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During the July 12th 2023 Members Only Live Show for SurrealPolitiks, I read aloud a lengthy piece I had put together, having collected some thoughts on the subject of beauty.
The piece was so warmly recieved that I later released it outside the paywall as "On Beauty".
As I have been working on compiling a "Best Of" collection for distribution to new listeners, I knew I wanted to include this piece. As I reviewed it, however, it became obvious to me that this was not suitable for this purpose, and would need to be revised and re-recorded.
I put some considerable effort into this, and produced a draft I sent out for review on October 19th. On the November 15th Members Only Show, I re-recorded it. Subsequent to this, I did some editing, and I now feel I have a piece of audio that does the subject justice.
If you have been looking for an opportunity to introduce somebody to my content, this would be such an opportunity. The recording is a bit long, at 45 minutes, but it is very well put together and I am very proud of it. It contains no profanity and it does not center on racial themes.
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Beauty Revisited
While I was in the custody of the United States Penitentiary in Marion Illinois, I met a man by the name of Matthew Hale. He was perhaps best known for his role in something called the World Church of the Creator, which outfits like the Southern Poverty Law Center would describe as a White Supremacist organization. Mr. Hale would certainly find more meaningful things to disagree with them on than this characterization, since he was above all concerned for the wellbeing of his people.
The church had been deemed a “Security Threat Group” by the Bureau of Prisons, the equivalent of a gang. On account of this, any transmission of the group's symbols or jargon or ideology became prohibited by prison policy, and this led to no shortage of trouble for Mr. Hale. The group's view of the world was not the sort of thing you typically find in a church. They denied the existence of a supernatural deity, and held instead to a very earthly and biological world view. One very familiar to anyone who had ever done some research into the subject of National Socialism.
For Mr. Hale, this became a subject of constant friction with the Bureau of Prisons, because he was essentially prohibited not only from discussing his sincerely held religious views, but really anything that pertained to the news of the day. As our society drifted into chaos, and race riots engulfed the country, most notably in, but by no means limited to, the year 2020, any mention of the racial component of these stories was deemed an abuse of the prison's communications systems. Thus, I came to meet Mr. Hale in something called the Communications Management Unit, wherein contact with the outside world is strictly curtailed.
At the time I was released from that prison in November of 2022, Mr. Hale had all of his correspondence cut off, save for that with his mother. So, it was with no shortage of sadness that I came to discover that she had died in June of 2023.
I knew not long after we met, that Mr. Hale would someday have to face this hardship prior to his release. He, having been convicted of soliciting the murder of a federal judge, had 40 years to do. Nearly a year for every month I did. I was not a young man myself by this time, and Mr. Hale older than I. Like most White people, we had in common that our parents were older than us.
I myself had been arrested just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic had gripped the world. Denied bail, and told by my attorneys that I faced up to 32 years in prison, I feared with some merit that my own parents might die before I'd have a chance to kiss my mother without a sheet of glass between us. This weighed on me tremendously.
When I met Mr. Hale, I knew with certainty that this was his fate, and I knew that he knew it too.
The news came as all the more troubling to me because just before I caught news of her death, I had spent all night into the morning writing some contemplations on the subject of beauty. I had become completely stunned and to some degree startled by an experience I had recently endured, and as I committed these thoughts to writing, I wrote passionately about what I had been contemplating. It was around 11am by the time I ran out of steam.
I am not complaining when I tell you that doing this can take a lot out of me. I can get into something of an emotional feedback loop where I am having this intense emotional experience, and to translate this into text while it is underway causes me to think about it more deeply. Trying to convey this to others in clear language, I come to realize things about the experience that I did not previously realize, which creates a whole new loop. Then I find myself thinking about thinking about it, and I'm thinking about writing about it, and I'm thinking about the impact this will have on other people. There are feelings of power, and guilt, involved in this. All of which have their own complex emotional implications, thus being prone to their own loops.
Suffice it to say, I spend most of my life as something of an aspiring psychopath. I tend to think that getting emotionally wrapped up in things is a hindrance to clear thinking and purposeful action. It is useful to the extent it inspires creativity, and it can be a powerful motivator, but for me, those emotional feedback loops can be a lot like doing drugs. This being a subject of which I am too well informed. Even when, perhaps, especially when, those are not happy emotions, I get totally carried away. I find myself tempted to dwell in things. I have to try to manage this and say to myself, "OK, time to stop". I might go so far as to whisper this aloud.
