America's sugar high of "armed" lies, deception, disinformation, denial and devolution

 This morning’s news from Republican Minority Leader, Mike McCarthy, that should his party secure the majority in the House of Representatives, in the November election, they will cut (if not discontinue) support for The Ukraine, is a bombshell that needs to be heard around the world. Almost at the same time as this utterance was hitting the airwaves, Putin, himself, declared Marshall Law in the four “annexed” provinces in East Ukraine.

It is not only disconcerting that McCarthy (drugged by trump) would have fallen so limply and distractedly into the seductive trap of the former president, and Putin ally, it is almost impossible to think that the two announcements were not co-ordinated in some manner. Conspiracy theories are a “drink” from which I prefer to abstain; however, it appears that nothing, literally nothing is outside the realm of the possible, especially what would normally be considered “worst case scenario”.

Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) tweets, (from The Hill, in a piece by Emily Brooks, entitled, McCarthy defends ‘blank check’ remark on Ukraine, 10/19/22):

(Republicans) “want to cast aside American global leadership at a time when we should do the exact opposite.”…(Also from The Hill, “In May, 57 House Republicans voted against a $40 billions  security supplemental for Ukraine.”

There are, it is true, some Republicans who continue to support Ukraine, especially in the U.S, Senate. However, there is an American election in a few weeks, which, if current polls continue to hold and the trend favouring Republican control of both the House and the Senate proves to be contained in the election results, it is not only the U.S. that will be in extreme jeopardy. The whole world will experience a political shock that could eclipse that “shock and awe” George W. Bush expressed over this anticipated glee in initiating the Iraq war.

Yesterday, a reputable polling report indicated that 71% of American voters consider their own democracy to be in peril, while the same poll showed only a mere 7% were considering that fact to be one on which to cast a ballot to address. Economic issues including the astronomic prices of gas, food, housing are trending as “kitchen-table” issues that drive voters to mark their ballots. A devolving democracy, as the American union is indisputably, positioned immediately adjacent to the pressing domestic ‘cost of living’ issues, in the midst of a horrendous Ukraine war that has serious repercussions on inflation and those same prices for everyone around the world, seems to be rendering those responding to pollsters, opting for the punishment of the Democrats, and Biden, as the ‘perceived cause’ of the current economic crunch. Of course, they know that Biden himself, and the Democrats too, have taken considered legislative steps to soften the burden of rising prices, including tapping into the oil reserves, to help cushion gas prices. However, given that the country is undergoing a scorched-earth zero-sum game of political parties, in which one party has a single goal, taking back power for themselves, while the other attempts to govern, the question of who survives the “internal political war” seems to many observers, a foregone conclusion: that Republicans will likely be in the majority in both House and Senate.

With some 399 candidates currently running for seats at both state and national levels, many of them seeking Secretary of State offices in various states, all of whom are dubbed “election deniers” in that they fully support trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from their “leader” through fraudulent votes, a claim rejected by over 60 American courts, presided over in many cases by trump appointees, and national polls showing the Republicans over all to have a 2% lead in popularity over the Democrats, many of these election deniers will hold office after the election. And that result will catapult McCarthy into his “dream” job as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Voters who can and do endorse what is almost without dispute, what amounts to an illiterate candidate in Herschel Walker for Senate in Georgia, and also who campaign to enact or pass laws in State legislatures that ban abortion outright, with no exceptions, give pause not only to other American observers and voters. They prompt outsiders, like this Canadian, to gasp in cynical horror at the prospect of an ex-president who escapes legal arrest and sentencing and a mob of his cult taking over the U.S. government after the November vote, and then paving the way for his own return to the White House in 2024. While that may seem like a dystopian and demonic scenario, today, it is clearly not outside the realm of both the possible and the feasible.

Voters who turn a blind eye to the personal positions of many of the trump acolytes, like seeking election in order to determine the results of elections, like outlawing abortion everywhere, like defunding medicare, social security, and other social-assistance programs, and generally do little to nothing to neutralize the inflationary pressures that all Americans (and Canadians, and Brits, and French, and Germans, and Italians, and Poles and Swedes and Finns and ….and….) are having to endure, seems to this observer to be a blatant and venal political “death wish” to the institutional stability and establishment that has been a cornerstone of American democracy, through the good faith and works of both Republican and Democractic parties for well over two hundred years. Post-modernism may have ushered in a post-truth tolerance of political rhetoric that is now totally unhinged from all of what once were the agreed guardrails of facts, on which politicians could and did debate, only after agreeing with the core data that served as the foundations for those debates. We have long ago moved out of a political culture that had and demonstrated honour, respect and dignity both for a body of facts and especially for one’s political opponent. There once was a kind of ‘chivalric’ and predictable and guard-railed cautionary public consciousness, both among candidates and among their electors, that served as a neutralizing chemical “base” for the virulent and acidic rhetoric of hate and the weaponizing of words, ideas, thoughts and especially human beings.

There is, so far as this limited observer can tell, no recruitment office seducing recruits into a political warfare that know and observes and respects no boundaries on whatever is uttered both in campaigns and in the daily hurly-burly of scrums and interviews and pontifications following the votes. Funded primarily in secret by those flush with cash and an over-weeing obsessive desire and will to take control of  the public’s business, overtly, blatantly and narcissistically to enhance the right (not responsibility) of all businesses to effectively control the public agenda in favour of those businesses and their operators who fall in line with the profit motive, to the exclusion of all else. Issues that threaten the air we breathe, for example, wilt under the demand for more removal of restrictions on pollution by private business, coal-fired electricity plants are left free from the obligation to the public interest to either clean their emissions or shutter. Even the Potomac River suffers, right in the heart of the capital, from overflowing sewage that demands daily and hourly monitoring, without effective legislation to punish and thereby reform polluters.

Women daily and even hourly are expressing their shared fear and desperation that, should they have, for example, an ectopic pregnancy and need medical attention, it might not be available in time for their life to be saved. Others, like young girls of ten who have been raped, are facing the prospect of having to travel out of their home state, already, in pursuit of a needed abortion. The theocratic Supreme Court in shoving the question of a woman’s right to choose back to the states, effectively declared the United States both un-united, divided, and tragically and openly torn-apart, after fifty years of what became accepted public policy and practice, access to medical, and ethical abortions if and when needed. Marco Rubio, just last night, declared his opponent, Val Demings, for the Senate seat in Florida, to be the “ extreme candidate” in this election, reversing the word extreme which has been sewn on the consciences and lapels of pro-life candidates. Rubio’s flipped use of the word “extreme” came in confrontation of Deming’s position that, according to him “She supports no restriction, no limitation of any kind…she supports taxpayer funded abortion..up until the moment of birth.(from Politico, today) Axios reports, today, “Demings said she supports abortion access up until the fetus “viability” but did not specify what restrictions she would support.” This war over abortion, and it can only be considered a political war, has already generated casualties in the medical arena. Doubtless, there will be political casualties evident after the November vote.

And while the right to choose is a hot-button political issue, just as is the state of the democracy, voters are likely to be swayed into a short-term, vindictive and arguably unreasonable vote for the Republicans in many cases, given that “anger” and “revenge” and the “shoot-out” archetype analogous to the wild-west tales of the frontier are the emotional and psychic models that govern the American psyche…

War….guns….the second amendment, Florida’s ‘stand your ground’ law…anti-wokeness….anti-establishment(arianism)….lawlessness and the free speech that takes to the street, armed without concern for the casualties, all in pursuit of small or no government (or the cult leader trump back in power)…..all of these vacuous cliches could be the litmus test for the November elections…and whatever policies and programs and legislation and promises offered by the Democrats will land like powder-puffs in the face of millions of voters who have already decided that “raw power” in the form of the trump cabal is preferred to the more restrained, thoughtful, often rational and compassionate, long-term approach that undergirds, for example, the infrastructure and inflation legislation that seeks to restore the thousands of decrepit bridges, airports, ports and rail lines across the country.

Instant gratification, regardless of the form it takes, especially when fueled by intense, irrational and uncontrolled vindictive anger, especially when it is armed with AK-47’s and AR-15’s.....is a force with which no government anywhere is prepared or capable of neutralizing…it is a force that slides along the corridors of every mall, and into every coffee shop, and out into the bars and casinos’ and into the armouries, and apparently also into some of the private homes and hearts of FBI recruits, whose participation in the January 6 insurrection has yet to be clarified, and potentially prosecuted.

Just how rotten is the state of America? It seems that the evidence, like a volcano waiting to erupt, continues to heat up, spill over in trickles, while the world audience, already historically conditioned to expect the most dramatic (even if melo-dramatic) of dramas to emerge not only from the American theatre, but also, more recently, from the American political operatives.

