John Strausbaugh, New York, 2009Flowback: A Filmstrip
A UFO lands on the roof of the Texas School Book Depository. Rose petals previously blessed by the Virgin Mary during an appearance in Flushing, Queens, begin to sift gently down out of the cloudless blue sky.
In Dealey Plaza, a young Negro boy named Tupac Shakur, with bottle caps attached to the bottoms of his shoes, goes into a charming tap-dance routine, scattering the petals. Tall cattlemen and oilmen in cowboy boots, Stetsons and three-piece Anderson & Sheppard suits pat him on the head and drop gold doubloons in his shoebox.
Crowds of high school girls peer up at the roof of the Book Depository, waiting for Jackie to emerge from the alien spacecraft. They clutch autograph books in their white-gloved hands and hope she will descend to offer fashion tips.
A burro wanders down the middle of Houston St., dragging its rope tether behind it. Abraham Zapruder, testing his new Model 414 PD Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series camera, shoots 26.6 seconds, or 486 frames, of footage. Years later, after buying this filmstrip at auction at Sotheby's in Manhattan, the aliens will run it backwards through a device they call the Improvalator, causing those 26.6 seconds to vanish from the time continuum. They hope this is enough to throw off the timing of Jackie's assassin. They calculate, however, that Zapruder would have had to shoot 893 continuous frames of film, far more than his relatively primitive hand-wound camera allowed.
Hearing of their prospective failure, Kurt Cobain goes into the famous funk that produces "All Apologies," originally titled "All Apologies (for Jackie)," and, ultimately, his suicide. The aliens buy his suicide note, in which he declares Jackie a goddess and all the rest of humanity unfit to live, at a Christie's auction, for one monstrillion dollars.
Cobain later joins Jackie and the Virgin Mary on tour. Courtney Love unsuccessfully sues the aliens for the return of the suicide note. She insists that it is a forgery and that she was Kurt's only goddess.
Back in Dealey Plaza, the rose petals melt, permanently staining the grassy knoll the deep, rich carmine for which some people will refer to it as the Bloody Knob. In the spacecraft, the aliens coach Jackie, Lee and Ruby through one last rehearsal. Over mahjong, Lev, the rare survivor of the Kolyma gulag, explains to the tattooed yakuza Yugioh how every evening, after a day of murderous labor in the goldmines, lingering over their daily ration of half a herring and six ounces of stale bread, the prisoners listened to a gramophone record of a speech Stalin delivered in the Bolshoi Theater in 1937. His voice was so mild and tender, Lev tells Yugioh, his love of the people so obvious, that we prisoners worshipped him as devoutly as Kurt does Jackie. We prayed to him nightly to deliver us from our tormentors, the gulag staff. Dying by the monstrillion in the mines, we could not conceive that Stalin was responsible for or even aware of our suffering. Even today, Lev tells Yugioh, some nights I find myself praying to the great father to watch over me in my sleep.
While Lev is preoccupied with this story, Yugioh twice cheats him, palming tiles. Yugioh is bored with Lev's stories. He is a survivor in his own right, and has lived up to the original meaning of ya-ku-za, which is the hard luck numbers 8-9-3, also known as za-pru-da. Yugioh's tattoos are nontraditional. A basket of rose petals adorns his chest. The Virgin of Guadalupe is on his back. Long quotations from Joseph Stalin and Michael Rennie run the length of his legs. He was about to be assassinated by the other members of his gumi for these outrages when the aliens, using the Improvalator, removed him to the safety of their ship.
Humans have given up trying to divine the purpose of the aliens' meddlings in their history and affairs. The aliens display a clear weakness for loners and outcasts, like Yugioh, like Lev, like the Virgin Mary, like Jackie after Jack left her for Judith Exner Kennedy. They show a predilection for inserting themselves into great, tragic or tabloid moments in history. Moving the White Bronco from 495 to El Pico, bringing Kurt and the Virgin back, and so on. But why have they orchestrated Jackie's assassination, only to try to undo it? And why cast Lee Majors as her assassin and Ruby Dee as the assassin's assassin? Why purchase Youtube, MySpace and Facebook, consolidate them as MyFace and remove all content not somehow related to them? They obviously possess technologies far in advance of ours, and have access to a vast store of wealth. But generally their actions seem pointless, even frivolous. In his two-hour video exposé Profiles in Uforia, previously viewable on Youtube, leading conspiracy theorist John F. Kennedy offers "proofs" of his argument that they are the wealthy, spoiled children of an advanced but now decadent civilization, wielding their riches and power with no marked intelligence or wisdom. Humanity is no better or worse off since their arrival, our affairs no more or less chaotic and confused.
