SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
“…Citizens seeking to introduce changes in
the form of their government, whether in favor of liberty or despotism, ought
to consider what materials they have to deal with and then judge of the
difficulty of their task. For it is no less arduous and dangerous to
attempt to free a people disposed to live in servitude, than to enslave a
people who [opt] to live free.” Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourse on the First Decade of Titus Livius, Ninian Hill Thomson,
Trans., Kegan, Trench & Co., London, 1883, p. 376.
I’ve spent some
thirty years, now, waiting for a worthy patron to discover Learners,
publish it in many languages and make our fortune; otherwise, that I might
vanish quietly from this world, without bothering with the upshot of my
intervention.
How amazingly
lily-livered and chicken-brained well-connected people turned out to be, how
many imaginary perils and empty distractions they’ve given priority to, and how
well insulated from important but unforeseen matters by an army of myopic
gatekeepers! My work has been ignored by
all of them. Either they don’t give a
damn or they deliberately worsen an already bad situation, as long as their
bank balance fattens…
Here I am, still
working alone after all these years; my oft rewritten and rejected samizdat self-published on the World
Wide Web and treacherously ejected from it, only to arise from the ashes of
denial. After decades of intellectual
house arrest, forced to witness so-called activists and progressives
congratulate themselves that reactionary backlash hasn’t got too much of
erection during their watch (even though it has), and for having dodged the
grim chore of studying Learners. Forced
to witness churlish warmongers earn big bucks and public acclaim by publishing
reams of best-selling martial pomp, and every government trip over itself to
fulfill their least stipulation, while no one dares call them on their kamikaze
swan song! I’ve grown weary and gray
from this universal dismissal. How much
better the world could be, without so much avoidable misery!
As I review this text,
its cosmic presumption stuns me. No
special privilege entitles me to claim your time and attention; no lofty
reputation, mighty patronage, personal charisma, business savvy, saintly
complacency or literary merit. When I find decent work, I’m just another
clerk and a distracted one at that.
Nonetheless, I must claim your careful consideration here. This may be the most important text you read;
that’s up to you and your fondness for the status quo.
I’ve long dreamt
of escaping from this madhouse and repatriating into Grace – somewhere out
there, beyond the white light – yet there’s so much love and beauty here. I’ve stayed up late nights reviewing the same
botched political experiments and muttering, “At least one of these ought to
have worked out to spec!”
I still dare
hope. Learners are a Nation among nations, a state of being within the
State. In our quiet way, once properly inspired, we will command enough
talent and initiative to tackle any challenge.
Once we Learners find
each other in the dark; realize how numerous we are and the commanding position
we hold over the world; once we rally to these ideas, we will be unstoppable
and destined for glory—no matter how wretched and powerless human isolates may be with their petty
pecking orders.
Aghast, I
understood King Ashoka’s
torment. Standing back-to-back in this
carnage of our own making, we watched helplessly as millipede columns of refugees
in tears crawled from the smoking wreckage of every horizon. Neither of
us could escape our complicity with this disgrace, nor could we stand by, idle
and indifferent. We had to do something: lunge for the fat brass ring
dangling just beyond our wildest dreams; blow the doors off our fragile
confidence, competence and self-worth; risk everything to reduce the atrocity
of the human condition.
This text isn’t
incised in stone. Dedicated specialists, amateur and pro alike, should
chew over each of its assumptions. Their
debate may conjure a brilliant Learner Commonwealth. Our new mantra should be, “What if the sky
were the limit?”
Every cubic yard
of earth, air, water and vacuum contains all the energy in the Universe (minus
1?). We must become clever enough to
reach into this cosmic fire and warm our hands, yet not burn our fingertips or
the world. Otherwise, we’re just
stumble-bums, parched and starving in a desert, while untold abundance lies
quietly locked away below our feet.
We are sitting
down together – you and I and everyone – to share a giant, super-deluxe
pizza. It stretches out to the horizon,
and beyond that to infinity. It is
covered with good things to eat. It has
mounds of perfect vegetables, creamy cheese, aromatic spices and deli
delicacies: all the toppings of the world’s finest pizza. It’s got college degrees, fair housing and
low infant mortality; enough abundance, justice and serenity for everyone;
anything anyone could ask for, and more of it than anyone could imagine, much
less find use for.
