The Wild Hunt
One of the popular strains of our protracted adolescent sub-culture is called live-action-role playing, or LARP, a type of gaming based on the obsessive need to escape the rigors and constraints of the real world. It involves the fantasy substitutions of roles and personae for the humdrum identities of our own recalcitrant natures. Online avatars are a more passive instance of this desire to transcend the limitations of the self and the captive circumstances of everyday life. But live-action-role-playing brings the passion for this evasion of and deliverance from the quotidian to a whole new level of engagement.
A recent movie dramatizes the LARP phenomenon to perfection. The Wild Hunt is a shoestring-budget Canadian production based on an ancient Norse myth recounting the exploits of a group of phantasmal warriors thundering across the skies. Somewhat more modestly, the film tells the story of a band of young men and women playing at being a troupe of Vikings and Celts and other mytho-historical characters somewhere in the northern forests of Quebec. They adopt heroic names, loll about on fur couches, wear magical cloaks, quaff beakers of ale, dance around bonfires, speak in archaic idioms, invoke the gods, and sally forth to storm castles and wage harmless combat with one another. When chided for the absurdity of his caperings, one of the participants replies, “Well, at least we’re fun losers.” He could not have been more wrong.
Eventually, as real-life relationships begin to emerge in all their untameable complexity, the innocence of the game is lost, jealousies and antagonisms break through the surface of theatrical posturing, and one of the players is gruesomely murdered, his head smashed repeatedly against a rock. Fantasy can never keep reality at bay for very long, which inevitably intrudes with a vengeance. The director’s message is clear. Live-action-role-playing — in effect, a vivid kind of pretending — is a temporary reprieve from the grimly ineluctable world that we find so hard to accept but must come to terms with to ward off unanticipated disaster.
In order to avoid abstraction, we should try to specify what we mean by “reality.” To say without qualification that reality is simply “what is” plainly won’t do, since pretending also is and functions as an element of the given. What we mean in the deeper sense by “what is” requires some amplification. Reality, I would suggest, is defined for us by the advent of the irreversible. Ageing and death are inescapable, unless one is Dorian Gray or Elijah. We cannot go back in time unless we live in an H.G. Wells story or a Michael J. Fox movie. We cannot undo what has been done. We cannot become someone else no matter how hard we may try. In the fantasy world, such things may be possible, but in the real world, regrettably, one cannot underclock and do things over again to create a preferred outcome.
That is precisely why a miracle is a miracle: it purports to reverse in the real world what can only be reversed in fiction, dream or mythology. Lazarus can return from the dead and Orpheus from the underworld. The sun can stand still “in the midst of the heavens” to ensure a military victory. Destiny can be thwarted, if you inhabit Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. Groundhog Day can recycle indefinitely to enable the revision of stubborn events. Infinitely recurring simulations, or Source Codes, can adjust the structure of impending reality. One can step into an obverse, looking-glass world where everything is done differently. Miracles — at whatever level of importance they are thought to occur — are subsidized by the powerful human desire to commute reality in favor of the counterfactual and thus to transform or reverse the settled order of the mundane.
Of course, change is a part of life and nature, but there is no eluding the fact that change is also a refractory part of existence and cannot be reversed. Change is an unchangeable aspect of the real and is always uni-directional. In the real world retroversion is contra-indicated — which is what we intuitively understand by “reality.” The constitutive “nature of things” cannot be remade. Though we all know this, the trouble is that we often act as if we didn’t and continually invest in one or another form of live-action-role-playing. No harm done if the illusion is kept under strict control and readily exited; otherwise the losing will not be fun.
The dilemma is obviously compounded when live-action-role-playing becomes a staple of political life and infects the foreign policy of entire national administrations. Enacting a LARP-like geopolitical fantasy on the international stage must invariably produce destructive consequences. Neville Chamberlain, who played the role of the peace maker and assumed that Hitler was a fellow actor, learned that sanguinary lesson to his and his nation’s exorbitant cost, as did the rest of the world — some fifty to seventy million dead. The results of Chamberlain’s folly were irreversible, no less so than is the presence of evil in the world, as he should have expected had he possessed the merest ounce of realism and been able to grasp the “vectors” of human nature. The “anatomy of appeasement,” writes Bruce Thornton in his just-released The Wages of Appeasement, discounts “the permanent truths of human nature expressed through social and political mechanisms.”
‘The president and his band of merry men and women are starring in their own movie. It’s called The Wild Hunt II. And the sequel will be catastrophic.
What you say is true and the movie will play out inexorably to its bitter end. It’s painful to watch a bunch of airhead role players ruin a great Nation. The NDP finally formed a national government, but in America, not in Canada. Go figure.
Reality is something that intrudes itself into your affairs whether you like it or not. The danger is that sometimes the perception of what is real can be held off until a threat is upon you.
