Get Ready for the Future: It is Martyr

Crime in most previous ages had been a localized phenomenon and had apparent and comprehensible causes in the human passions of greed, lust, envy, jealousy, and the like; never has there been anything more than a faint prefiguration of the crime that has become typical of our own century, crime for which the only name is one the avant-garde today is fond of using in another Nihilist context: ‘absurd.’

That was the future orthodox monk, Father Seraphim Rose, writing in the early 1960s. He saw what was coming -- the same Future foreseen by the poet Leonard Cohen:

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul

How do we measure what happened yesterday? What have we done with our scale? I don't pretend to know exactly what motivated the mass murderer, but I think it is safe to say that he felt victimized by someone or something, and therefore entitled to lash out -- as indeed all victims feel entitled to do. I can only say that there will only be more absurd lashing out if we continue our inexorable slide into nihilism, the only alternative to theism.

This is not a "false dualism" unless one views the situation in a perfectly myopic temporo-centric manner, just because we're not "all the way there" yet; one has only to extrapolate from the trends of the past 40 years. In other words, leftist assumptions inevitably lead to nihilsim, and they know it. It's just a matter of time before we live in the time of the martyrs -- not the old martyrs who were true victims, but the misappropriation of that existential category for the purposes of instinctual expression -- i.e., sex, violence, or general envious acquisitiveness under cover of a "progressive agenda" -- for no one is more greedy and acquisitive than the leftist who believes he is intrinsically entitled to the fruits of another's labor. But his victimhood is a convenient way to conceal his soul-destroying envy from himself -- and even to convert what is a soul-illness to a political virtue.

I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
but love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder

It's very easy to discuss evil in the abstract, much more difficult when it is concrete and in your face. As usual, opinions will diverge along the fault and nobody's-fault lines of liberal and leftist, true liberals emphasizing the importance of character and values, leftists arguing that it is just a matter of taking away the guns. The latter is fanciful, while the former, as always, is the only way for mankind to collectively survive, either with or without guns.

It is true that guns don't kill people, but what if they proliferate in a society that has, in the course of a couple generations, elevated the category of victimhood to an exalted status (which simply gives bullies a free pass to be so), indoctrinated people from the earliest age that their feelings are particularly important, and denigrated any religious barrier that stands in the way of the expression of the most base impulse? You shall not judge is one of the Ten Commandments of Nihilism.

Then you have a problem. Again, I don't know much about what happened yesterday, but I'm guessing that the MSM will be quick to determine how the perpetrator was a victim, because they believe that where there is evil, there is a victim -- and therefore, no evil at all. It certainly sounds like this man regarded himself as a victim whose feelings of victimization were sufficiently important to justify homicide. But everyone is a victim if you only search hard enough. Therefore, our sociopathy should be understandable. We're only lashing out at the cosmic injustice of it all.

Make no mistake: if you teach people to think in this disgusting way, you will engender more sociopathy, because people will regard society as the immoral oppressor that has victimized them. Victimhood is the gateway to morally sanctioned violence, always. This is why it is so evil to teach the leftist psychology of victimhood. It is not just soul-corrupting to the individual who buys into it, but toxic to the society, which cannot function if the individuals who compose it regard themselves as victims of it.

The language of the left is always framed in terms of victimhood. Analyze their discourse and there is always a victim buried in it. Always. I mentioned a recent email correspondence with a liberal who greatly admired my book. I told him up front that if he were aware of my politics, he would despise me which he soon enough did. All I had to do was spell out my beliefs, and the conversation literally ended with fuck you, which is where any conversation with a true believing leftist must end -- either there or with bullets and chains. In the polarized leftist world, there are only victims and victimizers, falling straight along party lines. Thus, all of the leftist victimizers are entitled to their bullying because they are victims. I hardly have the power of Al Sharpton, whose only power is the power of victimhood conferred upon him by his supposed white victimizers.

