The Key to the Whole Durned Human Comedy

At the end of All Desire Is a Desire For Being is a list of maxims compiled by the editor. Girard is no Dávila, but nor is anyone else. And in fairness to Girard, these are extracted from larger works, not necessarily intended to be standalone wisecracks. 

I might add that although I have no compunction to playgiarise with Girard, he has never done for me quite what he does for esteemed acolytes such as Bailie, for whom it is as if he has discovered the key to the whole freakin' world enigma, maybe even recovered the Cosmic Area Rug that ties the Room of Being together. But that's my job. 

I mean, I take comfort in knowin' Girard's out there revealin' the secret history of sacred violence for all us sinners, and showin' how the scapegoat mechanism perpetuates the whole durned human tragicomedy down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands a time... 

'Course, I didn't like seein' the Injuns go, but then again, you only die once, but victimhood is forever. Frankly, victimhood has no history, nor does its kissin' cousin, redemptive envy.     

It's not just my opinion that Girard has one Big Idea, but his opinion too:

I stand revealed by these days of debate as a man of few ideas, so simple in their principle that perhaps they amount to no more than a single idea. It would in that case qualify as an idée fixe. 

I-dee what? 'Course I never been to France, and I ain't never seen no queen in her damn undies as the fella says. But I'll tell you what, after readin' this anthology, I guess I seen somethin' every bit as stupifyin' as ya'd see in any a them fancy colleges, and in English too. 

Send any masterpiece you like my way, literary, cultural or religious, and it will be quite a miracle if I do not come back to you, a month or a year later, with my mimetic desire, my sacrificial crisis and above all... that bloody atrocity with which I am infatuated, the primordial, founding act of violence: the collective murder of the deity.

You can kill God -- hell, you did kill God -- but I also happen to know that there's lil' Son on the way, who rises in the ashes of our own attempted deicide. 

You'd think that would be the end of the story, and it is the end of the story, but post-Christian history is the story of denyin' the Story.

The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.

Look at the headlines, and every damn day is a struggle of naked libido dominandi in its damn undies, fightin' over the privilege of sacred Victimhood. It's an endless game of Who's the Real Victim Here? Like that smart feller Ace o' Spades says.

Isn't Expecting an Impartial and Unbiased Investigation of Hunter Biden Just Like Slavery All Over Again? https://ace.mu.nu/archives/405401.php

 Ya' see,

No one ever sees himself as casting the first stone.

Least of all our persecutors. Hell, 

Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.

Now, Victim, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. 

Tell ya' what, you try that big city horseshit in a small town -- cuss out a cop, spit in his face, stomp on the flag and light it up... Hell, you ain't no victim, but yer' about to be. Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk, carjack an old lady, pull a gun on the owner of the Silver Dollar Saloon, and you're entering a world of pain.  

Political correctness? Why that's just

the religion of the victim detached from any form of transcendence. 

That ain't what I learned in church. But then, I ain't never been to Bowdoin college, and I sure ain't been to no Harvard. 

Scapegoating is effective only if it is nonconscious. Then you do not call it scapegoating; you call it justice.

Hell, you call it social justice, which wraps her all up in that flowery progressive bovine excrement, but I know Ellie May's parlor from her daddy's barn.

Why is Christianity s'durned unpopular for these folks? 'Cause

Instead of incriminating a single person -- it indicts us all.

And

Christ reveals and uproots the structural matrix of all religion.  

Especially progressive religion, where

It is now no longer possible to persecute except in the name of victims.

Wal, I hope you folks enjoyed yourselves... Catch you further on down the trail, if the victims don't catch ya' first!