Speaking Maturity to Power

In my private practice, I teach that successful living has much less to do with the cultivation of intellect than it does with the nurturance of maturity. Living maturely means being in touch with your body and its life, its needs, and its messages; rather than subjecting yourself to whatever groupthink the government or Good Morning America happens to be feeding you at the moment.

So while the President tells lies amid a carefully (and expensively) staged setting, I am reminded that all conflict springs from an underlying immaturity. Every dispute, each barking stage of separation and divorce, every fight, and all the wars of mankind, are caused and perpetuated by the infantile mind.

Osama is not a Satanic symbol of Evil incarnate; he is just a rotten boy, a miserable adolescent living out a grotesque video game fantasy in real life. He is the poster child of regressive psychosis, and deserves no magnitude, no elevation into a symbolic monument of Evil. He is far too puny and insignificant a thing for all that.

The same is true of our President and his handlers in Washington. How clearly like a boy is he—nay, more like an infant. He squalls, blusters, stumbles over his tongue as if it were a stray shoelace dangling from his rubber face. He is the public mascot for dependent personality disorder, with his incoherent slavery to tyrannical corporate advisors and incompetent stooges who manipulate him like obsessive-compulsive nannies.

He has learned to externalize everything—especially blame. He casts it away from himself and his circle of controllers like a baby throwing food from its high chair. Listen to him tonight, if you can stomach it: every solution will be couched in violence or threat; every bromide of patriotism and the sacrifice of others besides himself will be painted in underlying strokes of conflict and hatred. Every lie will be told with the grim passion of a four year old who insists upon his innocence, even as he is covered and surrounded by the proof of his mischief.

People like Osama and Bush have never learned the first principle of maturity: that every conflict starts within the self, and that every conflict's resolution can be found in that same inner place. To look toward an external God is to become inevitably trapped in the quicksand of war, as the President himself has so helpfully demonstrated. To rely on weaponry is to explode the self—the first shot in a war is the last; it will inexorably return to its originator. To conduct government and diplomacy with the tools of threat and malevolence is to alienate those who would otherwise become your allies.

But there can be no alliances where there is tyranny; there is only death and fear, fueled by immaturity. A tyrant is, in essence, a brat: a self-aggrandizing runt who measures his own worth by the amount of damage he can cause. To deal with them, perhaps the best we can do is to speak and act so as to keep such miserable urchins off the stages of power and public policy; even as we turn within ourselves every day to nurture the humble love of self and other that truly, and maturely, leads the living personality.

The Cancer of War: Iraq, the Home Front, the Planet Earth

According to Technorati's statistics, there are something like 25 or 30 million blogs out there now. One of my favorites is Eric Alterman's Altercation, which appears on MSNBC. Alterman's primary talent as a blogger is his ability to condense the essence of a big and complex story into two or three brief paragraphs, while not narrowing the reader's perspective. That's what he did today in his piece about the global warming issue (to refer to it as a "debate" is to slide beyond ignorance and into the agenda-driven denial characteristic of our leaders in Washington and our mass media).

Why are people swallowing this studied ignorance? Why is global warming (incidentally, it was near 60 degrees again in New York today) even remotely considered a "debate"? Just turn to the business section of today's newspaper, and there's your answer: Exxon raked in a record $10.7 billion in profits in its last quarter, and set another record for 2005—over $36 billion. That's six months' worth of the Iraq War, ladies and gentlemen. It all ties together.

Which brings us to our next contribution from Terry McKenna, who we heard most recently in his health care series (which, according to the Progress Center, is to be a major theme of the King's SOTU speech tomorrow night). Tonight, Terry demonstrates how the mindset of war sets itself into a tyrant's brain, so that foreign policy and domestic policy are no longer apart. Mr. McKenna:

The history of recent foreign policy is of old men sitting in a well-appointed room somewhere planning how to preserve the good. For them, the good is defined by what is good for the existing economic and social order. The two world wars show us that despite good intentions, we have a hard time controlling outcomes.

The first WW was a complete disaster—nearly everyone was destroyed by the process. The second WW was equally unfortunate to both winners and losers. France and Britain lost their empires; Germany was destroyed, and split in two for 45 years. Only the US and USSR improved their position in the world.

After WW2, the US and Great Britain decided on a mix of force of arms, direct subversion, and the use of armed surrogates to contain the Soviet Union and Red China; and to maintain access to the bulk of world oil reserves. We were smart enough to not blunder into another global war, but our efforts to strangle Soviet expansion faltered (remember the domino theory).

