Our Divided States: Division #4 - The Purpose vs. The Random

Thanks to the upcoming Dark Tower movie (or series of movies, dare I hope?), more and more people are becoming aware of the vast network of connections between Stephen King's written works, and the nature of the multiverse that contains them. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of it comes in a novel from the 90s called Insomnia, which doesn't reveal its connection to the Dark Tower meta-story until late in its 800+ pages. Before that, however, we're treated to a character that outlines some of the philosophical structure behind King's whole mythos. This is kind of a roundabout way to make the political point I came here to make today, but bear with me for just a minute.

The Universe, King suggests, is governed by two forces -- The Purpose and The Random. It's been a few years since I read Insomnia, but I believe the ideology goes like this: the Universe tends toward order, because it is directed by human will. That's The Purpose, a sort of collective upward intent of the entire human race. Of course, there is an external force working against this order, which he called The Random (and is embodied in a character called The Crimson King -- and if you've met him among the pages, that name should be sending a shiver up our spine right now). Anyway, The Random's role is to throw nonsensical obstacles into The Purpose's way, trying to plunge the Universe into chaos simply by preventing Purpose from taking root and establish itself.

As I read Insomnia, I noted how ingenious this was. Most worldviews place Evil as the opposition to Good, but King takes it into a slightly different place. We're all working together for Purpose/Good, essentially, or at least our personal idea of it, but if or enemy in this struggle were Evil, the battle would at least be well-defined. "Evil" at least makes some kind of sense, has logic to it, although it will no doubt be twisted. Fighting against randomness, though? That's something else altogether, even *more* antithetical to The Purpose.

That's what I've been thinking about since our current President's recent flurry of executive-order-writing. There are things about them that make me believe that they are not actually there to enact policy. Instead, they seem designed to create confusion and make us unsure of what or how we should be fighting against. Let's take his (unofficially-Muslim) travel (")ban("), for example:

First of all, look at the wording on this thing. It points blame at our immigration vetting process as the reason terrorists were able to enter the country and commit the atrocity of 9/11. Fair enough, but it then uses this same example as the reason we should enact this travel ban, acting as if literally nothing has been added to our national security or immigrant vetting processes since then.

It then imposes a ban on *all* people entering the country from seven nations, each of which seem to have been selected by using precisely three criteria: 1) They are at least 80% populated by Muslims, 2) the President has no business interests there, and 3) exactly *zero* successful terrorists have come from them... Remember, most of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, a country that notably goes unmentioned in the order. The fact that this ban was originally on *all* people coming from those countries is another thing to look at. The White House went back and clarified that certain people actually could re-enter the country (green card holders and full American citizens, for example), but it did so without the oversight or input of anyone in the State or Immigration departments. It is a proclamation that is both grandiosely sweeping and bizarrely specific, issued with no oversight by people of experience who actually know how world politics work, and with no specific instructions on how government agencies should implement it. It essentially dropped a bunch of harsh-but-vague rules on government workers and then sat back to see how they would deal with it.

There's only one reason for such an abomination to be issued; to create confusion and fear. Answer truthfully now... if you are a practicer of Islam in this country, even after all this order's addenda and clarifications, are you going to leave the country for any reason, no matter how much documentation of your American citizenship and good intentions you have? This is no more than the start of a crackdown, ensuring that people from Africa and the Middle East don't know where they really stand in this country.

*That's* Random. Evil at least would be clear-cut, well-defined, if immoral, rules. This is not that. This is a statement to induce the following response: "I don't know what to expect, so I'm going to keep my head down for now." That's far too close to "Don't make waves and maybe we'll be okay" -- the repeated mantra of the oppressed people of the world -- for my taste.