What Is a Ghoul?
World leaders stimulate interest in the etymology of a strange word.
This morning over coffee, I reflected on my last post about President Biden’s strange habit of gobbling frightened children, and I found myself wondering about the etymology of the world GHOUL.
Turns out the word derives from the pre-Islamic Arabic world غول, ghūl)— a desert-dwelling humanoid demon that robs graves and devours the dead. The following graph plots its usage over time:
Note the initial rise in the 1880s, when the British were fascinated by Arab culture and ghost stories. Note as well how usage dramatically spiked that the turn of the millennium. In recent times I’ve often perceived that our public forum is now dominated by ghouls. On his deathbed in 1987, the great CIA spymaster, James Jesus Angleton, said of the founding members of U.S. intelligence agencies: “If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.”
The great Czech philosopher, Edmund Husserl, pointed out that most of our perceptions of the world are not scientific, but phenomenological. When someone smiles at us, we do not perceive the underlying action of nerves and muscles, but the expression of the spirit of joy.
What are we to make of the ghoulish spectacle of world leaders? While pondering the phenomenology of ghouls, I stumbled across this gem just posted by fellow grim commentator, James Howard Kunster:
This Halloween month, America looks super-busy preparing for the death of something, maybe itself. Surely many now live in terror of the malevolent blob that the US government has become, led by a very paragon of ghouls, “Joe Biden.” This week, the blob declared in a “leak” to Newsweek magazine, that supporters of Donald Trump, the Golden Golem of Greatness, are now officially deemed to be enemies of the state. So, the blob that has lately subsumed the state, explicitly targets Trumpists (the MAGA crowd) for wholesale persecution, cancellation, de-personing, and incarceration. That is, opponents of the blob regime organizing for the coming election will be systematically neutralized and / or liquidated, taken off the game-board one way or another, by any means necessary.
Note that Kunster places the name “Joe Biden” in quotation marks. J.P. Sears was having similar perceptions at this time last year when he made the following video.
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Brilliant connections - These are literally demonic forces unleashed on humanity - and to avoid them, humanity is called to stop its demonic abuse and exploitation of animals - as we sow, so we reap...
and I do not know what to do with the friends that have revealed themselves in this category. The casual infiltrating nazi that appeared in my circle, my church and neighborhood. Jesus come, we are in a dire mess down here.