Tag Archive | human rights

Deer Jesus Epistle — Measuring Up As Men

Apr13

SteubenvilleinTutu

“I call on men and boys everywhere to take a stand against the mistreatment of girls and women. It is by standing up for the rights of girls and women that we truly measure up as men.”  — Desmond Tutu, November, 2012

Not three months prior to Tutu’s statement, two teenage boys brutally assaulted, humiliated and traumatized a sixteen year old girl who was inebriated past the point of being able to take care of herself, let alone call for help from others.

To this very day, the victim’s family and the victim continue to receive death threats and threats of bodily harm from the victim’s teenage peers in the Ohio town of Steubenville, population under 19,000.

Various reports have attempted to slant the story away from the fact that a young woman, possibly already sexually traumatized before the notorious August, 2012 incident, was a victim of rape under Ohio law.  Some of these reports lay claim to this incident being, “fueled,” by social media.

I beg to differ.

Our society fuels both social media and violence against those who are vulnerable.  The whole of United States culture has been built and maintained by a strict code of exploitation of the temporarily weak by the temporarily strong.  When those temporarily weak grow strong enough, there is war.  This has been our pattern for over two centuries.  As the temporarily strong have used war to exploit the growing strength of the temporarily weak, they have become hollowed-out, rotting caricatures of the men, women, slaves and indigenous people who once founded and built this country.

The people of Steubenville have been demoralized and stripped of anything akin to human decency and what the rape of this vulnerable teenage girl reveals is not just cause, but effect.  This entire incident – the childhood trauma, the teenage alcoholism, the economic exploitation of the middle class, the indiscriminate violence, the media circus, the inappropriate labeling and valuation of cultural symbols by a media circus — all took place in a town too small town to be on any nation-state’s radar as a threat to anyone’s interests.  Steubenville has long since been decimated by “globalization” and the moving of steel mills to lands our uneducated children can no longer name, much less locate on a map.  And so the macrocosmic rape of Steubenville played itself out in a microcosmic incident of despicable human trauma and exploitation with vulnerable children caught in the midst of forces too powerful to be ignored.

Were the boys who victimized this teenage girl of Steubenville victims themselves?  Probably.  We enter into the so-called adult world of bitter realities praying to an ineffable sky-being that the personal coin of our lives will somehow magically land on its edge.  These boys parlayed their alcohol-induced block of feeling and sense-making to mean that, finally – for once – they were neither cause nor effect, neither victims nor victimizers, for their target of opportunity was so clearly incapable of recollection or self defense that they could finally act on their hormone-fueled drive for reconciliation and justice leaving no one the wiser.

Alas, no one in a surveillance culture ever gets completely away with anything.  Now everyone knows the coin landed with “cause” facing up even while a circus of agenda-setters tried to turn “cause” into “effect.”  However, the cellphone camera coverage made the facts clear in this case and gave the judge presiding no recourse but to adjudicate these two boys based on their behavior, rather than as well-intentioned young men who simply happened upon a vulnerable female during a night of alcohol-fueled stupidity.  “It was a case of mistaken identity, your honor, where one of these boys thought he had left his car keys in the vagina of an incapacitated female he thought he recognized.”  Such explanations would fall dead on arrival in the judge’s chambers, as they should have.

Human beings under stress behave no better than the worst-behaved chimpanzees in the wild.  Among the great apes a silver-backed gorilla could have mustered superior behavior to the demonstrated depravity of these two alleged hominids taken together.

What the media confusion of cause with effect displaced, potentially forever, is the idea that an incident like the Steubenville rape could be either cause, or effect, or even both at the same time.  The coin of human experience, constantly spinning in midair, revealed first cause, then effect, then cause again, in an endless cycle that rotated about an axis we prefer to call “time” but we might just as well label, “perception.”  For all humankind knows, there is no such idea as “time,” but simply circadian rhythms that come together only to fall away over periods greater than multiple human lifetimes.

Enter now into the social vocabulary words like, “forgiveness” and “mercy.”

