Ken

ANOTHER PROPAGANDA EMAIL has come across my desk, and in a strange way I welcome it.

It gives me a chance to explore an underlying structure that many of these propaganda pieces share: a lie (or series of lies), hiding a subtext, hiding another subtext, etc.

So here we go—first the email, then the facts, then the subtexts...

The email:

Subject: This statue is not covered by the media.


________________________________________
DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS IS?
OR WHERE THIS IS?

THE STATUE

This statue currently stands outside the Iraqi palace, Now home to the 4th Infantry division It will eventually be shipped home And put in the memorial museum in Fort Hood, Texas

THIS IS THE CONCLUSION of yesterday's post—to read it from the beginning, click here...

One thing that always strikes me about a labyrinth is that it's a place to get lost in.

Obviously, I didn't get lost in the normal sense of the word—I was never more than five paces from the edge.

All I had to do was break my self-imposed rule, step across the paths and stones.

Does that mean there is a wrong way to walk a labyrinth?

I don't mean "lost" in the sense of a maze of the kind that classical heroes had to master—the type with many different paths and dead-ends.

These meditative labyrinths usually have only the one path.

I wasn't truly lost.

But I was lost in another sense.

MY WIFE AND I took a little trip up the coast this last weekend to celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary.

I had an image of small children, chasing each other through the complex twists and turns, shouting and laughing and trailing balloons.

I hesitated before typing the word "celebrate" in that sentence because everyone—from colleagues at work to the waiter at the restaurant on Friday night—immediately respond by saying "Congratulations!"

Why did the waiter ask what we were celebrating, anyway?

It was probably because I was the only man in the restaurant wearing a sports coat.

I always have the same response to that response.

I always wonder what we are being congratulated on—our ability to tolerate each other for all those years?

The truth is that when you have found your soul mate, it isn't exactly torture to get to eat and sleep and plan and dream and work together for ten or twenty or thirty or forty years.

Or, I'm assuming, for sixty or eighty.

But congratulations are one thing, and celebration is another.

Yes, celebrate is the right word.

The resort we stayed at had a labyrinth on its property: an elaborate maze of paths marked out by rows of stones, which you can walk—entering at a point on the circumference, then winding your way through countless twists and turns until you reach the center, then winding your way back.

THE ABILITY TO DECEIVE is a fundamental aspect of life.

• Newly molted shrimp use aggressive displays to make potential attackers think they are stronger than they are.
• Certain orchids mimic the signals of female insects in order to entice male insects into helping with their pollination.
• When threatened by a predator, the caterpillar of one moth will inflate part of it's body to look like the head of a snake.

The list goes on and on.

We humans, with our highly developed brains and our social way of life, have become experts at deception in ways that leave shrimp and orchids and caterpillars in the dust.

I HAVE A STARTING place for this particular post—or series—but even as I begin to write, I have no idea where it will lead because there are so many connections to follow up.

It would probably be a good idea to start at the beginning by giving you a sort of map of the territory I had in mind when I started the daily mull almost four years ago:

I didn't have it so clearly pictured when I started, but my intuition was that we, in the United States and possibly in the world of humanity at large, were facing a crisis in two areas—spirituality and politics—and that these crises were intimately connected.