Hillary and Negan: Parallels in Evil : Edward Cline

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

An alternative title for this article could also be: Negan and Hillary: Partners in Tyranny and Terror.

An intriguing and I think apt parallel exists between Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, overall career, goals, and character, and the goals and character of Negan. And the parallels are so simpatico, they seem to feed on and off of each other. They are mutually symptomatic of the state of the culture. The parallel even extends to Hillary’s supporters in the electorate and to the MSM, and to Negan’s loyal gang of marauding “Survivors.” It all should be explicated. I make no apologies for drawing readers’ attention to the parallel.

The cartoon Negan and the TV Negan

Who or what is “Negan”? He is the new archvillain of The Walking Dead (TWD) a villain who, unlike other villains in the series, does not try to rationalize his evil. He is thoroughly evil, and knows it, boasts of it, and revels in it. He is the “king” of the Survivors, who obey him and do his bidding. There is no saying “No” to him. Negan is perfectly portrayed by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, formerly of “Grey’s Anatomy” and is a veteran dozens of films and TV shows. I have watched none of his other films or TV series. So I can’t gauge or assess his true character, or even his acting abilities from other shows. But he is overwhelmingly convincing as Negan, so convincingly evil that you want to smack him and wrest the baseball bat from him and give him a taste of his own medicine. The trailer here should give readers unfamiliar with the series a taste of Negan.

Negan is a vile, evil character who debuted in April at the end of Season Six of The Walking Dead. Negan is a brutal tyrant who lords over an enclave of plague survivors and likes to smash victims’ heads with a baseball bat sheathed in barbed wire. He has a policy of extortion that requires other, productive enclaves to give him half of what they have in exchange for his not raiding, raping, enslaving, and killing their inhabitants and trashing their communities.

As one of their spokesmen said to others in an earlier teaser scene: “Everything you have now belongs to Negan.” gang are also dedicated nihilists.

Negan could be taken as a metaphor for the Obama administration, for Hillary’s dreamed of administration, or for Islamic jihadists. All three entities are looters, plunderers, and destroyers.

And here is another, uncensored version of how he terrorizes, humiliates, and taunts his captured victims. Please excuse the language. This version was recorded from a TV. I do not know its source. It is compelling because Negan expresses Hillary’s malevolence, and Negan’s foul language has also been captured elsewhere as Hillary’s. Negan is the real Hillary Clinton’s fantasy surrogate. It is what she is at the core. Negan is artfully glib as Hillary is consistently plastic and arificial.

Countless fans of the series are waiting, one supposes breathlessly, for the debut of Season 7 on October 23rd. Then they will learn who is killed by Negan and his baseball bat.

(Advisory: I am not a “zombie” fan or aficionado of the genre by any means. Out of desperation to watch anything of interest on Netflix, I tried the first episodes of The Walking Dead and found them intriguing because of the personal conflicts and character growth of many of the characters. Nor am I enamored of the original and ongoing graphic comics rendition of the series, written by Robert Kirkman. The artwork in the comics is crude and without any redeeming value whatsoever, and the storyline in the dialogue is banal, naturalistic, if not repellant. Fortunately, the AMC TV series does not follow the graphic comics’ storyline. Not yet.)

Between the Negan fans and Hillary’s supporters, there’s a shared malevolence that thrives based on the “attraction” to Negan and what Hillary’s supporters are willing to sanction or evade concerning her life and what she’s done. They’re willing to forgive her repeated lies, her spectacular failures, her blatant corruption, and every other sin in the book she’s guilty of committing. This does not include her email promise to end many the best and most brutal of her critics, such as Breitbart and Alex Jones. I’m sure she has a long list of other “enemies” she wants to shaft.

The secret to Negan’s “charm,” of his glib boasting of his power, is his “subject’s” willingness to submit to his will, of their need to have a “leader” tell them what they should think and do, of the vacuum inside themselves that needs to be filled with Negan (which is why they all call themselves “Negan”) They are all nihilists to the core. In payment for being their “leader,” they eagerly give him whatever he wants, without hesitation: their property, their wives, everything, in shamelessly compliant dhimmitude.

