James Kunstler’s provocative opinion piece this year, “Call the Exorcist”, details the ways in which the current order isn’t merely corrupt, abusive, and/or tyrannical but downright insane verging on the demonic.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/call-the-exorcist/
According to the BBC film critic Mark Kermode, THE EXORCIST is the greatest movie ever, a rather extravagant claim. Still, Kermode’s appraisal is understandable given the movie’s overwhelming impact, not only with the graphic gore/violence but the masterly way in which William Friedkin juggled real-life drama with the supernatural, with the idyllic slowly but surely giving way to the insane.
In film history, THE EXORCIST is generally to horror what 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is to science fiction, a landmark case of a well-established genre with familiar conventions(or tropes) being blown out of the water by something wholly unprecedented and unexpected. (And it probably had as much impact on Steven Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND as Stanley Kubrick’s film did.) Both films ventured beyond genre conventions as Kubrick’s film goes from biology(apes) to technology(man) to mystery, a stab at cosmic metaphysics. Friedkin sounded utterly earnest when expounding on the spiritual dimensions of THE EXORCIST, i.e. he didn’t approach it as a Scary Movie but as a spiritual quest. A minor character, a guest at a party, is an astronaut, symbolizing man’s exploration of physical space in contrast to religion’s exploration of spiritual space with its own blackholes.
It was also comparable to THE FRENCH CONNECTION(also directed by Friedkin), THE GODFATHER, and CHINATOWN as inspired re-inventions of movie genres — crime thriller, gangster movie, film noir — , but its impact was far more explosive, comparable only to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY(and maybe THE WILD BUNCH directed by Sam Peckinpah); it went beyond what anyone thought was possible(and permissible). If the new violence in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and STRAW DOGS was viscerally unsettling, the horror in THE EXORCIST was the stuff of nightmares, driving some individuals to suicide, making William Friedkin the film equivalent of Orson Welles as the enfant terrible of the radio with his “War of the Worlds” stunt. Still, for all of Welles’ brilliance, his take on THE WAR OF THE WORLDS was intended as a stunt, whereas THE EXORCIST was a heartfelt expression of Friedkins’ views on spirituality and good-versus-evil.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’s stature has only grown vis-a-vis THE EXORCIST and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, not least because it rewards thought. The more you think about it, the more tantalizing and mysterious it seems, which cannot be said for Friedkin and Spielberg’s works, which, for all their visceral force and emotional impact, seem stupider the more you think about them. Kubrick was meticulous with details of space and science as the firm foundation of launching into fantastical dimensions beyond man’s comprehension. It isn’t called ‘beyond the infinite’ for nothing.
In contrast, one wonders why the Devil in THE EXORCIST and the extraterrestrials in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS would go about in such silly ways to either curse or communicate with mankind. Doesn’t Satan have better things to do than make a young girl puke? Don’t the ultra-advanced space aliens have more sophisticated ways of studying mankind than raiding refrigerators, later to be outdone by E.T. with a penchant for beer?
Still, upon their releases, the sheer force of horror or wonderment overwhelmed the audience that responded with ‘faith’ in their emotions as either collective rapture or defensive mechanism.
No less essential to spirituality than “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” is “render unto God the things that are God’s”. It is why 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is truly a cut above the rest as it renders unto reality what is known(and possible) and renders unto mystery what is unknown, manifested in sounds and images of dimensions beyond our own. Through extensive research, Kubrick created a literal universe of technological possibilities, i.e. all the technology on display in the film were in the realm of the possible and doable(and indeed, over the years, mankind has built space stations, computer technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, and it is theoretically possible to have manned flights to distant planets).
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is the most plausible and realistic of science fiction films, and yet, in its speculation on the powers beyond the possible or conceivable, it doesn’t pretend to understand the mystery. We go from a soluble maze to an open-ended enigma.
In contrast, for all the elements of wonderment and mystery in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, it turns out that the space aliens from the distant stars amount to little more than electronic musicians and smiley-faced people from meta-Mars. And for all the spiritual content of THE EXORCIST, it turns out the Dark Lord is essentially about making faces and acting gross like Helen Keller in THE MIRACLE WORKER.
For everything knowable, Kubrick sought answers, and for everything unknowable, he raised questions, with the HAL computer being somewhere between the knowable and the unknowable, representing the limits of man’s technology expanded to godly powers, albeit still as a servant to man.
In contrast, partly owing to box office considerations and partly to the limited imaginations of Spielberg and Friedkin, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and THE EXORCIST do reveal the mystery, the simplicity(and even stupidity) of which eluded many viewers too overwhelmed in the spectacle of the moment. Likewise, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN was mistaken as a dramatic masterpiece because of the overpowering action scenes, some of the best ever.
However, if THE EXORCIST and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS fail as thought-experiments, they work their wonders as fable or allegory. Spielberg the Fable-Man pursued his science-fiction concept in the manner of Walt Disney and Cecil B. DeMille. Indeed, it’s the sense of innocence that makes CLOSE ENCOUNTERS a great piece of popular imagination, one that makes one feel like a child again. No wonder Stanley Kauffmann called it the greatest science fiction movie ever. It certainly works as fable.
As for THE EXORCIST, it works as a kind of pop conversion, especially timely upon release as everything seemed up for grabs in the early 1970s mired in the Watergate scandal and tired of The War but also dogged by the Anti-War radicalism and insipid Sixties utopianism(and the exploding crime rates).
THE EXORCIST is so well structured and paced, as well as acted and choreographed, that it’s hardly surprising it cast such a powerful spell on the masses of viewers who made it a box office smash. The escalating fright alone makes the viewer recoil in terror yet with the fascination of a gaper who can’t turn his head away. It’s like a natural disaster from which one must flee but can’t help but turn around and look. No wonder God told Lot and his family, “Don’t look back.”
Upon closer analysis(after calmed nerves), however, the movie doesn’t make much sense, even within the irrational context of spirituality. What does the unearthing of some ancient artifact have to do with what appears to be an unleashing of evil on the world? Besides, why would more evil need to be released in a world full of evil already? It’d be just one more drop in an ocean, one more flicker in a forest fire. And, what does an archaeological site in Iraq have to do with Georgetown around Washington D.C. the capital of the U.S.? A commentary on Washington D.C. as the new Babylon as part of an endless cycle of rises and falls of empires since the beginning of time?
And why would this satanic force take possession of a young girl and make her spew foul language in a hoarse voice and shit through her mouth? Doesn’t Satan have anything better to do? Also, wouldn’t it be smarter for Evil to NOT seem so obvious and instead manipulate the world through subtler means? A smooth con-man poses a greater threat than an ax-wielding lunatic spotted from a mile away. Evil in THE EXORCIST is so blatant, declaring itself as vile and hideous, that it has no chance of winning converts. Even Charles Manson would have run like a mothafuc*a.
Though lesser as cinema, the OMEN movies seem closer to how the Prince of Darkness would use his bag of tricks, even though, there too, excessive energy is wasted on silly antics with arbitrary murders that could only give the game away. Ugliness and grossness repulse than entice, and apparently the Devil in THE EXORCIST never heard of the marketing department. His effects on the girl Regan are downright ugly and stink up the place. Every drug pusher knows the shtick: The end result of drug addiction is the degradation of body and soul, but the drugs are sold as a slice of hedonic heaven. Likewise, excessive intake of sugar causes cavities and diabetes, but the marketing is colorful and alluring. But, in THE EXORCIST, Devil seems to be in turd-flinging monkey mode.
Granted, one could argue that the Devil works in myriad ways ranging from the subtle to the crude? While, ironically, evil can get away with more by adopting the semblance of virtues of diligence, patience, and civility, thus gaining entrance and elevation in the respectable world, there are countless examples of blatant savagery and brazen sadism, just like Rock culture encompasses everything from easy-listening tunes to heavy maelstroms of sound. In the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”, we get both takes on the Dark Side, the refined aristocrat and the radical nihilist, as a kind of Neo-DeSade-ism.
In that sense, the Pazuzu-deviltry in THE EXORCIST could be regarded as merely one of the many manifestations of Evil, especially concocted to draw in Father Merrin, a man who will go to any length to rescue a single soul.
Indeed, the main conflict is between the Devil and Father Merrin with the girl/mother used merely as a prop by the former. The difference is that, whereas the Devil sees humans as useful but expendable — if not Regan, then another girl could have done just as well — , Merrin, as a servant of Christianity, believes everyone is unique and precious with a soul gifted by God(and offered redemption by Jesus). It’s sort of like the main conflict in the STAR WARS universe is between Obi-Wan-Kenobi(as the Merrin-like figure) and Darth Vader(as the agent of the Emperor), with the soul of Luke Skywalker caught between them. (The Devil sees no point in trying to fool Father Merrin, a good and intelligent man who can see through the ruses of Evil. Conceivably, just like even genteel folks sometimes need to let loose and go wild, the Devil really goes ‘Animal House’ by shacking up inside Regan.)
THE EXORCIST is most famous for the extreme horrors of Regan’s possession, but its standing as a great movie owes more to the setup than the delivery, especially evident with repeat viewings. Once the initial shock wears off, the later horror scenes, though impressive as imagination and ingenuity, seem rather simplistic, the equivalent of being slammed upside the head with a two-by-four(or run over by a semi-trailer truck).
It’s the earlier scenes that not only set the appropriate tone but faced the thornier challenge of conjuring a portent of horror in a mundane world. Regan-under-possession is a monster, unmistakable to the eye. The ghostly, in contrast, is harder to convey, especially in the sun-blazed landscape of Iraq.
Upon unearthing the artifact(equivalent to an invitation for another around), Merrin’s long subdued fears return and rattle his nerves with dread. He knew this day would come, like a cancer survivor distraught but not surprised by the relapse. The anxiety colors his view of the world around him, and it’s here that Friedkin’s mastery really shines through, an intuitive film sense that knows exactly what notes to play. It’s like the impossible feat of playing a violin with a saw-as-fiddle without severing the strings.
All around Merrin in Iraq is the hustle-n-bustle of everyday life. To Western viewers with a ‘Orientalist’ frame of mind, that alone may make the place seem exotically off-putting, like Turkey in MIDNIGHT EXPRESS released several years after THE EXORCIST.
But, what really makes the surroundings seem so strange and menacing is the way Friedkin modulates auditory and visual perceptions to suggest man’s spiritual fallenness, i.e. even without outright demon possession, all the world and mankind exist in a state of fallenness. When Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, they were no longer protected by God’s grace. Mankind had to fend for itself in a fallen world where brother could kill brother, over everything from toy to kingdom.
In its disgraced state, mankind has sought God and goodness, but nothing of man’s world could ever hope to be perfect or divine. Even the best people are tainted with sin, even the greatest beauty wilts and fades, even the most pristine nature is rife with death & decay, even the finest arts & temples are fueled by vanity & greed and drenched in blood & sweat, only to crumble to dust.
In such a fallen state, man can struggle for the good or, all too understandably, bargain with the devil in ways ranging from petty to grand to ‘get what is mine’. Most of these bargains or compromises are so banal and part of everyday life that we take them for granted as normal and necessary. We don’t bat an eye as they’re all around us in what we say, hear, and do.
And yet, Merrin, in his heightened state of dread, is sensitive to the minutiae of fallenness, of man’s toil, drudgery, fallibility, and vulnerability. He sees the plague of locusts that others don’t see. The world around him seems a cacophony of transgressions that people have become accustomed to the point of blindness and deafness. It’s like people living in stench don’t smell what’s all around them.
A blacksmith with one blind eye looks both pitiable and malevolent. The sound of hammers on molten metal, humdrum to most ears, reverberate like echoes from hell in Merrin’s. A pair of Iraqi riflemen strike fearsome poses before being revealed as guardsmen of the archaeological site, which itself symbolizes a great heritage as well as ancient idolatry of the dark gods.
Given its genre origins, THE EXORCIST sacrifices spiritual sense for popular sensation, but, it provides a variety of metaphorical meanings, partly as a reflection of the radical, excessive, and sometimes degenerate Sixties and partly, at least in retrospect, as prescience for what was to unfold in the decades ahead, especially with the rise of Jew-Worship, Negrolatry, and Globo-Homo, as well as the descent of American Conservatism into the worship of Mammon, not least with Las Vegas as the new family-place-to-be.
Looking back, even at its harshest and most damning, THE EXORCIST’s vision of hell seems mild compared to what has taken over the West(and much of the Non-West as well). And, whereas the audience was repulsed by the gross antics of the Devil-possessed Regan in the movie, the current West goes out of its way to praise, celebrate, and even sanctify various forms of insanity from the highest echelons of power to the lowest rungs of society.
The emblematic expression of the current West is ‘twerking’, where black women(and their non-black imitators) ‘dance’ by flopping their buns up and down in what looks like a parody of sex.
Even the majority of so-called conservatives support ‘gay marriage’, aka ‘same-sex marriage’, and a good number of them have tattoos splattered on their bodies. And they get their jollies by watching women pummeling one another in MMA. Christian Conservatives who claim to be godly seem to worship Jews and Zion above all, even more than God and Jesus. And they certainly favor Zionists and Neocons over Christian Arabs destroyed by the Wars for Israel.
While some on the Right speak more truth than others do, the range of discourse is dominated by mindless(as in ignorant) or mindful(as in craven) deference to Jewish Power. It’s essentially about the gradations of permissible lies than the courage of truth against lies.
