The Dazzling Meteor

One night, long long ago, my best friend Jim and I were drinking from a half-gallon bottle of Bacardi's 151 rum and cruising around looking for mischief.  Nothing illegal mind you, just the drunken shenanigans of two teenaged buddies out for a night on somebody else's town, swilling someone else's booze, driving someone else's car.                              

It was a warm summer night, clear starry sky and clean air, pitch dark away from the streetlights, quiet as an empty church, and we were the only car on the road wherever we went.  The old green '52 Plymouth purred under us like a contented 4200 lb. tiger.  We were young, strong, happy, full'a rum, with 20 bucks between us.  We felt like godlings.                               

By 4:00 a.m., we'd done most of the slightly dangerous things like crashing a college party,  getting kicked out of a few bars for being obnoxious (but not before they sold us many beers, of course), watching some  back-alley gamblers (no abortions though, alas) who wanted us to shoot craps,  and teasing the cops who had stopped someone else (Ha Ha!).  We were out of legal fun, still loaded, and money short, so we drove down to the riverside to relax, watch the water, chat pompously, and slog down more warm red rum.             

 The moon was a tiny slip of its full glory, but the lights of the city reflected on the waves so we could see the water quite well.  This wasn't the first time we'd sought the comfort of philosophy (the sport of the idle and vain) at the dissipated end of our decadent pursuits.  We knew every intellectual refuge along the river where we could discuss life, the world, the  cosmos, and similar grandiose topics without interruption, or disturbing others with our loud arguments and huge rhetorical gesticulations.  We were the only two people in this particular park at the foot of  Woodward Ave.

In just 15 or 20 minutes we were laughing loudly, making knee-slapping jokes about colliding galaxies and sub-atomic particle experiments, guffawing over clear errors in the number-set theories we were learning about in school, arguing over the etymology of the Latin verbs we were drunkenly declining.  Typical teenage fare.             

I tilted my head back and, as I took another swig of firewater, I noticed a strange line of light in the sky.  It was getting longer with every passing second.  I pointed up and said, "What the #@!$%& is THAT?"  Jim looked up, and we watched it in silence.            

In no time it grew into a sizeable fireball with a long tail, just like a comet.  We were hypnotized.  Then POW!!  It seemed to explode, filling the sky with blue light!  Again POW!! Bright green light!  POW!! Yellow light so intense we had to look away!  The whole area was lit up with the clear color!  POW!! Orange light everywhere!  POW!! Red light as far as we could see in every direction!  Then WHAM!!!  It went off like a gigantic flashbulb, and pure white light filled the whole landscape!  'Way, 'way brighter than the brightest day, the landscape was lit from every direction at once. I could see for miles up the main street.  There were no shadows anywhere!  Huge buildings were lit on every side.  There was even bright white light under the car!  Nothing like this had ever happened before, it was a completely unique moment in our lives.  Every square inch of our world was lit up with a celestial light from outer space!  It was like a miracle!                         

And then it was over.  We looked up and watched the glowing embers head off toward the horizon and then vanish.  We were speechless.  Everything was different somehow.                  

An old black man, hidden until then by the darkness, leaped out from behind some large bushes, yelling wildly about the ".....End Of The World!"  He quickly gathered up his fishing supplies, threw them in the back of his shabby truck, and sped off into the night, screaming hysterically about the ".....Stars Falling From The Skies!!" and ".....The Second Coming Of Jesus!!!"                        

Jim and I were budding Atheists, freshly freed from the traditional iron grip of Catholicism, so we didn't think it was God's doing.  But it certainly disrupted the confidence we had in the stability of our everyday world.  To this day it remains one of the most defining experiences of my entire life:  Deep night had been turned into the brightest day of all time, and a Cosmic Brilliance had driven the darkness and shadows from my psyche.  I saw life on Earth in a whole new light.  (I have to interject here that neither Jim nor I ever developed any super-powers from this incident, ........ Crap!!)                

It's too bad that these things don't happen to more people.  It's particularly sad that there's no such Illumination  in the Dark Night of the Liberal Soul.

Liberals scuttle about in a darkness of their own making, viewing life through hate-colored glasses.  Beset by enemies on every side, they battle phantoms borne from their own gloomy fantasies: vaporous  Republican creatures that hold minorities down;  nebulous monsters that  rape women and children; horrible spirits of homophobia, sexism, and Social Injustice.  Liberal Utopianism is plagued by a demonic "zero-sum game" wherein the noble proletariat remains poor only because the evil bourgeoisie are too rich (and 'way too selfish) to share their wealth. A vast Right Wing Conspiracy bedevils their splendid New Democrat/Third Way Messiah at every turn, sabotaging the great march of Progressive History from horrid Capitalism to glorious Inevitable Utopia.  Huge corporations despoil Nature and dehumanize the weak.  Injustice prevails, the dank specter of multi-national profit-taking threatens Universal ReDistribution, the  malignant malodorous haints of self-reliance threaten "The Village" (yes, like in The Prisoner) at its very core, and the great goal, the International Liberal Utopia itself,  hangs precariously in the balance between the forces of Bad and Good (Democrats, of course, being Good).  They wake up in the morning, look out the window, and see a country so evil that it must be destroyed, restructured into a Politically Corrected Wonderland with no trace of its malevolent past to be found.             

Democrats are just too stupid to see that all these phantasms are merely products of their own crazed psyches.  Like vampires, werewolves, devils, ghosts, witches, trolls and patchwork men, the forces that threaten the Democrats' Dream are just metaphors for the elements in their own collective mind.  Like the weird and fabulous monsters in a Buddhist mandala, they represent the components of the Liberals' common mental grammar, inner forces that occupy the Leftists' common mental landscape, not real creatures in the outer world.                    

When we apply these inner values to outer people, it's like dressing children up in Halloween costumes, turning them into the things we fear most:  creatures of supernatural scope and power.  They live in the night, illuminated only by the flickering, menacing pumpkins (carved into spooky faces) we put at our door to repel (and attract) them.  We fear them and need them at the same time, because they're US.                

If not for the demons, WE create all the evils in our own lives.  Democrats can't see this obvious 'mirror principle.'  In this denial, Democrats don't see how Liberalism created all the poor people it defends from the rich.  They can't see how their own cries of  racism and sexism actually constitute and create racism and sexism.  On one occasion, a Liberal friend told me, "The intolerance of intolerance is not intolerance.  Bigotry against bigotry is not bigotry.  In this way I can accuse you, but you can't accuse me.  If I condemn you, I'm right.  If you condemn me, you're wrong.  My anger is righteous and yours is evil because I want the right things for other people, you want the wrong things.  It's as simple as that. If you hate me, it's because you're evil.  If I hate you, it's because you're evil."  They just don't see how their good hearts can accomplish such evils in the world, so it must be the morally incorrect machinations of supernaturally powerful evil enemies.  Like the Republicans.                          

    Good Hate versus Bad Hate.           

The inability to see their own hate as a bad thing is the darkness in the Liberal soul.  "Good Hate" is the sinister illusion that prevails in the Liberal heart, keeping it black as the deepest night.  They spew the nastiest bile and venom in every direction, but for all the right reasons, of course.  Their rage over the "plight" of the _____________ (fill in the blank with:  blacks, gays, women, poor, illegal immigrant farm workers, indians, children, oppressed, uninsured, Pacific islanders, animals, hispanics, whales, and a thousand more victims of "Conservatism") gives them the perceived right to call Republicans every horrid name in the book (such as Nazis, murderers and the like), to loudly break in on the closed meetings of government, make death threats, undermine every social solution from the Right, take over college buildings, riot, loot, burn, mischaracterize the intentions of their enemies, lie outright about everything they don't like, and walk away from their Hate, remaining pure as the driven snow.  By accusing Republicans of "being negative!" they transfer all the pure evil inherent in their own actions to someone else.  Let's face it, the Democrats created today's poor with their 35 year "war on poverty."  The Democrats created the gangs and street drugwars of today with a 35 year breeding program (called "welfare") which created more children than our society could safely accommodate with schools or jobs.  In fact, there's no one problem about which the Democrats complain which has not been created by the Democrats themselves!  Over and over again, they screw things up then blame someone else (like "the Wealthy" or the "Republican special interests" as if the special interests of the Democrats aren't special interests at all).  Everyone else is "mean spirited," cries of Nazism aren't.  

No light ever went "on" for the Democrats.  They've never seen beyond their own darkness.  They're vain, if not worse than vain.  There's no problem they can't solve (if only by making it worse), they're on the "just" side of every issue (it's self-evident to them), and everything would be fine if we (the taxpayers) just gave them more "Federal Money" to enact their new programs.  And if we say "NO!" then we're the bad guys, we're evil.                           

Because the Democrats are unenlightened,  this absurd situation will go on forever.  Their low-minded vain zeal will not allow them to stop.  The darkness of their soul is permanent, there's no waking them up.  They're perfectly happy in their own eternal slumber.  They don't even want to wake up.           

The American Left is crazy. Even worse than crazy, they're absolutely  insane.  Madness creates Democrats, Democrats create madness.  It's a Mobius loop of lunacy.  A morbid ballet of good hate, performed in the dark night of the Liberal soul.           

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