The secret to Hillary’s alleged “charm” is that she has no “ideals.” The attainment of unopposed power and the accumulation of even more unearned wealth are her sole goals and motivations. Her supporters know this. For all the scandals and allegations of lying, of corruption, and felony-class crimes that surround her political career and personal life, all of which has been documented, they cannot help but know. The information is out there. Which means that her supporters are valueless dhimmis hoping she will take care of them while she destroys others’ values, and continues Barack Obama’s campaign to destroy America.

Personally, I do not think there is such person as Hillary Rodham Clinton. That person deflated years and years ago, perhaps in college, and is now a shriveled, empty balloon. Long ago Ayn Rand, the novelist/philosopher, coined a term for people who make others the fulcrum of their lives: social metaphysicians, meaning that they consider others, and not themselves, as the end-all and be-all of their values and lives. A joke went around about the passing of such a person. It is said that on the cusp of death, one saw one’s life pass before one’s eyes. An expiring social metaphysician, however, would see everyone else’s life pass before his eyes.

Bill Dedman, writing an excellent piece about Clinton and Alinsky for NBC News in 2007, remarked about Alinsky, and his description could just as well apply to Hillary (and Obama): But “Alinsky was no mere showman. He was a sometimes brutal seeker of power for others, schooling radicals with maxims such as ‘Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.’”

Moreover, supporting Hillary allows her people in and out of her campaign vortex their own malevolence and hatred onto her. She in turn acts as a proxy or surrogate of their own valueless existence. She promises to achieve what they are unable to. That way they are “filled” with a sense of efficacy over and revenge on America.

Why? For one thing, because rooting for Hillary spares them the effort of having any values to fight for, just as surrendering one’s existence to the whims of Negan, spares his gang of the necessity of thinking for themselves, of having no values beyond the possibility of naked existence. Seeing others’ values destroyed by Obama and Hillary gives them some sense of efficacy or sense of power. Evil is what “works.” They know that Negan and Hillary are unadulterated evil, but they’re comfortable with it. Not questioning the evil allows them to “live,” as though living at the behest and leave of a monster is a value to pursue and sustain. Hillary has been a hard-core “progressive” since 1969, when she finished her Wellesley graduation thesis praising the original community organizer, Saul Alinsky, “There is only the fight.” She wrote in it, “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again.” In truth, whatever she claims was “lost,” is what she wants to lose again.

The power that Jeffrey Dean Morgan wields in The Walking Dead is basically the kind of power Hillary wishes to wield over America and Americans. She wants us on our knees.

The similarities between Negan and his Savior underlings, and Islam and Muslims, are also striking to those paying attn enough to see the parallels and not afraid to point them out. The Islamic Negan has been raiding, killing, and trashing Western societies for decades. Note the latest raid in Brussels. Often these Negan jihadists and invaders are invited into these societies for a variety of political and economic reasons. Daniel Greenfield as Sultan Knish wrote, and warned, in 2010, in his column, “Immigration Jihad,” and the incremental and inevitable Islamization of Austria:

Where once upon a time Islamic armies had to lay siege, plant gunpowder charges and finally breach the walls in massive costly charges– today they can simply hop a plane. And so what started out as a few newspaper vendors, factory workers and janitors, morphed into a full blown cultural invasion complete with a network of Islamic schools where students are taught that Islam is incompatible with democracy, that Muslims are superior to non-Muslims, and where 8.5 percent of the teachers surveyed said that it is understandable when violence is used to spread Islam. The pattern however is not limited to Vienna, it exists worldwide…..

But like any takeover in which the enemy is allowed inside the gates, it could not happen without the active collaboration of those on the inside. And they have their various motivations. Left of center politicians and parties often expect that Muslim immigrants will serve as a reliable voting base for them, and they are correct about that—in the short term. Meanwhile more middle of the road pols see rising population figures as a regional net benefit and a shot at elevating their own political importance, without examining the consequences down the road. Companies are always on the lookout for cheap labor, and particularly in countries and areas with a low birth rate, there are always some dirty jobs that need doing. The jobs that Americans, Austrians, Frenchmen, Israelis and Norwegians don’t want to do. But those same jobs are also part of the critical infrastructure of a local economy. And by capturing them, they capture the base processes by which the system exists.

