Rabid Goon – Supreme Arbiter of Truth

we are all just sadness, happiness, excitement, despar…

March forth, March fifth, march on.

When people say we’re living in ‘uncertain’ times, what the fuck are they talking about? Have times ever been ‘certain’? Is certainty even something that should be considered an optimal or even slightly desirable trait for times to have? Should certainty have any real bearing on the way we conduct our lives? If we focus too much on a conceptual framework for existence that has only a tenuous relationship with the way things ‘really are’, are we doomed to isolate ourselves on a useless, blank, abysmal quixotic quest for nothingness, regurgitated reality?

One has to wonder…

When the summer of 2011 had finally come to a long-delayed end, and the dreary residue of blurry waking daydreams enveloped me in a thirsting quest for something, maybe ‘normal’, my desire for the party-fueling electronic beat-driven soundtrack of my recent past was on a major downswing, to say the least.

I actually found myself listening to Van Morrison more than anything with any kind of bloops, blips and beeps, and Mirror Traffic ascended to its perch on top of my year-end albums list. I just wasn’t feeling the beats. So, I kind of missed a beautiful, mesmerizing gem of an album called Sepalcure by Sepalcure. I’ve been making up for it this week.

Scorsese’s Hugo is on in the other room and I can’t be bothered to watch it. Every time I stop watch, it looks beautiful, but there’s just something I can’t get past. Something about movies that are specifically made for children is wholly unappealing to me. It’s not easy to pin down, but something about the innocent sense of ‘wonder’ for the sake of being wonderful repels me deeply. Some cynicism, please.

I thought of this the other night while hanging out with my friend, Rich.I have one of those wooden banana holders that the bananas hang from, and I mentioned kind of self-mockingly that I’m more inclined to eat bananas if they’re hanging than if they’re just lying on the counter. I quarter-jokingly said that it’s because we’re descended from apes and we have a natural inclination toward hanging bananas because of that fact. It seems to make some sense. It’s at least kind of a tidy little comforting idea.

Blue, brown and white, but kind of an off-white. Great color combo. Pretty nice.

10. Draconian Drug Laws – Conservatives love the idea of people serving lengthy prison sentences for possession of small amounts of illegal drugs, because certainly, these people cause more problems for society than rich people who ceaselessly manipulate the financial system to consolidate wealth.

9. Unnecessary and Aggressive Militarism as a Cornerstone of our Foreign Policy – Conservatives love war, because it gives them something other than the imprisonment of poor black people to cheer for. It also gives them yet another excuse to adorn the American flag on their articles of clothing.

8. Pre-Enlightenment Attitudes to Science – Conservatives are apparently still upset that the world has been proven beyond the slightest shred of doubt to not be flat. They’ve been tirelessly striking out against scientific advancement ever since.

7. Environmental Degradation – Conservatives want nothing more than to see the environment raped and pillaged to ensure the continuing, unabated profiteering of polluting industries.

6. Religious Indoctrination in Schools – Because kids can’t possible learn scientific ‘theories’ such as God’s having willed the world into existence, unless their school day is filled with Christian prayer.

5. The Lie that America is a Christian Nation – Despite many of the founding fathers being deists, agnostics or at least only casually religious, conservatives want to maintain our status as a ‘Christian Nation’ founded on ‘Christian ideals’ even though the constitution was specifically worded to reject this notion.

4. Sexual Inequality – Conservatives reject the notion that there should be equal opportunity among the sexes. After all, the Bible clearly states that women should be subservient to men, and the bible is the foundational document of our republic, right?

3. Racial Inequality – Along with Christianity, this country was founded on slavery. If conservatives are no longer allowed to enslave those uppity blacks, well they can at least build prisons and mandate harsh sentences for things like drug offenses which target poor blacks in cities. It’s also a good idea to reduce or eliminate federal tax dollars going to inner city schools, because improving education in these places might reduce the degree to which the deck is stacked in the favor of rich white children.

2. Shaming of and Hatred toward Homosexuals – Let’s face it, gays are icky. I think that’s actually what Jesus was quoted as saying in the bible. If we allow gays to openly exist in our society, God is going to punish us with stubbed toes and other tragedies. We need to fight this immorality, because if Steve and Mark get married, the entire institution of marriage is doomed, and the fabric of society will unravel. It’s in the bible.

1. Economic disparity – Let’s face it. More than religion, discrimination against others and dark-aged attitudes toward science, what conservatives really lust for is the idea that, not only do some people out there have less than they do, but this very fact that they have less will ruin their lives. Conservatives ‘work hard for their money’ and don’t want ‘dead beats’ to get said money to do unimportant things like feed their children or take care of them when they’re sick. After all, it’s ‘unamerican’ to ask that millionaires pay a tax rate equal to that of lower income Americans, because those millionaires have worked hard to game the system and find tax loopholes with which to build their wealth on the back of our entire society. To ask some great American like Mitt Romney to actually pay his fair share amounts to socialism. It’s in the fucking bible.

Let me start this by saying that I fundamentally do not give the slightest shit in the abstract if someone decides they are going to adhere to any particular religious doctrine or believe in one of the countless mythologies that comprise that body of information collectively referred to as the world’s religions. Essentially, belief is a private thing, and it really shouldn’t matter to anyone what other people do or don’t believe.

Well, except that it does. The sad fact is, religious beliefs, while apparently comforting to many people, are also the source of many problems, both large and small. Take, for example, elections to public office. There remains today, in the year 2012, despite advances in science that essentially make the notion ridiculous, the disturbing reality that, in the USA, a person who is intelligent and qualified, but also openly an atheist, will most likely lose an election in most places to someone who is a complete and utter buffoon, wholly unqualified for the office in contention, but who believes that the earth was created 3000 years ago or whatever their fucking bible says.

The reason for this, as far as I can tell, is that religion not only offers explanations for things, but purports to be the ultimate answer to everything. Thus, religious adherents naturally feel that someone whose faith differs from theirs is, by default, unqualified to lead, since ‘god’ is the actual leader and someone not following this god is naturally going to take us in the wrong direction. As quaint and nonsensical as that sounds, it is the way things currently are, and will always be if we allow religion to continue holding the power it does over our societies.