Stephen J. Gallagher

"Trust Falls"

2012-01-26T11:21:00.000-08:00

Back in my days as a young corporate scrounger, my manager sent a bunch of us to one of those shiny corporate "team-building retreats." It was a great way to dine well (and drink well) on the corporate Amex card, while the work piled up (and piled up … and piled up …) back at the office. One of the many trendy "team-building exercises" they inflicted on us was a little thing called "trust falls". For those of you who haven't had the chance to suffer through this embarrassing experience, here's the premise: you stand there with a bunch of your peers behind you, and you let yourself fall back. Their job is to catch your fall, preventing you from injuring your skull (or your ass, or your pride) by landing on the floor with a resounding "clunk." Anyone who's ever participated in this odd, ill-conceived bit of silliness can tell you that it is both degrading to all participants and ineffective in achieving its intended purpose. Did my coworkers and I walk out of that retreat imbued with one ounce more trust in each other than when we walked in? Of course not; we went right back to our desks and right back to slitting each other's throats and screwing each other over for any inch of advantage on the bitter Darwinian crawl up the hill to that corner office with the big window.

In other words, real trust is a damned hard thing to come by.

Not only is trust a rare commodity, but the discussion of trust tends to get muddied when one asks the not-so-obvious question: trust in what? (note for posterity: much of the credit for what follows goes to my good friend Gael. Tip o' the hat to you, ma'm!) So there are levels of trust, and it seems, at least at first glance, like the word means different things depending on the level or context in which one is discussing it.

One the highest level (and when we say "highest", we need to be very careful that we don't conflate "highest" with "most abstract," because there's nothing "abstract" about any of this), there's the question of the fundamental trust in the universe. Do you believe, deep in your bones, that the universe is workings its way towards the best possible outcome for all, regardless of how things look at the moment down here at ground level? Or do you believe, with the French Existentialists, that we are thrown into a big, empty, meaningless universe which has no interest in us and where all of our works and plans and dreams will eventually rip themselves apart on the rocky shoals of an absurd world? Your answer to this question is going to color and direct everything you do in this world, every single thing -- all of it.

One level down, there's a more concrete form of trust: self-trust. The question to ask yourself here is: do you trust your higher self -- what I call "the better angel of our nature" -- to do the right thing, or are you at the mercy of what Plato called the "rearing, uncontrolled stallion" of our base selves? Anyone who has ever tried to lose weight or kick an addiction is all-too-familiar with the often violent inner arguments that take place between our "better angel" and our "uncontrolled stallion." The cartoon cliche of an angel sitting on one shoulder and a devil sitting on the other isn't really that far-fetched when it comes to self-trust. For some, the only cure is age; the great Greek tragedian Sophocles was asked in his seventies if he minded getting old, an he replied that it was the best thing that had ever happened to him, because it was old age that finally cured him of the all-commanding sexual lust that had ruled him "like a tyrant" his entire adult life. Do you trust that you can follow your heart and your soul, knowing they will direct you the right way? Or do you have a deep-seated self-suspicion that says, "I have to keep an eye on myself; I can't trust myself to act the right way." And finally, do you have enough trust in yourself and the validity of what you think and feel to buck the herd and go forward on your own path without worrying "what will people think"? In other words, do you agree with the statement: "The only real freedom is freedom from the opinions of others"?

It is when we come to one human being trusting another that we begin to understand what a "trust fall" is; the real kind, not the silly "work team" version. This is where things get sticky and personal and very, very dangerous. So often our first premise is to assume the other person should not be trusted. It's a human instinct, it's down in our DNA, it's how our ancestors survived -- and so, in a very real sense, it's why we're alive today. And let's be honest: all too often, that suspicion turns out to be correct. How can we establish human trust, basic trust between two people, with so much of our "animal" heritage arguing so strongly against it? It isn't easy, but I've been thinking about it a lot in recent weeks. Two words that keep surfacing for me are "show" and "accept". I think what I'm getting at here (and it is still very preliminary and will take a long time -- a lifetime? -- to evolve) is something like this.

I show the other person a corner of my soul. It is perhaps, shall we say, not "my best side." This is a "trust fall," a dizzying falling-back with nothing to stop me. Except for acceptance. When the other person says to me, "I see you. I see what you're showing me. No, it isn't pretty; I don't have any illusions that it is. But - I accept you. Without reservation." This other person just "caught my fall." And then the other person shows me a corner of her soul -- again, probably not one of the shinier, prettier corners -- and I then say the same thing: "Yes, I see it. And yes, it's OK. I accept it because I accept you." I catch the other person's fall. And so it builds. Really it's a cumulative thing; I keep showing the other person what my soul looks like, and -- even when I show the other person the raw spots and the ugly spots and the wounds that can never, ever heal, including the self-inflicted ones -- the other person keeps saying "I know. I see it, I see all of it, I see it in the light of day. I don't delude myself about you. But I accept you anyway, because I know another 'me' when I see one. We are the same soul."

I am starting to believe this one, single thing -- trusting acceptance -- may be the greatest gift one person can give another, and the greatest gift the universe can give to each of us. And maybe, just maybe, it's the greatest gift we can give to ourselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fAjVeGwyKg

The Cailleach's Time

2011-12-24T17:47:00.001-08:00

The Cailleach arrived last night. The Hag of Winter made her presence know around 8:30pm. We were lounging by the firepit, comfortable in shirtsleeves and sweats, sorting out the problems of the world with a nice fire. A benign warm-ish breeze blowing. Around 8:20 the breeze fell off like someone had thrown a switch. A minute later, a new breeze, this one from the opposite direction, and bitter cold. It picked up to the point where our flags were fluttering flat-out and we found ourselves huddling close to the fire just to keep from freezing.

The Hag holds sway now, and will do so until Feb 2, when a small female figure will emerge from inside the hollow hills to engage The Cailleach in a desperate battle.

RIP Hitchens

2011-12-16T03:17:00.001-08:00

I found the man smarmy and infuriating when he was wrong (e.g., Iraq), and could be almost as smarmy and infuriating when he was right (which was often). But damn it all, the man could write.

RIP Hitchens.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2011/12/16/firebrand-christopher-hitchens-dies.html

The Long Slump

2011-12-15T03:01:00.001-08:00

…Under the best of conditions, we will endure a Long Slump. If we respond incorrectly, as we have been, the Long Slump will last even longer, and the parallel with the Depression will take on a tragic new dimension…

– Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz

The day you realize you're a writer

2011-12-13T03:25:00.000-08:00

"Where did it start, this bizarrely complex meshing of my sense of self-worth with my ability to express myself in writing? I don’t remember any classic “aha” moment, but I do know that as far back as my earliest school years, I hit on a pleasure unlike any I’d known when I wrote papers or “creative” pieces for my teachers. Hunched over my school binder, I had my first sensations of words coalescing into sentences I liked." -- Sven Birkerts

Goodbye, Jobs

2011-10-05T17:04:00.001-07:00

I remember when Steve Jobs took all his Apple $$ and poured it into a little thing called Pixar. "Rich man's folly," I grumbled. Years later, he generated a boatload of buzz over something with the ridiculous name of iPod. "Stupid glorified MP3 player," I harrumped. Then the iPhone: "Christ, people, it's a goddamn CELL PHONE!" Finally, the iPad - "Dude, everyone's tried to launch a tablet. All have failed. You're different how?" A life well-lived, and cut short too soon. RIP, Jobs. (typed on my MacBook Pro ...)

Sunday morning haiku

2011-09-11T05:45:00.001-07:00

Grey, dawn a ways off
Hens bounce up, down for breakfast
"BOK!" they insist. "BOK!"

Happy Labor Day

2011-09-04T03:36:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, my grandma put my hand on her head, under her hair, and I felt the lumps and scars. "The fookin' goons cracked my skull lotsa times," she said. And that's how I learned how my grandma stood with her sisters and helped organize the ILGWU. When that old "look for the union label" commercial came on, she would stand and sing along, hand over heart like she was singing the National Anthem.

Happy Labor Day, grandma. And a shout-out of solidarity to all those who labor.

SOUTH

2011-08-31T08:58:00.001-07:00

Just finished reading "South: the story of Shackleton's 1914-1917 Expedition" on Kindle.

An amazing read, and a humbling one. A matter-of-fact description of the kind of heroism, loyalty and determination that we moderns, with our addiction to pointless luxury and gawking inactivity, can not even imagine, let alone hope to emulate. When did hardship become a horror to escape rather than a challenge to accept and overcome?

Genetic differences account for half of intelligence differences

2011-08-09T05:33:00.000-07:00

Genetic differences between people account for up to half of the variation in intelligence, according to a study of more than 3,000 individuals.

Intelligence Tests Highlight Importance of Genetic Differences

"There is no longer a West ..."

2011-08-06T04:13:00.000-07:00

"The word "West" used to have a meaning. It described common goals and values, the dignity of democracy and justice over tyranny and despotism. Now it seems to be a thing of the past. There is no longer a West ..."

Once upon a time in the West

Race riot in Milwaukee

2011-08-06T03:42:00.000-07:00

Back in a simpler time we called them "race riots." Not sure what we call them now; "unruly youths," I suppose. Our language has become riddled with cowardice.

"Witnesses' accounts claim everything from dozens to hundreds of young black people beating white people as they left State Fair Thursday night."

Witnesses describe mobs, some people claim racially-charged attacks

What the slave wants

2011-08-05T12:01:00.001-07:00

“The true desire of the slave is not freedom, but rather that he and his slave master exchange places.” - Franz Fanon

Where have these guys BEEN all my life???

2011-08-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

By all the gods, this shook me to my roots. This should be it, the last song ever, the one you play as you sit in your favorite chair with a smoldering Cuban in one hand and a whiskey in the other hand ... waiting for the medicine to take its final hold.

Blood Axis, Vortex

Language, culture, and thought

2011-07-06T06:32:00.000-07:00

Language not only shapes culture, it shapes thought. The Irish thought differently before they were forced to learn English. Native Americans thought differently before they had the "Injun" beat out of them by reservation-school teachers. There is a unity between a people and their culture, their language, and their thoughts. Things only break apart and come undone when people are forced to live as isolated, alienated atoms inside this rootless, pointless, cosmopolitan monstrosity we call "modernity."

Centrifugal

2011-06-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

The European Abstraction is breaking down. Centrifugal forces that have existed for millenia will pull it apart into many small, natural political/ethnic groupings. Think Yugoslavia, but on a continental scale. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Were the Eurosceptics right?

This is what the collapse looks like -- June 1 2011

2011-06-01T04:36:00.001-07:00

http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/1424/city_of_ruins/

Are We a Society?

2011-04-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

Hart raises the fundamental question for America: are we "a society, a community, or whether we are a collection of individuals inhabiting the same geographical space"? Sadly, I'm thinking the latter. Is there really any such thing as a shared "idea of America" anymore in this fractured and belligerent country? And if we are, as I suspect, no longer anything but "a collection of individuals inhabiting the same geographical space," what does that imply for the future of the United States, a country that exists, after all, only on the basis of a citizenry that universally accepts those famous "propositions" we all got drilled into our heads in Civics class when we were kids. (do they even bother to teach "Civics" or anything similar anymore?)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-hart/are-we-a-society_b_847453.html

This is what the collapse looks like -- March 30 2011

2011-03-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/30/foreclosures-ghost-towns_n_840663.html#s258761&title=Las_Vegas_Nevada

Cultures and Cassoulets

2011-03-26T15:26:00.000-07:00

People here in the US don’t speak much about “culture” anymore, not in any real sense. To speak these days about things like “a culture” or “a people,” and to demand that such things be taken seriously, is to invite smirks at best, anxious frowns at worst. I believe that the new century will contain certain centrifugal forces that will enable us – force us – to take these things seriously again.

The US has always comforted itself with the myth of the “melting pot.” What we actually have – what we have always had, if the truth is to be told – is more like the southern French dish called “Cassoulet.” A large, bubbling pot full of chunks of disparate, bizarrely matched ingredients. When people speak of “an” American culture, they are willfully insisting on the myth of the smoothly mixed “melting pot” rather than the uncomfortable reality of the American cassoulet. American culture as such does not exist. In place of the culture is the shared assertion that “We are all Americans!” From the perspective of authentic cultures, this is a non-statement. It simply says, “We believe in the same ideas.” So saying, “I am an American” means nothing more than “I accept the same propositions that you do.” In a nation where even the illusion of such unity of beliefs and values lies shattered on the ground, this entire model collapses – and the US has nothing authentic with which to replace it.

Once the chimera of “shared ideas and values” is seen for what it is, we are confronted with a Bizarro World free-jazz interpretation of an authentic culture. By the time Americans’ ancestral cultures have been fed into the maw of the great American degradation machine and shat out the other end, they are nothing more than a collection of Disney Land “small world” artifacts bearing no more resemblance to authentic cultures than “Saint Patty’s Day” bears a resemblance to my ancestral Gaelic culture that it purports to celebrate. The idea that a nation can simply manufacture a culture at will is not only the height of hubris, it also misses the point.

With the idea of “an” American culture exposed for the myth that it has always been, perhaps it is time to rediscover and renew our faith in the authentic cultures of the ancestors we left behind. Not so that we can “celebrate our heritage” in some typically shallow, mercantile, set-piece little ritual of consumption. But rather so that we can have a true understanding of who we are and where we are from. As the “American idea” vanishes into smoke and faerie dust, this may be the only thing we have to hang on to, the only firm ground on which we can stand.

When I drive along the shore of the Mediterranean from Barolo to Monaco to Nice to Provence to the scrublands of Languedoc to the small rocky beach at Banyuls-sur-Mer, regions where the locals are once again demanding that their homelands be called by their true names – Catalonia, Occitania, Savoy – I rejoice in the multitude of alive, vital, authentic cultures. When I drive from mad King Ludwig’s castle across the Rhine and into the heart of wine country in regions that the locals are once again proud to call Bayern and Alsace and Bourgogne, I rejoice. Any place where an authentic culture grounded in an authentic people anchored to the land survives and even occasionally thrives in this flat, dull, monotonous, pasteurized, globalized, Disneyfied world, I rejoice.

And I salute them.

This is what the collapse looks like -- March 23 2011

2011-03-23T02:02:00.000-07:00

Detroit.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/26/detroit-decline_n_813696.html#218521

Utopia? No, but ...

2011-03-18T11:45:00.000-07:00

The country and the world are going to hell. But in the backyard, the sun is coming down warm and benevolent, the asparagus are rearing up and shouldering their way into the light, and the chickens tirelessly patrol the perimeter, same as it ever was. Utopia? No. But it'll do ...

Goldfrapp, "Utopia"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD_7Ejn74sE

Why I Stand With The Unions

2011-03-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

I can remember my short, bird-like grandmother putting my hand on her head, under her hair, and making me feel the lumps and scars that were hidden there.

“The feckin’ goouns did that, Stephen!” 75 years in America and my grandmother went to her grave with a brogue I could barely understand. I finally figured out she was saying “the fuckin’ goons.”

And that’s when she told me her story.

About how she had to find work when her husband died at age 28 (from blood poisoning due to a goddamn abscessed tooth, if you can believe it), and went to work doing piecework in a sweatshop in the NYC garment district. Her story helped me to understand why she would stand up any time the “Look For The Union Label” commercial came on the TV and put her hand over her heart like it was the National Anthem. For her, it was. She helped organize, and she got her fair share of harassments and beatings from the “feckin’ goouns.” And she told me something I’ve never forgotten: “You don’t give an inch. You fight.”

My grandmother was just one of millions, immigrants most of them or the children of immigrants, pushed out of their ancestral lands by starvation and brutality and pogroms and forced to cross the ocean to a new land, the land of exile, no giddy triumphalist “Land Of Opportunity™” but simply a place where they were somewhat less likely to be killed, or to starve to death. And here is where they drew their line and said “Enough! Here is where we stand; we can do no other.”

And so they did.

Stand with the unions? How could I do otherwise? To do otherwise would mean I was without honor. And to be without honor is to dishonor all those who came before, endless generations whose existence made mine possible. Endless generations, back all the way to those who spoke forgotten languages and worshipped forgotten gods, and who walked up out of Ice Age Europe and across the shallow marsh that is now the Irish Sea. We have to answer to them, every single one of them, in this world or the next. Because they watch us, always, and they judge us, asking themselves: “Does this one live with honor?”

I stand with the unions because I want them to be able to judge me, nod their heads, and say one word:

“Yes.”

8 Minutes 31 Seconds

2011-03-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

Wagnerian opera or an uncompromising tragedy by Sophocles - disguised as a Western. The revelation of why this unrelenting Fury with a gun has been hunting Henry Fonda makes that other great film revelation -- "Rosebud!" -- seem pretty trite by comparison. We never escape our deeds, and if our deeds were bad enough, well then some day someone like Charles Bronson just might come a-calling. Karma.

Once Upon A Time In The West - The Duel

Oh, Charlie

2011-03-01T10:56:00.000-08:00

The Zen-mystical stylings of Charlie Sheen. My favorite: the orange kitteh going all Mitch Miller on our ass as he proudly proclaims "I got magic and I got poetry at my fingertips."

http://mediumlarge.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/cats-quote-charlie-sheen/

Sundown at the old Gallagher place

2011-02-27T08:41:00.001-08:00

Lounging out back around the firepit. Burning some amazing incense. The two hens, "Camilla" and "Nigella", are winding down and getting ready to tuck themselves into their coop for the night. Our neighbor's white peacock "Sebastian" is perched on the peak of our roof like a weathervane. The sunset ia lighting him up, seeming from inside; he doesn't look real, he's all golden. At this particular moment, life is good.

This is what a collapse looks like - Feb 21

2011-02-22T01:53:00.000-08:00

Detroit Schools Closing: Michigan Officials Order Robert Bobb To Shut Half The City's Schools

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/21/detroit-schools-closing_n_826007.html

Sarko joins the chorus: multiculturalism has failed

2011-02-11T04:37:00.000-08:00

More interesting doings in Europe. Sarko joins the growing chorus (Merkel, Cameron) of leaders admitting that Europe's multiculturalism experiment has failed. A sea change, or just typical political maneuvering for advantage with an increasingly xenophobic polis?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110210/wl_afp/francepoliticsimmigrationsociety_20110210231042

UK's Cameron declares multiculturalism a failure

2011-02-07T18:34:00.000-08:00

First Merkel, now Cameron, declaring that the European experiment with multiculturalism has failed. Interesting times in old Europe. Very interesting times.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41444364/ns/world_news-europe/?fb_ref=story_header&fb_source=profile_multiline

This is what a collapse looks like

2010-12-13T09:41:00.000-08:00

I've been paying a lot of attention recently to what most people are referring to as The Great Recession. An enormous amount of attention, maybe even obsessive attention. Looking at it from an historian’s point of view, I've come to believe that this isn't a mere recession, or even a Depression. This is "It". If one wished to be polite and speak in terms that won’t scare the kiddies, the current situation might be described as "a consolidation of society down into a much more compact, sustainable size." I'm not a polite person, and I do have a flair for the hyperbolic, so I think I'll use the simple and quite accurate word "collapse."

