Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth

In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.

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The Ethics of War Voyeurism

 White House warns Russian invasion of Ukraine may be imminent

 

Gods, it's like watching a rape that I'm powerless to stop. I can't bring myself to look away, but the very act of looking seems in itself unclean, an act of complicity.

I feel like a war voyeur.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine has become a hideous kind of live entertainment as we watch it play out in real-time. Somehow my obsessive interest in what's happening seems to me prurient, ghoulish even. Something Nascar-ish is happening here: you don't really want wrecks, but the potential smell of blood has its own allure. In candor, the wrecks are the draw.

Well, war is interesting: a terrible truth, but a truth nonetheless. I think of the Iliad, the Mahabharata, the Táin, those culturally-foundational war epics. War is reality of the most extreme sort.

From the safety of somewhere else, I watch the suffering of others with fascinated horror. Try as I might, I feel myself in a state of perpetual uncleanness. How do I dare make offerings, do the sacred and necessary work, in such a state of mental impurity?

Yet the sacred work must still be done: without it, the world would fail. Better an imperfect offering than no offering at all. I turn off the radio, take a deep breath, wash my hands, and do my best to clear my mind as I enter the temple to make the morning offering.

Curse you, Vladimir Putin. Your uncleanness contaminates us all.

 

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Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.

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