Jackie enters Dealey Plaza on the burro, led by the tap-dancing Tupac Shakur. Secret Service agents flank them. She wears the now-famous pink riding outfit and cradles a bowl of rose petals in her lap. Her smile is radiant, a bit shy. The crowds cheer her warmly. She's been such a recluse since the divorce.
As Jackie turns onto Elm, the spacecraft rises from the roof of the Book Depository and hovers above the Bloody Knob, where, among assorted cattlemen and oilmen, schoolchildren and cheerleaders, Lee and Ruby prepare to play out their parts.
Jackie is passing the Knob. Lev can't watch. The Virgin crosses herself. Lee slips a hand in a pocket. Ruby, beside him, does the same.
Shots ring out. Lee Majors crashes to the ground. A throwing knife spills out of his hand. His blood spills out, the same color as the grass only shinier.
The crowd atomizes. A Secret Service man hauls Jackie from the burro and lies on top of her. Later she will remember his sheltering hulk and ask him out.
Ruby whirls. Kurt stands alone uphill from her, the shotgun on his cocked hip, the smoking barrels pointed carelessly toward the belly of the hovering spacecraft. He is smiling for the first time since she met him.
Then the aliens feed the Zapruder filmstrip into the Improvalator and switch it on. The burro lurches back up Elm 26.6 seconds, to a spot nearer the Book Depository. It is all about to unfurl again, but maybe differently this time.
In a fit of pique at the aliens' ceaseless meddling, Kurt fires both barrels at the belly of the hovering spacecraft. Yugioh, leaning out an open porthole, is peppered about the face with buckshot. He will later have a tattooist connect the dots, forming the famous Betty Hill Star Map, at the center of which is the constellation Reticulum. John F. Kennedy has speculated that the aliens come from the fourth planet circling the star Zeta 2 Reticuli. The aliens have never commented on the location of their home world, only claiming that in their language its name sounds like Flowbee. Kennedy is skeptical. The aliens, who are quite hairy about the shoulders and neck, are so fond of the human grooming device called the Flowbee that they bought the whole company.
In fact, an alien is trimming its shoulders with a Flowbee when the pellets from Kurt's gun fly in the open porthole. One pellet strikes the Flowbee, sending an electrical short back up the cord to the alien wall socket into which, through an appropriate and complex adaptor, it is plugged.
It is now evident that the aliens' spacecraft is not quite so advanced as they have always let humans believe. Specifically, it is highly sensitive to electrical shorts of the type that now cascade through its systems. The ship shimmies and quakes in the air over the Bloody Knob. The crowd below atomizes. Lee and Ruby stare at each other in befuddlement. Then Lee Majors bolts downhill, and Ruby Dee struggles to catch up.
Lee Majors runs up Elm, the throwing dagger held up by his ear. The Secret Service agents, distracted by the wobbling and whirring spacecraft now emitting trails of acrid carmine smoke, don't notice him until he is within 26.6 feet of Jackie. She meets his eyes. Her gaze is mild, resigned, forgiving. In her heart she has always known that the aliens would botch this moment. They are, she decided some time ago, silly creatures, rather reminiscent of some of her wealthy, privileged, yet irrefutably worthless and parasitic relatives and social peers.
Her gaze freezes Lee Majors in his tracks. Ruby Dee races forward, her own blade out. Up on the hill, in the shadow of the struggling spacecraft, Kurt hollers a strangled cry. Witnesses will later say it sounds like he shouts everything is my fault, which is of course a line from "All Apologies." Coincidentally, it is part of the long quote from Stalin that runs down Yugioh's left leg. The full quote, which Lev has told Yugioh was on a plaque at the entrance to the Kolyma gulag, is (The enemies of peace and democratic freedoms will tell you that) everything is my fault.
