Free The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment by Chael Sonnen Page A

have to drive to a rally in support of Monsanto or Halliburton or Raytheon or any one of the dozen other evil corporate entities you battle like a mangy little Don Quixote; corporations that perform functions like creating drought- and plague-resistant strains of crops that keep millions of people around the world from starving, or technologies to prevent maniacs in turbans from frying your Mecca, San Francisco, with an atomic devise.
    Washing my truck is a waste of water, you say? Well, exactly how is it being wasted? After it gets my truck all bright ‘n’ shiny, it goes down a storm drain, ready to perform another job. It doesn’t disappear into thin air like Nicolas Cage’s career or Kim Kardashian’s dignity. It goes back to work; it evaporates, turns into a cloud, falls into rivers that drain into a reservoir, and gets pumped back into my pipes, so I can spray it on my truck and start the cycle all over again. It’s called recycling! A perfect system. Aren’t you proud of me, He with An Empty Head Who Points Filthy Fingers at Others? That’s your new Native American name. Just thought it up. You like?
    OK, enough of this shilly-shallyin’, Nature Boy. It’s time to start takin’ some shots. Let’s see what you’re really made of underneath all that grubby unctuousness. Take this headgear and pull it over that empty head. Now put in this mouthpiece. God! When’s the last time you let a dentist take a look at those choppers, Jungle Jim? What, no toothbrushes available at the sit-ins? Anyway, the bell is about to ring. Throw up your mitts and guard your grille. I’m about to spit some knowledge, and it’s going to come hard and fast.
    First things first. A little history lesson.
    Your attitude and behavior are direct ideological descendants of the student-protest movement of the 1960s. It shares that movement’s overwhelmingly self-mythologizing, self-referential, colossally reckless, insensitive, and vile aesthetic. Just so you know, the student protesters of the ‘60s weren’t all students. They were a small group of semi-professional agitators who didn’t fit into society and rode herd over a bunch of lost, dimwitted, self-impressed, highly impressionable, sub-adults ripe for indoctrination and processing. In theory, structure, and practice, the leaders of the protest movement marched in philosophical lockstep with that other world-weary, grizzled, pimp and failure Charles Manson. And let me ask you this—did your ideological predecessors ever stop to think about how the lives of the overwhelming majority of college students were disrupted and derailed thanks to their protests and attacks? Of course not. For the protesters, what they believed in, what they wanted to tell the world, was the only thing that had value to them.
    Thousands upon thousands of students, many of whom may have opposed the Vietnam War themselves but chose to manifest that opposition by voting and maintaining society, were inconvenienced. They had their entire academic lives upset and defined by the actions of a scurrilous few who occupied buildings, disrupted classes, and made unlawful and ridiculous demands on society and the institutions of higher learning that they targeted. Hopped up on illegal drugs, they fomented showdown after showdown with the forces of reason, law, and order—with disastrous results. I often speculate on the actual nature of that famous photo taken at Kent State: a young hippie woman, looking, I should observe, not unlike Squeaky Fromme, kneeling down over the prone body of some male hippie, her mouth frozen in a scream, her agony captured for all time by a clever and fortunate fellow hippie photographer. I wonder if that young man lying there, instead of being the victim of some justified act of self-defense meted out by some heroic National Guardsman, isn’t actually just laid out in the middle of the street in a narcotic haze from a bag of really potent dope. I also wonder if his aggrieved female