Breakfast with the Dirt Cult

by Samuel Finlay

So this was the glorious cause for which the feminists had fought. They’d struggled for, and won, a world where men were seen as the problem and women as the solution. Women were deemed inherently “right” and needed a man “like a fish needs a bicycle.” Men, however, were pigs, and were perceived as semi-functional retarded pariahs without a woman. A woman’s sexuality was good and healthy; a man’s, toxic and perverse. A woman could commit a wrong and the chattering classes would come out of the woodwork spouting Marxist bullshit to frame her as the victim rather than the perpetrator. A man, though, was guilty until proven innocent.

Oceans of ink and thousands of hours of television had made it abundantly clear that a man was expected to make his woman’s happiness his top priority because she deserved it (or he wasn’t a real man). If someone demanded that a woman reciprocate such devotion by putting her man first, however, legions of man-hating shrews would have screamed, “Misogyny!” and argued that whoever believed such politically incorrect heresy was trying to “set back the women’s rights movement,” and was guilty of trying to return The West to the Fifties or “the Dark Ages,” or whenever it was that they deemed the height of barbarity. As the gender solely responsible for the birth of future humans they could abort at will, zealously exclaiming slogans about their bodies and their rights. (Most American girls didn’t like anything to come between them and their potential to buy stuff, have fun, and acquire status. For them, this passed for heroism. Being the heart and soul of a family they’d helped create, or simply giving a damn about something that didn’t revolve around them or “Women’s Issues,” not so much.)

Even medicine had been weaponized. People donated proudly for the cure of breast or ovarian cancer, but few gave a damn about men with tumors in their testicles or prostates. The same was true of parenthood. A girl wanting to “have it all” by being a single mom could seek to adopt, get knocked up, or go the spermcicle route and be considered a champion of progress. (Because she “didn’t need a man.” The Celebrity-Industrial Complex had told her so! Except of course, for her Uncle Sam. She also needed someone watch her child while she was busy focusing on her career. That, and it was nice to have a man around to lift heavy objects. And to perform household maintenance. And to deal with burglars and potential rapists. And to understand that in the event of an emergency, he was to forfeit his life for her and her offspring, because chivalry had died for some reason.) However, if a single man dared to step foot into an adoption agency in the hopes of providing a home for a child and raising it as his own, he’d be suspected of being a pedophile. (Men weren’t recognized as possessing any life-affirming instincts whatsoever. The very word paternal, which was once used to denote the strong qualities of a father, was now used as a slur. Fathers were now deemed unnecessary for civilization, save for their ability to hand over money and resources to women.

Toynbee had called it; “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Him, the floozies, the drunks stumbling around or fooling with their cell phones; they were all decadent as fuck. So much for the glory of consumerism, universal suffrage, sexual liberation, and U.S. hegemony. Americans had learned how to make false gods out of just about anything. And it was killing them. If the U.S. of A. didn’t wind up as the Whore of Babylon, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.

A projector screen showed the black-and-white heat signatures of people in a compound as seen from a gun-ship flying overhead. Small white human shapes scurried about like characters in a video game while a trail of white dots chased them until they touched the human shapes, causing them to stop, bounce in inhuman-like movements, or disappear altogether. The pilot’s voice was piped in for the play-by-play. Walton had watched, and though he figured the men the pilots killed were terrorists; the human equivalent of rabid dogs, and were to be put down without mercy, he was uncomfortable with the fact that many of the Joes had watched with eager eyes, relishing in the extinguishing of life like watching a porn star catch a cum-shot to the face.

He wasn’t too sure about the whole gay thing they did, though. Evidently Haji had to save up a crazy amount of money to front to a woman’s family if he wanted to marry her and if her family had no objections. Getting that kind of wampum together took years, and in the meantime, the poor bastard had no conjugal access to the gals, and in a pinch, made due with his buddies for intimacy, which was why a fair number of them went around holding hands. It gave new meaning to what it was to “take one for the team.” When the LT had read that part of the briefing, Sergeant Bronson had interrupted by saying, “You motherfuckers that drink that Haji tea those fuckers offer you—just remember, every cup of tea you drink was made by a man who fucked another man in his ass.”

He believed in the old adage, “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” He’d speculated that NGO’s in a warzone would’ve no doubt laced their instruction with Dewey-inspired “progressive” pedagogy and Western ideas in an effort to capture hearts-and-minds. Going into a village in foreign country, and teaching their children different ways and ideas, regardless of intent, was asking for trouble. Using a classroom to separate children from the culture of their parents was a form of kidnapping.

It put him in a possible Fatal Funnel (a sector in which an enemy could fire from a choke-point, like an entrance. The area covered by such a sector resembled the conical shape of a funnel, with Haji at the apex of it). However, if he lost sight of it, Haji could possibly come through it and get the drop on them.

