Saturday, June 23, 2018

Wading in at the beach of male spirituality


There are so many deep and perplexing, unanswered and unanswerable questions about “masculine spirituality” that one fears even sticking a proverbial toe in that water. And yet, perhaps that is what lingers as a far-off, yet occasionally brilliant and illumining star to seek to find in a far-off galaxy of other complex and   seemingly infinite stars.

There are male creative geniuses who have flown the flags and blown the coronets of their deepest thoughts, feelings, fears, dreams and utopias and dystopias. And there are theologians who have prayed, suffered, agonized and celebrated their deep and profound and permanent connection to the ultimate power in the universe. There are legions of us ordinary mortals who have caught glimpses of what we thought, perceived, believed and even acted upon were impulses nudging us in the direction of inner-seeking, withdrawal from the frenzy of career ambition, fiscal management, family duties and our failures in some or all of those areas.

Whether or not we “know” in the deepest, fullest and most intimate ways that we have “value,” are worthy, are loved, are honourable, are trusting and trusted, are aware of the “kingdom of God within”….seems an impelling, persistent, modulating, moderating and penetrating question needing some hints of both positive and negative answers….and even some that are ambiguous. And from the weight of evidence offered to our senses in our youth, and later to our minds, we conflate a tremulous and misty and mystifying and evolving picture. And then, we come to a place where the empirical evidence of our place in the universe is either or both incomplete or potentially flawed both in its content and in the motivations of those offering their critique.

Measuring our “identities” against others, as we all do, seems destabilizing and potentially “soul destroying” given the relative degree of our “hollowness” as the starting point in our biography. And, by inference, to measure ourselves against the “infinite, the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent is impossible and irrelevant.

And so, once we begin to appreciate something about the infinite in/of the universe, in birth and death, and in the galaxies, the trees, the lakes and oceans, the fauna and flora and we begin to glimpse the unbelievable complexities, intricacies, intimacies, dualities and tensions that pulsate in and through all of its magnificence, we cannot but get a sense of its open invitation to be a part of its symphonies.

And then, whether or not we have already made some social, community or searching connection to something known as church, or a faith community, we begin, almost inevitable and inexorably, and certainly tentatively and tremulously, to explore, investigate, ruminate upon and even dream about our potential  connection and relationship to and with the infinite. Funerals, and babies, both beyond our imaginations and intellects to define and contain, sunrises and sunsets, too, likewise often leave us in awe, as do Beethoven’s symphonies and sonatas, Bach’s Clavier, Monet’s gardens, and Einstein’s equations. Visiting cathedrals like Canterbury and Westminster, and although outside my experience the Vatican, can only reinforce a feeling and a consciousness that others have devoted their lives to “stretching” to aspire to reach something they envisaged as “heaven”…at the zenith of the universe.
Our “grain of sand” existence on this vast and beautiful beach/planet* seems to take on some meaning when people we read, explore, reflect upon and interact with as we realize that our meaninglessness is both unacceptable and unworthy of our being here. This time between birth and death, a monstrous gift, blessing and opportunity, like a new canvas or blank manuscript, beckons us to pick up a paint-brush or pen and begin to sketch whatever it is that seems to be a glimpse of meaning or purpose, some kind of light, perhaps (or inevitably) even linked to the previous darknesses of our biographies. And we “pray” for the courage to go into the dark night of chaos, confusion and wandering…under an energy and a muscle we most likely did not know we even had without really comprehending the fullness of what prayer can or might be.

Whether these stirrings and walks erupt from a trauma, or just evolve over a long time, there is a common modality to the journey to self-discovery, self-awareness and self-acceptance, that resist cognitive explications, reasonable and congruent timings, and even nicely bow-wrapped boxes of immediate answers…often there are even more and different and more difficult and penetrating questions, for which we unknowingly, and unconsciously have been “prepared”. (We might even venture to claim the word preparing!)

And, whether or not our little journey takes us into a formal faith community or not, and whether we have to engage in formal studies about our/human spiritual growth and development, and whether or not our little pilgrimage meets another whose search complements ours, and whether the universe throws speed-bumps, detours, diversions, regressions or depressions into our way, this new maples voyage into the unknown dimensions of our psyche, our spirit…and therefore compelling our minds and bodies to come along in willing or semi-willing support…we are on a new and different path….like nothing before in our empirical lives.

It is as if we have crossed a threshold from a life dedicated to the pursuit and achievement of extrinsic goals, rewards, titles, offices, stipends, pension plans, houses, children, marriage and social and cultural relatedness. And we begin to pass through a different canal from the original birth canal, although equally fraught with danger, threats, risks and even the potential of the end of life itself. Not to turn our backs on the previous decades of accomplishment, in secular terms, but rather to embrace the greater long-term, lasting and life-giving expectations of a life lived embracing spiritual, ethereal, non-corporeal, and frankly other-worldly matters.

While we each frame the new paradigm and its emerging questions differently, nevertheless the essential thrust of the questions is largely the same:

  • ·        If there is a life-force in the universe, (and I have to begin with a positive answer) then what is a life that is in harmony with that life force to look like?
  • ·        Where are some of the spiritual life-forces who have confronted such questions as the meaning and purpose of existence, and what do they have to say in and through their own lives?
  • ·        Is there a spiritual group to which I feel drawn, as a starting place to this new uncharted “nature-walk”?
  • ·        If beauty, truth and love are really at the core of the spiritual pilgrimage, how are they to be pursued, incarnated, re-evaluated, and re-incarnated in this one life?
  • ·        How have the previous decades shaped and formed such questions, and the launch-pad into a new perceptual dimension? What baggage needs to be left behind, and what new approaches, compass points and relationships apply here and now?
  • ·        What are the mysterious relationships between the world’s prevailing myths and the Christian narrative and how do/have/will both vectors impact me?
  • ·        Is there an implicit yet clear and qualitative difference between the “how and why” of existence prior to this shift, and the “how and why” of a new and different path?
  • ·        Does this path require a period of solitude, isolation, Gethsemane-type wandering, or is it just as accessible amid the frenzy of a career?

For many, it is more likely the case that this “shift” in consciousness is more like a glacier in its gradual, persistent, yet almost imperceptible movement and such questions as those listed above emerge perhaps many times, in varying tones, colours, rhythms and events, all of them probing the same mystery.
At least for this scribe, there have been a few moments that some would call epiphanies.

One, very early came out of a homily when I was sixteen, (the content has been referred to in more than one place in this space previously). So shocking, revolting and clarifying in its exclusion of Roman Catholics and any who drank wine, danced, frequented movie theatres or wore make-up…all of them “damned to hell” by this Ian Paisley clone….that I left the Canadian iteration of the Presbyterian church forever (only to return grudgingly seven years later, for a short afternoon ceremony for my first marriage). Having spent some time, at sixteen, casting my innocent eyes/mind/heart over the New Testament, I had concluded that these threats bore no relation to the spirit or the letter of the words I had been reading. And while my parents continued their attendance in those pews, they never prevailed upon me to return, except briefly after the marriage. Both my then partner and I declined their invitation.

