A Cult

I have no premeditated witticisms for this one. I'm too pissed-off for that, but I'll probably toss some stuff out on the fly just so I don't cry myself to sleep tonight. I can no longer sit idly by and pretend at some facsimile of political correctness or benefit of the doubt. That time has passed, and I must truly speak my mind. I make no apologies to anyone who is offended or thinks that I am too harsh.


The Republican Party is a cult, as sadistic as Charles Manson's family and as fiercely devoted as the residents of Jonestown. They deny science, dehumanize anyone who doesn't conform to their delusions, and call for the deaths of whomever they arbitrarily declare to be the enemy. As I write this all off-the-cuff, I realize that I must give this some structure or I may devolve into the same firebrand death-wishing as those I so despise, so let's do this.

Formation
First off, a cult does not need to be established around a religion; a dogma or philosophy works just as well, as Nazi Germany showed. The National Socialist party was most certainly a cult, and it rejected all religion.

The only true necessity for a cult to form is a dogma strong enough to gather like-minded followers and enough intelligence in the leader to realize that it needs to be kept silent. I cannot point to exactly when the Republican party became wholly infested by their cult, but I know that Conservative dehumanization, death-wishing and regressionist campaigning has existed ever since before the Civil War. My best guess for the firm entrenchment of this cult would be during the McCarthy era, wherein the madmen found that the public was willing to go along with the wildest accusations if driven by fear, and the Other was certainly enough to incite this fear.

The fall of the Soviet Union had to be a crushing blow to this cult, as suddenly there was no looming Other to terrify the proletariat. In the face of this, the cult dug deep and dipped into the collective fears that are nurtured by religious dogma and the willful ignorance that has always been a secondary goal of the Church since its rise to power at the fall of the Roman Empire. Lacking one major Other, they decided to instead sow the seeds of terror and division far and wide, striking at anything they could: homosexuality, women, other races, other religions, other demographics and educational levels; anything that could be painted as Different, Other, and Evil was done so. Fear is the single greatest motivator to make a person act against his or her own best interests.

Dogma
What makes one small group a religion and another group a cult? Well, there are all sorts of reasons, but the number-one thing that separates a religion from a cult is that religion is supposed to be a part of your life, while a cult is intended to BE your life. Nothing can supersede your loyalty to the cult, your subservience and dedication to your leaders. This certainly explains how so many competing Christian religions, who normally despise one another to the point of near-civil war, can work together in the Republican party while still making religion one of their primary stances. The reason, of course, is that their religion is their cult, not whatever denomination they claim. They ally with a church to gain the loyalty of the cattle, following basic talking points while keeping their true intent hidden.

This is another important point in defining a cult: they keep their behavior secret. They do not share their beliefs with others who have not yet been heavily indoctrinated, nor do they share anything about themselves, their lives, friends, activities, or anything else if they can avoid it. Todd Akin's recent verbal atrocity hints at this: we all know that the Republican base believes his words, that the vagina is some magic creature that can slay unwanted sperm, but I don't honestly believe that the cultists in power believe this. This is the dogma they spout to their constituents to get them to fall in lockstep; Akin made the mistake of sharing it with people who would protest, so the rest of the party immediately disavowed him.

In addition, cultists actively reject facts that do not gel with their fantasies. Whether these facts are that their leader is only human and not a god, or that economic deregulation has never worked in the history of modern America, they are ignored and violently shouted down. As with most cults that find their origins in heresy, Republican cultists have no problem with picking apart their holy book - the Bible - and rewriting sections to fit with their own interpretation of the world, to hold up homosexuality as a far greater sin than violating the Ten Commandments or the Two Commandments of Christ's covenant, and to somehow completely negate Jesus' lessons to support the poor and donate their wealth as the rich can never enter Heaven.

Something odd, though, is that most cults don't last very long because they have a single godly figurehead, and with that lost most can no longer cling to their madness, or at least cannot perpetuate it. In this case, scarily enough, I believe that their god-figure is the dollar. Every policy recently offered up that did not strip individuals of their rights was somehow designed to leave more Americans unemployed or stuff even more money in the pockets of the richest Republicans. In this case, the cult's leader will never die as the dollar cannot truly be killed. Instead, we are tasked with the nightmarish challenge of defeating the worshippers rather than executing their leader.

