ODE UPON AN ARROWHEAD

I’m tired of the battle to get real information accepted, in a society ruled by people who have a strange belief there is some bizarre good in being wrong.

They call it “propaganda”, but it boils down to attempting to brainwash people into believing Fake News is real news. When people object and speak the truth, they get cancelled. People are told that the only way they will make money is to tow the line, to mouth the balderdash of political correctness even when it is absurd, or else face being fired, marginalized, excommunicated, banned from the perks of polite company; people must parrot inanities. So inanities are all we get. Then the general public gets tired of being treated like they all have IQ’s of 45 and believe the balderdash. I get tired as well.

The media, (whoever “they” are), thinks it has the public all figured out, and calls people the “market.” They think they have only to advertise and the market will succumb to whatever their blandishments are; stupid people will obediently buy even absurd and useless objects. If told hula hoops are desirable, the sheep will buy hula hoops.

What they fail to understand is that, back in the day, few “experts” thought hula hoops were likely to sell. Most “experts” likely deemed hula hoops a bad investment. The public did not make hula hoops a profitable item because “experts” tweaked peon’s brains into buying them, but rather because the cheap advertisements of those times made hula hoops look like fun. Inexpensive fun. And people tried them out and discovered that, yes indeed, they were a laugh. Word spread. The salesman had a hit, and made a bundle.

The same is true for music. Some think that, if they buy all the recording studios, they will control all the artists, and be able to have a say in what the public calls a “hit.” Instead they spoil what they control.

For example, when I was young Walt Disney was still alive, and his emphasis was upon optimism and wholesomeness and good overcoming evil. He was a “hit”, (although perhaps he was not as hard-hitting concerning the difficult issues of those times as other film-makers were). He understood people don’t always want to be confronted by hard-hitting issues. Not only do they not want that, but they often don’t need that, and Walt gave them a place where they could relax and be happy. He made bundles of money simply by being a breath of fresh air. He also had a certain power to motivate optimism and wholesomeness and good. Then…..certain people coveted that power. After Walt died they thought that they might “control” as Walt had “controlled”, if they only could take over his company. So they took over. But what they they then attempted completely backfired, and they have lost billions of dollars and are in danger of bankrupting what once was a “cash cow.”

In like manner the brand of beer called “Bud Light” was a “cash cow”, but certain people felt that spicing their idea with the beer’s popularity might woo the public into accepting their idea. This too completely backfired. The beer’s sales dropped so precipitously that hundreds have lost their jobs.

Country music singers didn’t much like it when such manipulative, propaganda-prone people bought up the big recording studios where they recorded their songs. They did not like being told what they they could sing about. It was a wrench in the works, and made a hassle where there had been no hassle before. The quality of music suffered. To some degree even country music was dropping precipitously in its popularity.

At this point one tends to become depressed. Those who think they control the “market” are destroying the “market.” They are attempting to sell what people don’t want to buy. They offer the Fake News of propaganda, but people don’t want to buy it. Furthermore, even if people attempt to buy it (in an attempt to be “correct”) they find simply can’t buy it, because it is repellent to people’s hearts.

It is as if all that is attractive has been removed from a menu, and replaced with items that make a person want to gag. If you argue such disgusting stuff shouldn’t be served, you are cancelled, (which I suppose would be, in this analogy, tantamount to being booted from the restaurant).

I’m tired of this, as are many others, which has resulted in the phenomenon of “hits” appearing from outside of the major recording studios and major Hollywood studios. Anthony Moody’s “I’m Just Sayin'” rocketed to #1, though produced by an inconsequential and independent studio.

And the low budget “Sounds Of Freedom” exploded to become the most popular movie of the summer:

This should be seen as evidence that the so-called “sheep” can’t be told what to graze upon. They know what they like. Sheep like green grass, and object when you try to feed them horseshit. This does not require a high IQ.

Rather than understanding this basic reality, what the “Elite” tend to do is to either crush the song-writers and film-makers who appear from outside their control, or else try to seduce the film-makers and song-writers with money, getting them to sign contracts that control them. The elite are addicted to “control”, for they are myopic and can’t see beyond power.

It never seems to occur to such people that they don’t control. The people and the popularity they seek to control was not their doing. They did not make them or it. It was all made by the Maker.

The most recent person to appear out of the blue and, without any advertising and promotion (by those who like to feel they are in control), to become a “hit”, is Oliver Anthony, who rocketed from twenty “views” to ten million, in just six days.

