On May 23rd, President Bush provided completely incontrovertible and incontestable evidence and proof that he has lost it, that circumstances and events have conspired to cause him to become wholly delusional, no longer with even a semblance of contact with the existing reality.
On this auspicious occasion, he ranted about conditions in Iraq, completely oblivious of the fact that these are conditions which he, with his wholly unjustified act of aggression, created.
If, the latest spin being promoted by the Bush Administration is credible, if it is more than another political ploy to attempt to shore up the dismally poor, and plummeting, approval ratings of the President; that indeed Iraq is being used as a training ground by Al Qaeda, a staging area from which attacks can be launched on targets in the USA, how did this come to be so?
This is one, of numerous negative consequences produced by a wholly unjustified attack on a sovereign nation, an attack which not only overthrew its duly constituted government, that destroyed its economy and infrastructure; it also destroyed its security forces and its ability to secure its borders so that the boundaries of that pitiful nation can currently be infiltrated by any representative of any Muslim Fundamentalist organization with a grievance, real or imagined, against Americans.
Moreover, it the fact that Americans are in Iraq, that dreaded, feared, hated and most of all, very vulnerable Americans are in Iraq, that are attracting to this country, like bees drawn to honey, like moths fatally attracted to an open flame; mindless, suicidal killers from all over the Muslim world.
On this same day, Congress worked until very late, a very unusual situation for these highly paid incompetents, to produce a spending bill to fund this war which is killing, for no good reason, with no realistically attainable objective, some of the best and bravest young people in this country.
Many of these Members of Congress; were elected because the American people went to the polls in recent elections to express their dissatisfaction with the way this war was being conducted.
Mindful of the discontent rife in the body politic; and, with an eye to the upcoming Presidential Elections, Congress is doing its best to extract the Allied Forces from the quagmire the Bush Administration has created in Iraq, a situation that becomes more desperate and tragic with the passing of each and every day.
Another very important and complicated issue to the American people facing the Congress is the Immigration Bill, and every report seems to indicate that they are going to make a complete hash of this piece of legislation as well.
The question that arises out of this series of debacles by an elected government:Is whether realistically the USA can be truthfully and accurately described as the land of the free and home of the brave at this particular moment in the history of this nation?
President Bush might have been able to fool the American people when he was engaging in the foul and odious assassination of the character of Senator John McCain, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War and prisoner of war during that conflict, even though he had used his father‘s influence to serve in the Texas National Guard.
Many might have ignored the fact that his victory over Al Gore was suspect, that he might have become President because faulty voting machines were placed in democratic strongholds and so votes were not counted that would have denied him the high office he now holds.
There was perhaps understandable ambivalence given the confusion and turmoil created by the 911 attack about whether he contrived the justifications for the attack and Iraq; and, about the incompetence and faulty planning that attended the prosecution of hostilities against that nation.
Some might even excuse the Swift Boat advertisements and the character assassination of another Vietnam veteran, Senator John Kerry; that allowed him to win another term in office.
But now that his chickens all have come home to roost, what are Americans waiting on to remove from office this spoiled, deluded child who acts as he is a latter day monarch?
And what about the Congress, why are they so afraid of impeaching this President, but engage in the slow tortuous process of endless debate about funding of a war that all and sundry know is already lost; but in which more and more young Americans perish and are maimed in what has become, obviously and incontrovertibly, an exercise in futility?
Could it be that they lack the guts, the intestinal fortitude required to excise from the body politic the cancer that the Bush Administration has become - before it metastasizes and destroys this nation.
If one confronted anywhere a rabid skunk, it would be very clear what needed to be done, to protect the community; it is very clear, at least to me, what needs to be done to rectify this situation.
Americans take for granted their vaunted superiority to all the other peoples of the world.But most animals, not human beings mind you, but animals; routinely teach their young the skills needed for survival; yet Americans have presided over the decline in their education system for a quarter of a century and seem incapable of doing anything about it, they endlessly and interminably are content to be the dropout nation of the world.
This certainly is the primary and fundamental duty of every adult individual, of every community, of every nation, to be responsible for the education and welfare of their children.
Any people who cannot accomplish this task must be deemed to be wholly contemptible; and, only such a people would tolerate such criminal and blind incompetence from its elected government.
Any American who has a smidgen of the courage exhibited by those who carved this nation out of the wilderness must belatedly adopt the slogan “Not one more senseless and meaningless death in Iraq” and make this so by demonstrating to the Government who has power under the Constitution of this nation.
William E. Virtue
3222 Airways Blvd # 312
Memphis TN 38116
Ph: 901-201-8090
Monday, June 4, 2007
WHERE LIES BRAWL!
On the occasion of my twenty first birthday; I was given a copy of the Collected Works of Dylan Thomas, by Don Jones an Oxford graduate whom I had met in the course of my employment to the Esso Kingston Refinery.
He was the Technical Engineer for the plant and had lead the initial operation in which the carbon had been burned from the platinum catalyst; which was the major and most expensive component of the powerforming process which raised the octane of hydrocarbon products that formed the base stock of the gasoline produced by the refinery.
I was a member of the team; and, during the three weeks we were together rejuvenating the platinum catalyst we became friends and discovered we had common interests, including a love of poetry.
I had shown him some of my early attempts to write poetry; and, he reciprocated by making me a gift of the poetry of Dylan Thomas, whose poetry inspired me to attempt to transcend the crude, naïve and unsophisticated renderings that were my earliest compositions.
Thereafter, many of the poems I composed were written in empty spaces in that book; and, how I lost forever those poems is a story that is relevant to the thesis of this piece, and so I include it here.
My sister, Marcia, was visiting from Washington D.C. where she lived with her husband, Keith, who was studying to be an architect at Howard University.
She found the book of poetry remarkable and valuable because coincidentally her husband was studying the poetry of Dylan Thomas as a component of a course that he required to matriculate; and, when she returned to the USA, she took the book with her.
The cost of replacing the book was negligible but the fact that she purloined it, without my consent, is indicative of the attitude of human beings and reinforces and validates the world view that unceasingly and futilely I am attempting to communicate.
