DEFEAT FASCISM

 One of our state’s treasures, a journalist much more intelligent than I and eons better at expressing ideas in words, wrote a piece this week about lingering stress and worry. Seems he’s bothered too.

It caused me to think of a bit I heard on NPR once. A prominent scientist said that there is an archaic genetic trigger in our DNA that serves a mysterious purpose. Its only function is to alert us, when we feel safe, that there is still danger lurking about and we should remain aware.

We could call it the “you just think it’s all okay, Jocko” trigger.

It instantly made sense to me. Complacent animals on the savannah were probably the next ones eaten after the old, infirm, and devotees of Fox news. A feeling of safety probably sent all sorts of inviting pheromones to greedy lions, tigers, crocodiles, and primordial TV evangelists.

As they say in my home territory of LA, “Ain’t no sich thang as being too careful when you walk in tall grass.” Best watch where you step. And keep an eye on the clouds. Calm before the storm and all that. Black swan.  Après moi, le deluge.

They all trigger the sense of pervasive doom in the midst of optimism.

I think I felt it the day after Barack Obama was elected for the second time.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 While I can't say for sure what caused this insanity in other states, in mine it was the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States of America. Twice. It lulled many of us into the false assumption that America had turned a final corner leading to a righteous state.

It made me remember when I had seen witnessed an African American man allowed to sit in a movie theater in my state, in a spot chose by himself, for the first time in my life.

It made me remember when I had seen an African American family served in a restaurant in my state for the first time in my life.

It made me remember when I had seen an African American sit on a city council in my state for the first time in my life.

Now an African American and his family occupied the White House. I thought we had arrived.

Unfortunately, we hadn't. What happened next was reminiscent of the old science fiction films of the 1950s. You know, the ones in which nuclear testing had awakened some prehistoric monster who emerged full-grown from the bowels of the earth to wreak destruction. Only this time it was the monster of bigotry, prejudice, racism, and xenophobia that slithered out quietly then, emboldened, transmogrified into the monster of all monsters.

Worse still, whereas in the old movies brave people fought and destroyed the monster. (Remember: "It just might work?") This time evil people said, "We can train this monster to do our bidding." It was easy. All it took was a reshowing of "Gone With the Wind" and some jokes about watermelon patches on the White House lawn. Americans do love their myths.

So here we are, ruled by a madman and an army of monsters. Of course not all states have joined the horde.

Just enough. 

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 EGOS AND EMPIRES

I helped win World War Two. I can help free the Cubans.

I’ll not be the first American president to lose a war.

I’ll not be brought down by a third-rate burglary.

I can pardon whomever I wish.

I’ll say who uses the tennis courts and when.

Go ahead and sell them the weapons. I can act my way out of anything.

I’ll raise taxes just a bit to straighten out his mess. Who can stop me?

Who will care in the long run? If it feels good, go for it.

I’ll get the man who tried to kill my daddy.

People will love me in a brown suit.

Let them drink bleach.

It’s mine, my precious.

Theology Time

More on the Sermon on the Mount. Some writer I read once said that the Galilean was almost breathless on that barren mountain. Whoever it was said the reading resonates more with modern audiences if one inserts, periodically, “And another thing …”

Well whatever. If we are to believe the Gospel of Matthew, our hero really “shucked the corn” back then. As they used to say in my day, “It was radical man,” or, just “Rad, man, rad.” (It sounds more meaningful with smoke in the air).

We’ve already beat The Beatitudes to a fine dust. It’s still fun to think of how “rad” it must have been to the conservative Roman rulers, the bankers, and the Temple Vision evangelists to hear a man say that their worst nightmares—the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourners, the merciful, the peacemakers, the righteous, and so forth—were standing by to inherit the next world.

Today’s “out of context” crowd stays busy with all that. Maybe they wouldn't have heard it correctly.

Either He had a mighty fine voice, or it must have been hard to hear that day. That possibility occurs in the film spoof by Monty Python, The Life of Brian. One of those at the fringe of the crowd wonders why He is saying something about “Blessed are the cheese-makers.” That might, in fact, make more sense to men in those Manhattan skyscrapers and their third, fourth, or fifth wives.

