America, Land of the Evil Ones
“America, Land of the Evil Ones.” Sounds like a bin Laden rant. Yet,
it should be a common phrase on the tongue of all Americans. That it is
not is a prophetic charge laid against America’s President. “America,
Land of the Good Ones” marks his bully-pulpit evangelism. It is a homiletic
theme oft orated by American Presidents when drumming for War, civil
and
foreign.
The striking spiritual characteristic of Americans is that we claim that
we have no Shadow side, no demonic traits, that evil is something which
non-Americans do. This characteristic is not trivial. It is not superficial.
Indeed, we Americans truly believe that we are not and can never be Evil
Ones. As The Appointee presently claims, we Americans are the Light to
the world. Take his homily seriously; deadly serious.
During the Vietnam War the image of Good Ones was tarnished.
However, broad cultural acceptance of America’s Evilness has been kept in check
by the recall of the World War II generation who still remain convinced
that their Good War is morally unsullied. This has become a Dogma of Cold
War theology. Such is held notwithstanding The Bomb which vaporized humans.
An act, event as never so done before or since … but Yet To Come?
The current President from the Vietnam Generation represents
those in that generation who aggressively proclaimed the rightness
and goodness
of the Vietnam War – for them, an extension of The Good War, fought against
godless Communism. Yet, few Americans, then or now, grasp why this President must go to war. Why it is his commanding spiritual as well as political
Call. Why War is the bedrock American ritual.
For this and all predecessor Presidents, “America, Land of the Good Ones,” is
a self-conscious prophetic charge. Prophetic in that the President
believes he is authoritatively foretelling - and must - the future
of his People. Calling them to a way of living which he continually reasserts
is “Good.” More, that as Good Ones we Americans are moral models for every
other human being, and ours, the framework for every other culture’s
development.
Civil Religion – the mightiest, most evangelical,
conquering creed of all times
The President is a prophet of a religion, one about
which most Americans are not formally educated. It is a “Civil
Religion” – and it is
the mightiest, most evangelical, conquering creed of all times.
Most Americans would be hard pressed to define or describe this Civil
Religion. Its lack of clerical ceremony and classical religious imagery
leads most to the conclusion that it is more a loose collection of patriotic,
nationalistic and holiday hoopla than a religion. Yet,
it is a religion because it defines and determines how individuals and
the group understands and values bloodshed.
Ritual and liturgized bloodshed is a core Biblical belief and practice.
Animals for the Hebrews. Jesus for the Christians. Bloodshedding is also
core to the Civil Religion, though its ceremonial garb is solely militaristic
and no longer clerical. This continuity of transference between Biblical
religion and the Civil Religion is a central interpretive key throughout
this essay.
The fundament of this Civil Religion is that America
is a Chosen People – a Covenanted People - journeying through a Land of Promise. It is a
land with a Frontier horizon both physical and spiritual, where Good meets,
slays and conquers Evil. This is a Story of Origin revealing that it is
a People constantly purified and purifying. One set upon a Manifest Destiny.
A People set apart from “the Old World.” A world deemed Old in parallel
to St. Paul’s Old Man/New Man imagery. Europe, and all other cultures,
were judged Old, which meant Fallen, Lost, Depraved.
Denial of Biblical Fundamentals
It is readily apparent that this Civil Religion has Biblical roots. Yet,
it is the denial of Biblical fundamentals which
defines the fundamental beliefs and doctrines of the Civil Religion.
Doctrinally,
Original Sin slowly gives way to a belief in the Perfectibility of Man.
As a People Americans are no longer Unfaithful and in need of Prophets
to call them back to Righteousness, rather, Americans have a Manifest
Destiny ~ a companion to the British “White Man’s Burden.” In this vein,
notably, bloodshed no longer is ritualized in a church or a temple, rather
it is transferred as a Right, namely, to bear arms. This Right expands
to gird not only the eventual establishment of a Standing Army (which
the Amendment was first drawn to prevent!) but to effect the transfer
to each individual Citizen the clerical and priestly right to Sacrifice.
The Sacrifice for one’s country is that of the warrior slain in battle.
Of great note is the fact that it is this denial – with
the concomitant transfer of power from the clerical, sacral realm into
the institutions
and Rights of Democratic Society - which defines the Civil Religion
as a splinter sect of the broader Protestant movement. A splinter
sect for whom constant and continual war is Revelation, Truth and its
initiatory and daily ritual. A splinter which is speciating, becoming
root to a new faith.
Puritan Vision
America, Land of the Evil Ones is a radical image. Radical
in terms of root. The primary historical and cultural root being America’s Puritan
vision. Though this was the “New” World with its numerous News: York,
Haven, Jersey, Hampshire ~ all England! … though it was new, it was understand
as such more in respect to the Biblical Tradition than to a matter of
political definition. In its time, it was a newness as unsettling, weird
and numinous as cyberspace is today. The old algebraic equations could
not define it. America was in no way a measure of Europe. (Such is still
Doctrine!)
It was a Newness like that effected by holy Baptism
through which a new person, a purified soul, emerges. It was a Newness
purified – sanctified
and saved – yet it was simultaneously a human “Sinner in the Hands of
an Angry God.” True to the Biblical Tradition, the redeemed Puritan soul
had to be wary of his/her own darker side, that part of his/her self
which
could still fall to demonic temptation. Indeed, Salvation was Assured,
but nothing grasped as if a treasure about which the purified soul could
gloat! God was still a Righteous Judge.
Enlightenment Vision
When this Puritan root was spliced with the Revolutionary
root of Enlightenment Christianity, God, while still a Judge, became,
in character and practice,
Benevolent (encompassing “compassionate”). This Benevolent God of Love
removed Himself from direct involvement in the political
sphere, which was handed over to mankind, and He withdrew to a realm of
inspiration and unrelenting faithfulness. This is the theological movement
termed Deism. Whereas laws in the Puritan theocratic society were seen
as direct expressions of Biblical verses and commandments, in the New
Democratic Society laws were direct expressions of the Will of the People
as inspired by the Divine Commandments. In time, “In God
We Trust” has come to stand to define – in largess and restriction – this
relationship.
What happened during this rise of Democracy in religious terms? The Founders
and Framers -- though many were church-going Christians -- when they acted
in the political sphere felt that the institutions they were establishing
were divinely inspired. They did not surrender the belief which,
for millennia, anointed the King with Divine Right. Rather, they transferred
that anointment to We, the People – and to themselves as the practical
instruments of God’s Will. These deistic Enlightenment Christians – whose
values ruled the day even for those of Evangelical sway – did not believe
in the supernatural, and consequently they had a very practical concept
of Revelation.
Supernatural Revelation posited a great divide between
God the Father and His Errant Children. In rejecting this, these founders
asserted a
veritable closeness to Divinity; a closeness in direction proportion
to His distance from every day matters. The Creator had left the world
like
a tightly wound timepiece on the fireplace mantle. He was away since
his Children were of the Light, and directly revealed His Will and
Intentions
through their practical, everyday, mundane actions. The “natural” was,
itself, all that was claimed by the supernatural. For example, a sunset:
Rapturous and Transcendental. The intricate accuracy of a multi-cog mechanical
clock: Unity so Harmonious. The stark beauty of the Declaration of Independence:
Revealed Word. The orderliness of the Constitution: Fair and Just. The
purity, exacting and proportional measure of punishment and justice in
the newly conceived penitentiary system: Perfect Balance. Each and all
were sensate, visual, kick-the-wheels proofs of the intimate harmony
between
the Father and His Children of the Light.
The Penitentiary
At every level of society, culture, politics and religion,
the founders saw themselves as engaged in great “experiments.” This is most clearly
evident in the formation of America’s strikingly original prison system
~ the Penitentiary. Here, a characteristic of a religious institution
is that it deals with the Enemy Within - as War deals with the Enemy
Without.
War and the Penitentiary are the anchor institutions (rightly called, sacraments) of the Civil Religion.
Those who formed this foundational Democratic system
of justice and punishment were, in the main, clerics and active Christians.
When they acted politically – wrote Memorials to the Legislature -
they dropped their clerical titles. Insignificant? Or, indicative that
the sacral power of Divine Right was
being preserved, but now expressed through Democratic institutions crafted
by Citizens? Though without clerical garb or Episcopal ring, these
were
still clerics, now, each a cleric-Citizen.
