Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Refusing to "normalize" Trump's election

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, made a statement on Charlie Rose (Bloomberg, Television) last night that bears not only repeating, but underlining.
Remnick stated as forcefully as he could, “The election of Donald Trump cannot and must not be normalized!”

 So disturbed was Remnick, and so disturbed should the rest of the world be, that he listed some of the deeply negative characteristics of Trump: racism, misogyny, authoritarianism, along with the endorsements he has received: the KKK, the Alt-Right, the American Fascist party. Cozying up to Putin, scrapping the Iran deal on nuclear development, scrapping TPP, renegotiating NAFTA, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, and then the complex gordion knot of Trump’s business interests enmeshed with the official business of the United States are some of the other difficulties with the potential impact of the election.

This morning’s Trump tweet telling the British government his choice for UK Ambassador to the United States is another verboten diplomatic move, not only raising eyebrows among diplomats, but also embarrassing the country whose highest leadership position he is about to assume is and will be seen to be easily forgotten after he is finished wreaking his havoc.

As the black comedienne, Whoopie Goldberg put it on “The View” today, “Lady Liberty is Green” and ‘I have never known these values to be acceptable in America”…..

Having his children manage his business interests is not, cannot be and will not be the “blind trust” the legal requirements demand. Let’s be clear, no elected official is outside of or above the law on all issues. Just as important is Trump’s contempt for the public and private media, that compulsive-obsessive sponge and megaphone of every utterance made by the president-elect.

Deviance, unorthodoxy, unconventional, surprise, unexpected…..these words will look pale when the new administration accomplishes even some of its stated goals
Infrastructure, for example, poses a significant threat to the body politic. Trump’s offer of initial funding opportunities for the private sector, plus a share of revenue from those proposed project will witness a rush of investment cash on steroids, for the profit the “deals” will generate, while simultaneously robbing the nation of both the responsibility and the ownership and the stewardship of the public good.

Making the opportunity available for business, for ambulances and law enforcement to operate, by generating public facilities of which the public can be proud is a long-standing tradition in both the United States and Canada, where Trudeau is also giving hints that his government too will permit private ownership of public facilities, in order to fund the long-overdue infrastructure projects the country desperately needs. Toll roads, toll bridges….will these lead to toll runways and toll moving sidewalks in U.S. airports?

At root, however, for Remnick, and for Goldberg, the for American Civil Liberties Union, and hopefully for millions of others on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel, white racist supremacy is one of, if not the most heinous prospect that many believe Trump foreshadows, if not actually incarnates. Mein Kampf and all of the memories and fears it evokes, when espoused and championed by a generation of angry white men, (tragically,Trump won the large majority of evangelical Christians too!), must be confronted by surges of hope, cash raised in new and surprising amounts by those seeking to push back against everything Trump stands for. So while hate crimes have surged so too has the flow of cash to oppose, volunteers to become activists in opposition.

Not incidentally, the stock market is reaching higher numbers than ever in history. Is this a signal that the markets are enjoying and even luxuriating in the Trump win?
 Each person can ask him or herself what the deep meanings of this historic electoral result are and how each can take the also historic opportunity to come out of the proverbial closet of apathy, and indifference. Editors in national news outlets, along with editors in small-town weeklies, and local television outlets can examine their negligence throughout the campaign, with a view to rededicating their organizations to a much more critical judgement of the ways by which voter rights are being repressed, by which health care is being gutted, by which ordinary people will be impacted by the privatization of public facilities, by which the long-term values and interests of the nation are being eroded or even trashed.

Just as Henry Kissinger reminded viewers while appearing as a guest on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS, a business deal is very different from a diplomatic “deal”….the former involves only two parties and they may never see each other again, while a diplomatic ‘deal’ involves many players and depends on long-term relationships.


The same is true, when the history, tradition and values of equality, freedom, authentic justice, and the respect of every individual and each ethnicity, religion, language and culture. This is about long-term relationships with ordinary people. The presidency cannot and must not be reduced to the simplistic, reductionistic terms of a for-profit business deal, the modus operandi Trump claims as his signature accomplishment. Even the promise of  jobs and infrastructure must not depend on a single, short-term business deal that make the signatories look good today, if the long-term impact of such deals erode and decimate the tradition and values of the country, for which many lives have been lost, at home and abroad.

Today, November 22, is the anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and all of us recall precisely where we were and what we were doing the moment we learned of that tragedy. It is an historic watershed in all of our memories and makes us even more energized to protect the values, traditions and aspirations not only for justice and equality but for a peaceful world, that have impelled the nation. And this energy cannot be exclusive only to American citizens. The whole world has a stake in this new and very different historic moment.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Xenophobia in America does not originate with Trump...it has a long history

Contempt for those who are different, in its latest iteration, may have been triggered by the rise in immigrants and refugees from many Islamic countries where war and poverty, disease and hopelessness abound.

