Art Liches, Bitches...

This isn't about videogames. It's about power corrupting or some such thing.

But yeah, spooky picture, from Battle for Wesnoth. Because there are community-sourced independent computer games too.

Vampires, warewolves, zombies... we all know they have to "mean something" these days, because if they don't then it's supposed to be silly for adults to be interested in them.

A good straight scare and its ability to shock us out of convention and rut is "immature."

You know, zombies represent modern consumers, vampires represent some attraction to death, or perhaps a faustian bargain, or dangerous sexuality and warewolves represent the Tea-bagger movement.
It's all very simple.

And WTF is a Lich? In fantasy culture a lich is any dude who's used magic to unnaturally prolong his life. But what it takes to become immortal is usually pretty unpleasant and it usually leaves the individual a pretty grumpy old fellow.

Voldemort is the first big "Lich" in popular culture. What does he represent? Sure, "pure evil." I never buy the pure evil BS. "I'm going to take power for its own sake and rule the world!!!" From what I've seen of life, nobody with an IQ high enough to tie their shoes really has that kind of aspiration. No. The people who suck the most are always trying to do some kind of "good."

Another angle is: power corrupts, aboslute power blah, blah, blah....

But I like the liches that bisect this set of themes:
Power over life and death.
To become "immortal," everything that's "you" must die.
What lives on is no relation to what once lived, and what's left is so corrupted, so bizarre that it destroys its original values and ideals.

Look no further than any family business that's ever gone corporate.
Or look at a "Project for a New American Century" seeking immortality for their county and in the process sticking us in a "war without end."

But the best example is religion.
Look at the Buddha. Way back when, some small group of people started a movement of "noble atheism" to fight against the injustice and authoritarian abuses of the popular religion at the time. He ordained women, decentralized the religion and taught non-attachment to things like tradition and taught that God was irrelevant to living a good life.

2,000 years later what's left of the Buddha is a lich, worshiped as God by often centralized, authoritarian structures that use tradition as an excuse to keep women from being ordained, and marginalize ethnic groups or those who disagree.

And the biggest lich of them all?

Jesus.

2,000 years back a social movement formed around a person or persons named (or not actually named) "Jesus" that sought to fight the injustice of abused religious authority. Again. The Roman Empire did what every empire does (what the US is doing in Iraq) divide and conquer.

They gave the "Pharisees" authority over everything, including religion, then armed them, knowing other ethnic groups would fight back. And if they were fighting among themselves, easy time for Rome.

And the Pharisees made getting into heaven an expensive goal, keeping their adversaries in the poor house.

Jesus fought that, teaching you should follow basic principles, "love thy neighbor" and such. And taught the radical notion that wealth did not equate with religious "purity" by living like a slob in the desert. And he ran the fucking "money changers" who charged for purification rituals out of their own temple.

Now what's left of that movement and their "Jesus" is a lich who grants authority to a huge bureaucracy of money changers who use notions of "purity," tradition and ritual to further enshrine their own power. "Jesus" is big business.

So I wonder about all the artists who share that goal: immortality through their work... more later.