Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Left Hegelians – Arguing within a Construct

I belong to a Tea Party group. I thought it was the thing to do. Although I still think the movement has merit, I find myself more at odds with their approach with every session I attend. I was a soldier. I thought that was the thing to do as well. But during that sojourn, my eyes began to slowly open.

No, I am not against the military, nor am I against those who work hard to make the government understand that they are displeased with their policies. What I am against is their approach.

At a recent Tea Party meeting, I listened to a rather heated discussion. A young man, who I did not know, began to speak with a great deal of passion. He had obviously armed himself well with an understanding of the Constitution and could recite it verbatim, applying its verses to the problems of today. I was impressed with his passion, his articulation, and the notes he had beside him. Another gentleman loudly chimed in with much the same rhetoric. The young man seemed obsessed with the idea that the Tea Party was about taxes. Is it not? The other fellow led the discussion to a few more topics that were upsetting him beyond just taxes. I agreed with both.

As well, I had received an email recently from another Tea Party group calling themselves Contract with America. They had solicited statements from several other Tea Party groups and individuals about policies they wanted changed. They had settled on 22 such statements with the idea of sending them to those in the administration and those running for seats in government. They were patently the same statements being asked by everyone in the Tea Party movement. We want this and this and that. All were directed at the government to change things that they deemed unconstitutional or were hurting their individual situation. For the most part I found them shallow and some of them rather absurd. But they were working hard, their points well taken, and they were passionate about their concerns, as are we all.

Other groups are cornering the candidates and grilling them with questions: What do you believe about pro-life, et al? How will you attack that if you are elected? The young man I spoke of earlier was very vocal about that approach.

The Construct of Context

I have a really big problem with all of that. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let us take a paper plate and lay it on the table. Let us further suppose that the plate represents Germany’s Third Reich. At the plate’s center are those who believe in the ideology of Hitler. Like any group of humans, they disagree about how things are being done to accomplish the goals of their ideology. It matters not the morality of it. One could be heard to lament, “I think we should put 10 people in the ovens.” To which another responds, “No, it would be more efficient to throw in 20.” The first retorts, “But the ovens are not rated for 20 people at once.”

Surrounding the center of the plate are the German people. Many don’t know what to make of Hitler’s ideology, don’t understand it in any case, but are captivated by what it promises. Others don’t believe it at all and some, unbeknownst to them, will face the ovens.

Let me put the example in a different way. The American mentality did not agree with the Reich, and eventually went to war over it. The Americans stood on a different ideological plate than the Reich. German soldiers fought hand to hand against American soldiers. Imagine again that the theater of war was a third plate. On the Reich’s plate, arguments continued over how best to accomplish its ideology. On the American’s plate the same thing was occurring. All during this, the combatants battled each other on a plate not occupied by either the Reich or the Americans. But they did so in the context of the construct under which they both had idealized their roles. We did the same in Vietnam where I slogged through a wasteland of someone else’s construct.

What this illustrates is that each nation works within the context of its construct. The ideology of the Reich was a construct of Aryan superiority and the eventual take over of Europe. The ideology of the Americans was diametrically opposed to this, but stood by for years because no one wanted war. But it could not be avoided. The combatants were directed by each construct to battle the other. And each did so in the context of their own construct.

And that is exactly what the Tea Party movement is doing. It is trying to achieve its goals by doing battle within the context of a construct. “I want lower taxes!” Why? Obviously because they see taxes being too high. But the Tea Party does battle within the context of a regime the workings of which they do not understand. And they fight symptoms instead of the underlying cause of those symptoms. A hundred years ago, we did not understand cancer, but we knew it caused pain. We treated the pain with morphine. Today, we also treat the pain, but as well we treat the cause we now understand. The Tea Party movement does not understand the underlying cause of their pain and so do battle with symptoms. And they do it within the parameters set by their politicians. Good luck on that!

I listened to the questions of the impassioned Tea Party groups to their prospective representatives that were hoping to gain seats in the senate. The questions were well within the context of the construct that our present administration wants. Doing battle on one front leaves the other exposed. The administration, the government, wants it that way. They want us to work within the context of their construct, just as Hitler wanted the people of Germany to work within theirs … and they did.

People are unlikely to expand that construct to include the cause, the underlying source of the problem. Instead of asking their representative candidate how they will approach the 16th Amendment, why don’t they ask a question like:

“Sir, would you please contrast the work of Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm Hegel versus that of our Founding Fathers versus that of today’s administration.”

