SNUFF IT #4 The Journal of the Church of Euthanasia EDITORIAL Let me start by asking you a question. If you don't know, just guess, how long--months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds--how long do you think it takes for the human population to increase by one million? Net increase. Okay, I'll give it to you, it's four days. Four days, a quarter million per day, if you do the math, that comes out to *95 million people per year*, and just for a reference, 95 million is the population of Mexico, so next time you look at a map of the world, look at Mexico, and imagine the human population increasing by Mexico, every year. What do we do with all those people? They all need to eat, they all need houses, clothes, TVs, cars, and every other damn thing, who are *we* to say they shouldn't have them, and what's the result? The global environmental crisis. Massive species extinction. *Ecocide*. In the United States alone we lose an acre of trees every eight seconds. Worldwide, we're now losing an entire *species* every 40 minutes, that's up from every sixty minutes in the 1970's, and in the tropical rainforest we're losing a species every *fifteen minutes*. By some estimates we've already wiped out one third of the species on earth. Those species are *gone*, they're not coming back, this isn't some cute nature show on television, this is *real*. In terms of sheer power, this is our great accomplishment: severely damaging the chemical and organic structure of an entire planet, including the oceans and the atmosphere. We've got to do something, very quickly, and the most important thing we can do is *reduce our numbers*. It's something each one of us can do, it doesn't require special training, and that's why I, myself, and every one of the Church of Euthanasia's members have taken a *lifetime vow to not procreate*. Now people say to me, population reduction is one thing, but how can you support suicide and euthanasia, isn't that going too far, and I say this: right now, one third, that's a rough figure, it's probably higher, one third of the people on this earth are going to bed hungry every night. Does this surprise you? Maybe you're lucky: maybe you live in a country that still has some topsoil, or maybe your country steals food from everyone else. Don't get too smug, though, because simple arithmetic says the population will reach *8 billion* by 2010. Now that's well within my, and many of your lifetimes, and I'm telling you that if we, as *individuals*, allow that to happen, we are going to see suffering on a scale we can't even imagine yet, even right here, in the United States, and some of you are going to wish you had killed yourselves, because this planet is going to be a very grim and frightening place. It already is for most people. So that's why I say "save the planet, kill yourself." Because it really has come to this, and if you've had enough, and you want to get out of the game, and you honestly believe that's the best thing you can do for yourself and for the planet, I, Rev. Chris Korda, am not going to stand in your way. I'll make you a Euthanasian saint. And if no one listens to me, and the population keeps on growing, until there's no trees, and no hope, I'll join you. I think about it every day, and I feel *shame*. I'm ashamed of the way humans have behaved, especially *American* humans. When I look at the ugliness Americans have created in just two hundred years, and when I read about the "savages" we've exterminated to make room for our so-called civilization, *I feel suicidal rage*, and that's okay, because that's what the Church of Euthanasia is all about. Now suppose, for the sake of argument, we divide people into two groups: those who think there are too many of us, and those who think there aren't enough. If you think there are too many of us, why not take some personal responsibility for it? Maybe we're the church for you. But if you think there's not enough of us, consider your allies. The people who oppose euthanasia, and say it's morally wrong, are very often the same people who oppose abortion; they're the same people who oppose contraception and family planning; they've opposed sex for pleasure for a thousand years, and you know who these people are, they are the *Catholic church and the fundamentalist christians*. Their religious teachings have been a disaster for the planet, and we cannot allow them to dominate us any longer. They're the *real* sinners, and they can't help themselves, so we have to help them: we have to *lead by example*. How do we lead by example? By practicing sex for pleasure, it's a revolutionary act, remember Joycelyn Elders, she wanted to teach masturbation and look what happened to her...by showing the maximum compassion for *all* beings, we can start by not eating their flesh, why are we feeding most of our grain to cattle when people are starving...by supporting abortion, we're *not* pro-choice, we're pro-*abortion*, why isn't it *free*, it's every woman's sacred right...by supporting Dr. Jack Kevorkian and the right to die, and above all by *choosing to not procreate*, until their churches are empty and ours is full, until the population is reduced to a sustainable level, and balance is restored between ourselves and every other species on this beautiful, living planet. Thank you. Banana Cup Cake Banana Cake Broken tea cups --Lori Kramer I think, Dr. Railly, you've given the alarmists a bad name...surely there's very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race. Proliferation of atomic devices...uncontrolled breeding habits...pollution of land, sea *and* air, the rape of the environment...in this context isn't it obvious that Chicken Little represents the sane vision, and that *homo sapiens*' motto--"let's go shopping"--is the cry of the true lunatic? --Dr. Peters, "12 Monkeys" Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive. --Pardot Kynes, First Planetologist of Arrakis LETTERS Chris: About a month ago, three British alleged neo-Nazi kids who had been vacationing in America for six weeks blew their brains out--two of them simultaneously at an Arizona gun range, the other one the next day on a little-traveled Northern California road. The woman who shot herself alone--Jane Greenhow, 22--had called our voice mail a few days before killing herself, asking to verify our PO box address. I ignored the first call, but responded the next day after she left a similar message with the admonition "don't bother calling after tomorrow." She sounded intensely depressed, but all she wanted to know was whether our PO box was still valid. I told her that it was. On March 4--a full two weeks after she killed herself--I finally received her letter, which stated that she felt unable to articulate her frustration with life. She also sent me three $700 money orders--her life's savings. Knowing that with my recent luck I'd be struck by lightning if I spent a penny of it, I sent the money back to her parents. Jane had a degree in astrophysics and read ANSWER Me! Too bad she fit into the 1/10th of 1 percent demographic which actually had value in my book. Whereas the great bulk of human suffering doesn't do a thing for me, her departure actually saddened me greatly. You can imagine how the press--especially the vampiric British press--is treating these suicides. DID A PORTLAND PUBLICATION 'GOAD' THREE BRITS INTO KILLING THEMSELVES? et al. Typically, the ones who would portray me as some unfeeling creep have displayed far less remorse over Jane's death than I have. I figure the Nazi affiliation (Jane had left a note signed "Mrs. Hitler" next to her body) renders these goofy kids nonhuman in some eyes. Anyway, I wanted to gently caution you to be careful regarding your publishing endeavors. You and I know that depression and suicidal impulses betoken a mental condition which can't be neatly traced to (or blamed on) one source. However, in a social climate which tends to abdicate any notion of personal responsibility, very few others seem to know this. Since I see value in what you're doing, I'd hate to see you become embroiled in the sort of controversy/lawsuits which have dogged us for the past couple years. Believe me, it's nowhere near as fun as it might seem. And I'm not advising that you soften your approach--but it might make sense to lay the disclaimers on a little thicker. --Jim Goad, goad@teleport.com I make my money from the Defense Department. Usually I feel embarrassed to tell people because they associate Warfare with the inhumanity of killing people, but I can tell you with pride. Since reading your publication I have a whole new perspective on my career. The only problem is the U.S. usually kills third world people who don't consume as much of the world's resources as first world people. Also the Defense Dept. is the top worst polluter. I hope to offset that by sending you a contribution each month so you can continue your good work. P.S. I think Rev. Korda may be the 1st 21st century saint. Please document any miracles (preferably with video) so the canonization will go smoothly. P.P.S. Typed on a Defense Dept. typewriter. Rev. Chris: I received the latest SNUFF iT, and i must state that i was again impressed. I have always known that breeding was not at all for me, and although i have only recently pursued such a philosophy (after discovering the definition of what had before only been within me a vague but relatively eternally-practiced concept), it is one to which i shall forever adhere. That there are other folk out there who not only believe related philosophies and ethics but advocate them and still enjoy life, is nice to know. Cheers, Rev. Randall Tin-ear I work as a secretary during the day with the Passaic Board of Education at the High School in the MediaCenter and see the awful results of human overbreeding every day. Our school enrollment has increased about 750 kids each year in the past three years. The Board is having to lease new buildings every year and build additions on existing schools to compensate for the overcrowding. I live in a building where the apartments are very small and yet my fellow tenants insist on overbreeding and providing shelter to their young ones in a space that only one would be comfortable in. Needless to say the problem of overbreeding is all around me daily but how do you speak up about it? Procreation is the most sacred of rights and if you talk about it to people (even intelligently) they think you are a Nazi or something worse. Why do only a few of us see what is wrong? Why are so many fools still bringing children into the