We will not miss you because we believe that you, like Ted Kennedy, who will soon be following your footsteps into that dark, endless night, participated in the betrayal of America. Kennedy will not be missed because he sold Americans out to the alien armies who have invaded the American homeland. You will not be missed because you went over to the Dark Side of American politics to serve as George Bush’s spin meister (though you had already sold your soul to the neoconservative propaganda machine long before you bartered it to George Bush and company).
George Bush said that you were loved in the White House. Maybe you were (though I can't imagine love dwelling in such a den of conspiracies against American people), but the White House is a very small place that has become an object of loathing to millions of Americans, especially under the reign of the Bush administration, which has continued to sell out America to Mexico, Israel, and U.S. war industries. Now America is losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and her towns and cities to Mexico and other nations south of the border. Anyone in his or her right mind knows that the Mexicans and other Hispanics invading America are first and foremost loyal to their home countries (see WeHateGringos.com); thus, those who support them support the enemies of America.
You were nothing more than just another propaganda minister for George Bush, whose job it was to give a positive spin (Snow job) on Bush’s nefarious policies that have continued the process of America’s self-destruction. The President lauded what he felt was your ability to bring a certain civility to a very contentious job, but contention and consternation are to be expected when you are defending the devil, even to a press paid not to offend news media owners, advertisers, or consumers of the sanitized news presented by America's occasionally contentious journalists. I’m sure the job of being Hitler’s propaganda minister couldn’t have been more compromising.
Sadly, the end of your life will always be associated with George Bush. Apparently you, the so-called philosopher, never read Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illich or Sartre’s No Exit or Dirty Hands; otherwise, you would not have wasted the final year of the supposedly mature years of your life attempting to make a bad man look good. It’s hard to believe that you ever read Plato’s condemnation of the sophists; otherwise, you would not have become one yourself. You, like your mentor Rush Limbaugh and all the other hack sophistic rhetoricians who defend Republican and neoconservative evildoers for the sake of money, power, and glory, will live on, but only as a minor footnote to an infamous administration. (Say hello to Herr Koebbels, another lover of shock and awe.)
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Teenage Shooters, Immigration, and Other Melancholy Musings
Heeding Cassandra
I just read Teenage Shooters, the final novel of Travis Barrett’s Immigration Trilogy, which is concerned mostly with the declining state of the American nation. The book is filled with humor, but overall a very melancholy read. It is a book that will make American readers laugh at every page yet weep at the reality it reveals. That reality is the dismal, depressing state of the country. Americans and their European ancestors struggled for over 300 years to build the country and this July 4th look at state it is in. George Bush celebrates the surrender of America to aliens that are invading from every corner of the world, all the while Americans struggle keep their homes and gas in their cars and American soldiers continue to die in a fruitless war.
Barrett clearly associates immigration, legal and illegal, with America’s decline, but he also explores other causes of America’s having been rapidly transformed into a country quite unlike the America that existed before the end of the Second World War. Barrett is not rebel or crusader. He is a Cassandra-like fatalist. You might recall that she warned the Trojans about the Trojan Horse and foresaw the destruction of Troy. Barrett equates the Trojan Horse with immigration and the destruction of Troy with the destruction of America. He understands that the American people have neither sufficient will nor insight to save their country. He acknowledges that many groups of Americans do recognize the dangers, but too many Americans are complacently apathetic. Groups like Mothers Against Illegal Aliens and the Minute Man Project are doing the best they can to counter the alien invasion, but they will eventually fail because they struggle not only against alien armies but against the alien-loving U.S. Government, businessmen, and other politically powerful special interest organizations.
He also understands the threat of commercialized popular culture to the moral integrity of America, but that Americans are unable to counter the threat in a country in which the dollar (as devalued as it might be) is king, even among those, like George Bush, who claim allegiance to the king of kings, Jesus Christ. Religion in America has become just another business and a mask worn by the wealthy to give the appearance of righteousness as they swindle ordinary Americans into debt. Like the radio commentator Mike Savage, with whom Barrett otherwise has very little in common, Barrett sees America as a toboggan driven by alien sympathizers, political shysters, Wall Street swindlers, and Hollywood conjurers down the icy slope of American ignorance, complacency, and gullibility toward a dark and unavoidable abyss of social, cultural, and economic chaos. According to Barrett we are living during America’s twilight. It’s is a sad time for Americans, though still better than that which awaits those young Americans who will soon find themselves to be strangers in a strange alien land.
America as a Throwaway Society
A driving element in all those changes seems to be that America is basically a throwaway society, one that is willing to toss anything for a profit. Its tolerance of illegal immigration, which has transformed the cultural and ethnic landscape of hundreds if not thousands of American communities, is just one illustration of America’s pecuniary utilitarianism: the view that if X makes a profit then X is good, regardless of the social, cultural, and aesthetic costs. The official justification of this particular transformation has been that multiculturalism is a good thing, as if multiculturalism is a societal state to which every culture should aspire, when in fact most of the world’s cultures seek to retain a unified cultural identity, what might be called a cultural room of their own, that room being the territorial limits that bounds one’s culture.
Tossing the Homeland
No group has recognized the threat of cultural dissolution when a homeland is lacking than the Jewish people(who ironically have worked very hard to unravel the traditional fabric of American culture). And Muslims have shown that they are willing to die by the thousands in order to protect the integrity of their cultural homelands. Only America seems to believe that one’s homeland is for sale if the price is right. (In Europe the surrender to multiculturalism seems inspired by leftist ideology that believes traditional culture is a ploy for enslaving the proletariat and by a Jewish inspired guilt complex.) It seems Americans learned nothing from the noble Native Americans who fought tragically to retain their homelands. America’s disregard for the cultural territory of the Native Americans is illustrated by the Dawes Act of 1887 which authorized the division and privatization of communally held Indian lands. Because of Henry Laurens Dawes (certainly a name that will live forever in infamy), Native Americans lost about 90 million acres (360,000 km²) of treaty land (“Henry Laurens Dawes,” Wikipedia). Now Americans are discovering that their government is just as indifferent toward their homeland as it has been toward the homelands of the Native Americans. And let us not forget that the deeper motivation is always economic, in this case the importation of cheap muscle and brain power for our alien-loving corporations.
Who Says Multiculturalism is Inherently Good?
Multiculturalism is usually presented as a self-evident Platonic ideal, the truth of which cannot be question without being labeled a racist. What is usually left unaddressed publically is the question of who are sponsoring and benefitting from the multicultural agenda. Certainly the business community and immigrations groups have been vocal proponents of the multiculturalization of American society and have effectively utilized American politicians to promote that agenda. The one group that seems voiceless but whose way of life and whose communities are most affected is the American people.
George Bush’s 4th of July Celebration of Multicultural America
It was already noted that George Bush celebrated this July 4th by welcoming aliens at a naturalization ceremony (that should have been called the Great American Giveaway). July 4th is supposed to be a celebration of the birth of a nation, not a funeral for traditional America. The ceremony can be seen as a surrender ceremony in which the traitorous U.S. Government turns America over to aliens while thousands more continue to enter the country illegally. Bush said something to the effect that “America was a nation of creed, not a race.” Once again idiot Bush gets it wrong. A creed is a set of principles, the implication being that by adopting a set of principles a person is suddenly becomes an authentic member of another culture, as if adopting the communist principles of China and learning Chinese I would suddenly become a Chinaman, which is absolute nonsense. It’s true that America is not a race. What it is, is a historically defined culture that is quickly being unraveled by the aliens who come to America to make a buck and escape some social-cultural hellhole but will never be Americans because they are not at one with America’s traditional culture and history.
A native of Khartoum who was at the ceremony said she was "proud to be an American." That is not the issue. The issue is that millions of true Americans don’t want her or her people here because they want to preserve their homeland and not see it transformed into alienized nation. The other thing is that this person is attending an American college and has four children. Who is paying for all that? Her husband (who is not mentioned)? The fact is, these people establish their ethnic enclaves and really don’t what to have anything to do with America other than to have political freedom, milk the system for its benefits, make money, and go shopping (all of which was made possible by the blood, sweat, and tears of real Americans).
In addition, the woman from Khartoum probably receives medical care millions of Americans can’t. And what about Khartoum? Well, it is a city in Sudan, a nation of Muslims. Now what does Islam have to do with America other than the Muslims of the world hating our guts, like millions of the aliens who enter America from south of the border. (Is the U.S. government breeding Muslim insurgents and translators to be used to overthrow governments in the Middle East, as it did in Iraq? Check out Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister and American puppet. (See “Iraqi National Congress,” Wikipedia.)
But why should millionaire Bush care? He can hide out at the ranch and feel good about himself by thinking that a handful of aliens love him. No matter the millions of Americans who consider him a traitor. The reality of the immigration debacle is that it’s going to divide the country to the same degree as it was divided during the Civil War, and that wound never fully healed even though both sides were Americans. Imagine the division between the Americans and the Aliens by the end of the century. Just giving them a piece of paper doesn’t make them Americans in the eyes of Americans. Ironically, millions of aliens born in this country don’t see themselves as Americans, but as Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, etc. I mean to think La Raza is proAmerican is just plain idiocy. What America will become is a North American version of South Africa.
The woman from Khartoum also said "that when she looked at the cast on the stage—Bush, Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) and a gaggle of federal judges in black robes—she saw her American dream for her four children, ages 7 to 12, who watched.” That might be her dream, but it’s a nightmare for Americans because they know when that happens America will be no more, that they will have lost their cultural home.
Barack Hussein Obama: The First President of America as an Alien Nation
Already, millions of Americans feel that way about Sen. Barack Hussein Obama (a long ways from George Washington or John Adams), not because he is black (he really has no connection with American blacks) but because his father was a Kenyan. To millions of Americans, Obama represents a big step toward the alien overthrow of America, and there is no reason to think that these Americans will be any happier about that occurring than the Native Americans were about the Europeans confiscating Native American homelands or the Palestinians have been about the Jewish usurpation of Palestine.
And let’s be clear about one thing. The issue is not racial but cultural. All Americans with a brain (thus excluding those who still support George Bush) know that Obama is a brilliant man. But his roots are alien, and thus so are his sympathies. When he becomes president he will push further open the floodgates to that sea of aliens clamoring to invade America, gates that have already been unlocked by traitorous American politicians such as Kennedy, McCain, and Bush. In that sense, Obama will not be a traitor, like his rival John McCain, because as his name indicates he is already one of them.
Of course, the government will say that’s the law, so you will just have to accept the alienization of the country. That’s true, but we don’t have to like it, no more than the Indians or the Palestinians liked the laws that opened their homelands to invasion.
Commercialization and the Corruption of the American Soul
Though Barrett’s trilogy addresses the immigration problem in great detail, he also points out that the consumer industries, especially the entertainment industry (music, movies, video games, television, and the Internet), have also rapidly transformed America into a culture of consumption, a kind of “hyper-reality” that is connected to nothing deeper than manufactured images and momentary pleasures offered by consuming a Big Mac or the latest Hollywood movie. The television show CSI-Las Vegas does a pretty good job of depicting the weird rootlessness of an American society adrift in a cultural sea of manufactured images and activities—all of which are designed to make a profit for some behind-the-scenes Big Shot. Barrett, an obvious romantic, claims that nature can provide an anodyne to this cultural rootlessness.
Romanticism: A Missed Opportunity for America’s Salvation
This role of nature is illustrated in the Sean Penn movie Into the Wild, which depicts a young American’s quest for some connection to a reality that is primordially substantial and enduring. For Christopher McCandless that reality resides in the magnificence of nature. Perhaps an even better example of the cultural alienation that young Americans often feel is Timothy Treadwell in The Man Who Loved Grizzlies, since he seems to have been more thoroughly adrift in American popular culture than McCandless—whose pursuit seems to have been initially more intellectual. In either case, both these young men were true romantics who thought they had found in nature a closer and more spiritual connection to reality than could be found midst the fluid artificiality of modern America. (Both these men are mentioned in Barrett’s Gringo and Teenage Shooters.)
This sense of the country’s having lost its bearings (or marbles if you like) is not new. American intellectuals and artists have always thought that rapid social and cultural change would undermine what is best about the American way of life. Thomas Jefferson worried that the shift from an agricultural society to an industrialized society would harm Americans in many ways—spiritually and materially. His thinking foreshadowed the concerns of various 19th century romantic philosophers and artists. In America these concerns were most profoundly expressed by writers such as Cooper, Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Bryant, and Melville and painters such as those of the Hudson River School: Durand, Cole, and Church. These men had a profound vision of what America could have become: a deeply spiritual society whose spiritual roots were planted in nature herself, a vision America seems to have, for the most part, lost sight of. To my mind the consequences of the loss of the romantic vision are effectively expressed in the paintings of Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper. Sheeler’s American Landscape powerfully illustrates industrialization’s transformation of the American landscape. (To see Sheeler’s paintings: google Charles Sheeler— Bert Christensen's CyberSpace Gallery.) Most famously Hopper’s Nighthawks captures the lonely alienation that often occurs midst an American urban landscape populated by strangers.
