The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment Read online

  I love my country.

  Greatness

  hen I was young I needed great people to help me realize my own potential. These people often came in the form of wrestling coaches. My first coach, Dave Sanville, did more than train me; he beat any shreds of indifference I might have had into submission. Don’t forget that I coach wrestling on a daily basis, and I can say from personal experience that a lot of the kids who appear, to the untrained eye, to be mediocre actually have truckloads of talent. The reason they seem so average is that they don’t care, and more to the point, they don’t see a reason to care. The moment you give a kid a reason to give a darn, you have opened the door to his infinite potential. Dave went a step further; he opened the door, put up a welcome banner and gave me a set of keys, and then kicked me straight through the doorway before apathy could set in.

  My college wrestling coaches, the great Ron Finley and Roy Pittman, built on that solid foundation and inspired me to know no limits.

  Let me share a short anecdote about the sort of man who has the vision to shape a future generation into greatness. Awhile ago I was informed that Coach Finley was in the hospital, and his condition looked pretty grave. I dropped everything I was doing and drove hundreds of miles to his bedside. I brought him some cookies the size of Frisbees as a “don’t die on me” incentive, and I walked into his room expecting to see my frail coach, mentor, and early adulthood hero for the last time.

  I expected him to be a wreck, but Coach looked like Coach always did, aside from the silly hospital gown that showed more of him than I really cared to see. He also sounded like he always did. Between bites of the chocolate-chip supercookie, he reminisced about the training misery that he put us through, and he told me to go run two miles in twelve minutes on the hospital grounds because it was “easy.”

  A man in a hospital gown with a wrinkly butt and a potentially fatal condition was telling me to man up my training routine, and he meant it. I have a hard time thinking of a more inspiring moment than getting chewed out by a critical patient who could probably still wipe the floor with any healthy man. If you don’t see the greatness in this, close this book and beat yourself in the face with it until you either lose consciousness or gain clarity.

  Coach Finley made me the fighter I am today, and he taught me that if he can walk away from death just for fun, then I can do just about anything. I would not have been able to beat my most worthy opponent, Brian Stann, without his help. The first thing I did after that fight was call him at home and thank him for all his support and tough love. Do you want to know something crazy? On the phone he sounded healthier than I ever have. His “Well done, Mr. Sonnen” sounded like he was channeling the voice of the Almighty himself. That’s a man, the sort of man I can only hope be. The type of man we should all strive to be.

  More than showing me that I possessed greatness all along, my mentors gave me the tools to realize that I could achieve greatness on my own efforts. It’s one thing to tell a kid something (and good luck making it stick), but it’s another thing entirely to make that kid think he came up with the idea on his own. When a coach or teacher can convince a kid of his own authority, he is shaping greatness.*

  f you keep up with cutting-edge concepts in science and technology, then you’re probably familiar with particle accelerators. And if you keep up with my daily goings-on, then you probably also know that I am building a particle accelerator in my basement here in Oregon. For those of you unfamiliar with particle accelerators (also known as Supercolliders, or by the vulgate “atom smashers”—though we scientists tend to frown on that term), they are devises that fire atomic and subatomic particles at one another at super high speeds. The resultant collisions, and the particles they produce, are studied to gain insight into the very nature of matter and the origin of the universe. There are not many particle accelerators out there—the best one is over in Switzerland, but it’s always booked—so I saw building one as a good business move and a chance to do some good science. You know, conduct some hands-on research of my own.

  It’s going OK, but it is a bit of a challenge, and there are some risks involved, including the possibility (remote, I believe) that I could accidentally create a black hole, which would then consume the earth, the sun, the planets, and a few adjoining galaxies. But so far, so good. Right now my particle accelerator is constructed out of some surgical tubing and an empty cereal box, but I’ve got some grant applications out there. If I can just get past the cutthroat peer-review process, I can get something published by early next year. Then maybe some more money will flow in and I can upgrade a bit.

  So that’s a work in progress.

  I do, however, have one invention that is functioning absolutely perfectly, and has been for quite some time. It never fails, works flawlessly, requires no batteries, and is super low maintenance. It’s a bullshit detector.

  It goes off in my head whenever someone starts bullshitting. As a matter of fact, it went off this morning when I went downstairs in my comfy robe and slippers and put on the television.

  I’ve been shying away from the TV news for a while now. Apparently, there is very little actual news. What has seemingly replaced the news is alarmist speculation. News used to be a guy sitting at a desk, telling us what happened that day, which allowed us to freely decide how to interpret that information. These days “news” begins with a few seconds of setup describing some dire, terrifying threat, including, but not limited to, terrorists, tyrants, melting icebergs, and chickens that give you a runny nose. This is then followed by hours of wild, apocalyptic speculation by nine or ten different “correspondents” and “experts” on the subject. Each weighs in on the terrifying potential scenarios, giving meaningless projections of future events that cannot accurately be predicted or influenced by a group of idiots in cheap suits in a TV news studio.

  So now instead of one guy getting a paycheck for telling me what happened, there are ten guys telling me their versions of what happened, and all of them are getting paychecks. It’s as if they get paid per word because each and every one of them slings bullshit as fast as possible, scaring me to death in the process. They tell me how to think, what to be afraid of, and whom to vote for.

  As you can imagine, that’s why I’ve been steering a bit clear of the “news” and trying to stick to nature-type stuff, hoping that it will kind of relax me a little bit. Ya know, shows about sea otters or dolphins or some such. But even those types of shows have turned against me. Let me give you a breakdown. About a third of each show is devoted to the furry or finned rapscallions gamboling about in their natural habitat. And then the hammer drops as the narrator or one of the researchers gravely intones:

  “See this beautiful otter right here, the one you’ve been watching splash and dash gaily about for the last little while? Yeah, this one right here, cracking clamshells on her chest using a rock? Feeding her cute lil’ otter babies? Swimming, diving, happy, and at peace? Well, by the time you watch this show, this otter, and her cute, furry lil’ infant otter babies, will be DEAD. MURDERED. BY YOU … you selfish, heartless, miserable, fossil-fuel-consuming, global-warming-inducing, polluting pile of manure. This otter, yes, in fact this whole little otter family right here, died trapped in a nightmarish miasma of crude oil, battery acid, Styrofoam, and plastic that you created for your own miserable, cowardly, vicious needs.”

  What the narrator or researchers fail to mention is that while they might spend their time out among the otters of the world, they do so by avoiding adult responsibility and living on government research grants. As they point down from their moral high ground, they fail to mention that it is our hard work and taxes that supports them. Not only are they ungrateful; they are filled with hatred, anger, and spite for me and all of my hardworking kind. According to them and these shows, I killed that otter, I drowned that dolphin, and I am the reason that polar bear is staring forlornly at the shrinking ice floe, pondering his inevitable, imminent extinction. I have destroyed the world an
d everything in it, just so I could have a TV, a car, and air-conditioning.

  So, yeah, even nature shows can get kind of stressful by the second commercial break, which is when they start to segue clumsily from a fun look at the lives of the animals into a political manifesto based on rubbish science, self-interest, and the scorched-earth assignment of guilt and its attendant condemnations. To keep my sanity, I flip the channel.

  Oh, look, here’s a documentary about the Old West. This could be interesting. About two seconds in, a modern-day Native American comes on-screen and solemnly pronounces:

  “We lived in peace, until the white man came. …”

  And guess what happens then, boy and girls? If you’re picturing a single tear slowly running down Uncle Chael’s right cheek, you don’t know me at all. What really happens is that my Bullshit Detector starts screeching like a depth-alarm on a torpedoed submarine hurtling to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

  Now, I know what you’re going to say: Here’s where Uncle Chael upsets a whooooole bunch of folks. And maybe I will, but I hope I won’t. I hope you will hear me out before you pass judgment. Truly listen to what I am saying and give it some thought. Just remember, I’m not thinking any of this up myself. I’m simply relying on the wisdom and testimony of the great Native American thinkers who preceded me. They are my, well, kind of my spiritual ancestors.

  So, first things first. Nobody lived in peace before someone else showed up. This goes for here, there, and anywhere. There is no historical or cultural precedent that indicates a continent-wide Pax Americana in this great country before Christopher Columbus “discovered” it—that the various Native American tribes and cultures happily coexisted. “Sources” make it sound like these tribes were jolly-good friends for centuries, hunting, fishing, praying, playing lacrosse, and participating in quilting-bees on the weekends, and then suddenly in the very late 1400s, this idyllic state of affairs was all rudely interrupted by the strangers with beards who showed up and introduced war, slavery, destruction, and genocide.

  By the time Europeans arrived in the Americas, war, slavery, destruction, and genocide were already doing quite well there; they thrived just like they did in Europe, Asia, and virtually anywhere else humanity had ventured. Evidence shows that Native Americans practiced the exact same type of murder, slavery, torture, rape, cultural annihilation, forced starvation, mutilation, and general unspeakable mayhem on one another whenever the opportunity arose, just like every other culture did. There was no “line in the sand” that the Europeans somehow crossed, introducing inhumanity, brutality, and mass murder to an innocent, unspoiled, peace-loving hemisphere full of proto-hippies who wore beads and feathers and were satisfied to live in harmony and peace with one another. That’s an Arcadian fantasy—a revisionist look back through a very distorted lens to a past that never, ever existed. When you put your brain to work, you realize that that lens has been intentionally distorted for the financial benefit of modern-day opportunists.

  Not convinced? Here are a few things to consider.

  The Aztecs and Incans (the ruling cultures in Mexico and Peru, respectively, at the time of European exploration and contact) both had gold. A lot of gold. Just crazy gold. Statues. Jewelry. Amulets. Entire hammered sheets of the stuff covering temple walls. It would be safe to say that they had a glut of gold. Moctezuma II, the Aztec ruler, and Athahualpa, his Incan counterpart, both had buildings full of stuff. How, and where, do you think they got it?

