2005: Growth Amid Desolation, Part 2

We left 2005 at roughly the midway point yesterday: it was a time where many of us were spittiing mad at the murderous crimes being perpetrated out of Washington and documented before us in the blogosphere, even as the mass media continued to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to them all. The Downing Street Memo has been the elephant in the network newsroom. I am sensing that 2006 may bring a further connection between the DSM, foreign and domestic spying, and various other criminal activities of this administration in the run-up to the Iraq War, with a possible release of more revealing documentation in this respect. I am not in the habit of making predictions, but I have a strong feeling that we haven't heard the end of the DSM story.

As the truth about his administration's neurotic obsessions was dragged into the light, the President himself seemed unable to find any place to hide in the back half of 2005. He even landed in the first chapter of a "children's" book. For those of you who have not joined the Potter universe, just check out the first page of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince next time you're at a bookshop or library. And for those of you who love the Harry Potter stories as I do, you're no doubt already aware that Mrs. Rowling has announced that she will be writing the last tome of the Potteriad beginning next month. One more prediction, which I have received from our part-time correspondent, Guptilla the Hun: Harry 7 and the hunt for the 7 horcruxes will hit the stores on 7/7/07. If this tantalizing prediction is true, then we have about 18 and a half months to wait. Anyway, for those who may be interested in scratching the surface of the Pottermania a little, check out this selection from my book, Tao of Hogwarts.

I'm hoping that Guptilla's prediction about that date is correct, because 7/7 is obviously a tragic day in the U.K., just as 9/11 is for us here in New York. It was a very bizarre summer for our friends across the pond. A week before the release of the aforementioned Potter tome, and a day after having been awarded the 2012 Olympic games, London was rocked by three bombs. More than 50 people were killed, and sane folks around the world reacted with a mixture of outrage and compassion.

But sanity, in the realm of the mass media, is a very dark horse indeed, as we saw in this post. Note that the dominant voices in those aberrant, truly inhuman responses to a human tragedy are the media mouthpieces of the Christian fundamentalists who purport to represent the new moral majority.

Most of Daily Rev's commentary is devoted to exposing the reality behind fundamentalism of any stripe or brand name: Christian, Muslim, Judaic, political, moralistic, and even scientific fundamentalism. In short, wherever truth is deadened by being made into a rigid monument of doctrine, there is fundamentalism. It brings exploration and inquiry to a screeching, dead halt; and stops up our inner senses. Fundamentalism is therefore a cult of death, as I described in this piece, written near the end of Cindy Sheehan's month-long siege upon the Crawford Coward's desolate summer palace:

The institutions of fundamentalist Christianity provide the same answers as those of fundamentalist Islam: KILL. Kill anyone who can be remotely perceived as an enemy, whether they're from Iraq, Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela. Jesus and his message are no longer viable in today's world: we must retro-write the Bible to give more credibility to the God of Vengeance and Slaughter.

The response of the corporations is similar to these others: send in your underpaid or outsourced labor force after the armies of death; make whatever profits can be collected for as long as the money's there; and then vanish while you reward the executives who direct operations from a cozy boardroom with another bag of millions.