The Death of God

Oh, man, I had another of my political, current events, rants half done when I checked my posts on TW and came across that posted by StarShadow, the classical music. Listening – having called Rita in so she could share with me while we finished our coffee – I couldn’t shut it down until I’d heard (and saved) it all.

I always do things like that – taking the grandkids home to Lubbock recently, we stopped a dozen times in order to look at the wild-flowers – and I wrote just now to “Star” to tell him of a night where I happened to come upon a friend when car on an interstate ahead suddenly pulled over. Thinking something wrong, and having pulled over ahead of the car and walked back, I found my friend Gary leaned back against the seat, listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Understanding perfectly, I stood beside the car and listened with him as the Berlin Symphonic Orchestra played the powerfully evocative music. When it was through, and my friend had explained that the road noise and its interference with his listening pleasure had precipitated his sudden decision to pull over, he waved, said, “See ya,” and pulled away. We laughed about the incident for years.

When “Star’s” music had finished, I sat reflecting about a nation that seems to have lost – among so many other things – its appreciation of beauty and life, the encyclopedia of all its forms. What the hell – capitalism, of course – has happened to us? I am reminded of Markham’s poem, The “Man with a Hoe.”


“What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of the Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?”


Don’t we see, realize, that we are being brutalized? Racing desperately to stay ahead of a tax system supplying a military industrial complex so vast that it consumes part of everything an enslaved public earns, we have no time for anything but the “fast food,” one-liner news, entertainment, and political debate, and garbage art of life under corporate capitalism. Bombarded by mindless ideology no one has time to really consider, we accept the mediocre or less in veritably everything.

Worse, in order to survive economically – or to follow the siren call of supposed, what the corporate masters would have us believe, is success, we have cut our own children adrift, left them to fall prey to all of it. “What to them Plato and the swing of the Pleiades (quick – what IS that?); what the long reaches of the peaks of song, the rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose . . .?” For heavens sake, my friends, LOOK at your children once! Listen to the appallingly cacophonous, discordant trash they think is music, listen to what they believe a hero is, ask them what the word “honor” means (try it, I dare you – or don’t you dare ask yourself?).

I could go on, but this isn’t about that. Some years ago, while a coach at the National Judo Institute in Colorado Springs, I was taking a break and talking with one of the players when the young man’s girl friend approached. Her sinuously beautiful stride first caught my attention, then her magnificent form. Red of hair, which was long enough to reach her shoulder blades, she wore high heals and tastefully feminine apparel. The eyes she gave me when she said “Hi!” were green or greenish, and she was very, very pretty.

When she had made plans with my young team mate for meeting later, she turned to leave, and I, male as I am, watched her go – male as I am. What a beautiful thing she was!

And I said that to my young friend. “Do see how beautiful she is?”

I think I startled him a little, as perhaps I do you, now. Well, hell yes, he said – of course. But do you, really, I pressed him? For an instant, I saw him resign himself to one of “coaches” lectures, then become intent. “No,” he said, “I see what you mean – maybe I don’t.” He put his head down, looking between his feet. “Why do YOU notice?

I had to laugh at the obvious questioning inherent in his question, but I was equal to it. “Because, my friend,” I said, “THAT – nothing else – is what will makes your life worth living. If you pass through the years without seeing all the beautiful things here – and woman is the most beautiful of all, she’s the beautiful that teaches us about all the things really beautiful – you might as well have lived in a dumpster. If you let chasing medals, or property, or money, or political power make you deaf, dumb, and numb to things that are beautiful, you’ll never really know that you lived. You won’t really care, either. Even if you become president or rule or own the world, you won’t really care when it’s over. You won’t care because you will have become a corporation personified – no personality, no character, no feeling, no pleasure except the pleasure felt by a computer or ledger in having added another number. If you could see now what you would become then, you’d shoot yourself.”

His look was one of amazement. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“You’re damned right I do,” I responded. “The next time you’re with (I said her name, which I choose not to here) her, look at her. Listen when she speaks, when she laughs. When she smiles, drink it in. Watch her walk, how she moves when she sits. And by all means, if you do nothing else, see how very, very different she is than we are. Think about why. She makes life, you know. You and I are just her wingman, we fly formation on her, cover her butt in the dogfight of living.” I laughed at the look of awe on his face. “Hell, she SITS on the one, sure thing that every man on the planet will bust his ass, fight, even die for.”

Two guys, we laughed at one another. And the truth. The funny truth.

And there’s another thing, my friends – what’s happened to the beauty of laughter? Recently, a sociologist friend of mine nodded agreement when I said I’d noticed that people laughed half or less as much as they used to. “Around forty percent less, actually,” he said. That, he said, is what the studies were saying.

You, gentle reader, look around – see what you think. The bees, the butterflies, and now the birds, aren’t the only things we are sacrificing to the corporate world and the all-mighty dollar. We’re surrendering beauty, pleasure - the quality of life itself.

But I’m a fighter now become a teacher, and I not willing to just “go gentle into that good night.” So let me, with Dylon Thomas, “rage at the dying of the light” a little. Consider what the military industrial corporations would do, should they realize one day that you have begun teaching your kids what life is really about, why and how to live it. What if they knew that you had become aware of what’s been happening? Tell me that it would be different – in the least – from what they are doing about the atmosphere, the water, the very soil and substance of the earth becoming poisonous. Tell me what you think they would do, were we to begin insisting upon learning why the bees, the butterflies, and now the birds are disappearing.

Tell me you imagine it would be any different than what they are doing, now that we are aware, however so vaguely, that the polar icepacks, the glaciers, and snow fields are vanishing. Can you really imagine that they would treat any of these “issues,” any differently than they are global warming? Tell me, while you’re at it, that you don’t understand why people corporately obsessed – remember my “you will have become a corporation personified” lecture to the young judo player – with wealth wouldn’t stop for even a minute to consider even the possibility that they – man at his most avarice-addicted – are responsible? What would the harm in that be?

Yeah, you’ve got it – the harm would be to their “bottom line.”

A hundred thirty years ago, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the god created by metaphysics and religion would die (in the “Die Froehliche Wissenschaft,” he said figuratively “is dead”). As anyone might imagine, the remark stirred a furor among the people to whom god was a corporate product. Were the god they created to be found out or die, you can guess what the creators and purveyors of religion thought would happen. When one recognizes that the god of the military industrial complex corporations and the oil companies is production of weapons and oil, one might understand the furor that resulted from “Die Froehliche Wissenshaft.” Or, inversely, one knowing of the furor resulted from the discovery of the connection between global warming and corporate production might understand the “god is dead” controversy.

History does repeat itself, you know; you have to be watching, however. It – Die Froehliche Wissenschaft - means “The Joyous Knowledge” (science).

But consider again the death of another god, the goddess beauty. Of course, beauty – like god – will never die. But our awareness, our “joyous knowledge” of it, seems like Nietzsche’s “god” doomed. Then, when we have killed beauty, and, made certain by looking around, we know what we have done – then what? What will life be like? Remember my poem?

“O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

“O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?”


What do you think your children will do, when they realize that you killed god?