F*** the USA

It seems so long ago I was what a modern ‘red’-blooded American would consider a patriot. When I joined the army when I was 18 (and for the better half of my military career) I was a Republican, I believed in the rule of law, I believed in the country’s elected officials, and I believed that – all things considered – the United States was a country every other country should be looking up to because her citizens warranted that respect. Three decades later, I could not have been more wrong. While I have figuratively renounced my U.S. citizenship years ago, this morning’s news item finally caused me to spit, “Fuck the USA.”

Various news agencies reported that the owner of a Massachusetts ice cream parlor decided to close his door one day after re-opening during the current pandemic due to the harassment of his employees because…because people had to wait in line to get ice cream. (Please read that again, pause, and let it sink in.) Apparently his best employee quit at the end of her shift due to the harassment. It is absolutely unbelievable that this happened because, again, ICE CREAM was at stake. Although the operation basically returned to ‘normal’ soon thereafter, what with a renewed emphasis on safety and ordering procedures, it cannot be dismissed that people simply forgot their manners after weeks of being in quarantine.

It’s a common criticism by the alt-right that the alt-left hates America and I dare say the alt-right is not totally incorrect. But the alt-left also has a point insofar is that a love of the U.S. is simply not warranted and in fact perhaps should be hated. Donald Trump’s favorite saying ‘Make America Great Again’ really gives a thinking person a moment’s pause as it is not known exactly when America was so great. (Perhaps briefly upon entering WWII?) While many of you reading this right now may think ‘hate’ is a bridge too far, let us not forget the very recent history in which a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, was peacefully jogging until he was hunted down by apparent white supremists and shot to death, and then his assailants went free for two months until a video of the incident surfaced. To be certain, the assailants were not arrested because Georgia law enforcement saw the video but because the rest of the country saw the video. So is this the ‘great America’ the current U.S. president thinks the country should be? If it seems like I’m digressing, I’m not.

The Polar Cave Ice Cream parlor incident is indicative of almost everything that is wrong with the U.S. (By the way, this happened on the same weekend a group of white men carrying large-caliber weapons went to a Subway sandwich shop in North Carolina in an apparent attempt to protest lockdown orders.) Because Americans are not particularly well known for their intelligence, I will briefly enumerate what makes the U.S. such a terrible place to be these days (assuming you’re a non-white, unarmed, non-male person, though, the alt-left is certainly not without problems given their philosophy).

·       The Polar Cave Ice Cream parlor incident reveals the utter entitlement Americans feel they have to everything they want and to have it immediately. (Surprisingly, Americans haven’t yet stormed Amazon warehouses because they have to wait two whole days for their Prime shipments to arrive.) Americans feel so entitled to everything – including ice cream – that to too many people it was acceptable to harass ice cream shop employees for having to wait too long (a few minutes?) with language that would embarrass a sailor. Americans feel so entitled to what they want that involuntarily celibate men think it’s okay to shoot up college campuses because they shouldn’t have to do anything to get laid. And naturally Americans feel entitled to the guns they use in such incidents because they are part of a well-regulated militia. FFS, these days, Americans even feel entitled to their own facts. And when Americans don’t get their way, the play the victim card.

·       Being entitled to their own facts demonstrates America’s now nearly complete war on intellectualism short of killing university professors. A friend recently posted a blog (here) on the intellectual dishonestly so often associated with memes that is, of course, so completely on point we should be thankful Americans are able to communicate through posting memes at all and not still smashing rocks together to make crude music. Can a country that made the Kardashians, creationists, and flat-earthers famous and can’t answer basic questions about how their government works but is somehow mind-controlling them really be considered great? The U.S. is a country whose citizens can’t be asked to wear a facemask for a few months for everyone’s protection. It’s not like these people are being asked to go off to war to fight Nazi’s – which they wouldn’t do now anyway – or suffer a famine ala The Great Depression or stop taking selfies. The U.S. is a country that elected a president that cannot maintain a train of thought for more than two minutes, which no one should have sought to do because most people should not be electing people like themselves to high office seeing how unqualified the average American is for such a task. Exerting power by fiat has never worked out well for anyone, but the average American has no idea what I mean when I say that anyway. America is the same country whose Republicans foam at the mouth when the word ‘socialism’ is spoken but gladly took their pandemic stimulus checks and think big businesses and farmers deserve government bailouts.

