Arcadian Web Log
Matt Komoroski
Amherst, Va
12-29-04
I have been reading some of the other blogs, the real ones, the ones
with readers. People are saying lots of things I more-or-less
agree with. Bush is an evil character, a Hitler for the
21st Century, in my opinion. He will lose, eventually, I hope,
pray, and believe. It's just a question of how many Americans and
others have to die because of his evil before he loses, and how many
who are left will be too proud to admit they were wrong, and spend the
next two or three centuries making up SORRY EXCUSES about why their
great grand-daddy was stupid/patriotic enough to support
Bush. It's a sad, sad thing, but I am here as witness,
these people looked at the choice between Kerry, who'd already proven
he had the guts to come clean about US war crimes, and Dubya Butcher,
who'd proven himself utterly incompetent except as a fund-raising
speaker, and they chose killing and torture. They chose
deficits. They chose planetary destruction. No other people
on earth got to vote on this, but the American people did, and they
chose war, murder, and theft, all shrouded in false piety.
I don't hate Republians; I pity the fools.
And I hold to the quaint and anachronistic belief that Justice is
a real thing, a real force in the Universe, not unlike time and
Gravity. And those who chose to kill and steal, whether under the
cover of 'war' or not will Pay In Kind, soner or later, no matter how
many lifetimes it takes.
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12-1-04
An argument can be made that privacy itself is rapidly and irrevocably
becoming a thing of the past. On down the line, we are going to
have to cope in a social environment in which 'all is known' and
nobody's secrets are secret anymore. The catch is, _everyone's_
life is going to be transparent to everyone else, so with everyone's
dirty laundry hung out in public view, the main casualty will be
everyone's vanity and hypocrisy.
That's why this whole push toward public piety is so worrying to me,
since it reinforces the sugary lies and hypocrisy, and works against
people actually doing any inner work, introspection, or
questioning. If we become a nation under surveilence in the
christian mold, rather than a secular humanist mold, it could be really
ugly.
The movement toward less privacy and less secrecy is irrevocable.
It's a product of technology, and the technology will have its effect
whether people like it or not. I think we as humans can either
choose to rise to the challenge of transparency, or retreat into
further and ever more pathological denial, and 'faith' that what is
plainly so is not so.
Truth is, I'm more upset that the US military is torturing prisoners
and claiming exemption from the Geneva accords. It's
official. The Red Cross says so, and there's a paper trail that
says it was a conscious choice.
Radio this morning took a lot of time explaining how if the whole world
got really really ticked at the US, and in particular thought the fed
deficit was too high and stopped buying bonds, then credit could dry
up, interest rates could rise, and inflation at the same time...
stagflation. And isn't it interesting how the last time we had
high interest rates and high inflation at the same time was the 1970's,
also the last time that the whole world was ticked off at the US-Israel
axis because of viet nam and Israeli aggression. NPR was at great
lengths to say that US vulnerabilaity to international displeasure is
higher now than it has ever been because of the interdependency of
international trade. Hmmmph. Doggone
tootin.' Americans can't make anything for themselves
anymore. If the Chinese let their currency float like in a free
market instead of pegging it to the dollar, then all that stuff at Wal
Mart could double in price overnight. The price of fuel will
probably never go down again as Asian demand hits a growth curve.
Oil is yesterday's fuel, and it will never be cheap again, no matter
how much wilderness is destroyed or oceans polluted.
The soldiers kicking in doors in Iraq and dragging people away to be
tortured, where will they be in ten years? They will be right
here, doing the same thing to you and me, wearing the uniforms of local
cops, still getting paid tax money to terrorize civilians. I
truly hope I am wrong about this, but I truly believe tomorrow's cops
and jailers are being formed today in the laboratory of cruelty and
desperation which is Iraq. And if the US acheives success
in Iraq in this way, then the regime will no doubt apply the same
winning strategy to anything or anyone else that stands in its
way
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Nov 18, 12-1- 04
There are a few assumptions and attitudes apparent in the recent action in Iraq which I'd like to enumerate.
1. What is good for the USA is good for the world.
2. Might makes right.
3. God is on our side. Our side is entirely good, and the opposition is completely evil.
4. The greatest test of personal honor is the willingness to
murder strangers on command of a government you know to be lying.
I wish there were a way I could make my words come up off the screen
and wack republican amerika across the mouth and make those idiots
LEARN that what goes around comes around, sooner or later, and that if
you drop bombs on people and kill their children and steal their oil
long enough, they might start fighting back. And Then what if all
the US technology of control and killing isn't enough to keep amerika
safe? These Bush League nazi-christian crusaders are
stirring the hornet's nest of the moslem world. This hornet's
nest covers about a third of the world's habitable land mass and has
over a billion hornets that are actually human beings, capable of
scheming and plotting and executing operations that will deny all of us
peace and safety, for as long as they feel picked-on and
desperate. So what do the christian republicans propose to do,
kill them all? I think that's exactly what they
intend: to kill and kill and kill until there is nobody left who dares
to resist their domination. When will that be? When there
is nobody left at all. Genocide of course is ugly and evil,
but that seems if anything to attract christo-republicans, as if they
tested their faith by their willingness to do evil in service to
it. Think how gawd's blessings will shine on amerika's christian
soldiers as they go forth 'gainst the infidels. I suppose in the
minds of christian republicans, choirs of angels sang hallelujia
as a half million Iraqi children died thanks to US-backed
sanctions.
I hate not these people but the powers and principalities which lie
behind them, whatever god or devil it is who is happy and whispers
louder in their ears when they kill for religion..
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Arcadian Blog. Nov 17 04
I guess that's my new name for the journal. I'm thinking of
starting writing it again for practice, to get me writing, in the hopes
it will be easier to write the novel I am thinking of.
The news....
I'm building additions and porches on the house. When it's all
done I should have a bathroom and a kichen just like civilized
people.
Still playing the banjo, have gotten an electric guitar, which was my
first instrument, and I'm going back to it with the stuff I learned on
acoustic, and bass, and banjo. And I've gotten a cheap old casio
keyboard, but one with full-size keys, so I'm actually learning to play
it, and not just program the rhythm track and one-finger the chords.
So I guess I'm pretty busy.
Strange to be back to this... blogging. I tell people sometimes I
was blogging when blogging wasn't cool, been doing essentially this
since 1998. My emphasis was never just to write about stuff on
the web, but rather everything not on the web. The web, I
reckoned, could take care of itself, generating discussion of, well,
abstract things like a flame with no wick. (That would be a
gas-flame. How appropriate.) Theoretically the goal wasas
to discuss natural events and events in that hyper-real realm of
magickal reality. Instead it became a lot of my yammering on
about politics. That is not my favorite obsession.
Still... I don't think I was wrong, in all the things I said back
in the wake of 911. In fact, I feel completely vindicated by
events. But in the privacy of my mind it's a very cold comfort
being right. I don't need to say all that again. I might go
back and revise it at some point, clean it up a little, but I have no
real need to repeat myself on my opinion of the current press-indent
and what powers he represents.
I have been told that Socrates advanced an argument against democracy
which went like this. Since all politics is corrupt, it corrupts
everything it touches. If everyone were involved in
politics, then everyone would become corrupt, and not just a few.
This has rattled in my brain since 'black tuesday,' a few
weeks ago.