A simpler question might be, “Sir, would you explore America’s core values and tell us why political correctness is an assault on them.”

An even more visible question would be, “Sir, can you tell me why Americans have turned to tattoos, obesity, and diabetes while the products they used to make are now being produced in Asia.”

Those who could not answer or who had no idea what you were talking about would be those caught up so deeply in the well constructed construct of socialism that they too could only work within the context provided for them. They would undoubtedly have no understanding of the source of our problems.

It is not enough to scream bloody murder about tax increases. It is incumbent upon Americans to expand and change the construct within which our government(s) works to expose the underlying cause and the assault on American core values. The context of our policies is all that people see in front of them, and they try their best to work within it.

But it only tries to place band aids on symptoms.

The young man wanted to know how the politician would serve his immediate needs. He wanted to know how the politician was going to fix things. The discussion was contextual and seated within the construct of a new social engineering neither seems to understand.

The problem lies in the fact that a large segment of our society wants to reconstruct America. It has given us a new construct, one which we don’t understand. To continue to do battle on the turf given us is to play into their hands. As in Germany, during and after the rise to power of the Nazis, the nation worked within a soiled, sour, evil construct.

We have talked about the rise of the new left during the 60’s, the Alinsky community organizers, the progressives, and the moral relativists. We have not talked about their genesis.

One can reach as far back as Plato, Aristotle, or the Old Testament, but the era that describes, more than any other the state of our administration today begins with Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Immanuel Kant.

Hegel was German. Kant was from Konigsberb, Prussia. Kant’s work came to life in approximately 1760. Hegel’s influence spanned an era beginning about 60 years later.

Upon Hegel’s death, the Young Hegelians split between the Right and Left Hegelians. It is the Left Hegelians that heralded the likes of Carl Marx and his ilk.

The remnants of the Enlightenment and America's capitalistic system were to be undercut by the philosophy of German intellectuals. The philosophies of Kant and Hegel launched a frontal attack on the concept of an independent individual, an independent reality and the Law of Identity. Further, to reality being unknowable or non-existent they both advanced that the consciousness, man's mind, was not capable of perceiving reality, thus man initialized his own construct. Kant and Hegel closed the door of philosophy to reason. Contrary to Aristotle and Aquinas, Kant and Hegel asserted that the mind was the creator of reality not the perceiver of reality. This thinking lay at the heart of German "idealism" and easily later led to the philosophy of pragmatism. At the core of these new philosophies was that there are no principles, because there are no facts. Reality was fluid, to be manipulated by the primacy of consciousness. Reality, as perceived by man's mind, is a distortion. Kant and then Hegel were determined to save the morality of self-sacrifice, from reason. If man was incompetent to think or know reality, it only remained to determine who would control man and who would collect man's "self-sacrifices."
This philosophy gave the philosophical basis to the most revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Hegelian system of political thought was totally alien to Western civilization. Hegel proposed that the State is also God. That the only duty of the citizen was to serve God by serving the State. The State is reason and the citizen can only find "freedom" by worship and obedience to the State, of course, controlled by an "elite.

It is this philosophy that has American political thought in its grip. While taxes, fiscal responsibility, et al are symptoms of that attack, they are not the underlying cause. It is that upon which our efforts should point.

It is not easy to understand the rise of the left, the relativists, or the social progressives to power without some knowledge of its genesis. Once at the bottom of its core value set, we can change it. And in doing so begin to change those policies that are so abhorrent to us.

The Tea Party movement is not that attack. It is, in fact, stuck in its own naïveté.

It is for this reason that, although I applaud their energy, their passion, and understand their frustration, I wish to withdraw from their present way of approaching the problem.

Saul Alinsky


The Malevolent Underbelly of Protest

Protest is at least as old as social interaction. Protest occurs in third world countries stricken with poverty as well as more economically prosperous countries waxing toward revolution.

We are not unaware.

Protest is, of course, much easier in nations that are free. That begs the question: What nation is free? We used to think ours was. Some still do. But increasing government intervention is eroding our freedom every day. At least we can still gather, rally, and protest. Or can we?

We have reasons to protest.

The ever increasing size of government is one of them. We understand that government must grow. As population grows so must some government staffs to process and accommodate a larger population. We understand fully that is not the cause of our protest. We protest the unnecessary and unreasonable expansion of government. Taxes increase. We understand that as well, but we protest unnecessary and unreasonable tax. The list goes on.

But the real protest, the current “movement” of protest, runs much deeper.

The current grassroots movement is awakening to much more than taxes. It is beginning to understand that there is deepening assault on our core, cultural values. The list of Czars and their backgrounds help with that understanding. The present regime glares at us with distaste, at the Constitution with disregard, and at the traditional values and culture we endear with disdain. The political machine seems to be a nation unto itself with little regard for its citizens. We protest the assault on our cultural values.

Is that true only of Politicians? No. There is a generation of our citizens who have grown up on the ideas expounded by the liberal progressive movement. They have embraced the left, seduced by its autonomy and the ability it gives them to act irresponsibly, to see the personal benefits and soft soap of relativism, and to allow the government to take care of all their needs. It, as well, leads to the decay of productivity, endorses a behavior of sloth, betrays the free market system, and promotes a social decay that will lead to national collapse.

It also embraces multiculturalism, the variety that is destroying Europe. And with it, the sovereignty of property is threatened.

And so, the silent majority, the majority of Americans (?), begins to perk up its ears, to assemble, and to protest.

That begs the question: How do we protest? Better put: How do we most effectively protest? There are some who protest openly, straight forwardly, and unabashedly. Ms. Malkin is a conservative columnist and blogger who is committed to her point of view, pulls no punches, and speaks candidly and openly. Her form of protest is an approach that has reached millions and led to Americans being better informed of the issues, and I dare say spurred to action to protest. Does the left not do the same in opposition to conservatives? Read MoveOn.org, KOS, and other left wing blogs.

But there is a much more covert, underhanded, and malevolent form of protest.

Some Tea Party groups are beginning to entertain, even use, the tactics supplied in the writings of Saul Alinsky. Alinsky disliked the left and the young anti-war radicals of the 60’s. He tried to help the poor and those he deemed ravaged by corporations, forgotten by the government, and whose enclaves could not fight their way to success and prosperity.

Alinsky was a communist of sorts. He spent his life as an organizer for what he saw as the underprivileged, and he is famous for his books Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. In these books he laid out a list of rules by which the Community Organizer could disrupt the establishment, the opposition, and the status quo. He is reminiscent of Marx. But can one strip from it his communist ideology and embrace the so called neutrality of his tactics?

During the anti-Vietnam-War movement, many young radical activists began to use Alinsky’s rules. Alinsky was not particularly happy about this development, but it persisted. His rules seem benign enough at first glance. He tells people to fight within the system. But he also decries the notion of allowing morals to get in the way. His theme revolves around morals being situational to the struggle. And is it not?

Yet, his rules seem benign enough and strike people as perfectly logical. Why not? Fight fire with fire, right? And within the system. But the underbelly of Alinsky’s construct and most of those using his tactics were driven to be socialists, irreligious, underhanded, immoral, and downright fraudulent in order to accomplish their goals. In the end, they became ruthlessly relativistic, embracing the contradictions of Marx.

Be careful about being fooled by what appears to be benign rhetoric.

Alinsky followers believe that the ends justify the means, period. Many make the argument that what is important in life is “taking the high ground” at any cost. All else be damned. Whatever must be done, shall. Alinsky, whether intentional or not, spawned sociopathism bordering on psychopathism, following in the footsteps of Hitler, Gehring, Marx, Pol Pot, and others of their ilk. Do you want to be associated with their tactics?

Sociopathism is an antisocial behavior suggesting one who is unconcerned about the adverse consequences for others of one's actions. A psychopath is a person with a personality disorder indicated by a pattern of lying, exploitiveness, heedlessness, arrogance, and lack of empathy and remorse. Does that strike a chord about our own government?

These are the same tactics that brought people to spit on us as we debarked the plane from Southeast Asia in1969, exactly 40 years ago, while others called us baby killers. It is the same logic being applied to try our Navy Seals, to try the planner of the WTC bombing in civil court, and to judge every move our troops make as they are monitored by the media. And they are blatantly exhibited by Alinsky’s twisted social construct and, hence, his tactics wrought by ideology. The people who assaulted me were indoctrinated and led by these so called “Community Organizers.” One could not separate one’s despicable tactics from one’s ideology.

