Letter to the Future, by Kesey Seven
My dear future readers, as you are no doubt struggling through and attempting to clean up the mess that we so gleefully created in the 20th century, one question must come to mind repeatedly: What the hell were we thinking?
To answer this question is not easy. And nothing we can say can justify what we've done. But, as a way of rationalization, you must consider the radical culture changes we experienced during the 20th Century: From women being little more than indentured servants, to women being our equals and our bosses. We went from sex being something that was discussed in discreet whispers to something that was shown in disgusting detail. We went from drugs being legal, to drugs being illegal, to drugs being legal, illegal and everywhere. We went from black people having no rights, to black people having the right to vote, (unless they were black Democrats living in Florida or Ohio). We went from a government that operated largely in secret to -- well, to a government that operated largely in secret. We went from having to get news on a telegraph to news everywhere. We went from having a few celebrities to having thousands of celebrities. We went from an expected right of anonymity and privacy to having those thrown away at the stroke of good or bad fortune. We went from having a news media that was infantile and restricted to having news media that was infantile and ubiquitous.
Through all of this change the reactionary instinct grew and was cultivated -- cultivated by perhaps the most insidious scourge of the 20th Century, the G.O.P, the Grand Old Party, the party of Lincoln and Bush, the party that freed the slaves, the party that reinvigorated the racists, the party of the educated and the idiots, the party of the educated idiots.
But let's talk about religion as that must be the most baffling for you. And frankly it is the most baffling for me. Ninety percent -- ninety percent! dear future reader -- of 20th Century Americans believed in life after death, and deep in their minds was the belief that if they didn't vote Republican, they were going to hell.
I realize this staggers the imagination. Let me try to explain.
See, back in the late 20th Century, Americans became obsessed with men who probe each others buttocks. It would be succinct to say sodomy, but that's not accurate because Americans didn't care that the definition of sodomy is any type of non-coital intercourse. They didn't care if women schlurped schlongs and if men noshed coochie. If a man wanted to bugger his wife, good for him! If a woman wanted to bugger another woman, good for her! But if a man wanted to probe another man's buttocks, ooooh, that was bad, very bad. And if a woman wanted to bang another woman and then marry her -- ooooh, that was bad too. Gay marriage, taboo.
I'm sure the question in your mind right now is how could a man be all for a woman sodomizing another woman but be against a marriage of the sodomites? And how come a woman sodomizing a woman is considered erotic but a man sodomizing a man is not? Bear with me dear future reader and I will try to explain this butt-fucking conundrum.
It comes down to three things: What a man has heard from the bible, what oaths he has made in the presence of God Almighty, and what gives him an erection.
For one it's important to consider that most 20th Century Americans read little of the bible on their own. They were read to in church. And church leaders, particularly in the late 20th Century, read what was politically expedient. Therefore, there were many readings of Sodom and Gomorra, whereupon the man on the pulpit would expound upon God's disapproval of homosexuals. But by homosexuals, the average bear could translate that as meaning gay men. Nowhere in the bible does God condemn a woman for donning a strapon and buggering his neighbor's wife.
Two, when a man watches women have sex with other women, there's this fantasy that he could be right there in the middle of them, that he could do a little buggering himself, which was quite an appealing prospect to most 20th Century men.
Three, when a man takes the marriage vow, there's lot of drivel about "man and woman, man and wife, death do us part," that sort of thing. So the average bear had that shit down: God's listening when you make a marriage vow, and, goddamnit! a marriage vow is between a man and woman.
Alright, put all that together and you get 20th-Century logic that comes out to something like this: God destroyed a city because of the homos, but he didn't say shit about ladies banging ladies. Watching women have sex gives me an erection, watching men have sex gives me a queasy feeling. I know when I made my marriage vows that God was listening. I'll probably get a divorce someday, which puts me in a tight spot with God, so I better make damn sure I'm on his good side when it comes to this gay marriage thing. And besides, if those women want to get married, they're not gonna let me get in on the buggering anyway. Better vote Republican in the next election just to be safe.