Wherever one lives, one breathes in the attitudes, including both the sneers and the winks, the topics to be avoided, like religion and those that are “safe,” like the weather. It was not only the clergy from homily noted above who disdained Roman Catholics; that was a prevailing ‘meme’ in the little town. Protestants and Catholics simply did not mix. Of course, they conducted business with each other; often that was necessary as, for example, the only shoe-maker and repair shop was owned by an Italian family. Having had the attitude and words served at nearly every meal, “If the whole town goes down to the town dock and jumps in and drowns, are you going to join them?” I had unconsciously been nudged and shoved, persuaded and “commandeered” into a kind of “swim against the stream” salmon-like perspective. So, near the same time as the above homily was delivered, I invited a couple of friends, both protestants, to attend Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church.
Sitting in the balcony of that previously “forbidden” and “evil” church, and observing the prayers, hymns, incense, and Eucharist seemed to me then to be eminently reasonable, and unworthy of the contempt and disdain that crept like a noxious gas along the alleys, between the houses, and into the  sanctuaries of all the other churches. Only much later, in a very different place, time and insight did I discern a kind of infantilism in the power of both hierarchy and dogma to which I could not submit.

There is something to this notion of “not submitting” that is at the core of both my personality and whatever thoughts I have of God, spirituality, faith, salvation, religion and a full and healthy life. Sister Mary Jo Leddy’s spiritual biography, entitled “Say to the Darkness, we beg to differ,” expresses the attitude both precisely and sensitively, much more delicately that I have often expressed a similar view. Deep thoughts and feelings often bubble up out of some cavern when we least expect them, and when we have not given an extended time of reflection to their existence. Blurting out “that’s just not right!” when injustice lands its bully punch on its latest playground victim in the sandy schoolyard lying between Central and Gibson Schools. A more silent protest, fearing public scorn and humiliation, whispers, “I hate it when they ridicule Jim!” the tall angly guy in grade eight whose body seemed out of sync with his beautiful and insightful mind. Gentle, compassionate and isolated, he was compelled to remain mostly alone, and did so without recourse to revenge or visible bitterness against his peers.

Arguing against a mother’s cynicism directed to sports generally, and hockey specifically, I often protested her decision to exclude participation in that sport, following a minor dental accident in which the puck broke two front teeth, arguing “dentist costs” as preclusive of my continuing. Her decision forced more practice time for the piano lessons, recitals and examinations…and exhibited an attitude of what I then considered imbalance, and continue to this day to believe was unnecessary. “Both-and” (piano and hockey) seemed then and still does, far more “life-giving.” “Either-or” has become a premise to be faced with scepticism, adjacent to the “beg-to-differ” attitude that confronts most situations, especially those decisions taken by persons in positions of power.

Scepticism of the abuse of power by itself is central to my notion of the universe and my place in it. So radioactive is my radar on this score that only the exemplary role models of teachers, principals, clergy, lawyers, doctors, bishops and bosses, and of course political actors and athletic and novel and movie characters….This sceptical lens is also a critical instrument in helping to discern authenticity, credibility, trust and allegiance both to others and to ideas, promises, threats and judgements, especially of those behind lecterns, pulpits, policy uniforms, and religious garb of all sorts. Spiritual growth and development, then, proceeds through a maze of decisions that draw me out into service, and pull me back from continuing to throw energy in support of people or projects put personal advancement ahead of the stated aim and purpose of the “service” to others.

Just yesterday, I listened as a businesswoman with detailed knowledge of the workings of a health facility expressed disappointment that the medical doctor attached to the small rural clinic was furthering “self-interest” not meeting the needs of the client group of the clinic. “Self-interest,” while relevant, infects the professional approach of many in the “faith” business of the institutional church. And this consciousness was first awakened through a decade and a half of freelance reporting on the politics of city hall. Frequent interactions with and among the various actors, civil servants, elected officials, other reporters, and citizens including both victims of civic decisions and the big actors like developers and business owner-operators offered a unique, in-the-flesh real-time narrative of people worthy of trust and those of a different hue. Different from, and yet highly evocative of the characters from novels, and movies, these names and faces generated immediate and concrete reactions, demanding evolving evaluation and criticism (both positive and negative) that the reading of literature preserves in the more abstract, and the more “heady,” intellectual and thereby detached.

It is the tension between the immediate, concrete, and real-time experiences in life and the more abstract, theoretical and even philosophical and theological that generates the vibrations, sometimes like symphonic harmonies, and other times like raging hurricanes inside the mind, psyche and heart and comprises the biographical and the spiritual narratives of a life. And this has certainly been the case in my life. As an active thinker-feeler-observer-‘intuitor’-actor….fully aware of the limits of my skills and energies (only much later in years) I have been the instigator of many unwelcome and divisive encounters, having sought and been offered opportunities to question the basic norms and premises of many of the people and institutions with whom and with which I have worked.

Preferring stereotypes as more easily managed, controlled and financed (in business especially) our culture finds eminently cantankerous and irascible those less willing to comply with both rules and expectations. “Colouring outside the box” was not something I even thought about for the first third of my life….I was just doing “what I needed to do”. Whether that entailed waking up some somnambulant pre-teens in a classroom, or restraining a young male adolescent from demanding centre-stage on our football or basketball team, or resisting the lure of inbreeding in an Ontario private school through hiring primarily “old boys” from previous graduating classes, or jumping on a learning curve to “sell” meat, and other food products like margarine, and lard for Canada Packers, or asking for a social life as a requisite component in any family….and certainly not always successfully or with concurrence from others…I nevertheless proceeded in an almost head-strong determination “to be heard” (and to be recognized and “valued”).

Adler would say that I was merely compensating for a deficit in my own perception of my own value….given the chant “you are no good and never will be any good” that echoed down the basement stairs, and across the piano keyboard and into the raspberry patch and across the front porch and sidewalk…from my mother’s deep and profound self-loathing, projected onto her offspring. Unfortunately, I was totally unaware of the source of this infamy as a youth, and blamed myself for being “nothing”.

Any intimation that there is a separation between one’s biography and one’s spiritual life and development is absurd. And any intimation that there is a division between one’s wellness or personal health and one’s spiritual growth and development is also untenable. And it is the intersection of the wholeness of one’s experience with the totality of one’s inner life, perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and values, including one’s dynamic awareness of one’s relation to the infinite power of the universe that commands one full attention and energy….

And while this can be exhausting, it can and does also give new life, if and when one is open and receptive…

Enough for this episode….more later!



*This perspective does not forget or deny or avoid other less salutary and much less pastoral and often gut-wrenching planetary/natural phenomena that include a persistent striving for survival, competition between and among species, random acts of both kindness and brutality and the overriding mystery that pervades all of nature and life. In fact, it is with a balanced vision of the magnificent fragility of existence that one is enabled to set parameters and expectations around one’s emotional, intellectual, psychic and spiritual perspectives. Similar to the savage beasts, and at the same time, different in significant ways, we humans live in the tensions that pervade and vibrate inside the canyon between the raw and the gentle, the compassionate and the empathic. It is in this echo chamber, literally and metaphorically, that much of the “music” and the “dance” and the artistic renderings of all facets and phases of life are created.



Thursday, June 21, 2018

Timbits, tidbits and other placebo's anyone?


There is a lot more to corporatism, the new theology, than a focus on profits and dividends although those “ends” are used to “justify the means”. And the “means” are nefarious, deliberately dehumanizing, micro-managing and ultimately indefensible. 

There is a inscrutable and toxic take-over by what used to be called “classical conditioning” on the part of all management and governments, as if each of their “supervisees” (and voters) were able to be manipulated by anything extrinsic.

