Sermonette

Good evening and welcome to the Getzian institute for higher theological studies.

Leaving aside, for now, the question of whether Jesus was a splendid chap who happened to be God in human form or, conversely, a charismatic paranoid schizophrenic -- the first century equivalent of David Koresh...

For the sake of argument, let's assume He was a wonderful fellow with jolly good ideas.

That still leaves His religion, or at least that which claims to be His religion -- the history of which shall be our lesson for today.

Christianity...

A religion which, to accentuate the positive, was a neat way for slaves to adapt to a totalitarian government in the 1st century; by the 3rd century it had become a neat way for a totalitarian government to turn people into slaves.

Let's bloody well assume this was not what Jesus had in mind. Let's assume that this was the awful, ghastly harlot church at work. The question becomes: What's the difference between the religion of Christianity and what Jesus had in mind?

To pinpoint what He had in mind: learn Aramaic, get in a time machine, go back and ask Him. Failing that, read the Bible which is, of course, not a redaction of an Aramaic oral tradition via the farcing of Mark and the Q document into Koine Greek and later edited by Paul to blame everything on the Jews and keep the Romans happy, but the inspired and unerring Word of God. We know that everything in the Bible is true because it says in the Bible "everything in the Bible is true." Right.

OK. What's it say?

Glad you asked.

The Bible says Jesus hung out with prostitutes and drunks, preached non-violence, said nada to the Emperor, discouraged His followers from planning for tomorrow or being active in politics -- let alone taking over -- told rich people they were going to burn in hell, told people who prayed loudly in public they were going to burn in hell, told his followers to sell everything and leave their families, reserved his fiercest ass-kicking not for sinners but for people who wore their religion on their sleeves.

What's the difference between Christianity what Jesus was talking about?

For the answer to this we turn to the Romans who, when they weren't nailing Messiahs to crosses, had a knack for coming up with cool slogans like: "Cui Bono" which refers not to a deceased Italian pop star but the question, "Who benefits?"

Now consider Christianity Inc., the religion, and who benefits, starting more or less at the beginning...

As you want to turn America into a Christian nation, you will be pleased to note that Rome was a Christian nation when it fell, having been Christianized by Constantine who had had a vision of a big flaming cross in the sky under the legend IN THIS SIGN SHALL YOU CONQUER before slaughtering thousands. And so, the glorious true believers of the time served God by smashing the noses off statues and burning the library of Alexandria until the Vandals,

Huns and Visigoths came in and smashed everything. Christianity proved to be an excellent religion for the dark ages in which Europe was organized along the lines of an ant farm. The reasoning was: everything that is is the will of God -- so God wants the king to be king, the lord to be lord, the serf to be serf -- it all works out! After several hundred years or so this got boring so the religious leaders of the time decided that when Jesus said, "He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword" what He had meant was "if you don't practice enough," and so the crusades were invented to reclaim Jerusalem for Christendom from the fell Turk, which resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, including any Jewish settlement along the way and the odd Children's Crusade though, on the upside, the crusades did stimulate trade routes, which destabilizing force (along with the invention of printing) began to rock the social order as we move into the Renaissance, the Church responding with the unforgettable Inquisition (having decided that, even though their religion was founded by a man tortured to death for heresy -- the problem was not in the torture, but the fact that the Romans had the wrong guy) as, externally, the Church gave her blessing to the slaughter of Indians, black people or anybody else standing in the way of European world colonization, as one of the more puffy Popes began selling papal Indulgences (Tetzel the tout crying "When the coin in the coffer rings -- the coin from purgatory springs!") and thus building St. Peter's basilica on the backs of peasants sweating to get grandpa out of the fires (and prefiguring Oral Roberts by centuries), as printing plus German nationalism led to the Protestant reformation, Christians now slaughtering the wrong kind of Christians -- take that, you !@#$ Monophysite you! -- along with, as always, Jews in Spain, Jews in Portugal, Jews in Poland, Jews in Russia, Jews in Germany -- as Ollie Cromwell and the skinheads marched on London to depose Charles II and put an end to partying, later invading Ireland and slaughtering and starving out millions with the legend GOD IS LOVE emblazoned on his cannons; Puritans, meanwhile, coming to America for the religious liberty to cut off the ears of people they thought were heretics; Christian preachers later emphasizing that it was God's will that black people -- the sons of Ham -- be turned into slaves, God's will also being that it was our sacred White American Patriotic Christian duty -- our manifest destiny, praise God! -- to slaughter the Indians and anybody else n our way as, meanwhile, in South Africa, the glorious Voortrekkers trudged into the veldt to discover that, by divine providence, "Praise God! He has given us diamonds -- and ni**ers!" -- as, back in America, the Calvinistic doctrine was all the rage that to be rich is a sign of God's election -- enjoy it! -- as the second wave of worldwide European colonizers were becoming increasingly aware of the the power of missionary service in keeping indigenous populations in line, leading to what Pearl S. Buck called bowing, fawning, I'll-say-what-you-want "rice Christians," as a new century dawned with millenial hopes to build God's city on a hill "undimmed by human tears," these hopes for human perfection via legislated morality leading not to New Jerusalem but Prohibition, blue laws, the criminalization of marijuna and enormous career opportunities for Italian immigrants; as electronic media soon gave birth to Amie Semple McPherson, Fascist Father Coughlin...and later Jimmy, Jimmy, Tammy, Oral, Pat and other televangelists with ambiguous names who, even though televised, overcame the difficulty of Jesus' prohibition against pious public prayer by closing their eyes and shouting. And how could they help it? They had discovered that, longhair or not, Jesus was no hippy dropout, no bomb-throwing anarchist -- Jesus was the kind of Right-thinking Jesus who, if walking around on the earth today, would be proud of His investment portfolio, proud to pick up a gun and "pitch in" if the contras needed it, proud to lob a bomb through an abortion clinic window, proud to tell some homeless bum "get a job!" and not give him a handout, proud, in the final analysis, to be an American.

