Being an excerpt from my new book that certain readers might want to skip Part Sixteen
NOTE: While everyone is, of course, free to read, these particular excerpts are, essentially, footnotes provided for readers of my books and are there to make sense of what they are reading AS THEY READ. So, they may not make as much sense to those who are not reading at the time...
It’s a tough job when you’re a preacher. Always has been. Always will be. The gospel of facing up to the facts is a necessary one, however. Because you’re not just trying to save their souls, you’re not just trying to save them, you’re not even merely trying to save yourself. I suppose you’re trying to save the whole damn world. If people don’t face up to facts, they do stupid and stupid is no good for anybody. Take it from a master. I’ve done stupid for a long time. I still do, but not quite as often. Not nearly. And it’s only because I face the facts, a heck of a lot more often than I used to. Because I learned the prime lesson: The pain of failure is more important than the triumph of success.
All along that line, at work and out, in school and out, the best teachers taught me: if you’re going to find the facts and face up to them, ask better questions. That is the most important part of this process. The wrong questions lead you nowhere. Like…psychiatrist’s questions.
But you have to start somewhere if you haven’t a clue what questions to ask.
I was reminded the other day of what the philosopher Karl Popper had to say, discussing certain elements in his home country, Germany, coincidentally, that if you are tolerant of the intolerant, they will crush you. In Germany, people take facts seriously. Or they used to, or they do once in a while. That's why they are ahead of us in so much... We are a nation of airheads and assholes by comparison. And to think... They drink so much more beer than we do... The war crap? Well, blame that on the Prussians. We have our Southerners, too. Don’t we, now? Bless their hearts.
People do not take the time to contemplate the moral dimension of this work I do, and others do, having not to do it themselves, but it is there none the less. Even going out into the street to find a cat, sometimes you have to risk hurting some person. And when you take that risk of hurting a person, you risk crossing that line civilization has drawn between what is acceptable and what isn’t. I’ve been fortunate when it comes to that particular line in the past. I have not had to risk crossing it too often. Until Terry decided to come back from the dead.
Of course, no one can take the law into their own hands all the time. That would be anarchy. If people simply ran around doing whatever they wanted, acting out in a violent manner, we would have one continuous riot. One continuous, bloody mess. You have to have law. You have to have order. You have to teach civility. You have to make certain people understand that, not only are there penalties for crossing certain lines, but that it simply shouldn’t be done. That crossing such a line creates, in the end, a true sense of Otherness beyond any other sense of otherness, casting you out of society, so that people no longer need to empathize with you or ever have anything to do with you again.
Unless you have justification. Justice, doing what you do in a good cause makes a difference. But, there is still a line you cannot cross.
When I come up to that line, touch it, stand on it, I feel a sickness inside. And when I cross it, a revulsion, no matter what justifies me. I feel like that nine-year-old again, standing in those woods, smelling that cordite, holding that M-1, watching that chipmunk, part of its skull blown off, writhing and shivering in pain because of what I had done. For absolutely no reason.
And that feeling was crawling up inside me again.
The radical right, which controls most of American politics, business and media today—indeed, therefore, most of America—through its version of “libertarian” philosophy, has a problem with actual history. In addition to its version of virtually...well, you name it. This can be identified in comparison to our own recent past, as recalled by genuine historians, less than a century ago, for those who are willing to use less than their own limited and inconvenient memories.
The 1920s and 1930s, in our nation and abroad, witnessed a series of horrors that seemed to many acts of God or nature but turned out to be primarily caused by human activity, and what can be labeled human error. People doing what they wanted without any thought of the consequences usually for the sake of turning a profit, big or small. Throughout the American West, Midwest and South, for example, farmers essentially were goaded by bankers and industrialists into raping their own land until that land was uninhabitable by only dying insects and then the land itself turned into useless dust. Then came the floods. After which the banks and industries failed.
So much for libertarian greed and self-interest, upon which our economy now relies once again.
Now, most of us have our sordid moments in the past, believe it or not, need I remind you—or have I just done that?—and many of us have a lot of them. These horrors were undone, finally, and for the most part by the manna from heaven called The New Deal, thank you FDR (and others, primarily Eleanor, bless her heart). Which, from one standpoint, now appears to have had its own sordid moments and, as far as the libertarians are concerned, is happily going the way of the dust storms...
And yet nothing is all sweetness and light, as the saying goes. Old habits die as you age, and not all of them deserve to go. New habits form and some of them are incredibly nightmarish, at least one assumes so from the perspective of the young, I, having been young once and retaining some recollection. And there is worse.
An aside for perspective. Take for example the common red-breasted robin and the more-or-less common brown thrasher. They share a genus unto themselves but, being different species, they are immediately distinguishable from each other. The robin, charcoal with its noticeable flame-orange breast. The thrasher mud-colored with speckled white breast. Yet each has a similar behavioral pattern if you take the time to observe. They will walk rapidly along the ground a few paces, stop, forage though the undergrowth or detritus for insects or seed.