A recent story of a worker who was explaining to his supervisor that the work was becoming oppressive…too many details, in too few hours with too few workers, and yet the worker resisted stooping to the proverbial “its just management stretching everyone too thin to save money and increase profits. And the supervisor’s response: “Could I get you some TimBits?”

That is not a joke. That is not a piece of schoolyard pandering. It is an account of a single conversation in a professional mega-institution that occurred within the last week.

TimBits for a stressed-out worker!!!???….as if another “sugar-laden” placebo will “fix it.”

It is not merely the insult to the worker that is noteworthy; also tragically worthy of note is the belief both on the part of the supervisor and the worker that such a tactic is the best the supervisor can offer. Is this the new model of “leadership"?

And yet, in the last Canadian federal election, the winning party and leader offered “sunny days and sunny ways” as his pandering alternative to the more sombre and some would say “dark” analytical and reasoned offerings of the former (now retired and replaced) leader of the NDP, Thomas Mulcair. He also had the misfortune to be the successor to Jack Layton, former NDP leader, who was a rich combination of substance and hope and optimism.

And then there are the myriad “political timbits” that the current occupant of the Oval Office has served up to his ravenous hordes: “the wall”…”the tariffs” …the victimization of the U.S. by NATO, and all trading partners, the “new space force” (to dominate the heavens by America), and of course, “lock her up”….pure red meat to a gang of rabid rednecks. Included in this menu from the 2016 presidential election are all the mind-numbing epithets painted on his Republican opponents, as if the democratic process could be highjacked by a pre-pubescent narcissist…(as it truly was!)

Classical conditioning, under the guise of enlightened management leadership is a lie. It is to reduce both the perpetrators and the recipients of its “froth” to mechanical robots. The administrators follow some “protocol” promulgated by some bureaucrats in human resources, for seeking and acquiring compliance with whatever working conditions are the “flavour” of the month. The protocol encapsulates the latest “policy” and measureable method of executing the latest surge both for padding the resume of the “leaders” and for maximizing the profits and the dividends of the company and its investors.  Workers have been reduced to pavlovian dogs who simply have to learn to “ring the bell” (comply) in order to remain under the radar of the highly weaponized management (the other side of classical conditioning…the sanctions!). For workers, it has become a “risk avoidance” scheme, in order both to retain the job and to resist the kind of medication that overturns one’s lifeboat…like alcohol or non-prescption , drugs, or even more recently, pain-killing prescriptions. (Last year, 4000 people in Canada died from drug overdoses; the primary demographic was males between 30 and 39, for whom this method of death is now the highest of all causes!)
And for a culture to become so engaged in both timbits (as solutions) and hollow promises and scathing name-calling attacks, both of which are examples of silver bullets used as bait to seduce or to assassinate….we are seriously in danger of becoming our own “armed camp” within our own borders.

Of course, immigrant, refugees, “others” of all descriptions including blacks, indigenous, Latinos, Asians and Arabs (code for Muslims) readily fall into the line of fire of these bullets (by the white supremacists), all of them categorized as “enemy” to be resisted, barred, prosecuted, deported, or jailed. And the reductions in language and in the vacuity of thought that encourages and sustains the language both play into the hands of those white supremacists who seek total domination and control. The establishment, however, drinks the same modus operandi…the simplest and quickest and cheapest “trick” to gain control, compliance and the resulting profits and dividends, or for politicians, dollars and votes.

It is not merely the uber-rich who have aligned themselves with the redneck mob; so too, for the most part has the corporate elite, operating on the reductionistic premise that the removal of all “restrictions” in regulations, labour standards and environmental standards will serve their bottom line…once again the ends justify the means…..in all cases. The rare  recent push-back from the large airline companies against using their fleet to transport children ripped from the asylum-seeking parents is so surprising that it makes the case, as the proverbial exception to the rule.

The ends, as the justification for all the necessary means, is another of the many traps permitted, encourage and sustained by classical conditioning. It seeks and too often achieves complete compliance, given the power and the wealth of the corporations and the government to out-wait, and to overpower all whistle-blowers, and “insurgents” who might deign to express opposition to the prevailing corporate take-over of our institutions, culture and workers and voters. Just yesterday, for another example, the U.S. government announced that it was combining the Secretariats of Education and Labour…effectively closing both.

Public education has been, and will once again long after this cabal has deceased, be a cornerstone of democracy where children from all socio-economic and ethnic and religious backgrounds and beliefs and cultures sit in the same classroom every day, play on the same playground, eat at the same cafeteria and take the same buses as their peers. In American terms, this is the hearth of their melting pot! In Canadian terms, it is the  opportunity to forge acquaintances with kids from a variety of backgrounds that make us a better country, even though we still have serious race issues, on this Canadian Indigenous Peoples Day. Nevertheless, under the mantra of “saving money” as if these departments were a negative drain on the public purse, since they both advocate for public services for students and for workers respectively, they will be effectively razed from public consciousness. (IS the E.P.A. under Scott Pruitt, next for the guillotine?)

Nevertheless, this merger bromide, for public consumption, is just another in the growing and deepening pattern (we hope it will never become a tradition) of leading by tidbit, timbit, tweet, simple, spontaneous and vacuous announcements similar to the kind of “keep them in the dark” mentality that pervades most corporate entities. Public audiences, whether they are on the payroll of the corporate behemoths, or in the screening rooms of homes across North America, are subjected, literally and metaphorically, to the dictum that seems to govern the mentality of top-down hierarchies: “what have YOU done for me lately?

And this one-way street is loosely paved with such miniscule bribes/easers as timbits, or some anodyne of superficial persuasion, as if we (workers and voters) were so gullible and so vacuous and so bendable and malleable as to be easily taken for granted.

What kind of leadership education, or perhaps the word “training” (as in classical conditioning) would be more appropriate, are our leaders being offered? Certainly the business schools graduating the MBA’s are doling out large dollops of classical conditioning, under the guise of a corporate “branding” to brandish the image of the corporate sponsors who fund their students’ tuitions, scholarships and research grants.

Political leaders, too, for the most part, are steeped in the culture of manipulation of both the prospective donor to their campaigns, and eventually the people who cast their votes. Crass manipulation, blatant and overt and condescending spreading of propaganda fertilizer (analogous to the liquid manure poured of farm fields to enhance corn growth for their milk cows.

And also, what kind of critical thinking is being taught in our elementary, secondary and post-secondary schools, that we have a culture willing to accept the pablum “crumbs” (intellectually empty, socially self-serving for the leaders, and bankrupting the long-term interests of both the corporations (public and private) and the governments elected to serve.

LinkedIn trumpets “It is not What you know but Who you know” that counts in career advancement. Another “sell line” that hooks to the “old-boys” (and more recently “girl-power”) networks from which many hires are selected. So, on yet another level, partly as a sheer survival mode, everyone is out to “make a good impression on someone, especially those “someone’s” who can and just might put in a good word for us, sometime, somewhere down the line. And the whole system is “cooked” in the pressure cooker with the brand name “Classical Conditioning”.

We have all become enmeshed, both the referee or the reference, in a game of social engineering, “led” and “dominated” by those writing the script(s).