Alinsky’s were a set of tactics based on his ideology.

The fact is: tactics are themselves ideological in concept and cannot, by definition, be neutral. Tactics are a subset of, and driven by, goals. And strategy is based on, and driven by, the goals of ideology. While that is necessary, it, as well, requires an understanding of ideology, and ideology is used to subvert it. Hitler’s goals embraced the ideology of a pure Aryan race and drove him in attempting to eradicate an entire ethnic group. His tactic to throw them into the ovens obviously appeared moral to him. And what better way to reduce the bulk of some 6 million people? There is another way to put the destructive effects on followers of Alinsky’s tactics :

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

In other words, if you are willing to take the path and use the tactics that spawned sociopaths, you may inadvertently become one of them. Remember that one of the traditional attributes of America is that, opposed to the opinion of our President, KOS, MoveOn.org and the Young Turks, we are and have been a Judeo/Christian culture. If you do not support Judeo/Christian values, what do you support? Is the communist ideology of Saul Alinsky that of the majority of Americans? It certainly is the ideology of those we oppose.

I remember the tactics of Jerry Rubin, Jane Fonda, John Kerry, Alan Ginsberg, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and their ilk. Is it not ironic to realize that their protest during the 60’s created the very problems that we find ourselves up against today? And not only that, but to realize that the leaders of today came from that group: the neo, ultra left, youth movements.

One must take careful note of the effective social change they created. They became grotesque forms of malcontent in the hands of people who believe any means are justified by the vision of an end, and morality is something that gets in the way. The acts of Jane Fonda and Bill Ayers are testimony to misunderstanding the rules of Alinsky … or are they?

The work of Michelle Malkin is a case of straight up criticism. She ferrets out the facts and lays them on the table for everyone to see. Her rhetoric is plain, easy to understand, and not couched in the terms so often used by the new socialist statists. It is not newspeak nor duckspeak, but an honest presentation of the facts and an opinion about them. And with that, she has acted as a magnet to pull people into the movement. Why must we resort to the tactics of a known social, communist agitator the likes of Saul Alinsky? We must, however, remember who trained under him: President Obama, Hilary Clinton, his czars, and a great many of his supporters.

I say, let there be truth and light, not subversion and darkness. If we can get more people to research what is going on, we can make our voice heard at the polls and kick the new social engineers (sociopaths) out!

How do you think Obama, Reid, and Pelosi got elected? By tactics devoid of ideology?

There has got to be a better way. While denial is certainly not the way, are we sure that the tactics of Alinsky and Marx, scrubbed of communism and radical activism, are?

Dancing in the Jungle

When I was a young man, I stated some obscure, seeming truth to my cousin, something I don’t even remember. But the outcome of that brief encounter stayed with me the rest of my life. I had a thought that I believed was not only true but profound. He asked me to explain. I could not. He then told me that what I could not explain I did not fully understand and thus did not know.

I have pondered that seemingly pejorative declaration the past 50 years of my life. But I have come to realize that what he said is not necessarily true. I have come to believe that feeling is sometimes a form of knowledge as yet not fully defined.

The weight of this paradox returned when I used my phase, Dancing in the Jungle. A friend asked me on several occasions to explain what I meant. I could not define it to my friend’s satisfaction. Did that mean, once again, that I did not understand it either and thus did not know it?

The answer is more complex than it seems. Reading Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death has begun to posit answers that I could not put into words what I felt and knew: That I had come to terms with the duality of an active mind captured in a rotting, decaying, dying body.

I know what I need because I am instinctively drawn to it. I did what I did otherwise because I once feared the consequence of my being.

When I say I am finally at peace with that duality, I offend people. I assume it is because they are not, because they find it impossible, and because I am just a common man. I offered a book to my wife and told her I thought she ought to read it. When she did not, I asked her why. She said the author has no background. Who is he, she asked? What is his authority?

And so it goes. Without credentials, the thoughts of the common man are without merit. They are not considered worthy of consideration, of challenge, or even worthy of criticism. Yet Ernest Becker states that this terrible duality affects everyone: statist, elitist, scholar, or jughead.

The Jungle is an environmental condition found in parts of Southeast Asia and other places in the world. It is often thought of as foreboding, foreign, and filled with strange things that go bump in the night. It conjures up the idea of darkness and things closing in on you. But euphemistically, it can be used to invoke what humanity is faced with: The utter helplessness of their being. Fraught with the terror of its finality, they protect themselves with myths, lies, and barriers against its inevitability.

The problem is that man reasons within his situation. Although driven by instinct, he is aware of his past and his present, and, if normal, acts on his awareness accordingly. Thus, his instinct does not always win out in his effort to dismiss and disguise what his mind sees as being outside his dying body.

I no longer find myself out of my “self” (schizophrenic) nor overwhelmed by my “self” (depressed). I have no apparent reason to believe in God. I do not cry for everlasting life or salvation. I do not obsess with a feeling that accountability faces evil people in some “here after” life. I believe that reason is a human survival attribute like the claws of a lion. I find a great deal of purpose in life but no meaning. The purpose, of course, is to procreate, nourish one’s young, and shelter and feed them until they are on their own, and then die. All else is filler. That is different in my account than meaning. Meaning by my definition invokes a vision of more than life and purpose.

Dancing is often thought of in the context of joy. One raises his head to the sky and rejoices in affirmation of art and pleasure and contentment. One is no longer plagued by the dichotomy of dualism. For one to sit on the toilet and defecate while listening to the music of Bach symbolizes perfectly the dualism of both the best and the worst of being human. One is either destroyed by this realization or dances when finally coming to terms with the meaninglessness and finality of ones existence amid this duality.

Dancing in the Jungle, then, expresses one’s finally coming to terms with being-in-himself, yet being-beyond-himself. My mind soars as my flesh rots. But I dance in the face of it, in the jungle of human suffering and contradictions and lies and myths that allow us to exist within our own private madness.

People devour the bible, strive for salvation, labor for everlasting life, and pray for a certain mercy that expunges their cognitive aberrations. Christians, Jews, and Muslim’s alike cling, white knuckled, to their bibles. For in them lay the answers to all their questions. Ask a biblical scholar a question, and he will immediately seek out the passage in scripture that answers it. Though the answer might be vague, if not downright incoherent, it is so because it is the word of the lord. And in the breast of each lays a heart that secretly opines: My God can kick your God’s ass.

I did not join the military to defend my God but to defend yours. You would ask if it is not mistaken to act as the agent of something that is wrong headed, for it seems it could as well justify defending the worst in man. Yet it is a matter of practicality. Of all the myths and lies and wrong headedness and mystery of man, America’s the most benign. I would have it for my children. Its values and its culture are what I want for them. It is not a matter of right and wrong to me but one of what it is not.

Dancing in the Jungle is the realization of facing man’s impotence while rejoicing in his reality, his art, his accomplishments, and the fact that though man is mad, though his flesh slowly rots, though he is myth and lies and fear and trembling, he is man alone in the jungle yet free in his discovery that he can at last relent his being.

He is silhouetted on a mountain top against a darkening sky, turning and dancing in his aloneness. Lonely on that mountain top; but worse, his inner soul grasps his aloneness, the space he fills where nothing enters in, where nothing else resides. He feels it creeping under his skin as he faces death.

The ancient Jews believed in what they call basheet, that in modern times seems to have been reduced to bershet. In the Jewish community today, it is defined as something that was meant to be. But the ancients thought of it differently. They believed that there are only so many spirits waiting to be processed, so to speak. There are two thoughts: one holds that each male spirit was paired with a female spirit prior to gaining flesh. The other holds that one spirit was split in two, one female and the other male. They belong to each other and are only parted if one or both do something against God’s will. This a comforting thought in that it relieves one from the torturous realization that one is forever “an aloneness.” And to the thoughtful couple, as he enters her, they become one in flesh and in spirit. Was it their way of overcoming their “aloneness?”

Dancing in the Jungle is a metaphor for the release of my personal madness, the madness of hoping to escape my inevitable death, of not confronting it, and of the thought of my flesh rotting and with it my mind’s eye closing …forever.

But in the interim I shall continue to wage a battle with my pen, a battle to keep the traditions and values of America alive for those who follow me. I will try to render man’s madness a will to survive the onslaught of progressive ideology. For it is just another myth, a myth that captivates the unwary, that seduces man into believing that he is beyond helping himself, that he is stupid and common and impotent, and that, finally, the elitist, the statist, and the progressive scholar shall govern his life.

