The other mystery is the mystery of everything.  It’s the mystery of the question.  The ineluctable question of the Joycian mystery.  Part of it is how have we permitted this to go on for so long?  When I was young, I thought our generation of the 60’s would fix this whole thing.  But the political right came out to fuck everything up as usual, and so everybody turned tail and became businessmen.  They didn’t need to do too much fucking really; all they really needed to do was assimilate—like one-celled organisms do. 

    I had certain ideas back then.  I will try to summarize some of them:  we are the ones who have to make the changes! In our heads! In our world-view! The politicians won’t make the changes for us! We have to change and then elect people who have changed! Of course this is really difficult when at least half the people (republicans and conservative democrats) refuse to change and see the world differently.) These people refuse to face the fact that we human beings are fucking up the entire planet, and fucking each other up to boot.

2. Things do not get better by acting like we are computers or by utilizing the “business” model as an “ethic” or philosophy of life. These people who want everything in the world to run like a well-oiled business, or to replace ethics with “the business ethic” are just leading us all straight to hell. 

      People come up with great “fixes” quite often in history.  Some of the all-time great fixes have come and gone.  Freud’s psychoanalysis was a great fix that came and went. Sartre’s existentialism also.  Many religions are great fixes also, but they seem to do nothing for helping the world, though individual people seem to get relief from their troubles with them--some even go right to heaven through them.  Trouble with all the fixes is that finally they all wind up being theories.  Theories as well as bibles (written by inspired people) are man-made approximations of more ideal realities than the current problematic reality they are trying to obviate or modify in some way.  So, like within the scientific realm, all these fixes are constantly being modulated, changed, or discarded.  I, myself, came up with a fix about 20 years ago, that I have been trying to re-write and modernize here so that I can explain it to you, but I have to tell you, I am going to give up.  I think, I am just going to copy it on the Church of the Red Arrow and give it to you nearly exactly as I found it in an old drawer along with a lot of my other early writing.  Then you can decide if there is anything worth salvaging in it for incorporation into your musings.  So here it is (sort of) with just a little editing to try and bring the curse words more up to date:  (of course the real pity is when you fall in love with the wrong woman or wrong man).

  On second thought, there are certain things you just can’t write down.  You have a childish book, a plea for everyone to try and get along.  You have a childish plea for power brokers to just plain stop what they are doing, to start really caring about people over profits.  You plead for politicians to stop playing games with other people’s lives.  You point out the criminality of replacing ethics with the business ethic.  You plead for an end to ethnocentrism.  You want crazy people to be consulted and their higher vision utilized in decision-making.  You want people to look at them as the Indians looked at them:  as people who have been touched by God.  You plead for people to stop fooling themselves about everything, to stop selling out everywhere, to stop pretending that they are something they are not, to stop lying all the time and lying to themselves, to stop kissing ass and getting ahead and living in a dream world.  To see that we are not getting ahead—that when everyone in the world is constantly competing with one another to get ahead, get famous, get fucked, whatever, the end result of this is that the whole world just goes to hell.  No political system works.  All systems fail eventually, because people are not really as described by psychologists.  Normally distributed populations are a myth—this is a construct (and an apriori assumption) which creates it’s own false reality.  People are actually more different than similar.  There is no such thing as human nature.  People cannot be pre-packaged and then victimized by business-fucks all over the world.  They can, but the net result is you destroy the whole world.  Everything is much more complicated than we would like it to be.  True, people can be relied on to forget, businesses can exploit this broken memory.  We are bringing our world to its knees, but for what, for better ratings? For more votes? More money?  For what?   Just because it has always been this way, does that mean it always has to stay that way?  Can the mold, the old patterns never be broken?   Is that a law of physics?  Do certain people have to destroy everything in order to feel that they are on the right track to get into heaven as quickly as possible?  Is it really necessary for everyone to become famous, even if it is just on Facebook? Couldn’t we all just give up, take a deep breadth, give each other a big hug, and just collectively admit that we’re fucking up everything—how about we just start re-working the questions and start over.

                .............excerpt from "Church of the Red Arrow" by Michael Houlihan.   Available for $1.99 (minimum price they allow) as an ebook, or for more money as a hard copy at Amazon:      http://www.amazon.com/Church-Red-Arrow-ebook/dp/B004OEK6TS 

     also available in other e formats such as Sony for more money, unfortunately (they control the price):

  http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/jeff-harris/church-of-the-red-arrow/_/R-400000000000000400073