After years of intellectual, spiritual and physical struggle, I’ve managed to ascend from my self-imposed hell. By the grace of the Higher Power, I’ve emerged with a psyche that’s free and infinitely stronger than it was prior to my ‘fall.’
RT: So you went through some profound changes as a human being?
JM: I’m one of the extremely rare and fortunate individuals who, through my innate strengths of tenacity, persistence, passion, moral imagination, resourcefulness, and a relentlessly analytical mind AND thanks to a confluence of other factors, including serendipitous encounters with incredibly wise and compassionate mentors, was able to make a ‘conversion’ not unlike that of Saul of Tarsus. I make no claims to saint-hood or perfection, but I have made a significant moral transformation for the better.
RT: So what triggered your ‘evolution?’
JM: I’m glad you asked because the answer relates directly to my response to the apologists for capitalism who despise socialism so.
Raw emotion and an unconscious rejection of the myriad toxic elements that comprise our ‘culture’ and society here in capitalist central, the United States, triggered my mostly self-inflicted downward spiral. I was running and fighting like hell, but from and against what I knew not. To put this into a chronological perspective, my psychological nightmare began in about 1986.
Hitting rock bottom, or actually ramming into it at top speed to be more accurate, jarred me to my senses. I finally woke up and had two epiphanies. One was the fact that I was applying nearly all of my formidable tenacity into f*cking up my life. The second was that I wasn’t self-destructing because I was masochistic. I realized I had been born with a very potent conscience and with a strong tendency to dissect nearly everything with critical thinking. These traits often put me at odds with the capitalist, speciesist world around me. At that time I had a very limited frame of reference and pitifully few tools with which I could reconcile the nightmarish contradictions. Suicide definitely crossed my mind on more than one occasion.
RT: So you’re saying you’re better than the rest of us?
JM: No. Not at all. What I’m saying is that most people with reasonably developed intellects and consciences are going to struggle in some way in this ocean of liquefied excrement, and I don’t care what you call it—capitalism, corporatism, consumerism, Western civilization—it’s a sea of sh*t. Ignorance, anti-intellectualism, avarice, law of the jungle, deceit, get them before they get you, selfishness, self-centeredness, narcissism, exploitation, and nearly every despicable human trait your mind can conjure are encouraged, amplified, rewarded, and to some degree, necessitated by our rotten-to-the-core system of ‘free enterprise.’
Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is strangling the life out of the planet while .0005% of the population sits atop a mountain of cash that dwarfs Mt. Everest. These vampiric individuals won’t rest until they’ve sucked the Earth and its inhabitants dry. Gates, Mars, Walton, Buffet, Allen, Ellison, Dell, Redstone, Pritzker, Helu, Albrecht, Mittal, Deripaska, Ballmer, Koch....you want a who’s who of parasitic ghouls? Check out Forbes.com’s list of the world’s billionaires. These poster children for gluttony and greed don’t work in the sense that most of us do. They may go to an office and do work, but unlike most of us, they aren’t compelled to do so in order to function within the system and survive. We bleed, sweat, and cry to keep them in the obscenely lavish lifestyles to which these ruthless bastards have become accustomed—and philanthropy be damned. The money these leeches donate is for PR purposes, tax write-offs and to appease what tiny pricks of conscience they may feel on occasion.
I want to interject here that my passion against the accumulation of wealth does not stem from envy. I have what I need and there’s little that I want. Material possessions, power, and wealth hold little meaning for me—I am a minimalist. My zealous pursuit of capitalism’s demise is fueled by my insatiable thirst for justice.
So no, I don’t think I’m better than others—I’m simply awakened and motivated. And I’ve surrounded myself with friends and allies who share similar traits, worldviews, and objectives. Most of the people I know who still believe that the hologram of American Exceptionalism bears even a vague resemblance to reality, or that we’re actually bettering the world by infecting it with the virus of the American Way of Life (at gun and missile point, no less), are essentially decent human beings who are simply intellectually disarmed and emotionally pacified by the steady barrage of bourgeois, corporate propaganda. Not to mention the fact that many of them are bought and paid for, in most cases unwittingly, with the ‘generous’ crumbs the ruling class throws them to keep them fiercely loyal to a way of being that provides a relatively comfortable existence for 5% of the world’s population at an extreme cost to the Earth, its other sentient inhabitants, and the rest of humanity.
Now some do ‘play the game’ with eyes wide open. They are quite aware that the prevailing paradigm is causing alarming rates of deforestation and species extinction, Climate Change, Peak Oil, horrific levels of pollution, gross disparities in access to basic human necessities, the torture and murder of billions of non-human animals each year, resource wars, a serious depletion of potable water supplies, inevitable and recurring economic crises (like the current one), soil decimation, and much more unnecessary murder, mayhem, and destruction. Yet they forge ahead to get their ‘entitlements.’
Yes, that’s right; I used the reactionary right’s pejorative for ‘welfare.’ The dominionist fucks who think they are ‘entitled’ to exploit every human and non-human animal and all the Earth’s "resources" for their personal pleasure and fulfillment are the ones who are actually leeching off of the rest of us and the planet.
Sarah Palin epitomizes virtually all the loathsome qualities our sociopathic culture inculcates us to worship. She’s a venomous, conniving, duplicitous, and hyper-ambitious serpent of a woman who uses cunning to hide her profound ignorance and sublimates her repressed sadism by shooting essentially defenseless animals (she calls it "hunting"), enabling and applauding the murder of wolves with rifles and air-planes (now that’s truly ‘sporting’), and fighting attempts to keep the polar bears from vanishing forever.
Astoundingly, this transparently vile woman actually came reasonably close to governing the most powerful nation in the world. It is incomprehensible that a decent human being with a functioning mind would vote for a ticket that included such a repulsive member of our species. For Christ’s sake! Palin’s in bed with Ted Stevens (an indicted felon and probably the most corrupt former member of the Senate–now that’s some serious criminality), Big Oil, a secessionist (quite literally in bed with one–while she waves the flag of patriotism until her arm is limp with fatigue), gay-hating social regressives (who would vote for Hitler were he alive today and campaigning against abortion AND who think the Flintstonian version of humanity coexisting with dinosaurs is pretty realistic). Politically, historically, geographically, and socially moronic, she made Paris Hilton look sharp as a whip until she had time to memorize the talking points her GOP handlers spoon fed her.
Yet 58 million people voted for this troglodyte. That’s pretty disturbing. Does that mean that she is indeed a reflection of our collective selves? That we Americans are as petty, mean-spirited, narcissistic, obtuse, and belligerent (in a "socially acceptable" way) as Caribou Barbie? That we are but a thin, flexible veneer of respectability super-glued over a decaying, putrefied core that, were it fully exposed, would not even be "decent" enough to make the cut for Jerry Springer’ show?
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