Sacral Power
It is evident from the records (continual from Revolutionary to present
times through the voluntary organization they formed, The Pennsylvania
Prison Society) that these cleric-Citizens were comfortable with presenting
themselves as the proper vehicle for this tremendous effort of designing
the correctional structure of the Democratic Society. Comfortable, so
it appears, because they were doing exactly the same thing, exercising
the same sacral power, as they had previously done in pre-Revolutionary
times as ministers and active Christians. For them, the moral, spiritual
- and as it can be judged - mythic task they undertook, they did so with
ultimate confidence that they were so Chosen to do.
Characteristic of the easy transfer of both acts and terms from the religious
to the secular was evidence in that the punishment system was called a
penitentiary, and that personal, moral and spiritual reformation was intentionally
plotted and held to be inexorably effected by the terrorizing
action of the offender’s confessing conscience. Indeed, the foremost visionary
of the system, Benjamin Rush, referred to this confessionary institution
as a “House of Terror.” (See, “The Religious Dimension of the Rise of
the Penitentiary, 1787-1828” at ww.earthfolk.net/all_titles.htm) This
is, possibly, the most difficult fact which historians and other scholars
have overlooked. That the Enlightenment activists had an unshakable faith
in their own abilities to rationally analyze and then fashion an institution
which by the simple act central to its form, here, the mere act of incarceration
inside the architectural form they built – “separate confinement” – that
the effect they sought – reformation – would be achieved. The penitentiary
thinkers were scions of the medieval sacramental theologians. They were
builders as inspired and awed as were the medieval cathedral architects.
They were certain that they were creating a “sacred space” with its special
“sacred time” (a theme of Mircea Eliade. But since the word “sacred” was
not currency, it is best to say “sacral” space and time).
Sin and Crime
In this period, Sin was now not so much a crime – indeed, not the Original
Crime of Edenic Sin – which everyone committed, as it was that crime
was a personal sin. It was the criminals, the outlaws who became
the secular scapegoats. They carried the weight of collective sin in
their
personal acts. It was not Society which needed to be reformed and punished
as it was the individual. It would become tradition and culture in America
to not call the Nation to a day of penance, as had the Puritans. Rather,
in every situation of criminal crises the call is to individual penance,
confession, reformation. Americans, as a corporate person – “We, the People”
– know not how to confess or repent. The Evils Ones are outside of America
or “Inside” as prison is termed and known, especially to the inmates,
themselves. (See, “Prison and The Mother.”)
Criminal Redeemers
In a perverse way, the criminal becomes the High Priest
whose personal sacrifice redeems the group, here, Democratic Society.
It is the criminal
who goes on the spiritual and mythic journey into the House of Terror – the bowels of Hell – and testifies in his person as to the saving grace
of the Benevolent Father. A grace which is now mediated through the democratic
institution of the Penitentiary. Curiously, this word “penitentiary” is
all that remains in the Civil Religion of the sacramental tradition – a
fact not trivial nor baroque, rather of prime interpretive significance
for grasping the what and how of the Civil Religion.
In the Civil Religion the individual is not subservient to Society as
traditionally known. The pride of Americans is their individuality, independence,
Rights, and, today, privacy. Yet we are subservient to Democracy
as Process. It is a process of several ontologically grounding
sacramental institutions, much like the Roman Catholics’ historical “seven
sacraments.” This is a Process which has evolved over time. The Bill of
Rights, in the main, is the source for these process institutions. For
example, there was no Standing Army as in the corrupt Old World. However,
over time, this individual right, which was cited as a major Right which
made America “America” and each citizen a free-man, has concretized into
its opposite, namely, the fact that every eighteen year old American
male must register with the Selective Service. This
regardless of physical state or mental condition, and despite the fact
of the volunteer
military. This is the only act which binds all males, all Y chromosomes – it is truly a mythifying act! Of mythic whack in that those males who
resist the military – even in “peace time” – are subject to prosecution
and imprisonment. An interesting bridge to the battlefield of the penitentiary!
Bloodshed
The linkage here between the military and the penitentiary
is the notion of bloodshed. If a young man decides not to shed blood,
then he is put
through the institution which automatically & inevitably (re: sacramentally)
sheds his blood.
This penitentiary was where the blood shed in punishment
was enacted, though a telling characteristic of this system is its
initial rejection
of the lash. For several decades, there was no physical blood shed (except
for hangings, which were inside the prison courtyard). This fact has
mislead
most to miss – many more to deny - the psychological blood shed and horror
of this system to this day. (Of note, Charles Dickens visited and wrote
passionately about the cruelty of this “bloodless” system of punishment,
for which he was roundly and widely derided and denounced.)
