Public education needed in small and medium-sized towns and cities to better integrate new-comers

Nothing can explain or justify the actions of these young men who have allegedly perpetrated hate crimes against Muslim students. (See Globe and Mail article by Jill Mahoney below) Hatred, bigotry and fear continue to dwell in the hearts and minds of those continuing to resist the inevitable and quite consequential demographic changes that are sweeping the world, including Canada. We have historically been a relatively welcoming country, incorporating immigrants from many countries into our culture, our workplaces, our schools and our shops and restaurants. Yesterday, on Princess Street in downtown Kingston, my wife and I noticed and commented on the picture of three middle-aged Muslim women munching on Big Mac's in the window of McDonald's, as a sign of the degree and permanence of the changes.
As the world changes, however, government programs, including perhaps programs initiated by the colleges and universities of this country, would help to inform those new-comers about how our society works, and also long-time residents about the need for respect, tolerance and hospitality not only towards all citizens, but especially to those who have arrived here from distant places. We need to do much more to built bridges between the local culture and the new arrivals, and consider not merely the accidental and incidental encounters, but also the formal and structured opportunities to learn about people from all countries of the world, focussing especially on those countries from which most immigrants in any area have come.
Learning about the geography, history, culture, economy and political systems under which these immigrants lived, prior to emigrating to Canada, in our schools, our colleges and our universities, and also through the propagation of those information sessions in the local media, would do much to reduce the tensions that have obviously erupted in what are not called "hate crimes" that will likely prompt both sides to ratchet up the rhetoric. And such programs cannot be left to the religious communities, where one might assume there might be both a higher level of tolerance (NOT!) and where there also might be some knowledge and awareness of comparative religions (also not likely!)
These have to be secular programs, financed by the federal and provincial governments, in which not only public servants and retailers could and should participate, but also ordinary citizens could benefit from exposure to such information as well.
Of course, some of this work could be and probably is being undertaken by local service clubs who could invite immigrant spokespersons to address their members, and possibly their members' spouses.
Ironically there is more likelihood that such programs exist already in the large urban centres; nevertheless, there is a growing need for them in the smaller and medium-sized communities, where generally racially-tinged attitudes are more prevalent. We have to re-evaluate our conventional perceptions that large numbers merit large dollars, and this is one of those situations.
Furthermore, this act, and others like it, would barely merit a mention in the large urban dailies, unless someone were wounded or killed. Yet in the smaller towns and cities, this is even more significant. Perhaps that is why the Globe and Mail carried it on its digital edition.
We thank the Globe for paying such attention, and look forward to local community leaders, including the heads of both universities and community college, along with civic leaders and local politicians to put their heads together to develop a strategy for public information programs, their curriculum and their public dispersal.

Police arrest three men in suspected anti-Muslim hate crime in Kingston, Ont.

By Jill Mahoney, Globe and Mail, October 11, 2013

Police have arrested three men and are searching for a fourth after several Muslim students in Kingston, Ont., were attacked in what investigators are calling a hate crime.
A group of six Queen’s University students was targeted by four young men on bicycles who yelled “racial slurs and hate-based profanities,” police said. The students were attacked as they walked back from seeing a movie in the city’s north end early Sunday morning. 
“It’s a crime that dictates a swift response from the police,” said Detective Constable Jay Finn of Kingston Police. “This type of behaviour won’t be tolerated in our community.”
Investigators say the random attack began when the suspects approached the male students with an offer to sell them drugs. When they declined, the suspects began shouting racial slurs and attacking them.
One of the suspects had a weapon, believed to be a baseball bat, and hit one victim on the arm and leg, causing bruising.
Queen’s principal Daniel Woolf denounced the attack, saying the university was committed to protecting its students and staff from hate and discrimination.
“I am shocked and dismayed to learn that anyone in this community would be the victim of an unprovoked attack of this kind, let alone six of our students,” Mr. Woolf said in a statement. “I can only imagine how shaken they must be feeling after this incident, and my thoughts are with them.”
Police released a grainy photo one of the victims took on his cellphone, saying they believed the suspects likely lived close to the area of the attack, which happened on Fraser Street near Patrick Street. Det. Constable Finn said the photo helped lead to the arrests.
Three men, who are 18, 19 and 20 years old, face charges of assault with a weapon and uttering threats. Two also face charges of breach of probation.
Police are still looking for a fourth suspect.

Reflections on language, ambiguity, uncertainty and human growth

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. (George Bernard Shaw)
While Shaw's observation has some truth in it, there is also a significant danger than neither you nor I will completely comprehend each other's ideas, leaving a high risk of both uncertainty and confusion about both ideas in our heads. Language, after all, is so often imprecise and blunt, because we are either too busy to grasp the nuances of both its denotations and its connotations that we miss the resonance or because the full import of its freight is unreachable for some reason.
Even decades of practice cannot remove that possibility.
And our words have meanings that sometimes seem to defy their intent.
Take for example, "debt ceiling"....and the gridlock over raising it.
It does not mean that the government would increase the level of borrowing in order to spend more; it does mean that the government would simply have the capacity to pay for those bills it has already incurred. Nevertheless, those advocating for a smaller, less intrusive and thereby less costly government, on the premise that such conditions "would leave more money in the pockets of the individual tax payer" use the former argument to paint "big government advocates" with the brush of wanting to spend more than has already been spent.
Rhetoric, then becomes a dynamic in which words, phrases and even the subtleties of voice tone and timbre are used to argue for or against something, often using what is commonly referred to as "straw man" opponents to demonstrate the capacity of our argument to defeat our opponent. In the course of our discourse, we deploy, almost willy-nilly, stereotypes that inevitably exaggerate our opponents weaknesses, and exaggerate our own strengths, especially when we consider we are in a contest of some kind. We talk about our bosses in terms that frequently depict them as careless drivers whose only motivation is profit. We talk about God in terms that reflect our world view of power, supreme power, supreme knowledge and supreme love, perhaps, if we have graduated to a stage in which that has become a possibility. Often God is an "action figure" determined to convict us of our most minute sin, in our obsessive attempt to rid the world, and our lives, of misdemeanours of all kinds.
School is often stereotyped as that place where nothing really happens, except what happens in the exchanges between individual students, often of the highly charged hormonal kind, and occasionally what happens in a less than boring classroom. For decades I listened to adolescents paint the study of literature as nothing more than "BS" as they put it, given that there are many ways of seeing the words, actions and attitudes of characters in novels, plays, poems and those interpretations, if supported with references from the original writing, can and do qualify as reasonable essay responses to whatever questions one may encounter on tests and examinations. However, there is a much more subtle and intimate process going on, for which most adolescents are likely not ready, in the pursuit of the study of world class literature: and that is the development of a gestalt of both attitudes and perceptions within each student and also within each classroom, that is the accumulation of many perceptions of the lives of those characters to whom we are introduced in literature, whom we would never have the opportunity to get to know nearly as intimately as we do through those novels, plays and poems.
While even the words, phrases and intonations used by experienced writers have their shades of meaning, those writers are and likely have been engaged in the process of telling their truths, their perceptions and depictions of their world view in a manner fitting both the culture in which their characters dwell and the psyches that dwell within each character.
Let's look more closely at Shaw's quote above: If I tell you that there is no life after death, and you tell me that there is, we both have two different ideas, each of them the antithesis of the other. And yet, is it not possible that there are shades of nuanced possibilities to each position? Is it not possible that life as we know it may not exist after death, but that some different kinds of "life" are possible. For example, our relationship with those family members we have "lost" to death continues and even provides opportunity for change in our own lives, in the ways in which we perceive, understand and even empathize with those people. And it is not a stretch to portray those lives as continuing to impact our lives.
It is in the interaction between the two ideas that new possibilities lie and are ready to be found. And it is only through contemplation, reflection, "playing" with those possibilities that we find both our own new perceptions and realities and potentially those of others with whom we previously may have disagreed. We live in that "between".... life and death, past and future, hope and fear, a respect for science and a fear of its negative potential, and we are constantly attempting to nail down something fixed to both anchor our perceptions and our beliefs and to give us the illusion of stability, confidence and the concomitant reduction of our anxiety.
However, it is in the diving into the whirlpool of unknowing, of "in between" that we explore new insights, new ways of looking at everything and new attitudes...and that does require the willingness to embrace the other's idea, even if, at first, it sounds like heresy, apostasy and downright delusion.
It is in how we embrace a reality that willingly embraces ambiguity, uncertainty, openness to our own blind hubris and extending our truth to the other's grasp of things we do not know anything about
that we can come to embrace a far more flexible and far more tolerant and far more expansive world view...and the converse is also true, that when we refuse to embrace ambiguity, uncertainty, and to acknowledge our own blinding hubris, and when we refuse to accept another's perceptions of reality that we are in the greatest danger.
Back to literature, for a moment. Writers usually portray a series of scenes in which their characters "move" and open and change either for their own health and survival or in the opposite direction. It is in the drama of those movements that we witness their "development" and their maturing, or their devolution and decay. And we can and do point to those pivotal moments in which those characters experience an epiphany or a tragedy, or perhaps both that we are able to enter into their drama vicariously, without having to endure all of their pain, in the physical sense at least. It is no accident that Carol Pearson, in The Hero Within, in documenting the archetypes characters enter and shed in movies and novels, points to the Wanderer archetype as the transition stage between the other archetypes, innocent, orphan, victim, warrior and magician. It is naturally in the Wanderer stage that we are more open to ambiguity, to chaos, and to some kind of uncertainty, both in language and in our perceptions and attitudes as we move along our own pilgrimage.
We are all, it seems, individually and collectively, engaged in our own "development dramas" in which things we once perceived and believed are being met with perceptions and beliefs of others who deeply matter to us, and who love us deeply, that cause those original perceptions and beliefs and attitudes to shift, and to move into new configurations, almost as if they had become those 'atoms' in the kaleidoscope that shift each time we turn the instrument. And it is our hanging on to those fixed perceptions and beliefs that refuses to move, that digs in our heels, and confronts the "threats" never intended as "threats" to our world view that demonstrates our fear, and our resistance to the new.
However, as we open to our own "closedness", paradoxically, we also open to the other's reality, never quite making it our own, but at least permitting us a glimpse into their psyche that has the potential both to alienate us from each other, and to bring us much closer.
And that choice too rests on our courage to embrace both the new and the other simultaneously.
This may not be a new and different binomial theory, nor a new and different calculus from those deployed in all the most recent technology; it is, however, a pilgrim's path to new stars of insight, and new meteors of light, and new planets of culture to which s/he had never before flown. And, to think that those journeys come without the need to purchase a new space-ship, or space-suit, and are available each day in all of our significant encounters, if we are willing to dive into their black holes of uncertainty, confusion, ambiguity and perhaps even denial, without fear of losing anything of importance to our survival, yet perhaps even enhancing our potential for our own growth and development...that is the wondrous thing about our micro-macro bouncings off the ideas, perceptions, attitudes and beliefs of others who are prepared to share and who are courageous enough to enter into that "between" that always exists in our lives....where, as Buber reminds us, the Infinite dwells.
So while Shaw introduces us to our complexities, there are still universes waiting to be explored!
And aren't we all truly "wanderers" in the mystery that is our universe, when we peel away the mask of certitude?

 

U.S. Parochialism could come back to bite their country

There is a kind of parochialism about the United States that is quite surprising to one who has lived outside her borders for more than half a century, before crossing the forty-ninth parallel to work there for four years. It strikes one in the evening news casts which all to varying degrees trumpet a kind of unabashed nationalism, pride of accomplishment and American heroism, if not precisely exceptionalism. It strikes one in the strength of the American belief in their own culture, and their way of doing everything, unless and until some international objective instrument demonstrates their failing "grade," for instance in math and reading skills, or in upward mobility of their people.
A story in the most recent Atlantic magazine documents the role of athletics in the demise of academic education among America's teens, a role that is not shared to the same degree with any other country in the world. Competitive sports has been a staple of U.S. culture and educational practice for centuries, without so much as a nod to its negative impact on learning.
And the current government shut-down, militating against the president's trip to APEC, in spite of his announced "pivot" to Asia, his indigenous attachment to Indonesia from his youth, and the changing face and ambitions of both Russia and China, especially the latter, resulting from the extreme parochialism even narcissism of the Tea Party demonstrate America's capacity to self-sabotage.
Foreign workers who enter the U.S. are publicly declared "aliens" as if they came from another planet. They are not immigrants, or new-comers or some other less abrasive term. And their "alien" status is never far from the surface of the experience of working among American people. And the race or country of origin does not matter, given their pedestalling of their own people, practices and culture, compared with others.
For example, without knowing very much about Canada, we are too often reduced to that "pinko communist" country a phrase used by Nixon to describe his contempt for Prime Minister Trudeau, half a century ago. If there is that much ignorance and bigotry generated in the heartland of American toward her northern neighbour, just imagine how much ignorance and bigotry there would be for a culture and people with whom Americans were even less familiar. In fact, it is the American refusal to learn about the world, including the people and cultures of all countries around the world, that serves to keep American people isolated from both the positive and negative potential influences that might come from such "intelligence".
And at a time when the world is so turbulent, and requiring such an intimate and fast-flowing knowledge and awareness of the dynamics that are stirring that turbulence, this is no time to tie the U.S. president to his desk, over some juvenile political temper tantrum, as the Tea Party is inflicting on the capacity of the U.S. to govern itself.
And, make no mistake, China, for one, and perhaps others, will not be reticent to jump into the vacuum created by Obama's absence. And in the long run, that capacity and willingness to fill the vacuum could severely hurt the U.S. in her relations with South Asian countries. This time, it is only a photo-op that is missed, by that photo will be hung in many capitals in the region and referred to over the years, as the APEC conference that the U.S. president could not and did not attend because his government had ceased to function.
And what will that memory do to the level of confidence that South Asian countries and their leaders place in the U.S., especially her primary bond-holder, China.
And if the U.S. does indeed default on her debt, China can be counted on to expect a premium on any future bonds it would purchase from the U.S. Treasury.
Chicken is not a game for mature diplomats....and we all stand to lose by the parochialism that engenders it.

