We can't prevent what we refuse to predict..and obsessively deny

 I recall a pungent response from Graeme Gibson, in a Q/A with senior high school students when asked if he endorsed “dissecting” a poem, as was/is? the custom in English classes: “You have to murder in order to dissect,” he calmly answered.

I was reminded of Gibson’s pithy retort when I read this quote from                       K. M. Mac Aulay (author of Black Anna):

“You can’t prevent what you can’t predict.”

Reconnoitering in a world seemingly at a tipping point on so many issues, however, tends to bring their collective impact into a kind of gestalt. We spend billions on trying to ameliorate, calm and even minimize our fears, while we also spend billions on something we call “carpe diem” (“pluck the flower of this day) in an oscillation of tension without formal sound, a vacillation without formal acknowledgement, a pin-ball bouncing without the flashing lights and razzle-dazzle percussions.

In one ear we hear words of warning of impeding disaster on the COVID-19 file, as numbers of cases and deaths climb, of other disasters like global warming and climate change, business disruptions and closings, unemployment and hunger rising exponentially, of cyber attacks on both public and private servers by amateur and criminally professional hackers, of nuclear capability enhancement in North Korea and Iran, (not to mention the U.S. Russia and China), of more predictable pandemics coming,  and of permanently damaged young minds and spirits from having to go through this wind tunnel of a year, and even the ‘score’ of years in this century.

Simultaneously, in our other ear we hear the drum beat of opportunity, promise, challenge and ‘pots of gold’ at the end of many rainbows. Never before have so many been educated to this level; never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty; never before have so many global diseases been curtailed or even eliminated; never before have so many philanthropics operated in developing countries; fewer open conflicts have happened in the last decade that previously; never have so many agents co-operated in the pursuit and production of safe and effective treatments and vaccines for the pandemic.

Those high-octane headlines find similar warnings and rainbows in more local and regionalized public discourse: never has political rhetoric been so mean-spirited, divisive and contemptuous; never has there been so much collaboration among various jurisdictions ( in Canada) to confront COVID-19; never have food banks been so besieged by new hungry and hopeless families; never have there been more millionaires and billionaires; there must be a financial assistance package for displaced workers and shuttered businesses and for struggling municipalities and public services; “let them go bankrupt” comes from those on the other side.

Advocacy groups, including even those seemingly dedicated to social and political upheaval, metaphorically represent the tip of the spear on the left and the right. And, daily and even sometimes hourly outbursts of tweets jar those longer-term perceptions and the developed (and evolving) attitudes towards each person, tweet, headline or even cyber attack.

The flowing now has issues and processes that together comprise a weather pattern of a political culture and ethos. And increasing attention paid to the “weeds” of the “process” currently under consideration by the media, by CNN, by social media vacuums millions of eyes and thumbs into the cataract of public ‘opinion’. Swimming in this white water of public consciousness are political and media talking heads, some of whom have some of our respect while others lag far behind for each of us.

Falling headlong into the melee, however, by both those elected and those charged with reporting and analysing and interpreting, offers opportunity for ordinary people to latch onto whichever headline, opinion, stupidity, or calamitous “event” and whether consciously or not, package that stimulus (insult, outrage, affirmation) into the cognitive archive of our personal storage vault. Currently, the Democratic Senators are swimming (underwater on their prospects for derailing Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court) against the current in a valiant effort to solicit phone calls and emails to Republican Senators to withdraw/recuse/vote “No” on the nomination. And for many, both in the political class as well as in the media, the process has become the primary issue.

“How” something is done, or being done, or proposed to be accomplished has replaced a former concentration on what is being done/proposed. Relying on the majority of Republican Senators to confirm the nomination, McConnell knows that his legacy is intimately and eternally linked to his boast of ‘filling the judicial system’ with ‘right wing’ conservative justices at all levels. For his part, trump too is relying on a similar “accomplishment” both for re-election and for a triumphal legacy.

The voting process, itself, has become another of the many issues being weaponized, just like the rhetoric, the sycophancy, the push-back from centre-left Democrats. Removing ballot boxes from twelve to one, in each county, as the Governor of Texas has done (with now court support), along with emboldened restrictions of voting hours, timing of ballot reception, identification of voters, and even the question of whether mail-in ballots are legitimate are all like those tin roofs and neon signs that blow through towns and villages during recent hurricanes, flying through the political ether and ethos, in what has become a recurring, repeating, throbbing heart-beat of crises, much of it engineered, like those Wonky chocolate bars, by the trump’s fantasy and whim.

Unlike Wonka, however, trump is injecting his own venomous and toxic, unproven and untested, yet gullibly showered with glib adulation by his cult, “cure” for what he perceives as the American threat, if Joe Biden is elected.

Sugar-coated as his venom surely is, there are still some 40% of the American people who rush each time he holds a public, non-masked, non-socially-distanced super-spreader, to fill the tarmac, where Airforce One too often (and in complete disrespect for both tradition and respectfully practice) serves as backdrop to his Reifenstahl-inspired and Fuehrer-like narcissisistic hollow promises and self-congratulatory hymns.

Embodying the “entertainment” dictum and dogma of Barnum and Bailey, The Smithsonian magazine trumpets:

 “We are enraptured by scoundrels. They showcase our passion for ingenuity and resourcefulness. Rules don’t matter in a culture that constantly reinvents itself. In the world of flimflam, con artists are American prototypes who exemplify the land of opportunity, . Aren’t we all searching for the trickster Wizard at the end of the yellow brick road?...In an interview with The New York Times, costume designer Michael Wilkinson said, ‘We wanted the actors to use their  costumes as part of their hustle. They dress as the person they aspire to be.’…In the mid-19^th century, the con artist was featured in Herman Melville’s last published book,  The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. Set in a riverboat travelling  down the Mississippi River, the 1857n novel tells the tale of what happens when the Devil, dressed in disguise, boards the vessel to conduct the business of evil. Melville wrote this book because he was outrages at the way America was allowing capitalism to nurture a culture of greed. The Confidence-Man is a complicated diatribe, but New York Times critic Peter G. Davis phrased it succinctly in a 1982 magazine article stating that the book was a ‘microcosm of America’s melting pot…a loosely knot collection of fables’ in which the title character uses his guile to dupe each passenger on the riverboat. In each instance, the Confidence Man/Devil works a con against the nineteenth century American Dream of optimism, truth, altruism and trust.’…Mark Twain, too, took up the art of the con. Like Melville, he used Mississippi riverboats to stage the antics of his flimflam men…One of the greatest (con men), P. T. Barnum was the real deal. According to a 1973 biography, Barnum was the pioneering impresario of ‘humbug’ who helped invent mass entertainment; his mantra was to exploit the public’s desire to be flimflammed. From the 1840’s to the 1870’s, he organized popular New York museums that showcased ‘industrious fleas, automatons,, jugglers, ventriloquists, living statuary tableaux, gypsies, albinos, fat boys, giants, dwarfs, rope dancers…He wrote that the art of the ‘humbug’ was to put on ‘glittering appearances…novel expedients, by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear.’ Novelty and ingenuity were essential to his commercial success, his biography said, and if his ‘puffing was more persistent, (his0flags more patriotic’ It wasn’t because of fewer scruples, but more ingenuity. The glitter and noise created outside his museum drew crowds. Once inside they could be entertained fort hours by his displays, but they had to pay to get in—no one got something for nothing.

