God Bless You, Ozzie.

​I've had problems with church people right from the very start; one of my Sunday School teachers told me I was going to burn in hell, and at the time my biggest sins had been stealing penny candy and noticing that one of the teachers at Mark Twain Elementary School had a pair of pretty nice legs. I’ve always tended to favor the writings of someone like C. S. Lewis over listening to some slicked-haired preacher in a cheap suit who comes across more like a used-car salesman than a man of God. And don’t start lecturing me by saying they’re not all like that; I realize that, but it’s been my experience in life that’s there’s far too many that fit the description for it not to be a thing. And I consider myself a pretty tolerant person who has never completely written any man off for having a few flaws. Even my dad had flaws, and he was one the kindest men I’ve ever known personally, and he wasn’t always that way. I witnessed his religion turn him into someone who went into hospitals to pray with hundreds of people who were well on their way to see if their preconceived notions of the afterlife were true. You got to believe in something pretty strongly to do something like that.
 
 C.S. Lewis was an agnostic, and maybe even an atheist at one point; he came by his religion the hard way, by personal experience and revelation. That’s the way I learned it too.
 
But I didn’t come here to talk about religion, I come here to talk about the recent demise of the self-crowned Prince of Darkness, Ozzie Osbourne. 
 
By all accounts Ozzie was a kind and gentle man, a cultural icon whose shadow has loomed large over our culture for several decades. The tributes pouring in from every corner of the world, strongly attest to that fact. Mark Groubert, one of my favorite podcasters, said that, in his opinion, Ozzie was the nicest man he ever met in the entertainment industry. Ozzie’s music struck a chord with many of my generation. I can remember the first album I owned by Black Sabbath, and also remember being more than a little discomforted by the very name of the band and the things they sang about. It never stopped me from smoking another joint and putting the needle down in the groove. And that’s what I want to talk about.
 
I’ve been more than a little obsessed lately with discovering what it was about my life back then that caused me to go so far off the rails, back when I was young when life, was supposedly, all shiny and new. And I can guarantee, it wasn’t the fucking image of a baby devouring Satan, holding onto a pitch-fork while flames licked his feet with the unholy screams of dispossessed souls burning in their personal hot-tubs full of boiling oil that led me astray.
 
The image of the Satan who lured me away from realizing my true potential was more like the one described in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, one of the most chilling descriptions of the devil ever, not a horned, cloven-footed beast, but a personable, articulate, disillusioned bureaucrat. He appears to Ivan Karamazov in a fevered hallucination. Nowadays, that would be a drug induced dream. This kind of devil doesn’t judge; he just drones on and on about his world-weary frustration with things as they are. He doesn’t project evil, but justifies its existence, seeking to normalize it, “I’m a slanderer by instinct,” he says, “a rogue—and a useless one at that.” He is tediousness personified, and it’s his banality that is most dangerous, it doesn’t threaten; it corrodes. This type of evil doesn't need to use monsters, it can employ the services of the nicest people to perform its services, people who are completely unaware of the bad that they have done. People like me. People like you.

I read an awful lot, and I know that offering my opinion unsolicited all the time, can be tedious too.  I’ve slowed down a lot, and I’m working hard not be judgmental. But when Mark Groubert and his partner immediately leaped to Ozzie’s defense for biting the head off of that bat by declaring it an accident, seeking to justify it; it struck a chord. I know many people, some who I love greatly, who try to justify one their friends or idols committing a heinous crime by it declaring it, “a bad decision on a bad day.” Groubert went on to talk about a musician friend of his who bit the heads off of mice in his concerts in homage to his idol. A bat flying into your mouth, might be some kind of weird accident, the chomping down, not so much. That’s a statement that would have made Dostoyevsky envious to the point he would highlighted his description of the devil and pushed delete.
 
In my journey of self-discovery, where I’ve had to search through all my personal myths, pull them out and take them apart to examine them more closely, I found out that much of our culture back then was being manufactured by sinister forces, both tangible and real, not merely abstractions.  

The author Ken Kesey who created the Acid Test Concerts which gave the world The Grateful Dead, Light shows, and vats of Kool-Aid spiked with LSD, was among the first of the social influencers given LSD to sample as part of a government sponsored program. His retelling of how it led to the Acid Tests is probably myth. The Grateful Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter was another participant in the program. Does it make Jerry and Boys evil. No, I don’t think they even knew. I think that they truly believed in what they were doing, and also believe they helped some people cope with the great stresses that life bestows on so many of us. But I also think it would be the height of foolishness to deny that those Acid Tests did not produce their share of misery too. Only the Beat poet Alan Ginsburg, another participant in the drug study seemed to catch on that there may have been something else going on behind the scenes, something sinister. Does this information challenge their intelligence, or their sense of awareness of things? I’m afraid to say it does, theirs and also the millions of other people in this world who prefer to stick their head in the ground and not witness the truth of the world as it swirls around them, those who prefer for things to be as they wish, and not as they really are those who would even lie to themselves for it to be so.
 
I go to Las Vegas every year to attend a basketball clinic. In the last few years, the event has coincided with this music event known as the Electric Daisy Festival, where many of the attendees (I’m talking tens of thousands) wait till dark, swallow their Ecstasy (or drug of choice, enter into a universe of pulsating, flashing neon lights and the steady drone of techno music and dance till dawn at which point they stream back into the Casino hotels like weary vampires. I’ve seen girls come crawling in wearing thongs so small that you can’t see the thong and having only pieces of tape covering up their nipples. Some, not all, trudge through the casinos with an arrogance that dares someone to even look at them askance, an arrogance that seems to say to an old dumb fuck like me, “Why don’t you just hurry up and die. You’ve fucked this whole world up enough, don’t you think?”
 
Anyone born prior to the 1960s, would have recognized the festival for what it was at once, a revival of paganism, a rebellious, hedonistic, Luciferian outlook that teaches that there is little more to life than eating, drinking, fornicating, and defecating, one that promotes a nihilistic view of existence that leads to lonely grave on a piece of rock that’s so small that in the grand scale of the universe it probably doesn’t even exist. A view that denies anyone who embraces it the slightest iota of having hope that there is something sacred and divine about our existence.

Anyone who has read the truth about what happened back in the Sixties, would recognize these events as a continuation of the government sponsored Acid Tests which were designed  to promote the use of LSD in order to manipulate and control rebellious youth, to normalize banality, to undermine a belief in Christianity, and to create a permanent class of immature citizenry, so that someone or something, who so desired, might slip past them any degree of insanity whatsoever with great ease.
 
And while I don’t want to pass judgement on any man or woman, especially someone gentle and nice and someone revered by millions of adoring fans. I loved Ozzie, the man. Black Sabbath not so much.

There are a lot of things in this world I can’t bring myself to justify though, not even a little. I don't believe that God is going to judge anyone too harshly for petty things like appreciating a pair of nice legs or stealing penny candy, however, I think he may be compelled to draw the line at nihilism, or maybe God would just let the nihilists draw that line themselves.