FEAR

The Ministry of Fear

I’m listening to this British dude, Robert Fisk, telling it like it is about Iraq. He relates it all back to 1920 and the siege of Baghdad by the Brits; all of this the fault of the Brits, but actually the fault of our inbred imperialist attitudes—historically constructed attitudes, all based on FEARS, fears invented by think tanks [read: like the Brookings Institute, etc.] and passed on to the Ministry of Fear. Yep, even Georgie Porgie, our phony “president,” has his Ministry of Fear. Rummy Rumsfeld was the Minister of Fear and now it’s a man named DICK, Dick Gates, same as Rummy, just in a different color suit, but, I guarantee you, just as white MEAN and viciously caught up in his own white power, the power to torture and the power to eventually kill and even the power to perhaps find himself high up in the hierarchy of the eventual Fascist dictatorship that this country becomes if We the People don’t put a stop to it—Oh hell yes it’s coming. I am a bit of soothsayer, you know, so hold onto your hats, it’s a coming, though since I’m also a hidebound cynic, and as such, I, beneath the surface of my predictions, believe it’s already here, we are now FASCISTS, and we really have been all along, even since before the Constitution and the first Congresses and shit. Aristocrats formed this White Nation and aristocrats still rule this White Nation.

Let’s look at the word “aristocrat.” Aristos means “best” in Greek and Latin [sorry, I am not a linguist, so take my definitional statements as coming from the italicized portions of my Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. I do have a copy of the OED in my hard drive, thanks to l hat’s efforts of getting it to me, but I am awfully lazy computerwise and the “little dic” is right here by my side, so, hey, I improvise.

Trouble with an improviser? Let me name the ways! But my improvising on the breaking down of the English word “aristocrat” is purely according to what I’m reading in the dictionary. Why do we trust dictionary definitions so much? We don’t know the people who decide such things, do we? I remember the name Clifton Fadiman. Anybody else remember him? My dictionary’s Editor in Chief is Frederick C. Mish. The word “mishmash” comes to mind. The “Director of Defining”—Jesus X., what a title! I would rather be the Director of Defining than the Editor in Chief—Yahoooo! But the Director of Defining is E. Ward Gilman (a three-named person—we young college-boy writers used to make fun of three-named women poets). [By the bye, is anyone of you aware of the Explanation Chart in dictionaries?—I find it quite fascinating—it comes of pages 8a and 9a in my Tenth Edition Webster’s Collegiate (1993).]

So aristos means “best.” Numero uno. Ichi ban. The suffix -kratia just being the –cracy, like “demo-cracy.” So an “aristocracy” is “government (-cracy) by the BEST (aristos-) INDIVIDUALS or by a SMALL PRIVILEGED CLASS.” There’s nothing in aristocracy that has to do with any majority. Is this form of government beginning to look more familiar NOW?

RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM. When slaveholding counted when it came to power in this country, who the hell do you think became the leaders of this country? Aristocrats with the most slaves, read: George “Pot Grower” Washington, Tom “Whar’s My Cullard Gal” Jefferson, John “Kiss My Ass” Adams, a Boston Brahmin—or even Ben “the Philanderer” Franklin (“Methinks I’ll take meself down to the Hashfire Inn….”) or Alexander Hamilton (his mother was a Caribbean black wasn’t she? though Alex would have challenged you to a duel had you said he had even a drop of black in him) and Aaron Burr, an aristocrat who when shunned by his aristocratic friends went down to Texas and formed an army and declared he was forming his own empire; both Burr and Hamilton were snobs. Oh, I forgot, a part of the definition of “aristocrat” is being “snobbish.” Aristocrats live in “socially exclusive” neighborhoods—closed communities, like where most mansions are, outside the commonwealth usually. Did you ever hang around a really rich dude’s mansion? I have. My brother used to live across the alley from Ross Perrot in Dallas, for one brief moment in his crooked life the world’s wealthiest man, and by God was that Perrot mansion guarded! With high steel barbed wired fences sporting barred entrance gates with big RP monograms on them—symbols that bring awesome fear and respect from the low-life workingclass—from which all these assholes come, by the way; even Washington and Jefferson were from dirt-farmer stock—with tons of armed guards at those mighty pearly gates. And then Ross had his on “security force” inside the gates. Oh yes, quite an exclusive way to live; certainly isolated on purpose from the real-world community in which the workingclasses try to cope with existence. These dumbasses believe the witch doctors who tell them, “Work for the night is coming when you’ll work no more.” Very Calvinistic, don’t you think? Which is leading us right back to the Libertarians.

