PRAISE THE TRUTH AND PASS THE AMMUNITION
All I’m doing this particular posting is passing on a column by Michael Kinsley, with which I totally agree, about the possibility of raising Clarence “pubic hair on a Coke can” Thomas to Chief Justice. Thank you Michael for your remembering what so many of us want to forget.
[Open quote.]
Michael Kinsley
Los Angeles Times
January 25, 2005
Will President Bush actually have the guts to nominate Clarence Thomas for chief justice of the Supreme Court when that opportunity arises, probably soon? You know he's just aching to do it. Because of their shared judicial philosophy, of course. But also because of that arrogant willfulness Bush has that a more generous person than myself might even call integrity.
And will the Democrats have the guts to oppose Justice Thomas' elevation to chief, resisting all the Republican cries of, "Oh, for mercy's sake, you people – not that again"? Those cries are starting pre-emptively, in an effort to cow the opposition party out of opposing a Thomas nomination. I wish I could be as confident of the Democrats' guts as I am of the president's.
Ordinarily, and sensibly, it's considered to be an advantage when a presidential nominee has already gone through a Senate confirmation hearing. One reason Bush chose Michael Chertoff as secretary of Homeland Security after his first nominee imploded is that Chertoff already has gone before the Senate for confirmation three times. He's filled out the forms, he's been investigated, he's testified: Like a preapproved mortgage, he can slip right through.
But Clarence Thomas is different, because his famous 1991 confirmation was different. His strategy was to do or say anything that would allow him to crawl past the finish line. When the prize is a virtually invulnerable lifetime appointment, that's a good strategy. But it can, and should, come back to haunt you when you put in for a promotion.
Thomas' performances at the hearings, as well as the things we know now that we didn't know then, and even the things we knew then but were bullied or rushed into ignoring, are not just fair game — they are disqualifying. If he wasn't unworthy of the Supreme Court when his confirmation hearings began, he certainly was by the time they were over. The fact that he got confirmed as an associate justice anyway is no reason to give him a free pass to chief justice. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
And yes, some of Thomas' opponents may have been as demagogic and dishonest as he was, but that's not the point. When Anita Hill is nominated for chief justice, we can consider her qualifications.
To take the most obvious example of an issue that was opened, rather than closed, by Thomas' 1991 testimony: Thomas avoided revealing his opinion about Roe vs. Wade, the abortion decision, by insisting that he didn't have one.
It is beyond legitimate dispute that he tried to leave the impression that he'd never even thought or talked about Roe. This was implausible on its face – Roe is the most controversial Supreme Court ruling of the last century, and it came down while Thomas was in law school – but no one could prove Thomas a liar during the hearings. Since then, however, several people have popped up with memories of having discussed Roe with Thomas. His views were as you would suspect, and he has reasserted them with a vengeance from the moment he joined the court.
Thomas' supporters say he didn't commit perjury because he testified only that he had never "debated" Roe, not that he had never "discussed" it. They also like to point out that he said he had no view on Roe "this day," which doesn't make him a liar if he expressed a view some other day.
This is pathetic. But it's also irrelevant. The standard for becoming chief justice ought to be a bit higher than the standard for staying out of jail. Thomas indisputably did his best to deceive senators trying to perform their constitutional duty of advice and consent. If that isn't something the Senate should consider when passing judgment on his fitness for an even higher job, then "advice and consent" has no meaning. And we have endured too many sermons from Clarence Thomas, strict constructionist, to believe that the words of the Constitution have no meaning.
Since the hearing, various witnesses and pieces of evidence have come out lending credence to the stories about his personal life that he so indignantly denied at the time. Maybe most of this stuff should never have been raised. But that didn't give him the right to lie about it. Meanwhile, various remarks and rulings by Justice Thomas since 1991 have cast doubt on his professions of agnosticism on almost every important legal issue during his confirmation.
Because he chose an outright fib on abortion, Thomas relied somewhat less than most recent Supreme Court nominees on the silly pretense that discussing actual judicial issues at their confirmation hearings would amount to "prejudging" future cases. It's silly because sitting judges do nothing else but issue opinions on judicial issues, and no one thinks that this year's opinions are illegitimately "prejudging" next year's opinions. The nomination of a sitting justice for elevation to chief, if it happens, ought to snuff this pretense once and for all. After almost 14 years of strongly held and strongly worded opinions, it would be preposterous for Thomas to decline to discuss his judicial ideology, or to insist that he does not have one, on the nonexistent principle that a judge should never tip his hand.
It would be preposterous, but that is no guarantee that it won't happen. Saying the preposterous under oath has served Clarence Thomas well so far. If he is given the opportunity to be preposterous again, and the Senate Democrats let him get away with it – again – they will get the chief justice they deserve, and they'll deserve the justice that they get.
[Close quote.]
______________________________________________________________
"She cried and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook." —Tommy Manville (Oft married celebrity.)
Monday, January 31, 2005
Saturday, January 29, 2005
BUSH HATES AND FEARS THE ELITISTS? HE HATES HIMSELF?
“Yale had not been an easy ride for young George, even as an Andover graduate, a fraternity man, and a member of Skull and Bones. Ordinarily, those credentials would have allowed him to rule the campus, but as George told one of his Yale advisers, he felt his childhood in Texas set him apart socially from the more polished easterners who had similar resumes. He felt he was looked down upon by “snobs” and “elitists.” He also felt alienated on the liberal campus, because of his father’s conservative politics. In fact, he came to despise what he called “arrogant liberal intellectuals.” (THE FAMILY, p. 267)
“He felt he was looked down upon by ‘snobs’ and ‘elitists’.” (THE FAMILY, p. 267)
And if you don’t think that George Bush is a puffed up, arrogant prick, think about what his comment on the destruction of the elite system at Yale reveals about his conflicted values:
“George did not realize it at the time, but his class was one sweep in front of the dustpan. The class of 1968 was the last legacy class in which the sons of alumni were almost automatically accepted, thereby rewarding those with the most advantages. After 1968, admissions to Yale were to be based on merit. No more preferences for private schools; no more Social Register requirements. No more quotas for Jews.
“The year after George’s graduation the freshman class had more students from public and parochial schools than private schools for the first time in Yale’s history. Women were admitted (‘That’s when Yale really started going down hill,’ said George W. without a trace of humor); the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps was banished from campus; the dress code of jackets and ties was abolished. Fraternities, which the class yearbook described as a “benign irrelevancy,” soon disappeared, and even the secret societies lost some of their allure as more and more students began turning down taps, even from Skull and Bones.” (THE FAMILY, p. 268)
Bush Jr., if he were judged by the same standards that he and the neocons use to judge others, would come out very poorly, for don’t they tell people to quit whining and to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and to get a life? So what did Georgie do with all the benefits and opportunities in the world? Did he use them wisely or did he self-pity and booze himself into academic failure? He threw his opportunity away on booze and self-pity and to this day won’t take responsibility for himself. Instead, he blames and hates those who did not waste their privileged opportunities.
Some of us a tiny bit familiar with psychology will recognize that Georgie was not actually rebelling against Yale; he was rebelling against his absentee father and his grandfather and all their Connecticut and Kennebunkport hoity-toity upbringing which his Texas training taught him to hate. You would think with his newfound power over the people that his self-worth would have increased to the point that he would not be so afraid of who he is, really and truly down deep inside, but I think his going over to fundamentalism short-changed him by allowing him to imagine he is doing god’s will rather than his own. If Georgie took responsibility for what he’s doing rather than imagining that god is speaking through him, he might be more responsible and have to eventually come to terms with his inner demons. Bush, like so many of his conservative fellows, has identified with the abuser rather than opposing abuse, so he spreads and amplifies America’s abusive under-culture rather than helping to end it.
________________________________________________________
“The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.” —G.K. Chesterton [This is humor? The Bushes are funny?]
“Yale had not been an easy ride for young George, even as an Andover graduate, a fraternity man, and a member of Skull and Bones. Ordinarily, those credentials would have allowed him to rule the campus, but as George told one of his Yale advisers, he felt his childhood in Texas set him apart socially from the more polished easterners who had similar resumes. He felt he was looked down upon by “snobs” and “elitists.” He also felt alienated on the liberal campus, because of his father’s conservative politics. In fact, he came to despise what he called “arrogant liberal intellectuals.” (THE FAMILY, p. 267)
“He felt he was looked down upon by ‘snobs’ and ‘elitists’.” (THE FAMILY, p. 267)
And if you don’t think that George Bush is a puffed up, arrogant prick, think about what his comment on the destruction of the elite system at Yale reveals about his conflicted values:
“George did not realize it at the time, but his class was one sweep in front of the dustpan. The class of 1968 was the last legacy class in which the sons of alumni were almost automatically accepted, thereby rewarding those with the most advantages. After 1968, admissions to Yale were to be based on merit. No more preferences for private schools; no more Social Register requirements. No more quotas for Jews.
“The year after George’s graduation the freshman class had more students from public and parochial schools than private schools for the first time in Yale’s history. Women were admitted (‘That’s when Yale really started going down hill,’ said George W. without a trace of humor); the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps was banished from campus; the dress code of jackets and ties was abolished. Fraternities, which the class yearbook described as a “benign irrelevancy,” soon disappeared, and even the secret societies lost some of their allure as more and more students began turning down taps, even from Skull and Bones.” (THE FAMILY, p. 268)
Bush Jr., if he were judged by the same standards that he and the neocons use to judge others, would come out very poorly, for don’t they tell people to quit whining and to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and to get a life? So what did Georgie do with all the benefits and opportunities in the world? Did he use them wisely or did he self-pity and booze himself into academic failure? He threw his opportunity away on booze and self-pity and to this day won’t take responsibility for himself. Instead, he blames and hates those who did not waste their privileged opportunities.
Some of us a tiny bit familiar with psychology will recognize that Georgie was not actually rebelling against Yale; he was rebelling against his absentee father and his grandfather and all their Connecticut and Kennebunkport hoity-toity upbringing which his Texas training taught him to hate. You would think with his newfound power over the people that his self-worth would have increased to the point that he would not be so afraid of who he is, really and truly down deep inside, but I think his going over to fundamentalism short-changed him by allowing him to imagine he is doing god’s will rather than his own. If Georgie took responsibility for what he’s doing rather than imagining that god is speaking through him, he might be more responsible and have to eventually come to terms with his inner demons. Bush, like so many of his conservative fellows, has identified with the abuser rather than opposing abuse, so he spreads and amplifies America’s abusive under-culture rather than helping to end it.
________________________________________________________
“The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.” —G.K. Chesterton [This is humor? The Bushes are funny?]
Friday, January 28, 2005
BUSHSHIT ON THE BRAIN (To tune of "No Business Like Show Business")
There’s no Bushshit like George Bushshit,
There’s no Bushshit I know...
Everything about it is repelling,
Everything about it is quite vain,
Everything about it is revealing
Of the low ceiling inside his brain!
BAR BUSH RAISED THE BAR AND LOWERED THE BOOM
We read in THE FAMILY (p. 262) how Barbara Bush balked at allowing a certain religion into her family. She opposed George’s first fiancé, Cathy Wolfman.
According to Cody Shearer a one-time family friend, “She [Bar] couldn’t abide the fact that Cathryn’s stepfather was Jewish... ’There’ll be no Jews in our family,’ she said.”
Does that surprise us? Of course not; the racist, prejudiced South has now completely waffled over to the Republican Party, bringing with it all the yellow dog Democrats with their history of prejudice toward races and religions other than WASPS [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants]. Sadly the South now rules America again. People who don’t know history, of course, are ignorant of those prejudices, and they’ve added in their own prejudices and hatreds for homosexuals. The Republican Party is now the party of Mr. Allprejudice. The Dems, of course, do have prejudices. They’re prejudiced against the Southern Baptist religion from which all other prejudices flow. They’re prejudiced against prejudice—which I don’t think is so bad. Prejudiced Southerners have a way of taking over whatever party they need in order to further their prejudices in the cultural life of this nation.
SOME SKULL AND BONES REJECT THE BIG BUSHSHITTER
Some of George’s classmates saw through the hard-drinking, Texas-size bullshitter and noted that though he would use his family name to get into Yale, he would refuse to study hard and perform like a Yalie. Bush was two-faced even then. Read below:
From THE FAMILY (pp. 265):
[Open quote.] Each of these men [Skull and Bones men] had distinguished himself in some activity at Yale—intellectual, athletic, or social. George’s distinction was, unquestionably, social. Years later many who lived with him in Davenport College were forced to reexamine their cherished belief that hard work triumphs over all. Some sounded cynical as they reappraised the rewards of meritocracy over aristocracy, and a bit of resentment seeped into their recollections of the young man who had skipped studying in favor of socializing and yet ended up with the most powerful job in the world.
“It’s not that anyone is jealous,” said Ken White, “because we’re all at the peak of our careers and doing quite well. It’s just that George . . . from what we knew of him then.., doesn’t seem to be the.., a... well... the best-equipped person to be President of the United States.”
“He never seemed to care about studying,” recalled Thomas Wik (Yale 1968).
“I do not consider him a well-educated man at all,” said Richard Hunter (Yale 1969).
“He put me off because he just didn’t seem like he was working very hard in school,” said John Gorman (Yale 1968). “He would appear in the morning like he’d partied all night. . . He viewed himself as a Texan and did not want to be considered part of the eastern establishment at Yale so he went out of his way to act.., crude... It’s quite amazing that someone you held in low esteem later becomes President.”
The stories of George’s alcoholic escapades at Yale traveled the Andover network. At Harvard, Torbert Macdonald listened sadly to the tales of his old friend, whose politics were as out of sync with the times as his fraternity carousing. “Poor Georgie,” said Macdonald. “He couldn’t even relate to women unless he was loaded . . . There were just too many stories of him turning up dead drunk on dates.” [Close quote.]
THE SAD CENTER OF GEORGE BUSH’S FINGER: A BALANCED APPRAISAL
From THE FAMILY (pp. 266-267):
“’Hell, it’s not George’s substance abuse that bothers me as much as his lack of substance,’ said Tom Wilmer (Yale 1965 and Delta Kai Epsilon). That he coasted on his family name is understandable. Lots of guys do that. But, Georgie, as we called him then, has absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn’t interested in ideas, books or causes. He didn’t travel; he didn’t read newspapers; he didn’t watch news; he didn’t even go to the movies.... How anyone got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me. This guy has no concept of complex issues.... He’s a simple-minded zealot and—God help us—he’s now the guy with his finger on the button.’”
________________________________________________
“Ignorance once dispelled is difficult to reestablish.” —Laurence J. Peter [This is why George’s failure to study in college is a current tragedy for American influence in the world.]
There’s no Bushshit like George Bushshit,
There’s no Bushshit I know...
Everything about it is repelling,
Everything about it is quite vain,
Everything about it is revealing
Of the low ceiling inside his brain!
BAR BUSH RAISED THE BAR AND LOWERED THE BOOM
We read in THE FAMILY (p. 262) how Barbara Bush balked at allowing a certain religion into her family. She opposed George’s first fiancé, Cathy Wolfman.
According to Cody Shearer a one-time family friend, “She [Bar] couldn’t abide the fact that Cathryn’s stepfather was Jewish... ’There’ll be no Jews in our family,’ she said.”
Does that surprise us? Of course not; the racist, prejudiced South has now completely waffled over to the Republican Party, bringing with it all the yellow dog Democrats with their history of prejudice toward races and religions other than WASPS [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants]. Sadly the South now rules America again. People who don’t know history, of course, are ignorant of those prejudices, and they’ve added in their own prejudices and hatreds for homosexuals. The Republican Party is now the party of Mr. Allprejudice. The Dems, of course, do have prejudices. They’re prejudiced against the Southern Baptist religion from which all other prejudices flow. They’re prejudiced against prejudice—which I don’t think is so bad. Prejudiced Southerners have a way of taking over whatever party they need in order to further their prejudices in the cultural life of this nation.
SOME SKULL AND BONES REJECT THE BIG BUSHSHITTER
Some of George’s classmates saw through the hard-drinking, Texas-size bullshitter and noted that though he would use his family name to get into Yale, he would refuse to study hard and perform like a Yalie. Bush was two-faced even then. Read below:
From THE FAMILY (pp. 265):
[Open quote.] Each of these men [Skull and Bones men] had distinguished himself in some activity at Yale—intellectual, athletic, or social. George’s distinction was, unquestionably, social. Years later many who lived with him in Davenport College were forced to reexamine their cherished belief that hard work triumphs over all. Some sounded cynical as they reappraised the rewards of meritocracy over aristocracy, and a bit of resentment seeped into their recollections of the young man who had skipped studying in favor of socializing and yet ended up with the most powerful job in the world.
“It’s not that anyone is jealous,” said Ken White, “because we’re all at the peak of our careers and doing quite well. It’s just that George . . . from what we knew of him then.., doesn’t seem to be the.., a... well... the best-equipped person to be President of the United States.”
“He never seemed to care about studying,” recalled Thomas Wik (Yale 1968).
“I do not consider him a well-educated man at all,” said Richard Hunter (Yale 1969).
“He put me off because he just didn’t seem like he was working very hard in school,” said John Gorman (Yale 1968). “He would appear in the morning like he’d partied all night. . . He viewed himself as a Texan and did not want to be considered part of the eastern establishment at Yale so he went out of his way to act.., crude... It’s quite amazing that someone you held in low esteem later becomes President.”
The stories of George’s alcoholic escapades at Yale traveled the Andover network. At Harvard, Torbert Macdonald listened sadly to the tales of his old friend, whose politics were as out of sync with the times as his fraternity carousing. “Poor Georgie,” said Macdonald. “He couldn’t even relate to women unless he was loaded . . . There were just too many stories of him turning up dead drunk on dates.” [Close quote.]
THE SAD CENTER OF GEORGE BUSH’S FINGER: A BALANCED APPRAISAL
From THE FAMILY (pp. 266-267):
“’Hell, it’s not George’s substance abuse that bothers me as much as his lack of substance,’ said Tom Wilmer (Yale 1965 and Delta Kai Epsilon). That he coasted on his family name is understandable. Lots of guys do that. But, Georgie, as we called him then, has absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn’t interested in ideas, books or causes. He didn’t travel; he didn’t read newspapers; he didn’t watch news; he didn’t even go to the movies.... How anyone got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me. This guy has no concept of complex issues.... He’s a simple-minded zealot and—God help us—he’s now the guy with his finger on the button.’”
________________________________________________
“Ignorance once dispelled is difficult to reestablish.” —Laurence J. Peter [This is why George’s failure to study in college is a current tragedy for American influence in the world.]
Thursday, January 27, 2005
MORE BUSHISMS
George Herbert Walker Bush has a tricky way of sliding a fiction over the truth until a shoe fits like a glove and a hat like a sweater, so writes Kitty Kelley in her book, THE FAMILY (pp. 228-229)
"His slick television ads, his substantial financial backing, plus his name recognition from the 1964 Senate race gave him a resounding (58 percent to 42 percent) victory in November 1966. George Bush had won his first election. But in the end, his appeal to the black community did not work. He did not carry the black vote in his district, something he did not understand. 'It was both puzzling and frustrating,' he wrote in his autobiography. 'Running for Congress, I talked about the possibility of [breaking the Democratic Party’s grip on black voters] with a longtime friend..., who chaired the United Negro College Fund when I headed the UNCF drive on the Yale campus in 1948.
"This recollection is typical of George H.W. Bush. Not only does it show the way he rewrites history to fit his convenient view, but it also allows him to find it 'puzzling and frustrating' that a Republican who opposed open housing would not find support from black voters. The fact is that George had never “headed” a United Negro College Fund drive at Yale. There was no United Negro College Fund on the campus in 1948. Rather, he worked on the school’s annual budget drive, a charity project that allotted 18 percent of the drive’s twenty-five-thousand-dollar goal to the United Negro College Fund, a far remove from directly raising money for private black colleges. The national office of the United Negro College Fund said its archives show no record of George Herbert Walker Bush being affiliated with them at any time during his entire Yale career.
"'Uh ... maybe he got himself confused with his younger brother Johnny,' joked a friend. 'Johnny is a member of the Executive Committee of the United Negro College Fund and a former board chairman. Or his father, Prescott, who worked to raise funds for private Negro colleges back in 1952 when he was state chairman of the United Negro College Fund in Connecticut.'
"In later years of campaigning and public life, when George needed to embrace civil rights, he would cite his volunteer work at Yale. He further exaggerated his dubious claim on behalf of the United Negro College Fund so many times that it did not just become real to historians and biographers; it became real to George. When he was asked in 1988 how he could in good conscience portray himself as a candidate for black Americans when the Reagan administration had watered down civil rights for eight years, he sat silently and never objected. Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times that he looked genuinely hurt by the question. 'But,' George said, 'I helped found the Yale chapter of the United Negro College Fund.'"
TORTURE IS RIGHT AT HOME IN GEORGE W. BUSH'S WORLD
In 1967 at Yale, George Bush defended his fraternity's practice of burning pledges with lit cigarettes, saying, "It's only a cigarette burn." Can you imagine, with a mindset for justifying burning people with cigarettes, what young Bush and Albert Gonzales, also an advocate for torture, said when they got together in private to discuss information gathering at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib? Pity the poor soldiers going down for behavior approved at the very top of government? What will be their rewards when they get out of prison? We'll have to watch that! If our memories are long enough. (THE FAMILY, pp. 236-237)
BUSH UNDERSTANDS RACISM BUT HE DON'T KNOW IT
Bush Jr. ought to understand very well the feelings of blacks who think they are excluded from successful white society for he is constantly reacting to similar feelings when it comes to America's Eastern society. His failure to measure up to the intellectual standards at Andover stung him deeply. He graduated near the bottom of his class. He just didn't have the intellectual power to get good grades. He still is a mental midget, but does he take responsibility for his own failings? To this day he feels, sounds and acts like a disenfranchised black American when he allows his fears and hatred and inferiority feelings toward Easterners get the best of him. That he is unable to make the connection between disenfranchised blacks and himself is just one more case of his inability to empathize with anyone he automatically considers beneath his station.
________________________________________________________
"Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children." —G.W. Bush
[I hope I can phrase this correctly.] "One word sums up probably the responsibility of any Governor, and that one word is 'to be prepared.' " (That's right, you guessed it!) —G.W. Bush and boy scouts too.
"His slick television ads, his substantial financial backing, plus his name recognition from the 1964 Senate race gave him a resounding (58 percent to 42 percent) victory in November 1966. George Bush had won his first election. But in the end, his appeal to the black community did not work. He did not carry the black vote in his district, something he did not understand. 'It was both puzzling and frustrating,' he wrote in his autobiography. 'Running for Congress, I talked about the possibility of [breaking the Democratic Party’s grip on black voters] with a longtime friend..., who chaired the United Negro College Fund when I headed the UNCF drive on the Yale campus in 1948.
"This recollection is typical of George H.W. Bush. Not only does it show the way he rewrites history to fit his convenient view, but it also allows him to find it 'puzzling and frustrating' that a Republican who opposed open housing would not find support from black voters. The fact is that George had never “headed” a United Negro College Fund drive at Yale. There was no United Negro College Fund on the campus in 1948. Rather, he worked on the school’s annual budget drive, a charity project that allotted 18 percent of the drive’s twenty-five-thousand-dollar goal to the United Negro College Fund, a far remove from directly raising money for private black colleges. The national office of the United Negro College Fund said its archives show no record of George Herbert Walker Bush being affiliated with them at any time during his entire Yale career.
"'Uh ... maybe he got himself confused with his younger brother Johnny,' joked a friend. 'Johnny is a member of the Executive Committee of the United Negro College Fund and a former board chairman. Or his father, Prescott, who worked to raise funds for private Negro colleges back in 1952 when he was state chairman of the United Negro College Fund in Connecticut.'
"In later years of campaigning and public life, when George needed to embrace civil rights, he would cite his volunteer work at Yale. He further exaggerated his dubious claim on behalf of the United Negro College Fund so many times that it did not just become real to historians and biographers; it became real to George. When he was asked in 1988 how he could in good conscience portray himself as a candidate for black Americans when the Reagan administration had watered down civil rights for eight years, he sat silently and never objected. Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times that he looked genuinely hurt by the question. 'But,' George said, 'I helped found the Yale chapter of the United Negro College Fund.'"
TORTURE IS RIGHT AT HOME IN GEORGE W. BUSH'S WORLD
In 1967 at Yale, George Bush defended his fraternity's practice of burning pledges with lit cigarettes, saying, "It's only a cigarette burn." Can you imagine, with a mindset for justifying burning people with cigarettes, what young Bush and Albert Gonzales, also an advocate for torture, said when they got together in private to discuss information gathering at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib? Pity the poor soldiers going down for behavior approved at the very top of government? What will be their rewards when they get out of prison? We'll have to watch that! If our memories are long enough. (THE FAMILY, pp. 236-237)
BUSH UNDERSTANDS RACISM BUT HE DON'T KNOW IT
Bush Jr. ought to understand very well the feelings of blacks who think they are excluded from successful white society for he is constantly reacting to similar feelings when it comes to America's Eastern society. His failure to measure up to the intellectual standards at Andover stung him deeply. He graduated near the bottom of his class. He just didn't have the intellectual power to get good grades. He still is a mental midget, but does he take responsibility for his own failings? To this day he feels, sounds and acts like a disenfranchised black American when he allows his fears and hatred and inferiority feelings toward Easterners get the best of him. That he is unable to make the connection between disenfranchised blacks and himself is just one more case of his inability to empathize with anyone he automatically considers beneath his station.
________________________________________________________
"Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children." —G.W. Bush
[I hope I can phrase this correctly.] "One word sums up probably the responsibility of any Governor, and that one word is 'to be prepared.' " (That's right, you guessed it!) —G.W. Bush and boy scouts too.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
THE SHOE’S ON THE OTHER FOOT, BUT WHO CARES?
Recently, as everyone knows, four CBS staffers were canned for failing to adequately check out a story about Bush’s National Guard service before releasing it into the public air waves through Dan Rather. Lot’s of head was done rolled!!!!
Now we find out that a woman’s story about torture in Saddam’s prisons which Paul Wolfowitz prominently featured in his testimony before Congress while Bush’s neocons were beating the war drums was completely false. What! A falsehood about Iraq and Saddam by the neocons? Who coulda thunk it!
Will heads roll in Bush’s administration because of those lies and distortions and the poor fact checking which has killed and permanently injured nearly 12,000 American soldiers now? Will those heads roll like the heads at CBS?
Anybody think that Bush and friends are more objective and honest than newsmen? Did someone in the errorless White House actually make a mistake? Maybe it wasn’t a mistake, like CBS’s mistake; maybe it was a downright Bush-league lie! Will anyone admit to it?
Anybody wanna make a wager?
WAR ON DRUGS. WHO’S WINNING?
Just outside Matamoros, Mexico, six prison employees were intercepted and murdered as they left their prison work recently. Matamoros is just across the border from Brownsville Texas. Law enforcement is becoming very dangerous in Mexico just now because of drug lords being held in prison and issuing warnings and death knells from their cells. Here we have a case of drug lords acting like international terrorists.
And in Afghanistan poppy fields are madly blooming.
Here in America so many of us laugh at a government which criminalizes marijuana use while 17,000 Americans died in traffic accidents in which alcohol was a factor. It’s time to criminalize alcohol use...
...or decriminalize but regulate all drugs and time to make drug use a mental health problem (including drinking) rather than a criminal problem. If only we had the money to do something about expanding treatment options. Where has all the money gone? Where has all the money gone? What happened to our federal surpluses, our budgets in black? Who was so irresponsible as to squander America’s wealth?
VOLITIONAL EVOLUTION
“Volitional evolution” is the control of our genetic makeup through science. According to E.O. Wilson in CONSILIENCE we will soon be in control of our own evolutionary direction. “Stabilizing selection” is the historical process by which bad genes were weeded out of the system by the death of those who were not viable. We’re already interdicting some of those death processes. “Medical prosthesis” is the process by which we can, and do, put off the deaths of thousands who were once weeded out by stabilizing selection. This seemingly wonderful intervention could actually destabilize our worldwide gene pool with poor results for the human race as a whole.
However, Wilson believes that soon gene therapy will offer ways to improve the gene pool. “Sometime in the next century [twenty-first century] that trend [gene repair] will lead into the full volitional period of evolution.” Or, as he further surmises, “Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.” (Page 276.)
TWO EXCELLENT FILMS FOR CINEMATOGRAPHY
Recently watched two great library films of poetic visual intensity. “Maborosi”, a Japanese film and “Eternity and a Day”, a Greek film. Both films were visually exciting. The thing about the Japanese film was the use of long range and medium range shots. Very few close-ups. We were never allowed in too close, but the shots of the city and then the shots of the town offered a feel of great tranquility for the story of a woman who had lost her grandmother and her husband and who is remarried by arrangement to a country man who lives by the sea.
The landscapes in both films are as much one of the characters as the characters themselves. The Greek film is also full of wonderful cinematography and is the story of man in the last days of his life who comes across an Albanian child, an illegal alien, escapee from the holocaust in Albania. Their interaction makes for both an emotional escape from loss and loneliness and alienation. Two great films, both masterpieces of cinematography. To view them is to be transported.
______________________________________________________
"All jobs ought to be open to everybody, unless they actually require a penis or a vagina." —Florynce Kennedy
Recently, as everyone knows, four CBS staffers were canned for failing to adequately check out a story about Bush’s National Guard service before releasing it into the public air waves through Dan Rather. Lot’s of head was done rolled!!!!
Now we find out that a woman’s story about torture in Saddam’s prisons which Paul Wolfowitz prominently featured in his testimony before Congress while Bush’s neocons were beating the war drums was completely false. What! A falsehood about Iraq and Saddam by the neocons? Who coulda thunk it!
Will heads roll in Bush’s administration because of those lies and distortions and the poor fact checking which has killed and permanently injured nearly 12,000 American soldiers now? Will those heads roll like the heads at CBS?
Anybody think that Bush and friends are more objective and honest than newsmen? Did someone in the errorless White House actually make a mistake? Maybe it wasn’t a mistake, like CBS’s mistake; maybe it was a downright Bush-league lie! Will anyone admit to it?
Anybody wanna make a wager?
WAR ON DRUGS. WHO’S WINNING?
Just outside Matamoros, Mexico, six prison employees were intercepted and murdered as they left their prison work recently. Matamoros is just across the border from Brownsville Texas. Law enforcement is becoming very dangerous in Mexico just now because of drug lords being held in prison and issuing warnings and death knells from their cells. Here we have a case of drug lords acting like international terrorists.
And in Afghanistan poppy fields are madly blooming.
Here in America so many of us laugh at a government which criminalizes marijuana use while 17,000 Americans died in traffic accidents in which alcohol was a factor. It’s time to criminalize alcohol use...
...or decriminalize but regulate all drugs and time to make drug use a mental health problem (including drinking) rather than a criminal problem. If only we had the money to do something about expanding treatment options. Where has all the money gone? Where has all the money gone? What happened to our federal surpluses, our budgets in black? Who was so irresponsible as to squander America’s wealth?
VOLITIONAL EVOLUTION
“Volitional evolution” is the control of our genetic makeup through science. According to E.O. Wilson in CONSILIENCE we will soon be in control of our own evolutionary direction. “Stabilizing selection” is the historical process by which bad genes were weeded out of the system by the death of those who were not viable. We’re already interdicting some of those death processes. “Medical prosthesis” is the process by which we can, and do, put off the deaths of thousands who were once weeded out by stabilizing selection. This seemingly wonderful intervention could actually destabilize our worldwide gene pool with poor results for the human race as a whole.
However, Wilson believes that soon gene therapy will offer ways to improve the gene pool. “Sometime in the next century [twenty-first century] that trend [gene repair] will lead into the full volitional period of evolution.” Or, as he further surmises, “Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.” (Page 276.)
TWO EXCELLENT FILMS FOR CINEMATOGRAPHY
Recently watched two great library films of poetic visual intensity. “Maborosi”, a Japanese film and “Eternity and a Day”, a Greek film. Both films were visually exciting. The thing about the Japanese film was the use of long range and medium range shots. Very few close-ups. We were never allowed in too close, but the shots of the city and then the shots of the town offered a feel of great tranquility for the story of a woman who had lost her grandmother and her husband and who is remarried by arrangement to a country man who lives by the sea.
The landscapes in both films are as much one of the characters as the characters themselves. The Greek film is also full of wonderful cinematography and is the story of man in the last days of his life who comes across an Albanian child, an illegal alien, escapee from the holocaust in Albania. Their interaction makes for both an emotional escape from loss and loneliness and alienation. Two great films, both masterpieces of cinematography. To view them is to be transported.
______________________________________________________
"All jobs ought to be open to everybody, unless they actually require a penis or a vagina." —Florynce Kennedy
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
A DECLINE IN THE VALUES OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?
Kitty Kelley in her unauthorized but, as usual, balanced biography of the Bush family, THE FAMILY (p.152), reveals how some old-time Republicans feel about the current crop of Bushes.
[Open quote.]
Temperamentally, the Bushes [Prescott and Dotty Bush, grandparents of W.] were in perfect harmony with the Eisenhower era of Republican grandees—moderate men with an international perspective who believed in human rights. They didn’t realize it at the time, but they were in the final evolutionary turn of the Republican Party to the right, and soon their kind of politics would be doomed. Within the next two decades the liberal Republicanism of Jacob Javits (New York), Clifford Case (New Jersey), Leverett Saltonstall (Massachusetts), John Sherman Cooper (Kentucky), George Aiken (Vermont), Thomas Kuchel (California), and Margaret Chase Smith (Maine) would be extinct. By the time the grandsons of Prescott Bush — George W. Bush and Jeb Bush—ran for public office, they would be practicing an extreme brand of Republican politics that bore no resemblance to the moderate views of their grandfather.
“I’m so glad Pres [Prescott Bush] is gone and doesn’t have to bear the shame of his right-wing grandson’s lies to the country,” said Betsy Trippe DeVecchi in July 2003. “Prescott was such an honorable man he never would’ve lied or been unprincipled the way George W. Bush has been in dragging us to war in Iraq.”
The only daughter of Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American Airways, Betsy Trippe DeVecchi grew up in Greenwich with the Bush children in the 1940s and was a close friend of Jonathan Bush, who was called Johnny Jim. “Prescott taught me to play tennis on the Rockefellers’ indoor court,” she said. “He was a lovely man, and his wife, Dotty, was so warm and gracious. Once they drove me up to Hotchkiss to see Johnny Jim in a play... Pres sat on the board of my father’s company. They shared the same Republican politics. Both were big friends of Wendell Wilkie and Tom Dewey and, of course, President Eisenhower.”
[Close quote.]