And for what was the romantic vision for America discarded? Mostly profit—that driving force behind America’s pecuniary utilitarianism. And, Ironically, Americans assume that in their pursuit of profit Christianity gives them license to manhandle (literally) nature in any way they see fit. In the Christian perspective nature (e.g., those dark woods) is seen as the dwelling place of untamed, evil beings, such as Indians and grizzly bears, to be eradicated and their wild habitats transformed into farms and factories, and cities and suburbs. Furthermore, as God’s gift to humanity, nature has only extrinsic or utilitarian value, to be determined by its human possessor. A tree’s value, for example, is to be found only in the various uses humans make of it: a source of lumber, shade, or recreation. Finally, the absolute value of a transcendent God denigrates the value of all worldly things, except for humans, who are fortunate enough to carry within them a spark of the divine, a spark that justifies their lording over the rest of creation (including non-believing humans who have forfeited their divine spark). Thus there really is no reason to preserve any original aspect of nature or even one’s own culture as long as a church remains among the ruins to serve as a portal to the Absolute.
The French Alternative: Giving Up War for Peace, Beauty, and National Well-Being
Barrett seems to think that France is one nation that has done a pretty good job of maintaining a balance between a love of nature and the economic need for industry. Those of you who have traveled through France (escaping moribund America for a while) know that it is a nation that has been cared for as if it were a garden, which I suppose it is. It is also a nation that imposes aesthetic standards for its artificial environments, failing only when the attempt to be modern couldn’t be resisted, in particular the high-rise warehousing projects created for low-income mostly immigrant families. (France also suffers from some ugly newly developed suburbs, but nothing compared to the suburban sprawl found in America.) America has been more in love with personal freedom and profit than with the beauty of art and nature.
In addition, the French somewhere along the way decided that they would not allow religion to justify the depredation of nature, because they believe, as the romantics did, that nature is humankind’s primordial source of spiritual and aesthetic inspiration. Part of the answer may be that industrialization came later to France, enabling the French to learn from the mistakes that occurred during Great Britain’s reckless pursuit of industrialization and from the wisdom offered by romantic poets such as Blake and Wordsworth and novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton) and Charles Dickens (Hard Times), even better Friedrich Engels’ (The Condition of the Working Class in England).
America’s Choice: Global Intimidation and Cultural Inanity
A common theme in Barrett’s novels is that America has thrown away or left unrealized that which would have made America a truly great nation culturally. Instead, it has allowed itself to morph into something quite politically grotesque, not so unlike Russia during its Soviet phase. During the last half century one reason all things American had such appeal was the idea that America was a beneficent force on the global scene. However, that is no longer the case. Since the Vietnam War America has increasingly been seen as a global bully motivated by greed and a religiosity no less fanatical and even more weird (to nonbelievers) than Islam. Let’s face it. America is supposed to have progressed beyond the Dark Ages of its puritanical past (depicted so well in Nathanial Hawthorne’s “The Maypole of Merry Mount”). As a result America’s popular culture is becoming as amusing as a Disneyland theme park in North Korea. The fun and games can’t compensate for the bad news waiting outside. Or imagine a Bush-World theme park where armed Mr. Smith-like CIA agents accompanying riders on the Jungle Cruise only to discover they are actually on the Extraordinary Rendition Ride to an Egyptian torture chamber. Such an idea would never have occurred to me before the Bushian neocons took control of the country. So, disappointingly to everyone, America has become a Hollywood Happy Face : ) mask superimposed upon a Resident-Evil-like reality: AMERICA UMBRELLA CORPORATION, specializing in developing, producing, and using exotic weapon systems. That monstrous face behind the Happy Face of American pop culture has been recently a montage of faces, those of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and other infamous shock-and-awe neoconservatives.
I for one am amazed at how forgiving Europeans can be of America’s heavy-handed misbehavior—such as starting an unnecessary war that has inflamed a billion already religiously inflamed Muslims. Recently I attended a fete in the French Alps. I saw one little girl wearing a T-shirt with an American flag; watched a dance club perform line-dancing, its members decked out in cowboy hats and boots; and listened to two French bands play American rock-‘n-roll classics until the wee hours of the morning. The explanation for this magnanimity seems to be that the French people don’t believe you should hold Americans responsible for the idiocies of their government, a notion based on the apparent truism that governments tend to ignore the needs and desires of the people they represent. I mean just look at the poor British suffering under Tony Blair and now under Gordon Brown—both Bushian sycophants. And at present the French have added their president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to that list. We will just have to wait and see if he can get off his constituency’s shit list, or eventually sink up to his nose like his buddy and creepy wannabe G-Man George Bush.
The Retreat of Academe
To the rest of the world, the America Empire is undergoing a rapid decline and fall into cultural, intellectual, and political irrelevancy, like the Soviet Empire during its death throes. However, because of its huge arsenal of Star-Wars-like weapons of mass destruction, America will remain a source of fear, trembling, and loathing long after it becomes intellectually and culturally irrelevant. It will be respected for its might, not its insight. It really is remarkable how small and timid the voice of America’s academic community has become—unlike during the sixties. Perhaps what happened to Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who suggested that the people who worked in the World Trade Center somehow provoked the 9-11 attacks(when in fact better explanations are American troops stationed on holy Saudi Arabian soil and America’s unconditional support of Israel), sent a chill through university communities across the nation, so much so that barely a whisper of criticism came from them when George Bush embarked upon his disastrous war with Iraq.
Almost cowardly they apparently consider tenure more important than voicing their opinions on such weighty matters as war and peace (at least until it becomes safe to do so). Ironically, tenure is intended to encourage free and open expression of ideas without fear of retribution. You may recall how America turned against the gutsy Dixie Chicks for criticizing Bush’s War. As it turned out, the Chicks (and the French) were right, and they will be remembered for risking retribution in order to voice their opinions (unlike America’s cowardly members of congress (with the exception of the eloquent Sen. Byrd), members of the press, and cloistered academes). Too often Americans pay a big price for being pridefully stupid. It’s almost as if university professors have never heard of Socrates. We expect such behavior from our craven politicians and corporatized press, but not from those who claim to be lovers of the truth, especially at a time when a deranged quasi-dictator like George Bush is able to come to power in spite of America’s democratic system and transform two nations into testing grounds for America’s military hardware and operations.
These same educators have also been silent on America’s having aligned itself unconditionally with the nation of Israel, which has resulted in that tiny and otherwise insignificant nation becoming a major source of global instability. Imagine an tubercular homeless man violently forcing his way onto a crowded morning commuter bus, spitting in the face of the driver when he demands that the man pay the same fare as the other riders. Once situated at the middle of the crowded bus the infected man begins sneezing repeatedly, laughing as the other riders when they turn away and tell him to cover his mouth. Now you have an image of Israel among the world’s community of nations. And how far has the disease spread? Apparently, September 1, 2001, it had reached New York and March 30, 2003 it began spreading into Iraq where it has infected every man, woman, and child.
The Israeli Disease
Today the Israeli disease has become a global epidemic, threatening especially the European nations who guiltily supported the illegal and unethical creation of the State of Israeli on lands belonging to the Palestinians (supposedly justified by Biblical stories that have as much validity as the Elder Scrolls) while foolishly welcoming with open arms the very people the Israeli disease infected with hatred toward any supporter of the State of Israel, members of the Islamic faith. But the infection has also spread, with the help of the U.S., to Islamic nations such as Pakistan.
The nations that seem most safe are those who callously yet wisely turn away diseased immigrants fleeing homelands infected by a host of other diseases—crime, poverty, environmental degradation, inadequate health care, over-population, armed militias, decrepit or destroyed infrastructure, primitive or nonexistent education system, and so on. Many of the uninfected nations have also been able to distance themselves from the “Jewish problem” because they are fortunate enough not to be ensnared in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. For example, Japan’s relations with Israel involve primarily economic and environmental interests. Interestingly, there are only about 600 Israeli nationals living in Japan. The number of Jews with Israeli citizenship living in the U.S. is probably a million or more (there were 300,000 to half million Israeli born Jews living in America during the 1980s—google “Israelis in the United States: Reconciling Estimates with NJPS”). Had there been only 600 Jew living the in the U.S., undoubtedly America could have avoided a number of social, political, and military quagmires (certainly 9-11 and the Iraq War). And if the State of Israel had not existed today would Iran be interested in owning nuclear weapons? Probably not. And why has America cared more about the welfare of the Jews than about genuine Americans (there was fewer than 3000 Jews in America before 1800—google “Jewish Population of the United States”) such as American blacks and Native Americans? With friends like the Jews one doesn’t need enemies, but gets them anyway.
One could even argue that once the Cold War was over, the world would finally get itself on a non-confrontational track, maybe even with the help of American leadership. Then Israel slouched into prominence by miraculously collaring and using America as its pit-bull (imagine a Chucky in Child’s Play with a killer pit-bull the size of Godzilla and you get a pretty good picture of those two homies Israel and American). So that now instead of becoming a wise shepherd inspiring other nations to improve the state of the world, America has become an object of fear and loathing and at present the greatest threat to the world’s future. This is not to say that some other country, such as Israel, China, Russia, or Pakistan, won’t be the country to light the fuse that will set off a series of events that will return humanity to the age of Cro-Magnon man. Such is the world we live in. I am only saying that right now with George Bush at the wheel and Israel’s foot pushing the peddle to the metal, America itself has become just another big problem to the rest of the world, no different than global warming or soaring energy prices. Ironically, the rest of the world is probably grateful that America isn’t the only nation with nuclear weapons; otherwise, America might have transformed the world in an American version of City-17. As the historian Lord Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men,” and stupid little men with access to great power, like George Bush and his ghastly crew, are the worst.
While America is trying to accommodate its little Hebrew buddy by killing insurgents and taming the Middle East as if it were the Wild West, the rest of the world has been concerning itself with such issues as the increasing scarcity of essential resources, such as food and energy; environmental degradation, especially global warming (actually American scientists and ex-politician Al Gore have played a significant role in addressing this threat); severe economic decline in poorer nations; social instability resulting from overpopulation, especially urban areas (San Paulo, Mexico City, etc.), the increasing millions of desperate, ignorant people who will swamp not only their boats but those of other nations, and on and on and on. Again, like the old Soviet Union, America is seen by other nations as more of a threat to global stability than as a source of wisdom for how to deal with the many challenges facing the global community. In other words, simply sending rescue ships after an earthquake or flood isn’t sufficient to refurbish America’s image in the world as a wise and beneficent leader among nations. Those very same ships are just as likely to send a Tomahawk missile to blow up someplace or somebody in the Middle East.
Deliverers of Death: The Pride of America
This Weapon of Mass Destruction (the Tomahawk missile) has been idiotically called the Pride of America. Such a phrase reflects American hubris, or the hubris of any nation that associates its being great with its weapon systems and its military might. Remember those Russian May Day military parades in Red Square or even the July 14th parade put on by the French. Such demonstrations are no different from that of a gangbanger flashing gang signs, two chromeplated pistols stuck into his waistband. It just that in America it’s a lot weirder: imagine Jeeesus wearing bandoleers and shooting his M-16 in the air and you’ve got a pretty clear picture of the USA—the United States of Aggression. Or at least that’s what America has come to look like under George Bush’s neoconservative (“neoaggressive” would be a more accurate word) leadership (again “reign” would probably be a more accurate word).
The Scourge of America: Immoderate Capitalism
When one looks at America what one sees, besides a nation that delights in weapons of mass destruction, is a nation undergoing social, cultural, and economic decline caused by (in addition to fighting unnecessary wars and financing an obscenely gargantuan defense program: in 2006 the U.S. spent 528 billion dollars on its defense budget; China and Russia, 84 billion combined) an unbridled quest for profit, which is not meant to be a criticism of capitalism per se but of a form of capitalism that existed in America during the end of the 19th century and has reappeared like the monster from the Black Lagoon since the era of Reaganomics. (To quote Wikipedia: “The Reagan era was marked by cuts to social programs, and large-scale deficit spending on the military.” Bush’s contribution has been to make the wealthy obscenely wealthy and to give them greater control over every aspect of society—including making war into a profitable enterprise, except for American taxpayers and the killed or maimed American soldiers. June 30th Bush signed a $162 billion war funding measure for his two nation destroying-rebuilding wars. (Why doesn’t the American nation get rebuilt?) He said, "This bill shows the American people that even in an election year, Republicans and Democrats can come together to stand behind our troops and their families." That is of course rhetorical poppycock. (Writing Bush’s speeches has to be one of the worst forms of the Faustian sellout.) The American people want the American government to spend money on helping Americans, improving America’s roads, bridges, schools, etc. and protecting American borders. And American soldiers don’t want to risk their lives fighting King George’s 21st century version of the Crusades, defending Israel’s occupation of the Holy Land. Of course, the U.S. government operates independently of the wishes of the American people.
Consider the Americans back home who bought those you-will-probably-lose-your-home loans, and are now losing their homes. Or the no more easy bankruptcies for cancer patients who have gone broke using their credit cards to pay for chemotherapy. Or that poor American black woman who died lying on a hospital floor while others looked on. Actually, that incident is a terrific metaphor for what the American government has become: an indifferent observer of human suffering, unless there is a photo shoot opportunity, like sending warships to aid cyclone damaged Myanmar. And of course during the past five years America has been an active cause of human suffering in Iraq (its destruction unrivaled by the earthquakes, tsunamis, and typhoons that have occurred in other parts of the world). Welcome to George Bush’s militaristic scroogenomics.
Mark Twain’s Unheeded Warning
Mark Twain was one who recognize that unbridled capitalism would do great harm to America at home and abroad (including the loss of reputation) and to other nations as well. He called this period in American history the Gilded Age (see Wikipedia “The Gilded Age,” and google “Mark Twain and American Capitalism”; see as well Twain’s novel The Gilded Age), suggesting that beneath the gilt existed something both horrifying and morally unseemly. Today we live in the new Gilded Age, and the question is whether Americans really want their country to be run by wealthy imperialistic capitalists like Bush and Cheney. Apparently they do, in part out of fear of being labeled unpatriotic socialists.
Immigration: America and Europe’s Unraveling
So where does Travis Barrett immigration trilogy come into play in the present retrogressive state of America and the world, in particular his recent novel Teenage Shooters? Well, first of all, a pervasive theme in all three novels is nostalgia for the America of the common people that existed from the Great Depression to about the 1960s, which seems to be the decade when the old, traditional America began to quickly unravel. Admittedly, this nostalgia would be felt most acutely by white Americans and not at all by the millions of immigrants who have entered the country during the last half century, many of whom having worked very hard to see the old America transformed into a new and alien multicultural America. Barrett believes, as I do, that the immigrant enclaves created by recent Asian, Hispanic, African, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European immigrants have little or nothing to do with traditional America. The immigrants are here not because they have any connection with the old America but to escape degraded homelands and to make a buck. As Barrett points out, the first thing the immigrants do is to clone in America communities un-American replicas of the their homeland cultures. One example would be what Barrett calls the “Hispanicization of L.A.” But whereas the immigrants in America have created an army of gangbangers who have transformed many American communities into war and crime zones, the Muslim immigrants in Europe become insurgents who hate their host nations and the European people. In France, for example, a favorite pastime of young Muslim immigrants is the burning of cars and buses and accosting French women (stealing their cell phones and wallets if they can). Last Tuesday four buses in the small town of La Mure were burned. Whereas Americans would be outraged, the French accept it as matter of course when you have a huge immigrant population that you wish not to offend; otherwise next time the buses may be set afire while occupied.
England is no better off. Take jolly ol’ London. One recent Mail Online News article titled “Foreigners Commit 20 Per Cent of Crime in London, Say Police” states, “More than one in five crimes committed in London in the first six months of this year were carried out by a foreign citizen [so doesn’t include naturalized aliens].” The crimes included violent offences, ranging from murder to assault, drug offences, sex crimes, robberies and burglaries. The highest number of offences were carried out by Poles." You can see that the European Union idea, where national borders disappear, is working out really well. Jamaicans, Somalians and Romanians are also high on the list—as were the Irish, but the Irish have been screwed forever by the English, so a little payback is acceptable. In addition, the Irish are as British as American blacks are American, so should be considered unruly members of the family that deserve concern and assistance from other family members. The Poles do not fall into that category—whether in America or in Great Britain—and certainly the Jamaicans and Somalians don't.
Of course the British government’s immigration policy, like that of most other European governments, is inspired by colonialist guilt and leftist anti-nationalism. The truth is that political leftists tend to be unpatriotic ideologues more interested in saving the world than saving their homelands. Look what the communists did in Russia; they destroyed their homeland and created the culturally neutered monster once known as the Soviet Union to replace motherland Russia. The beast being reborn today out of the ashes of Marxist ideology is the multicultural state, which is all the European Union is really. However, whereas multicultural morons such as Tony Blair and George Bush think multiculturalism is the way forward, it is actually the way backwards. Imagine Marlow’s journey to the heart of darkness. That seems to be the journey Europe and America have decided to embark upon by allowing aliens to flood into nations.
Consider the Jamaican Yardies who now terrorize London. During the 1950’s the British Government encouraged immigration as a cheap source of labor [that should sound familiar to American ears], including Jamaican Yardies. The result, Wikipedia (see “Yardie Gangs”) tells us, has been “Yardie gangs are notorious for their involvement in gun crime and the illegal drug trade, notably marijuana and crack cocaine.” In addition, “Yardie (or imitator) gangs also appear to be active in Bristol, Birmingham and Nottingham.” There are now 169 gangs in East London where in the last six months 16 teenagers were stabbed to death, including a sixteen-year-old girl. According to the on-line BBC News, “African-Caribbean gangs were described as the largest group, followed by south Asian and white gangs.” Of course, not all the gangs are made up of aliens, some are British, but you can’t really blame the British youth for being F-ing angry seeing that their government has been handing the nation over to aliens. For example, East London is dominated by a mosque that rivals any found in the Middle East. And what do the British get in return for their greedy, guilt-ridden generosity? Terrorism.
So yes, French, British, German, and American youths also commit crimes, just what you would expect from young people who see their futures being stolen because their own governments cares more about future of the aliens. Take as an example the plight of blacks in America who have been pushed to the back of the bus by the deluge of immigrants, like that poor black woman who was allowed to die on the floor of a New York hospital. It's pretty clear to them that millionaire Señor Bush cares a lot more about the Mexicans that have been illegally invading America than he does about American blacks whose communities are now being overrun and threatened by the growing Hispanic Nation and its gangs. Barrett's Gringo is dedicated Cheryl Green, the 14-year-old black girl "who was brutally gunned down in December by the 204th Street Gang, the 100-member Latino street gang that has been terrorizing the black community there." It's time to wise up, America.
Back to gloomy ol' England, most recently two French students were the victims of East London violence. One of the students was stabbed 200 times, the other 50. Even if a resident alien wasn’t responsible, alien gangsters are responsible for leading East London back into the heart of darkness and turning neighborhoods into crime zones. Just as in America, the British already had enough problems to deal with in the land of Jack the Ripper without inviting an army of criminal aliens. The extent to which the British authorities are willing to grovel before the aliens is illustrated by “Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the most senior judge in England and Wales, [who] said Islamic or sharia could play a role in some parts of the legal system.” If that’s not surrendering one’s nation to the aliens, what is? While the Muslims are wisely ridding the countries of aliens, the West is welcoming the aliens into their countries. It’s pretty clear who will be the losers in the long run.
As mentioned above, France also has a lot to worry about when it comes to the alien invasion. For example, a recent Herald Tribune article titled “A Terror Group’s Resurrection” explains that Algerian militants have aligned themselves with Al Qaeda. “The Algerian group offers Al Qaeda hundreds of experienced fighters and a potential connection to North African militants living in Europe. Over the past 20 months, North African suspects have been arrested in Spain, France, Switzerland, and Italy.” France now has over 6 million Muslims, a lot for a country the size of Texas and many vulnerabilities.
Back to France. How Muslems feel about the French was illustrated last Christmas Eve in Islamic Republic of Mauritania when five picnicking French tourists from Lyon were ambushed by three men. Four were killed and one wounded by fire from an AK-47. Those French tourists were looking for trouble traveling to such a place to have a picnic, just the French, the British, and other European nations are naively looking for trouble by allowing their homeland to be invaded by aliens.
Immigration and Creating an Atmosphere of Mutual Hatred
And what is the attitude of the immigrating aliens? Basically it is one of gemmy, gemmy, gemmy but never being satisfied. The North Africans in France complain that their unemployment rate is 16%, overlooking that 84% of them are employed—and 100% are receiving generous benefits paid for by French taxpayers. And considering their dislike of Western education (and education generally for girls), it's no wonder that the unemployment rate is so bad. They also complain that the French people make them feel unwelcome. Well why in the world should the French people welcome invaders who basically hate their way of life and their guts and who have been allowed to invade their nation by their inapt, alien-loving leftist government? Americans don’t like Mexicans for the same reasons. Mexican-American history has been one of conflict and mutual hatred (Remember the Alamo?). And when the illegal aliens arrive they don’t bother to learn English and their children prefer being gang members to graduating from high school. And if they do graduate, they join anti-American organizations like La Raza and MECha (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan). The latter is a “Hispanic separatist organization that encourages anti-American activities and civil disobedience.” What does that mean exactly? “In its national constitution, MEChA calls for self-determination by its members to liberate Aztlan (google “What is MEChA”) Aztlan is the Southwest United State. So there is no way the aliens will ever return to their paradisaical homelands, either because life is infinitely better in the host-land they have invaded or because they want to remain in order to destroy it, most likely both.
I’m sure MECha is pleased that 16,000 aliens were given citizenship this July 4, at least 3 brigades for the mushrooming Hispanic Nation’s civilian army. On the other hand, Americans might be dismayed to know that “During the past year, USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service] has helped more than 640,000 men, women and children fulfill their dreams and become United States citizens.” Ironically, this information comes from the Homeland Security website. What a joke—on the American people, that is. Adiós, America!
Importing Trouble
Concerning Al Qaeda (or MEChA), let’s be clear about two things. First, the teeth of any terrorist group are the aliens living in the targeted nation. The 9-11 attacks made that clear, as well as attacks in Great Britain and Spain. (The Hispanics, on the other hand, will use the population bomb to destroy America.) And you might remember the Pope was shot by the Turkey terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca (who was added by Bulgarians, and now Bulgaria is a member of the European Union!)
And Europe is also considering allowing Turkey (with 70 million West hating Muslims) to join the European Union, which our own traitorous Señor George Bush advised them to do because he needs Turkey’s assistance to fight his own little war in Iraq. Europe should just go ahead an take a nuclear cyanide pill and end the misery foisted upon its peoples by idiotic politicians, leftist groups, and greedy capitalists that see Europe only as a giant, multi-national Wall Street.
The Al Qaeda Monster and the Original Axis of Evil
The second thing is that the monster Al Qaeda was given life by Russia, U.S., and Israel (the then true axis of evil, now reduced to two members—at least for now). Al Qaeda has existed for the simple reason to rid Islamic holy lands of European meddlers and intruders. I for one can’t blame them for wanting that, and believe just as strongly that America and Europe should rid themselves of the aliens (Islamic and otherwise) who have invaded their territories.
Barrett’sStrangers: America’s Lack of Practical Wisdom
Getting back to Barrett’s immigration trilogy, in Strangers, the first book of the trilogy, Barrett describes metaphorically the process of Hispanicization when a Mexican family shows up at an American home. The decadence of the Anglo husband-father, Thomas, incapacitates him as the protector of his home and family. Arsenio, on the other hand, the Mexican illegal immigrant is ruthless but not decadent. He is a realist, who, as he himself says, lives according to Darwinian principles of survival, not Jesus’ self-defeating philosophy of turning of the other cheek, which the European immigrants also put on hold while they invaded the Americas. In addition, Arsenio points out that his fellow illegal immigrants are acting according to the model of behavior illustrated by the Old Testament Jews (as invaders of other peoples’ territories), though Arsenio would not sanctimonious claim that he and his family have come to America as God’s chosen people but only in order to survive (and to reclaim land taken from them by the Gringo). He is also a great fan of Homer’s Iliad, especially of the part about the Trojan Horse.
Strangers plays off the American stereotype of Mexicans being docile and simpleminded. Of course, like the Iraqi “insurgents,” they are neither. As it turns out, the better educated, but decadent Thomas is no match for cunning, self-educated Arsenio, and, as a result, Thomas’ wife and daughter suffer greatly. Ironically, it is Arsenio who expresses most the wisdom the story has to offer. He recognizes, for example, that it is the traditional aspects of a people’s culture that gives it unity and meaning thus durability and longevity. He warns his son not to be enticed by the glitter of America’s culture of consumption. He uses Las Vegas as an illustration of where and how Americans went wrong and, as a result, have compromised the integrity of their traditional cultural.
Barrett’s Gringo: Don’t Depend on Jesus
Barrett’s Gringo is a philosophical novel like Strangers but goes into much greater depth, containing 453 pages and 260 footnotes. The main character, Jeffrey, an English high school teacher, is in jail for killing an illegal immigrant. Whereas in Strangers Thomas’ decadence and inaction allow his family to be driven from their home, in Gringo Jeffrey’s action has a similar result. His guilt over what he has done to his family and his incarceration have open a floodgate of commentary on an array of philosophical, scientific, theological, political, and social topics. Much of the commentary occurs during conversations with a minister and psychologist. (Similarities do exist between Barrett’s novel and Camus’ The Stranger. The minister, for example, suggests that Jesus Christ is the solution to Jeffrey’s problems, but Jeffrey doesn’t see how Jesus could make any real difference in his life or that of his family. And he certainly won’t bring the dead illegal immigrant back to life. For some strange reason Jesus decided to quit the miracle business (perhaps because modern medicine has come up with some miracles of its own). He’d have a lot more followers if he would just pass them out when people need them, like that poor woman who died “alone” in a crowded New York hospital. She had waited 24 hours (just think her life might of been save with some of the money from Bush’s $162 billion war funding measure). Did the all-knowing Jesus watch the whole time?)