When you are powerful enough to have gates to close against your fellow man and have your own protective army to make sure those gates stay closed to your fellow man, by God, then you are an aristocrat, subject only to your own improvised laws; your property becoming your own heaven on earth, fuck working for any coming night when you’ll work no more—in fact, F work; that’s for somebody else to do, all under protection of the fascist government that is engineered by your own class to benefit and secure your own class. This is why Bush is determined to free the richest Amuricans from taxes and plebian laws. Aristos, don’t you see, are above the law—they make LAW, they don’t obey it.

Yep, aristocrats rule us all and have since the beginning of time back there on the Serengeti Plain in Africa. So the first aristocrat may have been a tribal witch doctor, maybe one of the reasons we are instinctly impressed by witchcraft, one of the ways the aristocrats keep their power: by keeping knowledge from the commonman—Jefferson believed this to the point he built the University of Virginia as a place where aristocrat children could come learn how to be aristocrats, southern competition with Havard and Yale, the Big East aristocrat colleges. Aristocrats think they’re smarter than you. Are they? Well, hell, they’ve been to Harvard, Yale, and the cavalier University of Virginia, so, according to aristocratic law, yep, they’re smarter than you, even after they were forced to allow Jews and blacks to become aristocrats. Saudi Arabians, for instance, are considered aristocrats to the aristocratic Bushes. Iraqis? Oh hell no; Saddam Hussien was an F-ing peasant; the Shah of Iran, however, now he was a true aristocrat and was treated as such by the U.S. government. And, yep, you guessed it, the Bin Ladens are accepted aristocrats, and that includes little brother Osama—yep, he’s an aristocrat, too; one of THEM.

In my continuing to read and reread Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End, I came across the following--and regarding reading books over and over, Malcolm Lowry said he wrote books to be read more than once. He asked how could you get the true flavor of a complicated novel without reading it multiple times, each time taking on a new perspective of the story as it has unfolded out of a writer’s mind for a decade maybe, or in the case of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano 12 years? It takes a writer 12 years to develop his characters and a reader is going to wipe them out of existence after one reading? Those characters keep on living and changing in our best literature. On the other hand, who the hell gives a shit about a piece of Stephen King pap after one reading? “I can’t wait until they make a movie out of this.” “Would you read it again?” “Oh hell no. The movie, on the other hand, hell yeah, I might watch the movie two or three times, or when it came out again on teevee or CABLE or somethin’ or I might buy a DVD of the movie. But the book? Hell no; I threw mine away right after I read it—or did I give it my wife to take to her job where they have a lending library?”

Anyway, what I’m trying to tell you is that while reading Days Without End I came across these lines. They are spoken by John Loving, the play’s main character—remember, he shares the stage with a mirror image of himself who’s audible but invisible to the other characters and who is actually just his alter ego. But here’s a cool little speech that tells a good bit of what I’m trying to get across in a very passionate way—and remember, this was written in the 1930s, ancient times to some of us:

Act Three, Scene Three:

JOHN: “I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice. It is so obvious that they deliberately cheat themselves because their fear of change won’t let them face the truth. They don’t want to understand what has happened to them. All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again. They no longer know what they want this country to be, what they want it to become, where they want it to go. It has lost all meaning for them except as a pig wallow. And so their lives as citizens have no beginnings, no ends. They have lost the ideal of the Land of the Free. Freedom demands initiative, courage, the need to decide what life must mean to oneself. To them, that is terror. They explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the thime for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead—and stinking! No, they don’t want to be free. Slavery means security—of a kind, the only kind they have courage for. It means they need not think. They have only to obey orders from owners who are, in turn, their slaves!”

His alter ego replies to this:

LOVING (Breaks in—with bored scorn): “But I’m denouncing from my old soap box again. It’s all silly twaddle, of course. Freedom was merely our romantic delusion. We know better now. We know we are all the slaves of meaningless chance—electricity or something, which whirls us—on to Hercules! [Act Three, scene II, pp. 109-110, Eugene O’Neill, Days Without End, 1^st Edition, 1934.]

Damn, to me that’s fine writing and thinking while writing. But it makes you stop and think. It’s O’Neill’s yin and yang thinking; I love especially the statement that the righteous John makes about slavery to the stupid being security. I know that’s true even though one isn’t really supposed to admit slavery is still as alive and well today as it was back in 1933 when O’Neill was writing this play. “Freedom” in the eyes of numbskulls like Georgie Porgie, our phony “president,” and the numbskull coevals in the Pure White House is slavery. That’s why little spoiled brat GWBush--who now looks bushed to me lately—like when he trotted poor Pickles out yesterday to have her show her scrape scar where We the People’s paid-for special doctor scraped a skin cancer off her leg. Your doctor’s gonna charge you $4,000 a pop to scrape off your skin cancers one day—Pickles, however, got the royal queen’s discount and didn’t have to pay a damn dime for her skin cancer scrape. Praise the Lard how We the People pamper these already spoiled brat bastards as though they really were noble people (what the aristocrats were called in Medieval England, noblemen), these aristocratic assholes like the Bushes who have stolen their fortunes through politics and asslicking since back in the late 1800s—a family aristocratically proud that it helped Hitler’s regime with its banking problems at the height of the Third Reich, even to the point of helping Adolf finance the building of the concentration camps! Oh yeah! Go Bushes Go! You gotta love these sorry bastards. They are products of our American way, the way of aristocrats, plutocrats, theocrats, autocrats, whether Dumbocrats or Repugnicans—hell, even Ralph Nader’s a damn aristocrat!

God, I lose it everytime I think of how this “president” is getting away with all this lying and cheating and stealing and lying some more and just arbitrarily declaring us in a War on Terrerists and then just as arbitrarily taking away all our rights to privacy, all our rights to the pursuit of our happiness, all the rights to our guaranteed freedom of speech, all the rights to habeas corpus when we’re being falsely accused of let’s say murder, all the rights to worship or believe in whatever the hell we want to believe in even if it’s the right to not believe any of it if we so go that way—Atheists should have the same rights as faithful fools who believe in Almighties!, all the rights to travel unobscured by passports and ID-examinations and being fingerprinted, etc., etc., etc. (as the King of Siam liked to say).

Cowards become slaves. Now that’s a scary thought. That means if you rebuke slavery you could be subject to the state killing your ass. See what I mean? Say you follow all the orders given you by the aristocrats without question, without argument, with the obedience of a beaten-down hound without a home who hasn’t eaten in 7 days—like one of those dogs in the teevee dog food commercials, then you become a patriot, another Neo-Con word for "slave." [What Amuricans spend on pet food in a year could end starvation in the world forever.

Like John Loving’s alter ego, I am seeing it all as silly twaddle—and, certainly yes freedom is simply a romantic delusion.

Robert Fisk says these aristocrats hold us in slavery through FEAR. Red, green, yellow, orange alerts that really have no meaning whatsoever than to scare hell out of us. Or, hell, there’s tons of scary movies being made constantly, or there are murder mysteries constantly pumped on us, cop shows, America’s Most Wanted, detailed investigations into workings of serial killers—television CSI shows that turn serial killers into heroes! They do. They respect both scientifically and professionally serial killers. Plus, watch some of these shows sometimes and look at the various ways they show to kill people. Recently they’ve been into serial killers who bury their victims, always young girls, alive, leaving trails as to when their oxygen is going to run out unless they’re rescued, which this serial killer wanted because he didn’t really want to do what he was doing, you see; something was driving him to… Such bullshit.

Murder. Death. Well, OK, DEATH is our biggest FEAR. Only the truly stoned of us aren’t afraid of DEATH [Doctor Hunter Thompson wasn’t afraid of death; he beckoned it to take him and it answered his beckoning by blowing the top of his whole head off—leaving nothing of the brilliant Hunter S. Thompson but a stump of a wrecked body, the rest of him splattered all over a window overlooking his little Aspen empire. Before he died, he wrote that he was killing himself because he’d done all he could do, had tried to warn us but we didn’t listen, so, hell, he’d lived 68 years and that was long enough so—BOOM—Adios, suckers].

We are all along with our phony “president” and all the crooks in Washington, District of Corruption” are COWARDS who have “lost the ideal of the Land of the Free.” We want to be LED by the nose; we want to be RULED, we want to be enslaved because only then will we feel safe and secure. Only then can we really believe doctors and other medicine men, like Jesus X. Christ, the Great Physician, and all his healing force of gooney bird hucksters and hustlers and flim-flammers that we are never going to die if we only eliminate the Islamic faith from the world—and maybe the only solution to that elimination problem is the Final Solution. Right, Adolf?

The Ministry of Fear. What did that old bleeding heart crippled liberal say, that old rascal aristocrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a three-named man), “We having nothing to fear but fear itself”?

thegrowlingwolf declares that he is not afraid. I live in the middle of New York City, just a few blocks north of Ground Zero, where these aristocrats are hoopla-ing it up with spoiled brat NY governor Potato Head Patake over the fact they are going on with the building of the world’s tallest building anyway whether anybody likes it or not. This development not only includes turning that site into a real estate goldmine but also turning that area into a New Manhattan with an overabundance of new office space and of course tons of new 50-story luxury hi-rise apartment buildings with million-dollar views of Ground Zero—you know, they’re leaving the concreted-over hole open as a museum or Disneyland show or something crude like that. Totally a commercial monument to the aristocrat’s true god, Mammon. The Devil already owns their souls; so they can’t help themselves, just like Flip Wilson’s drag queen used to say, “The Devil made me do it.”

Candides. All of us are Candides.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler