Hatred Abounds

  Man is conceived in sin
and born in corruption
and he passeth from the stink of the didie
to the stench of the shroud 
--All the King's Men, 
 Robert Penn Warren

I'd rather you were dead
than be a fuckin' faggot
--American Beauty (1999)

 Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky 
---Imagine, John Lennon
__________________________

Scenarios are created by words in context. We are not a very serious people today, and require inflammatory rhetoric to keep us online and connected in even the fragile and tenuous way that we are when we subsume the "news feed", such as it is.

Of course, we are not connected with the truth, but only the facts with which we are presented, so we can only know those things which are fed to us.

A number of incidents over the past few weeks have struck me as either so unworthy of the coverage or of the sort it received. These stories are so tortuously constructed that they become, well, torturous. The stores are difficult because they are being used to front an agenda, instead of to understand who we are. I will write about several over the next few days.

Violence is the common thread, so the relevance to our project at RangerAgainstWar is solid.

Today, I will mention the shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, in which 49 people were killed and slightly more than that number were wounded. The shooter, Omar Mateen, had been a regular at the club and used a gay chat app over the course of a year with one of the customers.

Yes, Mateen claimed the kills for ISIS, but no one has asked the serious questions that must be asked if this sort of thing is to be extinguished.

First, his father said (after the requisite "I love America" spiel) that his son did not like gays. Mateen's ex-wife confirmed this, and it seems the father did not much like gays, either. This is a virulent hatred with which his parents did not seek help, and which most likely was learned and encouraged.

If the parents did not establish the hatred in the cauldron of the home, a hatred which would be in keeping with devout Muslim precepts, then at least it was never addressed as a pathology.

Mateen's behaviors sync with those of a self-loathing homosexual: he was abusive to his first wife (who escaped with the help of her family), and he was a regular at the gay nightclub. His sexual orientation was at odds with those sanctioned by his religion. He was closeted, like the Marine father in the film, American Beauty. Repression will out, often in explosive ways.

Another recent shooter who went into his comfortable fishbowl to shoot -- Dylann Root, in Charleston -- had also cased the joint well, and the regulars at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church also welcomed him inside the perimeter.

Press photos of Mr. Root show him in various poses with the Confederate flag and other classic white power paraphernalia. His hatred and fear of blacks overtaking the country was ab origine. He did not have original or strange ideations; he simply parroted what he heard. He took it a step further than most of his ilk who mutter their disdain sotto voce. Dylann Root wanted to be a hero.

So that is how you stop these spectacularly violent events: you rout out hatred and violence. You start at the cradle and you master your own ego before having children, or before joining a church.

Just that. But that is not how Homo sapien is wired, so we go on killing and hating better, enlisting our boundless and unremitting ego and opposable thumbs in the service of our hatred and violence.

At least we could be honest about it, and stop saying, "Gol-ly!" every time  something like this happens. Condoleezza Rice's disingenuous, "No one could have imagined them taking a plane" stance has worn quite thin.

The precedents abound. Imagine it.