Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Christian church co-opted by corporatism, racism, sexism ( mysogyny AND misandry), and a lost vision of its healing potential

It has been co-opted not only by the corporations, but also by any other political “identity” issue that threatened to set the Christian church outside the cultural winds that blow through the streets of the towns and cities, the farms and the factories, the banks and the court, and especially the legislatures. “Fitting in” as a guiding principle is a clear sign of co-dependence, and a lack of character/spine that defines so many individuals and organizations. It is not a sign of a serious commitment to living out the ‘gospel’.

Bowing to cultural pressures, can and does take a variety of forms, faces and co-dependencies. Money, and the capacity to induce and vacuum those cheques from the vaults of the rich into the collection plates is a trap into which too many church leaders have fallen, as they valued their personal career aggrandizement over the proposition of giving voice to the voiceless, regardless of the political, fiscal and social risk. And this debasement, or even denigration, of the principles of Christianity is evident not only in the prosperity gospel that equates faith with wealth but also in the literalist, fundamentalist conservative political wing of the right..

Co-opting by corporations is evident in the corporate structures of the mainline churches, where power and authority are housed at the ‘top’; it is evident in the kind of ‘discipline’ expected and required of those “prostrating” themselves as a symbol of their agreeing to “abide” by the rulings of their supreme commanders, of the human kind. It is also the primary  measuring criterion to determine the “success” of a local church and the clergy in charge, by those in head office. It is  the same criteria  General Motors uses to evaluate its dealerships and its executives, and promotes or demotes its executives and dealers as their bottom line “dictates”.

Asking whether the people in the pews are conscious that they are “growing spiritually” through their exposure to the homilies, the studies, the worship liturgies, the reflections, prayers, and conversations about spiritual issues with others, including, but not restricted to their conversations with the clergy, is apparently a step too far.
 After all, such a question is so “subjective” in both its intent, and in the responses it might generate and subjectivity has been willfully and surgically removed from the ecclesial organization. Are they afraid such a question would impose too heavy and too ambiguous a standard for them to attempt to meet? Are they afraid, that having failed to do their own spiritual “work” through a rigorous discipline, they would have trouble asking their clergy to commit to such a process, given the already heavy and pervasive goal of paying the bills.

Well, it says here that churches that are little more than warm-milk pablum of bromides, about God’s unfailing love, unrestricted forgiveness to those who repent (as Leonard Cohen chants, “I did not know what they meant, when they said ‘repent’), and especially God’s provision of an entry ticket to heaven to those who have died, while conducting a funeral….have little to justify their continuing existence. No matter how such themes are lifted through melody and rock groups, or through massive choirs, or through homiletic rhetoric that soars like Cicero, they are still bromides, analogous to the chest-nut hymns like “Old Rugged Cross” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” in full ‘military dress’.

The Christian faith, at least from the perspective of this scribe, is so challenging to the corporate ethos, structure, profit motive, and so revolutionary as to hold open the viable option of social policy that would move all governments away from arms, sycophancy to the rich and a “muddle-on” time warp that means taking centuries to get clean water to First Nations is acceptable. The Christian faith is also determined to seek the fullest expression of the truth, no matter the situation, always with a compassionate, and an ethical and process of remediation, reconciliation and healing, even in the worst of circumstances. And the challenges of such a high bar are ones very few church leaders are willing to present as guiding “lights” for their ‘flock’ lest they actually embrace the “vision”.

Imagine how the hierarchy would respond when it began to receive phone calls that the gospel was actually being practiced to the degree that each person engaged was able to offer.

 At least that is the rationale for many of the current “closed” signs on the doors of some historic and formerly “blessed” as sanctuaries buildings; there was no money to keep the doors open, the furnaces firing, the choirs singing, the education programs “educating” the young, and clergy offering too often religious bromides that made people feel warm and fuzzy, confident and secure in their reservation for an afterlife in heaven.

If the church is not an opposing and thereby balancing weight to the secular profit-driven, narcissistic, “me” attitude of “getting all I can however I can” and also offering the courage and the resolution to formally and informally stand up to, confront and even protest the establishment and its insatiable appetite for status, power and control, then it has little justification for its continuing existence. If it is not going:
·        to stand against the fracking chemicals of sucking natural gas from the water table,
·        to stand against the income gap that grows exponentially every year, to stand against the arguments for increased military power and its deployment with impunity,
·        to stand against racism, sexism, ageism and ethnic cleansing no matter the geography, or the political force that engages in these inhumanities
·        to embrace the most penetrating approaches to hunger, poverty, disease, and blockages to access to quality education and health care
to with the lifers in their pursuit of justice and rehabilitation
·        to embrace, rescue and fight to dry up the flow of the refugees no matter the source of their plight
·        to fight for the human right to access to clean air, water, soil
·        to demonstrate the self-sabotage that is contained in each and every act of the abuse of power and the healing that comes from vulnerable truths no matter how painful……
then there is little hope for its continuing survival.

Of course, critics will jump on that list as “politicizing” the church, turning it into an ideology. Yet, while there are clear over-laps with political policy, the central concept of agape and storge for all, regardless of income, education, political ideology, ethnicity, is at the heart of the theology of the gospel. And the courage needed to begin to move in the direction of making such ideals come true, not only on an individual basis, evidence of which abounds, but on a planetary basis.

It seems that the planet faces a range of threats to human existence, all of which, whether taken individually or together, have no regard for money, power, race, ethnicity, geography, gender, or age. They effectively render us all equal to a degree that is arguably new in human history. Ironically, however, we are also witnessing widening income/power gaps that depict a degree of insouciance irresponsibility that is threatening the very fabric of our institutional decision-making processes.

