HOBBY MONSTERS

Attitudes and Reality Checks

The massive Bellas Artes occupation with Dystopia, the evil and evasive opposite Nemesis of Utopia is a chilling exploitation of human fear, anxiety, emotional terror and the darkness of the soul. The manipulation of our minds is devious and passive aggressive because it rests on expertise knowledge and research in relation to human gullibility, flock mentality and social psychology which make us believe that we are supporting the "good", to conform and to walk arm in arm in the service of the common good while, in fact, it seems to lead us to a rapidly increasing mistrust, destruction and the collapse of normative decent mindsets in order to manipulate human interactions. Mindsets in plurals. There is no such thing as a one and only perfect set of norms.

The most evident dystopic subject matters have been the exploration of the borders between life and death. The vampire genre has been dominating the film production for two decades, seemingly harmless with erotic overtones, attractive protagonists with a stunning and overly aesthetic "The Vampire Chronicles", 1994, where the two top male movie stars, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt engage in a vampire kiss and bite which enticed the audiences by the gay overtones, the contrast between beauty and decay, not seen since the Visconti adaptation of Mann´s "Death in Venice" in which the director totally or willingly misunderstood Mann´s message.

The financial recession after the eighties overspending had already made an impact on a global scale, which until now has not recovered. In dark and restless times the obsession with dark forces, black magic, frightening science fictive worlds or continuous tales about the end of the world reflects the collective mind to an increasing and alarming degree. We are scared by what is taking place in the real world.  The world heritage artifacts and sites are being demolished. Well, it has happened before. Alexander, called the Great, did not have his best day when he wiped out Persepolis. We, like prudent pseudo masochists, try to escape into nightmare world to console us that maybe it could have been worse. 

The extensive and obviously profitable production of art, drama, music, literature, television series, reality shows, films and a media depicting mutilated corpses and body parts, the obsessive focus on revenge and retribution in the absence of the divine, the Games of power and thrones with heroes and heroines more sadistic than Caligula, dominates infotainment and entertainment in ominous colors of black and blacker.

The dead do not rest, they do not go to Heaven, they linger on as zombies, werewolf's or unruly ghosts to plague the living and to teach children that death is worse than a living hell, a sensible and comforting thought for the young generation to grow familiar and used to.  Or not ?

A majority may be able to "cope with" the fictive disgustingly repulsive and grotesque. The neo-neo "social realism" of future worlds in perpetual terror scenarios are seducing since the parameters of socio-political current movements are mimicked to perfection to potentate a "credibility" which is difficult to reject as fictional nonsense and absurdities. Taking into regard the infinite brutality of the Jihadists actually going on on an everyday basis and the general brutalization of our societies even down to your neighborhood leaves us scared and confused. Do we even dare to consult a neighbor, who may think you are attacking and counterattacks even before any communication has been started ? How many children can be found incarcerated in the basement or body parts in the freezer of the local community may we expect?

The popular series with meticulously made up and styled morticians chatting over body parts and the cozy Midsummer Murders, which by now are so many that no one can possibly survived the flabbergasting number of killings in a small British village may seem innocent and enjoyable but we are becoming desensitized to aggression, brutality and violence, enhanced by the televised news which gradually are pulling the camera lenses up the nostrils of butchered victims of warfare and terror.

The vampire hype deliberately has chosen the bold and the beautiful who have catapulted to a stunning celebrity status by non existing acting skills but with high cheekbones and perfect bodies. The neo-Gothic chic is mirrored in current fashion and the paintings by von Schiele looks like illustrations in a children s' book in comparison to what we find on museum walls or computer animations.

"War is Peace" and "Big Brother is Watching" from the Orwell "1984" futuristic horror vision was a deliberate absurdity which was meant for us to react and discuss before such scenarios could actually become a reality. The absurd slogans, however, have become politically true, whether it is called peace promotion or defense and, on a deep level, accepted in current times as well as a virtually non-existent resistance against the American Surveillance Order Reporting Act and British expansive surveillance network, inter alia. 

In Sweden it was discovered that the police force are registering all Romero ethnic individuals since 1880, using exactly the same categorizing codes as the Nazis. A two month old Romero infant, obviously, is still regarded as a subversive element in the Swedish society. Or why the registration ?? Just an embryo..An embryo to grow into what ??