Let's take a look at some of the other radical things he said:

"If you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire." (5:22)

"If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away." (5:29)

"Whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." (5:32)

"Do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you." (5:42)

"Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear." (6:25)

"The gate is narrow and the road is hard […] and there are few who find it." (7:14)

Maybe that’s why, in a 2006 speech, President Barack Obama (perhaps the last president we’ll ever have who could quote this masterful work), said, the Sermon on the Mount was so "radical" the Defense Department wouldn't survive its application. Earlier he suggested the economy couldn't get along without it.

Rad, man. Rad.

On the theist side, Augustine called the Sermon on the Mount "a perfect standard of the Christian life."

On the doubting side, Thomas Jefferson thought it was "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered".

For the young fans of the Harry Potter series, Albus Dumbledore quotes the Bible word-for-word in placing an inscription on the tomb of his mother and sister, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." 6:19-24

Not all of the Sermon is comforting, however. Think of how members of the “Tax Cut Cult,” when dreaming of their latest riches, must find it a bit troubling that the Galilean said, "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money."

Rad, man. Rad.

Radical, beautiful, or both?
I report. You decide.

Where is our center?

Did you ever wake up in the morning with nothing to say? I haven’t. What I have to say may not always make sense but I never run out. This morning, for example, I can’t help thinking about the center of things. For example, consider the center of the Universe. We, somehow think we are it. Sad thing is, we’re not. I’m not sure we even know where the center of the Universe is. It’s where the Big Bang started, but have we located it yet? If we have, let me know, and don’t tell me it is in Arkansas.

Then consider things moral and political. Those used to be linked, you know, at least occasionally. Anyway, it’s tough times, the way I look at things, for those who would have us cling to a centrist view of our amazing Universe and try to see things from a balanced perspective.

No such luck. We are drawn with increasing force to either end of polar extremes. On the one end is a philosophy of greed, meanness, and selfishness. On the other end is silliness, self-destruction, and a shortsighted obsession with perfection as perceived by the perceiver.

Pity the poor centrist. Like the old hobo with one hand grasping an east-bound tanker, and the other on a fast-tracking freighter headed for the Golden Gate, we risk being pulled apart by indecision.

When I parted amicably with the United States Navy, I had what I considered a fairly small repertoire of wants.

I wanted a nice job in a respected profession. (Done)

I wanted to marry an exceptionally fine woman. (Done)

I wanted us to have a home of our own, (Done)

I wanted to read the entire works of William Faulkner. (Still working on it)

I wanted to develop a cadre of exceptional friends. (Done and continuing)

I wanted to learn to play the banjo. (Questionable progress, and in conflict with the preceding.

I wanted to be left alone and to bother no one. (More and more difficult)

I wanted to be a positive force in helping my former shipmates of various minority persuasions overcome the national resistance to their success in achieving what was possible for me.

For the last item, I thought we were making progress. Educational opportunities expanded. Jobs opened. Positive role models appeared in TV and film. (Sometimes)

Housing opportunities … well … not much progress there but signs were positive.

Our national corpus wasn’t healed, but was improving.

Then along came Barack Obama.

Oh my lord!

How could one man create such a subterranean monster of hatred? It rose, and is still stomping on our dreams and opportunities. The Center folded and the extremes dropped anchor in separate but equally dangerous shoals.

There, today, we ride the rough waves that will carry us into the future. Outside this morning, I continue to hear a destructive rain that seems never to stop. Up north, it’s snowing in May. These are results of our refusing to respect the fragility of our planet. Can the Center pull us back to within a safe harbor of reason and rational thinking? I don’t know.

I hope so, though

Morning Thoughts: March 26, 2018

Sometimes your heart just gets too full to speak. I watched a bit of a documentary on the Civil Rights Movement last evening. I don't remember the context, but somewhere in it, the film cut to a speech by former President of the United States Barack Obama.

I watched this good, graceful, calm, erudite man speak and I just started crying. I couldn't stop for thinking about what America might have become. I'm sorry.

I know I quote this passage much too often, but I think of it almost every day now.

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion."
- Psalm 137:1

Peace and have a nice day.

Morning Thoughts: February 18, 2018

President’s Day. Lots of things on which to dwell. I’ve been around since FDR but only aware since Truman. Even as a child, I wondered why some people hated him so.

For example, there was the time our family attended a rodeo in my hometown. Remember those “fill-in” jokes where the clown and the announcer bounce lines back and forth? Try this one:

Mary had a little lamb.

