Murdering God: Of Shotguns, American Capitalism, and Moral Expediency

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By Jason Miller

“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

capitalism.gif 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.



Comments

2 Responses to “Murdering God: Of Shotguns, American Capitalism, and Moral Expediency”

  1. Michelle on July 15th, 2008 7:44 pm

    First off, a declaimer for myself: I’m not buying into the author’s collective “we.” I’m beginning to dislike this projection on all Americans. Even though I do understand why he uses this, it still brings forth the internal ‘feeling’ that all Americans engage in mindless behavior. And if I ‘feel’ this, then I would think that people from other countries might make the same assumption; even though they also may understand the author’s usage of the “collective we,” that particular internal dialogue is engaged and pollutes the thinking process.

    I’m having a difficult time in following Jason’s argument; to me it is merely articulated reactive resentment without much thought put in to it. Would it not be better said this way: To turn away from God is harmless; to turn away from sin is catastrophic?

    Before any misunderstand what I’m attempting to communicate, let me state that I understand the possibilities of religion which seek to express the core limits of humanity for I understand the depravity of which human beings are capable, be they secular or religious.

    The reason I find fault with this type of article is that it does not go far enough [or maybe too far with the ranting] and it gives no explanation as to how my country has been led to such disaster for the individual. Tocqueville said of the united States that America was for him a people without a book, referring to our lack of great thinkers of the old Great Books conviction, such as Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire, Goethe, Dante, and so on. [in all fairness, we were a young nation then] But Tocqueville wasn’t accurate with his statement; we were a nation with ONE book, the Bible.

    In this American simplicity, most could be counted on to know the Bible, that ubiquitous source of the older traditions. In the united States, it was not filtered through great national interpreters, but approached directly in the manner of early Protestantism, every man his own interpreter. The Bible was thus a mirror of that indifference to national cultures inherent in the American method. Most also participated in a remarkably unified and explicit political tradition that possesses one writing known to everyone and probably believed by most, the Declaration of Independence.

    OK, that was then. If a country is identified by its peoples, then, in truth, we’re not a Christian nation anymore. This country has been built up through an influx of peoples of all nationalities [and thinking that goes with the particular origin or brand of nationalism], all faiths, or no adherence to any faith. And, contrary to much contemporary ‘wisdom,’ the united States has one of the longest political traditions of any nation in the world. All these people of different beliefs and outlooks are crammed together here, with real no unifying force as in the past. Except TV and the type of education they receive…..hummm….

    Jason is correct when attacking TV. Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois, meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life. Now television has replaced the newspaper.

    Bill Moyers’, in his keynote address, at the National Conference for Media Reform Conference, in Minneapolis, on June 7, said, “Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent at the same time that it enhances the power of the state and the privileged interests that the state protects.” He goes further to say, “Our media institutions, deeply embedded in the power structures of society, are not providing the information that we need to make our democracy work. To put it another way, corporate media consolidation is a corrosive social force. It robs people of their voice in public affairs and pollutes the political culture. And it turns the debates about profound issues into a shouting match of polarized views promulgated by partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to speak the truth about how our country is being plundered.
    Our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders.”

    In the light of Bill Moyers’ truth, how is the average American to avoid becoming the pop culture infected zombie Jason Miller describes in his essay? Through the family? People eat together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life. It is not the low quality of fare provided that is troubling. It is much more the difficulty of imagining any order of taste, any way of life with pleasures and learning that fit the lives of the family’s members, keeping themselves distinct from the popular culture and resisting the visions of what is admirable and interesting with which they are bombarded with from within the household itself.

    Ah, well then, education’s the answer! Sorry, Charlie….you need to rethink that one too. Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others the warlike, in others the industrious. Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle. Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime. Over the course of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of human is best for our regime.

    Which brings me to the last of my points. If education is the training ground for citizens of a regime and the method of selection of our national leaders in politics, business, and education, then what can one say other than Americans are in a spot between a rock and a hard place. What makes it so difficult, if not impossible, to find a new and better direction here is the disheartening expansion of trained ignorance and bad thought. We live in a thought world, and the thinking has gone very bad indeed. Our universities have become a warehouse of often harmful influences. One only has to reflect on John Yoo and Tony Blair at teaching at Berkley and Yale. Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U.S. of A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people inside the university are identical in their appetites and motives with the people outside.

    Also, what can one say of a student who states that his goal is to be making 6 figures within 10 years? What ever happened to the vision of making the world a better place?

    One shinning moment to leave you with. It appears that contrary to the article above, some of our youth have woken up to the game; they deserve your support. Maybe it’s time to change the Internet chatter. This is my main irritation with this article and others like it: There is nothing at all new in the fiery posturing of these agitational and activist writers. However, if the following is any indication of a new breed of evolving humans, then perhaps the universities will loose their monopoly on the intellectual life. I LOVE these students; they are intelligent, focused, organized beyond belief, and are OUT THERE DOING SOMETHING!

    Michelle

    Adopt-an-Activist
    HITTING BERKELEY JULY 15, 2008:
    WORLD CAN’T WAIT youth activists Rock the Boat!

    World Can’t Wait youth organizers are heading to Berkeley, CA to make this a summer of resistance by creating such an intense orange uprising that it will reverberate across the nation! Working collectively with other young people committed to repudiating the Bush program, they will contribute to reshaping the political landscape by focusing on making breakthroughs in stopping the military recruiters and working to fire, disbar and prosecute John Yoo, infamous author of the “torture memos”. These summer plans are a crucial part of forging a new generation of leaders that refuse to be bound by “the politics of the possible” and mobilizing others to bring to a halt the whole Bush program that is still setting the terms for official politics today.

    More on the project:
    http://www.worldcantwait.net/i.....p;Itemid=5

  2. Michelle on July 15th, 2008 11:44 pm

    One more thing, I’d appreciate if TS readers would give this older post of mine a look and perhaps take on some meaningful action.
    Many Thanks,
    Michelle

    The LIGHT Shines on John Yoo….Let’s Direct More LIGHT His Way!
    Included here, action you can take to remove Yoo’s ability to influence the world with his dark agendas.

    “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to all the people who run it, to the people that own it, that unless you’re free, the machines will be prevented from working at all.”
    -Mario Savio, A notable activist among the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley University, December 2nd 1964

    See:
    http://airdance.proboards50.co.....age=2#2879

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