One thing interesting to me is that many describe Oliver’s music not as “country music” but as a “folk songs”. When I was young “folk music” was basically owned by the left wing, and even by communists. Now “the folk” have become what the leaders call “conservative”, which has the left wing in a bit of a panic. The new Woody Guthrie is not on “their side”? How can that be?!!

I actually am praying for the people who succeed “against the rules”. It bears repeating: What the “Elite” tend to do is to either crush the song-writers and film-makers who appear from outside their control, or else to seduce the film-makers and song-writers. They seek to regain control of something they never actually controlled.

In a sense the “elite’s” theory of control is like a person who thinks the way to control his boat is to control the river. They imagine they will never have to get their oars wet, if they control the river. But some laws cannot be changed; they cannot make water flow uphill, and as they entertain their delusions their boat is bobbing inexorably downstream into the rapids above a waterfall.

To tweak this analogy: In order to control the river the “elite” build levees, and, in order to to make the levee’s dry dirt pack down better, they add some water to the dirt so it won’t crumble, and sticks together and packs better, but this only works up to a point; after the dirt reaches a certain level of moisture adding water turns it into mud, and it no longer holds water back. (You cannot build a levee out of chocolate syrup.) In other words, what once worked doesn’t work any more.

Propaganda eventually loses its effectiveness. People develop an immunity. Like after the boy “cried wolf” too many times, people are no longer motivated. Towards its end, all the hoopla the Soviet Union attempted to generate about “five year plans” generated little beyond a complete lack of enthusiasm among its workers; they had heard it all before and knew the words were empty.

In conclusion, the public is not as stupid as the elite think they are. Ordinary people may be disdained as “sheeple”, “bitter clingers” and “deplorables”, and may be scornfully described as being easily brainwashed and manipulated, but they are underestimated, for no credit is given to the human heart, and to the heart’s innate ability to recognize Truth, and also to recognize balderdash. Propaganda ceases to be effective, and is actually the antithesis of what moves people.

This leads one to the immediate question: What, then, actually does move people? What makes a hit be a hit? The answer is simple: Truth.

This leads me to thirst for more of the Truth, for it is obviously far more nourishing than balderdash. Beyond a certain point all political debating becomes tiresome, for the deck is stacked against Truth, and speaking Truth to power only gets you hassled. Therefore I hope I can be forgiven if I just wander off from all the uproar into obscure corners of thought where one can look about for Truth without creating angst.

One such remote place involved the arrowhead pictured at the start of this post, found while excavating a Swiss village that existed roughly 3250 years ago.

This is a nice and far away place, about as remote from current affairs as you can get. Yet even in the haze of this distance one can see the powers of Truth, surprising and amazing people, and forcing them to cast aside their preconceptions.

One newer development in archeology involves the ability to trace metal objects discovered in such sites back to where the metal was mined. Different mines have different trace metals mixed with their predominant ores, and therefore it becomes possible to know, for example, where the tin, mixed with copper to make bronze, came from.

It initially was felt that most metals were mined locally, under the assumption prehistoric people were bumpkins who didn’t get around much, however increasingly it became apparent ancient peoples traveled more widely than we formerly believed. For example, an ingot of tin from Cornwall was found in Sweden. In fact, the more metals were studied, the more widely traveled the people of the past seemed to become.

I delighted in the knowledge which modern science was able to extract from corroded, old artifacts, because it always annoyed me that, when I was younger, archeologists and anthropologists so often took a rather snooty attitude which saw themselves as more evolved than past peoples, who sometimes were treated as is they were not much more intellectual than chimpanzees. I was far more inclined to see past peoples as residents of a Golden Age which fell, an Atlantis that was ruined, an Avalon we should strive to return to. I was told I was a hopeless romantic and must learn to be factual, and that the facts were the facts.

Which were?

The facts were we didn’t have many facts. Somehow people took this bare minimum of Truth and used it to have no imagination. Because they had never left the drab hallways of academia, they projected that world-view onto people of the Bronze Age. I, however, was never accepted into such hallowed halls and ivory towers, and therefore, despite not being a particularly courageous soul, knew of storms at sea, and finding myself in far lands among very different peoples, and therefore I projected very different possibilities through the haze onto the peoples of the Bronze Age.

So, of course, it tickled me pink to see a bumpkin like myself was right, and the learned academics were wrong, when it came to ancient peoples. They certainly were not chimpanzees, and likely knew things we don’t. They traveled more than we would think possible, considering the restrictions of their technology, and engineered things we are amazed by, considering the limits of their technology, but what fascinated me most was their metallurgy.

I was initially lured backwards in time by my discovery that the Viking colony at L’Anse aux Meadows actually mined and smelted bog iron, in order to make nails for ships. I was surprised such technology existed among such a small group of people, so far away from Europe, especially as I knew the smelting of iron took a long time to appear in world history, due to the higher temperatures required in the process. My mind was drawn backwards two thousand years, and then five thousand years, and then twenty thousand years.

The first firing of clay apparently occurred when the glaciers was still burdening the land in the last ice age. With sea-levels 300 feet lower, it is likely many of the best coastal sites are now hidden under water, however up in the mountains of Czechoslovakia weights for fishing nets were needed, and it was easier to make a weight with a hole in it from clay, and to then fire the clay, than to drill holes in stones. As far as we know, this is when firing clay began, and all knowledge of metallurgy came through the firing of clay, as a side effect.

The progress came about slowly, which some suggest demonstrates the people were not very smart. I think perhaps it demonstrates they were smarter, because the societies they formed were very stable, and untroubled by the trauma of change. Most of the advancements that came about were due to the retreat of the ice age glaciers. They were climate changes that occurred outside society, and not because societies were as neurotic as ours now are, or so I think as my wondering wanders.

The creation of pottery occurred because herds of reindeer vanished to the north, and people either had to follow them, or move towards agricultural lifestyles in the vast prairies the glaciers left behind. This agricultural lifestyle necessitated storage pots, and then, to make the pots more impervious to water, hotter fires were required, and kilns replaced open fires. As fires became hotter various combinations of clay were experimented with, with various results, and likely it was through such experimentation that the smelting of ores entered men’s knowledge. The first metals had lower melting points.

The mixing of metals into alloys was likely accidentally discovered; the first bronze was likely created because at one site copper ore occurred naturally with arsenic, and likely this discovery was soon followed by the discovery arsenic was poisonous, and led to a preference to bronze made with tin. This led to tin being traded over long distances.

We know much because pottery survives shipwrecks, and amphorae of wine and oil were worth trading over long distances. Metals do not survive the corrosion of seawater as well, (unless it is gold or silver), and tin “rots” in cold weather, but we do come across some ancient artifacts preserved under the right conditions, and are able to sit back and wonder.

To me it seems that the inquisitive members of ancient societies would have come to know of far away lands, and differing ways of making pottery and fabric and metals, and even have toyed with possible advancements, while remaining members of a very stable and happy society. Some advancements likely were not made simply because they were not necessary. Truth was there and people were happy, and therefore a particular Truth, such as the fact iron is harder than bronze, was not yet needed. It was there, awaiting a future day.

Iron was known about, because we have a few examples of ancient artifacts made of iron, for example in the tombs of pharaohs. Pure iron does rarely occur in nature, but most originally came from meteorites. The actual smelting of iron began to be seen as much as three hundred years before the catastrophic end of the Bronze Age around 1200 BC, so the Truth about iron was available when needed, but I don’t want to wonder about that particular catastrophe. I’m trying to avoid the topic of catastrophes. I’d rather ponder more peaceful and changeless times, and think about the subject of the arrowhead found by the lake in Switzerland.

It makes sense that an arrowhead of meteoric iron should be found in that area, for a meteor called the Twannberg Meteorite fell nearby; six fragments have been found, but it is likely other fragments were discovered by people of the past, and put to use, though no objects were found prior to the arrowhead. So the arrowhead was carefully tested, and to the astonishment of all it did not come from the Twannberg Meteorite. It came from the Kaalijarv Meteorite on a Baltic Sea island in Estonia, more than a thousand miles away. This meteor hit with an explosion like Hiroshima’s, burning forests three miles away, and it’s largest chunk left a sizable crater.

The question then becomes, why would a person bring an arrowhead made of rare iron from one source of meteoric iron to another source of meteoric iron?

This is a Truth we likely will never know, but into my mind’s eye drifts a man of long ago seeking Truth. A wonderful fiction I’ll likely never write is unfolding as a fantasy in my brow. An Ode to an Arrowhead sings softly in my imagination.

People are capable of far more than the “elite” ever dream, in their scorn, and such capable people have at their fingertips Truth the elite, sadly, may never know.