Political Wind and the Bags Who Break it

Eww. That was yucky. After several days of posting only about spiritual matters, I had to go and touch pitch by discussing politics yesterday. Now I can't get it off.

I am reminded of something Frithjof Schuon once wrote: "I have an unpleasant feeling of limitation when I write about historical and political matters, of which I cannot think without bitterness. It is as if I had stepped down from my luminous world into a sphere of things which ought not to fill my being." To be precise, I would never, under any circumstances, describe myself as bitter. It is not that we are bitter. However, all Raccoons -- it is part of our genetic entaoment -- can "taste" the bitterness at the core of leftism. In fact, some coonologists believe that coon taste evolved prior to coon scent, and that both developmentally preceded coon vision.

This is why I always recoil from the person who describes himself as a "political junkie." Whether the person is left or right, their head is likely full of junk. The difference is that for a leftist, politics is their religion. This we know. Even if they claim to be religious, you can be sure that their religion flows from their politics and that they would never adopt a religious stance that contradicted their leftist faith. Examples are legion. For example, irrespective of how one feels about the constitutionality of Roe vs. Wade, no spiritually serious person could ever believe that abortion is something that pleases God. At best it is a necessary evil.

Now, the Raccoon is not a political animal. Like our exalted Raccoon furbears who founded America, he would enjoy nothing more than to be freed from the necessity of thinking about politics. If he could, he would spend all day laying back in his camouflage barcalounger listening to Sun Ra and his Myth Science Arkestra broadcasting the sound of joy from some other heliocentric world while reading poetry or theology and thinking to himself, "Mmmmm, medicine for a nightmare. 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky!"

As we all know, before I discovered my Raccoon nature, I myself was a garden variety liberal. Although I didn't understand it at the time, I was also, ipso facto, a leftist. However, I was never a fully infected activist or anything like that, so my soul was basically intact. Rather, I simply drifted along in the intoxicating political tide of my generational cohort, the booby blamers. These narcissistic boobs continue to blame everyone but themselves for their problems.

These two designations -- Raccoon and leftist -- categorically exclude one another. Naturally, we get the occasional commenter veritably bursting with a rudimentary acquaintance with psychology, who says "aha! You were once a radical liberal! You are now a radical conservative! Underneath, you are simply the same person projecting into a different group, you know, like that evil David Horowitz!"

This type of comment should not be disregarded a priori. After all, it makes perfect sense to a dimwit, and dimwits are entitled to their opinions. Nevertheless, I did paws to scratch my coonskin cap over this mutterer. How is it different? How do I know that I'm not just projecting into leftists what I once projected into conservatives?

Well, for starters, there is the simple matter of knowing more now than I did then. To put it bluntly, when I was a liberal, I was an idiot. You have to imagine the days before the internet or talk radio, when there was literally no other widely available source of conservative opinion outside National Review, which I don't believe has ever had more than 100,000 subscribers. For a magazine with an ideology that supposedly caters to the "wealthy," one wonders why it has never turned a profit. Why do huge corporations not flock to advertise there instead of bonehead liberal magazines such as Time and Newseek? (That was a rhetorical question.)

So, number one, I was ignorant, even abjectly so. However, being that I did not know what I did not know, I assumed that it was safe for me to exercise my intelligence within the constraints of liberalism -- which ultimately is a good way to get nowhere fast, somewhat like a gifted Soviet economist who could only think about economics within the constraints of Marxism. No matter how brilliant, he will still be stupid.

We have an "integral" visitor who repeatedly chants the mantra of "separate lines of development," as if, say, someone can be highly spiritually evolved while being emotionally or politically stunted. That may be fine for postmodern integralists, but it is not the venerable Raccoon way, which insists upon the unity of the person -- indeed, equates both spiritual depth and height with unity or wholeness.

Coherence, depth, and meaning are all a function of increasing dynamic wholeness, so that, in the end (which is always here, both as ground and as telos drawing us toward it), we are no longer a scattered, fragmented multiplicity in futile pursuit of an ever-receding unity, but a Unity that com-prehends and therefore transcends the multiplicity of the cosmos. This represents our transdimensional bar mitzvah, as we make the transition from being a son or daughter of the the Cosmic Raccoon to actually being one. Only then are we entitled to "open the first clam" (speaking, of course, metaphorically).

