Friday, February 5, 2021

the burden of developing the soul....

In the Return of the King, (p. 190) J. R. R. Tolkien writes: It is not our part to master all the tides of the world. But to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. (M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie, p. 39) In a footnote, on page 46, Peck outlines three models of evil:

·        the nondualism of Buddhism and Hinduism in which evil is envisioned simple as the other side of the coin. For life there must be death; for growth, decay; for creation, destruction. Consequently, the distinction of evil from goodness is regarded by nondualism as an illusion.

·        ‘Integrated dualism,’ espoused by Martin Buber who referred to evil as ‘the yeast in the dough’ the ferment place in the soul by God, without which the human dough does not rise. (reference, Buber, Good and Evil, 1953, p 94)

·        ‘Diabolical dualism’ of traditional Christianity in which evil is regarded as being not of God’s creation but a ghastly cancer beyond His control. Peck suggests that, even with its pitfalls, ‘it is the only one that deals adequately with the issue of murder and murderer.

Another of the more pithy observations Peck makes is this: “We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as a part of this cover-up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it. (People of the Lie, p. 76)

And then, as a footnote, Peck quotes Buber again, from Good and Evil (p. 111):

Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one’s evil from oneself, as well as from others, that to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture?...I mean only that evil people tend to gravitate toward piety for the disguise and concealment it can offer them. (Peck p. 76-77)

Another guiding light, in the process of any attempt to begin to unravel the gordion knot of evil, is found in Erich Fromm’s The Heart of Man : Its Genius for Good and Evil, p.173-178) found also in Peck, p. 81-2: Most people fail in the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without will that they cannot lead a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide. They are not aware when life asks them a question, and when they sill have alternative answers. Then with each step along the wrong path it becomes increasingly difficult for them to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept the fact that they have wasted energy and time.

Whether or not evil is a developmental evolution, as Fromm suggests and Peck endorses, the issue of how a culture envisions, defines, and then enforces what human acts it considers evil is deeply embedded in both religion and history. What may have been thought of as not evil two hundred years ago, could well be considered profoundly evil today (e.g. slavery). Similarly what was considered evil two hundreds years ago might today well qualify as quite morally and ethically acceptable. (e.g. gayness and transgender) Having both taken, and assumed the role of the arbiter of evil in a culture, the various churches have a considerable burden to bear in the dynamic that they both encounter and disclose, especially given the equally perplexing dynamic of the evil that they do not encounter (or seek to encounter) and thereby fail to disclose.

A now deceased bishop exclaimed to me once, rather didactically and also as a cautionary warning, the T.S. Eliot epithet, ‘humankind cannot bear very much cannot reality.’ In a deeply personal and also highly insightful piece in the Guardian, (Nov. 14, 2008) Jeanette Winterson undertakes an explication of Eliot’s renowned phrase: “That for him, was not the reality of dingy streets and gas fires, typists and tinned food, …but the vast reality of two quite different invisible worlds—‘the heavy burden of growing soul’ (Animula), and what might be called the ‘shaft of sunlight’ (Four Quartets), a spiritual illumination that became for Eliot, a journey towards God. For Eliot, the 3D world where we live, that which he calls in The Waste Land, the ‘unreal city’ is a beguiling or distressing distraction from facing life head on, facing ourselves as we are—and ultimately facing God. He is tough, he refuses consolation, ‘Time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.’ (She continues) When I read him that day, gales battering me within and without, I didn’t want consolation: I wanted expression. I wanted to find the place where I was hurt, to locate it exactly, and to give it a mouth. Pain is very often a maimed creature without mouth. Through the agency of the poem that is powerful enough to clarify  feelings into facts, I am no longer dumb, not speechless, not lost. Language is a finding place, not a hiding place.”

The heavy burden of growing soul, of facing ourselves as we are, and ultimately facing God,  an entirely appropriate and even essential process whose nature habitat is indeed the sanctuary and the ethos and the community we know as ‘the church’ is too often and tragically blocked, diverted, and even declared dangerous by the church hierarchy. For centuries, the Christian church not only permitted by actually endorsed slavery, absolutely decried gayness, and so embedded its culture in the culture of the affluent, the corporate, and the implicit biases, bigotries, and, even more deceitfully, in the process of continual denial of what it was they were either endorsing or castigating.

Did the Christian church stand up to the fork in the road in 1933 and in the years following?

Did the Christian church acknowledge the fork in the road when the epic line screamed out across the continent, a signature of the late twentieth century film Wall Street, “Greed is Good!” as if there could be a more explicit defaming of the role and importance of money in the American culture? There were likely some, even before that Michael Douglas line, who prophesied about the demise of the hollow and desperate life of one Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman. The playwright, Arthur Miller, however, was not a prophet representing the faith.

Did the Christian church not only fall victim to the marketing chicanery of the corporate world, “Fill the coffers and the pews!” came the cry of an urban bishop, to a clergy who categorically refused, knowing full well he had all the tools and the skills to do what he had been directly ordered to do. That same bishop drove his thumb into my chest, uttering the words, “You will not publish that thesis! I am ordering you as bishop! My report is in the archives and that is all that will be made public on that event.” Tragically, it was the death of that same clergy by his own hand, at the altar, to which the bishop was referring.

Suicide, by anyone, is a deep and profound tragedy. And its committal was included as a criminal act, in Canada, until it was silently removed in 1977. Death, especially by suicide, among a small somewhat close community of worshippers, is deeply injurious to their individual lives, and to the community generally. However, there is much more to the “aftermath” than a rapid-fire paint job, a clearing of all affects of the deceased, and the smoothing over and almost unspoken convention, if not actual ritual, of silence, of never uttering the name of the deceased, and of ‘moving on’ so the struggling church can and will survive.

Similarly, there is much more to the narrow rendering of the Eliot “reality” line, than the bishop allowed, in his proferred perspective of the capacity of the church to encounter and to deal with head on the truth of our painful process of growing soul. If the church itself, and that means each parish, and each clergy in each parish, is not openly committed first to a spiritual discipline that includes facing our own darknesses, hidden traumas, dysfunctional families of origin, and perhaps even the kind of easily disguised guile and self-deception that can so easily dominate one’s personal modus operandi, then how can the church even begin to consider helping those sitting in the pews, in the committees, in the choir lofts, at the organs, and in the counting rooms, to consider that process an integral to membership, and certainly to discipleship?