The denial of blood-shedding is a consistent
historical claim of American penologists. The penitentiary is not,
for them, a viper’s
pit or an area for gladiatorial blood sport. When there have been abuses,
they have been claimed as such, that is, as abuses, not as defining flaws
of the System. Those who, through the centuries, defend the penitentiary
argue that – in stark contrast – it is religious history which is penned
in blood-shed, e.g., the rack and other demonic devices of the Inquisition.
In counterpoint, they argue that the main criticism leveled at the prison
system is that it is “soft” on the criminals. This is a claim laid at
the founders, themselves. Which has become a Civil Religion mythic cry,
that American prisons are “too soft on criminals,” that they are “country
clubs” … yes, short of total eradication of the criminal sub-class and
sub-humans, how shall America’s Civil Religious bloodlust be quenched?
What is of note is the shift in the visual character
of punishment. The penitentiary is private - “behind locked gates.” It
is invisible. Formerly, in most societies, punishment was part public
spectacle. Nevertheless,
what is not-seen still exists. Here, bloodshed.
We, the People
We, the People is not, as the Roman Catholics defined in
their documents of Vatican Council Two, the People of God. In like manner,
Democratic Americans are no longer a Biblical People which listens
and seeks prophetic insight from God’s acts and judgments (from outside
their collective experience – historical or otherwise). They are not
Fallen. They are not Evil.
Rather, Americans have become, self-consciously, the We of
the collective of humans who are acting based upon inalienable rights – yes,
bestowed upon them by their Creator, but once so bestowed as such so “self-evident”
that they look to their own experiences (personal & collective) for
justification and insight; they do not look externally to the Almighty
Father’s Judgments and Benedictions. Indeed, We Americans are a People
of a Revolution, of a profoundly new vision, a vision most visibly political
though as such it is simultaneously less-visibly though equally practical,
spiritual and theological. Theological quite strongly though now
expressed in secular images and words, if images at all. It is
a robust vision set into practice and as such preserved and assured through
the operating Democratic wholing mechanism of a Balance of Powers. Again,
this Balance of Powers is self-contained, self-regulating, and self-empowered – in practice, self-transcending. It makes no direct appeal – nor
is it judged in such need - to other Powers than those of its visible
trinity:
Executive, Legislative and Judicial. There is and can never be an
appeal to a higher law within the Democratic system.
Since there is no claim to Kingly lineage (sourced in
Christ the King), the institutions and Democratic process hold the
sacral. The temptation
for each head of such institutions, however, is Kingly. Here, the Executive
becomes not just Commander-in-Chief but an Imperial President. The
Legislature
becomes not just a political elite but a Presbytery of Elders or Cabal
of Nobles articulating not just constitutional laws but moral codes.
The
Supreme Court is as its name approximates, not just judges but “Supremes.” The
temptations retain a Biblical flavor, in that the struggle is not to
become King David, the Pauline Disciples, or the Apostles.
While a Revolutionary War is cited as the midwife of
the rise of Democracy, it was in character more a civil war or a variant
on the coup d’etat than
a war against a foreign power. There is a relentless continuity in secular
and sacral transfer of power from England and Europe into the Democratic
manifestations. There was more of the Old World in the New than Americans
admit, to this day. In this light, the Democratic society was to proceed
without a Standing Army, and the military was to be under civilian
authority.
Yet, as with former Kings, so the President assumes the warrior mantle
of Commander-in-Chief. The Cold War exposed the Civil Religion characteristics
of several of these underlying institutions and processes, for example,
as it set in process the co-existence of a Peace-Time Draft with (as
has
currently appeared) a Volunteer Standing Army. WE quest for Imperial
crown as manifest in the Faustian and apocalyptic Bomb. The Evil
which possesses America, henceforth quite clearly, is our recognition
that we are indeed Ugly Americans and our instantly concurrent denial
of such a fact. (!)
Stories of Origin
Every society needs a Story of Origin. We Americans
tends to tell our Story from Revolution to the present as one of the
actions of a Good People.
The founding documents which eschewed a standing army are cited by many
as proof that America had cut itself off from the endless wars which
marked
European and Old World history. Yet, others can tell the same Story,
from then to now, as one of constant warfare. In fact, our Story of
Origin
is one of a self-inflicted blindness. As manifest through our first Total
War - against Native Americans – expelling them into internal Exile.