  Let’s turn this into a multiple-choice pop quiz:

  a) As a reward for being a peaceful group of Indians, a proud and happy God made it rain from the heavens.

  b) It was just lying on the ground in piles, like shiny anthills.

  c) To paraphrase my mom when she deftly countered my frequent requests for money, candy, toys, or Pet Shop Boys vinyl albums for the millionth time, “Do you think it just grew on trees?”

  d) It came in with the tide, and was then collected in whicker baskets by happy, singing, topless women.

  e) None of the above.

  You know the answer as well as I do, kids. This is how all that gold was obtained, broken down step-by-step:

  1. Someone had to go out and find it.

  2. Then someone had to go out and dig it out of the earth.

  3. Then someone had to separate it from the dirt, rocks, and filth that encased it.

  4. Then someone had to melt it down, refine it, and make it pure.

  5. Finally, someone had to shape it into the phallic symbols South American Indians treasure so highly.

  Not easy work. People generally don’t volunteer to do it. They have to be … well … forced to do it. They have to be made aware that their options are limited to:

  a) Provide the rulers with gold.

  b) Die.

  This is, interestingly enough, not altogether dissimilar from the options the Spaniards presented to those two sick serial killers, those two mass murderers, Moctezuma II and Athahualpa, when they showed up to Mexico and Peru. Granted, it doesn’t make it any more right, but it was certainly no more wrong than what was already going on.

  You don’t have to take my word for this, kids. You don’t even have to read the contemporary accounts of Prescott, Cortez, or Pizarro (the leaders of the Spanish expeditions of commerce, conversion, and cultural exchange in Mexico and Peru). You can go to Mexico and Peru and see clear, incontrovertible evidence of the gruesome goings-on pre-Spanish-contact, written and chiseled into stone in the very hand of the Native Americans who committed the atrocities. I warned you that traveling would be involved in this book, and now I am pulling that ace. Pack your bags, hop on a plane to one of these countries, and look at the walls on the temples still standing. Look at the paintings. You will see a clear, legitimate, cultural history of monoculture, monarchical inhumanity, mass murder, dismemberment, rape, infanticide, human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, extinction, and virtually every variety of human carnage and suffering that can possibly be imagined, and then enacted.

  That’s the pattern, the norm, the baseline. And there is no spike on the graph of niceness, friendship, collegiality, forgiveness, or peace. There is a constant, grinding, irredeemable horror that permeates the cultures of the Americas prior to European contact, and it winds its way through the centuries with a grim, immovable rigor.

  How in God’s name do you think Cortez or Pizarro, with fewer than two hundred men each, conquered empires with huge standing armies and populations in the millions? The men under Cortez’s and Pizarro’s command were not even professional soldiers. In fact, many of them had no military training at all. It’s not like Ferdinand and Isabella sent the Best and Brightest, the Flowers of the Soldiery, fresh from the Moors, to handle the grumpy natives of the New World. So just how did they do it? Do you think they had flying suits like Tony Stark in Iron Man? They had some horses, yes. And they had some guns. But they did not have many of either, and certainly not enough to make even a slight dent in the empire of either the Aztecs of Incans. But they showed up, and within a few years they took over. How?

  By having the support, endorsement, and gratitude of the millions of Native Americans whose cultures had been shattered and people murdered, mutilated, enslaved, tortured, and forced to pay astonishingly cruel tributes of goods, services, and human sacrifices by the Aztecs and Incans. When Cortez and Pizarro showed up, there was no shortage of Native Americans ready, willing, and able to throw in with the New Guys with the beards and bang-sticks since virtually anything was considered better than how they were already being treated. The unremitting horror of their existence under Aztec and Incan rule was argument enough for hope and change. They were eager to join the Spaniards and take up arms against their oppressors—who were from the same place, had a similar culture, and worshiped many of the same deities yet who slaughtered and destroyed them as quickly and brutally as they could. They joined the Spaniards as a form of cultural survival, a form of last-chance self-salvation, brought about by the mos
t unimaginable conditions that had been imposed upon them by fellow Native Americans, not by “Whitey from Across the Water.” Without the support of untold Native Americans, the Spanish expeditions would have been wiped out in weeks.

  Think about this for a minute before you get all up in my grille and call me a bigot, a racist, or some other catchall epithet to divert attention from the indisputable historical evidence of domination, conquest, and inhumanity that was proudly left to history by its perpetrators, the Native Americans. It’s not me saying this. I wasn’t there. I didn’t do it, and I didn’t chisel the history of these actions into the walls of temples. But someone did, and he wasn’t from Castile or Madrid or Lisbon or London. He was from … here.

  Jorge Luis Borges wrote:

  Forget the onslaught/

  Of the bull that is a man whose strange and plural form haunts the tangle/

  Of the unending interwoven stone./

  He does not exist. In the black dusk/

  Hope not even for the savage beast./

  You don’t need beasts or villains skulking into the harbor under the cover of night in a bunch of shipworm-ravaged, secondhand ships to cause a cultural holocaust. In this case, it was already in full swing by the time the Spaniards dropped their anchors, climbed off the boats with their rusty armor and primitive weapons, and started shovin’ people around, looking for gold and makin’ guys kiss a crucifix.