The Effecient Mindset of the Efficient Leader

Dear George,

Let’s chit-chat about leadership. It will be idle chit-chat because you are the very personification of the efficient leader. The key word, here, is “efficient.” Not all leaders are efficient. Some, such as those who lead by consensus, are downright inefficient.

The efficient leader is he who gets things done quickly, no matter how dire the consequences of his decisiveness. His unique gifts allow him to take quick action without becoming bogged down in complexities and nuance.

The efficient leader is efficient because of certain force fields that bubble up from the bowels of his soul. It is these force fields that pump him full of the psychic steroids that allow him to transcend the arbitrary social restrictions that bind and imprison the masses.

Let us examine each of these force fields.

· You need a pumped up ego. You can’t lead shit if you don’t believe yourself invincible.
· You gotta dream big dreams of unlimited success, power, brilliance, and all that other bullshit.
· You’ve gotta believe you are “special.” It really helps if you are certain God called you to your leadership position.
· You love being loved unconditionally and have little patience for those who fail to exhibit this love.
· An excessive sense of entitlement permeates your inflated ego. You are who you are because you are entitled to be who you are.
· You are deft at manipulating others in order to fulfill the big dreams you’ve dreamed.
· You are so focused on your mission, or the lack of one, that you don’t give a shit about others.
· Because you are so gifted, you are justifiably haughty and arrogant.

Now, some shrinks might point out that the above force fields are the symptoms of a narcissistic personality disorder as found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-R).

Don’t let it throw you, Big Guy. Just listen to one writer who catalogs all that this disorder has accomplished though history:

Class structures of rich, middle, and poor class; capitalist economic structures which privilege a wealthy few and disadvantage the masses as well as pillage, plunder and seek to master the natural environment; religious hierarchies which promulgate gender inequalities based upon a superior male deity and human male superiority versus female inferiority…(and the list goes on and on.)

The simple, historical fact is that efficient leadership is a malignant mindset, without which the world would be a poor place rift through and through with a freedom bordering on anarchy.

Not everyone with these force fields throbbing through their glands achieve positions of leadership and influence. Some of us who are touched by this force fail to achieve leadership roles because of our love of controlled substances and a casual approach to personal hygiene. For consolation, we turn to our whores, as discounted as they are washed out, upon whom we void our fantasies of power and domination.

And as we pass out on our filthy mattresses, we send a prayer of gratitude up to God, thanking him for those of you atop the pyramid who give order and meaning to our meaningless lives.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Why We're a Nation of Really Great Guys

The Soviets had developed the most modern arsenal, and the 9/11 hijackers were
armed with box cutters, so how could we justify spending more to defeat al-Qaida
than we ever did to combat the communist enemy? That is the third-rail
issue that politicians and the media dread touching because of the national
security hysteria generated after the 9/11 attacks.

--Robert Sheer


Dear George,

The above quote explains why your Neocon minions have a lock on power and will continue to wield it, no matter who wins the election. There ain’t nobody who dares ask why we are bankrupting ourselves with a trillion-dollar defense budget that is giving us weapons that either gather dust and rust or are sold overseas so that when the world blows up, it will do so in style.

It is a truism that the America culture equates strength with military hardware. No matter how frightened we are of our imaginary monsters, we will be strong and resolute as long as we are up to our asses in weapons systems.

Defense spending is a Neocon dream come true. Frail men chained to meaningless jobs in meaningless offices who lead meaningless lives can experience a rush of power and potency when they watch a formation of F-16s cutting the sky with their roar.

The more prosperity weakens them, the more their moral fiber frays in the cluttered boredom of their lives, the more meaning do they find in the slaughter of innocents. The carcass of an infant eviscerated by shrapnel, the screaming mother drenched in the blood of her dead child and the father bound and blindfolded give purpose to their empty lives.

This is why they defend their turf with the frenzy of a wounded animal. It is this frenzy that has the democrats paralyzed. To dare ask why so much money is being wasted on the unnecessary and the useless leaves them open to accusations of “weakness.” In twenty-first century America, a man isn’t a man unless he supports the stockpiling of martial boy-toys.

And the beauty of these boy-toys is that once you got ‘em, you’ve just got to use ‘em. And if there are no real threats out there to justify their use, you make ‘em up.

