Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The site is a sister to Atlantic Free Press and Brick Ogden an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Pave the Holy Lands with Good Intentions
by Christopher Ketcham
"Razing Jerusalem, Mecca! Free holy land in Baja California! Get it while it's cheap!"
I came across this real estate notice in a copy of Take a Shit, an odd little zine published out of Brooklyn that proselytizes (if we can call it that) the notion that human beings aren't shitting enough -- backed up too much with meat, Jello, the Internet, suffering from the peculiar condition that doctors identify as scatalitosis, wherein the compost trapped in the intestines actually produces a kind of bad breath.
An ex-girlfriend had this condition: common constipation brings it on, too. Extrapolate to human history, the zine argues -- we aren't shitting out the past fast enough: our acculturations, tribal fealties, land fetishes.
Idea for a world-historic laxative: Behold the slavering
idiot tribes of Jehovah and Mohammed vying for the high holy ground in
Jerusalem. Solution: Deploy the unipolar dominance the U.S. claims so
loftily is a force for good and issue, ex nihilo, ultimatums to
populations of all sacred sites. Use the traditional caress of American
diplomacy, e.g. gunpoint. Proceed to bomb out of existence Mecca,
Jerusalem etc. -- wherever God has been fattened on the ground in the
Middle East.
Confiscate oil for the continued profligate
porno-consumerist existence of Americans.
As suggested by Take a Shit magazine, launch
wide-ranging advertising campaigns for travel to a new Holy Land in
far-off inhospitable places. Mars will do, so will the craters of the
moon. Barring that, we can offer the bottoms of the oceans or active
volcanoes. If things get out of hand, the U.S. can sacrifice Texas,
parts of Arizona, and most of Florida for the purpose of welcoming the
billions of insane-person believers to the baptism of this new "holy
land." Another solution is the mobile Jerusalem model wherein the Holy
Land becomes a sort of traveling freak show; the floating fortresses of
the U.S. Navy could be accommodated to this effect (better this use
than bombing) and keep the holy rollers guessing.
Ultimately,
however, this may prove a draconian effort with the usual blowback
effects wherever military power is wielded with "good intentions."
Indeed, historical patterns suggest that the effort may be in vain.
Several thousand years can pass and entire new strata of sacred zones
will obsess the human race. Consider the once holy sites throughout the
Mediterranean that today are meaningless for contemporary religionists.
The island of Samothraki near the Dardanelles, for example, where for
ten centuries until roughly 300 AD the mystery cults, heirs of Phrygian
custom, convened to worship eunuchs and oaks and waterfalls, where even
Philip of Macedon was drawn and where he met his future wife, Olympias,
who would bear him a son named Alexander, who went on to be a
psychopath (sacred child!).
In that tiny space of ten
centuries, the superstitionists at Samothraki understood all that was
needed to know -- and, of course, they knew nothing. The point is this:
Even at gunpoint we may never shit out all the many inherited
compartments of acculturation, the weight of superstition, never look
into each other's eyes from the base of our humanness. It is the bad
breath of history's scatalitosis.
Christopher Ketcham
is a freelance journalist who has written for Harpers', Penthouse and
Salon.com. He can be reached through his website: christopherketcham.com
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