Wealth Disparity Just a Pretext

Today I looked at an old movie during breakfast. Last night, I came across Bound for Glory while taking the birds out for amusement, and I watched for a while. Today I watched some more of it.

Bound for Glory is about Woody Guthrie, the communist musician who wrote the song This Land is Your Land, putting the words to the melody to an existing hymn. It starred David Carradine, the guy from Kill Bill and Kung Fu. He was a childhood hero of mine. I didn’t realize Kung Fu and eastern mysticism were BS. He died naked, while abusing himself, hanging by a belt in a hotel closet. Not the way an old man should go. No dignity.

Don’t get my started on Kung Fu. When I was a kid, I broke my arm imitating Carradine’s wandering idiot. A Phys. Ed. teacher told me to jump off a high beam made from an old telephone pole, and to hit the ground rolling. I jumped headfirst because I had seen David Carradine’s stuntman do it. Thank God my neck wasn’t broken.

I thought the movie would be interesting because it would tell me things about the Depression, but it left me a little nauseated.

I don’t know how true the movie is. It was based on Guthrie’s autobiography of the same name, but the movie’s “facts” don’t look much like the facts on Wikipedia’s page. Some of it is true. Guthrie was a union agitator and a communist. He didn’t join the Communist Party formally, but he did what he could to advance its twisted agenda.

The version of Guthrie presented in the movie was supposed to be flattering, but I found him disgusting. Carradine’s Guthrie is a smirking, smug, arrogant, selfish jerk who cheats on his wife without even thinking about it. He condescends to everyone around him. Very off-putting.

The movie promotes unions and leftism, and as I should have expected, it attacks Christianity. Movie Guthrie’s agitator pal Ozark Bule goes to migrant camps and sings a revolting song about pie in the sky when you die. The idea is that preachers tell you you’re going to get good things in heaven, which is a “dirty lie,” and that you should stand up and demand good things here on earth.

There is a scene in the movie in which Guthrie ask a preacher for an odd job so he can eat. The preacher gives him a speech about having no work to give him and not wanting to make things worse by giving him charity, and he gives Guthrie nothing. The message: “God isn’t going to do anything for you, and people who believe in him are your enemies.” Don’t think about the huge body of charity work Christians have done over the centuries. That’s irrelevant.

I found out that Guthrie wrote This Land is Your Land as a rebuttal…get ready…for God Bless America, which was getting heavy radio play at the time. Can you believe that? What a peek into the hidden heart of leftism. How can anyone find God Bless America offensive? Look at the lyrics. It acknowledges that God has blessed America, and it asks him to guide her. Only a leftist could find outrage in that. It doesn’t promote capitalism. It doesn’t attack unions. It is astounding that anyone would find it provocative.

This Land is Your Land doesn’t mention God once. It merely suggests that everyone in America owns all of America. In other words, if you don’t have everything you want, it’s because some rich person is hoarding it, and you have the right to take it.

When I say the movie was nauseating, I am not exaggerating. I feel physical nausea. The “heroic” leftists in the movie are sleazy people with dirty, defiled lives. They have no interest at all in God, except to fight the notion that he exists. They think all their problems can be solved be battling in the flesh. They think people who have more than they do are morally inferior parasites.

I’ve known successful people, and I’ve known poor people. The poor are morally inferior to the rich. In most cases, this is why they’re poor. They commit most violent crime and property crime. They have worse problems with pride. Many poor people are so intoxicated with self-love, they give themselves names, like comic book superheroes. I know two guys who call themselves Cheno Lyfe and Dunamis. I don’t think Dunamis is a proud guy, but he got caught in the name trend, which came from pride. We all know of pride-crazed poor people who became rich and held onto their bizarre handles or invented new ones: Jay-Z. Eminem. J-Lo. Dr. Dre. Snoop Dogg.

Success doesn’t make you a good person, but on the whole, successful people are better than poor people. Who would you rather live among?

The sick leftist notion that poverty equals holiness and wealth equals depravity is poisonous. It put the bodies of countless nice people in ditches in Cambodia. It built Castro’s torture chambers. It built the gulags. It killed 100 million people during the last century.

There’s a gag-inducing scene in the movie which could probably be used as a litmus test to distinguish good people from bad. Guthrie chases a woman in order to have sex with her. She’s a volunteer who fed him at a soup kitchen. When he finally gets into her house, he sees that she’s rich. After he has had his way, he scolds her for her money and asks if it embarrasses her. During the same conversation, with his smirk bright as ever, he tells her he has a wife and kids, and that he has to leave her because he has started to care. No shame. Just a big grin. Then he walks out.

If you can watch that scene and admire the character Carradine is playing, you’re probably going to hell, because you are completely unfamiliar with love, and you are blind to cruelty.

I wonder: how bright is the line between God’s children and the future residents of hell? More than ever, I feel like we only have 2 classes and 2 races. Once class/race is those who choose God, and the other is those who despise him. Leftism is associated strongly with the latter group.