Its face was almost human.

And every time she raised his tail,

She’d look at Harry Truman.

I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I remember that joke. There were others, like the postcard that pictured a man just knocked to the floor by a cowboy, the man saying “I said Truman was raising taxes. I didn’t say Truman was raised in Texas.”

Years later, I learned the source of much, if not most, of the hatred: fair housing and the integration of the military.

I don’t remember much about Eisenhower. He didn’t get to be a good president until sometime in the 1980s.

We viewed John Kennedy as a great president from the day he was elected. His star has dimmed a bit over the years but, hell, he just looked like a president.

It was easy for me to hate Lyndon Johnson. I blamed him for my having been sent to Vietnam. With more reading, (I’ve read all of Caro’s work so far, along with Dalleck, Doris Kearns Goodman, Arkansas’s own Richard Wood, plus others). I probably know more about him that I do any other president. He gets more complicated with each paragraph. He’s what I call an “Ansel Adams” figure. Like Adams’ photographs, Johnson’s image in history goes from pure white to pure black, with all tones in between. The result is a masterpiece of contrasting elements.

Richard Nixon would have been a good man had he not been such a despicable person. He left many legacies for us to untangle. We’ve accepted the bad ones and we are now dismantling the good ones.

Poor Gerald Ford got the “double-whammy” of history. The first was being typecast as dense and clumsy by Saturday Night Live, and the second was for pardoning “Tricky Dick.” I, for one, thought then, and still do, that he did the right thing. We had, as a nation, been through enough.

Jimmy Carter was, without a doubt, among the best human beings we’ve had in the White House. He walked into a partisan ambush, the first of many to come and he was an unlucky president, in my opinion. He didn’t handle it all well, particularly when his upcoming opponent seems to have been working behind the scenes to bring him down. I suspect JC, like U.S. Grant, had a hard time believing in the baseness of some people.

His opponent, Ronald Reagan was … what can you say? He may have been not only what the country wanted, but what it needed at the time. He was the crazy old uncle that tells funny stories at family reunions and then goes behind the barn and teaches the kids bawdy sea songs. Of all the conspiracies this country is supposed to have endured, his administration actually had one, called “Iran-Contra.” It unfolded in short order, and still stains our national conscious. He further proved, to our current dismay, that Americans don’t mind deficits and a huge national debt as long as they get what they want. He left his next-in-line an economy in tatters.

Thus, the Elder George Bush had to raise taxes to clean up the mess. America has never forgiven him.

Then there was Bill Clinton, the man from Arkansas. If he had only “kept it in his pants,” they might be carving his image on Mount Rushmore by now. He had the opposition party warning us of a coming economic catastrophe if the deficit and debt got too low. This I remember: if you couldn’t make money during the Clinton Administration, you’ll never make money. I’m financially comfortable today because of the peace and prosperity of those years.

What next? When the Supreme Court of the United States elects your president, you have to take what you get. I still imagine that a look of complete surprise comes across his face when the Junior George Bush learns that he was President of the United States for eight years. He was the first to establish what I call a “Salvation Date.” That’s when you have had a checkered past, but find the date of your last arrest and claim to have found salvation next day. Then the press can’t ask any questions about your life before that date. Its value in politics is that it allows religious fundamentalists to vote for scoundrels and say their god told them to.

Then America elected a man referred to around here as “our n****r president.” Among other things, he inherited a “credit card” balance that had paid for the cost of two wars off-budget. For eight years, members of his opposition party used political ads showing a photo of their opponent on one side and a photoshopped-darkened photo of Barrack Obama on the other with a few code words translating as “they are coming for your daughters.” His election shook the foundations of our country with such fury that entrapped racial rage spewed to the surface like a volcanic gas, soiling and staining the very heavens. Its noxious fumes are still settling upon us.

Those fumes helped get us where we are today.

Just my take on things. Ignore it if you don’t agree.

From this to "I'm the
Greatest" in one lifetime.
Remarkable.

Growing Up Southern

There was a saying back home when I was a kid. If you said So-and-So had “Snakes in his boots,” it meant he lied a lot. I guess now you would say “he has snakes in his Gucci’s.”