The church has found the poor distasteful; the homeless even more so; the poorly dressed, poorly spoken, poorly educated, and especially the people who are not “normal” in every sense of that word (leaving all physical and emotional, psychological and even sexual iterations outside the inner circles, not only of institutional power, but also of mere acceptance. If is as if the clergy, who may have a deep commitment to social justice, food banks, homeless shelters, half-way houses, can engage in those activities so long as there is no “shame” brought upon the congregation. And shame, in these cases, amounts to social embrrassment, a whisper campaign about potential “gayness” or waywardness or an upper class withdrawal of funds and participation in church committees.

All of the least desireable attributes of a high class social club including gatekeeping on steroids, social investigation of anyone and everyone, as if their pedigree and their social-economic status had to “measure up” in order to attain full acceptance, snide whispers behind backs and walls, in order to defame anyone considered different in any way…..and of course, a keen observation of the kind of contribution being made to the coffers….these all qualify, to a greater or lesser degree in every church with which I have been associated
.
 And then there is the question of the “executive decision-making group—including its composition, the linkages between and among members, the fawning and flirting for attention of those seeking appointment, the “symptom-bearer’ dynamic, by which one person (could be clergy or laity) is targeted as the one who most fits the collection of traits despised by the culture of the group. S/he is attacked in many manners, for many mis-steps, most of which s/he has no prior knowledge of their toxicity. Among the “leaders” one will find the most self-righteous, the most abrasive, the most condescending, the most co-dependent, and the most ambitious for control. And if and when a clergy risks appointing a dedicated spiritual pilgrim who embodies the spirit of truth, compassion, forgiveness and empathy, the “insiders” who fully believed that they should have received the appointment, will attack both the appointee and the clergy who made the nomination.

It would be called “office politics” when it took place in a corporate setting. It would be called simply, “the way politics is played, in the political arena; it would be seen as normal and predictable in a college or university where professional jealousy abounds, if not reigns. And in a church, it is referred, in the professional literature to “church conflict” and sometimes theological colleges and seminaries even dare to mention it in their curriculum, but likely only in passing. And everyone knows that whether it is a question of the “spirituality” of the clergy, the rising and falling of the dollars in the coffers, the rising and falling of church education attendees, the collapse of the choir, or the musical style of the organist or accompanist, the “failure to attract young people with children” (a favourite lament in many churches)….there is too frequently and for far too long, a simmering, or boiling conflict about to threaten the “peace and tranquillity” that is supposed to be the primary operating trait of the pastoral community.

Some theologians argue that there is no separation between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, and a strong case can be made in support of that view. However, to give voice, energy, and passion to the conflicts, without actually becoming aware of the deeper, symbolic and psychic significance and meaning of why individuals find others abhorrent, why those who view God as King have so much intolerance for those who consider God a pastor or teacher, a mentor or fellow pilgrim is to provide extension for the kind of petty grievances that rear their heads on a daily/hourly/minute-by-minute basis.

Untrained in the complexity of conflict, including both its psychological and spiritual implications and roots, many clergy are outside both their comfort zone and the zone of their professional competence when they face an uprising. There is no magic superhuman reconciler, a prescient healer to “calm the waters” of the raging sea. And turning to prayer to the God/Healer/Teacher/Mentor/Shaman is too often a reflexive act of such superficiality as to be more of a diversion, a distraction and a momentary quiet in the storm, without a light of reconciliation and healing at the end of the dark tunnel.
For their part, having likely attended some kind of early church “education” many adults in pews are in touch with a few names, and stories from both old and new testaments, without having a sense of who to put the pieces together, in their own lives, let alone the lives of their children whose friends may or may not have a church affiliation. Rules, commandments, parables, miracles, crucifixion and resurrection, Christmas and Easter….these are some of the words many may have heard, somewhere in their distant past, without spending either time or energy in seeking some of the implications of these theological concepts. And, attending a ritual liturgy, weekly, or perhaps even more frequently, may be highly comforting, and “centering” without helping to ask tough questions about how “my presence is impacting my world and the people in it.”

And, while serious discussion about the relative merits of different points of view on spiritual/ecclesial/epistemological/soteriological/questions and their import is clearly valid, the church often fails to provide a framework for such discussions. Exploration of new science, in the light of theological tenets and premises, could be so scary as to frighten off both clergy and laity.

 Hunkering down to the minimalist “identity”/“wedge” issues of personality politics is a clear sign that we have lost our shared ideals, and a shared vision that embraces the least among us….a vision that, purportedly attends all world faith communities worthy of the name and pursuit. In many small towns, law enforcement is relegated to the petty crimes of local “losers” (as they are called on the street”) while the ‘big issues’ escape their purview and their resources. A parallel seems to have emerged in many legislatures where racism, especially focusing on either or both Jews and Muslims has become the stereotypical response to what is perceived as threats from “outside” as the border of our minds/towns/states/provinces/nations have contracted through a withering of hope, courage, community, and collaboration. The blight of sexism is also sucking the oxygen from what’s left after trump and his gang have sucked their monumental portion.

If we have been reduced to a slogan like, “If you see something, say something!” then our focus has been reduced to mere safety and security at the street level. Meanwhile, on the top floors of our skyscrapers, the powerful continue to make decisions about stock options, bonuses, career aggrandizement and legacy planning….hardly the stuff of a social conscience, or an operative faith. Oh, there are a plethora of examples of token “ethical” initiatives that are designed to soften the profit-obsession of their originators. And this kind of tokenism, like the many that have operated inside the church sanctuaries for decades, serves as a kind of mascara on what are really personal extrinsic ambitions, and organizational growth metrics both linked like a two-headed monster.


Human capacity to envision a better world, however, seems to have taken a different turn, summarized in Cohen’s “You say you want it darker,” a prophetic insight if ever there was one.

