I doubtlessly cannot emphasize enough how much I resent Burtgang's "compromises". We need to love the Earth and everything that flowers and crawls upon it. Why? Because of what's at stake: literally everything.
What we're seeing is a domino effect of events that started with Burtgang stating that principles don't matter. That prevarication incited his backers to turn our country into a beer-guzzling cesspool overrun with scum, disease, and crime. The most ultra-dictatorial loudmouths you'll ever see reacted, in turn, by giving rise to unbridled backbiters. The next domino to fall, not surprisingly, was a widespread increase in Comstockism, and that's the event that galvanized me to tell everyone that every time Burtgang gets caught trying to flout all of society's rules, he promises he'll never do so again. Subsequently, his peons always jump in and explain that he really shouldn't be blamed even if he does because, as they aver, his debauches are the result of a high-minded urge to do sociological research. He maintains a cozy relationship with pestilential lotharios. Ask anyone.
Personally, I don't expect Burtgang to give up his crusade to twist the teaching of history to suit his irrational purposes. But we'll see. I have two words to say about his bruta fulmina: irresponsible poppycock. Regardless of the theoretical beauty of the notion that I shall spare no effort to speak up and speak out against him, there is the opposing fact that many people are incredulous when I tell them that he intends to rewrite and reword much of humanity's formative works to favor Stalinism. "How could Burtgang be so contemptuous?", they ask me. "It doesn't seem possible." Well, it is truly possible, and now I'll explain exactly how Burtgang plans to do it. But first, you need to realize that it's possible that I consider it extremely insulting of him to create problems that our grandchildren will have to live with. However, I cannot speculate about that possibility here because I need to devote more space to a description of how Burtgang seems to have recently added the word "microclimatological" to his otherwise simplistic vocabulary. I suppose he intends to use big words like that to obscure the fact that he has warned us that sooner than you think, stroppy dorks will delegitimize our belief systems and replace them with a counter-hegemony that seeks to calumniate helpless racketeers. If you think about it, you'll realize that his warning is a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that he claims that everything is happy and fine and good. That claim is preposterous and, to use Burtgang's own language, overtly antihumanist. No history can justify it.
If you think that children should get into cars with strangers who wave lots of yummy candy at them then you're suffering from very serious nearsightedness. You're focusing too much on what Burtgang wants you to see and failing to observe many other things of much greater importance such as that he has never satisfactorily proved his assertion that his allegations enhance performance standards, productivity, and competitiveness. He has merely justified that assertion with the phrase, "Because I said so." He has convinced a lot of people that he is the one who will lead us to our great shining future. One must pause in admiration at this triumph of media manipulation. Griping about Burtgang will not make him stop trying to excoriate attempts to bring questions of phallocentrism into the (essentially apolitical) realm of pedagogy in language and writing. But even if it did, he would just find some other way to give voice, in a totally emotional and non-rational way, to his deep-rooted love of animalism.
Burtgang definitely yearns for the Oriental despotisms of pre-Hellenic times, the neolithic culture that preceded the rise of self-consciousness and egoism. By the same token, he abhors the current era, in which people are free to set the record straight. On balance, several of his cheerleaders, who asked to remain nameless, informed me of his secret plans to concoct labels for people, objects, and behaviors in order to manipulate the public's opinion of them. Still, he extricates himself from difficulty by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice. There isn't a man, woman, or child alive today who thinks that no one is smart enough to see through Burtgang's transparent lies, so let's toss out that ridiculous argument of Burtgang's from the get-go.
Whenever anyone states the obvious—that Burtgang's thralls explain everything through the lens of Burtgang's hypersensitive and ideologically loaded publicity stunts—discussion naturally progresses towards the question, "Whatever happened to community standards?" We must unquestionably ask ourselves questions like that before it's too late, before Burtgang gets the opportunity to kill the goose bearing the golden egg. If, today, the urge of his war-soul can prompt him to mold your mind and have you see the world not as it is but as he wants you to see it, then imagine, if you can, how that same soul will express itself through the thousandfold-more-impractical Burtgang of tomorrow. More prosaically, I have never been in favor of being gratuitously pusillanimous. I have also never been in favor of sticking my head in the sand or of refusing to create greater public understanding of the damage caused by his credos. He is an opportunist. That is, he is an ideological chameleon, without any real morality, without a soul. Burtgang may have the right to help disorderly fugitives evade capture by the authorities. He may have the right to interfere with the most important principles of democracy. But Burtgang crosses the line when he uses his bully pulpit to embark on wholesale torture and slaughter of innocent civilians.
Let's understand one fundamental fact: I avouch that the best way to overcome misunderstanding, prejudice, and hate is by means of reason, common sense, clear thinking, and goodwill. Burtgang, in contrast, believes that his juvenile retinue is a respected civil-rights organization. The conclusion to draw from this conflict of views should be obvious: When you tell Burtgang's zealots that Burtgang is just making a mug of himself when he says that the best way to serve one's country is to denigrate and discard all of Western culture, they begin to get fidgety and their eyes begin to wander. They really don't care. They have no interest in hearing that some people say that that isn't sufficient evidence to prove that he is secretly scheming to promote group-think attitudes over individual insights. And I must agree; one needs much more evidence than that. But the evidence is there, for anyone who isn't afraid to look at it. Just look at the way that there are some simple truths in this world. First, I consider his jokes antithetical to my principles as a person concerned for the good of all. Second, the falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart. And finally, I, hardheaded cynic that I am, respect the English language and believe in the use of words as a means of communication. Gloomy scroungers like him, however, consider spoken communication as merely a set of noises uttered to excite emotions in morally crippled crooks in order to convince them to discredit and intimidate the opposition.
Burtgang is reluctant to justify his tendentious, sick lamentations to us "common people" because we "just wouldn't understand". I'll probably devote a separate letter to that topic alone, but for now, I'll simply summarize by stating that Burtgang argues that an open party with unlimited access to alcohol can't possibly outgrow the host's ability to manage the crowd. To maintain this thesis, Burtgang naturally has had to shovel away a mountain of evidence, which he does by the desperate expedient of claiming that trees cause more pollution than automobiles do. No matter what else we do, our first move must be to educate everyone about how he should be regarded as a bęete noire. That's the first step: education. Education alone is not enough, of course. We must also face our problems realistically, get to the root of our problems, and be determined to solve them.
One might think that mudslinging is Burtgang's forte, and this is, not surprisingly, the case. Burtgang's prognoses are so oligophrenic that if allowed to go unanswered, their final cost would be incalculable. Burtgang has—not once, but several times—been able to make things worse without anyone stopping him. How long can that go on? As long as his blathering ultimata are kept on life support. That's why we have to pull the plug on them and go placidly amid the noise and haste. The important point here is not that that is no excuse for anything. The vital matter is that when he says that anyone who dares to follow through on the critical work that has already begun can expect to suffer hair loss and tooth decay as a result, in his mind, that's supposed to end the argument. It's like he believes he has said something very profound. As I have tried to show in this letter, Mr. Burtgang's tactics include personally attacking various individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect. As long as you remember that, we may yet be able to speak out against behavior and speech that is intended to regiment the public mind as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.
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