Liberals on the political Left in America are particularly adept at gerrymandering reality. They posit that 1 million new immigrants a year into America overwhelmingly from the Third World are not a problem but just like immigrants have always been and so a positive boon.
The problem with that is that the civilizations that the new immigrants come from are ones we largely see as being in ruins. Every year our own country comes to resemble in some small measure one that is going down that same path to ruin.
Despite simple observation of the nature of Islam and the Third World, liberals have an entire panoply of stock answers as to why the new immigrants are the same as the old immigrants and why muslims and people of color are really examples of American exceptionalism.
Liberals say the reason this is not yet reflected in reality is because they believe that in fact you can hold a good man down. Basically the theory goes that everyone in the world who is not a male of European ancestry has had their true talents suppressed, oppressed, subverted, circumvented and short-circuited by a European culture that is colonialist, exploitative, financed by slavery and oppression, racist and bigoted.
Go to any black culture website like “The Root”, and read every story five days running and you will enter this version of “The Twilight Zone”.
The air of unreality the political Left moves in is palpable to all but themselves. Everyone who is not a European male knows what I have just written is true and it is the source of their constant agitation, desire for entitlements and resentment. Were it not true, there would be little reason for people who are fully equal to constantly talk about how fully equal they are, as if words are a substitute for reality – the proof is in the pudding as they say. This is a type of Orwellian culture that uses words and perception to see in what order the baseball standings should be rather than performance and it is dangerous.
Our current immigration policy = importing poverty on a grand scale. They will vote democrat, but they will ruin the country. The liberals don’t care about that, only the votes that they will get. More and more millions of impoverished and uneducated people are easier to manage and manipulate.
There is an alternate reality being played out, David. However, I’m not quite sure it is all that innocent.
Live action role playing, has is not always PG rated, with the TSA snooping, groping and semi-molesting.
And Lazarus may rise from the dead, but before he is allowed back into OUR “civilized” society, under this administration at least, we are going to ask him whether he was circumsized and what his mother did for a living before he was born.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/were-you-circumcised-new-passport-questionnaire-baffles-many-with-absurd-info-demands/
We won’t ask our own President anything about his birth, what his mother was doing….our vetting process for the projected leader of the free world is a bit less stringent than that of the putative leader of a lawn maintenance crew or perhaps a postal worker.
We are in the process of conditioning and softening up the populace for the intrusions to come. If one allows oneself to be groped, probed, dehumanized….all the better for the coming days of totalitarian dominance. Ahhh, the ignorant unwashed, the bitter clingers…their silly little religions and their guns they cling to…they will see who is truly “master of their domain”. Circumsized indeed. I not only will ask them to produce evidence verbally, I will take pictures at every airport and grope them until I see and feel for myself.
President Caligula will grope, grab and go golfing. And you…plebian…can “get rid of your gas guzzling Ford Taurus and drive a moped, you insolent little nothing.”
Bill Ayers once fantasized about killing 25 million Americans, who stubbornly held onto the dream of patriotically defending this country. Some of his compatriots thought the best way to rid the country of those who cling bitterly to the end…was through attrition.
Others, believed in the line from Braveheart,…”if we can’t starve them out…we’ll breed them out.” (ergo, open borders for future leftist voters, questions about circumcision for everyone else…also known as “the Jewish question”)
Oh, David…we are in the middle of a live action, alternative reality, role playing game quite clearly. We are being softened up for the kill by Bond villains. President Oddjobs and Pelosi Galore have us in their sights. By the way, what IS the price of arugula these days?
“staging what can only be described as a risible and emptily flamboyant performance”
We saw this when Obama moved the Democratic Convention to a stadium bedecked with fake Greek architecture to better reflect his ascension to Mt. Olympus to accept the nomination. I’m still waiting to see his smug visage on the $3 bill. A more fitting tribute to his stewardship I can’t imagine.
“Americans — or at least many Americans — discovered that indulging in the premise that Islam is a religion of peace and not a determined theo-political enemy is an untenable fantasy.”
I’d really like to know how many more people need to die, either on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq, and eventually Libya, or through countless more acts of terrorism, before all Americans embrace this simple truth? Many Muslims may, indeed, want to live in peace. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really matter if a sizeable minorty of them DO NOT. It doesn’t take a lot of people to kill a lot of innocent people (9/11 proved that). But what matters is the silence of the majority over the actions of the minority, and their willingness to ignore what they do. And for THAT they cannot be forgiven, let alone trusted. Until Islam can live in peace like the rest of the religions on this planets, that religion will receive the scorn and distrust it is so richly deserves.
‘The Wild Hunt’
I thought that cautionary tale of the human capacity
for chaos was forgotten; Glad to find that I was wrong.
Dana Milbank’s WaPo column this morning
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-lost-in-thought/2011/04/26/AF0FrwsE_story.html
makes this very point.
To the “experts” Milbank consulted, Obama is not as effective a leader as he could be because he is, literally, too smart- a “deep thinker” who is not able to lead the rest of us (the stupid “great unwashed”) because he is too subtle for us to grasp.
In their estimation, an “effective” leader needs to be a “plodder” who is neither “too rational or too thoughtful”, and who has a few credos that are easily understood by the masses and can be regurgitated at the drop of a microphone. They hold that Churchill was a “better” wartime leader than Chamberlain for this exact reason; Churchill was (in their not-so-humble opinion) fairly stupid and pedestrian(!), while Chamberlain was a towering intellect with semi-divine insight. (Into exactly what, they don’t explain.) Which meant that Churchill was more effective in combating that other “simpleton”, Hitler.
In reality, Chamberlain was a theorist obsessed with perfecting the “social contract” between the government and “the people” (as a nominal conservative, he balked at calling them “the proletariat”, but that was what he meant). And any unbiased reading of “Mein Kampf” shows that Hitler, plus his cronies (notably Gen. Haushofer, who “ghost-wrote” quite a bit of that tome), were “deep thinkers” to a man. The sort who know exactly how to create a Utopia, and are perfectly willing to kill anybody they see as an obstacle to the Great Work. (As well as having another common fault of such “deep thinkers”- their peculiar tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. See “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”.)
Chamberlain’s downfall was that he was unable to see the world outside of the framework of his own dogmas; to him, “social reformers” did not make war on each other, and he saw Hitler as a fellow “social reformer”. As stated here, Chamberlain was fully engaged in his own LARP, and only Dunkirk brought the real world back into focus with a crash.
Hitler, too, was engaged in a LARP. He only realized it in his bunker, on 30 April 1945.
Obama’s LARP is not yet on the apocalyptic level of these two. But it is just as resistant to reality. Put simply, he has his dogmas, and he is sticking to them, come hell or high water. This explains his diving turn to the left in launching his re-election campaign. His dogma demands it; a tack to the center ala’ Clinton would be apostasy.
His policies, both foreign and domestic, whether on energy, economics, or who our enemies are, is all part of this. He knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the dogmas of the “progressives” are correct. Never mind that they consistently fail in the real world, except in their ability to cause chaos and destruction. Sooner or later, they must work- if everyone just believes hard enough. (And if he could just get rid of all those “reactionaries”, somehow…)
But the concrete objections to all of this do not matter to Obama, his supporters, or the academics who fawn over him. His ability to ignore the real world, and continue to try to force it into the mould of his internal construct, marks him as a “deep thinker”, and thus inherently superior, and therefore “fit to rule”.
I fear that nothing short of a Dunkirk- or a nuclear fireball somewhere we really don’t want it- will convince Obama, or any of his enablers, that he is no more right than Chamberlain was.
clear ether
eon
This all leaves me depressed cause as you wrote about Chamberlain “social reformers” did not make war on each other, and he saw Hitler as a fellow “social reformer”. and Hilary Clinton saw Syria’s Assad as a reformer. Of what she didn’t say at the time but it seems the mindset is the same.
People who are committed to following dogmas sometimes make brand-new mistakes. But more often they simply repeat the mistakes of their predecessors with a new cast of characters.
What never changes is that they invariably insist that they are not wrong; it’s just that reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate with them.
cheers
eon
What the Demon Party and Marxist Media Megaphones do is lie, circumvent, dissemble, distract, and dupe people into believing things that are patently NOT TRUE. Islam is a religion of peace! Excuse me, its not. Its a religion of killing, exploitation, torture, and dominance. Its a political/religious/cultural/legal system all rolled into one. Where Islam flourishes, everything else dies.
We are doing a knetic military action in Libya. Well war is war, whether you are in the air or on the ground. A sane person would burst out laughing at such nonsense. But, the Marxist Media and the Demon Party coordinate their messaging everying morning. Rush has played the montages over and over. They all use the same buzzwords. Whether its
knetic military action or Rat budget cuts are “extreme”. Cutting a mere $61 Billion when are are overdrawing the checking account by $1.6 Trillion
is miniscule. Spending a nation into insolvency is extreme.
The United Nations IPCC said that 50 million people would die due to global warming/global climate change/global climate distruption. Just looking at how they have to keep changing the name, is evidence that they are losing the battle. The leaked messages demonstrated how coordinated
the scaremongering was between corrupt university researchers, NASA, Al Gore and his “Inconvenient Truth”, and marxist media megaphone. Now the United Nations has quietly scrubbed the site of its claim that 50 million would die due to climate.
I am convinced and nothing will convince me otherwise, that all the turmoil in the middle east has been created by this administration. There is little difference between that kid in school who took one look at me wearing my pink edelweiss dress to surmise I was a target for the rest of the year. Soon she had an entire group pulling my hair in the recess line. I was a little wimp and had I punched her in the nose on that first day, it would have ended.