Too bad we only
look down a one-degree slice of this pie, the sorriest of slices, saturated
with want, fear and pain. Stripped bare,
burned to the third degree and unbelievably unappetizing; it’s been combed over
at sword-point for ages. Across it,
starving children cower in stoic tears, in bunkers, hovels and refugee dumps:
poster children of our failure and guilt. We can’t distinguish anything any longer but
this WeaponWorld of ours, the napalm-blackened crust of a burnt-out world. Starving for something better, we scramble
after its crumbs with microscopic compulsion.
The infinite
leftover, heaping with untouched goodies?
It is beyond sight, as far as we’re concerned. We’ve walled off the other 359 degrees of
this cosmic pizza, blinkered as we have been by long-revered cultural
conventions. Our culture blinkers us at
birth, and more and more severely as we age.
It has screened us from PeaceWorld and focused our attention on
WeaponWorld. As a result, we have
dismissed this abundance as mere idealism, myth, dream, fantasy, utopia and
science fiction.
Learners will polarize those blinkers and reveal the whole pie to
everyone. This festive bounty is
certainly there for us to harvest on PeaceWorld. We have but to clear our vision, roll up our
sleeves, get to work and make it happen.
Then it will be harvest season, and most people too busy gathering and
sharing this incredible abundance, to cause further harm.
Two-thirds of a lifetime ago, as I began testing the shaky legs of my
new-foaled opinions, my father challenged me thus: “It’s easy to condemn
institutions,” this charming Bayard told me.
I’ll always remember him as a chevalier
sans peur et
sans reproche: a fearless and blameless knight.
That’s a tricky
combination, come to think of it. Harm
would be easy to inflict by those gifted with some illusion of fearlessness. “I don’t give a damn; let loose the dogs of
war!” Only slightly more difficult to do
good from fear of harmful consequences.
The truest goal would be to do nothing but good, fearlessly. My valiant father strove after that for his
entire lifetime, which made him a nobleman in the finest sense of the
term. No lesser deed would be worthy.
So you think yourself
fearless? Fine. Do good without counting the cost, and prove
it to us. A little trick you must play
inside your head. Can you do it?
The above
paragraph may be the most important one for sociopaths who recognize their
predicament, as well as for their friends who see it in them. I suggest they reread it carefully. It might relieve their ailment and would
definitely pave the swiftest road to PeaceWorld.
“Condemn institutions? Don’t bother,” this mild cavalryman told me,
“unless you can come up with better alternatives.”
I've knocked
myself out, since, trying to conjure up those famous alternatives. As a child of the greasy 1950’s, I found
capital-R Revolution revolting: its runny blemishes, more telling than its
watery promises. Among its worst
failures, after untold suffering, it offered nothing better than the
inadmissible present, with frequent backslides.
Revolutionary dialectics (and all the theses that sprang from them)
struck me as so much cheap talk—culture’s inflamed reaction to orthodoxy’s
stunted mediocrity.
No Great Book On Peace exists, even though students
cram Clausewitz’s On War in every college. Believe me; I searched the stacks
in vain, for On Peace.
Midway through my
mandatory obedience training – once I’d gotten good and fed up with it – I
began combing available libraries for a primer on the administration of world
peace. You know, a real civics lesson
for a serious world citizen? So what if
it were nothing but science fiction and wild-eyed speculation? I’d settle for that!
All I found was On War and elementary textbooks on
weapon management. There were countless
histories, devout religious tomes, pompous political screeds, literary soap
operas and nut-cracking philosophical quibbles -- each sustained weapon
mentality and diverted our attention from what should have been our primary
study all along: peace mentality.
Otherwise, they talked about feelings or sentiment or technicalities or
meaningless abstractions or some such worthless trash. As my readings grew more voracious and less
choosy, they led me to more and more ponderous, elaborate and boring affirmations
of weapon mentality. A mountain range of
useless trivia aside, I found very little else, to tell you the truth.