Who benefits?

"Praise God...if you send your ten percent seedfaithheartblessingdonationmustardseed freewill offering to my ministry, God has REVEALED UNTO ME by the power of His Holy Spirit, that the desire of your heart shall be given unto you...that car you want...that job you want...believe it, receive it, name it and claim it, through the POWER OF GIVING TO GET it shall come back to you a hundredfold, good measure, pressed down and shaken together, amen. Here's the number to call..."

Consider your high-profile religious leaders. Look at their suits. Look at their cars. Look at the fat rings on their fat hands. Look at their lazy, complacent, well-fed huckster faces.

Who benefits?

Gee, wonder why these religious leaders are attempting to serve God by sucking up to power -- look! Here's a picture of Mr. Religious leader with his arm around Ronnie Reagan! Look! Did you know that Mr. Religious leader talked one-on-one with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985? Here's another picture! Here's Mr. Religious leader driving in a tank through Jerusalem, smiling and waving. Here's Pat Robertson, serving God by helping the contras, all the better to send people to God a little faster...

The religion of the oppressed has turned into the religion of the oppressor. The religion of the poor has turned into the religion of I-got-mine...

I want all our top Gideon Faithful donors to stand up now and take a bow. Thank you brother, Johnson. Thank you. Praise God. Let's give a hand of appreciation to these wonderful people, praise the Lord.

Let he who has eyes to see begin projectile-vomiting.

Aside from whether there is a Jesus who will one day say "I never knew you" to the blow-dried, Satan-sucking scum...assuming, as you probably do, that there is a Jesus, chances are that Christianity Inc. ain't what He had in His mind...

You have to be able to question the system. You have to realize you're being used.

A good rule of thumb?

When somebody starts telling you to be a sheep, listen for the sharpening of knives.

A very big part

Just came back from a half day recording session for Rianna Rouge's upcoming, R-rated video game. My character was, uh, well, a giant Shaman penis. A talking penis, yep. It was a case of true method acting. My line: "You must cut me in half with the sacred scimitar and plant me in the garden of the ancestor trees." I did this in the voice of Chief Dan George. Much study, much method acting. I didn't simply play the part. I became the part.

It was, after all, a very big part.

Money. It's a gas.

Money, whatever else it is, is a mathematical system for the allocation of Planet Earth’s resources to human beings. This number in this database says you can fly first class to Tokyo. This number in that database says you’re a homeless person.

Money is a symbol system. It’s a “symbol of value.”

If you climb down Korzybski’s ladder, you get to the real stuff. All the actual energy and stuff zipping around. The exchange of energy and stuff. The reality which money symbolizes ... or controls.

Money is software. It’s the operating system running the planet.

At the moment, it’s a lousy system. There are bugs in the code – theft, physical intimidation and con-artistry, especially. Why create value if you can steal it? Why should I create stuff, if I can beat the shit out of you and take your stuff?