And, as some cheap, and cunning and schemeing local politicians of my acquaintance were wont to say, ‘I don’t care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right!”….and drama, especially of the tabloid-fixated variety, serves as a magnet both for the participants starved for public attention, even if it is notoriety, and for the spectators whose lives seem to need, even depend, upon a little salacious spice for their psychic survival.

Policy, and policy wonks, historians and political theorists, even marketers and advertising guru’s, and also those seeking the public approval and potential income of public office….they all in effect defer to the deep and unbridled and unleashed animalistic instincts for a “bite of the sugary donut of power” as a path to satisfy even the most desperate and demonic of needs.

Nevertheless, that instant ‘sugar high’ is ‘no way to run a railroad’ in America or anywhere else!

Has anyone checked the commodity price on sugar lately? Currently $0.1870 per pound… with a forecast rise of 4% y/y, with support measures from the American government and expected sufficient global supply,. Last year, the average retail refined sugar price in America jumped by 8% y/y to 68.4 cents per pound. (globalnewswire.com)

Revisiting and reviving SHAME in Canadian culture

 Canadian shame, as in other countries, cannot be shoved under the table, out with the trash, or buried in the bin of denial. It jumps out on every national news cast and screams loudly about the human dependence on greed, manipulation and secrecy.

Career colleges that hire recruiting agents, pay them $2000 per student signed up, foment the very lies that those recruiters use of promises of quality training and easy and smooth flow into the workplace in ‘good quality jobs’. CBC’s The National documented this dynamic with a particular story from India. A farmer-father sells two vehicles in order to provide the $28K for his daughter to enrol in a Canadian career college, with false promises of great training and a good job, only to have her discover that the whole scheme was nothing but false promises.

Fake, fraudulent mortgage brokers promising clients borrowed funds after fabricating income’ that does not exist, while charging an additional 1% interest on the mortgage is just another of the shams to which innocent and desperate people are being subjected. Again, the story comes from the CBC’s The National.

And yes, Canadian military trainers in Great Britain are engaged in developing trained soldiers among Ukrainian recruits, in their nation’s fight against the terrorist-invader, pussia, (the name of the country is so defamed by the murdered in the Kremlin). Good on them, and thanks to Canada for making them available. We do have a reasonable reputation as trainers.

And yet, our emergency rooms are so under-staffed following the pandemic and the resignation of health care workers, people with broken ankles are waiting up to a full day before they can have the needed surgery. Canada has had and insisted upon building metaphoric moats and barbed-wire fences to prevent professionally trained health care workers from other countries, among others, from entering their profession here. Exams, credentials checked ‘up-the-ying-yang’ by ‘gate-keepers’ installed in a manner that fossilizes a national superiority, an arrogance, a hubris that gives a bad name to the concept of myth.

There is a difference between a myth in literary and imaginative perspective, and a myth that grips a nation by its throat, in order to create another ‘papier-mache’ tradition of false pride and false superiority. A Chilean-trained female dentist, of my acquaintance, is only one of many examples of highly skilled, committed and even ‘superior’ professional health care workers who had to endure years of menial Canadian jobs before finally being permitted entry into the Ontario Dental College. A lifetime of at least a dozen Canadian dentists is eclipsed by her discipline, her patient care and her professionalism. And much of her work is dedicated to the concept of prevention of dental decay. Treatment counsel, constant mentoring, recommendations of options and regular appointments are all as important in her practice as filling the latest cavity.

Shame, in a Canadian context too, is evident in the data point that some 47% of Canadians cannot read at a high school level. The Conference Board of Canada reports:

“Forty-eight percent of Canadian adults have inadequate literacy skills-a significant increase from a decade ago. …Literacy skills are defined as ‘the ability to understand, evaluate, use, and engage with written texts toparticipate3 in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential. This requires ‘accessing, identifying, and processing information from a variety of texts that relate to arrange of settings’….65 percent of recent immigrants (those arriving in Canada within the last 10 years) and 63 percent of established immigrant (those who have lived in Canada for more than 10 years)..had inadequate literacy skills (in English or French, although their literacy skills in their own language is adequate).

 

This deficit in skills exposes the failures of both commission and omission in the education system, the immigrant and refugee system, the labour situation, and the cultural pandemic of ‘instant glances for instant judgement’ of sell lines, media headlines, social media twitter blurbs and an embedded resistance to the “weeds” and the “nuances” and the fine details of any situation, except those in which we consider ourselves engaged, involved and interested in.

At first glance, it would appear that the issue of ‘preferential’ exclusion of foreign-trained professionals and national literacy rates have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. And from the perspective of “cause-effect” in a direct line, of course they don’t. What does, however, potentially link them, is a sense of societal entitlement, devoid of conscience and reflection and regret or remorse. We just assume that “our” systems are the best, simply because ‘we” operate them; “our” people have designed and constructed them and the legacy and the heritage and the presumption of superiority is built in to our perceptions of those systems.

Similarly, the issue of gaping holes in literacy rates, seems totally unrelated to how decisions are made, by public bodies like provincial legislatures. However, the members of all governments in Canada are reliant on the public perspectives on their attitudes, behaviours and ultimately their votes. And those perceptions and  attitudes devolve directly from the kind of superficial and self-inflating headlines to the degree that those elected officials can engineer those headlines. We are all painfully aware that most elected officials do not read the fine print in the many pieces of legislation that are approved and signed into law; we are also aware that the publication of those bills, and the degree to which they are each digested, reflected upon and integrated into their lives, for most people, is both brief and superficial. And part of the impetus for that dynamic is the degree to which literacy skills have been integrated into our shared culture.

Shoving information that would turn the public “off” is both easy and available as a posture for governments. And the degree of “innocence” or “ignorance” or “willful blindness” or “dedicated avoidance” of news that would upset most people, tends to be shoved into one or more of the available secret spaces, the closets, the back pages, or even into the ‘classified’ category.  As a species, we do whatever we can to avoid the really hard task of confronting the most troubling and seemingly insolvable and intractable problem, whether it is in our personal lives or, similarly, in our public debates and decisions.

And while that “penchant” to avoid, deny, and thus “do nothing” or perhaps ‘form a study’ to avoid having to take specific actions abounds, historic patterns of considering those seeking to expose our ‘dirty laundry’ to ourselves, are often considered dangerous, unco-operative, non-conformists, or worse, dangerous. Hard-headed diligent digging of data that we would all consider “too troublesome to deal with” is considered “too much” and “too offensive” and “too costly” to address adequately, honestly and humbly, as a culture.

Nevertheless, we also know that, from our personal lives, the longer we leave difficult issues to fester, in silence, whether from fear of the consequences, or some other unidentified fear, the issue continues to fester. And while we cannot “fix” everything, especially in our encounters with others, we all know that there does come a time for such serious decision-making. The same pattern also holds for the public square.

Loosening the ‘strings’ that prevent and preclude entry into Ontario professions, obviously, has now been forced upon the government, especially since the pandemic has contributed to a severe shortage of health care workers, protracted  and unacceptable waiting times for urgent treatment including surgeries for serious cancers, for example. The public argument goes that the urgency of the moment has resulted in the change in “gate-keeping”….while we all know that the “forced hand” of the government obliterates the need for a public acknowledgement of the superior, insulated, and colonial mind-set that lurks like the fog from dry ice in all of the offices and chambers in the legislature, a fog that is itself denied as well.

This morning, in The Star, I read another investigative piece about the horrors to which vulnerable people, most of whom fall between the cracks of the regulated facilities for long-term care. Whether those are victims of unemployment, milder forms of mental health needs, homelessness, or those waiting for admission to long-term care facilities, (on lists that extend to what would be part the life-span of many of these people)….many of them are currently being “warehoused” in group homes in Ontario that escape regulation, only minimal inspection and the expectation of the most basic standards of cleanliness, nutrition and personal safety.

Diane Zlomislic, investigative reporter at The Star, today October 14, 2022, writes a piece entitled: It was supposed to be a safe, affordable home for Ontarians with nowhere else to go. But inside it was horrifying.

https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2022/10/14/it-was-supposed-to-be-a-safe-affordable-home-for-ontarians-with-nowhere-else-to-go-but-inside-it-was-horrifying.html

The details will offend many, while others will merely observe the headline, itself a very different from the normal “clip”, and continue on with their daily activities.

