Regardless of which side of the gun debate you stand on, when
you talk about guns and the second amendment, you’re compelled to speak a
strange variation on English.
I’m not talking about the words in the amendment
itself. They’re actually quite
clear. In the context of a
well-regulated militia being the arbiter, whoever the militia decides deserving
will be permitted to “keep and bear” (not “own” – that perfectly good word did
not get used here) the arms in question.
The implication is equally clear: if that well-regulated militia decides
one of its members no longer deserves to keep and bear an arm – or if the well-regulated
militia goes and changes its own regulations out of concern for public safety –
then that’s within their Constitutional rights to do so.
No, I’m talking about how people talk about the gun debate
itself. It struck me this morning while
listening to a responsible legislator take a responsible position on guns. He pointed out that he was a gun owner who “believed
in the second amendment”. Never mind the
responsible position he had already taken.
In his mind, he still had to prove his bona fides to be taken seriously. Gun ownership – okay. It puts you in “both camps”. Can’t argue.
But the “I believe in the second amendment” is where
it gets weird.
I’m sure that same well-meaning legislator would insist he “believes”
equally in all the other amendments, too.
But, if engaged in casual conversation about, say the eighth amendment (“Excessive
bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed nor cruel and unusual
punishment inflicted”), I really, really doubt said well-meaning legislator
would feel compelled to throw in “And, by the way, I’m a believer in the right
to not have excessive bail throw at ya!”
See what I mean? I’ll
bet that’s never happened. Not with the
eighth, not with the sixth, not even with the Thirteenth Amendment – the one
abolishing slavery.
Whatever anyone might say about any of the other amendments,
no one says “I believe” in the amendment like it was some separate entity that
had to be approached differently from every other amendment. Which is exactly what the Second Amendment
is.
Of all the amendments to “believe in”. Of all the other freedoms to “believe in”. Of everything enumerated in the whole Constitution
to “believe in”.
Only thirty
percent of Americans own guns. So – right away, we’re talking from a
minority position. Now, I’m just asking a question here. I don’t have an answer. Just suspicions that
I hope you agree deserve suspicion. How
did a word we use to discuss religion become associated with a product designed
to kill living things?
The object we’re talking about – guns – regardless of
whether you like them or loathe them – are designed from the ground up to send
a hot, metal projectile flying toward a live target with the intention of
killing it. If the person pulling the trigger is any good with this weapon,
that projectile will find its mark and finish the job it was designed to do.
Yes, yes, defense and all that. Stone, cold reality says all those guns play
a hell of a lot more offense than defense.
Despite what anyone “believes”, people can’t seem to resist using guns
to do what they were made to do: kill.
Like I said – I’m just here to ask a question. Isn’t “killing” a strange thing to “believe
in”?
It’s the movie buff in me. I see classic movies playing out
in real life all the time. It struck me
this morning that we’re staring at a perverse version of Babes In Arms,
the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney-MGM collaboration that gave us “Hey, Let’s Put
On A Show!”
Here – sample this…
See what I mean? Isn’t
it awesome how Judy & Mickey get the kids together, they “borrow” some
instruments and, using the Old Barn, they put on a damned show!
That’s exactly the movie we’re living through – except the
Trumpified version. It turns out, as the
depth and breadth of the Trump-Russia Conspiracy begins to assume real shape
and dimension, that this is a conspiracy in every sense of the word.
These are the players (some of them) and their “plays”…
Think of stolen data as a stolen bike. Everyone who
knowingly touches it, moves it, transports it, sells it or covers up its theft
is guilty of a crime. Just as a bike must
be physically transported from point A to point B, so too does stolen information. If it can’t be endlessly viewed where it is,
it has to be copied & that copy moved to someplace “safe” where it can be
viewed (by those not meant to view it remember). The criminals must transport their stolen
goods in order to benefit from them.