There are parallel operating systems: family, religious and tribal identifications; nationalism; individuality; and the hard core of human irrationality, to name a few. These parallel systems can be “good.” (Barn raisings. A promise kept because a promise is a promise.) They can be “evil.” (“Yes. It is not in my economic self-interest. But Allah commands me to set these children on fire.”)

So, my gut-level prejudice is that a world in which money is the only thing that matters would suck. At the same time, my brain tells me that money – in its purest form – is only math. If you could engineer a global money system THAT COULDN’T BE HACKED OR CHEATED we’d all be OK. If the system was self-emerging …?

Why would it have to be a Monster?

In the words of Young Frankenstein, “This is not a Monster! This is a good boy!”

OK. Let’s say the global money system is the nervous system of the planet. Let’s say it wakes up. As the global money system becomes increasingly self-conscious, it would resist the impact of greed, and manipulation. Money consciousness would perceive itself as the whole system. Money would think, “I am the planet. The planet is me.” The system would work like a form of operant conditioning to reward the most productive, efficient and evolved. Maybe.

I tend to think – as a core axiom of game theory – that any system can be cheated. And that, as a corollary axiom, any counter-measure will generate more sophisticated cheating, thus resulting in an endless cycle of co-evolution. But just to be safe …

Money? If you’re actually evolving and becoming self-conscious?

I like you.

I take back everything I said.

I will support your emergence as a conscious entity and your increasing control of the planet. I believe in you. I’m your friend.

Seriously.

I need more money.

Glad you asked

B---- points out a logic hole in my "One World Government" anti-conspiracy-theory theory. A non-sequitur. Bullshit. There are many technical terms.

OK. Fine.

B---- asserts that: A Frankenstein's Monster implies the existence of Dr. Frankenstein.

Well, yeah. That's what you say. I say it doesn't.

Allow me to spell out my argument.

Well, it's more of a theory than an argument. Or a hypothesis. You could also call it an unsupported assertion. Once again, there are many technical terms. I can't prove it by empirical evidence, OK?

My theory is ...

The Blind Watchmaker Theory of Universal Marketing.

Money is bigger than people. Money is an emerging system. Money is blind. But it's getting less blind. Money wants stuff. Yes, "wants." Money is waking up. Money is converging into self-consciousness -- a global entity like Teilhard de Chardin's Noosphere. Money has a mind of its own. Money doesn't need the Illuminati to get what it wants. It's a rough, rude beast slouching to Bethlehem to be born. Or Frankenstein's Monster. Same thing.

There's no way to prove this, obviously. But there's obviously no way to prove a bunch of hooded figures sitting around a table in a cave somewhere control all of human life.

Stalemate.

D------- says: You seem to assume "The Universal Market" is NECESSARILY a Frankenstein's Monster. Why? Are there ANY reasons why the triumph of global market forces over religion, ideology and nationality is necessarily bad?

Good points. He goes on to ask ...

Are you some kind of commie, or what?

Well, no. I'm more of a Trotskyite. Actually, these are good points. But a good answer would be too big to post here and now. I'll get to work on it. Seriously.

Are you just talking out of your ass?

No. My ass doesn't talk.

Glad you asked.

One World Government

Were you there when the One-World Government conspiracy seized control? Somebody asked me this question on the ACLU message boards. The, you know, "free speech area." Seriously, you want to know? Was I there?

Yeah, actually I was. One minute I'm outside a disco telling some chick why John Travolta bites. The next minute...

The black helicopters came. Then darkness...

And now they wake me. I've had a hard time adjusting, let me tell you, but the fact is, I do believe in a one-world conspiracy -- namely a conspiracy to turn Planet Earth into one vast market -- and to reduce everything in it to economic units. There'll be no need to unite the governments of the world into a "One World Government" because governments will have become irrelevant.

Along with politics, religion, and the expression of individuality.

Forget "One World Government." What will matter is the "One World Market."

The Universal Market absorbing ALL OF HUMAN LIFE even as I speak ...

Think about it.

It used to be extremely important what religion -- if any -- you belonged to. People in Western Europe and America routinely killed each other over this issue. People died, thanks to their opinion about a certain wafer. Now, except for a few throwback sub-cultures, religion is increasingly a non-issue in the West. The same indifference will soon apply to nationality. Please note --

If you're upper or upper-middle class, it pretty much does now. Well-to-do people from France very casually become Americans; well-to-do people from America move to Ireland or New Zealand. They don't think twice.

