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.

“Support the Troops”: the evolution of a lie

My wife and I were interviewed on the local news at an antiwar demonstration last weekend. All too typically, the story ended up focusing on a completely inconsequential incident in which three lone wolf demonstrators, dressed up as Guantanamo prisoners and their jailer, crossed the street and were jostled by the pro-war counter-demonstrators. The police jumped in and separated them, and no one was arrested, but if you watched the local news that evening you were given the impression that this was the big defining moment of the day, the top story, blah blah blah. In the snippet of my interview that was aired, I said, “We’re not here to demonstrate against our fellow citizens across the street. We’re here to protest against this illegal and immoral war.” Since it came after all the nonsense about the “confrontation” between demonstrators, this may (I can hope) have had some good effect on a viewer paying attention.

In general, local news programs are a sure indicator of how irrelevant and brain dead TV news has become. The stale phrases used are worthy of some study. This report was about the two sets of demonstrators, and more time was spent talking to the pro-war faction, even though we outnumbered them by at least two to one. “On one side, demonstrators supporting the troops;” said the announcer, “on the other, those who oppose the war.” Here we can see—even at this stage of the conflict, when around 70% of the population wants the troops out of Iraq—how the media has absorbed the words “support the troops” like a devotee memorizing his mantra. Its pervasive use as a code phrase loaded with unspoken meaning is in perfectly inverse proportion to its actual relationship to the facts.

“Support the troops” was invented by the rightists in the lead-up to the Gulf War in 1991. It was based on a revisionist version of the Vietnam experience: that antiwar demonstrators demeaned and betrayed the soldiers who fought in that war. The Vietnam veteran was thus set up as a victim of the antiwar left, in order to erase the fact that there was a sizable antiwar movement among Vietnam veterans at the time. The yellow ribbon motif came from a story (probably apocryphal) about a wife who put yellow ribbons on a tree to welcome her veteran husband home from the war, which was then turned into a song.

As a representative symptom of this deliberate revision of the past, we see how Jane Fonda was turned into a symbol of everything treasonous, but McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, Melvin Laird, and all the other powerful men who sent thousands of soldiers down the pipeline to their deaths for no good reason, are not reviled or condemned in the mainstream.

You never heard “support the troops” during Vietnam because it was generally assumed—and rightly so—that everyone outside of a lunatic fringe supported them, and that this support was a completely separate consideration from whether or not the war was right. But the radical nationalists, who want an empire instead of a republic and a king instead of a president, changed all that. It was a deliberate strategy to take war off the table as a legitimate topic of debate.

“Support the troops” simply means, “Don’t protest the war.” I must emphasize this point: that is all that it means. By identifying dissent against a war (any war that the government chooses to wage) as dishonoring soldiers, the rightists seek to taint protestors as anti-military, anti-American, and ultimately as treasonous. The central implication of this idea is that we do not have a right to protest a war, because it harms the war effort and demoralizes the soldiers. On what is arguably the most significant issue facing a country—the waging of war—the people should not speak, except, of course, in support. If we’re talking about taxes or health or education, we are presumably allowed to speak. But if we’re talking about the possible deaths of our sons and daughters, and the commitment of our resources to killing people for some stated cause, we should keep our lips buttoned.

It’s significant also that the phrase popped up prior to the commencement of hostilities in 1991. The same was true during the 2002-2003 buildup to the Iraq War. “Support the troops” was used to discredit protest before the war, just as it was after the war started. The argument based on national security, i.e. that once the war has started we should unite behind the cause, as flimsy and dangerous as it is, does not correspond to the right-wing strategy in fact. The war was not seriously debated in the government or the media prior to its launch in 2003. The millions of protestors around the world were not taken seriously. The 9/11 attacks were used as an automatic justification of all arguments, with a strong message that dissent from this justification was an act of support for terrorism. This is conveniently forgotten in the media, now that the war is unpopular. It should be vividly remembered.

By using “support the troops” as a rhetorical mainstay, the militarist right is essentially hiding behind the soldiers in order to avoid serious discussion of its ideas and aims. It’s an act of moral cowardice, pure and simple. William Kristol and his neo-con associates have no moral standing whatsoever, and their ideas and predictions would be thoroughly discredited and reviled in a sane political environment. Instead, they still command public attention and are given plenty of opportunities in the media to make their specious arguments. There is still no debate in the mainstream on the justice or morality, as opposed to the mere competence, of this war. The only real thought is occurring on the margins—but here we’re seeing an expansion of the margins to a width that is greater than what is supposed to be the mainstream. We are seeing conclusively that the mainstream consensus is an artificially created minority view sustained by economic and political elites.

It all filters down to the rote repetition of “support the troops” on the brainless local news. How long will “the troops” be used to hide the truth? It’s obvious that the militarists don’t really care about the troops. If they did, they wouldn’t be cutting their benefits, neglecting their health and well being at Walter Reed Hospital and other facilities, and sending them into harm’s way without proper training or equipment. You’d think by now that the blow-dry anchors and cardboard cut-out journalists would get this, but “support the troops” gets trotted out again and again, like an old lame cow disguised as a horse. For the sake of all that’s true and moral, for the sake of decency and conscience—for the sake of the troops, we need to stop saying “support the troops.”

The Flawed Question

Do you believe in God? For a long time this common question has provoked my impatience and frustration. There is an unwarranted assumption behind it—that we know what we’re talking about when we say the word “God,” and that it’s therefore a simple matter to say whether or not we believe in it.

If I ask, “What do you mean when you say ‘God’?” I usually get an expression of surprise in response. I’ve challenged the unspoken assumption. When the questioner then attempts to give me a definition, it is usually different in some ways, subtle or obvious, from responses I’ve received before. Even members of the same Christian denomination will give me answers that are strikingly different. This word is interpreted in so many different ways that the question of whether I believe in what the word means becomes practically nonsensical. If those who assume they know what it means don’t even agree on the meaning, how should I be expected to answer?

Speaking philosophically, I would argue that the word has so many meanings because it refers to a transcendent reality—and thus it indicates that which is greater than what we can perceive or even think. It is a metaphor by necessity, because it points to “something” that cannot be directly expressed, and therefore it is capable of multiple interpretations, even contradictory ones. This, however, does not solve our problem, it only provides a hint as to its origins.

First of all, let us attempt to gather together the most common conceptions into one general definition. By common conceptions I mean those we usually encounter in daily life and discourse, private or public. Philosophical ideas come later and reflect both an attempt to understand actual principles and a quest for the origins of our ideas. So in common parlance, I would say that “God” is an all-powerful being that created the universe.

In our culture, moreover, this being is usually referred to as a male person. This personal gender aspect would seem to be of secondary importance, but in practice it has been tied up inextricably with the general concept of the supreme, all-powerful creator. It cannot be ignored in any discussion concerning common conceptions of God.

So it is in this context that the question “Do you believe in God?” actually occurs, and it is in this context that the controversy between organized religion and atheism takes place. We now get bogged down in questions of proof regarding the existence of God, with a typical example being the arguments around Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion.

I’m not really going to analyze this aspect in any great detail. This may surprise you. The fact is that the concept of the all-powerful creator has already been demolished many times by rational argument, centuries ago. The writings of David Hume alone should be enough to shatter most of the assumptions, although Hume ended up accepting a Deist concept—the common escape for 18^th century philosophers from the charge of atheism. Subsequent authors have elaborated on Hume’s beginnings. The assaults of Voltaire, Paine, and Nietzsche were primarily on the cultural front, but in the realm of the common conception one can’t really separate the cultural assumptions from the rational ones.

Before I ever read these philosophers, I sensed a basic conflict within the idea of an all-powerful deity. The creator must be different from the creation, therefore separate, therefore limited in some way. For that which is separate from something exists relatively to something, and anything that is relative is limited, conditioned. If God is separate from the creation, does he therefore occupy space? If he does, then space is a condition of a higher category than God. If he does not, than he is separate from creation in a way that cannot be conceived. We might say “a different dimension,” but this is just magical language with no actual reference point for us. On a more abstract level, even to say that “God exists” implies that existence is our ultimate principle, with God subsumed under it. But God cannot be anything but the one, primary principle, otherwise he is limited. And so forth. In other words, the concept of a being that is separate from us automatically implies the relative nature of beings, which contradicts the language of absolutes assigned to the supreme being.

On a more concrete level—that of personalization and gender—I would ask if God has sexual organs. If not, why do we refer to God as male? If so, to what end would God have such organs? Furthermore, does God exist as a physical body at all? If so, does this body perform physical functions as all bodies do, and how could that be in the case of an all-powerful being, since it implies limitation and mortality? Or if not, why again do we refer to God as male, or indeed in personal terms at all? A theologian’s answers to these kinds of questions would inevitably admit metaphor, but this is precisely where theology parts ways with common belief, and it is common belief that we are concerned with here.

My point is that honest, disciplined, and searching rational inquiry will dissolve the common conceptions of God, and has dissolved it already. The debate, however, involves atheists in assumptions that confine us to a kind of endless loop where nothing is resolved. One of the primary assumptions, it seems to me, is that rational proofs against the common conceptions of God should lead to the end of belief in God. But of course, this has not happened. When confronted with this, atheists may argue that ignorance and superstition are implacable, persistent, deep-rooted forces that resist change.

But I must here confess my skepticism. Most people have been cured of belief in witches and evil spirits. Science has convinced the majority of people that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around, even though we don’t have personal experience of this fact beyond the data and reasons presented to us. To attribute the belief in God (and, in a wider sense, religious ideas in general) just to ignorance and superstition, is a colossal error of imagination. I am convinced that there is a meaning behind belief in God, and religion in general, which has both a basis in reality, and a connection to fundamental human need. Of that, I will write in the next part of this series.

Atheism is involved in another error here, though. It is strangely similar to the destructive beliefs of fundamentalist religion. And that is that we can hope someday for most people to come to agreement on these questions, and all share the same beliefs. If only everyone would recognize that there is no God, then we’d be okay. But it will never happen, and it is foolish to expect it to happen, or to try to make it happen. We need to accept that people will always differ on this, even if we think that those who belief differently are wrong. Belief is not what threatens us—the forces that threaten our world are deeper than that, and are reflected in our actions towards each other. Belief systems mold themselves to our patterns of action, and not vice-versa. They adapt to our lives when we learn new ways of action in our relationship to others.

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

Reasons to be cheerful

Chuck Schumer and Joseph Biden calling for Alberto Gonzales’ resignation. If the creepy torture guy’s job is in jeopardy, something must be going right.
NY firefighters blast Rudolph Guiliani. The former mayor has exploited 9/11 for his own image, and has been able to get away with it for the most part. Maybe this will help expose his feet of clay.
Bush’s Latin American trip features angry protests in Brazil and Colombia.
War protesters are occupying Congressional offices. And not just Republican offices, either.
Fox Noise-sponsored Presidential debate cancelled. Fox should be boycotted by all Democrats. Period. Let the propagandists sit by themselves in their own stink. Going on their shows only lends the Australian network a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve.
Libby found guilty.
You see, for things to get better, people need to say No to the criminals running the show.

Miasma at the CPAC

The latest belch from mentally ill attention-seeker Ann Coulter has succeeded in getting some attention. At the end of a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, she said, “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I -- so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”

Some have demanded that every major rightist figure attending (including Deadeye Dick) publicly condemn the remark. Which is fine. Of course, what we’re missing here is that a certifiable nutcase continues to be invited to speak at the CPAC. It’s not as if Coulter’s behavior is a mystery. So really, they’re getting exactly what they want to hear.

A spokesman for Mitt Romney (one of the attendees) said, “It was an offensive remark. Governor Romney believes all people should be treated with dignity and respect." What? I don’t understand. Romney went on the 700 Club to tell Pat Robertson that Rudy Guiliani is pro-gay marriage and therefore a bad candidate. And he doesn’t like civil unions either. So gay couples can just go to hell, really, which is where Robertson thinks they’re going. How can Romney then claim that all people should be treated with dignity and respect? Can you believe in a person being made a second-class citizen and at the same time say that you treat them with respect?

Actually the preceding paragraph could have been shorter, to wit: “Romney went on the 700 Club.” That’s enough right there to prevent his name being used in the same sentence with the word “dignity.”

The Editor & Publisher article detailing Coulter’s psychotic effusion informs us that the remarks “also drew disapproval from some popular conservative commentators… Michelle Malkin expressed disapproval.”

Here’s what Malkin actually wrote: “Would you want your children hearing the word ‘faggot’ spoken in such a casual and senseless manner? Would you like your first-grader or three-year-old running around the halls of CPAC singing ‘faggot, faggot, faggot?’"

You see, there were children at the CPAC. It’s about the decorum of the language, not the meaning of the word. Michelle Malkin, just like every other rightist, consistently opposes gay rights. Her supposed disapproval of the word “faggot” is mere window dressing, a strategy of trying to appear civilized and mainstream while practically and in every real sense supporting the denial of equal rights to gays.

Our media-drenched culture is hyper-sensitive about words, while at the same time virtually oblivious to the actions that give them meaning. A white comedian yells “nigger” on stage, and there’s outrage. Bill O’Reilly calls the citizens of New Orleans who were stranded during Katrina “thugs” and the “urban menace,” and there are no consequences. Senator Jon Kyl blithely says that New Orleans residents should not receive aid because they should have bought insurance, and there is no outrage. Republicans know a thousand different ways to say “nigger” without actually using the word, and they get away with it. The same is true of “faggot.” Every appeal to the “base,” every cynical use of gays to stir up right-wing voters (on an issue that really doesn’t significantly affect most straight people's lives the way Iraq does, or our lousy health care system) is really the word “faggot” whispered into the ears of a bigoted voting bloc.

And it has results. Not only do Republicans win votes, but gay men and women are bashed and murdered by haters who are being given tacit permission to do so by people like Mitt Romney, John McCain, Sam Brownback, Pat Robertson, and George W. Bush. So any and all disapproval of the word “faggot” by Republicans or right-wing gasbags like Malkin should never be taken seriously. If they faced no opposition, you would not hear a peep of disapproval from them. In fact, you would hear far worse coming from their own big mouths.

Ann Coulter is a slime-oozing bubble rising from the id of the American right wing. I hope she continues to embarrass her employers as long as possible. The more offensive the better, I say. And if she goes down, there’s still Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and other assorted troglodytes to carry the banner. This is the true face of conservatism, people. Don’t be fooled by the polite coded bigotry of the country club Republicans who mouth the words “dignity” and “respect” but practice manipulating and dividing us with hatred and ignorance. Just turn to wingnuts like Coulter for the truth. They represent the reality of right-wing rule.

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.