from npr's On Point with Tom Ashbrook website, October 9, 2013
New York Times: Obama’s Absence Leaves China As Dominant Force At APEC – “The partnership, a major element of Mr. Obama’s pivot toward Asia, is intended to achieve open market access among the 12 participants, with the United States, Japan, Mexico and Canada as the major economies. The administration was hoping that the leader of South Korea, Park Geun-hye, would announce at the meeting that South Korea was ready to join the negotiations. But South Korean officials said Ms. Park would not make that declaration in Bali.”
Wall Street Journal: U.S. Seeks to Reassure Trade Partners After Obama Cancels Trip – “Mr. Obama has canceled major overseas visits to Asia in the past. In 2010 he called off trips to Indonesia and Australia amid a debate over health care at home and also the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Last year, he skipped APEC in Russia because it clashed with the closing stages of the presidential election campaign.But his administration has repeatedly affirmed the U.S.’s commitment to building stronger ties in the region, often referring to America as a Pacific power.Mr. Kerry said scrapping the trip upended an opportunity to build Mr. Obama’s dialogues with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and China’s President Xi Jinping.”
AP: With Obama Out, Others Take APEC Stage, Sort Of – “For Obama, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit was meant to be an opportunity to underline renewed U.S. attention to Asia as a counterbalance to China’s increased economic and military clout. But that message was undermined by the U.S. budget impasse and government shutdown forcing Obama to cancel his trip to Indonesia and three other countries. His absence was perhaps felt most by Indonesians who consider him one of their own after he spent part of his childhood growing up in the capital, Jakarta.”

Economics, politics, and world order could be threatened by U.S. default

Debt-Ceiling Standoff Threatens America’s Global Leadership

Even talk of a U.S. default is bad for the world economy and America’s standing within it

By Michael Schuman Time, October 8, 2013

 

Policymakers have not minced words when describing the consequences of a U.S. default. “As reckless as a government shutdown is, as many people as are being hurt by a government shutdown, an economic shutdown that results from default would be dramatically worse,” President Barack Obama said in a recent speech. “The government shutdown is bad enough, but failure to raise the debt ceiling would be far worse, and could very seriously damage not only the U.S. economy, but the entire global economy,” warned IMF managing director Christine Lagarde. The U.S. Treasury was even blunter, predicting a default would spark another global financial crisis. “A default would be unprecedented and has the potential to be catastrophic,” it said in a recent report. “The negative spillovers could reverberate around the world, and there might be a financial crisis and recession that could echo the events of 2008 or worse.”
Just rhetoric? Not at all. In fact, these statements might be underestimating the consequences. Remember a couple of years ago the turmoil that resulted from fears that tiny Greece would default? Well, imagine the impact a default by the U.S. — an economy more than 66 times larger — would have. All of those Treasury bonds held around the world would quickly lose their value, wiping out a huge chunk of global wealth. The banks and funds that hold these bonds would take an instantaneous hit to their health, possibly destabilizing financial markets worldwide. The dollar would likely plummet in value as investors lose faith in U.S. assets. No wonder the world is getting nervous. An official in China, the world’s largest foreign holder of Treasuries (with almost $1.3 trillion of them) warned that “the clock is ticking” and pressed Washington to “ensure the safety of the Chinese investments.”
The cost to the U.S. would be greater than even this. A default would forever undermine global confidence in the ability and willingness of the U.S. to provide global economic leadership. That would hasten the decline of America’s status as the world’s “exceptional” nation. Policymakers and bankers around the world would be forced to look for other sources of economic stability. That would bolster the standing of China in global finance and commerce, and that of the dysfunctional euro. Even if Congress eventually raises the debt ceiling and avoids default, as many investors still believe, damage is being done. The mere fact that some senior politicians in Washington are willing to flirt with default over domestic political squabbles raises doubts around the world about America’s commitment to its global responsibilities and tarnishes the reputation of the U.S. as a global leader.
Read more: http://business.time.com/2013/10/08/debt-ceiling-standoff-threatens-americas-global-leadership/#ixzz2h7fCcHwd

