Searching for the divine in the terror

 “Buber was convinced that the struggle to discover the divine in the terrors of history would lead to personal transformation.” (Karen Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture, Rescuing the Sacred Texts, p. 464)

Let’s take Buber at his word, and begin a meagre, yet determined, ‘dig’ for the divine in the ‘terror’ of the history of 2020.

Theologians often are asked, and also ask themselves, “Where is God in the midst of this calamity?” And, of course, answers are often posited that satisfy few if any. People suffering terminal cancer will often ask, “Why is God doing this to me..I have lived a good life and can’t understand how this can be happening?” While there is no legitimacy to the “God doing” this to me scenario from a spiritual or theological perspective, the profoundly embedded notion of our ‘sin’ and God’s displeasure with us because of our sin has taken hold of millions of hearts, minds and belief systems in the west. Similarly, many in the west conceptualize the end of life as a dark and foreboding event, especially if the event is premature, untimely and unexpected, rather than as the natural sunset of a life will lived.

While it would be a gross exaggeration to consider either of the above views as “slavery,” there is an element of cell-like convention that might be holding many from exploring other perspectives. What if, for example, the certitude of our death were to enable and ennoble creative, courageous and principled transformations in how we see ourselves, how we see others, and how we might ‘fit’ in the universe’s landscape. Dr. Martin Luther King once commented: “No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.” And another ‘Kingism’: A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.”

Even death then, from this perspective, is and can be a lens to see through and a spark to ignite purpose, definition, hope and transformation. Sounds a lot like Buber whose light continues to shine into the darkest corners of human hell.

Many clergy will also recount stories of death-bed confessions, themselves another form of transformation, epitomizing the Mark Twain quote; Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged” borrowed from Samuel Johnson’s: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Looking back over his tribe’s enslavement in Egypt and his tribe's decimation in Auschwitz and Birkenau, Buber knows full well that seeking the divine in terror is the highest calling and the greatest challenge for humans. And who are we, as humans, if not called to our highest and best challenge? And where are the most difficult questions and challenges if not in the most penetrating and off-putting darkness?

So, where is God in this moment generally conceived to be if not outright apocalyptic, then clearly verging on the apocalyptic?

§  The west coast of North America is on fire.

§  Draught, winds, and water shortages continue unabated.

§  The social congestion decimates thousands daily around the world, through COVID-19 and other co-morbidities.

§  The Gulf Coast is awash with hurricane winds and tidal surges and torrential rains.

§  The airwaves are filled with lies, deceptions, distortions and narcissistic venom.

§  The supporting sycophantic silence almost drowns out the noise.

§  The streets are becoming boarded up as stores literally stop breathing. Their workers are clinging to expiring support cheques, and frayed hopes of work or training.

§  Greenland’s ice sheets are falling into the ocean, and vessels will soon traverse the Arctic.

§  2020 is the hottest year on record and the last five years are the hottest five-year period on record.

§  The Scientific American magazine has endorsed Joe Biden in the first such presidential endorsement in its 175-year history.

Hardly a comprehensive picture, yet adequate to display two observations:

1) We are facing a climatic, biological, economic, political and ethical cliff.

2) We are also drowning in a sea of lies, and hatred, denial and narcissistic self-aggrandizement.

Are we content to be victimized by our own complicity?

Or are we prepared to shed our insouciance and prepare the path for the divine to return, not as a “white night” or a superhero or a vengeful deity, but rather in more subtle, ironic, graceful and melodic, if unobtrusive and perhaps hidden form?

Are we going to grab whatever transient and titillating “bobbles, bangles and beads” from whatever show promises the most to feed our insatiable appetite for instant gratification?

Having concentrated on our extrinsic, empirical and immediate personal needs, collectively packaged and marketing as “holy grail,” have we not bought rather a “pig-in-a-poke”.

Where is that holy grail that might actually shine light on a different human pursuit that is less immediate, far less heroic, far less military and armoured, far less rich in the cliché sense of that word and for more lasting, intrinsic, ephemeral, gender-race-religion-and-ethnicity-neutral?

Are we ready to challenge the long-held view that humans can control nature, a fallacy that has helped to make the human race concrete and immoveable to ecological concerns?

Are we ready to come to and openly express agreement with the Earth Charter that states “we can achieve a just, sustainable and peaceful global society only if we ‘care for the community of life with understanding, compassion and love’? (Armstrong, op. cit. p 480)

Are we ready to bring faith and the “holy” back into the conversation about who we are, what it is we are about, where we want to go and how we might begin the pilgrimage on that journey?

Are we ready to rejoin the humility of unknowing to the modern obsession with power and mastery, in human affairs, in our attempt to govern ourselves, and in our vain attempts to “secure” the future?

Are we ready to explore the spectre that the planet has adequate resources for the 9-billions of projected population, only if we are prepared to enact structures, systems, processes and monitors that ensure food, health care, education and work with dignity for every single person on the planet?

Are we ready to do the extremely difficult, challenging and, from the perspective of today, seemingly impossible and unachievable task of transforming not only our personal perspective on ourselves and ‘the other’ but also on our desperate need (and gift) to sacrifice our excess in favour of the authentic and lasting gifts of charity, without  patronizing, condescension and pity?

Are we ready to find within ourselves, the so-far buried empathy, (not sympathy, we are drowning in that!) and the creative expression of not only courageous philanthropics but the actual surrender of those shibboleths we have considered “sacred” that have constructed and maintained the cultural, ethnic, religious and ideological silos in which we currently live?

Are we ready to implement, first in our individual and personal circles, and then in our jurisdictions stretching into the international geo-political spheres, strategies in the fields of jurisprudence, medicine, trade, environmental protections, labour and civil rights, human rights, the cessation of production of nuclear, biological, chemical weapons, the institution of geopolitical standards and controls over cyber-security, the weaponizing of space and the sharing of intelligence with those historically deemed our hated enemies?

A final word from Ms Armstrong’s epic tome:

“Religion is often regarded as irrelevant to modern concerns. But whatever our ‘beliefs,’ it is essential for human survival that we find a way to rediscover the sacrality of each human being and resacralise our world. Perhaps we should end with an ancient text that considers what will happen when the world ‘grows old’ and an awareness of this ubiquitous holiness is no longer observed, interpreted and animated by the ritualized language that helps to create that sense of sacrality within us:

This totality so good that there neither ever was, nor is, nor shall be anything better, will be in danger of perishing; men will regard it as a burden and will despise it…No one will lift up his eyes to heaven. The prior will be thought mad, the godless wise and the wicked good. The gods will take leave of men—O painful leave-taking…

In those days, the earth will no longer be firm, the sea will cease to be navigable, the heavens will no longer hold the stars in their course; every godly voice will inevitably fall silent. The fruits of the earth will rot, the soil will be barren, and the air itself will be stale and heavy. That will be the old age of the world: the absence of religion (irreligio), order (inordinatio), and understanding (inrationabilitas)

(Armstrong, op. cit. p. 481, Reference: Hermes Trismegiste,Corpus Hermeticum, 4 vols. Ed. A.D. Nock and A. J. Festugiere (Paris, 1954) vol. 2L Asclepius 24-26: trans. In Jan Assmann, ‘Officium Memoriae: Ritual as the Medium of Thought,in Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory.)