Of course, the rebels, the artists, the musicians, the dancers and the occasional “misfits” (think Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren) are “interesting magnets with a message too radical for the mainstream. And most are relegated to the philanthropic grant application process, or the reputation-brandishing process of playing concerts and gigs around the world, in order to generate a “following”….When and if we were really serious about changing how we think and how we do “stuff” we would push back against the corporate model of bigness and richness as our definition of quality…against our penchant to listen only to those the establishment has “branded” as acceptable, honourable and worthy of our time and consideration.

We are like those yahoo’s Swift wrote about, scurrying around looking for eyes that will glance our way, and ears that will bend in our direction, desperate for a twitter “following” and a Facebook repertoire of “likes” as our measure of our own value. And obviously we are so desperate that we will grovel for even a bite of sugar, or a morsel of a tweet, or a hollow epithet of a bullying name-calling, or a blatant ruse that disguises the real motive of our panjandrums in positions of leadership, responsibility and mentorship.

Just how desperate have we become to have permitted these blatant, self-serving sales seductions and placebo’s, including the tweets, the tidbits, the timbits and the “policy” sugar cubes (not to mention the calorie-ridden fast-food behemoths whose advertising, marketing and menus are over-flowing our cardiac units, our Intensive Care Units and our suicide numbers.

We are all living at the bottom end of the “food chain” in so many respects that the pattern has become entrenched and we have become “mind-blind, ear blind and heart blind to our own predicament. We no longer either expect or deliver our best: we no longer expect or deliver our strongest, collaborative performance, at least in the public arena…including both governments and corporations. And we all know that we are barely surviving, intellectually, morally, ethically, spiritually, socially and politically.
And it is not only our mortality rates that are suffering; so are our senses of our own worth self-esteem and confidence in our capacity to make a difference.

Occasionally, every few months or so, some little-reported story breaks through the veil of mediocrity. Such a story broke last night on Rachel Maddow. Given the outbreak of yet another horror story originating in the Oval Office, several hundreds of children have been yanked, as in a C-section, from their mothers and fathers, on the highly questionable legal premise that their parents have to be prosecuted for crossing into the U.S. ILLEGALLY!

It seems that a couple in California, seeing into the heart of the problem, knowing that if those parents could provide bail, they would be released until their immigration hearing date, and then re-united with the children. Thinking small, they targeted a goal of some $1500 to provide bail for one family in a social media fund-sourcing initiative. Truth be told, they raised some $15,000,000 (not a typo!) and now will seek to find all of those separated children and their parents and provide bail and reconnection of children with their parents for all families impacted by the inhumane, ridiculous and indefensible program.

That couple is inspiration for all of us, in the midst of this hailstorm of timbits..

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

The world is NOT his oyster.....OR...are we making it so?


Tantrum after tantrum after tantrum!

It really doesn’t matter which “other” is behind the tantrum, the “actor” at the centre of each melodrama is the same.

Such behaviour would be ejected from the most tolerant and compassionate day care, or nursery school. It would also be “expelled” from the most liberal pre-school. And the neighbours of the recalcitrant one would long ago have called in Children’s Services, appalled at the persistent “acting out” of the little monster.

If this little demon ever made it to an elementary school (only private ones with exceptionally high fees need apply) the first day on the playground, this demon would find his face handed to him on a platter. Several months ago, David Letterman publicly commented that, if this creature were running a fast food outlet, he would long ago have been fired.

Naturally, no one would welcome the position of headmaster in that hypothetical “elite” private school that might have taken the chance to admit him. The oscillating tension between the filthy lucre flowing into the coffers of the school and the predictable chaos that will inevitably ensue immediately after admission would be the hurdle facing the man….and it would have to be a man, because no headmistress, even of a co-educational school, would be dumb or devious enough to sign off on the application for admission.

And yet…..

The same behaviour that would not qualify as acceptable, honourable or even tolerable in any of the above scenarios seems quite OK for the Republican members of Congress, excepting a mere handful.

In the early years, most parents and neighbours and Early Childhood Educators would dub this kind of “acting out” as gross “attention seeking”….verging on compulsive and clearly inflicting mayhem on every child and classroom within earshot. They would be writing reports that recommended psychiatric intervention, family counselling and hopefully, sharing their impressions with any other institution that found the miscreant on their doorstep seeking admission.

If this “kid” played on the same forward line with, you would know he would never pass the puck….and then, if and when he accidentally scored a goal, he would blow his hubris-horn so loud, it would erase all the sweat-ordour in the locker room.

If this “kid” played baseball, he would learn everything there is to know about batting and nothing about what it either means, or the skills to accomplish defending his team. And, again, when the occasional home-run would pop off his bat, his “I’m just terrific!” boasts would suck all the oxygen out of the dug-out.

In the school band, he would demand the biggest and the loudest instrument, like a trombone or even a tuba, whichever is easier to learn the most quickly and requires less practice time, and then when he blew a wrong note, or set his own tempo and rhythm, he would merely fluff it off as another piece of magical improvisation, the likes of which ‘we’ would never have heard before.

If he were a team member in a fast food outlet, he would have “better” procedures than those generated by decades of research and experience, and would demand that ‘his way’ be adopted, justifying it as a way to increase profits or reduce costs, without giving a nano-second’s thought to how it might impede the growth and development of both the business and the people working in it.

In college, he would lead student protests against any expectation that students should pick up their garbage in the cafeteria or in their dorm, “because there are janitors who are paid to do that”…and, not so incidentally, there would be others, sadly, who would cheer him on in his twisted, perverted and megalomaniacal bullying, as an object of the projections of their own inoperative bully archetype, born out of both profound inferiority and even more profound exaggerated compensation.

In college, too, if he deigned to go out to the pub or bar, he would studiously avoid alcohol, and would concentrate on his over-riding compulsive desire/need for attracting women, initiating and honing ‘pick-up’ lines that would flow like a seductive and slimy aphrodisiac over all the innocent women, still learning how to detect the difference between an authentic male overture and one that belongs in the gutter of all of their lives.

On the rare occasion when he might dare to enter a religious sanctuary, he would glad-hand with all of his family’s “friends,” taking note of all of the attractive women in the congregation and in the choir, for future reference, sing lustily, read dramatically (if in soto voce) and preen himself, in the mode of the sanctimonious peacock who already knows he is “slated” for a prominent “place” in heaven and can’t understand why all these people can’t see his truth.

Secure in the conviction that his perception of the universe, one in which all others are enemies to be subdued, tricked, deceived and eventually decimated, believing that every situation is a zero-sum game in which “I” have to win, and therefore all others must lose, this twisted mind and spirit, mired in the slough of his own lies, deceptions and hubris, has already sentenced himself and everything and everyone he encounters to a predictable and tragic outcome….paradoxically while conveniently evaluating each and every “battle” as another epaulet for his own shoulder.

Of course, no such life could ever escape the inevitable pursuit by those left in the detritus of his jet-stream, through the courts, through the ostracizing and abandonment that accompanies his chosen lane on the freeway, and even through the occasional deliberate and calculated collision….and here is where this personality (there is no character here worthy of the name) truly shines. By being able to afford the most imaginative and deceptive legal operatives, and by learning the loopholes and the multiple gaps and nuances of the legal language in all criminal and civil codes, and by manipulating the public disclosure of each conflict in a deliberate delaying strategy he slips through many entanglements. Dependent on the human condition of short memories, and a kind of detachment that refuses to engage fully with such thugs, hardly even believing that they could really exist and operate as they do (most of us only peripherally conscious of the twists and turns of the screws of the mob), as well as a bare “highlight” awareness of the few details in any case that is not our own, he has figured out how to “create a life” that is modelled on the celluloid of Hollywood….mostly smoke and mirrors in an artistic attempt to entertain.