This piece is included under the broad title of "world finance"....and does not begin to include the implications of a default on the United States' capacity to provide moral and political strength to their words, and to their influence on events in the many boiling hot-spots around the globe. Myopia, and political narcissism, not to mention a deeply funded political movement to buy the American government by rich tycoons like the Koch Brothers and others for their own purposes which include their unfettered pursuit of profits without regard to either their less advantaged fellow citizens or the environment of the planet, has taken over the public perception of Washington.
And, in the near and longer term future, such a perception could easily and justifiably erode the confidence that players like China and the EU have had in the U.S. without replacing that confidence in a different world leader.
This is not merely a matter of global finance; it is a matter of the stability of the world's political system, including the capacity of the United Nations to expect and demand the needed funding for its existence, the capacity of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to attempt to balance economic and thereby political crises around the globe, and the precarious yet currently valued grasp on stability that is anchored in the position of the United States' dollar, and her respected and earned voice on the world stage.
This political terrorists who are threatening to push the United States over the default cliff are motivated by many simplistic urges, among them:

• contempt for the president
• contempt for the Affordable Care Act
• contempt for the view of government as supporter of the weak and the dispossessed
• contempt for the growing underclass
• contempt for science and academic research
• contempt for moderation in the pursuit of their political agenda
• a conviction that God is on their side in this fight
• a conviction that Satan is a member of the Democratic Party as well as an significant advisor to the administration
• a conviction that the rest of the world, who do not agree with them, are misguided and dangerous
• an addiction to the kind of uber-affluence that has purchased their thoughts and their votes
• a zealot's pursuit of a apocalyptic vision of a new world in which they are masters, through the elimination of anyone they considered "deviant" and unwanted....

And, bottom line, while they are not currently deploying military weapons in their zealotry, they are not that different from the Islamic radicals who are so opposed to the United States and Israel's existence.
And falling into a trap of extremism willfully, and so eagerly is little short of blind hubris, for their short-term, personal gain, at the expense of everything the United States, for all of its blemishes, has worked so hard to build over two-plus centuries.














Read more: http://business.time.com/2013/10/08/debt-ceiling-standoff-threatens-americas-global-leadership/#ixzz2h7exK0PE

Hedges: christian right seeks to destroy the Enlightenment and create a theocratic state

Editor's note:

I grew up in an evangelical, fundamentalist, 'dominionist' congregation, St. Andrew's Presbyterian in Parry Sound, ON, where tolerance even of Roman Catholics was denounced from the pulpit, and where the church was often compared to a "business" by the then preacher, a flaming "born-again" who refused to permit his wife to prepare meals on Sunday, etc.etc. I rejected the holier-than-thou attitude of this kind of faith when I was sixteen, and have been an active opponent for the last sixty-odd years, and their kind truthfully cannot be engaged in debate, simply because they know all the right answers, and people like me have only the wrong and misguided answers. I have met them in Episcopal clergy albs, advocating for the return of gays to a straight life-style as the Christian approach, and in Anglican albs and mitres taking pride in acts of sheer terrorism against clergy of a more liberal stripe, without so much as a tip of the hat to any form of reconciliation. As an ordained Anglican/Episcopal clergy, I neither took an oath to uphold the Conservative Party in Canada nor the Republican party in the U.S., both expected acts of submission and conformity on their respective sides of the 49th parallel.And I certainly would never take an oath to respect, honour and obey the Christian right, as it is founded and expressed in the Tea Party, and their mega-donors.
There is not a word or an implication of Hedges' piece (below) with which I disagree, and there is nothing I would not do intellectually, spiritually or even fiscally to root out this cancer from our culture, just as, I am confident, Hedges himself is committed to doing, as his commitment to his interpretation of the Christian faith, in its broadest and most relevant terms.

