When will responsibility "trump" rights again?....

It is no longer “do whatever you want as long as you don’t get caught”….today it is more like “hide your spine, bury your convictions and hope the tide lifts all responsibilities and replaces them with rights”….

Trump has no “right” to ask for and to expect and demand Comey’s pledge of loyalty. Nor does a co-worker have the right to wear noxious perfumes that are making co-workers seriously ill. The tar sands has no ‘right’ to dump polluting water into the rivers of northern Alberta, contaminating the water that keeps First Nations people alive. Volkswagen does not have the ‘right’ to lie about manipulating on-board computers to evade pollution emission testing.

And when the obvious claim to ‘rights’ that do not apply, by the most powerful office threatens to prove unequivocally his blatant obstruction of justice, perhaps then, after decades of skirting responsibilities, as a matter of “right” we can turn the corner and put responsibilities on top of our value totem pole.

There is a dramatic difference between “Yes WE can!” and “Yes I can!”….and the difference is that when the “can” is a shared act, project, initiative or even a dream or aspiration, then it has to be designed, proposed and executed by a range of players even if the range is more than two. Of course, if sycophants to power, those so fragile and so ambitious (the most dangerous and toxic cocktail of characters) join in an “I” with another, the result will always be tragic. The Trump white house is replete with sycophants to faux power, in this case defined by a single personal will that abides no opposition.

Last night on the Final Word, with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, Lawrence Tribe, professor of law at Harvard, documented trump’s obstruction of justice, in his question to Comey “Am I under investigation?” in a private dinner arranged by the White House, and his search for “loyalty” to Comey. The implication, according to Tribe, is that, “If you pledge loyalty, and protect me, then I will keep you on  as Director of the FBI!”  Of course, Comey already has declared that he pledged only to tell the truth, and not to offer his loyalty, nor did he request the dinner to secure his position as Director of the FBI.

Nor did Comey lack the support of the agency, as attested yesterday by the Acting Director in his testimony to Congress. In another contradiction of trump, the Acting Director also declared that the investigation into the Russian impact on the election, and the trump campaign collusion with Russia is a highly important matter, while trump continues to both question it and dismiss it and want the investigation terminated.

Of course, trump wants the investigation terminated; as others have put it there has never been a cover-up without an underlying crime needing it.

Tribe also characterizes trump’s spoken word as the “language of the mob” describing it in terms journalists might find their editors deleting as innuendo. Tribe is one of eighteen self-appointed “shadow cabinet” whose task is and will continue to be to offer public challenges to all acts and statements coming out of the White House and they have already initiated a court case on trump’s guilt under the emoluments clause, that public protection that precludes the president from being open to and accepting bribes from a foreign country or agent. Tribe expresses confidence that they will achieve a positive verdict against the president.

This morning we hear a comparison of these early days in the current administration to the Final Days of the Nixon administration in which both chief executives are “flailing” to quote Eugene Robinson, columnist in the Washington Post, and commentator on MSNBC.  Flailing presidents secretly host the Russian Foreign Minister, refusing to release photos of their back-slapping exchanges in the Oval Office, deferring to the Russian media agency for release of photos which, not surprisingly appeared on the front page of the New York Times, insulting America in the midst of the most intensive investigation of Russian meddling in the election of 2016.

There continue to be two groups whose fossilized attitudes in support of the president, the Republicans in Congress and the people who voted for his election and whether these two are joined at the hip is an open question. Yet, with the current public opinion polls putting the president’s popularity at 36-37%, how long will it take for the elected representatives to awaken to the political reality staring them in the face that they will be unlikely to be re-elected on trump’s base vote. So far, complicity and even support for trump seems to be evidence that individually and collectively, these men and women are all in desperate need of a political spine, through whatever intellectual and ethical and political gestalt that might be injected into their consciousness.

For the elected Republicans to stone-wall an independent prosecutor and/or commission to pursue the facts about Russian influence and trump collusion demonstrates either that they believe this storm will pass leaving them unscathed, or that they are sleep-walking into political oblivion. The trouble with both scenarios is that the republic’s constitutional foundations are quivering and the tsunami of more than circumstantial evidence against the president is sending signals that neither can nor will be denied, evaded, or thwarted with lies.

This not so much a question of which side of history they want to be on; rather it is a question of which side of the truth they come down on. And by continuing their current myopia (read denial, hubris, spineless paranoia, or stupidity) they extend all reasonable confidence in their ability to take  their responsibilities seriously.

Oh, but maybe it is their “right” to be intransigent and bull-headed!  

A non-clinical assessment of the occupant of the Oval Office

Political reporting this morning on the  “Tuesday Night Massacre” (the trump firing of FBI Director James Comey) focuses on the investigation of any potential collusion between the trump gang and the Russians during the presidential campaign, and potentially even after the election. It is an obvious question as to why trump would fire the person in charge of that investigation who could potentially bring trump down. The analogy to the firing of Archibald Cox by Nixon, to avoid his own political demise, back in 1973, then known as the “Saturday night massacre” is also obvious and warranted.

Nixon is portrayed as a dark character, one who considered the press his avowed enemy, in a manner that seemed out of touch with the “fourth estate’s job to be a check on those in government. Paranoia is a trait also associated with Nixon, prompting the adjective “Nixonian” in application to the Comey firing even by some Republicans.

Even as a paranoid, Nixon was elected, demonstrating that the democratic process is either unable or unwilling to distinguish some of the finer nuances of personality, preferring to resort to the legal process, dependent on evidence proven in court, to determine a person’s “fitness for office”. The nation, while partially conscious that no political aspirant is free of self-centred motives, wants to believe that all candidates have at least a small portion of patriotism and desire to ‘make the country better’ and, in many cases their belief and hope have been sustained by exemplary leaders. Among them are names like Lincoln, Roosevelt (x2), Johnson, Kennedy, Wilson, Eisenhower, and more recently Obama. Whether they had personal foibles, blind spots, or character flaws for many decades was never a large public issue, since they could be largely kept from public view and knowledge.  For many decades too, the media conspired with the White House to preserve the privacy (sanity, secrecy, sanctity) of the occupant of the Oval Office, given both the importance of the role and the need for the nation to function honourably on the world stage.  A president’s flaw(s) did not need to become part of the equation if and when the country was facing a crisis beyond its borders.

In the last two of three decades, political lives have come under a microscope of scrutiny under which it is highly unlikely anyone could survive, given our shared range of frailties, and the media’s unrelenting pursuit of “dirt” as the pavement on the highway to their individual career advancement. And this motive sits squarely on their executive suites’ demand for ratings and the concomitant cash flow, investment dollars umbilically linked to their blatant obsequiousness to those investors.

Whatever the current Oval Office occupant attempts to portray in his tidal wave of tweets, there is a different reality, both within the government and in the public. And, in this case, it does not require either a ‘Philadelphia lawyer’ nor a “Harvard psychiatrist”  to notice and to document the deviance in the attitudes and behaviour of the man from what are considered normal attitudes, behaviours and principles.

This man, should he be a student in a classroom, while he might be achieving A+ grades, would still be under considerable scrutiny and suspicion by those professionals who share responsibility for his “education” and development.

His attitude and behaviour would long ago have passed from the Guidance Counsellor to the Vice-principal, and attracted a referral to the school psychologist. After only a few sessions in that office, the professional’s arms have been thrown up, in despair wondering where to turn next. Always colouring just inside the lines of breaking the law, yet also always threatening to destroy whomever and whatever dares to block his path, this individual comes very close to incarnating the DSM-5 Definition of a sociopath.

The DSM-5 defines antisocial personality disorder as "[a] pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following:

1.    Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.

2.    Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.

3.    Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.

4.    Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults.

5.    Reckless disregard for safety of self or others.

6.    Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations.

7.    Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another."

It's important to note that sociopathic children do not exist as a person cannot be diagnosed as a sociopath until age 18. While the patterns of behavior and personality traits exist prior to adulthood, until then, a child may be diagnosed with conduct disorder, but he can't be defined as a sociopath.

While the legal process, including the several congressional and FBI and National Security investigations plod along, and the media pours gallons of ink and hours of airtime into their obsessive coverage of this personality, and the public is more than suitably entertained by the spectacle of this melodrama, there are some facts and trends and boundaries that might fail to fall under the lens of any of these investigators. And those boundaries include whether a man of this character is in fact suited for, fit for, or permitted to hold the highest office in the world. Of course, a mere blogger writing from a distance would not have, and should not have, any real impact on the outcome of the many mini-dramas that are swirling around the White House. Better brains, and more highly trained professionals in all fields need to be brought to bear on what is now and has been since the election back in November of 2016 a world problem. No one, in any country, ought to be able to announce proudly, “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and I would not lose any supporters!” And such a statement really ought to disqualify the speaker from any public office, let alone the highest office in the world.

Putin and Kim Jong Un, not to mention Duterte and several of the political leaders in African states may also be world problems, but they are not holding office in the United States. And for the sake of the reputation of the nation, and the very high stakes faced by the people on the planet, especially Republican elected officials who previously, and lamely and co-dependently hitched their political wagon to the trump star, will have to relinquish that fantasy, let themselves down to earth and into the muck that is currently threatening to engulf all of them, the nation and potentially the world community.

Laws, however, have not kept pace with the evolving science of psychology, psychiatry and the rising level of education among ordinary drones like your scribe. One would speculate that the capacity to put one’s name on buildings in many countries would indicate a degree of trustworthiness, integrity and the potential for leadership that could be trusted.

Such speculation, as is the case with most speculation, simply does not hold water nor anything else like hope, potential or dependability.

This man appears incapable of remorse, for the workers he has never paid, for the laws he has skated around, for the taxes he has never paid, for the traditions, expectations and disclosure ordinary people expect from their president. He certainly has demonstrated total disdain for the emoluments clause and for the expectation that the presidency is not to be a vehicle for self-enrichment. Everyday, another slosh of cash flows through the front and back doors of ‘his’ properties, at least a sizeable portion of that ‘flow’ dedicated to attempts to win favour from this man.

And there are still those among his original supporters who tell pollsters they would vote for him again, in spite of his wanton disregard for the moral and ethical principles on which democracy depends.

Can he be usurped? Can he be deposed? Can he be thwarted? Can he be removed?

The clock is ticking and the world is watching and waiting.

A small patch of daffodils, crocuses, and a four-trumpet amaryllis, portending a political spring garden

Listening to the hearing by the Senate intelligence committee yesterday, featuring retired Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates was a symposium in legal nuances, political innuendo and geopolitical cyber-security files.

Ms Yates, a veteran of 27 years in the Justice Department, rebutted one senator’s attempt to discredit her, following his earlier vote to confirm her, with her verbatim recall of his specific question as to whether she would, if required, object to a presidential order. She repeated his earlier question, her answer that she would oppose a presidential order that she considered illegal, and then stuck her finger in his eye with, “I said I would and I did” in reference to her directing the justice department not to defend the Trump executive order on the Muslim travel ban. Her testimony was guided and guarded by her clear grasp of both legal principles, legal statutes, and national security demands that she refuse to answer. Measured, calm, professional and articulate, Ms Yates burnished the reputation of the Justice Department (refusing to counsel her successor “from the cheap seats”) and further sullied he reputation of the Oval office and the administration for firing her and dubbing her a “democratic” pawn. Even the most reactionary right-wing ideologue would have to concur that she retained her professional honour and reputation and enhanced the trustworthiness of the government, at least under the previous administrations going back 27 years, including both Democratic and Republican governments.

Seated beside Ms Yates, James Clapper, not fired but merely retired Director of National Intelligence who served under both Obama and George W. Bush, offered another, yet different, model of professional competence and avuncular nonchalance. Also clear about what he knew and where the boundary exists precluding his crossing the ‘national security’ classification, Clapper was most forthcoming, in offering his personal opinion about how the country might improve its “pushback” against cyber-threats, and aggressive information campaigns by both Russia (and other national opponents) as well as ISIS.

He offered the prospect of a full-out information initiative to counter the mis-information threats from the Kremlin in its attempts to sabotage the democratic process, and the radicalization efforts (said to be both aggressive and highly effective) by the radical Islamic terrorists. Clear-eyed and now unrestrained by office and the many protocols that inhibit free expression while formally tethered to the government, Clapper relished his opportunity to insert his considered and substantive views about America’s reticence, reluctance or even considered rejection of aggressive actions in the ideas and information theatre, especially those offered by the internet.

Once again, evidence squirts out that this gigantic mother-ship of a country, like the testosterone-inflated nuclear-powered aircraft carriers that ply the seas in her name and can turn only ever so slowly in the waters of new threats, can and will change only at a glacial speed. Under serious threats from terrorists and from malignant dictators seeking to destabilize western institutions such as the EU, NATO and the American influence earned through decades of  both honourable and less-than-honourable methods and goals of foreign policy, Clapper points to a giant gap in the American “push-back”….clearly evidence, once again, that bullets, missiles, bombs and rockets are the preferred weapons of choice, while Putin and ISIS pound the internet with propaganda, fake news and incriminating noise.

The story of trump’s “pre-and-post-rebuttle” attacks on Yates will likely gobble the largest share of the news coverage of the hearing. However, the less ‘sexy’ story is about the potential impact of watching truth-purveyors demonstrate by their courage and their conviction that the United States has not totally abandoned the pursuit of truth even if the White House has, and will continue to do. Yates and Clapper, through three hours of testimony, have historically, given the current political climate, taught the people of America, (at least those willing to take the time to watch and to digest the details, and their impact) that there are seasoned professional among the civil service, the Justice Department, and even the Pentagon whose integrity cannot and will not be compromised in the face of mounting evidence of the potential of authentic compromise of high-level officials, like Flynn, whose participation in National Security, however, brief, may spell legal turbulence for trump and his gang.

His “clearance” for work conducted prior to his firing is significantly different from the “clearance” he ought to have endured under White House guidance for the National Security Advisor job he was given by the Oval Office. Clapper repeated the fact that the senior jobs all require a much stiffer scrutiny that those of lower rank. Even though he served for only 18 days, he still sat in on all the most highly secure briefings to the president….a simple fact that ought to arouse frenzy among patriots of both parties, and legal beagles of constitutional protection bent.

In Canada, as I am sure in other countries, one meets seasoned political veterans who have entered a pool based on their projected date for trump’s impeachment. I recently talked to one who had selected Easter 2018 as his date for the demise of the president. Even that date would allow trump considerable time and opportunity to make a mess of many files, including the debasement of the professional media, except for his ‘patron’ Fox News.

Juxtaposed to the Senate hearing yesterday was the ceremony in which of the Profile in Courage Award was presented to former president Obama on Sunday evening, in the JFK Library in Boston. The ‘coming-out’ of President John F. Kennedy’s only grandson, Jack Schlossberg, son of Caroline Kennedy, saw a self-possessed, articulate, young man espousing the liberal attitudes and values of his grandfather, and great uncles, Bobby and Teddy. As a graduate of Yale who will enroll in Harvard Law this September, there is little doubt the world will see and hear much more from this son-of-the-dynasty that emerged in the 1960’s from Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Not only was the young Mr. Schlossberg highly articulate, if obviously constrained in his modesty, but he detailed the many accomplishments of the first African-American president in U.S. history, and the courage he demonstrated throughout his tenure of eight years. And then, it was the former president’s turn to take the podium.

Documenting the courage of all those who voted for the Affordable  Care Act, knowing they could be, and eventually were, defeated in their constituency because of that vote, Obama inextricable linked his own legacy to the courage and tenacity of the America people, while using his own sophistication to remind his present and television audiences, “Any fool can be fearless” as a none-too-subtle jab at the current occupant of the Oval Office. A second lesson in American patriotism, humanist values, political courage and the public revealing of public servants of a calibre we can only be grateful were willing to serve in the previous administration.

Just when all new coverage seems like a race to the bottom of the honesty and ethical barrels of both lies and unrestrained narcissism coming from the White House, the world has been given shining examples of the quality, the excellence, and the positive vision for all Americans, including the health care provision for which both Obama and Teddy Kennedy fought so long and hard.

Obama told the story of Ted Kennedy walking the halls of the hospital during the period when his son was receiving chemo treatment for cancer. He spoke with the other parents of children undergoing similar treatment and listened to their fears and anxiety that they might not be able to afford the treatment, without considerable stress on their families. It was a similar story to the one told by Jimmy Kimmel, last week, about his newborn son, whose heart needed corrective surgery. As he proclaimed on his late-night talk show, “No one should have to be in the position of having to decide if they can afford the medical treatment to save their child’s life!