However, contempt for the outsider, someone who is different, named “alien” has been a long-standing attitude in the United States. Alien, for the Americans, is a person who was not born in that country. And having worked in their country for nearly four years, while wearing the epithet “alien,” I never felt welcome, often experienced a different look or even a sarcastic comment about my accent, and deliberately refused to do things that would more fully “embed” me in a culture that exhibits fear and contempt even for those of their own country who are not like them.

Let’s start with the shocking question from one white person who felt she had to inquire if a black relative from a large city, in state, would be welcome at an event we were both looking forward to attending and celebrating. Of course, the black person was also an American, and I was incredulous that such a question was asked. And then, let’s recall some of the other comparisons, subtle racist attitudes that emerged when I was confronted by the phrase, “you are too eastern for us”….meaning too “Ivy League” and “too sophisticated” and too “citified” illustrated even comparisons within their own country provided all the examples they needed to exclude this “alien.”
For a country that brags to the world about being the “best” country with the most powerful military, and the best universities, and the most advanced discoveries in science and medicine, in space and digital technology, this is still a country masking her fears. Recall one of Trump’s earliest lessons from his father, that the world is not a nice place and enemies abound, presumably from a motive of parenting a “strong” offspring who could face the world and successfully compete. Forged in revolution against the monarchy in Great Britain, and nurtured in their own civil war, adding on a list of smaller and larger world conflicts, animosity, and “shaking hands with their elbows” something I experienced daily in my stint working in the United States, Americans simply love a really down and dirty fight, whether that fight involves principles worthy of the engagement or not. Like a dysfunctional family raised in crisis, that (crisis) is what they know best, and what they seek to replicate in their political rhetoric, in their political competitions, in their street gangs, in their corporate take-overs, and in their athletic prowess.

Crisis is, after all, the epitome of exaggerated drama, out of which some kind of hero must emerge, and out of which some “loser” must also emerge. When the entertainment industry, and the marketing industry and the education sector, and the political demographic is fully immersed, engaged and motivated by the effort to win, at all costs, whether it be the scholarship, or the emission test for new cars, or the best “ratings” for its service or product, all components of the culture are reduced to just another transaction.

And when the tools and the instructions and the culture are all dedicated to winning, and thereby eliminating losers, mostly by creating them in their own minds, the country verges on the culture of the elementary and middle school play-yard. Power, often in the form of the biggest, the loudest, the most handsome, the best figure (for the females), and certainly the most popular (stereotypically the football quarterback and the head cheerleader), as the goal of individual lives, is reproduced in extrinsic examples.

All of the examples of power in the school yard are visible, audible, and measureable. Intrinsics like insight, creativity, compassion, faith, collegiality, and even ethics all give way to the expressions of physical/sexual/popular power.

And herein lies a significant danger, not only for those in the playground, but also for their parents and their children, decades later. Failing, losing, being cast out (from the inner circle) is never considered as a significant component in the engine that drives the culture.  Not only is their a two-pole kind of dichotomy about this reductionistic kind of culture, there is also a kind of split in the kind of attention dedicated to the winners and the losers.

The former are lauded, in all of the many venues available in the community; the latter are quite literally ignored, spurned, spat upon, and even kicked and punched by the bullies who find their own path to power, dependent on their own kind of neurosis.
And when the hard times come, as they inevitably will and have, there will be no cultural resource on which to rely, other than turning winners into losers (or the enemy) and seeking the “revenge of the deplorables” a phrase tailor-made for the millions who voted for the president elect. Combat, then, once again based on the collusion of the compliant who are just like us, another variation of the conformity/exclusion of the school yard, and the exclusion of those who are not like us.

It may well be that Obama’s entry onto the national stage championed not blue and red states, but the UNITED States of America. And for political rhetoric delivered by a young black state senator from Illinois, it brought the Democratic National Convention to their feet, and eventually elevated Obama to the White House.

At the same time, over the eight years of his presidency, it is not incidental to note that white supremacy hate groups have increased in both numbers and in size. The Republican members of Congress, in both Houses, conspired to block Obama’s every move, and whether or not the “moral license”* concept articulated by Malcolm Gladwell has been operating will be the subject of many doctoral theses over the coming decades. It is not accidental, nor incidental, too that the KKK is alive and well and living both physically and inspirationally among the racists who supported the president elect, without his ever rejecting the support from that quarter.

