An Open Letter to Jack Hues

Dear Mr. Hues;

During the 1980s, the entire world fell into a form of postmodern disrepair on a level unmatched since the advent of Generation X. We returned to a stronger, less friendly form of conservatism and proceeded to indulge ourselves in some of the most gluttonous and decadent practices known to man. Cocaine was consumed more than ever as more of a testament to sums of liquid capital rather than a need for a high, perfume was bought in OPEC-standard barrels for use in one night, and cars got more gallons per mile than vice versa. Hyperbole? Yes. Unnecessarily overdone? Not at all.

This brings me to you, Mr. Hues. There are many unanswered questions from the 80s which plague us to this very day. How did Reagan go from being union chief to das uberkonservative? What made the jackets Winner Only? Headbands? Shoulderpads? Pastel suits? New Coke? McDonalds in Moscow? MULLETS?! GERALDO?! DONAHUE?! PHIL COLLINS?!

Simply put sir, there are too many questions left unanswered from that decade. I have started an organizations, Citizens for the Acquisition of Resolution to the Eighties (CARE), membership numbering one thus far. As the self-explanatory name shows, the main mission of this group is to seek answers to these unanswered questions from our recent past. This is why we've (I've) come to you, Mr. Hues. In 1979, you started a band with Nick Feldman named Wang Chung, Chinese for "perfect pitch." For a while, your band languished in mediocrity until approached by William Friedkin to score his movie To Live and Die in LA. It was here that your band took off in the US charts. Then, you recorded your album entitled Mosaic. On it, you had three singles, two of which were "Let's Go," and "Hypnotize Me."

It was your best single to date that came off of this album. It reached #2 on the Hot US 100, #4 on the US Dance, and #25 on Rock, an impressive ecumenical hit. The name of this song, "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" has one famous line which has caused great men of thought and simple men of work much thought and perplexment. It has caused bodhisattvas on mountaintops to meditate on it for years, and crass athiests in alleys and on streetcorners to create a web of profanity that surely caresses the Van Allen belts. Your line, the one that has created such an impact in the world, is such:

Everybody Wang Chung tonight.

Mr. Hues, this lyric has caused everything from emergency meetings of the National Security council to prolonged discussions amongst pretentious college students in coffee shops. The heavens quake in fear and the seas are silent in awe at the potential meaning of this cryptic lyric. Theology as we know it may hinge its very existence on the esoteric knowledge you have imparted to us through the seemingly-innocent and seemingly-unintelligent means of post-punk synth-pop. The usage of hyphens within my previous statement pales in comparison to your unknown lyric.

Mr. Hues, you owe it to the world to disclose the meaning of this lyric, as profane or divine as it might be, to the masses of the world. We have waited, we have debated, we have lost enough sleep to garner the answer. Please, Mr. Hues. tell us....

How does one Wang Chung?

Sincerely,


Daniel R. Green

Precipitation

It's raining. It's been raining ever since I arrived in this town. Six-and-a-half inches, my dad reports as he does his periodic check on the rain gauge outside that I've never cared to look for or notice. Half a foot of water in two and a half days, with no sign of ceasing soon.

Rain, rain, go away
Darken someone else's day.

There's something about this town. I don't really know how to describe it, or if there's anything there at all to describe. What I do feel, though is that there is some vibe, some aura, some unique feeling to this town that makes it feel like a perfect accomplice to the weather that has plagued this place since I returned on Saturday afternoon.

See, my town is one of the last industrial towns in this state and most of the products here come from the ground. First, we have Chemtura, formerly Great Lakes Chemical Company. Basically, it made a plethora of chemicals and refined products out of brine, most of which were bromine oriented (Halon, fire retardants, so forth). Then, we have El Dorado Chemical Company. I don't know what in the hell these guys do, something with nitrates though. Kaboom. The only thing this town really needs. Oh, then there's Cooper tire plant here. Prescolite does some electrical crap, and Hubbell, the lighting fixture place, has a few big buildings somewhere where some people go to do some thing. Finally, there is the company in El Dorado that has a habit of blowing up every couple of years. Ensco as it was known when dad worked there, Terris as its known now after a buyout by some French company. Basically, Terris/Ensco serves as the colon for this industrial hub and processes the waste (Usually through incineration).