Because she resorted to an act of petty theft, instead of purchasing a copy of the book at some small cost; I lost one of the best poems I have ever written, it contained the line:
Where lies brawl on a barren world, which to believe.
Hitherto, I have tried to conform to the requirements to have articles published; even though an accurate description of social reality is a poor, very uncomfortable fit for the needs of newspaper editors who have to be wary that they do not contravene in the content they publish the laws of slander and libel; but latterly I have come to the conclusion, consequent to many and repeated rejection of my submissions that my essays will never conform to these requirements - not the least because they are too much the truth, they are too realistic, and realism is anathema to those who wish to perpetuate the status quo.
Yet I believe that these essays on freedom that are the repositories of information, very important information; ideas that I believe are critical to the survival of the human race - so despite being ignored I persevere.
I have noted that the same old ideas and policies persist even though the consequence of their application is greater and greater dysfunction, that they result in economic and social conditions that seem to be becoming worse and worse; I have concluded that this paradox is a consequence of the fact that the objective of the powers that be, is, in precept, not to make improvements in the quality of life of the majority of citizens - but to perpetuate the status quo.
The current debate among the candidates who are competing to be the next President is a case in point.
First of all, every last one of them is committed to gradualism, to minor changes and adjustments to fix the gigantic problems that beset the body politic in the USA; an approach that will have the same level of success that has been the experience for the past five decades - a period during which very few positive changes have occurred.
Secondly, every candidate sees the problem as external to themselves and to the Parties they represent; they blame inadequacies in the policies of the current Administration for the mess we are in and decline to see the need for reform in the ideology and practices, the pervasive corrupt practices in the political movements they represent.
Lastly, though the system is not working, is abjectly failing, they are oblivious of the need to overhaul the political machinery; a machinery that has become a vicious circle, one half of that circle being opinion polls which define the position of most voters, the other half being candidates adopting what they deem to be the most popular and advantageous to them, position on any issue based on the information gleaned from those opinion polls; while the candidate who invariably wins is he, or she, with the greatest war chest who can buy the most television commercials with the consequence that big money and vested interests are more in control of the outcome of the election than at any other time in recent history.
So I have decided to discard all the rules; I will not attempt to be diplomatic, nor will I be mindful of the sensibilities or need of any individual to avoid exposure, nor will I try to be politically correct.
I will be the ultimate iconoclast and embrace the spirit of unbridled speculation.
The central hypothesis of this theory about cultural and social evolution is the notion that during the many millennia that humanity existed in a ’state of nature,’ they became habituated to using force in their relations with other beings; a habit so deeply embedded in human culture during existence in the crucible that was the physical environment for a very long period near the beginning of the human story, that it persists, immutable and unchanging, up to the present.
Further, that its persistence and longevity is a consequence of the fact that every human mind is divided into two compartments, the conscious and unconscious; and, human beings developed the means to consign to their unconscious all information pertaining to, and affecting the use of coercion in their relations with other entities, human or otherwise.
When human beings became aware that concepts such as justice, equity, fair play, compassion and respect for personal autonomy existed, instead of this ameliorating the cruelty and savagery of social relations; the conflict between the requirements for survival with these ethics was consigned to the unconscious and produced burdens of guilt, remorse and shame; but allowed human beings to continue to be agents of coercion based culture, to engage in intense competition and continue to engage in the supremely dominant social roles of territorial predator and prey.
One of the definitions of the verb, repress, culled from the American Heritage Dictionary, is ‘to force (memories, ideas, or fears, for example) into the subconscious mind.’
Repression has become a vast and powerful institution perpetuating and sustaining the status quo, whose formulation was dictated by existence in the ‘state of nature’ which human beings inhabited for millions of years; a social milieu in which might was right, one in which a miniscule elite feasted while the majority existed on the verge of starvation; this has become the immutable, unchanging and unchangeable cultural template for human existence.
In a small park in Tel Aviv, Israel, in the month of October, 1975, drowning in a deep pit of depression occasioned by my imminent divorce, a consequence that would entail my living separate and apart from my beloved children; I determined to tell the truth for the rest of my life - whatever the consequences.
I feel constrained to report that up to the moment I made that earthshaking, monumental, watershed decision I had been an agent of coercion based culture; blindly groping toward my tragic destiny, selfishly driven and motivated by my wants and desires.
In that park was a sculpture that had been commissioned to be a memorial to the innocents who died in the Munich Massacre; it had been constructed to black, massive, rough hewn, polished stone, a design which depicted two monolithic, imponderable figures eternally struggling, in endless conflict with each other.
That prompted my first mistake, as I was born again.
I understood that sculpture to depict the struggle between good and evil, which was the message it was intended to communicate.
As I overcame the damage that had been done to my intellect by the powerful institution of repression I came to the realization, the awesome realization; that the conflict that I was involved in was much more basic and fundamental; that I was involved in a struggle with the monolith, the intangible, insensate, enduring monolith that was coercion based culture; which was, and is, the conscious and unconscious premises of thinking and action for the vast majority of human beings.
Subsequently, I came to an accurate perception of that struggle, for three decades I have been engaged in that struggle; for more than thirty years I have existed as if I had been transported into that sculpture while retaining my human weaknesses and frailties contending with an intangible, insensate, completely unyielding monolith composed of the attitudes and patterns of behavior of the most ancient construct that remains dominant and relevant to contemporary existence, coercion based culture.
This constitutes my latest invitation to human beings to join me in this conflict; to replace the world in which might is right, with one in which right is might.
This has always been a work in progress; with every essay on freedom containing some new insight that has emerged out of this pilgrimage of intense pain, suffering and despair.
Until recently, I thought that one day I would describe the existing social reality with such accuracy that this description would penetrate the gloom of repression that blinds and immobilizes humanity.
The truth is, that the more accurate my description of social reality has become; the more and more animus I must attract from human beings, from human organizations and human institutions; truth, an accurate description of social reality is anathema to the powers that be, who have developed vast and sophisticated instruments of repression to hide and obfuscate the sere reality and the massive negative implications of the vast differences in the existences of those who have, and those who have not.
