Another bonus "Unpublishable" story

 One day, I'll put these all in a book.

. . . . . . . .

Asshole With an Open Secret

Assholes are very good at making other people feel like assholes. I know this because I do it all the time. These people should know not to give me a podium or put me on camera. But they just never learn. They think they can make an example of me. I guess, in a way, they’re right, but it never goes like they expect it to.

Which is why I said to the Grand Inquisitor: “My secret is, I’m an asshole.”

He said, “That’s not a secret. You’re a public asshole.”

I said, “The secret is that it works.”

He said, “Fair enough. You’re still going on trial for obstruction of justice.”

I said, “I wouldn’t expect it any other way.”

What’s that quote about doing the same thing every time and expecting different results?

Can’t remember how it goes or who said, but basically, politics.

Here’s how it works: keep listening.

He said, “Will you answer my questions?”

I said, “No.”

He said, “Will you cooperate with the investigation?”

I said, “No.”

He said, “Were you not shot while counter-protesting at a political rally?”

I said, “I refuse to answer that question.”

He said, “You have a hole in your chest.”

I said, “You have holes in your head. More of them than you need.”

He said, “The investigation concerns the person who shot you.”

I said, “I will not cooperate.”

He said, “You refused to testify.”

I said, “I will neither confirm nor deny that allegation.”

He said, “You were subpoenaed.”

I said, “I check my mail.”

He said, “Why won’t you cooperate in the prosecution of your shooter?”

I said, “I have moral objections to your system of justice.”

I was still very much in pain.

He said, “You could be held in contempt of court.”

I said, “That would be in character.”

He said, “What character is that?”

I said, “A character with nothing but contempt for your court.”

He said, “Your refusal puts us in a difficult position. We could be your advocates if you’d let us. But if you refuse, we will have to conclude you were a provocateur in the matter of your shooting. You were shot by a rally attendee whose stated goal is to crush people like you.”

I said, “What kind of people am I?”

He said, “Are you now, or have you ever been…”

I said, “I refuse to answer that question.”

He finished, “…A member of the organization Grey Moment?”

I said, “I have already refused to answer that question.”

He said, “You didn’t let me finish.”

I said, “I didn’t need to. Can I ask you a question?”

He said, “It’s not procedure, but I can’t stop you.”

I said, “Are you really a Grand Inquisitor? Or are you a spook?”

He said, “I can show you my credentials.”

I said, “I’d like your badge number, please.”

He said, “C18-187-216.” He tapped his badge and the number flashed on its tiny screen.

I said, “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

He said, “Only place you’re getting is National Prison. For a long time. Unless you cooperate.”

I said, “I will not. I’d rather have free healthcare.”

He said, “You’re a free rider?”

I said, “No, just an opportunist. Like you.”

He said, “I question that.”

I said, “You question everything. Take this at face value: I will not cooperate with the justice system. It’s about mutualism. You would never cooperate with me. I have no quarrel with an exploited man. I have quarrel with you.”

He said, “I understand.”

And then his boys hauled me away.

But he was the one who felt like an asshole.

Better him than the shooter!

 

Stepmother of the Revolution : a bonus, "unpublishable" and VERY dark story

 This is purely for fun. A villain POV. This is the Wicked Stepmother's Version of the Story. I do not endorse the actions described herein. It was purely an experiment in writing a villain POV story involving relatively sympathetic and humanized neo-Bolsheviks.

Think of it as a cautionary tale about what happens when our own structures mask a predatory personality.

You have been WARNED.

CONTENT WARNING: INFANTICIDE

Stepmother of the Revolution

 

By Raven Green

 

Sometime After the Sixth Great Migration…

LaShade, another planet in the Milky Way…

Many lightyears from Earth…

 

Eustace hated her husband’s kid.

Just, absolutely, fucking hated the little snot, Isabella.

This kid knew all her dirty secrets. She used to babysit this kid, when she was practically still a kid herself, and in college. Then, she started a torrid love affair with her professor, who also happened to be Isabella’s father and her part-time employer, that led to a nullification, and a very bitter custody battle whose outcome pleased no one.

But Isabella was her father’s child, and it wasn’t long before, taking advantage of the chaos of the Green Season Uprisings, she ran away from her mom’s place and came to Eustace and her dad’s, and begged for the newly appointed DefSec and CivAdmin of the newly independent Free Peoples’ Nation to let her live with them in the Compound in DiKopa City.

