Author Archives: Morgan Mussell

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word

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See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, by John Snape, CC-BY-SA-3.0

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, by John Snape, CC-BY-SA-3.0

This morning I showed my wife a newspaper photo depicting a politician who closely resembles a recent movie villain.  “No one will vote for him,” I said.

She laughed and agreed, but a little while later said, “Wow, that made it hard.  I’m trying to give up criticism for Lent.”

I apologized, for I know how hard real spiritual discipline can be.  Then I reflected that her resolution echoes a thought I’ve had on and off for some time – cutting, or at least reducing, the negative topics and posts in this blog.  The period of Lent, about seven more weeks, seems like a good trial period, so I’m going to try this experiment and figure it out as I go along.

When considering this move in the past, I’ve had fears along the lines of becoming Pollyanna or having nothing to write about if I close my eyes to the world’s crap.  I am confident, however, that tens of thousands of writers can take up the slack if I take a break.

There are many reasons to do so.  First and foremost for me is this simple truth from Zen teacher, Cheri Huber, so simple and yet so easy to forget:  “The quality of your life is determined by the focus of your attention.”  

The same truth is expressed in completely different terms in Scott Adams’s new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.  This cartoon genius who gave us Dilbert says:  “Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others.”  (I plan to review this book here soon).

A final, obvious example, given his recent visit to this country, is the Dalai Lama.  Beyond doubt, he’s the most joyous person who lives in the public spotlight.  I’ve never been in his physical presence, but I have met a few spiritual masters, men and women of several traditions, and for me, they all had one thing in common: when you get near them, you pick up their joy.  And I mean a profound joy, the kind that sometimes has left my jaw aching from smiling so much more than I am used to.  I’m sure the Dalai Lama is like that.

Dalai Lama with Christ University Choir, Bangalore, India

Dalai Lama with Christ University Choir, Bangalore, India

One of the many things he has said that always struck me concerns a difficulty he had when he first came to the west: he could not at first believe the degree of shame and self-hatred that are native to our culture.  It was completely new and shocking to him to hear such a thing, for there was nothing like it at all in Tibet.  I believe it’s no coincidence that you never hear the Dalai Lama say critical things about anyone else.  He doesn’t even criticize the Chinese, saying only, “They helped me cultivate patience.”

As I end this post, I realize some readers outside the U.S. might not be familiar with its title, which comes from an old western song, “Home on the Range:”

Home, home on the range,
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,
And the skies are not cloudy all day.

“Home on the Range” is the state song of Kansas, and like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” that other great song that reminds us of Kansas, it seems to ask the question, “Why not I?” Or, “Why not us?”

Asking “why not” is itself a classic spiritual discipline.  What factors hold me back from the kind of life I want to live.  In my own case, criticism of self and others is part of that mix.  Let’s see what happens here over the next seven weeks…

Dr Seuss to the rescue

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A few days after his birthday 110 years ago, here’s a wonderful list of wise aphorisms by Dr. Seuss, courtesy of Rachael at Street of Dreams

beautiful loser's avatarStreet of Dreams

In honor of Dr. Seuss’s birthday, I’ve come across a fun little collection of life sayings (from his books) to live by.

I know I’ve posted similar things in the past, but everytime, I come across one of his books or a collection of his work, I am amazed at how insightful he was. And I am amazed at how complicated adults must make things.

Note: sorry this is a few days late. I thought I published this piece but apparently word press had other plans.

Dr Seuss to the rescue

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Media musings

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I find most alliterative titles, like “Media musings,” to be about 40% cute and 60% annoying, but in this case, it’s a good match for the headline that inspired this post: “Ellen’s Oscar ‘selfie’ a landmark media moment.”

“A what moment?” I mused.  “A landmark media what?”

Because the media is falling over itself to celebrate Ellen’s tweet, and because nature abhors a vacuum, it has fallen to me to be the curmudgeonly voice of this “event.”  One of the first things a curmudgeon does is reach for the dictionary.  A “landmark event” is “an event, discovery, etc. considered as a high point or turning point in the history or development of something.” 

At first I thought it must be the high point of product placement.  The picture in question was taken with a Samsung phone, Samsung was a big Oscar sponsor, and the Academy Awards are the biggest post-Super Bowl marketing event.  But that’s not really new news.  Reading on, I realized the article referred to a landmark social media event. Since tweeting about TV isn’t new, an expert, in this case an Oscar co-producer, had to explain it to the likes of me:

“What it’s all about right now is creating a conversation, and social media allows for the conversation as it’s happening.”

Oh thanks, now I understand.

The dogs don’t like me being a curmudgeon, so while I was writing this post, Kit grabbed my (non-Samsung) phone and snapped a selfie, hoping to create a new conversation.

Kit snaps a selfie

Kit snaps a selfie

“It’s all about what’s happening now,” she says, explaining why she wants to establish a social media presence.

So the price I pay for being a curmudgeon is having to ask all you loyal readers to give my dog a tweet (she accepts treats as well).  After all, she is cuter than Ellen’s crew, and she hasn’t been real annoying since puppy days when she chewed up my wife’s phone.  That really happened, but it’s a story for another day, and right now I need to let you log onto your twitter accounts.  Don’t forget – it’s all about right now.

