with recumbent figures of soldiers to visualize the

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the sense of place was a fairly late development in the history of prose fiction. As Mikhail Bakhtin observed, the cities of classical romance are interchangeable backcloths for the plot: Ephesus might as well be Corynth or Syracuse, for all we are told about them.

(Lodge 1992:57).

In other cases, the returning messiah is a religious founder: Jesus or a deified Lao-Tzu (after a judgment day of fire and flood according to some Taoist sects): the 12th Imam shall come back from exile to restore true Islam. The seven (Christian) sleepers (from the Golden Legend) retreat and sleep in a cave on mount Celion for 196 years.

Ambiguities subsist regarding the mythological return of heroes, founders and saviors. A Buddhist Zen koan recites:”If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha; if you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch”. Dostoevsky in The Brothers

Karamazov (1879-80) presents The Grand Inquisitor. Jesus comes back to Spain in the time of the Inquisition, preaches and performs miracles. The Inquisition arrests and questions him. At the end of the interview, an old inquisitor dismisses Jesus on the condition he shall never return; Jesus disappears in the dark alleys of Seville.

Mountains are the abode of a Melanesian modern savior-hero, too:”a god called John Frum -...- lived in a local volcano and he would bring cargo to the native peoples”1028. That's not limited to an eurocentric, Graeco-roman, or Judaeo-christian ‘sleeping dead’. In 1916, the art gallery of Mannheim in Baden organized a well-received exhibition about war graves and war memorials that afterwards toured Germany -...-. Consider Munich’s ‘sleeping warrior’ unveiled in December 1924. In harmony with the inscription, ‘THEY SHALL RISE AGAIN’, the speaker of the Bavarian Veterans’ Association pictured the imminence of national regeneration” (Goebel 2004:488-92).

1028 Wotton 2007:1.

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perspective. Mahakassapa, one of Gautama Buddha's greatest disciples -the founder of far-eastern Buddhism1029, and Buddha's unofficial successor1030-, is said to rest under the mountain at Gurpa; one day he'll symbolically surrender robe, bowl, and heritage to Maitreya, the celestial Buddha of the future 1031. Russian monarchs considered themselves -through dynastic alliance- the heirs of the defunct Byzantine -hence Roman- tradition.

The arahat1032 Pindola -according to legend - abused his supernatural powers in a trivial manner; Gautama Buddha was displeased, and barred Pindola from entering nirvana1033. Pindola therefore remained in the world to spread Buddhism, surfacing at great events such as the III Buddhist council under Asoka.

The XIII century Christian legend of the Wandering Jew sees a Jew who taunts Jesus on the way to his crucifixion. Jesus curses him to wander the earth until the Messiah's second coming.

Religious Taoism makes of immortality the supreme goal; immortal beings of three ascending groups are said to exist. Hindu Prabhakara Siddha Yogi is 1029 Mahakassapa apparently was the only one to understand Gautama Buddha's silent flower sermon, for which Buddha chose him as recipient of direct trasmission of wisdom. On slightly different terms, the same happens between Jesus and Judas in the apocryphal gospel.

1030 Mahakassapa apparently didn't lack self-esteem. The Theragatha records him as proclaiming: “In the whole field of the Buddha's following, Except for the mighty Master himself, I stand the foremost in ascetic ways; No one practices them so far as I�.

1031 The same is relayed about Kukai (VIII/IX century), founder of Japanese Shingon Buddhism, buried at mount Koya.

1032 arahat (=estinguished one): A person of superior spiritual accomplishment -though lower than that of a Buddha- and free from the cycle of rebirth.

1033 Of course, countless stories exist relating Gautama Buddha's own prodigies and miracles, often performed in front of crowds as Pindola had done.

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rumored to have lived 723 years. No or little difference exist between this tradition, and the lore of the allegedly immortal count of Saint-Germain 1034, or Lambert's 1986 Highlander: the human mind just loves the item. 1991 Highlander II sees the same character -originally an art dealer- as a scientist behind an outer space shield to counter the ozone layer's depletion that threatens the Earth: the more fads (of the day) filmmakers can fit into their formula movies, the better.

The motif lives on in our day when this or that unspeakable war criminal, movie or rock star officially declared dead is 'spotted' in some obscure place (or several at the same time); or when Dune's fictional messiah is 'the sleeper who has awakened'1035; the reverse also unfolds - albeit less frequently- when this or that public personality is rumored to have died, being thus replaced by a substitute.

Chilean diplomat, Fascist enthusiast and dabbler in esoteric matters Miguel Serrano (1917-2009) extends the imagery to Adolf Hitler he considers a demigod; the accursed arch-dictator would be – so believes Serrano- metahistorically asleep in Antarctica biding his time to return:

That means a new/old religion, with all of its rituals and myths which 1034 Rakoczy is often dubbed Saint Germain in theosophical circles. Rakoczy is apparently no other than Francis Bacon deified (1561-1626). The British aristocrat, statesman and philosopher -interestingly enough- ended in disgrace his seemingly irresistible public ascent under royal patronage: a Parliamentary committee charged him with 23 separate counts of corruption. Bacon acknowledged his misconduct, but clarified he had never allowed gifts to influence his judgement.

1035 “And they were hearing a voice from the heavens saying, 'Have you made proclamation to the fallenasleep?'And an obeisance was heard from the cross, 'Yes.' ” ( Gospel Of Peter, I/II century CE, verse 41-42, R. Brown trans.). “Asleep” here also means “dead”: Jesus brought his message to the deceased, just as Gautama Buddha did when he preached to his deceased mother in heaven.

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are necessary to discover or rediscover. Its central Drama is the aparition is the aparition on this earth of the Person of Adolf Hitler, the last Avatara who came to produce this enormous storm or catastrophe in order to awake all those who are asleep and to open the New Age which will come after the Deluge. That is the reason why we have started to count the beginning of the New Age after the birth of Hitler. We are in the year 105. -...- the secret roots of Hitlerism and "who" Adolf Hitler really was: a magician who had the power to come voluntarily out of his body and communicate with other unbodily beings.[sic] (Serrano 1995: no page).

The primary polarity of Gnostic psychology is not sin and redemption, but ignorance and gnosis, forgetting and memory, sleep and the awakening of knowledge. (Davis 1999:94).

In ancient times, too, they passed from glory ( kleos) to ktema1036, or the past transmitted in the fixed form of a yardstick to assess our present (and thus future):”the future as the unfolding of expectations the present time vouchsafes” 1037.

The mythologized more or less recent past becomes instrumental in the hands of orators, politicians and their ilk in a sort of Orwellian paradox (controlling the past is controlling the present, thus the future)1038, while sinking into the achronotopos.

In fact, while the mythologized past boasts real-life existence (it happened under Pontius Pilate; during WWI; when my grandfather was a kid; during the reign of Amenophis III, etc ), it rapidly slips into a misty dimension, whose time and space become less and less clear (“when the Earth was young...”), and thus unimportant (achronotopos, without time and space). At the same time, 1036 Several translation for the word/concept have been suggested in research. In Thucidides, ktema es aiei means acquisition (possession...) for all time (an eon): a monument? The utility of what is being narrated as evergreen (=perennial wisdom). In Thucidides again, ktema is put in relation with anathema, a sort of memorial.

1037 Vieira Ferreira 2009:78.

1038 Hartog 1997.

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the entranced followers led by the high priests of permissible discourse experience never-ending re-editions of the founding moments (=duration), quintessential ordeals and core values the regime of the day happens to endorse.

When political intrigue and the mood of the times command it, myth may also become fact; when all else fails, messiahs can be purposefully 'manufactured'1039 as tools of political intrigue:”la résurrection, sous cette forme, de princes absents ou trépassés, érige la nostalgie en acteur de la scène politique”1040 (the resurrection under this guise of absent or deceased princes sets longing as center-stage political actor).

A local Catholic Church publication these days invited to pray this Catholic clergyman having already attained pseudo-sanctity as victim of Fascist repression: at least one miracle due to his intercession was needed in order to support his candidature to beatification.

It isn't an unwarranted leap to hypothesize that -after several decades of stillness- the elusive miracle(s) could happen to some mythomaniac taking a morbid interest in the plea. Providential witnesses are often all it takes:”I wish I could prove Homer to have been an eye witness of the Troyan War ” declared a chagrined Schliemann in 1881: 1039 Prominent contemporary philosopher Krishnamurti was by all accounts the 'manufactured messiah' of the theosophical society.

1040 Lecuppre 2008:50.

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Were there no other reason whatever, we should still be obliged to reject the stories of miracles recorded of the Buddha, simply because not a single one of these stories can be shown to rest upon the testimony of an eyewitness, or even of a contemporary of the Buddha. But when we have, on the contrary, as Renan assures us, a record - as, e.g., in the case of Matthew's Gospel - proven to have come in substantially its present form from a personal companion and intimate friend of Jesus, then it should be clear as light to any ordinary mind that the case is totally different. And thus, to argue that because one rejects the stories of the miracles of Buddha, he should in consistency reject also the testimony of the apostles to the miracles of Jesus, is only to display one's ignorance and folly (Kellogg 1885:54-5).

The horde in fusion routinely invokes military heroes across cultures: either a lone voice in the crowd (for example NSDAP ceremonies), or the pack as one shall answer when the fallen hero's name is uttered.

Miracles abound over the internet. Con people are busier than ever taking pencil-necked sweat-hogs -in their eagerness to believe improbable mythological bunkum- for a ride:

Belle Gibson's empire was crumbling before her eyes. Weeks before her book, "The Whole Pantry," was set to be published in Britain and the United States, an Australian newspaper began chipping away at Gibson's claims that she had been given only months to live after she was diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer in 2009. -...- The fantastical story seemed too good to be true. And, it turns out, it wasn't true at all. -...-"None of it's true," she told the Australian Women's Weekly in her first comments acknowledging that she had duped the world with an elaborate hoax. -...-She [also] claimed to have died during a medical procedure -- and then emerged from a post-operative coma. -...-Believe it or not, the improbability of all of these stories might have gone unnoticed, and Gibson might have quietly joined the growing ranks of "holistic" 1053 DOLT

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healing evangelizers, had it not been for the diligence of the Australian, which first exposed some of the massive holes in Gibson's story in a March investigation. -...-Earlier in the month, charities for which Gibson claimed to have raised money told the Sydney Morning Herald that they never saw any of it. -...-Gibson rose to fame knowing that her ardent followers, some with large megaphones, would be willing to ignore the medical improbability of her story in favor of the hope she represented. (Phillip 2015:no page, emphasis added).

Longing can also pivot around the actual heirs to non-existent -or mythical- figures such as the recent cult of John Frum in Melanesia since the 1930s, and John Frum's sons rumored to have landed at some point or another during WWII. John Frum -as this writing reiterates- also played the usual part of the prophet of doom, for he predicted WWII. Popular culture follows suit: Il Figlio Di

Zorro (1974, Zorro's son); Il Figlio Di D'Artagnan (1950); Il Figlio Di Sandokan (1998); Son Of Dracula (1943); Children Of Dune (2003)...

The unholy alliance between more or less mentally unstable fringe characters and the Barnums of high politics is quite common:

I come to this essay not as an expert in literature but as a psychologist who was initially interested in the use of writing as a way to affect people's health. Through a series of experiments, my colleagues and I discovered that when people put their emotional upheavals into words, their physical and mental health improved markedly. Further, the act of constructing stories appeared to be a natural human process that helped individuals understand their experiences and themselves.

(Pennebacker 2000:3).

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individual uniqueness, pleasure, and introspection, therapeutic culture is, at face value, a vast cultural effort to recapture meaning and feeling in an otherwise barren and technical world of meanings. -...-In taking a reflexive posture toward emotions essential to selfhood, and in positing a model of disengaged mastery over one’s emotions, therapeutic culture has paradoxically contributed to a splitting of emotions and action. By insisting that the rules governing the expression of emotions are to be learned reflexively, the therapeutic discourse has made emotional life a matter of procedural and reflexive monitoring of the self -...-. therapeutic culture is an informal and almost inchoate aspect of our social experience, yet it is also a deeply internalized cultural schema organizing perception of self and others, autobiography, and interpersonal interaction (Illouz 2008:149-50,156). therapy and theory are always so closely linked (Rieff 2006:147).

As a move against culture and tradition this 'seeing the pearl as the disease of the oyster' could hardly be equalled. It may not be going too far to see in today's popular advertising and media culture, of stereotyped yet powerfully manipulative images, the full flowering of just such a conviction. What was 'once only imagin'd' now bares its tits for real, shooting to kill from every surface. Today it is the outer images which are dangerously pathological under their surfaces, yet essentially worthless in themselves; cheap simulations masquerading as 'the real thing' and systematically delivering their victims over to the psychic pimps. The images of the inner world, denied the 'living powers' of tradition, become mere reflections of pathology, a 'heap of broken images' from the Waste Land all around (Angelo 1992:71-2).

The modern reader may find these stories implausible and even grotesque; it's compulsory to emphasize, however, how they represent a snapshot of political dynamics at their times' highest levels. Runciman tells of Giovanni di Cocleria, who in 1261 claimed to be Frederick II risen from the dead 1041 in the greater scheme of the confrontation in Sicily between the Pope and the Normans; “Perkin Warbeck, fils présumé d'Edouard IV, en réalité natif de Tournai et issu du 10411958:56.

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milieu marchand, aurait échappé à la mort en se réfugiant sur le continent”1042.

Lecuppre recounts of Giannino Baglione, a wealthy merchant from Siena, who was overtaken by the spurious character scheming politicians imposed upon him; a reappearing margrave follows, who was initially endorsed by powerful royalties, yet after his demise identified as a miller:

Son existence et sa raison basculent lorsque le sénateur de Rome, Cola di Rienzo, parvient en 1354 à lui faire croire qu'il n'est autre que Jean 1er le Postume, fils du roi de France Louis X, échangé dans sa prime enfance contre le fils, assassiné à sa place, de la nourrice Marie. -...- la démarche de Giannino résulte d'une lecture paranoïaque de l'Histoire: il rapporte tout à lui, manifeste une crédulité excessive envers ses partisans potentiels et se fait donc fréquemment manipuler, sans qu'il soit toujours facile de deviner par qui. Des zones d'ombre demeurent, où le fabuleux affleure. Une certitude surnage: la conviction qui l'anime d'être de naissance royale. Sur elle viennent se greffer des images de la royauté émises par d'autres, mais qu'il incorpore harmonieusement dans sa vision naïve des hiérarchies de ce monde.

(2005:103-105).

Lasché par Charles IV [roi des Romains], vaincu sur le terrain, le pseudo-Valdemar [margrave de Magdebourg], demeuré entre les mains de ses alliés d’Anhalt, décède en 1356. Plus tard, on dira qu’il était meunier et se nommait Meinecke ou Jekel Rehbock.

L’implication personnelle d’un roi dans le complot prouve, s’il en était besoin, à quel point la conjuration fondée sur la substitution d’identité est devenue un instrument presque classique dans le jeu politique allemand. (2008:53).

Giannino is only one of a string of hypothetical royalties, mystics and messiahs meeting an horrendous fate, and whose life seems cut from ancient

1042“Perkin Warbeck, presumed son of Edward VI – in reality a native of Tournai with a mercantile backgroundwould avoid death by taking refuge on the continent “ Lecuppre 2002:531.

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narratives (for example the godly/royal newborn raised by foster parents, akin to Sargon, Sweet Medicine (American-Indian), Oedipus, Romulus, Mwindo, Moses, Karna -son of god Surya- etc etc).

Russia in the XVII and XVIII century saw dozens of pretenders at work.

Several people claimed to be King Louis XVI's son -deceased in captivity in 1795-.

When the monarchy was reestablished in France in 1814-5, several people from all over came forward as the heir royalists had miraculously spirited away. The entire situation looked like an Abbott&Costello comedy moment: a Canadian preacher of Native heritage, and a German watch- and weapon-maker were among the many candidates.

German watch- and weapon-maker Naundorff enjoyed widespread popularity: he was accepted by people close to Louis XVI as Louis' son; he is also buried with an epitaph recognizing him as prince, although disputed DNA evidence seems to disqualify him. Naundorff's descendants have also tried their luck pressing for judicial recognition in French courts.

In the XX century, an entire chapter of popular culture was written around the presumed survival of one of Czar Nicholas' daughters (either Anastasia according to most, or Maria according to some). While forensic science in recent years (DNA tests, recovering of remains etc) seems to show no member of the

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Russian Imperial family survived, many impostors, impersonators and con-people profited from one of the century's most enthralling spy stories.

Real monarchs such as Edward II can in effect meet their doppelgaenger claiming to be the legitimate King:

Significativement, la fin de notre période accorde une préférence à des fables d'apparence plus laïque ou folklorique évoquant des échanges de nourrissons ou des enfants épargnés par la main du bourreau. John de Powderham, en 1318, explique sans sourciller devant Edouard II d'Angleterre, objet de toutes les contestations, qu'il est, lui, le véritable Edouard, et que l'homme qui occupe le trône est un fils de charretier autrefois mis à sa place dans le royal berceau (Lecuppre 2002:531).

Contemporary conspiracy theories may require the world's royalties, celebrities and wheelers-dealers to be -in one instance- replicants, zombies or lookalikes (the modern equivalent of the swapping of infants) fostered by outer space cabals that thus run the world by proxy.

This theme recurs in all sorts of guises. For example, Hitler might not have died in Berlin: he fled abroad, and was replaced by an impersonator, of which there were many as it was the case with Saddam Hussein. Paranoid dictators -such as Saddam Hussein and Hitler- purportedly recurred to stand-ins: the ubiquity of the gods.

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Hollywood stand-ins. Once again, what the human mind loves so much exactly matches the symptoms of a serious mental illness: the Capgras syndrome (documented in 1923), where one is convinced one's near and dear have been replaced by clones.

Giannino's presumed royal birth was all the more prestigious because rumor had it that the first French Kings descended from no other than the holy Grail, or the biblical redeemed prostitute Magdalene 1043 having reached southern France pregnant of Jesus. That was why Popes never objected to the French King being anointed with the holy oil1044.

While such story will undoubtedly raise a few eyebrows, suffice it to say that southern France is to this day the Eldorado of mythers, treasure seekers and new-agers uninhibited writers chronicle, for some even contend various treasures (the Solomon temple's, the Nibelungen's...) hide there.

The supernatural bloodline/mythical treasure mania resurfaces at regular interval: swindling pen-men laugh all the way to the bank as their forged bunkum makes it to the best selling list. Frazzled gawkers can buy Da Vinci Code or Harry

Potter books not knowing whether it's a made-up story that looks real, or whether it's a real story that sounds made-up: both are so 'emotionally true' to the reader it 1043 There is confusion around who Magdalene really is. Some contend her character gets mixed up with other New Testament figures.

1044 Such was apparently also the case of Visigothic Kings in Spain before the Muslim conquest (VIII century).

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just makes no difference.

If -as Lecuppre explains- the game of identity substitution remained so popular for centuries across cultures (from England to Italy and Russia) as tool of high political intrigue, one can only recall the definition early psychoanalysts gave:

Accidental occurrences of this kind arouse the child's envy, and this finds its expression in fancy fabrics which replace the two parents by others of a higher rank.extnote -...- It is likewise a factor whether these fancies are elaborated with more or less claim to plausibility-...-.The projection mechanism--which also bore its part in the reinterpretation of the birth act, as well as certain other characteristics of myth formation, to be discussed presently-necessitates the uniform characterization of the myth as a paranoid structure, in view of its resemblance to peculiar processes in the mechanism of certain psychic disturbances. Intimately connected with the paranoid character is the property of separating or dissociating what is fused in the imagination. (Rank 1914:69-70).

I once had to perform a risk assessment on a prisoner who believed that his father was a famous Hollywood actor. “Michael,” as I will call him, had developed this belief about his parental lineage and had in fact driven long distances from his home in Canada to Los Angeles to see his famous father. He had broken into a house he believed to be owned by the actor and started living there. After he was arrested, he continued to believe, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that his father was the famous actor. Michael’s real father used to visit him in prison; Michael thought of him more as a friend than a father.

Michael’s delusion lasted his entire adult life. I met Michael some twenty years after his third break-in of the Hollywood actor’s home.

The third crime had triggered special provisions in Canada that placed Michael in the “dangerous offender” category, and he had received a long prison sentence (Kiehl 2014:169-70). e xtnote This is a variation upon the theme of the recapture discussed elsewhere. The press often covers the case of this, that or another person going on a wild chase after biological relatives ( children/parents) they have never met; or of close relatives (parents-children, siblings etc) oscillating between closeness and estrangement (note of this writer).

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In fact, Hippolytus the bastard is the mirror image of Theseus, the man with two fathers (Mitchell 1991:109).

When the film E.T. became a rip-roaring success, many of us marveled at the fact that a homely little extraterrestrial could win so many hearts. But our archetypal analysis identified a pattern of story elements that had been recurring in stories throughout the ages: the "Tale of the Foundling," a Caregiver story for children. In this tale, a small person, usually a child, starts out feeling dislocated and lonely, but then discovers a creature even more vulnerable than he. The child immediately becomes the protector. (Mark&Pearson 2001:287).

Lafaye relates how messiahs were endemic in the Iberic world (the present writer adds Brazil, Mexico...), and that the Portuguese monarchy could as well claim divine affiliations. Da Vinci Code balderdash was in fact much older than what Guieu or Lincoln hyped in the 1990s or 1970s:

On a déjà remarqué que la fièvre messianique gagnait généralement des sociétés menacées par un ennemi extérieur plus puissant ou atteintes d'une crise interne. A l'analogie des situations s'ajouta sans aucun doute, dans le cas du sébastianisme portugais, la référence consciente au Messie davidique, exemple diffusé par l'Écriture avec la valeur normative qu'on sait. On a pu écrire avec pertinence que le sébastianisme fut «la résurgence au Portugal du mythe judaïque du Cinquième Empire». Ce n'est pas ici le lieu d'étudier en détail l'oeuvre d'Antonio Vieira et ses sources; rappelons seulement que les moines d'Alcobaça lui avaient ouvert la voie en présentant Jésus comme le fondateur et le garant de la monarchie lusitane (1971:168).

According to his book, which reached No 2 in the Scottish bestseller lists, and to the extensive website of The Royal House of Stewart (the family's preferred spelling), Prince Michael's claim to the throne is based on his being the true heir to James II (James VII of Scots), wrongfully deposed from the British throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. -...-The case of Sir Laurence Gardner illustrates well what everyone gets out of it. He's the author of The Bloodline Of The Holy Grail and Genesis Of The Grail Kings, best-selling pseudo1061 DOLT

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historical works that claim, in the usual way, that Jesus married and had children and has living descendants. Gardner's novel twist is to identify Prince Michael of Albany as Jesus's direct heir. Visitors to the Royal House of Stewart website are quickly directed to links through which they may purchase 'Sir' Laurence's books - or official Stewart paintings by Prince Michael's ambassador in Canada, 'Sir' Peter Robson; and so on. The patent preposterousness of this web of imposture has not deterred all sorts of respectable people and organisations from going along with it. The Bloodline Of The Holy Grail, which drew credibility from its foreword by Prince Michael, was serialised at length in a national tabloid, while 'Prince Michael' and 'Sir Laurence' have both been commissioned to write follow-up books. (The Man Who...1999:no page).

In her diatribe against Campbell, Nugent1045 points out how -to herCampbell seems to neglect the prodigious birth aspects to the advantage of a characterization of heroism as open to all, especially the overwhelming majority, whose birth is very ordinary. Becker already emphasized the point that “Society itself is a codified hero system�.

Yet Lecuppre's examples, as far away from myth as possible and yet so similar, show that the prodigious birth mytheme can be easily inserted into a carefully doctored narrative at any point in time. Many specialists agree that the prodigious birth was purposefully inserted into the political ascent narrative as young Alexander conquered Egypt.

The new item

-originating from either an oracle Alexander had

supposedly received, or from his position as reigning 'divine' Pharaoh- could then

1045 1995:The Heroic Career.

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be elaborated and backdated as if it had been common knowledge since the beginning; this included fateful dreams and prodigies having befallen both King Philip and Queen Olympias before Alexander's birth 1046: “we only took on board the predictions and signs -...- after the event”.

A rising member of the party apparatus, Joseph Stalin was later lionized as Lenin's right-hand man, whose role at times matched or superseded Lenin's; conversely, party honchos fallen from favor (such as Trotsky 1047 or Yezhov1048) could have their roles demoted or simply erased from the accredited narrative.

In his apologetic dialogue Trypho (with an hypothetical Jewish Rabbi), Church Father Justin Martyr ( 100-165 CE) accused Jewry to have maliciously and repeatedly altered the text of the sacred scriptures -notably the tree in Psalm 1; the contention about the virgin -in Hebrew simply “young woman”- giving birth in

Isaiah 7:141049- in order to edit nods he considered a prophecy about Jesus. It turns out the maliciously edited text was Justin's (either he edited it, or owned a copy already edited), whereas the Hebrew scriptures originally carried no such mention.

Finally, Pharaoh Amenophis III

(XIV century BCE) accredited the

1046 Apparently, Olympias dreamt about being hit by a thunderbolt, and engulfed in flames; Philip dreamt about sealing his wife's body with the image of a lion.

1047 Pseudonym of Jewish-Russian thinker L.D. Bronstejn.

1048 Head of NKVD (secret police), he presided over Stalinist purges, but fell from favor, was arrested, brutalized and executed. Yezhov's figure was edited out of a famous picture as he strolled alongside Stalin.

1049 “All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means 'God is with us'). ”.

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version he was the son of Queen Mutemwiya and of the high god Ammon coming to her disguised as her husband Pharaoh Thutmose IV, which would later be the (mythical) case of Hercules, King Arthur etc. Earlier Pharaoh Queen Hatshepsut (XVI/XV century BCE) had also claimed be the daughter of -again- the god Ammon coming to her mother Ahmose to conceive her without carnal intercourse this time.

Amenophis III also commissioned scribes to examine extant records going possibly ten centuries back in time in order to reform religious customs. The cult of the Pharaoh as divine thus joined the cults devoted to Amun god of Thebes, Ra the sun god and Aten (Atun, Aton) the sun disk hailed as shepherd of humanity and -of course- light of the world: all attributes passed down to generations of gods and saviors then centuries into the future. Even Renaissance cynosure Marsilio Ficino ( De Sole, 1493) posited the Sun as god ersatz, claiming god had “placed his tabernacle in the sun�, an idea Ficino's disciple Copernicus quickly appropriated.

Maya ruler Pakal (603-683 CE) also bestowed upon his mother Zak-Kuk the title of divine mother (mother of three gods etc).

Yet it doesn't concern only royal lineages of bygone ages. What do Alexander Haley and Margaret Mead have in common? Apparently, very little: Haley was the author of best-selling and cult/opinion-leading book Roots (1976), whereas Mead was an acclaimed anthropologist, thus an entertainer (Haley) and a scientist (Mead).

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Readers should not underestimate the influence that Haley's and Mead's work exerted on the society at large, and within the scientific community (Mead).

Haley's work seemed to appear at the very peak of a surge in what popular culture calls 'blaxploitation'1050: a very handy addition to the salad bar of identities the U.S African community was helping itself to.

Beside a court case for plagiarism1051, Wright1052 argues that -in spite of some due diligence- Haley had been feeding his readers a hoax when he had trusted 'encyclopaedic informants':

It was in this regard that Haley was directed to Fofana. Haley was seeking his ancestry in the Gambia. He told his history to at least eight people, who undoubtedly told it to others, and who went out looking for someone to provide Haley what he wanted. It is not surprising they found Fofana. It is likely they could have found others, perhaps real griots to recite roughly the same story. (Wright 1981:211).

In the meantime, the book [Roots] sold 1.5 million copies and Alex Haley had won a Pulitzer Prize. -...-The Roots hoax had enormous consequences, for the story it fabricated was used to inspire militancy in a generation of black people, and was a significant factor in the development of black political power in the post-civil rights movement 1970’s and 1980’s. Its influence persists to this day. Although the hoax has received considerable publicity, it’s still widely regarded as an authentic and inspirational legend, not uncommonly shown in the 1050 The term refers to entertainment and cultural productions in the United States especially made to appeal to the African community. As a mere example Luke Cage, hero for hire, a comic strip published by Marvel (1972).

Luke Cage in fact offers to put his super-powers to the service of those who hire him. In the comics Cage is an African sub-urban petty criminal who is taken into custody repeatedly, before an experiment gone wrong turns him into a sort of superman; the various detective Shaft or inspector Tibbs movies are another example, alongside sit-coms like The Jeffersons, Sanford&son etc.

1051 African-American writer Haley had to settle a dispute in court, recognizing he had plagiarized significant passages from a work by Harold Courlander. It may be interesting to add that Courlander was a White anthropologist.

1052 1981.

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nation’s schools in order to sensitize white students to the black experience. The television miniseries it generated was viewed by an estimated 130 million people and broke existing Neilsen TV ratings.

-...-So extensive was the hoax that Harvard professor Oscar Handlin observed. "A fraud’s a fraud...Historians are reluctant - cowardly about calling attention to factual errors when the general theme is in the right direction. That goes for foreign policy, for race, and for this book."

(Wilcox 1994:29).

[An editor at Black militant group Nations Of Islam wrote]Maybe Alex Haley did make it all up. I don't give a damn. He was a great, great story-teller, no matter where the stories came from, and I wish I could grow up to be half as good at it as he was (cit. in Zemla 2002:no page).

Much the same can be said about Mead's field trips and investigations 1053: Margaret Mead's 1928 proto-feminist and proto-liberationist scholarly account of Samoan society would amount to a hoax: her 'encyclopaedic informants' had apparently told her what she wanted to hear1054.

Both the bestselling male, Black commercial novelist mongering African consciousness, and the brilliant, White female scholar mongering feminist liberation were thus feeding their readers ( 'oppressed' African groups in seek of an identity; 'oppressed' women burning their brassières in the 'swinging Ninety-sixties' ) no other 1053 Martin 2006.

1054 “ Her subsequent book. Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), claimed to give an unadorned account of uninhibited Samoan femininity, a snapshot of a society in which girls engage in blissful ("free and easy") sexual experimentation at a young age. Mead also set up a sharp contrast with North American girls. On the one hand, the young Polynesian female was an adept and an amateur of erotic encounters; on the other hand, her North American counterpart was a buttoned-up Puritan. It was not so surprising that Coming of Age in Samoa became something of an alternative Bible among sixties sexual radicals. -...- Mead's scenario of love in the South Seas, "under the palm trees" in her own phrase, started to unravel in the 1980s, when an Australian, Derek Freeman, denounced her narrative as a myth (Margaret Mead and Samoa, 1983). In his account, Samoan culture was in fact rigid, male-dominated, hierarchical, fundamentalist, fixated on premarital virginity. He even brought forward, as evidence, one of Mead's own sources who confessed—sixty-odd years after the event—that she and her friends had freely misled Mead by telling her what she wanted to hear, stories of innumerable moonlit rendezvous and sultry perfumed liaisons. In truth they remained strict conformists to the Samoan moral code.

Mead herself later admitted she had been hoaxed.“ (Martin 2006:144ss).

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thing than a pro domo hoax:

It was American anthropology itself, rather than any Samoan adolescent, that was the chief source of the legend of the serial sexual adventuress. The disciplinary paradigm presided over by Franz Boas presupposed radical cultural pluralism; and Mead, under the heading of Samoan sexuality, seemed to provide all the evidence it needed, a clinching case. (Martin 2006:145).

It turns out -once again- that the same petrified mythologies could be endlessly recycled to champion various causes at various points in time. The obsession with -or playing the 'card' of- gender and sexuality as polemic idols in no way is a province of XVIII century libertine writers such as de Sade, or lefty hippies in the 1960.

In 411 BCE, Aristophanes puts gender squabble on scene with Lysistrata, a pacifist play that includes women going on a sex strike. Lysistratas are ubiquitous.

In 1991, red light district prostitutes in Amsterdam go on a sex strike to protest against immigration policies, for example. The extra-canonical Christian Acts Of

Paul And Thecla (II century CE) see the beloved Christian Saint go through all sorts of tribulation to preserve her virginity and faith, akin to Sadean heroines.

At some point, St. Thecla -whose worship would spread from the East to Spain- is thrown to the beasts as a transgressor (=the master of the beasts motif). A multiple gender divide appears:

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9:1 Then Thecla was taken out of the hand of Trifina, stripped naked, had a girdle put on, and thrown into the place appointed for fighting with the beasts: and the lions and the bears were let loose upon her.

9:2 But a she-lion, which was of all the most fierce, ran to Thecla, and fell down at her feet. Upon which the multitude of women shouted aloud. (Hone 1820: no page).

The “noble savage” of natural virtue was also a preferred icon during the Enlightenment. In the age of great explorations, Pacific Ocean societies also tantalized European novelty-seekers with magical accounts of either idyllic societies ruled according to natural law -such as Sade's fictional Tamoé-; or of alleged sexual spontaneity and effervescence1055 that very well lent themselves to manipulation with political purposes well before the XX century.

In 1943, Jewish-American anthropologist Regina Weltfish co-authored (with Ruth Benedict1056, both in Franz Boas' intellectual circle) a booklet for U.S armed forces The Races Of Mankind, a sort of very rudimentary war manifesto cartoonish in nature. They argued for the non-existence of races, in favor of elusive culturally acquired traits. The booklet, which lent a scientific veneer to a mixed agenda of U.S patriotism, antifascism and emotional inclusiveness, was apparently banned in 1944.

Supreme irony, as early as 1946, Weltfish ran into increasingly severe problems with the U.S establishment - eager to uncover so-called “un-american

1055 Fernandez-Armesto 2004: lecture 6.05.

1056 Some sources claim Benedict and Mead might have been in a romantic relationship.

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activities”- for her affiliations and advocacy in women's movements. Accused of Communist sympathies, her teaching appointment at Columbia was not renewed in 1953: the wartime gem of Races Of Mankind -now officially deemed subversive material- was held against her.

Kevin MacDonald writes:

My claim about Boas — supported by a great deal of evidence — is that he was motivated by a desire to end racial anti-Semitism (which was quite common at the time) and by a desire to demolish developmental theories of culture that implied that contemporary European culture was the epitome of human accomplishment. This latter thrust of Boasian thinking is a typical result of social identity processes in which the outgroup is negatively valued, especially under conditions of between-group hostility. It is consistent with a theme of much of the writing on Jewish intellectual movements, including mine: These movements are often motivated by an attitude of hostility toward Europeans and their culture because of perceived history of irrational persecution. -...- Jewish identifications and the pursuit of perceived Jewish interests, particularly in advocating an ideology of cultural pluralism as a model for Western societies, has been the “invisible subject” of American anthropology—invisible because the ethnic identifications and ethnic interests of its advocates have been masked by a language of science in which such identifications and interests were publicly illegitimate. (no date, no page).

The cross-fertilization of Jewish and African American intellectual traditions, pointed out by Moses and Asante, has taken many forms, including the link between Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois (an intellectual ancestor who died a Communist, but who is claimed both by the ‘transformationist’ Walker and by the critic of Marxism Asante), and the Black Athena affair, which has seen M.Bernal variously depicted in the guise of an Afrocentrist, a pan-Semitist or a tacit legitimizer of a new historical pact between Jews and African Americans. And, as the reading of Shavit’s book suggests, the sheer 1069 DOLT

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impact of African American life induced new, and/or reawakened old, patterns in Jewish-American thinking. (De Moraes Farias 2003:338).

What about the danger rash judgments pose? What if the hero is the rogue, and the rogue is the hero? Forces of light versus forces of darkness? Sloppy coincidences or awful conspiracies? What if the opposite applies? It turns out the opposite does apply:

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Withstanding the Jewish-Bolshevik menace required support for the concept of race, the study of race, and White racial consciousness.

Given the very real and successful efforts of Boas, Klineberg, and Montague to de-legitimize race science, they were the "natural enemy." As Jews, they could be identified as key to the conspiracy.

Thus the "Boas conspiracy" writings demonized Boas for "brainwashing" American youth and caricatured him as an extreme environmental determinist, which he was decidedly not. In the extremist view of Boas, his Jewish identity was essential for explaining his position on race and culture, despite the fact that Boas did not practice Judaism or participate in organized Jewish life. His identity was as a German who believed in full assimilation for secular Jews with enlightenment values (see Glick, 1982). But extremists were not the only ones to use "Jewishness" in order to characterize Boas as a poor scientist or a propagandist. Anthropologist Leslie White (1966) presented a view of the Boasians as a closed Jewish clique from which Gentiles were actively excluded, a claim challenged vigorously by Opler (1967). Frank's (1997) analysis of Jewish identity in Boas and other anthropologists indicates the serious difficulties that attend the use of "Jewishness" as an explanation for an academic career. Boas's status as an assimilated German Jew is certainly important for historians to consider. However, the insidious assertions of White (1966), which resonated with old ideas of too many Jews with too much influence, lend themselves readily to a clearly antisemitic message: Jews are thought to function as a unit, and speak with one voice. The careful examination of the Boas myths illustrates the permeable ideological boundaries between cloistered academic settings and the world of political extremism. Arguments about the destructive role of Boas for Western Civilization moved quickly and easily from mainstream academics, to "concerned citizens" like A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A

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Putnam, to extremists such as Rockwellextnote. Alliances between academics and neo-Nazi activists were facilitated by the belief that the study of race could be a politically and ideologically neutral enterprise, and it was therefore unnecessary to inquire into the politics of those who shared one's negative view of Boas. The present examination of the "Boas conspiracy theory" is a part of a larger study of such alliances and their meaning. (Winston 2001: no page). a revolution in anthropology was happening in America. Franz Boas, one of the great unsung heroes of the Western liberal tradition, was a professor of anthropology and a museum director in New York. He became the master of the most influential school of anthropologists in the world and advanced the discipline by encouraging his students to do fieldwork, which was a new idea at the time. -...- After anthropology had exposed that truth, it became impossible to justify imperialism in traditional terms again. Conversely, it became possible to rethink the relationship of one culture to another, along the lines of what we now call cultural relativism—the acknowledgement that every culture deserves respect on its own terms. (Fernandez-Armesto 2004:72).

It is opportune to add how the praise devoted to cultural pluralism/relatism is absolutely neither an 'invention', nor a prerogative of individual groups or minorities. De Sade, the XVIII century French nobleman -first marquis of France-, writer, pornographer and activist – served for a time as president of radical revolutionary section des piques- delivered a circular, vitriolic plea in favor of cultural pluralism and relativism. Sade would in fact spend a large part of his life in prison under different regimes (monarchy, revolution, Bonapartism).

It is therefore neither new, nor unexpected, to see members of oute xtnote Different sources contend Rockwell was an informant and -by all accounts- his American Nazi Party was heavily infiltrated. (note of this writer).

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groups -or out-groups as a whole- embrace cultural pluralism, hence relativism, as a weapon against their alleged institutionalized tormentors. Several centuries earlier, Buddhism had emphasized dependent co-arising, or reality as a mental construct coalescing from multiple co-dependent variables.

Such group dynamics are not uncommon. In late XVIII France, during what is often referred to as pre-revolution, noblesse de robe (a strand of nobility mostly serving the crown in the judicial and financial State apparatus) started to preach ideas that -although far from nihilism and maximalism that would soon dominate the upcoming revolution- still flirted with popular discontent and fueled hopes of (relatively) radical reforms.

Rhetorics exposed and denounced in glamorous terms pitfalls -and inconsistencies in the state of affairs- under the catchy names of despotism and overpowering ministries. Massively excluded from election to revolutionary assemblies (that saw basse robe1057 on the raise ), haute robe1058 helped considerably with making the event possible. It turns out, Luke Skywalker in disguise never stops screaming his monosyllable.

While some fence endlessly with ideological foes to bring the discussion back in a circular fashion to their favorite version of apocalyptic stand off between 1057 The segment of robe (literally, low robe) on the fringe of privilege. It included famous names such as selfstyled nobles D'Esmoulins, D'Anton and De Robespierre. F.M. Arouet is today known by his pen name Voltaire: de Voltaire was, in fact, the prestigious -and totally fabricated- lineage he had concocted for himself.

1058 The segment of robe (literally, high robe) enjoying the highest privileges and rank.

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what -to them- constitutes good versus evil, the same attitude -as this writing suggests- can be traced back to mythical punchlines about not casting the first stone because we all are potential sinners (latent homosexuals, liars, thieves, murderers or whichever other punchline might be used).

Well before that, Herodotus (V century BCE) had written:

For if one were to offer men to choose out of all the customs in the world such as seemed to them the best, they would examine the whole number, and end by preferring their own; so convinced are they that their own usages far surpass those of all others. Unless, therefore, a man was mad, it is not likely that he would make sport of such matters. That people have this feeling about their laws may be seen by very many proofs: among others, by the following. Darius, after he had got the kingdom, called into his presence certain Greeks who were at hand, and asked- "What he should pay them to eat the bodies of their fathers when they died?" To which they answered, that there was no sum that would tempt them to do such a thing. He then sent for certain Indians, of the race called Callatians, men who eat their fathers, and asked them, while the Greeks stood by, and knew by the help of an interpreter all that was said - "What he should give them to burn the bodies of their fathers at their decease?" The Indians exclaimed aloud, and bade him forbear such language. Such is men's wont herein; and Pindar was right, in my judgment, when he said, "Law is the king o'er all." (Book 3: no page).

The Cottingley Fairies, The Piltdown Man and The Archeoraptor all represent 'myths that became fact': Archeoraptor and The Piltdown Man as two 'missing links' needed to buttress Darwinian theories based on such a concept. It is always possible to find a papyrus, fossil, warehouse list, cablegram etc to buttress a certain conclusion, and a 'scientist' (or witness in good standing: ethos and pathos

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versus logos) to argue whichever case.

In the Cottingley case, a couple girls manufactured this story of fairies coming to see them in 1917; upon getting teased about it, they even found a way to prove it with pictures. Conan Doyle, spiritualists, and other personalities boarded the train as it seemed to fit their own agenda like a glove 1059.

That went on for almost seventy years; the two witnesses repeatedly swore it was nothing but the truth. In the early 1980s they finally admitted it was a forgery; an elaborate forgery that included experts and makeup artists (as in the 'dragon in a jar' case) to make cardboard cutouts from a book look like fairies on film.

Cold fusion was also revealed to be a hoax. The famous 'bug of the year 2000' that was supposed to fry all computers' CPUs was another hoax. While the dreaded bug didn't show any power on old 286 computers, it goaded the masses into buying new -supposedly immune- computers. Various software suites promised to eradicate the pest that experts from all corners of the world said would -indeedbring us back to the stone age just in time for the world's end in the year 2.000.

Was that just a lark on time for the year 2.000? Hardly. The time to possibly go back to the stone age after the disablement of the I.T. infrastructure has 1059 In 1550 the Protestant doctrine of cessation of miracles had been proclaimed in England. The negation of miracles opened a space for other sources of supernatural, namely demons, spirits etc.

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been postponed to July 9, 2012, when “DNS changer� - a computer virus spread ages earlier by a rogue international syndicate- would detonate, thus depriving the public of what ought to have been a privilege of Mayan prophecies. Alternatively, the final doom shall unfold in conjunction with the next massive solar storm, of which several happen every year. Mythicist Gregg Braden almost entirely relies on a salad bar of factoids and posh scientific nods to lend credit to wild spiritualist or new-age claims. There again, it is about old wine in new skins.

'Creative science' is not only confined to the fringes. What length would stupendous people not go for their fabulous idea(l)s...:

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If space really were curved by the gravity of a large planet or a big star, then faraway stars would seem to shift their position a very tiny bit when theywere near a planet in the sky, because light from those stars would change direct ion as it passed through the warped space near that planet. With really good measuring inst rument s, scientists might be able to measure whether or not the observed position of a distant star really did shift when its light rays had to pass by anot her big object on the way to earth. But there was a complicating factor: even Newton's older theory predicted that gravity would cause light rays to bend. In 1916, Einstein used his theory to predict that the degree of Hght shift would be about twice that predicted by Newtonian physics. This provided a way to experimentally check the theory. Given the measuring equipment of that time, the sun was the only body large enough to create an effect big enough that the difference between the two theories' predictions could be measured accurately. But most of th e time, the sun's light made it impossible to see faraway stars behind it. The best opport unity to sec these faraway stars came with the 1919 solar eclipse, when the moon would block the sun's light, allowing th e stars behind it to be seen and measured.

A team of British physicists led by Arthur Eddington traveled to the island of Principe. off the coast of West Africa, where they knew they'd have the best view. Eddington already believed in Einstein's A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A

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theory and he was well known in Britain as an advocate of general relativity. When Eddington returned, he claimed that his observations supported Einstein's prediction, and he convinced the scientific community that general relativity was correct. However, in the 1980s historians discovered that Eddington did not get conclusive evidence; he doctored his results. Scientists now know that there was no way Eddington could have successfully measured the light shift with the primitive equipment that he had available. In 1962 a much betterequipped British team tried to reproduce Eddington's findings. The expedition ended in failure, and the team concluded that the method was too difficult to work (Sawyer 2012:372).

War propaganda's quintessential trickster is refurbished to go along with the networked society. There is a fifth-columnist lurking under every stone left unturned ready to march on town at a designated time on one hand; on the other, there is a virus in (almost) every computer ready to detonate at a designated time...

Zealots 'clip edges' to preserve the 'good cause' (Darwinism, U.S foreign policy, the IT industry, psychotic fixations of the 1960s...) in whose name all is justifiable (the if...then strategy). Pressure is also a crucial component to successfully coax the masses into doing the persuader's bidding (sale pressure, narrative tension and tragic urgency): the 'great cause' (the world, our health, the future of children, the ozone layer, white elephants, central bank's solvency...) is at stake right here and now, and action must be taken immediately upon notice lest doom unfold.

A specialist on influence mechanisms, psychologist Cialdini categorically states people are much more likely to embrace the same proposal when coated in terms of loss than in terms of gain. Highly interesting is what the Cottingley 1076 DOLT

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witnesses thought about deceiving so many people for so long: “people wanted to be taken in”, “they wanted to believe”, “we did not have to tell a lie at all, because every time someone came out to justify it”1060.

Myth must -at some point or another- become fact to lend believers credibility in the maze of myths, pseudo-myths and related imagery that haunt humans since time immemorial. If Hercules wrestled the immortal lion to deliver peasants from that threat, that would look just like another strongman myth among many; Putin -on the other hand- did save a TV crew from an Amur tiger according to Reuters (September 2, 2008).

Arnold Schwarzenegger describes his days of young rising bodybuilding star in Munich thus:

Every bodybuilder in Munich wanted to train with Arnold. They thought I knew some secret. -...- We ate enormous meals -...- we ended like doing something like fifty-five sets of squat each. -...Sometimes it became pure insanity -...- we got into this trip that we were gladiators, male animals. We swam naked out in nature, had all this food, wine and women -...-.Every year, in the spring, a stonelifting contest is held in Munich -...- the stone weighs approximately 508 German pounds -...-[and I, in 1967] broke the existing record -...-.

The press picked it up and wrote that Mr. Universe was the strongest man in Germany- which may or may not have been true (Schwarzenegger& Kent Hall 1979:84-86).

It is hard not to recall the feats of Hercules, and other mythological heroes larger than life. Moreover, Schwarzenegger often repeats his inner 1060 Clarke 1985: Fairies, Phantoms And Fantastic Photographs.

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premonition he would – as he did- become one of the greatest bodybuilders of all time.

Born in 1936, Berlusconi -on the other hand, and in spite of wearing a pace-maker- took up jogging in 2012. He assertedly does 72 push-ups ( flessioni) every morning, alternatively claiming to feel like a 56 or 35 year-old. The daily push-ups increase to 100 according to parliamentarian -and Berlusconi's aide- M.R. Rossi1061.

Davy Crockett claimed “if I didn't make Mexican heads fly about as thick as horsechestnuts in a hurricane, then melt me into iron for steambilers ” after reaching the battlefield “astride a fabulous bear that can outrun a thunderbolt” 1062.

Even academics discussing fine points of doctrine seem to hold that the scholarly consensus wants King Arthur to be a real, historical figure, although they may both take a demythologizing approach, and offer several likely candidates for the role of Arthur: myth ought to have become fact1063. Showing what historiography is mostly about, Noble1064 adamantly states that Arthur never existed: the 'fact' is just a myth, a collection of stories. Fears 1065 takes the middle ground: he quotes W.Churchill saying “it does no harm” to posit the existence of this great chieftain who valiantly stood up, and conquered, a powerful and barbarous foe, or Churchill's not so 1061 Ferrucci 2012: no page.

1062 Cited in Brown 1983:75.

1063 Armstrong 2009:King Arthur.

1064 2008: Celt and Saxon in the British isles.

1065 2011: King Arthur.

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allegorical characterization of Germany as WWII loomed on the horizon. Fears furthermore characterizes Arthur as a Romanized Christian Briton. Once again, mythologized ancient history serves as validation of all too crass present day political advocacy.

The same can be applied to many pseudo-historical figures: Goldman explicitly states Gilgamesh lived between 2700 and 2600 BCE 1066, whereas other consider him as either purely mythical, or the mythological spinning of tales around a modest kernel of historical truth a la William Tell.

Romulus is no exception: Fears1067 protests vehemently against the “nonsense� put forth by those who doubt Romulus was a real historical figure. Of course, many scholars think just that. The archaeological remains possibly showing early settlements at Rome in the VIII century BCE not necessarily 'prove' that Romulus existed as a single historical figure, however. As well, the seven Kings of Rome -much as Egyptian lists of very early monarchs- are steeped into myth, and cover a span of time too great for a handful of real historical figures to have covered.

Indian sage Kautilya (370-283 BCE) advised rulers to follow machiavellian policies based upon commodious expediency and outcome (his book

Arthashastra). He also drafted a model schedule for the ideal King, in which the

1066 2003:Studying Ancient Near Eastern Myth.

1067 2011:Lays Of Ancient Rome.

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ruler only gets about 4 hours of daily sleep, being otherwise busy attending to matters of State (entertaining spies, administrators, military duties etc) in 1,5h slots.

Japanese intellectual Lady Murasaki

(X-XI century) delivered her

version of this universal man (“shining prince�) in her extended Tale Of Genji. It surprisingly comes back nearly verbatim in Castiglione's 1528 Cortegiano – or Renaissance's ideal man-. The same hectic schedules, exhausting feats and unending multi-tasking recur, which characterize the 'brave new man' of utopian Socialcommunism, the James Bond of fiction, not to mention the increasingly merrier, creative automaton of industrial taylorism and fordism working in a factory to bring the fantasy world of oversupply -and ensuing social progress and oneness- to fruition, which ecstatic reformers and fist-shaking agitators never stopped babbling about on all extremes of the political spectrum.

Is this transition limited to hagiographical portrait of statesmen and more or less mythical princes? Hardly. In the late 1960s, a Japanese manga popularized Tiger Mask. 'Bad guy' wrestler member of an international rogue syndicate and famous for his foul play repents and starts championing fair play. He thus becomes the rogue syndicate's target for elimination: he stops sending them monies in order to fund an orphanage instead.

Various real-life wrestlers would over the years don a tiger mask thus

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making the myth become fact. The fact the fictional story included real-life wrestlers (such as Antonio Inoki and Giant Baba) lent some (unwarranted) credibility to the rumor that this, that or another Tiger Mask was -in fact- the one whose 'hero's journey' the manga and cartoon recounted.

In truth, the storyline in the cartoon was presented as authentic, in spite of the supernatural feats of strength depicted. No mention was made of the orchestrated character of wrestling story-lines (=kayfabe); no mention, either, of the fact that decent audio and video equipment allows to clearly see how real-life wrestling moves are mostly choreographed stunts and not full-contact blows.

A parallel with the Christian Gospel might be established. Christian apologists often defend the Gospel's historicity by claiming it includes figures present in history beyond doubt, such as Pontius Pilate; so the Tiger Mask cartoon presents real-life wrestlers such as Giant Baba (1938-1999), Jack Brisco (1941-2010), Inoki, and a host of others such as Lou Thesz, Bobo Brazil, Kintaro Ooki etc.

Some elated fans even maintain Tiger Mask existed “somewhere�, although records survive of none of his many matches (with the exception of later clones and impersonators), just as Jesus (or Socrates) left no record of their own. The Tiger Mask cartoon presents real-life wrestlers from the recent past: does it ensue Tiger Mask ought to have existed, then? In perfect keeping with hyperreality, there

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probably is a Tiger Mask chap wrestling “somewhere” right now, just as there is someone who claims to have met -or conversed with- Jesus “sometime” this week.

When a U.S WWII veteran claimed he had killed up to 500 (600, numbers varied in the press) Japanese all by himself in New Guinea in 1942 – a feat worth of any Achilles or Hercules one might conjure up-, the only contention was the possible interference of racists who had assertedly denied him his due honors and recognition only because he happened to belong to a minority group 1068.

A long legal battle ensued, whereby the army jousted with powerful, upset minority lobbies. The veteran's demands were not met after the army's official investigation, however:

In a reflection of the delicacy of the matter, the legislators said the investigation did not go directly to the issue of [racism]. Army officials and members of Congress were careful not to portray [the veteran] as a deliberate liar, saying instead that he had acted honorably in the war but that he and his supporters were victims of memory fogged by the passage of years. -...- Critical to [the veteran]'s claim was the photograph of a group of Japanese soldiers with a message in Japanese on the back saying, ''Six hundred fine soldiers died because of a solitary American soldier.'' But Edward J. Drea, a military historian fluent in Japanese, cited internal and external evidence to assert that the inscription was ''spurious'' and ''fraudulent.'' (Halloran 1989: no page).

In 1959, America’s “last surviving Civil War veteran,” Walter Williams, died. He was given a princely funeral, including a parade that tens of thousands gathered to see, and an official week of mourning. Many years later, however, a journalist named William 1068 Cited in Wilcox 1990:20.

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Marvel discovered that Williams had been only five years old when the war began, which meant he wouldn’t have been old enough at any point to serve in the military in any capacity. It gets worse, though.

The title that Walter Williams bore falsely to the grave had been passed to him from a man named John Salling, who, as Marvel discovered, had also falsely called himself the oldest Civil War veteran. In fact, Marvel claims that the last dozen of so-called oldest Civil War veterans were all phony. (Ariely 2012:76).

