Auditioning For Ragnarok
Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
- Heinrich Heine
Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
- Orson Welles in "The Third Man"
I could tell that my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.
- Rodney Dangerfield
There are two things happening in the world that are bothering me at the present time, and I want to talk about them. HOWEVER, in the process of resurrecting this forum and going over older posts, I find in myself a tendency to blather on and on and on nigh-endlessly, and I'd like to try and curb that if I can. Pithiness. That's the goal for today's post. Keep it snappy.
I already know I'm going to fall far fucking short of that, so just shut up. I don't need you to tell me that. Christ. Go get your own fucking weblog, why don't you.
ISSUE NUMBER ONE! On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 representing impossibility and 10 representing complete metaphysical certitude, what is the chance that Kansans will actually manage to summon the moral fortitude and integrity from deep within their chakras, dislodge their collective heads from their collective asses, and stop the American Taliban from trying to rewrite the laws of nature? Answer: 2. And that's being generous. In 1999, the Kansas State Board of Education removed the teaching of evolution and cosmology from their high school curriculum. Meaning that Kansan children weren't going to be taught how the universe came into being, or how the human race came into being. This, however, just wasn't strident, myopic, ignorant, or batshit crazy enough for some people. A group calling itself Families for Learning Accurate Theories [spell out the acronym and cringe along with me] complained that Kansas had abolished evil-ution and cosmology but still insisted on teaching the heretical, anti-scriptural idea that the Earth was spherical. As we all know, the Bible clearly says that the Earth has four corners. [somewhere. I have no idea where it says this, leave me the fuck alone, I'm trying to get through this paragraph without smashing my face through the monitor screen in sheer murderous frustration.] Now obviously, the Earth cannot be spherical and still conform to this passage. Earth must therefore be a huge, oblong tetrahedron.
...excuse me, I'll be right back.
[sounds of the entire inventory of the world's largest china shop being smashed into a billion pieces with an aluminum baseball bat]
...okay, back. As I was saying, Kansas threw out the most fundamental and basic concept in biology from its schools, but then reinstated it in 2001. All across Topeka, Lawrence, Leavenworth and Wichita, millions of people stood upright for the first time in years, and shed their vestigial tails. Supraorbital ridges flattened themselves back against foreheads. and eyes uncrossed themselves as if by magic. [I'd throw in mentions of Hosannas being sung by a choir of angels, but those are the other guys. Let's just say that it was a good day.]
But such secular experiments are the indulgence of a 9/10 world. Here, post-9/11, because the attacks of that day are obviously the most important event in the fucking history of the planet and change all previously accepted standards of decency and behavior and give us license to do whatever the fuck we want because "9/11 - Support Our Troops - Let's Roll!", anyway, post-9/11, the American Taliban thinks that it's been given its own political currency printing press and can just keep pushing and pushing and pushing and ram through whatever heinous legislation it wants by invoking the imagery of those falling skyscrapers and the memory of those three thousand dead. I genuinely believe this - that they consider 9/11 to be a gift from Jesus (although they'd never say so out loud), in that, since they were in control of the government when it happened, it gives them a permanent and self-perpetuating rationale for doing ANYTHING THEY WANT. These are people who literally believe that they are or soon will be living in the End Times. They honestly, seriously, literally expect the Rapture to come in the next few years. How...what...just what the fuck do you even say to such people, how do you confront such madmen beyond the obvious solution of simply smashing them in the face with a shovel and bludgeoning them until they stop twitching? You talk to people like this, and there's this perpetual gleam in their eyes...the slackened and pitiless gaze of the incurious, the self-satisfied, the sort of person who thinks that any questions worth asking have long since been answered and is just waiting for the preordained drama to unfold. Like it's a movie or something. These people are detached from reality. Now, not only are they striking down evolution again, not only are they going to teach that ridiculous junk science theory of "intelligent design" to kids who won't know that it's just a Trojan horse for creationism and evangelical fundamentalism, but they want to reword and redefine the concept of "science" itself. YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP. Reality has yet again surpassed satire. Now they want science textbooks to define science so as to "not limit it to theories based on natural explanations." In other words, to equate science with myth, mysticism, and whatever bullshit we feel like espousing today. In other words, let's defile Aristotle's grave and rape his corpse. And Kansas is going to let these lunatics get away with it. It makes me want to scream.
Yes, I'm safe here in a "blue state," but for how long? How long is the Party of God going to tolerate enemy strongholds before they redistrict us all into a bunch of patchwork Republican-ruled cantonments? Yes yes, the First Amendment and freedom of religion and blah fucking blah. I don't want to hear it. Maybe it is time for open war with these maniacs. They don't want to respect my difference of opinion, why should I respect theirs? Why should I, why should we, the freethinkers who reject religiosity and there are millions of us in America, thank you, why should we allow unknowing children to be subjected to that brain-deadening pabulum? It's not fair to them.
Religion kills the spirit. You'd think that a paradox, but it's not. I personally loathe when someone tells me that they're "not religious, but spiritual." At least religious people are willing to get up and go to church, or temple, or what have you. "Spiritual" people want the security of a loving Father-deity but don't feel like putting any time or effort into it. That's pure intellectual laziness. I think true "spirituality" connotes a love of knowledge and learning, a curiosity and openness about the world, a sense of trust in the innate capacity for the human race to achieve, to accomplish, to propel ourselves forward and do better than our antecedents did and so honor them. I can think of nothing more "spiritual" than the brotherhood of man, of helping others out, of contributing to society. That's the only kind of spirit I can acknowledge - the warmth shared by that Promethean flame burning inside each of us [forgive the arrogance of such an allusion, please], the sum that is far greater than its parts. And when people cheapen and demean that, when they graft their stupid, banal, witless, droolingly insane catalogue of hallucinations and mendacities onto the human psyche and the history of our achievements and call for pogroms and ask for donations, it galls me. It's one of the most viciously anti-social acts imaginable, to me.
I guess it's lucky for these people that I'm powerless. My tolerance for their delusions stems only from my inability to incarcerate them.
wow. That took a lot out of me. I was also going to comment on the recent wave of insurgent attacks in Iraq too. In some ways I feel it's disrespectful for me to rant about our education policies when so many people are dying over there, but the two are connected. They both tie into the sense of destiny with which our current government is totally intoxicated. It's not just religious either, it's ethnic and nationalistic and imperialistic and capitalistic, a whole lot of -istics, it's this absurd notion that God has bestowed Most Favored Nation status on the United States and that we can do no wrong, that by definition Americans are always right. And the sad part is that the worse things are going over there, the more intransigent and righteous these people get. Whatever pain they feel maddens them and sears their resolve into their brains, intermingling with their death-urge, their yearning for martyrdom which burns just as fiercely and brightly as it does in the heart of every mujahedeen that blows himself up in a crowd. It's an inescapable cycle, and that scares me. Since the Interim Iraqi government was named about two weeks ago [not to be confused with the Provisional Iraqi government, or the Coalition Provisional Authority], over 400 people have been killed in suicide bombings. Originally that read "over 300 people," but more news of attacks were posted online as I was typing this. Let's see...the butcher's bill for today, 69 people killed, 160 wounded, most of them recruits for the Iraqi Army waiting in line to be processed. But, clearly, We Are Turning A Corner. There Is Light At The End Of The Tunnel. And some Americans are horrified...and most are blandly, sleepily indifferent, let's not kid ourselves...but there are some who feed off of news like this. It makes them more determined to fight like hell to keep the country that we rightfully stole.
Granted, most of them aren't going to be doing the actual fighting, per se, it's more of a morale-boosting effort on their part. Our man Atrios calls these jackasses the "101st Fighting Keyboardists," and they deserve every ounce of vitriol and scorn they get and an extra dollop of hate on the side.
But a lot of these people are the ones in charge. The ones who don't know well enough to stop throwing good money after bad. The ones who are convinced down to the marrow in their bones that there's a painless way to spin their way out of this, that just one more charge over the top will bring the insurgency crashing down, that inside every Iraqi there is an American trying to get out. They wouldn't even recognize the sarcasm in that last statement, they think it should be perfectly natural that every foreigner should want to be an American. That's an extremely dangerous thing to believe. That's the attitude of the faithful: don't try to understand them, don't try to co-exist with them, convert them. Convert them or kill them. The very existence of disbelief and dissent is an affront to their all-consuming mindset.
There's a scene in the film "Nixon," wherein Nixon makes his historic visit to China in 1972 and meets with Mao. Mao Zedong, arguably the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century. It's one of those scenes where you think, If the actual historical figures didn't say these things, they should have. But honesty like this is rarely spoken aloud, in the light of day no less:
MAO: You know, I voted for you in your last election.
NIXON: I was the lesser of two evils. [laughs weakly]
MAO: You're too modest. You are as evil as I am. We're both from poor families. But others pay to feed the hunger in us. In my case, millions of reactionaries. In your case, millions of Vietnamese.
NIXON: Civil war is always the cruelest kind of war.
MAO: The real war is in us. History is a symptom of our disease.
Maybe it's not just limited to the sickness of religion. Maybe it's a cancer on the human conscience. Maybe we are coming up on the End Times, after all. I'd much prefer Ragnarok. Ragnarok teaches us that we can't sit around and wait for deliverance when the end of the world is upon us. We have to take up arms, and ride out into the fray, and fight for it. But in the end, we probably are doomed to fail, and to die. It's not any more hopeful than the fiery dissolution promised by the Apocalypse, but at least it's more honest.
A little honesty goes a long way, especially during the twilight of the gods.
- Heinrich Heine
Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
- Orson Welles in "The Third Man"
I could tell that my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.
- Rodney Dangerfield
There are two things happening in the world that are bothering me at the present time, and I want to talk about them. HOWEVER, in the process of resurrecting this forum and going over older posts, I find in myself a tendency to blather on and on and on nigh-endlessly, and I'd like to try and curb that if I can. Pithiness. That's the goal for today's post. Keep it snappy.
I already know I'm going to fall far fucking short of that, so just shut up. I don't need you to tell me that. Christ. Go get your own fucking weblog, why don't you.
ISSUE NUMBER ONE! On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 representing impossibility and 10 representing complete metaphysical certitude, what is the chance that Kansans will actually manage to summon the moral fortitude and integrity from deep within their chakras, dislodge their collective heads from their collective asses, and stop the American Taliban from trying to rewrite the laws of nature? Answer: 2. And that's being generous. In 1999, the Kansas State Board of Education removed the teaching of evolution and cosmology from their high school curriculum. Meaning that Kansan children weren't going to be taught how the universe came into being, or how the human race came into being. This, however, just wasn't strident, myopic, ignorant, or batshit crazy enough for some people. A group calling itself Families for Learning Accurate Theories [spell out the acronym and cringe along with me] complained that Kansas had abolished evil-ution and cosmology but still insisted on teaching the heretical, anti-scriptural idea that the Earth was spherical. As we all know, the Bible clearly says that the Earth has four corners. [somewhere. I have no idea where it says this, leave me the fuck alone, I'm trying to get through this paragraph without smashing my face through the monitor screen in sheer murderous frustration.] Now obviously, the Earth cannot be spherical and still conform to this passage. Earth must therefore be a huge, oblong tetrahedron.
...excuse me, I'll be right back.
[sounds of the entire inventory of the world's largest china shop being smashed into a billion pieces with an aluminum baseball bat]
...okay, back. As I was saying, Kansas threw out the most fundamental and basic concept in biology from its schools, but then reinstated it in 2001. All across Topeka, Lawrence, Leavenworth and Wichita, millions of people stood upright for the first time in years, and shed their vestigial tails. Supraorbital ridges flattened themselves back against foreheads. and eyes uncrossed themselves as if by magic. [I'd throw in mentions of Hosannas being sung by a choir of angels, but those are the other guys. Let's just say that it was a good day.]
But such secular experiments are the indulgence of a 9/10 world. Here, post-9/11, because the attacks of that day are obviously the most important event in the fucking history of the planet and change all previously accepted standards of decency and behavior and give us license to do whatever the fuck we want because "9/11 - Support Our Troops - Let's Roll!", anyway, post-9/11, the American Taliban thinks that it's been given its own political currency printing press and can just keep pushing and pushing and pushing and ram through whatever heinous legislation it wants by invoking the imagery of those falling skyscrapers and the memory of those three thousand dead. I genuinely believe this - that they consider 9/11 to be a gift from Jesus (although they'd never say so out loud), in that, since they were in control of the government when it happened, it gives them a permanent and self-perpetuating rationale for doing ANYTHING THEY WANT. These are people who literally believe that they are or soon will be living in the End Times. They honestly, seriously, literally expect the Rapture to come in the next few years. How...what...just what the fuck do you even say to such people, how do you confront such madmen beyond the obvious solution of simply smashing them in the face with a shovel and bludgeoning them until they stop twitching? You talk to people like this, and there's this perpetual gleam in their eyes...the slackened and pitiless gaze of the incurious, the self-satisfied, the sort of person who thinks that any questions worth asking have long since been answered and is just waiting for the preordained drama to unfold. Like it's a movie or something. These people are detached from reality. Now, not only are they striking down evolution again, not only are they going to teach that ridiculous junk science theory of "intelligent design" to kids who won't know that it's just a Trojan horse for creationism and evangelical fundamentalism, but they want to reword and redefine the concept of "science" itself. YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP. Reality has yet again surpassed satire. Now they want science textbooks to define science so as to "not limit it to theories based on natural explanations." In other words, to equate science with myth, mysticism, and whatever bullshit we feel like espousing today. In other words, let's defile Aristotle's grave and rape his corpse. And Kansas is going to let these lunatics get away with it. It makes me want to scream.
Yes, I'm safe here in a "blue state," but for how long? How long is the Party of God going to tolerate enemy strongholds before they redistrict us all into a bunch of patchwork Republican-ruled cantonments? Yes yes, the First Amendment and freedom of religion and blah fucking blah. I don't want to hear it. Maybe it is time for open war with these maniacs. They don't want to respect my difference of opinion, why should I respect theirs? Why should I, why should we, the freethinkers who reject religiosity and there are millions of us in America, thank you, why should we allow unknowing children to be subjected to that brain-deadening pabulum? It's not fair to them.
Religion kills the spirit. You'd think that a paradox, but it's not. I personally loathe when someone tells me that they're "not religious, but spiritual." At least religious people are willing to get up and go to church, or temple, or what have you. "Spiritual" people want the security of a loving Father-deity but don't feel like putting any time or effort into it. That's pure intellectual laziness. I think true "spirituality" connotes a love of knowledge and learning, a curiosity and openness about the world, a sense of trust in the innate capacity for the human race to achieve, to accomplish, to propel ourselves forward and do better than our antecedents did and so honor them. I can think of nothing more "spiritual" than the brotherhood of man, of helping others out, of contributing to society. That's the only kind of spirit I can acknowledge - the warmth shared by that Promethean flame burning inside each of us [forgive the arrogance of such an allusion, please], the sum that is far greater than its parts. And when people cheapen and demean that, when they graft their stupid, banal, witless, droolingly insane catalogue of hallucinations and mendacities onto the human psyche and the history of our achievements and call for pogroms and ask for donations, it galls me. It's one of the most viciously anti-social acts imaginable, to me.
