Happiness, the one thing every man and woman in their innocent, desperate, or perverse ways, march, or slouch, or slither to achieve.
This the first of two articles in tandem considers worldly happiness, touted as the best and most alluring, most exotic and erotic, most exciting and ecstatic, down and dirty finger-licking wicked, the most gold-awarded happiness possible on this planet – O so much better than God can give!
It was most eloquently and idealistically, and rather poetically, presented by our own most intellectual founding father Thomas Jefferson, the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the United States of America is arguably, older Americans would say incontestably, the greatest document ever written by man for man’s worldly happiness.
Giving a token nod to an aloof deistic God, Jefferson’s document is the culmination of millennia usually of rarefied human thought, including the Golden Age of Greek philosophy in uneasy tension with adulterated Judeo-Christian culture, followed in sequence by the humanist Renaissance and the reasoned-Enlightenments, the 16th century Reformation with direct divine guidance, and finally, for a happy period, the American Century when America was the wonder of the world, American cracker-barrel self-evident wisdom and Yankee ingenuity took over.
The Declaration was the earliest engine driving American capitalist self-interest (as the founding fathers put it, in contrast to selfish) and mass production of cars and cereals, the Wright Brothers’ 120 feet at Kittyhawk and Neil Armstrong’s one small step on the moon. It revered the uniformed giant George Washington, Rail-Splitter Abe Lincoln, hardscrabble U.S. Grant, and rags-to-riches Andrew Carnegie. It countenanced but doesn’t seem to have acknowledged William Miller.
For more complacent citizens unaware of the creeping erosion of the Jeffersonian vision, the American Dream is comfort, coziness, and selfish acquisition of everything on the Monopoly Board. It is the happy hour, happy days, happy birthday, happy Halloween, happy Super Bowl half-time entertainment, happy movie musicals with mass dancing in perfect sync, happy endings, a warm puppy, a “My Pillow,” a WWII mini Jeep or fast Porsche, a personal trainer. TV artist Bob Ross’s “happy little clouds.”
Happiness is a happy church, hardy happy handshake at the church door, happy humorous sermons, and, an elaborate hard rock drum set taking over the podium, pulpit and pipe organ, all spotlighted by bank upon bank of Klieg lights.
Worldly Happiness is the WWII USO team and Bob Hope swinging a golf club and cracking innocent jokes to get the troops happy, for tomorrow they die. Muslim warriors don’t get a golf club and jokes for tomorrow they die. Each has 70 virgins.
Happiness is Hollywood is the kidnapper of your soul and sponge of your money, maker of and slave to trends, awarder of golden idols, impresario of special effects and strut-supported facades, of Yankee Doodle Dandy and computerized explosions, disintegrating arms and legs, and ketchup-gore, and popcorn. Filmmakers are more admired than preachers. Hollywood, with sermons catching up fast, can smoothly evoke the whole gamut of emotions from cringes, tears, to guffaws. Theatergoers must check disbelief at the door while at church they willingly hoist high doubts like the host at a mass.
Happiness is money money MONEY! Piles, portfolios, jackpots, entitlements, court settlements, so many ways to get it, loose it. Mammon is more than happiness, it’s our one and only master.
Happiness the world gives is delivered by Santa via your picturesquely snow-covered chimney accompanied by Musak blasting “Jingle Bells,” or in expensive seminars or seductions, or when you hope nobody is looking, preferably at night.
Happiness is not falling in love with Prince Charming on a white horse rescuing you from your cruel kidnapper (antitypical of Satan), but to fall wildly in love with the kidnapper himself, as very rich heiress Patty Hearst did. Happiness is bemoaning wretched wages and lousy jobs and congress and a grumpy tweety president. Howling of being deprived of your rights, guaranteed by Jefferson and the marriage vows, or dreamed up by Marx or your dear self-centered self.
Happiness is the bride, who, after giving herself to romance novels, sighed the morning after the wedding night, “is that all there is?” As the world giveth, that’s all, folks. That is absolutely all there is. Only in fairy tales do brides live happily ever after.
At its most innocent and ideal the American Dream was depicted in paintings by Norman Rockwell. Remember Rockwell’s cover of the Saturday Evening Post years ago depicting large farm family happily gathered for a sunny Thanksgiving dinner, a uniquely American custom, with a huge steaming turkey happily served by a well-fed, aproned middle-aged mother?
Penned on parchment 250 years ago, Jefferson’s great document has faded and become brittle like dried mud, requiring a climate-controlled exhibition environment lest it crumble. Jefferson’s theoretical ideal has been replaced with Playboy porno. Jefferson has been downgraded from prophet and father of worldly happiness to embarrassing symbol of American #MeToo abuses to be apologized for by woke presidents. He has been dethroned, knocked from his plinth. His Climate-controlled exhibition has been defunded and defaced by graffiti. Rockwell is now a masked unhappy emoji. The American Dream has become California Dreamin’ a la “joy smoke.”