Saturday, December 9, 2017

Reflections on the demise of irony

It took Al Franken, in his historic speech to the Senate, to point out the “irony” of the moment, in which he is resigning his seat in the Senate, bowing to pressure from his Democratic colleagues following allegations of sexual impropriety, while the president who has admitted to sexual impropriety on tape sits in the Oval Office, and another man, allegedly an abuser of young girls, runs for a seat in that same Senate.

Only when our public discourse has been drained of irony, and many of the other literary figures of speech, including the many nuances for which students once read and assimilated prose and poetry by such luminairies as Shakespeare and Milton, Donne and Cohen, could such a set of circumstances emerge. Literalism, in the form of microscopic deconstruction of each word uttered by a public figure reigns in a world also drained of trust, imagination, and the complexities of thought, feeling and perspective. Have we so specialized and polarized and infantilized ourselves, into this cage, and this elementalism? Restricting the literary to the writers, the poets and indeed, the songsters, playwrights and comics is little more than shedding our opportunity to see the world differently than merely as if it were being parsed by a judge and/or a plethora of lawyers.

A friend recently expounded on his sense of awe and wonder at the discoveries of an infinite number of galaxies far beyond our own. His simultaneously child-like and also highly mature and also balanced perspective on the universe is so refreshing, probably because it is so rare at least in our public discourse. The paradox of “child-adult” is not rare in our universe; it is the stuff of the tension that sustains our yin-yang, our systolic-diastolic, our medical-natural treatments, our male-female, our birth-death, and our ambition-disappointment vibrations of the many strings on our individual and our collective “violins”..making the music of our lives. And, by myopically and compulsively excluding half of the tension, we are falling into the trap of boredom, physical, emotional, psychic and creative boredom. And at least as a partial consequence we have to generate “extremeisms” to hold our gnat-like attention spans.

My friend’s awe, wonder, amazement and sheer joy at the mysteries of the universe(s) is available to anyone who grasps and celebrates with a similar awe, wonder, amazement and joy the opportunities of the many profound mysteries still waiting to be discovered about our bodies, our minds, our emotions and especially our personal and public relationships. Faiths, religions, and all of the multiplicity of human artistic expressions have both celebrated and been birthed by the tension of finding the beauty in the garbage heap, the ugliness in the make-up, the ironic juxtaposition of the sardonic witty story told at the funeral of a loved one, demonstrating both his complexity and his ability to enjoy the same irony. A parallel irony can emerge even from the deep and profound depression that follows  the birth of new child, closing a curtain on a deeply anticipated parental freedom, given that older children are now full-time students.

There is irony in the deep emotional response of an “alpha male” to the sudden death of his dear friend, unexpected because of the stereotype of “frozen” that has been imposed, partly by the alpha male himself, as a form of armour and protection, and partly by those who have worked and lived with the “armoured” man.

Irony is at the core of many of our most poignant and cogent moments. It is the kind of “highlighter” that imprints deep and transformative memories on our personal hard drive, one of the most instructive “teachers” of history. It is at the core of the life of a young boy whose mother chanted “Don’t read! Do something!” throughout his childhood and adolescence, who later became an English teacher and free lance journalist. It is at the core of the life of a young woman who believed that propriety was defined as repression only to discover it really meant, to others, a kind of compulsive “hiding” from discovery by herself and by others. Irony comes out of the surgeon instructor’s mouth when, in the midst of a complex surgery, he turns to his amazed students and remarks, almost inaudibly, “Just remember, you can put the stiches in, but you cannot heal the patient!”

Irony flows, retrospectively, from a stint in a social, cultural, linguistic and spiritual wasteland that nearly destroyed the pioneer, before he himself was discovered by his soul mate, herself dying in that same desert. And then there is the irony of a small-town boy/girl who grows to embrace an intellectual disciplined life of scholarship that brings honors like Governor General to his life. There is the irony that, for Canadians living between the Arctic and the monster elephant to the south, we have produced so much profound, universal poetry, hardly expected from this “repressed” and sandwiched land and people. And, ironically, we have done so little “shouting” and bragging about our value, that the world has come to appreciate our contributions, almost in spite of our (false?) modesty.

There is a kind of difficult and complex irony in the recent deluge of complaints of sexual abuse from dozens, if not hundreds,  of strong women seeking justice and equality, who then wonder out loud, if their chorus is not going to defeat many of the political, social, economic and cultural victories they have attained, because they have allowed no discriminatory differences between the many  complaints.

We are awash in personal and public ironies, which, if we were to take the time to notice, and then to reflect upon, we would have little choice but to embrace both the humour of how silly the human species is, (each of us individually and certainly all of us collectively) and also potentially how tragic our blindness to our own ironies really is.

Are we so blind to the opposite realities, from those upon which we are fixated, that we are in danger of actually believing we can and do control the universe? Or, perhaps are we so despondent and desperate that we cling to a one-sided perception and accompanying belief that we sabotage our own conception of reality, thereby resulting in what amounts to two megaphones blasting at and past each other, something we erroneously call, the public debate.

The contribution of the current American president to the withering and dying of irony in our public discourse is palpable, and present with every tweet and utterance, except when he is hoisted on his own petard (the transcript) and then, “Oh, he was just exaggerating!” blurts out of the mouth of Ms Huckabee Sanders.

It is important to be able and willing to engage in public discourse that paints pictures with authentic names, dates, dollars, commitments, and the full disclosure of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And that significant public standard is in such danger, from all levels of our institutions, especially the current White House, that we are at risk of losing our grip on reality.

Once that collective grip lets go, we all fall into a vast abyss of darkness and a morass of swamp, from which we will all be entangled for centuries.

One of the most underused, and undervalued tools in our quiver of arrows pushing back against the trump tsunami, irony, would be included in a memo from all of the news editors in all of the major news outlets, across the western hemisphere: Since the current president is obviously, blatantly and unconscionably manipulating every reporter, every editor, and every other world leader, into a cavern of doom, to suit his own heroic and tyrannical purposes, we need to pay so little attention to his very presence, that all reporters are hereby re-assigned to cover all of the other news stories, without resorting to the sacred maxim, “balanced reporting that covers both sides is the only kind that we tolerate.”

