Bogged

Those Bog People captured me.

They were shriveled and brown — old, dehydrated leather — their last meals of gains, leaves and bugg preserved in their bellies. Ragged clothing, and accessories, too, in a state of preserved decay. Their necks had been slashed, or their abdomens or eyes, gouged. Sometimes they carried an assortment of inflictions, sometimes de-limbed. They were young and old, and in between in age. Parasites thrived in and on them. Had they been alive when photographed, they surely would have been frightening.

I first learned about the Bog People in 198x. I was inquisitively perusing a National Geographic, which beautifully presents things about which I know nothing. (To them, the people who write and photograph for the eclectic magazine, the world must be a playground. To me, the world is a place of unmet adventure, which I can sample on their pages.) The Bog People were a delight of fascination, a mystery of grim.

I found the pictures of the Bog People somehow haunting. They, the pictures, delivered a sense of awful inhumanity inflicted on these tortured people, preserved by the bog. What must their lives have been, to have their throats slit? Or their diet of grains and bugs: was that enough to sustain a healthy life, or were they just happy to be alive, when they were? Or, did they not value life, like a rampant religion today?

Had the Bog People committed some heinous crimes, or offend some churlish custom, and suffered the consequence? Were they victims of war, or infidel sacrifice to a gruesome being? Could those who meted the hideous disfigurations way back then be the forefathers of those who wantonly decapitate today?

They were truly bogged, those Bog People, in their bog of peat.

Civilization is a bog of sorts. No, not a bog of peat, but a bog of gadgets and rules, distractions and plastic. Things to possess, technology to understand; correctness that enslaves. Civilization, at least this present one we name US, calls for modern conveniences and annoyances: cars & emissions; vegetables from Chile & eColi; and toothpaste from China with diethylene glycol (antifreeze ingredient).

Political correctness wielded by those who impose it is, I think, a notable bog in Civilization. Certainly this correctness, so rooted in wrongness, is a prolific bogger.
Like the bog of the Bog People, this correctness encases with a shrunken, shriveled, deformed carapace the life of US, still alive…

aloha!
......................myRant Index