July 14, 2008
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
–Nietzsche
Experiencing decreasing levels of the comfort that ensures our loyalty to the criminal enterprise of American Capitalism, we "average" US Americans comprising the poor, working class, and rapidly shrinking middle class still revel in our relatively meaningless social freedoms (we can say "fuck you" to George Bush but can’t even get our "elected representatives" to impeach him for his Nuremberg class war crimes) as the economic manacles and shackles of wage slavery clamp ever tighter about our wrists and ankles.
In pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, we sell our souls for a relative handful of economic crumbs from the table of the US power elite and their express permission to do whatever we please (as long as we stay within "free speech zones," don’t threaten public officials, commit no acts that impede the sacred cow of commerce, "just say no" to drugs, pay our taxes that fund a massive military apparatus (that has slaughtered millions) and prop up the Zionist squatters in Palestine, look the other way as amoral corporations rape the Earth and torture billions of non-human animals each year, ignore the abject criminality of corporados, Wall Streeters, and those we have "elected," and act as cogs in the machineries of capitalism to avoid exercising our right to sleep under a bridge).
No doubt about it. We have made our Faustian bargain and are "the murderers of all murderers." Collectively speaking, we US Americans savagely shoved a 12 gauge into the face of God as He stood, mouth agape, stunned at the depth of the depravity and barbarism of our capitalistic ways. We then unceremoniously splattered His brains across the sky that once served as His canvas at sunrise and sunset.
By liquefying God’s gray matter we ensured the extinction of cumbersome and antiquated moral principles that impeded American Capitalism’s expansion, profit, and growth. Without ridiculous impediments such as justice, compassion, love, the Golden Rule, or truth, souless capitalists found a truly free market in which they could rape, pillage and plunder with impunity, even garnering admiration from the masses for their cunning ruthlessness. To top it off, being the connivers we are, we proudly display God’s colossal decaying corpse (an incarnation more hideous than anything yet to spring forth from Rob Zombie’s imagination) as our "proof" to the world that we are a Christian nation.
And we "comfort ourselves" by wallowing in the fetid sewage that flows freely from our idiot boxes, enslaving our minds to the Bernays-inspired propaganda that ensures our fealty to a system that is murdering the planet and rotting our souls. Reality television provides us with the twisted wreckage and bloody corpses of a horrific car wreck, piquing our morbid curiosity and distracting us from the prick of conscience or any thought of doing something really stupid, like perhaps ending our rape of the Earth. Kens and Barbies, "sage" analysts, establishmentized minorities, and "populists" pulling down six figures or better (all of whom enunciate, dress, and smile to sickeningly unnatural perfection, mind you), deliver the "news" and affirm the "rightness of our Whiteness." Television is truly a balm to our diseased souls.
TV is so powerful that we don’t even need to be watching it for its "healing powers" to impact us. As the conflagration fueled by American Capitalism’s insatiable lust for profit consumes the planet, we US Americans preoccupy ourselves with our selfish, narrow pursuits and indifferently banter back and forth about the inanities we worship on television. Will the Patriots win another Super Bowl this year? Who is going to win American Idol? What sycophant will give good enough fellatio to become Trump’s apprentice? McMurder for dinner tonight, honey?
"Who will wipe this blood off us?" Since we took God out with a shotgun instead of a blade, we made Lady Macbeth (with her 'damn spot’) look like a candy-striper. But what did we care? We’d been awash in sanguinary fluid since our ancestors started eradicating the "primitives" who inhabited Turtle Island. Besides, the high priests of American Capitalism and our false idol, Mammon, are more than happy to absolve us of any sin we commit in our pursuit of money, profit, property, or consumer goods.
As for festivals of atonement, no one does it better. While it may be ridiculously hollow and devoid of meaning, we give plenty of lip-service to our love and respect for our murder victim. And when we set aside a special day for God, we go all out!
Take Easter for instance. That is the one Sunday of the year when most of us put on our "Sunday best" and grace Him with our presence at His house of worship.
On Thanksgiving, we display our gratitude for His help in stealing the "Injun’s land" by stuffing our faces with over 40 million turkeys that have been brutally tortured and murdered in our nightmarish factory farming system.
Christmas is the real stunner though. We celebrate His birth by showering ourselves with gifts. December 25th is a disgustingly selfish greed-fest fueled by the runaway consumerism that is capitalism’s life-blood and the environment’s death sentence. How delightfully ironic is it that we honor God by rewarding ourselves and accelerating the demise of the planet? After all, we hailed Him as our Creator and then blew out His brains.
Was "not the greatness of this deed too great for us?" Let’s get serious. We’re Americans. We are the "can do," "git 'er done" nation. American Exceptionalism always rises to the occasion, even if the task involves executing a divine being.
And we need "not become gods simply to appear worthy of" having killed God.
As Americans, we already are gods.
For those of you with the chutzpah to challenge that assertion, remember that we have a larger pile of money, bigger guns, more mean-spiritedness, better technology, shrewder business people, and a much larger arsenal of nuclear weapons than any nation on the planet. Any questions?
Jason Miller is Cyrano’s Journal’s Associate Editor.
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