Closets

No doubt someone will do a word search and find how many times our media has mentioned ‘Osama’ and ‘Obama’ since Osama was killed by SEAL team 6. I wonder who would win that particular contest. Since we don’t really have all that much useful to do, we might even try to find out how often reporters and talking heads have used these two names interchangeably. They’re really quite similar – the only difference being, that one is dead and one is still alive. Both have killed, after all. (And don’t let me go into degrees of killing – killing one, or thousands – and get all caught up in an argument to determine at which point killing actually becomes a menace.)

Now you might say that one is on our side while the other one wasn’t. Fair point; but let’s define ‘sides’. Let’s say there are ‘sides’. Our side demands submission; that is to say that we expect their side to refrain from killing us. Their side appears not yet convinced that such submission is to their benefit. In Islam, submission is the ultimate goal. They will kill enough of us to convince the rest to submit. The same is true of us (in a way).

Killing is the ultimate statement anyone can make. In taking a life we become god-like, and thus assert that we exist. After one has done it, there is no walking it back. It is the finality of it that should frighten those who subsist on the illusion of death. Submission, on the other hand, is to bow to one’s fate. One continues to live, but one might as well be dead. When the Palestinian suicide bomber (whose vest failed to detonate) was asked why he did it, he claimed that he was already dead; that the Israelis had rendered him dead long ago. Another example is the phrase, “Give me liberty, or give me death” – the American apple pie version of the same thought.

It’s difficult to work things out and enter into an understanding when one has abandoned all reason; when reason needs at the very least to have a foundation on which both sides can agree, such as life being better than death. Islam doesn’t work that way. Therefore, the default position is power. Islam has discovered that the slow action of water running over a stone will over time reduce that stone. Islam has seen the action of water create great canyons. It is committed to chip away at what it believes to be evil and transient. In fact, Islam demands it.

We cannot connect. We are far too busy with our own lives to grasp the abstractions on which Islam builds its theology. We see them simply as aggressive and unyielding, without realizing that we are unyielding as well. What we call ‘advanced’, Islam calls ‘evil’. We claim to be non-violent, but it is us they are reacting to. Our money is perceived as poison by them. It threatens the purity of their abstract view. It is we who are the bulls in their china closets. What we think of as our kind-hearted outreach only shatters more of their china. They see us as aggressors. It is we who fail to recognize their purity; who label their purity as dangerous and corrupt and threaten to overwhelm it. It is they who find themselves backed into a corner from which they snarl and fight …and wear away our belief in ourselves like the stone at the edge of the ocean that eventually becomes sand.

We stand at a crossroads. Will we stand up and fight as Krishna demanded of Arjuna during the epic battle of Kurukshetra, or will we continue to appease, knowing that appeasement – like valium - becomes addictive? We too have a right to practice what we believe. In our ever shrinking world, can we really afford to build enough closets for everyone to live separately?
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Picture: Arjuna's Penance, Mahabalipuram, India.

Degrees Of Brutality

So, at last we’ve come full circle. We’re back to practicing the absurd - yet irresistible - game of racial politics. If the election of Barack Hussein Obama was to have fixed anything, it was precisely this. Instead the racial divide within our country has widened since Obama’s been in office. Anyone who disagrees with his radical policies is now automatically labeled ‘racist‘. That would include upwards of 70% of us.

There is a solution. The President could make use of his bully pulpit and tell everybody to just cool it. In the area of race, no white chief executive could have made much of an impact; it‘s an opportunity that is open only to blacks. Instead Obama remains silent. He is the dog who doesn’t bark, which leads to the inescapable conclusion that he actually wants it this way.

The first thing we have to realize about this is that it’s not about color. It’s about class. If it were about a hierarchy based on color, we would all be growing the same color flowers in our gardens. There’s nothing magical about skin color. In Hinduism, the god Krishna is depicted as (random) blue, simply to set him above the rest.

The world over, it has long been apparent that the white race as a group has enjoyed greater comfort and success - albeit, by it’s own definition of that success - than others. Now conditions have become ripe for the rest of the world to challenge the whole notion of ‘success‘. Within our own nation, meritocracy has been largely supplanted by the notion of entitlement. This is why the answer to 2+2 no longer matters.

Similarly, commonly used terms have been modified. ‘Success‘, for instance, no longer means success. It means ‘oppression‘; or, if you wish, ‘slavery‘. This is why blacks in our public schools are encouraged by peers to fail and not to be seen as playing by the rules of the ‘oppressor‘. As such, all knowledge that had been traditionally taught in our schools has now been downgraded to rank propaganda, promoting a largely leftist, egalitarian agenda.

The reason Obama cannot produce his school records is because there are none. He is the product of affirmative action which eschews merit as a standard for achievement. It was telling early on when he seemed not to know the precise number of states that make up our union. To him such lapses are of no consequence. Any number - even one that happens to coincide with the exact number of Arab states - would have earned him a passing grade.

What matters most is ideology. Ideology easily flows into the vacuum that typifies ignorance. Racial politics is retrograde. Yet we can expect more - not less - of it as the 44th presidential term progresses. It has always been an convenient political tool for dividing people up into groups, sowing suspicion, and setting them against each other. If the white race were to disappear overnight, it would not solve the problem.

On a local New York radio talk show this morning I heard about a school out on Long Island, where the students of one school had to be moved lock stock and barrel to another, a mile and a half away. It seems the original area is no longer safe. Gang activity has become so rampant as to render local authorities helpless. Gangs mentioned in the report were the ‘bloods‘, the ‘crips‘, and ‘MS-13‘. Whites were not known to be involved.

When affirmative action supplants success, new hierarchies begin to proliferate like weeds in a garden. Hierarchical behavior is sewn seamlessly into the human condition - like language and having to breathe. In Wyandanch the new hierarchy is apparently based on degrees of brutality.

Krishna Is the Eighth Avatar of Vishnu

It's interesting that the once benevolent and generous gesture of giving a hand to those we determined to be the most needy world-wide, has now shed all pretenses and morphed into outright extortion.

I just finished watching the most delicious French comedy ever “My Best Friend” (’07) which contained the line, “You mean you pay to have people like you?” It sums up our progression from spontaneous giving, through paying for sex, to blackmail and extortion.

Speaking of movies, if there is still any doubt that there is a fifth column in this country that spares no expense in helping to create the impression that America is evil and must be defeated by any means possible in order to save the planet, that doubt can be put to rest with James Cameron’s AVATAR.

Over the years, Hollywood has always been very successful in creating powerfully persuasive fantasies that pit good against evil. Within a span of the past 50 years it has worked hard to define the antagonists. On one side is America; on the other is the rest of the world. America itself stands divided and is perched precariously on the cusp. It is within the private chambers of every American heart that the conflict will eventually be resolved.

AVATAR, stokes the notion that America is the single most potent destructive force on the planet. Visually, it employs the racial aspects of the tension. It hails a kind of back-to-the-earth tribalism as the answer to saving the planet or, in a larger sense, saving mankind’s soul. As such, it justifies any attack on the white man’s hegemony as warranted and totally acceptable. To Hollywood (by an extension of the logic) the shoe and the panty bombers are visionary new-age heroes.

This movie should do especially well in the Middle East, in Africa, Asia and South America. Though we have a significant number of domestic self-haters amongst us, most of the American movie-going public will recognize that it is they who are under assault by the predictable propagandists for the no-boundaries Left. Let’s put it in context: If during WWII, Hollywood had turned out movies such as AVATAR, we all would now be speaking German and eating Bratwurst. There would be no more Jews, Gypsies and whoever else Hitler might have set his sights on.

After the movie was over, my son remarked that AVATAR had the exact same plot of every movie he’s ever seen in the past ten years. This is a shame. Hollywood has everything it could possibly want at its disposal. Yet, it’s been working so doggedly to cheapen itself and ultimately bring about its own destruction. It used to be that ‘propaganda’ was a dirty word. At least, it was when I was growing up. Now there are galleries in Manhattan and on college campuses celebrating Soviet-era propaganda as high art.

No doubt, depending on who ultimately wins this fight, either AVATAR or Mel Gibson’s APOCALYPTO (AVATAR’s exact ideological opposite) will some day be celebrated as well.