Zombie Apocalypse

I'm shocked! 
--Casablanca (1942) 

War is the spectacular and bloody projection
of our everyday life
--J. Krishnamurti 

When the fight was over, nothing was solved,
but nothing mattered. We all felt saved. 
--Fight Club (1999) 

Tell me with the rapture and the
reverent in the right - right.
You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright
light, feeling pretty psyched. 
--It's the End of the World as We Know It,
 R.E.M.

______________________

The Global War on Terror and the predictable knee-jerk reaction to the recent grotesque elementary school shooting share similarities. Both events will have elicited emotional responses that resulted in national policy based upon a feeling of vulnerability and demand for a response.

The terrorist attacks of 9-11-01 birthed the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), a self-proclaimed generational war the hoped-for success of which is based on no solid academic study.  The 9-11 Commission's report was an emotional cover-up for the failure.  The shouts to "Remember Newtown!" will lead the march to gun control laws, which will always be ineffective.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have thrown billions of dollars at an external threat, not an existential one as we were led to believe.  The real threat was containable and achievable without the declaration of war. So too addressing the tragedy of mass murder in America will require more than curtailing gun ownership rights.

"We Need to Protect Our Children!" is analogous to, "We must fight them there to keep us from fighting them here," or, "We must not let a mushroom cloud form over our cities." Effective policy cannot be based upon fear and irrational thought; emotionalism is not leadership.

We should trust our system of government and allow the Congress to do what they are constitutionally required to do, rejecting a unilateral Executive Order which would be created from the chaos of emotional reaction.

The problem is not high-capacity magazines or incorrectly defined assault rifles -- the problem is that our culture is death-oriented rather than life-affirming.  We have weak-minded members of society playing games disgorging blood splattering heroics, so valuable that developers stay at the top of the stock market weeks after new releases and parents line up in holiday queues to gift their young ones with this antithesis to the spirit of yuletide cheer.  We love to ask what guns should we use during the zombie apocalypse, funnin' with the idea of having power enough to shoot the undead. It would seem, by all the current renting of garments, that the Apocalypse is upon us.

Even our down time -- our relaxation mode -- is spent watching or engaging in ersatz gun violence in our commerce with various forms of media. Scientists now know that on some level, the brain assimilates ersatz actions (even gossip) as actual, lived events. We swing from angst over not being able to procure these simulacrums of violence to angst over the thought of being unable to protect our children and ourselves from the actuality of the thing.

In a monumental height of hypocrisy, those same actors in the violent films, or the makers of the violent games, then campaign for gun control.  They make millions portraying gun violence then wash themselves off with their morally superior attitudes, which amounts to some more acting. An example would be Angelina Jolie who portrays gun-toting action heroine Lara Croft, and then murdered journalist Daniel Pearl's wife -- she plays both victim and perpetrator. There is no coherence here in a mind which seeks to make understanding; it is schizophrenic, at best.

All the while we wallow in violent representations our proxies -- called soldiers and contractors -- are waging actual violence around the planet while we celebrate their handiwork, the bloody and broken bodies plastered on the front of our erstwhile dignified national news magazines.We celebrate the non-judicial murders executed at the behest of our President, while crying crocodile tears when the same President abhors violence, performing as a penitent at the site of the recent school murders.

This is hypocrisy in the highest. The United States has been shooting civilian children and innocent adults since September 2001. We are no strangers to extrajudicial, indiscriminate death.

We are comfortable, or at least impassive, about the deaths committed overseas in our name, yet we get incensed when this violence settles on our doorstep. Are the lives of Connecticut kids more valuable than those of kids in Afghanistan of Iraq, or any country that carries assault rifles given to them by U.S. foreign military aid programs?  When our Defense policy is based upon the concept of overwhelming and non-proportional violence, how can we say that gun violence is a discrete and perplexing phenomenon?

We love cage fighting, and boxing and every blood-lusty thing we can sink our teeth into, yet have the temerity to act shocked when our more vulnerable members of society act out their revenge fantasies.  Maybe we should be listening and talking to each other as opposed to getting lost down the rabbit hole of self-indulgent video pursuits.  We can claim to have thousands of Facebook and Twitter friends who consume our ersatz self, but who knows our soul?  Who can feel anothers fear and react accordingly?

We are victims of our gluttony, gullibility and fear, and guns merely facilitate the problem.

It Didn't Have to Happen

Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law,
for my own safety's sake!
--A Man for All Seasons (1966)

One of these mornings
You're going to rise up singing
Then you'll spread your wings
And you'll take to the sky
--Summertime,
George and Ira Gershwin
____________________

The Trayvon Martin - George Zimmerman media circus continues, with Mr. Zimmerman's bail for a charge of second degree murder set at $1 Million. As expected, the social media lynch mob is ramping up again, too. President Obama mistakenly stepped in, biasing the case when he said, "When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids." What a mess.

Why wouldn't Obama think about Zimmerman, who would be the more logical cognate. Both Obama and Zimmerman are mixed race; both prioritize community action. Zimmerman had mentored black children in his development (though the parents are too afraid to speak out in his defense.) Then the prosecutor in the Martin shooting said, "This did not have to happen."

While she is correct -- the event did not need to go down the way it did -- that is a personal judgement, not a legal yardstick. It does not matter how it ended but rather, was it within the framework of the law. It does not matter what should have happened, but rather, what did. That is the basis of legal action.

The Trayvon Martin ™ incident is just another sad case in the annals of random death in the United States. Why do people march over this death, yet cheerfully accept daily Predator and Hellfire strikes around the world daily? Why do those who protest have no problems with a Chicago murder rate outstripping that of Kabul, up 60% this year, primarily involving young black men?

Why should Martin's death not have happened, yet dead bodies in Yemen courtesy of U.S. guided missiles concern us not at all?

All life is of equal value, and if we do not accept this, then we must accede to totalitarian rule. It is odd that America calls Obamacare "socialism", yet raises nary a whimper at real totalitarian actions which threaten our core beliefs and values.

Socialism is the supposed bogeyman, while our entire internal security apparatus puts KGB efforts to shame. We operate under totalitarian security yet get squeamish over socialized medicine.

What are we missing here?

[This being summer, we are mining the archives for some good also-rans that did not get play, some never-rans, and might try out some new things. We are in the armpit of FLA and do not boat or beach, so we're just plum tuckered out. Languor is the mood. Mojitos and Gin and Tonic wind down the day -- and no HFCS in that tonic, please!

This is not to say new thoughts will stop flowing; they will.]