A man who lives at 1600 PA avenue and his sycophants love the hate and hurt from this President. That is what you call someone who gets off hurting others: we call him Mr. President.
You state the obvious so I don't have to. And maybe, depending on your own home address, you don't know the half of it. Very recently I had occasion to dig a little deeper into what has been happening with church-run charities at least since the downturns in their attendance figures resulting from the recent nondemic known in fan-fiction circles as 'covid.'
Here in the far/wild-west reaches of the High Plains Bible Belt, apparently only folks who live here have the least clue to what has been going on for generations with this much power being concentrated almost exclusively in the hands of a single faction.
Now that this faction has effectively taken near-total control of the entire machinery of national governance, the results of such a power monopoly ought to be entirely predictable. even by examining the way four extremely rural counties in Oklahoma have been run for decades: the combination of quiet warnings and self-censorship of any form of conventional media, the result of which is on a daily basis audiences seeing only those stories The Party wants covered, and only how The Party wants them covered, if any one media outlet knows what's good for them down the road.
And they all do, even 'public broadcasting' in its current pathetic desperate plight to remain on the federal teat while claiming with a straight face to be the only real source of real news.
There is much more to tell on any number of stories which have been effectively reduced to unconfirmable social-media rumors (known also with near-universal self-assurance on no particular basis as 'conspiracy theories', or the stories one faction or the other wants not to be stories at all), here in No Man's Land.
Even I don't know the half of it.
But my recent exploration of the historic background preceding a horrific double murder which occurred right up the highway from my home, easily revealed to me, with no end of plain-sight public-records sources, that what really killed Veronica Butler & Jilian Kelley last spring was the risk the former woman posed to this incestuous and entirely permanent political establishment of OKGOP rule, what she had learned from first hand experience of making a personal enemy of the most powerful local-boss figure in the Panhandle, a lady named Tifany Adams who also dominated the local GOP apparatus without question, until she got arrested for engineering the killings of her grandchildren's mother and her traveling companion.
Mrs Jilian Kelley was as genuine an article of a Bible-Belt preacher's wife fully committed to the ministry as they get, but since she was along for the wrong ride on the wrong day, the day the OKGOP vigilantes who run this place had decided was to be Veronica's last day, Mrs Kelley had to go too.
The story the media got sold, with little effort on any venue's part to investigate it independently, was and is a total fairy tale.
And I can prove it, with years and years worth of records showing clearly that OKGOP policy in these four counties had been for years prior, that What Tifany Wants Tifany Gets.
Tifany Adams, as committee chair of the OKGOP in Cimarron County, member in good standing of the local hospital board, owner or stakeholder in millions' worth of local agribusiness lands & assets, and established owner-operator of Cimarron County's court and sheriff department, was even supposed to get away with the murders she had been assisted in the planning of for months by numerous powerful local officials (of guess what party.)
But Mrs Kelley brought a gun, both ladies fought back for their lives, and the result of a planned missing-persons case where no one was ever to know even if any bodies had been buried, was instead the bloodiest crime scene in Panhandle history, and so the thoroughly compliant media machine hereabouts just bought the hasty cover story of a religious cult gone berserk, on face value, and moved right on.
Now then, when I found out a couple of weeks ago that a local church which had been running its own self-funded food-handout program once a month for years, has now become in effect a local office for the USDA which (since the election of course) magnanimously stepped in with grant funds to shore up the food program, and that USDA's boss Brooke Rollins is every bit as ambitious a career-builder playing the MAGA brand for all it is worth, as her colleague Kristi Noem is over at Homeland Security, and that both these ladies have enormous powers at their disposal to build up lists of names for future immigration raids and then use this information to pretend to be making America great by rounding up anyone suspected of the crime of Breathing While Latino (and ask questions later, as events in Los Angeles continue to show), you can imagine if you know anything about how my conscience works at all, that I promptly and vociferously dissociated myself with that church right down the street, and then set about doing even more research (already knowing that the dozens of local reporters I reached out to would never reply at all) to prove what I already knew, from having been a Bible-belter all my life:
That nobody in the evangelical industry hereabouts particularly minds the idea of using a house of God as a federal field office, a house of informancy and entrapment upon their neighbors (having first filled out an eight-page federal form for future aid eligibility, introduced by USDA just last month and shoved in the face of everyone coming into God's house for twenty bucks' worth of groceries),
because....
