What kind of animal will kill for food? Any one. What kind of animal will die for sex? Every one. What kind of animal will overeat (or electively starve), revile sex, and kill its own species because another animal of that species induces it to do so?
Ever wonder what became of Charlie Manson? Crazy Charlie? Mad leader of a band of drugged up homicidal maniacs – we all remember Charlie. Right? Ever think about where he ended up? Corcoran State Prison. How about Ted Bundy? You remember Ted. Murdered about 30 women, horribly over the course of his killing career, raping many brutally, some weeks after he had killed them. A not very nice man ultimately executed in Florida to much joy and public elation.
Or Jeffery Dahmer, remember him? Before he got to killing and dismembering and cannibalizing in earnest, he was arrested for drugging a 13 year old boy and sexually molesting him. This when he was 28. He was given 5 months’ probation and a year work release. It was after this ‘harsh’ sentence that he began his murderous descent into hellishness. After offering himself up again, to which the local constabulary declined his offer, he finally chased a victim into the police department’s hands that they could no longer ignore – only to discover about 14 more when they finally got around to bothering to look.
So Jeffery pled insanity and the court said, uh-uh-uh, that don’t wash, and they convicted him of 15 counts of murder with 15 consecutive life sentences just to show him who was crazy. The guy had heads and other body parts in the fridge, not even wrapped properly or anything. No Tupperware or that nice Press and Seal to keep his carrion fresh – heads just sitting there on the rack. The animal.
Remember John Hinckley? Shot a couple of guys as well as President Reagan (so we’re told). Or Mark Chapman? He executed John Lennon, in front of his wife, right on the street in front of his place. Shot him dead – another man who promoted peace murdered violently (though one supposes a certain violence to any murder). Chapman planned this execution. While broke and unemployed, he took a 6 week world tour, then returned to his place in Hawaii and decided John Lennon was the problem with the world. And he, Holden Cockbag, was the solution.
So, still broke (after flying around the world, one would imagine broker still), he flies to New York, to Atlanta, back to New York then back to Hawaii. Then he flies back to New York and murders John Lennon. Not bad on a part time salary from the hospital that fired him.
Both Hinckley and Chapman were judged by the American legal system as insane. No heads in the fridge, no systematic brutalization or massive body count, no carnage-strewn slaughter – the crazy ones were those who walked up with a pistol and shot public figures in the light of day. Even though they opened fire on people in the street, no one in law enforcement shot at them. Reagan was surrounded by well-armed bodyguards, but the only shots were fired by Hinckley.
Both Hinckley and Chapman have a readily overlooked commonality: the CIA. Prior to his globe-trotting, Chapman was associated with World Vision. Hinckley was a member as well. What is World Vision? It is an evangelical organization which advances political and economic agenda under the guise of Christian charity. Funded in part by USAID (a notorious CIA front), World Vision reputedly administered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon where a couple thousand Palestinians met a hard end, among their other good work. Interestingly, the president of World Vision United States was John W. Hinckley senior, Texas oilman and friend to George HW Bush. Who, had Reagan died, would have become president.
The former head of the CIA almost ascends to the presidency because the son of his friend and business associate shoots the president and nobody sees anything odd about this? As the crack cocaine epidemic of the 80s started effectively in Bush’s office (run by elements of his former company, the CIA), he certainly more than lived up to the vice in his title.
After 8 years as vice president in an administration that took office under treasonous circumstances (October Surprise); saw the assassination of the re-emerging peace activist John Lennon, and the shooting of the president elect with a CIA-style weapon by a family friend; a multi-billion dollar Pentagon scandal; a multi-billion dollar savings and loan scandal/collapse; and the multiple treasons of arming Iran, taking the proceeds, buying drugs, smuggling the drugs into the USA, selling them, then taking the profits and using them to fund a terrorist army, George HW Bush finally got what was coming to him.
We elected him president.
To be fair, in the face of multiple felonies, his defense team came upon his brilliant strategy, “I was outta the loop.” Reagan avoided prison because he couldn’t recall what he did as president (his response to over 50 questions posed by the Iran Contra Committee); Bush got elected president because during all this crime, much of it by people he had worked with for years, he was out of the loop. Nobody told him anything. So we made him president.
Then four days before Christmas 1989, he invaded Panama, killing upwards of five thousand people to arrest one of his former employees, Manuel Noriega. Not to be outdone, when he was president, his son George Jr. killed well over a million people in his purported efforts to thwart yet another CIA asset, Osama bin Laden. Some kind of efficiency, that.
5,000 killed to make an arrest? A single arrest? What did Noriega do, kill the Pope and his wife and rape their desecrated corpses on the altar of God? He was charged with drug smuggling. Over a million people murdered for bin Laden’s accused crimes? More than a million human beings killed to punish one man? The CIA (man, they’re sure hanging around here a lot) has stated that at its very peak of operational recruitment that al Qaeda had less than 300 members.
Even though the best evidence had bin Laden dying in 2001 (even reported on FOX), the USA is directly responsible for the murder of over a million people – and let’s be fair, this is a very conservative estimate, likely estimated by many of the same conservatives who insisted on them being killed in the first place – to stop a group no bigger than a local church congregation led by a dead figurehead. Like most churches. Citizens of the USA see this as acceptable as long as it happens in other people’s countries.
Which brings me back to Charlie and company. According to the legal system of the USA, psychiatrists, judges, attorneys, juries and the law itself, Manson, Bundy, Dahmer and God knows how many others (crazier still) were in fact sane when they committed their crimes. Inducing pathetic empty girls and freakish losers to eviscerate people to start a race war, because the Beatles told him to, no less, is sane behavior.
Luring scores of women to their deaths through mad brutalization and uncontrolled rage, having sex with their corpses for weeks or cutting off their heads with a hacksaw and keeping them around the apartment, in America is what a sane person would do. According to the courts, drugging boys, raping them, murdering them, cutting them into pieces – some of which you bury in your yard, others you keep in the fridge, and others still you eat – are actions of a sane person. Anti-social, sure, but at least according to the American definition, not insane.
Considered in light of such legal determinations, our foreign policy is perfectly rational.
But then again, so was Hitler’s.
© 2012