I'm Down For A Fight (Not Down-And-Out)

One of the main themes of this blog - expressed here, here, here, here, and here - got an eloquent little hearing, from Benjamin A. Plotinsky, over at City Journal recently. In fact, it was so close to what I've been saying, I wondered if they hadn't been reading me. Whether they have or not, I'm still glad to see it out there, because it gives credence to the message I've been delivering almost from Day One:

"Cast your mind back to January 2009, when Barack Obama became the president of the United States amid much rejoicing. The hosannas—covering the inauguration was 'the honor of our lifetimes,' said MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews—by then seemed unsurprising. Over the course of a long campaign, hyperbolic rhetoric had become commonplace, so much so that online wags had started calling Obama 'the One'—a reference to the spate of recent science-fiction movies, especially The Matrix, that used that term to designate a messiah.

It all seems so long ago now, as one contemplates President Obama’s plummeting approval ratings and a suddenly resurgent Republican Party. Yet it’s worth looking closely and seriously at the election-year enthusiasm of media elites and other Obamaphiles, much of which was indeed, as the wags recognized, quasi-religious. The surprising fact is that the American Left, for all its claims to being 'reality-based' and secular, is often animated by the passions, motivations, and imagery that one normally associates with religion. The better we understand this religious impulse, the better we will understand liberal America’s likely trajectory in the years to come."

Actually, City Journal (as far as I know) is the only publication that seems to be on the same wave-length I am, also presenting us with an article about The People's Temple, by Daniel J. Flynn, that underlines the long-running Democratic Party/cult connection:

"For years prior to Jonestown’s cataclysmic finale, unheeded voices, such as journalist Les Kinsolving’s, warned America about the raven-haired preacher feted by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, supervisor Harvey Milk, and mayor George Moscone.

Indeed, Jim Jones was a power player in Bay Area politics and thereby a player in national Democratic Party politics. Local politicians and activists benefited from the slave labor that he could provide on little notice to people political rallies and hand out campaign literature. In gratitude, Moscone appointed him chairman of San Francisco’s housing authority and Willie Brown likened Jones, a man who would eventually kill more African-Americans than any Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, to Martin Luther King, Jr. First lady Rosalyn Carter and her husband’s running mate, Walter Mondale, both met with the cult leader. Jones even appropriated the title of Huey Newton’s book, Revolutionary Suicide, to describe the extermination of his flock (which included several of Newton’s relatives). Once Jonestown’s residents had performed this 'revolutionary suicide,' the wills left behind bequeathed all to the Soviet Union."

How anyone else is missing all this, I don't know. Or maybe I do. Look at the quote, above, and you see the name of "Saint Harvey" Milk, who just had an Oscar-winning movie made about him - starring Hugo Chavez-loving Sean Penn - but it was a movie that erased all of Milk's connections to cultism. Of course, it had to, because if the decades-long connection between the Democrats and cults were ever made explicit - a connection that is just as vibrant today as ever, if not more so - they'd lose their black support (amongst others) in a heart beat.

This is what conservatives have to understand now - this is how we finish the Democrats off. As Mr. Plotinsky says, they've got us in The Matrix right now, but I've been saying all along that I'm Rorschach from The Watchmen, and the truth I'm revealing is The Truth, and I'd rather look crazy than allow it to be covered up for the sake of lying politicians, lousy gay pride movies, or even my love for women. Unfortunately, that's exactly what's been happening, so far.

But maybe - just maybe, if everyone remembers these cultish NewAge forces destroyed my marriage, killed my mother-in-law and three others, and can get over my (more-than-justifiable) anger - they'll decide to investigate all this in depth, and everyone's perception of me will change. It ought to, because I ain't hurt nobody.

I'm "The One" that's been hurt.

The Macho Response: Rorschach (Wiping That Cultish NewAge Smile Off Everyone's Faces)

"The moral center of Watchmen, both the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and the new, much-discussed movie based on it premiering today, is a curious and prickly masked vigilante who goes by the name Rorschach.

The surface meaning of the name is visually obvious—his mask contains swirling black blots on white that remind one of the psychological testing mechanism. But applied to his character, the name is both appropriate and ironic.

It’s appropriate in that the character is obsessed with stark duality—black and white—and ironic in that the mushy “it’s whatever you see” vagueness opposes his very definite vision of what’s what in the world:

There are good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys deserve to get it, good and hard. Rorschach’s mission, from which he will not diverge, is to give it to them, no matter what the demands of law, government, or social mores. He lives by his objective understanding of right and wrong.

...Rorschach’s sense of justice may make him hate most of humanity—he brags to himself at the beginning that if mankind begged him to save them, he’d justly say “no.” But by the end he sacrifices himself in the name of avenging the deaths of millions who he doesn’t know. He does it for another reason as well, one of particular holiness to the Objectivist: the truth, the facts of reality. Whether or not the villain’s scheme might result in some “higher good,” it did so at the cost of Faking Reality—a cost no Objectivist will bear. We don’t know if Rorschach’s attempts to set the record straight will do any good—but he’s willing to bear any burden, let the very heavens fall, to stay square with reality.

To be the kind of man whose highest value is to “have lived life free from compromise,” as Rorschach says, makes that man “unreasonable” in the colloquial sense—that is, you aren’t going to be able to talk them in or out of much. You are going to find them abrasive, aggravating, and in circumstances like those the characters in Watchmen find themselves in, mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Rorschach seems driven to madness by his ideology; a radical Objectivism forges a character that seems obviously damaged in unpleasant ways.

Yet he’s also the only man around who stands up for everyone’s right to be judged individually on the basis of their character and actions, their right not to be a means to someone else’s higher end—no matter what one might think of that end. He knows what it means to be human—that’s why he has to condemn those he kills as having betrayed the essence of man qua man, relegating them to the status of dogs to be put down."

-- Brian Doherty, describing the crime fighting hero of these NewAge times, in Reason Magazine.