 

The Radical Christian Right and the War on Government

By Chris Hedges, from truthdig.com, October 6, 2013

There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America. Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the “deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants” will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire International ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism. The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it—its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government—and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.
The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to sanctify military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions. Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian right, is a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist, attacking hypocrites and ultimately slaying nonbelievers. This cult of masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is appealing to the powerless. It stokes the anger of many Americans, mostly white and economically disadvantaged, and encourages them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The paranoia about the outside world is fostered by bizarre conspiracy theories, many of which are prominent in the rhetoric of those leading the government shutdown. Believers, especially now, are called to a perpetual state of war with the “secular humanist” state. The march, they believe, is irreversible. Global war, even nuclear war, is the joyful harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms billions of apostates to death.
“What we have here is our core values as Americans and Christians slipping away into this facade where we should take care of our poor, sick, and disabled,” Ted Cruz said in the Senate last month during a 21-hour speech that he gave in an attempt to block the funding of Obamacare. “It is disheartening to know that the nation our forefathers built is no longer of importance to our president and his Democratic counterparts. Not only that, we are falling away from core Christian values. I don’t know about you, but I believe in the Jesus who died to save himself, not enable lazy followers to be dependent on him. He didn’t walk around all willy-nilly just passing out free health care to those who were sick, or food to those who were hungry, or clothes to those in need. No, he said get up, brush yourself off, go into town and get a job, and as he hung on the cross he said, ‘I died so that I may live in eternity with my Father. If you want to join us you can die for yourself and your own sins. What do I look like, your savior or something?’ That’s the Jesus I want to see brought back into our core values as a nation. That’s why we need to repeal Obamacare.”
Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle against the forces of Satan. They live in a binary world of black and white. They feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their destruction. They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone know God’s will. They sanctify their rage. This rage lies at the center of the ideology. It leaves them sputtering inanities about Barack Obama, his corporate-sponsored health care reform bill, his alleged mandated suicide counseling or “death panels” for seniors under the bill, his supposed secret alliance with radical Muslims, and “creeping socialism.” They see the government bureaucracy as being controlled by “secular humanists” who want to destroy the family and make war against the purity of their belief system. They seek total cultural and political domination.
All ideological, theological and political debates with the radical Christian right are useless. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. Its adherents are using the space within the open society to destroy the open society itself. Our naive attempts to placate a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have “values,” only strengthen its supposed legitimacy and increase our own weakness.
Dominionists have to operate, for now, in what they see as the contaminated environment of the secular, liberal state. They work with the rest of us only because they must. Given enough power—and they are working hard to get it—any such cooperation will vanish. They are no different from the vanguard described by Lenin or the Islamic terrorists who shaved off their beards, adopted Western dress and watched pay-for-view pornography in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack. The elect alone, like the Grand Inquisitor, are sanctioned to know the truth. And in the pursuit of their truth they have no moral constraints.
I spent two years inside the Christian right in writing my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I attended services at megachurches across the country, went to numerous lectures and talks, sat in on creationist seminars, attended classes on religious proselytizing and conversion, spent weekends at “right-to-life” retreats and interviewed dozens of followers and leaders of the movement. Though I was sympathetic to the financial dislocation, the struggles with addictions, the pain of domestic and sexual violence, and the deep despair that drew people to the movement, I was also acutely aware of the dangerous ideology these people embraced. Fascist movements begin as champions of civic improvement, communal ideals, moral purity, strength, national greatness and family values. These movements attract, as has the radical Christian right, those who are disillusioned by the collapse of liberal democracy. And our liberal democracy has collapsed.
We have abandoned our poor and working class. We have created a government monster that sucks the marrow out of our bones to enrich and empower the oligarchic and corporate elite. The protection of criminals, whether in war or on Wall Street, is part of our mirage of law and order. We have betrayed the vast and growing underclass. Most believers within the Christian right are struggling to survive in a hostile world. We have failed them. Their very real despair is being manipulated and used by Christian fascists such as the Texas senator. Give to the working poor a living wage, benefits and job security and the reach of this movement will diminish. Refuse to ameliorate the suffering of the poor and working class and you ensure the ascendancy of a Christian fascism.
The Christian right needs only a spark to set it ablaze. Another catastrophic act of domestic terrorism, hyperinflation, a series of devastating droughts, floods, hurricanes or massive wildfires or another financial meltdown will be the trigger. Then what is left of our anemic open society will disintegrate. The rise of Christian fascism is aided by our complacency. The longer we fail to openly denounce and defy bankrupt liberalism, the longer we permit corporate power to plunder the nation and destroy the ecosystem, the longer we stand slack-jawed before the open gates of the city waiting meekly for the barbarians, the more we ensure their arrival.

Hedges: Artists needed for the revolution....are there any, and who would listen if there were?