If old-time Republicans feel that way about the current Bushes, you can imagine, then, how an old Roosevelt Democrat from that time thinks:
“For my money—and I’m a Democrat [Herman Wolf] who worked for Abe Ribicoff— Prescott Bush was a fine gentleman. In fact, he was the best of the Bushes. After him, the blood thinned as it went down the line. His son George Herbert Walker Bush wasn’t much to look up to, and then, God help us, we got George’s son George Walker Bush, and the less said there, the better.” (Kelley, page 167)
The scariest quirk in the current fundamentalist/Bush phenomena comes out in something Bush's Grandfather Prescott Bush said as he prepared to vote to censure Joe McCarthy during the McCarthy era. Change just a word and current America sounds pretty frightening indeed:
"He [Prescott Bush] said he had to vote to censure because the honor of the Senate was at stake, and failure to rebuke McCarthy would be a victory for Communism. 'For he has caused dangerous divisions among the American people because of his attitude,' said Prescott, 'and the attitude he has encouraged among his followers, that there can be no honest differences of opinion with him. Either you must follow Senator McCarthy [George Bush] blindly; not daring to express any doubts or disagreements about any of his actions; or in his eyes you must be a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a fool who has been duped by the Communist line.' " (Page 158)
That's right! Shades of McCarthyism from Texas.
AND HERE'S THE REAL ROOT OF BUSH'S MCCARTHYISM
(From MYTHS TO LIVE BY by Joseph Campbell, p. 91) "The Biblical image of the universe simply won’t do any more; neither will the Biblical notion of a race of God, which all others are meant to serve (Isaiah 49: 22-23; 61: 5-6; etc.); nor again, the idea of a code of laws delivered from on high and to be valid for all time. The social problems of the world today are not those of a corner of the old Levant, sixth century B.C. Societies are not static; nor can the laws of one serve another. The problems of our world are not even touched by those stone-cut Ten Commandments that we carry about as luggage and which, in fact, were disregarded in the blessed text itself, one chapter after they were announced (Exodus 21:12-17, following 20:13). The modern Western concept of a legal code is not of a list of unassailable divine edicts but of a rationally contrived, evolving compilation of statutes, shaped by fallible human beings in council, to realize rationally recognized social (and therefore temporal) aims. We understand that our laws are not divinely ordained; and we know also that no laws of any people on earth ever were. Thus we know—whether we dare to say so or not—that our clergies have no more right to claim unassailable authority for their moral law than for their science. And even, finally, in their intimate role of giving spiritual advice, the clergy have now been overtaken by the scientific psychiatrists— and indeed to such a degree that many clergymen are themselves turning to psychologists to be taught how best to serve their pastoral function. The magic of their own traditional symbols works no longer to heal but only to confuse.
"In short, then: just as the buffalo suddenly disappeared from the North American plains, leaving the Indians deprived not only of a central mythic symbol but also of the very manner of life that the symbol once had served, so likewise in our own beautiful world, not only have our public religious symbols lost their claim to authority and passed away, but the ways of life they once supported have also disappeared; and as the Indians then turned inward, so do many in our own baffled world—and frequently with Oriental, not Occidental, guidance in this potentially very dangerous, often ill-advised interior adventure, questing within for the affect images that our secularized social order with its incongruously archaic religious institutions can no longer render."
Stiff-necked, unbending righteousness grows from such ambiguity and it can't imagine that it might be wrong and it must have an enemy to justify the anger it feels because of it's own confusion. Thus, religious men like Bush and McCarthy must surround themselves with sycophants and yes girls, for their fragile beliefs cannot abide challenges which they knows will break those frail beliefs and show them to be lies. But the antidote to rigid theocracy, according to E.O. Wilson, is not always emotionally satisfying:
"FOR MANY the urge to believe in transcendental existence and immortality is overpowering. Transcendentalism, especially when reinforced by religious faith, is psychically full and rich; it feels somehow right. In comparison empiricism seems sterile and inadequate. In the quest for ultimate meaning, the transcendentalist route is much easier to follow. That is why, even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart. Science has always defeated religious dogma point by point when the two have conflicted. But to no avail. In the United States there are fifteen million Southern Baptists, the largest denomination favoring literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, but only five thousand members of the American Humanist Association, the leading organization devoted to secular and deistic humanism.
"Still, if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modem age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure." (E.O. Wilson's CONSILIENCE, p.261)
I think Wilson does not understand the joy in living in an ambiguous reality. Once you accept you can't know up from down and sideways from crosswise, the swimming in place turns out to be quite exhilarating.
Kitty Kelley in her unauthorized but, as usual, balanced biography of the Bush family, THE FAMILY (p.152), reveals how some old-time Republicans feel about the current crop of Bushes.
[Open quote.]
Temperamentally, the Bushes [Prescott and Dotty Bush, grandparents of W.] were in perfect harmony with the Eisenhower era of Republican grandees—moderate men with an international perspective who believed in human rights. They didn’t realize it at the time, but they were in the final evolutionary turn of the Republican Party to the right, and soon their kind of politics would be doomed. Within the next two decades the liberal Republicanism of Jacob Javits (New York), Clifford Case (New Jersey), Leverett Saltonstall (Massachusetts), John Sherman Cooper (Kentucky), George Aiken (Vermont), Thomas Kuchel (California), and Margaret Chase Smith (Maine) would be extinct. By the time the grandsons of Prescott Bush — George W. Bush and Jeb Bush—ran for public office, they would be practicing an extreme brand of Republican politics that bore no resemblance to the moderate views of their grandfather.
“I’m so glad Pres [Prescott Bush] is gone and doesn’t have to bear the shame of his right-wing grandson’s lies to the country,” said Betsy Trippe DeVecchi in July 2003. “Prescott was such an honorable man he never would’ve lied or been unprincipled the way George W. Bush has been in dragging us to war in Iraq.”
The only daughter of Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American Airways, Betsy Trippe DeVecchi grew up in Greenwich with the Bush children in the 1940s and was a close friend of Jonathan Bush, who was called Johnny Jim. “Prescott taught me to play tennis on the Rockefellers’ indoor court,” she said. “He was a lovely man, and his wife, Dotty, was so warm and gracious. Once they drove me up to Hotchkiss to see Johnny Jim in a play... Pres sat on the board of my father’s company. They shared the same Republican politics. Both were big friends of Wendell Wilkie and Tom Dewey and, of course, President Eisenhower.”
[Close quote.]
If old-time Republicans feel that way about the current Bushes, you can imagine, then, how an old Roosevelt Democrat from that time thinks:
“For my money—and I’m a Democrat [Herman Wolf] who worked for Abe Ribicoff— Prescott Bush was a fine gentleman. In fact, he was the best of the Bushes. After him, the blood thinned as it went down the line. His son George Herbert Walker Bush wasn’t much to look up to, and then, God help us, we got George’s son George Walker Bush, and the less said there, the better.” (Kelley, page 167)
The scariest quirk in the current fundamentalist/Bush phenomena comes out in something Bush's Grandfather Prescott Bush said as he prepared to vote to censure Joe McCarthy during the McCarthy era. Change just a word and current America sounds pretty frightening indeed:
"He [Prescott Bush] said he had to vote to censure because the honor of the Senate was at stake, and failure to rebuke McCarthy would be a victory for Communism. 'For he has caused dangerous divisions among the American people because of his attitude,' said Prescott, 'and the attitude he has encouraged among his followers, that there can be no honest differences of opinion with him. Either you must follow Senator McCarthy [George Bush] blindly; not daring to express any doubts or disagreements about any of his actions; or in his eyes you must be a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a fool who has been duped by the Communist line.' " (Page 158)
That's right! Shades of McCarthyism from Texas.
AND HERE'S THE REAL ROOT OF BUSH'S MCCARTHYISM
(From MYTHS TO LIVE BY by Joseph Campbell, p. 91) "The Biblical image of the universe simply won’t do any more; neither will the Biblical notion of a race of God, which all others are meant to serve (Isaiah 49: 22-23; 61: 5-6; etc.); nor again, the idea of a code of laws delivered from on high and to be valid for all time. The social problems of the world today are not those of a corner of the old Levant, sixth century B.C. Societies are not static; nor can the laws of one serve another. The problems of our world are not even touched by those stone-cut Ten Commandments that we carry about as luggage and which, in fact, were disregarded in the blessed text itself, one chapter after they were announced (Exodus 21:12-17, following 20:13). The modern Western concept of a legal code is not of a list of unassailable divine edicts but of a rationally contrived, evolving compilation of statutes, shaped by fallible human beings in council, to realize rationally recognized social (and therefore temporal) aims. We understand that our laws are not divinely ordained; and we know also that no laws of any people on earth ever were. Thus we know—whether we dare to say so or not—that our clergies have no more right to claim unassailable authority for their moral law than for their science. And even, finally, in their intimate role of giving spiritual advice, the clergy have now been overtaken by the scientific psychiatrists— and indeed to such a degree that many clergymen are themselves turning to psychologists to be taught how best to serve their pastoral function. The magic of their own traditional symbols works no longer to heal but only to confuse.
"In short, then: just as the buffalo suddenly disappeared from the North American plains, leaving the Indians deprived not only of a central mythic symbol but also of the very manner of life that the symbol once had served, so likewise in our own beautiful world, not only have our public religious symbols lost their claim to authority and passed away, but the ways of life they once supported have also disappeared; and as the Indians then turned inward, so do many in our own baffled world—and frequently with Oriental, not Occidental, guidance in this potentially very dangerous, often ill-advised interior adventure, questing within for the affect images that our secularized social order with its incongruously archaic religious institutions can no longer render."
Stiff-necked, unbending righteousness grows from such ambiguity and it can't imagine that it might be wrong and it must have an enemy to justify the anger it feels because of it's own confusion. Thus, religious men like Bush and McCarthy must surround themselves with sycophants and yes girls, for their fragile beliefs cannot abide challenges which they knows will break those frail beliefs and show them to be lies. But the antidote to rigid theocracy, according to E.O. Wilson, is not always emotionally satisfying:
"FOR MANY the urge to believe in transcendental existence and immortality is overpowering. Transcendentalism, especially when reinforced by religious faith, is psychically full and rich; it feels somehow right. In comparison empiricism seems sterile and inadequate. In the quest for ultimate meaning, the transcendentalist route is much easier to follow. That is why, even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart. Science has always defeated religious dogma point by point when the two have conflicted. But to no avail. In the United States there are fifteen million Southern Baptists, the largest denomination favoring literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, but only five thousand members of the American Humanist Association, the leading organization devoted to secular and deistic humanism.
"Still, if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modem age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure." (E.O. Wilson's CONSILIENCE, p.261)
I think Wilson does not understand the joy in living in an ambiguous reality. Once you accept you can't know up from down and sideways from crosswise, the swimming in place turns out to be quite exhilarating.
Monday, January 24, 2005
MYTHS TO LIVE BY (pp. 104-106)
Again, Joseph Campbell has supplied us with a wonderful contrast between Eastern and Western approaches to suffering. Unlike so may Western ways, the Eastern way accepts as a matter of course that life is brutal and nasty, but then goes on from there to embrace life. So many Americans seem to want to escape life by learning how to live in happiness for ever after and grieving constantly since life is not and never will be like that. So many Christians give up on life and wait till their imaginary afterlife for their happiness. They think that happiness will come in some imaginary afterlife or just as soon as they straighten every one else out. The passage opens with a Westerner in Japan who asks a Japanese friend a question about his religion. Campbell was in attendance and listened thoughtfully.
[Open quote.] “You know,” he said, “I’ve been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a number of shrines, but I don’t get the ideology; I don’t get your theology.”
The Japanese (you may know) do not like to disappoint visitors, and this gentleman, polite, apparently respecting the foreign scholar’s profound question, paused as though in deep thought, and then, biting his lips, slowly shook his head. “I think we don’t have ideology,” he said. “We don’t have theology. We dance.”
That, for me, was the lesson of the congress. What it told was that in Japan, in the native Shinto religion of the land, where the rites are extremely stately, musical, and imposing, no attempt has been made to reduce their “affect images” to words. They have been left to speak for themselves—as rites, as works of art—through the eyes to the listening heart. And that, I would say, is what we, in our own religious rites, had best be doing too. Ask an artist what his picture “means,” and you will not soon ask such a question again. Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether. You don’t ask what a dance means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean, you enjoy yourself; or at least, so you do when you are up to snuff.
But to enjoy the world requires something more than mere good health and good spirits; for this world, as we all now surely know, is horrendous. “All life,” said the Buddha, “is sorrowful”; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. “The world,” said the Buddha, “is an ever-burning fire.” And so it is. And that is what one has to affirm, with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain that is at the heart of every mythic rite.
And so, to conclude, let me recount now a really marvelous Hindu legend to this point, from the infinitely rich mythology of the god Shiva and his glorious world-goddess Parvati. The occasion was of a time when there came before this great divinity an audacious demon who had just overthrown the ruling gods of the world and now came to confront the highest of all with a non-negotiable demand, namely, that the god should hand over his goddess to the demon. Well, what Shiva did in reply was simply to open that mystic third eye in the middle of his forehead, and paff! a lightning bolt hit the earth, and there was suddenly there a second demon, even larger than the first. He was a great lean thing with a lion like head, hair waving to the quarters of the world, and his nature was sheer hunger. He had been brought into being to eat up the first, and was clearly fit to do so. The first thought: “So what do I do now?” and with a very fortunate decision threw himself upon Shiva’s mercy.
Now it is a well-known theological rule that when you throw yourself on a god’s mercy the god cannot refuse to protect you; and so Shiva had now to guard and protect the first demon from the second. Which left the second, however, without meat to quell his hunger and in anguish he asked Shiva, “Whom, then, do I eat?” to which the god replied, “Well, let’s see: why not eat yourself?”
And with that, no sooner said than begun. Commencing with his feet, teeth chopping away, that grim phenomenon came right on up the line, through his own belly, on up through his chest and neck, until all that remained was a face. And the god, thereupon, was enchanted. For here at last was a perfect image of the monstrous thing that is life, which lives on itself. And to that sun like mask, which was now all that was left of that lion like vision of hunger, Shiva said, exulting, “I shall call you ‘Face of Glory,’ Kirttimukha, and you shall shine above the doors to all my temples. No one who refuses to honor and worship you will come ever to knowledge of me.”
The obvious lesson of all of which is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think—and their name is legion—that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think—as do many— “Let me first correct society, then get around to myself" are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is. That is the meaning of the monstrous Kirttimukha, “Face of Glory,” over the entrances to the sanctuaries of the god of yoga, whose bride is the goddess of life. No one can know this god and goddess who will not bow to that mask in reverence and pass humbly through. [Close quote.]
______________________________________________________________
"Jews always know two things: suffering and where to find great Chinese food." —from the movie, My Favorite Year (1982)
Again, Joseph Campbell has supplied us with a wonderful contrast between Eastern and Western approaches to suffering. Unlike so may Western ways, the Eastern way accepts as a matter of course that life is brutal and nasty, but then goes on from there to embrace life. So many Americans seem to want to escape life by learning how to live in happiness for ever after and grieving constantly since life is not and never will be like that. So many Christians give up on life and wait till their imaginary afterlife for their happiness. They think that happiness will come in some imaginary afterlife or just as soon as they straighten every one else out. The passage opens with a Westerner in Japan who asks a Japanese friend a question about his religion. Campbell was in attendance and listened thoughtfully.
[Open quote.] “You know,” he said, “I’ve been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a number of shrines, but I don’t get the ideology; I don’t get your theology.”
The Japanese (you may know) do not like to disappoint visitors, and this gentleman, polite, apparently respecting the foreign scholar’s profound question, paused as though in deep thought, and then, biting his lips, slowly shook his head. “I think we don’t have ideology,” he said. “We don’t have theology. We dance.”
That, for me, was the lesson of the congress. What it told was that in Japan, in the native Shinto religion of the land, where the rites are extremely stately, musical, and imposing, no attempt has been made to reduce their “affect images” to words. They have been left to speak for themselves—as rites, as works of art—through the eyes to the listening heart. And that, I would say, is what we, in our own religious rites, had best be doing too. Ask an artist what his picture “means,” and you will not soon ask such a question again. Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether. You don’t ask what a dance means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean, you enjoy yourself; or at least, so you do when you are up to snuff.
But to enjoy the world requires something more than mere good health and good spirits; for this world, as we all now surely know, is horrendous. “All life,” said the Buddha, “is sorrowful”; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. “The world,” said the Buddha, “is an ever-burning fire.” And so it is. And that is what one has to affirm, with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain that is at the heart of every mythic rite.
And so, to conclude, let me recount now a really marvelous Hindu legend to this point, from the infinitely rich mythology of the god Shiva and his glorious world-goddess Parvati. The occasion was of a time when there came before this great divinity an audacious demon who had just overthrown the ruling gods of the world and now came to confront the highest of all with a non-negotiable demand, namely, that the god should hand over his goddess to the demon. Well, what Shiva did in reply was simply to open that mystic third eye in the middle of his forehead, and paff! a lightning bolt hit the earth, and there was suddenly there a second demon, even larger than the first. He was a great lean thing with a lion like head, hair waving to the quarters of the world, and his nature was sheer hunger. He had been brought into being to eat up the first, and was clearly fit to do so. The first thought: “So what do I do now?” and with a very fortunate decision threw himself upon Shiva’s mercy.
Now it is a well-known theological rule that when you throw yourself on a god’s mercy the god cannot refuse to protect you; and so Shiva had now to guard and protect the first demon from the second. Which left the second, however, without meat to quell his hunger and in anguish he asked Shiva, “Whom, then, do I eat?” to which the god replied, “Well, let’s see: why not eat yourself?”
