4 thoughts on “MARCHING ORDERS”

  • BrianK says:

    I've just been reading Jeffrey Feldman's Outright Barbarous, which focuses on the violent language of the political right. I'm glad that Neiwert et. al. have been cataloging this, but the implications of this violent language go beyond this horrible event.

  • Indira says:

    I guess I'm just really wondering exactly what "liberal values" this particular Church was espousing…this is Tennessee, right?

  • Matthew says:

    Yes, but it was a Unitarian Universalist church that had a sign saying "Gays Welcome!" which I think is justifiable homicide according to state law.

    Oh, snap! I just burned you, Volunteer State!

  • Myconfidence says:

    It could never happen (thanks a lot, PETA!), but for those among us who fancy ourselves intelligent/educated/civilized or, even worse, for those who privilege homo sapiens as something different in kind rather than in type from all other living critters, I've long thought we could dispel with those notions have a reality TV show along the following lines:

    Build a ghost town suitable for5,000 (an estimate of the average size of a municipality in the US) , probably somewheres in the copious gaps of the reddest part of the Plains states. Then, get hold of 5,000 apes. Put them in the houses/trailers, dress them, give them electiricity, plumbing, etc.
    In about a month it would look a lot like neighboring towns. In about a year it would look like those same towns would look if those towns continued to correctly choose the leadership of the US.

    Human beings are animals. That's not a pejorative, it's just a fact.
    Language is just communication, which is also a difference in degree, not in kind.

    It puts in mind the part in the film The Fifth Element, when Leeloo (sp?) is going through the database of human history. Are we so shocked by what people say? Show me what war since WWII has been just. Show me that we are sooo civilized that the majority of us sat idly by while they started a war of choice and aggression on Iraq. Newsfuckingflash: The evidence was publicly available before March, 2003, to give the lie to what they were saying.

    I have friends who get mopey about the current prospects given the atrocious doings of those in power. I remind them that, #1, things are pretty much always getting better but that it often doesn't seem like it because people forget or are unaware of how awful things were. On that point, I remember around age 12/13 realizing that things were so mindbendingly effed up even a century before (e.g., racism, autocracy, socioeconomic stratification, etc.) that I'd just as soon kill myself as have to put up with it. Then I tell them, #2, that history shows most major changes/paradigm shifts come after the powers that be are allowed to do just what they are doing now: Treat the world around them as their personal plaything/shitbox until they fubar the world we share. Then, when everyone is finally desperate enough to actually seek out and empower the people who actually know what the fuck is going on and why, you get things like the 40-hr. work week, universal suffrage, adjudication of injustice/the rule of law, peace, economic progressivism, redress, gun rights, et cetera.

    So, a guy shot up a church in TN. Tragic, yes. Part and parcel of the animality of our kind, no doubt. Reason to finally hold pieces of shit like Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Malkin, and other fart noises accountable for their misdemeanors against the constant struggle for a bit of grace and decency in the human race? Not until the boards of the companies who write their paychecks so chooose or, conversely, some drooling rightwing mendicant does something so far beyond the pale that the other mendicants wake the fuck up, the fuckin' robots.

    PS "The power elite have only ever wanted one thing, and that's everything."

    PPS It is the duty of the upper class to turn the middle class on the lower class and the lower class against each other in order to maintain the power structure upon which rests the upper class's laissez faire treatment and attitude of supremacy over the world around them and their fellow man.

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