View From The Left Coast

In reading about ritual sacrifices made by the Maya and Aztecs in Latin America in pre-columbian days, I was struck by the thought that these deaths made to ensure the gods sent good hunting, bountiful harvests and victory in battle were really more about political theater than placating bloodthirsty deities. In murdering virgins or children, those who actually put them to death became the demons they were ostensibly seeking to keep at bay. We now know, of course, that all those deaths really had nothing to do with whether the rains came on time, the birds and deer were more plentiful, or the foes easier to vanquish.

Don’t we?

The same is true to those holy people now governing us: they’ve sacrificed tens of thousands of their own young countrymen, 4,000 by killing and many, many more by psychological or physical maiming, at the altar of OIL.

Now, as in the days before Columbus and Cortez brought Christianity, slavery and death to the savages, there are those who believe our modern sacrifice is keeping the stock market healthy, our women and churches free of Moslem stains, and our country free of terrorism. They truly believe, and will not be moved. With Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh to encourage them, and almost all of our elected officials of both parties defending the priest-executioners, the sacrifices have gone one for five years unabated. . .last year even increased with a “surge.”

Dr. Jaime Awe, in his book “Maya Cities and Ancient Caves”, notes that many of thousands of caves in Central America contain offerings from the ancient Maya civilizations. These include agricultural produce, farm tools, hunting implements . . .and human remains. “The ultimate gift was the offering one’s blood or human lives,” writes Awe. “Many cave sites contain skeletal remains of victims who were offered in sacrifice to the powerful denizens of the underworld. More often than not, the skeletons are those of young children, a preferred victim of Chac the rain god.”

Awe goes on the say that these sacrifices appear to have increased during what is called the Terminal Classic Period, AD 800 to 1000. This is significant, he says, because it was during this period that ancient Maya civilization eventually declined, and that the cities in Belize, Guatemala and the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico declined. It has been suggested that overpopulation and deforestation, exacerbated by drought, spelled disaster for the Maya. Despite the apparent increase in sacrifices, “their socio-economic system eventually failed, and the surviving Maya gradually abandoned the once-thriving cities that extended across the lowland Maya world.”

So it is with us: the more frequent and frenzied our sacrifices become, the more the gods ignore us, and the closer we are to the end of our empire. I have to wonder, though, when our civilization ends, our cities are abandoned and our alphabet forgotten, will people in millennia to come speculate about how and why the people survived, but the civilization ended?

Posted by Walt Frazer at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Telemarketing (home invasion by telephone) is a hot-button issue with me. I pay for the phone to allow me to connect to my friends and family and people with whom I choose to do business. It’s mine. The idea that somebody out there thinks they can invade my life anytime they want (usually when I’m eating dinner) to try to separate me from my money, using an instrument I paid for, is outrageous.

But our corporate-owned society condones it. All the more reason I and a few other contrarians are trying to think about ourselves and our society outside the box of the corporatocracy. Some things, like torture, mass murder, and a whole political system based on bribery, are not OK with us, so we’re trying to live our lives differently.

And that’s why I was more than a little shocked yesterday to get a phone call from Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County. The computerized voice of DUHC Director Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap was telling me that if it was not OK for her computer to call me when it felt like it, I had to wait until she was finished talking to push a button saying so.

To me, this was like a midwife doing a c-section.

Alright, she wasn’t asking for money: it was an update on the schedule of what DUHC was doing in the coming week. But for an organization that is doing its best to wean people away from corporate-owned technological control to use one of the most pernicious weapons their foes have is hypocritical at least. It reminds me of another “progressive” organization, until recently called Working Assets Long Distance or WALD, which offers credit cards through one of the more regressive and pro-Bush companies in the US. The idea is that WALD gets to wet its beak while the regressive corporation profits bigtime, and gets all this personal, highly-marketable information about you, and the profits go to UNDO everything WALD-supporters back.

Come on, people, you can’t practice the same methodology your opponents practice without becoming them. If the Democrats practice the same bribery and support the same inhuman and fascist causes the Republicans do, how are they any different? Let’s have “progressive” organizations that practice what they preach, not ones that say “It works for the bad guys, but if WE do it, it’s holy.”

Doesn’t work that way folks: if you run your organization like a regressive, invasive corporation, it IS one.

Posted by Walt Frazer at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)