Just when the night of the political stage looks most dark and bleak, here are two or three occasions that lift the human spirit,, just as did the election of Macron in France on Sunday, defeating his primary opponent the far-right National Front led by Marine LePen.

With Hillary, Macron, Obama, and potentially Jack Schlossberg with the support and guidance of his parents, there are small green sprigs of what we can only hope are strong and indefatigable plants that will grow and inspire other sprouts of courage, integrity and authenticity.

And we can all hope that it will not take until Easter 2018 for trump to fall from his lofty perch.

Urging males to give up resistance to vulnerability

Catharsis is the purging of the emotions of pity and fear through art or any extreme change in emotion that results in renewal and restoration. It is a metaphor originally used by Aristotle in the Poetics, comparing the effects of tragedy on the mind of a spectator to the effect of a cathartic on the body. (Wikipedia)

One of the most obvious blind spots in the North American male psyche is the refusal to “emote” especially when tragedy strikes. Burying the fear and the pity somewhere deep in the unconscious, while providing an exterior veneer of stability, pride, “manliness” and strength, nevertheless, also deprives the man of the release that his psyche needs. Turning to drugs or alcohol, or some other over-whelming obsession/addiction/diversion/distraction that “medicates” the pain not only does not relieve the pain, but exacerbates the psychic turmoil even more, enhancing the risk of additional “medication”.

There is not a male alive who would attempt to counter a blocked bowel. Somehow, the consciousness of an observable physical obstruction offers, through merely common sense, the opportunity to ‘do something about it’. And yet, although originally posited by the Greek MALE, the notion of the need for a release, unless and until the situation results from war (P.T.S.D), then too many males will simply carry on. At the same time, those same males will express open and ugly disdain for their female partners or companions who seek to release their deep emotional pain without the use of illicit drugs or alcohol or some other chemical medication. Distinguishing male from female, after nearly a quarter century of aggressive and often abusive feminism, has provoked what some would call a ‘melodramatic’ and even neurotic push-back.

Men, through nature, were and always will be different from women, and not only from a physical perspective. And that  difference is not, and must never be considered, an excuse for discrimination of either gender by the other. However, the easy and glib slide into derision and even contempt for the other gender is often seeded in some painful early experience about which it is relatively easy to generalize. My father (mother) did this, so all men (women) have the potential for a similar behavior.

It is this precise type of rationalization that replaces a considered, balanced and guided psychic walk out of the forest of pain into a more healthy perspective. Displaced anger stalks our culture, generating more hate and more contempt and more anger than would result from a cultural perspective that began with an authentic tolerance and appreciation for each gender by the other. Both genders, and all individuals in each, have experienced abuse from the other, and in too many instances, have failed (or refused) to let go of the bitterness generated by the trauma.  Both genders experience trauma differently, and each can and does access different paths of release and treatment. However, we men have to own the fact that we are much more likely to self-sabotage than our women colleagues, friends or partners.

Pete Seeger has a quip that distinguishes the difference between education and experience. He says, “Education is what happens when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don’t!” Males are much less likely to read the fine print, unless that fine print is telling them how to fix the carburator, the lawn mower or the car’s exhaust system. The fine print that might shed light on the intimate details of their/our inner life, are tragically avoided and left to their/our women ‘because they do that stuff much better’….or some other rationalization/avoidance/denial/escape.

Men generally would prefer to leave the emotional/psychic/spiritual side of life to the poets, the artists and the otherwise “unmanly” of their gender. This is just another branch of the same ‘thought-and-attitude-tree’ in which men are impaled. If it smacks of sensitivity, sensibility, tenderness, beauty and the potential of a compassionate, empathic or caring attitude (on the surface) men ‘take to the hills’ fearing, their worst fear, that other men will consider them “effeminate”….a sin worse that any other among men and also, sadly among too many women.

And this attitude tree, in which male monkeys take refuge, has monstrous consequences: massive military spending, massive neuroses/psychoses if their “mask” shows a crack of vulnerability, profound insecurity  and over-compensation through bullying, excessive and lethal competition as ‘normal’, excessive power and control needs leading to acts like rape, physical and emotional abuse, and other venal and often uncontrollable expressions of desperation. It also supports an excessive build-up of intelligence and security apparatus, and the core belief that ‘if I don’t win, the other guy  will’….and that will be the end of me…and my ambition, dream, aspiration and utopian vision (personally and politically).

This is not to assume or assert that women are not competitive, and do not compete. It is to assert that men compete to the death, while women, often more petty and picky about the issues in their conflicts and also the methods deployed, can and will hesitate before sabotaging themselves, if the numbers of outsides, outliers, deviants and criminals is any indication.

We have, both men and women, created a culture in which judgement, punishment, hard power and its excessive use (in parenting, in schooling, in law enforcement, in international relations, in economic treaties) come out of deep-seated fears, and shame rather than a culture in which the authentic and irrepressible goodness of each person is both nurtured and celebrated.

And in so doing, we have historically, and from a limited vision onto the future horizon, hoisted ourselves on our own petard, as the vernacular puts it. Habeus Corpus, as a legal principle, may hold back the ‘rush to judgememt’ that attempts to protect an accused, until whatever evidence available is presented in a formal, and hopefully objective manner and culture inside the courtroom. However, our historic commitment to demonstrate our dark side, as the dominant and prevailing aspect of human nature, whether of men or of women, is counter-intuitive, counter-productive to our own survival, and counter-intuitive to our spiritual growth and development.

