I tend to think that guns were exciting as a child playing games, and seeing John Wayne fight it out against the horrible natives was obviously a legacy to be maintained within the American shoot em up mentality. But, the advocacy of a gun culture really does mask that America is not very civilized as a community. There is a very real failure of civilising forces to assert what is and should be the right of all American citizens in a country continuously to enjoy life, liberty, and happiness without fear. Unfortunately, the distribution of fire arms is now so rampant in the US within groups that are best described as social misfits or psychologically damaged by stresses of American family or dysfunctional life that there is no real sense in the United States of life, liberty, nor happiness. The myth of happiness in America is almost as great as the myth of the efficacy of capitalism to sort out the needs for jobs, security, and well being. Each generation of Americans sees a new range of authorised weaponry as manufacturers dominate the dialogue and push their lethal goods out the door. This to me is the opposite of civilisation, a form of managed chaos by the arms industry that seriously limits American people and their fuller enjoyment of life, liberty and happiness. The American revolutionary experiment has failed miserably and threatens to spread its distorted sickness about values of peaceful coexistence worldwide. The world would be wise to ignor America's pleas for a distorted view of gun based diplomacy and gun based human rights until it can manage its own house and home, which on average still remain far from happy or civilised. It seems the British really did win the war of independence because America remains forever traumatised and what is obvious to its British neighbours is that the country has no idea of how to maintain a peaceful democracy modelled by the French revolution. Instead a form of tyranny of the powerful remains. By embedding the worst traits of the American failures at life, liberty and happiness, the Americans have deprived themselves of ever as a wholesome community enjoying a full peace and like the knights of old build security castles to live out their lives in fear and self imposed independence. Sure, there will be pockets of civilisation scattered through America, but the sense of universality of civilised community has been subjected to the gun worn by its citizens to protect each other from each other, a form of Hobbsian world without social agreement.
"We often know more than we can tell .." MIchael Polanyi
"If you truly are an ole fart, perhaps, now's the time to create a stink, before the
beastly ones really mess things up... ".
Arthur Lake in his new Wuh Lax novel "X Marks the Spot"