·       Anti-intellectualism and racism go hand-in-hand, so it’s no surprise that hate crimes increased dramatically after Trump took over the U.S. presidency. True, it’s not like many white Americans weren’t already racist, it’s just that the person they elected to high office emboldened them to act on that racism. While we probably didn’t have too many incidents during the

Obama Administration in which the police were called on a black cop searching for evidence in between houses, but today it’s basically the norm. White people are so willfully oblivious to what black people go through, they dare not take a moment to figure out what Black Lives Matters really means. Does that sound ‘great’ to you? America is simply an evil place for allowing racism to go unaddressed and unfettered. It is an evil place for what happened at the ice cream parlor. If Americans cannot get over the frustration of not having ice cream in a ‘timely’ fashion, then how are they great?

·       America no longer appears to adhere to any rule of law. Just this past week, the Trump Administration’s DOJ dropped charges against former national security advisor Michael Flynn, a man who admitted to lying under oath twice. There are various reasons for this which have nothing to do with Flynn being an honorable man, but as it is for many in the Trump administration, being legally accountable is laughable. (Yes, Bill Clinton lied under oath, too, but at least he paid for it.) Meanwhile, President Trump has routinely said he is above the law as president…which would mean all the crimes he’s accused Obama of committing in office are irrelevant. Meanwhile, white men are walking into capitol buildings and sandwich shops with guns in an attempt to intimidate elected officials, but they are not charged with domestic terrorism because white. Meanwhile, in the 1960’s the Black Panthers were charged with domestic terrorism for doing exactly this. Meanwhile, a white salon owner in Texas openly defies a court order and judge and is hailed a s hero while the people hailing her as a hero keep telling black people that they wouldn’t get shot if they just did what they are told by law enforcement. What officials in high office and white people get away with, to say nothing of corporations, is reprehensible, to be polite.

·       Not surprisingly, the current pandemic has exposed the weaknesses of capitalism, that weakness being that it cannot survive something like a pandemic without the aid of socialism as I mentioned earlier. The strange thing is, not even liberals are questioning the fundamentals of capitalism. I expect such a thing of Republicans, but not Democrats. Even Bernie Sanders is mostly silent about the recent turn of events. I’ll say that capitalism may be the best monetary philosophy going, but that is not the same as saying it’s good at all.

·       For those of you who have forgotten, the U.S. consistently lags behind other Western and some Asian countries in math, science, and reading. You don’t see the Trump Administration doing anything to rectify that situation. No, instead Trump installs a completely unqualified person (because that’s what he does with his cabinet) to head the DOE because she’s a campaign donor with a vested interest in college students repaying their student loans. No, trump doesn’t see to it that Americans get an education because that would disrupt his base, that being uneducated citizens. As we’ve seen from China, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries, an educated population is in a country’s best interest. That simply cannot be allowed in a country held hostage by mega-corporations, though.

So we’re left trying to figure out when the U.S. was great and deserving of being loved. Was it when it institutionalized slavery and even fought a civil war to preserve it? Was it during Prohibition when the government was poisoning beer so it could use the dead as propaganda? Was it during the Trail of Tears? Was it during the McCarthy era? Was it when it dropped TWO nuclear bombs on Japan? Was it during the Tuskegee Experiment? Was it during the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam? Was it when it lied its way into invading Iraq post-9/11? Was it when the wholesale spying on Americans by the NSA was greenlit? Was it when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were people or ruled that super-PAC money didn’t have to be transparent anymore? Was it when the employee of an ice cream parlor quit her job because of the harassment she received because people couldn’t get their ice cream on demand?

It might be argued that many countries behave reprehensibly but this means nothing more than the U.S. being a country no better than any other. Yes, the U.S. may have a higher standard of living and all the money and goods it could ever want (gotta have the latest iPhone!), but U.S. citizens seem to equate these enviable qualities with some kind of moral high ground. That is how stupid Americans are. That’s how undeserving of America’s status it is.

