Full or partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline +  Forum Home + Open Forum – The-Not-Voter. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/  or to this bloggers main site at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com 


I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

THE-NOT-VOTER
14 Sitting At the Bottom of a Barrel…

…and singing a Latvian folk song:
“Strauja, strauja upe tecēj....”
(a fast, fast river flows).
Where does the fast river flow?
The barrel is too deep
for anyone at the bottom to see,
whether it is a river or whatever.
The barrel merrily bobs its way
to wherever the stream flows.”

As any Latvian will recognize, the above of course are not the words of the song. However, words to a song may change with time either wholly or in part. In the original version of the song, a horse fears the fast water, and the rider cannot cross the river. The rider urges the horse not to fear and move on. At the end of the song it is not clear however whether a crossing in fact took effect.

But the words of the song unexpectedly reveal the intentions of the rider. He has not come to the river to cross it, but to build on top of the fast flowing stream a fire. His reasons are shamanistic: he wishes to build the fire for the people who do not wish him well. If one listens to the rhythm of the melody, it indeed sounds like a shaman’s (burvis, ragana) incantation.

[It is unfortunate that the lovely melody of the song cannot be entertained here because the YouTube version incants scenes of WWII with Latvian legionnaires in German uniforms. This surely perverts the soothsayer’s magic and fast paced curse on ill wishers.]

When I was a young student and sang the song, none of the above ever entered my mind, except perhaps when it came to the words “I chopped my firewood (with my sword) on a rock.”* Being old enough to have been a cowherd and have seen live chickens suddenly dead, I knew well enough that no one in his right mind would strike his axe or sword against a stone. Therefore, these words encourage one to think that the song actually is a shaman’s incantation against his ill wishers (those who have declared a curse against him), those of his client, or those of his nation.

I was encouraged to think of and reminded myself of what I knew about magic incantations when I received the following two youtube clips. The first is a political campaign ad on behalf of two of Latvia’s foremost neo-capitalist, while the second one is their victims’ response.

AŠ kvadrātā - Stendzenieka variants
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m1gWH5-8qI&feature=related
AŠ kvadrātā - tautas vārds :) :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHteTxaSJZU&feature=related

It is obvious that the first ad is aggressive. It claims a 13% economic growth rate when the two heroes mentioned in the ad were (implicitly) riding high in government. The ad is unmistakably meant to put a curse on you who took power from us when we had ****** over the nation. We are ready to repeat the 13% growth clip squared if you elect us again.

The second ad, the one that is the response of those who received the curse of the first proves itself limp.

The ad responds by making ridicule of those who put the curse against them, but aside from ridicule (deserved) offers nothing new. It presents the future as more of the same. The ad suggests no tangible way to improve on the loss (to be compared to the death) of 200,000 emigrants, the vast majority of who represent the proletariat, but contains a good number of educated people—because there is no job for them in Latvia. The ad makes no criticism of those who originated the cursing, though it they are the ones whose economic policies bankrupted the nation, and in the name of capitalism lost the nation 200,000 of some of its best.

If the world ever returns to financial health and material prosperity and Latvia's economic situation improves with it, these 200,000 absent Latvians will likely be replaced by 200,000 Chinese. The Chinese are of course very nice people, but they will hardly know anything about Latvian roots, even less than when Latvians do not know much about their roots themselves. What has happened with the minds of these shamans? Are they possessed and is their power of possession squared? And is this why no prophecy comes from their mouths?

One can nth the curse and return it as a direct hit. For example, it could issue the curse on behalf of the proletariat and because of the harm that has been made to the nation. Almost all the 200,000 are working age people. They are the physical muscle of Latvia. The thought however never enters the mind of any of the cursed, because that has to be backed up with a vision of a more promising future and how to get there. By repeating to the curse of the first with the same images they use, but changing the words and getting no further than to make ridicule, is a tempest in the teapot between two banalities.

The fashion of the world in our time is to rule by not knowing how to govern. The Commandment that rules says: Do not kill:/ but reduce to slavery. This is what human rights amount to.

But, hey,

have we not all survived to be among the live ones? And have not many been reduced to slavery—very much so when it comes to using our minds? There are of course ways to bring the Latvian economy back to its feet, but none of the ‘democratic’ authorities dare offer it.

One offer that can be made is to realize the suggestion of a Dutch organization by the name of De Einder, or Horizon  which asks that people who reach the age of seventy years be given the right to decide for themselves whether they are also “at a point where they consider their lives ‘complete.’”

When the choice is between losing a nation and doing what it takes to keep it alive, then the people who believe that their lives are complete and they wish to exit [as incidentally did the now forgotten Christians (the Cathars, Bogomils, Lollards, Johns Children and others)] are right. Countryside tourism, with a meaning that reaches far beyond fishing and other forms of escape, would then return again as something real and enliven the economic scene. If it was restrained in producing the reality that now circumscribes and diminishes life with an offer of virtual life in the city, the city will shrink down to an acceptable level.

Therefore, vote by NOT-VOTING in the upcoming 2010 elections. See previous blogs for more arguments on behalf of the NOT-VOTE.
Asterisks & Other Readings
*Uz akmeņa malku cirtu,/ Strautā kūru uguntiņu. /Lai sildāsi tie ļautiņi,/Kas man labu nevēlējā.
Compulsory voting in the EU Parliamentary elections
http://www.ceps.eu/files/book/1886.pdf
The abstentionist elephant
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8783/
Electronic polls
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10102126.stm
On the Meaning of Voting
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/bylund/bylund1.html
British Government Attempts to Bracket the Constitution
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8681624.stml
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146989
http://www.alternet.org/story/146940/barbara_ehrenreich%3A_why_forced_positive_thinking_is_a_total_crock?page=2
If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com or http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com

Full or partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum – The-Not-Voter. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/  or to this bloggers main site at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

THE-NOT-VOTER
13 How To Nullify Sin

Everyone makes mistakes and learns from mistakes. The greatest mistake ever made was not by Eve handing Adam an apple (today no one can imagine how such a gesture could ever have been imagined a sin), but the event that led to mortal combat between Abel and Cain. While today no one knows what the argument between the two was, we know that it was resolved by a fight that ended in the death of Abel.

I am not of the school who thinks that Cain, the victor, was either right or wrong. When it comes to a naked fight, the outcome is not predictable. Who would have predicted that David would kill Goliath? The victor, to my mind, could have also been Abel.

The result of the mistake made by Abel and Cain was less the fact that Abel was killed, but that Cain for ever thereafter suffered from posttraumatic stress syndrome. It was this syndrome that manifested the power of memory and forced the descendants of Cain and Abel to seek solutions to conflicts that do not end in death.

The answer discovered by our forebears to the problem posed by Abel and Cain was the Sacred King, a figure who could resolve the most difficult of personal differences by taking upon himself the necessity to justify the death of Abel and free Cain from posttraumatic stress, guilt. The Sacred King did this by declaring himself responsible for the death of Able by claiming to have ordered Cain to be the executioner. The Bible calls the Sacred King “Lord”, who said (to Cain and all those within his hearing): “Whosoever slayeth thee, vengeance shall be taken upon him sevenfold. And I the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” It is only because of the mark on him made by the Sacred King why Cain lived on and was able live with himself.

While the above is a deconstruction of the story in Genesis (4:9-16), the Bible—most likely written in the days of Secular kings (though they still paraded as Popes in their own right)—avoids explaining that the “Lord” (king) frees Cain of blood libel by taking the libel unto himself. This interpretation explains the spirit of the lost civilization of our forebears.

The figure of the Sacred King has been forgotten in our day. It is remembered only by poets, anthropologists, literati interested in mythology, and an occasional proletarian who loses his job. The latter, sometimes feeling that with the loss of the job, goes loss of a dedicated life, may be seized by the spirit of Cain and go on a killing spree. After coming back to his senses, he is as quickly seized by the spirit of the “Lord”—and erases his blood libel by self-sacrificing himself.

Many contemporary philosophers have been so overpoweringly possessed by delusions of the benefits of democracy that they not only not mention the king anymore, but the posttraumatic stress syndrome never enters into and becomes a reality in their philosophy. Full of denial of the Other (Lord, King, God) as real in the space among the stars, they are unable to see the Other within themselves. Thus, our modern “kings” for the most part are known by the name of “president”, whether a Pinochet or X, both in their own distinct way unelected wimps when it comes to comparing them with the Sacred King.

The governments of the civilization that preceded ours proved (at least to themselves and many of their partakers) that to avoid violence does not mean to avoid death either as a subject or in reality. Unfortunately, this civilization disintegrated, because the Sacred King was displaced by the Secular King of out time. With no authority over death except by way of mass slaughter of his own and imagined “other” people, the modern president is the North Pole to the Sun’s son, the Sacred King. In Latvia the President is become the Fisher King, one wounded in the groin and unable to move but to go fish in the River Daugava just outside his residence, the Castle of Riga. Whenever he catches a fish, he remembers that River Daugava’s most ancient name is Yaunava, a virgin girl. Incidentally, it is the partidocratic Saeima through its Speaker who put the chastity belt on him besides.

……………………………………………………..
In the Latvia of 2010, now 800 years into the era that felled the spirit of the Son of the Sun, John (Jahnis), the Fisher King reigns supreme, paradoxically by not being remembered.

This is sufficient reason why this blogger to advocate NOT-VOTING. To vote in our day means to prolong the agony of suffering a Belgian President of the EU preside as the Fisher-Father over Latvia, while his son becomes Latvia’s de facto Vice-president. To quote Georges Bataille from his essay “Jesuve”:

“The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet it has been, due to its universality, a human action more significant than any other. Independely of each other, different peoples invented different forms of sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the conditions of present-day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior.”

On the other hand, if a NOT-VOTE succeeds in Latvia, it will succeed in the rest of Europe. Speaking in political language, this means that the Fisher King’s wound is healing.

Asterisks & Other Readings
* I am using the term in the sense used by Georges Bataille in his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism".
Compulsory voting in the EU Parliamentary elections
http://www.ceps.eu/files/book/1886.pdf
The abstentionist elephant
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8783/
Electronic polls
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10102126.stm  
On the Meaning of Voting
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/bylund/bylund1.html
British Government Attempts to Bracket the Constitution
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8681624.stml  
Ground Zero for Thought
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146989  
Why Forced Positive Thinking Is A Lot Of Crock?
http://www.alternet.org/story/146940/barbara_ehrenreich%3A_why_forced_positive_thinking_is_a_total_crock?page=2  


These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.

Full or partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline + Forum Home + Open Forum – The-Not-Voter. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/  or to this bloggers main site at http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/

Pictures: The Great Latvian rhubarb.


I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.

THE-NOT-VOTER
12 Do NOT-VOTE!
Have Another Singing Revolution!


For twenty years Latvians have been voting themselves a death sentence. At the beginning (1991) to be positivist was excusable, because the nation was just breaking away from the grasp of what was the former Soviet Union and had no hindsight on itself. It was not yet obvious then that voting into office a Saeima with the same old Constitution to fence the government, the result will be the institutionalization of elite with leadership qualities limited to exceptions, but the norm mostly will be advancement of one’s private estate. This is the reality that Latvians have not yet come to grips with. It is time they did.

To refuse to tangle with the present government and continuing to cast votes for a list of parties and candidates that offer no choice is for cowards. Only a NOT-VOTER by NOT-VOTING can resolve the issue and return Latvia to life as a nation. Latvians need to create a Constitutional crisis for themselves in order to provide themselves with an opportunity to find a second life.

A NOT-VOTE, that is to say, a nigh universal abstention from elections by Latvians, may leave the government insisting that it has de jure powers all the same. However, a government the voter does not requite with respect will have problems convincing anyone that it has authority. To put it another way, the government may be in position possess the State, but it will have lost the Nation. Under such conditions (lest government wishes to declare itself a dictator) the only thing a government can do is resign and call a “Constitutional Assembly to Rewrite the Constitution”.

While the State points out to its foreign guests the calm of Latvian citizens given the nation’s stressful financial and economic situation and the dire—indeed intolerable—consequences of it, a significant element of the nation agrees with the government by leaving Latvia for other nations and try to join the community there. While the Latvian media mention 100,000 to 150,000 Latvians leaving for parts foreign, the actual figure is probably closer to 200,000 (out of 2.3 million total population). Add this to a government that for twenty years invested little in rebuilding the nation’s community and material capital to survive the trauma of the Soviet experience, and the result is that we have a nation with almost no proletariat. What remains consists of the elderly and those who for one reason or other do not have the qualifications or wherewithal to leave.

To return to economic conditions, such as made for a homogenous centre about the city, a time which the Latvians remember as “the 1930s”, today seems impossible. The 1930s was too a time when the heterogenous proletariat felt that it had something, a flower—a job—and hope of upward mobility. The crushing of the hope that stands as a signifier for the nation’s psyche in the 1930s is entirely due to the Pope of the East, the Pope of the West, and the forced change brought by a hyped consumer mentality. Unfortunately, the encouraged spirit of those times, strong enough to survive a half a century of Sovietization and still demand an independent Latvia has been betrayed. In the beginning there was something in the air that brought me to Latvia after fifty-one years abroad. It brought many others as well. The challenges to one’s survival after fifteen years in Latvia, helped along by the collapse of trust in Western finance, engross a pensioner.

Because I was not interested in taking an active part in Latvian politics (I first had to become reacquainted with the country), I spent much of my time in the countryside and came in contact with the Latvian proletarians-populistinians (for lack of a better word) in the countryside round about the regions of Valmiera and Limbazhi.

I have been reeducated, surprised, horrified, and angered by what I found and still see.

