Election Distraction

I haven’t watched any of the presidential debates. I do follow what the media has been saying about the races, but the truth is, I don’t really care very much. It’s not that I think all the candidates are the same. At this point, any Democrat running looks better than what we’ve got—although it’s not very hard to look good compared to a criminal. I had an intense dislike for Bill Clinton (still do) but the last six plus years of Preznut AWOL make the Clinton years look like the golden age.

No, my problem with the presidential campaign is that it’s a dangerous distraction. To state the obvious first, the domination of our body politic by the rich has now resulted in the idiocy of a Presidential campaign running close to full tilt over a year before the election. We, the jaded electorate, are expected to pay attention to slickly packaged political rhetoric for two whole years of a campaign? It almost seems designed to increase voter apathy.

More importantly, however, the media’s focus on a Presidential campaign drains attention away from the misdeeds of the current White House occupants. The TV bobbleheads can now drone on about who’s ahead and what strategy so-and-so needs to take in order to gain advantage over so-and-so—the whole politics as horse race nonsense has already taken up a lot of center stage in the official spectacle of current American politics. It’s the perfect non-issue. Let me make this clear: I don’t give a damn who’s ahead and who’s behind. I care about now, not next November, or January ’09. Caring about the race is part of the “business as usual” paradigm that keeps us asleep. The TV “news” is invested in the belief that everything is humming along normally. There’s no crisis. Just consume products, watch the spectacle, and listen to the pundits.

It’s not only that the media tries to distract us with this rubbish. That’s bad, but not as systemically bad as what’s really ailing us. No, what’s dangerous is that the presidential race becomes an excuse for politicians not to do their jobs. The other day on Amy Goodman’s show Democracy Now!, I heard Dan Gerstein, a Democrat who used to work for Joe Lieberman, arguing that impeachment is a bad idea because it might hurt the party’s chances for retaking the White House in ’08. He’s not alone by any means—this is a fairly standard view among the Democrats in the House and Senate. On the surface the argument has a certain logic, but only if you accept the premise that our current situation, although bad, is somehow an ordinary political situation that can be solved best through the process of electoral politics.

Well-meaning strategists like Gerstein fail to note how extraordinary the crisis is. To those in the political class, the undermining of the Constitution in order to establish what are basically dictatorial powers does not set off any alarm bells. The breathtaking contempt shown to the Congress by Bush, Cheney, Rove, Gonzales, and the rest of them—which has reached the point where they defy subpoenas and the threat of contempt citations without blinking an eye—doesn’t seem like a crisis to the politicos. Even the Democratic response to the war in Iraq is crafted with electoral politics in mind. This is the basic mistake that may doom the Democratic Party to failure. Instead of seeing their opponents as a threat to our very liberty as a people—a threat that has proven its nature time and again for the last six plus years—they focus only on beating them at the polls. Not fighting them tooth and nail in the corridors of power, but looking over their shoulders at poll numbers. What we need is to stand up to this nascent fascist movement, confronting it at every level, without letting calculations of possible effects on the ’08 election inhibit us.

The old approach has failed. The victories of ’06 are naught unless you exploit that victory with courage. If a Democrat takes office in ’09, the right-wing machine will still exploit their media power to attack and weaken the new President, just like they did Clinton. They don’t give up. Why should we? There will always be another election looming, either a midterm or Presidential contest. We’re paralyzed by this focus on elections, when fear of electoral consequences prevent politicians from doing the hard work they need to do.

Finally, the election is a distraction because we don’t know how much more damage Cheney/Bush can do in another seventeen months of power. Good god, in seventeen months these people can destroy us. Blithely swimming along as if Bush poses no threat is insanity. His group obviously doesn’t care how low they are in the polls. They don’t believe themselves beholden to public opinion or the will of the people. They believe that they are the law, and they’ve consistently exploited terrorism and war in order to place themselves above all accountability, beyond any standards of human conduct or decency. They have to be confronted now, because the situation will just continue to deteriorate at an exponential rate. War with Iran? Declaring martial law after a terrorist attack? Hey, at this point, you can’t put anything past them, because they’re not just politicians. This is not business as usual. These are criminals, and dealing with criminals means trying to put them away, regardless of whether you might lose some votes in the next election.

As far as I’m concerned, if you’re campaigning for President right now, instead of campaigning for impeachment, you’re part of the problem. Bush must go--now.

The glass is one third empty.

I’ve been thinking lately about the 27-30% (or so) of Americans telling pollsters that they approve of George Bush’s performance as President. In a “normal” case of a bad administration, it would seem naïve and foolish to spend much time considering this. There have always been these kinds of divisions in public opinion. I have known myself to be part of such a minority many times—during the Reagan years it felt like a truly beleaguered one.

What makes this situation seem unusual to me is the sheer magnitude of failure represented by Bush. From Iraq to New Orleans and everywhere in between, the Bush regime has corrupted everything they’ve touched. It seems futile to restate the many crimes and abuses committed—illegal eavesdropping, torture, kidnapping, using signing statements to avoid the law, the Plame affair, trying to sell our ports to Dubai, the “unitary executive,” trashing Social Security, trashing the environment, the Gannon affair, giving high government jobs to incompetent fundamentalist lackeys, using the Justice Dept. to suppress voting, bankrupting our future for a murderous, failed foreign adventure—and there’s so much more. Even on the most superficial level, Bush’s deranged and juvenile statements, the lawless and arrogant mendacity of Cheney (whose attempt to conceal the circumstances surrounding his shooting of a man in the face is the very least of his crimes), and the grotesque antics of the rest of the gang of liars—Rove, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Rice, and so on—should be enough to make any partially awake citizen give pause.

And yet after all this, there are Americans who still approve of the job Bush is doing—if we are to believe the polls, somewhere around 27-30% of us. I would like to attribute most of this to sheer ignorance. I don’t doubt that a good chunk of this group consists of the fabled mass of hypnotized sheep who believe that Fox News is actually news, or (more likely) simply don’t pay attention to news at all.

I would prefer to think that’s the reason, simply because ignorance is something that can be treated. By sharing our views, by listening, and by making more information available, more people can become more informed. This is the job that the alternative media is trying to do today, and I would never want to underestimate the progress that has actually been made.

But I don’t think we can attribute all of this 27-30% to ignorance, or even most of it. It seems quite clear that there are many who believe the way they do not because they are misguided and manipulated sheep, but because they really believe in the message of war, hatred, and domination of the world preached by Bush and the rightist Republicans.

The situation today is analogous to that of having the Nazi Party, or the Ku Klux Klan, managing to win national office and thereby gaining control of the executive branch. The analogy is of course not exact—the current regime places looting and personal enrichment above most purely ideological concerns, for one thing. And in the case of Nazi Germany, the approval ratings were extremely high, so the extent and rapidity of the restrictions placed on human freedom, and the eventual murder campaigns, were much greater than we have now.

I realize that many people are turned off by such analogies. In this case I feel the need to make it because of one crucial aspect of the Bush-Republican movement. It has no interest in maintaining Constitutional freedoms, or in the democratic process of governance. This is a cautious, negative way of stating that Bush and company are actively committed to dismantling the Bill of Rights, and to establising a Presidential power unfettered by any law or standard other than their own political will. Everything they have done, every statement, policy, and initiative, has served the aim of absolute executive power. There has been no compromise. They will defy Congressional subpoenas, while finding ways to ignore and subvert any laws that Congress may pass which they consider a threat to their authority. Their arguments amount to claiming dictatorship over the United States, with perpetual war used as a pretext to refute any legal challenges. That is the simple truth, and everything that this administration has done falls perfectly within this paradigm, while alternative theories fail to adequately explain its behavior.

So in this sense I think it is accurate to characterize the Bush regime as fascist in nature. And the trouble with fascism is that you can’t make deals with it. “No appeasement”—that Cold War rallying cry of the right wing—in fact reveals the only possible response to the right wing movement itself. To think that you can coddle fascism, or somehow use the legislative process to disarm it, is an illusion, one which the Democrats have been too slow in discovering. It has to be rooted out of the body politic by any means necessary. When I’m living in a country where the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan run the executive, I don’t bother to give serious consideration to anything that the agents of the executive may say. What they say is always already false. They are inherently untrustworthy because their object is the destruction of American freedom and the establishment of dictatorship. No one now says of the Germans, “They did the right thing by respecting Hitler, since he was their commander-in-chief, after all.” With hindsight we decry the fact that so few fought back. We even wish someone had assassinated Hitler, although this ignores the truth that Nazism was an entire movement and not just one man.

But hindsight makes everything seem simple. Prior to World War II, it didn’t seem that way. At the time, many conservatives in this country liked Hitler. The point is, you can’t see all the destructive consequences of fascism when it first starts. It may just seem like “strong leadership.” But it is during these earlier times that one needs to recognize the threat for what it is and take action.

In my view, therefore, a large percentage of those 27-30% that tell pollsters they approve of Bush are fascists. They don’t call themselves that, of course, or think of themselves that way. But their views and actions coincide with a policy of despotism.

I don’t say this to declare war on a group of people, and certainly not violence of any kind. My intent is to warn against complacency, and against underestimating the threat. I know that I probably sound too extreme to some, but all you have to do is visit any number of right-wing websites, or listen briefly to right-wing radio, and you will see that these people have no compunction about labeling you as a traitor and an enemy. Many of them would not hesitate to sanction your murder, and the murder of your loved ones, if you demonstrated opposition to their movement. I believe we must recognize this group that has seized power in our country as an illegal and subversive movement, without legitimacy of any kind. It is a criminal fascist movement and must be characterized that way, not as a normal “business as usual” political phenomenon. No appeasement.

Moving on

When asked about the morality of his most senior advisors leaking the name of a covert CIA agent, President AWOL said:

“I haven't spent a lot of time talking about the testimony that people throughout my administration were forced to give as a result of the special prosecutor. I didn't ask them during the time and I haven't asked them since.”

Those poor men! Forced to give testimony in a legal proceeding! To this criminal mind, the law is not an obligation or a responsibility, it’s something you’re forced into, and presumably will do everything possible to avoid. Then again, if he’s the one wielding the force, there is no limit to its application—kidnapping, torture, and murder are all OK.

Notice also the peculiar attitude towards an investigation within the highest reaches of his own gang. He asks no questions. Has no curiosity whatsoever. If the leak had been something he considered damaging, do you think he wouldn’t tear down the house looking for the traitor?

The decider continues:

“I'm aware of the fact that perhaps somebody in the administration did disclose the name of that person, and I've often thought about what would have happened had that person come forth and said, I did it. Would we have had this, you know, endless hours of investigation and a lot of money being spent on this matter? But it's been a tough issue for a lot of people in the White House, and it's run its course and now we're going to move on.”

Perhaps? After everything that’s been revealed in court, under oath, our little commander guy still thinks there’s a chance that the leak didn’t happen. The “somebody” who “perhaps” disclosed the name of “that person” was actually a whole team of somebodies, headed by the Vice President and including Libby, Rove, and others, and this has been established without doubt in a court of law.

Then the whiner-in-chief talks about “endless hours of investigation and a lot of money being spent…” as if this was just some annoying waste of time and money with no effect on our security and integrity. No acknowledgment that leaking a covert CIA agent’s name is a bad thing, or that this agent was working on the highly sensitive matter of WMDs in Iran.

And I ask again a question that should be asked by every journalist confronted with a rightist making excuses for all this: If this were a Democratic president, and one of his or her top aides had leaked the name of a CIA agent in order to punish a conservative critic of his policies, would you be defending that action today? We all know the answer to that question, and it proves that principles have come to mean absolutely nothing to Republicans. They consider themselves above the law, while anyone else is fair game. In fact, if there’s been one thing most characteristic of Bush and Cheney, it’s the conviction that they should never be made accountable for anything, and that no law applies to them. They are a lawless, rogue regime, and therefore illegitimate, but this is the truth that the elites and the pundits and the dummy news networks can never admit even for a second, because the truth is too disturbing. Better that we continue being lulled to sleep with the notion that this is all just politics, a Washington-style spectacle with “the President” as chief celebrity.

And the White House press corps is powerless to do anything except take notes while this man lies again and again to their faces. Then they file their reports and pompous-sounding anchors relate the story as if it were just the most normal thing in the world for a self-styled apostle of democracy to give the finger to the rule of law on national TV. And if it’s Fox, there’s a little banner underneath saying: President stands strong.

“It’s run its course and now we’re going to move on.” Yes, sir, a commutation of sentence is one way of letting the law “run its course.” A much shorter and more convenient way, if you’re a crook.

Now stop gawking, folks. Move along. Nothing more to see here. We’re going forward now, leaving this unfortunate minor episode behind us. Pay no attention to the Dick behind the curtain. I am the great and powerful Liar-in-Chief.

The god of the soul and the god of the tribe

It has become a truism in anthropology that the world, in the eyes of the earliest human beings, was populated by spirits. What is rarely acknowledged, however, is that in a crucial sense, the ancients were correct. Human beings were subjects—they not only lived, but experienced, perceived, felt, and thought. Subjectivity is the primary fact of human life, a precondition for all others, and yet, because of its nature as the context of all experience, only expressed through symbol and metaphor, and projected, as it were, onto every aspect of the world that we perceive.

We do not conceive the world as a place created with us. We come to being, we awaken, within a reality that is already there. Behind experience is the experiencing spirit, self, or soul. Therefore (and this “therefore” expresses an intuition of eternity), behind the world itself, this place we have come to, are spirits, selves, or souls. As human society develops into more organized forms, the spirits—or some of them at any rate—become gods. Gods not only experience the world, they create, sustain, and control it.

The development of religion mirrors the degrees and stages of human self-consciousness. The social unit—the clan, the village, the tribe—comes first. Rousseau had it backwards. We experience ourselves as social beings first, and only later do we become aware of our nature as individuals per se. It is natural that this should be so, since survival for homo sapiens can only be achieved together, as a group. Moreover, we are not born alone, but from a mother and father, and we are immediately in their realm and that of their kin and clan.

As society grew and developed, so did the power and authority of the gods. The more complex the society, the more powerful the gods. The god of the tribe was an intimate aspect of each individual’s experience—the symbol of his or her own experience as subject—and at the same time was the power and authority of the tribe itself. Mythology guides us not only on our journey as individuals—the stages of life, the hero’s journey, and so on—it also establishes the foundations of culture and social organization. In truth, there is no “both” or “also” for early humanity—they are one. The god of the tribe is the god of the soul.

In Martin Buber’s great philosophical work I and Thou, he explained the direct relationship between human subjectivity and the eternal (or Divine) in terms of the “I and Thou” of the book’s title. For the earliest human beings, however, the distinction between “I and Thou” and “I and She” (or “I and He”) is not conscious. Perhaps only the shamans, with their perilous voyages to the hidden worlds where they encounter and grapple with mysterious beings alone, and with only their magic to aid them, are aware at this stage, at some level of consciousness, of the “I and Thou,” or what I choose to call the god of the soul.

The authority needed to organize human beings into societies was always conceived as primary and eternal. The imperative of survival, later manifested in consciousness as fear of death, made it so. We should never minimize or dismiss the incredible power of this god of the tribe. It connects the essential subjectivity of the individual—the only being experiencing everything in life—to the rest of the people in the tribe, affirming a shared agreement on the nature of the soul and the world.

But as human society developed, individual self-consciousness progressed. Like a baby who gradually learns to distinguish itself from the environment, human beings gradually became more aware of themselves as existing individuals. They still lived in the context of the tribe—or the city-state, kingdom, or nation—but the distinction between self and society became more conscious.

In like manner, the god of the soul and the god of the tribe—or, more precisely, our experience of these metaphorical powers—began to diverge, ever so subtly at first, and then more and more. They both took on the characteristics of whatever cultural type emerged at a given time. But there was also a difference, one that has had tragic consequences for humanity. The god of the soul, by necessity, retained its direct experiential nature. Regardless of where the seeker or devotee lived, or what culture or religion he or she came from, the relationship between spirit and source, mortal and eternal soul, was the only thing at stake. It was intuited, finally, that ultimate truth, reality, the Divine, transcends all the conditions and circumstances that we call the world, and that includes the family, the clan, the tribe, and so forth. This development can be observed most markedly in the emergence of Buddhism, which challenged all the accepted categories of religion (including gods, after-death beliefs, and the dualist structure of reason itself) in favor of a message of total liberation and understanding. The other religions manifested this in less extreme forms: as mysticism, secret teachings, and wisdom traditions.

In contrast, the god of the tribe, what we now call organized religion, retained its function as the authority for social organization, while becoming gradually alienated from the god of the soul. Why? Because the direct spiritual experience challenges the power principle by making religion a matter between “I and Thou.” It’s not that human beings no longer needed to connect with each other through religion. Quite the contrary. The problem was that the ability of those wielding power and authority in society to control their subjects was threatened by an intuition of eternity that could potentially eliminate the boundaries between classes, tribes, and nations. In short, the path of the mystic led to the realization of an identity between the soul and God, the human and the divine. At the end of the way of the mystic, subjectivity discovers its eternal nature. In the god of the soul’s terms, this is freedom, happiness, liberation. But if we translate this experience into the language of the god of the tribe, it means equating oneself with god, eliminating the gulf between the king and the subject, i.e. undermining social authority.

Whatever actions were taken by human beings wielding power over other human beings were given the sanction of the human authority’s particular religion. This resulted in a sort of inner struggle. The god of the soul symbolized love, cohesion, goodness, and what we eventually came to call morality. Revenge, punishment, hatred, killing, and the waging of war against those outside the tribe—these were sanctioned by the god of the tribe when the tribe thought it necessary, but the inner contradictions became acute. The god of the tribe had to claim moral authority as well—whatever public religion says is acceptable, is therefore moral. As it turns out, any human expression of passion, greed, and power was capable of being deemed moral simply because it served the self-interest of the tribe, or more accurately at this stage, the powerful. Thus we see, for example, the burning of Indians at the stake because they would not convert to Christianity. Thousands of other examples abound. For all its virtues, including (arguably) the taming of self-destructive forces within society, public religion failed to contain the power principle, and instead became a mere vehicle for it, until today it is almost totally discredited as a beneficial or civilizing force.

Mysticism was thrust to the margins of religious awareness—tolerated or sometimes even revered, but not accorded any social relevance. When mystics went too far, they were attacked as heretics, even murdered. The god of the tribe attempted to conciliate the god of the soul by giving it an isolated realm of its own—the monastic tradition. Buddhism, as we know, took on all the characteristics of public religion, as was inevitable if its message was to reach anyone, and its inner core grew within monasticism. In East and West, much beauty was born and preserved through this tradition, but it has proven sterile in terms of influencing the social order for lasting good.

Rationalism, born of the Enlightenment, maintains that we must abandon religion, and by extension, spirituality, since it doesn’t recognize a distinction between the two. I don’t agree that this is desirable, because I maintain that the human intuition of eternity will always require metaphorical expression, both individually and in community. But I also don’t even think that it’s possible for such a change to take place. Human beings will always have spirituality and religion. The question is, what kind?

I am convinced that is necessary for us to see through the curtain of mythology in order to free ourselves from religious authoritarianism. Religious truth must be perceived as metaphor, not as literal truth—and at the same time metaphor must be recognized as the source of meaning. This change will involve the end of the idolatry of the book—the idea of revealed scripture bearing absolute authority cannot stand—and the end of the idolatry of power, which is based on the fear of death. Religion can only be an environment for people to encounter the mystery together, a community in which a culture of spirituality can thrive, and in which poetry can find its home. No longer can it constitute an authority for controlling people, a foundation for the existing social order. Religion has failed in that regard because it failed to uphold its connection to the soul—the subjectivity of the existing individual—and instead maintained the idolatry of the “outside” world, the abstract realm of things possessed through power.

It will be objected that this is no more possible for us than the atheist vision of a society without religion at all. Perhaps that’s true. I believe, however, that we cannot mend the wrongs of religion without understanding its power, its sources in legitimate human needs, and those of its aspects that reflect a common truth.

Biodreck

Freeman Dyson’s essay “Our Biotech Future” in the New York Review of Books is very instructive, but not always in the way Dyson intended. He’s a brilliant scientist and an excellent writer, so it’s all the more striking how his views display some characteristic blind spots in the modern scientific world view.
“I predict,” he writes, “that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.” In case you were wondering, Dyson thinks that's a good thing.
“I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.”
I didn’t know that the computer industry was small and friendly. Someone forget to tell that to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
“There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets. Breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits too. Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer….Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.”
For all his expansive enthusiasm, Dyson’s envisions life forms as objects. Subjectivity is reduced to instrumentality, and the scientist sees no contradiction in that because all he sees is potential utility. The power principle, which the Judeo-Christian tradition expresses as “dominion” over nature, is reproduced in the scientific world view, with “reason” replacing “God” as the unquestioned authority. But when we objectify nature, we simultaneously objectify ourselves. Why should biotechnology stop with dogs and cats? Human beings will be the next project, and in fact already is. You can stereotype this as the old Frankenstein idea, which for modern science is merely a scare tactic by the unadventurous. But I think Mary Shelley was on to something.
The ingenuity of science has been employed just as much, if not more, in killing people and destroying things as it has in helping them. It’s brought us to the brink of our own destruction. Dyson thinks biotechnology will take a different path than what he calls “gray technology”—the machines of our industrial age. But why should it? The same human passions that resulted in nuclear weapons will find ways to exploit biotechnology in order to dominate and destroy human beings. Dyson writes as if he’s never heard of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, or the Soviet gulag. Adult human beings employing reason took part in these atrocities, and found ways to justify them.
Dyson’s political and economic naivete is breathtaking as well. He talks as if the relentless growth of centralized corporate power is some kind of temporary phase that we will naturally outgrow. But there’s no reason for technology to obviate either the profit motive or exploitation as a system of political power. Technology doesn’t make men wiser or more compassionate. It only serves the tendencies they already have.
Panglossian science dreams of growing plants with silicon leaves, and termites that eat junked cars instead of houses. “The twenty-first century,” he writes, “will bring us powerful new tools of genetic engineering with which to manipulate our farms and forests.” The key word here is manipulate. Why should I believe that limited, fallible human beings can be trusted to manipulate life itself? Furthermore, the confident scientist has no idea what effects his manipulation may have on the ecosystem. Dyson blithely assumes that we will simply keep creating new organisms that will correct any imbalances that occur.
The blundering faith of the scientist is akin to hubris. What is missing from the credo of the modern scientist is spirituality. Human beings need to have reverence for life, humility before nature, and respect for the emotions as part of their makeup in order to live in balance with the world and in harmony with themselves. It’s not that reason is somehow faulty, but that the followers of scientific reason don’t consider the passions as legitimate aspects of life, or even address their effect on the world and society realistically. The notion that we only need to be rational in order to live well is hopeless short-sighted. Everyone has good intentions. Hitler believed that what he was doing made sense. Justice can never be apprehended through reasoning without love.
The philosophical parting of the ways consists in whether the human being is considered as a means or as an end. The power principle always treats the existing individual as a means towards some ideal end. When science finds a way to create forms of life, it does not thereby free human society from the power principle. It only increases the peril we face. Dyson dreams of relieving poverty in Africa. But it would be quicker and more expedient for those possessing political power to simply destroy or enslave Africa. Dyson doesn’t even consider this. He acts as if we live in a neutral political landscape or that human society is mature and benign. All evidence indicates otherwise.
For all his faults, Gandhi was correct when he insisted that only spiritual change could foster political justice. With the public face of religion hardening into sterile and oppressive fundamentalism, it’s tempting to believe that scientific rationalism is a true alternative. Yet both ignore the subjective nature of the human as such in favor of an objective historical ideal that continues to fail. Only a wiser, happier, more compassionate human being will solve the problems besetting us, including the proper use of technology. The dream of a technological fix is a new form of the primitive belief in magic—ultimately a fool’s game.

The fruits of theocracy

From the New York Times, June 24: “Iran is in the throes of one of its most ferocious crackdowns on dissent in years, with the government focusing on labor leaders, universities, the press, women’s rights advocates, a former nuclear negotiator and Iranian-Americans, three of whom have been in prison for more than six weeks.”

Theocracy is incompatible with democracy. In the midst of so much debate about the place of religion in public life, it is essential to understand this. State religion has nothing to do with faith, or even with the relationship of humanity to God or to the Divine, despite all protests from fundamentalists and other religious zealots to the contrary. It has only to do with the control of people’s lives by those wielding power in whatever religion dominates the state. The absolutist nature of religious doctrine makes it impossible to tolerate differences. Inevitably, therefore, state religion will seek to suppress labor (autonomous workers), education (independent thought), and the press (free communication). Most significantly, it will repress women’s rights. The domination of women is the primary form of domination from which all other authoritarian forms are derived.

“The country’s police chief boasted that 150,000 people — a number far larger than usual — were detained in the annual spring sweep against any clothing considered not Islamic.”

State religion persecutes people on the basis of cultural norms that are often quite trivial, such as, in this instance, types of clothing. The purpose is to control the lives and behavior of individuals through fear. When it comes to state-sanctioned murder, torture, false imprisonment, or other government action against its perceived enemies, the authoritarian religion does not object at all. The religionists support all these atrocities, or at best remain silent. The assumption of moral authority is completely baseless—state religion is based solely on the exercise of power by one group over another. The absolutist nature of religious belief provides the perfect excuse for hatred, cruelty, and oppression, while the oppressor feels justified behind the conscience-proof wall of his religion.

As a rule, the religious groups that oppose state oppression are those that teach a spiritual relationship to the Divine characterized by love and compassionate action. These groups are open to differences in culture and belief. They usually end up being attacked as well, often by the public religionists who claim to be of the same “faith” as those they repress.

It is remarkable how similar Iran’s use of shame, humiliation, and violence mirrors the practice of communist dictatorships such as China and the Soviet Union under Stalin. These supposedly “left wing” systems simply projected the same absolutist tendencies onto their secular doctrines that the authoritarian religious groups employ in their belief systems. It’s not that communism is a religion, as has been falsely maintained, but that both practice authoritarianism with claims to absolute validity.

What we commonly call “religion” today is just another method of social control. The key element is that human beings are conceived as means to an end. Therefore, anything is justified in order to attain the end. Anything.

The truth of human life as an end in itself, not subject to the absolute demands of any belief or doctrine, is an essential truth of spirituality, and should always have been central to religion in its proper role. But although it remains, by its nature as subjective relationship, as part of spirituality wherever it is practiced, that has not been true of religion, because religion always involves community. From time immemorial, community has been undermined by the power principle. No matter how fervently religious people may have been, the public structure of religion has been vulnerable to exploitation in the interests of one group dominating another. This is the dilemma of religion. Any member of any religious faith who fails to address this dilemma in some way is lying—lying to everyone else and to himself. Because humanity will never be united into one set of beliefs, and the quest to achieve this unity produces nothing but death.

How easy it is to feel superior to these Islamic fundamentalists who oppress their own people in the name of God! But we risk the same fate if we continue to allow our own Christian fundamentalists and authoritarians to blur the distinction between religion and state. The founders were anxious to avoid the bloodletting that state religion had invariably produced in Europe. Only by maintaining a secular democratic form of government that was not allied with any church or religion could the United States avoid the tragedy of religious oppression. Nothing that has occurred since in American history or the history of the world has shown them to be mistaken. The same groups that the Islamist state targets as enemies—women’s rights advocates, intellectuals, labor unions, journalists—are attacked by the so-called Christian right and their neo-fascist allies on a regular basis. The fact that they also attack Muslims should not be surprising. A hater is most afraid of his own reflection.

No Confidence

The Senate recently failed to pass a “no confidence” vote on the so-called Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. One might wonder what it would take for the Republicans (and one virtual Republican, Joey the Rat) to express “no confidence” in Gonzales, since he’s nothing but a water boy for Karl Rove, and is apparently suffering from amnesia as well. Confidence must be an almost unlimited resource for the Republicans, if they can retain it in the face of the complete duplicity and incompetence of Gonzales.

Back in the real world, it seems to me that the “no confidence” vote was too limited in focus. I have no confidence in the Secretary of State either. Or the Secretary of Defense. I have no confidence in the ability of the Vice-President to speak the truth at any point in which he opens his mouth. I have no confidence in the administration’s Iraq policy, no confidence in its ability to protect our soldiers or anyone else. I have no confidence that this administration can respond to an emergency (say, for instance, a hurricane) that will be of help to the citizens of the country, or indeed not make it many times worse for us. I have no confidence that King Bush can do anything at all for the public good, no confidence that his rule will not weaken and destroy us in every imaginable way. Since every single policy and pronouncement of this administration is based on gaining political advantage for their criminal outfit, I have no confidence in anything that any administration official might do or say from now until whenever they might be forced to step down, if that blessed day ever comes.

“No confidence” is really a very mild way of expressing the reality of all this, don’t you think? Revulsion, outrage, protest, condemnation—these would seem to be more appropriate responses to the depth of venality, cruelty, and corruption manifested by the current occupants of the White House. But the Democrats tried “no confidence,” I suppose, because they still want to maintain some kind of decorum, at least some pretense that there is such a thing as the rule of law in this country, such a thing as decency and civilization. Gangsters are running the country, and the chief executive is an insane maniac, so the Democrats are trying to quietly take the steering wheel away without panicking the country. I almost sympathize with them. How to deal with such a frightening situation without making it worse?

Impeachment is the solution offered by our founding document. People around the country are clamoring for it. A Newsweek poll says that 51% of the public favors it. (That may not sound like a good majority, but compare it to the numbers on Clinton’s impeachment.) Most importantly, it’s the right thing to do. I think there’s a high level of denial on the part of Washington Democrats as to how bad things are, and how much worse they could become if we don’t get rid of this illegitimate regime. It’s easy to get complacent in Washington. The Democratic leadership thinks that it’s better to take little bites out of Bush, weakening him more and more, rather than try a full frontal assault. The received wisdom is that’s too politically risky to try that. I don’t doubt that the Barbarian Party will cry bloody murder about impeachment. But Republicans howl and whine about anything that the Democrats do, no matter what. They need to be ignored. As an institution, the Republican Party has ceded its right to any respect, since it refuses to respect others.

This whole bloody mess needs to be brought out to the forefront of the political process, and at least an attempt made to bring the Bush gang into accountability for their crimes. They will continue to degrade and destroy people’s lives, and our values, regardless of how low their poll numbers may be. Only an outright public fight, which involves an admission that we’re in a constitutional crisis, can give this country a chance to survive.

Telling the truth is always healthier than denial, even if it seems more painful in the short run. We have no confidence left. There’s been no confidence in quite some time, actually. The only real confidence comes from honesty.

Beyond liberty

I was perusing the U.S. Constitution the other day, and I was startled to discover that Wall Street is not mentioned anywhere in the entire thing. This is an amazing oversight, since Wall Street is clearly the most powerful branch of our government. All Wall Street has to do is make a few threats or express alarm about something, and you can be sure that the Congress and the White House will do all they can to placate it.

Just a little research into the historical era of the Constitution helped clear up my perplexity. In those days, as it turns out, there was no Exxon Mobil. Nor was there a General Motors, Citigroup, General Electric, Home Depot, or Lockheed Martin. How these people survived I cannot imagine. Without television or the internet, they could only sit and read by candlelight in their powdered wigs, passing the interminable hours writing letters. Without the thousands of helpful billboards and other advertisements surrounding them, they didn’t know what to buy, or even what to want. It’s no wonder, then, that their work, however laudable, has become woefully out of date and inadequate for the needs of our time.

One can only chuckle at the quaint notions that pop up in our ancient founding document. The Congress, for instance, is given the authority to declare war, when we all know that only the President does that. I don’t know how they expected a bunch of elected officials to be able to coordinate something as important as declaring a war. Only the executive knows the secret information about our security that necessitates military action.

Article IV of the amendments, to cite only one more example, says that no warrants should be issued without probable cause, and the police would even have to specify the persons or things to be seized. This would tie the hands of our law enforcement and homeland security authorities so that terrorists and criminals would be free to wreak havoc. It’s no wonder that we decided to sidestep this barrier by going without warrants altogether. Torture and detention without trial are further wise steps taken to protect us, and the protests of the so-called human rights community can only be viewed as ultimately self-hating. The Constitution, as Judge Posner so wisely stated, is not a suicide note.

Times have changed, and our leaders have understandably altered our course with the times. The founders sought naively to make liberty the centerpiece of their document rather than security or authority. When all that threatened them were antique muskets and cannons, that probably made sense. But now it’s far too dangerous a world for us to indulge in such infantile fantasies.

When we talk about freedom today, we of course mean economic freedom. We have the freedom to buy many wonderful products and enjoy their use. We can sit with our families and watch television, freely digesting our good food, in reasonable security from the actions of criminals or terrorists, provided we give our leaders and troops the support they need in order to keep us safe. We can ride in our automobiles across this fine land, enjoying the many picturesque natural sites and theme parks. And we all worship together in the church of our choice, satisfied with living moral lives, working together to ensure that fetuses go to term and homosexuals are kept in their place. These are time-honored values.

Freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and so forth, is fine within certain limits. We have seen, however, how abuse of those rights have led to discontent and distrust. Ultimately these freedoms don’t matter so much in the larger scheme of things because the authorities and corporations have more knowledge and expertise on how to run things than the average person, and allowing dissent or anti-government views to proliferate only weakens our credibility in the world, giving encouragement to our enemies and undermining our security.

For the sake of sentimentality, we talk about the old Constitution as if it mattered. We even have the President swear to uphold it, although we all know that’s not possible. We are the greatest country in the world because of our wealth. Much of the rest of the world is jealous of our riches, and the wide range of products that we consume—thus we have terrorists seeking to destroy our way of life, take our oil and wrest other resources away from us. For our own sake, and the sake of our children, we must face the facts. A military government, with the President as commander-in-chief of all the citizens, is the best way to face the challenges of a dangerous world. A few wise men know this, while liberals and other do-gooders continue to live in the past. Surely our founding fathers, who were practical enough to allow slavery to exist for a while rather than upset the social order, would understand the need for a decisive new vision of government to meet the new demands of a terrifying world.

The end of excuses

In an excellent recent essay, Chris Floyd writes of American moral cowardice:

“The fact that cynical power-seekers and war profiteers have been able to inflate this deadly but minor scourge [Islamic terrorists] into a globe-straddling monster capable of destroying the United States and enslaving its people speaks volumes about the timorousness that has entered America's national character.”

He contrasts this with the period of the Cold War, when we had the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads, yet experienced an era in which the concepts of civil and human rights actually expanded and gained a greater foothold in American culture.

Although it is no secret that the government is now practicing torture, indefinite detention, kidnapping, and secret prisons—and openly claims that it has the right and the duty to commit these monstrosities in our name—most of the politicians and the press act as if this were not so. By simply continuing on their mad course without conceding any validity to moral objections, the royalists in Washington have succeeded in making the unthinkable the commonly accepted. We expect criminals to behave this way, but what are we to think of the so-called opposition, the Democrats who, with few exceptions, continue to say nothing about this degradation of our character? And what kind of credibility can we accord the media toadies who continue to babble inanely while a police state arises gradually around us? Credibility is not an infinite resource. Surely the TV talking heads have lost theirs completely and forever.

Required viewing: this video of the blatant and illegal attack on peaceful protesters in MacArthur Park by the L.A. police. The fish rots from the head down, as you know. When the highest orders of the state countenance tyranny, the lesson trickles down to the local protectors of property, the dubious black-clad soldiers of insecurity and fear.

A special place of infamy, however, is reserved for the guardians of our “moral values”—the conservative Christians. History should note that at the time of crisis, when lawlessness and crime became official policy, the right-wing church moralists—the Dobsons, Robertsons, and Falwells—stood up and cheered. Their religion, which they supposedly defend, has suffered more damage from these modern Pharisees than any radicals or atheists could ever have inflicted. Called upon to awaken us to the higher callings of conscience, the American church has been reduced to a cheap little political action group, offering silence in the face of war and official murder, while focusing its moral efforts on the apparently more important mandate of compulsory childbirth, repression of homosexuals, and the indoctrination of children with anti-scientific superstition and sexual ignorance.

Without spiritual opposition to violence, there is no faith.

A Nation of Spooks

After decades of James Bond and other secret agent superheroes, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the figure of the spy was always heroic, but in fact it wasn’t so until the Cold War.
Spies were marginal figures in the history of warfare, and their activities were always considered unsavory, even when necessary. Spending one’s time sneaking around and prying into the lives of others, practicing deception and disguise, was not a noble occupation, but a contemptible one.
However, when the U.S. shifted from a republic to an empire after World War II, the image of the spy was refashioned into a guardian of freedom. The new elitists with their new religion—anti-communism—put their faith in secrecy and espionage rather than in the free and open democratic ideal they professed to protect. The holy spook was born.
It is remarkable, once you pull your head out of the fantasy realms of movies and TV, how many famous spy cases actually involved figures in the West successfully passing secrets to the Soviet Union. The notorious examples of Philby and Maclean in the U.K, and the more recent U.S. intelligence traitors Ames and Hanssen, were reputed to have tremendously damaging effects. There’s always been something of a puzzling air surrounding these cases. For someone enjoying the relative freedoms of America or England, it seems unaccountable that people would choose to spy for Russia against their own nations. The motives, of course, range from the merely pecuniary to ideological conviction. But behind the headlines lies a deeper irony.
A secretive society, a state predicated on the notion of secret information and spying as the bulwark of "national security," is far more compatible with an authoritarian political philosophy than a democratic one. It’s obvious, for instance, that a free press could only be an obstacle to the effectiveness of such a society. Any kind of oversight by elected representatives or judicial bodies would naturally make secrecy more difficult as well. The national security state, therefore, is by its very nature an undemocratic state, or at least one in which the state apparatus resists and opposes the country’s democratic institutions on a regular basis.
With all the parallels sometimes drawn between the Bush gang’s political ideology and early fascism (some of which are quite valid, in my view), the similarities to Stalinism are even greater. In Stalinist society the secret police were the primary instrument of state power. The idea of national security legitimized any and all behavior by the government, including torture, summary execution (although capital punishment was forbidden by the Soviet constitution), and of course imprisonment on political grounds, or indeed on any pretext at all, with a rigged court system providing the face of legality. A similar philosophy is evident in the practices of the Chinese government today—one-party rule, a subservient press, no free speech, torture, etc. And always secrecy. The citizen of a totalitarian state is kept in the dark concerning the true activities of his government. He or she is not trusted with such information. In fact, ordinary people are primarily viewed as potential security threats. Therefore, knowledge is restricted to the ruling few. The rest are expected to simply believe and obey.
The post-World War II anti-communists in American exploited fear for their political gain. Although the Soviet Union was a legitimate threat, the right wing mirrored the nature of Soviet thinking in its strategies. Show trials, guilt by association, blind obedience as a value, dissent as unpatriotic, and the elevation of the spy to hero status—all these developments have occurred in American society, and continue to hold sway in the right-wing world view after the fall of the Soviets. Islamic militancy has become the new devil, and even though the methods used to supposedly fight terrorism only promote it, the authoritarian world-view is self-perpetuating. It needs an enemy in order to maintain the religion of "national security," which implies an endless state of war, which in turn necessitates the suppression of democratic forms of government. The actual security threats facing the country are almost incidental to the workings of the ideological mechanism. The real enemy, the unconscious shadow haunting the machine, is peace, or rather a national vision that values peace, and therefore values a free and open society.
Early in the post-9/11 nightmare, when the Bush gang proposed a program where we would all be asked to spy on one another, there was an outcry. In America there is still a residual repugnance to spying, whereas in Stalinist Russia it was assumed to be the absolute duty of a citizen. The reason that the Soviets were better spies than we were, it seems to me, is that spying is simply more characteristic of a secretive society, a society of constant suspicion in which authority is invested in a dominant executive police power. The true ideal of Richard Cheney, the neo-cons, the radical extremists who have taken over the Republican party, and their financial sponsors, is in essence almost identical to the Soviet model.
To be fair, it should be said that this disease was shared across party lines for decades. It has been holy writ in national politics for over sixty years. Those who have challenged it are labeled as weak on defense, pinkos, terrorists, traitors, and so forth. All the Democratic presidents, from Truman to Clinton, have been votaries of the national security state. The Republicans have simply been more radical about it, and the current occupants of the executive branch have taken it to previously unimagined levels of extremism. But they have all tended to distrust the ideals of an open society and the workings of democratic institutions, favoring instead an ancient model of rule by specially educated elites. The liberal establishment thought that they could balance this model with a limited form of representative government. The right wing, on the other hand, was committed to the pure imperial idea—shut up and salute. Strangely enough, the rightists were more intellectually consistent in this regard. A national security state will always function more effectively in secrecy. The ensuing consequences—undeclared wars and subversions, corruption of the press, attacks on civil and human rights, the consolidation of power into smaller and smaller elites, the militarization of the police, and the placement of the spy agencies outside of any legal or ethical accountability—have proceeded steadily and with a kind of iron logic.
The United States will only find relief from its political woes when the people firmly reject the rule of the spooks. So-called "security" must be rejected as a national ethos, and society returned to a condition of openness and freedom from fear. We must trust the institutions of our forefathers, and condemn the un-American, undemocratic cult of secrecy that has held us so long in thrall.

These truths are self-evident

One of these days I’m going to compile a list of axioms for our post-satiric age. For instance: The wider currency given to a catchphrase or idea about current events (with Time and Newsweek covers and topics promoted by the punditry representing the high end of the scale) the less accurate a description of the actual situation it is. Indeed, if all the media is saying the same thing, it’s almost mathematically certain that the truth is exactly the opposite of what they’re saying.

Here’s another one: All official pronouncements by the Bush administration are lies in one form or another, and this is done out of principle, since the criminal mindset always assumes that the citizens of the U.S. are a threat and must be kept in the dark. This axiom holds even in those rare cases when the administration discloses facts—because they are always purported to demonstrate a false conclusion.

This axiom saves a lot of time for those of us who don’t have the leisure to read every story or piece of evidence on this sorry excuse for a White House. By this time, the pattern is clear, and every new story only reconfirms it, albeit in increasingly bizarre ways. And if you have a sense of history, or even a simple sense of time, you will understand that there comes a point where credibility is lost forever. With Bushco, this point actually occurred years ago, although the citizenry is coming to it in successive waves of awareness. Bush defenders seem to operate in a perpetual zero point of time, in which past deceptions are of no account when evaluating the present. In ordinary life, giving the benefit of the doubt, year after year, to a compulsive liar would be considered idiocy, or perhaps insanity. In Republican circles, it’s the modus operandi.

Finally, one more truth that should be self-evident to all who have not yet drunk the Kool-Aid: Anyone who works for Fox News is a whore.

Sorry, Alan Colmes. No exceptions. If you take money from Fox News, if you work for that network, regardless of what your private convictions may be, you are a whore. And the stink of your degradation follows you wherever you may go. If you only stay in the company of other whores, you may not notice this. But to re-enter real civil society, you will eventually need to acknowledge your whoredom.

I know this sounds extreme, but you must understand that this is not a legitimate news source. Its purpose is not to inform, but to distort the facts in order to convey an extremist, hate-based ideology. If there was a Ku Klux Klan network, this would be obvious to everyone, but since a corrupt Australian plutocrat is able to throw huge amounts of money around, using nifty graphics and almost lifelike “anchors” to simulate the appearance of TV news, many poor souls have failed to note the essentially bogus nature of the organization.

Well, this is at least a start. With these three axioms, the reasonably alert citizen can save a great deal of trouble navigating the realm of current events today. As a side note, I would like to know if there’s a way to discover all the sponsors who advertise on Fox News. I’m simply unable to watch the station for any length of time without succumbing to nausea, but I would like to contact these sponsors and let them know that I am not willing to spend money on their products if they insist on giving money to a network that is calling for my destruction, and the destrruction of my loved ones. Make no mistake, here. I’m not being unnecessarily alarmist. The ultimate goal of Fox and other neo-fascist extremist organizations is to eliminate liberals and progressives altogether. And this is only logical—for if all the woes of the U.S. can be laid at the feet of a fifth column of liberals, feminists, gays, tree-huggers, and politically correct academics, all of whom constitute a threat to the troops and their mission, then the only lasting solution, the only final one if you will, is the firing squad.

Planet of the apes

Surely by now, everyone is bored to death with the debate (if you can call it that) between evolution and creationism—everyone except those directly engaged in it. Those who know what science is have said all they can say, and will certainly not be convinced otherwise. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, have long ago made up their minds, or had their minds made up through obedience to literalist doctrine. The battle is over the minds of those who don’t know what science is, and yet are not necessarily fundamentalists. But the educational needs of this group are far greater than encompassed by the mere teaching of evolution.

The fundamentalist view was best summed up by a preacher in the film Jesus Camp. He said that evolution tells kids that they came from monkeys, whereas the Bible tells them that they came from God and are therefore sacred. Which teaching, he asked, is more affirming?

This is a seductive point of view, provided one doesn’t devote too much thought to the question. (And it would seem that shallow thinking is a sort of precondition of fundamentalist teaching.) The assumption, which is by no means atypical of the Christian world view in general, is that monkeys are not sacred. To be more exact, kinship with animals is denied while a special relationship to God is maintained.

The reason Darwin has caused such offense, while the Copernican revolution and other scientific findings undreamt of in the Bible has not, is clearly not because the glory and power of God is somehow maligned by evolution, but because of a perceived injury to the pride and self-regard of man. That the concept of the power of a creator could possibly be diminished by any scientific determination of the manner of creation is absolutely absurd. If one believes in a creator, tracing the process back in time eventually leads to the paradox of creation ex nihilo. So creation itself retains its mystery no matter how one describes the history of the world post-creation.

Of course we are dealing with a specific cultural tradition, and the investment of absolute truth in a particular book, and this conflict therefore extends beyond Darwin to the astrophysicists and their cosmological speculations, such as the “Big Bang,” and so forth. Once the idolatry of the book is in place, science itself is automatically in conflict with religion regardless of specific findings. This does not, however, account for the special animosity towards Darwin. I would argue once again, therefore, that when it comes to evolution, the fundamentalist feels (whether consciously or not) that the pride of humanity is at stake. And why should this be so? Because the idea of being directly related to the animals—not by analogy but literally, i.e. by blood—is experienced as obnoxious and insulting by the fundamentalist.

If we look to the mythology and folklore of the ancients—especially the ancient cultures preceding the establishment of large city-states, kingdoms, and empires—we see that animals occupy a prominent role. In tales of the hero’s journey, various animals typically aid the hero along the way, imparting wisdom and special skills to the hero in order to help him attain the goal. Very often it seems that almost all the knowledge and labor of the quest is provided by the animal helpers—all the human hero needs is a little bit of courage and determination, and the willingness to follow the animals’ advice. Animals are also frequent providers of cultural gifts, imparting the ceremonies, songs, and other life-ways of the people. Sometimes this is connected to the animals as sources of food (sacrificing their lives for the good of the people), but not always. In myriad tales, animals take on anthropomorphic characteristics—the things they do and say indicate a mythic blending of human and animal.

Kinship with the animals, and in fact with all life, was simply assumed by the ancients. Nothing could be more obvious or reasonable. Human beings found themselves in a world where other beings moved, fed, procreated, and died just like they did. Far from being ashamed of this relationship, human societies made it one of the central themes of their mythic and religious structures.

With the advent of authoritarian religious forms, accompanying the increasingly centralized city-states and kingdoms, this gradually changed. Humanity’s mastery over animals (domestication) helped foster a different relationship to nature. The great monotheistic religions of the Levant created a mythos of alienation from the natural world. Man was exalted above the animals, and no longer recognized his kinship with them.

It would be foolish to believe that this development was nothing but a mistake, or a bad move. The gods (and God) taking on a human face meant that the human as such—including reason, justice, art, and human love—was growing and becoming more refined. Human capacities were increased immensely by the recognition of human consciousness and individuality.

There was a negative aspect, though. Alienation from nature resulted in an imbalance not only with the environment (the consequences of which are now facing us with dire immediacy) but with ourselves. For one thing, sexuality could never be divorced from the natural per se, so the human alienation from our own sexuality caused many complex and often contradictory problems affecting every aspect of life. The rise of science inevitably clashed with the religious world view, despite the fact that scientists themselves were heavily influenced by their own alienation. For science is preeminently the study of nature, and the proper and rigorous study of nature led to the inescapable conclusion that man was not separate from nature. Darwin’s work brought our kinship with animals back to center stage, and our alienation is so far advanced that this kinship causes feelings of revulsion in those most invested in the religious doctrine which separates us from animals, placing us forever above them as masters.

D.T. Suzuki once quipped: “God against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature. Very funny religion.” The mainstream religion we know today, the public face of religion, opposes the reality of connection with a mythos of alienated life that is increasingly beset with contradiction, taking refuge in obscurantism and fear.

If you question a fundamentalist regarding the characteristics of animals, it would be impossible for him or her to deny that human beings breathe, feed, defecate, circulate blood, procreate, and die in a manner identical to other mammals. The more reasonable among them would even admit the definition of man as a “rational animal.” But to admit that humans once were a species of ape, a species that has admittedly evolved into a form that seems unique (at least for this planet), but nevertheless “came from monkeys,” as the preacher put it, is to bend one’s mind more than the ingrained habits of human pride and entitlement are accustomed to do. It offends fundamentalists because it feels like humiliation—having to admit that our attitude to nature was wrong, perhaps even sinful, and having to admit that we share a fate with, as the good book says, the beasts of the field.

Glimmers of hope

Something unusual occurred on TV the other night—they aired some truth. The kick-off to Bill Moyers’ new program on PBS, called Buying the War, documented the bill of goods that we were sold in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Although it strung together all the lies of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, and the rest of the gang, the real focus was on what we’ve come to call “the media”—the mainstream press, particularly the New York Times and Washington Post, and the network and cable news outlets. In painstaking detail, Moyers showed how the media regurgitated what they were told by the administration, relegating criticism and questioning of the official line to oblivion, or the back pages at best. And while those of us who have followed events closely are familiar with the players, seeing all the names and faces of the administration’s enablers lined up together on a 90-minute program brought back the pain and dismay of that period (from late 2001 to the invasion in 2003) with vividness. Judith Miller, Tim Russert, Paula Zahn, Jim Lehrer, Lesley Stahl, Tom Brokaw, even Oprah Winfrey lapping up all the rubbish from Chalabi and the other U.S.-sponsored exiles, and of course the bobble-head pundits like George Will, Charles Krauthammer and the zombies at Fox News in their endless right-wing echo chamber.

In contrast we were shown one example of journalists doing their jobs--John Walcott, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel at Knight-Ridder—demonstrating that the story was there if someone would just do the footwork. Knight-Ridder reported that the WMD claims were not backed up by credible evidence. But of course, they don’t have offices in New York or Washington. Moyers also exposed one of the motives for journalistic timidity: fear. Anyone questioning Bush was liable to become a target for the Republican attack machine. Just having Scott Ritter on his show (despite being “balanced” with a war supporter) was enough to get Phil Donahue fired from MSNBC.

Bill Moyers coming back to TV is good news for the country. He is intelligent, thoughtful, and thorough. And he’s also fair. Although TNR’s Peter Beinart reveals himself as a callow opportunist, Moyers gives him credit for being one of the few (the only?) pro-war pundit to admit that he was wrong about the WMDs. It’s a measure of how corrupt and useless TV news has become that a gentleman like Moyers is practically one-of-a-kind, and that he’s reviled or marginalized in what passes today for the mainstream.

There actually is a bright side to this dark night of journalism, and that’s the progressive blogosphere. As the media went brain dead, a lot of brave, smart people took to the internet, and I think that they have had a lot to do with the resurgence of a progressive movement in this country. Moyers highlighted one of them on his second show which aired tonight: Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. The inestimable, even-tempered Marshall broke the U.S. attorney scandal that is currently rocking official Washington.

There are also a lot of opinion blogs, or blogs that mix news and commentary. The incredibly well-written Hullabaloo, with digby and tristero, is at the head of the pack, followed by firedoglake (the premiere source of news on the Plame scandal), the fiercely intelligent Glenn Greenwald, and many others such as Crooks & Liars, Blue Meme, and Mahablog. There are also wonderful satirist blogs who regularly demolish right-wing nonsense, such as TBogg, The Poor Man Institute, and the brilliant Driftglass. Finally, there are sites that connect the threads of the progressive blogosphere together, highlighting links from all over the web to help us find interesting information and comment. The raucous Buzzflash has been doing excellent work for years, and I also admire the modest and hard-working Shaun Dale over at Upper Left.

I’m a small fry in a big pond, unleashing a rant once a week or so, and I definitely feel humbled when I read the work of these folks who write great stuff every day (and many others I don’t have the space to mention, but check out the blogroll on the left). I also feel very grateful. Can you imagine where we’d be without the internet? If all we had were the TV networks and the print news? Do you think the Dems would have taken back the Congress without the internet? I know things look grim a lot of the time, but there’s a whole hell of a lot of us talking together and agitating for change. I believe it’s making a difference.

Idiot wind

The “President” was asked about the comparison between Iraq and Vietnam the other day. Here’s an excerpt from his answer:

“And there are some similarities, of course. Death is terrible. There's no similarity, of course, is that Vietnam is the first time that a war was brought onto our TV screens to America on a regular basis. Looking around, looking for baby-boomers, I see a few of us here. A different, for the first time, the violence and horror of war was brought home. That's the way it is today.”

The entire quote is just as appallingly stupid as this excerpt. Really, I could have chosen any statement from the last six years. This is just one of the most recent.

The extent, or even the existence, of Bush’s idiocy has been a matter of some debate. Some have contended that it’s an act, but if so, it’s the most masterful piece of acting I’ve ever seen. Even if we were to suppose that his style is heavily influenced by an innate contempt for the intelligence of ordinary people (thus “dumbing” the presentation down into someone’s idea of folksy generalization), the presentation is too inept to provide a rhetorical advantage.

A more valid concern, in my view, is that the general perception of Bush as an idiot lets him and his administration effectively off the hook in the public mind. Making fun of the President's syntax on the Tonight Show has a far different effect that getting angry about his policies. Idiots are not held as accountable as the rest of us, and thus Bush can get away with being a mere fool (remember Gerald Ford falling down the steps?) instead of a danger.

The truth of the matter seems fairly evident, however. Bush is a puppet, a figurehead. The fact that the deeply unattractive Richard Cheney, Bush’s campaign manager, picked himself to be Vice President, was a tip-off from the start. Bush will do what he’s told. The right-wing Republican and neo-con interests chose Bush because they thought he had the kind of image that would be good for a President. Like Ronald Reagan (it seemed), Bush could play the down-home “regular guy” man of the people, the kind of leader that would look good in the media, while the real policy makers would endeavor to push their extreme rightist agenda into law. Then the September 11 atrocities made a bad situation a thousand times worse—Bush was elevated to “fearless leader” status while terrorism was exploited in order to remake the U.S. into a full-fledged dictatorship.

Here I advance what I think is a novel argument. The fact that Bush is an intellectual pipsqueak turned out to be a stroke of luck for progressives, liberals, patriots—in fact, for the country. With a corrupt sensationalist media willing to go along with the “9/11 changed everything” script, a right-wing leader of even modest charisma and intelligence might have pulled off the coup. Now imagine a very clever demagogue, charismatic and handsome, with a command of rhetoric, and you can easily imagine a successful dictator. All in the name of freedom and security. This does, however, beg the question: do such men even exist anymore in the current political climate? Not on either end of the spectrum, it would seem, and maybe that’s a good thing.

Using the Reagan example again, we can see that even a third-rate actor managed to seduce the majority of the country into believing in a whole package of lies and prejudices that were neatly wrapped up in the flag. I could never understand Reagan’s appeal, his supposed skill at communication. What I saw was a mean glint in the eye, a narrow-minded hatred of difference, and an assortment of simple-minded slogans that bore no relation to reality. But the media has turned politics into a game of personalities, and on those terms Reagan was sold to us as a leader.

With a modicum of cleverness, even just an average ability to make a case, who knows what kind of cover Bush could have provided? But the Republicans and neo-cons ended up hiding behind an empty suit. Although the media continues the pretense that Bush is the “President,” acting as if he can be taken seriously as a political figure, not to mention a statesman, Dubya’s lack of the most basic skills has been evident to the public for quite some time now. His policies have been disastrous, and that of course is the main factor in his consistently low poll numbers, but I would argue that a President with an actual brain would have been able to salvage more support.

The Republicans picked what they thought was the perfect little puppet to play President in front of the TV cameras. But the qualities by which such puppetry was judged—affability, the illusion of being a “regular Joe,” etc.—were not enough to sustain support when the right-wing agenda produced spectacular failure. What’s astounding is how much media slack is still given to this pathetic little frat-boy President even now. If someone this stupid was a liberal, he would be mercilessly pilloried on TV every day, and probably impeached by now. It’s clear that the folks who own the country have a stake in maintaining the illusion, no matter what it may cost.

Results of war

From USA Today:

“About 70% of primary school students in a Baghdad neighborhood suffer symptoms of trauma-related stress such as bed-wetting or stuttering, according to a survey by the Iraqi Ministry of Health.”

This is what it comes down to. The long-term future of a country mangled for the sake of a few greedy men.

“Many Iraqi children have to pass dead bodies on the street as they walk to school in the morning, according to a separate report last week by the International Red Cross. Others have seen relatives killed or have been injured in mortar or bomb attacks.”

You won’t see them on the news channels. No one will mention them on Fox. They’re not American, so they’re not worth talking about. George W. Bush’s sleep will not be disturbed by their cries.

"’Some of these children are suffering one trauma after another, and it's severely damaging their development,’ said Said Al-Hashimi, a psychiatrist who teaches at Mustansiriya Medical School and runs a private clinic in west Baghdad. ‘We're not certain what will become of the next generation, even if there is peace one day,’ Al-Hashimi said.”

Before the war started, I participated in a silent march to Senator McCain’s office in Tucson. We carried coffins with American and Iraqi flags on them. People jeered at us, told us to protest Saddam instead, but we didn't answer. When we got to McCain’s office, several of us chose to be arrested for trespassing. One woman yelled, “I cannot stand by while children are murdered!” while the police handcuffed her.

McCain did not listen. He did not hear her. Neither did the Democrats. The media pretended that the protests were small and irrelevant. Do any of them feel any remorse today?

Four years later, that woman’s cry haunts me. Children were murdered, and still are. The surviving children live in fear. McCain lives in comfort, as does Cheney, and Rice, and Powell, and Rumsfeld, and the rest of that criminal gang.

Here are the results. Those horrible yellow ribbons are stained red.

Empty souls

Andrew Sullivan’s latest book has the unintentionally ridiculous title of: The Conservative Soul. The sub-title is: “How we lost it, how to get it back.”

This of course assumes that the conservative had a soul to begin with, a proposition that I don’t find self-evident. From defending the right to own slaves, through fighting against suffrage for women, to suppressing the right of labor to organize and championing the war in Vietnam, the American conservative has not demonstrated what I would consider a soul under any but the most abstract definition.

For conservatism to gain something resembling a soul, it will have to pay attention to the needs of people rather than just corporations. It will have to recognize that the public good is not subsidiary to the profit motive. The conservative strategy has been to turn everything into an opportunity for business to make money, and to hell with education, health care, the arts, human rights, and the environment. If liberals hadn’t intervened, children would still be working in factories. (They still are in other countries—countries where American corporations move their plants.) The conservatives weren’t the ones fighting to end segregation—they were busy calling Martin Luther King a Communist. Karl Rove didn’t invent the “win at any cost” strategy—he just refined it. The Republican Party has been cynically exploiting racial bigotry and fear in order to win elections for generations.

So I’m not particularly receptive to the lukewarm awakenings of conservatives such as Mr. Sullivan. If you’ve turned a blind eye to torture, the killing of innocents for profit, and the undermining of the American Constitution itself, your sudden realization that Bush is fiscally irresponsible does not qualify as an act of moral redemption. When you’ve cheerleaded the war in Iraq, stupidly swallowing every lie and deriding those who had the sense to question or challenge the Bush regime, turning around now and saying that the war was a mistake is not a significant revelation.

If Bush’s poll numbers were in the 70s instead of the reverse, I am certain that Mr. Sullivan would not be questioning the conservative soul, just as I know that if he had not happened to be born gay, he would be just as opposed to gay rights as any other Thatcherite. Mr. Sullivan spends a lot of time telling us about his devout Catholic faith. If there’s one facet of Christianity he and his conservative soul-mates could really use, it is true, heartfelt repentance. Their policies have led us to disaster. Their advice has been the most unreliable and destructive we could have received. Yet I sense no remorse, only belated justifications.

For the conservative to get a soul, he needs to find out what a conscience is. He needs to stop lecturing the rest of us about morality and look at the immorality, the criminality, of what has been done by his movement and his party. The conservative (and I speak figuratively of the so-called conservative movement and not just of Mr. Sullivan) has blood on his hands. It will take a lot more than blithely talking about the soul to wash those hands clean.

The Facts are Biased

When things don’t go well for right-wing extremists, they whine about the supposedly liberal media. By chance, I caught Glenn Beck gesticulating wildly on CNN about the DOJ scandal. It’s not important, he sniveled. With all the HUGE problems we have (as he looks up, waving his arms), why is this non-issue getting any attention? (I ask: What huge problems? If the rule of Bush and Cheney is so swell, we can’t really have such problems, right?) Then the kicker: the problem is, of course, that the media is OVERWHELMINGLY liberal!!

That this ass-clown has his own show is the final refutation of any claim to journalistic legitimacy on the part of CNN. But leaving that aside, it’s painfully evident that the ranks of wingnut punditry have unlimited contempt for the American people. In their eyes, the citizenry is so stupid that they couldn’t possibly care about anything more complicated than a 4-second soundbite. And if polls say that they do (a Gallup poll showed people favoring subpoenas of White House aides by a 3-1 margin), it couldn’t be because people actually think independently—it’s the liberal media that causes them to think that way.

The view of Americans held by Beck and the rest of the talk-radio bed-wetters is that they have no opinions that can be taken seriously unless those opinions have been hatched and inculcated by either them or the “liberal” media. They pretend to value “ordinary” Americans, the real citizens from the heartland, blah blah blah--what Nixon used to call “the silent majority.” But the personal interest news stories they choose to highlight are always about some nasty horrifying crime, designed to make us look down at other people with disgust. They exploit the very worst tendencies in human nature, and glory in them. That people could actually care about the corruption of the Justice Dept., that the majority of Americans have rejected Bush and his policies for years and by big margins, is inconceivable to them. The “huge” problems we have are always attributable to somebody else—to liberal female gay flag-burners, not to the conservative Republicans who are actually in power, not to the wingnuts themselves, who can never be wrong and never make mistakes. When all else fails, blame the media, even though the media has been kissing their asses for two decades, even though nutjobs like Pat Buchanan, Beck, and the Fox Zoo have regular high-paying gigs in the media. Because the important thing to remember if you’re a conservative is, be a baby. Never grow up. And don’t ever admit responsibility for ANYTHING. For you know, as Stephen Colbert says, the facts are biased.

The Two Faces of Wonder

Religion and mythology were born from human wonder. This wonder has two faces—one that is hidden, and one that everyone sees.

The second face is the wonder of existence: that anything exists at all, and (accompanying this primal sense) the overwhelming variety and complexity of that which exists.

The first face is the wonder of subjectivity: that the world is experienced, perceived, known and felt by living beings, and (in the case of human beings) that we are conscious of ourselves as living and experiencing, and that this reflective consciousness has developed into thought, reason, and imagination.

The first face is hidden because we are that face. In more abstract terms, since subjectivity is the basis of all experience, we can only indicate it indirectly, and can never actually perceive it, since it is the precondition of perception itself.

All experience, without exception—past, present, and future—is experienced in one mind, or as one being, and this is an inextricable and essential aspect of individuation itself. Just as there can be no phenomena without individuation, so there can be no life without the individuation of subjectivity.

It may seem strange that I would characterize the wonder of existence as the second face of wonder, and the wonder of subjectivity as the first. Existence is prior to experience—by the very definition of these categories it could not be otherwise. But in speaking of the origins of religion and mythology, subjectivity is the first face of wonder. Without self-consciousness, however indirect and consciously unacknowledged it may be, there would be no imagination. Whatever thoughts we had would be strictly in the service of our needs in the present moment; metaphor would be unnecessary and indeed impossible. Only when we become aware of the experiencing subject are we then capable of wondering about existence itself, and the variety and complexity of form.

I have written elsewhere about the ineffable nature of experience. Suffice it to say at this point that the experiencing subject can only be described through metaphor. The most common terms in English are: self, spirit, and soul. Language necessarily involves abstraction, which in turn always implies division or separation of one thing from another. But the ineffable nature of subjectivity is such that it is the context of experience, (and not a specific content within it), and thus literally inseparable from it. Thus we find that the self, spirit, or soul, conceived as an entity somehow separate from the mind-body complex, does not withstand the scrutiny of scientific investigation. Nevertheless, they emerged as primary metaphors, as central to our thought and discourse as the word “I.”

When human beings awoke into self-consciousness, then, both faces of wonder became fertile grounds for imaginative representation, for the metaphor-making that we know as religion and mythology, and eventually as poetry and art in general. The first face, subjectivity, was intuited as hidden and ineffable, and thus eternal. The second face, objectivity, was intuited as conditioned and subject to change. In concrete terms, the self-conscious human awareness of the world was marked by the awareness of death. That the spirit, intuited as eternal, could be subject to death (the extreme boundary, if you will, of change), seemed an essential contradiction. For the very context of life, subjectivity itself, to have an end, seemed inconceivable. And although I here describe this in abstract terms, as if it were a rational development, it is in fact fear, born of the need for survival, (a need that is prior to all thought or reason), that is the cause or motivating force of this felt conflict, this division between spirit and world.

The idea of spirits that exist independently of bodies, then, arises because of the human intuition of eternity, accompanied by the fear of death. The intuition of eternity is a basic aspect of subjectivity. In order for anything to be conditioned, reality itself must be unconditioned: this is one concise form of representing this intuition in rational terms. But the intuition itself is of course not rational—it arises simply because of the nature of subjectivity as context of all experience. Just as the figures in a painting cannot exist without the blank canvas on which they are painted, so our experience of the world, the very content of our life, is impossible outside of the context of our subjectivity. Here, as always, we must recognize the importance of metaphor—for whereas the canvas can exist without the painting, subjectivity is only separable from experience through abstraction, not in the concreteness of reality.

Spirit is the essential element of culture. The spirit was plural because human beings were plural, therefore life was experienced as a world of spirits. The development from this world of spirits to a world of gods may seem to us like a huge leap. In fact it wasn’t a leap, or even a step, but a simultaneous occurrence. The intuition of eternity extended its subjective nature to the world. Behind experience was the experiencing subject—the spirit, soul, or self. Behind the world, then, behind the second face of wonder, there must also be an experiencing subject, one far more powerful than the puny human being who is subject to birth, change, and death. This spirit was plural, just like human beings, but unlike human beings, who are experienced merely as the selves of their bodies, these spirits, these gods, as we came to call them, are the selves of the world, of existence itself.

--This is the second in a series of articles about the debate between religion and reason.