Another Korean war veteran (deceased in combat) from the same minority background was indeed awarded a medal. A Democratic politician from Florida, however, proposed a bill in 2001 to the effect that

If the legislation becomes law, the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force would be required to review the records of all [minority group] war veterans who received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross or the Air Force Cross to determine whether the Congressional Medals of Honor were warranted. The [minority group] War Veterans organization would be authorized to submit additional names for consideration. (Harrison 2001:no page).

Those are motifs so dear to the human psyche that they are always paying dividends.

Lone heroes – a variant of the patriarch's arrival motif- enter the scene, and swiftly take care of business as the valiant knights of yore used to (Parsifal, Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain...). Schwarzenegger's lone character in

Commando

(1985), or in Raw Deal (1986) takes on, single-handedly and bloodily routs syndicates of mafiosi and spies. Robocop single-handedly takes on entire Detroit's ripe crime scene: surfeit and yet more surfeit.

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Star Wars' Anakin Skywalker enters the enemy's encampment at night to slaughter them all: a scene replayed in the Mahabharata (several centuries BCE).

Fears1069 censors unreliable Mexican sources claiming Crockett surrendered -and was executed- at the Alamo: he prefers to remember Crockett to have died atop countless Mexican foes killed in hand-to-hand combat. Real life modeled upon fiction, fiction modeled upon real life, or the other way round: can anyone really tell the difference?

As seen, reference to the myth is used to 'excuse' or hail someone or something (for example an ideology with political undertones in the cases of Haley and Mead). At the height of yet another crisis, Italian statesman Berlusconi was bestowed “pseudo-sanctity”1070 upon by proxy when the Israeli government saluted his mother as righteous1071.

Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini's son in law, and son of influential Fascist and war hero Costanzo1072) acquired “pseudo-sanctity” too -which he needed in his political ascent in spite of his high-ranking affiliations- when Pavolini swore his personal friend Galeazzo had been a member of a famous 1919 Fascist squad at the party's dawn, although nobody remembered seeing him: in antiquity it could have 1069 2011: The Alamo.

1070 “[people who] enjoyed a fama sanctitatis, a reputation for sanctity they carefully nurtured since it was an appropriate stepping-stone for their "pilgrims' progress" towards power. Some of them were clearly connected to vast aristocratic plots and used as -...-ridiculous puppets in the hands of scheming parties. ”(Lecuppre 2006:205).

1071 Blog:2011, no page 1072 According to some sources, for a period Costanzo was designated to succeed Mussolini in the regime's hierarchy.

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been being related to some ancient deity. Ciano was very grateful in return, which paved Pavolini's way to the highest political level.

Leon Degrelle -the Belgian Fascist leader and later Waffen SS Generalrecounts the lengths he went to insure his Belgian Wallon volunteers joined the coveted SS. He had not only to enjoy personal accolades as a decorated soldier, but to be warmly recommended at the highest military level and -finally- to run 'forensic investigations' to prove -to Himmler's fastidious standards- how Wallons were after all francophone Germans by a racial and cultural standpoint.

As Meineck said “ art [any creative production] responds to and provokes the prevailing cultural trends�1073. This concept is crucial in its manifold consequences and does not simply revolve around infantile morality or crass cynicism.

Different mythologies obsess different epochs:

We predicted that participants would take longer to read outcome sentences that mismatched biasing contexts. In line with our predictions, the interaction between biasing context and outcome was significant: Participants were, on average, 203 ms slower to read the outcome sentence if it was inconsistent (i.e., stories containing success-biasing contexts followed by failed outcomes or failure-biasing contexts followed by successful outcomes: M = 2725 ms), compared to when it was consistent with the earlier biasing context (i.e., stories containing success-biasing contexts followed by successful outcomes or failure-biasing contexts followed by failed outcomes: M = 2522 ms).

1073 Meineck 2005-2: Why Athens.

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(Rapp&Gerrig 2006:62).

The popular UK sci-fi production of the late 1960s UFO capitalized on two of the period's hot pop cultural icons: organ transplants and space exploration.

Transplant surgery then in its infancy promised to put in motion a circuit of human spare parts that soon enough would eradicate so many fatal diseases. Space exploration forecast deep space exploration, manned outer space bases, and other achievements that would satisfy even the most avid sci-fi reader. The UFO series mixed the two with equal parts of other popular culture fixations of the time (an interracial angle; the British driving on the road's right side; James Bond atmospheres etc).

An alien race of invaders as elusive as technologically advanced raids Earth to kidnap humans in order to harvest organs and tissues for transplant; it goes without saying how a common urban legends links mysterious disappearances to the rogue international network of underground transplants still to this day.

Against extraterrestrials rises a secret world military organization in James Bond style equipped with sci-fi gadgetry: they operate out of a moon base, underground headquarters and marine caves. Some parts of the screenplay hit the wrong nerve with some press that accused the series of one '...ism' or another because it portrayed the coming of aliens as a threat after all.

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Even the smallest of details reveal how the purported creativity of the allegedly gifted writers and visionaries imagining fantasy worlds to possibly vindicate political agendas is crassly reflecting a distorted image of their times: nothing more. Although set in a then far-flung future, UK sci-fi production Space

1999

(1975-77) never really left the seventies 1074: bell-bottom pants; analogic

control panels; thick-heeled shoes; hairstyles; pocket calculators as thick as bricks and futuristic intelligent computers running on punch cards...

Even Space 1999 “respond[ed] to and provoke[d] the prevailing cultural trends” by pillorying an alien race called Darians in one episode: readers may easily guess what that nods at.

In 1978, the Italian adaptation of the French adaptation of a Japanese cartoon (Goldrake, French Goldorak) took the public by storm. Although set in a far-flung future, the soundtrack that introduced the cartoon mentioned “circuiti di mille valvole (thousand-valve circuitry)”: the meta-historical future looked so similar to technology outdated already (then) in the seventies.

Japanese cartoons and productions of the 1970s often included western/cowboy elements -such as soundtracks or backdrops- that had nothing to do with the main storyline -typically sci-fi-, yet the Japanese of the 1970s were fond

1074 In the series UFO, Moon base pilots reach their vehicles via chutes, which are uncannily similar to actual technology of the late 1960s, as seen for example in Cousteau's documentaries.

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of U.S western/frontier movies.

Still in 1970s Japan, the heroes of sci-fi cartoons were typically maladaptive, male youth; suburban bullies rode their radio-equipped motorbikes, thus anticipating the terminal-man of later years: “ art [any creative production] responds to and provokes the prevailing cultural trends� 1075.

As the internet became a tool of mass entertainment and recourse, it also started to creep through popular culture, as the 1995 movie The Net epitomized; a garbled salad bar of potential dangers related to one's presence online such as identity theft, industrial espionage, ambiguous situations and danger oozing in all sort of ways from the computer screen people may get hooked to.

The very early 1990s saw a surge in such dramas axed around telephone lines and interactions: maniacs and nasty encounters might all materialize out of a telephone chat room, an item very popular before the internet revolution. Are readers not interested in mainstream Hollywood, perchance? Has the phone slipped out of fashion nowadays? What about Ragazze In Web (2011)? Danger lurks in the world of internet porn web cam sites two female students work in: thriller and ethical dramas rolled in a TV movie.

In 2001 it was the turn of Swordfish, another movie beating the concept

1075 Meineck 2005-2: Why Athens.

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of I.T, hackers and criminal exploits to death. Popular culture had started toying with cryptography right then, as it was being made available to the general public through some noted software suites; swordfish being, exactly, one of the then popular cryptographic algorithms: synchronicity, indeed. The fad had a long history stretching back through Sneakers (1992) and Wargames (1983)1076, which linked a then rudimentary, rising I.T culture for the masses with then popular phobias such as the impending 'nuclear holocaust' and -of course- a hefty dose of petrified mythologies such as an average layman in pursuit of diversion who finds himself facing issues or threats beyond belief 1077. In 1992 Sneakers, the changing of the guard among fads is made obvious: mafia and industrial espionage scenarios replace obsolete cold war scenarios:

Those for whom security rather than economy was paramount preferred to use ciphers, which take longer to encode and decode (since individual letters rather than whole words are substituted) but are harder to crack. Yet while such codes and ciphers were a boon for users, they were extremely inconvenient for [Victorian] telegraph companies. Codes reduced their revenue, since fewer words were transmitted, and ciphers made life harder for operators, who found it more difficult to read and transmit gibberish than messages in everyday language. -...-messages in cipher were charged at a higher rate. (Standage 1998:113).

At times the various clones from the most remote provinces of the 1076 As argued earlier, before the internet took over, computers were mostly inserted in story-lines revolving around the telephone network. With a broad brush, story-lines in Wargames or Sneakers revolve around phone calls groomed into a spy story with technological elements.

1077 The movie Vamp (1986) -among others- adopts the same stale plot contrivance. College students on a bawdy fraternity assignment visit the big city. After swerving in the midday city centre traffic jam, they instantly find themselves roaming at dusk in a semi-deserted ghetto teeming with aggressive street thugs, mischievious undead and swarms of hostile vampires.

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worldwide Americanized empire beat the mainstream at its own game. Deepities (statements that sound supercharged with meaning but are intellectually hollow, faulty and/or ambiguous) steal the day.

In 1995 and 1996 Children and One&One, pieces performed and produced by noted DJ and musician Robert Miles, take the musical scene by storm with new age music and a cargo of gnostic motifs:”I love the one we are -...- let's stand still in time”. It helps to consider a very Italian Roberto Concina hid behind a pseudonym turning him into another orderly brick into the wall of the Americanized mainstream, and ensuing anglicized pidgin:

Another song, “I Am The Walrus,” apparently written during one of Lennon’s acid trips, contains the quizzical lyric, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” (Polimeni 2012:187).

The traditional Upaniśadic knowledge of identity is revealed: “soham” – “I am He” “sarvam khalvidam Brahma” – “All this verily is the Brahman” (Savardekar, MAISI014 no date: lecture 3:8). [ Vajrayana Buddhist master] Trungpa walked in tipsy and sat on the edge of the altar platform with his feet dangling. But he delivered a crystal-clear talk, which some felt had a quality – like Suzuki's talks – of not only being about the dharma but being itself the dharma (Chadwick 1999:ch.18).

Complete Perfection Daoism began when Wang, while wandering around in a drunken stupor at the age of forty-eight, received revelation from two immortals who led him to a new synthesis of Daoism, Chan Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, and old-fashioned asceticism. (Prothero 2010:103).

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Jesus said to them, "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter [the Kingdom]." (Gospel Of Thomas no date no page n.22).

O Sariputra, Form does not differ from Emptiness And Emptiness does not differ from Form. Form is Emptiness and Emptiness is Form. The same is true for Feelings, Perceptions, Volitions and Consciousness. Sariputra, the characteristics of the Emptiness of all Dharmas are Non-Arising, Non-Ceasing, Non-Defiled, NonPure, Non-Increasing, Non-Decreasing. (Buddhist Heart Sutra).

The old romantic nineteenth-century philosophers and scholars in Germany had the idea that the people produce the myths.

Well, they don't! Myths come out of an elite mind like Black Elk's, whose dream then becomes a source of rituals. Myth has always come from visionaries, and all the traditions tell us this.

For instance, the whole mythos of the Biblical tradition was supposed to have come from Moses, not from the Jewish people.

It was he who brought it down from the mountain top. In the Old Testament, every time the people got into trouble, Moses went into himself, had a conversation with God, and then returned with more information.(Campbell&Boa 1989:131).

Fascist regimes, for example, were obsessed with war, heroism, patriotic values, action squads etc. In the 1960s the fixation switched – in the wake of war propaganda- onto oppression, sexuality, racism and so forth. Staloff mentions that “there is no culture that defines itself in terms of its own past to the same extent as that of the West”1078:”the Apocalypse in the East never became mainstream; it never became a dominant force in eastern culture. -...- The Apocalypse becomes

1078 1995:Issues And Problems.

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mainstream in the West”1079.

That explains how today it is trendy to speculate upon Gautama Buddha's attitude towards women. Is this concern really relevant to the thought of a sage who lived in the VI -or according to some tradition as early as the X-XIcentury BCE? Did the Graeco-Romans practice pederasty, or were they really pedophiles? Was the Inca Empire a Socialist State? Was Sparta a sort of feminist paradise? It boggles one's mind to apply mid-XX century polemics to civilizations twenty or more centuries in the past.

Of course, if no political pamphlet of

contemporary vintage could be written, historiography would lose most of its appeal.

Both Nietzsche and venerable Wuling (Pure Land Buddhist monastic) make of the ability to forget – to let the past go- a gage of moral superiority and spiritual achievement. Nietzsche's “active type” able to forget (master morality) faces the “reactive type” basking in remembrance, and thus resentment, or the prototypical Christian (slave morality). Solomon 1080 casts Nietzsche and his ideas as perfect byproducts of Darwinian theories popular at the time.

“There is no culture that defines itself in terms of its own past to the same extent as that of the West”. While readers may trace this mindset back to

1079 Williamson 1995: Meet The Beast.

1080 2000: Nietzsche: The Uebermensch And The Will To Power.

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Graeco-Roman times, it is also true that -the present writer contends- only starting with the First World War -in the footsteps on Romanticism and the XIX century revolutions- has this fixation with the past being exaggerated to the point of a schizophrenic ritual (=the enactment of a myth) that involves a vast portion of the population, and not only upper classes and rulers busy imaging communities or rewriting history books.

Pre-Communist China, too, had a tendency to see the present through the more or less updated prism of a far-reaching past -for example China as the abode of the longest-lived centralized government in continuous existence in history-, and related philosophies -Confucianism, Legalism, Buddhism, Taoism...-, which had little in common with the schizophrenic morality plays and comedies of innocence taking center-stage in the West that -by all means- exchanges the relatively unified Chinese politico-philosophical horizon for a discombobulated jumble of increasingly post-Christian drift, war propaganda leftovers etc.

When Hermes' statues were mysteriously chipped (around 415 BCE), the Athenians' hatred exploded, and a famous process ensued; Thucydides writes:�So they were concerned to blow up the whole affair and make strident claims that the profanation of the Mysteries and the mutilation of the Herms were part of a plot to subvert the democracy. “1081.

1081 The Peloponnesian War 6.28.

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Modern readers may scoff at what amounts to larks or modest acts of vandalism superstitious archaic cultures blew irrationally out of proportion, yet it is enough to evoke other vandals who might deface and/or spray-paint the communal abode of this or that minority group with symbols of past regimes to see the average modern reader instantly rise in desecrated anger demanding just retribution flipping out in much the same way the Athenians did, and for the very same reason.

Also for the very same reasons, shortly before the Peloponnesian war erupted, Athens introduced impiety laws, an obvious kangaroo court to deal with politically unsavory characters. Pagan impiety laws would become Christian blasphemy laws, which would morph into our contemporary special, '...ist' laws.

Is there a method to the madness? Ovid 1082 ponders this riddle when Piritous derides as made-up the story the river god Achelous just told as he had supposedly witnessed it. Of course, today it is fashionable to embrace Piritous' attitude puncturing the already improbable narratives of bizarre characters pretending to relay what just happened.

Ovid goes further and relays how the audience disapproved of Piritous' words, until old and sage hero Lelex toed the party line and simply declared that whatever the gods will shall happen the way they decreed (=society's plausibility structure). �Even if such claims had merit -...- [people] cannot ethically stand by this 1082 Metamorphoses 8.611-678.

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[statement] whose end result can only be furthering discrimination under the guise of academic discourse.”;”A destroyer of faith-...- places himself in great spiritual jeopardy. He is serving the wrong master, and unless he repents, he will not be among the faithful in the eternities.”: special interest hacks on the militant left and the Mormon Church eerily agree.

Most modern readers can hardly hold outbursts of laughter...river gods?

People turned into islands? Gods of the sea? Yet it is enough to interpolate crucified Canadians, bayoneted babies, evil arch-dictators, '...ists' of one foul breed or another to see how it all makes sense and that whatever has been decreed shall be equally believed in the minutest detail; failure to comply invariably entails hazardous complications.

Rousseau had already explained people might be “forced to be free”; in perfect Enlightenment style, Chilean national motto reads Por La Razòn O La

Fuerza (either through reason or brute force): Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Amin and other 'great men of history' couldn't have said it better.

Controversially involved with the collaborationist Vichy government, future French Socialist President Mitterrand was even awarded the prestigious decoration francisque in 1943, symbol of the Vichy regime; he would flatly omit that portion of his past, skipping to when he became involved with the Resistance.

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When the embarrassing evidence reappeared, he was gotten off the hook when many prominent antifascists declared he had been an infiltrator in their service all along.

French author of science fiction and erotic literature Jimmy Guieu (1926-2000)1083 involved himself in the controversial field of alien abductions, alien secret governments, the paranormal and so forth advocating related theories. In a taped series1084, Guieu repeatedly tried to bestow “pseudo-sanctity� upon himself declaiming how he had joined the French Resistance in his youth; that was supposedly to enhance his credibility and -by proxy- the credibility of his arguments in favor of alien abductions, paranormal phenomena, and what not.

Mythicist Jordan Maxwell repeatedly claims he got confidential insight from a noted rabbi in the 1960s regarding some counter-cultural facts about Judaism. In all likelihood, he got that information from a public book Rabbi Antelman -whom Maxwell misrepresents in some official, high-ranking capacity within the Jewish community- published in 1974.

In a paradoxical situation that becomes all too common in these insider's tales, Maxwell has been caught on tape giving

alternative -if not conflicting-

accounts of what he otherwise presents as the same, sharp eye-witness story about

1083 1991ss.

1084 Guieu 1991ss.

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these eminent family members of his (judges, congressmen, Vatican bureaucrats), who shared secret insight about how the powerful run the world behind the curtain.

Maxwell's uncle working at the Holy See alternatively becomes his or his mother's uncle; a civilian; a Catholic priest; a petty mobster figure:�After this, it is not surprising to find that no two authors who describe the deeds of William Tell agree in the details of topography and chronology.�. Readers would be hard-pressed to pinpoint the elusive uncle, as Jordan -or Jordon as billed in some instancesMaxwell is apparently just a pseudonym. Jimmy Guieu also had a few pseudonyms he went under.

Bonnie Lange, who claims to have sponsored and promoted mythicists such as Maxwell and David Icke, paints a very uncomplimentary portrait of Maxwell as a crook, a liar and an amateur of little substance 1085. She even quotes Maxwell's brother -formerly an employee of hers- who admitted he had no idea about Jordan's head trips: they never had any relative working at the Vatican.

Furthermore, Maxwell nowadays claims to have spent 50 (yes, fifty) years researching freemasonry, symbolism etc. As many in mythicist circles, and internet searches attest, Maxwell only surfaced no sooner than 1989-90: a lot less than fifty years back.

1085 No date.

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Such cases are not uncommon. As it is the case with cable TV productions, the same actors play different roles with impeccable gamesmanship while the frazzled crowd cheers every incarnation with relentless enthusiasm:

To those who knew him, or thought they knew him, he was a cerebral, fun-loving gadfly who hosted boozy gatherings for Hollywood's political conservatives. David Stein brought rightwing congressmen, celebrities, writers and entertainment industry figures together for shindigs, closed to outsiders, where they could scorn liberals and proclaim their true beliefs. Over the past five years Stein's organisation, Republican Party Animals, drew hundreds to regular events in and around Los Angeles, making him a darling of conservative blogs and talkshows. That he made respected documentaries on the Holocaust added intellectual cachet and Jewish support to Stein's cocktail of politics, irreverence and rock and roll. There was just one problem. Stein was not who he claimed. His real name can be revealed for the first time publicly – a close circle of confidants only found out the truth recently – as David Cole extnote. And under that name he was once a reviled Holocaust revisionist -...-.

He changed identities in January 1998. -...-Some of Stein/Cole's erstwhile friends are media figures with blogs, newspaper columns and syndicated radio shows. They put a lid on the story.

Not a word has been published or broadcast. -...-As Stein, however, he shielded his viewsextnote, not least during the next e xtnote “In 1994 he co-founded the Tinbergen Archives, a Holocaust education institution and research facility in Beverly Hills, California, and he served as its director of operations from 1994 until 2004. The Tinbergen Archives was named in honor of Isaac Tinbergen, a Jewish victim of the Holocaust who, on the eve of his death, implored his fellow Dutch Jews to "record and remember" their experiences. Under David Stein's directorship, the Tinbergen Archives became one of the leading suppliers of Holocaust education materials to colleges and universities in North America. In 1996 David created the documentary film division of the Tinbergen Archives, and over the course of the next eight years he produced over a dozen internationally renowned documentary films about the Holocaust, World War II, and the struggle of peoples around the world against racism and intolerance. ” The IMDB pages apparently never mention Cole the revisionist (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1783655/bio) (Note of this writer). e xtnote Once exposed, Stein lost his status as mainstream conservative figure. He apparently reverted back to his former self as Cole. He started milling outrageous nonsense for the consumption of judeophobes just as he had been doing in the old days. The crowd -whether ortho- or heterodox- automatically cheers for the Cole countercultural -or Stein mainstream- incarnation as if the other side of the coin had never existed. Every side argues how David kept the inner fire burning, and that the other incarnation was just a con game to show how gullible the other side really is. Clues suggest that David might have indifferently played the ortho- and

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stage of his career odyssey: the maker of respectable, conventional Holocaust documentaries. He knew the subject, needed an income and US schools and universities had budgets to commission such projects. He said: "I gave mainstream audiences what they wanted." (Carroll 2013:no page).

Italian Corrado Malanga, formally a university researcher in the field of chemistry, is another character trying to bestow pseudo-sanctity upon himself associating his capacity of scientist with that of 'authority' in matters of alien abductions and dabbler in matters of regressive hypnosis. Equally, reference to a more or less mythologized worldview helps to damn or indict anyone or anything; here are some opinions:

If you are confronted with an assertion, there is a short way of getting rid of it, or, at any rate, of throwing suspicion on it, by putting it into some odious category; even though the connection is only apparent, or else of a loose character. You can say, for instance, “That is Manichaeism” or “It is Arianism,” or “Pelagianism,” or “Idealism,” or “Spinozism,” or “Pantheism,” or “Brownianism -...-. In making an objection of this kind, you take it for granted (1) that the assertion in question is identical with,or is at least contained in, the category cited —that is to say, you cry out, “Oh, I have heard that before”; and (2) that the system referred to has been entirely refuted, and does not contain a word of truth.( Schopenhauer 2004:18).

The Europeans' enmity towards Israel cannot be detached from the Europeans' thousand-year hatred of the Jews and their shorter and much less lethal, but still palpable antipathy towards America. And thus we are back to the three standard pillars of classical antisemitism and anti-americanism. (Markovits, no date:96).

Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the heterodox tune at the same time all along, just like Hulk Hogan happened to play the 'bad guy' for one wrestling promotion, and the 'good guy' for another. Bible scholar R.M. Price also seems to play different personas to the antithetical delight of skeptic athesists on the left, and of Church-going chauvinists on the right (note of this writer).

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reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by wrongful, unfair, or malicious speech or publication.-...- In a ritual defamation the victim must have violated a particular taboo in some way, usually by expressing or identifying with a forbidden attitude, opinion or belief. It is not necessary that he "do" anything about it or undertake any course of action, only that he engage in some form of communication or expression -...-. To debate opens the issue up for examination and discussion on its merits, which is just what the ritual defamer is trying to avoid -...-. In order for a ritual defamation to be effective, the victim must be dehumanized to the extent that he becomes identical with the offending attitude, opinion or belief, and in a manner which distorts it to the point where it appears at its most extreme -...-.Ritual defamation is not necessarily an offense of being wrong or incorrect, but rather "insensitivity" and failing to observe social taboos -...-. Ritual defamation is an important means of social control (Wilcox 1990:42-43.).

Militant anti-racist and anti-fascist groups like militant groups of all kinds, including those that are patently racist, tend to see themselves in terms of their intentions, which they claim are selfless, noble and altruistic. A much clearer picture emerges when one views them as interest groups which, like virtually all interest groups, are engaged in benefiting a particular constituency. By claiming the so-called moral high ground, and appearing to act "for the good of others," they often manage to elude the kind of critical examination that befalls other less fortunately situated interest groups.(Wilcox 1998-9:14) Saul Kassin and his colleagues found that the credibility of an expert trial witness could be damaged merely by asking accusatory questions, such as, "Isn't it true that your work is poorly regarded by your colleagues?" The expert's credibility was damaged regardless of whether the accusation was denied or withdrawn by the lawyer after an objection was raised. Stanley Sue and his colleagues found that evidence prejudicial to a defendant would result in more convictions even when the evidence was ruled inadmissible. Numerous studies have found that negative pretrial publicity—such as reports of a confession, a failed lie detector test, the defendant's prior record, details of the case, and other information that was not admitted into trial testimony—can have a serious impact on jury decision making.

(Pratkanis&Aronson 2011: ch.11, emphasis added).

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Building common ground, then, is not only a by-product of recognizing the indirection itself, but is essential to keeping the criticism, and the person advancing it, 'safe'. (Carlos 2007:2).

When I am with those who are weak, I share their weakness, for I want to bring the weak to Christ. Yes, I try to find common ground with everyone, doing everything I can to save some. ( 1 Corinthians 9:22). the abstract virtues exemplified in a Saint must accurately reflect those of its target community. But, more importantly (at least regarding its capacity to inspire) the Saint herself (or himself) must be relevant and identifiable to that community. (Hunt 2001:41).

Rather, myths, like dreams, characteristically license fusions of categories and identities normally held discrete. -...- It is because myths rely on dream-logic that the word "myth," at least in one of its senses, preserves the connotations of falsehood and fallacy.-...- Myths rarely mean simply and solely what they seem to say. They often serve more faithfully to celebrate than to explain (Goodman 1993:5657).

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The very same stories and situations have circulated for decades, centuries, if not for thousands of years, in spite of having been obviously tampered with. The very pliable, Barnum-like nature of certain cliches has made them palatable to different cultures over immemorial spans of time.

Even if we set aside the recurring references to 'the hero's journey', Hercules, Caesar, Alexander, Theseus and the best known myths, a XIII century Dominican manuscript mentions the peasant cult devoted to thaumaturge Saint Guinefort, a dog that saved his master's infant son from a serpent but was killed in error because the master assumed him to be the attacker 1086: be wary of rash acts and judgments. The same story recurs in Indian panchatantra (several centuries BCE); in that case the faithful animal is a mongoose, a sort of ancient Rikki Tikki Tavi.

An identical story is still told today, and the cult of Saint Guinefort was still alive in the first half of the XX century, in spite of the Church's effort to suppress it. The dog-headed incarnation of San Cristoforo may represent a nod to Anubis, the Egyptian jackal-headed god who served as ferryboat man for the deceased1087; an astronomical nod; a nod to Saint Guinefort at Lyon also celebrated

1086 This theme (“beware of rash acts�) is overused in chivalric literature. Quite often knights joust or fight, and when they take their helmet off become aware they were fighting their friends or relatives (Parzifal and his half-brother Feirefiz for example).

1087 In the Legenda Aurea, Cristoforo helps the infant Jesus to cross a river.

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on July 25 (canicola =period of the heat waves, from canis=dog).

In Japan, the dog Hachiko would try to meet his deceased owner every day for nine years until the dog's death in 1935. Statues have been erected; a day (April 8th) has been set apart; a train station exit has been named to commemorate Achiko's (dubbed “the faithful dog”) relentless attempts at greeting his deceased owner at the appointed place and time. Hachiko's loyalty was co-opted to serve Japanese imperialism in the following years (=all the Japanese as one rallying behind the divine Emperor). While Achiko is indeed an historical figure, similar stories have cropped up in the press all over the world.

Being wary of rash judgments is a cherished motif that can stew in all sauces, such as Gianni Morandi's 1965 love song (and ensuing romantic movie 1088)

Non Son Degno Di Te (unworthy of you), which chronicles the misunderstanding between two young lovers thus: “E va bene così, me ne vado da te -...- ma al mondo non esiste nessuno che non ha sbagliato una volta” (Alright, I depart from you -...but there is nobody alive who hasn't made at least one mistake). Furthermore, the movie ends with a fabulous reunion scene, an embrace and a kiss that would melt even a 'heart of darkness'.

In a tsunami of sentimentalism, readers easily recognize the favorite

1088 A curious trivia is that Morandi's character in the movie is named Gianni Traimonti (literally: John betwixtthe-mountains), an awkward name on par with Luke Skywalker or Road Runner.

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motifs of the sullen departure (=grief, death, pain); the rash (mis)judgment motif; the choice that entails suffering motif; the punchline that either everybody makes mistakes (= don't cast the first stone); or to listen to one's heart, much as Darth Vader urges Luke Skywalker in the famous recognition scene.

The savior-hero-founder who refuses to cast the first stone in the lore becomes the positive psychologist granting one “the permission to be human”:

Therapeutic re-education is therefore at once a difficult and yet modest procedure. It teaches the patient-student how to live with the contradictions that combine to make him into a unique personality; this it does in contrast to the older moral pedagogies, which tried to re-order the contradictions into a hierarchy of superior and inferior, good and evil, capabilities. To become a psychological man is thus to become kinder to the self as a whole, to the private parts of it as well as to the public ones, to the once inferior as well as to the formerly superior. While older character types were concentrating on the life task of trying to order the warring parts of th e personality into a hierarchy, modern pedagogies, reflecting the changing self-conception of this culture, are far more egalitarian: it is the task of psychological man to develop an informed (i.e., healthy) respect for the sovereign and unresolvable basic contradictions that make him the singularly complicated human being he is. (Rieff 2006:45).

Popular culture is never far behind. 1996 international hit song One&One recites:”It's alright to fall apart sometimes -...- we all have an angry heart sometimes”.

At the end of Rambo II, fabulous 'real American' Rambo sullenly announces he doesn't know where he's going, and that he'll live day by day, just

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after claiming all he wants is for his country to love him as much as he loves it.

Rambo had just came back from Vietnam's jungles, after the obliteration of a huge number of Communist foes of the free world (the Vietnamese and their Soviet masters), yet a (real-life) former Communist resister during WWII in Northern Italy expresses1089 the exact same concern: WWII Resistance heroes want to be loved, not celebrated.

If one's heart is properly listened to, a reunion ensues, which brings about reconciliation between the 'common humanity fellows' (and their god, optionally): a Catholic sacrament. Listening to one's heart (soul...) is the befuddled rationalization of witnessing human mind's quirky reactions. Indeed, the hero's journey, the Ulysses shtick, the reunion/reconciliation shtick, the resilient saviorhero who goes ahead undaunted shtick -and countless others mythemes and

exempla- work their wonders upon the human mind across cultures, ages and regimes.

Jewish-Canadian scholar Goffman interestingly wrote about:

The individual may desire, earn, and deserve deference, but by and large he is not allowed to give it to himself, being forced to seek it from others. In seeking it from others, he finds he has added reason for seeking them out, and in tum society is given added assurance that its members will enter into interaction and relationships with one another. If the individual could give himself the deference he desired there might be a tendency for society to disintegrate into islands 1089 Giornale Di Arona, 26 April 2013.

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inhabited by solitary cultish men, each in continuous worship at his own shrine. (2005:58).

Although such a function may be carried on quite often, such mythemes and exempla are not the embodiment of the horde (=this, that or another horde coalescing under determinate circumstance at a precise time) in fusion kowtowing to itself, or the individual (=this, that or another individual acting under determinate circumstance at a precise time) using the horde as a proxy as Durkheim might have it.

When the horde is in fusion, both individuals and the group find the experience electrifying and irresistible indeed. The accent, however, is on the core mytheme (worshiping the hero's corpse, the hero's journey, becoming one...) rather than on the accessory details (worshiping the body of red heroes rather than black ones; becoming one to avenge a loss in a football match rather than a foreign policy debacle; the journey of this hero rather than that...).

Rather, those mythemes play a function for the human mind that certain nutrients play in the human body: absence or depletion creates serious or even lifethreatening situations:

Staline comme la marchandise démodée sont dénoncés par ceux-là mêmes qui les ont imposés. Chaque nouveau mensonge de la publicité est aussi l’aveu de son mensonge précédent. Chaque écroulement d’une figure du pouvoir totalitaire révèle la communauté illusoire qui l’approuvait unanimement, et qui n’était qu’un agglomérat de 1106 DOLT

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solitudes sans illusions. (Debord 1967: point 70).

The approval with which we look upon fashionable attire is by no means to be accounted pure make-believe. We readily, and for the most part with utter sincerity, find those things pleasing that are in vogue. Shaggy dress-stuffs and pronounced colour effects, for instance, offend us at times when the vogue is goods of a high, glossy finish and neutral colours. A fancy bonnet of this year’s model unquestionably appeals to our sensibilities to-day much more forcibly than an equally fancy bonnet of the model of last year -...-. For a creative principle, capable of serving as motive to invention and innovation in fashions, we shall have to go back to the primitive, non-economic motive with which apparel originated,—the motive of adornment -...- under the guidance of the law of expensiveness (Veblen 2007:88,115) media is no longer a collective experience but rather an individual experience. -...-There will soon be a way to avoid bad TV like this and watch only what you want to -...-And then the atomization of entertainment will be complete. (Twenge&Campbell 2009: No matter how people cathect these exempla, mythemes, and the reactions they trigger, with preposterous spiritual or mystical qualities, such effects are comparable to that of a potent emetic or laxative -or some other medicine of that kind-: it is swiftly potent; the effect is assured, and can in very precise ways be beneficial and save lives, yet there is nothing mystical or paranormal about it. There is nothing mystical or especially gnostic about gastroenteritis and the diarrhea it typically causes: readers shall come to their own conclusions about how gnostic or mystical emotional diarrhea mythological images can cause might truly be.

Bird1090 relates how Times printed a rumor in 1942 relating this story

1090 1979:65ss.

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about a stranger who had claimed s-he hoped war would last long because s-he 1091 was doing well because of it; at which point several outraged people would rise and slap the incautious person 'because their boy had died at war'. The same rumor could be tracked back to Civil War times.

Another such urban legend revolves around the display of colored ribbons to parade allegiance to a particular cause. Santino plots the evolution of the practice:

The 1973 popular song "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Ole Oak Tree" is not a variant of "All Around My Hat." Instead, it is a popular narrative song that prominently features the idea of the public display of a yellow ribbon. According to certain newspaper accounts, the song is supposed to have been based on a true incident that occurred in Brunswick, Georgia (Buffalo News, 2 February 1991, sec. C., p. 1).

However, there are numerous accounts of a similar story that circulated among the soldiers who fought in Vietnam. In these accounts of the story, which we would call an urban legend, a returning prisoner requested that his loved one tie a white kerchief, or something white, in the front yard if he were still welcome home.

(1992:24-25).

Endless variations upon the same story exist -in the Italian language, too1092-. It is easy to detect human mind's favorites: the choice that entails suffering; the hero's journey; the great reunion; the reconciliation/new beginning motif; the prodigal son motif etc. Readers or listeners freeze aghast:�These are static emotions that arrest the mind and cleanse it of the mere temporal interests of fear and 1091 Again, myths, legends and pseudo-witness accounts present many variations.

1092 Some tend to identify the ribbon as a U.S phenomenon. The present writer had read different stories in Italian using the same concept, which turns out so cross-culturally effective precisely because – as this writing contends- it provokes human psyche's innermost proclivities.

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desire.”. That's the aesthetic arrest the dramatic mode (=the audience is excluded from the scene as mere witness) brings about.

Is this entire ribbon imagery an invention of recent decades, perchance?

Of course not. Rag-bushes -trees, bushes or similar onto which rags or pieces of cloth were pinned- were often associated with pin-wells -throwing a coin in a well, spring or equivalent- with both votive and commemorative purposes across cultures such as India, Syria, Buddhist Tibet, Ceylon, Celtic Britain, and the Graeco-Roman world. Malevolent step-brothers throw Joseph the Hebrew patriarch into a pit (cistern, Genesis 37:24), which in the Quran (12:19) becomes a well.

Commemoration and topography prove circularly to be irresistible.

So many ribbons are nowadays used to parade commitment to various causes: breast cancer (pink), HIV (red), online freedom of speech (blue), domestic violence (purple), etc. The same motif recurred during the French revolution, in whose beginning future politician Camille Desmoulins had used tree leaves to incite great French patriots to identify themselves, or the origins of the French cocarde:

Le 12 juillet 1789, dans l'après-midi, on apprit à Paris que Necker venait d'être congédié. La nouvelle de cet événement produisit la plus grande fermentation. Les Parisiens criaient que tout était perdu, puisque ce ministre n'était plus à la tête des affaires publiques.

Desmoulins, qui avait ses instructions secrètes, profite habilement de cette disposition des esprits : il sort d'un café, tenant un pistolet à la main, et une épée de l'autre, monte sur une chaise et annonce la nouvelle, puis arrachant une feuille d'arbre, il l'attache à son chapeau 1109 DOLT

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en guise de cocarde, crie aux armes ! et invite les rassemblements à le suivre. Aussitôt, tous se précipitent à grands flots; en un instant le Palais royal et les quartiers voisins se couvrent d'une foule immense, les habitants de Paris descendent de tous les étages de leurs maisons, la population entière de la capitale semble être dans les rues. Il est difficile d'imaginer un mouvement pareil ; les spectacles allaient commencer, Camille Desmoulins et ses amis en forcent les entrées, en criant aux armes ! (Michaud 1814:214).

As it happens in suchlike cases, the myth had become fact: how could it be otherwise? A number of people in disparate places and circumstances claim to have been part of the actual event -or to have learnt about it from sources above reproach-, much as others claim to have seen the elusive crucified Canadian, and the precious bayoneted babies:”Clearly, what sociologists have called "diving rumors"--rumors which keep reappearing through history with the same themes and rumor cores--are folklore.”1093.

Here people elatedly raise their hands to testify how they indeed saw the lady who gave her eyeball to her child; there people have seen with their very own eyes a spaceship that landed with the nephilim or annunaki at the helm, just as the famous story goes:”Contaste-mo tu, ou terei sonhado que o contavas? [Did you tell me that for real, or was it in a dream that you told me about that?]”. Traditional religious literature presents ambiguous verses that look straight out of a Star Trek episode:”And the Lord [=Jesus] screamed out, saying: 'My power, O power, you have forsaken me.'

And having said this, he was taken up. ”1094.

1093 Bird 1979:67 1094 Gospel Of Peter, R. Brown translation, verse 19.

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In 1978 a red panda – a rare animal unlike any one might think ofescaped from a Dutch zoo. Hoping to enlist the public in order to rescue the valuable specimen, the zoo alerted the media. Just as the story aired, the panda was found dead. This notwithstanding, over 100 panda sightings were reported in the following days.

Orson Welles' phony 1938 radio broadcast about a Martian invasion triggered panic reactions in over 1 million people 1095. In an attempt to resist the invasion, a valiant 76 year-old even shot a neighboring water tower he saw as a Martian war machine1096.

Many so-called eye-witnesses reported seeing the advancing Martian armies; others saw blazing death ray guns; many witnessed an all-time favorite:

We got into the car and listened some more. Suddenly, the announcer was gassed, the station went dead so we tried another' station but nothing would come on. -...- [another witness reported in the aftermath of the 1938 hoax] We had heard that Princeton was wiped out and gas was spreading over New Jersey and fire -...- All I could think of was being burned alive or being gassed. -...- [another person]"I knew it was some Germans trying to gas all of us. When the announcer kept calling them people from Mars I just thought he was ignorant and didn't know yet that Hitler had sent them all."(cit. in Cantril 1940:48,51-2,100 emphasis added).

During a 1983 Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony Reagan told a story about military heroism that New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson wrote never happened. Nelson had checked the 1095 “This would mean that about 1,700,000 heard the broadcast as a news bulletin and that about 1,200,000 were excited by it.” (Cantril 1940:58).

1096 Franz no date:lecture 4.

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citations on all 434 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded during WWII. The scene Reagan described did appear, however, in the 1944 film A Wing and a Prayer. Larry Speakes’ response? “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.” (Douglas 2007: no page)1097.

What [this] -...- narrative demonstrates is one of the more fascinating aspects of these belief narratives: the mixture of information, often distributed by the media, and speculation. This issue of the combination of information and speculation within urban legends is particularly relevant (Koven 2008:85).

Isn't this a fitting comeback for miasma, that accursed agent of ritual pollution that obsessed ancient Greeks? Merriam-Webster dictionary defines

miasma as:”a vaporous exhalation formerly believed to cause disease.”:

Meanwhile, the [UK early XIX century] medical profession was in disarray, split between ‘contagionists’ and ‘anti-contagionists’, who could not agree whether transmission was the result of intimate contact with victims or exposure to ‘miasma’ (air somehow rendered poisonous). Londoners, their nerves quite frayed, veered between ‘fatuous contempt’ and ‘extravagant terror’.Gallows humour was the order of the day. George Cruikshank's publishers sold his latest collection of cartoons as ‘A New and Certain Antidote to the Cholera Morbus’, parodying the sales pitch of purveyors of quack nostrums, already much in evidence. (Jackson 2014:68).

But killing enemies by exploiting the lethal forces of nature was not just mythical fantasy. I have gathered accounts from more than fifty authors in the ancient world, along with numerous archaeological finds, to provide evidence that biological and chemical weapons saw action in historical battles—in Europe and the Mediterranean, North Africa, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, the Asian steppes, India, and China. Among the historical victims and perpetrators of biochemical warfare were such prominent figures as Hannibal, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great. -...-Greek 1097 For a good analysis of the episode, see http://www.snopes.com/glurge/military/ridedown.asp. Brown (2013: A Model For Successful Influence) summarizes thus borrowing a Chinese story: three people make a tiger. What matters here is to emphasize how this bizarre logic applies at all times, and not only to the 'wrong' party or 'bad' idea.

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historians, from the fifth century BC through the second century AD, document many examples of warfare waged by biological and chemical means, as do Latin accounts beginning with the foundation of Rome and continuing through the late Roman Empire of the sixth century AD. Meanwhile, in China and India, weapons of poison and combustible chemicals were described in military and medical treatises from about 500 BC onward. The story continues with the development of Greek Fire and other incendiaries described in Byzantine and Islamic sources of late antiquity,from the seventh through fourteenth centuries AD. -...-Cyborg rats wired to deliver explosives? Sea lions as sentinels or assassins? Bees enlisted to detect the presence of enemies and chemical agents? Even these sophisticated biological operations have ancient antecedents. Live insects and animals have been drafted for war for thousands of years: wasps’ nests were lobbed over walls, vipers were catapulted onto ships, and scorpion bombs were hurled at besiegers. A veritable menagerie of creatures—from mice and elephants to flaming pigs— became allies on the battlefields of antiquity. Generals even devised ways for animals to deliver combustibles and figured out how to exploit inter-species hostilities.How about poison gas, flamethrowers, and incendiary bombs? Propelling fire and creating toxic fumes have a venerable history, too. Flaming arrows were only the beginning. The Assyrians tossed firebombs of oil, and during the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans created poison gas and a flameblowing machine to defeat fortified positions. Recipes for toxic smoke were secret weapons in ancient China and India, and asphyxiating gases suffocated many a tunneler in Roman-era sieges. Meanwhile, catapults shot firebolts fueled by sulphur. In the time of Alexander the Great, fire ships laden with burning chemicals destroyed navies, and foot soldiers were incinerated by incendiary shrapnel in the form of red-hot sand. -...- When the Spartans ignited the great woodpile at Plataia, the combination of pitch and sulphur “produced such a conflagration as had never been seen before, greater than any fire produced by human agency,” declared Thucydides. Indeed, the blue sulphur flames and the acrid stench must have been sensational, and the fumes also would have been quite destructive, since the combustion of sulphur creates toxic sulphur dioxide gas, which can kill if inhaled in large enough quantities. The Plataians abandoned their posts on the burning palisades.(Mayor 2009:28-9,148).

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Malanga often tailors his mythologies detailing space alien interferences to the topic at hand; if the discussion keeps to archeology and ancient history, his alien foes are the nephilim/ annunaki / watchers of ancient myth; if the discussion is about the nature of the devil, his extraterrestrial foes become devils to the delight of mythicists and fringe enthusiasts.

Jordan Maxwell does much the same: the archetypal cosmic battle for mankind's soul (literally) no longer features Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, but competing races of outer space creatures. Flying saucers, gamma ray guns, stargates etc replace the pillars of fire and smoke, chariots and bronze daggers of the Old Testament...Also, Maxwell (and others) restyle the U.S diffidence towards Catholicism and Communism in terms of a pyramid, whose capstone is the Vatican, and whose cornerstones are represented by a web of financial, political and masonic cabals outer space beings direct by proxy. As many claim Maxwell was a Jehovah’s Witness in his youth, biographical inertia might explain his anti-Catholic ramblings.

Can the influence of mythology reach beyond television personalities?

In dubio pro reo: when in doubt, decide in the defendant's favor. This maxim is common currency in judicial culture all over the world. While legal scholars may give all sorts of explanations about the origin of this custom, perhaps credited to 'progressive' philanthropists, whose gums bled for humankind, its first sequential application runs back to the mythical times in which Athena, the goddess of 1114 DOLT

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wisdom and justice, established and presided a tribunal in Athens to judge no less than Ares, the god of war (Areopagus).

Myths says that Athena, every time the judges were evenly split and couldn't reach a verdict, cast her vote in the defendant's favor (=be wary of rash judgments, and of choices that might entail suffering). Athena also cast her vote in favor of Orestes who -in the myth- had killed his mother, in turn guilty of having killed her husband Agamemnon who -in turn again- had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia1098 in order to be allowed to sail towards Troy.

Many of the longest lived stories (which depict situations) derive their popularity from the uncanny ability to trigger some neuralgic points in the human psyche. The 'contamination' motif was meant to ignite suspicion about what is otherwise believed to be familiar and commonplace, for example.

Most probably, this constitutes the 'culturally hijacked' and 'socially amplified' equivalent of an in-born evolutionary trait called neophobia (=fear of what is new or unknown) meant to shelter humans from potentially hazardous, unusual circumstances, and potentially poisonous, unusual foods etc.

Contamination is at the very heart of ancient myths: one of the archsinners was Tantalus, condemned to eternal torment because he had tried to feed his 1098 In Euripides' Iphigenia In Aulis, Artemis -just like the Hebrew binding of Isaac narrative- replaces Iphigenia with a deer at the last moment on the sacrificial altar. Some, however, consider this happy ending spurious. In this version, Iphigenia is a willing sacrificial victim, too.

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son Pelops to the gods; Prometheus incurred Zeus' wrath for tricking him into accepting the inedible/worthless fat as sacrifice (or the gods' ritual meal).

Some WWI scares were destined to be long lived and -for a long time- to be incorporated in the liturgy of commonly received credo, such as the “corpse factory” one, whereby Germans were said to recycle the enemy corpses milled on a grand scale to produce soap or other common items.

Unpopular or hated regimes or troops are invariably associated with the breaking of quintessential taboos such as that of cannibalism. Popular crusades, too, were rumored to have consisted in swarms of unwashed Christian cannibals terrorizing meek Muslims in the Middle East:”les Tafurs éprouvés par la famine viennent trouver Pierre l'Ermite devenu leur conseiller spirituel. Celui-ci leur suggère de manger les Turcs tués au combat épars dans les prés, après les avoir fait cuire et saler. ”1099.

The honored tradition fueled scares throughout the hectic end of the XVIII century:

Still deeper into one's heart goes that Tannery at Meudon; not mentioned among the other miracles of tanning! 'At Meudon,' says Montgaillard with considerable calmness, 'there was a Tannery of Human Skins; such of the Guillotined as seemed worth flaying: of which perfectly good wash−leather was made:' for breeches, and other uses. The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in toughness 1099 Rouche 1981:33.

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(consistance) and quality to shamoy; that of women was good for almost nothing, being so soft in texture! (Montgaillard, iv. 290.)− −History looking back over Cannibalism, through Purchas's Pilgrims and all early and late Records, will perhaps find no terrestrial Cannibalism of a sort on the whole so detestable. It is a manufactured, soft−feeling, quietly elegant sort; a sort perfide! Alas then, is man's civilisation only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever? Nature still makes him; and has an Infernal in her as well as a Celestial. (Carlyle 1837: no page).

In Robespierre's private war against LaFayette, he ofen used wild exaggeration. He inflated the Champ de Mars casualties to 1,500 and repeated atrocity stories of children in Brabant being slaughtered in their mother's wombs by LaFayette's soldiers and carried on the ends of bayonets. (Jordan 1985:89).

The land itself has a long, unhappy history with Chinese people.

During the late nineteenth century, mining and logging operations in California were often undertaken with Chinese laborers, who were badly exploited. The land, then, was a logging camp, and the surrounding land, including neighboring Forest of Nisene Marks, was heavily logged during that time. Chinese laborers were brought from China, supposedly to work for six months and then return with their pay. They worked, but instead of being paid at the end, they were given the task of digging a large trench, and then shot and killed. At that time, it was not illegal in Santa Cruz County to kill a Chinese person. (Dharma-Aloka 1999: no page). a lynching holocaust murdered thousands of black men for allegedly imagining sex with white women (Morone 2003:260).

There is a bottomless corpus of urban legends detailing cases of food contamination, whereby the mindless public is fed say dog or cat meat instead of rabbit or veal.

In early 2013 a new contamination scare hits Europe. It appears horse meat was surreptitiously added to the stuffing of lasagne, ragù or other such 1117 DOLT

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While some top-shelf food companies may have violated provisions

regarding truthful labeling of products, details soon piled on.

Horse meat may allegedly have come from slaughtered horses from Italian hippodromes the ongoing crisis had forced to close down; or from foreign countries with lax regulations, thus resurrecting the specter of meat laced with doping

chemicals.

Quite

(un)surprisingly,

some

supermarket

chains

had

mysteriously stopped carrying that kind of product -as the present writer verifiedweeks ahead of the 'accidental' discovery: readers shall come to their own conclusions.

Alternatively, a noted furniture shopping mall discontinued chocolate cakes from its cafeterias in 23 countries after Chinese authorities denounced such products had been found positive to faecal bacteria 1100. According to Italian CIA, 45% of people in Italy stops buying products media scares denounce as contaminated: a 10% drop in the industry segment sales ensues1101.

Severed human fingers might assertedly be found in fast-food burgers, or Halloween treats may contain poison or razor blades. In many cases, urban legends1102 or the reports of hoaxers and unsavory characters, and the script of this or that horror/action movie 1103 read much alike; it is entirely possible that 1100 Alimenti 2013: no page.

1101 Carne Cavallo 2013: no page.

1102 Roberge 2009.

1103 One urban legend tells of a babysitter who keeps receiving threatening calls from a murderous maniac. At

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mythomaniacs serve as transmission belt in the case of these rumors.

Best and Horiuchi write that

The 1970s witnessed the discovery of a frightening new deviant - the Halloween sadist, who gave dangerous, adulterated treats to children -...- Various authorities responded to the threat: legislatures in California (1971) and New Jersey (1982) passed laws against Halloween sadism; schools trained children to inspect their treats for signs of tampering; and some communities tried to ban trick-ortreating -...-. the 76 reported cases were generally not serious. Injuries were reported in only 20 cases, and only two of these involved deaths -...- both boys' deaths were caused by family members, rather than by anonymous sadists.(1985:488-491).

As readers may see, myth develop around a modest kernel of truth embellished and tampered with over time, often for petty or 'political' reasons.

Various mythical characters (Tantalus, Atreus etc) get involved into barbarous acts of murder with the purpose of cannibalism.

Central-African dictator Bokassa (1966-79) was accused of not only indulging cannibal feasts, but to have served such polluting food to visiting foreign dignitaries. Another African dictator, Uganda's General Amin, tackled the same accusation in an interview thus:�I don't like human flesh. It's too salty for me �; he was also accused of keeping human heads severed from his foes in his fridge: the

some point she calls the police only to learn the frightening calls come from within the house. She runs outdoors asking for help and later learns the maniac had already killed the children in her custody. Another tells of this kind couple who rescues this frightened child on the road, who claims a maniac just killed his/her parents. The couple is taking the child to the police, when the driver suddenly realizes his wife has her throat cut and the child is licking a bloody razor on the back seat. Readers be the judge over whether this constitutes playing with atavistic fears and employing Greek tragedy tricks, or typical cable TV story-lines.

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ungodly pantry.

Around 1839, Mormon founder Smith, along with confederates, was arrested in Missouri. Mormon lore -which some regard as authentic, and others criticize as spurious- recounts how impious jailers had wanted to serve Smith human flesh (the so-called “Mormon beef”) from his fallen brethren, which Smith refused to partake out of divine premonition.

In 1986 The Golden Child, the fellow in captivity (an original plot contrivance, indeed) is neither a galactic princess, nor a religious prophet, nor an American prisoner of war in Communist Vietnam, but a child-saint. The devil himself and his cronies try to undermine his holiness by making only polluting food available to him.

Even some versions of Red Riding Hood contain the same motif, which in turn may be allegorically read in terms of generational interchange, sexual metaphors within the realm of the social proper and so forth:

Numerous variants of The Grandmother's Tale were collected by French folklorists in the 19th and 20th centuries in the Loire basin, the Nivernais, the Forez, the Velay, the northern Alps, and the Italian Tyrol. Italo Calvino published a version from Abruzzo in his collection Italian Folktales (1956). Called The False Grandmother, in this story a hungry ogress takes the place of the wolf - but in other respects, the story is quite similar to the French folktale. Just as in the French story, the girl is offered a grisly meal — beans (really teeth) boiled in a pot and fitters (really ears) in a frying pan; and she, too, 1120 DOLT

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escapes by feigning the need to relieve herself outside. Calvino had doubts that The False Grandmother actually came from the Italian oral tradition, suggesting it may have derived instead from published versions by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Yet the Abruzzo tale contains elements that link it clearly to the older folk tradition: the cannibal meal, the toilet ruse, the heroine who plots her own escape... all things that disappeared as the tale moved from oral transmission to print. (Windling 2004: no page).

As -in one of the many versions- Red Riding Hood is first eating her grandmother's flesh, then drinking her blood (presented to her as wine), first a cat, then a bird1104 try to forewarn1105 her but in vain1106. The animal -a proxy for the innate wisdom of nature, in turn an allegory for the conscience- can also be slain, just as Pinocchio kills the talking cricket with a mallet:

After the earthquake there was a fire. But the LORD wasn't in the fire. And after the fire there was a quiet, whispering voice. ( 1 Kings 19:12) Prophets of doom circularly issue their warning nobody heeds, which makes Smith's case all the more special: unlike Red Riding Hood, the godly Mormon prophet avoids the transgression as he heeds divine advice.

Popular culture is never far behind. In 1987 Lost Boys, young vampires try to induct a teenager into their clique. They tamper with his sensory impressions 1104 “The animals associated with Mars are the wolf and the woodpecker. In one version of the Romulus and Remus myth, a woodpecker called Picus also assisted the abandoned twins.” (Meineck 2005-1:36).

1105 A vulture warns Rama that the demon Ravana has abducted Sita.

1106 “In the Jaina Kathâkoùa (Treasury of Stories), a work of perhaps the fifteenth century although relating much older contents, we find the story of Madanakumâra, who is taken with, abducts, and plans to marry a woman, Jayasundarî, who is also strongly attracted to him. At the last minute, their true relationship as mother and son is revealed (by a pair of talking parrots, one of whom was Madanakumâra’s brother in a previous life), the marriage is cancelled, and both become Jaina renunciants” (Silk 2009:178).

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as he mistakes spaghetti for worms, and so forth. He's finally drinking blood, which he thinks to be wine1107 as the preceding trick played on him confounded his senses.

Even young Jason (No Retreat No Surrender) tries to forewarn the three karate champions from Seattle about how dangerous their Russian foe actually is: they make fun of him, then are defeated straightaway. Kickboxer, Bloodsport, Ip

Man, Rocky, and a host of other movies, similarly present the scene of the prophet of doom, whose advice goes unheeded with dire results.

Some talk about metaphors of incorporation:

from the most metaphorical and sublime to the most literal and. if not always ridiculous. frequently gothic and grotesque. Between these two extremes lies a range of images which indicate the different degrees of relation possible between the poles of inside and outside that are discovered to be the basis of other binary terms. such as self and other. mind and body. literal and metaphorical. textual body and its content.

(Kilgour 1986:1).

The obsession with metaphors of incorporation is evergreen. Oriental goddess Au Co is stranded on Earth1108 after tasting the Earth's soil against her sisters' advice; Proserpina eats pomegranate seeds while in the nether world, and is thus obliged to spend at least part of the year there. In Buddhist Agganna Sutta, divine beings (Abbhasaras) start losing their status after eating mud; later still, the habit of eating rice turns them into humans (=emergence myth).

1107 The stale connection between blood and wine.

1108 Another rendition of the godly savior-founder leaving heaven behind to herald a new beginning on Earth.

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To a lesser extent, several societies or tribes the world over 1109 enforce the taboo of not touching the earth under prescribed circumstances; the same prohibition recurs in various Celtic tales. As Meineck suggests 1110, Greek religiosity pivoted around a triangle: the gods represented the top, family and eating the bottom. It is thus not surprising to find so many myths axing around (im)proper eating or drinking (zombies, vampires, satanic masses etc), and -by extensioncontamination.

Considered the ruthless, foul though alluring inverted doppelgaenger of the loving, nurturing mother goddess (in her various incarnations), the lore of Dakinis (female spirits) transited from Hinduism to Buddhism, whereby Dakinis -roughly comparable to medieval Europe's incubi and succubi- indulge their bottomless appetites gorging themselves on wine and meat, the commonplace ersatz of blood and flesh. As this writing hypothesizes, the arch-transgressor can in fact be(come) the best among us, so Buddhist Saint Padma Sambhava originally studied under the Dakinis, now purveyors of spiritual truth.

Stories revolving around 'contamination' can either be calmly relayed as another urban legend based on the atavistic fears of the human mind wrapped in a fool's joke:

1109 Cfr Frazer 1913.

1110 2005: Religion And Society.

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Les rumeurs au sujet des animaux exotiques ou domestiques ne finiront jamais d'étonner. -...- Les anecdotes concernant des animaux se multiplient comme celle relatant l'incroyable méprise quant à ce petit rat affectueux ramené du Mexique par des vacanciers québécois qui l'avaient confondu avec un chihuahua (Roberge 2009:46).

Or it all may become explosive altruism in the hands of distressed, electioneering scholars with a hornet in their (red?) bonnet:

De nos jours, l'expression sans fard des préjugés choque et classe comme extrémiste. -...- Dans certains récits, l'hostilité est déguisée : ce sont ceux où le méchant étranger est représenté de façon métaphorique par un animal répugnant tapi dans des marchandises d'importation. -...- Dans d'autres récits, la menace grandit et de vilaines créatures étrangères contaminent le corps ou la maison (Campion-Vincent 1995:122).

In a context of increased fear of crime in which the poor are often associated with criminality, the upper classes fear contact and contamination, but they continue to depend on their servants. -...- to relate security exclusively to crime is to fail to recognize all the meanings it is acquiring in various types of environments (writing about Sao Paulo, Caldeira in Low 1999:90). 'sanitation syndrome' -...- as a general social metaphor for the pollution by blacks of urban space. -...-[leading to] ‘warehousing’ the racially marginalized; -...- no less than ‘Negro removal’. (Goldberg in Cross&Keith 1993:49) Contamination needs not to be strictly related to metaphors of incorporation. Earth itself can be a contaminating agent: the mythology of the foot.

Roman brides were carried across the house's threshold 1111 in fear of offending the virgin goddess Vesta, who presided over the hearth, and whom the bride represented as keeper of the family shrine. Brides among the Black Ju people of the 1111 Others contend this ritual celebrates the rape of the Sabin women instead.

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Kalahari had to be carried to their nuptial hut as well, for contact with the soil could prove inauspicious, and make them thin1112.

The mythology of the contact with the impure earth is limitless. What about the knight/gentleman using his jacket so that the lady's feet could avoid a puddle:

According to other versions, the young man was watching [Buddha of the remote past] Dipankara approach in a religious procession when he realized that a mud puddle lay in Dipankara's path. The young man [Gautama Buddha in a previous life] quickly unfastened his long hair and spread it over the mud puddle so that Diparikara's feet would not be soiled. (Hirakawa 1990:265).

This sound so similar to what assertedly happened to Jesus:

When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them. (Luke 7:37-8).

Just as this writing contends, endless variations may be applied to the same story.

Respected luminary of the new age/oriental wisdom movement, Kornfield 1113 relates the Dipankara anecdote claiming that Gautama threw his entire body across the puddle.

In Hindu mythology the foot is symbol of mortality, loss, oppression (the 1112 This pre-scientific hunting-gathering culture may have grasped through experimental wisdom what modern research shows: higher levels of body fat seem to quicken puberty's onset, hence the ability to reproduce.

1113 2005: part 7.

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untouchable labourers are born from the god's feet) etc. Unwritten rules dictate(d) feminine feet ought to be small. Crippling Chinese foot-binding practices, and our day's ladies shoes all tend to make ladies' feet (look) more diminutive.

Again, what is foul can also be purveyor of holiness. Here is about the mystical contemplation of Shiva's lotus feet, yet there the lotus feet are Buddha's (or Rama's, or Chandragupta's, or Krishna's, or Kali's, or Sai Baba's...). In Brianza (Italy), once upon a time it was believed that touching a clergyman's feet during a storm might scare devils away, thus propitiating good weather. Again in Brianza, well into the XX century San Giobbe -or the transfiguration of Old Testament Job- was the protector of silkworms -and related lucrative industry for local peasants-: from Giobbe's infested wounds silkworms would have come about.

Myths and topographies may overlap. Adam's peak in Sri Lanka is home to a godly footprint dear to Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian pilgrims alike: Buddha's, Thomas', Shiva's or Adam's depending on who's telling the story. Before climbing to the mountaintop, pilgrims purify themselves in running water (=the water mytheme again).

Various caves are the place where sages and Saints left their footprints (Padma Sambhava's footprint at Chiu monastery; Naropa's footprint in a block of quartz, for example), which of course recurred in prehistoric cave art as well.

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At Batu Maung (Malaysia), a temple serves as abode for the footprint of another legendary figure: Chinese admiral Zheng He.

As will be discussed later, many sacred stones located around the world appear to have the footprints of royal or sainted persons in them, or footprints of supernatural beings such as faeries and rockand water-babies. The human footprint motif is common in American Indian rock art. A site in Colbert County, Alabama contains carvings of four- and six-toed feet, serpents, and meandering lines. (Varner 2004:46).

Putting (metaphorically or concretely) one's foot over another's head is a symbol of extreme deference and submission:

Behaviour that usually results in pollution is sometimes intentional in order to show deference and respect; by doing that which under other circumstances would be defiling, an individual expresses his inferior position (Harper in Douglas 1966:9) Readers may see that the 'customization' element may vary according to the priorities, circumstances and bias of the 'embellisher'. That happens at all levels: hoaxes manufactured by powerful lobbies; a man who shuffled papers in the army, but tells his grandchildren what a hero he was; people online getting into all sorts of extortionate claims about their income, looks, connections, sex appeal, status and property:

Always already under a kind of erasure, the past becomes an evacuated space ready to be filled with wonders, ghosts, and other signs of the counterfactual and pathological -...-. An understanding of pathological alterity as the proper goal of cultural history comes, as I have suggested, only at the cost of being unavoidably implicated in the 1127 DOLT

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imprecise movements of invitation and interdiction with respect to the historical object. (Uebel 2002:48).

The circumstances and biases of the target audience shall be taken into account as well. Kramer1114 mentions Senator Kennedy's (an archetypal liberal) speech to Christians at very conservative Liberty University. Kramer emphasizes how successful Kennedy's speech was, starting with about 30 minutes of building common ground (=emphasizing commonalities and building intellectual bridges). As Kennedy proceeded to let the cat out of his politician's bag (= he's on the left after all), Kramer emphasizes the audience was still clapping hands at concepts Kramer is sure went against their Christian, conservative background. As Boothman 1115 would have it, “people one likes can do no wrong�.

Elementary ideas and exempla

tend to sell well irrespective of

situational factors. Homeland first gobbledygook works irrespective of the regime at hand being a Communist, Fascist or military dictatorship; or a vanilla western massdemocracy. Christ-figures sell well before one makes choices regarding which sort of Christ is at hand: black, white or red; a meek fakir, a lusty rabbi planting offspring here and there, a dying and rising mystery cult godhead, an affluence monger, or a rabid Che Guevara figure.

Instructions to religious preachers already included from time

1114 No date: Tools Pathos.

1115 2004.

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immemorial a series of rules and attitudes to get on their audience's good side by building common ground and using 'stick and carrot' tactics (mixing compliments and recognition with oblique critiques, and the sharp indictment of generic categories of sin):

Pathos entails the speaker carefully considering and appealing to the emotions of the listeners and Ethos requires the speaker to use good moral character for ethical ends and demonstrate good will and concern for the audience. While the premises of most of Aesop's fables were based in an effort to improve the thinking or conduct of the audience, the ones at Delphi seemed entirely an attempt to infuriate and condemn them. Because of Aesop's disregard for the principles of good argument, Aesop's persuasive efforts triggered a boomerang effect, yielding his own death. (Bonniksen 2006:17).

The animal or human (whether individual or collective) culprits (the 'Halloween sadist', 'scheming cabal', etc) date farther back into immemorial time with the enemy (the contaminating/contaminated agent) representing the quintessential trickster of the myth eventually adapted to whichever actual (tricky) situation:

Trickster is eternally scavenging for food, exhibiting an unbelievable appetite that places him in precarious situations. Trickster has childlike qualities, but in other narratives, he is also the father of the people and a potent conductor of spiritual forces in the form of sacred dreams. He represents the basest instincts, but attacks situations with cunning. -...- Trickster plays tricks and is the victim of tricks. The trickery of such stories extends as well to symbolic play regarding cultural forms, rules, and worldview. -...- self-absorption, and love of mischief--cruel and vividly silly--make him both unpredictable and potentially dangerous. At the opposite end of the spectrum, his endless foolishness catches him in one disastrous trap after another, making 1129 DOLT

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him a laughingstock before all, humans and deities. (Hempel 2004:34).

Promethian myths and the rival, blunderer genus diverge mainly through their rival uses, as vehicles of an ideal to be pursued or a past to be suppressed or overcome (Goodman 1993:58).

The antics of the archetypal tricksters of myth (coyotes, spiders...) may very likely leave the modern reader unaffected, possibly elicit occasional laughter, and more often raise a few eyebrows. It is enough, however, to substitute -in an otherwise preserved story- this, that or another human group or individual to have conventional modern readers either on their seats, or panicking to put as much distance as possible between them and the 'impure' (insensitive, '...ist') jester.

For example, one such story requires a representative of the mainstream community to approach trickster and to taunt him in a patronizing or insulting way to mockingly extract from him the secret of his alleged ability (smarts, tricking people...). While the mainstream character is convinced to know better than trickster by all accounts, trickster (the oddball, the minority, the outcast...) manages to have him surrender his possessions (money, horses, clothes...) by promising to share (sell, fetch...) a secret item (whatever that happens to be) that the end of the story reveals to be either purely imaginary, or of no value.

Readers shall come to their own conclusions. The same rule is also exemplified by the many jokes gathering stereotypical representatives of many

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groups, orientations or nationalities with the intent of ridiculing some, and to make one among them look smarter. It turns out the story works as well irrespective of who gets the upper hand in the end.

Alternatively, tricksters can don the modern garb of quantum physics:

On a quantum level, dirt is as mysterious as anything else. It is replete with trickster-like electrons that defy causal determinism by suggesting that their behavior depends on how they are observed, among other things. The trickster was then surveyed and a case was made for the wisdom of the ancients, for the wisdom of the collective human psyche. In the trickster myth, so much material, rife with paradox, speaks to the issues of duality and non-duality. This material has been uncovered by quantum mechanics, ironically, through its deterministic method. The trickster myth engenders questions about boundaries, morality, amorality, space, time, heaven, earth, consciousness, societal disruption, and transformation. (Nagata 2012:64-5).

Ramanuja anticipated Freud’s judgment on mysticism as merely a retrogressive attainment of the oceanic feeling of the womb, no advance but a retreat. He was even closer to modern brain physiologists who say nondual experiences are simply a function of an induced malfunction in the temporal parietal lobe of the brain, whereby the little gizmo that comes on line in infancy to differentiate self from others goes temporarily back offline. For Ramanuja, that’s all you’re doing. Once you snap out of it, a mountain’s just a mountain (Price 2008:114).

The same tactics are not limited to fables or folklore. Eugenics proponent -and plagiarist1116-, H.G. Wells also wrote in 1917 posing as an “extreme pacifist “

1116 While the case for Wells' plagiarism seems well supported, many forgiving authors simply suggest it all might have been “sheer coincidence” (Hughes 1966:85). Even eugenics is typically politely excised from Wells' dossier -as a token of appreciation for his 'patriotism' or germanophobia, perhaps-, or neutralized to mean absolutely nothing of interest except for the malevolent critic 'with an axe to grind'.

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who “did not want to write anything “under instruction””1117:

The German cultivation of opinion began long before the war; it is still the most systematic and, because of the psychological ineptitude of the Germans, it is probably the clumsiest. -...Neither the English, the Russians, the Italians, nor the French, to name only the bigger European allies, are concerned in setting up a legend, as the Germans are concerned in setting up a legend of themselves to impose upon mankind. They are reality dealers in this war, and the Germans are effigy mongers. -...- And then over and above the great outrage of the war come these incessant meanspirited atrocities. A great and simple wickedness it is possible to forgive; the war itself, had it been fought greatly by Austria and Germany, would have made no such deep and enduring breach as these silly, futile assassinations have done between the AustroGermans and the rest of the civilised world. One great misdeed is a thing understandable and forgivable; what grows upon the consciousness of the world is the persuasion that here we fight not a national sin but a national insanity; that we dare not leave the German the power to attack other nations any more for ever.... (no page), emphasis added.

Readers may remark that the sulfuric prose suggests the 'complete neutralization for ever' of 'aggressive groups whose national trait is insanity, the habit of setting legends about themselves, and appetites for world dominance': the pamphleteers of the future

totalitarian regimes could consider themselves well-schooled. The

Thebes of ancient myths, the abode of everything ungodly, had found a suitable replacement.

Naturally, double standards apply to the apocalyptic, vengeful genre as well. When a middle-eastern cleric -founder of his country's then third largest

1117 Wells 1917:No page.

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political party- invoked the deity to “annihilate” his people's foes, a party's spokesperson brushed that aside: "Only an idiot could understand that the [cleric] intended harm to innocents."1118.

In the example at hand, a prudent person in polite company would first make sure to know who/what exactly is the article about before tooting the horn of moral indignation, only to find oneself cast out and/or ridiculed if 'this time the opposite applies':

A dramatic example of that double standard was illustrated in the "dart man" case in New York City. "Dart man" was a black man who went around Manhattan shooting blowgun darts into women's behinds. Although all of "dart man' s" two dozen plus victims were white (including two light-skinned hispanics), the New Daily News of 4 July 1990 reported that "authorities do not think race is a factor."

Police are quoted as saying that they "have no reason to believe the attacks are racially motivated." However, in New York City's diverse racial mix the odds of picking two dozen white women at random are on the order of winning Lotto America! Imagine for a moment what the conclusion would have been if "dart man's" was white and all of his victims would have been black. Quite another story, isn't it?

(Wilcox 1990:3).

Samuel said to Saul, “I am the one the Lord sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the Lord.

This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys. ( 1 Samuel 15:1ss).

It's the old story of the missing apple: a foe stole it, whereas the apple 1118 Philps 2001: no page.

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accidentally slipped in a friend's bag. When 'bad guys' are concerned, apocalyptic literature is interpreted literally as a ' secret master plan' for future onslaught that “only an idiot” could understand as allegorical and thus irrelevant.

Early Christian apocalyptic literature specifically mentioned:”I have come to set the world on fire, and I wish it were already burning! ” ( Luke 12:49)1119, whence Nero's (plausible) accusation against Christians to have set Rome on fire, in the broader scheme of a constellation of Hebrew sects preaching impending divine judgment, and active revolt against Rome's impious regime. (Some) Christians may also have lent support to accusations against them by being either overjoyed or supportive of Rome's arson, which -irrespective of the actual culprit- represented a sign of the end of days according to their doctrines.

It shall also be mentioned how fires -whether accidental or typically a sign of unrest- in such early megalopolises as Rome were recurring, with major ones every few decades. Carlyle magisterially describes early XIX century Constantinople thus:

even Constantinople is not without its safety−valves; there too Discontent can vent itself,−−in material fire; by the number of nocturnal conflagrations, or of hanged bakers, the Reigning Power can read the signs of the times, and change course according to these (Carlyle 1837:no page).

1119 Whether or not this particular gospel could be construed as circulating in its complete form in Nero's times is open to debate. What matters here is that this imagery was indeed present in early Christian thought.

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In another era, the Soviet league of militant atheists, a maximalist organization devoted to the eradication of religious practice, vowed -in another Zoroastrian nod- to put on fire all the churches of the world. Again, the cue this writing hopefully gives is not in the promotion or demotion of particular groups, orientations or otherwise, but in the emphasis placed on the role recurrently played by petrified mythologies, fossilized characters, obtuse allegories that work on the human mind's neuralgic points in the ultimate service of any cause.

The figure of the arch-trickster is also useful to decontaminate and 'clear' situations and strategies that are eminently ambiguous. The encroachment of adult eroticism upon the life of children – which Vargas Paterno 1120 discusses- is best policed through the image of the elusive -but omnipresent- pedophile lurking from under every stone left unturned. That's more conducive to the fusion of the horde than having to face the role mainstream masters of acceptable discourse, media and advertisement – hence we the public as voters, consumers etc- play in such dynamics.

The erotization of the child's space to the advantage of consumerism easily co-exists with narratives of bayoneted babies, apocalyptic moralist pleas, scares about organized, outreaching pedophile rackets, and other sensationalized sentimental items.

1120 2011.

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Pencil-necked sweat-hogs gawking in front of the TV – reading a magazine...-

as

erotized

images

(=

Baudrillard's

“our

society's

sexual

hyperaesthesia”1121) of children and women go by can be construed as either doing it 'the right way' (whatever that really means=personality in order); or 'the wrong way' (whatever that really means, again= personality disorder) as perverts, freaks, potential sex maniacs, pedophiles:”More and more “interiors” (thoughts and feelings) - even vaginas – are promoted as “not normal.”

Meanwhile, on one end a friendly operator is ready to take their orders for whichever unrelated product was associated with the erotized imagery; on the other end, a watchdog group or analyst is monitoring and recording one's habit...there seemingly is a nice law, precedent or statute that might be (ab)used against one.

Foreign policy or economic ambiguities and imbalances may be exorcised invoking an “axis of evil”, whose master puppeteers, evil doppelgaengers, change over time: Germany, Cuba, Japan, the USSR, Iran, Libya, Iraq, Venezuela, North Korea, Communist Vietnam... Jung wrote:

Today humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to 1121 In Baudrillard, the prefix hyper denotes an object, reality or situation -which follows the prefix hyperbrought to a level that greatly exceeds the object's (reality, situation...) native characteristics:”more human than human”. Baudrillard dissects the neuroses and schizogenic sides coterminous with Debord's society of spectacle on a curve towards depersonalization and postmodernity.

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say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves. (1959:70-1).

Based on a careful (or careless, depending on your perspective) study of the book of Revelation and other biblical books of prophecy, Lindsey wrote with assurance about what was about to transpire in the Middle East as the superpowers of the Soviet Union, China, the European Union, and finally the United States converged in a massive confrontation leading to an all-out nuclear holocaust, right before Jesus returned. All of this, we were told, had to happen before the end of the 1980s, as Scripture itself taught. It obviously never happened.

(Ehrman 2011:120).

What is important here are not preposterous nods to the perfunctory cold war logic, but human psyche's schizophrenic fixation with the figure of the arch-trickster, evil doppelgaenger or other terms that may be interchangeably used.

Perhaps the cold war -now droll, disused subject fit for antiquarians- and SwissGerman theorists of volatile sympathies are not one's cup of tea. The so-called 9-11 might offer a suitable substitute in the words of venerable Wuling (on May 8, 2002), a U.S-born Pure Land Buddhist monastic who now places 9-11 in the exact same frame of reference (the world is never going to be the same) Jung placed the cold war.

Foreign policy analysts may know that -since the late 1980s and all the more after the disappearance of the USSR- the West has been on the desperate, compulsive lookout for a suitable arch-trickster. It goes without saying, every archtrickster is considered the ultimate expression in the matter (“as never before�), and

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not as the next stage act in a circular operetta.

As the world of professional wrestling again shows, once an archtrickster disappears -such as evil Russian Nikolai Volkoff-, another one -Sargent Slaughter and his Iraqi paymasters- appears; Ric Flair's Four Horsemen 1122 (='bad guy' wrestlers making trouble everywhere) of yore ultimately found a new incarnation in Hulk Hogan's NWO, and Flair's own Evolution: it has to be.

Considered with reference to this binary coding of morality, it is evident that our episode of "All-Star Wrestling" consisted of a drama in three acts: ( 1 ) the preliminary triumph of virtue (first match). (2) the repeated triumphs of evil (matches two through five), and (3) the definitive triumph of virtue (the grand finale). Beyond this, however, there is another operative code that is both more subtle and more vicious: an ethnocentric and racist coding for "Americanism" and lack thereof. In order to recognize this second code, which remained always sub textual to the primary moral code, it is helpful to consider the four central matches in the program : the repeated triumphs of evil. -...-Given this, Freedman argued that the fascination wrestling exerts on its predominantly lower-class audience derives from its ability to present a convincing picture of the contradictions between the Horatio Alger ideology of upward mobility within a free market economy and lived experience, where hard work and ability are seldom adequately rewarded, whereas other methods-unscrupulous dealings, family connections, obsequiousness, flattery,and the like-are regularly keys to success. -...-An order twice inverted is an order restored, perhaps even strengthened as a result of the exercise.

(Lincoln 1989:155,158).

Man experiences this flow of time in the festive marketplace, in the carnival crowd, as he comes into contact with other bodies of varying age and social caste. He is aware of being a member of a continually growing and renewed people. This is why festive folk laughter 1122 Nothing new under the sun. The shtick belabored upon virile friendship – A-Team, Riptide etc style- with all its stage acts and controversies.

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presents an element of victory not only over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts (Bakhtin 1984:92).

From the position of secular man (Homo sapiens), that is to say, we are to enter the play sphere of the festival, acquiescing in a game of belief, where fun, joy, and rapture rule in ascending series. The laws of life in time and space—economics, politics, and even morality— will thereupon dissolve. (Campbell 1960:28).

Chronological time, whose every passing beat gets cast in a fixed record slipping gradually out of reach, loses in favor of duration, whereby the past never really passes.

(Not so ) metaphorically speaking it's still 1688, 1941, 1963, etc. In the Buddhist Mahayana tradition, refined spiritual attainment should allow the skilled practitioner to join Gautama Buddha as he delivers his famous sermons XXV centuries (or more) ago.

The item can also stew in pseudo-scientific jargon, whereby quantum physics -again- possibly -for Della Santina 1123: unquestionably- lends a veneer of support to the mystical realization that Buddha is -indeed and right now- preaching at Deer Park or Vulture Peak, supercharged high places of Buddhist topography, thanks to some scientific relationship between multiple universes or something of that sort. Furthermore, countless Buddhas, in the eons before and after Gautama, shall live in the same eternal present. In Ghatikara Sutta, someone else enacts the 1123 ME6102: lecture 8.

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eternal high points:”While he was there, Ānanda, the Lord Kassapa, stayed near Benares at Isipatana in the deer-park. ”.

Babe Ruth is still playing baseball; Che Guevara is still busy leading Communist guerrilla; Michael Jackson moonwalks incessantly in a time beyond time recaptured on an ongoing basis. At N. Morita's funeral, Karate Kid star R. Macchio addressed departed Morita as “forever my sensei”, although Morita (the famous Miyagi on screen) had declared he had never studied martial arts: duration wins over linear time.

Pictures used to promote products associated with legendary physique superstar and actor Steve Reeves portrayed Reeves as he looked at the top of his career in the 1950s: a way he had stopped looking decades before the product ever hit the shelves.

Industrial production and the modern information society, too, have their own version of circular duration:

La victoire de la bourgeoisie est la victoire du temps profondément historique, parce qu’il est le temps de la production économique qui transforme la société, en permanence et de fond en comble. -...-Le temps pseudo-cyclique est celui de la consommation de la survie économique moderne, la survie augmentée, où le vécu quotidien reste privé de décision et soumis, non plus à l’ordre naturel, mais à la pseudo-nature développée dans le travail aliéné ; et donc ce temps retrouve tout naturellement le vieux rythme cyclique qui réglait la survie des sociétés pré-industrielles. Le temps pseudo-cyclique à la fois 1140 DOLT

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prend appui sur les traces naturelles du temps cyclique, et en compose de nouvelles combinaisons homologues : le jour et la nuit, le travail et le repos hebdomadaire, le retour des périodes de vacances. (Debord 1967:point 141,150).

"Very truly I tell you," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!" (John 8:58).

"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much. (Job 38:4).

'Having a personal relationship with Jesus', or asking oneself 'what would Jesus do' is the way some Christian denominations approach ”the need to make the experience of the past into the present”, “ancient events continually held up for emulation”.

In Hinayana Buddhism, Gautama Buddha was a supreme teacher who entered final extinction many centuries ago, whereas in Mahayana (the “wise physician” parable, for example), Gautama Buddha's departure constitutes a teaching detour. Much as Jesus is the earthly manifestation of a quintessential logos (here: archetypal principle), so Gautama Buddha only pretends to go away, but shall -exactly as is predicated of Jesus- come back in the future.

Was Jesus mere semblance? Was his existence only a sort of projection from the divine plane? In early Christianity the doctrine of docetism preached all that, while in Mahayana Buddhism the “parable of the wise physician” tells the same about Gautama Buddha, a mere semblance or reflection of the eternal Buddha.

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The Islamic Quran (4:157) also states that Jesus' crucifixion only “appeared� to have taken place, much as the Mahayana parable argued centuries before Mohamed.

Ben-Shahar1124 reiterates the importance of projecting one's own actual decisions onto the role model's plane: what would s-he do in this circumstance?

Naturally, Prophet Smith, Prophet Mohamed, Stalin, Pavolini, Winston Churchill or Lord Hanuman could very well take center-stage in another context; younger audiences may prefer What Would Buffy Do: The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual

Guide, the title of a 2004 book by Jana Riess.

Superstar Billy Graham retired, but Hulk Hogan took over; Andre The Giant died, but wrestler Giant took over wearing an identical tunic, and using the same moves. The question here is not about circular time, whereby time, life or history re-project or re-create xeroxed deja-vus.

Cultural products supply a fitting example. There won't be an exact, verbatim copy of Karate Kid, but the basic storyline can simmer in feminine sauce (The Next Karate Kid, 1994); or in Afro-American sauce ( The Karate Kid, 2010).

There won't be an exact copy of Rambo, either, but the basic storyline can stew in either Native-American broth in Thunder (1983); or in a mixture of rainforest, ecological and nativist motifs in Indio (1989): duration wins over linear time.

1124 2005-6a:lecture 24.

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Linear time cannot be successfully recovered; the best movie and exhibit about dinosaurs cannot even begin to compare with a bygone reality we mostly ignore. Duration, on the other hand, unfolds right here and now.

The peeping busybody, the idle bystander are thus offered the opportunity to switch sides, to join the godly savior-hero-founder, to 'enter the myth' right here and now going through the high points of its petrified path (annunciation, ministry, rejection, doubt, betrayal, sulking, sparagmos, comeback...).

There is little difference when stores offer customized DVDs for children, where the child's picture can be artfully inserted, and they thus become a character in the onscreen adventures of educational cartoon character Dora The Explorer, for example.

The shaking of those fists, the shedding of those tears, the march to show support for -or hostility against- this, that or another party, country, cause or agenda no longer is a sheepish act brainwashed zombies perform going along with what happens to be 'in' this season, but the circular re-edition (=the recapture=hyperreal repetition) of the emotionally vibrant heroism of the savior-hero, who went against the grain, against all odds when his precious life hung in a balance: history was still in the making. Broadly put, whether under the guise of filial piety, gratitude or otherwise, the value of remaining loyal through thick and thin to the end is extolled.

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What a supercharged ethical statement peeping busybodies make about themselves: a therapy of commitment. That way, hobos and hillbillies can be reborn by mythical proxy from the sacred oak (druids=men of/from the oak tree) of absolute morality, valiance, patriotism, or whichever other 'virtue' is being peddled at the moment.

Is the entire situation a stage act? Is the arch-villain a government informant performing a script? It doesn't matter, if public reaction is to be measured, as the famous “Castro study” documented in 19671125.

Kehoe1126 emphasizes how the human mind irresistibly tends to treat highly subjective, value-laden utterances (transcendence=rapport talk 1127) as if they consisted of forensic pieces of information (facticity=report talk 1128).

Again: people playing the part (embodying the exempla, stirring up petrified mythologies...) convincingly enough are automatically assumed to be authentic. Tannen1129 approvingly reports what U.S politician Kunin wrote: obstacle's in Kunin's political career as public speaker were overcome by “a 1125 Study by Jones&Harris. People were randomly instructed to write either a short and cogent defence, or indictment of Castro's regime. They were instructed, and thus played a role. They made no personal emotional investment. Later, other people were asked to grade the level of favor essays afforded the Castro regime, after being clearly told essay writers had been urged to write either an indictment or a defence of said regime. It turns out, people identified the writer of a pro-Castro essay with pro-Castro sympathies and so forth. Therefore, no matter how many informants for hire are exposed, the public shall keep on reacting like a well-trained laboratory specimen along the lines mos and suchlike easily predict.

1126 2011:The Conscious Mind In Using Language.

1127 Example: “John is arrogant”.

1128 Example: “John is 1m70 tall”.

1129 2003:lecture 11.

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passionate belief in what she had to say -...- fired up by conviction”. Tannen also disclaims the dark triad (machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy) in Kunin's case because Kunin1130 was working towards an altruistic goal: the betterment of society.

What are those statements/images about, exactly? Are they about politics or religion? Professor of religion at Boston University, S. Prothero 1131 declared at a conference that his professional opinion -substantiated through both formal and informal investigations- was that people, typically university students, in a purportedly religious country like the USA, have no idea what religion is about, and fail even elementary tests administered to assess their religious literacy. The same can be argued about politics. What people are after, essentially, is the feeling of oneness, the shaking of fists, the shedding of tears, the gasping for breath, and the chasing after one or more elusive ghosts, covenants, boons, 'just causes', 'honest wars', windfalls etc that all political parties promise; all religions write about; all regimes engage in; all martyrs die for in the tradition of the best folklore.

The PEW U.S Religious Knowledge Survey (2010) concluded:”The average respondent answered 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions correctly. ”. One man's martyr is another man's bandit (heretic, traitor...), or one man's 'truth' is another man's lie, but the schizophrenic fixation, the neurological and gastrointestinal syndromes are the same, in the attempt to cross the threshold, and 1130 Former Democrat and first Jewish governor of Vermont.

1131 No date.

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to join the hero-savior in his circular myth(ology). In more ancient Hinayana Buddhism, Bodhisattva was a title reserved to Gautama Buddha in his countless lives before enlightenment. In later Mahayana Buddhism, most practitioners take the Bodhisattva vow, thus joining the hero-founder 1132.

It may prove useful to ponder what follows:

In terms of cost-benefit analysis , the actual payoff for victimhood can be very high and the risk of discovery of a hoax is very small.

This issue of "secondary gain" plays an important part in racist and anti-semitic hoaxes, and the search for an answer to this troubling phenomenon is well served by the question, ''Who benefits?". Also, when a hoaxer gets caught , which isn't often, there are "fall back" positions which can put a positive "spin" on the incident. The hoaxer's status may be reframed so that "blaming the victim" can be invoked, whereby the hoax is understandable. Or, he may became "mentally ill," which also removes any responsibility for the hoax.

-...-. Many hoaxers have received substantial assistance from sympathizers and well-wishers, -...-. The most important benefits of victimization are psychological, however. -...- If membership figures for organizations are hard to determine, statistics on racist and anti-Semitic hoaxes are problematic as well. While recent legislation calls for reporting "hate crimes," (including unsolved cases) hoaxes and fabrications are not required to be reported as such. When an incident is discovered to be a hoax it ought to be dropped from the statistics, but maybe not. Many incidents are only reported in the local media and die when they reach the wire services. I've also been told that a fair number are simply "spiked" once their nature is ascertained, out of "sensitivity" to minority concerns, or not to "give ammunition" to racists. (Wilcox 1990:4,6, 1132 “In contrast, the bodhisattva portrayed in many Mahayana scriptures was only an individual who aspired to attain enlightenment. His eventual enlightenment was not assured. He had not received a prediction that he would eventually attain enlightenment and he even backslid in his practice. He was the ordinary man as bodhisattva. Of course, great bodhisattvas (who were not subject to backsliding and other ills) such as Samantabhadra, Manjusri, Avalokitesvara, and Maitreya were also mentioned in Mahayana scriptures along with the obscure, ordinary practitioner of Mahayana Buddhism who considered himself a bodhisattva.�

(Hirakawa 1990:267).

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emphasis added).

At the University of Kansas, for example, a group of black students descended on a white fraternity with clubs and other weapons shouting threats and insults after a black student had allegedly been insulted there. Fortunately, there was no violence in spite of the fact terroristic threats were apparently made. Neither the campus press or the local daily mentioned the incident. One has to wonder how many times such incidents occur nationwide in a year. Surely, they contain the elements of a "hate crime." In virtually every case, however, we can be sure that issues of "sensitivity" are raised, along with fear of "backlash" and "misunderstanding." (Wilcox 1994:26).

In the summer of 1977, Cathleen Crowell Webb, then sixteen years old, reported that she had been raped. Webb showed police her torn blouse and scars allegedly inflicted by the rapist; she also described the rapist to a police sketch artist. The police sketch just happened to match the likeness of Gary Dotson. Two years later, on the strength of this "eyewitness" evidence, Dotson was sentenced to not less than twenty-five years and not more than fifty years in the Illinois State penitentiary. Six years later, in March 1985, Webb retracted her story. She told authorities that she had made up the rape charge in order to cover up a sexual experience with her boyfriend. Dotson asked that his conviction be overturned. The original judge would not reverse the decision. The governor of Illinois refused a pardon but did commute Dotson's sentence to the six years served. Both the judge and the governor continued to believe the original story—the false allegation was more believable than the recantation and the truth. It took Dotson four more years to clear his name through DNA tests showing that the semen on Webb's underwear could not have come from Dotson but could have come from her boyfriend. The effects of a teenager's projections lasted for twelve years, ruining twelve years of an innocent person's life. (Pratkanis&Aronson 2001:ch.11, emphasis added).

An author who was so desperate to get his book published that he staged a hoax involving a baby dragon has won a lucrative publishing contract. After numerous rejections Allistair Mitchell concocted a tale that a dragon had been found in a garage last year.

He said: "I created the hoax in order to attract potential readers."

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-...-.In fact the dragon was created by Crawley Creatures, the model makers behind TV's Walking with Dinosaurs, and the jar was made by a specialist glass blowing studio in the Isle of Wight. A Waterstone's spokesman said: "This is a very refreshing approach to book publishing. (BBC News 2004: no page, emphasis added).

Dramatic footage of a polar bear tending her newborn cubs in the flagship BBC show Frozen Planet was filmed in a Dutch zoo using fake snow. -...- Eight million viewers were led to believe the scene had been captured by BBC cameramen inside an underground cave in the brutal sub-zero temperatures of the Arctic wilderness. But the footage, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, and interspersed with real shots of the Arctic, was in fact filmed in a den made of plaster and wood in a wildlife enclosure. -...- Sir David, 85, also defended the methods used by Frozen Planet. He said: ‘If you had tried to put a camera in the wild in a polar bear den, she would either have killed the cub or the cameraman.’ He added: ‘It’s not falsehood, and we don’t keep it secret either. (Gladdis 2011: no page, emphasis added).

ABC Nightline investigation later revealed that the leaders of the Romanian revolution had resorted to just such a grisly strategy— videotaping rows of corpses dug up from paupers' graves and claiming they were the bodies of demonstrators killed by Ceausescu forces. -...- Some of the threats may be spurious, traceable to a lone exile nursing old resentments. But there is something odd, and perhaps significant, about the way most of these messages are worded: They borrow the archaic language of the Iron Guard's mystic nationalism. In Athens the letters even featured obsolete accent marks. Most observers say this is an old Securitate cover tactic. -...- to intimidate dissidents, sometimes inventing new rightwing groups. (Anton 1992: no page, emphasis added).

Many Klansmen join through the mail and rarely or never attend meetings. Some belong to several Klans, and a few carry cards from virtually all of them. Thus, 1,000 "members" may represent only eight or nine hundred actual Klansmen and even fewer are actual participants in Klan activities. Subtract from this police informants, agents for "monitoring" groups, curiosity seekers and literature collectors, and this figure diminishes even further. -...-Another case involving the KGB surfaced recently with the defection of East 1148 DOLT

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German intelligence agents. The West German newspaper Die Welt reported in 1990 that West German security authorities had determined that the KGB or other Soviet state security services were responsible for numerous desecrations of synagogues in West Germany over the past forty years. The article also noted that the KGB worked in close cooperation with neo-Nazi groups. John Barron, in his book, K.G.B. - Secret work of Soviet Secret Agents discusses Communist complicity in anti-Semitic hoaxes. (Wilcox 1994:14,98).

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The vast majority of tricks of the trade and persuasion techniques examined in this essay shall be considered faulty1133; for example, Jimmy Guieu may or may not have been this Resistance hero; Malanga may be a university researcher (often incorrectly billed as university professor): that says nothing whatsoever about their theories about UFOs and so forth. Controversy arose about recurring statements Jesse Ventura -the wrestler turned politician, and later elected governor of Minnesotamade about being a U.S Navy SEAL corp member. It appears Ventura belonged to a completely different Navy unit; Ventura retorts:”Today we refer to all of us as SEALs ”1134. Martial arts instructor Furey, famous for a series of 'zero to superhero' video courses for the masses, purportedly claimed to have been a pupil of legendary wrestler Karl Gotch: a relationship Gotch sternly denied, apparently.

Yet, all the techniques/episodes examined have one thing in common: they count on neuralgic spots of the human psyche to trigger powerful knee-jerk reactions that hide possible rational planning, inconsistencies and oddities in a dust storm of elation, whereby the public cries, laughs, angers etc itself asleep, not without so doing the persuader's bidding, for example buying a product, voting a party, marching to support a victim and what not:”Ethos enables the audience to accept the persuasive change advocated by the person communicating the 1133 Monvoisin 2007.

1134 Reading Eagle, December 16, 1999.

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message.”1135.

What is being discussed here is not exactly new. Ancient thinkers already situated persuasion on the threshold between logos (rational account, extrapolation of the law), ethos (priority given to the credibility of the speaker and/or circumstances, “Ethos, the appeal to the source's character,”1136) and pathos (bandwagon and emotional appeals, or sentimentality as a feeling based on thoughts). The present writer's point is that the part reserved to rational accounts (and not just petty partisan truths) doesn't even begin to compare with credibility issues (most often based on commodious and/or political premises) and issues related to landslides of emotion and bursting barrels of tears, spleen or bile. Logos hasn't disappeared officially, but what is presented as rational account is most often just 'emotional truth' based on commodious credibility issues.

Astute adviser to already eccentric visionary President Wilson, JewishAmerican propaganda genius (and Freud's nephew) Edward Bernays had made a point

of

emphasizing

U.S

WWI

war

intervention

as

exquisitely

humanitarian/disinterested (“making the world safe for democracy”). Some wrote about the Wilson administration:

The typical textbook portrays Woodrow Wilson, who served from 1913 to 1921, as one of our great liberal presidents. They point to his 1135 Bonniksen 2006:38.

1136 Bonniksen 2006:17.

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institution of the federal income tax, creation of the Federal Reserve System, implementation of tariff and antitrust reform, development of the first child-labor law, and passage of women’s suffrage among his progressive accomplishments -...-.A different picture emerges, however, when one studies Wilson’s writings and record more deeply.

His record on race relations, in particular, is appalling; he set black progress in the United States back fifty years by instituting racial segregation throughout the federal government and greatly empowering the most racist Southern faction within the Democratic Party. Furthermore, he was responsible for repressive measures against political radicals vastly greater than anything Senator Joe McCarthy ever contemplated, let alone did. (Bartlett 2008:95).

Bernays' genius was behind the Communist scare -orchestrated on behalf of fruit multinationals- that led to covert operations preparing for the golpe in Guatemala in the early 1950s, employing a wide array of tactics including ritual defamation,

rigged

press

conferences,

(probably)

remotely

controlled

demonstrations of hostility relayed through in-home news agencies in turn exaggerating a faddish atmosphere of impending doom against which 'the good guys' had a moral duty to rise: wartime tactics never stopped paying dividends.

The cat has been let out of the bag about the sincere or simply purposeful nature behind the orgy of sentimental displays, vicarious trauma (= second person drama= hearing the accounts of trauma), and grotesquely colossal attitudes courtesy of saviors, minutemen, prophets of doom and other hecklers:

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(psychically or emotionally) structured like individuals in a strong social or cultural context that renders them vulnerable to feelings of dishonor, embarrassment, disgrace, or ignominy. Shame is thought of as a primordial force that articulates or links knowledge with action, a feeling or a sensation brought on not by physical contact but by knowledge or consciousness alone. And it signifies involvement in a social network, exposure to others and susceptibility to their gaze -...-.The dark side of revelation is overexposure. Sometimes we call it voyeurism, sometimes compassion fatigue, sometimes the obscenity of images or ‘‘disaster pornography.’ (Keenan 2004:435-438, emphasis added).

Another product is touted as using the ingredient "that doctors recommend." By reading the label, we discover the "magic" ingredient to be good old inexpensive aspirin. Several pharmaceutical companies also market "extra-strength" varieties of "arthritic pain" formulations.

You will pay a premium price for these products, although their extra strength comes only from extra aspirin (or acetaminophen, an aspirin substitute), along with a dose of caffeine. Taking additional aspirin would be less expensive, but the product sounds great in the ads: "Not one, but a combination of medically proven ingredients in an extrastrength formula.". Such blatant attempts at mass persuasion seem pitifully obvious when we are mindful and scrutinize them closely.

But most of us are not always mindful and are, therefore, vulnerable to being unwittingly influenced. Thus the cash registers ring, and in tremendous numbers we line up and buy the advertised product as if we really believed that there is a major difference among brands of aspirin. ( Pratkanis&Aronson 2001:ch.6, emphasis added.).

The same idea of the world being in danger if the 'cause' is not supported was already present in the pseudo-Manichean approach wanting god to hold each man responsible for the entire world (St. John Chrysostom). With small improvements the 'move' is guaranteed to work in all situations: people who are not religious may find it appealing under the guise of thwarting the plans of '...ists' of one breed or another.

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Personality coach Bradshaw has been dubbed “the shaman of shame”: Bradshaw's system would supposedly works wonders in “healing one's inner wounded child”, and so forth. Of course, all theologies -theist and atheist alike, from Christianity to Marxism- foster new categories of shame in order for them to offer suitable healing afterward.

Here Jesus suffered so much just as we can see in the Mel Gibson movie.

He suffered for us, so the least we owe him is to follow the dictates of [insert Christian denomination here]. A blessed minority suffered endless persecution and indignities, and we didn't do anything to prevent it: the least we owe them is to take a certain side in Middle-Eastern/marriage politics/affirmative actions and welfare gravy train. A corrupt politician is caught as the bohemian profligate he is. Because he proudly stood for [insert politicized flapdoodle here], however, the least we owe him is to afford him a blank slate...unless we want to be “the kind of person” who doesn't respect [insert here detail that makes one gasp for breath]...shame shamanism.

Conscience thus becomes little more than the sentimentalized and prettified bundle of recycled gnostic flapdoodle, pathetic taboos and miserable atonement routines typical of a given society that are a commodious loyalty test to an adventitious power system. Many contemplate aghast how third-world immigrants most often either fail to respond to shame shamanism rooted in rhetoric 1154 DOLT

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from the 1960s or war propaganda, or lampoon and defy such taboos openly.

Much earlier in his career, Bernays had masterminded a campaign on behalf of tobacco multinationals to make smoking appealing to women; during public events paid female testimonials were caught on film smoking, for example.

Rhetoric was also developed through paid newspaper columns to establish a link between the women's emancipation movement and smoking: the smoking “new woman” was also compared to the Statue of Liberty:

In the late 1920s, George W. Hill, owner of American Tobacco, hired America’s leading public relations guru, Edward Bernays, to design a new advertising initiative. The problem was simple: Despite a decade’s worth of movies, magazine photos, and F.Scott Fitzgerald stories, many Americans still regarded women smokers as “hussies.” Working on behalf of his new, prize client, Bernays hired a prominent psychoanalyst, A. A. Brill, to see what might be done to eliminate once and forever the negative connotations associated with cigarette-wielding women. “Some women regard cigarettes as symbols of freedom,” Brill advised. “Smoking is a sublimation of oral eroticism: holding a cigarette in the mouth excites the oral zone. It is perfectly normal for women to want to smoke cigarettes. Further, the first women who smoked probably had an excess of masculine components and adopted the habit as a masculine act. But today the emancipation of women has suppressed many of the feminine desires. More women now do the same work as men do.… Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom.” -...- Bernays contacted Ruth Hale, “a leading feminist,” and arranged to have “ten young women lighting ‘torches of freedom’ ” at the 1929 Easter parade on Fifth Avenue.

Newspapers carried front-page items marveling at this “bold protest against women’s inequality.” And American Tobacco had itself a new market segment.(Zeitz 2006:134). the financial services industry corrupted the U.S. government, 1155 DOLT

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leading to a lack of oversight on Wall Street and to the financial meltdown of 2008. The film also describes how the financial services industry paid leading academics (deans, heads of departments, university professors) to write expert reports in the service of the financial industry and Wall Street. (Ariely 2012:43).

Bernays as well first massively utilized

financial support lent to

'scientists' to publish 'studies' that extolled the virtues -or minimized the dangers- of products his clients had to sell.

Bernays' campaigns to foster smoking into the mainstream were so successful that critics can truthfully write about the cigarette motifs in Hitchcock's movies. Bernays shrewdly hijacked the human mind's fixations (for example, smoking and eroticism), originally unrelated to commercial smoking:

Although there are nuances to the way each of these objects functions in films generally, depending on whether it is a case or a lighter, for the purposes of the discussion here they may be combined. The essential point is that the case or lighter is originally a gift from a woman to a man. In most such cases, the gift signals the woman’s – frequently rather possessive – desire. -...-In other films, the sexual connotations to the gift are more muted, and the case/lighter serves, rather, to introduce another thread into the film: it becomes evidence in a murder investigation. (Walker 2005:26-7).

Bernays credited himself with inventing “public relations” to give propaganda a more respectable name, and -in Bernays' own words- to apply war propaganda methods of persuasion and control to peace time priorities: from a culture based on 'need' to a culture based on 'desire', or the old surfeit motif of ageold folklore and politics applied to the industrial mass-democracy, and its 1156 DOLT

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consumerism:

[Bernays] was a veteran of George Creel’s CPI and America’s leading “public relations counsel” in the 1920s. With a client roster that included some of the nation’s most lucrative business concerns —the United Fruit Company, General Motors, Procter & Gamble, Philco, and Liggett & Myers, among them—Bernays aggressively championed the integration of marketing and psychology. (Zeitz 2006:155).

Discussing Marx, Roderick comments about capitalism that:”reduce[s] the rich amount of human needs to needs can be simply bought and sold on the market place -...- our needs in terms of marketable needs -...- [for example] having intimate sexual conversations with one another, now that's telephonised and you put it on your Visa [credit card], right? ”1137.

Buddhist master Shantideva wrote:”We who are like senseless children shrink from suffering, but love its causes. We hurt ourselves; our pain is selfinflicted!”. Modern consumerism is too glad to oblige: decaffeinated coffee for the coffee-a-holic; low-calorie donuts; low-fat whipped cream to enjoy a guiltless treat...

Bernays furthermore popularized the concept of stock investing among the middle classes as the best way to allegedly get their slice of the capitalist cake, thus providing stock-market operators with an endless supply of impotent 1137 1992:Hegel And Modern Life. As the present writer suggests, every epoch has its totem imagery. Speaking in the early 1990s, Roderick here captures a clear obsession of the 1990s: the proliferation of the usages for the telephone. That was way back when the internet was in its infancy, well before the boom of the late 1990s. In just a few years, the obsession with the telephone would vanish to the advantage of the internet, possibly an evolution of the telephone itself technical wonders such as théâtrophone had prefigured over a century earlier.

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shareholders kept in the dark about what really goes on behind the corporate curtain.

Huettel1138 claims that “a comprehensive survey of investments held in the retirement saving accounts of employees in the twenty largest 401k [=retirement] plans -...- on average these employees held almost half of their retirement savings in the stock of a single company, their own employer [offering them such stocks at a discount]”.

Persuading the “stupid” (= Bernays' own word) masses that they needed a constant inflow of consumer goods; or that taking up smoking was in their best emotional interest would be no different from persuading them that they needed a war with another country to make an ethical statement 1139. Phallic projections might perhaps prove elucidative: a bigger car as the wish-fulfillment for the impossibility of a bigger penis1140 or greater mating appeal1141.

Compulsive consumerism, democratization of debit and credit schemes

1138 2014:Risk.

1139 Cfr.BBC 2002, episode Happiness Machines.

1140 An ad for Chevrolet De Luxe Sport Sedan Life Magazine -to name one- published (March 4, 1940) contained a vague sexual suggestion as punchline:”It has extra length where length counts”. Traditional, immemorial Hindu medicine ayurveda, however, seems to suggest the opposite:”The Brhat-samhita asserts that a small penis is best and that men fortunate enough to be endowed with such members will be wealthy, while those who have large ones will be unable to produce sons.” (Powers 2009:130).

1141 An ad for Kreml hair tonic-dressing Life Magazine -to name one- published (March 4, 1940) is in the form of a diary entry an unknown woman writes confessing how she had chosen “George” because of his impeccable hairdo over Tom (the “witty, fun” guy); Dick (the successful -albeit bald- “go-getter”); Harry ( a Fred Astaire kind of chap who danced divinely). The hair tonic thus greatly enhanced George's mating potential against such seemingly overwhelming factors as money (Dick), charm (Tom), and social skills (Harry).

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imply everybody into the game becomes “another brick in the wall�, an indentured retainer on the system's service who shall think twice about switching loyalties to sources outside the system in fear of losing not only elusive access to welfare massdemocracy (rather abstract for most), but to their periodical fix of credit and debit allowances, mirage miracle investments, trendy fads and worthless -though not valueless1142 -, ego-centered services -from erotic web cam sites to social networksupon which their life, horizon and self-esteem rest. Bernays and other trail-blazers didn't work so hard to put the system in place for naught to start with.

Jewish-American Bernays played a pivotal role in the service of western mass-democracy; Romanian Fascist leader Codreanu was a Christian nationalist of mystical tendencies, abhorred western mass-democracy, was a stern judaeophobe, and the ideological precursor of the WWII Romanian Fascist regime.

Yet Codreanu's words below could easily be Bernays', which shows -as this writing contends- that obtuse allegories, petrified mythologies and all the rest can be intuitively tailored to suit most agendas or situations with minimal interventions:

Supporters could be found for any "ideas," or votes for anyone running for public office. But this does not depend on the people's understanding of those "ideas," "laws" or "candidates" but on something entirely different: on the adroitness of individuals to win 1142 The difference can be grasped this way. An old car may be worth only very little money according to insurance policies or any other legal parameter one might use; the affective or personal value of the same for a given individual can hardly be converted into bank notes.

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the goodwill of the multitudes. There is nothing more capricious and unstable in opinions than the multitude. Since the war, this multitude was, in turn, Averescan, Liberal, Nationalistic, National-Peasant, Iorgan, etc. hailing each, only to spit on each a year later, thus recognizing its own error, disorientation and incapacity. Its criterion for selection is: "Let us try some others." Thus, the choosing is done not according to judgement and knowledge, but haphazardly and trusting to luck. (1976: election, selection, heredity).

