I am currently looking into the ‘subtext’ of our unraveling culture. Hearing this, a training partner of mine suggested I look at a giant ad in Time Square for an internet porn site. He explained to me that porn is making most of the internet money, and that the hundreds of porn sites out there were mostly owned by three large companies. I asked him to send me a link and he did. It appears below.

The text is in simple lettering above the graphic and reads ‘All You Need Is Hand’.

Note that it does not read ‘all you need is a hand’, which would indicate that what you need is contact and cooperation with another human to fulfill whatever need there might be.

The graphic below reveals this as a well-crafted ad of the highest commercial form. In case the reader is confused as to the significance of the text a not very masculine man’s two hands appear below, the open space between the joined fingers and thumbs forming a heart shape!

The message is clear, you don’t need a partner, you just need to view performers on our feed and replace love [that being the word replaced by hand in the text above] with your own uncalloused hands. A panleoanthropologist of a thousand years hence who might view this would perhaps write a book on the importance of this piece of monumental commercialism marking The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.

However, what might other observers from outside of the global commercial culture think of this? How might they express dissent?

When Charles put up this site I asked him if there were any limits and he said, “Anything you are comfortable with and willing to stand behind, I’ll post.”

Then, the following year, he found out I was reading the Koran with plans of reviewing it and he drew the line there, with getting beheaded by jihadists. Since then I have written much that one might consider sympathetic or at least empathetic to the Islamic cause, including my ‘Arabian terror tales’, Fruit of The Deceiver and Forty Hands of Night. I am currently doing background work on a fiction series titled Under the Crescent, about an Islamist America at the turn of the 22nd Century.

In that vein, I will pretend here to be the speech writer for an American Islamist, living now, on these shores, preaching Hitler-like to new converts at one of the Islamic centers I have noticed sprouting up in Baltimore County. If approached by such a man with news that poor Charles was being held captive at knife point and would not be released to post my next e-book unless I composed a recruitment speech, I might submit the following.

Note to the Orator: This is the stripped down secular version to be certain that we strike at the bedrock materialism of this audience. Please insert divine references where appropriate—every second line I would think.

“Do you see Brothers, what the worship of the money-god brings?

“Did our forefathers overthrow their ancestors for this?

“And what is this, but the promise of loneliness in service to greed, a world where the love of a woman is replaced by the stroke of your hand?

“If there is so little place for earthly love, and the way is cleared by sorrow for the stroke of the hand, then put a weapon in hand and let you masters touch themselves to the command of their money-god.”

Billboards and other large forms of advertising rate with monumental architecture of past ages as a true interpretation of a culture’s values. The Pyramids Look Ra, No Slaves! and the Great Wall of China are, above all else, symbols of industrial scale slavery. In general monumental architecture designed for living people to visit, work in, or reside in, give the form of the culture’s moral compass. For instance many American towns and cities consist of three architectural sky lines: the colonial one, above which the church steeple soared as the highest architectural form, indicating a faith-based society; the national one, above which soared the state building and other government structures, indicating that political ideology had replaced religion as the social driver; and finally the economic one, dominated by the sky scraper, indicating a material trade-based value system.

An examination of various small town and big city skylines according to this reference will have the same effect in the mind of the attuned viewer as the ubiquitous hockey stick graph now has in the mind of the viewer who looks at economic indicators. What you see is a church twice the height of a house, next to a state house thrice the height of a house, overshadowed by a skyscraper thirty or more times the height of a house. Such are the things that future archaeologists and the interpreters that follow them onto the sites that were once our teaming cities will consider when attempting to reconstruct the rise and decline of our society.

A reading of Nathanial Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, penned not far from the Manhattan Tower of Babel, could have predicted the very turn of the intimate screw embodied in this Time Square porn advertisement. I interpret internet porn at such volume attested to by this as holding one of the top ten ad placements on Planet Earth as a direct and predictable legacy of the puritanical ethos of the early modern period which sought to—and succeeded in—stripping all transcendental elements from the state backed religious experience and taking it back to its Old Testament roots to serve as a template for personal and cultural sacrifice in service to political and corporate ends underpinned by a purely material logic.

I think if Joseph Campbell ‘The Secret Cause Of All Suffering’ showed up at Plymouth Rock to discuss the planting of the European seed with William Bradford and showed the old white-slave driver [The Pilgrims owned at least 12 ‘duty boys’ or kidnapped white slaves.] what his legacy would be, that the prick would have been reassured that he was on God’s course and that the resulting soulless masturbatory society would be an acceptable means of erasing those aspects of human nature that had not yet been sacrificed on the ever thirsty Altar of Abraham.

Most Eurocentric thinkers will call me out of line on this account. I, however, have no reservations about the contention that very little separated—conceptually—Abraham and Bradford from Montezuma, whose actions all resounded down through the ages with much more effect than did their words.