Two Minutes Hate

--Suicide Bombers, Emad Hajjaj (Lebanon) 

I'd like to teach the world to sing
in perfect harmony
I'd like to buy the world a Coke
And keep it company 
--Coke Commercial jingle (1972)

 We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!
That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. 
We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities,
we are eaten up by nothing
--Charles Bukowski

He had raised hatred into an art.
He hated better than anyone had loved 
--Do you know the source of this quotation?
_________________

After recently reading the excellent Stories From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch covering the Rwandan Genocide, and seeing pictures of the fighting still going on in the same region by the same players in the next day's paper, Ranger was reminded of one of his pet theories: The world is held together by hate, and not love. 

Whether we are talking of the Balkans, Asia, Central Asia or wherever the world is not a Coca Cola commercial, and hatred is the prevailing glue that binds us together -- not politics, religion or any other enlightened philosophy.

Further, the United States both participates in the divisiveness and deviates incrementally from this fact as we are bound and riven by more seemingly benign tribal affiliations like sports teams and "reality" t.v.; a subset of reality t.v. would be the 24-hour news cycle programing. What this implies for America's future is unclear. Additionally, the maintenance of the tribes albeit once- and second-removed (via Tweets, feeds and other remote reportage) poses the question of whether the affiliations will be diluted via distancing, or strengthened via need for some defining connection, regardless of how ersatz  or remote it is.

We claim to be civilized, and have our differences mitigated and attenuated by various attempts at fellowship, but at bottom, love does not triumph. As U2 sang in "Pride", "What more in the name of love?"

Hatred runs and rules the affairs of our daily lives.