And who was Daddy to deny his little girl the right to follow in His Revolutionary Path?

Fucking little snot.

Eustace decided, early on, there would be no favoritism for Isabella in the Party’s Youth Wing. What she expected of the others, she expected triple from her stepdaughter. She hoped the exactitude would drive the girl from the Party’s ranks into a bunker somewhere she could then accidentally nuke.

And then, all her dirty secrets would be safe.

But as DefSec, she knew tactical fusion weapons didn’t work that way.

Nothing got accidentally nuked. Everything was accounted for. No one did anything alone.

 

Eustace didn’t hate kids, in general. She had actually formed the Party’s Youth Wing, and although she had moved on to other departments of the Liberation Struggle, she still maintained strong ties with the younger members of the movement. The younger Party officers liked her public persona, her theatricality, the gimmicks the rest of the Party despised her for. If it weren’t for Binjamin, who was Party Leader, they’d throw her out, but she’d probably take half of Youth Wing with her.

And if she was honest with herself, as she stood on the dais outside the Champions Stadium, and accepted one of the city’s repurposed High Awards, a big gold replica of an ancient key fob that was, in her opinion, absolutely hideous, and as she looked on the sea of young faces staring up at her, she didn’t hate Isabella, either.

She hated herself, for being vulnerable through a child. Her husband’s child. The fucking leader of the Revolution.

Eventually, something would have to be done.

She never considered an undiscriminating purge of Youth Wing, or a segment of Youth Wing, or a random selection. That is Establishment propaganda, and this publication disavows it.

She did, however, consider how she could take the kid out herself.

Poison would be detected by nano-snoopers.

She had no enemy arms for a frame-up job. All the captured arsenals of the Establishment were accounted for, same as fusion nukes. She could no more get her hands on an enemy sniper rifle than she could an enemy fusion nuke without attracting attention from her own, well trained security forces.

She could not depend on any comrades. It wouldn’t be fair to draw them into this. This was personal. The kid could really hurt her.

She briefly considered mobilizing Youth Wing, sending them to the Borderzone to fight the Remnant’s guerilla forces, or to the front, against the Establishment Army, but the girl’s capture would have defeated the purpose of sending her there to be killed, and then, her dirty secrets would be in the ears and minds of the Enemy.

So, she tried to talk to the girl.

 

Binjamin gave his precious princess the penthouse suite of the hexagonal Central Tower at the heart of the Compound. The seventeen-year-old had decorated the place with that tiled art she liked that Eustace thought was only half as ugly as the big gold key fob, which she planned on melting and banking with one of those Bank-Neutrals in the Montesco Islands that the mob used. She was going to convert it into cryptics for her soldiers.

“Hey kiddo,” said Eustace, trying to be nice.

“Hey,” said Isabella, coldly.

“Mind if I come in?” She was standing on the landing. The door was half open and Isabella was inside. Eustace didn’t wait for an answer. She pushed the door open slowly.

“I didn’t say yes,” said Isabella.

“You didn’t say no,” said Eustace. “Come on. Remember how we used to talk? Girl to girl?”

“This isn’t happening. Oh, tell me this is not happening.”

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you. I didn’t want anyone to think I was playing favorites and I guess I went a little overboard,” said Eustace.

“Fair enough,” said Isabella. “Is that it?”

“No,” said Eustace. “I wish there was some way I could go back in time and tell you things I should have been upfront about then. There’s a lot of those. But mostly, I wanted to ask if you could set the struggle aside. Go back to your mom. She needs you now.”

“She’s a self-absorbed alcoholic. You made her that way, you know. She never drank before you. You know she stole my lunch money once? The same I earned doing card tricks on the promenade, when you were distracted from your duties. You know, technically, that was neglect. Minors aren’t supposed to be engaged in commercial enterprise on the promenade,” said Isabella.

“Well, there’s no commercial anything anymore. We’re a free people now. Your meals are assured, and you can do all the card tricks you want,” said Eustace.

“I’m not into card tricks anymore,” said Isabella. “I’m into this.” She held up the armband with the yellow-on-black Party insignia and said, “This is the only thing we have in common, Madame DefSec. Don’t expect me to pout and whine that you’re not my mom. I’m over that. You’re no one to me but a name on a form.”

“You can’t hurt me that way, child,” said Eustace.