As we have all participated in the death and burial of something we used to call shame, and along with that unacknowledged and undocumented ‘funeral’ the accompanying grieving that attends all deaths, and the reflective hand-wringing that asks ‘what happened?’ after the silent, undetected death, until the full realization was so shocking that it seemed traumatic to “go there”….As George W. Bush declared, “I don’t DO nuance!” so too, we have collectively declared, “We don’t do SHAME!”

Nevertheless, although we may be in denial of our burial of shame, it continues to haunt us, in the boardroom of Hockey Canada, in the group homes of southern Ontario, in the hospitals where people who deserve immediate and highly quality health care WAIT, and on the streets, the underpasses, and in the foodbanks in most towns and cities across the land. Our language, and our capacity to care, while mediated by considerable generosity and philanthropic donoring, at the level of the public debate, we are still attempting to ride the oscillating equation between government policy that some consider “indulgent of indolence” and others consider a “needed hand up”.

It is not incidental to note that The Star story details the operator’s cash grab from the cheques of the residents in the homes, cheques that have come from public coffers. And, as a lone citizen, I have to ask why, if public funds are helping to keep these marginalized men and women afloat, why are the public ‘safety and health and sanitation’ quality control monitors not being demanded, for these homes. Is this another of the implications that inspections for long-term care homes have been radically reduced, or even discontinued, as a favour to the private-sector operators?

And has the private sector garnered such monumental control of the attitudes and the boundaries and the parameters of those making legislative decisions in this province, and also in other jurisdictions, that whatever the private sector wants, the private sector gets, so long as the problem of the marginalized, and the voiceless, and the indigent, do not become a political problem for those privileged members of the political establishment?

Are we living out our own worst nightmares because we have collectively  permitted the erosion of “citizenship” and the inherent “engagement” and public “literacy” on which functioning society relies to atrophy, and to be replaced by a kind of “gimme” instant gratification which extends to the next Netflix movie, the next social media gossip-fest, the next public scandal of some official. Are we not “entitled” to the kind of exhaustive and searing reporting that Ms Zlomislic offers in her piece, on many other public issues that tend to lie dormant, gathering dust and disinterest, and causing the political class no ‘headaches’.

It is not to simply shame an individual that this space is dedicated. It is to shame us all, in our turning away from those things we can really not afford (in all of the connotations of that word) to avoid. It is not only the short term cost of a new bill that would require licensing, inspections, accountability, responsibility and care for residents of these unlicensed group homes. The longer term coat of the glaring message that these people do not matter, in a culture and a society considered one of the best educated and most intelligent and most wealthy in the world, that really shames us all.

And none of us either wants to bear the burden of that shame, nor the full burden of a conscience that wantonly and brazenly permits such conditions to exist right under our noses, even though we cannot escape the stench.

Fear and its denial lie at the heart of all unravelling

 “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” (Abraham Lincoln)

In a speech (quoted above) to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield Illinois, January 12, 1838, entitled ‘The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions’, Lincoln warned that mobs of people who disrespected U.S. laws and courts could destroy the United States. He went on to say the Constitution and rule of law in the United States are ‘the political religion of our nation.’ He continued, “whenever the vicious portion of our population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend upon it, this government cannot last. By such things the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it, and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak to make the friendship effectual…..Is it unreasonable, then to expect that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs. Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would willingly perhaps more so, acquire it by good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down. (from abrahamlincolnonline.org)

Little did this scribe know, before this morning, (October 12, 2022) that in the United States, yesterday, October 11, 2022, was “Face your Fears Day. And like most other days of singular commemoration and reflection, the day passes like a token on checkers, from the playing field, with perhaps a mere glance.

It is often said that nothing knew is ever written or spoken; only the style, the vernacular, and the ethos/context in which it is repeated changes. Surely, Lincoln’s wisdom, insight and indeed what we today might call “clairvoyance” bears revisiting in this ‘fall’ of 2022, when the very notion of a “fall” as in an epic “fall” from grace, of the kind that once highly regarded and respected individuals experience as a life tragedy, faces what was once the most powerful and most revered nation on earth.

Juxtaposed by Lincoln, we find James Hillman, twentieth century psychology revisionist, writing about fear from a different, non-institutional perspective:
“fear like love, can become a call into consciousness; one meets the unconscious, the unknown, the numinous and uncontrollably by keeping in touch with fear, which elevates the blind instinctual panic of the sheep into the knowing, cunning, fearful awe of the shepherd.”…And “The soul of our civilization depends upon the civilization of our soul. The imagination of our culture calls for a culture of the imagination.”

Writing in The Atlantic, January 11, 2021, Ibram X. Kendi, in a piece entitled, “Denial is the Heartbeat of America, writes this:

To say that the attack on the U.S. Capitol is not who we are is to say that this is not part of us, not part of our politics, not part of our history. And to say that this is not part of America, American politics, and American history is a bald-faced denial. But the denial is normal. In the aftermath of catastrophes, when have Americans commonly admitted who we are? The heartbeat of America is denial. It is historic, this denial. Every American generation denies. America is establishing the freest democracy in the world, said the white people who secured their freedom during the 1770’s and 890’s. America is the greatest democracy on Earth, said the property owners voting in the early 19^th century. America is the beacon of democracy in world history, said the non-incarcerated people who have voted throughout U.S. history in almost every state. American is the utmost democracy of the face of the Earth, said the primarily older and better-off and able-bodied people who are the likeliest to vote in the 21^st century. America is the best democracy around, said the American people when it was harder for Black and Nati8ve and Latino people to vote in the 2020 election. At every point in the history of American tyranny, the honest recorders heart the sounds of Denial. Today is no different….White terror is as American as the Stars and Stripes. But when this is denied, it is no wonder that the events at the Capitol are read as shocking and un-American…..I’ve been arguing that the heartbeat of racism is denial. There is the regular structural denial that racial inequity is caused by racist policy. And whenever an American engages in a racist act and someone points it out, the inevitably response is the sound of that denial: I’m not racist. It can’t be, I was being racist, but I’m going to try to be anti-racist. It is always I’m not racist. No wonder the racists never stop….To overcome Trumpism, the American people must stop denying that Trumpism is outside America. Trump is the heartbeat of American denial in its clearest form. He is America shirtless and exposed, like Childish Gambino in the video. Trump is not different from those elected officials saying, “This s not who we are.” He denies. They deny. The difference is the extremism of Trump’s denial. While Americans say, “I am not racist,” Trump says, “I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world.” While Americans commonly say to those Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol, “You’re not us,” Trump says, “You’re very special.” Two groups of Americans are feeding, and feeding on, American denial. There are Americans like Trump who nonviolently-and like his supporters, violently—rage, and engage in the carnage at the U.S. Capitol in complete denial of the election results. And there are the Americans who, during and after the carnage say, “This is not who we are,” in complete denial that the rioters are part of America. The white domestic terrorist who denies his own criminality and the American Politian who denies that the terrorist is part of us both remain in the foreground of the American media, of American politics—taking up all our care and concern. Meanwhile, in the background, the violence is placed on red cloths as the victims of the carnage are carelessly dragged out of sight and mind—as Eddie S. Glaude Jr. powerfully says, “This is us!”

While Lincoln forecast an individual supported and sustained by supporters and enabled by a weakened attention and care, Kendi/Glaude point to a societal pattern, through twenty-first century eyes, that articulates both the deep and intimate dependence on denial as the root of racism, terrorism and what this scribe is calling the unravelling of the core institutions as well as, and more importantly, the collective will and collective care and concern that must undergird the trust that is the authentic and indisputable foundational value of any institution, nation, community, and family.

“The greatest democracy on earth” evokes sad memories and horrid visions of “this is the one and only true religion” on signs hanging over denominational seminaries. It is not only the hubris that is encased in such phrases and convictions but the denial of the fullness of the truth of the value of all religious attempts to approximate some kind of relationship with God, whomever and however that deity is conceived, perceived, worshipped and followed.

Neither Lincoln nor Glaude (nor Kendi) would fall into the category of those who seek to persist in the cultural modality of denial. However, the machine that trots out messages in support of denial, evasion, circumlocution, dissembling, and hubristic proselyting and propaganda, in America and elsewhere, has considerable historic roots and production facilities in America. Hence, it is no surprise that the denial and the lies and the hubris and the manipulation that is currently also flowing from the Kremlin, as if it has been conceptualized to mock the same kind of approach and an attitude and modality that is evident in the United States, cannot be considered either surprising or defensible.