America’s Moral Blather
Jeffrey’s sense of doom expands from his own situation to the whole of America. His conclusion seems to be that America, in spite of having the best higher education system in the world, has become weirdly irrational and socially and culturally self-destructive. For example, Jeffrey finds it odd that Americans (such as John McCain) worry so much about homosexual relationships (more recently in the news, homosexual marriage) and so little about their government’s allowing a cabal of neoconservatives to highjack the country into becoming involved in a an extra-ordinarily destructive and immoral war. (Let’s face it, straight marriage is dysfunctional in America when 50% of them end in divorce. I suppose that to Americans like John McCain (married twice) gay marriage would be an abomination even if none ended in divorce and each partner remained faithful to the other.
And only God or some statistician knows how many straight marriages produce dysfunctional juvenile delinquents, for example, the parents of Nicholas Sheley accused of killing eight people. Or how many battered housewives are in gay marriages? Perhaps marriages should be evaluated according the benefit and harm they produce, rather than on an antiquated collection of Hebrew stories. The fact is that homosexual pairing occurs all the time in nature as well in other cultures—the ancient Greeks, for example. And even good marriages don't prevent monsters. Apparently George Bush and Laura have been happily married, but that didn't prevent George from becoming a warmongering mass murderer.
Barrett provocatively examines this issue in Gringo, and his conclusion seems to be that consenting intelligent adults should be left alone when they aren’t harming anyone else. Mike Savage would ask, What about a man who wants to marry and have sex with his dog? The answer is, dogs are not intelligent adults, and thus cannot consent to dogamy.) To those who believe that homosexual marriage is abnormal, I would say sometimes it's better to just accept certain abnormalities than to do a lot more harm trying to eradicate them. However, Barrett is also critical of homosexual activists proselytizers who seek to have homosexuality promoted in the schools and elsewhere as being as normal as having green eyes. Doing that doesn't promote acceptance but creates enemies. In fact, had homosexuals had not been on their marriage high horse leading up to the 2000 presidential election, George Bush might not have been elected. Homosexuals are often insensitive to the beliefs and feelings of heterosexuals. Often they seem to prefer having heterosexuals as their enemies and accomplish that by mocking heterosexuals' beliefs and values.
America’s Fatal Wobble
Somewhere Barrett compares America to a spinning top that has been thumped by a malicious child and so is now wobbling out of control, and as we now see the thumpers are many. Hollywood, the Church (including born-again Christians and depraved Catholic priests and cardinals), American Big Business, self-serving politicians, and a variety of non-American (Barrett would say anti-American) special interest groups (such as Zionists and pro-illegal immigrant groups like La Raza). The overall result is America now exists on the brink of spinning out of control and into a paralytic of confusion—which is just fine with those who seek the dissolution of the old America.
Barrett’s Teenage Shooters: American Kids Get Shafted
This is pretty much where the novel Teenage Shooters comes in. Whereas much of Strangers is told from the point of view of a ruthless yet wise illegal immigrant and Gringo from that of an American high school teacher demoralized by his own failure to protect his family and by the intellectual, moral, and cultural decay occurring in his homeland, Teenage Shooters is told from the point of view of a lower class American teenager, Freddy Louche. The story could have been titled The World According to Freddy Louche, and if you asked Freddy for a one-sentence summary about the state of the world, he’d probably tell you “It’s a big fucking mess.” Significantly, this story is about the generation of Americans who will inherent that mess and an American nation in a state of decline and turmoil. A remaining fragment of America that Freddy and his father leave behind is the city of Waterloo, Iowa, which I assume represents not only small-town America (as in the Wilder play Our Town) but any American community where still exist the American way of life and values associated with America before the country slipped into its present state of decay and dissolution. (The depressing reality may be that there is no longer any such place because even in small towns the kids smoke crack-cocaine and listen to Marilyn Manson and Slipnot (the band is actually from Des Moines, Iowa; let’s just hope Barrett doesn’t find out) while their parents are in the kitchen cooking up meth and marijuana brownies—for the toddlers).
Inheriting a Multicultural Hell
In his new environment (America's future?) Freddy exists in a state of alienation. In a rather confused way he too rejects the old America represented by his father, in part because he sees his father as a failure in every way except as being a caring father. Freddy describes himself, his father, and friends as losers, which seems to mean that is how he also sees America—as big and powerful as it might be. Its military can destroy nations but the country cannot save itself. His alienation is aggravated by the fact that he lives in a multicultural neighborhood consisting of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics and roaming teenage gangbangers and wannabe bullies. His part of the community consists of white-trash losers. I do not believe that Barrett is saying that Freddy’s existence represents that of all American teenagers. The story points out that Freddy’s situation can be avoided by Americans with money. The question is whether Freddy’s world somehow represents what much of America is likely to become, a nation of desperate, disoriented people and multicultural antagonisms, a situation that will continue grow more severe as the country’s social, economic, and cultural conditions continue to deteriorate.
Part of the problem is that immigrants consider the laws of the hated host nation invalid and not applying to them. Crime then becomes a romantic act of rebellion against the racist American, British, or French oppressor. And about the “racism” issue, why should not the host population hate those strangers who have invaded their homelands bringing with them a multitude of social-economic ills, including crime and terrorism. And just so you don’t make the mistake of thinking only America, Britain, and France suffer from their immigrant populations, we are told that “Muslims are only 4 percent of Denmark's 5.4 million people but make up a majority of the country's convicted rapists, an especially combustible issue given that practically all the female victims are non-Muslim. Similar, if lesser, disproportions are found in other crimes.”
It’s a Video Game World
In Barrett’s Teenage Shooters sixteen-year-old Freddy escapes the bleak reality of his own multicultural community by turning to video games, especially those of the Resident Evil series, because he believes the games reflect more accurately the reality of existence generally and his life in particular than does what religion or high school tries to teach him. (And at least in the video games he has the power to protect himself by killing the human and alien monstrosities that threaten to destroy him. This certainly is one of the great appeals of video games in societies in which governments fail to protect their people.) Nevertheless, though Freddy thinks school is a waste of time, it becomes clear that he learns a good deal from school that explains and illustrates his worldview. Though many of his teachers encourage an optimistic view of the world and society, the stories, scientific theories, and history they teach give a different picture of things, one much more consistent with his experience of life (separated parents, bullies, a financially struggling father, etc.).
What Isn’t Taught in American High Schools
In his English classes, for example, Freddy learns that life can be a brutal struggle for survival (Beowulf), that human behavior is essentially irrational (Lord of the Flies and Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and that in the long run science is just as likely to make a mess of the world as to improve it (Frankenstein). In his history class he learns that human history has been pretty much a horror story that continues to repeat itself (wars; revolutions; and greedy, misguided and often downright stupid leaders). And in science, he learns that the beastly behavior of human beings is much more consistent with Darwin’s theory of evolution than with any religious notion of humanity’s being the children of an all powerful, benevolent God. He also learns from science that as bad as things are, they are bound to get worse (a vision clearly express in H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel The Time Machine). So in spite of his dislike of school, Freddy learns a lot at school that seems consistent with his own dismal view of things.
One thing that Freddy finds greatly perplexing is that so many smart people understand why human beings and their world are the way are but humanity continues to behave badly and make the world a worse rather than better place to live. Because of this failure Freddy considers humanity not so much evil (though he does believe many people are evil) as pathetic. And, as a result, he believes that for the most part “there is no hope.” Freddy’s view of things is bleak because his life is bleak. Today Freddy’s life is still the exception rather than the rule (at least in the United States). Barrett’s question is whether Freddy’s pessimism is a Cassandra view of most of America by the middle of this century. It has already arrived for millions of Americans and thousands of American communities.
Inheriting the Adult-Made Wasteland
The story need not be read for what it says about America’s and perhaps the world’s decline and fall. (How many millions of people have to live in social, cultural, and economic degradation and inescapable misery before one concludes that the world is in fact in a state of severe and perhaps irreversible decline? For example, what if the conditions of the global population evolve to a point similar to those endured by China’s population today—where 20% of the populations is well-to-do but the rest live like worker ants? Perhaps the world as a whole is already like China. Already the richest 2% of the world’s population owns 50% of the world’s wealth.) The story can be read as a depiction of a basically good American teenager who struggles with the very same problems millions of American teenagers struggle with. In the story many of those teenagers become bullies and gangbangers. Freddy hates them but understands that they are also not so different from him. They may become mean because doing so is a social and psychological survival mechanism. Freddy never goes down that road psychologically (I don’t think he does, anyway), but he does, nevertheless, reach a point at which he is capable of murder.
I just read Teenage Shooters, the final novel of Travis Barrett’s Immigration Trilogy, which is concerned mostly with the declining state of the American nation. The book is filled with humor, but overall a very melancholy read. It is a book that will make American readers laugh at every page yet weep at the reality it reveals. That reality is the dismal, depressing state of the country. Americans and their European ancestors struggled for over 300 years to build the country and this July 4th look at state it is in. George Bush celebrates the surrender of America to aliens that are invading from every corner of the world, all the while Americans struggle keep their homes and gas in their cars and American soldiers continue to die in a fruitless war.
Barrett clearly associates immigration, legal and illegal, with America’s decline, but he also explores other causes of America’s having been rapidly transformed into a country quite unlike the America that existed before the end of the Second World War. Barrett is not rebel or crusader. He is a Cassandra-like fatalist. You might recall that she warned the Trojans about the Trojan Horse and foresaw the destruction of Troy. Barrett equates the Trojan Horse with immigration and the destruction of Troy with the destruction of America. He understands that the American people have neither sufficient will nor insight to save their country. He acknowledges that many groups of Americans do recognize the dangers, but too many Americans are complacently apathetic. Groups like Mothers Against Illegal Aliens and the Minute Man Project are doing the best they can to counter the alien invasion, but they will eventually fail because they struggle not only against alien armies but against the alien-loving U.S. Government, businessmen, and other politically powerful special interest organizations.
He also understands the threat of commercialized popular culture to the moral integrity of America, but that Americans are unable to counter the threat in a country in which the dollar (as devalued as it might be) is king, even among those, like George Bush, who claim allegiance to the king of kings, Jesus Christ. Religion in America has become just another business and a mask worn by the wealthy to give the appearance of righteousness as they swindle ordinary Americans into debt. Like the radio commentator Mike Savage, with whom Barrett otherwise has very little in common, Barrett sees America as a toboggan driven by alien sympathizers, political shysters, Wall Street swindlers, and Hollywood conjurers down the icy slope of American ignorance, complacency, and gullibility toward a dark and unavoidable abyss of social, cultural, and economic chaos. According to Barrett we are living during America’s twilight. It’s is a sad time for Americans, though still better than that which awaits those young Americans who will soon find themselves to be strangers in a strange alien land.
America as a Throwaway Society
A driving element in all those changes seems to be that America is basically a throwaway society, one that is willing to toss anything for a profit. Its tolerance of illegal immigration, which has transformed the cultural and ethnic landscape of hundreds if not thousands of American communities, is just one illustration of America’s pecuniary utilitarianism: the view that if X makes a profit then X is good, regardless of the social, cultural, and aesthetic costs. The official justification of this particular transformation has been that multiculturalism is a good thing, as if multiculturalism is a societal state to which every culture should aspire, when in fact most of the world’s cultures seek to retain a unified cultural identity, what might be called a cultural room of their own, that room being the territorial limits that bounds one’s culture.
Tossing the Homeland
No group has recognized the threat of cultural dissolution when a homeland is lacking than the Jewish people(who ironically have worked very hard to unravel the traditional fabric of American culture). And Muslims have shown that they are willing to die by the thousands in order to protect the integrity of their cultural homelands. Only America seems to believe that one’s homeland is for sale if the price is right. (In Europe the surrender to multiculturalism seems inspired by leftist ideology that believes traditional culture is a ploy for enslaving the proletariat and by a Jewish inspired guilt complex.) It seems Americans learned nothing from the noble Native Americans who fought tragically to retain their homelands. America’s disregard for the cultural territory of the Native Americans is illustrated by the Dawes Act of 1887 which authorized the division and privatization of communally held Indian lands. Because of Henry Laurens Dawes (certainly a name that will live forever in infamy), Native Americans lost about 90 million acres (360,000 km²) of treaty land (“Henry Laurens Dawes,” Wikipedia). Now Americans are discovering that their government is just as indifferent toward their homeland as it has been toward the homelands of the Native Americans. And let us not forget that the deeper motivation is always economic, in this case the importation of cheap muscle and brain power for our alien-loving corporations.
Who Says Multiculturalism is Inherently Good?
Multiculturalism is usually presented as a self-evident Platonic ideal, the truth of which cannot be question without being labeled a racist. What is usually left unaddressed publically is the question of who are sponsoring and benefitting from the multicultural agenda. Certainly the business community and immigrations groups have been vocal proponents of the multiculturalization of American society and have effectively utilized American politicians to promote that agenda. The one group that seems voiceless but whose way of life and whose communities are most affected is the American people.
George Bush’s 4th of July Celebration of Multicultural America
It was already noted that George Bush celebrated this July 4th by welcoming aliens at a naturalization ceremony (that should have been called the Great American Giveaway). July 4th is supposed to be a celebration of the birth of a nation, not a funeral for traditional America. The ceremony can be seen as a surrender ceremony in which the traitorous U.S. Government turns America over to aliens while thousands more continue to enter the country illegally. Bush said something to the effect that “America was a nation of creed, not a race.” Once again idiot Bush gets it wrong. A creed is a set of principles, the implication being that by adopting a set of principles a person is suddenly becomes an authentic member of another culture, as if adopting the communist principles of China and learning Chinese I would suddenly become a Chinaman, which is absolute nonsense. It’s true that America is not a race. What it is, is a historically defined culture that is quickly being unraveled by the aliens who come to America to make a buck and escape some social-cultural hellhole but will never be Americans because they are not at one with America’s traditional culture and history.
A native of Khartoum who was at the ceremony said she was "proud to be an American." That is not the issue. The issue is that millions of true Americans don’t want her or her people here because they want to preserve their homeland and not see it transformed into alienized nation. The other thing is that this person is attending an American college and has four children. Who is paying for all that? Her husband (who is not mentioned)? The fact is, these people establish their ethnic enclaves and really don’t what to have anything to do with America other than to have political freedom, milk the system for its benefits, make money, and go shopping (all of which was made possible by the blood, sweat, and tears of real Americans).
In addition, the woman from Khartoum probably receives medical care millions of Americans can’t. And what about Khartoum? Well, it is a city in Sudan, a nation of Muslims. Now what does Islam have to do with America other than the Muslims of the world hating our guts, like millions of the aliens who enter America from south of the border. (Is the U.S. government breeding Muslim insurgents and translators to be used to overthrow governments in the Middle East, as it did in Iraq? Check out Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister and American puppet. (See “Iraqi National Congress,” Wikipedia.)
But why should millionaire Bush care? He can hide out at the ranch and feel good about himself by thinking that a handful of aliens love him. No matter the millions of Americans who consider him a traitor. The reality of the immigration debacle is that it’s going to divide the country to the same degree as it was divided during the Civil War, and that wound never fully healed even though both sides were Americans. Imagine the division between the Americans and the Aliens by the end of the century. Just giving them a piece of paper doesn’t make them Americans in the eyes of Americans. Ironically, millions of aliens born in this country don’t see themselves as Americans, but as Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, etc. I mean to think La Raza is proAmerican is just plain idiocy. What America will become is a North American version of South Africa.
The woman from Khartoum also said "that when she looked at the cast on the stage—Bush, Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) and a gaggle of federal judges in black robes—she saw her American dream for her four children, ages 7 to 12, who watched.” That might be her dream, but it’s a nightmare for Americans because they know when that happens America will be no more, that they will have lost their cultural home.
Barack Hussein Obama: The First President of America as an Alien Nation
Already, millions of Americans feel that way about Sen. Barack Hussein Obama (a long ways from George Washington or John Adams), not because he is black (he really has no connection with American blacks) but because his father was a Kenyan. To millions of Americans, Obama represents a big step toward the alien overthrow of America, and there is no reason to think that these Americans will be any happier about that occurring than the Native Americans were about the Europeans confiscating Native American homelands or the Palestinians have been about the Jewish usurpation of Palestine.
And let’s be clear about one thing. The issue is not racial but cultural. All Americans with a brain (thus excluding those who still support George Bush) know that Obama is a brilliant man. But his roots are alien, and thus so are his sympathies. When he becomes president he will push further open the floodgates to that sea of aliens clamoring to invade America, gates that have already been unlocked by traitorous American politicians such as Kennedy, McCain, and Bush. In that sense, Obama will not be a traitor, like his rival John McCain, because as his name indicates he is already one of them.
Of course, the government will say that’s the law, so you will just have to accept the alienization of the country. That’s true, but we don’t have to like it, no more than the Indians or the Palestinians liked the laws that opened their homelands to invasion.
Commercialization and the Corruption of the American Soul
Though Barrett’s trilogy addresses the immigration problem in great detail, he also points out that the consumer industries, especially the entertainment industry (music, movies, video games, television, and the Internet), have also rapidly transformed America into a culture of consumption, a kind of “hyper-reality” that is connected to nothing deeper than manufactured images and momentary pleasures offered by consuming a Big Mac or the latest Hollywood movie. The television show CSI-Las Vegas does a pretty good job of depicting the weird rootlessness of an American society adrift in a cultural sea of manufactured images and activities—all of which are designed to make a profit for some behind-the-scenes Big Shot. Barrett, an obvious romantic, claims that nature can provide an anodyne to this cultural rootlessness.
Romanticism: A Missed Opportunity for America’s Salvation
This role of nature is illustrated in the Sean Penn movie Into the Wild, which depicts a young American’s quest for some connection to a reality that is primordially substantial and enduring. For Christopher McCandless that reality resides in the magnificence of nature. Perhaps an even better example of the cultural alienation that young Americans often feel is Timothy Treadwell in The Man Who Loved Grizzlies, since he seems to have been more thoroughly adrift in American popular culture than McCandless—whose pursuit seems to have been initially more intellectual. In either case, both these young men were true romantics who thought they had found in nature a closer and more spiritual connection to reality than could be found midst the fluid artificiality of modern America. (Both these men are mentioned in Barrett’s Gringo and Teenage Shooters.)
This sense of the country’s having lost its bearings (or marbles if you like) is not new. American intellectuals and artists have always thought that rapid social and cultural change would undermine what is best about the American way of life. Thomas Jefferson worried that the shift from an agricultural society to an industrialized society would harm Americans in many ways—spiritually and materially. His thinking foreshadowed the concerns of various 19th century romantic philosophers and artists. In America these concerns were most profoundly expressed by writers such as Cooper, Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Bryant, and Melville and painters such as those of the Hudson River School: Durand, Cole, and Church. These men had a profound vision of what America could have become: a deeply spiritual society whose spiritual roots were planted in nature herself, a vision America seems to have, for the most part, lost sight of. To my mind the consequences of the loss of the romantic vision are effectively expressed in the paintings of Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper. Sheeler’s American Landscape powerfully illustrates industrialization’s transformation of the American landscape. (To see Sheeler’s paintings: google Charles Sheeler— Bert Christensen's CyberSpace Gallery.) Most famously Hopper’s Nighthawks captures the lonely alienation that often occurs midst an American urban landscape populated by strangers.
And for what was the romantic vision for America discarded? Mostly profit—that driving force behind America’s pecuniary utilitarianism. And, Ironically, Americans assume that in their pursuit of profit Christianity gives them license to manhandle (literally) nature in any way they see fit. In the Christian perspective nature (e.g., those dark woods) is seen as the dwelling place of untamed, evil beings, such as Indians and grizzly bears, to be eradicated and their wild habitats transformed into farms and factories, and cities and suburbs. Furthermore, as God’s gift to humanity, nature has only extrinsic or utilitarian value, to be determined by its human possessor. A tree’s value, for example, is to be found only in the various uses humans make of it: a source of lumber, shade, or recreation. Finally, the absolute value of a transcendent God denigrates the value of all worldly things, except for humans, who are fortunate enough to carry within them a spark of the divine, a spark that justifies their lording over the rest of creation (including non-believing humans who have forfeited their divine spark). Thus there really is no reason to preserve any original aspect of nature or even one’s own culture as long as a church remains among the ruins to serve as a portal to the Absolute.
The French Alternative: Giving Up War for Peace, Beauty, and National Well-Being
Barrett seems to think that France is one nation that has done a pretty good job of maintaining a balance between a love of nature and the economic need for industry. Those of you who have traveled through France (escaping moribund America for a while) know that it is a nation that has been cared for as if it were a garden, which I suppose it is. It is also a nation that imposes aesthetic standards for its artificial environments, failing only when the attempt to be modern couldn’t be resisted, in particular the high-rise warehousing projects created for low-income mostly immigrant families. (France also suffers from some ugly newly developed suburbs, but nothing compared to the suburban sprawl found in America.) America has been more in love with personal freedom and profit than with the beauty of art and nature.
In addition, the French somewhere along the way decided that they would not allow religion to justify the depredation of nature, because they believe, as the romantics did, that nature is humankind’s primordial source of spiritual and aesthetic inspiration. Part of the answer may be that industrialization came later to France, enabling the French to learn from the mistakes that occurred during Great Britain’s reckless pursuit of industrialization and from the wisdom offered by romantic poets such as Blake and Wordsworth and novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton) and Charles Dickens (Hard Times), even better Friedrich Engels’ (The Condition of the Working Class in England).
America’s Choice: Global Intimidation and Cultural Inanity
A common theme in Barrett’s novels is that America has thrown away or left unrealized that which would have made America a truly great nation culturally. Instead, it has allowed itself to morph into something quite politically grotesque, not so unlike Russia during its Soviet phase. During the last half century one reason all things American had such appeal was the idea that America was a beneficent force on the global scene. However, that is no longer the case. Since the Vietnam War America has increasingly been seen as a global bully motivated by greed and a religiosity no less fanatical and even more weird (to nonbelievers) than Islam. Let’s face it. America is supposed to have progressed beyond the Dark Ages of its puritanical past (depicted so well in Nathanial Hawthorne’s “The Maypole of Merry Mount”). As a result America’s popular culture is becoming as amusing as a Disneyland theme park in North Korea. The fun and games can’t compensate for the bad news waiting outside. Or imagine a Bush-World theme park where armed Mr. Smith-like CIA agents accompanying riders on the Jungle Cruise only to discover they are actually on the Extraordinary Rendition Ride to an Egyptian torture chamber. Such an idea would never have occurred to me before the Bushian neocons took control of the country. So, disappointingly to everyone, America has become a Hollywood Happy Face : ) mask superimposed upon a Resident-Evil-like reality: AMERICA UMBRELLA CORPORATION, specializing in developing, producing, and using exotic weapon systems. That monstrous face behind the Happy Face of American pop culture has been recently a montage of faces, those of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and other infamous shock-and-awe neoconservatives.
I for one am amazed at how forgiving Europeans can be of America’s heavy-handed misbehavior—such as starting an unnecessary war that has inflamed a billion already religiously inflamed Muslims. Recently I attended a fete in the French Alps. I saw one little girl wearing a T-shirt with an American flag; watched a dance club perform line-dancing, its members decked out in cowboy hats and boots; and listened to two French bands play American rock-‘n-roll classics until the wee hours of the morning. The explanation for this magnanimity seems to be that the French people don’t believe you should hold Americans responsible for the idiocies of their government, a notion based on the apparent truism that governments tend to ignore the needs and desires of the people they represent. I mean just look at the poor British suffering under Tony Blair and now under Gordon Brown—both Bushian sycophants. And at present the French have added their president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to that list. We will just have to wait and see if he can get off his constituency’s shit list, or eventually sink up to his nose like his buddy and creepy wannabe G-Man George Bush.
The Retreat of Academe
To the rest of the world, the America Empire is undergoing a rapid decline and fall into cultural, intellectual, and political irrelevancy, like the Soviet Empire during its death throes. However, because of its huge arsenal of Star-Wars-like weapons of mass destruction, America will remain a source of fear, trembling, and loathing long after it becomes intellectually and culturally irrelevant. It will be respected for its might, not its insight. It really is remarkable how small and timid the voice of America’s academic community has become—unlike during the sixties. Perhaps what happened to Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who suggested that the people who worked in the World Trade Center somehow provoked the 9-11 attacks(when in fact better explanations are American troops stationed on holy Saudi Arabian soil and America’s unconditional support of Israel), sent a chill through university communities across the nation, so much so that barely a whisper of criticism came from them when George Bush embarked upon his disastrous war with Iraq.
Almost cowardly they apparently consider tenure more important than voicing their opinions on such weighty matters as war and peace (at least until it becomes safe to do so). Ironically, tenure is intended to encourage free and open expression of ideas without fear of retribution. You may recall how America turned against the gutsy Dixie Chicks for criticizing Bush’s War. As it turned out, the Chicks (and the French) were right, and they will be remembered for risking retribution in order to voice their opinions (unlike America’s cowardly members of congress (with the exception of the eloquent Sen. Byrd), members of the press, and cloistered academes). Too often Americans pay a big price for being pridefully stupid. It’s almost as if university professors have never heard of Socrates. We expect such behavior from our craven politicians and corporatized press, but not from those who claim to be lovers of the truth, especially at a time when a deranged quasi-dictator like George Bush is able to come to power in spite of America’s democratic system and transform two nations into testing grounds for America’s military hardware and operations.
