I could go on and on – “all the friends I ever had are gone” - but I want to get to my point: In every single one of these cases their deaths were preceded by a combination of economic troubles and isolation from the ones they loved, who could not find the support or community to be able to love somebody as intense as a hero.

Do you want to know how to kill an Authentic Journalist or a revolutionary? Do you want to know how to provoke a truth-seeker and truth-teller into taking his or her own life? Play a con game on him and her: that’s how. Tell her you love her. Tell him you love him. Tell him and her that you’re different than all the dishonest people out there. Take the steps to show him and her that you are different, that you are like him and her, a truth-seeker and truth-teller. Get him or her to drop his or her guard, to open up. He or she will love you more intensely and generously than you have ever known. There is nothing he or she won’t do for you, so happy to feel, for the first time in probably a long time, that he is loved, that she is not alone. And then, when he or she are at their softest and most tender point, lightly drop the hint that it’s all been a lie. Reveal that you have successfully deceived him or her, in the very exact ways that you promised him or her with gooey eyes and poetic tones that you would never, ever, do to him or her.

Wanna see a truth-teller blow his or her brains out like Gary did, like at least two good journalist friends of mine are contemplating right now? Gain his and her trust, and then pull the trigger of deception: Make him and her doubt his and her own prowess as a truth-detector. Remind him and her that they are freaks of nature: truth-tellers in a world of liars, and that you are so smart – aren’t you cute and proud of yourself? - that you alone were able to deceive him and her.

That’s the first part: The suicides I have known have almost all been about love promised and not delivered. Let me be very clear: It is not the fault of the lover who could not love him or her enough. It is the fault of the entire community and culture for being unable and unwilling to support revolutionary love. The suicides I have known have mostly been in Gringolandia, where there is no support for love, where “the problem club” recruits daily, where the “self help” and addictionology industries prey on weak gringo minds selling the bullshit that a human being is a nation-state, that the human has “borders” or “boundaries” and has to “set those boundaries.” The "professionals" who peddle those inhuman theories have their fingers on the trigger, too.

There, in the United States, where, red state or blue state, it’s the same fucking fascism of cars and auto insurance, of illness and health insurance, of jobs at alienated labor, of “educations” that teach nothing except what must later be unlearned, or of unemployment, ignorance, illness, homelessness or prison, it is forbidden to love a revolutionary. If you do, if you are sincere at it, you will receive no support from your “friends” or “community.” If you love someone like Gary, like Abbie, like Ellen, like Jeff, someone intense and truth-telling and truth-seeking, you, too, will become isolated. You cannot find support. He or she is too overwhelming for you to handle by yourself, but nobody will help you. In fact, they may hypocritically blame you after he or she has checked out. They… the people who are really to blame, will turn on you for having followed their advice, and they will blame you. Think about that.

A hero simply loves more and gives more than an ordinary man or woman: and so do those who choose to love him and her while suffering the slings and arrows of the problem club and the jealous non-support of the slow class all around them. That’s the first part of the story.

But there is a second part, beyond the impossibility of loving a true revolutionary under capitalism. There is something else that assures a suicide when combined with deception and it is very much related to capitalism: The person looking down the barrel of the gun must lose his or her sense of place.

posted by Cyndy | link | | |