Nearly twenty years after emerging from an era under the rule of an impoverished East and making a headlong dive into the era of the “advanced” West, a homogenous (partidocratic) State sits on the neck of a prostrate national community. This community can survive into the future only if it rethinks and remakes itself.

The business of the Latvian Saeima has not been the business of community building except in the narrowest interpretation of the term. To escape drawing attention to its betrayal of the community, the establishment still runs from the East to the West, when the West has already turned East. The role that a nation like Latvia can play in bringing the East and West together and gain for itself economic advantage by doing so is never mentioned.

So, welcome NATO! You are from VIP-land. Our ex-surgeon President welcomes you to our Pils (Castle) and will show you the world’s most expensive bridge, not to mention the very expensive glass house known as the “Castle of Light” on the left bank of the Daugava River. We will fight in your ranks in Afghanistan. We are proud you are having this conference in Latvia, even if we are surprised over the Patriot missiles in Poland. We understand your coming is your way of assuring the East Europeans (proletariat and all) that as bad as poverty is and will yet get, you are here with your expensive missiles and other war machinery to protect us and bring us hope.

However, consider this: while the radicalized proletariat is expressing its radicalization by leaving Latvia, and the remaining heterogenes are hanging on by their fingernails (nails breaking turning into the screams of suicides), what little remains of homogeneity (largely an alliance of partidocracies) is no less a heterogenous minority than the others—except that it has the sadistic means to insist that it is the crown of the Latvian nation.* The other homogenes (the ones who were once part of the homogenous community) feel themselves sucked downward among the populistinians and may well become radicalized, too. The 90 students that graduate from the Latvian University’s Chemistry Department annually have no job offers in Latvia, though they and the pharmaceutical companies on location could help develop and market Johns Grass medications to an increasingly tense world. A long dead Jesus and his untrue story determine that the nation may not explore the feasibility of the idea.

The enemies of NOT-VOTING are many, of course. The dysfunctional system of government is held sacred by many no-brainers. Witness the Chairwoman of the Latvian Trade and Manufacturers Association repeating for the benefit of Latvian voters the well-worn neo-liberalist-positivist phrase: “Everyone is responsible for h/her own life. It is not the banks, or the administrators of credit collection agencies, or anyone else who is at fault, but everyone is responsible for his- and her own life.” In short, vote for the status quo that got Latvians into the present trouble, and be dumb enough to vote for the partidocracy once again. [For the article providing the quote (in Latvian) click here.]

To those who ask: What good will a NOT-VOTE accomplish? here is the answer: NOT MUCH if the system of government is responsible, functions well, and erstwhile candidates stand at election time. But if there is little or no choice among candidates, because all support the same corrupt and dysfunctional system? What does one do when the candidates for election are Ini, Mini, Mani, and Mo? Does one call such elections “democracy”, “democracy”?

Though there is no Ini, Mini, Mani, or Mo standing for the October 2010 elections in Latvia, none of the candidates or the parties standing behind them has a track record that inspires trust. All the candidates wear their left shoes on the right foot; in effect, the candidates speak, walk, stand and give their citizen witnesses the jitters, the “disbelieving belief” syndrome. If one of the candidates unbeknownst to the voters were to be in earnest about returning the nation to hegemony, then h/she could achieve this only by effecting short-term (hopefully) authoritarianism. Else the other parties will soon find ways to render h/her a babbling fool.

Do the Latvians have an alternative to the NOT-VOTE? I do not think so. This is too good a time to miss taking part in another “Singing Revolution”. Meet at the polls to sing, not to NOT-VOTE.

Asterisks & Other Readings
* I am using the term in the sense used by Georges Bataille in his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism".
Compulsory voting in the EU Parliamentary elections
http://www.ceps.eu/files/book/1886.pdf
The abstentionist elephant
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8783/
Electronic polls
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10102126.stm
On the Meaning of Voting
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/bylund/bylund1.html
British Government Attempts to Bracket the Constitutionhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/8681624.stml
Ground Zero for Thought
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146989
Why Forced Positive Thinking Is A Lot Of Crock?
http://www.alternet.org/story/146940/barbara_ehrenreich%3A_why_forced_positive_thinking_is_a_total_crock?page=2

These blogs tend to be a continuum of an idea or thought, which is why—if you are interested in what you read—you are encouraged to consider reading the previous blog and the blog hereafter.


Partial entries of my blogs may be found at LatviansOnline http://latviansonline.com/forum/  + Forum Home + Open Forum – The-Not-Voter. If you copy this blog for your files, or copy to forward, or otherwise mention its content, please credit the author and http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com  or http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/