Those who are not like me must be by enemies, would be both expected and addressed directly by school teachers and administrators who would be doing their jobs. In the “adult” world, there are no teachers and administrators to carry on the kind of education, enhancing horizons of both perception and attitude, from exclusion to welcome inclusion. And, in a culture that has placed law enforcement, along with the military at the top of its “icon pole” this education and transformational process is unfortunately left to the police, and to the social service agencies, most of which are underfunded and unprepared to spend the time, and dedicate the resources in “prevention” and prefer to build their case load of crises.

As a national modus operandi, crisis management is completely at odds with a healthy anything (family, school, hospital, corporation, government). Paradoxically, however, crisis attitudes, and crisis rhetoric and polar opposite epithets (including character assassinating name calling fit for the school yard) that garner public attention for their shock value have essentially drugged a ratings-driven media, thereby promulgating a kind of violent campaign of hollow and crisis-conceived and delivered rhetoric that has become the latest political kool-aid for the nationalist, populist, jingoist, xenophobic “movement” that is best compared with a bowel movement. (However, this “movement” is unlikely to remove the waste products from the political intestines that have been blocked for the past eight years.)

All of the evidence suggests that the president elect is conducting a hubristic parade of ring-kissing sycophants (like a newly elected pope) while deliberately holding his cards very close to his vest, as if the archetype of “enemy” now includes both the “people” and the “media”….when his job is to “serve” the people and in order to accomplish that responsibility, he needs the media.

However, if the insularity, and the xenophobia and the jingoism of the president-elect are so concrete that only those permitted inside the inner circle matter (leaving the people and the media deliberately outside, begging for crumbs of irrelevant information) then democracy itself is under threat, not from outside the country, but from the very heart of the republic, the White House itself.

And this threat to democracy did not start with the recent presidential campaign. It goes all the way back to the revolution. There is an old saying, “we become what we hate”….suggesting that hate itself is a kind of imprisonment that so captures its bearer it transforms that hate-monger into the very object of the hate. Americans quite literally hated the “oppression” they believed they experienced under the monarchy. And their hate, contempt and rejection was so strong they fought their revolutionary war to escape. It may have taken well over two hundred years; however they may have come to the point where they are now ensnared in the trap of their own xenophobic hatred, not of the British this time, but of the “aliens” in their midst and the “aliens” who have “robbed” them of their jobs, and the potential “flood” of aliens from other countries. All of these “aliens”  have an implicit “mark” of a danger and a threat to America simply because that “mark” has been projected onto their foreheads by the frightened, yet heavily armed, and heavily sedated populace by the drug of xenophobia.

I was once one of those aliens, and I once felt that I bore such a mark, in a community in which the alien was so denigrated and so despised and so abhorrent that those in charge were compelled to accept, however superficially, such an “alien” because a native American would not accept the post, after two years of national advertising. (That significant piece of information was denied to me by those ‘filling the hole’ on their roster, once again, as another example of the contempt for the alien ingrained in the hierarchy.)


*“Moral License” is the permission that accompanies, for example, the election of a black president, for one to declare “I am not racist” and then proceed to demonstrate the very racism previously denied, with impunity. The vote for the black president gives “license” for the ensuing racism that was always present, and may now be even exaggerated in its newly licensed stage.

Friday, November 18, 2016

A brief look at oscillation

Let’s have a look at the notion of oscillation* as it applies to human behaviour.
A fluctuation between to outside points around a central position offers a kind of “energy” that could be useful, or perhaps counter-productive.

Robert Fritz, author of “technologies for creating” speaks about the oscillation that occurs between two mutually exclusive goals, operating simultaneously. For example, if one seeks to lose weight, then one often becomes excessively hungry and eats more…oscillating between the two mutually exclusive goals.

Fritz posits that, in order to reduce, if not eliminate the oscillation, one has to decide which goal is primary, and which is secondary to help the individual to move more effectively toward the preferred goal, even if it takes a little longer than anticipated. Even the awareness that one seems to be oscillating, from Fritz’s perspective, can help to curb the tendency and shift to a more effective achievement of the desired “creation”.

In music, the notion of resolving tensions, between an unsettled sound to one of finality creates a “cadence” leaving the listener aware that the phrase or the piece of music has come to an end. It was the tension itself, however, that was playing out through the manuscript, as the phrases rose and fell in speed, or pitch or volume, depending on the composer’s intent.

For much of our lives, we are mostly unconscious of the playing out of those “phrases” of activity, varying between quick, slow, loud, soft, high pitched or low pitched….each of them signalling a different emotion, mood and comfort level. And most of our consciousness focuses on how “others” are impacting the music of our lives. A phone call, an email, a text….they each can and often do send a ripple of emotional energy depending on the nature of the message, the relationship to the sender, the timing of the message and the anticipated next step. Managing these micro-impulses, however, can often render us blind or unconscious to the larger patterns of the way things seem to be “flowing” or not in our lives.

