Let's cease from finger-pointing and its underpinning rationalizations

 In each and every aphorism lies its demise…..Too much egalitarianism renders chaos. Too much authoritarianism brings on another form of chaos….and when individualism is at the root of any and all political attitudes, we know that such a root, taken to an exaggerated degree, inevitably generates a different form of tyranny.

In North America, where the domination of capitalism is so deeply established, we can trace some of the underlying causes to a kind of religion offered by some christian preachers that is based on “purely personal understanding of the biblical message. In other words, the Bible does nothing more than save individuals, one by one, from the common destruction. According to them, the Gospel generates private virtue, not social justice. The government deserves support when it promotes private virtue, but should be opposed when it tries to establish ethical norms for public affairs, such as limitation of arms production, the reduction of nuclear weapons, assistance to Third World countries, the protection for the environment, and the containment of the free market.” (Gregory Baum, Compassion and Solidarity, The Church for others, CBC Massey Lectures Series, 1987, p. 103)

If millions of individuals have consumed, digested and integrated such a theology into their lives, as we know they have, then the prospects for a different kind of Gospel interpretation and application is going to prove difficult, if not nearly impossible. An epistemological crisis, (see last entry in this space) is compounded by a faith crisis, which pits an “individualist” salvation proposition against a social justice theology. And we all know too that “for centuries and centuries, the major churches, Catholic and Protestant, have tended to side with the powerful, with the dominant sector society. In the Third World the churches have supported colonialism.” (Baum, op.cit. p 106)

And in that light, of the mainline churches siding with, in fact advocating for ‘the establishment’, the churches have both consciously and unconsciously served as mouthpieces for that establishment, increasingly dependent as they are on the cheques written both by individuals and by trust funds owned and operated by wealthy, establishment individuals and corporations. Baum articulates many of the establishment-based messages that have been delivered, supported and underscored by the mainline churches in these words:

Today we are told that we have lived beyond our means, that society has been overlyo8 generous, that we have given away money, and that, accordingly, the government deficit is the central problem of the economy. We must recognize, we are told, that we live in the tough world of competition. We must advance our economy by letting private enterprise be the locomotive that pulls us out of the present slump. We hear that the successful entrepreneurs are the creators of wealth. That is why they deserve the assistance of government, tax breaks, and subsidies, along with the riches they make for themselves. The reason that our industries are th Carolinanot competitive on the world market is that labourers ask for excessive wages. The unions have become too powerful. There are too many strikes. It is their fault that we suffer economic decline. We all will have to tighten our belts—all, one assumes, except the creators of wealth….This is not the time for free lunches. Government should no longer assume responsibility for people who cannot make it in a society that gives them every opportunity…A certain toughness has become necessary to make labour work harder, to encourage business confidence and to attract foreign investment….The neo-conservative cultural trend that I have been describing makes selfishness respectable. Am I my brother’s keeper? According to the prevailing mood, the answer is No. It is all right to let the social gap become wider. There is not need anymore even to pretend that social solidarity counts. (Baum op. cit. p 101-102)

Although Baum wrote and spoke those words 33 years ago, on the CBC national network, they are echoed today by the right-wing conservatives in Canada, and certainly by the Republican Senators who even today are refusing to engage in a negotiation that would see a COVID-19 aid package for the up to 54 million Americans who are reported to be facing food insecurity.

One American thought and faith leader is Dr. William Barber, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina. In a report written by Jelani Cobb in The New Yorker, May 07, 2018, Barber is quoted as saying: I worry about the way that faith is cynically used by some to serve hate, fear, racism and greed. The Cobb report continues with these words from Barber, in a sermon, “The Bible says woe unto those who love the tombs of the prophets.” The duty of the living, he said, is not simply to recall the martyrs of the movement (e.g. Dr. Martin Luther King) but to continue their work. We’ve got to hold up the banner  until every person has health care, we’ve got to hold it up until every child is lifted in love, we’ve got to hold it up until every job is a living-wage job, until every person in poverty  has guaranteed subsistence.

Private virtue and social justice serve as code words for political prize-fighting, with much of the rhetoric being personalized in words like “family values” and “socialism”….as if, in order to hoodwink the electorate who might glide past the nuances, each side behaves as if it has the ‘key’ to the golden kingdom or nirvana. Let’s peel the make-up off each of these “hot-button” propaganda words (family values and socialism) and see what we are left with.

Family values has the connotation of picket fences, warm hearths, rich and captivating scents from a family kitchen in which the turkey for Thanksgiving is cooking and the pies are already warm on the counter. It also connotes marriage only between a man and a woman, profound and even lethal opposition to abortion, the right to bear arms (and the fear that any legislation to limit assault rifles is the first step in removing guns from every house), deep although preferable secretive distaste for the PRIDE movement, and in some cases even contempt for         #BlackLivesMatter. Smothered in the scents, and the smiles of a happy family celebrating Thanksgiving, these ‘family values’ are effectively political and theological and often spiritual goals to be embraced by those who deem to consider themselves “Christian”.

And for many in this category, “socialism” connotes a quick and easy slide into communism, defacto tyranny, support for Putin and the Russians, fear of the Russian cyber-invasion of whatever misleading information  ‘bots’ ‘they’ might have developed, government take-over of the health care system including dictating which doctor you can visit, contempt of any government leader’s advice to wear a mask in the pandemic, thumbing your nose at all government shut-downs and crowd control measures in the pandemic. Such a gestalt definition of socialism is not only a complete abnegation of the meaning of the word, but also demonstrates a profound seduction, likely through fear, by those seeking to uphold the “establishment” capitalist system.

It is the ‘right’ to operate a business, to make a profit, to run that business free from government regulations, and especially free from government taxation schemes that would support those struggling to feed their families, educate their children and access health care that single and collectively are attached to the opposition to ‘socialism’.

And when tyranny, of any ephemeral imaginative shape, size and political face  (especially one hung in effigy on a billboard paid for by a right-wing funding source like the Koch Brothers) is evoked, the sceptre of the original American Revolution against the British King is re-enacted, embraced by a religion that somehow, almost by accident and by inference, sanctifies a fear that evokes a fear of God, the Devil, Satan, and especially Hell. Demonizing a political opponent, for the sake of winning an election, or even of converting a neighbour to one’s political ‘side’ is so cliché that it evades even consideration as hate speech.

If a nation, like the U.S. is to embrace ‘freedom’ as its North Star, in its cultural galaxy, then those who disagree with “ME” have to be considered agents of Satan.

So, it is not implausible to link an epistemological crisis to a crisis of religion, and faith and essentially to a profound erosion of basic literacy. Eroded too in this protracted process is the capacity both to allow oneself to be seduced by con-artists, and the concomitant atrophy of what English teachers used to call ‘critical thinking’.

Starving children, seriously ill children, parents without work and the horizon that even hints at the return of once-cherished employment….these are not compactible into the slogans of “family values” or ‘socialism’ or the indifferent embrace of a political class dedicated to its hold on power (in both parties). Access to clean water, adequate numbers of health care practitioners, clean air, a rigorous, free and equal education and work with dignity also refuse to be stuffed into a metaphoric “Santa sack” of goodies, like Hallowe-en candy, in order to be trotted out like various panaceas of placebos at election time.

There is no Republican, and no Christian and no Muslim diet that needs adequate, dependable, reliable and bacteria-free fruits and vegetables and protein. There is no black or white or brown child’s need for respect and dignity….and there is no protestant, Roman Catholic, evangelical or Nazareen need for clean water, clean air, freedom from assault weapons and drug gangs and lords. There is no rich or poor segregation among those who need (not aspire to, or wish for, but need) streets that are free of racially charged law enforcement operatives, bigots, and those so insecure that their uniform and gun are their primary source of identity.

The vast majority of churches, while vigorously engaged in daily acts of ministry, like food banks, hospital visits, charity fund-raisers, even international foreign aid projects, remain silent in the face of the glaring, insidious, preventable and clearly objectionable political gridlock that finds politicians cowering from negative tweets, negative headlines, negative gossip and evaporating fund sources. Church leaders, like political puppets, cling to a politically correct silence, unless there is an opportunity to “act” in charity, while the glaring existential issues, (hunger, poverty, illiteracy, hopelessness, depression and climbing suicide rates, environmental catastrophe) go virtually unaddressed, except by small pockets of social activists. In a report on depression and suicide thoughts among college students in The Star, November 24, 2020, the life and death of Kyle Gardiner is documented by Robert Cribb, Morgan Bocknek, Charlie Buckley and Giulia Fiaoni. The report includes a December 2019 tweet from Kyle Gardiner, discovered long after his death: “Isn’t it insane that we’re facing the inevitable collapse of society in a few decades and we’re still like, ’yay we banned plastic straws?!?!?!’”

