Good Ideas, Capital, and the Crumbling of the Authority Paradigm

Conor Friedersdorf has a good idea:

Were I given my way — hey, last time I wrote an essay like this I was, so it’s worth a shot — I’d secure funding for a Web site that aggregated diverse opinions on various issues, commissioned thoughtful magazine pieces of argument and analysis… and then deliberately commissioned the strongest rebuttals, counterarguments and alternate takes, and published them all side by side, facilitating productive conversation whenever possible. (In innovative ways!) An enterprise that gave diverse views a fair shake — and earned the trust of readers necesary for its success — couldn’t be run by just one editor, so I’d set up an ombudsman blog, give access to a couple dozen carefully selected, variously minded folk who all believe in the journalistic project, and guarantee that whatever they penned would appear on the front page, as a check on the editor’s power.

I had a good idea once, too. My idea was that since artists increase property values in any given area, by attracting hipsters and cultured people with money, we should start an enterprise that consisted of moving a group of artists temporarily into fallow real estate, fixing it up, making it gorgeous, holding art events with publicity assistance from major cultural organizations, and then moving to the next space when desirable tenants were found. The radical part of this idea was that the artists would get paid to do this.

To this end, I talked with dozens of artists, event planners, lawyers, investors, businessmen, and cultural organizations. Everyone agreed that this was a splendid idea. I put together a core team of people with diverse practical skills, wrote up a business plan, ran it by some accountants, and applied for funding and fiscal sponsorship. Then all of our financial and political capital (i.e. the business/legal/cultural organization contingent) vanished without a trace.

After I got over my shell shock, I realized the obvious--that the entire foundation of our cultural economy depends on the fact that artists work for free. As much as it is politically expedient for those with cultural and financial clout to pay lip service to the idea of supporting the arts, artists, and freedom of expression, they are never going to back a project which threatens their authority.

This may go some way toward explaining why good ideas like Conor's so rarely become manifest in reality. The difference between an eccentric loser crackpot and a visionary creative mind is merely one of financing. But for every thoughtful, erudite screenplay that languishes in the slush pile, Hollywood makes ten inane, derivative blockbusters that are forgotten in two weeks; for every architect who designs an elegant, energy-efficient, sustainable building, developers put up forty more strip malls; for every thousand hard-working, skilled, reliable employees who lose their jobs, some investment banker pockets another multi-million dollar bonus, courtesy of the federal government.

As has become inescapably clear to anyone who has read a headline in the last four months, 'authority' in our society has become nearly synonymous with 'sociopaths, narcissists, pigs, sadists, and nincompoops.' And yet those of us with good ideas--those of us with skills, ethics, talent and vision--stand around wringing our hands, as we have been wringing them ever since we first graduated from college with honors, and discovered that we had a choice among sacking groceries, waiting tables, and temping.

In days past, when smart people with initiative found themselves crushed by corrupt and oppressive systems of authority, they went somewhere else. They colonized Australia, or Canada, or California. But we have no physical frontiers left on the planet, and the corruption of brainless, brutal authority threatens to destroy us. We have to find another paradigm--one that consists of action, real action, not useless symbolic statements like rallies, petitions, protests, and Marches On Washington.

Because an enormous part of the problem is that we have all been trained from the cradle to respond to authority like children. Meek submission, blind obedience, feeble protest and violent revolution are all part of the same authority-dependent continuum; they all acknowledge that the power of the violent alpha, the one with the money, the connections and the brawn, is what determines our circumstances.

So what might a trans-authority paradigm look like? Could it start with community building? Could it benefit from consensus decision-making? And how can it be financed? Consider this an open question.

Well, damn

Culture11 is going under. I'm seriously bummed about this, because lately it's been one place where I've seen smart conservative writers engaging with genuine good will and a distinct lack of petty, mean-minded sniping. It is too bad there doesn't seem to be much of a market for this.

On the other hand, I hadn't actually realized that Culture11 was, well, a business. Having been an artist for 20 years and a blogger for 4, supporting myself (barely) by any means I can, and regarding the occasional art sale or ad revenue check as an exciting bonus, it always perplexes me when people make ambitious business plans that rely on getting paid a living wage for generating intellectual property. Particularly when they've been in business for less than a year.