world? I have a full life and never had any children--what is this compulsion to breed? --Moo Oom, David R. Wyder/Daily Cow You can count on me to help you in any way I can. If abortion were mandatory it would prevent people like me from ever being born. I once considered having kids but when I realized they might all turn out to look like me (I look like Herve Vilachez), I immediately had my doctor castrate me. I'd kill myself but I'm too chicken shit. I just bought a new Harley and I'm hoping I'll have an unfortunate accident while riding it. As it is, my feet barely touch the ground when I sit on it and I can barely reach the handle bars. Let's hope I cross paths with a pyschotic truck driver! Keep up the good work! --Marc (Herve) Bifano CHURCH NEWS Lydia Eccles Interviews Rev. Chris Korda LE: Last year about this time you were soliciting funds for a suicide assistance hotline. Whatever happened to that? CK: That was Pastor Scott's idea, and it got off to a great start. The plan was to get a 900 number, put up a billboard for it, maybe take out a few advertisements. People would call up and pay to hear suicide assistance messages from a voice mail system. We were going to have a bunch of prerecorded messages--celebrity suicides, techniques from A to Z, damned good reasons to do it, style, etiquette--you could listen to all these messages and get useful tips on how to kill yourself, without making a big mess and inconveniencing a lot of people--and meanwhile you'd be paying by the minute and the Church would be making money. I made a bet with Pastor Scott that he would never get Ackerley [our local billboard company] to put up the billboard, and that if he did I'd pay for the hotline. He won the bet; they would say things like, "Are you sure you want it to say 'suicide assistance hotline'? It almost sounds like you're going to help people kill themselves." He's such a smooth operator, he was able to totally flummox them. LE: They thought it was a suicide prevention hotline. CK: Absolutely. And we figured, what the hell? If Ackerley buys it, then maybe Nynex will buy it too. But it didn't work out that way. Nynex turned out to be quite a bit sharper than Ackerley. They took one look at our web site and the game was over. LE: But you had no problem getting the billboard up. CK: And what a great billboard it was: "Suicide Assistance Hotline--helping you every step of the way. Thousands helped, how about you?" It was just a shame that the number didn't work. LE: Did you contact lawyers about it? CK: Yeah, but we couldn't find one who'd take the case *pro bono*, and the ACLU didn't return our calls. LE: Did you do any research on the legality of providing concrete assistance to people who want to kill themselves? CK: Let them sue, we need the publicity. Besides, you can walk into any bookstore and buy a book like *Final Exit* that gives specific suicide instructions--drug dosages, everything. With Dr. Kevorkian leaving bodies in cars and getting away with it, I figured the courts probably wouldn't bother with us. LE: How about the other billboard activities this year? CK: Well, there was a billboard modification in Cambridge... LE: "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea-- CK: "never regains its original dimensions." That's right. It was modified to say "Man's anus, once stretched by"-- LE & CK: "a big penis" CK: "never regains its original dimensions." Now whoever did this--these were obviously very disturbed individuals with sociopathic tendencies, presenting a serious danger to society. LE: Although they were advocating sodomy so technically the Church would have to stand aside and applaud. CK: But we can't have people running around modifying billboards and so forth; I mean, that's against the law. LE: I heard that the billboard got a lot of attention, and that the Boston Herald was interested and wanted to do a story but the editors nixed it. CK: Isn't that funny, that's what I heard too. I also heard that while the culprits were putting it up, people were stopping their cars in the middle of the street and honking their horns and hooting and hollering and getting out of their cars and taking pictures. It's kind of interesting that the Boston Herald went to all the trouble to send a crew down there to take pictures and interview everybody about it and then nixed the story at the last minute, but I guess you can't expect too much from the Boston Herald. LE: I heard it was up on the bulletin board at the paper, and everybody really liked it. But I guess the editorial decision-makers--their minds remained the original size. CK: [laughs] LE: How about the Institute for Global Dada event--this was during the heyday of Pat Buchanan, during the primaries, when Buchanan was making anti-Semitic remarks-- CK: He'd just won New Hampshire, hadn't he? LE: Yes, and he'd just come to speak in Massachusetts and was using all kinds of military rhetoric--you know, really violent-sounding metaphors. CK: It was primary day in Massachusetts, around 7:30 in the morning, in front of the Boston Public Library--the largest polling place in Boston, where all the Beacon Hill brahmins in their pin-striped suits go to vote. You were already there with Doug and Jamie, holding "Unabomber for President" signs. Meanwhile, we're tooling down the sidewalk with what looks like a giant black tampon. We unroll it, and hoist it up, and suddenly it's a 25-foot wide, 13-foot tall black banner, with giant red letters that say "GOP" and the "O" is a solid red circle with a black swastika cut out of it. LE: Like something you would see carried down a very wide thoroughfare during a Nazi demonstration. CK: Yeah, it took 4 people to hold it. Within 60 seconds, we were live on New England Cable, and a few minutes later the WRKO van was going by and they literally slammed on the brakes and pulled over. They put me on the air and asked me what I was doing, and I told them I was a Buchanan supporter. I said I was there to support my candidate like everyone else, and that Buchanan was the face of fascism in America. I stuck to my story, and finally Jim Rappaport [chairman of the state Republican committee] got on the air and called me disgusting. It was pure situationism, because on any other day the cops would have just said, "you're outta here" and that would have been it. But this was one day when the cops couldn't tell anybody to not hold a sign because everybody was holding signs, everywhere! All they could do was make sure that we were a certain distance from the polling booth--it was actually quite funny, because the cop came out and said "Look, you all have to move"--what was it?--"a hundred feet from the polls." Right? So one of the republican guys says to the cop, "You just mean them, right, not us?" And the cop starts yelling "Everybody! Everybody a hundred feet from the polls!" So everybody had to back up. It was an amazing thing to see. It got pretty rough towards the end, though--the library staff finally took matters into their own hands. The manager and the manager's assistant came out with their goon and started pushing and shoving, trying to make us take the banner down, saying we were on private property when we weren't, and then the goon threw hot coffee in Toto's face and punched him in the mouth. He was only taking pictures and got his lip busted--it was very unpleasant. I guess that's what happens when you call a spade a spade. LE: You spent a week at the Democratic National Convention campaigning for Unapack [the Unabomber for President Campaign] and then afterwards we all stopped off in Gary, Indiana and took photographs there. What was the reason for stopping in Gary and what is the significance of Gary to the Church? CK: I viewed it from the beginning as making a pilgrimage to Gary. I grew up in New York, but I'd always heard that Gary beat anything I'd ever seen, so I felt it was my duty to go out there and see what had been done to the Earth. We were driving down I-90 when suddenly you could actually see it from the highway; I remember the moment very clearly--we were all stunned. I don't think any of us were prepared for just how complete and utter the devastation was--it went on for miles and miles and you could see the clouds of smoke in the air. It really was a scene from hell. At that time, I knew that I would have to go to where the refineries were, to get up close and see it. I hooked up with $t. @ndrew (OGYR Network) and Pope Phred, and they drove us out there. I was staying with Deacon Kelly, and he kind of knew his way around, so he came along too. We were driving around all day, looking at the refineries. We stayed in the car mostly, but I got out and got down on my knees and prayed in front of one. I was so moved that you and I decided it would be worth it to go out there and do it again, do it properly. LE: We tried to get close to one of them and ended up getting followed by security. CK: It was a disaster! We were being followed the whole time by these Cherokee Jeep things with flashing lights on them. We were in the belly of the beast and they didn't like us one bit. They pulled us over and asked us to leave, and instead we pulled over somewhere else and got out and started taking pictures inside the perimeter, and then they nailed us. They wanted our film, and I think they were pretty much ready to haul us off until you told them we were doing a fashion shoot. LE: One of the things that amazed me was in the midst of all that wasteland and smoke to see tract housing popping up in between the factories every once in a while. CK: It was right out of Eraserhead; people living in the middle of an industrial wasteland. People are born and raised and grow old and die without ever leaving Gary, Indiana. I've never seen anything worse. LE: You also made a pilgrimage to the Rainbow this year--tell me about that. CK: The Church's annual meeting was held at the Rainbow Gathering, somewhere in the Ozark National Forest, in Missouri. It was my first Gathering, so it was quite an experience for me. I drove down with my friend Kevin--he's been to a bunch of them and told me a bit about it, but nothing could have prepared me for it really; it was unlike anything else I've been exposed to. The most obvious difference is it's a money-free zone; it's considered deadly impolite to offer people money at a Gathering. Another big difference is there's no homeless people; the general idea is that even if you have only the most minimal social skills, somewhere, somehow, somebody's going to feed you. There are people who show up with nothing, not even a cup or a spoon