Lee Majors blinks and prepares to throw. Ruby Dee lunges across the remaining space between them. Jackie gazes at Lee's knife. Tupac Shakur gazes at Lee's knife. The burro gazes at Lee's knife. The Secret Service agents gaze at Lee's knife. Lev covers his eyes and whispers a fervent prayer.
Jackie's lips move. Her famously enigmatic and vague smile. No one can hear what she murmurs. Witnesses will disagree. On his MyFace page, Kurt claims to be sure:
All in all, he says she says, is all we know.
The filmstrip drops out of the Improvalator and onto the shuddering deck of the spacecraft. It curls into a circle among scattered rose petals.
In Dealey Plaza, a young Negro boy named Tupac Shakur, with bottle caps attached to the bottoms of his shoes, goes into a charming tap-dance routine, scattering the petals. Tall cattlemen and oilmen in cowboy boots, Stetsons and three-piece Anderson & Sheppard suits pat him on the head and drop gold doubloons in his shoebox.
Crowds of high school girls peer up at the roof of the Book Depository, waiting for Jackie to emerge from the alien spacecraft. They clutch autograph books in their white-gloved hands and hope she will descend to offer fashion tips.
A burro wanders down the middle of Houston St., dragging its rope tether behind it. Abraham Zapruder, testing his new Model 414 PD Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series camera, shoots 26.6 seconds, or 486 frames, of footage. Years later, after buying this filmstrip at auction at Sotheby's in Manhattan, the aliens will run it backwards through a device they call the Improvalator, causing those 26.6 seconds to vanish from the time continuum. They hope this is enough to throw off the timing of Jackie's assassin. They calculate, however, that Zapruder would have had to shoot 893 continuous frames of film, far more than his relatively primitive hand-wound camera allowed.
Hearing of their prospective failure, Kurt Cobain goes into the famous funk that produces "All Apologies," originally titled "All Apologies (for Jackie)," and, ultimately, his suicide. The aliens buy his suicide note, in which he declares Jackie a goddess and all the rest of humanity unfit to live, at a Christie's auction, for one monstrillion dollars.
Cobain later joins Jackie and the Virgin Mary on tour. Courtney Love unsuccessfully sues the aliens for the return of the suicide note. She insists that it is a forgery and that she was Kurt's only goddess.
Back in Dealey Plaza, the rose petals melt, permanently staining the grassy knoll the deep, rich carmine for which some people will refer to it as the Bloody Knob. In the spacecraft, the aliens coach Jackie, Lee and Ruby through one last rehearsal. Over mahjong, Lev, the rare survivor of the Kolyma gulag, explains to the tattooed yakuza Yugioh how every evening, after a day of murderous labor in the goldmines, lingering over their daily ration of half a herring and six ounces of stale bread, the prisoners listened to a gramophone record of a speech Stalin delivered in the Bolshoi Theater in 1937. His voice was so mild and tender, Lev tells Yugioh, his love of the people so obvious, that we prisoners worshipped him as devoutly as Kurt does Jackie. We prayed to him nightly to deliver us from our tormentors, the gulag staff. Dying by the monstrillion in the mines, we could not conceive that Stalin was responsible for or even aware of our suffering. Even today, Lev tells Yugioh, some nights I find myself praying to the great father to watch over me in my sleep.
While Lev is preoccupied with this story, Yugioh twice cheats him, palming tiles. Yugioh is bored with Lev's stories. He is a survivor in his own right, and has lived up to the original meaning of ya-ku-za, which is the hard luck numbers 8-9-3, also known as za-pru-da. Yugioh's tattoos are nontraditional. A basket of rose petals adorns his chest. The Virgin of Guadalupe is on his back. Long quotations from Joseph Stalin and Michael Rennie run the length of his legs. He was about to be assassinated by the other members of his gumi for these outrages when the aliens, using the Improvalator, removed him to the safety of their ship.