I am inviting human beings to that the Freedom Road, to engage in a journey of discovery that will be the most difficult and replete with misery and suffering that any individual could travel.
A long time ago the snowball of coercion fell high on the slopes of the vast, endless mountain of time; in the millions of years since that snowball fell it has been rolling inexorably downwards, gaining weight and momentum until it has become an remorseless, insensate avalanche of Absolutism that threatens to sweep away every item and artifact that together constitute human civilization.
I am inviting you to do what is necessary to reverse the course of this avalanche, to endure the weight of its fury and momentum and so dissipate its force because this is the price of freedom, because this is the only way to create the possibility of happiness for human beings.
I can ask this of you because this is a road I have already traveled, for thirty years I have never known security because I never could be sure when I would be called upon to tell the truth or do the right thing; patterns of behavior that were certain to result in my experiencing abject poverty, loneliness and hunger.
This is the first ‘proof’ and argument that validates the hypothesis I have developed; the most important values, the most sacred values in concept to human beings are truth and honesty; but, the practice of these values will inevitably result in an existence of abject poverty, misery and suffering.
One of the reasons why this has not been hitherto apparent is that very few individuals have been able to endure telling the truth for the extended period necessary for creating a realistic picture of social reality.
The facts are that in the same way that the best hunters had absolute power over the level of nutrition all members of the tribe; and, exploited this advantage to consolidate their power over their fellows; so conforming is now necessary for success and for maintaining even a minimum standard of living.
One of the glaring inconsistencies of human existence is that to achieve eternal life, the goal of organized religion, each and every individual must attain high moral standards; yet for most of recorded history and even while human beings existed in a primitive ‘state of nature,’ most individuals were subject to absolute power, they were slaves and serfs subordinate to individuals who had the power of life or death over them; the moral standards or immoral standards of behavior they exhibited were that of their masters who had absolute control over their lives, and had little to do with the dictates of their individual consciences.
If judged by contemporary concepts and ideas about social relations the balance of power between human beings for most of human history produced monstrous distortions of human societies, as described in the following quote from the preface of the “The Sociology of Slavery” by Orlando Patterson:
Jamaica, and the other West Indian Islands, are unique in World history in that they present one of the rare cases of a human society being artificially created for the satisfaction of one clearly defined goal: that of making money through the production of sugar. In 1655 both the British masters and their slaves, who were later to come in such vast numbers, were total strangers to the land upon which they were to build a completely new society. The vast majority of the people who were to mould this society came against their will. This was true not only of the slaves, but of the large numbers of Irish, Welsh, Scots and English, who, coming originally as indentured servants and, later, under the pressure of economic deprivation, were as much the victims of the capitalist exploiters of England as were the bewildered tribesmen of Africa whose labour they were to supervise.
And of those whites who came to the colony with the high hopes of quickly making their fortunes and returning home many indeed were to spend the rest of their days bemoaning their foolhardiness. For Jamaican slave society was no place for the poor, ambitious pioneer. After the first fifty hectic years of indecision during which an unscrupulous few may have fulfilled their dreams, Jamaica developed into what it would remain for the rest of the period of slavery: a monstrous distortion of human society. It was not just the physical cruelty of the system that made it so perverse, for in this the society was hardly unique. What marks it out is the astonishing neglect and distortion of almost every one of the basic prerequisites of normal human living. This is a society in which clergymen were the ‘most finished debauches’ in the land; in which the institution of marriage was officially condemned among both masters and slaves; in which the family was unthinkable to the vast majority of the population and promiscuity the norm; in which education was seen as an absolute waste of time and teachers shunned like the plague; in which the legal system was quite deliberately a travesty of anything that could be called justice; and in which all forms of refinements, of art, of folkways, were either absent or in a state of total disintegration. Only a small proportion of whites who monopolized almost all the fertile land in the island, benefited from the system. And these, no sooner had they secured their fortunes, abandoned the land which the production of their own wealth had made unbearable to live in, for the comforts of the mother country. (Patterson 9)
This, I believe, is an accurate description of human societies everywhere, past and present, in precept; minor differences exist because of window dressing that obscures and obfuscates the actuality of human relations.
I see what the vast majority of human beings cannot because the practice of discipline of truth allowed me to resist and retain my objectivity despite the process of propaganda, mystification and conditioning that lames the intellects of most human beings and cause them to be unable to perceive the existing social reality.
I claim moral superiority, and it is my dearest wish that even one human being would attempt to cross the ever increasing chasm between my poor self and the human race; a schism that is created and sustained by the vast majority of individuals using lies and deceits as the small change of existence and my practicing the discipline of truth; a fundamental difference in methodology that causes me to be on a increasingly divergent course from the human concourse.
I see the reality and most human beings see what they want to see.
Recently, with a mind to repairing the tattered image of the USA before the imminent meeting with world leaders in the G-8 Summit in Germany, the Bush Administration announced increased sanctions against the Sudanese government.
What the Bush Administration and the American people fail to perceive is that what the Sudanese government is doing in that region of Africa, is very similar, if not identical to what the Allied Forces are doing in Iraq, with the same disastrous consequences for millions of human beings.
It is the common heritage embedded in culture during the countless millennia that dictates the actions of human beings worldwide; differences in apparel, in ethnicity, in levels of education, in access to technology and material possessions, produce superficial dissimilarities that are emphasized - but are meaningless when compared to the core of attitudes and patterns of behavior learned in the ‘state of nature;’ all human beings are deeply conditioned to playing the roles of territorial predator and their prey.
A massive fence is projected to be built between the USA and Mexico to stem the tide of illegal immigration; but what means will be used to buttress the moral characters of those who constitute the enemy within, within the psyches of Americans, those Americans who are strategically located to profit from this traffic.
All my readers will think I have at last lost my sanity when I dare to suggest that all social and political problems are fundamentally moral problems; that they are the result of human beings failing to do the right thing.