This is precisely what I had done after writing all through that night. Checking my email as I went to bed just before noon, exhausted from the experience, I now felt myself in Mr. Hale's shoes as I read word of his mother’s demise. Stuck in the drab harsh world of prison, cut off from communicating with anyone but his mother, wondering why she wasn't picking up the phone. Discovering, surely days if not weeks later, and not from a loved one, but from the men who stood between him and his freedom, that this moment he had been dreading had now arrived, and that he would now have to endure this without so much as the closure one gets from attending a funeral.
I felt this very intensely, not only because I care for Mr. Hale, but because prison had been so central to what I was writing about, and Mr. Hale in particular figured into my thoughts.
My contemplations on the subject of beauty had been initially prompted as I needed to find an image for a podcast episode I was producing. I was looking for something that captured the beauty I had come to appreciate about my adopted home of New Hampshire. This is no small task, as you know if you've ever been here, especially in the fall.
I grew up in New York, and there are lots of beautiful things in New York. If you can stop for two seconds to look at them, they can be very impressive. But in New York, it is not the custom to stop for two seconds, so they often go unseen. Or, even having seen them, they might stink of urine, or be turned into a homeless encampment. So, you miss a lot of this.
When I came to New Hampshire for the first time, I drove here with a friend to come to the Porcupine Freedom Festival with something called the Free State Project. A libertarian outfit I was once very sympathetic to. We drove nonstop clear from Long Island to Lancaster. It was the longest car trip I had taken in my adult life at that time, and I was just stunned at what I saw. You do not have the choice of missing the beauty on a long enough car ride. Mountains and lakes and animals and fields. You can see some of these things in New York, especially in the Northern portions, but these vast expanses were really stunning to me.
There are entire lengths of the interstate highway system up here that are just carved through mountains. At the time, I thought this was very impressive because I did not recall seeing anything like that before, not on such a scale anyway. The function of it, I thought was a symbol of power. Human beings came and said, "This mountain is in my way, I will destroy it" and they destroyed it, and I got to drive a car through it. I thought that was pretty cool.
Destroy is probably the wrong word. The stone walls around us had these grooves in them that indicated that it had not been simply blown up. This was a precision work, and precision is very impressive when you are dealing with such powerful forces. Any idiot can light a fuse or swing a hammer, but some better than others, and it is one sort of power to destroy a thing, and quite another to make of it what one will.
When we got to the campground, there were some very nice views, but the campground itself was unimpressive. So were many of the people, especially in subsequent years. There was quite a bit of high pitched whining, I come to recall. I was drunk most of the time so I did not then mind that so few were sober, but in hindsight, having gone there another year while sober myself, that was definitely part of the problem.
When I got out of prison, and retrieved all that remained of my computer equipment, I came to realize that I had done a very poor job of keeping my data organized in the years prior to my arrest. Things were scattered about from one drive to another over several different computers. Trying to find the things I needed as I was getting my studio back in order, proved chaotic and challenging. So, I set myself to the tremendous task of sorting and consolidating all of this, including photos and videos.
This too, played into my contemplation of beauty. Going through all of these files becomes a trip down Memory Lane, and having been a drunk during many of those years, these files constitute the only memories I have of much. I don't like to call too much attention to it these days, but my drinking was pretty ugly, and it made me ugly. Visibly. Not just that my attitude was poor or that I made mistakes, but I was fat. My face, specifically, was fat. Not just a protruding belly or a loosening of the belt. I looked like a totally different person than I do today. When I see photos of that face, I want to punch it.
Anyway, I go back to New York when the festival is over and I start thinking, maybe I should move to New Hampshire and abolish their government. Just show up and be like "Hey mountain, get out of my way" and expect that to work out, was sort of the plan.
When New York turned me down to buy a gun, I did just that. I moved here in 2012. The government hasn't been abolished, of course. I've actually become quite fond of the institution, in some ways.
I lived in the suburbs of a city by the name of Keene. It is a quaint little town with nice quaint things to look at. When we would go to the state legislature to testify at committee hearings, this would involve a drive of about an hour or so, to and from Concord. The State Capital.