Regardless of the mountain of evidence that is researched, curated and distributed about white Christian nationalism’s bigoted war on Jews, and the evidence of conspiracy and seditionist attempts against the government, all of which is true, verifiable and reliable, the penchant, even addiction, to denial has to ‘trump’ the more granular narratives of the racist abuse of power. Only if and when the nation succumbs to its knees, to the full truth of its own drowning in denial, both as escape and also as political aggression and power-brokering, will the issues of trust begin to surface.

In dysfunctional families, while there is anger, and there are arguments, and there are often individual human tragic weaknesses, it is the underlying “secrecy” and denial that lingers like an unconscious and malignant tumor in the psyche of those individuals who either remain in or separate from those families. And the need for denial and secrecy is most necessary for those whose control needs and insecurities and even neuroses and/or psychoses are the dominant psychic energy in the family fabric.

Recently, the notion of National Intelligence as protection for a nation engaged in serious and potentially tragic encounters with enemies was the focus in this space. It would seem to follow that the degree of fear and insecurity, and the fear of being weak and vulnerable, and the dominating need to defend against such fears, lie at the heart of the conception and the design and construction of such a monumental edifice as the National Intelligence institution.

How cam, for instance, a nation (and this is not exclusive to the U.S.) drum into its children that fear is the greatest enemy in their pursuit of their dreams, aspirations and life goals, when that fear is the guiding principle for the denial, and the obfuscations and the mis-leading attitudes, behaviours and intellectual rationalizations of those charged with the leadership and mentorship of the nation?

The paradox, the irony and the indefensibility of that juxtaposition is both glaring and disheartening. Thumping the nation’s chest with the biggest, the brightest, the best and the loudest messages, while continuing to deny the underbelly of the unconscious of the nation, is not only a recipe for national disaster; it is a model of cultural mis-leadership and seduction for individuals, especially young men and women whose full grasp of the hollowness of the land will only become fully recognized and grasped much later in life.

Churches too, have a role in this drama of denial, in that they are renowned for having turned a blind eye to their own culpability, life and family destruction, exclusion, brow-beating, mind-bending and denial of their own obsessive-compulsive need for absolute dominance, control…and all of it in the name of a deity whose need is clearly not congruent with the ecclesial perfection that has been baked into the cake of Christianity.

Hubris and humility, while perhaps opposite sides of the same psychic coin, are, in most cases, mutually exclusive. And the need for the one too often eradicates the pursuit of the other. In a nation, this spells catastrophe; in an organization, short-term success will only precede ultimate demise. In a family, of even a church, the high-handed, self-righteousness of any dogmatic theology that abuses men and women and children, is both obvious and inexcusable.

And these patterns, while obvious, need more than the sunlight disinfectant of disclosure; they require the transformative shared acknowledgement that we are all intimately embedded in their energies. And those energies spell eventual doom, as they must.

Only if and when denial is faced by individuals, by groups, and by institutions, (and this process can only proceed slowly and incrementally, lest we retreat in even more fear), can we look forward to a sunrise of open, fearless and hopeful encounters with others and whatever the world offers us to address.

We are more important that "National Intelligence" can even consider

There are so many lenses through which to contemplate our individual existence, our relationships, our purpose, our identity, our patriotism, our theology, our philosophy, and our death.

And while these various lenses, and their respective parameters continually ebb and flow, sometimes in concert and other times in tension, the continual movement of their various ‘sources and methods’ as well as the objects/targets of their attention offer a reservoir of moving films, some that borrow from others, while some that shed new images and new light on old scenes and scenarios.

National intelligence is renowned for its intense focus on preserving the secrecy, as well as the content of all of its ‘sources and methods,’ that phrase that encapsulates the various overt and covert policies and practices, interactions and reflections, attitudes and beliefs, not to mention perceptions and intuitions that both guide and blind all of its operations.

Any comparison of the national intelligence ‘fortress’ and the individual human being, will, on the one hand seem preposterous and presumptuous, and on the other insulting and condescending, also depending on the perspective of both the writer and the reader. So, while these caveats offer both an expansive and awesome view across a Grand Canyon of nature’s beauty and a narrow, dark, secretive and sinister almost forensic and clinical peering into the shadows, let’s begin to unwrap this conundrum of a comparison.

National intelligence is designed to protect a nation from whatever interior and external ‘enemies’ that might sabotage the integrity and the authenticity and the freedom of the nation. And while each individual is not primarily taught to adopt an exaggerated ‘intelligence’ system to protect itself, and its significant others from ‘harm’ of sabotage and dismemberment and devolution and destruction, the undercurrent of competition in the West, is embedded in our traditional ‘developmental’ societal nurturing.

John Donne once referred a trip to the continent and his apparent absence from his love, to the two points on a geometric compass, connected at the centre, and never fully separate even though apart at the extensions. Metaphysical poetry, in general, tended to deploy images seemingly unrelated to their subjects, as a method of connecting the physical and the abstract in imaginative images. And while this scribe does not aspire to the heights of the metaphysical poets, borrowing their ‘method’ offers a model for our highly prosaic and much more mundane comparison.

 Surveillance, including the collection, curation and sharing of information, in order to arrive at a most intelligent exegesis of the information, in national intelligence, requires a host of professionally trained sleuths, highly disciplined reporters and recorders, a layer of curators that attempt to connect the various ‘dots’ of data, and then another ‘school’ of historians, linguists, criminologists, legal minds, political guru’s, and psychological wizards to “make sense” of the various files and their implications on each other as well as on the practitioners responsible for decisions in the public interest. If you think that represents a complex system designed to “protect” a nation, it is. And, then, if we consider that all of those various functions, on a personal level, are expected to be conducted by each individual, often in the secrecy of his own mind, often with barely a nudge of observation and interpretation by a family member or a teacher or a clergy, of even a counsellor, we begin to grasp the seemingly overwhelming task of each person to live a life of purpose and meaning in whatever context s/he finds him/herself.

The national security edifice obviously has a budget reaching into the millions or perhaps even billions depending on the perception of need by those setting budgets. It also has a documented legal foundation and institutional framework, a range of instruments, teams of personnel and a circle of public observers, critics and even opponents all of whom are working in parallel, to ascertain the effectiveness of the protective system. Naturally, the political operatives will ‘shade’ the tendencies of the intelligence system to spend more time in a certain direction, focussed on a region or nation that seems most threatening, thereby releasing funds in that regard and moving funds away from other potential threats.

The multiple equations, algorithms, hardware, cyber professionals, and the capacity to ‘peer’ into places never before available, are all considered essential in the conventional wisdom that envelops the ‘national intelligence’ institution. Mathematical ‘thinking’ “provides methods for organizing and structuring knowledge so that, when applied to technology, it allows scientists and engineers to produce systematic, reproducible and transmittable knowledge. Analysis, design, modeling, simulation, and implementation than become possible as efficient, well-structured activities.” (Mathematical Sciences, Technology and Economic Competitiveness 1991, Chapter 4: The Technology Base, on nationalacademies.org)


Satellites, linked to each other and to the ‘ground’ computers and their digital operatives, as well as hacking opportunities and their discoveries, as well as the capacity to dismember various important resource facilities of enemies, are all within the gambit of the intelligence professionals. Of course, so are the multiple opportunities to mis-read, mis-interpret, mid-calculate and mis-inform not only between and among the devices, between the personnel and also between the devices and the personnel. Reproducing or at least emulating the human brain, in a process known as Artificial Intelligence, (AI), while still in the developmental stages, has come a long way and will inevitably find its way into the national intelligence services, if it has not already found a home there.

The individual with the seemingly inexplicable and irreproducible complex process of the human brain and mind, on the other hand, has a family, a school system, a sports team, an employer, perhaps a church or synagogue, mosque or temple, from whom and from which to gather the skills and the processing muscle to both detect the signals and to curate those symbols and then to interpret and decide on the bases of those ‘theories’. What most of us do not have, however, is that “team/army/batallion etc.” that comprises the established institution, based on the military model, working on our personal intelligence systems. We have occasional water-cooler observations, rants, critiques, and the occasional piece of hard data that seep into our ears and minds and perhaps into our memories and our unconscious. We also have our eyes, ears, noses and fingers that are all engaged in a process not only of ‘providing’ data to our sensibilities, and of engaging with other ‘humans’ either viscerally or virtually, in a dialogue that offers a pencil-thin sketch of our universe, including the threats and opportunities for our personal careers, the organization in which we are engaged, the families we come from and the social networks in which we find ourselves.

We can read books, magazines, journals, watch movies and documentaries, and we can integrate our conversations with those of others who both agree and disagree with our world view. And we can be engaged in a continual process of reflection,  review, recall, re-interpretation and revisiting of past observations, perceptions, attitudes and decisions.