We are here to serve the American people, and to provide a fourth-estate balance to the public figures who seek our service, only now who so denigrate our existence and our integrity, that we can no longer serve both the president and the nation. And our priority must always be to the nation, especially when the president is out of touch with reality, and determined to demonstrate our lack of integrity.


Ironically, in so doing, he is bringing into disrepute his own integrity, and threatening the security of the nation at the same time. 

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

The Alpha Male, an archetype whose time has long past

Starting with a posture that includes understanding, compassion, empathy and the openness to that kind of authentic acceptance, when dealing with any human interaction infused with tension and conflict, rather than the kind of rage that blurts out in too many contemporary tense moments, sounds idyllic, utopian and utterly delusional.

Would it limit the degree and the extent to which revenge characterizes our current attitudes and discourse? Who really knows? Yet it just might.

Oh, I can already hear the voices in the ‘cheap seats’ crying out, “Look at what happened when the U.S. started communicating with children/students solely in a positive and supportive manner! The kids turned into psychological dependents, believing or at least thinking they could do anything, when they could not even pass the basic tests in their classroom.”

And while that is true, starting with a basic premise that conflict is the expression of a wound from a different time and place is not the same as telling the kid he can do no wrong, or that he can do anything, including math, science, languages or abstract thought. Let’s separate cognitive development from emotional/psychological development, and start to look at the driving forces behind most human conflicts.
Each of us is afraid of failure, and each of us defines failure in our own unique way, much of that definition coming out of those portraits of failure our parents held as fixed and determinative. And while fear is a highly radioactive motivator, it is not necessarily a healthy, ethical, moral or developmental motivator. And as the commercial reminds us, “Managing was all I was doing!”….as in managing our fears, as opposed to confronting them honestly, courageously and compassionately.

And in a culture dominated by stereotypical forms of masculinity, fear, anxiety, nervousness, vulnerability, illness, failure and especially death are emotional, social, political, career and familial taboos. Not surprisingly, those very things we deny, avoid, and fail to acknowledge take on a power far in excess of their reasonable significance. Repressed, buried, ‘forgotten’ and expunged from our family history and memory, fears and vulnerabilities, anxieties and even socially unacceptable behaviour, most often with names and faces (“Uncle Charlie was a drunk”, for example) our fears have the capacity to exert highly toxic and iron shackles on our psyches, individually and culturally.

Invincibility, and the belief in its life-long presence, unfortunately, is not restricted to adolescent males; it seems to be an integral component of the hard wiring of western masculinity. And the “costs” are substantial, and continue mounting. We teach boys and girls the “facts” of how to be an honoured member of each respective gender. And we have been doing this for centuries; and while the trend-lines are moving at a glacial pace, we are still living with some self-destructive cultural archetypes around the perception of healthy masculinity, held by both men and women.

The contemporary fixation on “me” and on “winning” and on “success” crosses gender lines, and seems to have opened the gates of masculinity to the other gender, in their pursuit of positions of power influence, income, status and what is generally defined as “equality”. Many women have discovered their “animus” that unconscious masculine component of their psyche and, clearly they welcome both the discovery and the results. From a political perspective, this goal of gender equality makes sense; yet, a similar and balancing shift of the feminine attributes toward the masculine side of the gender equation is so resisted by most men. Others men, fortunately, have begun to acknowledge their unconscious “feminine” anima, as Jung theorized. However, as one firefighter put it, when asked about support services, like Employee Assistance or Chaplaincy, for the crew following a traumatic rescue, “If anyone sought professional help, he certainly would not tell anyone else on the crew!”

Masculine resistance to their own gentler, more sensitive and more empathic sides, including their learning the language to express the complexity of their (our) feelings, remains one of the major stumbling blocks to equality. So long as men are driven to prove their “masculinity” their sex-appeal and their need for power over others, there will continue to be a litany of male names in headlines the notoriety of sexual abuse.
And while there have been serious attempts to “get men to talk” about their feelings, both in therapy and in less formal settings, it is still a truism that men prefer to “act” out their feelings, including their feelings of love and devotion. Stories abound of young boys earning money for good causes by volunteering at a very early age, when, if they had been asked to name or detail their emotions, most would have drawn a blank.

It says here that, unless and until a specific woman enters a man’s life, and together helps to develop a relationship, including “taking that man’s hand and walking him into and through very unsettling emotional experiences like the loss of a loved one, or the loss of a job, or the loss of an exemplary reputation (probably through some form of self-sabotage), men will continue to “skate” around the boards of the rink of their own heart. They will demonstrate a degree of creativity in their avoidance rationalizations, their excuses, their resistance and the associations they make with “girly” men of their acquaintance.

Straight men, it seems, are quite literally terrified of being thought of as less than “real men”,….and that includes being considered gay, the worst and most damning “accusation” they might ever hear, from their own perspective. So long as this “fear” (and there really is no other way to depict the obsession) continues to play a prominent role in the psyches of mothers, fathers, teachers, coaches of athletic teams, employers and other community leaders, there is very little prospect that young boys will learn both the advantages and the excitement of multiple masculinities, each of them accessible to all young men.

The movie is somewhat out of date now; yet Dead Poet’s Society illustrated a highly damaging theme in many adolescent male lives. A male student really aspired to become an actor, yet was seriously wounded psychically by his father for his choice. Whether there are still such human dramas playing out in high schools across North America today, I really do not know the data. However, I do know that red-blooded masculinity still seeks opportunity to show off, to bully weaker young men, to compete for the most beautiful young woman on campus, and to exude a confidence that far exceeds his capacity to match it with his self-respect[ja1] .

