True Believers

In the '60s politicians like Richard Nixon called "true believers" the "silent majority." By 2005 the term True Believer was code for a right wing fanatic.  Whether Muslim or fundamentalist Evangelical Christian, the essential pathology is the same.  I always saw George W. Bush and Osama bin laden as sons of the ruling class. Osama came from a rich and powerful Saudi Arabian family, friends of George H.W. Bush.  (I can imagine a teenage W. meeting a high school age Osama at some kind of a Saudi state dinner party.)  They were the "black sheep" in families of extreme wealth and power, so it made sense to me when each became the nemesis of the other.  

The facts surrounding the 9/11 attacks of 2001 are at this time (in 2014) still contradictory and controversial.  The standard cover story makes 9/11 into a contest between W. and Osama. But, what really happened is something much more sinister, something that will take generations to sort out.   

True Believers

These true believers are comin’ after you.
On one side’s Osama, on the other W.
They play both ends of the street you’re livin’ on.
Only thing they got is fear and death and destruction.

By the year 2005 we were back in the same old 
    fix we’ve always been in.
King Kong fighting Godzilla couldn’t have made it 
    worse in this bull pen.
The strategic balance of the world being played 
    by the sons of the ruling class.
The leaders of both sides claimed to be taking orders from God,
    who always gets a free pass.
They really believed that what they were doing 
    would take the other down make a better world.
But fanatic is as fanatic does and 
    there was a lotta death they could hurl.
On the one side you had armies and corporations,
    on the other you had a cave.
One guy sitting in a bubble in a big house,
    the other guy plotting and praying.
But the wars that these two started 
    made a scream heard round the world,
    causing people to lose their traction, 
    vent their emotions, up the violent action,
    leading to repressive reactions
    requiring precision, not indecision, but religion
    to make the whole thing black and white
    then we’re gonna kick some ass tonight.
We’ll send out a posse to round em up,
    kill the bad guys and the good guys’ll sign up.
And the God who made these guys was 
    suffering bad because of their lies.
The rest of us just shook our heads
    in disbelief, but we had such busy lives.
So we did what they said
    went about our business and somehow,
    we all got fooled again.

Now what we saw that year was in a tried and true
tradition of taking fiction and calling it religion,
of making nice about murder destruction and 
trying to pass it off as something God commands.
God’s instructions - like a con man 
taking the ring off your hand
while selling back to you as nothing 
you’ll never understand
except that he’s getting creepy and making you feel 
very insecure, like he’s watching you and listening in,
thinking you’re gonna make a deal with someone who
knows someone who knows someone 
who knows someone else
who just might squeal about you being somewhere you
shouldn’t have been, and it gets more and more unreal
‘til you be thinking this ain’t my country no more,
this here’s like a nightmare in a bottle,
where the inmates run the prison and drive it 
like a train without a throttle,
where the idiot is king, 
and his yes-men never admit that they see anything 
that can be called the truth 
because they make their own reality 
out of wishes fear and fraud,
and when the facts get in the way they say 
it’s all the will of God.

See, Osama and W were symbols of wealth gone wild, 
with the power to take whole worlds apart. 
They didn’t realize what they were gettin’ us all into,
but they were both two sides of a coin that glows in the dark.
Cuz true believers only live to carry out God’s plan
and these guys thought each other a criminal, 
a terrorist acting as the Devil’s hand.
But the Devil, like any good fallen angel, 
uses both hands to ply his trade,  
makes excuses for the way the plan is failing,
while the other hand is wailing on the opponents of the cause,
but every hand is just a pawn in a power grab so great
it melts the heart into nuclear hatred 
of the world the way it is, and of the deicide machine that taunts the powers that be and works to feed eternal war, eternal violence, and eternal greed.
The true believers of this cause,
those who practice death destruction,
who, like junkies, need to fight and kill
to get their rocks off, get their thrill, 
are crazy in their hearts or simply psycho 
in their head and body parts.
And those who treat it as a game,
or as a martyr, purified from shame,
whose lie is bigger than any infidel,
who thinks he’s goin’ to heaven 
but has opened the gates of hell,
blowin’ up yourself to kill other folks,
make your way of life into a tragic hoax. 
And just as bad is the cowboy brain
of a wingnut fool who thinks he’s so brave,
he’s on a mission from God 
to protect a way of life so addicted to stuff 
and continuous strife, making war 
while saying you’re pro-life, 
giving the rich man more and more and more
while everybody else coughs it up 
or gets shown the door. 

These true believers they’re comin’ after you.
On one side’s Osama, on the other W.
They play both ends of the street you’re livin’ on.
Only thing they got is 
fear, and death, and destruction.

Copyright © 2005, 2014 by David Larstein, all rights reserved.

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