I was thinking about this recently while I was reading through The New York Times. A couple of reporters had counted and added up, apparently, all the outright lies our current president has told in his first ten months in office. It turns out, he is the “Whopper King,” and we aren’t talking about cheeseburgers, or anything else you might imagine. We’re talking lies. Wow. The Times counted them up and even unleveled the playing field in his favor when comparing him with his predecessor. The current’s tally didn’t count mere exaggerations. The former’s even included stated intents that didn’t come to pass.

Even so, the tally was 103 in ten months for our sitting president. Many are still being repeated, both by the originator, or by his robotess press secretary. (Snakes in her Christian Louboutin’s)? By comparison, the previous president racked up a total of 18 in eight years, making him a raging amateur in the Annals of Prevarication. Further, unlike The Whopper King, Number 44 didn’t repeat falsehoods once they were disclosed. Joseph Goebbels would have been aghast. He said that’s the way to make falsehoods believed, and he knew what he was talking about.

My sainted mother would have had a thing or two to say about all this. “Somebody has snakes in his boots.” That’s what she would say. She used to say that about an uncle (by marriage) of mine, a man known for lying as well as, during infrequent periods of employment, spending his pay on liquor while his wife and children went without. This was my earliest cognizance that there were those who would turn their backs on the most dependent of those among us for our care and support. I call them “The “Anti-Beatitudes” crowd, and, personally, I don’t agree with their politics, but what the hell?

Anyway, once, this uncle was doing some work hauling slab wood for my father. It required the wearing of boots while in the field and he kept his pair on our back porch at night.

Oh yes. You can guess what I did. Early one morning before “Uncle Sorry-Ass” showed up for work, I initiated a reconnoiter to check out the veracity of this bit of southern prognostication. I was a little shy of four years old, I guess, and already showing a bent for investigative reporting. Sainted Mother caught me, questioned me, and forbade any repetition only a minute or so before the owner showed up for his boots. I had completed my analysis, though, and am sorry to say that the boots in question were unoccupied by any form of reptile, at least that morning.

I was never a strong devotee of mythology thereafter. Further, there are those among us now whom I wouldn’t trust if they told me my name was Jimmie.

Sailing To Oblivium: June 28, 2017

“A plague o' both your houses!” It’s Wednesday, June 28, 2017 and that’s how I feel. When Romeo tries to break up a fight between Tybalt and Mercutio in Act 3, Scene One, of Shakespeare’s famous play, he winds up getting Mercutio stabbed and uttering the famous curse on both parties.

I haven’t tried to break up any fight between political parties, but on some days, I feel the need to cast a curse on both: the one who came to power by urging people to hate the former president and the one who wants to regain power by urging people to hate the new president.

These carryings on have just made us all hate one another. That’s what bothers me today.

On those days I remember the Tony Soprano’s famous misattribution, “Why can’t we do like Dr. Rodney King said and all just get along?”

The problem I see with all this squabbling is that it allows the political termites to chew away our moral foundations without being noticed, or challenged.

For example, have you heard about the latest plans for “regime change” in the middle east? Probably not, it is hidden away behind our concerns over who uses what bathroom, where religious symbols can go, and whether there is any spot in this great land where carrying a firearm would not be appropriate.

But, back to regime change in the Middle East. That’s worked out real well in the past, now hasn’t it? When the Draft Board comes for the children, let’s remember all the fights we had over things we will no longer remember.

I’ll be okay tomorrow, but today I’m a little put out with both sides.

Sailing to Oblivion: June 4, 2017

Fear and loathing is a catchy phrase for a book title, but no way to run a country. As Hunter S. Thompson said, though, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” We bought the ticket, and now we are riding into oblivion in a country ruled by fear and loathing. What irony.

Reading the news today, I can’t help believing that the major policy determinant emerging from the current American presidency is the desire to eradicate the memory of President Barack Obama in the manner of Egyptian kings defacing the statues of their predecessors.

No matter how sound, or popular the existing policy may be, the goal will be, not to amend it, not to replace it with a sounder tool, not to ignore it, not to admit, however grudgingly, the efficacy of a rival’s work, but simply to end it. “I’ll show him,” sounds better as comic book dialogue than as political policy.

There are even plans to renew the nearly 60-year-old cold war with a Cuban president who isn’t even still alive. This poses economic damage, with no benefit whatsoever to the average American, to our farmers and many businesses, not to mention simple humanity.

