An Ancient Sect in Israel, and Tangential Thoughts

     Essenes, the Jewish sect located in Palestine, later Roman Judea, from the 2nd Century B.C. to the 2nd Century A.D., comprised two groups, the practical and the contemplative, or the physicians, called so because they doctored troubled souls.  

     They lived by Lake Asphaltites (the Dead Sea).  Pliny the Elder, who wrote about the Essenes first, remarked that "bulls and camels can float in it [the Lake]."

     They had possession of the Dead Sea Scrolls but probably didn't write them.  Copies of Torah from the 3rd Century B.C.  Source documents.  Older than the first Catholic Bible, the Vulgate, by seven centuries.

     Essenes avoided sex with women.  Probably thought about it.  Dreams in an Essene mind at the time of Jesus.  A curvaceous city woman, a merchant's wife, a prostitute.  My own dirty mind in a time of savage war of eleven days in Gaza and Israel, mainly Israel pummeling their own Holy Land like it's a sand castle at the end of a day at the beach.

     Pliny, writing in the 1st Century A.D., writes a paragraph about the Essenes, who are "without any women, casting off the whole of Venus: without Money: keeping company only with date palms."

     Casting off means also unmooring a boat, a new freedom.  

     The Essenes practiced daily water immersion.  I wonder if John the Baptist learned from them?  Who is John the Baptist?  He's the man who announced the coming of Christ, the messenger who condemned Queen Herodias to her face for being an adulteress, condemned King Herod Antipas, both of them Roman puppet rulers.  The people, treated unjustly, overtaxed, brutalized, putting up with Jewish cooperation with Palestine's occupiers, Sadducees and Pharisees in a mode of go along to get along, cried out for someone to come along and solve all of their problems.

     John lost his head after sexy Salome, daughter of Herodias, stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, turned on by Salome's dance, granted her request:

     "Bring me the head of John the Baptizer on a platter."

     Presenting his neck to the ax, John smiled inwardly, convinced he'd passed the torch to the right person.

     Was he the right person?  There were many "messiahs" during those centuries.  Jesus, take a number, it's probably a double digit.  The numbers of men advertising themselves as messiahs must have felt strange to the pagan Romans, yet, they grabbed ahold of one philosophy of one man.  Jewish Christians wrote the early Christian writings.  The New Testament was written by converts, some would say "heretics."

     Paul was Saul, looking at Christians as those in the wrong.  He held robes of men stoning Stephen to death. watched the rocks breaking skin, cracking bones, back shots aplenty at resumption of the fetal position, and this was the birth of Christianity, shepherded by a man who watched another human being get pummeled by missiles thrown and flicked by right-thinking religionists.  Pharisee and Sadducee inducement to kill Stephen might have happened.  I wasn't there, don't quote me on that speculation.

     Christianity, early on during its first four centuries (until its full legalization in 381), needed martyrs, just like most Earth-shaking events require influences propelling the fact, real or not, of their having happened so that learners of these past conditions can acquire inspiration as they face their own eras and difficulties.  Thus do acts of injustice inspire movements.

     Peter, later sainted and given the job of Heaven's doorman, asked to be crucified upside down; he felt unworthy to be crucified as was his Lord.  Gary Gilmore asked to be executed by a firing squad.  In both men's cases, Peter and Gary were killed by state representatives.  Jesus, too, suffered and died on the cross, an execution method Romans reserved for political criminals, meaning they thought he was a threat to the state.  How this could be the case is open to questioning and speculation, and requires historical research I'm not going to spend five years doing.  Suffice it to say, Jesus wouldn't have been executed by way of the cross if he hadn't been judged as a political criminal, though it's interesting that the two crucified men on either side of Jesus were thieves.  He told them he'd take them to Heaven.

     "Sure, whatever you say.  You do see the situation we're in, right?"

     Humility characterized Jesus in some instances, grandiloquence in others.  And doubt, don't forget.  He doubted, knowing he was a sitting duck for Roman authorities led by Judas, agent of Jesus' ascent to Heaven where he's been sitting for a long fucking time at the right hand of God, his Dad.

     Can times get worse?  What is Jesus waiting for?  Has to summon a Heavenly Army to do Armageddon with?  Or does he show up as a regular human, unknown, underpaid, undervalued, kicked in the shins by capitalism every day, becomes a union organizer and a bit of a kook with a faraway look in his eyes, spends a lot of time praying.  Asks for guidance before withdrawing support for a presidential candidate.  Challenges power, gets assassinated, because that's how the story is supposed to play out.  When an organizer for good and humane treatment of the downtrodden becomes prominent and influential, the powers that be eliminate him or her.  The viciousness and brutality of the ruling class, no matter what the era, should never be forgotten or underestimated.

     So, I propose that Jesus came back already and got himself killed.  He might've been a Black man, or a Malaysian.  He wasn't J. Edgar Hoover and he isn't Robert Mueller, or Rachel Maddow, or David Hasselhoff, or me, nor was he Gore Vidal, or Timothy McVeigh, or Saddam Hussein, or Ronald Reagan.  Jesus had no place in his practice for a cretin like Reagan.

     I think Jesus was more like the Essenes: peaceful, abstemious, cautious in speech, challenged by life's experiences, a man of faith, a man of doubts, finally, a brave man committed to telling the truth as it came to his eloquent tongue.

     Here's to you, Jesus.  I never have been a Christian, but that's not necessary to get something useful for life out of the story of Jesus, as well as Judas, Mary Magdalene, and Joseph of Arimethea's cup held aloft to receive Christ's blood from near his heart where the legionary thrust his lance to put an end to him so they could take shelter while the wrath of God the Father blasted Jerusalem and environs with a black-clouded storm, all the way out to Gaza maybe.  

     NEW RELIGION BORN.

     One cobbled together from Judaic tradition (itself influenced by the Egyptian and Babylonian religions as well as Mesopotamian cults and Phoenician polytheism) and Mithraism.  Mithra, a god of light, worshipped by Roman soldiers, predating Christianity.  Mithra, born on December 25th, a day around the Winter Solstice, the birth of light.  Jesus was put to that birth date to make him appealing to Mithra devotees, got Army support that way.  Christmas and Santa Claus are really about acquiring a militarist point of view: "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war!"  Those lyrics either mean what they say, or they don't.  "As to" is like saying "as if to war."  The lyrics don't mention the casualties following the march to war, whether the march be literal marching, or marching by news people pushing the company line on invading Venezuela or North Korea.

     To you, Jesus.  You stuck your neck out, you surrendered and that's your message.  Stop trying to control, let things be, peace, at least for a while, for the world needs peace.  Peace of camels floating in the Dead Sea, a thing for a Roman writer to marvel at.  Pliny, who died of curiosity while studying the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

     Essenes would have been around to see the ash cloud coming west, making pretty sunsets, deep purple at times, magenta.  Floating past the bulls and camels in Lake Asphaltites, unaware that Romans to the west in Italia had suffocated and been singed thoroughly, en masse.  The Essene, I imagine, would not pass judgment on the singed and suffocated victims of the belching volcano just because they had led sex-filled sybaritic lives.

     Those who keep "company with date palms," as Pliny wrote, are the quintessence of harmlessness as they die out the like the Shakers, rejecting sexual reproduction, intimate contact with women, preserving ancient sacred books in the dry desert air, the best element in making natural time machines.

Vic Neptune

     

     

         

Love and Rockets

      Love, Actually, a terrible film I endured fourteen years ago.  Hugh Grant plays a bumbling Prime Minister, a bachelor, of course, spends more time thinking about dropping his pants with his secretary than he does about bombing Yugoslavia.

     The Walking Dead cop, Rick, plays a romantic in love with somebody.  The one good scene, a montage, has Rick in the gray London air on the street seeking his love, Dido's heartbreaking "Here With Me" on the audio track.