(let's see if I can recite it correctly)
"... these people come over here and take away our jobs and abuse welfare programs and don't even pay any taxes, and most of them are criminals anyway, I heard it on Fox just last night and from the pulpit this morning...'
Exodus 20:16 notwithstanding, apparently.
(That's from the Ten Commandments these hick Republicans want to impose into every classroom, the one that says, thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.)
Defining who is or is not one's neighbor, apparently, is all the moral hand-washing these MAGA cheerleaders require of their Party. Everything else is, as usual, GOP-monopolized business as usual in Oklahoma, and has been for years.
Effectively half our neighbors hereabouts are immigrants. Most of them had come from around the world to work at Seaboard Foods for the best chance of a better life they'd ever known, by (even the Muslim ones) processing tens of thousands of hogs into pork products each day.
Some of these attend local church food banks to help feed their families.
Do the math: Seaboard fires 300 employees on a single day, media from Amarillo to OKC totally ignore this story, Texas and Oklahoma alike have self-enforcement statutes now which no longer require federal assistance in arresting 'aliens' (their word not mine) on any premise or none at all, and now people who have used the food banks for years must suddenly fill out a lengthy federal document to get more canned goods and a sack of flour next time.
"I'm not sure if evil exists in a spiritual or religious sense. But I know some people do terrible things, and calling it trauma doesn't always cut it for me. Some people are just dangerous. And we need to stop pretending they're not."
What might be the most vexatious factor in assessing the nature of evil is that the assessment is usually framed in either the spiritual or behavioral context, when for my purposes the existence of evil is most readily observed through the lens of ethics, which according to American Heritage Dictionary's primary definition is simply 'a set of principles of right conduct.'
At the risk of kicking up a rhetorical hornet's nest of discussion of what is or is not ethical, or right conduct, my earliest adult lessons in everyday ethics came from those remaining adults in the work force by the late 1970s, who had been of adult age during the prior world war, an era when apparently service for its own sake was regarded as a near-universal mandate.
These old-timers, a far more iconoclastic and even rebellious lot than I would have expected, in their expressed views on the exercises of power that they had been given precious little opportunity to oppose throughout their lifetimes, seemed to sum up the making of choices between right and wrong conduct on a deeply personal level, with two factors as I recall being the anchorages of such a code of conduct:
One was the idea that 'we're all in this together', but in a tone suggesting that power had made it thus and that no one person was in a position to topple power off its pedestal, and so we might jus'well make it as tolerable as we can...
And the other was most often summed up in the phrase 'the next guy' in terms of how we might all achieve something tolerable out of the experience: don't leave a mess for the next guy, don't create extra work for the next guy, don't make it so the next guy can't do his job, etc, etc.
Evil is, for my purposes, manifest in that person who has decided he or she couldn't care less about the next guy. Such results to ensue can be anything from pure un-thorough laziness in cleaning up a bit of broken glass, to shooting up a schoolhouse and breaking even more glass in the bargain.
Parents with any sense of obligation to a larger society their children must learn to coexist with, have to take it upon themselves to try and teach a small child that there is something terribly, terribly wrong with (for instance) leaving a tap on, or a tricycle in the middle of a driveway, while not in the process frightening or even traumatizing an innocent child by insinuating that they themselves had done something evil, or even that they are simply evil for having done such a thing.
Not every parent gets that one quite right. Even with the most innocent of intentions, parents or other caregivers can indeed leave imprints on the young with their reactions to things having gone wrong, which can stick in a young person's memory long past when anyone older can even recall any such thing having occurred. What may appear to an adult, beset with the many and various distractions and obligations of adulthood, as an incident where a child had got into trouble but seems to have 'learned their lesson', can and often does become for the child an intensely formative experience that they go on and live with from then on.
How many times must a child be told they had done something 'bad' (an enormous, terrifying and entirely mysterious concept to a small child), or even that they themselves had BEEN bad, before they start to believe it?
And, in some instances, having been told it, and come to believe it, no longer care?
If right and wrong conduct are framed in terms throughout childhood as actions and even attitudes which define all by themselves who the child is as a person ('gonna find out who's naughty or nice...'), then the record shows that quite a number of people grow up thinking they are just bad, that everybody thinks they are bad, that this is because everyone is bad anyway and just getting away with it on the basis of any number of advantages they might have, that they will never be anything but bad, and that they might actually only get away with being bad over a lifetime by becoming even more skilled at being bad, at the cost of not taking any thought at all as to what might happen to... the next guy.
Hannah Arendt gave us a mighty and deeply instructive clue on the true nature of evil: that there is not necessarily anything on the surface of a person committed to doing evil, which might readily identify them in advance as such. In the case of her study of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her astonishing revelation was that the evil in this man was of little more substance or origin than his unflinching capacity to... do his job, and take little to no thought as to what the doing of it might bring to others. He was, after all, just doing what he had been assigned to do.
Maybe I am a little over-sensitive to this explanation of the presence of evil in everyday life, but any time I hear anyone rationalize an outcome which had brought even the most innocuous degree of harm to The Next Guy by saying, 'I was just doing my job' (or the infinite varieties of such Pontius-Pilate moral hand-washing one encounters on a continual basis), I am on full alert, knowing from long prior experience that there is evil afoot, leaving me only to decide whether I will aid and abet it, call it what it is regardless of the risks to myself, allow it to stand with no effort on my part to counteract it, or simply move along. I have, I am sorry to report, opted for each of these countermeasures at different times in my life, when calling evil evil is the only moral or ethical option every time that I can be at peace with afterward.
As for whether or not people themselves are evil, I leave that for God to decide. And yes, I do believe in one. No, I do not comprehend most of what God does all day. No, God does not consult or answer to me on the business of running all creation. But I do know that to call actions evil is one kind of judgment, and to call persons evil quite another. As much as possible, I try to stick with the former and avoid the latter outright: broken glass on a floor might be the result of the evil of negligence, but to judge the one who left it there as an evil person by definition, even when it is obvious that it was left there intentionally to hurt The Next Guy, will probably only set even more evil actions in motion, and what would I have gained in the process?
Not intentionally or negligently creating trouble or harm or extra labor for The Next Guy has actually served me quite well over a lifetime. But to judge on my own terms whether there is evil inherent in how such a simple ethos seems to be so horribly absent from so many settings in today's world, I will leave that one to God as well.
I have lived under a fairly simple code of conduct for longer than I can remember. Some have even called it The Bikers' Code: don't fuck with me, and I won't fuck with you.
A man who lives at 1600 PA avenue and his sycophants love the hate and hurt from this President. That is what you call someone who gets off hurting others: we call him Mr. President.
You state the obvious so I don't have to. And maybe, depending on your own home address, you don't know the half of it. Very recently I had occasion to dig a little deeper into what has been happening with church-run charities at least since the downturns in their attendance figures resulting from the recent nondemic known in fan-fiction circles as 'covid.'
Here in the far/wild-west reaches of the High Plains Bible Belt, apparently only folks who live here have the least clue to what has been going on for generations with this much power being concentrated almost exclusively in the hands of a single faction.
Now that this faction has effectively taken near-total control of the entire machinery of national governance, the results of such a power monopoly ought to be entirely predictable. even by examining the way four extremely rural counties in Oklahoma have been run for decades: the combination of quiet warnings and self-censorship of any form of conventional media, the result of which is on a daily basis audiences seeing only those stories The Party wants covered, and only how The Party wants them covered, if any one media outlet knows what's good for them down the road.
And they all do, even 'public broadcasting' in its current pathetic desperate plight to remain on the federal teat while claiming with a straight face to be the only real source of real news.
There is much more to tell on any number of stories which have been effectively reduced to unconfirmable social-media rumors (known also with near-universal self-assurance on no particular basis as 'conspiracy theories', or the stories one faction or the other wants not to be stories at all), here in No Man's Land.
Even I don't know the half of it.
But my recent exploration of the historic background preceding a horrific double murder which occurred right up the highway from my home, easily revealed to me, with no end of plain-sight public-records sources, that what really killed Veronica Butler & Jilian Kelley last spring was the risk the former woman posed to this incestuous and entirely permanent political establishment of OKGOP rule, what she had learned from first hand experience of making a personal enemy of the most powerful local-boss figure in the Panhandle, a lady named Tifany Adams who also dominated the local GOP apparatus without question, until she got arrested for engineering the killings of her grandchildren's mother and her traveling companion.
Mrs Jilian Kelley was as genuine an article of a Bible-Belt preacher's wife fully committed to the ministry as they get, but since she was along for the wrong ride on the wrong day, the day the OKGOP vigilantes who run this place had decided was to be Veronica's last day, Mrs Kelley had to go too.
