The Knight Will Lift You From Darkness

Some day, he will come along, take you by the hand and lift you up on his horse to take you with him, to a better place, to a better world. He will take you with him, to lands unknown, where milk and honey flow. Or where you won´t have to deal with the drags of ordinary everyday life, anyway. And you´ll live sorrow-free and happily ever after.

Don´t believe it! Reality is not a fairy-tale, and, yes, sometimes, it just flat-out sucks.

Perhaps you are still fairly young, or perhaps you are anything above 40. You have been working most of your life, and very likely, you don´t particularly enjoy what you are doing. But, after all, one has to make a living. Your relationship may have lost is magic, and you may be living side by side with one another, rather than with one another.

Perhaps you have stopped exchanging tendernesses, and you don´t really remember when you last had sex. But you probably don´t even miss it. In fact, you may even have seperate bed rooms and be content with this. In short, your life may not particularly exciting, but on the other hand, it is not particularly nasty, and it seems to be pretty much the same with everyone around you. And, somehow, you have grown used to this routine.

Chances are, you don´t think too much about these things anyway, because in your daily routine of getting up early, downing your coffee, rushing to work, working, getting home in the evening, having dinner, taking care of the kids, before dropping off to bed, only to get ready for the next day, you don´t have too much time to reflect upon anything beyond the daily routine. In case any questioning of this status quo should ever creep up, there are always ways to numb your mind by little escapes, such as TV shows or legal drugs.

Until one day ...

It may be a movie you have been watching. Or something you have been reading. Or an encounter you have recently had, perhaps a total stranger who looked at you with a certain glance, or perhaps someone you have stumbled across in a virtual environment.

This encounter suddenly threatens to disturb the world you have grown accustomed to live in. Suddenly you wonder whose life it is you have been living for the past you-don´t-remember-how-many years; it is, in any case, not the life you have actively chosen to live, but somehow you ended up in it. You did not so much define it than were defined by ... what? Circumstance? Necessity? Things you got used to?

Suddenly you realize that there is something inside you that you have long since forgotten, having been tucked away so safely by you. You may start wondering what happened to your passion, your dreams, your love. Worst of all, you realize that all of this which has been buried inside you has been there all along, all these years.

And you wonder if this is actually it. Is your life over before it has actually begun? You have 30, maybe 40 or 50 more years ahead of you, and you doubt that you´ll want to carry on like this.

Then you start contemplating your options: Should you follow the newly discovered path and leave your somewhat bleak routine? This would mean, on the other hand, to swap the relative comfort and security of the "known" against the big unknown. What would happen if you tried to shake up your partner and re-awaken that which brought you together in the first place, a (perhaps not so) long time ago? Would s/he even react, understand what you´re trying to say? Would s/he care? Or would s/he just look at you and wonder what has gotten into you now, hoping for the storm to pass? And ... what would you do then? Draw the line? Leave her/him?

Perhaps it would be safer to try and numb the nagging of your recently awoken mind, so you can at least stick to what you have become used to, and don´t risk to lose the comfy routine of it all, including your partner.

But that nagging just won´t go away, now that this string of thoughts has finally made its way from your sub- to your consciousness. And you feel like a character from "Desperate Housewives" as you meander between madness and depression.

You look for an escape. More to the point, you look for someone to take you by the hand and rescue you: The knight (or knightess) on the white horse (or black, depending on your orientation, state of mind, and preference). A strong, independent soul who will make everything allright. Undemanding, ever respectful, and yet protective.

OK, now let me tell you something: Forget it! Stop waiting for a miracle, and stop waiting for a saviour. There is no knight, neither a white one, nor a black one. YOU and you alone have to drag yourself out of this swamp-hole that you have gotten (yourself) into. Stop wallowing in self-pity and stop indulging in the blame-game, or projecting your hopes upon some vague fantasy of an even vaguer saviour. And don´t believe in that crap of someone coming along with the sole purpose and intention of rescuing you.

Get your act together and do whatever it takes to make this life your life.

To put it with the (admittedly: somewhat dated and no longer en vogue) lyrics of "The International":

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear

The decision to act is yours. This is not decided for you, and it is not done for you.You have to take it in your own hands.

It is your life!

PropagandArt

We´ve all heard the story about the Iranian speedboat recently threatening American vessels in the Gulf´s strait of Hormuz.

We´ve also all heard the ominous threat muttered - supposedly - by someone of the Iranian speedboat´s crew, muttering (in, I might add, a Schwarzeneggerian tone of voice reminiscent of "Terminator I") "I am coming at you. You will explode after a few minutes."

The supposed incident was, of course, immediately taken up by the US administration which found itself in a hurry to reaffirm what a big threat Iran is for stability in the reagion, world peace, and probably chocolate chipped cookies; and how this is another proof of their aggressive intentions, and reason enough why Iran should never ever be allowed to enter the nuclear game (not that I am a friend of this nuclear game - as far as I´m concerned, none of us, including the US of A, should be playing around with this kind of fire).

Well, turns out that the ominous threat was added to the video, posthumously, so to speak (wouldn´t be surprising if it turned out to actually have been text spoken by Arnie, would it?). It was, according to the BBC, in fact "a radio recording made seperately".

Monday´s (January 07, 2008) incident bears an erie similarity with a similar scenario which lead to the shooting down of an Iranian airliner in 1988 by a US vessel, killing all 290 people aboard the Airbus:

It has worrying similarities with the incident in 1988 when, in the same Strait of Hormuz, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, having failed to monitor the radio traffic properly.

The crew of the Vincennes became wrongly convinced that the airliner, an Airbus with 290 people on board, all of whom died, was an Iranian fighter jet.

[...]

What is clear is that there are grave doubts about who uttered the warning picked up by the US ships. A deep voice was heard to say: "I am coming at you. You will explode after a few minutes."

The video released by the US implied that the warning was part of a series of transmissions to the ships from the Iranian craft.

It turns out that the warning was added onto the video. It was a radio recording made separately.

Experts say it could have come from another ship in the area or from a radio transmitter on shore. The channel used by the Iranian vessels to make their inquiries is an open one.

Iranian version

The Iranians later issued their own video, in which one of their sailors, in a much higher and quite different voice from the one which issued the "warning", asks the US ships who they are and what course they are on.

He gets a dusty reply that the US vessels are in international waters.

Thank goodness that the BBC leaves no doubt about who are the true masters of propaganda:

This goes beyond the back and forth of a propaganda battle, in which once again the Iranians show themselves to be masters.

Uh-huh. The Iranians. Of course. Oh, not that their government are not artists at that.

BUT, I´d say this latest incident can be fully booked under the label "propaganda to serve our means". Not that we shouldn´t have gotten used to that meanwhile.

Who can seriously believe anything anymore this administration in particular, and our governments, and our media in general, are proclaming?

Read the full article at the BBC´s website.