And why not? Worldly happiness isn’t thanks to Jefferson, but to Satan. It all began on this earth in the Garden of Eden with Satan, his fingers crossed behind his back for he knew he was promising death, promised mankind happiness superior to what God had promised. The crowning deception of Satan, alas, worked!
Satan in that one instant acquired the deed to this earth from its creators, to become Prince of this Earth. It is Satan who owns this world and everything that in it is, to wit, us. For in that instant we became Satan’s lawful captives, our loyalties, talents, and our will, everything, surrendered to his feudal ownership as the natural state of things, the new normal. But to our re-programmed minds we are liberated and woke.
Woked mankind, however craving of Satanic happiness, is asleep to its author’s existence. The being who would be like God, the Prince of this earth, is disguised as a glittering serpent, or Christ Himself, or invisible and laughed off as a cartoon character with horns and pitch fork. The masked, muffled, disguised Satan turns around and denies being the cause of sin, misery, death. God is blamed by Satan for everything Satan has brought upon us.
For Satan is none other than Captain Counterfeit, flowing cape and stylized S on his chest and all. There is nothing, nothing, that God has created that Satan does not counterfeit, not happiness, salvation, any good-sounding doctrine, God’s goodness and gifts, even Christ Himself, claiming that he does it so much better than God.
The father of lies and the mother of deceptions, Satan is locked into one single standard operating procedure: lies, deceit, fakery, fraud, dissimulation. The most brilliant being in the universe besides the Godhead, Satan has a curiously, yea, astonishingly restricted repertoire.
Satan’s vocabulary may be clipped but you, lawful and stupid captive of his, are easily overwhelmed. Against him, you don’t stand a chance. In his maw you’re a piece of cake. Gulped, gone. Only with Christ’s power do you have a shred of hope.
Regardless of authoritarian manifesto, enforcement by law, cracker-barrel proverb, or online memes, happiness turns out to be fleeting, fading like Jefferson’s parchment. A letdown, a deception, it is delusion and disillusioning, even if you think you have hit the happiness jackpot.
“Jackpot,” that’s a term dear to the happy casino crowd. I consider it comparable to the term “full life” Those are the famous last words of the self-centered Jeffersonian crowd said to have smiled these words on their death beds. Those who say either of these things have been led to believe that we only go round once.
As Jefferson proclaimed it, the merry-go-round pursuit of happiness is an end in itself, ending in, well, happiness, and nothing more or nothing at all. As the bride learned, in this world there is nothing more, if you’re lucky.
Worldly happiness at best is but a feeling, just another emotion, necessarily physiological and psychological and therefore subject to confused exaggeration or suppression, being the uncontrolled consequence of a rush of all the many hormones during health and youth, or their lack in the crush of infirmity in disease and old age, and always self-centered. Wafted hither and yon by breezes or blasts, feelings are capriciously either rain and daffodils or drought and wildfires.
All this is possible only in our duped and masked advanced political and universally postgraduate society with real time global and managed communication, all together the most fertile ground for exploitation of ideology. “Public good” suavely expressed but tyrannically imposed so as to “gaslight” the populace, whether legitimately as in a pandemic, or as misinformation is but one ancient but now perfected tool to bring the final deceptions that, were it possible, will deceive, or drive crazy, the very elect.
The world’s happiness is bogus. Adventists about a century ago proclaimed worldly happiness spurious. Adventists had a larger and more apt vocabulary back then.
Happy strong drinks, however properly shaken, or hinting of mint, or garnished by a cherry, leave a hangover, or worse. Happy heavy food a bad aftertaste refractory to Sen-Sen or Tums or emergency surgery. Or the worst sort of happiness is a bitter pill to be washed down by Jim Jones’s Kool Aid.
Drink, gulp the Kool Aid, and be happy for tomorrow we die, without even 70 virgins as consolation. Worldly happiness is always death.
Stay tuned for Part 2.
Dr. Kime was born in 1929, in Los Angeles, California.
Kime pursued dual careers in art (since childhood) and medicine (physician; specialties in internal medicine and pathology; clinical and academic). He studied the principles of art, chemistry of paint, and the works of master artists as assiduously as medicine. After retiring from pathology at Kettering Medical Center in 1994, Dr. Kime has concentrated on his art, producing portraits, seascapes and figural work mainly in oils, and urbanscapes predominantly in watercolor. Dr. Kime currently lives in Redlands, CA.