Our personal/familial/professional/academic/religious affiliations, however, do not operate on the same technological, scientific and mathematical equations/algorithms/co-variant calculations and digital efficiencies. In fact, attempts to compare human ‘efficiencies’ with those of the digital world, soft and hardware as well as the professional personnel, render us almost inefficient. And, increasingly, we are asked and even expected to ‘measure up’ through STEM educational programs, so that we can both compete and integrate into the new technological world of employment, even if it isn’t inside the specifically ‘national intelligence’ system.

However, we are at risk of elevating the technological universe, including the national intelligence component of that universe, to a level of significance and relative importance in our public square, dialogue, budgeting, and future planning, that threatens to eclipse the relative importance, value, significance and even competence of the individual human being. Just last week, a local political candidate, in referring to a human being, uttered these words: “He may think highly of you as a person, but merely wants to retain and obtain increased leverage in and through you.”

Those words, from the benign mouth and mind and intelligence of a friend, as conceptualized by an octogenarian, rattled around for days, begging for reflection, rebuttal and review. “Leverage” that word that renders all persons, all data, all decisions and all public policies into a “means” for some “ends” that remain undefined, unspoken and unacknowledged.

If and when individual “ends” trump shared public “ends” as embodied in a shared vision, that is defined whether through “projects” completed, or through a process of review and evaluation to which a majority can and do agree, personal transactions will continue to trump anything resembling a shared vision, including respected and valued and aspirational “ends”.

We have to guard against the ‘technology’ and the “leverage” that comes from the technology, for example, in and through such instant searches as ‘how does math impact technology” even for those of us devoid of a math education, substituting for the meandering, confused and confusing, the ambient and ambulant imaginings of a human being’s mind, brain, heart and soul. That last word, considered not as an empirical component of the human being, but rather as a way of seeing the self, the other, the wider universe, including the notion of something that is far beyond the intellectual and emotional capacity of most of us, the national intelligence establishment, cannot and will not ever be replaced by the highest achievements of the algorithms, the equations, the schools of both relativity and quantum mechanics and their successors whatever and however they may emerge.

Indeed, it may ironically be, the blindness of the technology and the mathematics, and their highly schooled operatives, to the sameness, and the inherent decencies, dignities, and aspirational potential of all human beings, if ensconced in a personal, familial and communal nest of support that can and will eventually sabotage the very premises of the national intelligence forts that we continue build in the belief that they and they alone are keeping us safe and protected.

National intelligence fortresses, by definition, are envisioned, designed and constructed in the belief and the conviction that there are always others who are determined to destroy us. And therefore such forts of protection must be built and maintained regardless of the cost, in direct terms as well as in the loss of funding support for other worthy social projects and needs.

Human intelligence, on the other hand, regardless of its religious or philosophical underpinnings, holds that human beings of all nations, races, languages, and economic or educational or social background and status, have common needs common aspirations, and a common universe from which to sustain their individual and their shared lives. And it does not require a billion-dollar establishment of technological and military prowess to discern that each of us needs clean air, clear and accessible fresh water, access to health care and work with dignity, along with a societal commitment to foundational and sustaining human respect and dignity from all of the power structures and their operatives in all countries.

And all pretence of our need for bombs, missiles, and the many systems to operate and deploy them have a tendency if not a determination to both degrade and to deny the basic human intelligence of a human nature that is both shared and  worthy of support.

And that dignity, respect and honour that each human warrants has to come from and continue to be supported by Asian, European, North American and African continents and all of the various nationalities within the continents.

National Intelligence is not the shield that it purports to be. Indeed, we have collectively shared in deferring to those who have and will continue to argue that its protection, like most insurance policies for those enduring floods and hurricanes, is feeble at best and inoperative at worst.

We can no longer sustain a social, political and corporate mind-set that ascribes such glittery and glossy significance to something like the national intelligence edifice and to the people who operate that machine, while continuing to deny the real, basic, and indisputable human needs that are and will continue to be compromised by our fixation with our substitution of hard power for our capacity to attend to and to meet real human needs.

Let’s agree, in a new world of G-Zero, (borrowing from G-7 and G-20) that we no longer need to be blind to ourselves and to each other.

  

Will the centre "hold"?

 

William Butler Yeats…The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed ride is loosed and

          Everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the

       Desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blanks and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again: but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, is hour come round at

     last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Written in the aftermath of WW I, as well as the beginning of the Irish War of Independence, following the Easter Rising of `1916, the poem also reflects upon the 1918-19 flu pandemic.

The social ills of modernity: the breakdown of the traditional family, the loss of shared religious faith, the collapse of collective purpose are all evoked, echoed and highlighted here.

Nick Taylor, in The Paris Review, April 7 2015, writes:

As for the slouching beast, the best explanation is that it’s not a particular political regime, or even fascism itself, but a broader historical force, comprising the technological, the ideological and the political. A century later, we see the beast in the atomic bomb, the holocaust, the regimes of Stalin and Mao, and all manner of systematized atrocity.

The poem has been referenced in many other pieces of writing, including Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which inverts the poem: ‘here African civilization is the one under threat, and the rough beast is the West. Achebe’s Nigerian warrior faces exile from his village and pressure from Christina missionaries who threaten the tribal way of life; he commits suicide. … (Joan) Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (poses) Didion stand(ing) in the same position as Yeat’s narrator, describing a social disaster, feeling the centre start to give out. Didion reported the piece from San Francisco ‘where the social haemorrhaging was showing up,’ ‘where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves hippies’. /She tells of the disoriented youth she met there, including a five-year-old named Susan whose mother feeds her acid and peyote*. She muses that the hippies are dealing with ‘society’s atomization’ for which their parents are responsible. ‘At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing,’ she writes….Elyn Sak’s 2008 Memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, concerning her bout with schizophrenia. Though these four words from Yeats surely resonate with Saks’s feelings, the ‘centre’ in question here isn’t the moral authority of the Western world, it’s one person’s sense of stability, (Taylor)

Today, if we were to adopt Yeat’s stance as narrator, we can see so many feasible, even existential threats to the centre:

the geopolitical universe including the nuclear sabre-rattling in Europe and South East Asia,

                 the climactic warming of the planet

                                                      the biological spectre of additional pandemics,

pharmacological umbrella and both legitimate/legal and illicit…with street drugs, gangs and warlords, as well as a plethora of pharmaceuticals for which minimal clinical trials have been conducted…

                                 the religious/racial divide and the open aggression of various individual and ‘cell’ terrorists seeking to wreak havoc, revenge and contempt for the ‘other’…whomever that may be

Whatever centre we might wish to reference, one of the more cliché is the “world order” of the last three-quarters of a century, since the end of the Second World War. However we might like to think about “the centre”, it implies a core, a focal point, a point in and through and by which some kind of ‘order’ and ‘balance’ and ‘stability’ and ‘security’ and ‘reliability’ and ‘predictability’ and ‘trust’ might be discerned, ascertained and sustained. The “sun” for example, as the centre of the universe, around which other universes circle, including the earth; we also speak and think of a “leader” as a centre-point in any group, classroom, board-room, lecture hall, sanctuary, Vatican, as well as Kremlin, White House, 10 Downing, or even a national capital, symbolizing the centre of that specific nation.

When these ‘centres’ are considered to be stable in what has been their normal configuration, patterns, language, and attitude, the world considers such a situation to be relatively ‘secure’. Whenever some or all of these ‘focal points’ (often positioned in the public mind as ‘polar opposites’ or ‘enemies’) start to shift and those shifts are documented in the most minute detail in real time, ordinary people, as well as poets and prophets and writers, tend to think that things are “spinning out of control”.

Meriam-Webster.com defines “centrifugal force” as ‘what keeps a string with a ball on the end taut when you whirl it around. A centrifuge is a machine that uses centrifugal force. At the end of a washing machine’s cycle, it becomes a weak and simple centrifuge as it whirls the water out of your clothes. Centrifuges hundreds of thousands of times as powerful are essential to nuclear technology and drug manufacturing. Part of an astronaut’s training occurs in a centrifuge that generates force equal to several times the force of gravity (about like a washing machine) to get them used to the forces they’ll encounter in a real space mission. M-W then goes on to reference Yugoslavia, then a county of six separate ethnicities, threatened by centrifugal ethnic forces (which ultimately resulted in six separate nationalities.