However, in literature, while there is a limited amount of malevolence one can accept in fiction; it is not, or should not be, an unlimited feature; a continual presence of evil or of a malevolent character or theme can dull one’s brain and make one hostile to any and all values. In a story, evil or malevolence must be defeated at some point and rendered impotent. If it is not foiled and made powerless, but instead becomes a continuous presence and theme in a story, then there is no point in contemplating the story any further.

This is basically the state of literature and art today. There is little respite from the malaise. One finds relief where one can.

The Walking Dead from now on will dramatize what one could call “the primacy of malevolence” or the primacy of evil.

That is what is going to happen in The Walking Dead, and when it does, off will go my screen.

Many strong characters emerged over the six seasons, chief among them, at least from my moral and esthetic tastes, Carol Peletier (played by Melissa McBride) and Daryl Dixon (played by Norman Reedus).

My anonymous correspondent about TWD had this to say:

Melissa McBride as Carol Peletier

Carol’s character blossomed from a self-effacing housewife with a brute of a husband (who dies early on) into an efficacious dreadnaught of a zombie fighter who finds values to fight for outside of her formerly shrunken realm of domestic chores.

The character of Daryl evolved from an ambiguous, cynical, loud-mouthed, back-country redneck to one of moral certitude and honesty.

These were to two most interesting characters in the series. But the producers are prepared to kill them off as heroes. As a fellow The Walking Dead watcher, who has decided never again to watch The Walking Dead, remarked to me:

It’s a miserable thing to watch a favorite character being destroyed by his or her creators. I’ve seen that more than I care to and it appears that may be what is happening to the great Carol Peletier. To watch a timid, abused woman grow into an implacable protector of the good and then be brought down by guilt-inducing religious mysticism is inexcusable. Shame on the TWD writers if that is what they are doing….

Having just watched “Twice as Far,” and Carol’s goodbye note to Tobin and everyone else, if the scripters kill her off, I’m done with TWD. If they somehow compromise or kill of Daryl, I’m double done with TWD. Carol’s “leaving” the story because she can’t kill people who are trying to kill her or the people she values, is a dead end, as far as I’m concerned. To hell with the rosary, and the implied pacifism of Carol. Bad turn in the series. We want heroes, not characters who are angst-ridden about defending their values….

How they deal with the pure evil of Negan is going to be a turning point. I think we can wave Glenn goodbye because his character arc has pretty much hit cruise control and Maggie is taking over as the family badass. That’s going to be tough to watch, and if it’s going to be as dark as everyone’s saying there has to be a lot more of the same. Confronting that level of evil requires defining values precisely and making an absolute commitment to defend them. If they waffle on that out of fear of “becoming like Negan”, then I’m through with them as well….

Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon

My anonymous correspondent also had this to say:

Morgan’s [another character] rationalization for his mystically rooted “philosophy” (Aikido), if I recall correctly, is the notion that one must not kill anyone even if that person is in the act of committing a crime that violates the rights of others to their own lives because that miscreant “might” do something good or useful in the future. (“Might be” therefore given priority over “is”.) Having lacked the resolve to kill his own “walking dead” wife, with the result that she killed their son, Morgan suffered a psychotic break, killing indiscriminately. He was “rescued” by Eastman, who had damaged his own psyche by slowly starving to death (as opposed to cleanly dispatching) an escaped felon who had murdered his family, and who now lived by the mantra that “all life is precious”, refusing to discriminate between evil and good.

Morgan has been infecting the formidable Carol with this attitude after she appeared to have suffered a kind of “battle fatigue” following her spectacular defense of Alexandria from a marauding gang calling themselves “Wolves”. Daryl, who originally joined the group as a defiant, self-doubting young “redneck”, has grown into a true, responsible, resolute leader and, as Ed notes, should have become Carol’s partner.

There has never been any reason to watch TWD except for the exceptional level of characterization produced by its writers and its excellent cast. Watching these characters overcome weaknesses, uncertainties, and earlier poor choices to grow into true heroes has been an unexpected and exhilarating pleasure, and if that is seriously and permanently undercut there is no longer a reason to put up with an hour’s worth of “walker chopping” every Sunday. We can all recognize and maintain our own heroes in our own minds if given the proper building blocks, and if so that can become a rewarding exercise on its own. Some of us, like Ed, can do it so well they can produce such heroes and their adventures on a professional level every couple of months! But that we have to work so hard to find such inspiration is a painful reminder of the state of the “popular culture”.

What is the difference between the Negans of fiction and the Negans of the real world? The fiction will not kill you. The real ones can and will. As happened in Paris and Brussels and New York City and dozens of other places over decades. There are dozens of Koranic verses for violence that the fictional Negans could just as well adopt, such as these verses from the Koran:

A Muslim ranter who also wants your stuff.

47:4: “When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks, then, when you have made wide slaughter among them, tie fast the bonds; then set them free, either by grace or ransom, till the war lays down its loads. So it shall be; and if Allah had willed, He would have avenged Himself upon them; but that He may try some of you by means of others. And those who are slain in the way of Allah, He will not send their works astray.”

2:191-193: “And slay them wherever you come upon them, and expel them from where they expelled you; persecution is more grievous than slaying. But fight them not by the Holy Mosque until they should fight you there; then, if they fight you, slay them — such is the recompense of unbelievers, but if they give over, surely Allah is All-forgiving,

Angela Merkel, the French, the Swedes, the Danes, and other European countries welcomed the hordes of barbarians into their countries because they believed that “all life is precious.”

I left this comment on a Walking Dead fan site:

I have a bad feeling that Carol’s “getting religion” is going to be the death of her. I have no idea why the scripters decided to wussify her. She and Daryl are the only two characters in the series I have almost unreserved empathy for. In reality and in fiction, you can’t defend the ones you love by refusing to kill those who intend on killing them. It’s like the Belgians’ “arrangement” with Islamic jihadists, who promised not to kill anyone. You don’t declare a detente with killers. You don’t say, “All life is precious” when the killers don’t value life, not even their own lives. You extinguish the killers when they show their faces, before they extinguish you. You extinguish them before they take more lives you may not even know. That’s the way of open warfare. I do not look forward to the debut of Negan. It appears he’s a thorough-going nihilist and evil to the core. When he shows up, I’m quits with TWD. It seems that the scripters are pandering to viewers who want Negan. I’m not one of them. TWD was a great dramatization of how men can conduct themselves as emergency ethics. I don’t need Negan. We already have the kill-happy Islamists in the real world. Why would I want them in fiction, unless they were defeated without reservation or apology?

Angela Merkel is probably thinking: “Is this person real?”

In the meantime, Hillary was asked on her campaign jet by her lapdog “journalists” who was her favorite world leader:

“Oh, let me think. Look, I like a lot of the world leaders,” Clinton said, bursting into laughter initially when asked about her favorite world leader during a gaggle with reporters aboard her campaign plane in Chicago. “One of my favorites is Angela Merkel because I think she’s been an extraordinary, strong leader during difficult times in Europe, which has obvious implications for the rest of the world and, most particularly, our country.”

If Europe is having “difficult times,” they can be laid on Merkel’s doorstep. Merkel is evil from a “pragmatic” stance; she may or may not hate Germany as a country of genuine Germans, but she is determined to see it Islamafied . Hillary, however, like Obama, is moved by a basic malevolence and hatred of America. She wants to see them beaten, destroyed, humbled, Americans on their knees, its population replaced with hostile Muslims, ready to be bashed by Islam’s or Hillary’s baseball bat.

So, which will it be in our future? “Negan Akbar!”? or will it be “Hillary Akbar!”? In fiction, Negan should be dispatched with extreme prejudice. Hillary should be dispatched in the election with extreme prejudice as a wannabe Negan. They are simpatico. We don’t need them.

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