Stories From Camp Kitsch (cont.)

Although it was hardly noticed at the time by reviewers, on July 18, 1990, a two-volume work was published in Milwaukee, the manuscript had been written in prison during the previous year and a half by Zeke Pluto. “Anarchies of Reason” and “Anxiety of Contentment” set out the Plutonic Signifier’s philosophy.

It was evident from a close reading of the work that Pluto had strong pretensions to entrenching a major religious movement, and that he considered the world as a whole to be in danger of forever corrupting itself. There were, he argued in the book, twin perils threatening the fabric of humanity: one was souless, and unchecked technological growth, the other, "rampant utilitarianism." It was his experience in foster care, the military, and the prison system, that had taught him the truth about the goal of the New World Order's conspiracy: to rid the world of "altruistic collectivism" by means of political coercion, ideological domination and spiritual corruption.

The rubric, New World Order," hitherto an umbrella term referring to the economically affluent nations defined as the First World, took on, in Pluto's theory, a new meaning, one that within a decade was to capture the minds of millions worldwide. For Pluto, "altruistic collectivism" was synonymous with "virtue." By contrast, "New World Order Conspiracy" was synonymous with "moral corruption." Pluto's appeal is to individual, Edenic innocence and vulnerability. Considering the "inherent invidiousness" of the New World Orders' ideological project, Pluto wrote, "how can the unfortunate victims be blamed?" The politics of the mass consumer culture conspiracy are such that its proponents are akin to precision automatons, instruments of "dialectical perfidy, their ideological apparatuses distortions of truth.” According to Pluto, “modern life itself is a calculated device, an epistemological and ontological trap. The bourgeois worker and global under-class are the victims, not the beneficiaries, of technological progress.”

In "Anxiety of Contentment" Pluto represented himself as a man who had experienced, and would forever resist, not only the depersonalization of progress but the destruction of the ethic of communal obligation, and, by extension, the integrity of life on earth. The threat, as he perceived it, concerned the degradation of moral self-autonomy, and an attempt to deliberately obliterate that integrity. He told his readers:

"The ideological functionary bides his time,insidiously categorizing, quantifying and appropriating the unsuspecting target's ontological center with his pernicious and pychosocial machinations, indoctrinating through a dogma of false consciousness and thus alienating the subject from the bosom of the natural world. The New world Order ideologue marshals every resource available to undermine the foundations of core selfhood. Systematically, he blurs the distinction between ego and machine, striving to sever the ties between self and language. Technology, misused, is responsible for weapons both inert and organic that present the most dangerous and immediate threat to mankind. Only through an unremitting and thorough rejection of technological meliorism can we avoid the apocalypse."

In “Anarchies of Reason” Pluto outlined his mission: he would expose and then annihilate the looming threat posed by the rise of technology. Pluto not only warned his readers of what he considered the imminent danger to mankind; he also explained his role in combating those dangers. His message was apocalyptic: "Should schizophrenic technology, aided by consumer ideology, triumph over being, Pluto wrote, "its inexorable movement will be the funeral march of mankind, and this planet will follow its orbit through the ether, without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago. And so I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the unnamed and prime mover. In smiting down the technologies of materialism I am defending the Lord's creation."

By 1992, Zeke Pluto's attraction reflected his cult propagandists' political skill in creating a hero out of the common man. A glorification achieved by painting him as the innocent victim of a soulless society. Pluto did not impress all observers.

Theologically, Plato's dogma was predicated on those gaps that comprise the contradiction between faith and disbelief. His ministry was an attempt to reconcile this paradox. According to Pluto, yes, the Bible tells us that "God is our refuge and strength, / a very present help in trouble (Psalms 46:1), but it should also be understood that if you talk to God you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. It was upon this ambiguity, this theosophical schizophrenia that invariably mediated the God/believer paradigm, that Pluto established the core of his doctrine. Schizophrenia, in fact, came to define Pluto's ideas on how one should live. That the "New World Order," a post cold-war euphemism for the “Ancien Regime”, would associate this sensibility with silent minorities and the fanatic fringe is typical of pre-genocidal propaganda historically.

The left colored him as a racist ethnocentric while the right saw him as an immoral Jeremiah born of anarchistic revolutionary forces. So it was easy for conservative talking-heads, like Howie Boekrusch, and liberal byte-spinners, like McCarthy Magwitch, to condemn Pluto's ideas according to their self-tailored political agendas. In one famous tract, Boekrusch (pronounced Buckrush) compared Pluto's cult members to the Hutu minority, who, in Rwanda in 1994, butchered 800,000 of the Tutsi majority. The colonial construction of this bloody rift was never mentioned. In a similar fashion, Magwitch had excoriated Pluto on theoretical grounds, claiming that the totalitarian bent of his group should be less influenced by Stalin and Mao than Marx and Trotsky. The charge was that Pluto had abandoned all things socialistic and even democratic, applying violence as a means of internal allegiance in the same way that dictators resorted to terror as an instrument of domestic policy. Both views held some truth.