Chickens Running in All Directions (VII)

As the desacralization and deconstruction of Latvia’s sovereignty continues apace, Latvia may already no longer be a nation, but an area under the administration of proxies working for foreign banks.

Two of the proxies doing the administering are already in place and easily identifiable. One is the President of Latvia, Andris Berzins http://www.planetrulers.com/latvia-president/ , while the other is Latvia’s Finance Minister Andris Vilks http://www.mk.gov.lv/en/mk/sastavs/vilks/ .

Both of said men are former employees of Swedish banks. Both men support the “system” of neo-liberal economics, even though that system is arguably a manifest failure. Both men are among the core of men and women who have the privilege to put Latvia on its feet, but who instead stand for abysmal failure of example. Indeed, today a public example from the leadership may be the only thing that may inspire the despised ‘populists’ (re people) to endure as Latvians.

The difficulty facing Latvia as a sovereign nation is touched upon by Imants Lancmanis, director of the Rundale Castle complex in the Zemgale region. http://ltvzinas.lv/?n=video&id=4903 [Interview is in Latvian. The part relevant to this text begins at the 3:12 min mark.] However, this writer is not persuaded that the ‘new generation’, which the director mentions, will bring about anything more than continued deconstruction of the community and cement a naked money based secular administration more securely in place. Some will say, well and good, because, after all, all of Europe is in the process of being denationalized. Perhaps so.

However, the answer of those who are not persuaded that fiat money is able to create a community that lasts and can endure an economic crisis through the strength of its communal bonds is to point out that a pseudo community necessarily worships exponential growth.  Dependency on such growth necessarily leads to a catastrophe and collapse.

While the world of our culture is only at the beginning of its final catastrophe, the event is of a nature more felt than critically perceived. The situation brings about an intensification of mimetic rivalry, because in better days an increase in such rivalry was said to give rise to progressively more elaborate and humanized forms of culture. In other words, while a complete rollover in exponential growth has not yet occurred, but tremors and quakes of it are clearly felt, many people continue to opt for frenzied exponential growth in personal ‘liberty’ in the mistaken belief that it may prevent the crisis or that it does not even exist.

Alas! Exponential growth of “humanized forms of culture” (human rights as absolute rights), when such growth is based on debased former cultures and fiat money, cannot escape the moment at which it must reverse direction. It is at the peak (the hour of it no one knows) of this phenomenon that our fiat culture must either launch the societies under its umbrage into wars of surrogate victimhood that re-found or allow for changes in said culture or in order to avoid war, it must find a re-founding mechanism that allows for the substitution of mass victimhood with a reconciliatory event.

The reconciliatory event however must be an event of death (a symbolic death can be stretched only so far), because only death has sufficient charisma to impress and persuade the skeptical.

The least damaging death to all concerned is a single death. As Rene Girard points out in his work (“Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World”), such a death in past societies was discovered by seeking and finding a victim who was then stoned and killed. Indeed, the scapegoat or victim enabled through his-her death to increase the time necessary to think things over. Thus, a re-conciliatory death (a delay or cessation of the death threat) encouraged from times way back, both, a growth of the human brain in a child and development of human culture itself.

In the previous blog [Chickens Running in All Directions (VI)], I suggested that in spite of the fact that a surrogate victim may be found by the lottery method [Adolfs Buķis http://www.politika.lv/508/did/16931/ , a publicly unacknowledged self-sacrifice, may serve as an example if we allow that chance may become a synonym of the unexpected], Latvia now has the opportunity to substitute the unacknowledged man with two well known men, President Berzins of Latvia and the mayor from Ventspils, Aivars Lembergs. Both men are millionaires. Occasionally people call both men oligarchs. However, in terms of money, the President of Latvia is worth a few million, whereas the Mayor of Ventspils is said to be worth a few hundred million.

If the story that Lembergs had the first and last word as to who was to be Latvia’s next President (after the incumbent Valdis Zatlers was passed over) is true, it becomes intriguing to learn whether the voting public will side with Lembergs http://www.apollo.lv/portal/news/articles/245657  in his choice of who is to be Latvia’s surrogate victim and reconciliator (the President of course), or is the President of Latvia going to be able to foist the cadaver onto Lembergs.