Is it really such a big deal to be an American, to live in the USA.? Not when your job at an ice cream parlor entails threats to your life. Not when it’s more important to re-start the economy than to save people’s lives. Not when Americans are too stupid to see that capitalism cannot survive without socialism. Not when a black man cannot go jogging without being hunted down by Trump supporters. Not when the alt-left has ruined any sense of fairness on college campuses (they’ve turned out to be almost as bad as their alt-right counterparts). Not when you’re considered a lower form of life because your credit score is terrible.

The next time you see someone post “We’re better than this” on social media in response to the next example of human depravity, please remind them that the U.S. is not and never has been. Given history, both past and present, you might even want to say to them, “Fuck the U.S.A.” I sure do.

On Villains and Villainy

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” – Gerald Seymour in Harry’s Game

When I first heard the Joker movie with Jaoquin Phoenix was being made, I admit I was disturbed in the slightest. Critics of pop culture have long criticized what has seemed like a gradual and unnecessary decent into what seems like an anything-goes mentality for entertainment’s sake. The inundation of sex, drugs, and violence in pop culture appears to be on one hand merely for the sake of titillation yet on the other hand a reflection of the Western world’s dark underbelly it seems the average citizen doesn’t want to concede exists nor accept their explicit or implicit role in.* It is, however, the glorification of the villain that has troubled me the most when it comes to pop culture. I can name countless movies, not to mention countless musical artists, whose villains and villainy outshine their protagonists.

[Perhaps the same can be said for the world at large.]

To be clear, I prefer my villains to be complicated, for their motivations to be more than evil simply because that’s who the villain cannot help being. Certainly, the new Joker movie is a reflective character analysis in this regard. Even the long string of Marvel movies were part of a story arc that centered around stopping a ‘mad’ Titan, Thanos, from wiping out half the life in the universe. His murderous methods aside – which we assume are wrong – it’s difficult to say what’s wrong with Thanos’ motivations for those of you who are aware of them. I think it’s fair to want interesting villains – the world is not black-and-white after all – but we’ve reached the point where in America’s culture at least, we’re literally rooting for the bad guy.

Case in point; at last night’s WWE’s Hell In A Cell Pay-per-View (I apologize for still keeping tabs on professional wrestling at my age), a character called The Fiend did not win the championship match and fans in the audience were audibly upset. This Fiend character is very popular among the internet wrestling community to the point that fans would rather see him crowned champion than have a face (good guy) retain the gold. I agree that the character is interesting and that the heel (bad guy) needs to win on occasion to maintain the delicate and eternal dance between good and evil alive for the sake of storytelling, but for a crowd to nearly riot when the heel doesn’t win indicates something is possibly wrong with either the Western psyche, the current rules of society, or perhaps a matter of definitions. (It is possibly all of these.) I can point to actual current events to make my case.

The election of Donald Trump to President of the United States in 2016 couldn’t make my point clearer, being of the opinion that Donald Trump is clearly a villain. Why; what has he done that is so wrong? I could name a number of things and not be nearly exhaustive: Asking foreign powers to interfere in U.S. elections, accepting the word of despots over his own intelligence community, cavorting with said same despots, backing out of treaties with traditional allies and treating them with contempt, rolling back environmental and civil protections, coddling white supremists and stoking xenophobia, ignoring the U.S. Constitution (this is perhaps because he’s clearly never read it), embezzling from his charities, doing nothing about gun violence, and generally acting like a third-grade schoolyard bully. While I understand the frustration of many modern American voters with the federal government, I was aghast to find out a large swath of the U.S. thought Donald Trump was the answer. In my opinion, I can’t say Donald Trump has never done any good as U.S. president – even a broken clock is right twice a day by accident – but does the good outweigh the bad? No, because all things considered, the person in question wouldn’t be a villain. Inevitably, then, we’re forced to think about what exactly makes someone a villain.

What is a villain? The definition of ‘villain’ is broad throughout various dictionaries, meaning anything from the antithesis of the protagonist in fiction to generally someone doing harm to others in reality. In either case, a villain is typically breaking the law. They are considered dangerous or have behaved heinously towards any given person or group of people. A villain is often considered immoral, and therein lies a problem.

To some people, Donald Trump is a hero, a freedom fighter even. He is a protagonist to all those who feel they’ve been ignored, stepped on, or otherwise aggrieved by the federal government. The current president of the U.S. doesn’t play by the established laws, traditions, or unwritten social contract. This makes him a terrorist to some (in that word’s broadest sense) and a hero to others who feel that the current laws, traditions, and unwritten social contract need to be revised or reset to reflect some unspecified glory somewhere in America’s history. (Possible interpretation: When they felt more entitled.) So if a villain can also be a hero, there must either be something wrong with our definition or perhaps there is no such thing as a villain, objectively speaking.

It’s easy to contend there is something wrong with the definition. Scores of English words are too broad in their definition to be of much use or are outright confusing; ask anyone studying the English language. I contend that in modern U.S. culture, the definition of ‘villain’ is so ambiguous as to be vague to the point that many people would not know when they are behaving as a villain. (I’m not sure which is worse, a villain who knows they’re a villain or one who doesn’t know they’re a villain.) It also seems wrong to label anyone who offends us or that we simply don’t like as a villain, but that does seem to be the manner in which many Americans now operate.

Do villains exist, objectively speaking? Not if all cultures are relative, something we have to assume if not all cultures can agree that murder is wrong. (There’s always a caveat.) Villains can exist within a given culture, certainly, as there is no doubt that people have existed that have flouted the laws of a society they are seemingly a part of. Again, though, this allows a villain to be a hero to society’s downtrodden or any one outside of a society that would like to see that society fail. So it’s hard to say villains actually exist anymore than we can now say heroes exist. Now we can see that heroes merely prop up the rules of society, and this would make them villains in someone’s eyes somewhere.

My original feelings towards the Joker movie have to be misgiven. After all, what does his nemesis Batman do but prop up the rules in Gotham City? Imagine Batman having grown up in 1930’s Germany; what would he have been but a Nazi superhero come WWII? Thank goodness he’s not, but Batman must be seen as a villain by some law enforcement agencies; there are procedures for catching and detaining criminals and subsequently putting them on trial. When this sense of fairness is broken can we agree this is something villainous? In the Joker movie, the central figure that is Arthur Fleck is driven insane by a thousand unfair psychological cuts, so can we blame him for the anarchy that ensues?  Can we blame a mass shooter who goes on a rampage because they think they’ve been treated unfairly?

Hopefully you are saying ‘yes’ because you agree that murdering innocent people, people who have not directly affected the shooter, are being murdered and we have to agree this is wrong no matter what society we belong to. Breaking two fairness rules – making two wrongs – does not result in a right, correct? Unfortunately, any given mass shooter or lawbreaker will have sympathizers. (To say nothing of laws that should be broken either because they are apparently unethical or quite ridiculous.) It would make more sense for a mass shooter to only kill the people that have affected them assuming the punishment fits the crime against them and we’ve never seen that.

If we invoke this rule of fairness which we, Western culture, seem to have forgotten as of late it might be easier to gauge who the villains are when the doctrine of fairness is broken. Given the current impeachment inquiry regarding Donald Trump, his proponents can argue for an investigation into the Bidens ad nauseum, and I’d be okay with that, but so should there just as well be an investigation into Trump as well. The fact that Donald trump obstructs justice in a manner that most of us cannot violates the fairness doctrine. I think it therefore reasonable to construe him as a villain. Then again, his proponents see this ‘unfair’ characterization as exactly what’s wrong with current American culture (despite these same people not wanting to do anything about solving the problem of mass shootings, which I view as villainous). I can’t imagine asking a Donald Trump supporter what they think made Obama such a villain because it seems like their definition is going to wind up being arbitrary. In fairness, though, I am willing to hear them out. Villains on the other hand hear no one out and simply assume they are entirely in the right.

The Blood On God's Hands

If we consider all the death and destruction done throughout history in the name of God or gods, a number of things are possible if a deity really does exist. One, they are a bloodthirsty SOB. Two, they are unable to stop violence done in their name. Three, they don’t care what we do to each other. Four, the world is exactly the way they want it. Five, and this is important, having free will is far more important than any harm we can do to each other. Yeah, I’m sure that’s very comforting to the victims of the 9/11 attacks. “Hey, don’t get upset that terrorists killed your family. They’re just collateral damage in the name of free will.”

The fifth point, as everyone who knows anything about philosophy or theology knows, is referred to as the Free Will Defense and is most often turned to by the theist to allow for so much evil in the world. Yet, if any god did create the universe and everything in it, they are ultimately responsible for the existence of evil, not humans. Sorry, there’s just no way around that. With this being true, the remaining possibilities may be just as likely. If a god can’t or doesn’t want to stop violence, then evil must have a practical use. Say, anyone up for a crucifixion?

Let’s take a very, very brief look back upon the history of religiously inspired violence. Do we have to? No, but gee whiz, it sure is interesting.

·       The ancient Mayans were known to practice human sacrifice to please their gods. These sick bastards would rip your beating heart out and show it to you before you died, thousands of years before Mortal Kombat was only a game.

·       Ptolemy Philedelphus had the Catholic Church attack and burn down the Great Library at Alexandria in 391 CE to suppress learning and knowledge. Millions of scrolls and scriptures are lost over a friendly and divine marsh mellow roast.

·       Between 500-1000 CE, Christianity gleefully ignites the Dark Ages. Science, medicine, education, art, and history are demonized while the Church amasses land and wealth through force.

·       891-903 CE, murder and corruption leads to 10 popes over 12 years and eventually 40 popes over 100 years. This leads to speculation that it is not so good to be the Pope.

·       Through 1000-1500 CE the Church resists the Enlightenment, launching the Crusades to teach those pesky Jews and Muslims one final lesson.

·       The Reformations through 1500-1700 CE attempt to purge Europe of pagan elements, but instead sparks a schism when Martin Luther opposes the Church with a (Protestant) Reformation of his own. The animosity between warring denominations stains Europe with blood. On St. Bartholomew’s Day (1572) 10,000 Protestants are slaughtered in France. Animosity continues to this day in Ireland. (It is also during this time period when the idea of the devil and demons are clearly defined by the Church. The elaborate concept spawns a 300 year long period of witch-hunts. Women are scapegoated as the Church fails to maintain control of the masses. Millions are speculated to die thanks to the hunts. Religious leaders even demand that animals associated with paganism be put to death, such as cats and owls, animals that control rodent populations. Plagues soon explode across the continent.)

·       Since the creation of Israel by the UN in 1948, Muslims and Jews have been blowing each other to bits over disputed Holy Lands. (Sure, it’s all more complicated than that, but the two sides being uber-religious doesn’t exactly help negotiate peace.)

·       In the 1980’s and 1990’s, abortion clinic bombers and shooters claim moral authority to justify murdering abortion clinic doctors and workers. They are soon discovered to believe that one plus one equals whatever their version of God says it is.

·       In 1995, Master Asahara (a Christian Buddhist, whatever that is) attacks a Tokyo subway with nerve gas in an attempt to set off Armageddon. He fails. 

These are just a few examples among hundreds…of thousands.

         

The reasons for religious violence are not just anybody’s guess. For most anyone, being violent creates the illusion of power. With a god in tow any horror can then easily be justified or excused. Remember, the gods are generally supposed to be all-powerful and humans, being of lower stock so-to-speak, are the messengers of those gods. Too bad in their urge to make anything but peace, these messengers instead identify themselves as soldiers. In due time, when a movement to spread a message inevitably begins to collapse or fail, there becomes an inclination to commit greater and greater evil. Religious insanity escalates most painfully in the final, hopeless moments of the struggle to enforce belief, when the power of a god becomes the primary resource at hand. The current race for the 2015 Republican party candidacy for U.S. president is evidence of this.

Are there ever times when these instances of violence are justified? Self-preservation can fuel such emotion, but that’s a human response, not a divine one. Yet, why people should use God to justify self-preservation makes little sense if they believe they’ll go to heaven anyway. In that case, wouldn’t you want to die? If you want to blow yourself up with 20 sticks of dynamite, fine, but now you’ve got two dead people, me and you. Wouldn’t it be more tolerable for the believer to try and persuade me into accepting their religion? Of course it would, except that religions are by nature exclusionary, just another means by which groups of people divorce themselves from others.