And with that, no sooner said than begun. Commencing with his feet, teeth chopping away, that grim phenomenon came right on up the line, through his own belly, on up through his chest and neck, until all that remained was a face. And the god, thereupon, was enchanted. For here at last was a perfect image of the monstrous thing that is life, which lives on itself. And to that sun like mask, which was now all that was left of that lion like vision of hunger, Shiva said, exulting, “I shall call you ‘Face of Glory,’ Kirttimukha, and you shall shine above the doors to all my temples. No one who refuses to honor and worship you will come ever to knowledge of me.”
The obvious lesson of all of which is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think—and their name is legion—that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think—as do many— “Let me first correct society, then get around to myself" are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is. That is the meaning of the monstrous Kirttimukha, “Face of Glory,” over the entrances to the sanctuaries of the god of yoga, whose bride is the goddess of life. No one can know this god and goddess who will not bow to that mask in reverence and pass humbly through. [Close quote.]
______________________________________________________________
"Jews always know two things: suffering and where to find great Chinese food." —from the movie, My Favorite Year (1982)
Saturday, January 22, 2005
THE BIBLE IS OBSOLETE AS A CULTURAL GUIDANCE SYSTEM
What Campbell has to say in the following paragraphs seems so obvious and inescapable that I can't imagine we do not all reason as he does, but, then, how rational is anyone who still believes in a hypothetical superbeing which exists somewhere up "above" us in a Universe which has neither up nor down in it?
from Campbell's MYTHS TO LIVE BY The Confrontation of East and West in Religion 91
[Open quote.] The Biblical image of the universe simply won’t do any more; neither will the Biblical notion of a race of God, which all others are meant to serve (Isaiah 49: 22-23; 61: 5-6; etc.); nor again, the idea of a code of laws delivered from on high and to be valid for all time. The social problems of the world today are not those of a corner of the old Levant, sixth century B.C. Societies are not static; nor can the laws of one serve another. The problems of our world are not even touched by those stone-cut Ten Commandments that we carry about as luggage and which, in fact, were disregarded in the blessed text itself, one chapter after they were announced (Exodus 21:12-17, following 20:13). The modern Western concept of a legal code is not of a list of unassailable divine edicts but of a rationally contrived, evolving compilation of statutes, shaped by fallible human beings in council, to realize rationally recognized social (and therefore temporal) aims. We understand that our laws are not divinely ordained; and we know also that no laws of any people on earth ever were. Thus we know—whether we dare to say so or not—that our clergies have no more right to claim unassailable authority for their moral law than for their science. And even, finally, in their intimate role of giving spiritual advice, the clergy have now been overtaken by the scientific psychiatrists— and indeed to such a degree that many clergymen are themselves turning to psychologists to be taught how best to serve their pastoral function. The magic of their own traditional symbols works no longer to heal but only to confuse.
In short, then: just as the buffalo suddenly disappeared from the North American plains, leaving the Indians deprived not only of a central mythic symbol but also of the very manner of life that the symbol once had served, so likewise in our own beautiful world, not only have our public religious symbols lost their claim to authority and passed away, but the ways of life they once supported have also disappeared; and as the Indians then turned inward, so do many in our own baffled world—and frequently with Oriental, not Occidental, guidance in this potentially very dangerous, often ill-advised interior adventure, questing within for the affect images that our secularized social order with its incongruously archaic religious institutions can no longer render. [Close quote.]
COULD BUDDHISM REPLACE CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA?
In the following pages from Campbell's MYTHS TO LIVE BY (pp. 96-98), we see further how Christianity is already dead and gone and how Buddhism is more alive even though older than Christianity. However, Campbell does not call for the end of Christianity. He offers ways to make it new again in the pages following these I have quoted below. I suggest you go out and find the book and read it for yourself. It is still so unbelievably cogent for our time:
[Open quote.] We in the West have named our God; or rather, we have had the Godhead named for us in a book from a time and place that are not our own. And we have been taught to have faith not only in the absolute existence of this metaphysical fiction, but also in its relevance to the shaping of our lives. In the great East, on the other hand, the accent is on experience: on one’s own experience, furthermore, not a faith in someone else’s. And the various disciplines taught are of ways to the attainment of unmistakable experiences—ever deeper, ever greater—of one’s own identity with whatever one knows as “divine”: identity, and beyond that, then, transcendence.
The word Buddha means simply, “awakened, an awakened one, or the Awakened One.” It is from the Sanskrit verbal root budh, “to fathom a depth, to penetrate to the bottom”; also~ “to perceive, to know, to come to one’s senses, to wake.” The Buddha is one awakened to identity not with the body but with the knower of the body, nor with thought but with the knower of thoughts, that is to say, with consciousness; knowing, furthermore, that his value derives from his power to radiate consciousnessas the value of a light-bulb derives from its power to radiate light. What is important about a lightbulb is not the filament or the glass but the light which these bulbs are to render; and what is important about each of us is not the body and its nerves but the consciousness that shines through them. And when one lives for that, instead of for protection of the bulb, one is in Buddha consciousness.
Do we have any such teaching in the West? Not in our best-known teachings of religion. According to our Good Book, God made the world, God made man, and God and his creatures are not to be conceived of as in any sense identical. Indeed, the preaching of identity is in our best-known view the prime heresy. When Jesus said, “I and the Father are one,” he was crucified for blasphemy; and when the Moslem mystic Hallaj, nine centuries later, said the same, he too was crucified. Whereas just that is the ultimate point of what is taught throughout the Orient as religion.
So, then, what is it that our religions actually teach? Not the way to an experience of identity with the Godhead, since that, as we have said, is the prime heresy; but the way and the means to establish and maintain a relationship. to a named God. And how is such a relationship to be achieved? Only through membership in a certain supernaturally endowed, uniquely favored social group. The Old Testament God has a covenant with a certain historic people, the only holy race—the only holy thing, in fact—on earth. And how does one gain membership? The traditional answer was most recently (March 10, 1970) reaffirmed in Israel as defining the first prerequisite to full citizenship in that mythologically inspired nation: by being born of a Jewish mother. And in the Christian view, by what means? By virtue of the incarnation of Christ Jesus, who is to be known as true God and true man (which, in the Christian view, is a miracle, whereas in the Orient, on the other hand, everyone is to be known as true God and true man, though few may have yet awakened to the force of that wonder in themselves). Through our humanity we are related to Christ; through his divinity he relates us to God. And how do we confirm in life our relationship to that one and only God-Man? Through baptism and, thereby, spiritual member in his Church: which is to say, once again through a social institution.
Our whole introduction to the images, the archetypes, the universally known guiding symbols of the unfolding mysteries of the spirit has been by way of the claims of these two self-sanctified historical social groups. And the claims of both have today been disqualified—historically, astronomically, biologically, and every other way—and every body knows it. No wonder our clergymen look anxious, and their congregations confused! [Close quote.]
______________________________________________________
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." —John Milton
What Campbell has to say in the following paragraphs seems so obvious and inescapable that I can't imagine we do not all reason as he does, but, then, how rational is anyone who still believes in a hypothetical superbeing which exists somewhere up "above" us in a Universe which has neither up nor down in it?
from Campbell's MYTHS TO LIVE BY The Confrontation of East and West in Religion 91
[Open quote.] The Biblical image of the universe simply won’t do any more; neither will the Biblical notion of a race of God, which all others are meant to serve (Isaiah 49: 22-23; 61: 5-6; etc.); nor again, the idea of a code of laws delivered from on high and to be valid for all time. The social problems of the world today are not those of a corner of the old Levant, sixth century B.C. Societies are not static; nor can the laws of one serve another. The problems of our world are not even touched by those stone-cut Ten Commandments that we carry about as luggage and which, in fact, were disregarded in the blessed text itself, one chapter after they were announced (Exodus 21:12-17, following 20:13). The modern Western concept of a legal code is not of a list of unassailable divine edicts but of a rationally contrived, evolving compilation of statutes, shaped by fallible human beings in council, to realize rationally recognized social (and therefore temporal) aims. We understand that our laws are not divinely ordained; and we know also that no laws of any people on earth ever were. Thus we know—whether we dare to say so or not—that our clergies have no more right to claim unassailable authority for their moral law than for their science. And even, finally, in their intimate role of giving spiritual advice, the clergy have now been overtaken by the scientific psychiatrists— and indeed to such a degree that many clergymen are themselves turning to psychologists to be taught how best to serve their pastoral function. The magic of their own traditional symbols works no longer to heal but only to confuse.
In short, then: just as the buffalo suddenly disappeared from the North American plains, leaving the Indians deprived not only of a central mythic symbol but also of the very manner of life that the symbol once had served, so likewise in our own beautiful world, not only have our public religious symbols lost their claim to authority and passed away, but the ways of life they once supported have also disappeared; and as the Indians then turned inward, so do many in our own baffled world—and frequently with Oriental, not Occidental, guidance in this potentially very dangerous, often ill-advised interior adventure, questing within for the affect images that our secularized social order with its incongruously archaic religious institutions can no longer render. [Close quote.]
COULD BUDDHISM REPLACE CHRISTIANITY IN AMERICA?
In the following pages from Campbell's MYTHS TO LIVE BY (pp. 96-98), we see further how Christianity is already dead and gone and how Buddhism is more alive even though older than Christianity. However, Campbell does not call for the end of Christianity. He offers ways to make it new again in the pages following these I have quoted below. I suggest you go out and find the book and read it for yourself. It is still so unbelievably cogent for our time:
[Open quote.] We in the West have named our God; or rather, we have had the Godhead named for us in a book from a time and place that are not our own. And we have been taught to have faith not only in the absolute existence of this metaphysical fiction, but also in its relevance to the shaping of our lives. In the great East, on the other hand, the accent is on experience: on one’s own experience, furthermore, not a faith in someone else’s. And the various disciplines taught are of ways to the attainment of unmistakable experiences—ever deeper, ever greater—of one’s own identity with whatever one knows as “divine”: identity, and beyond that, then, transcendence.
The word Buddha means simply, “awakened, an awakened one, or the Awakened One.” It is from the Sanskrit verbal root budh, “to fathom a depth, to penetrate to the bottom”; also~ “to perceive, to know, to come to one’s senses, to wake.” The Buddha is one awakened to identity not with the body but with the knower of the body, nor with thought but with the knower of thoughts, that is to say, with consciousness; knowing, furthermore, that his value derives from his power to radiate consciousnessas the value of a light-bulb derives from its power to radiate light. What is important about a lightbulb is not the filament or the glass but the light which these bulbs are to render; and what is important about each of us is not the body and its nerves but the consciousness that shines through them. And when one lives for that, instead of for protection of the bulb, one is in Buddha consciousness.
Do we have any such teaching in the West? Not in our best-known teachings of religion. According to our Good Book, God made the world, God made man, and God and his creatures are not to be conceived of as in any sense identical. Indeed, the preaching of identity is in our best-known view the prime heresy. When Jesus said, “I and the Father are one,” he was crucified for blasphemy; and when the Moslem mystic Hallaj, nine centuries later, said the same, he too was crucified. Whereas just that is the ultimate point of what is taught throughout the Orient as religion.
So, then, what is it that our religions actually teach? Not the way to an experience of identity with the Godhead, since that, as we have said, is the prime heresy; but the way and the means to establish and maintain a relationship. to a named God. And how is such a relationship to be achieved? Only through membership in a certain supernaturally endowed, uniquely favored social group. The Old Testament God has a covenant with a certain historic people, the only holy race—the only holy thing, in fact—on earth. And how does one gain membership? The traditional answer was most recently (March 10, 1970) reaffirmed in Israel as defining the first prerequisite to full citizenship in that mythologically inspired nation: by being born of a Jewish mother. And in the Christian view, by what means? By virtue of the incarnation of Christ Jesus, who is to be known as true God and true man (which, in the Christian view, is a miracle, whereas in the Orient, on the other hand, everyone is to be known as true God and true man, though few may have yet awakened to the force of that wonder in themselves). Through our humanity we are related to Christ; through his divinity he relates us to God. And how do we confirm in life our relationship to that one and only God-Man? Through baptism and, thereby, spiritual member in his Church: which is to say, once again through a social institution.
Our whole introduction to the images, the archetypes, the universally known guiding symbols of the unfolding mysteries of the spirit has been by way of the claims of these two self-sanctified historical social groups. And the claims of both have today been disqualified—historically, astronomically, biologically, and every other way—and every body knows it. No wonder our clergymen look anxious, and their congregations confused! [Close quote.]
______________________________________________________
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." —John Milton
Friday, January 21, 2005
A DARK OR A BRIGHT FUTURE?
from Joseph Campbell's Myths To Live By
Chapter: The Confrontation of East and West in Religion
"There was another German culture-historian also writing in those days, Leo Frobenius, who, like Spengler and like Yeats, conceived of culture and civilization in morphological terms as a kind of organic, unfolding process of irreversible inevitability. He was, however, an Africanist and anthropologist, and so included in his purview not only the higher civilizations but also the primitive, his leading concept being of three distinct great stages in the total development of the culture history of mankind. The first was of the primitive food-foragers, hunters and planting villagers, non-literate, greatly various, and of a time span extending from the first emergence of our species on this earth to (in some quarters) the very present. The second, commencing ca. 3500 B.C., was of the “monumental cultures,” literate and complex—first of Mesopotamia and Egypt, then Greece and Rome, India, China and Japan, Middle and South America, the Magian-Arabic Levant, and Gothic-to-modern Europe. And now finally comes stage three, of this greatly promising, dawning global age, which Frobenius looked upon as probably the final phase of mankind’s total culture history, but to last, possibly, for many tens of thousands of years. That is to say, what both Spengler and Yeats were interpreting as the end of the Western culture cycle Frobenius saw in a very much larger prospect as the opening of a new age of boundless horizons. And indeed, this present season of the coming together of all the formerly separate culture worlds may well mark not only the end of the hegemony of the West but also the beginning of an age of mankind, united and supported by the great Western gifts of science and the machine—without which no such age as our own could ever have come to pass.
"However, the darker vision of Spengler foresees only desolation here too. For science and the machine are in his view expressions of the mentality of Western man, which are being taken over by non-Western peoples only as a means by which to undo and destroy the West. And when this killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs will have been accomplished, there will be no further development either of science or of industry, but a loss of competence and even of interest in both, with a resultant decline in technology and return of the various peoples to their local styles; the present great age of Europe and its promise for the world then but a broken dream. In contrast, Frobenius, like Nietzsche before him, saw the present as an epoch of irreversible advance in the one life course of the entire human race, here passing from its youthful, locally bounded stages of cultural growths to a new and general future of as yet unforeseen creative insights and realizations. But I must confess that while in my own thinking it is to the later view that I incline, I cannot quite get the other, of Spengler, out of my mind...."
SPEAKING OF A DARK FUTURE WHICH IS NOW PRESENT
Why was a Catholic archbishop kidnapped on Monday in Baghdad? Is Bush's war becoming ever more religious in tone? Why wouldn't Moslem fundamentalists believe Bush's war is a war pitting Xtians like Bush versus Moslems like them? For, after all, Bush has said time and time again that he's doing god's work. He more or less admits he's got a religious reason for doing everything he's doing. Look, folks, the man's a nut case, plain and simple, and is supported in office by nut cases like himself. Let's hope that most Americans are modern enough to recognize the danger he and his kind (fundamentalist Moslems too) put the world in. From both sides, I hear moderates like myself shout, "It takes one to know one?" It takes a tyrant to recognize and buck against a tyrants like himself. By opposing evil, doesn't one become evil? Doesn't Captain Ahab teach us that?
from Joseph Campbell's Myths To Live By
Chapter: The Confrontation of East and West in Religion
"There was another German culture-historian also writing in those days, Leo Frobenius, who, like Spengler and like Yeats, conceived of culture and civilization in morphological terms as a kind of organic, unfolding process of irreversible inevitability. He was, however, an Africanist and anthropologist, and so included in his purview not only the higher civilizations but also the primitive, his leading concept being of three distinct great stages in the total development of the culture history of mankind. The first was of the primitive food-foragers, hunters and planting villagers, non-literate, greatly various, and of a time span extending from the first emergence of our species on this earth to (in some quarters) the very present. The second, commencing ca. 3500 B.C., was of the “monumental cultures,” literate and complex—first of Mesopotamia and Egypt, then Greece and Rome, India, China and Japan, Middle and South America, the Magian-Arabic Levant, and Gothic-to-modern Europe. And now finally comes stage three, of this greatly promising, dawning global age, which Frobenius looked upon as probably the final phase of mankind’s total culture history, but to last, possibly, for many tens of thousands of years. That is to say, what both Spengler and Yeats were interpreting as the end of the Western culture cycle Frobenius saw in a very much larger prospect as the opening of a new age of boundless horizons. And indeed, this present season of the coming together of all the formerly separate culture worlds may well mark not only the end of the hegemony of the West but also the beginning of an age of mankind, united and supported by the great Western gifts of science and the machine—without which no such age as our own could ever have come to pass.
"However, the darker vision of Spengler foresees only desolation here too. For science and the machine are in his view expressions of the mentality of Western man, which are being taken over by non-Western peoples only as a means by which to undo and destroy the West. And when this killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs will have been accomplished, there will be no further development either of science or of industry, but a loss of competence and even of interest in both, with a resultant decline in technology and return of the various peoples to their local styles; the present great age of Europe and its promise for the world then but a broken dream. In contrast, Frobenius, like Nietzsche before him, saw the present as an epoch of irreversible advance in the one life course of the entire human race, here passing from its youthful, locally bounded stages of cultural growths to a new and general future of as yet unforeseen creative insights and realizations. But I must confess that while in my own thinking it is to the later view that I incline, I cannot quite get the other, of Spengler, out of my mind...."