I don't usually like being the passenger in car. I am a control freak, and I have to control the wheel to be completely comfortable. But I loved to stare out the window as we drove through New Hampshire, and for once I was at total peace sitting shotgun. Or even in the back seat, which was previously something I only did when arrested.
So, when I was trying to make this pitch to get other people to move here and take over rather than abolish the government, I wanted to find a picture that captures this beauty I fell in love with. And while a picture can be worth a thousand words, it is not worth an inch of New Hampshire. It was not easy to find a suitable photograph to capture what I aimed to capture, but I was still stunned by the beauty in these images.
I was so taken by the experience, so consumed, that I was a little unnerved by it. I wondered "Why am I so bent out of shape about this picture of the trees?" Then, it occurred to me while I was doing this, that my life has had a staggering lack of beauty in the last few years, and that this was increasing the emotional load of looking at these otherwise mundane photographs substantially.
At the county jail where I was held pre-trial, we did not go outside at all. To make matters worse, there was a problem that, since some of the windows are very close to the street, prisoners were exposing themselves to pedestrians. So, before my arrival, the jail had the windows sprayed with some sort of acid that made them foggy, and because of this you could not see clearly what was outside. I was trapped within this for fourteen months.
It drove me absolutely insane. Sometimes I would stand on a chair, and peek out the top seam of the window if there was a spec of space that did not have this crap ruining it, and I would almost whimper to look out at the trees in the fall.
The distinction between prison and jail is lost on many people, but it might be worth noting here that they are not the same thing. Jail is for pre-trial detention and persons sentenced to less than a year of incarceration. Prison is for convicted felons who have more substantial time to do, and on account of this the differences in conditions between the two types of facilities are considerable. People in jail who are facing prison typically feel some justifiable apprehension, but for those who have been to prison before, they are often anxious to get to what is sometimes called their final destination, since the conditions there are typically considered preferable.
Guys with time under their belts tell you, while you are in jail, that when you get to the federal prison, there's a yard. Some yards are better than others, but you get to go outside basically whenever you want other than some dedicated lockdown times like at night.
But I did not go to a regular part of the prison system.
I went to the Communications Management Unit, at the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. There, we have to be kept away from the other prisoners to avoid the passing of messages. So, we don't get to go to the same yard as everybody else. We have our own yard, and our yard is more of a parking lot, maybe the size of a professional basketball court in total. Not the stadium, but the actual playing area. There are three large cages made of chain link fencing within that space, and concrete walls three stories high surrounding it. Consequently, the sun falls behind our horizon rather more quickly than for others. In a place where time is the coin of the realm, our daylight is taxed at a higher rate.
As I thought about the contrast between the beauty of New Hampshire, and this drab isolation of prison, Mr. Hale's experience weighed even more heavily on me. Even beyond the fact that he has to do a year for every month I had to do, I really think his general disposition makes prison an even more awful experience for him than it is for me. Not that he tended to show this much. He considered himself something akin to a prisoner of war, with some justification, and he was determined not to let the enemy break him.
Matt really appreciates beauty. Particularly the beauty of women, and the beauty of nature. He does not like me to describe the World Church of the Creator as "nature worship" but I would otherwise feel comfortable describing it this way based on my conversations with Matt.
I remember one time somebody sent him this book with high resolution photos of frogs, and he was so excited to show this to me. Another time he saw a ladybug in the yard, and this absolutely made his day. When it was raining out, or when it was too hot or too cold, sometimes the prison would close the yard, and Matt basically was like "The sun is great, the winter is great, the rain is great, the snow is great, stop taking these great things away from us." He has such a profound appreciation for nature and he is totally deprived of this in prison, and it is actually the worst in the CMU.
When I got released to the halfway house after three years of this, since I am a professional podcaster, and media contact is prohibited, they told me I couldn't do my job there. Most people get a job while they are at the halfway house, and they get themselves established before they're released. I wasn't even allowed to do media interviews with regular mainstream news outlets, much less produce a podcast of my own. So, with only the charity of my supporters, I got into this windowsless bedroom that I now rent, and I got to work right away. I am very happy with how things have turned out for the most part, I am not complaining to describe the experience, this is a dream come true for me, to do what I love all the time, but I am very busy.
I do not have a car, and the part of New Hampshire I live in is not very pretty. It is not how I picture New Hampshire to be, prior to finding myself here. Manchester never was the most picturesque part of the state, and it has declined considerably in the last three years. It is now a drug ridden mess full of junkies and blacks dumped here by Massachusetts and the federal government. So, I have not had an opportunity to catch up on the beauty of this place.
This had not really struck me until I began looking at those photos for the show. Even though they were insufficient for what I wanted to convey, it felt like they had cleansed my eyes, in a sense. It struck me that this deprivation I had endured totally changed my perceptions of what I was looking at. I did not realize how important that appreciation for beauty was until pretty recently, and I was disturbed by the realization.
If you think some of the people in your life are not very beautiful, do some time in prison. This is not just a thing of the eyes but all that can be observed about a person. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, you might do well to blindfold some of these folks. Not just the prisoners, but the staff. One of the things that troubled me the most as I began to think of it, was the women who worked in our correctional system, and how they had become masculinized. Some even chewed tobacco, which, as much as I love nicotine, and with all due respect to any chewers who may be listening, I find to be among the most disgusting things a man can do, not involving fecal matter. To see women doing this made me absolutely sick.
A man in my position, doing a live call in radio show, I have to think a lot about voices, it would be fair to say. It is not just my voice I like the sound of. I don't take calls on the air just because I think it will please the audience or, "the more you talk the less I have to" as I'm fond of saying. I don't just like to talk, I like to listen, and when I listen, I pay attention to words, sure, but I pay more attention to voices. This is among the reasons why my audio troubles haunt me such as they do.
With men, tone conveys much, but I tend to rely on their words and we can communicate near as easily via email as face to face.
Not so with women. I need to see the contours of her face. I need to hear the tone of her voice. I feel I would do a woman a terrible disservice to take her words at face value, and fail to interpret the other wealth of information God gave her the gift of conveying with her eyes and her tone.
Every man over 30 knows he has lost the argument with his lover when he says to her "but, honey you said.... X, Y, and Z!"
Haha, yes, well, young man, maybe that's the words that she used, but when you get to be my age, you'll realize she told you everything you needed to know, and you were not listening as a man must learn to listen to a woman, sir. You must improve your communications skills, not her.
I really like the sound of a woman's voice. It has this amazing duality to it, in which it is both mysterious, and packed full of information. It is like a puzzle.
I only had two phone calls a week though when I was in the CMU, and my love life had endured a series of tragedies prior to my arrest. So, I did not get nearly enough of this for some time, and what there was of it did not give me the things that I love about a woman's voice.
But I did listen to the radio for more than news sometimes. And while we could not stream music like you can out here, I did acquire an MP3 player and purchase a number of songs by very talented female vocalists like Adele, and Ellie Goulding, and Kiarra, and Camilla Cabelllo, and Olivia O'Brien, and Julia Michaels, and Evanescence, and others. I would not listen to these artists while I did other things. Music consumes me. I cannot concentrate on a task with music on in the background. Save for perhaps drive. I would listen alone in my cell concentrating entirely on their voices, and this was the closest I came to lovemaking for a number of years.
I am not complaining, though I know it sounds like it. Firstly, I am describing some intensely enjoyable experiences here that I could have had in no other way. If I was asked "Would you like to go to prison and appreciate women's voices very intensely" I'd have said “No, I can appreciate women’s voices just fine without prison, thanks.” But while there, I was totally rocked by this experience, and I learned a great deal from it.
Moreover, I have tried to make a point not to complain about prison, because this is not the image that I wish to present, and I could of course have done a lot worse in these terms. Though I think it was wrong what I was sent to prison for, I have surely done enough wrong to warrant some punishment. In the end, it will do none of us, me least of all, any good to dwell in the darkness of Marion, Illinois. I just had to tell you about this in order to set the stage for something.
I might also note that I am not complaining about being very busy. I haven't been all work no play since I have been home. I have been blessed to know a woman's touch since my release, and I will say no more of it than that she is not still in my life, because that would be impolite. I will, however, breach decorum once again, to note that I have viewed pornography more than once since I have been out.
This has never bothered me so much in the past, but it bothered me a great deal in recent days, as I had been thinking about beauty, and my capacity to appreciate it.
