QUERY:

I suppose that my question for the American populace is this: why is the “pursuit of happiness” legal? I understand even the earlier concept of “property”, as bizarre as that capitalist invention is, better than this amendment to the Declaration. Take the instance of homosexuality, for instance. It has yet to be proven to me that the set of acts described as “homosexual” serve any utilitarian function, that they are necessary either economically or environmentally, that they serve either the Public Interest directly or a Higher Intelligence which serves people indirectly. While all of these appeals may appear relative in scope, the facts remain that they give individuals SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR, OUTSIDE of their own happiness, so they may never have to question that they deserve to be alive.

Conversely, I see a far more admirable example set by Islamic extremists than by the American military. I have it on the “authority” of a man who claims to have served in both the agricultural and the military sector that the only true obstacle between poverty and global prosperity is the individual will. Apparently, those farmers who are valuated as “good people” by their employers and coworkers would sooner fiddle while the world burns than to surrender the literal fruits of their actions to serve EITHER their people OR their Gods, an unprecedented sacrilege by any religious estimation which includes the sacred principles of yoga and the concept of karma, both of which are somehow well-known words but the study of which leaves one baffled by how perverse the present culture truly is, though we do not wage war upon the Hindus for their beliefs, despite the fact that their military is great and their holy texts are deeply martial. Even our songs praise the deaths of millions just so that the few may enjoy fried chicken, cold beer once a week, and loud recorded music. Yet we act shocked when a civilian in perfectly good health protests the status quo by attacking a concert!!

Conversely, the Islamic extremists make no attempt to either rationalize their thoroughly absurd behavior nor to descend into the same absurdity. Certainly a rational person would NEED to believe in a God like Allah in order to justify his own reasoning, since life would lose all meaning if all of one’s altruistic sacrifices were wasted on inferior people and no part was insured by Divinity. The entire ideal of the Warrior Archetype is far MORE salient and heroic in the instance of these religious radicals than in the American military, whose religiosity is so divorced from the austerity and strictures of the Christian Church which justifies it that it ought to be embarrassing. Terrorists may believe that they will receive seventy virgins in heaven as a reward, and if that were the case, it would alone account for their superiority in character. I mean: if more people wanted to screw virgins, there would be fewer virgins!! But at present we seem to live in the most sexually repressed society in history, where constantly any act of love is met with legal restriction, all with the CONSENT of the ruled, which the ruling class never fails to remind us of and to make more impossible to acquire for ourselves.

If the American idea of Heaven were populated by sexy virgins, maybe *I* would know what sex felt like. But the pursuit of happiness makes no provision for one’s induction, outside of random chance and inexplicable emotion, from that point forth rewarding experience with experience, wealth with wealth, and condemning all poverty to its perpetuation, without explanation. And yet somehow the populace is unified in its enjoyment of a state of affairs that, as the greatest writers of the twentieth century prophesied, from Huxley through Salinger onward, they ought NOT TO ENJOY.

It ought to be obvious that the “pursuit of happiness” is infantile and narcissistic, but somehow it is REWARDED even by those who do not directly benefit from its example, simply because by following an example that they OUGHT TO find deeply questionable and reprehensible they seek to avail themselves of the same depravity, a depravity so severe that even a man who has protested these actions WELL BEFORE they had affected his immediate person and prosperity could be held culpable once he was himself made into a victim of this treachery against his humanity, under SUSPICION of harbouring not only the SAME ETHIC as his assailant had exhibited unapologetically, but an “ethic” which he had himself ALWAYS opposed, in good faith and with selfless reason, which he is now penalized for having dishonoured even though it only ever served itself, much like a Devil that could offer him neither dignity nor transcendence.

I can understand things like sexuality, in the abstract, within the context of a meritocracy that does not offer them as conscious incentives but as unexpected rewards. But so long as this meritocracy is sabotaged by those individuals who want only the reward and not the honour of the merit, how can such a meritocracy function? I do not ask these questions because I truly anticipate an answer; I don’t doubt that my readers are as puzzled by these quandaries as I am. I merely hope to summarize the plight of my entire generation rhetorically, so as to help to alleviate the tremendous sin which by my existence I am heir to.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]