I guess it's lucky for these people that I'm powerless. My tolerance for their delusions stems only from my inability to incarcerate them.
wow. That took a lot out of me. I was also going to comment on the recent wave of insurgent attacks in Iraq too. In some ways I feel it's disrespectful for me to rant about our education policies when so many people are dying over there, but the two are connected. They both tie into the sense of destiny with which our current government is totally intoxicated. It's not just religious either, it's ethnic and nationalistic and imperialistic and capitalistic, a whole lot of -istics, it's this absurd notion that God has bestowed Most Favored Nation status on the United States and that we can do no wrong, that by definition Americans are always right. And the sad part is that the worse things are going over there, the more intransigent and righteous these people get. Whatever pain they feel maddens them and sears their resolve into their brains, intermingling with their death-urge, their yearning for martyrdom which burns just as fiercely and brightly as it does in the heart of every mujahedeen that blows himself up in a crowd. It's an inescapable cycle, and that scares me. Since the Interim Iraqi government was named about two weeks ago [not to be confused with the Provisional Iraqi government, or the Coalition Provisional Authority], over 400 people have been killed in suicide bombings. Originally that read "over 300 people," but more news of attacks were posted online as I was typing this. Let's see...the butcher's bill for today, 69 people killed, 160 wounded, most of them recruits for the Iraqi Army waiting in line to be processed. But, clearly, We Are Turning A Corner. There Is Light At The End Of The Tunnel. And some Americans are horrified...and most are blandly, sleepily indifferent, let's not kid ourselves...but there are some who feed off of news like this. It makes them more determined to fight like hell to keep the country that we rightfully stole.
Granted, most of them aren't going to be doing the actual fighting, per se, it's more of a morale-boosting effort on their part. Our man Atrios calls these jackasses the "101st Fighting Keyboardists," and they deserve every ounce of vitriol and scorn they get and an extra dollop of hate on the side.
But a lot of these people are the ones in charge. The ones who don't know well enough to stop throwing good money after bad. The ones who are convinced down to the marrow in their bones that there's a painless way to spin their way out of this, that just one more charge over the top will bring the insurgency crashing down, that inside every Iraqi there is an American trying to get out. They wouldn't even recognize the sarcasm in that last statement, they think it should be perfectly natural that every foreigner should want to be an American. That's an extremely dangerous thing to believe. That's the attitude of the faithful: don't try to understand them, don't try to co-exist with them, convert them. Convert them or kill them. The very existence of disbelief and dissent is an affront to their all-consuming mindset.
There's a scene in the film "Nixon," wherein Nixon makes his historic visit to China in 1972 and meets with Mao. Mao Zedong, arguably the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century. It's one of those scenes where you think, If the actual historical figures didn't say these things, they should have. But honesty like this is rarely spoken aloud, in the light of day no less:
MAO: You know, I voted for you in your last election.
NIXON: I was the lesser of two evils. [laughs weakly]
MAO: You're too modest. You are as evil as I am. We're both from poor families. But others pay to feed the hunger in us. In my case, millions of reactionaries. In your case, millions of Vietnamese.
NIXON: Civil war is always the cruelest kind of war.
MAO: The real war is in us. History is a symptom of our disease.
Maybe it's not just limited to the sickness of religion. Maybe it's a cancer on the human conscience. Maybe we are coming up on the End Times, after all. I'd much prefer Ragnarok. Ragnarok teaches us that we can't sit around and wait for deliverance when the end of the world is upon us. We have to take up arms, and ride out into the fray, and fight for it. But in the end, we probably are doomed to fail, and to die. It's not any more hopeful than the fiery dissolution promised by the Apocalypse, but at least it's more honest.
A little honesty goes a long way, especially during the twilight of the gods.
posted by Patrick at 12:17 AM
1 Comments:
I must say I like what your doing with the place. The new Blog is shaping up nicely.
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