Fitzgeralds’ The Great Gatsby, the Broadway sensation, Show Boat, and Gone with the Wind, all enhanced the ‘confidence man’ archetype, as was the 1973 Robert Redford’s The Sting, set in the Depression of 1936. Of course, Madisson Avenue’s over-riding industry, advertising and message-management, have adopted and refined many of the confidence-man, flim-flam. So, while statistical research, data collection and opinion polls flood our press-release-saturated media, roiling underneath the public discourse is the heart-beat, and the obsessive-compulsive neurosis/psychosis of a culture always on the edge of its own self-doubt, anxiety and fear that it will never be OK.

Dressing the cover-up, confidence-man, flim-flam heroic imitator of Barnum in an Oval Office suit, with ‘patriotic’ red-flag tie riding below his belt, and then sending him out to ‘perform as the chief executive of the American political, economic, military, and human welfare history and constitutional system, however, is like my kindergarten daughter dressing herself and her friends in their fantasy costumes, with stage props, on a Saturday afternoon, for their (and their parents’) entertainment, except that we could laugh and applaud at their imaginative creativity.

In this current political pandemic, we are left to social-distance, masked and sanitized, for our own and for the health of our neighbours, and then to ponder how it is/was/will be that the flim-flam actually holds the power and influence of the previously and historically most significant public office on the globe…and more importantly how all those forces that consider this situation intolerable and unsustainable, not to mention unethical, amoral, and (racist, misogynistic, homophobic, bigoted and despotic) might be brought into a voting majority that cannot and will not be overturned by either the Electoral College or the Supreme Court. And finally, the United States, and by extension, the rest of the world can bury the tolerance and adulation of the flim-flam, confidence man, from holding public office in Washington and in the several other national capitals where this toxic venomous archetype has spread.

We might even be able and willing to discern that process, as a political weapon, agenda, purpose and legacy is, like those flim-flam costumes and seductions of the confidence-man huckster, little more than mascara that will not only never disguise a pig, but can tragically divert attention and concentration from the urgent public needs and divide a people so deeply and potentially permanently that crisis management becomes not the “abnormal” but the norm.

What will the media do then, when they wake up to the contributions they have so monumentally contributed to engendering, in rendering not only honest, intellectual, and even ideational and dispassionate, yet trust-worthy debate and political discussion to the trash-heap of North American political record? Will they fall even further into the gutter they have helped to engineer, thereby overtaking the prophetic and visionary role of the poets, prophets, film-makers and both utopian and dystopian writers?

Questions like the imposition of what is so clearly and unabashedly self-serving, agenda-based, ACA-demolishing, Roe-v Wade removal, gun-rights upholding, and civil and voting rights dismantling an appointment by this occupant of the Oval office are effectively rendered mute, emasculated and irrelevant. And who are the agents of this deafening silence? The wannabe flim-flam, ironically confidence-men, Republican Senators, a choir engaged in adulation of their Barnum-replica,  now not operating museums of freakish specimens in New York, himself having become a freakish specimen in the White House.

Who says history is not stuffed with ironic (and too often pathetic and tragic) imitation?

Thanksgiving...a time for gratitude and deep self-reflection

 Historians bring together multiple factors in their analysis of events. Themes, however ranked in their world view, tend to find their way into the popular culture, as conventional mems, archetypes, or even cultural and foundational cornerstones.

Events themselves, like the recipes for specific food preparations, serve in the first instance, as teasers, headlines, stimuli for responses, relying on the basic principle, at least in a traditional democracy, that whatever does happen will evoke both voices of support and other voices of dispute.

Hegel posited a basic construct of history that has come to be known as “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” as a way of organizing how humans could come to wrap our minds around patterns of the larger/longer/perhaps even more predictable river of the narrative of the human story. A postulated idea, theory, proposal, vision serves, in this model as a cognitive starting point in any field of human endeavour which they evokes, from within and without the source of the original concept, reasons why the concept is flawed, worthy of rejection or at least needing modification. As the original concept undergoes the inevitable massage, reformation, and potential transformation, a new “synthesis, incorporating aspects of both the original thesis and its warranted and tested antithesis, generating a synthesis of both.

A similar ‘methodology’ operates in the science laboratory, somewhat more granular and over perhaps a protracted time frame.

The specific time frame itself offers comparative lenses, over a calendar year, a decade, a generation, a half-century, a century, or from an epic perspective, the whole landscape of periods of history and meta-history. Similarly, thought clusters that take shape as ideologies, offer another type of lens through which to view the relationships between clusters of influences that might include the flow of money and trade, the flow of where power congregates, how organizations are organized, how thought leaders grasp and apply various theologies/ethics/morals and social expectations. Some of the more popular perspectives about the relationship between human agency and human events focus on some common ‘street’ motions like “history makes the man” or the inverse, ‘man makes history happen.’

The cornerstone of the perception/belief in the ‘status or importance’ of human agency, both individual and in groups, as the primary driver of events, and the flow of patterns of events seems to have risen to a very high position in the conventional, North American, and especially American, concept of news. Personalizing history, by naming the individual perceived to be primarily responsible for an identified pattern, based on the collection, curation and comparison of gestalts of newly unearthed data, continues to attract both scholars and amateurs to the pursuit of ‘how we got here’. In the vortex of these ‘cognitive’ and ‘water cooler’ conversations, including formal research in academia, news and editorial opinion, and bar-room, and barbeque conversations, individuals participate in what comes to be known as public opinion.

Pollsters have generated a relatively new, and to many suspect, lens through which to anticipate how public decisions will unfold. Attentive to moment-by-moment vacillations in public perceptions, buttressed against formulaic propositions that filter the likelihood of how often and to what degree interviewed subjects tell their truth to pollsters, these opinion polls echo the daily stock exchange numbers of how various indices rise and fall by the moment, only based on a weekly average of data collection, massaged through statistical calculations for verifiability and reliability. (Lies told by ordinary people, on a daily basis, between and among colleagues, seem to pass as normal, tolerated and privacy motivated, while lies perpetrated by political leaders evoke outrage among political opponents.)

When the confluence of what seem like tidal waves of unsettling information threatens the accepted public tolerable level of ‘stress’ (itself a measure of what the political class can ‘get away with, without having to take action) and the pain breaks out in a display of anger, or disappointment, or rebellion or even revolution, then both political leadership and those documenting the ‘first record of history’ (the fourth estate) take note. And for their part, how when and to what degree each of these groups put their ‘hand’ on the scale of public opinion, they might inflame or mediate public action.

If and when a sizeable and perhaps even potentially unmanageable public protest threatens public safety and security, and whether that threat comes in the form of a health or a public security issue, we have traditional ‘buckets’ of legal and/or medical buckets of response. Public discourse that borrows from the legal lexicon or the medical lexicon, (each of these based on the historic traditions of the academic, philosophic, and perceptual as well as the ethical frameworks of their academic ancestors) tends to dominate the ‘coverage’ of such moments. Ordinary conversation, itself, tends to echo basic human  emotions like hope and fear, depending on and also disclosing both the anxiety running through the culture, as well as forming an index for decision-makers to discern the level of threat, and the concomitant need for a response.

Weather forecasts, like opinion polls, or perhaps the inverse, have become part of the public diet of information that both reflects and guides human behaviour. Political “weather forecasts” or “body politic’s medical diagnosis” flow from the key-pads and the microphones of those ‘in public life’ including politicians, pundits, reporters and occasionally academics. Among the latter group are men and women who have spent their working lives reading, studying, reflecting, experimenting, theorizing and postulating various theses, sometimes as doctoral theses, and later as post-doctoral research papers, submitting to and dependent on what scholars call “peer review”. Occasionally, one of these theses emerge in the public media, helping people in various demographics and occupations, holding various philosophic perceptions and beliefs to inform and potentially even to shape their own world view.