Churches, too, especially those of a fundamentalist, literalist, evangelical bent, champion the Alpha Male as their choice of traditional masculinity and in their clinging to that model, go a long way to preserving it among a particular demographic. The NRA, by propagating their “only a good man with a gun can stop a bad man with a gun” slogan, has succeeded in sustaining and even enhancing the Alpha Male model, armed as he is as part of his identity. The NFL’s persistent refusal to acknowledge the correlation between the tackles on the field and the literally destroyed brains that show up after many careers end, and their tardiness and reluctance in penalizing direct head hits with meaningful punishments, illustrates another of the many “established” institutions that keep the Alpha Male archetype seducing young men. Of course, the military is another of society’s established institutions that keeps supporting and enhancing the Alpha Male model, as do many law enforcement bureaucracies.
And the Alpha Male operates not only in person-to-person encounters and relationships, it also has a magnified influence on policy design. Alpha Males look for the quick fix, the hard power response, the most heroic approach, whether or not such approaches are the most likely to be effective. It is a conflictual, confrontative and also turbulent approach without the benefit of nuance, subtlety, collaboration and a long-term perspective. One of the most visible pieces of evidence of this nano-second response is the daily crawl of stock prices, and the daily inclusion in the news broadcasts of stock market vicissitudes, even though this data is one of the most neurotic and frightened indicators of the day’s news.

And then there are the bear and the bull markets…and the most voracious appetites for accumulating wealth, power and the status that accompanies these pursuits, all of it staking out one’s territory and enlarging that turf.

Among very few men only is there a real and comprehensive conversation about how all males are “tarred” with the same brush as bullies, and testosterone-driven monsters and, given the male preference for ‘action’ as the representation of their thoughts and feelings, some are taking active steps, without the blaring headlines and the neon charges of abuse by women. Men are, as predicted, essentially mute in the public discourse about gender relations and conflicts.

They do not want to exacerbate the already boiling cauldron; they do not want to justify the mis-steps of their peers; they do not want to fall into the trap of being another headline; and for many, they are muzzled and confused, as to how to participate in a healthy and healing and reconciling manner as supportive men and welcome and equal partners with women.

Perhaps, this could be a moment in history from which men might ‘recover’ their voices, legitimate their needs and join a highly radioactive discussion, without fear, without the need to overcompensate and definitely without the need to  “win” the day.

As it stands today, there appear to be no ‘winners’..neither men nor women in the current turbulence.








 [ja1]

Monday, December 4, 2017

A modest, if irreverent, proposal for reforming the premises that enable the abuse of power


There is a concept in Christian teaching, extracted from the New Testament, about how the sins of the fathers are “visited” on ensuing generations. While contemporary culture does not spend time or energy talking specifically about “sins” and the concomitant repentance and redemption that are theologically linked to them, there is nevertheless something worth mining from the notion.

First, there is the nugget that we are all connected to both the past and the future, not only through our biology and our genetic composition, but also through our specific engagements and encounters, behaviours and attitudes. And, while it is certainly not either popular or self-enhancing to write it, we are all participants in spreading the impacts of our own woundedness on those whose paths have crossed ours.

In brief, to the degree that we have been ‘sinned upon’ or wounded, either deliberately or unconsciously by others, we will inevitably find, at least upon reflection, that we have negatively impacted the lives of others. Any attempt to deny our complicity in such a repeating and inevitable pattern only masks our own reality and that of those whose lives we have bruised, or worse. And yet, our culture prefers to isolate each incident from our biographies, prosecute each individual for the commission of a wrong and operate generally as if such a process results in fewer crimes and wrongs being committed.

And in a world driven and even compelled by extrinsic motivations, based on our observations of the ‘outside’ world (as opposed to our internal reflections) we have all been conditioned to the point where we spend a monumental amount of time and energy complaining about the misdeeds of others. Such a collective and individual obsession, however, rarely generates the kind of reformation that our angst would like to be able to claim credit for generating. History, the writings mainly of those who “won” their specific battles whether they were military, diplomatic or economic, details the strategies for further successful competitions. Even cultural history, filled as it is with religious and ethnic themes, is filled with a human motivation for power, for dominance, for what the world considers “success” whether that success is measured on a personal (leadership) scale, or on a tribal or national scale, or even on the scale of empire, the symbols, the monuments, the buildings and the jewels of success remain static for centuries.

And then, upon learning the complementary corollary, that we all learn from our mistakes, we enter upon a kind of rationalization and a justification for those mistakes that we make out of either or both innocence or malice. And yet, somewhere, someone, we hope, is currently engaged in a historic research project that begins to connect the dots between original woundedness and future attitudes, beliefs and behaviours that are different from the kind generated, for example, by composers like Beethoven who musical scores rise to the heavens, from the ashes of despair, despondency, and woundedness. The incidental shooting of a puck into one’s own team’s net, is not part of a category of incident, behaviour or even attitude that qualifies for consideration as an echo from previous woundedness.

The list of petty crimes, even up to and including the current spate of inappropriate behaviours by prominent men, also, it can be argued, most of the incidents for which mostly men are currently spending “time” behind bars, would seem, from a less than clinical perspective, to have some root in attitudes, behaviours, beliefs and cultures that were inflicted as pain, punishment, debasement, harassment, assault and defilement. Every bruise, whether emotional, physical or social, has the potential to generate another bruise often when the perpetrator is least conscious that there is a “rebound” aspect to his or her inflicting of that bruise.

As history has bent toward an extrinsic perception that “cleaning up messes” is more to our ease and comfort, (when compared with prevention, which does not generate the kind of reinforcing evidence that motivates our energies), we spend far less money, time, energy and obviously research into prevention of hurtful and harmful attitudes, beliefs, behaviours. In short, we are committed (addicted?) to pulling kids out of the bottom of the waterfall, after they have fallen in, rather than seeking to prevent their fall before it happens.

