Psalm 2, Trick or Treat in Space

Stephen Hawking worries about the contact. Even if his ancestors were not felled by smallpox, his fear is they will raid us for our resources, that outer space capitalists seek earth the way Europe pillaged South America. Hawking's big ships from depleted solar systems reads like a novel, but scientific idealism has it that if these ships exist they  adhere to the best instincts of European philosophy, the good of mankind. So science hopes for the salvation of earth from pollution and overcrowding, but makes light of Hawking's threat. Billions have been spent and years  to make Contact, but if the most famous living scientific star fears their advent, at least he endorses the alien, if undocumented. So the last resort hopped for rescue of civilization by the presumptive alien becomes a counterfeit messiah.

Lord Rees however, the astronomer royal, thinks this  alien sounds very like the one in whom he cannot believe. Rees warned that nonetheless "aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding," like God, that “just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.” Talk about reality is embarrassing, having banded and put radio monitors, microchips and cameras onto every species on earth to fathom their intelligence, that is, except themselves, no one can as proud as a scientist thinking to meet the mind of a superior after dismissing every other species of earth as inferior.

Science is even superior to itself. It has determined that autonomous processes like the collective unconscious, evolution, "the market," exist of themselves the way deity used. These collectives function beyond influence, of themselves, so that for example, when the unconscious perceives the need of a hero it produces one. These scientific autonomies are superior to Ocean, which cannot say as much, for it has changed its ph and temperature by external influence. Ocean is not autonomous but the stock market is! Delusions mount like Babel. Science has extrapolated philosophy right out of the void. Hawking at one time under the influence of Einstein believed in a version of the LORD. Now he finds the aliens a threat, but he says paradoxically that science makes God unnecessary.

Hawking, Lord Rees, Carl Sagan hope for life on Mars. Mars, Titan and beyond. Either go  to them or they will come to us. If we go out, as Sagan did in CETI, the presumption is a return. He sent our address so they could find us. It was "a sacred undertaking," the payload on Voyager I, and still remains so to the power of a "a thousand million years," "a kiss, a mother's first words to her newborn baby, Mozart, Beethoven...." What  Hawking must worry about is that Sagan and NASA, who believe in the power of natural selection on earth, survival of the fittest, do not do so in space. Rivers, volcanoes, ice caps and every other aspect of natural science occur in space but not survival of the fittest! They don't believe in evolution there! Indeed there are miracles! Mr. Goodbar Alien boggles Hawking's mind. Simple romance sells well on earth.

Alien/Redeemer

It's not that it has challenged the existence of a Creator/Redeemer, science has repudiated it and substituted  the alien/redeemer in its mythology. The beaming of all sorts of communications continually in hope of making contact is exactly a Tower of Babel. Global thought would climb to heaven and do anything!  Global dismount is a self-rapture. After despoiling earth, also the instrumentality of science, it leaves. But Contact  to find "man's true place in the universe," begs the question. That species could not find its true place on earth, but it was not every nation that said so, only a few even if it preoccupies popular entertainment.

Spoil one planet and to another go. 

Any fool knows that one and one are two. 

The next is treated sooner than the first.

The Europeans eat the universe

And when they're done spit out the pit and run.

This "Ancient Mariner" says, "we must prevent their escape from earth." Whether going out or coming in, the nearest historical analogy to the "science" of the alien arrival in The Invention of America (O'Gorman) and The Invention of the Golden Age,  proves science infallible. It corrects its error by means of more science. Every time science is wrong it is right, which rivals politics and religion, other claimants to the earth throne.

Confusion of Tongues

To counter the thinking of CETI and confuse the alien another message has herewith been sent, a diversion meant to discourage their landing, a confusion of tongues. Do they want to take the chance and be contaminated by us? Of course model aliens would have debate this. Space is like parliament. Space is like the human brain. There is no end to terrestrial thinking. Science thinks by projection that everything  true of earth is universal, hence cosmic, except of course for natural selection. That's how Lowell found "canals" on Mars. They were in Venice. So aliens must "communicate," more earth talk, but do they have a sense of humor, or are they like their scientific believers?  At one time in the 19th century poetry was a kind of religion, now science is. If alien mercy to Earth depends upon alien plurality, another ambivalence of the projected human, as in the 2009 film District Nine, one hopes they remember the debate of Las Casas that Indians had souls.  All revolutions are preparatory. Sartre and the French Resistance, taught by Franz Fanon, will go underground, under Montana anyway. The earth nuke silos, provided for by science as the handmaid of business and government, are already underground.

Mass Rebellion


 It's enough to frighten the rulers into active resistance. It's enough to frighten them into inventing flying saucers. The parties of mass rebellion take counsel together. But about what and against whom? Mennonites have already proved it impossible to live in peace with earth rulers. Are autocratic corporations less punitive? Is Revelations 18, Babylon City Woman, an invention of the rulers to fake their own oppression, a picture of bond traders and merchants of world capital, global internationals unmasked in the intercourse of traffic? Is double think the fortune of “an idolatrous cult of Mammon, a cult that can only merit the name ‘fornication’”  (Ricardo Foulkes. El Apocalipsis De San Juan, 189) in the democratic state? Would  democrats execute Socrates? Never! Never means always. So peoples with  rulers nations and kings "take counsel" against the Lord, and against his anointed (2), but you will not catch them doing it.Such threats are only comprehended by fiction. The third part of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, has to stand in for the truth about it because nobody will believe about Karen Silkwood, or about anyone else who threatens these powers. These things are done behind doors where only prophets see, as Ezekiel did Lucifer's fall (Ez. 28) or  the seventy elders of Israel each at the shrine of his own idol worshiping all kinds of crawling things and detestable animals (Ezekiel 8). The most artful thing these powers have ever done, whether in Revelations 18, Ezekiel 8, religion, business or politics was to turn themselves into liberators and cast the true redeemer as the oppressor, instances which occur with frequency, as with the later cinematic cast of Johnny Cash's There's A Man Going Round as an incarnation of evil.

It's hard to say without the White Horse Rider who's more afraid of corruption, the howling mobs of the Boxer Rebellion or the state control of Tienanmen Square. China watches its billion unenfranchised dangers who might turn. America mastered its social controls, but had a productive economy. Rebellions above and below the surface suggest earth a danger, not at all what alien propaganda media and governments allow.

Western health pros think if you impose a belief on children they will rebel. They want to argue the semantics of "impose." Thus government is rebellion's cause, which contrasts with all pre-democratic, traditional experiences where the child was raised to belong to a people, ethos and tribe. In China, Japan, Nigeria and elsewhere some traditional respect remained. But in the west, Do It Is The Enchilada. Logically, to the West, all rebels are right. They are exercising free speech. Rebellion is a step toward diversity, a fight for human rights, except for the Taliban. It's hard on the United States to oppose the Taliban. Cast as terrorists by Western  rhetoric, the Taliban think they are fighting for a way of life. Freedom fighters!  Freedom means overthrow whatever law troubles the exercise of  "rights." The Supreme Court proudly imposes law and is proud the people submit. Government deems people children who don't know what's best for them. Psalm 2 magnifies this to the nth degree. It's as though we confront  a principle of human behavior that there is a law that there can be no law unless that law is overthrown.

This underlying attitude of what we should do about our children suggests that turning to the police is equally troubling. They may kill the child who we wanted to "listen to reason." Many mothers wish they had never called 911 when the child threatened because when they threatened the police they went down. But the Psalm is more sure than the rebels. The"come let us reason together" part is enforced with "thou shall break them with a rod of iron" (9). A father would wish for his children to  "get along," to live in peace and care for one another. While earth  is no family there is a destiny of "the son" to rule. The rebellion of the future will put others to shame.  Psalm 2 holds that nations, kingdoms and rulers who are afraid of one another, have more to fear from the Anointed.

" Why do the nations so furiously rage together, why do the people imagine a vain thing?" asks Handel. It stands unanswered. But then why did the people go from John Milton to Samuel Beckett, from justifying the ways of God to a dead man sitting in a chair?

Establishing My King Upon Zion

 There have been pictures of justice in the reign of  Queen Elizabeth celebrated by Spenser.  Psalm 2 establishes "My king Upon Zion" (6). The nations have adopted the rule, "do what you want is the whole of the law." There is no middle ground, but there is time yet in the Psalm for kings to be "wise," to be "admonished." They can yet "rejoice with trembling;" they can "do homage with purity" (12). When did this happen? Nebuchadnezzar did it, Cyrus might qualify. Sennacherib failed in his warning (Isaiah, 36f). "Kiss the Son" (12) says King James, but planning for resistance had already begun: they say, "let us break their bands asunder." This refers to the recognition, really David's, that the Two that the nations contend with are the Lord, and his anointed. This is coming. 

TRICK OR TREAT !

The Man Comes Around, 2002, here.
Almost the last song of Johnny Cash, worked longer than any other, was The Man Comes Around (2002). The final scenes of the last 2008 Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "What He Beheld," join it to a version of the space alien for a cinematic apocalypse played to Johnny Cash.

These things stand out, the left hand piano. The song references a kettle drum and the piano serves its depth. The reportage of his singing, reporting in the song, as though it were a message. In fact Cash digested many months of study, dreams and  life into this version of the Apocalypse. The speed of the rhythm guitar slightly ahead of the words makes a felt urgency against the piano bass. The high rapid beats of the rhythm at "a hundred million angels singing" is in sync with the words, implying a certainty. In reuses of it in cinema, good is visualized as evil, as though the devil were the man, as if the rebel were the judge. So for all his artistry nothing penetrates the pop rebel philosophical mind. Compare the deep tones of the left hand piano with the bass in Messiah, part 11, "The People That Walked in Darkness" (not a Hillerman novel) especially in the bass tones of "darkness" and later in "the valley of the shadow of death" here

From the liner notes of the CD:

I wrote and recorded ‘The Man Comes Around’ early on in this project, and for three or four months I recycled that song, over and over, until I’d have to get up out of bed, and turn on the radio. It worked for a while, but my inner playback system always went back to ‘The Man Comes Around.’
 
I spent more time on this song than any I ever wrote. It’s based, loosely, on the book of Revelation, with a couple of lines, or a chorus, from other biblical sources. i must have written three dozen pages of lyrics, then painfully weeded it down to the song you have here.

The initial idea for the song came from a dream I had seven years ago. i was in Nottingham, England, and had bought a book called ‘Dreaming of the Queen.’ The book talked about the great number of people in that country who dream that they are with the Queen Elizabeth II. I dreamed that I walked into Buckingham Palace, and there she sat, knitting or sewing. She had a basket of fabrics and lace. Another woman sat beside her, and they were talking and laughing. As I approached, the Queen looked up at me and said, ‘Johnny Cash! You’re like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.’ Then of course, I woke. I realized that ‘Thorn tree in a whirlwind’ sounded familiar to me. Eventually I decided that it was biblical, and found it in the book of Job. From there it grew into a song, and I started lifting things from the book of Revelation. It became ‘The Man Comes Around.’

‘Revelation’ by its mere interpretation says that something ‘is revealed.’ I wish it were. The more I dug into the book the more I came to realize why it’s such a puzzle, even to many Theologians. Eventually I shuffled my papers, so to speak, drew out four or five pages, and wrote my lyrics.”