Month: December 2017

Absence Makes the Mind Go Fonder

[NOTE: please read the second and third paragraphs from this post before continuing. Important–don’t skip reading them!]

When King Lear was reunited with Cordelia, having realized the dreadful mistake he’d made of alienating himself from her affections by disowning her, he asked her forgiveness and, finally knowing himself, called himself a “very foolish, fond old man.” (IV, vii, 60) By ‘fond’, Lear meant ‘foolish, stupid, mad’ (Crystal and Crystal, p. 181). That’s how I’m using the word fond in this post.

Narcissists are notorious for having low Emotional Intelligence (i.e., a low EQ). Their lack of empathy for others and their lack of insight into their own personality problems, because their False Self blinds them to their True Self, are examples of this irrationality, this lack of self-insight, this lack of understanding, which most people do have.

Consider Trump’s disastrous decisions, and how neither he nor any of his supporters acknowledge the folly of their actions. Instead, his ambassador to the UN made a public display of his narcissistic injury in a speech condemning the international community’s condemnation of his team’s decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The foolishness of narcissists in power can be seen to have its roots in childhood trauma, often from narcissists in the family. I’m convinced that my late mother’s probable narcissism stemmed from the traumatic loss of her father when she was a child, this kind of loss being one that Heinz Kohut observed in his narcissistic patients. “Traumatic deprivations and losses of objects up to and including the oedipal period…, and traumatic disappointments in them, may…interfere seriously with the basic structuralization of the psychic apparatus itself.” (Kohut, page 44)

I believe my siblings experienced traumatic disappointments in our not-so-healthy parents, childhood traumas that led to their helping my mom emotionally abuse me. Her lack of empathy for me (and for them, by extension) led to their lack of empathy for me, and their lack of insight into themselves is similar to her lack of such insight. I will now demonstrate how foolish their collective narcissism has always been, and how it was the main driving force to their having lost me forever.

I’ve already gone over countless times how my brothers R. and F., and my sister J., bullied me throughout my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood; then after I moved to East Asia, they took a few shots at me here and there when the opportunity arose for them, with my mother conniving at it the whole time. (You see, the only reason they weren’t doing any of this nastiness to me, on the almost daily basis that they had before I’d left Canada, is because I’d left, depriving them of the maximum of opportunities they’d once had, not because of a change in their natures; at best, they merely mellowed with age.) I’ve already explained my mother’s outrages against me (Part VII: Conclusion) over the decades.

Now let’s consider the utter stupidity of what they did.

They did what they did, not, as they’d have everyone believe, because I deserved it (of course I didn’t! Being mad at me for doing bad things needn’t require an abusive reaction, and much of what they did wasn’t even out of anger with me, but done rather for the sheer fun of tormenting me), but because they were getting away with it, all thanks to our mother’s winking at it, and rationalizing it at my expense.

When I’d moved to Taiwan, they never seemed to give much consideration to how easily I could disown the whole family. All I had to do was not buy airplane tickets, and stop communicating with them. All they had to do was give me a strong enough reason to give up on all of them.

I find it safe to assume that the family gave little, if any, thought to what a bad foundation they’d made of their relationship with me by the time I’d left Canada. They never seemed to reflect on how their constant bullying, belittling, gaslighting, and other forms of emotional abuse had not only built up resentment in me, but also ensured I’d feel little, if any, affection for them.

When such a shaky foundation for a relationship is established in a family, and the family member with whom this foundation has been made moves far away, it’s a bad idea to reinforce bad feelings with him in any way if you want to keep alive a bond with him.

So, here’s the question: did my family not care about having a good relationship with me, or were they being just plain stupid?

After a few months of living here in Taiwan (in the fall of 1996), I hadn’t written a letter to Mom, or anyone else in the family. She wrote to me, saying at the beginning of her letter, “You’re going to get it!” (i.e., for having not written to them). She meant this in a jesting tone, but anyone who knows about psychoanalytic interpretations of joking around, as well as my history of being controlled and manipulated by my mother, will know that–at least unconsciously–there was more to her words than mere jocularity.

She didn’t stand in the way at all of my moving to Taiwan (and restricting the victim’s movements is a typical form of emotional abuse); but she understood I’d wanted to stay in Taiwan only until I’d finished using my English-teaching job to pay off my student loan, then I’d return to Canada. She also had the good sense to understand that my student debt was not something I’d want to be saddled with for the rest of my life. So she didn’t fear losing me at the time. The thing is, within a year of living here, I changed my mind and chose to stay here for life.

A year or so later, my sister J. wrote to me, expressing a worry that I’d marry a local girl, and J. would never see me again. Did she not realize that she, who’d eagerly joined in on all the bullying and belittling of me during my youth, provided me with a perfect way to hurt her back with relative impunity? Did she, who rarely empathized with my fears, actually think I’d empathize with hers?

When I was dating my then-girlfriend Judy, and on my first visit to Canada (in 1999), I feared not being able to get back to Taiwan because of a problem with my passport. J. learned of my worries, and of Judy and me missing each other; soon after I’d got back to Taiwan with no problems, J. sent me a letter, having written it in a petulant, almost bullying tone, of how the family ‘missed’ me, and showing no sympathy for how Judy and I had missed each other. J. didn’t like the idea that I missed Judy more than missing the family. (Well, J., you see, there actually is affection between Judy and me, unlike with…)

Now, we had missed each other for only two weeks, as opposed to the family’s ‘missing’ me for three years (though I’d just satisfied their wish to see me again, which had surely cancelled out their ‘missing’ of me, at least for the moment); but Judy and I were in love, and we naturally had such gushing feelings for each other, whereas J. et al were just demonstrating a controlling attitude, as they always have. Judy was as annoyed by J.’s letter as I was.

I’m sure J. has forgotten all about her letter, though I haven’t forgotten it at all.

I mentioned in this post (Part VI: J.’s Dissing of Judy) how J. made it pellucidly clear that she didn’t like the idea of me marrying Judy. What did J. think I was going to do? Call off any plans of marrying the woman I love, out of a fear of displeasing my sister? J. calls her attitude ‘missing’ me, but it’s really about how she and the rest of the family consider me merely an extension of them, rather than an individual in my own right, with my own rights, feelings, and strivings.

But here’s the point that needs to be made: when a family member living on the other side of the world has already been estranged from the rest of you from childhood, and if you want him to continue to be a part of your lives, DON’T PISS HIM OFF!!!!

Of course, the crowning achievement in my family’s stupidity was my mother’s bringing up [<<<the last seven paragraphs of Part I] Asperger syndrome (AS), claiming, without any psychiatric authority whatsoever, that I have the disorder. Did she think I was going to thank her for talking about that?