Iran must not be allowed to develop the bomb! It is meet and right that we be the only threat to world peace. That is the very foundation of our national security strategy. If anyone destroys the earth, it will be us.

So we rattle our sabers and strut the world stage with our hard-ons flapping in the breeze as we drown out the scathing silence of our emptiness with threats and bombast.

The truth is that we are a nation of nihilists who believe in nothing except empty slogans about freedom and prosperity; only fear and hate make our lives worth living.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

An Ode to Greatness

Dear George,

Greatness always sweeps south, driven by Northern hearts with souls burnt by the ice winds that roar down from the pole; with eyes hardened by long winter nights spent dreaming dreams of glory.

Greatness is drawn by the lush foliage of the south peopled by an indolent brownness that knows neither the value of work nor the value of a dollar nor the value of the wealth buried beneath huts of grass.

Nor does their indolence worship the pinch-faced God of the North with his mighty sword of righteousness that denudes the land to make way for the economic expansion that is his Will.

The Northern heart is drawn to the sands of Arabia flushed green with the petrodollars that pour forth from its barren earth.

The Noerthern mission is a holy mission to baptize the heathen in the ice waters of free enterprise and unhindered capital flow. With the blood of their women and children they make the sign of the cross on their foreheads, and from the pools of blood that coagulate in their decimated villages mighty pyramids rise resting on the shoulders of the poor and the downtrodden who refuse to accept icy baptism from the North.

Our greatness our ability to view the world through the cracked lens of an ideology run amok. We destroy cultures that they may rise again from the dead ready to compete in the open market even though the deck is forever stacked against them.

Long may the north wind freeze our hearts and steel them for the destiny that awaits us as we trod the thorny path of economic suicide in our quest to create the world in our image, which is the only image worth creating even if doing so reduces it to dust.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

You light up my life.

Dear George,

You are the shining light that illumines the black miasma of my soul. You are my teacher and my guide, my refuge from the lousy shit I smoke. You are Viagra™ for my soul.

How firm is your grasp of evil. You and your minions realize that pure evil requires a supreme act of self-delusion. A man becomes capable of evil as soon as he convinces himself that God, history and destiny are on his side.

This is the great intellectual shell game that periodically purges the earth of its surplus population. In truth, God doesn’t take sides, history doesn’t give a shit and there is no destiny, only a blind momentum driven by ego, greed and stupidity. But, we are not concerned with truth, only with results. Truth never won a war or an election.

O how beautifully you’ve joined hands with the church to cripple Christianity by reducing Christ’s teachings to happy talk about the “Good News.” Let the people associate Christianity with “happiness” and they will never bother plunging into the pain-in-the-ass work required for redemption. Christ didn’t offer good news; he demanded we destroy our fucking lives by turning ourselves inside out! Thank god nobody listened!

Crusades, George! That’s what we need, scads and scads of crusades! Flogging wedge issues is better than bread and circuses. It distracts the masses and blinds them to the many injustices you have turned loose upon the land.

May God bless you and your manly efforts to exploit the faith while your minions empty the public treasury.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Detroying Stills to Protect Freedom

Dear George,

All too often we find ourselves hoisted by the petard of our buzz words. “Democracy” is an example of this phenomenon. If ever there was a word that has been abused and misused, it is that.

The problem is that the drones are constantly misinterpreting its meaning. Lincoln wasn’t serious when he spoke of “government for the people, by the people, of the people” at Gettysburg. It was pure spin. The Civil War was growing increasingly unpopular and Lincoln saw the speech as a way to rally the public.

Our democracy is the democracy of a paneled men’s club where leather lounge chairs embrace somnolent old men who doze their days away while their servants drive the unwashed mob from its doors with clubs and cudgels.

Ours is the democracy of fine brandy aged for decades in oaken barrels. It is not the harsh, strident democracy of uncut moonshine.

It is our mission as a free country to destroy illegal stills the moment they appear. We didn’t overthrow Mossadegh in Iran or Arbenz in Guatemala or Allende in Chile because they were Marxists, which they were. We overthrew them because they were bootlegging shine.

