by James True
CHAPTER FOUR
Love Trumps Nothing
ARE YOU BUYING the election hate? It’s a buyer’s market. I saw a post-election protest in my hometown that was a cornucopia of fresh organic, “Love Trump’s Hate.” These people were beautiful. I knew these people. They were gone now. It was a potluck of faces wading in the flotsam and jetsam of concern and eye droop. Safety pins declaring safe-zones and soul sisters selling messages urging people to love Trump’s hate. Wait, what? If these people were peaceful, why did it feel angry? If these people were love, why were they activating “Love Trump’s Hate?”
As I charted my way through the drowning crowd, I locked eyes with some of their children. They clung like castaways on sunken shoulders. Their needy eyes were asking me if I could help their mother. I saw the future of our nation weaning on emotional dissonance. Under fascisms brilliant rainbow, on this canvas in four dimensions, curtained by oak trees underneath a purple moon, a symphony of people played “Love Trump’s Hate.” This was the most attractive village mob I had ever seen.
Emotional fascism is a doctrine disguised as a feeling dictated through a collective. This doctrine is enforced throughout the hive using virtue signals and passive shame. Those who mimic are rewarded with energy. Admiration is a commodity. Those who do not reflect the doctrine are neglected i.e. shamed. Emotional fascism is an invisible agenda of emotions everyone has been auto-subscribed. This emotional agenda comes from outside the body. It is implanted like a commercial jingle. There is no self-soothing since the emotion is externally controlled.
You find emotional fascism in safety pin bowls passed around at food co-ops after the election. You see it when you buy a ticket to a Broadway musical only to be held hostage by a colony of actors scolding their patron. Innocent travelers meet it during a traffic protest on the freeway. Self-employed students see it when they find classes canceled for a cry day. This secret handshake of assumed devastation serves as a golden ticket for poor behavior. Emotional fascism is slander for cookies. It centralizes a shame vortex and begins to feed a pseudo hive. People start to ask each other with their eyes “How do I feel now?” All of this implanted from a corporate slogan “Love Trump’s Hate”.
I can imagine seeing the energy in the raw as it flows through this crowd’s atmosphere. This is not a vortex of love and compassion. They were up to their waist insisting they held the highest ground. But, it wasn’t high ground. The Love Trumps Hate event presented as solidarity showed itself as a silent parade for wounded cock strutting. One parent “pulled my kids from school.” Someone raised her with “it put my mom in the hospital.” It was as if a thousand soccer players cried, “Foul!” as they wriggled on the ground for attention.
Everybody loves melodrama except the kids who don’t know who's pretending. How do you explain a contra-dance of virtue? A child overhears mom say she is devastated. A child learns this must be the definition of devastation. All they could see was negative energy masquerading as positive energy sucking all the other negative energy pretending to be positive energy. Their parents were tuning forks wrapped in skin. They were vibrating their children’s emotions into a cauldron of drama and darkness. Dipping their soon to be flaming torches as they whispered back, “it’ll be okay.”
Who could wonder why this country is roaming with hollow people. Zombies are trying their best to mark themselves on the public yardstick of conviction. This behavior is not new. Who has the tallest ten-gallon hat? Who’s got the curviest petticoat? This posturing has gotten tricky. We’ve mingled our estrogen with testosterone. It’s so confusing being anything. You can have passion, but not too much passion. The only time women may fart is in yoga. The only time men may scream is at some primal retreat. We have arrived at an epic vista overlooking a foamy ocean of citizens all scrambling to be king of Mount Virtue.
We’ve lost our core. We no longer command our boundaries. We ask the community to define them for us. It’s the role of government to provide us a booster seat at the table. We’ve convinced ourselves we are selfish. We compete for the privilege to tell each other we’re not worthy. We sip from the sugar found inside the lips of pity. This will never sustain us across life’s big ocean. It gives us just enough to keep hovering in the breeze. We are trapped in a cage of wings. We have reduced ourselves to a nation of vampires. We define everyone’s boundaries but our own.