There is a case to be made that many nations are beginning (some have already entered a deeper phase) to see their ‘nation’s’ ethnicity challenged by the addition of thousands of refugees, and immigrants and asylum-seekers, from various regions and multiple tragedies. Similarly, the people of the world have been threatened by the onslaught of a pandemic virus for more than two years, that saw some two million deaths, and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, as well as many ‘long-haul’ cases that still linger, with research still learning about their prognosis. Fires, draughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, tropical storms, storm surges, record-rainfalls, floods and human devastation have all been visited on people on every continent and their number and intensity have grown in the last decade. The world faces daily, hourly news reports of nuclear ambitions in Iran, North Korea, as well as Russian attempts to blackmail the world into giving up on its support for Ukraine in this latest horrendous military massacre.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations declared on September 14, 2022,

“The solidarity envisioned in the United Nations Charter is being devoured by the acids of nationalism and self-interest. As fractures deepen and trust evaporates, we need to come together around solutions. People need to see results in their everyday lives, or they will lose faith in their governments and institutions, and they will lose hope in the future. This year’s General Debate must be about providing hope and overcoming the divisions that are dramatically impacting the world.

Unity, co-operation, collaboration, compromise, working for something ‘bigger than self-interest’….these are euphemisms juxtaposed beside the realpolitik of ultra-nationalism, white supremacy, stolen elections, closed borders, and the new leaders who are adamantly advocating such positions, and then winning more votes in many countries. In the U.S., for example, the Washington Post reported that some 277 Republican candidates for election to the House and Senate in November are “election-deniers” in that they believe the 2020 election of President Biden was fraudulently won, and of this number some 173 are running in Republican-leaning districts. These people are propagating the lie that elections, if they are not victorious, are inevitably fraudulent and must be overturned. Voter suppression laws have been passed in some 45 states, and outright bans on abortion have been passed in several states, immediately following the overturn of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court, in their decision to turn the issue over to the states.

In Canada, a right-wing candidate has just been elected as leader of the United Conservative Party, and thereby the next premier of Alberta, who has committed to passing an Alberta Sovereignty Act, declaring the provinces right to ignore any law passed by the federal government in Ottawa. One political opinion writer in Canada, Althia Raj, is asking the rhetorical question (in a new podcost, “It’s Political”) about whether we (Canadians) are having a constitutional crisis while no one notices.

Today, it can be argued that we are unable to reference only one or two dramatic and centrifugal forces that might be spinning the centre to the point where it ‘cannot hold’. Indeed, the number and the relatively high score on any metaphoric Richter scale that measure earthquakes, is somewhat indeterminate. Each day, we learn of new dimensions of threats, new frequencies, while the “old” familiar geopolitical foes continue to jabber in the headlines about their own ambitions:  Putin in Ukraine and against NATO, the beast incarnate in his head; Xi Jin Ping, over Taiwan, indisputably part of mainland China, and under military threat for annexation by Beijing; Kim Jung Un, in North Korea, whose insatiable need for attention on the world stage is prompting his firing of missiles not only into the China Sea but actually over Japan prompting Japan, South Korea and the United States to upgrade their military manoeuvres in the region; Iran, where a woman was recently shot and killed for wearing her head scarf improperly and where the nation’s leaders determination to develop nuclear weapons continues unabated after the U.S. withdrew from the Iranian Accord under trump.

Thousand of lives, buildings including schools, hospitals, child-care centres, homes and infrastructure have all been destroyed, and the one of the largest nuclear stations in Europe is under constant threat from Russian missiles and rockets, while the IAEA declares the facility to be the property of Ukraine, and must not be turned over to the Russians. The Western media is fixated on whether or not Putin will carry out his rhetorical threat of deploying tactical nuclear warheads, or chemical or biological weapons on the people of Ukraine.

Biden says yesterday, the world is as close to the nuclear cliff as it was at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Only this time, instead of Kennedy and Kruschev, it is Biden and Putin who are facing off.

On tenterhooks, that state of uneasiness or suspense, is where we are today, and have been for many months, if not years. Our shared trust, and the loyalty that can only come with trust, is in tatters, as if it were a quilt patched together over decades of diplomacy, sewed together by various world leaders and their nations who, at the time of the inauguration of the United Nations following World War II, recognised the absolute need to work together for peace.

That need seems to have given way to a new narcissistic nationalism, narrow, frightened, cynical, selfish and short-sighted, embodied by many national leaders, some of them elected, others self-or-serf-appointed. And while we are all linked digitally in real time and thereby exposed to the granularity of world news, including many faux-pseudo-psycho-analyses of the “mind” of world leaders who threaten the ‘stability and security’ of world order.

Truth be told, nature herself, is far from stable, in the sense that ‘she’ is in a constant state of change, seasonally, and that change exhibits some predictable memes, not all of which are as relevant to the human world as others.

Size, for example, in nature, usually suggests dominance, power, and the need for smaller creatures to learn stealth and escape. In the human world, masculinity, as a symbol of and embodiment of size and physical power, is not assurance of equanimity, nor of the absence of its own fear. Indeed, some would argue that many of the most frightened among us are those with the most “hard power”…especially in terms of nuclear weapons.

The myth of size and dominance as a moral ethical and thereby national “value” will have to give way to a much more challenging modality of soft power, of the deeper need to collaborate, and to “get along” in order to survive. The stakes, now, are no longer boundaried by borders, fences, moats, and wire communications. All of the stakes, for everyone, cross all of the traditional boundaries between and among nations, Even cyber-tactics need no physical wires, pipelines, or physical weapons for their deployment.

We are already living in a ‘new space’ generated right here on this planet; and our will and our capacity to work through our fears and our imaginary superiorities, and our imagined inferiorities, in some shared and safe space, in a manner exemplified by the Haudenosaunee people in The Great Law of Peace, will determine how this act of the history of the human race ends.

For the sake of our grandchildren we can only hope and pray that the end is peaceful and effectively shared….we may have to generate a new “centre” that will hold, in order to survive.

Dipping a toe at the beach of the indigenous way of life

The white, European mindset that ‘we’ have to reconcile with the indigenous people in Canada, while honourable, and even ethical, starts from the wrong place. It has honour in that there is a documented, and experienced and incarnated history of intense abuse of the indigenous people, the emasculation of their culture, language, ethos and belief-system by that European ‘white’ mindset. 

Warranted as the process is, including reparations, and a recognition of the insufferable wrongs done in the name of God, nation and ‘civilization’ (as opposed to savagery), it lacks the kind of energy, legs, hope and gift that comes from a full appreciation of the indigenous attitudes, perceptions, philosophy and ethics that are, or at least could be, a dawning of a new age of enlightenment for North Americans.

Land treaties that have been abrogated, and repatriations and reparations that are necessary, notwithstanding, it might be helpful to unearth a few of the gems of indigenous writings, and the thoughts and beliefs and perceptions behind those writings, in order to shift the reconciliation process from one of “making up for past wrongs” to “acknowledging and openly appreciating the incredible insights of the indigenous way of life”….from guilt and shame to gratitude and appreciation. Legal cases that relegate Indigenous realities to “subjective beliefs” substituting ‘religious beliefs’ for indigenous protection of sacred mountains, for example, along with the preception ‘you’re just immigrants like everyone else’ are examples of attitudes and perceptions that demand both exposure and erasure.

 A reading from The Great Law of Peace, KAYANERENKO:WA, by Kayanesenh Paul Williams might shed some light: One fundamental principle that flows from the Creation story is the relationship between human beings and the natural world. The Book of Genesis gives human beings ‘dominion’ over all parts of the natural world and suggests that everything was created to serve the needs of humanity. More recent Christian thinkers have struggled to insert the concept of ‘stewardship’ into these words. While logic agrees with the approach, fundamentalists who see an obligation to develop and exploit wage theological war with environmentalists who feel a need to conserve. The Haudenosaunee Creation story places human beings squarely in the midst of a natural world in which they form an integral part, and in which each part has been given responsibilities. Sotsisowah (John Mohawk) explained: The Haudenosaunee Creation story….is replete with symbols of a rational universe. In the Creation Story, the only creature with a potential for irrational thought is the human being. All the other creatures of Nature are natural, i.e. rational. Nature is depicted as a threatening and irrational aspect of existence in the West’s cosmologies. The Haudenosaunee cosmology is quite different. It depicts the natural world as a rational existence while admitting that human beings possess an imperfect understanding of it. The idea that human beings have an imperfect understanding of the rational nature of existence is something of a caution to Haudenosaunee in their dealings with nature. Conversely, the idea that the natural world is disorganized and irrational has served as something of a permission in the West and may be the single cultural aspect which best explains the differences between these two societies’ relationships to Nature. The reason it’s so important to get people to cease fearing nature is that negative emotions invade one’s ability to think clearly. People who are afraid of nature have much more difficulty defending it than people who are not. All of those negative emotions giver you permission to enact violence on nature. (Williams, op. cit. p. 33-34)

 Attitudes to nature, as well as the attitude to human irrationality, may both seem ‘foreign’ to many whose childhoods have been conditioned by a very different perspective. However, as history has evolved, developed and shown itself, perhaps the “euro-white-christian’ perspective shows significant holes in both logic and empirical evidence. 