Humans have given up trying to divine the purpose of the aliens' meddlings in their history and affairs. The aliens display a clear weakness for loners and outcasts, like Yugioh, like Lev, like the Virgin Mary, like Jackie after Jack left her for Judith Exner Kennedy. They show a predilection for inserting themselves into great, tragic or tabloid moments in history. Moving the White Bronco from 495 to El Pico, bringing Kurt and the Virgin back, and so on. But why have they orchestrated Jackie's assassination, only to try to undo it? And why cast Lee Majors as her assassin and Ruby Dee as the assassin's assassin? Why purchase Youtube, MySpace and Facebook, consolidate them as MyFace and remove all content not somehow related to them? They obviously possess technologies far in advance of ours, and have access to a vast store of wealth. But generally their actions seem pointless, even frivolous. In his two-hour video exposé Profiles in Uforia, previously viewable on Youtube, leading conspiracy theorist John F. Kennedy offers "proofs" of his argument that they are the wealthy, spoiled children of an advanced but now decadent civilization, wielding their riches and power with no marked intelligence or wisdom. Humanity is no better or worse off since their arrival, our affairs no more or less chaotic and confused.
Jackie enters Dealey Plaza on the burro, led by the tap-dancing Tupac Shakur. Secret Service agents flank them. She wears the now-famous pink riding outfit and cradles a bowl of rose petals in her lap. Her smile is radiant, a bit shy. The crowds cheer her warmly. She's been such a recluse since the divorce.
As Jackie turns onto Elm, the spacecraft rises from the roof of the Book Depository and hovers above the Bloody Knob, where, among assorted cattlemen and oilmen, schoolchildren and cheerleaders, Lee and Ruby prepare to play out their parts.
Jackie is passing the Knob. Lev can't watch. The Virgin crosses herself. Lee slips a hand in a pocket. Ruby, beside him, does the same.
Shots ring out. Lee Majors crashes to the ground. A throwing knife spills out of his hand. His blood spills out, the same color as the grass only shinier.
The crowd atomizes. A Secret Service man hauls Jackie from the burro and lies on top of her. Later she will remember his sheltering hulk and ask him out.
Ruby whirls. Kurt stands alone uphill from her, the shotgun on his cocked hip, the smoking barrels pointed carelessly toward the belly of the hovering spacecraft. He is smiling for the first time since she met him.
Then the aliens feed the Zapruder filmstrip into the Improvalator and switch it on. The burro lurches back up Elm 26.6 seconds, to a spot nearer the Book Depository. It is all about to unfurl again, but maybe differently this time.
In a fit of pique at the aliens' ceaseless meddling, Kurt fires both barrels at the belly of the hovering spacecraft. Yugioh, leaning out an open porthole, is peppered about the face with buckshot. He will later have a tattooist connect the dots, forming the famous Betty Hill Star Map, at the center of which is the constellation Reticulum. John F. Kennedy has speculated that the aliens come from the fourth planet circling the star Zeta 2 Reticuli. The aliens have never commented on the location of their home world, only claiming that in their language its name sounds like Flowbee. Kennedy is skeptical. The aliens, who are quite hairy about the shoulders and neck, are so fond of the human grooming device called the Flowbee that they bought the whole company.
In fact, an alien is trimming its shoulders with a Flowbee when the pellets from Kurt's gun fly in the open porthole. One pellet strikes the Flowbee, sending an electrical short back up the cord to the alien wall socket into which, through an appropriate and complex adaptor, it is plugged.
It is now evident that the aliens' spacecraft is not quite so advanced as they have always let humans believe. Specifically, it is highly sensitive to electrical shorts of the type that now cascade through its systems. The ship shimmies and quakes in the air over the Bloody Knob. The crowd below atomizes. Lee and Ruby stare at each other in befuddlement. Then Lee Majors bolts downhill, and Ruby Dee struggles to catch up.
Lee Majors runs up Elm, the throwing dagger held up by his ear. The Secret Service agents, distracted by the wobbling and whirring spacecraft now emitting trails of acrid carmine smoke, don't notice him until he is within 26.6 feet of Jackie. She meets his eyes. Her gaze is mild, resigned, forgiving. In her heart she has always known that the aliens would botch this moment. They are, she decided some time ago, silly creatures, rather reminiscent of some of her wealthy, privileged, yet irrefutably worthless and parasitic relatives and social peers.
