The empty wilderness of abandoned newsgroups.
I feel like I am spreading a checkered cloth
in a graveyard and having a picnic.
No one here but us chickens. And of course,
Ivan, the crazy religious nut who keeps saying
stuff about Jesus, in Spanish.
Ivan- why not Russian?
Oh, never mind. Ivan: would you like a glass
of cherry Kool-Aid and some corn-on-the-cob?
It almost seems wrong, somehow, to be here,
yet where else is there to go?
Virginia, we need to talk. We need to have
a dialogue. Perhaps it is already too late.
I suppose that your damnation is not a special
damnation, in spite of the things that make it
look that way:
- home of the CIA
- home of the Pentagon
- home to Pat Robertson and Regent University
- home to Jerry Falwell and Liberty University
- former capital of the Confederacy
- location of Jefferson Davis Highway
- location of the frightening strip mall,
where the leader of the American Nazis
party was once assassinated.
To be fair, your damnation is only everybody's damnation.
It is not like I was born hating the place.
I almost bought a home, once, in Virginia.
Had a contract on it.
I forget where, exactly- I think somewhere in
Fairfax County, but it fell through because the
woman who was going to buy my old place
wasn't approved for her mortgage.
I was very innocent, then. The real-estate agent
said of the place where I was going to buy, that
"This is where some of the first block-busting
took place."
I asked, like a child, "What is 'block-busting'?"
I was not deterred by the answer, from making
the purchase. I innocently appalled by the
attitudes of the real-estate people. I was already living
in a predominately black neighborhood, a fact which
I innocently found had horrified a great many
of my co-workers.
Reminds me of the time when a few of us
from the old GAA at our college were trying to
talk with students at a university's
psychology class, about homosexuality.
We were naive, thinking that all we had to do
was the set the record straight, show how we
were just regular people with an insignificant
difference that was not of our choosing,
and everything would be set right.
The professor warned us, that if she were going
to allow us to speak, that there we were not
allowed to proselytize. Of course, we agreed.
But we scratched our heads, and looked
at each other, in confusion. We did what any
naive kids would do when confused- at home, we looked
up the word "proselytize" in the dictionary.
When we realized what she meant- that she
thought we were out to "recruit" heterosexuals
into "becoming homosexuals", were were something
between amused and disgusted- that anyone could
seriously believe such a thing even possible.
The woman was supposed to be a professor, but
was like a hateful cartoon of ignorance, and
she didn't know it.
Later, the professor in class referred to a gay
meeting that she attended as being "a freak show".
College kids don't know that they are innocent.
They hate to think that they are, but they don't
realize- It takes 20, 30, 40 years to really lose
your innocence. In our world of censorship and
propaganda it is almost impossible to lose your
innocence is less time than that, because the
necessary information comes to you only in
little dribs and drabs, over an extended period.
"We are innocent", said a Virginia poet.
Yes, I know. Sweet woman- I can't even bear
to contact her, directly.
But she is not quite right. You have to
earn your innocence. The ignorance of youth
is not real innocence. Youths- undisciplined
children- would think nothing of going up to
a fat person and telling them how ugly
they are. Innocent children would innocently
enjoy pulling all the legs off a Daddy long-legs
spider. What is innocence?
There is a lot of work remaining in order
to acquire your innocence.
In a brutal dictatorship, it is easier to be innocent.
You have no control over your government. You
are powerless. In a democracy, it is more difficult
to claim that you are collectively innocent of what
your government repeatedly does.
Like when legislatures express their desire to
treat innocent people as criminals under the law,
or express their frustration that any court would
tell them otherwise- those awful, activist liberals!
Or when a state seizes child from arms of mother,
and the situation never gets corrected.
Americans like to think that if such events are
not in themselves beautiful things, then they are
at most minor blemishes on an otherwise beautiful face.
That is the kind of innocent self-deception that
you must lose in order to become truly innocent.
They are not minor things- they are the measure
of all that you are worth. It is like living in
a world where legislators righteously bellow about
God not hearing the prayers of Jews.
Or a state where there is a conservative convention,
and a right-wing, Jewish newspaper columnist from
Boston says something to cheer the audience, about
tolerance of gays:
"The ancient Jews didn't tolerate the Canaanites.
They wiped them out."
This is why terror has its place, like painful punishment
of a child who otherwise would grow wild and have not
the slightest, civilized inhibition.
Where attitudes like that are allowed to prevail, without
greater protest than we see today, you would lie on
the grass, innocently like children, trying to describe
the shapes that you see in the clouds above- ice cream
cones or cotton candy on a rainy day- and then you would
cry, and never understand, why they turned into
mushroom clouds.
Tom Keske
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1. George Lincoln Rockwell
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Nazis returned to Arlington with Rockwell's body.
... The strip mall where Rockwell was slain
is still called the Dominion Hills Shopping Center. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lincoln_Rockwell
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