Clearly, not a vision of life any of us want!

Facing both our failures and our shared hope TOGETHER

“Social justice was crucial to the monotheistic scriptures, and, like all scriptures, they insisted that compassion cannot be confined to one’s own group. You had to have what Mozi had called  jian ai, ‘concern for everybody’; You must love the stranger, the foreigner, even the enemy; and reach out to all tribes and nations. (Karen Armstrong, The Lost Art of Scripture, Rescuing the Sacred Texts, p. 461)

If Armstrong’s assessment, as a scriptural and comparative religion scholar rings true, and for our part, we can only say that we wish and believe it to be, then there are some other caveats attentive to her hopeful conviction:

One: we are all complicit in generating the contemporary conditions, planetary, sociological, economic, political, racial, cultural and religious in which we are all attempting to make our way.

Two: while we pour tanker-loads of ink and emit zillions of digits into exclaiming and pontificating our differences, dividing ourselves into seemingly armed camps, our commonality, while not nearly so magnetic and headline-generating, and not nearly so histrionic, nevertheless continues to uphold, undergird, sustain and offer the promise of hope for our survival.

Three: regardless of the early faith education and indoctrination of our youth, our family, our community and our church/synagogue/mosque/temple/sanctuary/monastery, we share a deep and profound consciousness of our personal, familial, communal, and national sins.

Four: While all of our faith communities hold liturgically significant dates, rituals, attire, readings, diets and venerated ‘saints’ and respecting our own rituals potentially enhances our capacity to honour those of other faiths, there is one period of time dedicated each year, in all monotheistic communities, for the need to reflect on our past deeds that hurt ourselves, and those who believed they were our loved ones, including those we do not know who were also impacted by our misdeeds. Whether it is Lent, or Yom Kippur or Ramadan, there is a deliberate need for every one of us to pause and to consider those things for which we feel deep regret, and wish to ask for forgiveness.

How we feel and think and believe about our transgressions, and how we express our confessions may have different features. Those differences, however, do not so much divide as ‘distinguish’ our faith communities. This morning, I found a prayer, written by a Rabbi Susan Talve, founding rabbi of Central Reform Congregation in St. Louis MO, that captures what might be a common theme given our shared moment in history:

(This is a confession of sins recited on Yom Kippur)

Long ago the Prophet Micah told us to hurl our sins into the sea. Now we are sinking into this sea of sins that threatens our lives as we struggle to breathe.

Sins of pollutant, the byproducts of greed that assault, making toxic the air, earth and water of our planet.

Sins of putting profit before life, breaking our bodies with systems of sick care—not health care—that serve too few.

Sins of embedded white supremacy that bruise our very souls as children remain in cages, families are separated, refugees drown in desperation, and People of Color are shot by militarized police. Black and Brown bodies as the fuel under the pot of oppression, burning with the salty tears of their mothers.

Sins of transnational colonialism that have led to genocide after genocide, with those of privilege using their power to make some lives matter more.

Sins of the legacy of slavery and discrimination that continue to exploit women and People of Color through cheap labour.

Sins that at this moment need us to do more than name them with ancient acrostics and the beating of our chests in grief—for we have cast our sins into the sea for too long.

Sins of the golden calf, that sin of certainty that we could make a god from our own hands.

Sins of the spies, who lacked the vision to move forward, to change and transform and to do more that talk about equity, equality, and justice. Making a place where the citizen and the stranger are one until there is no stranger requires us to sacrifice privilege and go beyond our comfort zones.

Sins of Korach*, leaders who care only for their own seats at the power tables, hoarding and gaining advantage at the expense of others.

Sins of hitting the rock—that momentary loss of humility, when even our beloved Moses, exhausted and afraid and in mourning for his sister, acted out of anger and beat the rock.

With our family at the Tree of Life at Mother Emmanuel, and Christchurch; with Mike and Trayvon and Tamir and Breonna and Ahmaud, and with George, and with countless others who were swallowed by these sin-filled seas of broken planet body and soul—I, too, am sinking in this sea of sin.

And I can’t breathe.

For these sins (S’lach lanu) God forgive us if we do not turn this moment into a movement for change.

(M’chal lanu) pardon our past failures to do and be better

(Kaper-lanu), lead us as we dare to be courageous and bold enough to redeem the future of our planet and humanity with fewer sins hurled into the sea

                                                                       (from ReformJudaism.org)

If any of our faith communities, their legacies, their traditions and their scholarship are to have any real, lasting and sustaining meaning and purpose in our lives, in this critical moment in the history of the world, it would seem that pausing even for just long enough to repeat the words, the thoughts and the feelings of this prayer, might offer some new insights in how each of us might begin anew to live a life in congruence and in support of those green shoots, those heroic men and women on whose shoulders we walk, those courageous and life-giving thoughts, poems, symphonies and canvases and dances that have lifted our spirits for centuries.

The simple phrase “I can’t breathe” echoes not only Lloyd George; it also echoes the thousands gasping for breath inside ventilators around the world, and the many more thousands whose gasps have gone silent under the scourge of COVID-19, and the many more thousands whose gasps for breath signalled their drowning on their desperate search for freedom from war, famine, anarchy, terror, and disease.

“I can’t breathe” also evokes the silent burning of consciences and larynxes, when confronted with the denial and the equivocation of so many complicit in the perpetuation of ravages to truth, to authenticity and to integrity.

“I can’t breathe” signals a spiritual war, not restricted to the streets of Kenosha, Portland, Chicago, Atlanta, Berlin, London, Paris, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver or even HongKong…..

While the specific circumstances may have changed from 1950 when William Faulkner delivered his speech on receiving the Nobel Prize, his words continue to inspire:

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man in immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock and hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, then even then there will still be one more sound; that of his puny inexhaustible voice still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. (nobelprize.org)

Confronting our own failures, individually, communally, nationally and certainly globally, we will be more able and willing to see that political rhetoric like “we are all in this together,’ while true, rings hollow in the echo chamber of our public discourse. Confronting them before God, however, offers a different and perhaps new perspective, and the act of humility can be the seed for compassion irrespective of our ethnicity or our faith or family tradition.