Her gaze freezes Lee Majors in his tracks. Ruby Dee races forward, her own blade out. Up on the hill, in the shadow of the struggling spacecraft, Kurt hollers a strangled cry. Witnesses will later say it sounds like he shouts everything is my fault, which is of course a line from "All Apologies." Coincidentally, it is part of the long quote from Stalin that runs down Yugioh's left leg. The full quote, which Lev has told Yugioh was on a plaque at the entrance to the Kolyma gulag, is (The enemies of peace and democratic freedoms will tell you that) everything is my fault.
Lee Majors blinks and prepares to throw. Ruby Dee lunges across the remaining space between them. Jackie gazes at Lee's knife. Tupac Shakur gazes at Lee's knife. The burro gazes at Lee's knife. The Secret Service agents gaze at Lee's knife. Lev covers his eyes and whispers a fervent prayer.
Jackie's lips move. Her famously enigmatic and vague smile. No one can hear what she murmurs. Witnesses will disagree. On his MyFace page, Kurt claims to be sure:
All in all, he says she says, is all we know.
The filmstrip drops out of the Improvalator and onto the shuddering deck of the spacecraft. It curls into a circle among scattered rose petals.
My friend went on to say how Mumia had been shafted by the FBI, who obviously had it out for him, just like they had with Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers.
Well sure, I said. The feds come down heavy all the time on political and social movements the government sees as threats. Just look at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Well, you could have heard a Yes We Can pin drop. They sat there blinking while I went on to expound my theory that the real issue isn't whether you, as a good liberal or staunch conservative, agree with the politics of the group in question. Whether they're left-wing or right, Panthers or neo-Nazis, to me the real point is the violent way the government reacts to these grassroots, fringe, up-from-the-bottom political expressions.
And that was the end of that discussion. We moved on to a safer topic.
My friends are smart, savvy sophisticates living and working in one of the world's great metropolises, but when it comes to politics they can be as knee-jerk, head-bobbing and closed-minded as those awful right-wing Christians they abhor. They are, in fact, just as fundamentalist in their world-views as any Bible-quoting Christian. They accept the word of liberal ideology as Absolute Truth and divine revelation, exactly the way fundamentalist Christians read the Bible.
For a while I dated a girl I called Anvil Head. Not to her face. Once Anvil Head made up her mind about anything, no contravening facts could dent it. You could bang on that mind with the Ballpeen of Truth until you dropped from exhaustion, it wouldn't make any difference. Anvil Head had a fundamentalist faith in her correctness that rendered all discussion moot.
Because we hear all the time about Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, we think of it as a religious phenomenon. It is in fact an intellectual, social and political one. Or to be more precise, an anti-intellectual, antisocial and political one.
The Christians are hardly the only fundamentalists in our society. Rigid, mindlocked, sanctimonious fundamentalist groupthink has spread to all areas of our society, including those liberal humanists who used to advocate open-minded free-thinking.
If you have turned your political positions or social views into matters of faith, you're a fundamentalist. If you accept what your pundits or your preachers or any kind of gurus or authority figures tell you as unassailable Absolute Truth, you're a fundamentalist. If you cite the New York Times or Bill O'Reilly or "the scientific community" or "expert consensus" the way Christians cite the Bible, you're a fundamentalist. If you're a head-bobbing, knee-jerking groupthinker who has closed ranks with any political or social or religious or identity group and stopped thinking or questioning or doubting or listening, you're a fundamentalist. If you demonize and viciously attack any individual or group with opinions or beliefs different from your group's, you're a fundamentalist.
When you think about fundamentalism that way, it's obvious how widely and deeply it's taken hold in America. This country is lousy with Anvil Heads who have crossed the line from having deeply held political opinions or well-thought-out positions on social issues to become True Believers for whom politics or social issues are belief systems, matters of unquestioned and unshakable faith.
They're everywhere. PETA people are, obviously, furndamentalists. Their incredibly self-righteous zealotry about "kindness to animals" gives them all sorts of license to be unkind to people. They've forgotten that people are animals, too.
There are Global Warming fundos, people who don't just believe that Global Warming is happening, they believe in Global Warming, the same way certain evangelical Christians believe in Armageddon and the Rapture. It's an apocalyptic, millenarian religion for them. They cite scientific consensus to defend their faith in exactly the way Christians cite the Book of Revelations to defend theirs. They shut out contrary scientific analysis the same way Creationists shut out evolution. They know the Truth, they've already had the Truth handed down to them, they can quote you the Truth chapter and verse.
There are fundamentalist Democrats and fundamentalist Republicans, people for whom party affiliation is a secular religion. They don't merely think the leaders and members of the opposing party are terminally wrong-headed, they truly believe they're evil. And they believe the flipside, that the leaders of their own party are, by definition, righteous and good, no matter what they do. You know the kind of people I'm talking about. You may be one of them. Republicans for whom Bill Clinton's blowjobs were evil, but who blithely shrugged off the death and destruction George W. Bush sowed in the world. Democrats for whom the Bush administration was evil incarnate, but who passionately defended Clinton's unconscionable narcissism, his lying to their faces and his breezy destruction of the career and reputation of a young female employee for the sake of those blowjobs.
Why have fundamentalist attitudes swept the land of the American Sissy? For one thing, they absolve you of the terrible responsibility of having an original, critical or independent thought. Ever. All your thinking has been done for you by your authority figures and handed down to you as the Word. All you have to do is bob your head and jerk your knee. You never have to think about that issue again. It's been pre-thought for you. The American Sissy loves being handed a free pass to the No Think Zone. Thinking is hard. Believing is easier. In a culture that does such a lousy job training people in math, science, reading comprehension and general problem-solving, it's no wonder that thinking is devalued while rigid belief and mindlocked faith are on the rise.
Fundamentalism also appeals to Sissies because it offers an easy and readily accessible high horse to climb on, all saddled up and mad for a gallop. Americans love climbing up on their high horses and riding them around. Much of what passes for public discussion and debate in this culture is really just opposing sides competing in a race to the moral high ground.
Fundamentalists of all stripes use a smug, self-righteous assumption of moral superiority not because they're so secure in the knowledge of their own righteousness, but because they're so insecure about it. Their smugness, their slanders, are tactics for heading off any actual debate or discussion before it can happen. They don't want to have to debate, because to debate you have to think. They're not thinkers. Not-thinking is one of the perks of being True Believers.
To me, if you're a closed-minded fundo you're a fundo, regardless of which side of the political line you toe. Those conservatives who crowded the town hall meetings this summer to shout down ideas and opinions they'd pre-decided they didn't want to hear learned that trick from college students on "progressive" campuses around the country, who've been doing that for years to conservative speakers they didn't want to hear. Explain to me the difference.
Blind faith is the enemy of the free intellect. A culture that chooses belief over thought is a corrupt, decadent and ultimately enslaved one. Ubi dubium ibi libertas. Where there's doubt, there's liberty.
Well sure, I said. The feds come down heavy all the time on political and social movements the government sees as threats. Just look at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Well, you could have heard a Yes We Can pin drop. They sat there blinking while I went on to expound my theory that the real issue isn't whether you, as a good liberal or staunch conservative, agree with the politics of the group in question. Whether they're left-wing or right, Panthers or neo-Nazis, to me the real point is the violent way the government reacts to these grassroots, fringe, up-from-the-bottom political expressions.
And that was the end of that discussion. We moved on to a safer topic.
My friends are smart, savvy sophisticates living and working in one of the world's great metropolises, but when it comes to politics they can be as knee-jerk, head-bobbing and closed-minded as those awful right-wing Christians they abhor. They are, in fact, just as fundamentalist in their world-views as any Bible-quoting Christian. They accept the word of liberal ideology as Absolute Truth and divine revelation, exactly the way fundamentalist Christians read the Bible.
For a while I dated a girl I called Anvil Head. Not to her face. Once Anvil Head made up her mind about anything, no contravening facts could dent it. You could bang on that mind with the Ballpeen of Truth until you dropped from exhaustion, it wouldn't make any difference. Anvil Head had a fundamentalist faith in her correctness that rendered all discussion moot.
Because we hear all the time about Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, we think of it as a religious phenomenon. It is in fact an intellectual, social and political one. Or to be more precise, an anti-intellectual, antisocial and political one.
The Christians are hardly the only fundamentalists in our society. Rigid, mindlocked, sanctimonious fundamentalist groupthink has spread to all areas of our society, including those liberal humanists who used to advocate open-minded free-thinking.
If you have turned your political positions or social views into matters of faith, you're a fundamentalist. If you accept what your pundits or your preachers or any kind of gurus or authority figures tell you as unassailable Absolute Truth, you're a fundamentalist. If you cite the New York Times or Bill O'Reilly or "the scientific community" or "expert consensus" the way Christians cite the Bible, you're a fundamentalist. If you're a head-bobbing, knee-jerking groupthinker who has closed ranks with any political or social or religious or identity group and stopped thinking or questioning or doubting or listening, you're a fundamentalist. If you demonize and viciously attack any individual or group with opinions or beliefs different from your group's, you're a fundamentalist.
When you think about fundamentalism that way, it's obvious how widely and deeply it's taken hold in America. This country is lousy with Anvil Heads who have crossed the line from having deeply held political opinions or well-thought-out positions on social issues to become True Believers for whom politics or social issues are belief systems, matters of unquestioned and unshakable faith.
They're everywhere. PETA people are, obviously, furndamentalists. Their incredibly self-righteous zealotry about "kindness to animals" gives them all sorts of license to be unkind to people. They've forgotten that people are animals, too.
There are Global Warming fundos, people who don't just believe that Global Warming is happening, they believe in Global Warming, the same way certain evangelical Christians believe in Armageddon and the Rapture. It's an apocalyptic, millenarian religion for them. They cite scientific consensus to defend their faith in exactly the way Christians cite the Book of Revelations to defend theirs. They shut out contrary scientific analysis the same way Creationists shut out evolution. They know the Truth, they've already had the Truth handed down to them, they can quote you the Truth chapter and verse.
There are fundamentalist Democrats and fundamentalist Republicans, people for whom party affiliation is a secular religion. They don't merely think the leaders and members of the opposing party are terminally wrong-headed, they truly believe they're evil. And they believe the flipside, that the leaders of their own party are, by definition, righteous and good, no matter what they do. You know the kind of people I'm talking about. You may be one of them. Republicans for whom Bill Clinton's blowjobs were evil, but who blithely shrugged off the death and destruction George W. Bush sowed in the world. Democrats for whom the Bush administration was evil incarnate, but who passionately defended Clinton's unconscionable narcissism, his lying to their faces and his breezy destruction of the career and reputation of a young female employee for the sake of those blowjobs.
Why have fundamentalist attitudes swept the land of the American Sissy? For one thing, they absolve you of the terrible responsibility of having an original, critical or independent thought. Ever. All your thinking has been done for you by your authority figures and handed down to you as the Word. All you have to do is bob your head and jerk your knee. You never have to think about that issue again. It's been pre-thought for you. The American Sissy loves being handed a free pass to the No Think Zone. Thinking is hard. Believing is easier. In a culture that does such a lousy job training people in math, science, reading comprehension and general problem-solving, it's no wonder that thinking is devalued while rigid belief and mindlocked faith are on the rise.
Fundamentalism also appeals to Sissies because it offers an easy and readily accessible high horse to climb on, all saddled up and mad for a gallop. Americans love climbing up on their high horses and riding them around. Much of what passes for public discussion and debate in this culture is really just opposing sides competing in a race to the moral high ground.
Fundamentalists of all stripes use a smug, self-righteous assumption of moral superiority not because they're so secure in the knowledge of their own righteousness, but because they're so insecure about it. Their smugness, their slanders, are tactics for heading off any actual debate or discussion before it can happen. They don't want to have to debate, because to debate you have to think. They're not thinkers. Not-thinking is one of the perks of being True Believers.
To me, if you're a closed-minded fundo you're a fundo, regardless of which side of the political line you toe. Those conservatives who crowded the town hall meetings this summer to shout down ideas and opinions they'd pre-decided they didn't want to hear learned that trick from college students on "progressive" campuses around the country, who've been doing that for years to conservative speakers they didn't want to hear. Explain to me the difference.
Blind faith is the enemy of the free intellect. A culture that chooses belief over thought is a corrupt, decadent and ultimately enslaved one. Ubi dubium ibi libertas. Where there's doubt, there's liberty.