Butt-Tucker Carlson, for example, speaks more truth than most Conservative pundits, but his ilk also skirt around the JQ. It’s looking out further from the Overton Window than moving over to the Truth Window. As Danny Ciello(Treat Williams) realizes in the film PRINCE OF THE CITY, those committed to the truth and justice cannot go halfway; they must go all the way, despite the dangers and pitfalls. Telling a bunch of little truths against the Big Lie simply won’t do. Big Lie can only be defeated by the Big Truth, and of course, this is why Jewish Power has its hands on the strings(of the puppets) and the leashes(of the dogs who dare not stray from the ‘acceptable’ discourse).
If, in THE EXORCIST, the connection from an Iraqi archaeological site to an affluent celebrity mother-and-daughter in Georgetown seems opaque or contrived, there is a kind of symbolic meaning. At one time, that part of the Near East was the center of civilization, and of course, when the movie was made, the US was the premier superpower, and Washington D.C. served as the metropole of the ‘free world’. Thus, past power-and-glory and present power-and-glory are linked. Also, it’s a way of saying there is no real past and no real present. Both are merely fleeting moments in time through which the eternal themes of Good and Evil are at war.
We look upon ancient civilizations with a blend of wonderment and detachment. Even the great horrors committed in the distant past hardly trouble us today, certainly not in the way the narratives of relatively recent wars and atrocities do. THE EXORCIST reminds us right away that the problems that haunt the modern world were no less present in the past, and vice versa — after all, the 20th Century was one of the most violent in history. For Father Merrin, archaeology not only digs into the past but unearths the present.
In a way, the horrors of history impacted the US less because of its distance from Europe and Asia where World War II(and the proxy wars of the Cold War) mostly raged. Latin America and most of Africa were spared the two great wars of the 20th Century but were marked by grinding poverty, horrific internecine violence, and the problems of Diversity, racial in Latin America and racial & tribal in Africa. Therefore, relative to other parts of the world, the US seemed uniquely blessed or favored, either by God or History.
On the other hand, it is partly because of this relative peace and prosperity that, in some ways, Americans(and post-WWII Europeans who never experienced war) feel the sense of Evil more acutely and naively than the peoples of other civilizations. Take the matter of slavery, a universal practice through all of history but deemed a permanent stain on America. Or, consider how Americans once reacted to the Evil of Drink, leading to the Prohibition, unthinkable in Europe.
Of course, such sensitivities may have partly owed to the Puritan factor in the founding of the American Civilization, but one cannot discount the role of relative privilege among a substantial portion of the white American population. If US history had been far more violent and marked by extreme poverty, most people would hardly regard the Black Experience as so terrible, which has been the attitude in Latin America regarding blacks and browns. “Sure, blacks got it bad, but we got it bad too, and life stinks.”
But, America defined itself as the civilization where things always got better and better and went up and up. So, the idea that the US, the richest, freest, and most powerful country in the world, had failed to live up to its dreams and principles bound to traumatize some people, even to the point of turning them radically Anti-American, cynical, nihilistic, or recklessly utopian with social experimentation, like with the Counterculture’s naivete about sex, drugs, and Rock-n-Roll.
THE EXORCIST was part of the Counter-Counterculture that perhaps began with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. Back then, the electoral reaction to the massive riots and social/racial unrest was to turn to the ‘law-and-order’ Right. (In contrast, the 2020 mayhem was followed by the ‘rightist’ Trump’s ouster, albeit in a funny kind of election year where the polling stats proved way off.) What had bloomed as the lovey-dovey Summer of Love in 1967 wilted by the crazy 1968 and 1969 with the Altamont Concert documented in the film GIMME SHELTER where the many drug-addled fans seem demon-possessed or zombie-like(as in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD). Roman Polanski made a joke of horror in THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS and ROSEMARY’S BABY, but real horror entered his life with his wife’s gruesome murder, soon to be followed with himself embroiled in a demonic behavior with a twelve year old. (Speaking of demons, let’s not forget the impact of Yoko Ono on the Beatles.)
Rock culture being what it was, it kept on rocking through the degradation and decay(and even thrived on them), but the cinema told a different story. On the one hand, it was billed as New Hollywood, a radical break from the stodgy conservatism of the Old Studios and the Old Guard. But while certain films were indeed anti-establishmentarian, some of the most notable works, despite their stylistic breakthroughs and/or rejection of past prudery, had considerable appeal to those disenchanted with the social and cultural changes of the Sixties, which culturally extended up to around 1973, the year THE EXORCIST came out.
THE GODFATHER is reportedly Pat Buchanan’s favorite film. Despite Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘liberal’ tinkering to make it seem a critique of capitalism, it appealed to many for its depiction of tradition, loyalty, heritage, and family life. (Before THE GODFATHER, Coppola gained renown by winning the screenplay Oscar for PATTON, Richard Nixon’s favorite film.) For the more astute, even the Counterculture favorite THE GRADUATE ended on a note of ambiguity, suggesting that neither Ben nor Elaine could ever escape fate, which is to end up like their parents. Besides, the film is about Ben’s break from easy sex with a ‘liberated’ woman toward a courtship with a relatively ‘innocent’ young woman. Another 1967 film, IN COLD BLOOD(based on Truman Capote’s novel), purportedly contained an anti-capital-punishment message, but the lasting impression was of the mystery of evil that partnered one fella who feels too little and another who feels too much. So different but so alike.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY, released in 1969, entered a new frontier in sexuality, almost gaining an X rating, but despite all that, its depiction of liberal-cosmopolitan New York was most damning as a materialistic, decadent, and soulless wasteland of snobs, freaks, and the alienated.
Something like the precursors to THE EXORCIST were JOE and PEOPLE NEXT DOOR, both released in 1970. In both films, the daughters go astray and spiral out of control into drugs and debauchery. Even though the blue-collar doppelganger in JOE played by Peter Boyle is no hero, let alone a saint, many viewers ended up rooting for him(anticipating Paul Kersey of DEATH WISH) against what looks like a bunch of quasi-Mansonites. And at the end of PEOPLE NEXT DOOR, the only thing that works on the junkie daughter is tough love, as when the mother’s had just about enough and goes Miracle-Worker on the brat who, after being slapped some, finally regains a modicum of sanity.
No doubt sexual anxiety played a big role in the Counter-Counterculture, but then, it’s been a running theme forever as much of the violence in the animal world derives from the males ‘jousting’ for the right to mate. Greek Mythology warns of the corrupting influence of the female principle, and the Fall in the Bible begins with Eve and the fruit. The foundation of social stability is the family where man and woman are faithful to one another and protective & caring of their young, but the sexuality that brings men and women together is primarily fixated on lust and the heat of the moment than long-term tending of the hearth, and this primal side of sexuality was loosed upon the modern world not only with youth culture, hedonism, and the cult of choice but the Pill(and other contraceptives) that greatly reduced the risk of pregnancy and disease(or its fatal outcome). Sexual crisis was ameliorated in pre-modern times by arranged marriages, patriarchy, and brutal violence against young ones who dared to violate the rules. And among the aristocrats, there was the threat of the deadly duel if a man’s pride or a woman’s honor was offended.
If the Counterculture conflated brotherly love with sexual love with a boundless confidence in ‘sexual liberation’ as happiness for all, the Counter-Counterculture was dubious about such optimism.
Indeed, there was something strangely off about the Counterculture as it veered into licentiousness with innocence. Even as the culture was becoming more ‘adult’ in sexual behavior, it was becoming more childlike in its dreams of flower-power Santa Claus. John Lennon would later say that he really believed ‘love’ could save the world. Here was a guy who couldn’t keep his family together believing in the healing elixir of ‘love’.
And of course, the Beatles themselves just barely kept up the facade of camaraderie until the whole thing blew up in 1970 with lawsuits and acrimony all around. Feeling was liberated from facts, reaching new heights(or nadir) with “Imagine”, Lennon’s piece of utopian narcissism. “I imagine, therefore I am better.” It’s telling that the album IMAGINE not only has Lennon’s most utopian musings but a nasty dig at Paul McCartney: “How Do You Sleep?” He couldn’t stand his long-time friend and partner, but he was telling everyone to just go out and love.
Indeed, if anything was off-putting about the Sixties, it was this innocence and naivete. Many of the themes of Counterculture that centered on experimentation with relationships, substances, arts & creativity, man & nature, man & machine, spirituality(often Eastern Mysticism), food & health, and etc. weren’t without interest and promise.
After all, the earlier generations had been preoccupied with the basic needs of well-being and survival through the Great Depression and War to have had much opportunity for anything else. Then, the youth that came of age in the Sixties, with their superior education, nutrition, and living conditions, naturally sought new possibilities. So far so good.
But, pioneers entering unknown regions need caution as well as daring, doubt as well as excitement, responsibility as well as liberty. But, many boomers who came to define the Sixties opted for platitudes and neo-sacraments, for instant-nirvana, as if smoking pot or dropping acid to a Beatles album in a room strewn with flowers was the answer. Such willful innocence, aka stupidity, not only stumbled and fell but created opportunities for the worst elements of society to exploit for money and/or power. Consider Iris(Jodie Foster), the 12 year old prostitute in TAXI DRIVER, who considers herself ‘liberated’. No Father Merrin to save her.
Before the utopian nightmare of the free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, there was the Apple fiasco with the Beatles. Following the death of their manager Brian Epstein, the Beatles had this ‘high-minded’ idea of forming and running a company based on Counterculture ideals of love, trust, brotherhood, and the notion that everyone was brimming with talent and creativity just waiting to be tapped. Unlike other companies, Apple would be open to all and put principles above profits.
In no time, it became a fleecing operation for parasites.
Again, the idea of trying something new and different was not the problem. Rather, it was the childlike innocence, akin to belief in the tooth fairy, which not only ignored reality but opened the door to every leech, thief, crook, charlatan, and fraudster. In the end, the biggest flaw of Counterculture was this mindless optimism sold as mindfulness because it just happened to be immersed in pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo and pseudo-intellectual theories about mankind. They should have given THE BIRDS by Alfred Hitchcock a second look.
Such naivete was almost inevitable given the centrality of youth in the Counterculture, which was not a movement for the experienced(though certain elderly types with radical dispositions and/or resentful envy egged on the young ones). Besides, Rock Culture fused pop and art, especially with the near-universal praise of SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND, and the young ones took pop attitudes seriously; they somehow KNEW BETTER because they listened to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Doors. And a good many were convinced they touched by the divine via marijuana and other drugs.
Yet, the ‘innocence’ was ironic because the boomers set themselves against their parents’ generation that was deemed gullible in their patriotism and trust in authority, which all came to a head with the Vietnam War. Unlike the earlier generation, Counterculture boomers wouldn’t fall for the BS dished out by The Man, which could be anyone over thirty.
But, as things panned out, the boomers were no less naive and gullible in the pursuit of their own false gods, and of course, they eventually took over as the New Boss(actually worse than the Old Boss). It’s like Mike(Meathead) and Gloria in ALL IN THE FAMILY are equally gullible as Archie and Edith but in different ways. Edith, in her traditional role as housewife, never thought to think outside the box of her duties. But, Gloria is no less foolish in her conceit of being ‘liberated’, indeed in a way, more foolish because she thinks she can rise above her essentially knuckleheaded self by repeating the platitudes she heard from her peers. And Archie Bunker may be blinded by prejudice, but ‘meathead’ is blinded by idealism.
Such naivete seems an ineradicable human condition. Whether it’s the Greatest Generation with their patriotic myths, the Boomers with their liberation myths, the 80s generation with ‘Morning in America’, the supposed expunging of the Vietnam Syndrome with the Gulf War, the Camelot Regained with Bill Clinton, the New Patriotism with Neocon invasion of Iraq, Obama’s Hope & Change, or Donald Trump’s draining the swamp, it proves P.T. Barnum’s dictum about the gullible.
Ideology assures no surefire immunity against gullibility as the supposedly cautious and sober ‘conservatives’ rushed into the Iraq War with guns blazing and utopian dreams of ‘democracy’ spreading throughout the Middle East on account of the US being the one exceptional country, rightfully the lone superpower with its wealth, freedom, and goodness. And in 2020, consider all those who naively fell for the Covid and BLM narratives. Those claiming to ‘trust the science’ went against the true grain of science.
No wonder Butt-Tucker Carlson has been nixed from Fox News. For all his limitations and betrayals(replacing Russia-Russia-Russia with China-China-China), he did plant seeds of doubt among his viewers, urging them not to rely on the party line or pat formulas, not least because both parties are essentially controlled by the same cabal of globalist ghouls and their neo-sacerdotal crew.
Sexuality has been the source of strife forever, at least with the emergence of warm-blooded organisms. It’s less so with the fish and frogs that lay lots of eggs and spray sperm all over. So, it doesn’t really matter ‘who’ mates with ‘whom’ in the fish and amphibian world. (Still, in the case of certain species of fish such as the salmon, sexual drive leads them to an epic journey that culminates in mass death, one of the most extreme rituals in nature.)
In contrast, birds and mammals don’t produce many offspring, and it’s much more of a challenge to secure a mate than among fish and frogs that come together in a slimy pool and ‘grab’ whatever is near. Therefore, competition for mating is far fiercer among birds and mammals than among, say, snails and jellyfish. (On the other hand, certain species of insects and spiders, though far simpler life forms than fish and amphibians, tend to exhibit exceedingly complex behavior in mating.) The ‘heat’ between the sexes among birds and mammals makes for greater attraction but also more repulsion and rivalry, especially among the competing males. Unlike a male frog that could just grab onto any female and release its sperm, birds and mammals are highly attuned to territory and the mating partner(or partners among the more social species). Such attachment leads to greater affection but also greater anxiety.
