How America morphed into 'Bizarro World'
Exclusive: David Kupelian takes readers on tour of upside-down dimension we now inhabit
As part of my well-rounded childhood, growing up during the 1950s in suburban Washington, D.C., I read Superman comic books.
That’s right. Also Superboy, Batman and Robin, Aquaman, Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern and others – but my favorite was Superman. And one of the most memorable characters in those adventures was a guy named … Bizarro.
Created when the “man of steel” was exposed to a “duplicate ray,” Bizarro was essentially a defective clone of Superman. Although he was ugly, surly and spoke broken English like Tonto in “The Lone Ranger” (“Me hate Superman. Him bad”), Bizarro’s defining characteristic was his total rebellion against everything normal, everything sensible, everything Superman stood for. Indeed, he took pride in being the exact opposite of Superman in every way.
Thus, Bizarro eventually relocated to Bizarro World, a cube-shaped planet called Htrae (“Earth” spelled backwards), which operated according to “Bizarro logic” – meaning it was wrong to do anything right, moral or good. That gave rise to the Bizarro society’s legal system based on the “Bizarro Code,” which meant it was “a crime to do anything well or to make anything perfect or beautiful.”
For example, I remember reading, as a 9- or 10-year-old Superman fan, how on Bizarro World, when the street-sweeping truck came down the road, instead of sweeping up dirt and debris, the Bizarro street-sweeper guy would actually throw dust and dirt onto the streets to make them dirtier! In every area of life, Bizarro folk did the opposite of whatever was logical and normal.
Got the picture?
Now, let’s look at today’s USA, which increasingly resembles a “Bizarro” version of traditional America – not just different, not just “transformed,” but morphed in so many ways into the opposite of what it once was.
First, for those who weren’t around during the 1950s and early ’60s, let me just say that the America of my youth, despite its shortcomings, was basically confident, unconflicted, prosperous and full of life, hope and unlimited opportunity. People were patriotic and our culture was strong and essentially moral. America was the undisputed leader of the world – not just militarily and economically, but in terms of freedom and goodness. (To my liberal friends: Do me a favor, and don’t tell me, “But the ’50s had racial segregation.” Yes, and today we torture, decapitate, dismember, vacuum and chemically burn to death 3,000 beautiful human babies every single day. So just drop it.)
Compared with the vibrant nation it once was, today’s America has become a different country. Divided, angry, squabbling, the world’s largest debtor nation, with rampant divorce, family breakdown and unprecedented sexual anarchy, 1 in 7 on food stamps, 1 in 9 on antidepressants – on so many levels America is disintegrating.
Let’s review a few highlights of the current scene:
Let’s quickly survey a few more Bizarro World hot spots:
The way out
How did this happen? Why has America turned into Bizarro World?
It’s quite logical: Once we manage to get ourselves seduced, conned, brainwashed, intimidated, or corrupted into embracing something evil as though it were good – we automatically see good as evil.
This radical change of polarity is captured perfectly in the well-known Bible verse, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20 KJV)
Here’s how it works: When, for whatever reason, we are tricked into embracing something corrupt, we then reflexively feel compelled to defend our new allegiance, which unfortunately means maligning and attacking those who, simply by holding to the truth we left behind, now make us feel uncomfortable.
So, let’s say you’ve had an abortion and have not yet faced the reality of what you did; you now feel threatened by pro-lifers, who somehow seem menacing and malevolent to you, regardless of how innocent, harmless and well-meaning they may actually be. Something is making you very uncomfortable in their presence, but it’s not really them. It’s the light of conscience you’ve extinguished (at least temporarily) in yourself, now shining brightly through them. Literally, the light of God makes you feel bad (guilty), so you blame and malign those in whom it shines. That’s the pro-choice movement in a nutshell. In fact, that’s Christian persecution in a nutshell.
As George Orwell put it: “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
Another factor that makes seeing evil as good, and good as evil, so easy is that we human beings are very adept at clothing our corruption with a veneer of goodness, even holiness. For example, as I explain in “How Evil Works”: <http://superstore.wnd.com/books/HOW-EVIL-WORKS-Autographed-Hardcover>
Just as murdering innocent people morphs (in the deluded mind) into righteous “martyrdom,” likewise, aborting babies becomes “reproductive justice” and two homosexuals playing house becomes “marriage equality” and Obama confiscating Americans’ hard-earned money so he can reward his friends, consolidate his power, bribe liberal voting blocs and take endless expensive vacations is called “social justice.” We’ve got a really nice name for everything rotten.
