Horror Show: Christmas In The USA (houses, buying, commercial, name)

[Bohemian Enigma]

December is the sacred epicenter of the annual religious cycle in the United States. The entire nation is rocked by an enormous mythico-ritual tremor as the faithful flock to their sacred sites, determined to fulfill their single-minded obligation to acquire, yea, to pursue the highest purpose of American culture - the ritual of consumption. The sacrament of commodity fetishism is administered upon the faithful by ceaseless dream manufacturing media blitzes and commercial saturation. The steadfast, monomaniacal acolytes, having been duly Starbuckized, resolutely fulfill their holy obligation.

"In the postmodern epoch the meta-myth of our culture is the sacred narrative of success and affluence," writes Dell deChant in The Sacred Santa, "gained through a proper relationship with the economy, and revealed in the ever-expanding material prosperity of society and through the ever-increasing acquisition and consumption of products by individuals."

And still the humans can't seem to get enough. The current ubiquitous commercial corporate consumerism celebrates nothing substantive beyond buying and owning things. This cherished relationship with the economy consumes their thoughts as the worker bees furiously acquire and consume, devoting their lives to the highest purpose of Western culture: the ritual of consumption.

On page 7 of the classic publication Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, one reads:

" ... the immersion of mankind into the counterfeit, computer-generated cryptosphere intensifies, and the march of induced hallucination, digital money, junk from Wal-Mart ... accelerates, commensurate with the spiritual and mental deaths of the animated corpses of the masses of walking dead of America.

"Millions of men and women who just [decades] ago, even with all their flaws, were at least family and community-oriented beings, possessed of some sense of place, some vestige of esteem for their heritage and a semblance of common sense, are now alchemically transformed into beasts, who care for nothing but money and television, as pliable and easy to manipulate in the hands of what James Shelby Downard calls the "huckster witches" of media and government, as cattle at a slaughter house ...

"In the name of better living through machinery, dead matter reigns. For the cause of making every day Shrove Tuesday, we do more than ever ritually proffer our heads to the perpetual Lent of automated artifice."

In a cultural septic field sodden with postmodern smugness and banal irony, the words resonate across the amber waves of grain like a misguided Gregorian Chant. While the denizens of this theoretical republic go about prating pseudo-patriotic tripe with the intensity of an impassioned Keatsian ode, "the prince of the power of the air" (Eph. 2:2) dutifully goes about his business. The quotidian occult undercurrent undulates from sea to shining sea. The tremors are felt from the sybaritic statehouses of New England to the rustic, bucolic outhouses of Appalachia, from the idyllic Norman Rockwell-esque landscapes of the Farmbelt to the shimmering, bdellium-hued beaches framing the Sunshine State, from the purple mountain majesties of the Pacific Northwest to the alien-infested waters of the Rio Grande. Therein the battle rages on in America's most un-civil war. At stake are human souls, and their eternal destinies.

Dr. deChant also informs us, "Like animate beings, malls and department stores seem somehow alive - filled with a vitalizing power and sacred energy not unlike what one might have found in the temples and shrines of antiquity. They welcome and enchant us, hold and enfold us, and guide us on through aisle after decorated aisle, all teeming with the mythic objects of our culture's dharmic dreams."

As Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West) shrieked on her way to radiator steam in The Wizard of Oz, "What a world, what a world!"