For too long we have contented ourselves to believe that forgiveness and mercy were gratuities we ought to extend to those less fortunate than ourselves.  We linger in pestilence and paucity of spirit when we think this way, for every grievance we hold against one another increases only our own misery and despair.  Confusing cause with effect, we then displace our agony and our anger onto some other victim of circumstance who seems a more fitting recipient of our ire.  Rather than identifying and then forgiving the multinational banker who has made our lives into wretched caricatures of grandeur, we instead direct our rage at unwed mothers too poor or uneducated to utilize contraception during sexual intercourse.  Or, perhaps even a gay male who, in spite of society’s remonstrations against the foundations of his conscience, manages to find a moment’s joy in the arms of a lover he never knew could exist.  How dare such people find solace or comfort in a world as laced with misery as this!  Do they not know that we were chosen, we were first in line to receive social justice when it finally arrived, not these outcasts and piriahs!

Identifying our grievances as rage against the international banking establishment and its tendency to treat human beings as chattel at best and dumb animals at worst, we might find the misbehavior and misdeeds our brothers and sisters commit against us as effects and not strictly causes in and of themselves.  While we cannot reasonably hold these banking offenders accountable for the behavior of specific individuals, we almost certainly can hold them accountable for statistical increases in the measurements of social misery – poverty, violence, unemployment, disease, ignorance starvation, war and violations of civil liberties of every sort – as surely as we can place pen to paper to sign a bill into law.

From this day forward, for every middle class and lower citizen who commits a crime and is held accountable, let us also hold accountable those leaders and institutions that failed to provide the childhood support and supervision even a modicum of human decency ought to afford.  For it is not only the youths of Steubenville who have lost their way, it is the entire economic establishment raised to believe that “greed is good” and “only the fittest should survive” while placing their thumb on the scales of justice to favor one sort of “fitness” over another.  No human being at any layer of the social strata will ever be capable of knowing what sort of fitness our future survival might require.  Let us no longer pretend that the crazed and menacing ramblings of a sociopath speaking on behalf of other sociopaths hold out any promise of brighter tomorrows blighted by creatures with less than half the human capacity for empathy and compassion.  Ayn Rand’s “Objectivist” rants and her present-day apologist’s polemics do not advance the cause of human evolution, but would drive us backward to a time when dinosaurs ruled this Earth only to be smited by their own inability to cooperate and ensure mutual survival.

Let this be our response to the people and children of Steubenville, Ohio, and our collective prayer that the wisdom and compassion of Bishop Desmond Tutu should not pass into history unacknowledged or unnoticed.

Fast, Furious and Outrageous

Apr25

Wayne Madsen has learned from his contacts within the Beltway intelligence community that Jared Lee Loughner is an “MK-ULTRA” programmed assassin and that US District Judge John Roll and Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords were targetted for assassination.  The reason for the decision to target Judge Roll and Congresswoman Giffords has to do with their knowledge

of the malicious and purposeful arming of Mexican drug gangs along the US-Mexico border by US intelligence agency assets in an effort designed to destablize the Mexican government.  This towards the end of making Mexico more dependent on US military aid and protection from its private security contractors.

A key quote from Wayne Madsen’s report follows.

“WMR has been told that in 2009, information about the CIA/Homeland Security/Napolitano smuggling operation came to the attention of three individuals, two members of Congress and a federal judge. The three were Arizona Democratic Representatives Giffords, Republican Representative Mike Conaway from west Texas, and Judge Roll. Giffords and Roll were working together on investigating the extent of the clandestine weapons and druigs smuggling operation and held some joint meetings with informants, one in north Phoenix, in 2009. Information on the investigation and informants was strictly limited to only a few trusted staffers and clerks for Giffords and Roll. In addition, Conaway was also being briefed by informants on the smuggling operation but since the death of Roll and the severe mental and physical incapacitation of Giffords from the shooting carried out by Jared Lee Loughner, said to be an MK-ULTRA-like trained assassin, he has gone silent in fear for his own safety. Loughner’s was declared mentally incompetent and there are reports, including one in Slate Magazine, that the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, where Loughner is being held, pending a determination of his mental fitness to stand trial, is being administered psychotropic drugs in his Kool Aid.

In addition to receiving drugs to fund its off-the-books operations, the CIA weapons smuggling program is designed to arm the two main Mexican cartels — Sinaloa and Los Zetas — in order to destabilize Mexico. A violence-ridden Mexico makes it more dependent on U.S. military aid and, eventually, the country is seen by Washington as a future virtual U.S. protectorate, whose state PEMEX-controlled oil reserves will be available to U.S. oil companies.”

The Obama-nation

Apr22

The “Honorable Michael B. Mukasey?”  At this juncture I could express shock, disbelief and horror at such a thought after reading former FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley’s article available via Information Clearinghouse and also at the Huffington Post.  But I won’t.

Rowley takes exception that such a relic from the Bush Administration could be called upon by any academic institution, let alone one involved in the training of professional attorneys, to speak on the subject of ethics and the implementation of unethical, often illegal, policies.

Sadly, I am not surprised by any of this.  While it is nauseating, I cannot devote a scintilla of surprise at the depths to which professional psychopaths and their willing stooges will sink to defend what in the past lead to Nazi corpses swinging at the end of ropes, post World War II.

I could offer up a, “well played, sir,” to those fascist lackeys in the United States through which the entire Nazi Holocaust was both inspired and launched.  Those well-moneyed individuals not only executed an intelligent multi-generational conspiracy to propel wealth and power to its economic zenith in the late twentieth century, but, perhaps to their chagrin, they are singularly responsible for sending humanity to its ethical and moral nadir in the early twenty-first.

Well-played, indeed, as evidenced in today’s headlines that highlight the deprivation of children in Uganda suffering from “Zombie” disease; that highlight the widespread sexual abuse of children at the hands of the hierarchy of our most-respected churches; that lay bare a culture where honesty and forthrightness are punished while convicted felons anchor television programs that reach millions; that blast and stun human brains with irrelevant trivia, allowing these sophisticated players to prosecute their resource wars under cover of “diplomatic” darkness.

Meanwhile, Wall Street has never been wealthier, nor more profitable; the wealthiest among us have never been wealthier, nor more powerful; governments have never yielded so completely to the desires of the wealthy and powerful.  In fact, syndicated radio host Thom Hartmann declared today (March 21, 2012) that the suburbs surrounding the US capitol – Washington, DC – are now among the wealthiest in the United States, including Beverly Hills, California.  Entertainment, fantasy and those who cater to it, will soon take a back seat to those whose business is the mass-exploitation of human labor and the mass-extinction of every living species that stands between them and future potential profits.

Such is the oppression of efficiency, of fascism.

In the world I grew up through, such paucities of spirit were considered ethical and moral poverty.  Dwight D. Eisenhower would certainly not recognize the landscape that he left behind as he yielded power to a President who would die attempting to realize Ike’s vision for an America that would always hold fast its moral compass.  Such a vast problem of morality and ethical conduct has not been visited on humanity since the depths of the Middle Ages before the advent of the Magna Carta.

But before we attempt a resolution to our problems, we should first have a clearer understanding of the relevant history surrounding our present state of affairs – the contextual background in which our present moment in history is unfolding.

First and foremost, every human nervous system has limitations and tolerances related to cognitive dissonance – a term used to describe a collision between observation and belief.  It was because these limitations and tolerances, en masse, were exceeded that many hundreds of years passed before humanity accepted the reality that the Earth was not the center of the known universe, or even that the world was not flat, but a sphere.  Therefore, if I am unwilling and/or unable to believe, “my lying eyes,” my nervous system will not permit me to change my beliefs about the world in which I appear to live.  Historians who chronicled the rise of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany referred to this phenomenon as, “the Big Lie,” but the truth is that human beings can be stunned into believing excessive dishonesty.  In software development terms, it is possible to “overflow the buffer” of large numbers of human beings and drive them to cling desperately to beliefs that no longer match with the reality of even a casual outside observer.  This is the reason why no one in America understood how the German people could tolerate the atrocities committed by the Nazi war machine on their, “behalf.”  General Eisenhower made certain, though, that all of those atrocities were painstakingly recorded, photographed and cataloged because he knew the instigators of that nightmare, of this nightmare, would go to absurd lengths to deny that those events ever took place.  He likely also knew that the revelations of Marine General Smedley Butler were true and that it was America, not just Germany, who had been responsible for building the nightmare of Nazi Germany.