Some people may mistake blood money for blood and blood in office for prestige, when in fact the option may be that 1) that a certain sum of money from the Ventspils mayor will to go to the restoration of the North Vidzeme Biosphere Region (starting with a 200 million lats contribution), and 2) the President of Latvia will resign from (sacrifice) the Office of President lest he be impeached by the new Saeima.

Incidentally, the election of the new Saeima is less than two months away on September 17, 2011.

Recommended essay (in Latvian): http://www.delfi.lv/news/comment/comment/gundars-davidsons-slazda.d?id=39645309

Chickens Running in All Directions (I)

To continue :

According to the economist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964)  http://uncharted.org/frownland/books/Polanyi/POLANYI%20KARL%20-%20The%20Great%20Transformation%20-%20v.1.0.html “…by the end of the nineteenth century the peoples of the world were institutionally standardized to a degree unknown before.”

Though Polanyi refers to the 19^th century, what he had in mind was not only that one century or the universal bureaucratic infrastructure crabbing and sterilizing governments, but how that same standardization “…enforced [a] uniformity of domestic systems [which] hovered as a permanent threat over the freedom of national development….”.  The result was, as Polanyi calls it “anarchistic sovereignty”, which became “…a hindrance to all effective forms of international cooperation….”

The failure of the international system in the 1920s and 1930s or as Polanyi says, “the passing of capitalist internationalism”, then “…let lose the energies of history …, the tracks of which were laid down by the tendencies inherent in a market society.”

The above thought may be carried forward to Latvia today, because the Latvian government has for all these years of failed capitalist internationalism presumed to join (in the name of Latvians) that very failure, justifying the course as the only way to escape the Bolsheviks. While such a presumption is not of all Latvians, it was presumed such by those who bought into the system of institutional standardization, which had preoccupied so much of the energies of the 19^th century.

The standardized system became the system in Latvia today by way of liberal capitalism teaming up with individual rights and buying with ‘good’ money a sustained period of growth. Even so, though a significant number of people in the West have indeed had access to ‘good’ money, their sustainability and their money is illusory. The Latvian government however does not see it thus and has no intentions of hiring scholars and other experts to research alternatives for any eventuality.

Too, both liberal capitalism and human rights became identified with ‘freedom’ as sold by a more or less libertarian America in a fit of temporary success. The Latvian-Americans who arrived in America mid-20^th century were America’s vanguard. They were not ones to discover the ebb in the tide of a free and self-controlling market and, therefore, in of the potential damage to their own that an ebb in their prescribed course would bring.  

Most Latvians fleeing the Soviets went to Germany (mostly) and then migrated to other Western countries (particularly the U.S.A.) during the late 1940s and early 1950s. As their arrival in America coincided with America’s and Western Europe’s post WW2 economic boom, the ‘right way’ of both politics and the economy for Latvians became what Polanyi called “failed capitalist internationalism”. In other words, few people, let alone Latvians, remembered Polanyi’s observation or perceived it as prescient http://ardictionary.com/Prescient/11143 .

This is one of the reasons why the Latvian government, having escaped the clutches of the Soviet Union, continued with its rightward tilt. Not surprisingly, Latvia is now caught up in the collapse of capitalist internationalism the second time around, this time however known by the name ‘globalization’ a la neo-liberal capitalism. And not surprisingly, Latvian politicians and business leaders continue to insist that no such collapse is taking place or is ever likely to take place.

All the same, the economic collapse of the West along with the value of its monies—the dollar and the euro—is foreseeable more clearly than ever. Given that economically Latvia is among the last of the European Union’s countries, it ought to be among the first to jump off the wagon known to be running out of tracks.

It is interesting that with the passing into retirement of President Valdis Zatlers [assuming that Zatler’s Reform Party will fail due to an early stall] and the aggressive implant of President Andris Berzins as the new President by the market forces, the opportunity—perhaps the last—for Latvians to escape death as a singularity has passed.

Currently the ‘word’ of the Latvian government is best expressed by the mantra: “Latvia is an example to the rest of the world”, sometimes also called “The Latvian Option” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/20/latvia-debt-economy-europe-austerity / . The Prime Minister has written a book called “How Latvia came through the financial crisis” http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xjn59w_latvian-prime-minister-launches-his-book-about-financial-crisis_news , though no crisis has as yet been overcome.

No, no one in Latvia is jumping off the wagon or the system.