Avid for the
peace primer I never found, I set about drafting its Volume One. I would never dare call it On Peace. Only a global consensus of Learners, assembled in the World
Virtual Agora, could begin to compose such a work in a thousand million
volumes. Nowadays, there are none.
Even if Learners fits all alone on a virtual
library bookshelf under a non-existent call number (no Dewey Decimal number for
peace, the Library of Congress prefix JX no longer used), its scribe – no
matter how pride-scoured – cannot claim copyright to the ideals of peace.
The gold dust of peace mentality may lie buried under mounds of weapon
mentality dross, but hints of its color glimmer from all of our
masterworks. Where did Learners’
opulent forbears go? They disappeared,
replaced by weapon Classics we’ve been forced to study all our lives.
This text
reconsiders a vital choice between the mentalities of weapons and peace.
Every moment we endure here on Earth, we connive with this evil or defy it,
whether we admit this to ourselves or not. These days, weapon mentality
dominates our thinking without serious debate. No wonder runaway weapon
technologies harvest evermore victims, since everyone submits to weapon
mentality without a second thought. Also, no wonder that every
progressive aspiration must shudder to a halt in this Sargasso Sea of weapon
mentality. What surprise is there in
that? This social defect is so prevalent
and predictable, we shouldn’t even feel disappointed
by it. Once we shift the focus of our faith
from weapons to peace, we may yet thrive along with all the rest of our
progressive hopes. Until then, forget
them and us.
Since you begin
to grasp the central premise of Learners,
you may spit it out: a common enough gag reflex. “World peace?
PeaceWorld? Shut up! I’m through!”
If you value controversy in your mental landscape, ask yourself: “Why
have I dismissed this topic without fair hearing? During my lengthy examination of countless
other topics at school, why didn’t someone sit me down and make me think this
through?”
I’ll tell you
why. Emerging from infancy into
frustrated adolescence, we mature sexually long before we do so emotionally and
socially. Society exploits this offset
development. It offers us a predictable
life cycle: from adolescent rebellion to adult uncertainty, and then the
mid-life backlash of reactionary senescence.
Like Herman Hess’s Siddhartha,
we may only plumb the depths of harsh asceticism, sensual pleasure, material
wealth, self-revulsion and eventually, saintly complacency in our own
mediocrity (by default). Forced to
surrender a healthy conscience and replace it with passive-aggressive
compromise and adherence at gunpoint to conspiracies of greed, we soothe our
heartache with ignorance, apathy, drugs, alcohol, fanaticism, amateur
obsession, professional compulsion, insanity, felony and self-destruction. From these escapisms, take your pick.
The
reform-idealism of youth is everywhere subverted. Suppressing youthful idealism is a
pseudo-skill each of us is called upon to master. Shouldn’t their creative drive be our first
priority?
Do you remember
when you were a bright young thing as pure as a glass of water? Recall the salvo of insults that met your
first, childlike questions about world peace.
No matter to whom you turned – to strangers or beloved, enlightened
teachers or dumb brutes – you ran the same gauntlet of veiled insult,
condescension and violence if you persisted.
Think back. “World Peace?
End poverty? Feed and care for
everyone in perfect equity? Get real,
stop dreaming, grow up! What do I have
to do, grab you by the shoulders and shake?”
Ok. I’m summarizing years of systematic and very
subtle indoctrination in as many lines of text.
But you get my point.
On this
WeaponWorld of ours, a so-called “happy childhood” is the rare one during which
inescapable traumas and injustices are inflicted a little later, at random, by
surprise and by strangers.
Did this
ceaseless brainwash while you were young and impressionable—did it bring you up
short? Was your conscience battered
silent? Did you suspend disbelief to
avoid rejection? Did you enslave
yourself to it, regardless of its merit?
Would it have mattered what race, nation or creed you sprang from? Did you ever have a choice?
