Imitation is the Highest Form of Surveillance

Lucifer is the ultimate parodist. His projects are conducted always with One Eye trained on the heavens, head cocked, the better to render imitatio Dei. As above, so below.

Similarly the Quran’s Dajjal can only ever commit one eye to the Earth’s field of play. The other, forever inward, is mimetically trained on his own every move. Such is the monocular fate of a self-studying pretender. The spirit of imitation lacks seminal force. Spontaneity is a stranger to parody.

The ubiquitous atmosphere of surveillance presently being erected above our heads by the Prince of This World is making an (ultimately) doomed bid for earthly omniscience and panopticon lockdown. We mustn’t let cutting-edge technological advances obscure the ancient coordinates of this effort. The Deep State is the Beast. We encounter its minions in positions of power. The latter are Emanations only, not the Source.

God abides free will shot through with sin. Lucifer seeks consummate control and micromanaged conduct.

Until first-order spiritual governance is duly acknowledged, the universe’s Prime Movers (Paul’s principalities) must forcibly impose themselves upon the secular debate, such terrestrial topics as geopolitics. They will not be invited. (I make it a habit to drag spooky actions, Biblical verse and poetry everywhere I go. People chuckle. C’est la vie.)

Indeed the intent of secularism is to sever the modern world from active recourse to this spiritually nourishing reservoir. Heck, the very intent of secularism is to insist on the reality of a modern world. When, in both fact and substance, nothing has changed. Superstition is not dead. It has been purposely excised from erudite conversation. Modernity is a calculated unmooring that awaits the restoration of ghosts.

We decipher malign human intent and motive from the flitting shadows cast by various bad actors on the wall, the bent politicians and bureaucrats: Clinton, Comey, McCabe, et al. The danger lies in making these characters the objects and termini of our inquiries. Spiritual myopia mixed with a media-saturated environment makes this an easy thing to do.

Even the dense and nettlesome Deep State ‘Trump coup’ saga so ably served up to the Light by the unparalleled Conservative Treehouse blog stresses, almost by narrative necessity, the shadows on the wall when the malevolent backlight, The Deep State and the forces behind even it, are so clearly the Prime Movers.

The bad actors are epiphenomena. Hillary Clinton and her minions initiate nothing. The source commands the shadow. There is a near-infinity of walking-talking factoids. You cannot nail down an atmosphere nor successfully jail a pervasively evil milieu. All lasting remedies are spiritual.

One imitatio Deo parody relates to usurping God’s law by supplanting it with a human analog more befitting the Man of Lawlessness (2 Thessalonians 2:1–12). The Antichrist will inherit a skein of lies made to resemble laws.

With astonishing candor –though perhaps lacking a palpable sense of irony– Alan Dershowitz lays the skein bare as perhaps only a storied defense attorney can, in this instance, ‘defending’ President Trump’s besieged personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

The 10 minute video is worth viewing ‘in the entirety of Dersh’s comments’ (i.e. do hop over the two ABC bobble-heads). Key takeaway? All citizens exist in a state of unactuated guilt that the State can pluck like a poisoned apple from a tree as it chooses. Of course, Christians already knew this, albeit in an Edenic context. Dershowitz is conceding the frighteningly radical relativism of ‘the laws that protect us’. Until they elect to turn on us. Many will live and die in an unprovoked condition of State-sanctioned innocence. Others will not be so lucky. They will be our saints and martyrs.

Law is a holstered gun that, unholstered, mimics a magic wand. No sooner does it point at someone than the target falls to the ground, duly convicted.

For now, Cohen has become the accidental, or is it incidental, criminal the System needs in order to pursue its larger Get Trump agenda. Like the rest of us, he is guilty of something (note Lucifer’s attempt at Original Sin imitatio Dei). The Powerful simply need to find it.

Is Cohen a bad man? Perhaps no worse than the rest of us who commit, on average, three felonies a day. That’s right. There is a book of that name (Three Felonies a Day) written by Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate. Curiously enough, we learn where Dershowitz might have acquainted with the meaningless of it all: he wrote the book’s foreword. Here’s Harvey:

The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.

Law is a mode of social control. Guilt is situational. When they want you, they will uncover your guilt. And that will be that.

How does this relate to Five Eyes (FVEY) surveillance? FVEY is not a new construction, though it’s been vastly perfected over its seventy-year life. In the 50s, Charlie Chaplin earned the foreign-domestic crosshatch of MI5 and the FBI, respectively, for his alleged Communist leanings. Loose coalitions from the originating five (US, UK, NZ, CDN, AUS) can now number up to 41 eyes. Edward Snowden has insisted FVEY is more intrusive even than the NSA.

The FVEY tag-team covers the waterfront even if it isn’t explicitly legal, allowing each participating nation to run domestic interference for another’s on the latter’s home turf, thereby circumventing domestic spying prohibitions. Soon this seamlessness will cover the globe like a dark canopy.

In the Steele dossier instance, domestic opposition research was laundered via ‘former’ MI5 Steele’s intermediation (is there really any such thing as a former MI5 agent?), then re-introduced, in ‘weaponized’ form, as intercepted intelligence data. Thus we see how practically anything, even whole-cloth fiction, can be ‘intelligence-ized’ when those who run the Deep State apparatus wish it to be. We are all spies. We are all criminals.

It’s a strange feature of dictatorships that they will insist on ‘legitimate elections’ so that 100% mandates from the People can be paraded before the world. The imprimatur of legitimacy matters even in hellhole Theatres of the Absurd. They still want ‘stuff on us’ just as Nineteen-Eighty-Four’s Goldstein must extract Winston’s confession so that the State could once again look in the mirror and see its perfection staring back.

The surveillance state is an imitatio Dei of God’s omniscience fallen to earth. Guilt is a universal condition –as above, so below. But then, God told us this. The Deep State merely seeks a Babylonian Imago Dei.

Persistent innocence becomes a symptom of bureaucratic sloth, precipitated by the State functionaries’ failure to dig deep enough. Dig Lazarus, Dig becomes the mantra. And so they do.

Norman Ball can be reached at gspressnow@gmail.com. Visit his blog Full-Spectum Domino to keep abreast. An excerpt of his latest book Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments is available at the Museum of American Poetics (MAP). He also has an eBook out on the impending currency reset Eye Am Eye Press, 2015. He can be reached at: gspressnow@gmail.com. Read other articles by Norman.