THIS is
the tarantula’s den!

Would you see the tarantula itself?
Here hangs its web: touch this,
so that it trembles.
There comes the tarantula willingly:

Enter, the tarantula!

Black on your back
is your triangle and symbol;
and I know also what is in your soul.

                    ~*~
Revenge is in your soul:
wherever you bite, there arises black scab;
with revenge, your poison
makes the soul lightheaded!

I speak to you in a tale,
you who make the soul lightheaded,
you preachers of equality!
Tarantulas you are to me,
and secretly revengeful ones!

                     ~*~
But soon I will bring your hiding-places to the light:
therefore I laugh in your face
my laughter of the heights.

Therefore I tear at your web,
that your rage may lure you out of your den of lies,
and that your revenge may leap forth
from behind your word “justice.”

Because, for mankind to be redeemed from revenge
— that is for me
the bridge to the highest hope,
and a rainbow after long storms.

Otherwise, as the tarantulas have it.

“Let our justice become a world
full of storms of our vengeance” –
thus do they talk to one another.
“Vengeance will we use,
and insult, against all who are not like us”
–thus do the tarantula-hearts pledge themselves.

“And ‘Will to Equality’
— that itself henceforth will be the name of virtue;
and against all that has power
we will raise an outcry!”

You preachers of equality,
the tyrant-frenzy of impotence
cries thus in you for “equality”:
your secret tyrant-desires
disguise themselves
thus with virtuous words!

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche trans. by Thomas Common, The Tarantulas, Part 2, No. 29

I received an essay composed by a friend which offered suggestions for combating the flood of lies, salvos of racist slander aimed at immigrants to this United States from Latin American counties. The Trump administration has made the expulsion of everyone without rock-solid legal status a priority. ICE is resolute with additional funding certain to be approved by a Republican Congress. Due process is routinely ignored. America as a refuge for the dispossessed, for the desperate refugee, for anyone strong enough to risk everything for a chance to survive – is being hammered into submission…

Moreover The Department Of Government Efficiency is hard at work, cleaving away, firing by fiat, thousands of workers in government agencies. The official rationale is “elimination of waste, cost savings.” Public institutions are being crippled, unable to maintain a standard of service, the life-blood of the common life that Americans have become accustomed.

The essay on “Truth” poses questions that are impossible to avoid:

   1. What can we do to rescue Truth?
   2. What do we mean by Truth?
   3. Is Truth a type of tangible asset?
   4. Are facts relevant in a storm-surge of lies?

Nietzsche/Zarathustra suggests this conception of society is comparable to the POV of a tarantula, ensconced within its den. So read and enjoy Zarathustra’s parable of the Tarantula. Does the parable direct you to a particular mode of thought relative to our present situation, relative to the questions posed by the essay?

Finally, keep in mind that I have exercised a writers privilege to substitute contemporary language for archaic terms to ease reading of the quotation. And should you be curious to read entirely the Truth-Part II essay that I mentioned CLICK HERE.