My resistance to her nonsense was gentle and tactful at first [<<<Part VI of the link], but she simply wouldn’t take the hint. If she had just left it alone, my visits to Canada, my sending of birthday and Christmas cards, and my general communication with them (including phoning Mom regularly) would have continued as normally…

…but Mom just had to fuck all of that up.

As I said above: when a family member living on the other side of the world has already been estranged from the rest of you from childhood, and if you want him to continue to be a part of your lives, DON’T PISS HIM OFF!!!!

As I said earlier in this post, deep down, I never felt any strong affection for those five people I shared a home with during my youth (they, of course, would blame me for my lack of affection, rather than take responsibility for alienating my affections during my crucial, identity-forming adolescence); this means that, whenever I contemplated the future deaths of my parents, I dreaded the obligation of flying back to Canada to attend their funerals (read this, Part IV: Rationalizing Irrational Behaviour, to know why I find family funerals traumatizing).

I imagined how difficult it would be to make excuses to avoid attending funerals. The funny thing is, though, Mom was making it increasingly easy for me to avoid the family, with how much she was upsetting me.

Her revival of the whole autism thing (which, had she just kept her dumb mouth shut about it, wouldn’t have led me to deduce that the whole thing had been a lie) was one thing, though: her use of AS to justify rejecting my plan to make a visit in the mid-2000s, to see J. and her terminally-ill husband, was something else, and it was the last straw (Part VII: No Good Intent Goes Unpunished).

I had always made my visits to Canada on the assumption that the family missed me, and therefore would always be glad to see me, every time. (Absence makes the heart grow fonder, doesn’t it?) With Mom’s rejection of my plan to visit J. and her husband, though, with her claiming that J. and the rest of the family agreed that my not visiting was a good idea, she compromised the whole notion of the family’s ‘missing’ of me. And in so doing, she made my wish to stop visiting all the easier: perhaps I should thank her for that.

By the 2010s, I’d put all the pieces together (‘my autism’, the family’s constant emotional abuse, Mom’s impenitence, and what it all really meant), and realized that not only was Mom’s labelling of me with AS a lie, but so was her original labelling of me with infantile autism! (see Part 3: The Dawn of Realization)

Yet she always acted as if she’d never done anything wrong.

This lack of responsibility goes triple for my siblings, of course.

You see, after I’d complained about Mom’s attitude in emails back in the mid-to-late 2000s, even explicitly warning that I’d stop visiting if Mom and the family continued to show me no respect (i.e., never apologize for rejecting my plan to visit, continue labelling me with AS), instead of the family complying with my demands, J. wrote me a snotty email, demanding that I “let this go” (what “this” was depended greatly on how Mom had portrayed “this” to J., doubtlessly a trivializing of my pain, making Mom seem innocent and me the bad guy), and that I not write back to J., thus silencing my ability to tell my sister my side of the story.

Again, the refrain is worth repeating: when a family member living on the other side of the world has already been estranged from the rest of you from childhood, and if you want him to continue to be a part of your lives, DON’T PISS HIM OFF!!!!

Still, my mother made one of her many feeble attempts at reconciliation with me in an email, and I, in good faith, went along with it, and decided to give the family one last chance. I visited in 2008, getting a chance to see my father one last time before he died (he, in spite of doing virtually nothing to stop Mom and her BS about ‘my autism’, when he believed it no more than I did, was nonetheless the closest I had of anyone in the family [apart from my cousin S., up until he lost his mind…more on that later] to being a friend).

And during my visit, members of my family showed me they were the same people they’d always been, thus showing my Mom’s email promise of them all ‘changing their attitude’ to be as hollow and empty as any profession of love that I’d ever heard from them previously. During a family get-together, R. mocked my speech on two occasions. F.’s son, when asked by his dad if he remembered his uncle, looked me in the face impudently and said, “No!”

This latter incident was one of many that made me assume, with perfect safety (Part 4: Abusing My Cousins), that the family was bad-mouthing me regularly behind my back; for my nephew hardly knows me well enough for me to have given him bad feelings myself; a mere absence in one’s life isn’t by itself enough to justify rudeness. I’m one of his two uncles, not his father: it’s not as if I’d abandoned him when he desperately needed me.

These slights of R. and my nephew were minor, though. My mother’s promise to change her attitude was broken in her continued prating about AS, even after I’d repeatedly told her to shut up about it. She even had the audacity to buy me a book on AS, to drill her gaslighting into my head further, all with that sanctimonious smile on her face!

Over the 2010s, I gave the family the cold shoulder, little by little (unlike them, I can take responsibility for my actions). They felt it, to be sure: no more birthday or Christmas cards, or acknowledgements of them by email, no adding them as Facebook friends (this last one especially worried them); but did they ever admit that they could have provoked my iciness? No, of course not. They just acted as though I alone had the problem. Any reasonable family would have contemplated the possible role they themselves had played in the growing distance between us.

Again, sheer stupidity and insensitivity on their part.

It takes collective narcissism on a colossal scale for them not to remember how mean, spiteful, and contemptuous they had been to me my whole life; how Mom’s perpetuating of her autism lies, her gaslighting, her condescension and victim-blaming were somehow not going to bite her in the ass one day.

They all fancy themselves a ‘good family’. Social groups all over the world kid themselves into thinking they do good for others, when in fact they do the opposite. This applies to religious groups as well as political parties. Trump and his clique of Zionists and evangelicals think that by making Jerusalem the capital of Israel, they’ve promoted…peace? The First World thinks that, by bombing the Arab Third World, they’re ending terrorism instead of perpetuating it. Capitalists think they’re lifting the Third World out of poverty instead of exacerbating it. But, I digress…

That ‘good family’ of mine thinks that bad-mouthing my cousins and me, something Mom inspired in them, is a good idea. She loved sowing division in our family, and she is now considered by the family to be a few rungs below sainthood!

My cousin S., only a few months after I’d told him my frustrations about my family (about seven years ago), began lashing out at me online, accusing me of all kinds of things, all without a shred of proof; not even a plausible motive had been offered by him, for he’d been my best friend here, and someone in whom I’d confided about my family and many other personal things, so why would I ever want to cross him?

He’s had a history of substance abuse (beyond regular drinking and smoking of marijuana and hashish, in his youth he did quite a bit of LSD), and this has probably played a large role in his mental instability (his accusations of me seem to be largely hallucinations); but since his online rants began only a few months after I’d told him of my decision to disown my family, I assume he told my mom about this (with the good intention of re-establishing family harmony); and she, reacting with narcissistic injury, may well have squirted some of her poison in his ears against me (as she had doubtlessly done in the ears of my siblings), thus arousing–or at least aggravating–his paranoia about me.