Attempting to “make sense” of what to a citizenry seems incomprehensible, or even unsettling is a ‘business’ that cannot and will not be assigned to any one individual or any one academic department. And one of the impacts of the digital capacity to dig, to collect and to curate and to reflect upon not only contemporary headlines but also the archives of both thought and events is that these pursuits are now open to people of all persuasions, in all quarters, in all cultures and faith communities.

When the record, for example, of how the ‘white’ western culture has treated those of a different skin colour, or how the industrial-military complex has “treated” the environment, becomes public knowledge, to a degree never before either available or consumed, the public consciousness becomes a new participant in the public square. The private lives of public figures, once preserved in the “off the record” files of reporters, are not the only ‘new information’ to which the public now has to react and to respond. Granular information about the hourly behaviour of hurricanes, and granular information about the decisions of the political class, including the gravitas, or its total absence, of the arguments are now available to everyone. For some, all of this information is considered overload; for others, it is a challenge; and for others this cataract is confusing. Voting percentages of 50% or less of the eligible electorate are only one measure of interest and participation, and the general concept of citizenship.

 Seeking patterns that might help curate, and clear much of the confusion of a collision of threatening factors, we have media outlets that, rather than detailing the headlines of the day, tend to take a step back and bring together a fresh compilation of both academic theories and broad strokes of events spanning a century or longer. Feeding both the public appetite for organizing principles or concepts that tend to shift the kaleidoscope’s fragments into a new pattern, The Atlantic, leans on both interviews and academic sources for the perspectives of their various essayists.

Bloggers, without direct access to many of these sources, then lean on essayists and their work, in our modest attempt to bring some of these influences to bear on our “take”. From this scribe’s perspective, the convergence of the personal and the public discourse is only a fledgling blade of grass in a field dominated by conventional discourse based on political science, and stereotypes with which the public has become familiar. Anything that smacks of personal or familial, educational or theological, that does not comport and conform with/to the conventional public discourse, unless deployed as comparative metaphor, too often is relegated to the “family pages,” or the lifestyle sections. It is our contention that the personal/familial/religious/psychological/emotional/theological/spiritual are not only impactful on our public discourse, they warrant a more respectable, if amorphous and less empirically measurable, attention and reflection not heretofore permitted.

It is a primarily masculine, intellectual, academic and cognitive vocabulary, and perspective that not only informs but actually foundationally constructs too much of the language and the temper of public debate. Relationships between and among individuals of different races. cultures, faiths, however, continue not only to depend on a collective blindness and denial of our unconscious biases, but actually continue to foster perpetuation from generation to generation. Breaking out of family ‘myopia’ (too often wrapped in hymns of tradition and even faith) is one of the most difficult thresholds for each of us to cross. Stirring questions that probe our families’ cultural beliefs, vernacular, ethical and moral positions, that bring such ‘hard’ positions into view, at first, and then into and through deep introspection is the only way we can and will shed those constricting attitudes that continue to bind us to our own failures, both individually and collectively.

Policy statements, even political campaign speech inevitably reflects attitudes originating in a personal belief structure. A belief system that, for example, values military might, and a ‘war’ to erase political and social trouble, has a high value on hard, top-down deployment of power. A belief system that considers compromise as weak, that the public interest and need must give way to the personal agenda of those in power relies on a psychological and spiritual insecurity the depth of which is rarely discussed as a significant factor in public life. We love personal indiscretions that feed our insatiable appetite for gossip. However, we categorically refuse to acknowledge our individual and shared habit to dissemble, to deny, to avoid and to cancel, while projecting all of our least admirable traits onto those in public life. Similarly, we also inflate our own impression of our value and worth, and then project our highest ideals on our public figures. Neither of those projections, whether they evoke hope or fear, are acknowledged as integral to our public discourse.

While it is true that we come to know “who” we are by recognizing what we oppose, and this is an essential discernment for each of us, it is also important to know those things we each have to shift in order to come together to co-operate, within our nations and provinces, as well as among and between all nations. The records of our shared history of treating minorities with overt or covert contempt demand our individual critical self-examination of how our families, our churches, our teachers, our clergy and our friends impacted our attitudes. Having been impacted, however inconspicuously and unconsciously, by our parents, our teachers, our clergy, our doctors and colleagues, we each have an opportunity to dig into our formative memories, encounters, experiences that have shaped our least desirable and potentially most dangerous attitudes and perceptions.

The public discourse about pandemics, about presidential lies, about bigoted police officers, and about a widening chasm of wealth disparity, as well as the clearly indisputable evidence of fire, winds, floods and environmental depletion, cannot be permitted to remove our individual and our shared obligation to examine critically, privately and with diligent and vigorous persistence, the sources of our unconscious biases, our hatreds, our dismissals.

High sounding political rhetoric, slogans, and even policies and laws must never be divorced from the narrow and bigoted and frightened personal perspectives of those in public life. And our own denial of our narrow and bigoted attitudes only assures that similar if even more toxic, bigotry and biases will have access to positions of power and influence.

The Lincoln Project, currently engaged in a public and courageous and creative disavowal of the current Republican candidate for president, as former life-long members and devotees of that Republican Party, offer an example of critical self-reflection that brings into light the collision of the personal and the political. The Republican Senators who have genuflected to the president’s power, on the other hand, offer what has become a more conventional example of public attitudes, perceptions and dangers. To go along to get along is an insidious phrase that risks not only personal autonomy but erosion of the public interest.

Failed attempts to reconcile racial, gender and ethnic as well as economic disparities plague the history of western culture. Any effective and lasting changes to this pattern will depend on the critical examination of the personal biases, including the failure to participate and to examine critically our own biases that make it possible for opportunists to seize power.

Reflections on the cancel, more-perfect culture

It will surprise no reader to read that the phrase, so effusively tossed about in American political rhetoric “a more perfect union” is nothing less than a tautology.*

Leaders whose public adulation seems to be boundless, like Barack Obama in retirement, will often be heard uttering this inflated, even bloated phrase, as if it were a call to inspire the American people to even greater effort, in pursuit of this “even more perfect union”. No one would desire, or even expect, political rhetoric, in an age of digital explosion, existential climate threats, economic turbulence and now, a global pandemic, to have a tautology like “a more perfect union” expunged from the podium or the interview set. However, some of the more subtle and too often concealed implications of pursuing perfection as an organizational, and especially a national goal, can be judged offensive, if not somewhat dangerous.

One of the more recent rhetorical and political and thereby cultural memes, is another equally distasteful phrase, “cancel culture,” the attempt to scrub out every last molecule of whatever might be considered dirt, morphed from anything that might hurt another, out of existence. Whether the form of “cancelation” involves:

    definition (speaking privately to an individual about perceived harmful, problematic actions or opinions, or calling in),

    calling out (criticizing an individual or organization publicly, usually on social media),

    boycotting (withholding financial support from a company in order to force a change in policies or practices)

the action involves a deliberate corrective, presumably in the spirit and tutelage of the late John Lewis’s honouring of “good trouble”….

Doubtless, each of us does not go through an hour in a weekday in which someone cuts us off on the road, smokes a cigarette in our breathing range, flips off another for some usually trivial insult. And as the anxiety over the pandemic and the concomitant precautions, restrictions, ever-shifting regulations and directives, mounts, the tendency to ‘chirp’ (like the linemen in a football game, trying to get under the skin of an opponent) whenever the “opportunity” presents itself. Retail workers currently wear shirts emblazoned with the words, “be patient and kind” or some version of that injunction. Hospital corridors shout an intolerance of offensive behaviour, and in one case, a supervising psychiatrist was hired because of his record of “law and order” control in his previous hospital.

Cancel culture, naturally and predictably runs directly into the concrete abutment of whatever the culture of the situation, organization, authority deems intolerable. Several years ago, I encountered a news story out of Colorado detailing the expulsion of a straight A grade ten student because there was a paring knife in the glove box of her vehicle in the school parking lot. (It was there to assist her in peeling fruit and vegetables for her lunch!) Back in the 1990’s a three-strike-you’re-out policy came out of the Clinton White House as a measure to address  the proliferation of illicit drugs. Not only was the practice not effective, it piled on power and authority into the already bloated briefcase of “the authorities” in their failed attempt to stamp out illicit drug consumption.

Just this week, in a visionary, creative and highly effective measure to address the problem of homelessness in Vancouver.

“The New Leaf project is a joint study started in 2018 b y Foundations for Social Change, a Vancouver-based charitable organization, and the University of British Columbia. After giving homeless Lower Mainland residents cash payments of $7500, researchers checked on them over a year to see how they were faring….Not only did those who received the money spend fewer days homeless than those in the control group (not given the $7500), they had also moved into stable housing after on average of three months, compared to those in the co9ntrol group, who took an average of five months…. Those who received the money also managed it well over the course of a year….Almost 70% of people who received payments were food secure after one month. In comparison, spending on alcohol, cigarettes and drugs went down, on average, by 39 per cent.” (Bridgette Watson, CBC News, October 7, 2020)

It may seem unfair to juxtapose a 3-strike practice in the 90’s with a stereotype-shattering experiment in 2020 given that times have changed, along with expectations, and also with the infusion of new minds, hearts, imaginations and the long series of failed experiments based on very different expectations about how the underclass will act if actually shown empathy, compassion and real help. Perhaps, it is fair to say that the many failures, incarcerations, illnesses and deaths resulting from the application of a far more punitive approach, paved the way for experiments like that in Vancouver.

Nevertheless, the “zero tolerance” “more perfect” attitude continues to operate at all levels of North America culture. Cancel culture seems to be a refinement of the cancel culture, and, while this next statement will likely offend some, it is also reasonable to link the dots between the historic political stance on the death penalty, the wave of minimum sentences imposed by the Harper (and other) governments on judges, and the explosion of prison populations south of the 49^th parallel. Cancel culture advocates, are at best, making instant and unappealable judgements of others whom they declare to be hurtful to them personally or to their ‘group’ (gender, demographic, victim).

Joe Biden has been severely criticized for his resistance to defunding the law enforcement departments in American cities. His more moderate (and less tolerable to justice protesters and advocates) approach seeks to bring law enforcement and civil rights leaders together, in an optimistic initiative of political leadership, to design a more fair, accountable, transparent and thereby sustainable relationship between those wearing “blue” and those in communities needing help and support from a variety of injustices.

It cannot be overlooked that, in some cases, institutional leadership has either  turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to legitimate complaints of injustice, even assault, among the people in those organizations. And in other institutions, because of the potential political damage that could and often does occur, if legitimate complaints are ignored and their authors silenced, other executives have tended to bend over backward, in complicity with what has become as “zero tolerance” objective. Squeezing out of the application of such policies and practices, however, is the messy, costly and even more difficult to execute process of a full, complete, fair and legitimate “due process” based on the ideal, fought and died for, of “habeus corpus”, innocent until proven guilty.

Given that our public discourse has been riddled with stories of public complaints of serious offences having destroyed both reputations and careers of hundreds if not thousands, without the benefit of even a private, objective and comprehensive investigation of the details of many of those complaints, it seems reasonable to wonder if and when the balance will be permitted to swing back to something like the process advocated by Biden for law enforcement.

Clearly, the racial injustice that blacks, native Americans, immigrants and refugees have suffered for centuries cannot and will not be eliminated in whatever processes, rules, changes and laws emerge from the Biden effort (if he is elected). Nevertheless, the model of bringing opposing sides, effectively the sides of the abuser and the abused, into the same room, at the same table, in what will have to be a protracted and complex process of reconciliation can serve as a model of hope, promise and example on other issues.

While there are examples of both forgiveness and tolerance among what are considered heroic individuals on both sides of  deep and profound hurt (emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual and also legal and ethical), the natural penchant to “tribal protests,” although they garner public attention, they serve really to bring about initial expressions of “the unfinished man” as Biden called himself, in a phone call to Senator Cory Booker, following an especially passionate debate about race, in the Democratic presidential primary.  As Booker told his host on MSNBC, Biden was willing to acknowledge that, as a white man, he needed to listen, really actively listen, to the pain of the black community, in order to be better equipped even to attempt to address its many complications.

And the spirit and the motive of Biden’s “vulnerability” as an honoured indication of authentic courage, is a model, too of the need for a similar moment of “aha” from the millions of those who consider it enough to blurt out their savage attacks, under an emotional and hyper-injured ejection of contempt (and pain, injustice and offense), without even considering their balancing responsibility to seek to find the whole truth.

In a culture so weaponized,

Ø in which even a mask to prevent the spread of a lethal pandemic is used against those who responsibly and patriotically choose to wear one, and

Ø in which those who have held power for decades, cling to its perks and its opportunities for self-aggrandizement, and for legacy-building at the expense of performing those duties to which they swore an oath, and

Ø in which millions have lost their jobs, their homes, and their families, and for some even their lives,

 

the leaven of counting far past “10” before vomiting the kind of instant, toxic and too often character-assassinating judgements into that anonymous phone or tablet, needs to be modelled at the highest levels of political and leadership perches. Parents, on the verge of administering some kind of abusive punishment on a disobedient child, have for decades been cautioned to “count to ten” as a way of deflecting and dissipating their intense frustration, anger, impatience and offense.

Words, when deployed as weapons, attacking the character, the dignity and the respect of another human being, for the simple reason of paying a debt to the offended ego of an insecure and neurotic spokesperson, slip like mercury smoothly, glibly and effortlessly from the larynx, over the tongue, through the lips and into the atmosphere. There is no “record” of such abuse, except in the heart/mind/spirit of the victim of that abuse. And while we have all colluded in forming an voluntary mass army of accusers, we have not, simultaneously, generated a similar battalion of those willing to put a hand on the arm, a raise of the eyebrows, a nod of the head, or even a phone call or text, if and when we know that someone in our circle is about to “flail” at another, with or without cause.

This space is not the place to advocate for, or even to make judgements of the many offences and their perpetrators whose stories have made headlines. Nor is it the place to judge that all of those headlines were based on untruths. It is however, a legitimate space in which to note the dangers of a cultural convention that has the potential to infect every single person on the planet, even potentially to destroy each individual, without that potential even being moderated, and certainly not eliminated, through the removal of impunity.

If each person who slings a potentially lethal arrow, or bends a potentially lethal knee on a neck, or observes such an act, were to count to ten, and to ask another for counsel, and to take him or herself out of the moment of the “enflamement”, it is conceivable that together we might cut the incidences of hate, racial, gender and domestic abuse and even parental abuse of relatively innocent children. That kid may be in fact “guilty” of a specific act, considered in that family as offensive; however, it is important for every parent to take note of the fact that that specific act is not, and must not be permitted to define that kid’s version of himself. Neither should a homeless person, or a person completely and utterly dependent on even a hard drug like heroine, be judged by another individual, and especially by the collective judgement of a society, as “worthless” and “undependable,” and “unworthy” of help, support and care.

None of us is without our own “bentness” and none of us should be categorized as “worthless” or hopeless. If and when we enter into such judgements, we are declaring our own refusal to acknowledge our own vulnerability. And if and when we can safely own our vulnerability, we will no longer need those ‘zero tolerance” and “cancel” culture steps which do not protect us from ourselves, anyway. 