“But I can hurt you. That’s what this is about. And don’t call me ‘child.’ I am Cadet 45-21-15, and the presumption of familial intimacy by a person providing unwanted attention is grounds for investigation under Anti-Harassment Stricture 7.5A. I could press charges, even against you,” said Isabella.

“Is that how you want to play this?” asked Eustace. “You little… if this were the parade ground, I’d have you singled out and shot.”

“Then catch me there, Madame DefSec,” said Isabella. “Right now, I’m a civilian, and you’re a civilian representative of this government. It’s harassment, either way. Go away.”

“If that’s how this is going to be, then, your move,” said Eustace, fuming as she descended the stairs to her and Binjamin’s suite.

Diplomacy had failed. This was now a war.

 

On Day 2 of the Glorious War, Isabella retaliated. In the capacity of an illegal civilian combatant, defined as a “terrorist,” she sneaked into Eustace’s office while Eustace was inspecting the Borderzone Troop Posts, and propped that ugly big gold key fob up behind Eustace’s desk. She messed with the light and air conditioning settings on the Main Access Terminal and uploaded a few hypertrojans to the Primebox for good measure. Then, she rearranged every file and form she could find that was sequentially numbered or alphabetized.

She smeared a thin film of oil on the organic neurodes below the MAT screen where Eustace neuralinked with the Compound’s Central Intelligence Matrix to monitor the city. She reprogrammed the food dispenser with a Lorento Cipher, so it would only make goop.

Eustace swore out loud when she discovered Isabella’s sabotage, but Binjamin talked her out of bringing the girl up on charges. The conflict was between them. It wasn’t political.

And Eustace smiled, and nodded, and agreed out loud, but as she told herself, “Everything is political.”

 

André the Android was an older-model mechanical, technologically inferior to the biosynthetics that populated many planets and very often lived side by side with Homo sapiens. He was one of the first AI organizers on the planet, a pioneer in organized labor and human-synthetic relations. Now, aged, his artificial skin flaked off his carbon-alloy frame. He was an early supporter of the Party. He now held the rank of Captain of the Guard at the Party Compound in DiKopa City. He wore a brown leather uniform, like his mixed lot of synthetic and human troops wore, but his was sleeveless and customized with medals taken from defeated enemy generals. He carried an EmCoil rifle. Andre and his subordinates all wore the same yellow-on-black Party insignia armbands as Youth Wing. The synthetics among them were all newer model biosynths, virtually indistinguishable from humans.

André demonstrated his troops’ discipline for Eustace. He had them shift their weight about and handle their weapons in unison while chanting Party slogans. The young soldiers seemed to enjoy their display. They were proud to bear arms for the New Regime.

Some of them had EmCoil rifles like André. Others held crossbows at the ready, or crude, improvised weapons. Some of them only wore parts of their uniform. Some of them were barely clothed, with the clan tats on their backs on display. But no one mentioned the clans, here. Nor the castes, nor the Masters or Financiers or Technocrats. Those distinctions were extinct in the Free Peoples’ Nation.

No one breathed a positive word here about Elroy Honshuck, the techno-billionaire who started this war when he tried to force the government to sell him one of the moons using his own fleet of corporate-built gunships and surplus DeGustean torpedo frigates.

No one breathed a positive word either about Adrian Leury, the so-called “culture critic” who had taken office as Supreme Thought Leader of the Establishment.

No one said anything kind about Simone Paultrice, the SecDirector of the Establishment, who hunted dissidents using extralegal means.

The Free Peoples’ Nation emerged out of the Free Peoples’ Movement and the Free Peoples’ Party. They were a confederation of cities and agrarian communes on the Southern Continent of LaShade. DiKopa City was merely one city in the confederation, which lacked a permanent capital. The Party preferred decentralization as much as possible. But they were also fighting a war with the Establishment, and at the Compound, discipline and rank were maintained as in the armies of other nations.

André the Android made a fine Unit Leader. And he was a friendly machine. He was proud of his troops. Eustace could see his work made him happy.

Would he have been able to do it?

No. She couldn’t ask him. That would not be fair.

 

On Day 25 of the Glorious War, Isabella turned eighteen. She enlisted in the Free Peoples’ Army. SecDef Eustace came upon her application file on the MAT and immediately e-stamped it with a DENIED cryptocode. Soon thereafter, Isabella came running to Daddy.

