"From beyond the stars"

"I hear the Crawling Chaos that calls from beyond the stars" - The Necronomicon
"We have a calling from beyond the stars" - George W. Bush, January 19, 2005

The Bush Mythos

HP Lovecraft wrote that "the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Increasingly, it seems to me that mercy is being withheld from us.

Perhaps it's an Internet thing: the digitization of data has enhanced our own Random Access Memory. That isn't to say we're necessarily correlating correctly - even if everything's connected, that doesn't mean our model of how they connect is accurate - but more than ever, we're seeing dots. What we do with them is becoming the question of our time. And it's on the meta-level of myth that some of the most significant connections can be made.

I doubt that George W Bush knew, as he delivered his speech at the "Celebration of Freedom" concert on the eve of his second inaugural, that its most memorable line was straight out of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. His speech writers also were likely unaware that their prose evoked nothing so much as the "Great Old Ones" from beyond space and time. But that's the thing about a myth, even one created by a pulp fiction writer: you needn't even know it exists to become a part of it.

Intentional or not, the nod to Cthulhu was apt. Lovecraft's apocalypse is of awakened Elder Gods who resume their rule of Earth when humanity becomes sufficiently like them: "free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the Earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom." Now that sounds like a crusader religion fit for the Pentagon. (I could see the promise of "new ways to kill" being the subject of a flurry of memos.) And Bush seems to be doing as much to hasten this End of the World as he is that of his supposed Christian faith.

Of course Lovecraft was writing fiction. Though as we noted here, Michael Aquino has written several Cthulhu-derived ritual ceremonies, and Kenneth Grant of the Typhonian OTO and the Cult of Lam regards Lovecraft as an unwitting prophet of the Left Hand Path. (Consider the gravity with which some hold Lovecraft's "prophetic fiction" here, in a treatise on the "Aeon of Cthulhu Rising.") Still, it's likely not Cthulhu calling. Though something seems to be.

"A Special Evil"

So I''ll give Bush the benefit of the doubt on Cthulhu, and believe he didn't know what he was saying. But there was another speech. And I'm afraid he knew exactly what he was saying, and also what he wasn't.

Do you remember his address to the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2003? It was his chance to win back the world on Iraq after the debacle of invasion and during the atrocity of occupation. The speech was consumed with the "War on Terrror," until this strangely discordant note was struck:

There's another humanitarian crisis spreading, yet hidden from view. Each year, an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold or forced across the world's borders. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls, and others as young as five, who fall victim to the sex trade. This commerce in human life generates billions of dollars each year -- much of which is used to finance organized crime.

There's a special evil in the abuse and exploitation of the most innocent and vulnerable. The victims of sex trade see little of life before they see the very worst of life -- an underground of brutality and lonely fear. Those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished. Those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery.

I watched the speech, and I remember how my jaw dropped when he suddenly segued from the virtues of the invasion of Iraq to the scourge of international paedophile rings. Most of his audience may have thought it an odd transition, if they thought anything at all, but I thought it something more. I knew the story of the Franklin Cover-Up. I knew this man's father, the former president, had been implicated by several minors in Lawrence King's service. I understood that paedophile rings were utilized by intelligence services to blackmail foreign dignitaries. And all this helped me process the subtext of Bush's digression: blackmail.

I thought of this again because of last week's story out of Britain, which made such an awful, appropriate follow-up to the reopening of the Atlanta Child murders investigation, that hundreds, maybe thousands of African boys are disappearing in London. Some like "Adam," to ritual sacrifice.

It's unlikely we would be able to correlate these stories without the Internet. Without the contextualizing web, it's unlikely I would have thought one might have anything to do with another. And if they actually do, how much longer will we be permitted such a processing tool?

Lovecraft went on to write: "some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

Perhaps that's it. Maybe they won't need to take the Internet from us after all. Maybe we'll hand it back, begging "Take it, please, I can't bear anymore."