…A circus complete with all fools
Foundations that lasted the ages
Then ripped apart at their roots
Beyond all this good is the terror
The grip of a mercenary hand
When savagery turns all good reason
There’s no turning back, no last stand
Heart and soul, one will burn
Heart and soul, one will burn
In Daniel Flynn’s column last week, over at The American Spectator, we see several example of the sur-reality machine at work.
Rather than accept the reality that a “silly little Communist,” as Jacqueline Kennedy aptly put it, killed the president, great numbers of small people weave elaborate, politically flattering fictions that usually involve dark cabals comprised of caricatures of those they hate most—shadowy intelligence operatives, ribbon-chested devotees of the military-industrial complex, Texas oil millionaires, etc. This is a form of narcissism, in which one’s own devils become the devil figures for larger-than-life leaders.
And…
In the aftermath of the deaths of more than 900 followers of Jim Jones in Guyana 35 years ago this week, many Americans drank the Kool-Aid on Jonestown. A vague understanding arose that the carnage represented a cautionary tale about the dangers of fundamentalist Christianity. But Jim Jones preached “apostolic socialism” and stomped on the Bible in front of his flock. The Peoples Temple didn’t believe in Jesus. They believed in Jim.
And Jim believed in communism, hence the commune Jonestown. “The temple was as much a left-wing political crusade as a church,” the Nation honestly reported at the time. “In the course of the 1970s, its social program grew steadily more disaffiliated from what Jim Jones came to regard as ‘Fascist America’ and drifted rapidly toward outspoken Communist sympathies.”
Despite this, within Democratic circles pilgrimages to meet Father Jim became obligatory, with Rosalynn Carter, her husband’s running mate Walter Mondale, and California Governor Jerry Brown among those who legitimized Jones by meeting with him. Willie Brown, later speaker of the state assembly and mayor of San Francisco, compared Jones to Martin Luther King and Albert Einstein.
Immediately after willing their fortune to the Soviet Union, the people of the Peoples Temple became the only socialist community to achieve their stated objectives. “We should be happy,” one woman announced in the final moments at Jonestown. “At least I am. Let’s all be the same.” In death, they achieved complete equality.
They achieved Nirvanna!
As every facet of Leftist Thinking is Anti-Life, Nihilism writ large, it should not surprise us that, ultimately, the Left desires the death of all things. Of course, being Human, they desire such an end to come about in a grand Gotterdammerung of their own design, an orgiastic triumph of The Culture Of Death.
Heart and Soul: Both will burn.