Time to document the failure to provide adequate, timely mental health support for people like Kyle in another space, although the dramatic spike in both suicides and mental health crises in the lives of young and old alike is one of the many glaring, obvious and clearly preventable symptoms/causes of distress today. Moreover, those whose hands hold the levers of power to make changes seem paralyzed by a kind of rigid fear of the impact of saying it like it is, in case the truth is so dramatically upsetting that it might inflate the numbers and severity of human tragedies beyond our capacity to cope.

This piece does not hold that only by mounting an army of Dr. William Barbers in each and every church pulpit on the continent will our social devastation disappear. However, it does suggest or more emphatically state that silence in the face of the collision of so many factors that, individually would degrade hope and optimism, collectively serve as a radioactive repeating time bomb, on generations already here and clearly, if we continue to do the “same old” will continue to generate even more tragic results.

If Barber and Buber, McKibbon and Klein, Thunborg and Malala, and Baum and Moltmann, King and Lewis, and the hundreds of thousands of thought-and-action leaders and advocates are unable to arose a public that is becoming both somnolent and slumbering as well as exhausted and dispirited, then not only do leaders have to find new and creative ways to awaken us to our own peril. The populace, too, has to come to the senses that Canadian Press reporter, Stephanie Levitz (on CTV’s Question Period, November 22), who in a voice of deep concern, pointed to the responsibility of each individual to take measures like wearing a mask, keeping social distance, washing hands and staying free from large groups. Government cannot resolve this current pandemic crisis without the serious commitment, without vengeance, reprisal, anger or contempt, from each and every citizen on the planet. And that model, perhaps, could serve us all well in the recovery from this universal dark period of our own withdrawal.

The time for finger-pointing has to come to an end, as do all of the rationalizations that support that social addiction. Religion, ideology, social class, level of literacy, political affiliation and funding puppeteers can no longer be deployed against our common needs, our common aspirations, our common secure good health, and our promised healthy future to our grandchildren.  

We are IN an epistemological crisis...it refuses denial

“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.” (Barack Obama in conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg, in The Atlantic, November 18, 2020)

Oxford defines epistemology: theory of the method or grounds of knowledge.

Dictionary defines epistemology: the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.

In simple terms: Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge> It seeks to answer the questions “what is knowledge? and How is knowledge acquired? Epistemologists are philosophers who are interested in questions such as whether it is possible to have knowledge, what kind of knowledge there is, and how people come to know things. Epistemology is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy along with ethics, logic and metaphysics.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Tern epistemology comes form the Greek words ‘episteme’ and ‘logos’. Episteme can be translated as ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘acquaintance’ while logos can be translated as ‘account’ or ‘argument’ or ‘reason’….(E)pistemology seeks to understand one or another kind of cognitive success (or, correspondingly, cognitive failure.

The phrases “what do we know?” and “how do we know it?” come to mind, whenever the word epistemology arises. And if Obama’s observation has merit (this scribe believes it has considerable merit!), then we have to take time to reflect that “alternative facts” is an oxymoron irreconcilable with “what we know” irrespective of how we ascertain those “things” (concepts, facts, emotions, perceptions) of which we are certain.

At 2:46 p.m. on Tuesday, November 18, I pluck the keys on this laptop, in a small town in Ontario Canada. Out this window, I see some blue sky, some cumulus clouds, a few grey puffs, and the occasional snow flake.
How do I know this? My eyes confirm, with corroboration of my wrist watch, the calendar, the map of Canada and the view from the window of my study. My ears also confirm that relaxing music is rising from the Stingray music channel on our television set. This simplistic list of information seems readily available to this observer, and could slide relatively smoothly along to a reader whose confidence in the ‘source’ is adequate for acceptance and belief.

However, within the hour, I heard, also from the television news, (MSNBC) that trump has ordered a draw-down by half of American troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, to 2,500 in both countries. And while most watchers/listeners/interpreters of American politics likely concur with the facts of the announcement, there is no doubt a wide, disparate and highly energized debate over whether or not such a decision makes “sense” at this moment in history.

The critical capacity to distinguish, rationally, and ‘epistemologically’, between the fact of the troop draw-down and the various “interpretations” is a first level of discernment between something known, and something conjectured. And those conjectures themselves, once detailed and made public, also flow into the river of facts, this time however, over the ‘name’ of the specific observer. “X” says, “whatever about the draw-down!” And for the journalists, this attribution is critical to his/her reputation as a recorder of whatever it is the interpreter says.

In elementary school, teachers stress the difference between a piece of information and an ‘inference’ (a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning). This skill, however, does not embrace or tolerate a leap into a proximate universe in which information that is incompatible with and irreconcilable to a given fact. One historic example of this kind of ‘alternative universe’ has been perpetrated by those known as ‘holocaust deniers’. In May 2014, The Atlantic reported in a piece written by Emma Green:

“Only 54 percent of the world’s population has heard of the Holocaust…Only a third of the world’s populations believe the genocide has been accurately described in historical accounts. Some said they thought the number of people who died has been exaggerated; others said they believe it’s a myth. Thirty percent of respondents said it’s probably true that ‘Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust. Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, two-thirds of the world’s population don’t know the Holocaust happened—or they deny it.”

The clear divide between those who “know” the holocaust occurred, and resulted in the death of some 6 million Jews, and those who do not “know” or who deny its veracity is an obvious failure on some many levels. On the superficial level of distribution of information, through media, and more significantly through educational systems, either the message is not being delivered or, if delivered, it is not being credited as believable. A story out of Arkansas, at the time when Bill Clinton was Governor and his wife was attempting to transform the education system in that state, we learned that some teachers were teaching about World War Eleven, mistaking the Roman numerals for 2, (II) for the Western Arabic Numerals (11). Obviously, the implications of this kind of mis-perception, embedded in an epistemology in those classrooms and transferred to those students has had, and will continue to have a significant impact on the “foundational” knowledge of that generation of students.

The reservoir, or perhaps even the underground mine of what many would consider the treasure of what most consider “foundational” knowledge, (while it is subject to new research, and the discovery of amending information) is nothing less than essential for the potential of legitimate, consensual, reasoned, and reciprocal conversations even to take place. Nevertheless, embedded in what many consider ‘foundational’ knowledge, there are in each cultural demographic, a sizeable cluster of what might be termed “old wives’ tales” or cracker-barrel wisdom that challenges empirical verifiable information. (“Red sky in the morning sailor’s warning, red sky at night, sailor’s delight! is just one well-treaded example.) While repeated ‘tests’ of the validity of this maxim may tend to support its likelihood, nevertheless, it can hardly be called a ‘law of the universe’ as ‘gravity’ for example, warrants.

Those standing firmly in a religious-foundational-belief system will, hopefully, embrace the dubious, highly problematic and easily disputed basis of this conversation I had as a teen, when asking my mother to stop smoking cigarettes: Her response, “If God had not wanted us to smoke, he would not have made tobacco!” This comment in the mid 1950’s continues to rebound among many others that beg more forgiveness than cognitive and rational response. The notion of human will, human discernment and the potential of human individual (and collective) choice, through decision-making processes that balance individual desire, or pleasure with the negative risk of nicotine and tar on the lungs and circulatory system, one might have thought, would have been readily grasped by a graduate nurse. Nevertheless, just this morning, the entrance to a prominent teaching hospital was populated by professional health care workers smoking their favourite cigarette brand, while preserving the 9-meter restriction away from the building.

The facts, the truth, the scientifically indisputable “knowledge” about the dangers to human life from smoking, both for smokers and for those in the presence of smokers who inhale second-hand smoke, have been promulgated for decades. At the same time, billions of dollars have been poured into the campaign to deny the danger to human health by the tobacco companies, is a pivotal and historic example of how “interests” compete to capture the flow of ‘information’ (including self-interested propaganda). A similar conflict has also been underway for at least half a century, over the negative impact of fossil fuels and the emissions of toxic gases like carbon dioxide and methane on the environment of the planet. The corporate profits of the oil and gas companies rely directly on the recovery, refining and sale of fossil fuels, as do the mega-corporations which depend on these fuels for their manufacturing and processing facilities. A similar tension has existed between environmentalists and coal producers, although this conflict has focused on the contamination of natural streams, and drinking supplies, as well as the health impact on miners from toxins inhaled during their work in the mines.

We can all agree that loss of the capacity to function, to breathe, to speak, and even to think clearly is impacted by the collision of certain chemicals, gases and toxins with our bodies. Even those whose 401 portfolios generated while serving as executives in tobacco, oil, gas and coal companies “know” that they are engaged in an industry whose long-term prognosis is clouded. Nevertheless, along with their political surrogates, they continue to beat the drum in favour of government laissez-faire with regard to environmental regulations that would crimp their industry.

“Prophets”, armed with the new “knowledge” of impending environmental danger continue to plead their/our case through the media, in classrooms and labs, generating graduates in environmental engineering, a class of graduates not even envisioned when those of us who graduate in the early 1960’s. The word “prophet” however, is one of those words that tends, like mercury, to slide between ‘believers’ and ‘critics’, depending on the degree to which each side is committed to ‘arguing’ and ‘advocating’ for his/her side of the argument.

In the academic community, however, these debates have a kind of discipline under clearly established ‘rules’ and traditions. Both sides can and will agree to a set of facts, and then engage in the “interpretations, implications, inferences and both exaggerations and minimizations of those facts, as is suits their respective argument. However, this model of intellectual decorum and professional discipline, while rigorously defended and embodied by those academics, as well as their medical and legal graduates in the conduct of their professions, does not apply to those practicing the ‘art’ of politics. Words, when used in political campaigns, and their under-studies in the editorial pages, the opinion pages, the social media platforms, have been unhinged from both their original intended meanings and have been ‘weaponized’ in what amount to military-style campaigns that pit one set of “data” against a completely alternative set of “data”. Individual personal character of an opponent, it seems, is also a subject and a target of these scurrilous attacks, when and where even the ropes of a boxing ring and a referee have both been abandoned.

The rise of social media, along with the appetite for sensational, titillating, and paradoxically enervating headlines screaming the fall from grace of prominent people, along with the scurrilous and humiliating and captivating and seductive details of that tragedy, as a gestalt, has given rise to an industry that rakes in literally billions for its perpetrators. And it is a gullible and apparently starving public that snatches these pieces of political radioactivity, morphing what once were Roman amphitheatre duels in which the masses were spectators, to political death-duels panting for both naïve and gullible audiences, and gladiators willing to submit to the ravages of this new political landscape.

And given that not only aspects of human behaviour is or can be confined to codified law, in any attempt to restrain the worst of our tendencies, and also given that linguistic traditions of grammar, sentence structure, thematic argument through the retrieval, curation, interpretation and presentation of packets of facts as the legitimate manner by which to advance a cause, have to a large extent fallen by the roadside, and given that the pursuit of power and wealth for their own sake have shoved the public interest off the public agenda, the extermination of any agreed set of facts has resulted. Rather than truth being the first casualty in war, we have all been complicit in turning our public discourse into a war in which each micro-act and each word have become the bullets, the arrows, the spears and the cannons of our battle. And there is no boundary on the battlefield; we each hold that battlefield in our hands, in our cell phones, or our laptops, or tablets.

We are not only at war with those whose words and actions and beliefs and attitudes we dispute, and we are instantly permitted, anonymously, to ‘fire’ our verbal rifles onto any one or more of several unregulated and voraciously profitable platforms. We are also untrained in this new pseudo-military-industrial-informational-cyber-technical political warfare. There are no apprenticeship programs for political neophytes, except those operated by dark money, or those funded by internet agents which serve a national government and/or an international cartel or cabal. We are all learning through experiments for which we are ill-prepared and under-tutored.

And so we are living, not only in and through a global pandemic that has already killed more than a million and threatens to eliminate many more lives, but also in a world where we, like those toxic gases, are the erosion and the atrophy of our capacity and discipline to deploy words, not as weapons, but as hand-shakes, even with those whose ideas we oppose. We have trampled on the subtle and nuanced meanings of words, as well as on the willingness to surrender our tyrannical domination of our knowledge “framework” based on a foundation of agreed information, beliefs, attitudes, traditions and even laws. We have not merely “dominated” nature as the misinterpretation of the old Testament suggested. We have morphed into ironic, paradoxical, and mythical self-defined and self-declared super-heroes unimpeded by the traditions of those cultures on whose shoulders we have tread for centuries and whose foundational precepts, principles and prophecies have served as guiding lights. We are now verging on the tragedy of self-sabotage, through our glib and willing surrender of those boundaries that define truth, that seek decency, and that envision authentic dialogue, not without humility, but with a level of grace that extends both to our competitors and adversaries as well as to ourselves.

Having abandoned shame, and a reliance on a body of foundational premises and facts, and fallen over the cliff of mature restraint, we are all endanger of succumbing to an intellectual, biological, chemical and political chaos for which we are unprepared and potentially unwilling to prevent.

To Obama’s words, I would suggest we are already IN an epistemological crisis, one we are endanger of denying!

Leaning into disclosure and active listening

The greatest threat to our civilization is a failure to communicate in an open way, combined with an unwillingness to listen to one another. (Rabbi Michael Dolgin, Temple Sinai Congregation, Toronto, in ReformJudaism.org, November 16, 2020)

The two-headed snake, failure to communicate openly, and a willful decision to refuse to listen to one another, lurks like toxic smog at the doorstep of each and every house, business, professional office, corporate boardroom, hospital operating and emergency room, and in every ecclesial sanctuary.

Why are we so concrete in our failure to communicate openly? First there is John Powell’s (S.R.) reminder that if I tell you who I am, and you reject me, that is all I have. So, we can likely agree with Powell that fear of rejection is implicit in our. We hold back open disclosure of those events, decision, statements, judgements, which lock those moments in a vault of personal secrecy. Keeping secrets, tragically, is a disease that infects and thereby affects each family, and by extension each and every institution, workplace and organization. There is neither time nor interest, in most places, to listen to those so-called personal melodramas that compound our lives, and if and when we encounter someone willing to listen, we are surprised and somewhat curious and sceptical. Private conversations with an intimate partner, perhaps, might offer space, confidentiality, trust and the chance to unlock some of those previously locked secrets.

Our memory, like an attic filled with storage boxes, suit cases and photo albums, tends to gather dust, and fade into the sepia of forgetfulness, as we attend to the duties, chores and agendas of each day. Also like that storage attic, it is rarely disturbed, only occasionally shifted, tested, and opened ever so slightly, on the occasion of an anniversary, a birth, a death, a marriage or perhaps even a search for a diploma or a baptismal or confirmation certificate. Sometimes, a single comment will strike a chord of anxiety, shame, embarrassment or even potentially of dream-like reverie, and morph into a trigger for recollecting. Lurking near the front of our consciousness, always, is a question that asks, “If I had trouble coping with that moment when it occurred, will I be able to withstand its impact if it is revisited?” And then, “If I revisit a tragic and painful moment, and I even consider whether to share it, with whom will that sharing be feasible?” “Will that person be OK with me, upon learning of my ‘bad’? Will that person keep the story confidential? And What would happen if the answer is “no”?

We have all had moments of truth-telling that went awry. And there was another layer of angst as our story served as an act of self-betrayal. What we often fail to bring forward into our thought process is that each other person has his/her own story locked securely in another safe-deposit box of memory. Conversely, I recently revisited a moment some three decades ago, through social media, in order to extend a heartfelt apology for having made utterly unacceptable comments to a supervisor in a learning session, at a time when my thoughts and emotions were running high and highly conflicted. To my grateful surprise, I received an authentic apology from that person, for his failure in offering support when, on reflection, he now deemed my need for support could have replaced his attempt to challenge. The exchange prompts a reasonable inquiry: Are more people trapped in a fear of sidisclosure that are open to the potential healing through honest apology?

Another aspect of failure to communicate hovers like a vulture over domestic/marital relationships. Pride and a determination to perform duties, both those expressed as expected by a partner and those implicit inside one of the on partners, having been deeply learned and embedded from his/her family of origin, dig trench ‘boundaries’ that lock in feelings of tension that can and will only fester without release. Those trenches, once established, have a tendency to make themselves ‘permanent’ if only through an unchallenged habit. Separated both from our connection to our underlying reasons and perceptions for doing or not doing specific things, or from saying those things we anticipate could be unsettling, we perform a security-check on ourselves that can later be summarized in words like these: “I feared rejection if I disclosed who I was and what I thought and believed, and ironically I was rejected for not showing up!”

 If it is anecdotally and experientially true that ‘showing up’ comprises most of what human existence entails, and we presumably are all cognitively conscious of the veracity of that epithet, then why is it so difficult to show up? There is an ironic twist of emotional power politics in this dynamic for which those of us who tend to be dubbed “gushers” for the obvious reason that we are far more ebullient, effervescent and perhaps even dominating need to be and to become much more conscious. We all know about physical and emotional space, especially in this time of social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19. What we do not speak of as often is what I might call, verbal space, referring to the time some of us take to express our thoughts and feelings, while inevitably and thoughtlessly depriving another of a similar and equal opportunity. If we fill the air, and the time together with our ‘emoting’ we are at the same time robbing the other of a legitimate opportunity to share his/her thoughts and feelings.