Whatever she may have said to him, she certainly nurtured the division between S. and me once I’d forwarded to her one of his email rants, a decision I now deeply regret (and that’s a stupid on me…stupid! Stupid! Stupid!) She obviously used this email as gossip fodder, and forwarded it to my sister J., at least, if not to the entire family. Mom did this not to alert the family to a serious mental health issue we needed to combine our efforts against and find a solution to (as I’d hoped, in all foolishness, she would); she did it to malign her nephew’s reputation, as she’d been doing to his brothers for decades.

When I mentioned S.’s problem to J. in an email exchange, she only said she was “dismayed”, having realized she was mistaken that S. was the one “normal” cousin we have. Note how her only concern was his lack of normalcy, not his ill health or unhappiness. His ‘screwiness’ in the head was another blot on the family’s reputation, apparently. Oh, dear…

J. then forgot all about S. and the urgency of his issues, and in her email reply asked about me making a visit. Naturally, I had no wish even to discuss that, preferring to go on at length in my email reply about S. (another one of my “over-the-top” emails, of course, though remember: I’ve never written in such a way to my aunt [Part 5: More Elaborate Lies]!) Since J. never replied to this message, I assume she (under Mom’s influence, probably) thought I was being as crazy as S. in my ramblings.

In any case, it was clear that neither she nor Mom were willing to lift a finger for S. Once again, they–the only two family members who ever showed an interest in my continued participation in the family–chose to alienate me even further from them. Here was a perfect opportunity for them to redeem themselves, at least in part, and they muffed it. Sheer stupidity on their part.

The family had been preaching to me for decades about the importance of setting aside one’s selfish interests for the good of others; they used this preaching to justify their smug sense of ‘superiority’ over me, and to bully and shame me whenever I failed to measure up to their expectations. Now, here we had an opportunity for them to practice what they’d been preaching: help S. They didn’t have to succeed. I didn’t expect my aging mother, or any of them individually, to take on the burden alone.

I did expect them to try, at least. They didn’t even do that.

In fact, my mother was adamant about not helping. When I asked her in an email if anything was being done to help S., she replied, “I haven’t talked to your aunt [about S.] and I will not. Knowing what he said about you in that email rant, I’ll get too upset to talk to her about it.” Funny how my mother never got upset about the awful things R., F., and J. used to say to me, almost daily, during my youth. What a convenient excuse Mom had not to help S.

This just made it all the easier for me to disown the family.

Indeed, I emailed another blunt warning to her about her attitude to S., saying he “isn’t acting the way he is because he’s a ‘bad person’: he’s acting that way because he’s ill, and he needs help. If this family just sits idly by while he continues to blunder about in his mental illness, there’s going to be a big regret…” etc., etc. [emphasis in the original email]

Yes, another of my ‘over-the-top’ emails…to my mother, not to my aunt.

And once again, Mom refused to heed my warnings.

So many opportunities to repent and prevent my disowning of the family, all wasted. So many deliberate choices to alienate me from them, yet they never faced up to what they’d done.

Instead, what was their choice method to warm me up to them? Sending me family photos, for fuck’s sake! As if seeing the faces of the people who’d hurt me so many times would ever kindle any love in my heart! They’ve really deluded themselves into thinking they were nothing but loving to me, all on the basis of a few favours done me here and there, and fulfilling the normal family obligations of feeding, housing, and clothing me; while conveniently forgetting about lying to me about a mental disability I don’t have; bullying and humiliating me, and getting explosively angry with me, usually over relatively minor offences; rejecting my own offers of love; and bad-mouthing me and our cousins behind our backs; and refusing to help the one family member who’d been my friend.

And they think I’m mentally ill? They think I’m the stupid one?

Oh, yes: during my youth, they called me “retarded” and “moron” (Mom, when I was around the ages of 9-12), “asshole!” (R., F., and J., many times during my teens), a “little shit!” (R., when I was about 14), “dip(stick)” and “dork” (R., F., and J., many times over my teen years), and a “wimp” (all of them, during my teens). Many of these names were shouted with a vicious or sneering facial expression that is the opposite of love, all during crucial, identity-forming years in my adolescence.

Mom and my siblings acted the way they did the whole time I’ve been in Taiwan, and instead of even asking what they’d done, or could have done, to make me not want to talk to them anymore, my mother complained in an email of how “hurt and annoyed” she was that I’d “given up on this family”, as if I’d just impulsively decided to turn my back on them for no reason.

To be sure, I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, too…but the Dunning-Kruger effect seems to have affected the family, because they as a group have done so many stupid things to facilitate my permanent estrangement from them, and they, so full of themselves, don’t even know it, or refuse to admit it to themselves, at least.

Though I can’t say for sure, I’m fairly convinced my late mother was narcissistic on a clinically significant level. She was a sick woman, and her sickness compelled her to do the irrational things she did to me, and to the family. As her flying monkeys, my siblings absorbed some of this narcissism, a group narcissism, and that would explain the irrationality of their actions.

When Erich Fromm wrote about group narcissism in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, he was writing essentially about such things as nationalism and fascism, but I believe his ideas can be applied to smaller groups, like narcissistic parents and their golden children, too:

‘When, in group narcissism, the object is not the individual but the group to which he belongs, the individual can be fully aware of it, and express it without any restrictions. The assertion that “my country” (or nation, or religion) is the most wonderful, the most cultured, the most powerful, the most peace-loving, etc., does not sound crazy at all; on the contrary, it sounds like the expression of patriotism, faith, and loyalty. It also appears to be a realistic and rational value judgment because it is shared by many members of the same group. This consensus succeeds in transforming the phantasy into reality, since for most people reality is constituted by general consensus and not based on reason or critical examination.’ [Note also Fromm’s note to this last sentence: “Sometimes this consensus even of a small group suffices to create reality–in the most extreme cases even the consensus of two (folie à deux).”] (Fromm, page 230)

It isn’t reason that inspires my siblings (“the team” that they’d always “score another point for”–Part 4, third paragraph) to see themselves as wiser, stronger, more mature, more loving, and more giving than I am. If R., F., and J. had had a fraction of those virtues, they’d have developed suspicions as to our mother’s motives, and made a decent attempt to rescue their relationship with me (and at least try to help S.). All they had to do was listen to my side of the story with an open mind, and show as much skepticism to Mom’s version of events as they were showing mine. I don’t expect to be believed without any critical thought, but I do expect the same consideration as they were giving their oh, so charismatic leader.