This distinct and shared behavior, somewhat unique, links them genetically back to some prehistoric period when they were not so physically distinct from each other. Because, despite their obvious distinction, they are essentially the same bird by origin.
Now, for some time, racists, as well as others who claim not to be racists, insisted that certain similarities and dissimilarities in human behavior bore proof of the distinctions between, say, the “white” and “colored” peoples. Doing so strictly, and originally, on the basis of that “color,” but extending this “distinction,” without justification, to “characteristics” that honestly did not exist. That, given one could actually say any group of people behaved in any particular ways, “colored” people behaved in such a generally different way to arguably prove they were racially distinct, different and, thus inferior to “whites.” All one has to do is observe their “characteristics,” in the same manner one would observe a brown thrasher’s difference from a robin. Despite similarities in behavior. Then extend such comparisons to any human outwardly not like...you.
Then, once “you” have all the wealth, land and power... Well, you get the picture.
It’s a fantasy to believe the privileged see justice in this world. Sometimes, but only sometimes, their minions do. I guess I’m somebody’s minion. No, wait, I’m no one’s minion. I’m only an onion. Peel back the layers and… Nah, I’m no onion. I stink more, like a piece of garlic. More stink but healthier. On the other hand, I guess you have to know your herbs. I had an Uncle Herb. Navy guy. Go Navy. See the world. Now, there’s a recruitment call for the minions from the privileged.
So, is there some possible wiggle-room for any “justice” in that space? Some leeway for stepping onto or perhaps even ever so slightly crossing over that line?
Once in a while?
If so, then, can anyone, like me, for example, and here, for example, get away with saying anything about it?
I’ve argued this point before and I’m arguing it again. Showing is not telling. Showing has never done the job.
However, telling hasn’t done the job either. We’ve been preached to even longer than people have taken the time to learn how to exquisitely show us.
So. What’s the problem, folks? Are we just too dense to get the message? Too lazy? Too “not give a fuck” about anything? Too drunk all the time? Too busy getting laid? What? Tell me what? Because if you pay attention for just one tiny second, and look around, you will notice that the world really is coming to an end. Because we haven’t been paying attention to either the “showing” or the “telling.”
One life form after another is going bye-bye. And we are in the chain. And we deserve to be. Maybe, probably, we would have been anyway, no matter what. But we have done so much to make it happen so much faster than it ever should have. And we will be going bye-bye in such a miserable, horrible, painful fashion. Suffering immeasurably.
Sad.
Somebody said that. Maybe he’s smart after all.
So. Robinson Jeffers was right to say we should have gone bye-bye a long time ago and left all the other life forms alone to thrive. To kill each other in happiness and beauty as they used to. Without us to muck it up. Amen to that.
Justice. There it is, finally.
It’s a tough job when you’re a preacher. Always has been. Always will be. The gospel of facing up to the facts is a necessary one, however. Because you’re not just trying to save their souls, you’re not just trying to save them, you’re not even merely trying to save yourself. I suppose you’re trying to save the whole damn world. If people don’t face up to facts, they do stupid and stupid is no good for anybody. Take it from a master. I’ve done stupid for a long time. I still do, but not quite as often. Not nearly. And it’s only because I face the facts, a heck of a lot more often than I used to. Because I learned the prime lesson: The pain of failure is more important than the triumph of success.
All along that line, at work and out, in school and out, the best teachers taught me: if you’re going to find the facts and face up to them, ask better questions. That is the most important part of this process. The wrong questions lead you nowhere. Like…psychiatrist’s questions.
But you have to start somewhere if you haven’t a clue what questions to ask.
I was reminded the other day of what the philosopher Karl Popper had to say, discussing certain elements in his home country, Germany, coincidentally, that if you are tolerant of the intolerant, they will crush you. In Germany, people take facts seriously. Or they used to, or they do once in a while. That's why they are ahead of us in so much... We are a nation of airheads and assholes by comparison. And to think... They drink so much more beer than we do... The war crap? Well, blame that on the Prussians. We have our Southerners, too. Don’t we, now? Bless their hearts.
People do not take the time to contemplate the moral dimension of this work I do, and others do, having not to do it themselves, but it is there none the less. Even going out into the street to find a cat, sometimes you have to risk hurting some person. And when you take that risk of hurting a person, you risk crossing that line civilization has drawn between what is acceptable and what isn’t. I’ve been fortunate when it comes to that particular line in the past. I have not had to risk crossing it too often. Until Terry decided to come back from the dead.
Of course, no one can take the law into their own hands all the time. That would be anarchy. If people simply ran around doing whatever they wanted, acting out in a violent manner, we would have one continuous riot. One continuous, bloody mess. You have to have law. You have to have order. You have to teach civility. You have to make certain people understand that, not only are there penalties for crossing certain lines, but that it simply shouldn’t be done. That crossing such a line creates, in the end, a true sense of Otherness beyond any other sense of otherness, casting you out of society, so that people no longer need to empathize with you or ever have anything to do with you again.
Unless you have justification. Justice, doing what you do in a good cause makes a difference. But, there is still a line you cannot cross.
When I come up to that line, touch it, stand on it, I feel a sickness inside. And when I cross it, a revulsion, no matter what justifies me. I feel like that nine-year-old again, standing in those woods, smelling that cordite, holding that M-1, watching that chipmunk, part of its skull blown off, writhing and shivering in pain because of what I had done. For absolutely no reason.
And that feeling was crawling up inside me again.
The radical right, which controls most of American politics, business and media today—indeed, therefore, most of America—through its version of “libertarian” philosophy, has a problem with actual history. In addition to its version of virtually...well, you name it. This can be identified in comparison to our own recent past, as recalled by genuine historians, less than a century ago, for those who are willing to use less than their own limited and inconvenient memories.
The 1920s and 1930s, in our nation and abroad, witnessed a series of horrors that seemed to many acts of God or nature but turned out to be primarily caused by human activity, and what can be labeled human error. People doing what they wanted without any thought of the consequences usually for the sake of turning a profit, big or small. Throughout the American West, Midwest and South, for example, farmers essentially were goaded by bankers and industrialists into raping their own land until that land was uninhabitable by only dying insects and then the land itself turned into useless dust. Then came the floods. After which the banks and industries failed.
So much for libertarian greed and self-interest, upon which our economy now relies once again.
Now, most of us have our sordid moments in the past, believe it or not, need I remind you—or have I just done that?—and many of us have a lot of them. These horrors were undone, finally, and for the most part by the manna from heaven called The New Deal, thank you FDR (and others, primarily Eleanor, bless her heart). Which, from one standpoint, now appears to have had its own sordid moments and, as far as the libertarians are concerned, is happily going the way of the dust storms...
And yet nothing is all sweetness and light, as the saying goes. Old habits die as you age, and not all of them deserve to go. New habits form and some of them are incredibly nightmarish, at least one assumes so from the perspective of the young, I, having been young once and retaining some recollection. And there is worse.
An aside for perspective. Take for example the common red-breasted robin and the more-or-less common brown thrasher. They share a genus unto themselves but, being different species, they are immediately distinguishable from each other. The robin, charcoal with its noticeable flame-orange breast. The thrasher mud-colored with speckled white breast. Yet each has a similar behavioral pattern if you take the time to observe. They will walk rapidly along the ground a few paces, stop, forage though the undergrowth or detritus for insects or seed.
This distinct and shared behavior, somewhat unique, links them genetically back to some prehistoric period when they were not so physically distinct from each other. Because, despite their obvious distinction, they are essentially the same bird by origin.
Now, for some time, racists, as well as others who claim not to be racists, insisted that certain similarities and dissimilarities in human behavior bore proof of the distinctions between, say, the “white” and “colored” peoples. Doing so strictly, and originally, on the basis of that “color,” but extending this “distinction,” without justification, to “characteristics” that honestly did not exist. That, given one could actually say any group of people behaved in any particular ways, “colored” people behaved in such a generally different way to arguably prove they were racially distinct, different and, thus inferior to “whites.” All one has to do is observe their “characteristics,” in the same manner one would observe a brown thrasher’s difference from a robin. Despite similarities in behavior. Then extend such comparisons to any human outwardly not like...you.
Then, once “you” have all the wealth, land and power... Well, you get the picture.
It’s a fantasy to believe the privileged see justice in this world. Sometimes, but only sometimes, their minions do. I guess I’m somebody’s minion. No, wait, I’m no one’s minion. I’m only an onion. Peel back the layers and… Nah, I’m no onion. I stink more, like a piece of garlic. More stink but healthier. On the other hand, I guess you have to know your herbs. I had an Uncle Herb. Navy guy. Go Navy. See the world. Now, there’s a recruitment call for the minions from the privileged.
So, is there some possible wiggle-room for any “justice” in that space? Some leeway for stepping onto or perhaps even ever so slightly crossing over that line?
Once in a while?
If so, then, can anyone, like me, for example, and here, for example, get away with saying anything about it?
I’ve argued this point before and I’m arguing it again. Showing is not telling. Showing has never done the job.
However, telling hasn’t done the job either. We’ve been preached to even longer than people have taken the time to learn how to exquisitely show us.
So. What’s the problem, folks? Are we just too dense to get the message? Too lazy? Too “not give a fuck” about anything? Too drunk all the time? Too busy getting laid? What? Tell me what? Because if you pay attention for just one tiny second, and look around, you will notice that the world really is coming to an end. Because we haven’t been paying attention to either the “showing” or the “telling.”
One life form after another is going bye-bye. And we are in the chain. And we deserve to be. Maybe, probably, we would have been anyway, no matter what. But we have done so much to make it happen so much faster than it ever should have. And we will be going bye-bye in such a miserable, horrible, painful fashion. Suffering immeasurably.
Sad.
Somebody said that. Maybe he’s smart after all.
So. Robinson Jeffers was right to say we should have gone bye-bye a long time ago and left all the other life forms alone to thrive. To kill each other in happiness and beauty as they used to. Without us to muck it up. Amen to that.
Justice. There it is, finally.
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