I noticed the first signs of the collapse out on the margins, out in the exurban areas where I live. In every rural county within driving distance of my home, there are a couple of "zombie" subdivisions and a couple of "zombie" strip malls, along with several others that are one anchor-store away from dying and becoming zombified. Out on the perimeter, where I live, in the places where the last four decades really didn’t happen (except for the ubiquitous satellite dishes), it's easy to see how it’s all rolling back now. One strip mall, abandoned early in the collapse, is already well on the way to being reclaimed: the parking lot is dotted with small, new pine trees. Give them five years, and they’ll grow higher than a man, hiding the ruins from the road and giving nature the privacy it prefers when it does its work. I think of Stephen King’s “langoliers” when I pass this place, and the others like it.

But another place where the collapse will become more and more obvious is deep down in the crumbling, dessicated urban core. Case in point: Detroit. Expect to see more of this …

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/13/detroit-budget-woes_n_795806.html

… city officials will be faced with the tough decision whether to repurpose or outright abandon certain sections of the city, as the population has dwindled by half since 1950.

Mayor Dave Bing also recently announced that the city will offer incentives to residents to move to certain less blighted areas of town.

No plastic pigs. Might "offend."

2010-11-17T02:30:00.000-08:00

Amazing. I'm not a fan of the Brits, but they were a courageous people once upon a time. Something odd happened to them (and most of the rest of Europe, for that matter) in recent decades, and they've devolved into a low, craven, cringing people. I thought allowing Sharia law in majority-Muslim neighborhoods was ridiculous, but now they won't even ship plastic pigs in the little toy sets for fear of "offending"? Breathtaking. And let's be clear: this has nothing to do with "sensitivity" or "celebrating diversity," and everything to do with kowtowing and cowardice. But then, Europe has a history of rolling over on its back and submitting to dangerous religions out of the Middle East. They did it 1500 years ago when a loopy little fringe death-cult showed up on the scene. It was called "Christianity."

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/plastic-pig-banned-from-uk-toy-set-for-fear-of-offending-jewish-muslims/story-e6frf7lf-1225954697030

Plastic pig banned from UK toy set for fear of offending Jews, Muslims

TOY shop bosses removed a plastic pig from a children's toy farm set because they feared it would upset Muslim and Jewish parents.

A mother who complained to toy store Early Learning Centre (ELC) when she found the pig missing was told it had been removed for "religious reasons," British newspaper The Sun reported.

The mother, named only as Caroline, found there was no pig with the cow, sheep, chicken, horse and dog in the store's HappyLand Goosefeather Farm.

Caroline, who bought the toy for her daughter's first birthday, said the farm set still contained an empty sty and a button that made an oinking noise when pressed.

But after writing to ELC's customer services she got an email reply admitting the pig was removed in case it upset Muslim or Jewish parents.

some days I feel sorry for young Georgie Bush

2010-11-09T02:45:00.000-08:00

I was horrified when I read that Pappy and Bar went golfing the day young George's sister died, but this??? Christ almighty, is Barbara Bush the most toxic parent since Joan Crawford, or is it me??? Poor little Dubya never had a chance in hell to grow up to be a normal adult.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/08/bush-abortion-fetus-jar_n_780675.html

Former president George W. Bush explained recently that a formative event in his staunch pro-life stance came when his mother, Barbara Bush, showed him the remains of a human fetus in a jar when he was a teenager, the result of an earlier miscarriage by the elder Bush.

Interviewed by the Durham Herald for the PlaySlam

2010-11-05T10:42:00.001-07:00

http://www.heraldsun.com/view/full_story/10165664/article-Frenetic-and-fun-PlaySlam-at-the-ArtsCenter?instance=main_article

The Nameless Urge

2010-07-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

Every year on the last Sunday of July, many thousands of pilgrims climb "Croagh Patrick". They think they're climbing to pay their respects to "Saint Patrick", but they're really driven by the nameless urge that drove their pre-Christian Celtic ancestors up the same mountain to pay homage to Lugh on Lughnasa, and that drove their pre-Celtic ancestors up there to bring offerings to the shadowy figure of Crom Dubh. Some things in human nature never change, among them the need to climb to the high places of the world to be with one's gods.

http://article.wn.com/view/2010/07/26/Thousands_join_Croagh_Patrick_holy_mountain_climb/

Vatican: ordination of women a "grave crime"

2010-07-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

Apparently, Dino von Crazypuss (aka His Holiness The Pope, Bishop of Rome and Holy Father of the Roman Catholic Church) has issued a clarification so that everyone understands that the ordination of women is classified in the same category of "grave crime" as the rape of children by priests. The mind reels at trying to conceive of the moral and theological gymnastics they had to go through to reach THAT particular conclusion.

Voltaire was right: "Ecrassiez l'infame!"

Vatican: ordination of woman a "grave crime"

Happy Bastille Day

2010-07-14T16:33:00.000-07:00

‎"Une bonne fete" to French (and Francophile) people everywhere. To celebrate Bastille Day, a short scene from "Casablanca". The best scene in the movie. Possibly the best scene in any movie.

Casablanca: The Marseillaise

The rich are different: they are more ruthless

2010-07-09T07:42:00.000-07:00

When does it start being OK to use that phrase that is such a taboo in America - "class warfare"? When does it start being OK to hate the rich? For that matter, when does it start being OK to eat the rich? (bonus points for the clever persons who get the reference...)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/business/economy/09rich.html?_r=1&hp

Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.
"The rich are different: they are more ruthless," said Sam Khater, CoreLogic's senior economist.

Cleopatra was White

2010-06-23T07:14:00.000-07:00

Apparently there's a big hoo-ha over the idea of Angelina Jolie playing Cleopatra, and that the role should go to an "actress of color". Postmodern PC ahistorical silliness. Look, Cleopatra was Greek. Well, specifically, she was Macedonian. When Alexander of Macedon (called "Alexander the Great") died, his generals whacked up his vast empire among them. Egypt went to his general Ptolemy, who decided since he was ruler of Egypt, it would be really cool to name himself Pharoah. And so the "Ptolemaic Dynasty" was born. The Macedonian rulers did -not- intermarry with the locals. Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, was pure Macedonian. Saying you don't want Jolie as Cleopatra because she's not Greek is fine -- someone like Nia Vardalos ("Big Fat Greek Wedding") or the still-gorgeous Marina Sirtis ("Counselor Troya") would be historically-accurate to play the role of Cleopatra. But saying she isn't suited to play Cleopatra because she isn't black is silly. She isn't black -- and neither was Cleo.

http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/17/backlash-over-angelina-jolie-as-cleopatra/?hpt=Sbin

Chimps attack other chimps ... for their land

2010-06-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

The Sharks and the Jets. The English and the French. The Germans and,
well, pretty much anybody. And now chimps. Apparently the urge to
engage in expansionist warfare and seize one's neighbor's land is
another thing that is no longer exclusive to the human race. So
if territorial expansion is hard-wired into our DNA, does that give
us an alibi to invade our neighbors and shrug it off as "evolution, baby".
Serious question.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37830165/ns/technology_and_science-science/

Chimp-on-chimp attacks in the wild are very common, especially among small packs of males on patrol. Now research suggests the motive for these crimes is to gain territory.

Malcolm McLaren, dead at 64

2010-04-15T06:20:00.000-07:00

Malcolm McLaren: impressario, fashion visionary, and general agent provocateur, dead way before his time. His fashion boutique was the seed from which the whole "punk look" emerged, not to mention the idea of piercing one's body parts. Before McLaren, only women got pierced, and then only once in each ear, for inserting a single pair of sensible and non-flamboyant earrings. So if you have any piercings of any kind (and I most definitely DO NOT WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT if you do, thank you very much), you can thank Malcolm. He also kicked in the doors of the tedious, pointless disco era with a quartet of fresh-scrubbed, clean-minded lads known as the Sex Pistols. Whatever you may think of their music (and mind you, I'm a person who can play every verse of "Anarchy in the UK" in my head), they were total game-changers.

Johnny Rotten, speaking at McLaren's funeral, choked back tears as he so eloquently expressed what we all must be feeling:

"**** on you, ya ****in' utter ***t!!! I'm *****n' glad yer *****n' dead, so ******and don't forget to ***** while ya ****** yer ******** and
your Mum too, ya *****n' wanker!!!!'

(OK, I made up the Johnny Rotten paragraph. Couldn't resist .... ;-)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100408/en_nm/us_mclaren_2

Creepiest Childrens' Books Ever

2010-03-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

This is some messed-up stuff right here. Thankfully, my mother chose to scar my psyche Olde Schoole Style, with endless readings of the anarchistic guerrilla-theater stylings of "The Cat in The Hat" and the bitter nihilism of "The Cat in The Hat Comes Back." I mean come on, seriously: a children's book called "Hair in Funny Places"? Really? Still, it sure beats #14 on the list, "I Wish Daddy Didn't Drink So Much." Hell, when I was growing up, we all kind of rooted for Daddy to drink his fill, he was more tolerable when he was three sheets to the wind. But I digress.

Creepiest Childrens Books

Does Jesus Cause Gayness?

2010-03-06T02:15:00.000-08:00

I'm really starting to wonder if there isn't some connection between ultra-conservative belief in Jesus and men who do all that there secret gay sex stuff. Could it be ... is it possible? ... OMFG!!! We finally know what causes gayness -- it's Jesus!!!

VATICAN CITY- One of Pope Benedict's ceremonial ushers and a member of an
elite choir in St Peter's Basilica have been implicated in a gay
prostitution ring, in the latest sexual scandal to taint the Vatican.

Read more:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/03/05/2010-03-05_gay_prostitution_scandal_rocks_the_vatican.html?ref=rss#ixzz0hMI43gTs

O Irony, is there no end to your endless array of manifestations?

2010-03-04T09:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/04/roy-ashburn-arrested-anti_n_485419.html

Early Wednesday morning, State Sen. Roy Ashburn (R-Calif.) was pulled over and arrested for drunk driving.Sources report that Ashburn -- a fierce opponent of gay rights -- was driving drunk after leaving a gay nightclub; when the officer stopped the state-issued vehicle, there was an unidentified man in the passenger seat of the car.

Good for the French

2010-02-03T12:03:00.000-08:00

Given their tendency in recent decades towards that uniquely post-modern combination of strident relativism and knee-jerk anti-Westernism -- this is the country, after all, that has inflicted both Foucault and Derrida on the world -- it's good to see the French can still act in a way that suggests they may still possess some vestigial remnants of cultural sanity.

Veiled wife costs man French citizenship

Paris, France (CNN) -- France has denied citizenship to a man because he allegedly forced his wife to wear a full Islamic veil, the French immigration minister said in a statement Wednesday.

The ever-quotable Mark Twain

2010-01-16T03:33:00.001-08:00

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."

Mayor: gays don't get to go to heaven

2009-12-02T16:00:00.000-08:00

Gay Americans, having been deprived of the spiritual consolation of standing around eternally singing Hosannas and Halleluhias to the bedouin sky god, are welcome to join me and mine in Tir na Nog, The Land of The Eternally Young. You basically get to spend eternity in feasting and merriment; good cheer, good company, stories, laughs, raucous debates and cheerful songs. Besides the finest of meats and cheeses, you get your choice of ale, mead, hard cider, or wine. No hangovers, guaranteed. And the Celts weren't particularly obsessed with a person's sexual persuasion, so there's no "purity test" to get in the door.

I'm hoping to get a payin' job there when I die. I'm thinking "court jester" would be a great fit.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_13908329

VALLEJO — Hundreds of people crowded the steps of Vallejo City Hall on Tuesday to protest a published comments by Mayor Osby Davis that gay people would not go to heaven.

Fox yells at employees for on-screen "mistakes"

2009-11-24T04:04:00.001-08:00

It's just so darn cute the way that Fox is trying to make believe that all those on-screen screwups are accidents and not a clever way of shaping opinion in favor of their conservative POV. The latest faux pas (not mentioned in this article) was showing SC gov Mark ("the girl from Ipanema is my Soul Mate") Sanford as "D-SC", when of course he is an "R". They did the same thing with Mark Foley during the height of the Foley "trolling for teenage boys" scandal.

Fox isn't riddled with idiots who screw up all the time. On the contrary, Fox is the ultimate expression of the ability, given modern technology, to reinvent reality. They show massive crowds at a rally, and people think to themselves, "gee, there are a whole lot of people who think the same way I do!" They show Mark Foley as a "D" instead of an "R", and people think "golly, them liberal Dems just can't keep their hands off young boys, can they!" It's sleazy, it's despicable, but you really do need to take a moment, step back, and admire how good they are at manipulating reality, and how effective the results are.

http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/fox-news-threatens-pink-slips-for-on-screen-errors.php

After a rash of mistakes and apologies over the past weeks, Fox News has sent a memo to employees announcing a new "zero tolerance" policy for on-screen errors.

FishBowlDC obtained the memo, sent last Friday, which warns mistakes could lead to written warnings, suspensions and termination.

"Please know that jobs are on the line here. I can not stress that enough," the memo reads.

Fox has had three much-noticed errors in the past few weeks. First, Sean Hannity used misleading footage to beef up attendance numbers at a Capitol Hill tea party rally -- an incident that caught the attention of the Daily Show's Jon Stewart, forcing Hannity to apologize on air.

Then, last week, one of the midday news shows aired footage of an old Sarah Palin campaign rally to show the "crowds" at her current book tour. An anchor apologized a day later, and Fox blamed a "production error."

They're doing a remake of "The Prisoner"

2009-11-11T04:31:00.001-08:00

What a horrible, horrible, horrible idea. Horrible. Some things are amenable to remakes. Some are not. "Citizen Kane" should never be remade. And neither should "The Prisoner". My dear old mom, who first turned me on to "The Prisoner" (and who sadistically refused to tell me who Number 1 really was, when I ran to the bathroom for a minute during the final episode and missed Number 1's climactic unmasking) must be spinning in her grave right now.

Did I mention that this is a horrible idea?

http://www.amctv.com/originals/the-prisoner/

I love me some North Carolina loonie politicians

2009-11-03T05:51:00.000-08:00

This is what I enjoy about living in NC: when the politicians are loonies, they are REAL loonies. The genuine article, madder than General Jack D. Ripper, madder than "Mad Jack" McMad, winner of last year's Mister Madman competition.

http://www.georgehutchins.com/
First offering for your delectation: George Hutchins, who's running against David Price for his congressional seat (which covers Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, etc). Note well the flamboyant and unrestrained use of color and, well, just "stuff" that gives his web site that certain je ne sais quoi that just screams "he's mad as a balloon!" Looks like the web page designer got his mitts on the Big Boy box of Crayolas when mommy's back was turned. The guy's politics don't matter; all sane people are morally obligated to vote against him on purely esthetic grounds.

http://mediamattersaction.org/blog/200911020003
And in this corner, we have long-time Uber-loonie Rep Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who states -- with nary a hint of irony (or goldy or bronzey, for that matter) -- "I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country." If she doesn't get mad loonie props for that, then she should definitely get some for using the word "tarbaby" in an earlier public speech on the floor of Congress.

This is the kind of stuff that makes it worth dragging my butt out of bed in the morning.

Samhainophobia

2009-11-01T02:05:00.000-08:00

"Samhainophobia". Apparently it's a real phobia, an irrational fear of Halloween. Me, I've got filthylittlebeggarphobia, an irrational fear of costumed rugrats showing up at my door and demanding "treats" consisting of simple carbohyrates and trans fats in that eerie, high-pitched little voice that they have. In years gone by, I would issue the command "Release The Hounds", who would then run the little monsters off. With the dogs all dead, I'm now reduced to commanding "Release The Kittehs", which doesn't seem to have the same salutory effect.

>>>
Samhainophobia is an intense and persistent fear of Halloween that can
cause panic attacks in sufferers. Other relevant phobias for this time
of year: wiccaphobia (fear of witches), phasmophobia (fear of ghosts),
and coimetrophobia (fear of cemeteries).

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/the-history-of-halloween_n_321021.html

Heidegger on the danger of certain encounters

2009-10-26T04:30:00.001-07:00

"Do we imagine that we could encounter the essence of truth, the essence of beauty, the essence of grace -without danger?" Heidegger

Weird and occasionally cute animals

2009-10-15T10:01:00.001-07:00

The smiley-face salamander is cute as a button. But as far as slide #3
goes, all I can say is: star-faced mole, my ass! That's Cthulhu! Run, people! Run!!!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/15/9-weirdest-looking-animal_n_317907.html?slidenumber=0#slide_image

Yes, but is it art?

2009-10-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

"Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. " -- the ever-quotable Albert Camus

Happy International Blasphemy Day!

2009-09-30T02:09:00.000-07:00

I plan to celebrate Blasphemy Day in my usual fashion, by blaspheming some major
religion. I can't make fun of Judaism; they'd just scream "anti-Semitism!" and make me
feel bad. Can't make fun of Islam; one of the faithful would mosey up alongside me and
blow himself up and make me feel dead. At first glance, Hinduism looks ripe for satire, but any religion that has a god with an elephant head is already beyond satire. Ah well, I guess it'll have to be the Christians again.

Reading of my Rwanda play in NYC

2009-09-09T02:54:00.001-07:00

Probably the high point of my literary career; from here on, it's all down hill. :-)

http://www.abingdontheatre.org/reading/upcoming.aspx#first

Monday, August 31, 7PM
Back to Rwanda
by Stephen J. Gallagher
Fifteen years after the genocide, almost no one remembers Rwanda – and those who still remember no longer care. Except for one man, a tormented hunter who lives to track down the butchers and confront them. His latest quarry: a frail, elderly nun who stands accused of unspeakable crimes against hundreds of children.

Quote of the Week 09/09/2009

2009-09-09T02:52:00.001-07:00

"A test to know if your mission on earth is finished. Are you alive? Then it isn't finished." - anonymous

Quote of the Week 08/24/2009

2009-08-24T15:33:00.001-07:00

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso

Random Quote 08/17/2009

2009-08-17T14:28:00.000-07:00

"Egotist - a person who finds himself more interesting than he finds me." Ambrose Bierce

Many a Cunning Plan?

2009-08-17T02:40:00.000-07:00

Far too many of the remaining Obama Faithful continue to believe (some confidently, some desperately) that what appears on the surface to be waffling, backsliding, lack of message discipline, lack of Party solidarity, and gutless course-changing at the first sign of pushback actually represents the playing-out of many a cunning plan, fiendishly clever machinations, "Art of War" political jujitsu of breathtaking subtlety, and "all part of his brilliant master plan." Maybe -- just maybe -- what we're seeing is exactly what it appears to be on the surface. Maybe -- just maybe -- he's out of his depth and out of ideas. Mind you, I say that as someone who politicked for the guy and voted for him -- and would do both again, knowing what I know now. But with every new retreat and every new compromise, I get more and more of the slightly queasy feeling that maybe -- just maybe -- the man is not equal to the times. And if that's true, then as Jello Biafra once put it, "we have a bigger problem."

Why "church" works

2009-07-17T12:38:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what (from my rabid-atheist perspective) appears to be a firm grip by the churches of America on those who attend church. I’m beginning to understand something: it isn’t that the church has a grip on the parishioners, it’s that the parishioners have a grip on the church. See, down here in the US South, “church” isn’t just a building you go to one hour a week, it’s the centerpiece of the local people’s entire culture. It’s where you see your friends and neighbors, it’s where your kids go when they’re Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts (you’d be amazed how many Scout troops are hosted in church basements), it’s where at least two people I know met and wooed their spouses (and where at least one person I know met the person he cheated on his wife with), and at the end of it all, it’s where the living go to bury their dead, knowing with certainty that they too will someday be buried there next to generations of their own people. Vacation trips, charity drives, study groups, knitting circles, art classes, the church is at the center of all of it for the majority of Americans, and not just down here in the South.

What do we secularists have to offer in place of this richness? The sad, barren truth, without even the dubious comfort of an uppercase “T” on the word? The truth that there is no God and when you’re dead, you’re dead and you’ll never see your loved ones again? And we wonder why we have, shall we say, a bit of a “PR problem”.

Secular humanism will overcome “church” the day that secular humanism offers something better. And to be perfectly blunt, “the truth about how the world is” just isn’t perceived by most people as “better”. We need more than just “the truth”, much more. I’m not sure that secularism as currently constituted even has the potential to replace “church”, if for no other reason than the fact that it simply isn’t set up structurally to answer the same set of human needs that “church” answers.

This is NOT a "crisis"

2009-07-16T04:17:00.001-07:00

I think a lot of the wrongheaded thinking on both sides of the discussion about the "economic crisis" is that people keep calling it a "crisis". This is a word that's abused almost as much as the word "tragedy". A crisis is a short, sharp event or series of events. And when it's done, things get back to normal. If -- as I strongly suspect -- the capitalist system is collapsing into a much smaller economic ball (a collapsing star, if you will), then the unemployment numbers and the nosediving housing situation and the freezing of formerly free-flowing credit are nothing more (or less) than the new normal. Perhaps, going forward, 10% + unemployment is going to be normal (it already is in the EU). Perhaps, going forward, those houses that popped in "value" from $500K to 1.5 mil in a few years will stay at their real value (say, $200K)and never regain their former puffed-up "value". Perhaps, going forward, credit of all kinds will not be freely available to one and all, and the engine of American consumerism -- which has always, at its base, been built on the mad flow of credit -- will slow down permanently to the more sedate levels we saw when people put things on layaway instead of whipping out their Platinum Card.

Perhaps this is the new normal. Perhaps this is how we live from now on. Perhaps.

'Charlie Don't Surf!' McNamara, Kurtz, and the Only Real Freedom

2009-07-06T16:36:00.000-07:00

I wrote this in 2007 for a conference in Nice, France. Reposting it to commemorate the death of Robert McNamara. At times like this, I find myself wishing that the afterlife existed. Hell, specifically ...

....................

What was Indochina? What did it mean? And what visual images suggest themselves? For me, I have never been able to shake the image in Coppola’s film “Apocalypse Now” of the American Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) who tells his staff that a seaside village with wonderful surfing conditions is to be bombed flat so that he and his staff can get a bit of surfing in before dinner. When one of his offers warns him that Charlie controls that village, Kilgore screams: “Charlie don’t surf!” It is self-evident and rational that he has a RIGHT to that beach because he can make better use of it. Kilgore’s proclamation is the paradigmatic image of one type of rationality, the type of rationality that manufactures sensible alibis for horrific acts. The rationale he manufactures to justify his right to a particular stretch of beach is really no more or less dubious than the alibis that our first protagonist, Robert McNamara, offered during the American misadventure in Indochina. Our other protagonist, Coppola’s fictional Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, faces the same conditions as does McNamara, but Kurtz’s refusal to tolerate what he calls “the stench of lies” drives him insane and then kills him.

We are offered the visual images of two men who represent the best and the brightest that America had to offer. McNamara: the cold fish, the emotionless cipher, the utterly practical go-to guy. Kurtz, one of the best officers the Army ever produced; also, “a good man, a moral man, a man of gentle wit and humor,” a man of compelling decency who embodies the best of American values.

In Indochina, each man faces a confrontation with absolute freedom in the face of moral Horror, and each man faces the decision to make or not to make an absolute choice. Each man is revealed to us visually: McNamara in the documentary “The Fog of War,” and Kurtz, of course, in “Apocalypse Now.”

In McNamara, we have a man who, without knowing it, is a leading actor in the death throes of American Reason, a death played out during the long, inevitable catastrophe in Indochina. We understand McNamara as a typical believer in Reason’s ability to explain everything, a believer in the deployment of a muscular sense of racial and class superiority in a world that is fundamentally rational. Kurtz begins as the same type of man, and begins his first tour of duty in Indochina viewing the world through the same lens. However, Kurtz’s encounter with the reality of moral Horror pushes him beyond the timid, lying morality that he brought with him from America, and pushes him into the sunlit clearing of absolute freedom that waits on the other side of Reason.

McNamara and Kurtz both start out by fighting to defend the reality and efficacy – and hence the MORALITY – of America’s unique form of Reason and America’s unique faith in modernity as such. Both men – at least in the beginning – embrace the article of faith that Reason and American “know-how” (savoir-faire) can solve ANY problem. Starting at the same place, McNamara and Kurtz arrive, finally, at very different ends.

We have these two men who, like Virgil in Hades, take us on two very different tours of the death of American Reason. How do the moviemakers present them to us?

McNamara is given to us as “an IBM machine with legs.” He combines a self-assured egotism with a cold, internally consistent logic. Serving under General Curtis Lemay in WWII, McNamara absorbed Lemay’s credo of Total War. He enthusiastically committed himself to mastering the “statistical control of war.”

Now, McNamara was no fool. He understood the statistics and he could crunch the numbers better than anyone (often in his head). He knew where the American project in Indochina was going. As early as 1963, he was telling Kennedy “we need a way to get out of Vietnam.” Yet he continued to serve, and he continued to follow orders with maximum efficiency. In order to justify this to himself, he constructed an elaborate superstructure of moral imperatives and rational analysis. The struggle to reconcile these alibis transforms the aged McNamara into a man obsessed with the issue of JUDGEMENT. He asks the rhetorical question: “What is morally appropriate in time of war?” He keeps coming back to this question, picking at it like a scab. He finds himself pinned by his own musings. For example, when discussing Agent Orange with his on-screen interlocutor, McNamara suggests that the best method for deriving a moral judgment about this poison is to “look at the law.” He explains – emphatically, as if trying to convince HIMSELF – that there were no clear-cut legal restrictions on the use of Agent Orange in a war zone. Had there been a legal restriction, then he would not have done it, because THEN it would have been immoral. His understanding of morality is limited to the idea of LEGALITY. Legal=moral. In effect, the same defense used by the top Nazis at Nuremberg. McNamara does not recognize that he did anything immoral in Indochina. McNamara deploys the alibi that we’ve heard so many times, TOO many times, in recent years in America: it was simply an “error of judgment.” As if the entire catastrophe in Indochina could be explained away simply as a MISTAKE. He says, “I truly believe that we made an error not of values and intentions but of judgment.” In other words, our intentions were good but we screwed up. The eventual outcome – the defeat of America by what McNamara described as “a nation of peasants with bicycles” -- was simply incomprehensible to McNamara. His rational universe had no framework to understand exactly what had gone wrong.

In Kurtz’s Indochina, by contrast, Reason is already dead. Rationality has no place. Modernity has not been invented yet. Even the war doesn’t really exist here. None of the projects conceived by the generals in Saigon and the politicians in Washington exists in Kurtz’s Indochina. In the words of the narrator, Captain Willard, Kurtz “broke from them ... and then he broke from himself.”

Unlike McNamara, Kurtz understands himself as what Heidegger would have called a “thrown” man, thrown into the middle of the Horror, where he realizes that Reason cannot help him. Thrown back on himself, in the midst of unreason, Kurtz does the only thing left to do. He pushes through. He pushes BEYOND, into madness, and into authenticity. Kurtz’s madness cannot be understood as a mere “backlash” against Reason. To the contrary. In a war that could never be WON but from which it was impossible to WALK AWAY, perhaps Kurtz’s decision was quite rational. Perhaps he is as much an Enlightenment man as McNamara. Perhaps his response, his DECISION, was, in those circumstances, COMPLETELY rational.

Kurtz, in his situation, offers no alibis. As the insane combat photographer tells us, “He’s a great man. He’s fighting the war.” That simple: he is fighting the war. He is killing and killing and killing, “pig after pig, cow after cow, village after village, army after army,” without alibis or aspirations and most importantly, WITHOUT JUDGMENT. Because, as Kurtz emphasizes, “it’s judgment that defeats us.”

“The Fog of War” is structured around what are called “Lessons from the life of Robert McNamara.” These are lessons that McNamara claims to have learned from his long and eventful life, especially lessons regarding the conduct of war in general and the war in Indochina in particular. Some of them are mindless, simple pieties, the sort of things one might see on a greeting card or on a pillow crocheted by your maiden aunt. But several of them are enlightening. I want to take a few minutes to explore a few of these “lessons,” look at how they contradict McNamara’s actual behavior, and highlight what our other protagonist, Colonel Kurtz, has to say on the subject.

Lesson: empathize with your enemy. McNamara had no real understanding of his enemy, and was constantly baffled by their irrational refusal to throw down their weapons and surrender. He tells us, significantly, “we empathized with the Soviet Union. But we were never able to empathize with the Vietnamese. We just didn’t know enough about THOSE PEOPLE to understand what kind of war THEY were fighting compared to the kind of war WE were fighting.” Kurtz, on the other hand, gives us a story that reveals his deep, perhaps TOO deep, understanding of his enemy. He describes going into a village and inoculating the children against cholera. After they leave, his team is called back by a weeping old man. When they arrive back at the village, they discover that the Viet Cong had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were, stacked in the village square, a pile of little white arms. He immediately understands the soul of his enemy, and immediately understands why America is doomed to fail in Indochina: “These were not monsters, these were men with families, these men whose hearts were filled with love. And yet they had the strength – THE STRENGTH – to do that.”

Lesson: rationality will not save us. An important lesson, to be sure, but if he knew this then why did McNamara continue to apply instrumental reason to the problem of Indochina long after most sane observers realized that the adventure in Indochina was OVER? The lack of comprehension in McNamara’s voice on-camera is telling. Kurtz understands the actual truth of this lesson, as he describes the men who cut off all those arms as men who were able to unleash their primordial instinct to kill and keep on killing, but WITHOUT JUDGMENT. In a world were Reason has no place, judgment can NEVER have a place.

Lesson: maximize efficiency. McNamara was able to apply this lesson indiscriminately in any context, from burning Tokyo to the ground to turning around the Ford Motor Company to attempting to hammer the Vietnamese into submission. With no hint of shame, and even a bit of pride in his voice, McNamara describes how “in one night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese in a bombing run on Tokyo. I analyzed bombing runs to make them more efficient.” To a bomber pilot lamenting the loss of one of his friends, McNamara offers this assessment, “You lost your wingman but we were able to destroy Tokyo.” McNamara puts many of his alibis in the mouth of General Lemay, but he argues with a passion that tells us he EMBRACES these alibis, and that he acknowledges them AS alibis. “Lemay said if we lost the war, we’d be prosecuted as war criminals.” McNamara asks, rhetorically: “what makes it immoral if you lose, but not if you win?” But we need to realize that McNamara is incapable of experiencing this as a GENUINE question, as a PHILOSOPHICAL question. As, perhaps, THE ONLY remaining Philosophical question. “What makes it immoral if you lose, but not if you win?” As far as McNamara is concerned, he is simply ‘playing with concepts’ He is simply ‘brainstorming the question,’ confident that Reason will provide the only sensible answer.

Kurtz’s efficiency is of a simpler and more intimate kind. His efficient killing is something that takes place on the ground, surrounded by blood, but he will do it anyway. He tells us that “we must kill them, we must exterminate them, pig after pig, cow after cow, village after village, army after army.” His efficiency is more intimate because it is something one must do while LOOKING AT the people that one kills, informed by the realization that “in a war there are many moments for ruthless action - what is often called ruthless - what may in many circumstances be only clarity, seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it. Directly, quickly, awake, looking at it.”

One final lesson, possibly the most ironic of the many “lessons from the life of Robert McNamara”: in order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. McNamara sanctimoniously qualifies this lesson, saying, “you may have to engage in evil, but you MUST minimize it.” He repeats several times, like a desperate prayer, the claim that “we were trying to save our nation.” He lets us know that this was “a difficult position for sensitive human beings to be in.” Please note that he most definitely includes himself in the ranks of those “sensitive human beings.” Kurtz doesn’t bother to slip a discreet tissue of lies over the evil that he is and that he does, he invites it in and claims it as a comrade. “It is impossible to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what ‘horror’ is. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If not then that are enemies to be feared, truly enemies.” For this pure, unequivocal truth-telling, the generals declared Kurtz insane and then sent men to kill him as Kurtz waited, squatting in the jungle and broadcasting his truth over short-wave radio out of Cambodia. In his last broadcast, his last duty, his last attempt at honorable amends for the consequences of his own madness, seconds before he freely embraces his death, Kurtz gives us this: “We train our young men to drop FIRE on people, but we won’t allow them to write the word FUCK on their airplanes, because it’s OBSCENE!” McNamara would see no contradiction here. For Kurtz, the contradiction is enough to drive him mad.

In the elegiac last minutes of “The Fog of War,” the interlocutor asks McNamara, “After you left, why didn’t you speak out against the war?” McNamara evades the question, but finally responds, “These are the kinds of questions that get me in trouble. You have no idea how inflammatory my words can appear.” Asked if he feels any responsibility, any guilt, he states, “I don’t want to go any farther with this. It just adds more controversy. Anything I can possibly say will require too many qualifications.” The interlocutor offers McNamara an easy way out, asking: “Do you think it was a matter of damned if you do, damned if you don’t?” McNamara thinks about this and finally agrees: “Yeah. And I’d rather be damned if I don’t.” McNamara, at the end of his life, embraces this ultimate act of mauvais fois. The technocrat is invalidated by his refusal to accept that he acted FREELY. And his own cowardly conscience rots his soul from the inside out as his time grows short. Kurtz is worth quoting again, very much apropos of McNamara: “It is judgment that betrays us.”

Kurtz, on the other hand, pushing out far beyond McNamara’s timid, lying morality into the very heart of The Horror, finally reaches a place where he can embrace his absolute freedom, “the only real freedom, freedom from the opinions of others, free even from our own opinions of ourselves.” And it is this freedom that drives him insane.

The seemingly opposite fates of Kurtz and McNamara reveal the ultimate moral failure of American Reason, of the idea that one can go somewhere and kill someone, and justify it with the alibi that one is doing one’s pure moral duty as revealed by the application of clean, unsoiled rationality.

Hurrah for Sarko!

2009-06-22T08:44:00.001-07:00

For the most part I consider Nicolas Sarkozy to be an annoying little weed of a man. But for this, I salute him:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8112821.stm

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has spoken out strongly against the wearing of the burka by Muslim women in France.

"The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic," the French president said.

Texas: It's A Whole Other Country

2009-05-14T08:23:00.001-07:00

Sadly, it's not. It's part of this here US of A. The TX board of education apparently knows more about the age of the universe than the collected wisdom of the scientific community. And they took a vote, all nice and legal and democratic-like, to make sure that students in the many fine educational institutions in the great and god-fearing Lone Star State are taught accordingly.

Cretins.

The Texas State Board of Education has voted 11 to 3 that scientists are wrong about the age of the universe, and students should be taught accordingly. “During the Texas State Board of Education hearings on science standards for Texas schoolchildren, BoE member and staunch creationist Barbara Cargill decided that the age of the Universe was up for vote.“ Cargill is a notorious biblical creationist, who has stated outright she won’t rest until all textbooks in the state align with the bible.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/05/06/texas-is-only-6000-years-old/

The Quotable Mister Churchill

2009-05-13T02:07:00.000-07:00

A noxious individual in so many respects, but he possessed that thing the Brits do so well: wit.

>>>
from "I'll Be Sober in the Morning" by Chris Lamb

The conservative Winston Churchill was often at odds with Clement Attlee, leader of the Labor Party,
which advocated a greater role for government in economic policy. Churchill once entered a men's room
to find Attlee standing at the urinal. Churchill took a position at the other end of the trough.

"Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?" Attlee asked.

"That's right," Churchill responded. "Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it."

...

Playwright George Bernard Shaw invited Winston Churchill to the first night of his newest play, enclosing two tickets:
"One for yourself and one for a friend – if you have one."

Churchill wrote back, saying he couldn't make it, but could he have tickets for the second night – "if there is one."

....

Lady Astor once shouted at Churchill, "If you were my husband, I'd put poison in your coffee."

His response: "If I were your husband, I'd drink it."

Another Nobel prize winning economist says: we're screwed

2009-04-17T01:46:00.000-07:00

Joseph Stiglitz joins fellow Nobel-winner Paul Krugman in calling out the Obama administration. Both agree that the Obama plan will not work; Stiglitz is to be admired for stating in plain and unadorned language exactly why it won't work.

http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ahnPchOxZMh8&refer=home

April 17 (Bloomberg) -- The Obama administration’s bank- rescue efforts will probably fail because the programs have been designed to help Wall Street rather than create a viable financial system, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said.

“All the ingredients they have so far are weak, and there are several missing ingredients,” Stiglitz said in an interview yesterday. The people who designed the plans are “either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent.”

"First Do No Harm"

2009-04-07T01:19:00.000-07:00

Looks like the Gitmo doctors were back in the dorm sleeping off a kegger the day that the Hippocratic Oath was covered in class. Amoral bastards.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/06/AR2009040603654.html?hpid=topnews

Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program "inhuman."

Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency said in the 2007 report, a copy of which was posted on a magazine Web site yesterday. The report quoted one medical official as telling a detainee: "I look after your body only because we need you for information."

French workers seize company HQ, take execs hostage

2009-03-31T09:59:00.000-07:00

Every time the French get a little irked, they shout "To The Barricades!" and do stuff like this, while we get whipped and snivel "Oh please sir, might I have just a bit more gruel?" And that, my friends, is why the frenchies have a 38-hour work week and get to spend the whole month of August lying on the Med beaches, while we have whatever the heck it is we have ....

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/03/31/france.hostages.caterpillar.workers/index.html

Hundreds of French workers, angry about proposed layoffs at a Caterpillar office, were holding executives of the company hostage Tuesday, a spokesman for the workers said.

3 million hit the streets to protest the economy

2009-03-19T11:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry to say, those 3 million people are in France, not the US. Why is it that the French hit the streets while we Americans don't? Like the writer of the piece says, "France is France." I wish Americans hit the streets more often. It might not fix anything in the long run (though it just might), but it sure beats huddling in front of our teevees and just "taking it," which is what we’re all doing now. If the AIG bonus nonsense was happening over in France, I guarantee there would be about 1.5 bazillion pissed off frenchies outside the corporate HQ setting up Madame Guillotine. As to why we Americans don't get out there like the French do, I suspect it's a side effect (a planned side effect?) of the whole "rugged individualism" myth, that toxic, retrograde aspect of the American character that says: I got mine, screw everybody else, and anyway "solidarity" starts with a "s" and so does that there "socialism", so it's gotta be bad fer ya.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7953555.stm

Why is it only in France that such demonstrations are taking place?

After all, it is people the world over who are bearing the brunt of the recession. But they are not on the street.

The answer is simple. France is France. It has its own political and social codes, forged in the Revolution and over the course of two turbulent centuries.

Meditation on Succetus

2009-03-17T02:51:00.000-07:00

I propose we rename March 17th "Saint Baldrick's Day". Instead of getting
hammered on “Saint Patrick’s Day” (and waking up disheveled, disoriented, and obscurely ashamed for reasons you pray you will never remember), do something nice instead and contribute a few pence at www.stbaldricks.org . Then go get hammered.

That is the only warm-fuzzy sentiment you will find in this piece, so enjoy it. On to the meditation ...

“Patrick” (real name, Magonus Succetus) was the worst thing that ever happened to Ireland and the Irish. Succetus was a cultural imperialist and bitter revanchist, an angry man who took a perfectly fine, vibrant culture and befouled the place with a weird, groveling, guilt-obsessed, master/slave middle-eastern death cult.

First let’s be clear. Succetus wasn’t Irish, he was a Romanize Briton. He came from privilege, but his life changed forever when, as a teen, he was captured by Irish raiders and dragged off to Ireland as a human slave. We can’t imagine the kind of life he would have led as a shepherd out in the hills. Often cold, usually wet, months at a time seeing not a single human being, no decent clothing to wear, very little food, and subject to random beatings and the hundred and one daily abuses and degradations to which human slaves have been subject throughout history. What did Succetus think about during those endless cold nights alone out on the pastures? The stories claim he thought about how, if he could just escape, he could bring these poor pagan Irish to The One True Faith. This is nonsense: it presumes a model of human behavior that has never been in evidence, especially among those known as “saints.” What Succetus thought about for those years in slavery was the same thing we would all think about in identical circumstances: revenge. Eventually making his way to the coast and from there back to home, he found the perfect weapon for his revenge: Christianity. This middle-eastern religion made it easy for Succetus, and when he returned to Ireland to “convert the heathens,” his quiver was full. The Celtic Triskellion? Why, that’s a representation of The Trinity! The god Lugh, born of a divine father and a human mother? Well, that’s none other than a pointer to Our Lord And Savior! Tir Na Nog, the blessed isles where the dead go to rest and refresh themselves? What else could that be but Heaven! My ancestors – very brave but perhaps not as intellectually gifted as one might like – fell for Succetus’ bullshit hook, line and sinker. And so the culture and the soul of Ireland were changed utterly.

Let me tell you about a place out in the west of Ireland, a place that shows exactly what Succetus did to the Irish.

Croach Aigle (now called “Mount Patrick”) is a small mountain or a big hill, depending on who you ask. In pre-Christian times, the people would dance and amble up the slopes singing their old songs. Once they reached the top, the pilgrims would have revels and celebrations in honor of Lugh (and before him, in honor of Crom Cruach). As one of his main orders of business, Succetus climbed the mountain and “exorcized” the “demons,” turning it into a Christian pilgrimage site. However, the Christians do not dance their way joyously to the top: they trudge up, flagellating themselves (verbally and physically), riddled with sin and guilt and terror of eternity in a lake of fire. Even today, many Christian pilgrims walk to the top barefoot; every now and then, one of them will crawl all the way to the top on hands and knees. All in the interests of degrading themselves before their god, who apparently is pleased by such behavior. If any single thing brings into sharp relief the difference between the old, indigenous faith and the new middle-eastern faith that Patrick brought to Ireland, the difference in attitude as the faithful climbed the holy mountain to meet their respective gods is it.

I plan to visit Ireland and walk up that hill before I die. There will be no flagellation or wails of guilt and cries for salvation to some alien middle-eastern sky god, I assure you.

Elf-spotting in Iceland

2009-03-12T01:29:00.000-07:00

Don't mess with The Folk, or they'll delay your construction project.
Happens all the time in Iceland, apparently. Place seems
to be crawling with The Other Crowd. I wondered where they'd
relocated to after they got sick of dealing with the Irish.

http://www.slate.com/id/2213353/

An article on Iceland's de facto bankruptcy in the April issue of
Vanity Fair notes that a "large number of Icelanders"
believe in elves or "hidden people." This widespread folklore
occasionally disrupts business in the sparsely populated
North Atlantic country. Before the aluminum company Alcoa could erect
a smelting factory, "it had to defer to a government
expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were
on or under it." How do you find an elf?

The Inflection Is Near

2009-03-09T02:31:00.000-07:00

Every time I see Tom Friedman's weasely, supercilious face on the TeeVee I have to quickly change the chanel before I succumb to the urge to start screaming "SHUT UP! SHUUUT UUUPPPP!" at the top of my voice. (it scares the cats ...) Imagine my shock to see this NYT op-ed that is right on the money. The only point on which I disagree is with the bone he throws us at the end, where he claims that we'll all do the right thing, gird our loins, and fix this problem. The West's track record in loins-girding hasn't been real good the past half century. We''ve forgotten how.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/opinion/08friedman.html?_r=2

What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Saved My Soul

2009-03-08T15:00:00.000-07:00

At the age of 14, I sat in the cavernous balcony of the Stanley Theatre in Jersey City, waiting for the science fiction movie with the odd title to begin. The house lights went down and I settled deeper into my seat, ready to begin the familiar, beloved ritual.

The screen was completely dark. Slowly I became aware of a strange, deep bass rumble coming from the enormous Dolby speakers on the walls. The floor itself, the seats, were vibrating. On the screen, the camera was panning up over the dark side of the moon. Three brass notes sounded, rising; the music suggested infinite distance and enormous possibility. On the screen, Earth broke above the curve of the moon, and an enormous orchestral outburst slammed me back into my seat. As the fanfare continued, I experienced something I’ve never experienced since: the hair on the back of my neck and my arms stood up. I had to know what this music was, what it meant. The subject was not open for discussion. It was an obsession, you understand.

My investigations took me to the King Kullen record store in one of the sleazier neighborhoods of midtown Manhattan, where I bought the sound track for 2001: A Space Odyssey. I played that LP until it became unplayable, its uneven grooves reamed smooth by the needle. The liner notes told me that the piece that possessed me had an odd title, in a language I didn’t recognize: Also Sprach Zarathustra. The liner notes explained that it was composed by Richard Strauss as homage to a book with the same strange, incomprehensible title, written by some man with an equally comprehensible name. How exactly should I pronounce that name? Nye-chy? Nitch-key? Nysh?

Another (warning: bad pun ahead) odyssey to Manhattan secured me a copy of The Portable Nietzsche, which contained Zarathustra and several other works. And so I started reading.

Let me be clear: had it not been for Nietzsche, I would have wound up just another dead junkie in the low, dangerous, feral neighborhood where I grew up. I damn near wound up that way anyway, which is a whole other story. I have a t-shirt that reads, “Friedrich Nietzsche Saved My Soul.” People tell me how witty and totally post-modern it is. I tell them I'm dead serious.

Miraculously, I escaped to a small Jesuit college, where I majored in Philosophy and went head-to-head with the priests, full of the sort of tedious, humorless sincerity that only Humanities undergrads can muster. Nietzsche led me and my college peers to Camus and Sartre, and we all styled ourselves as engaged, indignant Existentialists, determined to change the world or at least change a few lives. You were either a Camusien or a Sartrean, and your life wasn’t worth a plugged franc if you got caught after dark on the Sartre gang’s turf with a copy of L’Etranger in your back pocket. We all wrote boatloads of philosophy, but in the spirit of our heroes we also wrote novels and plays and short stories. All of what we wrote was completely awful, of course, full of trite, portentous bathos and strident poseur bravado. What the hell; we put our hearts and souls into it, and we lived and wrote like we meant it.

You know the next chapter: life got in the way, as it always does, and I got waylaid, sidetracked, stopped ... for 30 years. And then one day five years ago, I found myself working on a software development project far from home, driving hours to and from work in the dark. With nothing in front of me but the cone of headlight, and no radio stations that far out, my quotidian mind slowed down and finally became quiet for the first time in decades. And that’s when I heard the little voice. Lethargically at first, as if struggling to wake from a long, drugged sleep, and then with increasing urgency, the small still voice said: Become who you are! At that moment, I felt something slip. It was a sensation, an actual physical sensation of a deep slippage inside my head. Something broke free, some great inner dam gave way and ideas poured through the breach and into my mind. An enormous flood of ideas, each demanding not only that I pay attention to it, but that I help it on its way out into the world.

And so, this blog. A place in the world for those ideas that are unlikely to grow into full-fledged essays, or books. I write constantly now, and am having some modest success in placing my work. But this place here, this is the place for the runts of my litter, my beloved runts.

So I found my way back, at the end, to Philosophy, to all of it, and when I’m grinding out the miles on the treadmill at my gym I wear my t-shirt proudly. And in March 2007, I made an important pilgrimage, and stood at the head of the “Nietzsche Trail” in the mountaintop Hobbit village of Eze, the trail he walked up and down every day when he was writing Zarathustra. Standing there, I finally understood Nietzsche’s poetry of the great heights, his poetry of over-coming and under-going.

How Your Brain Creates God

2009-02-11T05:23:00.000-08:00

Apparently our brains have "a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times." This does not bode well for advancing the interests of reason and science in the continuing economic crisis -- especially if you believe, as I do, that what we're seeing now is just the beginning.

Born Believers: How Your Brain Creates God
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126941.700-born-believers-how-your-brain-creates-god.html?full=true
WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

See also:
The Credit Crunch Could Be A Boon For Irrational Belief
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126943.600-the-credit-crunch-could-be-a-boon-for-irrational-belief.html

The System Is Resetting Itself

2009-02-10T08:34:00.000-08:00

This system -- this mad, funhouse-mirror system -- that we've had since the end of WWII, this system built on the presumption that all Americans need to be willing to put themselves into insane amounts of debt in order to puff up the machine, that system is dying -- now, as we speak. The economy is going to contract -- permanently -- and people's attitudes are going to contract along with it. Maybe our culture will finally find its way back to the honored tradition of cash-and-carry, "if you can't afford it, then you can't have it," that sort of thing. Does that mean a lot of Americans won't get their piece of that very problematic thing called "The American Dream"? Does that mean that a lot of Americans won't get that second or third car that they really can't afford? does that mean that they won't get that big house they really can't afford? I think that's what it means, yes. And the "collateral damage" from this systemic change is going to hurt each and every one of us, in ways we probably can't even imagine yet. Being unemployed isn't even the start of it.

Yes, Even The Hindus Are Religious Lunatics

2009-02-04T03:07:00.001-08:00

I've always considered the Hindus to be the endearing exception to my "all religions are dangerous to others" rule. I mean, how dangerous can a religion be when they have a god who has an elephant head? Apparently I was mistaken about our Hindu brethren and sistren: they're as nuts as the rest. I look at the lunatics of every major religion, and somehow the fact that my pagan Celtic ancestors went in for the odd bit of headhunting and human sacrifice seems almost benign.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/4447238/Hindu-extremists-will-attack-Valentines-Day-couples.html

Militants belonging to a group called Sri Ram Sena, who claim to be custodians of Indian culture, said Valentine's Day is un-Indian.

The threat comes days after the group's activists stormed a bar in the south western city of Mangalore, dragging out and beating women they accused of acting obscenely and "going astray".

The attack led to fears an extremist "Hindu Taliban" was on the rise in India.

Gangadhar Kulkarni, an activist in the group, which is a radical wing of the Hindu nationalist movement, said: "If people celebrate the day despite our warning, then we will definitely attack them."

"Valentine's Day is definitely not Indian culture. We will not allow celebration of that day in any form," added Pramod Mutalik, the group's founder.

Happy Groundhog Day

2009-02-02T02:00:00.000-08:00

For my regular friends (do I even have any of those?), Happy Groundhog
Day! For my Pagan friends, Happy Imbolc! If you're just a crusty old
Celtic traditionalist type like me, then happy Lá Fhéile Bríghde!
(Brighid's Feast Day). Since Brighid is the patroness of writers,
naturally I'll be celebrating her day with much feasting and
libations and getting some writing done.

Mandatory Archeological tid-bit: The ancestors took Imbolc pretty
seriously: at the Loughcrew burial mounds and the Mound of the
Hostages in Tara, the inner chamber of the passage tombs are perfectly
aligned with the rising sun of both Imbolc and Samhain. The rising
Imbolc sun shines down the long passageway and illuminates the inner
chamber of the tomb. You know my gal Brighid was a lady to be reckoned
with when they designed burial chambers to light up especially on her
day.

On this day, Brighid's serpent would come out of hibernation and have
a look around, and his behavior told the druids if there will be six
more weeks of winter or not. The druids had Brighid's snake, we have
Punxatawney Phil. Nothing ever changes. Speaking of druids, Brighid
is also the patroness of druids, so if any of you out there have any
Druid tendencies (which would surprise me, since none of you look
Druish....), then lift a beer to Brighid. She's the patroness of beer
and beer-brewers, so she always appreciates a cold frosty one.
Back in the day she was known as a brewer of her own beer, which was
said to be of unsurpassed deliciousness. A goddess who brews her own
beer – how can you not like her?

Brighid is a goddess, not a "Saint", though it's no surprise to find
that Saint Patrick subverted yet another local deity and turned her
into "Saint Bridget." Apparently those damned Irish heathens just
wouldn't stop worshipping her like they did most of the other gods
(at least, publicly), so it was one of those wink-and-a-nod deals.
Patrick was nothing if not practical.

It is said that when Brighid was born at sunrise, a tower of flame
roared from the top of her head to the heavens. For this reason she is
know by the honorific "Breo Saighead", "The Fiery Arrow of Power."
Obviously not someone to fsck with.

Brighid watches over a lot of stuff: poets and writers; personal
excellence; livestock (so also 4-legged family members); sacred
flames; hearth and home; metalworkers and smiths; beer-brewing; and
wells. Her feast days is the first day of Spring as the Celts measured
it, the time when the ewes start lactating, and in the epic Tain Bo
Cuailnge ("The Cattle Raid of Cooley") Emer explains to the endearing
homicidal-maniac hero Cú Chulain that "Oimell, the beginning of
spring...is the time when the sheep come out and are milked", and the
name Oimelc is used, because "ói-melg, 'ewe-milk', that is the time
the sheep's milk comes".

Brighid is VERY old, definitely pre-Celtic, very widespread. She turns
up everywhere you look: Brighid, Brighde, Brigit, Brigantia,
Brigindoni, Bride, Britannia, Bridey, Bridget. She even appears as the
Caribbean voudoun goddess "Maman Brighite," and some scholars see a
reference to her in the ancient Indian Sanskrit word 'Brihatî,'
meaning 'the exalted'. A world traveller is our gal Bridge.

When Brighid became "Saint Bridget," the former virgin priestesses
became "nuns" and just kept on doing what they always did. They kept
Brighid's eternal flame burning without interruption for many hundreds
of years, until the order was finally (seemingly) suppressed by that
wife-murdering British imperialist swine Henry VIII. The worship of
Brighid/Bridget (seemingly) disappeared, for hundreds of years. And
then, not too many years ago, several amazing things happened. First,
she was "de-canonized" by the Vatican; they basically fessed up and
said "she's not one of ours, you can have her back." And a sweet
collection of Catholic nuns from the mysterious Order of Bridget and
some pagan ladies started working together to renew the sacred flame. The final
triumph: the Kildaire town council recently made the nice ladies' job
easier by building an eternal flame monument in the Kildaire town
square mounted atop an acorns-and-oak-leaves motif, officially
recognizing Brighid for what she was and welcoming her home with
honor. I imagine it was a "two-hankie" moment for all the faithful in
attendance. For that matter, I wouldn't doubt that some of the city
functionaries probably got a bit "dewy" at seeing the old girl come
home.

What's to do for fun on this stay-indoors Imbolc day, you ask? Why not
drive yourself insane with the evil, evil game of Fidchell
(which it's easy to believe was invented by a god, since no human can
figure out the fscking thing): http://historicgames.com/RPgames.html
or online at http://www.ulyssesinteractive.com/content/games/java/fidchell.html

How to celebrate Imbolc Olde Schoole Style?
• On the day before the festival (i.e. January 31) clean and tidy
your house, ready for Brighid's visit.
• Decorate the place with flowers that are appropriate for the time
of year - such as tulips, primroses, snowdrops, daisies or dandelions (but
remember, folks, don't pick wild flowers). Light candles in the
evening, or have a fire if you have a fireplace.
• Celebrate the feast of Brighid on the eve of the festival with a
meal of your choice. Dairy-based food are especially appropriate, in
particular mashed potato and onions served with a well of melted
butter in the middle. Lamb, bacon, apple cake, colcannon and dumplings
are also appropriate. Beer can be drunk since Brighid was renowned
for brewing it herself.
Since Brighid was said to attend the meal as well, it was customary to
invite her in before everyone sits down to eat.
Hang up Brighid "crosses" (actually ancient sun symbols) at all
thresholds to bring good health to the family for the rest of the
winter season.
• Offerings such as cake or bread and butter should be left out (on
the window sill) to indicate that Bride is welcome to visit.
- If you have a fire, keep the ashes from the fireplace and scatter
them in your garden; you will have bumper crops all the year long.

Seventy Years Ago Today ...

2009-01-28T08:56:00.001-08:00

.. the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats went down into the hollow hills to rest with his ancestors.

Can anyone read those last two ineffable lines from his most famous poem without getting a cold chill? I've never been able to. Hell, I'm reading them right this second and they're totally freaking me out.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
....

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I thought maybe it was just me and Jon Stewart

2009-01-26T07:07:00.000-08:00

Jon and I were in agreement that the "inaugural poem" was a pedestrian, mundane bit of instantly-forgettable fluff, suitable for lulling small children (and not a few adults) to sleep, but not good for much else. I can't begin to tell you how happy I am that Jon and I aren't alone.

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2009/01/20/adam-kirsch-on-elizabeth-alexander-s-bureaucratic-verse.aspx

... it was no surprise to hear Alexander begin her poem today with a cliché ("Each day we go about our business"), before going on to tell the nation "I know there's something better down the road"; and pose the knotty question, "What if the mightiest word is ‘love'?"; and conclude with a classic instance of elegant variation: "on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp." The poem's argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity. Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou's, Williams's, and even Robert Frost's inauguration poems already proved: that the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd ...

Duty Now For The Future

2009-01-20T09:39:00.000-08:00

Decades ago – long before I became gray and respectable – I was a big fan of the punk rock band Devo. I found myself remembering their second album just now; specifically, the title of the album: “Duty Now For The Future.” Today, that phrase seems to carry an unexpected weight; it seems pregnant with meaning and promise.

As I write these words, President Obama has just finished his inaugural address. It was an address for the ages, and yet one that was desperately needed at this particular time in our history. It pointed the way forward with resonant themes from a simpler and more honest time. The themes of duty, sacrifice, responsibility, obligation, and service.

To which I can only respond: it’s about time. Long past time, in fact. Long past time for Americans across the entire political spectrum (as well as those who consider themselves apolitical) to embody these ideas -- ideas that have recently been misappropriated by the hard-right fringe of the body politic and used as blunt instruments of political demagoguery.

It’s a funny thing about America: almost no one talked about duties anymore. All we hear from Americans is the endless din about “rights.” The idea that our rights can exist in a social vacuum, without a corresponding set of duties, is a toxic idea that is poisoning America. We have come to believe that we are nothing more than individuals, and that as such all we need concern ourselves with is rights, and never with obligations.

Let’s talk about obligations for a change, and about duties. A philosophy that proclaims the idea that rights do not have their basis in duty and obligation must inevitably result in a sick, narcissistic citizenry, a citizenry from whom the endless, birds-nest cheeps of “Me! Me! Me! Me!” has reached deafening volume. It is time for less talk about our rights as citizens, and more talk about our duties as citizens.

Obama is not calling America to service because such service is "needed” in any practical sense. He is calling for service, and sacrifice, and a sense of obligation because these are the rhetorical clarion calls by which one inculcates a sense of shared duties and national solidarity, without which no healthy, committed society can be built or surv

Adieu, George

2009-01-15T16:19:00.000-08:00

Goodbye, George. It’s time for you to go. Long past time, to be blunt. The low, shameful years during which you strutted and fretted upon the world stage, full of sound and fury but signifying less than nothing, are finally over. And what an eight years they have been! They were certainly the most eventful period in my lifetime -- and I’m old enough to remember the Nixon era. It feels strange now, at the end, to be so completely indifferent to you and anything you might have left to say or do. All I can manage now is a sense of weary resignation at the prospect of cleaning up the mess you’ve left behind. You’ve left us so much to be angry about, if we only had the energy to be angry.

Terrorism? You’re 0-1 on the terrorism front, George. Much as you’d like us to believe that you magically appeared on the scene on 9/12/01 and took charge, the simple fact is that the attacks of 9/11 took place eight months into your watch. You “own” them, George – and you own the consequences.

Your self-described role as “war president,” a role you embraced with such juvenile abandon? You’re 0-2 there. Iraq, that monument to ego and hubris, remains a question mark; my personal sense is that, within a couple of years after we complete our withdrawal, the locals will go back to slaughtering each other with the same gusto with which they’ve slaughtered each other for 1500 years. As for Afghanistan, the good war, the war that a majority of Americans – including me – believe we needed to fight, things there are going very badly indeed. Your hand-picked puppet, Ahmid Kharzai, has been reduced to nothing more than the de facto mayor of Kabul, and an independent analysis recently concluded that the Taliban have managed to put “a stranglehold around Kabul.” Afghanistan cannot end well, and history will blame your pointless sideshow in Iraq for the loss.

Let’s turn to the economy, George. The consequences of particular brand of laissez-faire, buccaneer Capitalism has forced the pundits and economists to keep reaching farther and farther back in American history to find comparisons. In some cases, they’ve had to reach all the way back to those halcyon days of Herbert Hoover to find equivalent levels of damage to our economic structure inflicted by the man in the White House. Think of it, George: for centuries to come, historians will mention your name in the same breath as Herbert Hoover.

And looming over all of it, possibly the greatest obscenity of your entire time with us, is the disaster known as “Katrina.” What made it a disaster was your sad, laughable (non) response to the crisis; if there was ever a moment when the phrase “crime of omission” had meaning, it was in August 2005.

It’s an odd thing, George: if one were of a paranoid mindset, one might wonder: do you actually hate America? It’s a question that really does need to be asked, so complete and all-encompassing has been the damage you have inflicted on America in your relatively brief time at the helm.

As you strut off into the sunset in your trademark plenty-tough kippy-ki-yay cowboy fashion, grinning that inane, pointless grin of yours, many millions of us who were foolish enough to open the door and let you in back in 2000 struggle to find a way to forgive ourselves for playing a part, however small, in all the damage that you have inflicted on our country and on our world.

Your hour upon the stage is over, George. Finally, and forever – go!

R.I.P. Number Six

2009-01-15T15:50:00.000-08:00

Veteran actor Patrick McGoohan died today at the age of 80. I will
always remember him for that one brilliant season of his life,
that "Citizen Kane" moment when he created, from sheer talent, drive,
and force of will, the most disturbing and thoughtful TV series
ever: "The Prisoner." The first time the series was broadcast here in
the US, I sat riveted for every episode. In the closing minutes
of the last episode, I had to tear myself away and run to the
bathroom, and so did not get to see the final, shattering revelation
in which we discover the answer to the question that haunts the opening credits
of every episode: "Who is Number 1?" (my mother saw it, but
she refused to tell me -- she just smirked and winked). Many years
later, when the series re-ran, I caught it and this time made sure
not to miss the end of the last episode. Once I realized what I had just
seen, I thought to myself: "Of course. Who else could Number 1 have
been?"

In honor of McGoohan?s masterwork, I resurrected an essay I wrote back
in early 2003; it's the first sustained piece I wrote after coming
back to writing after a (30-year) "hiatus" from writing.

NUMBER SIX vs. THE PANOPTICON

Introduction

Every episode opens with the same fragmented sequence, a sequence saturated

with the disjointed and implicit terror of a familiar nightmare:

‘Where am I?’

‘In The Village.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Information.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I am Number Two.’

‘Who is Number One?’

‘You are Number Six.’

‘I am not a number! I am a free man!!’

In the classic television series The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan plays a

nameless man who resigns suddenly from a top-level secret job. Before he can

leave the country, he is abducted, waking up in a fantastic village. He is unable

to find out where he is, or who has kidnapped him. All he knows is that they claim

to want ‘information’.

The Village is a complete community -- everything is accounted for. It is the

ultimate welfare state -- the perfect home for those prepared to cede their

individuality and liberty. It is Panopticism taken to its technological extreme.

Everyone is surveilled, videotaped, bugged, betrayed.

In The Village, everyone is known by a number -- the Prisoner, as we have seen,

is designated as Number Six. The Village is run by a large, infallible

infrastructure, under the supervision – but not the control -- of Number Two,

whose task it is to find the answer to one question -- why Number Six resigned.

Or so we are led to believe. The Prisoner's goal is to keep the answer from his

mysterious minders, to find the identity of the menacing and unseen Number

One, and above all to escape.

Or so we are led to believe.

In each episode, Number Six and the Village battle for power. Sometimes one

side wins, and sometimes the other side wins. But no one ever wins for long.

The battle, seemingly endless and epic to those of us who are old enough to

have watched the series every week when it was first on TV, actually only went

on for 17 episodes. There is a continuing controversy about what ‘order’ the

episodes ‘should’ be viewed in (the production sequence is known not to match

the original UK broadcast sequence, for instance), and most viewers were

disoriented by the non-linear and frankly surreal aspects of the series. The

Prisoner was full of bizarre and memorable features – the fairytale Village,

canopied penny-farthing bicycle, piped blazers and striped capes, golf umbrellas

and numbered badges, Mini-Moke taxis and the huge white 'Rover' balloons.

The series makes the viewer work – which, for many of us, is a large part of its

enduring worth. In the ensuing 35 years, there has been nothing on the tube to

compare with it.

Patrick McGoohan created The Prisoner from soup to nuts, as a follow-on to his

immensely popular spy show ‘Danger Man’ (release in the US as ‘Secret Agent’).

To get a sense of what McGoohan gave up in order to devote himself to The

Prisoner, one must imagine if Sean Connery, on top of his game as James Bond

and free to write his own ticket, chose to suddenly start adapting Franz Kafka to

the small screen.

The series asks more questions than it answers. Why is Number Six being held?

Why did he resign? Who is Number Six? Who are his jailers? Who is Number

One? The village is seemingly administered by Number Two, whose identity

changes from episode to episode (often the same Number two reappears in

subsequent episodes without explanation).

Fans have been slammed over the years for paying the same amount of navel-

gazing attention to a TV program as traditional academics would to a

postmodernist tome. Fans have their get-togethers and newsletters and

‘Prisoner-based fiction’ offerings and bitter listserv wars over minutiae of meaning

(think Trekkies, except not as geeky and without the Spock ears). Still, to the

complaint, ‘Catch a grip, it’s only a TV program’, many contemporary thinkers

(Baudrillard comes to mind, for one) would say that this is precisely why it must

be taken seriously.

Television As Text

It is a genuine mystery: how did this television series, which was aptly described

at the time as a ‘puzzling failure’, mutate into something so complex? How did it

take on such a life of its own?

In order to answer this mystery, we must consider the possibility of treating The

Prisoner as a ‘text’.

As arguably the most ‘literary’ of television endeavors, The Prisoner can be –

indeed, must be – confronted and interrogated as a text. Can one over-read a

given text? If so, what does it mean to over-read it? Will we unpack layers of

mean that contain, as Goethe said of one of his own writings, more meaning than

the author himself knew? The Prisoner, taken as a literary artifact, contains

strata of significance that the series’ creator and star, Patrick McGoohan, never

imagined – and never intended. The text literally contains more content than was

written into it.

One of the more fruitful ‘reads’ of The Prisoner is as an exemplar of radical

Panopticism. Our nameless protagonist is drugged and transported to The

Village, where he is confined, disciplined, occasionally interrogated. Yet there is

something strangely tentative about the discipline and control which The Village

attempts to impose on Number Six. It is almost as though the interrogators feel

that Number Six must be somehow complicit – that Number Six is, in some

obscure sense, in control of his own nature as an object of discipline and

surveillance.

Prisons are merely the visible embodiment of a broader, all-encompassing

‘power’, the principles of which are defined in Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’ and

evolved by Foucault. In The Village, surveillance is both visible and unverifiable.

Number Six never knows at any given moment if he is being watched, but he

may always be under surveillance. This is the principle of Panopticism deployed

in a Village-wide scale.

Other than the unacceptable option of submission to the discipline of The Village,

there is only one course of action available to Number Six: escape. In the very

first episode (‘Arrival’), he stumbles across the Village old people’s home, a clear

signal that he and every other prisoner in The Village is here ‘for the duration’.

The Village is sort of like Guantanamo, only with more sumptuous living spaces.

Number Six attempts his first escape in this very first episode – without success.

He is issued conformist Village wardrobe and forced to wear his ID badge with

just ‘6’ on it. He goes to the Green Dome (the center of The Village as well as

the hub of the Panopticon apparatus) to force a confrontation with his captors,

only to discover that Number Two – who he met upon his arrival -- has been

replaced ( something which recurs in almost every episode, always without

explanation or any indication of surprise on anyone’s part).

Number Six is (understandably) obsessed with the project of escape. At a craft

show in ‘Chimes of Big Ben’, Number Six presents his work called ‘Escape’. It

wins first prize. He seems to escape in ‘Many Happy Returns’, making his way

back to HQ, where he organizes an expedition to find the elusive Village. He

spots it from the air, but the pilot is revealed to be a minion of The Village.

Number Six is ejected, and drifts on his parachute, slowly back down to The

Village. Our protagonist isn’t going anywhere, it would seem.

Unmutual

A second major subtext of The Prisoner (which synchronizes on several levels

with the subtext of escape) is the idea of Number Six as Other. Number Six is

excluded from the discourse of the Village. Why? Is he mad? Criminal? A sexual

deviant? Perhaps all of the above, and more. Number Six clearly and

persistently poses a threat, and that threat is ‘not so much the crime committed

(at least in isolation) but the potentiality of danger that lies hidden in an individual

and which is manifested in his observed everyday conduct. The prison functions

in this as an apparatus of knowledge.’ Like the rebellious chess Rook in

‘Checkmate’, Number Six exhibits the ‘cult of the individual’, which simply cannot

be allowed to stand in The Village. Yet, the warders will not – or can not – let him

leave. From the point of view of The Village, Number Six is considered as a

‘rebel’, ‘reactionary’, and ‘Unmutual’ (the most heinous crime of all). ‘The

suspect, as such, always deserved a certain punishment; one could not be the

object of suspicion and be completely innocent.’

The most striking characteristic of Number Six’s ordeal is that it seems primarily

intended to simply regulate his body. They don’t particularly want him to believe

anything; they simply want to contain his body. Their claims that ‘we want

information’ ring hollow; they really don’t make any credible efforts to obtain any

information. There are the occasional odd interludes of torture, but one senses

that the interrogator’s heart really isn’t in it. Number Six breaks up the regime of

normalcy. Repeatedly, and with bitter gusto. Why don’t they kill him? Or at least,

put his body under some more draconian form of control?

His position in the Village is perhaps not quite what it seems. We are given a

premonition of this in ‘Checkmate’ when the eccentric Village inhabitant applies

his empathic ‘sixth sense’ on Number Six, claiming that he can tell prisoners from

warders because warders display a secret arrogance. The eccentric denounces

Number Six as one of the warders. Is the eccentric simply mad, or is his insight

based, on some level, in fact?

Foucault would argue that there are no bare facts, simply power relations. The

dominant power structure gets to define the facts. In effect, ‘to the victor go the

spoils.’ Knowledge is controlled in The Village through mechanisms of power.

Everywhere you find knowledge, there you will also find power. Though

imprisoned, Number Six is powerful and in control because he has the

knowledge – ostensibly the knowledge of why he resigned.

The village is a prison, but it is also something from which Number Six is

voluntarily excluded: a discourse, which enables behaviors that Number Six is

unable or unwilling to perform. One realizes that he suspects, correctly, that to

do so would invalidate his power.

Number Six realizes what none of the other inhabitants of The Village realize:

that surveillance is a two way street. This is explored throughout the series by

means of the constant salutation ‘Be Seeing You’, which courtesy prescribes as

the thing to say when taking one’s leave of another prisoner. Form the thumb

and forefinger into a circle; look through the tube thus created (the lens of a

camera, perhaps?), and toss off one’s hand in a salute while chirping ‘Be Seeing

You’ with manufactured congeniality.

Number Six throws it back at them, bitterly, angrily, from between pinched lips.

When he performs the gesture and spits out the words, he turns ‘Be Seeing You’

into a threat. You may be watching me, he seems to say --- but I’m watching

you, as well. And biding my time.

I Am Number Two

Number Two gives every appearance of being the administrator of the Panoptic

apparatus, as well as the on-site delegate for the elusive Number One. Yet

Number Two’s primary function is that of an observer, and the constant,

obsessive object of his observation is Number Six. Number Two is really a

function rather than a person, changing in every episode (and once during an

episode).

The power structure of The Village, personified by Number Two, seems geared

towards forcing Number Six to ‘make his honorable amends’. Yet there is

something almost tentative in the ongoing interrogation. One senses that Number

Two is, on one level, not particularly interested in results. Number Two is, in

computer terms, ‘interrupt-driven’; he awaits detailed work direction from Number

One, who is unseen but instantly aware of every twist and turn in the

interrogative project. Number Two is a classic example of ‘supervisors,

perpetually supervised’. Underneath his veneer as interrogator and master,

Number Two is fundamentally a researcher. ‘The investigation, the exercise of

common reason, lays aside the old inquisitorial model and adopts the much more

subtle model (doubly validated by science and common sense) of empirical

research.’

It is important to keep in mind that The Village, like the Panopticon, ‘was also a

laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter

behavior, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and

monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to

their crimes and characters, and to seek the most effective ones.’

Regardless of the actual content and practice of the various ‘science

experiments’ inflicted by the various Number Twos on Number Six, we begin to

notice that, as the series ‘evolves’, Number Six seems almost in cahoots with

Number Two. Number Six seems to be somehow complicit in his own

imprisonment.

Fall Out

This possible complicity becomes more and more obvious, once one knows to be

on the look-out for it. The episode ‘Living in Harmony’ deploys a key element,

one carefully hidden in most of the other episodes but present as a subtext. The

episode opens with a Western parody of the normal pre-titles resignation scene.

Riding out of town, the ex-sheriff is dragged by a mob into a town called

‘Harmony’. He tries several escape attempts, but he cannot get away. The town

judge wants him to be the new Sheriff – but the man refuses. This theme

resonates through the series – the powers that be in the Village want Number Six

to do something, something involving stepping up to some responsibility. Number

Six refuses, avoids. His efforts to do so become more heroic, more frantic.

Things continue to slip into … what? Dementia? Dadaism? Some sort of neo-

Freudian thing? In ‘Once Upon a Time’ we see Foucault’s proposition that the

prison structure can be deployed in all aspects of modernity when we see

Number Two morph into Number Six’s father, then his teacher, coach, employer,

judge, officer, and prison guard. Number Six plays the parts of the son, student,

athlete, employee, accused, soldier, and prisoner. After this mythic rewind/replay

of power relationships, Number Two drops dead at Number Six’s feet. ‘The rule

was that if the accused ‘held out’ and did not confess, the magistrate was forced

to drop the charges. The tortured man had then won.’

A door slides open and a Supervisor enters the room.

‘What do you desire?’

‘Number One.’

‘I’ll take you.’

As ‘Fall Out’, the final episode of the series, begins, Number Six has won.

You Are Number Six

The final episode of The Prisoner is difficult to describe, even more difficult to

unpack. But we need to do it, because the final episode, more than all that has

come before, validates our Foucauldian read of this text.

As ‘Fall Out’ begins, we are in a sort of surreal courtroom. There is a judge, who

gives a long speech to the effect that all the inhabitants of The Village are

‘gathered together in a state of democratic crisis’ and that ‘Number Six has

survived the ultimate test and will therefore no longer be called by a number.’

This speech is followed by an interlude of strange Absurdist theatre that puts one

in mind of Number Two’s advice in ‘Dance of the Dead’: ‘if you insist on living in

a dream, you may be taken for mad.’ Indeed.

Number Six is given traveler’s checks, his passport, and the keys to his London

flat. He attempts to address the throng in the courtroom, but he is drowned out by

their inane chanting of ‘I, I, I’ (or could it perhaps be ‘Eye, Eye, Eye’?).

Things happen quickly now.

Number Six climbs a circular metal staircase and at the top finds himself in a

room full of globes, presided over by a masked and hooded figure wearing the

‘Number One’.

Number Six rushes over to him and rips off his mask.

Under the mask, Number One wears another mask, a monkey mask. (‘I’ve made

a monkey out of you’, perhaps?)

Furious, Number Six rips off the monkey mask, and is confronted with his own

face. His own laughing face.

So it is not until the last seconds of the last episode that we encounter the true

nature of the regimen imposed on Number Six. It is only then that we discover, to

our shock (but not really to our surprise) precisely how ‘all-seeing’ The Village’s

Panopticon really is.

We are now in a position to deploy an alternative – and more productive – read

of the dialog in that dreamlike opening sequence. To the question ‘Who is

Number One?’ the response

‘You are Number Six’

is really

‘You are, Number Six.’

The prisoner and the jailer are one and the same. This bitter vision of our entire

internal landscape as ‘The Village’ is what we arrive at after all of our

protagonist’s struggles and heroics. As the Village saying goes, ‘Questions are a

burden to others. Answers, a prison for oneself.’ Finding the answer to his

screamed question, ‘Who is Number One???’ reveals a prison inescapable.

In a construct where every person is constantly and completely surveilled,

Number Six’s parting words – ‘Be seeing you!’ – can be fully understood as both

a promise of revenge and a cry of despair.

The Prisoner is ‘an account of individuality, the passage from the epic to the

novel, from the noble deed to the secret singularity, from long exiles to the

internal search, from childhood, from combats, to phantasies.’

The last episode ends in a phantasy, a dream sequence. The Prisoner’s little life

is rounded by a sleep.

So, at the end of it, does Number Six imprison himself? Do we all?

Appendix: Episode Guide With Original Air Dates

1. Arrival (10/1/1967)
2. The Chimes Of Big Ben (10/8/1967)
3. A B And C (10/15/1967)
4. Free For All (10/22/1967)
5. The Schizoid Man (10/29/1967)
6. The General (11/5/1967)
7. Many Happy Returns (11/12/1967)
8. Dance Of The Dead (11/26/1967)
9. Checkmate (12/3/1967)
10. Hammer Into Anvil (12/10/1967)
11. It's Your Funeral (12/17/1967)
12. A Change Of Mind (12/31/1967)
13. Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling (1/7/1968)
14. Living In Harmony (1/14/1968)
15. The Girl Who Was Death (1/21/1968)
16. Once Upon A Time (1/28/1968)
17. Fall Out (2/4/1968)

Irish "pattern days"

2009-01-11T02:36:00.000-08:00

Everybody thinks that my ancestors the Irish are, along with the Italians and the Spanish, the most Catholic people in Europe. I'm starting to wonder. I've been researching a lot lately (the whole "getting in touch with one's ancient roots" thing), and last night I had a moment of Zen reading this article about the oddly-named "pattern days." First time I heard of them, I thought "oh you whacky, Jesus-smitten Micks, any excuse to worship some 3rd-rate Saint." Then I read this and discovered that "pattern" was a slur of "patrun," which was a slur of "patron," as in patron "saint" of a particular place. Those places turned out to be the same wells, lakes, and high places (especially giant burial mounds, the "hollow hills" of folklore) that the people visited and celebrated in the pre-Christian days. And it hit me like a revelation: oh, you clever Irish bastards! You subverted Mother Church and held onto your old traditions, while simultaneously avoiding nasty things like The Inquisition! A wink and a nod to the local cleric (who probably joined in the celebrations, since he was usually a local boy) and the archbishop back in Dublin is none the wiser. Brilliant!

The description of a "pattern day" festival from the early 1800s really brings home the joyous, community feel, and gives some vague sense of what wonderful things the original festivals must have been back in the day.

http://homepages.iol.ie/~ronolan/pattern.page.html

cf also the intriguing and suspicious "Order of Bridget" in Kildaire who kept "Saint" Brigit's sacred fire burning for centuries. What kind of freaking Christian Saint has sacred fires in her honor?

Vicar removes "horrifying" crucifix from outside of church

2009-01-10T03:17:00.000-08:00

Apparently the fairly graphic representation of the agonies of The Cross
were "upsetting the children" and was, in their words, a "put-off." Now, I'll admit I've been away from Mother Church for awhile, but as a good Irish Catholic boy, I seem to recall being told over and over again that the unimaginable agonies of Jesus on The Cross were the point of Christianity; his agonies and suffering were what redeemed humanity. Silly little bake-sale Christians; when they say things like "we need a more uplifting and inspiring symbol than execution on a cross," we realize that they've lost any reverence for -- hell, any understanding of -- the broken, tortured body that for 2000 years was the central truth of their faith.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/06/crucifixion-church-vicar-sculpture-copnall

A statue of the crucifixion has been taken down from its perch on a church in Sussex because it was scaring local children and deterring worshippers, a vicar admitted today.
...snip...
Souter, formerly a cell biologist, said: "The crucifix expressed suffering, torment, pain and anguish. It was a scary image, particularly for children. Parents didn't want to walk past it with their kids, because they found it so horrifying.

"It wasn't a suitable image for the outside of a church wanting to welcome worshippers. In fact, it was a real put-off.

"We're all about hope, encouragement and the joy of the Christian faith. We want to communicate good news, not bad news, so we need a more uplifting and inspiring symbol than execution on a cross."

The New Leviathan

2009-01-08T03:13:00.000-08:00

On 9/11, America was shocked to discover that there was an outside world with many, many people in it who quite simply hated America’s guts – and this discovery scared the hell out of America. If the last several years are an indication of what America’s future holds – and I believe they are – then 9/11 will haunt and infest American cultural life for many years to come. Everything that Americans think, write, do and believe will be refracted through this enormous funhouse lens. This event, which contained so much potential to inspire serious-minded reflection and subtle analysis, instead inspired America to do what it does best: unleash its power.

Michel Foucault wrote of:

A power that presented rules and obligations as personal bonds, a breach of which constituted an offense and called for vengeance; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility, the first sign of rebellion .. of a power that had to demonstrate not only why it enforced its laws, but who were its enemies ... of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as ‘superpower.’

America’s favorite ritual display is war, something that seems to have an almost addictive power over Americans. America spends as much on war as the rest of the world combined. This is beyond any sane concept of “security”; this is the behavior of a junkie.

I do not describe this behavior as “addiction” lightly. As writer Chris Hedges pointed out (at a college commencement address at which he was shouted down by an auditorium full of fresh-faced, patriotic young Americans), “the seduction of war is so insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true – it does create a feeling of comradeship which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time in our life, feel we belong.” This is why America – a country full of people who are so un-alike in so many ways – embraces this addictive new chapter in its love affair with war, the “Global War on Terror.” Because as soon as that warm, patriotic glow of togetherness starts to dim (as it appears it is now doing with the “Iraq front in the war on terror”), a new battle in this war without end is served up: pure, uncut, expensive as hell but cheap at twice the price, ready to be mainlined by an eager nation.

America does not view its decades-long string of foreign-policy disasters (most recently the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) as failures of diplomacy and policy. War replaces diplomacy and defines policy. War is the point: so easy, so unambiguous, so damned glamorous compared to the mundane tedium of building consensus and displaying moral leadership.

But what is this frantic, almost compulsive resort to the military option as the default response really in aid of?

I recently found myself re-reading Hobbes’ Leviathan, and I was struck by how easily one can map Hobbes’ mythical authoritarian/submissive society to America in the 21st century. Hobbes believed that a society’s function was to accrue more and more power, to strive constantly to seize the upper hand, all in aid of defending a passive and cowering populace from a world full of evil enemies. Hobbes argued that humans are always willing to accept submission to a strong and domineering leadership in exchange for protection from evildoers. Protection from fear itself, in effect. The citizens of Leviathan were so riddled with fear and doubt that they surrendered their freedom with breathtaking eagerness. America’s default attitude since 9/11 can best be summed up by Derrida’s wonderful phrase: “manic triumphalism.” However, this is mere posturing, intended to cover a deep core of dread. Underneath all the testosterone-laden, Hoo-Rah bravado, America in the 21st century is the new Leviathan, in which the citizens cower like whipped dogs.

Still, the unabashed willingness with which Americans surrendered their freedoms must give us pause. Because at the end of the day, that is the fundamental question: why did so many Americans toss off the burden of freedom with such eagerness? I would like to propose at least a partial answer. America is a country where 90% of the people describe themselves as “religious” and 46% describe themselves as “evangelical.” Eighty-six percent of Americans believe in miracles; 83% believe in a real, literal Virgin Birth. Over 40% of Americans believe the world will end in an actual battle of Armageddon, and a stunning 45% believe in a real, anthropomorphic Devil. To the majority of Americans, those who live and die within such a belief system, America’s vaunted “freedom” – and, more importantly, the consequences of that freedom – is, quite simply, horrifying. Profanity and nudity on TV, gay marriage and adoption, “Feces Madonna” and “Piss Jesus” and Mapplethorpe’s photos of men with bullwhips jammed up their asses, on and on and on. They look at America’s free society, they look at the things that this free society permits to happen and they hate what they see. They absolutely hate modern America, and they believe that surrendering their freedom is a very small price to pay in order to make it stop. These Americans have more in common with Muslim fundamentalists than they can ever admit to themselves. This is the secret heart of darkness in 21st century America. America will have another Bush some day, because it is what so many Americans want and need.

Caller on the Line: a short play

2008-12-25T03:35:00.000-08:00

A short theatre piece. I saw it produced in late 2007 and was surprised at how well it worked. It was also published here.

Cast of Characters

Stan: an executive

Mom: Stan’s mother

Sarah: a secretary, offstage

Scene

Stan’s office.

Time

The present.

SETTING: An office with a desk.

AT RISE: STAN sits at the desk, working on a laptop computer. He drinks amber liquid from a liquor glass. A telephone sits on one corner of the desk. It rings. STAN presses a button on the phone.

SARAH
Mister Garland.

STAN
Yeah, Sarah.
SARAH
I have your mother on line one.

(Stan does not respond.)

SARAH
Mister Garland?

STAN
Yeah. I’m here.

SARAH
Should I go ahead and take a message?

(STAN pauses, then sighs.)

STAN
No. Go ahead, put her through.

(STAN presses phone button.)

STAN (awkwardly)
Yeah, Ma. Hey!

(A spotlight illuminates MOM, stage left. She is sitting in an armchair with a phone in her lap.)

MOM
Your father’s circling the drain.

(STAN yawns and leans back.)

STAN
Do what, now?

MOM
Your father. He’s circling the drain. Pulling the dirt in over him. Giving up the ghost. You know?

STAN
Are you trying to say he’s dying?

MOM (sarcastically)
You always were my brightest boy, Stanny.

STAN
Yeah, so what’s the old bastard’s problem this time? Ebola? Black plague? Alien anal probe? What?

MOM
He’s in the hospital.

STAN
So he’s graduated from daily doctor visits to inpatient mode? Way to go, Dad!

MOM
He’s decided to starve himself to death. Just decided it was a good idea, you know?
(long pause)
Stanny? You still there?

STAN (stunned, quiet)
Yeah, Ma. Yeah. I’m here.
(long pause; laughs awkwardly)
Well, you have to give him credit. It’s original. The old man thinks he’s Gandhi, or what?

MOM
Have you been drinking, Stanny?

STAN
No, Ma. No. I’m good. Just real tired is all.

MOM
OK. Because you sound like you’ve been drinking, and it’s only two in the afternoon, is why I’m asking.

STAN (a bit peeved)
I’m clean and sober, Ma. Cross my heart and hope to die. OK?

MOM
OK, that’s good. But like I was saying about your father, it’s like he’s set his mind to it, you know? I mean, it’s not like there’s anything wrong with him.
(pause)
He just decided to go ahead and starve himself to death. Just like that.

STAN
Yeah, OK. So why are you of all people breaking a sweat over it?

MOM
I’m not. I just always seem to wind up getting stuck playing messenger boy between your dear old father and you kids every time he does one of his little psychodramas. Why the hell is that, Stanny?

STAN (chuckles)
Simple, Ma. You’re the only one that’ll still take his calls. The rest of us got call screening.

MOM (after awkward pause)
Do you think you should give him a call, Stanny?

STAN (evasively)
No. What for?

MOM
I don’t know. Sort out any unfinished business? Try and penetrate that thick skull of his? Tell him to stop being so melodramatic? Whatever?
(long pause)
Do you think maybe you should call him? Are you there, Stan?

STAN
No.

MOM
No, you’re not there? Could’ve fooled me.

STAN
No, I don’t think I should call him.

MOM
Ah. OK.
(awkward pause)
I mean I’m not saying you should or anything, I’m the last person who’d say any of you should give your father the time of day, you know? I just figured, you know, because of how everything went, and how it all ended up, that –-

STAN
Like I said. I don’t think I should call him.

MOM
Why not?

STAN (after long pause)
Because I don’t think I should call him, that’s all. It’s not complicated. Look, Ma. We both know that as soon as the old man realizes his little drama routine isn’t going to make him the center of attention, he’ll get bored with the whole thing and get back to drinking his Scotch and smoking his smokes and flashing that million-dollar smile.

MOM
I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so this time. I really do believe he means to do it. He seems, I can’t explain it exactly, it’s almost like he’s relieved somehow, like he’s okay with it.

STAN
Come on, Ma. You can’t possibly think he’s serious.

MOM
Stanny, you know how his mind works, if anybody does. I sure as hell never did. Took me a long time to figure that one out, let me tell you. It’s like this. Your father’s going to starve himself to death because he doesn’t have an audience anymore. It’s like your father’s not even there when there’s no people around.
(long pause)
Looking back, I really do think it’s always been that way. Always. If he walks into an empty room, it’s like it’s still empty.
(pause)
You there, Stanny?

STAN (quietly)
Yeah, Ma.

MOM
What? I can’t even hear you, Stanny.

STAN
Yeah, Ma. I’m still here.
(sighs)
And like I said, I don’t think I should call him, that’s all.

MOM
Listen, I’m telling you, Stanny, you need to be the one to call him. It needs to be you. You need to call your father up and you need to tell him it’s wrong. Tell him it’s selfish and melodramatic, and tell him it’s just wrong! He’ll listen to you. If the idiot ever listened to anybody, he listened to you.

STAN (quietly)
I can’t do that to him, Ma.

MOM
God damn these phones! Are you sure you don’t have me on speaker? What did you say?

STAN (louder)
I said, I can’t do that to him, Ma.

MOM
What? Do what ‘to’ him? What are you talking about?

STAN
He decided, Ma. I’m not going to take that away from him. He decided. He did. I’m not going to help him be weak again, now that he’s finally decided. I won’t do that to him.

MOM
What the hell do you mean? You are making no sense to me, Stanny.
(pause)
You are drunk, aren’t you?

STAN (quiet, bitter)
Not yet, I’m not.

MOM
No, I didn’t get any of that. Can you hear me? Stupid phones. Hello?

STAN (almost to himself)
Judge, jury, and executioner. I can’t tell him he’s wrong to be any of those things.

MOM
Look, Stanny, you’re talking insane, you know what I mean? What the hell is this ‘I can’t tell him he’s wrong’ crap? What is that supposed to mean? Yes, you can! You sure can tell him, and you’re going to, you’re going to call him and tell him not to do this. Tell him he’s wrong to do this, God damn it!

STAN (after long pause)
I can’t, Ma. I can’t. (Long pause) Because he’s not wrong, Ma. He’s never been less wrong about
anything in his whole sorry-ass life. Leave it be, Ma. Leave him be. He needs to do this, and he’s right to do this. He’s been waiting most of his life to do this. Just waiting around trying to work up the guts to finally do it and get it over with. The best thing we can do is leave him alone to do this one thing right. Please, Ma.

MOM
Stan.
(pause)
Stan, listen. Please. You have to save him. Stan?
(long pause)
Did I lose you?

STAN (quietly)
I am saving him, Ma.

MOM
I can’t hear you, damn it. I told you a long time ago that these new high-tech phones aren’t worth a damn.

STAN
Yeah, Ma, look. I got calls stacked up like crazy here, and I’m five minutes late for a pretty important meeting. I really do have to get off this phone and get to work.

MOM
Stanny –-

STAN
Love you, Ma. Look, I got to go. I’ll call you later in the month, I think your birthday is coming up soon, I’ll call you then, you know?

MOM (quietly)
It was four weeks ago.

STAN (laughs awkwardly)
Ah, yeah. Damn it. You know me, I’m an airhead about that stuff. I’ll swing by the mall
and get you something nice for your birthday on the way home tonight.

MOM
Get your secretary to swing by, you mean.

STAN
Ma, look, they’re all standing right outside my office and I’m holding up all these people, so I have to go like right now. Bye, love you.

(STAN pushes the button to hang up. Spotlight over Mom immediately fades to black. Stan sits at his desk, staring, for a long time. STAN presses button on phone.)

STAN
Sarah? What’s my calendar look like for the rest of the day?

SARAH
You have the weekly download meeting in fifteen minutes, then the Mid-Atlantic forecast briefing from four to five-thirty.

STAN
Cancel them all, will you?

SARAH (after long pause)
Sure. No problem. Is everything okay?
(long pause)
Mister Garland?

STAN
Yeah, I’m good. Couldn’t be better. I’m just thinking I’ll take off early today. You’ll take care of all that for me, right?

SECRETARY
Of course. I’ve got you covered. You take it easy for the rest of the day, okay?

STAN (small smile)
Yeah. I will.

(Stan packs laptop in briefcase, drains his drink and exits SL.)

(BLACKOUT)

(THE END)

Collapse Into Silence: Pirsig, Tao and the 'Parmenides'

2008-12-12T15:14:00.000-08:00

Originally published at http://www.rescogitans.sdu.dk/files/RC___Gallagher.pdf

Introduction
American mystic and writer Robert M. Pirsig struggled mightily with the question of
how to interrogate the Unspeakable within the mental constraints of Western logical discourse. This struggle took him on an internal journey far from his Midwest, mid-century home, eventually pushing him into the unknown country of mental illness and involuntary commitment. I believe that what Pirsig was pursuing was not an empty Nothing, a no-thing. It was a full, even overfull Nothing, for which he struggled in vain to find a name and a vocabulary. I have taken to calling it the ‘over-full Nothing’ and will continue to use that term here to indicate when we are speaking of Nothing as an ontological term. Pirsig would come to believe that the closest approach to what he was trying to articulate could be found in the Tao, and indeed the Tao’s mapping to the characteristics of this ‘over-full Nothing’ was quite close. However, he failed to latch onto the full significance of something he noted in passing: the striking similarities between his thought and the system of the important Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides. We will look in detail at the most influential deployment of the Parmenidean ‘over-full Nothing’, in Plato’s infamously obscure dialogue The Parmenides. Plato’s attempt to wrap it in logical discourse runs aground for the same reason that Pirsig’s attempt to do so ran aground 2500 years later. Both of their attempts to encapsulate the ‘over-full Nothing’ within language and logic eventually collapse into silence in the face of that of which nothing can be said.

American Mystic
There was a man once, who went insane trying to wrap the Unspeakable within the syntax of Western logical discourse. He lived in the seemingly mundane circumstances of Midwestern America, but his thoughts were off in another place, another time. Speaking of himself in the third person in his stunning work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he tells us that he ‘did not try to use his brilliance for general illumination. He sought one specific distant target and aimed for it and hit it. And that was all.’ As we shall see, the target that he aimed for and hit is what I am calling the ‘over-full Nothing’. A man possessed of (and eventually possessed by) a brilliant and incisive mind, Pirsig spent several years as a teacher of Rhetoric in Montana and Chicago. It was during this time that his mind took what many of his colleagues would come to think of as a somewhat ‘peculiar’ turn. Pirsig stumbles across something that he knows is real, but that all of his logical and rhetorical gifts are unable to encapsulate. Forced to try and at least make an effort at formulating a discourse for describing his findings, Pirsig adopted the mundane and inadequate word ‘Quality’, but he makes it to clear that, within his evolving system, the word is simply a placeholder for something that is full, erupting, but without any logical attributes. He attempts to capture the essence of this ‘over-full Nothing’ in the following formulation:

‘Quality is not a thing. It is an event … It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object…Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible …. This means that Quality is not just the result of a collision of subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects.’

In short, Pirsig’s Quality ‘is the parent, the source of all subjects and objects.’ To Pirsig this ‘quality event' was ‘the continuing stimulus to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it … He felt momentary fright and was about to strike out the words ‘All of it. Every last bit of it’. Madness there. I think he saw it.’ As this passage suggests, Pirsig understood that he had just stepped outside the logical mythos that is ingrained into the very intellectual DNA of Western civilization, our gift from the Greeks. He was faced with ‘something’ that could not be denied and yet could not be described. Almost in despair, he found a place to anchor his sanity when he came across another attempted description of the ‘over-full Nothing’, this one found in the 2,400-year-old Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu. Listen as the Chinese sage wrestles with his own attempt to describe the indescribable, from within the somewhat more flexible bounds of a non-Western discourse:

Looked at but cannot be seen … listened to but cannot be heard …grasped at but cannot be touched. These three elude all our inquiries and hence blend and become one.Not by its rising is there light. Not by its sinking is there darkness.
Unceasing, continuous It cannot be defined And reverts again into the realm of Nothingness That is why it is called the form of the formless The image of nothingness That is why it is called elusive Meet it and you do not see its face.

Note this description (or, what is the same thing, this non-description), and compare it to what we will discover later when we look at Parmenides’ own efforts to articulate his own encounter with the ‘over-full Nothing’.

Indeed, Pirsig eventually came to suspect that the Greeks may have had a hand in muddying the waters regarding the permissibility of discussing his ‘Quality’, simply by virtue of the fact that the Greeks constructed a mode of discourse that made such discussion structurally impossible. Pirsig realized that the Greeks had loaded the deck right from the get-go: ‘The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it is actually a mode of discussion itself. You discuss things in terms of their immediate appearance or you discuss them in terms of their underlying form, and when you try and discuss these modes of discussion you get involved in what could be called a platform problem. You have no other platform from which to discuss them other than the modes themselves.’ This importance of Pirsig’s insight into this limiting function of Western logical discourse will become obvious when we get to Parmenides.

We have evidence that Pirsig actually was close to realizing that Parmenides had more to teach him – certainly as a cautionary lesson – than did Lao Tzu, but it appears that Pirsig didn’t really give Parmenides enough attention and never really grasped Parmenides’ critical importance for his project. Here is all that Pirsig was able to get out of Parmenides:

‘Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. It's here that the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, ‘The Good and the True are not necessarily the same,’ and goes its separate way.’ Pirsig spent an enormous amount of time puzzling over this separation, musing about the pre-Socratics: ‘Ancient Greece – strange that for them Quality should be everything while today is sounds strange to even say that Quality is real. What unseen changes could have taken place?’

He was so close to finding a Western kindred spirit here, but he didn’t even know it. There is nothing in his writings or any of his public statements subsequent to the surprising success of Zen to suggest he ever suspected how close he had come to a precursor. He concluded that ‘further study there was unlikely to uncover anything concerning an apparently mystic term.’ How wrong he was. He blew right past it. All he had to hang on to, at the end, was his belief that ‘the mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality [‘over-full Nothing’] of this world is unreal is insane…’ He apparently never expected that if he had scratched harder at the pre-Socratics, he would have found that one of the most significant of them was saying essentially the same thing.

And what became of Pirsig, as his pursuit of the ‘over-full Nothing’ tapered out into a collapse into philosophical silence, then eventually into a literal silence? ‘Destroyed by an order of the court, enforced by the transmission of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain…in a process known technologically as ‘Annihilation ECS’.’ I believe that a large part of what drove him insane was living with the knowledge of ‘the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectical truths, had lost.’

We now need to look at one of the first struggles between this dialectical truth and the ‘over-full Nothing’.

Plato Fights for His Life
A battle took place shortly before the birth of Plato, a battle on the nature of ‘what is’. The protagonists in this battle exchanged broadsides that read like the pronouncements of sun-addled Zen Masters. Heraclitus makes oracular pronouncements that induce perplexity and challenge us to make sense of them. Parmenides and his followers argue, or seem to, in a long, strung-out series of what seem to the naïve eye to be logical propositions.

Parmenides insists, obscurely, that one must choose between the way of ‘It Is’ and the way of ‘It Is Not’. We are literally incapable of conceiving of something as ‘not’, so our ‘over-full Nothing’ ‘is’ by default, and perhaps in its essence as well.

If one cannot think ‘Is Not’, then one will need to accept the ‘over-full Nothing’ that is ‘reality’ as containing no change, no generation or destruction, no difference, no imperfection. Why? Because – and this is key for Parmenides -- it is ‘full of what is’. For our purposes, the attack on Parmenides found in Plato’s immortal dialogue The Parmenides demands much more attention. It is a strange dialogue, unlike any other that Plato wrote. It comes at the end of his vaunted ‘middle period’, and indeed after the travail of wrestling with the issues in The Parmenides, Plato apparently steps away from writing for several years.
The Parmenides is the only dialogue in which Socrates is unequivocally beaten. Pimp-slapped, not to put too fine a point on it. Also important for us to understand is that, in this dialogue, Plato is defending himself. More, he is defending the cornerstone of his entire philosophy: the theory of Forms. Without the theory of Forms, Plato’s ethical and political philosophies collapse for lack of a structure to prop them up – and the followers of Parmenides, the clever Zeno, deploys a set of arguments that leave the theory of Forms in pieces on the floor. In this part of the dialogue, Zeno demonstrates, with a light touch and a flair for the absurd, that logic cannot be trusted because it is insufficient to encapsulate his master Parmenides’ Being, the One, the ‘over-full Nothing’. Zeno, and then Parmenides, use dialectic to tie Socrates up in precisely the sort of logical knots Socrates would inflict on so many interlocutors later in his career.

I do not propose to drill down into the part of the dialogue in which Parmenides slices and dices the Forms; suffice it to say that most scholars agree that Parmenides lands several blows, most of them serious, on the Forms. As we will see, Plato’s goal in the rest of the dialogue is so say, in effect, ‘OK, my beloved Forms may be discredited, but look at the sort of incoherent Parmenidean madness you’ll have to contend with if you give up the Forms! If we want to remain rational beings, the Forms are all we have to work with!’ He uses the rest of the dialogue to demonstrate the logical absurdity of Parmenides and his followers. As we shall see, this is not difficult to do, since the Parmenidean system stands outside of dialectical discourse.

After verbally overpowering young Socrates, Parmenides is invited to expound on his own ideas. Of course, he is asked to do so using dialectic. As Pirsig noted, this was a clever trap on Plato’s part: ‘How the hell do you ever justify, in terms of reason, a refusal to define something? Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.’ Which is precisely the problem we run into in the second half of the dialogue. We are treated to 20 pages of an absurdist, Bizarro-World imitation of Socratic dialectic,

as Parmenides is shown forcing the ‘over-full Nothing’ onto the Procrustean bed of dialectic. Plato is being mean-spirited and vengeful here, as could be expected from a man who is quite literally fighting for his philosophical life. Plato’s goal is to make Parmenides look absurd, but what he winds up doing, unintentionally, is making dialectic and logic look absurd as a technique for encapsulating the ‘over-full Nothing’.

When we read Plato’s funhouse filter of Parmenides in the second half of the dialogue, we find ourselves confronting something that reads almost exactly like the Tao as Pirsig encountered it. Look at this, and tell me if you don’t agree with me that Parmenides’ worldview looks more and more Asian, not really ‘Western’ at all.
Plato has Parmenides telling us that the One ‘will have neither beginning, middle, nor end’, it ‘cannot be anywhere, either in itself or in another’, and let us make no mistake that ‘if one be the same with itself, it is not one with itself, and will therefore be one and also not one’.

On a couple of levels, this is a delightful farce. The very density and duration of this kind of gibberish (and it goes on like this for over twenty pages) is a big part of the comedic value. Plato is working hard to make Parmenides look completely absurd, and Parmenides is happy to oblige. On another level, one certainly unintended by Plato, Parmenides is having his way with Plato as well: his long, bizarre deployment of ‘dialectic’ in the service of explaining his ‘over-full Nothing’ serves the unexpected purpose of demonstrating that dialectic, logic itself, has surprising and damaging limitations.

Socrates’ new invention, the dialectic, breaks up against Parmenides’ extended koan, reducing the attempt to articulate Parmenides’ ideas to broad comedy. Parmenides is using dialectic as a cudgel to beat dialectic itself to a bloody pulp. To embarrass logic into silence, in effect.

On yet another level – and The Parmenides may well be the most multi-layered of Plato’s dialogues -- we are given a stunning demonstration of the fact that, in the face of the ‘over-full Nothing’, language itself begins to collapse. All that ‘is’ is not real. Anything you can describe is not real. The One, Being, the ‘over-full Nothing’ ‘is’. But not really, not in any sense we can imagine. It is unthinkable, unspeakable, and unknowable. Inside this singularity, nothing is preserved; it is a naked opening-upon.

We try and apply Plato’s beloved dialectic, his clever little parlor trick of categorizing and discriminating, and we find ourselves sinking, and fast. We see:
‘over-full Nothing’ is.

But we can’t even say ‘is’ in this context, because we could then also say ‘not-is’, and that not-is would be equally ‘true’. So we are reduced to being able to say:

‘over-full Nothing’.

But even that is too much discrete ‘content’, and dialectic sets itself up for a situation where all dialectic allows us to say is:

.

Singularity. No content. No thing. Dialectic has failed – miserably, one should note – to enable us to come to terms with the ‘over-full Nothing’. Beyond the rim of this singularity, logic has no place and dialectic will not stand. Plato knows this, which helps explain his fury at Parmenides. Plato understands that his theory of Forms has been skewered on his own dialectic, but he turns away from the Parmenidean alternative with the same shudder of instinctive revulsion with which the Greeks reacted to the concept of the Unbounded. Plato forces us to confront the brute fact that Parmenides’ ontology is logically absurd. Parmenides (who either reinvented or encountered the same ontological concepts that fed into the Tao), was not really Western at all, and was in fact trapped in the straitjacket of Western reason.
‘We’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purposes something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.’ Reason has failed us, indeed language itself has failed us, and at the end of any attempt to penetrate the Parmenidean ontology, our discourse suffers a catastrophic collapse into silence.

Time Tunnel
Imagine with me a long temporal tube, a tunnel. In places it is poorly lit, but in other parts of it we see bright, cold, fluorescent lights. Occasionally, the tunnel pulls a sudden sideways turn or dead end, but for the most part it is as straight and as forthright as a mathematical proof. At one end of this tunnel sits Plato, shouting the good news of the birth of Reason into the tunnel’s maw. At the far end of this tunnel lurks Pirsig, gazing in horror at Reason’s death. Pirsig pursued the ghost of this dead Reason ‘because he wanted to wreak revenge on it, because he felt he himself was so shaped by it.’ After Pirsig, facts become fables again. Looking at Parmenides and Pirsig, do we not get the suspicion that the long reign of dialectic and logic was perhaps just an interlude?

The ‘over-full Nothing’ will always remain absurd and inarticulate within the confines of logical discourse. Parmenides didn’t make any serious attempt to wrap the ‘over-full Nothing’ in logical discourse, and Pirsig went mad trying. Perhaps the ‘over-full Nothing’ should be simply left alone.

Book Review: Prince of War

2008-12-07T03:36:00.000-08:00

Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire, by Cecil Bothwell, Asheville: Brave Ulysses Books, 2007, 213 pp. softcover

“Billy Graham represents a basic kind of patriotism in this country – an unquestioning, obeying patriotism, a loyalty to the authority of the President. Billy was always uncritical, unchallenging, unquestioning.” --- Bill Moyers

“I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B and C. Just who do they think they are? --- Barry Goldwater

A power-hungry moral coward. A vicious racist and Jew-baiter. A man with an almost uncanny ability to always be on the wrong side of history. A craven climber and groveller at the feet of power. An “unabashed nationalist and advocate for American empire.” If Cecil Bothwell is right – and he marshals a lot of evidence in support of his thesis – then “America’s most beloved pastor” is all these things, and more. Bothwell gives us the opportunity to see the other side of Billy Graham, the man who was seventh on a recent Gallup poll’s list of the most admired people of the 20th century. Graham is a man with a history, a man who must be called to account. Bothwell lays out his bill of particulars with subtlety and skill.

The first leitmotif in Graham’s life story is his obsessive scrounging after power. From the very beginning, he has sought access to the corridors of power with an almost touching desperation. Graham was the first evangelist to conduct a religious service on the steps of the Capitol building, and the first to conduct a full-blown crusade inside the walls of the Pentagon. But Graham has always known that the real center of power in America was the White House, and has proven to be a “constant suppliant seeking presidential attention.” The more intelligent and responsible presidents (Truman, Kennedy, Carter) kept Graham at arm’s length, while other, lesser men utilized Graham for whatever they could gain from the association.

Truman apparently despised Graham from the get-go, describing him to a close friend as “one of those counterfeits I was telling you about,” the sort of man who is only interested in “getting his name in the paper.” But in a bit of pure luck, Graham suddenly found himself being groomed as the darling of the Hearst media empire, which built up the persona of the “simple preacher” and turned him loose to rage against godless Communism to crowds of up to 350,000 rapt believers. Graham was becoming an influential player in the toxic politics of 1950s America – and he was learning to love it.

Graham’s increasingly high profile brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy, eventually “becoming one of his most loyal and enduring allies.” Documents reveal that Graham was eager to out-do McCarthy in his rabid commitment to exposing “the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge between the wings of the American eagle.” As McCarthy ratcheted up the rhetoric with his demand that suspected Communists be stripped of their Fifth Amendment protections, Graham was right there with him, proclaiming, “Let’s do it!” Never one to hitch his wagon to a single star, Graham was simultaneously voicing his strident support for “the red-scare tactics of Senator Lyndon Johnson and a young congressman named Richard Milhouse Nixon.” Give the man credit: he had a knack for spotting talent early on and currying favor with the people who would run the country for the rest of the century, and beyond.

While Graham’s most infamous association was of course with Nixon, he nevertheless racked up a pretty good track record with subsequent tenants at the White House. It is a tribute to Jimmy Carter’s canny instincts that he wanted nothing to do with the man and kept him out of the White House during his term, but most of Carter’s successors warmly embraced Graham and his values. He wooed Reagan and George H.W. Bush with great success. He had somewhat less success with Bill Clinton, but he was there to give solace to Hillary Clinton (whose religious associations in Washington were uniformly “conservative and fundamentalist”) during the Lewinsky scandal.

I was continually amazed at Graham’s ability to insinuate himself into the centers of power, given some of his more unsavory views. For if Bothwell is to be believed, Graham is a life-long racist and the worst sort of bigot. It is tempting to fall back on the old, old alibi and say that Graham was a “product of his environment.” As a very young many, Graham fell under the influence of “holy roller Mordecai Ham,” a man notorious as “one of his era’s most gaudy and livid anti-Semites,” a man who fulminated against “apostate Jewry and the wicked Jews who killed Jesus.” While it was not unusual for a youngster coming of age in the Jim Crow south to be bombarded with this sort of vicious rhetoric, it is notable that Graham never shook off these baleful influences. We would hear echoes of Mordecai Ham’s rants in Graham’s infamous “off the record” conversation in the Oval Office with Richard Nixon.

This conversation, which was captured on one of the legendary White House tapes, was not the momentary lapse or attempt to curry favor, as the Graham apologists attempted to claim. On the contrary, the conversation lasted an hour and a half, had rarely strayed from the denunciation of the Jews, and had sometimes been led by Graham. “The Bible says there are Satanic Jews, and that’s where our problem arises,” Graham pontificates at one point, to mumbled agreement by Nixon. Amazingly, twenty additional minutes of this conversation had been redacted before being released to the Watergate committee. What could possibly have been in those redacted twenty minutes that was worse than what wound up being released? Many years later, when the tape was released to public shock and dismay, Graham would do what he has always done when confronted with evidence of his own failings: he would claim that his clear, unambiguous words simply did not reflect his actual views. Inevitably, whenever Graham used this alibi, the big implication remained discreetly unspoken: Graham was either a liar or a moral coward.

Another aspect of Graham’s history is his unequivocal record of racism. Like many from the South (and not a few from the North), Graham inherited a significant bigotry against African-Americans. When a friend suggested to the young Graham that they stop off and get a haircut at a “colored barbershop” where a haircut could be gotten cheap, Graham declared, “Long as there’s a white barbershop in Charlotte, I’ll never have my hair cut at a nigger barbershop! Never!” Many people inherit this sort of vicious thinking, and many people eventually grow up to shed such primitive, mean-spirited attitudes. I kept looking for some point in Graham’s history where he had grown beyond this sort of thinking, but I kept coming up empty handed. The public record demonstrates that Graham was always on the wrong side on the racial issue. Always.

Over the years, there have been a number of attempts to portray Graham as being on the “progressive” side of the civil rights struggle that began in earnest in the 1950s. In fact, as Bothwell documents at length, this “progressive” history has been manufactured out of whole cloth. This is a man who, as late as the 1960s, was holding “separate but equal” crusades for black audiences. Graham would claim, “It wasn’t his decision but that of the organization.” And whenever segregationists would slam him for showing even an inkling of a progressive idea, he would immediately backpedal, claiming he was only there to preach the Bible, not to “enter into any local issues.” While the whole world was watching the battle for human rights in Selma, Graham was vacationing on the beach in Hawaii. Indeed, Graham was notable by his absence from every decisive moment in the civil rights struggle. When M.L. King was gunned down, Graham pointedly failed to attend the funeral, an event attended by over 200,000 people. On those rare occasions when Graham would even acknowledge that something called “the civil rights struggle” was taking place, he would limit his pronouncements to cautioning others to “put on the brakes a bit,” opining that “only when Christ comes again will all the little white children of Abraham walk hand in hand with little black children.” He seemed genuinely puzzled by the unwillingness of black Americans to wait for the Second Coming to claim their rights as human beings.

One might suggest, in Graham’s defense, “that was then, this is now.” Sadly, he does not appear to have grown over the years. As late as 1991, Graham was a member of the whites-only Biltmore Country Club. When called on this by local activists, Graham’s spokesman trotted out the old standby: Graham “didn’t have time to involve himself in local issues.” And in 1993, Graham publicly asked the rhetorical question, “Is AIDS a judgment of God?” His answer: “I could not say for sure, but I think so.” Needless to say, Graham’s remarks brought down a torrent of outrage, in the face of which Graham promptly did what he always did: “I remember saying it, and I immediately regretted it and almost went back and clarified the statement.” He “almost” went back and clarified the statement. Almost. Graham’s entire life, it would seem, is one long chain of moments of truth in which he “almost” did the right thing.

As an elder statesman whose mental and rhetorical powers are rapidly fading, Graham did not play his usual role as panderer to the powerful in the George W. Bush administration. While one should be grateful for this small mercy, Graham’s son Franklin delivered the inaugural sermon at Bush’s 2000 inauguration, and went on to become a close Bush confidant. And so the torch was passed, and so the disease was propagated. Billy Graham’s uniquely intolerant form of fundamentalist rhetoric, centered on the twin messages of fear and hate, continue to worm their way deep into the fabric of American discourse. It is to Bothwell’s enormous credit that he forces the reader to confront Billy Graham raw, unfiltered, as he really is. To the droves of Graham apologists and “clarifiers,” Bothwell offers a simple challenge: “Perhaps we should pay heed to what Graham has actually said.”

Chemical Bags and Dinner on the Grounds

2008-12-01T06:05:00.000-08:00

What does atheism have to offer human beings in place of the rich, warm, familial cultural milieu that religious people have? I’ve recently found myself thinking about this question a lot, and there is a definite problem here if the secularist community is honest in its desire to bring more people into the secular fold. Secularists seem not to understand that the religious community is not exclusively about belief in the middle-eastern sky god. In fact, I’d say in my experience here in the American South, that is sometimes almost incidental. It’s an entire social structure: you have a communal celebratory meal at church ("dinner on the grounds"), you see friends and extended-family members at church, you pursue your hobbies at church, you perform your good works and your charitable efforts at church. Heck, a lot of people even get involved in church because it’s a (relatively) safe place to meet potential romantic partners! So it’s an entire social structure, something religions have provided as far back as we can see. And what do secularists offer as an alternative? “You’re just a walking bag of chemicals, evolved to do certain hard-wired things you can’t control. You have no ‘spiritual connection’ to any of the other walking bags of chemicals you encounter. You are truly ‘an island’, you’re on your own, everything is about the naked selfish will-to-live. Oh, and did we mention? When you die, your brain is extinguished and your body rots, and buh-bye, no more you!” I happen to believe that all those statements are 100% true, but I have to acknowledge the obvious fact that secularists have a bit of, shall we say, a “public relations problem” if this is all they bring to the table as an alternative to what the religious bring to the table. Would most people rather relax and lean back into the warm communal embrace of “dinner on the grounds,” or would they rather ponder the existential meaninglessness of an absurd world? Humans beings seem to have an innate need for community, celebration, and purpose, and until the secular community can address those human needs, it will remain what it is now: small, marginalized, and incapable of influencing events on any level.

A Look Back at the Great Books

2008-11-30T12:07:00.001-08:00

My mother was one of those one million Americans that bought the Great
Books (and let me tell you, she had to do without a lot to scrape
together the $$$). I wouldn't have survived my high school years
without them; they were my friends. It's a sad commentary on the
postmodern dumbing-down of America (the entire West, for that matter)
that no one can talk about the Great Books without putting those
infuriating "air quotes" around the word "Great". The fact is, they
are great, and they'll be great long after "Desperate Housewives" and
Eminem (see below) have stopped being the kind of sad, degrading
memories that makes you feel just a little bit soiled knowing that you
ever devoted a single brain cell to thinking about them. Kant, Hume,
Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, and even that annoying and consistently
wrong Athenian elitist named Plato, whose Great Books volume still has
a place of honor on my bookshelf, where I take it down every year or
two to write yet another screed attacking yet another aspect of
Plato's wrong-wrong-wronnnnnnggggggg thought. (my personal feeling
about Plato is this: if Plato doesn't infuriate you to the point where
you stand up and kick furniture, then you really haven't understood
him ...).

The problem with the internet is that it is so bloody
indiscriminate. A young person online has no way of knowing that an
online version of Plato's Phaedrus is better for him/her to read and
learn from than an online screed from some tinfoil-hat wearer going on
about missiles taking down Flight 800. The idea that the internet puts
everything out there, and the person reading it has to apply his/her
discriminatory powers to culling the wheat from the chaff, dodges one
crucial question: where the hell are young people supposed to have
learned these "discriminatory powers"? The Great Books project did
something that's considered "rude" and "elitist" in this low, degraded
post-Western age. It dared to say: "look, kid, it's like this. Here
are the Great Books of Western Civilization. We probably missed a few,
but these are pretty much the best of the best. They've stood the test
of time -- in some cases, millenia of time. So just take our word for
it, and get reading!" I wish we as a civilization still had the courage and
faith in the best parts of our shared heritage to be willing to
dictate to our young people like that. These days we're more concerned
with pumping up their all-important "self-esteem." Twenty years from
now, I believe our young people will hate us for betraying them that
way.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122628172105412477.html

2008-11-22T03:18:00.001-08:00

An obscure internet radio station led me to American symphonic composer Gloria Coates, creator of some of the most relentlessly bleak music I've ever experienced. On the amazon.com page for one of her symphonies I saw a "listmania" item on the left side of the page. This is a user-produced feature of Amazon, sort of "If you like this, you're gonna love the items on my list!" It was the title of the list that got the hook in me and kept gnawing away at me for the next several months.

BLEAK TIMES CALL FOR BLEAK MEASURES

This glib and self-consciously ironic collection of words seemed to carry the freight of more meaning than their creator could have ever intended. Nietzsche claimed that we need chaos in our soul to give birth to a dancing star. I believe we need bleakness in our soul to give birth to a dancing god. Most people don't need the experience of bleakness; most people couldn't stand the raw, uncut experience of bleakness, and do everything they can to keep it at bay -- through booze and drugs, through frenetic social activity, and of course through that most popular defense mechanism, regular visits to their local houses of worship.

I recently listened to Ingram Marshall's "Three Penitential Visions," as bleak in its way as anything Coates ever composed. But after playing Marshall's piece through a couple of times, I realized something: Coates' bleak vision only got it half right. She captures the bleakness like no one else can, but she never understands that there's something beyond the bleakness. She stopped at the half way point; she turned coward at the critical moment. Ingram takes his bleak vision and turns it right on its head, transforming it into a joyous "Yes-saying" in the epilogue, Hidden Voice. This epilogue, the last three minutes of which can almost make me believe in god or gods, rises triumphantly as both the confirmation and refutation of the empty bleakness.

There are very few things more bleak than the unplugged acoustic torch songs of Tracey Thorne; her despair and yearning and hopeless need give us a vision so bleak that we are only left with one genuinely philosophical question: slice lengthwise, or across the wrist? But then her husband, Ben Watt, had one brilliant, unforgettable idea: take her hurt, bleeding songs and lay a demanding techno dance beat on top of it. Her songs of doomed love and tainted hurting became something that got into your head and your body, and told you that sure, the world and life and love and just being human was unimaginably bleak, but the backbeat wove it into something that not only told you what was on the other side of bleakness, it also told you what the cure was.

Which brings me to my point, finally. We find uplift and something resembling meaning not in despair, but on the other side of despair. I believe it's no coincidence that this important philosophical issue keeps finding its way back to music, because I believe we humans have some important unfinished business with music. Because, you see, we've forgotten what music is for. Music is what we get instead of God. Maybe it's our "consolation prize," in every sense of both those words.

On the other side of despair, beyond the bleak times and the bleak places inside us, waits a god who dances. A god promised by Nietzsche and so many others, and some may call him Dionysus and others may know him as Dancing Shiva and to some he is Pan and in the big continental sprawl of America he goes by the name of Kokopelli, but they are all the same and they all continue to hand down just one simple commandment:

Shut up and dance.

The Crime of Indecision and the Crime of Indifference

2008-11-17T15:03:00.002-08:00

"There are moments when everything becomes clear, when every action constitutes a commitment, when every choice has its price, when nothing is neutral anymore."

-- Albert Camus

During the most uncompromising and dangerous years in the 20^th century, Camus threw down the gauntlet. There were people in France and around the world who wanted to sit on the fence, think about the best course of action, weigh their options, and hide behind the endless alibis for refusal to make a decision and then act on that decision. We all try so hard to hide, to wait out the crisis, hoping that events will move quickly and thus deprive us of the curse of choice, hoping that events will make the decision for us. It is human nature, it is an understandable cowardice. But still, it is cowardice.

Here is a parable for this moment and for all the moments in history when every choice has its price and nothing is neutral anymore:

The semi-mythical Athenian leader Solon made it a law that anyone who refused to take sides in a revolution would lose all civil rights. That way, people could not stand aside and hope trouble would pass them by while they waited to see which side would win.

Book Review: Piety and Politics

2008-11-13T16:24:00.003-08:00

Figured I'd start things off with a review I wrote several months ago ...

Barry Lynn is angry. Furious, in fact. And the object of the man’s fury is the politicized, evangelical religious fanaticism that has seized control of America’s moral discourse. As a minister in the United Church of Christ and executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Lynn is an unlikely figure to be standing in the front ranks against the tide of militant Christianity that threatens the United States. Unlikely or not, Lynn seems to be hitting the right keys and pressing the right buttons: he has incurred the wrath of right-wingers like Jerry Falwell and Patrick Buchanan, and Lynn has the distinction of having once been described by Pat Robertson as “lower than a child molester.” If one can be known by one’s enemies, then I like the guy already.

Lynn does not waste any time, wading right into the middle of the battle almost from the first page. He takes an almost boyish delight in going toe-to-toe with the Religious Right on some of their favorite obsessions: public education, religious symbols, the church in politics, censorship and sexual politics. Lynn believes that the Religious Right has it all wrong, that their Bible-based worldview is an unacceptable basis for approaching the question of how America should be run. He demands that American politicians stop their pandering attempts to use the Bible to justify their actions and instead put their faith in the document that they are all sworn to defend: the U.S. Constitution. But Lynn is no wide-eyed naïf; he knows the history of his country, and he understand how tenuous the separation of Church and State is, especially now.

“When, in the history of the world, has a union of church and state ever been a good thing?” With these words, Lynn attempts to reason with the fundamentalists, posing a question that they are unwilling to consider and ill equipped to answer. Unlike the Religious Right, Lynn knows the true history of his country, and is able to describe religion’s long struggle to usurp America’s secular system of government. Those Americans who believe that the current spasm of fundamentalism is something new, or even exceptional, will perhaps take comfort from Lynn’s insightful analysis of the history of a fanaticism that has always been embedded in the fabric of American culture, and his explanation of how America has (so far) survived the ill effects of this fanaticism.

Quite simply, there was never a time when some form of struggle between secularism and fanaticism was not taking place. We must remember that the first colonists in New England came to the New World seeking religious freedom because their fanatical brand of religiosity was too radical for the Europe of the time. Mind you, we are talking about a Europe riddled with religious wars, a Europe where witches were burned along side heretics who dared to claim the Earth was not the center of the universe. And yet America’s “Puritan forefathers” were too radical to be tolerated in that environment. If we keep this thought at hand, we have no problem understanding the eruptions of bizarre religiosity that litter American history with almost monotonous regularity.

In the 19^th century, “tensions over religion in public school rode so high ... that in 1844 a riot erupted after rumors circulated that schools were going to remove Protestant religious exercises.” An organization called the National Reform Association (the Moral Majority of its time) engaged in a protracted campaign to have an amendment to the Constitution declare that America was “a Christian nation,” and propagandized at the local level to write into law the idea that commerce and revelry should be curtailed on “The Lord’s Day” (an idea that continues to enjoy wide support throughout many areas of the U. S. to this day).

Very little changed in the 20^th century, except that the Religious Right became more sophisticated and clever as they struggled to infect the Constitution with the virus of religiosity. Lynn reminds us that the seemingly immutable slogans “one nation, under God” and “In God We Trust” are relatively recent innovations, driven by the decision in the 1950s to recruit God “in the battle against juvenile delinquency and communism.” The propaganda campaign to portray secularism as “some amoral, libertine perspective on life” also gained enormous traction in the second half of the 20^th century, and not just among those who were obvious fringe cases. One cannot help but think of Joe Lieberman during the 2000 presidential campaign, making the truly alarming claim in his stump speech that “faith is necessary for good behavior.”

Lynn oscillates between sadness and ill-concealed amusement when he discusses the fact that, in the United States, “secularism is mandated by the government, but religion still pervades the culture with a strong and vibrant voice. In much of Europe, there is no government mandate of secularism, but the cultures are effectively secular.” This is no exaggeration: I have driven through much of Europe, from the Spanish border to Bavaria, and it is only in Italy that one sees even a faint echo of the old religious madness. For the most part, the old churches of Europe, from the grand cathedrals to the most humble village church, are now nothing more than museums. As Lynn observes, the churches of Europe “lack for only one thing: congregants.”

Lynn seems to recognize, at least implicitly, that America’s tribal and atavistic religiosity will never wither away the way it did in Europe. There is something unique about the tightening grip that religion has on America, something toxic and not a little bit mad. Yet even within this historical context, Lynn is forced to admit, “I’ve never seen the situation this bad.” The disease of religious fanaticism has mutated, growing ever more dangerous as it turns the tools of modernity against modernity itself in a struggle to undermine America’s secular foundations.

Lynn has no illusions about the nature and ambitions of America’s new crop of fundamentalists. “I’ve studies the tactics of these groups for more than thirty years. I know what they want. They want to run your life, mine, and everyone else’s as much as they possibly can.” While these Christian zealots always portray themselves as oppressed and marginalized, “members of the clergy walk the halls of Congress ... pressing their views and often being warmly received. You see them in the senators’ dining room. I’ve been there myself.” These influential members of the clergy – effectively, lobbyists for the Christian fundamentalist worldview – have admirable persistence and remarkable message discipline. Everything wrong in this country, without exception, can be laid at the feet of the godless and dubious plot by secularists and their lackeys to promulgate the separation of Church and State. Whether it is rampant immorality, plunging SAT scores, the epidemic of unwed motherhood, gay marriage, or the scourge of drugs in our urban ghettoes, all of it is the fault of the separation of Church and State. If only America could go back to those halcyon days when religion was the basis of every aspect of American life, all would be well.

This is a seductive message, perhaps because of its simplicity, perhaps because it appeals to the seemingly universal yearning for a Golden Age that never was. America’s Golden Age was brought to ruin when “that mean old Supreme Court, prodded by an atheist, intervened and threw prayer out” of the public schools. Within this context, an “activist judge” is “simply a judge who writes an opinion the Religious Right doesn’t like.” As a proudly “God-centered” Bush administration loaded the American judicial system with judges who held the “correct views,” the leaders of the fundamentalist movement, never noted for their timidity, shook off the last of their inhibitions and began to speak more openly about their grand vision of what a God-besotted American future would look like. Lynn cleverly allows fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to reveal themselves – and betray themselves – with their own words. They really do make it almost too easy for Lynn to mock them and then dispose of them.

We are dealing, after all, with men who genuinely believe that “God punishes communities that displease him with hurricanes, floods, and meteors; who assert that demons control major U.S. cities and who think Harry Potter books lure children into practicing witchcraft.” As he offers us up a seemingly endless smorgasbord of choice tidbits from the mouthpieces of the Religious Right, Lynn gives us a feel for the deeply strange beliefs of America’s fundamentalists, an archaic, tribal view of the world that would seem more at home being articulated by some shaman crouched around a Neolithic campfire, or by a priest standing atop an Aztec sacrificial pyramid. The fact that this deeply uncivilized way of understanding the world finds millions of adherents in the world’s sole remaining superpower should do more than give us pause – it should scare the hell out of us.

What Lynn gives us along with his analysis of the thinking of the Religious Right is a deep and disturbing sense of how radically opposed to America’s freedoms these people really are. They want to control what all citizens do, and they are perfectly willing to enlist the government, the courts and law-enforcement if that is what it takes to rid themselves of the burden of a freedom that they are unwilling to embrace. Lynn, to his credit, continues to believe that the American people are too smart to stand for this, and that most Americans want a government that is free of religious dicta. Those of us who share his deep concern for the influence of the Religious Right in American life can only hope that he is right. I for one do not share his optimism.

Lynn tells us that “a get-along philosophy ... will increasingly prove disastrous” and that we will end up “whistling past the graveyard of our Bill of Rights and religious freedom if we take that road.” Yet, having said this, Lynn continues to preach restraint and an insistence on “sweet reason” as the best approach for dealing with the predations of the fundamentalists. Relating an anecdote about a televised confrontation with a member of the Religious Right, Lynn recalls that the host told him off-camera, “your side isn’t as passionate as his side.” Therein lies an enormous problem, and therein lies the reason that in America today, the Religious Right marches on, rampant though not (yet) completely triumphant. The forces of common sense and reason continue to lose ground to the forces of religious bigotry and intolerance. And in a country where every candidate for public office feels compelled to outdo the others with ever more over-the-top proclamations of personal religiosity, the problem is not going to go away when a new tenant moves into the White House.

While Lynn remains a strong proponent of a rational, even-handed approach, one occasionally gets an exciting sense of the rhetorical power that Lynn must deploy when he is in the pulpit and the spirit moves him. I found myself wishing for more of the sort of fire that Lynn displays when he shouts – and though they are only words on the page, I had no problem imaging him shouting them -- “I am weary of their gay bashing. I am weary of their crude attacks on nonbelievers. I am weary of their constant effort to sneak their bogus “creation science” into our schools. I am weary of their meddling in the most intimate areas of our private lives. I am weary of their attempts to politicize houses of worship. I am weary of all that they do.”

Preach on, Reverend.

Open for business

2008-11-13T16:05:00.003-08:00

The blog for Stephen J. Gallagher, philosopher and playwright, is open for business.