Hate Walks With Me, and Hate Talks With Me...

PFC Manning was forced to strip naked in his cell again last night. As with the previous evening, Quantico Brig guards required him to surrender all of his clothing. PFC Manning then walked back to his bed, and spent the next seven hours in humiliation.

The decision to require him to be stripped of all clothing was made by the Brig commander, Chief Warrant Officer-2 Denise Barnes ["Barnes said she plans to take things to another level within her new unit."] According to First Lieutenant Brian Villard, a Marine spokesman, the decision was "not punitive" and done in accordance with Brig rules. There can be no conceivable justification for requiring a soldier to surrender all his clothing, remain naked in his cell for seven hours, and then stand at attention the subsequent morning. This treatment is even more degrading considering that PFC Manning is being monitored -- both by direct observation and by video -- at all times. The defense was informed by Brig officials that the decision to strip PFC Manning of all his clothing was made without consulting any of the Brig's mental health providers.

This is common, or SOP, for "military intelligence". From a 2004 piece about Abu Ghraib: "Detainees were paraded naked past other prisoners and guards; some were ordered to do jumping jacks and sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the nude, according to a several witnesses. Also, a father and his grown son were stripped, then forced to stand and stare at each other. The International Committee of the Red Cross, visiting in October, found prisoners left naked in their cells for days, modestly trying to shield themselves behind cardboard from meals-ready-to-eat boxes."

Remember...this is approved of by your Democratic President (if not, it would not be happening). Of course, this president has gone farther than the reviled GWB in that he has claimed the right to murder anyone in the world anywhere regardless of citizenship.

We are in a nation oozing systemic rot. These are not "insurgent" "bad actors" or mercenaries for hire who murder families while at weddings in foreign lands. This is your land, this is my land..."made for you and me" brothers and sisters. We are all in the brig with Bradley Manning. Manning is but one very clear example to you. Get with the program; Be "one of us". Or else. But that is really, the least of our worries.

Wisconsin's Governor is showing us the more of this same mindset--bullying and holding hostage the citizens of his state--defunding care for women; Ohio has already passed legislation to allow its labor force to be steamrolled into a third world existence; Arizona leads the nation in enacting hate legislation; systemic rot pervades our nation. We are lost. Were we ever the idyllic land our mythology proclaims? We are showing our true colors...the bully is in the ascendancy. He is your governor, your police chief, your president. He has the courts at his back. The bully is conservative; the bully says "my way".

I'm wondering when people are going to recognize that not only is the Tea Party socially conservative and uhm ... racially uncomfortable, their antipathy to taxes and government actually stems from those attitudes. It's not a coincidence or even a sympathetic constellation of various positions on the issues. They don't like government because they believe that government should not protect and support people they don't like. [bold emphasis added]

Please read that part in bold again. This is the animus--no government, small government, less government...means keep out of my business. I don't want to treat all people equally. I want to hate my neighbor if he's not like me--I want to hang him from a tree after I drag him behind my truck for a few miles. Having this kind of politician "in charge" will lead to laws that ALLOW this kind of hate-filled abusive behavior and call it "freedom". In this way your only real liberty will be your death.

I'm finished with my own polite response to this kind of inherent bigotry. I believe it is systemic in our white Christian nation. Poll the haters...poll the tea partiers...poll the Klan...poll the neo-Nazis...Do you believe in God, ask them...do you believe in Jesus as your savior, ask them.

I do not fetishize atheism (hate needs no religion or god) but I do not believe any good can come of a religion where the divinity walks with you while you carry your uzi and your flag and your noose.

You cannot disassociate the "ease" of coming to hate from within this religious system. Faith in Hate!

Do some comparative reading to discover which religions are the most warring, aggressive and hate-filled. If you belong to one of these, you really should be asking yourself why. Then take a gander at the tolerance inherent in Hindu religious traditions.

Punishing Success

A little something to go with the James quote yesterday about our national disease--a description of a symptom:




Tom Tomorrow

By Their Very Fear (Update)

The community is inhuman, and less than human. It becomes at last the most dangerous because bloodless and insentient tyrant. for a long time, even a democracy like the American or the Swiss will answer to the call of a hero, who is somewhat of a true aristocrat: like Lincoln: so strong is the aristocratic instinct in man. But he willingness to give the response to the heroic, the true aristocratic call, gets weaker and weaker in every democracy, as time goes on. All history proves it. Then men turn against the heroic appeal, with a sort of venom. They will only listen to the call of mediocrity wielding the insentient bullying power of mediocrity: which is evil. Hence the success of painfully inferior and even base politicians...

So today. Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bring the evil into being.

This is the Christian community today, in its perpetual mean thou-shalt-not. This is how Christian doctrine has worked out in practice.

There is no doubt that Lawrence is troubling...that his deep insights into the mind of man and the mind of the collective (not woman per se, though woman is lost in the collective) will often spill over into some very distasteful thinking. But baby/bathwater; wheat/chaff.

There is a clear understanding here of the weakness of humans in general. We fear for our very existence (we are small and soft as predators go) and so we have created systems for protection from the natural world and from each other.

Lawrence believes in the strong, brave aristocrat--where strength shepherds the weak--and believes that the religion of the masses, which is Revelation (as he propounds) and not that of Jesus, exists only to destroy all worldly power with the only "good" being the power yielded by the elect in another world (yet to come, but never arriving). Apocalypse is the theology of those who are already "left behind".

And those who feel this deep sense of denigration in their very soul have a singular desire to "equalize" through violence, to be "tough" in their fear.

UPDATE: Digby details some Tea Party plans regarding budgets, teachers, churches and armed employees of the state.