The Phony Door Man and Men Mad to Be Normal
“Those fingers in my hair, that sly come-hither stare, strips my conscious bare, its witchcraft.” ~Frank Sinatra, “Witchcraft”
At one of the local retail store establishments, Giant Liquors, we have what my brother-in-law calls, “The Phony Door Man.” In this social game, a black man pretending to be an authentic doorman employed by the retail establishment attempts to sell kindness (acts of charity) for spare change to patrons of the retail establishment. Upon arriving at the front of the retail establishment, you are greeted with a very cordial greeting. “Hello. How are you? You are looking very well today.” Upon exiting the store, the doorman leaves you with a very cordial, “Have a blessed day!” But quickly inquires of you if you have any spare change or cash you can give him. In the phenomenology of spirit, this man is like the angelical preacher who sells the comfort of heaven through his weekly sermons to a dispirited congregation desperate for hope. While accepting the congregations’ payments, the angelical preacher builds establish trust with his kind words. Unlike The Phoney Door Man, however, the Angelical preacher goes on to build himself a palatial estate. One that looks remarkably like something one would find in Heaven. Since this retail store establishment is a liquor store, it must be that all the “drunks” are truly deluded and rich with cash they would most likely be prodded into giving cash.
What is this phenomenology of spirit? Is it authentically genuine? I don’t believe so because on the back-side of this social game is an expected pay-out/charge in “completing the sale.” Acts of kindness and acts of charity are supposed to be made in the spirit of Love, giving without the want for anything in return, thereby turning the act of selflessness and Love into a payable job. People sometimes presented themselves, at times, to be like this “Phony Door Man.” I’ll tell you why in a minute. In the psychic life of power, to be dominated by an external force is the shape power and control take. What forms the psychic life of power? The master, who at first appears to be “external” to the slave, reemerges as the slave’s own conscience. We are used to thinking of power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order. The Phony Door Man, in performing an act of kindness and establishing trust, plays on the conscious awareness of his targeted population. Tugging at the heartstrings of unsuspecting customers he hopes to generate sympathy and win sales.
“You got to pick up every stitch, you got to pick up every stitch, you got to pick up every stitch. Mmmm, must be the season of the witch. Must be the season of the witch, yeah. Must be the season of the witch.” ~Donovan Leitch, “Season of the Witch”
In the phenomenology of spirit, taking kindness and acts of charity and regulating them to the lowly positions of “business” is a perversion. Transforming an act of kindness or act of Love into a cash transaction; a paid-for service, not asked for but provided anyway, is a seduction. Can we sell kindness for cash? Well, it is an awful lot like selling genuine authentic Heaven in a pre-paid package like Joel Osteen. The Roman Catholic Church once practiced this form of prostitution in what was known as “the selling of indulgences.” Johann Tetzel, a German Dominican friar and preacher, was one such fellow who happened to be appointed Inquisitor for Poland and Saxony. In his lifetime, history would record man’s experience with the absolute outer limits of religious authority in what became known as the Inquisitions and Law Codes dedicated to eradicating Satan possessed women also called the “Witch Trials”; The Malleus Maleficarum (1486). And these ruling ecclesiastical authorities were absolutely free to liberate the elite ruling monarchs of any excess heavy cash baggage through what became known as “the selling of indulgences.” An indulgence is “a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for sins”, thereby eluding certain terraces of Purgatory or Hell. The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church describes an indulgence as “a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and all of the saints.” It was a favor extended by a member vested with God-given authority of the church and there was a hefty treasury of a price attached to such forgiveness.
Should we be selling forgiveness, or kindness for that matter, and how do we determine its values? Can we sell true Love? And who would purchase it insatiably? Should we be selling a Heavenly Hope like Joel Osteen? Or should we be selling a hardcore dose of reality? Should we be selling the illusion of an everlasting eternity in Heaven with God the Father, the only one who “truly Loves us”? Or the reality men most fear, that one day we will most certainly die and fade into oblivion? Who sells illusions anyway? High-paid female escorts with a personal stairway to a second-floor hotel room? Well-versed Angelical ministers whose promise only goes as far as the words he speaks? Inquisitors for Poland and Saxony with the vested heavenly authority to reduce God’s punishments in the “afterlife”? Who are the real charlatans here? When I think of Angelical preachers selling the illusion of hope, I think of Joel Osteen. By the way, have you seen Joel Osteen’s estate and what it’s valued worth? Wow! It was once said if you want to become rich invent a religion and then L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer, birthed The Church of Scientology.