By failing to do these critically important things (and as a group of at least three, their combined efforts would have made things easier for each other), they failed me, they failed S., and they failed as a family. R., F., and S., like our late mother, have been as vain, and as “old and foolish” (IV, vii, 85) as Lear, who lost everything.

Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Picador, New York, 1973

David Crystal and Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion, Penguin Books, London, 2002

Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1971

Analysis of ‘A Christmas Carol’

A Christmas Carol is a novella written by Charles Dickens and published in 1843. Considered one of the greatest Christmas stories ever written, it is about the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge, a bitter old miser who scoffs at Christmas and alienates all those around him in London. Many theatre, TV, and film adaptations have been made of the story over the years, including the much-loved version of 1951 (Scrooge) with Alastair Sim in the title role, An American Christmas Carol with Henry Winkler as the miser, a musical version (Scrooge) with Albert Finney in the title role, and a motion-capture version with Jim Carrey as Scrooge and the three Christmas ghosts.

As with many Dickens stories, A Christmas Carol is a searing indictment of the deleterious effects of 19th-century industrial capitalism in England; however, Dickens presents a sentimental, bourgeois liberal solution to the problem of Scrooge’s miserliness by changing him into a ‘kinder, gentler’ capitalist, giving generously to the poor, instead of proposing a more radical and lasting solution to class conflict, of the type Marx and Engels would propose by the end of the 1840s.

Here are some famous quotes:

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. –narrator

“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”

“Merry Christmas! [<<<a wish popularized in this novella] What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.” –Scrooge

“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

“God bless us, everyone!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!”

“Now, I’ll tell you what, my friend,” said Scrooge, “I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And therefore,” he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the Tank again: “and therefore I am about to raise your salary!”

The novella is called A Christmas Carol because Dickens conceived of the story as song-like, its five chapters called “Staves”. The staves of a song tend to have a rather cyclical quality, in how the end of one stave leads into the beginning of a new one. This phasing of the old into the new will be a motif in the story.

The story begins with the emphatic declaration of the death of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s old business partner. This is significant in how Christmas, traced back to its origins as a pagan holiday based on the December solstice, is all about ‘out with the old, and in with the new’.

The winter solstice happens around December 20-22, and the European pagans believed that, because the Northern hemisphere faces furthest away from the sun at that time of year, the sun-god was dead, soon to be reborn, with the shortest days of the year to be followed by longer and longer ones. Replacing the sun-god with the Son of God, the Church replaced such festivals as Yule, and possibly Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, with Christmas on December 25.

Out with the old, in with the new.

Marley, Scrooge’s double, is gone. Scrooge is about to be reborn, as it were. As miserly as Marley was, Scrooge is too cheap even to paint over his partner’s name on the sign of their office (page 2). When visitors address Scrooge by either his or Marley’s name, Scrooge answers as if no mistake were made in calling him ‘Marley’; hence, the two money-loving businessmen are virtually indistinguishable.

Dickens compares the importance of Marley’s death at the beginning of the story to that of Hamlet’s father at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play: without that death, “nothing wonderful can come of the story” (page 2); the Danish king and prince have the same name, Marley and Scrooge have the same nature; and the death of the one begins the chain [!] of events leading to the delayed, but ultimately achieved, final heroic acts at the end of both stories.

The sun-god must die before he can be reborn, then gradually grow and warm the Northern Hemisphere in the next spring and summer. Life is a cycle of contradictions, the primary and secondary aspects of which change places in the development of all things. “We often speak of ‘the new superseding the old’. The supersession of the old by the new is a general, eternal and inviolable law of the universe…In each thing there is contradiction between its new and its old aspects, and this gives rise to a series of struggles with many twists and turns. As a result of these struggles, the new aspect changes from being minor to being major and rises to predominance, while the old aspect changes from being major to being minor and gradually dies out. And the moment the new aspect gains dominance over the old, the old thing changes qualitatively into a new thing.” (Mao, page 158). The contradiction between greed and generosity will also result in a swapping of aspects, as will happen with Scrooge by the end of the story.

Scrooge is “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” (page 2). He keeps the coals to himself in his office (page 4), so poor Bob Cratchit, his over-worked, underpaid clerk, has barely a glowing coal or two at the fireplace by his desk. This is on Christmas Eve, seven years to the day of Marley’s death, and when the Northern Hemisphere is facing the farthest away from the sun, the sun-god dead and yet to be reborn.

Part of Scrooge’s meanness is his general misanthropy, reflected in his contempt for his cheerful nephew Fred, who insists on inviting Scrooge to his Christmas party, in spite of knowing his uncle will refuse to attend (pages 5-8). Next, Scrooge refuses to give to two portly charity collectors (pages 9-11), preferring to support the workhouses and other austere government-provided institutions, like the debtor’s prisons, the Poor Law, and the Treadmill.

Such government provisions are the worst kinds that the bourgeois state has to offer, and Scrooge won’t even give to charity, another bourgeois form of pity. The most charity he can muster is to allow Cratchit to have a paid day off on Christmas, and Scrooge does this only with a grudging scowl (page 13).

When Scrooge gets home, a suite of rooms once owned by Marley, he encounters the ghost of his old partner (pages 15, 19-27). This ghost could be said to be a parody of the risen Christ, for Scrooge is like a doubting Thomas believing he is hallucinating at the sight of Marley’s ghost from having eaten bad food. Only the ghastly sight of screaming Marley’s broken jaw, falling to his chest after his having removed a bandage wrapped around his head, frightens Scrooge into believing in Marley; this is like Thomas seeing  the stigmata and spear-wound in the side of the risen Christ before finally believing. Marley, like Christ, has harrowed Hell, and suffers from it.

Marley’s ghost is also like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who has suffered in Purgatory, a temporary Hell: both ghosts tell the respective protagonists of the difficult but necessary things they must do to redeem themselves and their world. Scrooge, like Hamlet, is rich, and therefore, powerful; he’s also a reluctant hero, like the Dane, with a long list of personality flaws, yet with much potential for good.