Eustace withdrew the denial and approved the application after an argument with Binjamin that she lost badly, and Isabella boarded a troop convoy to travel to the Rhyeander Training Compound at Mount Morigori.

She wore the brown sleeveless leather variant of the uniform, with a green scarf around her neck and clan tats on her arms. She carried two bags. She hugged her father goodbye and grinned at Eustace.

“We’re on the same side,” she said. “We both know that. So let’s stop pretending like we’re enemies.”

Eustace smiled and nodded. She hugged Isabella and, unknown to her, planted the nano-tracking explosive gel-drone in her hair. Later, it would burrow into her scalp. She would think it was a skinmite. The itch would pass before the end.

 

 

 

 

 

 

P0EM (Excerpt from a work in Progress)

 

Ode to a Boy, and Railroad Tracks

 

Worshipping the abandoned

[ he makes ceremony at railroad tracks ]

And partly into sublimation

[ he understands political economy too well ]

Would sprawl, thereupon, a public work

And sing loud words there, out of tune

Imposing himself on the order and predictive

[ he is not as stupid as he acts ]

This luminous savage, this John,

Pretending amazement at this sad, old world

While planning somewhere more brave and new

[ would sing with spirits in mourning, be lured, and fall for tricks, and serve with smiles to prove

himself to power ]

He is lectured in a crisis and told what he thinks

[ he is godless but identifies with saints more than bosses ]

[ wears only black, seductive ]

He seizes his agency, he thrusts it like an elbow into the air at a challenge, tone barbed and calculated

[ he understands propaganda ]

He is well read but coarse

[ calculated ]

Does not make pretense -

He knows what he is doing

[ he understands power, too well ]

[ makes gestures at what he knows to be true, above him ]

Nothing except in context

[ the truth of things is in the greyscales ]

Walk with him on the railroad tracks

[ it’s not dangerous ]

[ the trains don’t run here anymore ]

His hand is rough.

You wonder if he keeps it that way.

You feel like you’re not alone here with him

[ but in a way that’s a comfort ]

[ You don’t want to be alone with him ]

Pays you attention, this one

And you don’t trust that

[ would sprawl in public, rudely ]

[ would sing, off-key ]

He of the trenchcoat warriorhood,

The Militant Avant-Garde

[ the scimitar, the rose, the gun and the hands that sculpt timeless trunks withstanding

forgetment ]

In desert sands, bare and wasted,

Illegible warnings in ancient tongues carved

At ancient opportunities.

[ wind is harsh here ]

So, no more of this naïve amazement

You are not a child

[ strident, untamed ]

Before any God or Gods

And neither is he a child

[ his fertile wings, his near-feminine countenance, waif-like, thin, and dusty ]

That is neither excuse for either of you

Nor chain -

No more.

[ and whispers in some dialect, he’d be better off back home, if only the trains still ran here, he’d

hop one ]

He makes you sad, this one

Don’t fall for this.

[ would sprawl, elbows lazy, reflecting on the universe as it surrounds him, his thoughts his only

reality ]

[ would have to will himself to power to corrupt and is too lazy and too stupid by his own

deceitful admission ]

This wisdom of his determined ignorance

When so much of so called common knowledge is lies

And with readiness to launch, sometimes, into

Impromptu ceremony, to keep alive

The spontaneity of spirit that transplanted his ancestry

[ theatrical, maybe, performative, definitely, but at our age that’s hardly a crime ]

Young and enthused with ideas

But this isn’t your first round

There are better outcomes than this

 [ these branched chains of possibilities ]

[ would sprawl, his truth between obscurities ]

[ and froth at opportunity ]

[ and deny it ]

These tracks mean something to him

Do I Believe in UFOs?

 "I believe in UFOs

"Baldheaded men with goldfish bowls

"Tied securely round their waists

"Observing us from outer space."

- Screeching Weasel

"And she bore him a son, and he called his name Gershom, for he said, 'I have been a stranger in a strange land.'"

- Exodus 2:22

I believe people see things they want to see. I believe that the desire to believe in something bigger than oneself is strong within us. I think that is why many people (though not all) believe in deities. And I think for a lot of people, that may account for wanting to believe in visitors from outer space coming to Earth and interacting with us.

There are many aspects of UFO and Alien Abduction lore that are functionally identical to a religious mythos surrounding a higher power. In this case, the high power is extraterrestrial. And many religions have their own mythos surrounding unidentified objects in the sky. The mythos has inspired New Religious Movements. And it has inspired artists and writers.