I wish our culture worked that way, but it manifestly doesn't. I never thought I'd see the day when I'd call a bunch of conservatives out on their naive idealism.

Question

Rod Blagojevitch is clearly insane, delusional, and a narcissistic nincompoop. Why is he continuing to garner news media attention, instead of being shot full of Demerol and confined to a locked ward?

Oh, wait, I know! Palin/Blagojevitch 2012!

To Set Away Childish Things

The time has come. Let's get going.

Once upon a time, I was looking for a roommate. I put out an advertisement for a 'mature female.' When one of the candidates arrived at the door, I was in the kitchen; it took me 15-20 seconds to respond to the doorbell.

When I was halfway to the door, the bell rang again, long and furiously. When I opened it, there stood a girl in a spiked dog collar and fuchsia hair. "You said the appointment was at 2, and it's 2 now," she whined, incensed at being made to wait those interminable 20 seconds while I traversed the length of the house.

What I did not say: "I asked for a MATURE roommate. Can't you READ??!!! Why are you wasting my time?"

Instead I invited her in, and it took her only two minutes to discover that my cats had independent outdoor access by means of a cat flap. Her cat wasn't allowed outside. "So sorry. Goodbye." Catfight avoided.

In that moment it dawned on me--immature people don't know they're immature. You can lecture them until you're blue in the face, and they just think you're being mean. Every adolescent thinks he's king of the world, and that he has nothing to learn. The best we can usually do with such brats is to fence them in, be polite, and try to limit collateral damage until they injure themselves sufficiently to inspire serious thinking.

But for too long now, our nation has been run by children, and we have not only failed to fence them in, but have neglected to define what, exactly, makes them so childish. So, in a spirit of hope, and perhaps a start on good parenting, I'm going to spell it out.

Spite: petty ill will or hatred with the disposition to irritate, annoy, or thwart; MALICE.

Making goofy faces is childlike, not necessarily spiteful; it all depends on the context. Spite is refusing to consult an expert on a crucial issue because you need to prove something--even though that expert might be your own father, and even though his counsel could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives.

On a more mundane level, spite is the deliberate withholding of generosity, whether it be consistently interpreting other people's motives in the most negative possible light, harping on petty issues at the expense of major ones, or habitually making mean-spirited comments that impede productive communication. It is prizing one's egoistic sense of superiority over the concerns of others.

I was going to continue the list, but now that I think about it, everything else flows from this one thing. We have the choice to view other people with compassion, to attempt to understand where they're coming from, to let go of rigid expectations, or to condemn them out of hand and attack, attack, attack. We can cling to our own perspectives and try to force the world to conform to them, or we can have the inner confidence to consider other points of view. We can whine, blame, and take pleasure in the suffering of others, or we can shoulder our responsibilities with quiet good will.

The more I have read about Obama's transition process, the more I have felt--not euphoric, not hopeful--but simply relieved. During the debates, when listening to McCain go on about arcane details of international military engagements, I thought, "This guy would make a great Presidential advisor, if a temperamentally problematic President"; now, lo, Obama is asking him for advice. His appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State appears to have brought out the best in her, judging by her recent address to the Foreign Relations Committee; it productively incorporates her iron will, her ability to assimilate formidable amounts of detail, and her need to be immersed in conflict and drama in order to function. With every decision he makes, I see a renunciation of grievance and a determination to expect the best of people, tempered by a realistic understanding of our human limitations.

Because the tragedy of the Bush administration was not that mistakes were made. It was that avoidable mistakes were made, and not corrected, because the ego aggrandizement of the few took precedence over the well-being of the many. There were advisors available who knew better, at every step of the way--whether the issue was the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, the handling of the war itself, the warnings about the financial system, the handling of disaster relief after Katrina--but these people were dismissed and ignored, for the pettiest of reasons.

The Obama administration will make mistakes, because that's what people do. We, as a species, are not adults yet. We don't know everything, we're not able to divest ourselves of grievances and blame, and we haven't figured out a way to cope with the complexities of a changing world. My hope is not that Obama will miraculously 'fix everything,' which simply is not possible. It is that he will inspire us to become a little less petty, a little more responsible, and a little more forgiving. Perhaps as a nation we will start to leave adolescence behind.

The Marginal Utility of a Dollar

Thank you, thank you, thank you, anonymous donors:

It may not seem like much to you. But there's this thing about money that economists call *The Marginal Utility of a Dollar.* It describes the way one dollar means much more to someone who has only a few to begin with.

I've had times in my life when $50 didn't seem like much to me either. This is definitely NOT one of them.

Here's one of the big differences in my life a *small* amount of money just made: I can type some tonight. Why? My hands are now covered with these Lidocaine patches. My *mummy* hands. They're very expensive, nearly $400 for 2 boxes, or even more if you don't shop carefully.

My previous Medicare HMO's refused to pay for them at all, they just weren't covered. Effective January 1, I changed HMO's. This year's HMO does cover them, hooray! OMG! I've waited to get these patches for 3 or 4 YEARS, and now, suddenly, I need them far more than ever before.

However...that new HMO still wants a $20 copay.

Just a little $20 copay, right?

But when you have less than zero money, and you acquire a small sum, first you buy food. So those patches sat at Walgreen's for a week, because I didn't have $20 for the copay.

And now I have my patches, and at least for tonight, I can type.

It's so easy to give in to despair, particularly in times like these--to think, "there's nothing I can possibly do to alleviate the suffering around me, so I won't even try." It happens to me, more often than not. I read about the war in Gaza, slave trafficking in Thailand and India, brutality in Africa, the overwhelming global financial meltdown, and my faith feels like the spark left after a candle is blown out, confronting a tsunami.

Then I ask for help, and help arrives, sometimes from people I don't even know. Miracles abound.

'The Condescension of the Entitled'

Rob Horning speculates upon the evolution of 'kindness':

A theory: When kindness is performed out of social necessity by those without the privilege of inward-looking selfishness and individualist isolation, it doesn’t register as “kindness.” When one finds they must make a conscious effort to be kind and must trumpet their efforts to have it recognized as such, it’s probably already too late for them to be worrying about kindness—they have already become the beneficiary of an unequal society to the degree that they are conscious of being or not being kind. If you think, “how kind of me,” how kind have you really been? Being kind has already become an expression of class privilege, not human fellow feeling.

Indeed. I don't encourage my friends to assist those in need out of 'kindness,' either in myself or in others; I do so because of an innate understanding that 'there but for the grace of God go I.' Aspiring to some sort of moral virtue in doing so strikes me as hubristic.

It seems obvious to me that some human beings are born with a well-developed sense of empathy; others, not so much. It seems equally obvious to me that codified moral systems, whether they be religious or secular, attempt to lay out a rule book for conducting oneself as though one were motivated by empathy, as though one's neighbor were oneself. This is why I believe that following one of these systems to the letter does not guarantee one the moral high ground, nor do I think that such system-following is the pinnacle of human morality. Religion and law are a training ground for the conscience, no more and no less.

Furthermore, I see that when a sufficient number of citizens in any society follow an empathy-encouraging moral system for an extended period of time, that society continues to extend its empathy in more pervasive ways--by setting up a universal healthcare system, for example. This is an organic process, not a revolutionary one; witness that the brutal feudalism of the Russian empire produced the brutal levelling and totalitarian failures of Marxism, whereas the gentler Christian traditions of Western Europe gave rise to more or less functional socialism. The difference, in my view, is not just one of degree but of genesis.

Moreover, the word 'kindness' itself encompasses such a wide range of acts, feelings and motivations that it is almost pointless to argue whether society is becoming kinder, or more callous. As Horning points out, kindness aligned with power produces the condescension of the entitled; kindness unaligned with power is just common decency. (via Sullivan)

Community, Please Rally Round

I have a very serious favor to ask of all my readers.

A very good friend of mine is in a very bad way. Due to a combination of severe chronic health problems, and the fact that the makers of the drug Cipro failed to warn consumers of crippling tenosynovitis as a side effect of its use, she is completely disabled and in terrible pain:

Along with the physical loss of the use of most of my fingers, my left hand, and now the right hand, is the most mind-bending pain I've ever experienced. To touch or accidentally brush against anything can make me cry out despite myself. It's the kind of pain that brings you close to vomiting, to going insane, to chewing into your own flesh like a mortally wounded animal.

Every day a new area of attack emerges. It's spread from my left hand to the right, throughout my left arm, left shoulder, left rib cage, both elbows, both knees - front and back - both ankles, both Achilles tendons, and now both feet. This morning it had hit my left lower back. Tonight, just now, I felt it pulling throughout my left leg. All these for the first time, all in the last few weeks.

At the same time, her husband is disabled because of a work-related injury after a heart attack, and both workman's comp and disability are screwing them over:

We're like so many other Americans, living paycheck to paycheck; if one paycheck stops, life can spiral out of control with horrifying speed. We're there. Walter's Worker's Comp was cut off on a spurious basis. Yesterday came a letter saying his disability claim was denied. The basis? They said his disability was from a work injury, so go apply for Worker's Comp.

Like so many others in this disastrous economy, Joe and I are hanging on by our fingernails, with the help of good credit, good health, family, friends and community. We can't wait for the government to step in and solve this; we've got to help our friends in need, RIGHT NOW. This is my friend and she is in need; I have just sent her the amount of my monthly blog income (from the Russian brides, in fact). I can vouch for her character.

Please hit her tip jar NOW. The money will go for food and medicine.

Why I Am Not Renewing My Whitney Membership

Received today:

Dear Ms. Jackson,

It's been several months since your membership expired on October 31. Your support is crucial to the Whitney's vitality and I sincerely hope you'll consider joining us again.

Since its founding, generous individuals like you have helped the Whitney advocate for artistic innovation by responding to emerging trends...

After all, our exhibitions are not just the artists' stories. They are also your story.

Dear Whitney Museum,

It is true--my support IS crucial to the Whitney's vitality. The Whitney relies on emerging artists like myself, not only for direct financial support, but for the media attention, attendance and respect which allow the museum to retain its status as a major cultural arbiter in the contemporary art world. This is why I am not renewing my Whitney membership.

Because the 'story' of 'emerging trends' that the Whitney's curators have chosen to tell, as evidenced by the last two Biennials, is not my story; nor is it the story of the thousands of other emerging artists whose work is aesthetically rich, conceptually engaging, and culturally relevant in a wider arena than that of mere cliquish Art World politics.

Instead, the Whitney has consistently championed art which is conceptually banal and aesthetically bankrupt, selected almost entirely from a pool of artists who have already been filtered by high-profile galleries and cultural organizations, and justified by a morass of pretentious, impenetrable and obfuscatory rhetoric.

As a Whitney member, I receive regular newsletters, exhibition and lecture calendars, and fundraising requests from the museum. Never once in these publications have I seen the Whitney acknowledge or respond to the widespread criticism of its use of egregious 'artspeak' in the most recent Biennial, despite the fact that this issue was discussed in both the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine. I see no evidence that Whitney curators are paying attention to the art blogosphere, which has exploded during the last few years with debate, commentary and original vision at a grassroots level. I sincerely doubt that these curators spend much time looking at artist registries, attending studio tours and alternative exhibitions, or combing through unsolicited submissions in search of unknown artists with powerful vision. The organization's stated goal of 'responding to emerging trends' is a disingenuous distortion of the reality--that its curators pander to the tastes and agendas of a small coterie of insiders, ignoring artistic arenas where passionate engagement is yet unbolstered by wealthy patrons, critical attention, or a curatorial agenda.

As I have come to see it, the Whitney and institutions like it have a vested interest in ensuring that the vast majority of living artists remain voiceless, invisible and powerless. It is our thousands of college tuitions, donations, fees, submissions and applications which keep major art institutions financially viable, and allow their agendas to supercede artists' visions. The aesthetic and conceptual characteristics of the art itself are literally the least important factors in whether or not the work gets shown, if the artistic quality of the past two Biennials is any indication. Far more important are the invisible machinations of profit and ego politics, which parasitically feed upon the resources of artists and art lovers, dependent upon the fact that artists work for free, and will pay for any slim chance at recognition.

