KILL ALL HUMANS!

Why Are We Such Jerks to Each Other?

Happy Nagasaki Day! Today we celebrate the official beginning of the Cold War with the commemoration of the (merciful) incineration of several thousand Japanese, and of course the UN-merciful, slow, painful cancer deaths of thousands more who escaped the immediate effects of Fat Man, the world's first plutonium gun-type nuke. In the paper this morning, I read all about Mara Salvatrucha's wave of stabbings in Montgomery County, that Zarqawi's network in Iraq has mastered the art of posting video of roadside bombings on the internet minutes after they happen, and that's just TODAY. What the fuck is wrong with everyone?

Stabbing someone in public for the right to stand on a street corner in Montgomery County, intimidating people is AT LEAST as stupid as suicide bombing someone... for the right to stand on a street corner in Iraq, intimidating people. In one case, they lock you up and throw away the key, in the other case, you're dead, so you can't stand on your street corner afterwards ANYWAY. If this was about competition for people or resources, it'd be done purely by ideology and advertisement. I mean, hey, here in America, we have organized gangs of people with whole shitloads of money at stake in selling various drugs, and there's some vicious competition out there. But you don't see Seagram's dealers pulling drive-by shootings at Bacardi's offices, and no one expects the Corona folks to strap a fanatical chihuahua with a plastique sweater and send him to take out the Anheiser Bush Clydesdales.

Howard Bloom would say it's about status, it's about lashing back at those who threaten your position, it's about trying to take down the top dog. Howard Bloom is the author of the Lucifer Principle, and his site's got this neat animation called "Why do the Iraqis Hate Us?" It makes some sense, but it's pretty twisted when you get down to it.

Both of these phenomena mentioned above, the gang stabbings and the suicide bombings, are part of a chicken-hawk mentality whereby a group of organized thugs get little people around them that feel like nothing and nobody to feel like a somebody because they're part of this big bad gang. Often it's done by getting them to do something that will get them into a lot of shit if it's revealed: stabbings and shootings are common gang-initiation rites. It's kind of like what they tell officers leading infantry in wartime: your job is to get the guys on the line to shoot, and keep shooting. They say that after the first shot, it gets easier and easier, until it's automatic, and the people you're shooting at aren't people anymore, just targets.

The gangs, Al Qaeda, the Army... all are VERY similar organizations, in that they induct kids that don't know what they're getting into, they don't let you out when you realize what's going on, and they put you in harm's way for a supposed greater good that you don't ever get to really experience. I mean, the suicide bombers are sold on houris in paradise; the MS-13ers are seduced by the illusion of gang glory and protection for themselves and their families (who are usually the victims in the neighborhood drive-bys and stray bullets); the Army sells on patriotism (which doesn't carry the same meaning since a certain administration arrived). The tangible benefits are few: Army gives you a bonus to sign up and sends a big check to your folks when you die; the MS-13ers get whatever they can scrape out of drug sales and maybe prostitution (and not every gang-banger is a dealer or a pimp); Al Qaeda sends the families of its "martyrs" checks to support them afterwards. But what do you, as an individual, get for volunteering yourself for extinction?

Not a damn thing. Hopefully, when you're sitting in a crater in Iraq or an alley in Montgomery, your guts spilling out from the roadside bomb or knife attack or gunshot wound, you've been brainwashed enough to get a fuzzy feeling that you died for something greater than yourself. But that's about it. Did you have a hand in making that greater thing that you served? Probably not. Did you sacrifice yourself on the altar of someone else's organization, removing yourself from all the good things you could have done for your family, for your friends, for the people that actually love you? Most probably. And WHY don't the Seagram's and Bacardi folks, or the Corona and Budweiser brewers do this sort of shit?

Because being an alcoholic doesn't carry with it an ideology. Bloom said it best: IDEOLOGY IS THEFT. And Righteous Indignation is nothing more than hunger for real estate. There are legitimate reasons for violence: I stridently affirm the right of everyone to defend themselves from uninvited aggression. For instance:

"We will go to America with the gun," vows Sultan Atiqur Rehman Allehadi, who quit the Pakistani air force and now guides younger men in the Army of the Pure. "First we will ask them [Americans] to take up Islam. If they don't, then we will use the gun."

Come get some, Mr. Sultan. I may not be a fanatic, I may not be a gang banger. I don't even agree with the concept of taking over your shithole of a sand-trap country for the dubious pleasure of sucking nasty black stuff out of the ground. But this is MY HOME, and I've got my own religion, so I don't need yours. Come here and try to convert me to Islam with your AK-47, and I'll convert you to fertilizer with my Kel-Tec.

Not that I have anything particular against Muslims. I just don't like to be forced into something without a say in the matter. And as I have a non-dualistic, demiurgic perspective of what "God" is, I don't need to replace it with some bastardized over-grown pagan Moon God who's religion got a face lift and scimitar-point marketing campaign fourteen hundred years ago. Not that the Catholic Church didn't do similar conversions in South America and Mexico in the 1500s... but they gave those tactics up hundreds of years ago. Were Islam to crystalize entirely into the militant evangelism that some of its fringes have displayed recently (or were the Fundamentalist Christians to do the same conversion at gun-point in our country), well, as Bugs Bunny was fond of saying, "Of course you realize, this means War."

So, what's it gonna be, folks? Wabbit season or Duck season? Maybe we should turn this around, and make it ELMER SEASON. Time to hunt the hunters, boys and girls. In three years, there probably won't be a neutral country for the reasonable people to go to. Hopefully, Mr. Bloom will have some insight in his forthcoming book, Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul Back in the Machine.

I hope we can keep from nuking each other until it gets published.