The stars must be aligning. The constellations are achieving greater resolution. And there is a new one to be seen through our telescopes, or better yet sight-scopes mounted on our high-powered rifles. In honor of the National Rifle Association’s annual conference, I felt the need to offer a theory.
The constellation is not the military-industrial complex of the Eisenhower era or the healthcare-insurance-lobby or the real estate-sub-prime mortgage-derivative-credit default swap complex of 2008. No, it is the “Can’t–afford or can’t admit- I-need Viagra-thanks to hormone-injected meat –gun lobby called the NRA.
Here’s how the theory works. Manly men seldom admit to needing a sexual performance enhancing drug to enable their “pistol” to operate effectively, so they deflect their frustration at the government who, they believe, might take away their right to bear arms. Some of them choose to depend on firearms (notice the term and its components: fire-implying heat and arms suggesting appendages) for reliable firepower because their natural firepower appendage no longer works properly. A manly man needs to be able to count on his tools, and when the most precious one fails, he turns his focus to external ones that he can always count on. The most symbolic are those that have the power to destroy (gun) which are the opposite of those that procreate (penis). If he has not lost the biological capacity yet, he is fearful of losing it and therefore stockpiles weapons against the day he actually does find himself “softening.”
One of my favorite sayings is from Oscar Wilde: “All criticism is autobiographical.” When I see the NRA folks hooting and hollering about the 2nd Amendment and how the government is going to take away their guns, I now see this phenomenon as another example of Wilde’s observation. What the gun folks are really mad about is their own loss of sexual virility.
My theory about this epidemic loss which has resulted in one of the most lucrative products in the history of the pharmaceutical industry (Viagra, Cialis, etc.) is the growth hormones pumped into commercially produced meat in the United States. Unless you are buying hormone-free meat products or going Vegan (which manly men never would consider) and you are a man, be prepared to see yourself developing female-like breasts growing on your chest and limpness where you wish there were salutes at attention. These are the same hormones that are causing young girls to mature prematurely. Clearly, what gun owners need to do is eat more of what they shoot, so long as they stay away from aiming at very large cattle and people who eat them.
Therefore, the USDA is tacitly approving the emasculation of the American male which results in his compensatory accumulation of firearms and surrogate firepower. Not only is it embarrassing to admit impotence, it is more expensive to buy Viagra than ammunition. Typically, Viagra pills cost $20 a piece whereas you can get a whole box of live ammunition for that amount of money.
Now some population control fanatics might argue that we need to let well enough alone. We may have to begin shooting people just to keep the lid on exponential population expansion, not that we don’t do that already in the name of promoting peace and prosperity around the world. If the USDA starts banning the use of growth hormones in meat, we might have to actually start taking the idea of birth control seriously. But I digress. This was about trying to explain why the NRA folks are so angry.
Now you might say, well, what about the women of the NRA. The Viagra-impotence argument doesn’t hold any water with them. All right, you asked for it. The answer, of course, is penis envy. There is no better symbol of penis envy on the part of women than a picture of a woman holding a gun. Some women wish they had that natural appendage and the privileges of power that go with it, strange as it may seem. They want to be just like men. Their sense of impotence, however, derives from their traditional historical status as second class citizens; and, like those who suffer from any sort of inferiority complex or actual inferior status, they want to compensate for it somehow, and nothing symbolizes power more than a gun, except, of course, that natural and fully functioning appendage attached to a man.
Therefore, that new constellation we can witness if we look long enough through our scopes is the one I mentioned in the first paragraph, which I won’t introduce again here except to say that the NRA could stand for No Reproductive Activity or Never Really Adjusted or No Reasoning Ability or Never Read Anything or Not Rational Americans….
Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guns. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Manifest Destiny 2009
The shooting at Fort Hood is beginning to look like another story in the long history of manifest destiny narratives. What they all have in common is that some kind of god told a person (or a people) that he should listen to the voice in his head (presumably the voice of God) and do what it says. Whether it is a voice telling Israelis to keep building their houses on occupied Palestinian lands, or Christian settlers usurping Indian lands in the settling of the American West, or Islamic Jihadists detonating suicide bombs, or right-wing Christians killing abortion doctors, they all have the voice of God as their navigator or inspiration.
Most of the time throughout history the voice of God has been benign. Most believers in God have used that voice to tell them to be good or to do good works. The problem is, as soon as a person decides that voice in his head is the voice of God, all bets are off as to what head voice messages are assigned to God and what are not. God’s voice is hard to distinguish from whatever other voices exist in the head. You can assign God to the deep voices or to the little bird-type voices. The problem remains: how can you tell for certain which messages are God’s and which are not?
The safer course is to assume that all voices in your head are of your own making, not anyone else’s, especially a god’s, and to question every voice you hear no matter what. Relinquishing authority to someone else, especially an invisible voice, is kind of dangerous. It leaves you open to the possibility of believing a message to kill someone is a good thing.
That’s why we would be a whole lot better off if we question authority, especially if that authority comes to us in the form of a voice or in the form of an authority who is telling us to do something our reason or the law tells us is quite wrong.
Therefore, it is probably better to listen to the narratives that are life-affirming and respectful of others rather than those that are not. That way, we won’t end up thinking God told us to do something or start believing homicide is better than suicide because at least we are thinking of others when we kill them.
As soon as we turn our lives over to the care of God, we have relinquished some responsibility for governing our own lives. That is why I have a hard time understanding why conservatives advocate taking more responsibility for ourselves and yet also stand behind the notion of a God whose voice can surely be mistaken or invented as an excuse to take the law into ones’ own hands.
I would rather leave out trying to tell which voices in my head are God’s or someone else’s and assume they are all just voices in my head. That way, I will not empower some voices more than others and will remain skeptical of them all.
However, in American culture we have the triple-edged sword of freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech. In other words, we are free to believe anything we think and free to purchase a gun to act on those beliefs without regard to consequences until after the action has occurred, unless we have previously sent enough verbal signals in advance to call attention to our intentions. Unless those verbal signals are confronted, it is often too late to prevent the consequences. Such is the dilemma of freedom of speech, of religion, of the right to bear arms.
In the case of the Fort Hood shooter, the verbal signals were there. Apparently the supply of Army counselors was so small in relation to the demand that the screening process was made loose enough to keep the supply of counselors greater than was safely advisable. Sending a devout Muslim with extremist sympathies to Afghanistan was the straw that broke the back of what was left of the shooter’s sanity because it put him in a psychological double bind: he was going to have to hear the confessions of American soldiers who would be apparently killing his own religious brethren. He could not imagine withstanding that personal torture. Belief in absolutes trumps mundane duty to one’s profession when the two conflict.
The respect America gives to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech will continue to be ingredients readily available to produce a “bomb” ready to go off almost anywhere in America, even at a military installation. That’s the price we pay for those freedoms, and this Fort Hood narrative is just one more in the pantheon of sad narratives that are a part of the on-going American story. And we hear them in one form or another when the body count is large or valued enough or the perpetrators initially seem unlikely (an American soldier shooting other soldiers on an Army base).
Maybe we need more counselors for all of us, especially those of us who are prone to view the world in terms of absolutes and those of us who have trouble identifying the voices in our heads. But that would mean universal mental health care coverage, and we can’t even get to universal physical health care without diluting compromise. You’re still on your own there, but you can have all the guns you want without a prescription.
Most of the time throughout history the voice of God has been benign. Most believers in God have used that voice to tell them to be good or to do good works. The problem is, as soon as a person decides that voice in his head is the voice of God, all bets are off as to what head voice messages are assigned to God and what are not. God’s voice is hard to distinguish from whatever other voices exist in the head. You can assign God to the deep voices or to the little bird-type voices. The problem remains: how can you tell for certain which messages are God’s and which are not?
The safer course is to assume that all voices in your head are of your own making, not anyone else’s, especially a god’s, and to question every voice you hear no matter what. Relinquishing authority to someone else, especially an invisible voice, is kind of dangerous. It leaves you open to the possibility of believing a message to kill someone is a good thing.
That’s why we would be a whole lot better off if we question authority, especially if that authority comes to us in the form of a voice or in the form of an authority who is telling us to do something our reason or the law tells us is quite wrong.
Therefore, it is probably better to listen to the narratives that are life-affirming and respectful of others rather than those that are not. That way, we won’t end up thinking God told us to do something or start believing homicide is better than suicide because at least we are thinking of others when we kill them.
As soon as we turn our lives over to the care of God, we have relinquished some responsibility for governing our own lives. That is why I have a hard time understanding why conservatives advocate taking more responsibility for ourselves and yet also stand behind the notion of a God whose voice can surely be mistaken or invented as an excuse to take the law into ones’ own hands.
I would rather leave out trying to tell which voices in my head are God’s or someone else’s and assume they are all just voices in my head. That way, I will not empower some voices more than others and will remain skeptical of them all.
However, in American culture we have the triple-edged sword of freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech. In other words, we are free to believe anything we think and free to purchase a gun to act on those beliefs without regard to consequences until after the action has occurred, unless we have previously sent enough verbal signals in advance to call attention to our intentions. Unless those verbal signals are confronted, it is often too late to prevent the consequences. Such is the dilemma of freedom of speech, of religion, of the right to bear arms.
In the case of the Fort Hood shooter, the verbal signals were there. Apparently the supply of Army counselors was so small in relation to the demand that the screening process was made loose enough to keep the supply of counselors greater than was safely advisable. Sending a devout Muslim with extremist sympathies to Afghanistan was the straw that broke the back of what was left of the shooter’s sanity because it put him in a psychological double bind: he was going to have to hear the confessions of American soldiers who would be apparently killing his own religious brethren. He could not imagine withstanding that personal torture. Belief in absolutes trumps mundane duty to one’s profession when the two conflict.
The respect America gives to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech will continue to be ingredients readily available to produce a “bomb” ready to go off almost anywhere in America, even at a military installation. That’s the price we pay for those freedoms, and this Fort Hood narrative is just one more in the pantheon of sad narratives that are a part of the on-going American story. And we hear them in one form or another when the body count is large or valued enough or the perpetrators initially seem unlikely (an American soldier shooting other soldiers on an Army base).
Maybe we need more counselors for all of us, especially those of us who are prone to view the world in terms of absolutes and those of us who have trouble identifying the voices in our heads. But that would mean universal mental health care coverage, and we can’t even get to universal physical health care without diluting compromise. You’re still on your own there, but you can have all the guns you want without a prescription.
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