SPEAKING OF A DARK FUTURE WHICH IS NOW PRESENT
Why was a Catholic archbishop kidnapped on Monday in Baghdad? Is Bush's war becoming ever more religious in tone? Why wouldn't Moslem fundamentalists believe Bush's war is a war pitting Xtians like Bush versus Moslems like them? For, after all, Bush has said time and time again that he's doing god's work. He more or less admits he's got a religious reason for doing everything he's doing. Look, folks, the man's a nut case, plain and simple, and is supported in office by nut cases like himself. Let's hope that most Americans are modern enough to recognize the danger he and his kind (fundamentalist Moslems too) put the world in. From both sides, I hear moderates like myself shout, "It takes one to know one?" It takes a tyrant to recognize and buck against a tyrants like himself. By opposing evil, doesn't one become evil? Doesn't Captain Ahab teach us that?
Thursday, January 20, 2005
MY WIFE WON’T SHOP AT WALMART
My wife and I used to shop at Walmart. We called it the working people’s place. And we felt that free enterprise America ought to offer a place where low prices forced strong competition in the market place, but we began to realize that just as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century in American, competition was riding on the backs of the poor and not on the backs of the capitalists who own the stocks that make them rich. A fine article in The Nation magazine reveals it all.
[Open quote.] article | Posted December 16, 2004
Down and Out in Discount America
by Liza Featherstone
This article is adapted from Liza Featherstone's, Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at WALMART (Basic).
On the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year, Wal-Mart's many progressive critics--not to mention its business competitors--finally enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude when the retailer had to admit to "disappointing" sales. The problem was quickly revealed: WALMART hadn't been discounting aggressively enough. Without low prices, WALMART just isn't WALMART.
That's not a mistake the big-box behemoth is likely to make again. WALMART knows its customers, and it knows how badly they need the discounts. Like Wal-Mart's workers, its customers are overwhelmingly female, and struggling to make ends meet. Betty Dukes, the lead plaintiff in Dukes v. WALMART, the landmark sex-discrimination case against the company, points out that WALMART takes out ads in her local paper the same day the community's poorest citizens collect their welfare checks. "They are promoting themselves to low-income people," she says. "That's who they lure. They don't lure the rich.... They understand the economy of America. They know the haves and have-nots. They don't put WALMART in Piedmonts. They don't put WALMART in those high-end parts of the community. They plant themselves right in the middle of Poorville."
Betty Dukes is right. A 2000 study by Andrew Franklin, then an economist at the University of Connecticut, showed that WALMART operated primarily in poor and working-class communities, finding, in the bone-dry language of his discipline, "a significant negative relationship between median household income and Wal-Mart's presence in the market." Although fancy retailers noted with chagrin during the 2001 recession that absolutely everybody shops at WALMART--"Even people with $100,000 incomes now shop at WALMART," a PR flack for one upscale mall fumed--the Bloomingdale's set is not the discounter's primary market, and probably never will be. Only 6 percent of WALMART shoppers have annual family incomes of more than $100,000. A 2003 study found that 23 percent of WALMART Supercenter customers live on incomes of less than $25,000 a year. More than 20 percent of WALMART shoppers have no bank account, long considered a sign of dire poverty. And while almost half of WALMART Supercenter customers are blue-collar workers and their families, 20 percent are unemployed or elderly.
Al Zack, who until his retirement in 2004 was the United Food and Commercial Workers' vice president for strategic programs, observes that appealing to the poor was "Sam Walton's real genius. He figured out how to make money off of poverty. He located his first stores in poor rural areas and discovered a real market. The only problem with the business model is that it really needs to create more poverty to grow." That problem is cleverly solved by creating more bad jobs worldwide. In a chilling reversal of Henry Ford's strategy, which was to pay his workers amply so they could buy Ford cars, Wal-Mart's stingy compensation policies--workers make, on average, just over $8 an hour, and if they want health insurance, they must pay more than a third of the premium--contribute to an economy in which, increasingly, workers can only afford to shop at WALMART.
To make this model work, WALMART must keep labor costs down. It does this by making corporate crime an integral part of its business strategy. WALMART routinely violates laws protecting workers' organizing rights (workers have even been fired for union activity). It is a repeat offender on overtime laws; in more than thirty states, workers have brought wage-and-hour class-action suits against the retailer. In some cases, workers say, managers encouraged them to clock out and keep working; in others, managers locked the doors and would not let employees go home at the end of their shifts. And it's often women who suffer most from Wal-Mart's labor practices. Dukes v. WALMART, which is the largest civil rights class-action suit in history, charges the company with systematically discriminating against women in pay and promotions [see Featherstone, "WALMART Values: Selling Women Short," December 16, 2002].... [Close quote.]
For the whole article go to The Nation magazine.
My wife and I used to shop at Walmart. We called it the working people’s place. And we felt that free enterprise America ought to offer a place where low prices forced strong competition in the market place, but we began to realize that just as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century in American, competition was riding on the backs of the poor and not on the backs of the capitalists who own the stocks that make them rich. A fine article in The Nation magazine reveals it all.
[Open quote.] article | Posted December 16, 2004
Down and Out in Discount America
by Liza Featherstone
This article is adapted from Liza Featherstone's, Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at WALMART (Basic).
On the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year, Wal-Mart's many progressive critics--not to mention its business competitors--finally enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude when the retailer had to admit to "disappointing" sales. The problem was quickly revealed: WALMART hadn't been discounting aggressively enough. Without low prices, WALMART just isn't WALMART.
That's not a mistake the big-box behemoth is likely to make again. WALMART knows its customers, and it knows how badly they need the discounts. Like Wal-Mart's workers, its customers are overwhelmingly female, and struggling to make ends meet. Betty Dukes, the lead plaintiff in Dukes v. WALMART, the landmark sex-discrimination case against the company, points out that WALMART takes out ads in her local paper the same day the community's poorest citizens collect their welfare checks. "They are promoting themselves to low-income people," she says. "That's who they lure. They don't lure the rich.... They understand the economy of America. They know the haves and have-nots. They don't put WALMART in Piedmonts. They don't put WALMART in those high-end parts of the community. They plant themselves right in the middle of Poorville."
Betty Dukes is right. A 2000 study by Andrew Franklin, then an economist at the University of Connecticut, showed that WALMART operated primarily in poor and working-class communities, finding, in the bone-dry language of his discipline, "a significant negative relationship between median household income and Wal-Mart's presence in the market." Although fancy retailers noted with chagrin during the 2001 recession that absolutely everybody shops at WALMART--"Even people with $100,000 incomes now shop at WALMART," a PR flack for one upscale mall fumed--the Bloomingdale's set is not the discounter's primary market, and probably never will be. Only 6 percent of WALMART shoppers have annual family incomes of more than $100,000. A 2003 study found that 23 percent of WALMART Supercenter customers live on incomes of less than $25,000 a year. More than 20 percent of WALMART shoppers have no bank account, long considered a sign of dire poverty. And while almost half of WALMART Supercenter customers are blue-collar workers and their families, 20 percent are unemployed or elderly.
Al Zack, who until his retirement in 2004 was the United Food and Commercial Workers' vice president for strategic programs, observes that appealing to the poor was "Sam Walton's real genius. He figured out how to make money off of poverty. He located his first stores in poor rural areas and discovered a real market. The only problem with the business model is that it really needs to create more poverty to grow." That problem is cleverly solved by creating more bad jobs worldwide. In a chilling reversal of Henry Ford's strategy, which was to pay his workers amply so they could buy Ford cars, Wal-Mart's stingy compensation policies--workers make, on average, just over $8 an hour, and if they want health insurance, they must pay more than a third of the premium--contribute to an economy in which, increasingly, workers can only afford to shop at WALMART.
To make this model work, WALMART must keep labor costs down. It does this by making corporate crime an integral part of its business strategy. WALMART routinely violates laws protecting workers' organizing rights (workers have even been fired for union activity). It is a repeat offender on overtime laws; in more than thirty states, workers have brought wage-and-hour class-action suits against the retailer. In some cases, workers say, managers encouraged them to clock out and keep working; in others, managers locked the doors and would not let employees go home at the end of their shifts. And it's often women who suffer most from Wal-Mart's labor practices. Dukes v. WALMART, which is the largest civil rights class-action suit in history, charges the company with systematically discriminating against women in pay and promotions [see Featherstone, "WALMART Values: Selling Women Short," December 16, 2002].... [Close quote.]
For the whole article go to The Nation magazine.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
UNCHARITABLE RELIGION
A few posts back I entered a letter to the editor I’d written about people using charity in order to spread their particular gospel. A thoroughly uncharitable thing to do; instead of pure charity, using money as a bribe to get into the door to belief. Now, coming out of tsunamiland, we read how Moslems and Christians are using people’s suffering as a way to spread their particular mythology to the devastated populations.
BUT HERE’S A WAY TO COUNTER THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT WORLDWIDE
PRISON AND RELIGION
Have you ever wondered how many people in prison are religious? You’d think that the religious would be a small percentage of the general prison population. But, as anyone who knows could tell you, religion prepares many for a career in crime. Because feeling worthless and guilty and full of shame is quite likely to lead one to crime. In my own case, though never imprisoned, I was always at my worst when I felt that I needed to improve myself, judged others too harshly and felt that I was less than the next man. I thought many criminal thoughts. So I thank friends of mine for forwarding the following statistics:
[Open quote.] Prison Stats on Atheists
A letter in the November December 1997 issue of Free Mind asked for information on prison statistics concerning atheists. The author pointed out that, if religionists are correct that one cannot be moral without the Christian religion, then prisons should be full of atheists.
This is definitely not the case. The American Atheists Online News for July 8, 1997, offers many facts on the subject, a few of which I shall quote:
In The New Criminology, Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith say that two generations of statisticians found that the ratio of convicts without. religious training is about one-tenth of 1 percent. W. T. Root, professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners and concluded, "Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character," adding that Unitarians, agnostics, atheists, and freethinkers were nearly absent from penitentiaries.
In Sing-Sing, of 1,553 inmates, 855 ( over half) were Catholics,18 Protestants, 117 Jews, and 8 nonreligious. During ten years in Sing Sing, of those executed for murder, 65 percent were Catholics, 26 percent Protestants, 6 percent Hebrew, 2 percent pagan, and less than .0033 percent nonreligious.
The Elmira, New York, reformatory system overshadowed all others, with nearly 31 ,000 inmates, of which 15,694 (or half) are Catholic, 10,968 are Protestant, 4,000 are Jews, 325 refuse to answer, and none report being an unbeliever.
Surveys of Massachusetts reformatories found every inmate to be religious.
Dr. Christian, superintendent of the New York State reformatories, checked the records of 22,000 prison inmates and found only four college graduates, while 91 percent of the people listed in Who's Who are college graduates. Christian concluded that "intelligence and knowledge produce right living" and that "crime is the off- spring of superstition and ignorance."
These figures suggest that an in-depth study of survey results, published by the AHA, would be of interest to all readers and could contribute to countering the current drive to have "Christian" values taught in our public schools.
Jan Brazill
Colorado Springs, CO [Close quotes.]
======
[Open quote.] The results of the Christians vs atheists in prison investigation.
By Rod Swift
I have expanded the figures to provide a % of the total respondents, and I have ranked them (they were presented to me alphabetically). These stats were obtained from their computer on 5 March 1997.
Dear Mr. Swift:
The Federal Bureau of Prisons does have statistics on religious affiliations of inmates. The following are total number of inmates per religion category:
Catholic 29267 39.164%
Protestant 26162 35.008%
Muslim 5435 7.273%
American Indian 2408 3.222%
Nation 1734 2.320%
Rasta 1485 1.987%
Jewish 1325 1.773%
Church of Christ 1303 1.744%
Pentecostal 1093 1.463%
Moorish 1066 1.426%
Buddhist 882 1.180%
Jehovah Witness 665 0.890%
Adventist 621 0.831%
Orthodox 375 0.502%
Mormon 298 0.399%
Scientology 190 0.254%
Atheist 156 0.209%
Hindu 119 0.159%
Santeria 117 0.157%
Sikh 14 0.019%
Bahai 9 0.012%
Krishna 7 0.009%
----------------------------
Total Known Responses 74731 100.001% (rounding to 3 digits does this)
Unknown/No Answer 18381
----------------------------
Total Convicted 93112 80.259% (74731) prisoners' religion is known.
Held in Custody 3856 (not surveyed due to temporary custody)
----------------------------
Total In Prisons 96968
I hope that this information is helpful to you.
Sincerely,
Denise Golumbaski
Research Analyst
Federal Bureau of Prisons [Close quote.]
----------------------------------------------------
[Open quote.] Now, let's just deal with the nasty Christian types, no?
Catholic 29267 39.164%
Protestant 26162 35.008%
Rasta 1485 1.987%
Jewish 1325 1.773%
Church of Christ 1303 1.744%
Pentecostal 1093 1.463%
Jehovah Witness 665 0.890%
Adventist 621 0.831%
Orthodox 375 0.502%
Mormon 298 0.399%
Judeo-Christian Total 62594 83.761% (of the 74731 total responses)
Total Known Responses 74731
Not unexpected as a result. Note that atheists, being a moderate proportion of the USA population (about 8-16%) are disproportionately less in the prison populations (0.21%). [Close quote.]
Doesn't look too bad for us atheists and agnostics, does it? I've entered more than one post about jailhouse conversions to Jesus, noting that I think these people were made criminals by a culture overly influenced by misguided fundamentalists who abuse and shame everyone they come in cantact with.
_______________________________________
“Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
A few posts back I entered a letter to the editor I’d written about people using charity in order to spread their particular gospel. A thoroughly uncharitable thing to do; instead of pure charity, using money as a bribe to get into the door to belief. Now, coming out of tsunamiland, we read how Moslems and Christians are using people’s suffering as a way to spread their particular mythology to the devastated populations.
BUT HERE’S A WAY TO COUNTER THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT WORLDWIDE
PRISON AND RELIGION
Have you ever wondered how many people in prison are religious? You’d think that the religious would be a small percentage of the general prison population. But, as anyone who knows could tell you, religion prepares many for a career in crime. Because feeling worthless and guilty and full of shame is quite likely to lead one to crime. In my own case, though never imprisoned, I was always at my worst when I felt that I needed to improve myself, judged others too harshly and felt that I was less than the next man. I thought many criminal thoughts. So I thank friends of mine for forwarding the following statistics:
[Open quote.] Prison Stats on Atheists
A letter in the November December 1997 issue of Free Mind asked for information on prison statistics concerning atheists. The author pointed out that, if religionists are correct that one cannot be moral without the Christian religion, then prisons should be full of atheists.
This is definitely not the case. The American Atheists Online News for July 8, 1997, offers many facts on the subject, a few of which I shall quote:
In The New Criminology, Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith say that two generations of statisticians found that the ratio of convicts without. religious training is about one-tenth of 1 percent. W. T. Root, professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners and concluded, "Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character," adding that Unitarians, agnostics, atheists, and freethinkers were nearly absent from penitentiaries.
In Sing-Sing, of 1,553 inmates, 855 ( over half) were Catholics,18 Protestants, 117 Jews, and 8 nonreligious. During ten years in Sing Sing, of those executed for murder, 65 percent were Catholics, 26 percent Protestants, 6 percent Hebrew, 2 percent pagan, and less than .0033 percent nonreligious.
The Elmira, New York, reformatory system overshadowed all others, with nearly 31 ,000 inmates, of which 15,694 (or half) are Catholic, 10,968 are Protestant, 4,000 are Jews, 325 refuse to answer, and none report being an unbeliever.
Surveys of Massachusetts reformatories found every inmate to be religious.
Dr. Christian, superintendent of the New York State reformatories, checked the records of 22,000 prison inmates and found only four college graduates, while 91 percent of the people listed in Who's Who are college graduates. Christian concluded that "intelligence and knowledge produce right living" and that "crime is the off- spring of superstition and ignorance."
These figures suggest that an in-depth study of survey results, published by the AHA, would be of interest to all readers and could contribute to countering the current drive to have "Christian" values taught in our public schools.
Jan Brazill
Colorado Springs, CO [Close quotes.]
======
[Open quote.] The results of the Christians vs atheists in prison investigation.
By Rod Swift
I have expanded the figures to provide a % of the total respondents, and I have ranked them (they were presented to me alphabetically). These stats were obtained from their computer on 5 March 1997.
Dear Mr. Swift:
The Federal Bureau of Prisons does have statistics on religious affiliations of inmates. The following are total number of inmates per religion category:
Catholic 29267 39.164%
Protestant 26162 35.008%
Muslim 5435 7.273%
American Indian 2408 3.222%
Nation 1734 2.320%
Rasta 1485 1.987%
Jewish 1325 1.773%
Church of Christ 1303 1.744%
Pentecostal 1093 1.463%
Moorish 1066 1.426%
Buddhist 882 1.180%
Jehovah Witness 665 0.890%
Adventist 621 0.831%
Orthodox 375 0.502%
Mormon 298 0.399%
Scientology 190 0.254%
Atheist 156 0.209%
Hindu 119 0.159%
Santeria 117 0.157%
Sikh 14 0.019%
Bahai 9 0.012%
Krishna 7 0.009%
----------------------------
Total Known Responses 74731 100.001% (rounding to 3 digits does this)
Unknown/No Answer 18381
----------------------------
Total Convicted 93112 80.259% (74731) prisoners' religion is known.
Held in Custody 3856 (not surveyed due to temporary custody)
----------------------------
Total In Prisons 96968
I hope that this information is helpful to you.
Sincerely,
Denise Golumbaski
Research Analyst
Federal Bureau of Prisons [Close quote.]
----------------------------------------------------
[Open quote.] Now, let's just deal with the nasty Christian types, no?