Secondly, no organization, family, church or trust whose wealth and power was established prior to the French Enlightenment ever believed in the tenets of democracy, or in the rule of society of the people, by the people and for the people.  A great deal of time, energy and effort has been placed since the establishment of the United States of America in its ultimate perversion and destruction.  One can only assume that those with the most to gain from the destruction of the American experiment would be those organizations, families, churches and trusts whose wealth and power originated in Europe and Asia during the Middle Ages.  These same institutions and organizations may choose to package their indiscretions as part of some larger philosophical context (e.g., the Hegelian dialectic), but the truth of the matter is that those who achieve power through conflict and ruthlessness have no intention of ever relinquishing their hold on power, or allowing the “rules of the game” that they have mastered to be changed by any circumstance or happenstance of evolution or revolution.  They see only the ruin they have visited upon others to be their fate should they lose their grip on power or control.

Finally, the destruction of democracy, of even a shred of what was left of the Magna Carta, has been vaporized not by some lackey of the Bush Administration – Michael Mukasey – but by the crowned prince of American “Just-Us,” Attorney General Eric Holder.  In a speech given to Northwestern University Law students on March 5, 2012,  Eric Holder preceded Michael Mukasey’s attempt at gagging Colleen Rowley with liquid sleaze of Orwellian Doublespeak by some two weeks.  Had Ms. Rowley finally had enough, or must we always yield to the fascist wearing a smiley-face button?

Legal analyst and scholar Jonathan Turley attacked Holder’s disingenuousness in this blog entry, and many others have done so as well, to no avail.

Americans appear to be satisfied that if they are to be killed by secret fiat that they can rest assured that they deserved to be, that the high and mighty government of these United States of America, LLC, took no pleasure in finally dropping the hammer on their mediocre existence.

…and ladies and gentlemen, we have long since passed the bar from “concerned citizens” to expressions of ultimate mediocrity beginning at about 1pm on November 22, 1963.

Return to Nazareth

Jul9

“Such was the crucifixion of the Son of God. His faithlessness did this to him.”

A Course In Miracles, p. 421

Imagine a world where this might be true.

In the first place, being a country-born ideologue riding into the “Big City” on a white jackass to “learn them city boys some righteousness,” would always be contraindicated regardless of their obvious need for remediation. Mocking the power structure must always result in your untimely death at the hands of that power structure.

In the second place, lying to an entire civilization as to the nature and consequences of one of its pivotal, if manufactured, moments in time could have massively deleterious consequences.

My early tutelage in Catholicism taught me to not question authority, to always regard the Church as the “one truth” I could always count on to provide me the guidance any worthy human life could possibly require. If the solutions provided by church dogma did not provide me with the solutions, or relief, that a solution should, the problem was due to my as yet unreconciled defects of character. The Church was to be the pearl of great price in my life and conducting myself as if I believed otherwise must always result in being posthumously tormented for all eternity. Simple. Like all great solutions.

So, in addition to having a number of unresolved challenges waiting for me outside the doors and walls of various churches scattered across the country of my birth, I had the problem of hiding the fact, growing more obvious with each passing decade, that I was the Antichrist spoken of by John of Patmos in his Apocalypse. My blood boiled with unresolved rage, my life became awash in failed relationships and the world around me grew darker the more worldly “truth” I let come into my mind. Much was wrong within me and the more I tried to apply the solutions provided to me as a child, the worse things seemed to become. One would expect that the wicked should suffer so.

Quite naturally, a nice refreshing box of wine became one of my favorite escapes. Smoking some of the “sacred ganja” in combination became a daily lifestyle choice that lasted some ten years. But like most love affairs that burn hot enough to produce smoke, an inability in both acumen and desire to be a responsible motorist, or both, things ended rather poorly. Alcohol and ganja continue to work for others which is fine for them; I, however, have had my dance card unceremoniously punched out of existence. Time to go home, time for salvation, time to get down to causes and conditions wherever they might take me.

