Dead Zones

by G. Murphy Donovan (August 2019)


Smoke Stacks, Joseph Stella, 1935

 

 

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
—George Orwell

 

 

I don’t like to think of myself as a Luddite, but as they say, if the shoe fits, walk on.

 

My skepticism is driven by “progressive” politics and unprincipled “science,” both leavened with a kindness of lies, the sickly-sweet smell of mendacity. Many things political are represented as progress when they are, in practice, recidivist editions of Marxism, Fascism, or Socialism. Contemporary notions of “social” democracy in the European Union, for example, come to mind.

 

Unelected apparatchiks in Brussels now call the shots across Europe.

 

Misnomers like “democratic republic” in the Muslim souk suffer from similar adjectival fakery. The Ummah is a racially diverse religious ghetto. An Islamic theocracy is a “republic” in the same sense that Puerto Rico is actually rich.

 

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Many things scientific are represented as ground truth, too, when much contemporary “reason” is in fact shot through with liberal politics or, worse still, hidden agendas. Specious arguments for “medical” marijuana come to mind here. Calling pot “medicine” is a chemical joke. Nine of ten citizens in Oregon may get baked twice a day, but they seldom get cured.

 

Mary Jane is another revenue stream.

 

If the truth be told; weed, blow, alcohol, and suicides are, at the same time, profitable and predictable rackets. Drugs, depression, suicide “treatments” and counseling are more business model than remedy. Hence, “recovery,” like rehabilitation, is always a journey not a destination.

 

Long trips make for a better bottom line in the psychobabble industry. What you believe is never as important as who you believe.

 

If the meter is running, recidivism pays. Calling a drunk or junkie a patient is the kindest of lies, a deception which allows tokers, tipplers, slackers, dead beats, and grifters to think of themselves as powerless victims.

 

The personal computer is, at its best, the principal crutch for career victims, the rhetorical equivalent of a public toilet that can’t be flushed. Occasionally, thought police manage to pluck out a few choice chunks, but digital oligarchs of Silicon Valley are invariable social democrats, insuring that any turd toss will be very selective.

 

The internet privy is the kind of water closet where fact and fiction float with equal pride of place. Digital truth is now officially Orwellian, a function of: repetition, views, reviews, likes, up-votes, retweets, and star ratings.

 

One has to wonder what seers like Orwell and Gogol would have thought of global memes where truth, virtue, values, and character are popularity contests. Perpetual adolescence has been trending since Princess Diana was beatified. Arrested development is a new digital mean—a rechargeable liberal lifestyle.

 

OCD, ADD, hysteria, addiction, depression, and digital autism have gone viral. Our tendency to label all bad or tedious behavior as illness is the unkindest of lies and self-deception.

 

Nevertheless, sick, and proud of it, appears to be the new normal.

 

Mendacious Politics

       

The political world is, arguably, the place where truth dies first. At least three false narratives shade the American political landscape; fake national security threats, fake domestic perils, and mischaracterizations of nationalism and globalism.

 

Alas, with the advent of Donald Trump, national security institutions and most media outlets lost their credibility in an orgy of pique and partisanship, if not treason.

 

In short, the very institutions that should be the brokers of objectivity and truth, have sold their souls for a pocket full of political mumbles. Top cops at Justice, State, and the Intelligence Community are now implicated in an Obama/Clinton era scheme to undo a national election and then unseat a sitting president.

 

National Security Mendacity

 

Realpolitik foreign relations are now sacrificed on that altar of domestic animus. The Russian bogey man was exhumed to service the anti-Trump conspiracy whilst Mohamed’s mad men mutilate, pillage, and kill at will in the name of Allah.

 

The Russian chimera, withal, defies all logic.

 

The American left, which formerly romanticized the Soviet Union, Stalin, and Communism, now vilifies modern semi-democratic Russia. All the while, Americans and their allies are being killed or mutilated by Muslim jihadists, not the Red Army. Call it strategic inversion. We obsess about a hypothetical threat from the Kremlin while minimizing the jihadist blood bath that continues to unfold globally before our eyes.

 

Calling Islam “Abrahamic” or, worse still, one of the world’s “great” religions, is a theological lie. Labeling Russians as an enemy is a foolish and dangerous strategic lie.

 

Islam is in practice a repressive political virus where state and mosque are joined at hip and lip. Infidels defer to Mecca from fear, a kind of numerophobia. Islam is on the move again, a fourth of the world’s population and growing. Fear, loathing, and appeasement midst unbelievers is trending.

 

Among the many Muslim small wars, Afghanistan is the poster child for strategic inertia if not operational stupidity. Nearly forty years of American blood and treasure has been squandered in that sierra hotel. Net result, Afghanistan is now the largest successful Islamic criminal drug cartel on the planet.

 

Beyond irony, the US Defense Department, augmented by an insatiable American junkie demographic, is subsidizing the global Muslim jihad with opium production, profits, and consumption. You can’t make this stuff up.

 

Islam is triumphant and our national security mandarins insist that Moscow is the problem. Calling Russia the enemy and Islam a friend is at once false, stupid, cruel, and expensive.

 

Racial Perils

 

Racism is the single word that captures the faux world of domestic division. Mendacity here is again binary; white=bad, black or brown (or colored)=good. Euphemisms like “people of color” exclude any prole who has a real job, wears a red ball cap, or uses sun block. Withal, black or white is still a rhetorical not a biological or racial distinction. The truth here, seldom spoken, is that most Americans are mutts of one sort or another.

 

Brown is indeed the new white. Some mutts are more prominent than others to be sure.

 

Barack Obama comes to mind. Obama claims to be “black” because he identifies with an African dad not his Caucasian mom. Ironically, if “white privilege” is a thing, Mr. Obama is surely a beneficiary of that meme. Hard to believe Barack would have ever seen Harvard, the Senate, or the White House were it not for the enlightenment and largesse of his Haole mother and her parents.

 

Labeling a chap like Obama “black” is a calculated racial lie.

 

Race may be a thing, but it is infinitely more complex than binary. The simplistic black and white demographic wedge is a useful political fiction cultivated by bigots, race hustlers, and social “scientists.”

 

The fembot political “Squad” on the Hill takes a bow here. The Squad is another victim caucus with four predicates: vaginas, melanin, Jew hate, and Islamism. The face of American Socialists (nee Democrats) is now officially a vanguard of forlorn hope, enfants perdus at best.

 

Calling the Squad, feminists, is a genital lie. Bigot is closer to the mark.

 

Speaking of social mendacity, “cultural appropriation” is still trending too. Surely Beyoncé, Wendy, and Nicki Minaj are not from Finland, nor are they true blondes either.

 

Racial authenticity, like ethnic truth, is a terrible thing to waste.

 

The Globalist Chimera

 

The nationalist versus globalist imbroglio is another binary hoax, one with messianic and genocidal implications. We are led to believe that a world with open borders is a better world. Concurrently, we are led to believe that nationalism is just another symptom of white male privilege.

 

Real history puts the lie to all globalist utopian schemes of the past. They fail because global empire inevitably degenerates into fascism where force is the only mastic. From Alexander, to Cesare, to Mohamed, to Hitler, to Stalin, and now Jeremy Thorpe or Elizabeth Warren; utopian schemes always come a cropper.

 

Globalism is never about diversity so much as it is about uniformity, conformity, and repression.

 

Still, world government is both a perennial death wish and the premier employment agency for failed socialist politicians. Agencies like the UN and the EU are spastic with refugees from the global political left. If world government ever becomes a reality, the first casualty would be diversity, followed quickly by the death of personal liberty.

 

National biological, economic, and political competition are virtues. Like industrial competition, national competition makes the world go round. Hat tip to common sense, Charles Darwin, and Adam Smith. A culture without competition, conflict, and enterprise is a dead zone, a necropolis. Most arguments for globalism are utopian lies, literal pipe dreams these days.

 

What you believe is never as important as who you believe.

 

Mendacious Science
 

If America is awash in fake news, modern science and the academy have a lot to answer for. Indeed, beyond government, the school house is the largest failing industry in America. Phrases like “public education” and “public service” are usually half-truths at best.

 

Academia has now brought public schoolhouse standards to the scientific marketplace. Examples of fake science abound, especially in disciplines like history, social “science,” and environmental studies.

 

Iconoclastic History

 

It’s probably a stretch to call history a science or a “discipline,” so “department” may have to do for the sake of argument. The meme du jure for academic historians at the moment is deconstruction, or better still iconoclasm. Beyond the destruction of statuary and monuments, revisionists claim that history was written by “white” men, the winners of colonial or exploitive wars.

 

As such, the books must now be rewritten and films must be made to elevate all the mud hut kingdoms of the Third World to some kind of parity. Hollywood and Broadway are doing much of the heavy lifting here. Efforts to rewrite history are not without irony. The “reparations” corollary is an example.

 

Special pleading for reparations argues that this generation of “whites” owes the descendants of African slaves compensation for historical abuses. Carried to its logical conclusion, specific culprits would have to be named, say those crackers in the Democrat Party, those Jeffersonian states-rights legates that sponsored slavery, Civil War, segregation, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, and a host of other historical crimes.