In the case of stolen data, the benefit would only come once
that information was transported out of the country to Russia – where the GRU
(Russian military intelligence) was tasked with analyzing the data then weaponizing
it and turning it back on America and – most importantly – individual Americans. The Russians (with Cambridge Analytica’s
help) had created a way to turn stolen voter data into fear-directed Facebook
ads that would appear right on an individual voter’s Facebook page – stoking fears
about, say, racism among Democrats that “could” induce an ambivalent African
American voter to stay home on election day rather than go out and vote for
Hillary.
Betsy DeVos provided the pipeline. Hey, Betsy — Lets put on a show!
ERIK PRINCE – Erik is Betsy DeVos’ brother so, already, ya know he’s corrupt. Erik founded a company called Blackwater that won big service contracts in the Iraq War theater – making them millions of dollars while they formed a private army for the benefit of their benefactors and electrocuted American service people when they showered (in Iraq) cos why not add incompetence to your resume of corruption?
WILBUR ROSS – Known as “Trump’s MOST corrupt cabinet appointee (and that’s including Ryan Zinke FFS!) had lots of corrupt dealings with Russians and their laundered money while holding a board seat at the Bank of Cypress – a place where the banking laws encourage money laundering & money launderers like Wilbur Ross.
Lots of Russian money needed to be laundered then donated to every Republican on the ticket.
Hey, Wilbur – Let’s put on a show!
PAUL MANAFORT – Gosh, GOP, why let Paul Manafort (a guy you all knew was dirtier than dirty) with Russian connections so deep he farts in Russian run your presidential nominee’s campaign. Paul had one change – ONE – to your whole freakin’ platform: Support for Ukraine and sanctions. No one “wondered” what that was all about? Perhaps no one NEEDED to wonder because you already knew.
Then there’s Mike Pence.
Paul brought Mike to the dance.
We have to ask “WHY?” Of all the
gin joints in all the world, why did Paul invite Mike into his?
Remember (it’s important) – Paul wasn’t running an honest
campaign. He was running a dirty
one. He was trying to leverage his role
as Trump’s campaign chief into forgiveness for $17 MILLION worth of debt to Oleg
Deripaska, former client & a Russian oligarch not known for his largess or forgiveness
(especially of massive debt which, also remember, Deripaska believed Manafort
was trying to skip out on). Paul was
running a very criminal enterprise.
So, ask yourself, why would a criminal want a boy scout as
Veep? Why would a criminal position a
cop right where the criminal needed to go?
Paul didn’t want anyone blowing the whistle on him – we’re all clear on
that, right? Paul wanted – NEEDED – a veep
who HE KNEW FOR A FACT was compliant and trustworthy enough to keep their big
secret SECRET: Russia was running the show.
Last point about Paul. He wasn’t flying solo. He wasn’t a lucky conman who’d figured out a
way to save his ass (and save his family – for now – from a brutal end). Paul knew that Trump was dirty and Trump knew
that Paul was dirty. Remember – no one
can put their cards on the table because then everyone would see those cards
spell treason. Though these criminals
surround themselves with other criminals, they’re entering a system with checks
and balances bent on stopping people like them.
That’s where BILL BARR fits in. Hey, Paul – Let’s put on a show!
MIKE PENCE — Mike is a sanctimonious fraud so unloved by the people of Indiana that compromising what was left of his soul to sell out to Trump and Russia was a no brainer. Mike had nowhere else to go except total corruption.
Mike’s an opportunistic con man adept at speaking
preacher-ese to the yokels who salivate like Pavolv’s dog when they hear
it. These soulless cretins wouldn’t know
Jesus if they stopped mid-way through nailing Jesus to a cross to spit in his
eye.
I betcha Paul Manafort knew lots about Mike Pence and his
deep, dark secrets. Let’s be honest –
Mike Pence’s relationship with women – and his wife – is bizarre. It’s beyond unhealthy, it’s fraudulent. Karen Pence’s nickname shouldn’t be “Mother”,
it should be “Beard”.
I wonder… when Mike eventually goes away for Life, will “Mother” change her nickname to “Available”?
