by Ayoob » Thu 01 Jun 2006, 11:02:10
Here's a selection from each interview. It's so fascinating to me how these two guys essentially say the same thing in very different ways.
Noodge:
He explains his political philosophy which, as I understand it, is based on extending the death penalty to a far wider range of crimes than homicide, then arming any survivors to the teeth. He owns around 350 guns himself - more than one for every household in Crawford.
British police who don't want to carry firearms are, Nugent says, "out of their minds. I say if somebody robs you, shoot 'em. I'd like all thieves killed. And all rapists. And carjackers. No more graffiti. No more..." - this next phrase is a Spoonerism, rather than some Texan term for gross indecency - "snatch-pursing."
"For an unarmed force," I suggest, "the British police have shot quite a few people. Did you hear about Jean Charles de Menezes?"
"That was horrible. An American cop would have just beat the shit out of him."
Nugent has had a Sheriff Deputy's badge since 1982, and recently assisted with federal raids, "kicking down doors and arresting people". A keen admirer of fellow-guitarist Tony Blair, he abhors drugs, including alcohol, and maintains that he has never used such substances. He considers homosexuality morally wrong. He speaks about Muslims in a way which, were he to repeat it on globally networked television, might endanger his life. Nugent is aiming to run as Governor of Michigan in 2010.
"If Yusuf Islam is a threat to world peace," I tell him, in response to his anti-Islamic rant, "I'll run your campaign myself, wearing cactus shorts."
"Only the guilty need feel guilty," he replies. "These jihadists want to kill us and Cat Stevens. The message to send to a coyote is: the next time I see you, I'll shoot you."
He went to Fallujah in May 2004, as part of a tour with the USO (the same organisation that sent Bob Hope to entertain on the front line).
"And I visited Saddam Hussein's master war room. It was a glorious moment. It looked like something out of Star Wars. I saw his gold toilet. I shit in his bidet."
In Iraq, he says, he was allowed the opportunity to man automatic weapons. "Our failure," he tells me, "has been not to Nagasaki them."
"Is that opinion shared by your friends in the Republican Party?"
"Most of them feel that way."
"At what level?"
"I've heard it from high-level senators and congressmen."
"How high?"
"The highest."
"Do you mean Rumsfeld, Cheney, or Bush?"
"No," he says, with a defiant look.
We get into his pick-up, which is piled high with gun cases and food for the deer that roam his woodland, and set off for his estate. I tell Nugent how, 20 years ago, having observed a slaughterhouse at first hand, I decided to stop eating anything I felt I couldn't kill myself, and have since got by on fruit, vegetables and fish.
"That's my premise too," says Ted. Then: "Hang on - are you saying you don't eat lamb?"
"Yes."
"Well, my hunting system is pure. These people who passively connive in that hideous assembly-line slaughter are in denial, yet they condemn my natural gathering system. That is a bizarre mindset." Just to set the mood, he fires the .22 out of the open cab window.
Rebuttal from Jay:
Q: And in ancient Afghanistan, they played polo using human heads.
A: Right, and [that might happen again and] it could be on TV and play to huge audiences. It’s arbitrary. What these things actually are [the content of a moral code] is irrelevant. It doesn’t make any difference, it’s all the same thing to the genes. Moral philosophy is irrelevant because it is nothing more than a rationalization of the act. The discussion about philosophy is based on the incorrect view that people consciously think about a subject, and then they act. But the reality is exactly the opposite — people act then rationalize. This is literally true. This also self-evidentially true. Where else could consciousness come from except that meat between your ears?
Q: But this elimination of moral philosophy still leaves us with the existential problem, of suffering — that we ourselves undergo and what we see mirrored in others. Otherwise, there’s nothing to discuss.
A: Yes. I don’t have a moral theory but I have morality. I don’t lie knowingly, I don’t cheat people, I don’t hurt anything. But I don’t need to rationalize it. It’s built in. And that’s where it all comes from, it’s built-in. People act in ways that make them feel good and then invent social rationalizations designed to increase social rankings and fitness, or bond them to their tribe, after the fact. These social rationalizations can be almost anything that increases fitness. The actions that make them feel good consist of a basic genetic set, plus others, which may also be one hundred percent genetic, selected by the environment when they were maturing. So from what we are when we’re born, and as we’re raised, these values or morals are instilled. Then when we grow up, we have to tell other people why we do that, so we can form tribes. I don’t join tribes. So, I don’t care. I don’t bother any more. Why bother? Hey I saw Jesus — so what? And Elvis isn’t dead either. [laughs]
Q: That leads into something you’ve written about just in passing, which is that when you thoroughly understand the implications of genetics and evolutionary psychology, you come to view people as absolute automata, as robots, thoroughly and completely conditioned.
A: Yes.
Q: Can you say anything about the personal experience of looking at things that way?
A: People literally make decisions, decide what they’re going to do, subconsciously. And the conscious [rationalization] follows some time later. It’s literally true. Consciousness is a meat by-product. Continued reflection and reading can alter those algorithms that are making those decisions, but it’s not an immediate kind of a thing. It’s organic, and we don’t have direct access to those algorithms. I could try to go in and say ‘I’m going to change the way I think about such-and-such, tomorrow’ — but I can’t do that. If it’s going to happen it will be by education, reading, critical thinking, and reflection, whatever — over time. You need to pay constant attention even after you understand, so you don’t revert. A lot of this stuff keeps trying to draw me back. It’s like you’re climbing out of a slippery pit here. And those genes want you back.
Clarification from His Nugeness:
"I know you do a lot of charity work for wounded veterans. Has it occurred to you that someone else may have died in Saigon because you didn't go?"