Finally, there's Lion Oil, this state's richest palindrome. Ha! You get it now! Lion Oil, Lio Noil. Anyways, this thing has been the lifeblood for some time in this town, as they continuously expand, rebuild, and branch out not only bringing in workers and revenue, but also by hiring local contractors and such to help them out. I work for their pipeline over the summer, it's called Lion Oil Trading and Transportation. LOTT is a subsidiary of Lion Oil Refinery, and LOR is a subsidiary of some big energy trust-type company in Jackson by the name of Ergon. Ergon doesn't completely own the LOR/LOTT setup though, just enough to completely fuck us over should they ever decide to dump the stock.

This is where I get to my point. This town has a big ego for a shrinking town. We want more banks, more chains, more stores, more big highways. People seem to forget this town is dying, and dying quickly. Maybe it's a combination of industrial-town blues as well as a deathbed regretting that has gripped this town hard. Maybe it's that they realize we're in Arkansas and so far secluded from the rest of the state we're practically insignificant. Maybe it's that there's this collective remembrance of the glory days of the 20s, when oil was everywhere, new towns like Norphlet and Smackover sprung up over night, and El Dorado was as big as Little Rock and far richer.

I don't know. I just have to cope with it. So I read and read and read, and hope that the rain washes whatever it is in this town away.

The Deniability of Our Existence

Human beings have been pumping the air on our planet and the space through which it revolves with a plethora of broadcasts across the electromagnetic spectrum. Simply put, we are a very noisy planet. We've been broadcasting radio in its various forms (shortwave, AM, FM, VHF, UHF) since the late 1800s. Television is more contemporary of a broadcast medium, coming about either right before or right after World War I, depending on your definition of television and who's side you take. Today, even more signals are broadcast. Cellular phones, microwave transmissions, more radio and television stations than ever... The airwaves are a thick crowded mess out there. The one thing that perhaps no one ever thought of when first creating these transmitting devices that employ the electromagnetic spectrum as their medium was that, given enough power behind their transmission, any signal can escape Terra and bounce out into the cosmos beyond, flying across the universe just waiting for someone or something to pick it up and decipher it.

This is the main idea behind the movie Contact when an alien civilization from the star Vega send us a sequence of prime numbers. For those who haven't seen the movie, the scientists at the Very Large Array in New Mexico later find a television broadcast of Adolph Hitler from the Berlin Olympics in 1936 is part of the transmission as well, purported to be the first ever television signal with the power to reach a star 25.3 light-years away. This is where I get into the main idea for this posting: The inadvertent broadcasting of our media to the stars and the possible consequences it might have.

There are two main theories concerning this. The first simply is Contact. Very simply, aliens find our transmissions, discover we are developed enough to try and contact, then do so in a peaceful manner, even going so far as to send encoded transmission describing the finer intricacies of the technology necessary to get in contact with them. A very idealist, optimistic view of the universe, but when talking of alien worlds and alien species anything is possible and nothing should be ruled out in the least (Except holodecks and hot busty Borg chicks). The second, more familiar theory to us all, is the hostile alien invasion after 100 years of inadvertently turning our planet into a big neon sign saying "PRIME FOR THE TAKING!" via the electromagnetic spectrum. The baddies fly in, take us over, kill us off, force us to join against our will.... You choose the adventure. A lesser known option is the aliens come to find us in order to force their views upon us. Probably best embodied in the 1950s sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still, Earth is visited by a very intelligent humanoid alien named Klaatu that comes with a startling and important message: Come to peace, stop killing, and work together, or else an alien civilization will see to it that a force as destabilizing as warrior humans will never gain the capability to leave our planet. Somewhere between the two, I believe, and certainly reminiscent of the father-figure who knows how to beat hard with the rod only to play a game of catch with his son afterwards.