Furthermore, this isn't a method that works only when applied in/to political matters or merchandise sold on shelf. A ritual that symbolizes cosmic fertilization (the rain as sperm of the sky gods upon mother Earth, etc) that indigenous pacific islanders adopt can be seamlessly re-branded to become bungeejumping so that the overstressed 'weekend warriors' of the westernized world can feel abreast of the latest trends in leisure sports. The tribal member of Pacific island societies trying to secure a good harvest, and the anonymous westerner in his pursuit of posh idleness share the wonderful human psyche, and its manifold proclivities.

Tribal tattoos aren't a demarcation line anymore, either. Western inner city pencil-necked sweat-hogs covered in all sorts of tribal tattoos, piercing and so forth to show off possibly outnumber indigenous people doing the same for allegedly mystical reasons. The elaborate hairstyle and make-up of a Japanese geiko have reportedly sexual undertones: the make-up lines behind her neck allegedly recall female genitalia.

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The inner-city dweller of defaced megalopolises Beirut-style can thus relive his past from bygone ages archetypal images haunt. S-he becomes a walking cathedral like shaman-priests of hunting-gathering societies always on the move, whence the need for walking cathedrals.

The only caution is that contemporary walking cathedrals have mostly no clue about the symbols they etched on their skins, however; tattooed gnostic punchlines are often misspelled turning the person into a walking joke: mere narcissistic supply. Postmodern society's shamans look more like elementary schoolchildren having failed a couple grades because of some mental condition than medicine men coming back from a mythical quest.

The only residual psychical connection remains the one that archetypal elementary ideas and mankind's psychical unity provide. Alternatively, pain is what people are essentially after. Wrestling with pain as their bodies get pierced again and again is what is paramount; odd pictographs or foolish images fade in the background.

A famous variety of coffee sells in some highfalutin eateries the world over for up to thirty-five euros each cup. The allegedly most expensive coffee on Earth – regularly served to the affluent and powerful as its cost may dictate- comes from a very peculiar location: the intestines of a small animal as feces containing the

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remains of coffee beans that are patiently harvested and processed. According to a tragicomic Italian scandal, Berlusconi's kitchen paid string beans euro 80/kg...

Bernays' uncomplimentary opinion of the masses -whose cravings made his (and his employers') fortune- isn't an isolate case. Acclaimed director George Lucas declared:”Star Wars didn't kill the film industry or infantilize it -...- popcorn pictures have always ruled. Why do people go see these popcorn movies when they're not good? Why is the public so stupid? It's not my fault”1143.

It isn't difficult to link the 'infantile' element to Hulk Hogan's characterization of his fans as “little Hulkamaniacs”1144. Contemporary societies are obsessed by cute imagery: children, puppies and so forth. Even the most loathsome, crude or insignificant person, animal or thing can be restyled into someone/thing cuddly by adding smallness and cuteness to the portrait. Once smallness enters the pictures, the human mind typically goes on autopilot in 'sweet child' mode.

Infantilism not only materializes in the pre-scripted, gut-wrenching feud that opposed 'The American Dream' Dusty Rhodes to his son Dustin trying to establish himself as a wrestler; or the feud between then real-life brothers in law 'The Hit Man' Bret Hart and 'The British Bulldog' Davey Boy Smith, which culminated in Bret Hart's defeat and the final hug between a reluctant Hart, Smith 1143 Quoted in Biskind 1999:344, emphasis added.

1144 Other wrestlers quickly seized the moment. The fans of wrestlers Texas Tornado and Ultimate Warrior were dubbed “little tornadoes” and “little warriors” etc.

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and Hart's sister (then Smith's wife).

It may be argued how the turncoat hugging the party liner (wherever the 'line of good' happens to be drawn at any moment in history) on a mountain of debris, corpses etc could be a recurring image in our times. The mountain of debris, corpses smoldering out etc represents the lesson earlier rash judgments and choices now impart, and grows bigger or smaller according to fleeting political priorities.

Saint Paul who created Christianity was in fact a former persecutor; governor Pilate -who oversaw Jesus' execution- is a Saint in the Coptic Christian Church as he supposedly converted; Saint Augustine was an adversary of Christians; Joseph of Arimathea -who received Jesus' body for burial in his own tomb- also belonged to the Jewish supreme council who had condemned Jesus; Milarepa was a nasty black magician pursuing revenge; members of ruthless political police corps and busybodies ('influencers' and 'community builders') easily transit on to the victorious enemy's service:

we learn that the woman, Inge, had once been a zealous functionary in the National Socialist girls ’ organization, the League of German Girls (BDM), winning ‘ promotion after promotion ’ and remaining loyal to the Nazi cause until the bitter end. After ‘ an eighteen-month grace period ’ at the end of the Second World War, she then became an equally active and successful functionary in the East’s Communistled youth organization, the Free German Youth (FDJ). Inge, the West German narrator notes, appeared to be ‘ perfectly at ease ’ in explaining her rapid switching of allegiance from one political system to another. Inge had many real-life equivalents in the Soviet-Occupied 1163 DOLT

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Zone of Germany (SBZ) after the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of young East Germans made just such a speedy transition from the brown shirt to the blue, from one mass youth organization — the two branches of the Nazi youth movement, the Hitler Youth (HJ) and the BDM — to another, the FDJ, in the mid- to late 1940s.

Members of this ‘ Hitler Youth generation ’played the decisive role in reconstructing the Communist state that ultimately emerged in East Germany from the ashes of the Third Reich. -...-From late 1945 onwards, when the East German Communists essentially exonerated the Hitler Youth generation from the crimes of ‘ Hitler fascism ’ , the ideological changeover from the racist, nationalist Weltanschauung of the HJ to the ‘ anti-fascist’ values of the ‘ peace-loving ’ FDJ became a taboo subject.(McDougall 2008:24-5).

Psychopaths Hare describes, like conventional busybodies, “are much freer than the rest of us to pick and choose the rules and restrictions they will adhere to .”1145;”the psychopath, that personification of remorseless evildoing, has such an established place in the public consciousness. ” 1146. It's the old figure of the mythological trickster that comes back circularly.

Such people can easily span the entire political spectrum: from left-wing terrorist to mainstream leader (Mandela); from left to right-wing violent radicalism, then on to statesmanship (Mussolini); or from right-wing to left-wing maximalism (Mujica); from a liberal to an ultra-conservative agenda (Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte); from a Demo-Christian youth to the leadership of the former Communist party (Renzi); from “criminal and subversive” (according to a Parliamentary committee) Masonic lodge P2 to Prime Minister (Berlusconi)...

1145 Hare 1993:78.

1146 Weber 1991:no page.

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Basically, a Star Wars good guy ↔ bad guy circular shtick unfolds, whereby the good guy becomes a bad one -or the other way around-, but deep down he's still good, and he'll find a way to prove it at the last moment. This shtick has been put to good use in the first two Star Wars trilogies, and rumor has it that an hypothetical third Star Wars trilogy shall present the same situation.

Romantic comedies also follow the same blueprint: potential lovers bestow trials and tribulations upon each other before they come to live happy ever after. Stereotypical action movie characters also meet these situations (for example in providential master shticks, and training montages).

In mainstream politics, will the EU (IMF, Germany...) stop financial transfers to Greece (Portugal, Spain, Italy...), thus letting the noble nation go bankrupt? Will they find a last-minute agreement so that the ensuing implosion of the Euro zone is finally averted? Will a doomsday, Hitler-style regime seize the proud nation on the verge of bankrupt if forces occultes press too far1147? “The circumstances seem changed but the cliche is in one's psyche”; that's an ongoing romantic comedy or action movie shtick.

The romantic comedy -or thriller, for those who can tell the differenceTV ambiance is obvious. The world peeps aghast as EU executive Juncker refuses a

1147 That's the same image of the psychotic who threatens to jump from a balcony, or to kill an hostage if his demands are not met. The Zoroastrian choice shtick has never been healthier.

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phone call from Greek Prime Minister Tsipras 1148: even U.S President Obama seems to fear a global economic catastrophe looming on the horizon. Readers can almost hear the appropriate soundtrack of this third-rate cable TV drama that had already unfolded nearly verbatim in the past: Iceland, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Argentina...In all those cases, the routine “unforeseen development”; the “accidental revelation”; the “ill-timed misunderstanding”; the “shocking wording” none could foresee seem surgically timed so that the usual suspects may make a profit on the stock market.

Irrespective of the many good objections to this overload of third rate sentimentalism, in some milieus is it common to retort that -whatever might be wrong, excessive or objectionable in at least some occurrences- it serves -all things considered- the noble or ethical purpose of psychical surgery that is supposed -according to some- to prevent yet another outburst of collective sparagmos.

Irrespective of any modest side-effects, pencil-necked sweat-hogs, prigs and dolts thus trained would be 'mentally castrated' to such an extent to exceed prevention, and to frankly render any such occurrence impossible.

For example, no matter how often so-called gypsies (Rom or any other designation) or people of color show up in crime statistics or crime journalism, one is not authorized to 'connect the dots', but shall withdraw into speculations about 1148 ANSA, June 8, 2015.

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quantum entanglement, synchronicity, six degrees of separation, the butterfly effect of inequality and '...ism', and suchlike: there is a nice explanation that shall change your opinion entirely. Should evil eyes and shame shamanism fail to deter, lawyers are ready to serve those who refuse to comply.

Lenin believed that Marxism cannot be generated naturally among the proletariat, but must be infused from outside. Lenin tried his best but still could not cause workers to shift from the economic struggle to the political battle for power. So he pinned his hopes on the Conditioned Reflex Theory put forth by Nobel Prize winner Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. Lenin said this theory "has significant meaning for the proletariat all around the world."

Trotsky' even vainly hoped that conditioned reflex would not only psychologically change a person. but also physically change the person. In the same way that a dog drools once it hears the lunch bell ringing, soldiers would be expected to rush ahead bravely upon hearing gunshots, thus devoting their lives to the Communist Party. (Epoch Group 2004:99).

Nevertheless, sentimentalism was very much alive and trendy during the period that preceded the First World War, and between wars. Much as it's fashionable to draw lines between today's sentimentalism in its many provinces, and what it used to be like back then, it remains equally true that pacifism, internationalism, positivism, globalism, humanism and the many provinces of sentimentalism were not much effective in preventing neither world wars, nor a host of regional wars.

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Ahnenerbe- was a continuation of German romanticism.

Sentimentalism was equally very alive in the XVIII century, yet that didn't avert the revolutionary catastrophe. Today overexposure kicked in. Those who might speak out of just ethical concerns suffer an aggressive competition from popcorn philosophers, vegan activists, former Soviet enthusiasts transited to campaign for ecology and climate, animal rights crusaders, prophets of doom, hoaxers and mythomaniacs of all walks of life; mythicists, new agers, exotic gurus of all persuasions; the advert guy and the public relations gal hired by the fast food chain, the tobacco company, or the malt liquor brand.

The emphasis on sentimentality, vitalism (superman theories) 1149, on trusting one's emotion beyond any idea of consistency, on the often questionable nature of mainstream truth, on elusive “truths beyond rational comprehension� that united

transcendentalism

and

romanticism

drifted

beyond

progressive

transcendentalism (abolitionism, contemplative naturalism etc).

Mussolini -for one- explicitly lampooned the priggish notion of consistency in favor of reckless eclecticism (=political expediency). Ahead lied industrialized social Darwinism as State policy; the war-welfare State; Nietzsche's will to power, whose idea of superman Fascist regimes quickly appropriated.

1149 It won't elude readers how this is just the arch-trickster in his incarnation as culture hero.

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CEKA-NKVD and GESTAPO thugs rounding opponents up for elimination were not far in the future as Jacobin thugs were not far in the past.

They, too, endeavored to “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life ”1150.

Alternatively,

feminists

such

as

B.

Walker

can

swiftly

join

transcendentalism with neo-pagan suggestions, and a version of feminism that urges the recapture of a long-gone achronotopos when friendly matriarchies ruled peaceful societies where nurturance was the norm, and violence and sexism (=the absolute wrongdoing in this case) were absent or banned.

Walker also claims a mind-boggling (9 million 1151) number of women were executed as witches. This number possibly first appeared out of thin air in a 1893 book by suffragist and neo-pagan author Mathilda Gage (she speaks of “nine

1150 Walden, Thoreau 1854:no page.

1151 Walker 2006. Professor Plaisted (with the department of computer science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ) traces this ongoing bingo back to the XVIII century in works by “Conyers Middleton lived from 1683 to 1750 and in 1729 wrote his “Letter from Rome, Showing an Exact Conformity between Popery and Paganism.” He was a rationalistic theologian, and denied the occurrence of miracles in the church. ” (2006:50), and “Gottfried Christian Voigt (1740-1791) ”. Plaisted clinches:”Therefore the figure of 9 million witches killed also has a source and was not made up. From these two examples it is possible to infer Middleton ’s approach: All of the figures he gave were obtained form another source. None of the figures were increased; in fact some of them may even have been reduced. Even the figure of 30,000,000 Mexicans and Peruvians killed, for which we do not have a source, is not too far off from the estimate of 15 million given by Schmucker, cited above.” (no date:51). He gleefully adds: “Some say that these high death toll figures are tinged by anti-Catholicism. One could just as well say that arguments against these figures are tinged by pro-Catholicism. ” (ibid.:52). Readers shall come to their own conclusions.

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millions of persons”1152); a claim neo-pagan thinker and activist Gardner 1153 borrowed, in turn meant to apply to “women” for Walker and her ilk (such as German author and “magical feminist” Luisa Francia): (academic) cronyism (=information cascade) at its zenith (or nadir).

Points of contact between Transcendentalists and -to name one- the NSDAP regime are too many to count. Much as people like Marcuse would like, disentangling enlightenment and terror may prove either impossible or futile. Let's pick vegetarianism, for example1154:

Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. ( Walden, Thoreau 1854:no page).

But there's one thing I can predict to eaters of meat, that the world of the future will be vegetarian ! (Hitler in November 1941 (point 66) cit. in Cameron &Stevens 2000).

I'm a vegetarian, and they must spare me from their meat. ( Hitler in January 1942 (point 105), Ibid.

When I became a vegetarian, a mouthful of water from time to time was enough. When you offer a child the choice of a piece of meat, an 1152 “It is computed from historical records that nine millions of persons were put to death for witchcraft after 1484, or during a period of three hundred years, and this estimate does not include the vast number who were sacrificed in the preceding centuries upon the same accusation.” (1893:247). She mentions “historical records” but fails to specify which ones. Her book is a theosophical jumble of Belle Epoque motifs that clearly supplies a blueprint for the 'scientific' mother goddess fads of later decades.

1153 “How many perished in the witch-mania throughout Western Europe, in the whole of its long course, will probably never be known; they are estimated to number nine millions.” (Gardner 1959:34).

1154 Some in the vegetarian community have risen indignantly against this juxtaposition. They contend Hitler's vegetarianism was a marketing ploy, a myth engineered to foster the image of Hitler – and other NSDAP honchos- as mystical and compassionate. The present writer lets Hitler speak for himself.

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apple or a cake, it's never the meat that he chooses. (Hitler in January 1942 (point 117), Ibid.

I am no admirer of the poacher, particularly as I am a vegetarian; but in him I see the sole element of romance in the so-called sport of shooting. (Hitler in August 1942 (point 293), Ibid.). "[Daniel said] Please test your servants for ten days: Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. -...-At the end of the ten days they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. So the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead. ( Daniel 1:12-16).

Transcendentalist and activist Mary Peabody wrote 1858 Christianity In

The Kitchen, linking proper attention to nutrition to moral implications. Millennia before, Taoist Nei-Yeh (inward training, IV century BCE) advises in keeping with Taoism alchemy:

For all the Way of eating is that: Overfilling yourself with food will impair your vital energy And cause your body to deteriorate. Overrestricting your consumption causes the bones to wither And the blood to congeal. The mean between overfilling and overrestricting:This is called "harmonious completion." It is where the vital essence lodgesAnd knowledge is generated. (point n.23, H. Roth translation).

De Sade had already delivered in the late XVIII century a cargo of such ideas in his depictions of the fictional utopia of Tamoé, a paradise island in the southern seas1155. Some Jewish rabbis interpret the Bible to give a vegetarian diet 1155 Here Sade describes a meal at the palace of Zamé, the divine philosopher-king of the paradise island of Tamoé. Zamé then explains that a vegetarian diet is the staple of a healthy lifestyle “jattes d'une superbe porcelaine bleue du Japon, uniquement remplies de légumes, de confitures, de fruits et de pâtisserie.—Le plus mauvais petit prince d'Allemagne fait meilleure chère que moi, n'est-ce pas mon ami, me dit Zamé. Voulezvous savoir pourquoi? C'est qu'il nourrit son orgueil beaucoup plus que son estomac, et qu'il imagine qu'il y a de la grandeur et de la magnificence à faire assommer vingt bêtes pour en substanter une. Ma vanité se place à des

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priority: after all, before the fall, Adam and Eve consumed only vegetarian food in the garden of Eden while enjoying god's company. If religions propose mystical meals and permissible food lists conducive to spiritual uplift or salvation, online junk banners propose to lose 1kg per day eating some 'secret' food according to 'ancient', long-lost recipes.

Fernandez-Armesto magisterially evokes the deeply ideological resonance behind food fads and alternative styles:

Mealtimes are our oldest rituals. The companionable effects of eating together help to make us human. The little links which bind households together are forged at the table. The stability of our homes probably depends more on regular mealtimes than on sexual fidelity or filial piety. Now it is in danger. Food is being desocialised. The demise of mealtimes means unstructured days and undisciplined appetites.

The loneliness of the fast-food eater is uncivilising. In microwave households, family life fragments. The end of home cooking has long been both tearfully predicted and ardently desired. The anti-cooking movement started, rather feebly, more than 100 years ago, among socialists who wanted to liberate women from the kitchen and replace the family with a wider community. In 1887, Edward Bellamy imagined a paradise of kitchenless homes. Workers would order dinner from menus printed in newspapers and eat them in people's palaces. Twenty years later, Charlotte Perkins wanted to make cookery "scientific": in effect, eliminating it from most lives, while professionals in meal-making factories maintained energy levels for a world of work. It would have been insufferably dull - institutional objets différens: être cher à ses concitoyens, être aimé de ceux qui l'entourent, faire le bien, empêcher le mal, rendre tout le monde heureux, voilà les seules choses, mon ami, qui doivent flatter la vanité de celui que le hasard met un moment au-dessus des autres. Ce n'est point par aucun principe religieux que nous nous abstenons de viande, c'est par régime, c'est par humanité: pourquoi sacrifier nos frères quand la nature nous donne autre chose? Peut-on croire, d'ailleurs, qu'il soit bon D'engloutir dans ses entrailles la chair et le sang putréfiés de mille animaux divers; il ne peut résulter de-là qu'un chile âcre, qui détériore nécessairement nos organes, qui les affaiblit, qui précipite les infimités et hâte la mort. Mais les comestibles que je vous offre n'ont aucuns de ces inconvéniens: les fumées que leur digestion renvoie au cerveau sont légères, et les fibres n'en sont jamais ébranlées. ” (Sade no date: no page).

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eating can never beat home cooking. But at least it was nobly conceived, with socialising effects in mind. Now capitalism has succeeded where socialism failed. We are facing a nightmare version of Perkins' vision: a dystopia in which cooking has surrendered to "convenience" and family break-ups start at the fridge. The eateries Bellamy imagined have materialised but they are supplied by private enterprise in fast-food outlets, serving uniform pabulum. (2002:no page).

Suggestions that a proper manipulation of food intake -breath and all the rest- could impact one's spiritual ascent were the staple of oriental doctrines ( Hinduism, Taoism...) being gradually “in the air� in the west since the late XVIII century as readers saw with Sade. Also, freemasonry, theosophy and related spiritualist doctrines endorsed versions of such alchemical strategies of spiritual uplift that -as previously seen- included such a diverse cohort of luminaries as Hebrew, Hindu or Taoist sages, De Sade (XVIII century), transcendentalists, NSDAP honchos, Soviet-funded green or race activists, frisky hippies, animal rights busybodies and so forth.

Another thread that links Transcendentalism to the NSDAP -or any other ideological regime for the matter- is exorbitant eccentricity taking off in all possible directions. If the NSDAP regime had a mystical fringe, so did Transcendentalism. Jones Very (1813-80) was a transcendentalist of an atypical lifestyle. He claimed to have been chosen by god -just as Jordan Maxwell and David Icke claim extraterrestrials chose them-; to converse with the almighty -much as George Bush, Jr. and General Amin claimed-, and was committed to a lunatic 1173 DOLT

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asylum for a period -much as NSDAP mystic honcho Weisthor1156 would be-.

The idea of superman was still around well after WWII. In 1969, Aurobindo's sidekick and successor proclaimed

the realization of “superman

consciousness”. Mormon theology still opens the possibility of becoming gods in the afterlife. Theosophical dregs are ubiquitous: Rudolf Steiner's heritage survives in his proprietary pedagogical style. Reference to Steiner's key role in the Theosophical Society, or his capacity as esotericist (of the anti-nationalist kind 1157) are conveniently forgotten. Acclaimed Jiddu Krishnamurti was in fact the embodied, botched attempt Theosophists had made to craft a living god to fulfill disparate and abstruse 'prophecies' of one kind or another. Aurobindo would plot a similar trajectory -through the nationalist node, however- towards becoming -for some at least- a sort of world teacher preaching theosophical doctrines.

A similar concept recurs in Christian Pentecostalism: a constellation of fast-growing denominations that equally preach miracles, spiritual descents 1158, and fabulous gifts. This time the transcendental entity that descends is the Christian Holy Ghost, and not some fancy theosophical construction, in turn the posh 1156 Karl Maria Willigut, known under various pseudonyms, was a colonel in the Austrian army during WWI. Convinced he possessed mystical powers (which he credited to his mythologized Aryan origin) and involved in all sorts of 'occult' pursuits and investigations, is referred to as prominent member of the SS along with allpowerful leader Himmler (also convinced he was the reincarnation of King Of Germany Henry The Fowler, 876-936 ). It is also said Willigut was behind the runic inscriptions on the mandatory SS ring.

1157 Steiner and other Germans left the Theosophical Society when the Society announced Indian Krishnamurti was the savior (world teacher). Racialist preoccupations and anti-nationalism (the NSDAP attacked Steiner) could co-exist.

1158 Even in traditional Hindu thought, avatarhood (=descending spirit) is the quality of many savior-heroes such as Vishnu's incarnations Rama and Krishna: “the birth of the divine” (Savardekar, MAISI014: audio lecture 4).

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doppelgaenger of the various mystical Chi (China), Num (Ju people of the Kalahari), Mana ( Pacific island cultures), Haché (Afro-Cuban Santeria), Prana (India), Pneuma (Ancient Greece), Ain Sof (Hebrew Kabbalah) etc...

The distinguishing marks of Pentecostalism appeared around the globe—in Wales, Korea, and India—during the first few years of the twentieth century and popped up in Kansas in 1900. But Pentecostalism’s origins are typically traced to April 1906 and a small black church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. At a series of interracial revivals led by a one-eyed black Holiness preacher named William Joseph Seymour (1870–1922), Christians began to pray, sing, and speak in languages they did not recognize. Many believed that the “gifts of the Spirit” they witnessed at Azusa Street were signs that they were living in the “last days” when God had promised to “pour out my Spirit upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17, RSV)—a belief made compelling when San Francisco’s Great Earthquake erupted in the midst of the bedlam. The Azusa Street revival, as it is now called, went on to exhibit for years the sort of sacred power that the Yoruba refer to as ashe. -...-One source of Pentecostalism’s success is its ability to address both thisworldly and otherworldly concerns. Another is its ability to abide simultaneously in the pragmatic present and the biblical past. Like evangelicals and fundamentalists, Pentecostals view the Bible as the inspired Word of God, evangelize with gusto, and respond to the challenge of death by preaching personal salvation through faith in Jesus. But Pentecostals also attend to the challenge of human flourishing by promising health and wealth here and now. Especially in the Third World, they offer deliverance from demons and witches, and their strict rules about drinking, gambling, and womanizing have improved the lives of women worldwide, while putting more disposable income in the pockets of Pentecostal families.

-...-Whereas Luther liberated Christians from what had become for many a tyranny of good works, Pentecostalism liberates Christians from the tyranny of belief, which, after the Enlightenment, has become a straitjacket for many. (Prothero 2010:37).

Transcendentalists had written:

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In the language of the school, it is a free intuition, and can only be attained by a vigorous effort of the will.” (Hedge 1833, cit. in Myerson 2000:88).

Choice implies apostacy. The pure, unfallen soul is above choice. Her life is unbroken, synthetic; she is a law to herself, and finds no lust in her members warring against the instincts of conscience. Sinners choose; saints act from instinct and intuition: there is no parley of alien forces in their being. (A.B. Alcott 1840, cit. in Myerson 2000:302).

Although, as we have said, there is no pure Transcendentalist, yet the tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them, at least in our creed, all authority over our experience, has deeply colored the conversation and poetry of the present day; and the history of genius and of religion in these times, though impure, and as yet not incarnated in any powerful individual, will be the history of this tendency. (Emerson 1841, cit. in Myerson 2000:371).

Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? -...-Trust your emotion. -...- A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. (Emerson 1841, cit. in Myerson 2000:324).

I do not believe in erecting statues to those who still live in our hearts, whose bones have not yet crumbled in the earth around us, but I would rather see the statue of Captain Brown [a violent abolitionist, whose abolitionist expeditions left several people dead; he held views similar to Most's “propaganda of the deed”] in the Massachusetts State-House yard, than that of any other man whom I know. -...- I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. ( A Plea, Thoreau 1859: no page).

Fernandez-Armesto quips:

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becomes more important than reason or virtue, and goodness disappears. According to Nietzsche, goodness is a false notion.

Moreover, truth disappears. According to Nietzsche, all truth is illusory—he solved the problem of defining truth by asserting it did not exist. The only reality is self-fulfillment. Anger, lust, hatred, all these things become virtuous in the kind of new morality that he proposed. And the person who succeeds in imposing his will on others becomes a natural leader whom everyone should follow, the leader whom Nietzsche calls the “superman.” (2004:65).

Again, transcendentalist Elizabeth Peabody propelled the kindergarten movement in the USA from the 1850s onwards: public kindergartens as a measure to counter social ills in impoverished neighborhoods. The transcendentalist full of noble intentions, whose gums bleed for mankind, suspiciously rubs elbows with another row of elated proponents of compulsory, extended public schooling: the crooners of Belle Epoque nation-States eager to put the diverse jumble of creeds, origins and allegiances that constituted the citizenry through the food processor of public education. Another group loomed on the horizon: totalitarian regimes that ranged across the political spectrum from Communist Bolsheviks to Chang KaiShek's Chinese nationalists (a mixture of Confucianism and European Fascism), and Fascist regimes generalissimo Chang opposed allied to the USA.

While the workers in their paradise queued up for hours in order to jockey for the possession of scarce essentials, Soviet Communist bureaucrats, for example, stocked posh top-shelf goods up from the unfair, decadent West through venues assertedly seen as a condescending concession to tourists and foreign dignitaries; high-ranking Soviet bureaucrats were also entitled to differential 1177 A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT

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treatment in matters of housing, healthcare etc.

Furthermore, just a few years ago1159 - offhand opinion leaders could argue extensively over the Internet in favor of “nuking the frogs”, “ass-grabbing Russia” and other trailer park and ale house surrogates of top-shelf propaganda.

Others posted pictures of missiles and other weapons with (often obscene) taunts directed mostly at Muslims in general.

More recently, T-shirts for sale invited to arrange a meeting between the Taliban and their god; or to catch two birds with one stone by killing pregnant Muslim women in the Middle East. Earlier still, footage exists of 'good guys' painting ribald slogans and insults on ammunition destined to civilian cities or the enemy.

What on one side is the rambunctious enthusiasm of the righteous, on the enemy's side amounts to sadism, which in turn constitutes a notarized proof of one's 'mental illness'. It is enough to ponder that similar public exhortations in different circumstances (='the opposite' might be the case at any time) might lead one in front of the courts in many jurisdictions under some '...ism censorship' law, statute or provision, not to the gilded podium of the incensed patriot.

1159 When Russia, France, China and other countries strongly objected to the American intervention in Iraq, which was alternatively designed as peace-keeping, counter-violence, freedom export or invasion. The fact that American citizens could advocate to subject the biggest contributor to U.S independence to a nuclear attack says all.

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Such childish outlook constitutes -at least in theory- the golden rule in the inner sanctum of today's popular morality: such and such belief, attitude, political party and so forth do not belong in polite company because 'you-knowwho' might cry, sulk, ire, agonize mentally or -broadly put- resent it whichever the way. An impassioned mountebank might suggest that refusing to pass the next special law or celebrating the next atonement ritual right away would amount to doing you-know-what to you-know-who a second time.

No wonder human mind's vortexes are at work, if we consider ritual human sacrifices such as the Lindow Man, who -in the I century CE- was quite literally murdered multiple times. Of course, even the various atheist and lefty Khmer Rouge, Bolshevik or Jacobin regimes made a series of 'you-know-who' cry, sulk and agonize. The opposite there chances to apply, however, for victims were imperialist swines, greedy hoarders, royalist apparatchiki, bourgeois oppressors, anti-national intellectuals, religionist conspirators who had it coming, or so the story went...the precious human soul and its incoherence.

The opposite that applies can, of course, be anything and everything.

The Russian self-proclaimed “punk feminist� militant rock group Pussy Riot sung in a Russian cathedral a protest song with political overtones targeting the Putin regime. Apprehended and tried on the basis of a law targeting hatred on the basis of religion, they soon became the heroes of a diverse universe of indignant western 1179 DOLT

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drones and their high-placed chorus leaders. The arrest was unanimously exposed as a political machination; 'anti-hate' laws were pilloried as fig leaves for an oppressive government's misdeeds; free speech was lionized.

Eric Zemmour's 1160 earlier case

-to name just one- failed to rally such an impressive cohort of free speech proponents and conspiracy theorists, however.

Cases like this are innumerable. In 2014, GLBT activist and singer Wainright is invited to join -for a hefty fee- musical event Festival Di Sanremo on the Italian State TV financed with taxes levied from all taxpayers: lefty anchormen salute Wainright's “classy pop”. Rumors circulate the histrionic singer might deliver a performance of his hit “gay messiah” where Jesus, baptism and sperm are commingled in pornographic imagery1161.

In spite of legal prohibitions in place against “religious hatred”, lefties, homophiles and progressives champion freedom of speech, and denounce intolerance. The opposite might chance to apply as always. Biracial French comedian Dieudonné has been targeted with an endless stream of legal actions, threats and prohibitions since he ignited a polemic with the Jewish community years back: freedom of speech is never a good excuse to go that far.

An illegal immigrant from Ghana is caught on tape as he savagely 1160 The Jewish-French journalist was in fact sentenced on the basis on a law targeting “incitement to racial discrimination” for his televised declaration to the effect that “La plupart des trafiquants sont noirs et arabes ” [Most drug dealers are Blacks and Arabs] as Le Monde reported on March 16, 2010.

1161 Il Giornale, February 16, 2014.

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murders three people with a pickaxe in Milan: forensic experts pronounce him mentally ill as the trial unfolds: what happened to him could happen to anyone.

Others champion the frail soul, as tainted as we all are, claiming images on tape aren't very clear, and so forth. The frail soul declares that he hears voices in his head to the effect that “Whites made me what I am” 1162, thus exposing opponents to the transgression of a beloved taboo: “ mos requires neither deliberation, nor judgment, but praise or blame”. A weird genetic makeup can also be hold as proof that “nature made me do it”:

What might have been the civil rights establishment’s worst nightmare occurred in December 1993, when Colin Ferguson, a black man of Jamaican ancestry, deliberately shot and killed six white passengers and wounded 19 others on a Long Island railroad commuter train. It was clearly a "hate crime," for Ferguson raged at black "uncle Toms" and carried notes on his person expressing his hatred toward white people. Ferguson has been indicted on 93 counts, including civil rights violation. Black spokesman Jesse Jackson immediately went into damage control, expressing fear of a “backlash" and preaching a message of healing and reconciliation.

-...-Ferguson was portrayed in the media as a victim of white racism on the one hand, and as a victim of mental illness on the other. Had he been a white man who had killed six black people solely because of their race, we might still be hearing about it. In the meantime, however, the story has disappeared from the news. (Wilcox 1994:25).

A man murders his roommate (January 2014) with an ax in the Italian province of Pistoia. Years earlier, the same man (G.Lotti) had clubbed his fiancee to death; Lotti had already gone through the justice system for robberies and

1162 Notizie.Tiscali.it 30 January 2014.

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vandalism. Pronounced mentally ill, he had served only 6 year prison term, and was currently on parole at a rehabilitation center as psychiatric reports had recommended. The magic show of the justice system can only point out how Lotti was apparently keeping up well with the rehabilitation program.

The tenors of the 'great values' would rather go down in flames rather than repudiating their sublime values. That is what the NSDAP regime did in Berlin (Hamburg, Dresden...); what Castro was ready to do at the height of the missile crisis (October 1962); what the Israeli government considered doing by pondering a possible nuclear strike against foreign threats in 1967, 1973, 1991 and in very recent times against Iran1163.

Even Bokassa, the Central-African dictator (1966-79),

clamored he needed atomic weaponry to defend the noble nation.

The opposite might apply at all times, though: speedy sentence (13 months) meted out within weeks to minor Lega Nord politician (Italy) who had insulted a State minister of color online: intolerable crime that only 'that kind of person' might commit.

Drout melts in delight:

But the pathos of the tears in the eyes of [M.L.] King’s daughter is what pulls the entire piece together, and to my mind, at that moment, early in the letter, King had already won the argument. Everything works (logos, ethos, and pathos) and the argument performs the 1163 Haaretz, October 7, 2010.

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highest function that rhetoric can perform: to convince a hostile and unwilling audience of something that is not merely what the speaker wants, but which is, in the much larger sense of the world, true.

(2006:45, emphasis added).

One might wonder how well would another such cargo of melodrama fare today: children who have to avoid certain neighborhoods at certain times because of rampant crime, and people know already who's taking the lion's share in crime statistics. Both are facts (=injustice because of segregation; unsafe neighborhoods because of crime), yet the riposte to this hypothetical glurge scene would probably be an invitation to have one's mental health assessed.

Alternatively, a nice scholarly work might detail how �Refusing to -...[remedy] underlying social conditions, we are forced instead to make increasing private investments in physical security �1164. Rac(ial)ist groups howling about the future of White children are probably committing an offense actionable in several jurisdictions: end of the story.

Atheists, lefties and progressives hope that religionists move out of the way with their bibles, and their scourged saviors moaning in agony: it's all a folkloric intoxication validated through schizotypal fantasies of redemptive suffering. Religionists wish that atheists, lefties and progressives would move out of the way with their grievance-shopping Africans, women, illegal immigrants and homosexuals.

1164 Davis: Pile, Brooks&Mooney 1999:142ss

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Lefties, atheists and progressives may typically retort that so-and-so really suffered so much that in all fairness we owe them so much...which is precisely what the religionist claimed all along with his scourged saviors, rejected prophets with a beard, and slaughtered martyrs. What is fair for the goose is not fair for the gander, apparently: Drout's oracle is not completely convincing.

Drout seems also unaware -or worse: he pretends to be unaware- that M.L. King plagiarized parts1165 from his famous “I have a dream” speech from a 1952 speech another Black preacher, A. Carey, gave at the Republican Convention. Hitler uttered an “I have a dream” speech as well well before Carey, although those dreams were very different in nature.

The movie Street Fighter (1994) gives another perfect example of the dominant infantilism, even if we excuse the laughable premises of a movie based on a video game. Earlier in the movie, two youngsters consider joining arch-dictator on a world domination binge. The 'good guys' bring them to a hospital and shown weeping mommies, disembodies kiddies, defaced innocents etc: there is no excuse for going that far, no matter what (or the 'if...then' strategy reversed) any ideology might say1166. Their amygdala (mirror-neurons or any other such item), or the area 1165 In the specific the portion “let freedom ring”.

1166 This dead horse has been beaten to death over and over. The concept of penultimacy -according to German theologian Bonhoffer executed in 1945 for opposing the NSDAP regime- is but another restyling of teleological concerns: no matter what the perceived reasons or possible goals might be, there are supreme spheres (for Bonhoffer: god as the ultimate sphere) that must not be traspassed into, lest Statolatry (NSDAP policies Bonhoffer opposed) unfold. For Bonhoffer, radicals represent ultimacy, or the negation of penultimacy; in other words, another restatement of the deontology/teleology divide. Only Yahweh can send premonitory thunderclaps, incinerate cities or obliterate humankind with a flood. Of course, a nice Dalai Lama, Ayatollah,

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of the brain responsible for empathy feedback-loops by 'making us feel what the other does', probably grows as big as a basket ball: they thus decide to join the the 'good guys' instead after all.

This -of course!- works only with ' the bad guy over there's regime'. Any attempt to reverse the polarity will result in equal parts of laughter, angry stares and possibly lawfare. Pictures? People have been faking those for ages. Videos? We all watched The Matrix movies...just because it's on film does not mean it's true. News releases? Those guys work freelance for everybody...for so many dollars an hour.

Witnesses? Do we mean people with an ax to grind, who have a stake in the debate, or just simple actors? None is worth their salt: their stories are full of holes anyways.

Emotional agony? Truth makes no allowance for crooks: schizophrenics should be talking to a shrink while wearing straitjackets, not haranguing the crowds wearing medals. Moral lessons? But everybody knows it's a smear campaign by this, that or another group, which has proved itself through history to be just that vicious. Is the evidence irrefutable for once? Well, what they did was possibly wrong but terribly romantic in the defense of the best of all possible regimes or causes; as 'divine' Robespierre said, one is expected to break some eggs in order to make an omelet.

Church President or Pope might be on call to let the masses know whether the thunderclap might mean god (dis)approves of anything in pursuit of greater goods. Penultimacy can be understood alongside Voegelin's (ens) realissimum (most real thing), or supreme reality as either god, or divine ground. Theravada Buddhist abbot Aggacitta reveals that when the Taliban regime destroyed the famous giant Buddha statues, it rained. Buddhists interpreted such natural events as meaning the gods were crying over the blasphemous act, whereas Muslims interpreted rain as god's auspicious approval of steps taken against idolaters.

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Later in the Street Fighter movie, the murderous dictator captures 'good guy', and wants to turn him into a monster on his service. Chemical transfusions will transform his body and -very original indeed- circular footage of Adolf Hitler and random acts of violence ( epitomized by a growing red upload band) will transform his mind. That continues until a turncoat switches to circular footage of random soothing images interspersed with Martin Luther King's speeches: the upload bar turns blue so that the 'good guy' remains good.

Another great piece comes in the end. An oaf on the dictator's service is told how his master is peace's real enemy who got mercenaries on his service only because he pays them, whereas good people from all over the world have come (=

congredi motif) to stop the carnage.

It would be simple to dismiss it all as more or less cheap movie-making, yet the explanation of the situation throughout the fall of Libyan dictator Gaddafi followed a very similar script according to international media. There are indications the same teleplay is endlessly replayed at the behest of forces occultes, as courtesy demands: Egypt, Ukraine, Syria, Tunisia...

Wrestling supplies handy comparisons again. In 1988 Black wrestler Bad News Brown -an irascible Harlem thug character- picked a fight with his own team member Greg Valentine after being accidentally hit, then went back to the dressing

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room in disgust. The scene was so much in favor that Bad News Brown carboncopied it in 1989 irascibly picking a fight with team member Big Boss Man. How many times did Hulk Hogan agonize on the canvas, just to recover speedily in order to win in a matter of seconds? Didn't countless others -such as the Ultimate Warrior- copy the routine, much as Hogan was patently imitating Superstar Billy Graham?

Leaders of the 'bad' regimes (of the day, of course) and their henchmen shall be physically eliminated and exposed to public execration because -no matter their excuse- they went too far. Leaders of 'good' regimes and their cronies shall at worst be deposed and left alone with their conscience (and bank accounts?). No matter what wrong they chanced to do, their intentions were noble: possibly wrong but terribly romantic.

All there is to 'the magic' discussed here is possibly a 'machine' milling fossilized myth(ologie)s, more or less obtuse allegories (such as the journey or arrival, the maltreated yet forgiving savior in agony, the Ulysses shtick etc) and fakelore basking in an ocean of infantile melodrama, whose handle shrewd gamesmen endlessly crank with the help of fitful gasbags preaching impending doom of some sort or another.

As an example, where did Chewbacca possibly come from? We got the

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imagery of a sort of Sasquatch named after an elusive creature possibly appearing in print only in 1851 in the story mentioned below:

There's a new varmint come around in our county, that's got a mortal likin for the tobaker crap. They looks a good deal like a fox, but are as big as a three year old nigger, and can climb a tree like a squirrel, and they steals a dozen or so 'hands' every night, and next marnin' ef you notice, you'll see all the tops of. the pinoaks around the plantation kivered with them a-dryin", and the infernal Chawbacks-that's what we call 'em-a settin' 'up in a crotch, a chawin' what is cured, and squirtin! ambeer all over the country. Got any on em' up here yet?

(Burke 1854:114-115).

A search on popular Google and Google Scholar in September 2011 returned zero relevant results for the term “Chawback”: the secret is safe.

Chewbacca belongs to the Wookies. It sounds just a little bit like a charming anglicized version of Wocki, a grotesque, gigantic hairy animal character (=just like the Star Wars movie character) of the Swiss-German Basel carnival. It is always possible to go on the internet, however, and find that Chewbacca derives from the Russian word for dog (sobaka), or the filmmaker's own dog. Does Star Wars' artificial moon Death Star resemble Saturn's moon Mimas as some argue, perchance?

What about the planet Tatooine? Was this term derived from French tatauine (aller

à tatauine=go to hell), or a French colonial prison camp in the Tunisian desert?

What about the character in the last Star Wars movies, Padme (Padmé)?

Is that “lotus” in Sanskrit, perchance? The goddess Padma, whose body is the

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universe1167? Is it really that simple? It is important to emphasize again how the standard moviegoer has no idea whatsoever about what a Chawback or the goddess Padma might be, yet the 'magic' never fails to yield dividends in the same way as the Ulysses shtick never stops ensorcelling people who have no clue what the Odyssey is exactly about.

Does this incoherent jumble of images not resemble a disjointed collection of scraps from a Discovery Channel cutting room session? Does this farrago in turn not look sinisterly like casual observations from a psychoanalytic notebook? Readers shall come to their own conclusions.

What about Robin(s) Hood? Could Robin Hood be some old acquaintance's clone?

By the time they were grown boys, [Romulus and Remus] employed themselves actively on the farm and with the flocks and began to go hunting in the woods; their strength grew with their resolution, until not content only with the chase they took to attacking robbers and sharing their stolen goods with their friends the shepherds. Other young fellows joined them, and they and the shepherds would fleet the time together, now in serious talk, now in jollity. (Livy 1960:3351, emphasis added).

Even earlier Theseus, the swashbuckling founder on a journey, was sung to have delivered Attica from the plight of brigands; earlier still, Hindu god Ganesha 1167 �He himself existed before anything else did, and he holds all things together. �. ( Colossians 1:17). St. Teresa of Avila thought the same about the Christian god; Muslim mystics thought the same about Allah. In Christian art, a statue of Mary (Cluny Museum, Paris) from Eastern Prussia (XV century) sees her body as abode of a statue of father god, in turn abode of Jesus crucified. That kind of statue epitomized an entire genre of medieval art called vierges ouvrantes: (statue) of the opening virgin.

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was said to have delivered both men and gods from the threat of unsavory, abusive characters such as demon king Ravana. History merges with myth: in 1926-8 Chinese Generalissimo Chang Kai-Shek mounted the Northern Expedition to unify China defeating a series of local caudillos (warlords).

Later, even Romulus and Remus1168 are subjected to the reversal of fortune and scourging befalling all savior-heroes:

but Remus was caught and handed over to Amulius. The brigands laid a complaint against their prisoner, the main charge being that he and his brother were in the habit of raiding Numitor’s land with an organized gang of ruffians and stealing the cattle. Thereupon Remus was handed over for punishment to Numitor. (Livy 1960:33-51, emphasis added).

As readers can easily see here, the Romulus and Remus narrative was compounded later with Celtic reminiscences and tailored to fit English milieus in order to bring forth the medieval brigand Robin Hood, adding – so argue some- the item of mythical highwaymen. It is therefore impossible to suggest that in those cases the entertainer may be nodding at something the public doesn't know; it is possible to suggest that the entertainer is activating those magic spots of the human mind, though.

Myths do tend to coalesce: Jesus Malverde (portrayed as a sort of 1930s 1168 “this myth told of two brothers, *Manu- "Man" (Sanskrit Manu, Avestan *Manus, Germanic Mannus being linguistic correspondences; Old Norse Odinn and Latin Romulus being structurally related) and *Yemo- "Twin" (Sanskrit Yama, Avestan Yima, Old Norse Ymir, and Latin Remus being linguistic matches; Germanic Tuisco being a semantic match; Sanskrit Mandvi and Purusa, Pahlavi Gayomart being structurally related). ” (Lincoln 1976:42). Hindu elephant-headed god Ganesha is hailed as sarvatman, “whole” or “integral person”.

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gangster) is a sort of folkloric Robin Hood outlaw figure (=arch-trickster breaks taboos in order to bestow boons), and the popular patron of drug traffickers in Sinaloa (Mexico). Different, often conflicting, accounts exist about a real-life figure having been the 'real' Malverde, assertedly murdered in 1909.

Argentina has its Robin Hood figure as well: Gauchito Gil. Giving up battles during the Argentinian civil war, Gil turned (= Jean Valjean, turncoat, good guy<->bad guy shtick) into a Robin Hood outlaw figure. He purportedly promised the policeman who was about to execute him that he would save the policeman's son in critical health condition if the policeman would pray to him. And so it allegedly happened: no mythologist working at his desk could assemble such array of mythemes.

Some have raised objections to this kind of approach (for example criticizing Meheust's theories) alleging that the suggested source(s) are too remote to be the right choice, although such cases as Saint Guinefort's leave no doubt at all. As argued throughout this paper, a large degree of personal choice is involved. It is possible that some may resent casting whatever aspersion upon the received character of anyone/thing involved. Some may brush this aside as mere examples, pattern recognition, selective reading etc.

As some point out Freemasonic imagery present in Jehovah Witnesses'

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lore (the pyramid, the winged sun, the cross-and-crown, etc), others hasten to add how such symbols aren't exclusive to Freemasonry: people are thus not authorized to 'connect the dots'. Mormon President H.C. Kimball declared in 1858 about Mormonism â&#x20AC;&#x153;we have the true Masonryâ&#x20AC;? recovered from purported Hebrew sources. While the point seems compelling, a fair dose of luck would be needed by those wishing to propose a party or religion using the Fasci or swastika as symbol alleging that -indeed- they are not exclusive to Fascist regimes ( Fasci are present in the U.S parliament, for example).

According to the paradox of the ravens, however, everything may constitute selective reading and pattern recognition, unless one can satisfactorily prove to have tested all occurrences down to the last one in all possible universes.

At least some uncontroversial and compelling evidence exists -such as George Lucas giving publicly credit to Campbell - to substantiate the line followed in this writing.

The final verdict rests with the reader, however.

It isn't difficult to identify here what some refer to as 'predictive programming': politicking filmmakers and the entertainment circus spoon-feed the masses what they think is 'the way', 'the right cause', 'where the world is going', how certain attitudes and beliefs are 'bad' and others 'good'.

Theatrics typically unfolds as proponents of the great cause test

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waters with (then) counter-cultural proposals, typically retreat or recant a few times until the camel magically is in the tent as the torpid masses gradually get used to what they would at a given moment reject:

Writers, directors, and producers view themselves as “crusaders for social reform in America. They see it as their duty to restructure our culture into their image….[the entertainment circus] should be a major force for social reform.”(Lichter &alii 1983:54-58 ).

I think that when the film industry can capture (an idea) and make it glamorous and gorgeous, so that the audience isn't even aware that they're embracing something they never would have embraced before--then, yes, the film as a social motor can inaugurate some kind of change (actor Tom Hanks at a 1991 GLBT fund-raising event1169).

I believe the properly manipulated image can provoke an audience to the Burroughsian limit of riot, rampant sex, instantaneous death (director Gus Van Sant1170).

If ROMNEY gets elected I don't know if I can breathe same air as Him & his Right Wing Racist Homophobic Women Hating Tea Bagger Masters (performer Cher on the internet in 20121171).

Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys, including Quarterback Tony Romo, were names that ACORN [left-wing advocacy group] workers attempted to register to vote during the 2008 presidential election. -...-Gathering signatures was too difficult, said one ACORN worker in Seattle, so he went home and filled out the forms while he "smoked marijuana." (Shawn 2012: no page).

Leftist factions compete on who is more multicultural. When ecofanatics at UC-Berkeley illegally saddled themselves in trees on campus and hurled urine and feces to block the construction of a multi-million dollar athletic facility, probably the last thing they 1169 Quoted in Stein 2001: no page.

1170 Quoted in Alexis 2010:397.

1171 Quoted in Shahid 2012: no page.

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expected was to be called racists. Yet the school’s chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, labeled them just that, saying the environmental radicals were impeding the completion of a new athletic facility designed to attract “minority student athletes.” Puzzled that the chancellor played the race card on them, the tree dwellers argued that “three of the final four” protestors were “Latinos” and the very first hijacker was a “Native American.” One of the Berkeley zealots, who goes by the name “Running Wolf,” said that Mr. Birgenaeau attempted “to pit colored against colored.” ( article over the internet in 2008 1172).

If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its laws. Today, television tells most of the stories to most of the people most of the time (Gerbner 1987: no page1173).

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action.

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. (M.L. King 1963: no page).

Too often we think about leadership simply in terms of persuasion and influence, while in many cases leadership ought to be about mobilizing others to confront difficult problems -...-. To get the people to own the problem, and own the solution (Roberto 2011: The Challenge).

Your stories must be designed to heighten emotional awareness of the problem your solution is solving.(Lakhani 2005:63).

Nibbling is a tactic in which the negotiator continues to ask for more and more, often implying that you are very close to an agreement and there is just one more thing left to add. In fact, as mentioned in a 1172 PC Campus 2008: no page.

1173 Quoted in London 1987: no page.

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previous lecture, some refer to this gambit as â&#x20AC;&#x153;yes, butâ&#x20AC;? tactics.

(Freeman 2014:108).

A controversial book1174 once virulently denounced a supposed radical left-wing conspiracy to take over America through the rogue use of -broadly put'brain-washing' methods (including psychoanalytic methods). A thesis similar to Szasz's, who denounces the commodious and culturally-specific character of a verdict of mental insanity, as the Devlin-Hart-Dworkin debate about homosexuality showed.

Szasz's arguments -although coming from a professor of psychiatry- are taken by many to be controversial; yet they share the same approach that understandably underscored the debate about the criminalization of homosexuality.

The book denounced certain practices -such as electric shocks- that uncannily resemble later denunciations of the highly unethical (and State-funded) Mkultra/Cameron1175 experiments that took (at the U.S government's behest) the Victorian fixation with hypnosis and altered states of consciousness to unethical new depths. Of course, according to some, all that never happened and/or happened in less sensational proportions than let believe. The book also explicitly established a parallel between the 'justified' recourse to 'brain-washing' to re-educate people in 1174 Strickley 1959.

1175 Patients underwent heavy electrical shocks and unorthodox therapies, and were administered massive doses of psychotropic cocktails in the alleged attempt to 'reprogram' them to bypass neuroses etc. The government was interested in the possibility of creating 'psychobombs', perfect killers on demand for rogue intelligence purposes, as it was rumored the Soviets were very ahead in the field. The program was a complete failure, along with other similar ones devoted to ESP, psychokinesis etc (in perfect Victorian fashion once again).

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defeated enemy countries, and the growing fear such 'scientific methods' may be used as a rogue weapon of mass control in unscrupulous politicians' hands.

The debate still goes on:

A different 2007 study, says the report, found the 5-to-1 margin between liberal versus conservative professors had become 8-to-1.

Almost 20 percent of professors in social sciences and 25 percent of sociology professors self-identifies as “Marxist.”-...-. Students are immersed in an education that emphasizes the wrongs done to minorities, women, gays and other groups. Gender, ethnic, religious and sexual orientation grievances are highlighted as representative of an imperial, racist, exploitative capitalist superpower that continues to engage in widespread racism, sexism, homophobia and worldwide domination. (Elder 2012: no page).

After having been at work to “make the world safe for democracy” for over 30 years (1914-1945), the 'patriotic' cohort of wartime spin-doctors; social alchemists, whose gums bleed for humankind; 'patriotic' psych-warfare experts; politicking minorities; 'militant' filmmakers; jingoist clinicians etc started to appear to some in a new light throughout the 'scares' of the 1950-60s and to our day. As it's clearly seen, the same emotional arguments and journalistic appeals are evergreen: they can easily be used to broadside a number of different targets at the behest of whoever sees fit to do so.

This situation goes back to ancient Greece, where wealthy citizens were expected to contribute to communal life by either offering war equipment (such as war ships), or by sponsoring theater performances at civic festivals (typically under 1196 DOLT

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Dionysus' aegis). Every playwright operated under the tutelage of one such sponsor who -by the very situation- could influence how the playwright slanted his plays, which were a foremost tool in the political arena; at some point, the Athenian State took upon itself to finance these events. Naturally, a feedback-loop situation arose as bankrollers and the State in turn had to factor in the way in which the myth had been slanted, more or less according to their instructions and desired outcome.

The feedback loop, broken record effect involving the fossilized myth(ologie)s, the public, the media and policy making requires that each participant be (at least to a telling degree) shaped by the interplay: policy making determines today's bogeyman and/or fetish; the media slantingly

produce an

emphatic, sensationalized and prettified image thereof that -no matter how preposterous- the public perceives as being reality pure and simple as caught on film (the Cottingley fairies are an example). It is as old as man:

prominent Romans might present a client, especially one with a reputation for literary or historical work, with notes for him to work up into a text that would enhance their joint reputations. Among others, Cicero sent notes on his year as consul to the historian Lucceius, in hopes of seeing them transformed into a history glorifying his deeds of 63 BC (Woodard 2007:246).

