So... that last article kinda got... Lost.
[...but, in a good way.
Hitting the ground running here...
Let's have some fun.]
I started off with yer standard Obama-Jesus Messiah-Hero rhetoric, and before I could say "radical socialist agenda", I was getting Lost in Space trying to find meaning behind a mask. Such a perfect example of how this research goes and flows where it pleases, and we're all just along for the ride. Merrily, merrily, merrily... life is but a dream...
"A recurring theme in this Primary is that Black Gilligan’s [Obama's] biggest contribution to America’s foreign policy and standing in the world, would be his blackness; his embodiment of difference, and the American Dream universally accessible to everyone regardless of their origin, will magically rebrand America from 'Global Enforcer,' to 'Global Embracer.'"
"The Tree/Adam/Eve and the Serpent/DNA... also reminds me of... ‘Paradise Lost’. I think it refers to a time when our Parad-Eyes became quite literally Lost. It brings to mind the ‘Island’ (3rd Eye) which was somehow ‘Lost/Closed’ when when we ‘fell from Grace’. Adam & Eve where booted out of Eden, the human race lost it’s Balance, and the Doorway/Stairway to Heaven (3rd Eye/DNA) was Lost..."
http://blackdogstar.blogspot.com/2009/03/surfing-rainbow-wave.html
ol' one eye knows this ain't paradise
The Lost Boys, feelin blue, seein red
To recap:
In
Lion is Lamb, I revisited the opening article of this blog
(which kinda got Lost in Wonderland) by taking a second look at the simplified illusions that contributed to the rise of Barack Obama's star in mass media. Besides being astrologically Leo, the fact that Obama's image was simultaneously that of the Messiah-Savior and the Anti-Christ connected him to the concept of the anti-hero, the dark hero, as our collective [un]consciousness accepted him as the symbolic "black" man, the dark man, the man in black... even though he is more accurately -ethnically- both black and white. Two-faced.
After trying to make some overplayed, somewhat obvious connections between the concept of an avatar and the dark hero archetype, the research -as per usual- stumbled clumsily into much deeper ideas about lies, reality and belief. The avatar, represented in the initial patterns by Barack Obama as the black/white everyman precedent, is revealed as a mask, a lie. Just as the treasonous terrorist codenamed V from V For Vendetta embodied the truth of his ideals through a lie we could all put on via the Guy Fawkes mask, we -as members of the new global village- are finding new truths about ourselves and our reality through the avatars we've created online. In the all-connected internet Wonderland, the dreamworld is starting to make more sense than the "real" world. Just as Jake Sully's blue body in Avatar was a "false" body through which he found a reality more true, Obama's truth came to us through the mask of our society's accepted representative liar - the politician.
my president is mixed
..can't spell believe without 'lie' :)
my hero
can't spell belief without l-i-e
But, as we all knew/now know/must admit, Obama is much more than just another lying head of state. I titled the first chapter of this series Black Star Resurrection; Obama's rising star is the resurrection of the spiritual dark father figure that was once fallen. It is this -the fall, the failure, the loss- that connects us all to this meme; just as Cypher cynically says of Neo in The Matrix, "Everybody falls"...
"[C.S.] Lewis often capitalises the word 'lion', since [Aslan] is, at least partially, represented as God."
Denzel stars alongside John the GoodMan, not good meaning go[o]d but good meaning bad
paradise lost, falling into the abyss
This line of research was supposed to be simpler. I was hoping to use the more straightforward duality within the patterns of the Lion and the Lamb, black and white, to counteract the wildly colorful craziness that was so hypnotizing in the previous chapters. I was hoping to counter the in-credible showbiz Beyonce-ness of Wonderland with the clear truthiness of history and politics. Surely MTV's popstar culture must be less 'real' than the history taught in our schools or the politics that shape our livelihoods. I was hoping to give a bit more credibility to my approach to all this "pattern" stuff, but instead, a surprisingly solid path that started with a 'self'-serving Lion-Jesus has led me directly to Satan. Satan? Yep, time to back it up some... let's get back to Obama...