or a blanket. Nobody's going to serve them without a cup--they're going to have to find one or make one out of a Pepsi bottle or something. But once they do then somebody's going to feed them and they're going to be taken care of and not just left to die. That's a very different way of looking at things. Some people arrive months before and put tremendous energy and love into feeding people, other people show up with nothing--most people are somewhere in the middle, and hopefully it all balances out. LE: Did you do any Church activities while you were there, I mean aside from having your meeting? CK: Well, I came prepared to cause major trouble. I lugged all these signs in with me, like, "The Rainbow Family is Big Enough", "Bear Asses Not Children," "A Hippie with Kids is Looking for Work," "Peace, Love and Sterility"--I was prepared to really tear it up with those Rainbow people. LE: This was because you thought there'd be a lot of breeders. CK: And there were a lot of breeders. But when it came down to it, I just couldn't do it. I would have been totally by myself. I couldn't find a single other person to carry one of those signs. LE: Also I got the impression that you wanted to just enjoy the experience of being there. CK: Yeah, I didn't want to have to be the Reverend the whole time. I wanted to enjoy being close to the Earth, with like-minded people, and that's what I did and it was the most powerful spiritual experience I've ever had. The Fourth of July is the big day at the Gathering: the whole morning it's silent throughout the area, everyone forms a huge circle around the sacred fire, thousands of people meditating and praying their asses off, and then at noon the children arrive in a big parade, the energy is released, and everyone goes cuckoo. It was serious Earth magic, the largest scale magic I've ever participated in. LE: What is the purpose of the Rainbow? CK: Well, that's hard to say, because by long-standing tradition, no one speaks for the Rainbow family. The Rainbow family is everyone who's there. I think there's a strong Indian influence--for example decisions are made by consensus in open councils, as opposed to the democratic method, which is tyranny of the majority over the minority. There's lots of music, and hanging out, and eating, and taking care of each other, and making love, and purifying yourself. LE: You were there for a week. As a city kid, how was it being out in the woods for that long? CK: It was awfully hot, but clothing was optional, and there was a nice creek to dip in. It was a three-mile hike in, and I did the hike several times, one time with a 50 lb. bag of rice; that was rough. We were hauling around giant buckets of water and digging shitters and carrying wood. I'm not used to that type of thing, so my back hurt a lot, and the chiggers were gross, but overall it was very exhilarating for me. I was incredibly lucky; I found Scott Lamorte right away and he hooked Kevin and me up with his friends at Bi The Way kitchen. They are wonderful people; they welcomed me into their family, and I'm very grateful. LE: Okay, now I want to get on to the abortion clinic activities. How did that get started? CK: I'm really not sure. LE: I just remember that Der Spiegel [the German equivalent of *Time Magazine*] was coming. CK: Aaah, you're so right. I'd been wooing them all year, or they'd been wooing me, really; it just had been a matter of getting it hooked up. They'd been saying that they were going to come to Boston for months and they finally were coming and they were coming the week after we got back from Chicago. Pastor Kim and I talked about it and realized that we were going to have to show them a good time. I mean, they made it pretty clear that they weren't coming all the way to Boston just to sit around and chat and drink coffee. They wanted to see us in action. LE: So the first one was at Repro in Brookline, and Operation Rescue was supposedly going to be there but-- CK: Yeah, there was only a handful of them there. LE: Let's name off some of the signs you had because I know they're not all in the photos. "Fuck Breeding," "Sperm-Free Cunts for the Earth"-- CK: "Fetuses are for Scraping," "Depressed? Commit Spermicide"-- [also "Make Love, Not Babies," "No Kid, No Labor," "Love the Earth, Tie Your Tubes," and "Feeling Maternal? Adopt!"] Vermin Supreme was there, and he was in rare form that day. He had his Satan mask on and his little jiggling eyeballs--he had his megaphone out and he was harassing people going by, saying something about "This is Satan here, and I want you all to-- LE: "Watch TV, eat red meat, and try to drive your car as much as possible-- CK: "Read a newspaper, and throw it away." LE: "And together we can make hell on Earth." CK: [laughs] LE: He also asked passers-by to raise their hands if they were using contraception, or if they'd been sterilized. And a woman across the street was praying with a rosary, and Vermin was yelling with a megaphone that we were going to sacrifice a gerbil-- CK: Yes, we were going to sacrifice a gerbil to the unborn. LE: And you were singing, "All we are saying"-- CK: "All we are saying is fetus pat‚." LE: The neighborhood around the clinic is very affluent and boring, and it was great watching people walk by these incredible signs and Vermin in his Satan mask and the dolls nailed on to sticks with bloody hands and mouths--and many of these people would just walk by and pretend there was nothing strange going on at all. CK: We got a good reaction from the clinic escorts, though, and that was a huge relief. If they'd asked us to leave, we would have had to leave, because they're guarding the doors and hopefully keeping the Christians from going in there and shooting everybody. But the escorts liked us. LE: Now was that the clinic where the shooting actually took place? CK: No, that was the next weekend. Der Spiegel had such a good time that they decided to come back. We'd heard rumors that there was something big happening at Preterm, so Becky infiltrated Operation Rescue and got the inside dope. We wanted to turn the voltage way up, so we decided to make a 15 foot tall, 6 foot wide "Eat a Queer Fetus for Jesus" banner--we figured that might get their attention. We had the carnivorous babies again, but we used much bigger sticks, just in case there was trouble, and we added life-size skulls on top, painted blood-red. Also Vermin brought some gigantic cartoon fetuses that he'd made out of day-glo paper, plus we had all the signs from last time. LE: Since I was videotaping, I was at all of these events before you guys showed up, which was fun because I got to see you make your entrance. Before you came the Christians went marching down the sidewalk in formation singing hymns through megaphones. They got to the building and planted themselves and they were starting to say their prayers when all of a sudden I saw the "Eat a Queer Fetus for Jesus" banner come marching down the street. And everyone stopped, they were all staring in total disbelief. CK: We had at least 20 of our own people there, and we were marching down the street in formation with all of our stuff. The cops saw us coming, and the first thing they said was, "If you turn on that megaphone, we're going to arrest all of you." We came and we stayed--we were there for hours, in the rain. There were two TV stations, the cops were videotaping, the clinic was videotaping, the Christians were videotaping. It was a pitched battle: they had their trench and we had ours, and they were singing their hymns and praying and we were singing "Every Sperm is Sacred" and "All we are saying is fetus pat‚"-- LE: That was also where Nevada's speech premiered, right? CK: "Abortion as a Sacred Right." [see page 9] Pastor Kim screamed it at them until he lost his voice. LE: The police kept you behind the barricades for a while, until Vermin noticed that some of the Christians were doing a walking picket in front of the clinic. So he said, "If they can walk, we can walk." People were sneaking out one by one, and you ended up with a walking picket that was half Christians and half Church of Euthanasia. One person would walk by with a scraped fetus and right behind them would be someone holding "Fetuses are for Scraping." CK: [laughs] LE: And it was really confusing. The best thing about these events is that it creates confusion as to who's on what side. CK: We were standing in front of one of the clinics where a shooting had taken place not even a year ago, and there were five people from NOW [National Organization for Women] facing hundreds of Christians--it seemed to me that the situation called for extreme tactics. The pro-life agenda is fundamentally coercive; they want to push you into a situation where you have to respond to them. They seize control of the issue, and try to pin the violence on you, but we know perfectly well that the violence is coming from them. So our object is to unseat the Christians, to expose the violence that's slumbering in them. We want the violence to be on the surface, because when it's out in the open, it's less dangerous. LE: I think NOW's big problem is that they permit themselves to play the role of audience, and of course the news isn't going to cover the audience at a theatrical event. CK: NOW is fucking up. Abortion is restricted in almost every state, and if you don't have money, forget it. Why are the Christians winning? They're winning because their tactics are better: they have good timing, they're imaginative, they use visuals well, and they definitely go for the throat. But they count on people taking them seriously, and that's their Achilles heel. It makes them extremely susceptible to ridicule; the one thing they can't stand is being made fun of. They try to intimidate everyone with shock tactics and disgusting props, but we can out-shock and out-disgust them any day. We're seizing the moral low ground right out from under them. LE: Let's go to the third abortion clinic demonstration, at Gynecare, and this is where you introduced the Pedophile Priests for Life. CK: We did some reconnaissance this time. I went down there myself a week early and fraternized with the Christians--it turned out they all belonged to a group called "Our Lady's Crusaders for Life." I talked to them quite a bit and managed to get a hold of one of their newsletters. LE: That's kind of a handy aspect of your dressing in women's clothes, that you can go undercover as a man. CK: Absolutely, it's very convenient. I think a lot of them still haven't put two and two together. LE: That's where we get our little