What, then, I propose is a fourth alternative become the norm for these scenarios: Aliens avoiding Earth like the Plague.

This idea has been expressed in a few books, movies, etc. But never with real credibility or in a believable fashion. So, here to sway all of you into believing that this is the most likely course of action taken by wayfaring aliens who happen to venture close to our planet, here is a semi-comprehensive list on all the reasons why our broadcasts across space have made us the Goth-kid-reject of the Milky Way:

-Laxative commercials
-Condom commercials
-Local car dealership commercials
-Strange, lucid prescription drug commercials
-Reality TV
-Brittney Spears
-Hentai
-Bill O'Reilly
-Tucker Carlson
-Crossfire
-Hannity & Colmes
-Richard Novak
-George W Bush speeches
-Howard Stern
-The History/Hitler Channel
-Xanga
-LiveJournal
-MySpace
-Christina Aguilera
-Squidbillies
-Televangelists
-eBaumsworld
-Anarchist Vampire
-LoveLine
-Country, post-Garth Brooks
-Anything with emo, screamo, hardcore, goth, poser-punk, pop-punk, or any other psuedogenre that primarily shops at Hot Topic for their clothing ensembles
-Law and Order: SVU
-80s Sitcoms
-Anna Nicole Smith
-Terri Schiavo
-When Animals Attack
-Lifetime, and especially Lifetime movies
-News Corporation
-Religious fanatics burning down international institutions because of a CARTOON
-fetish Internet-exclusive porn
-Pauly Shore
-Tanya Harding
-OJ Simpson
-Michael Jackson (unless he is a sleeper agent, like Dennis Rodman)
-Anne Heche
-Preparation H commercials
-Erectile Dysfunction commercials
-Amy Heckerling movies
-Wes Craven movies
-Vanilla Ice
-Chacarron
-maxi pad commercials
-YTMND
-YTMNSFW
-Ashlee Simpson
-Jessica Simpson
-Savage Love
-Mullets
-AOL Instant Messenger

Dear God. Perhaps instead of avoiding us, whatever-alien-civilization-that-be, no matter how peaceful, will feel compelled to eradicate us simply for the safety of the universe or the removal of any of the above-listed things. The scariest thing of all is, I could have gone on longer.

We're doomed.

Treason of the Radicals, part III

With the potent combination of faith and talk, there exists today an atmosphere where vices are blown out of proportion and the smallest transgressions become the greatest crime ever committed against a given nation/group. Simply put, the ideas and needs of the self, to feel vindicated, righteous, and having a purpose, are fulfilled more and more by the media and the church of modern America; however, these constructs can only go so far to legitimize this sort of shameless self-gratification, the buzzword that has become cliché in this series. Basically, the church and the media make self-gratification palpable for the masses, but only on a small, personal level. There is no superstructure where self-gratification become apparent as anywhere outside of the home and the gathering of close people, until you encounter that very last portion of the constant-twisted Romantic ideals of the self.

Today, the American political system has been hijacked by the radicals of each respective organization. Today, the Democratic party is headed by Howard Dean, the screaming maniac from Vermont. We all remember his debacle during the 2000 Democratic Presidential Primary, and some of his quotes are show his militaristic us/them mindset:

I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for.
Howard Dean

Everything they stand for? Simply put, Mr. Dean is a demagogue on par with those of his counterparts on the right. He is out to stoke the fires, to raise the rabble, and to move the Democrats to the foaming-at-the-mouth self-destructive rhetoric and tactics they employ today. Once again, the image of self-gratification through the definition of yourself in response to an enemy, however real or perceived it may be, is apparent. Not only is it apparent, it is shocking. One of the biggest complaints against John Kerry's presidential campaign was his inability to come up with a clear-cut platform on which to run for President. What kind of man runs for leader of the free world on a platform that basically amounts to whatever-he-says-I'm-going-to-do-opposite?! Tragic, really, that one of our parties relies on this sort of basic appeal to indignation and childish tactics in an effort to gain votes.