He’d noticed a reoccurring argument that kept insinuating itself into many of the media pundits’ narratives that disturbed him; namely, that the wars downrange were the result of Christians in rural states. The assertion that people like his parents were to blame disgusted him, and as a man who’d been wounded in his country’s service, it felt like a slap in the face.

Having spent the first nineteen years of his life deeply involved in the Church, he had never once heard in a prayer meeting, worship service, or even on a Wednesday night business meeting, anything whatsoever about putting the Middle East to the sword. No deacon had ever made a motion for the congregation to pressure elected officials to have the U.S. blow up Muslims. No preacher had ever said that he felt like The Lord had laid it on his heart to make the streets flow with the blood of the nonbelievers. No youth minister had ever told them that the greatest thing they could do for God was to kill Haji.

Their yeoman ancestors, with their toughness, high degree of religiosity, and community-centered norms and values, had been handy to have around for whenever country had needed people to till the dirt, settle the frontier, bale hay, pick cotton, mine coal, turn bolts, work railroads, and fight wars. However, their decedents in the brave new world were to be fitted with a yoke of shame, and to be unofficially branded as trash or vilified in their own home. They were to be fed a steady diet of dissention, entertainment, and dependency infrastructure lest they maintain some semblance of backbone and self-reliance. Didn’t the silly Proles know that the modern nation-state was now just supposed to be a market of “human capital” and not a sovereign country of citizens?

“I swear, Sir, after havin’ to pass a Lincoln Log like that, I don’t see how chicks and the gays can handle anal sex on a regular basis. That sort of thing can’t be healthy in the long run. You watch, in fifty years there’s gonna be a lot of old people runnin’ around with fucked up assholes.”

Pop-culture was psychological warfare, and the anomie it celebrated was the means by which the First World ate its young. Or rather, sacrificed its children to its gods. It was a theology of seduction; of pretty people selling things, and survival didn’t figure into it. The intelligentsia had turned on their own people and set them up for failure. Thanks to the bullshit, The West had lost its ability to mate effectively.

For all its damned “liberation,” sexual and otherwise, the era was woefully deficient in heart. Secret admirers were now stalkers. Romeo and Gatsby’s asses would’ve gotten restraining orders. Cyrano De Bergerac would’ve been diagnosed with some chickenshit, two-bit, tin-horn disorder and put on Prozac. Guys like Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash would’ve been ignored. Motown would have never been invented.

Walton thought about America and her wars, and believed more and more with each passing day, that ultimately, many of the interventions upon which the service was sent were little more than militarized missionary work on behalf of the Carpetbagger Caste, bringing to the far corners of the earth a dose of That Old Time Secular Religion whether anybody actually wanted it or not. With gallows humor, he imagined that somewhere out there was an op-order with words typed in red ink saying, “Go yea therefore unto all the world, preaching and teaching, baptizing them in the name of Democracy, Commerce, and Human Rights.” God have mercy on the heretics.

In the breathless drive to make the world rootless it grew more and more chaotic as a result, leading to an unseen precipice somewhere up ahead on the horizon. He could feel something in the air akin to the ominous tension that had sometimes loomed over a mission.

The Carpetbaggers and their useful idiots wouldn’t be happy until they had “deconstructed” every standard, tradition, culture, belief, nation, community, family, identity, or shred of order, and filled it with their commoditized, globalized, nothingness. Maybe even instigate another World War in their continued efforts to chain the world to an empire of good intentions. Fucking savages.

Pride in one’s country, pride in one’s people, history, ways, and beliefs, was a valuable resource to be exploited whenever the Carpetbaggers needed the yokels and suckers to sign up, line up, and go fight wars. When they needed blood, they called it Patriotism. However, let those same yokels and suckers try to express those feelings in ways that didn’t involve killing strangers, but rather sought to preserve and cultivate the strength, identity, and spirit of their homes, then The Powers That Be had The Tal...

Of course, the Nazis had also borrowed from Socialism when building their monstrosity. The Talking Heads never mentioned that any more than they discussed the 60 million or so people who’d died under Stalin and Mao. (The blood spilled in the central-planning schemes of Marxist regimes, somehow having obtained a pass. Whatever their polarity on the Left/Right spectrum, Walton thought the Nazis and Communists both sucked.) The agendas pimped by the media were deemed enlightened and progressive, and opposing ones were evil, xenophobic, backward, bigoted, etc. Fucking hypocrites. Whores had more integrity than they did.

The next word would no doubt be Isolationism. As if the U.S. ever had, or could, tread that path. Eventually, they’d probably get around to Fascism, or whatever other isms they could think of that would establish the dreaded Reactionary frame to delegitimize the identity of the opposition.

Words like Neutrality or Self-Determination would never see the light of day, even though Walton thought they were wanted by most people all over the world; to simply enjoy the sovereignty of their homes with dignity, and neither have to fight wars not in their interests, nor bow to a confusion of supranational, intergovernmental, plutocratic master plans envisioned by faraway eggheads who’d never touched ...