We are in a new era where the US is the single “super power” but now no one cares.

In Africa, from the Sudan to Zimbabwe, impoverished but corrupt dictatorships commit the worst sorts of atrocities without the least concern for “world opinion.” (Just check out the dominant members of the "20 Worst Dictators" Club). The middle east remains a mostly benighted place with the brightest spots (Iran and Palestine) residing the farthest from the US orbit – and yes, Israel is a democratic nation in the middle east, but that’s almost beside the point, given the massive shifts underway in the deserts of power. In Asia, China and India are emerging industrial powers competing with us for oil and steel and going their own way on foreign policy (hence China’s and India’s policies towards Iran).

What will we do now? Iran elected a fundamentalist extremist – after we suggested to moderates that they sit this one out. The results may have been the same regardless, but how can we pretend to support emerging democracies unless we allow for the give and take of electoral politics? In Palestine, Hamas won a stunning and shocking victory. In Bolivia, the Americas have their first indigenous president - left-leaning Evo Morales. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez thumbs his nose at the US. And in Chile, socialist Michelle Bachelet, will soon take power. And as far as the bomb goes, our “ally” Pakistan traded technology with (it seems) everyone. Iran should have a bomb soon. Korea probably has a few already. Who next?

How can we reassert control? Iraq shows us that a new war is out of the question; our army is stretched to the limit. But subversion won’t work either. Not anymore, not in the days of satellite telephones and the internet. (Nor will the arming of surrogates – remember Afghanistan! We essentially created the Al-Qaeda playbook and provided them with arms to do it). No… we have no options.

So what is a right wing president to do? Maybe that explains the secret domestic surveillance. Perhaps GW and Co. have decided that if they can’t control the world, maybe they just need to control the home front. That’s right, in the mode of Richard Nixon, they may have embarked upon a course of domestic spying against domestic enemies.

Paranoid? Over the top? Sure! But without congressional oversight, we’ll never know, until history, someday, tells the tale.

—T. McKenna

The Boy Who Taught the World to Dance

I have a story to tell tonight, about the best musical concert I have ever attended, and it weaves together two historical moments that are being observed today.

It will have been 20 years ago, about three days from now. It happened at Carnegie Hall here in New York, and the artist was Rudolf Serkin, the magnificent Austrian pianist. He played, as well as I can recall, two Beethoven sonatas (The Tempest and Waldstein?), maybe a Brahms piece, and then at the end of the program, the Mozart C Minor Fantasy. He walked onstage for this last piece, and before sitting down to the keyboard, he faced the audience and humbly announced, "This is for the astronauts."

If there was a dry eye in the house by the time he finished, I would not have noticed, for mine were streaming. It was one of those moments in which art and prayer merge; where you felt as if a hidden world was speaking directly through the hands and heart of an artist and his audience.

People say that language is the greatest and most uniquely human gift. I would answer, "well maybe, to the extent that it is a particular form of music." Perhaps, in the realm of non-form, the dimension of being that some must call heaven, everyone speaks and communicates in pure music, and all movement is dance. If so, it is no wonder that death is such a mystery—if it weren't, then we'd all be far too anxious to reach the blessed realm that the Buddhists call "the pure land."

For many of us, no artist in human history has ever brought us so near to that bliss-dimension as the man whose 250th birthday is being observed around the world today, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. For anyone who has ever experienced the sound of Fate breaking over the raging body of Don Giovanni; who has heard the mournful cantabile of the A Minor Clarinet Concerto; who has felt his heart melt to the prayer of the Ave Verum Corpus—Mozart is as alive today as he ever was in the Vienna or Salzburg of some two and a half centuries past.

Sure, much of what you may have heard and seen of his personality and life (most notably in Milos Forman's marvelous 1984 film, Amadeus, a link to the trailer of which is at the graphic above) is true. He was vain, often arrogant, childish and sometimes infantile (probably because of his truncated childhood, in which he was treated like the proverbial circus monkey), rude, impractical, and subject to bizarre mood swings. And it should also be noted in passing that much of what is told of him is pure bosh (and, incidentally, that the unfortunate Salieri probably had as much to do with his death as I did).

In the midst of it all, this little man with a crooked wig and a near-obsessive taste for women became the vessel of an art whose like had never been known, and never will be again. His music has inspired every musician who lived after him, whether or not they had ever consciously felt or acknowledged his influence. He moved the human race forward, by reminding us that it is our nature to be musical; by showing us that, no matter how fraught with pain a human life may be, it can still dance.

So in this moment of planetary peril and seemingly irreparable human suffering and institutional ignorance, it may not be a bad thing to pause for a moment to listen to the music of this man whose life, though a mere breath of 35 years upon the endless web of time, somehow received and recreated the song of all Life.

Hear Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus(3MB, 2:45 playtime)

Fundamentalism: Dung for the Tree of History

First off, a message for Oprah: I feel your pain. I can assure you, I've got two books that are real, true, and thoroughly non-sensational. And they're selling worse than a bowl of Hamas in Jerusalem (sorry about that, really I am). If you can just give me a passing endorsement, Oprah, I know I can make Idol, now that those twins have been removed: folks say I can belt out ancient Chinese poetry with the best of 'em.

We live in a world where fools are adored, and arrogance rewarded. We live in a time when real work is paid with scorn, as if it were a disgrace, and when the sham of busyness is given credit, and often stock options. Ours has become a nation so obsessed with image that the once living substance inside has rotted into a stinking lump of darkness.

Every morning, on the subway, I see people reading God, in black or tawny red books with gilt lettering on their dark covers. I wonder, "is god there—in those books?" Surely it is there, somewhere, though not in the language. I look for god in the same places where the great scientists have, though without even a shadow of their insight and ability. I look between the lines, in the atoms comprising those pages, in the quantum space that patiently carries the images. But god can't control whether those images are the pictures of a delusion. Only you can.

Is God in His heaven, talking over a golden phone to a squint-eyed, vapid white man in Washington or Crawford who can't string two sentences of decent English together at a time? Is He magically engorging the cranial vasculature of an old white minister of state in Israel, as punishment for having divided a desert filled with bullets and fables? Is He silently plotting the murder of a socialist leader in South America, for the greater glory of Himself and His appointed television spokesmen? Is He intelligently designing a world where cruise missiles decapitate children, and white phosphorous melts the skin of widows?

The real god that you breathe in and exhale in every moment, that dances through your bloodstream and even your bowels—this god is in your flesh—you are it and it is you. This god is the subatomic ocean that sparkles in the lips of lovers or the eyes of children. It is always at rest, and never stops moving; and will never be trapped in the slimey snares of fundamentalism. So let the dead rot—fundamentalism is shit for the compost heap.

Have you ever wondered why tyrants are never assassinated? How can you kill what is already dead? Every tyrant kills the god within himself, until only a shell, an empty image, remains. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all their ilk, are hollow husks whose rot will feed the tree of history, and thereby nourish the next generation, and fertilize the coming transformation.

State of the Union: CYA

Before we begin tonight, I want to point out another reason why I feature the work of Terry McKenna in this space: it seems he's repeatedly ahead of the progressive curve on the issues that matter most. If you've been following along here, you know that most of last week's posts came from Terry on the subject of health care and the woeful state we're in as a nation, both medically and economically, with respect to health care. Well, today I notice that American Progress—my personal favorite among all the progressive online truth shops—is rolling out its own analysis of the health care problem. I would encourage you to read it, because it adds even more statistics and sobering observations to what we had from Terry last week. Sure, the crimes, depredations and incompetencies of the Bush administration and the necon Congressional hegemony are important; but still I have a feeling that when it comes down to crunch time at the polls this November, health care could be the one big issue on which the Democrats can take back the majority on Capitol Hill.

Now perhaps you have noticed a certain theme developing over the past few weeks (or years): the people and institutions that have bludgeoned us with the message that they are here "to protect America" seem to spend far more time defending themselves than they do protecting us!

Welcome to the CYA Administration: Clueless from Crawford is at the NSA today (after his former NSA czar publicly fumbled a simple explanation of the Fourth Amendment yesterday); meanwhile, his Secretary of CYA is busy denying the conclusions of a report on the state of the American military that was ordered by...um...the Pentagon itself; and the legal staff over at 1600 Penn is very busy obstructing the flow of information on the Katrina debacle.

Once again, I ask: how can you possibly have any energy for protecting America when you spend all your time covering your own fat, stinking, diseased butt? Hell, these people have to be corrected by journalists on the actual language of the Constitution, so let me remind them of one of its crucial clauses, while the rest of us click on that graphic above and left to get our Congress to show some sense of responsibility toward this benighted nation:

Article II, Section. 4.
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.