Of Freedom and Idols

An old friend of mine posted an essay by Domingo Castro de Guzman in her blog. Check it out:

http://sarahbelle.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2005/10/why_be_a_revolu.html

The essay, like a lot of the discourse on liberation and freedom these days, smacks of the postmodern tendency to take post-structuralist assumptions to their logical conclusion--a totalizing discourse that ironically started out to combat totalizing discourses.

I feel uneasy about the essay, suspicious that there might be verbal sleight-of-hand involved. First, it defines the revolution as negative liberation, liberation "from" something instead of freedom "toward" something. Then it lists down almost everything that can be construed as an object for idolism. some of the items in the list are even things some of us don't view as "bad" or needing freedom from ("the nation," "work," etc.) It pushes us and challenges us to take away any metaphysical ground beneath our feet. It denounces "God, Man, society, the proletariat, the race the nation, the party, the feminine, the masculine, the androgyne" because it "amounts to the same thing--dolism." It basically warns us against the dangers of fetishism.

At this point in the essay, I was expecting one of two things: that he would either 1) pursue this liberation viewed negtively to its radical conclusion and theorize how a social order free from everything would even look like, or 2) replace the vacuum of the metaphysical idols he denounces with something else. I think that it is the second option he chooses to do. For work, science, nation, God, even the proletariat are now replaced by the just-as-metaphysical "love." Granted that he avoids metaphysical love by drawing our attentions to personal love, he nevertheless leaves the issue of how personal love can translate into structural freedom. The worst totalitarian rulers can be very loving fathers and husbands, after all. And even if were all to be magically transformed into Mother Teresa, the poor would still be poor.

I'm not saying love is not a good thing. I'm saying love here seems to be fetishized just as badly as we fetishize God or the proletariat. Moreover, i have a nagging suspicion that "freedom" itself is here being fetishized. The second paragraph describing his ideal society reads like a hippie commune. This is essentially what you get when "liberation viewed negatively" is itself fetishized. Why should freedom be an end in itself? And why should freedom from the Collective necessarily be a good thing. We human beings have always operated on two levels when it comes to love--the personal where we love people around us "as persons" and the political where we love "the collective," be it family, tribe, or nation not because we are idolists but because the collective is part of who we are. So added to my suspicion of his concept of "love," i am also wary of the extreme individualism of his version of liberation.

So where am I coming from? My own contention, until I become otherwise convinced by a good essay, is that we cannot escape a metaphysical ground. Now, i can be convinced otherwise if an essay can show how it is to be done. I feel that in this essay, however, the author fails to do this and merely replaces the fetish of God and nation with the fetish of an anarchist community founded on personal love. Until it can be truly demonstrated that we can live without idols, then we may have to content ourselves with choosing our idols intelligently. Moreover, I am suspicious of discourses that try to transcend totalizing concepts such as God or other "idols" by wanting to destroy all these concepts in a manner that seem just as totalizing as the next discourse.

in short, i think the author is as much an idolist as i am now. Despite the supposed radical epistemological breaks occuring these days, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes is still right: "there is nothing new under the sun." Now, as in the old days, battles are still being fought in the name of idols. Perhaps they always will be.

Exploding the Nation

If we were to accept the version of Philippine history as an unfinished revolution, a revolution initiated by the "revolt of the masses" but was later hi-jacked by the bourgeoisie, then what we have is a divided nation. In fact, our nationhood is even suspect. Once upon a time, the masses dreamed of and fought for a nationhood of free citizens only to wake up in a nightmare of internal colonialism. The old Spanish masters have been replaced by local ones who in turn serve the interests of the old regime now transformed into the universal fellowship of capitalists, otherwise known as globalization. The masses remain enslaved. There is no nation, at least for them. The nation-state is invented by the bourgeosie for the bourgeoisie. The masses have been silenced.

Part of this silence is the peasant/proletarian complicity in the narrative of the nation. Filipino television has created a nationhood not based on a fellowship of free citizens but an affinity based on Nora Aunor, Joseph Estrada, FPJ, Sharon Cuneta, and Judy Ann Santos--icons defining wall between the adoring masses and the godlike elite. This is a nationhood that structures salvation not in terms of a peasant revolution but in terms of begging. Thousands among the urban poor fall in line every day at the studios of GMA and ABS-CBN for a chance at winning money from noontime game shows. Urban poor communities pray that Willie Revillame should come down from heaven and perform miraculous deeds and build schools and houses in his program, Willingly Yours, which is just the newest incarnation of older models such as Kapwa Ko, Mahal Ko--programs that ease the bourgeoise guilt through benevolence in the form of ephemeral consumables that do nothing to change the material relations that enslave the poor or to give them the means to transcend these material relations.