Do I believe in other intelligent life in the universe? Probably. It's a strong possibility. But as a Darwinian, I know evolution is not teleological (unless you're Nagel, but I still demand proof of things purportedly outside of nature). So I think it's a strong likelihood that life exists and that if it is common than perhaps intelligence has evolved elsewhere, but I caution that intelligence in the animal kingdom is a spectrum.

There are aspects of Alien Abduction lore that remind me uncomfortably of sexual abuse. I think for some people the trauma of abuse is so strong that they internalize an alternative narrative to cope. The stories of "multiple abductees" and their often brutal and sexually oriented experiences with "aliens" sound a lot like grooming a person from childhood. I don't think this explains all accounts; sleep paralysis is also a likelihood. But it concerns me that this narrative and the subculture around it maybe in the way of dealing with the trauma of abuse.

I have written about abuse in my novel "Rentkids." I deal with abuse and its effects as a social worker in child welfare. If I was to profile these purported alien abductors, I would describe them as predatory personalities, kidnappers, compulsive sexual abusers, and pedophiles/ephebophiles. The stories of the presentation of children onboard the visitors' ships also seem like a common form of gaslighting and possibly also related to sexual trauma as well.

"Rentkids" is a crime novel, a work of political satire, and a space opera, but there are no aliens. It is about human abuse. I wonder if people in the future will still believe in extraterrestrial visitors, or if the apocalyptic UFO mythos will fade when aliens (who, if they exist and are intelligent, maybe too removed from us in space or time period to make contact) fail to materialize and either invade and subjugate or solve the spiritual crises of modernity and make us less alien to each other.

We have to that ourselves, all us "aliens."

For who among us has never been a stranger in a strange land?

A Few Words on Atheism, Religion, Secular Politics and Spirituality

 This is another one of those "the person you meet today is at a certain point in a long journey that started before you met him and is not yet over" posts. That thing I just put in quotes is the sort of thing we generally should assume about other people. I have met very few "flat characters" in my life.

But I have met some. More than I wish I could say. I feel pity for someone who is trapped in themselves and unable to grow but I think I feel more sympathy with everyone else in that person's life who has to deal with them.

I would say I know a lot about the way people work, what maintains behaviors, especially harmful or socially disruptive behaviors, and for most people, what motivates change. This is a large part of the work that I do as a social worker, with clients in various stages of change.

On that, before I get to the meat of this post, I want to point out that I do think people are accountable to themselves and others and responsible for change. That includes people who are also, at the same time, systematically oppressed. It includes many people who do not benefit from my combination of racial, sexual and educational privilege. I am responsible for holding people accountable. And every single one of my clients is part of more than one type of underclass. I hold people accountable for change and I do not feel conflicted about this in the slightest. The reason I bring this up is because conservatives love to trumpet about "personal responsibility" but have no appreciation for "personal context," whereas Leftist social workers kind of have to deal in both worlds, so we are naturally more tolerant of contradictions and ambiguity.

And contradictions and ambiguity are a big part of what I want to use this post to address. They are part of the Fifth Stage.

James Fowler was a theologian and student of human development who proposed six stages of spiritual development. Fowler's stages apply to basically everyone (maybe excepting sociopaths), and that includes materialist atheists like myself.

I supposed technically I was born an atheist. Technically everyone is born an atheist. But I was raised with a moderate degree of religion in my life. My family for most of my childhood until my mid-adolescence were "High Holidays Jews." We didn't identify really with any of the Sects like Orthodox, or Conservative, or Reform or Reconstructionist, from my earliest memories until sometime after my Bar Mitzvah, I would say my family tried to integrate religion and make it meaningful for us. My mother was not Jewish by birth. She converted when she married my father and this was done partly because she genuinely identified with the religion and culture but also because, at the time, their views on Israel were significantly less critical and in their early religious experimentation (their Stage 4), they wished for me and my siblings to be able to become Israeli citizens if we wanted, later in life.

Like I said, their views on Israel have changed.

Their views on religion also changed. And the change was in parallel but not in conjunction with my own.

I would say that I spent a lot of time as a kid trying to "find myself" and one of the ways I tried to do this was with intense spirituality.

