Trouble in River City

Glass half-Full is the title of my first novel, published in 2007. The story takes place in the Washington DC area.

In chapter 21, we find that two DC detectives have arrested a suspected rapist, Barney Bluntell. At police headquarters, they are questioning the suspect when they suddenly receive a lot more confession than they had thought possible.

In this scene, Barney the suspect is getting worked up as he answers a few more questions than detectives Trent and Nguyen have asked him:

“You’re damned right.” Barney was on the soap box now, showing his true colors, almost unaware of his prisoner status, lecturing the cops on what would have to be done to get society straightened out.

“And how did you know who these women are…the ones that need to be put in their place?”

“It’s the Jewish women. They started the whole thing. Now its infecting everybody. The men don’t know how to handle their women. They’ve fucked everything up. The Jews started communism. Marx and Lenin were Jews. You know that, don’t you?”

Now Nguyen thought he’d take a chance. “Is that why you bombed the Holocaust Memorial?”

Barney looked at Nguyen, surprised at the question. “That whole damned holocaust never happened. You know that don’t you? They made the whole thing up so they could get sympathy from everybody else…just like the niggers.”

“Oh yeah? What did they do?”

“They didn’t do a damn thing, except pick cotton. The Jews raised a bunch of hell until they got Lincoln and the rest of that nigger-lovin’ crowd worked up enough to fuck the whole country. It’s been a mess ever since then.”

Nguyen’s voice became calm, professorial. “The last time I checked a history book, Barney, it said that it was a bunch of Christian abolitionists who got that movement going.”

But the detective realized he was getting off track. He paused and thought for a moment. “What do you think it’s gonna take to get this country straightened out?”

“It’ll take a major rearrangement of power,” said Barney, now overconfident in his own psychopathic harangue. Having lost sight of the criminal implications of his actions, Barney was misinterpreting Nguyen’s interest in his activities. Barney was not an habitual criminal, but an idealogue who had gotten sucked into a criminal fringe of fascism.  “These days, people don’t know what real power is.”

“What is it?” Nguyen inquired, now spreading the net of inquiry over Barney’s self-laid trap of fanatical egocentrism.

“Power is whatever is taken by those who are unafraid to be strong.” Barney smiled, lost now in his own self-incriminating screed, as if he were talking to himself. “Power is what you are going to see very soon, when the obstructions to it are taken out of the way.”

“What obstructions?”

“The weak and inferior elements. They’re dragging the whole evolution of the human race down. It’s just a matter of time before power will be put back where it belongs. The Jews were the ones who fucked it up to begin with, with their worship of weakness…then the niggers, spicks. Some people were born to be slaves. What we need is a caste system. The Hindus had a few things right, but they missed it on the animals thing, and the untouchables. It’s better to just extinguish them altogether.”

Nguyen looked over at Trent, amazed at the unbridled fanaticism that had just passed from the prisoner’s lips. They were at a loss for words for a minute or more. Derrick Trent stood, stretched, began pacing around at one end of the room. Then he asked, “So that’s why you moved on the Holocaust Museum?”

“That was only a wake-up call. The next time, it’ll be much more effective.”

“Says who?” Trent shot back.

“Says me…and about 100 other people,” declared Barney, not even thinking now of the legal implications of his diatribe.

“How do you know? Were you there?”

“The fuhrer was there.”

Trent stopped his pacing, incredulous.

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What people Dotoeachother

Seems like folks these days are gettin all wound up about politics and stupid stuff like that. Democrats v. Republicans. Progressives v. Conservatives. Extremists v. Moderates, blah blah blah.

And to make it worse, with the intensifying effects of cellphones and pads and pods and whatnot and so-called social media blather, what we are barreling toward is a vast dumbing-down, barbarizing of all public discourse.

What was called debate in earlier times now has degenerated to knee-jerk bluster hubris yada yada blahblah hatred the-loudest-loudmouth-wins trouble.

People take sides on every little controversy that rears its ugly little head in the public domain. Seems to me more like, as William Faulkner or William Shakespeare might have called it, sound and fury signifying nothing.

My studies of human history indicate some recurring characteristics of the tactics employed by extremist diehard yahoos: Such people want to push public discourse farther and farther toward extremist tactics so they can impose their great radical-fringe remedies on the rest of us who want only to live in peace and security with a little justice, mercy and neighborly good will toward our fellow-man thrown in.

I was born in the middle of the 20th-century, 1951. Looking back on all that happened during that century, I’ve noticed a few alarming things, such as:

The two worst 20th-century  assholes who ever came along the pike and pretended to be great leaders—Hitler and Stalin—both of them manipulated evolving political institutions, and the idiot people within them— to make a grand bloody mess of their two nations and the whole damn world at large.

Both dictators, Hitler and Stalin, were idealogues. Historians call Hitler a Nazi, which is a type of Fascist. They call Stalin a Communist.

What’s more important, however, in the historical classification game is this:

Both Hitler and Stalin were mass-murderers. They did not do justice to the people they claimed to govern.

This factual identification is more important than the ideological label by which each of these two demagogues manipulated their bloody way into absolute power.

And they weren’t the only ones. In the 20th-century, there were others: Pol Pot, Idi Amin. Some would say Mao. And onn a small scale. . . Jim Jones, Charles Manson?

This scenario to which I make reference— this human behavior attribute of folks being swept up into murderous behavior by a maniacal leader driven by ideological or religious frenzy that results in mass murder—it could be right around a historical corner now.

If people do not allow the practice of mercy, decency, compassion, reason— and most of all forgiveness— to overpower imminent institutionalized manipulations of bloody power-mongers, then we’ll have another terrible round of mass murder on this planet.

Religion (old-school) and Ideology (new school) are both, when carried to extremes, cut from the same extremist cloth, and can drive people to endorse mass murder.

Don’t go there.

Ideology is a big circle. On one half of the circle is the arc of conservatism, which in its extremism leads to fascism; on the other half is the arc progressivism, which in its extremism leads to communism. They both start their movements at the top of the circle going in opposite directions. But at the bottom where they collide, we find extremism so lethal that it requires mass-murder as a so-called final solution.

You know what I’m talking about: “Somebody needs to kill them bastards!”

Religion, same thing. “Somebody needs to kill them _____” (fill in the blank)

Which is why we must harken to the greatest clarion call of all, the one spoken by the man from Galilee who stood on a mountainside and taught us:

“Whatever you would want done to you—do that for everybody else.”

This is the most important principle of all. Far greater  than communism or fascism, far more effectual than Democratic or Republican power-mongering, far more spiritually effective that the Church or the Caliphate.

Peace on this planet ultimately comes down to what people are willing to do–or refuse to do– to each other in the name of  _______.

You fill in the blank.

King of Soul