Victimhood is one of the important paving stones on the pathway down to leftist nihilsim. Hitler was a victim. Arafat was a victim. The Columbine shooters were victims. Islamic terrorists are victims. Once you have embraced the language of victimology as legitimate -- instead of the language of absolute values and standards -- then you have no defense against the victims you have empowered. All they have to do is play the victim card, and you can have no response. Only in this way can monsters such as an Arafat receive the highest honor European leftists can confer, instead of being taken out back and shot through the head.

Once you replace the language of absolute values with the psychology of victimhood, then you will have created a society in which its citizens are not mature enough to possess weapons. The weapons will have to be confiscated by the sort of heavy-handed state our founders never envisioned, since they presumed a virtuous citizenry steeped in Judeo-Christian principles. I just have to laugh -- to keep from crying -- when someone says (and it doesn't have to be a moonbat -- increasingly, it is simply what "sophisticated people" believe) that ours is not and was not intended to be a "Christian nation." Of course it was. Our founders were not that stupid. These superior men were the opposite of leftists; they were true liberals, and it is a presumption of classical liberals that one can never use the word freedom without responsibility, or right without obligation, or entitlement without debt.

The reason why the odious civil rights charlatans have done so much untold damage to blacks is because they speak only the language of rights, entitlements, and victimhood. They are not liberals and therefore do not liberate. If for the past two generations they had inculcated their so-called "people" (whatever that means, but the MSM has designated the sociopathic Sharptons and Jacksons "leaders" of a people, so I'm just playing by their rules) with the the psychology of success, they would have rendered themselves obsolete by now. As it stands, their philosophy does not appeal to blacks, unless you are a racist who believes that blacks are incapable of arriving at truth. Rather, their philosophy appeals only to bitter losers, to the con-men who profit from creating more losers, and from guilt-ridden white leftist bigots who can feel good about themselves by giving the losers a pass on meeting standards they quite naturally impose on designated non-victims.

This is how you have a situation in which a Don Imus can have his career destroyed for simply imitating the language of blacks, language that white liberals otherwise celebrate as "art." You could say that most of that music is consumed by whites, which is true. Someone said -- I forget who at the moment -- that white adolescents are probably drawn to this music because they are not provided with virtuous male role models -- indeed, are not even taught from the earliest age that there is something called "manhood" which they must achieve at risk of being a failed human being -- because it speaks to their masculine sexual insecurities.

The grotesque sexual stereotyping of rap and hip-hop culture is the language of boys who are in thrall to what they denigrate. An overly aggressive or verbally abusive man is a feminized man -- which is not to say a "woman," but a man who has never left his mother behind and entered the world of moral manhood. In other words, male energy in the absence of the spiritual telos of manhood tends toward the monstrous. Whatever else yesterday's killer was, he wasn't a man. One wonders if he had one in his life -- not a biological father, which we all have -- for the time being -- but a man. Perhaps we shall see.

As Mark Steyn wrote,

"Apparently, when two hip-hoppers are up on stage doing their 'Who was that ho I saw you with last night?' / 'That was no ho, that was my bitch' shtick, they're just keepin' it real. When a white guy does it, he's just keepin' it real unlikely he'll find gainful employment again. Unless, of course, the networks are now proposing to apply the Imus standard to all performers, in which case the Grammy Awards will last 10 minutes (Best Liner Notes on a Polka Album and Best Tony Bennett Celebrity Duets CD of the Last Two Months).

"I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where a white guy can be fired for racist remarks without his employers having to prostrate themselves before clapped out professional grievance mongers and shakedown artists. But dream on. Two men who slandered the Duke lacrosse players not just as racists but as rapists (by the way, has the Rev. Jackson come through on his promise to pay for the 'victim' to go to college?) are the go-to guys when it comes to judging rhetorical excess in respect of varsity sports teams. Surely even a network president isn't such a craven squish he can go through a meeting like that with a straight face?"