Recalling this as an adult, it feels like a very inauthentic time for me, similar to when I was in the closet and trying to live life as a heterosexual or primarily heterosexual man. I remember being impatient with traditional religious instruction, and I had some pretty traumatizing experiences in Hebrew Sunday School (the story of the Binding of Isaac comes to mind, but also, the casual and bloodless fiction of Israel that the teachers presented, an extreme and distasteful nationalism, possibly fascism).

So, I never saw religion and politics as separate and as a religious minority as a child, I developed a very strong belief in the Separation of Church and State, in secular national discourse and justice, in secular public services and civic life. This concern of late has been subordinated by a more general hatred of both Capital and the State that protects it, and a feeling that much of the apparent "conflict" between "church and state" (what a predictably Christian-centric kind of term!)  has to do with funding and tax codes and other aspects of capitalism which would be rendered irrelevant with the obsolescence of the system that maintains it. It is just another way that our ruling elites and bourgeois culture divides the working class. I always knew there was a problematic relationship between government authority and the authority of religious leaders and that the line had to be thickly drawn or it would be weaponized against minorities and used in the service of suppressing class struggle. This had literally nothing to do with "atheism." I was not an atheist at that time. I believed very strongly in something, some mystical element to reality, that could be called God.

After our Bar Mitzvahs, my friend Judah (who later became known to us as Paz) broke from his equally confusing religious home life (his mother was Christian, father was Jewish, and they celebrated both traditions) and he devoted himself to the practice of Wicca. Because I admired Paz's spirituality, I did the same. I learned about Wiccan theology and and ritual and I spent a good deal of time fashioning items for use in those rituals and writing spells and drawing runes in my Book of Shadows. I think this was even less authentic for me than Judaism. And I was ostracized and ridiculed for it, including by members of my own family, who already thought I was weird. These family members are conservative Christians and my experience with them is feeling like they are nice to my face but have fascist politics and would vote for Hitler if Hitler said he was against abortions and his opponent was not. And a certain traumatic childhood memory involves my judgmental, right-wing Christian aunt mouthsoaping my brother and I without my parents' knowledge in a restaurant bathroom for using mild swears in context, something which in my family was normalized, unlike the child abuse she subjected me too, not to mention, legal and ethical between consenting family members, and not abusive. I remember thinking "I know this isn't fair but I have to put up with it because she's an adult." I didn't know it was abuse. I didn't know my parents didn't know about it. I assumed they did because it did not occur to me that someone who was not my parent would discipline me without a parents' consent.

But right-wing Christians feel they need to take ownership of other people's morality, and when I came to understand how deeply my aunt has internalized a narrative of Secular America being crueler and more awful to (white) Christians than any other group, her boundary violations made sense, because as a secular person of a scientific worldviews, I feel my boundaries are constantly tested by a pervasive national narrative that we are a Christian Nation (hard variant) and that this should be reflected in public by government institutions, or (soft variant) that government institutions are not prohibited from endorsing religion in general over nonreligion. But again, I felt this way before I considered myself an atheist, and before I considered myself a philosophical materialist. It had nothing to do with atheism. It had to do with feeling threatened by assimilation and by assaults on the secular character of public institutions that were humiliating and invalidating of me, personally.

I would say I became a Seeker. That is Fowler's 4th Stage, after the 3rd Stage, which is characterized by conformity to a religious ideal. This was, at first, Judaism, and then, Wicca, which was more syncretic and led to explorations of other faiths and practices (these are not always the same thing, for example, some religious, like Judaism, are more practice-oriented than oriented to what most American Christians would consider "faith," and for many "practicing" Jews, faith doesn't really enter into it much. But in Stage 4 I was a seeker and I began to integrate knowledge into a novel synthesis.

I graduated slowly from that to agnosticism and then atheism because I became fascinated by human evolution and read everything I could about evolution and the beginning of the universe and paleohistory and prehistory and cultural anthropology and sociology and biology, and after absorbing all that information I concluded that God was a failed hypothesis and ceased to believe in the "spiritual." The reason that word is in scare quotes is because I don't actually mean "concerning the human spirit" but rather the "immaterial" which is what most modern Americans take that word to mean. I think more religious people than myself have ruined that word, which is why I am using it, in this context, in scare quotes. I would say that as a materialist with a background in cultural and biological anthropology, I have a spiritual life (no scare quotes) that involves writing and hearing and reading and telling stories. My spiritual life is "narrative." But I don't use that word a lot because it's been robbed of its semantic utility. Similarly, I prefer to describe myself as a "philosophical materialist" than an "atheist" because while I am an atheist, atheism as a label isn't very useful. It only says that I disbelieve in one particular thing. But I am many things. I am a scientifically informed skeptic, with a philosophically materialist metaphysical worldview. These are things I actually do believe in.

