“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” MLK, Jr.

We’ve killed millions since King said those words in 1967, and now we’ve re-elected a president to whom the Constitution means nothing if it gets in the way of what he wants to do. Perhaps, his worst sin in this regard was that he executed one of his own countrymen—Anwar al Awlaki—without the Constitutionally guaranteed benefit of a trial. Of course, the other candidate made it clear that he was even more passionate than Obama about the president being a law unto himself, so it’s not like we had a viable option.


Why is it that Canada, Britain, Australia, and much of the rest of the world supports America? Don’t they know we’re criminally insane over here? Don’t they know we’re like a black hole that sucks whole worlds into its gaping jaws and squeezes them out of existence? Since I was born in 1949, my country has attacked, or supported attacks, on nation after nation for little or no reason, yet our many allies go right on smiling like idiots and pretending everything’s just hunky-dory. Heck, they’re even willing to send their own children to die as long as we don’t ask for a number that would cause people to take to the streets (we like to keep friendly politicians in power, so we’re always willing to hash out details regarding how much blood we require).


If you’re country isn’t white, Christian, English-speaking, and democratic, you should be very afraid because even we don’t know who we might bomb next—although we're pretty much fixated on Iran at the moment. We have more weapons than most of the world’s countries put together, and it only takes the decision of one man to fire them. I don’t know how the world can trust any one person with that much power, much less when he’s the rotating leader of a country with the Orwellian view that War = Peace.


Actually, I think I know why much of the world supports America. I think it's because they're afraid of what America might do to them, and I think it's because they're afraid to be without American support and protection. After all, it can’t be because they love and respect us.

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition

Martin Luther King Jr’s claim to have “seen the Promised Land” was an ironic reference for a black pacifist given that the original Promised Land was inhabited by presumably lesser peoples that the Israelites set about enslaving or exterminating—by God’s command no less. Nearly three millennia later, we newly arrived Americans used the Biblical account to justify our own partial extermination of Native Americans and our enslavement of Africans. We called our belief that we, as white American Protestants, had replaced the Jews as God’s chosen, Manifest Destiny, and it allowed us to see others as either obstacles to our progress or tools for our use.

I once took a Sunday School class in which we studied these accounts in which God ordered the Jews to attack cities and kill every person and every animal (except for the young female virgins whom they sometimes got to keep for the victory party). It was a liberal church, and the liberal response to anything vicious, contradictory, or simply stupid about the Bible is: Oh, THAT part isn’t God’s word because it makes God look bad, but THIS part, the warm and fuzzy part about how Jesus loves us, and we’re all going to heaven (all we Christians that is), THAT’S most definitely God’s word. Not so for one old man, who sat there looking for all the world like Santa Claus in a three-piece suit, for he said, “I can only conclude that all those people and animals that God ordered to be killed must have somehow deserved it.”

The stores are already selling Christmas decorations in preparation for the one season of the year during which America talks about “Peace on Earth,” and I will admit that it’s good to have a respite from what the baby Jesus grew up to represent (“I came not to bring peace but a sword”). Jesus’ position on violence certainly reflects America’s approach to problem solving, and we take great pride in the fact that we’re the most Christian nation on earth, which I’m sure we are inasmuch as we are willing to forego necessities in order to buy Hellfire Missiles (“…he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one”). Our love for Jesus is so great that we even paid him homage when we named our favorite weapon, which we quite naturally use to kill those who don’t love him the way we do. Of course, some of them deserve it, I’m sure, but I can’t help but think that we deserve it too. After all, the biggest difference between us is that they kill for one god and we kill for another. Maybe whoever is left alive might finally have Peace on Earth.