While the proletarian of Europe have failed to achieve their revolutionary potential because they have become too comfortable, the proletarian of the Phillipines is continuing to fail because it has become complicit in a narrative of nationhood that naturalizes poverty.The same television industry that promotes a nationhood based on such shallow icons such as actors is the same industry that ignored the EDSA 3 of the lumpen who marched to Malacanang palace to demand the return to power of a deposed president Joseph Estrada. The irony lies in the fact that Joseph Estrada was created by the media to serve as the opiate the masses (the entertainment industry becoming a kind of religion with its own casts of prophets and heroes). Subversion, no matter how much it is repressed in the national unconscious, has funny ways of re-surfacing.

BUt the fact remains that our tradition of EDSA revolutions is losing its revolutionary potential (the most recent one having even failed to crystallize) because it remains trapped in the ideology of the nation. All three EDSA revolutions are, in fact, counter-revolutionary. They have merely wasted the crisis of capitalism that have pushed the poor to act, wasted all that energy, in order to manifest a "people power" that is nothing less than a lie. People power is a hegemonic and unconscious drive of the bourgeois nation-state that directs the wrath of the masses into the wrong targets in order to reinstate its hegemonic order. So EDSA I had its toppling of Marcos that enshrined Cory, EDSA II had its toppling of Erap that enshrined Gloria, EDSA III had its attempt to topple Gloria to restore Erap, the almost-EDSA IV again targeted Gloria but failed to crystallize because it had nothing and no one with which to replace her. All this energy, this mass rage, the Philippine Left is unable to harness for the proletarian revolution.

The claim of the Philippine Left is that they have no illusions about EDSA revolutions and are merely working on a tactical alliance with the right-wing elements. For what? They think that by helping to disrupt the operation of liberal democracy, the masses will get enraged and will one day rebel. But the masses already are enraged. All that these fruitless, misdirected people power revolutions are accomplishing is to demoralize them even further, show them that mass action accomplishes nothing, thereby killing their sense of agency that crucial historical moments have managed to produce. Worse, these "tactical alliances" are doing nothing to help the Left build credibility in the eyes of the people. Most people see the "tactical alliances" for what they are--political opportunism.

EDSA revolutions are not revolutions. If we are to transcend the nation, we must first explode the concept. The grip of a shallow nationhood on the minds of our people must be broken and replaced by something else. If there's one group of people who can help create what that "something" else, it's the Philippine Left. So why don't we stop on the silliness of these "people powers" and move on to more serious business?

Patriarchy in the Garden

The Bible, and Christianity with it, has been condemned time and again as phallocentric. The fact is overlooked that the dominant discourse during the time of its inscription was phallocentric. The Bible, after all, is the word of God inspired in men and not the actual word of God. So why should contemporary feminists fault Biblical writers for not being feminists? And even if the Bible were hypothetically the actual word of God, like the Koran is believed to be so, why should God (who would be speaking to humanity in order to be understood) speak using a discourse that would be centuries ahead of its time culturally and politically? In short, we should always be conscious of the gulf between us and the original audience of the Bible. Instead of condemning it for failing the discursive standards of modern cultural politics, why not praise it for the radical elements that allowed it to transcend its cultural context? After all, St. Paul talked about how there was neither slave nor freeman (and neither man nor woman) in the presence of Christ. And this, eighteen centuries before the abolition of slavery in Western society!

But non-Christian feminists also cannot be blamed for their reaction to the Bible. In truth, they're not really reacting to the Bible but to the phallocentric discourse of our time that uses the Bible to justify itself. I hate it when the Bible is used to justify the most reactionary of views, further giving the impression that Christianity is a reactionary religion. The Bible is presented as an unassailable arbiter of issues, but it is presented through the kind of commentaries written in the Middle Ages.

One particular discourse that seems to promote patriarchy is this whole reading of Eve as the sinner who led Adam to sin. The popular view is that Eve bought the serpent's sales talk when she ate the forbidden fruit and gave some to Adam who unwittingly ate some as well. A close reading of the text, however, would show that this is a false reading:

"And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make onewise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat." (Genesis 3: 6, King James Version)

Notice that the husband was "with her." Other versions make this fact even more self-evident:

"She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it" (New International Version).