The resistance needs a vibrant cultural component. It was the spirituals that nourished the souls of African-Americans during the nightmare of slavery. It was the blues that spoke to the reality of black people during the era of Jim Crow. It was the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca that sustained the republicans fighting the fascists in Spain. Music, dance, drama, art, song, painting were the fire and drive of resistance movements. The rebel units in El Salvador when I covered the war there always traveled with musicians and theater troupes. Art, as Emma Goldman pointed out, has the power to make ideas felt. Goldman noted that when Andrew Undershaft, a character in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Major Barbara,” said poverty is “[t]he worst of crimes” and “All the other crimes are virtues beside it,” his impassioned declaration elucidated the cruelty of class warfare more effectively than Shaw’s socialist tracts. The degradation of education into vocational training for the corporate state, the ending of state subsidies for the arts and journalism, the hijacking of these disciplines by corporate sponsors, severs the population from understanding, self-actualization and transcendence. In aesthetic terms the corporate state seeks to crush beauty, truth and imagination. This is a war waged by all totalitarian systems.
Culture, real culture, is radical and transformative. It is capable of expressing what lies deep within us. It gives words to our reality. It makes us feel as well as see. It allows us to empathize with those who are different or oppressed. It reveals what is happening around us. It honors mystery. “The role of the artist, then, precisely, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest,” James Baldwin wrote, “so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
Artists, like rebels, are dangerous. They speak a truth that totalitarian systems do not want spoken. “Red Rosa now has vanished too. …” Bertolt Brecht wrote after Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.” Without artists such as musician Ry Cooder and playwrights Howard Brenton and Tarell Alvin McCraney we will not succeed. If we are to face what lies ahead, we will not only have to organize and feed ourselves, we will have to begin to feel deeply, to face unpleasant truths, to recover empathy and to live passionately. (Chris Hedges, in truthdig.com, September 30, 2013, "The Sparks of Rebellion")

Is there a George Bernard Shaw among us? Or an Arthur Miller? Or a John Steinbeck?
And if there were, would our current slicing and dicing of every issue into micro-bits not blind us to the big picture for many reasons, one being the lassitude and luxury we have enjoyed for so long?
Listening to the McLaughlin Group on PBS, I found a Washington Post writer arguing with former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan about global warming and climate change, the former putting the position that it was one of the most significant tragedies of our time that there was any doubt about both its reality and about the human causes, the other continuing to doubt even while being challenging on his ante-deluvian position on national television.
Twenty to thirty people are currently holding the United States government hostage to their narcissistic parochial and dangerous views of both the president and their country, while the media "reports" on the various meetings or non-meetings that might present a way out of the impasse.
Who is going to write the play that portrays the first black president as imprisoned inside the White House for no other reason than he is black, and there are billions of dollars arrayed against every breath he takes, and certainly every proposals he supports, simply because he is trying to do the job to which he was elected?
And if there were a Shaw or a Miller or a Steinbeck, which television network or movie sound stage would be willing to commit the resources to producing a piece of incisive social commentary that would foreshadow the bleak future we are marching blindly toward, while also disarming those leviathans of the purse of their mountains of financial assets, without at the same time, incurring an even more heavily financed piece that debunks the original? And why television or movie, rather than novel or stage play? For the very simple reason that the generations of people who need to waken to the onrushing hell do not read more than a few characters, and most of those are so incoherent as to be merely gushes of narcissism, faintly disguised as gossip.
The pursuit of mountains of profit, including the purchasing of the legislative and political power to engage in such a pursuit, has so seduced our time that we have sold out our capacity to protest, except in small numbers for very short periods over some single issue brought forward by a politician who actually wishes to thumb his/her nose at an established tradition like, for example, the collective bargaining process of public service workers, by Governor Scott Walker  in Wisconsin.
And, while it is true that the occupying of the legislative building by ordinary people received national attention, it is also true that the bargaining process was gutted....and "the men and women come and go talking of"... Michael Jackson, and John Lennon, and Princess Diana...
How do we write a play or novel about the unconscionable chasm between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon, for example, on how to run down Islamic terrorists in Mali when the ambassador to that country has to sign off on any proposed action and refuses, for diplomatic reasons? (If you want more information, read the current issue of The Atlantic which exposes this opinion divide.)
There is no collective opinion anymore, on anything; there are only multiple and widely dispersed views on everything with no discerning compass worthy of trust that can or will be permitted to chart a prospective course out of the darkness into some shared enlightenment.
Even if there were a Shaw or Miller or Steinbeck, who would read, reflect and join the ramparts in support of the efforts needed to overthrow the current system.
For example, everyone knows that campaign finance reform must be re-introduced, using public money, in order to cleanse the political system of inordinate influence peddling and the concomitant prostitution of the candidates to their benefactors' agendas. Is there a hope in hell that such needed reform will be witnessed in the next century, by politicians whose lips and tongue are red with the wine sloshed from the public troughs yet whose faces bare not a trace of that colour of shame?
We all know that arms proliferation prevention starts with an international piece of paper outlining the terms of such an agreement among and between national signators. We all know that the NRA's grip on too many members of Congress will never permit the US Secretary of State's signing of such a treaty to become national policy.
We all know that corporate profits and tax loopholes that permit and enable such profits, far beyond what could be considered legitimate, will continue, if not actually increase because there are sufficient and more funds to buy the votes needed to achieve such a goal.
We all know that those same dollars will not permit the kind of legitimate votes in Congress that would see a significant bite taken out of the toxic emissions from various industrial operations, including currently operating coal-fired power plants...and does anyone care enough for the constrictions that will block the free breathing of our grandchildren, if we do not pass such legislation nationally and internationally.
I once listened to a very small entrepreneur in a very small U.S. frontier town explain that the local police could only deal with what she termed, "mickey-mouse issues" because they have not the spine or the support to deal with the really big issues, in her case, the trafficking of major drug dealers in and through that town.
"Mickey-Mouse" issues replace the important issues when everyone is reduced to an addiction to a hand-held screen manipulable by the average three-year-old and when everyone shuts his/her mind to the apparent over-run of personal greed and ambition in what were once considered thoughtful fora in local, regional and national governments. We have elected the most easily bought and the most easily bent to a breeze blowing with the full support of a corporate media that sacralizes corporations and their needs and sacrifices ordinary people on that altar.
Even Crysta Freeland, author of "Plutocrats" appearing on a public panel at Harvard yesterday, as part of NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook, took positions that put a public face on the problem of the accumulation of wealth by a very few, (120% of the economic gains in the last five years going to the top 1% of the population), without proposing radical and necessary steps to reverse the situation. Even with her respected and authentic research, she is not prepared to become a radical pioneer leader to bring about significant changes.....and she is already a candidate for an important Toronto seat in the House of Commons in Canada, a country where revolt is a dirty word and anyone sounding alarm bells is not merely apocalyptic but dangerous.
When public listening is selective and superficial, and public reflection and contemplation are intermittent at best and non-existent at worst, and when public information flows in nano-seconds regardless of its vacuity, and when fewer and fewer hands control the people who pull the levers of power and those hands are covered in the blood of the sacrifice of public safety nets for the purpose of self-aggrandizement, and when the agents of distribution of public information are owned and controlled by those same hands, and when the schools have become agents of public "decorum" and not public scepticism and inquiry....there is the high potential for an entropy of public institutions based on the apathy of public absence and the extreme, and uncontrolled and uncontrollable pursuit of greed and personal ambition running the system into the ditch, without enough people realizing what is happening or how they have participated, making it possible through their indifference.