But all of this is rooted in the same denial-steeped reasoning – the same “Bizarro logic” – that criminals use to justify their predatory acts: “I took his money because I needed it.” “I had sex with the kid because he wanted it.” “I only care about me and my friends.” “This is justice for Trayvon.”
In our Bizarro World, true justice and true righteousness are replaced by fake justice and fake righteousness. Just as a noble society is rooted in affirming and encouraging all the good qualities of human nature – honesty, thrift, courage, unselfishness, hard work, modesty and so on – today’s culture orbits more and more around everything low in human nature – immorality, laziness, distraction, self-indulgence, envy. Indeed, Winston Churchill called socialism “the gospel of envy,” and every other disastrous ideology and debased human inclination likewise becomes clothed in false righteousness for those who have descended into Bizarro World – another name for rebellion against God.
For some of us, the pain and suffering of living life in Bizarro World finally awakens us to realize we’ve been rebelling against our Creator – that we’ve been tricked, and that now something else, with its own bizarre thoughts and feelings, has been “created” and is living through us, kind of like in “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” It’s called sin. It’s in us, but it’s not really us.
There is a simple way out of this state: It’s called repentance. If we will only stop in our tracks and cease being so prideful and angry; if we will stop making excuses, blaming everyone else and justifying everything wrong with us; if we will just relax, take a deep breath and realize that something is seriously wrong with us, but that God can help us; if we will just find the courage, honesty and dignity not to freak out, but to face our sinfulness calmly, and to wordlessly ask God to help us, He will. It’s what He does.
He will take us by the hand and lead us away from Bizarro World – which is just a comic-book term for the angry, rebellious, excuse-ridden, inverted, perverted realm most of us dwell in – and He will show us the way out.
Once we get our feet firmly planted on His path, then everything that once seemed so important and fulfilling to us – when we were tangled up with and compulsively attracted to everything wrong – will just seem, well, bizarre.
The preceding was excerpted from the September issue of Whistleblower, WND’s acclaimed monthly magazine edited by David Kupelian.
Exclusive: David Kupelian takes readers on tour of upside-down dimension we now inhabit
As part of my well-rounded childhood, growing up during the 1950s in suburban Washington, D.C., I read Superman comic books.
That’s right. Also Superboy, Batman and Robin, Aquaman, Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern and others – but my favorite was Superman. And one of the most memorable characters in those adventures was a guy named … Bizarro.
Created when the “man of steel” was exposed to a “duplicate ray,” Bizarro was essentially a defective clone of Superman. Although he was ugly, surly and spoke broken English like Tonto in “The Lone Ranger” (“Me hate Superman. Him bad”), Bizarro’s defining characteristic was his total rebellion against everything normal, everything sensible, everything Superman stood for. Indeed, he took pride in being the exact opposite of Superman in every way.
Thus, Bizarro eventually relocated to Bizarro World, a cube-shaped planet called Htrae (“Earth” spelled backwards), which operated according to “Bizarro logic” – meaning it was wrong to do anything right, moral or good. That gave rise to the Bizarro society’s legal system based on the “Bizarro Code,” which meant it was “a crime to do anything well or to make anything perfect or beautiful.”
For example, I remember reading, as a 9- or 10-year-old Superman fan, how on Bizarro World, when the street-sweeping truck came down the road, instead of sweeping up dirt and debris, the Bizarro street-sweeper guy would actually throw dust and dirt onto the streets to make them dirtier! In every area of life, Bizarro folk did the opposite of whatever was logical and normal.
Got the picture?
Now, let’s look at today’s USA, which increasingly resembles a “Bizarro” version of traditional America – not just different, not just “transformed,” but morphed in so many ways into the opposite of what it once was.
First, for those who weren’t around during the 1950s and early ’60s, let me just say that the America of my youth, despite its shortcomings, was basically confident, unconflicted, prosperous and full of life, hope and unlimited opportunity. People were patriotic and our culture was strong and essentially moral. America was the undisputed leader of the world – not just militarily and economically, but in terms of freedom and goodness. (To my liberal friends: Do me a favor, and don’t tell me, “But the ’50s had racial segregation.” Yes, and today we torture, decapitate, dismember, vacuum and chemically burn to death 3,000 beautiful human babies every single day. So just drop it.)
Compared with the vibrant nation it once was, today’s America has become a different country. Divided, angry, squabbling, the world’s largest debtor nation, with rampant divorce, family breakdown and unprecedented sexual anarchy, 1 in 7 on food stamps, 1 in 9 on antidepressants – on so many levels America is disintegrating.
Let’s review a few highlights of the current scene:
- In public schools throughout California, thanks to a brand new bill signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, boys can now use girls’ locker rooms and restrooms <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/13/california-gov-brown-signs-transgender-student-bill/> and play on their sports teams, as long as they feel more comfortable thinking of themselves as girls. Same thing with a girl who feels more emotionally comfortable thinking of herself as a boy; she now can use the boys’ restrooms, dress and undress in the boys’ locker room and play on their team.If that’s not bizarre, nothing is bizarre, and we should just retire the term from our dictionaries and save a tree.
- Of course, this latest transgender-rights madness was inevitable in a society where homosexual behavior – which just a generation ago was considered aberrant, immoral and criminal – is glorified and glamorized, its practitioners afforded special privileges and benefits denied other Americans. Meanwhile, those who still champion Judeo-Christian morality and the traditional definition of marriage – you know, the one the entire world held to steadfastly, at all times and all places for the last 5,000 years – are now suddenly regarded as closed-minded, mean-spirited bigots or drooling, backwoods religious fanatics.
- Moreover, according to today’s “Bizarro logic,” it’s cruel, unscientific and unenlightened to think a homosexual man could possibly become, through therapy, a heterosexual man, or a lesbian become a heterosexual woman. Indeed, reparative therapy – counseling for people troubled by homosexual feelings and gender confusion – is increasingly disparaged and even, in some areas, outlawed for minors, even if they and their parents desire it! On the other hand, amputating healthy breasts and sex organs, as well as loading up on sex hormones for the rest of one’s life while play-acting in the clothes of the opposite sex – this is considered enlightened “therapy” for those who believe they can alter their own gender.
- Let me restate that: It’s unscientific and cruel to even talk about changing from gay to straight, but it’s enlightened and normal to attempt to change a man into a woman and vice versa.
- Yes I know. Totally Bizarro.
- The Fort Hood shooter, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was finally convicted of his crimes by a military court and sentenced to death. Thank goodness. But let’s look at how the Obama administration dealt with the massacre for the past almost-four years. Hasan, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” before shooting 14 people to death (including an unborn baby) and wounding more than 30 others, openly admitted he was, is, and ever shall be, an Islamic jihad warrior. Yet the Obama administration refused to call what he did “terrorism,” categorizing it instead as “workplace violence.” Until his recent conviction, taxpayers continued to pay Hasan’s salary as a military psychiatrist of $80,000 a year <http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/the-pampered-good-life-of-fort-hood-shooter/> (more than $278,000 since the Nov. 5, 2009, terror attack).But during the same period, the Obama administration refused to pay to have the remaining bullets removed from the back of a soldier who was shot multiple times by Hasan. In fact, the Army garnished the soldier’s pay when he sought counseling for PTSD after the attack. Likewise, the soldiers victimized by Hasan will not receive Purple Hearts or combat-related benefits intended for victims. When the families of soldiers shot by Hasan complained about all this, the Obama administration slapped a gag order on them.
- That’s not just wrong; that’s Bizarro wrong.
- Of course, the perverse way the government dealt with the Fort Hood terror attack – and continues to disrespect its victims – is merely a reflection of how it relates to the larger issue of Islam, which is still officially regarded in Obama’s Bizarro World as a “religion of peace.” As everyone on Earth knows, Islam hasn’t been a religion of peace for the past 14 centuries and shows no signs of beginning now. Meanwhile, Christianity, the moral and spiritual foundation of Western civilization and the basis of its laws, culture and values – not to mention, the explicit reason for the founding of America – is increasingly denigrated, marginalized and demonized here.
