Impeaching Helplessness

For a supposedly liberal newspaper, The New York Times is traditionally respectful to institutions and their leaders. So when you see a quote like this in one of their editorials (this is not the op-ed page, mind you, but an editorial), it gets your attention:

Nor is there likely to be an explanation of why the White House could not have sought the court’s approval in the first place. The White House’s claim that the process is too cumbersome doesn’t ring true. The law already allows the government to wiretap first and then ask for a warrant within three days. The real reason is almost certainly that the imperial presidency had no desire to share power even with the most secret part of the judiciary.

We've been talking here about the imperial presidency for over two years now, but this is the blogosphere, not the Paper of Record. For the Times to be switching to language like this in a Sunday editorial is a sign of how clearly decadent our government has become.

Also in Sunday's Times was a more familiar voice of cut-the-crap sanity: Frank Rich, who has been calling them clear and straight for years now.

In reality we’re learning piece by piece that it is the White House that has no plan. Ms. Rice has now downsized the surge/escalation into an “augmentation,” inadvertently divulging how the Pentagon is improvising, juggling small deployments in fits and starts. No one can plausibly explain how a parallel chain of command sending American and Iraqi troops into urban street combat side by side will work with Iraqis in the lead (it will report to a “committee” led by Mr. Maliki!). Or how $1 billion in new American reconstruction spending will accomplish what the $30 billion thrown down the drain in previous reconstruction spending did not.

A program of lies rarely accomplishes anything beyond a narrow and limited agenda: this is the reality of the modern corporation in a nutshell. The problem we're living with today is that our government has studiously modeled itself after the corporate, adopting all of its delusions and fabrications; pursuing the five-year plan of destruction, perpetual downsizing and firing, and short-term profiteering as if it were the golden fabric of a new social order, the outline of a new constitutional model.

That, too, is, of course, a lie. Indeed, an entire tapestry of lies—what I have elsewhere referred to as a monument made of shadows.

But for a fellow like me, the question really is this: "can it all be about mere greed?" Or is there something else feeding the greed, filling the hungry demon with the vapid sustenance that only increases its desire?

I had cause to work on these quesions a little over the past week. The circumstances are quite unremarkable for our time: I was fired again by another corporate entity (this time the credit card monolith, American Express). On the morning after I'd received my notice (I'm to be officially discharged this Friday), I woke up with the sensation that a sea of time had drained between the night before and the morning after. It was as if a vast gulf had suddenly opened in the space between that then and this now. On the way into work, the sensation only intensified, all the way to the point where I became fearful—that I was going crazy, that I was sick, or even that I was about to die.

So I said an inner No to that fear, and to the self-consciousness that created it, that made me think in terms of an image or a perception rather than about what was really happening within me. It was at that point that a certain realization came about, and it came in the form of a fresh meaning to Hexagram 1 of the I Ching.

This is the hexagram that has been traditionally referred to as "The Creative". The understanding that arose to me on the subway ride to work that day was "The Awakening". Here is the rest of it, as it came through me:

The Awakening:
The sun of the self arises,
Fearless and free.
Where could the darkness have gone?

It occurred to me then that it is fear that feeds all destruction, all delusion. Fear fuels every dogma of fundamentalism. What Bush and his co-conspirators, for example, have done in Iraq is only superficially driven by greed. For the hidden agent of greed is fear.

Greed is itself commanded by fear. Why else would someone grab and accumulate, spiraling down all the while through layer after depraved layer of murder, corruption, and falsehood, so far beyond the point of satiety? What makes greed run so far out of control as to defeat its own purpose?

It must be fear—a terror of such conditioned, corporate intensity that it makes a slave out of the tyrant. What other kind of fear could make a person die within, to his very core of being, rather than face his inner torment and call for the help needed to overcome it?

The psychologist Joan Borysenko offers one description for such a fear in her book, Fire in the Soul:

The most basic fear of every human being is rooted in the helplessness of childhood, the time before we are capable of surviving on our own and must depend on the protection of powerful others. It is the fear of rejection and abandonment. This instinctual terror arises from the part of the mind that thinks not in words but in feelings and images. The common nightmares that children have about being chased and devoured by monsters—nightmares that occur even in children who have never been exposed to the idea of a monster—are the expression of a primitive fear that has its roots at the dawn of human history when abandoned children were, indeed, chased and devoured by wild animals.