Now, as stated, leftist and Raccoon are entities that precisely exclude one another. They cannot be integrated, any more than one can integrate Judaism with a ham sandwich. While Raccoons are technically omnivorous, certain things are nevertheless treif -- for example envy. It would never occur to us to exalt envy, much less build our political ambitions around it, much much less try to "integrate" it into our Raccoon nature.

But of course, leftism is little more than the breeding of victims for the cultivation of envy. Last night I did catch a few moments of the liberal rebuttal to the State of the Union, but to be honest, when are liberals not rebutting reality? It is what they do.

In his response, Jimmy Webb suggested that "Someone left the economic cake out in the rain, all the sweet green money flowing up. When one looks at the health of our economy, it's almost as if we are living in two different countries. Some say that things have never been better. The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared."

Wo, wo, wo, time out, bucko. What are you hiding under that wig? "Fairly shared?" What's that supposed to mean? This is news to me. I am invested in the stock market. True, some of my mutual fund picks have been less than sterling, but it never occurred to me that it's someone else's fault -- that I'm not getting my fair share! Wahhhhhhhh!

But let's say I am intrigued. I like what I am hearing from this man Webb. My envy has been piqued. And exactly how are liberal politicians going to ensure that I do get my fair share -- whatever "fair" means? Why, they'll take away some of that wealth and create economic conditions in which less wealth is created for all! Of course, it will have no effect on my economic well-being, except to reduce it. However, if it also reduces my envy of those who are wealthier than I am, then I guess it's worth it.

Here is a type of "thinking" that would never occur to a Raccoon. It would never "cross our mind." Or, if it did, it would cross right through without ever nesting there: "When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it's nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day [this is a lie he just made up, by the way]. Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world."

My fellow Coons, do you smell what I smell? Let's pause for a moment to sniff this insane and disgusting approach to economics to try to understand just how spiritually rotten it is. We are not to live our lives from "within," to simply enjoy our life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the real world. No. Rather, we are to calculate the percentage of national wealth that we possess, and live our lives in the darkness of this meaningless and abstract imaginary world.

You see? You only thought you were content. But you were fooling yourself! You're not content at all. Liberals are here to remind you of this. Be honest. Envy is eating away at you. Something must be done to satisfy this envy. Someone must pay. Someone must be punished. I want some of Nancy Pelosi's millions! Her wealth must be fairly shared with me! I want my wife to have hundreds of thousands of dollars of plastic surgery so she too can look like a blinking corpse!

Speaking of Nancy Pelosi, here is another thing that disgusts us about the liberal media, the idea that we care that she is a "woman." Only a liberal could think that one's reproductive equipment is more important than one's ideas. Likewise, it disgusts Raccoons -- it literally makes us want to vomit -- to repeatedly hear about Obama's skin color, for we are so far beyond race that it doesn't even occur to us that he's half white. Rather, we only notice that he is halfwit. That is the only thing that matters to us.

Since liberals, with their perfect myopia, have no ideas but instead obsess over things like race, class, and gender, there is much talk that this is the year of potential "firsts." First black president, first female president, etc. But to a Raccoon, they might as well be saying "first chick president," "first n***** president," "first dago president" (Giuliani), "first baby killer president" (McCain), "first cult president" (Romney), for it is no less disgusting to our ears.

Besides, I thought negroes already had a president, Al Sharpton. Isn't he the "black leader?" That's what I heard from the liberal media. "Al Sharpton, Black Leader."

Imagine the bottomless contempt you must have for blacks to presume to appoint them a leader, much less a lowlife like Al Sharpton. Consider for a moment the racial condescension in imagining that, unlike any other Americans, blacks require a "leader" selected by the white liberals who know what's best for them. Sick, sick, sick.

By the way, ladies, who's your chick leader, anyway, Hillary or Pelosi? And where do you get your chick news, from Katie Couric or from the View? And if Tom Sowell is my leader, does that make me black?