Let’s quickly survey a few more Bizarro World hot spots:
- Illegal aliens: Although their presence is hurting America’s economy, bankrupting border states, injecting many criminals and gangs into the population, permanently harming our culture, taking jobs away from Americans and threatening (once they get amnesty) to create a permanent Democrat voting majority, illegal aliens are rarely prosecuted and deported and, in fact, increasingly are being treated as a protected class! Meanwhile, those opposed to illegal immigration – which is still a crime – are maligned as bigoted, heartless, “anti-immigrant” and, of course, racist.
- Voter fraud: The “Department of Justice” is working overtime to block states from passing legislation requiring that voters identify themselves before voting. So, even though you need a photo ID to get on an airplane, cash a check, check out a library book or purchase Sudafed, the Obama DOJ now considers it discriminatory (and, of course, racist) to require people to identify themselves before exercising the most important civic right Americans have, which alone permits them to determine the direction and destiny of their country.
- Socialized medicine: The greatest health-care system in world history – America’s – is currently being torn down and replaced with a socialist model that has led, everywhere it has ever been implemented, to inferior care, tremendous loss of freedom, increased costs, bureaucratic care rationing (aka “death panels”) and vastly expanded government control in every area of life. And yet, if you oppose Obamacare, you’re vilified for hating poor children. And you’re a racist.
- Guns: Virtually all of the serious, scholarly research done for the past three decades on the relationship between firearms and crime shows that more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens (especially concealed-carry handguns) results in less crime. And yet, there is a never-ending push to take firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens – to “stop the violence.”
- Energy: America, which like all modern industrialized nations is heavily dependent on oil, is blessed with more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. However, the Obama administration has done everything possible to restrict and hobble domestic production, leaving America dependent for her energy needs on adversaries that turn around and use our petrodollars to fund terrorism.
- Bizarro government: Although Marxism (or socialism, communism, collectivism, progressivism, statism, “the far left” or whatever name you prefer) has been, over the past century, by far the world’s single greatest scourge, causing more death and suffering than any other force on earth, we are elevating these types to the highest levels of government. Meanwhile, the biggest political devil in modern American history is the late Sen. Joe McCarthy, who claimed the U.S. government was full of communists and Soviet agents. However, the U.S. government was full of communists and Soviet agents. Yet to this day, it is not insane Marxist ideology and practice, but rather, those who criticizethe “radical left” and “progressives” (as Marxists prefer to be called) that are maligned in the press, popular culture and education.For the same reason, free-market capitalism, proven to result in a higher quality of life and greater degree of prosperity and liberty for a larger number of people than any other system in world history, is maligned, while socialistic, all-powerful nanny government, which has proven always to deliver misery, corruption and serfdom throughout history, is celebrated.
- Abortion: After the Kermit Gosnell trial – in which the Philadelphia abortionist was convicted of first degree murder and sent to prison for life – many in America, even those who consider themselves “pro-choice,” were forced to confront the grisly reality that late-term abortions are virtually indistinguishable from criminal infanticide. <http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/the-insanity-of-the-gosnell-baby-murder-trial/> And yet, just a few weeks later, Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis filibustered for 12 hours to block a law restricting abortions after 20 weeks – in other words, late-term abortions at the same age Gosnell killed. Davis later called her stand on abortion “sacred ground.”So, what was universally condemned as barbaric murder in May became “sacred” in June.
- Psychiatric drugs: Antidepressant drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Effexor are given to tens of millions of Americans – in fact, 11 percent of everyone in the country over 12 years of age, <http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/americans-snapping-by-the-millions/> according to the most recent stats from the CDC. Yet the most well-known side effect of these drugs is that they cause suicidal thoughts. Mind you, antidepressant-induced feelings of “suicidality” are not so-called “rare adverse events” (i.e., occurring in less than 1 in 1,000 people using the drug) – but rather, are serious side effects for the average user, warned about on a “black box warning label,” the FDA’s strongest possible warning, included on every antidepressant sold in America.Repeat: We are giving depressed people drugs that literally make them want to kill themselves.
- Any questions?
The way out
How did this happen? Why has America turned into Bizarro World?
It’s quite logical: Once we manage to get ourselves seduced, conned, brainwashed, intimidated, or corrupted into embracing something evil as though it were good – we automatically see good as evil.
