Man, Pharaohin’ is hard work!
It’s hard!
So what was the story of Exodus? Not the famous, Moses side of things, but the Ramses narrative?
It was the story of the trivial son.
The son who grew up wealthy and privileged and vindictive, because he never measured up to his father’s stature or wisdom. Sure he could beat a slave to death, or command an army to raze a city -- his family name gave him that kind of power -- but he never commanded respect.
He was bitter and rivalrous, and especially envious of the Other Son.
The Other Son not sired by his father, but taken into the family and given the place of honor at the table for his natural gifts and abilities, not his royal blood.
The Other Son that symbolizes genuine accomplishment, intellect, competence and leadership.
The Other Son that represents that blend of endurance and genius the Common Man needs to survive in the Real World, and that the biblical (not the historical) Ramses is doomed to despised and violently react against because merit and brains are the eternal enemies of inherited position and borrowed status.
Ramses hates this embodiment of the Divine -- or, I would argue, the Real World -- because he has been told his whole life that to command all things is his birthright, just as our own modern Pharaoh-in-Chief and his Party of God believed his Name and his Election made him the Boss of Universe.
Believed in that deeply sickening, Orwellian way that to him was given final dominion over Reality itself, so that if he decided that we were winning in Iraq...then we were Fucking Well Winning In Iraq!
Period.
But being merely a man who has mistaken himself for a God, our Pharaoh has run himself and us onto the same rocks as Ramses. By trying to order Reality around like a houseboy, Bush has invited disaster after disaster.
Like Ramses, he finds himself beset by plague after plague, each haunting him with public reminders of his very un-Godlike stupidity, weakness and hollowness.
And, like Ramses, after each disaster the Real World rebukes him and demands that he change his mind, his heart and his course.
And, like Ramses, each time his heart is hardened by evil council. Each time his cowardice and ego are played by his advisors like a set of steel drums.
And each time he redoubles a bet he has already lost and can no longer cover with more of our blood and more of our treasure.
Until, in the end, he will find to his horror that Reality always wins.
Or, to quote Cecil B. DeMille quoting the Bible:
Your shadow fell between me
and my father,
between me
and my fame...
between me
and my queen.
Your shadow now fills all things with death.
Go out from among us, you and your people.
Take your people, your civil war, your oil, and your IEDs.
Take what spoils from Halliburton you will, but go!
In the end, regardless of whatever rear-guard revisionist twaddle his flunkies try to use to paper over his catastrophic presidency, Iraq will destroy him completely and the world will go on without him, and historians will ask this question:
How in the Hell did this man who ran on little more than his Fundamentalist credentials manage to use a Bible to ram his way into the White House without ever bothering to learn its oldest and most famous lesson about the how the weak son of a powerful father
can piss away the country he inherits if he tries to bluff God Almighty with bullshit, peevishness and a busted flush?
End Part 2 of 2
14 comments:
Just when I think you've written the most brilliant, and synapse-stretching screed about the State of the Nation, you come along with an epic pronouncement of Biblical proportions.
Must have been an urgent muse given the time of the post. Was it a Single Malt? Or something more interesting? ;-)
US Blues,
Thank you most kindly.
I'd read the Bob Barr article earlier and had gone "Hmmm".
Then, later and unrelated, went looking for a quote from the "10 Commandments" to bulwark a completely different essay I was outlining.
Then it all started to sorta move around and line up in my head.
Then I said "Whoa", worked out the details, and wrote it.
No single malt was harmed in the making of this post :-)
Well written indeed. This definitely passes the "I wish I had said that" test.
I'm surprised that you were able to resist the temptation to stick Lieberman's face on Edward G. Robinson.
RAMESES:"You are Lieberman, the Hebrew Democrat."
EGR:"Chief Hebrew Democrat, mighty one."
RAMESES:"Rove the Master Builder tells me I can rely on you..."
EGR:"I am warmed by his favor."
RAMESES:"...rely on you to sell your own mother for a price."
EGR:"Who am I, to dispute the word of the Master Builder?
outstanding job drifty. elegant. impassioned. simply beautiful.
Drifty:
You are indeed the heir of the Joseph Campbell chair of narrative. Great work!
And as far as your thinking about a post on the Ten Commandments, you must have missed the e-mail from Jim Dobson removing the false-witness part of the Decalogue. Dobson's piece in Time magazine this week has been called out by the researchers he cited as a boldface lie.
Falwell is trying to remove the murder prohibition so he can assassinate Hugo Chavez, Haggard got rid of the adultery clause, Bush's followers are practicing idolatry, and all the Christopaths are showing that stealing is A-ok, so you better get that piece written while there's still a couple commandments left for you to write about.
Awesome work, as always, Sir DG!
Great work! I Photoshopped a little collage and stuck it up on the fridge door this morning. The roomate walked by and sprayed coffee over the entire kitchen floor.
She still isn't talking to me.
This is a tremendous piece of writing. Stunning, really.
Excellent!!
[standing ovation] I lurk admiring your always cogent, always clever work, but this is out of tha park.
Thanks
some of the best writing on the internets.
Esprit del’ escalier experiences (and won’t be my last) But it begs the question of what is the historical comparison for Poppy Sr. The closest I can get is Tiberius to Caligula, but most comparisons require the death of the progenitor, who then can't commment on his *choice*.
However - Poppy is now disavowing his *senior moment* in weeping over his long-lost dynasty of Imperial Rulership – dead as a coffin-nail under the slag-hearted mistakes of progeny #1.
It still makes one gasp at how he could knowingly inflict upon our nation this cretinous imbecile he begat and has propped up all these years – as IF no one should know his son better than his Poppy!
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