“Crimestop means the
faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any
dangerous thought. It includes the power
of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of
misunderstanding the simplest arguments that are inimical to [orthodoxy], and
of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading
in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in
short, means protective stupidity.”
George Orwell, 1984, the New
American Library, Inc., New York, 1961, p. 174.
See The 1984
Syndrome.
We stopped short
because Everyman silenced us the moment we started asking awkward
questions. Our culture subverts pacifism
and military decadence as obsessively as it controls human waste and waterborne
pestilence. Both are lethal to a
primitive society and both are suppressed.
We are potty trained, as children, against peace and valid
spirituality.
One arises from
the other, don’t you think? In the
absence of peace, wouldn't valid spirituality suffer? In the midst of war, doesn't our spirit turn
into a monstrous caricature of itself, sneering at our hypocrisy? During what we dare call peacetime, is it not
just as bad?
Are we ready to
say enough to this grotesque weapon cult? Have we ever been, will we ever be more
ready?
As with our
weapon religions and their relevance to God, it doesn’t matter how much
mouth-jabber we devote to peace. We are
just as averse to it as to excrement. As
a result, we face unlimited social contradictions and zero closure, resolution
or clarity.
Sure, I can
understand your fear and loathing but can’t let that stop me. You and other Learners, join me instead! We’re grownups, now, apparently immune to
childhood blame. Unplug your ears –
there, that’s better – and pay attention.
Learners retrieves painful
questions we let drop when we were kids, with or without our honest consent.
As this Aquarian
Age dawns, it’s a sorry state we submit to.
Snake oil democracy and chainsaw logic promote arrogant
mismanagement. Fate’s idiot smile favors
Conspiracies of Greed. Smirking
predators gang-rape Blind Justice before our disbelieving eyes. They laugh all the way to their bank,
congress, pulpit and academy; then come back for sloppy seconds. Over and over, our institutions legitimize
the spastic slapstick of killer primates.
Absurd clichés
jam our constellation of political metaphors, despite their spectacular failure—or
hadn’t you noticed? Like nitwit
kibitzers around a stalled car, we keep intoning “We’re just gonna need more
Love, personal perfection, Christ in this world, Humanism, Science, Submission,
Family Values, Free Markets – straighter politicians, fairer bullies and kinder
Fat Cats.” In short, some purer
dictatorship of fathead fatuity. Even
more widespread and worthless: “Don’t believe in nothin’, little pal, but
earning and spending your next buck. Be
cool, be a steady fool, like us.”
Stupefied by all
this barbarism, prophets, newscasters, technocrats and commoners bray disaster
in four-part harmony. Others pray that
swift Apocalypse deliver them pretty please.
Stupefied by their panic, they worsen the necrosis of this world, merely
to hasten the Ending they crave.
Thus do we deny
the obvious, the Miracle upon which our existence depends a thousand times a day. According to
this Miracle, a far greater wisdom awaits us.
It could replace typhoons of venom with windfalls of abundance. Fantastic plenty could bloom where wastelands
now fester; full justice, salve ancient traumas and about-face mutinous legions
back to civility.
Imagine
that! Cast off your silly panic and
start visualizing the best that could happen.
Learners are waiting for your arrival.
Instead, weapon
dissidents and weapon reactionaries croak contrapuntal duets of hoary
dogma. They obsess over the hated Other
and plot His impossible destruction.
Others sit on their hands, until everyone becomes an angel or until
Christ returns to deliver us (whichever comes first).
Everything is
improvised. No one has any idea what
he’s talking about and no one has a workable plan except for more killing—sit
still for it or stir it up worse. No one
listens to anyone; the major perk of promotion into power, these days, is no
longer having to listen to anyone; just issue
a series of insane orders unmindful of reality—the recipe for guaranteed
disaster. Nothing else is tolerated.
We are only
permitted two kinds of politicians, nowadays: those who have quashed every good
idea for generations (Democrats) and those who never met a nasty idea they
didn’t love (Republicans). Like a
village blacksmith lusting after a first-glimpsed motorcycle, they long to
tease the world apart and reassemble it to suit their fancy. Yet their obsolete political vocabularies
won’t let them comprehend the world’s most basic contradictions and
opportunities. They seek to fix a 1950
Harley-Davidson with Age of Pericles terminology and horse-and-buggy tools.
Only the absolute
justice of our cause keeps it alive—not our necrotic habits of thought and
speech. Poisoned by gangrenous
ideologies and rejecting them, we’ve grown so credophobic that we refuse to
believe anything any longer. Force-fed
meaningless commercial blather, our moral gyros tumbled, we’ve lost our last
spirit toeholds and fallen into riptides of change.
But don’t
despair. Heed Jesse Jackson and “Keep
hope alive!” As with two post-war
Germanys, reactionaries will hand over a basket case for us to reanimate, once
it appears too late to salvage anything from the wreckage. Learners
anticipates that handover—this time, of the whole world. Up to us to rebuild everything!
You might recall
some movie where ruthless Evil secures every source of power, control and
security. By midway through the story,
the Good are dumbfounded. No one knows
what to do next.
Then someone –
perhaps Ruth – says, “Hold on, I have a plan.”
Rather than turn away in despair, passive bystanders start paying
miraculous attention. Inspired, they
turn into heroes. By that time, for the
sake of dramatic continuity, the camera cuts to the triumph of the Good.
This book
itemizes the vital steps between ‘no plan’ and ‘plan in action.’ During this critical but no-fun stage, we
should discuss our plan in detail, expose its inherent weaknesses, suggest
better alternatives and coordinate our timing and chronology. Let daring volunteers take on tasks that fit
their special interests and talents. All
you reductive meliorists out there, who’ve pounded the steering wheel in stalled
cars for the last few thousand years, start your engines! Shake awake all those who’ve abstained from
sheer nihilism and cowardice.
I have a scheme,
and here it is, as follows. We are at
this essential if boring stage of the procedure. Proceed accordingly and with dispatch, I
implore you.
Some warnings
before we begin. This book’s eccentric
prose, exotic idiom and outlandish speculation will make very hard
reading. We’re gonna make warfare
illegal, here, across the planet—not bake a simple cake. You’ll find no easy sound bites in these
pages, no quick fixes and none of the simplistic, TV pabulum you’ve grown
accustomed to. You may click back,
now, if that was all you were looking for.
Treat Learners as a rough guide, clearer than
run-on Classics and straighter than Ivy-League obfuscations. After reading it, young prodigals may scout
out this locked-down prison world while guards and convicts slumber. Evenhandedly, it beckons ecstatic Nobel
laureates, berserkers with nothing left to lose, aimless idealists, madrassa
dreamers, dissatisfied bonzes, Talmud scholars and Bible seminarians,
prep-schooled sellouts and ghetto luminaries defying the evils that wriggle
just beyond their own brown study. It
speaks just as much to every Learner lost in a funhouse mirror-maze of weapons
and peace, as to my childhood ghost haunting bygone stacks. I address these words in equal parts to next
year’s applicants to the War Academies and to next year’s crop of middle school
prodigies. The best among you sought the
literature of peace in the library stacks of weapons administration, to no
avail.
This book
outlines what we were driven to discover and failed to find. California dreamin’, it surfs the riptides of
chaos and the undertows of paradox.
Irritably, it tosses aside treasured concepts and reconsiders
much-maligned ideas.
My message is
very biased. Attacking sly platitudes,
my arguments climb way out on shaky limbs—farther out than you may wish to
follow. You’ll find no ‘detachment’,
‘disinterest’ or ‘balance’ here, as those terms are misused today. Given this topic’s infinite complexity, my
writing numbskills and lesser erudition, your work is cut out for you.
What’s more, I’ll
turn every rhetorical cannon against the weapon mentors who drilled me on
them. Horrified and enraged, I’ll invoke
any fallacy more useful than its ‘logically correct’ counterpart. I have no use for proponents of ‘logical
analysis’ who dare permit children to starve to death and turn their backs when
such awkward topics encroach on their blank spirit. In the same spirit, Learners will revive PeaceWorld by shamelessly appropriating every
Madison Avenue fraud and taps bugle call that has lulled us to sleep up ‘til
now.
If the dry logic
of world peace is all you seek, read Mortimer Adler’s
How to Think about War & Peace,
Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944. Back
then, President Roosevelt and his brilliant staffers anticipated a popular,
one-world government that would have criminalized warfare across the planet and
guaranteed human rights for all – seventy years ago, with 150 million fewer war
dead and a couple billion fewer dead of famine and preventable disease than we
“enlightened” contemporaries are responsible for―and how many thousands
of trillions of cash in vital assets and sabotaged ingenuity thrown away with
our consent?
How dare you
suggest it’s none of your doing! Quit
lying to yourself, here at least. We are
all 100% accountable.
Alas, American
Weapon Party commissars made sure a failed haberdasher, Harry Truman,
would grab the reins of power from Roosevelt’s dying hands. Hiroshima, my love? Truman and his small-town, small-mind cronies
threw away all the goodwill America earned by liberating the world from
fascism. Just like Bush and his rat pack
did after 9/11. They’ve groomed a
succession of politically correct mediocrities,
since. Their parochial prejudices
allowed no alternative but another hundred and fifty million war dead, and
another half-century of bankrupt weapon management.
Still today, we
waste precious time and talent pointlessly protesting their mighty warmonger
initiatives. Let them protest, in absolute futility, our mighty peace initiatives—never again the other way around!
This text is a
speculative entertainment and an impassioned rally cry, not some textbook
drear. Neither fiction nor non-, it fits
in somewhere between confession, screed and sketchbook of homilies, anecdotes
and conjectures. As Margaret Atwood puts
it, forecast journalism. There is no
other text like it, and I can find no political group that would adopt it as
its own. Were that I could! I would not feel so abandoned on this planet
of unrepentant killer primates. I have
no faith in my own generation (good for nothing but Bush the Lesser and his
National Capitalist cronies) nor the one that follows; perhaps the following
one… Learners
will certainly arise as a political party in the future—perhaps after I’m gone,
as with Marx, Rousseau and Erasmus.
“So it happens that beyond the imaginary demarcation line between past
and present, the writer still finds himself eye to eye with the human
condition, which he is bound to observe and understand as best he can, with
which he must identify, giving it the strength of his breath and the warmth of
his blood, which he must attempt to turn into the living texture of the story
that he intends to translate for his readers, in such a way that the result be
as beautiful, as simple, and as persuasive as possible.” Ivo Andrić, Acceptance Speech for the
1961 Nobel Prize for Literature.
"If humanity bears an eternal truth, it is certainly that tragic
hesitation of the man who will someday be called, for centuries hence, an
artist – facing the artwork that he experiences more deeply than anyone, that
he admires the way none other can, yet that he, alone on Earth, wants to
destroy sub rasa at the same
time."
"So let’s understand this fully: if genius is a discovery, it is
upon this discovery that the resurrection of the past is based. At the start of this speech, I spoke about
what a renaissance could be, what the heritage of a culture could be. A culture is reborn when men of genius,
seeking their own truth, draw from the depths of centuries everything that
formerly resembled this truth, even if they don’t recognize it." André Malraux, Les Conquérants, (The Conquerors), Le livre de poche, ©
Bernard Grasset, 1928, pages 311-13.
“The leader carries all of our confusion with
him as he attempts to climb above society in search of a clear view that would
indicate the right way. There, on his
imaginary mountain, he stands alone, suffering the personal anxiety of
freedom. He watches us dancing aimlessly
below, half struggling with mortality in our consoling maze. He can see we have a certain reassurance,
lost in our earthly eternity. But how is
he to get his own reassurance if he cannot make all of us and the structure
itself respond to his efforts?” John
Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West,
Vintage Press, A Division of Random House, 1991, p. 349.
Accept those
parts of Learners you hearken to,
then make something better happen.
Dismiss anything you find in here that disconcerts your fancy—as
conjecture, hearsay, heresy, what you will.