"She also gave some to her husband, who was with her" (New Living Translation).

"She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate" (New King James Version).

In other words, the view that Adam was off somewhere while Eve listened to the serpent and eventually seduced him into sin is wrong. He was with Eve. He was listening to the serpent, too. But it was Eve who was doing all the talking. Some of the modern commentaries call this episode not the "The Temptation of Eve" but "The Silence of Adam." This is actually the basis for Dr. Larry Crabb's book, The Silence of Adam: Becoming Men of Courage in a World of Chaos.

Catholic commentaries in the Middle Ages drew heavily on St. Paul's interpretation that Eve led Man to sin and would be redeemed through the pain of childbirth. But we should take Paulinian epistles for what they are--commentaries bound by their culture. This is what exegesis and hermeneutics are for--to find out the original meaning of a text relative to its cultural context and to see how this meaning translates into ours. Ignorant Christians do the exact opposite--they read the text using modern systems of meaning (such as the meaning that condemns the homosexual when the homosexual subjectivity, as opposed to the homosexual act, is a product of modernity), and then try to apply the wrongly perceived meaning of a centuries-old text into our own time.

Paul's interpretation of The Fall was his commentary, his exegesis and hermeneutics that were a product of his age, not ours. It is our task to investigate the truth not only by examing Paul, but by going straight to the source: Genesis 3: 6.

Genesis 3: 6 tells us that Adam was with Eve while the serpent was giving them the sales talk. What was the motivation then for Adam's silence? The context was that God told them they could eat from the tree of life, but could not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Prohibition from the knowledge of good evil here does not refer to the trite interpretation that our ancestors were amoral like innocent animals. Good and evil are categories that shift according to subject positions. Good and evil are not pre-existing categories; certainly they do not pre-exist God. It is the ultimate Subject, God, "the ground of our being," who has created these categories because all things emanate from Him. Therefore, it is in the nature of good and evil to become categories not in the process of discovering a pre-existing moral condition, but in creating that moral standard. To "know" good and evil is not to find it, but to create it. In other words, God forbid Adam and Eve access not to the moral order but to the means of creating a moral order. Defining good and evil is supposed to be for God alone. To chart your own moral course, to be existentially "free" in an absurd world with no script to follow but your own (because God's moral order, representing God in our consciousness, is dead) is to become like God. Adam and Eve were, during that time, immortal but were not like God. By partaking of this tree with the power over good and evil, they would become like God.

So Adam was silent because on the one hand he was seduced by the power, but he was also afraid of God's warning that they would die. He thinks: what if the serpent is wrong? What if i eat and fall dead. So he allows Eve to be led by the serpent, allows her to eat the fruit, observes whether or not she will fall down dead, and when he realizes that she did not die and therefore the fruit of power was perfectly safe to eat, he had some himself. Adam turned Eve, the love of his life ("flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones"), into his personal guinea pig.

The Silence ofAdam marks an event in the history of male/female relationship when the unity of marriage was torn asunder by personal desire separate from the desire of the diffused identities of Man and Woman as a couple. There was a breakdown of communication, not because they passively lost the means to understand each other, but because Man deliberately and actively decided to pursue his own desire (for godhood), structuring the woman's subjectivity to fit this desire and turning her into a mere object for the achievement of power. The Silence of Adam (not the Temptation of Eve) marks the the birth of the patriarchy.

Phallocentric Christian discourse claims God put Eve under the dominion of Man because of her sin. On the contrary, by destroying the original unity of man and woman through his selfish desires, it was Adam who had already subjected Eve under his dominion in order to become like God. Patriarchy was thus born before they were even driven from Eden, and patriarchy is the is the reason why God drove them from Eden. Patriarchy represents the rending of Man's (and Woman's) relationship with God and the rending of Man's unity with Woman. Driven out of Eden, Man and Woman attempt to restore this unity by making a family, but it is gone. They speak different languages, create different meanings, and experience different desires. The sacrament of marriage becomes the imperfect vessel through which we try to restore the unity of Woman to Man, as well as our unity with God. It is exactly when communication breaks down in the marriage, when desires and priorities become so incompatible and irreconcilable and both parties give up communicating in order to pursue isolation, that marriage fails and mirrors the original failure of humanity to achieve wholeness caused by The Silence of Adam.

