Another week, another lashing out at the government.  Though Bedell is dumbly reported as a right-wing teabagger, citing his manifesto, the manifesto was actually published in 2006, during the Bush presidency.  Basically, he’s a Zeitgeister:

This seizure of the United States government by an international criminal conspiracy is a long-established reality. The murder of the United States President in 1963, the associated murders and institutional subversion, and the manipulation of official inquiries and public opinion, was effected by individuals within organizational structures that play a central role in the United States government up to the present day. The coup regime founded with the murder of President John Kennedy utilizes a number of mechanisms to perpetuate its criminal rule.

In other words, his worldview, absent the psychotic break, is not entirely far off from my own.  What this makes me think about is how much the writing here could look deranged and maniacal if viewed through a certain prism.  I always feel this way when an act of violence occurs that mimics something I’ve written.  My first novel, The Golden Calf, is about a celebrity stalker who writes hate mail to a college student and a celebrity.  Sounds like the maniacal manifestos of any real-life lunatic.  If I were every to do anything – hypothetically, please, because I’m a wuss when it comes to actual violence, I get out my revenge on paper – the books I’ve written would seem like clues.

The same could be said for anyone who writes about darker subjects.  And one of the damaging things reaped by a person like John Patrick Bedell or Joe Stack is that while they call attention to certain ideas, they also make it seem like certain ideas are the purview of lunatics.  Doesn’t do someone like David Ray Griffin any good.  So they destroy more than whatever it is they set out to destroy in a violent act. If you read John Patrick Bedell’s blog entries they’re a strange mixture of total clarity and precision while also being unintelligible.  Cold and distant, no sense of personality comes through. even if some of his ideas aren’t totally off-base.  The guy was plainly mentally ill and used these ideas as a springboard.

There is a basic conflict in the world today between the power of organizations and the liberty of individuals. The greatest achievements of human societies have historically been linked to the freedom of individuals to pursue their unique course. Human liberty has a spiritual benefit for individuals that can easily be overlooked, but it also has a profoundly beneficial economic effect for societies. Ample historical evidence, supported by economic insights, demonstrates that the economic and cultural progress of free societies with secure property rights is unparalleled by that produced by other forms of government.

His writing is really hard to get your head around.  Makes enough sense sentence by sentence, but also seems to be missing a circuit.  Of course that may be hindsight.

What this also brings forward is what celebrity means in the digital age. People have always committed crimes to be famous (Mark David Chapman).  But now that fame is both more instant and more permanent.  In an instant, his Youtube video is getting views, people are going to his Sourceforge page, even looking at his Amazon wishlist (I realize I’m helping these go viral). It is profoundly eerie that I could get more attention for my writing in an instant by doing something horrible than I could ever do by going a more-human route. Again, that’s a hypothetical and worth a short story in itself.

There’s no reason to think these things won’t start happening with more and more regularity – with each new one giving an extra license for the next.  Even mainstream personalities like Michael Moore decry the corporate takeover of the government.  Does that make him a lunatic?  No, it’s not a minority view, and it’s growing on both the far left and the far right.  If the current structure is actually leading to the demise of the planet and entire societies, it’s not lunacy to try to stop that from occurring.  So far, though, it’s the lunatics who have taken action with totally self-defeating and purposeless events.  All they do is increase the sense of breakdown.

The media sucks so much that the right has been given the “outrage” mantle, when the left is just as outraged at the state of government.  Maybe if the left and right could see where they overlap and not devolve into hyperbole (Obama is Hitler) a true populist movement could emerge.  And maybe these acts of violence wouldn’t have to happen because the outrage would have a targeted voice, and wouldn’t just come off as a tantrum.  So far these violent acts have the intellectual weight of the stupidest of teabagger signs:

or

I find someone who writes a sign like that a low-grade lunatic.  They’re a reflection of the dissolution of the country as much as the government they’re protesting against.  Not holding my breath for these protest movements to suddenly get reasonable.

Posted on March 6, 2010 at 2:13 pm
http://www.theamericanbookofthedead.com/2010/03/06/john-patrick-bedellpentagon-shooter/
Categorized under: Blog
Tags: Dystopia