If this work
inspires you to frame some new idea, let me know. I’d love to filigree new ideas into the next
rewrite of this text (with proper attribution, of course). With a little luck, I may get to chronicle
the real-world progress of this righteous endeavor … perhaps in future chapters
of this samizdat.
Why do the terms
‘utopian’ and ‘idealist’ consign our highest values to the trash heap? When did reactionary
chic make it unfashionable to do the utmost good?
We may be clumsy
practitioners of peace, at first, but the love of good throbs in our
veins. No word for this talent exists (kalotropism?), but it will not be denied
much longer. Who knows; doing good may
become fashionable, once again, despite the mightiest efforts of the worst
among us, to forbid and ridicule it.
Loudmouthed
morality truants feign sophistication by aggravating our weapon neuroses. By rote repetition, they malign ‘do-gooders’
and ‘bleeding hearts’. Hiding their
shameful shortcomings, they confabulate the pig-headed terminology and criminal
line-up of reactionary correctness.
They’ve built up an assembly line of conmen and professional hypocrites
who are (literally) politically correct enough to serve as stand-ins for
legitimate leaders. Each candidate worse
than his predecessors, while people of talent and genius are chased from
politics and social commentary; either gunned down in the street or crucified
by the media.
Who are these
malingerers? Do-badders? Flinty hearts? Do a few stony hearts require a little
lubricant bleeding to re-oxygenate their owners’ flat-lined conscience?
After so many
tries, why don’t we have the best possible government? And don’t you dare suggest we have the best
government already. Be honest with
yourself, here, if nowhere else. With
all our schools, books and teachers, why aren’t there millions of peace mentors
out there, enriching the abundance that is our due, filling the world with
miraculous technologies, sacred wildlife, courtly love and random acts of
kindness? Where did the superb
replacements of young Andy Carnegie, the Roosevelts and Little Flower LaGuardia
go, that the administration of excellence demands? Where have you gone!
If we considered
this world one Great Academy – as Learners
hope it shall become – most of its students major in some aspect of weapon
technology while all too few take too few electives in peace. As the machinery of war grinds on without
letup, only its most devoted slaves may evaluate its usefulness in public
discourse.
Hardly anyone can
list the great peace mentors; I know I couldn’t. Peace’s foremost practitioners have been
unassuming gentlefolk. Female peace
practitioners are as under-reported here, as they have been in general history.
Compare this blitzed state of ignorance
with our household familiarity with Genghis Khan, Hitler and like masters of
mayhem. If peace were our first priority
– not mass murder – this Learner deficit would cause us grave concern. Nothing of the kind concerns us, since we are
first and foremost weapon slaves.
Your first
appraisal of Learners may make you
dizzy, its range of topics is so kaleidoscopic.
We never studied them in the depth they deserved. Of necessity, our first review will be
insolently superficial and subject to myth-based denial at every
page-turn. Once this crisis has passed,
we may render full justice to these exotic notions.
Read the first
few chapters of Learners to take in
its vocabulary: (“Intro & Vocab” to “Stop”). Thereafter, resume your random perusal in any
of its three Sections:
SECTION I)
Why we’re in this mess;
SECTION II)
How we approach PeaceWorld; and
SECTION
III) What results we may expect.
The first and
harshest Section, “Why,” stretches midway through Learners. Why is so
incendiary, its first-time readers risk burnout. Unlike more soothing texts, this one won’t overlook
great evils we’ve been taught to regret briefly and then take for granted. This merciless inventory of error will seem
wearisome at first, mind-numbing later and soon unbearable. Your subconscious will revisit every aversion
therapy you suffered as a child, to get you to quit. You’ll grow frustrated with this reading,
then nauseated by it and soon enraged.
You’ll have to brace yourself sternly to chugalug this bitter brew to
its dregs. Take tiny sips of that sour
mash and find more syrupy refreshment elsewhere, perhaps at the titty of TV.
Just don’t give
up. I might as well have entitled Why,
How and What—Lamentation, Transition and Hope.
Bittersweet “How”
lists unfortunate tendencies and proposes some countermeasures. Sweeter “What” sketches peaceful alternatives
to the weapon technologies we submit to today—assuming global majorities have
grasped Why and How beforehand.