     Liam Neeson, having lost his life to Darth Maul, plays a single dad in the cutest and most vomitous scenes in the film, as his little kid, who looks like a Dungeons and Dragons ginger goblin, practices his drums to impress a girl.  A montage includes the boy doing this, a sign hung on his bedroom door about how he's practicing.  Liam, wanting a gun in his hand and for his son to be "taken," so he can exit this maudlin anti-masterpiece, yearns to smash London instead of playing Cupid to his son's ploy at childhood romance.

     An English bloke gets on a wrong flight and ends up in "Milwaukee."  I put the name of the city in quotation marks due to director Richard Curtis's ill-informed idea of what Milwaukee is like.  The gawky Englishman attracts a girlfriend of the fineness of Shannon Elizabeth who speaks not with an eastern Wisconsin accent.

     Everybody converges at the airport in London, and, according to Prime Minister Grant on the narration, what is it all about, this life?  "It's love, actually."  The cast claps and feels a joy I couldn't feel after having masochistically inflicted this film upon my mind.  My eyes enjoyed Shannon Elizabeth and the secretary character.  That shallow pleasure condemned me to watch the film to the end.  On vacation, I watched this movie among a pile of videotapes given to me by my cousin.  

     Refreshingly, for balance in quality, that same summer of 2005 I saw two good, funny, engaging Hal Hartley films, Henry Fool and Amateur.

     I'd been told Love, Actually, is good.  Chris Matthews, former MSNBC host fired due to his outrageous comments about Bernie Sanders, said his favorite film is Love, Actually.  This proves to me that an inside the Beltway millionaire news host with no real problems in a world designed by neoliberals and neoconservatives, doesn't have a clue about how real people are and how they speak.  Contrived dialogue and hokey situations more maudlin than anything I've ever seen identify Love, Actually as a stomach-churning affront to the performance arts.  Richard Curtis should retire from making films.

     Sir, you have abused cinema!!!  The genre of the love story is ruined forever because of the implausibilities in your film.  Hugh Grant is not a convincing Prime Minister of the U.K.  Milwaukee is nothing like the way you depicted it in a kind of glib treatment, making a real place look cliched and false.  I've been to Milwaukee many times, I know what I'm talking about, Richard Curtis.

     Now, the reader I hope gets that I'm kidding, at least the line about Curtis retiring from filmmaking?

     Favorite films of odious people:

 

     Josef Stalin loved Each Dawn I Die, 1939 prison film starring James Cagney and George Raft.  Raft gets walked into solitary for a few months, dark room except a shaft of light from the barred window of the cell door, dirt floor, chamberpot (I'm assuming), nothing to do except go crazy.  He comes out, the makeup job Academy Award caliber, walks like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, stiff, dazed, broken, eyes dark circles, mouth hanging open; theater in the raw in terms of the situation and George Raft's acting in a classic prison riot and standoff movie.  He's mesmerizing and over the top, he's the gangster in The Public Enemy who tosses a coin in the air and catches it, over and over again.  

     Adolf Hitler loved the dystopian science fiction film, Metropolis; he loved The Charge of the Light Brigade, I don't know why, but maybe he was turned on by British cavalry officers riding full tilt at Russian gun emplacements, firepower of muskets and cannon, taking them down, explosives flinging horse guts on the dusty ground, brains of English officers exposed to smoky sunlight, all turned into a Rudyard Kipling poem.

     Howard Hughes repeatedly watched The Outlaw, his own film, and one he produced, Jet Pilot, as well as the Cold War thriller, Ice Station Zebra, watching the latter in his Vegas hotel room hundreds of times.

     

     Expectations?  Dashed.  The idea this would turn into a coherent blog post makes my readers feel disappointment even as its author feels release from the practice of sticking to one subject, going on tangents for no apparent reason.

     Odious means extremely unpleasant, repulsive, which means lacking sympathy.