The American Monomyth

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In my so far disappointing effort to make sense of Tumblr, I have at least found several intriguing posts, including this one from josephcampbellwasright.tumblr.com called “The American Monomyth.”

The Monomyth is a world-wide mythic pattern that Joseph Campbell described in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 1949:  “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

The Tumblr post references a lesser known book by Robert Jewett, The American Monomyth, 1977, that describes an interesting variant:

“In the American monomyth, the hero is an outsider who comes into a once-perfect community in peril (the “violated Eden”) to confront the evils that have caused trouble. The hero eschews such things as joining the community, standing apart from them in order to better keep them safe, in a manner that could best be described as vigilantism. Once the evil has been vanquished, the hero either allows himself to absorb into the community (through such means as moving in, marrying, etc.), or he moves on to the next violated Eden.”

The post lists several movies as examples, but doesn’t mention several key genres that raised the “Heroic Outsider” to the mythic status of true American Hero.  What of superheroes like Batman and Superman or crime fighters like The Untouchables?  What of the genre I grew up on, the western?

Clint Eastwood and Sidney Penny in Pale Rider, 1985, my favorite "Heroic Outsider" western

Clint Eastwood and Sidney Penny in Pale Rider, 1985, my favorite “Heroic Outsider” western

While Googling for westerns with the classic, “clean up the town” theme, I came upon an interesting syllabus for a course at Dominican University, The Western:  America’s Mythology – books it would be fun to add to my geometrically expanding list of things I would like to read!

Meanwhile, I suspect that everyone has personal favorite books and movies in this “swoops in and saves the day” genre.  What are some of yours?

Anatomy of the Deep State by Mike Lofgren

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Be warned, this post has disturbing content.  If it was a movie, I’d rate it “R,” not because of sex or violence, but because it concerns a penetrating essay on the current state of the US government.  Change the channel now if you’re squeamish.

If you’re still here, good, because disturbing or not, I think everyone ought to read Anatomy of the Deep State, by Mike Lofgren, a former GOP Congressional aide who retired after 28 years as a staff member for Congress and the Senate.  This article is a distillation of ideas he explored in his recent book, The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.

party is over

Lofgren says what many of us have long suspected, that our visible political landscape is merely the tip of a much bigger iceberg – that our various issues, debates, and elections often have little to do with the real trajectory of power in this country.  Much of this “real” trajectory is hidden in plain sight.  With almost three decades inside the belly of the beast, Lofgren can show us where to look.

He cites many examples.  During the political circus surrounding the 2011 debt ceiling “crisis,” our leaders had no problem finding money to topple Gaddafi.  A few months later, during the government “shutdown”, while debates raged over canceling meat inspections and air traffic control, we gave $112 million to Syrian rebels, to keep that conflict going.  And since 2007, as our bridges collapse, schools fail, and cities go bankrupt, we’ve spent $1.7 billion on an NSA building in Utah the size of 17 football fields.  Its purpose is to house a yottabyte of data.  A yottabyte, the largest number computer scientists have so far coined, equals 500 quintillion pages of text.  “They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life,” Lofgren says.

The best news, according to Lofgren, is that what he calls the Deep State is far from invincible.  He notes how sufficient ineptitude draws pushback even from allies, citing our two failed wars and the Snowdon revelations among other things.  Past elites have often reacted to challenges in one of two ways.

Some have tried to “stay the course,” and Lofgren observes that,“The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner.”  Others have followed reformers, as diverse as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, and Deng Xiaoping.  What each of these men developed in common was a deep understanding that their cultural stories and myths were ossified and that survival depended upon renewing both vision and action.

Mike Lofgren, a self-described “former proud Republican” now says, “there is…a deep but as yet inchoate hunger for change. What America lacks is a figure with the serene self-confidence to tell us that the twin idols of national security and corporate power are outworn dogmas that have nothing more to offer us. Thus disenthralled, the people themselves will unravel the Deep State with surprising speed.”

The first step in dealing with any problem is understanding its nature.  In this time of deliberate political and economic obfuscation, I highly recommend Anatomy of the Deep State as one of the best and most succinct diagnoses I’ve yet seen of what ails us.

An unplanned television fast

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CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

We are a week into a major home reconstruction project that has about 2/3 of our living space sealed off against dust.  Bedroom, study, kitchen, and bath are available.  Internet too, since I carried the modem down to this end of the house.  A little cramped at times, but overall, just fine for a short period of time.

What surprises me is how little I miss TV.  More than that, it’s refreshing in many ways not to have it.  The sound was on at one of the TV’s at the gym and I found it so irritating I moved away.

It hasn’t been a completely video-less week.  One day we ventured out to the cineplex to watch Frozen.  Another evening we viewed an Agatha Christie mystery on youTube (the 13″ screen of my mac was ample).  On Friday, I watched a 20 minute Newshour segment on pbs.org.  And last night, we clambered through the dust curtains, out to the living room where the furniture is clumped, to watch the finale of Downton Abbey.