The public then identifies with both; policy makers shall factor in the public's reaction shaped by the media, and all over again. U.S authorities took a careless approach during the Vietnam war allowing the press to roam free, perhaps

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as experts naively anticipated only a short and glorious campaign. The negative backlash, and domestic unrest, resulting from 'bad press' taught the U.S government a lesson put to the test in later years through gagging countermeasures, deployment of centralized public relations, stricter surveillance etc.

As mentioned earlier, financing and propelling spin-doctors, 'engaged' filmmakers and other bizarre characters for the purpose of wartime propaganda had the -however foreseeable- effect of having the same propaganda tools turned against the original bankrollers. Many golden names of WWII U.S war propaganda were back -after short eclipses in the late 1940s and 1950s- milling aggressive social alchemy on screen in the 1960s.

After all, bandwagon appeals counting on human mind's neuralgic points are so flexible: the evil trickster -to name just one- can be just about any party, whether individual or collective. That is not about an analysis of group dynamics as much as it is about quintessential threats, in the same way scares about contamination (food, epidemics or otherwise) are not about epidemiology and lab tests as much as they are about archetypal fears.

The carbon-copied sobriquet of the schizophrenic community spinning improbable yarns about itself as it schemes to achieve (world) domination playing on the simpleton's good will has been pinned to many over the centuries: Rome,

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Spain, England, USA, USSR, Germany, Japan, China, French-Canadians, Jews, bankers, spammers...

Pathologizing

(=medicalization)

foes

(subalterns,

competitors 1176,

strangers...) knows no bound: Nicolson denounces the pathologization of women under patriarchy.

exaggerating dangers and creating diseases and risks are key marketing tactics used by promoters of propaganda in the helping professions. The term medicalization describes “a process by which non-medical problems become defined and treated as medical problems, usually in terms of illness and disorders”(Conrad, 2007 , p. 4). The terms “healthy” and “unhealthy” have been applied to an ever wider range of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. (Gambrill 2012:159).

As we just saw in the previous section, this playing with the neuralgic spots of the human psyche is not new, but goes back to the very beginning of civilization. To approach the matter from another angle, it is useful to add that pathetic rhetoric and exempla went hand in hand in Roman times as persuasive strategies.

More precisely, Ahl1177 comments “”formidable speaking”, deinotes, is a major style of oratory in antiquity -...- [and] it relies on the listener to supply details omitted altogether by the speaker -...-. The reader or listener must supply some 1176 Press campaigns disguised as 'unbiased' informational reports recurrently berate Chinese restaurants as unsanitary under many aspects; and merchandise from this or that foreign country as third-rate, poor-quality, toxic etc.

1177 1984:175-6.

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information, do some work himself”. The 'detective angle' ( a sort of suspense device) sits at the heart of Greek tragedy, or the divide between (a version of an) established order (=myth), and challenges to the same (=riddle):

Because riddles appeal to prerequisite group knowledge, riddle performance assists in the definition ofthe knowledge boundaries ofthe riddler's group or subgroup. "Insiders" will be equippedto understand the desired answer, whether or not they are capable of suggesting it. Once revealed, whether by themselves or by the riddler, the answer appears "reasonable" to group members. The "logic"of the answer may not, however, be apparent to "outsiders," who do not possess the knowledge necessary to propose an answer, and who could not understand the basis for determining the "correct" answer without further explanation. (Thatcher 1996:220). the notion that puzzlement or dissonance [=riddle] inspires writing is found throughout the rhetorical tradition from Cicero through Quintilian to Wilson -...- The fact that riddles are not solved, therefore, does not invalidate the comparison of rhetorical invention with the creating and solving of riddles. The very impossibility of solving some riddles, as we have seen, provides yet another point of comparison between rhetoric and riddles. And the cognitive and epistemic process of merely apprehending and appreciating the riddle answer parallels the experience of the writer, who must pursue discovery and surprise through writing, realize a change in perception and understanding, and attain a more personally satisfying interpretation of the facts of reality.(Jasnowski 1991:7,122) What Otto termed “the numinous experience” (=non-rational realization of the holy) -which Moses might have experienced approaching the bush that was on fire, yet never consumed1178- has been shifted to apply to serialized folklure, canned newscasts and glib infomercials:”Believe it or not, the attention span of the

1178 “There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. ” (Exodus 3:2).

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average person is about 30 seconds! Focusing attention has been compared to controlling a troop of wild monkeys. Attention craves novelty”1179. People nowadays have 'numinous experiences' with malt liquor or condom brands, including possible conversion scenes when switching loyalty from one brand of espresso coffee to the next.

For a more finicky mind, complex postmodern rituals are offered: bungee-jumping; tattooing; posthumous trials of long-deceased tyrants; kite surfing, and so forth. It turns out the “numinous experience” is based -once again- upon “formidable speech” as explained above:

it is because deinos [=deinotes]is simply the numinous (mostly of course at a lower level, in an arrested form, attenuated by rhetorical or poetic usage). Consequently deinos is the equivalent of dirus and tremendus . It may mean evil or imposing, potent and strange, queer and marvellous, horrifying and fascinating, divine and daemonic, and a source of energy . Sophocles means to awaken the feeling of c numinous awe through the whole gamut of its phases at the contemplation of man, the creature of marvel (Otto 1936:40).

Planning to bring about chaste Hippolytus's death because he scorns her, angry Aphrodite announces:”He doesn’t see the gates of Hades gaping wide for him, or realize this daylight is his last.”1180. Medieval collections of Iberian exempla destined to the education of the wealthy and powerful ( miroirs des princes) always require some sort of dialogue or other interaction through which the spirit of the 1179 Boothman 2000:11.

1180 Euripides 2007:126 (Hippolytus 69-71).

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powerful figure to be advised is puzzled, pushed to inquire further in order to possibly jump to conclusions in the end:”And, while parables are sometimes misunderstood due to their lack of overt explanation -...- they are simpler and more accessible than most forms of philosophical discourse and are certainly far more interesting.”1181;”most moralizing tales, [are] understood retrospectively, with its conclusion already established. ”1182.

As an example of moralizing tale(s) understood retrospectively with an already established conclusion, an article by Ann Coulter tries to use the established, moralizing conclusion of a well-known story to foster a political point, whereby:

Gun control laws were originally promulgated by Democrats to keep guns out of the hands of blacks. This allowed the Democratic policy of slavery to proceed with fewer bumps and, after the Civil War, allowed the Democratic Ku Klux Klan to menace and murder black Americans with little resistance. (Contrary to what illiterates believe, the KKK was an outgrowth of the Democratic Party, with overlapping membership rolls. The Klan was to the Democrats what the American Civil Liberties Union is today: Not every Democrat is an ACLU'er, but every ACLU'er is a Democrat. Same with the Klan.) -...- With logic like that, Republicans eventually had to fight a Civil War to get the Democrats to give up slavery. -...- This will give you an idea of how gun control laws worked. Following the firebombing of his house in 1956, Dr. Martin Luther King, who was, among other things, a Christian minister, applied for a gun permit, but the Alabama authorities found him unsuitable. A decade later, he won a Nobel Peace Prize (2012:no page).

1181 Hunt 2001:38.

1182 Koortbojian 1995:46.

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In the case here in point the author first establishes common ground, then uses the retrospectively established truth (or the common ground) as an emotional weapon against a political party used to seeing that sort of arguments as its exclusive domain.

The author also uses bandwagon appeals to the circular founding myths of the horde in fusion, the evergreen past whose experience in the present is so much sought after, so that an efficient riposte may offer itself up for criticism on that very account.

Exempla are not only 'situations that look alike', but situations linked by an unavoidable inductive logical relationship, whereby more cogent proof may be lacking:

Nel mito si struttura l'organizzazione romana secondo il mos.

E nel mos soprattutto non c'è da deliberare, né da giudicare, ma da lodare ο biasimare.” (Roman [argumentation] revolves around mos. And mos requires neither deliberation, nor judgment, but praise or blame) (Zorzetti 1980:51, free translation).

Cioè, a mio parere, l'efficacia del modello esemplare descrive un campo categoriale della mentalità, un campo antropologicamente dato, in cui ogni cultura storicamente determinata organizza a suo modo proprie forme di giustificazione dell'induzione. (In my opinion, the strength of the exemplary approach rests within categories of mentality, an anthropological given, whereby each historically given culture organizes in its own way its own strategies to justify induction (Zorzetti 1980-1:147, free translation).

Christian preachers used collections of exempla (such as de Vitry's in the

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XIII century) in their ministry: short stories with an assured ability to trigger a knee-jerk reaction:

CCXIV There is a certain place in Normandy called Walter's Leap, because a foolish man named Walter leaped from the spot to show his mistress that he loved her so much that he would shun no danger for her sake. She likewise promised to follow him wherever he went.

When, however, she saw Walter drowned, she was unwilling to follow him, and shortly after took up with another lover (de Vitry 1890).

CCXXIII A knight in the diocese of Artois neglected his wife for a mistress. The wife complained of this frequently to the image of the Virgin, who said to her one night in a vision, " I cannot avenge you on that woman, for although she is a sinner she bows before me a hundred times a day, and says, Ave Maria. The wife awoke, and went sadly away. (de Vitry 1890).

In other words the familiar framework and format of the fairy tale were used to circumvent distrust and to facilitate identification (Fitzgerald 2006:13).

The exemplum is paradoxical in that it refers both to the ordinary— an example of a dog is any instance of a dog, so any old dog will do— and to the extraordinary—historical examples that establish actions to be avoided or imitated stand out from the crowd. An exemplum turns out to be either the most representative or the most singular instance.

(Lowrie 2007:104).

Then, too, the lives of the Saints are often more effective than mere instruction for inspiring us to love heaven as our home. Hearing about their example will generally be helpful in two ways. In the first place, as we compare ourselves with those who have gone before, we are filled with a longing for the future life; secondly, if we have too high an opinion of our own worth,, it makes us humble to find that others have done better. (Saint Gregory 1959:7).

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comporte sept atouts : l'univocité, la brièveté, l'authenticité, le vraisemblable, le plaisir qu'il doit procurer, son caractère métaphorique et sa facilité à être retenu par la mémoire. (Berlioz 1980:113).

Whereas figural interpretation is a process of discovering the mysteries of God's creation by revelation [such as the intuitive perception of the real-life meaning of an otherwise garbled oracle], exemplary storytelling is a creative act on the part of humanity. (Hunt 2001:34).

El exemplum ofrece a cada hecho y a cada vivencia una norma, por eso esencialmente es educativo porque repite el sentido con que la Edad Media entendía la vida y aceptaba su sentido, por tanto, el ejemplo constituye el instrumento y la representación que tiene la cultura del mundo objetivo y fue la expresión más adecuada de la realidad que podía ofrecer la civilización medieval (Haro Cortes, cit. in Cepedello Moreno 2003-4:207)1183.

Mythological figures turn up in these early prose works often because of the importance that the past played for Greeks in debates over contemporary matters. (Woodard 2007:242).

That the great moments in the struggle of individuals form a chain, that in them the high points of humanity are linked throughout millennia, that what is highest in such a moment of the distant past be for me still alive , bright and great this is the fundamental thought of the faith in humanity which is expressed in the demand for a monumental history. (Nietzsche 1874:15).

And I wish that you would, if possible, show me a little more clearly that virtue can be taught. Will you be so good? That I will, Socrates, and gladly. But what would you like? Shall I, as an elder, speak to you as younger men in an apologue or myth, or shall I argue out the question? To this several of the company answered that he should choose for himself. Well, then, he said, I think that the myth will be more interesting. (Plato, Protagoras:252).

1183 Exemplum offers norms to regulate every fact and experience; it it educative in the sense it conveys the meaning by which the Middle Ages understood and accepted life. The exemplum constitutes thus the vehicle and the representation of the objective world that culture endorsed; it was the most adequate expression of reality medieval civilization could offer.

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The main actors in these stories are equally fossilized figures invariably associated with 'image' or 'expectation' banks that the human psyche (soul in Greek, opposed to phrenos1184 ) loves so much. In Wells' Time Machine a few mysterious, truly iconic characters take part in the meetings: the Psychologist, the Provincial

Mayor, the Medical Man, the Editor of a well-known daily paper , down to simply a Very Young Man, and the Silent Man, and so forth. Why are these iconic characters referred to in uppercase fonts, as if they were real names, much like Napoléon Bonaparte or Flash Gordon? Why this sort of living synecdoche1185 or metaphor?

Fossilized characters are ubiquitous. The evil witch godmother who casts a spell upon this or that princess' birth or wedding because she hadn't been invited (accidentally or maliciously) to the party goes back to the primordial myth of Peleos and Thetis' wedding1186. The goddesss Eris (discord or strife) resented not having been invited and put in motion the whole “apple of discord” episode, in turn the main cause of the Trojan War. Empedocles (Greek philosopher, V century BCE) also posited love and strife (as in the primordial myth of Peleos and Thetis' wedding: the 1184 Phrenology was the first name associated with the procedures later taken over and updated by contemporary psychology. The “rational account” ( logos) of phrenos (mind) was replaced by the “rational account” of psyche (soul). As it appears, when soul (psyche) replaces mind (phrenos), the verdict (psychoanalysis) is predetermined to be eminently theological in nature, notwithstanding all protestations to the contrary: a disturbance of the soul runs much deeper than a disturbance of the mind in symbolic terms. The jargon of psychoanalysis could -and in fact was and is- be easily (ab)used to curse the analyst's political or personal foes, whether individually or collectively. The first one to use the term psychology was apparently German philosopher Goclenius in 1590.

1185 Where a part ( for example one Medical Man ) is used to signify the whole (= the attitude of the members of the medical profession ).

1186 Thetis, a primordial deity often typecast as a nymph but elsewhere said to be so powerful to shift the balance in Zeus' favor in the struggle for supremacy among the gods, had shape-shifting abilities and had to be conquered by her future mortal husband Peleos: the item hasn't stopped selling ever since, and shape-shifting creatures (often fairy brides) crowd folklore the world over.

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doppelgaenger motif again) as principles presiding over the universe's elemental dynamics.

Alternatively, Daksha (son of Brahma, Rig Veda, XV century BCE or older) did not invite son-in-law Shiva to a great ceremony, and insulted him, which caused his daughter Sati to commit suicide out of shame; this in turn invited Shiva's anger that caused the annihilation of those who attended the ceremony. So many cases of small mistakes trigger disastrous consequences of tidal proportions: if only mortals had known.

How many movies (books, stories...) are there - from Terminator (1984) to Sliding Doors (1998) etc – beating the concept of alternative time-lines to death?

“We may consider the concept of time as critical juncture in gnostic movies.

Gnosticism considers time a prison, a source of mystification and illusion” 1187. The prospect is offered of the momentous impact seemingly trivial events/oversights may exert on the greater scheme of things of either world history or individual life: the butterfly effect, whereby -according to chaos theory- a butterfly flapping its wings may bring about a hurricane on the other side of the world 1188:

An effect of immense happiness may arise from a small virtuous act, 1187 “podemos considerar o conceito de tempo como o ponto crítico nos filmes gnósticos. O gnosticismo encara o tempo como uma prisão, fonte de mistificação, ilusão e engano.” (Vieira Ferreira 2009:56).

1188 Ven. Wuling (Buddhist monastic of the Pure Land tradition) followed the same line of thought describing Buddhist karma, or the endless chain of action and reaction that lead the rebirth cycle: the greatest consequences mature from seemingly trivial beginnings. It is human mind's old obsession with choices and consequences that myths belabor to death.

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and small non-virtuous act can bring immense suffering. Hence, karmic causation seems to involve a magnification which is not found in ordinary external causation (Terentyev no date ME6217:unit 3:4) Is it really different from the ritual oversights that ultimately resulted in the death of (semi)divine characters of lore such as Achilles, Siegfried and Balder?

What about incidents that see gods (spirits, witches...) not being (accidentally, maliciously or on purpose such as the goddess of discord Eris at Peleos and Thetis' wedding) invited to a seemingly auspicious event (wedding, birth etc), which puts the chain of misfortune in motion, such as in the Sleeping Beauty folk tale?

An optional possibility is that to recast the past in order to alter the future -for example in Terminator, The Kid (2000), Back To The Future (1985ss),The Man With Rain In His Shoes (1998)-: Hercules never leaves the crossroad.

Although improbable at first glance, Back To The Future (1985ss) recasts the oedipal dilemma (is fate cast in stone? Can we overturn fate's decrees? Are we victims of our environment, or can we shape it through our actions?) in a sci-fi extravaganza engineered to chime with Reaganite policies extolling the American dream: self-made men eventually triumph over adversities of all kinds (=the usual hero shtick).

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8-year old self, thus bringing back suppressed childhood memories. He was once bullied as a child, which had shaped his future life. He and his child self thus take remedial actions, then go back in time to engineer an alternative outcome for the bullying episode (much as it happens in Back To The Future). The climax consists in the 8-year old self overcoming the bully, whom he obliges to apologize: a scene identical to the climax scene in Bloodsport. Hard as it might be to believe it, Dues1189 tells the same story as what really happened to him when he was 6 or 7yo (time travel and paranormal encounters excepted, of course). The meeting of people from one's forlorn past happens within the frame of a comedy ( The Kid), or as a paranormal drama (Flatliners).

Achilles, Balder, Siegfried and other heroes perish because of some seemingly trivial oversight during the rite that granted them invincibility. Krishna perishes as a hunter accidentally shoots him in the foot (=Achilles' heel). Gautama Buddha asks his head disciple Ananda three times (=the importance of sacred numbers) whether he should live an entire eon: Ananda1190 forgets three times to say that Buddha ought to live an eon indeed. After great struggle, Gilgamesh recovers

1189 2010:Teaching Our Children About Conflict.

1190 There are parallel motifs, however imperfect, that recur in the figures of both Buddhist Ananda and Christian St. Peter. As the great man's closest disciples, Peter and Ananda would have been expected to excel in both practice, wisdom and doctrine: this was clearly not the case. In Buddhist lore, before the I council Ananda was not yet an arahant but a sekha (=one in the course of perfection); Peter wasn't much skilled, either. Peter denied Jesus three times; Ananda (the Buddha's cousin) refused to give water to the dying Buddha (because a neighboring stream had been muddled as a caravan passed by), and so forth. Other imperfect analogies between Buddhism and Christianity are the presumed rivalries between Jesus' real followers and St. Paul, and between Ananda and Mahakassapa.

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the plant that could grant him a second youth: he falls asleep, and a snake eats it 1191.

Gautama Buddha leaves the community of the faithful free to abolish the lesser precepts if they see fit: Ananda forgets to ask which were the lesser precepts, exactly.

That's why -right here and now- that 'special law' has to be passed; that new social alchemy scheme or charity has to be funded; this party has to be either voted or banned; that foreign land has to be carpet-bombed or invaded...if we leave stones unturned, doom may await us in the future.

Schroedinger's cat that embarrassed quantum physicists is dead or alive (or both) depending on our observation of what goes on inside the cat's box, where an atomically random event determines either his death or his survival. Didn't this or that folkloric precious savior-hero already warn us about our state as â&#x20AC;&#x153;potential sinnersâ&#x20AC;?? In some alternative time-line (universe...) or another, we have stolen that apple, killed that opponent, robbed that bank: reverse paranoia.

In a state of paranoia, everything represents a likely threat. In a state of reversed paranoia, everything represents a likely boon or opportunity. Mind magic devotees thus roam an interesting universe ready to gratify them with winning lottery tickets, service-minded people, thrilling and easy sexual encounters, nice

1191 In Hindu Rig Veda, cosmic snakes may steal the light of the divine creation (Yatsenko, MAISI018 no date: 3.1).

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weather, and plenty of free parking spaces right where they are most needed:

Even God plays only a supporting role, and by no means an indispensable one, in the Osteens’ [=evangelists] universe. Gone is the mystery and awe; he has been reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant. He fixeth my speeding tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts.

Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of courtesy than a necessity. Once you have accepted the law of attraction—that the mind acts as a magnet attracting whatever it visualizes— you have granted humans omnipotence (Ehrenreich 2009:363).

Advertisement and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) specialist Boothman quips:”I've talked my way out of dozens of automobile-related tickets -...and not just for parking infractions.”1192. Boothman, just as any other self-help guru, tantalizes people with the possibility of becoming as irresistible as those hyperreal cardboard cut-out characters from that fifty second Irish malt liquor or aftershave ad. The advice Boothman -and his ilk- impart to the hopeful projects one-liners and situations that seem lifted from posh sit-coms and blockbusters. Even the most despicable nobody can become an “irresistible” Charlton Heston or Eddie Murphy character practicing one-liners and postures the master explains.

This idea of multiple futures at one's fingertip expanded beyond beliefs through the internet. Only a few mouse-clicks away lie one's ideal sex partner, fast and easy princely income, dream job, cheap DVD player or airfare... But after all, isn't the maze of possible futures just the equivalent of no future, “no fate” as Sarah 1192 2000:39.

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Connor scribbles in Terminator 2 (1991)? â&#x20AC;&#x153; Paradoxical previsions and prophecies with no fateâ&#x20AC;?1193..

Quantum mysticism and positive psychology couldn't be far apart in endorsing gnostic quandaries:

In any case, I think the particular sense in which I suggest interpreting the neurosis as a failure of personal growth must be clear by now. It is a Falling short of what one could have been, and even, one could say, of what one should have been, biologically speaking, that is, if one had grown and developed in an unimpeded way . Human and personal possibilities have been lost . The world has been narrowed, and so has consciousness. Capacities have been inhibited. (Maslow 1993:32).

Although the human mind loves to dress its speculations in rational garb as religion or science (quantum physics behind Schroedinger's problem; positive psychology; divine providence behind original sin and savior-heroes bound to save us from it), it all is probably as worth as the screenplay of another awful cable TV sci-fi movie.

Of course, the contemporary reader may not be interested in hearing about Hercules, but may be interested in the Hercules myth re-branded to suit contemporary concerns as Joe Magarac (=Joe Jackass), the 'myth become fact' of the steel industry, whom steel workers rarely knew about, yet who was such a literary success1194.

1193 Vieira Ferreira 2009:76.

1194 Fishwick 1959.

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The contemporary reader couldn't care less about whether Emperor Redbread is still alive, but perhaps Elvis Presley or doctor Mengele might be, much as Nero -whose corpse had never been identified- in his own time had been rumored to have escaped death, and to be hiding somewhere ready to seize power again.

Today's people won't weep because Theseus abandoned she who had made his glory possible, or because Apollo and Artemis killed Niobe's sons, but may weep hearing about boat people, or about the victims of terrorism. People today aren't concerned with Oedipus -or whichever other Greek tragedy hero- suddenly realizing (anagnorisis=recognition) his condition of arch-violator of taboos, and wishing he had gotten the clue earlier. They, however, 'dig' scoops on this or that third world dictator.

Only short earlier, he was brought on tour as kind investor-savior of decrepit western economies: the wealthy and powerful bowed in abject gratitude.

The 'savior' suddenly became a genocidal 'freak' placed on international black lists:

Libyan leader Moamer Gaddafi's fall from grace resonated in the European Union corridors of power on Thursday, as a picture of him in the company of one the bloc's former top officials was removed on Thursday. (Deutsche Presse Agentur 24 February 2011).

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academic adviser to the toppled dictator's son when he studied at the LSE and was director of the research programme funded by his charity. Held, who is currently Graham Wallas professor of political science at the LSE, has announced that he is leaving in January to take up a post at Durham University. The LSE is expected to face sharp criticism over the academic independence of the North Africa Research Programme, which was funded with a ÂŁ1.5m donation from the Gaddafi charitable foundation, and Held's departure is regarded internally as the latest aftershock from the donation. The LSE's links with Libya have already triggered the resignation of its director, Howard Davies. Held has extensive ties to Saif al-Islam, now on the run after the violent collapse of his father's dictatorship. Held was on the board of the Gaddafi foundation, the charity run by Saif al-Islam.

(Vasagar 2011:no page).

The same scene of the now horrified retinue of prigs and dolts who couldn't possibly have known, and now hasten to come clean for their good name's sake in deference to superseding values, continues to apply in all circumstances if political preconditions are in place:

Most of us would be devastated and humiliated by public exposure as a liar and a cheat, but not the psychopath. He or she can still look the community straight in the eye and give impassioned assurances, on their "word of honor." (Hare 1993:112).

Doping in professional sports? If only people had possibly known...:

Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, has voted to rescind the honorary degree it conferred on embattled bicyclist Lance Armstrong, a university spokesman confirms. -...- Armstrong was recently stripped of his seven Tour de France titles after refusing to continue to cooperate with the investigation into allegations of doping. -...-â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lance Armstrong brings a powerful message to our graduates and commencement guests: Never give up," then Tufts president Larry Bacow said when Armstrong was announced as an honorary degree recipient in 2006. "His perseverance on the bike and in life sets an 1214 DOLT

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extraordinary example for all who seek to overcome obstacles and achieve their highest goals. We are honored to host him at Tufts.”

That statement, too, no longer seems to have stood the test of time.

(Halper 2012: no page).

In 2003, Lance Armstrong was a hot commodity. As his sponsor at Nike, MacEachern was trying to figure out the best way to harness all the attention Lance was getting. Lance had a powerful story.

Diagnosed with life-threatening testicular cancer seven years earlier, Lance had been given only a 40 percent chance of survival. But he surprised everyone not only by returning to cycling, but by coming back stronger than ever. Since his return, he had won the Tour de France an astounding five times in a row and inspired millions of people along the way. From fifteen year- olds dealing with cancer to college students trying to stay in shape, Lance helped people to believe. If he could come back from cancer, they could overcome the challenges in their own lives (Berger 2013:77, emphasis added).

All people are liable to the same treatment, big and not-so-big names alike. Is it time to “erase and forget the concept as such”, or to grant exceptional status under extenuating circumstances that cripple the principle of coherence? Is it time for the press to gentlemanly ignore crank calls, damning evidence and tip-offs in the name of privacy and fair play, or to let the public know over and over in the name of freedom of information and nagging suspicions?

Which show goes on, exactly? It depends on whether or not the transgressor's armband, personality or actions -whatever those might be- happen to square with “popular morality”, “free-floating folk beliefs”, “explanations or interpretations usually put forth”, “prevailing cultural trends”, “only an old Phoenician tale of what has often occurred before now in other places”, “the

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audience’s pre-established set of convictions”.

Rather than the political gem of the check and balance system right out of the breast of goddess reason 1195, this interplay reads like the unwritten chapter of some Godfather mafia novel. On July 2, 2013, Associated Press informs that:

The Big Ten female athlete of the year award no longer is named for the Olympic track star from Wisconsin who later acknowledged working as a prostitute. -....- Favor competed in the Olympics in 1992, 1996 and 2000. The Smoking Gun website in December first reported that Favor Hamilton had worked as an escort in Las Vegas. She has described it as a "coping mechanism" tied to depression and other personal issues. (Athlete Who...2013: no page).

The public may attain 'purgation' (catharsis 1196) in this modern tragedy claiming with the policy makers it knew nothing of the unspeakable deeds now on all newspapers: truth and plausibility are in no way necessary ingredients in a good tragedy.

The process of 'discovery', the busybody peeping aghast as s-he 'realizes' that things are/were not as s-he was told (had believed, read...), and desperately wants to make amends, is a universal fig leaf for societal dynamics. Logrolling groups compete for supremacy in order to invest private concerns with protection reserved to taboos. Vicarious trauma (= second person drama= hearing the accounts 1195 Atheist factions during the French Revolution in 1793-4 tried to supplant Christianity with civic rituals heralding republican and enlightenment values axed around the goddess reason first, followed by the supreme being.

1196 According to Meineck 2005-2:The Origins Of Greek Drama, catharsis represents “to step beyond entrenched social position[s], -...- to cross a boundary and in crossing that boundary to reach a truth” (discussing the Odyssey ).

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of trauma) is an ongoing show on today's media.

An example might be the debate -in Italy in the XIX century- about whether railroads should charge merchandise by weight (favoring agriculture), or by volume (favoring industry). Which productive activity, agriculture or industry, would usher 'the great nation' into the brilliant future that is its?

Alternatively, the same method can be employed to create new crimes and to reshape public sensibility sweeping formerly mainstream doctrines and attitudes under the rug of insensitivity, mental illness and abuse:

Despite documentary evidence of child beating throughout the ages, the "discovery" of child abuse as deviance and its subsequent criminalization are recent phenomena. In a four- year period beginning in 1962, the legislatures of all fifty states passed statutes against the caretaker's abuse of children. This paper is a study of the organization of social forces which gave rise to the deviant labeling of child beating and which promoted speedy and universal enactment of criminal legislation. It is an examination of certain organized medical interests, whose concern in the discovery of the "battered child syndrome" manifestly contributed to the advance of humanitarian pursuits while covertly rewarding the groups themselves. -...- But prior to the 1960's socio- legal reactions were sporadic, and atypical of sustained reactions against firmly labeled deviance. -...- In each case the primary objective was not to save children from cruel or abusive parents, but to save society from future delinquents. -...- Thus, it was children, not their abusive guardians, who felt the weight of the moral crusade. They, not their parents, were institutionalized. -...- Both in scholarly research -...- and journalistic outcry -...-the last years of the fifties showed dramatically increased concern for the beaten child. -...The opportunity of generating a medical, rather than socio-legal label for abuse provided the radiologists and their allies with a situation in which they could both reap the rewards associated with the diagnosis 1217 DOLT

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and avoid the infringement of extra-medical controls. What was discovered was no ordinary behavior form but a "syndrome." Instead of departing from the tradition of organized medicine, they were able to idealize its most profound mission. -...- the discovery of abuse as a new "illness" reduced drastically the intra-organizational constraints on doctors' "seeing" abuse. A diagnostic category had been invented and publicized. -...- The proliferation of the idea of abuse by the media cannot be underestimated. Though its stories were sensational, its credibility went unchallenged. What was publicized was not some amorphous set of muggings but a "syndrome." -...- The problem had become "real" in the imaginations of professionals and laymen alike. It was rediscovered visually by -...- several other television scripts and documentaries (Pfohl 1977:310-11,315, 318-20).

It helps to ponder that the “discovery of child abuse” coincided with a campaign to turn children -once subjected to stern parental authority in the form of spanking and injunctions to “eat all veggies”- into one major driving force behind purchase-power, especially in the grocery store. The maximization of the group's economic potential could -as Herbert Spencer had argued eons earlier- be fully tapped into only following a sort of emancipation, like the case of women, people of color and other presumed pariah groups showed: quantum entanglement, indeed.

In recent decades, pets -or animals in general- have plotted the same trajectory children, women, people of color, homosexuals etc have plotted. Beautiful souls legislate against the horrors the frail, diminutive little creatures suffer(ed).

Perpetrators may now go in the dock over what once constituted common practice.

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niches exist in the dog industry that exist in the province of childcare and related consumerism.

Like in the case of a bad soap opera, or the case of professional wrestling, everybody knew what to expect when Hulk Hogan, only seconds earlier having seizures in pain on the canvas, stood up and started hyperventilating; or when Ken Patera outstretched his arms moving his fingers: the 'father (full) nelson' 1197 was coming, and the opponent's defeat was near. That's why movie-makers on a string budget cast lookalikes or copy plot devices: it works nearly as well as 'the real thing' at a fraction of the cost.

Peddling images of dying infants of color, Italian showman Costa could pocket the lion's share1198 of the donations that the meek public in tears would contribute to fight starvation; Italian newspaper Il Giorno (3 December 2011) details how five investment advisers have been detained because they are accused of embezzling euro nine million of charitable funds destined to relieve the situation in Haiti.

Religious or secular charities regularly surface in scandals involving money laundering, tax evasion, and elaborate financial schemes to supply politicians, mafiosi, millionaires and their minions with fresh money. They pay lip 1197 A wrestling move.

1198 The criminal investigation is ongoing. Different sources quote different percentages of the fund that the showman might have embezzled: 70,80, 90%.

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service to lemonade oceans, solidarity/charity and other utopian flumadiddle with the alleged purpose of relieving an endless stream of ills typical of societies in decomposition: (illegal) immigration; waste management; public works; foster care for the youth; remedial interventions too numerous to count...

Centro Cooperazione Sviluppo charity at Genova (Italy) registered to help children in Mozambique, Nepal and elsewhere which famous testimonials heavily supported, was revealed in 2006 to be â&#x20AC;&#x153;a black holeâ&#x20AC;? ( un buco nero) in which donations (euro 3,754 million received in 2005) disappeared 1199; three people are sentenced in 2012 to about 1 year prison term with suspended sentence, awaiting further developments.

What about the testimonials' reputation guaranteeing the operation's transparency? They couldn't possibly have known, of course. The real shame rests in the end with the gullible subscribers who possibly believed the charming entertainer as he smiled for the camera with swollen eyes in order to propel the noble charity he had no clue about anyways.

Colossal Operazione Arcobaleno, an Italian

humanitarian and relief

effort for Kosovo orchestrated under a then left-wing government axed around the former Communist Party, is the object of several criminal investigations for all sorts of wrongdoings; press agency ADNKRONOS (on November 8, 2001) writes about 1199 Pistacchi 2006: no page.

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goods collected for humanitarian purposes being sold by third parties instead.

As this writing suggest, the press can either skewer possible culprits in their full glory with all details, or take a more reserved approach to honor the presumption of innocence: euro 800.000 directed to an old, unnamed charity in Milan in order to allegedly support youth in difficult situations are fraudulently diverted by an equally unnamed president into the purchase of real estate he would personally own.

ANSA reports1200 how police cleared a travellers' camp at Rome.

Foreigners living there -some of whom with criminal records- lived on welfare, yet the police uncovered they had â&#x20AC;&#x153;Centinaia di migliaia di euro in banca â&#x20AC;? (hundreds of thousands euro in the bank).

Such spurious charities are all over the place. The loot is worth it. In the U.S alone, charitable giving totals about 2% of GDP, or over 300 billion US$ in 2012; other estimates see the UK second to the U.S with about 0,9% GDP, and Canada close third. As it happens during electoral campaigns, decoys are set up to 'jam' all segments of the social spectrum.

In July 2013, animal welfare association GAS -which the city hall of Ferrara (Italy) had contracted to run a stray cat shelter- is under investigation:

1200 April 15, 2015.

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appropriations (euro 60.000 and 40.000 respectively) were mostly devoted to fund the personal and frivolous expenses of the association's leaders rather than to animal welfare.

In 2015, Thom Feeney, an English shoe seller from York, started online a crowdfunding operation to “save Greece” from the ongoing financial scourging by collectiong euro 1,6 billion (yes, billion) from website INDIEGOGO. No practical details are offered about how the money raised might be concretely put to use, and everything hides behind smokescreens about “making a difference” etc. The website promises Greek culinary delicacies, and even an entire Greek island, as token for benefactors. How that might happen is again a matter of conjecture. Euro 1,93 million have so far been collected (July 6, 2015). Several worried posters already comment on the fundaraising page how the campaign has obviously failed, but no refund has so far been granted.

Mr. Thom Feeney claims to have refunded everybody, and starts anew to raise funds for undisclosed Greek relief operations. While it's possible to argue Feeney might have “made a difference” for himself rather than for Greece, “ultimate goodness” must be inferred to explain the peculiar obsession of an English shoe clerk and his innumerable imitators. Of course, the international press is equally involved as it publicizes and lionizes such campaigns to attract yet more hopefuls ready to fan their wallet around noble causes.

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People rush to merge like dewdrops into the ocean of well-wishers pledging their money to “make a difference” in order to “save” anything ranging from infants of color, Greece, elusive online romantic interests to improbable personal ventures. Erik Chevalier, a U.S citizens, collected US$ 122.000 to start a board game enterprise. The endeavor got canceled, and Chevalier declared to be penniless: where did the money go? U.S FTC investigates the matter. UK Mirror1201 relays how Maurice Asola Fadola from Ghana swindled a series of lonely British ladies into surrendering their money to him in a romance scam worth UK£ 800.000 as he posed online as a romantic U.S military officer strapped for cash.

Elizabeth (Elle) Edmunds, an Australian and mother to six sweet children, made hearts melt as fund-raising started online to help her fight ovarian cancer. It appeared later tattoo-covered Elle never had cancer, and now claims to be mentally ill. Alternatively, Edmunds claims her tattoo-covered partner forced her to stage the scam under threat of violence. Media also suggest the cancer hoax might have been a tentative to elude charges for the possession of unlicensed firearms 1202.

Fundraisers pledge to donate to unnamed cancer societies: where will the money finally end?

Kaltenbach1203 has examined the situation in France drawing a similar portrait. All causes may be (ab)used: 1201 November 1, 2014.

1202 Mailonline, February 9, 2015.

1203 1996.

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Imagine having your own personal piggy bank filled with funds with which you could do whatever you wanted. Pay off your mortgage or car loans, remodel a home, and even take a trip to Atlantic City. A dream come true; livin’ life like a grown-up version of Preston Waters from Blank Check. But it wasn’t a dream for the four just arrested for tricking thousands into donating to their charities that branded themselves as Israel-related causes. Nineteen charities, all given Jewish names, like Bnei Torah or Israel Leukemia and Cancer Society, were exposed (Zipken 2013: no page, emphasis added).

Although aggressive grievance-shopping and minority watchdog groups might be expected to ride the controversy, the problem -to name one- of the great percentage of substandard or counterfeit drugs destined to developing countries -and relative human consequences- is best left alone:”In Africa the situation is extremely serious. Half of the malaria medication sold there could be ineffective or even harmful. ”1204.

Those are just a few of the countless cases involving charities and other agencies purported to relieve this, that or another plight or catastrophe. Almost on the same pace - according to titles on prominent Italian newspapers- U.N. FAO spends only about 50% of its 929.8 million budget (2008-9) on actual help to the poor and the needy. The rest goes into bureaucracy, studies, information analysis and princely wages1205.

Millionaire donations via SMS or phone to the victims of yet another natural disaster (Emilia, Italy, 2012) have been directed not to such victims, but to 1204 Problems Of Fake...2010: no page.

1205 Redazione 2009:no page.

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an 'international consortium' in charge of 'running relief programs' in collaboration with a string of involved parties such as banks. Ben-Shahar 1206, however, rhapsodizes about the good will of Americans in general, and extols the virtues of many fellow Harvard graduates who serve on the boards of countless charities; readers shall come to their own conclusions.

Party liners are busy hugging one another in non-dualistic rapture to celebrate the wonderful human soul, while gamesmen seize their profits.

Yet

hoaxers sit on both sides of the fence. Italian newspaper Il Giorno (21 May 2009) detailed how -in the L'Aquila region an earthquake had recently hit- out of 70.000 registered residents, authorities had received 100.000 requests for refunds and subsidies under the emergency provisions the catastrophe had prompted.

Fakelore can he either the total manufacture of lore, legends, and myths or the adaptation of original texts to meet a specific spiritual belief. The act of creating or rewriting stories does not in and of itself give a work this negative overtone, but it is the presentation of an entirely original story or revision as being genuinely historical (Alexander 2007:14).

[I] introduced the word and the concept of fakelore, as a synthetic product claiming to be authentic oral tradition but actually tailored for mass edification. (Dorson 1976:5).

But the question of popularization is not so simple. Is not public "demand" a direct influence on what is produced? -...- If popularizers are responding to public need in a manner (if not medium) similar to people who work in oral tradition, how can we call their products "fake"? -...-Paul Bunyan could easily have existed both in tales and as 1206 2005-6:lecture 3.

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general knowledge well before the first known printed source of the material. He might have been much like Kilroy was to the fighting men of World War II. I have collected stories from lumbermen who knew the "idea" of Paul Bunyan when they worked in lumber camps before the turn of the century. Paul was one of those free-floating folk beliefs from which ever-new stories could be created by an ingenious tale teller or joker as the situation presented itself. -...- The concept of Paul Bunyan, and many of the ideas in those "fakelore" stories, may now constitute the authentic folklore of another group, the urban or urban-influenced Americans. (Stekert 1986:180-1).

In all cases, the country in question was suffering from a severe case of an inferiority complex-if one can appropriately speak of an entire country being affected by such a complex. -...- Macpherson's Ossian put Scottish Highlanders on the map -...- It may be true that ideally folklore serves the cause of national identity cravings, but where folklore is deemed lacking or insufficient, individual creative writers imbued with nationalistic zeal have felt free to fill in that void -...Folklorismus, the commercialization of folklore, often results in fakelore of this exploitative kind (Dundes 1985:11-15) As Boccaccio put it a long time ago, representation (literature in Boccaccio's case) is a 'mirror' of human existence, whereby people see human miseries in action, and compare them with their own. In most cases, such representations are cathechted with quintessential, supermundane or otherwise doomsday characteristics that have people gasp for breath with ensuing gastrointestinal and neurological syndromes.

In reality, such representations are just what gossip is all about.

According to evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar's 1207 hypothesis, gossip is what glues human society together, an equivalent of grooming in big apes. And

1207 1992.

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what is gossip about? Exactly about what is to be shunned -or heavily censored- in polite company: sex, violence, adultery, politics, religion. In its progressive refusal of worldly attachment, Buddhism rightfully prescribes abstinence from gossip (idle chatter), and values silence.

In 1989 French noir (cop drama) L'Union SacrĂŠe sees a brash, prejudiced Jewish cop and a Muslim colleague in a team to fight a terrorist cabal while an erotic triangle is in place including the Jewish cop's ex-wife, now dating the Arab cop.

Tense action movies might not suit everyone as poor excuses for political pamphlets, though. In 1990 grotesque comedy Heart Condition, a brash, racist White cop hounds a rogue Black lawyer. He, however, ends up receiving the transplanted heart of his Black foe, now deceased. Furthermore, not only does the cop collaborate with the lawyer's ghost, but he also ends up together with his former White girlfriend who -divine coincidence- was dating the Black lawyer, and had gotten pregnant of him: circularity to state of the art.

Just as (unchecked) African immigration in Italy became matter of public outcry, 1993 obscure Italian production Teste Rasate sees a suburban bum in a relationship with a Black (illegal) immigrant from Africa. He then joins a Fascist squad: another political manifesto hits the screen, with a tragic ending, and more obtuse myths than one might count. In 1987 another such 'Romeo and Juliet' in

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(mildly) politicized sauce had been credited to top Hollywood director Ferrara:

China Girl sees gang warfare between suburban Chinese and Italian gangs as a backdrop. 1981 The Fox And The Hound finds two animal friends forced to become enemies.

How many of those reversal storylines are there? How many divided loyalty movies (telepictures, novels etc) are there? Ben Hur is a classic example.

Peplum narratives might nowadays not satisfy many. Divided loyalties can thus take another garb. Postmodern White woman scoffs at tribal hallucinations as she makes an exogamic choice: a frantic love story with a man of color who's a true ladies' gent. The exotic chap initially wears three piece suits, and has a glamorous job.

When she relocates to (visits...) his even more exotic homeland, divided loyalties kick in. He goes native, and she's threatened, abused, harassed, oppressed etc: what a blockbuster.

Black and White? Fox and hound? German and Jew? Muslim and Jew? Rich and Poor? Country boy and city girl? Italian boy and Chinese girl? Earthling and alien? Isn't that just a variation upon the good old â&#x20AC;&#x153; be wary of judgment/recognition/common humanityâ&#x20AC;? routine? Human beings ride their high horse making supercharged ethical statements about themselves, but soon reveal themselves as pathetic phonies ready to turn their coat.

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There is no limit to the sauces the same stale allegories can stew in. A comedy cop/crook, White/Black movie like 1982 48 Hours? 1985 Enemy Mine simmers the judgment/recognition/common humanity shtick in sci-fi sauce, serving the public a long-winded excuse for a situation involving a prejudiced White guy and his Black foe, which ends on a note that could have been lifted from any WWII U.S war propaganda booklet (minus the sci-fi elements, of course). If a remake of

Karate Kid in Afro-American sauce has been released, rumor has it someone's considering a Black remake of Rambo. Miles Morales (possibly an Obama lookalike), an Afro-Hispanic character, is scheduled to replace Peter Parker as Spiderman in comic books:

Just before the turn of the last millennium, the National Catholic Reporter sponsored a contest called “Jesus 2000” that challenged artists to produce a twenty-firstcentury Jesus. The winning entry, Janet McKenzie’s Jesus of the People, depicted a character of indeterminate gender and race but with dark skin and thick lips suggestive of a Native-American or black Christ. (Prothero 2010:38).

Improbable sci-fi characters frothing at the mouth might not be one's favorite choice, so the evergreen White and Black situation may become a 'Manhattan meets Harlem' comedy as Diff'rent Strokes (1978-86); this time the twist is no longer crook versus cop, but rich versus poor. Escapist fare, creative diversion and nowheres of one eccentric kind or another end up looking like circular, xeroxed parodies of war propaganda, and the fixations of the 1960s, a weird period drama:”by 1850 almost any book by or about a Negro was in great demand [in 1229 A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A DOLT

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America and England]â&#x20AC;? (=the rise of melanocracy).

The ecstatic crowd rises to a standing ovation clamoring for more:

If Star Wars really is merely "escapist fare," a lighthearted and diverting entertainment, why did such a wide spectrum of adults (as well as children) "escape" to see this film three, four or even more times-at first-run prices? Even George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, was surprised when a preview audience (made up of a cross-section of ordinary moviegoers) gave the film a three-minute standing ovation at its conclusion (Miller 1981:204, emphasis added).

In another context, stale plot contrivances aren't limited to movies. The best minds of Italian journalism and political analysis had no other recourse than to lift terminologies such as anni di piombo1208 (years of lead) and vecchia repubblica1209 ( old republic) from the antipodal context of Brazilian history ( anos de chumbo1210,

repĂšblica velha1211) to pass them off as the gem of an acumen that so often eludes the common man, especially when not familiar with Brazilian history. If Estado Novo (new State) was the dirigiste and monocratic political regime in Portugal since 1933 (and in Brazil since 1937), Roosevelt had his New Deal (also from 1933); in Germany, too, novelty took power in 1933.

1208 A period of unrest in the 1970s characterized by agitations and terrorist acts.

1209 In the early 1990s, repeated corruption scandals brought about the demise of the parties up until then pivotal in forming a government. From the foam of the severed genitals of said parties, new ones would soon form such as Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Alleanza Nazionale. It isn't mere speculation to remark how the peak of the former Communist block's implosion unleashed political catastrophes elsewhere.

1210 Referred to a period of alleged stronger repression under the military regime.

1211 The first Republican regime of Brazil, typically said to last from 1889 to 1930. Alternatively referred to as Primeira Republica, another idiom (Prima Repubblica) the golden minds of Italian journalism and politics shamelessly borrowed. It shall be emphasized how Brazil underwent radical regime changes, while Italy remained under the same constitutional arrangement.

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Lefty pressure groups in Italy talk about the pursuit of diritti civili for the GLBT community, which is a nonsensical translation of U.S “civil rights” that -through the omnipresent anglicized pidgin- transit from the advocacy on behalf of people of color to that in favor of any and all groups on the usual ground of “emotional truth”.

All in all, nothing so different from filmmakers recycling the same stale plot contrivances over and over. If most are familiar with the jingle associated with the early Rocky movies, few may have noticed the Italian movie Bomber -also using boxing as main storyline- offered a slightly modified rip-off jingle in the same way as the row of Star Wars rip-off movies were modeled after the blockbusting original.

In fact, beside the shrewd con-men and media experts running the 'show' for tangible gains, there is the faceless public -being bilked (directly or by proxy) on the other side of the curtain- that wants to desperately believe in order to make a statement about itself.

In a TV ad, average Joe -who had the taste to choose a particular liquor brand over others- was instantly transfigured into the paladin at a medieval King's court:”Hence the incidents are fantastic and "unreal": they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs.”;”folklure is the calculated association of folkloristic concepts with manufactured products, usually through one form or another of the

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media, in the sole interest of commercial gain.”.

Are fantasies of (improbable) medieval manhood not one's cup of tea? In another Italian commercial of the 1980s, an executive in a tense reunion with his staff receives a phone call, then announces:”we're the sole agent”. He then presses a button, and a malt liquor bottle appears: “your choices are always the epitome of success” quips an adoring subordinate having a toast with the executive.

The pathetic Hulk Hogan song of the 1980s illustrates this well:

I am a real American, Fight for the rights of every man, I am a real American, fight for what's right, fight for your life -...-. I gotta be a man; I can't let it slide, -...- I feel strong about right and wrong, And I don't take trouble for very long, I got something deep inside of me, and courage is the thing that keeps us free Is this not another exemplum? Instead of a muscle-bound behemoth performing choreographed stunts for a paid audience, could this not be a sonnet introducing Hercules, Menelaus or some other ancient hero? Couldn't the song be a slogan for the Trojan war? Or perhaps the invasion (pacification, plundering, liberation...) of Iraq and Afghanistan? Isn't it telling how Hulk Hogan publicly referred to his fans as “little Hulkamaniacs” although most of them were adults, more or less young but decidedly not “little”?

Isn't the purpose of this to allow the “pencil-necked sweat-hogs” (in the

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oft-recurring words of deceased wrestler Rick Rude and his wrestler-stripper persona) -or “pigs” (in the words of deceased wrestler turned manager Freddie Blassie ) - in the audience to overcome some of their frustrations by identifying with the lyrics' myth that becomes fact as Hulk Hogan battles evil Russian Nikolai Volkoff, Iranian Iron Sheik, or the American traitor -now in the service of Iraq's general Adnan ( =a Saddam Hussein lookalike)- Sargent Slaughter? Wouldn't the same words go down in history if some politician -however scandal-ridden and discredited- pronounced them igniting “fire in the minds of men” with various slogans, images1212 and bandwagon appeals? “ Mos requires neither deliberation, nor judgment, but praise or blame”.

Therefore, when people want to make ethically (=credibility issues) supercharged statements about themselves (by sharing beliefs, parroting slogans, trying to be one with the entranced pack etc), they hope that the 'shoe' of the

exemplum they have in mind will fit them like a glove:”is it so far-fetched to assume that -...- the native, who wishing to be gifted with the strength and stamina of the vulture wears a wingbone from that animal?”.

Exemplum (or the bank of images, situations, characters and expectations associated therewith) is what matters here, and not just one of those fossilized 1212 Thinking of imagery having made long journeys, the rose (or the western equivalent of the eastern lotus) is a symbol of spiritual alchemy and ensuing realization, from medieval Roman De La Rose to freemasonry. Cfr. Doane (1882:486ss) on the image of the heavenly rose (possibly on a cross) as symbol of salvation. Once implanted in China, Nestorian Christianity adopted the lotus alongside the cross as spiritual symbols.

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characters embedded in it. Hulk Hogan is not just another muscle-bound behemoth, for Sargent Slaughter and Nikolai Volkoff fit that description, too. Hulk Hogan -on the other hand- is the muscle-bound behemoth who “is a real American fighting for what's right”, whose slogan axes around prayers and vitamins. Even the slogan of fighting for what is right wasn't even new, being already adopted in Japanese wrestling-themed cartoon Tiger Mask (1969-71).

Adrian Adonis - the deceased wrestler cultivating his 'queer' image and attire - was in fact a great performer, but he definitely could not replace Hogan in the context/exemplum at hand:”La condition de vedette est la spécialisation du vécu

apparent, l’objet de l’identification à la vie apparente sans profondeur ” (being a star corresponds especially to life as it is represented: it identifies itself with life made manifest without any depth)1213 .

Mystics and pseudo-mystics also spin the same bundle of wisdom capsules worth of Chinese fortune cookies to unimaginable lengths; commercial filmmakers then compress and prettify the jumble to delight the fans of gnostic movies. Again, gnostic tirades that send the mind into aesthetic arrest may come from all sorts of sources: exotic gurus, action movie heroes, religionists, Marxist theorists like Debord or Foucault, or even no source at all like “the postmodern generator”, a computer script that randomly generates paragraphs that sound as

1213 Debord 1967: point 60.

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academic and as meaningful as anything one might read in Derrida, Foucault or Debord. It becomes increasingly difficult to tell apart the public going berserk or into conniptions watching wrestling as entertainment, from the public having the same neurological syndromes when it's about 'serious things', wherever the threshold sits in one's opinion.

Is this comparison too stretched? Not exactly. On January 25, 1975 1214, “a stout black man in his 40s with a goatee and mustaches”,”who was shouting complaints about a referee's decision, suddenly pulled a gun and began firing toward the ring. Five spectators were wounded”. What's the difference between this event, and patriotic UK mobs raiding stores with German names during WWI, or NSDAP squads attacking Jewish stores in Germany in 1938? May, 29 1985 during a soccer match Juventus-Liverpool at Bruxelles, UK hooligans attacked the Italian team's supporters leaving 39 people dead.

Is the patriot a hate-filled, murderous vandal? A hooligan with a different cause, perhaps? Or maybe does the opposite apply (=wrath of the righteous)?

Partisans of “muscular Christianity,” recalling that Jesus “came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34), contended that their “manly Redeemer” would want them to fight for what is right.

Christian pacifists, who worshipped a “sweet Savior,” countered with the story of Jesus rebuking followers after they drew blood from his 1214 As the Pittsburgh Press reported copying a UPI press release on January, 27 1975.

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captors in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:51–52) (Prothero 2007:48).

Who can withstand [god's] indignation? Who can endure his fierce anger? His wrath is poured out like fire; the rocks are shattered before him. (Nahum 1:6).

O daughter of Babylon -...-Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks! (Psalm 137:8-9).

We think it quite normal for a deity, while if a human being behaved that way we'd send him to a lunatic asylum. (Campbell&Boa 1989:89).

On

which

ground,

exactly,

is

the

man

who

started

firing

indiscriminately at a wrestling ring in 1975 Chicago a deranged sociopath? What about the hooligans in 1985? Couldn't theirs be the wrath of the righteous, too? Or is such frenzy just a colossal neurological syndrome? According to which principle are lines drawn about people equally flipping out, and committing acts of violence to right wrongs they find unbearable? Newberg describes1215 rituals based upon myths as a “morally neutral technology” to attain oneness within the group.

Is there a method to all this? The Vault Guide To Schmoozing1216 hails the findings of 'emotional intelligence' -expounded in a book by Goleman in 1995as golden nuggets for salespeople. On quite a different level of salesmanship, prestigious OECD's1217 Government Of The Future, urges:

There is a need to identity those special personal traits that enable 1215 2012:The Brain And Religious Rituals.

1216 2002.

1217 2000.

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leaders to deal with people in a special way and to provide them with vision and purpose. Organisations need to undertake evaluation of emotional intelligence characteristics such as those identified by Daniel Goleman to ensure that such characteristics are identified and developed in managers and potential managers (2000:233).