     Repulsive government representatives unable to express condemnation of Israeli military killings of Palestinian children.  State Department spokesman Ned Price, Antony Blinken's mouth, was asked point blank if he's against the killing of Palestinian children.  Dodging, the soulless dithering creep relied on the excuse of insufficient current knowledge, won't speculate about unconfirmed casualty reports.

     Come on, Ned!  Are you in favor of child murder or not?  That was the journalist's question, the essence.  Ned couldn't answer because it's affirmative.  The United States will allow Israel's atrocities against Palestinians whenever it happens while continuing to give that chronic human rights violating nation three billion dollars per year, U.S. taxpayer-supplied, so they can buy our weapons and mutilate Palestinian flesh and steal their land and properties while the world looks on and does nothing.   

     Still, bottom line, Ned Price approves of child murder; so does Joe Biden and Antony Blinken.

     What a drag it all is to think about.  Watching from a distance as the Israeli government and military annihilate the Palestinians, committing an ironic genocide against a Semitic people; so really, crimes against Palestinians are acts of Anti-Semitism.  Two brothers go their separate ways in some book of the Bible, one generates Judaism, the other Islam.  Interestingly, they serve the same god, though a deity

hidden, as now, behind layers of deepening mystery.

     Buck up, Earth!  The human population may be on its way out.  You can take millions of years to heal, parts of you will be irradiated until 10 Billion A.D., but new dominant species will rise and fall, a human remnant may survive, a new leaf.

     Tannhauser, the German opera, beautiful Overture, the Crusader who returns home, goes on a bender sin-wise, spends years in the Venusberg, willing captive of the Love Goddess, fucking himself silly, finally leaving, becoming monkish, going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, dying, his pilgrim's staff sprouting a leaf, the music of that scene shivering my skin.

     

     A few advertising hooks:

     PEPSI!!! Favorite Cola of the C.I.A.

     THE WOUNDING OF FRODO ON WEATHERTOP brought to you by Burger King.

     Covid-19! brought to all of us by scientists conducting gain of function research on viruses in Wuhan with funds raised by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

     Assignment: Dealey Plaza, a thirty-five minute film presenting the Praetorian Guard Theory, that John Kennedy was killed by the Secret Service, as Emperor Caligula's guardsmen killed him, inside job, Roman style.

     

     Heather Locklear in a pink bikini, big hair boosted with chemical spray.  Also in a cop uniform trading barbs with Adrian Zmed; black uniforms, shiny steel badges, William Shatner reduced from Captain of the Enterprise, coolest job in the Universe, to an L.A. street cop, a sergeant, going after punks, driving recklessly, and teaching drug users a lesson.  He's got a heart of gold.  He can't tolerate pimps or prostitutes even though his name is Hooker, T.J. Hooker.  T.J. stands for Thomas Jefferson, stands for Total Jerk, Totalitarian Jackass, Tumescent Jock. 

     I remember that Heather Locklear went by the name Stacy in that show.  Tommy Lee dated her before he was with Pam Anderson.  Pam is my favorite name for a woman, I'm not kidding.  Kidding is something people feel they have to explain.  Tommy Lee had an interesting reality TV show.  He joined the University of Nebraska marching band, played various drums and learned to march and perform.  Easy pickings for the skilled L.A. Glam Metal drummer?  Not so fast with your assumptions!  Tommy Lee found marching and drumming difficult at first, like anyone would.  The experience gave him a workout and challenged his drumming skills.  Good show, better than most reality TV I've seen.

     

     Ending this on a happy note, as if Rocker Tommy Lee lore isn't the highest note we can achieve, I'm fully vaccinated, until a third and fourth and so on are necessary.

     Still, it's a feeling of relief for that Covid-19-obsessed part of my mind's activities to take a break from worrying about catching it, though I still wear a mask in public buildings.  Side effect of wearing a mask this past year: for the first time in I don't know how long I didn't catch my usual winter cold, haven't had one since February 2020.  So, anti-maskers, do you want to not catch colds?  Wear a mask in public places.

Vic Neptune