COUNTERFEIT PARADISE

 

by Mark Hackard 

Along with another round of Beltway scandal and misdeeds in the Middle East, this spring has seen the United States once again consumed by debate over homosexual "marriage," with the US Supreme Court deciding upon the constitutionality of legislation banning the phenomenon. And the Supreme Court, thought the final arbiter in all the great moral issues facing our nation, must be obeyed lest a new crisis threaten the very fabric of our republic. Sacred liberty and equality shall be venerated no matter the cost in ruined souls or innocent blood- Roe v. Wade, forty years and fifty million aborted infants later, affirms this imperative. Our way of life is protected by a worldwide imperium, and soon the airborne drones that prowl over the Hindu Kush and the Gulf of Aden will assume their vigil in the skies of American cities.

Yet the heart revolts against such infernal bargains. America is a land of immense blessings, but it is also the home of infomercials, pyramid schemes and the prosperity gospel. A trusting people embraced fraudulent ideals as their own. Is it too much to conceive that the enlightened republic has been a political expression of the West's headlong rush into apostasy? We all have seen the wages of the philosophes' liberty and equality; the crystal palace of reason is strewn with filth and decay.

Whatever the nine elders of the Court might decide on gay nuptials, sexual deviance has already been enshrined as a sacrament in Western society, and this transformation is far from accidental. News headlines in unconcealed jubilation announce that a majority of Americans now favor same-sex unions. The media corporations have certainly earned their moment of triumph, for in conjunction with academia, big business and bureaucracy, they have attained this victory through decades of ceaseless psychological warfare. More to the point, liquidating any traces of popular morality has been a profitable enterprise; US citizens pay for their families to be subverted through tax dollars, monthly cable fees, movie tickets and college tuition. While a dwindling number of retrogrades refuse to play their assigned role in this grotesque vaudeville, across the space of a generation campaigns for every sort of "right" to transgression act to further corrupt the masses.

"It wasn't supposed to turn out this way," assume many of the earnest and patriotic among us, watching in dismay as the pride parade makes its annual march down Main Street. These "Tea Party" conservatives seek to "take back our country" and restore national purpose, blind to the fact that America's exalted purpose has always been revolution against higher order. The founders may have been men of moderate temperament and even generous in virtue, but the ideology they set loose upon the world has proven a virulent force of destruction. Traditional identity must be swallowed by a carnal materialism deftly managed through entire sectors of the economy. None of this was a tragic detour, but rather the foreseeable consequence of pluralist civic faith.

Modern man, proclaimed free and equal, is ultimately reduced to the sum of his lower drives; he is taught to forsake God (or better yet, subordinate Him to earthly whims) and forget his ancestors in favor of an illusory progress through self-will. Thomas Jefferson quaintly recommended in his Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments that practitioners of sodomy be castrated. Yet the core political principles Jefferson and his peers championed have led directly to the establishment of perverse sexuality as a social institution. Homo Americanus bills himself as the apex of civilization, though he is more a wayward creature meriting our pity.

Considering ourselves fortunate for the friends, neighbors and strangers who are a credit to their country, we are also presented daily with the image of the socially engineered man: derisive of higher truth in favor of utility and cash-value, divorced from family and the generations preceding him and ever in search of pleasure, novelty and entertainment. He declares the primacy of his reason and glories in technical development, but at the mercy of the passions, his personality disintegrates. Homosexuality is just one of many analogous phenomena, yet it stands as an obvious case in point. Drug use, venereal disease and suicide exact a disproportionate toll among gays due not so much to social hardships and "discrimination" as to the liberation of utterly poisonous desires that wreak havoc on the psyche and soul. There has been no surer and more durable way of progressively annihilating the human form than liberal humanism.

Liberalism is the exoteric religion of the financial oligarchs, the high priests of Mammon who rule the West.  Appealing to the vanity and self-regard of the profane, they manufacture consent by way of elections, propaganda and all manner of distractive spectacle. Manipulation of the popular consciousness, a black art honed to new levels of refinement over the last century, is now accomplished through electronic memes and quite literal programming in television, music and film. An inverted hierarchy will promote inverted values. Who among us today honors saints and warriors past as heroes worthy of our emulation? Under the usury bankster regime, we instead offer adoration to the savage and the harlot.

A mass of properly conditioned "individuals," told they are the sovereign People, are only too eager to conform their worldview to applied media stimuli. As theorists from cultural Bolshevik Wilhelm Reich to Madison Avenue's Eddie Bernays understood well, sexual deviance serves as a weapon to sabotage traditional culture, thus inaugurating the reign of equality. Grace is furnished in abundance through one's support for the latest cause celebre. And so marriage is a civil contract, fornication is carefree fun and sodomy is beautiful; no one shall be denied the right to love! Democracy has shown itself the most effective instrument of social control and evolution the Money Power can buy.

Beyond their initial thrill, celebrants at the orgiastic Festival of Liberty might care to take notice as the atmosphere grows ever more sinister. The spiritual disorder brought on by the rule of the passions, a condition that typifies democracy, is inevitably manifested within the polis as anarchy. Lest we forget, the mysteries of Dionysus transition seamlessly from the ecstasy of free copulation to the ecstasy of slaughter. The dark gods of apostate modern man demand sacrifice - something Tony Sanchez, drug dealer for the Rolling Stones, could realize at the band's blood-soaked concert on the Altamont Raceway in 1969:

[The crowds] were impelled, as if by some supernatural force, to offer themselves as human sacrifices to these agents of Satan. The violence transcended all comprehension; it had become some primeval ritual; the victims were no longer merely tolerating pain and evil and bestiality but were actively collaborating in it. And now the pounding voodoo drumming and the primitive shrieks echoed out and the Stones were into their song of homage to the Antichrist. Another sacrificially naked girl climbed onto the stage, and six Hell's Angels leaped on her at once to toss her from the stage like so much human rubbish.

Total human liberation brings about enslavement to a kingdom of death. The operations of Postmodern Empire could indeed be set to Sympathy for the Devil, complete with a highlight reel of aggressive war, school massacres, riots and bombings, all interposed with the newest samples of pop-subversion from the media-entertainment complex. Trumpeting aloud our freedom from divine order, we devour each other as beasts and forfeit the divine image, manageable only through coercion, amusement and indoctrination. Our deluded masters deign to channel the chaos they've summoned and so proceed to implement tyranny, the universal Pleasure-Dome Police State. 

A cosmopolitan, sexually omnivorous market system delivers us the infrastructure for a "happy" oblivion, but never will salvation be found in Babylon. Mortality's shadow lengthens pitilessly, paying no heed to our vain designs. All the vast power of the oligarchy will be ground to dust, and this proud counterfeit paradise reduced to ashes before the face of eternity.  In the battle with sin, each man can do no better than to forgive and ask forgiveness[i], for dread judgment will come for us all. May noble mercy, love for neighbor and the iron discipline of repentance strengthen us in our trials. Like Tsar Lazar's brave knights at Kosovo Field, take joy in Our Lord Christ, He Who overcame the world and smashed the gates of hell:

O compatriots and comrades in arms, let us take up the hardships of the soldiers of days gone by who are now dwelling with Christ, so that we may be glorified with Christ also. We are a single human nature exposed to the same passions; let there also be a single grave for us, a single field to receive our bodies and bones, so that the radiant paradise of Eden may receive us. 

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[i] Nikolai Velimirovic: For a slave, the most difficult act is to forgive; but for a victor, the act of forgiving is already part of his victory, inseparable from his victory...Jesus, Conqueror of death, have mercy on me.