Foto by tgw, "Snowy Night in Manhattan," New York City, 2009.
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I heard this guy on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now Monday. His name is McGuire. I didn't trust him at first because he's a professor at Marquette University--a Catholic college. If that wasn't enough, at Marquette he teaches theology. But then the guy started talking. I'm not looking for wisdom anymore. I've got tons of wisdom. I'm looking for good thinking; good reasoning.
I believe some of us are born intuitive. Because of this I'm a lousy psychologist but a great Sociologist (which seems to be my religion; though sometimes I find modern Sociologists too caught up in problematics to the neglect of providing us with amazing collective estimates and in some cases even guessimating future happenings with amazing closeness to actuality based on the direction those amazing collective estimates are leading us). My problem is I am a human. By nature, my curiosity drives me toward complicating the simple; exaggeration is the human animal's metier. We work hard at stirring our divisive selves up; of pitting ourselves against all the others. "Competition" we call it. We justify it by saying we subscribe to social Darwinism, which says, only the best & brightest in any environment (even the environment of the global marketplace) will survive. They must be strong physically as well as bright mentally in order to lead the mediocre majority into doing all their slavish work for them. The result is that the best & brightest rise to the top. They become the seedbed of the future Power Elite.
Competition is fun. Being a winner is rewarding. Being the very best in your domain is rewarding in more ways than money. You know what I mean. Money is important, yes, but better than money is POWER. The power to control large areas of your domain. Like Tiger Woods. He's a failure as a wife cheater and profligate, but he's a big winner when it comes to his ability to play golf better than any other son of a bitchin' golfer in the world. When Tiger shows up at your golf tournament, you get rich quick because you can expect thousands more spectators to your event plus if your tournament is carried on teevee, when Tiger plays, golf's ratings shoot up 50% higher than when he doesn't. You watch. Tiger lays off a year--or if he plays golf, he plays in Dubai, or Malaysia, or Singapore, or Taiwan. Like Tiger had just won a big golf tournament in SE Asia (and before that he was coming off a multimillion-dollar win of a really big golf tournament in Dubai) right before he was caught flipping his pecker in the faces of young club girls while his light-white Swedish wife was home tending to the sunshine kids who'll grow up to become leeches on the celebrity world since they will not have to be very ambitious after mommy collects half of daddy's multibillion-dollar worth. So Tiger simply has to go off into other parts of the world, let his carousing image cool down over here. By the way, you don't think Tiger behaves himself in the rest of the world any more than he does when he's over here do you? I'm willing to bet there are some Asian honeys who'll soon be coming on the market chattering away in Mandarin about the excellent talents of Tiger With Wood On when he's off the course relaxing in some Happy Ending pleasure palace. [Being a loser, by the bye, means you are soon forgotten and lost in obscureness.]
So this guy McGuire...he's Daniel McGuire and he's a professor of Moral Theology at Marquette. Here's a passage from an article he wrote in November that shows you what impressed me about the way this guy thinks.
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Bred to Violence
Language and thought never rise out of a sociological vacuum. Theory, except in moments of true creativity, is autobiographical. Our stories ensoul our words and frame our discourse. A strong penchant for self-destructive violence toward one another and toward the rest of nature seems tragically kneaded into our history-formed collective personality. Maybe the apocalyptic voices are the realists. Georg Henrik von Wright says with chilling calmness: "One perspective, which I don't find unrealistic, is of humanity as approaching its extinction as a zoological species. The idea has often disturbed people. . . . For my part I cannot find it especially disturbing. Humanity as a species will at some time with certainty cease to exist; whether it happens after hundreds of thousands of years or after a few centuries is trifling in the cosmic perspective. When one considers how many species humans have made an end of, then such a natural nemesis can perhaps seem justified."10 Vaclav Havel warns that if we endanger the Earth she will dispense with us in the interests of a higher value-that is, life itself. Lynn Margulis joins the grim chorus saying that the rest of Earth's life did very well without us in the past and it will do very well without us in the future. Not all religious scholars rush in with gospels of consolation. If we are the "missing link" between apes and true humanity, as Gerd Theissen puts it, our species is morally prenatal and yet armed to the teeth, with the end of our existence stored and ready in our nuclear silos and other species dropping around us like canaries in a doomed mine.11
Some scholars think our passion for war is innate and irrepressible. Thus L.F. Richardson in his 1960 study on the statistics of violent conflicts searched for the causative factors of war and concluded that wars are largely random catastrophes whose specific time and location we cannot predict but whose recurrence we must expect just as we expect earthquakes and hurricanes.12 This leads a writer in American Scientist to see the nations of the world as banging "against one another with no more plan or principle than molecules in an overheated gas."13 Supportive of these dismal views, is the study that says humans have been at peace for only 8 percent of the past 3,400 years of recorded history.14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------That's brilliant thinking in my way of thinking. WHY? Because it jives perfectly with the way I've been thinking and the way other Growlers have been thinking since we started blogging going on 4 years ago now. To read Brother Daniel's whole article, here ya go:
www.religiousconsultation.org/lies_of_war_dissecting_Just_War_euphemisms.htm
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And in my last Growler post I mentioned Obama should preemptively strike Yemen ASAP--and who beat me to that suggestion? Why Unka Joe LIEberman--the Dumbocrat's Peck's bad boy who since the party turned against him [I mean, come on, he went to the Repugnican Convention--the dumb bastard] and beat him in the Dumbocratic primary up in "the Insurance State"--and Old Joe showed their asses and ran as an Independent and won by a hair] he's determined to become a thorn in the Dumbocrats's side, especially their populist side. And these weak-kneed Rollo Dumbos tolerate him with ass-kissing ardor.
