Anti-Bob Update #7: That Old Devil Moonbat

I went down into the arkive, and this was the first post I grabbed. It was surrounded by a number of other golden wedgies, so I've tried to edit and distill them all down to their demonic essence. Yeah, it's long, but I think its a keeper. All gags and insults that have not stood the test of time have been ruthlessly excised, and new ones embedded. Unlike the left, we do not grant automatic tenure to old jokes just because they reflect our political sentiments.

♪♫ They vote for him and suddenly,
Something in their polices,
Soon begins defrauding me,
It's those old devil moonbats ♫♪ --Apologies to Frank

Let's see what our Unknown Friend has to say about these devils. That would be card XV, Le Diable, which is the French word for "the French."

UF calls it the card of "counter-inspiration" -- of intoxication and electrical fire. But first he warns us that, unlike the other arcana -- with which the seeker should sympathetically identify -- we must keep a certain disrespectful distance from this one, for identification is a form of intuition that also involves comm-union, or becoming one.

This immediately makes me wonder about the lunar 'batmosphere of academonia. As the deviled eggheads of the tenured left say, "give me a child between 18 and 21 with a skull full of mush, and he will be a moonbat forever."

These children become old before their time, preserved in umbrage like the mentally and spiritually sclerotic old geezers who perform the brainwash. As one observer asked of one of their geriatric pep rallies, "What do the old radicals have left to offer the youth? Socialism."

"Expecting a healthy turnout of idealistic youths, I was surprised to find that the crowd was comprised predominantly of middle-aged '60s throwbacks looking to recapture the glory days of the jarring folk music, campus occupations, and general social chaos that accompanied the Vietnam War.... Dominated by the '60s generation as it was, it was unsurprising to see a galaxy of signs and booths invoking the sacred cure-all of nearly every 1960s radical -- socialism.... It is sad that in thirty years, the U.S. Left hasn’t come up with a better idea than [this].... A good many of the older folks, I suspect, are not even motivated by politics so much as by a desire to recapture their youth.... These old coots -- Fonda included -- are like insects trapped in amber; forever destined to to remain fixated and unmoving as time passes them by."

I think this is a key insight, for it highlights the truism that "progressivism" is a deeply nostalgic exercise, politically, developmentally, and even ontologically. Politically it is a form of romanticism, a backward-looking philosophy that naively idealizes human nature and the realm of the instincts in general.

Developmentally it is nostalgic, for it attempts to resuscitate the conditions of infancy, when "wishing" could be instantaneously converted into "having" merely by crying and registering sufficient distress. For a helpless infant this is entirely appropriate, but most of us "move on" -- which is to say we don't moveon.org. This reminds me of one of Petey's "old saws": If wishes were horse's asses, then Democrats would need a much bigger stable for their convention.

And progressivism is ontologically nostalgic, for it denies the ironyclad conditions of the Fall, imagining that our primordial calamity never occurred. Thus, for the leftist, the distance between mankind and paradise is not a result of man, but The Man. If we can just eliminate The Man, then we will all live on Sugar Candy Mountain. Most recently The Man was George Bush, but it could be anyone, so long as it is a Man who represents Manhood -- which is to say, a direct challenge to the dominion of the Great Mother who presides over the dreamworld of infancy.

Of course, it is difficult to speak of these maters without insulting someone, but psychoanalysis does it all the time. As I wrote in the Coonifesto, human beings are structurally trimorphic, which is to say, composed of Mother, Father, and Baby. Just as in the home, their relations in the head can either be harmonious or perpetually conflictual. That is to say, there can be a turf war within the psyche over who is going to be in charge: Mommy, Daddy, or His Majesty, the Baby.

In your home growing up, who was in charge? And was the power wielded benignly, in consultation with the others, or was it lorded over the other two? And who calls the shots in your head today? Hopefully, you have a system of shared powers -- a creative and imaginative, dream-prone infant who is able to conjure a benign reality in the presence of a safe, reverent, containing, and metabolizing (m)other, given protection and structure by the the rule of the Father, or the limitations and responsibilities of the Real.

Please try not to think of this in an overly saturated way, but more in the spirit of it, for as Christopher Bollas writes, each of these modes "is an essential element of the triad seeking truth." Each of these very different orders must be present within the psyche in a balanced way in order for us to process reality -- or to be precise, in order for reality to process us.

Likewise, "any emphasis on one of the three constituents to the subtle exclusion of the others automatically undermines the structure of knowledge..." Growth requires "three elements of authoring and knowing: a celebration of the dreamer, the infant, the child, the producer of vivid ideas; a capacity to receive life and to bear a not knowing..., even though a profound mulling over and playing is the medium of such reception; and finally, a search for the truth that calls for judgment."

It is no wonder that (either literally or figuratively, or both, in the case of Obama) fatherless children account for most of the real trouble in society, for, psychically speaking, these are omnipotent infants in the presence of adoring mothers, with no father to "lay down the law" and provide conditional love. But there are also "motherless children" (again, either literally or figuratively) who suffer in different ways, as well as "infantless adults" who are dead to the most spontaneously alive part of themselves.

It is a banality to point out that there is a dearth of fathers and even an overt devaluation of the concept of fatherhood on the left. In fact, a colleague of mine had an interesting analysis of 9-11 along these lines, noting that one's emotional reaction to it may parallel the type of family in one's head, so to speak. For the left, there was a deep and painful nostalgia for those first couple of weeks after the attack, when we were "unified" and "the world was with us." This is a fantasy of the realm of the infant-mother dyad writ large, a harmonious union of frightened babies. Remember Jodie Foster's supremely inane commencement speech a couple of years ago?

She starts by snidely noting that "my freshman year in the fall of 1980 marked the election of Ronald Reagan [read: the symbolic Father] for his first term in office and a subsequent 12 years that we all know too much about" [read: that I know nothing about, and you certainly don't, since you weren't even born, and your leftist professors would be the last to tell you the truth about it]. Foster then turns her attention to 9-11, to the "unending grief too hard for one nation to bear." But for "one instant of deep sorrowful mourning, the world was with us" [read: Mommy loved us].

In fact, speaking of Mommy, "We reached out our arms as the world reached out its arms -- a terrible moment, a moment of wonder, a moment so true, and so beautiful, and so exquisitely sad, one that we shared with humankind. And then, the moment was gone. In my belief, squandered..."

We had a boo boo, we reached out to mommy, mommy reached out to us. Mommy make better. It was all good. What happened?

Daddy happened, and Daddy don't play. Daddy has a rule: you take out two buildings, we take out two countries. Got it? [Of course, Obama's worldwide "apology tour" is an effort to get mommy to love us again. Predictably, for the the pirates of the world, their lives will now be as easy as stealing candy from a baby.]

Foster closes her infantile wish list with a rap, or urban nursery rhyme: "You better lose yourself in the music / the moment / You own it / you better never let it go." Translated, this means, "You better lose yourself in the womb / the mommy / You own her / you better never let her go / never grow up / stay a Democrat for life!"

Coincidentally, at the same time, Bill Cosby was giving a different kind speech, speaking on behalf of the order of the Father:

"'You have to know that it is time for you all to take charge.... You have to seriously see yourselves not as the old women where the men stood in front and you all stood behind, because the men, most of them are in prison.' In his current... speaking tour, he has emphasized the need for proper parenting and education as self-help answers for low-income, urban families.... Cosby told the graduates that the same male students who are dropping out of high school 'have memorized the lyrics of very difficult rap songs.' Added Cosby: 'And they know how to send their sperm cells out and then walk away from the responsibility of something called fatherhood....' Cosby made a reference to his critics, whom he called 'all those liberals.'"

But of course, first we must overturn the order of leftist, man-fearing, heterophobic white Hollywood mothers who memorize inane rap lyrics and want mother government to usurp the realm of the Father.

Now, according to our Unknown Friend, demons are essentially indistinguishable from what I call mind parasites, which are "engendered subjectively" but then "become forces independent of the subjective consciousness that engendered them." He quotes Jung on the matter, who regarded psychological complexes as "autonomous being[s] capable of interfering with the intentions of the ego," and which "do indeed behave like secondary or partial personalities possessing a mental life of their own."

But there are individual mind parasites and collective ones, for example, Marxism and the neo-Marxist wack magic of modern "progressives." Although writing in the 1960s, UF could be describing today's demon-haunted leftism: "Engendered by the will of the masses," nourished by resentment, and "armed with a dummy intellectuality which is Hegel's dialectic misconstrued," at least half of mankind "is impelled to bow down before this god and to obey it in everything."

In fact, neo-Marxism is a collective demon by its own standards, since it is a wholly materialistic philosophy. Being such, it is only the will to power dressed up as ideology. This is why there is a fundamental incoherence at the root of all forms of leftism, which affirms its own privileged ideological truth in a cosmos where truth is strictly impossible.

I call any philosophy "of the left" if it denies the transcendent truth under- and overwritten by the logos of the One, because once the One is denied, all paths lead to leftism, whether it is materialistic scientism or the kind of bonehead atheism promulgated by phobosophical flaw firm of Harris, Dawkins & Hitchens. Just as all paths of truth lead to God, the denial of Truth is the "final common pathway" to leftist hell on earth.

This is also why all philosophies and institutions that are not explicitly conservative (by which I mean embodying the principles of classical liberalism rooted in Judeo-Christian metaphysics) sooner or later descend into leftism. Moreover, this is why it is no mystery that the Republican Party should fall into a form of "leftism lite," because very few Republicans are explicitly conservative -- which is to say, they may be "conservative" as adjective but not "Conservative" as noun. Thus, when given power, they govern like slightly less intoxicated leftists.

Mankind is sick. This we all know. We also know that there is a "treatment," but no absolute cure.

America's founders, who wanted to "relaunch" mankind in a new setting; not just a geographical setting, but an interior one of spontaneously ordered liberty oriented toward a spiritual telos. And they obviously achieved a smashing success, because America produced the finest and most decent and prosperous country the world has ever known. In fact, it is hard to even imagine what a miserable hellhole the world would be without America's beneficence. (Here is a simple test: what I just said is either immediately self-evident to you, or your soul is possessed by a demon.)

I'm not saying it's your fault, dear moonbat -- to put it in your terms, you may well be a victim, but not in the way that word is usually employed by the left. Rather, leftists are the victims of their own demons, and like all demons, they seek to convert others by "placing the bite" on them. Thus, for example, they have successfully plunged their teeth into the majority of blacks, 90% of whom vote against their best interests by identifying with the Democrat plantation. Secular Jews too have by and large abandoned God for the demons of the left, for how else can you account for their support of the most anti-Semitic institutions and forces in the world?

And adolescents with no spiritual foundation -- which is to say, no anchor in objective truth -- naturally veer leftward, since they, more than any other people, are under the influence of the earth, what with their abundance of hormones raging through a mind that has been temporarily dismantled on the developmental road between childhood and adulthood.

But to inculcate adolescents with leftism at this sensitive age -- to expose them to registered text offenders, which we routinely do by giving them an insanely expensive brainwashing in leftist loondromats -- is a grave, even unforgiveable, offense, for it sanctions a lifetime developmental arrest at a partial stage of what should be a "functional dis-integration," not a permanent one. For it is written:

If anyone of you moonbats causes one of these little ones to reject Truth for the intellectual crack of leftism -- look at me, Chomsky, I'm talking to you -- if any of you little tenuremites eating away at the spiritual foundation of the West do this, it would be better for you to have a large millstone hung around your pencil neck and drowned in the depths of your own bullshit.

The benign "neurological breakdown" that naturally occurs with adolescence serves the greater evolutionary purpose of allowing the mind to re-integrate at a higher level of wholeness and unity. Indeed, this back-and-forth process of dis-integration and synthesis -- what Bion called PS<-->D -- is what makes the human mind unique among the animals, because it signifies a form of neoteny for life. In this sense, we are children for life, but only in the sense that we -- unlike any other animal -- are capable of limitless growth toward an implicit but transcendent end. But no growth is possible if we become arrested at -- and even idealize -- what should be a temporary stage of adolescent questioning and skepticism.

Put another way, leftism is simply intellectual sanction for a lifetime of adolescent rebellion, something which is again self-evident if you merely consider what leftists say -- especially at their many demon-strations -- and how they govern. Obviously, there are no proper adults on Air America. There is no coherent philosophy on dailykos. There is no mature reflection at huffingtonpost. There is no intellectual sophistication at The Nation. There is no wisdom in the New York Times idiotorial pages. There is no Light in the UN, just a family of organized grime. Why is that?

"Now, there is the Word, and there are egregores [collective mind parasites] before whom humanity bows down; there is revelation of divine truth, and the manifestation of the will of human beings; there is the cult of God, and the idols made by man. Is it not a diagnosis and prognosis of the whole history of the human race that at the same time Moses received the revelation of the Word at the summit of the mountain, the people at the foot of the mountain made and worshipped a golden calf?" (UF).

There is the Word -- a supernaturally natural world intelligible to our naturally supernatural intellect -- and there are idols. Ultimately, leftists are intoxicated and grandiose idol-worshipers who bow before their own creations, which are truly an opiate offered to the masses of traumatically lost, confused, bitter, lazy, entitled, and disenchanted souls -- the surly teens among us.

The cure?

As always, "Light drives out darkness. This simple truth is the practical key to the problem of how to combat demons. A demon perceived, i.e., on whom the light of consciousness is thrown, is already a demon rendered impotent." And Obama could hardly be more narcissistically self-impotent.