Selling the illusion of an afterlife is a perversion. It’s a perversion because the behavior is an act of incorporation of Truth that prevents the process of introjection and the process of mourning one’s life. Incorporation replaces introjection with the artificial, the veiled, and the hidden, with deception, a fantasy. It is a seduction. It’s a lie told by a fork-tongued snake. It would be like a Jurassic snake swallowing the suckling ego of a child, and swallowing it up whole, then regurgitating it as a masculine artificial creation; veiled, armed, synthetic, all artifice, seduction, and defense, a femininity created from the warped and twisted mind of the masculinity. Thus, the narcissistic personality. In religion’s case, the Truth that is hidden and concealed within a fantasy is the knowledge “I will not die.” It is then replaced with the fantasy of “I will live on forever in Heaven with God the Father.” (with the one caveat, of course, as long as you do God’s will. People sacrifice their whole lives in dedication to this hope of never dying but living on for eternity.)
Why are some people like this Phony Door Man? It is because some people perform acts of kindness and charity, not out of the Love from their own heart, but with the expected pay-out/charge of “You OWE ME!” This represents the incorporation myth of Zeus who, swallowing his pregnant wife Metis, births forth his own offspring, void of a vagina, a fully-developed child, from his own womb/head. The brainchild. Zeus not only achieves the appropriation of the female reproductive capacity together with the “wisdom” of Metis, his wife but also effectively swallows and obliterates the mother-daughter relationship. This mother-daughter relationship, in my opinion, is represented as the nurturing acts of kindness in acts of Love we give each other, not with the intention of a pay-off, but because we genuinely know how to Love. This represents, of course, the Mother Love of hippy influence.
“Normal man has killed fifty million of his fellow normal men in just the half past century.” ~from the movie “Mad to Be Normal”
Since I started to study psychoanalysis, I started looking at things not as they are, but what they represent in terms of philosophy and psychoanalytic truths. I had recalled a time when my twin sister and I were young girls. I would say anywhere between the ages of 8 and 10 years old. We would pretend to be pregnant and stick pillows under our shirts. Our cousin April had become pregnant. She would be our first female pregnant body experience. My twin sister, while mimicking being pregnant, forcefully expelled her pregnancy by punching the pillow out of her shirt with her fist. She turned to me and wanted me to do the same. Instead of mimicking her forceful abortion, I shielded the imaginary baby and protected it from danger/destruction. Some might say that my sister’s imaginary fetus might have mimicked an unconscious wish towards me, as we both shared gestational time in utero, it might be pondered that perhaps it represents an unconscious wish rooted in sibling rivalry. However, after carefully studying psychoanalysis it most likely represents a rejection of motherhood, an aversion to maternity, with the possibility of some latent unconscious wishes to “kill me off.” My sister can possess a rather sadistic personality at times. I say this because when we were little, during role-play of Student-Teacher, she liked to discipline me with a ruler by spanking and slapping my hands with the ruler. This was practice performed at our Roman Catholic grammar school we both attended in the 1970s. Where do these Medieval institutions like Roman Catholic Inquisitions get their beginnings? Some would say the practice of psychiatry mimics medieval inquisitions.
In literary analysis of the movie “Mad To Be Normal” in comparison with the phenomenon of gang stalking, electronic targeted assaults, and psychotronic torture and with the development of direct energy weapons (DEW), and the song by Donovan Leitch, “The Season of the Witch,” it was Donovan Leitch who had told Mojo magazine regarding the song in June of 2011, that at the time (1966) “You get a feeling that not everything is perfect in the Garden of Eden…Dealers were moving into bohemia and hard drugs were on the fringes.” In my opinion, it’s a song about the delusions of Satan. “The beatnik” trying to make it rich and “two rabbits” running into a ditch. Who are the real threats to the social order? You get this feeling that the mentally ill, the beatnik, and the hippies are “the witch” and those are the ones that threaten the social order, not the military establishment or the new advancing technological war machines that leave their repercussions behind in our streets and troubled homes following a war. Soldiers who return home broken from the shock and trauma, and to deal with this “season of the witch,” which represent our fears, we invent new and advancing electromagnetic weapons, technologies, and drugs to further obliterate the objects we fear which are rooted in our delusions of evil and what evil represents. Instead replacing Love with fear and the idea of a perfect illusion of one’s very own Garden of Eden free from gays, lesbians, Muslims, transgender, hippies, beatniks, drug addicts, black people, prostitutes, the mentally ill, any other type of “witch” you might dream up.
Note: The author of this paper believes the phenomenon of gang stalking, with electronic physical assaults, and psychotronic torture is part of experimental and special interest technologies that utilize low-income, marginalized populations within American society for the advancement of neurological brain initiatives and the electronic grooming of individuals.