This radical change of polarity is captured perfectly in the well-known Bible verse, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20 KJV)
Here’s how it works: When, for whatever reason, we are tricked into embracing something corrupt, we then reflexively feel compelled to defend our new allegiance, which unfortunately means maligning and attacking those who, simply by holding to the truth we left behind, now make us feel uncomfortable.
So, let’s say you’ve had an abortion and have not yet faced the reality of what you did; you now feel threatened by pro-lifers, who somehow seem menacing and malevolent to you, regardless of how innocent, harmless and well-meaning they may actually be. Something is making you very uncomfortable in their presence, but it’s not really them. It’s the light of conscience you’ve extinguished (at least temporarily) in yourself, now shining brightly through them. Literally, the light of God makes you feel bad (guilty), so you blame and malign those in whom it shines. That’s the pro-choice movement in a nutshell. In fact, that’s Christian persecution in a nutshell.
As George Orwell put it: “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
Another factor that makes seeing evil as good, and good as evil, so easy is that we human beings are very adept at clothing our corruption with a veneer of goodness, even holiness. For example, as I explain in “How Evil Works”: <http://superstore.wnd.com/books/HOW-EVIL-WORKS-Autographed-Hardcover>
Jihadist wannabes can buy into such murderous insanity precisely because their insanity happens to closely parallel the truth! After all, self-sacrifice, martyrdom – giving up one’s life for God – is great and noble and honorable. “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” an encyclopedic compilation of true stories of Christian martyrdom, was one of the most popular books in the Protestant world from the 16th through the 19th centuries. Genuine martyrdom is an exceedingly high calling, as is standing up and courageously opposing evil oppressors – exactly what jihadists are told they are doing when they’re slaughtering innocent men, women, and children. What they’re being taught has the resonance of truth, although they end up embracing a hideous perversion of truth.
Just as murdering innocent people morphs (in the deluded mind) into righteous “martyrdom,” likewise, aborting babies becomes “reproductive justice” and two homosexuals playing house becomes “marriage equality” and Obama confiscating Americans’ hard-earned money so he can reward his friends, consolidate his power, bribe liberal voting blocs and take endless expensive vacations is called “social justice.” We’ve got a really nice name for everything rotten.
But all of this is rooted in the same denial-steeped reasoning – the same “Bizarro logic” – that criminals use to justify their predatory acts: “I took his money because I needed it.” “I had sex with the kid because he wanted it.” “I only care about me and my friends.” “This is justice for Trayvon.”
In our Bizarro World, true justice and true righteousness are replaced by fake justice and fake righteousness. Just as a noble society is rooted in affirming and encouraging all the good qualities of human nature – honesty, thrift, courage, unselfishness, hard work, modesty and so on – today’s culture orbits more and more around everything low in human nature – immorality, laziness, distraction, self-indulgence, envy. Indeed, Winston Churchill called socialism “the gospel of envy,” and every other disastrous ideology and debased human inclination likewise becomes clothed in false righteousness for those who have descended into Bizarro World – another name for rebellion against God.
For some of us, the pain and suffering of living life in Bizarro World finally awakens us to realize we’ve been rebelling against our Creator – that we’ve been tricked, and that now something else, with its own bizarre thoughts and feelings, has been “created” and is living through us, kind of like in “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” It’s called sin. It’s in us, but it’s not really us.
There is a simple way out of this state: It’s called repentance. If we will only stop in our tracks and cease being so prideful and angry; if we will stop making excuses, blaming everyone else and justifying everything wrong with us; if we will just relax, take a deep breath and realize that something is seriously wrong with us, but that God can help us; if we will just find the courage, honesty and dignity not to freak out, but to face our sinfulness calmly, and to wordlessly ask God to help us, He will. It’s what He does.
He will take us by the hand and lead us away from Bizarro World – which is just a comic-book term for the angry, rebellious, excuse-ridden, inverted, perverted realm most of us dwell in – and He will show us the way out.
Once we get our feet firmly planted on His path, then everything that once seemed so important and fulfilling to us – when we were tangled up with and compulsively attracted to everything wrong – will just seem, well, bizarre.
The preceding was excerpted from the September issue of Whistleblower, WND’s acclaimed monthly magazine edited by David Kupelian.
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