STEVE BANNON – Steve’s the guru of darkness (while Stephen Miller is merely its court jester). Steve’s religious faith runs deep. His ooga-booga is better than your ooga-booga – that’s the basis for everything Steve believes. He’s so determined to save the world from YOUR ooga-booga in fact that he’s willing to torpedo the greatest experiment in human self government ever.
Steve has never stopped being philosophically connected the
Trump’s ultimate purpose – destruction of America as a Democratic Republic. Well,
to be fair, that’s not Trump’s ultimate purpose (he couldn’t give a shit – he just
wants to be richer than he already supposedly is), it’s Vladimir Putin’s.
And let’s be real – this is mostly Putin’s deal. The Saudi’s, the Chinese, the Israelis and Erdogan may be trying to horn in on it but they’re strictly back seat passengers. Putin’s joe sits in the Oval Office.
Hey, Steve — Let’s put on a show!
THE NRA – Conspiracies cannot live by bad intent alone. They need money, too, because traitors are notoriously greedy. Money always comes with strings. Don’t do what the strings want? Forget about the money. Back in the day, the NRA was primarily a gun safety organization.
Then the gun manufacturers took over. Gun sales became the point of the
exercise. The gun lobby rewrote the
second amendment in its own image and used the NRA to sell it. A gun control
amendment became an amendment justifying mass murder because how dare you come
for our guns? Putin saw a golden opening
and took it. The more guns in American
hands, the more gun violence there would be.
The more Putin pushed the “more guns more places” meme, the more divided
he could make America seem. Hell, using
the NRA, Putin has managed to create situations where stores have to beg their
customers NOT to come armed to the teeth.
That’s not normal, people. That’s screwed up.
As we’ve learned – Russia sent a very skilled agent named
Maria Butina to play the NRA. She made
the NRA a useful conduit for Russian money.
It wasn’t Russia contributing (illegally) to all those Republican
campaigns all around the country, it was THE NRA. Get it?
Russia stays within the letter of the law while raping its
spirit senseless.
Hey, NRA – Let’s put on a show!
ROGER STONE – conduit & con man. Connoisseur and creep. The man so dedicated to Richard Nixon, he got a tattoo of Nixon on his back. Former business partner of Paul Manafort and Lee Atwater (who personally started the Culture & Political War that the Right (un)declared on the Left. Roger via the weasels immediately around him (Jerome Corsi, Sam Nunberg, Randy Credico) was the conduit between Wikileaks and the Trump campaign.
Hey, Roger, let’s put on a show!
WIKILEAKS – That we EVER thought Julian Assange was a hero is a testament to our own collective failure of imagination. A guy accused of sexual assault should instantly get our collective attention. Yes, yes – we need to hear the whole story and all – but honest people face their accusers. Weasels weasel out and stink up foreign embassies.
Hey, Julian — Let’s put on a show!
THE MERCERS & CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA – Again – pipelines. But also the design. Robert Mercer’s a brilliant computer guy with a twisted political vision that’s tied to even more twisted Dominionist religious tripe. What could possibly go wrong? Rebekka is just as nuts but a little less on the spectrum. That’s what makes her dangerous.
Cambridge took a “benign” product meant to profile potential terrorists and turned it on America – using its powerful insights to gin up right wing conspiracy theorists while helping to carry out a crime – the total undermining of the United States Constitution.
Hey, Mercer’s — Let’s put on a show!
BILL BARR — Having saved the Republican Party once from the punishment it deserved (Iran-Contra) b making the crime go away & the evidence disappear, Bill Barr was perfectly positioned to be Donald Trump & the GOP’s ultimate Bag Man. So far, he’s LIED about the Mueller Report. Lied about the Whistleblower. Lied about Ukraine. Tried to seduce other governments into helping Trump in 2020. It’s all in a day’s work for Bill.
Hey, Bill — let’s put on a show!
