Epilogue: Sneak Peek at My Unpublished Book

Here are the first few pages of the book I am writing. As soon as I recognized some of the analogies like the lightning rod politicians and the matador's cape, I realized I shared it as an essay in 2007. Therefore I have nothing to lose by sharing it again with updated examples from my experience. Did I see Dennis Miller on TV using words from the original post of this? Probably. No, the erased italicized entries at the bottom of this were not forced on me. The only thing forced on me is the unbearable nuisance of knowing about all the stupid lies people use against me on the web. Chapter One: They Love Hate Hate's Anatomy Generally held in a negative light, with some countries even passing laws against it, hate should be as rare as pagan idolatry. Instead it is the emotional extreme of choice for most people, especially youth. My experience in being hate's target, as I struggled against popular stars who stole my work, has taught me a great deal. While the hate of prior generations was sufficient to give us our bloody past, today's hate is harnessed by the practices of the mass media. Hate is obvious. We do not need to ask the scowling hater how he feels. This sets hate apart from other less visible emotions for being able to serve as an external marker for a planned emotional response to manipulation. The manipulator needs to see the impact of his actions to be assured of their success. Hate is pure. In experiments scientists often need to gauge their results on a subject by comparisons with an untreated or 'control' subject. By the same token, pure hate offers a means by which to measure the intensity of other emotions, which tend to be mixed and harder to define, for the purpose of knowing the full reach of emotionally manipulative methods. Hate blinds. The infamous Nazis of the 1930's and 40's were able to establish a brutal dictatorship over a free and enlightened people by submerging the state in the darkness of racism. I suspect that our leaders took a lesson from this sinister technique, ironically enough, with the well intentioned aim of avoiding the chaos that gave rise to the monstrous regime. Hate may very well be used to blind consumers and voters today, its destruction confined to remote targets which cannot threaten the establishment. Elected officials, for instance, may serve as lightning rods for public hate, keeping it focused on themselves to spare their peers or benefactors among the corporate elite. Since terms of public office are temporary, hate for politicians ever lacks sufficient time to build to a threatening level. TV villains like the 1980's JR Ewing may also be used to steer public hate down an impotent course, with viewers blinded to the faces of the real life villains who exploit them. And the mass media, by training on the 'sins' of the unemployed, blinds us to the much greater crimes of the overpaid. Hate is seductive. JR was heralded as 'the man you love to hate', implying that hating can be pleasant. For years gala events were organized to celebrate hate of me, my work's fans misled into believing that I was a fraud. Hate's intensity adds depth to the experience of living. Hate is divisive. Its uncompromising negativity helps us to clearly define ourselves as belonging to a particular group. One of the easiest ways to establish a bond with a stranger is by expressing a mutual dislike of an absent third party. Hate is immediate. We indulge in this emotion when we believe it is just, as when we are subjected to a perceived wrongdoing, and seldom do we examine its cause closely. Our eagerness to hate, then, agrees with any efforts made to provoke hate. Hate is thoughtless. As long as you hate, you don't think. The growl of an animal whose meal has been interrupted roughly resembles the cursing and swearing of a disgruntled worker. While it is momentarily empowering to indulge in wrathful hate, doing so traps the brain in a primal mode, impeding higher reasoning. And hateful intellectual cripples are easier to exploit than peaceful, rational philosophers. Hate's outcome is predictable. Just as the bull rushes towards the matador's cape, the hater is drawn to his hate's target. Apparently I had as many views on YouTube when I was hated as I did later when my reputation was [temporarily] restored. Broadcasters are often indifferent to hateful feedback, counting it with other responses as mere confirmation of their viewership. The results of hate's provocation may be accurately forecast and hate's targets zeroed in on with surgical precision, making hate perhaps the aptest tool for goal oriented behavioral manipulation. Hate's Parents Envy Hate is almost always born of another emotion. Depending on its source, it may be constructive or destructive. Further to that, its merits and drawbacks may transpose according to subjective peculiarities. For example, hate born of envy seems fair to an eclipsed performer but strikes others as unjust. It is envy's hate with which I am most experienced, my original material having been coveted by performers around the globe, and about which I may speak with authority. The root of hate's envy is egotism. One who hatefully envies is one whose overextended ego is painfully diminished by an inability to presume equality with or superiority over another. Those who hatefully envy talent are incapable of enjoying the work