Religious War 3

What if it all goes the way I expect? Total, absolute isolation from the rest of the world, Muslim countries attacking us (which we will just ignore for a while, then blow them off the earth if they continue) and a booming economy manufacturing all the junk we used to import, and doing the labor that used to import itself. No more embassies. No more money, or people, going across borders. The State Department a bunch of little kids making "Go Away" signs with markers. Go back to old blog for detail.

Two problems remain: One, what about our need to kill large numbers of people? And, two, what about our freedom? Will we be let ourselves be free, or will we remain in the grip of a bizarre and vicious ideology which rewards silliness and penalizes real work?

The first one is easy. We just lob a nuke now and then at a random country. We kill a lot of people now anyway, with conventional weapons. The weak sisters among you can revert to high explosives, but I'll go with the nukes. They're cheap -- we've got way more than we'll ever need already. We don't know if the ones we have actually work any more, so this is a nice chance to test them. A little more radioactivity in the atmosphere will vanish in the middle of all the other junk floating around. Plus, keeps everybody else just a little nervous.

I'll be conservative; one very small nuke every, oh, three years or so will do. The European countries will be off limits, of course, and only folks with darker skins will be subject to our random attack. Sort of resembles the foreign policy of the last 50 years, doesn't it?

Two blogs ago, when I went down the list, I forgot Guatemala: US victims, 200,000. And East Timor: US victims, 180,000. This in the last 20 years of the 20th century, mostly in the idyllic Reagan years. First decade of the 21st? A very conservative million, and those direct, by our own hands, not by our proxies. You think a little baby nuke every few years will be any worse?

It will be cheaper and it won't harm any of our folks. We can go on being the world's greatest nation. I know that this is all true, and I don't understand any of it.

On to freedom. The news about freedom: not so good. After we throw out all the Muslims, then what?. No other possibility than a fine christian theocracy, with one exception -- for a while -- for Jews. We still pretend otherwise, but politics in this country is first about race, and then about religion. We are not ready to take on race, not yet. But religion: woo-hoo. All you Unitarians out there, you're gonna have question marks burned on your lawns. That's a joke.

No more secular humanist atheists -- we'll stone them, I guess -- and no more Hare Krishnas and no more Baha'is. No more Darwinists, no more physicists talking about relativity-- get rid of all that science stuff. Science people can return to theology school if they need to retrain. Theology will be the only "ology" allowed. Finish the list above with your favorite non-christian sect.

The Mormons are going to be trouble, as they always are. You're guess is as good as mine about their fate, but I think, in the end, their aggressiveness and peculiar theology will be their downfall.

Ha ha, you say. People have been predicting this for years, still hasn't happened. Crying wolf is, after all, crying wolf.

Not this time. The armed forces are permeated by evangelicals, particularly the officer class. Congress and the Senate are permeated by the rotting husks of ruling-class wannabees. The Supreme Court is permeated by, of all things, fundamentalist catholics. You think they won't stick together? You think they won't unite for an election very, very soon? You think the inauguration of the first openly theocratic president won't be in an evangelical church? You think there will be any elections after that? Think again, bucko. The train has left the station on this one, and there's nothing big enough to stop it.

Prosperity for all, good godly christians in every public office, mandatory church attendance, tithes out of your paycheck, complete control of all media. Video cameras watching everything. And you say we're not getting close? Ok, forget the tithe thing.

We always ignore the fact that the whole free market "ideology" is just a way to ensure a ruling class and a pretty scummy underclass. I can't understand how we've been fooled for a century with that stupid and self-serving crap. When it came to the crisis, the ruling class abandoned pretense and saved itself, got rid of the free market foolishness in maybe, what, twenty seconds. No one batted an eyelash. The free market indeed spoke; it told everyone outside the ruling class to go away and die, same as it did with health care.

Orwell? 1984? He had it a little wrong. He didn't anticipate our hoopy theocracy, really; his was more a secular nightmare. And the war stuff? Orwell saw a forever war designed for profit, and to suck up the energy of youth. Wrong. Our need to kill is more obscure, darker, a historical swamp.

We don't want wars. We want piles of dark-skinned corpses, and we'll take them any way we can get them. Profit? Sure, always good to make a buck. But what we really want are the corpses. We kill to get back to normal. Any time there is social change, class confusion, economic upset, we just kill a lot of people, and we are healed.

We have killed millions upon millions of people in my lifetime, many hidden, many televised. Hard for me to keep myself seeing through that dark glass. Why do we murder these millions? We do it to make us whole. I can't look away, and I can't look.

About 10 years ago, I had a wonderful idea. You could state your religion when you set up your bank account, and then, when you used the ATM, there would be a cheerful religious saying, personalized for your belief system, printed at the top of the receipt. Millions for me in royalties!

Now, just the christian sayings will be on the receipt. Control of thought and economy, on one little, barely legible slip of paper. Control of my life is easy, and just about finished. I have no freedom left.

Next time, anonymity. Stay tuned. Remember, I know who you are. Heh.

BTW, to comment, just click on the 'Comments' link below. Put in your comment, then click on the dropdown box. Put in your name if you wish; you don't need a url, but you can add your link if you have one. Otherwise, click good old 'Anonymous', and I won't know who you are. Heh.