It is the discernment of appropriate ‘showing up’ both from the perspective of being too withdrawn as well as from the perspective of being too overwhelming that much of our repression can be traced. Repression, analogous to keeping secrets, although not necessarily the same, can occur without anyone actually taking conscious note of its happening. On the one hand, a rather shy person begins any encounter with unfamiliar people as an observer, keeping distance, keeping silence and gathering the ethos of the situation, in order to ascertain the mood, the tenor, the tone and the feelings of comfort or discomfort in the situation. Conversely, another person rushes into a conversation with new faces, seemingly ignorant of if and how his/her person is charging like the proverbial ‘bull in a china-shop’ into the room. Insecurity underlies both types of response to a new situation; however, how each person responds to insecurity withheld or exaggerated will have an impact on many of the responses.

In court rooms, and in diplomatic negotiations, terseness is considered professional. Discretion, in terms of protecting information, and of delivering information in manner strategically designed to influence the ‘court’ or the ‘other party’ includes a detached, unemotional and professional “friendship” encapsulated in the legal profession in the words attached to the opposing legal team, “my friend”. Rules of engagement, developed over centuries and codified in transcripts (now dubbed read-outs) guide participants in the ‘normal’ manner of professional discourse or more appropriately debate.

The world of the reporter, on the other hand, while fixed on the prize of a newsworthy quote, the accuracy of which determined by the absence of any denial or reprisal is guaranteed, nevertheless permits the contextualizing atmospherics, both in background, and in tone, and in what might be expected to ensue. Whether the ‘source’ is disclosing the whole story, or a tightly guarded miniscule crumb, poses interminable digging obligations and opportunities for the reporter. Public figures, stereotypically, have arrived in their current position through exuberant, enthusiastic and ebullient expression, often filling the air and heads of their audiences with entertaining decorative presentations of their own exemplary qualities and promises. Increasingly, ordinary people are grabbing microphones in order to pose serious and often troubling questions of those figures. And consequently, some public figures are shying away from town hall formats.

On the listening side of this equation, too, there are those whose strength and success have come from paying attention to those persons including parents, teachers, coaches, and supervisors in part-time jobs, whose mentorship they have valued, and from which they have benefitted. And then there are many more who have blocked the impact of many of the mentoring caveats, believing their own attitudes and values trumped those of their mentors. There may have been persistent experiences of debasement when persons positioned as coaches used their position to abuse, even if their motive was to challenge and to test their charges. Power, whether in the form of a quiet, private, confidential suggestion, or in the form of a public display of embarrassing demeaning, nevertheless lands in the moment it is delivered, without the coach usually taking time and care to assess the long-term impact of his/her actions and words. I deeply regret my own carelessness in not being as sensitive to the impact of my coaching volume and intensity, and my failure to consider options before losing it and embarrassing a player who could have benefited from a more humane approach.

Another cliché about listening is that it is very difficult, in fact impossible to listen while engaged in a cataract of words gushing from one’s mouth. As a long-term teacher, I bear both guilt and responsibility for having heard most of the cognitive connotations of oral responses from students, without actually having integrated the emotional connotations of those responses. My own directed intensity to ensure that the experience of the classroom never devolved into what the student would have considered boring may have been a factor in my negligence. Nevertheless, active listening, a process through which one individual hears the cognitive and the emotional and the psychic messages from another, and processes the complexities of those various layers of communication, is a process few are taught and fewer are willing to take the time and the care to consider. Naturally, those in the therapeutic professions are both trained, and hopefully adept, at the highly nuanced skill. And, occasionally, they may even have moved beyond the skill to integrating the process into their “presence” a sine qua non of the needed process of growing trust between client and therapist.

Among families, there is a deep divide between men and women, the former paying diligent attention to the factual literal meanings of whatever communication is coming from his partner. Women, on the other hand, seem to have an innate capacity, and comfort in, hearing multiple levels of meaning in the communication in which they are engaged. This is not to disqualify men, or to put women on a pedestal; it is rather to attempt to level the playing field, in the hope that women will pause to indulge our bluntness and unnuanced receipt of their messages, and to encourage men to experiment with a way of hearing that carries many of the overtones of feeling, and implication to which we previously turned a deaf ear and a blind eye and a blank mind.

The less we actually “hear” the more frustrated will our partners be; the more we disdain any notion of opening our ears and our hearts to intimate family communication, the more we will deprive ourselves and others of the potential of being fully ‘understood’ and fully ‘known’. If we can begin to clear some of the stereotypes of those identity traps that keep us wandering through our trenches, and start exploring new pathways both to disclose and to listen, while it will be frightening at first, the possibility does exist that we will become known to those who matter and they will also become known to us in ways previously out of reach.

Deception, like obfuscation, dissembling and distraction, is a defence from which we can free ourselves, if we no longer need it as part of our mask. And regardless of the professional requirements of communication etiquette and ethics, perhaps we can begin to replace its prominence with confidence and disclosure even in our diplomatic ventures. 

Soulage's BLACK canvas depends on the play of light...an instructive metaphor?

“Black is never the same because light changes it,” he said, in French, through an interpreter. “There are nuances between the blacks. I paint with black but I’m working with light. I’m really working with the light more than with the paint.” (Pierre Soulage, quoted in “Black is Still the Only Colour for Pierre Soulage, by Nina Siegal, The New York Times, November 29, 2019)

Featured recently in a CBS segment of 60 minutes, hosted by Elizabeth Palmer, Soulage is currently highlighted in a solo show in the Louvre. Anyone who witnessed even a single piece of his work cannot help but be struck by the strength of the ‘draw’ of the viewer into the canvas, which seems ‘alive’ as the light shimmers and emits multiple shades of colour. We look at a painting completed by the 100-year-old artist, exclusively in black, that literally and metaphorically glistens with the energy, the bounce, and the reciprocal bounce back from the ‘eyes-mind-imagination’ of the witness. Dramatically different from the ‘scenes’ depicted by various realist, naturalist, impressionist, cubist and other artists, Soulage’s canvases captivate the viewer paradoxically by penetrating the psyche to become integrated into the spirit of the viewer, rather than remaining ‘detached’ inside a frame on a wall in a gallery.

The creativity to envisage the ‘play’ of light reflecting from the various edges of black paint, ‘sculpted’ by Soulage, using often self-designed ‘devices’ of cardboard, or metal, or wood, to this lay viewer’s eye can only be minimally described as ‘black magic’ while seriously avoiding a slide into a trite cliché.

The mid-wife of these mysterious, mystical, moving, modulating and, superficially simplistic canvases, however, may have begun his career by ‘’throwing’ paint at a canvas, has morphed into nothing short of a visionary.

Even a brief glimpse of a single Soulage canvas evokes, provokes, stimulates and births visions of how our individual and collective lives, as symbols of light, constantly ‘play’ off on a foundational background of darkness. Penetrating a mystery considered so risky by millions, even after nearly a century of Jung’s depiction of the Shadow, Soulage may offer to those still resistant to the promise, an entry point into a new insight. And perhaps this new insight might just offer individuals, as well as communities, and naively even perhaps the planet, a reservoir of radiant light and hope whose energy will elevate the human mind, heart, spirit and confidence to envision a new, if not utopia, at least a century of ameliorated anxiety and fear for our grandchildren.

Those of us naïve men who, often tragically and even more often comically, find ourselves gazing at the clouds, or looking for the wind, or vicariously wandering the hedgerows around Lake Windermere, (without ever seizing the opportunity to visit the Lake District), are unconsciously painting our own pictures from the darkest walkways of the darkest coal mines, imitating the proverbial canary, in the faint and often quixotic hope that someone might hear our song, feel our heartbeat, and even pause long enough to consider some of the dangers and risks pictured.

Of course, each of us “naives” is never burdened with the pain of diving into the weeds of whether or not anyone has even read our song, let alone attempted to listen to its rhythm, melody and theme. So, naturally, painting pictures ‘in black’ is deeply congruent with our world view.

For the last several decades, while the world has endured serious pandemics, economic depressions, world wars, the holocaust, the development of nuclear, biological, chemical and more recently cyber war machines, as well as coups, revolutions, assassinations, as well as rushing and then ebbing political ‘crushes’ on evil men, we have, it seems, consistently held a detached, somewhat objective and for millions, a non-involved posture, with respect to our personal relationship, connection and thereby responsibility for any of these darknesses.

Of course, there have been and continue to be multiple signs of light, new vaccinations, new procedures, new therapies, new laws and regulations that have brought to bear new and often more compassionate and more sustaining decisions by the body politic for the people within the body.

It is, however, another persistent feature of ‘western’ culture that we are constantly preparing for another ‘attack’ from another dangerous enemy, and then beating the drum of our “accomplishments” as proof that we are making progress against the interminable, predictable and newly generated enemies that will compete with us and individuals and as communities, and nations.

Posing as “defenders and protector against evil” requires a metaphysic that is based on many religious answers to the source, location, responsibility and impact of those ‘external’ forces that are set to destroy us. Us against the world, (whomever we consider our enemy to be, or to become, or to threaten to become) is a posture that permeates our homes, our schools, our hospitals, our courts, and our governments. Churches, generally, as well as specifically, have taken on (been given, assumed, sought) much of the responsibility for outlining the relationship between humans and darkness. Those churches have defined what is evil, they have prosecuted what they considered evil, they have consecrated those liturgies, prayers, rituals and dogma they consider sacred, as insurance and as ethical and moral guidance, in the events of malfeasances against those expectations.

Churches have spent centuries debating the nuances of the variations of, for example, a ONE God versus multiple Gods, or  transubstantiation versus a symbolic embodiment in the Eucharist, as well as the incorporation of a God into the justifications of war, of changes in how humans treat each other, of the hierarchy of genders, the hierarchy of social and political status, the doctrine of the divine right of kings (to marry the spiritual/ethical/legal/political) and thereby enhance the ‘power’ of those embodying such a theory. People have revolted against what they considered abusive power, (as is currently the situation in Hong Kong, Eritrea, Belarus, and incipiently in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere in the U.S, and formerly in Northern Ireland, on the James Pettus Bridge in Alabama, and on the Akwesasne reservation in Canada).

   
What if, for example, all of our historic examples of conflict, on the political scale, as well as on the individual human front, have been signs of light against what was a shimmering background of blackness, without any of us actually envisioning the light that was playing out against that background? As Morley Callaghan reminded us in his novel, A Time for Judas, (1983), Judas Iscariot was Jesus’ most trusted friend, chosen by Jesus to betray him to the authorities, according to tablets attributed to Philo on the last days of Jesus’ life. In the light of this version of the story, Judas took his own life, not for betraying Jesus, but for failing to keep the secret as he had promised.

What if, for example, revisiting our historic archives, our biographies, even those of our most sinister individuals, we were to discover that even the most heinous acts were committed by men and women whose lives, persons, psyches, spirits and minds had previously been so tortured that their actions, like that of Judas in the Callaghan novel, were very different from the judgements we (collectively and compliantly) have taken them to be?

What if, for example, our collective vision of “blackness” while it embraces the horror of witches, goblins and extra-terrestrial spirits, nevertheless also shackles us in a metaphysic in which our “evil” nature does not uphold or even object to our necessary mountain-climb out of darkness into light? (with the concurrence, and the blessing of the self-serving ecclesial institutions)

What if, for example, Soulage’s canvases embody a ‘revolutionary’ perspective on the relationship between our shadow and our conscious lives? And in this light, (pardon the pun!) our lives are constantly, repeatedly, predictably, and inevitably ‘casting us in a very different light’ than the one the religious institutions would have us bear?

Rather than weep and wail at the interminable horrific and heinous situations men and women have created, (and put us in, as interminable victims) is it possible, or might it be feasible, for us to embrace a new relationship? A relationship that warrants our imperfections, as not merely tolerable and hopefully modified through critical self-examination and even more critical atonements…Could this new relationship see the new light shining in ripples and in ever-changing colours, different each and every time our life (biography, evaluation, engagement, relationship, birth, death) is witnesses, assessed, appreciated and absorbed, playing out on the backdrop of the collective and the individual shadow.

In this perspective, every individual man, woman and child is an agent of light, as the sine qua non of his/her identity. The darkness is a shared planet on which the lights beg not only to shine but to be noticed, and evaluated and celebrated as light. And, in this new perspective, no single light can ever be judged to be ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ to any other light, given that no one is able to discern which light represents which individual. Although all "lights" (persons) share equally in their impact on the 'canvas' there are those among us who choose not to 'turn their light on' in the sense that they are unwilling, or perhaps unable, to include the needs of the body politic, the human race, and the preservation of life and liberty around the globe. (Failure to put 'the public' needs and the 'public good' ahead of personal narcissism is a current example of this abdication.)

How would this view apply to some of the most heinous of tyrants, assassins, torturers, villains? First, the perspective would entail a social responsibility, not merely for the obvious ‘human rights’ that struggle for tolerance and application (among the Uighers, the Black and Brown in America, the indigenous in many countries including Canada, the Belarusians and others) but for the development of those processes on which the survival and enhancement of human life depend. Scholarship, rather than heavily funded to find curative or therapeutic applications, would and could shift to preventive measures, given that prevention (medical, legal, criminal, educational, and even economic) is far more effective than the crisis-management addictions we currently witness.

Earlier this morning, for example, on Brian Seltzer’s “Reliable Sources” we heard former ABC newsman, Sam Donaldson, in a conversation about how to turn the American media around from conspiracy theories to hard, factual, credible news, express serious doubt that anyone would be approaching Rupert Murdoch to ask him and his media empire to shift how they cover the news, for the benefit of the United States, in this time of political and social crisis. It might interest My Donaldson, and his CNN partners, to note that, according to the Financial Times, on November 9, 2020, (written  by Jamie Smyth) “a petition with 500,000 signatures calling for a public inquiry into Rupert Murdoch’s media empire was presented to Australia’s parliament (on Monday), amid concerns the nation was slipping into deeper political polarization and division.” The fact that Murdoch owns the whole media landscape in Australia, while significant, would indicate that any such move in the U.S. where Murdoch does not control the whole media landscape would require even less political pressure than it would in Australia.

There are a myriad of human individual and collective “lights” that have been deliberately turned off, by their namesakes, for a variety of motivations, among U.S. Republican “leaders”…and their ‘power-outage’ enhances the darkness we are all experiencing, as we continue to fret over the next traumatic and self-serving melodrama the outgoing president might explode. The power outage that currently obviates those many lights, obviously and unequivocally, renders the current canvas of the American political landscape void of the many nuanced shades and dynamism on which it depends.

And, unless and until we begin to consider the “absence of light” something more critical and thereby warranting collective attention, as opposed to an observable and willful and malignant overt act, we will continue to wander on a metaphoric canvas devoid of the required light to bring it to “life”…Legal definitions of culpability can no longer be restricted to the causative, the empirical and the measureable…There are already too many teachers going through the motions, and lawyers and accountants and politicians whose lights have suffered a self-imposed power-outage, fearful of a political storm before it even arrives, and thereby narcissistically protecting their tenure, rather than participating in the lighting of our collective work of art, that black canvas the legacy of Pierre Soulage. 

An empathic petition in support of healthy men

 Ink is being poured into the magazine and newspaper pages (as are electronic digits online) attempting first to discern what happened on November 4 in the election and second, how to move forward in a focused, disciplined and effective manner, not only in the U.S. but throughout the geopolitical arena.

Diagnosis, including and beyond the ‘medical model,’ demands a critical look at the individual political actors, the political culture, and the attitudes, perceptions and beliefs that are apparently ‘driving’ the political ethos. Far from a single presenting ‘issue’ (e.g. the current occupant of the Oval Office), or a single media outlet’s blatant and unapologetic bias (e.g. Fox news or MSNBC), or even a single political party or political ideology (radical right or left, or even centrist), or casting for another silver bullet (e.g. social media” or “Russian interference,”), any attempt at a diagnosis must embrace a critical analysis of how many factors interact in a moment in time. And that moment can only be considered as a moment in a longer historic flow from the past, stretching far into the horizon.

In  an interview reported on his website, The.Ink, Friday, November 13 2020, Anand Giridharadas says this:

…I think if we were to be honest with ourselves, and if many men were to be honest with themselves, they’re in a bad way….For some men that’s (the economy) the big thing in their lives. The desertion of opportunity is an economic fact that quickly becomes a cultural and a gender fact. In many communities, men were raised with an idea of themselves as a provider, as the stable source of income. The world has changed where they’re not the stable provider, or the wife earns more money, or not having a college degree no longer provides the kind of life that it did. The larger dynamics of the erosion of patriarchy, the ascendency of women and the growing (in)equality in this country over the last generation are another tremendous, tremendous source of change….If a society fails to show those men, in this case, who they can be on the other side of change, what is left for them when this mode of being is rightfully taken away—if they can’t be convinced that there’s some other way of being a man, of being a human being, of having dignity on the other side, then in addition to their own failure that they visit upon others, it becomes our collective failure, because they lash out…..Donald Trump…is a weak man’s idea of a strong man. In many ways, he represents an authoritarianism fueled by feelings of emasculation. Weak men look to him to be the husband that, deep down, they fear they can’t be to their wives; the father that they fear they cant be to their children; their lack of vigor in the economy or otherwise. If we don‘t heal men, I think we’re going to have more Trumps in our future.

Thanks to Anand Giridharadas for uttering so eloquently and courageously what some men have been saying for some time. And then, in a albeit imperfect parsing of his words, while there is definitely a tectonic shift in the economic stability, certainty, security and promise of men, it has to be noted, too, that much of that shift in fortunes resulted from other men seizing short-term, personal self-aggrandizement (whether in profit, political standing, or some other equally  ‘instant’ gratification). The shift from a public consciousness dedicated to the building and sustaining of public institutions, libraries, social services, health care facilities, and educational resources to the highly individualistic testosterone-fed addiction to personal success in business needed and attracted the undivided attention of millions of men.

Currently, a documentary film, Assholes A theory from director John Walker, investigates “the breeding grounds of contemporary ‘asshole culture’—and locates signs of civility in an otherwise rude-n-nasty universe. Venturing into predominantly male domain, Walker moves from Ivy League frat clubs to the bratty princedoms of Silicon Valley and bear pits of international finance. (from the Assholes, A Theory website). Robert Sutton, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has authored a book, The Asshole Survival Guide. He defines an asshole this way:

An asshole is someone who leaves us feeling demeaned, de-energized, disrespected, and/or oppressed. In other words, someone who makes you feel like dirt.

Obviously, the current occupant of the Oval Office sparks much of this conversation, and yet, while we need to protect ourselves from persistent “assholes” their very existence speaks loudly about their current place on centre stage of our political culture. And, without devolving into a pity-party for assholes, given that their behaviour is totally and unequivocally intolerable, the primal scream they individually and collectively emit needs some detached, objective and professional analysis.

Those who hurt others are those who are hurting themselves. That is neither original nor really very profound. Yet, for many men, unfortunately, when we are “hurt” we act and speak and pout as if we are angry. Hurting, in a male-dominated culture, is so profoundly and defiantly repressed, given that it signifies weakness, and weakness is also profoundly and defiantly rejected as a possible and reasonable and tolerable experience (including emotions, perceptions, beliefs, and anticipated/projected perceptions of others). For a man to wrap his arms (brain, heart, body) around the bottom line that he is afraid, that he is hurting, that he is lonely, that he is unloved and unwanted, for many if not most, is about the most difficult challenge of his life. And for many, the depth of the pain (hurt, failure, shame, tragedy, bullying, defamation) too often has to be so deep and penetrating that only then is there literally no other option but to surrender to the vulnerability.

A recent episode of The Good Doctor explored the ripples of implications of COVID-19 among the medical staff, detailing a protracted conflict between Dr. Aaron Glassman (Richard Schiff) and his partner, Maddie Glassman over the doctor’s effective emasculation at being refused permission to participate in the hospital’s excessive needs. His self-imposed estrangement from his partner, burying himself in computer games, refusing to go on marital walks, and generally behaving in a highly irritating manner, created an domestic/emotional/psychic impasse broken only when he finally acknowledged his own fears, his own feelings of uselessness, and his own new awareness of how much of an “asshole” he was truly being. Naturally, his partner authentically and dramatically expressed her appreciation for his gift of self-disclosure, especially given how hard it was for the character to bring himself to that place.

Like most of us, we can be assholes, but most of us do not seek or wish to inflict pain on any other people. Those whose need to inflict pain are the most “assholes” among us, and we all need to guard against reverting to that kind of behaviour. And, just as many men do not consider themselves conversant, fluent, adept, skilled at identifying emotions, especially those more subtle feelings like being ‘hurt’ or disappointed, or shameful, or embarrassed, (these words and the experiences that generated them originally are indelibly burned into our memories), we slam a door, stomp out of a room, shout obscenities, blame the other, engage in a loon-like escape, or act out in a manner that effectively serves to sabotage us either directly or indirectly.

In the political arena, preserving a pristine public image, while secretly undermining an opponent may not surface for some considerable time. Similarly, in the business, professional world, many can and do ‘get away’ with acts of sabotage, justifying them as the only way to get ahead, or to ‘show that we are not weak’ or to demonstrate our ‘prowess’ and thereby compete for the next promotion. And the first single act of betrayal of another, may remain hidden from public disclosure; it remains to fester within our own psyche, undoubtedly. That ‘festering’ part, however, remains out of sight and out of reach in those moments when our “betrayal” seems the only option available. Pausing to reflect on our motives, and then to pause even longer to consider whether there are any options to our “shitty’ behaviour, in a world so fast-paced, and so based on competition, and on being rewarded for quick-inventive-creative thinking on the spur of the moment is literally and metaphorically prohibited. And this is especially true in the moment of greatest perceived threat, danger, risk, when the adrenalin is running like white water, through our system.

Recent reports of suicide in Canada, indicate that 75% of all suicides are committed by men, many of whom do not have (or do not seek) support (personal, neighbourly, professional) for what might be loneliness, alienation, shyness, employment status (especially if one has recently lost a job), or financial stress, or even repeated attempts to ‘fit’ into a new environment. This fitting in to a new environment is made more tremulous for those who have already experienced one or more situations in which their contribution was not valued, not understood, not wanted because it might ‘show up’ those already ensconced in their roles. And given that men are more likely to talk (not only in talk therapy but also in pubs, coffee shops and in workplaces) as counterpoint to the deployment of our/their hands in some shared project, men in Ireland and New Zealand have devised and exported what they call “Mens’ Sheds” where local men randomly gather in a shed or a garage, or a basement to work on some variety of projects depending on the interests and the skills of participants.

It will take hundreds, if not thousands of Mens Sheds around the globe to begin to make a ripple of an impact on the bruised, wounded, shameful, ostracized, alienated, ageing, solitary, unfriended (and potentially unfriendly) men whose lives have been dealt some kind of psychic blow (perhaps even of their own making). And given a culture in which those who are not or cannot “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” (like the rest of us have already done) there is little appetite, especially among prominent, successful wealthy, well-respected and status-filled men in positions of leadership, executives, politicians, lawyers, doctors, accountants for attitudes that begin to recognize the growing tide of displaced men (and that phrase is evocative of those DP’s who rode the rails in the Great Depression). And without a recognition of the complexity and the confluence of multiple influential factors (some stemming from local conditions, others from conditions generated and the provincial or state level, others of a national or international impact), and the basic yet glaring fact that men have had and are continuing to have a really difficult time in what to many seems like the obvious “getting on with it” there will continue to grow a gap between the male “have’s and the male have-not’s. It is far more likely that our women friends and partners, colleagues and associates are and will be much more empathic in first grasping, and then fully comprehending, and then enacting policies, practices, incentives and supports, training opportunities and re-start incentives. Nevertheless, will men even be willing to consider accessing such new options? Will men consider such social and economic and educational supports another patronizing hand-out to another ‘desperate’ and especially “weak” “failure” of a man?

We are proud, as men, and while we have some reason to be proud of what other  men, including our fathers and grandfathers have accomplished. And pride is far too often a barrier both to our own acknowledgement or both our strengths and our weaknesses and to envisioning and anticipating and then to accepting a supportive hand when it if offered. Just as we cannot permit the “perfect to be the enemy of the good” in our public policy, or corporate governance, or our private, domestic relationships, including the relationship we have with ourselves, we can no longer tolerate our own hubris to suffocate our potential. And how can we possibly come face to face with our potential, if we are blind and deaf to those endearing words of support that have been showered upon us for decades, as we disdained their melody and their caring rhythm.

As pogo reminds, We have met the enemy and he is us!

While originally modified from Commodore Perry’s military quote by cartoonist Walt Kelly in 1970, to celebrate the first Earth Day in 1970, with the message, man, from his treatment of the earth is the planet’s enemy…can justifiably be currently applied to the condition of masculinity in North America, at least. And, it says here that if we are to own the “enemy” within, for the sake of the planet, we will first have to take ownership of the “enemy within” as men.

And we will need all the help we can get, especially from our female partners!

Is this political incest we suffer from?

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There’s something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It’s like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with. (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale #1)

Chris Kofinis, Democratic pollster, talking to Carol Off last night, on CBC’s As It Happens, bemoaned the tragic failure of his colleagues in the polling business in the U.S. for having gotten it so wrong AGAIN (remember 2016?), and called many of them out for trying to “tilt the news story” in the direction of their own personal (professional?) preference. Kofinis believes it is his job to listen to each person in a focus group and attempt then to figure out not only where they are coming from but what they are thinking. In other words, Kofinis believes it is his job to practice an art/skill/science in which the American public (and likely many other contemporary cultures) does not believe, does not adhere to, does not practice, and does not consider it even relevant to their private, family, community and national health: ACTIVE LISTENING!

All the psychobabble opponents will already have closed their laptop/tablet, given their utter disgust that this piece is about to launch into a defence of listening. It is not only the literal words, sounds, gestures, and even body shifts that are available to anyone who is “listening,” it is also the “person” inside all of those expressions who, if we are even to begin to honour the adage, all men are created equal and deserve both respect and dignity…that is so prominently and proudly proclaimed as political rhetoric in most democracies. And the “person” currently has become either an ally or a foe. The former is a potential client/customer/voter/parishioner/fixer or lender while the latter is a potential ideological nerd/religious fanatic/gender warrior/ethnic polluter/trickster/ignoramous…both lists could continue interminably.

