We are all Waco. The nefariousness and misplaced priorities of government actions have eroded the people’s trust to the extent that doomsday paranoia begins to make sense as a viable possibility.
When I say we are all Waco I really mean just me. And by Waco I mean the Branch Davidians specifically. Is it Branch Davidians or Banch Dravidians? It’s Davidians because of David Koresh, right? Or just because David? And it’s branch because … banch isn’t a word.
Koresh is supposed to be from Old Persian, meaning “forward-looking” or some such nonsense. Why Old Persian I wonder? Oh, because Cyrus in Old Persian was Koresh. Those Old Persians pronounced things in inebriated fashion. “What’s ‘at guy’s name, Cyrus, Kyrush, Koresh. He was a regular musheeyugh, for letting the people of Ishrael rebuild their besh ha migdash.”
When I say I’m like the Bench Dravidians, I don’t mean I’m a cult, following a charismatic leader who marries ten-year-old girls. And I don’t mean I’m amassing weapons in preparation for the final war of Holiness against Evil, Heaven against Hell.
What I think I mean is, the corporate, military, and government three-headed hellhound has set my teeth on edge. It seems to be fulfilling all my most paranoid doomsday fantasies. Sure, I may follow questionable lines of reasoning, pickle my own turnips, operate in a clandestine economy, and practice unsanctioned sex, but why would you come to me with war machines and enough ordnance to wipe out thirty My Lai villages unless you truly were the prophesied Beast of Destruction? Why massacre 82 children and other innocents and quasi-innocents unless you were hellbent on stamping out a godly message from godly people?
I know, the metaphor is still too blurred with my own identity to make sense. Let me see if I can compartmentalize. I mean, I really need to. I’m not an apocalyptic messianic Christian, though I sometimes like to pretend I am.
I inhale from a few different quarters of the information atmosphere lately the idea that the greater the power and wealth disparity between the few at the top and the vast majority in the relatively normal world, the greater the likelihood for paranoid conspiracies to develop among the people, or the greater the likelihood the people can be manipulated into pursuing paranoid conspiracies that foster destructive emotions. Destructive emotions that can lead to destructive behavior. Mass destructive behavior.
Seems like the rulers want the people to pursue destructive behavior. Or at least believe things that might lead them to behave destructively. Like, why would you conspire to murder a sensible socialist community leader like Fred Hampton but leave a slippery snake oil peddling conspiracy monger like Louis Farrakhan alive unless you wanted to instill for generations of Black people a suspicion of and hatred for the cops? And why would you conspire to fill law enforcement with white supremacists who keep lynching Black people under the cover of law unless you wanted to continue to confirm their suspicions far into the 21st Century?
Why would you torture, massacre, and burn villages and forests full of Southeast Asian civilians unless you wanted to confirm their conception of The West as a profane poison of the soul?
Why would you try to cover up your high crimes and make up obvious lies to justify invading Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, or Iraq if you didn’t want people to come up with idiotic theories about the moon landing being faked or the Earth being flat or Parkland being a false flag or Covid being a psy op? Why sneak Nazis out of Germany to work for the US government? Why allow Kissinger to reach the age of a century when you murder in their youth labor leaders, forest and water protectors, people marching for their rights, children playing with toys? Do you want me, fat little old me, to suspect that crime pays and nice folks get buried alive by those who own the dirt?
And why, if your contention was that there was no coming war of the government against them, would you descend on the Branch Davidians at their Mt. Carmel compound outside Waco, with all your choppers, military armor, tanks, guns, grenades, bombs, and gases, and ultimately burn them alive? You acted out their fantasy for them.
Now those sympathetic to the idea that the socialist multicultural woke government wants to kill sovereign Christians in an apocalyptic war feel confirmed in that belief. And you killed the barely-known niche charismatic David Koresh but left the very world-famous dangerous charismatic slippery snake oil peddling conspiracy monger Donald Trump alive, so he could go hold a rally at Waco and capitalize on your brutality by feeding the lunatic white supremacist sovereign citizen crowd exactly the elixir that will get them to try to overthrow the government for him.
Why would you do that unless you were arming fascists for a war against the people, as many of us have every reason to expect? Where’s that nice FBI negotiator played by Michael Shannon to talk them all down from their fear and rage? Hell, to talk me down from my fear and rage? Why don’t I have a deep-voiced, slightly lispy Frankenstein looking but nonetheless intensely captivating negotiator of reason to assure me and the other side that “this can all be resolved peacefully?”
Ask yourselves this, listeners: if this isn’t Hell, why are they making it look and feel like it is?
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!