line, "Don't be fooled by the dress." CK: So the newsletter was denouncing the Catholic church for allowing sex education in Catholic schools. They had an example of some "obscene" Catholic sex-ed material, and it was all about eggs and sperm and God's plan--no mention of orgasm or masturbation, not even the slightest hint that sex might be enjoyable. It went on and on about the miracle of life--it even said a fetus has the same rights as a person, but it was still too much for them. They wanted to burn the books. I remember talking to Nevada about it, and understanding that the real issue is sexual pleasure. These people are terrified of human sexuality, and especially of pleasure. LE: The basic point is they want to make it impossible for people to have sex without having children. It's not that they care about fetuses, it's that they want to stop sex. CK: They want to stop sex because it's so connected to the body. The body reminds them of death, and they can't deal with death, so they deny the body--in the old days they tortured it too, especially if it was female. They idolize innocence and virginity, and meanwhile the priests can't keep their hands off the altar boys. How could they be expected to? It's ridiculous. The sexual urges are still there, and the boys are a safe outlet. People can't deny their sexuality, it just comes back in another way. LE: ACT UP has brought this out a lot, they have these special condoms for priests--it's well known that many men join the priesthood because they're homosexual anyway. CK: I'd been reading Wilhelm Reich all year, and thinking about sexuality, and I came to the conclusion that he was absolutely right. He said that one of the greatest mistakes our society makes is the repression of childhood sexuality; that children should be not just free but encouraged to explore sexually; to explore their own bodies and to explore the bodies of other children their own age--that it's healthy and positive. Meanwhile I just happened to have these beautiful line drawings of naked boys, so I put two and two together, blew them up, and added in giant letters "SEX IS GOOD" and "Pedophile Priests for Life." I also made a new batch of signs, yellow ones with black letters that said "Drink Your Holy Water." This was a bit of a pun [and a reference to *Snuff It* #2] because if you make Pedophile Priests for Life into an acronym it spells PPFL, which sounds like "pee-pee fell." LE: How about Brigitte? CK: Pastor Kim and I were talking about how to symbolize the situation and we came up with the idea of a blow-up doll on a cross. So I went down to the zone [where the porn shops are] and found a lovely blond doll named Brigitte. I put her on a giant wooden cross, and gave her a blue-and-white striped hospital robe, ankle socks, rosary beads, a crown of thorns made of barbed wire--plus she had a carnivorous baby coming out of her vagina, with blood dripping down its chin. A real traffic stopper. LE: It definitely created massive confusion. I'm sure a lot of people, including the tour buses that were passing by, thought that those were Christian representations. CK: Yes! There was confusion and shock and disgust-- LE: Because you also had "Eat A Queer Fetus For Jesus" there, so there were three different images that related to Christian imagery. CK: It wasn't one group in one trench and one group in another. It was everybody all mingled together. So you couldn't tell anybody from anybody. And there were groups that we'd never even heard of that were showing up because of our publicity. We had the pro-masturbation, anti-intercourse group that was claiming they were the middle ground, that both sides were wrong. We had the Satanist Youth Corps doing their thing-- LE: You had the reelect Michael Dukakis guy... CK: Yeah, I don't know how he got in there. Then there was the Pedophile Priests for Life which were ostensibly a separate group from the Church of Euthanasia. Pastor Kim was all dressed up in his priestly outfit. So, it was absolute bedlam. I mean, if you were walking down the street-- LE: It was a circus. People weren't just walking by this time, they were gaping; they were sticking around to see what would happen. CK: Dan and his friends were banging on their tambourines and singing and dancing around--it was like a Fellini film. I'd never seen anything like it. LE: Moments after you guys arrived, the Christians were on their cell phones calling the cops and then calling the state cops--I heard the guy say to them, "We've been coming here for ten years! These people have no right to be here." And the first thing the cop wanted to do was separate the two groups, which, of course, was impossible--he had no idea how to separate them, because he didn't know who was on what side. And then he said, "Take me to the leader of this group" and people said, "there is no leader, just a lot of people who really believe in what they have to say." CK: That's right! So then he went over and talked to Pastor Kim, and I guess he didn't get anywhere, because he came back and asked me if I was the leader, and I said no, I wasn't the leader. He was one confused-looking cop. Of course, it had gotten ugly by that point because Vermin had finally squirted one of the Christians with his water penis. LE: He was saying, "Spread those Christian cheeks to receive the holy water!" CK: He squirted the guy who was holding the giant Madonna statue, the same guy who called the state police, what an asshole--he started screaming "Assault!" and the cops ran over and said, "Look, you can't do that anymore." I knew that if I gave Vermin the water penis that he was going to squirt a Christian with it. I warned him not to do it, but I knew he was going to do it anyway and that as soon as he did, all hell would break loose and he wouldn't get to do it twice. He didn't do it twice, because if he had they would have arrested him. LE: The Christians had a megaphone and were sitting there praying and singing into it throughout the entire thing. So of course Vermin was on a megaphone too. CK: And I was on my megaphone, and the pro-masturbation guys had one. There were four megaphones going at once! LE: One of my favorite parts was when they started saying that they were surrounded by demons, that Satan was among them. They were praying for help, and then they started saying "God will not be mocked." And Vermin meanwhile was yelling into the megaphone, "God will be mocked and that's what we're here to do!" CK: [laughs] LE: And the other thing was that Madonna had just had her child and Vermin had a great spiel going about it--"Madonna has just given birth, isn't that enough for you people?" "It's the second coming!" and all that kind of stuff, which horrified them as well. But one tactic you used, both at this clinic and the previous one, was talking about sex and using explicit sexual terms, yelling them loud in front of these people to disconcert them, like cock and pussy. CK: That's right, we were chanting "sex is good, pussy is good, cock is good, orgasm is good"-- LE: And then you went off into a rant about, "it's a well-kept secret, but there's such a thing as sexual pleasure." CK: I was shouting about genitalia, and all kinds of sex, and how orgasm was good and positive and nothing to be afraid of. And pretty soon there was not one, but two, three, four cop cars--a lot of cops, and a lot of us, and it was getting to be, you know, pretty exciting. And then finally the head cop came up to me and told me that Brigitte had to go. I was amazed that we got away with it as long as we did. I mean, we had electrical tape over her nipples, but her robe was wide open, and her--everything was quite visible, and we were out there for an hour before they did anything about it. Anyway, the cop says "We've received complaints, the doll is lewd and lascivious, it's gotta go." So I said I was just as offended by the enormous photo of a mangled fetus that the Christians were displaying right next to me, and why didn't that have to go too, and he gives me a stony look and says "The doll has to go, now." He wasn't budging, so I said, "What if we just close her robe?" and quickly tied it back up. I think the cameras were having a soothing effect on him, because he said "Make sure the robe *stays* closed," and walked back to his car [the police are your friends]. LE: They didn't seem to do anything about the nude boys on the Pedophile Priests for Life signs. CK: That's because we had those little pink crosses over their penises. I was so tempted to let them hang out, I agonized over it, but in retrospect I'm glad we drew the line--I mean, one of them had an erection, and I think if it hadn't been for the little pink crosses it would have been over in 5 minutes instead of an hour and a half. LE: It was kind of like religious lingerie. CK: [laughs] Yes it was! And every now and then the wind would blow and lift up the pink crosses. There was something kind of lascivious about that too. Between the young boys and the penis pistol and the blow up doll--the whole thing had a kind of peep show feeling to it that was very nice. It was all very sexually charged. LE: Vermin jumped up on a wall and delivered Nevada's speech again, which had the crowd transfixed. CK: It was even better the second time. It's great oratory and it was wonderful to hear it. We screamed until our megaphones went out, you could hardly hear what was happening. Everything was going on simultaneously. LE: That was the power of confusion, I think. CK: The power of confusion and ambiguity. ASK CHRISSY The CoE has as part of its guiding principles a fondness for this planet. If this is so, how can you not value humankind after having any kind of a life? [What a piece of work is man, etc.] --Lee Unlike other "misanthropic" organizations (e.g. VHEMT, GLF), the CoE does not advocate complete Human extinction--except as a last resort, should efforts to restore *balance* between Humans and the remaining species fail. It was exceedingly difficult for nineteenth-century Indians to value the white man while he was systematically destroying their way of life. It's equally difficult for me to value Humans while they're turning the Earth into a giant sewer. Nonetheless, many Indians did--and still do--manage to feel *sympathy* for whites. I usually manage to feel sympathy for Humans, but don't push your luck by bragging about how great they are. What does cannibalism have to do with the Church's mission, other than the shock value? Isn't it enough that a body be dead? What's the point of eating it? --Steve If you're a typical flesh-eating Human in a "civilized" industrial nation, you've probably never killed anything in your life. What do you think about as you bite into your cheeseburger? Do you feel any compassion for the animal that died so that you could live? Are you even aware that you're eating the flesh of an animal? How can you tell? Is there any blood? Where are the skin and bones and organs? Maybe they're not good enough for you, fit only for your pet. Are you aware that the animal you're eating lived its entire adult life in a tiny pen, force-fed, and unable to take a single step? Do you think the people who killed the animal spoke kindly to it, or prayed for it, or did anything to make its death less painful? Could it be that they smashed its head with a sledgehammer and threw it on a conveyor belt? Could it be that the meat industry is engineered to conceal these truths, to hide them from you with processing and marketing? Would you enjoy your cheeseburger as much if you had to watch the animal die first? Do you think that the animal feels pain less than you, or that its suffering is unimportant? Do you imagine that you are superior to the animal? Maybe if a third of the people on earth weren't going to bed hungry every night, often because their land was taken away to grow food for livestock, and maybe if you knew how to hunt and kill an animal, as an equal, with weapons you made yourself with your bare hands, and maybe if you knew how to skin the animal, how to remove its flesh, how to cook what you could eat, preserve the rest, and utilize every piece of the animal, wasting nothing, and maybe if you were willing to get down on your knees and *thank* the animal for allowing you to live, *then* maybe you wouldn't have to eat Human flesh instead. The US population is growing faster than that of eighteen other industrialized nations and, in terms of energy consumption, when an American couple stops spawning at two babies, it's the same as an average East Indian couple stopping at sixty-six, or an Ethiopian couple drawing the line at one thousand. --Joy Williams, "The Case Against Babies" ABORTION AS A SACRED RITE by Nevada Kerr Abortion is a sacred rite that has been performed by women for centuries. The midwife, healer, shaman or witch is the holy abortionist. She has been hounded by christians for millennia. It is time for this witch-hunt to end! With the help of the holy abortionist, in the form of the death goddess, the crone, or the medusa, we will overcome this new onslaught by the christian fanatics. Century after century these zealots try to impose their feeble morality on women. They claim that god has sovereign power over issues of life and death. This is far from the truth. Women as the goddess incarnate in all her forms and in particular in the shape of the hag, shrew, or fury who devours life in her gaping mouth with her sharp fangs, has sovereign power over issues of life and death. Let us not forget that when she decides her children are fated to die, so be it! She is the mother of necessity. She is the groomless bride who traverses the bridge between the worlds and carries the souls of aborted children to the other side. Like Lilith, she mercifully robs them of their breath. We are all on loan here and the death goddess must protect her own interests! No one can argue with the whirlwind who sweeps the doomed away! Her word is law! Today we hope to invoke the wisdom and justice of the sacred abortionist, and in defense of women we scoff at these hysterical christians! All hope for an overpopulated planet is born in the darkness of her lethal grasp! Praise loudly the victorious destroyer of unwanted and unneeded children! She who has the right of jurisdiction owns the souls of this earthly tribe! You may shudder, shake, and tremble! These are appropriate responses. Fear, awe, dread, and reverence are what the death mother has come to expect! With sickle in hand, she seizes the sated and weary souls of the damned! These christians here today only make her job more difficult than it needs to be. Like a goblin-mother, she who suckles the stillborn babe also comforts the mad and possessed. Beloved and misguided christians--know that you are vigilantly watched over by the ever-present destroyer who will someday swoop down upon you and gracefully carry you away! The nature of desire, the truth of life itself has always been death--the all-seeing one who demands responsibility from those who procreate and overpopulate this overburdened planet. Do not misunderstand! She means to do harm! You can invoke your insane and giddy god all day long. It will do no good. He has no power here! She who whets your appetite with sexual pleasures also whets the knife. She grasps, binds, and enthralls! The holy abortionist only summons those who are deserving of the call! She is free from imperfection! Like husks removed from grain, the unborn are hers! She marks her territory, a boundary these christians here today have crossed over. These misguided christians think they can strike a bargain with the grave, shriek at the whirlwind, bellow and screech at the all-devouring one. The fearful one, the holy abortionist is deaf to their pleading and will win in the end! There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace--those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death. --from "The Collected Sayings of Maud'Dib" by the Princess Irulan E-SERMON #15 Dear brethren, these are difficult times we live in. I'm sure that the bombing in Oklahoma leaves us all with a deep uneasiness about our future here in the Land of Opportunity. The Dollar drops precipitously against the Yen, unemployment keeps rising no matter what the president says, the streets are dirty and dangerous and crawling with crazed crack dealers...even the atmosphere is full of holes. It's enough to make any decent citizen depressed. But don't despair! No matter how overwhelmed and powerless you might feel in the face of such adversity, there is something you can do, right here, maybe even right now, to help solve all of these problems, and ensure your happiness and the happiness of generations to come: you can have a baby! That's right, it's time to raise a family! That woke you up, didn't it? I saw you snoozing there in the back row. Pay attention! This is important! Now, you've heard the politicians complaining about the decline of the family, and the collapse of moral values, right? And how many of them are doing their share? Not many! They're too busy driving their fancy cars, and besides, half of them are closet queers! They can complain until they're blue in the face, but they're not going to save the planet. It's time to take matters into our own hands! If you're a guy, punch some holes in those rubbers, or better yet, throw them out the window, and tell your beloved to expect a little visit from the stork! She'll understand, and what's more, she'll respect you for it. If you're a girl, stop taking those poisonous birth control pills, today! Wait for the right time of the month, ask your mother if you don't know what I mean, and then slip your boyfriend's penis into your vagina. Don't be shy about it, just slide it in and out until his sperm shoots right up into your cervix! He'll fall asleep, and you can rejoice in the absolutely certain knowledge that you are carrying out God's Plan on Earth! Think of all the years you've wasted, flushing that sperm down the toilet, in condoms or wads of kleenex, wiping it off your chin with a t-shirt, or even swallowing it, when you could have been helping to save the planet! But that's okay, because with today's modern scientific miracles, it's almost never too late! Soon you'll be making up for lost time, with a little cutie-pie on each nipple and a bun in the oven. What joy! There's no cure for the blues like hungry mouths to feed. You won't have time to feel depressed anymore! You'll be pumping out copies of yourself like there's no tomorrow, and if your man doesn't like it, well, you'll just have to find another one! Slap him in the face! Tell him to snap out of it and deliver the goods, because only a crazy man would stand in the way of God's Plan! That's grounds for divorce in any state, and worse if he's not careful! The Founding Fathers of this great nation made laws to protect us against men and women who use their sex organs for lewd, disgusting perversions instead of procreation. God doesn't like people who masturbate, or engage in unnatural acts, with members of the same sex no less! God hates these wicked people, and strikes them down with terrible diseases like herpes and AIDS! They are even lower than animals, almost as low as abortionists, and the Founding Fathers knew this and created sodomy laws so these foul creatures could be safely locked away, or killed like rabid dogs. Don't let it happen to you! Would you rather rot in a filthy jail cell, or follow the path of righteousness? Would you rather roast in the electric chair, or help build the new Jerusalem? You know the answer, so what are you waiting for? Put your sex organs to work for Jesus! Hear me brethren, God needs warm bodies, right now! God wants us to have more babies than fingers! God wants us to fuck like bunnies until there's no room for anything else, not even animals! God doesn't love animals! God wants us to push the cows and pigs and chickens into the sea, and still keep on fucking, until there's no more space left on Earth, until we tear into each other's flesh like rats in a cage, because GOD LOVES PEOPLE! And now dear brethren, let us rise, and sing along with the Borg: No animals. No animals. No cats to purr. No dogs to scratch. No birds to sing. No cows to kill. Dream, dream, we can dream, We can dream. (Wolf! Sheep! Wolf! Sheep!) No lions to tame. No cocks to crow. No mice to trap. No deer to kill. Dream, dream, we can dream, We can dream. No animals. No animals. Thanks to TMax and Izzy for translating the preceding hymn from the Borg Collective. They can be reached at The Noise, 74 Jamaica Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130. The life of a laying hen begins in a hatchery. Because male chicks will never lay eggs and are not bred to gain weight quickly for slaughter, they are promptly suffocated, gassed, or put through a crushing machine which grinds up their bodies into pulp. Female chicks are de-beaked [see the film *Baraka*], toe-clipped, vaccinated, and sent to large windowless buildings. At 20 weeks of age, when they are ready to begin laying eggs, they are transferred to laying houses, which typically hold 80,000 hens confined in wire cages so small