Though Latvia’s wagon has no engine, it rolls on. Though the system is now run by bad or fiat money, and few Latvians of former times would recognize themselves in the world of today, the cultural vacuum or debasement smiles on. To end with the words of Karl Polanyi: “Not economic exploitation, as often assumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is … the cause of disintegration ”.

Part 2 to follow.

Stealing Latvia, Final Episode

Fifth part of Ra-gana’s story



Getting on a bike.



Ra-gana again apologized for her fits of Turett’s http://twinbeech.com/images/turret_truck/Turret_truckrearweb.JPG . These fits come and go. It is not as often as you think that I want to f*** you http://twinbeech.com/images/turret_truck/Turret_truckrearweb.JPG . I am doing it in the interest of keeping your attention.

So, here it is the last day of Valdis Zatlers, the President of Latvia for the last four years, skulking off the stage in a well acted scene of abject failure making a dignified exit http://www.delfi.lv/news/referendums-2011/saeima/zatlera-partijas-nosaukums-varetu-but-reformu-partija.d?id=39438673 The link links to a “possible” Reform Party. How utterly thrilling your intentions are, President Zatlers.

It was just on June 28, that Zatlers openly urged a Referendum on whether the Saeima should be dismissed or kept as is.

Must catch up.

The Saeima voted in a new President-Elect Andris Bērziņš, who will succeed President Valdis Zatlers tomorrow.

Now what of a*** (hole) do you have to be to fail to understand that some serious f*** party is going on. Or are they all simply flat out on their beds as limp you can be and pretending that no one has stolen anything?

Ra-gana has suggested in previous blogs that Andris Bērziņš should refuse to accept his election to the presidency as valid, until the Referendum vote on July 23 reflects the people’s choice whether they believe Valdis Zatlers long list of reasons for dismissing the Saeima or whether they continue to put its trust in an institution whose present state of body is accused of corruption.

Rolling.

If the people vote to dismiss the present Saeima, then President-Elect Andris Berzins has been put in office by a government body that the people have just voted as being corrupt. The implications of the Referendum vote on the Saeima are serious enough that a President-Elect of that Saeima should refuse the honor.

Else, the corruption of the Saeima has projected itself into the future a kind of cocoon of itself in the shape of an oligarch, the highest paid pensioner, a former bank president, a militant neo-liberal with a conflict of interest tilting in behalf of Sweden. More can be added. Certainly one may say that Berzins is attached to a view that the sovereigns of the Earth are not the people, Latvians in this instance, but a class of oligarchs who have amassed their wealth by encouraging irresponsible growth.

Everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon of irresponsible growth. In Latvia, it is a shining ambition even if it goes unreported. Rip the forests down, no shortage of chainsaws here. My neighbour reported this morning that eight good sized wild pigs had marched 20 meters from his house on their way to his potatoes field.

If President-Elect Andris Bērziņš lets pass the moment when he is not officially President, Latvia is as good as dead—especially in view of the near 500,000 of the last twenty years that the government has forced into economic emigration. The exile is evidence of a failure of either a long-term policy or vision. It is leadership floundering in the not so gentle ebb tide of the economies of the West.

Of course, one way of doing it is to do it in the last hours. Here is the scenario.

President Valdis Zatlers turns out not to be a wimp. The President calls for a press conference, at which he announces that he believes that President-Elect Andris Berzins should not accept office until the popular Referendum reflects the peoples’ view of things.

Such a call by Zatlers would send the media into an immediate twitch. The worm will wriggle. Everyone now wants to know what President-Elect Andris Berzins will do. Will he agree and top it off with a suggestion that both he and Zatlers be candidates in a popular election?



Home in the wood.



At this moment, the ball is yet in Valdis Zatler’s hands. Will he let it drop? Or will Andris Berzins drop it?

Stealing Latvia, Final Episode

Fourth part of Ra-gana’s story

Driving home one evening.



Ra-gana bared her teeth—though none of the blinded Latvians could see them. Raw heat flowed from her mouth and as soon as her words struck the ears of her listeners, their empty eye sockets twitched as if the black eggs that filled them were hatching black chickens infected by Turret’s.

The chickens jumped to the sunlit ground and formed a whirl of black feathers, but instead of “pihp, pihp,”, the customary ‘chirp’ of chickens, one heard “behp, behp” of an automobile. As if this was not sufficiently dreadful, a chronal event joined the chickens honking with the rat-ta-tat of a machinegun, the squish of moss in a swamp, and, for good measure, the rattle of tank treads and an earthquake. It made one think of Latvian ghosts of who knows what wars come alive to mix it up with Lady Gaga.

“How on Earth!...” howled Ra-gana, “could the Latvians, co-inventors of the endearing word, have sunk to such corruption? How on Earth did the sons and daughters of the Sun, Saules meitas un dehli, the zhenchinas, the Tochtern aus Elisium http://younghill.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/image018.jpg become such suckers for cream of shit manufactured in Brussels, Stockholm, and other overfed places of the world?”

No problem to answer that one, yelled a listener. The angels got raped http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2010/100/a/6/Tochter_aus_Elysium_by_Venty_chan.jpg and lost their wings.

We are living in millennium horriblis, said Ra-gana. The Pavlovians are still shoving a peppered broomstick between my legs and calling the Sun in her chariot a witch on a broomstick.

Driving along a country road.

Latvia is no longer an existential question for Latvians. Did you see those cow licked fans of outgoing President Valdis Zatlers come to wimp it up at the Garden of Fates (Liktendārzs)? The umbrellas of the so-called “umbrella protest” a few years ago were replaced by summer parasols making make-believe that it was time for the rainbow.

However, the President’s good bye and farewell wishers were put in their place by the incoming Viceroy* Andris Bērziņš [*before he came out of retirement, Berziņš was president of Uni Banka, an affiliate of Swedish SEB http://www.sebgroup.com/pow/wcp/sebgroup.asp . This is why his interests are conflicted, motives may be questioned, and service may be contrary to the interests of Latvians http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andris_B%C4%93rzi%C5%86%C5%A1_(Latvian_President-elect) ], who trumped the outgoing President by marrying his girlfriend, a Latvian doctor, who does not understand why she should not have married—given that she had not been in a hurry to do so before Berzins sudden rise to fame.

Ra-gana was visibly eclipsing herself. Those who were listening to her saw neither the sun nor the moon.

Did the doctor weigh the existential question, i.e., whether she should be wife of a president who may not be averse to the de-sovereignization of Latvia? Not surprisingly, the news media were interested in the banker on his way to becoming the President of Latvia, not the non-event of the near ex-President at the Park of Fate (Liktendārzs).

Ra-gana’s questions, many of a rhetorical nature, because they implicitly questioned the President-Elect loyalties, reverberated through Latvia with a “ker-plunk” that has no bridge overhead to echo it. Though the questions are rhetorical, mere thinkable unthinkables few think about, they are actually weighty enough for President-Elect Andris Bērziņš to refuse the Presidency, confound a corrupt Saeima that elected him, and call for direct popular elections to take place simultaneously with the Referendum on the dismissal of Saeima.

I know that my enemies are calling for Garth Wader, shouted Ra-gana, but I love the Latvians. They are among the last of indigenous peoples, and not much is left of them.

So, what else is new?

One may readily imagine an alternate future for Latvia, one more advantageous to her as a sovereign nation than a nation de-sovereignized and stuck for public view in a bottle of formaldehy. Is freedom being bought at the price of seeing one’s self de-Latvianized enough to be indistinguishable from Latvian tourists touring their own country http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdYwAXZh0ME&feature=related . Many Latvians do not agree that the life of their community is being put in jeopardy by debts, many of which were accrued by oligarchs and those with tendencies to imitate them.

Driving into it.

Why should Andris Bērzins want to preside over a system, where the heirs of Latgale region are paid for their labour with a bottle of ‘krutka’ and piece of fatty sausage? The suicide rate in Latvia under the government in operation for the last twenty years (where suicide is a way of sacrificing one’s self to Gods of one’s forebears to keep from being miserable under the present One) is rather impressive. One should check out whether President-Elect Andris Bērzins, as a banker, repossessed the farms of some who protested by killing themselves.

Not that Berzins would admit to ever having heard of such a thing, someone shouted. He will say that the Swedes love Latvians.

The corruption problem of the Latvian government (some say it began in 1993, when Adolfs Buķis from Jelgava killed himself at the foot of the Freedom Monument in Riga) is the result of a visionless government marching into the future looking backward and full of faith in the short-lived post-World War Two economic story.

