Wheel! Of! FISH!

A Beast in heat.

2002-04-05 - 7:03 p.m.

"Then I stood on the sand of the sea. And I saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, on his horns ten crowns, and on his heads a blasphemous name." - Revelations 13:1

Probably a million damn quotings of Revelation since September 11, and ten trillion before that on the eves of every other disaster.

But I've been thinking about Beasts.

I'm not capable of providing any sort of insight as to the meaning of all this mushroom-induced versage. I don't want to prove that those demon locusts with men's faces and lion's hair are U.N. helicopters, or to conclusively demonstrate that the Whore of Babylon has something to do with anything at all in the Middle East.

I've just been thinking about Beasts.

A lot of metaphors were tossed around about the American reaction to 9-11. Fear, horror, shock, rage, patriotism, camaraderie, human compassion, race hatred, militarism, religious revivalism, jingoism, strife, madness, &c., &c, ad infinitum, ad astra ... they were all spun magically into lyrical new images as reporters and pundits and philosophers and Joe Sixpacks tried to put a helpful handle on matters well beyond the ken of manual control.

I think of one image in particular that strikes me as relevant in the arena of world politics. And it has nothing to do with emotions. Rather, it's a reflection of the collective lack thereof.

A Beast.

Let's not confuse this rough Beast slouching nonchalantly towards the Holy Land with "The Beast", beloved and colorfully-described caricature of "Transmetropolitan", although they share a lot of adjectives.

A great, massive, Beast, with a steely glint to its dark hide and the pulse of dark blood in the thick veins that lace along its massive limbs. A Beast that stares out into the suddenly endless night around it and experiences the closest thing a Beast can feel to fear.

The Hound of the Baskervilles encountering its own mortality in the yawning barrel of Watson's revolver.

I say nothing here about the virtues of human decency or the sudden prevalence of flags or the massive donations or the outpouring of support and brotherhood on the part of the American people. The affairs of the cheery little things clinging to the Beast's hide don't concern the hapless rodents and reptiles that dwell in the Beast's yard.

The Beast rises up on its haunches and stretches its vast Neolithic jaws in a gape of long waiting.

The Beast seizes whatever hapless rodent wanders into the range of its snuffling snout and shakes it like a bullyrag, leaving it in tatters.

The Beast does this again, and again, until ... well, it reminds me of another bit of Revelations:

"He performs great signs, so that he even makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men. And he deceives those who dwell on the earth by those signs which he was granted to do in the sight of the Beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the Beast who was wounded by the sword and lived." - Revelations 13:13-14

Smoke on the water, fire in the sky.

America took a wound, and a sharp one. Its head lolled to the side and blood ran down its jaw and it looked like Sonny Liston finally realizing he'd come to the end of his rope for a few long starry moments

Then it's eyes came rolling back into focus like dice in the cup, and snapped into the dull ochre blaze of the Beast.

It's been tamped down a bit by the sturdy legions of the American press, but for the first few months right after 9-11 you could hardly breathe with the pressure America was putting on the rest of the world. Every leader who wanted to keep any vestige of authority and not become the sovereign of the world's first all-glass parking lot felt obligated to come forward and speak on cue all the words America approved for common consumption.

Fall down at the feet of the graven eagle, you heathenous bastards. We're the global exorcists, and we'll decide whose body is the vessel of Satan.

Even the French, poor buggers.

That reminds me: the French have a lot of problems with their government, their infrastructure, and their ability to not to be ravaged by every invading army that hop-skips through Belgium, but at least they've produced a culture that sweats great literature like a bottle of Luskosawa vodka left on the kitchen table.

There was a great book called "Day of the Dolphin" written in 1967 by a man named Robert Merle. It was translated by a French major from Vasser in 1969 and made into a horrible movie with George C. Scott in the early '70s.

"The Day of the Dolphin" describes the success a team of scientists have in teaching dolphins to speak ... and of course, in allowing the military to train an elite fighting force of lethal biological submarines in the bargain.

At one point in the book, a cruiser in the Gulf of Tonkin called the "Little Rock" is destroyed by a small-yield atomic device.

America instantaneously prepares to go to nuclear war with China, despite an astonishing volume of evidence that China had nothing whatsoever to do with it, nothing to gain from it, and certainly no desire to go to war with America - China had no missiles worth noting in 1967, and Russia was certainly not willing to take one for the team.

There's an excellent chapter where Merle describes the reaction of the American people and the American nation ... and the fear the rest of the world is wracked by. He has one memorable quote when describing an article appearing in "Le Monde" comparing the incident to the 1898 destruction of the "U.S.S. Maine":

"In France, the January 10 issue of 'Le Monde' expressed their view with a clarity that would have impressed even the Americans if they had attached any importance to either the information or the opinions given in the European press. But the American newspapers quoted only other American newspapers, or at the most, British newspapers, in their columns."

It's a hard thing in this day and age to find coverage of America's activities overseas and in the realm of global politics which isn't corrupted either by the rigid self-censorship of the American press industry or the natural fear of destruction exhibited in many of our allies' newspapers. The mainline French papers have given up and started repeating in rote the information passed to them from the Associated Press, which is perhaps the most effective public relations firm of all time.

More interesting opinions are voiced in the offbeat French papers, particularly those put out by the independent political parties, which still have some sort of influence on politics in France and which actually have their own journalistic organs, just like in th olden days. If you can read French or find a decent translated edition -- there's actually a good chance of finding the English language versions of French articles in the "Times of India" -- you can find papers that are still holding true to their opinion that America is a blundering giant, a Beast driven mad by the scent of its own blood. Just like in "Day of the Dolphin".

Sometimes the French ARE good for something other than serving as a demonstration of how capable the German light infantry is.

Pray, don't question my patriotism just because of this "Beast" rambling.

God forbid I question the wisdom of raining bombs on a nation with a GNP smaller than the personal income of 15% of American citizens. As far as I can tell, we've been a big boon for them economically. Their primary export might have once been dried fruit, but now they're making a mint with scrap bomb fragments, and the prosthetic limb export business is booming in the nearby nations with actual industry and medical care.

Yeah. You can see the toothmarks of a mad Beast there.

Then there's Israel.

Now I am NOT going to express any sort of opinion on the West Bank. I do not know whose ancestor oppressed whose first, or which forefather slew which forefather, or which God hath more thous in his service. I DO know that the A-1 reason that concussion grenades are going off in the Church of the Nativity in little Bethlehem is because Israel knew that America was now waging a general war against a concept. And that concept tends to whip up a lot of foaming hatred towards a particular ethnotype. And that ethnotype happens to live pretty thickly in the streets where Israel's shells are falling.

How can America object to Israel waging war on a depressed minority which has actually taken hostile action against their borders and has loudly and proudly been behind a number of very successful terrorists when America is busy digging her mandibles into a nation which might well have harbored a man who purportedly made a video in which he may have taken responsibility for a hostile act against an American building?

She can't. So Europe cries foul and America shrugs complacently with bits of bone and gristle dangling from her teeth, and she turns her burning ochre gaze on that Axis of Evil which sprang into being recently, and the manger gets blown to smithery-bits. That's the way things go.

What's it like to ride the back of a raging Beast?

Frankly, we're so small that it's hard to tell. Don't tell the tick on the wolf's back about the fate of the lambs.

We just work here.

- Wheel, feelin' grim.

"He who leads into captivity shall go into captivity; he who kills with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is patience and the faith of saints." - Revelations 13:10