PizzaGate and the State of American Democracy

It’s hard to know exactly what the good old Founding Fathers were thinking back in the day, before the Internet and the railroad and the Slurpee. Though, of course, we do know what they wrote.

Did they worry about a large and evil cabal horrendously devoted to raping and eating children? Well, they did worry about the Catholic Church, another charming institution devoted to child rape.

But then they also put that persnickety All Seeing Eye of Sauron up on the pyramid, the eyeball so provocative that Nick Cage had to steal it, and so insidious that generations of men decided to become Masons just like George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower.

Perhaps it’s more a question of:

When did we really become democratic?

And, when did we really start raping and eating babies?

A lot of this can be traced back to Gobekli Tepe, which is an archaeological site in southeast Turkey. It’s dated older than a lot of other stuff we’ve found (though of course there are older artifacts, including stone rings, in Africa): about 9,000 BCE. That puts Gobekli Tepe at the cusp of agriculture, and we know from genetic studies that the chickpea and wheat now eaten the world over originated in Anatolia, quite possibly on the hill where Gobekli Tepe is, a name which means “Potbelly Hill.”

Gobekli Tepe shows up in other places too. It’s mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the great narrative poem of ancient Iraq. In Gilgamesh, Gobekli Tepe is referred to as the place from which the religion of Iraq originated: a mountain full of animals.

When we dug up Gobekli Tepe, we found huge numbers of animal bones. They had been buried along with the temple, to seal it up. So we were clearly eating a lot of animals there, probably sacrificing them too.

Gobekli is interesting for other reasons too, like the Pyramids and Stonehenge: some of the rocks are REALLY big, and archaeologists say they were designed that way in order to provoke the kind of religious experience which were clearly associated with the sites: i.e., ‘god is big, and you are small.’

What you’ve read so far is more or less the facts as we understand them, with a few left out that I may have forgotten, combined with the much larger number of things we don’t know yet!

But now for some speculation:

Although some social theorists will tell you that the class system as we know it, with rich and poor people and all the accompanying differences that come with that, was invented around the same time as agriculture, I argue that it goes back a lot further. That the idea of monarchy, and the idea of ruling families, is really really old, probably older than our species.

We know, for instance, that some monkeys practice hereditary privileges, and have a rigidly enforced class system, where “princess monkeys” have their pick of mates, and can actually pick food out of the mouths of lower status monkeys. The lower status monkey must yield to this, knowing that the whole troop will beat him if he refuses.

So, what does this have to do with PizzaGate?

Well, PizzaGate is very much about that oldest of historical questions: how did kings get so much power? And why do people tolerate the enormous abuses that come with kings, and king-like rulers?

Because, on the one hand, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta and their friends raping, killing and eating little children is just like little princess monkeys reaching into slave monkeys’ mouths for an extra morsel of food: the powerful ape wants something the weak ape has, and uses the threat of force to get it.

But on the other hand, even though we’re monkeys evolutionarily, we’re not ONLY monkeys in practice. You know, we cook and stuff. (And no, I don’t mean Spirit Cooking. Some theorists do argue that cooking is really the only thing that separates us from the animal kingdom, since we now know animals have complex language, just like us, and practice a form of science, of knowledge transmitted through the generations, just like us).

So yeah, fire. Control of the elements.

And, no coincidence here: Satan is the original fire god. He is Prometheus, the fire bringer.

This brings me back to another interesting factoid l left out earlier: the Yazidi people, who Obama so kindly saved from genocide by Isis (I guess we can forgive Obama helping to create Isis a little, since he did clearly work to stop this particular genocide . . . . . maybe? Maybe not?).

The Yazidi are interesting for all kinds of reasons, not least of which is that their calendar is one of the oldest recorded (I think it goes back about 8,000 years), and they recognize the gods carved into the stones at Gobekli Tepe: they know it was their ancestors who worshipped there. And the Yazidis, who are called devil worshippers by Isis, do in fact worship a Satan, from way back before he was Satan, but a guy named Melek Taus.

Melek was the peacock angel, the proud one, exactly like Satan, and Prometheus, who defied the gods and helped humanity out. Gave us fire.

So we can imagine, with some justification, that the work being done in the underground in Gobekli Tepe was centered around this central fact of our existence: our control of fire, and how this separates us from the rest of life on earth.

This idea of a separation is an important one: what does it mean to be separate? How separate are we? And if we’re separate, do we have to stay that way? Is it permanent?

Because on the one hand you can understand a great joy and pride that comes with this separation: you can see it in Genesis and in other stories, religious and not, of dominion over the plants and animals of earth, and our special relationship with this environment we share. But it also makes us lonely, and it’s probably why so many of the religions of the world are centered around us basically playing dress-up, and pretending to be things we’re not (trees and animals, often enough).

But for the ruling class, these little princesses and princes who in the Stone Age were getting, already, much of the same privileges our rich folk get now (better food, more sex), this idea of separation was crucial: even as fire set humanity apart from the rest of life, these princesses and princes were set apart from the rest of humanity.

And of course, any student of history, art, or literature will tell you that the course of all of those things, the course of humankind as we know it, is centered around this incredibly awkward question, of justifying the privileges of the ruling class.

And, I would argue, a lot of the discussions centered around these privileges, and the practices which are put in place to protect them, start at Gobekli Tepe.

It is no accident that PizzaGate blew up so big in Turkey.

It is no accident that one of the pedophilia symbols, seen at Comet Pizza, is a crescent.

The evil privileges of the ruling class, the same privileges that allow monkeys to take the food out of their cousins’ mouths, the same privileges which allow Popes to rape children and lie about it, the same privileges which allow DC insiders to photograph kill rooms, walk in freezers, label those photos with truthful hashtags about their murderous intentions, and expect that we will do nothing to combat their grave hubris and evil, these privileges and their expression were likely begun in southeast Turkey.

Or maybe they go further back.

But I do not believe that aliens gave us the secret code word, like an Arthur C Clarke monolith. I believe that intelligence is shared, even as life is shared on earth. And how we moderate and express these shared intelligences and shared lives on earth is an ongoing conversation, one that the Internet has made very interesting, but one that is ultimately very old.

Because again: like our dear friend George Carlin said, the rich are different than you and me. It’s a big club, and you ain’t it! But why does the club exist? And what is the cost we are willing to pay to maintain this club?

In the late 19th century, it was considered that the class system would soon collapse, because it was so clearly unscientific, irrational, and unfair. Edward Bellamy’s groundbreaking early science fiction novel from the 1890s, Looking Forward, Looking Backward, imagined a future, essentially a communist Boston, free from the predations of what we are now beginning to see as the PizzaGaters.

But Boston does not look like Bellamy envisioned it.

This now coming is our American-French revolution. Back in 1776 Americans’ may have been over taxes, but for the French it was about the privileges of the rich, about prima nocte and all the same shit CNN is censoring now: rich psychopaths up in their chalets, drinking virgin blood, eating little kids, and worshipping evil gods.

One more quick word about “satanism” : Now, I’ve never drawn a pentagram and tried to summon Baphomet, which, according to some of my friends on Facebook, is pretty hard to do, but fun.

But my Facebook friends are what you might call casual pagans, horror writers who like a little frisson in their lives, who might like writing stories about eating babies, but are just as nauseated as you and me by the real thing.

What’s the difference between pretend and the real thing? Why did that Catholic cardinal in St. Louis say “he didn’t know it was against the law for priests to have sex with children”?

What is the nature of this Big Club? Why do the rich exist?

The strongest argument to me is one seen through our evolution, and we can see it echoed in other species, in more of those David Attenborough nature documentaries where princess monkeys and their friends show up.

I believe it’s in The Life of Mammals where Attenborough follows some of our tiniest cousins, tiny little simians about the size of your fist, who live in tree trunks, are nocturnal, and subsist almost entirely on insects which they grab and force into their sharp little mouths. Because they’re so small, and because they live together on just one or two trees, they’re very vulnerable to predators. So when danger shows up, it is the Big Mommy and Daddy monkeys who are given the sole privilege of giving the “come on home” signal, so they all know to run for their lives at the same instant.

When you’re not at the top of the food chain, your communication infrastructure (another word for “tiny voiceboxes of little tree monkeys”) is of paramount importance. Whoever is trusted with that duty to ring the ‘come home bell’ is trusted with the lives of all the little monkeys on the tree. You can’t have multiple monkeys crying wolf: only one is allowed to do it.

We can imagine that humankind gained similar benefits over the course of our evolution: in those split second moments where danger is imminent, you need to have a trustworthy actor who calls the shots, on whether to fight or flee.

But now our modern world is a world where most dangers (barring the occasional shark attack), are of our own creation. We are the problem; not bears and wolves.

As Bellamy understood, and Marx before him, and the revolutionary French peasants before them both: the rich are the biggest problem we have.

All of that privilege—and, not coincidentally, it is also tied in, at Gobekli Tepe with white privilege, because it was wheat that made us white. Melanin mutations occur subsequent to adapting an agrarian wheat-eating lifestyle; we know that the earliest inhabitants of Finland, for instance, the Sami, originally had brown skin— all of that privilege is coming home to roost.

Satan—remember, only a metaphor for fire, for our control of nature—has come home to roost. We are our own worst enemy.

To combat this problem of humanity against humanity we must start with those the loveable Dan Quayle once called “the best of us.”

It is “the best of us” who steal children away in the night, drink their blood, eat their flesh, photograph their deeds, and do so as part of the desperate 10,000 year old illusion that they are the children of the sun, the children of a special god, who are separate and distinct and better than all the rest of life on Earth.

We may be better technologically than the rest of life on Earth (at least, crucially, at our scale), but we can hardly be seen as better given all our other failings. Especially our moral failings, which is perhaps too polite a term to apply to PizzaGate. Our moral abysses.

We have allowed PizzaGate to happen because of a failure of imagination.

Because, in some horrible black-satire version of Fiddler on the Roof, we have chalked baby-eating up to “tradition,” and left it at that.

I know that one problem is we’re all facing now is, naturally, that not enough people believe the stories of what “the best of us” have been up to in their DC basements. But I think we will overcome that problem. The evidence will only keep growing.

The larger, and more profound problem is the one I’ve outlined here: our relationship to our own human privilege.

The American revolution was about a lot of things, but it was about in part the systemic curtailing of that human privilege.

I don’t believe that all Masons eat babies any more than I believe all Democrats do. Any more than I believe my “Satanist” horror-novel writing friends eat babies. A fondness for Baphomet and other pagan nature-idols doesn’t equal PizzaGate and its evils.

No, PizzaGate is explicitly about the rich, and humankind’s long, long, long march (we’ve had fire for ONE MILLION YEARS, remember, since homo erectus) from Africa out into the world.

The networks which homo erectus established in his long marches around the world (and he did make it at least as far as Java, on foot!), are the trading networks which Gobekli Tepe, and other early agricultural footprints at Iran and Georgia, helped to cement, and which became the international capitalist networks we know today.

We have been doing this a long time, but as we’ve been noticing, our time may almost be up, if we do not foment, dig in, and consider with utmost seriousness the reasoning behind a world revolution. Not necessarily for communism, not necessarily for socialism, or anarchism, or any ism, but simply against the enormous privileges of the rich.

The privileges of the rich are what became white privilege. If all men are created equal, if John Locke is still right, if the Enlightenment is still right, along with its problematic Masonic eye that Nick Cage likes so much he wants to steal it, then we need to act.

We must end what it means to be rich, so that, for future generations it becomes impossible for a CEO of Reddit to blog about eating human flesh and get away with it, so that it becomes impossible for major political figures to email asking for their pizza-related map on their handkerchief back, and so that we monkeys can no longer reach into each other’s mouths to take the half chewed food out, because there will be (as there has already been for a long time, economists know) enough food for all.

Enough for everybody’s two and a half kids. Haitian and American. African and French. Belo-Russian and Vietnamese.