The movie reminds me of something they used to do in communist countries. You have a teacher ask a room full of kids to pray to God for food. Then when they get nothing, you tell them to pray to Mao/Stalin/Castro/Barack Obama/whoever for food. Then you wheel in a cart full of pastries and pass them out. Leftists want us to think violence and agitation get our needs filled, and they want us to hate God for failing to cater to our whims.

In East Germany, there used to be posters that read, “Without God and without sun, we will get our harvest done.” The average American does not understand how deeply leftism is entwined with hatred of God. Socialism was invented to turn the government into a messiah, in order to replace the Lord.

When I was at Columbia University (before Obama was admitted belatedly as a transfer student), I used to hang around with Woody Guthrie’s heirs. I was not interested in their politics. I did not realize you had to swing that way to really be part of the gang. We used to play instruments and sing in our dorm rooms. They were social justice warriors. Now, of course, 98% of them are bank presidents and lawyers and so on. Not one that I know of went on to become a bona fide, to-the-bone agitator.

One of the agitators was named Dave. He had a beat-up Gibson J45. At the time, I did not know this was the signature guitar of leftist troubadors. He was one of the people who used to come to my dorm room and play and sing. When I left Columbia for one of the last times, I caught a cab, and Dave was at the wheel. On the way to LaGuardia, he told me how he was hoping to go to Nicaragua and work for the bloodthirsty Sandinistas. I looked him up today. He’s a partner in a New York law firm. Still sings. I wonder if he thinks he’s a real Guthrie heir.

I didn’t understand that he and my other music buddies were part of the other class. I wish I had. I would not have messed with them. I wouldn’t have gone to Columbia in the first place. A person of my race has no business there. I was ignorant, though. I didn’t know the world was divided, or that there was no way to cross the gulf.

Dave was a nice enough guy, and I had fun with the others, but these were relationships without futures.

Satan tries to convince us that people are all more or less the same. Not true. There are two groups, and everyone belongs to one or the other. If you hang out with the other group, you will suffer eventually. I did. You can be nice to them. You can do business with them. You can’t become part of their family, though.

You can’t join the other race, but you can let them drag you to hell, where, in addition to being damned, you will be a misfit.

Interesting stuff. There was no one to teach me these things when I was young.

I am not a Woody Guthrie fan. I literally find him disgusting now. I don’t mind being rejected by the grey people; the people with dark lives. Life around them is depressing and anxious. There is no real love among them.

More

Today after I wrote this entry, a strange feeling came over me. I felt like I was saying goodbye to the children of darkness.

I feel like a sliding door has come down between me and people who won’t listen to God. They’re on the other side, continuing to scrap over cheap trinkets, and I have a feeling I would describe as resignment. It’s not going to work out between us, and I might as well let them go.

As the Bible says in many places, God sets his people apart from the world. We are not called to have 5,000 Facebook friends. If you can go anywhere and be accepted, you’re not close to God. A child of darkness is welcome in a much wider variety of social circles. A person like that can go nearly anywhere and adapt. Fewer things are forbidden to them. If you’re close to God, you have to be careful not to get too close to the wrong people. It’s like working at a hospice and making friends with every patient you work with. The friendships have no future.

It’s almost as though people who are against God aren’t real. No matter how solid they look now, in a few years, they will vanish forever.

I know many people I will never see again. People I know are in hell. I could give you names. Some are relatives. I know a lot of people who are virtually certain to go there. It’s funny; we laugh and joke with our non-saved friends here on earth. We don’t feel afraid for them. We don’t think much about their terrible destinies.

Christian friendships are different. Christian friendships will last forever. We will know each other and enjoy each other’s love and faithfulness a billion years from now.

If you’re a Christian, and you want to do it right, you have to stop trying to fit in. Strangely, though, we have a lot of prominent clergymen telling us to be friends with everyone. We have hip young pastors telling us to try to be cool. Love is their excuse, but the truth is that they’re greedy. The more their congregations conform to the world, the more people go to their “churches,” and the more money comes in the door.

If you look like the worldly, you talk like the worldly, you think like the worldly, and you vote like the worldly, you are a person of the world, not the church.

So much of our activity here is wasted. All sinful activity is wasted. Then there are our other pursuits, which, although not forbidden, serve to render us useless. We get caught up in chasing goals that mean absolutely nothing to God. We’re so proud when we succeed! We want to be noticed. We like reminding ourselves. We collect ridiculous trophies and medals. We put plaques on our walls, celebrating our vain accomplishments. Salesman of the Month. Who’s Who in America. WBC Lightweight Champion. Whatever. We die, and then it’s all garbage. If we’re rich, we may try to be keep our names in people’s mouths. We may have our widows put our names on the fronts of hospitals and dormitories. As if such things help or matter to dead people.

There are parks and museums named after people who went to hell before they were built. They were in hell, thinking about anything but parks and museums, while people they left behind got things rolling and gave speeches and cut ribbons. How weird is that? You can be in hell, crying and screaming, while your smiling widow cuts a ribbon in front of a library with your name on it.

“Wherever he is, he must be smiling.” We ought to stop saying that.

This life looks stranger and stranger to me all the time.