It's cool by the Pool - right? [COLUMN]

The Tower of Babel story is more common than you think, by Nick van der Leek

I've been doing some research for a magazine article and I came across some information on a fairly peculiar topic. Yes - THE TOWER OF BABEL. The story is essentially about human ego, about collective arrogance. It's about people organising themselves into a collective to build something magnificent, something iconic. Something to demonstrate man's godliness to himself.

Of course, in every permutation, every one, these efforts end in disaster. What starts off as a grand project ends in calamity and destruction, or to use a more effective and contemporary word: collapse.

You might not think so, but there are many permutations to the Tower of Babel story than what happened in Babylonia perhaps as early as 610c. For reference, here's the story in terms of an African perspective.

WIKIPEDIA: According to Dr Livingstone, the Africans whom he met living near Lake Ngami in 1849 had such a tradition, but with the builders' heads getting "cracked by the fall of the scaffolding" (Missionary Travels, chap. 26).

In his 1918 book, Folklore in the Old Testament, Scottish social anthropologist Sir James George Frazer documented similarities between Old Testament stories, such as the Flood, and indigenous legends around the world.

• He identified Livingston's account with a tale found in Lozi mythology, wherein the wicked men build a tower of masts to pursue the Creator-God, Nyambe, who has fled to Heaven on a spider-web, but the men perish when the masts collapse.
  
• He further relates similar tales of the Ashanti that substitute a pile of porridge pestles for the masts.
  
• Frazer moreover cites such legends found among the Kongo people, as well as
  
• in Tanzania, where the men stack poles or trees in a failed attempt to reach the moon [13].
• He further cited the Karbi and Kuki people of Assam as having a similar story.
  
• The traditions of the Karen people of Myanmar, which Frazer considered to show clear 'Abrahamic' influence, also relate that their ancestors migrated there following the abandonment of a great pagoda in the land of the Karenni 30 generations from Adam, when the languages were confused and the Karen separated from the Karenni. He notes yet another version current in the Admiralty Islands where mankind's languages are confused following a failed attempt to build houses reaching to heaven. Some of these stories were later revealed to have derived recently from Christian missionary teaching.

Now I'm not interested in your religious take on this. Whether you feel God intervened and prevented man from reaching the heavens, or whether you regard such a project as doomed to fail with or without god, that's not the point. The point is to demonstrate how commonplace the Tower of Babel meme, that is to say, the repeated folly of building castles in the air actually is.

The modern day example of Babel in 2009 is called Wall Street. There are many more besides, including the entire US AUTOMAKER industry, in fact automakers in general. All that is based on a ponzi scheme of phantom energy. Entire industries are Babel industries. Like junk food empires [the world's biggest brands are junk food brands - McDonald's and Coca Cola. They are very valuable companies to the equally counterfeit health care industry, which is really disease care].
Banks, like Goldman Sachs, and Lehman Brothers are Babels. All of these industries got caught up in fantasies of infinite growth, of fictional money, of pixel-cash and leveraged wealth [as opposed to real wealth]. Do they do anything that is worth anything? That makes sense? That is ultimately life sustaining, life enhancing? No, all of these industries are geared towards just one thing: MAKING MONEY. And lately how they have being doing this is by borrowing from the future.

Is it cool by the pool? Well, when you have so many Babels abounding, it is hard to dispute that the very fabric of society has become Babel-ised. And let's face it, we worship the idea of Babel, of plastic barbies and tattoos [are we playing pirates and prostitues?] of building celebrities up, and the wealthy, propping pop stars like Michael Jackson [a child molester] on their ivory thrones when they couldn't be less deserving. Obama wins the Nobel prize - for what? For presiding over at least 2 wars? For being president for 200 days and...what?

Surreal. But not real. And when all these surrealities untangle, unwind, unbundle, unravel, foreclose, fall down, fragment and finally collapse, well, it's going to feel pretty damn surreal. This is the great surreal before the giant FOR REAL.