Lion of Judas, Snake in the Grass
In
Lion is Lamb, images in art and media of Obama as Jesus led me to the lost image of the Lion Jesus, the warrior-messiah, as the representative image of Judaism and Israel, being famously replaced by the image of the Star of David. The title "Lion of Judah" comes from the Israelite Tribe of Judah, the largest of the twelve tribes who followed Moses through the wilderness into the "Promised Land". The connection between Ju
dah as a tribe and Ju
daism as a world religion is obvious, but less discussed is the connection between these and Judas as the betrayer of Jesus and the Christian characterization of Jews as the mob who called for his crucifixion. The entire Old Testament hails Jesus' coming as the
Hebrew messiah, sent to save the
Hebrew people. and he was hung on a cross with a sign that read "King of the Jews". Thanks to Emperor Constantine and some careful political editing, the Jewish perspective in the Bible is pretty much nonexistent after Jesus -their prophesied messiah- dies. The consequence of their heinous betrayal...
look at that big smile... jew going to hell
14 For ye, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God which are in Judaea in Christ Jesus: for ye also suffered the same things of your own countrymen, even as they did of the Jews;
15 who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove out us, and pleased not God, and are contrary to all men;
-1 Thessalonians 2:14
This is where Judas' place in the pattern gets tricky.
In order to follow this logic train, it is necessary to note how the allegorical nature of these stories is revealed by the repetition of names associated with concepts. It is not simply coincidence that Judas Iscariot sold Jesus (Yeshua) to the Romans and in the Old Testament, Judah sold the Old Testament's Joseph (also the name of Jesus' earthly father) to the Egyptians. It is not simply coincidence that Joseph brought the Hebrews into Egypt by inviting his family and that the largest tribe to follow Moses out of Egypt -and choose Jesus' ancestor David as king- was the Tribe of Judah, eventually led to the Promised Land by the warrior surrogate-son Joshua (Yeshua). The followers of Judaism and a man named Judah are both blamed for betraying Jesus to the Romans (who actually tortured and killed him). Yeah, yeah, yeah; it's all a rich tapestry...
In the 1970's, a tattered papyrus codex was discovered in the caves of the Egyptian desert that flipped the proverbial script on the straightforward good-and-evil framework of the story of Jesus' crucifixion. The Gospel of Judas presupposes that not only did Jesus instruct Judas to betray him in order to facilitate his own martyrdom, but that Judas, the snake, was Jesus' most trusted apostle. Let that synk in for a sec.
Like many gnostic texts, Judas' Gospel is dismissed by christian scholars as pseudeponymous fiction -history re-written to fit the gnostic rhetoric- but for the purposes of the pattern, the historical validity is irrelevant. Within the context of either version of the story, Judas is the catalyst for a set of divinely orchestrated events. Much like the "evil" serpent from the Garden of Eden, and [lu]Cypher in The Matrix, Judas' actions switch from bad to good once we step back and see the big picture, the steps of causality. This pattern also extends to a few other pop-culture traitors mentioned so far here in the Black Star series; Batman betrays the trust of the people (for the greater good) with his little surveillance trick in The Dark Knight, and Tyler Durden betrays himself and his movement to try and prevent the tower bombings. Jake Sully's first betrayal in Avatar put him in "place the eye[i] does not see" before he betrays his race for ascension through the eye[i] of the deity (and "some local tail"). Darth Vader not only betrayed the Jedi Council during his rise to power [i.e., his fall to darkness], he betrayed Emperor Palpatine to save his son before his final descent into death [i.e., his moral resurrection].
not so black and white, eh?
