Silenced Voice

Readers in many U.S. cities will be familiar with the so-called “alternative weekly” newspapers. These are tabloids styling themselves as alternatives to the mainstream dailies. Occasionally they produce some OK local journalism. But most of them are drab, mediocre fish-wrap with a phony “hip” attitude, a few middle brow columnists, one or two local feature articles a week, listings for local arts, and a ton of advertisements. You can scan these rags in less than a half an hour with rarely a need to pause over an article that’s even remotely challenging, much less anything like great journalism.

The master template for this shit-for-brains newspaper genre is the New Times in Phoenix, Arizona, run by an arrogant huckster named Mike Lacey. Lacey went about buying up weekly tabloids around the country and turning them into identical, irrelevant, disposable crap. It was easy to ignore this parasite, considering the far greater problems afflicting American media in general. That is, until New Times bought The Village Voice.

I have read The Voice for over thirty years, and was a regular subscriber for almost twenty. Although it was published in New York, and printed its fair share of local stories, its scope and influence was larger than that. It was one of the very few papers in the country that regularly covered progressive politics and culture. I could spend hours reading the paper’s political columnists, feature articles on world and national issues, and film, theater, and music sections. When it was announced that the predator New Times was absorbing the paper, to a long-time lover of The Village Voice, it was like a punch in the gut.

Right off the bat, the excellent James Ridgeway was fired, and Sydney Schanberg quit. That’s when I cancelled my subscription. Since then, we’ve seen Michael Atkinson and Dennis Lim axed from the film section, and Robert Christgau and Chuck Eddy from the music pages. Those are just some of the bigger names—over thirty other staffers have been fired as well, to be replaced by idiot clones of editor David Blum, and recycled writers from other New Times rags.

The usual line you read is that The Voice was already predictable, a shadow of its former self. And Lacey talked like he was going to make the paper better, more “relevant.” All you had to do was pick up any one of his birdcage-liner publications across the country to know that this was a lie. But the proof is in the pudding, or in this case, the putrid swill.

In a time of illegal war, right-wing Republican scandal, and a level of both political meltdown and progressive activism not seen since the 60s, you can read The Voice now and barely have an idea that any of this is going on. Nat Hentoff is the only one writing about national issues--in fact the only real columnist left. We’ve had cover stories about American Idol, a gay rugby player, a woman addicted to candy, and an exposé of male pick-up techniques (which turned out be both phony and plagiarized). A recent cover story purports to criticize Tom Wolfe for writing about historical preservation just to salvage his career, a charge which applies more to the article itself, which offers nothing but baseless insinuations in a desperate attempt to be “cutting edge.”

You can read the first three paragraphs of any of these articles and know exactly what they’re going to say. They’re always boring. Whereas I used to spend hours reading The Voice, I can now just go to the library, scan the first part of the paper briefly for something interesting (which I never find, outside of Hentoff), read J. Hoberman on film, Feingold on theater, and be done with The Voice in less than twenty minutes. It’s now an empty, cowardly, dull, mindless publication, just like everything else Lacey has ever touched.

Memo to Mike Lacey: fuck you. You’ve turned one of the country’s best and only progressive newspapers into a piece of shit. Your features are just like every other stale “alternative” weekly article I’ve ever read. Despite your pretentious blatherings, what you produce is not journalism. I have read journalism, and I have read The New Times, and I know the difference. Please sell The Voice to someone with a soul—you can go back to Phoenix and have a fine career as a pimp there. You’re out of your element in New York.

Lacey will just keep on sucking the life out of newspapers, which is what he knows how to do. All I can say is, don’t subscribe to The Voice, or buy from the companies who advertise in it. If The Village Voice is ever to be reborn, this zombie New Times imitation of The Voice needs to die.

Afterdeath (Part 3)

In the East, a completely different belief system developed around the concept of life after death. Instead of a new life in another world, life would be continued in this world, through the transmigration of souls, or as it has become popularly know, reincarnation.

This ingenious idea has several advantages. It soothes the fear of annihilation, while avoiding the absurdities implied in the Western notion of personal immortality. It also teaches a continuity of life on earth—living beings are recycled into new forms, and life goes on. The view of time and the cosmos as endlessly recurring is more in line with ancient beliefs, born of humanity’s alignment with the seasonal cycle of eternal rebirth, than with the more recent, and more difficult, concept of an end of time in which everything is resolved once and for all.

In all belief systems concerning the soul, death, or the supernatural, it is necessary to apply what I choose to call the rule of “human, all too human.” Human conceptions of the absolute or the transcendent are founded in intuitions that can not be codified into language without reflecting human limitations. It is the very nature of abstraction, of thought and language themselves, to embody principles of duality. It is for this very reason that transcendent truth can only be indicated through metaphor, or if discussed in strictly rational terms, through the negative. Thus we say, “the unlimited,” or “the unconditioned,” since the intuition of such can only be conceived in terms of the absence of any abstraction, of any duality whatsoever.

One of the greatest ironies of the clash between science and religion is that science has actually confirmed, in empirical terms, the intuitive sense of the incommensurable that has been a perennial source of spiritual belief. The resistance to it is based on human clinging to the so-called literal interpretations of religious dogma and scripture, with a great contributor to this being simply human pride—the immensity of the universe as revealed by science threatening the perceived centrality of the human drama. But in terms of human belief systems, science has only accentuated, made more obvious, a truth that was always evident to those brave enough to see. Human concepts cannot adequately convey the infinity of Nature.

So religious belief systems appear clumsy when compared to natural processes because they attempt to fit the infinite into a schema, whereas Nature needs no schema, or rather is the source of all that we may perceive as a schema. If we keep this in mind when examining the idea of reincarnation, it is perfectly evident that the notion of souls jumping around from body to body (like fleas jumping from one dog to another) seems unnecessarily mechanistic (i.e. clumsy) when compared to the incredible profligacy of Nature, in which living things can be born by the billions per second, and die at the same rate. To have to operate through individual souls, as if such souls were solid, indivisible units of being—how awkward and superfluous for Nature, whose fecundity is beyond conception. This indeed is “human, all too human,” and the stumbling block is of course the need to cling to the individual self, not daring to face the fact that this self is exactly what dies.

The problem becomes more acute when the notion of karma is added to the mix. I speak of popular conceptions, not of the many rarefied and sophisticated doctrines of Eastern philosophy. The widely known (and crude) meaning of karma is in some respects similar to the problem of justice that led to the creation of heaven and hell in the Western tradition. The actions one performs in this life, good or bad, lead to good or bad results in the next life.

I have actually heard it explained that suffering, injustice, and grave misfortune happens to people because of actions they took in previous lives. This superficial solution to the problem of justice is ultimately more unjust than the doctrine of hell. For one thing, since we have no memory of previous lives, there is no moral result from karmic consequences. I would have to make a conscious connection to previous actions in order to experience any moral awareness or change regarding my experience of suffering in this life. If the universe contains an ethical cause-and-effect between lives, it totally defeats the purpose to have people reborn without memory of previous lives. If a child is maimed in an accident, there is no ethical validity to imagining that the child was a Mafia hit man in a previous life. He’s a child now, and nothing within the continuity of the child’s present experience justifies his suffering.

There are, besides this, graver consequences of such a belief. For if everything that happens to us is a lawful result of karma, than nothing can really be unjust. Everyone who was killed in the Holocaust must have done something to deserve it in previous lives. (As a corollary to this, we have a popular New Age belief that we choose everything that happens to us. The little girl that got molested actually chose that.) The end of this doctrine is moral vacuity. Karmic results for actions can have no ethical dimension at all—what standard could there be for a moral consequence when the action in question is in itself a just consequence of a previous action?

So much for the popular misconception of karma. A karmic system of reincarnation would seem to be another myth of life after death that causes more problems than it solves. But even without the moral dimension, rebirth assumes the continuity of the ego. In Buddhism, where the existence of an ego is denied, the mythology of reincarnation has always presented a contradiction. Yet it remains part of the popular Buddhist mythos. Such is the endurance of human clinging to the idea of a permanent self.

This is, in fact, the ultimate dilemma of all afterlife beliefs. The human fear of death determines the structure of belief according to the desire for personal survival, and at the same time in denial of human intuition. For the spiritual seeker to face and experience the truth, he or she must be willing to explore and entertain the intuition of that which has hitherto seemed insupportable.

(This is the last in a series of articles about beliefs concerning survival after death)

What a maroon

Sean Hannity recently unveiled a new feature on his show. The idea was obviously to imitate Keith Olbermann’s “Worst person in the world.” Guess what Hannity’s segment is called. Are you ready? Enemy of the State. (Here's a clip for the incredulous.)

Usually I’m just enraged whenever I catch a few minutes of Hannity’s show, during the rare occasions when I visit the Zombie Channel out of morbid curiosity. In this case, however, I had to laugh at the sheer stupidity of the title. Of course this guy is not known for his intellectual abilities (the fact that the President has chosen to be interviewed by this lug is an indicator of how far we have sunk). But this goes beyond his normal level of imbecility, because even on supposedly conservative terms, the title is an incredible gaffe that only makes Hannity look like a clown.

Elevating the state to sacred status is not a characteristic strategy of the American right, at least not in recent years. The standard horseshit, distilled into a fine brown liquid by Ronald Reagan, is that we need less government. Self-reliance and individual effort are the bywords, and state interference is to be avoided. It was never strictly true, only a code for profit-making untrammeled by ethics, but here it’s as if Hannity has unwittingly revealed the fascist subtext. Here’s Mussolini, for instance: “…the Fascist conception of power is for the State; and it is for the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State.” I could pick any number of other quotes from the Nazis that say the same thing. For that matter, the Soviet line was identical, except that they would say “the people” or “the workers” or “the Party” instead of “the State,” but it’s the same damn thing in the end.

So by choosing “Enemy of the State” as the title of his segment, Hannity ennobles any and every person he might choose to name. (His first choice was Sean Penn, the lucky bastard.) But really, what liberty-loving American of any political persuasion wouldn’t feel honored to be called an enemy of the state? It’s about the same as being called a freedom fighter or a patriot. The only people that would not wish to be named by Sean Hannity would be craven, sniveling cowards whose only ambition is to blend into the mass of state worshippers, or at the most to gain the approval of their masters. Hannity has gauged his true audience and his judgment is clear: the ideal viewer of his show is a sheep.

How shrewd

President Pantload has announced that more American should be killed in order to stave off any embarrassment he may have to experience by admitting complete failure. Such are the consequences when war is waged not in response to a genuine threat to our shores, but as a move in a geopolitical game.

It’s remarkable, too, how members of both parties admit openly to being motivated by a fear of being blamed for “losing.” The essentially infantile nature of our politics has never been more obvious: the fear of blame overriding even the dire and deadly realities on the ground. Everywhere one looks in Washington, and in the corrupt media covering it, we see a frightening ability to look at human lives as if they were dispensable objects. This is moral degradation of the first order.

We are told that to “lose” this battle (on the front of the generalissimo’s global war of terror) would be disastrous. The consequences we are being warned of have already happened. The neocons turned Iraq into a terrorist breeding ground. They have destabilized the Middle East to the point of near breakdown. Yet they warn us that these things will happen if we pull out.

Senator Durbin presented the official Democratic response to the Boosh speech, and it should have dismayed anyone with a conscience. After saying that Americans have paid a heavy price—which is true—he went on to say: “,,,we have given the Iraqis so much. We have deposed their dictator. We dug him out of a hole in the ground and forced him to face the courts of his own people. We've given the Iraqi people a chance to draft their own constitution, hold their own free elections and establish their own government. We Americans, and a few allies, have protected Iraq when no one else would.”

What mendacity. What arrogance. Have the Iraqis not paid a heavy price, heavier than our own? Have they not lost hundreds of thousands of people to death, injury, or exile? Have they not seen their country collapse into chaos? The Iraqis have told us themselves that life was better under Saddam. But Durbin acts as if the U.S. bears no responsibility for the tragic consequences of its invasion.

I happened to be watching MSNBC, and the fathead Chris Matthews called Durbin’s speech shrewd. “He doesn’t come off as antiwar, as some sort of flower child” (I quote from memory). The other pundits seem to agree. Perhaps willful blindness and lying is shrewd. Perhaps it’s the only way for Democrats to even be heard in the media. But if true, it’s a sad and shameful truth. Durbin said what he said because you can’t say that America did something wrong. You can’t even admit mistakes without risk to your political life. Think about that. Human beings do wrong things on a regular basis, and part of being sane and civilized is being able to admit that, and apologize. But America, we are told, can do no wrong. The patriotic view of America, apparently, is that the nation is a huge sociopath, because that’s exactly what a person who never admits wrong would be.

So instead of facing the fact that this war was wrong to begin with, Durbin paints it as a noble endeavor that has run its course. Truth is sacrificed to the piggish vanity and ignorant self-regard of unthinking nationalism. But the price of shrewdness is very high. If we can never honestly examine the war-making and mongering of our elites, if we can never question militarism and triumphalism, then our national dialogue will always be stillborn. These idiots like Chris Matthews, who even while they jump on the anti-Bush bandwagon, claim that everyone thought the war would succeed, closed their ears to the demonstrations of millions of protesters prior to the invasion, and after.

The bully who frets about losing, or being perceived as losing, when his actions have caused unimaginable suffering to untold numbers, when the blood of children is on his hands, has lost any right to be listened to that he may have had. And when a speech like Durbin’s, crafted as the response of the opposition, buys into the same criminally self-centered world view, it perpetuates the shame, recirculating poison into the body politic. Shrewdness equals complicity.

Forever Young

I’ve noticed when I talk to friends about the state of things politically, a lot of them mention news overload. They’ve followed the news, mostly on progressive web sites and other alternative media, and eventually they get so angry and upset that they have to put limits on how much news to take in.

That’s been true for me at times, and I think it’s a symptom of how bad the situation has become since the Boosh Junta seized power in 2000. To list the successive outrages here would probably be redundant. Each time that Cheney, the Republicans, and the neocon-artists have revealed some new way to wreck our country, it is as if we’re being tested to see how much degradation we can put up with, how far they can go towards their dream of a Chinese-style police state without awakening a sleeping populist giant. Pretty damn far, as it turns out, and they’re still pushing.

Anyway, many people have discovered that if you spend too much time reading about this insanity, you start to get a little unbalanced yourself. If you combine powerlessness with rage and fear you can end up in the metaphorical shitter fairly easily. Many of us who are of a progressive bent have had to learn how to balance our intake of information with a sense of well-being. Doing something—anything from joining a union to writing a letter to the local newspaper—can help relieve the pressure. There’s also the importance of simply being grateful and appreciating the moment. Happiness, I like to say, is a revolutionary act.

One of the best things to happen in ’06 was the emergence of Stephen Colbert as the foremost political satirist of the day. Of course this didn’t come out of nowhere, but from the steadily more impressive comic fold of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. When mainstream media outlets have mentioned that many people get their news primarily from Stewart and Colbert, there’s often a trace of condescension in the remark, but anyone familiar with the shows can tell you that they generally present more information about what’s going on politically than the network evening news shows. But in my case, I often go to Comedy Central first because a satiric attitude seems the only healthy way to deal with the political situation today. Only on Stewart and Colbert can I share the proper sentiments of sarcasm, ridicule, and scorn, while being reminded that I am not alone in regarding our current government as both ludicrous and insane.

Another important refuge is in the work of artists who keep in touch with what is truly important—love, beauty, passion, and all the visions, light and dark, of the human soul. One of the best movies of the past year was Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold. At first glance it is just a concert film, a record of Neil Young’s premiere performance of his Prairie Wind album at Nashville’s fabled Ryman Auditorium. But Neil Young is no ordinary artist—with the help of Demme’s impeccable visual sense, Young evokes a sense of gratitude for the American musical tradition through beautiful songs exploring dreams, mortality, the bonds of family, and coming to terms with both our loves and our failings. This is not about idol worship or collective congratulation, as too many concerts tend to be, but about giving back, paying tribute, opening ourselves up. As in all great performances, we come away feeling unexpectedly transformed.

Young is an artist who has always been engaged with social issues as well. His latest album, Living With War, faced the truth about the criminal occupation of Iraq head-on. And he offered it for free download on his website. Some weeks later, I remember running across Saturday Night Live while idly flipping channels. The cast of that show presented a pathetic piece of mockery about Young’s album, with Kevin Spacey imitating Young. The entire point of the flaccid skit could be summarized as, “Oh look at that pathetic old hippie trying to be relevant.” It was poorly written and empty-headed, with similarly impaired viewers nevertheless hailing it as brilliant. Anyway, the idea was that popular musicians who sing about current events are automatically ridiculous. I guess they’re supposed to just sing mindless dance numbers or boy-girl songs. It’s as if Dylan and the 60s never happened. Cynicism and “cool” are the only acceptable things now.

This brings me back to The Daily Show. It is truly the first television show specializing in political satire, which is an amazing thing when you consider that television has been around for over sixty years. Saturday Night Live was never satire, or at least very rarely. They were content with having Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford falling down, or Dana Carvey imitating Poppy Bush’s mannerisms. When it came to talking about anything substantive, the show opted for detached nihilism. Lorne Michaels’ approach to politics has always been superficial and cowardly, and even in the supposed golden age of the show every good skit was balanced by three or four bad ones. That ratio was great compared to how it’s been for the last decade or so. SNL hasn’t been funny for years, and it’s basically amounted to nothing but a launching pad into movies for one overrated performer after another. How it stays on the air I don’t know—I would guess that a crucial drunk frat boy demographic still finds it amusing. You’d have to be drunk to sit through the boring TV show parodies and stupid recurring characters, punctuated by endless commercials.

The Stewart and Colbert shows are true political satire because they attack the powerful over and over again, not just weak, easy targets like SNL, and they’re consistently smart and funny. They help us stay cheerful in the midst of the madness, and great musicians like Neil Young give us reasons to hope.

Pardon me?

As the media looks back through rose-colored glasses at another dismal President, Gerald R. Ford, the subject of the power of presidential pardon comes up, if only obliquely, due to Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, a controversial and (rightly) unpopular act that may have contributed to his defeat in 1976.

It’s remarkable how infrequently this power has been examined, even in legal circles. It originates from Article II, section 2 of the Constitution: “...he [the President] shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.”

The ideas of our nation’s founders almost never seem naïve to me—much of their thought was based on a healthy awareness of the inherent dangers of political power. But in this case I wonder. Of course they couldn’t foresee the extreme corruption of government as it has developed in the last century, culminating in our current situation, in which the White House is operated by what amounts to a criminal gang. But surely there were precedents in the 18th century for heads of state excusing the crimes of their families and associates. It would seem that the motive for instituting this power in the Constitution was, in fact, distrust of the tendency of courts towards severity in punishment. It was common in England for minor offenses to carry the death penalty. Alexander Hamilton thought that the conscience of a single person, the President, was necessary as a corrective to such unjust severity. In Federalist #74, he wrote: “The reflection that the fate of a fellow-creature depended on his sole fiat, would naturally inspire scrupulousness and caution; the dread of being accused of weakness or connivance, would beget equal circumspection, though of a different kind.”

In regard to the second clause of this sentence, I believe history has proved Hamilton to be naïve. Weakness and connivance no longer carry enough shame to prevent the abuse of this power. Bill Clinton pardoned his own brother Roger, and this is only one example of that President’s high tolerance for weakness and connivance. Of course, it’s argued that it can be politically risky to pardon someone—but in Clinton’s case he was at the end of his final term, so there was virtually no political fall-out for him to consider. He pardoned former Arizona Governor Fife Symington in a case involving the defrauding of union pensions. It turns out that Symington, an old pal, had once saved Clinton from going under in a riptide. The working people who were Symington’s victims mattered for nothing compared to the personal loyalties of the wealthy Clinton.

Ford’s pardon of his predecessor was remarkable in that Nixon had not been charged with any crime. It was not at all certain whether the special prosecutor would pursue an indictment of Nixon. Ford’s action basically cleared Nixon of any charges that might be made against him in the future regarding actions he performed when President.

The impression of weakness and connivance is very much magnified by the pre-emptive nature of the pardon. It’s one thing to pardon someone who is in jail, or even someone who’s been indicted and is facing trial, but pardoning someone before he’s even been charged with anything is about as naked an exposure of political favoritism on the part of an arrogant elite that one could ever expect to see.

The official excuse for this was that the prospect of having a former President go on trial would be too much of a trauma for the nation. Thus a thoroughly phony principle of protecting the public from emotional upheaval was made to supersede the ancient, venerable, and simple principle of justice. The office of the President was cloaked in a bogus aura of imperial prestige, thus putting the President effectively above the law. It is dangerous to underestimate the power of this prestige, as we can see from the behavior of the current occupant, who has advanced the idea of the omnipotent “unitary” executive who is subject to no law but is himself the measure of all law, just like the kings and emperors of old Europe.

Now we discover, according to Ford’s memoirs as leaked by The Nation, that Nixon’s chief of staff, Al Haig, offered to Vice-President Ford the possibility of Nixon resigning in return for an agreement that Ford (who would of course have become President when Nixon resigned) would grant Nixon a full pardon. Oh, what a tangled web we weave! Ford denies agreeing to this, but when such a subject is even broached, involving the assumption of the Presidency by one politician depending on the pardon of another, one can see what a nasty can of worms the power of pardon can become.

Now that we’ve come to the point where we have a President who has no shame at all, a President who insists that the Constitution is just a “goddamn piece of paper,” the power of pardon (granted to him, of course, by that same Constitution) grants the Liar-in-Chief a wider range of corruption. Consider the Scooter Libby case, which has the potential of exposing a criminal conspiracy to lead the nation into a war under false pretenses. Bush could pardon Libby at any time, and for anything he might have done while he worked for the White House, not just the perjury charge. To be honest, I’m not sure why it hasn’t happened yet. As hard as it is to imagine from a President so indifferent to criticism, it could be that Bush and his handlers fear that the political fall-out from such a pardon (in a case involving, we need to remember, the outing of a CIA agent) could be too devastating for Republicans who have already been rocked by the disastrous war and various scandals. Perhaps they fear it could tip the White House to the Democrats in ’08. But when it comes down to a choice between losing politically and having the criminal actions of Bush, Cheney, et. al., exposed in a court of law, I would think that the current regime would eventually choose political loss. (In addition to the Libby case, it has become evident in recent months that Bush is scrambling to make everyone involved in his murders and tortures immune from prosecution. That was why the Military Commissions Act had to be passed in a big hurry.)

To sum up: the Nixon pardon stands as a warning to the nation. The more corrupt the political elites become, and the less accountable they are for what they do, the more likely it will be that the President’s power of pardon will be used in order to conceal corruption and evade justice. I might dream of amending the Constitution to eliminate or at least limit this power, but the chances are slim to none. We can hope, however, that the issue will become more prominent in the public mind, and that a debate will be opened in legal circles and in society at large regarding the proper use and function of this power.

Flesh-Eating Ghouls: How Liberals are Stalking and Crushing Our Innocence with their Monstrous, Oozing Tentacles

In a future less distant than we might suppose, the many books that have been published by right-wing gasbags in recent years will molder on thrift-store shelves, gather dust at flea markets and garage sales, and disintegrate en masse underneath thousands of landfills. Their contents will be as thoroughly forgotten as the works of Louis Dodge. For indeed, there has rarely emerged a more breathtakingly empty genre of literature than the conservative whine.

Despite an apparent multiplicity of subjects, there is only a single guiding idea behind all these books: to point a finger of blame at liberals and leftists. Let us sample a few titles, shall we? (The names of the authors have been concealed to protect them from undeserved attention.)

The Terrible Truth About Liberals; Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild;, The Enemy Within: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Churches, Schools, and Military; Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream; Liberal-itis: A Thinking Disorder Destroying America; The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds; Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization; Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left; The Lethal Liberal Society in America: We Will Bury You!; Surrounded by Idiots: Fighting Liberal Lunacy in America; Liberalism is a Mental Disorder; Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.

Then there are the “how” books—usually a snappy main title, followed by a “how” subtitle outlining the insidious threat. (I’m listing most of these books without the main heading, so as to highlight this aspect of the, um, mental disorder…)

How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers and Jeopardize our Security; How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First; How the Left Created the Outsourcing Crisis; How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity; How the Left Was Won: An In-Depth Analysis of the Tools and Methodologies Used by Liberals to Undermine Society and Disrupt the Social Order; How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help; How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church; How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports; How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.

You must understand that there is no engagement with actual issues in these books. The problems in our country, in our world, are due to the presence of certain groups who are bent on destroying us—“us” being the right-minded citizens who buy these books and listen to talk radio. The liberals (or the Democrats, leftists, feminists, environmentalists, whatever—the terms are interchangeable) represent a malignant force of motiveless evil. They “assault” everything we hold dear, endanger our safety, undermine our culture. They even “plot” against Christmas. Why? Who knows? They’re just evil, folks, and they need to be stopped at all costs.

In the upcoming publishing cycle we may expect books that explain how liberals want to rape our children, make Satanism the national religion, put LSD in our food supply, force everyone into gay sex, and legalize cannibalism.

I’m trying to imagine the poor credulous reader who buys and eagerly reads these books. What does he get out of it? A confirmation of his status as a victim, perhaps. An echo of every secret, self-pitying complaint against whatever people or groups he hates, or who seem to threaten his imagined privilege. And every succeeding book helps him to snivel a little bit longer, and to get angrier and angrier.

The reader imagines an earlier time, a blissful American Eden that existed before the rise of the dreaded liberals. A time when you could buy almost anything for a nickel, when men were men and neighbors were friendly, when family was the most important thing. A time when black people were in their place, and if they got unruly you could lynch 'em. A time when women knew their role: raising babies at home, not working or voting. The golden age, when there was hardly any crime, no unions, no do-gooders, when you could safely piss into the lake without worrying about the EPA. The golden age, my friends, the American Arcadia.

So what is the solution to our problem? Clearly, if we just lined up all the liberals, feminists, loony leftists, gays, environmentalists, animal rights activists, and antiwar protesters against a wall and shot them—then everything would be ok, right?

I wonder what it will take for people to realize the infantile nature of this thinking, to realize that with all the talk of a “culture of complaint” and the weakness of liberal concern for the victim, that no movement has been more characterized by whining, complaining, and pointing the finger, by a complete and total victim mentality, than this pathetic right-wing movement in America. Why, they could take over all three branches of government (and they did), dominate the media discourse (which they also did), and reduce the Democrats to a cringing, ineffectual minority (it happened, and could happen again), but they are still somehow the victims of a powerful liberal enemy determined to corrupt everything good and decent. Now, imagine if the “enemy within” were finally crushed by the righteous power of the conservative state, what meaning would be left for the right-wing whiners? What on earth would they do?

Wouldn’t they have to find someone else to attack? Maybe the Jews—that’s always a good one. Or maybe they’d just end up eating each other. Because, you see, when you run screaming from your own shadow, there is ultimately no escape.

Afterdeath (Part 2 )

The attribution of moral significance to the afterlife is a relatively recent development. For most of human history, the notion of survival after death proceeded simply from assumptions about spirit, i.e. that the self, subjectivity, could not be mortal. The fear of death prompted much in the way of ritual, ceremony, and propitiation, for the sake of the departed spirits as well as for the living community. But ensuring the best outcome, the best experience, of the spirit’s travel to the “other” world was a process primarily magical and sympathetic in nature, not moral.

To speculate on the historical motivations behind the invention of heaven and hell is to risk confusion between conscious decisions and unconscious cultural developments. For the sake of exposition, we may discuss it as if a group of priests (of whatever ancient religion) got together to devise a strategy, but the truth concerning the history of religious beliefs involves great inward struggles followed by emergence of new convictions wielding the force of sudden insight or revelation. The birth of our beliefs about things unseen does not take place through cunning or calculation, despite the impression that is presented by later history to the atheist or skeptic. Such beliefs would have no power unless they emerged from the depths of our nature, from needs and desires that are imperative. This is a truth that it is important to remember at all times when investigating religion: all the concepts which seem so strange to the rationalist would not have arisen unless they had deep-seated causes, and one must take these causes seriously and respect their importance in order to understand the concepts.

There came a time in human history, then, when the desire for justice took on the nature of an overwhelming priority—indeed, a crisis in human affairs. The invention of law had allowed great advances, but its fallibility became more and more evident as society became more complex. Although the origin of law was attributed to the gods (and later to God), the idea that the Divine would reward good actions and punish bad ones on earth became impossible to credit. For one thing, law could be subverted by men who performed bad actions and then codified these bad actions as law. For every person who was judged by the law, there were many who escaped punishment and were able to hurt other people without consequence. The power principle itself, the dominance over others through brute physical force, presented a contradiction to the idea of justice, because the outcome depended on the degree to which the person wielding power was just, and this seemed increasingly a matter of chance rather than Divine will. Ultimately, tte suffering of innocent people presented a challenge to the notion that the cosmos was just—and thus we have the Book of Job. That great poem maintains human limitation and fallibility regarding such questions, but the religions and cultures committed to beliefs in an afterlife could not be satisfied with such an answer. (Here we must focus on the Western traditions—the Eastern religions took a different path, which we will postpone discussing until a later time.)

Then comes the revelation, the sudden thunderbolt of insight. If human beings are judged for their actions after death, then our desire for justice no longer contradicts the drama of life—there is no contradiction any more, because our preparation for the “next” life is now conceived as a moral one. Those who have acted justly, therefore, will be rewarded after death in such a way as to resolve any injustice experienced in this life. Those who have acted unjustly will be punished after death, so that even if they died peacefully in their sleep after committing terrible crimes against the innocent, the desire for justice will ultimately be satisfied.

Of course, the sum total of our actions are rarely, if ever, completely good or bad. So the process of judgment after death will have to take both good and bad into account, and the degree of reward or punishment will vary accordingly. But as absolutist thought became increasingly ascendant in human culture and religion, so heaven and hell gradually lost all degrees and became an either/or proposition, a development that injects a greater element of peril into the notion of judgment. (The Catholic Church tried to compensate for this by introducing purgatory, and also different circles or levels in heaven and hell).

The first phase of belief in the two great traditions born from Judaism—i.e. Christianity and Islam—indicates a final day of judgment in which all are judged together, a day conceived as occurring in historical time. This is actually a radical departure from the age-old beliefs about the survival of an individual spirit after death, because it posits a sort of interval of nothingness or cosmic sleep for the dead, between their death and the day of judgment. (In the case of Christianity, there’s the equally radical idea of an actual resurrection of the body, but that’s another issue).

Eventually, popular belief triumphed in the form of an individual surviving after death, being judged immediately, and then going to heaven or hell. An uneasy combination was made between this and the millennial doctrines, and there has always been controversy on this point. In any case, the moral significance is identical. The practical result, the design emerging in the form of human conduct, if you will, is that the fear of punishment after death is supposed to prevent us from committing bad actions, and the desire for reward after death is supposed to motivate us to performing good actions.

The eternal, or never-ending, nature of reward and punishment is a peculiar outcome of this development. Not only, then, are we punished or rewarded after death, but there is no end to these punishments or rewards. They last forever. To do evil is to risk not only painful consequences, but consequences that will never be exhausted, leaving the judged spirit without hope of ever finding relief from punishment. (It is noteworthy that this aspect of hell is more psychologically vivid to us than the corresponding eternity of reward in heaven. I think this is because the entire complex is motivated by fear of death, and therefore has an essentially negative character.)

Thus the great problem of justice seemed to have been solved. But was it really? The complexity of the after-life system presented its own contradictions. People eventually perceived the doctrine of hell itself as a symptom of injustice. The arguments are too many and diverse to enumerate here. Perhaps the most basic is simply that reward and punishment are not compatible with the true realization of virtue, that they represent a limited, self-centered view of human conduct that fails to comprehend the nature of good actions, or indeed of goodness itself as a subjective quality for human beings.

On the purely practical level, though, can we say that heaven and hell have improved the overall state of human conduct? It’s impossible to say for sure without speculating on how human history would have proceeded without the introduction of the moral element in the afterlife. Maybe it did improve things. But I think it should be abundantly clear that this belief did not result in the faithful and virtuous human society that one might have hoped for. The atrocities of human oppression, the massacres, tortures and cruelties of the last two millennia in the West have all taken place within a culture proclaiming the belief in heaven and hell.

To put it on a more personal, and therefore more comprehensible level, I will pose a question. If a person really believed that committing a sin would sentence him or her to a hell of eternal punishment, would that person ever sin? Or let us ask instead: if a person really believed that committing a sin would open up even the slightest possibility of eventually being punished in hell for eternity, would he or she ever sin? Could you imagine taking such a risk? If you really believed in eternal punishment of sin, wouldn’t you make every effort to live a blameless life, a life of such moral purity that you could manage to live in some ease from the fear of such a horrible and inconceivable punishment? And wouldn't therefore, the majority of people in our society, who believe in heaven and hell, be virtually blameless? We would expect, then, to be experiencing a more peaceful world, a much less violent world, than what we have.

The answer to the riddle, I think, is that no one, or at least very few people indeed, actually believe with full conviction in eternal reward and punishment. Religious people try to believe. They persuade themselves that they believe. But at a deeper level they don’t believe, because at the deepest and most unconscious levels of subjectivity we intuit reality, the absolute, essentially non-verbal reality of which we, so to speak, partake. And at this level, we know, despite all conscious suppression of knowledge, that these beliefs are a fiction. No one alive can actually tell us about an afterlife from experience, and this fact is perhaps the most obvious aspect of death we know—in a sense, it could even be said to define our intuitive awareness of what death is. So no matter how many sacred revealed scriptures we are given, or how many visions or stories we are told of, we know that it’s a fiction. In the form of mythology, such fiction has undeniable meaning and relevance for us, but when it is transposed into a method for maintaining a certain form of behavior through reward and punishment, it ends in failure.

Why? Because the fear of death is an insufficient cause for moral action. It only replicates our fear in ever-evolving, complex forms. Love, compassion, caring, respect, and all the other truths that we discern beneath the surface of virtue, originate and derive their meaning from some other source besides the fear of death. Heaven and hell are dead ends.

(This is the second in a series of articles about beliefs concerning survival after death.)

A Right to Know the Truth

The 9/11 Truth Movement is a controversial subject. I’ve even had some heated arguments with friends and family about it. The greatest barrier to discussion is the stigma of “conspiracy theorist,” which threatens anyone who takes the subject seriously to be labeled crazy or gullible or worse.

In one discussion, someone commented that the belief in a conspiracy fulfills a need for us to make order and sense out of senseless, chaotic events. This is a common notion, but I actually think the opposite is true. It’s much more comforting to believe that there are no conspiracies, at least of this magnitude. To think that an event this important, an atrocity that has become a central rationale for a whole new direction in our country’s foreign and domestic policies, was the result of a government conspiracy of some sort, is very frightening indeed.

But I think it’s wrong to speculate on the needs such a controversy fulfills, on either side, because it obscures the real issues involved. The key point should be—does the official version of the event make sense? If it doesn’t make sense, then we as citizens have not only the right but the duty to demand the truth.

This key point often gets lost because of our tendency to speculate about what the truth might be. Some of the speculations may seem more plausible than others, but they all shift the attention away from the questions of fact to the questions “Who did this and how?” It is much easier to ridicule such speculations than it is to refute a fact-based analysis of the event itself. Yet the tendency to speculate is inevitable, and so we must expect such things to crop up around any question of political conspiracy. With the JFK assassination, for instance, popular attention has tended to focus on speculative and sensational aspects—the “grassy knoll” and so forth—while the fact that the official version is flimsy from top to bottom, even if one only relies on the Warren Commission’s own evidence, is rarely recognized.

In addition, there will always be lunatics that are attracted to conspiracies. This fact is consistently exploited by those who attack conspiracy theories. They use the argument ad hominem and by association: find the least coherent conspiracy theorists you can, and then label all of them with the same brush. Everyone gets lumped together with believers in Roswell and Elvis sightings. But although there are wackos who are attracted to conspiracies, it does not follow that all conspiracy theories, or theorists, are necessarily wacko. Only a sober examination of facts, and not personal attacks on the sanity or general character of critics, is a valid form of argument.

There are quite a few on the left who are dismayed by the 9/11 Truth Movement because they see it as a distraction from the important work of grassroots organizing and resistance. I certainly agree that political action is of more importance in the larger scheme of things. And yet, if the official version of the attacks is wrong, I can’t imagine how anyone could justify denying the need for truth. Interpreting history is one way that the political class attempts to control people. Surely part of resistance is to be skeptical about the official version of history. And this particular piece of history is evidently being exploited in order to steer this country towards a more authoritarian, less democratic state, as well as putting us on a perpetual war footing. We can’t really claim, then, that the issue is irrelevant.

For the record, I am very troubled by glaring inconsistencies in the 9/11 story. Among the many aspects, the most bizarre, it seems to me, is the collapse of the WTC buildings. Even if one were to accept the idea that the airplanes could cause such a collapse (which I don’t), the collapse of WTC Building 7, which was not hit by a plane, is inexplicable. I am open to hearing rational explanations of these events, but so far I have noticed a peculiar defensiveness and hostility on the part of those who seek to refute criticisms. They all end up making ad hominem attacks on the critics, while using flimsy and scattershot arguments to rebut their questions of fact. I haven’t seen a sober, systematic refutation yet. And the attitude of the government, which has been to stonewall and bluff its way past attempts at investigation, is suspicious, to put it mildly. To be fair, the Bush administration lies so routinely about everything that it’s difficult to attribute rational motives a lot of the time. Still, it begs the question—if the truth about 9/11 was clear, and favorable to the government, wouldn’t it be more forthcoming, if only in self-interest?

The fact is that no one has ever been disciplined for negligence over this terrible event. Not a single person has had to pay the piper for allowing this to happen. There has never been an actual criminal investigation. All we got was a commission with a very unsatisfactory report. WTC 7 went conveniently unmentioned in this report, among other things. It’s absurd for the defenders of the official version to get testy about criticism when those who have presented this version have done such a lousy job.

Earlier this year we witnessed the sorry spectacle of a mentally ill extremist named Ann Coulter, who actually has a voice in the media during these strange times, attacking the 9/11 widows as publicity seekers. I don’t think the real problem was that these widows supposedly supported John Kerry, although that’s the way it was framed. The problem is that they’re not satisfied with the official version of the event that caused the deaths of their husbands. This speaks particularly to my point, because I don’t think these widows are conspiracy theorists. At least, that’s not my impression. I haven’t heard any speculations from them. What I do hear is that the version of 9/11 that we’ve been given does not seem like the whole truth to them. And I know if my spouse had died in this attack, I wouldn’t care what anyone, Ann Coulter or otherwise, said about it—my sole focus would be finding out the truth. If the entire world told me to shut up, I wouldn’t stop talking as long as I thought there was some part of the truth that was still hidden.

What is a legitimate issue for the widows is a legitimate issue for the rest of us as well, because this event has been a catalyst for so much more tragedy. For myself, I can say with complete sincerity that I have no stake in what particular form the truth might take. If it were proved that Osama Bin Laden did it, I would be relieved. I would prefer not to have to face the possibility of government complicity. But as long as the events are not reasonably explained, strictly on the basis of reason and science and not on name-calling or innuendo, I can’t dismiss the issue from my mind. And I don’t think the American people will be able to forget either.

Time Lapse Politics

You couldn’t ask for a more pointed example of elitism combined with brain-dead media than the Iraq Study Group.

If you were to believe what you see on TV and the McNewspapers, we just got confirmation that the Iraq War is a disaster. Never mind that the majority of the people have known this for at least a year, probably longer. Never mind that there has been no lack of intelligent political observers saying the same thing for years. And forget about the millions who protested this war from the beginning, and have been consistently demonized as terrorist-friendly “moonbats,” along with right-wing Democrat Jack Murtha, for chrissake, who was saying all this a year ago.

But now that a hand-picked group of fossils, headed by Mr. Grinning Death-Head James Baker, says that the Iraq policy is failing, well—that’s news, my friends. It’s as if the people who own the country are in a time warp, only receiving factual reports two years later than everyone else. And it’s assumed that the American people are ignorant dullards, when the Boosh poll numbers have been consistently in the toilet for so long that you can almost hear the sound of flushing every time a new poll comes out.

The moral of the story is that the people in government, as a rule, do not feel responsible to those they serve, or even to the facts on the ground. The truth that we perceive is in a different realm from the artificial world of the media-projected national drama. And just as we are passive spectators of the junk parade on TV, so our citizenship is one of passivity. What has been abundantly clear for a long time now becomes official “truth” after a blue-ribbon panel of elite insiders declares it, all in the service of preventing an empty suit President from having to admit a mistake.

In such circumstances, thank the gods I can turn to His Rudeness for relief from mendacity.

Afterdeath (Part 1)

If the fear of death, as it’s been said, is the beginning of wisdom, it has also been, by extension, the cause of much folly.

Since our subjectivity is the one constant of life—the context, as it were, of all experience—it is impossible to imagine its loss. In our imagination, extinction becomes a semblance of night, like being locked in a dark room forever. But of course, being locked in a dark room is still an experience, while extinction is not. The fear of death, then, is different in kind from the fear of pain or any other fear, because of its unimaginable nature.

The ineffable nature of subjectivity, its wondrousness, if you will, lies at least partly in the fact that is not reducible to any experience or object, but is the precondition for every experience of every object. This gave rise to the idea of a spirit, soul, or self—some sort of being-essence that inhabits the body. Human beings could clearly perceive that the body was mortal, but could not accept that the spirit was mortal as well. Indeed, the presupposition of a spirit separate from the body already assumes that the spirit is permanent and the body impermanent, since it is the intuition of unconditioned reality that gave rise to the idea of a spirit in the first place. From this separation, it follows that the spirit survives the body, in other words, the notion of “life after death.”

The argument describes a process founded on human desire and fear. Like all animals, we seek to survive, and we avoid death. With greater awareness, however, comes a more acute form of avoidance: the fear of death as a lasting mental influence rather than just a feeling-reaction in the moment. When human beings became aware of their mortality—not just in times of threat but in all times, as a form of knowledge, and retainable in the memory—they first manifested the signs of culture that we identify as human. And among the earliest such signs, if not the earliest, were burials of the dead and funerary rites.

The ineffable and ungraspable nature of subjectivity, when intuited by a higher (human) level of awareness, leads to the notion of spirit or soul, which simultaneously transforms the instinctual avoidance of death into an emotional and intellectual fear of death. (It is significant that this higher awareness is commonly known as “self-consciousness,” for it involves reflection.) From this fear of death, in turn, is born the notion of life after death.

Although the idea of spirit separate from body does not withstand the scrutiny of scientific reasoning, humans still cling to it because of their fear of death. The idea can’t be disproved empirically, of course (since death is inherently non-empirical), but even the overwhelming power of logical argument will not change anything as long as the fear of death remains a dominant force in culture. The paradox is that many forms of religion have sought to free us from the fear of death, and by various means, even while retaining the assumptions regarding a spirit or soul that end up perpetuating that fear. Those forms of religion and spirituality that honestly seek the truth, therefore, are faced with the necessity of grappling with the idea of spirit, and resolving the contradictions that leave the mass of humanity in bondage to fear.

(This is the first in a series of articles about beliefs concerning survival after death.)

To hell with the homeland

Prior to the September 11th attacks, I had never heard my country referred to as the “homeland.” Shortly after, I started hearing this word bandied about by Boosh Administration officials, and then the media caught on and started using it. It was as if this was a well-known, traditional word that had always been used. Not long after this, the term “homeland security” cropped up, well before the actual creation of a Department of Homeland Security.

I have always used the term “my country,” and I think I’m probably in the majority in that regard. So this bit of linguistic sleight-of-hand caught me completely by surprise. I had a negative reaction to it from the get-go. “Homeland” sounded to me like something from a World War Two movie, in which a German officer might say, “We must defend the homeland at all costs, mein Kapitan!” On reflection, I guess it was the “land” part of the word that bothered me, because, of course, the Nazis used the term “Fatherland.” And the Soviets, I believe, referred to their country as the “Motherland”—at least when it was being attacked by Hitler. “Homeland” has that feeling to it—there’s something old European about it, with a sprinkle of xenophobia.

As it happened, James A. Bartlett had the same reaction I did, and wrote a good essay about it in 2001, which also confirmed my suspicion that the term had rarely been used before in American public life. Bartlett decided that the term was sentimentalist manipulation, and cautions that it implies an anti-democratic point of view. I think there are definite nativist overtones as well.

I find it very curious that the word suddenly popped up after the 9/11 attacks, and gained a complete and dominant currency within weeks. It hardly seems likely that this idea came out of nowhere. Why “homeland security,” then, and not simply “internal security”? I would speculate that the neo-cons, the power behind the scenes, would prefer a term emphasizing American exceptionalism, our separation from the rest of the world. This is precisely where American foreign policy ended up—as a “go it alone” policy of arrogance and isolation, rejection of the UN and international law combined with a sense of an American mission to refashion the world in its own image.

The “home” in “homeland” also implies fear and defensiveness, framing 9/11 as the violation of our home by foreign enemies, and therefore requiring a reaction of distrust to anything not sufficiently patriotic or “home”-like. The faint totalitarian echoes of the word imply obedience to authority as well.

I am hereby declaring a boycott of the term “homeland.” I refuse to use it when referring to my country. I think it’s another ploy to change the way we think about ourselves and our traditions of free thought and speech. In any case, it’s another ugly reminder of the attempt by an authoritarian political movement to refashion our language, and thereby influence our minds.

Liberals and Conservatives

Here’s what my dictionary says about the word “liberal”: favorable to progress or reform, of or pertaining to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies, favorable to concepts of maximum individual freedom as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties, free from prejudice or bigotry, open minded or tolerant, characterized by generosity, broad-minded, beneficent.

Why should anyone be ashamed of this word? I would feel honored to be so named. The day when “liberal” became a dirty word was a catastrophic day for us, politically and morally.

Here’s what my dictionary says about the word “conservative”: disposed to preserving existing conditions, institutions, etc., agreeing with gradual rather than abrupt change, having the power or tendency to conserve, preservative.

How do those who call themselves conservative fit this description? Rather than preserving existing conditions, they seek to establish radically new ones: the merging of church and state, the arrogation of dictatorial powers by the executive, the undermining of habeas corpus and other basic traditions of American society, the use of torture, the propagation of endless war. Citing the threat of terrorism, they seek to abruptly transform the values and principles of a nation that managed to survive a civil war and two world wars without abandoning its traditions. And what do they conserve? Not the environment—in fact, they mock and deride those who seek to conserve it. Not our liberty, which they consider a threat to security. Not individual choice, which they violate through increasingly invasive forms of social control and surveillance. Not science or education, which they attack when it does not agree with their prejudices. Not free enterprise, which is devoured by ever-expanding corporate monopolies. Not freedom of the press, which is controlled and co-opted by corporate interests. Not the economy, which continues to plummet into mind-boggling deficits and debt. Not our values, which they erode by approving torture, disappearances, pre-emptive war based on lies, and a poisonous political culture based on name-calling and accusing one’s opponents of treason.

In fact, they conserve nothing. We who speak out and organize and struggle for peace and freedom—we are the conservatives, and the liberals. The so-called conservatives and “centrists”—what should be call them? Royalists, because they believe in the absolute authority of a king disguised as a president? Fascists, because they seek corporate domination in all areas of social life? For now, let’s just call them: Nihilists.

The only thing a nihilist knows how to do is destroy things. They are never really happy, because they cannot create. We who work for peace and freedom are working for them as well. Happiness is a revolutionary act.

More on the "literal truth."

There have been some interesting responses to my essay “No Literal Truth.” One reader pointed out that it is an essential aspect of Christianity that the resurrection be taken literally rather than “just” metaphorically. More generally, 2 Peter 1:16 makes a central point clear: “For we do not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

It seems to me that, taking Christian belief on its own terms, the reader was absolutely right. There are two points that I need to make about this. The first is that my statement “All meaning is transmitted by metaphor” is not the same as the reductive idea that “such-and-such event in a religious scripture did not actually happen, but is in fact only a metaphor.” The question of what happened and what didn’t is, on the one hand, a matter for scientific investigation, and on the other—the other being in the context of a religious tradition—strictly a matter of belief. But I maintain that the meaning of such an event is accessible to the believer only through the power of metaphor. The reality of which the believer believes only gains significance because, subjectively, it has meaning for him, e.g., in Christian terms, it has meaning for the soul, such as salvation or blessedness.

If we just take the resurrection as fact alone, without metaphor, there is no meaning beyond the fact that someone defied the law of nature by rising from the dead. That’s what you might call “a curiosity and a wonder,” a singular and incredibly unusual event. But what, I ask, does it have to do with my soul? Christian theology would answer me by going on to explain the significance of this event for my soul, and in this metaphor inevitably will be the means. It’s not enough to say that the resurrection promises that we will all rise from the dead too, if we believe that Jesus is Lord, because my resurrection from the dead would also be a “curiosity and a wonder,” but with a questionable significance for the soul. So we’re all resurrected and we’re still ignorant, limited beings. So what? In other words, the actual theology involves a change in the soul, and this change cannot be explained through any plain, objective expression (i.e. “literally”) but only through metaphor.

The point is that metaphor has been degraded to the status of a word indicating “unreal,” “not actual,” or “not true.” So when religious people insist on the literal truth of their scriptures, they are buying in to a view of life that considers human experience to be unimportant and accidental compared to the existence of the “outside” world. Instead of accepting that subjectivity is an inherent aspect of existence, they deny it in favor of the same objective standard maintained by science. They end up hoisted on their own petard, because science is consistent in its reliance on facts, while the religious people put belief before facts.

The resurrection is a good example. I think everyone would agree that the resurrection would not be considered remarkable if we saw such a thing every day. People didn’t need science to tell them that to rise from the dead would be an unprecedented feat—a miracle, in fact. If everyone were rising from the dead all over the place, Christians would have no reason to mention that Jesus had done it. It is characteristic of a miracle that it goes against the observed laws of nature. And yet, after Christianity became the dominant religion in the West, and its doctrines became the status quo, any doubt about the possibility of such a miracle became heresy. We see today that fundamentalists are offended when someone challenges the possibility of the resurrection. If they were consistent within themselves, if they understood the nature of miracles, they would calmly expect that most people would not believe. This isn’t to say that they wouldn’t attempt to persuade people to believe, but instead we see indignation that someone would have the temerity not to believe. And I think this proves not only that what passes for belief is often only the assumption of an inherited cultural tradition, but also that such belief is confused as to its own nature.

I happen to think that belief in and of itself falls short of the truth concerning spiritual experience, that it is essentially a mental operation that doesn’t change anything unless something deeper is touched—what I call “meaning”—that transcends thought and language. But that’s another essay. Here it’s important to understand that the attempt to divorce metaphor from religion is essentially an unconscious betrayal of the foundations of religion in favor of a soulless view of reality, a reality that is purely “objective” and has no room for poetry or the experience of transcendence.

My second point is more practical in nature; in fact it’s political. By stating my view that the “literal truth” is not spiritual, I do not thereby declare that fundamentalists should be outlawed, persecuted, prevented from practicing their religion, etc. I make a distinction between discussions of a philosophical nature regarding religion and discussions about the legal and political implications of religion in society. I believe that the American founders got it right by forbidding both the establishment of religion and the prohibition of its exercise. Everyone should be allowed to practice any religion they want, and express any religious belief they want. But the demagogues who seem to have hijacked a good portion of the church in America right now don’t seem to understand the first part, the establishment clause. To give one’s religious belief the force of law is to establish an official religion. It’s as simple as that. It excludes others who have different religions or no religion at all, and it’s untenable even within a Christian context, since the various churches and denominations often disagree on many basic points of doctrine.

The demagogues have taken the position of victims, claiming that secularists are ruining the country. There are millions of churches in this country freely practicing their faith. There are thousands of Christian radio stations. The claim that Christians are being persecuted is ludicrous and pathetic on the face of it. What it really amounts to is a demand for a theocratic system of government rather than the one established by the founders.

I am intellectually opposed to fundamentalist religious belief. I also believe in the absolute right to be a fundamentalist if that’s what you choose. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, don’t extend the same courtesy to me. The current leadership, at least, seeks to use the force of law to deny my rights. It is this attempt to undermine the Constitution, to break down the wall of separation between church and state, that I strongly oppose, not the mere existence of an opposing viewpoint, which is inevitable.

There will never be a time when everyone is going to believe the same thing. To try to achieve that has led, and will continue to lead, to nothing but destruction. That’s why the American tradition of tolerance and separation of church from matters of state is so wise, and must be preserved if we are to remain free.

What if you're wrong?

Faced with an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that global warming is a very serious threat to our existence on this planet, the right wing, along with most of the corporate establishment, has responded by—attacking the messenger.

If I understand the arguments correctly, what these wise leaders are saying is that global warming is a fake, a plot by liberals to undermine the economy and our way of life. A recent Fox Lies program featured interviews with “skeptics” who turn out to have strong ties to the oil industry, and whose claims have already been debunked. Our friend Rush Limbaugh claims that global warming is a fraud that has been cooked up by the “wacko” UN, with the help of evil environmental activists. The Wall Street Journal has chimed in on its editorial page, claiming that the scientific case for global warming is “getting weaker all the time.”

I’m reminded of a remark by Robert F. Kennedy in his account of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The Joint Chiefs had argued that the U.S. needed to use nuclear weapons against Cuba, because if we didn’t, our enemies would eventually use them against us. RFK wrote, “I thought, as I listened, of the many times that I had heard the military take positions which, if wrong, had the advantage that no one would be around at the end to know.”

There’s the rub, you see. The question that I ask of the global warming deniers is, “What if you’re wrong?”

On most issues, being wrong has consequences which are survivable. But here, we’re talking about a threat to our very existence as a species. The catastrophic effect of climate change, caused by our petroleum addiction, involves the deaths of billions of people, an unspeakable level of extinction. And we only have about a decade to turn things around.

Now, even if one were skeptical, in the face of such a threat the issue should at least be faced with seriousness and an appropriate level of concern. I don’t hear that here. We’re supposed to believe that scientists have been fooled by some sort of left-wing cabal that is plotting to undermine our economy. We’re supposed to believe that the subject doesn’t deserve our attention, that it’s a hoax, and that someone like Rush Limbaugh knows more about such things than the many, many scientists who have been ringing the alarm for years and decades.

Self-interest is perhaps the most blinding and misleading tendency in human nature. Apparently if the news from the scientific community contradicts a desire to continue making money in the same way we’ve always made money, then the response is to hide one’s head in the sand and accuse the messenger of ulterior motives. But if these ostrich people are wrong, we all lose in a bigger way than can even be imagined.

I wonder if they think about the future at all. The whole Wall Street mentality is so wrapped up in short-term gains that it doesn’t seem to possess the capability of considering future generations at all. In the secret recesses of the right wing brain, perhaps the thought arises, “I’ll be dead then anyway. Might as well make my money now and not worry.” Who cares about the future of the planet? Who cares about my children, or my grandchildren, or what kind of conditions they will have to endure? That must be the mindset, even if it’s only unconscious. Nothing else can explain the complete disregard of, and indeed the contempt for, facts.

Never mind that it’s bad government, bad social policy, bad morality. It’s bad business. You don’t just throw away your future assets on a gamble. Even a filthy rich capitalist should have that much sense.

What if you’re wrong? Can you even conceive of the possibility that you could be wrong? Are you a human being, or some kind of god who never doubts yourself? The stakes are too high to treat this issue as if it were like any other, a political football or a hammer to hit your enemies with.

We need to wake up, or we’ll find ourselves in the boiling water with the proverbial frog, croaking idiotically while our world dissolves.

Eejits in your living room

I happened to catch Soledad O’Brian interviewing my new Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, on CNN. Here’s a question she asked (I’m quoting from memory):

“It’s pretty certain that Nancy Pelosi will be the Speaker of the House. Now, she’s a liberal with a capital L, from San Francisco—I lived there for many years. Do you think this will be a problem?”

Questions like this, which are very common nowadays on TV news, illustrate the complete inanity of the pseudo-journalists and anchors on these major networks. First of all, what does “liberal with a capital L” mean? I guess the implication is that it’s far left, or farther left than most liberals, but one can’t be sure. The idea that mainstream liberals like Pelosi are somehow beyond the pale is so disconnected from reality that it’s almost impossible to know how to respond to such rubbish. One can marvel that an idiot like O’Brian gets to ask questions on TV, but it’s not as if she’s unique.

The fact that Pelosi is from San Francisco is supposed to mean something negative too. Right-wingers talk about San Francisco and Massachusetts as if the politics they hate is a matter of geography. But then O’Brian adds the breathtakingly irrelevant fact that she lived in San Francisco for many years. Who cares? No one should, but the point is that Soledad O’Brian thinks that she’s somebody, that she’s part of the news rather than someone who just reports it, and that therefore it’s important that she lived in San Francisco. There’s also the implication that her residence in San Francisco confers expert status on her regarding the political nature of this city, and of Pelosi. Well, you know, I lived in New Jersey for twenty years, so I guess that makes me an expert on that state. If CNN wants to interview Robert Menendez, they should definitely call me.

Finally, I’m not sure what “problem” O’Brian might be referring to. Is liberalism just an inherent problem, like a disease one must overcome in order to govern? Has right-wing ideology ever been framed as an inherent problem, or is it assumed to be the norm? I think you know the answer to that.

Giffords said “No,” and then wisely sidestepped the whole thing by talking about issues. She might not have even noticed how stupid and insulting her interviewer is. I don’t know. But the groundless self-regard of these anchors and other vacuous talking heads who style themselves TV personalities creates a smothering effect on the news. You can be sure that if you get most of your news from TV, you’re most likely getting it filtered through a fool.

Quack, quack

Watching the election returns on TV provided the perfect opportunity to observe the “business as usual” paradigm at work. The dominant narrative is that the re-taking of the House by Democrats (insert sigh of relief here) means that the President must now work with the “opposition” party if he wants to get anything done. Bush is now a wounded, lame duck president.

The pundits and assorted TV bubble-heads still don’t seem to notice that this lame duck is a unitary executive duck. And it only knows how to quack one way. The idea that Bush (or the hands inside the Bush costume, i.e., Richard Cheney and associates) would ever work with the Democrats is such wishful thinking that it may qualify as science fiction. These guys will continue to do whatever they damn well please under the rubric of “national security” and the “war on terror.” They don’t care if the government “works” properly, a fact which Katrina should have proved once and for all. But denial is a wonderful thing. (And the name “Katrina” was notable for its complete absence during election night coverage.)

The Democrats are apparently laboring under the same delusion, what with all the talk of working together, reaching across the aisle, and so forth. Maybe they believe it, although Republican behavior over the last twelve years makes me doubt that. What we really have is a situation in which the Democrats and the media enablers are too frightened to say the truth out loud: that we have a lawless, illegitimate, rogue presidency that is threatening the foundations of American liberty. The theory, I suppose is that announcing that the bus driver is insane would increase the chances of the bus driving off a cliff. Better to pretend that the driver, no matter how strangely he behaves, will obey all traffic laws.

I don’t agree. I think the Democrats need to be merciless towards a foe that did not shrink from accusing them of “aid and comfort to the enemy.” But it won’t happen because the Democrats are also beholden to business interests, and we all know that. The responsibility for the future of our country lies not with them but with us—I mean the progressive community. Only a vital, growing progressive movement can force the Democrats to do what’s right. A new party (say, for instance, a Labor Party) would be nice, but that’s a long way down the road. In the meantime, we’re stuck with the donkey, and it will only listen if we stay active and committed.

Anyway, CNN’s coverage was remarkably free of insight into the issues. MSNBC offered a bit more entertainment, albeit coordinated by the incredibly narcissistic Chris Matthews. Over at the Zombie Channel, we had the usual gang of idiots headed by cold fish Brit Hume (with Bill Kristol flashing his satanic little smile as he tried to spin what was happening into his neocon framework). I confess that I could only watch brief snatches, since I forgot to take my anti-nausea medication. I did notice, however, that Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and other assorted psychos were conspicuous by their absence. They were hidden away because the network thought that a somewhat different audience (to wit, grown-ups) may be watching on election night. I'm sure things are back to normal now.

Make no mistake. What happened last night was a good thing. Witnessing the voters rejecting the Royalist party in droves was cathartic for me. I am disappointed that Jon Kyl, the crypto-Nazi senator from my state (Arizona) was re-elected. His opponent, Jim Pederson, failed to attack on the issue of the war. I suppose his advisors know more than I do. On the other hand, he lost, so maybe not. Now we have six more years of this elitist creep, who depicted himself leafing admiringly through the Patriot Act in one of his TV spots. An interesting thing about Kyl—he’s never replied to a letter or e-mail. Not even a form letter. My other repulsive senator, John McCain, always sends a reply, which would seem to be the proper way to interact with a constituent. Kyl is too busy hobnobbing with Dick Cheney and other high-level crooks to take the time to respond to mere residents of his state. Perhaps he knows that he’s already lost my vote, so he’s saving paper. But the fact that he was able to win another term here is a somber tribute to the continued political backwardness of the Grand Canyon State.

Keep the faith

I remember standing on a busy street corner in Tucson with about thirty other people in 2003 holding signs protesting the war that had just been launched against Iraq. No talking or chanting, just quietly holding up our signs. A lot of people honked and gave us thumbs up or the peace sign. There were also a lot of people who screamed and swore, gave us the finger or tried to spit on us. The rage was sometimes hard to take, but we only responded by waving and smiling.

There were big demonstrations all over the world against this war before it even started. Millions of people gathered to say No to what we saw as an impending disaster. There were huge crowds in the major cities as well. In Tucson, a smaller city, over 8,000 people protested.

But if you get all your information from the mainstream media, it’s as if we never existed. The protests were marginalized, and now that it’s evident even to many Republicans that the war is a disaster, the pundits talk as if no one cried out a warning, as if the public simply joined in the steady march to war.

The protesters were right and those who attacked us, and still attack and demonize us, were wrong. But there’s no pleasure or fulfillment in being right, god knows, as we see the death and suffering continue and increase in Iraq. There’s only the knowledge that we must always trust our desire for peace, even in the face of the greatest opposition. The noise machine does not speak for us, nor does it represent even a majority, but only a wealthy, armed minority trying to control what we think, what we say, and what we do.

These thoughts are inspired by the latest masterpiece from the fiery tristero at hullabaloo, who says what should be the final word on Richard Perle and the other neocons, whose blind ambition has become our disgrace.

Big Mistake

Recently Senator Kerry made headline news by apologizing for something he said. (Actually he apologized for saying something that was misconstrued, but no matter.) I find it peculiar that this is considered a big story.

Among the most disturbing type of person encountered in discussions of any kind is the person who never admits that he or she could be mistaken. In personal relationships, we find the same type of person never admitting wrong, and never apologizing.

It’s impossible to have meaningful discussions with such people, just as it is extremely difficult to have good relationships with them. Human beings are limited and fallible—no one would deny this. It can, however, be quite difficult to admit that I (as distinct from human beings in general) am mistaken or wrong. Self-centered pride is deeply ingrained, and we avoid feelings of humiliation if we can. The history of this is too complicated to explore here. Let’s just say that it’s unfortunate.

However, despite our pride, in real life—in ordinary day-to-day life, that is—most of us admit that we could be mistaken, and most of us apologize at some point. It’s an unavoidable part of living. I’ve met a few people who don’t, and I have to say that they seemed to me to be mentally ill, although they may have appeared quite functional on the outside. To never admit even the possibility of being wrong is an untenable position. It is, in effect, to claim perfection and infallibility. And that way, as they say, lies madness.

In politics, on the other hand, it is customary not to admit mistakes, and not to apologize. Apparently to do so is to appear weak, which is supposedly a deadly flaw in a politician. Never mind that we are weak. Never mind that awareness of one’s weakness is a sure foundation for wisdom, and that unawareness leads to the most foolhardy decisions imaginable. The image that politicians wish to project is one of strength, and for some reason that means never admitting mistakes or apologizing.

So when John Edwards said that his vote for the Iraq war was a mistake, it was considered news. You may recall Dick Durbin apologizing for his remarks about Guantanamo (something for which I don't think he had a good reason to be sorry). Some Democrats apparently retain a faint, flickering belief in human fallibility, and Republicans take advantage of this by demanding that they apologize for saying certain things. This is seen as humiliating. Republicans usually don’t apologize unless they face indictment, although not always even in that case (e.g. Tom DeLay). Right-wingers make outrageous, morally repugnant statements on a daily basis and never apologize for them.

In ordinary life, then, admitting mistakes and apologizing when wrong is a sign of mental health. In politics, it is a sign of weakness. We have witnessed, then, the elevation of mental illness to the standard of political wisdom. I suppose the public bears some responsibility for this. I suppose that polls have shown that people feel safer with leaders who are infallible. I find such leaders the least safe of all, but perhaps that’s a minority view.

We have now attained the perfect outcome of this approach with the current U.S. administration, and by a firmer logic than we normally witness in affairs of state. The president doesn’t admit mistakes, or doubt. Certainly he never apologizes. The apparatus surrounding him is also invulnerable to human limitation.

And yet, curiously enough, we notice that the president is always mistaken—he is wrong with a consistency that is rare even in the history of the Republican Party. He need only open his mouth to speak, and a stream of untruth is emitted, undiluted by facts. His policies are uniformly wrong and destructive. His administration has broken everything it touches. There is not a single policy success that it can legitimately claim.

I would argue, in fact, that the premise, the very idea of not admitting mistakes, leads inevitably to this result. By considering the admission of mistakes to be political weakness, by covering with shame the normal human need for apology, we have ended up with the weakest, most foolish, most mendacious, and most dangerous White House in our history.