Among humans, the anxiety can turn into a sense of betrayal, as in the Helen of Troy story. Also, because humans notice and prize beauty, they feel far greater outrage when their beautiful property is taken by another or goes with another. If Helen of Troy looked like Andrea Dworkin, a thousand ships would have rather sunk than set sail.
This sense of betrayal is what makes THE SEARCHERS so disturbing but also understandable. Initially, Ethan(John Wayne) sets out to save cute little Debbie from the Indian brutes. However, when, as a sexually matured young woman, she chooses the Red Tribe as her people, Ethan is overcome with a sense of betrayal and pulls out his gun. (But then, such a possibility had been lurking in his mind for some time.) Its dark but all-too-recognizable sexual themes(with racial overtones) made THE SEARCHERS a powerful and provocative work for later generations of artists and culture critics.
Similar obsessions are found in THE EXORCIST where the girl is taken not by warrior savages but by the Devil himself represented by Pazuzu with a long snake penis. And of course, TAXI DRIVER and HARDCORE, both written by Paul Schrader who, despite having distanced himself from a strict religious community, couldn’t overcome certain formative hang-ups, feature worlds in which young girls are lured into sexual slavery, albeit of their own choosing.
In a way, THE EXORCIST, for all its horror, is a more comforting work than either TAXI DRIVER or HARDCORE. At the very least, we can comfort ourselves that the Devil made Regan do it(mostly against her will) and that she could be saved by noble self-sacrificing priests. Besides, Regan under demonic possession is clearly a monstrous creature, and the girl cries out for help from beneath the ugly exterior(by etching ‘help me’ on her abdomen), much like a damsel longing for the knight to slay the dragon and take her home.
The disturbing implication of TAXI DRIVER and HARDCORE is that young girls all across America, of their own volition, may choose the bad side of town over the dull world of the straight and narrow(much like the errant son in Akira Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO opts for a short exciting life than a long life eating gruel).
In THE NORTHMAN, the hero’s search for his mother reveals that she wanted it that way, that she despised her husband as a weakling unfit to be the lord of anything and a hypocrite to boot. The ‘damsel’ can turn out to be the ‘dragon’, a gloomy thought that is at the heart of THE ILIAD, as Helen seems to prefer Paris to her husband and Troy to the backwater of Mycenae. The monstrousness is of their own choosing, their own free will. There’s no Devil in plain sight to make them do things against their own will, like puking all over or twisting one’s head 180 degrees.
Therefore, the Devil is oddly therapeutic in serving as a scapegoat, the simple source of all that is horrible in the world. In THE EXORCIST III, for example, forget about the real-world problems of black crime; instead, just pretend Patrick Ewing is an angel and that THE DEVIL goes around torturing and murdering adorable and innocent black boys.
Of course, the problem of blackness is situational and contextual. In and of itself, blackness isn’t a problem, especially if limited to where it originated and belongs. But when blackness is relocated to a world that operates according to different modes of conduct, it can be problematic and even grow into a social evil.
Likewise, wolves, gorillas, badgers, and alligators in their own habitats are not a problem. If anything, they were adapted to survive in their own natural niches. But transporting such organisms into different habitats could upset the existing natural balance and cause real harm to them and/or to the native species. And if placed in the human world, the result could be hellish for the humans and the animals(as humans will be forced to take drastic measures to cull them). Thus, what isn’t evil in and of itself in its own environment can be problematic in a different environment where the overall impact may go from bad to worse to even evil(for both sides). Dinosaurs aren’t evil, but reviving them to run wild in the human world could be a kind of evil, as in JURASSIC PARK.
Consider the impact of the Asian carp and European wild boar in North America. While the fish and pigs aren’t evil, the overall impact on the environment and native species has been devastating. While such species weren’t introduced with evil intent, the result has been downright criminal. If people did something similar deliberately to cause harm, that would be evil, akin to arson.
Blackness was adapted to Sub-Saharan Africa where blacks over the eons evolved traits suitable to their particular land and climate, to the flora and fauna. By civilized standards, black savages might have appeared crazy, but being a black savage in a savage world made perfect sense.
The evil was in forcibly transporting millions of black Africans to the New World for exploitation. It was an act of evil not only against blacks but to civilization itself because, upon the inevitable abolition of slavery, blacks would not only be free men but free men with traits more suited for jungle-jivery than to the duties of civilization. Also, as evolution made blacks tougher and more aggressive, they were bound to use their freedom to act like hunter-warrior thugs against the weaker races deemed as prey. Thus, blackness became an evil to civilization once it was displaced from its origins and placed in the heart of Western Civilization.
Now, some would argue that it’s unfair and, of course, ‘racist’ to use the analogy of invasive species in a discussion on blacks. Blacks are human after all. True, blacks are human, but the sentimental, humanistic, and/or ideological use of ‘humanity’ and ‘mankind’ obfuscates the real differences that exist among the races. Blacks are not whites with black skin, no more than whites are blacks with white skin. There are noticeable and even profound differences. Just because all human races belong to one species doesn’t mean they are all the same or equally suited for every environment. Likewise, wolves, dogs, and coyotes can all interbreed and produce fertile offspring, therefore qualifying as members of a single species, but the differences among wolves, coyotes, and the various breeds of dogs aren’t negligible.
In some ways, blacks are more dangerous than various animals to the non-black races because they have both the protection of humans(and thus are guaranteed all the rights of citizens in a civilized setting) and the propensity to act apelike. It means even when blacks act like chimps and baboons, they must be treated as the rest of us. What with Negrolatry as the new cult among whites, it’s gotten to the point where blacks, the most savage and destructive race, are regarded as divine beings and sacred objects. Yes, whites now worship the race that loots entire business districts and burns down entire building blocks.
If blacks acted human(in the civilized sense), blackness wouldn’t be much of a problem. Or, if blacks could be treated as a different category of humans, the ones with natural nasty-savage genes, blackness would once again be easier to deal with, i.e. if blacks act like wild animals, they’d be treated like wild animals. For too long, blacks have been acting like savages or animals, but whites have been treating them as civilized humans. Worse, blacks act even wilder and crazier, but whites treat them like saints, angels, and gods. Such levels of delusion can only be evil.
The notion that civilization is less threatened by various species of animals than by a certain group of humans is borne out by India. While cows and monkeys cause all sorts of problems, they are far less damaging than blacks are to the West. Monkeys can be a hassle, but they don’t create Detroits and Baltimores in India. Cows may wander the street and slow things down, but they don’t rob, rape, and burn down entire cities. If an American town had a choice between accepting raccoons and coyotes or blacks, it would do better with the wild animals than with blacks whose form of humanity is savage and oogity. Besides, if some raccoons and coyotes got out of hand, they could be culled, or treated like animals. But if blacks rape and murder in the worst ways, they would still have to be treated as fellow civilized folks, or indulged as ‘marginalized groups’. Blacks marginalized? They are placed at the center of White Imagination gone tawdry.
In a similar vein, the Terrorist Threat became a favorite bogeyman after 9/11. Unlike all the insurmountable problems at home with no solution in sight(especially as White America lost the will to stand up to Jews, homos, blacks, and illegals), the country could direct its collective rage against this thing called ‘Terror’, something all ‘good people’ could rally around.
Likewise, the ‘woke’ believe that the main source of evil is MAGA or ‘systemic racism’ or ‘homophobia’, against which the angelic and saintly forces of BLM and globo-homo rally to make for a rainbow future. Faced with a harsh reality and stifled by taboos, a Manichean formula of Good vs Evil can be a source of comfort, that is until reality finally comes around to grab one by the ankles.
As a counterpoint, the endings of TAXI DRIVER and even more so of HARDCORE present the possibility that, in a devil-less world, plenty of people could be accustomed or favorably disposed to their ‘fallen’ state. Unlike the priests of THE EXORCIST, Travis Bickle’s one-man ‘exorcism’ of the pimps to save the supposed damsel isn’t a clear-cut act of good against evil.
Martin Scorsese had already won critical accolades with MEAN STREETS, which came out in the same year as THE EXORCIST and is no less Catholic-themed. In the film, the minor hoodlum Charlie wants to make it in the mafia business but also serve God, and he is drawn in part to his epileptic girlfriend and his deranged ‘best friend’ Johnny Boy for that very reason. He figures that by ‘saving’ them, he can score some points with God. (Or maybe he envies Johnny Boy for possessing a kind of purity, even if in a bad way. Johnny Boy is 100% committed to being an delinquent, whereas Charlie straddles the fence between conscience and crime, incapable of committing to either. Thus, the attempt to ‘save’ Johnny Boy could subconsciously be a way of compromising his ‘black sainthood’.)
Among the crime movies, the Counter-Counterculture produced THE FRENCH CONNECTION and DIRTY HARRY, now considered classics, at one end of the spectrum, and DEATH WISH and its pale imitators at the other end. Even though William Friedkin and Gene Hackman made proto-PC-sounding noises about the cop Popeye Doyle being a ‘racist’, the audience ate it up precisely for that very reason, though the core of the movie is about Doyle vs. the French-Italian gangsters. With crime so out of control in the Big Rotten Apple, it was bracing to see a tough cop chase down black junkies and shake down black dealers. (According to AMERICAN GANGSTER by Ridley Scott, it wasn’t so much the Europeans but some enterprising Negro with connections to Southeast Asia who was flooding New York with heroin.)
But if in the realism of THE FRENCH CONNECTION, Doyle was merely doing his job, the violence took on mythic proportions in DIRTY HARRY. Harry Callahan vs Scorpio is more than good guy vs bad guy but a matter of Good vs Evil. No wonder Pauline Kael derisively characterized Callahan as ‘Saint Cop’. He seems to be jaded and cynical, hardly the spiritual type, but he takes on his mission as an avenging archangel against Scorpio who is more an evil incarnate than a mere villain. Unlike Ethan of THE SEARCHERS who ultimately saves(and spares) the girl, Callahan couldn’t save the girl from Scorpio’s clutches, and he’s committed to sending the Manson-clone to hell(though he dies in a splash of baptism). As with THE FRENCH CONNECTION, the main villain is white, but there’s a nod to rampant black criminality to lend it street cred with the audience, as when Callahan blows away a bunch of Negro bank robbers and gleefully torments Buckwheat-gone-bad with a game of San Francisco Roulette.
The 1980s were perhaps the last hurrah for the White Patriarch(or Father Figure), what with Ronald Reagan at the helm for two terms, followed by the weak father George H.W. Bush, after which we had three Sonny Figures in Billy Boy Clinton, George Dumbya, and Barry Obammy. (Trump and Biden come across as pimps though acting like whores, to the Jews of course.)
In cultural terms, the White Father Figure died a slow and then sudden death in the movies and TV. They went from a source of authority, stability, knowledge, and even wisdom to objects of criticism and ‘deconstruction’, albeit with some empathy(and even grudging admiration), to objects of scorn and derision, to objects of irrelevance and oblivion, and finally to objects of torture and humiliation(as with the destruction of the Robert E. Lee statue in Virginia by Negroes greenlit by Jews and white cucks). Even in the works where the patriarchal figure retained a degree of respect, especially the movies of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, they were secondary figures to young heroes whose main appeal was youthful narcissism.
Of course, the father-figure need not be a father in the literal sense, e.g. John Wayne often played a tough fatherly role to young men in movies such as RED RIVER, SANDS OF IWO JIMA, and HORSE SOLDIERS. Though usually not an ideal figure, especially in RED RIVER and THE SEARCHERS, his characters command recognition as tough guys in tough times. You can’t expect Mr. Rogers to lead a bunch of men in Iwo Jima(though, to be sure, it was the more Rogersy James Stewart who served in World War II, not the Duke). Ben Jonson’s role as a small town patriarch is most memorable in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, a film that was as nostalgic for the old as it was a model of New Hollywood.
In the Fifties, there were shows like FATHER KNOWS BEST and LEAVE IT IN BEAVER, and TV Westerns like GUNSMOKE and BONANZA were nothing without their congenial patriarchs. The story of the West was bound to favor the neo-patriarchs as it required hierarchy and organization, not just freedom and movement, to create order out of the wilderness. While plenty of patriarchal types in Old Hollywood movies were far from perfect, what was unquestioned was the need for such men, just as it was a given that the world couldn’t do without God.
If a father-figure was bad, he needed to be replaced with a good one as the notion of a void without a chief, a boss, or a leader was inconceivable.
Even in rebellion, as in TEN COMMANDMENTS and SPARTACUS, the man of the hour with fatherly(or at least husbandly) qualities shapes a rabble into a meaningful collective. (Granted, the leader type need not always fit the patriarchal mold. Alexander the Great surely appealed to the counterculture side of Oliver Stone because the young Macedonian took charge early and, as the legend would have it, acted on visionary impulse than cautious strategizing.)
Perhaps, the over-idealization of the father figure led to a powerful sense of betrayal at both the personal and political level. Consider the moment in DEATH OF A SALESMAN when Biff finds out about his father’s infidelity, which, more than anything, leads to his disillusionment about life in general. And if the military commanders of World War II were seen as godlike patriarchs, their counterparts in the Vietnam War came to be regarded as mendacious, craven, and/or incompetent.