that 4-5 birds live in a cage the size of a single newspaper page. Under these highly unnatural conditions, hens become aggressive, cannibalistic, and often die from stress. A 10-18% mortality rate is not considered unusual. But on the factory farm, the individual animal is worth little in terms of the overall profit margin. I WOOD by Rev. Chris Korda Make yourself as comfortable as possible. Okay, now close your eyes, relax, and try to imagine yourself dying. It's bound to happen eventually, right? So try to imagine yourself dying. It could be suddenly or gradually, by chance or by design, far in the future, or tomorrow, but imagine yourself passing into the twilight world between life and death. Your body is letting go, growing heavy, the life force is passing out of it, and finally your body is completely, irrevocably, dead. Now there's a ceremony, a wake, and your friends and family are gathered around your body, expressing their love for you, honoring you, wishing you well. Meanwhile, your detailed instructions for the disposal of your body have mysteriously disappeared, and so, due to circumstances beyond anyone's control, your body is buried, naked, without casket or shroud, in the forest. Time is passing. Your body is decomposing, rotting, breaking down into the simple substances that sustain organic life. The worms and beetles are chewing, burrowing into you, digesting you, I know it's creepy, but don't worry; you can't feel it. They're just playing their role, doing what they do best: helping the Earth recycle you. After a lifetime of eating, consuming the riches of the Earth, now the Earth is eating you. You're part of the food chain after all, because while your body's nutrients are slowly dissolving into the soil, they're being absorbed by the roots of a tree. Now try to imagine that nameless part of yourself that survives every stage of death. Beyond your ego, beyond your consciousness; your highest self, your spirit. Try to imagine that while your body is composting, feeding the tree's roots, your spirit is also passing into the tree. And slowly, very slowly, you begin to have sensation again. New, unfamiliar sensation. Where your feet used to be, you have roots that sink deep into the warm, moist Earth. And where your poor, aching spine used to be, you have a thick trunk, flexible but incredibly strong, and covered with bark instead of skin. And instead of arms and a head, you have a profusion of branches, ending in thousands of delicate twigs instead of fingers. And your twigs are thrust out in every direction, towards the heavens, towards the sun, and instead of hair, they're covered with tender, green leaves. Feel the warm sun beating down on your leaves. Breathe. Breathe with your leaves. In...out. In...out. Your leaves are a million tiny lungs. Feel how they ripple in the breeze. Your branches are swaying, gently swaying, back and forth, back and forth, and the sap is running up and down your trunk, carrying nutrients from the soil up to the branches and leaves. Birds are resting on you, and insects scurry around on your bark, but they move so fast you barely notice them. Time has slowed down for you. You're not going anywhere. Day becomes twilight, and then night. The stars come out, and the moon rises. Feel the other trees, all around you. You're one tree, among many other trees, in the forest. Hear the sound of the forest. Animals, birds, insects, singing the song of the Earth. You're singing too, with a deep, slow sound, all the trees singing together. Mist creeps along the ground, and the stars fade, as dawn approaches. The song is louder now, and your leaves are wet with dew. The sun creeps over the horizon, and into the sky. Days pass. Weeks pass, and the air gets colder. Your leaves are dry and brittle, and the wind blows them away. Now the ground is hard, and ice covers everything. Your sap thickens, the snow lies heavy on your branches, and the forest is still. In the stillness of winter, all along your twigs and branches, tiny buds are forming, under the ice. As the years pass, you grow bigger, and bigger still. Your roots crack open boulders, birds make nests in your branches, and animals hide in the caverns of your trunk. Beneath your roots, the flesh of your old body is gone, and even the bones crumble, but your spirit lives on. Sometimes when I watch TV, I stop being myself, and oh, I'm a star of a series, or, or, I have my own talk show, or I'm on the news, getting out of a limo, going some place important. All I ever have to do is be famous! People watch me, and they love me, and I never, never grow old, and I never die. --John Carpenter's "They Live" Ask a few questions here and there, but do it casually. THE POLITICS OF DAILY LIFE by Lydia Eccles Think of your direct bodily experience of life. No one can lie to you about that. Do you hear insect sound of drones clickering keyboards in a fluorescent hive of fabric-padded cubicles? How many hours a day do you spend in front of a TV screen? A computer screen? An automobile screen? All three screens combined? Is software your supervisor? And how many hours a day do you sleep? How are you affected by sound? How are you affected by light? How are you affected by warmth and touch? How are you affected by music? Is a good record better than live music raw? Is it simply sound you want? Or shared ritual magic? How many of your rituals come at you through a glass, vicariously? What are you being screened from? Does it bother you if the windows don't open, and even your air is "conditioned"? How about your degree and variety of body movement? How do you feel in situations of enforced passivity? How are you affected by a non-stop assault of symbolic communication, audio, robotic voices video, print, billboard, as you stumble through the forest of signs? What are they urging upon you? Do you need contemplation? Do you remember it? Thinking from inside, rather than reacting to stimuli? Is it hard to look away? Is looking in the very thing that cannot be permitted? How are you affected by being in crowds? How much bodily space do you need? Do you find yourself blocking your empathetic responses to other humans? Do you find yourself committing acts of symbolic violence? How are you affected by the size of the room you're in? By living in two and three dimensional grids? And by the visual space? Do you need to see the sky? Water? Foliage? Animals? Glinting, glimmering, moving? (Is that why you have a pet, an aquarium, and fernplants?) Or is video your glinting, glimmering, moving? Who prepares your meals? Do you eat standing up? Do you trust what you're eating? How are you affected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those of millions of others? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours? The minutes and hours that add up to your life? How are you affected by being moved around without control, in elevators, subways, escalators, conveyor belts? How are you affected by waiting? Waiting in line, waiting in traffic, waiting to pee, waiting...learning to discipline and punish your spontaneous urges? How are you affected by being immobilized and scheduled rather than wandering and roaming freely and spontaneously? Scavenging? (Shoplifting?) Can you use your hands creatively, building making touching a variety of materials? How are you affected by holding in your desires? By sexual repression, by the delay or denial of pleasure, starting in childhood, along with suppression of everything in you that evidences your wild nature, your animal life? Is pleasure dangerous? Is danger joy? What are we deprived of by labor-saving devices? And thought-saving devices? How are you affected by the efficiency requirement that puts the end product ahead of the process, that values only the future and never the moment, the present moment that gets shorter and shorter, as we try to speed to the future endpoint? Are you saving time? Are you lonely in a way that language can't allay or even express? Do you sometimes feel yourself ready to LOSE CONTROL? That had been the signal. Nature allows for only very slow change. Accepting a change of species...before a change of conscience. I'm more rational than you. I respond rationally to stimulus. If someone suffers, I console him. If someone needs my help, I give it. Why do you think I'm crazy? If someone looks at me, I respond. If someone talks, I listen. You have gone slowly crazy, by ignoring these stimuli...simply for having ignored them. Someone dies. You let him die. Someone asks for help. You look the other way. Someone is hungry. You squander what you have. Someone is dying of sorrow. You lock him up so as not to see him. One who systematically adopts this conduct...who walks among the victims, ignoring them...may dress well, may pay taxes...go to Mass...but you cannot deny he is sick. Your reality is terrifying, Doctor. Why don't you look at the real madness for once? Stop persecuting the sad ones...the meek...those who don't want to buy, or cannot buy, that shit you would gladly sell me. That is, if you could. --Rantes, "Man Facing Southeast" THE AGE OF SIMULATION by Rev. Chris Korda A visionary is one who has visions, one who dreams. Visions are by definition nonverbal experiences, and therefore difficult to communicate. Throughout most of human history, nonverbal experience was shared telepathically, and the atrophy of this ability directly coincides with the end of the Age of Magic. There is no way to be sure how long the Age of Magic lasted, partly because its time was not linear but mythic, and partly because the continuity and rootedness of Magic-based cultures encouraged oral rather than written history. It is the turmoil of Magic's demise that has inspired people to write their history down; what most people call history is merely the brief and violent history of Industrial Society. The history of the Age of Magic exists, not in libraries or museums, but in the timeless realm of mystical experience, and within all beings who maintain their connection to that realm. As the number of *human* beings who remain open to spiritual awareness dwindles, entire aspects of this hidden history disappear from human knowledge, to be recovered only laboriously, or perhaps lost forever. It is possible to communicate visions through any of the nonverbal media which comprise "art," but this requires sensitivity of both the creator and the viewer. Ideally these two are joined as one, if in not in body, then in spirit. Spiritual or Magical art is by definition *participational*, and encompasses every aspect of life. Unfortunately, sensitivity