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Plato knew that the spiritualized polity he envisioned � his ideal State -- could not be installed by Fourth Century B.C.E. Athens. The Hellenic world was a mass of torture, murder, and iniquity. Slavery was pervasive. Offend against �law,� and have all the skin peeled from your body. Alive and very slowly. In front of your kids.

We�ve come a long way since then. Now we sodomize men in our prisons for smoking pot or yelling at their wives.

The �Myth of Er,� concluding chapter of the Republic, recounts the �near death� experiences of one Er, son of Armenius. Er, a Pamphylian apparently slain in battle ten days prior, is paraphrased:

He said that when his soul left the body he went on a journey with a great company, and that they came to a mysterious place at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and over against them were two other openings in the heaven above � he beheld and saw on one side the souls departing at either opening of heaven and earth when sentence had been given on them; and at the two other openings other souls, some ascending out of the earth dusty and worn with travel, some descending out of heaven clean and bright.

Er is not merely a �near-death experiencer.� He is an Embarkee upon the Homeward quest. He's one of Joseph Campbell�s heroes �with a thousand faces� � shamans witnessing the crucible of matter -- and living to tell.

Plato refers to Er as a �hero,� and indeed Er endures the prototypical shamanic journey. He stands in liquid fire at the portals of the Upper and Lower Worlds � the Quaternity of Opposites, nexus of transformation and renewal.

As Er found, once there really was a Way to get Back Homeward. In every culture, there are some folks who try Er�s road. Dead white male Plato took that long, dark walk --Route 666, through burning Needles, the desert badlands of the Scapegoat, and finally ascent into the heaven of Western philosophy. Er saw the road America now attempts, the passage through denial and darkness, the harrowing of the underbelly of Western Empire -- the Lower Hole, descent.

Yet where the portal of Hell yawns, Er sees also Heaven�s door. "The Myth of Er" tells the West that, with suitable leadership, it can harrow the labyrinth of history and head on Home, planet in tow.

It is Hellenic shaman Er -- Plato�s Philosopher King -- who while still living walks with the dead, exchanging eyes with them. Er stands at the quadrivium, at the crossroads where the opposites meet, witnessing from whence we come, to where we go, and the places between.

Enron and On and On

... and the Business will shake hands and talk in numbers
and the Princess will wake up from her slumbers
and all the knights will step forth with their armbands
and every stranger in the street will make demands

-- "Glad Tidings" Van Morrison

In the first chapter of the Republic, Plato asserts that leadership is honesty in word and deed. The current Enron toxicity encapsulates our cultural corrosion. On and on the fa�ade goes: Watergate, Irangate, support of tyrants, mass imprisonment of Americans under barbaric conditions, domestic and foreign assassinations, torture academies, drugs and arms sales to finance covert operations -- while hypocritically fighting Holy Wars on Drugs and Terrorism.

The nation is a glittering snakepit. We puff up as Leaders of the World, but we are a diminished people, clinging to the privileges of Empire. Our �leaders� are thieves, liars, and weaklings � pretenders to the throne. Plato knew them in his own time. He called them leeches, enemies of the Republic.

Real leaders are unpopular. Elevation to office does not constitute a license to steal. Real leaders do not line their own pockets -- they empty them in public service. They tell us what we need, not what we want, to hear. When was the last time you heard a Western �leader, � someone in high authority, confront their constituency with a truth that challenged and angered them, expecting them to rise to it?

Our leaders grovel at our feet, pandering to the polls, and to our basest urges -- fear, greed, vengeance, and an insatiable lust for �protection,� with which we are imprisoned. We tell our leaders what we want to hear, and like robot sheep, they baa back to us. Then we re-elect them.

Our �leaders� bar the Way Home against us. They maintain the death spiral, the closed loop of history.

Despite the establishment of a supposed Republic, our leaders -- whether political or religious, whether Republican or Democrat, Baptist or Wiccan or Undeclared -- are false. They are regents at best, monsters at worst. We know it. They know it. It�s a sham we trade off to maintain our fat lives. But we are an increasingly unjust nation, internally and externally. We are a hemorrhaging People. Blessings so long shed on America are over-withdrawn.

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, America became an official Empire, and so it remains. Most citizens of historic empires didn�t want to know about the horrors committed in their names. In the American Empire, we are no different.

We are willing to embrace George Bush, Jr., and the rest of our rancid politicians, institutions, and behaviors � as long as I�ve Got Mine. The Machine churns on, invisible and unconscious, cannibalizing its citizens. Anyone or anything opposing our gluttony is designated Evil.