Another mental note from Saturday’s militaristic-type event: set up along the main walkway to the air show, a barricaded Sunrise Blvd., a side vendor area featured local radio stations, DJs, girls in bikinis, etc. Also featured was a black Humvee, surrounded by young African-American soldiers in fatigues, with a large installed sound system playing subsonic frequency-enhanced rap music. Shameless? Absolutely. Without shame? Completely. Shameful? Incredibly.
Yesterday, as the major part of Henry’s fifth birthday present, we took him down to Fort Lauderdale beach for the Air & Sea Show. We had purchased tickets for the Public Preferred Seating Area, and were surprised to discover that after a 1/2 mile walk down to the beach from the mall parking lot, there was another 1/2 mile walk (with beach chairs and accoutrements in tow) up the beach to the seating area. “Preferred” indeed. Once we had set up on the beach, we spent an hour or so watching banner planes — large quantities of them — fly up and down the miles-long gallery of viewers. It was strikingly similar to Philip K. Dick’s descriptions of a future. Eventually the show proper began, and then something really interesting happened, the “Beach Invasion”
Six F-18s began circling the designated flight area, rocketing past the grandstand with full afterburners, then turning out to sea to begin another pass. The sound was astonishing. During this, a squadron of Apachee attack helicopters and Huey transport copters also made circling passes at a lower altitude. Further up the beach landing craft made their way toward the beach, and a massive hovercraft entered the fray. It was impressive, and enlightening. There was the full realization of what it was for: suffering, death, carnage, power, control, manipulation, savagery, brutality. It hung in the air like a foetid odor. I imagined being on the receiving end of this machinery, and I saw what it would feel like. On display were the instruments of a profound psychosis, an alien mind control apparatus, predatory insects enforcing the will of twisted landlords. It was inescapable, and terrifying, and it continued throughout the day. I have been to airshows in the past, private airshows, but never one like this, which so vividly melded corporate power with military might and appeals to the cannibal/rape chimpanzee meat machine. During the later appearance of the YF-22 fighter, which was louder than any of the others, and which was able to hang in the air like a giant, malevolent fly, I thought of The Demiurge, Yaldabaoth, Nebro, Samael, Yahweh, Satan:
Like Plato, Gnosticism also presents a distinction between the highest, unknowable “alien God†and the demiurgic “creator†of the material. However, in contrast to Plato, several systems of Gnostic thought present the Demiurge as antagonistic to the will of the Supreme Being: his act of creation occurs in unconscious imitation of the divine model, and thus is fundamentally flawed, or else is formed with the malevolent intention of entrapping aspects of the divine in materiality. Thus, in such systems, the Demiurge acts as a solution to the problem of evil. In the Apocryphon of John circa 200AD (several versions of which are found in the Nag Hammadi library), the Demiurge has the name “Yaltabaoth,†and proclaims himself as God:“Now the archon (ruler) who is weak has three names. The first name is Yaltabaoth, the second is Saklas (“foolâ€), and the third is Samael. And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, ‘I am God and there is no other God beside me,’ for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come.â€[6]
The sensation was as follows: this technology is the direct representation of that. The enemy of mercy; the twisting blind worm; Humwawa:
The Lord of Abominations is HUMWAWA of the South Winds, whose face is a mass of the entrails of the animals and men. His breath is the stench of dung, and has been. HUMWAWA is the Dark Angel of all that is excreted, and of all that sours. And as all things come to the time when they will decay, so also HUMWAWA is the Lord of the Future of all that goes upon the earth, and any man’s future years may be seen by gazing into the very face of this Angel, taking care not to breathe the horrid perfume that is the odour of death.
These things have material form. Outside right now I can hear them, shrieking past, returning home.
The Department of Defense is The Department of War.