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Maybe it’s Mercury retrograde, maybe it’s just time for the synchronicities to start rolling again, but like another time when I had a series of odd, personally meaningful coincidences crop up, they came to me while I was indulging in some recreation (previously, I had a cascading series of synchs while I was reading the book “John Dies at the End”).
I was feeling a bit morose yesterday contemplating the end of 2022, which was a very difficult year for many people I know. I’m not the most empathic or sympathetic person (anyone who knows me who happened to read this would be howling with laughter at the understatement), but I’ve felt my usual walls and barriers sagging a bit and the amount of suffering and pain all around is quite acute. It’s like everyone I know has been bruised and aching. I’ve been bruised and aching too.
I got up and wrote my previous blog post, then puttered around the house awhile before my girlfriend I settled down to watch a movie. We like watching old, cheesy movies so she picked “Escape From LA”, starring Kurt Russel and directed by John Carpenter.
I remember seeing ads for it when it came out, but I thought it looked pretty hokey, so I’ve never seen it. It was an entertaining enough movie, although the effects are pretty dated (but most movies now require quite a bit of suspension of disbelief to watch thanks to all the CGI).
To aid in comprehension for anyone who happens to read this who hasn’t seen the movie, the basic premise is that LA has been isolated from the rest of the United States by an earthquake, and a Fundamentalist conservative type has become president and taken over the country. He decided to make the now-island of Los Angeles a penal colony for dissidents and undesireables.
The hero of the film is an outlaw former Special Forces soldier named Snake Plissken, who at the start of the film has been captured by the forces of the President and his military advisors. Snake is notorious for reasons probably related to the first film in this series, Escape From New York, which I haven’t seen but may very well watch next time I’m incredibly bored.
Snake is offered a deal; he gets set free if he can recover the briefcase and whack Utopia. He seems unlikely to help out until he’s informed that he has been infected with a special designer virus that will kill him in about 12 hours. He’s given some gear and set loose in Los Angeles to find Cuervo, Utopia, and the briefcase.
There were certain elements of the film that stuck out to me as being synchronous with regards to current events and my own state of mind both yesterday and (more-or-less) through much of 2022.
First off, the name of the virus injected into Snake is Plutonix. This is relevant to me because, first off, the Coronavirus madness kicked off right around the time Pluto formed a conjunction with Saturn. John Michael Greer, who I consider to be my (extremely unofficial and impersonal) teacher and go-to source in matters of occultism, believes that Pluto is a waning power and that most of the things closely associated with Pluto are overblown. I am willing to accept that as a working hypothesis, and in the film, the virus injected into Snake to ensure his cooperation with the President and his plan is actually a harmless fraud. I wouldn’t consider C-19 a fraud, but it clearly wasn’t as potent as originally advertised.
Using a trumped-up illness as a means to enforce compliance on a rebellious character. Interesting idea... Another interesting tidbit is that one of the secondary characters mentions that eating meat, smoking and a variety of other traits are now illegal in America. The speech sounded a bit like some of the things on the WEF’s wish list.
That by itself wouldn’t have raised my eyebrows. The Sword of Damocles did.
I wrote my blog post titled “The Sword of Damocles” first thing yesterday, before watching a movie was even on my radar. When the movie revealed that the doomsday device in the briefcase Snake was after was called “The Sword of Damocles,”, well, my ears perked up.
In the movie, the Sword of Damocles is a satellite-based EMF device that has the power to selectively destroy all technology in a targeted region… or all across the entire globe. Cuervo Jones wants to use it to force the US to surrender so he can further his political agenda. The President wants it back to stop the army massing near the US’s borders.
Snake manages to get the briefcase through a series of adventures that reveal that both the President and the government of the US and Cuervo Jones and his armies are equally corrupt and morally bankrupt. Rather than helping one side or the other win, Snake activates the device and causes a “Great Reset” of progress and technology.
The themes of society de-industrializing, the end of progress, and a Great Reset are all themes that should be familiar to anyone following JMG’s work.
There were other interesting echoes of current events in the movie, including a transgender character, gang violence, the presence of what Spengler would label warbands on the edge of a collapsing empire, and naïve do-gooder Utopia, who was woke enough to be attracted to Cuervo’s messaging about the evils of the US empire but blind to the threat of warband culture at the periphery (the opposite of a bad idea being another bad idea occurred to me).
I’m still unpacking the meaning of all of this, but I’m not sure that my research is done quite yet, because there was a final synch last night.
After the movie, my girlfriend and I went out to eat at a fast-casual chain. We were seated in the bar area, and an affable but extremely loud drunk yelled throughout most of our meal. His dialogues with other, quieter and less trashed, patrons mostly involved sports, but before he left, he started chatting up some ladies about movies.
He didn’t bellow at the top of his lungs about Escape From LA; that would have been a bit to on-the-nose. But he did start hollering about another film starring Kurt Russel, directed by John Carpenter… Big Trouble in Little China.