One example of a kind of oscillation that appears in some lives is that between the victim and the bully. A victim is usually the receiver of negative messages, perhaps abusive messages, from others who project their insecurities onto him/her generating the inevitable feelings of insecurity, resentment, anger and revenge. If the abuse of negative messages is protracted, the negative emotions only grow generating a compelling need to release the pent-up negative emotions, generating a new “self” as a bully…one that gives out, rather than receives, similar negative messages. Of course, much has been written about being “OK” or “ NOT OK” (See Eric Berne’s Games People Play, Transactional Analysis). And, from a cliché perspective, we all want to be OK, rather than “NOT OK”.

However, being “OK” is not cast in granite, for most people, depending on the culture in which the early and highly impressive early messages were positive and negative. The culture, itself, can and often does oscillate between a historic period of “positive” messages and “negative” messages. An example of this oscillation can be seen in the American education culture in which positive messages to every student have generated kids who believe they can accomplish anything and everything, while many of their scores on demanding tests demonstrate a lack of learning the basics needed to pass those tests. There is a profound gap between “feeling good” and accomplishing one’s required goals.

How both the culture and the individuals perceive any oscillation, and their place in the oscillation, can offer some clues both to personal identity and to a larger picture of the nature of the world we live in. Recently, an election in the United States illustrated one dramatic oscillation: following a period of calm, rational, predictable and even smiling leadership under Obama, the country swung wildly in favour of an irrational, impulsive, unpredictable and mostly angry candidate, believing that the former was a “weak” leader and the latter much more “strong” and unable or unwilling to be “pushed around”. It is not incidental to note that Obama (the rational and predictable and moderate) followed immediately on the heels of another “war monger” in George W. Bush, whose over-reaction to 9/11, with the full compliance of the American people set the stage for the election of Obama.

It is not only from the perspective of the nature of the nation’s leadership that this oscillation can be considered. It is also an oscillation in the unfolding of the search for masculine identity that is playing out, both in the oscillation from Bush to Obama, and from Obama to Trump. Identity is one obvious stage on which both individual and cultural oscillations develop. Who is this person? And what is the country’s identity? These are critical questions is the evolution of personal and national identity. And they emerge from the existential search for meaning and purpose….following the inevitable “existential moment” in which the person/organization/nation recognizes its own meaninglessness. And for many, there is not a single “existential moment” in the course of history.

The identity of feminism is another curve that demonstrates a kind of oscillation from the “victim” archetype to the “dominant” or “warrior” archetype. This oscillation can be witnessed in the many upheavals in domestic relationships, where, for example, the female begins as completely compliant with the male interests and over time, emerges (sometimes seamlessly, sometimes more turbulently) into a much more assertive individual. And parallel to this evolution is the shift from a male archetype of “warrior” to the “compliant” or “passive aggressive” model, neither of which effectively provides an authentic and responsive partner for the evolving female.
Gender identity as one of the primary cultural, sociological curves of our time, oscillates between images of “strength” and images of “weakness”….just another of the many reductionisms that plague much of contemporary public consciousness and discourse. What seems to be missing from this discussion is the concept of androgyny, the notion (offered by Carl Jung) that in both men and women, in our unconscious, there are indications of the opposite gender. It is a resistance to the reality of androgyny, especially among men, that is often at the centre of the extremes in oscillation in the gender identity drama. “Bush” attempted to project an image of “macho masculinity” in response to the 9/11 attack supported by most Americans. Obama, on the other hand, adopted a much more evolved and more moderate leadership approach, in part because it is consistent with his own personality, and also because he believed it was essential for the country’s long-term interests geopolitically.
The recent push back against Obama’s weakness, (at least as perceived by those men who have been emasculated by their many serious losses of jobs, income, status and even respect, as well as those who feel “second class” in their relationships, rightly or not) has catapulted Trump to the most powerful office in the world. Is the vote an over-reach demonstrating a risky oscillation? Of course.

And it is the over-reach of most of our personal, organizational, and national oscillations away from whatever it is we perceive to be the “force” we are saying “No” to that comprises much of the drama of our histories. If things feel “stuck” we will oscillate into dramatic “action” just to demonstrate that we are capable of “action”….and vice versa, if we perceive our lives as strung-out, overwhelmed, and out of control, we will seek either to escape such turbulence, or perhaps some “medicative” escape, whether that escape is within limits or not.