I’m not going to waste any time with polemics against television.  I enjoy several shows and of course, Turner Classic Movies.  I expect to watch those when the house is back to normal.  But a cautionary story came to mind as I looked for images for this post.

It’s possible some readers may not remember analog TV and the pre-404 no-signal pattern called “snow.”

Snow. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Snow. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This always reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s visionary novel, Snow Crash.  Published in 1992, Stephenson envisioned a post-nation state world in which people lived as citizens of corporate territories.  The former United States still excelled at two things, computer micro-code and high speed pizza delivery, the latter because the mafia had taken over the business.

In 1992, the year I first got a windows computer, an 8K modem, and an AOL membership, Stephenson imagined virtual worlds where people created avatars to jack in and interact.  Then someone launched a virus that messed with people’s brains.  Anyone who opened this malware saw a pattern based on ancient glyphs that led to the Tower of Babel.  Viewing these symbols scrambled their neurons, in essence, turning their minds to snow.

What struck me this past week were the parallels to our current media world.  I can’t help thinking of all the ways that commercials, local news, political debates, and most of what passes for entertainment scramble our neurons, though much more slowly and in ways that leave us perfectly able to buy stuff.

I could say more, but this is enough – something to think about.

‘On the Supposed Unsuitability of Fairytales for Children” Guest Post by J. Aleksandr Wootton

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This is, in essence, a double reblog, in which you will meet two interesting writers in the field of folklore. The first is Benton Dickieson of Prince Edward Island, Canada, who blogs at A Pilgrim in Narnia. The second is the author he presents, J. Aleksandr Wootton, self described “Author, Folklorist, Poet, Book-Worm, Faerie Historian, Cultural Critic, and Virginian.”

Writing on the “Supposed Unsuitability of Fairtales for Children,” Wootton has much to say including a fine summary of a subject I’ve circled about on several occasions, attributes of successful fairytale heroes and heroines:

“The world is fraught with danger, including life-threatening danger, but by being clever (always), honest (as a rule, but with common-sense exceptions), courteous (especially to the elderly, no matter their apparent social station), and kind (to anyone who has obvious need), even a child can succeed where those who seem more qualified have failed.”

Enjoy the websites of both of these folklore enthusiasts.

Brenton Dickieson's avatarA Pilgrim in Narnia

J. Aleksandr Wootton chairs the fictional Folklore Studies department at Lightfoot College, where his research focuses on post-war Faerie. He has authored Her Unwelcome Inheritance, an account of fairy refugees on earth, and has recently published a poetry collection titled Forgetting: Impressions from the Millennial Borderland. 

For more on his writing, or to contact him, visit www.jackwootton.com.

“On the Supposed Unsuitability of Fairytales for Children”

J. Aleksandr Wootton

Shortly after supporting a local library event promoting fairytale literature, the folklore department at Lightfoot College received an animated communication from a very concerned mother regarding, in short, the “unsuitability of fairytales for children.”As this seems to be a rather widespread idea (I might mention the Daily Telegraph article of February 12, 2012) as well as an oddly long-lived one, I take the liberty of public response.Dear Madame,

Though you may be unaware of it, your email represents sentiments that have…

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Remembering Kate Wolf

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Lately I’ve been thinking about Kate Wolf (1942-1986), a singer and songwriter from this part of the country who was just beginning to draw national attention when leukemia took her at the age of 44.  Growing up, she listened to Dylan, The Weavers, The Carter Family, and Merle Haggard (1).  Her poetic lyrics celebrated backroads and small towns and her music wove the “high lonesome” sound of bluegrass into landscape of northern California.

Once I loaned a friend one of Kate’s albums.  When she returned it she mentioned that her 10 year old son listened to several songs and said, “Wow, that music is really sad.”  Pothos comes to mind, a Greek word I have used here before, that signifies a restlessness, an unrequited and unrequitable longing for what lies beyond the horizon.  Pothos is the affliction of dreamers and it’s woven as a minor chord through much of this music, even when it seems most concrete:

Here in California fruit hangs heavy on the vines,
But there’s no gold, I thought I’d warn you,
And the hills turn brown in the summertime.
– from “Here in California” by Kate Wolf

In April, 1986, Kate was diagnosed with leukemia.  After chemotherapy, she went into full remission, started work on a retrospective album, and scheduled another tour.  The disease returned in the fall, however, and we lost her on December 10.  Her long time friend and touring partner, Utah Phillips covered the remaining shows she’d booked, including one in Placerville Mary and I had tickets for.

He led the crowd in singing her songs and said something I’ve never forgotten. “At the end of her life, Kate told me she knew why she’d gotten cancer.  She took in people’s pain, the pain of living.  It was the source of her art, but she realized too late that she never learned to let it go.”  Phillips warned everyone to beware of clinging to grief and reminded us of the threads of hope and joy we also find in her music.

Kate’s music has been covered by musicians like Emmy Lou Harris, Nanci Griffith, and Peter Rowan.  You can sample her songs on katewolf.com, a website her family maintains, as well as on iTunes. Once you listen, these songs find a home in your head and heart, for as Kate Wolf put it in “Brother Warrior:”

We are crying for a vision
That all living things can share
And those who care
Are with us everywhere.