The story the media got sold, with little effort on any venue's part to investigate it independently, was and is a total fairy tale.
And I can prove it, with years and years worth of records showing clearly that OKGOP policy in these four counties had been for years prior, that What Tifany Wants Tifany Gets.
Tifany Adams, as committee chair of the OKGOP in Cimarron County, member in good standing of the local hospital board, owner or stakeholder in millions' worth of local agribusiness lands & assets, and established owner-operator of Cimarron County's court and sheriff department, was even supposed to get away with the murders she had been assisted in the planning of for months by numerous powerful local officials (of guess what party.)
But Mrs Kelley brought a gun, both ladies fought back for their lives, and the result of a planned missing-persons case where no one was ever to know even if any bodies had been buried, was instead the bloodiest crime scene in Panhandle history, and so the thoroughly compliant media machine hereabouts just bought the hasty cover story of a religious cult gone berserk, on face value, and moved right on.
Now then, when I found out a couple of weeks ago that a local church which had been running its own self-funded food-handout program once a month for years, has now become in effect a local office for the USDA which (since the election of course) magnanimously stepped in with grant funds to shore up the food program, and that USDA's boss Brooke Rollins is every bit as ambitious a career-builder playing the MAGA brand for all it is worth, as her colleague Kristi Noem is over at Homeland Security, and that both these ladies have enormous powers at their disposal to build up lists of names for future immigration raids and then use this information to pretend to be making America great by rounding up anyone suspected of the crime of Breathing While Latino (and ask questions later, as events in Los Angeles continue to show), you can imagine if you know anything about how my conscience works at all, that I promptly and vociferously dissociated myself with that church right down the street, and then set about doing even more research (already knowing that the dozens of local reporters I reached out to would never reply at all) to prove what I already knew, from having been a Bible-belter all my life:
That nobody in the evangelical industry hereabouts particularly minds the idea of using a house of God as a federal field office, a house of informancy and entrapment upon their neighbors (having first filled out an eight-page federal form for future aid eligibility, introduced by USDA just last month and shoved in the face of everyone coming into God's house for twenty bucks' worth of groceries),
because....
(let's see if I can recite it correctly)
"... these people come over here and take away our jobs and abuse welfare programs and don't even pay any taxes, and most of them are criminals anyway, I heard it on Fox just last night and from the pulpit this morning...'
Exodus 20:16 notwithstanding, apparently.
(That's from the Ten Commandments these hick Republicans want to impose into every classroom, the one that says, thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.)
Defining who is or is not one's neighbor, apparently, is all the moral hand-washing these MAGA cheerleaders require of their Party. Everything else is, as usual, GOP-monopolized business as usual in Oklahoma, and has been for years.
Effectively half our neighbors hereabouts are immigrants. Most of them had come from around the world to work at Seaboard Foods for the best chance of a better life they'd ever known, by (even the Muslim ones) processing tens of thousands of hogs into pork products each day.
Some of these attend local church food banks to help feed their families.
Do the math: Seaboard fires 300 employees on a single day, media from Amarillo to OKC totally ignore this story, Texas and Oklahoma alike have self-enforcement statutes now which no longer require federal assistance in arresting 'aliens' (their word not mine) on any premise or none at all, and now people who have used the food banks for years must suddenly fill out a lengthy federal document to get more canned goods and a sack of flour next time.
Praise The Lord.
What it all means to the rest of the USA?
Call it... Previews of Coming Attractions.
"I'm not sure if evil exists in a spiritual or religious sense. But I know some people do terrible things, and calling it trauma doesn't always cut it for me. Some people are just dangerous. And we need to stop pretending they're not."
What might be the most vexatious factor in assessing the nature of evil is that the assessment is usually framed in either the spiritual or behavioral context, when for my purposes the existence of evil is most readily observed through the lens of ethics, which according to American Heritage Dictionary's primary definition is simply 'a set of principles of right conduct.'
At the risk of kicking up a rhetorical hornet's nest of discussion of what is or is not ethical, or right conduct, my earliest adult lessons in everyday ethics came from those remaining adults in the work force by the late 1970s, who had been of adult age during the prior world war, an era when apparently service for its own sake was regarded as a near-universal mandate.
