The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (8 page)

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 and 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: