Today, July 15, 2009, I have finally set up a blog page. My son said that I should because I have had many valuable experiences, some of which might assist those who want a share of ordinary history. As time goes on, you, the reader, will decide if he was right.
I have named the page after the Greek mythological, Procrustes, the proud murderous one, who the ancients said tortured his victims by stretching them to fit his giant bed. Handsome no more, from a similar process, we are like-governed and are stretched beyond recognition from our former more humble and alive selves.
In the sixties the proud modern Procrusteans willed our demise, and we let them get away with it. Some of our hearts were not brave enough and we yielded: some didn't care, and sadly some enjoyed watching from near and afar as misery was inflicted on a once proud, industrious, God-fearing nation. The lawless laughed and hummed a Beatle-lullaby as they lulled der Volk to sleep.
Today's Procrusteans rule as did their ancient mythical counterparts. Bullies all: they create disorder, which in turn allows them to mislead, disinform, stretch us - and the truth - so as to inflict mindless conformity. Circe, you were right, men are easily turned into swine.
Procrustes, the giant, is but a figment of someone's long-ago fertile imagination, but a necessary one. Consider the penalties extracted in the past for daring to speak or write truth: hear the ancient angst and smell death and torture for sounding alarms about tyranny. Free men in the past paid for their beliefs with stolen honor; beheadings, crucifixtions, poisonings, imprisonments etc. One has the sense that the mythical Procrustes was a survival literary device to warn an unsuspecting populace that evil's mindless walked the land as "ravening wolves."
Speaking and writing while using facts was dangerous in the past as it is today: lives and reputations were and are terminally taken in the process of disclosure. So, I can see in my mind's eye that Procrustes was a necessary mythical personna, an archetypal tyrant that was created by ancient writers to protect their lives, while sounding an alarm against the murderous among us.
Today we have a variety of victims, losses, victories and tyrants, who are at war with the Triune God and Humankind. What do we do about it? I wish to confront lies and half-truths with the full measure of God's standards on this page. Sounds odd doesn't it? God's anything. The modern Procrusteans have aggressively expunged Him from the national lexicon and have caused us to barely whisper His Name. We are free no more and haven't been for a long time.
In fact, we may have had only bits of freedom, and rightly so. Anarchy is a bad extention of unbridled freedom. On the other hand, self-limiting freedom is a liberating construct. One sees its deep structure in the Constitution of the United States of America, and in ordered towns and neighborhoods and in devout, unchanged church congregations.
For a while we didn't need and would not tolerate a Procrustes. But now we have a rarefied form of him (Obama, Obama, Obama) hear the chant? Some freely voted him into a position of great power where abuse is common. I wonder how they will rationalize this to God.
Initially, Obama was cleverer than Percrustes; he didn't use brute force and he lied through omission when he said he would change America. But wait! He didn't show us the unmade bed, upon which we would be pleasantly corerced to lay supine. Obama malevolently wanted us to see horror as it approached - as he began to stretch us - so that We the People, now a partial nation of partial snivelers were no longer recognizably alive, as we smilingly looked into his dark, indifferent and forested eyes.