Also, the holy war against peoples of color: defining them as children
of Ham or as with Cain’s mark, so as to render them sub-human, with animal
souls.
This self-inflicted blindness is self-consciously recorded
in documents of the period. Thomas Jefferson penetrated Sally Henning – knowing
in lust and love the full mythic impact of his personal action. George
Washington
declined to be named King, though he was without doubt that his Presidential
actions were as regal. When he freed his slaves upon his death, it
was
a personal act of conscience which, however, simultaneously bowed to
the Evil which he and so many other Revolutionaries served and preserved.
The Benevolent God’s inspiration has manifested itself in secular terms
such as Manifest Destiny – a scion of Divine Providence. “The Frontier,”
as noted by scholars, has served as the Promised Land – a spiritual promise
towards which the People struggle, and which enables them to justify whatever
they do on their journey towards this Promised Land. For both the Biblical
Tradition and the American Tradition the common characteristic of this
journey to the Promised Land is the waging of endless war. It is an Endless
War which is endlessly denied. We claim ourselves as Chosen and Holy,
never as Warriors. Only the current predatory “pre-emptive war” being
prepared by The Appointee has shown us what we see in the dark, lightly.
As Americans faced the Frontier, they geared for War.
A war both physical and spiritual. Before them lay ungodly tribes of
red-skinned heathens.
These were barriers to be overcome. They represented as much a spiritual
as a physical challenge. Spiritually, these heathen were to feel the
Wrath
of this Benevolent God, for they were obstacles to the commercial and
cultural development of the Frontier. Only on the Frontier could America
be purified and so perceive itself as spiritually faithful to its God.
It was for the savages to bear the Wrath of God, and not for the People
to be so chastised. The People saw God’s Benevolent Love magnificently
manifested through the sufferings of these heathens. Because He Loved
His People, so these Red Devils must suffer – and perish! It was a perspective
drawn and girded by the warrior vision of Joshua. As at Ai, so every
tribe
which stood in the way was massacred – Take No Prisoners! Total
warfare. (Of note, is that Saddam Hussein can find comfort and historical
precedent for biological warfare by citing the facts about the smallpox
infested blankets knowingly handed out by the Army to Native Americans.)
The Puritans had waged spiritual war against their fellow
colonists. Quakers and other dissidents had their ears cropped and
bodies branded.
However, in the Revolutionary Society, so it was held as insight, dissent
could be tolerated from every quarter since the mechanism which balanced
the powers was itself a manifestation of God’s grace bestowed upon the
Framers of American society. It was a mechanism which, in its fundamental
definition, balanced the dissents of religious sects by declaring Freedom
of Religion. All were free to say what they wanted – not because God
had directly spoken through a prophet, but because God had prophetically
inspired a governing mechanism to which all religious dissents
must bow. The shift is from The Good Book to the Democratic Process. This
is one reason why Christian Fundamentalist are so confused and confounded
as they listen and read the Biblical words of the founders, yet fail to
grasp the meaning of their acts.
The Revolutionists merged into the Frontiersmen who
waged war against their fellow “Native Americans” by defining them as not-American (the
prophetically original un-American Red Menace). This is the secular twist
on the Biblical Tradition of acclaiming oneself Chosen, namely, that for
someone to be Chosen, someone else must be not-Chosen. Fortunately, as
many scholars have noted, the not-Chosen not only could not say “shibboleth” properly
but they were red (and black) of skin. Red Devils. Black as Satan.
The Puritans were in constant warfare against Satan. The Frontiersmen
were in constant warfare against the Red Savage. Each was inspired by
God, one directly by their Judge, the other indirectly by their Benevolent
deity. From this perspective, the Story of the Puritans merges via the
Democratic Revolution into the Story of the Frontiersmen.
Theological Secularism
The burden of exposing the theological secularism of
America, the rites and rituals of the Democratic Society’s institutions and processes, is
that the spiritual and theological language of the documents of the Revolution
are scant to bare. But the assumption of the Age that the Benevolent God
blessed their every act and would deliver upon every promise was as scarlet
and public as Hester Prime’s sin. The American Story, as it begins to
unfold in the 19th century, is undoubtedly not Christian in
terms of sectarian cant, but it is also undoubtedly Biblical in its Call
and governmental intent. The Land is to be cleansed of the heathen, worked
by field hands of the Sons of Ham, and delivered to the World as Light
and Savior to society and civilizations everywhere.
As true to the Biblical Tradition, America is faithful
and faithless to its God. Wars are both external and internal. Civil
and against the
Foreign Devils who dwell within – from Red Menace Commies to Eye-talians
of the Palmer Raids to the Border Wars presently ranging from San Diego
to Texas. As birthed by War – as only a Biblical Nation can be – so is
War the ongoing ritual: social, economic, political and religious. The
Powers may be Balanced, but it is a balancing of warrior’s bloodlust.
This warrior’s bloodlust is America’s spiritual
hunger. Warrior language is theological language covered
with secular sauce. The War to End All Wars is its finest moment
of self-revelation and self-deception.
For the Biblical Warrior cannot cease warring – not until the Final Day
when the end to earthly wars is accomplished as the Benevolent God returns,
once again, as Warrior King. In the broader Christian Tradition this is
“Christus victor” and Christ the King. Biblically, it is the Son of Man
returned to earth during the Apocalypse. The Warrior’s Bloodlust, then,
reveals itself as that which drives the Benevolent God’s return.
When America dropped The Bomb, it proclaimed itself
ready and prepared for the Lord’s Return. For The Bomb indicated that the Warrior now possessed
an instrument of destruction which was – indeed often proclaimed with
careless Pride – to be wielded only by He Who Judges.
America as the fulfillment of the Biblical Warrior Promise
should have ended with the truly Joshuan devastation of The Bomb. After
all, the Enemy
was vaporized! An act of impressive spiritual prestidigitation – “And
on the 8th Day ….!”
Current Times – Truly Webbed, World-Wide?
What then has followed – in what is also “current history”? President
Kennedy faithfully re-directed the Vision and Promise outwardly – to the
Moon! Yes, at the same time teetering on the Apocalyptic Edge, once again,
dropping The Bomb on Cuba. LBJ would wait, patiently, confidently as he
relentlessly “wasted” a Gook Enemy while balancing the world with a MAD
pact of not using, the now proven, Weapon of the Warrior God. Nixon could
find no new Frontiers, so he turned inward, and destroyed his own soul.
Ah, a Faustian conundrum of a secular Joshua – not a Job! Not a Job because
as President he wrestled not with “God” or a Deity but solely with himself
because he was, or so he believed he was, Imperial. Thereafter, a repulsion
of the Moon (symbolic Goddess that She be!) and the focus inward upon
the bloodless bloodlust of The Market. Enter Reagan’s “Greed is Good” era.
Now comes the internetted generation. X and D and all
that. What do they hear on the World Wide Web? A global voice? A single
Call to be Family – of which there is only one, an earth family? An Earthfolk?
At this moment of impending war it appears that this is not a new generation,
at least in spiritual terms. Rather, they are re-asserting the fundamentalistic
Civil Religion tenets of our own culture: in which there is only America,
the Good Ones.
The Volunteer Army is robust. There is a broad public commitment to fight
the alleged Axis of Evil. There is scant public self-reflection when other
nations and peoples indict us as Evil, claim that Kissinger and Bush are
War Criminals. In some ways, despite all the available critical information,
Americans cannot stop warring. This generation – composed of gen-xers
and all such tabloid drivel – is compulsively marching off to war … based, at the moment, upon the flimsiest of information, the shadiest
of reports, the known corruption among our leaders (“I am not a thief!”)
True, it must be clearly stated that we all exist at
a queer moment –
a strange intersection – when the myth which binds us all unto life and
death is graphically manifest through very visual and definitive actions.
That is, a War which is being proclaimed after The War to End
All Wars, and the Final Solution, and The Bomb, and The Moon Visit, and
We
Are The World have been proclaimed. Didn’t this generation virtually
fight all those wars? Videogame reality. Ah, they fought and won! – Won
every war-game! - It is the videogames which became the catechism
of the Warrior Culture, ever alive.
So, America the Good Ones is alive and well. The Appointee every evening
ascends the media pulpit and preaches the Sermon of Bloodshed. He has
no other way of imagining. No other Way of Life is there for him or We.
Ah, the Dark Night of the Soul. And in daylight a world drenched in blood.
On every lip the Call: Kill!