These same educators have also been silent on America’s having aligned itself unconditionally with the nation of Israel, which has resulted in that tiny and otherwise insignificant nation becoming a major source of global instability. Imagine an tubercular homeless man violently forcing his way onto a crowded morning commuter bus, spitting in the face of the driver when he demands that the man pay the same fare as the other riders. Once situated at the middle of the crowded bus the infected man begins sneezing repeatedly, laughing as the other riders when they turn away and tell him to cover his mouth. Now you have an image of Israel among the world’s community of nations. And how far has the disease spread? Apparently, September 1, 2001, it had reached New York and March 30, 2003 it began spreading into Iraq where it has infected every man, woman, and child.
The Israeli Disease
Today the Israeli disease has become a global epidemic, threatening especially the European nations who guiltily supported the illegal and unethical creation of the State of Israeli on lands belonging to the Palestinians (supposedly justified by Biblical stories that have as much validity as the Elder Scrolls) while foolishly welcoming with open arms the very people the Israeli disease infected with hatred toward any supporter of the State of Israel, members of the Islamic faith. But the infection has also spread, with the help of the U.S., to Islamic nations such as Pakistan.
The nations that seem most safe are those who callously yet wisely turn away diseased immigrants fleeing homelands infected by a host of other diseases—crime, poverty, environmental degradation, inadequate health care, over-population, armed militias, decrepit or destroyed infrastructure, primitive or nonexistent education system, and so on. Many of the uninfected nations have also been able to distance themselves from the “Jewish problem” because they are fortunate enough not to be ensnared in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. For example, Japan’s relations with Israel involve primarily economic and environmental interests. Interestingly, there are only about 600 Israeli nationals living in Japan. The number of Jews with Israeli citizenship living in the U.S. is probably a million or more (there were 300,000 to half million Israeli born Jews living in America during the 1980s—google “Israelis in the United States: Reconciling Estimates with NJPS”). Had there been only 600 Jew living the in the U.S., undoubtedly America could have avoided a number of social, political, and military quagmires (certainly 9-11 and the Iraq War). And if the State of Israel had not existed today would Iran be interested in owning nuclear weapons? Probably not. And why has America cared more about the welfare of the Jews than about genuine Americans (there was fewer than 3000 Jews in America before 1800—google “Jewish Population of the United States”) such as American blacks and Native Americans? With friends like the Jews one doesn’t need enemies, but gets them anyway.
One could even argue that once the Cold War was over, the world would finally get itself on a non-confrontational track, maybe even with the help of American leadership. Then Israel slouched into prominence by miraculously collaring and using America as its pit-bull (imagine a Chucky in Child’s Play with a killer pit-bull the size of Godzilla and you get a pretty good picture of those two homies Israel and American). So that now instead of becoming a wise shepherd inspiring other nations to improve the state of the world, America has become an object of fear and loathing and at present the greatest threat to the world’s future. This is not to say that some other country, such as Israel, China, Russia, or Pakistan, won’t be the country to light the fuse that will set off a series of events that will return humanity to the age of Cro-Magnon man. Such is the world we live in. I am only saying that right now with George Bush at the wheel and Israel’s foot pushing the peddle to the metal, America itself has become just another big problem to the rest of the world, no different than global warming or soaring energy prices. Ironically, the rest of the world is probably grateful that America isn’t the only nation with nuclear weapons; otherwise, America might have transformed the world in an American version of City-17. As the historian Lord Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men,” and stupid little men with access to great power, like George Bush and his ghastly crew, are the worst.
While America is trying to accommodate its little Hebrew buddy by killing insurgents and taming the Middle East as if it were the Wild West, the rest of the world has been concerning itself with such issues as the increasing scarcity of essential resources, such as food and energy; environmental degradation, especially global warming (actually American scientists and ex-politician Al Gore have played a significant role in addressing this threat); severe economic decline in poorer nations; social instability resulting from overpopulation, especially urban areas (San Paulo, Mexico City, etc.), the increasing millions of desperate, ignorant people who will swamp not only their boats but those of other nations, and on and on and on. Again, like the old Soviet Union, America is seen by other nations as more of a threat to global stability than as a source of wisdom for how to deal with the many challenges facing the global community. In other words, simply sending rescue ships after an earthquake or flood isn’t sufficient to refurbish America’s image in the world as a wise and beneficent leader among nations. Those very same ships are just as likely to send a Tomahawk missile to blow up someplace or somebody in the Middle East.
Deliverers of Death: The Pride of America
This Weapon of Mass Destruction (the Tomahawk missile) has been idiotically called the Pride of America. Such a phrase reflects American hubris, or the hubris of any nation that associates its being great with its weapon systems and its military might. Remember those Russian May Day military parades in Red Square or even the July 14th parade put on by the French. Such demonstrations are no different from that of a gangbanger flashing gang signs, two chromeplated pistols stuck into his waistband. It just that in America it’s a lot weirder: imagine Jeeesus wearing bandoleers and shooting his M-16 in the air and you’ve got a pretty clear picture of the USA—the United States of Aggression. Or at least that’s what America has come to look like under George Bush’s neoconservative (“neoaggressive” would be a more accurate word) leadership (again “reign” would probably be a more accurate word).
The Scourge of America: Immoderate Capitalism
When one looks at America what one sees, besides a nation that delights in weapons of mass destruction, is a nation undergoing social, cultural, and economic decline caused by (in addition to fighting unnecessary wars and financing an obscenely gargantuan defense program: in 2006 the U.S. spent 528 billion dollars on its defense budget; China and Russia, 84 billion combined) an unbridled quest for profit, which is not meant to be a criticism of capitalism per se but of a form of capitalism that existed in America during the end of the 19th century and has reappeared like the monster from the Black Lagoon since the era of Reaganomics. (To quote Wikipedia: “The Reagan era was marked by cuts to social programs, and large-scale deficit spending on the military.” Bush’s contribution has been to make the wealthy obscenely wealthy and to give them greater control over every aspect of society—including making war into a profitable enterprise, except for American taxpayers and the killed or maimed American soldiers. June 30th Bush signed a $162 billion war funding measure for his two nation destroying-rebuilding wars. (Why doesn’t the American nation get rebuilt?) He said, "This bill shows the American people that even in an election year, Republicans and Democrats can come together to stand behind our troops and their families." That is of course rhetorical poppycock. (Writing Bush’s speeches has to be one of the worst forms of the Faustian sellout.) The American people want the American government to spend money on helping Americans, improving America’s roads, bridges, schools, etc. and protecting American borders. And American soldiers don’t want to risk their lives fighting King George’s 21st century version of the Crusades, defending Israel’s occupation of the Holy Land. Of course, the U.S. government operates independently of the wishes of the American people.
Consider the Americans back home who bought those you-will-probably-lose-your-home loans, and are now losing their homes. Or the no more easy bankruptcies for cancer patients who have gone broke using their credit cards to pay for chemotherapy. Or that poor American black woman who died lying on a hospital floor while others looked on. Actually, that incident is a terrific metaphor for what the American government has become: an indifferent observer of human suffering, unless there is a photo shoot opportunity, like sending warships to aid cyclone damaged Myanmar. And of course during the past five years America has been an active cause of human suffering in Iraq (its destruction unrivaled by the earthquakes, tsunamis, and typhoons that have occurred in other parts of the world). Welcome to George Bush’s militaristic scroogenomics.
Mark Twain’s Unheeded Warning
Mark Twain was one who recognize that unbridled capitalism would do great harm to America at home and abroad (including the loss of reputation) and to other nations as well. He called this period in American history the Gilded Age (see Wikipedia “The Gilded Age,” and google “Mark Twain and American Capitalism”; see as well Twain’s novel The Gilded Age), suggesting that beneath the gilt existed something both horrifying and morally unseemly. Today we live in the new Gilded Age, and the question is whether Americans really want their country to be run by wealthy imperialistic capitalists like Bush and Cheney. Apparently they do, in part out of fear of being labeled unpatriotic socialists.
Immigration: America and Europe’s Unraveling
So where does Travis Barrett immigration trilogy come into play in the present retrogressive state of America and the world, in particular his recent novel Teenage Shooters? Well, first of all, a pervasive theme in all three novels is nostalgia for the America of the common people that existed from the Great Depression to about the 1960s, which seems to be the decade when the old, traditional America began to quickly unravel. Admittedly, this nostalgia would be felt most acutely by white Americans and not at all by the millions of immigrants who have entered the country during the last half century, many of whom having worked very hard to see the old America transformed into a new and alien multicultural America. Barrett believes, as I do, that the immigrant enclaves created by recent Asian, Hispanic, African, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European immigrants have little or nothing to do with traditional America. The immigrants are here not because they have any connection with the old America but to escape degraded homelands and to make a buck. As Barrett points out, the first thing the immigrants do is to clone in America communities un-American replicas of the their homeland cultures. One example would be what Barrett calls the “Hispanicization of L.A.” But whereas the immigrants in America have created an army of gangbangers who have transformed many American communities into war and crime zones, the Muslim immigrants in Europe become insurgents who hate their host nations and the European people. In France, for example, a favorite pastime of young Muslim immigrants is the burning of cars and buses and accosting French women (stealing their cell phones and wallets if they can). Last Tuesday four buses in the small town of La Mure were burned. Whereas Americans would be outraged, the French accept it as matter of course when you have a huge immigrant population that you wish not to offend; otherwise next time the buses may be set afire while occupied.
England is no better off. Take jolly ol’ London. One recent Mail Online News article titled “Foreigners Commit 20 Per Cent of Crime in London, Say Police” states, “More than one in five crimes committed in London in the first six months of this year were carried out by a foreign citizen [so doesn’t include naturalized aliens].” The crimes included violent offences, ranging from murder to assault, drug offences, sex crimes, robberies and burglaries. The highest number of offences were carried out by Poles." You can see that the European Union idea, where national borders disappear, is working out really well. Jamaicans, Somalians and Romanians are also high on the list—as were the Irish, but the Irish have been screwed forever by the English, so a little payback is acceptable. In addition, the Irish are as British as American blacks are American, so should be considered unruly members of the family that deserve concern and assistance from other family members. The Poles do not fall into that category—whether in America or in Great Britain—and certainly the Jamaicans and Somalians don't.
Of course the British government’s immigration policy, like that of most other European governments, is inspired by colonialist guilt and leftist anti-nationalism. The truth is that political leftists tend to be unpatriotic ideologues more interested in saving the world than saving their homelands. Look what the communists did in Russia; they destroyed their homeland and created the culturally neutered monster once known as the Soviet Union to replace motherland Russia. The beast being reborn today out of the ashes of Marxist ideology is the multicultural state, which is all the European Union is really. However, whereas multicultural morons such as Tony Blair and George Bush think multiculturalism is the way forward, it is actually the way backwards. Imagine Marlow’s journey to the heart of darkness. That seems to be the journey Europe and America have decided to embark upon by allowing aliens to flood into nations.
Consider the Jamaican Yardies who now terrorize London. During the 1950’s the British Government encouraged immigration as a cheap source of labor [that should sound familiar to American ears], including Jamaican Yardies. The result, Wikipedia (see “Yardie Gangs”) tells us, has been “Yardie gangs are notorious for their involvement in gun crime and the illegal drug trade, notably marijuana and crack cocaine.” In addition, “Yardie (or imitator) gangs also appear to be active in Bristol, Birmingham and Nottingham.” There are now 169 gangs in East London where in the last six months 16 teenagers were stabbed to death, including a sixteen-year-old girl. According to the on-line BBC News, “African-Caribbean gangs were described as the largest group, followed by south Asian and white gangs.” Of course, not all the gangs are made up of aliens, some are British, but you can’t really blame the British youth for being F-ing angry seeing that their government has been handing the nation over to aliens. For example, East London is dominated by a mosque that rivals any found in the Middle East. And what do the British get in return for their greedy, guilt-ridden generosity? Terrorism.
So yes, French, British, German, and American youths also commit crimes, just what you would expect from young people who see their futures being stolen because their own governments cares more about future of the aliens. Take as an example the plight of blacks in America who have been pushed to the back of the bus by the deluge of immigrants, like that poor black woman who was allowed to die on the floor of a New York hospital. It's pretty clear to them that millionaire Señor Bush cares a lot more about the Mexicans that have been illegally invading America than he does about American blacks whose communities are now being overrun and threatened by the growing Hispanic Nation and its gangs. Barrett's Gringo is dedicated Cheryl Green, the 14-year-old black girl "who was brutally gunned down in December by the 204th Street Gang, the 100-member Latino street gang that has been terrorizing the black community there." It's time to wise up, America.
Back to gloomy ol' England, most recently two French students were the victims of East London violence. One of the students was stabbed 200 times, the other 50. Even if a resident alien wasn’t responsible, alien gangsters are responsible for leading East London back into the heart of darkness and turning neighborhoods into crime zones. Just as in America, the British already had enough problems to deal with in the land of Jack the Ripper without inviting an army of criminal aliens. The extent to which the British authorities are willing to grovel before the aliens is illustrated by “Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the most senior judge in England and Wales, [who] said Islamic or sharia could play a role in some parts of the legal system.” If that’s not surrendering one’s nation to the aliens, what is? While the Muslims are wisely ridding the countries of aliens, the West is welcoming the aliens into their countries. It’s pretty clear who will be the losers in the long run.
As mentioned above, France also has a lot to worry about when it comes to the alien invasion. For example, a recent Herald Tribune article titled “A Terror Group’s Resurrection” explains that Algerian militants have aligned themselves with Al Qaeda. “The Algerian group offers Al Qaeda hundreds of experienced fighters and a potential connection to North African militants living in Europe. Over the past 20 months, North African suspects have been arrested in Spain, France, Switzerland, and Italy.” France now has over 6 million Muslims, a lot for a country the size of Texas and many vulnerabilities.
The Tuberculosis Immigrates to Texas
And by the way, in Texas “The epidemiology of tuberculosis is changing in the United States as a result of immigration... We found nonimmigrant visitors to be an important source of tuberculosis morbidity in Tarrant County [Texas]. Further studies in other regions of the U.S. are needed to determine if screening and treatment recommendations of persons who spend extended periods in the U.S. should be raised to the standards set for permanent residents.” In other words, the tubercular people are infecting America with social diseases other than crime.
Back to France. How Muslems feel about the French was illustrated last Christmas Eve in Islamic Republic of Mauritania when five picnicking French tourists from Lyon were ambushed by three men. Four were killed and one wounded by fire from an AK-47. Those French tourists were looking for trouble traveling to such a place to have a picnic, just the French, the British, and other European nations are naively looking for trouble by allowing their homeland to be invaded by aliens.
Immigration and Creating an Atmosphere of Mutual Hatred
And what is the attitude of the immigrating aliens? Basically it is one of gemmy, gemmy, gemmy but never being satisfied. The North Africans in France complain that their unemployment rate is 16%, overlooking that 84% of them are employed—and 100% are receiving generous benefits paid for by French taxpayers. And considering their dislike of Western education (and education generally for girls), it's no wonder that the unemployment rate is so bad. They also complain that the French people make them feel unwelcome. Well why in the world should the French people welcome invaders who basically hate their way of life and their guts and who have been allowed to invade their nation by their inapt, alien-loving leftist government? Americans don’t like Mexicans for the same reasons. Mexican-American history has been one of conflict and mutual hatred (Remember the Alamo?). And when the illegal aliens arrive they don’t bother to learn English and their children prefer being gang members to graduating from high school. And if they do graduate, they join anti-American organizations like La Raza and MECha (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan). The latter is a “Hispanic separatist organization that encourages anti-American activities and civil disobedience.” What does that mean exactly? “In its national constitution, MEChA calls for self-determination by its members to liberate Aztlan (google “What is MEChA”) Aztlan is the Southwest United State. So there is no way the aliens will ever return to their paradisaical homelands, either because life is infinitely better in the host-land they have invaded or because they want to remain in order to destroy it, most likely both.
I’m sure MECha is pleased that 16,000 aliens were given citizenship this July 4, at least 3 brigades for the mushrooming Hispanic Nation’s civilian army. On the other hand, Americans might be dismayed to know that “During the past year, USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service] has helped more than 640,000 men, women and children fulfill their dreams and become United States citizens.” Ironically, this information comes from the Homeland Security website. What a joke—on the American people, that is. Adiós, America!
Importing Trouble
Concerning Al Qaeda (or MEChA), let’s be clear about two things. First, the teeth of any terrorist group are the aliens living in the targeted nation. The 9-11 attacks made that clear, as well as attacks in Great Britain and Spain. (The Hispanics, on the other hand, will use the population bomb to destroy America.) And you might remember the Pope was shot by the Turkey terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca (who was added by Bulgarians, and now Bulgaria is a member of the European Union!)
Let's stop to take a closer look at Bulgaria. According to the Overseas Security Advisory Council, in Bulgaria “Organized crime groups are active and very visible in Bulgaria... Automobile theft is a common problem... Very few vehicles stolen in Bulgaria are ever recovered... People who plan to reside in Bulgaria on a long-term basis should take measures to protect their dwellings... Driving in Bulgaria is extremely dangerous... Bulgaria's ineffective court system makes it important for American companies to take precautions up front since relying on the Bulgarian court system to resolve business or contract disputes can be problematic... It is not unusual to observe anti-American and anti-NATO graffiti on walls in Sofia (okay, you can’t blame them for being anti-American; Bush and the neocons have made most Americans anti-American)... Con artists and thieves operate at airports, bus and train stations, and hotels, as well as on the street... Due to the potential of fraud, credit cards and ATMs should be used with caution... A "dropped wallet" scam occurs when a wallet is either left on the street or thrown down in front of the victim. When the victim picks the wallet up, the thieves claim the person stole the money... Baggage pilferage at airports is common.” And the European Union has invited the members of this criminalized nation into their home. Go figure!
And Europe is also considering allowing Turkey (with 70 million West hating Muslims) to join the European Union, which our own traitorous Señor George Bush advised them to do because he needs Turkey’s assistance to fight his own little war in Iraq. Europe should just go ahead an take a nuclear cyanide pill and end the misery foisted upon its peoples by idiotic politicians, leftist groups, and greedy capitalists that see Europe only as a giant, multi-national Wall Street.
The Al Qaeda Monster and the Original Axis of Evil
The second thing is that the monster Al Qaeda was given life by Russia, U.S., and Israel (the then true axis of evil, now reduced to two members—at least for now). Al Qaeda has existed for the simple reason to rid Islamic holy lands of European meddlers and intruders. I for one can’t blame them for wanting that, and believe just as strongly that America and Europe should rid themselves of the aliens (Islamic and otherwise) who have invaded their territories.
Barrett’sStrangers: America’s Lack of Practical Wisdom
Getting back to Barrett’s immigration trilogy, in Strangers, the first book of the trilogy, Barrett describes metaphorically the process of Hispanicization when a Mexican family shows up at an American home. The decadence of the Anglo husband-father, Thomas, incapacitates him as the protector of his home and family. Arsenio, on the other hand, the Mexican illegal immigrant is ruthless but not decadent. He is a realist, who, as he himself says, lives according to Darwinian principles of survival, not Jesus’ self-defeating philosophy of turning of the other cheek, which the European immigrants also put on hold while they invaded the Americas. In addition, Arsenio points out that his fellow illegal immigrants are acting according to the model of behavior illustrated by the Old Testament Jews (as invaders of other peoples’ territories), though Arsenio would not sanctimonious claim that he and his family have come to America as God’s chosen people but only in order to survive (and to reclaim land taken from them by the Gringo). He is also a great fan of Homer’s Iliad, especially of the part about the Trojan Horse.
Strangers plays off the American stereotype of Mexicans being docile and simpleminded. Of course, like the Iraqi “insurgents,” they are neither. As it turns out, the better educated, but decadent Thomas is no match for cunning, self-educated Arsenio, and, as a result, Thomas’ wife and daughter suffer greatly. Ironically, it is Arsenio who expresses most the wisdom the story has to offer. He recognizes, for example, that it is the traditional aspects of a people’s culture that gives it unity and meaning thus durability and longevity. He warns his son not to be enticed by the glitter of America’s culture of consumption. He uses Las Vegas as an illustration of where and how Americans went wrong and, as a result, have compromised the integrity of their traditional cultural.
America’s Suicidal Economics
America used to be a nation of workers but has become a nation of consumers who rely more heavily on credit rather than on becoming consummate workers. Thus, the nation now must import skilled and unskilled labor from south of the border and highly skilled labor—including science and engineering graduate students—from countries like India and Taiwan. In France, however, you still find French people working in the kitchens of French restaurants or making beds in French hotels. The French people are still willing to perform that kind of labor. However, these workers have advantages American workers lack. All French workers receive decent pay, medical care, paid vacations, and retirement benefits and live in a country that provides outstanding public transportation.
America’s: Prideful Ignorance
Americans could have learned a great deal from les Français (it now may be too late) had they been less pridefully arrogant, such as from the former French president Jacques Chirac, who argued that going to war against Iraq was unnecessary and thus would be immoral. So now while the French (like the peoples of other Europeans and non-European nations, such as China and Japan(who were not too proud to learn from America)) continue to improve their nations and their economies, Americans continues to squander blood and money in Iraq. It appears that America has gone into the business of creating domestic and foreign problems for itself rather than solving them. That’s why I say it may be too late—the business of creating rather than solving problems tends to have a positive feedback dynamic, especially in a world as competitive as ours. American manufacturing has decline from 25% of the economy to 12% since the 1950s (stiffing millions of American males by denying them well-paying masculine forms of work). What is remarkable about countries like France is that they accomplish so much with so little. France is twice the size of Colorado. Japan, the second largest economy in the world, is slightly smaller than California (and not nearly so blessed geographically). Whereas these countries efficiently use their resources, America, like the old USSR, tends to use its resources wastefully.
Barrett’s Gringo: Don’t Depend on Jesus
Barrett’s Gringo is a philosophical novel like Strangers but goes into much greater depth, containing 453 pages and 260 footnotes. The main character, Jeffrey, an English high school teacher, is in jail for killing an illegal immigrant. Whereas in Strangers Thomas’ decadence and inaction allow his family to be driven from their home, in Gringo Jeffrey’s action has a similar result. His guilt over what he has done to his family and his incarceration have open a floodgate of commentary on an array of philosophical, scientific, theological, political, and social topics. Much of the commentary occurs during conversations with a minister and psychologist. (Similarities do exist between Barrett’s novel and Camus’ The Stranger. The minister, for example, suggests that Jesus Christ is the solution to Jeffrey’s problems, but Jeffrey doesn’t see how Jesus could make any real difference in his life or that of his family. And he certainly won’t bring the dead illegal immigrant back to life. For some strange reason Jesus decided to quit the miracle business (perhaps because modern medicine has come up with some miracles of its own). He’d have a lot more followers if he would just pass them out when people need them, like that poor woman who died “alone” in a crowded New York hospital. She had waited 24 hours (just think her life might of been save with some of the money from Bush’s $162 billion war funding measure). Did the all-knowing Jesus watch the whole time?)
America’s Moral Blather
Jeffrey’s sense of doom expands from his own situation to the whole of America. His conclusion seems to be that America, in spite of having the best higher education system in the world, has become weirdly irrational and socially and culturally self-destructive. For example, Jeffrey finds it odd that Americans (such as John McCain) worry so much about homosexual relationships (more recently in the news, homosexual marriage) and so little about their government’s allowing a cabal of neoconservatives to highjack the country into becoming involved in a an extra-ordinarily destructive and immoral war. (Let’s face it, straight marriage is dysfunctional in America when 50% of them end in divorce. I suppose that to Americans like John McCain (married twice) gay marriage would be an abomination even if none ended in divorce and each partner remained faithful to the other.
Let’s take a closer look at John McCain’s first marriage to Carol McCain. During McCain’s five and a half year captivity in Vietnam where he had been bombing the hell out of the Vietnamese for no justifiable reason, since the Vietnamese, like the Iraqis, hadn’t harmed America in any way, but simply adopted a form of government the U.S. Government disliked. During his captivity Carol raised their children by herself; she sent frequent letters and packages to him, few of which the North Vietnamese let through. On Christmas Eve 1969, Carol McCain had an automobile accident that smashed both of her legs, broke her pelvis and arm, and ruptured her spleen. She spent six months in the hospital, and over the course of the next two years had 23 operations. She did not tell her husband about the accident in her letters to him, believing he already had enough to worry about.
When the McCains were reunited upon his release from captivity Carol, a formal swimwear model, was four inches shorter, on crutches, and substantially heavier than when he had last seen her. During John McCain's assignment as Executive Officer and Commanding Officer of the VA-174 squadron the McCains' marriage began to falter; he had extramarital affairs. In April 1979, John McCain met and began an extramarital relationship with millionaire and former cheerleader Cindy Lou Hensley. Carol McCain was described by friends as being in shock from the developments. The McCains separated later in 1979. John McCain filed for and obtained the uncontested divorce in Florida on April 2, 1980. (Biographical data from Wikipeida, "Carol McCain.")
It’s understandable that McCain would abandon the now less attractive woman who stood by him all those years for a young, beautiful millionaire. We all get that. But this guy has no right to be lecturing anyone on the morality of marriage.
And only God or some statistician knows how many straight marriages produce dysfunctional juvenile delinquents, for example, the parents of Nicholas Sheley accused of killing eight people. Or how many battered housewives are in gay marriages? Perhaps marriages should be evaluated according the benefit and harm they produce, rather than on an antiquated collection of Hebrew stories. The fact is that homosexual pairing occurs all the time in nature as well in other cultures—the ancient Greeks, for example. And even good marriages don't prevent monsters. Apparently George Bush and Laura have been happily married, but that didn't prevent George from becoming a warmongering mass murderer.