This moment must not be left to the reverberations from the political podiums, or the talking heads, or the ideological pundits. It is a moment for each of us to seize TOGETHER, in the name of and in the spirit of compassion, empathy, truth, resilience and hope. And none of these gifts are low lying psychological fruits; they are hard earned gifts of the spirit, about which the poets and the artists seek to be our shamans and our mentors. 

*Korach..the Book of Numbers tells of Korach's attempt to overthrow Moses

Reclaiming the poetic, imaginative allegory from the facticity of now

 In the last blog entry, the focus on ‘desperation’ dominated….emanating from trump’s elephantine narcissistic desperation to what speculation might lead to many other sources of desperation for individuals and nations, and even for the planet.

Supplementing Ed Yong’s “army ants” metaphor for a spiralling, unfocused, self-sabotaging circular march, absent of leadership, and morphing to what some would consider a cultural “dark night of the soul,” we are seemingly in such a dark place that only disciplined, collaborative, collegial and universal bonding at the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, economic, scientific, philosophic levels seems to offer the spectre of both direction and the reservoir of human energy that is needed to move toward the light of liberation.

Several scholars, fortunately, have scribbled some not-so-insignificant ideas that might be helpful in this moment. Although this scribe has a ‘christian’ background, experientially and cognitively, Karen Armstrong’s latest tome, The Lost Art of Scripture, Rescuing the Sacred Texts, offers illuminating insights into both the contemporary cultural ethos as well as a pathway into the “reading” of the sacred texts that bears examination.

First, Armstrong’s diagnosis:

At the root of many of our problems, global and national, is an inequality that, for all our good intentions, modern society has been unable to assuage. This has been evident in the horrific spectacle of thousands of migrants travelling in flimsy, inadequate boats from Africa and the Middle East, and literally dying ty get into Europe. In London in June 2017, seventy-two people, many of them Muslims, were buried to death in Grenfell Tower, a local-authority apartment block, because the Council of Kensington and Chelsea, the richest borough in the city, had encased the building in cheap but flammable cladding and failed to provide adequate fire-safety equipment. In the United States, the richest country in the world, a disturbing number of people still cannot get adequate healthcare. In agrarian society, the aristocracy…generally regarded their peasants as an inferior species, but at least they saw them working in their fields. But in the modest West, most of us never see the labourers who manufacture the good we are pressured to buy, and who are slaving in substandard conditions for low wages in distant impoverished countries. (Reference, Gregory Brad S. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, Cambridge <MA, 2012)

Armstrong continues:

We have become adept in blocking off such inconvenient truths and no longer allow ourselves to feel moral responsibility for others. This attitude has led to the greatest waning of political engagement and concern for social equity since the 1960s.  (Reference: Ford, Amanda, Retail Therapy: Life Lessons Learned While Shopping, York Beach, ME, 2014) Television presenters now seem to be required to warn viewers that spectacles on the evening news may be distressing, giving them the chance to close their eyes or switch to another channel lest they see yet more disturbing footage from war-torn Syria or Yemen. We have become expert in refusing to allow the suffering of the world to impinge on our cocooned existence.

Social justice was crucial to the monotheistic scripture, and like all scriptures, they insisted that compassion cannot be confined to one’s own group. You had to have what Mozi* called jian ai, “concern for everybody”: You must love the stranger, the foreigner, even the enemy, and reach out to all tribes and nations. We have now created a global market that has made us more interdependent than ever before, yet people are retreating into national ghettoes and closing their eyes to the problems of the wider world….The twentieth century saw one mass slaughter after another: from the Armenian genocide during the First World War to the Nazi Holocaust, to the massacre in Bosnia. In the West, we pride ourselves on our humanity, bur during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although we quite rightly mourned our own soldiers who died in the conflict, there was no sustained outcry about the unacceptably highly civilian casualties—ordinary people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Armstrong op. cit. p.461-2)

 One of the primary roots of social and cultural thought is the lens through which all holy texts have been read and interpreted. Throughout Armstrong’s tome, we read repeatedly that the right brain-left-brain tension prevailed, from logos to mythos, from solo ratio to what the Jews called scripture,  “...miqra (a “calling out”), rendering the exegete’s task “to penetrate the written text of the Bible and attend to what (Martin) Buber called its ‘spokenness;’….Buber rejected the idea that the divine revelation had occurred once and for all in the distant past or was simply imparting theoretical doctrines….Jews, (Buber) insisted, must not try to ‘escape from (problems) into a world of logos of perfected form.’….Buber pointed out that during their years in the wilderness, the tension between Moses and his people, who still yearned for the fleshpots of Egypt, was rooted in their desire for a more controllable God. While ‘Israel’ served the God of an open future, ‘Egypt’ was more conservative, worshipping idols that were created in the image and likeness of human beings. Scripture did not provide dogmatic certainty but,…it could enable readers to acquire a new understanding of God’s presence in history and  inspire a scholarship that was more involved in the tasks and challenges of the time. Buber was convinced that the struggle to discover the divine in the terrors of history would lead to personal transformation. Like all great midrash, his exegesis leads his readers beyond the text and into life’s dark enigmas. As an old rabbinic maxim has it: The abstract midrashic study of texts, is not the main thing, but rather the transformation of these texts, through midrash, unto sources of power for the renewal of personal and interpersonal life. (Armstrong, p. 464, Reference: Aphorism recast by Michael Fishbane, “Martin Buber’s Moses in Fishbane, Garments of Torah, 97-98)

It is the transformation of reading and interpretation of scripture (all holy books) from a rational, literal, left-brain certainty to a much more open, universal, and transformative potential that, Armstrong suggests, (and we concur) that offers the individual in all faith communities escape from the darkness of reading scripture as history. “People forgot that they were written as stories that were merely ‘history-like’ and began to regard them as wholly factual accounts, and therefore for some they became incredible…Hans Frei, (convert from Judaism, Episcopalian priest and professor of theology at Yale) argued, the person of Jesus should establish the norm by which Christians judge the world and current events….Christians therefore had a twofold task. They had to read the gospels and their history-like stories with all the critical, literary and historical acumen that they could muster. They also had to read and interpret their own times with all the historical, sociological and cultural sensibility at their disposal. Like Buber, Frei believed that the Bible should be read in conjunction with a critical interpretation of current events….Politics and the Bible should coexist in a symbiotic relationship, Frei argued, because it would prevent scriptures from becoming a convenient instrument for the clerical and political establishments. Instead of backing up their claims, scripture should call the establishment to account because the gospels were essentially subversive. Jesus’ teachings had inspired hopes and expectations in the crowds who followed him, which were then smashed but reconstituted by his resurrection. The gospels dissident ideas—about God, justice, equity, compassion and suffering—must be brought to bear on our mundane circumstances…