Catholic 29267 39.164%
Protestant 26162 35.008%
Rasta 1485 1.987%
Jewish 1325 1.773%
Church of Christ 1303 1.744%
Pentecostal 1093 1.463%
Jehovah Witness 665 0.890%
Adventist 621 0.831%
Orthodox 375 0.502%
Mormon 298 0.399%
Judeo-Christian Total 62594 83.761% (of the 74731 total responses)
Total Known Responses 74731
Not unexpected as a result. Note that atheists, being a moderate proportion of the USA population (about 8-16%) are disproportionately less in the prison populations (0.21%). [Close quote.]
Doesn't look too bad for us atheists and agnostics, does it? I've entered more than one post about jailhouse conversions to Jesus, noting that I think these people were made criminals by a culture overly influenced by misguided fundamentalists who abuse and shame everyone they come in cantact with.
_______________________________________
“Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
SO MANY WAYS TO DISCREDIT MODERN RELIGIONS
One way to discredit Bible stories is to fact check the inaccuracies and the missing data which leave gaping holes in supposed Bible truths. Another is to show how Bible truths are just latter day interpretations of even older myths which existed way back in time. Below, I've entered some more numerological data from that eminent mythographer, Joseph Campbell, which goes a long way toward tying older myths to Christian myths, thus knocking the holiness hell out of religious dogma:
"Let me take, as an illustration of the effect on mythology of this disenchanting turn of mind, the example of the Deluge. According to many of the mythologies still flourishing in the Orient, a world flood occurs inevitably at the termination of every aeon. In India the number of years of an aeon, known as a Day of Brabma, is reckoned as 4,320,000,000; after which there follows a Night of Brahma, when all lies dissolved in the cosmic sea for another 4,320,000,000 years, the sum total of years of an entire cosmic round thus being 8,640,000,000. In the Icelandic eddas it is told that in Valhall there are 540 doors and that through each of these there will go at the end of the world 800 battle— ready warriors to join combat with the anti-gods. But 800 times 540 is 432,000. So it seems that there is a common mythological background theme, here shared by pagan Europe with the ancient East. In fact, I note, with a glance at my watch, each hour with 60 minutes and each minute with 60. seconds, that in our present day of 24 hours there will be 86,400 seconds; and in the course of this day, night will automatically follow light, and, next morning, dawn follow darkness. There is no question of punishment or guilt implied in a mythology of cosmic days and nights of this kind. Everything is completely automatic and in the sweet nature of things.
"But now, to press on a few steps further: according to a learned Chaldean priest, Berossos, who rendered in the early third century B.C. an account of Babylonian mythology, there elapsed 432,000 years between the crowning of the first Sumerian king and the coming of the Deluge, and there reigned during this period ten very long-lived kings. Then we observed that in the Bible it is reckoned that between the creation of Adam and coming of Noah’s Flood there elapsed 1656 years, during which there lived ten very long-lived patriarchs. And if I may trust the finding of a distinguished Jewish Assyriologist of the last century, Julius Oppert (1825—1906), the number of seven-day weeks in 1656 years is 86,400."
ANIMAL BECOMING HUMAN
Step by step, humankind has been freeing itself, through evolutionary adaptations, from instinct, from the gods, from kings and rulers of all kinds. In the West, more than the East, the individual has become an important spoke in the wheel of the universe while gods have slowly been displaced. The final step in human evolution will be total atheism. About 2000 BCE, according to Joseph Campbell, in Mesopotamian texts "a distinction is beginning to be made between the king as a mere human being and the god who he is now to serve. He is no longer god-king, like the pharaoh of Egypt. He is called the 'tenant farmer' of the god.... Furthermore, it was at that time that Mesopotamian myths began to appear of men created by gods to be their slaves."
Before that, men and kings were all just functionaries in a universe of divine laws which were above and beyond both king and person. That is still the way it is in Buddhism where gods are still only expressions of universal laws. The individual means nothing in that scheme.
I think the idea of one's being engulfed in the Universe reflected a very early time in mental evolution, when all kings and people were cogs in the wheel of human nature, more animal than human. Their bodies were enslaved by instinctive, natural behaviors. They couldn't conceive of being free from their instincts which probably pushed them around like so many puppets on strings. Without evolved consciousness, they couldn't even "conceive of" or express what they were experiencing. Only with evolving consciousness could humankind state the slavery they "had been" in in the past. In other words, the written and spoken record always lags behind the actual evolution of consciousness. One must be beyond any stage in development to look back at it and express the bondage. Freedom from nature had already occurred before the myth of the "slavery to the gods" could be expressed. Atheism is the next stage. The handful of atheists can already state the past myths by which others still live. More atheists will follow after.
Or, as Campbell states it more poetically but less scientifically (p. 76) "... as a consequence of... this loss of essential identity with the organic divine being of the living universe, man... has won for himself release to an existence of his own, endued with a certain freedom of will."
_________________________________________________________
'A woman occasionally is quite a servicable substitute for masturbation." —Karl Kraus (Who?)
One way to discredit Bible stories is to fact check the inaccuracies and the missing data which leave gaping holes in supposed Bible truths. Another is to show how Bible truths are just latter day interpretations of even older myths which existed way back in time. Below, I've entered some more numerological data from that eminent mythographer, Joseph Campbell, which goes a long way toward tying older myths to Christian myths, thus knocking the holiness hell out of religious dogma:
"Let me take, as an illustration of the effect on mythology of this disenchanting turn of mind, the example of the Deluge. According to many of the mythologies still flourishing in the Orient, a world flood occurs inevitably at the termination of every aeon. In India the number of years of an aeon, known as a Day of Brabma, is reckoned as 4,320,000,000; after which there follows a Night of Brahma, when all lies dissolved in the cosmic sea for another 4,320,000,000 years, the sum total of years of an entire cosmic round thus being 8,640,000,000. In the Icelandic eddas it is told that in Valhall there are 540 doors and that through each of these there will go at the end of the world 800 battle— ready warriors to join combat with the anti-gods. But 800 times 540 is 432,000. So it seems that there is a common mythological background theme, here shared by pagan Europe with the ancient East. In fact, I note, with a glance at my watch, each hour with 60 minutes and each minute with 60. seconds, that in our present day of 24 hours there will be 86,400 seconds; and in the course of this day, night will automatically follow light, and, next morning, dawn follow darkness. There is no question of punishment or guilt implied in a mythology of cosmic days and nights of this kind. Everything is completely automatic and in the sweet nature of things.
"But now, to press on a few steps further: according to a learned Chaldean priest, Berossos, who rendered in the early third century B.C. an account of Babylonian mythology, there elapsed 432,000 years between the crowning of the first Sumerian king and the coming of the Deluge, and there reigned during this period ten very long-lived kings. Then we observed that in the Bible it is reckoned that between the creation of Adam and coming of Noah’s Flood there elapsed 1656 years, during which there lived ten very long-lived patriarchs. And if I may trust the finding of a distinguished Jewish Assyriologist of the last century, Julius Oppert (1825—1906), the number of seven-day weeks in 1656 years is 86,400."
ANIMAL BECOMING HUMAN
Step by step, humankind has been freeing itself, through evolutionary adaptations, from instinct, from the gods, from kings and rulers of all kinds. In the West, more than the East, the individual has become an important spoke in the wheel of the universe while gods have slowly been displaced. The final step in human evolution will be total atheism. About 2000 BCE, according to Joseph Campbell, in Mesopotamian texts "a distinction is beginning to be made between the king as a mere human being and the god who he is now to serve. He is no longer god-king, like the pharaoh of Egypt. He is called the 'tenant farmer' of the god.... Furthermore, it was at that time that Mesopotamian myths began to appear of men created by gods to be their slaves."
Before that, men and kings were all just functionaries in a universe of divine laws which were above and beyond both king and person. That is still the way it is in Buddhism where gods are still only expressions of universal laws. The individual means nothing in that scheme.
I think the idea of one's being engulfed in the Universe reflected a very early time in mental evolution, when all kings and people were cogs in the wheel of human nature, more animal than human. Their bodies were enslaved by instinctive, natural behaviors. They couldn't conceive of being free from their instincts which probably pushed them around like so many puppets on strings. Without evolved consciousness, they couldn't even "conceive of" or express what they were experiencing. Only with evolving consciousness could humankind state the slavery they "had been" in in the past. In other words, the written and spoken record always lags behind the actual evolution of consciousness. One must be beyond any stage in development to look back at it and express the bondage. Freedom from nature had already occurred before the myth of the "slavery to the gods" could be expressed. Atheism is the next stage. The handful of atheists can already state the past myths by which others still live. More atheists will follow after.
Or, as Campbell states it more poetically but less scientifically (p. 76) "... as a consequence of... this loss of essential identity with the organic divine being of the living universe, man... has won for himself release to an existence of his own, endued with a certain freedom of will."
_________________________________________________________
'A woman occasionally is quite a servicable substitute for masturbation." —Karl Kraus (Who?)
Monday, January 17, 2005
A NIFTY COMPARISON OF OCCIDENTAL/ORIENTAL PHILOSOPHIES BY JOSEPH CAMPBELL
The following is from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, pp. 72-74, by Joseph Campbell:
[Open quote.] The philosophies of India have been classified by the native teachers in four categories, according to the ends of life that they serve, - i.e., the four aims for which men strive in this world. The first is dharma, “duty, virtue,” of which I have just spoken, and which, as we have seen, is defined for each by his place in the social order. The second and third are of nature and are the aims to which all living things are naturally impelled: success or achievement, self-aggrandizement, which is called in Sanskrit artha; and sensual delight or pleasure, known as kama. These latter two correspond to the aims of what Freud has called the id. They are expressions of the primary biological motives of the psyche, the simple “I want” of one’s animal nature; whereas the principle of dharma, impressed on each by his society, corresponds to what Freud has called superego, the cultural “Thou shalt!” In the Indian society one’s pleasures and successes are to be aimed for and achieved under the ceiling (so to say) of one’s dharma: “Thou shalt!” supervising “I want!” And when mid-life has been attained, with all the duties of life fulfilled, one departs (if a male) to the forest, to some hermitage, to wipe out through yoga every last least trace of “I want!” and, with that, every echo also of “Thou shalt!” Whereupon the fourth goal, the fourth and final end of life, will have been attained, which is known as moksha, absolute “release” or “freedom”: not “freedom,” however, as we think of it in the West, the freedom of an individual to be what he wants to be, or to do what he wants to do. On the contrary, “freedom” in the sense of moksha means freedom from every impulse to exist.
“Thou shalt!” against “I want!” and then, “Extinction!” In our modern Occidental view, the situation represented by the first two in tension would be thought of as proper rather to a nursery school than to adulthood, whereas in the Orient that is the situation enforced throughout even adult life. There is no provision or allowance whatsoever for what in the West would be thought of as ego-maturation. And as a result—to put it plainly and simply—the Orient has never distinguished ego from id.
The word “I” (in Sanskrit, aham) suggests to the Oriental philosopher only wishing, wanting, desiring, fearing, and possessing, i.e., the impulses of what Freud has termed the id operating under pressure of the pleasure principle. Ego, on the other hand (again as Freud defines it), is that psychological faculty which relates us objectively to external, empirical “reality”: i.e., to the fact-world, here and now, and in its present possibilities, objectively observed, recognized, judged, and evaluated; and to ourselves, so likewise known and judged, within it. A considered act initiated by a knowledgeable, responsible ego is thus something very different from the action of an avaricious, untamed id; different, too, from performances governed by unquestioning obedience to a long-inherited code—which can only be inappropriate to contemporary life or even to any unforeseen social or personal contingency.
The virtue of the Oriental is comparable, then, to that of the good soldier, obedient to orders, personally responsible not for his acts but only for their execution. And since all the laws to which he is adhering Will have been handed down from an infinite past, there will be no one anywhere personally responsible for the things that he is doing. Nor, indeed, was there ever anyone personally responsible, since the laws were derived— or at least are supposed to have been derived—from the order of the universe itself. And since at the source of this universal order there is no personal god or willing being, but only an absolutely impersonal force or void, beyond thought, beyond being, antecedent to categories, there has finally never been anyone anywhere responsible for anything—the gods themselves being merely functionaries of an ever-revolving kaleidoscope of illusory appearances and disappearances, world without end. [Close quote.]
READING JUST FINISHED
HIROSHIMA by John Hersey [First read this in mid-1960s after viewing "Hiroshima, Mon Amor". Still a clear and almost dispassionate account of death and suffering. I also now have the film "Black Rain" to view, another film I saw way back when, probably about the same time I watched "Dr. Strangelove", a real terror tale.]
100 YEARS, 100 STORIES by George Burns [Bedside reading, stories from Burns' reality and imagination.]
MOVIES VIEWED THIS WEEKEND
Songs From The Second Floor [A must see. A surrealistic poem. Two thumbs up by Ebert/ Roeper too.]
Manchurian Candidate [Just so so, but exciting.]
Meet The Fockers [Went to please my wonderful wife. She said she got from it what she expected so she wasn't disappointed.]
BOUGHT TWO BOOKS THIS WEEKEND TO GO ON MY STACK OF TO-READ BOOKS
101 MYTHS OF THE BIBLE by Gary Greenberg
THE SELFISH GENE by Richard Dawkins
__________________________________________________
"Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way around." —David Lodge [However, I think David is forgetting a lot of second class, regional literature and the literature of the South. In fact, I think David doesn't know what he's talking about.]
The following is from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, pp. 72-74, by Joseph Campbell:
[Open quote.] The philosophies of India have been classified by the native teachers in four categories, according to the ends of life that they serve, - i.e., the four aims for which men strive in this world. The first is dharma, “duty, virtue,” of which I have just spoken, and which, as we have seen, is defined for each by his place in the social order. The second and third are of nature and are the aims to which all living things are naturally impelled: success or achievement, self-aggrandizement, which is called in Sanskrit artha; and sensual delight or pleasure, known as kama. These latter two correspond to the aims of what Freud has called the id. They are expressions of the primary biological motives of the psyche, the simple “I want” of one’s animal nature; whereas the principle of dharma, impressed on each by his society, corresponds to what Freud has called superego, the cultural “Thou shalt!” In the Indian society one’s pleasures and successes are to be aimed for and achieved under the ceiling (so to say) of one’s dharma: “Thou shalt!” supervising “I want!” And when mid-life has been attained, with all the duties of life fulfilled, one departs (if a male) to the forest, to some hermitage, to wipe out through yoga every last least trace of “I want!” and, with that, every echo also of “Thou shalt!” Whereupon the fourth goal, the fourth and final end of life, will have been attained, which is known as moksha, absolute “release” or “freedom”: not “freedom,” however, as we think of it in the West, the freedom of an individual to be what he wants to be, or to do what he wants to do. On the contrary, “freedom” in the sense of moksha means freedom from every impulse to exist.
“Thou shalt!” against “I want!” and then, “Extinction!” In our modern Occidental view, the situation represented by the first two in tension would be thought of as proper rather to a nursery school than to adulthood, whereas in the Orient that is the situation enforced throughout even adult life. There is no provision or allowance whatsoever for what in the West would be thought of as ego-maturation. And as a result—to put it plainly and simply—the Orient has never distinguished ego from id.
The word “I” (in Sanskrit, aham) suggests to the Oriental philosopher only wishing, wanting, desiring, fearing, and possessing, i.e., the impulses of what Freud has termed the id operating under pressure of the pleasure principle. Ego, on the other hand (again as Freud defines it), is that psychological faculty which relates us objectively to external, empirical “reality”: i.e., to the fact-world, here and now, and in its present possibilities, objectively observed, recognized, judged, and evaluated; and to ourselves, so likewise known and judged, within it. A considered act initiated by a knowledgeable, responsible ego is thus something very different from the action of an avaricious, untamed id; different, too, from performances governed by unquestioning obedience to a long-inherited code—which can only be inappropriate to contemporary life or even to any unforeseen social or personal contingency.
The virtue of the Oriental is comparable, then, to that of the good soldier, obedient to orders, personally responsible not for his acts but only for their execution. And since all the laws to which he is adhering Will have been handed down from an infinite past, there will be no one anywhere personally responsible for the things that he is doing. Nor, indeed, was there ever anyone personally responsible, since the laws were derived— or at least are supposed to have been derived—from the order of the universe itself. And since at the source of this universal order there is no personal god or willing being, but only an absolutely impersonal force or void, beyond thought, beyond being, antecedent to categories, there has finally never been anyone anywhere responsible for anything—the gods themselves being merely functionaries of an ever-revolving kaleidoscope of illusory appearances and disappearances, world without end. [Close quote.]
READING JUST FINISHED
HIROSHIMA by John Hersey [First read this in mid-1960s after viewing "Hiroshima, Mon Amor". Still a clear and almost dispassionate account of death and suffering. I also now have the film "Black Rain" to view, another film I saw way back when, probably about the same time I watched "Dr. Strangelove", a real terror tale.]
100 YEARS, 100 STORIES by George Burns [Bedside reading, stories from Burns' reality and imagination.]
MOVIES VIEWED THIS WEEKEND
Songs From The Second Floor [A must see. A surrealistic poem. Two thumbs up by Ebert/ Roeper too.]
Manchurian Candidate [Just so so, but exciting.]
Meet The Fockers [Went to please my wonderful wife. She said she got from it what she expected so she wasn't disappointed.]
BOUGHT TWO BOOKS THIS WEEKEND TO GO ON MY STACK OF TO-READ BOOKS
101 MYTHS OF THE BIBLE by Gary Greenberg
THE SELFISH GENE by Richard Dawkins
__________________________________________________
"Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way around." —David Lodge [However, I think David is forgetting a lot of second class, regional literature and the literature of the South. In fact, I think David doesn't know what he's talking about.]