MITCH MCCONNELL — I’ve spent plenty of time on Mitch here. Mitch is a traitor but he started his life as a mere culture warrior. Apparently Mitch loves it when people walk right up to his turtle face and scream “SODOMY” at the top of their lungs.
It brings back memories of his time in the military apparently. You’ll have to ask Mitch. Better yet — scream “SODOMY” in Moscow Mitch’s face at the top of your lungs.
Hey, Mitch — Let’s put on a show!
Vladimir Putin – For a guy running a shitty country with a
shitty economy and a shitty future, he’s done very well for himself.
It’s not a mystery what any self-proclaimed “conservative”
wants. As their name says, they want to “conserve”. The question – what do they
want to conserve?
You can take “the future” right off the table. You can’t conserve what doesn’t exist.
Not only do Conservatives not want to “conserve” the future, they’d like to avoid it altogether if they can. They don’t want to know about it and they don’t want to think about it. They definitely don’t want to prepare themselves for it – because then they’d have to think about it. And if they had to think about the future, they’d have to change.
And THAT ain’t happening.
Progressives – for comparison’s sake – want to “progress” – just as their name says. Considering as you can’t “progress” into the past (that would be “regress), Progressives not only think about the future, they actively pursue strategies to deal with it. But, I digress…
Conservatives have no interest in the future. Their interest in the present is as a bulwark
against the future. Whatever change has
already occurred – their first choice is to roll it back if they can. If circumstances make that too complicated,
conservatives are willing to cut their losses and move on. But wherever progress has made inroads,
conservatives see a long-term project.
Whether it’s abortion, immigration or LGBTQ rights, though conservatives
may act as if they’ve accepted reality, they will continue to plot against
it.
So – if Conservatives can’t conserve the future and
grudgingly conserve the present, that must mean what they REALLY want to “conserve”
is THE PAST.
And THAT is the crux of the matter. What Conservatives want to conserve is what
was. Not necessarily what REALLY was,
but how they imagine “it was”. Keep in
mind – these are all White, Christian Men (mostly) that we’re talking about. The “then” they so desperately want to
conserve is a “then” where THEY had all the power & money. The “then” Conservatives want to conserve is
a time when THEY had total cultural and political hegemony.
The 1950’s were nicer and all but the time frame American
Conservatives really have in mind is the 1850’s – antebellum America when
everyone not European White knew their place.
If you sat most American Conservatives down on Tara’s front
porch, had Prissy fanning the sweat from their brow while Mammy put a cool mint
julep in their hand, those Conservatives would feel right at home. They’d wonder why anyone would want to change
this. And then they’d put their feet up.
Every time a journalist on the TV frames the chaos we’re living through from Donald Trump’s point of view, I want to scream. And I often do.
If you ask a liar if he’s lying and the liar lies (says “no, I’m not lying”), are you doing anyone any favors by telling their story without framing the liar as a liar first? By not framing the story as a liar probably lying, you’re telling the story of an honest person doing honest things and speaking truthfully. If that’s not the truth, what the hell are you doing telling this story — if not deliberately retelling a lie?
James Bond movies are always written, produced & told from James Bond’s point of view — that is, that James Bond is the hero doing heroic things for our collective benefit. He’s saving the world from guys like Ernst Stavro Blofeld. But, if we told a James Bond story from every point of view, including Blofeld’s, we’d have to justify Blofeld if only to himself.
No one ever does anything for “no reason” or “just because’. Even if a person (or character) can’t articulate what motivates them to action, there’s something inside motivating them. Ironically, for all his appearances across multiple Bond movies, neither Ian Fleming (Bond’s creator) nor any of the filmmakers who’ve adapted Fleming’s work to the screen have bothered to dive deeply into what makes Blofeld tick.
It’s pure greed or megalomania, take your pick. No idea what his parents were like (was Ernst born this way or was his environment and upbringing to blame?) With Donald Trump, for instance, we can point to horrible genetics, clinical narcissism and deplorable parenting. With Blofeld? All we know is he woke up one day wanting to rule the world never mind all the headaches it might cause.
