Friends,
I’m a big fan of Walt Disney’s Bambi. Even a bigger fan of the movie’s source, Felix Salten’s book Bambi, A Life in the Woods (English edition, 1926). Disney only touched the surface of a whole lot of often wonderful and sometime disturbing symbolism using animals as metaphors for human consciousness, ecological rape and ultimately the triumph of the spiritual freedom of the individual, at last exemplified by the grown up and mature Bambi representing the noble king of the forest, celebrating his aloneness. I would love Pixar or the folks who produce my current favorite talking animal series (Ice Age) to take up Salten’s far richer and profound Bambi story.

Ah, Scrat! I’m digressing.

In the movie, we see Bambi, Thumper the rabbit and Flower the skunk as adolescents visiting Friend Owl. Some sexually aroused birds flutter by petting each other with their rapidly waving wings. The adolescent animals are astonished. “What’s the matter with them?” asks Thumper. Friend Owl chuckles and says, “Why, hee hee, don’t you know??” Then he leans in conspiratorially with a wing muffling his beak, “They’re twitterpated.”

“Twitterpated?” reply the deer, skunk and rabbit.

“Yeeeess…” grins the Owl, but then his mood darkened. “It can happen to you and you,” says the Owl pointing an accusatory pinion feather at Bambi and Thumper. Flower the skunk smiles bashfully blinking at Friend Owl with hopeful, uncertain eyes. He points to his chest. The Owl sardonically pressed, “Yes, it can even happen to you! “

The adolescent animals are defiant that they won’t succumb to twitterpation. Then, one after the other, their paths are crossed, purposefully I might add, by the adolescent female of their species: Flower falls, then Thumper and finally Bambi goes all twitterpate technicolored.

Perhaps using Bambi delights is not the best narrative set up for my discourse on the Teheran tragedy, but then, I am a Rogue Scholar. I don’t follow the rules and I can’t help finding myself often saying things that go against everyone’s grain.

So, here it comes.

The Iranian Green Revolution as it’s been described because its supporters distinguish themselves by wearing green will fail by the same phenomenon that gave it life: Twitter-pation.

There is something almost sexually gratifying about sending and receiving those little postings. An intoxicating micro brew of micro blog boffs for the mind. You get pulled in to Iran in cyberspace, rather than the actual place. I’m moved  by the theme, the passion of the twittering demonstrators, the injustice texted in real time as the riot police are rambling and the Teheranian texter chased down the street is defiantly type-in decrying. The first chirps of voter fraud, escalate to squawks of open rebellion against the regime. Before you know it. Woooh! Wow girl! He guy! How did we heat it to here from there in our uprising argument?

Don’t…

Stop..!

Don’t…

STOP…!

Don’t-stop, don’t-stop-don’t stop twitter tickling me with palpateted news-naughty bits.

Quickie blogs of a few lines have that special euphoria of instant gratification without a lot of patient foreplay of fact or reflection.

We can’t help ourselves see the bigger picture shafted, and well, down the You Tube where it is easier to “micro” the “scope” of a far bigger and more complicated political reality that is Iran into the spyglass shot of fashion model beautiful Neda Soltan being shot through the upper chest by some Revolutionary Guard on a roof top. Graphic violent gratification satiates a collective moral indignation of such a heinous act. Ten million tweets a day made her the Angel of the protesters, the great martyr of the movement.

Again, there’s something twitterpatently sexual about it. If Neda had been old, or a bit overweight or not so attractive as some of the 150 other people slain so far by the police and revolutionary guard crackdown, her tragedy would not have been transformed to the level of mass mob myth with angel wings.

These are just the kind of emotionally packed mass waves of feeling, amplified by instant access reaction made possible by the twitter phenomenon. The sexed-news drive will only increase in the next 35 years remaining in the Cosmic Night Cycle.