Saturday, January 15, 2005
LAMARCK REVIVED
For a long time it was thought that evolution was not effected by learned behavior. But, in Steven Pinker’s HOW THE MIND WORKS, the “Baldwin effect” is discussed which states that the quicker an animal can learn a behavior, the better its chances of survival. Thus learning capacity enhances genetic evolution and procreation. This “Baldwin effect” does show that adaptive, learned behavior can roughly be passed on.
ALBERTO GONZALES
Look... whether or not Alberto Gonzales, Bush’s nominee for Attorney General, is too torture prone in the head is a very important issue which we need to think about very clearly. We can’t allow ourselves to be diverted by the fact that he was talking about torturing non-American, global citizens. The chief point to focus on is the psychology of a man who can calmly discuss torturing anyone, for if a person can torture anyone, he literally “can justify torturing anyone”, even you, dear reader. Once a man has justified the use of torture and becomes psychological accepting of torture by the state, then he can make a case for the state torturing you if the state decides that you are a big enough threat to it to deserve torture.
Legalities must be put aside and we must ask what are we to think of a man whose emotional life can justify torturing anyone he thinks is his enemy. Once we’ve given the state the right to use torture, it will not be long before you will be the tortured.
GOOD NEWS FROM THE ISLAMIC WORLD
Fareed Zakaria’s column in the Dec. 27, 2004 NEWSWEEK is full of hopeful thinking about the breakdown of Pan-Arabian thinking:
“In those places in the Muslim world where political life is open, the evidence is overwhelming. The 2004 elections in Malaysia and Indonesia saw secular parties trounce Islamic ones.”
“Jordan has begun serious economic reforms. Egypt, which remains the most tragic case of lost potential in the Arab world, could be rousing from its slumber.”
“... progress, at least economic progress, is coming from the gulf, while countries like Syria appear to be stuck in the Stone Age.”
You know... on this issue of spreading democracy around the world, I can agree with the goals of the Bush administration but to back Bush is too costly to almost every other American value which I cherish. If only Bush didn’t have to cater to his religious base, we could all get behind his international goal, even though we might argue about his methods.
SOME HUMAN VICE IS NON-ADAPTIVE AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE
From page 207 of HOW THE MIND WORKS:
“Human vice is proof that biological adaptation is, speaking literally, a thing of the past.” Instead of mate seeking, we have pornography; heroin is preferred over food, and some people now eat themselves into the grave.
Of course, I think Pinker doesn’t deal with the sort of sexual vices that lead men to fuck anything that wears a skirt which is adaptive behavior. So I don’t think we ought to expand his findings too far into the realm of morality. For morality is relative, sorry to say.
THINKING WAS ADAPTED TO ENVIRONMENT
I know I’ve brought this up from other reading too, but here’s Pinker’s take on the matter from page 208 of HOW THE MIND WORKS: “... genes give [us] thoughts and feelings that were adaptive in the environment in which the genes were selected for.”
Again... the conclusion is that our modern cultural mores expressed in our thoughts and feelings do not match our genetic adaptations. Our bodies are out of sync with our environment. This conclusion is so common in the literature of evolutionary psychology that I’m stunned it’s not more common in our modern cultural mythology.
_______________________________________________________
"Be yourself is the worst knowledge you can give to some people." —Tom Masson [Who?]
For a long time it was thought that evolution was not effected by learned behavior. But, in Steven Pinker’s HOW THE MIND WORKS, the “Baldwin effect” is discussed which states that the quicker an animal can learn a behavior, the better its chances of survival. Thus learning capacity enhances genetic evolution and procreation. This “Baldwin effect” does show that adaptive, learned behavior can roughly be passed on.
ALBERTO GONZALES
Look... whether or not Alberto Gonzales, Bush’s nominee for Attorney General, is too torture prone in the head is a very important issue which we need to think about very clearly. We can’t allow ourselves to be diverted by the fact that he was talking about torturing non-American, global citizens. The chief point to focus on is the psychology of a man who can calmly discuss torturing anyone, for if a person can torture anyone, he literally “can justify torturing anyone”, even you, dear reader. Once a man has justified the use of torture and becomes psychological accepting of torture by the state, then he can make a case for the state torturing you if the state decides that you are a big enough threat to it to deserve torture.
Legalities must be put aside and we must ask what are we to think of a man whose emotional life can justify torturing anyone he thinks is his enemy. Once we’ve given the state the right to use torture, it will not be long before you will be the tortured.
GOOD NEWS FROM THE ISLAMIC WORLD
Fareed Zakaria’s column in the Dec. 27, 2004 NEWSWEEK is full of hopeful thinking about the breakdown of Pan-Arabian thinking:
“In those places in the Muslim world where political life is open, the evidence is overwhelming. The 2004 elections in Malaysia and Indonesia saw secular parties trounce Islamic ones.”
“Jordan has begun serious economic reforms. Egypt, which remains the most tragic case of lost potential in the Arab world, could be rousing from its slumber.”
“... progress, at least economic progress, is coming from the gulf, while countries like Syria appear to be stuck in the Stone Age.”
You know... on this issue of spreading democracy around the world, I can agree with the goals of the Bush administration but to back Bush is too costly to almost every other American value which I cherish. If only Bush didn’t have to cater to his religious base, we could all get behind his international goal, even though we might argue about his methods.
SOME HUMAN VICE IS NON-ADAPTIVE AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE
From page 207 of HOW THE MIND WORKS:
“Human vice is proof that biological adaptation is, speaking literally, a thing of the past.” Instead of mate seeking, we have pornography; heroin is preferred over food, and some people now eat themselves into the grave.
Of course, I think Pinker doesn’t deal with the sort of sexual vices that lead men to fuck anything that wears a skirt which is adaptive behavior. So I don’t think we ought to expand his findings too far into the realm of morality. For morality is relative, sorry to say.
THINKING WAS ADAPTED TO ENVIRONMENT
I know I’ve brought this up from other reading too, but here’s Pinker’s take on the matter from page 208 of HOW THE MIND WORKS: “... genes give [us] thoughts and feelings that were adaptive in the environment in which the genes were selected for.”
Again... the conclusion is that our modern cultural mores expressed in our thoughts and feelings do not match our genetic adaptations. Our bodies are out of sync with our environment. This conclusion is so common in the literature of evolutionary psychology that I’m stunned it’s not more common in our modern cultural mythology.
_______________________________________________________
"Be yourself is the worst knowledge you can give to some people." —Tom Masson [Who?]
Friday, January 14, 2005
GENETIC SCRIBBLERS
Thinking of my Grandpa Thomas.... He used to keep something of a journal on brown butcher paper all through his life. Every summer and spring day, he recorded the box scores of all the major league baseball teams and local weather reports. When I was living with them, I recall his sitting at the huge mahogany dinner table in the dining room, writing down these scores on rolls of butcher paper. I suppose it was all he could afford to keep his records on. Perhaps he was doing it in order to make better bets on pro baseball. I don’t know why he kept those figures or where those records went after his death.
Now, here am I, the man who tried to “make it” as a writer, a scribbler, but who now finds himself keeping a different kind of journal, a more personal journal, yet also one which impersonally records my reading and thoughts too, and which I now use as a source for my BLOG entries. My journals also keep a record of the movies I want to see and the books I want to read. Both lists are getting so long and the movies are so outdated that I don’t think I’ll get to all of them.
There’s something comforting in scribbling down my thoughts on paper and into computers even though I don’t know that my records will go anywhere or be read by anyone. That’s why I think my scribbling is a genetic tic of some sort, a comforting control over or release of my restless thoughts. The repetition comforts me. That’s genetic, and I feel closer to my grandfather for noting it down in this BLOG entry.
CONSCIOUSNESS: SCRIBBLING AND EJACULATIONS
Consciousness is the I being aware of the I, the “I am that I am” in the Bible. How does that fit in? The I being aware of the I in the other, and therefore, being aware of the I in the self? The I recognizing the I in the pool of water? The I becoming aware of the me in the mirror? Because I observe your consciousness of me, I am conscious of myself? What are the physical brain’s modules which allow this? There needs nothing more except to recognize that consciousness is no more than a material phenomena. According to Donald’s A MIND SO RARE, and in opposition to Steven Pinker, “The only modular element in language appears to have been the vocal apparatus.” (p. 294)
Perhaps consciousness does have something to do with the awareness of the other outside myself, of my becoming aware that the other is speaking to me. Our primitive, prehistoric jabbering back and forth leading to an awareness of our individual selves. Everything I am is represented in that other. He’s a feedback loop to my self, outside myself. He feeds back to me my sense of self.
What do epic poetry and writing and, later, novels have to do with making us imagine that consciousness is a steady stream of unbroken information, even though we know that consciousness is a fragmented view of reality, cut into bits and pieces with no real continuity at all? Novels eventually emerged from time-locked verbal narratives and allow us to see consciousness as physicality, spread onto a series of pages with a page one and ending on page three-hundred thirty-three. Reading novels, telling tales gave us a sense of continuity of consciousness. Writing concretized consciousness. Language led to writing and writing concretized consciousness onto material pages. We are no different than stones except we talk. We are talking stones. We are moving water and bending flowers which talk.
The very fact I can observe a book is a concrete representation of the result of someone else’s thought processes. When I read, I internalize the other’s thought process and recognize it as the thoughts that flow through my own mind. Therefore, I can call thoughts sifting through the narrow window of my consciousness, “consciousness”.
Wow! That certainly was a bunch of scribbling, eh?
ANXIETY. ANOTHER, MORE SCIENTIFIC, DEFINITION
According to Joseph LaDoux in the SYNAPTIC SELF (p. 288) anxiety is a “cognitive state” in which “working memory is monopolized by fretful, worrying thoughts.”
DEPRESSION
In another post, I mentioned that taking antidepressants might disrupt a human’s chance to disengage from life and to heal and might allow humans to engage in self-destructive behavior. This take on the subject was according to Peggy La Cerra who thought that perhaps depression oughtn’t to be treated but it ought to be accepted as a good thing. Though they both agree that depression is a way to escape world pressure for awhile, Joseph LaDoux looks at this from another, more positive, point of view. On page 281 of SYNAPTIC SELF, he writes, “Depression... is no longer simply viewed as a monoamine imbalance. It is instead believed to involve altered circuits that lock one into a state of neural and psychological withdrawal in which the brain’s ability to attend to, engage, and learn about the world is reduced. Any treatment that can reengage a person with the world is likely to help.” Further, he says, “A brain on antidepressants can be brought back from its state of isolation from the outside world and encouraged, even forced, to learn. The brain, in other words, is duped into being plastic by these treatments.”
________________________________________________
“A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe.” —Pierre Berton
Thinking of my Grandpa Thomas.... He used to keep something of a journal on brown butcher paper all through his life. Every summer and spring day, he recorded the box scores of all the major league baseball teams and local weather reports. When I was living with them, I recall his sitting at the huge mahogany dinner table in the dining room, writing down these scores on rolls of butcher paper. I suppose it was all he could afford to keep his records on. Perhaps he was doing it in order to make better bets on pro baseball. I don’t know why he kept those figures or where those records went after his death.
Now, here am I, the man who tried to “make it” as a writer, a scribbler, but who now finds himself keeping a different kind of journal, a more personal journal, yet also one which impersonally records my reading and thoughts too, and which I now use as a source for my BLOG entries. My journals also keep a record of the movies I want to see and the books I want to read. Both lists are getting so long and the movies are so outdated that I don’t think I’ll get to all of them.
There’s something comforting in scribbling down my thoughts on paper and into computers even though I don’t know that my records will go anywhere or be read by anyone. That’s why I think my scribbling is a genetic tic of some sort, a comforting control over or release of my restless thoughts. The repetition comforts me. That’s genetic, and I feel closer to my grandfather for noting it down in this BLOG entry.
CONSCIOUSNESS: SCRIBBLING AND EJACULATIONS
Consciousness is the I being aware of the I, the “I am that I am” in the Bible. How does that fit in? The I being aware of the I in the other, and therefore, being aware of the I in the self? The I recognizing the I in the pool of water? The I becoming aware of the me in the mirror? Because I observe your consciousness of me, I am conscious of myself? What are the physical brain’s modules which allow this? There needs nothing more except to recognize that consciousness is no more than a material phenomena. According to Donald’s A MIND SO RARE, and in opposition to Steven Pinker, “The only modular element in language appears to have been the vocal apparatus.” (p. 294)
Perhaps consciousness does have something to do with the awareness of the other outside myself, of my becoming aware that the other is speaking to me. Our primitive, prehistoric jabbering back and forth leading to an awareness of our individual selves. Everything I am is represented in that other. He’s a feedback loop to my self, outside myself. He feeds back to me my sense of self.
What do epic poetry and writing and, later, novels have to do with making us imagine that consciousness is a steady stream of unbroken information, even though we know that consciousness is a fragmented view of reality, cut into bits and pieces with no real continuity at all? Novels eventually emerged from time-locked verbal narratives and allow us to see consciousness as physicality, spread onto a series of pages with a page one and ending on page three-hundred thirty-three. Reading novels, telling tales gave us a sense of continuity of consciousness. Writing concretized consciousness. Language led to writing and writing concretized consciousness onto material pages. We are no different than stones except we talk. We are talking stones. We are moving water and bending flowers which talk.
The very fact I can observe a book is a concrete representation of the result of someone else’s thought processes. When I read, I internalize the other’s thought process and recognize it as the thoughts that flow through my own mind. Therefore, I can call thoughts sifting through the narrow window of my consciousness, “consciousness”.
Wow! That certainly was a bunch of scribbling, eh?
ANXIETY. ANOTHER, MORE SCIENTIFIC, DEFINITION
According to Joseph LaDoux in the SYNAPTIC SELF (p. 288) anxiety is a “cognitive state” in which “working memory is monopolized by fretful, worrying thoughts.”
DEPRESSION
In another post, I mentioned that taking antidepressants might disrupt a human’s chance to disengage from life and to heal and might allow humans to engage in self-destructive behavior. This take on the subject was according to Peggy La Cerra who thought that perhaps depression oughtn’t to be treated but it ought to be accepted as a good thing. Though they both agree that depression is a way to escape world pressure for awhile, Joseph LaDoux looks at this from another, more positive, point of view. On page 281 of SYNAPTIC SELF, he writes, “Depression... is no longer simply viewed as a monoamine imbalance. It is instead believed to involve altered circuits that lock one into a state of neural and psychological withdrawal in which the brain’s ability to attend to, engage, and learn about the world is reduced. Any treatment that can reengage a person with the world is likely to help.” Further, he says, “A brain on antidepressants can be brought back from its state of isolation from the outside world and encouraged, even forced, to learn. The brain, in other words, is duped into being plastic by these treatments.”
________________________________________________
“A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe.” —Pierre Berton
Thursday, January 13, 2005
DECISION MAKING AT A BASIC LEVEL or
TRICKING THE SYSTEM INTO SELF-DESTRUCTION
I recall as a young man in one of my philosophy classes being very strongly impressed by the hedonist Greek philosophers and their idea that all humans seek to escape pain and to embrace pleasure. I bought the idea then, and, at some level, I’ve always steered near that conclusion. I’d say that recent research in evolutionary psychology tends to support a hedonist’s basic contention.
From THE ORIGIN OF MINDS by Peggy La Cerra, pp. 124-126:
The collection of nuclei called the “basal ganglia” feed “three distinct dopamine pathways.... These dopamine pathways play critical roles in the construction, modification, and activation of the ARNs [adaptive representational networks or memory clusters] that guide human behavior and thought. In effect they [the dopamine pathways] are the control machinery of our intelligence systems and our minds.” They give emotional weight to ARNs of successful or unsuccessful attempts to adapt for survival. They produce feelings of pleasure when we move toward things in our would that are adaptive” and the nigrostriatal pathway... “flags stimuli in the environment that are reliable predictors of rewards.”
It’s obvious to me that this human guidance system is much more than nearly automatic. Guided by chemicals, the human intelligence steers from one choice to another motivated mainly by chemical reactions which produce feelings of pain or pleasure.
On pages 112 and 123-124, La Cerra writes, “neurotransmitters—serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline [are] messenger molecules that chemically ferry information from cell to cell in your brain across synapses” [and] “the dopamine and noradrenaline systems are designed to help you generate behavior that will keep you viable”. Further on (page 128), she writes that “... serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline work together to produce global calibrations of your intelligence system.... they function [in cooperation], making offers that your system finds hard to refuse.”
Our adaptive representational networks (ARN) are an archive of our ups and downs in our efforts to remain viable in our life courses. On page 128, La Cerra adds, “Imagine this episodic memory record as a sequential string of positive and negative [chemical] values.... The sum is either negative or positive. If it’s positive, the trajectory of your life is viable.” If not viable, your system signals distress in many ways, from stress reactions to heart attacks, from depression to neurotic behaviors.
But how does your behavioral system know that it’s time for course changes, and how would it “implement” [choose] a change in direction? The basil ganglia does it. It’s an accountant with a chemical abacus board. It can shut down or slow down behavioral motivation and help you cut your loses and “put you on a new course to viability.”
The basal ganglia “is positioned between the neo-cortex—which stores the ARN record—and the motivational centers of the LHRS [life history regulatory system] that drive the planning and initiation of behavior. One of its primary functions is sequencing behavior—arbitrating between various competing possibilities as represented in your neocortex and then selecting an action. It’s also the core machinery for the generation of behavior. In effect, the basal ganglia is the only system that would ‘know’ when you should abandon your current strategy and would ‘know’ how to change your life course.”