Paying lip-service to kindness, generosity, compassion, ethical exceptionalities, and sharing attitudes,  behaviours, beliefs and even laws (the Good Samaritan Law, forbidding punishment for a medical doctor who offers emergency assistance, for example) is a gross reductionism from which our culture suffers and will continue to suffer. Patronizing attitudes in support of our better angels, will forever perpetuate a hierarchical value with evil, violence, contempt, denial and avoidance in all of their many forms at the top of our collective tribal totem pole.

Is it not long past time for us to acknowledge that our current value system, including our tokenism and patronizing of all that is good, strong, ethical, moral, and life-giving as weak, silly, effeminate, artsy, even “gay” and thereby easily dismissed and dismissable is and will continue to yoke us to a kind of serfdom, over which money and political power wants to triumph, and out of which our freedom and our full opportunity to live and breath in true confidence, and in full creative expression will forever be strangled and thwarted.

So for men to wake up, and to accept our unconscious feminine side, and to shift our priorities from fear and the abuse of power in all of its forms, to more life-sustaining attitudes and beliefs and perceptions is our only hope. Women are out in front of us waiting for us to catch up. 

Calling for an intervention at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

“I would have been your president if…..” (Hillary Clinton yesterday in conversation with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour) “If Comey had not written and released “that letter” and if Putin had not interfered with the election”…..and while there is a modicum of truth in both of those “influences,” taken together they do not account for the election result.

While trump was calling her ‘crooked Hillary’ and prompting his audiences to chant ‘lock her up’ in a mock kangaroo court, Hillary was expressing an excess of disgust at both her opponent and his supporters (remember those “deploreables”?). So repulsed by his person, his behaviour and his attitudes especially to women was Hillary that she forgot to shine a persistent and bright light on her policies to hep people regain some semblance of normalcy, security and hope.

Bullies have a tendency to shape the agenda for the simple reason that they have forcefully declared that reason, facts and negotiation, collaboration and working together are ALL off the table. And people who refuse to stoop the lowest rung on the ladder by becoming bullies are infused and infected with righteous indignation…so much so that there is always the danger that the bully will overcome his opponent given that he is motivated by the need for complete control.

The mafia have discovered the benefits of bullying, both within and outside their organization. ISIS, AlQaeda, AlShabab, AlNusra have also deployed the strategies and tactics of the bully, for their own purposes. Winning is everything, and the lives and character of their opponents matter not a whit, so long as they triumph. No one can  argue that trump is a bully, having rehearsed the role for decades in the less than savoury business of real estate where bribes and deception and failure to perform to contract abound. The victims of the real estate sector populate every town and city in North America from the flooded basements without necessary drains to the leaky roofs, to the bankruptcy liens imposed by the courts on properties, to the plethora of short-cuts that builder know more about than consumers. And trump, like the slime that rises to the surface of standing water, has risen to the top of the pool of stagnant and infested water that is the real estate sector.

It is not as if the United States itself does not have a record of  bullying when their interests in oil, for example, were paramount. They have propped up, armed and championed bullies in other countries, while papering over the acts of those dictators in the western media. It was the Reagan administration, ironically in the light of history, through Donald Rumsfeld that provided chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein, prior to declaring, in the Bush II administration, the threat of weapons of mass destruction (those same chemical weapons). Police brutality on the high seas and on foreign soil is really no different from police brutality on the streets of American cities so Americans have more than their share of blood on their hands from the exercise of their bully archetype, both at home and abroad.

If it takes trump’s election to remove the scales from the American eyes to their own complicity in his election, and fake news is dealt a death blow, along with the American bully archetype, then the world will have been served better than prospects appear today.

To use the nuclear option of full-frontal character assassination of Hillary by  magnifying and exaggerating her real flaws, while mauling women and bragging about it, as an election campaign strategy is, for most self-respecting people in 2016 (election  year) a step too far. For trump, however, and his gang, it is just another ‘day at the office’.

A Boston psychiatrist appearing on The Last Word, with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC last night, declared that trump is “out of touch with reality, and creates and lives in his own reality”. On the same programs, the host interviewed the author of the cover story to this week’s “The New Yorker” entitled, “How trump could be FIRED”. The story postulates two scenarios through which his demise might be accomplished: through the 25^th Amendment, or through impeachment. What is also striking is that The New Yorker writer reports that elected representatives of both parties, in both the House and Senate, are quietly talking about the need to get rid of this plague. Of course, they will not permit their names or their quotes to be printed, recorded or reported. Everything at this point is “off the record”…and any breach of that compact would ostracize any reporter so bold and brazen.

If this is an early spring-sprout of green hope in an otherwise asphalt political desert, the world can only hope that it will find both water and sunlight to continue to grow. Of course, the growth of this glimmer of a sprout will not be quiet and calm, like those daffodils that now dot the backyards. It will be noisy, and potentially violent, as the country goes through the throes of confronting decades even centuries of “national Shadow”….that buried unconscious memory that will only be repressed and denied for so long.

As an exercise in catharsis, the purging of guilt and shame at the ownership of the national bully, the betrayer, the deceiver and the narcissist will make the total cathartic expression of the combination of all of Shakespeare’s tragedies look like a Methodist Sunday School picnic. And Hillary’s Methodist roots will be uprooted in the cataclysm….the one path to a national cleansing and healing, for which the world has long waited.

Consumed by the addition to dominance, hard power, mountains of cash and the need to sustain the addiction, America is like the neighbour whose recycling boxes are filled with magum liquor bottles, while the addiction to alcohol continues to control his silent, desperate life. It is not just trump who is out of touch with reality, but through his entry into the Oval Office, he has demonstrated that the system itself has fallen into the same entrapment of generating and then becoming dependent on its own construct of a reality outside the reality shared by the rest of the world.