I hadn't viewed pornography almost the entire time I had been locked up. They do not allow it in the federal prison system, or in any of the jails I was in. The first time I went to jail in New York, there were porno mags all over the place. They were absolutely ubiquitous. Banning pornography seems to be one of the changes that have since been made to much of the correctional facilities in this country, along with banning smoking, but the occasional racy image will find its way round.
At the county jail where I was held pre-trial in New Hampshire, they had these modified Android tablets for the prisoners which had come to replace the books and the mail. They were actually connected to the Internet through WiFi, and though this connectivity was very tightly restricted, we were able to subvert some of the controls on them. Some guys managed to find books in the outside libraries that contained images of women's breasts. In a world flooded with hard core porn this would hardly raise an eyebrow, but deprived of such things, these images were very exciting even in small doses.
When I got home and in front of a computer, it did not take me long at all to pull up PornHub. When I went to look at it, after all that time, it was like when I was a kid all over again. The intensity of it was a bit much, actually. I have not viewed it nearly so much as I had before I was arrested, which I confess was not at all infrequent.
I had discovered my first dirty magazine in the 1980s, before I was even old enough to understand my erection. At first it did not even occur to me to masturbate, I was that young that I did not even know what masturbating was. Today I get the impression they teach this to kids in kindergarten, but I was fortunate to be born in the earlier stages of our National decline. I just knew that looking at these images was exciting for me. I wanted more of them, and of course as our world descended further into chaos, these became easier and easier to find, to the point that they became a regular fixture in my life.
To the extent I have had any ethical concern with pornography in the past, it has tended to be because I view its production as exploitative of women. I have literally befriended an actual prostitute or two over the years, which is not a confession to being a client, I might note. I've been more forward about this elsewhere. I've befriended others who have called their prostitution pornography, because somehow sex for cash ceases to be a crime if you let other people watch, which is a hell of an incentive structure, if you think about it.
Though they would at times talk about how exciting their lives were, and how easy the money was, I could see in their voices, and hear in their eyes - that's not an error, it is art - that they were very sad, and that this arrangement was not in their long-term best interests. Nor their short-term best interests, for that matter. Whatever they told themselves, as they walked away from those men, there was some consciousness that they had lost something in the exchange.
This silly libertarian idea that consent constitutes right, is easily disproven by this observation alone. These women, these girls, I should say, were getting ripped off. They were selling their youth and beauty, and waning fertility, at what seemed to them a high hourly rate, because they compared it to what they could earn as grocery clerks. They had no concept of what they were selling, but I could hear the terribly high cost of this in their voices.
Months prior to the evening in question, I had written over 30,000 words for what was supposed to be Radical Agenda Stage Six Episode 8, to tell the story of one Cathy Reisenwitz. She was a Left wing feminist activist who was thrust upon the libertarian scene by what was very obviously some well heeled benefactor. It seems he pulled the plug because she became a literal sex for cash prostitute and OnlyFans cam girl. She had also launched a Substack blog that talked about all the great reasons for legalizing prostitution, which she purported to know from hard won experience. I paid the $7 to get full access, and I spent weeks reading and listening to her screeds, which have been recorded over the course of nearly a decade. I became so stunned by what I saw, that my $7 turned into $14 at the end of the month and I was still reading.
You get to watch this slow motion train wreck unfold over several posts a week during that time. She begins excited and feeling very empowered, and giving other women detailed instructions on how they can join in the fun.
She talks about her efforts to feel loved during this time. This presents substantial challenges, as you might expect, to having sincere emotional connections with men who disapprove of her lifestyle. Perhaps worse, the men who approve of it do not tend to treat her very well, or stay around very long. As we reach the current day, she is alone, and realizing that she is not a young woman anymore. She calls her cat her roommate. She notices that she is getting fewer swipes on Tinder. Since she is a reasonably talented writer, her sadness is conveyed in her text even when she is trying to sound empowered, because that is what a woman's voice does.
I have not had the heart to record this, much less publish it. I was too troubled by what I saw. Although I hate everything that she stands for, it feels wrong to exploit her further after how she has been so badly led astray by others, and knowing that her suffering will only intensify with time, because she still refuses to learn her lesson.
After the incident with the New Hampshire photographs, my contemplations on beauty had reached something of a crescendo as I was watching music videos on YouTube. One night I had been thinking about my experience listening to women's voices on the radio in prison, and I thought this might be even better if I had the ability to see them.
On the contrary, I was repulsed by what I saw. When listening to music with nothing but the sound and the concrete, the mind creates an image. The images I had created were very beautiful, but some of the songs I heard on the radio that had sounded very nice, when you see what they do in the video, it clashes with the images of the mind's eye. Instead of being serenaded by angels I was watching drugs, and whores and mixed race couples and recreational shoplifting and all manner of degenerate filth.
I was very angry about this, and I had remarked on Telegram that in our future State, we would have to ban music videos, half jokingly.
Then my luck changed, and I found some vocals and visuals more to my liking. One of the singers I came to appreciate, Lzzy Hale, did a very powerful song with a violinist named Lindsey Stirling. This led me to search YouTube for her name.
Ms. Stirling is very young and beautiful and talented, and she has a top notch production team and great artistic minds working with her. As I would later download her MP3 collection, I'd find she has a beautiful voice, but at this time, in all the videos I saw, she sang not at all. You could have told me she was some kind of mute prodigy and I'd have had no reason disbelieve you.
She can, however, do amazing things with a violin that are almost like a woman's voice, and I felt like she was singing to me with the instrument. In these videos she is mostly just dancing very gracefully in very beautiful but tasteful clothing, while playing the violin in these vast natural or natural looking environments, or pre-electrical civilizational settings. In one video, titled Elements, she dances in the rain, and in the desert, and on the ice, and on a city street with controlled flames in the scenery. In another, Crystallize, the entire thing takes place in this sort of maze of ice which she explains later is some sort of man made tourist attraction that is very, very impressive.
She is very limber and her movements demonstrate an athletic talent, but they never appear forced. She is always very graceful, and never lude, and her violin conveys the joy and intensity of youth. She appears at one with the instrument and her facial expressions are very communicative. They convey the same emotional content as the sound of her violin, and I was just so totally immersed in the experience. I spent hours watching this. I at times fought back tears and at others made no such effort.
It occurred to me, first, that I had not seen anything so beautiful in more than three years on account of being in prison, and then doing little but sitting in front of my computer since. This was troubling on its own.
Then it occurred to me that a for a far longer time than that, this might have been background noise to me, such that I might not have noticed it, or even found it annoying.
What do I care about your dumb violin? Whore! I can download two thousand songs in an hour, for free, while I watch a girl twice as hot as you, eat another girl out, while a guy I can pretend is me smashes away on her like she is mere exercise equipment. When I'm done (and I'll say it just like that, too. Done!), I'll just turn it off, and get back to cursing out ethnic groups on the Internet, because that's my idea of pursuing righteousness. Let's hurry up and get this damn war started. I'm bored with laughing at suffering. I want blood, and fire, and the stench of decaying humanity.
Such is what I required to feel any intensity, having been desensitized as I had.
When I saw the leaves in the pictures it occurred to me that I had been deprived of beauty for three years, but as I watched this woman dance on the ice with her violin, and I was baffled by the swelling of tears in my eyes that this inspired, I realized had been deprived of it for much longer than that.
I am bothered by this in the extreme. Ms. Stirling has been on YouTube for 16 years. My current favorite video of hers was published 11 years ago. I said before that I was not complaining, and I meant it. If anything, I am given new eyes for this, precisely thanks to being locked away for this time, and had I not been so deprived, I might even yet not know what it was.
I am not stunned by grace because I have not seen it in three years. I am stunned by grace because I have been distracted by filth at least since I discovered my first dirty magazine when I was too young to understand my erection. Now that I am able to see this beauty, and appreciate it the way that I am, I am given pause about many things.
We have a tendency as we look around us to see all of this chaos, and ugliness, and we want to destroy it. I would say that it is with all propriety that we have this impulse to reckon with.
But reckon with it we must, gentlemen, lest we too become the destroyers of beauty. We should not forget that it exists because we are bombarded with all of this ugliness.
In recent months, part of my caution is that I am perhaps more averse to participating in destruction as a general matter. I want to create. I want to build. I want to make and improve upon beautiful things. Whether this be to cut with precision through a mountain, or to arrange the words ever so thusly. These are what make men great, not destruction.
Any asshole can break things and hate people. Any criminal can end a life, and far too many do. If this be necessary, so be it, but it ought not be aspirational.
I could have jumped across the courtroom, during my trial in New Hampshire when I was being questioned by one of the prosecutors. She asked me something about my fondness for language, and I told her "Language is a useful tool, and a beautiful art form". I was very satisfied with myself as I said this, because I had never articulated it this way before, but it was in my mind very true, and having come up with something so well put in the pressure of that moment seemed to me a tremendous accomplishment.
She shrieked at me, as only a woman can, and she said "And you used that useful tool, and beautiful art form to say this!"
And my words were on the screen. "If you don't want me to fuck your wife in front of your kids, you better get scarce"
Her accusation made me very angry. It was as if she had insulted my art for her to put it in this way, but I could only answer yes, because that was, however manipulatively framed, the truth.
I do not know if I am wrong or right to say, that we should try to prevent the destruction of what is present, on account of my not wanting to lose what beauty and worth remain in this world.
I have come to realize, however, that there is more beauty and worth around than I had once appreciated.
I suspect I am not the only one who has failed to appreciate many of these things, and I do not wish for anyone to go through what I went through to be able to see them.
But we should be very cautious with our capacity, and our temptation, for destruction.
The beauty that remains is very valuable, and this increases with its scarcity.
It would be a very terrible sin if we were to wreck it because we had become incapable of seeing it.
It is by no means lost on me, of course, the argument that this will all be gone very soon if men do not do very ugly things to stop the threats to those things we value. I take very seriously my obligations as a man to partake in that ugliness, and I accept, though with no small degree of reluctance, that part of me will enjoy it, should it come.
I know something of my own capacity for destruction. My capacity to enjoy it. Given license to destroy, sanctioning those basest of impulses, I understand why some people wish for it. I struggle with this. I've long considered some of my youthful improprieties as a sort of unintentional training for this obligation that was to fall upon me. As I started to notice the world spiraling out of control, I came to believe that perhaps I come to my position for such a time as this, and yes, that's an intentional if incomplete bible quote.
Thinking that has helped me to trust my intuitions. If I am here for a purpose, creative or destructive, then, thy will be done, after all. No sense resisting it.
I'm not making a literal claim here, but I recall a quote I heard once on, I guess it was American Family Radio, I heard somebody say "When God calls on you, either you can say 'thy will be done' or God can say 'Alright, have it your way'", and the implications of this are obvious.
God or no God, if you refuse to do what you are here to do, then you are going to get exactly what you asked for, and you are going to regret it.
I hate the word atheist since it has come to convey so much more than a lack of faith. Most people who call themselves atheists these days do not appear to disbelieve in God, but rather, that they are certain of God's existence and that they hate him and mean to make war against him. The professed disbelief is only a sort of economic sanction. A tactic, a munition. Beneath this, their fanaticism, their absolute opposition to every commandment betrays their deceit. They don't just lie. They invert the truth, and with remarkable reliability. It defies all earthly conceptions the energy that they devote to this, going so far as to mutilate their own sex organs and risk prison and death in service to what they would have us believe is a sort of nihilistic Darwinism.
No. This is obviously not what they are pursuing. That is just one more of the deceptions.
But for me, I don't believe in God, for simple lack of proof, and so what am I to say of my religious views if not this?
And yet, this itself becomes a difficult prospect. Whatever the terminology. I think of beauty, and it has a sort of sacred quality to it. Sacred is a religious term, yet I have no better word for it than this. You might say that without this sanctity, one cannot appreciate beauty in its fullness.
On social media some time ago, I shared this image of a woman calling herself Elliot Page, who was once very beautiful. Her parents had named her Ellen.
She had been a successful actress and in the course of this it may suffice to say that she got mixed up with the wrong people. She had some regrettable sexual experiences. She credits these experiences with the decision to cut off her breasts and start taking testosterone.
She assures us that she is very happy, and this is just one example of why I do not take women at their word. The sadness of Ellen's eyes and tone betray her deceit, and anyone who tells you they do not know it is a monster. A demon, better said.
How can I look at evil, like this - with no conceivable earthly purpose - just the wanton destruction of all that is decent and good and say to myself that this is not in service to something beyond this realm? I honestly do not have an answer for that. I see this and my gut reaction is something better described by religious thought than anything I can actually claim to believe in. I want to take up the holy sword of God and strike down the demons who curse his creations.
I've always found the transgender thing very troubling. I have always viewed it as predatory, contaminating, and contagious. But I tended to think of it, until recently, mostly as feminizing men. If men are predisposed to being feminized, well, I am rather okay with them being killed, so what care I if they prance around in a dress for a few months before they do themselves in? What few women I had seen start taking steroids I did not figure they had been very beautiful to begin with.
But I was very troubled by the Ellen Page story. I could not shake my horror at the contrast between what she had been and what she had become. I compared whoever talked her into this to a child molester, because that is the worst sort of criminal I can think of, generally speaking. As I sought a comparative example, this seemed to be the worst thing a person could do, short of that.
Destroying feminine beauty, at the time, I thought might very well be worse. But beyond this even, worse than destroying it, making of it a sick perversion. Blaspheming this holy thing of reverence. It would be so much better in a sense to just kill her. Put a bullet in her head. Even to grind her up in some kind of machine and totally destroy her, than to make this sick mockery of what she had been.
That it would walk around reminding us of the crime with every breath she takes. I was so deeply offended by it and I experienced this very intensely.
It struck me during these contemplations of beauty, that this was what troubled me so much more about Ellen's story. Deprived both of feminine beauty, and the desensitizing influence of pornography for those years, that perversion was overwhelming for me. Not that I was in habit of looking at anything this sick, but these things are on a continuum, is what I came to realize. You take somebody's daughter and you make of them, this... what may as well amount to a public toilet. You throw some money at her, and you show everyone what you've done. She spends the money in one night on drugs trying to cope with the humiliation. At that point, you almost might as well cut off her breasts and give her a beard, at least she'll be a less desirable target for these demons with the cameras.
I understand theft on some level. Drugs make perfect sense to me. Men killing other men, it might be a described as a miracle we don't see more of that.
But destroying a woman is a uniquely wicked thing, in my view. Not only because they are the weaker sex. I consider it a terrible thing for women to destroy other women. It is not about a power disparity. It is not just because of some cultural programming toward chivalry, or my desire to possess them.
It is because they are such beautiful and precious creatures, that their frailty is considered a positive feature of their existence, and to their Darwinian advantage. Contrary to men in whom this is a form of death.
People often confuse survival of the fittest by saying only the strong survive, but women remind us of this error. That the strength, and the capacity for destruction that stains the soul of every man, would deprive a woman of this pleasantness that makes them such a joy to be around. That gentleness that makes them so ideal for the nurturing of children. This disarming, for want of a better term, aura, this force field, of sorts, that hangs around them.
The power she wields, is truly awe inspiring. She can walk up the most dangerous of men, her voice alone can take him from a murderous rage to a wimpering puppy. If this fails, it might be considered extreme for her do so little as brush a fingernail across his forearm, seemingly on accident, and this insignificant contact with him would render him hypnotized. She might ask him to lower his voice, or to kill the king, and in either case, it is not for him to decide.
I don't know if this is so much beauty as it is magic, but I have only my eyes and ears to behold it, and I am at the mercy of what remain of my senses in her presence.
Whatever it is, God or no God, it is a terrible sin to wreck that thing.
Whether you wreck it for everyone by smashing it with hammer, or whether you wreck it for yourself by destroying your own mind with filth.
If you are unable to appreciate beauty, then you are not simply deprived of its enjoyment for yourself. It is not only you who suffers in this deprivation.
You become a threat to everyone, and every thing, around you.
In your blindness, you are no less dangerous than a drunk driver, and surely you are far more dangerous than this, if you take an interest in politics while so impaired.
A healthy society cannot tolerate such threats, for they are, in the truest sense, existential.
The vibration of strings agitated by rosin. Ink, or paint, that for all intents and purposes is a beautiful woman, or a smiling child. Pre-brutalist architecture that makes it obvious a God we can neither see nor hear resides in this building. Letters on a page that bring a man to his knees. The kinds of things that convey such powerful messages that they overwhelm the very will to live. That a man dies for, sans regret, save for that he has but one life to give.
I do not know if we can live at all without these things.
But even if our hearts do keep pumping blood in their absence, I am certain that such loss would be the end of us.
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