American Revelation (Part Four)

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. ~Revelation 6:7-8

From the moment I decided I wanted to do this series of articles, I new that the subject of death was going to come up. In fact, I suspected it was going to be a theme of the entire series, though I think I've done a decent job of not letting it run away with the script. 

The picture above is a picture from the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The Cambodian Genocide was easily the most terrible chapter in a book full of them, begun by American involvement in Vietnam, concurrent with US support (including military support) for authoritarian regimes in Cambodia and Laos. Following "Peace with Honor" and American withdrawal from Vietnam achieved by Richard Nixon, the local forces struggled to contain the Communist insurgencies...and in the case of South Vietnam...a slow-motion military invasion. It all came crashing down in 1975, leading to additional American military action in the form of Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of Americans and other foreign nationals along with Vietnamese who had worked with the Americans in sensitive capacities. However, when the Cambodian government fell on April 17th of 1975, there was no comparable effort to that which was then ongoing in Vietnam, and the full extent of the resulting horrors would be known only when the Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia (in response to Khmer Rouge attacks against their own country) in 1978 and especially after the conquest of the country by the Vietnamese People's Army in 1979. 

Skulls stacked on bookshelves in Cambodia...

Two million tons of bombs dropped on Laos from 1964 to 1972...

And for what??

That's the real question.

The Laotians, and whoever else will help them, are still dealing with UXO (Un-Exploded Ordinance) along the former Ho Chi Minh trail and on the Plain of Jars. Usually, it's in the form of cluster-bomb munitions...anyone care to speculate what a Mk. 20 Antipersonnel munition from a CBU-100 Rockeye Cluster Bomb can do to a human body? Even after it's been sitting there for 50 years?

Laos has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world (73%) Even among literate Laotians, the idea of reading a book for enjoyment is something many people there don't understand. US-supported NGO's are trying to help with literacy issues there. Even so, the country's GDP is not that high, and it's place in the Human Development Index hangs onto the low end of medium.

These are the effects of war, and Cold War politics, even half a century later. 

I bring this up, because we've seen similar patterns in the continuing conflict with the Islamic State after the American withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, although the government there ultimately held, US forces returned in small numbers and Kurdish proxies helped to drive Daesh from Iraq. Also, no one with a brain in their head seriously expects that the corrupt, unstable government in Afghanistan will long survive after US and NATO forces leave...especially given that the Russians appear to now be backing their former enemies, the Taliban.

If there's anything we've learned...it's that this isn't over. In a lot of ways, it often seems like Americans haven't learned a damned thing since 1975...or 1968 for that matter. For fuck's sake, I'm not sure we've ever adequately dealt with the ramifications of 1863.

We're not off the hook domestically, either...and I'm not just talking about the Civil War. We have our own terrible history of ethnic cleansing, genocide and war...the The Trail of Tears, the various Indian Wars, the expulsion of African Americans from Forsyth County, Georgia. Lynching, Murder, Segregation, no, really, the Cambodians or for that matter the Germans don't have a damn thing on us. The terrible truth is, that when a certain part of Donald Trump's base says "Make America Great Again" that is exactly the kind of shit they're talking about.

It's still going on, in small numbers but with considerable media awareness in the form of police brutality against African Americans and the occasional white supremacy-fueled incident...and certainly more of those than there were before Trump.

That's not the only problem, as I've said before, we have around 30,000 firearms-related deaths in this country every year. The Opioid Epidemic kills around 60,000 people every year. As I said yesterday, just because you can't see it doesn't mean we don't have disease, starvation, and Third-World sanitation conditions right here in the United States of America.

...And we currently have leaders who see death as increasing their profits.

That is absolutely where health care cuts lead to.

That is absolutely the result of over-prescription of Opioids.

That is absolutely the result of prioritizing firearms-industry profits over the safety of the public...

It's also frequently the result of despair.

DEATH.

