The Lost World of Michael Bywater: Hate springs eternal (Super Barf/Deranged Leftist Limey ALerts)

The Independent on Sunday (by way of Look Smart) ^ | Mar. 30 2003 | Michael Bywater

[Jacob Kell]

It's that horrible moment when it all comes to a head. You finally know that you were wrong. You know that you were right, too, that things weren't as they seemed, that one day you would come and there she would be, beneath him on the bed, splayed like a starfish, like an exploding constellation, crying out too, but not to you.

Even in the full tide of horror, you are astonished at how unsurprised you are. Because you knew. All along, you knew.

In my case, it was a love affair that had been going on since I was, I suppose, six or seven years old. I took it for granted, but don't you always take it for granted? Even though the signs were there - the bad food, the swaggering, the boasting, the bullying, the sentimentality, the indescribable self-absorption, the narrow- mindedness masquerading as open-mindedness, the hypocrisy, the insane spending habits, the shouting and posturing and foot-stamping and hysterics - I thought (when I thought at all; when I wasn't just being seduced) that they were just the other side of the coin, the necessary preconditions for the energy, the fun, the things, the good times and the endless possibilities and the pure glamour.

I was wrong. I was wrong all the time, and it was always heading for this. This was the necessary destination, all along.

But between knowing it and accepting it lies an indefinite cauldron of anger. It's not so much what one is angry about that is so corrosive; it's the being angry. Whatever happens next - life will return to normal, I suppose, because that's what life does - I hate hating.

I hate hating Frank Pierson, president of the Academy (set up originally as a union-busting cartel), when he said of the Oscars that, "At a time when American culture and values are under attack all over the world, we think it is more important than ever that we honour those achievements that reflect us and America at our best." Really? Acting? Making up expensive simplistic lies and selling them to the world? Farting about in disguises and persuading people it's important? Characterising the rest of the world as your inferiors, perverting history to your own aggrandizement? Cheating and lying? Really?

I hate hating a religious fundamentalism as imbecilic as any Bedouin peasant's, complete with epiphenomena (they see angels; they see the embodiment of Death at the bed's foot; they plunder ancient cultures for the soft, sweet bits and call it New Age) incorporate de facto (though never de jure) into the world's most powerful government, when in a civilised state a deeply held religious faith should act as an absolute bar to public office of any kind.

I hate hating something which calls itself a peace-loving nation when I can't remember a time when it wasn't bombing people somewhere; at something which mouths platitudes about a pluralism which in truth it hates; which claims belief in individual choice yet has an anti- abortion clause in its bidding conditions for companies which want to get rich rebuilding the things which it itself has destroyed.

I hate hating its harassment of peaceful demonstrators at Fairford, hovering helicopters over them at 50ft to drown out the free speech written into its "Constitution". I hate being "defended" by people who we don't want here, against... against whom? Who are our enemies, other than those they have brought down on us? Isn't this just an old-style protection racket ("Nice country. Be a real shame if anything was to happen to it")?

I hate hating the swaggering youths, fed to bull-size on burgers and Michelob, swaggering round Amsterdam's Walletjes seeing only whores ("You want her, go screw her, man!") while the ancient liberal civilities underpinning it go wholly unseen.

I hate hating Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating in his baseball cap with his rock music, and "Tommy" Franks for allowing himself to be called "Tommy" and for his pounds 200,000 film set in the Al-Safiyah - what else could that money have bought? - and for the dishonest elision of his morality and language.

I hate hating those who say "this will be different from any war ever seen" when it is not a war, and it is not different but the same: the same tattered prisoners, the same dead hands, the same scared kids.

I hate hating the Sun when it says "At The Mercy Of Savages" which should refer to those who take their world-view from its pages.

I hate hating the very idea of America when once I loved the very idea of America (or at least the Brand America it sold me) of space and light and freedom and opportunity. I hate hating my American friends wondering if I hate them for being American.

I hate hating. Like the betrayed lover, I want the hate to stop and I want it all to be all right again. I want her to kick him out of the house and say it was all a mistake, it will never happen again, it will be just as it was. I want to believe her. I want America back. But I know that that America never existed.

It's over. And only the hating remains. n

Copyright 2003 Independent Newspapers UK Limited

[Jacob Kell]

Who is this Michael Bywater guy? It sounds to me like in some cases, BDS can mutate or transform into ADS, or America (or American) Derangement Syndrome.

[Jaysun]

WTF is this nut talking about? It's hard for me to follow.

[Trailerpark Badass]

LOL, put some ice on it, sweetie!

[oneamericanvoice]

Michael Bywater probably has a bumper sticker that says, "Mean people suck" right next to the one that says,"Erase hate".

The car is probably a Prius.

[Jaysun]

Michael Bywater probably has a bumper sticker that says, "Mean people suck" right next to the one that says,"Erase hate".

The car is probably a Prius.

Indeed. I'm sure those stickers are right next to his "Free Tibet" and "The Daily Kos Rocks!" stickers. I'm sure he has a rainbow air freshener hanging from his rear-view mirror and a f**king bobble-head Che on his dash.

