Monuments Over The Murdered Gil Bailie and René Girard wrote brilliantly on culture surviving through murder. War is, after all, organized and religiously sanctioned murder, as is the death penalty. Indeed, imprisonment is a macabre, government–sanctioned form of slow execution spread out over years. One definition of a prophet is a person who threatens culture’s power structure by holding up a mirror to its folly and showing where such folly leads. Jesus observed that culture kills such a prophet, and, having killed the prophet to be rid of the threat, that culture then builds a “Monument over the prophet’s grave.” These monuments are the constructed mythologies through which prophets, once they are safely dead, can be converted from cultural critics into cultural supports and made objects of saintly hero worship to serve culture. Jesus obviously intuited that this travesty would be the outcome of his own gesture, but of course this couldnt deter him from playing the hand destiny had dealt him. Consider how American culture first demonized and killed off the native peoples who were here when we arrived—we stole their land, and then, once they were safely out of the way, built monuments over their graves. Through mythologizing we reversed our demo using and read into those murdered peoples a history of great spiritual teachings, legendary heroics, and saintly nobility of character. Easing our national conscience concerning our murder of their forebears, we dumped on the stray survivors of our ethnic cleansing the heavy burden of a glorified imagery few of us could live up to. While we attribute to them pseudo–religions and spiritual paths, giving them a larger–than–life nobility, we also succumbed to our cultural impetus by selling the symbols and myths we created. We hawked the false wisdom of counterfeit medicine men and women on the workshop circuit and fed like vultures on the corpses beneath the monuments we had erected while our treatment of those who remained was as shabby and shameful as our eulogies were overblown and hollow. American culture killed Martin Luther King Jr., and then, once he was safely out of the way, built a monument over his grave as well, making a saint of him, naming streets, boulevards, schools, and institutions after him, at the same time allowing the condition of his people to steadily deteriorate under new words covering the same old cultural travesties. Political correctness, while seeming to promote racial sensitivity, is an agreed-upon form of social lying in which the most biased and prejudiced among us can unctuously say the proper words and thereby cloak our continuing destructive patterns. —Joseph Chilton Pearce
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 02:40:38 +0000
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