It is not only a refusal to discuss the implications of a clergy suicide, but also the refusal to openly acknowledge such petty tensions as power politics, on an open, conflict-resolution framework basis, using each conflict as a moment of insight, clarity, and the concomitant ‘charity’ that can come only from a process of truth-telling. In another urban parish, an honorary assistant, substituting for an incumbent clergy on leave, delivered a homily addressing the defunding of a needed social service program for handicapped adults. The parish response, to the returning clergy ran something like this: “We cannot have him criticizing a premier whom we have just recently elected.” And then, when another parishioner privately told the returning clergy, “The honorary is a leader, and you are not!” all hell broke loose. A secret kangaroo court was held to discern the wishes of the parish leadership, about the future of the honorary. Even the results (13-4, 2 abstentions) were neither conveyed, nor executed!

Silence, in Man for All Seasons, from the mouth of Cromwell: “So silence can, according to the circumstances, speak!” Does one’s silence construe consent, as Sir Thomas More says in the same play? Or is silence, in the case of the unreported kangaroo court, another way of expressing a fear of the kind of confrontation that would have ensued upon the honorary’s receipt of the news of the meeting, and the failure to honestly and openly and honourably deal with its implications.

Fear of conflict, however, is no assurance of no conflict. In fact, fear of conflict is a guarantee that there will be more conflict, the implications of which will only grow and fester and ultimately, too often, result in some “significant” episode, the cauterizing of which boil will only engage the church in another one of its cover-up campaigns. Keep the lid on, if and when a priest decides to leave a marriage after falling in love with a parishioner. Secret, private, midnight surveillance of the apartment of the parishioner, in a directed effort to prove the evil, will only lead to another act in a drama too old for the church itself even to digest and to resolve. It is the ecclesial co-dependence that shackles both the individuals in an interior conflict and  the institution itself. And, of course, for the institution, the secrecy, the avoidance of having to confront whatever it is that is emerging as an open sore, is open acknowledgement of its institutional dysfunction, immaturity, and failure to provide a healthy model of conflict resolution for the people in the pews, themselves, obviously and inevitably, engaged in their own conflicts, (emotional and spiritual and familial). Furthermore, a theology that supports, encourages, and even enmeshes with “political correctness” as the voice of authentic Christianity is itself a denial of the essence and the spirit of that theology.

Anyone who speaks directly, as I do, will inevitably encounter many forms of rejection:

from a female supervisor: “You are far too intense for me!” to which I retorted, “I am also too bald so deal with it!”

from a senior parishioner whose family founded and funded the mission: “I am here to tell you all what to do about the organ and how to do it!” to which I retorted, “I feel very strongly parented at this moment!”

from another senior parishioner: “There really was no Resurrection! To which I retorted, If not, then this whole thing is a fraud!”

From a bishop, to whom I suggested, “It is time for men to learn and to own their emotions (2000), to which he retorted in a loud and uncontrolled scream: “No! That is much to dangerous!”

From a canon to the ordinary: I want you to meet with the bishop. When I asked, “Why?” he replied, “I have been trying to get through to him for nine years, and maybe you might be able to get through.” And then, to my shock, upon entering the meeting I learned that the canon had not informed the bishop that he had called the meeting, and the bishop was misled into believing that I had asked for the meeting.

From another supervisor, upon reading my report on rural ministry: “You were only sucking up to the Canon to the Ordinary!” to whom I today (twenty years later) “That is both insulting and disingenuous!”

From a Canon to the Ordinary: “If you so much as even contact a legal counsel, I will see that you never work again!” To which and to whom (now deceased) I respond: “If you and the church are so fearful of actually confronting the whole of reality, in my or any other’s situation, and circumstance, for which you have never taken responsibility, then I am obliged to follow through on legal counsel, if not for my own defence, but for the protection of the others who follow.”

Raised in a family in which too much abuse was routinely buried under the metaphoric carpet, and in a church in which the theology of bigotry and the messianic evangelist went un-challenged and then elevated into some kind of haloed and holy dogma, I guess it will come as no surprise that my little journey into and through the “fields that we know” (“Tolkein above) would have generated a perspective and a will to declare what little corner of reality of which I am familiar. It is shared in the hope that others will not have to endure the hierarchical silence, cover-ups, failures to investigate fully, and to confront the needed truths and reality of both abandonment, and denial. It is a failure to confront that fails most of us, and the church has a significant position to embrace its failed history, in the light and the spirit of a confronting God. 

Monday, February 1, 2021

Kardman triangle #2

Our first look at the Kardman bully triangle, in our last piece, detailed the Republican conspirators (conspiracy theorists, cultists) as self-identified victims, and their extreme passion and irrationality also works hourly on every platform and from every microphone available, to paint the Democrats as persecutors. This paint-by-number political theatre sadly, is not a game like paint-ball. The poisoned words, beliefs, and acts of insurrection (Jan. 6, 2021) are neither erasable nor can they be tolerated in a state that calls itself a democracy. Furthermore, any attempt, however lame as depicted in the last piece, to bring the two sides to a common table, through what in family therapy would be termed mediation, is so ephemeral, ethereal, and even quixotic, as to disqualify as a credible political agenda. The best and most idealistic intentions of Biden and his administration to work “across the aisle” are already running into predictable roadblocks on the size of the COVID Recovery bill.

The phrase, “words matter,” has been bandied about profusely since trump rode down the escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015. Nevertheless, five years have passed and, the words chosen and weaponized into grenades (not merely bullets) by the ex-president and his millions of cult members, have left a political landscape littered with, from trump himself, some 20,000 documented and curated lies. It is the appetite for those lies, the false emboldening of his cult by those lies, and the dangerous consumption of the implications of those lies among the 74 million voters who cast ballots for trump that continues to impale the Democrats, and the political structure, as well as the American culture on the horns of a dilemma. An army of 74 million, not all of whom believe all of his lies, nevertheless, is a political force, armed with millions of funds from supportive donors, who themselves either believe the lies, or tolerate them, in order to facilitate an agenda that seems to cohere with trump’s style and actions.