Furthermore, Goleman has been criticized for extolling the virtues of emotional intelligence, praising those who apparently possess it to a high degree, but not going beyond anecdotes when it comes to achieving or significantly increasing the elusive ability. Other theorists and consultants -such as Livermore- restyle the elusive thing as “cultural intelligence”. “Emotional intelligence” applied to cross-cultural contexts possibly means being “culturally sensitive” yet in so many more words. Emotional intelligence acts therefore like Buddha nature, Haché, Chi, Mana, Num, Ain Sof, Pneuma, Prana or some other elusive quality present in different degrees.

Manzke1218 lists Goleman's “critical emotional competence skills” that he ascribes to Abraham Lincoln:

1. Knowing and monitoring your emotions.

2. Managing your emotions.

3. Motivation by using emotions.

4. Recognizing another's emotions.

1218 2008:24ss.

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5. Handling relationships -...- [or] managing emotions in others.

It is difficult to say what the difference in skills may be between a successful crisis center counselor doing her job to make ends meet; a salesman (or the like); a pokerfaced 'adviser' selling junk shares; the creative writer of preposterous 'glurge' to chain-mail online, and a politician having people believe his promise to build the next bridge over a river that doesn't even exist 1219. It shall be noted in passing how fences, bridges and the like imagery are the stuff of legend when it comes to myths and pseudo-myths; let's just think about medieval Japanese Buddhist monks specializing in bridge-building as meritorious deed. Also, the Pope is still referred to using the Roman formula pontifex maximus. The pontifex was originally linked to Rome's bridges cathected with mystical properties before becoming the supreme hierophant of the Roman State.

Goleman1220 categorically reiterates that IQ, technical and/or intellectual abilities are mere threshold advantages when it comes to ultimate (marketplace) success and leadership. While Goleman understandably disclaims manipulation, and even sets emotional intelligence in opposition thereto, it is difficult not to equate his emotionally intelligent overachiever with a gamesman who is part politician, part mafioso and part high pressure salesman, for those who can tell the difference.

1219 Soviet leader Krushev was credited with expressing such a concept.

1220 1998.

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The difference with conventional -or what popular culture regards aspsychopaths is that the 'emotionally intelligent psychopath' is more likely to ruin people by selling junk bonds or by voting a war declaration than s-he is by raping, mugging, stabbing or killing one in a ghetto, which is what popular culture associates with psychopathy in action.

Most of us are irrationally influenced by appearance, and Skipper [=composite, fictional character possibly mirroring former U.S President Bush, Jr.] has always looked good. He knows just how to smile. He is charming, and we can readily imagine him showering flattery on the boss who gave him the Ferrari, meanwhile thinking him the fool, and underneath it all being incapable of gratitude toward anyone. He lies artfully and constantly, with absolutely no sense of guilt that might give him away in body language or facial expression. He uses sexuality as manipulation and hides his emotional vacancy behind various respectable roles--corporate superstar, son-in-law, husband, father-which are nearly impenetrable disguises. And if the charm and the sexuality and the role playing somehow fail, Skip uses fear, a sure winner. His iciness is fundamentally scary. -...- this is a leader of the community, in an Armani suit. This is -...-the father of two: This man is the CEO -...for goodness sake! Just what are you accusing him of, and what proof do you have? Who is going to sound crazier--chief executive Skip, or his accuser? And sealing his invulnerability, there are those who need Skip to be around for one reason or another, including people who are wealthy and powerful. Are they going to care what you say? -...-The prize to be won can run the gamut from world domination to a free lunch, but it is always the same gamecontrolling, making others jump, “winning.” (Stout 2005:43-44,49).

We analyzed the succession plans of a few hundred North American executives and noted that the similarities between the developmental issues for some managers identified as “high potentials” and psychopathic-like features were startling.

(Babiak&Hare 2006:230).

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Now, if along the way I can give people the pleasure of being scared-because it is a pleasure to be scared if you do it right-or I can give people some amazing landscape that they've never seen before, that's great, but it's got to be in service of something else. The idea of getting up in the morning and saying, "I'm going to scare the hell out of somebody" or "I'm going to create some wonderland and not connect it with some transformative story, something which is going to take the reader and change them a little bit," doesn't interest me. I need to have the energy, the motive force of a story which is going change people. (genre author Clive Barker in McIntyre 2000:no page). in a large sample of prisoners, -...- Psychopaths showed profound deficits in emotional intelligence compared to nonpsychopathic criminals. However, psychopaths had normal general intelligence (IQ) scores. (Kiehl 2014:203).

The fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the beasts of the field, every creature that moves along the ground, and all the people on the face of the earth will tremble at my presence. The mountains will be overturned, the cliffs will crumble and every wall will fall to the ground -...-declares the Lord GOD (Ezekiel 38:20-1).

Professor of management Brown also emphasizes the need to be ethical when exerting influence1221. Manipulation at that point would just be the lot of the underachiever, of those who ultimately strike a negative record or balance, of the fraud who finally gets caught red-handed and cannot simply talk his way out of trouble.

As this essay's contention goes, the effect is so assured and powerful that it is often brought about artificially, not only by entertainers or vendors. Aboard an aircraft carrier in 2003, President Bush, Jr. delivered a speech to celebrate the end of

1221 2013: A Model For Successful Influence.

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the invasion of Iraq; he dressed and posed in ways that many recognized as a staged allusion to the movie Top Gun.

Some clever salesmen even launched a doll

opportunely attired to celebrate the event, with a transcript of Bush's speech included.

The feedback-loop, broken-record interplay between the real world of policy-making and the artificial world of entertainment and merchandising is apparent:

le discours de Jeanne Poésie a des accents de féminisme, même si sa créatrice s’en défend. « Les droits des fillettes et des femmes étant encore bien souvent bafoués dans le monde, ce combat s’inscrit pleinement dans son « champ d’action ». Elle mobilise ses amies dans les différents pays pour retrouver Yang Chi, la petite chinoise, retirée de l’école par sa famille pour travailler dans une usine… » (Schiappa 2010: no page).

Sesame Street will soon introduce its first HIV-positive Muppet character to children of South Africa, where is estimated that one in nine people have the virus that can lead to Aids. (SABC 2002: no page).

Showmen mocked workers’ dissatisfaction by fabricating pointedly comical instances of resistance in press releases. Press agents for Barnum & Bailey crafted a nationwide ‘‘rebellion’’ among sideshow acts just as the 1903 circus season opened—the same season that canvasmen walked off the job. A series of articles reported that these sideshow workers demanded to be called ‘‘prodigies’’ instead of ‘‘freaks.’’ Ostensibly, they had formed a ‘‘union’’ called the Sunday Order of the Protective Order of Prodigies and threatened to strike and destroy circus billboards if their wishes were ignored. Reports of the ‘‘freak revolt’’ were suspiciously riddled with oxymoronic images and puns. (Davis 2002:80).

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Who is Jeanne Poésie [Jane Poetry] who lobbies for women's rights and marches to rescue a Chinese girl, whose parents decided she should quit studying to work in a factory? A doll in a line of new “intelligent dolls” to cater to the public's postmodern cravings.

One of the most recent rising stars of Italian politics is Beppe Grillo, a stand-up comedian by trade who years ago took up the job to awake the torpid masses to the backstage deals of mainstream capital and politics. His non-dualistic rapture helped him to allegedly increase his lavish pre-tax income exponentially (allegedly euro 4 million in 2005); the publication of official tax returns caused misunderstandings with his populist followers taking his onstage frugality seriously.

Followers are also regularly solicited to send donations to venues 'the great man' controls in order to support 'the great cause' when most needed. Be it as it may, the 'anti-political' party he banded was the sensation during the last elections (between 23 and 25% votes in the 2013 general election).

The entire operation – so contend some with some facts and names to match1222- would be orchestrated by public relations firm Casaleggio 1223. Said experts would -so argue the same- be entirely responsible for the content -and the steeringof Grillo's extremely popular internet presence and political persona employing strings of professionalized hecklers -so-called influencers- and mountebanks -so1222 Orsatti 2010: no page.

1223 In recent times the cat has been left out of the bag, and the P.R guru has appeared in official capacity alongside the 'great man'.

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called community builders-.

Grillo's internet presence alone1224 -according to some estimate- should yield between euro 5 and 10 million of yearly revenue 1225 orchestrated behind an opaque financial and corporate smokescreen. The accounting system and financial flows remain private, and disclosure is non-existent. Anonymous groupies online chalk it up to the great man's hard-earnt money: a matter as private as Grillo's conviction for triple manslaughter, of all things.

Not only is the main act a stage act – as in the situation comedy of yore-, but the public reaction as well is often a stage act the way recorded laughter outbursts or clapping of hands were to another class of sit-coms. Is there a method to the madness? It was documented how

Four experiments investigated the extent to which judgments of candidate performance in [U.S] presidential debates could be influenced by the mere knowledge of others’ reactions. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants watched an intact version of a debate or an edited version in which either “soundbite” one-liners or the audience reaction to those soundbites were removed. In Experiment 3 participants saw what was supposedly the reaction of their fellow participants on screen during the debate. Participants in Experiment 4 were exposed to the reactions of live confederates as they watched the 1224 As with all political or opinion-leading operations, there are the sale of various gadgets, and rights to various kinds of events and contents.

1225 “Il blog da tempo è diventato il punto di riferimento del Movimento e ne promuove contenuti. Il tutto viene realizzato con l'assistenza della Casaleggio Associati, che si occupa dei contenuti del blog e li promuove in rete.

Secondo Il Sole24Ore il traffico stimato raggiunge una media tra i 150 e i 200mila utenti unici ogni giorno con circa 1 milione di pagine viste, portando il blog in testa alla classifiche dei siti più letti al mondo. Durante la campagna elettorale il blog ha fatto registrare un aumento dell'82% di accessi e del 96% in termini di pagine viste. Il ricavo annuo - stima sempre Il Sole 24 Ore - dovrebbe essere tra i 5 e 10 milioni. ” (Serafini 2013: no page).

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last debate of an active presidential campaign. In all studies, audience reactions produced large shifts in participants’ judgments of performance. -...- As can be seen in Figure 3, participants who saw a graph suggesting that their peers saw Reagan as winning the debate rated Reagan’s performance more than 15 points better than Mondale’s, whereas they rated Reagan’s performance more than 20 points worse than Mondale’s if they saw a graph suggesting that their peers saw Mondale perform better, resulting in a net difference of about 36 points (Fein et alii 2007:165,180).

In different years, Italian leaders of a left-wing coalition (between the former Communist party, lefty maximalist and reformist groups) Prodi and Veltroni (then groomed as possible prime ministers, which came true for Prodi) mingled with the faceless crowd up close and personal: Prodi assertedly 'arrived' riding a bicycle (thus giving the lie to rumors about politicians going around in princely convoys); Veltroni visited the toiling community in their dwelling places to share a communal meal while listening to their grievances.

Jesus allegedly visited and/or consorted with the rabble. In the Yucatan Maya village of Tum (Mexico), Hispanic Mayas take a statue of the Virgin Mary in a procession to each home in the neighborhood, where she remains in turn one night: god never stops visiting mortals.

French President Sarkozy went on 'surprise visits', and was seen in close company of the disadvantaged, especially people of color; newspapers later hinted the 'spontaneous' meeting between the powerful policy maker and the 'casual underdog' had been carefully arranged1226: dramaturgical moments. Italian ANSA 1226 Le Monde September 14, 2010.

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reports (July 26, 2014) how Pope Francis I had dinner with workers at a public canteen: another arch-patriarch mingles with the last and meek.

Dramaturgical moments involving a personable savior and/or patriarch are innumerable: it works every time. Jesus ( Luke 19:1ss ) makes clear he wants to stay at the wealthy tax collector's home, thus flaunting social stigma. Pope Francis I pretends to drink from the straw of a drink offered to him while he's passing amidst the Copacabana crowd aboard his jeep1227.

Hitler addresses German Siemens workers with the words:”I am one of you”, whereas African dictator Bokassa loved to describe himself as “just a soldier”:

Subtly, through clever banter, the psychopath begins to share bits of personal information, seemingly letting down his or her guard with us. These conversations resonate with you because someone is sharing personal details that reflect values, beliefs, and issues similar to your own. The psychopath’s second message is I am just like you. (Babiak&Hare 2006:76).

It isn’t that everyone is doing it; it is that everyone like me is doing it. Early adopters of products are very susceptible to social matching simply because they are in the minority and like it. They have an identity built around an idea of being first and beating the competition. (Lakhani 2005:135, emphasis added).

Again, social psychology's “leader protypicality” and a psychopath's maneuvers to control people look exactly alike: conversational emotion fluency.

Just as it might be the case with Sarkozy's (Pope Francis', Veltroni's...)

1227 Reported by Italian news site TgCom24 on 25 July 2013.

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antics, professor of religion Oden explains :â&#x20AC;?how utterly middle class were the first Christians. Christianity in its foundational period under Paul and others was essentially a bourgeois religion -...-. I can't think of any religion that doesn't say our sources were proletarianâ&#x20AC;?1228. Just like the abolitionist, Marxist and civil rights movement, the middle class -whether male and/or White- leads one ideology after another from the pulpit as the unwashed congregation dances and applauds.

According to news portal news.tiscali.it, Pope Francis I personally calls on the phone a list of casual underdogs: a young French homosexual ( August 29, 2013); an Argentinian rape victim (August 25); an Italian student (August 22), whom the Pope invites to be on a first name basis with: Jesus and the Apostles did so, in fact; a 102 year-old lady, whom he thanks for the scarf she sent him (April 18, 20141229). Underdogs the Pope nowadays calls or entertains are innumerable, according to the press. In the 1990s, training tapes of major bodybuilding champions typically featured moments in which the champion fraternizes with ordinary gym rats while on film.

A chef, also the owner of a noted company producing pasta products, calls an housewife -who doesn't know what to cook next - in order to suggest a pasta recipe: such was an Italian commercial radios aired a long time ago. In 2004, ads for Italian pay TV SKY feature international superstar John Travolta appearing 1228 1998:Defending Divine Justice.

1229 TgCom24.

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within the life of an ordinary Italian family. In a travel show, the show host -who visits a sport apparel store that belongs to a tennis legend - needs help to choose her clothes. Out of nowhere, the tennis champion steps within the camera's range to offer his help: the patriarch arrives, or the famous masonic motto Ordo Ab Chao (Order out of chaos).

Even the promotion of an aftershave or malt liquor brand soon to hit the shelves can get botched. July 22, 2014, Italian ANSA reports how stupendous Pontiff Francis I would have called the family of one girl abducted and brutally murdered in 2010: news would be on major newspapers. The very same day, ANSA also reports a statement the family had issued to the effect they had no contact whatsoever with Pope Francis: the magic show of the free press.

Patriarchs â&#x20AC;&#x201C; leaders if one prefers the jargon of contemporary management theorists and psychologists- and their ilk appear on the scene and set things straight: the arch-trickster in regalia.

What about the horde? Could pencil-necked sweat-hogs wear the patriarchal mantle as well? Of course they can. For example donating to this, that or another charity or emergency relief operation; or voting for this, that or the other candidate, meek party liners can 'make things happen', too. For example, this charity pledges to bring a smile onto the dear face of dejected children of color; that candidate vows he'll introduce drastic tax cuts alongside massive subsidies to 'make 1247 DOLT

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things happen' for both the middle class, and the social outcast:

I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, "Look, God's home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. (Revelation 21:3).

My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people. (Ezekiel 37:27).

If an object or person is to be truly efficacious within the community, they must be imbued with this enigmatic essence, this "power-tomake-things-happen", this ase. -...- Esu's control of ase gives him immense power, second only to Olodumare. Yet rather than distributing "logos" and semiotic knowledge evenly among his worshipers, he speaks in riddles and subverts attempts to maintain a clear, literal discourse. By his very nature, Esu defies categorization.

Gates says that a partial list of his "qualities might include individuality, satire, parody, irony, magic, indeterminacy, openendedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, uncertainty, disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure, encasement and rupture"(1988, 6).(Campbell 1999:22.24).

Jessica McClure was an eighteen-month-old girl in Midland, Texas, who was playing in the backyard at her aunt’s house when she fell twenty-two feet down an abandoned water well. She was wedged in the dark, subterranean crevice for 58½ hours, but the infinitesimally drawn-out media coverage made it seem as if the ordeal dragged on for weeks. -...- In the aftermath of the rescue, the McClure family received more than $700,000 in donations for Jessicaextnote. Variety and People magazine ran gripping stories on her. Scott Shaw of the Odessa American newspaper won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of the swaddled toddler in the arms of one of her rescuers. There was a TV movie called Everybody’s Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure , starring Beau Bridges and Patty Duke, and the songwriters Bobby George Dynes and Jeff Roach immortalized her in ballads. (Ariely 2010:113).

As this, that or another sublime deity out of compassion chose flesh to

e xtnote According to Xfinity News (March 25, 2011), Jessica -then 25- accessed a trust fund holding US$ 800.000 coming from the donation campaign (note of this writer).

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share the human predicament in order to bring salvation about (Orpheus, Aesculapius, Krishna, Jesus, Mahayana Buddhist Bodhisattvas 1230, Apollonius...), so the powerful policy maker – modern doppelgaenger of all those (semi)omnipotent patriarchs and shepherd-gods - mingles with the underdog, the best among us all:”Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”1231.

Stories emphasize how 'approachable' and personable hero-saviors are.

It is equally difficult to disprove public figures (especially politicians ) are trying to fit that part. Savior-god-heroes often visit mortals in disguise, and/or share a sacred communal meal with them; Saint Francis hugged lepers; Napoleon, too, was immortalized while visiting plague victims in Jaffa.

Again (and again...and again) mythical deities loved noblemen serving as shepherds (Paris -who seduced Helen thus starting the Trojan War- was a Trojan prince then serving as shepherd; Anchises; Dumuzi the shepherd and mother goddess Inanna; Ganymede...The future King David of Israel also originally served as a shepherd.

Mesopotamian rulers thought gardening a hobby fit for the greatest of Kings. Is that just a remnant of pagan imagination's figments living in the

1230 Mahayana Bodhisattvas can work prodigies and miracles. They also vow to help all sentient beings until the final extinction of all forms of suffering. They indefinitely postpone ultimate bliss/extinction (nirvana) in order to take up forms so that they may help as many sentient beings as possible. In some Mahayana schools, all things -including the inanimate- possess Buddha nature.

1231 Matthew 5:5.

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achronotopos of the bygone “age of heroes”? Didn't Saint Mary appear to a string of young shepherds and the like, too? That includes not only mainstream sanctuaries known to all, but obscure countryside locations as well, such as Notre Dame De

Dromont in southern France1232, or Madonna Del Bosco1233 at Imbersago (Italy). As well, godly shepherds include not only mainstream figures, but also peripheral ones such as XVII century Guatemalan Christian Saint Pedro de San José de Betancur (Hermano Pedro) who served as a shepherd in his youth in Tenerife.

Weren't Jesus and Krishna born among shepherds, too? When Arjuna (and his brothers) were miraculously born to Kunti, each son of an high god, thundering heavenly voices announced the great man's forthcoming greatness, and local people gathered to worship the divine children.

Furthermore, shepherd are not just limited to passive roles: St. Joan Of Arc served as a shepherdess. Abraham Lincoln came too late to fit into the pastoral scene, but he was assertedly born in a log cabin, the 'wild west', U.S equivalent of the pastoral community of yore.

Of course, some versions of the story did not need to present the godly shepherds as 'real' princes momentarily toiling away, but simply as 'noble' as their 1232 The story wants that on the premises stood a wooden cross whereby peasants gathered to pray. The virgin Mary then appeared to a young shepherd and told him a chapel dedicated to her existed right there, and that she wished to see it restored. The local landlords and the peasants then discovered the ruins of an old chapel (about XI century), possibly built upon a pagan shrine. A chapel was built there to honor St.Mary.

1233 Rumored to have appeared to three child-shepherds in 1617.

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hearts were pure. Madhu Khanna 1234 says that the message of Hindu tantra, with all the messing around with impure items and situations, is just that: if one's intentions are pure, the most foul substance or situation becomes also pure:

they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well." (Mark 16:18).

It is in these verses that we find the famous words of Jesus that those who believe in him will be able to speak in foreign tongues, pick up serpents, and drink poison without suffering any harm.But Jesus never said these words, and Mark never claimed he did. They were added to Mark by a later scribe and then recopied over the years. This is a fabricated story that has been put into the Bible by a copyist who falsified the text. (Ehrman 2011:270).

The entire obsession about shepherds possibly goes back to the Bronze Age: agriculture and urban settlements prospered, and tension arose regarding the preceding -or competing, alternative- status of herding nomads:

"When Pharaoh calls you and says, 'What is your occupation?' you shall say, 'Your servants have been keepers of livestock from our youth even until now, both we and our fathers,' that you may live in the land of Goshen; for every shepherd is loathsome to the Egyptians." (Genesis 46:33-4).

Even in ancient India, it was considered a sacrilege to approach some sacred Vedic scriptures in an urban milieu, or after engaging in impure activities.

Jesuit scholar King, however, explains why would Jesus talk about vineyards, fishermen and shepherds:â&#x20AC;?He talks of daily life because it's going to be in 1234 2014.

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our daily life where we meet god”1235.

Savior-hero-founders -paying a primitive homage to class struggleseemingly love mingling with

bottom-feeders, the last, meek and dejected:

shepherds, fishermen, prostitutes, drifters, lepers, transgressors, slaves, beggars are purposefully chosen as their confidants, subjects, disciples, and ideal companions. St. Paul explicitly discarded pivotal Jewish rites and taboos with the objective of making the new religion more palatable to the masses. In an era of communal living, food taboos; and in an era that valued gymnasia and public baths, circumcision would be dead giveaways.

Livy describes the bulk of divine Romulus' subjects thus:”Hither fled for refuge all the rag-tag-and-bobtail from the neighboring peoples: some free, some slaves, and all of them wanting nothing but a fresh start. ”1236. In Buddhism:

special characteristic inherited by birth was called jātimayaṃ lingaṃ.

Therefore, thousands of species are different from one another on the basis of jātimayaṃ lingaṃ. As far as human beings are concerned, however, there is no jātimayaṃ lingaṃ. -...- According to Aggañña Sutta, in the primitive society the people were all equal ( sadisānaṃ no asadisānaṃ) and later on the various social groups emerged on the principle of dhamma (Abeynayake, ME6208 no date: The Buddhist Arguments On The Oneness Of Humankind).

Marginals, inferiors, and others who live between categories or near boundaries often have an above-average susceptibility to paranoid ideas. By necessity they must be especially sensitive to threats to their 1235 1994:God And The Secular World.

1236 Livy 1960:33-51.

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well-being. They understand that elites are unlikely to be attentive to their needs and often conceal information from them. Many examples can be cited. (Hansen 2001:299).

Savior-hero-founders of very lax standards who recruit the scum of the Earth (=restyled in terms of an awesome vanguard according to whichever scale is adopted) is not just a strategy fit for hero-saviors of bygone ages:

But I am very hopeful. There seems to be a new kind of Christianity emergingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a Christianity that is closer to the poor and broken people forsaken in the abandoned shadows of the empire. Folks are hungry for a Christianity that mirrors Jesus, not the judgmentalism that has done more to repel than to woo people towards grace. (Clayborne 2008:70).

The Jews then were astonished, saying, "How has [Jesus] become learned, having never been educated?" (John 7:15).

Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus. (Acts 4:13).

There has always been a small segment of society described as odd, off, peculiar, flaky, quirky, different, eccentric, weird. For centuries it has been anecdotally observed that such people are also creative. This oddness is typically not its own separate entity, but reflects a mild form of psychotic spectrum illness, usually bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Mild psychiatric conditions can include certain symptoms such as hypomania or nonconformity which seem to be especially useful for creative endeavors. Hypomania, for example, boosts energy while enhancing affective attunementâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; a mental state particularly useful in creative writing and music composition. (Polimeni 2012:87).

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believe in the potential of the relationship to go further; we believe this person will be a true friend. (Babiak&Hare 2006:77).

Joseph [Smith, founder of Mormonism] “could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well-worded letter, let alone dictat[e] a book like the Book of Mormon.” ( Book Of Mormon...no date:no page).

As Muhammad was said to be illiterate, he had to commit the Quran to memory so that he could transmit it accurately to his followers. The allusion to illiteracy is found in the twenty-ninth surah or chapter entitled “The Spider,” when Allah addresses Muhammad “Never have you read a book before this, nor have you ever transcribed one with your right hand” (29:48).

Muhammad’s enemies claimed that he had arranged to have stories of the ancients written down so that “they could be read out to him morning and evening” (26:6), another indication that he was unable to read and write. “It is not the words of a poet . . . nor the words of a soothsayer. . . . It is a revelation from the Lord of the Universe’’ (69:41-43). Whether or not Muhammad was actually illiterate is in dispute. One theory is that he only feigned illiteracy in order to emphasize the miraculous nature of the divine revelation and to remove any possible speculation that he had composed the Quran himself (Zwemer 1939:l00-120) (Dundes 2003:2).

Part of the miracle of both books is that Muhammad and Joseph Smith were uneducated men when they produced them. The Qur'an often refers to Muhammad as the ummi prophet, typically believed to mean the unlettered prophet (Harris 2007:90).

Savior-heroes (Jesus, Krishna, Romulus, Buddha) love the rabble so much they forsake the realm of the high gods to take flesh on Earth. It shall be emphasized how the relationship between the savior-hero-founder and the rabble in his retinue is eminently reciprocal: Romulus cannot become a King without subjects, and nobody else (better?) is ready to follow him. Also, ambiguities may 1254 DOLT

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arise regarding the savior's true call:”Then Jesus said to the [Canaanite] woman, "I was sent only to help God's lost sheep--the people of Israel."” (Matthew 15:24).

If founders Mohamed and Joseph Smith were deemed illiterate, or semiliterate, so was Buddhist monk Hui Neng (VII/VIII century CE): the VI patriarch of Chinese Chan Buddhism. The patriarch started his career as a layman, an illiterate kitchen helper in a monastery (Cinderella style) who (just like Cinderella) surpassed all monks in his wisdom. Cinderella in the end marries the prince, whereas Hui Neng becomes the patriarch in exile.

Heroes and saviors not only delight in the rabble's company, but also go further by engaging in the most frowned upon actions in its service. One savior may want to wash people's feet1237; volunteers from most provinces of the political spectrum may want to go 'save' the dejected in the Third World; Gandhi challenges untouchability by performing menial jobs such as emptying latrines; Chinese Emperor Wudi embraced Buddhism, and later went on to serve as a menial in Tongtai monastery in 547 CE. Some western inner city dweller may want to 'sacrifice' his free time going on an 'alternative holiday' in order to toil away in some developing country's outback:”This is the general outline for an answer to why pollutions are often used in renewal rites.”1238.

1237 This seemingly trivial purification ritual not only recurs in Mediterranean cultures, but it's also part of the traditional Khmer marriage ceremony.

1238 Douglas 1966:164.

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But psychopaths, Ohira and Osumi discovered, play the game rather differently. Not only do they show greater willingness to accept unfair offers, favoring simple economic utility over the exigencies of punishment and ego preservation, they are much less bothered by inequity. (Dutton 2012:59).

After he successfully conquered Mecca, and rededicated the Kaaba to the true one god, Mohamed (as both world leader and messenger of god) allowed Bilal, a freed African slave, to perform the call to prayer. Over ten centuries earlier, Upali, the former barber of Gautama when he was a prince, led -at the I Buddhist councilthe recitation of the monastic rule: Buddha himself had extolled his proficiency in that domain. In Buddhist Ghatikara Sutta, Gautama Buddha in a previous high caste birth exclaims in delight:”'Indeed it is wonderful, indeed it is marvellous, that this potter Ghaṭīkāra, being of lowly birth, should lay hold of my hair ”.

In other versions -as there always are competing versions- Upali is not Gautama's barber, but the barber of Sariputta and Moggallana, two of Gautama Buddha's chief disciples of noble descent, who also request Upali be ordained before them, thus becoming their senior: a metaphor for the new society's blueprint.

The rabble, in turn, heaps praise, titles, and cooks aggrandizing tales about the savior-hero-founder, which invariably grow taller by the generation.

That's what Goffman refers to as the deference-demeanor dynamic. The rabble, outcast or liminal figures (women, slaves, beggars...) are those who recognize the savior-hero first:”Trickster figures have particular appeal to marginal (low status) 1256 DOLT

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groups. In ancient Greece, aristocrats viewed merchants and craftsmen [associated with trickster-god Hermes] with suspicion and disdain. -...-The affinity between the trickster and marginal groups is also found in our culture.”1239.

Even Mohamed (Quran surah 80) at first scoffs at a blind man trying to interrupt the prophet's sermon to eminent Meccan chiefs. Allah then intervenes, and the blind man (=metaphor of blindness) is considered a sincere convert who wants -thus deserves- to be taught, possibly the inverse of those tribal chiefs who still need persuasion.

The rabble and the 'great man' become one:

"The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'(Matthew 25:40).

Whoever would tend to me, should tend to the sick.

(Gautama Buddha, Kucchivikara-Vatthu).

Vulgarity, scatology, and ugliness [in Sartre] all raise issues of either deliberate violation of civility or uncontrollable breaches in it. (Charmé 1991:30).

To appease inner dissonance, the rabble heaps praise upon the 'great man': it usually serves as a proxy for some almighty, in turn an ersatz for absolute values such as righteousness:”The idea of permission is ingrained in us from a very early age. Giving permission encourages people to take the actions you want them

1239 Hansen 2001:43.

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to take.”1240.

The rabble also abjectly crawls in self-denial so that the deferencedemeanor routine may circularly unfold:”Remove from us the devious attraction of sin, tempting or misleading darkness -...- this tempting power is always there -...we would create for you [=the god Agni=mystic fire] the greatest surrender ” 1241. In the Gita, Arjuna and Krishna address each other with innumerable salutations and honorific nicknames.

The 'great man' then invites the underdog (liminal figure, pencil-necked sweat-hog...) to sit to his right-hand as vanguard:

And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son [=Jesus after baptism], whom I love; with him I am well pleased." ” (Matthew 3:17).

He lifts the poor from the dust and the needy from the garbage dump. He sets them among princes, placing them in seats of honor. For all the earth is the LORD's, and he has set the world in order. (1 Samuel 2:8).

With the rating information in hand, Ann and her colleagues could compare which paintings the participants liked more, the ones from Third Moon or the ones from Lone Wolfe. As you might suspect, when the researchers examined the ratings they found that participants gave more favorable ratings to the paintings that came from their sponsoring gallery. You might think that this preference for the sponsoring gallery was due to a kind of politeness—or maybe just lip service, the way we compliment friends who invite us for dinner even when the food 1240 Lakhani 2005:132.

1241 Yatsenko on the Isha Upanishad, MAISI011 no date: lecture 3.

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is mediocre. This is where the fMRI part of the study came in handy. Suggesting that the effects of reciprocity run deep, the brain scans showed the same effect; the presence of the sponsor’s logo increased the activity in the parts of the participants’ brains that are related to pleasure (particularly the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is responsible for higher-order thinking, including associations and meaning). This suggested that the favor from the sponsoring gallery had a deep effect on how people responded to the art. And get this: when participants were asked if they thought that the sponsor’s logo had any effect on their art preferences, the universal answer was “No way, absolutely not.” -...-.The magnitude of brain activation in the pleasure centers of the brain was lowest when the payment was $30, higher when the payment was $100, and highest when the payment was $300. (Ariely 2012:39).

Jesus and his apostles; Buddha and his elders; Confucius and his pupils are no different from Krishna (in the Gita) and his vibhutis (co-operators). Krishna explains to Arjuna how he, the supreme godhead, is the Ganges among the rivers; the Sun among the lights; Vishnu among the gods; Vyasa (author of the

Mahabharata) among the sages; consciousness among faculties etc.

A slave woman recognizes both Ulysses and Ratthapala as they come home after the hero's journey; Magdalene recognizes Jesus after his resurrection. A slave woman/maid first sees Gautama Buddha meditating under the Banyan tree.

She reports the sight of a god to her mistress Sujata, who feeds Buddha on the brink of death after 49 days of fasting, thus showing him the middle way is the most appropriate.

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the deitiesâ&#x20AC;?; the lore has it that Confucius, like Jesus and suchlike figures, was of noble descent, and that supernatural wonders, dragons and spirits greeted his birth.

Taoist founder Lao-Tzu shall return as harbinger of a golden age after judgment day according to some Taoist sects; in 325 CE at Nicaea, Constantine temporarily macadamizes many Christian factions by proclaiming Jesus' divinity.

Such is the case not only in Christianity, but in Buddhism, too, whereby -especially with later Mahayana- the praise, supernatural wonders and detail devoted to celebrate Gautama Buddha -and his countless celestial or spiritual counterparts- really know no bounds.

Buddha even turns into a sort of omnipotent, omnipresent, loving heavenly father-god. Taoism and Confucianism follow the same course, too. This is not confined to folklore relating to awkward figures supposedly greater than life, but recurs in everyday life as so many people routinely cook tall tales up about this friend, relative, classmate, confederate etc of theirs.

Do such tall and obstreperous tales not amount to a statement the rabble -by proxy- makes about itself? Much as Persigny in mid-XIX century France was instrumental in engineering Napoleon III's accession to power through deft political maneuvers, he also needed Napoleon III to act as grantor for his personal fortune (nobility titles, prestigious appointments, sinecures, cash awards...).

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Do the bombastic statements, tall tales and wonders the party liner refers to the great man/idea not reflect -albeit indirectly- onto the party liner himself?

Doesn't the party liner give thus unmistakable proof of refined taste and pinpointed sensibility, for he chose just the right idea, hero, politician or armband? Isn't the party liner in this situation acting just like another infomercial character, whose heightened skills or sensibility warranted the choice of the best malt liquor, condom or espresso coffee brand?

The choice, which the ad industry foisted on frazzled viewers through artful manipulation, becomes then one's own. Religion and politics plot of course the same trajectory:

For each of the three problems for which participants had to come up with their own solutions, we gave them a list of fifty words and told them to use only these words to create their proposed solution.

The trick was that each list was made of the words that made up our solution to that particular problem and several synonyms for each of these words. We hoped that this procedure would give the participants the feeling of ownership, while guaranteeing that their answers would be the same as ours.-...- We compared the value participants attributed to the three solutions we gave them with the three solutions that they “came up with.” Again, we found that participants appreciated their own solutions more. Even when we could not attribute the increase in perceived brilliance of the ideas to objective quality or to their idiosyncratic fit, the ownership component of the Not-Invented-Here bias was still going strong. At the end of the day, we concluded that once we feel that we have created something, we feel an increased sense of ownership—and we begin to overvalue the usefulness and the importance of “our” ideas. (Ariely 2010:561242).

1242 The dynamics at work here are similar to those

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Gandhi's stroke of genius was to turn the Indian independence movement from the lot of intellectuals in galosh, bowler hat and bowtie, or outrĂŠ insurrectionists and their secretive cabals, into a mass-movement that recruited the faceless rabble in rags.

Gandhi himself left behind the galosh and bowler hat of his (failed) law career, and became someone who:

lived a very frugal lifestyle, scorning most material needs, in the pursuit of knowledge. These Indian ascetic sages seem to have particularly impressed Western authors. Indeed, many authors seem to see Indian ascetics as paragons of self-sufficiency and other virtues.

In some of the literature, authors use accounts of Indian ascetics to support moral or rhetorical treatises, emphasizing, eliding, or even changing certain details about the Indians as befits the particular argument.

"I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." (John 16:33, emphasis added).

The best within the pack are the first to give the example, which -in recent decades- has been presented as the unparalleled pinnacle of post-war ethical thinking. To be more clear, Latin-American Zapotec milieus also prefer hacer el

balance (reach an equilibrium) in the collective function of justice based upon melodramatic displays and sentimental exchange of emotional currency:

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The language of healing casts the consequences of collective violence in terms of trauma; the paradigm is health, rather than justiceâ&#x20AC;?...- The last fifteen years have witnessed an unprecedented number of public 1262 DOLT

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apologies on behalf of one group for wrongs suffered by another. We might add to the list apologies by the Pope for past actions of the Catholic Church, by European heads of state for treatment of Jews during the Holocaust, by the Japanese government for treatment of Korean women during the second World War, by the Southern Baptist Church for complicity in regard to slavery in America, and a variety of other examples. (Pettigrove 2003:3,8).

Yet, a substantial body of evidence, some controlled and some anecdotal or historical, shows that many victims seek forms of satisfaction, vindication, or resolution that are not vengeful even where they are retributive or that are not only or necessarily retributive. Victims seeking retribution are willing to see an impersonal, measured, and socially sanctioned act of retribution as appropriate vindication in part because it represents a public and communally shared response rather than a private act of reprisal.

Furthermore, retributive responses are not the only way to achieve a public and socially shared vindication. Victims do not typically seek, it seems, to visit back on their offenders what they have suffered themselves. (Walker 2006:89).

Hacer el balance recurs in several cultures the world over, for example the figure of the juez de las aguas (judge of waters) in charge of irrigation and water matters in both Incaic -later Hispanic- regions, and Arab Iberia.

The pendulum of opportunity swings incessantly between bipolar opposites. Schizophrenic masses on one end clamor for total war in selfaggrandizement, and commit mass-murder; on the other, they put ashes over their heads, and abjectly crawl in unrestricted self-denial, as Nietzsche had explored in depth: co-dependency.

Again, what is not only accepted but celebrated under the fig leaf of

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politics, religion or folklore, is typically shunned or judged a mental disturbance in individuals such as masochists enjoying pain or humiliation inflicted upon them, or sadists enjoying inflicting pain and humiliation upon others. Sadists, masochists and other purported paraphiliacs in fact enact carefully scripted rituals, dramaturgical moments: it is not just a question of slapping or being slapped around.

The inherently schizophrenic, bipolar human mind yearns for fantasies of blood baths, ultimate reckoning, dismemberment and the like, much as it alternatively yearns for oneness, tactile hugs and kisses. Exchange of emotional currency bridges between the two stages: the (social) sacrament of reconciliation.

The entire mechanism is one of (morbid) co-dependency.

People who -at one point in time- were bitter opponents busy desecrating one another's mystical bodies, are equally busy -at a later point in timeengaging in making amends, cuddling, brotherly embraces and reconciliatory kisses:”A experiência tátil seria, por assim dizer, modelo da experiência psíquica. -...A ternura é, portanto, inicialmente tátil!” ( Tactile experience ought to act -so to speak- as model for psychical experience -...- tenderness is thus tactile to begin with)1243.

In 1995 movie Crying Freeman, a mafioso hit man weeps after each execution: what a beautiful soul. In Italy in 2014, a person murders three people he 1243 Fontes 2006: no page.

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owed money to after trying to extort additional money from them. He even murders a “granny” (“nonnina”) who lived downstairs. He hides the body after a parting kiss (“le ho dato un bacio”) because “his heart was breaking” (“mi si stava spezzando il cuore”), and he was sorry about killing the “nonnina” (“ero dispiaciuto”) 1244: what a gage of emotional integrity, and tactile awareness.

This may look awkward to the casual observer. Nevertheless, humankind has been toying with such seemingly eerie concepts since time immemorial. Such figures as that of the “harlot with a heart of gold”, or that of “noble highwaymen” a la Robin Hood easily rally enthusiasm. This shows that various categories of moral defectives and sociopaths can -indeed- be better than the casual observer no matter what they might be up to.

Is it by sheer chance that both Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, and posters to publicize the movie E.T (1982) portray two outstretched fingers about to touch? Again, the great tragedy that shapes collective consciousness looks increasingly like a Tom&Jerry cartoon: a genealogy of hyperaesthesia (=abnormal increase in sensitivity to sensory stimuli).

Newly elected politicians compete to secure the approval of this, that or another powerful minority or organized lobby. Hulk Hogan vehemently protests he only bows down before someone who walks on water. Medieval knights received a 1244 Numa 2014: no page.

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symbolic slap on the face from their overlord: the only offense they were supposed to tolerate.

'Divine philosopher' Rousseau wrote about “le joug des lois, ce joug salutaire et doux que les têtes les plus fières ne rougissent pas de porter, parce qu'elles ne sont pas faites pour en porter d'autres ” (the burden of the laws; this burden so welcome that the most proud won't blush to bear as they're meant to bear no other)1245;”Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. ” (Matthew 11:29-30).

If the best in the pack are so uninhibited about their allegiances, it must mean those credos or values are the best, indeed. 'The good guys' choose only the best gods and causes, much as that nice chap in the infomercial always chooses the right malt liquor, condom or detergent brand.

This applies even when international stars such as Telly Savalas, Robert Wagner or Peter Falk are recruited to act as testimonial for Italian brands (a brand of spirits for Savalas; a tea brand for Wagner; a supermarket chain for Falk), which -of course- are unlikely to be part of their daily life to start with.

1245 This definition sounds quite similar to Islamic theology, whereby the true believer puts god at the center of his life. Allah thus becomes the only reality the believer submits to. As this writing contends, the same ideas return circularly. Hindu philosophy equally preaches surrender to god. Ages before Mohamed, Hindu Rig Veda (XV century BCE or older) qualified the god Savitar (the creator) thus:”worthy of surrendering to ”. Medieval knights as well suffered a symbolic slap from their overlord: the only outrage they were pledged to suffer without retaliation.

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It all goes a long way back in time as part and parcel of the human mind's obsessions. The philosopher Dio (40-115 CE) had already depicted a King of Kings (in that case a young Alexander) being advised thus :” Will you not throw off this armour which you now wear, don a worker's tunic, and serve your betters, instead of going about wearing a ridiculous diadem? ”1246; another King of Kings (the Emperor Trajan) was addressed thus:”What can give greater pleasure than a gentle and kindly ruler who desires to serve all and has it in his power so to do? ” 1247; the ten main duties Buddhism prescribes to Kings include the readiness to sacrifice everything for the subjects' welfare. Jesus said:”For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.” (Luke 22:27).

Ben-Shahar's overview of scholarship 1248 concludes that the best leaders are selfless servants. Is it by sheer chance that immemorial, pre-industrial philosophies, Pope Francis I, and the best minds of today's organizational theory agree about the figure of the best leader as selfless servant? “rather, [Jesus] made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” (Philippians 2:7).

Why is this idea recurring circularly in spite of not resonating with most real-life practice as experienced from most real-life leaders? Are the politicking 1246 Discourses,4, no date: no page.

1247 Dio, Discourses, 1, no date: no page.

1248 2005-6a: lecture 13.

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banksters (banda del 5% , five percent gang, from the loot they assertedly divided among themselves1249) behind the multi-billionaire financial crack of Italian bank

MPS an example?

It is therefore not the main question whether this, that or another historical or pseudo-historical character did (or not) relish in serving others, or in being subjected to indignities, for it is the same old human mind's circular obsession at work, in turn inserting a character of choice into the petrified narrative and its high points. “The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others -...-One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero -...- is that one lives only for self while the other acts to redeem society”1250.

This clearly explains how human mind's schizophrenic tendencies strive to recognize -again, again and again- the faces of the (semi)omnipotent patriarchs, saviors, heroes, founders of immemorial lore in real-life bohemians, debauchers, banksters, frauds, squanderers, mafiosi, psychopaths tabloids reveal as the real individual behind public relations' carefully painted mask of selfless 'great man' on a quest to redeem the brutish flock in the name of this, that or another foolish utopia culled from long-dead hacks.

1249 “secondo Cortese, Baldassari e Pontone erano “conosciuti nell'ambiente finanziario come la banda del 5% perché su ogni operazione del loro gruppo prendevano tale percentuale” (probabilmente anche su quella sospetta effettuata con la triangolazione Mps-Lutifin-Dresdner). ” Telara 2013: no page.

1250 Campbell&Moyers 1991:6.

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Saviors and founders scandalize, scold and try to reform the mainstream.

Persuasion and NLP author Lakhani quips:

Understanding what the beliefs are of the people you are trying to persuade allows you to focus on building on their current beliefs rather than trying to change them or create a new belief. -...-People are most likely to change their beliefs when they are searching for a solution to a problem that has caused them stress, concern, or confusion. Emotional release allows them to create new beliefs quickly. (2005:93). they embrace the current social ethos on one end, and pillory it on the other:”But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ” ( Matthew 5:28)1251. Marx thought he had drastically improved upon Christian and utopian Socialism; Jesus wanted to perfect Judaism, much as Gautama Buddha improved upon Hinduism.

Powlinson1252 triumphantly announces that Christian counselors “have a system that promises to do much, much more” than secular psychological theories ever could. In the 1920-40s as paternalistic statism was so popular, disagreements existed over which variant was best: Mussolini's, Roosevelt's, Hitler's, Salazar's, Vargas'...

The result was a war welfare state, a phenomenon that became, as the historian Lawrence Stone observed, the norm for 1251 Buddhism imparts the opposite advice:”For one person may be controlled in his bodily behavior with his control in doing an extensive course of duty know to all, though his verbal and mental behaviors are not controlled. Then the latter should be ignored and the control in his bodily behavior remembered.”

Visudimaggha, ix, 328.

1252 1995:lecture 7.

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advanced societies during the twentieth century (Schaffer 1991:xii).

Much as Social-Communist regimes constituted a sort of mixed bag, so did paternalistic-statist regimes. If Hitler was murderously and frantically judeophobic, “President Roosevelt today received the Gottheil Medal of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. The medal was presented by Harold Riegelman, New York attorney, “for distinguished service to Jewry””1253. One mysterious character some consider instrumental in Hitler's rise to power was, however, the self-styled Danish aristocratic occultist, astrologer and psychic E.J. Hanussen, who was born H. Steinschneider, a Moravian Jew; Hanussen1254 fell victim of Hitler's purges in 1933.

In order for the rabble saviors, heroes and founders rouse to play the part of vanguard, taboos and virtues have to be redefined, often in a hyperbolic way that cripples the very concept of right and wrong, being and not being. This isn't exclusive to Christianity: Buddhism in China, for example, recruited among the lower classes and was shunned by upper classes at the beginning, which can be said of all major religions.

Isn't that the celebration of the nincompoop who becomes like one of 1253 Roosevelt Gets...1937:no page. According to news on JTA, Roosevelt -and his consort in her own right at other points in time- also received other awards such as “The American Hebrew Medal”(March 7, 1939 for F.D Roosevelt).

1254 He apparently shared with Rasputin the capacity of hypnotist and thaumaturge. Just as Rasputin had allegely forewarned the royal house that a war would prove fatal, so Hanussen had purportedly forewarned Hitler of the danger of unbridled political maximalism. Both Hanussen and Rasputin issued precise prophecies regarding doom soon to unfold: twelve years of duration for Hitler's rule; a lease of life of about two years -proffered in 1915- for the Imperial family.

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the many almighties, who brings worlds into being by simply invoking them, or thinking about it? Furthermore, the image of the savior-founder scandalizing the mainstream is recruited later – the criterion of embarrassment and discontinuity- to lend subsequent credibility to the whole jumble of myths, facts and pseudo-facts under the label such embarrassing (= contrary to the time's mainstream attitude ) facts wouldn't have been reported if honestly believed to be false. Conclusions also apply to UFO, paranormal doom and other extraordinary claims of all kinds.

Do transformational psychology pundits not claim throughout endless series of tapes, books and videos that 'the magic of will' can accomplish mostly anything right there and then? From making one overcome depression, eating disorders, grief, to making one rich quick in a sort of 'American-dream'-themed Michael J. Fox movie without most plot contrivances?

Both Hindu Vedanta philosophy and Jesus1255 claim that faith alone operates miracles. What about awesome Tibetan Buddhist sages who, through their tantric mastery of the inner world and its elusive energies, can purportedly control even the weather in the outside world? Does it not sound like another rendition of the pathetic fallacy?

How different is that from conventional animism, Melanesian cargo

1255 “He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering."” ( Mark 5:34)

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religions, whereby the savior (=restorer of the societal fabric= bestower of spiritual boons), hero (=U.S soldier in military fatigue) and conferrer of material boons (=the Santa Claus motif) soon to return co-exist:

To encourage this, clearings were built in the forest to attract the cargo-bearing aircraft and altars (the Christian religious connection) placed in the clearings. These altars didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bear the familiar religious symbols of the Catholic Church, but crudemodels of transport aircraft.

(Wotton 2007:1).

When you know your archetype, you live your destiny, not your fate.

You live a truly empowered life guided by synchronicity that shows you the doors you should walk through and those you should avoid.

(About Archetypes no date: no page).

Anthropologist H. Whitehouse relates a variant of cargo religion he studied in New Guinea. Locals there practice a form of religion called Kibo, according to which their ancestors -and not some character a la John Frum- would come back from death to bring the bounty of western technology to their devotees; the rain forest would disappear, and marvelous buildings would appear.

Magic of will, indeed. On a different wavelength on a different date, Ben-Shahar1256 pillories positive thinking divorced from action. The 'magic of will' is scaled down to -in more simpler terms- :'have faith in god, but tie your camel tight'.

If the mind has magic powers, everybody is a (potential) sinner (arsonist, rapist, thief...) threatening the entire universe through quantum entanglement, six

1256 2009: lecture 5.3.

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degrees of separation, Buddha nature, the matrix... Everybody is deep down as tainted and discredited as the newly roused rabble: shame shamanism.

By this very sophism, the rable is authorized to teach moral lessons, and to act as vanguard. Pure Land Buddhist monastic Wuling, 'green' progressives, positive psychologists, chaos and quantum theorists, and a host of diverse characters all toot the same horn.

Modern psychology and progressivism adopt the same approach (for example: everybody is a latent homosexual, ...ist etc ). Criminals and outcasts ought not to be criticized too harshly, for we all are (potential) victims of innermost violent drives, compulsions, and bizarre twists of fate.

Real criminals are just tormented souls who fell victims of their flimsy and unaccountable human nature -which is ours, too- and of a series of '...isms' that predetermined their fate, much as Christian lore emphasizes an inescapable original sin; the unavoidable chain of karma yanked by the almost irresistible greed, hatred, delusion, doubt, sloth and torpor in Buddhism; the pre-written Mesopotamian tablets of destiny (=the same kind of hard predestination found in Calvinism ages later1257)...

The definition of the primeval pack of followers -freshly awaken to 1257 â&#x20AC;&#x153;To execute vengeance on the nations And punishment on the peoples, To bind their kings with chains And their nobles with fetters of iron, carrying out the judgment decreed against them. This honor is for all His godly people. Hallelujah!â&#x20AC;? (Psalm 149:8-9).

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truth, liberty etc- as rabble is not exactly some rude disbeliever's fancy. The 'honest crowd' clamoring against Persia's Mossadeq reforms -and for the Shah's return - is -according to mainstream accounts- an idle rabble foreign intelligence agitators had recruited in perfect Bernays style.

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Ever since the arrival of fledgling Ukrainian democracy in the early 1990s it had been standard operating procedure to pay people to attend political rallies, but since the Orange Revolution the entire concept of people power has been abused to such a degree that it has lost all credibility. The Orange Revolution raised the stakes enormously in what up until then had been a relatively limited contest. It was a game-changer that made paid protests a central pillar of the country’s post-Orange political pluralism and in many ways guaranteed the rapid erosion of the genre’s credibility. -...- Before the advent of the Orange Revolution, paid crowds had largely been used as a supplementary strategy to harass and to embarrass political rivals.

After the Orange Revolution this changed overnight and the mass rally became the weapon of choice - something which could be deployed to paralyze parliament and bring down governments. It proved the advent of an age of political tourism, with rural Ukrainians – largely from the Party of Regions heartlands of southern and eastern Ukraine – were brought to the capital in their tens of thousands to stand listlessly on Independence Square, drink vodka and goggle at the relative consumer riches of downtown Kyiv. The nadir was reached during the spring 2007 showdown following President Yushchenko’s call for fresh parliamentary elections, which saw Kyiv brought to a standstill for almost two months. Every morning coach convoys brought hordes of villagers snaking into Kyiv’s river port terminal, to then be marched up the hill to Independence Square. This regimented debacle of the unwashed went on relentlessly for weeks and led to swirling rumours about outbreaks of cholera as well as considerable Kyivite anger at the conduct of this bussed in protester army. -...- This rent-a-mob culture actually has its roots in the Soviet era and had been developed significantly in the perestroika years as a method by which the Party could mount a defence of its crumbling ideological empire by bussing loyalists to trouble spots during the rising independence movements of 1989-91. Its post-Soviet practice is by no means limited to Ukraine – Russia and most other former Soviet A PEDLAR, A PRIG AND A

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republics have embraced the method with equal if not greater enthusiasm. (People Power Peaks...2011:no page, emphasis added).

Police shot [Afro-American] Mr. Thomas while trying to escape capture .Residents in an adjacent apartment complex witnessed the shooting, and the word soon spread. Anger grew about this latest shooting of an unarmed suspect. -...-Mr. Thomas was cited 20 times in three months. Multiple charges of driving without a drivers license and seat belt violations were filed against Mr. Thomas and allowed to accumulate into 14 open warrants. -...- the crowd attending the April 9, 2001 City Council meeting, spilled into the streets turning into civil unrest [Cincinnati Riots, 2001]. The people that looted and damaged their own neighborhood in the name of a person they had probably never met used this tragedy to line their pockets al the city's expense and reputation. The riot became a "Theft Olympics" and a "Criminal Convention" exploited by opportunists. -...-The actions of less than one thousand individuals plunged Cincinnati's other 330,000 residents into an apartheid-like curfew, criminalizing the right to go work or socialize . For four days the police had the right to stop people and question their motives and right to travel based upon the "riot” atmosphere in the city. Looters just need an excuse to rob and steal.

They were stealing before the unrest stared, and after it cooled down they would steal again; just not as boldly. The death of one or more persons by the police will not turn innocent citizens into 'Robin Hood' style outlaws. The national Black leaders arrived in town, some to actually help the situation, others to “pimp" the moment. The " fringe crazies" arrived. Some came to participate while others were trying to make a name for themselves. (Davis 2001:1-4).

In 2014, the same screenplay seems to unfold in Ukraine once again: a shower of sacred blood rains all over...once more. This time the code-word is no longer an elusive “orange thirst” for freedom, but an equally vague “European choice”.