The American theologian, George Linkbeck, (1923-2018) came to a similar conclusion. (Reference: George Lindbeck, “Toward a Post-Liberal Theology” in Ochs, ed. 83-100, and Ochs, Peter ed. The Return to Scripture in Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation. Eugene OR, 1993)..In the monotheistic traditions –the ‘religions of the book’—the sacred text is paradigmatic but, (Lindbeck) argued this is only a problem if we distinguish it radically from other literary classics. Since the printing revolution and the spread of literacy, our inner world has been created by fragments of many different texts, which co-0inhere in our minds, one qualifying another. Our moral universe is, therefore, shaped by King Lear, Middlemarch, and War and Peace as well as by the Bible. These classics also inform our imaginations and the way we experience the world, so, whatever our faith, we have a multi-textual perspective on reality…..(In) the West, there (has) been a progressive move away from allegorising and a greater reliance on the literal sense of the Bible as well as an emphasis on intertextuality—one passage of scripture being interpreted by other biblical passages. As the ethos of the Enlightenment progressed, the old typological exegesis collapsed under the4 increasing influence of rationalistic, scientific, Pietistic and the historical-critical method, so scripture was no longer the lens through which theologians interpreted their world. Instead the Bible ill8ulminated the world, the world explained the Bible. Scripture had become itself the focus of study and traditional interpretive methods had been replaced by exegesis that prioritised facticity. This has led not only to the unhealthy literalism of fundamentalism but also to widespread scepticism.

Instead, Lindbeck concluded, the Bible should be read in a literary manner, so each text must be interpreted in a way that is consistent with its genre….Our reading of scripture…must be innovative. (Armstrong, op. cit, pp. 464-5-6)

Several times, in this space, we have, with James Hillman, bemoaned the default and decimating position of literalism, facticity, into which much of modern western culture has slipped. As in so many other aspects of North American culture, where male domination, balkanization, absolute binary conflicts and seemingly unresolvable debates have prevailed, so too, has the reading and interpretation of scripture contributed significantly, if seemingly under the radar, to the way we tend to think and to see the world.

In order to shift our orientation away from the literal and begin to take steps towards the allegorical, the mystic, the ambiguous, and the ephemeral, we must also avoid sliding into the trap of “trump’s ALTERNATIVE FACTS” imprisonment.

We need our teachers, our clergy, our reporters and journalists, to read more poetry, and to read more poetry into their perspective. When they intone only the literal facts, as supreme, and in contrast to the alternative facts of a cult, whether that cult bear the trump name, the Orban name, the QAnon name.

On September 10, 2020, La Croix International reports that the National Prayer Breakfast has awarded the Christifideles Laici (Faithful Christian Laity) award to U.S. Attorney General William Barr. The Association of U.S. Catholic Priests says that Barr is not deserving of the award. It is given to laity whose work ‘exemplifies’ the teaching of the Catholic Church and to ‘help highlight those good works  and those who serve the Church so well.’ If ever there were a miscarriage of ‘christian justice, and interpretation of the gospel, this proposed award ought to generate the outright push-back from Catholics, as it has in the case of Helen Prejean (Walking Dead).

When the National Prayer Breakfast demonstrates its demise into the trump/barr cult, based on a litany of lies, deceptions, bravado and narcissistic service to the occupant of the Oval Office, rather than to the national craving for integrity, authenticity and compassion, then it is not only Roman Catholics who shudder. The whole world shudders.

And, we have decades if not centuries of intellectual, theological and cultural rejection of the literary genres, the reliance on the human imagination and the deferral to the brittleness of so-called facts.

The current dilemma in governance cannot and must not be laid exclusively on the shoulders of one or two men. However, in order to help each of us rise above the quagmire (intellectual, spiritual, social and political) into which we have slunk, we each need to take a close look at our own social, intellectual and spiritual formation. The sources, teachers, thought leaders, epithets and slogans that have stuck to our memories and have risen to our ‘hit-parade’ of mantras…they all need to be examined critically, and soon and urgently.

The climb out of this cave of darkness will take a unifying thrust of will, of heart and of spirit….from the houses of worship, the ghettoes, the schools and colleges and the courtrooms and the legislatures around the world.

As Rahm Emmanual once said echoing the words of Stanford economist, Paul Romer, “A Crisis is a Really terrible thing to waste.”

 

*Mozi: Chinese philosopher who taught that everyone is equal in the eyes of heaven. His fundamental doctrine of undifferentiated love challenged Confucianism and became the basis of a socioreligious movement known as Mohism. (From Britannica.com)

Just how desperate are WE?

 Desperation is defined as a loss of hope, or a great need that can make you act irrationally. When you are absolutely starving and you steel a loaf of bread because you are feeling so hungry, this is an example of acting our of desperation. (yourdictionary.com)

Like many pivotal moments in human history, a single act, captured for the world to witness, gives clarity, meaning, often shame, and occasionally transformation. As what many might call a “last act” of desperation, the president of the United States, desperately, opened his mind, mouth and naivety to the recording device(s) of one Bob Woodward, he of the Washington Post and also of Watergate fame. Desperation borne of a life of narcissistic play-acting, while clinging to the belief, the absolute conviction, that everything he did was absolutely outstanding, this latest and most desperate fall for some nine hours, over eighteen phone calls, has stripped all the clothes from the ‘emperor’…leaving him, his office and especially his country gaping in horrific shame, bewilderment, denial and, for Senator Kennedy, scoffing. Kennedy refuses even to read the latest Woodward book, Rage, from which the torrent of disclosures from the mouth of the occupant of the Oval Office have been reported.

And while this spate of obsessively pursued and desperately needed psychic photographs of the man America elected president in November 2016 literally and metaphorically strips him and his administration of all pretenses to legitimacy, it signals, what for many may be an extreme, intense and embarrassing vulnerability: we are all desperate, in some way or other.

And it is our individual and our shared denial of our own desperation, at various moments in our life, that we could actually come face to face with, in this moment of national, and international existential threat.

Whether our desperation comes from our shared despair that the world will not come together to confront the looming and glaring climate crisis and global warming, that is so much a factor in the inferno that is California and a dozen other western states..

Or whether our desperation comes from our shared despair that the world continues to pursue the desperate and futile competition for more nuclear weapons, signalled by the president’s public sharing of ‘his’ latest, secret nuclear device, never before announced to the world…

Or whether our desperation comes from our having to face, both individually and collectively, the most serious and lethal pandemic for over a century, in such obviously immature, divided, selfish and even arrogant ways that we have morphed something as minimal and protective as face masks into a political statement of ‘alpha’ individuals’ and ‘wimps’…following in the rhetorical and cognitive vacuum of trump himself…

Or whether our desperation comes from our having to face one or more of the cataract of implosions of job loss, divorce, eviction, COVID-19 itself, and the prospect that needed assistance, like nutrition for children from school programs will never return while facing a government that has turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to providing basic support According to Schumer, Democratic Minority Leader in the U.S. Senate, McConnell (Majority Republican Leader in the Senate) has said publicly that twenty (20) of his Republican colleagues in the Senate absolutely refuse to vote for any bill that will provide additional assistance to thus living on the edge .