 

*Tautology: in logic, tautology is a formula or assertion that is true in every possible interpretation; a repetitive statement..(Wikipedia)

Reflections on faith as an election factor

 There is a collision long in the making about to smash into the public consciousness on November 3, 2020, (and in the days and weeks following) that pits some irresistible forces against some other immoveable objects. Which side is which, however, is a moving wind-tunnel of the toxic gases that thunder through the political vortex in Washington on that day.

In the age of identity politics, when identities are as diverse as the number of people in any population, each person seems to be determined to affix him or herself to one or other of a dominant group with the specific cause of that group serving as the magnet for those committed. The complexity of the convergence of the many energies that are infused into the individuals and their respective groups, while seemingly discernible and divisive, also discloses some serious overlaps, subterfuges, unpredictabilities and seemingly unresolvable conflicts.

For example, those for whom the overturning of Roe v Wade, and for many of these also the Affordable Care Act, is a paramount moral decision for the American society, in what they believe is a return to the Godly position as outlined by the Roman Catholic church, have signed up for trump/pence. Also, among American Catholics, who have strongly opted for Biden/Harris, there is less emphasis on the need to overturn Roe v Wade (“established law”) and a need to reinforce and enhance the Affordable Care Act, especially in the middle of a pandemic. African Americans also break into different demographics, with those demanding social justice under a reformed law enforcement system flowing to Biden/Harris, with those who champion the slogan “law and order” seeing civil protest as a threat to the peace and security of neighbourhoods, towns and cities siding with trump/pence. Mixed deeply and deliberately into this “issue” in the public mind is the injection of words like ‘antifah’ and Proud Boys, representing the far left and the white supremacists respectively. Even the degree of importance placed on one or other of these forces by prospective voters, signals their tilting toward or away from trump/pence, and toward or away from Biden/Harris.

Polling having become so prevalent by so many different organizations, universities, corporations and media outlets, cataracts of data flood morning television screens, shouting, for example, dramatic shifts in popularity among seniors toward Biden, or tight races in states like Florida and Texas. Each talking head pays attention to a selected range of polls, while ordinary political amateurs are left pondering the philosophic and ideological underpinning of those polling agencies, including the development of their specific questions, the size of their sample and the statistical reliability and validity of their calculations.

Thundering phrases, like “a change election” or “I am a transitional candidate” or “stop this clown” or “shades of Mussolini on the balcony” or “a fight for the soul of this nation,” while evoking intense emotions on all sides, may or may not have a direct and measurable impact on the result.

For some time, the question of the health of the economy had a rather significant role in voter preferences, now seeming to be replaced by the health of the president, the White House and Pentagon officials, and the spread of the lethal and ubiquitous COVID-19. And of course, the personalities and character of the competing candidates for the Oval Office, as well as their respective ages, factors into the intimate, and often unconscious motives of the voters.

Compassion v narcissism, stability v unpredictability, thoughtful v impetuosity, moderate v extreme, dependable v unreliable….these are just a few of the bandied-about comparative emotional and somewhat thoughtful measurements used by voters to align with or refute their choice of president and vice-president.

Having watched much of the coverage, this scribe’s concerns are drawn to the question of the importance, subtlety and seduction of “religion” on the voters in a nation that champions itself as a ‘christian nation’.

Claiming that God is on “my side” is a traditional and even pervasive cliché among military generals, dictators, revolutionaries, and even democratic candidates for election. Endlessly attempting, in a flowing white-water of polls, events, speeches, tweets, and mis-steps, each political candidate flays away in hope that s/he will not flounder on the rocks, or drown in the eddies. Each candidate also brings his/her own religious experience, teachings, values and perceived identity to that “flaying”.

We all recall Obama’s igniting a storm of political backlash when he mused that many people who are frightened turn to the Bibles and their guns. While his headline was guaranteed to ignite intense, reactive and even defensive emotions among many Americans, it is my personal experience that millions of Americans, sadly and ironically, deny their fears, their insecurities, the anxieties and protest far too much in bravado to convince an “alien” clergy of their sense of wellbeing, confidence and hope. Invariably, those things we are especially committed to ignore, deny and cover up, nevertheless, exert an even more inordinate impact on our lives and on our culture. That is not ‘my rule’ but rather an inescapable truth in which we are all embedded. Truth is that those willing to unpack those previously denied, ignored and covered-up traits, including those willing to talk openly about how such ‘demons’ have reared their heads spontaneously in our private lives, are demonstrating and modelling a courage and a confidence that so far escapes those in denial.

Integral to the development of a mature confidence among adults who have and continue to face the hard truths of pain, loss, failure and desperation is a notion of the nature of “God” in that journey. If, for example, the deity is attributed to be a punitive, wrathful, unloving God but also one who is not usually involved in human affairs and is seen as impersonal and distant, and religion may be seen as a means to other goals (like eternal life), according to the research of Spilka and others, many of those who share this view seek money, prestige and power. (The Psychology of Religion, Eds. Spilka, Hood, Gorsuch, Prentice Hall, 1985, p. 28)

Over against this perspective, is an orientation based on “interpretations (attributions) of self, God and the world as nonthreatening and positive. Personal capability parallels a sense of trust in others and the deity.” (op. cit.)

Perceptions of how “God-fearing” a candidate is, projected onto that candidate, and by comparison, withheld from his/her opponent, is a phrase that emerged from the recent “evangelical” rally on the Washington Mall, headed by vice-president pence, the man adjudged to be a ‘man of God” by interviewed supporters. Some present even went so far as to claim that “trump was sent by God” and therefore he must have qualities approved by and congruent with what God wants. Biden’s comment, in reference to anyone who next questions his faith, (as a presumed comparison to pence or trump), “The next person who questions my faith, I am going to stuff my rosary down his throat!” rings like a deeply personal plea for fairness, even among Roman Catholics. Biden’s faith, according to his own account, has sustained him through several deep and painful tragedies in his life, as it continues to do.

In America, in this time period, when crass brutish, seemingly immoral and highly unethical and destructive attitudes and behaviours are on display, at the highest levels of the government (read the White House), the question of how human beings are to be treated, considered and supported has risen to the top of the agenda totem pole for millions of voters.

“No theme expresses the spirit of religion better than the identification of faith with humanity and community. Whether the term describing this relationship is love, justice, compassion, helping, responsibility, mercy, grace charity, or a host of other similar sentiments and actions, the message is one of positive feeling and support for others. Niebuhr tells us that ‘Love is, in short, a religious attitude.’ It is the essence of interpersonal morality—a free giving of aid, of sympathy, of the self to realize the highest ethical ideals of religion. In a similar vein, Pope John XXIII wrote in his noted encyclical Pacem in Terris, that ‘the social order must be a moral one.’ Judaism also speaks of the ‘right of our neighbor and his claim upon us.’ The Western spiritual tradition continually stresses obligations and duties to others as fundamental moral imperatives. These are ideals. (op. cit. p. 274)

The target, subject, object of the compassion, responsibility, mercy, grace and justice, as perceived by each voter, will, whether consciously or not, play a significant role in the choice each voter makes on November 3 (or before). Similarly, the target, subject, object of “anxiety, contempt, fear and loathing, or even disdain and disrespect will also play a role in the decision. For those who argue for hope over fear, they have to rest their own vote in the possibility and potential that hope will overcome the national fear and angst. On the other hand, for those who believe that the current upheaval, unrest and disarray is a sign that things are so bad only the act of God can rescue the nation, their choice will likely favour the trump/pence ticket.