And having surmised that all we want ( or more likely deserve!) is bread and circuses, and having determined that he can dispense a few crumbs of both, enough to placate the masses, on whose persistent eulogies and hymns to his “greatness” he literally depends, like a starved child who has no centre, he buys a retinue of sycophants whose desperation equals or surpasses his own moral, spiritual, ethical and social bankruptcy.

 And together they parade their own version of the ‘triumph of the will” complete with  caged babies, encamped children, dispossessed mothers and fathers, artificial and exaggerated “boundaries” of a nation (to compensate for their own complete absence of personal boundaries), conflicts that are both real and imagined at the same time, (keeping others off balance is the only way to secure and maintain absolute control of any situation), friends that only survive as long as  they accept and act out their prescribed sycophantic roles, and a whole range of middle-of-the-road enemies (fabricated as in the media, the educators, the clergy and the health care practitioners) who want only the best for the ordinary people, and do not and will not buy in to the caricature of themselves as “extra’s in his movie. 

And yet….

Somehow this human specimen apparently passed through elementary, secondary school and then college….albeit a highly “right” wing business school, Wharton.
Has the United States of America sunk so low as to first elect and then to permit this man to continue to occupy the Oval Office? And it is not just a single, or even a small number of glaring nefarious episodes, personal, professional, financial, legal and even constitutional that cry out begging the question. We could never have imagined that at least three former First Ladies, as well as the current First Lady have all cried out against the latest “interpretation” of the rules/law resulting in the incarceration of thousands of young children. We could never have imagined the guilty pleas, the indictments, the court cases and the desperate measures that apparently characterize the “modus operandi” of the campaign for the White House.

Those of us who live outside the borders of America have often commented that everything within America is for sale. The last two years have confirmed that, indeed, it is not only the usual commodification of all things American that we are witnessing; now it includes the very office in which he sits.

We always knew that in most elections in the west money changed hands plying people for votes or for campaign favours. John F. Kennedy reportedly had deep ties to the mob, implicating such public figures as Frank Sinatra. What we now know, and still hope is not true, is that the very soul of America is on the market as a commodity for sale. And the price is absolute, complete and unsullied loyalty to the tyrant. Anyone who does not subscribe and submit to the religion of the Oval Office KOOLAID is dispensible, and dangerous,  in the mastermind in charge.

And where is the hope in that scenario?

Monday, June 18, 2018

Can/Will we accept the mantle of "world citizen" and shed our tribal adolescence?


From where did the latest spate of tribalism erupt? Like a new volcano, from a previously silent, (hidden from consciousness) mountain, this new ‘hot lava’ has already swept across the political landscape, destroying careers, principles, institutions, alliances, and even a modest respect for an agreed body of facts, as the starting place for an ideological or policy discourse.

This ‘lava’ easily ‘took out’ some dozen-plus moderate, reasonable, and proven Republican candidates from the presidential primary in 2016. It then, fused to other equally if not even more toxic ‘lava’ (read Russia, Wikileaks, Stone, et al) from outside the continental U.S., swept the Democratic candidate off the political stage, leaving only the primary energy source of this lava, a kind of magnetic, enmeshing and volatile cloud of energy that can only be tentatively described as seductive and repulsive at the same time. Powerful magnets, too, depending on their position in relation to the “same pole” or the “opposite pole” will repel or attract.

One of the problems with this “magnetic lava” entry into our political petry dish is that our culture’s preponderant approach to any new influence is to categorize it as a single “entity” and not as a combination or confluence of more than one component. We have adopted a mechanistic, single-cause-effect equation which permits a kind of illusion of  control. This “bug” or that “tumor” or this “tendon” or that “eye” is causing the symptom….and if and when we address/remove/ameliorate/medicate/destroy the immediate “cause” of the presenting symptom, we will have done whatever is possible. This approach pertains to our medical theatre; it also applies to our legal system; to a large extent, it has taken root in our education system. And, to a significant degree it is also prevalent as a dominant structure in most of our “real” theatre…protagonist/antagonist conflict impelling the narrative of most of our novels, plays, films and journalism reports.

Only recently, in the west, has there begun to be a consciousness of something complementary to the mechanistic, single-cause-effect equation, at least in some circles of health care in North America….and that is a consciousness, born-out by empirical evidence, of an energy field that attends each human person. Contributing either to the healing process, or conversely, the illness “process”, depending on whether it is in balance, is flowing, is blocked, is too much or too little, this energy field is garnering a growing number of research projects, as well as a growing number of health teams comprising medical practitioners, as well as spiritual healers. We all recognize, accept and even celebrate the basic truth that no presenting “issue” has a single cause, whether that truth pertains to the human body or psyche, or to the broader cultural and political landscape.


Although “energy fields” are finding resonance among the health care profession, the rest of the culture is a long way off from accepting them as an influential component of the initiating causes of political symptoms. Political pundits, historians and political actors continue to seek out and concentrate on the tried and true “single cause” explanation for any situation. More easily managed, “message controlled” (and manipulated), and more readily assimilated by the masses in an age of waves of more information than anyone can either assimilate or digest and comprehend.

Deep thinkers tell us that when we, personally or as a culture, are experiencing anxiety, fear, discombobulation and disorientation, we revert to our default position, whatever may have taken over in what we might call the more primitive period of our lives. Simplify, simplify, simplify….in order to regain a sense of balance and perspective. Anything that appears too complex, too ambiguous and/or too threatening is “parced” into its miniscule components. And, from both the educational founts and the media factories, this kind of reduction prevails.
There are numerous signs of both anxiety and reductions flying around us, many more in the last sixteen or seventeen months. Linked to the simplify obsession is the preference to see our political “leaders” as cardboard cut-outs, mere stereotypes of stick men and women, easily drawn and easily dismissed.

Tribalism, too, needs simple, easily accessed and assimilated messages in order to sustain its power to unite, to bond, and to protect those within its boundaries.
Most of us can likely concur that complexity, that escapes glib explanation and intellectual comprehension, because it resists simplistic reductions, seems to have evaporated from our political discourse. Social media, too, depends on the minimalist ‘tweet’ that cannot and will not capture the nuances or the multiple factors that comprise the history of any public issue. In fact, the ‘tweet’ practitioners are little more than what formerly were headline writers, interested in the maximum punch to arrest the reader, and thereby to magnetize his/her attention to read the following 500+ words of copy.

If there is a surfeit of information, issuing from a plethora of mouths, magnified by a million devices, being “served” to an audience who is disoriented, disjointed, disillusioned, and increasingly desperate, there is little chance that an “informed” and critically-thinking audience will be the result of the dispersion of that motherlode of data. What previously were the macro-world problems were neither anatomized nor shared to the degree both are currently. So, the wave of existential threats, linked to succeeding tsunamis of words, pictures, tweets and choruses of cheerleaders, colliding with socio-economic forces that inordinately favour the rich over the middle and the lower income demographics make a dangerous threatening cloud in addition to the global warming, political chicanery and the institutional erosion that already face each of us.

Small towns, where the issues were common and discussed hourly in local coffee shops and pubs, were once a kind of quiet retreat from the “world” of geopolitics, globalization, global warming and public malfeasance. And small towns are the original tent for tribalism. Tribalism, the linking together of people around a few select myths, traditions, beliefs, buildings, local public figures whose lives were generally modest, and modestly conveyed among the tribe, and even local school teachers and clergy, all of whose indiosyncracies were well preserved by local oral history and lore, took root in those small towns, was the menu that raised most of us North Americans.

None of us felt anxious in our small towns, unless and until something like a major fire tore up the main street, or a plant closed, or a prominent person took his (almost always his) own life.  Nothing earth-shattering ever seemed to happen, and we did not really expect it to. Of course, we ventured into the big cities, for glimpses of the larger world. Imaginative and courageous teachers even took small groups on “school trips” as part of our development. However, we always returned to that small town, where the most complex question was, “Who is the new pharmacist on Main Street?”

There were no tablets, cell phones, or wall-to-wall news outlets, spanning the globe. There were no televisions even, when some of us were in high school. Radio was dominated by “high-brow” CBC or commercial top-ten tunes. Movies depicted the proverbial and dependable love triangle, or the western with its bad guys being chased and caught by the good guys. We never thought of ourselves as inhabiting a particulate “tribe” although, to every other small town in the area, we likely had distinctive traits as a tribe.

International influences, like multiple ethnicities, multiple languages, multiple faiths, and of course, highly distinct and varied cultural norms and diets were almost excluded from our tribe. Occasionally a “Chinese restaurant” would open with a hearty invitation to savour a new menu. Occasionally, too, a professional music soloist or small ensemble would come to town, opening the doors of our hearts and minds to a new talent and a new artistic experience.
However, the tribal norms, including the service clubs, the golf and country club, the local arena and the attendant minor and occasional provincial Juvenile or Junior team. Churches were generally filled on Sundays, and prominent local figures adopted one of the half-dozen Christian models of worship.

The few city-natives, in the form of doctors, dentists, a lawyer or two and the few teachers who ventured out of their home turf added much needed cultural salsa to what was essentially a bland diet, an extremely bland (literally silent) political debate, and an occasional glimmer of industrial expansion to supplement the government jobs and the summer tourism.

And while our “tribe” was our birthplace and birthright, it also limited our range of what we would consider acceptable behaviour, thought, faith options and political philosophy. Small town tribes incubated thousands of neophyte conservatives, because conservatism was the dominant perspective, whether that applied to politics, business, leisure or religion.

There is, without doubt, no returning to such tribalism, regardless of the energy field that seems to hanker and long for its return. While we came from a tribe, and while that tribe helped to nurture us in adolescence, we are now, willingly or not, citizens of the world, bombarded by messages from all world capitals, from all refugee boats that either capsize or receive warm welcome (as in Spain last week), from all political ideologies and from all religious points of view.

Our openness, readiness, and mature assimilation of these many influences, through a discerning, and balanced filter that combines history, culture, and identity with an authentic welcome of the new and the different, from enriched imaginations that will challenge our comfort zones could be legitimately considered as the sine qua non of our shared survival.

Dividing into our respective tribes, and retaining our respective taboos, limiting our horizons by a prescription of static clinging to our respective tribal pasts, as the current lava threatens to compel us to revert to, (and the current American propaganda demands) would only erode our capacity to envision and to seek collaborative solutions to our shared exigencies.

Regression, reversion, bending into the tiny, brittle pretzels that we each were in our original tribes will serve the insatiable appetites for power and tyranny of those who have the current levers of power in several nation states. If Malala can withstand her brutal and lethal bullet, undergo transformative surgery, continue her own education and the advocacy for millions of girls who are denied access to education, and then be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and if the surviving students of Parkland Florida can launch a movement to achieve gun control, and if the children currently separated from their parents, and the children left as lifeless bodies on Mediterranean beaches attempting to escape the ravages of war, disease and famine….then these lights in the darkest night of the world’s soul have to have meaning in all of our lives.

The little children can and will lead us, if we will only accept their invitation! We might together learn how to accommodate the inevitable lava floes, the political chicanery and the childish regressions if we were to catch the light and the torch from the battalions of young people who are becoming our most enlightened mentors and leaders.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Today's putrified politics makes the acid rain of the 80's look like a benign cumulus cloud


There is a strong strain of reverse snobbery running through American politics   today, that threatens the very fabric of the culture. Anti-intellectual, anti-sophistication (as they define it!), anti-science, anti-research, anti-history and  anti-all things androgynous, anti-institution, anti-establishment (collated in their minds as the “swamp”), this view of the world, primarily anti-everything even they aspire to attain ironically, is at the core of the trump base.

Missing in action, however, from their angry mis-representations of truth and reality, as seen by the rest of the people on the planet, is either or both the willingness to acknowledge or the incapacity to concede their blind spot. And that blind spot can be seen in multiple holes in their black, solid putrified cheese of  narcissism. In summary, they are blind to subtle and real differences between some “code” words, and the neighbours of those words.

Like holes in Swiss cheese, blindnesses that fail to discern between such niceties as the difference between “free” speech and “hate” speech, or the difference between  “spine” and the addiction to bullying, or the difference between massive cover-ups and denials of illicit behaviour and authentic explanations of fear, neurosis, and even psychosis characterize this new world view. Failure or refusal to discern between mutual respect between and among both genders from a “right” to abuse the feminine in all of its forms is an integral component of their blindness as is a parallel process of abusing friends and allies, while slobbering infantile flattery over tyrant enemies, just two more of their “entitlements”.

And these entitlements, unlike bridges, freeways, tarmacs, sewer and water lines and fibre optic cables, will not merit a single budget line in any state or federal budget as drains on the national balance sheet. They will, however, embed their indelible ink into the hearts, minds and psyches of every American and all world citizens who happen to stay awake for a minimum of two hours daily and catch even glimpse of the American political psycho-drama. Slippery as a snake, devious as a shark, lethal as a python, and mercurial as a loon diving underwater if and when a tilt in their windmill foreshadows danger to their “brand”, this madness, (without resorting to a clinical diagnosis) not only threatens to destabilize “normal” and historic structures and patterns between and among world powers; it also threatens to destabilize the individual human psyches of all of us who happen to be ‘stationed’ on the planet, for the foreseeable future.
Who would have thought when George W. Bush uttered his now infamous line, “I do not DO Nuance!” that he would have cast such a shadow over the American political landscape, shortly after 9-11. Revenge, in the form of both the Afghan and  Iraq wars, against a declared terrorist enemy, not only failed to demonstrate “nuance” but also plunged the world into a cauldron of hate, blood, dry-ice and the bully-grease that paved the freeway for trump to ride to victory in 2016. And so that cauldron has not only expanded exponentially, but it has had poured into its lethal cocktail, a full measure of defiance, arrogance, deceit and hubris that has, is and will continue to contaminate the American reputation for decades.

While it is true that one man does not a country make or define, the cult growing around his name, and his “big bully stick”( words, gestures, lies, character assassinations and intimidations), already threatens to dislodge the American government from its foundations. Republican congress men and women, almost to a person, have sold their political, moral, ethical, intellectual and ideological souls/core/identities/reputations/and future prospects to this monster’s every whim and wish.

While it may have begun as an angry revolt against globalization, job losses, and the “effete” Harvard graduates of the eastern establishment, this outright reverse snobbery threatens to overshadow what used to be seen as dominance by the elite 1%, without in any perceivable way diminishing the wealth and the potential political power of that elite to buy its wishes in the next election. It is, in fact, the fusion of the angry mob, (and that is really what the trump base amounts to) with the top 1% that forms such a dangerous political storm on all of our horizons. Each faction, mob and uber-rich, is drunk with its own addition to power, enabled as they both are by the complicity of the mob on one hand and the hubris of the rich on the other. The slippery mostly hidden from public scrutiny donations to political operatives who will do their exclusive and specific bidding of the extremely rich is both foil and counterpoint for the bombastic, guttural growls of the trump base, comprised largely of non-college-educated, GUN-TOTING white males whose command of nuance escaped their grasp shortly after they stopped breast-feeding.

The storm, in both physical and metaphoric terms, blows raging fires over western deserts, storm surges over tropical islands, tax evasion schemes over the eyes of reporters and legislators charged with scrutiny of the public accounts, bulldozes jerrymandering rules into neighbourhoods to restrict the vote of  poor, black and Latino communities, inflates the military budget while starving the health care and food stamp budgets to helium-corrode the ego’s of those in charge, and climbs into political “bed” with whomever (both male and female) will satisfy the insatiable lust for power that drives this machine.

And much like the crippled and negligent federal government response to the hurricane that wiped out Puerto Rico, Republican members of Congress from both houses stand, sit or run and hide, fossilized in their self-inflicted deaf-muteness. Senator Corker, in defending his bill to abrogate the tariff regime on steel and aluminum, calls it a “cult” that is afraid “to poke the bear” lest the bear will work to defeat them in November’s election. Reports indicate that some 4600 people died as a result of the calamity of the non-response in Puerto Rico. One has to wonder out loud how many Americans will die because the current administration has removed from health insurance companies all responsibility to cover individuals with pre-existing conditions. Similarly, one has to inquire how many children, potentially warehoused in a vacant Walmart in Texas, awaiting their parent’s hearing on their immigration claim, will be scarred for life, whether or not they are finally deported.

Deliberate surgical excision, under the watchful eye of the nation’s media networks, of the vaunted U.S. global “power” as the strongest, and the most honourable democracy on the planet, linked to the deliberate infusion of political steroids into the leadership of Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jin Ping, not to mention Duterte, and the Saudi kingdom, along with the testosterone injection into the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu….offers a cocktail so potent and so toxic that it is casting a pall over watercooler conversations around the globe.

With American suicides up by 25% since 2016, (another piece of reliable information to which the administration turns a  deaf ear and a blind eye) and wages remaining stagnant while stock prices zoom through the ceiling and the unemployment falls to under 4% (lowest since 2003), the tourniquet that Robert Mueller is tightening around the neck of the president can not reach its tightest position too soon.

Reason, nuance, civility, morality, political ethics and more than two centuries of American growth and leadership (not always honourable, nor peaceful) are being threatened as if they constituted the “swamp” he has promised to drain. Ironically, it is the precise trump-swamp that demands draining. Everything the man tweets, speaks, touches and orders is so tainted with fundamental noxious evil; and it appears that only he and his family (in the loose political sense, including Guiliani et al) are rooted in their blindness, cheered from the “peanut gallery” of the heartland, and financed by the behemoths of the HARD RIGHT.

Sorry to be a voice “crying” like another “john” in the wilderness!

Thursday, June 7, 2018

Revisionist history, and the fantasyland of Gatsby-esque pubescence have taken hold


A new book, Fantasyland, by Kurt Anderson, editor of Spy magazine, and a new film, Shock and Awe, by Rob Reiner, both address the current American cultural black holes from different perspectives. The former expresses the development of “conspiracy theories” primarily on the political right, while the latter delves into the work of the four Knight-Ridder reporters who “got it right” about the ‘official’ lies undergirding the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Conspiracy theories, and the tsunami of media coverage that fails to let the truth penetrate the drowning wave of government lies, both of which play a significant role in American history, now and for a long time, are legitimate subjects of investigators who seek to expose the truth.

There is another, underlying, persistent and toxic theme in American culture that could be playing a significant role in nurturing, enhancing and proliferating both conspiracy theories and lies. Call it provincialism, parochialism, or the personalization of all things political, public and public policy.

Back in grade nine, we all went through the conversations about whom to vote for, for class rep, or class president. Epithets like “she’s really smart, or she’s really cool, or he’s a really nice guy, or he’s captain of the school team” are the criteria we all used to make our choice. (Let’s also acknowledge that we also used physical attractiveness of both genders as one of our most magnetic influences!) And we told our friends, including those who preferred another person, based also on their observations and assessments of their personalities, what we were going to do when we voted. And then we voted, and some of us actually watched them ‘do things’ while they held office, judging them, less on their decisions, and more on whether or not we continued to “approve” of their “person”.

Likeability, when we were thirteen, was everything. And, all of these decades later, polls still point to “likeability” as the primary quality in voters’ choices when they go to the polls. Admittedly, “likeability” now includes things like “worthy of trust” and our answer to the archetypal question emblazoned on billboards in 1960 with Richard Nixon’s face, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Policy, however, has, for a very long time, played a very minimal role in our discernment process of our elected officials, as compared with “personality”.

As adults, we have also learned much from management guru’s about the dangers of “personalizing” our workplaces. People who are admired by the boss escape serious sanction if and when they deviate from policy or protocol. People who serve as sycophants to the boss, especially, are not merely admired, but actually encouraged, promoted and “developed” by their admiring (and self-serving) mentors.

 Bureaucracies, we all know, are rife with the toxin of obsequiousness, under the ruse and rubric of “self-protective” behaviour, given that all workers seek to protect their jobs, pave the road upward toward more responsibility with higher stipends, and even more enriched pension plans.

Just this week, the Canadian Auditor General laid the “blame” (read responsibility, accountability and professional and personal ethics) for the Phoenix pay scheme of Canadian public servants at the feet of the principle of “people refusing to bring truth to power”. Everyone in the department(s) in which this IBM-generated program was hatched, installed, and later rolled out, under both Harper and Trudeau governments, knew that it was not going to work, that it would be a disaster. And yet, those same people refused to bring that glaring insight (fact) to the attention of their bosses. The costs, in personal losses, government payouts and public confidence in public institutions are almost inconceivable, they are so exorbitant and unnecessary.

The same can be said of the costs ensuing from the debacle that was the Iraq war of 2003. The same can be said, too, of the debacle, based also on lies, of the VietNam war in the 1960’s. Scott Peck, we remember, wrote about the massacre at MyLai in People of the Lie, after searching the Pentagon in vain for the person(s) responsible for the decision to carry out this specific massacre. At that time, “group think” apparently was the best answer he could uncover.

We have become willing, compliant, sycophantic and servile accomplices to our most base instincts in our race to the bottom of our political consciousness, responsibility and final perversion of the minimal expectations and standards of democracy. We have sabotaged, sacrificed and abused the rule of law, the premise an agreed set of facts, and our willingness and commitment to elevating our perceptions, observations, judgements and evaluations of our public figures to their policy rationales and their philosophic cornerstones. Their traditional objective arguments for their proposals and their votes, both in committee and in the final votes on laws, no longer have any “authenticity” in our media, nor in our evaluations of their performance and their legitimacy, including their warrant of another affirmative vote in the next election. We have collectively, and apparently willingly and mob-like, swarmed into the “swamp” of a tabloid news outlet, possibly fitting for our grade nine mentality, maturity and the sophistication of our insights.

Our focus has shifted from policy and political theory and ethical philosophy, as  articulated in political actors who have been subjected to the scrutiny of public questioning about those highly significant, and democracy-dependent criteria, to a highly toxic, cancerous and debasing mass-dialogue of what can only be called “smut”. Just this morning, we learn from Mike Brezinski, of MSNBC, that trump is even complaining, (his most prominent complaint about life in the White House) that he cannot watch pornography in the White House.

At the same time, he denies a sexual relationship with a porn actress (to whom he paid $130,000 in silence money), sends Giuliani out to diss her appearance, dodges charges from her and her attorney of collusion with her former lawyer, defames everything “female” and snatches young children from their parents at the border.

Meanwhile, this same thug evokes a revisionist history to “blame” Canada for burning the White House in the war of 1812, decades before Canada was a nation, as if to reinforce his use of the “national security” provision to justify his latest round of tariffs on steel and aluminum. His State Department spokesperson uses the anniversary of D-Day to support her assertion of a healthy and positive relationship with Germany, conflating D-Day with the Marshall Plan, as evidence of America’s “good relationships” with allies.

Even when we were in grade nine, we were able to discern the qualitative, as well  as the historic difference between D-Day and the Marshall Plan, and the confusion of his conflated equation of the KKK and white supremacists with protesters against their blatant racism. Even when we were in our early teens, we could and would call lies, “lies”, and “BS”. And even if and when such lies and distortions were erupting from the mouths of our class “leaders” we would and could be “in their face” with our push-back.

Nevertheless, the legal, ethical, moral, and adult perspective of civility, decency, honour and the submission to the “facts”, all of them requiring a degree of humility, modesty and interaction in similar terms, have been replaced with an extremely narrow, base, immature, frightened even neurotic and potentially psychotic titillation around the most base instincts of the human race. And the media, of course, dependent for its survival and growth, on the lasciviousness and the “locker-room” stench of the adolescent football team, have become not merely willing but eager enforcers of those base instincts.

We can not look forward to emerging from this shared morass, swamp and sink-hole in our consciousness and our public accountability, (shared equally between the most visible actors and the voracious appetite of the “gutter” media and its audience.

Of course, this piece is about “class” and its absence from our public discourse, from its public utterances on social media, from its discourse between national leaders, and increasingly from its justice system. There is, after all, a chasm of difference between adolescence and mature adulthood.* And that acknowledgement is made without apology, in the hope that we, collectively and privately, can and will look into our respective mirrors, and cry, “Shame on me!”

*As for Samantha Bee's deconstruction between civility as "only words" and  policy decisions and actions, like separating children from their parents, does anyone really think that the two are not connected, that a race to the bottom, in the tone and temper of our discourse and attitude will not lead inscrutably and inevitably to a race to the bottom in policy and the debased excuses on which such policy is based?




Monday, June 4, 2018

Outcasts must be given a place at the American national table


Writing in 1923, in Studies in American Classical Literature, D.J. Lawrence penned these words:

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.

Quoted by Chris Hedges, in his column in truthdig.com entitled, The Second Sight of W.E.B. DuBois, June 4, 2018, Hedges goes on to write these words:

The pillars of American capitalism are genocide and slavery. America was not blessed by God. It was blessed, if that is the word, by processing the most efficient killing machines and trained killers on the planet. It unleashed industrial vi8ooence on its enemies abroad and empowered armed white vigilante groups and gun thugs…

Hedges continues, referencing DuBois:

DuBois warned that is times of widespread unrest, this indiscriminate violence, familiar to poor people of color and those we subjugate abroad today in the Middle East, becomes the primary mechanism for internal social control. As the empire disintegrates under unfettered corporate capitalism, futile and costly military adventurism political stagnation and despotism we will learn the truth DuBois elucidated….
Outcasts are gifted, Dubois wrote, with a “second-sight”  (behind a veil) or what he called a “double-consciousness”…. of always look at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
A black intellectual, Du Bois, posited a “veil” that blinds those of privilege and the myth of whiteness from fathoming reality or understanding themselves without these outcasts. Hedges asserts, “The more the voices of these outcasts are shut out, the more collective insanity grips the country. By silencing the voices of the oppressed, we ensure our own oppression.”

As a citizen of her northern neighbour, Canada, like most Canadians, I have struggled with the level of violence, including the dependence on violence, that has poured buckets of blood and treasure onto the pages of American history, from the beginning. And while the number of mass shootings has skyrocketed in the last two decades, and the American enmeshment in military violence, against both state and non-state enemies has deepened in the same time frame, there is the obvious core behaviour that ensues in America whenever chaos threatens, to upset the norm.

And that violence is not restricted to murder, or directly to guns; it spills over to judgements made by those in positions of power, authority, and tragically given the cultural acceptance of violence, judgements that eliminate all negative voices from the corporate scene. The “killer” archetype can be found in all professional sports, in all detective movies and television dramas, in the street vernacular “he killed it,” in the propensity to resort to guns as the single answer to gun violence, the sheer intolerance of opinions that do not conform with the expectations of the establishment, clearly a “white” edifice.

White police officers “killing” innocent young black men, seemingly almost a weekly headline, is merely the only result that can be expected from a cultural history of approved, sanctioned and fostered “killing” that pervades the American streets, television sets, movies and political rhetoric.

Those thin veneers of civility, rationality, nuanced debate and inspirational addresses like Obama’s race speech in Philadelphia during the 2008 presidential campaign, or Bobby Kennedy’s spontaneous, unscripted response immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April, 1968, or even King’s I have a dream speech, while intensely motivating and historic, and, at the end of the day, mere moments of hope, beauty, melody and public grief and reflection. Of course, they show America at her best, express the voices of her best angels, and raise the bar for all who aspire to public leadership.

However, the blood and careers of millions of human lives have been spilled through the blatant dependence on violence as the means to achieving “national interests”…If the Americans cannot succeed in the pursuit of what some consider their legitimate goals, through the “purchase” by cash, (and that expended without restraint or shame), they resort to violence, a process by which competition is effectively eliminated.
During the Cold War, a visiting professor from the Soviet Union, frequently joked that the Russian method of solving problems was a single word, “elimination”. Sadly, although the method has been adopted in the extreme by the current occupant of the Oval Office, the nation has a history, a dark history, of deploying similar tactics so often that it can be termed a “habit” a default position.

D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. DuBois, and more recently Chris Hedges, have all pointed to the core of darkness that infects the American soul.

The students of Parkland, Columbine, Sandy Hook, and the millions of innocent or marginally deviant whose lives have been permanently derailed by decisions of extreme “punishment” under the ruse of the pursuit of “justice” can and do all testify to the radioactive sinew in the American psyche and soul.

Without either recognition and ownership, and the potential of repentance at the national level, this black hole will continue to sabotage the young, families, corporations, and even the nation itself, spilling its devastation far beyond the limits of the borders of the United States of America. And the world is just now beginning to acknowledge what native Americans, outsiders, and outcasts have known for centuries.

Can these previously silenced voices from the darkness of the American forest finally be acknowledged and given a place at the national debating table?

There is little to support optimism just now.