Or whether our desperation comes from facing co-morbidity issues, in our own life or in the life of a family member, without confidence that needed medical care is or will be available in order to facilitate either or both a recovery or a peaceful and stress-free passing…

Or whether our desperation comes from watching a western culture, formerly supported by the strength, the creativity and the ambition of the United States’ economy and political system which lies gasping for breath on the floor of the Oval Office, the offices of the Department of Justice, the ravages of the tatters of environmental protections eviscerated by the Environmental Protection Agency, or in the classrooms of the United States public education system, gutted of essential funding by its current Secretary DeVos, or in the gaping divide between the executive and legislative branches of government, not to mention the total ennui rampant in the Pentagon, and in the National Security former bastion of intelligence….

Or whether our desperation comes from watching false promises, deceptive contracts, inflated egos and desperate leaders scheming and executing the poisoning of high-profile opponents, with both impunity and apparently international immunity, given the spinelessness of the world’s international governance bodies, like the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Bank ….

Or whether our desperation comes from watching the streets of our towns and cities vacuum onto their plate glass faces the plywood boarding that normally appears only in the face of a hurricane or a tornado, only this time, they face permanent closure because they have lost hope and confidence that they can or will recover from the pandemic shut down…

Or whether our desperation comes from our former, and even original family history that for many included and was even centred on a faith community whose pillars of both belief and personnel are themselves lying breathless on the beaches of our formerly committed hopes, prayers, and even dreams in an ethic that reached even the most desperate among us, only to watch the hierarchical eyes, ears and even heart turn upward to the elites whose cheques they desperately sought for their own resumes…

Or whether our desperation comes from our daily diet of what we call news, all of it sliding quickly into the quicksand of gossip, character assassination, and ‘gotcha’ headlines in order to inflate ratings in order to generate advertising revenue,

OR whether our desperation comes from what can only be diagnosed as the ‘stench’ of verbal garbage that pours out of many if not most of the social medial platforms, throwing grenades of gossip, innuendo, jealousy, revenge, threats and even outright death threats as the ‘public access’ to these megaphones emboldens especially the most desperate among us…

Or whether our desperation comes from the attempt to digest what are primarily band-aids, and those primarily of  a public relations nature, substituting for serious legislation in even the most democratic and allegedly enlightened parliaments like Great Britain, Canada, France, and Italy…leaving the current U.S. administration our of this picture

Or whether our desperation comes from the spectre of millions of refugees currently encamped in bulging tents, hovels, boats, and streets starving, cold, hopeless, and desperate in a way that none of the rest of us can even begin to imagine, while “elected” leaders throw up walls, barbed wire fences, staffed with hungry dogs, and with security personnel, to preserve the ethnic purity of their respective nations. And we all know that such “nationalist nihilism” is another desperate act of those who can flex their muscles, while the ordinary folk gape in despair, without even denting the iron-clad will of those despots.

Or whether our desperation comes from our individual capacity to envision a personal role for each of us, in an authentic commitment to a legitimate and glaring social justice campaign, on behalf of our neighbours whose capacity and resources preclude their own ambition to take responsibility for their plight….

Or whether our desperation comes from watching those we considered honourable, and tolerant and inclusive and visionary become enmeshed in the minutiae of managing their own public image that they have lost sight of the public needs, and the public legitimacy and the public contract to which they have been assigned…

Or whether our desperation comes from noting the desperation of even the most highly educated and the most talented among us flounder in their own desperation, clinging to a false notion that they “know” both what they are doing and where they want to go, while all the while projecting their self-loathing onto those they endear most and those who also endear them as well…

Or whether our desperation comes from the reductionism of both language and perception to the basal level of human interaction as defined by mere transaction, in which each person is determined to ‘win’ while the other automatically has to lose…in what has become a zero-sum game in which we all lose…

Or whether our desperation comes from the fear of unknowing and thereby speculating that everything that we and our forebears built in what we like to think was a reasonable and sustainable and life-supporting civilization is crumbling under our feet, with the weight of insouciance, greed, ambition, profiteering and the refutation of compromise, collaboration, and even basic, except as narrowly defined legally, ethics and morality…

Or whether our desperation comes from the sheer weight of knowing how we human beings are laying waste the planet, invading the habitats of nature’s wild life, in order to feed that insatiable appetite for conquest, for power, for profit and for immediate gratification, on a corporate, capitalist and unleashed and unfettered law of the jungle, to which one either joins or is left behind…

Or whether our desperation comes from the kind of war that characterizes much of the conventional public attitudes on the potential relationship between the genders, the ethnicities, the religions, the races, the generations and the have’s and have-not’s….

If we seem to be at war, and if we seem to be, collectively and increasingly individually, careless and carefree about how we treat each other in the face of a lethal pandemic, and the planet is suffering from the desperately irresponsible attitudes, beliefs and decisions of leaders like trump, who have put the markets ahead of the science of holding the pandemic at bay, and if we are determined to grab whatever shiny image of the moment, the hook-up, the latest drink, toke, shoot-up, the momentary photo-op of the self-proclaimed protective vigilante, at 17 with his own AR-15, and then turn that misguided child, himself desperate for attention and acclaim, into a poster-child for the right wing….and if we are cut off from the people and the details of whatever it is that they might be thinking and why they might be thinking those thoughts….

Then there is little need to wonder that we are individually, communally and collectively feeling more desperate than most of us have felt, probably since the end of the Second World War….

As in a divorce, which is like and unlike a death, there is no funeral; today there is no formal declaration of war, in the historic sense of that word, and there will be no formal treaty signed signifying some collaborative and collective commitment to share responsibility and intelligence, and creativity and productivity for new ways of facing our shared future. There are no Marshall Plans to underwrite the plight or refugees in Jordan, for example; there are no signs that anything remotely similar to the Paris Accord will replace that document on the environmental front; there is no prospect of a U.S. renewal of its commitment to the Iran Nuclear Accord; there is no international accord to address the shared and desperate plight of the world economy and the nations’ economies, demonstrating that rugged individualism, the survival of the fittest, and the law of the jungle has replaced most legitimate and formerly respected and honoured statesmanship on the international stage, and among those who share responsibility for offering example of leadership that can and will keep hope alive.