And that preference is motivated  by the notion that “we have to let each kid/person/friend/neighbour/colleague make his own mistakes, because that is the only way he will learn”.

Are we really telling ourselves the truth? Or perhaps are we exonerating ourselves, and disengaging ourselves from what we consider to be “other peoples’ business”….as our way of reinforcing and justifying our worship of the individual and the rational that only strong individuals can compete and survive in our capitalist, Darwinian jungle, where only the fittest survive?

Have we perhaps so militarized our notion of how to define and then to achieve success, and how to achieve relationships, and how to achieve even “love” that we have performed millions, if not trillions of emotional and psychological and political and intellectual lobotomies, in service to what amounts to a profound deception, distortion and self-sabotage? We have certainly militarized our “salvation” concepts into those who buy into the paint-by-number model of instant acceptance of/by a “Saviour”. And we have militarized our schools into a competition for marks, grades, references, and awards. And we have militarized our social strata, into those who have achieved wealth, prominence, social status from those who have not. And we have militarized our corporate world, both from a human relations perspective as well as from a marketing and sector dominance perspective. Our journalism is replete with militarism and the competition and the devices and techniques that attach to those who get the story first, (and get it right) and the accompanying punishment for those who deviate from that rule.

We have militarized our political discourse, and our legal system, into gathering of superficial intelligence, (governed largely by the costs of more deep and profound biographical research), its presentation by the state, whose belief is that lowering the incidents of crime justifies our methods, while other approaches might generate even less crime to pursue.

It says here that we are individually and collectively engaged, even conscripted, into a military machine-like culture where we have defined “success” and failure so narrowly and so restrictively and so reductionistically, in order to fit into our governing economic and political and historical archetypes that no longer serve us. In fact they are serving as a counter-force to our very existence.

Considering the individual as “supreme” when compared to the “collective” (a nuclear word, given the association with communism) precludes a more balanced perspective and world view, in which the similarities of our individual stories is either neglected completely, or at least significantly reduced in influence in favour of an individual, punitive, competitive “medical” model where the symptom is at the core of the intervention. And the intervention is framed as an “attack” against the “enemy”. As a consequence, we have framed a universe populated, even dominated, by enemies….in the form of diseases, maladaptive behaviours, thefts, and the litany of physical and emotional and psychological abuses. And of course, defining the “enemy” and the “attack” mode, as a basic principle of social organization and management, comportment and cultural convention is now endemic to how our western world operates.

It is not rocket science to note that the greatest enemy in our metaphysic is death, that horrible “end” to our life on this planet that is the natural outcome for each of us. If death is an enemy, then it is, and has been throughout human history very easy and glib to extend the ‘enemy’ archetype to other enemies, evils, and taboo’s. And, given a fear-based foundation of our collective world view, that list includes listing many attitudes behaviours and beliefs that emerge, in part, from the “Decalogue” in the Old Testament. However, in spite of the dedication of centuries to standards outlined in that document, and others, we are continuing to “combat” the evils that now dominate our culture.

And our obsession with our own evils, and our “depravity” and our “having sinned and come short of the glory of God” (see Saint Paul’s writing in the New Testament) presumably detailed by those leading the initiative to establish a Christian church to gain and to maintain control over their “charges” has, it would seem, not led us to a better understanding of our true condition. Naturally, such a concentration on “evil” and the need for an external deity to save us from ourselves can and would predictably generate both multiple agencies and careers as “redemptive” agents, and a faith institution that holds fast to the dogma originally expounded.

Perhaps, just perhaps, we have been misleading ourselves, out of the best of intentions, motivations and designs. Perhaps, just perhaps we have bought into the humility of hair shirts that so controlled many of the early religious orders, and thereby unconsciously and innocently and somewhat childishly succumbed to a state of being that denies our inherent dignity, including a spark of the divine. And in the process, we have effectively turned centuries of young people into obsequious and disciplined soldiers in a war against evil in all of its many forms, faces and incarnations.

I have listened to too many people in church pews tell me that the only reason they sit there Sunday by Sunday is to provide some assurance of a “heavenly afterlife”….as if they were in a bargaining and negotiating process with some kind of higher power. And of course, the notion of imperfection, as compared with a perfect, holy, all-knowing, and ubiquitous deity, originated and sustained by an organization whose existence and survival depends on their succeeding in getting millions to subscribe, and to “confess” loyalty to their hierarchical design of the universe. Has anyone asked the question about the impact of the inevitable, predictable and apparently irreversible infantilization of millions of men and women, as a consequence of this hierarchical structure?

Has anyone thought through the implications of a kind of military colonization of the very people the society was created to help flower and flourish? Has anyone really penetrated the implications of the battles within families for control of the children, and even too often for control of the opposite spouse? What if, for example, the legal principle of “Habeus Corpus” (innocent until proven guilty) has a theological, ethical, moral, spiritual basis as well? And what if such a premise were to be extended beyond the legal system, beyond the court room and into the main streets of our towns and cities?  What if, with the possible exception of certifiable sociopaths and psychopaths, there is no wrong-doing that does not have a legitimate root in the biography of the “offender” and that the biography is a direct (or even indirect) consequence of a social, economic and political system that renders a large proportion of human beings powerless, unable even to feed themselves, unable to seek out and find access to even minimal health care, unable to find work with dignity, simply because we have, innocently and unconsciously, or willfully and quite deliberately subscribed to a social structure that is little more than a replication of the old feudal system, in which those with land, money and political status controlled the lives of their “serfs”. What if our pursuit of the wrong-doing and the wrong-doer is in an of itself upside down, in the more far-reaching pursuit of a society that can sustain and develop its people? What if our prisons, and our schools and our corporations are little more than replicas of a long-ago outdated Greek tragedy that pitted the top 1% against the bottom 99%, as a drama that spoke loudly of the fear of the 1% of losing their status, their power and their wealth in any other structure?

What if, perhaps unbeknownst to those who govern, they are embedded in a system that places their own status (and the prospect of losing that status) as the sole justification for the kind of political and economic system we are inheriting? What if, rather than requiring that all “serfs” become lifelong agents of the generation of wealth for the very rich, we were to re-think, and to re-imagine a society in which the dignity (not the wealth, amount of land owned, size of the investment account, name on the hood of the car in the garage, not the square footage of the mansion in which they live, not the size and degree to which the wardrobe is fashionable) of the people, both as individuals and as members of a collective, was the highest good, and was the primary guiding principle of the exercise of power in our society?

What if our social, military and tax policy were not based, as they currently are on fear of the poor, fear of the uneducated, fear of the different other, but rather on the premise that we are all, literally, ethically, morally and in real terms evident by the policies, the laws, the premises and the conventional beliefs of the society, not only by the symbol of the right to vote, and the right to own property and the right to make a living, but by the starting point of a guaranteed annual income, a guaranteed right to quality health care, a guaranteed post-secondary education and a guaranteed right to work with dignity, commensurate with both ability and qualifications.

Of course, this dramatic shift would require a substantial defunding of the military, a defunding of the tax breaks and tax havens for the rich, and a shift in how corporations pay their workers, supplement their pensions. And it would also demand a dramatic shift in how decisions are made in all public and private organizations, away from a top-down, hierarchical privilege and power, to a circle of committed and participating workers, investors, suppliers and consumers.

Moving away from a suspicion and an ingrained presupposition of wrong-doing, chicanery, personal avarice and a personal subversive agenda to a starting place of full support and encouragement of the best ideas, the best practices and the best policies that will generate a fair return on investment, judged on a much more fair distribution of organizational income. Laws limiting the number of times a chief executive’s income is multiplied over that of the factory floor worker, probably to not more than 5-10 times the base income, would go a long way to levelling the playing field.

The notion that each individual can carve out an existence of fairness, justice and equality simply no longer holds, when any reasonable, sentient and morally conscious person scans the political, economic, social and ethical landscape.

And having slid into what Bunyan would call the morass, there is really no other approach than a total turn-around.

Of course, this piece will be found to be highly irresponsible, highly out of touch with reality, and probably written by someone who is smoking very strong illicit drugs.
Well, dear reader, I am very sorry to disappoint those who hold that view. I am neither under the influence of any illicit or prescription drug nor am I out of touch with reality, nor have I ever been thought to be worthy of the irresponsible label.

It is precisely the current status quo that reeks of the stench of the abuse of power, the abuse of a majority of ordinary people, especially in the western world, as well as even more heinous abuses of those in the developing world where violence, disease, poverty and hopelessness pervade. If this is our shared nadir, then we can start to look upward from this oppressive, dark and threatening cave.

Are we not both more intelligent and more insightful, more imaginative and more compassionate than the current historical evidence demonstrates? And, if so, then what are we individually and collectively prepared to do to turn this contemporary 21st century cultural, political and social ship around 180 degrees? And when are we really going to admit that the world is going in the wrong direction, a direction that promises more abuse, with even more impunity for the abusers?

If not now, then when?

Friday, December 1, 2017

If I were an adolescent today....I would be confused, disillusioned and angry

If I were an adolescent today, watching and listening to the public discourse about how “shame” and the power to inflict it, taken together, is running rampant over some, while leaving others seemingly exempt, I would be confused, a little shocked and greatly drained of energy and hope, at the kind of world my generation is inheriting.

Some people attempt to purchase their exemption from the shame and the guilt and the embarrassment of their own indiscretions: witness the taxpayer-funded silence payments to staffers in the United States Congress. Others, with the help of evangelical fundamentalist “Christians” find a modicum of escape from guilt, responsibility and shame, as they are buoyed by the “he is a man of God” chorus swelling up around his Alabama campaign. Others issue public apologies, (Al Franken, Charlie Rose, Marc Halpern and now Matt Lauer) some in an attempt to begin their road back to “redemption” and acceptance in the public eye and mind, innocent perhaps of the indelible stain on their reputation.

And there is the “groper-in-chief” who sits in the Oval Office, busily issuing moral edicts and attacks in 280 characters, grateful to Twitter for the expansion of his opportunity to spread his kind of darkness and innuendo and castigation of others, completely oblivious to the maxim that “he who lives in a glass house ought not throw stones.” He sides with his own party’s Alabama candidate for Senate, by deriding his Democratic opponent as a disaster, indicating that policy options appear to take precedence, if convenient, over the morality of the candidate as attested by several women, from encounters four decades ago.

The chief executive himself is also the master “blurrer” of the lines between fact and fiction, so as to suit his own depraved, deprived and decimated, yet ever tyrannical, ego. The latest battle of the genders, on top of the already deeply and emotionally engaged battle for political power, through the selling of images, mixed with a healthy dose of exaggeration, dissembling and outright lying, has left the policy issues muted, except for the occasional outburst against the character of another leader, or even occasionally in support of an already infamous leader like Duterte. Forbes magazine features a story whose import is, “the new American religion is ideology”.

On NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday when Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, being interviewed by Chuck Todd, was forced to attempt a last-minute interjection of her objections to the tax reform bill that is before Congress. And that was the topic on which she based her agreement to appear on the show in the first place. Of course, however, sex took over, and dominated her time allotment on the show which had been built, of course, to generate the highest ratings, not to provide the best vehicle of government oversight and fourth estate critique.

Just as facts have morphed into “alternative facts” (courtesy of Kelly Ann Conway, the president’s image-maker), so too has much of contemporary journalism morphed into tabloid journalism, so too has much of public debate morphed into “’locker room” talk (courtesy of the chief executive), as the race to the bottom of the public gutter gets faster and less inhibited. Just Monday, a scurrilous person, acting as an agent of Project Veritas, a right-wing nut-job organization dedicated to discrediting the mainstream media, told the Washington Post that she had been raped by Moore who then wanted her to have an abortion, the ersatz Republican candidate for Senate, to replace the now Attorney General Sessions in Alabama. Her story was  found to be a hoax when Post reporters dug deeper.

Fortunately, for the public, those who work as professional journalists at the Washington Post found her story was another “smeer” job on the media. Just imagine the extent to which these people will go to re-invent a universe that is more to their liking, given their contempt for a political and cultural universe which they do not and cannot, and must not dominate and control!

Alice in Wonderland, the 1865 fantasy novel written by English mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, under the pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, seems to be a legitimate foreshadowing of the world of 2017, with all of us living in that same rabbit hole. Only trouble is the novel was intended as literary nonsense, playing imaginatively with logic whereas what we are witnessing and having to live through is anything but literary nonsense. Satire, today, would fall on deaf ears, as does irony, and all forms of literary language that express the imaginary world of either wish-fulfillment dreams or avoidance dreams.

We are being flooded with millions of archeological, anthropological “digs” into scraps of evidence, mostly in the digital universe, and all of them steaming forth from the new smokestacks of a digital world where no one is a reputable authority and everyone has his finger on the trigger of political influence. Many propagandists, however, have not been trained or disciplined into a respect for the “public” and “wider” truth, that concept having become the sacrificial lamb of the pool of narcissism in which we are all swimming. Theirs is the universe of manipulation, and in the case of the white supremacists, even scurrilous defamation of character, with a kind of impunity that those of us living outside the United States simply do not comprehend. The American courts have found and ruled on a very subtle nuance between what comprises “hate speech” and what does not. In short, a statement like “All Muslims (Jews) or whatever group must be banished,” since it does not target a specific person, is not considered hate speech. If a name were to be inserted as target into such a statement, then the statement would qualify as hate speech.

Those of us who are mere generalists, neither legal experts nor linguistic scholars, find this ruling to be a distinction without a difference. If one is advocating the banishment of any ethnic group, then it follows to smaller minds like your scribe’s, that one has the intent to carry out, enable, support and perhaps even enact such a banishment goal. 

And hate is at the core of the statement. To argue “irony” as the modus operandi of such a statement and sentiment and intent, simply does not hold water. Therapists, when faced with a client expressing the wish to commit suicide, are trained to take such a statement of intent very seriously. The alternative is, in a word, unacceptable and perhaps lethal. A similar caveat needs to cover the hate speech issue.

This space has referred, above, to the Narcissus myth and archetype. Unlike Narcissus however, we are not merely fawning over the image of our visages on the surface of the water; we have, collectively in effect, drowned in that pool. It is not only that legal protections against defamatory statements have yet to keep pace with the technological opportunities to spew them around, in the manner of the “twitterer in chief”, taking aim at anyone who might have a different view. His kind of “leadership” is simply not worthy of the name; it ranks as the latest version of chicanery that has been practiced for centuries by midway hucksters barking out sales of tickets to a freak show.

This time, however, the barker and the freak are one and the same. And as the world watches and listens to the smoke and mirrors coming from the "trumpstack," mocking the science of global warming and climate change so venomously and defiantly that all wonder what other security threshold he might cross, under the pretense of this own pardon.

The dung pile of mixed metaphors above, normally unacceptable as they constitute the extremely pervasive and noxious stench of  linguistic insouciance, are finding what might be considered a normal  place amid a current mind-and-spirit “stew” of angst, confusion, fear and not a little hopelessness.

What has been unleashed is not merely the democratizing of information. Unleashed now is the range of human evils from Pandora’s Box, that previously sealed vault of human depravity from Greek mythology. Now there is nothing left in the vault; everything including plutonium, poison, libel, pubescent and pre-pubescent pornography, unlicensed character defamation, money-laundering, corporate malfeasance and the impunity that denial, deflection and huge sacks of money can “buy”.

After all, when human interactions are so debased as to be reduced to nothing more than just another transaction, like buying another package of sausages in the supermarket, how can we expect anything more substantive than pork left-overs wrapped in some kind of slick skin. We have only to question the “expiry date” and the “brand” name on the label, in order to determine whether or not to make the purchase.

Such superficiality of the consumer renders both the consumer and the producer mere agents in another commercial transaction. And only if and when the meat is infected with listeria, or salmonella, e-coli, or worse, botulism is there a blast of public anger, disgust and withdrawal of consumer confidence. Meanwhile, lives could have been lost; certainly humans have become ill through no “fault” of their own. And those who imposed their defective product evoke an instant recall, issue a proforma apology, and try to re-market their product as the new champion of healthy food production and consumption.

In politics, however, once elected, it seems, the political botulism continues to wreak its havoc on everything it touches.

For this kind of bacteria, there is no official “court” and no official “inspector general” and no penicillin to combat the effects of the self-inflicted cultural disease. Even Mueller’s charge against Flynn, the disgraced National Security Advisor for 24 days in this administration, and Flynn’s guilty plea, are only the early steps in what so far is a “closed door” legal investigation.

And, with respect to public anger, frustration and push-back that ought to be overflowing the streets of hundreds of American streets:

·        over the bellicose rhetoric on North Korea,
·        on climate change denials,
·        on a tax “reform” package that robs $5+ billion from the poor and middle class, while moving that tax benefit to the top 10% of income earners
·        on the support and enabling of white supremacists, quite literally home-grown terrorists
·        on the denials of collusion with Russia in the election
·        on the refusal to staff fully the State Department and
·        on the massive list of unqualified candidates for the judiciary
·        on the rejection of the application of the emoluments clause, while continuing to gather millions from private business interests


I am still a highly confused, disappointed and disillusioned “adolescent” growing impatient with the kind of world my ancestors are leaving to my generation.