When we observe and discuss the dynamics of a group, we can easily perceive the modus operandi, in terms of, on one hand, clear decision-making, or conversely, murky and indecisive co-dependence with much “niceness” and almost obsessive feel-good messaging of all members by the others.

Here is a typical illustration of one of the primary oscillations, between action and being. In seminaries, we hear many times the expression, “I am a human BEING not a human DOING,” as if to underline the difference between justification only from accomplishment, achievement, extrinsic rewards and appreciation as compared to “the who” of our being. Our culture is much more interested in rewarding, recognizing and perpetuating the “doing” of individual lives, and not their “being”. The latter is considered peripheral to how much of our work and home lives are structured.
It is the race to the bottom line, the cutting of costs, that is the current culture of most organizations, especially those whose leaders are rewarded by such accomplishments. Do more with less, accomplish more with fewer people….these are the mantras of many in middle and upper management….If they only recognized and accepted how counter-productive is their approach.

Neurotic organizations come in many varieties and colours. One obvious example pervading much of our work culture is “do more with less” so that targets of decreasing losses, or increasing profits can be met. And of course linked to that “corporate philosophy” is the acceptance of the fact that full disclosure of the real “figures” and the authentic fiscal picture will never be released. Once launched on the path of “cutting costs” these gigantic corporate ‘ships’ cannot be easily and quickly turned around to move in a direction of respect and dignity and honouring the workers and their already proven ways of accomplishing their tasks.

And so, ironically, the deficit of respect from supervisors to workers only grows, thereby completely defeating the stated goal of reducing costs, a goal designed to be implemented by all managers in training, so easily trained and measured is the skill.
Worshipping the bottom line, just like turning every relationship into another transaction demonstrating “profit” or “loss” to the participants, is so demonstrably counter-intuitive and counter-productive that a concerted oscillation back toward honouring personal dignity, personal feelings and personal respect for all, while much like pushing water uphill is more than worth the effort.

And this energy dedicated to real human encounters, ones that are not dependent on classical conditioning, the tool of the control management operatives, includes a recognition of and respect for androgyny, for discussing our own oscillations, for perceiving and naming the oscillations of the organizations in which we are involved, in helping our children to moderate their vacillating and oscillating intensities so that they too can and will escape the ensnaring trap of the many oscillations, and learn to fly their own unique flight path, neither too high (like Icarus) nor too low (like too many Canadians who have been told “we are not that kind of people” by their parents when they wanted to go to med school).

It is true that through oscillations, we find our limits, and our boundaries. However, when the culture marches to the drum beat of the one percent, it is only the interests and the values of the one percent that become the dogma of the new religion. And we all need to put our thumbs on the scales to balance the inordinate power and influence of that one percent, the same one percent that will be moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on January 21.

Surely, the church of the plutocrats is no authentic religion, but rather a machine perpetuated by the powerful, of the powerful, and for (only) the powerful. And the refuse it generates every day in the losses of human potential will soon suffocate the very edifice in which it worships.

*Oscillation:

(physics, statistics) regular fluctuation in value, position, or state about a mean value, such as the variation in an alternating current or the regular swinging of a pendulum. a single cycle of such a fluctuation. (from dictionary.com)

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Eulogy for the Common Good

weather reports depict the next hours,
                           or days
climate forecasts look through a
                                longer lens..
both fail to measure and report
                  the erosion of conscience
the depletion of the natural resource,
                                the common good
as if to hold it up is to honour
                               some communist
ideology
while the dictates of fashion moguls, and the
              exclusive lists of the ‘best’ parties
and the Forbes list of billionaires
                    all exhibit a cultish reverence for
idolatry
               of the ‘big’ names for their clones
of their disdain for the voiceless
                      of the contempt for the imprisoned
many of whom merit amnesty
                                     and rehab…not incarceration..
grace and forgiveness, once cornerstones of
                          public morality, and authentic
justice
                        have been exterminated with the
hundreds of species of flora, fauna and fish
                            in a garbage flooded ecosystem
married to a narcissistic individualism
                          and then
a story of an eleven-year-old’s
lemon-aid stand fundraising for a good cause
                   generates a feel-good news story
like a Zoloft for the masses
                 and an amnesty for our
guilt and our
                          apathy
                                     and our detachment
We are the hollow men T.S. Eliot prophesied
                                             and we stuff our heads
with the straw of illusion
                                        and fame
                                                       and money
Oxford choses “post-truth” as the new word for 2016..
                                        has shame too been exterminated

or merely highly endangered?

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Sounds of Silence 2016

bodies of babies lying lifeless on
                  Mediterranean beaches
silently screaming…stop the bombs!
stop the missiles!  stop the insanity….
                                  no one listens…
                                           even today the children’s hospital
in Aleppo is bombed!
                       clinging to power with children as
hostages
                      invalidates both the power and the
method of holding on
                     the leaders of the world
and their people have all gone

              deafanddumb

to the pleas of sanity,
                                   compassion
                                                             and ethical requirements
of ordinary citizens

                                if we were follow the lead of our

leaders, we would spend the rest of our lives in a cell
                    in ‘enlightened’ countries

and likely tortured in others

                      there is no oversight, no law enforcement, and no courts

                   for those in power

and their files are silently screaming
                                                          like those lifeless bodies
for their attention….
                      war, arms sales, poverty, hunger, clean air, water and conscience

                         the ‘words of the prophets written in graffiti
on tenement walls’
                              have become sets for comedy rants
and funky entertainment

our children’s minds are filled  
                                                     with tactics
for personal aggrandizement
                                               stuffed  with insouciance
and greed
and the narcissism
                                they see everywhere when they look
UP!

 will we build walls around men with power-needs to keep them
                           away from nuclear codes and all the
communication devices that command the military
generals?

                  the silent cries of lifeless children
                                                           carry our hope
into the corridors of political power…..
                                                               can anybody hear

their deafening, screaming silence of death?

Sunday, November 13, 2016

The Real Wild West

The Real Wild West

Sun spilled over the continental divide
         on a 1996 September Sunday afternoon,
The wine Subaru cruised curves on this new
                      topography of barren hills
An alien ventured into the northwest corner
                      of a rigidly right-wing state
Of mind
Blindly tempting the boundaries of will
                          and faith and ministry
Greeted by blowing tumbleweed on parched
                         empty streets of a movie façade
For the Butch Cassidy western foretelling the
                        Smith-and-Wesson insurance
Of all the straight-pipe half-tons seemingly
                          blown like vagrant weeds
through the straw-dry dreams of coal-miner
                         imaginations behind a mascara of
black soot, defiant fears, teen wives and mothers
                          and children who are forced
witnesses to their father’s shooting sparrows
                              from clothesline wires
Just to prove their power over all, disdainful
                           of the impact on their innocence
Small-town bigotry targeted “city-slick”, educated
                         ‘sophistication’ of tree-hugging
Environmental sensibility, gun-reform advocacy
                                         and all faith practice
Sustaining racial, gender and ethnic tolerance….
Into this cauldron the man with an alb, a bible,
                                  a chasuble and prayerbook
Reminded observers of a new fawn trying to find
                                       food on a desert mesa
Misfit, alien, dangerous and suspect…..the white-tail
                                        gasped for air and water
In vain…
And lay lifeless forever....

With an 81-13 plurality in favour of trump fascism
                        the county has finally found its

Messiah…………………..while losing all hope!

Saturday, November 12, 2016

Reflections on a country in denial

"Everybody Knows" (A/Z lyrics)
By Leonard Cohen, 1934-2016, whose death has left us grieving and gifted with the inheritance of his mind and spirit.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died 

Leonard Cohen’s lyrics never seemed more fitting than on the day of his passing.                                                      
Some weeks just have a way of staining a year!
Such weeks witness something(s) shocking, often highly depressing and perhaps even tragic.
Ending on Remembrance Day, today, this week has left an indelible mark on the history of the world. Looking about as far as the end of their nose, too many Americans, in all the ‘wrong’ states, wrought a revenge so blatant, so narcissistic, so self-sabotaging and so demoralizing as to rank high on the list of the worst mistakes in American political history. George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 is legitimately considered the “worst mistake in American foreign policy” in the history of the country. Similarly, the election of a tongue and ego rivalling the cruise missiles of the Pentagon, killing the people while leaving the buildings still standing, to the highest office in the nation, and the most powerful leadership chair on the planet, outranks even the Iraq tragedy in its potential for long-term danger to the  planet, as well as to the American people.
While Doomsday prophets are having a field-day, and young men and women have taken to the streets in protest (chanting “We re-ject the pre-si-dent-elect!) the sitting president, of course, demonstrates how surreal is his capacity for grace, dignity and generosity, by hosting the “pres-elect” in the Oval Office. Denouncing “lobbying” in favour of “briefing,” Obama so impressed the new guy that he has already announced a mere “amendment” and not a total revoking the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). New Jersey Governor Christie has been shunted out of the chair of the ‘transition’ and replaced by Vice-president elect Pence. (Bridge-gate may finally pillory the rotund Governor.) Nevertheless, the tweets continue from the ‘big bully’….example: those protestors are being paid by the media….how unfair….
Not a word has blurted from his larynx, nor from his cell phone that would demonstrate his potential for being ‘presidential’. Why would anyone be surprised?
Michael Moore, appearing on Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning, took tragic credit for having predicted that DT would win both the Republican nomination and the election. One example he used as evidence for his “ordinary-person, high-school educated, baseball-cap-proud ‘insight’ was his ridicule of the pundits’ guffaws earlier in the summer, after the party conventions, that the Trump campaign spent the highest sum of dollars purchasing baseball caps. The sophisticated talking heads so ridiculed the decision (suggesting more polling or more ‘intelligent’ budget allocations) that Moore knew then and there they did not ‘get it’.
What did they not get?
They did not ‘get’ the disillusion of the people in small towns, villages and rural counties who wanted to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington, and who wanted to get their revenge for having been dubbed a ‘basket of deplorables’. They were willing to overlook the mysogynist’s racism, his gutter-tongue, his preening arrogance and his “I alone can save you” authoritarianism. So disgusted were some 87,000 voters in the state of Michigan, for instance, that although they voted on every other category on the ballot, they pointedly left the presidential section blank. Moore also pointed to Obama’s visit to Flint, where young children have been poisoned permanently by lead-infested drinking water from rusted lead water pipes, where the president drank the water to illustrate the ‘end’ of the problem, thereby short-circuiting all further coverage of an issue far from resolved.
Besting Romney’s vote numbers with Latino’s, Blacks, and especially white voters, both college educated and those without a college education, Trump quite literally romped to victory in the Electoral College, while losing the popular vote.
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. 
It's coming through a crack in the wall; 
on a visionary flood of alcohol; 
from the staggering account 
of the Sermon on the Mount 
which I don't pretend to understand at all. 
It's coming from the silence 
on the dock of the bay, 
from the brave, the bold, the battered 
heart of Chevrolet: 
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. 

