Mass Rx

Dennis and I will remember those high and mighty hippie days when some dreamed of putting LSD in the water system so as to "enlighten" the "endarkened" masses of older and less sanguine/progressive folks.

The hipsters used the Dow Co. slogan of "Better Living Through Chemistry."  I didn't particularly buy into this. The couple of times I inhaled cannabis it did nothing for me except make we look strange to my girlfriend of the time; at Shimer College circa 1970. 

But there are those-- perhaps the majority of those who still celebrate the halycon hippie days of Shimer-- who have never grown out of this--like the Huxley's, they simply have added the old brew of evolution, materialism, sophistry, and gossip--so they remain stuck--how ironic for Progressives, so-called! But then, as now, outsiders to this very limited paradigm are not welcome--it is, also ironically, a closed shop. They have forfeited their curiosity for reactionary nostalgia and tossed in more hubris to help them to fail to change.

I was not then, nor am I now, part of this. Also strangely enough, some of the conversants, still materialists to the core, sound a lot like tea partiers.It strengthens my theory that there is always an Uncle Adolph in each one of us who would like nothing better than world domination (see again Animal Farm and When the Sleeper Wakes.) Darwinism drastically lowers the threshold for the raw expression of this anti-God particle, as we saw unmixed in the 20th Century. And on into the 21st, with drone executions and the extension of governmental and corporate individual surveillance ad infinitum. Drone sales to police departments will soon eclipse their use in war; as if that weren't bad enough, or unsuccessful enough!

There was only one person, a prophetess, who warned the Trojans (our team in Mendota) not to bring the wooden giant hobby horse into the city. It was no offering, neither to the godz nor to the Trojans and Trojanettes. Dennis probably can find her name. (Penelope?)

Small single voices are increasingly unheard in the decrepit buzzing mess we call our civilization.  It certainly sometimes seems as if someone had dropped a general anesthetic in the water. (See Walker Percy's "The Thanatos Syndrome," for a full blown application of this--that was his last book, and the one most prophetic, and the most thoroughly ignored. Probably because it sounds pretty pro-life by the end of the book.)  However, given our 99.999% carnal nature, mass applications of drugs, like fertilizer in a drought, are pretty useless, even to the evil one!.

I am very careful not to call myself a prophet, since the standards of a prophet are pretty high; you have to be in near perfect communication with God, like Elijah or Moses; and even if you get the right instructions, it makes no difference at the last if you disobey them, like Balaam or even Moses himself.

"The discerning of spirits" is more my gift--what seems perfectly clear to me about the various manifestations and excretions of the Weltgeist seem quite opaque to others and, as Chesterton said of Christianity itself, "found too difficult and left untried."  I don't find this difficult at all--just like a recurring nightmare, it comes unbidden. ("I see dead people," now revived in the cartoon ParaNorman.) I see dead and dying societies, ideas, sciences, sophisticated men and ladies, philosophies, and so on--rather in the spirit of  Ste. Flannery, who had this gift in spades; and was ignored because of it. 

When few people or no one listens, this is a difficult gift. One does not get positive feedback--it's rather like pain, which Yancey describes as, "The Gift Nobody Wants;"  Unless you are a leper, in which case your will be wanting it more than anything.....