There had always been lousy, stupid, abusive, negligent, and irresponsible fathers in family life and father-figures in public life. But for the sake of societal trust, much of the darkness had been swept under the rug to maintain the image of a moral community from high to low, as conveyed in Don Henley’s “End of the Innocence”.
The loss of WASP confidence, the fading of Christian authority, the rise of youth culture, the exuberance of black primitivism, the subversion by Jewish elements, the nihilism of the ‘cool’, the normalization of cynicism, and the encouragement of neo-infantilism all led to the demise of the father figure, especially the white one. (In our time, even though a white guy is more likely to still play the constructive father figure in private life whereas most black men are into gangsta culture, advertising and entertainment will often present the Wise Negro as the face of ideal fatherliness.)
One reason for the Camelot myth could have been that John F. Kennedy embodied, in the eyes of the boomer generation, the perfect balance of the father figure standing for traditional virtues and the new modern man exemplifying the spirit of youth. What followed, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, came to embody the Corruption of Experience as a series of compromises with the dark forces of power(though some now theorize that Nixon was taken out by a palace coup by the real power that loathed him). According to the official story, Kennedy was an idealistic young father-figure killed by an errant prodigal son type(who even betrayed good ole USA for the Soviet Union), but the conspiracy theorists or the truth-seekers(take your pick) have argued Kennedy was the good son killed by dark father-figures led by Allen Dulles with the wink-wink approval of J. Edgar Hoover, possibly a crypto-homo patriarch of national security.
Counterculture has been characterized as a rebellion against adulthood but, in another way, could be understood as a rebellion against patriarchy or the father-figure-authority in the name of true adulthood, i.e. for too long, true adulthood had been arrested by excessive deference to elderly men as the repository of wisdom and executors of what’s good for the nation. Such deference to the cult of age and experience suppressed the natural development, even among adults, of genuine curiosity and critical thought.
Such trust in authority led not only to mass conformity but to the managerial elites doing the bidding of the kings and queens, the supposedly ‘great men’ and elders of experience. And it led to the Great War or World War I. And then, the radical sons soon became the new iron-fisted father types in the form of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, leading to much soul-searching or mind-rummaging among the Frankfurt School type who aimed for a more libertine-spirited Marxism.
In order for young people to grow naturally and develop fully in mind & soul and become thinking adults, the old hierarchy had to be demolished. Thus, it was less a war on adulthood per se than a movement in favor of true adulthood by removing the obstacle of the father-authority. If you live your entire life looking up to father figures, you will always retain, on some level, a ‘son’ mentality, as with the Nick Nolte character in Paul Schrader’s AFFLICTION. Just like the Olympians had to overthrow their parents, the Titans, to come fully into their own, a kind of metaphorical patricide was called for in the culture.
And there was the Jewish angle as well, especially as Jewish Boomers gained absolute dominance in the 1990s. To a large extent, the changes in boomer dynamics owed to the rise of Judeo-centrism in American Life. When boomer Jews were young, the figures of authority were still largely WASP or White Christian American. As such, they conflated elderliness with goy power standing in the way of rising youthful Jewish spirit, much like Goliath before David(or at least Saul before David). And in their tribal solidarity, the war on WASP patriarchs was to avenge the stifled ambitions of the Jewish patriarchs. Before there was the Gulf War, there was the Golf War. “You WASPs must be destroyed because my Jewish grandpa wasn’t allowed to play golf in your country club.”
Back then, youthfulness, conflated with Jewish radical will, was good, whereas age, conflated with WASP authority, was bad, or very problematic, akin to how Benjamin Braddock feels about the older people in THE GRADUATE(or how the Jewish student feels about the Christian college dean in Philip Roth’s INDIGNATION). But now, Jewish Power totally controls the elder-sphere, and so, the views on youth have grown more ambivalent, especially as some of the most spirited elements of youth these days are to be found in the alternative spheres of both the right and left that refuse to hew to the official line laid down by Jewish Boomers.
Given the centrality of youth in popular culture, Jewish Power has been careful to steer and choreograph the latest fashion-passions of youth, thereby keeping the young and the restless most preoccupied with issues and causes most amenable to Jewish Interests, like LGBTQXYZ(contra BDS) and also BLM in order to burden whites with ‘guilt’ so as to keep them on the plantation of redemptive cucking to Jews(and their allies).
If, to some degree, the youth culture of the Sixties had an authenticity and autonomy that flustered the adults, Jews and goyim alike, who didn’t know what to make of it or how to control it, the new crop of ‘youth culture’ since the Eighties has largely been stage-managed by the industry.
This is clearly evident in popular music, in which the personal artist was most prized in the Sixties but is now inundated with interchangeable idols carefully groomed by the industry. Even the ‘controversial’ stunts are part and parcel of the marketing department, in contrast to the hot water John Lennon found himself in when he said the Beatles are bigger than Jesus.
Because the current movers and shakers in the industry came of age during or after the Sixties, they are far more conversant and engaged with the dynamics of youth culture than the industry moguls of the Sixties who came of age when the likes of Frank Sinatra and the Andrew Sisters commanded the scene.
Despite Counterculture’s insistence on a faster path to (true) adulthood, what ensued was something different though hardly surprising. The fading of fatherly authority didn’t so much spell doom for arrested adolescence as herald the eventual rise of a new infantilism, which is no wonder that the ‘woke’ powers-that-be are now so invested in indoctrinating children at the youngest age possible.
It went from youth demanding faster access to adult freedoms to adults demanding easier access to children to sexualize. While teenage sexuality has always been problematic in the modern world, at least teenagers feel the rush of hormones, the Beavisean Boing. Their drives are fueled by bodily changes, and therefore, sexual education, if done properly, can raise awareness of their desires.
In contrast, the recent sexualization of children via gender-nuttery is an imposition of adult deviance onto a demographic that has no way of understanding any of it. The agenda not only perverts the children but infantilizes adults because only fools with cockamamie ideas could swallow this gender-bender theory that makes about as much sense as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but then, it’s no wonder these deviant adults(with the full backing of Jewish Supremacist power that rules the West) target children who lack the critical acumen to parse through these ‘ideas’ and see them for what they are.
THE EXORCIST can be approached on five levels: Literal-dramatic(in accordance to the presented cosmology), visceral-kinetic, psycho-mythic, personal-metaphorical, and allegorical-symbolic. It is weakest at the literal-dramatic level though it works well enough emotionally given the quality and intensity of the performances. At this level, we are to believe that an unearthing of an ancient artifact in Iraq led to some 12 yr old in Georgetown being possessed by the Devil that makes her do gross and naughty things and that she was finally saved by a priest dragging the Devil out of her and jumping out the window. If the staging, pacing, and performances weren’t so good, the audience would have laughed at the entire premise.
However, it worked because of the sheer visceral power of the suspense, hysterics, and the mounting horror. And the heroism of the priests came across as larger-than-life, indeed ennobling(in a rather cynical age). At the sensory level, the movie overpowered the critical faculty, rendering the audience too awestruck to wonder if any of it made sense at the literal level or in accordance to Christian cosmology. The movie’s box-office-busting success owed mainly to bravura film-making.
Or, the entire movie could be approached as a kind of hallucination or waking dream on the part of William Blatty, the author of the source novel. The mind makes free-associations, connecting the dots thematically among things that outwardly seem unrelated. On that level, it’s understandable how Blatty’s frame of mind could have associated an archaeological dig with deviltry halfway around the globe. However, this sort of thing works better in painting or poetry than in cinema where the sense of literal reality is more palpable than in the other arts. Whether Blatty hallucinated the whole concept or not, the movie asks the audience to suspend disbelief and accept the people and places as as they’re presented.
At the level of personal-metaphor, the movie suggests that there is no greater hell than that of private life. In DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, the private life is held precious against the impersonal and often brutal forces of History, but even so, the deepest pain is personal. The Revolution and the Civil War destroyed countless lives, but nothing pains Zhivago more than his separation from Lara. At the very least, social problems and public issues are collective matters and involve one to feel as part of a community, however flawed it may be. Also, there’s the hope that society will somehow find the solutions with proper leadership and participation of the citizenry.
In contrast, a private problem is entirely yours, a kind of personal hell. For all his knowledge of theology and psychology, Father Damien Karras cannot escape from the personal guilt over his mother’s death. Not only was he not there when she died but, on some level, he feels that his scholarly and righteous path — as a graduate of psychology and theology — prevented him from earning the kind of money that could have provided better care for his mother. How is he supposed to save souls when he couldn’t even save his mother?
The most unusual aspect of THE EXORCIST is it takes the form of a private hell. Unlike most monsters in the horror genre, the evil spirit in THE EXORCIST doesn’t target an entire community or stalk and slay a series of victims, like Michael in HALLOWEEN. Rather, it targets a single household and torments it to no end. Paradoxically, because the evil is so narrow in scope, it is all the more terrifying, at least to the affected. They are alone in their terror, with the rest of Georgetown completely unawares.
At least if the Devil terrorized the entire community, the mother and daughter wouldn’t feel so alone. Just as the memory of his mother haunts Father Damien Karras, the mother feels alone in her helplessness as her child becomes ever more demented.
Father Merrin is something of an outlier as a PERSONAL vendetta has developed between himself and the Devil. He knows God is more powerful than the Devil, but the Devil is more powerful than any man, himself included. He won battles against the Devil, but the Devil will win the war against any man, but there is hope in the community of the faithful bound by God in an eternal struggle against the Devil, so that when the old warriors fall, the new ones will take up the sword.
If most priests are imbued with the abstract sense of the Good in eternal war with Evil, Merrin encountered Evil face to face in Africa when he exorcized a young boy from the clutches of the Devil. (One wonders though, how can you tell if black have been exercised when they be naturally crazy?)
Father Karras, knowing of Good and Evil through church dogma(but also schooled in modern thought), wondered if the Devil really existed. Could it be that badness is simply a social or biological matter? So say the sociologists and psychologists.
In contrast, Merrin has no doubt of the Devil’s existence because he met him face to face, and things have gotten personal between them.
After the unearthing of the Pazuzu figurine at an archaeological site, he senses what others do not. To others, it’s just one more artifact, but to Merrin, it’s a message, a warning, a taunt, and a dare from the Devil himself. In this state of mind, haunted by the Devil’s vengeance, he senses what is sickly and fallen even in the mundane facts of daily life. What is normal to the average eye becomes menacing and portentous. As the Devil sets the stage for a second round of battle, Merrin steadies his nerves for the rematch. Whereas Chris MacNeil(the mother)’s private hell concerns her daughter and Father’s Karras’ private hell concerns his late mother, Merrin’s private hell is spiritual in nature as the Devil once again challenges him in his much diminished state.
The fifth approach to THE EXORCIST is allegorical-symbolic, even though the movie by evidence wasn’t meant as such. Blatty seems to have been sincere in his spiritual musings, and William Friedkin in interviews have expressed something close to religious faith. Both men accepted the literal premise of the story as a conflict between Satan and the servants of God.
However, in retrospect, especially in light of the socio-cultural transformations with the boomer takeover of power and influence, THE EXORCIST can function as a kind of allegory in spite of itself. In other words, instead of taking it literally as a dramatization of the conflict between the divine and the devilish, the characters and situations could serve as symbols of the larger malaise and unease.
The Devil could stand for all the vile, wicked, corrosive, and perverted elements of our social, cultural, and political order; Regan could stand for the vulnerable young whose privilege of innocence has been stripped in order to corrupt and possess them at the earliest possible age; the priests and their exorcism could stand for the resolve of some determined souls to keep fighting the good fight against all odds. Thus, the movie goes from an escapist fantasy, one where we shut out real-world problems to fixate on the supernatural, to a social critique where the elements of the movie symbolically represent the problems we face now.
If the original story, as intended by Blatty and Friedkin, is intensely spiritual in literally envisioning a conflict between the godly and the satanic, an allegorical approach is useful to sounder-minded secularists and atheists who, no less than genuine Christians and other religious folks, are appalled at the fallen and degraded state of society, especially in the West, once considered the most advanced and rational part of the world and in all of human history.
Such a symbolic approach would have held less relevance at the time of the movie’s release because, for all the social upheavals caused by the Counterculture and the like, there remained the bastions of normality and sanity at all levels of society pushing back against the sickos, perverts, freaks, and degenerates. The mere presence of the ‘silent majority’, despite its lack of intellectual engagement, ensured a certain social conservatism in the political arena. The idea of churches flying sodomy flags would have been unthinkable even in the most ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ churches of the period.
Today, however, globo-homo is not only conspicuous but esteemed as higher than God and Jesus in the majority of US churches and has indeed become the de facto official cult of the state. And if, back then, the Judeo-centrists were still afraid to execute the full extent of their twisted supremacist agenda, today their chutzpah has gone through the roof. “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound! Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Super-Zion!” Jerry Falwell wasn’t exactly wrong when he prophesied that the Antichrist would come in the form of a portnoic fellow.
Of course, the world would be an evil place with or without Jews, but Jews now hold the satanic torch with which to set the world aflame with their vagaries of madness.
If we take THE EXORCIST literally, we’d have to believe Bible verses and holy water could serve as effective weapons against evil, but we know such things are useless against the real-life devils in the world. There’s no way evil, big or small, can be vanquished by invoking Christ, making signs of the cross, sprinkling holy water, or praying. One can do all that, but things will be just the same the next day and the day after that and so on. No war was ever won by prayer or invocations of scripture, though one could argue that certain forms of religion, especially of the Abrahamic tradition, provided inner strength and resilience for the defeated to carry on with hope and faith in God(on their side).
However, taken metaphorically, the tools and rituals of religion can stand for an approach to life, one of resolve, determination, conviction, commitment, and sacrifice. Even if exclaiming, “the power of Jesus compels you” will not ward off, let alone destroy, evil in the real world, one needs a proper mindset and framework to lead a good life and to summon up the righteous courage to stand up to evil, even or especially in friendly guise, so often the case with the globo-homo agenda devised to disarm well-meaning normal folks, aka the ‘normies’.
Among the characters in THE EXORCIST, the mother of Regan, Chris MacNeil(Ellen Burstyn), comes closest to serving as an archetype. Whereas the two priests strike us as characters of depth and inner-life, MacNeil, a famous actress and beloved celebrity, seems a walking-talking jumble of fashionable attitudes and assumptions. She seems to be a talented actress, a loving mother, and a modern person. A decent human being but accustomed to being the center of attention and being taken care of. She’s sort of spoiled. And she has a short fuse when things go wrong, as her problems should always take center-stage.
Indeed, we first see her on a movie set(at Georgetown University) where she plays an activist faculty member in sympathy with(or eager for approval from) radical students and giving an impassioned speech. The extras-as-students cheer her on, as if the world’s problems could be overcome with loud noises and gestures. There’s no sense of soul-searching or individual agency, just rabble-rousing and self-righteous rage. It’s as if all the problems are social or political, and the only path to justice is activism.
However, the activism is a staged piece of film-making, and MacNeil is doing her part as an actress. We don’t know to what extent she personally invested in the views of her movie role. More likely than not, she probably does, at least outwardly, as most actors of that period tended to be liberal, even radical. She could be a commentary on someone like Jane Fonda who mixed movie stardom with political activism, who was both an outspoken radical and a spoiled brat used to being the center of attention, real Hollywood royalty who, far from being punished for her political antics, was richly rewarded with two Academy Awards in the same decade.
Still, the fact that MacNeil’s activism takes place in a movie role casts doubt on the notion of the activist celebrity. Is she just going through the motions as a performer or in tune with the opinions expressed by her character? If the former, the whole thing is phony, and if the latter, how easy it is to play the radical or do-gooder in front of a camera, spouting fashionable diatribes written by someone else.
At any rate, MacNeil seems mostly content with her success and doesn’t think too much at all. And the film director, who seems to be a British(and maybe Jewish) alcoholic, comes across as a most cynical type despite the apparently idealistic tone of the movie he is making. And the student protest, presented as a movie shoot with spectators standing around amusedly, suggests that there was something orchestrated and contrived about the Sixties(that spilled into the early Seventies), a generation possessed with simple utopian dreams of a better world to be discovered just around the corner with the correct mantras, fist-shaking, and marching against The Man. It’s as if the whole thing was a kind of staged event, and it was to an extent because the Counterculture was founded on unprecedented middle class affluence and privilege, the first time in human history when a large swath of young people could put off the future and playact at changing the world through exhibitionistic antics.
Even though MacNeil is of an older generation, close to being middle-aged(if not there already), she appears to have imbibed, at least in part, the ‘radical chic’ mode of the time. In temperament, she is the opposite of Peter Sellers’ character in BEING THERE, but they do have in common the sense that the world should operate like a movie set or a TV screen. Just as she’s used to taking orders from directors and producers, she’s used to dishing out orders and making demands. With a personal assistant and house servants at her beck and call, it’s obvious she’s used to ordering people around. Not that she treats them badly, but she’s the boss, rather ironic considering her role of the radical activist in the movie. In a roundabout way, it suggests a certain hypocrisy of the Counterculture itself, one demanding ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ but from the privileged perch of the academia where the students got deferments and prepared to join the upper ranks of society; of course, many of the radical boomers of the Sixties later became some of the most privileged, conceited, and stuck-up people in American History.
While Chris MacNeil is a sympathetic character, certainly not a bad person, she has a rather unpleasant tendency to hysterically blame others for problems she herself can’t handle or fix. Surely, the excuse for her rage is that the others are the experts and should have all the answers, so why don’t they? It’s as if she expects reality to be scripted with readymade solutions when, in fact, reality is what it is, which is totally unscripted. Just like Peter Sellers’ character in BEING THERE cannot change the world with a TV remote control, the world cannot be revised or repaired like a movie. (Perhaps, it was this aspect of her character in THE EXORCIST that led Darren Aronofsky to cast her in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM where an alienated mother confuses her addictive TV fantasy for truth.)
And for all the science and technology, much of reality still remains a mystery. A person could be of perfect physical health but soul-sick, a malady beyond the reach of doctors and psychiatrists. It’s far worse in our age when the medical and psychiatric community, along with legal institutions, are both complicit in the sinister agenda of globo-homo and tranny-tyranny. So many doctors today claim to not know the biological differences between the sexes. And plenty of doctors and psychologists recommend the tranny agenda of messing with children’s minds and encouraging genital mutilation and hormonal monstrosities. But, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Who would have thought the scientific community itself would become possessed with a kind of cultish witchcraft?
Anyway, in THE EXORCIST, the good doctors and psychiatrists do their sincere best to ferret out the problem that is presumably afflicting some part of Regan’s brain or psyche, but alas, they fail. The science isn’t false but hasn’t all the answers. But, MacNeil reacts hysterically, cursing out the experts for not having the cure for her daughter. It never occurs to her to wonder if there’s something in(or missing in) their lives that might partially explain why what’s happening is happening.
In a way, the horror in the movie could stand as a metaphor for the horribleness of reality that cannot be scripted away(like a screenplay) or repaired(like a piece of machine). The great advances in modernity have led people to assume that the experts have all the answers(or will have them in time). So many problems have been solved, and mankind has even been on the Moon, giving us hope and even hubris that modernity can fix all problems, indeed as a matter of entitlement for humanity. Notice how so many on the so-called left endlessly bitch and whine about how such-and-such institutions have yet to fix this or that problem, i.e. people should just sit on their ass and demand that the ‘experts’ provide all the answers. Ironically, such ‘criticisms’ of the expert class only furthers its power as the only sheriff in town, as evinced in the Covid-19 hysteria where the tyranny of expertise took over the entire system.
The undeniably great advances have certainly undermined the appeal of religion and prayer. Why pray for better health and contemplate death and the afterlife when you can go see a doctor and get a prescription or, if need be, an operation? And Father Karras himself advises Chris MacNeil against an exorcism on her daughter because even the modern Church looks to scientific methodology of explaining a host of emotional problems that once used to be associated with demonic influence or possession.
Theological expertise has, to a large measure, come to defer to scientific expertise, with the Church remaining mainly as cultural heritage and spiritual guide, also ebbing in influence and respect as people look to the state to ameliorate social problems, look to popular culture(the new idolatry) for entertainment and even meaning, and look to science/technology for better living.
At any rate, the mainline expertise of both the medical community and the Church simply has no answer for what has happened to Regan, leaving her mother to seek desperate measures. When she mentions the possibility of exorcism to Father Karras, the latter tells her that it’s virtually an abandoned practice disapproved by the Church, which also favors science and medicine as a means of dealing with problems of neurological or psychological origin. However, Regan’s extreme case is such that the Church comes around to giving the rare permission to proceed with the exorcism. The occasion calls upon Father Merrin, one of the few remaining priests who practiced the mostly-abandoned ritual; he presumably met the Devil face to face and overcame his possession of a black African boy.
The theme of possession in THE EXORCIST is now more relevant than ever as there isn’t just a preponderance of bad ideas but a mad obsession with them, as well as the benediction from the highest levels of power and authority. And these are different from the kinds of ideological possessions of the 19th and 20th centuries(as explored in The Devils by Fyodor Dostoevsky), where the big ideas and movements at least contained values and objectives of some meaning and worth. If anything, they went astray or ended in tragedy because of their excessive emphasis or tunnel vision at the expense of other considerations.
For example, communism championed the rights and interests of the workers, a good thing, but went too far with its messianic class struggle agenda that could only end in bloodshed, tyranny, and inefficiency. One can understand the appeal of radical nostalgia in Warren Beatty’s REDS. Anarchism explored the problems of excessive concentration of power and wealth in a handful of institutions and industries but often degenerated into a cult of chaos and violence as cleansing rituals. The Prohibition addressed the real problems of alcoholism but went so far as to ban all alcohol, only to create fertile ground for gangsterism. Nationalism called for the right of homeland for each people but sometimes led to chauvinism and jingoism. Capitalism fostered investment and industry but also led to wild speculations that led to economic distress, especially the great panic of 1929. Fascism seemed promising a balancing act between the old and the new, the left and the right, autocracy and mass power, but ultimately collapsed with the cult of personality(of Hitler especially) and the war-mongering.
Still, they all had something of worth to salvage from the wreck. Same was true of the Civil Rights Movement as blacks hadn’t been granted full rights in much of the US, even if for understandable reasons. And, the Counterculture, before it turned self-indulgent and licentious, addressed the problems of post-war materialism and explored organic ways of living in a system invested in ‘plastics’. Flower Power bloomed for a moment before wilting into a morass of drug abuse and delusions.
The participants in those events were possessed by both the good and the bad, or they were overly possessed by certain good ideas that turned bad in their excess. Worker’s Rights, good; Dictatorship of the Proletariat, bad.
In contrast, what people now seem to be obsessed with or possessed by is usually utterly worthless, decadent, degenerate, retarded, and/or crazy, in equal parts inane and insane. That so many people could become so dazzled with such nonsense truly makes us wonder about the human nature as so many ‘average’ and ‘ordinary’ people have fallen for the ludicrous.
Worse, it affects some of the most intelligent and successful members of society, though one wonders if they’re playing along to get along or exploiting the nuttery for their own advantage(which is surely true of the highly intelligent Jews who are mainly concerned with power and control).
These types seem like so many real-life Regans. Possessed by some demonic force that cannot be reasoned with. People who claim to be secular but are quasi-religious or cultist in their worldview. People who claim to be liberal but don’t have a genuine liberal, or tolerant, bone in their body. People who claim to be rational but blindly trust and obey the authority of the powers-that-be.
It’s all the more reason that the sound of mind and body must never cave to such types. Their mind-or-soul virus is like the Terminator machine or the Thing(of John Carpenter’s movie). It cannot be reasoned with. It can’t even be appeased to some compromise. It must conquer all and then some. Given it an inch, it takes a mile; give it a mile, it takes the world. Just like the priests in THE EXORCIST stand their ground against the Devil, one must never retreat in the face of this monstrosity. Liberals and then conservatives caved to ‘gay marriage’, and just look at the result!
William Friedkin was often drawn to stories of obsession, which is a kind of possession. The (anti)hero in THE FRENCH CONNECTION isn’t only a tough cop but a manic(or even a maniac)-cop for whom justice becomes as much a personal as a professional matter. It makes him more admirable or more dangerous(than even the criminals); even other policemen are killed by his friendly fire.
Friedkin’s greatest movie is TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.(which never got the credit it deserved), and its main character, another anti-hero, is soon revealed to be as just as ‘possessed’ as the Muslim Jihadi about to bungee-jump with a bomb strapped to his chest. Initially, as a secret service operative who confronts the terrorist, he comes across as ultra-professional, cool under pressure, but it isn’t long before he shows his true colors as a man so possessed that he will do anything, even go outside the law, to get what he wants, and what started out as a matter of justice(and personal vendetta) turns into a thrill ride headed straight to Valhalla.
Nothing extraordinary gets done without passion, where one feels possessed by some ‘spirit’, a kind of Faustian bargain. But, it can also lead to blindness and madness, where the only life worth living is one that tempts death. Generally, moderation and balance, the pragmatic middle, is preferable, but what about extreme situations? There are times where fire must fight fire, but the fire can burn out of control, as happens in TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. where the lawman becomes the mirror reflection of the outlaw. Even though the protagonist in CRUISING doesn’t go that far, he too immerses himself in the extreme world of sadomasochistic homo subculture to tease out the killer. Lawmen and clergy are committed to the good as respectively defenders of justice and servants of God, but excessive zeal in the name of law-and-order and in the name of God has produced results almost as horrific as the forces they’re at war with.
The post-Vatican II society of THE EXORCIST is a world of waning religious influence. Set in the early seventies, the Catholic-heavy Georgetown area seems mostly a liberal-secular enclave. The Catholics are present but don’t amount to much, and the relatively younger generation of priests as represented by Father Karras and his roommate Father Dyer don’t come across as particularly devout. Karras, trained in modern psychology, is plagued by doubt; he’s more a man in spiritual crisis than a man of spiritual devotion, but still, he struggles to keep the faith and be a good soldier. In contrast, Father Dyer’s role as priest seems mostly professional, shoes to fill regardless of faith; he seems unperturbed by the Big Questions as long as he’s assured of a niche in society, especially one in the DC area that provides access to the rich, powerful, and/or famous. Not a bad fellow, he comes across as a bit glib, someone Karras cannot confide in.