Principles
Cults always stand against human decency, acting in manners directly anathema to the survival of the species. In this case, we know the origin of their actions: fear of the Other keeps their followers quietly in check, following along in abject terror of some evil brown person leaping out to slay them, with the occasional carrot being dangled before them to make them move faster - usually something to do with religion or the stripping of human rights from women or minorities.

However, fear has been working less and less. Americans don't have as much to fear. Fewer and fewer people, though still more than is in any way acceptable, fear others for the color of their skin, their religion or orientation. So, faced with this glaring fact, the cult has changed to incite hatred.

This scares me more than ever, even more than when I first learned about Bush-era renditioning. Tea Party rallies cheer when someone dies from lack of medical care, they call for the deaths of their candidates' political rivals, and plot the demise of our President. All the while their cultist puppet-masters continue to drive them forward, stoking the flames of their rage.

Republicans have made more unfounded claims regarding fellow Americans than we have seen since the age of McCarthy, and now the motivation of these accusations are not fear but hate. We have seen a total of eight mass killings in one month, and the month isn't even over yet.

We need to declare this Republican cult to be the religious terrorists they are before they amass and strike against peaceful Americans. Human compassion from the Right is at an all-time law, and they believe murder to be justified in idealistic disagreements. I do not normally stand as an advocate of fear or direct negative action against fellow human beings, but I can no longer sit quietly and watch as the raving masses continue to build power and create a feedback loop of rage amongst themselves. This bubble of hatred is soon to burst, and I fear for all those who believe in self-determination and human moral responsibility. The most outspoken of them will likely be the first casualties.

Pros and conned

The recent Chik-Fil-A controversy has unveiled a disturbing number of gay-haters, many of whom try to disguise their bigotry - even to themselves - with rhetoric and differing arguments. The "pro-" movement has existed for a long time, and is most often utilized by the ignorant in an attempt to positively or negatively charge a debate.

Take some of the most common (and inaccurate) terms: Pro-Life and Pro-Family. Pro-Life is just a blatant lie. If life is sacred, why is it only sacred until birth? After that, Conservatives work to strip healthcare from mothers and children, stating that programs such as welfare and Medicare are only a drain on society, and it's every person's duty to take care of themselves. Of course, this is why Ron Paul, one of the biggest supporters of abolishing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security makes excessive use of all of them for himself and his family. Apparently only those capable of easily supporting themselves deserve handouts, because why should those with the ability to do so actually do so?
People who are Pro-Life also frequently favor the death penalty and leniency in killings with laws like Stand Your Ground, so again life is sacred only until birth, then they don't seem to care if people die or are murdered. Truly, Pro-Life is simply Anti-Abortion trying to make itself appear friendlier.

Pro-Family is another laughable concept, if one actually takes a step back. Those people who claim to be Pro-Family stand behind representatives who are adulterers, who hate their own family members for being different, who divorce their spouses or abandon them to die, and numerous other atrocities against the concept of family.
The entirety of the Pro-Family argument is basically "pro-anything that's not gay." Gay children are shunned, and gay people are hated. Many of homosexuals' detractors say that gays are "anti-family" or "anti-traditional marriage." This implies that they wish to abolish marriage or tear apart families, and where has one advocate for gay rights seriously come out and said that gay marriage should be the only marriage? I'm seriously asking for a single recorded statement, on the record in a press release, saying that this is the goal.

Now for two actual "pros": First is Pro-Choice, which does nothing but acknowledge that it is each woman's, and each family's, choice. If Pro-Life doesn't care that parents torture and violently beat their children, and calls for the deaths of people every day, how can they claim the moral high ground over a movement that just says that a person's body is his or her own?

Next is Pro-Equality, a common term for the gay rights movement. As the name says, the movement is focused on equal rights, not on superiority. Gays only want the same rights as any other Americans, the ability to visit their loved ones in the hospital and to share the precious commodity that is health insurance, among other things.