[Blind Eye Jones]

Seems this youth is enjoying his own hate filled emissions -- poisonous poetic anti-American vapors of the hate hating hate kind of hate -- the drama queen wouldn't want it any other way.

[Rurudyne]

People can love an illusion––like the one wrought by drug addled beatniks and hippies and latter-day progressives posing as "liberals"––and they can hate a delusion––calling American "conservatives" warmongering fascist when such should be seen as both ultra-liberal and sober with respect to the innate limitations of human institutions, centralized governance and internationalism.

Progressives are deluded because they are in fact not "liberal," but are merely "radical" (at best). They are radical because they accept the same Enlightenment notions about the capacity of Persons and governments to achieve that has poisoned the world since the French Revolution and has propagated most every modern horror from the French Terrors, through the rise of Fascism and the cancers of Socialism and Communism.

Progressives accept the same first principals and are ultimately no different from that which they hate.

Let it not be forgotten that it was the Civil War and Reconstruction Era Republicans who were the font that first spewed this poison into our own nation ... for while many were Republicans from the honest desire to do something about slavery, a great many were Republicans because they were for the primacy of the Federal over the States: for the transformation of our government founded on the collected genius of the true greatest generation into another KIND of government, one like all the other insipid governments of the fatuous nations roundabout: these radicals even included those who (like contemporary Justices Field, Bradley and Chief Justice Swayne) deemed their desired ends––based on a fatuous assumption of moral necessity––to demand that we should be a nation ruled by what government can get away with rather than Laws (in his lonely Slaughterhouse dissent, Justice Bradley even goes so far as to imply that the activities of a legislature are not proper "Due Process").

And then the Democrats embraced this radicalism and have since become even more republican than the real Republicans. Enough so that they are sickening: posturing over "social justice" even as they champion genuine injustices like the wholesale theft of the People's means for their petty schemes and the American holocaust––now amounting to about a 10% reduction in the population we might have had otherwise.

If that radical social and political phenomena was the delusion that the writer "loved" then the sooner we can disabuse him of it the better for us!

[singfreedom]

This rant sounds just as deranged as the letters I used to get from my ex when he was incarcerated in the state mental hospital. He would be in the full blown throes of his medically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and would have refused to take his medication. Like all paranoid schizos he would periodically decide it was everyone else who should be on medication and HE was perfectly sane.

This poor fellow seems to be suffering from the same untreated delusions. He needs to see a shrink--yesterday.

[Rurudyne]

And yet is irrational bitterness is mirrored in so many: from George Soros on down to the average uber-offensenitive that populate the true believer wing of the DNC.

And here too, we see these taking steps through institutions like the government and certain "medical" or "legal" associations to make themselves the norm and commit all the sane people to virtual (if not factual) asylums.

Pardon my bile, but maybe we need to start calling them out in accordance to their madness. Civic peace and prosperity and not so seemly, not so comely that we should mutely endure them; but rather we should resist them with vigor, never accepting co-existence to be the same as co-dominion––for that would be accepting their madness for sanity (just as these loons desire).

[Louis Foxwell]

Progressives are deluded because they are in fact not "liberal," but are merely "radical" (at best). They are radical because they accept the same Enlightenment notions about the capacity of Persons and governments to achieve that has poisoned the world since the French Revolution and has propagated most every modern horror from the French Terrors, through the rise of Fascism and the cancers of Socialism and Communism.

____________________________________

WONDERFUL!!!!

What will be required to enlighten dark adolescent minds convinced that freedom is tyranny and collectivism is democracy?

[Louis Foxwell]

Watta rant! Why have we never met on the field of banners flying wildly and forays into the breach?
Battle on. The day is not ended and more truthful words need to be thrown up against the walls of elitist sophistry and nuanced poppycock.

[Atchafalaya]

I was gonna ask for interpetive guidance then I flashed on "low men in yellow cars" and decided this author knows how to type just like the other.

[Rurudyne]

I would choose to rhetorically stand with the Founding Fathers and demonstrate through reason and in ordinary language that what they undertook––what made them the true liberals––is as different from progressivism et.al. as anything could be.

In this the plain language and intent of the Constitution would be a veritable boon––if, that is, we could actually separate just the Republican party from the notion that what government has gotten away with in the past is a valid basis for governance.

One more thing: progressives now define themselves by what they aren't and what evils they no longer enjoin: they have divorced "progress" from the notion of going towards some lofty goal and have instead defined it as simply being "change" ... not for "change's sake" but for the sake of achieving the libertine ideal of nothing being abnormal save that which has been normal.

Progressives are like plowman who only look back behind them and who do nothing less than tear up the future into which they blindly drive any government they control. No examples are better than abortion and internationalism: progressives act as if these are a manifest good when every sane society has understood that it is very much the contrary interest––to assure it's own survival through its own population and Independence––that is the real manifest good (as well as the compelling interest of the State).

[Rurudyne]

Well ... I was thinking of the words Patrick Henry when I wrote that. Maybe a more than just a bit of Hamlet or Henry V, too.

As God is my witness, I feel certain if they were alive today, just starting out and somehow still themselves: neither the playwright nor the statesman would be as well received as they were in their own day.