Victor Davis Hanson often writes about his experiences with human nature in grape farming, the neighbor who is stealing your water, like the men in that greatest of all movies Jean de Florette/ Manon of the Spring. If one shows the slightest bit of weakness or appeasement you are doomed. Now put that on a world wide scale.
Think about the advantage Russia is taking at this very moment. The money in arms sales must be astronomical.
Zero gives a speech in Cairo, basically saying, hey we’ve been wrong all along, we won’t meddle in your affairs.
That’s what was heard all around the middle east, oh and Israel.. pfft!
When the leader of the most powerful nation in the world feigns such ignorance and moral relativism, the consequences are that playground on a ginormous scale.
That hit the mark, David! The Gods of Copybook Headings will not be denied.
But isn’t that what liberalism is? Denying reality and creating your own? Living life by simple decree and what you say is universal truth results be damned?
The canary’s in Congress and the White House, have been dead for years. Those on display now are replicas by the renowned Democrat taxidermist David Plouffe.
But, these aren’t the only animal appliances being used. Look around and you’ll see many more, complete with sound tracks.
DAVID, probably nobody has noticed an increase in the sale of english dictionaries in the past 6 months but there is a certain bureau in the government that has. And this increase is due to your articles in PJ which has impelled me, literally, to the dictionary on its stand, on at least 10 different occasions in the last month alone.
I mean, really, DAVID, give me a break. We all know what a fantastic writer you are but a little relief is necessary.
The president and his band of merry men and women are starring in their own movie. It’s called The Wild Hunt II. And the sequel will be catastrophic.
So, no sequel.
Because if we don’t throw out this not so merry band in 2012, we’re finished as a reasonably great nation.
Pres has announced as director of today’s media production that authenticity and details of any newly released documents supporting his eligibility to direct his personal biographical movie are not subject to discussion due to current production priorities also brought on by his administration’s actions or lack thereof and replacement of the Donald as its star. Current closed door meetings must be hilarious with czars reaching their severely strained terminal limits.
The court delay defense balloon must be due to pop from the overload of rats leaving his sinking ship. The bag is now hanging over the proverbial fan. Let the festivities begin and play the movie on Cannes reruns.
“That’s only a distraction”.
Now, onward to the next campaign stop!
As a nerd, D&D player and one-time LARPer, I do feel obliged to speak up in defense of my subculture. When done correctly, role-playing isn’t a method of denying reality, but rather of stepping away from it for a few hours and enjoying the possibility of what might be. The fantasy ends at the doors of the gaming room, and everybody exercises their imagination a little and then goes home feeling refreshed.
I would agree, though, that Obama and company do appear to be caught in a live-action roleplay. In fact, Obama is–to borrow another term from nerd culture–a Mary Sue, a supposedly perfect creature whom the narrative must bend to accommodate. As a writer, I’ve been observing the left’s view of things for a long time, and I’ve been unable to escape the conclusion that a lot of their problems stem from inextricably viewing themselves (and their president) as the heroes, the good guys, the ones who must inevitably triumph. Since they’re the good guys, their opponents must therefore be evil. And evil, of course, will always lose. It’s the kind of severely black-and-white story that a lot of real fantasy roleplayers would roll their eyes at.
“In fact, Obama is–to borrow another term from nerd culture–a Mary Sue, a supposedly perfect creature whom the narrative must bend to accommodate.”
Agreed. The trouble is, Obama thinks he’s a God Mode Sue- who can bend the narrative himself with no reference to the gamemaster.
(Former AD&D/Shadowrun player here.
)
cheers
eon
Reality-based community
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Reality-based community is an informal term in the United States. In the fall of 2004, the phrase “proud member of the reality-based community” was first used to suggest the commentator’s opinions are based more on observation than on faith, assumption, or ideology. The term has been defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality.” Some commentators have gone as far as to suggest that there is an overarching conflict in society between the reality-based community and the “faith-based community” as a whole. It can be seen as an example of political framing.
The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, The New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush (later attributed to Karl Rove[1]):
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”[2]
[edit]
“He and his advisors, his colleagues, his team of officials and indeed his entire entourage and party are mounting a vast imaginary production, acting as if the world is not what it intractably is and staging what can only be described as a risible and emptily flamboyant performance, though one which casts a dark and lengthening shadow. They dash about brandishing their delusions, unaware that the world is not kind to its fugitives and deniers.”
brilliant
Mr. Solway is a tough read, but he has some unique insights.
They do appear delusional, don’t they?
But there is a simple explanation. It’s a good way to acquire power. The delusions are designed to appeal to the better instincts, which probably adds a sliver of supporters to the thugs, pickpockets and cons who form 99% of their supporters.