Another Modest - If Irreverent - Proposal.

I think I've got it. Since high school, I've been perusing history, searching in hopes of understanding the vicissitudes there - and the human critter responsible for them. Why in hell - what in hell, who in hell - keeps the human race slaughtering one another as if it were a damned sport?

It is that, you know. Military strategy and tactics aren't rocket science; they're not even high school football science - in fact, they're about as mentally demanding as golf (is that a sport, or just a game?). The chimpanzee version of a whiz-kid can be a general (and I'll bet a dollar you can teach a chimp to play golf - if they haven't already). Twelve-year old kids often do better at military computer games than generals - especially the U.S. version. The difference is that people get killed when the sport is war; lots of people. When you run a play that gets stuffed at the line of scrimmage, the runner dies. When you throw a block the guy is maimed or dead. Protecting the quarterback means killing everybody who tries to get to him. Trying to "sack" the quarterback means trying to kill him. You get the point, maybe?

It is, all of it, nevertheless, a game. Sports are played in order to aggrandize oneself, in order to become a "winner." War is like that, too. Winning, or doing something well, contributing to the team, gets you a trophy or a medal. Human beings will kill, or die, in order to win the award of a ribbon and medal hung around their necks. There is fame and high advancement, too. Win and the capitalist world will throw position, power, and money at you. And, of course, the wannabe world loves war in all its forms, from football to world war. They love - football game and the like or intercontinental war - to watch, participate - vicariously, of course - and criticize. "Monday Morning Quarterbacking, you know."

All of which is probably beside the point. I've known since building muscle and learning to play judo and fight that a fundamental reason for war is the incontrovertible fact that the human being is in his heart and essence a hypocrite. He says he hates war. What horseshit! He LOVES war. He LOVES killing. That's as long as it's someone else who gets killed or does the killing, of course. In the book, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story," I wrote concerning my own struggle to rid myself to the bullies who were making life miserable - to say nothing of altering my features:

"When my growing strength and my study of fighting became known, townspeople, teachers, and relatives all had the same reaction.’Fighting isn’t good,' they said. 'Turn the other cheek.' 'Live by the sword, die by the sword.' A teacher, Mother Superior of the parochial school I went to, put it even stronger. 'They’ll hang you some day,' she said. Now, taught by my relentless opponent life, I saw it all for what it was. Society is at its heart a hypocrite."
Writer and historian H.G. Wells said it another way: “The Social Contract,” he said, “is nothing more than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the ‘General Good.’ Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.”
"The first casualty of war," a gentleman named Hiram Johnson observed many years ago, "is truth." Man makes war because he is a fucking hypocrite. A list of the lies attendant any war and the effort entailed would fill libraries. Pure and simple, it's all about lying.

(As I write this, FoxNews' Sean Hannity appears on television - lying, of course. Three statements, three lies; and if you recognize the lies, you're a traitor. Does that sound like his hero in the White House? Yeah. Wannabes tend to worship wannabes like themselves.)

So what to do? Well, you may have noticed that no one goes to war because war is evil. Oh, no. Especially where the "Land of the Free," the "Nation of Laws," and all the rest - how much can you stomach? - is concerned, it's always a crusade. We're on god's side. And the number of people, who die, people who - absent our crusading - would otherwise be alive, is staggering. In order to save the village, the captain in South Vietnam said, we had to destroy it" - what's the problem?

If that doesn't sound like Iraq today, it sure as hell is turning out that way.

And who can argue? Check the holy books - ANY holy book. God, it seems - we are always told - always wants his chosen people to wipe those infidel bastards out. I often wonder if any of the fundamentalist adherents to just about any religion you choose ever reads the scripture with which he pounds head of the infidel. Islam, for instance is a religion of peace. Excuse me? The Bible? Now I KNOW you haven't read much of the founding document for your religion. Genocide, rape, murder, pillage, arson - what ISN'T there in the Bible?

But one thing is very clear where all the religions and religious teachings are concerned. It's all god's fault. God made them do it. That's right down to the present. First, we have a guy who purports to be favored of god - don't they always? - who demands of his equally devout followers that they kill unbelievers. All of them. God will love Osama bin Laden's minions for blowing to bits women, children, and old people who have never done them any evil other than believing differently than they do. Then, we have a Christian - that's the follower of a man whose basic premise, the Kingdom of God, demands that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us - who has unleashed a slaughter rivaling the worst ever. That's on the premise that another guy who had nothing to do with bin Laden was an evil man. And where did he get that idea? From god. Because he - G.W. Bush - listens to god.

How many times have we heard all this before? More damned times than I have the time to count.

So, I have another of my modest proposals. Let's - for crying out loud - stop listening to god! No, I mean it. Make it a felony offense with a penalty of ten years, no time off for good behavior, no matter what, for anyone who so much as reads what god has to say. Even the most cursory examination of history makes it thunderously clear that listening to god results in hundreds of thousands of innocent people being maimed or killed. Talk about "hate speech!"

The next time some cuckoo bird says he heard from god, throw his butt in the slammer. DO NOT ELECT HIM COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE BIGGEST MILITARY IN HUMAN HISTORY! Call the guys in white jackets, slip him into the rubber room, lock the door, and lose the key. If a voter belongs to a church that listens to god (from what I gather, not all of them do), disenfranchise him. If god wants to vote, let him register like everyone else.

I'm reminded as I write - and, in so doing, consider it all - of Mark Twain. He may have reflected concerning all this before. His work, "Letters From the Earth" would certainly give one that impression. In "Letters" - Twain's, not mine - Satan is writing to his erstwhile buddies Michael and Gabriel, Archangel and Trumpeter Angel, back in heaven. Listen:


"This is a strange place, and extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at is worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the "noblest work of God." This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a new idea with him, he has talked it through all the ages, and believed it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it.
"Moreover -- if I may put another strain upon you -- he thinks he is the Creator's pet. He believes the Creator is proud of him; he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for help, and favor, and protection, every day; and does it with hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered. The daily affront, the daily defeat, do not discourage him, he goes on praying just the same. There is something almost fine about this perseverance. I must put one more strain upon you: he thinks he is going to heaven!
"He has salaried teachers who tell him that. They also tell him there is a hell, of everlasting fire, and that he will go to it if he doesn't keep the Commandments. What are Commandments? They are a curiosity. I will tell you about them by and by."
The commandments old Mark speaks of, of course, forbid killing - invariably the sine qua non and end result of war - to say nothing or the rape, murder, pillage, and the covetousness that is always the real reason for starting war in the first place. So why is it that the god who wrote those commandments is contradicting himself - and telling these people he talks to something else?

Now, I have a confession to make. I confess that I don't believe god talks to anybody. I think, frankly, that all the people who say he talks to them are liars. I mean, doesn't it seem odd to you that he goes to all the trouble to create a human being, then has him destroyed? A little kid (what, he knows the kid is going to be a pacifist, or something?)? God? God, who knows everything, presumably - therefore - before it happens? Like he didn't know this guy or that guy was going to be an infidel? He didn't know there were going to be seven hundred and fifty religions?

It's like sex, people. He invented it, then equipped people to do it, in order that people should do his job for him. Then he tells those people he talks to that it's a bad thing, and people should only do it when he tells the people he talks to that they should do it? Seems like kind of a roundabout way to accomplish what otherwise would be pretty straightforward thing (like it always was with yours truly, matter of fact), doesn't it? For god? Come on, now - doesn't that sound a lot more like the way a human being does things? FEMA, for instance?
So there's my proposal. And I think you'd better get right on it. The way things are going, god is about to tell the people he talks to something pretty stupid.