How can the country, (including the media, the academe, the churches, the corporations, the military, the civil service, the justice system, and the behemoth that is the U.S. government) together, even begin to mount a “truth-campaign” that will penetrate the wall of denial, resistance, hubris, and what some would call outright psychosis, in the political sense. (In a junior high definition of neurosis from a physical education instructor I heard once, a neurotic builds castles in the sky, whereas a psychotic moves into his castles.) A mere line drawing of psychological trends much more complex, that description clearly applies to the trump’s cults enmeshment in their conviction that trump has come to be their saviour, from the hordes of blood-drinking satanic pedophiles. Not only is their depiction of the Democrats a monstrous projection, of their own worst and most dark unconscious; their individual and collective readiness to acknowledge their projection, is, so far, totally out of reach. If there were time, and if there were a professional therapist, it would take several sessions to break down the wall of intransigence that separates them from their ownership of their projections.

Parents too often, hurl projections of inferiority, insecurity, angst, and especially those fears of being “found out” for their insecurity, at their children. In a fit of temper, a piercing epithet, “You’re no good just like your father!” can and will come screaming from a larynx of a nearly rabid and frustrated parent. And the piercing goes right into the indelible memory bank, along with the fine details of the time and place of its utterance. The moment is never fully excised from the child’s memory, and any long-term attempts to detoxify the wound usually need forgiveness, treatment, sometimes sharing with a partner, and perhaps even prayer. In the personal life, however, these wounds are likely to be ameliorated with time, work and the gift of the mining of the strength and insight they bring.

Given that a good 40% of the American body politic is linked to, if not saturated by, the lies, the victim-mind-and-heart-set, and the false belief that trump alone can and will rescue them from their completely imaginary and incomprehensible and ethereal danger, even Pizzagate is still considered a real event, whereas the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings are staged flags, by their hated enemies.

How does the body politic excise this psychic, emotional, ideological, and propaganda-feeding tumor?

The depth of dependence on the tumor if extreme. It is as if, like a person sick with real cancer, whom before he would even treat such a patient, Bernie Segal, oncologist, would ask, “What do you need with this cancer?” And where do we find the equivalent of a Bernie Segal, oncologist, to ask these people:

v “What need does this cancer fill in your lives?”

v Are your lives so desperate, empty, angry, alienated, isolated, separated that you are determined to leave an indelible signature, through verbal, physical, emotional, character-assassinating, racially-motivated violence?

v What is it that you hate about yourselves that you have to project onto others?

v What evil monster, of a political and a psychic dimension, has so inflicted pain on your person that only protracted vindictiveness will assuage your hate?

v What kind of battle-field do you conceive your fight needs in order to destroy your perceived enemy?

v What lengths do you intend to pursue in order to meet the profound needs that seem to be animating your hate?

v When did you begin to believe that violence, from your hands, is your only and best weapon to tear the national house down?

v What kind of letter would you leave for your parents, children, friends, colleagues, to explain your total commitment to this vexatious campaign?

v Is this campaign similar to a suicide plan by an individual who has reached the end of his rope?

v If your actions were being perpetrated against you, what would you say to those doing the perpetrating?

v Do you know the meaning of the word, nihilism?

v Do you know the meaning of the word, fascism?

v Do you believe that the Third Reich made a positive contribution to the world’s people?

v Do you believe that your groups are committed to actions emulating the Third Reich?

v If you were a Jew or a Moslem, and these acts and words were being directed directly at you, what would you do or say to those committing or uttering those act/words, respectively?

v Is there any hint of a theology or spiritual component to your self-righteous anger, intensity, passion and unleashed terror?

Naturally, however, such questions would likely only enflame the hard-core insurrectionists…and they would be unlikely to hear them.

And so, as the world grapples with a rapidly mutating pandemic, a race to produce and to inject vaccines into enough arms to generate herd immunity, and the millions whose lives have been ripped from under them strive to stay alive, to find work, to feed their families, and to stay healthy, there are many, including this scribe, who consider the actions of the insurrectionists to be among the most self-centred, narcissistic, vengeful and self-sabotaging and blatantly immature series of actions to have emerged in the last have century.

However, any words or thoughts that can be described as “parental” (and the last sentence certainly qualifies) are less than helpful. What the insurrectionists need, and what the political/legal culture will offer, could well be two different things. Charging, sentencing, imprisoning and potentially further exacerbating the contempt and dissociation of these people, even from themselves, might well spell even further revenge. A protracted, profoundly and diligently designed re-training educational curriculum could go a long way to shifting the attitudes, beliefs, prospects, and relationships (all of which are seriously damaged now!) of many of these people. The nation, collectively, wants its own revenge. And it also wants to find a method by and through which it can go forward without morphing into an armed camp against its own people. And there is a strong and easily discernible mountain of evidence that, when American considers itself ‘under attack’ it rises up into epic actions, programs, budgets, staff super-structures and highly sophisticated ‘deterrent’ technologies.

Prick the skin of the American political culture, (and that skin has been pierced, bloodied, and even murdered and shoved into suicide)and there is a predictable, and not necessarily measured and effective response. Behemoth edifices of intelligence, siloed off from other equally monstrous pyramids of intelligence, tend, first of all, under attack, to ‘protect’ the turf of the silo. Whereas, the sharing of intelligence, in both formal and informal channels, without perhaps the inflated budgets that then get siloed, offers the potential of a very different response.

Bureaucracies, however, hire, train, and then breed professionals to operate within the boundaries and frameworks of that bureaucracy. There has likely never been an administration more siloed, and thereby enemy-defined, and enemy-driven, operating on a zero-sum premise, than the U.S. administration that has just, thankfully, come to an end. And yet, it really has not been silenced. It is certainly not dead. And the cultists, including too many elected Republicans, are still clinging to the envisioned promise of another Greek-like epic and thereby historic event, the rise from the ashes of the Phoenix, trump.

Messianism, the notion that a messiah is an integral and essential component of the religion of the United States, has a long history. A complete history can be found in Karen Armstrong’s, A History of God, (Random House, 1993). A brief summary starts as far back as The Great Awakening in New England in the 1730’s. Jonathan Edwards fueled a frenzy of born-again conversions and ascribed responsibility to God who “was moving the people in a marvelous and miraculous manner…These intensely emotional reversal have continued to be characteristic of religious revival in America. It was a new birth, attended by violent convulsions of pain and effort, a new version of the Western struggle with God…The violent swings of emotion, the manic elation and profound despair, show that many of the less privileged people of America found it difficult to keep their balance when they had dealing with ‘God.’…It was Edwards and his colleagues who led Americans of the lower classes to take their first steps toward revolution. Messianism* was essential to Edward’s religion: human effort would hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom, which was attainable and imminent in the New World. The Awakening itself…made people believe that the process of redemption described in the Bible had already begun. God was firmly committed to the project….In the New World of America, God would ..be able to contemplate his own perfections on earth. The New England would be a ‘city on the hill,’ a light unto the Gentiles, ‘shining with a reflection of the glory of Jehovah risen upon it, which shall be attractive and ravishing to all. (From Alan Heimart, Religion and the American Mind, From the Great Awakening to the Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, p. 43, in Armstrong’s A History of God, pp.323-324-325)

It is not surprising that 1776, the numbers and the cry would help to sign the events of January 6 at the Capitol. However, like so many other symbols, images, metaphors and narratives lifted from scripture, there is little supporting evidence to link the holy book and its contents with acts of insurrection. Their deployment doubtless helped to fuel the American revolution, at a time when the stoic, and staid, and mystical Brits were considered the fundamental reason and culture (monarchy) from which the Americans were revolting.