Projection of ideals as well as fears is only one of the less reported ways by which voters express their attitudes and their beliefs. I have been struck by my own consistent contempt of the attitudes, words, actions and obsessive needs of the current president, likely unaware of what in myself that I cannot tolerate is to be found in him. Similarly, I have found the moderate, temperate and measured attitudes, words, actions and lesser need for attention and acclaim in the Democratic candidate to be reassuring, confirming what I consider to be those traits I like to consider part of my own temperament. Nevertheless, I am less conscious of how much calculating ambition, creative strategy and demonic tactics it truly takes to win the office of the president of the United States.

And, my deepest anxiety is that a pastiche of respectability, responsibility, moderation and gentility will drown in what could become a tidal wave of hate, anger, white supremacy, sexism, racism and a flood of undetected cash from sources too illicit to reach public scrutiny. The Mueller Report, ostensibly generated to rein in the president’s obvious culpability on more than one front, failed both in its execution (seemingly based on a fair and limited assessment of the role of the special prosecutor) and in its public release, under a Barr-cloud of disparagement. The again respectable and responsible pursuit of a “COVID-Relief bill, by the House Democrats, has been blocked by both the president and the Senate Republicans, (and just yesterday scuppered by the president, to be reclaimed as his personal prize today). And the infamy of bribing millions of literally hungry and hopeless Americans with a personally signed cheque of $1200, over trump’s signature is the most blatantly hucksterish, mobish, scurrilous and reprehensible campaign tactic.

However, is it just possible that the Americans who have already been seduced into the trumpcult will convince too many others of their quiet desperation to provide a skin-of-his-teeth victory, or worse, a hotly contested legal process that ultimately results in a Supreme Court ‘win’ which can only be seen from history as a profound and damaging tragedy to the nation?

Reflections on "power" in the west...sources, definitions and implications

 In this space, much time has been dedicated to the issue of the means, the manner and the consequences of how power is deployed whether that is power inside a family, a neighbourhood, a school, a church, a military or quasi-military battalion or a corporation. It is a primary contention here that how power is designed, organized and deployed is not only determinative of how the ‘organization’ functions, but also is indicative of the kind of thought processes, myths, cultural archetypes and conventional cultural modalities apply at the time of the power deployment.

Let’s anatomize, again, the deep foundations of “power” in the western culture, especially in North America, starting with the basics of how history is comprised of recorded actions, recorded and performed primarily by men. Given that hubris underlies much of western history, and given than men, universally and almost exclusively, regard their/our “superiority” in primarily, if not exclusively, in physical terms, it is not rocket science to remind ourselves of just how deeply embedded in our collective unconscious is the notion that big, strong, fast and agile are all adjectives attributable to masculine heroes in history. Of course, there are the requisite antitheses of the hero’s tragic flaw, and the glaring ironic examples of quixotic and excessive failures. These ‘dark’ moments, however, show in greater relief the “light” and sensational accomplishments of others, lauded for their heroism.

The cultural concept of hero is inextricably embedded in the notion of one or more deities.  Man creates God, or God creates man?…whichever your mind holds most credible, (or for some perhaps both, in the most intimate and inextricable endless mutual relationship), the question of absolute power, as embodied in a deity, has served, and continues to serve as a ‘crown’ on the top of the cultural totem pole that signifies western culture. Aspiring to the quality, traits, attitudes, beliefs and ethics of a deity (as we envision, speculate, and even pontificate upon this complexity), continues to both inspire and frustrate those of us inhabiting this planet.

And undoubtedly, there is a paradoxical as well as highly complex relationship between aspiring to the “good” and potentially becoming alienated from both self and the rest of the world. Losing identity, in a kind of surrender to something larger than the self even if that ‘something’ is deemed to be holy, sacred and honourable, is a danger for all people whose intensity, focus, drive, ambition and myopia is not safeguarded by and through detailed, intimate and confrontative associations, collegiality and community. However, such linkages depend on a shared commitment to open acknowledgement of the most difficult truths. Too  often, at least in my experience, the issue of ‘truth-telling’ has been sacrificed to the more valued ideal of ‘political correctness’ ‘social affability’ or even personal aggrandizement and career building.

While this sacrifice is not exclusive to men, we men are highly vulnerable to its bright sheen, in our enculturation to succeed, to compete, to rise in the eyes of vaunted supervisors, and to reach some summit of achievement in which we and our kin can and will take pride. Some of the specific sabotages that too often emerge in such a cultural mythology include elevating size, strength, speed, numerical size, fiscal size and strength, academic degrees, portfolio burnishment,c and even political and career titles. All of these symbols, in western culture, impede the full and authentic development of men in particular, but, by extension, their families who are themselves embedded in this myths, and their shared institutions and organizations. Others will argue, with some relevance and validity, that “growth” in numbers, and size and dimension, are legitimate measures of the relative success of leadership, and the beliefs that underpin that leadership.

Capitalism not only thrives on this mythology, it actually depends on its concrete embedding in the educational, ecclesial, management and even social systems theory as applied to both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. And, as a natural and inevitable follow-up to these myths, all processes, strategies, tactics and the structural foundations of such processes must contribute to the larger goal of bigger, better, faster, more facile, more universal and more dominant.

Although this anecdote might be misinterpreted as bigoted, it is not intended as such. The comment refers to the process, and not to the dogma of its speaker. A Roman Catholic priest once spoke to a clergy of a protestant church and asked, “How many kids are there in your church education program?” And when the answer, “About a dozen,” came back, he retorted, “You can talk to me when you reach 400, where mine is.”

The seductive appearance, and for him the reality of “power in numbers” (extended obviously to dollars, and parishioners and all things empirical) cannot and must not be laid exclusively at the foot of that priest. It lies at the front door, and in the archives and in the boardrooms, and in the strategy sessions of virtually all of the organizations operating in North America. And the corollaries that keep it front and centre among all executives, of both genders, include how to balance budgets, how to position new hires, how to design and execute all communications, both interior and exterior, how to celebrate the successes of the organization and how to indelibly imprint this period of the ‘history’ of the institution into the doctoral theses of the graduates pursuing their degrees.

These, of course, are all masculine-intuited, incarnated, and embodied myths. And one of the other less tasteful corollaries about the need to maintain and sustain these “appearances” is that whatever does not “accord” with the veracity and validity and viability of these myths must be ignored, denied, disavowed and even disallowed.

Now, if Edmund Burke’s aphorism “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” has any merit and bearing on this discussion, it is especially applicable to the history of the Christian church, beginning with the church in Rome. Set aside, for a few moments, the dogmatic beliefs of the church, and join me in a reflection on a piece of cultural history, originating from the pen and mind and research of the Head of Harvard University’s Department of Evolutionary Biology, Joseph Henrich. His new book, entitled, “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous,” is reviewed by Judith Shulevitz, herself the author of “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of A Different Order of Time”. Her review is included in the latest edition of The Atlantic.