And each of these “persons” are transactional agents of some agenda….And, baked into the ‘cake’ of each person is the notion that full disclosure of opinion, thoughts, feelings even if they are tentative, spontaneous, experimental, nonchalant and/or trivial and socially-motivated is unacceptable, immature, naïve, simplistic, too intense, and/or reductionistic.

Long ago and far away in another life, I free-lanced as a cub reporter, covering an earlier iteration of the trump archetype who left a legacy as a perennial mayor of a small northern city. The word on the street, following each and every election in which this man was victorious ran like this: “Surprising how he won, given that whenever I asked someone how they voted, everyone denied voting for him!”

Denial of any even meagre form of attachment to this man was so abhorrent to the “political class,” to the elite, to the educated, to the upper middle class of the city that they/we refused even to acknowledge any participation in his electoral victories. His own public, often-repeated adage ran something like this: “I don’t’ care what you say or write about me, as long as you spell my name right!” For him, any and all publicity was more beneficial than none.

Along about the same time, I was mentored by a wise owner-operator of a car Intdealership who, upon hiring me to prepare and produce some of his advertising tutored me: “Don’t ever believe any of the opinion polls; people will lie to pollsters! And never prepare an ad targeting teachers, lawyers or doctors; they are the cheapest people on the planet!”

There is a fault-line peering out from under the rubble of Tuesday’s American election for the White House. The “over-performing Republican red-mirage” as it has come to be dubbed, turned what the polls and the national media had twisted into a landslide for Biden into an extremely tight, nail-biter of a race, the outcome of which is still up in the air. And as results trickle into newsrooms, various media outlets are continuing to ‘shade’ their version of the numbers in favour of their preferred (and their audience’s) preferred candidate.

There seems to have been almost no voter attention paid to the nuanced version of tax policy, environmental policy, immigration policy. And as for presidential malfeasance, given that the election was considered by many to be a referendum on the trump first term, only the Democrats waded through that swamp, while 67.5 trump voters decided he was their ‘man’. “I cannot stomach the man, but I like his “policies”….were words that spewed from many voters in interviews. And when asked about which specific policies, the interviewer heard silence or some version of ‘he is a man of action and not words like the other guy.’

Image, slogan, deft manipulation of reality, by the master-magician, rolled off the minds of those 67.5 millions as they likely privately cursed his person, his personal values and his language and his sexism, racism, homophobia, and his outright disdain for everyone of those thousands who risked their lives in attending his mask-less, crowd-crushing rallies.

And the intimate, and even mutually seductive enmeshment of the trump voter with their ‘man’ could well wear the mantle outlined by Margaret Atwood above. There is a delicious, seductive, hideous, nefarious, secretive, thrilling quality to cursing a monster in private, behind his back, and then trumpeting his “action-accomplishments” blindly and willfully ignoring everything else. Bring him ‘down to the common denominator, while deflating him, and then exaggerating how “the effete elite, political class are “picking on him” evoking a lever-pull in sympathy for the victim of this political chicanery is only one equation that attempts to unpack the mysteries of this week, and the last four years, and the potential for the next four, should he cling to power.

We already know about the political incest rampant in the Republican-trump ‘party’ in which sycophantic hugging and clinging to the president not only did not “do them in” in the eyes of the voters; it actually pummeled them into victory. And yet, is there also another facet of political incest among and between trump-voters and the trump-man himself?

What is it that he “knows” or “intuits” or “smells” or “touches” about the people who vote for him that the “public” discourse cannot and will not penetrate?

There seems to be a “devilment” that motivates, infects, stimulates and undergirds both the voter and the president. They share both a capacity and a desire to wreak havoc, as mutual-cohorts in a war various described by Breitbart, Bannon, QAnon, the white supremacists, the law-and-order devotees, People of Praise, evangelicals, the KuKluxKlan, the nationalist/populists, Foxnews, Barr, Jack Nicklaus/BobbyOrr, with the ultimate ‘saviour’ from all the carnage and evils that dominate the list of deep neuroses currently infecting the various participants.

Deconstruction of the “traditional establishment” was one of the original battle cries from Steve Bannon, in aligning himself with the trump candidacy. “Draining the swamp” was another of the guiding slogans of the campaign….seemingly not only cognizant of but also riding the wave of angst, fear, disassociation, alienation, and despair then impacting a rather large segment of the American public.

Singling Obama, the intellectual, the articulate, the circumspect, ‘no-drama-Obama’ as the target of much of the energy for this anti-establishment drive, while convenient for those needing a glib excuse, only masks the depth, the danger and the toxicity of the 67.5 millions.

When Iago becomes the “hero” of Shakespeare’s Othello, the world has indeed turned upside down. When Al Capone becomes not the villain of the twenties, but the hero, at least in deviousness if not in the object of his villainy, then the “treasured” tradition of history and pride in the legitimacy, the integrity, the authenticity, and the trust-worthiness of the American experiment in the constitutional democracy is turned on its ear. When the moon-shot, and the Peace Corps, the AIDS-Ebola-Swine-SARS victories, the New Deal equalization, the Voting Rights unleashing millions of African Americans from demeaning poll taxes…when these are overshadowed by a few paper towels tossed in disdain to the literally drowning people of Puerto Rico, the caging of hundreds of children as deterrence to other potential immigrants, the disavowing of COVID-19 and then the heroic ‘recovery’ by ‘superman’ trump….then everyone on the planet can see the sun setting on the promise of the American commitment and dedication to their own well-being, not to mention their protective instincts for us all.

There is some hint of morning sunlight in the historic number of voters who mailed, walked, levered, and posted their voice/vote in this election, even if that glimmer has yet to reap any of the potential benefits from a release from another four years.

However, even if after all the votes have been counted, and even if Biden moves into the White House (still very much a suspect prospect on Thursday, November 5, two days after election day), the Senate appears to remain in Republican (McConnell’s) hands, thereby potentially thwarting legislative initiatives that might rise from the White House, and pass through the decreased majority of Democrats in the House. And, we are all left to ponder the myopia, the politically-correct narrowness of the design of the Mueller investigation, the apparent lack of equivalent (or perhaps more venomous) energy of the trump voters, and the Republican/trump leadership, on the part of the Democrats.

Decency, honour, the adage of “bringing a knife to a gun-fight,” not to mention ‘car-rallies’ and a refusal to knock on doors (to protect both canvasser and elector from COVID-19), in a contest with the devil, do not replace or substitute for a much more muscular, even frenzied attack, against an enemy the scruples of whom are not only lacking, but twisted.

In athletics, it is known as ‘the killer instinct’…A real-estate professional, when asked what he especially liked about his career, replied instantly and passionately, “I just love the chase!” There is an instinctual, (and perhaps more attributable to men) aspect to the political war, also dubbed a “blood sport” (also in highly masculine terms). And the rise of a high degree of sensitivity, compassion, empathy, and the obvious decency that accompanies those traits, (all of them embodied and celebrated in and by Biden, while totally missing from the trump camp) for many reeks of the feminine.

This is in no way to paint Biden with a feminine brush; however, even in the middle of a pandemic from which 400,000 Americans might die, before the end of 2020, the concept of “caring for one another” (by social distancing, wearing a mask, rejecting large crowds and parties) has been not merely flaunted, but virtually destroyed throughout the campaign and also throughout the trump presidency.

The triumph of greed, narcissism, mis-representation of reality, and the appetite to devour the sugar-high of these cotton-candy “treats”, and thereby endorse and participate in this political orgy can only be considered appalling by the rest of the world, as it most certainly is by those who voted against trump and for Biden, in whatever equation of that mixed motive applied.

Atwood has much insight to offer the public opinion industry, (as did that car dealer), and also to the political guru’s whose lives have been twisted, as has the life of the republic, by the tornado that wears a blue suit, a red tie, a red MAGA hat, and nevertheless, sees every moment as another in which to inflict vengeance, to instill and to unleash fear and doubt, while promising “greatness.”

Is he a student of Orwell or, more likely, a clone of those operating the government in Orwell’s 1984, where the Peace Ministry conducts war, and the truth Ministry continually re-shapes and re-tells history so convincingly that today’s enemies are tomorrow’s allies, and vice versa?

In any case, we are all entrapped in a universe whose foundational footings of truth have been eroded and concussed by rhetoric that cannot be put back into the vault of the archives. These footings need a totally new “crew” as well as at least a decade of truth-telling, accountability, decency, and honour in order to public the public “square” back into structural security.

And it will take more than throwing paper towels to recover from the trumptsunami! 

"Teach your children well"...(Crosby Stills & Nash)...a song trump never learned!

We hear trump supporters touting the “business-man” approach and the market growth potential of a re-elected trump presidency. A ‘man of action’ and a ‘doer’ not merely a talked like other politicians…are other epithets being applied to the incumbent. 

Nevertheless, those of us just on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, saturated with political advertisements from all candidates, and especially from The Lincoln Project, a group of former Republicans who have turned diametrically opposed to this administration and especially its ‘leader’, perhaps have an ‘owl’s-nest’ view, without having to take on the direct result of our personal vote in the American election today.

One of the eight founding members of The Lincoln Project, Jennifer Heard, head of the GOP in New Hampshire, appearing on Morning Joe on MSNBC today, articulated the sycophancy of Republican senators, and the racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and the ‘caging’ of immigrant children on the border as just some of the features of the administration that erase many of the honourable traits of the  Republican Party before trump.

While the American media turns a laser-beam on the two candidates (and their running mates) there is another aspect of this moment in time that begs notice, amplification, and even neighbourly advocacy.

While those ‘caged’ children are a tragic testament to a failed presidency, it is the long-term impact of the trump administration’s failures, including those “actions” to which some cult members refer. The long-term impact on the American children, the anecdotal, unconscious and even conscious messages, learnings, fears and even mis-directed and mis-applied ambition, like sand pellets in a desert wind-storm, will impact the psyches of millions of kids for generations. And that impact does not even begin to address the direct impact of lost, permanently ill family members, all of this resulting from the negligence of the trump administration in its refusal to address the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.

From a ‘lay’ perspective as opposed to a clinical, research view, (although scholars will conduct graduate research for decades) to reflect on the language, the attitudes, the ennobling of the attitudes, beliefs and actions of those whose sole ambition is to sew terror in the homeland, one easily uncocvers many reasons to  endorse wholeheartedly, Noam Chomsky’s judgement that this president in the worst criminal in human history. There may have been no missiles fired into the homeland, by the administration, (although American missiles took out one of Iran’s top military leaders in Baghdad), the body language, the rhetorical language, and the individual images of both of those aspects of this presidency, can and will only culminate in a social and cultural residue of toxicity whose stain on the psyche of many already struggling young men and women.

And, just as the administration is dead-set against scientific testing for COVID-19, ‘because testing will result in higher numbers’ of cases, so to the administration is profoundly aware that deaths associated with the pandemic cannot and will not be criminally assigned to the president, (the legal argument of causation precludes such a process). Yet it is those collective, and deliberate and conscious words and actions that poison the public discourse, based as they are on vengeance, reprisals, character assassinations, dismissals, merely tentative and impermanent hirings and supervision of all major executive positions that are brewing in the collective consciousness and the collective unconscious of the American psyche. And these ‘flags’ are also linked inextricably to the obvious self-serving narcissism,  disclosure more recently publicly disclosed by courageous defectors from the administration (the anonymous author of the editorial, the former assistant to pence on the pandemic advisory task force, the former national security official.)

Earlier this year, Jason Wilson, writing in The Guardian, March 18, 2020, under the headline, ‘The Far Right--White nationalist hate groups have grown 55% in trump era, report finds…Southern Poverty Law Center warns of growing movement driven by ‘fear of demographic change’…’White nationalist hate groups in the US have increased 55% throughout the trump era, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and a ‘surging’ racist movement continues to be driven by ‘a deep fear of demographic change’. (The report continues) Nationally, there were 155 such groups counted last year, and they were present in most states. These groups were counted separately from Ku Klux Klan groups, racist skinheads, Christian Identity, groups, and neo-Confederate groups, all of which also express some version of white supremacist beliefs…The report notes that the perpetrator of a massacre on 3 August 2019 in El Paso, Texas, where 26 were killed, and another man who attacked  a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one woman and wounding three more, claimed to be motivated by the idea that white people were being replaced. The increase in hate groups includes many which openly advocate violence, terrorism, and murder, and ‘accelerationist’ groups ‘who believe mass violence is necessary to bring about the collapse of our pluralistic society’, including organizations like the Base, Atomwaffern Division, and Feuerkrieg Division, according to the report. Seven members of the Base, six members of Atomwaffen Division, and one man, Richard Tobin, who is allegedly a member of both groups, have been arrested since last October on charges including firearms offenses, conspiring to vandalize synagogues and conspiracy to murder….According to the SPLC report, the arrests are evidence that federal agencies are finally ‘hearing the alarm bells’ regarding violent white nationalism. It points out that in the last year, ‘the FBI upgraded its assessment of the threat posed by racially motivated extremists to a ‘national threat priority’, and the ‘Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a strategic shift toward countering racial hatred.’ But the report says that those efforts are hampered by senior members of the Donald Trump administration like Trump aide Stephen Miller, ‘who has long been allied with anti-immigrant hate groups’. Miller’s attempts to insert white nationalist talking points into rightwing news website Breitbart’s coverage of the 2016 election were exposed last year, but the administration has retained him in his senior role….Along with the increase in white nationalist groups, there was an increase in homophobic and transphobic organizations, with anti-LGBTQ groups increasing 43% in 2019. Many of those highlighted in the SPLC report are religious fundamentalists. The report calls for a ‘national movement against hate violence in America’ in defense of ‘inclusive  democracy.

There is no reason to conclude from such reports that all or even most young people will fall into the trap of insidious, nefarious and hate-mongering speech or activity. Indeed, thousands of young people have volunteered as poll-workers in the national election, and many others have become much more conscious of their opportunity to engage in the political process, in a positive way. However, there is a serious risk to those young people already living on the margins, especially given that those numbers have grown exponentially with the impact of the pandemic. Life on the margins, including food shortages, blocked access to health care, impeded access to educational and employment opportunities, (literally thousands of businesses, many employing young people in the service sector have shuttered permanently) carries with it an extra burden of psychic desperation. And, in lay language, psychic desperation is just another word for feelings of “powerlessness”. And, when we are feeling powerless, we are also often experiencing walls closing in on us, thereby foreclosing on what may have been options in our past.

Without options, and blocked from what are considered normal opportunities, desperate young people do and will turn to illegitimate quick fixes. And we all know that there are a plethora of others willing to take advantage of young people in such a state. Preying like vultures on the vulnerable, the weak, the lonely, and the desperate is deeply ingrained in many cultures, including the United States. However, just as nine million cases, and 230,000 deaths from the pandemic cannot and will not be formally laid at the feet of the president, nor will the ravages among young people long after his departure from the White House (hopefully today!)

Listening to the vacuity of the explanations of ‘trump voters’s attempting to justify their decision tragically lays bare a devastation or perhaps more accurately, a depletion of the reservoir of critical thinking, based on reflective sorting through the vacuous propaganda, the lies, the deceptions and the false promises by tjhose voters. Clinging to cliches, slogans, ‘pro-life’ and faux-righteous sanctimony, anti-socialist fears, gun rights, caricatures of Biden and Harrris and their allegedly frightening plans, that have been manufactured and delivered by the master-hoax himself hardly displays an adult maturity so deeply needed by the vacuum of confidence and trust that trump has literally sucked out of the public square.

Enabling bullying at the highest levels of the nation’s most cherished and formerly trusted offices, deploying power for the sake of personal self-aggrandizement by the administration and the Senate leadership, confirming judges to put their whole bodies on the scales of justice for generations, defying allies while consorting with terrorists and saboteurs, raping environmental protections, while abdicating the Paris Climate Accord, appealing for the overturning of the Affordable Care Act to the Supreme Court while publicly lying about protecting pre-existing conditions….it is not only that these individual and heinous measures are detestable…taken together, they comprise a landfill of self-impugned superiority, mis-guided mentorship of the adults as well as the young.  trump’s sowing of the national cultural garden with spiteful, toxic, even radioactive seeds that will continue to grow and fester among the various endangers not only the current young generation, but also injects new and threatening warning signs on the horizons of those public agencies entrusted with protecting the public and preserving the peace.

While Obama tells audiences that ‘you would not put up with such behaviour from a school principal, or a co-worker, it might be even more to the point to suggest that were a teacher to perform in the manner, in the vernacular, and with the philosophic disposition of this president, the parents of the children in his classroom would be howling for his dismissal in the first week. And yet, after four years, during each and every hour of which we are fed despicable morsels of hate, contempt, vengeance and venom from a twitter-verse whose investors must be drunk on the champagne they continue to devour as their Twitter stock climbs exponentially and their dividends mount, (all of it resulting from the president’s absolute dominance of the social media), there are still some 42-45% of the American electorate who refuse to see the fires that area burning through, not only the forests in California and Colorado, but also through the culture forests of  tradition, honour, respect, rule of law, judicial fairness and especially the truth.

It is those latter ‘trees’ that have sustained the nation for well over two centuries, just as the redwoods have sustained the forests on the west coast for even longer. And given the president’s contempt for the forest management (no raking of the forest floor) and his declaring global warming and climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, we cannot and must not be surprised that he cares so little for those sustaining trees in the forest and the metaphoric trees of the political and social culture.

“Contempt for ‘the other’” is the engraving on the prospective tombstone of this man who can and will see only those aspects of the universe that directly inflate his hollow and empty and starving ego.

And that is a mantra from which the nation and the world desperately must escape!

Will it?