Tag Archives: Culture

Notes from 2017 – #TheResistance, one week in

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Today I set a photo of Lady Liberty as header for this blog, which is entirely consistent with its six year old title, “The First Gate.” She guards the gate through which many of our ancestors of non-native descent came to this country. Her light has been a beacon of hope for the world for several centuries. Never perfect – no institution is – this light is under attack in a war for the soul of the nation. Vicious forces, now in power, seek the transformation of our democracy into a tyrannical plutocracy.

Lady Liberty will remain at the top of this blog until the current administration is removed from power, or until writing a blog like this becomes illegal, whichever comes first…

This is not so much an article, as much as a collection of notes and images, like the jottings, sticky notes, and bookmarked URL’s that percolate into the articles I write. There hasn’t been time this week for percolation, so here are some tidbits, both distressing and encouraging…

1. Definition:  Plutocracy – A government controlled exclusively by the wealthy either directly or indirectly. A plutocracy allows, either openly or by circumstance, only the wealthy to rule. This can then result in policies exclusively designed to assist the wealthy, which is reflected in its name (comes from the Greek words “ploutos” or wealthy, and “kratos” – power, ruling).

To those who voted for the current administration – is this what you wanted? Because it is what you elected.

2. The Pledge of Allegiance:  Do they still make kids recite this in schools? If so, all school districts of integrity should immediately stop the practice. To force children to say, “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” is to make them repeat a lie, and indoctrinate them with the kind of hypocrisy which infects our overlords.

3. Donald Over the Edge? – The Washington Post reports that Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chair of the House Oversight Committee, is “weighing legislation to require presidents to undergo an independent medical examination, including for mental health. Chaffetz cautioned that he wasn’t ‘talking about some of the rhetoric that’s flying around’ about Trump. Still, he said, ‘If you’re going to have your hands on the nuclear codes, you should probably know what kind of mental state you’re in.’” The 25th Amendment to the Constitution outlines the means by which the Vice President and members of Congress may remove a president for office when he is unable to adequately serve. 

4. Join #TheResistance: This was a hashtag I first saw on Twitter back in December (I think), and thanks to three million women and their allies last week, has made it into the mainstream.  From the cover of Time to the millions following the rogue twitter accounts of the government agencies Trump tried to shut down, to those protesting at JFK this afternoon, to Jerry Brown, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, to everyone who values the ideal upon which this nation was founded, now and every day until he is out of office is the time resist the lies, fear, and unconstitutional tyranny now propagated by Donald Trump and his cohorts. Push back against the bullshit storm!

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And finally, from a tweet by Senator Chris Murphy (D Conn), a reminder of the absence of core American and human values in the Trump administration:

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Notes from 2017 – What is your innermost truth?

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I  started this post several days ago – in what now seems like a galaxy far away – with something different in mind. My title is paraphrases a question asked by Zen priest, Edward Espe Brown, at a retreat in 2011: “What is your innermost request?”

In the context of the retreat, I took his question to mean, “What is the deepest desire at the deepest core of your being?”  The word, “request,” implies not just desire, need, want, but something akin to prayer. What do we want our lives to be about? What would it take , when our time comes to leave this world, to exit with a sense of peace, victory, satisfaction?

I mean the same kind of thing with, “innermost truth.”  Not just beliefs, ideas, concepts, deductions, or any of the contents of consciousness, for they inevitably change. How many beliefs, ideas, concepts, and so on do you hold from this time a year ago, let alone 10 years ago, 20, or from childhood? What do you know more deeply than emotion and reason both?  Jack Kornfield, in A Path With Heart described this as something you know so deeply that if Buddha and Jesus both said, “You’re wrong,” you would answer, “I am not!”

It’s not an easy question, and there is no simple answer, but it has never been more essential to look to our truths, try to clarify and hold them close over time.

Knowing what we truly believe is an anchor, a center, a “know thyself” tactic at a time when the new president and his minions are trying to normalize lies as “alternate facts.”

The day will come when telling “a Spicer” is a synonym for “telling a whopper,” but until that happens, we need to guard our sense of right and wrong, true and false, as the greatest safeguards we have against the fascist administration that now occupies the White House.

voltaire

Notes from 2017: Who doesn’t love a hero?

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Woody Guthrie, 1943. Library of Congress.

Woody Guthrie, 1943. Library of Congress.

On January 16, The Times of London posed a question to Donald Trump:  “Do you have any models – are there heroes that you steer by – people you look up to from the past.”

In reply Mr. Trump said,: “Well, I don’t like heroes, I don’t like the concept of heroes, the concept of heroes is never great.” He then described his admiration for his father, from whom he learned “a lot about negotiation,” but then he gave himself final credit, saying that negotiation is “natural trait,” which “you either have or you don’t.”

Father and son may share additional traits. In 1950, Woody Guthrie leased an apartment from Fred Trump, and soon came to despise the president-elect’s father for his racism. In his song, “Old Man Trump,” he wrote:

Beach Haven ain’t my home!
No, I just can’t pay this rent!
My money’s down the drain,
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower
Where no black folks come to roam,
No, no, Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!

In the 1970’s, the Justice Department sued Fred and Donald Trump for racial discrimination, under the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which Rep. John Lewis helped pass. The Trumps settled, “without an admission of guilt.