It's coming from the sorrow in the street, 
the holy places where the races meet; 
from the homicidal bitchin' 
that goes down in every kitchen 
to determine who will serve and who will eat. 
From the wells of disappointment 
where the women kneel to pray 
for the grace of God in the desert here 
and the desert far away: 
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A
(Democracy, by Leonard Cohen, (A/Z Lyrics)
Another of the prophet’s satirical pieces stands today, as the world mourns his passing, leaving us all wondering how democracy can even creep ‘through a hole in a wall’ when as Jeff Greenfield put it on ‘Charlie Rose’ (Bloomberg television, Canada) “Everyone today has their own set of facts” and no one cares what that means.
It is not just that Trump’s campaign painted a picture no one, including the candidate, can testify is ‘reality’ just like all the other Orwellian overthrows of meaning (“war is peace, peace is war”). We can all testify that without a compendium of agreed evidence on which to base an observation, and an opinion about the amelioration of the problem, the problem of those rusty lead pipes will continue to plague the people, those terrorists will continue to use the president-elect as a primary recruiting tool, the rich will grow their Wall Street investments (just look at how the market has rebounded from an initial drop), the air we breathe we grow ever more contaminated, (global warming is a hoax pawned off by China, according to the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania).
And we can read words penned nearly forty years ago:
 the upper-class elites of America have the greatest attachment to constitutional democracy. They are the abiding activists in the use of electoral, legislative, and judicial machinery at all levels of government. It is their baby. Ordinary people-called the masses by Dye and Ziegler-tend to share this perception. The democratic machinery belongs to them, "the powers that be," not to ordinary people. It is not their baby.
What will happen if more ordinary people should try to take over this baby and actually begin to make it their own? How would the elites respond if the masses began to ask the elites to give much more and gain much less-particularly when, under conditions of capitalist stagflation and shrinking world power, the elites have less to give. Some radical commentators claim that the powers that be would use their power to follow the example of the classic fascists and destroy the democratic machinery. I agree with Murray Levin that this would be stupid. I see it also as highly unlikely. No First World Establishment is going to shatter machinery that, with a certain amount of tinkering and a little bit of luck, can be profitably converted into a sophisticated instrument of repression.
Indeed, the tinkering has already started. Some of it is being undertaken by people for whom the Constitution is merely a scrap of paper, a set of judicial decisions, and a repository of rhetoric and precedents to be used by their high-paid lawyers and public relations people. Some of it is being perpetrated by presidents and others who have taken formal oaths to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Sometimes knowingly, often unwittingly, both types of people will spare no pains in preserving those parts of the written or unwritten constitution that protect the rights of "corporate persons" while undermining, attacking, or perverting those parts of the Constitution that promote the welfare and liberties of the great majority of all other persons.
(Friendly Fascism, Bertram Gross, South Press, 1980, p. 230)
Some have argued that the disparity in incomes, and the hopelessness of those left behind by the shift in manufacturing jobs to the lowest available labour costs elsewhere lies at the root of the national pain. Others like Eddie Glaude, a black professor of Culture at Princeton, (appearing on Morning Joe, MSNBC) argue that race relations are the core issue, given that both Trump and Sanders, the faces of the latest insurgencies of populism (some would add ‘nativism) both struggled to include minorities in their vision of the ‘city on the hill’ that so epitomized the Reagan legacy.
Naturally, the economic historians will tilt to the wag and income and joblessness as the core issue given that it encompasses all racial demographics. Others like Gaude, a native of Jamaica, will express a cultural perspective that begins with the identity of the outsiders. (In another page in this space, I tell the story of my thesis advisor, a black Bahamian native, who, after earning a doctorate from Harvard, was refused ordination to the Episcopal priesthood in Massachusetts because he was not “black enough”, stuck his finger in the eye of the presiding bishop and travelled ‘south’ to Atlanta where he was ordained.) To us, the economic/cultural emphasis, while useful for the pursuit of more rigorous academic research, scholarship and the achievement of the revered doctorate, need not be disentangled as a contradiction in “reality”. Many of the same “data points” appear in the research in the ivory towers of academe and in the bureaucracies inhabited by the policy wonks.