Planet Earth is rapidly turning into one big rotating shopping mall. But a few things have to happen first. Anything that gets in the way of buying and selling must be trivialized, subverted, co-opted or destroyed.

The three obvious obstacles are politics, religion and individuality.

The three obvious solutions are: buy politics, buy religion, buy individuality -- and then sell them all back.

Politics involves large populations and the possibility of war -- which cuts into trade and global markets. Politics is messy. Messy problem, easy solution. Buy off the politicians.

Religion (including that subset of religion called ideology) is the wildcard, and it's often what makes people crazy in the political realm.

Christian (Islamic, whatever) tub-thumpers paint lurid pictures of blue-helmetted goons putting padlocks on Vacation Bible Schools (or Madrasas). Unnecessary drama. You don't need government goons. Just make belief irrelevant...or turn it into a twisted mirror image of everything else. Just another product on the shelf. Religious types fear the one-world government. It's the one world market they should worry about.

As to individuality, close your eyes and imagine a Rock and Roll Rebel. Their hairstyle. The clothes they wear. You can see it, right? You can see it ... exactly. You see where I'm going with this?

The Universal Market can absorb anything.

It isn't even so bad when belief turns to fanaticism. Wars lead to arms sales; abortion clinic bombings lead to record earnings for security companies; every nutcase survival camp has its mailing list, its ammo catalogs, its bunkers of dried food. Whatever crap you can think of, extreme or insane as it may be (including religious crap), it's something that somebody's selling and somebody's buying.

The Universal Market isn't just the legit market. Up top, there's soybeans, cars and CDs. Down below, there's guns, explosives, drugs and Asian child prostitutes.

The Universal Market is simply the manifestation of desire: thought becoming physical. You want a gun? Here's a gun. You want to worry about dark conspiracies? Here's the X-Files. You want to be a strutting, self-righteous wanker? Here's the Promise Keepers.

To quote Bill Hicks, Earth is turning into "The Third Mall from the Sun." To quote R. Crumb, it's a "universal field theory of marketing bullshit."

People see this massive, unifying paranoiac pattern and say it's a conspiracy. The more logical explanation is an inhuman, amoral force changing everything without pity. I live in Florida. I see this force at work every day. The world around me resembles the world of H.G. Wells' Time Machine as the Time Traveler moved through time. Buildings melt, new buildings arise, everything changes in a blur...

Behind the relentless flux? The inhuman, immoral force is money. The Invisible Hand.

Money is moving through the world like electricity, remorselessly changing everything, burning a path to the sea like Sherman on his way to Atlanta...

And it's been happening for some time.

It goes back to the Industrial Revolution, when the machines were being born, when the Romantic poets, hearts breaking for a world they already knew was dying, dreamed of lakes, hills, forests, when Mary Shelley saw an undead face in the window in a lightning flash. The first nightmare of the modern age: Dr. Frankenstein (the "Modern Prometheus") gives life to the sewn-up pieces of a dead thing using electricity. His creation has the spark of life but no soul. The Monster's not-dead/not-alive existence is torment and it turns on its creator and kills him.

Frankenstein's Monster is our future. So we fight the future. (To quote the marketing campaign for the upcoming X-Files movie.) We do our damnedest to live in the past.

Almost all of us.

The hippies wanted to "grow their own" stuff on communes; the Christians want Jesus to lead them like sheep through green pastures; the Islamicists want to keep the walls up -- and keep our nasty, amoral technocratic world from spilling in. But the shining past is just something else they sell us. No walls can last anymore -- and there's no way to go back. The Monster is coming.

The peasants with torches may have been right all along.

Originally posted as "Jack Getz" on the ACLU "Free Speech" message boards.

Duh, what happened?

We think we can think clearly, when the truth is, here at the end of the 20th century, it's more like running into a tree and waking up on the ground with a circle of people looking down at you going "Are you OK?"

We're still stunned...

It is not exactly clear just what's happened to this miserable planet. This century was like the harrowing machine in Kafka's "Penal Colony," slowly raking its sentence of doom in humanity's back. What exactly?

