Wipe your feet

Maybe it’s time for a little free association, Freudian-style.  I look at the landscape, where nihilistic terrorism has become the wave trying to sweep over the world, and can only see false smarts and lip-service power in all the reacting action figures – government, politico’s, news wags.  To me they all seem like ignoramuses playing adult, acting somber.  For example, their newest buzzword, “radicalized.”  This or that lost soul or psychopath “became radicalized” at a certain point, and it is for some reason important to discover when this happened.  I am sorry, but a man or woman groomed, from childhood, to be interested in killing people did not “become” radical.  The seeds of inner death and destruction were always in the person.  The sick body-mind has simply found an enclosed idea system that reflects, explains and externalizes his inner death, and thereby stops his bleeding.

The intellectualized bigotry (I’m thinking of Sam Harris, but there are many others) versus righteous pussy-footing about the sync between Muslims and “radical Islam” and terrorism is, at the very least, so Groundhog Day-repetitious that the developed world should have bored itself comatose by now.  Where are the meta-thinkers who say – How are the grown-ups still arguing over this, whether bad people come from bad ideas?  Isn’t it obvious that sick people make and accept sick ideas?  I guess it isn’t obvious, as the intellectuals and movers-and-shakers – shaking in their boots – ponderously flap the same arguments every day.

Right now we’re watching all the idiots throwing hollow barbells and dropping anvils from second-story windows on these terrorist zombies, who in fact are the living dead.  But we are, on the whole, less so, so why can’t we accept the right understandings, find the right actions to eliminate them?  It’s almost as if impotence has become the statecraft of our day.

I don’t expect our “leaders” (I have always hated that word) to be motivated by psychological insight into the mass murderer.  Imagine them lecturing, at their bully pulpit, about aborted civilizations, the corrupt parents of murderers, delusion and group delusion, religious belief and ideology as the match that ignites buried pain and need and rage.  Nevertheless, their being more in touch with the psychic deep and unfixable sickness of the terrorists would get them to sweet-talk less, stand still as the pee puddles at their feet less, and act.