When contacted by Chris MacNeil(Regan’s mother), Karras’ advice is to forget about religious options and to continue with modern medicine. It’s almost as if Karras is as troubled with religious fanaticism as with the spiritual concept of evil. Though a priest, he prefers modern explanations for phenomena and accepts the much-diminished role of the Church as the carrier of tradition, performer of rituals, and repository of spiritual philosophy. Karras appears doubtful that the world is animated by an eternal conflict between the divine and the demonic. If something goes wrong with man or society, the likely cause is best understood and ameliorated through reason and science. Misdiagnosis of a problem as Evil Possession, to be (mis)treated with exorcism, always an extreme practice, seems to Karras to be a cure worse than the disease: Blaming the iffy Devil for what the iffy God can’t fix.
But upon bearing witness of Regan’s possession with his own eyes and out of sympathy for Regan’s mother at the end of her tether, he opts for the practice under permission granted by the Church. In a way, the conflict becomes one of Regan being excessively possessed by the Devil and of Karras being insufficiently possessed of the divine spirit. Exorcism isn’t something he can perform without total faith and commitment. He must let go of his doubts and believe in the redeeming power of the Good against Evil.
Thus, his struggle isn’t only against the demon inside Regan but the gaping hole within himself that has dimmed with second thoughts about God and Christ. Karras is a sturdy specimen, a young man who’s also done some boxing, but his faith of late has been on wobbly legs.
In contrast, Father Merrin is strong in faith but feeble of health, not least due to a harrowing and arduous exorcism in Africa that left him broken in body if not in spirit. Together, they take up the challenge, underlining the truth that Good vs Evil is a forever war passed down through the generations.
THE EXORCIST works so well by weaving together the various strands(made compelling with first-rate characterizations and performances) that are interesting in their own right and not necessarily intrinsic to the horror genre. Chris MacNeil’s life as an actress and her relationship to her daughter could have made a fine movie about fame and family. Father Karras and his Greek-immigrant mother could have been the basis of a film about the crisis of the modern church and the ethnic experience in America. Father Merrin’s story as an archaeologist could have been the stuff of adventure and discovery. Most movies have, at best, one interesting thread, but THE EXORCIST has several woven together by a director who, at the peak of powers, mastered the styles of the documentary, the art film, and the genre movie. The movie’s unique horror derives from this very quality as the story isn’t confined to genre space but pulsates with the very stuff of life. Indeed, one of the best scenes is where Chris MacNeil decides to walk home from the movie set. It feels like a perfect day, an autumn afternoon of dappled sunshine, children scampering about, and nuns’ habits billowing in the wind. And yet, there’s just the slightest intimation of calm before the storm, halcyon day before hell breaks loose. Unlike Father Merrin who can sense evil’s presence, MacNeil is entirely oblivious of the force that is encroaching into her world.
Of course, one could argue, not entirely wrongly, that the movie is really a triumph of manipulation, one so well done that the audience(and even many critics) missed out on the essential tawdriness of the material and the ludicrousness of the premise, especially as it’s not just horror but presented as a kind of spiritual statement.
Still, what mastery in Friedkin’s handling of the material: Stories and situations usually associated with dramas, even art films, gradually shaped into powerful horror. Ultimately, the success of the whole owed to the sum of its parts, each of them worthy of its own movie.
In contrast, THE SORCERER, an even more ambitious work by William Friedkin(who called it his best), fails because the disparate strands in the jungle venture aren’t very interesting due to weak characterization or irrelevance to the central focus of the movie. Even though THE EXORCIST’s introductory storylines — Merrin as an archaeologist in Iraq, Chris MacNeil making a movie in Georgetown, Karras visiting his mother in New York — seem unrelated, they become integrally linked via the crisis of Regan’s possession. In contrast, the fact that the men in THE SORCERER ended up together seems entirely incidental, thereby besides the point to the central adventure.
There are some odd, quirky, or ambiguous elements in the movie as well. Karl(Rudolf Schündler), the male servant with a thick German accent, is taunted by the director Burke Dennings(of Chris MacNeil’s latest film project) as a Nazi escapee living under false identity. Could Karl be a clue as to how evil entered the MacNeil residence? But, even as he comes across as a bit stiff and secretive, indeed as if he’s hiding something, he’s presented as a good and loyal member of the household, and, if anything, Dennings comes across as loutish in his Anti-German prejudice masquerading as piety.
Perhaps, it’s a statement on the limited quality of duty as a virtue. It is possible that Karl once fulfilled a role in National Socialist Germany, in which he was as dutiful as he is with MacNeil, his new master. He’s reliability and dedication are an asset to but do not necessarily redeem whatever he has done or is doing, i.e. he is a good ‘soldier’ to ANY master, Hitler or MacNeil. We first see him when MacNeil orders him to look in the attic for mice, possibly a joke on Nazis hunting Jews in every nook and cranny.
In one scene, as the horror begins to escalate with Regan, MacNeil asks Karl if he’s the one who placed a crucifix in Regan’s bedroom, something he denies. The tense moment is loaded with ambiguity because the presence of the holy object is an affront to MacNeil’s sense of authority(it’s her house and her daughter, dammit) and outlook(secular than religious), even as it holds the cure that may finally release Regan from her torment. And if Karl is lying, he acted out of consideration but lacks the courage to justify his deed, and if he’s telling the truth, he sticks to allotted duties and nothing else. And if he did place the crucifix there, one wonders what his true objectives may have been. A spiritual aid for Regan or a symbol of reaction against the liberated order, of which MacNeil is a part. For many liberals, Christianity has been ‘triggering’ less for its spiritual message than for its political baggage, e.g. today, for instance, when some people hear ‘Christ Is King’, they hear ‘White Power, Down with Jews, Hell with Homos, End Immigration.’
Anyway, if Karl didn’t put the crucifix there, who did? It’s never answered? Did Regan take it from the church where she defiled the Madonna statue? If so, why? Did a part of her seek spiritual protection from the forces taking possession of her? Or, did she take it to use as a sex toy at a later date, which eventually happens. It’s never quite revealed that Regan defiled the statue, only inferred. If she was the culprit, the act is somewhat out of character with the Devil’s general plan with Regan, which is to let her rot in her own private space than run about wreaking havoc all about town. In the so-called “director’s cut” version, there is an extra scene where Regan, face side up, crawls across the upper-floor hallway, and it should have remained on the cutting floor. Creepy(crawly), yes, but inconsistent with the rest of the horror. If indeed Regan is willing to leave her bedroom, why not the house itself? Why not fly around like a witch and terrify the whole town, especially the Negroes?
Other than Karl, another figure of ambiguity is the detective Kinderman(Lee J. Cobb) who happens to be a Jew, the polar opposite of a Nazi. Why does a movie heavily loaded with Catholic themes need a Jewish character, an ultimately sympathetic one at that, who also happens to be a cinephile(suggesting that pop culture has become the new shared reference of imagination and inspiration, certainly true of THE EXORCIST itself).
The Church, especially prior to Vatican II(regarded by both its proponents and opponents as akin to something like the Nuremberg Trial for the Vatican, with the former welcoming it as long overdue and the latter condemning it as wholly unnecessary and unjustified), had a long troubled relation with the Jewish community. A sop to the Jewish community lest the movie’s overt Catholicism make some Jews nervous?
Kinderman suspects some disaffected member of the Church as the likely culprit behind the Church vandalism and the possible murder of the film director, who apparently leapt out(or was thrown out) from the vicinity of Regan’s bedroom. Kinderman even applies pressure on Karras to name some names to as he’s pretty sure that some priest-gone-bad did it. As a Jew, maybe he wouldn’t mind his investigation exposing the Church as a dark institution filled with freaks, sickos, and murderers for all its pretentions of sanctity. Overall, Kinderman seems a decent feller but, as a Jew and a detective focused on material evidence, comes across as a trespasser onto the spiritual territory on which the real battle is fought.
In recent years, even the idea of referring or appealing to experts has become something of a crazy notion as so many institutions have become corrupted by money, ideology-idolatry, status anxiety, and, above all, Jewish Supremacist mindset whereby well-positioned Jews not only favor other Jews but have their antennas tuned to a shared conspiratorial worldview. Jews don’t have to get together in dark rooms to hatch out plans. Having grown up in the same milieu with shared cultural attitudes, historical narratives, ethnic hostilities, and political paranoia, they intuitively sense what is expected of them to achieve the desirable outcome.
For example, Jews didn’t need a tribal powwow in 2020 in their plot against Donald Trump and MAGA. Regardless of whether they were ensconced in the federal agencies, media, academia, medical community, big pharma, Wall Street, or local governments, they knew the Covid and BLM narratives were about GET TRUMP. As many Jews in high or prestigious positions count as ‘experts’, they were favored by the media, also controlled by the Jews.
Ideally, experts should not only be more knowledgeable but be animated by principles in regards to truth and integrity. But when the Jewish mindset is characterized by supremacism, victimology, contempt, hostility, and paranoia(that anything that triggers them means Another Holocaust), even erudite Jewish experts who know better will choose Power over Truth, as has been manifested so many times as far as anyone can remember.
As for the goy cuck ‘experts’, they are either stupidly gullible(especially in their awestruck admiration of all things Jewish) or cravenly timid, especially if they’re white, Christian, and/or conservative as those identities or ideologies have been put on the defensive morally, culturally, and historically: Whites mustn’t believe It’s Okay to be White, conservatives must cuck(mostly to Zion), and Christians must worship ‘gods’ higher than God and Jesus, namely the Magic Negro and Holy Homo, along with ‘Muh Holocaust’. Because whites have failed to name and stand up to Jewish Supremacism, the main source of the disease, the evil cancer eating away at the West has grown only bigger.
Christmas and Easter have no place on Google either
Expertise has been weaponized into a vehicle of ideology, also compromised in its lack of logical consistency in favor of shifting the goalposts at any given moment to appease the Power of Zion. The academia sets the intellectual and cultural tone for the whole of society, and the predominance of ideology over truth, e.g. ‘Race is not real’ and ‘gender is just a social construct’, along with the power of Jewish donors to steer research and discourse, has set a dire intellectual tone for the whole country, reflected not only in the institutions but in the various industries branded as ‘woke capital’.
Of course, the fact that the BS still comes packaged as ‘liberal arts and sciences’ fools a lot of people that they partake of rational discourse. Labels do matter as people tend to judge a book by its cover, but any sincere search for truth requires something more than mental energy; no less essential are emotional balance and a healthy dose of skepticism.
As human nature is biased towards data and words aligned with one’s most strongly-held assumptions, a degree of skepticism is needed as brakes on the emotions. No matter how smart and erudite someone is, he may arrive at the wrong conclusions if prone to excessive emotions and pride, and this seems to be the case with a lot of smart people who should have known better but have been undone by their rather childish emotional makeup, such as Nassim Taleb with the Covid Hysteria.
That said, no less deluded are the drones whose passionless demeanor is less a sign of cool rationality than of mindless conformism, as with the Pod People in THE INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Some people feel secure only within the consensus and dread the exile of rejection.
At the literal level, the Bible, the Crucifix, and holy water as instruments of the exorcism only make sense to the faithful and within the ‘suspended disbelief’ of the movie. Incantations such as “The power of Jesus compels you” means nothing to non-believers, and whatever happens in movies, however visceral as spectacle, has no relevance to reality.
Still, anyone can appreciate the symbolic significance of such items as people are motivated not only by success or dominance but righteousness. While competition in sports is amoral as no side is good or evil and play only to win, many conflicts at the personal, cultural, and political level are driven by a sense of good vs bad(even evil). Given that most sides believe themselves to be right and their rivals or enemies to be wrong, the manner in which they delineate their righteousness is crucial. As history, past and present, has demonstrated over and over, just about any side, however deluded or demented, could believe itself to be right or justified. And even the better side could become blind to its own evils in the righteous rage of the moment(as illustrated by the Allied war crimes in World War II).
Even the most monstrous cosmologies surrounding Aztec gods and Moloch believed themselves to be on the right side of truth. Today, people who celebrate sodomy truly believe themselves to be on the side of angels. Plenty of narcissistic homos feel, “It isn’t up to me to change my ways to serve God but up to Him to change His ways to flatter me.” And there are the so-called Christian Zionists(who should really be called Christian Sodomists as Jews turned the Holy Land into Sodom and Gomorrah) who believe Jesus’s message boils down to “Cuck to Jews, bow down to Zion, and giggle fiendishly at the death of Palestinians.”
The Torah is a testament to how the darker features of God can be sanctified, justified, or rationalized, indeed even when He brings about the destruction of entire domains of man and nature. Even when He commands the Chosen to put everyone to the sword, man, woman, and child. Even when He hurls misfortunes upon Job, a most devout servant. The Torah is a profoundly moral text but lacks consistency, with Yahweh sometimes rivaling the darker pagan gods in His rage, violence, and cruelty.
It is Christianity that sought to distill the higher essence of Judaism(with the aid of certain state-of-the-art concepts found in paganism) into spiritual purity so that its reconceptualization of God would be one of love, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness. God still judges and condemns but with a greater empathy of man’s failings and with a consistent set of moral values. Gone is the God who is erratic, arbitrary, and volatile(and pray He didn’t wake up on the wrong side of Heaven), with too many holdovers from the days of the bad gods.
Then, the appeal of Christianity around the world isn’t difficult to fathom as its spiritual-moral formulation of the good, the just, and the pure went beyond any before it(and arguably after it), though some would argue that it encouraged sanctimony, not the most pleasant of human sentiments, one that is prone to purity spirals of holier-than-thou piousness, as well as excessive repression and ‘guilt’ about what are natural and healthy.
For literal-minded Christians who believe in miracles, the Bible isn’t just a book but the Holy Scripture blessed with the power of divine words, and the holy water isn’t just water but imbued with sanctity, the power to heal.
For the non-believers who have no use for miracles, the weapons of the two priests, the Bible, the cross, and holy water(and few other items), nevertheless serve as powerful metaphors of whatever is necessary in order to combat the vile and wicked forces of the world. Even for non-believers, the Bible can represent the repository of man’s literary wisdom, the principal canon of man’s place and purpose in the world. As such, even non-Jews and non-Christians can respect the Bible, just as open-minded Jews and Christians can appreciate the sacred texts of other peoples and cultures as attempts in their own right to understand the deeper meanings of life.
And just as the body needs cleansing, so does the soul, as both routinely clog up with detritus of life. Holy water is a powerful representation of man’s dream of becoming closer to God(or the gods) than to the beasts.
The difference between Christians/Muslims and Jews is that the former want ALL peoples to be Nearer to God whereas Jews want themselves to be Dearer to God. If Christians and Muslims are delighted when converts become equally nearer to Jehovah or Allah, Jews are filled with rage and resentment when others deign to be as near to God as(or nearer to God than) the Jews, whose concept of the Covenant insists on Chosen-ness and a special contract between Jews and God. So, if the ultimate objective of Christians/Muslims is to build a bridge between God and Man and to fling open the gates to Heaven, the Jewish objective is to drive a wedge between God(theirs alone) and the rest of humanity(that is deemed unworthy and undeserving of God’s attention).
In a way, Jews seem to be wreaking material vengeance on the goy world for the latter’s violation of the Jewish spiritual space. The goyim, via Christianity and Islam, opened the gates and let in tons of lowly goyim into the domain of God as conceived by the Jews, and in return, Jews violate the borders of the Middle East and the West(and rest of the goy world) and inundate them with bombs and migrants(and immigrants).
Furthermore, it appears Jews have a more nuanced or complicated understanding of God and Satan. If Christians and Muslims see God and Devil as polar opposites, whereby decent folks must always choose God against the Devil, Jews don’t necessarily see God and Satan in such a binary way. Sure, God is infinitely greater than Satan, but sometimes, one must rely on Satan to do the dirty work that God is unwilling to do. Consider the ‘good’ respectable doctor in Woody Allen’s CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS. He gets into some serious trouble, and the ONLY person who can fix the dilemma is his gangster brother. The doctor knows it’s wrong to commit murder, but… sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do, and it won’t do to call on the rabbi to do it for him. So, one must appeal to the gangster. Even as the doctor chooses the respectable ‘good’ world over the underworld, he comes to appreciate the latter as a kind of last resort in tough situations. So, in the Jewish imagination, Satan, though evil, has his useful place in the order, which explains why Jewish rabbis can also be pornographers. Besides, if indeed the goyim are lesser beings, is it really so evil to unleash some satanic misfortune on them? If the Jewish strategy is for themselves to be dearer to God while making the goyim further from God, then satanic means can come in handy to lead the goyim from virtue to vice. This way, Jews have God for themselves while Satan takes the souls of the goyim. It’s win-win for Jews and Satan.
This is why Christian Zionism is about the stupidest thing ever. The idea of Christians sucking up to Jews who are hellbent on driving a wedge between God and goyim is truly surreal. It’s like Billy Bob, who is besotted with Betty Sue, sucking up to Bad Bart who is hellbent on destroying the relationship between Billy and Betty.
In a way, the so-called Culture War is also a religious war as it’s a conflict of symbols as determinants of what is sacred and what is profane. It’s not just about ideas or values but a shared sense of what we behold as sacrosanct, precious, and/or essential to what we are.
In a way, the demonic forces of ‘wokeness’ understand this better than their enemies as they don’t so much try to push the vile-and-wicked as vile-and-wicked but as the New Normal in sanctity and salvation. They are far cleverer than the Devil in THE EXORCIST who manifests himself as something close to Jabba the Hutt(of STAR WARS universe), or a gross mess overflowing like an open sewage. He’s not trying to fool anyone that he’s the real god, the real divine. Rather, he relishes in his putridity and wallows in filth(and vomits out a good deal of it).
If indeed the current ‘Culture War’ was about the divine or decent versus the flagrantly demonic or detestable, the good guys would have the advantage. But, the demonic forces have wrapped themselves in ‘rainbow’(or rainbung) colors, been portrayed in the media as the New Wholesome(or Ozzie and Harry), and even infiltrated the spiritual institutions(which explains why so many Post-Christian churches are delirious in the worship of Anno Sodomini).
Or, take the canonization of George Floyd. When Melvin van Peebles made SWEET, SWEETBACK’S BADASS SONG, whatever one thinks of Peebles or the film, it was a proud declaration of being a ‘crazy nigger’. The jive-ass dude in the movie may have appeared as a hero to some viewers(mostly black and stupid white ‘liberals’), but he was not a saint. But George Floyd, a lifelong thug and criminal, has been consecrated by the Jewish-run media as something close to the second coming of christ as a mofo-messiah, truly a willful parodying of Christianity(but don’t expect idiot goyim to get the joke).
This is why the current Culture War, really a Religious War, is so dangerous. The demonic doesn’t show its true face as an affront to decency. At the very least, one couldn’t fault the Rolling Stones for dishonesty when Mick Jagger pleaded for sympathy for the devil. A crazy song with perhaps evil sentiments, but at least it was honest. Jagger’s devil was wily, clever, charming, and seductive, but he was the devil just the same without pretense. The same could be said of the detestable work, Piss Christ. Defended on grounds of the First Amendment(with which I agree), it was meant to be subversive and offensive, to taunt and challenge, which was also true of the ugly and demented photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe the homo-degenerate. But, despite or precisely because of their outright willingness to offend, they were less dangerous than the later developments in the Judeo-Homo plot to undermine Christo-Western Civilization.
After all, offensive art/culture/expression is meant to insult the sensibilities of most people and have a place in society only under the protection of the constitution. But, what if the demonic is packaged as the neo-angelic and promoted as something essential to one’s good standing in society?
Also, instead of just dealing with black and homo issues as matters of civil and/or individual rights, turn them into sacred cows, i.e. blacks and homos don’t merely deserve basic rights as individuals but are owed our adulation and reverence as the especially haloed members of society.
Of course, Jews first achieved this for themselves by turning the Shoah from a historical tragedy into a neo-religion that, over time, convinced the majority of whites that Six Million Saintly Jews sacrificed themselves to wash away the ‘antisemitic’ sins of whites/Christians, an inversion of the long-held Christian perspective that was wary of Jews as the Tribe stained with the blood of Deicide.
Why is the near-deification of Jews, homos, and blacks demonic? Because it assumes that mankind, or certain portions of it, deserves to be worshiped as gods, a case of supreme hubris. Now, some may argue that Christianity is also guilty of this as the Christ Myth would have us believe that a certain man, Jesus of Nazareth, was the Son of God and therefore is the Eternal God. There’s validity in the Jewish argument against Christianity as a quasi-pagan perversion of the original faith, and yet, in defense of Christianity, one could argue that Jesus led a unblemished life as a perfect Man and, of His own volition, sacrificed Himself for the souls of mankind. As such, His suffering and death were different from those of blacks, Jews, and others whose tragedies were the products of circumstance than any high-minded purpose, i.e. they were pitiable in body but mostly wicked in heart, like the rest of humanity. Jewish horror in the Holocaust was like the Japanese horror in Hiroshima. Ghastly but not a willing act of self-sacrifice.
That said, we mustn’t fall into the false dichotomy that, because one side is clearly demonic, the other side must be angelic. In truth, both sides of the current Culture War are pretty vile. The so-called Christian Right is mostly filled with bloodthirsty Christian-Zionists(or Sodomists as Zionism turned the Holy Land into Sodom and Gomorrah), numbnut fatheads, money-grubbing charlatans, or cynical manipulators of the GOP that serves the Military-Industrial-Complex and fatcat Zionists(like the late Sheldon Adelson). They’re so compromised, weak, stupid, and shallow that, given enough time, they usually come around to aping the fashions of the Current Year. Look how the Catholic Church is now close to being an open ‘gay disco’.
Perhaps, this is understandable as all humans are deeply flawed and history has never been a simple game of Good vs Evil, but clearly, even many of the forces that claim to be traditional, essential, and/or eternal in their values are hardly better than the obviously demonic forces they claim to be up against.
Besides, one cannot effectively combat or counter evil unless it is properly named, just like a doctor cannot save a patient unless the disease is honestly diagnosed. In THE EXORCIST, it’s the failure of the doctors to identify the real source of Regan’s weird symptoms that finally prompts her secular mother to seek the advice of priests as the disease appears to be spiritual in nature.
The failing of even the people who do sense something truly wicked, demented, and/or demonic about our age is that most of them dare not go all the way in naming the core source of the sickness, which is Jewish Supremacist madness aided and abetted by White Submissivism.
Jewish Evil could have been checked if whites, especially the elites, hadn’t indulged it so much. It’s not enough to name ‘wokeness’, homosexual excesses, and the fantasies of Negrolatry. It’s not enough to point out how terms like ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’, and ‘equity’ have been distorted and weaponized to bring down entire civilizations of the West. One must name the source of this madness and try to understand/explain why it is what it is and does what it does. Also, it’s not enough to name the Beast but blame the very people who keep on feeding its megalomania that thrives on a sick brew of arrogance, contempt, self-pity, paranoia, hatred, and projection of one’s own darkness onto others.
Evil has manifested itself in various guises across different times and places, but there has been a common thread running through them all. Father Merrin’s terse response to Father Karras’ analysis of the Devil’s various personalities is, “There is only one.” Likewise, no matter the religion or culture or ideology or time or place, there is a core dynamic to the nature of evil.
In our time, the various faces of evil are usually the masks of the True Face of Evil, that of Jewish Supremacism. Rip off the ‘masks’ known as Biden, Hillary, Lindsey Graham, BLM, Globo-Homo, ‘wars to spread democracy’, and etc., and the True Face is revealed, best represented by the visage of Victoria Nuland who looks as demented as her rotten soul. Nuland is your typical Jewish elite member, but the Philo-Semites keep dreaming of the Ideal Jewish Ruling Class that is nowhere in sight. It’s like whites dreaming of the Magic Negro while ignoring the reality of the Ghastly Negro.
The most obvious divide between the Good and the Bad(evil or not) is that some people are committed to the good while others are openly committed to the bad. Gangsters, for example, have no pretensions of sainthood. Some individuals fully embrace the demonic and love to rape and murder(and even admit as much).
But, it can be complicated because evil can and often does coexist with talent and other admirable qualities. Movie audiences were fascinated with Hannibal Lecter who, though obviously evil and sick, is a genius and a scholar of the mind, someone with the kind of insight that can help the good track down the bad, even if his intentions are devious than noble. (Yet, in his sympathy for and even sentimentality about Clarice, there is something of the human in him.)
An understandable kind of evil is what might be called ‘Evil Realism’, a kind of Machiavellian-ism, powerfully dramatized in THE GODFATHER by the figure of Michael Corleone(and his father before him). Both men started out as decent sorts but were pulled into a life of crime by the world around them. In THE GODFATHER PART 2, we see how Vito Corleone, a honest immigrant-worker, comes to the realization that either you push or get pushed around. So, the power will always be ‘bad’, and so, the naturally good(or better) must utilize ‘necessary evil’. Michael, who tried to be a good American(and had even volunteered for military service), was drawn into the family business by an assassination attempt on his father. For a son, it was the right thing to do, and even though he gunned down a NY police captain, the man had it coming as it was all part of ‘business’.
Evil Realism is, at the very least, honest in its evil. Its practitioners see the world as a dirty and dangerous place, as both Senator Geary and Michael Corleone understand they’re all part of the same ‘masquerade’ and ‘hypocrisy’.
But what about the kind of evil that animates those who believe themselves to be on the side of the good? What about the Christians who believed themselves to be on the side of angels but were blind to their own cruelty, sadism, and even murderousness? In the name of battling the demonic, they could be plenty fiendish themselves. And, what about the communists who, believing themselves to be on the right side of History, went about creating totalitarian nightmares, those in which the high-minded idealists rationalized their violence and brutality as eggs that need to be broken to make an omelet.
Christianity and Communism were committed to the idea of the Good and Justice, but the Good Wars they waged could be hardly distinguishable from the crimes of the ‘bad guys’. It suggests it isn’t enough to be committed to the Good but to be of sound mind and character, which requires some degree of self-reflection and self-restraint as even the good can be undone by pride or ulterior motives(repressed by one’s ego).
As people are not God or gods, even those sincerely committed to the good often falter or draw false conclusions, and either pride or purism blinds people to their own failings, leading them to hide their wrongdoings or, worse, destroy those who know of their transgressions(as Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong did so often). Thus, even the Good(in idea or cause) goes wrong if bad in character and self-awareness. It’s no wonder there were so many battles within the camp of any self-designated goodness, e.g. Christians vs Christians, Communists vs Communists, often locked in battles as bloody or bloodier than against those of another faith or ideology.
