Atheist Meditations

One of my favorite characteristics of blogging lies in the ad hoc, stream of consciousness-ness, nature of it. In no other medium can one expect to begin on one topic and only barely seek to justify a transition to an entirely different subject. These are the subjects dueling for my attention today.

Yesterday I picked up Christopher Hitchens' latest book, god is not Great, from the local appendage of a chain book selling company. This marks the third or fourth clearly atheistic work of non-fiction that I've purchased in the last six months, and this one is easily my favorite by far. I took an hour and fifteen for lunch today so I could squeeze in just a few more chapters. I'm hooked on some literary kine.

Here's a quote a driving intensity, regarding the sexual dysfunction almost always glorified as a pillar of various religions:

The homicidal lunatics - rehearsing to be genocidal lunatics - of 9/11 were perhaps tempted by virgins, but it is far more revolting to contemplate that, like so many of their fellow jihadists, they were virgins. Like monks of old, the fanatics are taken early from their families, taught to despise their mothers and sisters, and come to adulthood without ever having a normal conversation, let alone a normal relationship, with a woman. This is disease by definition. Christianity is too repressed to offer sex in paradise - indeed it has never been able to evolve a tempting heaven at all - but it has been lavish in its promise of sadistic and everlasting punishment for sexual backsliders, which is nearly as revealing in making the same point in a different way. (p 55)

I can understand why in a debate over the war in Iraq a few years ago British MP Galloway screamed at him, "Yes, you write like an Angel, but you are working for the Devil!"

Christopher Hitchens was a former Trotskyist and even a regular contributer to The Nation before leaving the Left - an act few at The Nation seem to be capable of forgiving. That betrayal was the lever which opened the bomb doors for: 'wet-brained alcoholic' and 'jaded opportunist.' I was pretty biased against him before I read much of his work - and in that debate with George Galloway he did utilize some rather unsavory rhetorical tactics.

Yet I'm feeling my own energy for the Left dissipate, and a combination of my spiritual need to be intellectually better than worthless fundamentalist (i.e. to occasionally consider that I might be wrong) with an attraction/respect for cleverly coherent writers; I'm open to the opinions of this fellow atheist even if they contradict my established world-view. We all want to dig in and defend our territory, but we have to be ready to accept that the world is a whole lot bigger than what we thought. We may need to take more territory, not defend this insignificant and strategically weak parcel.

In fact, I'm reaching the point where I no longer want to be called a liberal. Not because the right-wing media has convinced about half of our population that liberal is a synonym for fag - if that were the case I'd be calling myself a 'bright', a practice I agree with Mr. Hitchens when he refers to that 'cringe-making proposal' to 'conceitedly nominate themselves to be called' - I don't know if I really understood what Liberalism means. Was it just a broad drag net, an abstract designed to let a large number project their own hopes and dreams upon this ideology? Could it be more than Civ4's Free Religion, Free Speech? I think I might be wrong in cherry-picking quotes from the Founding Fathers of our Liberal Democracy and cherishing that 'Liberalism.' Maybe it is just an overloaded term, similar to 'Communism' that means absolute good to some and absolute evil to others, thus making the term meaningless?

Part of it is that I'm now starting to realize what '9/11 changed everything' means. To continue a blog of naked honesty, as a midwesterner 9/11 didn't shake me up all that much. For a while it was dramatic and awesome, like a living in history sort of thing. Then it was just advantageous, cuz for a few blessed weeks the crew I was working with was willing to listen to Public Radio instead of neuron deadening christian rock. I've never been to the east coast, and the impact of 9/11 was not too personal, similar to hearing about the killings in Sudan, but these folks were rich and white. I saw plenty who wanted to indulge in the horror of 9/11, titillating themselves with camp fire horror stories about 'what ifs.' I despised that practice, every time I heard a preacher or a pundit hold up 9/11 like a teenage boy holds up pornography in his left hand.

Hitchens, and some of the other writers I've been reading lately was on the East Coast, for them the trauma was much more real. More akin to the brief panic I felt when our bridge collapsed and I didn't know for sure my father was not on it. More than just the 'Pearl Harbor Level Event' of that disgusting memo, it was a shock treatment to a massive chunk of our 'liberal population.' The shocked included our federal politicians, our students at our 'elite' colleges, our bastions of progressive population. . .

I feel like Alan Alda as his M.A.S.H. character, not sure if the surgery was a success, but done and wanting to just tell a subordinate to 'close for me.'

9/11 really did change everything. More so than just a talking point for the propagandists of the corporate media. It changed what a plurality of educated Americans thought about how the world does and should work. Unilateral military action that ignores the Geneva Conventions is now the model. Our country will interact with the rest of humanity with the righteous rage of a man avenging his murdered family for the next generation at least. No rules apply to us, no limits are permitted to be discussed regarding our militant behavior - have you forgotten September the Eleventh?

That's what burns my soul but I need to just get over and accept.

Part of me wants to just scream at the wind. The 'Greatest Generation' laid down life after almost countless life in a World War. Except for ourselves, almost no civilian population was spared the horrors or war, on scales that are neigh unimaginable today. The French were occupied for terrifying years, the English had the Blitz, the German people suffered Russian rapes and English fire bombing of cities, the Russians lost cities and citizens on a horrific scale, the Chinese suffered more than anyone in sheer human numbers to the Japanese, the Japanese lost two entire cities to the most terrible weapons ever used by our species. Italy, Egypt, the Balkans, Indonesia - it was a World War and innocent civilians were targeted and terrorized over and over again. Out of that came the Geneva Conventions, a code of honor for warriors that was trumpeted by the United States in our hour as the 'good guys', the noble defenders of liberty.

The Geneva Conventions were ratified, and by our nation's law that makes them also the law of our land. They contain the wisdom of a generation that not only fought, but won a world war.

An invading country under the Geneva Convention has an obligation to provide law and order. To even pretend you were going to do that in Iraq would have required four times the number of troops we needed to knock down Saddam's speed bump of a military. There would also have been more initial casualties as nationalistic Iraqis attacked the nearest invading American. More Americans outside of the Green Zone, more casualties. Remember Rumsfeld watching looting in the streets and saying something about 'democracy is messy.' That's a failure to meet the Geneva Conventions, that breaks American Law. When your Commander-in-Chief comes from a state that routinely executes the mentally retarded, don't go pretending that pleading ignorance will save ya. A country with a population of 24 million, over sixteen million in the population centers? Could even a feces-flinging retard articulate the position that a hundred and fifty thousand troops were going to provide unquestioned authority.

Under the Geneva Conventions an invading country has a clear obligation to respect international law, and under such law the right to organize cannot be curtailed. Yet Paul Bremer re-affirmed Saddam Husseins' law criminalizing labor unions almost immediately after taking control of the country. Labor unions, perhaps the most effective means of forming bonds between people that transcend ethnic or religious lines, were made illegal to please Chevron, BP, and Exxon. It is illegal and it is wrong. Paul Bremer should not escape justice.

We have two choices. Either the Bush Administration intended to turn Iraq into another Nigeria, where 'business partners' were nothing more than reactionary tribal dumbasses who could be manipulated with a promise of a case of M-16's or a pair of Apache Helicopters (both of which were also easy profits for an established political donor.)

Or the Bush Administration was populated with political hacks who were far more concerned with expressing their political loyalty to Mr. Bush than affecting the real world that some of us remain committed to living in. Honestly, if the entire bureaucracy that one brings to the Presidency is filled with nothing but eager interns and graduates in 'Yes Man,' are you not responsible for the tragedy in that wake?

Yet that scream may be just an outlet for immature misunderstanding. If the mass media will never speak the syllables of a crime, is it really a crime? If no politically appointed prosecutor will mention and no politically appointed judge will hear, is it still illegal?

On the other hand, what I need to be holding up before my panting vision be the fact that 9/11 was enough to change the landscape forever. Pretending that the sole remaining Superpower should even consider the opinion of our lessors is now heretical. America is good, and pretending that our Leaders should ever be endure a judgment other than hagiography - have you forgotten 9/11.

It is now ten bells. I started this at seven thirty PM. I have more beer bottles before me than I can count with my blurring vision. Don't hesitate. Reading up on the Gen Con (amusing) or even the biography of C.H. can't hurt. What is becoming of our generation and our society?