I’ve been bothered by the increasing angry incoherence at the core of our culture. It has really gotten out of hand in recent years but it has always been headed this way. I understand that in a culture that values only money and the things it can buy, a certain amount of incoherence will be necessary to sell poisonous substances for vast profit, to sustain an unjust, exploitative, extractive economic/cultural system that is destroying the earth itself for the benefit of a tiny, hereditary minority. Without the incoherence nobody would go along with this.

A recent example to stand in for all the rest of it, little white children are butchered in a Christian school by a maniac with an assault rifle. The obvious solution is to make it harder for maniacs, and everybody else, to get rifles designed to spray bullets to kill as many as quickly as possible. The obvious question is why anybody needs an assault rifle except for mass murder, but we’ll leave that aside. So the vast majority of us call for restrictions on access to these kinds of mass killing machines. What is the argument on the other side?

Make sure every little white child in a Christian school from the age of four always has an equally powerful assault rifle with them at all times to defend themselves against such maniacs, because freedom means that everybody is allowed to have any kind of deadly weapon they want anywhere. Look, the Second Amendment guarantees it! Forget those inconvenient opening words about a well regulated militia. A brilliant and fanatical right wing judge wrote those words right out of the amendment, as his doctrine of Originalism required. So you see there are two sides to this so-called debate.

Everyday there are a thousand more examples of this kind of desperately insane crap from people with an agenda to dominate in spite of the deadly consequences to the world of their domination. We are subject to a constant firehose of incoherent, maddening, divisive, profit-driven complete horseshit, misinformation, propaganda, lies, calculated provocative idiocy, whatever you want to call it. So the incoherence has long rankled me, of course, as someone who tries to resolve vexations by pursuing agreement on the things 99% of us can agree to, and we can build on that to compromise about other things. Obviously, though, if problems could be solved that way one person would not be thought a hero and a genius because they owned more then 10 million people including millions of children who go to bed hungry in the wealthiest country on earth, and those many thousands who die needless, preventable deaths for lack of healthcare and all the other externalities of a culture of billionaires.

What I realized after my recent disorienting brush with turning into Rush Limbaugh as my frustrations with post-surgical pain my painkillers did nothing to dampen, an idiotic post surgical lack of care and concern, enhanced by oxycodone, which while it didn’t cure my pain, certainly stirred my anger, my indignation, my strong sense that all of my feelings were extremely righteous, is that the raging machine that drives this culture is disorientation.

If we can’t agree whether it’s day or night, whether we are traveling east or west, whether medical precautions are wise or a form of tyranny akin to what the Nazis did to certain German homosexuals, we find ourselves demoralized and disoriented. When people are disoriented they will cling to literally anything to give their life some kind of coherence. The irony, of course, is that, because they are disoriented, they will cling to the most incoherent possible things in their need for coherence

We want to protect freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Common sense and common decency both tell us that if a little girl is raped she must be treated with the tenderest possible care, every consideration given to her health and recovery. 16th century Catholic theology, however, winds up trumping all of that, we must honor the sacredness of the rapist’s seed which has created sacred life in the tiny womb of that young rape victim. And so instead of balancing what Jesus Christ himself would have done against the right of a rapist to see his child born, six unappealable lifetime appointees, selected by a powerful psychopath from a list of people who believe they speak for Jesus Christ himself, rule that, if she lives in a certain political jurisdiction, the girl must carry the sacred fertilized egg to pregnancy and go through the agonies of childbirth even at the age of 10 or 11, for the sake of their beliefs. Their beliefs, mind you, not the girl’s, not the girl’s family, not other people who love the girl, not the greater good of society not the beliefs of anyone but the six who have the power to impose their will on everybody else in the name of the greater good, in the name of the actual son of God, according to the “one true religion” as written in the immutable, multiply amended sacred text that founded our great democracy.

If that shit is not disorienting to you , you’re much stronger than me, and I salute you, I guess. But the frame I’m seeing things in lately is that disorientation is the technique that is used to keep people from opening their eyes, becoming “woke” if you like, connecting history with the present and the future as a kind of cause and effect one might draw important lessons from in a world under growing threat from a dozen angles. What happened when people were allowed to forcibly grab, restrain, torture and hang people without consequences 70 years ago, 200 years ago, 1000 years ago is a pretty good indication of what will happen if we allow people to grab, restrain, torture and hang people without consequences today. It may be common sense to say this, but in the age of disorientation it is equally valid to say “why don’t you go fucking hang yourself, you woke, transexual libtard cuck? We burn books here, asshat.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the Age of Disorientation.

One tiny encouraging thought, incoherent rage may be a successful argument in the so called Court of Public Opinion for a solid 30% of the population. But in an actual court of law, where there are only a small number of cases they can be unappealably decided by unprincipled partisan judges ignoring the law and the facts of the case (see for example our Supreme Court), angrily arguing that the woman testifying under oath that you raped her is a publicity seeking, gold digging liar hired by George Soros and other evil global monsters (wink wink, see Q) who you wouldn’t fuck with Mike Pence’s dick, will more often than not come back to bite you in Mike Pence’s dick, as a matter of law, justice and common sense.