of living artists by whom they feel outmatched. Imprisoned by self love, such people can only despair over what was created to please them. They respond to talent's generosity with inappropriate putdowns, often isolating themselves amid a host of celebrants, and in extreme cases, they steal the work whose high quality taunts them and pass it off as their own to secure the acclaim they believe they are due. While it is common to be discomforted by any reminder of our shortfalls, such an experience need not result in hate. One may take inspiration from the majestic feats of another to improve oneself. When this option is not exercised it can only be from laziness and a lack of faith in one's own potential. This exposes yet another fault in the hatefully envious, self deceit, for the insecurities which fuel their hate contradict their egotism. The source of such egotism is often talent and/or money. Performers are notoriously self centered, though they may be excused for it onstage where they are called upon to dominate a large group. And the exclusive privileges of the well-to-do quite naturally endow them with a sense of superiority. The hatefully envious may comprise a small, unenlightened minority from this group, but the cruel societal tendency to shun living artists shows that the hateful envy of talent is not necessarily class specific. In my forced co-habitations with the underprivileged I have endured many rebukes over my talent, which must be traced, along with the others, to egotism. Here the egotism is harder for me to bear because it is unfounded. These fools who have nothing and wallow in a state of constant need, lacking the skills and the proper attitude for success, steadfastly persist in seeing themselves as somehow elite. A combination of low intelligence and narcotics use appears to make this possible, with every decent person in their proximity suffering for it. Fortunately, the character building experience of poverty limits them to a small but irksome minority. The competitive middle class in which I was brought up makes a good breeding ground for envy's hate. A middle class man's preoccupation with social advancement may turn all others who would rise above him into bitter rivals. The middle class ideal of job, home, and family was apparently not enough for the well fed, comfortable, loved employees who subjected me to their hate. While I longed for the tranquility of their modest success, they condemned me for my 'stellar' achievements and went out of their way to disturb my peace. Among workers normally deprived of the leisure time to contemplate their condition, such offenders again, mercifully, form a small minority. Envy's hate has been a recurring barrier to my success in the seven long years since I first wrote and shared a popular song, and given the widely reported, well documented horrors that fame has inflicted on me, has no basis. One in my stricken state should be pitied, not envied. Meanwhile, industry artists who boast enormous wealth are not envied but admired. Egotism aside, this plainly artificial effect smacks of deep and powerful psychological programming. Envy's hate can confidently be classified as destructive. Hate would be expressed in mathematics as having a negative value. As such, when it is applied to a positive value, it returns a negative result. By this rule, creative talent, being positive, is negated by hate. We envy assets and I submit my volumes of damaged work and their consequent expense to broadcasters and culpable stars as evidence of envy's harm. Indignation On the other hand, in Ethics Aristotle praised as a virtue the hate of indignities, separating it from hate altogether with the term, righteous indignation. In this instance, the negative value of hate is crossed with another negative value, an indignity, to produce a positive result. According to Aristotle, it is good to hate indignities, such as those imposed on the poor and the dispossessed, for only by hating them can we find the motivation to eliminate them and thereby improve our living standard. (I interpret him broadly.) All hate strikes its target as an indignity since we are, by and large, oblivious to our wrongdoing, so that a strict definition of an indignity is needed to rule out any other cause for its hate before such hate may safely be found righteous. To this end, I propose that at least three conditions be met: 1) The insult must be deliberate. The eclipsed performer does not suffer an indignity at the hands of a superior talent. The latter's goal is to please others, not to hurt them, and any pain they might suffer from his noble effort is accidental. But if discouragement of the lesser talent was the real purpose for the greater one's appearance, the act qualifies as meeting this condition for inflicting an indignity. 