Much of the present march into oblivion is the result of the uneducated optimism of Latvian exiles (trimdinieki), the hidden greed of former communist apparatchiks, people living in belief (still) that liberal and self-regulating capitalism is a system for forever, and abandonment of community in favour of anarchy of individualism will be sustained by good money also forever. While the success stories of Latvians living abroad is impressive, few knew enough about the history of economy to oppose the shock capitalism advocated by America and other Western countries in the early 1990s or are themselves committed to a unipolar world view.



One more bend in the road and I am home.



President-Elect Andris Bērzins is of oligarch vintage, a careerist—as we see—even as a retiree. Why are we to believe that the answer to the question (as yet unasked by the media) that he is free of conflict of interest on behalf of Sweden, when so much of the evidence (true, indirect and inferred, not objectively proved) leads one to infer the opposite or at least investigate it as the Latvian media does not do.

Ra-gana was out of breath as she came to the finish of her story to the blind. “Oh, do not go gentle into that good night,” she screamed at the top of her voice. “Make rage at what you have been made to become!”

Many windows in Riga opened as people looked to see who that Crazy Jane, a pa-yane for sure, was doing in depopulated Riga. Unfortunately, the windows opened to the dark of night, and an echo that sounded very much like “On July 7^th, the President of Latvia will be Andris Bērzins. Latvia is making a great leap forward. De-sovereignization, here we come. What crisis? There is no crisis.”

Stealing Latvia, Final Episode

Second part of Ragana’s story

Gate West, Temple to Black John in Memoriam of Lost Forests



The Latvian witch http://www.zemgaletourism.lv/bildes/ragana.JPG  paused and looked around to see what impression her story had made on the Latvian tourists touring Latvia.

The witch was delighted by what she saw: almost no one had been listening to her. However, all were spellbound by the bleached mask over her face, which was made of torn old cardboard weathered in the rain and sun for over a year.

“Glory be!” said the Witch. “The worms will ream your arse. Listen up, marines! If you wish to come out alive, you must kill the enemy.”

“Go tell them, mother,” someone from the audience called.

“I am only kidding,” replied the witch. “I don’t want anyone killed, but I would hang them by their balls and pussies if that would help.” The witch took a deep breath and then continued with her story to the Latvians, who she had just bewitched and blinded. Her breath still reeked of eyeballs turned into rotten eggs.

She began by reminding everyone about the need of sacrifice.



If trees let grow, in ten years it will look very different



When on May 28, President Zatlers made the speech that initiated the dismissal of the Latvian Saeima http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT6944am6IY , he used the word “sacrifice” a number of times. The President mentioned that among the sacrifices made by the Latvian people, which sacrifices had pulled Latvia out of the economic crisis were lower wages, higher taxes, and unemployment. He did not mention the 300,000 to 500,000 Latvians who had been driven out of their country by liberal economic policies of the Latvian government. Of these none were returning yet, though the President mentioned “improved economic conditions”.

Nonetheless, to mention the word “sacrifice” is a noteworthy departure for President Zatlers. He had seldom used the word before. The reason for its disuse is, of course, the liberal capitalist economy, which is presumed to be “self-regulating”. In other words, if liberal capitalist economy is self-regulating (the economists of the U.S.A. swear it is so), so is the governing of the state. There is no need for any kind of radical intervention by sacrifices such as people make in times of war or at times they are laying the foundations of their nation. In a liberal democracy self-regulation is the word. As we know, today foreign banks are regulating Latvians, which is to say, they are easing Latvian sovereignty out the door by not saying a word about it. Mum is the word; and surprisingly, Latvians are mum about their sovereignty.

The walk to the temple.

In his speech, President Zatlers mentioned the word “radical” with regard to himself. This is not to say that he is, though he may have thought so. After all, privatizing a nation is as radical a step as must be the nation’s reaction to such an effort.

That President Zatlers had turned a sceptic about liberal capitalist economy and its advertised democracy was picked up quickly by the more sensitive ears among the ruling elites. Andris Grutups, a lawyer of note among Latvians, reacted almost immediately http://www.delfi.lv/news/referendums-2011/referendums/grutups-zatlers-ar-savu-vieglpratibu-nolicis-valsti-mulkiga-stavokli.d?id=39093605 .

