Happy Holidays, Merry Mass of Christ and Improbable Heights

‘When you strip everything away from Batman, you are left with someone who doesn’t want to see anyone die.’ — KINGDOM COME by Alex Ross and Mark Waid

When I think of humanity in general, and the holiday season in particular it strikes me that that should be our goal. The pursuit of a world, where nobody dies in vain.

But the reality, particularly in America, this time of year is that with the eyes of the media diverted; government sponsored mass-murders actually ramp up, bombings ramp up (now of the drone and unmanned variety, machines murdering men.. what an unholy road we walk), the terrorism of the rich… ramps up.

I’ll not forget the media celebrating the death of Bin Laden. Death and Murder and Torture are never things to celebrate, no matter the justification.

While I am savage enough to know that killing may be a necessary evil, I am human and moral enough to know it is never a joy, never a victory, never a cause for celebration.

Be the murdered Bin Laden, or Hitler or insert bogieman here, bringing murder to murderers is never anything less than a soiling, and a failure, necessary though it may be, it is a failure of reason. And as such is a solemn time, not a glorious one.

Because to do otherwise, to take joy from death, and celebration from degradation and horror… is to devoid you of moral high-ground, is to make you (in ways stark and true) worse than those you would revile, worse than your Hitlers and Bin-Ladens. It makes you a lynchmob, a coward, and an opportunist of carnage.

We must strive to be better than that, otherwise your protestations of Christianity, and Holy Nights, and piety are just lies, are hypocrisy and mendacity most foul, that you use to conceal your roman desire to see people bleed and suffer and die.

You become that lowest form of life, a gibbering coward among cowards, you become nothing more than a grasping claw, a rolling eye, and a screeching mouth… in the creature we call lynchmob. And there is no lower, and ultimately, more inhuman form of life.

Our goal therefore must be to reject that, to reject the easy lies and the easy hates, and work toward this wildly improbable world where no one dies in vain.

But humanity’s very existence is an improbability, so we can bend that already fanciful existence to either improbable heights of good, or improbable depths of evil. We just have to pick a direction.

‘We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. ‘ — John Fitzgerald Kennedy when imploring men into space

Here, on this holiday season, more fiction than fact, ‘goodwill to all’; look into yourself and find what is hypocrisy, what is lies, and find it in yourself to make truths, and truly believe and act on this idea…. of a time of peace.

Here endeth the lesson.

Law, the Films of Peckinpah & Unsupportable Dichotomies

What becomes apparent, revisiting the films of Peckinpah, particularly THE WILD BUNCH and PAT GARRET AND BILLY THE KID is Peckinpah’s stance on Law in the dimming days of the west and beyond. And it’s not a favorable view.

The Law in the films of Peckinpah is nothing more than crime tamed to serve the rich, crime in the service of rich interests.

If we accept the definition of crime at its basest definition, to be ‘the violation of the other’, be that a violation of property or person, than in Peckinpah’s world the law is such violation used in the service of monied interests. It is crime not just organized, it is crime… sanctified.

If you as a private citizen go over and kill citizens in Iraq or Haiti or Afghanistan it is a crime. But if you do it at the behest of monied interests, that same crime is suddenly sanctified.

Let’s take the crime of bombing. That same crime of bombing, vilified for the individual (suicide bomber) becomes glorified if that crime is done en masse (bomber pilots) for your betters; done for your masters… corporate and civic.

Whether in the fictions of Peckinpah or the ‘reality’ of our Nightly News, it is an unsupportable dichotomy.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS… Defined??!!! Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!

So called spokesmen for the people, representatives, annoy me.

Whenever you see someone using the term political correctness, they are disparaging it, typically. Which is funny considering the ones bitching about the term are the ones who coined the term in the first place.

Well it wouldn’t be America if people didn’t build things up so they could have something to tear down.

Like African-American.

Incredibly stupid term, taken out of the unifying context it was first used in (most clearly in the 60s as a call for economic and cultural ties with the larger global African/Black community, including Libya, which today a loose-cannon American administration and war-machine is currently bombing into the stone-age).

If you’re Black and you happen to live in America, you’re not fucking African-American.

I’ll say it again… You are not African American.

You’re Black. You also happen to be American.

But Nationality and Ethnicity are two separate fucking things and should remain so. Because these days, your nationality is doing its level best to exterminate your ethnicity. And if you confuse where you live, with what you are, the truth of that genocide may be lost on you, until they come knocking on your door. And by then it’s going to be a little damn late, isn’t it?

And of course being puppets of an inane media we all, regardless of color, tend to some degree to integrate these divisive stupidities that the propaganda machine feeds us.

But that’s why you have to wake up a bit, and be aware of the strings that are pulling you.

So that you can cut them, or at the very least… pull back.

So getting back to Political Correctness, and these morons who can’t go a single day without whipping on Political Correctness for this or for that. They never quite make sense do they?

It’s because political correctness is a nonsense word, put in place just to muddy the conversation, even in the head of the speaker.

I’ll say that again.

Even in the head of the speaker.

If you want to know what people are railing against when they use the term Political Correctness, replace it with respect. And you’ll see what people are really arguing against. They are arguing against having to respect each other. It’s that simple. They are even arguing against having to respect themselves.

So the next time that moron in your life or at your job starts going on about Political Correctness, have him say again the sentence, substituting the word respect, and you’ll both really understand how idiotic and petty are the things he’s really bitching about.