If and when religion, and the enflamed passions of many of its most desperate and perhaps misguided recruits, is manipulated into an instrument for insurrection, hate, bigotry, anarchy and blatant racism, it has lost its way. There is no justification for any lame attempt to capture and to display a distorted Christian faith, even its minimalist and distorted words, as a psychedelic potion for hateful anarchic motivations. 

*Messianism is the belief in the advent of a messiah who acts as a savior or liberator of a group of people: human effort would hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom, which was attainable and imminent in the New World


Friday, January 29, 2021

American political culture through the lens of the Kardman Bully Triangle

The Kardman drama triangle, while originating in the “transactional analysis” period of family therapy, with Eric Berne as the prominent theorist,  may have some considerable relevance to the American psycho-drama that is playing out across the United States, and threatens to immolate the political system. Doubtless, the political class more than defers to anything “psycho-babble” sounding, in fact so demonizes the professional practice and its relevance to their political careers as well as to their personal lives. However, it is precisely those “specters” we are determined to ignore, deny, defy and bury, as outside the purview of our personal world view that have the potential to wreak the most havoc. It is not that they are more virulent and toxic that other aspects of our psychological profile, but that in their being locked into a vault of the unconscious, they somehow manage to take on overtones, accretions and pulsations that eventually splurt forth seemingly out of nowhere, when we least expect such eruptions.

The political class, including the reporters, analysts, practitioners and even the historians, tend to focus on the daily events, tweets, photos, and words as the first draft of how the political tides are moving. Occasionally, a theoretical framework might be useful in  at least offering a different light, and contextual and cognitive ethos in which and from which to investigate the potential for the daily news to move in a more detectable direction, if not an actual destination.

Right now, the Karpman drama triangle offers a lens into the three principal leads in what we are calling the American psycho-drama. The three ‘characters,’ if we were examining a specific family structure are: victim, persecutor and rescuer.

The Victim: whether or not this archetype (beyond a single individual person, in this case a group) represents those who feels or acts like a victim. Feeling victimized, oppressed, helpless, hopeless, powerless, ashamed, unable to make decisions, unable to solve problems, unable to take pleasure in life, or to achieve insight. If this victim is not actually being persecuted, will seek out both a persecutor and also a rescuer. Both additional archetypes are necessarily to sustain the victim’s negative emotions, perceptions, and underlying beliefs.

The Rescuer: “I alone can fix it for you!” is the stereotypical rescuer’s line. The rescuer is a classic enabler who feels guilty if they do not ‘go to the rescue’. The negative impact of their efforts, however, keep the victims dependent and prevents the victim from failing and experiencing the consequences of their choices. The rescuer’s primary interest is in avoiding their own problems in their well-developed disguise as concern for the victim’s needs.

The Persecutor (the villain): controlling, blaming, critical, oppressive, angry, authoritarian, rigid and superior are all words to describe this ‘character’.

Energy to initiate the drama depending on which perspective we are looking at, comes from the villain or the persecutor. As soon as a victim experiences what s/he calls persecution, s/he feels also a need to recruit others into the conflict. When a rescuer is brought into the drama, all three roles are now engaged and quite possibly, roles can be reversed, if for example, the victim turns on the rescuer who then reverts to persecutor.

It is, however, the meeting of the immediate, often unconscious psychological needs of each, without actually realizing or acknowledging the harm that is inevitable from the dysfunction. Each is acting on selfish needs rather than acting in a responsible way that would include consideration for the other(s). The rescuer’s complex motives might well include a desire to resolve the conflict, but also may have a midden motive to fail to succeed or at least to succeed in a way by which they benefit. Boosting self-esteem, or respective rescue status, or the deep enjoyment of having another depend(ent) on them, there is a clear potential to continue to play on the victim to perpetuate the payoff. The victim is potentially co-dependent, by engaging in a process in which their needs are met through the rescuer’s care.

The process of depriving each participant of the payoff they need or desire or demand or require, as a way out of the cycle, is much more easily stated than achieved.

If we, for our purposes here, extrapolate and assign roles to the three dominant actors in the American psycho-drama, the victim applies coherently to the trump cult.

The persecutor (in the eyes of the victim) is clearly the Democrats, The Gang, the Socialists, all of them operating as a cabal of child molesters.

And the rescuer, in this space, is, and has been, the former president who, while pontificating about how he alone is making America great (again), is profiting (allegedly) both financially and potentially politically, while also potentially falling to the various arms of the American justice system and its official and legal prosecutors.

Triangulation in family therapy is a process in which a two-party relationship that is experiencing conflict and tension will inevitably and naturally involve a third party ‘to reduce tension.’ One researcher’s insight seems especially cogent in analyzing the U.S. dilemma: that drama-based leaders can instill a culture of drama, in an organization, family, and (it says here) a nation. Persecutors are often in leadership, and a culture of persecution fits hand-in-glove with a culture of cut-throat competition, fear, blaming, manipulation and high risk of law suits. Certainly, the language, decorum, behaviour and inflammatory ethos of the American political theatre qualifies as one of cut-throat competition, fear, blaming, manipulation and high risk law suits.

Persecution seems to exemplify the psychic state of the trump cult, fed by the long-standing menu and diet of lies, distortions, manipulations and prevarications of the ex-president. “They are coming to take your guns!” “There is a Muslim invasion in Washington and across the country!” “Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings of young children and teenagers respectively were “flag events” staged to enhance the anti-gun lobby!” “Pizzagate was real and trump is coming to save us from these child molesters!”….are just some of the wanton, exaggerated and flagrantly untrue lies and manipulations being spread virally with the co-dependent compliance of the social media companies.  In a nation in which ‘hate speech’ is protected (Supreme Court in Matal v Tam, 2017, reaffirmed that there is effectively no hate speech exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment and that the U.S. government may not discriminate against speech on the basis of the speaker’s viewpoint.) Additionally, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, 1996, says an ‘interactive computer service’ can’t be treated as the publisher or speaker of third-party content. This protects websites from lawsuits if a user posts something illegal…Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Chris Cox, (R-CA)crafter section 230 so website owners could moderate sites without worrying about legal liability. (from theverge.com)

·        So….

·        if the wild west has been and continues to be re-enacted throughout the universe of the internet, without worry or even consideration of the potential for liability, on the part of the platform corporations, and

·        if the political psycho-drama is and has been so hot that ‘the show’ has actually shoved the potential for legislation off the table of the elected officials in Congress, and

·        if the arguments for obstruction, evasion, manipulation and narcissism now include and depend on a total disregard for what once qualified as an agreed body of facts, and

·        if the dysfunctional family model, in which and by which immature, self-centered, self-serving individuals regarded in many quarters as role models, heroes, wealthy magnates of influence and social status, and

·        if the political theatre/culture has morphed into little more than another reality television show, in which the stereotypes (archetypes) of victim, persecutor/rescuer play out, with all actors relying on a zero-sum game, in which and by which every win must include a loser, without compromise and

·        if the media buys into the psycho-drama as a reliable vehicle for both ratings and advertising revenue and

·        if the American ‘business model’ places profit and winning at all costs as the one to emulate in all aspects of the national culture and

·        if desperation is the scarcity the defines all three participants (actors, archetypes) in the American psycho-drama, then the cycle of national dysfunction will continue to play out regardless of the placebo vocabulary of the Biden administration and the army of politically and intellectually accomplished minions and

·        if there is no shift in the attitudes, the emotions, the psychic framework of those who perceive themselves (and their 74 million voters) as victims, and

·        if those victims are frozen into their self-designed, and self-applied, self-sabotage, without evincing a willingness to shift their perspective,

Then the multiple tasks on the Democrat agenda for unity, to build-back-better, to resolve racial inequities, to nurture trust among world powers, to combat climate change, to stem the tide of the pandemic….will all fall victim to the Kardman triangle.

In order to confront the implications of the Kardman bully triangle, one based in anxiety and problem-focus, where each role is fearful of owning their own experience, so they focus outward, the first step is for each ‘actor’ to recognize their role. In order to do that, each has to turn attention ‘inwards’ and take an inventory of the needs each is attempting to have met through the dysfunctional role they have adopted. And then, each needs to acknowledge the reality of their needs, take responsibility for addressing those needs, and ‘step into an already available and accessible power resource of your own. Its is not a huge step from victim to ‘vulnerable’ where powerlessness morphs into struggling. Nor is it a monstrous step from  rescuing to caring…instead of taking power away from others, empathize with others and allow them to cope however they deem necessary. From persecuting, instead of threatening punishment to control others, persecutors can move to assertiveness, by which you meet your own legitimate needs. (Reference: Jenn Getts, May 27, 2020 in Calgary Institute of Counselling.ca)

Now, given that there does not appear to be an objective, outside, professional trained, highly experienced and even more highly intuitive national psycho-therapist playing a public and prominent public role, through the media, (although Mary Trump has tried!), it behooves both political parties, the White House, and the various respected thought leaders from both parties, and diverging political ideologies, theologies, ethnicities and social and economic backgrounds to, first, reflect on the current conditions, including the truth of each actor’s co-dependence and reliance on dysfunction to meet needs. And then, to begin informal discussions within each ‘tribe’ about how to shift the internal dialogue, not only within each practitioner but also within the culture of the tribe, and then to start to free the freshness of a new foundational approach that is based not on  scarcity but on plenty, including the energy, creativity and support all who are triangulated to stand up both to reality and the truth and to meet needs without harming others in the process.

A mature, health, self-respecting American nation would be a welcome invite to the international party which we all have to ‘entertain’ if we are going to shift our planet and our access to legitimate opportunities and needs, in a shared, collaborative and committed new world order. 

Thursday, January 28, 2021

Healthy men are crucial to healthy culture

Amid the confluence of a pandemic, its mutating variants, the uneven production and delivery of vaccines, the economic fallout, potentially as damaging as some kind of military-engagement devastation, this morning Dr. Robert Whitley, as associate professor of psychiatry at McGill University and a research scientist at the Douglas Research Centre (also associated with McGill) contributed a highly provocative piece to the CBC. Entitled, “Alarming numbers around men’s mental health indicate need foo national response,” Dr. Whitley documents some shocking, trend-shaping, and tragic information:

·        Men account for 75% of suicides in Canada, an average of 50 men per week dying of suicide.

·        Canadian men are around three times more likely to experience addiction and substance abuse compared to Canadian women.

·        In B.C. the Coroner’s Service reports that males accounted for 81% of drug overdose deaths in that province in 2020.

·        Statistics Canada noted that one in four boys do not graduate from high school on time, a rate significantly higher than for girls

·        A study found that nearly 9% of men aged 25 to 34 never graduate from high school, almost double the rate for similarly aged women

·        4 in 10 university students are male and a lack of post0-secondary education leaves people ill-equipped for the new economy

·        The unemployment rate for 25029-year-old-men who are actively seeking work is twice that of similarly aged women, the second-largest gender gap in the OECD

·        A massive decline in traditional blue-collar industries leaving fewer jobs for unskilled workers, especially in rural areas, and medium sized towns with few alternatives. Absence from the workforce can leave people bereft of pride and purpose, contributing to despair, alienation and isolation.

·        Angus-Reid survey found that 63% of 18-34-year-old Canadian men experienced considerable loneliness and isolation, compared to 53% of similarly aged women

·        Evidence suggest that men underutilize mental health services, with women being three times more likely to seek such help

·        Studies indicate that men tend to prefer more informal action-based or group-based mental health services to 1-on-1 talk therapy

·        The U.K., House of Commons launched an inquiry into the mental health of men and boys in 2019, a decision supported by all political parties

Dr. Whitley calls for a need to create a parliamentary inquiry in Canada on men’s mental health issues, to include a critical examination of policies and programs in education, employment and health care.

Before we get to the mountain of empirical data about employment and educational trends, let’s pause, just for a few moments and cast our gaze over what can be legitimately termed “male culture” in Canada. We are, and have been for a century, raised in such pathetic aphorisms as “don’t cry, big boys don’t cry!” and “suck it up, you’ll be alright!” “don’t tell me you’re sick, when you really don’t want to go to school,” and even, deplorably, “real boys don’t play house, dolls”….And such epithets come from the mouths of both mothers and fathers, all of them determined to raise a young boy who is battle-tested and therefore battle-ready, in order to ‘take on the world’. And given that ‘battle’ imagery, and the cultural icons, myths, heroes and movies that celebrate all things military/war/battle/espionage/power/winners and the obvious and tragic opposites, losers/prisoners/victims/failure/loss/ and the multiple contributing factors that demean others (stupidity/ignorance/innocence/weakness/unpreparedness/lack of discipline/defiance of authority/) have come to saturate not only the military establishments, but also the organizational hierarchies, power structures, (pyramidal, autocratic, single executive,) and the cultural conventions that sustain those structures, how can we be surprised?

Sycophancy was not invented by the Republican Senators in the U.S. Congress. It abounds in every hierarchical organization on the continent. And every rookie recruit knows implicitly that he must “pay his dues” and “pay homage” to the traditions, the ethos and the personalities of those currently in charge and those on whose shoulders the edifice was built. Power rains, reigns and reins ubiquitously….downward, regally, and constrictingly of innovation, free, open and honest communication in those pyramidal top-heavy organizations whose legacy will infect both men and women for decades, if not centuries. It is also not accidental, either, to note that women ‘fit’ into such structures with much greater ease and compliance, and conformity, knowing that ‘pleasing’ those in power ‘will attract more flies’ than vinegar (just like sugar!)

And, conversely, young boys and emerging adult men, in our valiant and often misguided effort to identify as “different” from our female peers, take great pleasure in the grease and oil of a machine that needs fixing, and also take great umbrage at participating orally in classes that are designed to analyse critically Jane Austen’s or Emily Bronte’s or George Elliot’s novels, of Emily Dickinson’s or Margaret Avison’s poems. We engage eagerly in all social activities that put the latest football games, and especially the most onerous tackles in the spotlight. In short, we are steeped, brewed, casked in a culture of brittle, narrow, strictly enforced masculinity. And that masculinity, while not sustainable, is suffering from an onslaught of erosive forces over which neither individual males, nor even groups of males have much if any control.

Those is power, making decisions, mostly male, are so obsessed with their/our own immediate personal gratification (wages, ambition, power symbols, records, trophies, and legacies) that we care not a ‘fig’ for how we might be influencing generations of young men who will inevitably emulate our “success”. We are trained, like Pavlov’s dogs, to strive for success. And that success, we are indoctrinated to believe, and to embody, and to enhance, will assure us of our desired status and station: married, with achieving children, a beautiful home, a nice car, trendy vacations, a pension plan and a coterie of friends. Of course, while there is a grain of truth in the myth, there is also a large “dose of salt” that minimizes life’s complexities, life’s challenges, life’s sicknesses, divorces, deaths, bankruptcies, firings, redundancies, economic depressions, global recessions, pandemics, global warmings, and the rising and receding tides of technologies, machines, medical interventions and evolving cultural models and demands. And, contrary to popular opinion, learning how to become a professional golfer, or scholarship hockey or football athlete may or may not entail those highly impacting experiences of set-back, interruption, defamation, and threat that can and often will overtake even the most “successful”.

Add to this bildungsroman that attaches to and identifies each adolescent male who is emerging into adulthood, a masculine cultural stereotype that silently whispers, “You have to get through this alone,” especially if the problem/pain/discomfort/anxiety/fear/failure does not include a physical, observable and treatable bodily injury. Strength, traditionally, and almost sacredly, is both developed and displayed by an individual, except in team sports, where individual skills embodied by those special athletes, stand out and define excellence for the coaches, other team members and certainly the parents. While Canada’s college applicants’ landscape differs from that of a U.S. college applicant, it is not accidental, nor irrelevant in a general sense, to note that many U.S. parents are so committed to their young son’s or daughter’s admission to a ‘first class school’ that they turn the complete routine and budget of their family into a production house to develop athletic skills at the highest and most costly level, in order to pave their child’s entry into those schools. Imitation, while considered by some to be the greatest form of flattery, is also a potential cultural mimicking that warrants deep and critical examination.

However, any such public examination, I fear, will devolve into a combination of individual biographies, (case histories) as well as a compilation of sociological, statistical data, whose curves and predictions will then be interpreted and translated into policies that plow public dollars into the “problem’ as if, to repeat, what we do in all other instances of public angst can and will assuage all vestiges of public guilt, shame, responsibility and lingering attention to a deeply rooted and tenaciously-held mythology. Our culture is so truth-averse, so deeply ingrained in avoidance of personal responsibility, especially when it concerns a publicly documented, and thereby politically radioactive, social and cultural issue. We are very quick to tap the keys (letters) on our phones and tablets to excoriate individuals whose lives insult our sense of public decency, public ethics and morality, and the concomitant “ire” that seems to have seeped (flooded) into our neighbourhoods, courtrooms, and our public transit systems. On the other hand, we are also very quick to minimize any public issue that not only appears to be highly complex, but actually is extremely complicated. And this “avoidance/denial” mechanism helps us to deflect an authentic and shared and national responsibility for our own part in the national tragedy. “It’s too big and complicated for me to do anything about it anyway!” becomes a chorus, if not a national anthem, as we all look askance and disdain public figures who might actually be invested in making things better ridiculing their every proposal as ineffective, inadequate, too costly and motivated primarily by self-interest.

Vacillation between denial and avoidance, on the one hand, and a public posture that, while attempting to integrate the implications of research into the proposed recommendations, fails to engage the whole public consciousness, as well as the shared unconsciousness, will generate a brief flurry of symptom-directed activity, a few doctoral theses, a plethora of public envelopes of cash and the needed administrators, and little shift in the tectonic cultural plates that underpin the continental, if not global, demise of men, and the masculinity-shackles that impales too many.

Our families, our schools, our colleges and universities, and our corporations including the public service and the military all share in helping to generate the problem of masculine mental turbulence, and it will take all of them, individually and collectively to begin to address this sleeping and growing malaise. And, too, all of our churches will have to bring out the individual and the organizational mirrors, and investigate the origins and the histories of all of our deities, (almost exclusively male) and the hierarchies of dogma, belief and ritual that have been designed, imposed, sacralized and dissected for their toxic potency in the lives of millions of men, over centuries.

We have played religious (and pseudo-theological) war games from the beginning. We have pontificated our “truth” as the one and only. We have colonized millions with our self-serving, deity-denying power trips, on all continents, and then rewarded those colonizers with the “blessings of God” as we conceived HIM to be. The churches, all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, have traded in the generation of how men and women are to obey their god, how they are to procreate, with whom they are to procreate, to love and to dwell with. They have also enjoined in making their models and their ideologies, and their beliefs sacred and pure, while remaining silent about the inevitable, undeniable and veritable scepticism, doubt, uncertainty, vagueness, humility and pathos of their wandering pilgrimages. And while that was continuing, the churches built organizational structures, pedagogical systems, evangelizing systems, funding edifices, as well as worship and liturgical traditions that all contributed in their own way to the kind of tensions we are now witnessing among men and women around the world.

Naturally, Canadians will focus on the plight of the men who live here. And that focus will have to include the ravages of both world wars, including the Canadian patriotic heroes who died and those who returned from the front, mentally ravaged by what has only recently been  legitimized as PTSD, and treated, however meagerly. And into any new fabric of Canadian culture, will have to be woven the more recent fibres of the celebration of gay men and trans and bi- men whose contributions will continue to unfold.

And in the midst of the new tapestries of masculinity, celebrating the diversity of examples, there will have to be an extensive effort to disabuse many straight men from their ambivalence, if not outright hostility to gayness, and to gay men specifically. And in that worthy initiative, the Christian churches, at least, will have to play a significant role, given that the biblical injunction against homosexuality continues to plague much theological interpretation and practice even if it remains under the public radar.

The issue of the mental health and wellness of Canadian males, while peeking out from behind the many veils of secrecy and avoidance, will continue to attract researchers, scholars, athletic professionals, and hopefully theologians and social critics, as well as a bevy of educators steeped in the multiple dimensions of healthy masculinity. Mothers and fathers, too, of especially new born boys, would help to begin the process by poring over such books as “the Wonder of Boys” by Michael Gurian….and then searching for the many other insightful and supportive works about boys and men that are appearing in bookstores and on line.

As an integral part of any move toward enhanced mental health of and for men, the term “toxic masculinity” ( a term coined in the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1980’s and 90’s) will have to be tempered at least. It is not masculinity that by definition is toxic, but the acts by which men are tragically and persistently sabotaged by other men, themselves deeply burdened by their own experiences, and too often, their participation in denying responsibility and certainly in refusing to seek help soon enough to prevent those tragic acts. And, it says here that the hand of a supportive, courageous, creative and independent female colleague, partner, friend can and often does provide the light and the empathy that can neutralize some of the symptoms of toxic masculinity.

Healthy families, classrooms, organizations, churches and businesses depend on healthy men. And it will take us all to help to move our culture toward a time when the Whitley report will no longer be either so relevant or so urgent. 

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Ischinger's call for truth, trust and transparency needs trumpeting globally

For a while immediately after the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, there were many public comparisons made between the “Black Lives Matter” protests and the events of that horrible day in January.

It might seem useful and appropriate to take the veil of the kind of glib comparison that some make, for their own political purposes, in much the same way that non-equivalencies have been the stock and trade of the last four years in the United States.

White supremacists, and a goodly number of the seditionists were clearly supportive of white supremacy values and goals, differ significantly from those protesting the murders of clearly innocent black men and women, by most often white police officers. The immediacy of the injustice leaves blood on the hands of those bad actors who committed those murders. However, the injustice of some 400 years of what can only be called apartheid, colonialism, repression, racial bigotry and even radical racial bigotry, makes the violent cry for the false extension of the trump presidency look like a fall from a child’s wagon, resulting in a bruised knee. There cannot be permitted any attempt to justify the actions of January 6th, 2021, and to falsely try to weld that day to those several days of massive street protests just won’t fly.

Conspiracy theorists, including those cultishly enmeshed with something called QAnon, for whom trump was (is?) considered a saviour from the “satanic pedophiles” in the Democratic, also come already disqualified to be even entered into the same sentence as equals, to those protesting on behalf of murdered black men and women. Their total and complete disregard for what can only be called empirical evidence, truth, transparency and basic public facts renders them outside the pale of what must be considered legitimate public discourse. It is not merely hate, racism, bigotry and violence that define  their motives and their actions; it is an all-out onslaught against whatever truths they wish to erase through their inflammatory rhetoric, beliefs and actions. Even those who do not subscribe to the QAnon conspiracy hoax, (and it has to be labelled for the lie it is and for the danger that lie imposes on the body politic), their participation at the Capitol on January 6th represents an open, defiant, dangerous, act of anarchy. And that anarchy is the fruit of the seeds planted by trump, and especially reinforced by his sycophants in the Republican party, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, over the four years of the trump scorched earth policy against science, truth, facts and their flower, democracy.

For Republicans now to reinforce their allegiance to their “leader” in a manner evocative of the servile obeisance of North Koreans to their Kim Jong-un, or of many in Russia to Putin, or of millions in China to Xi Jinping, or of Philippino’s to Duterte, or of Brazilians to Bolsonaro, or of Hungarians to Viktor Orban. And while that list may not capture the length and depth of tyrannies, it serves as a reminder of the growing muscle of right-wing tyrannies, and the danger those tyrannies pose for human rights, for free press, for free and fair elections, for collaboration with those who seek both policy and practices that will impede the destruction of the ecosystem, that will curtail the pandemic, that will foster international co-operation in the design and free delivery of vaccines. Those tyrannies, too, will likely be more conducive to continuing attempts to commit cyber crime, illicit drug deals, intelligence piracy, and a prevalent tendency to secrecy, especially when it comes to investigating the source of pandemics like COVID-19. Or course, the western media, especially in the U.S. will not often, or perhaps ever, stretch as far as to compare their former president with right-wing dictators, except perhaps as symbols of anti-democratic governments with right-wing, white supremacy impulses. They will say things like, ‘he prefers dictators to former U.S. allies’ in an almost anodyne expression of their embarrassment, shame and disgust.