I am happy to report that my inflated opinion of myself regarding my ultimate identity was not true. Not entirely. It appears everyone around me is both christ and antichrist and how we choose to deal with this most confusing set of circumstances determines whether we live happily and usefully whole, or die according to some miserable bodily or mentally vanquishing upheaval. I believe I am on the mend, certainly in much better spiritual and physical condition than a person who began life on an unstable trajectory might deserve, but I am by no means completely free and clear of a formerly incessant desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Particularly in those circumstances where, like Jesus of Nazareth, I return to the Big City to mock the rich and well-heeled for the crime of maiming a large portion of my family tree, mostly before I was ever born. The Great Depression hit my mother’s side of the family tree especially hard.

The Catholics and Protestants of my youth, in many cases, would like to make the story of Jesus of Nazareth a tale about those who loved the spoken word of God made flesh, and those, “dirty Jews,” of the Sanhedrin, the Scribes and Pharisees. No doubt Jesus may have felt that way and may have “cleared the temple” for this very reason, but, according to A Course in Miracles, the problem that resulted in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth was his own inability to believe that every human being is equipped with a divine spark that makes salvation and “seeing the Light” possible in the first place. Jesus lost faith in the ultimate humanity of his fellows and took to insulting and mocking them at just the wrong moment in history. The story of the end of Jesus of Nazareth had nothing to do with “Jews v. Christians” at all, but rather rich versus poor. When one considers that for the majority of Christian history the only humans wealthy enough to own and operate a printing press might have had a vested interest in distorting the story of Jesus’ life and death, the scapegoating of more modern Jewry begins to take on a completely different hue. Especially if those Jews were also quite wealthy themselves as often becomes the case when slaves overthrow their masters and learn how to hold their former masters at bey.

And you thought being black, African, Egyptian or possessing more than a slight amount of melanin in your skin was cause for horror or concern. Yet genetically, it is not possible for two white humans to produce a dark-skinned child, yet it is quite possible for two dark-skinned humans to produce one that is very Caucasian in appearance. Click, click and click. Obviously a huge amount of human history has been lost to us over the centuries, which is sad, but one side benefit of getting one’s own story straight becomes an uncanny ability to sniff out bullshit from the collections of stories other humans tell about themselves and to start identifying and resolving similar patterns of denial, delusion and dishonesty.

My problem with the phenomenally wealthy is not so much that they are not human but that, like any human ceded that much authority over other humans, the slightest character flaw in them produces an enormous amount of suffering in those occupying the lower rungs of the social strata beneath them. The problem is not that human beings possess flaws so much as we are utilizing a system of social organization that magnifies the impact of human flaws on the lives of others. In time this condition will need to be adjusted so that compassion and mercy can be more evenly distributed throughout the human family. Merit may well strike in one person for a particular of time, but that good fortune seldom passes on to one’s progeny. Certainly the times where one is called to demonstrate their merit change such that what is required at one time may be more or less than what is required in another. A genetically oriented social hierarchy is not fluid enough to allow solutions to flow to the problems where they exist.

I continue to distrust, as do many, the religion that water-boarded a fear of drowning into my consciousness at the age of six months – the only memory I possess from that period in time. I continue to distrust any collection of humans hierarchically organized to manage the thinking, beliefs, money, property and/or prestige of any social collective – I do not believe that such trust is merited given both history and the known unknowns we can deduce from the lack of it in key areas of import. But most importantly, I am coming to realize that not every phenomenally wealthy human is a psychopath, nor is it entirely ill-conceived that merit be considered when deciding who deserves their station in society and who does not. My great sin in life has been that I did not possess the merit required, at the proper time, to bring down the psychopathic conspiracies of wealth under whose heel we all now suffer. I only hope that I can be of some service to those who hope to make our present conditions survivable, tenable and known to others for all time. We dare not repeat these same mistakes ever again.