I am also an organizer and while I think there is some utility to organizing around certain church-state separation issues, I don't think that alone can created a broad enough coalition around it without also adopting and aligning with the economic critique of the Left.

My experiences with "Organized Atheism" were brief and dramatic and traumatic and disappointing and many other regrettable things. I very briefly watched Richard Dawkins videos and posted on "Rational Response Squad" and I loathe to admit these things, but it was only for a few months when I and some online friends tired of what we were seeing and instead attending a conference for a group called CFI (Center for Inquiry) that promotes science, secular humanism, and church-state separation. They were not explicitly an atheist group although the majority of the people there were atheists and that was primarily who attended the student conferences. This was in college, I was a super senior, a stoner and a drunkard, and probably had a bit of acquired situational narcissism at the time. I was also neurologically speaking, at age 23, still bascially an adolescent (a point I will continue to harp on, as I think this aspect is lost and ignored in public discourse surrounding student activism). At 23, one tends to be an extremist. But I was uncomfortable with a lot of groupthink and quasi-cultish behavior I witnessed in "Organized Atheism" and by other aspects of the whole thing that were, frankly, alienating to a lot of more Leftist-minded people in that milieu, who later left and ceded that fetid sewer to the Dawkinites. CFI later merged with his Richard Dawkins' Foundation, and that was the point I left, because I wasn't a fan and I disliked the cult of personality surrounding him. At the time I was involved, regrettably, from 2008-2011, the general political biases of the student wing were somewhere on the centrist-liberal spectrum with a few oddball socialists like I was.

Later, so I hear, it got taken over by neoliberalism and the early stages of the Alt Right development.

I'm not surprised. The whole thing was a house of cards. Like I said, certain church-state issues are worth organizing around, but there's no real unity in atheism or even scientific skepticism. There's just not enough there and it's not inclusive enough. It's an oblique and off-centered analysis of fundamental social problems, a wrong analysis that doesn't address the inequalities that create those problems.

I regret my involvement from 2008 to 2011, but I don't beat myself up over it. I left. I'm not one of those people.

I'm in Stage 5: the "Conjunctive" Stage. At this stage I tolerate ambiguities and contradictions as a matter of maintaining a healthy mind and healthy relationships. I don't really trouble myself with people who persist in boundary violations or are unwilling to grow with me. I just don't have the emotional capacity left to deal with that. I cut them off, and I focus on the healthy relationships. I'm very satisfied with my life and if I seem like I'm not, you're not hearing my critique. I am extremely dissatisfied with our socioeconomic order. I love life. I (mostly) love people. I have a lot of faith in people. I've talked about this before, I think libertarians, and liberals, and theocrats, and fascists, and centrists and conservatives lack faith in people. They see themselves as part of a tribe or as individuals unconnected with the class struggle. I think this is incorrect but I don't think it's a moral flaw. It's a flaw of ignorance. But persistent ignorance is design. Design is agenda, and agenda is bias.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with agendas. But there is something wrong with the pretension that one has no bias.

I'm not sure Stage 6, the Universalizing Stage, really exists except in theory.

And not everyone gets through every stage. Some people never leave Stage 2 or 3. That describes most fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, unfortunately.

But I'm glad to know that there is forward movement.

It is 12:42 AM.

Good morning.

 

 

Key phrases in the Lexicon of the American Liberal-Centrist (Part I)

 "Red states." (they seem to think these are geographic realities and not statistical abstractions)

"The masses." (they never see themselves as part of this, always separate, distinct, apart, but this is not a pretension they extend to people they don't think are intellectually worthy of being treated like equals)

"Pennsyltucky" (this is specific to my region, it's a way of dismissing the entire state except the two largest and most liberal cities, as a bunch of inbred hicks who don't know what's good for them)

"Inbred hicks" (this is what they call people they want you to dismiss and hate instead of organize)

"Hicks" (same thing)

"Bunch of rednecks" (same thing... it's to dismiss their alienation, and obfuscate the difference between sympathy and empathy)

"Idealist." (This is what they call anyone who disagrees with them, as though ideals are inherently a bad or impractical thing, and not values one should fight for against whatever constitutes "reality" in that moment... notably, they use against Leftists, but not against fascists or theocrats, they tend to think of those tendencies as "legitimate modes of politics in a democracy")

"But that would be anarchy!" (GOOD.)