Don't think the Republicans are any better. If anything, the neo-conservative heads of the current Republican Party is one of the most atrocious in their tactics employed to gain support and buy the votes of America through shameless validation of the self through tactics of holy-than-thou destruction of the others, as well as a penchant for lies, half-truths, abuse of power, and pure disdain for the modern American citizen. The truth to the GOP, as it stands now, is this: A corrupt party full of liars, thieves, nepotists, and villains on par with that of a sub-Saharan autocratic dictatorship. Lies have been made over and over. Today, backers of the GOP are quick to show their adept skills at legalism, by pointing out that the Iraq War was done for a plethora of reasons, i.e. Removal of a dictator, saving a population from human rights abuses, and so on and so forth. Yet, the matter of weapons of mass destruction has never been solved. Why is this the largest matter of concern to Americans?

Simply put, they were the justification for the invasion of Iraq. The current administration, for all of its anti-UN rhetoric and actions, still reverted to UN resolutions to justify their invasion, referring to resolutions that ended the Gulf War and the resolutions, specifically clauses relating to disarmament. Despite this apparent credibility gap, the administration continues to play this off as nothing more than childish attacks on the righteous people defending this nation through press statements and talking heads. This is not the exception, this is the rule for this current regime.

Up-armored Humvees. Abu Grahib. Hurricane Katrina. Valerie Plame. Yellow cake. Duck Tape and plastic. Lies. The sadder thing than this, than the fact that they think they can get away with this by playing it off through self-gratification of holier-than-thou and us/them paradigm, is that people allow it to happen and do so because they need to feel their selves have a reason to live and they find it easier to digest than actually sitting down and writing obscenely long blog entries.

Simply put, this is the nail in the coffin. I'm sick. I have nothing more to say.

Treason of the Radicals, part II

The church, with its new position in the West as a Crusader against manufactured woes, has shown itself to be an institution wherein the self can be shameless and ceaselessly flattered with the creation of a paradigm of Us/Them and the destruction of a one's own society. Now, not all churches are like this, and I am not going to make the fallacy of construction by saying that every single denomination is a monolithic structure wherein all followers march in lockstep to a collective goal. This is the same mistake the United States made during the Cold War with its avowed Communist enemies (Until we learned to play Chinese-based Communists against Soviet-based Communists, e.g. the Sino-Vietnamese War). No, I know there are individual churches and maybe even entire denominations that do not fit the aforementioned qualities. Yet, the churches that take it upon themselves to declare holy war on the very society they are members of in a desperate last grasp of meaning in an increasing relativistic world are the ones that are the most numerous, the loudest, and the fastest-growing; however, it's when this is coupled with other sensationalist, fear-mongering constructs that make self-gratification easy to take part in and easy to to enforce.

This is the media today as we know it. The United States media, fully using the hysteria and sensationalism of the yellow press, has created an environment in which fears are promoted and spread through an ever-present medium. Simply put, the advent of the 24-hour news networks is, for all things considered, one of the worst things to ever befall the pysche of Western humanity. How often has it been that we have turned on our domestic news channels only to see one more upper class white girl has gone missing? How many times are we going to hear about runaway brides? Simply put, the American media today makes mountains out of molehills and creates an atmosphere in which smaller, insignificant stories become huge national scandals and stories that grip our deceived little hearts.