Borysenko goes on to point out that the destructive effects of emotional abandonment are every bit as devastating and life-threatening as physical abandonment: isolation sickens and eventually kills its host. Lonely children fail to grow naturally; adults trapped in isolation have significantly greater incidence of heart disease, depression, and immunological illness. Borysenko is referring directly to the fear of abandonment within the family or human society, but her description also implies a related and equally primal fear—that of the abandonment, through repression or denial, of one’s true self, one’s unique individual connection to Tao, or the Cosmic Whole. This, too, is isolation—the loneliness that comes of separation from the Source of our being and the unified totality of our personality. This is the isolation that befalls us when, under the influence of a group ideology, we project an inextinguishable stain or intrinsic fault onto Nature, and thus onto ourselves.

This fear, this isolation, is what I saw in Bush's face during his last speech; it is what I heard in his voice. The demons have trapped him; the nightmare is real; and he can't move in any direction except to let them drag him further into death. When it is all over, he will need treatment, a lot of help. But now it is his very illness, his utter rootlessness, that will make him and his cronies all the more dangerous if they are allowed to remain in their positions one moment longer than is absolutely necessary by the time required for the process of the consolidation of the evidence and the procedural necessities of impeachment.

Now is the time.

The Corporate Cold Shoulder

Maybe if you work for a company in corporate America, you'll understand what I'm talking about here: so often, workers will peel the skins off their backs to keep the company treadmill moving and productivity at least apparitionally positive. In return, they will be browbeaten, burdened with threats and suspicion, shafted at payday, bonus time, and the annual review, but most of all simply ignored.

If this sounds familiar to you, then you'll not be shocked to find that you are being treated exactly the same as a citizen of the United States of Corporate America. Tony Snow says that you and the remaining two-thirds of the American electorate are "out of touch" with the reality in Iraq. So it's time for a troop surge, some ten weeks after the American people had told this government, in the clearest possible terms, that they've had enough of this war and its endless escalation; and less than two weeks after our own nation's death toll had reached 3,000.

Next week will mark another milestone, the fifth anniversary of the opening of Camp Gitmo, Dick Cheney's personal torture laboratory, where all the other aberrations of justice and humanity that have marked this administration took root. The FBI has now released a horrifying report of what has gone on at Gitmo; and it resounds fairly exactly with what AI, HRW, the IRC, and other international NGOs have been telling us for years. Here's part of what our government did there, and repeated at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and uncounted other places around the world:

Captives at Guantánamo Bay were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves, an FBI report has revealed...Besides being shackled to the floor, detainees were subjected to extremes of temperature. One witness said he saw a barefoot detainee shaking with cold because the air conditioning had bought the temperature close to freezing.

This is what our government has been doing, even as it sent young men and women of our own to the most violent and horrible deaths and disfigurements imaginable; and as it prepares to continue to do tomorrow and next week, until we stop it. This is why I rise to disagree with all the Democrats who are saying that impeachment is the wrong direction to go. In fact, I don't see any other direction that will preserve this nation before its bespattered dignity is thoroughly corrupted and lost before the entire world.

In fact, our corporate analogy weakens only in the matter of the degree of the depravity involved. We corporate citizens have been treated worse than the lowest schlub in the company mailroom. We have been lied to, sneered at, taken for granted, economically stripped, driven, and most of all, ignored.

Will the new Congress change all that? Not unless we are all over them on it. Here are some options for making that happen:

Amnesty International's human rights pledge

Gold Star Families for Peace and the Walk for Change (today)

Code Pink's letter to Congress: Impeach Now

UFPJ's March (January 27)

If you know of anything else that's happening in your part of the world, by all means add it to the comments and I'll post it prominently here. The time to tear away the veil of corporate ignorance must be now.

Power: Naked and Upturned

The thing I love most about Death is how it tends to reveal the institutional ego in its most naked weakness. The superficiality that death exposes surpasses even your average mass media New Year's celebration. Now put a couple of high-profile deaths side by side with the turning of another solar calendar's page, mix well, and you can see the Emperor in all his pink and bearded nudity. It's like grabbing Power by the ankles, turning it upside down, and viewing its crotch: the scrotal eyes, the dangling penile proboscis, and the short, ragged beard covering the dark and recessed mouth. Power in 2007: raw, naked, and...dead?

I don't know. But maybe Terry McKenna does. Here he comes...

On the weekend of Saddam Hussein’s execution, we need to ask ourselves: did his death make it worth it? For much of the first two years of the war, the Bush Administration, aided by a strangely compliant press, presented a story of war that was a succession of milestones. Each one was treated as a success and as a benchmark on the road to a free and secure Iraq. Now the death of Saddam is counted by the Bush White House as another triumph in the War on Terror. But a triumph of what, for what?

There is an old saying that suggests that nations get the government that they deserve. It was said often during the cold war, and it allowed us to feel complacent about the lack of change in the Soviet Union. For if they were getting what they deserved, then perhaps it was ok to let things alone. The notion has some truth in it. For example, the nations of Western Europe spent 5 centuries developing democratic institutions (such as independent courts). Thus it is no surprise that modern Europe is genuinely democratic. Russia on the other hand replaced Czarist Tyranny with Soviet Communism. Can the current tyranny under Putin really be surprising? It turns out that Gorbachev was the true Russian original, but the revolution he hoped for had no takers. If we consider the wider world, Africa remains very poor and virtually hopeless, and so are its governments. I won’t try to say much about Asia, but certainly the need for governments to maintain order among large masses of people would tend to create different governing structures than would be necessary in the much less populated regions like Canada and the US.

So Saddam was the leader that Iraq deserved. Iraq was an artificial creation assembled by Europeans out of groups of unfriendly and very tribal Arabs (both Shiites and Sunnis); around the edges, they added Kurds, and even sprinkled in a few Christians and Jews. Perhaps the only way to control Iraq was through the sort of brute force that Saddam was comfortable in using. Certainly our experience as an invader would suggest as much. This is not really surprising. Yugoslavia was a similarly artificial place assembled by negotiators after a war. Its very name meant nothing, the place of Southern Slavs. I don’t see a stirring anthem coming out of that history. It was often said (by knowing commentators) that after Tito passed from the scene, Yugoslavia’s opposing factions would destroy it. And so they did.

In the 1960s and 70s, Gerald Ford represented an America that was beginning to pass from the scene. Decent small town America. After Tricky Dick faded away, we needed a man like Jerry Ford to put things back in place. He was not an intellectual, but neither was he a boob (he graduated from Yale Law School after an undergraduate career that included success on the gridiron). As an experienced legislator and minority leader, he was a successful negotiator and conciliator. So, yes we were lucky to find him at the right time, but it also was inevitable that such a person would emerge during the 1970’s and Watergate.

The America of the 21st century is a different place than the America of Gerald Ford (or Ronald Reagan for that matter – he too came from that more decent time). We are full of ourselves, and full of shit too. We expect the world to take us as we are without our making the least effort to take the world like it is. And we’ve lost our ability to think. News is presented in sound bytes, and then the bytes are analyzed. Talking heads will come on TV to debate “stay the course” – and until recently no one was willing to admit that “it” was over. The America of today is – as already has been explained in this blog – the creation of corporate America. Not only do the corporations have tremendous behind the scenes power, they also have created the Newspeak that has replaced the English prose narrative that we’ve been perfecting since Shakespeare. Who better than George Bush to represent our era? Yes, that’s right, a mindless automaton is the embodiment of the America of today.

Do we deserve this fate? I think we must. Perhaps it was the sin of Hubris. In any case, it’s not about any single one of us, but about the corporate us. We may not have any control over it, but America is surely our creation if it is anyone’s. Think of the current culture as the result of some unseen hand (the very same unseen hand that directs the economic marketplace). And just like the marketplace, it didn’t do a very good job with us.

Oh well, tomorrow is another day.

—T. McKenna

The Time To Be "Firm As A Rock"

Here amid the Karl Rove parallel reality, we have been trained to detest truth. Or at least to genetically modify it, which to my mind is saying the same thing. Remember, for example, that ABC "docu-drama" about 9/11? Or any of the swift-boating campaigns against John Kerry, Max Cleland, and various others? Or the Pentagon's docu-drama on the death of Pat Tillman?

Well, John Rolfe of SI, one of those extraordinary sportswriters with a gravel-tipped pen, as it were, has exposed the sports version of this surreal trend in journalism. Rolfe has written a bristling article on a piece of "reality fiction" about Mickey Mantle, which is to be published by none other than Judy Regan of recent FOX / OJ infamy. It gets really fun when Rolfe offers a selection from his own "reality novel" on the late Yankees manager, Billy Martin. This scene is from a conversation the author has with #1 as the latter arrives back from Limbo:

Martin settled into a chair by the window and fished a cigar from his jacket pocket. "Mind if I smoke? I love a good cheroot, but St. Pete won't let you light up unless you go outside. Damned cosmic winds keep blowing your match out. I tried going down to the Other Place and your matches sure stay lit, but you can't hear yourself think from all the hammering and electric saws. Halliburton's building an extension on the place..."

"So why have you've come to tell me all your darkest secrets?"

"Good deed. Earn some brownie points. Figured you could use a hand, put the 'truth' in a novel, make heap big scratch. You got kids. I hear tuition's a killer these days."

"So is the price of a red Ferrari. Fess up."

"My brawlin' tough-guy stuff was just an act. It got out of control after the fight at my birthday party at the Copacabana in 1957. Hank Bauer just had to have that last goody bag and I stuck my nose in to stay tight with the team. After that, I had to keep fighting to save my jobs. Heck, I'm a sensitive guy at heart. I liked poetry, puppies, decorating cookies, barbershop quartets. Sheez. I even cried easy. Managed to keep a lid on it until I broke down in K.C. in '78...."

Read the rest of it here.

_________________________

I was thinking today about how difficult it is to avoid becoming an asshole when you work in corporate America. You know, when you swim in a toxic pool, the poison inevitably becomes a part of you. I am honestly more afraid of that than I am of losing my job and being materially impoverished. What is there left to lose after you lose your self, after you are assimilated?

Right there, in the Wintergarden of the World Financial Center in New York City, that fear took hold of me. So I did what I often do in such moments: I threw some coins. I used to worry about people watching and what they'd think, but I'm too old to care anymore.

I tossed Hexagram 16, "Enthusiasm" from the I Ching, with the second line changing. It taught me what I needed to know about holding to my true self amid corporate America, and I'm also hoping it may serve to teach all of us what we must do to help our country at a time when it is threatened to the core by a maniacal set of tyrants who are dragging us further into distant wars and global death.

Firm as a rock. Not a whole day. Perseverance brings good fortune.

Here's the commentary to that line, from Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog, in I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way:

"Firm as a rock" refers to the inner No that needs to be said to displays of ego...This line warns the person who is tempted to tolerate ego-behavior...[that] it is a form of magnificence (a false enthusiasm)..."Not a whole day" refers to saying the inner No at the first sign of ego's appearance. Depending on the circumstances, the No can also be an outer No...It is "No" to the other's transgression against oneself, or to his false expectations...If the person does not say the inner No when ideas are false, they enter the unconscious by default and become part of his inner program.

Perhaps you have occasionally had the feeling that someone is attacking you, though there is no obvious physical or even verbal threat in the vicinity. That's your true self with its radar fully extended, catching poisonous airwaves from someone or something. It happens in our work, family, and personal lives; I suspect it happens in a nation's life, as in right now.

But if you haven't ever experienced such moments, I won't try and convince you that the sensation is both as natural and as genuine as hunger or sexual desire. Nevertheless, I think that six weeks ago, the people of this nation had such a moment, and they are seeing the actualization of the deeply-felt threat that guided them to vote the way they did. "Troop surge" is an attack on every American who voted with his and her heart last month, and chose a candidate who promised an end to troop surges and continued sacrifice and precision bombing campaigns.

Troop surge is a casting of more poison into the pool in which we all swim; sacrifice is a Roveian marketing term for the death by impoverishment of a once-great nation; and there is no such thing as precision bombing. It is all a lie, an oxymoron. You can target a bomb to hit a particular building, perhaps, but you can't tell the bomb, "kill the bad guys inside but spare the lady walking past the building with her young children." Bombs are designed to cause collateral damage; that is their purpose. In other words, they are made to kill indiscriminately, just as Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have designed themselves to lie indiscriminately.

Now we know—most of us, anyway; and now something can be done. Be firm as a rock: don't let any corporation steal your true being; don't let any government steal your true nation, and sell it into a slavery of death. Be firm as a rock.

God's Nose

Happy holidays to all, and a Merry Christmas to you, Bill-O: may your Who-ville moment of enlightenment be not far off.

One of the primary signs of a good blog is not necessarily its content or its writers as much as the quality of the audience it attracts. Daily Kos, Altercation, and the HuffPost (for example) are great blogs mainly because smart and perceptive people read them and post comments. So I'm always grateful when we have comments such as we received from Hugh7 to Thursday's post, where we considered the news of the supposed benefits of circumcision. Hugh7 is another of our readers who questions authority and penetrates appearances, and that's what we're about here at DR.

Now Terry McKenna is taking a well-deserved break from blogging. This week, we'll focus on the holidays and their various symbols and practices—starting with a small essay on God's Nose. First, a few news items from the weekend deserve our attention.

What does it take to make a Bush see the faintest light of reality? How about 35 minutes of torture in what is supposed to be a non-cruel and thoroughly human punishment? I suppose we should give Jeb credit for ordering the practice stopped, at least temporarily. Let's hope he has a talk with bro about the same principle: for now that the casualty count in that cruel and inhuman war for "our" side has reached 25,000 and another half million or so for "them," it would appear as if the moment has long passed to finally do what two-thirds of the American electorate is asking be done.

BBC is doing a special report on an issue that our mass media wouldn't dare touch, because it would adversely impact a cornerstone of the Washington economy, especially when Congress is in session. It's about prostitution, and is told from the perspective of the ladies themselves, and it is compelling reading. Check it out, and by all means pass the link around.

________________________________

God's Nose

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God knows all (mind, intellect); sees all (the omni-eye); and hears all (the cosmic NSA wiretapper). But He doesn't smell a thing; and this, I submit, is a problem, a failing of God.

The Greeks and other ancient cultures knew better. They understood that man was not created in God's image, but that it was really quite the other way around. Therefore, they gave God a very sharp sense of smell. This sense is a part of the many stories (usually of the big guy, Zeus), that involve attraction, deception, and even seduction. Read the tales of Homer, Ovid, or Pindar: if you wanted to get a god's attention in those days, you laid out a feast that would usually feature a juicy, burning, smoking sacrificial barbecue. The fumes from the roast would waft toward Olympus and next thing you know you'd have a god at the picnic table.

The only remnant of such stories in the Judeo-Christian Bible that I could find is Gen. 8:21, where Noah, having survived the famous flood, has smoked some sacrificial animals in the BBQ pit and the smell attracts God, who as a result swears never to destroy the Earth again. Otherwise, in both the Old and New Testaments, God's nose has been removed.

Maybe the authors of these texts wanted us to believe that God couldn't possibly be an animal like us, so they made a point of taking away or at least minimizing the most primordially animal sense—smell—from the attributes of God. Once again, in these texts God knows, sees, hears, and certainly acts a lot; but he rarely smells (though he often stinks).

The problem with a God who can't smell is that this deficiency severely weakens the teaching potential of the myth; it saps the metaphor of a crucial strain of pragmatism, since God is suddenly so fundamentally unlike us that His experience is no guide for our lived experience.

And if you think the sense of smell is overrated, check out the animal kingdom: what do two dogs do when they first meet? How do animals in the wild detect enemies or food? Then consider your own experience, and think of how often you've relied on your sense of smell to choose the right food, the best living space, even the right mate. For us, smell means so much that it has become embodied in our language as a symbolic or inner sense that's applied to situations metaphorically: we smell a rat, we sniff for meaning, we smell trouble, we will even say that we can smell a lie (and, in fact, we can).

So how can a God of the Universe teach us anything meaningful about ourselves—our lives, our bodies, our relationships—if He has been effectively deprived of the most basic and essential of our animal senses? For when we make God insensate to odor, then we in turn become the same, and we build a culture of sanitized, genetically modified foods that neither nourish nor entice us with a delightful odor. We also spew poisons into the air and can pretend they're not there, because we have denied, through our Creator stories, our own sense of smell.

This seems to be a problem we need to work on. My first suggestion would be that we simply drop God altogether—flush Him out of our consciousness, individually and culturally. This, however, may meet with a certain resistance in most parts of the world; so my second-best alternative is this: let's give God back His sense of smell. Give Him back his nose.