"Adult in the room." (What they expect you to be, and what they think they are)

"Bipartisan consensus" (this conveniently ignores the many horrible things that have been at one time or another a matter of bipartisan consensus)

"Both sides" (this is a form of positionality, where the centrist or moderate casts himself as somehow ideologically neutral with respect to power)

My Enemy, the Liberal, Who Underestimates My Alienation, and Who Underestimates My Solidarity with the Alienated

 My enemy wants to be my friend.

My enemy wants me to think I am like him.

He appeals to my intelligence, my education, my privilege, to warn me about the "unwashed masses," of which I consider myself a part. He doesn't accept the validity of that sentiment. But he wants me to validate him, to tell him he's doing good. He wants me to help him feel alright with himself and the world.

He doesn't want to believe he's a bad person. But the problem is, he still thinks it's personal.

It's really not, though.

What happens is, he flatters me. Tells me I'm smart. That I'm a leader.

I hear between his words, an exasperation with "the unwashed masses," a frustration with the inconvenience of more direct, participatory modes of democracy, and a belief that nothing positive can come of deconstructing power too consistently except "anarchy," by which he means "lawless violence."

But that is not what "anarchy" means. And I think Law is quite violent, in its way, not more or less so than lawlessness. He confuses peace with order.

And I don't have as much in common with my Enemy as he would like me to believe I do.

He underestimates my alienation, and he underestimates my solidarity with the alienated.

So, he flatters, praises, and chides me, like a knowing friend. But he is not my friend.

And when I reject his attempt to make of me, conspiratorially, with him, in his alliance, an "adult in the room," I see how he turns and declares me a naive, idealistic, woeful child.

Because, to a liberal, there are only two kinds of people: adults and children, and children do as they are told.

It is when I reject his first premise, these appeals to likeness with me, that he turns passive aggressive, and tries to project his spinelessness on me. He asks me "Don't I like my smartphone?" He has failed to appeal with reason, so he appeals now, instead, with toys. Bright, flashy, shiny things. This, he calls "progress."

But he fails to judge that I may yet define progress differently. That my vision of a more ideal society is not that we all become like him- elitists. I seek an end to elitism. I don't want to be like him. I want to drag him down to my level. I want the other people, the ones he dismissively ignores because he thinks they won't understand him, to hear his words, and for him to know he is understood as someone who sees himself as better than they are, as wiser, and more deserving of authority.

This Enemy is called the Liberal. Every thing he says today about Black Lives Matter, his forebears said about MLK, Jr. Everything he says about trans rights, has already been said about other groups he used to concern-troll into accepting their subordination.

He is not to be trusted.

He thinks he would make a good cop. A good politician. A good judge. He believes so much in his education and apartness that he thinks he is immune to bias or groupthink. He weaponizes rationality in service of the unreasonable. He weaponizes pity in service of the status quo, and he calls it Love.

But this is not the Love of equals. It is the love of a master for a pet. It is the love of a self-absorbed parent for the child whose autonomy and dignity they neglect. It is the love of the owner for the slave.

And when you lay this bare, when you point it out in no uncertain terms, this infantilizing paternalism, you can hear him turn on you. When you refuse to repay the flattering, when you do not give his intellectual and cultural elitism the due he thinks he deserves, he snaps. And he reveals himself as who he truly is: the self-proclaimed "adult in the room."

We need fewer people like that. As few as possible. Zero, preferably.

I have no patience for them anymore. I cut them from my life like thread. Every time I have let my guard down and ignored the yellow flags and let someone like this into my life, I have regretted it. And there are people I've known for a long time, who I respect much less, now, that I see him in them.

The next time someone tries to appeal to you as though you are the "adults in the room," figure out that person's sacred Bourgeois cultural cow. Find it,  torch it, and watch how they react. That sacred cow might be aesthetic or it might be practical, but whatever it turns out to be, believe me, it is there. Waiting. And it's fucking ugly in the face. Set it on fire.

Then you will know where they truly stand. Then, you will know your Enemy.