Whether or not those around trump, including the sycophant Pence, Bannon, Kushner, Ivanka, Tillerson and the rest of the cabinet can or will come to their senses about the truth of their, and the country’s, predicament, is an open question. A similar situation confronted the White House, at the domestic level, during the Ford presidency, when the Ford family had to, and agreed to, confront Betty Ford, who had regrettably grown dependent on both prescription drugs and alcohol. The film that documents this intervention, while unsettling, upsetting and cathartic, nevertheless, brought about not only Mrs. Ford’s treatment, but the long-term treatment of thousands through the Betty Ford Foundation.

Intervening in the life of an individual, with family and professional practitioners, is far more feasible than a similar intervention in the life of the nation. Conflicting motives, especially motives of loyalty, sacrifice, even love, and ambition will inevitably challenge other motives to bring truth, reality and a sense of perspective to the Oval Office, the White House and thereby to the nation and the global community.

The damage already done to the capital, the state, the nation and the world, while serious and significant, can still be righted, so there is still time for the massive and highly complicated and even risky intervention. The whole world watches in hope and in silent prayer that the United States will come to her senses, accept that the current course is not only unsustainable but, more importantly, dangerous for the most vulnerable within her borders and for the people of the planet. Millions within and without struggle every day to survive, some within in abject fear of deportation, and without in terror of death through starvation,  disease, military-terrorist massacre, or even a dictator’s bombs. All of us want and need clean air and water and access to health care, and every sign from the current administration signals increased dangers on the ‘survival’ file.

These are not Republican or Democrat agenda items: they are human issues. And they demand a human response.

Can and will the world support the Americans through their darkest, self-imposed nightmare at the official political level?

Reflections on Chris Hedges' column, "The Reign of the Idiots" from truthdig.com

Chris Hedges, in his column in truthdig.com, calls trump the “king of the idiots”….lumping the “leadership” in all circles including academic, journalistic, political, corporate and of course entertainment as blindly and hubristically head-in-the-sand self-indulgently fomenting and then championing a death spiral of American civilization.

 For Hedges, the rest of us, pawns in their chess game, blindly oblige, follow and even bow to their wealth, status and esteem, all of it unwarranted, unearned and mis-appropriated. And as arresting as his writing, and point of view are, there is a danger that, being so far out in front, it could conceivably shift the balance from opposition to the juggernaut, to throwing up arms in hopelessness and despair, and completely surrendering. Of course, Hedges is not the only voice crying in the wilderness of the trump blitzkrieg. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the occasional whimper from Obama staffers, Susan Rice, and Robert Reich from the Clinton cabinet, in voices much more discreet and mellow and, it might seem, a little too embedded in the problem to help us extricate us from its tentacles.

Hedges, on the other hand, espouses a much more radical response to the current disaster. Operating in the “prophetic” voice, borrowed by many from the prophets in the Old Testament, predicting gloom and ultimate disaster, Hedges is a twentieth-century Jeremiah* in a time and place where his kind of shrill sound is considered catastrophizing and apocalyptic, when such language and dire warnings fall on deaf ears.

This past Saturday night in Harrisburg PA, trump held another ‘campaign’ rally, nothing more than another de Mille ego-tripping extravaganza, and yesterday he announced that he would spend some $1.2 million on an advertising campaign to trumpet his accomplishments. (Remember, he has already filed his nomination papers for the 2020 presidential election, so he has personally declared that the country is now in a permanent “campaign” mode.) At Saturday’s event, thousands of cheering enthusiasts raucously re-endorsed this political pariah, joining what amounts to a rock-concert-type-fawning of the sycophants.

We expect such behaviour and attitudes from the pre-teens who flock to their concerts. For generations, teens have ‘found’ their respective entertainment idols, without doing much harm to themselves or their country. Yet this is very different!

Hedges' “king of the idiots” is dependent on his own kind for their shared idolizing of cash portending that anything and everything “can” be bought and will be bought, including the fawning deaf and blind ‘idiots’ who voted for him….not literally of course, but certainly blind and deaf to the dangers we all face, and the collective failure/refusal/avoidance/denial to do anything about confronting them.

Edmund Burke’s quote, ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ along with ‘power is the universal aphrodisiac’ and many other warning aphorisms notwithstanding, for many moderates, we never really expected to have to confront such an obvious abuse of the office of the President, when such abuse is not merely offensive but highly dangerous to every person on the planet.

Idiots, in the legal application of the word, are incapable of committing a crime, given their mental incapacity. So, from this perspective, trump does not qualify However, in the vernacular, idiots encompasses a very broad and deep range of people, for Hedges, to whom the levers of leadership have been given….whether by votes, or through some kind of competitive gamesmanship, impressive scholarship or perhaps sheer good luck and good fortune.

There is another dimension to this perspective that the idiots are in charge. And that is that other idiots are given both moral support and ‘cover’ for their acts of verbal and physical and emotional violence, including a depleted lack of civility, respect and common courtesy. The blind eye that they collectively and individually turn to science, both environmental and that evidence that supports the many social policies and funding practices that include Planned Parenthood, Green Stamps, school meals, arts and music in schools and the scientific evidence that demonstrates the significant contribution to the American economy by both documented and undocumented immigrants.

And the ‘other idiots’ have not been elected, nor appointed to positions of leadership, except in their thug world. Of course, this sounds reminiscent of a class war….and it is. Those who voted for, funded and continue to support trump, including especially the Republican members of both the House and the Senate who have had a spine removal, a tongue or larynx removal, or worse, a brain-deadening drug of unknown chemical equation. Their “investigations” into the Russian election manipulation, Flynngate including the wanton irresponsibility of the vetting conducted by the White House, their turning a blind eye to the question of the relevance and application of the “emoluments” clause that forbids a president to profit from the office…all of these are limp, like barely perceptible water colours on a water-scarred canvas. The canvas has already been so tarnished that any colours added by intent and design comprise merely the “empty spaces”.