Marley tells Scrooge of the three ghosts that will visit him, three ghosts that will effect the redeeming transformation in him–beginning, middle, and end, a kind of Trinity, or Trimurti, in themselves (more on that later). Then the ghost goes to a window, Scrooge following (pages 27-28). They both watch the pitiful spectacle of a homeless mother holding her baby, trying her best to keep it warm. Ghosts of men like Marley are out there, too, trying in vain to redeem themselves for their lifetimes of avarice.  One of them, one Scrooge is familiar with, cries at being unable to assist the woman and her child. “The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.” (page 28)

That is the end of Stave One. Stave Two begins with the arrival of the Ghost of Christmas Past, a paradoxical-looking character, both young and old-looking at the same time (page 32). A bright light glows about his head, yet he has a large candle extinguisher for a cap. As a ghost of the past, he represents the old brought back new again; his is a light that has been snuffed out before, and will be snuffed out again. The old must die for the new to be born. This ghost, showing the creation and growth of the miser in Scrooge, is Brahma just after the leaving of Śiva.

As the ghost shows Scrooge the shadows of his Christmases as a boy and a young man, we see how Scrooge came to be the miser that he is. His father seems to have been cold and unloving to him, so he’s been a lonely schoolboy; and only on the Christmas of the first shown memory has his father finally warmed up to him, to have him come home (page 41). It is plain to see that a negative father imago has already been built up in young Ebenezer’s psyche, with his little sister, Fan, as his only good object relation for the time, to compensate for the psychological damage his father has done to him. Still, she will die after bearing Fred, and Scrooge will repeat the same cold relationship with his nephew as his father had with him. This harsh relationship is more fully developed in the 1951 movie.

Scrooge prefers wealth and gain over “dowerless” Belle, his girlfriend from a poor family; though he’s never said it to her, his preference is too obvious to her to ignore, so she chooses to “release” him, knowing a “golden…idol has displaced” her (pages 50-51). This preference, of the pleasure of owning money, over people is an example of failed object relations (i.e., ‘object‘ = a person other than oneself), as Fairbairn once observed: “…from the point of view of object-relationship psychology, explicit pleasure-seeking represents a deterioration of behaviour…Explicit pleasure-seeking has as its essential aim the relieving of the tension of libidinal need for the mere sake of relieving this tension. Such a process does, of course, occur commonly enough; but, since libidinal need is object-need, simple tension-relieving implies some failure of object-relationships.” (Fairbairn, p. 139-140)

When we fail to get the love we truly need and crave, we replace it with the shoddy substitutes of money, drugs, sex, pornography, alcohol, etc. Scrooge’s rage and regret over discovering Belle’s marriage to another man, as well as their large litter of children, a rage expressed in his snuffing out of the light of the Ghost of Christmas Past, underscores the reality that, deep down, it’s love and relationships, not money, that Scrooge has longed for so badly.

The Ghost of Christmas Present, “a jolly giant” in a green robe with a holly wreath around his head, is seen by Scrooge in a room full of “turkeys, geese, game, poultry,…sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings”, chestnuts, apples, oranges, pears, etc. (page 59). All of this plenty, food that preserves and maintains life, represents the living reality of now; as the previous Christmas ghost was Brahma, this one is Vishnu. He shows Scrooge the lives of ordinary, working class people, including a miners’ cottage (pages 78-79), sailors during a storm at sea (pages 79-80), and, of course, the Cratchit family (pages 67-77). Scrooge is touched to see the love in this family.

He is especially moved by Tiny Tim, a sweet boy one couldn’t dislike if one tried, one who is a sick cripple. When his parents show their fear of him dying, Scrooge feels an emotion he surely hasn’t felt in years: compassion. All those US politicians who refuse to allow single-payer healthcare could do well to see the millions of faces of the sick proletariat who can’t afford the healthcare they need, all those Tiny Tims who are being ignored.

At the end of Scrooge’s time with the Ghost of Christmas Present, two filthy, emaciated children are discovered to be hiding under his robe, sitting at the ghost’s feet. The boy is Ignorance, the girl is Want: Scrooge is warned to beware of both, but especially to beware the boy.

How many of us fetishists of commodities fail to beware the boy? We eagerly buy the latest smartphones, electric cars, etc., ignorant of how the cobalt needed to make them is found; this cobalt has been mined by children “in the bowels of the earth” in the DRC. The corporations that exploit this labour either claim ignorance of how they get their cobalt, or claim they’re taking measures to solve the problem: should we be buying their claims of innocence?

Dickens was decrying the evils of 19th century industrial capitalism in England, and how these evils were causing suffering among the British working class, especially children. The contemporary equivalent of this problem is capitalist imperialism, which is exploiting the global proletariat, the millions of people who live in Third World countries like the DRC.

Dickens’s proposed solution in this novella was to have ‘kinder, gentler’ capitalists. This might be acceptable, to some extent at least, in First World countries; but it solves nothing for the Third World, where suffering was plenty acute even when Keynesian capitalism, coupled with better social welfare programs, was ‘kinder and gentler’ for the white Western world from 1945-1973.

The Ghost of Christmas Present actually ages and ‘dies’ at the end of the day (pages 89-91). This is appropriate, given he represents the living now of the current Christmas, a preserving Vishnu. The end of the current Christmas means the end of his existence.

Immediately after his demise appears his successor, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, a mute spirit shrouded in deathly black who communicates only with hand gestures. As the previous ghost was of the living present (Vishnu), the final ghost is of a future of death and destruction…Śiva. Indeed, death looms throughout the shadows presented to an increasingly terrified Scrooge.

In the first of these shadows, some businessmen are seen discussing a recently deceased, rich old man (pages 94-96). None of them shows any sadness over his death. Typical capitalists: they have no more pity over the falling of a rival member of the ruling class than they would over the deaths among the proletariat. The more and more repentant miser clings, with an ever-loosening grip, to the hope that this spoken-of dead old man, one whose death is–if anything–celebrated rather than mourned, isn’t himself.

Another microcosm of capitalism is shown in Old Joe, a fence who profits off of stolen items, in this case stolen from the despised old man (pages 98-103). The capitalist meets his karma among the cackling leeches who get money from Joe for such items as stolen bed curtains and blankets.

In contrast to the apathy felt toward the dead old man, Tiny Tim’s death is profoundly mourned by the Cratchits (pages 107-112). Scrooge has no family to grieve over him: Fred and his wife are missing among the shadows shown to Scrooge; has the miser done something to end the patience of his long-suffering nephew?

Finally, Scrooge sees his austere-looking gravestone in an uncaring graveyard at night: his corpse lies there as lonely as the boy in that classroom in the first of the shadows the Ghost of Christmas Past showed Scrooge. Fan’s spirit won’t come to comfort him now. Terrified into repentance, he promises to change his ways, and as we know, he grows into a generous man, buying a huge turkey for the Cratchit family, promising a large donation (including “back-payments”–page 121) to one of the charity-seeking portly gentlemen from the beginning of the story, and finally appreciating family and relationships by attending Fred’s party (pages 122-123).

After raising Bob Cratchit’s salary (page 124), Tiny Tim is given the medical help he needs, and Scrooge is now known to be “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.” (page 125) Kinder, gentler capitalists: this, apparently, is Dickens’s proposed solution to the socio-economic ills of “the good old world”.

In the parlance of our time–peak liberalism.

One wonders if the ‘generosity’ of the Bill Gates Foundation, or the Clinton Foundation, or anything Trump or Jeff Bezos are doing, is in any way helping the millions of people who die of preventable disease or malnutrition each year, in a world where we’ve been producing more than enough food to feed the whole planet. Lots of money is spent on the military, to kill people, but not so much to help people.

Then again, Christmas is just a celebration of the birth of Christ, as opposed to his salvific  death. The day of the birth of Sol Invictus is only the beginning of the light, the birth of the coming warmer days. That Christmas Day of the redeemed, ‘reborn’ Scrooge is just the beginning of his new goodness, the ‘kinder, gentler’ capitalist who, it is to be hoped, will inspire others in power to help the poor.

‘Kinder, gentler’ capitalists of this sort are far from enough, though, if social justice is something we are truly committed to. Eisenhower’s administration demanded higher taxes from the rich, but the US imperialism of the time also helped with the ouster of Mohammad Mosaddegh; then there was the coup d’état in Guatemala. LBJ wanted to build the Great Society, but early in his administration, the Gulf of Tonkin incident fraudulently involved the US in the Vietnam War, which would lead to bad feeling against him. “We [were] all Keynesians” under Nixon, whose administration used the CIA to replace Salvador Allende with Pinochet, and bombed the Hell out of Cambodia.

More will be needed to help the global poor than Keynesian capitalism with a strong welfare state (of the post-WWII sort inspired by the USSR and other socialist states of the 20th century), of the sort that existed from 1945-1973, and which helped only the First World proletariat. The Tiny Tims, and Ignorance and Want wretches, of today won’t be saved by the generous Scrooge of social democracy: perhaps a spectre (like the one that once haunted Europe) or two, or three or four–ghosts from the past to inspire new ones in the present and future–will replace all the Scrooges and Marleys, be they stingy or redeemed, with workers’ co-ops of Cratchits; maybe those spectres will bring that newborn baby of a sun of winter to a bright, warm sun of spring and summer, from the baby Christ of December to the Saviour in April.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Puffin Books, New York, 1843

Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, Lexington, KY, 2014

WRD Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, Routledge, London, 1952

Analysis of ‘The Omen’

The Omen is a 1976 supernatural horror film written by David Seltzer (who also wrote the novelization), directed by Richard Donner, and starring Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner, and Harvey Stephens. It is about a (secretly-adopted) five-year-old who, it turns out, is the Antichrist. Considered one of the scariest movies ever made, it spawned two not-so-well-received sequels, then an even worse-received made-for-TV attempt at a revival of the franchise, and finally, a competent but tepid remake of the original movie.

The soundtrack of the original trilogy, by Jerry Goldsmith, garnered especial praise, particularly with its use of the choral singing of a kind of Satanic (but ungrammatical) Latin liturgy. “Ave Satani” was nominated for the 1976 Best Original Song.

Here are some famous quotes:

Latin (as in the soundtrack)Correct LatinEnglish translation
sanguis bibimussanguinem bibimusWe drink the blood
corpus edimuscorpus edimusWe eat the body
tolle corpus Satanitolle corpus SatanaeRaise the body of Satan
ave, ave Versus Christus!avē, avē Antichriste!Hail, Hail Antichrist!
ave Satani!avē Satana!Hail Satan!

“I don’t know if we’ve got the heir to the Thorn millions here or Jesus Christ Himself.” –Keith Jennings

“Look at me, Damien! It’s all for you!” –young nanny, before hanging herself (Considered one of the scariest moments in horror movie history)

“Have no fear, little one. I am here to protect thee.” –Mrs. Baylock, to Damien

“When the Jews return to Zion / And a comet rips the sky / And the Holy Roman Empire rises, / Then You and I must die. / From the eternal sea he rises, / Creating armies on either shore, / Turning man against his brother / ‘Til man exists no more.” –Father Brennan

“Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666.” Book of Revelation Chapter 13 Verse 18 (last title card)

The focus for understanding this movie shouldn’t be on the Devil, demons, or spiritual/Biblical issues, but rather the material and political concerns that the religious elements symbolize.

A Brief Digression…

The Biblical Antichrist was, most likely, Nero–the most powerful man in the Graeco-Roman world at the time when the members of the early Church were writing the New Testament manuscripts–a man who persecuted Christians and was believed to be still alive when the Revelation was written. (For more information, see Mays, general ed., the commentary on Revelation chapter 13, page 1197.)

Even the early Church fathers could “count the Number of the Beast,” and with gematria calculated 666 through Aramaic, using Hebrew letters to render (the Greek version of his name as) Neron Kesar, or Nron Qsr in transliterated Hebrew:

Resh (ר)Samekh (ס)Qoph (ק)Nun (נ)Vav (ו)Resh (ר)Nun (נ)Sum
2006010050620050666

If you remove the Nun final, of numerical value 50, to spell Nro Qsr (‘Nero Caesar’), you get 616, an alternative version of the Number of the Beast, as given in some of the early manuscripts of the Revelation, which were acknowledged even by Irenaeus, though he preferred 666, and considered 616 to be a textual error.

Then, there was Robert Graves‘s idiosyncratic method of arriving at Nero (or Domitian, who was persecuting Christians around when the Revelation was written), as is found in The White Goddess, pages 342-348: DOMITIANUS [or DOMITIUS] CAESAR LEGATOS XTI [i.e., ‘Christi’] VILITER [or VIOLENTER] INTERFECIT. (i.e., DCLXVI, or 666) “Domitian [or Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus >>> Nero] Caesar basely [or violently] killed the envoys of Christ.”

One shouldn’t need to point out the validity of the preterist interpretation of Revelation, as over the futurist one, except that today’s Christian fundamentalist religious kooks like to link current problems with the Revelation’s cryptic verses.

There are so many interesting reasons why the futurist approach to interpreting the Book of Revelation is so tenacious and popular, though, in spite of how ludicrous it really is. One reason involves how self-absorbed futurists are in thinking everything in the Bible is about their world (in, for example, the US today), rather than about events in the Mediterranean and Middle East from about 1,920-1,950 years ago, when the Revelation was actually written (i.e., written about what the writers were concerned about at the time). I believe another reason for futurism’s popularity is a psychological one, based on an impatient need to believe God will come down and right the wrongs one is suffering right now, including punishing all those modernists who laugh at and scorn the fundamentalists.