Then there are the plans to renew the long-failed attempt to eradicate drug problems through incarceration. Of course, this plan has another element in addition to pure spite. The idea seems to have germinated from the mind of a man who has substantial investments in private prisons.

The idiocy of this policy becomes more evident when one considers that voters, even in a conservative state such as mine, are increasingly voting to legalize the use of marijuana. And too, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to name more than a few people one knows who have never used drugs in any form. As the movie character said, “I’ve been to college.”

In the news, I read yesterday that a sizable section of our population is composed of Americans who “don’t believe in the scientific facts of global climate change.” Believe? Science is not something in which someone believes or doesn’t believe. Goodness gracious. Jump from a tall building and see if the Law of Gravity cares whether you believe in it or not.

When the last tree on earth is cut, as the last tree on Easter Island was, nature won’t care if we don’t believe in the scientific fact of photosynthesis, not even if we declare loudly that we believed in individual property rights more than we believed in survival.

When we start bringing back the iron lungs for children with polio, the disease won’t care that we claimed a right not to believe in the healing power of scientific facts.

When Trump Tower is under water up to its second floor, the Atlantic Ocean won’t care that an American president didn’t believe in climate change.

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Ain't that the truth?

Survivors

Early morning thoughts while listening to the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major.

I know it gets old to hear people drone on about the New Year and all, but it does make one think. I always remember going to the movies this time of year as a child and seeing the cartoon where the Baby New Year chased out the Old Man Past Year. I always felt sorry for the old man. On the other hand, I’ve probably stayed up, by choice, until midnight on New Year’s Eve maybe a dozen times in my life. Never saw much sense in it.

Sunday will mark the 44^th year since I reported to work (the day was a Monday in 1971) on my first real job after military service. It was with a planning firm and, since they didn’t really have an opening but took a chance on me, I took a chance on them—a job paying $400 per month, not really much even back then.

A year and a half later, when I met and married Brenda, I was making $900 per month, the equivalent of maybe $60,000 per year in today’s dollars. A few years later, I was a partner in the firm, not a major partner, but a partner nonetheless and my annual salary was the equivalent of close to $100,000 by today’s standards. I think it was a chance that paid off well.

It’s been an enlightening experience. I often think of the first secretary the firm hired after I arrived. The mother of a small child, she was kicked out on the street by her husband and “Bambi” at nine o’clock one night, child in hand. During the divorce proceedings, the (male) judge awarded her a child-support payment that was $12.00 per month less than her child-care cost. For that she tended, doctored, fed, and nurtured the child except for an occasional weekend when the “dad” would take him to ride horses at the farm of Bambi’s parents. That mother, our secretary, through no fault of her own, needed the help of her community and government. It never came, and this new batch of legislators seems hell-bent on making sure it never comes for her modern counterpoints. She, nevertheless, survived as did hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, like her. There should be a monument erected someday.

I owe the fact that we are financially independent to two presidents, I suppose—Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Reagan fouled the economy up for local governments almost beyond redemption, and, just as I started my own consulting firm, Clinton came into office. The subsequent financial boom was exacerbated for me because most cities were in such a state of disrepair that they were quite willing to use their new financial stability to pay someone to help update their planning system. It was a glorious eight years and coincided with my peak earning period. One can’t ask for much better than that.

I suppose we should also thank the current president Barack Obama. Although I now only work sporadically when I want to, our net worth has nearly doubled while he nurtured the economy from its almost total collapse. Life is good for us. I wish it could be for everyone.

We are lucky though, for we both have enjoyed good health. I’ve been sick enough to miss work only once since 1971. We’ve never faced the ordeal of some of our brothers and sisters who had to deal with an obscene, until now, system of providing health care. Blessed, we’ve been so blessed.

I will die happy if I am wrong, but I fear now that our country has begun its long slide into historical obscurity. If so, I’ll probably be able to watch it from the sidelines as they must deal with the minorities, the poor, women, and the immigrants before they come for the white, male, college graduates.

After all this time, I plan to pass on still harboring the belief that government be a force for good if used wisely, that religious institutions can be a force for evil if used poorly, and that the salvation of America may rest on the strength of our women.

 

Only a mother could teach a child goodness
from a heart that knows only misery.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See also www.travelswithanalien.blogspot.com