A Crackpot Welcome

Crackpot Chronicles welcomes to it's very small and ecclectic link list, Open Letters to George W. Bush (from your admirer Belacqua Jones). It is Case Wagenvoord's Salon Blog of witty and insightful commentary on American life and policy, directed at our lame lame duck current president. I don't know what he's going to call it when Dubya's term is over, but I hope he keeps it up. Well worth a read.

I've been a fan of OL2GWB for a while now with no idea that Case was a Crackpot reader. Recently he left a comment, to which I replied here and by email and we've since become e-pals, someday to meet.

Sample from today:

Dear George,

One of America’s favorite pastimes is making hyperbolic statements of questionable validity. For example, we say we are the world’s sole surviving superpower. This is true if you define “superpower” as a nation swimming in obsolete military hardware suited for traditional army-against-army warfare, but totally unsuited for today’s reality, which is guerilla/insurgency warfare.

Another hyperbolic assertion is that we are the richest nation on earth. This, also, is true if we define wealth as indebtedness.
I mention this because the ability of Americans to maintain an illusion of prosperity is an important instrument of social control. As long as an illusion of well-being remains, the public will be content enough not to cause trouble. A patina of prosperity, no matter how thin, is enough to conceal a condition of functional impoverishment. The illusion holds as long as the banks don’t call in their loans.

Prosperity, whether real or imagined, works to your advantage when it is divorced from meaning. By meaning, I mean a firm grounding in something other than material accumulation

Nothing rots the soul like prosperity without meaning. A prosperity grounded in meaning yields spiritual serenity. Without meaning, prosperity yields boredom. Boredom in search of stimulation fosters evil. It is in the dense fog of boredom that intelligence divorces wisdom and gives you the banality of evil so necessary for the corporatization of the earth.

This is why the religious right is so important to the oligarchy. We must never allow boredom to morph into serenity. A congregation seated in the sterile environs of their mega-glass auditorium watching their preacher on a big screen is able to maintain the illusion of meaning without actually experiencing it. For the mega church’s, religion is all about happiness and personal growth. They forget that for a genuine religion, the goal is wisdom, not happiness. This quest for happiness is the barricade that guarantees worshipers will never experience the transrational gift of the Spirit.

Yes, George, a bored people is a tabula rasa upon which the grossest barbarity may be written with impunity. All that matters is that it stimulates.

In the end, it's all smoke and mirrors.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

read the blog and wonder why George doesn't ever write Belacqua back