…Back to The Omen

I’d rather treat The Omen as an allegory of today’s political world in different ways than the fundamentalists do with the Books of Daniel and Revelation. The Latin text of “Ave Satani”, sung at the beginning of the movie and repeated throughout it, parodies the receiving of the Eucharist. Note the materialist focus: “We drink blood, we eat flesh, raise the body of Satan–hail!” It’s all about the body, not the spirit.

This Satanic parody of the Church represents the connection of the Church with evil (i.e., Church corruption). Such a connection continues with Father Spiletto and the nuns in the Italian hospital giving Robert Thorn (Peck) the baby Damien in place of his dead baby son, whom the priests and nuns have murdered. Spiletto tells Thorn, “God has given you a son.” (Seltzer, page 14)

The implied identifying of God with Satan should tell you something about the Church as understood in this movie. The fact that Fathers Spiletto and Brennan (the latter is Tassone in Seltzer’s novel), as well as Mrs. Baylock (B’aalock, as she’s also called in the novel), are Satanists shows the corruption in the Church (Seltzer, pages 130-131).

One key to understanding the political, materialist meaning of the movie is the poem Brennan/Tassone recites to Thorn (Seltzer, page 140): the Jews have returned to Zion (the creation of the state of Israel); the Holy Roman Empire rising is understood to be the Treaty of Rome and the establishment of the European Common Market, which would evolve eventually into the EU, which, as a capitalist entity, cannot be a good thing; for the EU in turn has gone hand in hand with US/NATO imperialism. (Speaking of US/NATO imperialism, one connection of the CIA with western Europe has been Gladio, a ‘stay-behind‘ organization in Italy that arose during the Cold War to help defend against possible attacks from the Warsaw Pact, but also could have been responsible for many terror attacks in Europe.)

From the eternal sea, the Antichrist rises (‘he’ representing all that is evil in “the Eternal Sea”, the world of politics. “The Sea that constantly rages with the turmoil and revolution…The Devil’s child will rise from the world of politics.” (Seltzer, page 188) This child will be “creating armies on either shore”, like the buildup of NATO, its armies on one side of the North Atlantic Ocean, and the US army on the other side.

Now consider how, over thirty-five years since the original Omen trilogy was filmed, those “armies on either shore” are even bigger, more numerously manned, and more powerful than ever, with no more substantial ‘communist threat’ for the US/NATO to worry about. Yet we are in a new Cold War with Russia, with a NATO buildup on the Russian border. These tensions–along with the threat of war with North Korea, Iran, and China, and all of this added to the unending “War on Terror” that has destroyed lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria–could very well lead to WWIII.

“Turning man against his brother/’Til man exists no more.”

Seltzer’s story is a true omen.

I argue that this movie is a political story, using Biblical prophesy as an allegory for a real warning of what will happen if we don’t change the direction our world is going in. It isn’t a religious prophesy; it’s an artistic prediction based on the material conditions of our world, the spiritual and supernatural being mere metaphors.

Consider Father Brennan’s entreaty to Robert Thorn when they meet in Thorn’s office: Brennan emphasizes drinking Christ’s blood and eating His flesh; the priest means for Thorn to take Communion, of course, but note the implications of emphasizing it in graphic language that sounds like cannibalism. Sanguis bibimus, corpus edimus. This is a materialist salvation, the doctrine of the Real Presence, in stark contrast to the non-denominational emphasis on salvation by grace through faith, and the symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist, which are much more spiritual. Similarly, Brennan speaks of wanting to save Thorn, so Christ will forgive him: this is salvation by good works (material action), instead of by faith (spirituality).

So the battle between Christ and Antichrist in this movie is a material battle, not a spiritual one. The material battle between contradictions, one that has occurred throughout not just Biblical history, but history in general, is the basis of dialectical materialism. Marx said, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. According to Mao Zedong, everything is made up of contradictions, and Lenin pointed out the paradoxical unity of contradictions.

Note the association I implied, in the paragraph preceding the last one, between Satanist and Christian cannibalism (bearing in mind how Romans from Nero’s reign and onward persecuted Christians because of, among other things, the pagans’ too-literal interpretation of “…eat; this is my body…Drink,…This is my blood.”). Then remember Spiletto telling Thorn that God, rather than the Devil, gave him a son. Then there’s Jennings the photographer (Warner), who–at Damien’s fifth birthday party–says he’s not sure if they have “the heir to the Thorn millions here or Jesus Christ Himself.” Are God and the Devil being, in a sense, equated in this film?

Brennan’s death is just outside a church, where one would think he’d have at least some protection from God: a lightning rod from the top of the church falls and impales him. This is during a brief thunderstorm, suggesting that a sky-father-god (a pagan one, like Zeus), in concert with the invisible demons chanting, “Versus Christus! Ave, Satani!”, has caused the priest’s death. Is the sky-father punishing Brennan for abandoning Christ, or Satan? Is it revenge for successively abandoning both?

Six is the number of the Devil, for it is incomplete, whereas seven is complete–hence the seven daggers of Megiddo, which Carl Bugenhagen gives Thorn to kill Damien. There were six days of physical Creation, and a holy, or spiritual, seventh day of rest–the Jewish Sabbath (Friday evening to Saturday night), or the Lord’s Day (Sunday). Six days of Creation without a day of rest suggest the Demiurge rather than the Biblical God; the Demiurge fashioned the physical world, and the physical is associated with evil, as opposed to the crucially missing spiritual world. In an evil world of class war (masters vs. slaves, as in the ancient world of Nero and the other Caesars; feudal lords vs. peasant serfs; and the bourgeoisie vs. the proletariat), the poor work and work, never resting (i.e., no Sabbath day). Did the Demiurge kill Brennan?

What makes this movie so horrifying is the seeming absence of the good, Christian God: Damien (Stephens) is given plenty of help, but what spiritual forces help those humans who recognize the boy’s evil? Killing Damien requires the use of the seven daggers; there is no sense of Christ doing battle with the Antichrist in this movie. As in The Exorcist, this is a world of only devils and no angels, of only Satan and no God, of only matter and no spirit.

The three sixes represent the diabolical Trinity: Devil, Antichrist, and false prophet. The Demiurge, though seen as benevolent according to Plato’s Timaeus, is pervasively seen as malevolent in Gnosticism, and thus could be equated with the Devil in this film; and the Demiurge is associated with physicality in how He created the material world. Damien (a pun on ‘demon’) is most physical, born of a jackal, and the dagger that extinguishes his physical life is, according to Bugenhagen, the most important one. The Holy Spirit’s Satanic counterpart is the false prophet, again, a physical being. The Omen‘s world is essentially material.