IMf Head Christine Lagarde warns U.S. against failure to raise debt ceiling

IMF head warns US debt crisis threatens world economy

from the BBC NEWS website, October 3, 2013

IMF head Christine Lagarde says it is "mission critical" that the situation is resolved

 
IMF managing director Christine Lagarde says failure to raise the US debt ceiling would be a far worse threat to the global economy than the current shutdown.

The shutdown is due to a budget standoff between President Barack Obama and Congress.

But a worse problem looms: the US will run out of money if there is no agreement to raise the borrowing limit.

Ms Lagarde's comments were echoed by the US Treasury.

It says a debt default could lead to a financial crisis as bad as 2008 or worse.

Mr Obama emphasised that gloomy message in a separate speech on Thursday.

"As reckless as a government shutdown is, as many people as are being hurt by a government shutdown, an economic shutdown that results from default would be dramatically worse," he said.

Mr Obama and Congressional leaders have been in political deadlock for days, which has had the effect of freezing non-essential US government functions.

The US government closed non-essential operations on Tuesday after Congress failed to strike a deal on a new budget.

The shutdown has left more than 700,000 employees on unpaid leave and closed national parks, tourist sites, government websites, office buildings, and more.

For US economic watchers, a widely tracked indicator - the monthly US jobs report - has been delayed due to the shutdown, it was announced on Thursday.

However, while this budget crisis rages in Washington DC, another, more dangerous, one looms in the coming weeks.

On 17 October, the US government will run out of cash to pay its bills - unless the debt ceiling is raised.

In a speech looking ahead to a decade of challenges for the world economy, Ms Lagarde said that the US government needed to fix its finances for the long term.

She said it was "mission critical" that the US agrees a new debt ceiling.

But as she has often said before, there should not be too much change in the short term because that could undermine the economic recovery.