And it is the empty spaces in both the degree of pursuit and the intensity of accepting accountability that are continuing to plague the essential process of bringing to bear all the force of custom, tradition and the constitution itself that is so blatantly missing.

Will those town-halls give way to the removal of all Washington insiders who support trump come 2018 and the next congressional election?

And yet, perhaps this hope is far too lame.

As hard as it is for some of us join Hedges “at the weeping wall” of Jeremiah, it is nevertheless incumbent on all of us to consider what price we are will to pay to bring the trump era to an early close. Clearly the price of not bringing the trump presidency to an early close will be very high:

·      Drilling in national parks and oceans heretofore off limits, dangerously rising  levels of carbon emissions,

·      another spike in the wealth of the 1% at the expense of the “pawns”,

·      the brinkmanship of international conflict as a daily, weekly and interminable reality,

·      an emasculated media,

·      the courts tied up in knots fighting absurd and punitive executive orders, effectively achieving the full obstruction of the “administrative state” (Bannon wants to destroy it, remember?),

·      the privatizing of the public school system through publicly funded vouchers,

·      the over-turning of Roe v. Wade

·      the filling of at least two more Supreme Court vacancies with Gorsuch/Scalia clones

And that’s only a northern observer’s minimal take on the damages, without even considering the trade wars and the lost jobs, the broken alliances, and the re-setting of the international table with personally designed deals that profit the “deal-maker dictator”….

Are these potential losses, and their concomitant dangers worth taking to the streets to protest?

Reflections on the Christian faith and church

Many (or is it all?) men are hard-wired with a restlessness, a need for action, often impulsive and irrational action that trumps reason, patience, thoughtfulness and too often results in self-sabotage. As a member of the class of men who either skipped classes on decorum, moderation, patience and self-restraint, or never knew there even were such classes, my timeline is dotted with responses to unfair judgements, biased criticisms, rejections and dismissals that served to magnify the impact of the initial punch.  Offering a punch-back that, like the shove-off of a boat from the dock, often left me drifting in wonderment at what just happened.

With a string of chapters that seemed to begin quietly enough, yet escalated quickly, I have found myself taking long walks and reflecting on what it was that prompted the “first punch”. The first punch, observed in virtually every hockey game ever played in history, sees a slash to the opponent’s ankle, an elbow to the face, a slew-foot to the back of the opponent’s skate, a cross-check into the boards, or a deliberate stick between the legs tripping the opponent onto his back. And every coach in history has told his players “not to retaliate” because the “law enforcement” (referee) probably missed the first blow, and will surely penalize the retaliation, doubling the injustice to the “innocent” team.

There is a vault full of obvious problems with this scenario starting with the obvious, “why does the referee NOT notice the initial ‘punch’? Also, why was the initial punch taken? And, is it part of hard-wiring to seek pay-back in order not to be considered a “sucker” or a “patsy” or a “wimp”? There seem to be two mutually exclusive impulses working in the individual who retaliates, and perhaps also in the individual who inflicts the first blow. The retaliator, while wanting to help his team to win, with all of the guidelines and rehearsed skills, strategies and tactics in his and his team’s quiver, also wants to be respected both by his team members and especially by the other team. Our culture seems to be more offended by the revengeful retaliation than by the initial blow, especially in a hockey game where “strength” and toughness and resilience and the longer perspective of retaliation without being penalized, at some other time and place, when the initial offender least expects and has probably forgotten the original provocative incident, are so valued.

Timing, then, is especially relevant to the one who has been punched first. However, to hold the grudge for an extended period also impinges his full capacity, waiting for the appropriate time and place to retaliate. Naturally, it is highly probable that we have all participated as striker of the initial blow, taken immediate retaliation and also waited for a protracted period for another time to get pay-back.

There is an underlying sense of injustice, and the commitment to the pursuit of justice that underlies this proverbial drama, that is clearly not restricted to the hockey arena. And in those thousands of arenas, when one player is noted and named as a ‘star,’ immediately, so goes the hockey culture, a “protector” is assigned to defend, protect and take on the opponent who would dare to slash our team’s star player. Stars then, rarely, if ever, have to take off their gloves and engage in retaliation, yet when and if they do, then their star shines even more brightly, for having demonstrated a willingness to defend himself, in addition to his other multiple and highly revered skills and accomplishments.

Often young men, in their adolescence, seek the protection and the companionship of a group of their peers, from the same neighbourhood, or sharing a similar sport, or hobby, or one of a variety of “social menu’s not to overlook those group under the rubric, “nerd”. Those who remain isolated, either by their choice or by the choice of the “crowd,” have neither protection nor a perceived need for it. And of course, there is a cost to “belonging” to such a group that reciprocates in a defensive pact protecting each other. Such transactional underpinning, (I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine), seems to render all participants the target of social approbation/denigration of function, based on his performance level according to group norms.

Of course, should any member of the group fail to “perform” his “side” of the bargain, then group retaliation is the inevitable consequence. So, this little drama (S1 provokes R1, or 2,3,4 depending on the severity of S1 and the severity of R1 and perhaps the self-confidence of the agent of R1) occurs not only between two individuals, but also between two groups, gangs, teams, and even nations.

Some would argue (among them William Golding, author of Lord the Flies) that violence is programmed into the human psyche. Others, like Rousseau, would argue that this penchant for violence/evil is not ‘natural’ but the result of teaching, learning and the impact of our social experience.