 

Withal, descendants of slaves in America today vote in lock step with those same Democrats, still captive to the very demagogues that enslaved and abused their ancestors for several millennia. Reparations might be a righteous slice of poetic justice if the payer is to be the DNC—maybe the Clinton and Obama families too.

 

Adding ignorance to liberal irony, the only significant institution in America today still arguing for black and white separatism is the Nation of Islam, America’s home-grown warren of “black” Islamists. The NOI and the Islamist “Squad” of Democrats in Congress are cut from the same ideological burka.

 

Historians have managed to slander all “whites,” or Europeans, with the evils of slavery when in fact the guilty party in America was the Democrat Party, still thriving on the left, still extant.

 

Historical mendacity is augmented today by omission. Slavery is alive and flourishing today, in many black and brown sierra hotels, contemporary mud hut kingdoms in the Ummah and Africa. Polite euphemisms like “human trafficking” cannot cover the stench of mendacity when the subject is modern slavery.

 

We would be remiss not to mention that revisionist historians and Islamists share the same like-minded enthusiasm for iconoclasm, erasing history or artifacts that threaten their ideological moorings.

 

Social Fakirs

 

If history departments are a refuge for ideological hucksters, the social sciences are not far behind. There was a time when some intellectuals on the left had the integrity to call cards where they fell. President Harry Truman and Senator Pat Moynihan come to mind.

 

Moynihan had the courage to point out, in The Negro Family (1965), that government social programs, public assistance (nee welfare) were not working. Indeed, he argued that welfare was destroying black families, encouraging out-of-wedlock children, and creating generational dependencies. Moynihan didn’t mention self-segregating schools and resegregated neighborhoods. Those pathologies too came to pass in urban America.

 

The hand-up ethic now has been replaced by hand-out sinecures. If the truth be told, public assistance programs today serve two primary purposes; vote buying and a kind of urban fire insurance. The fire insurance thing is a dicey bet in places like Baltimore and Detroit.

 

All the while, cultural mandarins, black and white, are tripping over themselves to cash in on the fake history fad that seeks to romanticize, yea reinvent, black history in America and Africa. Hamilton on Broadway and Black Panther in Hollywood take a bow here.

 

Let’s leave the inconvenient truths of social science with a single thought. What does it profit an at-risk kid in a Baltimore slum to believe fake history or a Hollywood version of the African American or African past when that child’s mother can’t tell him who his father is?

 

Environmental Theater

 

If you had to choose between the three most useless degrees to pursue with borrowed money; education, gender studies, and environmental studies would top the list. Of the three, environmental studies are the worst if fact and truth are values. Calling the environment a “study” is itself a stretch.

 

Most of the noise on the subject is a political food fight. The major premises of the environment movement are rhetorical strawmen.

 

Nobody disputes “global warming.” Climate and temperature have been sinusoidal since the big bang. Nobody disputes “climate change” either. Climate changes when you walk from your attic to the basement. Your dog seeks refuge under your house in August because he senses danger better than you do. The great conundrum, withal, is man’s role in opening/closing the ozone hole and those melting ice sheets. Here arguments go from hysterical to hypocritical in a heartbeat.

 

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Without wading into the minefield of environmental trivia like paper or plastic bags, reusable straws, sidewalk chewing gum, cotton diapers, outdoor smoking, pooper scoopers, cruise ship scat, cow farts, scooter emissions, biking spandex, and recyclable sanitary napkins, let’s identify the single reductio ad absurdum which is beyond dispute. The great polluting, yea toxic, sierra hotels of the planet are all liberal, if not socialist, population centers, most perched on key water ways or oceans fronts where aquatic environs have already been reduced to “dead zones”. Pollution in America, like slavery, is a legacy, indeed an artifact of the political left. If environmental rigor or reparations are in order, start with the culprits.

 

“Progressive,” in any context, could be a euphemism for pollution.

 

As the great coastal enclaves are about to go under, there’s good and bad news. On the bright side, rising waters should solve the urban smut dilemma. On the dark side, flyover country will probably have to pay to relocate all those liberal barnacles.

 

Cow scat in agrarian America is a plop in the bucket compared to garbage and carbon generated by New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

 

When the great progressive sewers clean up their acts, then and only then can an honest discussion begin about gas, garbage and what humanity as a species should do to create a righteous niche in a more habitable cosmos.

 

What you believe is never as important as who you believe.

 

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G. Murphy Donovan is a former urban Democrat from the Bronx, an erstwhile career Intelligence officer who writes about the politics of national security.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast

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