Chapter Eighty-Four
COMES A PALE HORSE
“Maybe you ain't walked on any highway
You've just been flyin' in the air...
We dropped anchor in revolution harbor, amidst a nearsighted fortune teller's tea-leaf
celebration and barely stopping for a pint of ale and a breath of social respite, quickly made
our way towards the land of Babylon, kingdom of treasures and pleasures and desire’s illusion of
the eyes, ancient realm we’d studied up on in all the required texts. And when we reached
the timeworn storied city gates we rang our cracked bell proudly, holding the main-event tickets
in our calloused hands; cheap-seat passes for the nosebleed section some acting governor had taxed us
triple for, plus an added value county levy and another cut for the corrupt town council’s back
pocket. After forcing the great gates slightly ajar by reprogramming our all-in-one
trillion function remote, we slipped on in to the land inside the box, land of wealth’s deception,
freedom-less conformity and mediocrity’s jaded boredom, amidst mass confusion exceeding all
known delusion and sorrow beyond all tears.
“Welcome, brought to you by the American Bull Company---don’t forget our discount tickets
for your Florida summer vacation” a salesmen from Magic Mountain grandly exclaimed, as a
multi-colored peacock strutted his white-washed stuff and lied, “No Bull Company over here, right in line
with the Gold Medallion generals and their all-electric mansion on Capitol Shill.” Nearly
hidden on the bottom far-right, big brother’s ever-watchful menacing eye silently coerced us, “Certified
Bull Services this way,” as a former embedded media pawn, now buried deep within the mail room
at CNN for repenting of many sins of many fathers and their even more ridiculous offspring,
suddenly appeared and straightaway warned us profusely: “Beware the sly Fox slithering
several degrees to the far right of Joe McCarthy, guarding iniquity’s hen house of public
thievery and social debauchery, while leaving all unsuspecting prey unfairly paralyzed in her war
machine propaganda contrivance of trivial pursuit, weighed in true balances and justly found
severely wanting.”
Weeping just inside the exquisitely carved and ornamented front gates, a long-term sixties
folk singer softly plucked a worn flower-powered guitar, sorrowfully hailing a big yellow taxi
trying to get back to Eden's garden. ¹ And, mistaking it for certified public
transportation, we jumped in without a clue as to where we were going. The driver asked,
“which way” and we said, “we’re here to see King George the Little.” “You ain’t one o'
dem lebrels”, he warned. “They ain’t ‘lowed w’thin ten blocks of de show, that is, the
one’s that’s left after the rast hav’ be’n rounded up ‘n tortured by the homel’nd’s s’curity
Sheriff of the Far Reich.”
“No”, we lied, “we’re three wise men from the Mid-East, here to observe and report back to
the Texaco Sultan.” And of course, the tired hack believed us. After all, he drove a
company cab and we figured him an illegal for certain, which was true enough as we found out
later, he was born in Missouri and had immigrated from a peace and blow festival somewhere
upstate New York. King George knows how to maintain his allegiance---just wave a rebel flag and
promise him a shilling or two rebated right away upfront and fail to mention that his children
won’t have any flowers left to sing about or ever visit a licensed doctor or be vaccinated or
receive any necessary medication for their severe childhood vitamin deficiencies or live long
enough to not be able to afford an education, that is, if universities are somehow, still
in existence.
And now we’re stuck in six o’clock traffic under a giant jumbotron, craning our necks to
catch a glimpse of King George’s beady-eyed teleprompted image, spewing forth
some tired rhetoric of much to do about nothing and nothing to do about anything that matters
regarding his long since powerless subjects’ security, health, happiness and the pursuit
thereof. And somewhere between not all that carefully thought through lies of
unsophisticated sound-bite sophistry and a twisted quote or two from Isaiah of old
(mistranslated by his shifty-eyed father King James, commonly known as George the Plutocrat),
in the midst of the city square a broken clock high above us, at the top of a lofty tower
seemingly reaching above the clouds into heaven, comes slowly to a forlorn grinding halt.
A short dark homeless man in filthy rags watches silently, sitting by the broken fire
hydrant near a newsstand across the square. Now he’s standing with a whiskey bottle in
one hand and an old scroll in the other and going on about some good news he once sang and a
freedom bell he once rang, angrily shouting “I warned you about the deceitful and confining
freedom-less land inside the box, about the scales of justice and time’s great pendulum of
judgment slowly swinging your way. And I warned you not to listen to anyone who doesn’t
practice freedom by sharing all things in common and forsaking vain religion and philosophical
treacheries of mammon’s disinformation, embellished with intellectual perversion and seasoned
with all-manner of social malfeasance.
“But you chose your lonely manifest destiny and wealth’s oppressive and deceptive
charade, drinking blood with the harlots of the city inside the box. And while your science
pretended that my father does not exist your educators taught your children everything they
could not use and nothing that really matters. You hoisted your jingoistic idol of John
Birch up on the stain-glass steeple cross, nearby where widows and orphans hide under bridges
in cardboard boxes. And now your wicked leaders pray on capitol steps, voting for war and
poverty and as a pretence, beseech my father’s blessings for unprecedented clandestine plans of
universal aggression and oppression, lining Cesar’s pockets with corporation larceny’s excess
while the bagpipes of petroleum’s fools gold mournfully play Amazing Grace. And they bow
to the television gods of wealth and ease, who teach you to love Lucy and follow false messiahs
of self-salvational narcissistic manure and to buy and sell and crave and buy yet again, what
you never in a million years ever needed or wanted in the first place.”
In the distance down the broad way comes a thin stranger astride a tired pale horse,
weaving his way slowly amidst petrol fumes rising between the rows of mostly single-passenger
snarled automobiles. “I’ve been waiting for Antiquity’s pendulum to come swinging your way,
weighing you in the balance of history’s great scales of justice”, he gleefully
chuckled. “All calendar reckoning will now chime thrice into a bottomless howling scream
forever.” Jumping from his thirsty pallid horse onto the tower stairway, he quickly
ascended toward the clock at the top and pulling off the great hands of time, he stuffed them
non-dramatically into an invisible vest pocket. “You won’t have much use for these any
longer, for time has lost all meaning within the celebrated city inside the box, kingdom of a
new world order, land of wealth’s deception, freedom-less conformity and mediocrity’s jaded
boredom, amidst mass confusion exceeding all known delusion and sorrow beyond all
tears. And you won’t be leaving anytime soon, no, not in a million years and
definitely not in a billion years and many more thereafter.” *
We suddenly find ourselves outside the great impenetrable walls of the ancient city inside
the box; three wayfaring strangers scared beyond all known sanity of reason, who once thought it
prudent to pretend to be wise. And we lied about some other things, definitely more
than once or twice and will no doubt lie some more, no doubt more than once or twice in the near
future. Me and my brothers Stretch and Leroy, now following slowly behind the short dark
homeless man who has become but a vague blur in the golden distance. We had asked him who
he was and he explained he just stopped by to make an adjustment on a phony claim or two,
something about fire insurance and some worthless stain-glass sacraments it was supposedly
based on. And we had cried and begged and grabbed and shook him and would not let him
go, until he had given us a free ticket ‘cause we knew our own were worthless.
And now we can smell the great fire rising forever higher from the city inside the box,
but I reckon something might be gaining on us and so we don’t look back, ‘cause we were once
warned by a friend from Cleveland. ² And we may have lied about being wise and may
have lied before and since, but we work hard down at the factory and in the harbor on weekends
and we don’t believe in twisted leaders who are in reality, blind followers being lead by blind
lackeys of the blinder, who send our children off to die in wars they lied their asses off
to get out of. And we don’t like being deceived and being lied to for someone else’s gain
and otherwise, just for the hell of it and we don’t like being burned, neither now nor in the
future. And we have suffered through many a holiday season’s artificial charade parade
and somehow, through overt greed’s crass commercialization jingle and the tombstone priests and
flimflam proclaimers of religion’s plasticized obeisance, we learned about three wise men who
seemed to know what matters. So we took the great fire escape and now we hold on tight to
our free ticket, ‘cause we’ve been lead around a block or two and, among all the lies and the
wise and the mainly otherwise, we know a good deal when we see it. **
...When you're on the last train to glory
You'll know you're reasonably there” ³
GiveAsYouGet.net TakingItGlobal.org
DEDICATED TO: Poet laureate of a troubled generation, Joni Mitchell; if We The People aren’t more careful who we elect (or allow to be appointed), we
are more than likely not to have much of a garden left to get ourselves back to. Also
dedicated to Grace
Slick, who along
with Bob Dylan, first taught me that songs can be a little more than about girlfriends and
parties, to Arlo Guthrie, author of many great often overlooked songs, including
the one covered here and to politically conservative motion picture actor Clint Eastwood who, in his own unique way, had a rather dramatic influence on my often
contradicting generation.
Credits:
1. reference “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell; Ladies of the Canyon (1970).
2. Famous saying attributed (some argue, incorrectly) to Satchel Paige, who played for Bill
Veeck’s Cleveland Indians among many other professional baseball teams and who some argue
(probably correctly) to be baseball’s greatest pitcher.
3. “Last Train” by Arlo Guthrie; Last Of The Brooklyn Cowboys (1973).
*FootNote:
“And the wind shall say: Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”
-- T.S. Eliot, Choruses From The Rock (1934); one of the most overlooked great poetic
works of art.
**FootNote II: Title concept from Revelation 6:8;
stranger on horse scene inspired by the Clint Eastwood motion picture Pale Rider (1985).
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