Simply put, our media is baseless. Useless. A waste of energy and space on the airwaves. Our media has, over the years, gone from a respectable institution to tabloids on the air. One man in particular is responsible for this new paradigm that has been brought upon modern media:

Rupert Murdoch. This man, the emperor of tabloids, the grand poobah of sensationalism, the reincarnation of Willam Randolph Hearst, the kind of man a James Bond villian could be based on. Simply put, this man has brought the trash and sleaze of base, emotional, tabloid classlessness to the constant talking heads of the 24-hour news networks. Is it any surprise that a man who got his start through unscrupulous business ventures and paparazzi-fueled tabloid publications would absolutely ruin the media of the United States once he tries to remake it in his own image? No, this man who routinely takes it upon himself to commit character assassination on a monthly basis has decided to reshape the news in the United States to fall more along his own idea of the Fourth Estate. Unlike other people who take chances to attack a man of this sort of wealth, power, and stature in the world, my main beef with this man isn't his questionable business practices nor his political ideology. My major problem with Mr. Murdoch's News Coroporation is the same problem people had with the yellow press.

Fox News, Mr. Murdoch's most famous vestige in America, made a name for itself in the days before the Iraq War as being an outlet for conservative opinion and unquestioning backing for the war. This was the rule, not the exception, as all 175 Murdoch-owned papers had editorials that backed the war. The main reason though, the rationale behind why Fox News was founded, is fairly simply to comprehend once you look at Mr. Murdoch's former business practices and modus operandi (The idea that Fox News was started to compete with Ted Turner's own CNN doesn't seem to hold much water, at least for me). Fox News shows a keen grasp that Mr. Murdoch has on the media markets, showing that he can not only acquire media outlets that serve his interests, but he also has inate feel for the markets, making it capable for him to provide services and information in a market that lacks something. In America, that would be news with a definite conservative spin in a market where cable television is reaching more and more families previously out of its reach in the rural, traditionally red areas of America. There is a definate liberal bais in the United States right now in the news media. Now, there are two main reasons why media in the US has this left lean, however slight or major one may perceive it to be (I'm not the only one who disputes the nature and degree of this purpoted liberal slant):

• Supply and Demand - To be unabashedly honest, we live in a capitalist society. Whether we like it or not, those are the rules for the game we must play by. Now, media does not have any exception from these rules, meaning that they too are rules by the markets just like any other profit business. Taking this into account, if the majority of people with access to mass media have been, until very recently, traditionally liberal, why shouldn't media have a liberal bias? It provides news to their chosen demographic in a manner that is easily digested by the masses and returns key profits to the media construct.
• Post-Watergate Attack Dog - Since the triumph of media over the Presidency that came with the Watergate fiasco of the mid 1970s, some have argued that whatever sort of ideology a President has while in office, the media will take the exact opposite and see to it that the administration's every move is criticizied and watched. If this is true, than the media has had a liberal bias consistently from Reagan to the current administration (Clinton, for all of his liberal banter, constantly waffled and will go down in history as a moderate president who could wheel and deal with both sides consistently).

Either one of these theories can explain why there has been a liberal bias for the last several years, no matter what degree it might exist to. In the first case, it was simply an abidement to the rules of the marketplace by a capitalist agency. In the second, an unfortunate consequence of successive presidencies that were not leftist enough to warrant a right-wing slant. Either way, Fox News provides a end to both circumstances as it shows Mr. Murdoch can either capitalize upon masses of new people acquiring cable broadcasting for the first time, or simply capitalizing on a lack of coverage from a different angle, or both simultaneously.

This is where my major grievance with News Corporation, specifically Fox News, comes in. It is a tabloid on the airwaves. It is base. It is emotional. It is sensationalist. It is war-mongering, starry-eyed, demagougic banter and trash with little or no respect for journalistic integrity and a tendency to be reactionary in gathering of stories and treatment of other networks (How often has a Fox News story been nothing more than refutation of another network, i.e. "Rathergate"). Now, this would be less problematic, perhaps even tolerable, if this sort of drovel was confined to one network. Unfortunately, when Fox News dethroned CNN as the cable news source, CNN wisened up and started copying News Corporation.

"In this country, Fox News has gotten a big, big audience that appreciates its independence. There's passion there, and it's pushed. ... It has taken a long time, but it has now changed CNN because it has challenged them -- they've become more centrist in their choice of stories. They're trying to become, using our phrase, more fair and balanced."
Rupert Murdoch

So, did CNN become "fair and balanced," to quote Fox's buzzwords, or did they pick up the same sensationalist entity by a different name? Simply put, CNN became even more sensationalist with many of their programs, falling back on flashier programs, more typecasted talking heads (like Tucker Carlson and Richard Novak as the typical heartless conservatives) and gone to an even more extreme version of the attack dog mindset.

It goes without saying that whatever the shape of media was, it is worse now. Our papers and television sets are filled with inane stories of naive rich white girls disappearing in the Bahamas, brain dead people being used as political cannon fodder by both parties in this nation, car chases, or other big flash stories that wouldn't have made it into the news 20 years ago. Basically, our news has turned into explosion-filled, poorly-written Jerry Bruckheimer film. What purpose does most of this serve? What point does the ticker on the bottom of the screen serve except to give us a drip-feed of fear?

Basically, media is an even more prevalent source of fear and self-gratification that the church is. It is constant. It is ceaseless. And when it meets the church head on, by allowing talking heads from an organization that is a shadow front for the church on (usually an organization with the name "Family" in there somewhere), the effects of the paradigms of the church, plus the fear and easily-consumable goods of the media combine to create a potent mixture for the flattery of the self and the creation of delusion and affliction on an unheard of scale. But what of our very politcal structure?

Treason of the Radicals, part I

"Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some."

Jose Marti

Truer words on the Western mind have never been spoken. The West, with its ceaseless infatuation with the self, that ever-elusive idea that each person is unique in his own right or in her own abilities, has never stopped with its sickening self-infatuation long enough to contemplate the true status of the world about it. Why should it? As long as there are constructs that exist for the pure purpose of gratification of the self, and so long as these constructs break down the world into packets that are easily digestible by the masses, the West will never have to wake from its self-glorification that is the constant creation of new vices, harms, evils, threats, and afflictions. This means that the basic ideology of the West, one that focuses not only on the being of one person as being individual (I have to restrain myself from using the Dilbert term "In-duh-viduals") will be one that constantly produces and invents new woes for the self-gratification of the self.

Why are woes and pains one of the greatest forms of self-gratification? Simply put, it gives someone a reason to feel like they have a reason to flatter themselves with the ideals of purity, innocence, and, ultimately, validity for whatever cause they have allowed to consume and define their life. If one has a villain, one has a purpose. If one has had a transgression against them, they have righteousness. If one has a poison, one can make a remedy. One aspect of this, one troubling dimension of this, is the definition of one's life not by their own terms by but being in opposition to someone else. Regardless, a woe or a conflict, no matter how invented it is, gives meaning and validity to a life and a self that is otherwise spent and useless.

Enter the church, the media, and the politicians of the United States of America. While I hesitate to call the United States a hyperpower, and I'm certainly not one to play the lyre and sing the epic of her great rise to world dominance, I will admit the singular status of this nation. We have the highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the world, weighing in at first place no matter which criteria you use to evaluate it. In terms of per capita GDP, we rank third and are the highest ranked nation without major national subsidies or other sorts of socialized programs. Our political system is secure with regular exchanges of power in a peaceful manner. Our life expectancy is higher than our fore-fathers ever dreamed. Ethnic strife and racial tensions are now the exception, not the rule. Inter-religious conflict is something that is laughable in this nation. Our military is the most technologically advanced in the world, with bases in 132 nations.

I will not say it is without flaw, and I will not say it is the "greatest nation." Neither of those criteria can be applied to any nation built by man. Nevertheless, this nation has, within its borders, an environment that can best be described as harmonious. Religious groups don't practice mutual immolation on one another. Political parties don't start militias and slaughter one another in the streets of our cities. A tribe from one side of the mountain doesn't attack a tribe down in the river valley (The Hatfields and McCoys, for all practical arguments, stopped fighting in the late 1800s and the gang wars of the 1990s were just another example of white hyperparanoia). This nation lives in tranquility that is virtually unknown except to other industrialized nations of the Western world. Even the traumatic events of September 11, 2001 are the exception, unlike places such as Lebanon and the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo.

So then, on to the perpatrators of these self-indulgent crimes. First off, the church. Not the Church, but the collection of people who accept Trinitarian doctrine as set down at Nicea and subsequent ecumenical councils. Growing up in the Methodist church, the more poetic version of the Apostles' Creed that I learned goes something like this:

I believe in God the Father Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth;

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord:

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, dead, and buried;

the third day he rose from the dead;

he ascended into heaven,

and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty;

from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy catholic church,

the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and the life everlasting. Amen.

Beautiful when recited by the lay. Anyways, that's the church. The church, especially the branches of Protestantism indigenous to the Western Hemisphere, have always been the scare-mongering, anti-intellectual, opiating, hateful bastions for the gullible and self-indulgent. Simply put, at its very core the church professes an idea that Jesus Christ is your chaffeur into heaven. He died for your sins when He was up there on the cross. He actually felt your individual transgressions and was willing to do whatever it took to get you into heaven. You may pass Go, you may collect 200 dollars, you may put hotels on Boardwalk scotch-free. So, we have a deity coming to Earth to alleviate the sinful condition each man is born with for the sake of each individual human, not for humanity. How much more self-indulgent can something actually be?! To be blunt, it can't. But it can provide for an institution wherein lesser forms of self-indulgence can gestate. Simply put, by taking up the sword and shield, and crusading against the very society they are a part of, the church becomes a potent breeding ground for gratification of the self:

• Enforced Morality - What better way of giving righteousness and validity to someone than by telling them the very society they happen to be a part of is immoral, corrupt, indecent, and vile. The creation of an Us and Them paradigm is, simply put, the easiest way to glorify one's self. How? Simply by destroying another person by creating an alien set of criteria they neither believe in nor adhere to and will automatically fail, becoming a self-predicting prophecy that ends positively for the Crusaders of American Protestantism.
• Us/Them, Good/Evil - They are bad. We are good. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and Eastasia has always been our ally. What good is this kind of thought except to create two clear-cut, absolute communities with which one can contrast itself against the other, namely the Us group versus the Them group? Simply because one group falls short of an idea does not mean by any means that yours is exemplar. In addition to that, this sort of mindset fails within Christianity itself. For example, some of the more radical branches of Christianity adhere to a belief that even the most tacit approval of abortion is a sin, and therefore evil, vile, etc. So, then what of the more liberal branches of Catholicism, Methodism, Episcopalianism, Lutheranism, and some Northern evangelical churches? Are these people, their Christian brethren in the holy catholic church, evil, repugnant, hell-bound sinners? Yes, according to these far-right doctrines, they are. Within Christianity itself, this doctrine fails as the community that is, as a whole, supposed to be morally-upstanding and naturally gravitate to the same God-given ideas of right and wrong is torn asunder.

Of course, one can go on and on with the sins of the church. Yet one would be a fool to think that the plague of self-gratification that leads one to bury oneself in pity and remorse is perpretrated by the church alone. No, this is a recent development of the church. As science explained more and more of life and the universe, as society tended to move away from the morality imposed by a plethora of sects, the church found itself having to fight for its survival. Is it any surprise, then, that the most vocal, most ardent, most firebrand radical denominations of all are the fastest growing sects, while the most ecumenically-minded sects are dropping in enrollment? With the exception of the Latter-Day Saints, fundamentalism and Crusaderism has returned in force as the church finds itself appealing more and more to the base needs and emotional wants of the self.

They are not alone, though. Media and politics are right there by their side, providing easy access to the one thing every self needs to feel like it has a reason to strive to live: drama and psuedo-anguish.