Livy explains thus what happened when Romulus proposed to neighboring communities to send women to wed to his subjects:

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More often than not his envoys were dismissed with the question of whether Rome had thrown open her doors to female, as well as to male, runaways and vagabonds, as that would evidently be the most suitable way for Romans to get wives. (Livy 1960:33-51).

Much like Wertz1258 claims, literature is an immemorial societal tool to come to grips with -and hopefully soothe or resolve – social conflicts through “morality plays” that allow symbolic retribution, (partial) reversal of roles and so forth:

The riddle's relationship to group ideology is therefore somewhat unique among traditional genres, in that it creates a play world in which forbidden beliefs and practices can be safely explored. In this sense it defines group boundaries negatively, in terms of what a group does not believe. (Thatcher 1996:170).

Liminality involves an equalizing (or even an inversion) of status, a blurring of distinctions. One of the trickster’s duties is to lower or invert status and to induce marginality. Margins refer to positions at or near boundaries. (Hansen 2001:306).

Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.

While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. -...- The hierarchical background and the extreme corporative and caste divisions of the medieval social order were exceptionally strong. Therefore such free, familiar contacts were deeply felt and formed an essential element of the carnival spirit.

People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations.

These truly human relations were not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced. The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience, unique of its kind (Bakhtin 1984:7,10).

1258 1969.

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Starting with ancient mystery religions 1259, the purpose of most religions is in fact -paying homage to class struggle as a recruiting strategy- to act as theoretical equalizers, taking the garb up of universal religions whereby ancient gods -such as Mithras or Isis- absorb new powers, and spread all across the Mediterranean world, at first Hellenistic, and later Roman.

During the times of the struggle for, and path after Indian independence, the collective grievances of the untouchables were apparently so ignored that a few leaders -and their mass of followers- converted to Buddhism in order the escape the caste system. Earlier on, the same had likely happened with Islam (=conversion in order to escape the caste system). People had equally converted en masse to Catholicism in the Portuguese colonies in India (about 1/3 of Goa's population is still Catholic): a conversion that allowed to escape the caste system.

Later still, hobos, proletarians -and other social outcasts not necessarily dejected1260 such as segments among Jews, bourgeois and intellectuals- would embrace Marxist doctrines, or another secular religion that allowed for instant social mobility under the socio-economic quake they produced in some countries.

Early Buddhist psychology had charted the dynamic millennia before 1259 Experts argue that mystery religions â&#x20AC;&#x201C; such as Mithras'- often transgressed caste or social boundaries in the pursuit of higher unity by welcoming then outcast or liminal groups such as slaves and women, which were rubbing elbows on equal footing as initiates with members of other social classes.

1260 In an interview, Chilean Fascist intellectual Serrano acknowledged the public regarded him as a sort of lunatic novelty of no import.

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talented XIX century wisenheimers and their secularized talmuds:

Therefore, hatred character canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fulfill his/her social services or duties introduced by the culture. The failure of fulfilling social norms and duties bring him ill fame in the social context. Finally hatred character trends to hate the society where he/she lives -...-The person whom led by hatred is unable to understand good and bad. This mental distortion, brought by hatred, causes further to bring about various self annihilation tendencies such as selfblame, self-punishment, being too hard on oneself, and heavy guilty feelings. ( Priyadarshana, ME6210 no date:chapter 7:3).

Much as so-called sinners and bottom-feeders could herald the new age of a new religion, so affluent bourgeois and bohemian intellectuals could herald the new age of new socio-economic paradigms without any sense of inconsistency, irony or ridicule.

In the Belle Epoque China torn between the clutches of foreign imperialism, inadequate or sabotaged Imperial reforms and underdevelopment, many Chinese found convenient to convert to Christianity in order to both court favors from influential foreigners, and to escape from traditional hierarchy and collective responsibilities.

The invisible hand of Christian missionaries is seen behind Chinese insurrectionist leader Hong Xiuquan (Taiping Rebellion, 1850-64), who believed to be Jesus' brother, and who wanted to overthrow the corrupt/inept bureaucracies (=Hong had failed several times the imperial exam to enter the State apparatus) and

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false religions (Confucianism/Buddhism) to bring about a heavenly kingdom in Taiping based upon Christian doctrines, which he would later head as “heavenly King”. Taiping insurrectionists allegedly failed to gain assistance from European powers: several million people died during the rebellion (20 million accord to T.H. Reilly1261).

The Emperor and the peasant; the upper class litterateur and the illiterate hobo; residents of shanty towns and posh gated communities alike, all come together as one through the prism of religion and consequent membership in artificial kin groups:

The moments of racial, class and gender reversal in these folkloric [Francoist] musicals should not blind one to their conservative plots.

But their self-conscious staginess at least makes the viewer aware that the fantasies of miscegenation being enacted on screen are just that: fantasies.(Labanyi in Brah&Coombes 2000:68).

The 'last and meek' of the Christian imagery, the 'proletarians and dispossessed' of the 'scientific Socialism', the 'Aryans' of the NSDAP mythology scheming coteries robbed of their heritage/due/plus-value etc will one day turn tables on their oppressors.

In Lucian's (II century CE) Voyage To The Lower World , Micyllus the humble deceased cobbler concludes:””All is peace. The tables are turned: the laugh

1261 The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, 2004.

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is with us poor men; it is the rich that make moan, and are ill at ease.”1262. Nietzsche identifies in this obsession a salient trait of Christianity:

Belief in what? Love for what? Hope for what? There’s no doubt that these weak people at some time or another also want to be the strong people, some day their “kingdom” is supposed to arrive—they call it simply “the kingdom of God,” as I mentioned. People are indeed so humble about everything! (Nietzsche 1887:15).

Famously impatient with even pro-Bigfoot academics, Sasquatch pioneer René Dahinden imagined a moment of comeuppance for ivory tower scoffers. “I’d take the scientists by the scruff of their collective necks and rub their goddamn faces in—actually, I would like to see all the people—the scientists—who have opened their mouths and made their stupid, ignorant statements, fired from their jobs,” Dahinden felt. “They should totally, absolutely, right then and there, without pension, without anything, just be taken and thrown out the front door. Then and there.” If the dream of the discovery of a cryptid should one day be realized, Buhs explained, “those who had always known the truth, those who had come to the right conclusion by the dint of hard work and the application of skill, would receive the dignity that the world had otherwise denied them.”

(Loxton&Prothero 2013:ch.7).

Micyllus resurfaces as Lazarus in the gospel parable ( Luke 16:19-31) according to Hock:

The second question asked what sources can be used to clarify the Mentalitat, the social and intellectual conventions, which the parable assumes of its readers and hearers. It should now be clear that a variety of rhetorical, literary, and philosophical sources from the Greco-Roman world provided detailed and insightful clues to those conventions. In particular, Cynic sources, such as Lucian's Gallus and Cataplus, proved especially helpful. In any case, these extrabiblical sources are very different from those usually cited in discussions of the parable. -...- By seeing the parable as arising out of a traditional 1262 Lucian 1905:215.

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culture (rather than only a Jewish or Oriental one) I can include the whole of the Greco-Roman world. This distinction is clearly justified in terms of social roles and experience, for Lazarus and Micyllus inhabited very much the same social world, albeit at its margins among the poor townspeople. (1987:463).

Kuhn says quite starkly that we can now state, with little chance of refutation, that the Gospel â&#x20AC;&#x153;lifeâ&#x20AC;? of Jesus had already been written, in substance, at least five thousand years before he came. An Egyptian Jesus had raised an Egyptian Lazarus from the dead at an Egyptian Bethany, with an Egyptian Mary and Martha present, in the scripts of that ancient land at least five thousand years b.c.e (Harpur 2005:80).

As Koester1263 suggests, apocalyptic images of role reversal, retribution, healing and triumph in African-American music were ambiguous insofar they might be interpreted as relating to this world or the next. Liberation theology in Latin America shows religious images can indeed be a double-edged sword. They may work as opium to pacify the masses in waiting for glory in the afterlife; or as ether to enthuse them to set things straight here and now. Before coming to indicate socialcommunism in polite society, progressivism was the equation between social progress and a foundation for religious truth.

The method really 'works' in every circumstance. In the tragedy, Oedipus sinks into the Earth to his death (just as Sita does in the Ramayana), not without sharing some mysterious secret with Theseus first:

And [Jesus] took him and withdrew and told him three things.

When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?" Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the 1263 2011:Revelation In African-American Culture.

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things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up." ( Gospel Of Thomas no date no page n.13).

One of the many songs in the low-cost merchandising landslide related to a Japanese cartoon introduced in France with great success in 1978 appropriates such motif. The song (Goldorak Et L'Enfant, 1979) relates how a child going for a walk with his dog “along the seashore” spots the superhero aboard his luminous giant robot who's coming home after the battle

and waves to him. Without

hesitation, the 'hero/savior of arrivals' forgets his fatigue and promptly lands to meet with and to “reveal a secret” to the child.

What secret could Daisuke Fleed (the hero's name in the original Japanese version) possibly share with the child he has chosen for that purpose?

Perhaps one regarding his father's kingdom? “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. ” (Matthew 11:27).

Why not? After all, in the cartoon Daisuke is Duke Fleed, the heir to the throne of a faraway paradise planet he had to leave behind in his giant UFO-robot when the overpowering forces of a coalition of hostile aliens destroyed it in a nuclear mayhem.

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The song begins with the telling words:” I know this young boy who met him one evening and that didn't happen in a song, nor in a story” 1264. The song (Jet

Robot, 1980) tied to the Italian adaptation of another Japanese cartoon ( Getter Robo G, 1975) could be part of the Catholic credo as it recites:

 tre amici e un corpo solo (three friends yet only one body);

 E' uno e siamo in tre (it's one yet there's three of us here);

 In un perfetto accordo noi ritorniamo in tre. Ma si può ripetere il miracolo (in perfect harmony there's three of us here again; the miracle can happen once again, though).

Encapsulated in a low-budget song tied to the mass-marketing of a Japanese cartoon targeting elementary schoolchildren readers may find an entire galaxy of myths no less (or no more) credible than when they're applied elsewhere.

The vegetarian Pythagoreans as well cultivated secret knowledge passed on through chains of initiates. Jimmy Guieu, David Icke, Jordan Maxwell and their lot also often secretively and ambiguously hinted at secrets that more or less omnipotent authority figures (aliens, high-ranking insiders 1265, 'Men In Black', 1264 “For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” (2 Peter 1:16).

1265 Guieu interviews esoteric writer Jean-Louis Victor, who claims he got one of Pope Paul VI's lawyers (no less) to admit the Church had purposefully redacted doctrines in early times to expound the notion of reincarnation from the canon in order to exert better control over the masses in league with secular authorities.(Guieu 1991ss: Les Vies Antérieures).

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powerful rabbis...) had shared with them.

Renaissance Madonnas have appeared all over the place through time to a diverse bunch of liminal figures (shepherds, outcasts...) also in order to “share”, “entrust” or “reveal” secrets. Uninhibited writers and offhand scientists offer to “reveal the secret” behind the Hebrew Torah; Dante's or Da Vinci's work, and so forth. The role “secrets”, cliques, 'secret handshakes', and best of friends play in the development of children is obvious. Fringe radical groups promise to reveal countercultural truth that will warrant the rewriting of history books at once.

Elated hucksters promise to share secrets to make one look much younger, wealthier, and so forth:

In the beginning, subtle, informative print ads were used in place of prime-time television advertising, based on the feeling that the product should be "discovered" by women, not "sold" to them.

(Mark&Pearson 2001:267).

A cursory analysis of the however thin plots of classic Hanna&Barbera cartoons reveals much the same recurring image banks: Amazon queen of faraway planet wants to turn Superman and his (super)friends into stone; Wonder Woman sees the light as the clay statue an Amazon queen sculpted, then is fated to...go to the USA to help win WWII (so much for the political spin); Dino boy and Ugh go through an ordeal to escort someone safely home, and so do the Herculoids. As Hindu god Hanuman had to speedily find a rare antidote to cure divine Lakhsman 1284 DOLT

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in danger of imminent death, so did Dino boy and the Herculoids.

Can readers count the motifs listed in this succinct presentation? Is it also possible to add that -in the Japanese cartoon- Daisuke Fleed's betrothed is no other than the daughter of the hostile King who would then attack and destroy the paradise planet: Romeo and Juliet go to outer space.

Is it possible to suggest the cartoonist hinted at something elementary schoolchildren were in no position to know or to fully grasp? Hardly. It is however possible to suggest the cartoonist was deliberately pushing human mind's mysterious buttons.

As well, the idea of the arch-transgressor acting as a double of the archhero/savior is not uncommon: the 'bastard' -whose paternity is either unknown or disputed- rejoins as arch-outcast of the ancient world the arch-hero/savior, whose paternity is equally shrouded in mystery because he's allegedly the son of this quintessential spirit; or the incarnation of that almighty god.

Representativeness heuristics – a typical human bias- ignores that there are huge numbers of 'bastards', but no son of any god is unanimously recognized; even if he were unanimously recognized, it'd just count as one case, yet that is what the mind is schizophrenically in search of:”When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. ”. The same goes for 'hot hand effect' of any kind (“I feel this is my lucky 1285 DOLT

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hand” etc):

Players will check those scoreboards to look for patterns, and they will stay at the table and change their bets accordingly. It doesn’t matter what they bet; the house advantage is the same regardless. So, why does the casino provide those scoreboards?

To keep players at the table. The casino just wants them to see patterns and keep betting. -...-However, this nonrandom “hothand effect” does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. Research has shown that the probability of making a shot does not change, regardless of whether the previous shot was made or missed. In other words, the sequences of made and missed shots are essentially random. (Huettel 2014:90-2).

It is difficult not to think of the explanations given by early psychoanalysts. While psychoanalysis' jargon and theoretical apparatus may be inadequate, ideological, and open to critique, it certainly offers suggestions that it is difficult to resist in at least some instances.

History at times vindicates myth: William the Bastard indeed becomes William the Conqueror; John Lackland -thus named as youngest of five sonsbecomes King of England. Issued from small Spanish gentry, Pizarro was illiterate, and had shepherded pigs in his youth: he conquered the mighty Inca Empire and its fabulous wealth with only a few dozens ill-equipped soldiers.

Another illegitimate child shall conquer a country: Fidel Castro... De Valera, the icon of the Irish independence movement, was born in New York to a Cuban father; Hitler was born in Austria, yet became the messiah of German

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nationalism. Just as myth(ologie)s predict, the outsider saves the day.

Yet an(other) illegitimate child (at times labeled as son of either an unwed teenager, a prostitute or a floozy ) makes headlines as fringe pop-culture figure -in association with the Beach Boys-; as self-proclaimed messiah and murderous cult leader as well: Charles Manson. He -who was rumored to have performed miracles such as levitating a bus over a desert crag- wanted to launch judgment day in the form of a racial war, in perfect keeping with the fads of the 'swinging sixties':

A number of twentieth century musicians including Kurt Cobain, Phil Spector, Ozzy Osbourne and Axl Rose have been suspected of having bipolar disorder, according to various news reports. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys probably has schizoaffective disorder, bipolar subtype. It has been reported that Wilson was tormented by auditory hallucinations for decades (Friedman 2009). (Polimeni 2012:91).

Not only is the 'bastard' a liminal figure on account of his undisclosed parentage, but he most often appears also as an outsider, another liminal, reviled category that in ancient Greece included all non-kin members (typically outside one's city, tribe, Greek culture...): the opposition between philoi (kin members) and

xenoi (outsiders).

Again, the hero comes from afar in order to typically save the day:

Footloose; No Retreat No Surrender; Karate Kid; Bloodsport â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in which case the

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emphasis is put on the racial divide of a White man defending a Japanese clan's honor-; 1996 Independence Day -in which Jews and Africans united save the world from an alien invasion-.

In Italy in the 1950-60s a film genre called musicarello served as a readypackaged, commodious vehicle to promote a particular singer (or song). Offhand, youth-themed plot contrivances often required the crooning beau to have foreign connections, for example being an Italo-American or an expatriate. Countless other movies present situations lifted almost verbatim from tragedies of old: Hercules, Perseus, Oedipus and Theseus are outsiders of disputed or mysterious parentage who come from afar. Jesus -another hero of mysterious parentage- reappears at about 30 years of age after being sighted last as a boy to deliver humankind from sin. They ultimately save the day, thus showing that the arch-outcast, doppelgaenger ( of the savior, hero and kin member ) is the best among us all.

The

(psychopathic) hero, the thrown-away of mythology resembles

Arendt's â&#x20AC;&#x153;superfluous manâ&#x20AC;? she located in Victorian South Africa:

From now on, the mob, begotten by the monstrous accumulation of capital, accompanied its begetter on those voyages of discovery where nothing was discovered but new possibilities for investment.

The owners of superfluous wealth were the only men who could use the superfluous men who came from the four corners of the earth. Together they established the first paradise of parasites whose lifeblood was gold. Imperialism, the product of superfluous money and superfluous men, began its startling career by producing the 1288 DOLT

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most superfluous and unreal goods. -...-The superfluous men, "the Bohemians of the four continents" who came rushing down to the Cape, still had much in common with the old adventurers. -...-they had not stepped out of society but had been spat out by it; that they were riot enterprising beyond the permitted limits of civilization but simply victims without use or function.(1976:151,189).

This clearly shows that Christianity did not invent anything of any import by taking the scum of the Earth on a grand parade down history's central avenue on a backdrop represented by humankind's miserable shortcomings, melodramatic conundrums and tragicomic antics. This also shows how Nietzsche – a philologist and expert in the classics- and his ilk might have had an incomplete perspective when they contrasted ancient culture and Christianity as antithetical.

This is not to deny that Christianity took a segment of the GraecoRoman ideological gamut to unprecedented highs (or lows), much as other regimes did with other segments (NSDAP and the fixation with bloodlines; Khmer Rouge and the fixation with rusticity: enforced agricultural toil went on from 3 am to 11 pm). “An order twice inverted is an order restored, perhaps even strengthened as a result of the exercise”:

The LORD will go forth like a warrior -...-"I will lay waste the mountains and hills And wither all their vegetation; I will make the rivers into coastlands And dry up the ponds” (Isaiah 42:13-5).

In the end of both Christian and Graeco-Roman narratives, the archoutcast reveals his superhuman nature: a divine and/or royal parentage, outstanding

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feats, sublime insight...The deck of human cards still has a top and a bottom; cards just have been shuffled, but hierarchy is preserved and even strengthened.

Campbell1266 gives an interesting explanation in his discussion over schizophrenia and myth, whose imagery overlaps. He claims that -akin to his mythological proxies- the schizophrenic patient experiences:

a sense of split -...- he sees himself in two roles -...- the role of the clown, that's the outer role that he plays -...- inside he's the savior and he knows it -...- an experience -...- of terrific drop-off and regression backwards, [then] -...- feelings of new knowledge -...- then there comes a sense of a terrific task and danger to be master, also of divine presences that will help one and -...- the final crisis.

What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron-or what makes the difference between an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer-is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity. What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions. (Stout 2005:10).

At Lecco (Italy)1267, an Albanian mother, recently separated1268, hunts down1269 and stabs1270 her three daughters to death, only to lie their bodies on a bed

1266 1970.

1267 Il Messaggero, March 9, 2014.

1268 Another wrathful matron like Medea, Procne etc, who resolves to murder her own children to avenge wrongs at at an impious husband's hands.This Albanian woman's husband had run away with another woman.

A very similar case was on the Italian press just days earlier: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Due to the inferiority personalities, some wives do not express their hostility or antagonism towards their husband, but to their innocent child. And on the other hand, the SambulajÄ taka emphasizes the psychosomatic effect of this sapathuiroshaâ&#x20AC;? (Priyadarshana, ME6210 no date:chapter 5:5).

1269 The tearing apart element: a perversion of the hero's journey.

1270 The piercing element.

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in order to keep watch over them 1271 before attempting suicide1272, and alerting a neighbor1273. She allegedly attempts suicide again in prison some time later. The shtick works like a charm: she is acquitted, and discarded to a psychiatric facility for ten years as mentally ill1274.

At Pioltello (Italy, May 5, 2014), a 81yo man kills his disabled wife with a hammer, keeps watch over her dead body for 2 days, then attempts suicide. On April 27, 2014 at Pescara (Italy), a man gives a big bear-hug to his 5yo daughter as he sets himself on fire inside his car while his ex-wife looks on: both die. Images of myth spontaneously rise from minds schizophrenic crack-ups distort. News report that psychologists have been commissioned to investigate the frail little creature's motives.

In the contemporary world of social decomposition 1275 (alteration,

1271 The contemplation of the hero's body element.

1272 The parading of one's suffering.

1273 Calling the horde to rescue.

1274 TgCom24, May 19, 2015.

1275 Divorces can have catastrophic human and economic consequences. If women have progressively gained much in matters of family laws, alimonies etc, divorced men are slowly but surely slipping into insolvency as a result of divorce. In Italy, many parties have proposed building shelters not for women, but for divorced men driven into insolvency. One source describes the situation in Italy thus:â&#x20AC;?170.000 couples get divorced every year, with a 2% annual increase -...- separated fathers number 2,2 million. A whopping 800.000 live under the threshold of poverty, whereas 250.000 -or 9%- live with under euro 300 a monthâ&#x20AC;?. The same source profiles such unfortunate divorcees thus, citing a report an association of lawyers issued: mostly white collars and other formerly affluent middle-class professionals. (Padri Separati...2011: no page).

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evolution...) and -to name a few- high rates of divorce 1276; vertical polygamy1277 (= siring offspring with more than one mate, as in the cycles of divorce and remarriage); single parenthood; out-of-wedlock births -nearly 40% of babies in the USA in 2007 were delivered to unwed mothers according to some sources 1278-, the scandal factor lost most of its impact. ANSA (November 28, 2013) reports a new law in Italy puts on equal footing all children, whether legitimate or natural, included those born from incestuous relationships.

The figure of the semi-retarded hero under the guise of Rocky Balboa, Forrest Gump, and their lot replaced the scandal factor, perhaps; if the 'bastard' could be the greatest of heroes, so can the mentally challenged. “The social herosystem into which we are born” recurs endlessly.

Some

root

the

problem

in

the

contemporary

evolution

of

cohabitation1279. The 1960-70s proved to be an unending Mardi Gras built upon 1276 “The average couple marrying for the first time now [in the U.S] has a lifetime probability of divorce or separation somewhere between 40 and 50 percent ” When Marriage...2010:71. Divorce rates vary considerably according to different sources. Ben-Shahar (2005-6:lecture 18) repeatedly mentions a rate of 67%. It is safe to estimate a rate around 50%. To that, a percentage of separations (not considered divorces by a legal or administrative standpoint) should be added, typically 10%. If divorce rates are no longer rising (“steep increase in the percentage of all adults who are currently divorced -...-[the percentage in] 1960, quadrupled by the year 2000 “ When Marriage...2010:71), it is because fewer people are getting married to start with.

1277 Naturally, the term polygamy can be wishfully ethicized, excised or rephrased. The final outcome, however, is not going to change: siring offspring with different mates over a span of time.

1278 “Nearly 40 percent of babies born in the United States in 2007 were delivered by unwed mothers, according to data released last month by the National Center for Health Statistics. The 1.7 million out-of-wedlock births, of 4.3 million total births, marked a more than 25 percent jump from five years before. Statistics such as these, which include for the second year in a row a bump in teen pregnancies, after a 14-year decline, leave Sarah Brown concerned. She worries about the children born to unwed parents -- about the disadvantages they often face, including increased likelihood of poverty and greater high school dropout rates.” (Ravitz 2009: no page).

1279 Not only are common-law relationships increasingly common percentage-wise (=living together without being officially married), but they are striving towards a legal status of equality with marriage in several

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wartime propaganda's premises. All sorts of minorities and hyphenated groups marched to the tune of radical cultural pluralism to pillory and tear apart a series of ...isms. In the U.S, entertainment in the 1970s marked the induction of AfroAmericans (blaxploitation) and Italo-Americans into the American dream mainstream.

Counterculture and its doppelgaenger consumerism flourished under the fig leaf preposterous spiritual or political doctrines supplied. Capitalism never withered, but gorged on the schizophrenic appetites and neurotic compulsions to buy surreptitiously foisted on dull masses, frisky hippies, deprived minorities etc.

Armies of counselors, lawyers, psychologists and the like marched on to facilitate the byzantine process of unending strife and litigation. While this may look bad, the opposite might always chance to apply. Dues 1280 elatedly celebrates the unending progress in conflict management in recent decades. Dues' emphasis is not on forces occultes and the culture of litigation and irresponsibility they foster, but on the solutions society provides for such strife:

Meet today's new divorced woman. She is tough, aggressive and armed to the teeth with ammunition on how to get what she wants in divorce court. It all comes courtesy of a profusion of new books, videos and workshops geared to teaching women how to go for the jugular when their marriage breaks up. -...-.Other writers contributing to this new genre are even more aggressive, such as jurisdictions.

1280 2010:Conflict Management.

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lawyers Sharyn Sooho and Steven Fuchs, author of Tao of Divorce: A Woman's Guide to Winning, which they published on the Internet. The book integrates Eastern philosophy with divorce, and urges women to adopt such strategies as "enemy reconnaissance, strategic information, covert planning, and the element of surprise" to get what they want in court. -...-Kansas lawyer Bradley A. Pistotnik -...- recommends -...- "control your husband by being alternately loving and indifferent to keep him in a state of continual concern" and "hire a detective to prove your husband has a bad character, and pay for the services with your husband's money.

(Matchan 1998:no page).

From the mid-1990s onwards, however, massive social intervention programs -for example PRWORA and TANF under Clinton and later Bush, jr. since 1996- were launched to foster the values of marriage and relationships as part of welfare interventions: horses may already be way out of the barn, though.

Social ills are everywhere on the rise. Quebec (Canada) local intervention group JEVI (suicide prevention) announces in 2014 a 140% increase over 2009-10 of calls to its hotlines (4498 calls in 2009-10 versus 10799 in 2014); JEVI's concerns find echo in WHO reports.

Gone were the bold days of the 1960-70s when the skyrocketing rates of divorce and social decomposition only meant a boon to emerging new lobbies: political activists; lawyers; agony aunts; instant book pros; counselors; professionals in the field of psychology; contractors (=more divorces= more houses to rent for example).

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As a row of formerly liminal groups -homosexuals, divorcees, people of color, illegal immigrants...) marched down history's central avenue, gagging measures and censorship laws (civil rights laws, ...ism censoring laws) were deployed to extract the last ounce of economic or political return.

Regulators preached extended government rule as litigation soared; ancillary professions emerged to help managing skyrocketing social strife and unease; increasing amounts of money changed hands as a consequence while the nanny State levied a tithe (for example the production and licensing lines associated with new professions in the legal, counseling and psychological field).

Society has become a global sit-com where toxic relationship dominate.

The only difference being, of course, that judges typically settle dispute in real life at an escalating personal cost for most of the participants: unlike sit-coms, there is nothing 'funny' about it. A poll noted U.S agony aunt and psychologist Joy Browne cited allegedly showed 74% parents would not have chosen to have children in the past if they had known what they knew then.

No wonder an increasing number of people shun real-life toxic relationships in favor of chasing fantasies over the internet, where liars lie to themselves; or of carrying their own personal girlfriend in the pocket (the game

LovePlus): always cute, personable and highly interactive thanks to the latest IT. No

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justice system lying in wait to destroy one's emotional and/or financial well-being in court in case of real or presumed faux-pas.

The use of psychotropics is on the rise in the Western world. The 2011 report about the USA (America's State Of Mind) stated that:

Overall, the number of Americans on medications used to treat psychological and behavioral disorders has substantially increased since 2001; more than oneâ&#x20AC;?inâ&#x20AC;?five adults was on at least one of these medications in 2010, up 22 percent from ten years earlier. Women are far more likely to take a drug to treat a mental health condition than men, with more than a quarter of the adult female population on these drugs in 2010 as compared to 15 percent of men.

Since the 1990s the social costs of such Mardi Gras are becoming apparent as governments on both left and right circularly bemoan:

A slew of new research during the past few years shows that marital stress can play a significant role in a person's overall health- increasing risk for everything from chronic pain to a heart attack. -...- One study linked marital distress to dangerous thickening of the heart wall , just like smoking. -...- Stress is a major risk factor for many health problems but marital stress appears to be a bigger hazard than other types of stress simply because it's so personal. You can't escape marital stress the way you can other types of stress. Most people think of marriage as a comfort zone and a place where you can relax, but when that is stressed, there is no safe haven.(Joshi 2005:109).

Whereas a child born and raised by a single parent is 7 times more likely to live in poverty than a child born and raised by married parents;Whereas a child born to and raised by married parents is 5 times less likely to be dependent on welfare than a child born and raised by a single parent; (U.S. 107 th Congress, 2nd session, res.316 2002:2).

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The $112 billion figure represents a "lower-bound" or minimum estimate. Given the cautious assumptions used throughout this analysis, we can be confident that current high rates of family fragmentation cost taxpayers at least $112 billion per year. The estimate of $112 billion per year is the total figure incurred at the federal, state, and local levels. Of these [U.S] taxpayer costs, $70.1 billion are at the federal level, $33.3 billion are at the state level, and $8.5 billion are at the local level. Taxpayers in California incur the highest state and local costs at $4.8 billion, while taxpayers in Wyoming have the lowest state and local costs at $61 million. ( The Taxpayer... 2008:5) Professor Sue Richardson, of the National Institute of Labour Studies at Flinders University, said Australia was re-creating an underclass "of the excluded and the dangerous" not seen since the late 19th century.

"Back then, large numbers of men were excluded from secure jobs, never got to be fathers - at least officially - and were a menace to society."extnote. Speaking at the Conference of Economists in Canberra yesterday, she said labour-market changes accounted for the rise of single or divorced men who were poor marriage prospects.They were unemployed or reliant on part-time or casual work. Subsequently, many were forgoing fatherhood. She said 35 per cent of Australian men aged 35 to 44 in 2003 were not married and did not not have a full-time job. This compared with 20 per cent in 1978. Half the men aged 25 to 34 had not done what men in that age group had traditionally done: found a full-time job, married and had children. In 1978, only 30 per cent were not on that path."This is an extraordinary decline," Professor Richardson said in an interview. "Men of prime parenting age who are married and employed full-time are a threatened species." -...- While an "alarming" 18 per cent of children lived in a household with no employed parent, the growth was in sole-mother families, not couple families. Jobless men, it seemed, had chosen to forgo fatherhood.(Horin 2003: no page).

More women are having children alone, unable to find men willing to commit to marriage or the cost of setting up a household, a study has found. The proportion of [Australia's] single mothers aged 30 to 34 e xtnote It is quite an irony indeed that the institution of the family might represent just a septic tank to discharge all the noxious pulsions and aggression into, which could otherwise result in such pent-up anger being released into the society at large. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Near and dearâ&#x20AC;? ones then serve not as icons of Bronze Age sentimentality, but as one another's lightning rod. Crime columns throughout the Western world seem to anecdotally support this grim appraisal (note of this writer).

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who fell into this category jumped from 17 per cent of female lone parents in 1986 to 42 per cent in 2001, according to the study, released today. Among younger women aged 25 to 29 who were sole parents, the number was even greater, increasing from 37 per cent to 66 per cent over the same period. The author of the Monash University research, Dr Bob Birrell, said this group of single women heralded a new social phenomenon. (Milburn 2003: no page).

This is the overall conclusion of research among 2,100 British adults that says women are happy to abandon the workplace but not if it means spending all day at home cooking, cleaning and looking after children. Instead they want to play the "role" of housewife with a little help from, for instance, a nanny, and someone who does the ironing. And unlike Kylie Minogue, they don't want to do any dusting either. The report, by Marian Salzman, chief strategic officer of Euro RSCG Worldwide, the world's fifth largest advertising agency, describes these women as princess-style "domestic divas" who effectively exploit their husbands. (Womack 2004:no page).

There again, mythology serves as a salad bar for the mythmaker/storyteller. Let's consider only the narrative of the child, whose important father disappears soon after casually eloping with his mother (akin to mythical Phaeton1281). The encounter may happen during a routine ( the sun god cruising the sky) or accidental (the King lost in a dense forest; Hanuman in his adventures) journey; physical intercourse is accessory, as god Hanuman sired offspring without it: a common mytheme1282.

The mytheme of the the illustrious -yet unknown- father may -as this

1281 The same story recurs elsewhere, or the chase after a mythical ancestry and fabulous heritage, for example in the Navaho myth of the Twin War Gods.

1282 â&#x20AC;&#x153;A young Pueblo woman, who was helping her mother mix clay for pottery with her foot, felt a splash of mud on her leg but thought no more of it. "After some days the girl felt something was moving in her belly, but she did not think anything about going to have a baby. She did not tell her mother. But it was growing and growing. One day in the morning she was very sick. In the afternoon she got the baby.â&#x20AC;? (Campbell 1949:301).

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writing contends- come together with any other mytheme, such as Pandora box's in the Tongan story of Sisimataila'a, hero on a journey to both discover his father the Sun god, who had impregnated his virgin mother during his sky cruises, and to retrieve two bundles (good and bad) from an old woman in order to marry a princess1283:

Well in myth this motif occurs, time and time again-"Who is my father? Go find your father." This means simply find your manhood. The young man has to break from the mother and find his action, his male action. (Campbell&Boa 1989:71).

Eminent -though absent- fathers are most likely to be present, although mothers -equally eminent and absent- are at times chosen, such as goddesses Aphrodite (mother of Aeneas); Thetis (mother of Achilles); Ganga (Hindu goddess who bore Bhisma1284 of Mahabharata fame to King Santanu).

The rest of the story remains mostly unchanged; the child is fated to reappear only at a later date: Aeneas is raised in his early years by nymphs in Aphrodites' retinue on mount Ida (=the mountain connection again); the godly centaur Chiron raises Achilles on mount Pelion (=the mountain mytheme); Ganga raises Bhisma in her domain until he's fit for presentation to his father.

While there is no doubt Hercules was Zeus' son, Theseus could not be sure Poseidon was his father, as the god theoretically raped his mother the same 1283 The theme underarching most of these myths is that of rites of passage and life cycles.

1284 Ganga disappeared with the child to bring him up for awhile in her realm (just as what happened to Aeneas).

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night she slept with his mortal father. The illustrious traveler (gods, princes...) leaves a token object (swords, sandals, manuscripts...) to recognize his offspring later (akin to Theseus).

The child later ventures to discover his origins upon being teased about it. Myth-makers may merge the Phaeton and Theseus stories to produce King NoFather of Buddhist stories.

Alternatively, storytellers behind “the legend of

Gregorius. The earliest known texts of this very popular story are not in Latin but in Old French and date from about 1150”1285 may merge Theseus, Sargon1286/Moses1287, Phaeton, Oedipus and countless others. In spite of being a new Oedipus, Gregorius ends up a saintly hermit and Pope. That's the stuff the various Paul Atreides and Luke Skywalker are made of.

It is what in ancient times popularized the later -more or less redshifted- Christian idea broadly summarized as the greater the sin, the greater the 1285 Archibald 2001:111.

1286 The biography of Sargon (XXIV century BCE) reads thus:”My mother was a high priestess; my father I do not know. My mother conceived me and bore me in secret. She placed me in a reed basket and caulked it with pitch, then she abandoned me to the river, from which I could not escape. I was carried by the river and was found by a water carrier. He raised me to be a gardener. Then I was declared king” (Cit. by Goldman 2003:Royal Historians, Poets, And Artists).

1287 According to Exodus, the Israelites suffer slavery in Egypt. The Pharaoh orders that all male children of the Hebrews have to die.”Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman,and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months.

But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile.-...-Then Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. ” (2:1ss). Variations exist. While Sargon, Romulus/Remus, Karna and others are raised among the lower classes, Oedipus, Moses, Kalu Kumara (demon of Sri Lankan lore; the son of a launderess, he was raised by the King of Anuradhapura) and others find foster parents of high lineage.

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forgiveness. Oedipus, Tantalus and our day's banksters, murderers and criminals may -after all- be -as guru Osho put it- the Zorba who can become Buddha, the necessary foundation for the palace that is Buddha, or the paradigm of the enlightened/godly man.

Oedipus, too, and all other mythical arch-transgressors, had hero-powers they could bequeath. The Rig Veda ( XV century BCE or older) describes the mystic fire thus:”By the Flame one enjoys a treasure that verily increases day by day, glorious, most full of hero-power.”. Aurobindo explains that:”The heroes are the mental and moral energies which resist the assaults of ignorance, division, evil and falsehood”1288.

It isn't just about mythical figures from the mist of time. Ben-Shahar 1289 elatedly reports how legendary IBM and Johnson&Johnson founders (=the hierophantic patriarch) not only forgave executives who made critical mistakes, but accompanied forgiveness with lenient words of praise:”Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy. ”( Micah 7:18). As an aside, even deposed Brazilian Emperor Pedro II on his deathbed made the wish of prosperity for Brazil, the homeland he was barred from re-entering.

1288 MAISI003 no date: lecture note 2:3.

1289 2005-6: lecture 14.

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Freeman1290 tells the story of exhausted airline passengers trapped aboard a plane unable to dock at an airport under bad weather for hours because of a shortage of personnel. One of the powerless passengers has the idea to contact one of the airport's executives via a phone directory search. Shortly after having relayed his plight to the executive's wife, the airplane is allowed to dock: the marvels patriarchs can make happen.

November 26, 20131291 Berlusconi appeals to political foes so that they may “examine their conscience” (mettersi una mano sulla coscienza) before a vote regarding Berlusconi's removal as Senator in the aftermath of a judicial sentence. In this case, Berlusconi tantalizes both political foes and the public: shouldn't they in turn play the merciful father-god, thus letting him off the hook in sentimental rapture? The deference-demeanor ritual stalls: the Senate votes in favor of Berlusconi's removal.

Seizing another opportunity to ensorcell the rabble with sweet myths, Berlusconi hailed deceased Mandela -often on tape saluting with a clenched fist in a gesture not supposed to register well with Berlusconi's reaganite credo- and urged Italians to follow the sublime African statesman's example: reconciliation should prevail1292. Berlusconi's henchwoman D. Santanchè also compares Silvio to Mandela:

1290 2014: Hidden Factors That Shape Negotiation.

1291 AGI. 1292 ANSA, December 6, 2013.

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standing up for greater goods, both suffered persecution under inequitable regimes1293.

Of course, to the last moment is alive in the public's mind the possibility the transgressor might go away dejected in disgrace, thus prompting narrative tension and tragic urgency. Discredited in the wake of a political assassination and corruption scandals, Brazilian caudillo Getulio Vargas -in his new incarnation as democratic-populist leader- committed suicide in mysterious circumstances declaring to the great Brazilian nation how he loved them, and that had given them his death after giving them his entire life without regrets:”saio da vida para entrar na historia” (I leave life behind in order to enter history), he wrote following in the footsteps of so many hero-saviors the ungrateful flock tore apart; Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi also declared:” What I got to take with me in the grave is history”.

“Historical ‘heroes’ are ten-a-penny”, indeed.

The forgiveness/reunion scene may consist in a salad bar of diverse motifs. In 2005 at Besano (Italy), a 23yo bartender is killed by illegal Albanian immigrants during a brawl at the pub he works at. The usual theatrics ensue; a squabble between pro- and anti-immigrationists unfolds. The bartender's mother, however, macadamizes the unity of the pack under the beloved sign of the just war propaganda's covenant, for she would adopt an Albanian child at a distance under

1293 Blitzquotidiano, December 6, 2013.

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the sweet sign of nonjudgmental oneness that refrains from casting the first stone1294.

Ehrman tells about the famous story where Jesus refuses to pass judgment on an adulterer because everybody's tainted with sin after all:

The story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery is arguably the best known story about Jesus in the Bible余 it certainly has always been a favorite in Hollywood versions of his life. It even makes it into Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, although that movie focuses only on Jesus's last hours (the story is treated in one of the rare flashbacks). Despite its popularity, the account is found in only one passage of the New Testament, in John 7:538:12, and it appears not to have been original even there. -...Despite the brilliance of the story, its captivating quality, and its inherent intrigue, there is one other enormous problem that it poses. As it turns out, it was not originally in the Gospel of John.

In fact, it was not originally part of any of the Gospels. It was added by later scribes. How do we know this? In fact, scholars who work on the manuscript tradition have no doubts about this particular case. -...- its writing style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories immediately before and after)余 and it includes a large number of words and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. The conclusion is unavoidable: this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.

How then did it come to be added? There are numerous theories about that. Most scholars think that it was probably a well known story circulating in the oral tradition about Jesus, which at some point was added in the margin of a manuscript. From there some scribe or other thought that the marginal note was meant to be part of the text and so inserted it immediately after the account that ends in John (2005:63-5, emphasis added).

The famous holy writ that caused generations to have neurological and gastrointestinal syndromes across ages, regimes and continents; the cornerstone of 1294 La Mamma...2005: no page.

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popular morality in front of which people abjectly crawl in self-denial is possibly another scribal interpolation (hoax?) just as it routinely happens in our day:

Jonah Lehrer [blogger, neuroscience and psychology author] has resigned from The New Yorker, soon after new allegations that he fabricated quotes. Michael C. Moynihan says he’s uncovered something worse than Lehrer recycling his own material for New Yorker blog posts, which came to light in June. Moynihan says he couldn’t find evidence that Bob Dylan said some of the things Lehrer quotes him as saying in [the book]“Imagine: How Creativity Works.”

Worse, he writes, Lehrer admitted lying to him about where he got some of the material because he “panicked.” Moynihan confirmed Lehrer’s resignation in a tweet: “Jonah Lehrer has resigned from the New Yorker and apologized to me.” (Myers 2012: no page, emphasis added)1295.

A representative for Morgan Freeman says that a statement attributed to the actor regarding the Newtown, Conn., shooting is a hoax. -...Reddit users later revealed the alleged author of the Freeman hoax as a man named Mark from Vancouver. "Couple of us thought it'd be funny, since it was a well written article, to attribute it to Morgan Freeman," one reddit user wrote on the Freeman thread. "Day Later, Reddit Front Page. Bravo, Internet." (Sieczowski 2012: no page).

The practice of altering texts in the process of copying them happened all the time in antiquity. In a world without electronic means of publication, photocopy machines, or even carbon paper, it was wellnigh impossible to ensure that any copy of a text would be 100 percent accurate, without changes of any kind. This is true for all books copied in the ancient world. (Ehrman 2011:267).

Ehrman continues:

1295 Two of the three books Lehrer authored have been withdrawn due to inconsistencies and fabrications. One of the endorsements for the publications that were withdrawn is still visible on Lehrer's website(http://www.jonahlehrer.com/books/imagine/):”he knows more about science than a lot of scientists and more about writing than a lot of writers. ”. The present writer agrees that is probably true: divine irony.

Lehrer was at some point such a prominent figure that his endorsement was used to promote the works of American-Israeli behavioral economics luminary Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke university.

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This is the account of 1 John 5:78, which scholars have called the Johannine Comma, found in the manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate but not in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts, a passage that had long been a favorite among Christian theologians, since it is the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity -...-.But Erasmus did not find it in his Greek manuscripts, which instead simply read: "There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one." Where did the "Father, the Word, and the Spirit" go? They were not in Erasmus's primary manuscript, or in any of the others that he consulted, and so, naturally, he left them out of his first edition of the Greek text. -...-As the story goes, Erasmusâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;possibly in an unguarded momentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; agreed that he would insert the verse in a future edition of his Greek New Testament on one condition: that his opponents produce a Greeks manuscript in which the verse could be found (finding it in Latin manuscripts was not enough). And so a Greek manuscript was produced. In fact, it was produced for the occasion. It appears that someone copied out the Greek text of the Epistles, and when he came to the passage in question, he translated the Latin text into Greek, giving the Johannine Comma in its familiar, theologically useful form. The manuscript provided to Erasmus, in other words, was a sixteenth century production, made to order. (Ehrman 2005:81-2, emphasis added).

Is the pouring of the dew of forgiveness a rare occurrence as statistical probability might demand? Not at all. The broken record effect is unfortunately apparent. In 2013, an Italian physician is murdered by an Indian immigrant while she was trying to help another Indian immigrant wounded during a feud between compatriots. In December 2013, the murdered physician's mother reaches out under the sign of forgiveness and nonjudgmental oneness: she just received the season's greetings from the Indian community.

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In 2005-6, Ben-Shahar1296 elatedly introduces Nelson Mandela as the quintessential great leader. It is hard to reconcile the fact that Mandela was until 2008 on U.S “terror watch lists” with the fact that Obama ordered U.S flags to be flown at half-mast to mourn Mandela's passing1297.

Mandela also receives praise from sources other than the thrones of western power, and capitalist high places like Harvard. Are there dots to connect, perchance1298?

The South African Communist Party (SACP) joins the people of South Africa and the world in expressing its most sincere condolences to -...the entire Mandela family on the loss of what President Zuma correctly described as South Africa's greatest son, Comrade Mandela.

We also wish to use this opportunity to express our solidarity with the African National Congress, an organisation that produced him and that he also served with distinction, as well as all his colleagues and comrades in our broader liberation movement. -...-At his arrest in August 1962, Nelson Mandela was not only a member of the then underground South African Communist Party, but was also a member of our Party’s Central Committee. To us as South African communists, Cde Mandela shall forever symbolise the monumental contribution of the SACP in our liberation struggle. The contribution of communists in the struggle to achieve the South African freedom has very few parallels in the history of our country. After his release from prison in 1990, Cde Madiba [=Mandela] became a great and close friend of the communists till his last days. (SACP Statement...2013:no page, emphasis added).

1296 2005-6a:lecture 3.

1297 Biddle 2013:no page.

1298 This seemingly trivial and unobtrusive article by the South African Communist Party puts a nail in the coffin of a decade-long controversy about Mandela's relationship with the SACP, which Mandela disclaimed, and which was indignantly denounced as a canard White supremacists had spread to taint Mandela's reputation.

Nothing especially new to the present writer: a former insurrectionist becomes the herald of a new society much as the various Washington, Bolivar, Mazzini, Pisacane, Codreanu, Princip, Castro, Neto, Hitler etc did.

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According to Ben-Shahar, Mandela would first consult with third parties, then reach an irrevocable decision. Scholarship seems to support such mixing of antithetical strategies, stick and carrot, irrevocable authoritarian decisions, and paternalistic forgiveness or inclusion.

Nevertheless, to the present writer it is not clear whether psychologists and management experts indulge more in immemorial fantasies about semiomnipotent patriarchs 'arriving' to settle issues, schoolyard bullies bossing people around, and 'popular ones' setting trends at school; or in actual findings at the electronic microscope, and so forth.

Dues1299, in fact, seems to chastise the culture of authority much as others seem to embrace it. The divide, once again, revolves around that media virtus (golden mean) of ancient lore nobody can exactly point to, however: there is hardly any need for top-dollar consultants.

Well before Nelson Mandela, fictional commander Straker -from UK scifi epic UFO- was the supreme leader who -in the 1970 episode Kill Straker- not only forgave a subaltern who had attempted to kill him after being brainwashed by outer space foes, but explicitly mentioned he would consult with his closest associates first, then he would tell them to shut up upon hearing his irrevocable decision.

1299 2010:The Manager's Role In Dealing With Conflicts.

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Are UK sci-fi telepictures not one's cup of tea? Debord offers a Marxist interpretation of the same stale allegory:

Si les bureaucrates pris ensemble décident de tout, la cohésion de leur propre classe ne peut être assurée que par la concentration de leur pouvoir terroriste en une seule personne. Dans cette personne réside la seule vérité pratique du mensonge au pouvoir : la fixation indiscutable de sa frontière toujours rectifiée. Staline décide sans appel qui est finalement bureaucrate possédant (1967: point 107)1300.

The

quintessential

(semi)omnipotent

patriarch

-in

his

cyclical

incarnations as leader, patriarch, hero-savior, trickster, Mussolini, Stalin, CEOs of billionaire multinationals, the Chinese Emperor...- is intrinsically neither on the left, nor on the right politically speaking, for he taps into human mind's bottomless pit.

Fiedler's contingency model in social psychology (1960s) foretells two kinds of leader: task-oriented (=gets the job done=micro-manager) and peopleoriented (=focuses on group cohesion and feelings). That's exactly what the Straker -Mandela etc- two-prong strategy of palavers followed by irrevocable decisions works like. That's equally well what the Yahweh two-prong strategy of leniency and anger outbursts works like.

Bronze-Age scribes got it much earlier than social scientists inventing theories they could tag their name to: 1300 French Fascist intellectual Drieu De La Rochelle referred to Stalin in almost identical terms: Stalin as the master who embodies the terror of god's omnipotence.

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While a clearly negative trait which often leads the psychopath toward a downward spiraling personal life, when couched in the appropriate business language, can be misinterpreted as strategic thinking or ‘visioning,’ a rare and highly valued executive talent.

Even those traits that reflect a severe lack of human feelings or emotional poverty (lack of remorse, guilt, empathy) can be put into service by corporate psychopaths, where being ‘tough’ or ‘strong’ (making hard, unpopular decisions) or ‘cool under fire’ (not displaying emotions in the face of unpleasant circumstances) can work in their favor. In sum, the very skills that make the psychopath so unpleasant (and sometimes abusive) in society can facilitate a career in business even in the face of negative performance ratings. (Can You Identify...2014:no page).

Should there be any doubt regarding the symbiosis between the hierophantic patriarch and the horde in fusion, the President of the United States' arrival aboard a vessel is announced as “United States arriving”. It is therefore normal that human mind's schizophrenic quirks tend to associate individuals with abstract qualities that are thus personified: absolute evil arriving; suffering arriving; common humanity arrives as illegal immigrants cross-over.

Alternatively, mister homeland first; mister immigration amnesty; mister primordialism bloviate:”Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, so the latter become clear. Actually, the pattern needs no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning.”1301;”the brand or product benefit is integral to the story.

When it’s woven so deeply into the narrative that people can’t tell the story without mentioning it.”.

1301 Jung in Angelo 1992:138.

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In 2014 sensational posh magazine reports1302 in Italy hint at an increasing number of (il)legal immigrants -even second generation- who would turn their back to western mass-democracy gobbledygook in favor of radical Islamism even after western political systems lavished all sorts of subsidies, boons and affirmative actions upon them trying to win them over...

Consciousness of sin and despair, and longing for salvation are experiential realities of people surrounded everywhere with death, the decay of the body, and the disappearance of conscious existence. For most people this is an intolerable situation, and they want to go on and continue existing, surviving death and entering an afterlife, a new incarnation, or at least the socially carried memory of their nameâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that is, they want to subordinate the man/woman to the creature of their illusionary imagination.

(Fischer 1994:18).

It seems that as long as real public figures of some import superpose themselves with, endorse or don the garb (=demeanor) of stale allegories and petrified mythologies that obsess humankind since time immemorial, a ticket for greatness (= deference) might be theirs. This in turn begs the question whether the masses are kowtowing to the great leader -of the moment, of course-, or to human mind's irresistible fixations and circular proclivities.

A hero -after all- is someone who lived an extraordinary life, regardless of how that ranked on any moral or material scale; strikingly awful behavior may be presented as a moral lesson, or the paradoxes of doubleness:â&#x20AC;?Yet the bricoleur aspect

1302 Such as Panorama, September 3, 2014.

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of the trickster can cause any or all of such lewd acts or objects to be transformed into occasions of insight, vitality, and new inventive creations”;” We think it quite normal for a deity, while if a human being behaved that way we'd send him to a lunatic asylum.”.

The epic of Gilgamesh undergoes considerable reworking from a Sumerian original to a later Babylonian tradition we are familiar with. The epic originally features a swashbuckling hero that startles the world with his deeds: he does not care about how that may register on any moral or material scale.

In Babylon, the epic -and flood stories- take up a sort of moral connotation. Morality plays suited the epoch of Hammurabi (around the XVIII century BCE) very well: the King had produced the first extensive law code under a preamble1303 that slightly resembles the Chinese mandate of heaven1304.

The Chinese Duke of Zhou introduced (about 1045 BCE) the “mandate

1303 “When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land, assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind. ” (L.W King translation).

1304 Enthroned Egyptian monarchs actually became living gods as presumed incarnations or relatives of this or that deity, whereas Mesopotamian monarchs were considered as appointed by the gods, much in the way Hebrew Kings would be at a later date. Yahweh says about David of Israel:”I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands. ” (2 Samuel 7:14). In The Blessings Of God Ptah Upon Ramesses II at Abu Simbel and Karnak, the god addresses Ramses II thus:”I am your father who begot you to act as a King”.

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of Heavenâ&#x20AC;? to justify and buttress a dynastic change on the basis of the ineptitude and corruption of the (former) ruling house the Zhou had defeated in battle. The defeat in battle, in fact, was construed as retribution visited upon the former ruling class because of its impiety and evil ways. Zhou Kings resumed autocratic rule, yet under the stipulation they pledged to rule according to piety and virtue.

Even in Hindu Mahabharata, the struggle between two sets of cousins epitomizes the clash between -as Aurobindo puts it- â&#x20AC;&#x153; truthâ&#x20AC;? ( dharma) and falsehood (adharma). The Kauravas have cheated the Pandavas, thus gaining the throne; this also grants them the support of noble men-at-arms in their retinue (=legitimate authority).

Because the Kauravas misuse their power, however (=the mandate of heaven concept), war ensues so that the Kauravas finally lose the ultimate battle.

Goldman1305 emphasizes that ancient near-eastern myths were in a state of flux coming to and fro various cultures in the region, being thus adapted to local sensibilities again and again.

The character from The Scarlet Letter -Hester Prynne the adulteressbest epitomizes the hero:

And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows 1305 2003:Hittites and Canaanites.

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and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especiallyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. (Hawthorne, 1850, no page).

Of course, Hester Prynne is not alone. She joins the various fra' Cristoforo, Magdalene, Angulimala, Jean Valjean and their innumerable literary clones to show how arch-transgressors -which may include felons, addicts, murderers, corrupt politicians, inept plumbers, car mechanics and electricians...- are so much better (=the ugly duckling motif) than the law-abiding average schmuck, who is (not so) deep down an hypocrite, a pharisee, a closeted transgressor: a real bore.

In what the present writer terms 'the foundling reflex', the horde -or the individual- opportunely enthused shall not only let bygones be bygones (no matter what the original transgression was all about), but rise in desecrated anger to champion the foundling, that precious, wonderful soul that suffered so much: s-he has a good 'secret cause' to explain it all away in such a way that reconciliation becomes inevitable.