And then there's this obsession with sperm, embryos, and fetuses. Call it a fetus fetish. "Every sperm is sacred," screams the Catholic church. "Every embryo is a human being," screams the Protestants. And lo and behold you have an unlikely collusion of the entire American Christian world getting all bent out of shape about abortion.
And then, you got this remaining 40 percent, who rarely if ever attend church, who like seeing women have sex with each other, who enjoy a good heterosexual sodomy session every now and then, who have probably paid for an abortion or two themselves, but who believe if they vote against a dumbass Republican like George Bush then God will get really pissed off and send them to hell, never mind whatever else they've done. In a nutshell, that's how George got to be president: sanctimonious Christians and guilt-ridden butt fuckers.
Now that I've solved that mystery for you let's move on.
The daily news media played an integral part in helping us destroy the planet for you. There are lots of reasons given for media incompetence: Their obsession with stars and the personal screwups of stars; their lack of funds for covering international news; and, of course, an ignorant populace too preoccupied to follow in-depth news. But there is one thing that is rarely mentioned but is perhaps the biggest factor: Self-censorship.
To explain this, I'm afraid I will need to resort to some vulgar language. So please exit now if this type of communication is offensive to you. Here are the two words that ruined the media and hence your world: Cocksucker and motherfucker. Not those words per se, but the media's fear of those words. If they would have had the courage to publish those two words, they could have saved the world.
Why, you might ask, were they afraid of meaningless expletives that nearly all 16-year-olds utter as an indication of affinity, and how could this fear have possibly affected our air, our water, our ecosystem?
Allow me to explain: War.
You see, people who are afraid of mere vulgarity are simply afraid to offend people. Odd isn't it, that people in charge of writing the first draft of history would be afraid of offending people? But that was exactly the case. No "cocksucking motherfuckers" in the news copy. But more importantly no pictures of dead bodies. So let me ask you this: How do you cover war if you can't print "cocksucking motherfucker" and publish pictures of dead bodies? Well, the first thing you do is rely on "official sources." In other words, you publish liars spewing lies day after day so people can't really figure out what the hell is going on. And then, when you do publish first-hand accounts of the war, you rely on soldiers who have been trained in public relations, thereby rendering the stories virtually incomprehensible to the average American.
You see, if a soldier got on the news and said: "We were traveling north in a convoy when a group of enemy combatants detonated an IED that resulted in 10 casualties. We subsequently found ourselves under enemy fire, and therefore returned fire, thereby expeditiously suppressing the enemy," not many 20th Century Americans could really comprehend what he was saying. If the media then showed a quick video of a burned up Humvee, American's couldn't appreciate the visceral nature of the encounter. But if the soldier said, "We were driving along when some cocksucking motherfucker threw a goddamn homemade bomb at us and started shooting at us, blew my buddy's fucking legs off, and then we opened fire and made fucking road pizza out of them chickenshit bastards," Americans would get it. If the accompanying video then showed body parts and accompanying viscera strewn all over they place, Americans would really get it. And they would know it was real. And, goddamnit, they would have watched that newscast to the very end and talked about it the next day at work, too.
And here's a secret you won't find in the history books: People liked seeing dead bodies. Oh, they shuddered and turned their heads, but they always turned around for a second look, rubber necking like assholes in a traffic jam looking for a dead body in the jaws of life. And without dead bodies on the TV, Americans didn't give a rat's ass about war. And since they didn't care about war, they didn't care about US foreign policy. Since they didn't care about US foreign policy, newspapers didn't write about foreign policy. Since newspapers didn't write about foreign policy, Americans weren't afraid to elect a goddamn idiot like George Bush who didn't even know the name Musharraf before he became the American Commander in Chief.
Oh, after the fact, after Americans realized how terribly Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove, and Bush had executed the Iraqi occupation -- then Americans got upset, when it was too late.
So there's another piece of the puzzle for you. Americans could ignore the war because their daily news media was rated G for general audiences. And you have a militarized globe and a ravaged ecosystem to deal with because the American media didn't have the balls to call a cocksucking motherfucker a cocksucking motherfucker.
Ahem.
But perhaps the most perplexing part of the puzzle for you must be how we could have knowingly mucked up the environment. There were theories that by 2050 the oceans would rise to the point of inundating Florida and forcing the evacuation of Boston, New York, and Houston. There were other theories that rising heat and melting ice caps would result in more precipitation that would then flow to the oceans, desalinate the oceans, stop the flow of the Gulf Stream and paradoxically result in an ice age. Did that happen? Just curious.
Hard to tell from this perspective but what is clear is that humans during the 20th Century did unfathomable damage to the environment. Whether it was polluting fresh drinking water, filling the air with crap, or simply filling our bodies with junk food and making ourselves fat and stupid, we polluted everything. You must be asking yourselves "How could you have let this happen? How could you have done this to us -- your progeny, your future, your genetic and socially immortality -- how could you have fucked us so royally!"
Allow me to explain: Republicans.
To be fair, we all played a role, but if you'll allow an analogy: Way back in the 20th Century it was common for mobs, after their team won a major sporting event, to ransack neighborhoods. Everyone who participated was obviously guilty, but it was the instigator, the first guy who jumped on the hood of car and screamed, "Let's torch this motherfucker!" who was the real perpetrator. The same applies to the environment, everyone went along, but it was the Republicans who goaded everyone to the path of destruction.
Here's how they did it: Sometime during the late 20th Century the debate was artfully high jacked by the master debaters, the intellectual foundations of the far right. From there, with mouthpieces such as Rush Limbaugh, these master debaters were able to reach the average idiot.
Once the average idiot was convinced, the local journalist was not far behind. Journalists, after all, developed during the 20th Century a nasty habit of giving scientists and sociopaths the same credence, provided the sociopath came from an affluent family.
The argument used so convincingly to befuddle idiots and journalists alike went something like this: There is no way to convincingly prove that human beings were causing global climate change; therefore, there was no reason to do anything about global climate change.
Say what you will about 20th Century Republicans, but accede this: They were smart bastards -- vicious bastards, cynical bastards, but smart bastards nonetheless. Let's take a look at the genius of this argument: There is no way to disprove it. It's so simple in its beauty: Scientists need data. Weather patterns have changed over time for eons. They could be changing now. And scientists simply didn't have enough data to prove one way or the other what was changing the climate. They simply didn't have enough data and wouldn't have enough data, until it was too late.
The result was, since we couldn’t get past the first stage of the debate (that something was dreadfully wrong) we couldn't move to the next stage, which was what to do about it. So now, you, dear future reader, are sitting in ocean front property near Amarillo, Texas, or you are in the midst of an ice age. You can thank 20th Century Republicans for that.
How's your population by the way? Have you reached twelve billion people yet? Or have you seen billions die because of disease and poverty and the acts of tyrants? Again, thank the Republicans. When Americans should have been doing something about global overpopulation, they were debating abortion. Again, it was the genius of Republicans who controlled the debate, restricted the debate, and left you holding the bag. Sorry about that.
I'd like to end by saying something that my fellow progressives might contest. Twentieth Century Republicans were very smart. Their leaders were anyway. It was common among progressives to think that Republicans were stupid.
They might say: "Look, Republicans can't see the effects of global climate change. How stupid. Look, they want to destroy pubic education in the world's greatest democracy. How ignorant. See, they can't even grasp evolution. How dim." Republican leaders were not dim, ignorant, or stupid. They were cynical, short-sighted, and destructive. There's a difference.
Despite all their arguments to the contrary, Republicans understood humans were the source of rapid climate change and that humans were rapidly degrading the earth's entire ecosystem. They just didn't care. Or, they did care, they just recognized a different solution: military might. You see, if the world's resources become increasingly scarce, the best way to preserve them is to take them. The best way to take them is through global hegemony. And that, my dear future readers, is exactly what the neoconservatives of the late 20th Century were pursuing.
Oh, they might have couched it in terms of spreading democracy and freedom (good for them), but they didn't really go after the true problem: the militarization of the globe. They didn't try to rid the world of weapons or pursue peaceful means of stoking the global economy. No, they wanted perpetual war and a militarized globe, so that when the time came for America to take over, they would have a good excuse for doing so. "So what if the ocean's rise? So what if another ice age comes two thousand years before it was due? We've got to fight all the terrorists. As long as we have the military might to take what we need, all will be well."
Regarding evolution, Republican leaders very well understood evolution. They just knew as well that evolution presented a fundamental problem for fundamentalist Christians. Namely, that the earth was not created in six days and it's been around much longer than 6000 years. Once you take away that cornerstone, one has to accede that the bible is myth, some of it is true, some of it is historical, but some of it is just the superstition of ancient peoples. Once you accept that fact, other questions come in to play: Where is heaven? Where is hell? Does God really monitor our thoughts?
As I'm sure you're well aware, unraveling the Christian myth in no way destroys the mystery of the universe. People can have not one whit of Christian faith and yet still be spiritual, still believe in right and wrong, still meditate and pray, still be good people, and they may even believe that the laws of the universe are the laws of god. To you, it may be a wonder that there was ever any distinction between scientific knowledge and religious belief. Your knowledge of science and the universe may have indeed unearthed profound metaphysical truths that we never considered. It could very well be that your understanding of quantum physics renders the universe all the more mystical. You may have discovered that other dimensions do indeed exist; that extraterrestrial beings with supernatural powers do indeed exist. But the point is these future truths probably have little or nothing to do with ancient Hebrew and Christian myths. Or, if there is a correlation, it's symbolic, not literal.
And that, my friends, is what scared the shit out of 20th Century Republicans. Their base of power relied upon people who believed in the bible literally. They closed their eyes and spoke to God, with a capital G. Their God justified their racism, sexism, bigotry, their geopolitical strategy. They claimed to interpret the bible literally, but what they did was interpret it conveniently, reciting that which reinforced or justified their prejudices and lifestyles, ignoring that which did not.
A public education system that taught comparative religion, that studied Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Christian mythology with an analytical eye would have destroyed the Republican party. They understood this fact. They were not stupid for wanting to destroy the public education system of America; they were intelligent. Cynical, short-sighted, and ultimately destructive, but supremely intelligent when it came to protecting their own self-interests.
Religious belief for 20th Century humans was instinctual. We had been praying for thousands of years. And let's not overlook the fact that thousands upon thousands of good deeds were done by Christians every day. Let us not overlook the moderate Christians, the ones who could not only read but also comprehend what they read, the ones who understood symbolism, the ones who could appreciate mysticism, the ones who were tolerant and not bent on destroying the earth to bring about the Second Coming of Christ. These were good people. They helped the poor. They took people in to their homes. When their neighbors were in distress -- regardless of their neighbor's race or creed -- they helped them out. Alas, very few of these types of Christians were Republicans. Some were, and we must forgive them and understand them: They were deceived by perhaps the greatest disinformation campaign in the history of mankind: Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the Heritage Foundation.
One final point, as you are contemplating your thoroughly fucked up world and generously hoping we are all burning in hell with George Bush and Dick Cheney, consider this: They did it for Jesus. As I alluded to earlier, many fundamentalist Christians believed that the prophecies in the New Testament were coming true and it was just a matter of time before Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.
Allow a bit of autobiography here: When I was a child, I knew a boy, who, at the age of eight, proclaimed that all biblical prophesies were coming true and the world would end in five years. Year after year, he made this same declaration, without ever subtracting a single year. By the time he was 18, he was still predicting the world would end in five years. So it goes with Christian fundamentalists; they're not very good at deductive reasoning.
Hence, when they saw how screwed up the world had become and how desperately needed peace was, they turned the other cheek, the belligerent cheek, the truculent cheek, the destructive cheek. In other words, they showed us their ass. They believed that if we nuked the Middle East, annihilated the atmosphere, killed the oceans, and overpopulated the globe -- that then Jesus would come from the sky, praise us all for being good Christians, and bring us all up to heaven -- which is near a globular cluster just south of the Andromeda galaxy by the way.
Didn't happen, did it? No, just as I thought. You've got a helluva mess on your hands. Sorry about that. We did what we could.
There you have it. That's why you have no resources, no food, no water, no shelter. In short, the Republicans fucked the whole thing up and rest of us just kind of kowtowed along.
Well, thank you for your time. And have a nice day.
Sincerely,
Kesey Seven
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