I AM BACK, and I am rather not quite the same person who last posted here.
For the past 18 months I have wandered in a wasteland of on-line U.S. politics, its cultoid demands for lockstep conformity befouling whatever fresh air it might formerly have offered, its once-presumably fertile realm now a toxically anti-intellectual barren, its most apt description the oft-quoted William Butler Yeats line -- the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity -- a condition that seems at least as dreadfully true of humanity today as it was in the era of Nazi ascension Yeats so accurately described.
But my odyssey actually began not with the advent of my long silence 18 months ago but three years beforehand in 2001. A writer as much by inclination as by trade, I was looking for an on-line home, a virtual family. Instead, on both Right and Left, I found superficial acceptance that -- once the unorthodoxies of my views became clear -- was invariably followed by venomous personal attacks, deliberately hurtful rejection and, in two instances (both on the Left), the virtual execution of electronic banishment. Thus my quest has taught me that in today’s United States, my very independence of mind makes me an ideological pariah and dooms me to political homelessness -- a condition I may as well embrace, solitude and all -- because it is now obvious it will accompany me to death‘s door if not beyond.
Nevertheless, as I better absorb the lesson I learned, I will tell more about my travels -- particularly why my own former (leftist) values had by 1988 deteriorated into a (rightist) politics of retaliation (for that is precisely what happened), but then, beginning in 2004, evolved into reconciliation with those original (leftist) wellsprings. The result is a new and abiding clarity based on the historical truth of class struggle: the Occam’s Razor of political analysis -- the genuine missing link in U.S. politics -- the principle that among other things explains precisely why my life was destroyed by the Washington state welfare bureaucracy 19 years ago: the victimization for which, from 1988 through 2004, I voted Republican in revenge.
Alas, though my experience is an extreme example of the contradictions woven into the devil’s bargains served up by our political system -- we are allowed only the narrowest of choices, either Democrats who falsely promise they will provide us with a desperately needed socioeconomic safety net even as they forcibly deny us the right and means of self-defense, or Republicans who make no secret of their intent to reduce us to slavery but claim to preserve our right to defend ourselves against crime and apocalypse -- the same impossible dilemma ultimately confronts all of us who must sell our labor to survive. While I foresee no escape from the dilemma itself, perhaps my own struggles toward political understanding will at least help others grappling with the same crazy-making reality.
Meanwhile, to illustrate a much larger dimension of what is at stake, here is an infinitely sad and endlessly saddening report of an especially gentle species of dolphin now harried to extinction.
Dolphins are as intelligent as we are -- there are many true stories of dolphins saving sailors' lives, and there is even some suggestion the ancient Minoans regarded dolphins as uniquely symbolic of the co-mingled elements -- earth, water, fire and air -- characteristic of all earthly life. Because intelligence is also capacity for emotion, it is at least arguable that dolphins possess the same range of feeling as humans. Thus if we have ever known (as I surely have) the pangs of genuine isolation and absolute loneliness, we might be able to empathize, just a bit, with that last surviving Baiji, who no doubt spent endless hours desperately searching for kindred before finally dying in the ultimate despair of loss and abandonment.
Such is the genocide implicit not only in capitalism but in what H. sapiens sapiens attempts to rationalize as "civilization" -- an escalating atrocity for which I do not believe our planet will ever forgive us. Therefore as an Act of Contrition -- and as a small prayerful foreword to what will be another of my recurring themes -- I offer this fragment of a Cheyenne Ghost Dance chant:
The white man’s god has forsaken him
Let us go and look for our Mother...
I was doing a Google search and happened across your blog here and you pretty much sum up the small bit of your political odyssey that I've been witness to for the last several months. I hestitate to limit it by saying'political odyssey' because it is deeper than that, but here is one note of optimism:
I think you have misread your recent demise in a very big sense. You were only truly rejected by the traditional Left, a group that is more worthy of rejection than any other. They guised themselves as something else, but their masks came off with a ready abandon, didn't they? By that reading, it was simply a farce because there is a group you've long been estranged from.
Don't surrender to that, don't surrender to them.
Posted by: Kid Of the Black Hole at December 20, 2006 07:10 PMSorry kid... wrong again. That ain't the "traditional left". Much more Yani and pyramids and touching conversation. There is a surplus of it on the web. Gotta be a way to burn it in a stove to keep out the winter chill.
anax
Too much of a lone wolf--wolves are pack animals working together for the whole. You are a mix of contradictions and perhaps some of your views about Islam are misgided--it isn't fair to compare the highest aspects of Christianity with the negative extremes of Islam--and even then, perhaps their unifying force in repelling the "infidel" as political overlord is religious rhetoric.
Still, you spend too much time alone and have far too much to offer to succumb to bitterness
Yours was a very thought-provoking note -- for which many thanks -- and I am answering most of it at length in the regular blogspace, an answer I won't have completed until tomorrow.
Meanwhile, I believe my comparison of Christianity and Islam is indeed fair because I compare what each religion was at its moment of birth: Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on what the Christians now celebrate as Palm Sunday (his first public recognition as the Messiah), and Muhammed's entry into Mecca to murder, rape and enslave the unbelievers (his first public act as the Prophet of Allah). This is the history I was taught by a defiantly Marxist professor 47 years ago at the University of Tennessee -- a professor who was later vindictively purged both for his politics and for his public friendship with civil rights activists -- and it is a version of history I have since found no reason to doubt, especially given its underlying (and classically Marxist) bias against all Abrahamic religion: a bias I share not as a Marxist (technically Marx is only one of several influences in my thinking) but because I acknowledge the validity of the goddess-centered (and therefore eco-centric) spiritualities ALL the Abrahamic religions have forever sought to exterminate.
Bottom line: while Judaism, Christianity and Islam each aspire toward the absolute tyranny of total theocracy, Islam alone is unchanged in its aspirations toward a global caliphate -- a caliphate it very nearly imposed on Europe twice: once long before Europe mustered the failed counterattack of the Crusades, and again afterward in the retaliatory Islamic onslaught that ended at Vienna in 1683.
Indeed the historical background is precisely what makes the present world situation so seemingly paradoxical and thus difficult to comprehend: the Bush Regime's manipulation of 9/11 into a latter-day Reichstag Fire and the subsequent and ongoing imposition of domestic and global tyranny (which includes the meat-grinder of Iraq) -- these are all very real outrages that embody steadily worsening threats. But the threat of fundamentalist Islam is equally real (never mind it was the U.S. that resurrected Islamic extremism to suppress Marxism in the Middle East). Thus -- as never before in our history -- we are threatened equally from without and within.
(If you want introductory links on the nonrevisionist history of Islam, just ask, and I'll provide them within a few days.)
In any case, thanks again for your critique.
Posted by: Loren Bliss at December 27, 2006 02:32 AM