Williams borrows, too, from Neil Patterson’s ‘The Fish’ in Haudenosaunee Environmental Task force 2001: From a Haudenosaunee perspective, there is a personal mandate from the Creation to protect Mother Earth and all that inhabit her. We should all begin to look at what personal changes we can make to reduce waste that our waters will eventually receive….It there are doubts in the minds of our leaders about action like this on the Natural World, the answer is obvious. These past mistakes of history serve as a guideline for future generations: not only our grandchildren, but for the fish and everything that is in the Circle of Life. Lur elders have learned from their elders these rules and guidelines. (Williams, p. 35)

 While it is futile, today, to wonder about the condition of the planet if the admonitions of the indigenous peoples had been observed, as well as how the economic and political ‘norms’ would be radically different, as in any process of transition, we can start today to get our hands, minds and hearts looking through a different lens. And this lens, in part the gift from indigenous peoples, could be a new ‘birth’ in both perceptions, as well as in the foundational principles on which we base those perceptions and the actions of transformation that follow. It is not only a transformation of the climatic conditions of the planet that is needed; it is also a transformation of the basic premises on which humanity and nature co-exist that must precede the climatic changes.

Another significant difference in perspective and attitude, concerns the comparative attitudes to good and evil. Williams writes: Christianity has wrestled with the issue of how an all-powerful God who is absolute good could permit evil to exist and even to flourish. The Church answers: it is a mystery that we humans cannot fathom; we are told we must have faith. Haudenosaunee thinking recognizes that good and evil both exist, and have been here from the beginning. They are, and therefore the question is not why, but rather how to address them in our lives and societies, and how to find a balance. Evil will not go away: we must continue to recognize it, understand it, and guard against it. (Williams, p. 35)

 There is a degree of pragmatism grounded in the observational evidence that all around us, we witness, and too often participate either overtly or covertly consciously or unconsciously, in both good and evil, and, irrespective of the legal systems, the ethical instructions, the psychological research and theories, we not only have to confront evil but also to balance it with good. And while, the human approach is admittedly prone to irrationality, and thereby needing help and support from others, there is an element of embedding very different understanding, perception, attitude and relationship within the ‘christian’ context and the indigenous context. Another significant difference between the euro-christian mindset and the indigenous, is the relationship between the real and the spiritual or what Wade Davis has called an ‘inner horizon’.

 (Borrowing from Wade Davis, Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire, New York, Broadway Books, 1998, p. 36). Williams continues: In ‘scientific; societies, things exist if their physical presence is provable. In most Indigenous societies, a thing that is dreamed also exists. The Haudenosaunee Creation story reflects a society that recognizes (as quantum theory suggests) that beings can move between out world and the spirit world, and that each world influences the other. And from Wade Davis, ‘Just as Aboriginal Australians assert that there was a Dreamtime before there was this age of the earth, so the Haundenosaunee Creation story takes place in a Dreamtime in which the animals are also spirits, and in which the formation of the world is happening at the same time as its first inhabitants are both already existing and taking shape. (Williams, op. cit. p. 36)

Rational/irrational….real/spirit…part of and protective of nature/dominant over nature….good/evil co-existing and needing balance….these are both a different way of perceiving, conceiving, considering and obviously of enacting a human existence on this planet…. In a footnote, Williams writes, in response to the Canada Health and Protection Act that required clinical testing by ‘science and objective observation’, Haudenosaunee medicine, which sees a partnership between the patient, the healer, the plants and the spirits that assist the healing, would have a difficult time providing scientific proof of its effectiveness. (p. 36)

 And these notes, observations and reflections are a mere ‘scratching the surface’ of the indigenous world view, by one still in ‘kindergarten’ as far as becoming steeped in the indigenous culture. I have not even acquired the moccasins that will be needed in order to ‘walk a mile in the moccasins of the indigenous peoples, in order to begin to understand first, and then to appreciate fully the import of their potential enhancement of our world view. For decades, I considered the grafting of a few symbols onto a liturgy in a Christian church service as another (albeit well-intentioned) patronizing crumb of meagre acknowledgement of the indigenous people, effectively a superficially polite and condescending form of colonialism. I never encountered anything but authentic and deep appreciation from indigenous individuals who attended services; however, on reflection, a more integrous, authentic and honourable approach would be to plan liturgies together, thereby integrating, incorporating and synthesizing two very different ‘cosmologies’ as well as perspectives. 

No doubt, others are already attempting to accomplish this ecumenism; however, any efforts in this direction would have to acknowledge the substantial differences in perspective, attitude and belief…while creating a liturgy that serves that end. The two perspectives differ so considerably that, it now appears, the Christian church has a long way to go to reflect upon, and to openly discuss and even to consider the relationship between what are two very different world views among very different histories and mythologies. And they each point to a very different application in the conduct of world affairs. 

It would seem that, the ‘establishment’ church would do well do relinquish the lead in the hypothetical process of attempting to reflect upon and to work toward any kind of compatible liturgy, as deemed to be compatible by the indigenous participants. Indeed, there is so much of profound value and authenticity in the indigenous cosmology, creation story, and especially in the significance the indigenous people ascribe to tat the need for healthy, supportive and honest relationships.

Paul Williams writes too: The Haudenosaunee do not believe (as the Bible seems to assume, in saying that we were made in God’s image) that we are the ultimate beings in the world, the end of all evolution. Things change. Sotsisowah John Mohawk observed: Things flow from sources which have roots deeper than individual talents or society’s gifts’ They flow from nature, and the sacred beings who designed nature. If one embraces the initial premise, that human beings were extremely lucky that of all the places in the universe, they have a home just the right distance from a sun of just the right intensity, that there is enough easter, grass and enough of everything. From there, it’s a small step to accept that whatever created all that is a force of unexcelled sacred dimensions and the will of that force is something people should try to cooperate with to perpetuate life. The way a group expresses its cooperation is through ceremonies which recreate the conditions present when people first came to consciousness of these things. Humankind’s relationship to nature projected in this precolonial pre-patriarchal, pre-modern story carries a fundamental and unchanging truth, but one which subsequent generations would need to relearn over and over. Humans exist in a context of nature and not vice versa. Everything we have ever had, everything we have, everything we will ever have—our health, our good looks, our intelligence, everything—is a product not of our own merit but of all that which created our world. That which created our world is not society, but the power of the universe. Nature, which is the context of our existence, is sacred. A significant manifestation of nature, the regenerative power of life, is also sacred, and we who walk about on the earth are not without obligations to perpetuate this system, the ‘work’ of the Giver of Life, in the greater scheme of things. (Williams, op. cit. p. 37)

 Is it too much to envision, to dream and to imagine a world in which these perspectives, along with their supporting cosmologies, legends, myths and ceremonies might be seen, embraced, integrated and celebrated, not as a redemptive path to reconciliation, but more as a gift from the peoples who were here before the European conquerors and whose wisdom and culture warrant our humble observance and respect?

Reflections on racism and its tentacled tumor on our body politic

 On this second year of a Day to Commemorate Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, it is long past time for “white” men and women to open both their hearts and minds to begin to welcome a respect for indigenous ways, indigenous thought, indigenous spirituality, not as an act of cognitive reprogramming, or as an act of political treaty-making, nor as a patronizing and condescending gesture of masked colonial arrogance, but rather as a humble prayer of gratitude and hope and surrender.

Indigenous traditions of respect for the earth and for all life offer a depth and breadth of wisdom that the world needs, and seems so resistant to embrace.

Marie Battiste, in a paper entitled, Maintaining Aboriginal Identity, Language and Culture in a Modern Society: Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, Marie Battists, ed. Vancouver BCL UBC Press, p. 201-202, as quoted in John W.  Friesen and Virginia Lyons Friesen, Aboriginal Education in Canada, p18:…

Immigrant society is sorely in need of what Aboriginal knowledge has to offer. We are witnessing throughout the world the weaknesses in knowledge, based on science and technology. It is costing us our air, our water, our earth; our very lives are at stake. No longer are we able to turn to science to rid us of the mistakes of the past or to clean up our planet for the future of our children.