and "oneness" are qualities that Industrial Society must ruthlessly seek out and destroy, in its effort to create passivity and "sameness." In Magic, the many meet as one, and return to the many: in Industrial Society, the many are crushed, and homogenized into a uniform *mass*. Due to the rapid growth of "mass" society, and the resulting loss of participation in the rituals of Magical art, I am obliged to verbalize, and communicate my visions through the written or spoken word. In a mass society only that knowledge which conforms to the inherent laws of mass communication can be kept alive and disseminated. These laws have been explained in great detail by others; suffice it to say that the verbal forms of mass communication require, above all, that knowledge be *rational*. Since spiritual knowledge emanates from aspects of reality that are beyond the scope of rationalism, it follows that spiritual knowledge cannot be verbalized except approximately and allegorically. This paradox led early Chinese thinkers to divide reality into two spheres of influence: the spheres of Relative and Absolute Truth. According to this division, all verbalized experience, and by extension all spoken or written communication, is relative, because it depends on the participants' points of view, and on the symbolic language that each participant applies to their observations. Thus Lao-Tze proclaimed in the *Book of Changes* that "the Tao that has a name, is not the true Tao." Absolute Truth was assumed to be nonverbal, and accessible only though meditation. This caveat was lost on many subsequent thinkers, including the ancient Greeks. The confusion of reality with words about reality led to insoluble philosophical contradictions, including the conflict between *rationalism* and ***empiricism*. The empiricists, led by Francis Bacon, held that all knowledge derived from the senses, while the rationalists, led by Descartes, argued that knowledge was acquired by reason alone. The dilemma was brought to a head by Hume, and threatened to undermine the still-delicate foundation of material science. Though Kant eventually negotiated a truce, by ceding mathematics and logic to the rationalists, while claiming the rest for empiricism, the corresponding split between Mind and Body continues to this day. Meanwhile both sides cheerfully extended the mechanical world-view into every human pursuit, and thus laid the foundations of Industrial Society. The result of their zeal is a senseless world in which all truth is relative, and it is to this world, and its mass society, that I find myself attempting to communicate my irrational visions of Absolute Truth, hampered by a lack of spirit, not only in people, but in the language itself. In spite of these difficulties, I begin by agreeing with Jeremy Rifkin that this is the Age of Simulation. By this I mean that people now accept *mediated experience* in the place of real experience. This change has taken place in a series of leaps, each corresponding to a technological innovation. The printing press, camera, telephone, radio, television, and computer form a continuum; with each "advance" the simulation becomes more complete. The simulation spreads, by eliminating human capacities it has no use for, while excessively stimulating others; in this sense it behaves like a virus, which replicates by altering the structure of its host. Simulation creates conditions favorable to itself by isolating people from other living beings, by reducing their range of sensation, and especially by narrowing their attention span. Parents and teachers, unable to grasp this, surround children with televisions and computers, and then complain about learning disabilities and "attention disorders." As Rifkin points out, today's children dismiss someone with the phrase "you're history," and as history recedes, the future becomes equally uncertain. Unlike the Iroquois, who considered the impact of their deliberations on the next seven generations, today's leaders plan no further than their reelection. Obsession with an ever-changing present destroys *continuity*: the cycles of gradual change so essential to biological and spiritual health, are shattered into furtive, splintered motion. Calculus becomes a way of life, as matter, energy and even time are quantized into ever-smaller units. The search for irreducible elements conceals the desire to *standardize*, to make things uniform and interchangeable; humans seek total control, to avoid the disorder that their control-lust creates. Through simulation, humans seek not only to concentrate all their knowledge in the present, but to use that knowledge, as power to *transform* the present, ever more quickly. Thus while the stated goal of technological "progress" is increased *efficiency*, which by itself seems beneficial, the concealed goal is to use that efficiency, not to reduce waste, but to go even faster. Yesterday's model is discarded, efficient or not, and as the speed of development increases, more and more of earth's structure is consumed, and dissipated as waste and heat. This dissipation is *entropy*, or unrecoverable energy. Entropy describes not only energy loss, but also the tendency of order to expand and decay into chaos. On a universal scale, chaos, like death, is inevitable, but "progress" towards it can be slowed down, or even reversed, if only temporarily. Life itself is a miracle of negative entropy: chaos evolves, in a harmony of self-sustaining changes, and the monoculture of primordial nothingness, over eons of time, becomes biological diversity. Humans try to mimic nature's feat, and succeed in creating short-term order and complexity in one place, but only at the price of creating long-term chaos and loss of diversity somewhere else. In this way a forest, which for practical purposes would have lasted forever, is traded for consumer goods that will last a few years, or for packaging, to be discarded immediately. Similarly, America's Great Plains, once built for eternity, generate riches for a time, but meanwhile the topsoil washes into the sea, never to return. Shifting sand demonstrates high entropy; the expanding man-made deserts are a grim reminder that Industrial Society's goal is not to "steward" the earth, or even sustain life on it, but to *use* it. But use it for what? Simulation continues to masquerade as convenience, or as novelty, but its object has always been to *replace* reality. This is now openly acknowledged in the term "virtual reality." Just as the mechanical world-view permitted standardized information to be collected, and centralized as *surveillance*, so that surveillance now permits the *assimilation* of reality by machines. The process is destructive and one-way: as aspects of reality are reduced to commodity, **and assimilated as data, they are disfigured and erased. This is illustrated by nature shows, in which extinct species live on, as stored information.1 Simulation concentrates mental energy at the expense of the physical. The resulting imbalance exhausts the body, making assimilation more urgent. The virtual reality is an *out-of-body experience*, and the mind must free itself of the body, or lose its war of secession. Industrial Society attempts to extend the body's life, or even replace it, through bionics and genetic engineering, but these efforts only cause more disruption, and divert energy from healing the split between Mind and Body. As the mind abandons the body, entropy begins to manifest itself in devastating syndromes, such as AIDS and cancer. The split is a belief system, and can be unlearned, to varying degrees; thus true healers consider *belief* to be their single greatest obstacle. Humans have been usefully compared to cancer, but it is a mistake to assume that cancer is genetic in origin, and that humans are therefore inevitably programmed to destroy the planet. It is the mechanical world-view of Industrial Society which is destroying the planet; humans are merely the agents by which this world-view is applied. In this sense the cancer is ideological, and humans cannot be blamed for the desecration, anymore than a dreamer can be blamed for a nightmare. Though irreversible, the desecration is preventable, and can be stopped at any time, so it is not a question of blame at all, but of how to wake the dreamer, without further injury. The ideological cancer has its roots in *humanism*, the Sophist idea that "man is the measure of all things." Goethe's followers built on this notion to create their pyramidal "levels of being," with humans at the top, a chosen species for whom all was created, and without whom all would have no meaning. When Europeans arrived in the New World, this hierarchy of consciousness was their chief ideological export; it was poorly received by the First People, who in general saw themselves as part of a larger organism, and no better, or worse than any other living thing.2 Humanism views man as the super-ape, who seeks to bend nature to his will through the use of his reason. The next logical step is to the super-man or *trans-human*, who seeks to liberate his reason from the biological limitations of nature, and thus achieve immortality. The cancer, faced with the immanent death of its host, makes plans to escape, by building machines and transferring itself into them. The danger is not that humans, in the grip of their nightmare, will actually build machines capable of self-awareness and interplanetary conquest, but that in attempting this folly, they will damage the earth so severely that life will no longer be possible, even for humans.3 The Hopis saw Industrial Society in visions, thousands of years ago, and though they did not always comprehend these visions at the time, they preserved them in the form of prophecies, which only now begin to make sense. An example is their prophecy that there would be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky. This can be understood not only as a reference to power lines, but also to the trails of light made by our ground and air vehicles, as revealed in time-elapse photography.4 These changes in perception illustrate the Hopi's ability to shift their awareness, in this case from fleeting human consciousness to the slower vibrations of the vegetable and mineral worlds. The Hopis are well aware of the power of dreams, and they know that our illness is a matter of the *heart*. They have also recognized the many signs that the illness becomes terminal, and have repeatedly attempted to warn the world through the United Nations, finally succeeding in 1992. The signs have included earthquakes and drastic changes in weather patterns, as well as Mother Earth "crying" through the formation of crop circles. These are symptoms not only of deforestation and massive extinction of species, but of *geological* damage to the earth. Mining in general, and particularly mining of radioactive materials, is seen as a direct assault on the planet, and on its magnetic balance and weather. By spewing waste into the air and water, humans poison the planet's blood, but by digging precious things from the land, humans injure the vital organs of a living organism, and invite disaster, for all beings. The Hopis are sworn to protect the treasures that lie beneath them. In victory or defeat, they stand for the ultimate truth that *earth is sacred*. 