The State Republican party of Oregon yesterday (from The Guardian’s Lois Beckett, on Monday January 25, 2021), “claimed.. by resolution that the January 6th attack by a pro-trump mob was a ‘false flag’ operation, an orchestrated conspiracy ‘designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters and all conservative Republicans, and to create a ‘sham motivation’ to impeach the former president. To back up these false claims, the resolution cited links to rightwing websites, including the Epoch Times, a pro-Trump outlet that has frequently published rightwing misinformation, as well as the Wikipedia entry for ‘Reichstag Fire’…Bill Currier, Republican party chairman, (said), ‘We’re partway in the door of socialism and Marxism right now..and we have to fight…It’s time for choosing. People can decide what they want to believe and when they wan tot do, but there are people standing up and there are people sitting down..”

Language that actually borrows the Third Reich, memorializing the burning of the German parliament (Reichstag) in 1933, coming from the Republican state party in Oregon can and will only enflame both sides: some Republicans, especially those in the Senate already campaigning to shut down the impeachment trial, emboldened, without having to take responsibility for such language, and Democrats who can and will see such expressions as emboldening their efforts to govern without seeking compromise with recalcitrant Republicans.

Appearing on the Global Public Square, with Fareed Zakaria, just this past Sunday, German diplomat and author, Wolfgang Ischinger, told the world that there are three things needed precisely at this moment: TRUST, TRUTH, and TRANSPARENCY! His recent book, World In Danger, A vision of a European future of peace and stability despite the present gloom. The brookings.edu website carries this nugget: “Ischinger examines the root causes of the current conflicts and suggests how Europe can successfully address the most urgent challenges facing the continent.” The author served as deputy foreign minister (1998-2001) in Germany and has served as Germany’s ambassador to both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has chaired the Munich Security Conference, the world’s leading forum for debating international security policy, since 2008. Henry Kissinger praises in book in these words, also from the brookings.edu website: ‘Ischinger is one of the most perceptive analysts of international affairs. His book should reach a broad audience.’

One can only hope that Biden’s state and national security advisers will put the book on the president’s required reading list. Perhaps after such an assignment, Biden might be prompted to change his call for “unity” to a call for truth. It is, after all, the demise of truth in which the conspiracy theorists, the supremacists, the obstructionists in Congress, and especially the Republican leadership traffics, depends upon and cannot survive without. One of the signature features of the Democratic Party, for too long, has been a proclivity to civility, a compulsion to “play fair” and to moderate their language into diplomatic tepid and luke-warm tea. At the same time the Republicans have been, and will undoubtedly continue to fire their verbal (and vacuous) rhetorical cannons, grabbing the headlines, sustaining and enriching the culture of hate, contempt, racism while linking socialism to Marxism. And for the Democrats to call such language extreme, immoderate or even irrational is to miss the point: it is another seductive, seemingly professional and clearly dispassionate understatement.

Believing that the Republicans will only continue to call anything and everything proposed by the Democrats as socialism and Marxism is neither historically accurate nor politically and ethically tolerable. Call such talk and such misinformation what it is: an unadulterated lie! And only if that message is pounded, and pounded in and through every public interview and statement made by each and every member of the Democratic Party, in every forum, will the public even begin to come to the point of view that libraries, for example, streets, sewers, sanitation workers, and even educators in public schools serve as living, working, effective, necessary and highly professional examples of how the state takes care of human needs in every town, city, state and across the nation. Not only are visible public services provided by state funds, supervised by state officials, the state undertakes to protect every person living within the state’s (and the nation’s) borders. It is the state that issues passports, enabling all citizens to travel around the globe; it is the state that curates information about the pandemic, national security risks, nuclear armament developments, climate changes swirling across all continents and oceans, documents the changes in both flora and fauna, especially those directly related to the food we all eat and its cost, and the state also funds much new research into vaccines, therapeutics, cancer treatments.

This lie that socialism and Marxism are Satanic and thereby must be avoided, as if they were another form of the plague has to be countered just as vociferously, vehemently and urgently as doe the lie of the election fraud, the disappearing pandemic, the Russian influence peddling in favour of trump’s election and re-election. Political speech, editorial opinion, television talking points, and their respective participants, have to be able and willing to tell the truth, and not merely those truths that superficially seem to support the conventional water-cooler talk. And everyone around a water-cooler, too, has an obligation to confront those specious, unsustainable, and especially untruthful statements that overflow the hallways wherever there is a water-cooler.

It is not only those elected Democrats that have to find the political and ethical spine to call a spade a shovel, and to call a lie a lie, without prevarication, without fear of reprisals from their media interrogators, interviewers and their political bag-men and women. Ordinary people, in every classroom, in every office, in every board room, on every factory floor have to wake up to the smell of the stench of the lie. Back in the 90’s, Scott Peck, while doing research for his book, People of the Lie, scoured the Pentagon in search of a single individual who would claim responsibility for the My Lai massacre. He found no one. By Committee, apparently, the decision absolved all individuals of direct responsibility. And yet the chain of command brings with it that specific responsibility, for the desk, or the jeep, or the wheel-house, or the byline where the “buck stops”….And shirking that responsibility only provides added sabotaging fodder for all those who seek refuge under the desk, or without a byline, for whatever it is they decide, publish, spread.

There is a crying and perhaps never more resonant cry for the truth, since only with and through a commitment to the truth, whatever that truth may be (and not only about the mortality rate of the pandemic) can there be any hope of establishing public trust, not only in the science of this galloping virus, and its variants, and the desperate race of the vaccines and therapeutics to catch up. There is a crying and desperate need for  those charged with public responsibility to wear, to walk into, and to utter nothing but the truth.

And that will mean that people in what we regard as high office will have to face the truths of their watch, both the successful and the not-so-much. Having worked in the United States, in a situation in which those in charge refused to take responsibility for the conditions of that workplace, and even to become familiar with those conditions, because they were effectively permitted innocence (and ignorance) by those who knew, but whose truths were never sought or desired, I know how tragic a failure to acknowledge especially organizational truth, in the deepest and darkest truths of its toxicity. Similarly, those who have come to be known as whistle-blowers, too often demeaned and disgraced by those in power who seek the refuge of lying irresponsibility, must come to be regarded as the canaries in the various coal mines whose toxicity (not merely literally but also metaphorically) are threatening our planet’s capacity to endure.

Ischinger’s mantra of “truth, trust, transparency” would be a welcome injection into the veins, the hearts and the minds of each and every public and private organization, and especially in those national and provincial and state governments whose work is needed today more than at any time in the last three-quarters of a century.

Can the author/ambassador’s words be integrated into a political firestorm as part of the extinguisher?