The materialism of conflicting opposites is symbolically clear in the gory, violent nature of each death. Thorn’s biological son, a newborn baby, is killed with blows to the head with a rock (Seltzer, page 133), smashing a hole in his skull. Damien’s first nanny hangs herself with a loving smile for the boy. Brennan is impaled. The fetus in Kathy’s womb is ‘aborted‘ by Damien making her fall from a balcony. Thorn and Jennings are attacked by Rottweilers in the cemetery, Thorn injuring his arm on a spike on the gate. Kathy (Remick) is thrown from a hospital window by Mrs. Baylock. Jennings is decapitated by a sheet of glass. None of this is overtly supernatural; but it’s all ever so materialistic.

In Seltzer’s novelization, more attention is given to the political issues allegorized with all the Biblical imagery. Thorn’s wish to postpone his trip to Saudi Arabia, just before Brennan/Tassone (Seltzer, pages 78-79) meets him in his office, is expanded on. His staff have worked hard to make the arrangements, and they are annoyed with the ambassador’s sudden changing of his mind. They remind Thorn of how important the US’s relationship is with the Saudis (all that oil!–see also page 107: “…the Arabs, with their oil, were now too powerful for anyone to stand against.”), and a postponement (or outright cancellation) would be seen as an insult.

The importance of the US/Saudi political relationship has become even more evident since the release of the movie; consider how Saudi Arabia, exporter of Wahhabism and home to 15 of the 19 men who hijacked the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, is never fought with in the “War on Terror”. Instead, the US and UK have sold the Saudis billions worth in weapons, and thus with the UK have aided the Saudis in the war in Yemen.

Elsewhere in Seltzer’s novel, Jeremy Thorn (as he’s called in the novel, not Robert) is giving a speech on the issue of world poverty, and a communist heckles him, asking why he doesn’t give of his own enormous wealth to feed the poor (pages 112-115). Liberal-leaning Thorn can’t help but agree with the communist (page 122), though he’d never want to be called a ‘commie’ by the press. Here we see the real, materialist basis of evil and political corruption symbolized by the rise of the Antichrist and his war with God: the material contradictions between the ruling class and the poor–capitalism.

As capital is accumulated, there is a fear that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall will endanger the survival of one’s business; therefore, business must expand, and markets must be sought out in foreign countries when the ability for capital to be accumulated in one’s own country dries up. Accumulating capital in foreign countries (which includes getting cheap, non-unionized labour) leads to imperialism, hence all this warmongering in the Middle East…for oil. The Biblical fundamentalists (who tend to be apologists for capitalism), instead of trying to prove that the Revelation’s prophesies are of things in today’s world, would do well to focus on such verses as this: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” (1 Timothy 6:10)

And as for those pro-Trump idiots who think that that lecherous narcissist is in any way religious: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:25) Finally, consider what, according to Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus considers to be true Christian behaviour.

Being a good Christian ought to be about helping the poor, downtrodden, and unfortunate, rather than engaging in speculative nonsense about relating Biblical prophesy to today’s world; yet, in the opinion of far too many conservative Christians, helping the poor and disadvantaged is mere “socialism,” the ‘tyranny’ of the state (as if there were no such thing as unaccountable corporate tyranny). They speak of ‘voluntarily‘ helping the poor, but one wonders how often these people actually give this voluntary help, when they often propagandize against such moderate leftism as social democracy.

The conspiracy of devils in The Omen is symbolic of the machinations of the bourgeoisie and the state that protects their interests; in the real world, we needn’t (nor, in the case of the more bigoted manifestations, should we) believe in ‘Illuminati, NWO, Jewish, or Masonic conspiracies’ to see the great evil in the world today, and throughout history. Ignore the spiritual claptrap, and look at the material conditions of the world: whoever has the money, has the power; and whoever hasn’t money is powerless. The conspiracy theorists, again, all too often apologists for capitalism, distract us from the material contradictions that Christian dualism (God vs. Satan, good vs. evil, spirit vs. flesh) represents in the movie.

To give yet another example of the unity of opposites given allegorically in the film and novelization, consider what’s written on the headstones of the graves of the jackal and Thorn’s practically still-born baby son, “Bambino [Scianna in the movie] Santoya…In Morte et in Nate Amplexrantur Generationes…In death…and birth…generations embrace.” (Seltzer, page 203) Death and birth unite in the embrace of generations (just before being killed herself [pages 132-133], the jackal gave birth to baby Damien in the same moment as Thorn’s newborn baby was murdered), as do God and Satan unite, the flesh and spirit unite, and good and evil unite. All material contradictions embrace, and are one.

In the novel, when Thorn meets Bugenhagen in Megiddo (associated with the word “Armageddon”), it’s pointed out that there have been many apocalypses in history (page 241); so the current one with Damien is merely the latest one (remember when Nero was the Antichrist, and it was believed that Nero would return, as Jesus is expected by Christians to return, even though He said all the events leading to and including the end of the world would pass by within His listeners’ own generation in the first century!).

The evil dealt with in The Omen is a banal, earthly one, not the grandiose one of the Revelation. Still, our mundane, materialist evil is a serious one that could lead to the end of all life here (i.e., global warming, often denied, ironically, by fundamentalist Christians and conspiracy theorists who fear a One-World Government, rather than warily watch the rapacious late-stage capitalism of the real globalists, the sovereignty-defying multinational corporations that, with the help of the bourgeois state, are quite possibly pushing us all [outside of mere fear-mongering to sell weapons and create jobs in the US military] to the nuclear brink of World War Three).

Damien’s birth is supernatural, but also most physical, as was Christ’s birth. Remember that The Omen‘s Satanism parodies every Christian dogma (Three sixes as a parody of the Trinity; the jackal’s name is Maria Scianna–Maria Avedici Santora in the novel [page 203]; “Ave Satani” parodies “Ave Maria” and the rite of Communion, etc.).

The Orthodox Church rejected as heresy Gnosticism’s insistence on Christ being pure spirit for soteriological reasons; for Christ to die for our sins, He had to be God and man, to have a body, his literal, physical blood washing away our sins. The Church is materialist; Satanism is materialist; the war between the two is materialist.

Dialectical materialism and class war: that’s the moral war that The Omen, however allegorically, is warning us about.

David Seltzer, The Omen, Signet, New York, 1976

Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Faber and Faber, London, 1948

James L. Mays, general editor, HarperCollins Bible Commentary, Harper, San Francisco, 1988