I am often puzzled by this thing called "disagreement." How is it possible that all human beings don't agree with Mark Styen? What is debatable about what he said? To be unable to understand something so elementaty despite normal intelligence, there must be something wrong with the state of one's soul. It's not just that the person "does not understand." Rather, the problem is that the mind willfully "disunderstands" with all of the native intelligence at its disposal. Is this not the formula for the New York Times idiotorial page, which churns out so much intelligent stupidity, day after day?

Steyn continues:

"And saddest of all were the Rutgers basketball gals themselves. Almost a century and a half after the abolition of slavery, 40 years after the civil rights era, a group of young black women who've achieved great success went on TV and teared up because of a cheap crack by an over-the-hill shock jock. As a female correspondent to the Powerline Web site commented:

'Here are these tough women on top of the world and they are so fragile that a remark knocks them down. Hey, why wouldn't they have said 'F--- you? Who the heck is this fool Imus? We are queens of national basketball and there is no stopping us now. We can be and do anything we choose to be or do. . . . We don't need Al Sharpton to protect us. . . . ' But no, they look devastated and say they are damaged irreparably.'

"Only in America: a team of champions who think they're victims, an old white fool who talks like a gangsta rapper and multi-millionaires grown rich on race-baiting who promote themselves as guardians of civility. Good thing there are no real problems to worry about."

Exactly. In a way, these women are much more pathetic than "hos," whatever that word exactly connotes. I assume it must designate promiscuous or sexually conniving women, who do exist. But do we have a word of equal power to designate people who have been taught -- for you must be taught -- that no matter your level of achievement, you are still entitled to be a whining, aggrieved victim?

It reminded me of the baseball game of the week last Sunday evening. It was "Jackie Robinson Day," the 60-year anniversary of Robinson's breaking the color barrier in major league baseball. Once again, what was a noble triumph by an incredibly courageous man has been hijacked by guilty white liberals as an exercise in polarizing self-flagellation. Robinson's accomplishment has now been lost, as he has become a model for contemporary self-inflicted victimhood.

One of the reasons Branch Rickey specifically chose Robinson for his important mission was because of his strength of character. Rickey was looking for the very opposite of a victim, 180 degrees removed from the wimpy Rutgers girls, who, one is afraid to say, must have no earthly idea of what Robinson had to endure, and how much strength of character it took to maintain his composure in the teeth of a world of real racists, not moronic deejays who jokingly imitate the language of black rappers.

If that were all Robinson had to face, then a man of Robinson's caliber would have been unnecessary and we certainly wouldn't need to celebrate him. Any average person could have done it. That's the irony. If you really understand Robinson's accomplishment, you have to realize how far we've come in 60 years. To fail to appreciate it, you have to remain in a state of total historical ignorance and imagine that Robinson was analogous to the sociopathic Sharpton exerting his power to end the career of a moronic deejay. For one thing, Robinson didn't have that kind of power. Furthermore, if Robinson had spoken and comported himself in the manner of a lowlife such as Sharpton, the "experiment" would have failed, as it would have simply confirmed the prejudices of the bigots.

The constant commentary by the race-obsessed Joe Morgan was particularly grotesque. At one point he was going on about how there aren't enough black managers. If it is possible for there to be not enough black managers, then it follows that it is possible for there to be too many. I believe that approximately 12.8% of the American population is black. Since there are 30 major league baseball teams, that means that we should have... hold on, let me get my calculator... 3.84 black managers. Is my math correct? Anyway, there are presently two black managers, so we're off by more than one black! But there have been times that there have been too many black managers -- again, not in my opinion, as I don't really care, but if we apply the Morgan rules. Why didn't he complain about that? I don't know. I guess because he's a jackass. But he sure could play baseball. As could his teammate Pete Rose, who is guilty of far less. Between them, they're a regular martyrer's row.

I am out of time, so I have no way to elegantly wrap up this dispassionate rant. Cue Leonard:

Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby:
it is murder

*****

The proper attitude toward the monsters in our midst.