Puritanism 2005: Still raging for paradise after all these years

[dweller]

By Phil Rockstroh
Online Journal Contributing Writer

"Having an unexciting occupation may increase your risk of a
heart attack, believe researchers."—Headline from the BBC, 7
June 2005

June 21, 2005—It now appears the dire consequences that puritanical
hysterics have attributed to human sexuality—from ill-health, early death,
and societal decay, to being the flat-out progenitor of nearly every aspect of
worldly travail—is applicable to the very act they hold more sacred than
chastity: work.

Ever since the first fantasy-prone Puritans trudged upon the shores of North
America, intent on establishing the New Jerusalem, that ever-shilled-for
Shining City On A Hill (now in an ongoing state of brownout, on to the way
to a full scale blackout), they and their descendants have carried on the
conviction that the only impediment to the construction of a godly
municipality—where grace, piety, and purity would reign and whose glowing
righteousness would serve as a beacon of divine light to drive the darkness
from the face (not to mentioned those Satanically besieged genital regions
of the human anatomy) of this sin-blinded earth—was human sloth,
vitality-sucking carnality, and a general disobedience to the admonitions of
the Holy Bible . . . that cosmic interoffice memo circulated to increase
heavenly dividends by maximizing earthly efficiency.

Ergo, anyone perceived as thwarting the progress of their goal of achieving
earthly perfection fell subject to public scorn. Over the years, social
conservative activists have refined and commodified the process down to an
art form—if not a fetish—delivering ever more graphic displays of
exhibitionistic outrage for public consumption. Capitalizing on this, cable
television news networks now give over large segments of their programming
to legions of finger-wagging, right-wing performance artists, all straight out of
the school of perpetual moral indignation (not to mention the time allotted to
coverage of the ceaseless circle jerk of self-righteousness partaken by the
Washington press and political establishment). Most recently, upon the
acquittal of Michael Jackson, we were treated to another in a series of their
formulaic performances, the tone of which was nearly identical to the
contrived umbrage that ensued after Super Bowl audiences in 2004 caught a
glimpse of his sister's chemical ball facsimile of a female breast.

The tone and tenor of our times seems retrograde, pre-enlightenment,
possessed of an overall aura that harkens back to time periods when
daylight hours were dominated by a feudalist order and the night was ruled
by the superstitious terror of a demon-haunted cosmology. Stricken, we
obsess that the forces of moral decay endeavor to drain, like some medieval
hallucination involving a nocturnal visitation by a succubus, our essence
from our pristine souls, by way of seducing our sullied flesh.

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/062105Rockstroh/062105rockstroh.html

get yourself some preachin'...read to the end for the cure.
dp

[dweller]

1. nobody want's to get healed?

amazing...


dp