“With his light headedness and short sightedness, Zatlers has put the State into a foolish position. There was no reason to dismiss the parliament…. The only pleasing thing is that the parliament quickly elected Andris Berzins as the next President. What he will be like only the future knows, but as far as finances and economy are concerned, he is at least three times smarter than Valdis Zatlers,” said Grutups.

After quoting Grutups, the Latvian witch looked at all the Latvians whose eyeballs she had eaten and lowering her voice said: “When you have got no eyeballs, it is much easier to lobotomize you. All you have to do is scoop it out. Surreptitious desovereignization is the very essence of globalization.”

“Wow!” said the listening Latvians. “If your name is Yane or Zhane, we want you as our next President.”

To see one's shadow.

“Of course you know,” said the Latvian witch, “that the witch in Latvian is spelled ‘ragana’, that is to say ‘Ra-gana’ or Sun-herder. If you really would like, I would be your Sun gladly. When I am the President, our national hymn will start with the words ‘Dear Sun, bless Latvia’.”

“Go, mother, go!” yelled someone in the audience.

“I will marry Clever John, and he can succeed me as President.”

“Wot!” cried another voice, obviously that of a Populist.

The logic is quite simple, continued the witch Ragana. Latvians must take heart. The President-Elect, Andris Bērziņš must think twice before he accepts his office.

If in the Referendum vote, the Latvians vote for the dismissal of the Saeima, then surely the Saeima was in the eyes of the voters illegitimate at the time it presumed to elect the so-called next president.

Attorney Grūtups should know that while the law cannot be subjective, a sovereign may. And the Latvian people surely are the sovereigns of their nation. The Latvian Saeima and its parliamentary democracy is not the State’s sovereign. The Latvians are Latvia’s sovereigns, because without sovereignty, the Latvians are without a community of their own.

If President-Elect Andris Bērziņš is let stand as Latvia’s President after the Latvian people vote to dismiss the Saeima (which means that the People are also seconding the reasons that Valdis Zatlers gave for asking its dismissal), the surreptitious evolution of the undisclosed cancer continues to devour Latvia’s sovereignty. The casket may be made now.

“Wot, wot!” cried several Populists.

“I think that it is high noon for Latvia,” said the witch Ragana.

Consider the weed.

“Is your name Gary Cooper, the late American actor?” one of the blinded Latvians asked.

“No,” answered Ragana, “he’s the one sang to me “Oh my darling.”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4a_1UhwgFU&feature=related .”

(To be continued.)

Stealing Latvia, Final Episode

First part of the old witch’s story



Of ducklings and grasses



Latvia was stolen with the help of a helpless Latvian President.

This is a funny story but also sad. Both little children and grown-ups who tell children this story will laugh and cry.

So, here it goes.

Once upon a time in a country called Latvia, there lived a real witch. The witch wore a black sheet over her otherwise bony and teatless body. Color black made the witch both invisible and horrible looking. The more invisible the witch was, the more horrible she became to the imagination.



A group of about a dozen came marching through the meadow,
but I had to drive on and know not whence they came or went



Many people were struck blind by the sight of the witch—even if she stood in the shadows. There may be to this day blind people alive in Latvia, who can tell what happened when they had their fateful encounter with the witch. The moment she appeared was when she wanted to eat human eyeballs. This is when she (or he?) became visible to Latvians.

The moment the witch’s victims saw the witch, their eyes turned black and teary and flowed from their sockets as rotten eggs. Even as the people screamed, and the smell of rot filled the air, the witch came over to the horrified victim, and licked its eyes right off its cheeks. Many say that the witch smacked her lips and made sounds that sounded like “Nyam, nyam”. The witch then took the opportunity to sit the shocked and blinded victims down wherever it was it all happened and tell them a story.

This is what the witch told.

Once upon a time Latvia was a country covered by great forests. The Latvians themselves were people living in the forest, where they made small clearings to build their houses. The Latvians subsisted mostly on salted mushrooms and cabbages (in the winter) and wild strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, milk, and honey (in the summer).



A midsummer heaven of daisies



The Latvians of former times ate no meat, because they did not like to kill anything alive. The one occasion when the Latvians were willing to kill was at certain high noon times, when the Sun—the goddess who represented the wonders of the universe for them—was directly above them. Trapped in the glowing moment of noon was like being trapped within the Sun herself. To make themselves feel real again, the Latvians gathered a crowd of witnesses (other Latvians), and then asked if one in their midst wanted to die.

