Chairman and CEO of Exxon – AP Photo
I have been involved in myriad discussions of corruption in business and government, in private and public affairs and have been aware, intuitively, most of my adult life of the cancerous cesspool of corruptive greed that exists in the heart of America. When I saw the portrait above I recognized the face of an ancient demon.
What has, and is being done to the average American by the one percent among us, who, by luck, accident of birth, and sheer murderous criminality find themselves to be members of the ruling oligarchy makes the Stamp act or the Tea taxes of our history seem somewhat quaint and peevish discomforts.
I find greater grievance and reason for revolution, for armed struggle against an oppressive criminal class at the beginning of this twenty first century than our predecessors had at the outset of our last American Revolution.
There exists in our time more grievous mistreatment of the body politic than any English King ever envisioned. Even those who believed in the “divine right of Kings” never dreamed of the depraved excess of what has taken root among us. The enormity of the crimes of this ruling corporate class cry out to the heavens, to whatever gods of justice there may be for redress.
In what volume of our mutual library of documents, of history and law, of justice and beauty, of war and of the tranquility and peace of nature’s god will I find the treatise that will explain to me why the creature displayed in the bloated faced image above should be rewarded for his efforts in the world at a rate four hundred times that at which I am paid for my own?
I don’t believe that anyone can show me the teachings of any man in control of his mental functions, a rational person, who would advocate such a circumstance.
I do not profess to be a scholar, but in my limited exposure to the lore and learning of history I can remember only cries of outrage against the rise of such a condition. Prophets and preachers have railed against it, statesmen, politicians, men of science and men of religion, the leaders, and the led have all, in my memory, decried the existence of such inequity, at least among reasonable men.
Yet here in our time it is portrayed as the summum bonum of American life to which all aspire, the grasping for obscene wealth at the expense of one’s brothers, filling one’s porcine mouth with loaves while the rest scratch for crumbs is now seen as something to admire.
Again, I am no scholar, but such teachings escape my memory.
The beast portrayed in the hellish portrait above has a name, “Mammon est nomen daemonis” This demon has been reviled and resisted for all the centuries of man. This evil has been reviled and resisted, in every language, every religion, every tradition whether primitive or those with pretense to sophistication.
I have never encountered a culture which placed avarice on the altar as mine has in this last quarter of my life.
I suppose it’s to be expected, and in the nature of things, when the president is a cowboy and a preacher and all the preachers wear pinkie rings.
Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust
http://sawdust.eponym.com/