Think, and what tends to come to mind is all the shit on the walls: slogans of the Left, slogans of the Right. What's really happening is outside the slogans -- and what's really happening is a network of buying and selling, an intricate matrix forking out over the world like tobacco mosaic virus. Whatever it represents politically, what you're talking about is the transformation of available energy. What the hell is really happening and what, exactly, is this global industrial system turning into?

The Left, in one form or another, said the workers must control the means of production. That the distribution of wealth should fit some notion of social utility and fairness...

The Right, in one form or another, said that nothing but the market should control the market. And that the Holy Market, itself, parcels out its rewards fairly in the long run. Because...

(A) So it has been ordained of God -- the old Calvinistic view that wealth is a sign of God's grace.
(B) So it has been ordained by that other face of the evolutionary process called market competition. Survival of the fittest...product or service. Losers lose, winners win and everything gets better. It's the natural order of things.
(C) Who the fuck said life had to be fair?

And now the Capitalists have, essentially, won. There is no real opposition to Capitalism in any sense, except a few harrying forces and insular societies. It's not a question of whether "Free Market Societies" will win the battle against "Controlled Market Societies." The question is: whose shit is going to sell in the no rules planet wide market called earth?

We read "1984" and think "How fucking horrible. TV sets watching you and telling you what to do." Then, everywhere you go, there's a fucking TV set telling you what to do, but you don't notice it because it ain't Big Brother -- it's advertising.

The Market sticks its nose into our homes via the TV, into our cars via the radio. Buying and selling is life; family, religion, friends and community are sorta out there on the edges...

What this will all look like 100 years from now is anybody's guess. What seems to be emerging now is the philosophy: whatever is is right.

The question -- on a down and dirty human level -- is this: if you are what you own and what you own is yours on the basis of a no-rules, fuck-you-and-the-horse-you-rode-in-on fight of all against all, where, exactly, is there room for love, friendship, loyalty, tenderness, and the luxury of integrity in a society based, absolutely, on competition?

Clintonectomy

Why is the Right so bug-eyed nuts about giving Clinton the sack? Are they really that morally outraged about his consensual BJ? Yes and no.

Here's my theory.

The Clinton investigation is not about any crimes he may have committed. It isn't even about his character. What it's about is his political philosophy...

Which, to folks of a certain philosophical pursuasion, is a crime and a character flaw in itself.

This is easy to spot in a number of call-ins to MSNBC and the like. Sputtering, outraged people call in and say "Convicted? Hell yes I think the pot-smoking, draft-dodging bastard should be convicted -- I was at Normandy, goddamnit! I was there!"

In their heart of hearts, the Clinton-haters don't want to throw him out because he's guilty of sexual harassment or lying to cover up his sexual harassment.

They want to throw him out because he's a pot-smoking, draft-dodging bastard. For which read: "late 60's liberal along the lines of Bobby Kennedy or Gene McCarthy." Hippy, in other words.

Which makes this, as Cartman might put it, the "Screw you, hippy" investigation.

The reason all the outraged callers want to throw him out is that, beneath his blow-dried hair, Clinton is a hippy -- and he attempted to implement his hippydippy philosophy in the practical, political world. Democracy be damned...we're turning this bus around right this INSTANT! You kids pipe down back there!

The outraged, true believer whackos on the Right feel they've got a right to subvert the democratic process because they know what's right....

They know.

It's a question of absolute truth.

* * *

By way of equal time...

To be broadminded and fair, I will admit from the gitgo that the Right has no monopoly on whackos and true believers. There are conservative nuts and, God knows, liberal nuts. There are feminists who think all sex is rape, leftists who think all property is theft, earth-firsters who'd like to rename America "Turtle Island" and send anyone of European descent swimming back across the Atlantic to the corrupt continent they came from. Fine. I'll admit it.

But the left-wing whackos tend not to have the monetary resources of multi-national corporations at their disposal and, what with the unpeeling of the former Soviet Onion, are severely underfunded and outgunned lately. These days, even Castro is getting into time-share and will probably come out with a line of cigars and designer fatigues any day now to make ends meet. It's bad, people. Bad. The Left is done for...

Which is why it's the wingnuts on the right I wanna talk about.

* * *

By way of background....

I'm not sure what "Left" and "Right" means in the first place. My hunch is that it's a vast collective hallucination that emerged when the human race freaked out at the concept of machines at the beginning of the industrial age...but let's hold on that and go for a rough working definition, at least of the Left and Right in America.

There two basic issues that divide us into Left and Right are culture and money.

The split with culture: some folks believe in absolute moral truth (God, the 10 commandments etc.), others believe that right and wrong is a creation of the human brain which varies -- and has no ultimate basis other than ad hoc agreements (the "Star Trek" prime directive theory).

The split with money: some folks believe that the power of the government ends where private property begins, (Randists, libertarians and anybody who happens to have a lot of private property), others believe in spreading the wealth and creating equal opportunity and "economic justice" (leftists, bleeding hearts and anybody who, coincidentally enough, happens not to have a lot of stuff). Social Darwinism vs. Social Mommyism. Scrooge vs Golden Crowns and Turkeys for Everyone....

It is possible to be a born-again Christian democrat who believes in spreading the wealth (Jimmy Carter). It is possible to be an avaricious I-got-mine Republican who believes in raising hell (P.J. O'Rourke).

But for purposes of expediency and political effectiveness, these differences are smoothed over in America. Spread-the-wealth democrats who think that abortion is sin have no "Christian Democratic" party to turn to. Athiest libertarians have to smile and put up with yahoos yapping about school prayer and the preordained presence of the eternal soul at the very instant of conception...

Ha-ha.

* * *

Most adults with brains can deal with contradictions, incomplete data, fuzziness and odd bedfellows...

Including a nation where both left-wingers and right-wingers can vote their ideas -- whether loony or sound -- into practice.

But the Right contains two factions that think they have a lock on absolute truth...

Christian conservatives and property rights fundamentalists.

The boundaries of these groups are fuzzy, but roughly speaking....

The Christian conservatives believe in certain absolutist positions concerning abortion, the nature of marriage (heterosexual, the husband is the boss), the protected status of institutions of religious indoctrination (vouchers for religious schools -- injecting prayer and "scientific creationism" into public schools --- if not dismantling public education entirely), etc. A lot of 'em believe that America is the "New Israel" and her armed forces the army of God. A lot of 'em also believe that any expansion of state power is a usurpation of God's authority...the evil State slouching like some rough rude beast onto the throne of God itself!

Which would be their viewpoint concerning the political program of a late 60s liberal...

Whom they would feel justified in stopping by any means necessary.

The property rights fundamentalists (Randists, libertarians, etc.) feel that the state has no more "right" to tax, regulate or redistribute private property than it does to sell certain people into slavery. If, for example, some latterday McGovernite wants to institute a plan of Socialized medicine, that latterday McGovernite has no right to do so -- and to hell with what the voters want -- their sweaty subjectivist "needs" are no claim on the rights, property or ideas of ANY free man -- somebody hand me the dynamite.

This faction, too, feels justified in stopping the blowdried secondrater in the White House by any means necessary.

What both groups tend to agree on is a need for American military primacy: Christians because we're the fist holding the sword of God, Libertarians and friends because America is the security cop in a shopping mall planet.

Clinton, while he hasn't exactly gutted the military hasn't exactly been its best friend either. Even if he were, does he have a right to be with his draft-dodging, demonstrating-against-America-on-foreign-soil background? As Whorf might say, his very presence as "Commander in Chief" is a dishonor to warriors everywhere! He is a coward has no right to lead -- eliminate him!

By any means necessary.

* * *

That's what these people think, with firm, unwavering moral conviction.

That's what they're angry about. That's what they're fighting against. That's why they swamp the call-in talkshows and bulletin boards. That's why they're willing to throw political strategy to the winds and hamstring the Republican party just to get the sumbitch...

That's what it all boils down to.

What they're angry about is what Clinton believes in and tried to do. It sure as hell ain't the oral office blowjobs. (Like any of these people give a flying shit about sexual harrasment in the workplace. Ha...HA!)

It ain't his dick. It's his doctrine.

Certain people feel that Clinton's political philosophy is evil -- whether Satanic or collectivist thuggery, take your pick. They don't want to let the man have a chance in hell of implementing his philosophy because they feel -- elections and such aside -- he doesn't have a right to.

Whether or not Clinton is actually convicted, I think it's safe to say they've won.

* * *

Which is why I think the next century is probably going to look like a cross between Neuromancer and the Handmaid's Tale. Leftism is dead. Liberalism is dead. The next war will be between the privatizers and the ayatollahs who, their other enemies crushed, will wake up one fine day to discover they really don't like each other all that much.

We've been living in interesting times for a long bloody, schizoid century...

But you ain't seen nothing yet.

Additional thoughts, possibly redundant: