Politics at the Pseudo-End Times: 1

I do not like writing about politics. There are so many other people who do it. They speak about it, too. Endlessly. And the standards for entry into the field are so very low. I was at my parents place, painting the outdoor furniture, hurrying to beat the rains.At night they listen to Fox News. This evening, Bill O'Blabs-a-lot was talking to fellow media-monger Gretta Van Chatterbox. The very odd Alphonse-Gaston routine they were doing caused my father to yell at the TV, " Let him talk, for goodness sake!" I chortled to myself, secure in the knowledge that I would never descend to listen to Fox News, even when the TV volume was cranked up to the maximum. I sometimes think of my parents sitting in front of the TV with their hair blowing behind their heads, as if the audio were a wind machine blasting in their faces. I will restrict Politics to areas where it mixes with Religion; that witches' cauldron of Western Society from its beginning. From Cairo's Al-Ahram Cairo Review of Books:

Elsewhere in the same section, US historian William Polk, in a piece dated March 2003 ( Une sombre affaire / A Sombre Affair ), reviews the arguments given by the Bush Administration for the invasion of Iraq. Dismissing these as fantasies, he outlines the "hidden agenda determining American relations with Iraq: the new strategic conception of American world domination; the messianic faith in Christian fundamentalism; and the connection between Christian fundamentalism and Zionism."

This is a statement of enormous range.It is not my intent to argue about the truth or falsity of such a statement.

It is my interest how such statements come about.

I believe that a human being is so complex that all the above motives could exist without the individual having them all grouped together in a coherent belief system.

Words and Reason help us to create such a coherence. However, this coherent belief system is not absolutely necessary for an individual to act. The belief system expressed in words is more like a description of actions.

Actions and words, actions and words.

I disturbs me that a writer could discern the features of the face of our new neo-conservative Interregnum of 2000 to 2008 so early on. This is all a part of our Narrative of End of Times. We differ in the details, but almost all of us believe we are headed for destruction.

What happens when a majority of a society believes in inevitable doom?

We'll find out.