First up, more of the staff are clearly getting pissed off with wearing masks. An increasing number can be seen with them worn well down below the nose, or pulled down for a breather before going back into full numbskull mode; or just left dangling while they get on with their job. One, who I'd seen struggling and working in dangling mode a couple of weeks ago, now sports an 'exemption' thing, as do a couple of other workers.
I am pleased, not for ideological reasons, but for their sakes: long-term wearing of a suffocation cloth will be bad for health - there is far more literature around to back this up than evidence that it does any good in scaring away viruses.
Outside the supermarket, a lively-looking guy - I think he was a Jesus dude - was having an animated discussion with one of the supermarket workers, an older guy, one who goes around collecting the trolleys around the car park. "They are herding us into a new way of life" he was explaining to the trolley man, who looked interested but bemused.
Back inside, I had spied a masker paying at the checkout wearing a Lou Reed t-shirt. "Lou Reed wouldn't wear a mask" I thought to myself, before letting it go: there's no way of knowing, really.
But Lou Reed and masks go back a long way.
In some respects, Lou was a master of the mask. Not for keeping at bay a phantom virus, but for putting on and taking off persona. Unlike most of our modern occult mask-wearers, his was a conscious act, so he was able to control the magick; well, most of the time. But it was that: one mask for an audience, another mask for tomorrow night's audience, a particularly odious mask for the music journalists he so despised. And there was the Blue Mask.....
The album entitled 'The Blue Mask' was released in early 1982. It was in the middle of a period during which only true Lou aficionados will be familiar with any of the songs. The fashion among rock 'critics' at the time was to ignore, dismiss, or run down.
'The Blue Mask' came to bathe Reed's gathering ignominy in a little light relief. The working title of the album was apparently 'Heaven and Hell', and it fits the bill. After years of living and making music that was on the edge of destruction, despair, premature complete annihilation, Lou Reed takes a big step towards personal redemption (if we remove any theological connotations to the word) with some of the songs on 'The Blue Mask'.
'Heavenly Arms' is one such. And there is 'Our House', evoking scenes of rural idyll. 'The image of the poet's in the breeze/ Canadian geese are flying above the trees/ A mist is hanging gently on the lake/ Our house is very beautiful at night.'
But then there is the song itself, the one which gives its name to the album. The Blue Mask. I provide a link to the song, though I am unable to really listen to it myself. The distorted guitar feedback, the pounding beat and rhythm, the vicious military snarl of Lou's voice, the words, the words, the words. It is not a 'high vibrational' song; but then it is not intended to be.
Suffering and torture are the name of the game on 'The Blue Mask'. 'They tied his arms behind his back/ To teach him how to swim/ They put blood in his coffee/ And milk in his gin.'
The catalogue of sadism continues, until...... , ambiguously(much art worth the title is ambiguous) it begins to dawn. This is not a one-way street of abuse. The abused is a willing participant in the entire horror movie.
'Take the blue mask down from my face/ And look me in the eye/ I get a thrill from punishment/ I've always been that way'. And again, near the song's pained finale: 'Make the sacrifice/ Mutilate my face/ If you need someone to kill/ I'm a man without a will'.
Doesn't it sound all-too familiar? Isn't this the ritual which is being enacted across the globe right now, by literally billions of people on a daily basis? Is it not that the human species is being invited to engage in sado-masochistic ritual on an unimaginable scale? Just watch some people when they don the mask. Their heads are literally bowed. They walk around looking cowed, downtrodden, thoroughly beaten. Not so much teenagers: it needs more than a blue mask to knock the stuffing out of most of them. But older folk, from age twenty on, I'd submit. Happy masochists. Punish me, punish me, punish me some more. I am a danger to the world; I am crap.
Bowed and cowed. The ritual of submission. Willing submission, mind you, for the most part. This is the important bit. If I can walk around the supermarket mask-free, so can anyone else. It's a choice. And, just as in the 'Blue Mask' song, there is a conspiracy between abuser and abused: both get their kicks from the twisted, perverse ritual. 'Make the sacrifice/ Mutilate my face/ If you need someone to kill/ I'm a man without a will'.
What a perfect expression of the goal of the blue mask ritual enacted worldwide today: to render the human being no longer human; no longer an independent entity, with any vestige of personal choice, of free will. To become passive, mute, faceless. And, in an expression of the unspoken covenant between abuser and abused, the mutilated will speak up for, defend with aggression if need be, the right of the abuser to continue the abuse. Speak out against the mask and you will likely be accused of recklessness, irresponsibility, and of wanting to kill other people.
They are after the children now. Enforcing a mask on a child is child abuse, plain and simple, literally. There is no limit to the depths that 'they' will plumb in their sickness. 'Children need to wear a mask to protect the old people.' What manipulative diabolical bullshit. And they know that.
'The adult is now debased. Let's see if we can take it further. Will they allow us to debase their children? Will they allow us to do that?'
'I'm a man without a will'.
Here's the song, if you dare:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCXA7RRoD0M
I am reminded of animal documentaries that I saw when I used to watch television. I can't remember what it was: sharks or dolphins I think. Anyhow, they would come upon a great shoal of little fish, millions of them, darting around. The sharks/dolphins would go crazy, uncontrollable, get carried away in a total frenzy as they decimated their prey. This is what I see today. The architects of control can't believe their luck, and they've gone ape-shit crazy. Completely out of control as they plough through the shoals of consent-to-debasement humans. It's a frenzy, it doesn't look good, but it's only possible because the prey are willing prey. There is no limit to where they can go, should they be allowed. Psychopathy is by its nature insatiable in its evil.
Take the blue mask down, look me in the eye.....
We have a problem. The majority of people are not psychopathic. The problem is that they do not recognise that there is a psychopathic mentality at work in the world; and that, while unrecognised, can rain down as much havoc as it wishes on the rest of human life.
Studies vary, but the suggestion is that between 1% and 5% of the human population is of psychopathic disposition. This is characterised above all by absence of empathy, of feelings of remorse and of the recognition that actions have consequences. In sum, there is no fellow-feeling; no feeling for any living thing aside from oneself.
It is lack of honesty and courage which lead so many people to dismiss, or refuse to acknowledge, the psychopathic element at work in human affairs, I suggest. For many non-psychopaths it is uncomfortable to consider this possibility. My humble suggestion is that it's time to get over it, and ..... take off the blue mask and look it all firmly in the eye. Otherwise, future prospects may not be worth thinking about.....