Let me ask you something...look in some depth at the current "Conservative" political and social program. Do you see any hope there? For anybody who doesn't make at least six figures, anyway?

I sure don't.

As a people, we don't reach for the stars anymore. Despite all the power and influence of the Trumpvangelicals...or more properly, probably because of it...religion is in decline, at least to my knowledge, and particularly among white people. Education is increasingly looked down upon at least among conservatives, the Coal industry isn't coming back, the outsourcing of manufacturing continues...

All we're being offered as compensation is racism, Trump's one-political party clown show, and the vague promise of hurting people...

Who exactly finds hope...or anything else worth having...in any of that, besides racists, I mean.

Believe me when I tell you, despair can lead to death.

Every time I happen to see FOX News on a TV somewhere, or am unlucky enough to see some conspiracy theory kark or when I find myself encountering some angry alt-right internet-Nazi who's never seen a naked woman outside of a porn video...I find myself wondering, how the hell do these people get up in the morning? Who in the hell really wants to live in that kind of world?

I'm divorced, trust me. I know from personal experience that there's limits to spite in that regard.

I don't find the idea of "The world is horrible, now go out there and be a terrible person before someone comes along and is terrible to you" to be a good program for...well, anything. Selling out your country and your religion and your soul for the sake of hate just seems like a terrible idea.

I see conservatism...and individual conservatives...spiraling off into hate and racism and some kind of bizarre social rage at the idea that anybody is doing better than they are, and I see only spiritual death.

I often think that these people don't want to accomplish anything...but they don't want anybody else to accomplish anything either.

People being so afraid of change or difference or The Other that they'd destroy the very civilization that sustains them...that's being spiritually dead, right there.

As an American, hell as a former conservative, who was taught what the ideals of America mean and why somebody would want to come here from a place like Afghanistan or El Salvador or Lebanon or Nigeria or Tonga and sign on to the ideal of being an American...I literally do not see the point of Building A Wall or trying to keep out any of those people...who historically want to come here and end up making America better...and I think anybody...anybody...who'd sell this great (for all its faults) country out to a Third-World shit-hole like Putin's Russia (for any reason) ought to have the last thing they see be the muzzle-flashes of a firing squad's rifles.

Death has a purpose, on occasion.

Death is, naturally, a part of life.

But 90,000 unnecessary deaths per year? That's not a part of life.

Death by despair and drug addiction and murder and war? That's not supposed to be part of life either.

A religion that nobody really believes, because in reality it's all dog-whistles for power and wealth, there's nothing life-affirming about that. The quoted Bible verse says "...And Hell followed with him" but many other translations will say "Hades" instead. Hades was a name for the Underworld, and for the god who controlled it. In the Ancient World, if you weren't righteous enough to go to whatever state of blessed afterlife, nor evil enough for your soul to be destroyed...you went to the Underworld. To me...that's what spiritual death means. Too often people get hung up on the issue of heaven or hell, but by design...there was always that third option....and it seems like it sucks.

George Orwell described fascism as "Imagine a boot, stomping on a human face, forever."

Do you know what I imagine the Underworld, in a modern context, would be like?

Imagine sitting in a recliner, with a beer in your hand, watching FOX News...forever.

Imagine having the choice between possibly knowing all the secrets of the universe, or sitting there and resenting the hell out of those who do.

The worst part is, there's people who will choose the latter, willingly.

That is spiritual death.

The truth is that the Judgement of the Black Horse and Death...and for that matter all of the other of the Four Horsemen...isn't dying, it isn't being killed in some horrible manner...It isn't war, famine, plague or some combination of them...the true Judgement is what comes after when we are judged for how we lived, for how we treated people, and the Earth, and all the other living things that inhabit it.

Death is only the beginning.

Live your life accordingly.

...And know that Ayn Rand was wrong, your self-satisfaction is not its purpose.

American Revelation (Part Three)

Mirror, Mirror (Part Five)