Now we have Chavez and Morales to deal with. I swear to god, I don’t understand why the ignorant peasants of Latin America insist on setting up their illegal stills. Were it not for the historical amnesia of our citizens, we’d have the same problems.

This amnesia is what makes us such a badass nation. There can be no guilt over past misdeeds if you can’t remember them, and without guilt, there can be no redemption.

Thanks to our poor memory we are able to continue along our imperial path to ruin, while our old men doze in their leather loungers secure in their belief that they are the center of the universe while outside the doors of their club the mob increases in size and the servants grow weary of cracking heads.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Joe Lieberman protects us from reality.

Dear George,

America is a little safer today because Jolting Joe Lieberman is on the job. It seems the good senator took exception to some videos posted on You Tube that depicted, among other things, gratuitous attacks on America troops.

What makes this even more galling is that these videos were posted by Islamic organizations, some of whom were associated with terrorist organizations.

Apparently You Tube has forgotten that the Iraq enterprise is a Hollywood production in which visuals are carefully orchestrated to convey an image of American power and invincibility. It’s bad enough that the Pentagon is forced to list the American dead. We sure as hell don’t need some terrorist group showing our soldiers being killed.

According to You Tube, some of the videos “depicted gratuitous violence, advocated violence, or used hate speech.”

I only hope that nobody tries to use this criterion to muzzle our right wing pundits or, for that matter, shut down CNN.

Of course, the difference is that the violence and hate we advocate is righteous, while theirs is evil.

Censorship is always selective.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones

Disarticulating Art for Art's Sake

Dear George,

The well ordered state is one that marginalizes art. Plato knew whereof he spoke when he banned poets from his Republic. The poet inspires, and all too often, this inspiration becomes the soil in which the seeds of rebellion and revolution germinate.

Art grows in the clammy cracks that form on a nation’s fringe where, like a fungus, it takes root and begins to spread its toxins throughout polite society. The successful leader of the corporatist state is he who can neutralize Art before it becomes dangerous

And Art is neutralized when the moment the fringe is commodified. In this, America has been more than successful. One writer laments, “We’ve seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by madness, as Alan Ginsberg put it. The madness of materialism—owning things, possessing things, caressing things in a world or shrinking resources, “peak oil,” water shortages, food riots.”

Things, not thoughts, that’s the answer.

Nothing corrupts the artist faster than the grant and the sinecure. Let our artists earn big bucks for creating esoteric works that define space rather than meaning and our stability is assured.

Concurrent with the commodification of the fringe is the dumbing down of our language. The key weapon in this campaign is the simple sentence consisting of no more than one byte of data that is devoid of nuance and metaphor. Both compound and complex sentences must be consigned to the dust bin; the monosyllabic word must rule!

Literacy endangers. A literate society is one that is exposed to unsettling and dangerous ideas. Here, again, America has a track record of which it can be proud as we have produced a generation of functional illiterates who prefer the mundane images that dance across their screens to the harshness of black print on a white page. One never turns off a television because an idea has caused one to stop and think, but one will sure as hell do so with a book.

Without language the angry songs of the rebel are reduced to inarticulate screams and incoherent lyrics. Because they lack the language to analyze they are forced into a state of drug-induced withdrawal.

Another writer describes the benefits of our functional illiteracy when he says:

Because protest in America has become more symbolic than effective, those in
power can afford to ignore it. Even when the participation in protest is
great, it is of short duration; it does not cause serious economic or political
disruption, and it does not pose a real threat to the established
orthodoxy. After a few hours of peaceful marching, the people pack up and
go back to their lives and everything remains as it was before they came.
Effective protest causes economic and political disruption

.

Pray that they never learn to compress their anger until its fire becomes a crystalline ball of ice. Fire dissipates; ice radiates. Ice is hard and clear; fire blinds with its heat and smoke.

The Art that no longer expresses no longer endangers the state.

Should the public ever discover that, on the grand scale of geological time, our era of technological wonders will barely register as a cosmic fart made possible by that geological fluke known as the Age of Oil, all hell would break loose. And it is the artist or the poet who will make this connection.

So, let them continue to chase after their sinecures and grants, let them drown their anger in the shriek of the electric guitar, let the young equate rebellion with a fashion statement and you may rest assured that our corporatist state can continue merrily along its path of depraved corruption.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones