Crazy Thinking

For those innocent folks who might have thought that the election of 2006 proved that American democracy was in good shape, the events of the last couple of months must be quite disillusioning. Polls show that 67% of the public disapproves of Bush’s handling of this war, and 64% think that the war was just flat-out not worth fighting. And yet we are witnessing not only a plan to escalate the Iraq war, but a steady drumbeat signaling an eventual attack on Iran.

Our country is owned and run by a small group of moneyed elites. In the final analysis, they don’t care what the majority of citizens think. They do what they want to do to advance their interests, which are the interests of the corporations and the military-industrial complex, and then the people are fed a steady diet of prevarication and distortion designed to confuse, divide, and disempower us.

The consensus in Washington seems to be that the war in Iraq must be a noble cause because America couldn’t have an ignoble cause, since that would be a disgrace. By all means this disgrace must be avoided, so we hear politicians blaming the Iraqis for not doing “their part,” and criticizing Bush for not waging the war competently, rather than for waging the war at all. The rightists in particular become hysterical at the mere thought of American failure, lurching around for someone else, anyone, to blame for the catastrophe.

It’s a peculiar, emotionally insecure kind of rhetoric that we’re hearing. It’s taken for granted that things would get much worse in Iraq if American troops pulled out, but there’s no real basis for this belief other than desperation. The invasion of Iraq caused the problem in the first place. The waging of this war has given birth to the civil war. I believe that the situation could only get better if the U.S. pulled out. This is not to say that the civil war would suddenly end, but without American troops there the people would actually have a better chance of resolving the issues. (Wayne O’Leary at Progressive Populist sums up the practical benefits of withdrawal here.)

There’s a strong element in the establishment, right wing or otherwise, that sees everything in the emotional terms of victory or defeat, triumph or disgrace. Instead of really considering what would be the best course of action for our country, and our security, they are ruled by the fear of weakness. War becomes about perceptions and messages rather than any real political strategy, just as we saw in Vietnam. The central problem, then, is the delusional belief in American infallibility, entitlement, and virtue. An adolescent pathology has been projected onto an entire country, as if “America” were an actual living being with a sensitive ego that should never be challenged.

The polls show that the majority of people really have a much more sensible approach to things than the leaders who are supposedly representing them. Hubris and concentration of power in the executive have resulted in insanity. That’s what it is. When someone refuses to acknowledge the reality that everyone else sees, he is considered insane. The cocoon of prestige and media-fed oblivion surrounding the powerful prevents them seeing their own insanity. But more and more ordinary people are seeing it, and it’s truly a radicalizing experience.

I don’t know what will happen if Bush bombs Iran. I can tell you one thing—it won’t make us safer. In fact, everything this government does places us in an increasingly dangerous place. Perhaps the cruel truth about having a pretend democracy is that things have to get unbelievably bad before the people get mad enough to make a difference.

Old lions

Some wise person said recently that if we focus too much on hating Bush, we end up as shallow as he is. I can see this tendency in myself, and I know I see it in others. The point is not that we’re supposed to love a criminal head of state, although a Quaker might say just that, but that the energy for change isn’t sustained by personal animosity.

One of the things I like about Noam Chomsky is that he analyzes ideas and institutions, and doesn’t spend much time talking about personalities. He might mention Cheney or Wolfowitz once in awhile, but identifying individuals to blame is really not the point. Read this recent interview, for instance, and you’ll see how Chomsky tries to understand not only the sociopolitical forces at work, but the general ways of thinking that drive them. His central insight—that the elites of the West actually hate democracy—will purge your mind of a lot of foolish beliefs assumed in the mainstream, if you can take it in.

Because of this impersonal approach, Chomsky seems to come off as a little cold—not brimming with the outrage we might expect, but looking at things from several steps backwards and seeing the continuities between our current situation and the stages we have traveled through to get here. He was practical enough to recommend a vote for Kerry in ’04, simply because the Bush regime represents a kind of radical nationalism that poses a very dangerous threat to the world. At the same time, he knows that Kerry and other establishment politicians do not challenge the assumptions of corporate imperialism. For those who place a lot of hope in the possibilities of Democratic Party opposition, Chomsky must seem discouraging. Yet he continually expresses optimism about the potential of organized resistance, because he knows that the only real change is going to come from the bottom up, and we’ve seen a greater resurgence of progressive activism under Bush than in the previous twenty years. It’s too bad that it’s taken this steep a plunge to wake people up, but perhaps that’s how it had to be.

Chomsky is 78 years old. Howard Zinn—warm and folksy where Chomsky is rigorously academic, yet sharing Chomsky’s broad historical vantage point—is 84. Gore Vidal is a different sort altogether—a kind of patrician satirist who definitely likes to focus on personalities yet brings years of wit and wisdom to the debate. He’s 81. These people aren’t going to be with us very much longer, and that actually scares me a little. We need people with the long view, fearless and tireless, in the coming years, which promise to be full of tumult. I would like to know what figures in the next generation will sustain their work. Who do you think they are? And how can we support them?

Interview with the Klan

Standing in line at the bank, I saw a Ku Klux Klan member being interviewed on CNN. The bank has a TV above the tellers with the sound off, and I only caught a little of the closed captioning. A headline said, “Klan membership growing.” I began daydreaming about what I might say if I were interviewing a member of the KKK:

CD: Thank you for talking to us. First of all, I’m interested in your costume. I’ve noticed you wear a robe and a pointed hat. I’ve also seen pictures of members who hide their faces with a hood that has holes cut out for the eyes. Is your organization Halloween-based in some way?

KKK: No, the uniform was originally meant to appear like a ghost, so as to frighten the…

CD: And yet I notice that your costume is purple. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a purple ghost…

KKK: Well, I’m an Imperial Wizard, so our uniform is a different color…

CD: A wizard? So you practice sorcery?

KKK: This is just a traditional title…

CD: I have to tell you, this whole thing seems so, well, retro. I mean, your costume looks like something from the Renaissance fair, and then you say you’re a wizard. Is this a Dungeons and Dragons tie-in of some sort?

KKK: Look, I came here to talk about our beliefs…

CD: Oh, I know, you hate blacks and Jews and so on, we’ll get to that. But I just wonder, wouldn’t it be smarter to wear business suits like everyone else? I think you’d have more credibility that way. The pointy hat and the mask and the robe, it’s so off-putting.

KKK: There’s a tradition behind the uniform, and we don’t call it a costume, by the way…

CD: The robes aren’t even well-fitted. They’re just sort of this dumpy thing, like wearing a tent. And I look at you and I think, Harry Potter? Bilbo Baggins? Then I find that you’re a political organization of some kind, I mean, your presentation just doesn’t fit your act, you know what I mean?

KKK: Now, you listen to me, sir, sir…

CD: And the pointy hat. You could do better. Maybe a smart looking cap of some sort. Times have changed. People aren’t scared by guys running around in a sheet yelling “Boo!” any more. At least not in my part of the world. Now, about that cross on the front of the costume, is this some kind of affiliation with Christianity? The Crusades? I’m confused here, first we have ghosts, now the ghost is wearing a cross….

Etc., etc.

I'm Spartacus

Shakespeare's Sister left the Edwards campaign. I understand her decision. And I also understand that the unscrupulous right-wing demagogues who attacked her have no credibility, and no guts. We are all Spartacus. If you have a blog, please join us.

The proper attitude to war

When asked if he was troubled by the firebombing of Tokyo, in which about 100,000 people were killed in one night, Air Force General Curtis LeMay said, “Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier."

LeMay was a prick, but when he said “all war is immoral,” he spoke the truth. The part about not letting it bother you is untrue, however, or at least only partly true, and moreover it contradicts the first sentence of his statement. For if every soldier thinks about the moral aspects of what he’s doing, and what he’s doing is immoral, then it has to bother him somewhat, or else he’s not really thinking about the moral aspects, is he?

In any case, the central statement that “all war is immoral” is a very important concept to get. On the face of it, it seems incredibly simple, but in fact the common belief is that not all war is immoral, only unjust war, i.e. war waged for the wrong reasons. War in self-defense is considered moral.

This is not just verbal hair-splitting. It goes to the heart of our attitudes about war, and there’s a long history behind all of this. What we need to understand is that something can be necessary without being moral. Killing people is immoral, but it may be necessary if one’s country is attacked. Ideally, a civilized people would wage war with courage and firmness, but not glorying in it. We would recognize the terrible cost to ourselves, to the soldiers, to humanity, of war, and therefore fight the necessary war without trying to pretend that it’s a great and glorious thing that we should romanticize or celebrate.

Ideally, I say. For we know that in reality it never works out that way. The reasons are complicated.

The role of the warrior has been invested with glory and prestige since ancient times. We see it in tribal culture, and not merely in the context of defense, but also, and in fact primarily, in terms of conquest. It’s difficult to envision a warrior role without it, if only because a person wouldn’t be expected to risk his life without some prestige being attached to it. I think it goes deeper, though. The whole notion of conquest is founded on what I call the power principle. Power over others is the mark of authority. Authority is always invested with prestige, and so it comes to be that power by force of arms carries the ultimate prestige. This became more and more magnified as humanity developed larger social units—cities, kingdoms, empires. By the Bronze Age the linking of war with glory was already fully formed. In the Iliad, glory has become fame, a sort of immortality in which the warrior’s glory outlives him in the memories of his countrymen and even in the eternal realms of the gods. And the Greeks were by no means unique in this regard.

Glory, honor, fame, sacrifice. War is ennobled by these words, and so they were used in order to motivate people for war—especially the people who stayed at home while their sons or brothers went to fight. They motivated the sons and brothers too, but for them in addition there was the promise of material gain—booty. When a city was sacked, the soldiers would gain some of the goods of the defeated people, and if they didn’t, the result would be angry, restless soldiers. Those who fought wars would also stand to gain public honors, privileges, and offices. All these, including material gain from booty, are also kinds of prestige in themselves. They all increase power.

Returning, then, to where we began—the firebombing of Tokyo—we are confronted with the dilemma of war in the modern age, namely, the duality of soldier and civilian. Civilians have always suffered in wars. In warrior tribal culture, the conquered enemy was often enslaved. This continued with the rise of empires. The historical origins of slavery lie in war. Those other people, the barbarians, would become our slaves after we conquered their city or their kingdom. Moreover, in the Old Testament we read of entire cities being slaughtered—man, woman, and child. This was less common, but still not unique to the Hebrews by any means. Rape and other depredations were also common. Slavery became an established institution, practiced on a huge scale in the Roman Empire, and providing a crucial underpinning to the imperial economy. Empire and slavery went hand in hand, and empire was of course created through conquest. This has been true right through to the modern age, even after the literal state of bondage was outlawed and replaced by less overt forms of coercion. There is fertile ground here for historical thought and investigation. I introduce the concept here in order to make the point that war has never spared civilians, albeit there have always been varying degrees of separation between the roles of soldier and civilian.

The change in the nature of war that we have seen in the last two centuries, therefore, is not primarily a matter of kind, but of degree. When aerial bombing was introduced, there were always sound military reasons for it. Most of the time, military targets were being bombed. But of course, people live near these military targets. LeMay’s goal, for instance, was to knock out munitions factories in Tokyo. But there was also a military justification for bombing cities regardless of what military targets might lie in them. It was thought that causing widespread destruction to cities would demoralize the population and therefore aid the war effort. The Nazis did this, in Rotterdam, London, and elsewhere. The Allies pulverized the German cities in turn. The estimates of deaths in the firebombing of Dresden range from 150,000 to 250,000 people. Incendiary bombs got around the enemy’s air defenses to wipe out the target—they also wiped out the people.

There is a sense in which a line had been crossed. The ratio of civilian deaths to deaths of soldiers had become far greater than ever before. And civilians were being directly targeted as part of the war effort, rather than as primarily a sequel to conquest. Nevertheless I would argue that the horrible consequences of modern warfare were the result of a progression by degrees, not of a radical shift in thinking about war. All war is immoral—it’s just that the immorality became increasingly horrifying and unacceptable due to the sheer increase in the numbers of civilians killed. The more likely the killing of non-soldiers became in war, the more widely evident war’s immorality became.

The culmination of this increasing arc of war, of course, was the development of nuclear weapons. It was as if the internal contradictions of war inevitably reached this point of no return. And for the first time, there was something of a change in kind, rather than just of degree, involved. Fewer people died from the Hiroshima bomb than in the Dresden or Tokyo firebombings. In fact, the combined deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were probably less than that in the Tokyo bombing. But there is something particularly shocking, I think, about one single weapon leveling an entire city. The ancient idea of the battle (admittedly already obviated to some degree by the concept of aerial bombing) is now completely outmoded. There is no battle, just the complete slaughter of man, woman, and child, like the Old Testament but in the blink of an eye.

There’s a sense in which it is just as immoral to kill one person as it is to kill a million, because from the point of view of the individual who is killed the only life he knows is being taken away. From the point of view of people living in society, however—families, communities, countries—a greater number of deaths is a greater evil. Nuclear weapons take this to a level that transcends what we can even conceive of as social creatures. Jonathan Schell was very forceful about this in The Fate of the Earth when he talked about the crime of erasing humanity’s future. Another aspect that I don’t think has been talked about enough is the violation of our proper sense of limitation as human beings. When we’ve reached the point where we can annihilate entire countries in minutes (and indeed wipe out humanity itself), we find ourselves unwittingly in the position of a god, the old idea of the all-powerful god who can destroy us all (such as in the flood of Genesis). We all should know that people are limited, flawed, prone to mistakes, and capable of causing harm to one another through their passions. It is not sane to trust human beings to hold such absolute life-and-death power over the world. And in a religious sense, I would maintain that it’s actually blasphemous to presume to wield such power. Anyone claiming to be religious who also believes that human beings have a right to such godlike power (“God bless the atom bomb”) is, in my view, usurping the place that properly belongs to God—or to use Christian terminology, is espousing a Satanic philosophy. The power principle has led us, then, to this—either the assumption of amoral divinity by the merely human, or (and this is the most difficult choice we face) the renouncing of the power principle as the central tenet of the social order.

We still have “conventional” war, however. We still have soldiers, weapons, and battles. And there is still the possibility, contrary to the strictest teachings of pacifism, that a war would be necessary in order to defend ourselves. This brings me back to the beginning. After all we know now as a race, after two terrible world wars, a "cold war" nuclear stand-off, and many other wars around the world right up to the present day, can we really maintain the glory, honor, and prestige of war? The politicians are still doing so, and the civilians who push the reality away from their consciousness with flags and rhetoric. But those who know war firsthand, soldier or civilian, know differently. Even if a war is justified (and so few of them really are), the proper attitude is solemnity, determination, and the grim knowledge that killing is shameful and wrong, and that there’s nothing glorious about being killed. The proper attitude is seriousness, and that’s just what seems to be missing now.

No more parades.

Why we are here

Take a look at this clip (courtesy of JC) of Senator Leahy giving Alberto Gonzales a lesson in basic decency. The subject is “extraordinary rendition,” Newspeak for the transfer of terrorism suspects to countries where they will be tortured. Leahy makes points that those of us who have been protesting for years are already familiar with, including the important fact that the government has sent people to Syria for torture, a country that we supposedly consider a sponsor of terrorism itself.

Contemplate, if you have the stomach for it, the simpering countenance of the little creep who somehow became the highest law enforcement officer in the land. He wears a smirk of condescension, no doubt feeling an innate superiority to anyone with a conscience. Leahy can talk about freedoms, values, or the Founding Fathers all day, but Gonzales won’t hear, or comprehend. He’s a Bush toady, and that’s the sum total of his world view.

When I think about these times, and these pathetic little men who hold power, I often feel a sense of vertigo, a wonder at how we could have descended so far. When I heard the first stirrings of a right-wing argument for torture (it was in a George Will column in 2001) I was sickened, because I knew it meant that the administration was going to take that route. But I never dreamed that it would become such a central aspect of their program.

Even if one were to believe that torture is an effective tool against terrorism—a belief contradicted by all the facts—it certainly could never be conceived as one of the most important methods, compared to intelligence gathering, informants, surveillance, etc. The need, the absolute imperative to have the “freedom” to torture, which has been repeatedly expressed by Cheney and company, seems completely out of proportion to its importance, as long as one assumes that the rightists really care about fighting terrorism. If, instead, one comes to believe, as I do, that the rightists have a stake in perpetuating the fear of terrorism (and therefore a stake in its persistence), then a couple of possibilities present themselves.

The first is that they believe that the threat of torture will strike fear into the hearts of all their opponents. The enemies, whoever they are, will be intimidated by the apparent willingness of the U.S. to “disappear” people into secret prisons from which there is no escape, and to torture and abuse them for as long as it chooses. The purpose is to strike a super tough, super aggressive attitude that will deter attacks. This is fully in line with Bush foreign policy in general, which has relied almost solely on creating an image of so-called toughness against “terror,” “Islamo-fascism,” etc. The occupation of Iraq has thoroughly discredited this naïve approach, except for the Bush cadre, which continues to adhere to it, believing that to acknowledge any other approach would mean defeat. (Defeat for the rightists is equated in their own minds with defeat for the country, although in reality our country’s true interests lie in the opposite direction from the Bush regime’s.)

We must not fail to also acknowledge the intimidation of American political opponents as a motive. This brings me to the second possible reason for this peculiar fixation on torture. This radical group that I usually label with reference to Richard Cheney, but is in fact a much wider phenomenon, encompassing the so-called neoconservatives as well as neo-fascist, theocratic and nativist forces dominating the Republican Party, is essentially hostile to the American tradition of freedom embodied in the Bill of Rights. To these elements, human and civil rights are an obstacle to the exercise of authoritarian control and economic power (the latter is what they mean when they refer to “freedom.”) The rightists are also hostile to the separation of powers, preferring a centralized executive with unlimited authority. (Paradoxically, they will seek to undermine an executive who is not of their group, e.g. Bill Clinton, if the outsider has connections to elements that does not adhere to rightist ideology. Thus, any Democratic president will be attacked and weakened by the rightists unless he is a rightist himself.) The project, then, is to take any remaining force out of the Bill of Rights, concentrate power in a king-like executive and one-party apparatus (such as in China), while extending economic dominance abroad. The legitimization of torture is a key step along the way, because it ups the stakes against dissenters by discouraging protest, and it undermines the moral foundations of human and civil rights. Torture takes center stage because people need to get used to the degradation of human dignity if they are to eventually accept dictatorship, or at least tacitly accede to it.

I have always maintained that the Bush administration is illegitimate, i.e. not a bona fide legal executive. It has gained power, and maintained it, through fraud, and it has operated primarily through the commission of various crimes, from the crimes against humanity in Iraq and elsewhere to its consistent violation of the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, and other legal and common human standards of decency, along with deliberate negligence (New Orleans) and political crimes exemplified by Karl Rove and the Libby case.

Nevertheless, it is important to take a long view as well. The creation of a national security state after World War II, and the emergence of an imperial mindset as its driving force, has led us—with tragic inevitability—to where we are today. This idea of government was similar in some respects to the Soviet state that it ostensibly opposed, in that policing and spying (“intelligence”) were invested with virtually unchecked authority, and cloaked in secrecy. Again and again, we have seen the advocates for the military-industrial complex and the police agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.) stress the need for secrecy, and this always involved eliminating any oversight by the citizenry. “Security” became the byword for the maintenance of power by a bloated military and police establishment, and this large group has of course an interest in perpetuating itself and its power. This self-interest did not go away with the fall of the Soviets. It holds on to power with all its might.

One of the central tenets of this imperial mindset is that America must act without moral scruples in order to defend itself. Since the enemy has no scruples, neither should we. Torture has always been a part of this. “Rendition” is not a Bush innovation. The CIA and other intelligence agencies have been committing crimes against humanity for decades. What we see today is the result of a progression of “national security” ideology. The authoritarian model, with its emphasis on secrecy, cannot coexist comfortably with the old-fashioned American idea of personal liberty. It was bound to produce the result we have today—an entrenched anti-democratic rightist faction controlling the executive, and making concerted efforts to turn us into a de facto dictatorship. Previous White House occupants since FDR—the establishment as we have come to know it in the post-war era—have been less overt in their anti-democratic aims. This administration has brought those aims out of the closet, so to speak, in an attempt to turn an unofficial “shadow” government into an officially recognized government system. Verbal compromises are still made out of political expediency—Bush denies that we torture while simply giving the torture a different name—but this latest group is remarkable for how indifferent it generally is to public opinion or even to the views of traditional conservative forces. Its behavior indicates that the stakes are far greater than the “business as usual” paradigm in Washington would have us believe. For the rightists to put torture in a central place on the table is essentially to say that they are staking everything on an outright seizure of power. We must therefore assume that the world situation, economically and politically, appears so dire to them that short-term political considerations ultimately must take a back seat to the requirements of an imperial ideology.

The Bush regime appears to be losing. But in the long run, the national security state will continue unless the apparatus is drastically reduced. The CIA needs to be dismantled. The Pentagon budget needs to be gutted down to a size that actually defends the country instead of imperial interests. Control of the state must be seized from the corporations. The fact that all these goals seem unattainable right now is a measure of how bad things are, and how far we need to go.

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.