The Sieg-Heiliotropists

I Rule Your World.

"Sieg Heil"
German phrase, which literally means "Hail [to] Victory." During the Nazi era, it was a common chant at political rallies.

“heliotropism”
noun: phototropism in which sunlight is the orienting stimulus

Not so very long ago I chanced to be in the company of a veritable Jeroboam of the chatty and the clever and the subject turned (as it often does) to philosophy. Specifically to the enduring problem of finding a system in which different peoples and faiths can co-exist.

I listened for awhile, sympathetically, as men and women played with the problem of building a system that

1. Tolerates differences.

2. Can be sustained by an assertion of superior morality that can survive challenges by hostile, competing systems.

3. Understands that tolerance has its limits and has exception clauses that allows the citizenry to act as antibodies when the fascists roll tanks in the streets.

I listened with kindness as I had a hundred other times and wound up returning to the same place I have returned to a hundred times before.

With the realization that this is not a software problem.

Almost any system or hybrid can be made to work on paper. You can yoke capitalism to the plow of common good and make the fields green. You can make a socialism where the gifted and the industrious still do better by virtue of their labors. And a Jesuit with a gifted tongue and naughty turn of mind can make a friendly and receptive Atheist scream “Oh. My. God.” with such sky-rending sincerity as would make Baby Jebus smile.

Because between the angelic and bestial poles implied within James Madison’s famous quote -- "If all men were angels there would be no need laws much less for government.” – you’ll find real people.

You’ll find all of us pervy, frightened little angels with flawed intentions.

And with equal helpings of humor, discipline and reciprocity, most of us can make most systems work most of the time.

But not all of us. Not all of us.

And that is the bitter, epiphanic cup which too many of us choose to let pass on by.

Because we want to believe that there must be a better tool, a more perfect voting machine, a more compelling narrative that can be wrapped around the bare, blinding facts of Evolution which will (as I have written before) compel “Conservative Christopaths to grow opposable thumbs en masse, climb down out of the Stupid Tree and stop believing dangerously lunatic trash.”

But there isn’t.

And while all of those are perfectly good ends in themselves, there are no upgrades, patches or new releases that can bulletproof a system against the malevolent intentions of those who come with fascism burned on the board.

The predicament which faces us – which has always faced us – is predominantly a hardware, not a software problem, which is why I suspect we were never promised anything but a more perfect union.

Because no matter how elegant your solution looks in the dorm room or in the Upper Room, there will always be men who will butcher, slag and pervert any system to serve the shadows.

The Sieg-Heiliotropists who strengthen only as they bask in dark energy of Authoritarianism, and bend and breed only in the direction of the totalitarian.

Those who will deliberately claw their way to the highest offices a constitutional democracy can offer in order to better rape and raze that carefully constructed system of checks and balances

so they can build a corporate slaughterhouse on its bones.

Those who will methodically debase and pulverize one of the most radically liberal, compassionate and explicitly altruistic faiths on Earth and sift the rubble to “prove” to themselves that Christ was really --



-- a lily-white, lard-assed, illiterate, queer-hating, ‘Murrican bigot whose greatest beatitude was “Blessed are the swinishly privileged, for they shall inherit…every fucking thing”

And those who will

cheer them on.

I believe that if you examine the long road Modern Conservatives have traveled to come to be where they are today, what you will find most striking and depressing is the degree to which their fundamental ideology has not changed one fucking iota over the centuries.

That the problem with America is not to be found in the -Ism of the Month – in what color Conservatives are choosing to paint their pulpits this generation, or which group they expeditiously choose to hate and blame for the misery of their lives.

The problem is deeper than that. Sadder than that.

Brief driftglass aside --

Until I finally realized that the hard-core Modern Conservative is simply not curable by facts and reason, I used to keep a copy of the “Cornerstone Speech” handy. It is the perfect Anti-Second Inaugural: one of the most famous public declarations of Confederate ideology and intent, delivered by the Vice President of the traitorous CSA himself -- Alexander H. Stephens -- on March 21, 1861.

I kept it on hand as an easy and instant rebuttal to grubby, little wingnut revisionist who wanted to blat on about the abstraction of “state’s rights” being the real cause for the Civil War, and not the concrete and evil manifestation of Original American Sin that was slavery.

Stephens obligingly laid that ridiculous notion to rest over 140 years ago when he said:

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact.
…”

The long dead and unlamented Stephens could not possibly have been any clearer: These were butchers, terrorists and fascists who were fighting for their right to remain unapologetically malevolence and to reap the substantial economic and psychological windfalls of their evil system forever.

-- end brief driftglass aside.

But what makes the speech an epic American tragedy is how its loathsome themes have remained a clear and constant refrain for the same people, fighting for some mutation of the same cause, with the same fervor almost a century and a half later.

It is, for them, always a crisp, pre-battle dawn on the Plaines of Meggido, Georgia.

“I was remarking that we are passing through one of the greatest revolutions in the annals of the world. Seven States have within the last three months thrown off an old government and formed a new.”

And God is always on their side of their filthy enterprise.

“They [The North] were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.”

“With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator.”

As with Bush and his delusional “history will vindicate me” alibi for both the catastrophe he has unleashed in Iraq and the unwavering Nixon/Watergate level of loathing he has earned from the majority of Americans, the traitors of the South also argued that the tidal force of history was on their side and they could therefore safely disregard all criticism:

“As I have stated, the truth of this principle may be slow in development, as all truths are and ever have been, in the various branches of science. It was so with the principles announced by Galileo—it was so with Adam Smith and his principles of political economy. … May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests? It is the first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. …With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”

And as with all blood-caked tyrannies who swaddle their malevolence in the mantle of Heaven, they make loud and preemptive assertions that everyone else on the face of the Earth disagrees with them is simply insane.

Consider that the people who hunted Clinton like a wild boar for seven years and cheered hysterically for his impeachment over trivial are now exactly the same people screaming “Bush Derangement Syndrome” whenever anyone even questions their Dear Leader’s infallibility.

Now note how eerily similar those philosophical grandchildren of the degenerate Confederacy sound to its Vice President as he dismisses anyone and everyone who believes that slavery is not a noble institution ordained by God:

“Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics…

“All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind—from a defect in reasoning.

“It is a species of insanity.

“One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics.”

Same as it ever was.

Same as it ever was.

Because, in the end, our problem lies not on our stars or systems, but in ourselves.

In the end, our problem is not that democratic institutions themselves require any substantive modification, but simply that around a quarter of the inhabitants of the United States desperately want to get rid of our pesky Constitutional republic and replace it with a nice, tidy, white, Christian police state.

That around a quarter of our fellow citizens are intractably Sieg-Heiliotropic, and as such are fundamentally and permanently unfit to be Americans.