The contemporary political culture, deeply embedded in a kind of patronizing and condescending model of patting the head of a child, as if, eventually that child will learn the appropriate ways of modern commerce, modern political vernacular and debate, of adapting to the demands of an economy that provides jobs to millions through technological innovation and heavily funded marketing will eventually have to bow on bended knee, stop talking and start listening, reading, reflecting and even engaging in a conversation whose agenda including both content and method will be offered by those indigenous men and women as a freely-given gift. And in order for that process to begin in earnest authenticity, surrendering and abandoning preconceived perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and practices that once dominated North American life among the powerful will need to be seeded as a precondition for further growth.

The German people surrendered to a process of denazification, as a way to turn the page in their collective history. The philosophy and the actions of the Third Reich are so horrendous, contemptible and disgusting, that the colonizing history of indigenous peoples in Canada, in the light of the Third Reich, might seem pallid, tepid and therefore tolerable. It is not tolerable; however, the process of reconciliation to which the Canadian government has expressed a full commitment, may well be sabotaged if a process of embracing, comprehending, acknowledging and formally discarding, and even burying all of the perceptions, needs, aspirations and fatal errors of that colonial mentality is not an intimate and integral feature of the process.

Colonialism has application to a stereotypical European, white, ambition to explore, conquer and subdue the ‘whole world’ primarily for the self-interested purpose of “using” the bounty and the treasure of the “new world” to enhance the wealth of the powerful back is Europe. Empire building, royal acclaim, profit-engineering, as well as the inherent drama and excitement including considerable risk, supported and nurtured by a variety of forms of patronage from wealthy/royal sponsors may have been the ‘light’ side of the initiative. The dark side, however, was the rape, pillage, murder, and religious conversion and complete emasculation of indigenous people, both individuals and the supporting and sustaining culture, beliefs, perceptions, languages and identity. This pursuit of dominance, competitively enacted, carried with it the strings, ambitions, expectations and hubris of both the sponsors and their people, as well as the adventurers themselves. Empires, like kingdoms, royal families, corporate and institutions, have behaved in a manner that, in many cases, was then free from the kind of critical examination, exposure and public disdain that needed investigation and a vehicle for communicating the impact of these expeditions, in real time. And, this pattern of competitive domination, control and the pursuit of power by those whose wealth and influence enables the ventures, is embedded in the political and economic and normative culture in the West today.

Targets of the neo-colonial ambition, as well as the strategies and tactics available, have changed, from indigenous to all those who have come to “need” the meagre wages the behemoths grudgingly concede. Capitalism, including the perpetuation of the wealthy and powerful class, (defined as the source and the stability of the normal order), continues to colonize industrial workers, farmers, transportation workers, in order to maintain the perceived need for control and dominance, that lies at the core of the colonial mentality.

And it is not only the business community that holds these views as normal, ethical and ultimately essential. The academic world, the ecclesial world, the health care field….they are all operating on a system of pyramidal top-down power, albeit with the more recent injections of modest ‘crumbs’ like the number of hours per week for work, and the injection of modest benefits for workers, in some instances.

Power at the top of the social, political economic gradient has always been able to, and also willing to “do whatever it can get away with” in order to serve its own primary interests. Benevolent dictatorships too have proferred meagre and modest ‘crumbs’ to their people, and then sung their own praises lustily.

Add to the campaign to grow and burnish the range of empire, the inherent racial superiority of white Europeans when confronted with people of a different skin colour, and significantly different ways of valuing each other, their environment and their spirit(s). Prejudice, bias, superiority, and power have throughout history maintained a degree of enmeshment and co-dependence for which those in power have never had to account. Of course, there are occasional exceptions of individuals and corporations who/which ‘valued’ their employees by building company towns, and by injecting medical supports, within clearly described and enforced limits. And by comparison, viewed through a lens of comparison with nearby corporations not engaged in similar initiatives, these ‘benevolent’ companies accrued an aura of humanity and compassion and worker appreciation.

When social and political forces like labour unions are considered sinister and anathema to the pursuit of corporate profit, however, as they are today, and have been for decades in North America, the stench of the abuse of power, similar to the stench of racial colonial empire-building abuse continues to hang over the contemporary and modest shifts in acknowledging, and accounting for the deep and ineradicable stains of colonialism.

 
It is not considered colonialism if and when a sole shooter attacks a synagogue or a mosque; however, it is a lingering and growing sign of the same ‘lethal social/psychological poison’ that inhabits the colonial mind. It is not considered  colonialism when a Prime Minister refuses to support his Attorney General, who just happens to be the first indigenous woman in Canada to hold that office, when she attempts to uphold the boundaries of her office(s) when faced with an applications fora deferred prosecution of SNC Lavalin. And yet, who can effectively and honourably argue that vestiges of colonialism do not infect that whole chapter in Canadian history?

It is not considered colonialism when a premier exempts long-term care institutions from inspection only then to witness excessive numbers of sickness and deaths in those homes resulting from conditions conducive to the spread of COVID.

It is not considered colonialism if and when hospitality workers have to scrape and beg for reasonable wages, and even for the tips they have been paid by patrons, (when withheld by employers)…and yet it is a similar kind of abuse of power.

Is it not considered colonialism when tax breaks for the rich are built into legislation, thereby funnelling public funds toward padding the portfolios of the wealthy, while eviscerating public programs to feed, to school, to house, and to provide health care for the disadvantaged…and yet it is.

While failing to provide safe, secure and abundant water for indigenous communities is obviously another vestige of colonialism, the length and duration of the failure has now become systemic, and so embedded into the culture that, for more than a century, governments have failed to act and have never been fully held to account….and so the initial impact of colonialism has been revisited on indigenous peoples for more than one hundred and fifty years impacting generations of young men and women, many of whom now dwell in Canadian prisons.

Law enforcement’s penchant for seeking and arresting people of colour at a rate far in excess of the proportion of such demographics in the national population, while obviously a blatant and open wound based in racism in the national body-politic, is nevertheless, another of the cancers for which we have not discovered, and applied even a repressive intervention. Just how serious can this country be about acknowledging, and then addressing the multiple complexities of racial attitudes, first to indigenous and also to minority groups, including new immigrants and refugees, if we continue to walk past these social and cultural “boils” as if they were normal, expected, tolerable and resistant to all curative measures.

Perhaps, rather than a ‘cure’ in the medical sense, the Canadian culture needs to consider the questions around “Truth and Reconciliation” to be matters needing a permanent and revolutionary perspective…Can we as Canadians begin to see our betrayal of indigenous families, and their children, not only as our worst and most heinous night-mare, but also as a path of light to re-imagine how our people with the least ‘political voice and influence’ are our most important and most valued and most resilient and most creative and most prophetic and poetic among us.

IT is not enough to build water lines, with reservoirs, in order to provide clean water for people living on reservations; it is not enough to hold public artistic ceremonies of song and dance in the nation’s capital, while wearing orange shirts; it is not enough to continue to hold wealthy and highly esteemed individuals as most important in our culture, while watching men and women sleeping on grates with temperatures near or below zero F.

The colonial mind-set, attitude, practice and its many implications continue like a barely recognized and acknowledged tumor pushing against both the brain and the heart and the lungs of the body politic. It is emasculating our sense of self-discipline, our sense of self-worth, our sense of our potential and our belief in our shared identity as a self-respecting nation. And its cells are continuing to replicate each time we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the obvious abuses of power over those whose voices we ignore or dismiss.

And there is no medical faculty or hospital, no ethics professor or consultant, and no court or  legal measures that can or will ameliorate our dependence and reliance on the abuse of power, for which we are all responsible, both for its incarnation and for its erasure…

We have to see, to feel, to think and to act our way out of this protracted night of darkness whose tentacles reach far beyond the imaginary ghosts and goblins and vampires of hallowe’en.

We actually are those vampires and sinister and ‘real’ human apparitions in the lives of millions of our own people….We can do better!

 Every conscious recognition, by each of us, that we are abusing power, is a step forward in neutralizing our hardwiring for power over. And while that recognition need not and must not erase our past, including words and phrases that were integral to the colonial mind-set. We have to sail between the Scylla of the contemporary “sanitizing” of our past, and the Charybdis of those clashing rocks of our innate insecurity that seems insatiable, in its appetite for ‘victims’ to assure us of us our unique and uncontestable (ironically and satirically) value. Our personal, familial, institutional and community reality and identity all depend, to a degree that we have thus far failed to acknowledge, on our disciplined commitment to take each step. And we must do it, not to patronize our indigenous peoples, nor our racial minorities, but to rescue ourselves from our own sabotage of our authentic better angels.