The battle of the sexes is a fallen condition, a fallenness structured by patriarchy or the Law of the Father. The Father of this Law is not God but Adam whose "genes" we men indeed share. These genes are asleep during the masquerade of romance but awakens like a hidden monster as we move through the fallen structures of our culture in which we play and re-play in an endless dialectic of "what-could-be" and "what-could-have-been" the institution of marriage, beginning from the honeymoon of our youth, the having and rearing of children, all the way to aging and the confrontation of mortality.

Ideology and Alienation

Alienation, they say, can be traced to the industrial revolution when craftsmen were forced to become factory workers. They simply could not compete either by way of volume or quality against the factory. And so they had to give in to the new world order. In their workshops, they owned the means of production; in the factories, they didn’t. In their workshops, they were the masters; they made and sold products. In the factories, they were little more than slaves; they sold their labour power for products owned by the company and driven by capital. In their workshops, they were involved in all stages of a product’s creation; they were like artists infusing each product with their creativity. In the factories, the manufacturing process was fragmented into distinct stages, each requiring one worker to a series of repetitive actions. There is no creativity there.

A factory worker doesn’t look at a factory product and say, “It was I who made that.” The worker becomes part of the machine and is just as expendable as any spare part. A factory worker cannot take a factory product and say, “This is mine and I will sell it.” It is not his. It is owned by the factory. Alienation is the phenomenon in which a worker becomes divorced from his labour and the work of his hands, an abomination that is so far removed from our natural ability to, like God, admire our work and say, “It is good.”

I think, however, that the feeling of alienation resulting from this divorce between a labourer and his labour does not depend on the method of manufacturing per se. For example, Japanese management styles (at least in the middle of the 20th century) were very effective in keeping workers happy. The workers, despite working under Western-style factories, did not feel alienated. This was because the Japanese management system was designed to effectively allow the Japanese worker to identify with the factory. Workers were “employed for life,” subjected to a corporate culture that developed company loyalty—singing pro-company songs in the morning, attending company parties, being exposed to all sorts of propaganda about the goodness of the company, the progress of the company, the superiority of the company over its rivals. The worker, in identifying with the company, allows his subjectivity to be diffused into this collective identity, this community bound by the common goal of increased production and profit.

This is propaganda at it’s best. After all, the workers do not, in supposedly sharing in the company’s dreams, actually get shares in the company’s profit. But it is exactly the genius of “motivational activities” that allows the worker to identify with the company while all the company needs to do is maintain an appearance of identifying with the workers. The Japanese were pretty good at it, and so their workers were blinded and unable to see the reality of their alienation. Ignorance is bliss. But this is one way in which alienation is countered—if I am made to believe that I am an integral part of the company (not just an expendable worker but a consciousness among a community of subjectivities united as one identity, one community) then I can be made to believe that I made the company’s products, I own the company as the company owns me, and I share the company’s success.

This success of corporate management in imposing this process of identification is apparent when managers announce the status of the company to their workers. When the company experiences success, the workers rejoice, they feel “good”—even though their salaries don’t really change. And so they work harder to maintain this good feeling of success and are even prepared to make sacrifices for the company (forced overtime, delayed salary raise, etc.) if the company experiences difficulty because they see the company’s success or failure as their own.

In the past, people thought of alienation as something that only plagued the workers. Most of us have gotten over this naiveté. It has become obvious that professionals, though exploited in different terms, are likewise vulnerable to alienation.

The modern office is not that different, after all, from a factory. Writers who learned so much about their craft in college end up doing dull, generic reports and letters. Like the factory worker, they can find themselves drained of any capacity for creativity as they are driven by demands of efficiency to use word processors to cut and paste generic texts from one document to another.

I am reminded of Bubbles Guerrero who said one evening while photocopying hundreds of materials way into the wee hours of dawn (8 hours of overtime): “I can’t believe I studied twelve units of Philosophy in college for this.”

In truth, many young professionals entering junior corporate positions are experiencing this alienation, leading to a phenomenon that has been dubbed the “quarter-life crisis,” a time when the promises of youth are broken in the face of alienating professional reality.

Not all yuppies suffer from this, of course. Some companies, especially multi-national companies, are particularly good at making junior employees feel good. These employees are given all sorts of bonuses and incentives and indoctrinated into company values of loyalty and honour. These things encourage identification with the company. Like the Japanese workers of half a century ago, modern yuppies can feel just as happy—and be just as blind to the alienating circumstances of their professional labour. Call centre employees in the Philippines, for example, can become ecstatic over freebies and bonuses, they feel lucky for belonging with the company as opposed to working for some pathetic organization where workers are unappreciated and underpaid (like, say, a Philippine government agency)—all the while ignoring the fact that their foreign counterparts are earning several times as much.

