Humanity is a goal: On Science fiction, so-called Zombies, the Space Race and dreaming futures to make them

I don’t think Humanity is a birthright, I think it is a goal. And I think most people in this world, most Americans especially, fall short of that goal.

We have this ludicrous idea, particularly in this country which produces only one thing in quantity, mass murderers and television, that adult hood is something we reach in years. That we hit 18 or 21 and suddenly we are adults.

No. To repeat a trite phrase, but hopefully not tritely used here, ‘age is just a number’. Maturity is something else. And I think with just a quick scan of what passes for dialog in this connected age, what passes for conversation, you can see very few people… grow. While they may grow physically, mentally they stop maturing, in ways deep and dangerous they are immature children, with adult responsibilities.

Mayors, Governors, Police Chiefs, Generals, a whole world full of children in the roles of men, but lacking the conscience of men, the humanity of men.

I don’t think Humanity is a birthright, I think it is a goal. And I think most people in this world, most Americans especially, fall short of that goal.

There was a time when people went to the movies to cheer for the hero, to be inspired by heroism. Today people watch movies, or tv, or play video games to watch the other suffer. To play out vicarious games of aggression and an end to responsibility. It’s part of the reason so-called zombie movies are so popular, because subconsciously you have empty, aimless, driftless, purposeless population, that wants and needs and is angry, but is unsure of what they want, and what they need, and what they are angry about.

It’s just an irrational need, irrational hunger you may say, byproduct of an irrational leadership, an irrational age. Caused by at every path, the higher callings of their nature being sabotaged, by a leadership that relies on ruling ignorant, stupid, misinformed, desperate people.

So a rudderless people see in the myth of the ghoul (the proper name for what western cinema incorrectly misnames zombie), this engine of only hunger and no responsibility, something to identify with. To lose the burden and responsibility of higher humanity, of callings of honor and friend and family and duty, and sublimate it all to the joys of abandon and bestiality.

A consumer nation, a capitalist/tyrannical world, taken to its rudderless extreme.

It’s the reason I have no use for Ghoul ‘Zombie’ films, or torture porn flicks, or slasher flicks. Everything in moderation, but I see in this deluge of barbarity, that in our fictions, do we shape our facts.

The 50s and 60s, decades of science fiction fanaticsm, of the dreaming of stars, this obsession passed like cholera to every man, woman, and child of the age, and the dreaming culminating in man walking on the moon.

Shared idea space, as progenitor to our physical space. Our facts but late fortifications of our fictions. Heady concepts, but well trod ones.

So what becomes of a culture whose obsessions are death, war, serial killers, cannibalism and the crazed dead? God, whatever God you believe in, being always kind, he gives you what you dream of.

He gives you horror, if that is what you are intent on having.

So many have died aspiring to nobler ends for those who follow them, do not sacrifice all the virtues and the hopes they have bequeathed to you… in pursuit of petty dreams of barbarism. Dream larger. Save yourself, and save us all and… dream Nobler.

Dream of a world where wars may be ended, governments held accountable, forests replenished, aboriginal people saved, and lives bettered. Dream of a better world, and who knows, you may become a better man (or woman)… to build it.

Liberty’s Great Lap: The Fort Hood Texas Shooting

I have very little to say about the Fort Hood, Texas massacre.

Not because I have become numbed to massacres by dint of long sojourn in America, that bastion of massacres, though surely some of that is in my reaction and the reaction at large. I feel for the loss of life and loved ones in this atrocity, as I do every atrocity. Those we endure ourselves and those atrocities we impose on others.

I feel them all.

No I have very little to say, because it was largely said by better men than me, before me.

“I don’t know who I’m going to shoot, you put a rifle in my hand”

and

“This is chickens coming home to roost”

America for a while now, has worn herself thin declaring war on every darker, non-christian country from Haiti to Liberia. Waging what amounts to the bloodiest religious crusades in the history of the world, while being tactful enough to keep the idea of crusades and ethnic cleansings out of the television reasoning for such expenditure of lives and dollars.

At a time when America would be best served by shoring up her own crumbling economic, moral, educational and cultural landscape we instead invest our time in destroying these things for other countries. And the oddest thing is, we get other disenfranchised people to go out and disenfranchise other people.

It’s a cycle we’ve been engaged in since the Revolutionary war. Making of victims, our victimizers.

The Irish became the American police force, because Ireland had become a fucking killing ground. And disenfranchised soldiers flocked here to find something… better.

The Buffalo Soldiers, escapees of enslavement, won renown by being efficient cleaners of the plains, killers of Native Americans.

Latin Americans escaping in some cases decades of bloody totalitarian regimes, often supported by US Dollars, augment today’s dwindling American armed forces.

And the cycle continues.

Our victims today, America will turn around and make (when they have no other jobs to accept) her victimizers tomorrow. That type of duplicity and juggling act is no easy feat to keep going.

In fact it’s damn difficult and dangerous.

And the concept of diminishing returns being a reality, it is costing America.

America has by hook or by crook, pushed, grabbed, cajoled, threatened anyone it can…. to garner the manpower to continue its endless war. In many cases that has meant the armed forces being more than happy to augment its forces with the less than stable. From well documented cases of soldiers with Autism, to convicts, to out and out psychopaths.

America doesn’t care who they put on the front lines, as long as you will kill for them. It doesn’t care what you have to lose to go someplace and kill people you have no beef with, as long as you do it. As long as you will be their gun.

The problem with that is, every so often, people get shot with their own guns. Particularly irresponsible people. And America is an irresponsible nation.

It is an irrational nation, that breeds this in their subjects, demands it even. Demands that you accept the most irrational reasoning, the most irrational justifications… for that which can not be justified.

You ask of people to kill for your lies, to weigh the life of the other… cheap. For no other reason than you say so. To surrender personal moralities, religions, codes, ethics, humanities… to the ever shifting dictates of the state.

And at some point teaching people to weigh other lives cheap means the ability to weigh all lives cheap.

Do you understand?

You can not spit horror into the wind, and not ultimately end up swallowing it yourself.

I do not know this Officer Hasan, beyond the sound-bites that his life has been reduced to. But as a psychiatrist, he was obviously an intelligent man, more intelligent arguably than those who now debate him, and as a psychiatrist understanding of the strange landscape of the human condition.

So to try and right this off as a dirty muslim, killing good Americans would be inept.

No, do not put that lie upon your soul.

Officer Hasan perhaps was never more American, than in his massacre of other Americans.

It is after all, the American past time. Ask any number of Post offices, or Shopping Malls, or Schools, or McDonalds.

No my dear beloved child, you lay that butchery at Fort Hood, where it belongs… with you.

And with me.

Hasan was the bomb, but we as America… were the lit and burning fuse.

Officer Hasan was by occupation aware of Abraham Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs, and Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality so he understood better than most the foilbles and fallacies of the human condition, its pitfalls, and yet he himself fell into them.

Looked too long into the abyss, and found it sweet.

What hope have the rest of us?

If a man whose occupation it is, to deal with pressure, himself crumbled under the pressure of America, how much more these 18 and 19 and 20 year olds that we send into the killing fields?

How shall they come back to us? Us… we who gleefully do send them out to kill, in unjust wars to unjust ends, if not changed and ready to show us… what lessons they have learned at liberty’s great lap.

Oh yes, what they have sown abroad, we will surely in the fullness of time, reap the harvest of at home.

You and me and all of us.

Unless we stop this train wreck direction America is on, this rule by sociopaths… then our Fort Hoods are waiting for us.

All of us.

This is what is to be learned from all that pain and anguish and calamity of Fort Hood. That it is America… unplugged.

Chickens coming home to roost.