Barrett provocatively examines this issue in Gringo, and his conclusion seems to be that consenting intelligent adults should be left alone when they aren’t harming anyone else. Mike Savage would ask, What about a man who wants to marry and have sex with his dog? The answer is, dogs are not intelligent adults, and thus cannot consent to dogamy.) To those who believe that homosexual marriage is abnormal, I would say sometimes it's better to just accept certain abnormalities than to do a lot more harm trying to eradicate them. However, Barrett is also critical of homosexual activists proselytizers who seek to have homosexuality promoted in the schools and elsewhere as being as normal as having green eyes. Doing that doesn't promote acceptance but creates enemies. In fact, had homosexuals had not been on their marriage high horse leading up to the 2000 presidential election, George Bush might not have been elected. Homosexuals are often insensitive to the beliefs and feelings of heterosexuals. Often they seem to prefer having heterosexuals as their enemies and accomplish that by mocking heterosexuals' beliefs and values.
Of course, traditional Americans are at fault as well because they literally buy into and even celebrate the culture of corruption that oozes out of Hollywood and other centers of the entertainment industry. They are more like Hoffman and the character he portrays in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. (I know what you’re thinking: “See that is what the film is revealing, the decadent American way of life.” Nonsense. Such movies and their makers love the decadent way of life and get rich and famous embracing it. They wouldn’t have it any other way. It simply feels too good and pays too well.
Brokeback Homosexuals
A look at Brokeback Mountain: Undoubtedly the homosexual community considered Brokeback Mountain as a big joke on the quintessential heterorsexual film genre the western, directed by alien Ang Lee. Embellished with traditional western film elements, writers and director attempt to give a majestic, mythic quality to the story; however, as I watched the film I was reminded of the sodomizing hillbilly in the movie Deliverance. Stripped of all its western-movie romantic pretence, Brokeback Mountain is simply about gay men butt fucking in the wilderness, something that prison inmates might find appealing but not most of America. However, to be fair to homosexuals, watching Philip Seymour Hoffman pig-like butt fuck Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is no less a depraved cinematic moment. I believe it was Jane Austen who suggests in Mansfield Park that the distinction between the actor and nihilist is fine to nonexistent. Actors seem to believe that morality or values are nothing more than the fleeting glimmerings rooted in nothing more than an individual’s imagination. In addition, Hoffman’s pornographic moment shows that winning an Oscar is no indication of moral rectitude. For money and fame, anything and everything is for sale.
From its very inception to its receiving an Academy Award Brokeback Mountain is certainly a story characterized by a hatred for traditional America—its history, values, and people. It's appropriate that this animus is depicted in that genre most reviled by the citizens of the New Contra-America (homosexuals, leftists, aliens, Judas Americans like Larry McMurtry who will sell their American souls for a buck, and of course the anti-America Jewish multiculturalists). Clearly these people have formed an alliance against traditional Americans and seek to subtlely transform, overthrow, and appropriate their culture.
America’s Fatal Wobble
Somewhere Barrett compares America to a spinning top that has been thumped by a malicious child and so is now wobbling out of control, and as we now see the thumpers are many. Hollywood, the Church (including born-again Christians and depraved Catholic priests and cardinals), American Big Business, self-serving politicians, and a variety of non-American (Barrett would say anti-American) special interest groups (such as Zionists and pro-illegal immigrant groups like La Raza). The overall result is America now exists on the brink of spinning out of control and into a paralytic of confusion—which is just fine with those who seek the dissolution of the old America.
Barrett’s Teenage Shooters: American Kids Get Shafted
This is pretty much where the novel Teenage Shooters comes in. Whereas much of Strangers is told from the point of view of a ruthless yet wise illegal immigrant and Gringo from that of an American high school teacher demoralized by his own failure to protect his family and by the intellectual, moral, and cultural decay occurring in his homeland, Teenage Shooters is told from the point of view of a lower class American teenager, Freddy Louche. The story could have been titled The World According to Freddy Louche, and if you asked Freddy for a one-sentence summary about the state of the world, he’d probably tell you “It’s a big fucking mess.” Significantly, this story is about the generation of Americans who will inherent that mess and an American nation in a state of decline and turmoil. A remaining fragment of America that Freddy and his father leave behind is the city of Waterloo, Iowa, which I assume represents not only small-town America (as in the Wilder play Our Town) but any American community where still exist the American way of life and values associated with America before the country slipped into its present state of decay and dissolution. (The depressing reality may be that there is no longer any such place because even in small towns the kids smoke crack-cocaine and listen to Marilyn Manson and Slipnot (the band is actually from Des Moines, Iowa; let’s just hope Barrett doesn’t find out) while their parents are in the kitchen cooking up meth and marijuana brownies—for the toddlers).
Inheriting a Multicultural Hell
In his new environment (America's future?) Freddy exists in a state of alienation. In a rather confused way he too rejects the old America represented by his father, in part because he sees his father as a failure in every way except as being a caring father. Freddy describes himself, his father, and friends as losers, which seems to mean that is how he also sees America—as big and powerful as it might be. Its military can destroy nations but the country cannot save itself. His alienation is aggravated by the fact that he lives in a multicultural neighborhood consisting of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics and roaming teenage gangbangers and wannabe bullies. His part of the community consists of white-trash losers. I do not believe that Barrett is saying that Freddy’s existence represents that of all American teenagers. The story points out that Freddy’s situation can be avoided by Americans with money. The question is whether Freddy’s world somehow represents what much of America is likely to become, a nation of desperate, disoriented people and multicultural antagonisms, a situation that will continue grow more severe as the country’s social, economic, and cultural conditions continue to deteriorate.
Consider the fact that every country with a large immigrant population—especially militant populations such as the Muslims and Mexicans—now suffers from a pervasive and constant angst, disquiet, distress, and unease, a kind of national mental illness: That anxious mood, which has become the source of other darker moods, such as hopelessness and depression among those who believe the problem of immigration is unsolvable and thus eventually dooming their nation to continuing chaos and eventually dissolution, regardless of how many happy, propagandistic multicultural television shows and movies are made or maudlin new-immigrant stories (such as Crossing Over, Enrique’s Journey, The Joy Luck Club, and The House on Mango Street) are published. The fact is that the reality on the street and that on the movie or television screen will always be diametrically opposite. Thus the question must be asked, was allowing and even encouraging the alien invasion worth the price that is now being paid and will continue to be paid by the people themselves? Of course, the answer is yes for the aliens escaping dysfunctional nations (made that way mostly by their own kind). But for the people of the host nations, the answer is no. To them the aliens are a kind of infection that has caused a national malaise that is very likely in some way to be fatal to their homeland (“The problems of Arabs and Muslims in Europe are particularly worrying given that the 14 states or entities along Europe's eastern and southern borders are home to 385m Muslims—mostly Arabs—with a birth rate more than double that of Europeans.”) For example, Americans don’t want to live in gang infested Hispanic communities such as East L.A. The English don’t want to live in criminalized Jamancan communities such as Brixton. And the French don’t want to live in radicalized and criminalized Arab communities where the French are hated and disrespected, especially French women.
Learning from the French Experience
Excerpts from various articles about crime in France: “A study by a Sorbonne University researcher this year indicated that violent crime [in France] had quadrupled in the last eight years.”
“Opinion polls indicate the French are putting an increasing sense of insecurity at the top of their list of concerns. And crime has become the topic of many dinnertime conversations. During a nationally televised interview on Bastille Day, President Jacques Chirac mentioned rising crime as the country's greatest concern. ‘People are scared,’ he said.”
“A specter is haunting Europe — crime. Voters are mad as hell about it, and they've made it clear to their elected officials that they're not going to take it anymore. It was disgust with insecurity that helped sweep rightists to power in France last June.”
“The causes [of crime] are regarded across the political spectrum as dangerous to discuss, [such as] the disproportionately large role, acknowledged by some social workers and criminologists, played by young men of Arab immigrant origin in the rise in crime and disorder... French crime statistics make no reference to race, [such as] the disproportionate delinquency rate of young people of immigrant background, which was denied for so long under the pretext of not stigmatizing them."
Part of the problem is that immigrants consider the laws of the hated host nation invalid and not applying to them. Crime then becomes a romantic act of rebellion against the racist American, British, or French oppressor. And about the “racism” issue, why should not the host population hate those strangers who have invaded their homelands bringing with them a multitude of social-economic ills, including crime and terrorism. And just so you don’t make the mistake of thinking only America, Britain, and France suffer from their immigrant populations, we are told that “Muslims are only 4 percent of Denmark's 5.4 million people but make up a majority of the country's convicted rapists, an especially combustible issue given that practically all the female victims are non-Muslim. Similar, if lesser, disproportions are found in other crimes.”
It’s a Video Game World
In Barrett’s Teenage Shooters sixteen-year-old Freddy escapes the bleak reality of his own multicultural community by turning to video games, especially those of the Resident Evil series, because he believes the games reflect more accurately the reality of existence generally and his life in particular than does what religion or high school tries to teach him. (And at least in the video games he has the power to protect himself by killing the human and alien monstrosities that threaten to destroy him. This certainly is one of the great appeals of video games in societies in which governments fail to protect their people.) Nevertheless, though Freddy thinks school is a waste of time, it becomes clear that he learns a good deal from school that explains and illustrates his worldview. Though many of his teachers encourage an optimistic view of the world and society, the stories, scientific theories, and history they teach give a different picture of things, one much more consistent with his experience of life (separated parents, bullies, a financially struggling father, etc.).
What Isn’t Taught in American High Schools
In his English classes, for example, Freddy learns that life can be a brutal struggle for survival (Beowulf), that human behavior is essentially irrational (Lord of the Flies and Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and that in the long run science is just as likely to make a mess of the world as to improve it (Frankenstein). In his history class he learns that human history has been pretty much a horror story that continues to repeat itself (wars; revolutions; and greedy, misguided and often downright stupid leaders). And in science, he learns that the beastly behavior of human beings is much more consistent with Darwin’s theory of evolution than with any religious notion of humanity’s being the children of an all powerful, benevolent God. He also learns from science that as bad as things are, they are bound to get worse (a vision clearly express in H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel The Time Machine). So in spite of his dislike of school, Freddy learns a lot at school that seems consistent with his own dismal view of things.
One thing that Freddy finds greatly perplexing is that so many smart people understand why human beings and their world are the way are but humanity continues to behave badly and make the world a worse rather than better place to live. Because of this failure Freddy considers humanity not so much evil (though he does believe many people are evil) as pathetic. And, as a result, he believes that for the most part “there is no hope.” Freddy’s view of things is bleak because his life is bleak. Today Freddy’s life is still the exception rather than the rule (at least in the United States). Barrett’s question is whether Freddy’s pessimism is a Cassandra view of most of America by the middle of this century. It has already arrived for millions of Americans and thousands of American communities.
The Boring Truth about American High Schools
In Gringo the reader discovers that Barrett actually believes what American students learn in high school is, for the most part, pretty boring because teachers, for a variety of reasons, avoid examining challenging and controversial questions and ideas. Take, for example, Darwin’s theory of evolution. The topic is still avoided like the plaque in American high schools because it calls into question many cherished beliefs, such as there being a benevolent God watching over us who has prepared a wonderful or hellish afterlife for us.
Philosophy is a discipline that rarely finds its way into American public high schools, so students do not have the opportunity to seriously study critical thinking based on an understanding of rhetoric, epistemology, logic, and language. So what goes on in American high school, especially American public high schools? Basically two categories of learning: First, cultural indoctrination (succinctly expressed in the Pledge of Allegiance, written by a Baptist minister and Christian Socialist), such as being patriotic (even when your country is behaving like a global bully) , God fearing (though you have found no evidence in your life for being so), in favor of multiculturalism (when you really don’t want a mosque or drug cartel in your backyard), and tolerant and even welcoming (of people you consider a threat to your homeland, your values, and your way of life). Second, vocational training: learning to read, write, and calculate at a 6th grade level by graduation and acquired a modicum of factual information in various disciplines so that you can at least find on a map the country America is currently at war with. The success of all this will be determined on standardized tests, which have become the primary focus of most high school teaching.
Inheriting the Adult-Made Wasteland
The story need not be read for what it says about America’s and perhaps the world’s decline and fall. (How many millions of people have to live in social, cultural, and economic degradation and inescapable misery before one concludes that the world is in fact in a state of severe and perhaps irreversible decline? For example, what if the conditions of the global population evolve to a point similar to those endured by China’s population today—where 20% of the populations is well-to-do but the rest live like worker ants? Perhaps the world as a whole is already like China. Already the richest 2% of the world’s population owns 50% of the world’s wealth.) The story can be read as a depiction of a basically good American teenager who struggles with the very same problems millions of American teenagers struggle with. In the story many of those teenagers become bullies and gangbangers. Freddy hates them but understands that they are also not so different from him. They may become mean because doing so is a social and psychological survival mechanism. Freddy never goes down that road psychologically (I don’t think he does, anyway), but he does, nevertheless, reach a point at which he is capable of murder.
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