Rumpled Foreskin

The Hungry Ghost is a forlorn spirit burdened with a chasm of unquenchable appetite that appears as a significant archetype in a number of Asian mythologies. In the Book of Enoch from the Christian Apocrypha, the Hungry Ghost manifests as the Grigori, spirits so voracious that they must take human form in an ultimately futile attempt to quell the unappeasable demands that are the very essence of their being. At its most allegorical, the Hungry Ghost certainly represents the insatiable lusts, illusory needs, and seemingly bottomless greed that result in so much ill in human affairs. The modern, educated, person may dismiss Hungry Ghosts and the whole host of other archetypal demons as merely symbolic but our ancestors considered them as real as the thunder, lightening, or human imperfections they described. The modern guy or gal on the go continue to be accosted by all manner of anomalous being , usually on lonely country lanes, but the encounter is inevitably rationalized away as a bit of “undigested roast beef” or better yet temporal lobe epilepsy. But what of the Hungry Ghosts, the Grigori, are they merely imaginary figments? If not, where do they reside and manifest in our enlightened age?

“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful state of luck.” …The Dalai Lama

Look no further than the Wall Street “financial class” for the contemporary face of the Hungry Ghost. Hungry Ghosts do not create jobs, generate ideas, or produce real wealth. Hungry Ghosts are not entrepreneurs, mavericks, or any thing else that sounds romantic or swashbuckling. They are amoral greed heads who despite their already obscene wealth, continue to suck blood from the stone of every available government loop hole, social earmark, and banking Ponzi scheme, while somehow convincing roughly half of the US voting populace that this is what free enterprise, i.e. democracy, looks like. Thinkest thou upon these things the next time you’re prioritizing your budget between groceries, the mortgage, and the heating bill.

“I know how difficult it is to put food on your family”… George W. Bush.

Propaganda to the contrary, Hungry Ghosts are not particularly intelligent but they are extremely clever and have a talented nose for the path of least resistance. Unrelenting hunger does that to you. Demagogues (the power hungry charismatic leader is another demon for another dissertation) are the historical ally of the Hungry Ghost. Hungry Ghosts will willingly part with relatively small pieces of their treasure to promote demagogues who use their superior people skills to steer discontent mobs toward the Hungry Ghost’s way of seeing things. If this is beginning to sound like modern AM radio, well…you said it not me. The daily AM radio harangue maintains that “government regulations are the true enemy” and cautions that any deviation from this line will lead to the dreaded system of SOCIALISM. This blather masquerades as an ideology called conservatism and worships a mythological figure they call Ronald Reagan (some historians claim that there once really was a person named Ronald Reagan but that he bears little resemblance to the conservative demi-deity). The meta-message in play here is the promotion of the false god of left wing/right wing dichotomy- which more expressive commentators have called the “modern day dumb show”. Social scientists often remark that “the lack of control increases illusory pattern perception”. Really, they say that all the time. Cultural observers will note that as “conservative” radio continues down the winding path toward marginalized cult, the craziness meter will tip further into the red—but don’t stop listening—a wise man dismisses nothing out of hand.

“You can always tell a shit by their need to always be right”…William Burroughs

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the word on the street is that communism has failed everywhere it has “been tried”. Of course the man himself, Karl Marx, didn’t recommend just “giving communism a try”, he basically said it “would emerge after capitalism collapsed of its own inner contradictions” (yes, I know Marx eventually came around to pushing revolution as a radical but necessary response to the truly fiendish injustices of the industrial revolution. So what?). Marx said that communism was a historical and inevitable evolutionary process brought about by greedheads always taking more than they need and everybody else being forced to overextend their credit. The last time this bit of Social Darwinism came close to emerging from the historical ooze was during the Great Depression of the 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt responded to the crisis by implementing some government programs that could be interpreted as SOCIALISM, which gave depression era Hungry Ghosts corresponding conniptions. In retrospect it is clear that FDR’s actions actually prevented the country’s evolutionary collapse into communism. Being the great connivers that they are, the greedhead hungry ghost bastards have continued to do pretty well for themselves in this more mixed economy but their physiological insatiability renders them incapable of any kind of historic perspective on the matter.

“I can conceive of nothing in religion, science, or philosophy that is anything more than the proper thing to wear for a while.” …Charles Hoy Fort

Despite what they try to sell the kids at the Cineplex, during humankind’s darker ages, priests, shamen, and other sundry necromancers never sought to eliminate or defeat Hungry Ghosts or for that matter any other supernatural entity. Rather, throughout history, the enduring hope for much conjuring and other ritualistic running about has been the possibility of bending these energies to human will. The economics of harnessing non-human sentience has always been and always will be a risky and imperfect science (perhaps more grant money…) yet the lassie faire alternative is to let the demon spawn fuck with us as they please. It’s not a great leap from casting out demons to casting out the money changers (we’ll give the unclean a pass on this one). Drafting legislation and creating regulations, analogies to sausage production aside, is too often like so much incredulous conjuring—but unlike say, the vacuous rites of the contemporary church, accountability and oversight actually have the potential to produce some tangible benefit. Government regulation of any kind is an imperfect and risky enterprise and it will never eliminate Hungry Ghosts, but perhaps greed and even the greedy can be constructively harnessed and bent to human will. The alternative is to allow the demon spawn to continue to fuck with us as they please.

“Five years after you get your degree in economics all you’re going to remember are two things-supply and demand”…Father Guido Sarducci