November 13 & 14, 2008
Ed Tubbs
Reno, NV
_
_
Marauding chimpanzees and the November 4 results._
Growing up in Allen Park, a 100% white suburb six miles downriver from Detroit, we never really experienced the kind of racial hatred that typified the South. That’s not much of a balm however, given the fact that, although the presence of Negroes — the polite company term used to designate African-Americans at the time — in Detroit and a few heavily black communities outside the city’s boundaries was a dominant demographic, by and large, they were to us fairly consistently invisible. Our disregard, best described by Ralph Ellison in his aptly named Invisible Man, was a rather akin to a cancer that hadn’t yet been diagnosed, or even suspected might be present.
My first association with blacks arrived when I joined the Army in June of 1964, right out of high school. The introduction was anything but traumatic: like, I truly was unable to discern the first lint of difference between us, on account of our racial differences. After all, the basic training drill instructors (I use the term as charitably as humanly possible.) regarded our genealogy and mothers with equal derision, without regard for our disparate genetic distinction.
It wasn’t until I crossed the bridge from Columbus, Georgia to Phoenix City, Alabama that I came face to face with the most despicable outrages that were based solely on facts of birth that had zero to do with anything anyone had any choice making. It was so traumatic an experience that it has remained a conscious and unconscious part of me ever since. Just the proposition by some that there might be a quality difference amongst individuals that was premised exclusively on the facts of one’s birth sickened me then. The utter disgust of it has coalesced in my soul as a hatred I cannot, and do not want to, disgorge.
Furthermore, the notion there might be a particle worthy of disparagement due to an accident of birth — ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, whatever — is evidence of a diabolical predisposition. I’ll get to Arkansas and California in a moment. For now, the news items highlighted below prompt my soul to retch.In yesterday’s Political Machine, Tommy Christopher reported how elementary school children in Idaho were chanting “Assassinate Obama!” on their school bus.
A high school teacher’s aide in a Pittsburgh suburb castigated a 16-year-old Obama supporter, proclaiming “Obama was going to be shot and killed, and that our flag is going to be the KFC flag and that the new national anthem will be ‘Moving On Up.” The aide also said how the President Elect supporter’s beliefs were “all wrong and that the children’s lives would be ruined because Obama was elected.”
AP reported that in Long Island, several cars were vandalized with anti-Obama messages and with threats to kill the Illinois senator.
At NC State (North Carolina State University), four students spray-painted “Let’s shoot that n-word in the head” and “Hang Obama by a noose”, and now face expulsion.
At Baylor University in Texas, a noose was found hanging from a tree in front of Morrison Hall, the morning after the election.
The morning of the 5th, in Mount Desert Island in Maine, a number of black figures were found hanging from nooses.
In Torrance, California, vehicles with Obama bumper stickers were spray painted. And one house was spray painted with, “Go Back to Africa.”
An Apolacon Township, Pennsylvania interracial couple awoke to find the remnants of a burned cross on their lawn.
A preliminary observation is in order here: all these acts, and all others like them, are acts by the most contemptible of yellow-bellied, gutless cowards.
But there is more to say than just that. They are also acts by some variety of a sub-human species that is unrelated to mammals blest with higher intellects. I have viewed the Discovery Channel depictions of clans of wild chimpanzees, going on hunting parties, in search of other chimpanzees; all for the apparent joy of killing those who are not members of their group. The cacophonous screeches that fill the jungle air draw for their strength from sub-intelligent instinct. There is no pretense that they have about them anything that approaches human. Yet even here, at least those marauding chimpanzees manifest no cowardice.
All this acknowledged, my heart might feel as it did upon hearing the first declaration that Senator Obama had been elected president: elated and hopeful that at long last I could genuinely feel boundless pride that my country had elevated itself from the septic bowels I acquainted in Phoenix City, those decades earlier. Sadly, that hope was short lived, as I learned of the depravity that had found its way into Arkansas and California law.
It is not debatable: Those states that find their way to red blotches on Election Day maps, and that compose what we call the “Bible-belt” are also the most poorly educated regions in the country. In other, less kind terms, the majority of folks in those realms are but laughable rubes. And that those areas that are better educated, less superstitious-prone, overwhelmingly are blue, and the higher the level of education, the less religious they are, and more indelibly blue they become.
Is there a cause-and-effect between one’s level of education and the depth of one’s religious inclination and one’s voting disposition and one’s acceptance of others? Statistically the correlations are not arguable. The correlations are solid, indisputable fact.
Without accepting the idea had about it anything laudable, under the just noted demographic reality, I can understand how Arkansas’ voters are so obtuse they feel children who have been abandoned and/or abused are of less importance than the voters’ primitive fantasies concerning “official” heterosexual marriage. Passed this past November 4 was the prohibition that precluded even heterosexual partners from adopting or from providing foster care for such tragically dispossessed children. There is to be found nothing either intelligent or “Christian” in such a hateful and ignorant vote.
But it was California and the passage of Proposition 8, outlawing marriage between same-sex couples, that quashed my November 4 vote results elation the most.
A brief tour though religious history, to destroy any supposition such a vote could point with any legitimacy to an honorable religious premise.
There is nothing honorable about Jewish history. They are among the very first to practice genocide on a large and wholly unrestrained scale. On the miserable excuse that God had delivered the victims into their hands, they ravaged and raped and pillaged peoples after peoples after peoples. Entire towns were wiped out, burned to the ground, the men savagely killed or taken as slaves, the women they wanted as concubines were stolen, the others slain, the children similarly treated, and the livestock and valuables confiscated, the gold to be melted down as raw material for Jewish temples.
However I am not, if I were a “Christian,” I sure as hell wouldn’t tell anyone one. I’d be too embarrassed, or ashamed; especially if I were a Roman Catholic. Millions upon millions of non-Christians, most particularly Muslims, were brutally murdered by successions of Catholic armies that invaded lands they had no justification to invade. And when it comes to the most vile, the most heinous, the most cruelly repellent forms of torture — the Catholic Church wrote the book on live disembowelment, on the Iron Maiden that pierced eyes and ears and internal body organs . . . No abomination escaped the fertile imagination of the Catholic Church. (Google “Pope Innocent IV,” then “Ad expirtanda,” then “Torquemada.”)
To dot the ‘i’, and to cross the ‘t’ on the Church’s deprecations, come these words from Father (NOT mine) Jay Scott Newman of South Carolina: “Our nation has chosen for its chief executive the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president. Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ’s Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation.”
(http://news.aol.com/main/obama-presidency/article/priest-blasts-catholic-obama-voters/247897)
_
(NOTE: While “abortion” is mentioned nowhere in any of the books of the Bible [See Gen 2:7 as to when “life begins according to the Bible], the Decalogue, or 10 Commandments reported in Exodus 19:23 and in Deuteronomy 5:2, Commandments 7 and 9 were persistently violated with wild abandon by John McCain. Indeed, the Arizona senator continues to consider Commandment 9 as irrelevant to him. There has never existed the first presumption or supposition President-Elect Obama ever held his marriage vows as anything other than sacred. Evidently the Church retains its propensity for equivocation as to what It, and not the Bible, considers sinful to the extent a parishioner is subject to condemnation. As any lay person of even modest intellect can read, that is a most exquisite definition of “hypocrisy.”
A PROFFERED SUGGESTION TO EVERY ‘HOLIER THAN THOU CHRISTIAN’, INTENT ON SHOVING SOLID EQUINE EXCRETA DOWN EVERYONE’S THROAT: Please stop. Your own perverse and pervasive history, perpetrating grotesque delusions and grotesqueries denies you even the first moral premise to so proceed.)
_
_
Nor is the Islamic faith less despicably historied. From the first, when Muhammad supposedly received through the angel Gabriel the Qur’an, the religion has ever since been one of internecine and cross-border brutality and bloodshed. It is neither any better nor less culpable than the others. All stand in their own marked distinction for their ability to beguile huge masses into genuinely believing the greatest absurdities, and of committing the most barbaric atrocities.
_
Those who have permitted themselves to fall under the inexplicably ridiculous spells and who have behaved (including voting) so dastardly are unworthy of my respect, as fellow, intelligent and sentient and loving human beings. Those who have behaved as they have, who voted as they did, have shown themselves to be less than Discovery Channel chimpanzees. And it leaves me so dispirited . . . even California, even there.
1
1
1