This text is
intended for every Learner to come. Its
discontent should have been our patrimony and was—since forgotten. I leave the Sections Who, When and Where to
you, my beloved Learners. If you catch me fumbling my extraordinary
mandate, that’s your cue to take up the burden of proof.
I may have
recently found a hassle-free way to gatecrash heaven, merely by reincarnating
into Jesus Christ’s lifeline the next time I die. I believe this painful redemption is open to
all of us, no matter how heavy our Karmic burden. I repeat myself to emphasize this crucial
concept.
This exotic
doctrine might shut down fundamentalists’ idiotic diktat, once and for all.
Its universal acceptance would eject all those fundamentalist middlemen
unworthy of spiritual discourse. By what
right, wisdom or benediction do they claim to butt in there, anyway? It would put the Kingdom of Heaven within
everyone’s reach in the afterlife, regardless of truth or error in this
lifetime, entrust earthly cares to our own accountability, and our salvation to
the Lord’s direct tutelage.
Once you grasp
this idea and its outcomes, no pompous bigot can lecture, weasel or torture
them out of you. You will be completely
free to save your soul, miraculously free.
Or you may return to these endless lives as often as you wish, as a
Bodhisattva—provided this lesson awaits you here, the next time you come
around, and hasn’t been silenced by Godless fundamentalists and indifferent
idiots, as so often in the past and present.
We may serve God
or Mammon, but not both at once. Learners suggests how to serve this
world gracefully and Grace in the next.
If you dismiss the above-stated as some worthless, Bible-thumping
crankdom (more fundamentalist babble), you missed my point entirely. And, my friend, that is your loss. Check out the “reincarnating” link above, and
see for yourself.
If you take your
weapons indoctrination too seriously, you may expect to sort religion from
government as independent variables.
Forget it. We are progressives
insofar our faith (in whatever) induces fearless love in us, and reactionaries
when we react (faithlessly) against the shadow of our fears and hatred. Our creeds and governments are one and the
same. It doesn’t matter what phony
drapes we use to cover the religious underpinnings of government, the way
prudish Victorians used to drape piano legs to prevent sexual excitation.
These assertions
may sound like pure arrogance to you. I
assure you, they’ve been as carefully thought out as any you’ll find in Learners. It’s up to you to discuss them, once and for
all.
One of Christ’s
parables (the Parable of the Talents: Matthew
25-14) entrusts risk-taking coinage to each of his servants. The Lord intends us to manage our lives for
the profit of our souls, not mere risk-reduction. As stunt persons in this universal action
feature, we’re here to take enormous risks.
Safe mediocrity must be illusory, since everything kills us in the
end. In our mortality reside our glory
and our salvation.
I’m surprised how
little this epiphany alters what I must say in Learners. Even more
surprising will be our grand
exploits once we’ve claimed grace in this world and Grace in the next.
At most, these
meditations have turned my fortune or failure on this material plane into the
blinding glare one gets off wavelets during tardy, sun-dappled afternoons. Transient and annoying at worst, they are
beautiful despite their ache, and soon to fade.
I have given up
on free advice to “Live each day as if it were your first and last.” How hormonally unworkable! I look forward to each day’s end, now. My sorriest sleeping dream has turned out to
be more interesting than the most spectacular and moving epic I’ve read in a
book or watched on the screen. I suspect
that the after-death experience, properly negotiated, is at least that much
better than life, or better yet. Good music,
good lovin’ and a few good friends, along with some other things during this
lifetime (like laughter, and great meals, and just helping somebody), they’re
something else; they make the pain of living bearable. I counsel no-one to abandon them prematurely,
no matter what fate our souls may have in store. It seems obvious that we have something
important to learn in the here-and-now.
I had no choice
but to write and rewrite – en deux langues (in two languages)
– this book, this whole book and nothing but this book. In the end, I can only justify my presumption
by pointing out the depths of our moral bankruptcy … and of our craving for
Peace.
LEARNERS: On the Move from
WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld