LETTERS TO DAVE


PART THREE: SEEING MORALITY THROUGH A MICROSCOPE

Dear Dave,

In AA’s principles the tenth step says, “We continued to take a daily inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.” In step four, that inventory is described as a “moral” inventory. So that’s what I began to do on a regular basis after I got sober, for nine years or so, constantly taking a “moral inventory” and making apologies day to day as they became necessary. It’s what I was doing when I discovered my terrible lies about poor innocent Pete, and I wouldn’t blame you, Dave, if you pointed out that I might be slipping in my tenth step work in my dealings with the SR or you. Anyhow... you can immediately see where Bush, without AA, and I, with it, part company. It’s in the concept of promptly admitting it when we’re wrong. Bush is the original man for not wanting to admit a mistake. For sure, he could never be a Catholic. Imagine George in the confessional: “Forgive me, father, but god has sinned in putting that Saddam fellow in power in Iraq, I’ve corrected god’s mistake.”

But I don’t want to take Bush’s moral inventory any further in this third and last part; I mean to understand and write down my own slow march of consciousness from a religious/moral stance to a scientific stance with which to understand reality and improve my own character. And that brings me to the next and last tale of woe in this narrative.

Ten years into sobriety, my third divorce came to pass. Lo, did it come to pass, and I discovered that being sober and moral was just not enough to make marriages work. In fact, being judgmental was one of my problems all along, and my third divorce brought that home to me with another crash. Till then, there were only one right way and one wrong way. George’s way was the right way and others’ ways were the wrong ways. Recall—though that last sentence may sound like I’m trashing George Bush’s current way of life again, which I’ve said I wouldn’t do in this section, I’m really describing my own behavior. I was being a fundamentalist, Old Testament sort of guy. Even though I wasn’t a Christian, I was being what I didn’t want to be. I was being dishonest with myself; I was being my own worst enemy.

So—away flies wife number three and in flies a depression, suicidal in intensity. I could barely get to sleep most nights. I couldn’t go into the bedroom of my small apartment; I slept on the couch. I watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus every night at twelve and went to sleep with the TV on so that I wouldn’t have to face the silence. I awoke to the static of an empty screen. They were miserable times as my wife soon was dating the man who would become her husband. She rushed to divorce, and we fought over everything.

Eventually, from that early suicidal despair, I entered a period of painful growth, which, in retrospect, was the best thing to happen to me in my life. Swearing never to feel such pain again, I determined on a course of recovery which I hoped would make me a new person altogether.

I retreated to a ratty, barren farmhouse six miles outside of Cheney where I wintered two winters and enjoyed two summers in monkly splendor with coyotes as comrades while reading spiritual literature for two to four hours every morning (the Bible, the Psalms, Thomas Merton and etcetera), joined the Lutheran Church in Cheney with lessons and the tap of a rose, got into counseling, began to read and listen to the tapes of John Bradshaw, jogged the dirt roads thereabouts, associated myself with a small band of Catholic evangelicals in their Wednesday night conclave in the basement of St. Rose of Lima’s church in Cheney where we quietly prayed, talked and sang, took up training for and then a job as a Certified Nurse’s Aide at the Cheney Care Center where I humbly wiped withered butts and spoon-fed those who couldn’t feed themselves.

I went to every self-help workshop I could find and afford on CNA pay. Eventually I entered into five years of celibacy to see what that would bring while dating every woman who attracted my fancy. I discovered that many of the women I most wanted to fuck, bored me to tears when we conversed. And all the while, in AA meeting after AA meeting, and in 12 step meetings of Alanon, Sex and Love Addicts, Incest Survivors (who knew? maybe that too?), Adult Children of Alcoholics, and Codependents Anonymous, day in and day out, I confessed my sins, I took my “moral inventory” until I was tired of hearing it. I became acutely aware of the processes that led to self-flagellation.

During this period of recovery, I broke down many times into a sobbing heap of tears so intense I could barely catch my breath. One time I Iost it in the basement evangelical meeting. They were singing a hymn that was something about being brought to the water, about being naked and afraid, defenseless and poor, and, boy, that was certainly me. I couldn’t defend myself against that song and image. They tore into me. One of the songs I’d sung all my adult life, discovered in the folk tradition that came alive in the hippy daze, was “Motherless Child”. I knew that feeling backwards and forwards. Suddenly I was bent over in my church chair and sobbing helplessly. Snot dangled from my nose to the floor.

To make the story brief: the evangelicals gathered around to lay hands on and pray over me. They prayed and they prayed, then, as my tears stopped and my snot grew manageable, they withdrew to their chairs, and the leader of the group asked me if I was ready “... to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.” I recalled Joanne Woodward in the movie, “Rachel, Rachel” and told him, tremulously, “No.” At this point he suggested they get up again and pray some more, but a good friend among them said, “No, Charlie”, and Charlie was saved the embarrassment of another futile try.

I was just not about to be moved by emotional extremity into the Christian camp it seems. Dave, if that breakdown didn’t do it, when I was surrounded by hosts of praying Christians, then no breakdown could do it, could make me accept some invisible presence to be my aide and comforter. I couldn’t have been more defenseless against Christian attacks than at that moment in the church basement. Many give up on themselves during those breakdowns and find Jesus, that mythological authority outside themselves to become their father, ruler and secret playmate, but I think I knew their tricks too well.

From the days of our earliest awareness, America’s Christianized culture beats at you, trying to wear you down, and shames the psyche until, eventually, in your unprotected youth, in fear and trembling, you give your self up and your freedom away, and you slink back into blind obedience under the pitiless gaze of an angry god. Then they give you Jesus to replace your authentic self so your shamed obedience doesn’t seem so bad when compared to his mindless self-sacrifice, but the frightening part is that no one can become so abject without retaining a powerful potion of hatred for anyone outside the Christian camp who reminds them that they are no longer free. Terrible things have been done to anyone who reminds them of the freedom they gave away in their fear.

Actually, though I couldn’t see it at the time, all my breakdowns were helping me immensely. I just didn’t understand the natural power of grieving one’s losses. I was, unknown to myself, gaining confidence in the process I was embarked upon and learning that if you don’t die of grief, then, eventually, grieving builds up an inner strength one can rely on. One doesn’t have to surrender their autonomy to a being outside themselves to find strength. The tricky part is that loss feels just like real death and is scary as hell. You cry out for someone to help you. You look to others and they shun you if you’ve gone too mad, but—here’s the secret—grief never does kill you even though you fear it will as you enter into its grip of terror and pain before your tears buy relief from it. Eventually, I learned to trust the process. This was the lesson I was learning unawares in my secret limbic system of limbic systems about gods and morality and about human frailty and the pain and suffering the human animal is heir to. Then one last experience diverted me into a science-based answer to my human travails.

I was in a noon twelve step meeting, and, as usual, I was doing a great job of taking my own inventory. The program says that the drunk must be tough on himself and gentle on the other. The drunk must assume that when he’s having a problem with another human being, it’s his fault. He must somehow adjust his vision to accept the problem that is confronting him. He must ruthlessly take his own inventory! Can there be anything more moral and right than that? Many religious people can’t even do that, but I was doing a good job of it.

I finished my little monologue after a lengthy process of tearing myself down and admitting to everyone that the divorce was all my fault. I told them in no uncertain terms what a lousy son-of-bitch husband I was. I was a “... no good, lousy, manipulative, controlling asshole type of male, incapable of being kind and gentle to anyone in the whole world”. Yep—I was just plain no good and rotten to the core, I informed the group. They’d heard it many times before.

When I finished, I felt terrible. What a shock. Usually, such a rant gave me some temporary relief from my pain. This time it didn’t. Something was hanging on. I’d confessed my sins to the group but something still was not right. The meeting went on around me. I sank into myself and my pain. I heard no one else speak. I was off in a world of my own, scrunched around my pain, like a gargoyle around a bright, rich jewel hoard and suffering terribly. Then the final, awful truth bore in upon me. O, shit, it hurt. It was obvious that I could no longer hide the truth from myself. Indeed... I really was a lousy, selfish son-of-a-bitch. No hiding from it. (I laugh, now, aloud, in the coffee shop as I admit it once more in my narrative. It’s a fresh truth always and forever, how we fool ourselves with our imagined innocence.) I was selfish, selfish, selfish.... I couldn’t escape the truth! There it was. I… was… selfish.

My guilty pain was horrible. You see, like the lie about Pete, there are many forms and levels of truth. There’s the telling of the truth, the words that can be said repeatedly, then there’s the accepting of the truth and the final seeing through the lie! What I didn’t realize just quite then, but which had to follow upon my discovery, was that I was going to have to take full responsibility for my path out of this pain. I’d already, in that basement debacle, shed forever the chance to put my suffering off on someone else’s bloody, disjointed shoulders. Now what the hell would I do? What a quandary was upon me! Then a scientific moment came upon me, though, even here, I would not fully realize for some years that it was a scientific moment.

I heard myself ask, “Okay, admit it, you are selfish. So, if you really are selfish, how did you come to be this way? Why are you selfish? What made you this way?”

That’s actually quite a scientific question, but most people think it’s a moral question, and they try to answer it with ineffective moral replies. Thousands of years of philosophers and moralizers, millions of theologians keep asking the “selfishness” question about humans as if it’s a moral problem, when, actually, it’s a scientific question with a scientific answer.

I did get an immediate answer, however, and the answer for some time appeared to be a moral answer because I was able to shift blame for a while. My answer was a lie, but a necessary lie along the path to mental health. It gave me some breathing room from the Jesus people who, I feared, like all cults, wanted to use my human frailty and guilt and shame to enslave me in their religion.

I suddenly understood why I was selfish. It was a matter of survival. I was doing what I had been doing all my life in order to survive my less than satisfactory childhood. I saw that I was a product of my childhood. I was being who I had to be, not feeling what I had to not feel, and doing what I had to do in order to survive. Another piece of my puzzle was in place. I saw myself as both abuser and abused, victim and victimizer. At last, I could see both sides of the coin: I had been controlling, fearful, manipulative, mean at times and loving at times, whatever it took to get my way, because that’s how children survive. I could see it clear as hell. Love and cruelty were both tools in getting what I needed from others. If one doesn’t work, try the other. Whimper, plead, scream and threaten, whatever works. I could see that I was completely selfish and living at the level of a damaged four year old, throwing tantrums and offering hugs to control others. At the same time, I would love no one because they could hurt me if I did. No wonder marriage didn’t work with me.

Great benefits immediately flowed from my new insight. Not only did the pain I was feeling in the meeting go away, I could see my dilemma with unflinching clarity, Soon, quite naturally, I no longer blamed myself so harshly for all my shortcomings that my daily inventories constantly rubbed in my face. I really saw that I made mistakes and could let myself make mistakes. Before that, I could say the concept of human equality, but I couldn’t feel it in the bones of my understanding. Now I could try to let others make mistakes without piling on, but not all the time.

Once I started to take it easy on myself, I found I could take it easier on others. Love and liking for myself metamorphosed into liking and love for others. In fact, I have a principle now which I should always pay attention to but don’t. When I’m being miserable and picking on someone else, when the world seems lousy and dangerous, when I’m being badly argumentative, that’s a sign I’ve started to beat up on myself again, to be moralistic rather than naturalistic and logical. Pain and anguish are signs to slow down and smell the roses.

Still… I’m not perfect, and I keep slipping in and out of conscious mindfulness about those inner realities. Even with that leveling insight that showed me that I was just like my fellow man, I still must feel superior from time to time because I continue to let morality dominate my view of human behavior, and I get distressed that people continue to hurt one another. Me too. I still want to blame humans for everything they do. I just don’t want to let go of being judgmental, I guess. There must be some safety in judging my fellow humans that I don’t quite understand.

However, finally, more of the puzzle fell into place in my 60s when I began to read in the science of evolutionary psychology and socio-biology and to read about the development of consciousness and, through them, to think more clearly about the human animal and its evolutionary past as revealed in it’s developing consciousness. Science shows me that selfishness is just the way the human animal constructed itself to survive. Selfishness is necessary for survival. One who is completely selfless will not survive the sharks out there. At last, through science, I’m moving from, I hope, “came to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity” (the third principle of AA) to “came to believe that science can restore me to sanity.” Science gives perfectly adequate answers to most of my more troubling concerns. I don’t need to look outside myself or beyond the realm of the material to perfectly understand what’s going on with the human race, and, you know, if I’m honest with myself, I’m not all that concerned with afterlives and imaginary worlds. Let others have what they need as long as they leave me alone to my own meditations.

I can’t make much of a big deal out of this final part of my story. It’s all intellectual and unemotional, all about the expansion of my rational capacities as I learn more from my studies of biology and consciousness. I am reading and enjoying, learning to meditate. Slowly and surely, I hope my studies will help take me out of myself and into the intellectual world where I can see why everything in the world is exactly as it has to be. There’s no magic here, nothing transcendental or mythical. Science can answer so many things right now and more soon. We are as we are because we are still animals. We hurt one another, squabble like monkeys, show affection and fuck just like animals, so why deny the truth still? Once you start seeing the world that way, it’s amazing the things you see.

The other day, I watched a mother and daughter cross a parking lot outside the Starbuck’s I was feeding in. The genetic similarities were obvious, the way their hips moved and the way they held their backs and shoulders. Yes, unconsciously they were accenting their breasts too, like two proud animals unawares of their animalism. I knew I was observing two animals in our modern jungle cross a dangerous place warily on the look out for the danger of autos that surrounded them. They were so much animals that a joy filled me as I saw myself in those other beings so much like myself in the thick of the material world.

THE END

LETTERS TO DAVE


PART TWO: THE LIE MULTIPLIED

Dear Dave,

I’ve just gone away from my computer to attend a 12 step, non-AA, every-Saturday meeting and to lunch with people of both sexes from that group. More insight poured into my head over the course of the last three hours as I listened to their stories from the week, their struggles with self and others.

One thing I realized as I pulled into my driveway is that I write nowadays not so much for the benefit of others but to clarify who I am. It’s a far different task for me than the writing task is for you, Dave, who writes and reports news. Even your column must take into account the presence of others whereas I write purely for fun, the titillation of the exercise of imagination and the discovery of self. Pure pleasure! Which is basically what this exercise has become for me—a current snapshot to myself as to the steps that led me to be the current person I am. Very informative to me, but if, at any time this bores you, I know you’ll stop reading and go on to better things. I will still be blissfully unawares, writing away in the vasteness of my small room like the compulsive writer that I am until I complete Part Three, The End. (Hey—you could let Rebecca read this. I’ll bet she’d like it. It’s her cup of tea, I believe.)

Anyhow… I thought some about what I meant in the very last line in the closing of Part One about wanting to get “status” with your “clan of writers”. It occurs to me that I’m trying to force a writer’s or writing relationship with the unwilling editors of the Spokesman and that my exchange with them is full of conflicts because I’m still in conflict with relationships from my past, especially with people who dismissed and discounted me. It is, of course, a relationship all in my own head, which would amuse them, I’m sure, if they fully understood it. Or, maybe they have thought about men and women like me who badger them from afar, and they do understand the psychological dynamics. It’s funny to see myself as a potential flake in their eyes and, yet, to know I’m not a flake in my own eyes.

For Doug F. and Steve S., I’ve become too much (as you noted), and they don’t really want to hear from me again (your situation with John H.), which is a bad situation for I have the goal to get at least one really, atheist guest column on the opinion page of the SR. Unfortunately, by your having responded kindly to many of my comments and to our having met, you have fallen into a psuedo-relationship with me, for good or ill, in our imaginations, for which I thank you. At least I’m not totally unreal in the collective mind of the SR. I at least exist somewhere there in one mind. For your trouble, you get to receive this longish, three part, personal memoir.

In my belief system, imagination is all any of us have, and we are constantly writing our own stories in our own heads from the least sophisticated among us to the most. The only difference between me or you and an undereducated, redneck oyster farmer on the Louisiana coast is that I’m fully aware of our state of affairs.

Anyhow… my situation with your top editors parallels my lifelong existentialist situation with the entire American culture. Existentialism would be unbearable if I wasn’t so damn proud of it. It’s the kind of strained relationship that led the ex-patriots of the 1920s—Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein and etcetera—to abandon America for Paris. I love the Twenties! If I weren’t so old, I’d consider living in Canada or France, but now it might be silly, and, perhaps, my wife couldn’t go along with it. I can hear one of your senior editors say, “Let me tell you, George, you are no Hemingway.” I know that, but well… but… I am a sober Kerouac, or more ambitiously, an F. Scott Fitzgerald in my own head....

Now... hurrying to the present from that Cheney of the past and into present day sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: in the Pete incident, with my AA tools, I caught myself in my own mental lies and deceptions, and I got insight about human consciousness which bears even more fruit, now, with further scientific information. In recent years I’ve discovered a lot about lying. It appears that dissimulation, lying, or protective “mental” coloration (a form of hiding away) are all part of the human animal’s biological baggage for survival. Even chimps, our nearest relatives, can be observed deceiving one another. Two conclusions are obvious in the research. One: we are selfish and must survive. Two, we are herd animals and must get along with others in order to survive. We need to exchange information about water holes, plants, crops, spear points, camouflage colors and where the game is while competing with our collaborators for mates and goods. (A lot of what I’m saying is found in Pinker’s and other’s work.) So our very survival means that we must learn to lie and to detect liars and to hide our true motives while getting along. Some researchers find that our sophisticated human consciousness evolved from this need to deceive and to detect deceivers. After all, survival in the wild for earlier human forms depended to some extent on who could hide and who could detect hiders best.

We know others lie because we know we lie, thus there’s a sort of arms race of liars and lie detectors. The best detectors survive and procreate better than the least effective ones. That means the best liars are better survivors while the more honest have troubles. And—here’s a scary one—the best liars are those who believe their own lies themselves. That’s right—the best liar doesn’t even know he’s lying because he believes he’s telling the truth. Which knowledge will bear more fruit in later paragraphs.

I think after the total naiveté of my childhood, which was considerable and painful for me, I went on to become one of the more devious liars in the world, which is why I think I can detect a liar at fifty paces. So... when I listen to most TV evangelists, my consciousness almost universally screams out, liar! But it’s difficult to tell. Some of those religious liars believe their own lies, thus they’re perfect at it, and only a master liar like myself can detect them. Poor simple, mostly honest folk are at the mercy of good liars.

Now we have come, as promised in the first line of this very abbreviated memoir, to the subjects of alcoholism, George Bush and lying and to the exposing of the big lie which George Bush is telling himself. Bush and I are both alcoholics. Alcoholism is a disease as far as statistical research goes. You can’t prove the connection conclusively, but when you look at the statistics that show the rates of alcoholism in the children of alcoholics, you do get a strong correlation.

Further, in AA’s view, since it’s a disease, once an alcoholic always an alcoholic. You never get over it. Now Bush openly says he was once an alcoholic. He proclaims that Graham saved him from “alcoholism” though, according to Kitty Kelley, Bush was actually saved in a coffee shop discussion with a very wild, evangelical racist down in Texas. The story of Graham was later added to normalize and glamorize the moment and give Bush a connection with other presidents who were close to Graham.

Many in AA would condemn me for these portions of my memoir because in AA we are to keep AA out of any political situations: AA, as an organization, has no political opinions; we avoid political and religious debate because everybody is welcome and can find help in AA, no matter what their religious and political beliefs. Bush, however, is not in AA and so I think I can take him to task, using some of the principles I’ve learned in AA. If he were humble enough to be in AA, I could not write what I shall.

So we can all agree that Bush is a self-proclaimed alcoholic which gives me leave, as a member of AA, to say a few things about his non-AA recovery, though I am not claiming that I can speak for AA as a whole. There is one thing that AA really insists on when the subject is drunks. For a powerless alcoholic to recover who has “no effective defense against that first drink” (that first drink is always the drink which always gets him drunk, not the last one), the drunk must find for himself some power, a spiritual power, to help him when the urge to drink comes over him. As William James, a premier American psychologist and brother to novelist Henry, says, “The only cure I’ve ever found for dipsomania [alcoholism] is religiomania.” For many in America that spiritual force is found, naturally enough, in a “god of their understanding”.

Well… Bush had his moment of truth and I found mine too, both of us at about 40 years of age, but I’ve never heard that Bush’s was as powerful as mine, which is strange since he now walks so closely with god. I had a complete and satisfying “born again” experience in which I was thoroughly lifted up and turned around, my pockets shaken out, before I was set down again. I believe I was a little outside of reality for a time. For nine days (I don’t know why that magic number stays that way) I literally believed that everyone around me were truly but souls trapped in physical bodies. I saw souls when I looked into eyes. Life, as we said, (and some still do) in AA, is a soul in a body having a human experience.

Though I did not become a Christian in my conversion, mine was a very profound and a deeply moving, psychic experience, and it kept me sober for many long years and gave me a useful tool for handling all the guilt and shame I had to deal with and all the problems which came my way along the way. There was a god-like power, I thought, but it wasn’t Jesus, though Jesus seemed one of many fine models to copy a life from. Nowadays, my higher power is AA itself and the wonders of the cause and effect, natural Universe, and my church of the “what’s happening now” in the 12 step meetings I attend.

Now... what about Bush’s sobriety, you ask?

In AA, we’re told to watch out for the god stuff. It’s a heady and dangerous concept for alcoholics new to the god idea. Almost without exception, people who have been profligates and ne’er-do-wells all their adult lives who suddenly find the god concept become suddenly crazy fuckers. Some even seem to be “drunk with the Lord!” which is how many Christians describe the born again times. As alcoholics in our drinking years, we were filled with dreams of vainglory and were puffed up with “grandiose” notions, and we don’t get rid of those tendencies very easily or quickly. We struggle with grandiosity all our lives. Newly sober alcoholics imagine and do all sorts of wild things, thinking all the while they’re doing god’s will. If our advisers don’t restrain us, we wildly run amuck, doing harm and damage on every hand. In order to counter that tendency to headstrong action, we are told to get human advisers to advise us when we go off half-cocked on god power. They mustn’t be “yes” men; they ought to be humble advisers and offer the advice of restraint and caution.

Bush, as I understand it, no more then got sober, and he set off to be governor of Texas, with more to follow, and rather than finding good direction and help in AA with down to earth, sober advisers, he found coattail men around him, people like Carl V. Rove who wanted to make him emperor… well, at least president of something or other…. So, need I say this, after all I’ve written in these last few paragraphs? Isn’t my point clear? All I need ask is, “Who is going off half-cocked around the world to make war, imagining he’s hearing the voice of god telling him to do this and to do that. Who has grandiose dreams of his own self-importance, who postures in a vainglorious manner? Who is a really convincing liar because he believes his own lies?”

If Bush were a friend of mine in AA, I’d sit him down and tell him in the most loving manner possible, with respect and charity, “Hey, ol’ buddy, I fear you’re off on a dry drunk. Time to sit down, be still, listen to your Jesus, and get off the power trip.” Unfortunately, none of the people near him would or will tell him that. They don’t have the AA experience. They don’t know how dangerous a recovering drunk can be when he first gets the god tool in his power mad hands. They’re on power trips too, using him and riding his coattails for all he’s worth. Consequence world chaos.

Herein lies the end of Part Two. Only one more part to go, Dave, my imaginary relationship inside the SR. Part three and last section will tell how I went from a moral, judgmental point of view of reality (Bush’s way) to a scientific view, but that’s a tale for tomorrow.

LETTERS TO DAVE: AN ATHEIST’S PROGRESS

What will follow for the next three days is the odyssey of a rake from a time not too long past his third divorce, caused by too much moral thinking, and his arrival upon the shores of atheism some ten years later where he finds himself a changed and more honorable man through adopting selfishness as his code.

My treatise is in the form of three letters to a certain Dave fellow, almost a stranger that our man picks on to reveal himself. Some have called this a sign of boundary problems, to be too open too soon and with too much candor. Others might see this as the sign of a conscience which no longer has need to hide.


Dear Dave,

Here’s a true story about morality, lies, god, me, George Bush, alcoholism and sociobiology.


PART ONE: THE BIG LIE

Back in the late 70’s or early 80’s during Rodeo week in Cheney, for two years in a row someone raped a girl in the Eastern dormitories. I was sober by that time, living on campus in the Vets’ dorm called Sutton Hall. I knew a guy named Pete from my drinking days in Cheney, and he had lived in Sutton Hall for a couple of years too, and that second year, I happened to notice that he flipped out just about the time of the rape.

Pete began walking around town in shorts alone, barefoot, claiming that his house had burned down. He also climbed into his best friend’s house through a window a couple of times to sleep on his couch even though Pete’s house had actually not burned down. I grew suspicious. Gossiping around, I learned that Pete had once slugged a woman in the face with a beer mug down at Goofy’s, the local hippy bar in Cheney. He was a reputed party animal too and well known among the hard-drinking veterans, and I noticed that, for all his partying, he never had a girlfriend.

Putting all my evidence together, I came up with the conclusion that Pete was the rapist. By straightforwardly gossiping my suspicion around town in my usual devious manner, eventually, my suspicion drifted into the campus cops’ ears, and they showed up at Sutton Hall looking for me.

“Why do you think Pete is the rapist?” they asked.

“Unh….” Then, when I realized I had nothing to go on except a few wild hairs up my ass, I turned beet red, lamely mentioned my evidence, and that, as they say, was the end of that.

One of reasons I thought Pete might be a rapist was the fact he couldn’t seem to get a girlfriend and that “… men without girlfriends are likely to be rapists because they are women haters”, I lectured, looking down into the face of a little person, literally, who was a cop on the Cheney campus police department at the time, realizing as I said this that I thought he probably couldn’t get a girlfriend either. Boy, was I eating my words!

An aside—years later when that midget campus cop left Cheney, he happened to pull up in a huge Cadillac to say goodbye to a mutual acquaintance who I was chatting with beside the street. In the passenger seat beside the little guy was his very attractive, nicely built, full size wife.

Well, anyway, back to the rape case. That afternoon, after being completely humiliated, I was driving into Spokane to go to work. I worked evenings. I felt very uncomfortable, guilty about my unfounded suspicions, embarrassed by the whole interrogation process and being forced to face my own stupidity.

Now at this time in my early sobriety AA was trying to teach me that I had to question my motives in all matters to find the truth of my situation or bad feelings like these could lead a man back to drinking. So I was asking myself why I had jumped to my conclusion… “why, out of all the damn people in Cheney and the Rodeo visitors and cowboys, why did I single out this one poor bastard to lay my suspicion on.”

Didn’t take me long to build the case against myself once I got serious about looking into myself. The guy had once sold me a faulty camera, and I was too shamed to ask for my money back. He was a popular party animal, so I imagined, and I was a recovering drunk who felt very unpopular about himself a good deal of the time. He was a wise guy who once questioned me as to why I would do such of stupid thing as to get sober in AA. And finally, my girlfriend, who was breaking up with me, once said a complimentary thing about Pete’s partying ways which made me feel small and once attended a party he was attending so, of course, she must have slept with him at that time or was soon going to sleep with him in the future.

All this driving self-evaluation was very uncomfortable. I was inside the Spokane city limits and didn’t even know how I got there. Then I learned another thing about lying and the frail nature of human reality: I now knew how I had used all these bad motives to make a decision about another human being, but then, I realized, with a powerful jolt, an even deeper truth, that not only did I think he was guilty, I also wanted him to be guilty! Quite a jolt!

Ever since that day, I don’t listen with the same ear to anything that anybody tells me about themselves, about others, about anything! I don’t care if the man’s the president of the United States, he’s as human as I am and as capable of self-delusion as I am, of lying to himself and others without blinking an eye, and basically, we can lie so easily because we are all frequently capable of lying to ourselves first and for devious reasons. It makes the world a very relativistic place to live in—to realize that all people are just like me, with those capacities for self-deception, even the men who write the things which are in a book, no matter how holy they think they are.

More asides—turns out that Pete may have been the rapist because he soon left town and no more rapes occurred. Also he ended up in prison because he later stabbed his father in the back with a broken beer bottle. Final irony—as I was looking the midget detective in the eye with my silly claims, he was looking back at me as one of the men on his list of suspects. What I didn’t know until years later was that all men who lived on campus and who owned a denim jacket were on the list of suspects. I owned such a jacket.

And… Pete did sleep with my ex-girlfriend.

[This very last detail I only guess at because of a few comments Pete made to me when he returned to Cheney years later, ex-con and all, and I put it in because of the wonderful irony and fitting conclusion that it brings to this first part of my essay.]

Even as I argue with you and the editors of the Spokesman, I fall in and out of anger and kindness, of self-justification and lies, false accusations and true, true revelations and deceptions, honest moments and false…. And I know that you all have the same flaws because you are human animals too, just like me, just like George Bush, with similar psychological mechanisms for interpreting the evidence pouring into your senses. You can’t escape your human biology no matter what you do, because we all live in such fictions and each of us makes up the world we live in as the moments flit by and we go on. In fact some evidence suggests that none of us are in the least bit in touch with the reality outside our ears. Which brings me to sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, more about alcoholism, and the world of reality outside the average, value-based reality we are all trapped in. That will be in the next section in my next email to you. Please stay tuned… please… for my animal ego with its need for status among the writer clan (the evidence shows that all animals have that need) craves it.

THE DRUNK AIN’T PRETTY

He’s peeing blood and his teeth are yellow/brown. Some of them are missing. He’s fallen down recently, he doesn’t recall when, and through his thin, curly gray hair, a nasty scabbed over gash shows. He tells you he shit his pants a few days back and that the fire department came once to fish him out of a snow bank where he was waiting to die. People have had to bring him home from the bar from time to time because he’s so drunk he can’t walk or drive home. When he’s not laughing, he’s crying. He transitions from tears to laughter rapidly.

He won’t go into detox where people trained to recognize seizures and impending heart attacks can watch him because, “It’s dirty down there. Sheets full of blood, piss, shit and I don’t know what. No. No. I won’t go down there.” He takes your hand and squeezes it, fond of you, loving you, accepting your love because that’s all he thinks he has in the world. He doesn’t know all the love out there for the taking because he doesn’t feel he’s worth it, that he’s earned it.

In the drunk’s world, all love is earned or achieved. You gotta earn it. No one loves you for nothing. You get what you pay for and nothing more nor less. It’s a dog eat dog world out there, and he’s failed somehow miserably to measure up, and he feels like a school boy who long ago missed school one day when the teacher gave out the secret to life. He keeps failing the tests of life. He’s been lost ever since, all his life long in fact. Can’t you see that, damn it!

Out there, beyond the drunk, someplace, he fear’s there really is a secret to life, and now he’s too old to get it, to ever escape the constant sense of failure and doom he feels. The pain is unbearable, and no one has ever hurt like he hurts. So why don’t you just shut the fuck up and quit trying to help him? Helping him, caring about what happens to him, only makes him feel even more shamed, miserable and futile. He’d rather die, but he doesn’t have the courage even for that. He’d make a mess of that too. So just leave him alone, let him die slowly, one drink at a time. It ain’t pretty, and I don’t know many who can make there way out of that hole, even if they wanted to.


A KYRS RADIO SHOW POR MOIS?

Recently I listened to a talk by Lupito Flores who was instrumental in getting KYRS, our local, low power radio station, up and running. Spokane is the biggest city with a low power station anywhere in the U.S. I went so far as to imagine and speak to Flores about a radio show called, “Recovery”. I imagined taking my AA program and its twelve steps and enlarging their recovery goals to take in all kinds of recovery, recovery from religions and from faulty thinking of all kinds. I imagined pushing for Jung’s “individuation” as an enlightened goal for all. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a tremendous ego it takes to imagine that I could come up with a one size fits all solution to human biological engineering.

I also listened to religious shows, self-help gurus and infomercials with a new ear and knew that I would be little more than one more voice selling in the wilderness, a bazaar hawker promoting his intellectual wares to a naive public. Of course I have an answer for myself. It works fine for me for the most part, but will it work for others? I’d just end up fighting with the intellectual hawkers in the booths next to mine. What good would that do?

Actually, I believe in a very simple formula. I believe each of us must find a safe enough mental reality in which each of us would be so comfortable, so comfortable in our individual myths, that we don’t need to hawk it to other people in order to pick up numbers of believers to bolster our own weakly held mythologies. That’s hard to do, and I’m a long way from achieving my own goal. In fact, I’ll probably disappear from the face of the earth with little progress toward my goal, but for the most part I’m okay with my current condition.

A radio show could be conceived of which just encourages people sharing but not arguing over their belief stories. A discussion in which each speaker shares their own thoughts and perhaps uses other’s thoughts to spring from to their own thoughts, a mutually encouraging series of enlightened sharing (call in?). However, to show you one of my fears, I imagined immediately that such a show would be hijacked by fundamentalist callers. That’s right and I couldn‘t sit still and let them share their own feelings about their paths because I’m afraid of proselytizers who want to make their beliefs my beliefs and who are not happy just sitting in their own visions peacefully.

Eventually, I heard myself say to me in my imagination, “I have nothing to offer the world that it doesn’t already know if it would be but honest with itself.”

[PS: However, in finally typing this up, I did see that if I made “individuation” as a human goal, religious people who believe in a great god who directs their every action would not qualify as individuated persons. Therefore, my goal could be accommodated under the rubric of recovery while discouraging fundamentalists from dominating the radio conversation.]


A FRIGHTENING THOUGHT FROM FLORES’S TALK

Rupert Murdock’s media empire reaches 80% of the people in the world now, and he doesn’t in the least believe in economic and political justice for anyone other than himself and his rich buddies. He’s a dark international force for the freedom of the powerful to dominate the existence of the poor.
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“Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.” —Rex Stout

NANOBOTS AND GODLESS IMMORTALITY

Recently, I’ve come across several anecdotal reports that Christians are saying more frequently that they’re ready to face the afterlife which they anticipate will soon be upon the human race when the rapture comes. They happily anticipate it. That’s all well and good, but I see a complicating factor ahead for their rosy anticipation.

A real test is coming. Scientists predict that soon science may be able to loose nanobots to run around in human bodies and repair damage and destroy disease. If aging is only a disease, then science can begin to use the word “immortal” in connection with living human beings.

What will Christians and other religious (with afterlives in their mythologies) do when faced with a choice of living eternally on earth with the rest of us skeptics or going to see their makers? Will they accept eternal life without god or will they suddenly discover the sacrament of suicide in their holy books?

HEARTS AND MINDS INSEPARABLE

Now America’s trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi’s. Many years back, we tried to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. In both cases our heartfelt attempts to win other’s hearts and minds were accompanied by weapons of mass destruction leveled by our troops against their troops and civilians too.

However, to the skeptic the best recent result in winning hearts and minds that he’s aware of is the worldwide craze for the Beetles and other bug groups back in the 60s and 70s. In that case, the Soviet hearts and minds who smuggled in Beetle records (with their freedom, joy and peace-oriented spirit) and other voices and ideas of the 60s were so won over that when their turn came to rule their nation, they brought in glasnost and the end of yet another dictatorship. That Ronald Reagan's devotees want to give him credit for ending the USSR is a travesty of justice and a bad misreading of history. Peace and love brought peace and love to the USSR, not the guns of capitalism.

Let’s hope that American neocons don’t make the world so inhospitable for peace and love that Gorbachev becomes a bad word in the Russian language. He and other young people in the Soviet Union were the hidden hippies in Russia who loved freedom and peace so much that they almost peacefully ended a dictatorship. If America continues to be a nation for empire, led by religious and political fools, many in Russia may rue that they chose peace and freedom and put down their guard. Like North Korea, they may again build up their weapons of mass destruction to defend against the American neocon’s aim of world domination.

But let me throw another curve in here while speaking of peace and love. According to studies in consciousness, the hearts and minds to be won are not separated in the human body, and we all certainly know that the heart muscle is not the seat of emotions no more than the brain is exactly the entire cause of thinking. One is the other and vice-versa. Feeling and thought lie on a continuum of synaptical firings out of which emerge the sensations we call thought and emotion. The process by which one experiences an emotion is similar to the process which produces a thought. Each is little more than a chemical electrical phenomena.

Understanding these distinctions, these bodily biological processes, will do more for world peace than all the wars and propaganda in the world meant to win “hearts and minds”. When a science educated humankind begins to see that all its fondest causes and purposes are barely more than animal mechanical processes, the humility we gain from that knowledge alone should undermine the most dedicated terrorist whose high religious purposes will be reduced to little more than animal urges in a world which understands the mechanisms of human behavior.

In future, terrorists and all rigid idealists whose fear drenched thinking drives them to violence will be laughed at by those in the know rather than encouraged in their follies. Skeptics already laugh at the high-minded follies of the disillusioned idealists of the world. They stand on the lip of an imaginary hill, awaiting the rest of mankind to lift up its eyes from their evolutionary roots in struggle and mistrust and come join them where vision is cleared by rational thinking. The superstitious religious have certainly had their millenniums and have failed to produce peace. Now is a time to let skepticism have a century or two.
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"Which is it, is man one of god's blunders or is god one of man's" —Friederich N. (1844-1900)

IN A FEW DAYS, PREPARE FOR A THREE PART POSTING. . .

Stay tuned. Another long and personal memoir is soon coming, in which I reveal a big lie from my past, why Bush is such an effective liar, and how I moved from looking at reality through a pair of cloudy moral glasses and put on a more realistic pair of science glasses. Three parts and three postings. Two are already done, but I won't start until I know I have all three ready.


AGAIN, RELEASE IS IN SUFFERING WITH COMPASSION

One trouble I have with Joseph as he presents his myths. Sometimes, I think he's a little too much enamored of suffering, and I'm still not sure how much suffering is necessary for the human animal. Do other animals suffer except the necessity of suffering physical pain and death or moments of mortal terror when attacked by predators? Ain't that enough suffering for anybody? But, then, a recent post mentioned how immature it is for us to set our sights on "happiness" as a human goal. Now is it really immature to seek happiness? Why? Just as long as we're prepared to accept that the best laid plans of mice and men "aft gang awry" and accept the ups with downs and Epson Downs.

From MYTHS TO LIVE BY, Joseph Campbell, pp. 159-160:

[Open quote.]
The most widely revered Oriental personification of such a world-affirming attitude, transcending opposites, is that figure of boundless compassion already discussed at considerable length, the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, known to China and Japan as Kuan Yin, Kwannon (supra, pp. 138—140). For, in contrast to the Buddha, who at the conclusion of his lifetime of teaching passed away, never to return, this infinitely compassionate one, V who renounced for himself eternal release to remain forever in this vortex of rebirths, represents through all time the mystery of a knowledge of eternal release while living. The liberation thus taught is, paradoxically, not of escape from the vortex, but of full participation voluntarily in its sorrows—moved by compassion; for indeed, through selflessness one is released from self, and with release from self there is release—from desire and fear. And as the Bodhisattva is thus released, so too are we, according to the measure of our experience of the perfection of compassion.

It is said that ambrosia pours from the Bodhisattva’s fingertips even to the deepest pits of Hell, giving comfort there to the souls still locked in the torture chambers of their passions. We are told, furthermore, that in all our dealings with each other we are his agents, whether knowingly or not. Nor is it the aim of the Bodhisattva to change—or, as we like to say, to “improve”—this temporal world. Conflict, tension, defeats, and victories are inherent in the nature of things, and what the Bodhisattva is doing is participating in the nature of things. He is benevolence without purpose. And since all life is sorrowful, and necessarily so, the answer cannot lie in turning—or “progressing”—from one form of life to another, but only in dissolving the organ of suffering itself, which—as we have seen—is the idea of an ego to be preserved, committed to its own compelling concepts of what is good and what is evil, true and false, right and wrong; which dichotomies—as we have likewise seen—are dissolved in the metaphysical impulse of compassion.
[Close quote.]

What am I to make of this? I grew tired of suffering, yet I can see that when I was blindly suffering, drinking and struggling, I was also feeling compassion for the plight of others from time to time. How often did I say between gritted teeth that, "As long as there is one poor person in the world, I don't want any money!" Man, that was painful!

Such a statement sounds silly to me, now, in my recovering days. Pompous, grandiose! Yet I did suffer my suffering till I could suffer no longer. I embraced my suffering with a stupefying willingness that I now find incomprehensible. But in all this suffering the Buddha speaks of, I don't see anywhere that the sufferer has to be mindful and fully aware of suffering's purpose in order that his suffering may be worthy of enlightenment. In the telling of it, which comes out of the enlightenment that some suffering can force on one, then suffering seems to have a purpose, but when one is in the arms of his sadistic lover, suffering seems eternal and pointless. Suffering can be just blind, stupid and still be worthy. Mixed in with all self-pitying suffering, there is usually concomitantly, a real sorrow for the suffering of others in the world about us. Maybe at certain times during the suffering process one's own suffering and his compassion for others are not extricable because no enlightenment has yet come to the sufferer. So how can he know the purpose of his suffering until the suffering is done?

Still, let me interject here, I've had all the suffering I need. I can no longer see anything holy or enlightening in it. Those who are wise enough not to suffer needlessly are the ones to seek out for wisdom. Second, those who had to suffer but who truly wished to escape and made some effort toward that end also have something to say. Those who still hate life and who still clutch their suffering to them like a robe of many colors should be shunned as one shuns the embrace of an open flame.
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[Speaking of which.]: "The happiest time in any man's life is just after the first divorce." —John Kenneth Galbraith [Well... that depends on if.... See below.]

"I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep a house." —Zsa Zsa Gabor

I LIKE HER AS A PERSON BUT. . . FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD . . .
WHAT THE HELL IS SHE THINKING, WHAT CENTURY DOES SHE INHABIT?

To see how deeply the Spokesman’s head is up… well… you know… (in the clouds) here’s a recent column from medieval correspondent, Rebecca Nappi, who reports from the heart of darkest Rome, straight from the Vatican during a recent inquisition investigation.

My response, in all its glory, follows her column. As presented to the SR editorial board, my reply drew hostile fire. This is a long one, folks, so settle your britches and hang on… .

[Open quote.]
Evil reveals complexity of humanity

Rebecca Nappirebecca Nappi
The Spokesman-Review
March 2, 2005

In the summer of 1966, Richard Speck murdered eight nurses in Chicago. I was in sixth grade and read everything I could about it. I did the same a few years later when serial killer Ted Bundy surfaced in Seattle. But as an adult, I've lost my fascination with serial killers, because no one has figured out exactly what makes them tick. If we can't understand them, then everyone we love is vulnerable to their madness.

There's enough to worry about in this world, so I had no intention to read much about Dennis Rader of Kansas, the 59-year-old man suspected of murdering at least 10 people in the Wichita area. But then, in our Sunday story about him, one detail caught my attention.

The serial killer once wrote, "I can't stop it so the monster goes on and hurts me as well as society. It's a big complicated game my friend the monster play, putting victims number down, follow them, checking up on them, waiting in the dark, waiting, waiting."

Was this "monster" actually Satan? Read M. Scott Peck's latest book, "Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption," and you'll ponder the possibility. Peck's book, a swift seller at Amazon.com, is generating some fascinating buzz on spirituality Web sites.

The best explanation of evil I've encountered is in Peck's 1983 book, "People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil." In it, he says that at several points in people's lives, they face moral decisions.

Decide one way and innocent people suffer. Evil ensues. The child an adult brutally beats, for instance, will learn violence firsthand and possibly spread it. Evil escalates, Peck believes, when adults refuse to get help to change their harmful behavior.

"When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder," Peck writes. "Evil is also that which kills spirit. Evil is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness."

"People of the Lie" is not about Satan, though Peck briefly discusses two exorcisms he witnessed as a young psychiatrist. He always hoped to write more about the exorcisms before he died. Peck is in his late 60s now, and he has Parkinson's disease. He says "Glimpses of the Devil" will be his final book.

In it, Peck describes exorcisms he performed on two women, Jersey and Beccah. Neither woman seemed likely candidates for possession. Both had been religious. Both had families, education and intelligence. Both wished to be healed from what was considered mainstream mental illness.

Though Peck believes demonic possession is real, he also believes it is extremely rare. He concludes that the women chose to collude with their demonic freeloaders. And they also had to choose to kick them out. Jersey did. Beccah didn't.

The book, written in an almost clinical tone, is no "Exorcist." Still, it's scary as hell. Beccah, for instance, returned from vacations with shockingly deep suntans, because she always felt ice cold inside. The night I finished the book, I didn't sleep well.

The book stirs questions about the true nature of evil. If Rader is the serial killer, how could a devout Lutheran, a man married for 30 years, a father of two, a responsible professional, coldly murder so many people? At one point in the serial killer's life, he faced a choice. He could murder that first victim. Or he could seek help for the compulsion to do so. He allegedly chose to kill. Did the devil make him do it?

I wish it were that simple. But evil is a complex mystery. Every day, people make destiny-altering choices. They get drunk as skunks and drive that way, their children in the car with them. They abuse others, through words and deeds. They refuse psychological and spiritual help when needed and offered. They choose actions that crush the spirits of others, in small ways and in big.

And we're all capable of this kind of evil, no doubt about it. That might be the scariest thought of all.
[Close quote.]


Dear Editorial Board,

Rebecca Nappi’s muddled and uninformative essay on Wednesday about “evil” is a clear example of what I’ve been saying about the fact that no one on your paper represents a rational, useful and clear-eyed point of view on current events. She added nothing to anyone’s understanding of human behavior and so her column was a waste of everybody’s time.

I read a few of Peck’s earlier works, when he was still a bit more sensible, but he’s fallen off the edge now, so to speak. S. J. Gould did a good job of picking apart Peck’s theories of human behavior quite some time ago, and I wish I could recall which of Gould’s essays performed the vivisection so that I could recommend it to the Board.

Who cares whether we call an act “good”, “evil”, “cute”, “bad” or “criminal”? Labeling an act by any name yields not the slightest information of why the act appeared in the behavior repertoire of an individual human being. None whatsoever. Historically, labeling never stops an act from occurring again, never has, and it doesn’t really explain the behavior. If it did, the human race would have had only to experience one Hitler. So Rebecca’s column was just an exercise in futility and commiseration. She waved a soggy handkerchief at the problem of human behavior and turned her back on some potentially real answers.

I’ll cut to the conclusion that Rebecca should have arrived at: an appeal for more funding for the scientific research of evolutionary psychology and a genetic understanding of the real causes of human behavior. In those fields some real understanding of human behavior is already being uncovered. Over and over I’ve recommended to your august company some of the names of those books for your reading pleasure. However, none of the solid and useful information from those books seem to be getting into your paper.

Human behavior does not occur in the way that most under-educated Americans think it does. Really, to hear most people talk, you’d think that all the sensory data which bombards the human animal every second goes to some little room in the brain where sits a homunculus (or soul, armed or unarmed with moral imperatives) which reviews all the arriving data for its moral content then selects from a repertoire of action levers on the wall beside it and pulls one or another to achieve some moral purpose. You’d also think that two other creatures also inhabit this control room, one which tells the little homunculus to chose the good action lever and one which urges it to pull the other lever. If you listen to most babble and commiseration about human behavior, you’ll see that’s what underlies most people’s simplistic idea of how behavior erupts from the human psyche. Nothing could be farther from the truth. How stupid, uninformed and actually immoral in it’s callous disregard for the knowledge being developed that could eventually change human behavior to more constructive ends.

I’ve got a lot more to say about the hows and whys of human behavior, but why should I bother? No one listens down there anyhow and we get the same old religious nonsense to explain everything. I’ll once more recommend a book by a scholar in behavior: Stephen Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”. Then when you finish that book packed with information, look in its index for other books about the whole issue of the evolution of human consciousness and the solid information being developed about human behavior. Anything less on your Board’s part is criminal neglect of your job or, at least, dereliction of duty. I keep appealing to your duty to inform your readers rather than to stroke their ignorance.

Sincerely,

Geo

PS: Really, Rebecca, a Yale graduate, you should be ashamed of yourself for supporting such superstitious nonsense to explain human behavior. Could it be correct that George Bush was right when he said the admission of women into Yale was the downfall of that institution? Please don’t make Bush and Harvard’s current president right nor let us male supporters of feminism down. Show that you do have the ability to think scientifically. I’ll support you one hundred percent.
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“I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a break.” —Alexandre Dumas the Younger

“I’ll take the part of the rogue!” —George Thomas the Only. Now that Dad Senior’s dead.

FUCKIN-A, MAN: THE FIFTH AND HIGHEST FORM OF LOVE

Man, I've been burned by the passion of love more than I care to tell you, specially in the sense that the troubadours sing of it, when the real fuck blends into the spiritual maelstrom, and a man destroys his "sacred" and "lawful" marriage and risks everything just to get a little strange on the side.

"Among the troubadours...," says Campbell, "the beloved to them was a woman, not the manifestation of some divine principle; and specifically, "that" woman. The love was for "her". And the celebrated experience was an agony of earthly love: an effect of the fact that the union of love can never be absolutely realized on this earth." (MTLB, p. 163)

By way of further illumination, the following rumination is from Campbell's lectures in MYTHS TO LIVE BY, pp. 156-157:

[Open quote.]
And so now, finally, what is the fifth, the highest order of love, according to this Indian series? It is passionate, illicit love. In marriage, it is declared, one is still possessed of reason. One still enjoys the goods social position, and the rest. Moreover, marriage in the Orient is a family-made arrangement, having nothing whatsoever to do with what in the West we now think of as love. The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one’s dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. And the aim of such a love can be only that of the moth in the image of Hallaj: to be annihilated in love’s fire. In the legend of the Lord Krishna, the model is given of the passionate yearning of the young incarnate god for his mortal married mistress, Radha, and of her reciprocal yearning for him. To quote once again the mystic Ramakrishna, who in his devotion to the goddess Kali was himself, all his life, such a lover: when one has loved God in this way, sacrificing all for the vision of his face, “O my Lord,” one can say, “now reveal thyself!” and he will have to respond.

There is the figure also, in India, of the Lord Krishna playing his flute at night in the forest of Vrindavan, at the sound of whose irresistible strains young wives would slip from their husbands’ beds and, stealing to the moonlit wood, dance the night through with their beautiful young god in transcendent bliss.

The underlying thought here is that in the rapture of love one is transported beyond temporal laws and relationships, these pertaining only to the secondary world of apparent separateness and multiplicity. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in the same spirit, sermonizing in the twelfth century on the Biblical text of the Song of Songs, represented the yearning of the soul for God as both beyond the law and beyond reason. Moreover, the excruciating separation and conflict of the two orders of moral commitment, of reason on one hand, and passionate love on the other, have been a source of Christian anxiety since the beginning. “The desires of the flesh are against the “Spirit,” wrote Saint Paul, for example, to the Galatians, “and the desires of the Spirit, against the flesh.”
[Close quote.]

Speaking of "Radha", Krishna's passion, his "mortal married mistress"—in Spokane, over in Brown's Addition, sits a nice house with a view on the edge of the Spokane River. And in the nicely appointed garage of that house is taught and practiced Radha Yoga, a practice I took two lessons in a very short time ago, but as in all things where "divine" things are spoken of or a "divine light" summoned, Radha Yoga didn't work for me.

I can't get out of my body to spiritual things. Perhaps that's why for me sex was so spiritual and so fraught with the delicate delights of suffering and risk taking. The troubadours must have had the same spiritual problem.

"Hey, out there, I'm trapped," I shout/think.

"O, yeah, guess you'll have to accept it," another, rational voice replies.
__________________________________________________________

"Is sex better than drugs? That depends on the pusher." —unknown author

PSYCHIATRY HAS MADE A FEW MISTAKES

I thought this was a particularly poignant example of a serious mistake that psychiatry has made, but I don’t introduce this to be anti-psychology, like those who speak mindlessly about “psychobabble”. They usually are still in denial about the things that have reduced them to a permanent case of infantilism. To put down psychiatry is their way of letting us know that, “I’m regressed but I don’t know it.”

“The effects of such lobotomies are well illustrated in the movies Francis and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I myself have observed their devastating results. The first patient with whom I attempted psychotherapy had taken off all her clothes one day and run around the streets of her home town screaming, ‘My father is the handsomest goddamn drunk in [X], Pennsylvania!’ She was subsequently hospitalised and then was lobotomised within six weeks. She often continued to shout, ‘My father is the handsomest goddamn drunk in [X], Pennsylvania,’ but she would not take off her clothes or otherwise express her clearly ambivalent and partially sexual feelings toward her father, because she would immediately forget what she was shouting about. Unable to concentrate for more than ten seconds at a time, she was unable to obtain a job outside the hospital or live with relatives. She had, in effect, been sentenced to life imprisonment for having expressed her feelings in a socially inappropriate way. Although lobotomies are now greatly reduced, destructive techniques are far from ancient history.” (from Robyn Dawes’s HOUSE OF CARDS, p. 49)


CHARITY, A PARTICULARLY LIBERAL THING TO DO

Premise: the government under liberals used to practice a pure form of charity. Under current conservative leadership and since sometime in the near past, say since Reagan, pure forms of charity have almost disappeared.

Have you noticed the number of drunks and drifters currently standing on street corners in most major cities of the U.S., holding up their begging bowls, er… signs? Even women have joined them. The question we should be asking ourselves is why this has happened. Drunks have been with us forever, but when I was child and youth, they weren’t standing on street corners. Not that I mind them standing on street corners. After all, if they’re begging for a living, conservative meanies can’t charge drunks with being on welfare, can they? Drunks on street corners with begging signs are earning their living in a not too agreeable way, but they’re at least earning a living. Most Americans who denigrate them probably wouldn’t have the courage to earn their own keeps in that way. They’d steal first, they’d take from the poor and give to the rich. They’d get their Ivy League college buddies to give them a job. That’s how they’d do it if they were brought up in Bush circles and were not too bright. That’s what Bush himself did. That’s Bush-league charity: you rub my back and I’ll rub yours. No charity at all. Do you think Bush would have gotten where he is in a fair test of skills and abilities?

In the past, under liberal leadership, the absolutely destitute drunk could get help and didn’t have to stand on street corners. Believe it or not, a drunk or hobo could get enough pure charity from Democratic government to exist without going to the curbside. Taking their cue from the mythological words of the mythological Jesus (who neocons claim to have close relations with), liberals didn’t judge the drunk. They just pitched in and built a governmental system that helped him. That’s pure charity, charity without strings, charity as it should be practiced if it’s to be called “charity”.

Now, under conservative leadership, pure charity has disappeared. It’s been lobotomized right out of the American consciousness. It’s been replaced by coercive giving, giving with puppet strings attached. Now, the drunk must kowtow to conservative values to get charity, or she must go to Bush’s religious charities to get a hot and a cot. Now government force is being used to make a drunk get Bush’s religion in order to find any help at all. Do it Bush’s way or starve. That’s right, government is now a Christian front organization. Charity has disappeared altogether to be replaced by coercion and bribery. There is no real charity under neocon systems.

In fact, if conservatives were honest, they’d admit that under their forms of governance, charity doesn’t exist. To a conservative, to need charity is already to be judged as unworthy of it. If you need charity, you don’t deserve charity. That’s the Catch 22 of conservative compassion. Even a mother with children is not worthy of help, not even the widow. “Send them to work,” conservative’s say. Never mind that welfare mothers can’t find affordable day care for their children. Screw the children, conservatives say. They say this not with words, because then we’d know them openly for what they are. They say it with every bill they pass and every regulation they level against the poor.

“Every man has three characters—that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.” —Alphonse Karr [Now this one tells on us all, eh?]

A LETTER TO CAL THOMAS

I don’t know whether or not Cal read this email essay I sent to him, but it was gone for almost a week before it came back with an "unable to deliver" message attached. I thought that only took 24 hours. Well, anyway, someone read it. Here ‘tis for you to read.

Dear Cal Thomas,

May I quote you?

“This is why the slippery slope analogy applies in cases such as stem cell research. Having abandoned an Author and definer of life, it quickly becomes possible and then probable that any value attached to a living thing — particularly a human being — is simply a matter of individual or societal whim. Such values, like a fluctuating stock market, may change at any moment and for any reason, or no reason.” —Cal Thomas

I’m a modern day atheist by which I mean I’m not like Stalin whose stint as a seminarian made him a vicious ideologue in the other direction once he decided that religion tended to keep people meek and in their place so that others could run over them. Then he promptly ran over them just like the Christian ideologue Hitler ran over those opposed to his ideology. It’s ideology that makes people mean, not pragmatism, and I resent your implication that just because I believe in reason and science I’m less human than those who adopt the irrationality and superstition of religious faith. Religious superstition and irrationality have caused just as much if not more harm than science ever did.

All changes are for reason though the reasons are not always the obvious ones. Change may be a result of unconscious processes hidden in our evolutionary natures or through false reasoning, for examples, but to speak of “no reason” is to speak of a logical impossibility.

When I look at the misguided reasons that led to our attacking Iraq and, in fact, the whole history of human behavior, including moral reasoning to conclusions for behavior, I see nothing but whim involved on every hand. To bring whim in as a cause for poor judgment in genetic matters is a canard. Further, for solid logical conclusions, I’ll put my trust in top notch scientists any day above a trust in moralists and theologians who are likely to let dogma decide matters of importance without reference to common sense or logic.

There is no group of people who more “value” the human condition than atheists who put humankind at the center of the universe and, thus, make him fully responsible for every action she takes, whereas, though they don’t admit to it as often as they ought, religionists often lay blame for bad things on forces beyond human will. Evolutionary psychology (see Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate) is giving us a much clearer picture of the springs of human behavior than that imaginary story about the fruit of a badly identified fruit tree and some sexy and tempting woman of six thousand years back.

Now to another column of Cal Thomas’s:

When you were lecturing others in another column recently about fiduciary responsibility, you credited Daddy with helping you and blamed others who might not be so lucky as you because their Daddies didn’t do the job your Daddy did. Do you see how you blamed the child for the father’s actions without really seeing what you did? And you claim to have Bible knowledge which tells you about the sins of the father being visited on the son, etcetera? See… moral reasoning is so relative, isn’t it? Escapes us at times, the full implications of what we moralize about?

Further, why do some people with no parental guidance succeed where others with good parents not “amount to much”, whatever that means? And maybe some of us got good guidance from our parents but were freer spirits than you were and so experimented more than you dared to experiment because, perhaps they feared their daddies less than you did? Some of those freer spirits may have succeeded wildly beyond your level of success. And then other free spirits may have failed because they tried some pretty zany ways to succeed. I think you are being pretty simplistic when you just claim that people succeed to the same measure that their daddies taught them to succeed.

Also, another logical error. If the good old days were better and, presumably, fathers were better teachers then than currently, how did we fall off, why and when did the teaching go awry? How did the good teaching go bad since good teaching, according to your claim, leads to right action? There should be no falling off according to your logic. Good teaching leads to good teaching leads to good teaching, ad infinitum. So, if your good teaching paid off, your teacher had nothing to do with it unless you can logically explain why others fell away from their good teaching teaching. Was it because they were genetically freer spirits, less afraid of their fathers while you were more tightly bound to your father's belt strap? More afraid? Many things to consider here, eh?

Another thing you give no credit to is your good fortune. You should be grateful for your good teaching and for your good genes and not be so busy judging others. The genes which give me a 127 IQ are no credit to me but to my parents. They’re the luck of the draw. The genes which give you more aggression than a meeker man are no credit to you either. I bear no credit for the genes which make me more sensitive than some others. They drove me crazy for some time. Genetic makeup is why great creative genius is born and not made. For the more average sort, like you and me, perhaps effort might have something to do with our survivability but that’s not much difference.

We were both given middleclass values because we were lucky to be born into the manner. That is if you are middleclass and did not go to Ivy League schools which, if you study the class system in America, certainly give opportunity for networking and advancement even for a mediocre mentality like that of George Bush Junior. His genes, like so many of the genes of financially and socially successful people, don’t lead to brilliance, but they do lead to aggressive pursuit and tenacity in the rough going. Again, just a matter of genes. I don’t deny that each of us has some wiggle room within the constraints of our genetic makeup, but it’s less wiggle and more wattle than most would imagine.

I’ve spent a good part of my life with those less successful in adapting to social pressures. Most of them don’t have the genetic drive nor intelligence to really thrive in our current complex society. It was much easier when all one had to do was shove a stick in the dirt, drop a seed, and pray for rain and sunshine. That cultural complexity is the current variable that is leaving so many peoples in the dust, unable to successfully adapt. Culture is beginning to bring an adaptive pressure to bear, and that’s the subject of much evolutionary psychology.

Sorry to have gone on so long, but let me make this last consideration. I think conservatives would be a nicer lot if they felt a little more gratitude for their genes and a lot less time congratulating themselves on their imagined moral superiority.
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“Only a [an old-fashioned] mother would think her daughter has been a good girl when she returns from a date with a Gideon Bible in her handbag.” —Frank McKinney Hubbard