Stretch your imaginations to embrace a world in which merit was the absolute requirement for every job; if when an individual applied for a job in the Justice Department, or any other department of government; they were not required to answer political questions as Ms. Goodling in her testimony to the House Subcommittee recently admitted to, and apologized, for asking; questions that determined whether that the applicant was a good Republican, or, a good Democrat - imagine with me the impact on the functioning of the government that this would have.
Suppose, simultaneously, government contracts were awarded on merit; a combination of being competent to do the job and allied to that capability, the ability to complete that project, at the most economical cost; imagine the impact on government spending that such a consideration would have.
I remember a stretch of road in front of the Esso Refinery in Kingston named Marcus Garvey Drive that was always being repaired no matter how many times it was constructed and reconstructed; a situation which in my mind has always been a metaphor for the impact of corruption in governments.
This causes citizens to pay, again and again, for the cost of doing any job or completing any project; because it is never done right the first time because political affiliation not merit determines who is chosen to do the job.
In such a world as I envision, nations would be able to harness their resources, including their human resources, to provide a minimum standard of living for their citizens who would then would not be forced by economic privation to travel emigrate to survive.
When I left Jamaica in July, 1975 to travel to Israel, I was in much the same state of mind that I experience today, I had completely lost hope.
During the following three months I had my hope rejuvenated and renewed that humanity could overcome; my faith was restored that the human race could create a Garden of Eden here on earth.
It is these achievements that I list that are the best arguments for preservation of the State of Israel; that completely surrounded by intensely hostile states; these human beings caused the desert to bloom, that they integrated into their society without massive dislocation vast numbers of Jews, relatively unskilled Jews, who were expelled from Arab States with only the clothes on their backs; that they created comprehensive, integrated programs of development, for example, the city of Ashdod.
I am not stating that these human beings have achieved perfection, far from it; I was in Israel when the United Nations voted on the nature of Zionism, and was one of those rushed to a meeting in Jerusalem and taken to task, not because we had influenced the vote of our respective nations in any way; but, because we were available.
I witnessed Kim, a representative from Korean who was the leader of a union with more than a hundred thousand members; avoid being sent home because of that fact - after he had assaulted not one, but two, Ghanaians.
But I have other vivid and unforgettable memories of intelligence, creativity, tolerance, compassion and merit to set against, and minimize, these inadequacies.
These memories are so replete and redolent with hope for humanity; they are so powerful that I have said before, and reiterate here, that in defense of the cooperative forms of life I experienced there, and never anywhere else, that I, a voice of peace, would take up arms.
In fact, more than anything else, I consider myself, a voice of peace; which was the name of a radio station that broadcast, during that period, propaganda to the Arab world from somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea.
Moreover, it was there in Israel that I received the most recognition for doing what I have always tried to do everywhere else; and reaped such a bitter harvest of poverty and suffering as the reward for my efforts, for simply following the dictates of my conscience and doing what I perceived to be the right thing.
When a meeting was called in which the Director of the Afro Asian Institute tried to find and express justifications to excuse the assaults by the Korean who had a black belt in karate on the hapless representatives from Ghana, I was incensed beyond speech; especially because everybody else sat very quietly and passively listening to him - that I walked out of the meeting.
When I cooled down after walking for hours in the streets of Tel Aviv, I returned to the Institute and demanded that my passport be returned to me; and, indicated that I was going home as soon as I could arrange a flight to report the truth about the hospitality extended to some participants during their course of study.
When I returned to my room, Kim and another older representative also from Korea knocked at my door and abjectly apologized for the assaults and gave assurances that these would not be repeated.
I eventually agreed to stay and accepted their assurances - after I delivered a warning of my own; that any future assault on any individual by Kim, would be taken by me and responded to, as if it were an attack on me personally.
The next morning, Zamani Jali, a representative from South Africa who was one of the leaders of the delegation from Africa, came to thank me for standing up to powers that be in the Institute; and, to apologize for Africans who had treated me with disdain because of my failure to join and support the African clique during the course.
It was one of the proudest moments of my life that I was able to rejoin that I never joined or supported cliques; and, that in demonstrating my anger about the injustice inherent in the assaults I was only doing what I was always strove to do - what I believed was right.
It was the hardest truth to assimilate, the greatest test of my objectivity to conclude that it is the Jewish nation that is the interloper in Palestine; that they are the aggressors in this troubled region, that in building the fence that separates them from Palestinian refugees they are creating a large ghetto for those pitiful, much victimized individuals very similar to the ghettos that housed Jews, in Europe.
The thing is, the thing is, I exist in a world where anything goes; a world that is a place where anything goes mostly because all and sundry are members of cliques with powerful patrons.
Whatever members of that clique or community do, no matter how criminal or savage, they maintain a code of silence; this becomes a vicious circle because it allows individuals to escape punishment, even for crimes as heinous as murder and rape; and, because there are no sanctions or consequences individuals are encouraged, by these numerous examples of license to themselves engage in ever more nefarious and damaging activities.
After a few years of practicing the discipline of truth I came to the realization that the real key to self discipline and curb on my primitive impulses was that I would not dissimulate about these inadequacies, that I would tell the truth about them.
I came to the realization that the social system was permissive of individuals avoiding responsibility for their actions, even their criminal actions; that morality, not the pretense of morality, but real morality depended on practicing the discipline of truth, the means to real civility that I had stumbled on.
Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, it was the issue of sexual fidelity; the most difficult item of morality for me; that prompted this discovery.
I discovered that the only way I could break my powerful lifelong habit of promiscuity was by exacting a promise from me that I would report without preamble, without justifications or excuses any failures in this regard to my significant other as soon as they occurred; and, it worked.
Imagine my dismay when this modus operandi created animus in everyone with whom I came in contact, who sincerely believed that I should practice the code of silence that they opportunistically adhered to; and, allow them to escape responsibility for their actions, an approach that is responsible for all, or almost all, of the malignant and odious conditions that exist on Planet Earth.