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The lines of 1989 hit song Another Day In Paradise come to mind:”Oh think

twice...

Oh

lord,

is

there

nothing

more

anybody

can

do

Oh lord, there must be something you can say”. The former transgressor sits now atop the commodious pedestal of whichever excuse, yarn, obtuse allegory or petrified mythology may happen to be the case at the present moment. Conclusions are foregone: reconciliation must unfold. As the wonderful myths mankind produced teach us:”And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more. ” (John 8:11).

The 'foundling reflex' presides over the horde recurrently marching to deliver this, that or another pariah group/individual as it no longer brooks such intolerable inequalities, '...ism' etc. The list of foundlings to champion; of tyrants to put on posthumous trial; of inequalities to redress is literally endless.

This works equally well as Blacks march or riot protesting against discrimination; as animal right activists march or riot to support their beliefs. Of course, as GESTAPO (NSDAP Germany), CEKA/NKVD (Bolshevik USSR), STASI (Communist East-Germany), Securitate (Communist Romania), OVRA (Fascist Italy), PIDE (Fascist Portugal), SAVAK (Persian monarchy) went about their business, only political expediency makes room for significant differences, for even authoritarian secret police corps weren't all equally destructive.

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Tocqueville here describes the social ebullience of 1848, but his description could easily portray 1688, 1789, 1949, 1959, 1968...

Dès le 25 février [1848], mille systèmes étranges sortirent impétueusement de l'esprit des novateurs, et se répandirent dans l'esprit troublé de la foule. Tout était encore debout sauf la royauté et le parlement, et il semblait que du choc de la révolution, la société elle-même eût été réduite en poussière, et qu'on eût mis au concours la forme nouvelle qu'il fallait donner à l'édifice qu'on allait élever à sa place ; chacun proposait son plan ; celui-ci le produisait dans les journaux ; celui-là dans les placards, qui couvrirent bientôt les murs ; cet autre en plein vent par la parole. L'un prétendait réduire l'inégalité des fortunes, l'autre l'inégalité des lumières, le troisième entreprenait de niveler la plus ancienne des inégalités, celle de l'homme et de la femme ; on indiquait des spécifiques contre la pauvreté et des remèdes à ce mal de travail, qui tourmente l'humanité depuis qu'elle existe.

(1964:128-9).

So much about a distant past's heroes and their exploits. What about our present? A website reports the following speech:

As a psychologist, I teach on a regular basis about the nature of prejudice. And we talk about how prejudice nowadays is supposed to be modern, and covert, and based on ignorance, and stereotyping.

And I thought these acts aren't ignorant. This isn't the result of some covert thought. This was a well planned out act of terrorism. -...- And I think if you confronted those people they would deny it because they're cowards. -...- Diversity is more popular than segregation. Love is more popular than hate. -...- The Statue of Liberty stands every day of all of our lives theoretically welcoming people to this land to become part of us. So to say that we should act like we're colorblind I really believe is an excuse. I believe it's an excuse to remain lazy, it's an excuse to turn your head. And it's an excuse to allow these idiots to continue with their agenda. -...- I can't say thank you enough to the administration. -...- are here, and I have to say they're doing not just what they have to do administratively, but they're doing what they should be doing as human beings1306.

1306 Presented on Sailer 2004: no page.

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Thus spoke the alleged victim of a 'hate crime' ('haters' had vandalized her car with racial epithets); the public rallied in desecrated anger, marched and so forth; administrators rose indignantly...so many celebrated one's possibility to be on the right side of the myth – akin to Pater's “sublime”1307-, one with the pack of entranced believers. The righteous will not let another Orpheus succumb to injustice until there is still time to prevent some frightening collective

sparagmos...the Greek tragedy's secret.

Too bad it was a scam: the presumed victim -a person with criminal records1308- had committed the vandalism herself. Wilcox relays thus news about a Black man in Chicago who falsely claimed a gang of White racists had assaulted him for no reason in 1985:

witnesses have accused Jackson of trying to run down people on pedestrian walkways before his car hit a tree-...-. Jackson had been fired from his security guard job after it was learned that he was a convicted felon awaiting trial on charges of possessing two loaded 1307 “We authors recognize the sublime not by an act of analytic or comparative judgment, but by our transport.”

(Pater 1873: 133-134).

1308 The Los Angeles Times wrote “Dunn -- a Catholic converting to Judaism -- prided herself on being passionate and outspoken. But court records and interviews with colleagues, students, friends and police reveal a woman of contradiction and secrets. -...-. Gary S. Lincenberg, her California attorney, will not comment on the alleged hate crime or on her police record. James Michael Rierden, an attorney in Nebraska who represented Dunn for an arrest four years ago, said she pleaded guilty to shoplifting, paid a $200 fine and agreed to counseling. -...Pam Manske, a friend of Dunn's, chalked up the shoplifting to high jinks. "She'd been a student -- sometimes students do goofy things," said the commercial real estate agent. -...- On Sept. 24, 1999, she was arrested and charged with driving without a license and with fictitious license plates, said Officer Katherine Finnell, a Lincoln police spokeswoman. Dunn paid $75 in fines, said chief prosecutor John McQuinn. -...- Less than a year later, on Sept. 29, 2000, a Dillard's department store employee saw Dunn putting a shoe box in a shopping bag, Finnell said. A police officer found Dunn's shopping bag contained a pair of red size 7 shoes and some Liz Claiborne jewelry: three bracelets, a necklace and a pair of earrings, Finnell said -- about $141 worth of merchandise from Dillard's. Dunn also was carrying $403 worth of steak knives, utility knives and a pair of black size 6 Enzo Angiolini shoes from a store next door, Finnell said. ” (Zamichow 2004: no page).

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handguns, one of which was stolen in a burglary. (Wilcox 1994:61).

What are people marching, donating and rising for, then? People from all provinces of the political and credibility spectrum crank the same handle warning about impending doom of one sort or another, whereby ...ists of one foul breed or another shall march onto town to do 'you know what' to 'you know who' according to a 'master plan' the 'good guys' desperately want you to know about:“Martyr narratives continu[e] to be produced despite the end of persecution”.

The site further reports:

Police and the FBI said [the culprit] cannot be charged with a hate crime. Officials with the Anti-Defamation League, the organization that authored the hate crime statute in 1987, also said that the suspected actions of [the culprit] would not qualify as a hate crime.

-...- [one college official wrote back to the site columnist:] “Imagine how you might have felt if the crime was real and the Claremont Colleges ignored it.” -...-. [another official:]”I have always thought it better to respond sympathetically to a claim on my sense of justice than to reject out of hand a cry for help. If one does the former, surely one may be taken in; if one does the latter, one is condemned to cynicism.” Ibid. (Emphasis added).

This case of hero-victim party liners exalt, who then turns out to be a disturbed individual with a checkered past or present is not unique. Frediano Manzi - president of Italian association SOS Racket & Usura (SOS Racket & Usury) banded to raise awareness about racketeering - recurrently alleged to have been victim of intimidation, and violent attacks, at the hands of crime syndicates he tried to expose. On October 18, 2012 La Repubblica1309 announces Manzi was sentenced to 1309 Presidente Dell'Associazione...2012: no page.

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20 months; Manzi himself had apparently commissioned his own flower stall's arson in 2011, which he had then passed off as a threat coming to him from crime syndicates on the account of his activism.

Racial slurs are painted on predominantly Black Churches at Lafayette (USA) in 2011. According to a FBI press release (October 16, 2012), the culprit is a person of color, Brian Toriano Crimiel. Crimiel allegedly planted false evidence to point to his ex-girlfriend (whom sources identify as White) as the culprit:

Once a suggestion of heroism, patriotism, or martyrdom has been made, the impetus behind personified symbol creation can and has been set in motion. This is not to imply that suggestion is as powerful as reality. If an audience has been created by suggestion and association, it is more likely to require additional substantiation if the original allegations have been challenged. Created audiences, therefore require constant manipulation. Given this manipulation, created audiences for personified symbols can be just as effective as one which is real. (Allgrove 1994:47).

Saturday night TV usually follows a predictable pattern: quiz shows, movies and sports. So Georgians were in for the shock of their lives when the progovernment Imedi station reported during prime-time viewing over the weekend that Russian tanks were yet again invading their land, barely 18 months on from the short lived war of 2008.

What's more, according to the channel, the country's pro-western leader Mikheil Saakashvili had been murdered. -...-Apparently the broadcast was introduced as a simulation of possible events but this warning was clearly lost on many Georgians (Levy 2010: no page).

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DARRES PARK, who had claimed he was attacked by three white men wielding baseball bats and tire irons. -...-He also said that without his knowledge of martial arts his attackers would have succeeded.

Clearly, DARRES PARK had become a local hero in the fight against bigotry and prejudice. -...- the alleged attack appeared nationwide -...On 13 December [1990] DARRES PARK and a confederate were charged with three armed robberies of banks in Seattle and Battle Ground, WA -...-. Charged in the bank robberies with PARK was JOSEPH FRITZ, a white, who had "witnessed" the attack on PARK and supported his account in a statement to police at the time. -...Amazingly, PARK'S lawyer, ROBERT LEEN, said he might have robbed the banks because of brain damage from the "racial assault. " (1990:18-19, emphasis added).

Vandals [in 1985] threw rocks through windows of eight Jewishowned shops ....Mayor EDWARD KOCH said the city would offer $10,000 reward ... " The Jewish Community Relations Council offered a $5,000 reward as well. The windows were broken in the predominantly Orthodox Jewish areas of Boro Park and Flatbush in Brooklyn NY. Around the nation newspapers reacted with shock and outrage and compared the incident to Kristallnacht, when Nazis terrorized Jews in pre-World War II Germany. -...- Within a month police had their man in custody. He was GARY DWORKIN, a 38 yearold Jewish resident of Boro Park. DWORKIN was charged with 14 counts, including felonies and misdemeanors. He was ordered to undergo psychiatric examination. (Ibid:14).

Black students at Williams College in Massachusetts were horrified in February 1993 to find three racial slurs written on notebook paper posted on the door of the Black Student Union building. The event took place five days before the start of Black History Month. The campus convulsed with social consciousness spasms and indignant speeches condemning racism. -...-it was fully 10 days before the Williams Record, the campus newspaper, reported that Gilbert Moore, a black student, had been suspended. -...-Students at the State University of New York in Binghamton were shocked to find antiSemitic slogans spray-painted inside the door of the Jewish Student Union office in November 1988. -...-Authorities investigating the incident soon zeroed in on a suspect. He was James Oppenheim, former President of the Jewish Student Union. -...-The Judge accepted his account and in December 1989, James Oppenheim was acquitted of all charges. (Wilcox 1994:38-40).

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Police announced Tuesday [ October 23, 2012] they believe [Afroamerican] Sharmeka Moffitt fabricated a story about being attacked and burned Sunday night at Civitan Park in Winnsboro by three men who wrote “KKK” on the hood of her car, and instead set herself afire.

Franklin Parish Sheriff Kevin Cobb said during a press conference at the Franklin Parish Courthouse this afternoon that Moffitt's DNA and fingerprints were found on the lighter as well as charcoal lighter fluid used in the incident. (Police Say...2012: no page).

Le Monde (on 9 June 2009) announces that the president of popular French watchdog group SOS Racisme (SOS racism) has been arrested pending a financial investigation involving a co-founder, the Socialist parliamentarian J. Dray.

It is hypothesized that Dray possibly benefited personally from donations (about euro 350.000 in some estimates) originally directed to SOS Racisme and/or sister organizations.

No plausible explanation except 'it felt emotionally right' is offered and -of course- the ominous mythic image of Cassandra, the prophetess who correctly predicted doom, but was never believed and we know what happened next:“people wanted to be taken in”, “they wanted to believe”, “we did not have to tell a lie at all, because every time someone came out to justify it” said the Cottingley hoaxers.

The heralds, crooners and savior-heroes of the 'best of all causes' are often deranged or bizarre individuals of dubious standing (criminals, sociopaths, informants for hire...):

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postpartum depression. Burgus alleged that while she was undergoing psychiatric therapy from 1986 to 1992, she was persuaded that she had been part of a satanic cult, had been abused by numerous men, had abused her own children, and had had sex with John F. Kennedy.

Drugs and hypnosis helped her "recall" that she had cannibalized people. At one point, her husband brought in some hamburger meat from a family picnic, and the therapists agreed to test the meat to see if it was human. Burgus was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder (MPD) and developed numerous "alters" (alternative personalities). Even today, Burgus has trouble remembering what they were, in part because her therapist would get her alters mixed up with those of his other patients. (Loftus 1998:no page). thus we learn that parts of the story of the past may not ever be recalled by the person whose story it is, or was, but may nonetheless be figured in a construction of them by the analyst-narratee – a construction which is unsubstantiated, unverifiable, yet carries conviction -...- no doubt the aim of any storyteller -...-, more radically construction, working toward the goal, not of verifiability, but of conviction: toward “what makes sense.”. -...- it appears that the interpretive analytic construction and the patient's delusional construction are -...- two versions of narrative that test themselves against one another, together working toward the construction of the “complete” and satisfying narrative text. Not only does the patient, in any successful analysis, become his own analyst, the analyst also becomes the patient, espousing his delusional system, working toward the construction of fictions that can never be verified other than by the force of the conviction that they convey (Brooks 1994:59-60).

This is invariably brought to ongoing attention when nailing foes to their discredited ideologies' ultimate consequences, but is otherwise swiftly ignored, rationalized or camouflaged as long as friends are concerned.

Discussing ancient drama, Rexroth comments:

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Aristotle, Plato, in ethics, psychology, politics, were health oriented.

Human conduct was described and judged ultimately in terms of man at his physical and mental best. Euripides, like American medicine or psychology or literature, was morbidity oriented. he is the most psychological of classic writers, at least in our sense, but only because we define psychology in terms of pathology. "Who is well?" Euripides asks this question again and again in every play. It was a nonsensical question to the classic Greek thinker to whom the traditions of Aesculapian and Hippocratic medicine still determined the understanding of human minds and motives. (1989:10) therapeutic culture— the primary vocation of which is to heal—must generate a narrative structure in which suffering and victimhood actually define the self. Indeed, the therapeutic narrative functions only by conceiving of life events as the markers of failed or thwarted opportunities for self development. Thus the narrative of self-help is fundamentally sustained by a narrative of suffering. This is because suffering is the central “knot” of the narrative, what initiates and motivates it, helps it unfold, and makes it “work.” (Illouz 2008:173).

Being scolded and finger-pointed by the 'divine other' resurrecting from the flaming pits of our presumed hate, indifference and endemic murderous tendencies seems a favorite cathartic pastime that increasingly replaces the sermons of established religions in decline. It is as old as man.

Hindu epic Silappatikaram (I century CE) tells of penniless, yet valiant widow Kannagi, who wanders the streets of Madurai protesting against a miscarriage of justice: her husband had been unjustly executed as a thief. She protests, and asks whether any good people are there to avenge this injustice. As nobody answers her call, her anger turns the city to ashes, and she ascends to heaven, rumored to be an incarnation of goddess Parvati. The lines of 1989 hit song

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more anybody can do Oh lord, there must be something you can say”.

Freddie Blassie and Rick Rude weren't perhaps far off the mark by calling the public who had paid to see them perform “pigs” and “pencil-necked sweat-hogs”, which is definitely a few notches below the 'shepherd and sheep' allegory.

Some

among

the

masters

of

acceptable

discourse

inside

the

media/entertainment machine not only talk the talk, but walk the...walk as well in their...'appreciation' for the files and ranks of meek artificial kin members eager to be(come) one -as Campbell characterizes-. ABCNews reports on April 6, 2001:

Two teenage girls filed a lawsuit against cable music channel MTV, saying they were sprayed with excrement as they stood next to the stage during the taping of the aptly named Dude, This Sucks. (no page).

In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young; not to mature away from Mother, but to cleave to her. And so, while husbands are worshiping at their boyhood shrines, being the lawyers, merchants, or masterminds their parents wanted them to be, their wives, even after fourteen years of marriage and two fine children produced and raised, are still on the search for love—which can come to them only from the centaurs, sileni, satyrs, and other concupiscent incubi of the rout of Pan, either as in the second of the above-recited dreams, or as in our popular, vanilla-frosted temples of the venereal goddess, under the make-up of the latest heroes of the screen. (Campbell 1949:10).

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desired effects in spite of it all-, it is possible to argue that -as in Greek tragedy- all there is is an avalanche of emotion that should cleanse our souls, train us to obedience, and reinforce tribal taboos:â&#x20AC;?Mos1310 requires neither deliberation, nor judgment, but praise or blameâ&#x20AC;?.

In other words, what people are reacting to and dancing around is the

mos -those age-old images and situations tailored to present circumstances- and not the individual hoaxer or situation. The oblivious crowd will rise in defense not so much of the craft and originality of the Harry Potter series - although they may claim they do so- as it does in the defense of the sensations it affords. Put differently, people addicted to a(ny) particular medicine do not exactly swear by the quality of any given brand, even if they sometimes say so; they are addicted to the sensations and feelings the chemical affords them.

Martyr narratives' appeal is independent from actual persecution as they simply allow the popular 'longing for the zero hour of the myth' to take once more center stage in palpable form.

Prosecutions

against

Christians

were

not

the

genocidal

(=deliberate&systematic) slaughter the lore rhapsodizes about, but a constellation of minor, short-lived local repressions: in the Rome region under Nero; or in Bitinia under Pliny the Younger, for example. Only with Decius (249-51 CE) and later 1310 Mos maiorum: the way of our forefathers. It may be rendered as in: folkways, the customary way to go about it over here.

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Roman Emperors such as Valerian (253-59) and Diocletian (284-305) prosecution took a more centralized -though always unequally applied- form.

Well before the III century, however, Christians had been penning gutwrenching volumes full of ghastly fire and brimstone apocalyptic imagery of universal slaughter legions of shocked eye-witnesses confirmed:

It is widely thought that from its early days Christianity was an illegal religion, that Christians could not confess their faith openly for fear of governmental persecution, and that as a result they had to go into hiding, for example, in the Roman catacombs. As it turns out, none of that is true. Strictly speaking, Christianity was no more illegal than any other religion. In most times and places, Christians could be quite open about their faith. There was rarely any need to “lie low.” It is true that Christians were sometimes opposed by pagans for being suspicious and possibly scurrilous, just as most “new” religions found opponents in the empire. But there were no imperial decrees leveled against Christianity in its first two hundred years, no declarations that it was illegal, no attempt throughout the empire to stamp it out. It was not until the year 249 CE that any Roman emperor—in this case it was the emperor Decius— instituted an empire-wide persecution of Christians. Before Decius, persecutions were almost entirely local affairs. More often than not they were the result of mob violence rather than “official” opposition initiated by local authorities.(Ehrman 2011:183).

The voyeur and the busybody can thus again peep while the next saviorhero is being torn apart or subjected to indignities,”the need to make the experience of the past into the present”, “ancient events continually held up for emulation”, as the phenomenon of civilians donning uniforms in order to impersonate veterans in public -for one- shows.

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All martyrs meet these criteria. Firstly, we have previously established that martyrs, particularly those in revolution, help manifest and induce a millenarian expectation within their communities. Secondly, we have also recognized that martyrs embody an aura of persecution which invokes strong emotive, often sympathetic, sentiments. Finally, this sympathy, while not always honored or revered, can at least be respected. When comparing the same criteria to patriots and heroes in revolution, it becomes obvious that as a collective body these figures don't adhere to the apex of the hierarchy, in absolute terms. -...Revolutionary martyrs, even when used in a secular sense, are sacrosanct figures. Originally, merely witnesses to God's grace, martyrs rose to be regarded as first among a messiah's followers. They were conceived to be extraordinary beings which possessed extraordinary powers. These powers included a vision for redemption and a special influence with a higher authority that would intercede on behalf of one group to help sustain, if not sway their struggle toward victory. Heroes and patriots, on the other hand, are ordinary beings who perform extraordinarily well in given situations. They are susceptible to human frailty and weaknesses and they often fall from grace.' (Allgrove 1994:48-9).

In 1998 the Italian government (a coalition between radical and reformist left-wing groups axed around the former Communist Party) hosted for a while the leader of the insurrectionist Kurdish Communist Party (PKK) Ocalan. The ideological aspects are of no consequence here; what matters, though, is that militant groups of elated left-wing youth started spraying walls with slogans hailing the PKK their leaders had just spoon-fed them. As the international crisis mounted, Ocalan was forced to leave, only to be captured and deported to Turkey later on; the PKK craze evaporated as fast as it had materialized.

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toeing the party line, wherever their leaders happen to have drawn it. It is highly dubious they ever had -or acquired- a reasoned opinion of the Turkish situation.

The PKK craze was such a rage back then that Associated Press announced in 1996:

Another Born documentary purported to show a camp in Turkey of the Kurdish Workers' Party, which has been fighting for an independent homeland. Bearded men were shown building a bomb.

Prosecutors say there wasn't a bomb and the men weren't Kurds _ they were Albanian actors. And it was filmed in Greece, not Turkey.

(Maker Of...1996: no page).

People possibly love the adrenaline rush and stomach butterflies they experience as they are convinced to make an highly supercharged ethical statement about themselves, no matter what the statement is exactly about:

Brown [wrote about] -...- 'mass conversion', in which the rabble who gathered around an aristocrat, or around a miracle-worker, would suddenly take up the Christian name - in imitation of the one or in awe of the other without any process of cultural or ethical instruction (Cooper no date:25).

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life extnote. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

That's what it's all finally about, and that's what these clues help us to find within ourselves. (Campbell&Moyers 1991:12).

Leaving China in complete dejection, exiled Tibetan Buddhist monks

e xtnote

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rapidly transited from the abject conditions of Indian refugee camps to worldly pursuits and empire building, in spite of Arnaud Desjardins' righteous warning that Tibetan Buddhist were 'determined not to enter the international commodity market1311'-like Hindu sages had already done-. On one end of the gamut, pulp fiction and sci-fi author L.R. Hubbard1312 (Scientology founder); on the other end Tibetan monks ended up ministering to a diverse crowd of spiritually deprived westerners: protesting hippies, novelty seekers, deluded celebrities, pseudointellectuals, ego-tripping millionaires, welfare-fatigued drones...

Action movie star and eminent contributor Steven Seagal - whose celebrity indeed helped Tibetan Buddhism into the mainstream- was recognized as a

tulku1313, the reincarnation of spiritually gifted sage Chungdrag Dorje (treasure reveler1314). Great master Penor Rinpoche of the Nyingma lineage 1315 issued a statement:

In February of 1997 I recognized my student, Steven Seagal, as a reincarnation (tulku) of the treasure revealer Chungdrag Dorje. Since 1311 1966.

1312 “Perhaps the most “mainstream” of the cult-like religions is the Church of Scientology (Bainbridge and Stark 1980; Miller 1998;Wakefield 1991). In the 1950s L. Ron Hubbard founded Scientology, which evolved from an over-reaching, pseudo-scientific psychological treatment program called Dianetics. Hubbard may have had bipolar disorder. He was an imaginative and prolific science fiction writer. According to biographical accounts, he could be temperamental, erratic, paranoid, phobic, depressed and grandiose. His most unusual delusion was that he had visited heaven on another planet, forty-three trillion years ago; and then again forty-two trillion years ago.” (Polimeni 2012:185).

1313Tulkus are a particular category of Lamas. The Dalai Lama, the (former) chief of the Tibetan government in exile, is a tulku.

1314 In Vajrayana, a category of Saints fated to bring back the long lost teachings of great masters such as Padma Sambhava.

1315 There are several main lineages in Tibetan Buddhism.

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there has been some confusion and uncertainty as to what this means, I am writing to clarify this situation. Traditionally a tulku is considered to be a reincarnation of a Buddhist master who, out of his or her compassion for the suffering of sentient beings, has vowed to take rebirth to help all beings attain enlightenment. To fulfill this aspiration, a tulku will generally need to go through the complete process of recognition, enthronement and training. -...- In the case of Steven Seagal, he has been formally recognized as a tulku, but has not been officially enthroned. He has also not undergone the lengthy process of study and practice necessary to fully realize what I view as his potential for helping others. When I first met him, I felt he had the special qualities of a tulku within him. According to the Great Vehicle (Mahayana) of the Buddhist tradition, all beings have within them the potential for becoming Buddhas. With Steven Seagal I perceived this potential to be particularly strong as accords with being a tulku. In the past, whenever I have met someone that I feel is a tulku, I have always consulted with other masters of the Nyingma lineage such as Dudjom Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and other senior lineage holders. Similarly, after my experience of meeting Steven Seagal, I consulted with another important Nyingma master and with his concurrence, recognized Steven Seagal as a tulku. (1999: no page).

Yet it is not only about adolescents trying to be cocky, hobos from flop or ale houses, spiritually deprived novelty seekers, exposure-seeking celebrities and their ilk. No less than esteemed academic Richard Dawkins starred in two documentaries Enemies Of Reason, whose title and approach is clumsily theological in nature: Slaves To Superstition and The Irrational Health Services. With an atmospheric music worth of any 'worlds in collision' movie, Dawkins 1316 exposes -with the facial mimicry of a consummate actor- internet conspiracies such as â&#x20AC;&#x153;the malicious and utterly unfounded rumor that 4.000 Jews were tipped off by Israeli agents -...- on 9-11â&#x20AC;? that leave the viewer wonder about what exactly that says 1316 2007:slaves to superstition.

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regarding his crusade against alternative health methods.

It is also interesting to ponder what people like Dawkins are touting in their apology of Darwin. It is not by chance that science could once be used to unquestioningly buttress that from which today people recoil in horror; what once constituted the gem of clinical science -for example atavism pioneered by eminent Jewish-Italian scientist Lombroso (1835-1909) or eugenics - is today shun as politically tainted, bogus '...ism'.

Most will embrace the thesis that a little Hitler, Lombroso or Nietzsche lurks in the shadow of every volume of eugenic literature ever published; the same, however, will be much less willing to admit a little Marx, Mao or Liebkneckt lurks in the shadow of every volume of Darwinist literature ever published: Russian revolutionist Plekhanov described Marxism as Darwinism in its application to social science. Readers be the judge. It is so shamefully easy to detect all the backstage deals and political claptrap pulling the wires of 'science' the current regimes or political climate have no stake in.

In short, what did Lombroso do? He applied Darwin's evolutionary theories and Victorian materialism and scientism ( a word introduced in 1870 according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary) to criminology. Clinician Lombroso basically thought that -broadly speaking- criminals, antisocials and their lot could

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be detected by way of bodily features (for example by way of skull measurements).

We're not far from Lombroso â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or NSDAP eugenics- even today, although the polarity seems reversed. Throwbacks, defectives and their ilk need special leniency on the very same basis that allotted them exclusion, sterilization or death in ages now bygone; they need compassionate advocates, not the hangman:

As interesting as the philosophical tenets of the doctrines of criminal responsibility are to debate, most people, including the US Supreme Court justices, argue that whereas individuals with brain differences or abnormalities might not warrant a complete exception from all criminal sanctions, the presence of such abnormalities does diminish their personal culpability. It was this language the US Supreme Court justices used when they eliminated the death penalty for youth -...-.In essence, the Supreme Courtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s position is that populations of individuals with different behavioral profiles, and therefore different brain profiles, can be less culpable than healthy normal populations with respect to the death penalty.

Juveniles who have not yet had time to reach full brain maturation and individuals with low IQ who have significant brain gray matter density are less culpable than normal adult populations because their brains are different. These positions are well supported by extensive behavioral evidence indicating youth and individuals with low IQ are fundamentally different from healthy adults, and the associated new neuroscience further bolsters this position.

-...-Neuroscience studies are routinely showing that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and most other major mental illnesses are associated with impairments in brain structure, function, and connectivity. (Kiehl 2014:213-4).

The opposite might chance to apply at all times, however:

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covering the forehead and extending to the base of the ears, resembling a royal turban that symbolizes sovereign power.

Buddhaghosa also asserts that this feature can refer to the fact that the Buddha’s head is perfectly rounded like a water bubble -...- The Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang claimed to have seen the bone relic of the Buddha’s usnisa in a monastery in Hadda in modern-day Afghanistan. Faxian described it as a bone four inches in diameter and shaped like a wasp’s nest or an arched hand. Xuanzang said it was twelve inches in diameter. In depictions of the Buddha in India, it is often a round lump on top of his skull covered with hair curls (Powers 2009:15).

Several civilizations -such as in Mesopotamia, Suriname, Chile, Malta, Egypt; among the Olmec and Nazca- in both pre-historic and historic times artificially modified skulls to assume an elongated shape (=cone-head):

Examples of kinship based identities expressed through head shaping include a range of group identities - such as family relations, lineage or ethnicity – or hereditary personal positions.

Furthermore, intentional cranial modification can also be related to a differentiation between the sexes or genders, religious or mythological motivations, and aesthetic notions within society (Van Duijvenbode 2012:2).

Are Lombroso's skull measurements resting on such an awkward logic?

Politics set aside, levels of technological sophistication changed dramatically since Lombroso's times, yet today as well one may look at those colorful charts of the human brain, with areas responsible for different functions -such as speech, memory etc- outlined in different colors, which is what phrenologists did with the skull.

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volume in the frontal lobe -...- the site of self-control -...- and more volume in the reward center of the brain-...- the striatumâ&#x20AC;? 1317. An authority on psychopathy, professor of translational neuroscience Kiehl quips:

In other words, the weird P3 was literally diagnostic of psychopathy. Ninety-seven percent of the psychopaths showed this weird brain wave response, and none of the nonpsychopaths showed any evidence of it. -...-Patients with brain damage to the lateral and medial temporal lobe have the same weird P3 response as psychopaths. -...-The amygdala and the anterior and posterior cingulate were -...-less active in psychopaths than in nonpsychopaths. -...-Psychopaths showed reduced gray matter in the orbital frontal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, insula, temporal pole, and in the anterior and posterior cingulate. The entire paralimbic circuitry was impaired. -...- The incarcerated youth with elevated callous and unemotional traits as assessed by the Youth Psychopathy Checklist had the same brain abnormalities as the adults with psychopathy. The brain plots of the youth and adults were uncannily similar.(2014:83,86,100,182,184).

Political claptrap and levels of technological sophistication aside, such as statement could have easily been Lombroso's. Of course, phrenologists' technical understanding of how the brain's various areas worked was rudimentary in comparison with today's: science is continually redefining its subject, method and understanding even today:

They found that pathological liars had 14 percent less gray matter than the control group, a common finding for many psychologically impaired individuals. What could this mean? One possibility is that since the pathological liars had fewer brain cells (the gray matter) fueling their prefrontal cortex (an area crucial to distinguishing 1317 DeWall 2013: Taming The Impulsive Beast. Newberg (2012:How God Changes The Brain) mentions the same subject; to frontal lobe anomalies, Newberg adds the possibility of an increased activity in the brain's limbic system.

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between right and wrong), they find it harder to take morality into account, making it easier for them to lie. -...-Yang and her colleagues also found that pathological liars had 22 to 26 percent more white matter in the prefrontal cortex than nonâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;pathological liars. With more white matter (remember, this is what links the gray matter), pathological liars are likely able to make more connections between different memories and ideas (Ariely 2012:84).

Aren't by chance the ape-like characteristics Lombroso detected in his criminal brutes and sociopathic throwbacks very much in tune with Darwin's posh theories that basically delight certain people mostly because they evict the supernatural from the world? Darwinism enthralled Marx, Engels, Liebkneckt, Mao -who declared Chinese Socialism rested upon Darwin's theory- and other left-wing revolutionists for a reason.

It soon turned out people couldn't have it both ways, and eugenics took a turn to the right in the 1930s in high consistency with Darwin's core concepts:

There is certainly a sizeable chasm between Heinrich Himmler and Margaret Sanger [U.S birth control activist, eugenist, 1879-1966].

Sanger was not just opposed to the violence of abortion but also outright condemned the use of the "lethal chamber" in "Pivot of Civilization " Yet, Himmler's and Sanger's ideology not only share an ideological wellspring, but more importantly a willingness to act on their personal prejudices. Their commonalities are more than mere coincidence, and their methodology evidences this. Sanger shares with the National Socialists, and namely Himmler's SS officers, a disdain for "sentimentality" "charity" and "benevolence:' Both saw "sentimentality" as dangerous hurdle to be overcome in order to enact their eugenic policies. The "Pivot of Civilization" repeatedly attacks the church for its "crimes of charity". Again, the National Socialists and Sanger share an admiration with Nietzsche 1335 DOLT

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as the source for this disdain for traditional morality -...-Notably so.

Sanger also credits Thomas Huxley, better known as Charles Darwin's " bulldog” for this concept of the "crimes of charity" (Pg. 109). Sanger credits this view on Huxley's attack on the Salvation Army's condemnation of the "debauch of sentimentalism". Here again, Sanger finds Thomas Huxley's political view of Darwinism appealing, and finds a kindred spirit in Nietzsche (Samaan 2012:305).

In order to gentlemanly exonerate Darwin 1318 from such awful charges, MacNeill shoehorns:

Why does this idea sound peculiar, even threatening, to most people, especially social scientists? And, more importantly, why does this idea generate so much controversy in the public sphere? Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, the dominant social theory about human behavior and motivation was what has since become known as social Darwinism. Despite its name, social Darwinism owes few of its main ideas to the work of Charles Darwin. Rather, it is most closely associated with the social theories of English political scientist, philosopher, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. Central to Spencer’s philosophy was the idea that evolution is progressive; it begins with primitive unorganized matter, which then steadily develops into more complex and more perfectly formed systems, from atoms to cells, from cells to animals, and ultimately to humans and human societies. This idea has been called evolutionism, and actually predates Darwin’s theories by at least a century. Lamarck’s theory of evolution by means of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, published almost half a century before the Origin, was another of the central works of evolutionism. Like Spencer’s, Lamarck’s theory was relentlessly progressive, assuming that all living organisms evolved into more complex forms in a steady drive toward greater and greater perfection, once again reaching its culmination in the evolution of humans.

Spencer proposed essentially the same idea, but proposed a different mechanism by which such progressive evolution occurred. Spencer called this mechanism “survival of the fittest,” a phrase that Alfred 1318 It is fallacious to put too much weight on these 'prophetical' relationships of antecedence and consequence.

Yet, since this is done all the time (“all roads lead to Hitler”, as some said for example), it is appropriate how many might want to exempt their favorite leader, thinker or initiator from a treatment that appears not only appropriate, but morally dutiful in other cases.

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Russell Wallace recommended to Darwin as a replacement for natural selection. Darwin eventually adopted it, using it interchangeably with natural selection in the sixth and final edition of the Origin of Species.

(2010:31).

Others prefer a broader -yet still fideistic in nature- explanation that rivals with that of any established religion:

Consider the notable technological and science achievements in the Victorian era: pseudosciences such as clairvoyance or misinterpretations such as Social Darwinism and eugenics also flourished among the better-educated British and American upper and middle classes. Juxtaposed against the seeming miracles of the trans Atlantic telegraph or airplanes, Victorian pseudoscience, e.g., séances to “contact the dead”, seem less farfetched. Given a steady stream of technical marvels, the line between science and fiction in the educated public can begin to blur, and pseudoscience beliefs can grow.

(Losh&Nzkewe 2010:8-9, emphasis added).

Of course, there are evolutionary biologists who have been guilty of this kind of confusion themselves. The so-called “science” of eugenics offers clear examples of some evolutionary biologists misrepresenting their science as advocacy. (MacNeill 2011:31).

Technology -unlike science- is both purposeful, and necessarily includes a moral -or normative- aspect. Science -on the other hand- is neither about purposes, nor has it any direct moral implications as science. (MacNeill 2011: lecture 4)1319.

That we can separate out the positivist Darwin from the ideologue, either within the Origin and other relatively strictly scientific works, or between what he said about species and what he went on to say 1319 The present writer shares an opposite view. Technology -for the present writer- is more neutral than science.

A cane is a tool that can be used to either help the elderly cross the street, or a weapon used to kill or injure them. A sharp blade may serve to prepare food, or to threaten or injure a person. In other words, the manufacture of sharp objects may -or may not- signal offensive intentions, whereas the development and manufacture of missiles, explosives, cannons, spy apparatuses, bacteriological compounds etc leaves little room for doubt. Some branches of science -however- exist -or are created- purely in the service of either military and/or political goals. Bernays knew that too well when he had 'scientific studies' cooked to extol the advantages, or minimize the disadvantages, of products his patrons had to sell.

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about humanity and society; or that we can separate the Darwin and Wallace scientific theory from the wider debate embracing, most notably, Chambers, Spencer, and (Lyell's version of) Lamarck. Then there is the attempt to privilege natural selection as the mechanism of evolution and deny the real strength of other mechanisms in the Origin, and their growing prominence in subsequent editions and in Darwin's other writings.-...-Nature is a societal category, and so is God. The ideological process that, it seems to me, underlies these developments is one that must be seen as arising in nineteenthcentury secularization and that culminates in twentieth-century functionalism and sociobiology. That process is the naturalization of value systems. If we look at the debate about man's place in nature in those terms, we have to look much more widely: that is, look backward into a wider process of biological naturalization in the nineteenth-century movement that embraced the work of St. Simon, of Comte, of Gall. Looking forward, we have to consider much more carefully the biologization of human sciences, which is most prominently displayed in the present in ethology and sociobiology.

(Young 1985: no page).

Isn't this a retelling of the mythical fall? Isn't this another triangle in which a sinister Eve (=bad scientists) had led astray a gullible Adam (=the public) with the â&#x20AC;&#x153;misinterpretationâ&#x20AC;? of the rules of a divine order (=evolution/Darwinism) at the behest of an immoral instigator (=racism, euro-centrism...)?

Is this preposterous, commodious attitude based on emotional truth and political convenience reasonable if one considers the credentials of at least some of the main proponents of Social Darwinism? Should readers in emotional rapture connect Darwinism with Marxism and the countless deaths Social-Communist regimes provoked in history?

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part of the landscape, and not only among selected cultures such as the German one.

British Prime Minister Disraeli (1804-81) as a litterateur weaved around Jewry he belonged to a web of orientalist fantasies that espoused eugenic imagery.

Eugenic preoccupations gave rise to rather awkward situations:

In 1903, there was an interesting U.S. Supreme Court case about a Sikh. The law said that naturalization was open to free white persons, and this law was broadened after the Civil War to include persons of African descent. One year earlier, in 1902, there had been a Supreme Court case with a Japanese American ( Ozawa v. United States), and the Supreme Court, in denying citizenship to this Japanese American, said that â&#x20AC;&#x153;whiteâ&#x20AC;? meant Caucasian. According to the prevailing racial theories of the time, Sikhs and Hindus from India were Caucasians.

But the court decided in United States v. Thind (1923) that you had to be white not in a scientific sense, but in a popular sense, and so the Sikh man was denied citizenship. (Prothero 2005:32).

Involuntary sterilization was not only invoked, but legally sanctioned in the U.S until 1976. C.R. Henderson, U.S pastor and professor of sociology, contemplated in 1901 drastic measures to deal with those likely to spread dysgenic genes; measures that someone else decades later would love to extend to another category of throwbacks:

The first of these, stated in its baldest form by McKim, is to kill all persons whose hereditary strain promises bad issue. Under this scheme all defectives and confirmed criminals would be placed in air-tight compartments and be put to death without pain by the introduction of some poisonous, but not unpleasant gas. -...- Another scheme has been proposed by many thoughtful persons: sterilization. Surgery has reached a point where this can be effected painlessly and without danger. It has already been employed, sometimes at the request of the 1339 DOLT

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patient, as a hygienic measure; -...- Bad sanitation, imperfect education, neglect of industrial training, low wages, would still produce their natural crop of criminals, no matter how far these schemes might be carried out. (Henderson 1906:317). in the words of one leading historian, “The creation of the gas chamber was a unique invention of Nazi Germany.” In fact, however, the lethal chamber, later called the execution gas chamber or homicidal gas chamber, was originally envisioned before Adolf Hitler was born, and the first such apparatus claimed its initial human victim nine years before the Nazis rose to power and more than sixteen years before they executed anyone by lethal gas. -...-America’s and the world’s first execution by gas arose as a byproduct of chemical warfare research conducted by the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service and the chemical industry during the First World War. Embraced by both Democrats and Republicans, including many progressives, and touted by both the scientific and legal establishments as a “humane” improvement over hanging and electrocution, the gas chamber was also considered a matter of practical social reform. Its adherents claimed that the gas chamber would kill quickly and painlessly, without the horrors of the noose or the electric chair, and in a much more orderly and peaceful fashion. But they were quickly proven wrong. Technocrats neverthelesskept tinkering with its workings for seventy-five years in a vain attempt to overcome the imperfections of lethal gas. Eventually adopted by eleven states as the official method of execution, lethal gas claimed 594 lives in the United States from 1924 to 1999, until it was gradually replaced by another, supposedly more humane, method of capital punishment, lethal injection (Christianson 2010:13).

Germany should be so effectively destroyed that we should not have to fight her again for a hundred years -...- This can probably only be done by sterilization -...- [which is] little more painful than vaccination1320 It is interesting how the same drastic measures can sort different 1320 “ Said Hemingway, in his preface to the impressive collected stories Men at War ($3): "Germany should be so effectively destroyed that we should not have to fight her again for a hundred years, or ... forever. This can probably only be done by sterilization [of] all members of Nazi party organizations." The virile, well-equipped novelist admitted that his suggestion should not be advocated now, as it would provoke "increased resistance" by the would-be victims. But, he pointed out, with an air of self-possession: Sterilization is "little more painful than vaccination." “ (The Year In Books: 1942).

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emotional responses. Wolpe1321 selectively quotes Henderson's reference to execution by poison gas and attributes it to Henderson (incorrectly, as Henderson was summarizing current theses) in a line of thought leading covertly (as Wolpe doesn't mention it directly) to a comparison with mass-murder of civilians by poison gas occurred during WWII.

Readers might recall Lobato's 1926 fictional book O Presidente Negro, whose plot demanded that all U.S Blacks be sterilized. U.S Birth control advocate Margaret Sanger also wanted in 1921 to extend sterilization to those resisting her birth control and atheist agenda on religious grounds, not to mention the “reckless”, “feeble-minded”, “paupers”, “diseased”. The third quotation, however, epitomizes no less than the party line par excellence, as Hemingway heralds germanophobia and advocates the “sterilization [of] all members of Nazi party organizations”, a suggestion that a majority of people might have approved of.

Hemingway himself, an endorser of Castro and a vitriolic propagandist during WWII, is possibly yet another kind of throwback:

Ernest Hemingway harbored bipolar symptoms and committed suicide, as did his father and two siblings.

(Polimeni 2012:92).

(Social) throwbacks can be identified with different groups according to the shifting goalposts each regime sets, yet with similar real-life consequences: 1321 1998: Deviance As Pathology.

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people wearing glasses and/or having learnt a foreign language for the Communist Khmer Rouge; Jews for the NSDAP; a composite jumble of religionists, monarchists and bourgeois for the lefty Jacobins; Acadiens for XVIII century British administration in Canada...the real-life result is the killing fields; the gas chamber; the guillotine or the noyade; the harvesting of scalps...

The entire traveling freak show of racial classification hasn't disappeared as of yet, having barely undergone sanitation in order to align itself – at least in part- with “popular morality”, “free-floating folk beliefs”, “explanations or interpretations usually put forth”,”only an old Phoenician tale of what has often occurred before now in other places”, “prevailing cultural trends”, “the audience’s pre-established set of convictions”.

Professor of psychology Rushton (1994ss) has brought forth a new racial hierarchy that sees Orientals (=Asians) supplant Whites at the top of the tree:

Race differences exist in sexual behavior. The races differ in how often they like to have sexual intercourse. This affects rates of sexually transmitted diseases. On all the counts, Orientals are the least sexually active, Blacks the most, and Whites are in between.-...- IQ tests measure intelligence and predict real life success. The races differ in brain size and on IQ tests. On average Orientals have the largest brains and highest Iqs. Blacks average the lowest, and Whites fall in between.

(Rushton 1999:18,22).

Wolpe1322 contends that Rushton's theories seem to reflect contemporary

1322 1998: Deviance As Pathology.

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economic hierarchies, with Asian countries (China, Korea, Indonesia, Japan...) increasingly playing first fiddle on the international scene. These possibilities show once again how ethical dilemmas and existential claptrap make sense, if any, only if socio-political conditions are in place.

A shuffling of the deck of Darwinian evolutionary hierarchies may yield all sorts of results. In a 1971 novel (Another Roadside Attraction), writer Tom Robbins argues on Darwinian premises that the final evolutionary showdown will involves cockroaches and gonorrhea, not mankind. Cockroaches and gonorrhea proved to be as tough and resilient as action movie and folklore heroes, the present writer adds.

Robbins' argument can't be explored here, yet Robbins' ideas immediately saturate popular culture. In 1972 the Japanese monster movie Godzilla

Vs. Gigan includes an invading race of outer space aliens who snatch the body of the recently deceased to obtain identities in order to enact their global takeover plan undercover. In the end, those aliens are revealed to be...cosmic cockroaches: synchronicity indeed. The cockroaches from outer space also plead to bring “perfect peace”,“absolute peace to the whole world”: possibly a nod to Jehovah Witnesses' doctrines of perfect peace with 1975 as (yet another) appointed year for the world's end.

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Bringing apes1323 in to score cheap political points in ale house debates about human groups is likely to have all the 'progressives' and their ilk cry themselves hoarse in distress. What people long on pathetic rhetoric and short on consistency seem to lack is the basic understanding they cannot have their Victorian claptrap both ways: putting god on trial for playing no role, which invites the analogy religions are invariably phony beliefs, while simultaneously pursuing their own equally petty political goals and equally transcendental social alchemy without ricochets only because their armband is of another color.

They cannot both claim that the right-wing appropriation of evolutionism is morally wrong because 'it makes you know who feel bad', and claim that offense taken on religious grounds is nonsense: that's too bad if some fanatics or schizophrenics cannot take the 'scientific' verdict of the microscope -or whichever other gadget- with equanimity.

When all else fails, open the dam of tears invoking emotionally supercharged imagery of slaughter, departure, exclusion and sentimental indignities while an audio clip from Full Metal Jacket plays with the desperate cries of private 'Gomer Pyle' (the overweight recruit) who just got punished during the night for failing to conform to standards.

1323 As with most of those pseudo-theological debates, according to a possible wish to pursue either more radical ways, or more appeasing ones, Darwinism could be construed to bring monkeys in as such, or to simply posit an elusive â&#x20AC;&#x153;common ancestryâ&#x20AC;? fit to mean about whatever one wishes.

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Of course, when religionists try the same hand, they are laughed offstage along with their barrels of tears, and rows of mortally offended performers gasping for breath in agony. A more balanced approach shall detect third-rate theatrics whenever presented.

So when 'progressive' hecklers and pamphleteers sell

Darwinism mostly -or only- to infuriate fundamentalists, it is nice to know there is another side to the story.

The U.S Council For Secular Humanism defines its activities thus:

To promote secular humanist principles to the public, media, and policy-makers. To provide secular humanist activities and communities to serve the needs of nonreligious people and foster human enrichment. To demonstrate the viability of the secular humanist eupraxsophy as an alternative naturalistic life-stance. To engage in research relating to the critical examination of religious and supernatural claims and the humanist outlook. To conduct educational programs for all age levels ( Summary Information, no page).

Only to drop the act and bin the pretense of solomonic equidistance and non-partisanship to deliver a maximalist plea in favor of an agenda as politically tainted as that of groups they so vehemently oppose:

His election reminds us that the United States really is the universal society on this planet and reconfirms Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s identity as a truly (if not yet perfectly) multiracial, multi-ethnic, multicultural nation. The United States is the first major country founded under the ideals of the Enlightenment, committed to the secular values of â&#x20AC;&#x153;life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.â&#x20AC;? America is a land of opportunity and individual achievement; its civic faith in progress, education, science, humanism, and democratic values is well justified. Yet it comes at a 1345 DOLT

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price. Almost a century was required to overcome the moral blot of slavery. It has taken another century and a third since the Civil War to make the nation significantly more inclusive. America has elected a biracial president; had the Democratic primaries turned out differently, the nation would most likely have elected a woman. How long will it take before an open nonbeliever can be elected to high office? The U.S. Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required” to hold “any office or public trust.” Yet surveys still show that a majority of Americans would not vote for an atheist candidate for president. Clearly there is more work to be done to realize a truly secular society. (Kurtz&Flynn no date, no page).

Using this functional approach, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in 1961 that secular humanism functions like a religion, so secular humanists merit the same sorts of First Amendment protections that religious practitioners enjoy. In 2005, in a decision that irked atheists and Christians alike, a lower U.S. court held that, because atheism walked and talked like a religion, judges should treat it like one.

(Prothero 2010:108).

It is old news. In the political life of several countries, it is common occurrence for the main contending parties or candidates to set up a number of satellite rolls (=decoy effect) -or candidates- acting as polemic straw men to 'jam' certain segments of the electorate. The simulation of greater diversity serves to deflect criticism and/or to maximize results among fringe electoral niches or constituencies the main actor does (or shall) not want to associate itself too closely with in fear of striking a negative balance.

To give an example, in Italy for the election of administrative division

Regione Piemonte's assembly no less than 32 allegedly competing rolls were duly registered in 2010, of which 9 to support main right-wing candidate Cota, 12 in

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support of main left-wing candidate Bresso, and -astoundingly- 10 in support of third candidate Rabellino, who raked in only 1,67% of votes altogether.

Most of these jamming rolls have identical -or nearly so- designations: 20 out of such 32 rolls score under 1% vote each, apparently. A shower of court cases follows regarding presumed abuses in the registration and operation of such rolls; in 2012, Rabellino receives a 34 month sentence for forgery. Rabellino also loves to present as candidates namesakes of more famous politicians such as “Pericle Berlusconi” (<> Silvio Berlusconi) and “Giuseppe Grillo” (<> Beppe Grillo).

According to the courts1324, the Cota administration would be illegitimate: a verdict challenges the election's results on the ground of “irregularities” on the part of one of the many rolls supporting Cota. The left-wing Chiamparino administration that succeeds Cota is also embroiled in the same “irregularities” that plagued three administrations in a row.

In the 2013 Italian general elections, 27 national rolls compete. A shower of public subsidies targets not only existing registered and active parties, committees and so forth, but also parties (committees etc) that ceased operations years earlier, but are still considered active by a legal or administrative standpoint.

Like Krishna at the Yamuna river, the 'usual suspects' multiply

1324 ANSA, January 10, 2014.

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themselves to dance with each electoral segment/ advocacy group in a game of smoke and mirrors, whereby administrative forgeries, mafioso tactics, paid influencers and community builders jockey for position to influence the befuddled masses under the wishful pretense of a civil society that mostly doesn't even exist:

Consider also the close alliance between an Alzheimerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Society and drug manufacturers, which Chalmers ( 2007 ) argues, encouraged members of this group to promote harmful products.

This charity is subsidized by the government in the United Kingdom. It fails to report on its website sources and amounts of revenue it receives from drug companies. Ties between academic researchers, advocacy groups, and pharmaceutical companies is illustrated by funding sources and activities of the American Obesity Association (AOA) founded by Dr. Richard L. Atkinson, an obesity researcher. (Gambrill 2012:71).

The same routine unfolds in all circumstances. When the internet dating fad of the late 1990s boomed to encompass 'exotic' niches -such as the former Soviet block, Asian or Hispanic countries-, awareness of boiler room tactics, confidence trickery and other swindles in the industry soon surfaced.

Due diligence watchdogs speedily started cropping up as alleged 'civil society' response to conmanship. Such watchdogs were in fact either owned or operated -directed or by proxy- by the biggest players in the internet dating industry as a way to both expose their competitors, and/or to present themselves as above suspicion to attract more business.

Pork-barrel spending and boondoggling are ubiquitous. In September 1348 DOLT

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2013, sources claim a stream of unaccounted for public money is directed from the Italian Senate to a diverse array of unnamed charities, individuals, associations, according to a logic that escapes outsiders. In 2012, a scandal 1325 details how politicians running Italian administrative division Provincia Di Salerno distributed funds to a row of charitable organizations: best of all causes oblige. Such funds were later diverted to finance left-wing President Villani, also detained on grounds of financial wrongdoing in his capacity of entrepreneur.

In October 2013, Italian jumbo publisher Corriere Della Sera requests an emergency financial audit of some of its companies. It appears that a rogue web was in place to (mis)direct unaccounted for funds to a series of unnamed sporting clubs in relation to the running of unnamed sporting events 1326. The same situation recurs at every joint of the command line of Belle Epoque nation-State Moloch: national, regional, provincial, city level.

In the USA debates rages over for-profit educational institutions, whose budget mostly consists in the appropriation of an endless stream of public subsidies from a string of local and national agencies. According to newscasts, such for-profit institutions would often employ rogue boiler room tactics to pander to a series of minorities, and other disadvantaged groups, as main beneficiaries of a shower of public subsidies meant to foster progressive social alchemy, and ensuing oneness.

1325 Trasparenzaelegalita.it, March 22, 2012.

1326 Giornale Di Arona, 11 October 2013:8.

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Ink does not cease to flow to detail how certain groups or agendas merely serve as 'civil society front' for this, that or the other economic, maximalist or fundamentalist group, 'great cause' or agenda, whichever it might be. A plethora of national, regional, provincial and city associations, unions, committees, posses, interest and advocacy groups lobby to canalize the stream of public subsidies, often just a facade to hide settlements on account of collusive, nepotistic, mafioso and vote-buying practices.

In Italy in 2014, investigations strike a number of political dignitaries accused to have put a mafioso racket in place 1327 to direct -and profit from- another jumbo endeavor the nanny State put in motion for the common good. The event

Expo 2015 (Universal Exposition) was fed to the Italian masses as a spectacular opportunity to unleash economic prosperity to revive the collapsing economy. It turns out the usual suspects -from all provinces of the political gamut- helped themselves to a whirlwind of public subsidies taxpayers funded. Rogue networks of hijacked public contracts are in place as minions orchestrate remotely controlled political appointments.

French news portal Voici publishes (July 25, 2013) how French taxpayers have paid euro 330.000 (2011) and 80.000 (2012) under laws safeguarding cultural heritage. The money served to run a website - which analysts define as crummy and

1327 ANSA, May 9, 2014.

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