“Hee, hee!” laughed the Latvian witch, and continued:

Quite often no one came forward and said “I”. Who in his right mind would? But then why ask the question. This was a moment of truth.

If no Latvian came forward to say that he-she loved Latvia as much as him- or herself, then there was no community of Latvians. Then all those Latvians who had come together on Johns Eve and on Midsummer Day stood at high noon on privatized Gaizinkalns were just a lot of curious tourists watching some silly ritual or other.

There came a time, however, when in fact no one came forward. The Latvian tourists did not in any way feel themselves more real than real feels at high noon at any other place, and evidence for that reality was in the lats, dollars, and euros they left behind at the inn. Oh, yes, the inn was called “Pagan”.



Clover in bloom



The tourist brouchure does not explain that “pagan” stands for pa-yan. Yan had been the name by which the original proto-Latvians designated a man and a human being. Women were included through a trick of the Latvian language: it could turn almost every word into a feminine word by adding a vowel. In this case, Yane, sometimes Zhane, stood for all women.

Thus, the word “pagan” is actually “Yan” and “Yane” demoted to being pa-yan and pa-yane, and then again to pagan. “Pa” is a prefix that diminishes the significance of who ever bears the word by half or more. While Saule stands for the Sun, pa-saule stands for the planet Earth.

When the day came that all Latvians became tourists in their own country (and many tour right out of it, say, to China or Ireland), then something needs to be done for Latvians to recover themselves as something more than tourists. If this does not happen, Latvians turn into soap bubbles and everything goes Pop! This is a great time for witches to drink blood.

Of course, I am not talking of real blood. If sometimes the blood is real, most of the time it is symbolic.

The fragrance is like that of a mild honeysuckle

For example, if Latvians do not become real, the time will be lost to rent out Riga for the next hundred years to the Chinese as their capital in Europe. Right now the Chinese are all over Europe http://www.zerohedge.com/article/china-says-it-will-bailout-insolvent-european-countries saying they are ready to save floundering economies and worthless currencies. If insolvent Riga and Latvians become real and play their cards right, China could bail the Latvians out of their debt and turn Riga into Latvia’s taxi meter for Chinese passengers.

With the tax money, the land of Latvia could be turned into a forest again, and Latvians could again be a forest people. Don’t you know that if you want a real democracy, you must live in a forest? The barons got the best of proto-Latvians when they got them to cut down their forests and their machineguns could move down anything that crossed the field.

“Hee, hee!” laughed the Latvian witch. “To this day, I hide best behind trees. When in a forest, you will never know when I jump out from behind a tree.”

There is even more to tell.



Gate West of the Temple to Black John

Not being too smart and tied into a knot known as “the oligarch”, the Latvian parliament elected a new President, one Andris Bērziņš. The reason the Latvian Saeima (Parliament, sort of) did this was because the new President had been the head of a Latvian bank, drew the highest pension of anyone in Latvia, and was an adventurer, a Don Juan who did not distinguish between women and people when it came to a chance for a tryst.

You know what I mean, said the witch. Hear this!

When President Zatlers suggested in his State Directive #2 (based on the 48^th Pants of the Latvian constitution) that the people decide through a vote in a Referendum whether to dismiss the Saeima or not, his mind was hoping he was reading the mind of the People right, that is, that the Saeima is really deserving of dismissal. President Zatlers gave a long list of potentially anti-Latvian acts of the Saeima, one of which is a surreptitious evolutionary form of privatization of Latvia, which in due course will surprise Latvians by turning Latvia into a non-State. This can be achieved if the sovereign of Latvia is not the People, but the Saeima.

Quite a witchy story, is it not? hee heed the witch. It is also high noon.



Black John on Johns Eve, Midsummer 2011



Could the man to step forward as a sacrifice at this high noon be President-Elect Andris Bērziņš?

It is not Bērziņs life anyone wants, but the Presidency he holds is wanted back in the hands of the sovereign People again. The 17^th of September vote for the new Saeima should include a vote of Latvia’s sovereigns for their next President. Of course, Andris Bērziņš can be given a place on the candidates list. So can Valdis Zatlers. So can others.

(To be continued.)