Ghost Dog and The Way of the Conspiracy Samurai

Well, I finally saw Ghost Dog last night and this movie’s had a profound effect on me. Perhaps it’s been the repeated mentions of it across Tim Boucher’s posts over a course of a few months that got me to rent it. Maybe it was just the one particular quote from the Hagukare, the 18th century text on the Samurai Way, that opens the movie and that Tim recently featured on his site. In any case, having now seen the movie and that very same quote in all its glory in the context of the film, I think I can finally pin down something really important that I’ve intuited, but not quite been able to articulate in the past. It’s something that many practitioners and consumers of conspiracy poetics (or whatever terms we use for our dispirate tribes of rabbit hole investigators) often miss.

I’ll keep the suspense going here for a moment while you read the quote:

The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day, when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears, and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day, without fail, one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai.

Now, for all the writers, researchers and consumers of deep political horrors, we might re-write it thusly:

The Way of the Conspiracy Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day, when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being run down by United Nations tanks, water-boarded at Gitmo, tazered, poisoned by chem-trails, shot by secret society/intelligence agency assassins, being micro-chipped and carried away to concentration camps by surging fascists, New World Order/Illuminati/Freemason minions in black-helicopters or unmarked vans driven by members of The Finders or some other CIA cut-out cult, being thrown into the midst of a great fire during the Cremation of Care ceremony at Bohemian Grove, being struck by lizard people, being shaken to death by convulsions caused by ELF weaponry, falling from twenty story buildings after being dosed during MK-Ultra experiments upon your person , drowned in floods caused by the HAARP array, dying of diseases manufactured in government biochemical weapons labs that officially don’t exist, being suicided or committing seppuku at the death of Alex Jones/Jeff Wells/ Ron Paul/ John Stewart or whoever one has placed hir hopes of leading the way to salvation or positive revolution. And every day, without fail, one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the Way of the Conspiracy Samurai.

If you’re looking into these horrors and terrors to get a shot of the fear you need to feed your adrenaline addiction; or to prove yourself a victim; or because it entertains you in the same way that other people are entertained by the latest horror movie or degrading Reality TV spectacle; or because it gives you a reason to feel righteously indignant and superior to others while you have that next conversation around the water cooler at work or at the dive bar downtown; then you’re not a practitioner of The Way. And you should start asking yourself what good all your rabbit-hole diving is really doing for you or anyone else.

Investigating this stuff, in my view, should lead to an awareness, not a fear, of death. It should also lead to an awareness of life’s mystery, fragility and value. And it should also lead to a state of non-attachment from all the fearful phantasms you see, feel and hear about on the news or in dusty books, online or even in the everyday world around you.

The Way of the Conspiracy Samurai doesn’t require you to shed any blood, just fear and self-satisfaction.

I’m trying to be on The Way.