For those of you yet uninitiated in cycles of the future, there is a temporal engine of prophetic time keeping called “the Great Year” or the “Cosmic Year.” It’s the time it takes the Sun’s position to gradually recess each year to a new Vernal Equinox position on the tropical zodiac as we see it from our vantage point on Earth against the star field. One degree of change is a “Cosmic Day” of roughly 72 normal years. This 24-hour “Day” translates to two 36-year “day” and “night” cycles. In the “Day” cycle of 36 years, history is collectively and unconsciously influenced by assertive, yang-male, intellectually cerebral driven, rational history. The night cycle of 36 years is subtly influenced by more yin-female forces, more subjective, more motivated by the irrational, driven by the emotive. Our new Internet tools like Twitter will only magnify the power to let emotion overrule reason in popular movements. The news media also will gauge fact by the size of flocking tweets.

Twiter gave the Iranian Green Revolution its power.

Now comes the karmic price.

The emotions carrying the protesters have blinded them to facts and realities. No matter how noble are their urges and dreams — dreams that I too support — these dreams are betrayed by the very twittering emotion that has carried them audaciously aloft since the Iranian presidential elections on 12 June 2009. Tweets blew a huge balloon of belief that there is wide support inside Iran for their rebellion far beyond any reality. This helium of hope is popping.

John Hogue
(02 July 2009)

Predictions for the rest of 2009

Friends,
I have been going through the dated and documented detritus of many passages I intended for e-books but cut and saved for future reading. I documented and dated back in December 2007 the following passage for Predictions for 2008. I found it rather surprising to read today, what with Norm Coleman conceding his legal bid to keep Minnesota’s US Senate seat Republican.

Back in November 2008 I predicted Democrat Al Franken would win the voting count dispute and take Coleman’s place. Those of you who read my final list of predictions posted on this blog just before the presidential elections know I predicted the Democrats would gain more than 60 seats, even though it was a mathematical impossibility at the time I made the call. My oracle has more than once snatched an accurate forecast from an irrational situation, so I waited to see. It was already onto something as far back as December 2007 when it accurately pinpointed the political future of Al Gore in 08 plus the shape of Congress to come with a little dig at Vice President Cheney for fun.

***

Now that Vice President Cheney’s term in office is about to end, will a draft movement to compel Al Gore to run for a second term succeed? No. As I said years ago, his window for a second term prophetically yawned wide open for election in 2004. Once those windows shut, history is stingy about opening them again. However, missed opportunities can bring Nobel Prizes. Al Gore, if he does not start taking better care of his health will go down in history as one of America’s greatest Presidents who ever rule solely in the private sector.

I have one more subject on my laundry list before we explore in prophecy the man or the woman who would be elected president in 2008.

Whoever they will be, they will have to wrestle with a new Congress. The Republicans will lose big in House and the Senate elections.

The Republican Party leadership forgot the caveat of the first great Republican President. Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided cannot stand.” The political karma of 8 years of ruling by division and strengthening your base gave the Republican Congress and President power over a polarized nation. The country is tired of it. A house divided for eight years will see the House and Senate united under new majorities. The Democrats will get 60 seats in the Senate and achieve a two-third majority in the House of Representatives. The party that embraces the aspirations and hopes of independent voters has a future. No others.

***

ASSESSMENT:
Gore did not run for President despite the fact that when I wrote it there was a big push by many Democrats to compel him to run. The 60-seat majority became official today with Republican Coleman conceding defeat when the Minnesota State Supreme Court rejected his recount complaint. He could have extended his fight into federal courts for eight more months but fortunately thought about serving the people of Minnesota and the nation rather than serving his political hubris. Perhaps Coleman self-served his political ambitions to run as Governor, which he will indeed do, and I predict he will win next year.

I would add that more defections of Republican moderates might be on the way, taking the count beyond 60 seats.

A two-third majority in the House of Representatives requires 290 seats warmed by Democrats. At the current seat warming of 257 Dems to 178 Republicans, my prophecy is close but off by 33 seats. At best I could say that prophecy if eventually correct would have to rely on a further meltdown of the Republican Party reduced to its core extreme right wing legislative members. Right now, I cannot see how they could lose an extra 33 seats unless their soul searching and political self-destructive process continues into the mid-term elections of 2010.

John Hogue
(30 June 2009)

Predictions for 2009