Denzel Washington, pictured above, and in this chapter's banner art, has quite a few recent roles in which the "treason theme" fits. The Manchurian Candidate has him betraying the secret evil machinations of the puppeteers behind the United States government and himself -resonating Obama- and in the role that made him a star, Private Tripp from Glory, his most powerful scene comes when he is publicly whipped as a union army deserter. Also, in my view, resonating Obama [mostly the public whipping part]. That pivotal role in Glory had Washington sharing starlight with Morgan Freeman -resonating Obama as Hollywood's first black president- who plays Pvt. Tripp's surrogate father figure, and with Matthew Broderick -resonating Obama as the voice of Simba, the Lion King- who plays Robert G. Shaw, the union army colonel who betrayed his race by siding with the darkies as an abolitionist and as an active force against the racial discrimination of his all-black regiment, the 54th. Coincidence that becomes constant and ubiquitous is no longer coincidence... co-incidents... coin... flip...
"the Southerners must be made to feel that this was a real war, and that they were to be swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews of old..."
-Colonel James Montgomery,
quoted in the letters of Colonel Robert Shaw
Examining Glory in the context of this study was eye-opening enough, but after getting past the synchronicities, my co-contributor and I were led to the contradictory idea of "historical" films. Movies like Glory and Braveheart are generally accepted as reflecting actual history -at least more so than non-historical films- while, at the same time known for the creative liberties taken by the writers and producers. For example, Washington's public flogging as Pvt. Tripp, the scene that put Glory on the national scene and won Denzel an Oscar, never happened. Aside from the fact that there was no Pvt. Tripp -only Broderick's character was real- flogging was an illegal punishment by that time, and Broderick's character, Robert Shaw, was known for being conservative. In Braveheart, the first battlefield meeting between the Scottish rebels and the English army, the famed Battle of Stirling (which took place on the morning of September 11th), was actually the Battle of Stirling Bridge, and, you guessed it, was a guerrilla battle where the rebels surprised the English as they crossed a bridge. Those extended-length phallic spears that turned the tide? Fake. The shot of lines of rebels raising their kilts to moon their opponents? Imaginary. 13th century Scottish rebels didn't wear kilts. Or plaid.
what's the message, Mel?
Now, as for the famous blue make-up, the jury's still out. Some nitpickers have discounted that detail as false as well, due to lack of evidence, but there isn't any evidence saying William Wallace didn't wear blue war paint. In fact, a few centuries earlier, Scottish warriors would dye their entire bodies with blue paint by bathing in it. Perhaps Mel wasn't blue enough. In any case, the director is not the bad guy here: films, we concluded, are stories, and stories are just plain ineffective when they're bogged down by too much accuracy. In most cases, in order to better communicate the message/moral/truth of a story/myth/history, one must re-write the real to fit the rhetoric. On one hand, this seems wrong... manipulative, dishonest, and at worst, a betrayal of history itself. On the other hand, this is precisely the way our subconscious sends us messages in our dreams. Sooner or later, though, we all have to wake up... right?
Morpheus: Have you ever had a dream, Neo,
that you were so sure was real?
HisStory is... a Dream
"This was not like reality. We were blue. We were having a good time riding in vehicles and even riding backwards in wheelchairs for fun. I and my daughter and our vehicles were blue, including our skin. We were laughing joyously while we were doing this."
-Dee Finney, recounted dream
not like reality
"The look of the Na'vi—the humanoids indigenous to Pandora—was inspired by a dream that Cameron's mother had, long before he started work on Avatar. In her dream, she saw a twelve-foot-tall blue-skinned woman, which he thought was
'kind of a cool image'."
"The new film, Precious, reminds us that no matter how bad our situation,
our dreams can help us change our reality"
-Anonymous Reviewer
Morpheus: I have dreamed a dream,
but now that dream is gone from me.
merrily merrily, merrily merrily...
We are synking in the abyss.
Awake while dreaming, dreaming while awake.
It's okay if it doesn't seem real
or right.
Almost done...
To be concluded in the next and final chapter:
BSR4: Laws of Power, Words of Mercy, Children of Gods and Devils (really)
peace.
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