What drum beats will echo in all of our ears will continue to be those who believe that they simply do not matter to those in power. And, from here it would appear that they have been the most vulnerable, not only to the recession and the impacts of globalism, but even more importantly to the candy floss hyperbole/lies/seduction/manipulation by Trump.
Governing, in a world filled with anxiety, and with the pounding impacts of shifts in money and power, the alienation and the despair of the “masses” is not even analogous to a reality television show. The excesses of narcissism of the newest billionaires (and their “brilliant” defiance of tax laws) coupled with capsizing boats filled with desperate refugees from wars that refuse negotiation, from disease that defies available treatments, and from a global ecosystem that cannot sustain more carbon emissions from fossil fuels (‘Trump is the best gift for coal ever’, read the headlines) and from political decisions and promises that demonstrate an insouciance beyond imagination create a toxic political cocktail.
Bernie sought to begin a political revolution and many are now asking if he would have bested Trump. Change, that loaded ‘star’ to which both presidential candidates attempted to hitch their wagon, (Trump clearly won on that reductionistic front) in a culture so deeply addicted to the ‘star’ personality cult, is inadequate as a discerning instrument for active citizenship, especially when it is embedded in revenge.
And basing a campaign of change on a footing of lies, bounced around in a twitter universe that gives a veneer of “power and influence” to everyone with a cell phone, coupled with a media drugged by the ratings obsession and their own job-dependence, based also on the ‘star’ quality of their own ratings leaving the truth exposed and dying on the battlefield of the newspapers and the television and computer screens is another canvas fraught with deception and a disturbing level of self-indulgence.
From a clinical, pastoral perspective, the “patient/client/grieving family/victim” (the nation) is suffering from a collision of many self-sabotaging delusions:
·      A history that holds open extreme conflict, including military conflict, as its greatest achievement
·      A belief in the power of money to symbolize superiority and exceptionalism
·      A history of championing “competition” in the earliest years of a child’s life as the pathway to excellence
·      An national neurosis of denial of the blind spots in its perceptions of the good life
·      A progressive obsessive compulsive adherence to the drugs of entertainment, and capitalism, and racial superiority/inferiority that distort even the most basic water-cooler conversations
·      A denial of the significant potential contribution pool of the poor, the outcast, the prisoner, the sick and the “challenged”
·      A demonstrated mask of humility, vulnerability and compassion belied by too many overt and overt decisions in schools, families, corporations and government
·      A belief in the basic evil that motivates most, especially ‘strangers’ (dubbed aliens in the national lexicon) and the need to combat and to compensate for that danger, as a guiding national principle
·      A history of the abuse of excessive power in race relations, sexual relations, diplomatic and foreign relations, and in the culture of corporate competition
·      A history of denial of the relative importance of government to ameliorate social dislocation, and the spreading of opportunity to all
·      A veneer of sophistication that defies and masks the real insecurity and the psychosis of the fear of not knowing all the answers another self-sabotaging impediment to the pursuit of national truth-telling and the achievement of sustainable national collaboration, co-operation and harmony.

The public discourse will, of course, focus on the immediate political upheaval, the need for the democratic party to rebuild and the titillation of the latest now president-elect tweet. And the nation will continue to vacillate between periods of excessive submission to the power of money with periods of submission to the power of the guns/missiles/bombs/ and the attitudes that undergird both of those faces on the common insecurity/fear/obsession/compulsion that lies at the root of the national unconscious, another of the serious national denials.