Do any of us want to die for the beliefs of others? I don’t want to die for what other people believe in. I’m not a puppet in any god’s sick puppet show to be controlled or maimed through the use of force. I wasn’t designed to be a contender in an unholy, cosmic game of Battle Bots. Some theists however thoroughly disagree and those people need to be eliminated with extreme prejudice. My holy scriptures would surely tell me so.

So what do you say; have we all had enough of having been given life by some supposed Creator who ironically calls for us to kill each other? Surely any god who endows a universe with evil is not reconcilable with a peaceful world. For all of you taking a moment out of your busy schedules to pray for world peace, stop. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

I mean it when I say I am tired of the excuses and I’m sure not going to let any god off the hook for the existence of evil. Lots of people say they want world peace but I don’t see them doing anything about it. I want world peace too; or at least one where only socially acceptable outlets for our primitive, violent tendencies are allowed. So I’m going to do something about it.

I’m calling God out; any god, you name ‘em. Anytime they want to duke it out with me in the ring for the fate of the world, I’ll be happy to punch their stupid face in, bite their ear off, and eat their babies. Now if only Don King wouldn’t screw me out of my hard-won purse, the world would be a better place.

A Thief In The Night

“Death never comes at the right time, despite what mortals believe. Death always comes like a thief.” Christopher Pike

I am in a bit of shock. I received word this morning that one of my employers passed away yesterday. It appears to have been an accident, meaning, this is all very sudden and unexpected. He leaves behind a beautiful wife and precious daughter.

Death rarely hits so close to home for me and as such, I rarely get to be reminded how fragile life is. With more than seven billion human beings on the planet and counting, the species hedges against this fragility by playing the numbers. But this doesn’t speak to any of us on a personal level. We tend to consider only our own lives. And this is a frightening prospect. Time waits for no man; when it is your time is up, your time is up as a friend likes to say.

“We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.” Aleister Crowley

I had a dream (twice actually) a few years ago that I received a note that said, “In 2015 your dead.” My first reaction to the note in my dream was that whoever wrote the note misspelled ‘you’re.’ Beyond that I have been a little wary of this year, wondering if there is a specter lurking nearby. Yet I go about my business not so afraid that it keeps me from doing possibly dangerous activities. This aside, if I were to die this year, would I be satisfied with the totality of my life? “What if tomorrow never came? / Could I live with myself as I lie in my grave?” I once wrote in a song. This bothers me because I feel I haven’t gotten around to doing anything significant with my life.

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin, Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.” Emily Dickinson

I try to take a solace in Emily Dickinson’s poem. If the point of life were to help others, then I feel I have contributed much. Maybe not as much as I could possibly have, but a fair enough amount for me to be satisfied with. But I haven’t done much for myself. As I have complained before, despite being one of the greatest thinkers to ever live, if I died tomorrow the world would go on without the major contribution to the world I wish to make. (Not that any of us really matter when you consider how vast the universe is, but the universe has nothing to say about how we feel about ourselves.) So what if I did die tomorrow? I suppose I’d be happy I’d get some damn sleep. But I fear I’d leave a world of people behind who have no ambition to accomplish anything. I believe this default setting for human beings has been the bane of humanity’s existence.

Fortunately my employer did accomplish much. He founded two schools so that people could receive the education needed to serve people in a meaningful way. Running a school increases and spreads knowledge exponentially. I am glad to be around people trying to accomplish something. As an educator myself, I hope I am doing a good job of helping people achieve their goals. It should inspire me to achieve my own. Everyone else may bide their time until death but perhaps there has been enough of that throughout history. While there may not be enough of celebrating life, there is even less celebration of achievement.

I will raise a glass to my departed employer. Then I will raise a glass to my own life. Then I will get to work.

…I leave you with these words from Plato’s Socrates, “To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.” Perhaps we should not mourn the dead, but it seems we have all mourned living too much. In the immortal words of the pop-duo Wham, choose life!...