This feeling of superiority that leads individuals to read other people’s lives and beliefs as somehow wrong or inferior while failing to realize the contradictions in our own lives—contradictions that upon realization could lead either to suicide or revolt—is a result “ideology” as formulated by Louis Althusser. Ideology is what keeps us happy, what allows us the privilege of bliss in ignorance of the things that ideology allows us not to see. The ideology of social mobility, for example, that has driven millions of Filipino youth to study in order to achieve personal success is a type of ideology propagated by the State and by the educational ideological state apparatus. This ideology, by pointing to the educational system as the official means toward personal progress, allows the State to shift the blame from itself (for its corruption and inefficiency) to the people themselves. In fact, the educational system itself is the means in which the ruling class keeps class boundaries and counters the social mobility it is supposed to produce. For example, students in public schools (where poor people go) are blamed for not reading when their libraries have no books, for not being smart enough when their teachers are overworked and underpaid, and for not passing entrance exams to prestigious universities when the difference between the quality of education in public schools and private schools (where the children of the middle-class and the elite go) is so vast.

Poor children are allowed by the state to go through the school experience so that in the end, when they end up in some dead-end job, they can be made to believe that their failure in life is nobody else’s fault but their own—a belief that is essential in an ideal worker who is submissive and obedient because he knows his “natural” place. But how can it be their fault when they never had a chance from the very beginning? Their poverty forced them to avail themselves of poor-quality education—education for the poor—which in turn determined that they would remain poor and deserve to be so.

Not all poor children fail. Some are able to rise despite the fact that the game is rigged. These are the people who become the poster boys and girls for the ideology that education must lead to success. I was once (and still is?) such a poster boy.

This, then, is the role of ideology. Ideology is the comfortable cage that blinds us from seeing that we are in fact imprisoned. The full force of alienation occurs when ideology, for some reason, crumbles. We are either forced to suffer the alienation or forced to find release by seeking escape.

In my previous post, I sounded as if, just because of the fact that I had decided to pursue an academic career, I have somehow escaped alienation. Because I no longer needed to cut and paste texts onto generic documents but was now in an environment where I could read what I wanted and write what I wanted, I made the silly assumption that I have now “awakened from my torpor” and am now "resurrected." This is wrong. At the end of the day, I know that I’ll be working in institutions where dissent is expressed not in order to inspire radical change but in order to be contained. And who is to say, even if one were to be inspired to revolution, that the acts and institutions of revolution are themselves free from subtler but no less dark machinations of ideology?

Ideology is inescapable. I merely transfered myself to another part of the cage. I laugh at myself and my previous entry.

Still, I go on. I go on believing that, despite the realization that there is no way out of the cage, there must still be avenues for redemption.

Reflections on Subjectivity

This blog is a forum for my intellectual posturing and a venue for exercising my faculty for theorizing. Blogging is one of the many venues that the conditions of late capitalism and its concomitant postmodernist ideology provide me to make me believe that I am a unique individual with unique ideas and desires even as I ignore the fact that I am only as original as the millions of existing bloggers flooding the web with their own drivel. Many of us believe so much in this uniqueness, this individuality, that we come to the unwarranted conclusion that we must be interesting enough to broadcast our subjectivity for all the world to see, perhaps not seeing that in the process of capitulation—reducing our individualities to our choice of weblog service, web layout, links, personality quizzes—we are in fact allowing the internet in particular and global capitalism in general to turn us into objects. We become objects when, in this mode, we cease to become who we are and instead become something to be perceived by others. To blog is to create a representation of our subjectivity, but this representation takes on a life of its own to the point that it becomes us.

I have, in my previous entry, relegated introspection to the realm of the unworthy. How else can I read my abandoning childeoftheblood.blogdrive.com in favor of using a weblog service that most of my friends are using and justifying it in the name of “in-depth criticism of culture and society?” This is, of course, another posturing, a(n) (un)conscious attempt to distance myself from the reified masses who commodify their experiences for public consumption and instead end up being consumed by their signifier. The distancing is, of course, a failure. This very mode of discourse is already tantamount to the triumph of the autonomy of representation within me. I am already in the belly of the beast. While some theorists glory in the immanence of ideology and some reject it, I resign myself to it. This is the postmodern condition, an evil and idolatrous age that has allowed the fallen nature of the cosmos to masquerade as the actual nature of the order of things, signifying perhaps the coming of the Anti-Christ, that is, assuming that the Anti-Christ were a person. If the Anti-Christ were to be revealed instead as a condition (as I believe it is revealing itself now), then the Anti-Christ, the swallower of souls, is already here. But just because I have been swallowed, it does not mean I cannot try to hack the beast from the inside.