This is the bedrock of the difference between every human being and me; they know that adhering to a code of silence provides the license to do whatever they want without fear of being held responsible and this is the means of their escaping sanctions; and, I believe that telling the truth is the bridge between fact and function.
The next layer of difference is that human beings are wholly and uniformly selfish and their paramount interest is self aggrandizement; while I am committed to the common good, or, most specifically I see children as my constituency, whose interests and safety I will defend until my last breath, and with the last drop of my blood.
Last Friday, I was in small grocery at the corner of Park Avenue and Getwell Road in the city of Memphis when I made eye contact with a small girl child.
She smiled and retreated behind the skirts of the female who accompanied her; and, from that secure location she played a game of peek-a-boo with me until that woman paid her bill and left the store.
She knew that I was safe person with whom she could engage in any game because love knows love, innocence knows innocence; from her attitude I could see the cashier was less sure of my credentials that she was ambivalent about whether I was a dirty old man or something worst, as I paid my own bill and decamped.
Her suspicions had nothing to do with the reality of the threat which I posed to that child; but much to do with her guilt and the state of this society; which cannot educate but abuses, sexually and physically, feeds on, and exploits its young.
A society so deeply committed to tradition and the past that it now embraces dumb animals as pets which cannot report abuse and maltreatment and will never develop a mind of their own as a substitute and alternative to conceiving, socializing and taking the responsibility for rearing children.
Like that cashier, my readers are threatened by the truth in these essays on freedom; and, as a consequence they feel animus towards me and the ideas I promote.
But these feelings of extreme and intense animus have nothing to do with the reality; in fact, the ideas that are contained in these essays, bizarre and aberrant as they may appear to the ignorant and unenlightened, are, the best hope that humanity will avoid destroying themselves with the weapons of mass destruction they have developed.
Telling the truth has made me the prophet of these times - with a very simple message.
Humanity can no longer afford to rely on coercion, overt or covert, in their relations with other entities and beings; because this must stimulate conflict which must escalate and intensify over time, and, soon or late, result in the use of weapons of mass destruction which will destroy human civilizations.
Further, telling the truth will cause a bare majority of human beings in every society to perceive this reality; and, facilitate individuals becoming adept at using positive reinforcements which will in turn aid the development of cooperation between individuals and nations, significantly reduce levels of conflict and cause our race to avoid a destiny replete with tragedy and catastrophe.
Copyright Retained, All Rights Reserved
William E. Virtue
3222 Airways Blvd, # 312
Memphis TN 38116
Ph: 901-201-8090
He was the Technical Engineer for the plant and had lead the initial operation in which the carbon had been burned from the platinum catalyst; which was the major and most expensive component of the powerforming process which raised the octane of hydrocarbon products that formed the base stock of the gasoline produced by the refinery.
I was a member of the team; and, during the three weeks we were together rejuvenating the platinum catalyst we became friends and discovered we had common interests, including a love of poetry.
I had shown him some of my early attempts to write poetry; and, he reciprocated by making me a gift of the poetry of Dylan Thomas, whose poetry inspired me to attempt to transcend the crude, naïve and unsophisticated renderings that were my earliest compositions.
Thereafter, many of the poems I composed were written in empty spaces in that book; and, how I lost forever those poems is a story that is relevant to the thesis of this piece, and so I include it here.
My sister, Marcia, was visiting from Washington D.C. where she lived with her husband, Keith, who was studying to be an architect at Howard University.
She found the book of poetry remarkable and valuable because coincidentally her husband was studying the poetry of Dylan Thomas as a component of a course that he required to matriculate; and, when she returned to the USA, she took the book with her.
The cost of replacing the book was negligible but the fact that she purloined it, without my consent, is indicative of the attitude of human beings and reinforces and validates the world view that unceasingly and futilely I am attempting to communicate.
Because she resorted to an act of petty theft, instead of purchasing a copy of the book at some small cost; I lost one of the best poems I have ever written, it contained the line:
Where lies brawl on a barren world, which to believe.
Hitherto, I have tried to conform to the requirements to have articles published; even though an accurate description of social reality is a poor, very uncomfortable fit for the needs of newspaper editors who have to be wary that they do not contravene in the content they publish the laws of slander and libel; but latterly I have come to the conclusion, consequent to many and repeated rejection of my submissions that my essays will never conform to these requirements - not the least because they are too much the truth, they are too realistic, and realism is anathema to those who wish to perpetuate the status quo.
Yet I believe that these essays on freedom that are the repositories of information, very important information; ideas that I believe are critical to the survival of the human race - so despite being ignored I persevere.
I have noted that the same old ideas and policies persist even though the consequence of their application is greater and greater dysfunction, that they result in economic and social conditions that seem to be becoming worse and worse; I have concluded that this paradox is a consequence of the fact that the objective of the powers that be, is, in precept, not to make improvements in the quality of life of the majority of citizens - but to perpetuate the status quo.
The current debate among the candidates who are competing to be the next President is a case in point.
First of all, every last one of them is committed to gradualism, to minor changes and adjustments to fix the gigantic problems that beset the body politic in the USA; an approach that will have the same level of success that has been the experience for the past five decades - a period during which very few positive changes have occurred.
Secondly, every candidate sees the problem as external to themselves and to the Parties they represent; they blame inadequacies in the policies of the current Administration for the mess we are in and decline to see the need for reform in the ideology and practices, the pervasive corrupt practices in the political movements they represent.
Lastly, though the system is not working, is abjectly failing, they are oblivious of the need to overhaul the political machinery; a machinery that has become a vicious circle, one half of that circle being opinion polls which define the position of most voters, the other half being candidates adopting what they deem to be the most popular and advantageous to them, position on any issue based on the information gleaned from those opinion polls; while the candidate who invariably wins is he, or she, with the greatest war chest who can buy the most television commercials with the consequence that big money and vested interests are more in control of the outcome of the election than at any other time in recent history.
So I have decided to discard all the rules; I will not attempt to be diplomatic, nor will I be mindful of the sensibilities or need of any individual to avoid exposure, nor will I try to be politically correct.
I will be the ultimate iconoclast and embrace the spirit of unbridled speculation.