On the one hand, I think a Bond movie told from Blofeld’s point of view is extremely appealing — but only because I really want to know what makes a character like Blofeld tick. Are Bloefeld’s born or made?
But that would be a Blofeld movie, not a Bond movie.
We live in a Bond movie, not a Blofeld movie. Telling us how Blofeld thinks is interesting but not if you’re telling us at the same time that how Blofeld thinks is valid. It’s not. It can’t be — because Blofeld having his way and Bond World surviving intact are mutually exclusive propositions.
A story told from Bloefeld’s point of view would justify Blofeld. It would explain him — not as the villain of the Bond Story but as the hero of the Blofeld story. From Blofeld’s point of view, he’s completely justified doing what he’s doing. Keep in mind — he never just shows up as the guy with all that Dark Power, he’s worked his way there.
He’s found the money to pay for his evil empire. No one’s working for free, right? Working in remote locations where no one can snoop on you? You still have to feed, house, clothe your work force. And they all have families, you know? What about them? Does Blofeld, Inc offer competitive salaries and benefit packages? What’s their healthcare plan like?
Every time a Stephanie Ruhl asks a “But, what if…” question that supposes Trump might not be lying this time, it stops framing the story from the point of view of reality and frames it instead from bullshit’s point of view — as if bullshit were true. It’s not. Never was, never will be. If the Trumpanistas believe the bullshit, they’re delusional — that’s the story. If the Trumpanistas don’t believe the bullshit but want to shove it down our throats anyway, they’re liars and rapists.
Why would any responsible journalist frame any story from an untrue point of view? Nothing good can come of it. Dialogue from a James Bond movie comes to mind. James Bond is tied down to a metal table. A laser is moving slowly toward his family jewels — the laser will sear them good and proper before burning a line all the way up to Bond’s forehead.
“I expect you want me to talk,” says Bond.
“No, Mister Bond,” laughs Goldfinger, “I expect you to die.”
If we saw the movie from Goldfinger’s point of view? We’d be cheering for the laser.
Lack of perspective kills.
A swimmer who sees only the immediate water around them – lovely and
turquoise – but not the school of hungry sharks circling that lovely bit of
turquoise? That swimmer is chum.
Religionistas will insist that their deity wants them to live according to the rules set down by ignorant (by our standards) iron age desert dwellers because everything anyone needed to know was “known” and set down in the texts those iron age desert dwellers produced. But, what if those iron age desert dwellers, before they sat down to write, had had access to all the information we take for granted today?
What if those scribes had known that microbes and pathogens cause most human diseases? What if they knew what RNA and DNA are? What if they had a Hubble Space Telescope and every bit of its remarkable data flow to chew on? Would they have written texts that killed people with magical plagues or put the earth at the center of everything?
If the men who wrote the OT had read Darwin or Stephen
Hawking, if they had taken in a geology text book or a scientific paper on
genetics, if they had ever gotten a chance to use the internet – would they
have sat down and written the texts they wrote the exact same way?
Doubtful.
The people who wrote, edited and put together the canonical
New Testament used significant portions of the old texts as the basis for their
new texts. The mythology Paul created
leaned heavily on the Pentateuch. The whole
basis for original sin is Eve and the Garden of Eden. If the men who wrote the originals never
wrote those originals – because they were better informed about how the world
really worked – the course of human history would have been radically
different.
We may not have been any less self-destructive (homo sapiens are still homo sapiens) but at least we would have been denied that particular flavor of bullshit to use as an excuse.
So – if the people who wrote the religious texts so many Americans say they rely on as the basis for their lives had been just a teensy bit more educated via access to modern technologies – had they been able to “pull the lens back” even a little — human history would have been spared the chaotic, illogical darkness that certain religions have repeatedly inflicted upon humanity.
By the same token — if our Main Stream News Media were able to find the widest possible lens they can find, they might finally be able to tell the story we’re all living through. Nearly three years in to this nonsense, there are STILL reporters (like NBC News’ well-meaning but hopelessly feckless Kelly O’Donnell) who repeat back Donald Trump’s words as if he spoke gospel truth. It never occurs to them to contextualize Trump by saying – before repeating his words – that nothing he says is reliable.
They don’t. They position their reporting lens inside Trump’s bubble – where bullshit is true just because Trump says so. They report from inside the lie with the lie as their only apparent frame of reference. Either they genuinely believe the lie is true or they lack the perspective to see and report the relationship between lie and truth. Either way, they render themselves useless to We The People just when we need them most.
At the end of the day, when the smoke can finally clear and we see this story with whatever perspective we can before our generation literally dies off (and real perspective finally has a chance to flower), I bet we’ll post mortem the press this way: they failed on two major counts. First – Lack Of Perspective. Too often, our press has turned a laser focus on a piece of the larger story. While their focus was admirable, the fact that they lost perspective while focusing in so intently was not. For all the detail a guy like NBC’s Steve Kornacki can tell you about how voters vote, he never places them in the context of their times.
We have never lived through what we’re living through
now. We have never had elections stolen
by foreign countries before (at least not that we’re aware of). We have never experienced one party tossing
out the Rule Of Law in a desperate grab for permanent minority rule. When these things happen, it kinda changes
things. It’s like someone shitting in
the pool. Is swimming in it – with turds
bobbing around – the same experience?
No, Steve Kornacki, it is not. Steve epitomizes this sort of “intense focus”
journalism. He can tell you everything
you want to know about a particular grain of sand. Ask him where the grain of sand IS – on a
beach? In the middle of the Sahara? In some kid’s sand box in a suburb somewhere?
Steve has no idea.
That’s a problem where storytelling is concerned.
Second – Failure Of Imagination. It’s directly related to the first problem –
lack of perspective. It’s kinda the “ouch”
to lack of perspective’s “pinch”. If you
can’t really see what the problem (or the story) is, you can’t possibly solve
it (or report it accurately).
What happens when we pull back the lens on most of our Main
Stream News Media is we see that they’re failing us – failing their
Constitutionally mandated role as final check on power. I suggest we keep the lens back here. Their close up is really, really ugly.
No revelation here: It is way, WAY easier to sell Americans
bullshit than it is to take that bullshit away from them once they’ve acquired
a taste for it.
H L Mencken got it right: no one ever went broke underestimating
the intelligence or taste of the American public. Maybe our problem is
Americans (conservative ones especially) have a religious bent that distorts
their thinking right out of the gate.
For reference’s sake, consider how insidious religion is –
and how (and when) the religious begin shoving their religion down young
throats and into young minds. The point of the exercise is to undermine any
capacity for analytical thought. Accept
what we tell you as truth. Nothing else
matters.
Did a sky god really have unprotected sex with a teenage
human virgin to produce a hybrid man-god put here to die for human sins tracing
back to a supposed first woman who ate a piece of forbidden fruit at the behest
of a talking snake? That’s a soupcon of
the bullshit you have to accept to be a fully practicing Christian (in the eyes
of fully practicing Christians). Proof
that you’re “faithful” is that you will willingly spit all this nonsense back
as required – and then insist that you use it every day as the basis for ALL
your “thinking”.
There are people among us who start their day accepting that
great buckets of bullshit are true – and then they start making decisions based
on it. It’s not unlike being captain of
the Titanic, seeing that you’ve hit an iceberg, but pressing on nonetheless for
New York as if nothing had happened. Most bullshit is denial of what is.
These people accept lies as truth – as their starting point.
Selling more lies to people happy to buy lies is easy. That is what Donald Trump & the
Republican Party is really good at. They
know their base are rabid Magical Thinkers to whom Trump is a business genius
simply because he says he is – and the word of a liar is good enough for
them.