Never mind elevating our expectations beyond what can be delivered reasonably and responsibly; as Biden exhorts his presidential opponent, so too we exhort the leaders of the world’s think tanks, newsrooms, university lecture halls, science labs, and political theatres “JUST DO YOUR JOB!”

We are exhausted and despairing that any future that breathes clean air, and drinks clean water, and feeds the hungry and educates the masses, and thrives on the blessing of such normal and legitimate and minimal requirements is slipping out of our grasp. Ed Yong describes the United States as a colony of “army ants” moving around in circles without focused leadership, without any conviction and without hope, in the midst of this pandemic. It is not a stretch to extend his picture to the global scene in an ironic and tragic replica of America leading the world, only in the wrong direction…

Are we all, like Jong’s army ants just turning and turning blindly in circles that spiral downwards into our own demise?

Or, will a world leadership team, comprising some of those still available on the sidelines, still vigorous, still mentally acute, still creative and courageous and still available find both the motivation, the encouragement, the support and the endorsement of their peers both to recognize that we all need their help, their best efforts and their design of a future that holds some promise that it will sustain and grow the lives of our grandchildren and their grandchildren?

Names like Obama (x2), Bush, Merkel, Cameron, Blair, Brown, Miliband, Lewis, Mulroney, Martin, Chretien, Kissinger, Rice, Powell, Gates, are just a few of those we need to come off the sidelines, and into the front pages into the lecture halls, into the book stores, and into the television studios….

PLEASE!

Misandry, finally laid bare for both men and women!

News Flash:

From theguardian.com, September 8, 2020, byline Alison Flood, here is the headline:

Moi les hommes, je les deteste

“French book I Hate Men sees sales boom after government adviser calls for ban”

And the sub-head reads:

Ralph Zurmely, who advises the gender equality ministry, says Pauline Harmange’s ‘ode to misandry’ should be withdrawn for inciting hatred.

Paragraph two of the piece explains:

Pauline Harmange’s Moi les hommes, je les deteste explores whether women ‘have good reason to hate men,’ and whether ‘anger towards men is actually a joyful and emancipatory path if it is allowed to be expressed’…..
Harmange, a 25 -year-old activist from Lille, said the book is an invitation to women ‘to imagine a new way of being, to take less account of the often unsupported opinions of men, to consider the adage ‘it is better to be alone than in bad company’ seriously, and to rediscover the strength of female relationships full of reciprocity gentleness and strength.

As one septuagenarian birthed by a misandrist, and subsequently reared by that same misandrist (to the silent complicity of a passive-aggressive husband, my father), I can attest to the notion that such deeply imbedded imprinting, vacillating from excessive indulgence to equally excessive and oppressive abuse, leaves deep scars, analogous to undiagnosed tumors, without the currently available CTScans, or MRI’s or even physically symptoms except skin rashes from stress.

This is not a pity party! It is rather a authentically welcome response to the fact that the word “misandry” has finally hit the public square, from the pen of a courageous woman, and not from the keypad of male mysogynist. Had it emerged from a misogynist male, it would have provoked screams of additional hatred, contempt, and perhaps even violence. Men are legitimately loath to criticize their female counterparts, and is it that precise “self-gagging” (some would call it passive aggression) that could feasibly be adjudged to be a contributing factor to the misogyny that confronts millions of women around the world. Men, like my father, who categorically refused to argue with, confront, honestly disagree with or even to amend the thoughts, words, attitudes, beliefs and feelings of their female partners, have failed those same partners for centuries. And, in order of the hierarchy of the objects of misandry, as advocated by Ms Harmange, I would propose that passive aggressive men would/could rank near the top of her list.

Why do men prefer silence, and the essentially burying of their emotions deep in their bodies, minds and hearts, rather than letting them flow freely into the vortex of intimate relationships? There are several potential reasons, not be rejected as mere excuses, for this apparent preference. As our family’s physician put it, when I challenged him that men could learn to name and express their emotions, “Oh John, but women do it so much better than men!” To which I blurted, “Who is making it a competition Howie?... certainly not the women, but you have just done that!”

 The relevance and the ‘health’ of acknowledging one’s emotions, and then sharing them with a female partner, is for most western men a step too far. It is an engagement in which too many men consider themselves “unarmed” and “unprepared” and thereby already a victim and loser before the uttering of the first word. Similarly, physical pain, unless it is so dire and unbearable that it cannot be ignored or denied, musts be borne stoically, preferably in silence, and certainly without seeking medical assistance. Some men go so far as to call it the ‘code’ of masculinity, defining men as strong, invulnerable and thereby heroic, in a mythical mind-set that believes “that is what women want”!

Myth-busting is desperately needed among both men and women. Men need to awaken to the lies  in which we/they are steeped like ageing wine, shedding the perversity of “faux invulnerability” for the far more sustainable and relateable sharing of fears, insecurities, neuroses and even nightmares and worse-case scenarios. Women, on the other hand, need to acknowledge that some (perhaps far more than has ever been documented) actually do hate men, and that hatred need no longer be perpetrated, silently, secretly, surreptitiously and lethally on the men in their lives.

While my mother’s contempt for men, born out of her disdain for her father’s premature marriage to another woman a bare six months following her mother’s death, was visceral, clearly displayed, overt, verbal and physical, as well as emotional and frequently ice-cold silent, many women whose lives have crossed my path have been much more secretive, surreptitious, and at least this man was inordinately and tragically unprepared for their assaults. I have known and worked with women who disclosed, after a period of growing acquaintance, “I literally destroy men!” Even my own father’s confronting his own suicide by .22, demonstrated his conviction that he no longer wanted to continue living. Similarly, his own father’s physical attempt at suicide burned its image in his young adult psyche, after he found him and cut him down. And, no doubt, that image never really left my father’s memory! Did my grandmother, too, hate men? I will never know as reports from two aunts repeated “we never saw our parents even argue, ever” whenever the subject of family history came up.

The self-loathing capacity of both men and women, who for various and complex ‘reasons’ are unable to see and to value their/our own worth, is a seed planted in the genetic code and nurtured by the parenting of those who, themselves, too often bear a burden of self-loathing and self-contempt from their own lives. It is not rocket science to connect the dots of “the original fall” from Genesis, as interpreted by a plethora of Christian denominations, over the centuries, and the desperate need for redemption, through conversion, to the plague of self-loathing that infests the underbrush of western culture.

I have no evidence for or justification to speculate that Ms Harmange, herself, is expressing an unconscious stream of self-loathing through and in her latest essay. Projection, after all, is a common shared dynamic among all human beings, regardless of our gender, our background, our ethnicity, our religion or our political ideology. I can however, without fear of contradiction, assert that many of the women in my experience who hated men were also infected by a considerable degree of self-contempt. And, of course, it is not only conceivable, but likely, that such self-loathing arose from experiences involving men, fathers, brothers, neighbours, uncles, teachers, clergy, doctors, who treated those women/girls in an unacceptable and demeaning manner. There have been cultures developed mostly by men around the macho, alpha male mantra, model and archetype, primarily to protect and incubate their/our very fragile ego’s that they/we dared not display in front of any woman in whom we might be interested.

Distant fathers who buried themselves/ourselves in our work, in our careers, in our hobbies, boats, cars, games, hunts, vacations, too, have sometimes inadvertently, but certainly not less insidiously, imposed a degree of emotional damage simply because we were not present for our children. This emotional abandonment may have impacted our daughters more than it might have our sons, although that too may remain another of those masculine secrets begging for formal research. Naturally, it will take several ice-ages for men to open up to those researchers/counsellors/mentors in order to ‘dig’ up sufficient evidence of generations of repressed masculinity.

Fathers whose own self-loathing laid the burden of projection on their children to be “perfect” to be “heroic” to be “stars” and, too often unconsciously, imprinted an ineradicable perception and belief that the child would never ever be good enough. There are no bruises, and no cuts, and not blood or broken bones need emergency room mending from such psychic wounds. And the “conservatives” among us will cry “Nanny state!” if and when they hear or read such observations. They were raised in ‘tough love’ and emotional abandonment was effective in developing self-reliant, self-assertive and self-aggressive and independent adults, the backbone of the capitalist system, they argue.

There are other paths to child abuse by fathers who need to demonstrate their own “worth” by competing with their peers in providing, (indulging) their children with too much affluence, too much stuff and too much status, in order to compete with the children of other ambitious, competitive, usually macho and driven fathers. This ‘show’ only debases the desired and hard-wired concept of authentic relationships, a wiring from birth that knows no ideology, religion, psychology or political and social status. This path can and often does swerve into the parent who choses to be a “buddy” a “pal” or a “brother” of the child, whether that child is a son or a daughter.

For Ms Marmange to be able and willing to put into print her open, honest and courageous contempt for men, as another way to release the truth from all women, who themselves, may have been holding back on acknowledging such hatred for fear of being labelled a bitch or worse, is both commendable and historic. Will such female courage and insight prompt men, on the other hand, to come face to face with their/our misogyny? This misogyny leaves the hands and the reputations of all men in tatters because so many of our fathers, brothers, uncles, and even and especially our current leaders behave in a manner that can only be characterized as contemptuous and contemptible. Will men be able and willing to risk the backlash that will inevitable, like a storm surge, threaten to drown those very courageous and sensible and sensitive men who care deeply about the future of masculinity, and especially of the prospect of relationships with the female gender that speak only of respect, dignity, honour and trust.

After all, in a personal and cultural climate of such hatred, most of it virulent expressions of self-loathing, unmasked as violence, bigotry, hatred and ignorance, can the secret ignorance of self-denial, self-contempt and fear be finally exposed for the universality and indiscriminate prevalence with which it infects most of us?

Can we see the guns we fire at those we consider our hated enemies, and the fire-bombs that we explode on our streets, and the tear-gar cannisters that we throw at our neighbours and the lethal verbal assaults we tweet about our political, religious, economic, ethnic, and historic targets of our contempt as launched missiles of denial, vaunted and privileged ignorance, both of ourselves and of the other?

Rather than fomenting further gender wars, might it be possible that Ms Harmange has ignited a candle of peace, and of deep and profound inquiry into the buried gifts of both male and female psyches desperate for both release and for tentative exposure after centuries of being locked in dark caves of silence?

In each of us, anger is brewing, and for each of us that anger has its own unique and never-ending spring. And that anger, while providing clarity and conviction about some of those ‘things’ and ‘people’ and situations with which we no longer wish to associate, can also boil over into serious damage and lethal punishment on others. Expressing honestly that we carry anger, directed to any one or more of several targets, be they individuals or selected categories, can release us to the next steps in our growth and development. For that gift of leadership and courage, we thank Ms Harmange.

And now, can both men and women begin the long and arduous process of a dialogue born out of mutual awareness and confidence that we need each other, not necessarily as intimate partners, but certainly as social justice-seekers and activists. And if and when we can neutralize the gender aspect of our various contempts, in favour of a collaborative and anger-inspired commitment to see new ways of preserving the planet, and of respecting the dignity of all men and women, and of reducing our dependence on military power and ideologies based on hate and zero-sum beliefs, then this could be revisited as a new beginning.

Moi, les femmes je ne les deteste pas!  

Mais, moi-meme, je me deteste quelquefois! 

Witnessing the deliberate deconstruction of truth, trust and community

 “Patriot Prayer”…another oxymoron if I heard of one! No deity is a nationalist, for any country, nor for any patriot. No god can be squished into a box that has borders fitting the United States, or any other nation. And for those invoking God, while marching with an AR-15 down the street, there really no hope to penetrate their sensibilities, nor their cognition. And for a chief executive to pervert the danger of the 17-year-old, at the hands of a young man with a skateboard, is not only just another of trump’s millions of lies. It is a litmus test for the presidency and whether such a person is really ‘fit’ for the office.

In another life, I attempted, sensationally unsuccessfully, to serve as a clergy in a denomination commonly referred to as “God’s chosen frozen.” The incompatibility of my presence with the people in the pews, no both sides of the 49^th parallel, over a period of a decade or more, has only become glaringly evident with the passing of time. Ostensibly assigned to parishes on life support, I guess I was expected to ‘breath life’ back into the comatose community. And while I was neither trained to resolve nor was I supported by officialdom in these several exigencies, I blundered on, until, one by one, I had to withdraw.

Ecclesial emergencies, like many human trips to the emergency room, arise after protracted period of neglect, denial, avoidance, and outright irresponsibility, on the part, not only of the patient but also of the circle around that patient.

·        A liturgical clergy suicide, after a prolonged and vague yet strident  episcopal ‘directive’ to the incumbent to fill both pews and coffers,

·        a dead dog shot by a departing cleric, who then turned the gun on the dog owner in the middle of a conflict swept under the diocesan rug and hidden from the neophyte deacon,

·        the vacuum ensuing after the departure of a thirty-seven-year cleric’s tenure, a man absolutely resistant to mentoring his successors

·        a smouldering parish conflict about how to transition from an atrophying building into a renovation or a ‘strip mall,’

·        a dying mission with a half-dozen desperate seniors, after a two-year, fruitless advertising campaign for a clergy

Diagnosing the situation, from the vantage point of two decades’ later, however, is far different from walking into the various situations, unknown, unaccompanied, unsupported, without appropriate orientation, guidance, and hierarchical support. And whether even now any diagnosis is full, comprehensive and capable of offering light and peace and hope (three of the more significant ideals of the Christian church) remains a mystery.

Undisclosed to church officials was a litany of conflicts from my childhood, preserved in the secrecy of a locked memory vault. They included:

ü My own adolescent theological and spiritual divorce from a fundamentalist, evangelical, bigoted, protestant theology inseminated, gestated and delivered in Northern Ireland before being imported to an already conservative, anti-Roman Catholic Presbyterian church in central Ontario

ü my rejection of such vacuous bromides as “If God had not wanted us to smoke, He would not have put tobacco on the earth!” (from my mother, when confronted about her DuMaurier cigarettes, in our family kitchen when I was 13), and

ü losing a debate inside the church whose resolution read: Resolved that Christians should be part of the secular culture, in which I defended the affirmative

The running narrative of physical and emotional abuse experienced by both my sister and me cultivated, at least in me, both a high level of suspicion of those in authority and a capacity to keep secrets from the ‘outside world’. I had personal experience of the abuse of scripture by a clergy, for his own ideological, contemptuous and control needs. I also gleaned from my father, a member of session in that Presbyterian church, that born-again, self-righteous, sycophantic acolytes of the evangelist were frozen and locked into a narrow, literal, unforgiving and intolerant praxis of their faith. They were armed and resistant to dialogue, and clearly to any other point of view than their own. It was as if they suddenly belonged to what today we would call a right-wing cult, of a kind of religiosity and certainly to a charismatic rock-star personality.

 

Another inescapable reality about such hard-assed, frozen, and self-righteous primarily men seemed to be then, and has continually been observed in many venues since, is that such men are both deeply insecure, profoundly dependent on a perspective of reality that includes no ambiguity, no greyness, no uncertainty and no perception of wrong-doing. While not exclusive to right-wing, fundamentalist religion of whatever faith, their ‘brand’ can be found in corporations, schools, universities, colleges, and certainly in churches and in the political arena.

 

Like Leningen’s ants, too, they breed through both genetics and role-modelling, others, again predominantly men, but certainly a fair number of females. They offer a simplified, almost caricatured version of reality, around which they believe they can put their arms, physically, emotional and especially cognitively. They have an inflamed sense of their own ‘righteousness’ and that flame renders them obvious choices for those seeking to “convert” others to a kind of passion, dedication and compliance among others. Their vision of utopia has to include a world in which each has brought a ‘quota’ of converts into the fold, as their chosen path to eternal life in heaven, where the streets are paved with gold.

Gullible, naïve, twisted and excessively needy, (there is no need to be clinical) these men, regardless of their specific personal choice of a faith path, are also susceptible to any charismatic, ideologue, and his ideology or ‘brand’ as a refuge from the insufferable angst of unknowing. Not only as they averse to not knowing, they are also averse to any other view that might challenge their superior and almost ‘holy’ perspective of what is right and wrong.

They will even go so far as to contort facts to fit into their crucible of perception/values/identity/faith so that they can maintain and sustain their seat on the pedestal of purity. And such contortion and such charisma and such sheer size of their numbers, both in bodies and in dollars, all converge in a compelling gestalt of intensity. Taken together, they are literally and metaphorically like a swarm of locusts currently devouring vegetation in central Africa.

In North America, they are voraciously devouring all political opponents, the major media outlets, the evidence of their own wrong-doing, as well as the methods and procedures, rules and regulations that permit and enable the exposure of their wrong doing. And not only are they doing these horrific things, by compulsively adhering themselves to the bodies and the “ephemeralities” of multiple conspiracy theories that depict their enemies as child molesters who drink the blood of the very children they molest.

And, of course, these falsehoods are not only so compelling and so repulsive, like magnets with the power to attract the most vulnerable, they are finding sycophants in many countries. And they link their converts to anything objectionable to their perceived pursuit of freedom, such as the wearing of masks. Making this a personal, political choice, however, negates the core truth that when I wear a mask I protect you first and me second from the vagaries of COVID-19. And for such highly insecure mouths as trump to cheer-lead for not wearing masks, for Patriot Prayer, and for QAnon’s twisted and perverted lies, as millions actually contract the virus, and hundreds of thousands have died, with many more to follow, is a flag of a kind of danger that threatens people everywhere.

If a vacuous ideologue in Washington can drum up the millions of dollars to campaign for a second term, for which he is blatantly unfit, and find sycophantic cult followers for conspiracy theories like QAnon in Berlin and in Holland, without a shred of evidence of the truth of the beliefs being espoused, and then other vacuous, insecure oligarchs/ideologues join the same movement, what are the many, grave and effectual steps the rest of the world can and will take to help to dissolve such movements.

Mysterious, anonymous, twisted, perverted, unproven allegations, inferred character assassinations, and the natural inclination to dismiss such quacks as not worthy of official attention, are all features that converge in what can only amount to a massive collision, at first ideationally, and potentially ultimately physically.

Already we know that trump is fomenting violence in the streets of Portland, through “Patriot Prayer” and he has wondered out loud about whether his “saviour” status as QAnon’s cult hero is a good or a bad thing, and he has perverted the street violence in the U.S. as Biden’s America, when he sits in the Oval Office, and it is really trumps’ America….But is it only America that he and his growing cult following seek to dominate?

Is the rapid-fire of lies, deceptions, arrogance, conspiracy theories, cult-followers and propaganda-purveyors threatening many more acres, minds, hearts and geographies than the current spate of forest fires sweeping across California, Colorado and the west coast?

I have already met too many people who remind me both of the “officials” deeply drowning in denial of the seriousness of the political, environmental, biological, and economic existential threats we all face. And there are also too many so-called ‘educated’ who have also dug their heads into the sand of denial, in their absolute rejection of providing social service workers to police departments, in their denial of including emotional and mental health care in the establishment budgets, and of contending adamantly, that theirs is the right and the only correct position on ideology.

And they claim their self-righteous perch by defaming all those with whom they disagree, including even now the scientists, the visionaries, and the poets and the prophets whose vision of how and society and a culture might begin to operate by opening the closed minds that consider themselves the “preservers” and the custodians of the “tradition” of how they inherited, or clambered their way to their status and their influence.

Long ago and far away, I felt the unmistakeable imprimatur of a neurotic charismatic bigoted and self-righteous ideologue, masquerading as an evangelist, in a small town in Ontario. And I now feel his hate and his need for power and control in pressed blue suits, behind microphones, under the spray of narcissistic fireworks and I see the banners of sycophancy sprouting in places beyond the borders of North America, as distrust, deception, lies, conspiracies seed the new cultural garden in which our grandchildren will be expected to attempt to survive.

I fear for their plight!