"a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it"

"Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?"


I'm wondering this morning why I'm finding this Pope's long goodbye so affecting. I'm not Roman Catholic; I'm more secular than not; I'm Left, not Right. I've written how the first John Paul, had he been allowed to serve his natural term, would have swept the Curia and the Vatican Bank of the corruption and the paedo-fascist Masonic conspirators he was shocked to find, which is precisely why he served all of a month. The second John Paul has seemed, rather, a pained enabler of the Luciferian excesses sheltered in the Church's "conservative" wing, while devoting the bulk of his energies to stamping out perceived liberal threats and liberation theologies. So why should the thought of Karol Wojtyla's Last Rights choke me up?

I'm thinking, perhaps, it's the same reason Bob Dylan has always affected me. Both have a burdensome vision of the Hell that's opening up beneath our feet, though they often haven't known what to do with their vision besides cradle their heads and lament. And I suppose I can relate to that.

The great calamity of America is too big now for just analysis and rational thought. To be parsed, it needs now also art and faith, and the insights of supra-rationality. Almost everything I've written in this blog could be distilled to four lines from a mediocre Dylan song of the mid-80s:

Witchcraft scum exploiting the dumb,
Turning children into punks and slaves
Whose heroes and healers are rich drug dealers
Who should be put in their graves.

We're supposed to move the clocks ahead an hour this weekend, but it feels as though my internal clock is already set on the near future. And that song's refrain - "It's Hell Time, man!" - sounds to me like the alarm which has set the world groping for the snooze button. The crises, the daily Watergates which pass without mainstream comment, keep cascading with a ferocity which frustrates all justice, and our ability to understand. Clearly that's not by chance; clearly there's intent in piling it on, so we few who try to take notice will never notice it all. Nor, so they hope, be able to do something about it. Something like Dylan suggests in the same song:

We're gonna blow up your home of Voodoo
And watch it burn without any regret.
We got the power, we're the new government -
You just don't know it yet.

Problem is, most of us just don't know it yet, either.

The 2004 election seems already an ancient crime, one fit only for getting over and moving on. And yet a study of the vote by a team of statisticians was released Thursday which asserts there is only a 1-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been that wrong. More likely, it suggests, is that votes were altered on a massive scale; enough to throw the election to Bush. But "what are you going to do except laugh at it?" said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. There are plenty of other things to do, such as ignore it, which is what most Democrats are doing. Because it's better, some presume, to not "cry in your tea cups" about what can't be fixed - water under the bridge, spilled milk, and all that - and hope that next election, things'll be better. And if not, there's always the election after that.

No. It's Hell Time now. No more next times; no more dread reckonings indefinitely deferred. The Republic is dead, the Earth is dying, and their killers are black magicians flying the skull and bones. With resigned clarity, Bob Dylan knows, and so does John Paul II. And perhaps, as well, I'm affected by this Pope's imminent death because I doubt the next one will bear his burden of knowledge.

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by, all good people are praying.

It's the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount.
The last radio is playing.