We (our Main Stream News Media) began to normalize Trumpian
bullshit in earnest the instant they stopped challenging Trump on his “Mexicans
are rapists” pronouncement. The instant
that stopped, Trump succeeded in normalizing his racism. “Mexicans are rapists” was no longer cause
for his campaign to end. Racism was now “just
how Trump is”.
There is no safe amount of bullshit. All bullshit has the potential to kill you –
even the incidental bullshit we all live with every day (“Five more minutes of
sleep won’t make me that late…”) can build up like plaque in a vein.
And just like plaque in a vein, that first bad cholesterol lipid
that sticks to the vein wall is a problem – because a second bad cholesterol lipid
will stick easily to the first lipid.
Blockage – and potential death – is just a matter of time and more lipids.
Never mind the exhaustion.
Either we fight back or we start looking over out shoulders. The end could come at any moment
otherwise. And that end does not have to
be.
That end cannot be.
Let’s start fighting back one lie at a time. Let’s start by calling them
all out – screw anyone who has a problem with it. They’re gulag bound anyway.
Cut to the end of the chase: even the smartest people you know have a taste for bullshit – their own.
We all believe things that – if we actually had to back them up – we’d realize how silly we were for saying such things out loud (never mind actually believing them). We might even realize our problem’s much worse: bullshit has taken over most of our lives.
That ain’t bullshit.
I was watching the football club I follow – Tottenham Hotspur
– play horribly again this morning. With
ten minutes to go, they were down 3-0 to a team they should have thumped. Spurs lost earlier this week 7-2 to Bayern
Munich in the Champion’s League. With
ten minutes to go – and defeat a dead certainty (in a week we’d been outscored
10-2 FFS!), I still experienced a moment where I thought “Hey, we’re Spurs, we
can still do this!”
No, we couldn’t – and we didn’t. We couldn’t get the ball past midfield. We’re in a mental freefall as a team. That’s the Truth. It’s bullshit to think Spurs can win anything
right now.
But, for a moment, I tried to convince myself that they
could. I tried to bullshit myself and I
succeeded.
Bullshit is Hope’s evil twin. Just as Hope is aspirationally positive,
Bullshit is aspirationally negative. It’s
a lie easily thrown together, easily tossed off and easily forgotten –
especially when new bullshit is created to replace the old. It’s the sausage factory from the seventh
ring of hell.
And yet, damned if Bullshit Brand Sausage doesn’t sell.
For a lot of us, the addiction to bullshit starts early – with our “religiouseducation”. That’s a non sequitur. You can learn about religion, but to be educated IN a religion is to be fed a diet of pure, unadulterated bullshit. Religion, mind you, is entirely different from spirituality.
Spirituality is the ineffable essence of the awe any human
feels as they gaze up at the cosmos and tries to see how they fit with it. With the pure fact of “being”.
Religion is rules & regs. It’s crowd control. It’s the perverse corporatization of
spirituality: an institution invents a “way” to spirituality – through them,
through following their rules. Followers
may flirt with spiritual experience but it’s always within the context of the
religion’s rules. Any spiritual
experience outside those rules? It’s
heresy. You’re allowed the church’s
definition of “spiritual” and not your own.
Funny irony? Jesus
himself preached AGAINST having a church.
He taught his followers to speak directly to god. No need for the Temple, its authorities or
priests.
And no need to tithe any church either. Just “Do Unto Others”. It’s that simple.
How many American Christians “do unto others”? Not many (relatively speaking). Most are “church-goers”. They’re not followers of Jesus. They’re in it for the “exclusivity”, the clubiness.
They like the mythology, too. They like
the magic behind it because the magic says they’ll never die.
Magic is sparkly bullshit. It’s no more real just because it glitters a little.
The Truth is we’re all going to die. There’s no escaping it. There’s no proof of
any afterlife. None. To insist that one
might exist is simply magic forcing itself upon you.
It’s me thinking Spurs could come back from three-nothing
with minutes left when all the evidence said they were already in the locker
room, their heads hung low.