Dystopia as "Weltanschaung" is silently creeping upon us, whether we are aware of it, or not. To read a tabloid, when it is not dealing with the gender transformation of a famous 64 year old US Olympic athlete or the burial arrangements of Zsa Zsa Gabor´s daughter, focuses on havocs, disasters, violence, massacres, murder and a gradually dying world because of toxic outlets, climatic anomalies and extensive contamination and the "Schadenfreude" (epicaricay, malice) when a politician or a decision maker is caught with the fingers in the raspberry jar or with the pants down seem to be the highest form of entertainment. The reason for why the elite allows itself to act immorally is seldom analyzed or addressed, unless they are found in Africa, the Middle East or Asia, since, without saying it out loud which would be politically incorrect, we still seem to regard everybody else, except for our self proclaimed center of civilization in the Occident, as inferior culturally and intellectually.

"God is dead" , except for murderous Jihadists, and general misery are the ruling conceptions in the most "enlightened" of all times where rationality and facts rule. We live in the most informative of all worlds and tell ourselves that rationality and reason are infallible entities and that we are the guardians.

Do we want be right or to be happy? Utopia has a negative connotation, meaning something impossible to achieve resting of gullibility and naivety. Is naivety a bliss? Naivety may be a spontaneous reaction still not manipulated to a stimuli which the child experiences most of the time before it is taught how to perceive the world. Right now we seem to be telling them that everything is going to hell and death is not a liberator.

Can you even imagine that there are people of a generation still alive, who between two devastating world wars went to the movies to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or enjoy an overly chirpy Doris Day in "Pillow Talks" without ever taking off her knickers? What a bunch immature, naive idiots and wimps they must have been. Or ? Despite two world wars and a Korea disaster...

Am I a misogynist? No, a dystopic... Increasingly mistrusting.  Maybe more now when I no longer can work in conflicts and disaster areas.

But I refuse to bestow the domineering present mindset on a child. I am not willing to be that rational...Are there any alternatives ? Yes, of course !! Start to count your blessings and dare to teach the children that they exist ! Otherwise we will contribute to grow and foster generations of children headed for the psychiatric wards...

Douglas Modig

A Mother´s Grief

I  cannot think of anything so endlessly tragic as a mother´s grief. No matter where we turn or travel, no matter how well read or ignorant we are, we do universally react to a mother´s grief over the loss of a child. We do not need to be saints, sinners but just ordinary people to react with deep emotion when such grief is being displayed in any cultural or ethnically context and we cannot help ourselves unless we are deeply emotionally disturbed. We respond with sorrow, pity and a deeply rooted compassion for the bereft. We hurt inside with the stricken and for ourselves.

We have all come across the dry facts that the infant deaths  in historical and rural times were  like an unwelcomed rule, not a rare exception,  and still is in a major part of our world and in our times. The number and the fact of the frequency, however, did not lessen the pain.

In the Zeffirelli ”Jesus of Nazareth”  adaptation, the often flamboyant director tunes down the operatic storytelling and by choosing Robert Powell as Jesus and the Argentine born actress Olivia Hussey as Mary he was rewarded with acting of highest possible quality. None of the actors mentioned fully recovered from the experience and their careers came to a stand still.

Hussey´s scene at the cross holding her dead son in her arms and her heart breaking lament is cinema / television history regarded as one of the most impressionable ever caught onscreen. 

While my mother, widowed young and with me as her only child, had good reasons to fear my early death because of health issues I had but one prayer to my Maker. Not because I wanted a long life but that I should outlive my mother to spare her the grief. My prayers were answered. My anguish, fear and worry lessened to a great extent when she passed on with me by her side. 

I do not fear death. I fear what grief and sorrow it causes our beloved surviving ones. We do not know if death is a personal tragedy. But we know we can cause tragedy by dying. Some of us die with guilt since we could do nothing to stop the separation from our children, our spouse, our friends and those who genuinely mattered to us and vice versa.

I cannot even begin to imagine what losing a child means to the parents. A father´s grief is seldom told.

You may be utterly convinced that the historical Mary and her firstborn, Issa, Jesus, were but ordinary people, like you and me. But no matter how we perceive them, we can be touched by and pity their fate. That is the gift of being born a human. We are so sensible to tragedy that we feel the grief of an elephant matriarch loosing her elephant cub and recognize her pain.

That may also be our ultimate hope. We have not become totally dehumanized and prepared to coldly ignore suffering, whether that of our own species, or others.

Just a thought

Easter 2015

Douglas Modig

THE FLOWER OF LIFE: CANCER UNDER ATTACK

THE FLOWER OF LIFE

CANCER UNDER ATTACK

  

I have been waiting for some good news instead of all the darkness I seem to have got stuck in the last years. The following was broadcast ed on all Swedish TV channels some months ago and were published in Swedish media four weeks ago.

Before I continue I want you all to know that I am not an oncologist and the information shared must be taken in with a healthy distance and maybe your own participation to trace the sources, the subject matter and the present state of being, before any conclusive deductions can be made. I wish to emphasize that important scientific findings by no means automatically are being implemented for reasons of economy, even when the clinical reliability has been accepted by the researches and the physicians.

During the AIDS epidemic it became apparently clear that poor nations could not finance the remedies available unless they broke international and domestic legislation with regards to patenting. Brazil, which was developing an extensive epidemics simply copied the drugs without asking and thus saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Unethical ? Not in my book. I am not an idiot and I do understand that the production of drugs, like any enterprise, is expected to make profits to reinvest in further research and production, or not. I am not a Drug Baron and regard the Brazilian criminality as pardonable. But that´s just me.

Swedish (nationality does not matter) scientists have discovered and developed a medically promising remedy protein that targets cancer cells only and, according to lengthy research, stops > 70 % of further growth and spreading. Only determined fractions of the protein are used which do not attack healthy cells in the vicinity of the tumor as does current chemical treatment. They are only activated by the malign tumors which they enclose and fence.

And in addition: we do obviously do not have to wait a decade for it to be clinically evaluated because the job,  so we have been informed in all media, is already done. What is needed are funding to start to produce the drug which is not an exclusive, high cost treatment if drug companies do not declare war on one another as so often before and delay the production and distribution or as a consequence produce a substance that can be afforded by the most affluent only. 

The scientific world seems, so far, to close ranks and cooperate to make it available globally as soon as possible. We may be able to avoid unethical greedy drug companies to monopolize it for a decade, according to the Swedish scientists. This is by far the greatest obstacle. Swedish scientists are of no significance once they have published their findings and are often, as are all scientists, rapidly dismissed by the drug companies and cartels. Since the potential of immense financial profits are spectacular we are responsible to monitor the drug companies with a keen eye, civil disobedience and a big and loud mouth !!!!

Together with scientists from Singapore Swedish scientists also found that Hypoxia-induced and calpain-dependent cleavage of filamin A regulates the hypoxic response and in addition to the a/m protein which by being cut to a fraction stops 70 % of further metastasis growth* 

This time is seems to be for real ! Let us pray the scientists are right. At least it seems very plausible they are on the right track ! The treatment has been given not only to rats but is currently used to treat patients in Sweden and may be instantly available to all nations that are interested as far as we are being informed.

If this is yet another publicity stunt the media will have to suffer the consequences as well as some of Sweden´s most prominent scientists and oncologists. We cannot afford to raise the hope for millions yet another time.

If this proves to be the case we all have to act and strip the drug industries of their omnipotence and arrogance. The legislation is already up to date but we also know that the often monstrous drug industry is two steps ahead to secure gigantic profits.

So let us stay alert ! If we do not monitor and do follow ups ourselves the train may be very, very late...

And STOP, you lords of the drug companies and high tech research if you are only looking for attention ! Legally you will be on very thin ice if we surprise you with your fingers in the raspberry jar or are taking us for a ride again. Such steps must be regarded as severely incriminating and sanctioned with penalties accordingly.

We are not without responsibility to follow up and keep us informed of the development of the subject matter. Hitherto the powerful drug companies seem to occupy  themselves with fighting one another and kept us ignorant of important results.

Douglas

*( published in various State of the Art medical journals)

O Tempora O Mores

O TEMPORA   O MORES

2015

Looking back in retrospection often goes to prove how relativistic time is. The experience of a minute in distress is countered by the minute of bliss. They seem a decade or a split second long. Science and mathematics have en effet very little to do with it.

So many of the major events of 2014 were already on their way in 2013 or even a century back in advance. 

The imacculate Now does not seem to exist because it has already passed before you have ended your thought.

