Two-Cent Tupac

In the latest incident of fatal black malice two innocents were killed as a result of a car-on-car drive-by on the Vegas strip. Yes, we've lost another "aspiring rapper" (see one of his compositions here) and all that potential therein.

All the usual elements are in place here: a confrontation between rivals spills out into the street, shots are fired, bystanders are killed. Inured as we all are to this grotesque cliche, this one will get a little more attention due to its dramatic, gruesome aspect--a taxi caught fire after being struck by the rapper's Maserati as it rolled through traffic with him (now dead, presumably less sentient than before) behind the wheel--and its similarity with Tupac Shakur's assassination just blocks away in 1996. So an obscure petty potentate calling himself "Kenny Clutch" gets to go out in high gangsta style, behind the wheel of a fine Italian sports car in a blaze of vainglory.

But he may also have something in common with another rapper (as of this writing still alive), the highly successful Rick Ross, unauthorized namesake of "Freeway Rick Ross", a drug dealer who almost single-handedly introduced crack cocaine to LA (now putatively reformed and blogging at Huffpo; but of course). Recently the rapper Ross was exposed as a fraud who lied about his criminal resume. Turns out he was in fact gainfully employed--as a prison guard no less.
This does not sit well with the Black Gangster Disciples. When the fake Rick Ross name-checked one of their more renowned killers in a rap they'd had enough. Ross had to cancel several shows when the gang declared he must pay them a tribute or he would be assassinated. Ross was later fired upon as he drove his Rolls Royce in Ft. Lauderdale.

 A commenter over at the L.A. Times reveals this comment was left on Clutch's Facebook page:

"lil kenny clutch better keep a killaz name out his fukin mouf or he gone stay stinkin..."

I wouldn't be surprised to learn this was a sort of local version of the Ross situation, or even that Clutch's killers were inspired by the Black Gangsters' successful intimidation.

Not All Lies Are Created Equal

"The miraculous lie is, generally speaking, useful to many who exert all their efforts to adorn and promulgate it: those who know the truth are either sensible enough to keep silence, cunning enough to pretend to believe it, or weak enough to lose reputation and to be considered liars by opposing it."
--Sir Richard Burton

Sound familiar?
I submit the Christian fable of the Cross worked for the West for so well for so long precisely because it is a fantasy. Conversely, the modern secular fable born of and displacing it--all men are born equal in the eyes of God gave birth to all men are equally endowed (and thus interchangable in the great, malleable mass of humanity)--fails because it makes a falsifiable assertion about physical reality.

You cannot disprove a fantasy. Whether or not Jesus was God is quite immaterial. It is not a worldly question. Thus it leaves room for man to investigate and understand the living world. And so many a good Christian did--and many a good atheist from Christendom as well, for he too is blessed by the idea of man created in the image of God. He paid his tithe in hypocrisy and went on his way. A good religion leaves room for such hypocrisy. The Islamic world's stubborn backwardness may be due largely to the stultifying effects of a religion leaving no breathing room for the hypocrite. But the assertion that each individual is imbued with the personal dignity and rights that come from being created in the image of God--the Jewish idea Christians put on the Cross for all humanity--has been beneficial to say the least. I might even call it progress, if I trusted it's going to end well. And if I believed in progress.

The new prevailing lie--Christianity's patricidal, ingrate bastard--makes of the first the fiction that each individual is equally endowed with the host of human talents. It thus asserts material reality in the present and is falsifiable (and has been, repeatedly). It has none of the advantages of fantasy. It may be ridiculous to believe in the Cross and Resurrection, but it is harmless in and of itself. It is the practical edicts anchored to that myth that count. And those edicts have been very good to us. So far.

On the other hand, to take as literal truth the Egalitarian Lie is to misunderstand human nature and material reality. Christians have created a fantasy about the afterlife. Progressives have created a fantasy about life on earth. Which is the greater lie? Which, in demanding silence or acquiescence on the part of society and the individual as Christianity once did and progressive egalitarianism does now, strains and distorts society more?