Henrich posits that the natural human inclination is to kinship, and early western history illustrates how people clustered in their communities, close to their families. Broad and generally accepted marriages between and among family members, including cousins, were relatively frequent, until late ‘antiquity’. Here is a quote from Shulevitz’s review, reporting on Henrich’s thesis:

As of late antiquity, Europeans still lived in tribes, like most of the rest of the world. But the (Catholic) Church dismantled these kin-based societies with what Henrich calls its ‘Marriage and Family Program,’ or MFP. The MFP was really an anti-marriage and anti-family program…..Forced to find Christian partners, Christians left their communities, Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relationship identity, replacing it with a vertical identify oriented toward the institution itself. The Church was stern about its marital policies. Violations were punished by with-holding Communion, excommunicating, and denying inheritances to offspring who could not be deemed ‘illegitimate’. Formerly, property almost always went to family members. The idea now took hold that it could go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, benefactor to the needy. In so doing, ‘the Church’s MFP was both taking out its main rival for people’s loyalty and creating a revenue stream,’ Henrich writes. The Church, thus entitled, spread across the globe. Judith Shulevitz, “Why is the West So Powerful—And so Peculiar?” in The Atlantic, p 93-4)

As the most powerful institution operating as a mouthpiece for God, the Catholic Church, obviously had immense influence over the people in its charge. Not only could and did the church authorities impose definitions of ethic, moral and spiritual standards (in this case of appropriate family life), they enforced their own standards by with-holding what to many would have been, and continue for many today, those ‘gifts of grace’ which the church asserts accompany compliance and a secure place in eternity.

Whoever speaks, in any manner, as a surrogate/representative/prophet/shaman/clergy for God, whether that be an institutional or personal voice, there is a high degree of perceived authenticity, veracity, validity and even reverence for those utterances among many people. The implicit and attendant iron filings of meanings that accompany those magnet words, phrases, concepts and commands are showered over and among the many pew-dwellers, coffer-donors, and heaven-seekers among ordinary people. Applied to an audience, many of whom were not yet literate, offered an even more fertile ground in which to plant those seeds of conformity, financial stability and world evangelism.

Henrich does not address the question, “Why did the church adopt (the MFP)?” and states as his bottom line, “the MFP evolved and spread because it ‘worked’.” (op. cit. p. 93) However, speculation about the church’s motives, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, while not pretending to be exhaustive, has to expose the bare minimum of institutional needs, aspirations, perceptions and beliefs.

Henrich’s work, and Shulevitz’s review includes these words:

Around 597 A.D. Pope Gregory I dispatched an expedition to England to convert the Anglo-Saxon kind of Kent and his subjects. The leader of the mission, a monk named Augustine, had orders to shoehorn the new Christians into Church-sanctioned marriages. That meant quashing pagan practices such a polygamy, arranged marriages (Christian matrimony was notionally consensual, hence the formula ‘I do’), and above all, marriages between relatives, which the Church was redefining as incest. Augustine wasn’t sure who counted as a relative, so he wrote to Rome for clarification. A second cousin? A third cousin? Could a man marry his widowed stepmother?

He could not. Pope Gregory wrote back to rule out stepmothers and other close kin not related by blood—another example was brothers’ widows….Not until 1983 did Pope John Paul II allow second cousins to wed. (The Atlantic, op. cit. p. 92)

Originating in a common belief and perception among church elders, the power of the Church stemmed from “upon this rock I will build my church” biblically recorded as an intention to the apostle Peter. Declaring what is/was/will be such matters as incest, polygamy, monogamy, and the inevitable measures to assure compliance is a meagre extension of that original Godly direction/intention/documentation.

Initially seated in one man, this power, the pontificate, has continued for these two millenia, not only in fact, but also in symbol, for many, if not all, of the institutions, trade associations, craft guilds, city councils, and national governments. “Dominant male figures” is the cultural archetype that is continually replicated at the most visceral level, as if it has proven its value, over the centuries. However, it has also demonstrated considerable, and some argue, lethal and persistent dangers.

For one, the ‘top-man’ model implicitly argues for a ‘final decision’ by a single man. It clearly champions the too-often repeated slogan among ambitious capitalists, “don’t speculate, just react” as a modality of action, while clearly opposed to and rejecting of reflection, consultation, deliberation, investigation and protracting the process of decision making, especially on highly important matters.

The DOW index, geared to data each nano-second, the instant other-side-of-the-coin to “instant gratification”…instant rebuttal of anything that smacks of threat, danger or damage to the public image (of individuals, organizations, sales, investments, profits and “success” so measured). The genuflecting gyrations of a COVID-infected president, fawning in a hermetically-sealed Suburban, while subjecting secret-service-men, and their families to his starved and humiliated ego (starved and humiliated by his own actions, perceptions and beliefs) is only one of millions of “instant reactions” to the obsessive-compulsive need for instant gratification.

Just as the church could and did announce, and then promulgate its insidious and nefarious plot on the family, so too can and do millions of mostly male executives announce, and then promulgate and then enforce and reinforce their “power” over whomever happens to be “under” their charge.

And when even the doctors fall sway to the ego-demands of an infected and infectious president, to “inflate his spirits” and “prevent depression” (as is and has been the dependent cases of millions of heaven-aspiring church believers throughout history), then we must all reflect on our own subservience to rules, laws, processes and personnel whose primary purpose is to serve the interests of those promulgating those edicts, and not the wider, and more applicable and more ethical interests of the whole community.

The church does not shoulder the whole responsibility for how we conceive and operate power among our society; yet, it must account for much of our western cultural mythology, as we strive to deconstruct and tear down those walls behind which we have been cowering.

Reflections on "news" v "messages"

 The news is overflowing with talk of racism, taxes, relief packages, Roe-v. Wade, Affordable Care Act, Supreme Court appointment, pandemic numbers treatments and vaccinations. Each of the topics has relative merit, and to some extent, each gets lost in the turbo-vacuum of power rhetoric, power perceptions, power traditions, power righteousness and power imbalance.

Entrenched power, for centuries, has been the bane of ordinary* people, for the simple, obvious and undisputed reason that those in power consider their power to be legitimate and as ‘permanent’ as possible, and their persons as “legitimate” holders of that power. Whether that power is embedded in a misguided perception that only those with theological training, for example, can be permitted to read holy scripture, as was the case for centuries prior to the printing press, or whether that power is embedded in body, brain and heart cells that declare unequivocally, that white race is superior to all other races, it is the power that is embedded in the dominant culture, that essentially and effectively rules.

Entrenched power, the self-imposed, and too often complicity and sometimes innocently and even naively endorsed and supported by ordinary people right to rule, is not nearly as clearly defined as it once was in a monarchy, or a papacy or a tyranny. Single person rule, while offensive and worthy of evolution, if not revolution, to erode such power, nevertheless, was so clearly visible, identifiable and also removeable, should adequate force(s) be brought to bear. With a single  stoke of a pen a ruler could dispatch an army, a navy, and any number of explorers, traders, conquerors, and empire builders. With a single stroke of a pen, a single ruler could also impose any one of multiple forms of tax, loyalty, feudal harvest, military service and even a geographic boundary.

In the pursuit of that maintenance of single ruler power, the lives of both the holders of such offices as well as many opponents of those specific office holders have been lost. Similarly, when the tolerance, and submission of those governed by tyrants grew too thin to be sustained, any of a number of forms of protest, conflict and even insurrection have erupted. One theory of leadership, deeply embedded in the North American culture, through the writing of Chester Barnard (mid-twentieth century), is that the “governor” can maintain power and authority and responsibility only with and through the consent of the governed, the people over whom s/he has responsibility.

Over time, however, that theory of consent, so lauded by the evolving and increasingly penetrating tactics of persuasion, influence-peddling, classical conditioning of rewards and sanctions for specific and required compliance (or its opposition) has been impacted, and perhaps even dimmed like a sepia photo, through the work of other theorists like Maslow, and Mihaly Csikszent’s “Flow”, Dr. William Ouchi’s Theory Z, (loyalty through a job and well being for life), to some of the more contemporary leadership/management theories, including transformational leadership, leader-member exchange theory, Adaptive Leadership, Strengths-based leadership, and more recently Servant leadership.