Indeed, as often as not, movements went off the rails due to the problems of personality. It’s like what Pike Bishop(William Holden) says in THE WILD BUNCH, i.e. pride prevents people from admitting their errors and learning from them, a flaw that bedevils Bishop himself. For sure, so many white cucks have been so shamefully wrong about the possibility of the Jewish-White Alliance that their pride prevents them from admitting they helped create a Frankenstein Monster by appeasing and indulging the worst aspects of Jewish Megalomania; instead, they just double-down on a strategy of sucking up to the Jews some more in the hope that, finally at last, Jews will appreciate the ever-loyal white flunkies and toss some doggy biscuits their way.
Arguably, pride blinded William Blatty and William Friedkin as well. Shamelessly invested in their self-anointed roles as spiritual seekers, they were loath to admit the extent to which their impressive but ultimately coarse concoction was exploitative than exploratory.
It’s also worth noting that it isn’t enough to call out the evils of the other side if in denial of the evils of one’s own side. Take the Nation of Islam, for example. Louis Farrakhan has been largely correct in many of his fulminations against Jewish Power, especially in its exploitative relationship with blacks, but even if all Jews vanished into the air, black problems would continue as they are because blacks evolved to be mostly unfit for complex civilizations created by non-blacks. It’s made even worse by the BAMMAMA(blacks are more muscular and more aggressive) factor that fuels blacks with bullying arrogance, as well as resentment against the higher-achieving nonblacks. In the crude mentality of blacks, it seems unjust that the races they can beat up make more money and have nicer houses. Their bling-bling mentality only understands gangsta justice where da badass mofos be deserving to have it all and shit.
Black nature is especially wild and violent(by the standards of the other races), but that in and of itself doesn’t make the black problem evil, any more than the innate natures make lions, chimpanzees, baboons, hippopotamuses, tigers, bears, and wolves make them evil. Black DNA carries the epigenetic trauma of 100,000 years of struggling to survive alongside lions, hyenas, cobras, crocodiles, hippos, rhinos, elephants, gorillas, chimps, baboons, wild dogs, warthogs, killer bees, killer ants, and the honey badger. The ‘progressive’ types say that black genes were traumatized by 200 yrs of slavery and then 200 yrs of being called ‘coon’, but relatively speaking, black life under white rule was relatively a vacation compared to the horrors of the jungles and savannas. Blacks, scarred by evolution in a tough environment into a beast-race, should have been left in their own worlds and to their own devices.
Race-ism understood this truth, though its radical variants excessively focused on race and/or devalued other races. Unfortunately, the evil side of radical racism has been projected onto all of race-ism, making a rational and honest discussion of race and racial differences extremely difficult when it’s more necessary than ever in an ever blackening West.
The good side of Anti-Racism was in denouncing radical racism but, in going after all of race-ism(in an attempt to throw out the baby with the bathwater), it turned into a greater evil as it came to either reject racial realities and pretend that blacks can be as stable and constructive as the non-black races OR, worse yet, elevate blacks as especially noble to satiate the emotional craving for new gods in the secular order.
Thus, Anti-Racism isn’t even consistent as it simultaneously argues that race is just a social construct and that blacks are the better race deserving of veneration from the other races(that possess less prowess in jumping and humping). To white ‘wiberals’, blacks are both the object of awe and pity. They wet their pants over blacks dunking basketballs and making touchdowns and going ‘muh dick’ but also entertain paternal feelings toward blacks who seem endemically hopeless in academics and professions without the intervention of ‘good whites’.
Black nature, in and of itself, is deeply problematic, but it’s the lies surrounding blackness that constitute an evil as they deny and destroy truth while placing the most dangerous race on the pedestal as the future hope of Western Civilization. This dire trend has progressed furthest in the Anglo and Anglo-made world of the UK and US.
Perhaps, as whites face ever steeper competition from nonwhites, especially Asians(Hindus in the UK and HIndus/Chinese in the US) at the top and especially browns(Muslims in the UK and ‘Hispanics’ in the US) at the middle and bottom, they cling to black-veneration as a kind of bulwark against the yellow-brown tide, i.e. “We whites may be slipping in power and privilege, but we care more about the Cool and Awesome Blacks more than your kinds do.”
Another problem with goodness is that intention or conception isn’t synonymous with reality. Christians and Muslims believe in the Good God who watches over, protects, and guides mankind. But what if there is no God? Or, what if the satanists or the dark-paganists are right that either Satan or the amoral gods are really in control of the universe? Can one’s sense of goodness be sustained as a Christian or Muslim if one’s convinced that there is no God or the evil-lords reign supreme?
As for the Marxists, they were so sure that their understanding of history and society was scientific and foolproof, ironically despite communism taking power in semi-industrial and pre-industrial countries contrary to Marx’s prophecy. They were so sure of their goodness, especially as it was purported to be based on science, but, history proved otherwise.
Can genuine goodness survive thought-systems that are unverifiable(in the case of the high religions) or proven false(in the case of secular ideologies)? One could still argue that they meant well and their high-mindedness still has inspirational value, much like modern aeronautics appreciating Leonardo Da Vinci’s models for flying machines, faulty as they were, i.e. he had the right idea if the wrong means.
There is some truth to this. While there is no God and no Devil, surely those who worship the Good God tend to be more sound of mind and body than those who worship the Devil. Even if God doesn’t exist, He represents the truth, the good, the noble, whereas the Devil, even if nonexistent, represents the vile, hideous, wicked. It’s like fiction where the characters aren’t real but nevertheless represent a moral layout of good vs bad, and it’s more edifying to side with the hero against the villain, though, to be sure, our inversionary world tends to turn villains into heroes and vice versa. Even if non-existent, God as a concept represents the highest and deepest truth unknowable to man but, in everlasting love and mercy, looks over him.
In contrast, what do the ‘woke’ worship as their cult-idols? Now, even real saints shouldn’t be the objects of worship as they too are human after all, but the true perversion of ‘wokeness’ is in elevating certain freaks, perverts, and dregs of society to quasi-divine status. So, Matthew Shepherd the homo-junkie killed by other homo-junkies was made out to be some christ figure murdered by ‘homophobes’. And recently, there’s the sickening apotheosis of George Floyd, venerated in ‘woke’ churches above god and jesus. It’s one thing to let unto Caesar what is his but quite another to let unto freaks and perverts what certainly shouldn’t be theirs, but that’s where we are in a world where most people’s ‘spiritual’ encounter comes by way of the Jewish-Supremacist-controlled media.
Likewise, even though Marxism was the god that died, there was something there in its attempt to understand the underlying forces of history and to arrive at material conditions for social justice that still resonates to this day. True, communists often acted like gangsters(and even worse), but they did believe in creating a better world for all mankind. To this day, the Latin American Marxists of yesteryear come across more favorably than the landed oligarchs whose only interest was their own wealth and privilege.
Of course, it’s a false dichotomy to assume that those were the only choices(as there were sounder options than either), but whereas one side tried to improve society as a whole, the other was utterly petty in its self-absorption, remaining in power only with the backing of the US then locked in a Cold War and willing to back any regime, however loathsome, to ‘contain communism’.
Still, it’s often been the case that those seeking Heaven-on-Earth tend to be filled with moral hubris, which then justifies whatever they do in the name of ‘justice’. In the end, the problem with Marxism wasn’t its idealism and concern for justice for the working man but the utopian delusion that tended to push regime policies beyond the limitations of reality, the worst case scenario being something like the Great Leap Forward.
But then, we also need to be wary of idolatry, which could be just as dangerous. Whereas ideology comes with a measure of logic, idolatry is blind in its cult-worship of certain individuals or iconographic obsession with certain groups(deemed sacred and infallible). In China, Maoism had both ideological and idolatrous components, i.e. sometimes, it was justified as a Chinese interpretation of Marxism, and at other times, all that mattered was “Mao felt like it”.
The Jim-Jones Cult became dangerous because it turned into an adulation of a single figure, who cast such a power over his minions that the majority of them willingly went to their deaths by drinking the ‘Kool Aid’ as their kind of holy water. But, before we ridicule and dismiss the abject stupidity of religious extremism(of Jones and his ilk), are things really all that different in the current Western Order? Wokeness has as its ideological underpinning the infantile sloganeering about ‘diversity, equity, inclusion’ and endless tirades against ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘antisemitism’, ‘white supremacism’, and the like, but it’s really driven by an idolatry of certain groups that happen to be the Big Three that pose the greatest dangers to Western or Modern Civilization: Jews, homos, and blacks.
While Jews, homos, and blacks need not be on the side of evil, they invariably are when they embrace narcissism, megalomania, paranoia, and contempt. Jews now feel they are the rightful master race and that ANY criticism of Jewish Power or Israeli policy is akin to ‘antisemitism’, the line endorsed by cuckservatives who are ever so eager to curry favors with Jews in light of the current rift between ‘Liberal Zionists’ and those calling for justice for Palestinians. Jews as merely Jews are a special people of talent, but Jews as Jewish Supremacists pose a great threat to the world as they use their might and influence to remake the world in the narrow-minded pursuit of “Is it great for Jewish Power?”
Likewise, while blacks, given their genetics, are a most problematic race when it comes to crime and violence, they become a force of evil in a society that pretends that blacks are a uniquely saintly victim-race whose lives matter so dearly because ‘racists’ are running around hunting down innocent blacks to murder. Such idiocy, running counter to all real world evidence, indulged the already volatile nature of blacks, and the ruling elites and the educated classes fanned the flames of the Big Lie.
But it gets even worse as the lionization of blacks means there can never be enough of these saintly noble folks, i.e. the West must never say NO to endless waves of Black African migration to Europe, Australia, and America. How could anyone say No to the Magic Negro and Black Girl Magic?
GUESS WHO’S FUNDING THE AFRICAN MIGRATION TO EUROPE, YOU ONLY NEED ONE GUESS.
At the very least, the nutjobs of the Jim Jones cult constituted a tiny self-enclosed community, whereas the current Western perversion of ideology and elevation of idolatry could very well bring about the downfall of Western Civilization.
Currently in Ireland, many of the elected leaders are denouncing the patriots while calling for even more mass-migration to turn Ireland into Direland.
Sadly, many Irish voted for such politicians because they drank the globalist Kool-Aid of Bono-ism where the Irish, in their hubristic role as global saviors, are supposed to welcome all the world into their tiny island.
False ideology and blind idolatry make for a surefire formula of evil. Needless to say, homos(and trannies) have their special place in this evil. Homosexuality, a sexual deviance, need not threaten civilization and, if anything, certain homo proclivities and inclinations could even contribute to certain key fields of creativity and ideas. As such, homosexuality in and of itself is problematic but not necessarily a force for evil. But when homos(and trannies and now even pedophiles) are anointed as the new priesthood and class of commissars, the result can only be evil as the homos, indulged in vanity and bitchy narcissism, will go about enforcing a globohomotarian socio-political order in which one’s only hope of entering the kingdom of power & privilege is to bend over and take it up the arse from the ‘gay pride’ cabal.
What this teaches us is that nothing is inherently evil but everything is potentially evil. Take drugs that can be used to cure the sick or sold to addicts. Granted, some things are more prone to evil than others. Sure, someone can overload on broccoli and get sick, but (1) few people want to pig out on broccoli (2) it hardly has any deleterious effect even in large doses. In contrast, the coca leaf or opium, while mildly medicinal if used properly, can be made into substances that turn people into self-destructive addicts.
Likewise, most individuals tend not to be extreme in personality, habits, or attitude; they are naturally moderate. But certain individuals tend to be naturally vain, egotistical, nasty, hostile, and contemptuous, and if these tendencies are indulged, they can do much harm.
Certain groups have a greater number of individuals with particularly problematic traits, and in the Current West, who can deny that Jews, homos, and blacks are most emblematic of this dilemma, i.e. their personalities contain higher levels of plutonium?
As counterbalance, some might argue that the solution lies with the groups with higher number of moderate-minded individuals, but this poses a challenge in and of itself as moderate people tend to lack the passion, zeal, and fighting spirit to enter the ring of power and influence. When push comes to shove, they’d rather move over than create a scene by standing their ground and/or pushing back. American ‘conservative’ types tend to be more moderate and ‘nicer’, but that’s precisely why they’re so gutless, milquetoast, generic, and bland, indeed incapable of fighting back fire with fire.
Paradoxically, the moderate must adopt the way of the ‘extreme’, at least in times of crises, to fend off the forces of the naturally or chronically extreme. To some extent, you must become your enemy to defeat it, like with the vigilante cop in DIRTY HARRY. Just don’t make a permanent habit of it and make sure to return to moderation when the storm has subsided.
In THE EXORCIST, the only way to fight the Devil is to be just as ‘extreme’ but in the name of God. It always comes with a risk, the very theme of CRUISING(directed by William Friedkin) where a cop goes undercover in a demented homo-subculture and fears turning into the very thing he’s assigned to root out.
In our insane inversionary world created mostly by Jewish and homosexual forces, the respectable ‘bourgeois’ middle class life has been pathologized while various problematic subcultures have been elevated to the New Normal. As a result, we are supposed to believe that a homosexual leather-bar subculture is no more likely to inflame or encourage certain anti-social attitudes and behaviors than a respectable middle class community is. Such logic would have us believe that certain subcultures, such as that of trannies, should be embraced by the normal community through stuff like Drag Queen Story Hour and Pornographic Homosexual Instructions for elementary schoolers. We are supposed to believe that the tranny community, despite being full of freaks, isn’t more likely to harbor pedophiles, or worse yet, we’re to be nudge-nudged into tolerating pedophilia as just another kind of ‘love’.
No comments:
Post a Comment