piasharn | Strange Coincidences

Have you ever had an occasion where you involved yourself in a certain activity to get your mind off of something, only to have that unrelated activity somehow steer you right back to the thoughts you were avoiding?

Glancing back through recent entries, I've realized how political this journal is becoming. Perhaps not a bad thing to some, but I desperately need a change of pace. I need to clear the air, not only in these entries, but in my personal space. I need to get out and remind myself that although Bush is a moron of epic proportions, he will not always be in office. Life will go on and all that rot.

Don't get me wrong... I don't mean to say that I'm giving up. I simply want to balance out all the negativity I've been feeling as of late. I need to untangle my emotions from my thoughts before I can move forward.

Having recently aquired some new reading material at a local used-book sale, I started on one, intent on pursuing a subject other than current political uproars. The book is "The Human Zoo" by Desmond Morris. It's a follow-up to "The Naked Ape", which I greatly enjoyed. I was likewise enjoying this novel, looking at our society through the eyes of a Zoologist. I was wandering through paragraphs describing how our biological nature has not kept up with our culture, and getting into the section that described how our "super-tribes" had adjusted their old ways of leadership and whatnot from our primitive anscestors. Then I read this, and a shiver went down my spine...

"To put it cynically, one could say that nothing helps a leader like a good war. It gives him his only chance of being a tyrant and being loved for it at the same time. He can introduce the most ruthless forms of control and send thousands of his followers to their deaths and still be hailed as a great protector."

I should point out to those who may not be familiar with this man's work that this is not a current book. Both "The Human Zoo" and its predicessor were written in the late 1960s.

(Which makes me wonder if the above quote was meant to be a reference to Vietnam. However, the fact does not make me feel any better since my dad mentioned that this proposed war with Iraq would probably be my generation's Vietnam.)

So that attempt to look elsewhere has failed. I think I'll dig into Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" next. And I hope I don't find anything political in that... Perhaps by then the clouds obstructing my vision will have disapated.