These old-timers, a far more iconoclastic and even rebellious lot than I would have expected, in their expressed views on the exercises of power that they had been given precious little opportunity to oppose throughout their lifetimes, seemed to sum up the making of choices between right and wrong conduct on a deeply personal level, with two factors as I recall being the anchorages of such a code of conduct:
One was the idea that 'we're all in this together', but in a tone suggesting that power had made it thus and that no one person was in a position to topple power off its pedestal, and so we might jus'well make it as tolerable as we can...
And the other was most often summed up in the phrase 'the next guy' in terms of how we might all achieve something tolerable out of the experience: don't leave a mess for the next guy, don't create extra work for the next guy, don't make it so the next guy can't do his job, etc, etc.
Evil is, for my purposes, manifest in that person who has decided he or she couldn't care less about the next guy. Such results to ensue can be anything from pure un-thorough laziness in cleaning up a bit of broken glass, to shooting up a schoolhouse and breaking even more glass in the bargain.
Parents with any sense of obligation to a larger society their children must learn to coexist with, have to take it upon themselves to try and teach a small child that there is something terribly, terribly wrong with (for instance) leaving a tap on, or a tricycle in the middle of a driveway, while not in the process frightening or even traumatizing an innocent child by insinuating that they themselves had done something evil, or even that they are simply evil for having done such a thing.
Not every parent gets that one quite right. Even with the most innocent of intentions, parents or other caregivers can indeed leave imprints on the young with their reactions to things having gone wrong, which can stick in a young person's memory long past when anyone older can even recall any such thing having occurred. What may appear to an adult, beset with the many and various distractions and obligations of adulthood, as an incident where a child had got into trouble but seems to have 'learned their lesson', can and often does become for the child an intensely formative experience that they go on and live with from then on.
How many times must a child be told they had done something 'bad' (an enormous, terrifying and entirely mysterious concept to a small child), or even that they themselves had BEEN bad, before they start to believe it?
And, in some instances, having been told it, and come to believe it, no longer care?
If right and wrong conduct are framed in terms throughout childhood as actions and even attitudes which define all by themselves who the child is as a person ('gonna find out who's naughty or nice...'), then the record shows that quite a number of people grow up thinking they are just bad, that everybody thinks they are bad, that this is because everyone is bad anyway and just getting away with it on the basis of any number of advantages they might have, that they will never be anything but bad, and that they might actually only get away with being bad over a lifetime by becoming even more skilled at being bad, at the cost of not taking any thought at all as to what might happen to... the next guy.
Hannah Arendt gave us a mighty and deeply instructive clue on the true nature of evil: that there is not necessarily anything on the surface of a person committed to doing evil, which might readily identify them in advance as such. In the case of her study of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her astonishing revelation was that the evil in this man was of little more substance or origin than his unflinching capacity to... do his job, and take little to no thought as to what the doing of it might bring to others. He was, after all, just doing what he had been assigned to do.
Maybe I am a little over-sensitive to this explanation of the presence of evil in everyday life, but any time I hear anyone rationalize an outcome which had brought even the most innocuous degree of harm to The Next Guy by saying, 'I was just doing my job' (or the infinite varieties of such Pontius-Pilate moral hand-washing one encounters on a continual basis), I am on full alert, knowing from long prior experience that there is evil afoot, leaving me only to decide whether I will aid and abet it, call it what it is regardless of the risks to myself, allow it to stand with no effort on my part to counteract it, or simply move along. I have, I am sorry to report, opted for each of these countermeasures at different times in my life, when calling evil evil is the only moral or ethical option every time that I can be at peace with afterward.
As for whether or not people themselves are evil, I leave that for God to decide. And yes, I do believe in one. No, I do not comprehend most of what God does all day. No, God does not consult or answer to me on the business of running all creation. But I do know that to call actions evil is one kind of judgment, and to call persons evil quite another. As much as possible, I try to stick with the former and avoid the latter outright: broken glass on a floor might be the result of the evil of negligence, but to judge the one who left it there as an evil person by definition, even when it is obvious that it was left there intentionally to hurt The Next Guy, will probably only set even more evil actions in motion, and what would I have gained in the process?
Not intentionally or negligently creating trouble or harm or extra labor for The Next Guy has actually served me quite well over a lifetime. But to judge on my own terms whether there is evil inherent in how such a simple ethos seems to be so horribly absent from so many settings in today's world, I will leave that one to God as well.
I have lived under a fairly simple code of conduct for longer than I can remember. Some have even called it The Bikers' Code: don't fuck with me, and I won't fuck with you.
Highly recommended.