Hindu philosophy sees history as a cycle of four ages or yugas, beginning with a golden age, the Satya Yuga. The process is one of decline, away from the gods, away from virtue. Even lifespans shorten, from an incredible 100,000 years down to 20. Each age is represented by the demon Kali (not to be confused with the goddess of similar name) cutting off one of the legs of the sacred cow. The final age is Kali Yuga, the demonic age of vice, in which there is one-quarter virtue and three-quarters sin.*
How appropriate, then, to characterize the contemporary age in the minds of the right-wing conspiracy theorists who are featured in this piece. The rants range from psuedo-scholarly predictions that there will be a full communist takeover of America by the 1970s (a Bircher-type conspiracy theory put out in 1973 by something called "Fact Records"), to the full blown schizophrenic ravings against the Communist Gangster Computer God by the notorious Francis E. Dec. Also included is the infamous evangelical interpretation of backwards recordings of Led Zeppelin and the Satanic/Nazi imagery of KISS (a version of this is also on the new Mogwai album, Rave Tapes). The soundtrack to all this decadence is provided by the seminal drone-metal album Earth 2.
The language on this recording is often offensive, always absurd.
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* According to most interpretations, the Kali Yuga began in the bronze age and still continues, and since whole civilizations have risen and fallen in that time, the Hindu cosmic-cycle schema is actually totally inapplicable to contemporary politics, except as a metaphor.