1. It is truly ironic that humans regain their long-lost oneness only in mass hallucination. The experience is *collective* because its source is not the diversity of organic life, but the technological monoculture. 2. This is illustrated by Lakota hunters, who left a piece of their flesh at the spot where an animal was killed, as a symbol of their indebtedness, and as a reminder that through death, came life. Even if modern man left fingers in fast-food restaurants, the ritual would be empty; the killing is not done by him, but anonymously, by remote control. 3. This danger is often downplayed by technological utopians; books such as *Third Wave* and *Futureshock* present the soft side of trans-humanism. By comparison, the libertarian trans-humanists, also known as Extropians, speak openly of "downloading" human awareness into machines, gutting other planets, and turning the universe into a cyberspace. 4. The film *Koyaanisqatsi*, which explored this discovery, takes its name from the Hopi word for *disintegration*, crazy life, or a state of life that calls for another way of being. Commuters are compared to sausages flowing through a packaging plant, and a rocket launch becomes the ultimate symbol of Industrial Society. Wisdom Earth and sky Hear my song I am weary And the way is long The wind is wild And the waves are rough Give me wisdom Make me strong enough To swim that sea To crawl up that shore To breathe deep and stand And find out who I am To reach high and climb up To find my place To be To live my life To love And be loved To die Peacefully In heaven Above -Chris Korda RECOMMENDED READING Black Elk Speaks, John G. Neihardt. After having a great vision at an early age, Black Elk became a medicine man. He spent the rest of his life trying to realize his dream for the Lakota--and for all people--of the tree of life blooming at the center of the sacred hoop. His dream ended in the butchering at Wounded Knee. Years later, with tears running down his face, Black Elk tells the Great Spirit that the tree never bloomed, and is withered: "A pitiful old man, you see me here, and I have fallen away and done nothing...It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds." To see how things could be, but be powerless to make them so, surely nothing is harder. Does the preservation of Black Elk's vision in a popular book lessen his defeat? The author thought so, but I'm unsure. Even if the tree still lives, how can I nourish it when I can barely nourish myself? Or are these two are the same, because the tree is in each of us? I also have a vision, and feel unable to realize it. Will I end up like Black Elk? O-Zone, Paul Theroux. Industrial society concentrates its power in cities, but only by ceding control over outlying areas, as Hakim Bey and others have observed. Already the elite submit to surveillance, and willingly trade freedom of movement for increased security. Today's "knowledge workers" telecommute, and rarely leave their gated communities, complete with shopping malls, recreation facilities, and private police. How much longer will it be before cities become walled cities? Are we returning to a feudal world? Theroux's answer is yes, and his bone-chilling novel searches for life outside the walls. "I'm an Owner...get out of my way and let me through!" On Behalf of Wolf and the First Peoples, Joseph Marshall III. Unlike hundreds of tribes that became stacks of paper, names on a list, or nothing at all, the Lakota are alive, with a surprising amount of their heritage intact. Marshall moves easily in the white man's world, but he also listens to his ancestors, and their voices permeate his essays. They stress the importance of knowing one's place, and living within the limits of the shared physical world. Every species has a part to play in the dance of life, and possesses unique strengths that enable it to survive. The first peoples "did not see their ability to reason or understand as anything that made them superior; instead, it was simply *their* key to survival." Like Vonnegut, Marshall distinguishes the Europeans not by their technology, but by their *arrogance*. Their merciless campaign to exterminate the wolf--and the remaining first peoples--in the late 1800s is one of many examples. The Only Planet of Choice: Essential Briefings from Deep Space, Phyllis V. Schlemmer and Mary Bennett. After three hundred pages of channelled interviews with the Being who speaks for the Council of Nine (also known as Tom), the mind boggles. The good news is that total destruction won't be permitted, but other than that, it's up to us, as usual. Eyebrow-raising topics include universal civilizations, Atlantis, and Hebrew aliens. Despite urgent warnings to get "unstuck," overall the message is positive: "You all have come to Earth to beautify it, to purify it, to love it and be in joy with it. Know this: in your time, through your and others' dedication, through the quality of your being on Planet Earth, you may bring it to the fulfillment of its creation. That is for us a great joy and we thank you." The Being who visited me was considerably less cheerful. How do you say "don't count your chickens"? The Wanting Seed, Anthony Burgess. In this outrageous Malthusian comedy from the author of *A Clockwork Orange*, overpopulation is so bad that the government promotes homosexuality. Their slogan: "It's Sapiens to be Homo." The humor is very British, of course, and it overwhelms in places, but civilization is demolished, and three out of four pillars are covered, in short order. Fans of Aldous Huxley's *Brave New World* (written thirty years earlier) will notice many interesting similarities and differences. Thank you, William, for making me read this. Where White Men Fear To Tread, Russell Means with Marvin J. Wolf. Means--another Lakota--achieved lasting fame as one of the most outspoken leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM), for which he and many others suffered almost unimaginable violence. His autobiography is white-hot with anger, and it left me exhausted, racked by alternating spasms of self-hate and self-pity from which I'm still recovering. I can't overcome all of my social conditioning in one lifetime; it's too much to ask. I was born and raised in a city, and indoctrinated into the intellectual elite. As a child, my knowledge of the world came from books. I thought food came from behind the mirrors in the supermarket: I didn't know any better. I learned to read and write and control machines, and the damage is done. My skills are only useful to industrial society, and it tempts me, with distractions and a comfortable existence. I drink its poison, and my spirit is sick. I have no tradition, and I can't be a Lakota, no matter how much I purify myself. I'm an outsider, a mental European. Sometimes I want to live in a right way, but I'm weak, and Microsoft is big. I weep for myself, I'm so ashamed. There's an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet...You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life. Life--all life--is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life *by* life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships. --Pardot Kynes, First Planetologist of Arrakis More Reading 1984, George Orwell. All's Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque. Biodiversity, E.O.Wilson. Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut. The Decade of Destruction, Adrian Cowell. Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World, Jeremy Rifkin. Final Exit, Derek Humphry. Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon. A Guide for the Perplexed, E.F.Schumacher. Howl, Allen Ginsberg. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair. The Lorax, Dr. Seuss. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke. A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn. Our Plundered Planet, Fairfield Osborn. The Population Explosion, Paul Erlich. Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, Jim Keith. The Sixteen Satires, Juvenal. Tales of Power, Carlos Castenada. The Tarot, Paul Foster Case. The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul. Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, Rudolph Steiner. Worlds in Harmony: Dialogues on Compassionate Action, the Dalai Lama. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig. CHURCH MOVIES 1. Eraserhead 2. Koyaanisqatsi 3. Providence 4. The Man Who Fell to Earth 5. THX 1138 6. Hearts and Minds 7. Network 8. Soylent Green 9. Being There 10. Liquid Sky 11. Clearcut 12. Man Facing Southeast 13. The Gods Must Be Crazy 14. Metropolis 15. Dr. Strangelove CONTACTS BOTA (Builders of the Adytum) P.O.Box 42278, Los Angeles, CA 90042-0278 CPR (Circles Phenomenon Research) P.O.Box 3378, Branford, CT 06405 Daily Cow (David R. 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Moore postal: The Church of Euthanasia P.O.Box 261 Somerville, MA 02143 e-mail: coe@netcom.com ftp: ftp.etext.org /pub/Zines/Snuffit gopher: gopher.etext.org Zines/Snuffit www: www.paranoia.com/coe/ www mirror: www.envirolink.org/orgs/coe/ THANKS to $aint @ndrew, Tim Anderson, Bob Baden, Cardinal Bailey, Ronald Bleier, Boboroshi, James Bredt, Henryk Broder, Sister Catherine, Jim Cypher, Becky Day, Tess Decosta, Christopher Dinardo, Dane Donato, Lydia Eccles, Paulie Gurspam, Annie Harrison, America Hoffman, Iah House, Susan Johnson, Slyther Kalson, Deacon Kelly, Pagan Kennedy, Nevada Kerr, Angela Kimberk, Ryu Kirtz, Keith Krisa, Father Lamorte, Dan Martinez, T & Izzy Max, Nova Maynard, Cassy Mitchell, Kent Miller, Justin P. Moore, Nina Paley, Anne Phillips, Stephen M. Pike, William Plowman, Kevin Roche, Ashkan Sahini, Pastor Scott, Doug Sery, Sara Stewart, Vermin Supreme, Mike Therion, Toto, Karen Tozzi, Burt Urbanowski, Jamie Wheelock, Nancy Young, and especially Pastor Kim.