This happened when we decided we were no longer capable of independence. We’ve decided we’re not to be trusted. We’re too racist, too sexist, too ignorant, too naïve, and too human. We’ve delegated our stewardship to the E.P.A. We’ve farmed out our compassion to F.E.M.A. We’ve bowed to the 30-foot P.C. Gorilla that kidnapped our precious lady liberty. We’re afraid of the wall. We’re afraid of not having one. We’re going nowhere as fast as we possibly can. Our disgruntled toes keep squishing us deeper in this shitty pudding.
Love trumps nothing. Love has no enemy. Love is not here to coddle us about how we’re the good guys. Love does not call for the obedience of minions. Love is not here to take home a democratic trophy. Love comes when you find yourself broken. You only know love when you need it. Personally. Privately. A political movement has no place co-opting love’s definition. Nor should it tarnish love atop a slogan that closes with the word hate. Hate was your idea. You insisted it belonged here. You carry signs to prove it. Love is our word. Love trumps nothing. Love would never work that way.
CHAPTER FIVE
Patriarchy
A FEW WEEKS ago I found myself defending some statements on my perspective as a man. I was defending this position to a woman. I chuckled at the absurdity of my situation. I was validating my own gender’s perspective. I was giving away my power. This is the undisclosed side effect of today’s social justice. We are uninstalling the freedom of self-definition.
We bought the idea that it’s selfish to have our own boundaries. We’ve replaced them with invisible fencing buried in our culture. Society’s man gathers admiration by flogging his ego in public. This turns the act masochistic. How can we reward someone for enjoying humiliation? Men should be hunting virtue instead of gathering it.
The woman was convinced we live in a patriarchy and it was my fault. She was granting me the privilege to pay all women reparations. This is the blueprint laid out like a school uniform: 1) Declare me a sexist, or broken. 2) Declare me too blind to see it. 3) Offer a path to salvation by shaming myself publicly. Until I did these things, I was perpetuating the patriarchy. This incident reminded me of what I learned in College. They convinced me my manhood would always corrupt my thoughts. The mountains I climb in life would only be the result of my white skin and phallus. I asked her if we live in a patriarchy, why am I missing the tip of my penis. We are mutilated at birth. The cutting of our pagan tail keeps us entrained to a village. We pass the time with the games of Shakedown Street. Man’s dreams are so much bigger than a pillow. Let culture’s opinion bounce off of you. A free man is shame-proof. He cuts the strings from his boyhood. No one does this for him. If he leaves them hanging, anyone can take control.
Make your definition brave in the face of tribal fascism. Always acknowledge the energy you see. Remind yourself that hiding truth is a form of stealing. Challenge your peers as you watch them dip into intellectual bigotry. Advocate for anything that feels emotionally unpopular. Experience a group pushing back. Feel the power of their opinion push against you. Put yourself in a circle of wild indians and let them shake you free of dogma. The dervish of your will is the egg of manhood. A man needs these punches and claws. How else will he know how thick his flesh is?
We are here on this earth to feel things like rejection. Our life has a choreography of failure. Mortality is an oboe in our fingers. How does it move you? Do you waste your measures in a heap on the floor? Can your lips feel the tickle of the reed through your breath? Fill yourself with heart’s warm pulsing. Become more than reptile wrapped in a mammal. Your ego is the throne of identity. Be your own king and champion.
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CHAPTER SIX
Carbon Footprint
A LONG TIME ago, in the presidential debate, Al Gore told a mother he was going to fix television for her children. He wasn’t offering to repair her equipment; he was offering to fix what she got on the screen and from the speakers. I was thoroughly indoctrinated at the time as a liberal. I was watching the debate as a demonstration of my loyalty. Al Gore was my favorite wrestler. The moment I heard Gore make her that promise, I was smacked in the face with a metal folding chair.
