Fear Series: Fear and The Corrupt City

  
The Corrupt City is very close to the root of my fear.  Growing up from the soil of my preconscious mind is the recognition that to me, the City of Man is ultimately an evil place:  It is all man-made.  Concrete and asphalt and metal and machines and all of us for its grist.  The Corrupt City.  Mordor. Babylon.  Sodom.  Gomorra.  The City, and tainted people who gravitate to it, power-hungry and uncontrollably self-validated.  Fear is their relish.

    I know that if I loved those people, if I could truly see them, they couldn’t scare me.  If I had love inside of me, fear would have no place.  Someday, this fear will have to give place to love, instead of holding it hostage.

    But I have always lived in fear.  I grew up in a nutrient broth of fear.  My times reek of hysteria and fear; Fear, and a world-city relishing and denying it, holding love hostage like the carcass of a lamb in a den of jackals.

    The Corrupt City has an endless appetite that leads inevitably to aggression.  Excess always perverts the appetite, and we are no longer tribal.  We have become the consuming Global Village, and now the citizens who aren’t being chewed up and spat out by politic games watch them on screen, or read books about them.  Is this bizarre?

     Those in power tell us straight-faced that a strong defense, an invincible arsenal will make us strong and free and kind neighbors.  First we talk, and then with great predictability and considerable precision, we blow away our opposition.  Then we watch the blow by blow by blow on the news, or share it over the fence.  Awesome.  We watch war movies.  We watch the controversial airing of The Day After and gorge ourselves on the Global Village.

    Where is God in this barrage?  Every side is claiming Him and denying Him.  Claiming and denying; and instead of moving in the assurance of His power like David before Goliath, we are merely pawns in the chess game played by minds we cannot fathom.  And for those who absent God, the absence leaves a huge vacuum that can only be filled with a huge mushrooming cloud of unreasoning fear.  Or denial.  How high can you see?  If God is absent, what is it hovering over us, watching our every move?  If He is absent, then love is frivolous, merely a lamb in the jaws of a dog, and hovering over us is the buzzard.

  
    Some nights, I cannot see very high.  I cannot see over the head of Mankind.  Those nights I don’t let sleep seduce me.  There are nights when I am too crazed to sleep.  Then it is better to keep vigil and face the holocaust with one eye one the sky.  I wait for the sirens and the fire and the scorching wind.  The cloud gets very close, those nights, and heaven is way beyond my grasp.

    It is after all, Armageddon we attend and pervert with fascinated horror.
This is the pinnacle of the Corrupt City.  We are already marshaling on the sands, going through the initial staging.  Isn’t that just a piss-assed thing to say?  Pacifists get mad at me and start to rhapsodize about Humanity and The New Age and Science, saying “I just can’t believe THAT will HAPPEN.”  I look at the evidence, which is not hopeful.  The City is expanding on a dying planet.

    If death is inevitable (and is there anything more inevitable?) why not go out with a bang, reasons the Zealot.  Whether I am immortal or not, it is the glory of the moment.  The Pacifist cannot understand this insanity.  Reason, he is sure, will win the day.  The Zealot cannot tolerate this Reason, unless it serves him Power.  There is no reconciliation for these two.  One refuses to see Armageddon, and the other is rubbing his hands together.

    And confounding all is David moving in the assurance of God’s power.

    The City is deceived into thinking that war in the sands, though perhaps inevitable, is easy.  Their victory is assured.  Although they can see David, they see no higher than his head.

    But death itself is very hard to face.  Annihilation is hard to imagine.  Having your Humanitarian New Age Science Reality reduced to cinders is antithetical.  So is having to admit that Armageddon may not bring you the kind of immortality you prefer.  This is what blackens us.

    And those of us living the amazing denial; denying the evidence of our own decay, we can’t face the desecration of the background Babylon we take so for granted.  It is proof of our substance, our permanence.  Landscaped malls.  Courtyards.  Amenities.  Groceries.  WKRP in Cincinnati.  Earth Day.  Civilized living, reduced to ashes?  Never.  It is an amazing denial we live.  Everything grows old and dies, or is destroyed, or murdered, or slaughtered, or discarded, and we deny it to ourselves.  This life of denial is the piece de resistance of the Corrupt City.


    So. Just imagine the final landscape:  Verdant hills, burnt whole.  Undulant land, pocked.  Imagine slinging your bag over your peeling shoulder and stepping over the charred and stinking on your way to the back to pick through the potholes and the smoking toxic garbage for your amenities.  Still afraid to die?
How abstract.  In this landscape, we are afraid of living.  A new subject, closely tied to fear of death.  Hey, let’s watch TV.  I don’t even want to think about that.

    Welcome to the Global Village.  We refuse to admit that we are out of control, complaining that we are poorly monitored, denying that we are accountable, that what we decide actually matters at all.  We manipulate and abdicate, with no real authority to do either.  We pacify and incite.  We insist on our supremacy and excuse ourselves because we are bestial.  We insult God by deliberately ignoring Him, and look only as high as our own heads.  Truly, in all Man’s attempts to create something for himself akin to validation, he can only copy poorly at best what he lost through his own arrogance; and fabricate as he will, he realizes only Mordor.  It is Babylon that man heaps up for himself with pitchfork and shovel, because Zion is safe beyond his grasp.