The Grey Mech Cometh

This morning I woke about 4:30, got up made coffee, thought of somethings I had to do, then sat down to watch the rest of Terminator: Genysis. I do not quite understand the continuous softening of Sarah Connor in the series of movies, but it was OK.

I mean, the whole time-travel-paradox thing with an evil John Connor lost me at the first turn in the time maze and I really did not understand a word of the patter the characters spoke about "future so-and-so" and "in the past so-and-so"... so much was my befuddlement that Skynet himself became more like a pantomime horse in the sky...

zipping through various incarnations, or immetallations, or implasmations of newer and more advanced terminator entities.
So I did not seek to understand.

Furthermmore, there was a sub-plot of Sarah and John's father-to-be and romance, but any romance was always preceded by (1) strategy sessions, or (2) tactical discussions, or (3) meditations on time-travel paradoxes of Skynet and related devices.

I liked it. I do not sit through films I don't like. I like Terminator films. Period.
Yesterday I watched The Queen of Katwe, and I liked that, too, and I always like Mira Nair's films.


After finishing with Terminator: Genysis, I took in a few blinks-worth of Suicide Squad - I figure I'll watch about 15 minutes per day to keep the evil from boiling over - and then I went to the good old computer, thinking I would be greeted with a few laughs about the new administration.

Fate, had something else in mind.


Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable
Trump’s top adviser thinks we’re in “the great Fourth Turning in American history.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-apocalypse_us_5898f02ee4b040613138a951?ref=yfp

... In Bannon’s view, we are in the midst of an existential war, and everything is a part of that conflict. Treaties must be torn up, enemies named, culture changed. Global conflagration, should it occur, would only prove the theory correct. For Bannon, the Fourth Turning has arrived. The Grey Champion, a messianic strongman figure, may have already emerged. The apocalypse is now...

... Strauss and Howe’s theory [which theory is the view held by Mr. Bannon] is based on a series of generational archetypes — the Artists, the Prophets, the Nomads and the Heroes — that sound like they were pulled from a dystopian young adult fiction series. Each complete four-part cycle, or saeculum, takes about 80 to 100 years, in Strauss and Howe’s reckoning. The Fourth Turning, which the authors published in 1997, focuses on the final, apocalyptic part of the cycle.

Strauss and Howe postulate that during this Fourth Turning crisis, an unexpected leader will emerge from an older generation to lead the nation, and what they call the “Hero” generation (in this case, millennials), to a new order. This person is known as the Grey Champion. An election or another event — perhaps a war — will bring this person to power, and their regime will rule throughout the crisis...

I was not entirely honest with you about this morning.
Before I had gotten out of bed, I was thinking of fears and flight; I was thinking of the things that haunt my mind and bedevil me; I was thinking of the strange imaginings that sometimes sap my strength in the marches of the night...
Then I got up made coffee, thought of somethings I had to do, then sat down to watch the rest of Terminator: Genysis. I do not quite understand the continuous softening of Sarah Connor in the series of movies, but it was OK...

I have mentioned I often was oppressed by a vision of a future dystopic. This was back in the 80s and before, well before most of the modern day bleak future visions, but not before Brave New World, 1984, and A Chronicle for Leibowitz.

I knew such things were madness, because I lived in the USA, powerful, wealthy, religious.
And since the turn of the century, I saw 9/11, the 2008 Financial Crisis during which you could see how nervous the President and the Treasury Secretary were on TV, and I have now seen the abomination of desolation in the holy place....

I hope to God the Bannon article is nonsense, for the idolatry of one's own mind in pretending to know the infinite mind of God is spiritual death.


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The Grey Mech is a character is Gregory Benford's Sailing Bright Eternity (1995), a mechanical device of ultra-potent destructiveness.
Why grey? Why is Strauss and Howe's champion grey?
What about Mr. Grey in Stephen King's Dreamcatcher?

"Young man, why are you here? You know we have an appointment in Samarra t'morra!"

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