The statist as well as the liberal progressive scholar despises me. For I have found my way. I am at peace with it, and I am, at long last, Dancing in the Jungle.

Flounders Field

Ernest Becker, author The Denial of Death

Whereas Freud explained the motivations and neuroses of human nature to unconscious instinctual drives, Becker and Rank see man’s problems based on his basic split between his limited body and his limitless mind. This basic dualism is a universal form that can be seen throughout history in all works. Sartre’s being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Descartes’s division between mind and body, etc.

Socrates once mused that philosophy is practicing the art of dying. So, Becker would write, “…to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.” Becker believed that each of us carries a “vital lie”, that which gives our life meaning, and we would do anything to protect that lie. Becker’s hope was that by becoming conscious of the vital lies that we live by, we could by some degree be free from them. We, as a society, could choose better vital lies to live by such as the principles of freedom, truth, and peace. Ultimately, Becker wrote that the fullest achievement of man was his self-transformation, submission to being the creature that he is. We are neither animal nor god, only human. He understood religion in this light, as the presence of a transcendent that we submit our individuality for something greater than ourselves.

Cement House Cemetery, near Langemark in Flanders. Burial of three unknown soldiers, November 2005 (pictured at the top).

A cold November morning in Flanders fields where between the crosses, row on row, fresh graves wait. It is burial day. A few times a year corpses and parts of corpses, recently found, are given back to the earth.

Here, at Cement House Cemetery near the village of Langemark, the day starts with the burial of three unknown soldiers, whose remains were found by the Boesinghe Diggers in an industrial zone near the canal at nearby Boesinghe.

These Boesinghe Diggers are Flemish archeology amateurs, all fascinated by the Great War, all devoted to dig up as much as possible, while it still can. The industrial zone is expanding and the diggers excavate sites where modern factories will soon be built.

In 1915 the whole area near the canal at Boesinghe was a battlefield, Patrick explains. He is one of the Boesinghe Diggers. Every Saturday he and his friends dig up the former trenches. They use old trenchmaps to locate Nomansland and the frontlines.

The Idea of Death

It is incumbent on any intellectual consideration of death to also intellectualize life. Is it true that one must have lived to say that one is now dead? Pre-spiritual advocates might ponder that seemingly absurd question. It has become controversial in medical and religious circles to define what death really entails. One example of life seems to center around consciousness. But that is only a human attribute. For example, plants are assumed to be alive, but consciousness is not a part of their life-hood.

Some species of living organisms, hydra for example, seem to be immortal. Others such as one celled organisms are alive but do not exhibit any attributes of the rest of living organisms. While parts of more complex organisms may not appear to be alive, other parts of that organism do.

An almost universal human idea of life holds that life as we know it is simply a transient state between that of living protoplasm and that of spirit. That is, life will continue in some form after death. Is that superstition or fact? It might be either, but it is certainly improvable.

The idea of everlasting death is repugnant to all humans. In fact, one’s own death is the most terrifying thought a human being can entertain. Yet the religious zealot embraces life’s temporal status only as a bridge to a more sought after form upon his death. I am a hunter, and while hunting one day with religious friends, I asked if the antelope we were about to kill would go to heaven. The answer I got was yes, as would ants, bees, and all living creatures. I wondered if the antelope might take offense to our efforts to end his life when that fellow finally joined him. While such a view seems absurd to me, the truth of such things is unknown. Antelope have no comprehension of death. Likewise, they have no real idea of life, but they do have a powerful urge to sustain it.

To most civilized societies, the place and time of one’s death remains unknown. And it is programmed within the general, human consciousness to not ponder such an eventuality. Yet, to some, the religious implications of death are so manifestly welcome that they embrace it. To wit: terrorist suicide bombers. Britain’s MI5 has intelligence information that Islamic surgeons trained in England have migrated to some Middle Eastern countries and are now implanting bombs in women’s breasts.

On the flip side of the coin, an American soldier goes into battle with the thought that there is at least some small chance that he will survive. The unlucky fellow beside him will meet his fate, but not him. Yet we all know that our day will come. We are not immortal, at least not terrestrially so. We do not know when or how, but we do know that our day will come.

“This is man’s paradox” writes Becker: His body is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to the fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways – the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out in nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”

As Pascal states “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” To which Becker explains “ Necessarily because the existential dualism makes an impossible situation, an excruciating dilemma. Mad because everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness – agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same.”