It would be fair to compare my assessment of the current age to millenarian utterances that were revealed by the forward march of history to be false. To claim the uniqueness of this age, of this stage of social and technological development, and draw from it ultra-pessimistic or ultra-optimistic links to the endpoint of some grand narrative is surely no different from the posturing of modernity which has been present in the world in various times, places, and forms. And yet, one cannot dismiss the phenomena that do suggest that human history is undergoing a radical “cleansing by fire”—the triumph of representation over the material and the ideal, the death of the subject brought about by capitalism’s idolatrous fetishization of human labor and commodity, and the death of the Absolute Subject, of God, in the postmodern ideology that has dominated our understanding of reality in one way or another here in the 21st century. All these point to an unraveling that shall be terrible to behold.

No other aspect of this unraveling is nearer to the experience of the upwardly mobile young professional than the death of the subject. The average yuppie glories in the consumer culture and does not give a damn about the death of God. These conditions of postmodernity do not terrify the yuppy. What will terrify the yuppy is the death of the subject. Postmodern discourse in the academe discusses this in order to desensitize us to the magnitude of its abomination and teach us, in fact, to glory in the so-called freedom in this decentralized, closed system of free-shifting signifiers. But there is nothing decentralized nor free-shifting about the order of our lives. The center is representation in the realm of theory and money in the realm of the material. The only thing that shifts freely is money, not us. We are not free—our choices are defined for us not by who we are but by what we have. The self is effectively dead, replaced by a Frankensteinian zombie created from a mish-mash of custom-made attitudes and manipulated desires.

As a graduate student studying this very sort of thing, I could of course be accused that I make these utterances from the ivory tower of the university. I could be accused of reading theories that I then force to shape my own understanding of life. Fortunately, I can back up my reading with actual experience. Five years span the gulf between my graduation from college and my present efforts at graduate school. This gulf represents my time of torpor. I am the bloodchilde and I glory in my resurrection (a resurrection that may yet be temporary or revealed to be just a dream, God forbid). In my next entry, allow me to describe this death, a death revealed in the discourses between the Dark Other and me in my previous blog. Or rather, an experience of undeath among the corporate zombies of the Philippines’ financial district.

Blood, Introduction

Blood flowing is life.
Blood spilled is death.
The taking of blood is immortality.
The giving of blood is history.
The drinking of blood is a promise.
The offering of blood is redemption.
The blood of the Lamb is salvation.
The blood of the prophets is revolution.
I am the bloodchilde.
I am of the blood and the blood is mine.


While postmodernism has opened a floodgate of narratives coming from a variety of perspectives, it would be a mistake to reject grand narratives altogether as many students of cultural studies are doing. I'm personally not inclined to reject grand narratives that have rich histories and have produced the most profound criticisms of society and culture just so I could instead valorize introspective, existentialist texts and criticisms competing for the Oppression Olympics involving race and gender. Metaphysically, the bottom line is still good and evil, justice and injustice. Materially, it's class struggle. While this blog aims to be a critique of culture and politics with occasional existentialist introspection, let the reader be aware that this writer is a worshipper on the altar of two major Grand Narratives--Christianity and Marxism.

In both Narratives, blood is a powerful symbol inspiring hope and transcendence among believers. The blood of the Lamb is the blood of salvation, and the blood of the martyrs is the color of the bloood-red flag of Marxism. Both narratives present an acute analysis of history and a positive vision for the future of humanity.

Life is short, ladies and gentlemen. The blood flowing in our veins will eventually stop flowing. I'd rather spend the time I have on this earth pondering how the little spark of life granted to me could be of significance to history, to both the now and what will be, than to waste my time whining about how my Dad treated me when I was five or whether or not I should open doors for my wife. This is not to say discourses of psychoanalysis, feminism, or postcolonialism are unimportant. It's just that they should be discussed within the larger framework of class struggle and sin--and not the other way around.

So let the blood flow. Let it bring overwhelming strength to our arms and piercing intelligence to our minds. And never forget that the blood of our brother Abel is still screaming to the high heavens over the guilt of humanity.