Resurrection and the Sociopath

Apr24

Last year about this time I found myself steeped in a post-graduate rhetorical analysis of the front pages of the website Stormfront.org and two Patriot Movement sites.  The details of contemporary rhetorical analysis go beyond the mere study of words, so I won’t bore you.   But the “a-ha” moment I received at the end of my qualitative analysis is worth mentioning, at some point, in light of all the ballyhoo surrounding the latest remake of Ayn Rand’s last novel, Atlas Shrugged, and Rand’s many “contributions” to the neo-conservative movement of the post-industrial, post-modern United States of America.

First, I think that it is important, perhaps an epoché, to mention that I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead during my first attempt at an undergraduate Computer Science degree in 1982.  I found her writing rather dull but her less-than subtle attempt at providing an air of plausibility for the malignant narcissism of her character, Howard Roark, thought-provoking.  It allowed me to make some kind of sense out of the madhatter Libertarian prognosticators who began finding their way onto my high school campus several years prior.  I believe my love affair with the ideas of Libertarian Objectivism lasted about six months due in no small part to the massive quantities of alcohol, marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms I was consuming in a quest to understand the life that I later discovered I did not have.

Rand’s basic problem with altruism, and the phony characters who often people movements known for their well-publicized altruistic intent, was that it represents an unqualified evil to the human species.  When people, especially theologians and philosophers, start pulling out loaded words like “good” and “evil” to describe their pet theoretical constructs, it becomes very easy to get lost in the weeds of side-discussions long before a viable premise of their pet theory can be identified, described and critiqued.

But let’s indulge this tendency for a moment.  It is highly illustrative.

The heroes of Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and all of Rand’s novels, find their genesis in Rand’s notes and interviews with none other than child murderer William Edward Hickman.  Hickman, by most every psychological analysis of his behavior, was a sociopath of the psychopathic type.  To highlight the conscience-free, malignant narcissism of humanoids like Hickman, we have a description of the crime in the nineteen year old killer’s own words, a crime that resulted in his death, by hanging, in October of 1928.

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he continued, “and I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly. I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead. Well, after she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

And a description from a different newspaper account of what Hickman did next.

“Hickman packed her body, limbs and entrails into a car, and drove to the drop-off point to pick up his ransom; along his way he tossed out wrapped-up limbs and innards scattering them around Los Angeles. When he arrived at the meeting point, Hickman pulled Miriam’s [sic] head and torso out of a suitcase and propped her up, her torso wrapped tightly, to look like she was alive—he sewed wires into her eyelids to keep them open, so that she’d appear to be awake and alive. When Miriam’s father arrived, Hickman pointed a sawed-off shotgun at him, showed Miriam’s head with the eyes sewn open (it would have been hard to see for certain that she was dead), and then took the ransom money and sped away. As he sped away, he threw Miriam’s head and torso out of the car, and that’s when the father ran up and saw his daughter—and screamed.”

I bring this information to your attention, gentle reader, because most everything put forward by the neo-conservative movement since 1980 has been in service of the ideas espoused by Ayn Rand, pseudonym of Alisa Rosenbaum, a Soviet émigré and, yes, a Jew.  The debauched calumny against the great, unwashed masses who made Rand’s popularity even possible is evident in all the neo-conservative epithets directed at the poor and disadvantaged, all the anti-altruistic legislative agendas and all the malevolence of the nation’s bankers and investors against the “collectivists” who, “don’t get it” – it is all there in stark relief.

A world made safe for sociopaths and psychopaths like Rand’s hero, Hickman, and, arguably, Rand herself – this was the purpose and point of Rand’s “philosophy.”

I know it is a little late to be suggesting this, but, “Houston, we have a problem.”

Freakishly detached from human concerns though they may be, the psychopathic personality is a throw-back, a genetic anomaly and evidence of the continued presence of our ancestors, the dinosaurs, still demanding their day in the “evolutionary court of appeals.”  Their legal representative in this regard is none other than Ayn Rand herself, and the fact that these lizard-brained anomalies also have control of all the levers of governance and justice, species-wide, bears some mention.