In short, depression is trying to tell many of us Americans that we need to make course changes, but instead of changing course, we take chemicals, antidepressants, to try and trick the survival system and bull ahead on nonviable courses of behavior. Could that be a true conclusion? Could humanity be on a course of self-destruction?
WILLY LOMAN STRIKES AGAIN
I just checked out from the library and watched for a second time, Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman”. All I can say is, “Wow”! It was better the second time around. I saw the original production made for TV years ago and recalled that all the performances were great, and they are still great. John Malkovich plays Biff, the son who gets honest with himself, and Charles Durning as the compassionate and wry next door neighbor was excellent too. In fact, every part was well played. I choked up a few times, recalling my own struggles with myself (as a young man) and my fears that I was sinking into middle-class nothingness. Poor me! I even recall the original movie portrayal by Frederick March as Willy Loman. That has always been a powerful drama for me.
Finally, I tried to watch the “Personal Conversations” after the play, the stuff that DVDs have a lot of. My copy was a VHS production. I can tell you that I don’t appreciate all the stuff added after the play. To watch the guys joking around and being their artistic selves is much less interesting than the play itself. To watch it right after watching the genuine stuff just ruins it for me.
When I finally get a DVD player, I’m going to look for simple inexpensive DVDs without all the extra sugar. All the outside the box stuff is just an excuse to overprice the DVDs. Screw ‘em!
________________________________________________________
"To the person with a toothache, even if the world is tottering, there is nothing more important than a visit to the the dentist." —George Bernard Shaw
TRICKING THE SYSTEM INTO SELF-DESTRUCTION
I recall as a young man in one of my philosophy classes being very strongly impressed by the hedonist Greek philosophers and their idea that all humans seek to escape pain and to embrace pleasure. I bought the idea then, and, at some level, I’ve always steered near that conclusion. I’d say that recent research in evolutionary psychology tends to support a hedonist’s basic contention.
From THE ORIGIN OF MINDS by Peggy La Cerra, pp. 124-126:
The collection of nuclei called the “basal ganglia” feed “three distinct dopamine pathways.... These dopamine pathways play critical roles in the construction, modification, and activation of the ARNs [adaptive representational networks or memory clusters] that guide human behavior and thought. In effect they [the dopamine pathways] are the control machinery of our intelligence systems and our minds.” They give emotional weight to ARNs of successful or unsuccessful attempts to adapt for survival. They produce feelings of pleasure when we move toward things in our would that are adaptive” and the nigrostriatal pathway... “flags stimuli in the environment that are reliable predictors of rewards.”
It’s obvious to me that this human guidance system is much more than nearly automatic. Guided by chemicals, the human intelligence steers from one choice to another motivated mainly by chemical reactions which produce feelings of pain or pleasure.
On pages 112 and 123-124, La Cerra writes, “neurotransmitters—serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline [are] messenger molecules that chemically ferry information from cell to cell in your brain across synapses” [and] “the dopamine and noradrenaline systems are designed to help you generate behavior that will keep you viable”. Further on (page 128), she writes that “... serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline work together to produce global calibrations of your intelligence system.... they function [in cooperation], making offers that your system finds hard to refuse.”
Our adaptive representational networks (ARN) are an archive of our ups and downs in our efforts to remain viable in our life courses. On page 128, La Cerra adds, “Imagine this episodic memory record as a sequential string of positive and negative [chemical] values.... The sum is either negative or positive. If it’s positive, the trajectory of your life is viable.” If not viable, your system signals distress in many ways, from stress reactions to heart attacks, from depression to neurotic behaviors.
But how does your behavioral system know that it’s time for course changes, and how would it “implement” [choose] a change in direction? The basil ganglia does it. It’s an accountant with a chemical abacus board. It can shut down or slow down behavioral motivation and help you cut your loses and “put you on a new course to viability.”
The basal ganglia “is positioned between the neo-cortex—which stores the ARN record—and the motivational centers of the LHRS [life history regulatory system] that drive the planning and initiation of behavior. One of its primary functions is sequencing behavior—arbitrating between various competing possibilities as represented in your neocortex and then selecting an action. It’s also the core machinery for the generation of behavior. In effect, the basal ganglia is the only system that would ‘know’ when you should abandon your current strategy and would ‘know’ how to change your life course.”
In short, depression is trying to tell many of us Americans that we need to make course changes, but instead of changing course, we take chemicals, antidepressants, to try and trick the survival system and bull ahead on nonviable courses of behavior. Could that be a true conclusion? Could humanity be on a course of self-destruction?
WILLY LOMAN STRIKES AGAIN
I just checked out from the library and watched for a second time, Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman”. All I can say is, “Wow”! It was better the second time around. I saw the original production made for TV years ago and recalled that all the performances were great, and they are still great. John Malkovich plays Biff, the son who gets honest with himself, and Charles Durning as the compassionate and wry next door neighbor was excellent too. In fact, every part was well played. I choked up a few times, recalling my own struggles with myself (as a young man) and my fears that I was sinking into middle-class nothingness. Poor me! I even recall the original movie portrayal by Frederick March as Willy Loman. That has always been a powerful drama for me.
Finally, I tried to watch the “Personal Conversations” after the play, the stuff that DVDs have a lot of. My copy was a VHS production. I can tell you that I don’t appreciate all the stuff added after the play. To watch the guys joking around and being their artistic selves is much less interesting than the play itself. To watch it right after watching the genuine stuff just ruins it for me.
When I finally get a DVD player, I’m going to look for simple inexpensive DVDs without all the extra sugar. All the outside the box stuff is just an excuse to overprice the DVDs. Screw ‘em!
________________________________________________________
"To the person with a toothache, even if the world is tottering, there is nothing more important than a visit to the the dentist." —George Bernard Shaw
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
A CATALOGUE OF BUSH ADMINISTRATION FAILURES AND
THE REPUBLICAN THREAT TO DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS
HERE AND ABROAD
If you can’t believe that Bush and company are trying to rewrite reality to fit their own brand of wackiness, read what a senior aide to president Bush was quoted as saying in the Oct. 17, 2004 NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE by Ron Suskind:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors... and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do.”
Isn’t that a chilling statement of irresponsibility and power which one might expect from a latter day Genghis Kahn? Whoever said that must be one of those University of Chicago students who studied under Professer [Whomacallit]? I can’t recall his name, but he urged conservative students to act above and beyond the law. They were elite and special people, he taught, who needed to somtimes act outside the law in order to achieve their special and necessary purposes. How I wish my short term memory was stronger.
Rachel Gillet makes a telling list of how the Bush administration has created its own reality, divorced from truth and common sense.
___________________________________________
“I have always believed that to have true justice, we must have equal harassment under the law.” —Paul Krassner
THE REPUBLICAN THREAT TO DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS
HERE AND ABROAD
If you can’t believe that Bush and company are trying to rewrite reality to fit their own brand of wackiness, read what a senior aide to president Bush was quoted as saying in the Oct. 17, 2004 NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE by Ron Suskind:
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors... and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do.”
Isn’t that a chilling statement of irresponsibility and power which one might expect from a latter day Genghis Kahn? Whoever said that must be one of those University of Chicago students who studied under Professer [Whomacallit]? I can’t recall his name, but he urged conservative students to act above and beyond the law. They were elite and special people, he taught, who needed to somtimes act outside the law in order to achieve their special and necessary purposes. How I wish my short term memory was stronger.
Rachel Gillet makes a telling list of how the Bush administration has created its own reality, divorced from truth and common sense.
___________________________________________
“I have always believed that to have true justice, we must have equal harassment under the law.” —Paul Krassner
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
A CHARITABLE THOUGHT OR TWO
The following is a letter to the editor which I recently sent off to our dear little newspaper not too long ago:
Dear Editor,
Peter Brown’s essay on charity (1/4/05) demonstrates the uncharitable attitude of those among us who still, long after election time, divide Americans between blues and reds. Shame on Brown!
I accept Brown’s “weighted” figures which show that Americans are very generous and the slight tendency of some states to give more than other states, but, then, we must subtract from his figures all worldwide charitable giving whose purpose is to proselytize for one’s religion. For example, does charity come with strings attached? Must a drunk listen to sermons in order to qualify for a meal? That’s not charity; that’s bribery. Christian missionaries don’t qualify either.
The presence of charity in any society is a measure of that society’s failure to create an economically just society. People may from time to time need help, but that help ought to come without charity’s religious strings attached. Help should be available in any well-regulated society not as charity but as a right to the temporarily dispossessed. And since economic justice underpins all cultural stability and benefits everyone, all citizens ought to be held equally responsible to contribute to their nation’s social stability.
A society without charity is a just, prosperous and rational society.
Thank you,
Geo
IF ONLY FOX WERE AS DILIGENT AS CBS ABOUT CLEARING OUT POOR NEWSMEN
Well, CBS finished its investigation of the Bush air national guard papers and ended up firing four senior people from its news organization. Fair enough. Just how things ought to be done in respectable journalism. Now if only Fox were to clean house of all their lying, prevaricating, fudging newsmen and commentators. But Fox will never be the news organization that CBS has been. In fact if Fox got rid of all their liars, they’d have no one left to broadcast news or make commentary. I wonder just how many Fox watchers are even aware of the lies that they are fed and if they care to see their own Foxy liars purged? There is a certain disadvantage to being a creditable news organization like CBS, isn’t there, when in competition with routine liars like the Fox organization? Your viewers are likely to be better educated and to demand balanced and fair reporting and are also more likely to catch you out when you distort the news whereas those with little training in logic, debate or argumentation or in the process of uncovering the truth will accept almost anything they hear.
_________________________________________________________
"I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic and the others give me a stiff neck or lockjaw." —Tallulah Bankhead [Tallulah was a very sexually active hollywood star long before being that active was a benefit.]
The following is a letter to the editor which I recently sent off to our dear little newspaper not too long ago:
Dear Editor,
Peter Brown’s essay on charity (1/4/05) demonstrates the uncharitable attitude of those among us who still, long after election time, divide Americans between blues and reds. Shame on Brown!
I accept Brown’s “weighted” figures which show that Americans are very generous and the slight tendency of some states to give more than other states, but, then, we must subtract from his figures all worldwide charitable giving whose purpose is to proselytize for one’s religion. For example, does charity come with strings attached? Must a drunk listen to sermons in order to qualify for a meal? That’s not charity; that’s bribery. Christian missionaries don’t qualify either.
The presence of charity in any society is a measure of that society’s failure to create an economically just society. People may from time to time need help, but that help ought to come without charity’s religious strings attached. Help should be available in any well-regulated society not as charity but as a right to the temporarily dispossessed. And since economic justice underpins all cultural stability and benefits everyone, all citizens ought to be held equally responsible to contribute to their nation’s social stability.
A society without charity is a just, prosperous and rational society.
Thank you,
Geo
IF ONLY FOX WERE AS DILIGENT AS CBS ABOUT CLEARING OUT POOR NEWSMEN
Well, CBS finished its investigation of the Bush air national guard papers and ended up firing four senior people from its news organization. Fair enough. Just how things ought to be done in respectable journalism. Now if only Fox were to clean house of all their lying, prevaricating, fudging newsmen and commentators. But Fox will never be the news organization that CBS has been. In fact if Fox got rid of all their liars, they’d have no one left to broadcast news or make commentary. I wonder just how many Fox watchers are even aware of the lies that they are fed and if they care to see their own Foxy liars purged? There is a certain disadvantage to being a creditable news organization like CBS, isn’t there, when in competition with routine liars like the Fox organization? Your viewers are likely to be better educated and to demand balanced and fair reporting and are also more likely to catch you out when you distort the news whereas those with little training in logic, debate or argumentation or in the process of uncovering the truth will accept almost anything they hear.
_________________________________________________________
"I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic and the others give me a stiff neck or lockjaw." —Tallulah Bankhead [Tallulah was a very sexually active hollywood star long before being that active was a benefit.]
Monday, January 10, 2005
WHY DENTAL FLOSS WON’T TUNE AN ENGINE
I just happened to pick up a book lying around the house written by Thomas Moore, a kind and caring psychotherapist, called CARE OF THE SOUL, and read the opening lines of its Introduction. I’m immediately struck by the fatal flaws which weaken so much of Moore’s kind of approach to modern troubles: “The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all of our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is ‘loss of soul’. When soul is neglected, it doesn’t just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning.“
I can’t argue with Moore’s worry that America may be in the grips of “addictions”, etcetera. In CONSILIENCE, Wilson more than once suggests that we’re now in a position where we can make cultural decisions which may be self-destructive rather than adaptive. And Moore’s sort of evaluation is well-meaning enough but to approach modern problems in his way will lead to no good result. In the first place can a thing so personal and immediate as a soul be lost? Where does it reside? Where does it go to be lost? Who knows what a soul is? Are they all alike, made of a common substance or as highly variable in construction as an individual face or fingerprints? Does one cure cure all? Is the Christian soul different from a Moslem soul? Do they react to different patent medicines?
As far as any concrete study of consciousness can find, no seat of the soul exists in the body, no central location where all the incoming signals from the senses arrive and where thoughts take place or decisions are formed, and from which commands back to the body originate. The studies which reveal this lack of central authority are many and detailed. The facts are in on it. No central decision making authority, no soul. The evidence is harder and more obvious, more complete than all of the evidence for evolution, which is plenty. To talk about the soul and its care is like talking about using dental floss to tune an auto engine.
The facts are that this human consciousness of ours, our psychology, was evolved and remains basically a tool for making the decisions and meeting the problems of survival on a savannah. It’s equipment is useful for hunting and gathering. The trouble is that we are now engulfed in a cultural revolution too, which also calls for adaptive responses if an individual’s genes are to survive, and culture changes so rapidly that evolutionary change is left far behind, almost of no consequence. We are like animals in a zoo without keepers or like tigers wondering city streets.
We must be more realistic than to talk of “souls” when it comes to human potential. We must look at the measurable consciousness of the human animal and look to how culture impacts the hunter gathering equipment and wounds it or diminishes its capacity to reproduce itself. We must know quantitatively and qualitatively how culture effects the psyche, the physiology of the natural man or woman, so to speak. The good thing about the problem we face is that it does not lie in an immaterial soul; it lies in the emotional damage and psychological twists in the plastic wiring of the brain, the synaptical patterns which are observable and measurable things. Eventually, we should not have to guess about “spiritual” causes. We’ll know as certainly as we can detect a cancer where the human problem resides and what remedies to apply. All that remains for we humans to do is to admit that we have psychological problems galore, caused by our living in body/brains which aren’t evolved far enough to guarantee our survival as a species. To put it bluntly: when we quit talking about souls and begin talking about the origins of consciousness in the human animal, then we’ll begin making progress.
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"We are ready for any unforseen event that may or may not occur." —"W" [That's right. He's a moron.]
I just happened to pick up a book lying around the house written by Thomas Moore, a kind and caring psychotherapist, called CARE OF THE SOUL, and read the opening lines of its Introduction. I’m immediately struck by the fatal flaws which weaken so much of Moore’s kind of approach to modern troubles: “The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all of our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is ‘loss of soul’. When soul is neglected, it doesn’t just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning.“
I can’t argue with Moore’s worry that America may be in the grips of “addictions”, etcetera. In CONSILIENCE, Wilson more than once suggests that we’re now in a position where we can make cultural decisions which may be self-destructive rather than adaptive. And Moore’s sort of evaluation is well-meaning enough but to approach modern problems in his way will lead to no good result. In the first place can a thing so personal and immediate as a soul be lost? Where does it reside? Where does it go to be lost? Who knows what a soul is? Are they all alike, made of a common substance or as highly variable in construction as an individual face or fingerprints? Does one cure cure all? Is the Christian soul different from a Moslem soul? Do they react to different patent medicines?
As far as any concrete study of consciousness can find, no seat of the soul exists in the body, no central location where all the incoming signals from the senses arrive and where thoughts take place or decisions are formed, and from which commands back to the body originate. The studies which reveal this lack of central authority are many and detailed. The facts are in on it. No central decision making authority, no soul. The evidence is harder and more obvious, more complete than all of the evidence for evolution, which is plenty. To talk about the soul and its care is like talking about using dental floss to tune an auto engine.
The facts are that this human consciousness of ours, our psychology, was evolved and remains basically a tool for making the decisions and meeting the problems of survival on a savannah. It’s equipment is useful for hunting and gathering. The trouble is that we are now engulfed in a cultural revolution too, which also calls for adaptive responses if an individual’s genes are to survive, and culture changes so rapidly that evolutionary change is left far behind, almost of no consequence. We are like animals in a zoo without keepers or like tigers wondering city streets.
We must be more realistic than to talk of “souls” when it comes to human potential. We must look at the measurable consciousness of the human animal and look to how culture impacts the hunter gathering equipment and wounds it or diminishes its capacity to reproduce itself. We must know quantitatively and qualitatively how culture effects the psyche, the physiology of the natural man or woman, so to speak. The good thing about the problem we face is that it does not lie in an immaterial soul; it lies in the emotional damage and psychological twists in the plastic wiring of the brain, the synaptical patterns which are observable and measurable things. Eventually, we should not have to guess about “spiritual” causes. We’ll know as certainly as we can detect a cancer where the human problem resides and what remedies to apply. All that remains for we humans to do is to admit that we have psychological problems galore, caused by our living in body/brains which aren’t evolved far enough to guarantee our survival as a species. To put it bluntly: when we quit talking about souls and begin talking about the origins of consciousness in the human animal, then we’ll begin making progress.
_______________________________________________________
"We are ready for any unforseen event that may or may not occur." —"W" [That's right. He's a moron.]
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