The hour when the ship comes in

Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins
The hour when the ship comes in - Bob Dylan

There's something about Hope, that for me, doesn't go down easily, and burns on the way back up.

It's the pasturized, hollowed-out passivity to it - or what passes for it - that makes me scrunch up my lips and shake my head Hell no. It's the same idle dream that tricksters and daemons, both human and other than human, have encouraged us to entertain for millenia. It's Maitreya; it's Hillary in '08; it's our benevolent Space Brothers; it's Disclosure; it's the lottery; it's the Rapture. It's the pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die, or when a Democrat is returned to the White House. It's even the fatalistic anticipation of Doom, and the Final Release.

However it's tarted up, the message is always the same: Just wait. Just a little bit longer.

Hope, remember, was Bill Clinton's hometown. And if that's hope, if all we have is Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, then please God, give me naked, howling despair. Which, I must say, has its place. If we howled naked more often we might be ahead of the game by now, or at least know what game this is.

That's the emasculating Hope of the devils who honour the Dr King they killed by psychic-driving I had a dream to the vanishing point of I'd like to buy the world a Coke. The Dr King of "Beyond Vietnam" is not safe, cannot be contained by Happy Thoughts for the better tomorrow forever dangled in our faces, and will never have his portrait hung in the hall of his murderers. That's a Dr King who must be killed daily, because the next time he marches he's going to carry Hell behind him.

It's a Hope that tells us to empty our pockets of all valuables, and sit on our hands and wait. For what? For whatever you like. Just wait. Wait until your ship comes in. Then - ooh man! - it's gonna be sweet.

So it may seem peculiar that I find an example of authentic hope in a song titled When the Ship Comes In. In some measure we're only as strong as our metaphors, so do we really need to wait for another damn ship? But that's not this metaphor which we ought to celebrate:

A song will lift
As the mainsail shifts
And the boat drifts on to the shoreline.
And the sun will respect
Every face on the deck,
The hour that the ship comes in.

Do you see? We're not waiting on the shore, scanning the horizon for the ship and our salvation. We're on the ship. It's ours. The deck is overrun with whistleblowers, blowing whistles, and the communications room is tapping out messages to those still on land who don't know what all the hubbub's about.

Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin'.
And the ship's wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin'.

Maybe this is just the vanity of cattle, to think we must be of exceeding importance to those who would slaughter us, but I don't think we know yet how much we must scare them. If we had no power, then history - and alright: parahistory - would not be the record of our being separated from it. All sinister forces share the trait of vampirism: they draw strength by consuming our blood, our fear, our minds, our awe. So perhaps, in some sense, it really is all about us.

In the early hours of August 8, 1993, several cars pulled to the side of a road between Belgrave and Fountain Gate near Melbourne, Australia. A massive, radiant object which should not have been there was sitting in the adjoining field. Kelly Cahill and her husband, and the rest who happened by randomly, exited their vehicles to better regard the weird sight. (Cahill's account is supported by the other witnesses.)

Kelly's description of the preliminary scene, which sets up a typical abduction account, from Hair of the Alien:

I'm standing there and we are looking at this thing. All of a sudden there is a black figure in the field. It's about seven feet tall... It started coming towards us, only slowly, and it had big red eyes. It sounds stupid, but it had great big round red eyes, like huge fly's eyes, and they were red like, not like a reflection of red, but like burning red, like....fluorescent stop lights....

All of a sudden I started screaming out.... Now this has really got me baffled because of the fact that a human being doesn't know this, so I don't even know how I came out with this, but I started saying, "They've got no souls." And then I started screaming: "THEY'VE GOT NO SOULS!"

And maybe that's our power: We do. Maybe that's what they've been coveting all this time, from the incubi and succubi to alien "genetic hybridization." Maybe that's what our more mundane demons mean to kill within us. Maybe that's really what we're talking about when we talk about mind control and ritual abuse.

Let's have no false hope about this. I won't say they can't kill us all, because they can. Perhaps they even mean to. And I can't promise that the ship will come in. The hour may never arrive, or we may not live to see it. But if we're ensouled and know it then we can make our enemies quail, because we're on a good ship with some wind at our backs. Even if it seems sometimes as though we're sailing in circles, that's far better than standing on the beach in wet shoes with our hands thrust purposefully in our pockets.

And we're not sunk yet.

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'.
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it's for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.




By the way, Fintan Dunne has thoughtfully published a list of "CIA Internet Fakes." He writes, "We do not contend that everyone associated with these websites are knowing intelligence operatives. Some have been professionally manipulated, others merely misled. In any event these are promoting the psyop agendas and disinformation themes of the covert controllers. This is also not meant to be a fully comprehensive listing of all the fake websites."

It's really quite the list. And honestly, given some of the cans of worms lying open around here, I can see why he might include Rigorous Intuition, and think I'm at best misled. But Buzzflash? CooperativeResearch? Narconews? Riverbend? The only site I see missing is his own.

There are psyop agendas and disinformation themes. But someone who sees them everywhere can't help but make me wonder: What's his agenda?