After all this, the fact that the Whitney expects literate persons to swallow absurd curatorial verbiage in lieu of a powerful artistic experience is a slap in the face. Cancelling my own membership is the least I can do in the face of such institutional contempt for my intelligence; I can only hope that my example inspires many others to do the same.

They're Not Going To Go Away

Happy New Year, darlings! I trust all of you are still there. I am still here, although moving very, very slowly.

Recently I have been exasperated, but not surprised, at some 'progressive' reactions to Mr. Obama's pre-presidential appointments, notably his decision to include Rick Warren as the prayer-giver at the Inauguration. It seems as though these people weren't listening to a word he said during the entire campaign; some of them even seem to have believed the delusional right-wing hype about him. They seem to expect him to roar on in and impose a radical agenda, ignoring the cries of the opposition, much the way Bush has done for the last eight years. All that stuff about 'we are one people' they took as so much window-dressing of a totalitarian agenda. Now that he is behaving exactly as he said he would--prioritizing competence over ideology, listening to people with whom he does not agree, creating bridges between opposing factions of society--they feel shocked and betrayed. They failed to understand his underlying philosophy.

So, it is very simple: They're not going to go away.

Gay people aren't going to go away. Neither are evangelical Christians. Neither are atheists. Neither are Israelis. Neither are Palestinians. Neither are Muslims. Neither are poor people in need of healthcare. Neither are immigrants.

Nobody, in fact, is going to go away. You can try to exterminate them, of course, but the relatives of genocide victims have a way of running off, reproducing, and coming back with guns and international treaties. If opposition makes people stronger, persecution makes them superhuman.

So why in the world do people persist in behaving as though we just need to make those people go away, or at least shut up and Know Their Place, is a valid solution to any and all problems?

I am as upset about Proposition 8 as anybody. I have no great affinity for the Rick Warrens of the world; any world view which fatuously and self-righteously declares that certain people must, by nature, be treated as second-class citizens gets no support from me. But the reason this view is ludicrous, in my view, is written above: They're not going to go away.

In other words, "You have not got the right to exist, at least not on the same level as me, with the same rights, privileges and responsibilities" is an unwinnable argument. You might cling to semantics, ideology, theology, or weaponry in order to prove your point; you may prove it over and over and over again. You may use political leverage, financial leverage, or angry petitions to gain the upper hand. But you're never going to get the opposition to toe the line, because there they are. Not going gentle into that good night. That's just a fact.

So it seems to me that we have two choices; continue trying to exterminate, humiliate, overpower and dismiss Those Awful People, or accept that they exist and seek other ways of coming to some accomodation with them. This will inevitably be a unilateral proposition, at least in the beginning. People do not leave aside their spite, grudges, fears and hatreds easily, particularly when they predicate their identities upon these things, and particularly when past experience has taught them to expect persecution. Somebody has to make the first move, and I'd like to think that so-called 'progressives' would be willing to make it.

And in the grand scheme of things, an inaugural prayer is a really small concession to make. Be generous, already.

Complexity, Paradox, and Hope

Deborah says it better than I could:

...what I am hoping to see on the 20th is a vision of our collective spiritual mind-scape in which it's clear that everyone wants the world to be a better place, and yet the only mental tools we collectively have to do that are tools of destruction, of hammering complexity into brittle certainties. And I am hoping that by putting the two halves together and winding up with a total complexity, we wind up seeing a door to allows us to collectively comprehend complexity in the future.

I might be disappointed, but I am going to hold out hope because I think that this is the most important thing we could possibly be doing right now. We aren't going to get anywhere if we can't inhabit the world as it actually is--in terms of its profound complexity and irreconcilability and connectedness. Every time we create a construct that allows us to think that the world is simple or understandable, we are actively breaking something--shutting off understanding of something else. Defining the parameters of our minds and refusing to let in more. This has real physical consequences outside ourselves. We can't keep breaking things, but at the same time all the tools we have are the tools these men offer: lenses that focus one true or beautiful or correct thing to the point of oversimplification. We all do this. We all have beautiful smashing tools that tell us not how the world actually is, but how we want the world to be. So that means that we are all at this really funny crossroads: we have to learn how to stop breaking and hammering by selectively breaking and hammering our way out of the habit.

Cultural Sickness

This comment on the NYTimes editorial page today got more attention than the Krugman article it was attached to:

The underlying cause of the economic catastrophe is cultural, not just a few bad policies or corrupt officials: The USA now has an excessively adversarial, exploitative, cutthroat culture, undermining the civility, generosity, tolerance and respect that societies need to function. It's a dysfunctionality that devastates human capital and ruins good people.

I'm an old engineer now, but I still teach classes and mentor budding engineers. This cultural sickness hits them in 3 cruel ways: an unforgiving financial sector where loan-sharking is the norm, mass outsourcing of critical jobs, and a legal system so vicious that good people find all their decency and good intentions subverted in the interest of personal destruction. Recent grads have crippling debt, yet they're "the ones who did everything right"-- thrifty savers who studied hard, didn't gamble or waste their savings, and patiently built their careers.

But education and living expenses debt are severe-- trapping them at the start of their careers-- and if grads hit a bump in the road, like suffering crime, illness, an accident of some kind, they're ruined financially. Interest rates in the US would be usury anywhere else, and since unfortunate circumstances causing debt are ignored, many decent, hard-working, entrepreneurial graduates are devastated. This is worsened by mass outsourcing and corporate abuse of the H1-B program, depriving grads of jobs and experience.

On top of this misery, our legal system is so viciously adversarial- with greed and high-stakes money ruling the system- that decent people are ruined, as they see their character attacked. I've seen good friends, business partners, even spouses who once loved each other deeply, pushed to "go at it" and destroy each other for money-- rather than accepting the fallibility in all of us, and coming to a reasonable accommodation better for everyone, that respects how much people have invested in their careers.

In short, the US has become an inexplicably vicious, hostile place that undercuts its talented people, denigrates achievement, and has lost touch with the basic importance of mutual respect.

There. I find I haven't a thing to add.

Investment Advice for Dummies

Unlike many other commenters, I feel no urge to excoriate Alexandra Penney for having once been wealthy:

When I hung up with my friend, I turned on the TV and began to scour Google for news until the message became nauseatingly clear: Forty years of savings—the money I’d counted on to take me comfortably through the next 30 years—had likely evaporated in Madoff’s scheme.

THAT MOTHERFUCKER!! The soufflé fell.

I do wonder, however--what was she thinking, to invest forty years of savings with one motherfucker? Why would anyone do that?

Once you are making more than your basic expenses, you invest in highly diversified index mutual funds. Socially and environmentally responsible ones. That way, the only way you're entirely bankrupt is if Western Civilization permanently collapses. Which, at the moment, is a distinct possibility.

So you also invest in real estate (income property, not just Second Homes, or first ones), gold, and bonds. You have a chunk of money in a money market account. You have an emergency savings account in an unpretentious mom & pop savings bank. You have a couple of friends in foreign countries.

This is basic. But the failure to follow common-sense money managing principles seems to be part and parcel of what I've been ranting about all day--that too many people submit entirely to the Big Authority, instead of building a network of lateral connections. It seems that the only reason Alexandra Penney trusted Madoff was that he was 'exclusive' and well-known among the upper classes; she never met the man, never understood the nature of his business. And yet she handed him the power to wipe her out.

And again

Extreme wealth does not indicate merit, it indicates thievery:

As regulators and shareholders sift through the rubble of the financial crisis, questions are being asked about what role lavish bonuses played in the debacle. Scrutiny over pay is intensifying as banks like Merrill prepare to dole out bonuses even after they have had to be propped up with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. While bonuses are expected to be half of what they were a year ago, some bankers could still collect millions of dollars.

Critics say bonuses never should have been so big in the first place, because they were based on ephemeral earnings. These people contend that Wall Street’s pay structure, in which bonuses are based on short-term profits, encouraged employees to act like gamblers at a casino — and let them collect their winnings while the roulette wheel was still spinning.

Does anybody seriously think that these people earned their money, in any system of accounting that is tethered to the physical world in any way? Why, then, do we continue to behave as though people with large incomes deserve every penny they have, and that people with small incomes deserve to go without healthcare, decent education, transportation, etc.?

From the top down

As if there were any doubt:

Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

Yes, and what about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney?

This is not a joke. It is incredible to me, how many Americans seem unable to free themselves of knee-jerk deference to authority, sufficiently to hold the President and Vice-President accountable for war crimes. These men aren't gods. They are human beings who have knowingly committed unbelieveably evil actions, and have given orders for untold other people to commit those same evil actions.

Our country throws poor people in jail for possessing a few ounces of pot. It throws them in jail for street fighting and petty theft. The law is not an equalizing force, it is a controlling one. Its purpose is to control the underclass, while the upper class gets away with robbery on the scale of billions, murder on the scale of hundreds of thousands, and systemic torture.

We accept this state of affairs because we're trained to it. We accept the canard that 'the government is keeping us safe' because it is too terrifying to wonder what is keeping us safe from the government. Unconsciously, we believe that keeping our heads down, going along with the lies, will keep the finger of brutality pointed elsewhere.

It won't. As long as we keep silent about this, we are complicit.

Lovely Interlude

I met the girls of Ember in Mexico in 2002, and their music is as gorgeous as ever. Their CDs would make great stocking stuffers, hint, hint.

Fundamentalism and Denial

Andrew Sullivan sums up the Bush psyche fairly accurately, I think:

With this president, it is actually hard to know for sure whether he is capable of understanding what he did. I have no doubt that Cheney and Rumsfeld understood very well that they were crossing a legal and moral Rubicon; they knew they were authorizing war crimes and made every effort to give themselves phony legal cover and a theory of dictatorial presidential power that would have made King George III blush.

With Bush, however, his levels of denial are so strong he may simply be unable to accept that he has committed an absolute moral evil.

This Christianist president has a hard time with actual Christianity. He is of the fundamentalist psyche that holds that since he is on the side of the angels, he cannot do evil. And so even when presented with indisputable evidence of his own acts, his own memos, his own staff's decisions, he cannot own the consequences. He asked for memos from apparatchiks saying it wasn't torture, as if this guaranteed it wasn't torture. He reacted to the tangible consequences of his own decisions as if someone else had been president, or someone else's signature was on those memos, or someone else's vice-president had publicly embraced torture as a "no-brainer."

There are many times in my life when I have had infinite patience with fundamentalists--people with rigid, absolutist moral philosophies, who freely discuss angels and demons and the cosmic struggle against evil. On some level I both understand where they're coming from, and perceive a great deal of metaphorical truth in their reasoning.

The problem is, THEY don't see it as a metaphor. And in their literalistic, black-and-white struggle against evil, they are far more likely to project the evil in their own psyches outside themselves, and use their rigidity as an excuse to bully, torture, attack, harass, mock and oppress people who do not see things their way. This is not 'fighting evil', it's a transparent and contemptible attempt to avoid the very self-examination that is the core of all true spiritual growth.

In a way, I can kind of get inside Bush's head. I think he believes that someone else actually was President. I think he thinks that he was following spiritual guidance in doing what he did. I think he saw the machinations of Rove, his privileges of birth, his innate charisma, all as the hand of God directing him to become President and carry out an evangelical crusade against the evils of the world. And I think that on some level, it actually was spiritual guidance.

But the one thing I've discovered about spiritual guidance is that the lessons it teaches you are never the ones you thought you were learning. Bush didn't stamp out evil in Iraq; he didn't stamp it out anywhere. He may or may not have learned a few things about unintended consequences, listening to others, personal responsibility, and perceiving the character (or lack thereof) in one's intimate advisors. I've said before that I think Bush is co-dependent on an international level, and I stand by this assessment.

Spiritually speaking, however, he is a child, and the people around him are bullies. A Sullivan reader sums it up:

...their faiths themselves are defined by the people they exclude: the unbelievers, the unsaved (or let's be blunt: the "damned"), the always-demonized Other: without that division, that exclusion, their entire theology, indeed their entire worldview, collapses: a theology of inclusion is anathema to them, just as a politics, a sociology or even a science of inclusion (evolution) is anathema.

And why? Because despite their fine words, and their closely-guarded self-images, the actual and real ruling principle of their lives and their theology is fear, not love.

Everything flows from that original orientation, that original choice (because it is, finally, a choice). For them, to be inclusive is to expose themselves to what they fear; and what they fear most is summarized in their mythology of hell and eternal damnation: an eternal torture of body, mind, soul and spirit administered by an angry, vengeful, psychopathic god. It is all pure projection.

And irony of ironies, it is precisely the opposite of the message the Christian Savior tried to bring: that salvation is found only through love, through inclusion, through openness of mind and heart and spirit, through, ultimately, trust -- that this world, with all its difficulties and pain and imperfections, built through evolution, and including endless Others, is as it should be, as it was intended to be.

But that leap, from fear to trust, from fear to love, from fear to inclusion, is not an easy one, either for the individual or for a society. No evolutionary leap ever is -- and that is precisely what the leap from fear to love is: an evolutionary leap; evolution in action, evolution at the cognitive, emotional and spiritual levels.

Tangentially, this same Sullivan reader references a This American Life episode which I also listened to, and which I highly recommend, about an evangelical pastor who committed the ultimate heresy--he stopped believing in hell.

Okay, I'm angry.

BAGHDAD — An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

Translation: The Bush administration wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, and told blatant lies to cover their incompetence, stupidity, and ignorance, quite possibly destroying this country as well as the country of Iraq in the process.

You people--you know who you are--voted for George W. Bush, TWICE. You people--you know who you are--cling to the belief that Sarah Palin is a much-maligned, abused innocent who made a valid Vice-Presidential candidate, despite the fact that she is even more ignorant, even more jingoistic, dogmatic and demonstrably incompetent than George W. Bush, and a proven pathological liar as well.

Have. You. No. Shame.

Compassion and Vitriol

Now, tell me. Which of these two people deserves an outpouring of compassionate empathy, and which deserves to be mercilessly excoriated for narcissism, selfishness, and general asshole-hood?

I have been to 11 schools in different parts of the world and there must be thousands of people I could, if I wished to, call my classmates. I was never sad when leaving and I never had trouble making friends; I blended in just fine with whatever crowd there was to blend in with. My trick was that I never missed friends and relatives whom I left behind. The moment I set foot in a new country, even the moment I set foot in a plane that was to take me away, the friends I made in the country I left stopped existing. I have never written a letter or an e-mail or a Christmas card to anyone, never called, never tried to catch up with people with whom I used to hang out. If I got letters I never replied.

Or:

I didn't intend to be celibate for the rest of my life. I just wanted to get some therapy, wanted to understand why I kept choosing men who were smart and funny but critical, sarcastic and merciless like my father. I figured I'd give it a go again later, when I felt stronger, more confident. In a couple of years, say. But here I am -- 55 years old, a spinster long past my sell-by date, no kids -- and I haven't had sex in a decade and a half.

It's my own fault, I know. I'm picky. Casual sex doesn't do it for me. (I've always thought I had to be in love in order to make love.) I regard men with ambivalence, with alternate longing and fear. I've grown accustomed to being alone.

Can anyone explain to me why example #1 received dozens of gentle, forgiving responses, many of them with the heading 'Me Too,' while example #2 received seven hundred and thirty two comments, the majority of which were along the lines of 'Quit whining, you bitch'?

Because I am going to go out on a limb and state that candidate #1, regardless of Childhood Trauma, regardless of the human Need to Adapt, regardless of Coping Strategies, nevertheless still bears the moral responsibility for acting like a narcissistic user. In fact, this person IS a narcissistic user, whatever the reasons behind her behavior. I say this because she knowingly and habitually behaves in ways which hurt the people she claims to care about. Their unhappiness is less important to her than the discomfort she might incur in making the effort to change. And that is lame.

The second candidate obviously has Issues, as well. But while she may be losing out on life in protecting herself from its hurts, at least she's not out there actively harming others in the process. So what is the deal? Is this simply an example of vulnerability drawing attack?