Informant38

The Controversial General

Ω{Boykin's about as front and center as you can get in this pre-apocalyptic world, famous now for saying what a lot of people are currently thinking; and at a second, more elusive level, he's solidifying a little piece of the chaos. What's ironic is the 'Christian' membership of Americans United For A Separation of Church and State saying essentially it's all well and good to believe in Biblical scenarios and prophecies, but you can't let it influence your political life. Because politics is serious. Politics is real.
It's always seemed strange to me that people will accept these 'beliefs' in others, and then be all surprised when they live them, act on them, make decisions in the light of them that affect the rest of us.
These are people who believe that God gave them the earth to use and discard, that when they die they will live forever in a better place, that God chose the Jews to be his special children, that Satan is a real and active malevolent presence in the world.
How can you expect them not to act on that? That's serious stuff. That it's part of something much more complex and strange than it appears is readily obvious, but the implications are so unsettling most of us don't like to think about it.
So much is happening, so much more about to happen, it's hard to focus on the big picture.
A lot of us were raised to believe it was enough to point out how insane someone was, how illogical and nonsensical their positions were, and that that alone would stop them, the way it stopped us in the classroom.
But it doesn't work like that in the real world. Madness works there as well as sense, sometimes better. Not in architecture, not in engineering, but on the battlefield, in both the short and long run.
It's not about common sense or fairness or honesty, it's about winning, and as trite as it sounds, life is a battlefield.
Boykin was laughable, or people with his world-view were laughable, in most parts of the United States a few decades ago. Not to me maybe, but to most 'thinking' people. Now it's not so funny.
People are dying because of this nonsense, and lately it's not looking like nonsense so much as guile.

This is a war of public relations. A war of images. Because the real power here is made of dreams and wishes; it's the power of concentrated human aspirations, regulated and channeled.
Pop stars ride that power to the doors of mansions. They create it around themselves, and it creates them. The pope is made of that, the president now, and Boykin himself in a smaller, more ridiculous version.
The focused strength of attention, of belief, creates what it believes in. When there isn't much belief, there isn't much created, but when a billion people believe 'in' something, whether it's Allah's will, the People's Republic, or the Great Jehovah, something is created that has an awesome presence, even in the lives of unbelievers.
None of this is about right and wrong, about truth or lies. The truth is biological, and there is no right and wrong in biology, there just is what is. But believing a lie that helps you live is true, biologically; it's only the in-betweens that that doesn't work for, the ones who want a deeper more lasting truth than superstition and fantasy, but still a truth that includes them, their lives and what they desire.
That's the kicker. And that's what the scams have always done, offered that illusion of inclusion while they took the profound, still unmeasured power of the individual and hooked it up to the invisible grid.
The shorter version of this fundamentalist claptrap is "If you don't believe we're right, you're evil."
It's a mechanism that strengthens itself on resistance, becoming more solid with opposition, that feeds on rejection.
Look to what they fear most. It's explanation. And love. Itemize it. The most encouraging work being done today is the line by line rebuttal of the garbage rhetoric we're fed daily.
Understanding will undo them, and a wider view of things, a deeper history of love, because what we are goes way back, and you can love that, it transcends nonsense, you can love all of it, all of this living, and you can fight for what you love.}