Transformational leadership is where a leader works with teams to identify needed change and seeks commitment to bring about that change. Leader-member exchange focuses on the two-way relationship between leaders and followers that develops through three stages. Adaptive leadership attempts to facilitate how organizations adapt to change effectively. Strengths-based Organizational Management (OBOM) focuses on maximizing efficiency, productivity and organizational success through development of ‘strengths’ like computer systems,  tools and people. Servant leadership, as its name implies, posits that the main goal of the leader is to serve through listening, persuading, conceptualizing, applying foresight and stewardship…examples include Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa.

Regardless of the relevant and currently deployed theory and model of leadership, underlying all modalities are some critical pieces of rebar that hold the organizational foundation in place: results have to be attained, costs have to be reduced, profits have to be increased. How the equation is framed and executed, including the relative significance of the “people” to the relative significance of the “leader” nevertheless determines the level of trust, compliance, integrity, openness and even effective and efficient “productivity” (however that variable is to be measured).

Power in every organization is interminably shifting, as the wind ripples, or erupts lake waters, dependent on the velocity, endurance, direction and the wind-breaks of that force. Unlike the formal study of physics, however, the flow of energy as political/leadership power and influence seems to be elusive and so far beyond the ken of algebraic equation. Whether or not this power/leadership/influence is amenable and expressible in an algorithm perhaps has been discovered in some high tech lab. Naturally, if and when this power/leadership/influence is finally captured as a finite entity, there will be a tidal wave of highly affluent ‘leaders’ seeking to acquire whatever means is more likely to make the achievement of that “finiteness”.

However, what is even less amenable to a kind of algebraic or alorgithmic definition, is the culture, the mind-set and the degree of compliance/defiance of whatever power and leadership they might be experiencing. Demographics have evolved almost to the power at which “knowing” about others by those seeking to know rivals or exceeds the long-time small-town attribute in which everyone “knows” everything about everyone else. Only, through digital technology, the personal information, collected, curated, compared and then sold and disseminated, has become a marketable commodity. Those whose business, political, cultural, philanthropic, educational, and even ecclesial goals and objectives depend on targeting limited resources toward increasing “revenue” (participation, votes, enrolments, trust donations, sales) rely on this personal “so-called” private information as the GPS for their organization’s growth.

Leadership, in some cases, has devolved to a point where, for example, knowledge of and interpretation of something called “analytics” is more important in assessing talent (especially in professional sports) that the former attributes like character, personality, work-ethic, and those old formerly reliable “bromides” of litmus tests for those in the hiring and selection business. Nevertheless, in whatever organization, corporation or whatever, there is a growing trend toward enhancing and even gildening of the ‘rose’ of the single leader, that is most offensive.

Single leaders, provide clarity and simplicity in a world seemingly gone nuts with the overflow of information and opinion, multiplied by the armies of dispensers of information and opinion (websites, podcasts, blogs, newsletters) to the point where opportunistic power-seekers, (themselves highly needy of adulation and attention) have even administered a kind of political thalidomide to the formerly trusted and reliable public news sources, defaming them as ‘fake news’.

So, one of the first and foremost tasks of ordinary people, is to be able to discern the difference between information demonstrated and verified to be accurate and the layers of opinion that is embedded in the presentation of every piece of information. And because this discernment is becoming increasingly complex, given the subtlety and ubiquity of much of the flow of paid advertising, marketing and political messaging, and unvarnished hard news.

Just recently, Susan Delacourt wrote in The Star, a column that took note of the difference between “messages” and “news”. As a long-time highly regarded columnist based currently in Ottawa, Ms Delacourt is growing frustrated with the plethora of “messages” that are being churned out as a method of ‘branding’ a political messenger. Is that messenger a “right” or “left”-leaning public figure? Is the (likely) press release inevitably devoid of hard information, and full of blathergab that reinforces the nudge the author (and/or his/her publicist) seeks to put on the scales of public opinion. Telling the people of a constituency the ‘brand’ the political operative knows will resound favourably among the ‘locals’ is another way of gobbling up free media coverage, given that many local media outlets themselves gobble up press releases from Ottawa, in their relentless pursuit of their own readership, who are themselves, ready and pliable consumers of the latest ‘gossip’ of the life of their candidate. Feathering that local nest is also like a saving account of public acceptance, anticipating a time (again almost inevitable) when the party or the candidate him/herself will stub a toe and will need to draw on that reserve account of public acceptance as an antidote to the bad news.

Some 40% of the American voting public in about to cast a ballot for trump, in the upcoming presidential election. Many of them are proudly attired in t-shirts blaring the epithet VOTE YOUR FEELINGS! This, to remind others that, regardless of whatever the president utters, does, or does not do, how one feels about him (as ordinary, a doer not a talker, a judge-factory, an abortion warrior, a health-care destroyer, as plain-if-vulgar speaker) matters much more than anything else. The obvious and indisputable facts that that he lies, that he defames everyone including American allies, that he fails to implement measures that would prevent thousands of unnecessary deaths, hundreds of enchained children separated from their parents. The feelings of those voters, apparently, take precedence over such glaring features of his tenure including a denial of knowing David Duke, a denial of knowing the Proud Boys (while ordering them to stand back and stand ready), the denial of empirical science, even if it is continuing to evolve) while exhorting governors to open schools and businesses, thereby threatening thousands of lives.

The “messaging” is an expression that comes from the corporate world, a world so dominating, ever so subtly, that much of North America hardly recognizes, and certainly would mostly deny the seduction we have permitted. Even the churches and the universities now boast or complain, depending on their relative affluence and attendance numbers, of needing to “serve” those in their orbit, or to “gather” new recruits in order to maintain or to grow their value. The public relations business is the heart and mind of the messaging business. How to manage a crisis, especially, has taken on a whole vocabulary, a methodology and a contractual relationship between the practitioners of the new business and the organizational or individual resident of the crisis. Corporations, and by default, individuals seeking to reclaim a public trust and reputation turn to the professional “message-makers” whose task it is, for considerable fees, to transform a public debacle into an easily forgiven or forgotten mis-step into a ‘win’ another of those “measureable” turning points in the life of an organization or an individual.

News, like the numbers of deaths and mental defects that will remain with the children in Flint Michigan, for example, are so painful and so tragic, that their capacity to continue to impact the life of the nation has faded, partly through the deluge of other competing headlines, and partly through the cultural tendency and proclivity to deny really painful information. Similarly, the encased and separated children at the border is another piece of news that has faded from public consciousness, in the tsunami of emotive sludge pouring through the president’s twitter feed, and into the Fox “news” channel.

There is an oxymoron, if I ever heard one, “The Fox New Channel”….no longer a channel for the dissemination of news, it has become the no longer alleged, but now openly agreed, official mouthpiece of the occupant of the Oval Office. The capitulation of Fox to the Oval Office, rendering Sean Hannity a literal subject to be channeled by the president, in pursuit of re-election, has effectively elevated propaganda to the level of formerly diligently researched, objectively confirmed, and articulately reported news. And once propaganda is indistinguishable from news and reliable verifiable news, in the minds of millions of voters, regardless of the reasons for that merging, the healthy pulse and the energetic breathing of a democracy, in medical terms, has to be considered in danger.

Whether that democracy can be judged to be ‘on life support’ or merely ‘in a coma’ or perhaps ‘under the influence’ (of a seduction), or even ‘infatuated like an adolescent’….the diagnosis seems irrelevant so long as the lifestyle choices, habits, perceptions and attitudes of that forty percent continue to be locked inside the cult.

Can the other sixty-odd percent provide the needed naloxone (opioid antagonist) to render the American body politic recoverable from this nightmare?