I am familiar with death, as are we all. As a soldier I saw it. There was also a time in my life when I worked on a terminal ward of a military hospital. All who resided there knew that death was upon them, and that it lay only days or weeks ahead. All were young. Observing their response to it was undeniably tortuous. If, rather when, they pondered their demise, I would frequently have to inject thorazine to calm them. And why? Because to the human mind, the idea of death is one of such finality that it cannot be dealt with rationally. Life’s “vital lie” was at an end for them. The repression and denial of death could no longer sustain them.

While animals do not consider the idea of death from a standpoint of ratiocination, they do have a strong survival instinct. As a hunter, I have observed their reactions to the threat of death hundreds of times. Their will to live is extraordinary.

There is an amusing saying that you should not take life too seriously since you will never get out of it alive anyway. And yet people continue to struggle with concepts, dreams, and the determination to further goals they perceive as either beneficial to themselves, to their children, or to society as a whole.

The world is filled with such people and their activist movements, all mundane to their individual existence it would seem. Throughout history such ambitions have been examined and individuals have risen to power or prominence because of it. Yet the great equalizer is death. Hitler or Mother Teresa is no worse or better than I in the final analysis.

Is it then true that we should not struggle for a cause in the midst of knowing our own demise? If you knew you had only 30 days to live, what would be your response? Let me pose this question: Let us assume that you believe the direction that Obama, his corrupt administration, and his activist, communist czars are taking this country would affect not only you but all your progeny in an extremely detrimental way. What would be your response? Would you find it more important to spend “quality” time with your loved ones and get your affairs in order, or to make an even more gallant attempt at stopping the outrageous actions of a Marxist regime in the making that would affect your offspring for the remainder of their lives?

The Elasticity of Nouns. The Plasticity of Death.

Such words as communism, terrorism, fascism, et al are elastic. That is, they expand or contract within the ideology of their own definition and the individual defining them. They seem to have a memory of their own state of equilibrium in social engineering and gravitate to that constant state. Yet death is anything but elastic. It is indeed plastic. Once that state of life is altered by death, it will not return to its normal state. Thus, we often ponder apples against oranges in our effort to understand our position and worth in the universe.

Ernest Becker, in his book Denial of Death, points to how humans repress the idea of death. It seems to me that he is stating another case of denial, a frequent and impotent social aspect of most Americans. Yet it is the very definition of America that has given men and women the courage to face death.

We speak of the death of an American in his struggle to defend it. But we seldom speak of the death of America itself. Some would say that America is elastic and that it will return to its normal state of cultural and traditional values, and, further, that the conservative Tea Party movement, made loud enough, is the current method by which that will be accomplished. Some say no, that the America they knew and grew up in has become plastic, and that our once great culture is beyond changing, manipulating, or saving. It has no memory.

Can we extrapolate or correlate the repression of one’s own death to the repression by Americans of its death as well? Or is it a matter of one’s own outlook? The ultra-left embraces the current efforts to change American values. But can we, in all consciousness, continue to call our nation America or fly the stars and stripes over a land that is headed for the grave? Do we revolutionize consciousness?

I was astonished and surprised when my 4 year old granddaughter began to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the dinner table recently. She recited it perfectly.

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all".

It is noteworthy to understand the origins of some of those words. The word republic, for example, underscores the government the founders invoked. The words under God, insisted on by Eisenhower during the cold war, gives the nation a stated religious character, and the words liberty and justice for all seems self evident. Yet, today, all these words are under attack. My four year old granddaughter has no understanding of either that or the powerful implications of the words she recites, nor does she understand death. It strikes me that neither do many Americans. But it most certainly does to those activists interested in the death of America.

Like the animals I have hunted, where is that extraordinary will of America to live? Is it apathy, complacency, laziness, or an abject tolerance to their surroundings no matter its heated advances toward destruction? No, Americans will continue with their comfortable lives until their bellies are empty. They will continue their denial, their repression of their own deaths, until it is upon them. And then we will see the sleeping giant awaken. The injection of thorazine will not calm their panic nor their will to survive. Will it be too damned late?

Is Becker’s and Pascal’s madness theme that of American citizens, that they have a project immortality that keeps them in denial about the death of their own country? And when will their “vital lie” about the decay of America be cast aside and they rise up to rescue it? Again, not until their bellies are empty.