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Heroism begins with a concern for someone or something greater than oneself, so of course Mr. Trump is unacquainted with the concept. Polls show his approval rating has slipped since the election, but a core group of supporters apparently still hope that inauguration will somehow awaken a concern with their wellbeing and that of the nation.

I’m betting in six months – a year at the outside – the denial will wear off, and most of his remaining supporters will realize they’ve been conned as badly but effectively as those who enrolled at Trump University.

We will not find any heroes in the White House after Friday.

Notes from 2017 – Predictions and Prophecies

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I’ve never been big on New Year’s predictions. Even if accurate, they’re like signs on a mountain road saying, “Watch out for falling rocks.” What do you do if you see one barreling at you?

Prophecies are even worse! In all the old stories, those who attempt to escape an evil fate choose the precise actions that bring it about. They do it every time!

Oedipus is probably the best known example. Told by the Delphic Oracle – an ironclad source – that his fate was to kill his father and marry his mother, what does he do? He quarrels with the first old guy he meets on the road and kills him! That’s when we know it can’t turn out well!

The following video is Keith Olbermann’s take on what we, as a nation, have done. Recognizing that our political and economic systems were broken, we went to the polls and made a choice that most of us now know can’t possibly turn out well…

See what you think. I’ll make a few predictions of my own in future posts, but most of them follow on this one.

Notes from 2017 – Remember moral courage?

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On New Year’s day, Wall Street Journal editor, Gerard Baker sparked a social media storm after saying on Meet the Press that he has instructed his paper’s journalists not to report Donald Trump’s lies as lies, but as “questionable,” or “challengeable” statements (1) (2).

The word “lie,” he said, implies a moral judgement, and opens the Journal to claims of bias. He cited Mr. Trump’s claim that “thousands” of Muslims celebrated 9/11 on New Jersey rooftops. To call that a “lie,” Baker claimed, would imply an intent to deceive, so the Journal reported instead that there was “no evidence” to support the allegations.

There are many obvious problems with this approach. No one with a pulse believes that Trump made an inadvertent mistake – his intent with this lie was to win the support of xenophobes, in one of the classic moves of would-be tyrants. Trump learned in his earlier “birther” rants that if you repeat a lie often enough, those who want to believe you will, and will rally to support your cause.

I our midterm election in 2018, we’ll have new voters who were a year old on 9/11, with no clear memory of the event. “No evidence” is too weak a rebuttal to our would-be dictator-in-chief, who unfortunately, is an expert on manipulating the news, and in a classic strategy tyrants before him continues his efforts to discredit legitimate news outlets (3) (4) (5).

The journalists had gathered on Meet the Press to discuss Mr. Trump’s attempts to discredit news he doesn’t approve of. You can read a full transcript of the session here (6) Not being sufficiently versed in history, Mr. Baker doesn’t realize that capitulation will not save him or his paper if Trump can manage to gain the power over news outlets, like “stronger libel laws,” that he craves.

Therefore, I’m awarding Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal, my first Wormtongue Award of 2017. This is the first, but I’m sure not the last, such award I’ll hand out…

The First Gates "Wormtongue Award" goes to Gerard Baker, of the "Wall Street Journal"

The First Gates “Wormtongue Award” goes to Gerard Baker, of the “Wall Street Journal”

Notes from 2017 – A New Year

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At midnight tonight, something changes – in our minds, and nowhere else. It’s like a graffiti artist once wrote on a step of the local library: “Time does not exist, only clocks exist.”

That could be a Buddhist aphorism, like the image of my all time favorite bumper sticker pictured above. Through Buddhist contemplative practice, we come to experience that the contents of our consciousness – the thoughts, emotions, concepts that shape our reality – are fluid and insubstantial. Like rainbows. Like state lines.

State lines exist because legislators, surveyors, and highway departments put signs saying things like “Welcome to Oregon,” at certain points in the landscape. The mountains and rivers and deserts know nothing of state lines, but I need to. The speed limit drops in Oregon, and I’ll get a ticket if I ignore that gap between consensual and ultimate reality.

Today I am thinking of Joseph Campbell who called out one of the core abstractions that separate people. In the last episode of The Power of Myth series, Campbell said the view of our beautiful planet, photographed from space, might well serve as an emblem of the religion of the future.

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Not anytime soon, I’m afraid. The Power of Myth was released in 1988, a time of optimism and economic expansion. In our current era of fear and economic decline, nationalism, fascism, xenophobia, and class warfare are becoming the new normal. No national or state boundaries are visible from space, but we, collectively, are killing each other over such abstractions, both with weapons and legislation.

I’d love to have started this post with, “Happy New Year,” but I don’t think that’s very likely. Nobody really believes it. There isn’t much “Happy days are here again” in the air. There’s too much bullshit online these days so I won’t add to it. Not for the first time will I say that I think the road ahead was accurately painted by Matthew Arnold in his 1867 poem, Dover Beach. In the last stanza he said:

“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

More than 100 years ago, Arnold saw our world as struggling through the death throes of a dying age and the birth pangs of a new one. That labor continues.

I hope you and your loved ones survive and thrive in 2017.