The mother went home feeling better. She tucked herself into her bathrobe and sat in her recliner and waited patiently. Her kids remained refugees in front of the television while she waited. She waited, and waited. But the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll kept dripping out of the screen and onto the carpet. Day after day, heaving breasts and camel-toe kept spewing mental yogurt. Behind television’s glass curtain, a giant pulsing electron gun was firing photons at the speed of light into the delicate rods and cones of her children. She kept waiting on Al Gore’s promise.
Al Gore is a freelance messiah trolling for disciples. Environmentalism is a religion of virtue and admiration is the false idol. A social marketplace develops around this kind of honey. Like cash; virtue is a commodity to be brokered. It’s why Al Gore pivoted from fixing television to fixing the environment. Al Gore is a psychopath and a vampire. The archetype of the carbon footprint corroded America’s self-esteem for his benefit. The acid from his lips still drips in textbooks. Overnight, millions of American’s pictured their chalky-black fingerprints spoiling a beech of virgin white sand. He declared our every breath a poison. Climate data has been manipulated to serve a purpose. We believe it because no one dares ask if it is true. The spellcraft of shame bypasses scrutiny in the name of compassion. Al Gore was there to feed on that vortex.
The wizardry of virtue will always flow from the lips of the black magician. Convincing sheep they are deficient makes it easy to lead them to slaughter. The key to indoctrination is the removal of confidence in your perceptions. Your faith in your ability to discern truth is the biggest threat to the black magician. Statements like “Check your privilege” always mean “stop being so confident.” To live a truly moral life, one must reject society’s dominion over what you deem true. The most effective way to help our environment is learning to spot the lies. Declare yourself a tribe of one.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Babel Virus
WHAT IF WE discovered that language was a virus installed in your head? Imagine your mind inoculated from the curse of comprehension. What would our thoughts look like without the clothing of words? Mammals are highly empathic creatures with an elaborate sharing interface. The brain burns most of our precious calories on the interpretation of others. An fMRI shows two minds reacting identically when one subject is exposed to a facial expression. We share someone’s live feed by subscribing to each other’s feelings.
A baby boy is born. His emotional software comes preinstalled from the factory. He has no language. He has no concept of shape. He knows the pain, and he knows its absence. Feeding is a built-in function, not a skill learned in first grade. His mind is purely irrational - motivated by instinct and intuition. This irrational state is one of pure connection and vulnerability. Imagine the freedom in a mind with no language. Before words, ideas were blurred fish swimming in the stream of consciousness. They had no associations or edges. With language installed, our words are a million transparent cups jumbling the river.
Corporatism needs men with words that are predictable and linear. Man serves this system best as a tiny reliable motor. But our deeper intuition is a sail harnessing the raw power of emotion. Man can be more of a canvas than an engine. This kind of power can only be experienced outside the harbor. Without a destination, the mind can justify the ‘ridiculous’ journey. When the mind is free of language, the concept of rationality can be treated as just another opinion for parsing the world. From this free space, we remember that language itself is a figment of the imagination as is the very concept of objectivity.
Imagine this spring a small startup discovers a cure for the babel virus. New technology is developed that breaks the world’s ceiling. The world will not end that day. But the illusion will change as a curtain of language is opened above us. The new technology is applied like a patch behind both ears. It vibrates into the skull and blocks the language center of the brain. It’s a white noise filter for comprehension. The wearer can still hear sounds, but the words are no longer connected to their former meaning. Likewise, the words we hear in our head are rendered superfluous. This technology makes emotions clearer. We start to see a temperament emerge from the vibration of the speaker versus the verbiage. By paralyzing our language center, the mind loses its ability to command through linear reason. The brain is rendered speechless. Our eyes can finally tune into the direct vibration of another person’s emotional state. A more profound emotive ego takes hold in us as the mind loses its stilts and falls into the frothing tide of heart. We emerge from the tide, a captain of intuition.
There are several side effects of this technology. One of the most profound is the discovery of emotional telepathy. For the first time, we begin to understand each other above the chirping. Our clear minds allow us to experience a new fidelity in the silence. Our entire body becomes the listening device. We discover an inner being to man as a tuning fork for emotion. Conversations turn into sessions of beholding. We are filled by and with the presence of each other. This kind of communion has no fingers to grip an agenda. Unlike the one-lane bridge of speaking and listening, emotional telepathy opens an asynchronous connection.
We’ve had these abilities all along but our mind was suffering from is own babel. The electric language was too loud. On the brain’s surface, the virus called the Tower of Babel has fallen. Its barbed stinger freed as blood rushes into the crevices and replenishing our gray tributaries. Our life slips back into a marinade of the heart’s wet pulsing. The bellow of breath returns to stoke the engine. We replace the human electric motor with steam.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Agnes, the Wise Wife of Keith
AGNES SAMPSON, THE Wise Wife of Keith, awoke in the beautiful cobblestone town of Castlehill, Scotland. Agnes had been chained to a wall in the standing position for weeks with steel prongs forced into her mouth and a rope around her neck. Agnes was a midwife, herbalist and town elder. She pled guilty to attempted ship sinking by witchcraft. The testimony against Agnes came from Gillis Duncan who claimed she saw Agnes summon a violent tempest late one night. Agnes, under cover of her storm, crawled up the keel of a ship and rocked it violently. One of the passengers on that ship was bringing his bride back to their new home in Scotland. It was purely by God’s grace that he survived the demonic terrorism of Agnes Sampson. For you see, that man was Scotland’s young King.
On Jan 16th, 1591, Agnes was shaved from head to toe and tied to the stake. Because of the progressive mercy of the town, a tourniquet was used to choke her unconscious before the fires would burn her body. The execution cost the town $7.76. It was a Wednesday. The 31-year-old King had presided over her trial. He found Agnes’ confession to be somewhat forced but still acceptable. It was his first witch burning. It would not be the last. For the next six years, hundreds of witches were miraculously discovered and tried all over Scotland. The King felt beset from all sides by the devil and was moved to write his first book, Demonology. In this philosophical work, the reasons, methods, and justifications for witch hunting are outlined, decreed, and sanctioned by God and King. This book was well received all over Europe and the new Americas and used as evidence for the conviction of over three thousand more cases of witchcraft. Demonology was a best seller. Young Shakespeare used it for the three sisters of Macbeth. This King had more to say to his people. In 1604, King James would begin his second literary opus as managing editor of the Bible.
Terrorism and piety have both been used effectively to control a populace. One is a political
motivation, and the other is a spiritual one. Both leverage fear but from opposite poles. It’s important to remember that the people who tortured and murdered Agnes Sampson thought they were right and decent people. Some were patriotic and believed in the grace and divinity of their government. Others were motivated by a quest for purification. Regardless, the populace approved of its reflection. Society could do no wrong in the people’s eyes simply because they were a part of society. Its members could be found guilty, but society itself is always good. The absurdity of this dogma is why we repeat our history. When has a mob looked at its behavior and thought, “Wow, we are evil.” That’s not how evil works. Evil thinks itself is good. Evil makes itself righteous.
Evil gains power in the sanctity of its own opinion.
Government is not an umbrella of righteousness. Government is the child of the people. Children without guidance will steal things. Children without supervision will hurt others. Even today, as we adorn each other with Medals of Freedom, fifty-five people rot in prison in Cuba that’s so illegal we can’t house it in our own country. We are fully justified because we are on the side of “freedom.” This freedom is important enough to violate it globally while taking it away from our citizens in the name of preserving it. This happened because a leader convinced his population they were in danger. On this day in history, Agnes was murdered so that everyone could feel safer. Nine of the fifty-five prisoners in Gitmo died to make us feel safer. Did it work?