Mercifully, Ayn Rand is dead and her legacy has been frozen solid in the minds of those closest to her.  These people knew Rand for what she was, good and bad, and their testimony is available for all to read and see.  Personally, I am neither surprised nor impressed by Rand’s legacy.  She died of lung cancer with only a hired nurse at her bedside, a fitting epitaph for an individual who both sucked the breathable oxygen out of nearly every room she ever walked into while also demanding the slavish devotion of admirers she neither admired nor appreciated.  Every other human being was just an object to Rand and objects have no purpose other than the one the “assigner” assigns to them.

Were it not for the fact that Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve from the Reagan Administration to nearly the present day, spent most of his lifetime locked in sadomasochistic “devotion” to his mentor, the life of this sociopath of the psychopathic type, Ayn Rand, would be pitiful and pathetic, rather than the force to be reckoned with that it has become.  Strange, is it not, how the alienation and isolation of profound mental illness drives these creatures together to re-experience the defining moment of mammalian evolution — the moment of “cooperation.”  The moment where two apparently separate and unequal entities came together to harmonize, legitimize and validate their devotion, however warped, to one another, causing a stir in the ethos of an entire civilization.  And, as we have already surmised, this has been a toxic stir, indeed.

Objectivist philosophy requires the presence of slaves and widespread exploitation in order for it to provide the fetid fruit that it has been able to provide thus far.  This is the same problem that all atheists come across as they dig deeply into their rival theistic paradigm.  Objectivism is parasitic and incapable of standing on its own.  If every living, breathing human were capable of adopting objectivism as a lifestyle, the world would become a battleground of bad neighborhoods as each warlord attempted to actualize his or her own will to power.  Sort of like it has become now, only worse.  Think Afghanistan in every subdivision and hamlet around the world.

This prejudice begs the question, however: can cooperative, mammalian-friendly civilization stand on its own without the benefit of the lethal pursuit of sociopaths of the psychopathic type?  Granted that we could certainly use less malignant narcissism at this time in our history, but could we sustain ourselves in a world completely devoid of fear and its exploitation?  Do we truly have more choices available to us than the current objectivist economic repression and the collectivist intellectual repression?

This might be a good time to mention that “a-ha” moment I came upon as I completed my qualitative analysis of the angry fascists, racists and xenophobes who provide the websites for Stormfront.org and the “minuteman” patriot movement.  All of these humanoids, and in fact all of us who regard ourselves in a relatively mundane, milktoast fashion with regard to ethnocentricity, are after just one communal peak experience.  Just one.

Utopia.

That’s it, folks.  Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die to this world we have manufactured together.  Everyone wants to be able to say to themselves of the people they meet on the street every day, “they’re just like me,” but no one wants to fully concede to their innermost selves that they could ever be as dysfunctionally warped as, say, a William Edward Hickman, or an Ayn Rand.  Everyone wants to see themselves in some sort of perfect light, but no one wants to completely release their belief in “sin,” whether they are atheists or theists.  And so we are trapped, imprisoned in the jailhouse of the human mind, completely incapable of loving one another and, by extension, ourselves.

We should strive to refuse to have our regard for each other, and our very selves, to be limited by the machinations of mental illness, neurological impairment or treatable psychological disorders.  No matter how widespread or how often these dysfunctions are taken as standard-operating procedure, we cannot continue to allow psychopaths, or the mentally ill, to dictate the quality of our very lives in any way at any time.  We do this every time we turn our backs on people like Ayn Rand or Alan Greenspan.  These pitiable creatures need to be identified and kept far away from the levers of power, lest the present circumstances be repeated.

On this Easter Sunday, pull a rabbit out of your proverbial hat and let your fellows be free to be as dysfunctional or functional as they are without the benefit of your secret need to pass judgment on who you think they are or what you believe it is that they do.  This is the Final Judgment any man or woman can ever make for themselves.

But do not mistake this foolhardy tendency to make dramatic every trivial or dopey aberration in human behavior for a trangression against the beating of your own heart.   Those we have regarded as “evil” or “outside humanness” should be seen only as infirmed.  This “turning of the cheek,” this “shift in perspective” to regard the despicable as only temporarily impaired is the one that opens the gateway to the Utopia we all seem to crave, but have never actually chosen to live in for long at all.