There is a religious/faith element to the unpacking of the question of both violence and evil, more generally (at least in the Christian context). Starting from the premise that all men are, by nature evil, having disobeyed and eaten from the forbidden fruit of the tree of life in that archetype of all gardens, Eden, then the church is ideally positioned to offer to all a kind of cleansing, a washing a forgiveness through the sacrifice of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

That whole narrative foundation of the Christian faith, while perhaps difficult to grasp for many, provoking many questions that can enrich a spiritual journey or terminate it, attempts in its theoretical form to embrace all human beings. Some segments of the church offer a kind of “penitential” through which the experience of forgiveness is expressed, following acknowledgement of wrong, evil, or, in the church’s lexicon, sin.

And yet, the church itself is the perpetrator of literally untold numbers of acts of violence, splitting families if and when the proposed marriage of two people in love crosses a denominational line, or demanding that the pair commit in writing to raising the children in the faith of one parent. Similarly, the church excommunicates (formally in some churches, informally and simply by alienation in others) those it considers unfit to wear the ‘badge’ of that faith, some for merely being ‘unkempt’ or poor, or ‘from the wrong side of the tracks’…or from a different ethnicity, culture language or nation. And in every church of my experience ( and likely of many of yours’ as well) there is a cadre of gatekeepers who consider it their self-appointed task to judge, bar the door, or remove those who do not comply….And this alienation, isolation, excommunication, rejection of the ‘sinner’ is undertaken with a vehemence and a passion that would fit a sociopath, all the while uttering, even chanting words of love, forgiveness and compassion.

There is a violence to this hypocrisy so venomous and so reprehensible that one has to wonder how those caught between the two poles of  (1)demanding the eviction of sinners, while (2) either denying or failing to acknowledge their own culpability do not experience something akin to the rack, being pulled in two opposite directions. There is not only a culpability, and a hypocrisy, but a role-modelling that attends church history, that sees the institution and those in leadership failing, refusing, ducking, avoiding accountability, until and unless so provoked that they simply cannot refuse.

Preaching and teaching about a God, and a Son who seeks and embraces the lost, the blind, the sinner and the outcast, while deliberately ostracizing those same characters in their own world, is hardly an archetype that any parent would wish to have inculcated in their child’s formation.

And, of course, the argument will be made that no “human” institution is perfect because no human is perfect, and no construct, system or initiative mounted and sustained by humans can or will be without imperfections.

However, it is the wanton and deliberate abuse of power, under the guise of “obedience” and “discipline” and “humility” to the church’s “imperium” that is so galling to those who seek support, accompaniment, guidance and acceptance from the clergy and laity inside the ecclesial forum. And, for the world (in Christendom) to have to bear the attitudes and the beliefs and the hair shirt of Augustine, and the church fathers who amplified and magnified human “unworthiness” especially in the face and light of God’s purity, including the grasp of the natural world, all life is holy and sacred, (for those who espouse a faith-based opposition to abortion) while continuing to advocate for war, for imprisonment, including the death penalty, solitary confinement and hard labour and, in some locations, torture, is an imperium that has outlived its sanctity.

Agape, storge (family love) empathy, identity and full disclosure of the whole truth all expect and, in fact, demand a kind of humility, a vulnerability and an acknowledgement of ethical and moral imperfection that is universal. Somehow that proposition has either been lost in the fog of the corporatizing of the modern church in the twenty-first century. Demanding obedience and submission, especially of those seeking ordained orders, to a superior, including a bishop, or archbishop, a dean or even a pope, in the name of God/Jesus and the scriptural narrative and exhortations to be disciples, under the threat of damnation in eternity, amounts to little more than abhorrent classical conditioning by the hierarchy, the implanting of fear, and modelling a type of social, political, cultural and intellectual control, based on a very narrow and limited concept of the “mind, spirit and love of God” that renders itself mute under critical examination.

While growing up, young girls who became pregnant were the most vile, according to the puritanical Christian church. Blacks were considered by many in the Christian church to be less than human, and at one time the church even condoned slavery. Relegating women to the “back of the church bus” is just another way of demonstrating a gross ethical, moral and spiritual failure of the church’s body politic. While elevating the heavy-hitting cheque-writers to the “front of the church bus” is another way of sabotaging the spirit and the intent of the church’s spiritual mission.

Little wonder, after so many spiritual, social, familial and intellectual deaths committed by self-sanctified Christians with impunity, and without being even called out on their many merciless offences, the church is experiencing a significant withering on its own vine. The spiritual life, including the breath of the poor, the gays, the racial minorities and the outcasts has been driven out of the garden, leaving only those who can tolerate the chicanery, the hypocrisy and the abuse of power in God’s name. Appropriating the ‘western’ masculine archetype for the church, including the need for power and control, including the need for revenge and retaliation, as an integral aspect of the deity makes no more sense today than it did two thousand years ago.

Furthermore, any religious affiliation that will enhance our human capacity for compassion, empathy, agape, storge and a full spiritual development will be premised, not on our potential for evil, without failing to acknowledge the dark side of our psyche, but rather on our every so tiny aspect of divinity, that each human possesses.

However, there will need to be a protracted period of history for this premise to be fully integrated into a theology worthy of discipleship.

First, there has to be an androgynous notion of a deity that interacts with human beings, as the evolution of our understanding of the complexity of both God and human beings. And the church as we know it may not be capable of evolving to a place where it can welcome such a transformation.

Marketing, fund-raising, providing social and political status, and a punitive deity as well as a punitive hierarchy…..these do not comprise an  receptive incubator for the fledgling spirit wandering among the droughts, fires, and starvation and hopelessness s/he sees around, wherever s/he looks.