The central hypothesis of this theory about cultural and social evolution is the notion that during the many millennia that humanity existed in a ’state of nature,’ they became habituated to using force in their relations with other beings; a habit so deeply embedded in human culture during existence in the crucible that was the physical environment for a very long period near the beginning of the human story, that it persists, immutable and unchanging, up to the present.
Further, that its persistence and longevity is a consequence of the fact that every human mind is divided into two compartments, the conscious and unconscious; and, human beings developed the means to consign to their unconscious all information pertaining to, and affecting the use of coercion in their relations with other entities, human or otherwise.
When human beings became aware that concepts such as justice, equity, fair play, compassion and respect for personal autonomy existed, instead of this ameliorating the cruelty and savagery of social relations; the conflict between the requirements for survival with these ethics was consigned to the unconscious and produced burdens of guilt, remorse and shame; but allowed human beings to continue to be agents of coercion based culture, to engage in intense competition and continue to engage in the supremely dominant social roles of territorial predator and prey.
One of the definitions of the verb, repress, culled from the American Heritage Dictionary, is ‘to force (memories, ideas, or fears, for example) into the subconscious mind.’
Repression has become a vast and powerful institution perpetuating and sustaining the status quo, whose formulation was dictated by existence in the ‘state of nature’ which human beings inhabited for millions of years; a social milieu in which might was right, one in which a miniscule elite feasted while the majority existed on the verge of starvation; this has become the immutable, unchanging and unchangeable cultural template for human existence.
In a small park in Tel Aviv, Israel, in the month of October, 1975, drowning in a deep pit of depression occasioned by my imminent divorce, a consequence that would entail my living separate and apart from my beloved children; I determined to tell the truth for the rest of my life - whatever the consequences.
I feel constrained to report that up to the moment I made that earthshaking, monumental, watershed decision I had been an agent of coercion based culture; blindly groping toward my tragic destiny, selfishly driven and motivated by my wants and desires.
In that park was a sculpture that had been commissioned to be a memorial to the innocents who died in the Munich Massacre; it had been constructed to black, massive, rough hewn, polished stone, a design which depicted two monolithic, imponderable figures eternally struggling, in endless conflict with each other.
That prompted my first mistake, as I was born again.
I understood that sculpture to depict the struggle between good and evil, which was the message it was intended to communicate.
As I overcame the damage that had been done to my intellect by the powerful institution of repression I came to the realization, the awesome realization; that the conflict that I was involved in was much more basic and fundamental; that I was involved in a struggle with the monolith, the intangible, insensate, enduring monolith that was coercion based culture; which was, and is, the conscious and unconscious premises of thinking and action for the vast majority of human beings.
Subsequently, I came to an accurate perception of that struggle, for three decades I have been engaged in that struggle; for more than thirty years I have existed as if I had been transported into that sculpture while retaining my human weaknesses and frailties contending with an intangible, insensate, completely unyielding monolith composed of the attitudes and patterns of behavior of the most ancient construct that remains dominant and relevant to contemporary existence, coercion based culture.
This constitutes my latest invitation to human beings to join me in this conflict; to replace the world in which might is right, with one in which right is might.
This has always been a work in progress; with every essay on freedom containing some new insight that has emerged out of this pilgrimage of intense pain, suffering and despair.
Until recently, I thought that one day I would describe the existing social reality with such accuracy that this description would penetrate the gloom of repression that blinds and immobilizes humanity.
The truth is, that the more accurate my description of social reality has become; the more and more animus I must attract from human beings, from human organizations and human institutions; truth, an accurate description of social reality is anathema to the powers that be, who have developed vast and sophisticated instruments of repression to hide and obfuscate the sere reality and the massive negative implications of the vast differences in the existences of those who have, and those who have not.
I am inviting human beings to that the Freedom Road, to engage in a journey of discovery that will be the most difficult and replete with misery and suffering that any individual could travel.
A long time ago the snowball of coercion fell high on the slopes of the vast, endless mountain of time; in the millions of years since that snowball fell it has been rolling inexorably downwards, gaining weight and momentum until it has become an remorseless, insensate avalanche of Absolutism that threatens to sweep away every item and artifact that together constitute human civilization.
I am inviting you to do what is necessary to reverse the course of this avalanche, to endure the weight of its fury and momentum and so dissipate its force because this is the price of freedom, because this is the only way to create the possibility of happiness for human beings.
I can ask this of you because this is a road I have already traveled, for thirty years I have never known security because I never could be sure when I would be called upon to tell the truth or do the right thing; patterns of behavior that were certain to result in my experiencing abject poverty, loneliness and hunger.
This is the first ‘proof’ and argument that validates the hypothesis I have developed; the most important values, the most sacred values in concept to human beings are truth and honesty; but, the practice of these values will inevitably result in an existence of abject poverty, misery and suffering.
One of the reasons why this has not been hitherto apparent is that very few individuals have been able to endure telling the truth for the extended period necessary for creating a realistic picture of social reality.
The facts are that in the same way that the best hunters had absolute power over the level of nutrition all members of the tribe; and, exploited this advantage to consolidate their power over their fellows; so conforming is now necessary for success and for maintaining even a minimum standard of living.
One of the glaring inconsistencies of human existence is that to achieve eternal life, the goal of organized religion, each and every individual must attain high moral standards; yet for most of recorded history and even while human beings existed in a primitive ‘state of nature,’ most individuals were subject to absolute power, they were slaves and serfs subordinate to individuals who had the power of life or death over them; the moral standards or immoral standards of behavior they exhibited were that of their masters who had absolute control over their lives, and had little to do with the dictates of their individual consciences.
If judged by contemporary concepts and ideas about social relations the balance of power between human beings for most of human history produced monstrous distortions of human societies, as described in the following quote from the preface of the “The Sociology of Slavery” by Orlando Patterson:
Jamaica, and the other West Indian Islands, are unique in World history in that they present one of the rare cases of a human society being artificially created for the satisfaction of one clearly defined goal: that of making money through the production of sugar. In 1655 both the British masters and their slaves, who were later to come in such vast numbers, were total strangers to the land upon which they were to build a completely new society. The vast majority of the people who were to mould this society came against their will. This was true not only of the slaves, but of the large numbers of Irish, Welsh, Scots and English, who, coming originally as indentured servants and, later, under the pressure of economic deprivation, were as much the victims of the capitalist exploiters of England as were the bewildered tribesmen of Africa whose labour they were to supervise.
And of those whites who came to the colony with the high hopes of quickly making their fortunes and returning home many indeed were to spend the rest of their days bemoaning their foolhardiness. For Jamaican slave society was no place for the poor, ambitious pioneer. After the first fifty hectic years of indecision during which an unscrupulous few may have fulfilled their dreams, Jamaica developed into what it would remain for the rest of the period of slavery: a monstrous distortion of human society. It was not just the physical cruelty of the system that made it so perverse, for in this the society was hardly unique. What marks it out is the astonishing neglect and distortion of almost every one of the basic prerequisites of normal human living. This is a society in which clergymen were the ‘most finished debauches’ in the land; in which the institution of marriage was officially condemned among both masters and slaves; in which the family was unthinkable to the vast majority of the population and promiscuity the norm; in which education was seen as an absolute waste of time and teachers shunned like the plague; in which the legal system was quite deliberately a travesty of anything that could be called justice; and in which all forms of refinements, of art, of folkways, were either absent or in a state of total disintegration. Only a small proportion of whites who monopolized almost all the fertile land in the island, benefited from the system. And these, no sooner had they secured their fortunes, abandoned the land which the production of their own wealth had made unbearable to live in, for the comforts of the mother country. (Patterson 9)
This, I believe, is an accurate description of human societies everywhere, past and present, in precept; minor differences exist because of window dressing that obscures and obfuscates the actuality of human relations.
I see what the vast majority of human beings cannot because the practice of discipline of truth allowed me to resist and retain my objectivity despite the process of propaganda, mystification and conditioning that lames the intellects of most human beings and cause them to be unable to perceive the existing social reality.
I claim moral superiority, and it is my dearest wish that even one human being would attempt to cross the ever increasing chasm between my poor self and the human race; a schism that is created and sustained by the vast majority of individuals using lies and deceits as the small change of existence and my practicing the discipline of truth; a fundamental difference in methodology that causes me to be on a increasingly divergent course from the human concourse.
I see the reality and most human beings see what they want to see.
Recently, with a mind to repairing the tattered image of the USA before the imminent meeting with world leaders in the G-8 Summit in Germany, the Bush Administration announced increased sanctions against the Sudanese government.
What the Bush Administration and the American people fail to perceive is that what the Sudanese government is doing in that region of Africa, is very similar, if not identical to what the Allied Forces are doing in Iraq, with the same disastrous consequences for millions of human beings.
It is the common heritage embedded in culture during the countless millennia that dictates the actions of human beings worldwide; differences in apparel, in ethnicity, in levels of education, in access to technology and material possessions, produce superficial dissimilarities that are emphasized - but are meaningless when compared to the core of attitudes and patterns of behavior learned in the ‘state of nature;’ all human beings are deeply conditioned to playing the roles of territorial predator and their prey.
A massive fence is projected to be built between the USA and Mexico to stem the tide of illegal immigration; but what means will be used to buttress the moral characters of those who constitute the enemy within, within the psyches of Americans, those Americans who are strategically located to profit from this traffic.
All my readers will think I have at last lost my sanity when I dare to suggest that all social and political problems are fundamentally moral problems; that they are the result of human beings failing to do the right thing.
Stretch your imaginations to embrace a world in which merit was the absolute requirement for every job; if when an individual applied for a job in the Justice Department, or any other department of government; they were not required to answer political questions as Ms. Goodling in her testimony to the House Subcommittee recently admitted to, and apologized, for asking; questions that determined whether that the applicant was a good Republican, or, a good Democrat - imagine with me the impact on the functioning of the government that this would have.
Suppose, simultaneously, government contracts were awarded on merit; a combination of being competent to do the job and allied to that capability, the ability to complete that project, at the most economical cost; imagine the impact on government spending that such a consideration would have.
I remember a stretch of road in front of the Esso Refinery in Kingston named Marcus Garvey Drive that was always being repaired no matter how many times it was constructed and reconstructed; a situation which in my mind has always been a metaphor for the impact of corruption in governments.
This causes citizens to pay, again and again, for the cost of doing any job or completing any project; because it is never done right the first time because political affiliation not merit determines who is chosen to do the job.
In such a world as I envision, nations would be able to harness their resources, including their human resources, to provide a minimum standard of living for their citizens who would then would not be forced by economic privation to travel emigrate to survive.
When I left Jamaica in July, 1975 to travel to Israel, I was in much the same state of mind that I experience today, I had completely lost hope.
During the following three months I had my hope rejuvenated and renewed that humanity could overcome; my faith was restored that the human race could create a Garden of Eden here on earth.
It is these achievements that I list that are the best arguments for preservation of the State of Israel; that completely surrounded by intensely hostile states; these human beings caused the desert to bloom, that they integrated into their society without massive dislocation vast numbers of Jews, relatively unskilled Jews, who were expelled from Arab States with only the clothes on their backs; that they created comprehensive, integrated programs of development, for example, the city of Ashdod.
I am not stating that these human beings have achieved perfection, far from it; I was in Israel when the United Nations voted on the nature of Zionism, and was one of those rushed to a meeting in Jerusalem and taken to task, not because we had influenced the vote of our respective nations in any way; but, because we were available.
I witnessed Kim, a representative from Korean who was the leader of a union with more than a hundred thousand members; avoid being sent home because of that fact - after he had assaulted not one, but two, Ghanaians.
But I have other vivid and unforgettable memories of intelligence, creativity, tolerance, compassion and merit to set against, and minimize, these inadequacies.
These memories are so replete and redolent with hope for humanity; they are so powerful that I have said before, and reiterate here, that in defense of the cooperative forms of life I experienced there, and never anywhere else, that I, a voice of peace, would take up arms.
In fact, more than anything else, I consider myself, a voice of peace; which was the name of a radio station that broadcast, during that period, propaganda to the Arab world from somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea.
Moreover, it was there in Israel that I received the most recognition for doing what I have always tried to do everywhere else; and reaped such a bitter harvest of poverty and suffering as the reward for my efforts, for simply following the dictates of my conscience and doing what I perceived to be the right thing.
When a meeting was called in which the Director of the Afro Asian Institute tried to find and express justifications to excuse the assaults by the Korean who had a black belt in karate on the hapless representatives from Ghana, I was incensed beyond speech; especially because everybody else sat very quietly and passively listening to him - that I walked out of the meeting.
When I cooled down after walking for hours in the streets of Tel Aviv, I returned to the Institute and demanded that my passport be returned to me; and, indicated that I was going home as soon as I could arrange a flight to report the truth about the hospitality extended to some participants during their course of study.
When I returned to my room, Kim and another older representative also from Korea knocked at my door and abjectly apologized for the assaults and gave assurances that these would not be repeated.
I eventually agreed to stay and accepted their assurances - after I delivered a warning of my own; that any future assault on any individual by Kim, would be taken by me and responded to, as if it were an attack on me personally.
The next morning, Zamani Jali, a representative from South Africa who was one of the leaders of the delegation from Africa, came to thank me for standing up to powers that be in the Institute; and, to apologize for Africans who had treated me with disdain because of my failure to join and support the African clique during the course.
It was one of the proudest moments of my life that I was able to rejoin that I never joined or supported cliques; and, that in demonstrating my anger about the injustice inherent in the assaults I was only doing what I was always strove to do - what I believed was right.
It was the hardest truth to assimilate, the greatest test of my objectivity to conclude that it is the Jewish nation that is the interloper in Palestine; that they are the aggressors in this troubled region, that in building the fence that separates them from Palestinian refugees they are creating a large ghetto for those pitiful, much victimized individuals very similar to the ghettos that housed Jews, in Europe.
The thing is, the thing is, I exist in a world where anything goes; a world that is a place where anything goes mostly because all and sundry are members of cliques with powerful patrons.
Whatever members of that clique or community do, no matter how criminal or savage, they maintain a code of silence; this becomes a vicious circle because it allows individuals to escape punishment, even for crimes as heinous as murder and rape; and, because there are no sanctions or consequences individuals are encouraged, by these numerous examples of license to themselves engage in ever more nefarious and damaging activities.
After a few years of practicing the discipline of truth I came to the realization that the real key to self discipline and curb on my primitive impulses was that I would not dissimulate about these inadequacies, that I would tell the truth about them.
I came to the realization that the social system was permissive of individuals avoiding responsibility for their actions, even their criminal actions; that morality, not the pretense of morality, but real morality depended on practicing the discipline of truth, the means to real civility that I had stumbled on.
Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, it was the issue of sexual fidelity; the most difficult item of morality for me; that prompted this discovery.
I discovered that the only way I could break my powerful lifelong habit of promiscuity was by exacting a promise from me that I would report without preamble, without justifications or excuses any failures in this regard to my significant other as soon as they occurred; and, it worked.
Imagine my dismay when this modus operandi created animus in everyone with whom I came in contact, who sincerely believed that I should practice the code of silence that they opportunistically adhered to; and, allow them to escape responsibility for their actions, an approach that is responsible for all, or almost all, of the malignant and odious conditions that exist on Planet Earth.
This is the bedrock of the difference between every human being and me; they know that adhering to a code of silence provides the license to do whatever they want without fear of being held responsible and this is the means of their escaping sanctions; and, I believe that telling the truth is the bridge between fact and function.
The next layer of difference is that human beings are wholly and uniformly selfish and their paramount interest is self aggrandizement; while I am committed to the common good, or, most specifically I see children as my constituency, whose interests and safety I will defend until my last breath, and with the last drop of my blood.
Last Friday, I was in small grocery at the corner of Park Avenue and Getwell Road in the city of Memphis when I made eye contact with a small girl child.
She smiled and retreated behind the skirts of the female who accompanied her; and, from that secure location she played a game of peek-a-boo with me until that woman paid her bill and left the store.
She knew that I was safe person with whom she could engage in any game because love knows love, innocence knows innocence; from her attitude I could see the cashier was less sure of my credentials that she was ambivalent about whether I was a dirty old man or something worst, as I paid my own bill and decamped.
Her suspicions had nothing to do with the reality of the threat which I posed to that child; but much to do with her guilt and the state of this society; which cannot educate but abuses, sexually and physically, feeds on, and exploits its young.
A society so deeply committed to tradition and the past that it now embraces dumb animals as pets which cannot report abuse and maltreatment and will never develop a mind of their own as a substitute and alternative to conceiving, socializing and taking the responsibility for rearing children.
Like that cashier, my readers are threatened by the truth in these essays on freedom; and, as a consequence they feel animus towards me and the ideas I promote.
But these feelings of extreme and intense animus have nothing to do with the reality; in fact, the ideas that are contained in these essays, bizarre and aberrant as they may appear to the ignorant and unenlightened, are, the best hope that humanity will avoid destroying themselves with the weapons of mass destruction they have developed.
Telling the truth has made me the prophet of these times - with a very simple message.
Humanity can no longer afford to rely on coercion, overt or covert, in their relations with other entities and beings; because this must stimulate conflict which must escalate and intensify over time, and, soon or late, result in the use of weapons of mass destruction which will destroy human civilizations.
Further, telling the truth will cause a bare majority of human beings in every society to perceive this reality; and, facilitate individuals becoming adept at using positive reinforcements which will in turn aid the development of cooperation between individuals and nations, significantly reduce levels of conflict and cause our race to avoid a destiny replete with tragedy and catastrophe.
Copyright Retained, All Rights Reserved
William E. Virtue
3222 Airways Blvd, # 312
Memphis TN 38116
Ph: 901-201-8090
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