As an addendum, I truly do not understand the hatred of gays. Homosexuality is not condemned by the Ten Commandments, nor by any sacred covenant between God and His people. How do the religious Conservatives justify permitting violators of the Ten Commandments, the very building blocks of Christianity, to hold rights that they would keep stripped from gays?

Coattails

The world is turning to shit. There is one simple reason for this: we're letting it. Oh, I could bawl on and on about how corporations and big media use the power of their lobbyists to control our government like a really expensive marionette, how the alcohol and tobacco industries intentionally beat down the legalization of marijuana because it's safer and less addictive than either of the aforementioned substances, how pharmaceutical companies have to be led by evil overlords, and all sorts of jazz. But at the end of the day, it's the people's fault. The Obama election proved that a true grass-roots campaign, making people aware that they had the power to improve things, worked. It proved that we, the people, can change things.

Unfortunately, that election was very telling about the American people. You see, the reason it worked so well was because the people weren't really the ones taking responsibility. They were picking somebody else to shoulder the responsibility, somebody else to take the blame. The voter is like the sports fan: If his team wins, he exclaims, "We won!" If his team loses, he growls, "They lost." Notice the difference? A fan and a voter can claim responsibility for their favored team/candidate if they perform well, citing their support, but can also foist the blame on the same figurehead if things go awry.
This is a VERY important point: for the most part, Americans don't want to do the work. They don't want the responsibility. Fuck, I don't want the responsibility. Not alone. And the problem is that, even with all our social media, many of us do feel hopelessly alone. One person is as effective as the lone remaining protestor in Tiananmen Square, but without becoming a symbol around which others can rally; the rest of the people will just change the damn channel.

This subject of responsibility cannot be stressed enough. When combined with Americans' short-as-fuck attention spans, it has made for an unbelievable upheaval. Apparently the average person either is too stupid to realize that the world doesn't reset itself when a new president is elected, or entirely forgot about the foreclosure bubble destroying the economy and blamed the economic collapse on Obama rather than the fact that the economy looked like a three-hour game of Jenga by the time Obama took over.
This is also a question of responsibility: whenever a Liberal does something wrong, every Conservative talking head and the entire body politic gathers together and declares the n'th crusade against the target, but when a Conservative makes such a minor misstep as, say, politicians who call for the persecution of homosexuals being found to have been gay all along or actively promoting laws that serve a company they or a friend owns at the expense of an entire state, no expense is spared to downplay or erase it. Bush the Lesser was a barely-functioning alcoholic until he was 40, and his wife killed a man with her car. Pundits have referred to these occurrences as, no lie, "Youthful indiscretions." Youth ends at about 25 at the very latest, and I don't think the taking of another human being's life counts as an indiscretion, particularly considering that this is the same party whose members have been known to bomb abortion clinics because murder is wrong.

The author side of me jokingly blames Stephen King for the negative reaction to Obama's four years in office. The writer whose dramatic works inspired the term "the magic Negro" undoubtedly raised Americans' expectations as to what would happen. The public expected him to raise a magic wand and fix everybody's problems. But are we really surprised? These are the same idiots who don't want to work toward anything, so why should a fix to their suffering have to take time and effort? We want our happy ending NOW, and if we don't get it we'll turn to a representative of the party that violently butt-fucked us in the first place.
Speaking of, Conservative policies have never worked in the history of forever. The entire idea - removing, of course, the rampant hatred and religious oppression now so inherent in the Republican party that it makes actual governmental policy an afterthought - is that corporations know best how to run themselves, and catering to the wealthy will make the entire country a better place. Now, back in the early 1800s (the time period to which most Conservatives seem to want to return, albeit with air conditioning and TiVo) this might have worked, seeing as the country was for the most part self-sufficient and self-contained, so money spent would cycle through American towns. However, ever since the infamous robber-barons realized that they could incorporate, charge whatever the fuck they wanted, and sell for profit with no regard for consumers or those affected by their actions, the entire economic policy falls apart. Corporations care only about profit. They care nothing for proper service, or if the service even comes through. So long as they are paid and those in the highest echelons receive titanic bonuses, they do not care.

Christ on a cracker, I could go on forever about this stuff, but I haven't slept in forever and I really don't want this single post to become a book-sized diatribe, so I'll save the rest for another post.