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Godspeed to Obama, etc., but how many more centuries is it going to take before humanity gets the message that 95% of politics is simply running in place. It's a bloody squirrel cage about 6 BILLION human beings are now puffing and gasping in, while the Beast continues genocidal assassinations (e.g., Africa and aids, New Orleans, etc.), the rape and murder of Mother Nature (i.e., our one and only planet Earth), stealing the labor and retirements of the peasant-like "working class", buying the disgusting souls the American Congress (with noble & courageous exceptions who prove the rule), and draining and killing multiple ecosystems of the Earth just like a cancer drains and kill our bodies.
OK, let's keep track of this:
(1.) The Beast is real and is the God of the Earth
(2.) "Politics" is a game invented by and for the Beast to lock in the fascist status quo.
(3.) This leaves "Revolution", but history has shown us that these blood baths almost always end up making everything worse.
Maybe we should add the consequence of meaningless politics and revolution is what tragically now defines human existence: hopeless passivity and despair. How could it be otherwise? One theory of schizophrenia is that is comes from being trapped in "double binds: that is to say, you're dammed if you do and you're damned if you don't. That's us. Both politics and revolution are like eating ground glass, but if we don't at least pretend we're doing "something", we'll spend our entire lives (and the lives of our descendants) hearing the roar and laughter of the Beast -- which ALWAYS has the last laugh.
If all of the above were a kind of syllogism, the inevitable conclusion would be we need what ancient thinkers called a "tertium quid", which meant a "third thing". Or in the spirit of Monty Python: "And now for something completely different".
In short, to HELL with politics and to HELL with revolution. We need to quantum jump to a radically new mechanism of social change.
Now this is a dangerous place, because the temptation will be to intellectualize all this away. But if we do that, it will be like not being creative enough to get off the tracks in front of an approaching train. This is NOT the time to be resigned or argumentative. This is the time to be OPEN TO THE NEW.
OK, time for honestly. The PRIMARY function of this piece is try to convince the world (yes, the world!) that the human race is doomed to the degree we think politics OR revolution in any significant way "deals with the Beast". These are the core, twin illusions of social existence, because all either of them do is to "perpetuate" the Beast, and to paraphrase the words of ancient and wise Zen Master, “This is wiping off blood with blood.”
And even when politics marginally works (as it "may" be doing with Obama), it's still a game of the elites, since at the end of the next four years, it will be obvious that nothing has FUNDAMENTALLY changed in human Civilization. Not to overwork the analogy, but politics "at its' best" (about as rare as a unicorn) is still only putting band aids on terminal degenerative diseases.
This is what the mystic J. Krishnamurti called, "decorating your cage." So back to what to do, what to do? Hopefully a critical mass of human beings is getting very, very clear what NOT to do, i.e., politics or revolution, and if so, that's the biggest spiritual, intellectual, and existential step EVER taken in human social history.
If you're drowning, knowing you should NOT strangle the neck of the hero (or heroine) who is trying to save you, is salvation for both of you.
Perhaps it will help to see this dynamic of "now for something completely different" in a different context.
In the history of science and mathematics there are certain historical moments which stand out as beacons of genius. At the end of the 19th Century, much of physics was in a mess. We had laws about energy and very different laws about matter and it seemed like the twain would never meet. We also had contradictions galore about the "addition of velocities" and metaphysical assumptions about time and space. Probably most of all, we were basically stopped dead in our tracks about a post Faraday/Maxwell understanding of light. In short, a maddening mess.
And then in the very early 20th Century: Albert Einstein! Suddenly, almost miraculously, things began to make sense. However, the price was high since we had to sacrifice the pseudo absolutes of time and space (rather a time/space continuum -- which "bent" with mass). The speed of light rocketed to a place of honor, relative to which, yes, things were "relative". Long story, but the image that fits is that Einstein quantum jumped out of the common sense physical understanding box of the 19th Century. And he did it again a few years later with "General Relativity".
