I am the way into eternal sorrow.
Sacred justice moved my architect.
I was raised here by divine omnipotence, primordial love and ultimate intellect
Only those elements time cannot wear are beyond me,
and beyond time I stand.
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.'
~Sign above the gates of hell (variant translation) Canto III, Dante's Inferno, the Divine Comedy.
...
We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon On The Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. ~General Omar Bradley
...
If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan
Good.
Never thought I'd pity Charon, or the Grim Reaper.
I did not actually know until today that Dobson's mentor was an American Nazi ass-kisser Eugenicist, Paul Popenoe.
But, apparently, People Are Stupid.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
Or feel sympathy for the Devil who now has to put up with Dobson's stank ass.
Sorry to sound that way, but I personally know way too many people who were hurt by that particular False Teacher's bullshit, even though I can't say I ever followed any of it nor paid much attention to him.
I always thought his whole bit was just creepy as fuck, especially the obsession with spanking kids.
Like, sorry, but you can't beat a person into believing what you want them to believe, humans just don't work like that.
Note; I say this as somebody with a church background who was far more adjacent than I wanted to be, to various Fundamentalist Christians and others (Nazarenes, for example) who bought into this crap. Never practiced any of his shit myself, but I'm not unfamiliar with it.
And I know way too many people who got the fuck beat out of them by their parents or a spouse with these kind of "Christian Teachings" as an excuse.
That's all it is or ever was, an excuse for the shit these fucking people wanted to do anyway.
And perhaps more to the point, without people like James Dobson you wouldn't have Christian Nationalism as, effectively, the Imperial Cult of the Republican Party at this point.
You sure as hell wouldn't have fucking people like Donald Trump in Power without him and his brutal teachings and view of the world convincing a lot of Christians that God is an Asshole and that secular leaders who are assholes are thus somehow following God, either.
Worse, the reach of this crap extends far more than most people realize. All the way back in 2005 I was taking a psychology class at Central Michigan University and my instructor spoke almost reverently about "Dr. Dobson" in class, when somebody brought up something to do with Christianity and a then and now current "Culture War" issue (LGBT Rights, and we'd just watched a video about Transgender people in Samoa, if I recall correctly.)
Yeah, stop and think about that for a second.
Yeah, stop and think about that for a second.
(Who only redefined himself as a "Marriage Counselor" and shit like that after the revelation of the Holocaust.)
I'm gonna take a minute here and remind you that there's nobody in my little family that Eugenicists and Nazis wouldn't try to kill for various reasons.
Yes, believe it or not this kind of crap, people like Tucker Carlson saying that America was on the "wrong" side during WWII and all that, does affect real people.
Sorry, but growing up I still knew way too many shattered old men who'd left parts of their bodies or their souls in places like Bastogne or Guadalcanal who were and forever would be against German or Japanese people and I'm here to tell you the sweet old German immigrant lady that lived down the street (who'd met her husband when he was a GI stationed in Germany in the early 1950's) had a hell of a time with some of those old guys.
There was a time when saying "One can make the argument that we should have sided with Hitler" would have gotten one run out of public life and beat up by a bunch of old WWII veterans.
No one seems to want to take the Ancestors and the historians at their word that Slavery was bad, or that Nazis were (and are) evil.
How many people are gonna have to die so people can re-learn "for themselves" the shit that pretty much every current Expert is already fucking telling them??
And what's worse, the entire damned point of all this crap is that a hell of a lot of fucking morons somehow think they're going to get something out of being willfully ignorant.
Something other than Dead like James Dobson, that is.
Somebody needs to stick a screwdriver through his brain just in case, so that fucker doesn't turn and reanimate like some sort of Zombie, 'cause I bet Heaven won't take him and Hell don't want his ass either.
And neither should anybody else have, ever.
But some of us seem to want to be the Forsaken People in the City Of Woe in Dante's Inferno, apparently they think it legitimizes their shitty beliefs when things suck for everybody.
I'm so tired of the debased boredom and willful ignorance of a lot of American White people.
You either believe in freedom or you don't.
You either believe in your own right to live your fucking life, or you don't.
We need to stop fucking around with this bullshit and putting up with Nazis and religious fanatics.
It really is that simple.
Слава Україна!
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.
I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran
The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love. And those that confess to the Angkar are punished, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive. ~Dith Pran, The Killing Fields
No comments:
Post a Comment