Boom Town

The news filters in as fragments of rumour and reportage. We exchange messages of reassurance, and watch events unfold, and life goes on; except where it doesn't.   We've been here before too often not to remember how the story plays out.   Still, the texture varies, and this is the closest to home it's been in awhile.

Our leaders fall over each other to make proclamations of strength and defiance, ritually insisting that wickedness must fail, that such acts as these will never cow us.   And they are right, really; for all the noise the bombs make, they are but little things, and even with the amplification of shock and outrage remain mere squibs.   The city will sail on, majestically indifferent to their popping.

Terror cannot win if we are not terrified, and we are not.   London is far bigger and far fucking scarier than a few small explosions.   If we were going to succumb to terror we would have done so centuries ago.   It is not in our nature.

But the bombers do achieve something, even so.   They can claim this mean little victory: to have added to the sorrow of the world.   Huzzah!

As if it needed any more.

There's plenty of mourning to be done, now, plenty of weeping.   Dozens are dead, hundreds wounded.   Lives broken, blood on the streets, horror in the dark.   So many tears.   Chalk that up, believer, score one for you.

But there is always mourning to be done.   The world is full of grief, there's no fucking shortage of it.   More people will die in agony around the globe as I type these words than were burned and choked and shattered in the tunnels this morning.   Pain is a commonplace.   Hurt grows on trees.

So, beyond the terrible sadness of the event, there is another: that there are human beings so stupid as to value this worthless currency; who think there is anything to be bought by yet more bloody misery.

Fnords

For some geek-humour reason, fnords came up on a mailing list I'm on and one thing led to another.

It's a fuck of a long time since I read Illuminatus! and Schrödinger's Cat, and a lot of intellectual water has flowed under the bridge since then, but I still have a bit of an adolescent soft spot for those paranoid, drug-addled, absurdist hippy fantasies. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson shamelessly appropriated whatever shambolic fragments of mysticism, science fiction, anarchy and random plagiarism came their way, and the lunatic tapestry they created remains a seminal document of the era -- and also a continuing apocryphal bible for that ever-popular internet religion Libertarianism.

There's a lot of crackpot twaddle in there, a lot of bad acid trips, and I'm sure much of it has dated horribly. But there's something touchingly romantic about the underlying humanism that still, more than two decades later, seems to me to be worth hanging onto.

Also, I clearly remember a gay sex scene in one of the Schrödinger's Cat books that, despite having all the rude words replaced with names like "Rehnquist" and "Falwell" (a gimmick stolen shamelessly from Gore Vidal), was one of the most incredibly erotic things I'd ever read at the age of 14 or so :)

So. Hail Eris! All hail Discordia! Why should we let the forces of darkness immanentize the fucking Eschaton?