As The War Goes On

posted June 7, 2005

I’d like to start this column off the way I begin my lectures: “We’re here for two reasons, for me to talk and you to listen. And if you get through before I do, please raise your hand.”

The most hopeful trend that I see taking place in America today is the growing separation between the stupid and the less stupid.

On the other hand, the most ominous trend is that there are more people on the stupid side than on the less stupid side.

But, of course, as former President Bill Clinton would say, that depends on what you mean by “stupid.”

So let’s look a moment at the word “stupid” and decide on an agreeable definition. To save time, let’s borrow from the mind of Albert Einstein and state bluntly that “stupidity” is relative.

To save even more time, let’s say “stupidity” is what I say it is. That’s all you need to know in terms of this particular lecture. Stupidity is not what you think it is, but what I think it is.

If you disagree with that and think that you have a better understanding of what stupidity is than I do, keep it to yourself or send me a postcard. I’m not interested in what you think. Try to remember why we’re here, for me to talk and you to listen.

Like I said, if you get through before I do, please raise your hand. And in the meantime, shut the hell up. I say that out of love and respect for the human intellect. If you can’t listen, get up and leave and let someone else take your seat.

One of the most primeval signs of stupidity is the inability to listen with an open mind to the possibility that you have not really done any intelligent thinking in years and that your thinking mechanism is rusted shut.

For example, consider this, there has never been a human that did not have a great sea of stupidity in their own mind which requires an almost constant vigilance and struggle just to keep one’s head above water from conception to the grave.

We are born much more stupid than intelligent. And we are born into a world that is much more stupid than intelligent. Our environment - from our family and playmates, to our churches and schools, the things we read and the things we see and hear on our TVs, to the workplace, the marketplace and all other places where people congregate and socialize – is like a sea of stupidity soaking into our brains without letup, leaving minds by the countless millions as dead as drowned rats way before the individuals are literally and physically dead.

If you can’t see that, the probable reason for it is that you are one of the drowned rats that make up the majority of the earth’s population. You’re brain dead when it comes to intelligent reasoning and thinking in the wide and far reaching sense of the term.

But before we get into the wide and far reaching range of reasoning and thinking, let’s look a moment at short sighted intelligence to see if there are clues that might indicate a probability that the individual has either arrived or is on their way to being brain dead, in the figurative sense.

For example, when a man covers his bald head by coming his hair across the top of his head, that is an example of short sighted intelligence. Ironically, the man in his vanity, thinks that no one will notice what he’s done. In his desire for a more becoming head, he has given the public a clue to both his silly vanity and his short sighted intelligence – which is to say his stupidity - and has made his head even more unsightly than it was.

This is not absolute evidence that the man is brain dead, it’s just a little clue that he has a little trouble thinking beyond his own bald head and seeing himself the way that others see him. It may be an indication that he has trouble with intelligent reasoning and thinking in the wide and far reaching sense, and may end up floating in the sea of stupidity with the other dead rats.

Before going any further, let me remind the class that being stupid or brain dead, in the sense that I’m talking about, has nothing to do with a person’s job or position in life. The brain dead – those without the ability to think and reason in the wide and far reaching sense – have held positions from presidents, congressmen, popes, preachers and judges to heavy equipment operators, wheelbarrow pushers and grave diggers.

President George W. Bush showed that he was brain dead when he claimed that he was guided by a higher power in his decision to attack Iraq. He was brain dead when he decided that that higher power wouldn’t mind him lying about his reasons.

The fact that neither he nor anyone else that helped instigate and bring the war about has yet to admit any wrongdoing is a further indication of stupid, lying, brain dead thinking on their part.

The vast majority of Americans showed that they were brain dead when they responded with flag waving approval for the attack on Iraq and voted him into office for a second term even after it became obvious that he had lied about his reasons for the attack.

Vice President Chaney showed again the other day that he is brain dead when he insinuated to a graduating class of cadets that Iraq was attacked because Saddam Hussein was harboring terrorists. Everyone in that audience that applauded the remark, which was the overwhelming majority of them, showed by their response that they are brain dead.

Everyone in America who has swallowed the Bush propaganda that we are fighting a War on Terror, rather than taking advantage of the 9/11 attacks to overthrow other nations and install puppet Democracies, regardless of how much terror and death results, is brain dead.

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with the support of the Bush administration, criticized China recently for increasing its defense budget, it showed that he was brain dead.

Everyone in Bush’s administration is a brain dead liar, from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to spit-haired Paul Wolfowitz, Bush’s nominee for president of the World Bank. Everyone that Bush nominates to any position is brain dead. Every congressman that supports him is brain dead and every American that supports him is brain dead.

Not only do we have a greater stockpile of weapons of mass destruction than all other nations combined, we’re building more of them at a faster rate than all other nations combined.

Bush and his war machine is even working on plans to take our nuclear capabilities up into space so that we can fire destruction down from the heavens and eliminate any nation that comes against us, as if we were God.

Anyone who doesn’t realize that we have no right to rule the world this way is brain dead. Why should the rest of the world believe that we are like Jesus and would never fire our weapons or attack another country without first being attacked ourselves?

If the great majority of Americans were not brain dead, they would realize that it is America itself that is causing nations around the world to increase their defense capabilities and seek out nuclear arms.

If the vast majority of Americans were not brain dead, they would realize that we are the root cause of terrorism in the Middle East, in Iraq and Palestine, because of our policies and the way we use our power.

It is impossible for the brain dead to see far and wide, beyond their little shiny dome of vanity and hypocrisy. If they could they would realize that the only way to bring about peace in the world is for America to conduct itself in a peaceful way.

Instead they comb their hair over their bald heads and claim that they have freed Iraq and conceived a democracy in a strange land. The less stupid people of the world have no trouble seeing through all that.

They know that Iraq, nor any other nation occupied by a foreign force, will ever give up the fight – whether it be through terror or armies – to determine their own political destinies and their natural rights of independence and freedom from the domination and occupation of American might.

But what can you expect when the blind lead the blind and the brain dead lead the brain dead, leaving the less stupid with nothing to do but scratch their heads and wonder how we ever got into this mess and how are we going to get out of it?

If you are not among the brain dead, but among the less stupid, you should be feeling a funny, sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach by now, as if you were in an aircraft at high altitude when suddenly you hear the sound of silence and you’re dropping at a high speed toward the ground.

We’re at that point where the line between the stupid and the less stupid is just a state of mind and we’re all going to go down together because there are more of them than they are of us, and they have the controls.

The final, most ironic thing of all, is the fact that it is the highest values of the brain dead – their moronic religious beliefs which allow them to lie, kill and praise God all in the same breath – that will destroy the world and all the life in it.

Is there any hope at all? Can we be saved? It’s possible. If we keep going in the war mongering way that we’re going and manage to stir up a few more wars and bring about the deaths of a few more hundred thousand, including a good number of our own – without bringing on Armageddon - many in the ranks of the stupid but who are not yet certifiably brain dead may come over to the side of the less stupid, putting us in the majority.

But I figure the odds of that are about a million to one. And even if the less stupid does, by the grace of God, become the majority, I doubt that that would be enough to change the fate of the world at this late date.

From the moment that humanity first tied the lead weight of moronic religion around its neck and jumped into the sea of stupidity, it’s just been a matter of time before it drowns itself like a bunch of rats, along with everything else that it is tied up with, including the innocent and the hope of a clean, sustainable planet teeming with life the way it was before we changed it.

Originally published in The Chatanoogan at http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_67951.asp and reprinted in TAM with permission of the author