The celebrations of the Occidental New Year´s Eve and the welcoming of 2014 and the numerous New Year celebrations in other cultures, calenders and concepts of time are equally socially and emotionally exciting and obviously a universal token of a "rite de passage" of substantial symbolic importance. People are remarkably unison in so many matters.

The implicit connotation of a new, happier, more graceful year, still not contaminated by misery, violence, greed and natural disasters is the customary and widespread quintessential idea of change, a substantial and miraculous change for the better, a liberation from the chain and balls that fetter us to the emotional and physical dungeon where we seem to dwell, not yet inventive or emotionally clever enough to break free, seemingly doomed to repeat the same destructive patterns with occasional glimmers of hope which even the most pessimistic have to acknowledge...They exist, you know. The glimmers of hope and light...

I will not tire myself nor anybody else with repeating the calamities and horrors of 2013. I will intend to, and I know I may fail, try to see if there really is another side to the coin.

We all know there is. But we seldom express it openly and with emphazis. It becomes however, and as an example among many others, so obvious by soberly studying what facebook friends post on their walls. Endless encouraging and compassionate motivating proverbs, sayings and suggestions which contain thousands of years of continuous  human experiences of how to cope with life, how to live in peace, how  to love every living creature and all of the living flora. Wonderful images and clips of the bond and loyalty between man, animals and nature, affection so obviously shared between animals although somewhere on the timeline some ignorant churchfather came up with the braindead idea that animals have no souls, no emotions, instincts only.

Nicodemus taught us that woman is inferior to men after centuries of gender equality in the early Christendom and a confused and overly ambitious assembly of church fathers invented the ”Original Sin”, 300 A.D. The very idea that the newborn child is already burdened by the sins of hers/his forefathers is not only absurd, filled with misleading superstition and apalling, but, I suppose, a lofty ”explanation” as to why the human species behave like monsters on a grand or a small scale and never seems to improve.

The Pope (Franciscus), normally a marginalized and ignored person in Lutheran and secular nations, has received attention because of his rebellious attitude versus century old dogma, in addition to his personal simple habits and lifestyle, opening his arms, excluding nobody, stressing the importance of the woman in Christianity, the importance of other creeds and religions and pointing at who may have been Jesus most prominent disciple, Maria Magdalena, and hinting at a future female Pope.

The immense courage of young Pakistani girls who fight for their right for education and human rights despite continuous death threats and attacks, the endlessly patient environmentalists who, together with Transparency International and others, continue to whistleblow on toxic agricultural production and food processing and actually winning cases against transnational giants, the dangerous voluntary work trying to stop trafficking engineered by EcPat and others, the courage of people randomly risking their lives to save their next or animals in distress and vice versa makes this life worth living.

"Because we belong to each other", as Mother Teresa wrote, and many before her have said. We belong to each other wether we like it momentarily, or not. We cannot make all threats, real or imaginary, become instinct. It would eventually only result in two people finally left and ultimately one survivor.

I admire people who, without halos, without public attention, without prize winning, continue to be everyday heros and who carry some kind of sane world on their shoulders. I see them everywhere, caring for the elderly, imvesting emotionally and with genuine affection in their family life or social constellation and belonging, in the private and public relief and rescuework, in reaching out for a sinking soul without the expectations of any applause. I admire the people who do get credit, who are honored with medals and public attention, as well.

We cannot do without any of them.

I honestly believe that the ” do gooders” are at least as many as their opposites. The potential danger, pointed out by Dr Martin Luther King, and others before him, is the silent majority. To step out of one´s comfort zone in these turbulent times is a leap of faith or potentially fatale and so we hesitate....

”We don´t need another hero” sung by Tina Turner as a lead movie score of an apalling movie, ”Mad Max”, backfired. The superpowers are competing over the hero status with dire consequences for everybody involved.

We do need heros. Not Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) dropping bombs. Those must be the single most unheroic conventional warfare weapons apart from biochemcial and nuclear longdistance missiles ever.

We need heros since we, the silent majority, seem not very inclined to be heroic. We do, however, envolve ourselves in altruistic work of all kinds and to various extent. THAT is yet another example of heroism we cannot do without...The comfort of Good Old Friends long passed their prime, a kind word, holding a cold hand, warming it...

My deepfelt gratitude to my Facebook friends for sharing your worlds of wisdome and love with me. God Bless You All !

Douglas Modig