Sex, sex, sex. It's all about sex.
We climb mountains; we dig holes. We build skyscrapers; we frack for slippery carbons.
It is not he who controls the means of production that rules, but he who controls the means of reproduction.
For most of our history the human species has sorted itself into rival tribes competing for scarce resources. Two things, in general, would compel tribes to interact with each other --a lack of some essential resource, or not enough females to keep the tribe going (and often the latter was classed with the former.)
And thus was concocted every mystical contrivance towards justifying the endless epochs of rape and pillage that have punctuated humanity's slow progress toward a global civilization.
But that global civilization has arrived. We're all living in it now, whether we like it or not. We are all now members of the Global Tribe.
Most reasonably educated people have some modicum of understanding of this. But unfortunately, we all have thousands of years of tribal imprinting stored in our DNA. Not even the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya can overcome all that baggage.
Former NYC Mayor Guiliani might fervently believe that Obama is not of "our tribe", but most of us recognize the speciousness of his argument. Of which tribe do you speak? The American one? The Capitalist one? The Christian one? The White one?
Which brings me to the outrageous headline of this article - Teledildonics in
the Age of Isis. Has a nice ring to it, don't it? Sort of like saying, "Alvin Toffler, meet Mad Max".
The experiment is basically this:
Let's take a bunch of angry, frustrated, horny young men in a sexually backwards
region of the world, give them smart phones and see what happens. Porn. That's
what happens. Decadent, Western pornucopia suddenly blossoms --full frontal-- before their eyes. Guys who get a woody looking at an uncovered ankle are shocked by every conceivable sexual indulgence imaginable (and a great deal quite beyond that!) Is this how those people live? By Allah, we are missing something!
So, like any self-respecting medieval tribe of holy warriors, they set out by the
thousands to try and get a piece of the action. By. Any. Means. Necessary. Especially after the fornicators from the West start dropping bombs on them. Can we make it any more excruciatingly awful? Look at what you are missing --all that writhing, sticky loveliness-- and then BOOM goes the dynamite!
And in the time-honored way of all the tribes of our past, they embark upon
their raping and pillaging. We'll be in your Mall of America soon!
Meanwhile, in the West, Bible-thumpers are still trying to stop abortion and
birth-control. The resurgence of our tribal ways bubbles up from the long suppressed
realms of Jungian/Cthulhu collective unconsciousness. The phallic worship rituals
of the ancient world have been sublimated into a bunch of "ammo-sexuals" running hither and yon, scribbling all manner of hysterical legislation, and blathering such profundities on the Sunday morning talk shows as, "we can't pull out now!"
He who controls the means of reproduction controls the world! Rat-a-tat-tat!
Tut Ankh Amen Ra
Cock, Aim, Squeeze, Fire!
Here's a poem I wrote, way back in 1978, when I was one of those angry, frustrated, desperately lonely and unloved young men:
The 'gasm sweet
O'er I tripped in my youth, why
I rode nearly to the sky
In my fury and lament
For the way things were not likely
To go
See? I sublimated my frustration into poetry/masturbation. Uncle Sam left me alone then, because we had exhausted our collective "seed" ejaculating death all over Vietnam and weren't being drafted anymore, despite Reagan's threats. And the Catholic Church I grew up in could only rage impotently, as the centerfolds spread themselves far and wide, and the women (oh yes, the women!) Took. The. Pill.
When old men gather gold and harems, expect riots.