"Absolutely."
Nugent's name, as I am sure he's aware, appears, along with those of Cheney, Bush and many of their fellow Republicans, on a website called chickenhawks.com. It lists those who have evaded or abbreviated their own military service then, later in life, developed an appetite for war and machismo, either personally or by proxy.
"So has this made you..." "Certainly. Because I failed to serve in Vietnam, I feel an obligation now, to do everything I can to support those defending our freedom. Do I feel guilt and embarrassment? Yes."
"You missed your calling."
"I wish I'd understood how important America's fight against our enemies was. But did I go to Fallujah two years ago? Damn right I did. And was I in Afghanistan, manning a 50-calibre machine gun in a Chinook - ready to rock? Yes. Was I there for years? No. A couple of weeks. But I am not a coward."
We take a break. Nugent sits by a small amp and plays tunes by Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed. Though he's sometimes derided as a circus act, watching him close up it's not hard to understand why people have likened him to Jimi Hendrix, or how John Peel came to call "Cat Scratch Fever" the best rock single of its year. His decision to restrict his berserk talent to heavy rock has undoubtedly masked his virtuosity. Not that this bothers Ted. "GOD SENT ME HERE TO MAKE SURE THESE LICKS CAME OFF OF A GUITAR. THEY ARE PERFECT. THEY ARE FUCKING PHENOMENAL."
They are. But there is something unnerving about Nugent, both as a musician and a human being. I think it's to do with the way that sex, killing, and rock'n'roll seem to have melded in his mind, into one intense, (omega) primeval compulsion. Nugent tells me that, as a younger man, sex was his true addiction. Speaking off tape, he confides rather more than I need to know.
He married his first wife Sandy when both were 22. They had two children, Sasha and Toby. Sandy divorced him seven years later, accusing him of "bizarre sexual practices". She also alleged he defecated in paper cups.
"I supposedly shit in a bowl of whipped cream. God, I wish I had." Sandy died in 1982, in a car crash.
"Which was apparently drink related?"
"So I believe," says Nugent, a patron of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. "Drugs and alcohol." Arguments over Sandy's substance abuse, Nugent says, caused their divorce. "I can't imagine you were monogamous." "Of course I wasn't. But that wasn't why she divorced me."
He married Shemane - now a TV producer, then a Detroit radio reporter - in 1989.
"You have four children - the two from your first marriage, Rocco, and a child by a teenage girlfriend..."
"Who was given out for adoption."
Nugent pauses.
"It's five, actually. I had a child out of wedlock 10 years ago. I suggest you include that, to show what a prick I am. Here I am, railing against people who do drugs, and I did something like that."
This isn't quite so dramatic a confessional moment as it might appear: Shemane's entertaining autobiography, Married to a Rock Star, offers a compassionate but frank account of Ted's struggles in the battle for fidelity, and a paternity suit was filed by the mother of his youngest child in August 2003.
I recall a music writer visiting Nugent in the late 1970s and observing that he had "never seen so many girls on one bed". ("Stick around," the guitarist told him.)
"I got that out of my system," says Nugent. "But I do believe that we were put here to breed."
I'm not sure that I've ever met anybody whose opinions and instincts are more directly opposed to my own. And yet, in some odd way, I find Ted Nugent impossible to dislike: I think because I consider him to be a psychotic - by the classic definition that he does not perceive the world as others do.
He has become sincerely persuaded that, to quote Alabama 3's paraphrase of Chairman Mao, "change must come through the barrel of a gun". Nugent says he worked tirelessly in George W Bush's campaign to be elected Governor of Texas: "I had a great communication with him then." More recently, he has criticised the President for feeble liberalism, especially concerning border controls. But Nugent remains a cherished if wayward, member of the Republican family.
Retort from Jay:
Q: If you personally acquired enormous political power, on the outrageous scale of, say, Joseph Stalin in the 1930’s, what actions would you take? Would you stock up a palace with a squadron of Praetorian Guards and a harem and then just enjoy the ride, or would you establish some Draconian program of absolute controls on human mobility, consumption, and reproduction, which are the three categories of required controls you’ve identified in your writings? If you’d go for the authoritarian approach, can you share with us some details on how you might work that?
A: I’d take the Praetorian Guards and the harem [laughs]. If I wanted to be in politics I would be.
Q: Nothing at all could be done?
A: Well, you might get together the brightest people in the country and have them work on it. There’s nothing I can see that can be done. However, if they were to have a Manhattan Project, with all the best evolutionary biologists, microbiologists, etc., maybe they could come up with some kind of gene tweaker or something. Some kind of drug they could give people.
Q: It would have to be a model of total control? There’s no other way?
A: Exactly.
Q: So in the best case, we’re looking at something between ‘1984’ and ‘Brave New World’ - total lockdown. And that’s in the best case.
A: Absolutely. On some previous forums and discussion lists we tried to figure out if there’s any way we could make a sustainable society. But we couldn’t see any way. Because you have the problem of reproduction. How do you keep people from reproducing? Do you give them a shot when they’re born?
Q: Or a dog and cat model?
A: Here’s the problem. The problem is that people evolved specifically to overcome social constraints on inclusive fitness. That’s what we’re for, that’s what we’re good at. So no matter what kind of controls other people put on us, we’re going to sit down and figure out how to get around it.
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And that's the ball game! From the nerdiest dieoff doomer to a rock star fucking hotties ten at a time, the conclusion is: Kick ass and take names! You are on your own, nobody is going to help you.
![[smilie=car3.gif]](https://peakoil.com/forums/images/smilies/car3.gif "car3")
