Carpooling with Adolf Eichmann

[eridani]

Joe Bageant hits another one out of the park--

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2005/05/carpooling_with.html

All this sanity is killing some of us. To my mind, it is killing the best of us. It drives the artist and the philosopher, dancer, the psychiatrist, the homosexual torch singer and the spiritualist dishwasher toward the cliff with its macabre locust drone. Most of the genuinely beautiful minds and souls I know are in the deepest sort of despair. Rather like the cabaret society of 1930s Berlin, you can hear the high whine of hysteria behind their drunken revelry, their bitter laughter in the face of such black folly. Some people I know do not even bother to get out of bed on weekends. I am serious. I am "seeing the best minds of my generation" etc. right before my eyes. And like that magnificent old faggot who saw the same vision years before we did, I often find myself sobbing on the steps of a madhouse called America. Meanwhile, I ask my doctor for Prozac, and he says: "Joe, the solution to every problem is not a drug." That has not been my experience by any means.
What do we prize? Rote sanity? Practicality? Efficacy? Ants are all those things. So are lizards. Perhaps what is lacking is religion. Yet both Eichmann and Hitler were Christians, as were the German people. Tamerlane was a Muslim. And it was Buddhists who conducted the Rape of Nanking. It was Christian America that practiced genocide on the Red Indian and chopped off the feet of Negro slaves so they could not run away from their appointed duties building the "City on the Hill." Chopping off their feet was practical, sane, clever even. We are all richer now for our ancestors' cleverness and sanity. Right now it is a dusky Semitic people and their oil that occupy our cleverness.

In any case, there is no lack of religion. We are seeing more of it than ever as it promises to swallow up our judicial system and entire government. Bin Laden, Rabbi Avraham Shapira, Jerry Falwell, and a hundred million Christian pod people are proof religion alone cannot temper our relentless "sanity" into something more deeply human. So what is lacking? My god! No, this cannot be! Is it possible that even leftist intellectuals and educated liberals, are going to be forced to admit it? Admit that "without love, we are nothing?" That without empathy and charity we are doomed?

If in the end the American empire continues pursuit of this awful thing we seem so determined to carry out, we will learn the answer to that question. Assuming it can be found amid the ruin.

[wagthedogwar]

1. onward Lysistrata

You can find a similar message from the Dalai lama last week here:

http://www.dalailamacenter.org/multimedia/index.php

[teach1st]

2. I'm kicking

I'm recommending.