2) The harm must be unjust. The indignity's target must be innocent, in order to distinguish injury from corrective punishment. The poetic lampoons I aimed at stars who stole my work were provoked by their theft of my online posts. They deserved to be bashed for that. Indeed, they went to jail and prison for that. 3) The culprit must be aggressive. A social worker's role in the regular performance of her duties is passive when she is required to refuse aid to a client. The true aggressor in such a case is the government and, ultimately, the electorate. Again, at least all three of these conditions must be met. If the refusal is just or accidental, it is not an indignity. In my ceaseless struggles against the giant corporate entity that robbed me and nearly killed me before the eyes of the world, I often feel alone. My cause is just. My success would be shared by all artists and their crowds of followers. In a land where freedom and property rights are cherished, for an artist whose work was as severely violated as was mine to not only go uncompensated but suffer further abuses, as I have to the present day, threatens every man, woman, and child. When it comes to this 'good' hate, the same passion that freed our ancestors from their oppressors, it fizzles out today as a tasteless joke against a firewall of prejudice, arrogance, and deceit, and the poverty I am expected to settle for, after authoring works that generated millions of dollars in profits, is the most it can gain. So much for the American dream when the spirit of free enterprise is publicly crushed, sparking no effective protest, as the population is drawn by the invisible strings of modern mental manipulation towards a dead end of self betrayal - or so it appears to me. Fear Bonding us with the animals, fear rules as the dominant emotion governing our behavior. Its vital attachment to our basic survival makes it a prolific breeder of primal emotions. Fear is reported to be the favorite means by which to control mass behavior with techniques which I must assume factor in its tendency to produce hate. My personal fear is the risk of mass destruction posed by such reckless and irresponsible emotional button pushing. Driving fear's hate are multiple phobias, the most relevant to this discussion being fear of strangers, fear of foreign cultures, fear of change, and fear of death, all of which may be gathered into a broader category under the popular term, fear of the unknown. Fear's hate is extremely destructive, being the chief cause of war, and by my formula this suggests that the unknown has a positive value. Certainly by offering humanity the gainful pursuit of purposeful exploration, it is an asset which should inspire wonder rather than provoke hate. While enlightened thinkers have long adopted this mindset, the ongoing production of war weapons, the persistence of culture clashes, the stubborn maintenance of unpopular government policies, and the ever increasing human lifespan through medicine sadly show that the rest of us are far from overcoming our fear of the unknown and leaving the jungle of our primate ancestors behind us. My surprise success in the early summer of 2007 has been compromised in the years since by all four of the aforementioned phobias: my comparatively sparse performing experience estranged me from the music crowd, to the majority of my online followers I am a foreign national and my name is foreign sounding to locals, by musical and literary innovation I brought change, and at the hands of character assassins I suffered a kind of death. Along these lines a door has been left open for the fear of the unknown of what might happen if I ascend to the glory of stardom to be accessed by hate mongers. Having faith in the strength of my work, in these circumstances I wonder if I wouldn't be cornered in an alley and beaten senseless without my songs and stories to shield me. And has the population yet had a chance to make a fair decision about me, free of the undetectable persuasions of my detractors in the corporate mass media? Let's ask Ellen watchers. The wide array of religious and philosophic approaches to fear of death fractures the population deeply on the issue of the afterlife. It is unsafe to discuss religion at card parties where the conversation inevitably turns violent. Most religions promise a happy afterlife if we try to be good, and the race for riches would be dismissed as fleeting by the devoutest followers of most religions. The opposite seems to be the case for those in a world whose economy is structured around greed and where the persuasion to betray religious principles is constant. Those who don't believe in the afterlife may plunder the world's resources with a clearer conscience but lack the internal support of religious faith in times of hardship or crisis. They are also a minority, with most of us accepting the religious instruction to love our neighbors, however compelled we might be to do otherwise. (The discussion continues to the end of the chapter. Youth are mentioned as being the principle target of fear/hate campaigns because of the tendency for their behavioral programming to last through their adulthood. The next chapter, 'They Live on Lies', is about how a superfluous, destructive industry has been created for mass manipulators to give them something to ruin with their lies during peacetime, as has been the case with my music, my comedy, my image, and my reputation. When my songs were lies in the hands of frauds, they were all fit for the TV and radio and movies and it was safe for people to say they liked them. But now that my music represents truth, its author has a hard time even posting videos on YouTube. Because of my extensive knowledge of industry lies, I expect this new chapter to double in length my words on hate.)
Arguments Copyright Issues Comedy Sketches Cartoons Lyrics Poems
More Statements Scripts Songs
© 2007, 2014. Statements by David Skerkowski. All rights reserved.