Unka Joe has several important connections--OK, first he's Jewish, there, we got that out of the way, and second, he's a senator from Connecticut, the insurance capital of the world at one time--Hartford being the home of the Hartford, Travelers, Connecticut General--plus Connecticut is the home to a ton of corporate headquarters and big-time big-monied CEOs of some of the worlds big global marketplace giants. So, yep, Unka Joe was ballyhooing around the District of Corruption about how President Obama, our "War IS Peace" President, should preemptively invade and occupy Yemen--which now it seems is the new hotbed home of al-Queda. [I just read on BuzzFlash that Obama has already sent air strikes against a certain area of Yemen.] The al-Queda, I guessimate from empirical study, left a hundred or so of themselves back in Afghanistan and Pakistan to throw us off, when in actuality it looks like the majority of al-Queda's huge main forces are now embedded in Yemen and the Arab Peninsula. What do you think, is al-Queda maybe heading back home to Mother Saudi-Arabia? [Do Islam nations consider their countries women, like we do, Lady Liberty, or men? "Saudi-Arabia, she...." or "Saudi-Arabia, he..."?]
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After listening to Brother McGuire and then reading his piece on war, he's thinking way outside his Catholic frame of mind. Talking about the "JUST WAR" and about the term "Kill Power." It's an interesting term and McGuire shows it goes way back in our collective thinking back to Revolutionary times. And then within hours of hearing McGuire discuss this Kill Power concept, I then heard President Obama speaking about the spoiled rich brat banker's son's spoiled terrorist plot and how our "national security" blew it (Oh NO! I thought Homeland Security was doin' a HECK of a JOB!)--didn't catch this "love-me-daddy" college boy (did he not even have a passport?) who tried to blow himself and an airliner up over Detroit using, now they are saying, a container of explosives he had sewn (sewn!) into his shorts (so Muslim men do wear shorts). AND (breathe) what startled me about President Obama's speech was he used the very phrases McGuire mentions in his article--Obama starts talking about "our power" and that he would use all our "power" to "eliminate" (kill power) these terrorists who are immorally trying to kill Americans. And Obama, dammit, up and said those very words, that we have the power to destroy our enemies and we will use every bit of that kill power to protect our people from a terrorist attack. And, yes, too, dammit, as McGuire said, President Obama is sounding more and more and MORE like Commander-in-Chief Georgie Porgie Bush and seems intent on bringing us further editions of General Georgie Porgie's trumped up WAR on TERRORISM, which in actuality is a war for power--the power of OIL [G.W. Bush, ex-faux-president, our only never-elected president, is enjoying life to its fullest down in Texas--he was at the Cowboys game in the owner's box with his old Arkansas-hick-massuh Jimmy Jones--God-damn that pisses me off when I see that little prick having a damn good life, drinking the best whiskey, laughing it up--Jesus, I feel like ripping into the throat of dumbass America--Wolf Power!
McGuire asks the question, wouldn't we gain more peace if we sat down and talked face to face with these people rather than threatening them with annihilation if they don't change their ways and become US-adoring Christian-Capitalist gentlemen and ladies?
I said during the Vietnam War that all Hanoi had to do was throw up their hands and surrender to us and ask our forgiveness and we, like we did Japan and Germany after they surrendered to us after WWII, would make them a leading world Capitalist power!
I think as an intuitive Sociologist-type full-of-wisdom person, I have to agree with the doomsdayers McGuire mentions and say, I don't think we have any choice but to war. We are animals, you see. Animals war. Monkeys war like mad over territory; over eats; over water to drink. War is animal; War is instinctual. Benevolence is a sign of weakness, except when it's family. That's why dynasty families evolve out of our animalistic tendencies--the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Bushes--they form foundations; they pool their wealth; most of their worthless offspring get into politics after graduating from Harvard or Yale--even the Bin Ladins knew that going to Harvard was a Good Thing, as successful felon Martha Stewart might judge all this.
As long as we consider ourselves divine--the "missing link between monkeys and the higher forms of human beings" as McGuire says--and deny our being animals the same as a god-damn monkey is simply an animal we are doomed--right now to the dictates of Chaos. There is nothing divine about monkeys--and there is nothing divine about us monkeys--nothing missing between monkeys and those higher beings--Whaaaa: Angels! Spirits! Holy Ghosts! The bullshit is deep and getting deeper.
We are doomed. Our truths are based on lies. Our motivations are wrongly directed. We should be peacekeepers of the "Garden of Eden," which our earth is--totally under the control of our true God, the Sun, and the Sun's God, the Universe, neither of which give one shit whether human beings continue as is continued or are wiped out, say by one cracked-up Universe hurling an asteroid straight into the breadbasket gut of the human-crippled planet Earth, so named that by human beings!
I am contaminated by wisdom; I am cleansed by good thinking and solutional revelation.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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