tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86477949741562458852024-03-12T19:30:21.403-07:00DiStasiblogA writer's musings on the passing show Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.comBlogger467125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-23148238209414678602022-11-07T12:45:00.000-08:002022-11-07T12:45:16.970-08:00In Memoriam--Layla Smith Bockhorst<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">My Zen teacher, Layla Smith Bockhorst, has died. It happened on November 3, after a not-very-long illness with cancer of the cecum, metastasizing to the liver, with which she was diagnosed several months ago. The diagnosis sounded rather dire, in that she was told she had stage four cancer, which is about as dire as it gets. Yet she dealt with that diagnosis as she dealt with everything else: with quiet dignity, carrying on with her teaching duties with our Mountain Source Sangha as well as, and as often as she could. We in the sangha, seeing her mostly on Zoom for our Tuesday and Friday morning zazen meetings, hoped she might be recovering, mainly because we never heard her complain—though she <i>was</i> truthful about being in some discomfort, and not being able to eat very well. This was her way: undramatic, unassuming, preferring always not to be conspicuous, and emphasizing mostly the quiet, fundamental Zen practice of just sitting in zazen (classically, sitting cross-legged with back straight, and focusing on whatever is in front of one, in the moment). <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> At my age, I am not unacquainted with death, having had both parents, a wife, a sibling, a niece and friends die, as well as three Zen teachers: my first teacher, Robert Aitken Roshi, with whom I trained usually at annual summer sesshins for more than ten years; Joko Beck, with whom I trained, also at sesshins both in Oakland and in San Diego, for several more years; and now Layla Smith, whom I have come to appreciate mostly via Zoom. There have been other teachers, to be sure, but most, like Stuart Kutchins with whom I study via Zoom also, are still living. But never has one of my teachers died while I was actively practicing with her. This time it has hit closer to the bone. That may be because when a Zen teacher dies, it has an uncanny and, to me, indefinable resonance. It is as if we somehow think of these “honored teachers” as immortal—which all are diligent to teach us they are <i>not</i>. Yet we still think it. So when a valued teacher dies, it is almost as if one’s parent or partner or a part of oneself has vanished. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> That may be because death, to those of us living, is still <i>the</i> great mystery. We know it is bound to happen. We may even know, as with cancer or advanced age, that it is coming soon. And yet, when faced with the fact of death, of a dead body—as I found out when my late wife, who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and was lying “brain dead” in a hospital bed kept alive by a respirator but still alive, <i>suddenly stopped</i>—we recognize death instantly. I am referring here to the change that occurs even before we notice that breathing or heartbeat has stopped, even before we get medical confirmation that it is over. We <i>know</i>. The irreducible and incomprehensible phenomenon that is life suddenly departs. And we don’t know what it is. This pertains among animals or plants or anything alive. We instantly know a living entity, and we just as instantly recognize a dead one. And it is not simply that outward movement has stopped. Because what we have learned from high-energy physics is that even inert bodies, dead bodies, rocks and metals, still have ceaseless motion in their innermost, subatomic elements. So life cannot be defined by movement, nor death by the absence of movement. What is it then? We don’t know; we can’t define it. Which was brought home to me when my oldest son saw his mother lying in that white bed, having, just minutes before he arrived, stopped. Seeing her, he collapsed to his knees and said, referring to that now utterly still, cold, rigidifying body, “What is that? What <i>is</i> that? That is <i>not her</i>!” <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> If we were to follow most Judeo-Christian religions, we might say of the dead person that the “soul” has left the body. But the Buddha prefigured modern science when he announced his doctrine of “anatta,” or no separate self or soul. Modern materialist science agrees. Nothing we can identify as a “self” or a “soul” can be located in a human body. In its place, most science states or implies that the brain is the essence of life. Hence that awful term we heard referring to my wife, <i>brain dead</i>. When the brain stops functioning, that is, life ceases—so life <i>is</i> brain function, according to science. But of course, plants do not have brain function or even nervous systems, yet living plants or flowers or trees or leaves are clearly alive. And when they wither and shrivel to the ground, they are dead. We all know that. So what <i>is</i> it that animates those entities that are alive. As far as I know, no one has yet been able to locate this animating something. Which is why some philosophers like Bergson coined the term <i>elan vital</i>, and poets like Dylan Thomas in his great poem, referred to it as a force, the “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Alternatively, some novelists like Mary Shelley seemed to imagine the life force as electricity—hence the astonishment when the human-built Frankenstein monster first moves, and the shout bursts out: “It’s alive!” And yet we know that simple electricity, such as that which seems to animate computers, leaves them just as dead as ever, even before the plug is pulled. And so life and death remain to us, still, just as profound and mysterious. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> But I digress. My honored teacher, Layla, no longer manifests motion, or life. That is, her human form, with which we are compelled to associate her, no longer has what we call ‘life.’ She will no longer be able to go on her beloved bike rides through the mountains and valleys and trees of California. She will no longer be able to take sustenance from the so-precious-to-her natural world. She will no longer be able to appear to us on Zoom to give one of her talks on Zen—low-key talks that usually employed numerous references to her favorite Zen writers, like her teacher, Suzuki Roshi, who likewise died of cancer; or Eihei Dogen, the 13th Century Zen ancestor and founder of the lineage from which most modern Zen, and Layla herself, derives. No longer will she be able to deliver essential insights, as she did in her last brief talk, when she said something like, ‘When will you stop thinking you lack something?’ And then, ‘but even when you do, you can regard it as a gift—and, sitting, catch its arising.’ Nor will she be able to embody for us her main teaching—her simple but wise presence that sought no limelight, that was most comfortable avoiding it, preferring simple, quiet zazen to all else. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">And that may be, in the end, what Zen teachers have most to offer: the simple essence of living; of being, above all, human; of being even preternaturally human—but being, as Joko Beck titled one of her books, <i>nothing special</i>. That was, to me, Layla’s essence, and that which, I have come to think, is the true essence of Zen: To be human beings, secure in our knowledge that living is simply ‘things as it is,’ as Suzuki Roshi used to say; ‘nothing special’ as Joko used to say; just a tall, lanky guy in a Hawaiian shirt, as Aitken Roshi was when I first met him. And as Layla Smith was and remains: just a tall, unassuming woman from Montana who somehow found, years ago, that the way of life presented by Zen suited her as nothing else ever had or would, and which she embodied to her last breath with dignity and courage and quiet robed grace—and the practice/realization that she was ok, had always been ok, and was going home, going beyond, to her true, abiding no-self. And teaching to the end that we, her grateful and now-grieving students, “standing or walking, sitting or lying down, practicing the way with gratitude,” with all existence, were and are the same. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> <img height="147" src="blob:https://www.blogger.com/e2ce5b51-3792-4dd6-8c8f-6063dadda506" v:shapes="Picture_x0020_1" width="155" /><o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-29070139087421716052022-07-04T11:56:00.000-07:002022-07-04T11:56:07.601-07:00Ukraine's Pre-historic Mega-Sites<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Given all the coverage of Ukraine since the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, and Vladimir Putin’s justification of his 'special operation' as stemming from Ukraine’s lack of historic independence, one would think that some mention would have been made of the important pre-history of Ukraine. But so far, I have seen none. I was only made aware of these facts by reading Graeber and Wengrow’s pathbreaking work (David Graeber’s last), <i>The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Hum</i>anity, Farrar-Straus, 2021. In that book, Graeber and Wengrow discuss the Mega-Sites that appeared in Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova during the Neolithic era, more than 5,000 years ago. The authors discuss recent research (the sites were discovered in the 1970s) establishing the astonishing fact that several excavations confirm that ‘cities’ such as Nebelivka, and Taljanky (ca. 20,000 residents) did in fact exist in Ukraine’s Uman district south of Kyiv, and pre-dated the supposed ‘first’ cities in the near East—Sumerian cities which are said to prove that large-scale agriculture led directly to bureaucracies, priesthoods, and powerful rulers. These Ukrainian sites seem to disprove that long-standing theory. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Regardless of the agriculture-to-cities debate, however, the existence of such sites, usually assembled in circular patterns, and consisting of individual groups of wooden houses that appear to have been more or less independent of a central ruler and/or government for as long as eight centuries, proves that civilization—or at least large self-governing communities—existed in Ukraine long before there was a Russia or a Soviet Union to claim hegemony over this land. And given the discussion about how Ukraine’s grain exports fed nearly half the globe before Russia’s invasion put an end to easy shipments of grain via Black Sea ports, it is enlightening to read that the reason such large populations could gather and thrive in pre-history must have been due to the soil. That is, as much as two-thirds of Ukraine has been blessed with a type of rich, black, exceptionally-fertile soil called <i>chernozem</i> (Russian for “black ground”). That is why grain grew and still grows so abundantly there; <i>chernozem</i> contains <span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">a high percentage of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span>humus<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">(4% to 16%) and high percentages of<span class="apple-converted-space"> phosphoric acids, phosphorus, and ammonia. So valuable is it (it is 60 inches deep in Ukraine) that it has been sold on the black market for years. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"> The name given to these early cultures by pre-historians is Cucuteni-Trypillia. Though there is some dispute about their nature (i.e., whether they were permanent living sites or were occupied only temporarily; whether they should be called ‘cities’ or ‘villages;’ what kind of rule kept them together, councils with shifting leadership, or more permanent leaders), what no longer seems in dispute is that these ‘mega-sites,’ consisting of thousands of individual houses and several larger communal structures, and extending over hundreds of hectares, have caused the traditional view of the origin of cities to be re-evaluated, and perhaps changed for good. That is to say, most of these homes have been found to be almost self-sufficient, containing not only ovens for warming and cooking, but also kilns with which to make their distinctive pottery, and sacred altars for worship. So whereas traditional early cities were seen as gathering around rulers and a priesthood directing subservient masses to toil to produce wealth for those rulers, the mega-sites in Ukraine seem to have avoided all that paraphernalia, and its resultant inequality. Rules seem to have been made by neighborhood councils, rather then handed down from above. The design of these places—roughly circular groups of houses, none of which stands out from others—reinforces this notion of rough equality among its residents. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"> This evidence of the ancient habitation of Ukraine, to this writer, says volumes both about our notion of how humans initially gathered in large groups we call ‘cities,’ but also how it validates the current Ukrainian fight for independence from Russia. About how preposterous the Russian claims to justify its invasion are seen to be. And though Vladimir Putin probably has no idea of this pre-history, one wonders what would happen if he did. Would it change his tiny, imperial mind? Probably not. But perhaps it would give him dreams disturbing enough to make him pause his bloody work—which would not be a bad outcome, all things considered. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">Lawrence DiStasi <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-54504208584490559542022-06-18T12:25:00.000-07:002022-06-18T12:25:00.045-07:00Why Can't It Be the Way It Was?<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">The more I think about it, the more most of our human problems and dilemmas come down to one wish/desire/demand/yearning: ‘Why Can’t It Be the Way It Was?’ I’ve got one of those going on at the moment. Walking—which I’ve always done (after I could no longer run long distances, that is) has been my preferred exercise for years. It not only keeps me relatively sound physically and improves my mental state; it is also the way I’ve been controlling my blood glucose (I have diabetes, and so, walk after dinner), and more or less keeping my blood pressure in check. So I do it not only because it feels good, but because it may be saving my life. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Recently, however, a left knee that I injured running years ago, and have always managed to keep relatively OK via said walking, has begun to act up in a different way. Due to my stroke in 2019, my right-side function checked out. So, naturally, even after recovering some right-side capacity, I’ve had to put a lot more stress on that ailing left knee. That has worked reasonably well for a couple of years. But sooner or later, as we hate to admit, the imbalance begins to take its toll. I think that’s what’s happened, recently. A few weeks ago, my left-knee pain flared a few times when I came down on it awkwardly, perhaps, though I’m not even sure what the precipitating event was. Whatever it was, my body reacted automatically to that sharp pain in the front meniscus area, I think, by compensating. That is, I began to put more pressure on my left knee by leaning more on the <i>back</i> part of the knee. Though I worried about hyper-extension, I was told by my PT guy that I’m not really hyper-extending, but I know it’s in that direction. A few days or weeks of that, though, and now that pressured back of my knee hurts like hell. It hurts when I change positions from standing for awhile to sitting down: that is, from straight leg to bending. It hurts in the opposite direction too—from sitting for a time to standing and walking. And it hurts when I do my longer walk in the morning, and short one in the evening. Just in the last few days, the pain has even extended down into my left foot, sometimes causing my leg to buckle—a very worrisome development. Everything is connected, as they say. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> My response is both despair—about whether and how long I’ll even be able to walk as I now do; or worse, whether I’ll fall—and desire: <i>Why can’t my body keep going</i> the way it always has? Why does it have to deteriorate in this way? Why can’t I take a pill to make the past return, or the present disappear? Or do exercises that will restore me to my former strength and health? Why, indeed. Time does not go backwards. And this is the point: no matter how fervently we want to go back to what we remember as our stronger, more capable days, it does not, <i>can not</i> happen. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">That’s the general situation we now face on several fronts, especially politically. Think of the MAGA zealots who unconditionally support our former President (even as the revelations regarding Jan. 6 become more damning by the day). What motivates them? Getting back to what they perceive as the “good old days,” that’s what. MAGA, in fact, stands for “make America great again”—i.e. let’s get back to when we were ‘great.’ But when we examine this ‘truism,’ we find that what these deluded folks really mean is “let’s get back to when it was great <i>for me, for us, for white people.</i>” We white people ruled then, before all these underlings of color began rising up to claim their (really <i>our</i>) places—'taking our jobs, our homes, our neighborhoods, even our Presidency. Before all these foreigners started invading from south of the border and coming here illegally to take our jobs, flooding the labor market with low-wage workers who depress the salaries of even those jobs we still have. Without question <i>we</i> ruled before that; and those of us who didn’t rule, no matter how low on the totem pole we were, could still say: “At least I’m not as low as those people; at least I always know I’m better than they are or can ever be.” <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> The ones who are more overt in their fervor make it even plainer. Groups who have been emboldened, like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and the Patriot Front and all the neo-Nazi groups (like the AWD, the Atomwaffen Division, aka National Socialist Order), by President Trump’s overt praise for the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, now parade their arms and their hatred openly. They did this most vividly when they coordinated and led the assault on the national Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More recently, the young punk who killed 10 Black shoppers in a Buffalo, NY supermarket openly espoused what is at the heart of all this hatred and murder and mayhem: The Great Replacement Theory. This is a theory first promoted in 2012 by French writer Renaud Camus, who opined that black and brown immigrants were being brought into Europe and America by nefarious forces, ‘reverse-colonizing,’ and wiping out the white-dominant culture in the West. In short, the root fear among white nationalists is that the White Race is being replaced by blacks and other people of color, whose greater birth rates <span style="background-color: #f9f9f9;">threaten their hegemony; meaning they must fight back. </span>And, as noted by Robert Bowers, who killed Jews in the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue attack, this replacement is being promoted and implemented by Jews and other liberal-socialist-communist sympathizers who assist and enable immigrants to ‘invade and kill our people.’ In other words, ‘we yearn to go back to the white-dominated world we remember, and will do it by force if we have to.’ <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> One could go on. But the basic dynamic, here, is <i>Change</i>. And resistance to that change. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">We all remember, to be sure, when it was different. When, as children, we couldn’t wait for changes—in our bodies, in our height, in our status that would change us from kids with no power to grown-ups who could drink and drive and do whatever they wanted. We yearned for those changes, that growing up. Until, that is, we got there and then beyond it, and one day realized that the same process that had made us allegedly-autonomous adults was now working in the opposite direction. And we noticed the flesh of our faces and arms and legs and bellies beginning to sag a bit, and muscles in our arms and legs no longer enduring as long as they once did, and minds forgetting little things like names, and the location of keys or phones or turning off the gas jets when done cooking. Change, in short, became the enemy. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> That is the way it is. We welcome change when it seems to work to our benefit. We hate it and try to reject it, especially when (and if) we realize that change is not only a some-time thing. Change is ubiquitous. Everything changes, and not just occasionally, but constantly. We can usually ignore this; can usually think we see objects that are solid and persist in their ‘true’ form forever—or at least as long as we need them to persist. But sooner or later, those of us who carefully observe life begin to realize that what we have always thought was stable and unchanging (like all material objects) has, in fact, been changing all along. Has never, in fact—not for a millisecond—stopped changing. And that realization extends with particular force to us, to our bodies and minds, to our very being—which must change and dissolve and disappear like everything else under the sun. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Still, there are those, and we see more and more of them in our U.S. society these days, who simply do not, will not accept the great law of change. They think that by shouting, and arming themselves, and gathering with their silly hats behind silly leaders who assure them that the ‘glory days’ can be recaptured, they can turn back the clock. America can be made Great Again. Mussolini in the 1930s followed this same delusional playbook: ‘Italy can be great again, can be the Roman Empire again.’ Hitler did something similar: ‘Germany can be great again, the Third Reich can conquer and rule the world.’ All tyrants, from Mao to Stalin to Napoleon to Putin; all political hacks—no matter which side of the political aisle they stem from—act on the same delusion: ‘The past can be recaptured.’ And they are always wrong. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> To sum up what could be a very long and complex argument, the only genuine way to confront change is to accept it. <i>Change is</i>. No matter how fervently we yearn for a different reality, or ignore the evidence, we can never go back. Which is as simple to understand as it is hard to accept—personally or societally or politically. Difficult or not, however, there are no alternatives. All others lead to bitterness or idiocy or Armaggedon, or all three. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-48258603023701830392022-03-31T14:20:00.001-07:002022-03-31T14:20:22.808-07:00Truth, Again<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">I have written several times in recent years about the decline of simple truth in our time. Now I am prompted to write about truth and falsehood again because the situation is leading, and has led to both war, killing, and the complete collapse of even an elementary sense of ethics in one of the major nuclear nations and in one of our two major political parties. I am referring, of course, to Putin’s attack on Ukraine, with its attendant losses of life and civilian structures, and the outright lying in public from both this puta-tive leader, and the plague of lying which has overtaken the entire Republican Party. The latter is promoted, of course, primarily by Donald Trump’s confounding control over his “base,” which demands that his most egregious lie to date about winning the 2020 presidential election—which he claims was “stolen” from him by massive Democratic party fraud—be corrected by overturning the election, evicting Biden from office, and declaring Donald Trump President. This would be remarkable even if Trump were the only one subscribing to this whopper. But he is not. Millions of his American supporters believe this self-serving crap. Still more astonishing, large numbers of Republican office-holders actually insist that it is the truth. We seem to have entered Donald’s Wonderland. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> There was a time—and I am old enough to remember it—when such a transparent lie coming from federal office holders would have prompted outrage from voters, public shame and humiliation for the liars, and calls for their resignation. No more. In our confused and benighted time, we have members of Congress, leaders of major parties, and countless state officials willing to repeat this outrageous lie, one that early on and repeatedly has been exposed as having <i>no merit whatsoever</i>. With almost no one in the entire Republican party, save Liz Cheney, willing to call what it and the Jan. 6 assault on those trying to certify a fair election, actually is: an assault by a mob on the most basic elements of our democracy. The peaceful transition of power from one president to the next. The constitutional duty of every member of Congress to certify electoral votes duly submitted to it by the states for approval and verification. Instead, most Republicans, including the leadership, have cowered in fear of Trump’s base, and denigrated and excoriated the Committee trying to investigate the Jan. 6 events, claiming that the rioters were simply exercising their right to visit the Capitol, and protest. Any news, such as that emanating from the <i>New York Times</i> or the <i>Washington Post</i> suggesting otherwise, is dismissed as “fake news.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> What Trump has done in America finds its more sinister and lethal echo in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and his invasion of Ukraine. The lies are just as preposterous: Ukraine has never been a “real” nation; the war of invasion Russia has launched is <i>not</i> a war, but a ‘special military operation’ to oust the Nazis seeking control there; the destruction of cities and the slaughter of civilians is actually <i>carried out by the Ukrainians themselves</i> to make Russia look bad. Given Putin’s more thorough control of the state apparatus (which Trump openly envies), he can also control more completely what the Russian people can see and hear. So they see peaceful scenes of Russian troops being welcomed by their Ukrainian ‘brothers’; none of the scenes of the rubble-ization of Mariupol and other Russian cities whose apartments, theaters, and infrastructure have been terror bombed to a point not seen since Nazi destruction in WWII. Any Russian who questions this “truth” is branded a traitor to the nation, and subjected to fines, arrest, and worse. Any news that contradicts this official truth is “fake capitalist news.” And all is backed by thinly-veiled threats to use the ultimate weapon if Russia’s sacred territorial integrity should be threatened. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> The truly astonishing thing about the perpetration of such egregious lies is that, for a sizable and not-insignificant portion of the publics in each nation, this bullshit works. Recent news articles (see <i>NY Times</i>, Mar. 6, 2022) have shown that Ukrainians with relatives in Russia have been unable to penetrate the beliefs of even their parents about what they have experienced: that the Russian military is waging a brutal aerial, artillery and rocket-led assault amounting to a terror attack on civilians and their living spaces meant to demoralize the population. Instead, those in Russia believe what their media says: that the Russian ‘special military operation’ is saving Ukraine from drug-addled Nazis in power there. And as Ukrainian defenses have put up stiffer and stiffer resistance, the apparently-frustrated Russian military has resorted increasingly and more ferociously to indiscriminate bombing and artillery campaigns that many have labeled war crimes. With Russian officials and news media hiding the mounting deaths of their troops which, if publicly known, might blow the whole cover. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">To be sure, Aeschylus’ line that ‘truth is the first casualty in war,’ pertains as much today as it did in ancient Greece. But the demise of truth in our time has reached another and more dangerous dimension. That is because, with the rise of internet-based social media platforms, and the ability of governments to either control those internet outlets, or ban them outright, or provide others that contradict what major media choose to report, the labeling of any contradictory evidence as “fake news” becomes easier. Or, at the least, more confusing for the average citizen. In America, those who have been addicted to the simplistic version of politics promulgated by Fox News, seem to find such simplicity both easier to digest and more consistent with their preferred narrative of events. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The upshot of all this fakery and subterfuge is that elementary facts, which once provided the basis for what we might call “consensus reality,” no long pertain, and can no longer be taken for granted. Where once Walter Cronkite could intone on nightly TV his mantra “And that’s the way it is,” and count on most Americans taking his word for it, now millions can find their own preposterous version of “the way it is,” and feel more righteous than those who believe mainstream “fake news.” This amounts to a serious state of affairs, and a dangerous one. Democracy depends on a rough consensus among its citizens. It depends on most of its citizens agreeing, if not to the interpretation of major events, at least <i>agreement on what those events are</i>. Not any more. I have talked personally to a cousin who insisted that the Q-Anon-promoted canard about Hollywood child-abuse rings was the major issue of our time—one that Donald Trump was the only person with the moral authority to address. This about a proven narcissist and pervert who once spoke on the record about grabbing women’s pussies with impunity. It is simply mind-boggling. And anything that contradicts such a person’s “facts” can be met with what I was met with: “do some research.” With such a conflict about basic facts, a democracy cannot function, cannot reach consensus about what matters and what should be legislated. The rule of law, likewise, depends on a rough consensus—that most people will agree with the fact that everyone needs to stop at a traffic light, for example, or that murder is a capital offense that demands adjudication, abiding by proof and evidence, and punishment if warranted. Or that racism and lynching are unequivocally wrong, and cannot be permitted. If a society cannot agree on such basics, it cannot function as a society. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But in our time, we increasingly have the collusion between power and truth that promotes, too often, the condition that power can make its own truth, create its own facts. This is precisely what is happening in Ukraine at this very moment. Vladimir Putin is creating his own reality, and insisting, with the power he has assembled, that the Russian people—and more generally, the whole world—accept that reality as the truth. Russian troops are not killing civilians; his brutal invasion is not a war; the destruction of apartment buildings and other civilian infrastructure witnessed by the entire world is <i>not</i> his military’s doing but that of the Ukrainians themselves. Trump, likewise, though with far more resistance, can insist that he had nothing to do with inciting or planning the Jan. 6 riot at the capitol; but, in any case, that the violent attempt to stop Congressional certification was more or less justified by the theft of his “victory” in the 2020 presidential election. Or that Americans might try ingesting bleach to protect themselves from the Covid-19 virus. And those who report on these things, or demand some accounting, are simply the victims of the large, liberal conspiracy of the “fake new” media. What’s worse is that this nonsense can be openly admitted by those with power. During the George W. Bush administration, for example, journalist Ron Suskind in 2004 attributed the phrase “reaity-based community” to a Bush aide (thought to be Karl Rove) who said, in part: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 11pt;">… that guys like me (Suskind) were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” [...] “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…” (Wikipedia, accessed 3/30/22)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Or, we might recall the inimitable Kellyanne Conway’s evocation of “alternative facts,” in a <i>Meet the Press</i> interview on Jan. 22, 2017, where she tried to defend Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s lie about attendance numbers at Trump’s inauguration. This might have been considered a joke, were the words not uttered and defended with incredible zeal. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> What’s even more baffling is that large numbers of the population, both in Russia (where they are compelled to) and in America (where the compulsion is internal), take this idiocy for the unvarnished truth. For the way things should be. Alternative facts? We create our own reality? Have people lost all touch with what used to be called “the real world?” Apparently they have. And the sum total of this willingness of those in power to “create their own reality,” can leave millions of ordinary citizens at sea in a swamp, a miasma of uncertainty, if not outright bedlam. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> The question is, can democracies, which depend on the consent of the governed (all governments, ultimately, must have popular consent to stay in power), still assemble sufficient majorities on which to base that consent? Or disagreement? What will persuade enough people on this planet that global warming is not only real, but has very nearly reached the point of no return? What can persuade people to turn away from propaganda meant to serve a small, wealthy elite, and commit to vetted, scientific opinion that this crisis is real? That there are, in fact, substantiated facts? That the war in Ukraine is not only an actual war but a slaughter? That autocrats like Putin and Trump are both frauds and liars?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> I have to confess, the prospects from here don’t look good. Because in truth, the truth about reality is, even regarding normal facts, not easy to discern. Where power obscures it even more, it may be impossible for the average person, who doesn’t have time to pursue and tolerate the uncertainty that increasingly dogs our pursuit of the truth, to ferret out. This is why populist leaders and their simplistic solutions appeal so broadly. For many people, perhaps a majority, anything, no matter how unfair or preposterous or brutal, can seem preferable to uncertainty. All one can say is that care is needed. Patience is needed. Ability to read and discern mere opinion from that which is based on real evidence, is needed. And a healthy skepticism about information coming from authoritarians who “make their own reality” is desperately needed. Though actual attention to those recommendations may seem unlikely, they may be all we have. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-87272167454274272292022-03-18T11:55:00.000-07:002022-03-18T11:55:23.772-07:00Some Thoughts on Anger<p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">A Zoom group I’m in had a discussion about anger recently, and it brought up some thoughts for me. They began with the notion that not all anger is alike, or equally damaging, and may in some cases be preferable to the alternatives—especially suppression. In my experience, to be specific, with a real father and a stepfather, parental anger was handled in two very different ways. My real father, born in Italy, had a rather volatile temper. He got <i>mad</i> (that’s what we used to call it, never “anger” which would have seemed unnaturally formal for us) regularly, and expressed it freely with choice Italian curse words. He also got mad at us children, sometimes gave us a swat for misbehaving (though it was usually my mother who administered physical punishment), and then could often not help laughing about the whole thing shortly after. In short, the swat ended the trouble and the punishment, and that was it. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> My stepfather, whom my mother married after my father died, was fully American, of French-Canadian descent. He typified suppression. We knew he got “mad” because of the threatening atmosphere he created, but he never expressed it. Never yelled at my brothers or sisters or me, at least not publicly. The same with my mother: he clearly got annoyed at some of what she said or did, but he never expressed it (other than obliquely) in front of others. We learned later that he was pretty hard on her in private, but none of us knew that, except perhaps by inference. What we did know was that she never crossed him, and we assumed it was out of the fear we could feel. Towards the end, she<i> did</i> leave him once, to live with my sisters in a house they had rented, but after a short time went back; he kept pleading that he couldn’t live without her, and that his health was failing. Even though it wasn’t, she yielded, and remained with him until her death from pancreatic cancer. A few years after that, when he had sold their CT house and moved back to Lowell, MA to live with his sister and her husband in a mobile home, the situation in that enclosed pressure cooker produced its bitter end. We read it in the newspapers: the man we had lived with for years had shot and killed his sister and her husband, and then turned the gun on himself as police closed in. I and my older three siblings were stunned. But my younger brother told us he wasn’t surprised at all: “Didn’t you know he always had a .38 caliber pistol in his safe?” <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> So: two fathers, with different styles regarding anger. One expressed it freely, verbally and sometimes with a smack, but that was it. It was over and done with. The other brooded in silence, and laid down an atmosphere of dread that went on and on. And that brooding, that suppression, finally ended with three deaths via his gun. For me, at least, the quick acting out of anger was far preferable to the quiet, brooding suppression of it that always felt as if it could—and finally did—explode. The immediate expression seemed healthier for all concerned, including for the one that gave vent to it. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Sigmund Freud, as I recall, had a lot to say about instinct suppression (killing anger being one of these instincts) in <i>Civilization and its Discontents</i> (1930). Civilization, that is, makes the expression of both the sexual instinct and the killing instinct with which all humans are equipped, unacceptable in most societies, and Freud saw that necessary suppression as dangerous. (It should be said here that the expression of rage cannot be lightly dismissed, as Jared Diamond [<i>Guns, Germs and Steel</i>] shows in his examination of primitive cultures, where encounters among males often lead to violent death). Such extreme suppression is toxic in the long run, Freud said, and can lead to blowouts such as wars or other conflicts that can do widespread damage. My stepfather’s case is instructive. More to the point, I years ago met a psychotherapist named Zaslow who had developed a therapy called “rage reduction” meant to treat the suppressed rage Freud wrote about. In Zaslow’s view, the suppression of rage was just as toxic, if not more so, than the suppression of sex which had been given far more attention. To treat this rage, he would encourage its expression in a controlled treatment where the patient was held firmly in the laps of eight or so helpers, so that the patient could give vent to extreme rage without the risk of harming others or him/herself. I witnessed one or two of these sessions (they could go on for as long as eight hours in order to elicit this rage, which is so deeply repressed), and they seemed helpful. Unfortunately, a few patients did not do so well long after treatment (at least one committed suicide), and the therapy came under such intense criticism it had to be abandoned. But the point remains: the suppression of rage or anger in modern society can lead to deep psychological, physical and societal problems. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> This brings us to the present. The alarming rise of guns in the hands of so many millions of Americans swiftly comes to mind. But guns themselves are not the real issue here. It is the anger that arises so often in mass culture, and which can, and increasingly does, result in mass gun violence, and more. The recent case of a large Black man pummeling a Chinese woman in the entrance to her New York apartment is a case in point, and it asks the question: what could possibly elicit such monstrous rage? In my limited view, such outbursts stem largely from one main issue: the feeling on the part of most individuals that they cannot control their environment or their lives (in some cases leading to the feeling that such a life is hardly worth living). Whether most humans have ever been able to control these things is not obvious, but it certainly seems that it would have been easier to control one’s life circumstances when the group one belonged to was a village or small town where most people were known. Interpersonal problems might be addressed directly with the person or persons involved; larger problems with a local priest or local official or council. In mass culture, of course, this is no longer an option. We are forced, most often, to deal with entities that are remote, and impersonal, and often mechanical. We dial a number to solve a problem, and we get a machine-answering system. The “person,” driven by an algorithm impervious to our frustrations or our specific human needs, mindlessly goes through the options available; and if those options do not fit our situation, we are left with the ridiculous option of screaming at a machine. And even if we finally succeed in reaching a real person, the ones we get to speak to are often just as mechanical. We are left with anger and rage that literally have no outlet. So we smash the phone or kick the dog. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In short, the whole modern world, which turns most of us into non-entities forced to deal with robots, contributes greatly to the frustration and anger we are left with (which is not to say that no other causes or incitements to anger exist. The constant need of humans to assert dominance, and the reaction to it, is certainly one.) Our lives seem increasingly meaningless in the greater realm of things, where we seem helpless to affect the majority of our world. And it now seems clear that this frustration with having no control, with being non-entities, has led in recent years to more and more Americans (and people world-wide) opting for authoritarian alternatives like Donald Trump to, if nothing else, shake up or thumb a nose at those in charge. The dangers in this case need not be enumerated. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> And what do our helpers, psychological or spiritual, offer? Reason. Patience. We are advised to either take nonviolent action, such as writing letters to our representatives, or, more generally, consider the person(s) we are angry with, and try to have compassion for their plight. Or understand that they are not at fault; their passion is. Therefore, we should empathize, and treat them with love. All of which are nice ideals. But how effective are they in dealing with the likes of Vladimir Putin, and his mass murder of Ukrainians? Or Donald Trump and his violence-prone minions? And worse, what if such ideals help only in suppressing our rage? What results if we end up never dealing with them, but pushing them beneath our supposedly wise exterior? Will they fester and grow larger and blow along with us, making us ‘go postal’ eventually?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> I am afraid that, for me at least, there are no good answers to all this. In our wired world, we are not only exposed to more of the troubles in the world, from global horrors (such as Putin’s vicious invasion of Ukraine) to murders in the smallest hamlet, but are also increasingly removed from anything like an effective response or remedy. No places to make such a response. Our letters and posts seeming to fall on deaf ears. Our screams at the TV audible only to us and perhaps our families. Leaving us left only with the personal, self-regarding response. Is there a good way for an individual<i>,</i> that is, assailed constantly in every media forum by all this, and assailed by interpersonal conflict as well, to respond? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Perhaps what Zen practice teaches us works best. Take pains to be fully aware of how we are feeling, how our bodies and emotions are reacting, and where in the body and how strongly; and then making the decision <i>not to act</i> upon those powerful feelings. That is to say, pretending that we do not have strong feelings, such as anger, about what is happening in our offices or relationships or in Ukraine, pretending that we don’t have to feel any upset but can adopt feelings of “calm” and “equanimity,” is only feeding the beast with denial. No, feelings of anger, if they occur, are better admitted, acknowledged as human, <i>and</i> thoroughly examined. What does <i>not</i> need to happen is our acting upon them. That is to say, <i>we can feel anger without expressing that anger physically</i>. We can hold that anger in our awareness, and be aware of each impulse to strike out. But <i>not</i> strike out. Eventually, we can become better aware of what triggers anger in us, see what in us feels out of control (including whether it really is or should be in our control in the first place), and better able to manage it when it arises. Eventually, too, we may come to see more sides of each situation (including the position of the “other,” who is usually just like us) before it arises. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> All this, to be sure, takes time, and practice. And we must admit that. We must also admit that, in the short run, instantly giving vent verbally or physically to our anger can seem much more satisfying. But in the end, we can come to see that it truly is not; that the expression of anger, pent up or not, can harm not just others, but ourselves, often leading to a greater inclination to express that anger in more and more violent ways. The spiraling results of which we can easily see, vividly appearing in our own troubled world, every single day. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p><br /></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-66712092353629324622022-01-20T12:32:00.000-08:002022-01-20T12:32:03.516-08:00Perfection<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">I got to thinking about perfection and perfectionism this morning, after a zen zoom meeting in which it came up. The idea is one with which most people are familiar: the desire or felt need to do things perfectly, or, as perfectly as we can. It is usually accompanied by the feeling that we have fallen short of our ideal. This can happen with our performance in any number of activities, such as playing an instrument, or playing a sport, or doing math, or writing an email or essay or book, or giving a talk, or preparing a meal, or cleaning, or driving a car, or fixing a roof, or any of the activities we engage in, <i>ad infinitum</i>. We are always aiming, though rarely succeeding, at reaching perfection. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> The question that comes up is why? Why this mania, this desperation to be perfect? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> The answers, if there are any, are of course complex. First has to be its source—striving to please or get approval from our parents. Nearly all of us would admit that, deep down, the person(s) we’re always eager to please, regardless of the current form they take (teacher, boss, critic, reviewer, the public, posterity, etc.), is our father and/or mother. And of course this makes sense, for if we do not get the approval of the source of our life and well-being—our parent(s)—our very survival could be at risk; and, not incidentally, our sense of worth. This is clearly why “unconditional love” is now considered so important, why so many parents now say, ad nauseam, “love you.” Even so, the message that most of us get, or <i>hear</i> as the message, is conditional: ‘I’ll love you if you do this, and do it well.’ Which means to most of us: ‘get it right, get it perfect as I see it, or you will not only not be loved, you will be unworthy.’ No parent actually says this. But most of us interpret the message in this way—if only subconsciously. ‘If you will do as I say, if you do it perfectly, only then will you get my approval and love; if you do it wrong, you will lack my approval and be abandoned, worthless.’ No wonder we all want to be perfect. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> In modern America, there is an added condition or two to this drive toward perfection. We in the land of “equality” bear the added burden of having to <i>prove</i> our value, our place, earn our love and sense of worth, in the marketplace. That is to say, in more traditional cultures, where social positions are more or less fixed, average people do not have to prove their worth by “doing;” they are considered worthy regardless of what they do or don’t do, simply by the fact of <i>being</i> human. The Dalai Lama was said to have commented about this lack of a fundamental sense of worth in Americans. While he knew that Tibetans had this as a kind of birthright, Americans he observed did not; Americans somehow felt that they had to <i>earn</i> a fundamental sense of worth. And it’s true: we Americans feel we have to “make something” of ourselves. Then, with either our earnings or fame or possessions or the celebration of our colleagues as proof, we can feel worthy—worthy of any social position to which we might aspire. The drive to perfection gets exacerbated by this. It also gets exacerbated by the related fact that most of us live in highly urbanized settings totally unlike the village cultures from which many of our forebears came. And in those small village cultures, embedded in societies similar to the Tibet of the Dalai Lama, one’s sense of worth derived, similarly, just from being known, and accepted/respected as a human being. As such, one was worthy without having to prove anything, without having to <i>make</i>something of oneself. One was worthy and known and loved from the outset—unlike those of us in America, where worth must be <i>proven</i> by our accomplishments.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> There is an added burden that we moderns share. That is the burden of being, almost always, watchers rather than performers. We have TVs and CDs and DVDs and smart phones that display for us, always, the most perfect performances—in sports, in music, in scholarship, in talking even—known. Where in prior cultures, one had to attend a live musical or sports event where the risk of mistakes was always on display, and everyone knew it, we always watch or hear on our devices perfection—performances where errors or blunders are easily edited out. And those doing the performing are, to begin with, the best the world can offer: be it Valentina Lisitsa playing Beethoven, or Tom Brady throwing perfect passes. The standards we measure ourselves by are, therefore, these super performances, rather than the communal games or singing fests that more often prevailed in previous times, and which we could all join. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Everything leads us, compels us, therefore, to try for perfection. And what this naturally leads to is discontent—with ourselves for not achieving the perfection we hope is possible, and with others for embodying, at least from the outside, the perfection we wish were ours. Perhaps the most graphic example of this latter is found in the arena of feminine appearance. Women (and, increasingly, men) are constantly regaled with products and processes meant to enhance their looks in the marketplace of attracting a mate. Along with those products come the images, constantly before all of us, of impossibly slim and perfect models whose appeal is hyped in every forum: in parties and bars and marriages and sporting events and automobile outings and business meetings, all of which are made to seem perfect by the presence of beautiful, perfect people. No wonder so many teenagers are depressed, and so many attempt suicide. Who could possibly measure up? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> With all this, there is, at the same time, an inner dynamic at work, forming resistance to the actual achievement of perfection—even if it were possible. This involves the phenomenon, widely seen in cultures where evil eye is prevalent, of <i>avoiding perfection</i> as a kind of danger. This is especially dramatic in traditional India, where mothers purposely smear the faces of their babies—especially if they are beautiful—to mar or disguise that beauty. Why? Because in evil eye cultures, the attractive child or possession is always at risk—from envious eyes that either lust after that attractive possession, or wish it to be harmed in some way. It is believed that this envious gaze can result in illness or death. The best way to avoid such dire effects (aside from wearing amulets to ward off the eye) is to cover over the obvious beauty or wealth by minimizing it in public. Avoid talking about one’s success or accomplishments. Minimize one’s wealth. Reduce the beauty of a child with dirt or rags. All in the belief that, if envy can be avoided, one will be safe. I myself experienced the latent effects of this as a boy, growing up in a family that definitely believed in evil eye (<i>malocchio</i> in Italian). When I had to perform in piano recitals, for example, and though I never realized it till I was an adult, there was always the inclination to perform well, yes; but dragging in the opposite direction was the impulse to make some mistakes. In short, to avoid looking too good or playing too well, which subconsciously meant attracting the envy of others and the damage of evil eye, I was impelled to fall well short of the perfection I was always striving for. (see my <i>Mal Occhio: The Underside of Vision</i>, [Sanniti: 2008] for more details.) <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> I have the feeling that more people than myself, whether they believe in or even know about evil eye, sabotage what they do in this way. That is, concurrent with our drive for perfection, we have an opposite drive seeking to avoid doing our best. If this seems like a contradiction, it is that confounding contradiction of which human behavior is so often made. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Perfection, then. We yearn for it more than anything else. At the same time, we seem to avoid it like the plague. Which brings us to the question: is perfection even possible in this world? And if it were, would we, as mere humans, want it? My guess is that most of us don’t really have to worry about this. Nothing we do, or are, is ever perfect. But what if we <i>could</i> approach it? Would any of us make that storied bargain with the devil, or with science, to achieve perfect health (DNA purged of all genes for disease) or wealth or competence or immortality if it were offered? I think not. Perfection, it seems to me, would take us out of the human realm, where “human” means, if we examine it closely, the arena of mistake, of error. Life itself consists mostly of mistakes. Mistakes, errors, failures are what make us human. Each of us, at some level of our being, knows this. I knew this (albeit not consciously) when performing on the piano. And so, we make mistakes; and so, we constantly fall short of our ideal of perfection; and so, we are at one with the rest of humanity, with the rest of life itself; striving to be perfect, driven to achieve perfection, but always knowing that we cannot get there—not least because perfection would be that ultimate end stop, that isolation that none of us truly wants—if, that is, what we mistaken creatures want matters in the first place. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-16187242785578872572021-12-16T12:10:00.003-08:002021-12-16T12:13:17.314-08:00The Crisis Coming in 2024<p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Bart Gelman’s recent piece in the <i>Atlantic<b> </b>Monthly</i><b>, </b>“January Was Practice,”<b> </b>should alarm every American. It lays out in clear and chilling detail what <i>very nearly</i> happened in the wake of the<span style="font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 21px;"> </span>2020 election (particularly on Jan. 6), but also who, exactly, the people are who would support the overturning of an election (and democracy itself) should Donald Trump be defeated again in 2024. There are at least 20 million of these people, according to Gelman, who cites a recent CPOST (Chicago Project on Security and Threats) poll. And the vast majority said that Biden was an illegitimate president, and that <i>violence</i> <i>would be justified</i> to restore Trump to the White House. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;"> This is astonishing in itself. But one other statement “won overwhelming support” among the 20 million respondents, about two-thirds of whom agreed with this statement: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">“African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">This is a version of what has been called the “Great Replacement Theory”—an ethno-nationalist theory, popularized by French writer Renaud Camus, who warned that the white population in Europe was being replaced by non-European (i.e. black and brown) immigrants, in a process he called “reverse-colonizing.” A form of this Great Replacement Theory has taken hold in America; and what makes this belief even more alarming is not only that these are the very people willing to use violence to overturn an American election, but that these violence-prone crazies who assaulted the National Capitol on January 6 were NOT primarily from rural areas of the American South or Midwest as we might have thought. Rather, they were people with decent jobs in well-populated counties—but counties where “the white share of the population was in decline.” As Gelman writes, “for every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent.” In other words, the bulk of insurgents on Jan. 6 were white people who believed what they seemed to be seeing: that “their” country, like the 2020 election, was being “stolen” from them by “non-whites”—aided and abetted, of course, by the government actions of the hated Democrats who (they believe) specifically favor those non-white workers. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;"> These ‘committed insurrectionists,’ as they have been called by Robert Pape, form a virtual army of shock troops ready to use violence to support the ex-president if he runs again, and to start a new Civil War, if necessary, to preserve their white privilege. If this sounds like hyperbole, listen to some of the Jan. 6 rioters Gelman interviewed. One guy (Phil is the only name he would give) said:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">“Civil war is coming…and I would fight for my country….Oh Lord, I think we’re heading for it. I don’t think it’ll stop. I truly believe it. I believe the criminals—Nancy Pelosi and her criminal cabal up there—is forcing a civil war.<b> </b>They’re forcing the people who love the Constitution, who will give their lives to defend the Constitution—the Democrats are forcing them to take up arms against them, and God help us all.” (Gelman, ibid.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">Another Jan. 6 rioter, Gregory Dooner, told Gelman something similar: “Violent political conflict…was inevitable, he said, because Trump’s opponents ‘want actual war here in America. That’s what they want.’” (Gelman, ibid.) Notice that the pattern here is the usual one in the Trump era: <i>total reversal of the truth</i>. The hated Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are allegedly forcing a civil war (I assume by not recognizing Donald Trump’s Big Lie.) They are forcing those who are “defending the Constitution” to take up arms. As is obvious to anyone not blinded by right-wing propaganda, exactly the opposite is the case: the right wing insurrectionists are the ones taking up arms, and, they hope, forcing those who respect the Constitution and democracy to fight a new Civil War. Such a war would be based in the same determination with which the Confederacy tried to overturn the Constitution (and the Declaration) by insisting that NOT all men, particularly enslaved Africans, were created equal. And, importantly, that states had the right to <i>institute their own laws</i> keeping those Africans slaves, in defiance of the federal government. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;"> Gelman goes on to show that this is precisely what Trump, his advisers, and now the entire Republican Party, is intent on doing in 2024. It was “the main event,” as he terms it, in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election: “a systematic effort to nullify the election results and then reverse them.” This plot—and it must be called a plot, in light of the revelations that have now surfaced about specific plans by Trump and his advisers (the scenario for this election overturn came from adviser John Eastman, an arch-conservative lawyer, who wrote a detailed 6-point memo outlining how it would work, with VP Pence playing the main role) on how to nullify Biden’s victory. Indeed, one of these plans is now known to have emerged on Nov. 4 <i>before the results were known!</i> (“<span style="font-family: "PT Serif", serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;">Why can't [sic] the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS”)</span>—a plot that would<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"> </span>require “GOP legislatures in at least three states to repudiate the election results and substitute presidential electors for Trump.” That is, the pro-Trump plotters needed a mere 38 electors to reverse the election results, and they carefully selected six states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—where they might get those electors. Why? once again, because the state legislatures in those states are controlled by Republicans. And this very plot was actively promoted by the conspirators we now know had gathered at the Willard Hotel in DC (Eastman, Giuliani, Bernard Kerik, Bannon, and others), and were in constant communication with Trump and his White House.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;"> Fortunately, these efforts, including the appeal/command to VP Mike Pence to delay the counting of the votes, alleging that there was fraud in some state results, did NOT work. But it was not for lack of trying. Those attempts included an appeal to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito to stop the count and throw the issue into the Supreme Court, as in Bush v Gore. But even Alito did not respond to this desperate attempt. Neither did Pence, who was threatened with lynching as he tried to fulfill his Constitutional duty to certify the electoral votes. And, as it became clear that neither Alito nor Pence would stop or even delay certification of Biden as the winner (and Trump as the loser—a position that is akin to death for him), Steve Bannon on his podcast played the only card left. On January 5, he summoned his troops: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="articleparagraphrootwy3ui" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">“Tomorrow morning, look, what’s going to happen, we’re going to have at the Ellipse—President Trump speaks at 11.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="articleparagraphrootwy3ui" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">This last-ditch effort, advanced at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, would comprise an invasion of the Capitol by Trump supporters to stop or delay, by violence if necessary, the dreaded count and certification of the electoral vote. This invasion was not just a tour of the Capitol as some have claimed. Its purpose has been clearly outlined a number of times, as for instance in the words of one of the rioters, Ali Alexander:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="articleparagraphrootwy3ui" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">“I was the person who came up with the January 6 idea with Congressman Gosar” and two other Republican House members. “We four schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="articleparagraphrootwy3ui" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">We all know what happened on that certification day, Jan. 6. Except, that is, for the right-wing version, which has raised the issue of rioter Ashli Babbitt’s shooting death by an officer (as she attempted to enter the Capitol through a window she had broken) as evidence that yet another deep-state, left-wing plot was at work. Enrique Tarrio, leader of the violent Proud Boys militia, claimed that the shooter was a black man: “This black man was waiting to execute someone on January 6th. He chose Ashli Babbitt.” Another crazy has alleged that making the police officer who stopped Babbitt a hero was yet another example of the “only injustice in America today—anti-whiteism.” Though the accusation is totally false, it fits the narrative that the rioters feel comfortable with: that the white race is being sacrificed and replaced by people of color.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;"> This is the situation we now face. Gelman makes the point that 2020 and the subsequent Capitol riot were attempts (that nearly succeeded) to stop the electoral count and declare Trump the winner—when he had clearly lost. Trump, his millions of supporters (all believers in his “fraud theory”) and the entire Republican Party do not intend to allow their scheme to fail again. They are, according to Gelman, “fine-tuning a constitutional argument that is pitched to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court.” Their scheme involves one they have been implementing for years—cementing Republican majorities in the legislatures of several key states (they now have legislative majorities in 30 states, and hope for more in 2022). With these majorities, they will promote the <i>independent state legislature doctrine</i>. This doctrine, very much like the one the Confederates used prior to the Civil War, “holds that statehouses have ‘plenary,’ or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors.” This differs from the current Constitutional system, in which each <i>party</i> chooses its electors; and whichever party candidate wins the popular vote gets ALL the electoral votes of that state. But if any state legislature can substitute its own slate of electors, discarding the popular vote for a bogus reason like fraud, “it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead.” Alarmingly, Gelman points out, there are already four justices—Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas—who “have already signaled support for a doctrine that disallows any such deviation from the election rules passed by a state legislature.” In other words, the “independent state legislature” doctrine. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> The end game, then, is that the stage is set for the 2024 election, in which Donald Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee happens to be, will not be allowed to lose. If the electoral college vote, determined by the popular vote, does not go his way, several state legislatures (already busy passing voting rules that disenfranchise millions of normally Democratic Party voters), can simply claim fraud, substitute their preferred slate of electors, and appeal to the Supreme Court to sanction their theft. And if, as often happens, Republicans win control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 elections, and take control of the entire U.S. Congress, they will be in full control, at the national level as well, of the vote count and certification. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;"> Gelman adds this statement by Nate Persily, an election law expert at Stanford: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;">“If a legislature can effectively overrule the popular vote, it turns democracy on its head.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;">Indeed it does. So we must again wait, as during the Civil War, to see if, in these United States, a government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people,’ can long endure the assaults upon it—not, this time, by southern secessionists, but by the millions of loonies whom Robert Pape has called “insurrectionists,” and who have been unleashed and driven on to battle by their recently-found Messiah, Donald Trump. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">And very much related to that is this critical question: do enough Americans care whether Democracy— that is, their electoral decision about who governs them—survives? Or are they more concerned, as some recent polls suggest, about the price of gasoline, or eggs, or where they can be “free” to go without a mask or a vaccination? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 6pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Lawrence DiStasi</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span> </p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-29156651009971049182021-11-28T11:08:00.000-08:002021-11-28T11:08:18.023-08:00Vultures<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">The other morning on my daily walk, I encountered a dead skunk on Elm Road in Bolinas. At first, I couldn’t identify it, but then the black fur and large white tuft (and the stench) told me it was a skunk. I held my breath as I passed and warned several cars and bikes not to hit it—remembering what I had heard, that once you hit a skunk with your car, you can never get the smell out. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The next day, on the same walk, the skunk was no longer in the center of the road, but on the roadside amidst browned eucalyptus leaves and road detritus. And hovering over it was a large black buzzard—aka a turkey vulture, of the order <i>Cathartidae</i>, from Greek <i>cathartes</i>, which means “purifier”—tugging at what I took to be a long trail of crimson innards. “Ugh” was my first reaction: ugly carrion eater going about its grisly work, adding to the disgusting smell with a disgusting sight. And as I continued walking, I began to reflect on my reaction. And the question arose, “Why do we view carrion eaters as the lowest of the low?” As not noble like the great predators (including us), or even raptors like hawks to whom they’re related, but as nature’s bottom feeders: eaters of putrescent flesh. But then I also remembered reading that humans, when they first began to prowl the open savannahs, were also scavengers, of necessity—not equipped by nature with the teeth and claws of lions or leopards, or even dogs or hyenas, to bring down their own prey. So who are we to condemn scavengers, when that’s probably how we humans began our flesh-eating journey? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Then I began to recall that carrion eaters are actually a key part of the eco-system, clearing away the disease that resides in rotting flesh. So these ugly, ungainly birds (there were two more perched on a wire, eagerly awaiting—I imagined them salivating—their turn to dig into that skunky, putrescent flesh) <i>did</i> have a critical function. And that led to reflections on why we are so eager to bury our dead—clearly, at least in part, to keep our precious flesh from becoming a meal for one of these vile creatures whose tiny, raw-looking, red heads seemed to symbolize their lowly, repugnant status. And that in turn led to reflections about why, in fact, we are so anxious to embalm and then entomb our dead; which must come from the notion that the material body is really all we are, and keeping it inviolate is key to something—our hoped-for survival as everlasting beings, perhaps. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Then I discovered some fascinating facts about vultures. When vultures feed in a group, as they did on my skunk, they are called a “wake.” Again, this name evokes the idea of death, or perhaps more precisely, a death watch. There are also biological reasons for some of their most revolting traits: that un-feathered bald head, for example, helps keep their heads clean while feeding, and also helps prevent overheating. Peeing on themselves is yet another somewhat-disgusting (to us) means they use to keep themselves cool. And while Old World vultures locate their prey using their keen avian vision, many of our New World species do not, but rather employ a keen sense of smell, unusual for raptors, to locate carrion. They can smell a good meal from heights of a mile and more—which explains why we see them most often gliding and circling effortlessly on air currents, always signifying to us that a dead carcass must be nearby. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Their close relationship to humans goes deeper than that, however. First, they seem to know about us and our wars, and what a great opportunity are our battlefields, where large numbers of eager vultures have regularly been seen feeding on the numerous dead (again, ugh). We also have learned, via scientific investigation, how valuable vultures are to humans, particularly in hotter regions. For we now know that the stomach acid of vultures is exceptionally corrosive—which is what allows them to detoxify and digest carcasses infected with such poisons as botulinum, cholera bacteria, and even the bacteria that causes anthrax. In this way, they help remove these lethal (to us) bacteria from our environment. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> This helpful function must be what has led to the adoption and near-worship of vultures in ancient cultures. The ancient Egyptians, for example, believed that all vultures were female, and were spontaneously born from eggs, with no need for male fertilization. It was for this reason that they linked vultures to <i>purity</i>. Perhaps more important, the vulture’s ability to “transform” the dead matter on which they feed into life, made them symbols of the recurrent cycle of death and rebirth so important to Egyptians. It is probably for this reason, too, that many of the great royal wives in Egypt actually wore vulture crowns, said to signify the protection of the goddess Nekhbet<span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 21px;">, a </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">tutelary (patron) deity of Upper Egypt depicted as a vulture. Nekhbet thereby became the symbol of the rulers in ancient Egypt, progressing from that to become the protector of mothers and children throughout the land, worshipped as a goddess. Nekhbet’s headdress always boasted the image of the vulture. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> In India and Nepal, too, vultures have always been highly valued, but the species has declined dramatically in recent years. The cause has been found to be the <span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">presence of the veterinary drug</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diclofenac" title="Diclofenac"><span style="color: black; text-decoration: none;">Diclofenac</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"> in animal carcasses. The government of India has finally recognized this toxic effect on vultures and banned the drug for use in animals, but it could take many years for vultures to return to their earlier population levels. And without vultures to pick corpses clean, rabid dogs have multiplied, feeding on the<u> </u></span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrion" title="Carrion"><span style="color: black; text-decoration: none;">carcasses</span></a> instead of the vultures, and multiplying the prevalence of rabies—thus demonstrating once more the crucial role vultures play in keeping the environment clean and the human population healthy. <span style="color: #0b0080;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Perhaps most dramatic are the so-called “sky burials” of the Himalayan region, particularly Tibet and the northern-Chinese province of Qinghai. Sky-burial practice is very old (in Tibetan it is called <i>bya gator</i>, meaning “bird-scattered”), and was also practiced among the Parsees of India. In sky burial, a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to be disposed of—either by natural decomposition, or through consumption by animals, especially carrion-eating birds like vultures. It is part of a practice called <i>excarnation</i>—that is, removing the flesh and organs of the dead before burial. Its function is to dispose of human remains in as generous and practical a way as possible—practical because in much of the Tibetan plateau, the hard and rocky ground makes it nearly impossible to dig a grave, and with so little timber for fuel, difficult to use the traditional Buddhist method of cremation to dispose of the dead. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Buddhism is also key in my final reference to vultures, Vulture Peak, also known as Holy Eagle Peak (apparently because of its shape). <i>Gadhrakuta</i> (Sanskrit for Vulture Peak) is said to have been one of the Buddha’s favorite retreat and training sites. It is located in Rajagaha, in Bihar, India. It is often mentioned in Buddhist texts as the place where the Buddha gave sermons—such as the key one in the Heart Sutra, and the equally-critical sermon in the Lotus Sutra (specifically chapter 16). Again, the link to vultures and purity is reinforced in this latter sutra, with mention of the <i>pure </i>land. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> In sum, though we moderns tend to link vultures to revulsion, filth and disease, many cultures before us linked them to just the opposite—to <i>purity</i>, to the indispensable function of maintaining the health of human society by keeping it free of deadly pollution from rotting flesh. Perhaps, more generally, that should lead us to become more aware of our modern fetish for cleanliness, our quick response to that in nature which seems disgusting to us, but which functions, rather, to help preserve our health and our lives.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-19599447312606110672021-11-18T11:56:00.003-08:002021-11-19T10:37:32.651-08:00Donald Trump, Traitor <p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Not to put too fine a point on it, Donald Trump, the 45<sup>th</sup><b> </b>President of the United States, is a traitor. As president, he swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States by faithfully executing its laws. These are his publicly-recorded words:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><i> </i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">And yet, in at least two major ways, he has violated that oath. First, he has perpetrated the Big Lie that he actually won the Presidency in the 2020 election, and that he was deprived of his victory by fraud. In pursuit of that claim—rejected by every court and every state that heard it, including Arizona—he and his cohort organized and instigated the January 6 assault on the nation’s Capitol. This resulted in five deaths, with 140 more wounded, and endangered the lives of hundreds of Senators and Representatives, all in the brazen, violent attempt to prevent the assembled Congress from doing its Constitutional duty—e.g. to certify the election. Perilously for our democracy, this attempt to overturn the 2020 election has never quite abated, nor has Trump’s insistence that he is the legitimate president who should be re-instated in place of the “fraudulently-elected” Joseph Biden. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Second, the migrant conflict on the border of Poland, created by the dictatorial president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, is a blatant attempt to cause a crisis in NATO by weaponizing migrants. Both Russian President Putin and Pres. Lukashenko know full well that migrants incite right-wing opposition: Viktor Orban took power in Hungary by inflaming popular fears of migrants, and Donald Trump followed the same playbook to take the U.S. presidency in 2016. Nor is this mere speculation: Lukashenko has publicly promised to “flood the EU with migrants and drugs”— this in response to international sanctions following his downing of a plane that was crossing Belarusian territory carrying dissident journalist Roman Protasevich (see Heather Cox Richardson, “Letter from an American,” Nov. 10, 2021). This, of course, follows the many signs of fealty that Trump gave to Putin, both before and after his election—not least by criticizing and denigrating NATO members and leaders nearly every time he had the opportunity. He is the first US president in memory to have done this, and many critics consider this cozying up to our avowed adversary, while denigrating our perennial allies, as tantamount to treason. Lukashenko’s current move with migrants plays this same game. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> It is hard to think of more that any president could do to qualify him for treason. In spite of this, Trump retains millions of die-hard supporters throughout this nation. Not only are they supporters, but many of them seem ready and eager to foment a revolt to overthrow the legitimate and now-certified election of Joe Biden, and install their great leader in his place. It is, for me at least, impossible to imagine that most of them are fully aware of what his means. Perhaps they consider the similar attempt to fight a war with the Lincoln-led Union in 1861 as a good precedent for their plans. But that secession-driven attempt, which caused the death of more Americans than all our other wars combined (until the War in Vietnam), was clearly treason. This little detail seems not to matter to Trump’s supporters. Some of the latest evidence for this comes from the now-notorious memos from John Eastman, conservative lawyer (one of Trump’s senior advisers to promote and validate the Big Lie), outlining how VP Pence, acting to supposedly count the votes, could recognize that several states have alternate slates of electors, and thence turn the electoral decision either over to the Congress, where Republican senators could use the filibuster rule to prevail, or to the state legislatures, where Republicans control a majority of state delegations. Either way, Pence, if he went along with the plan (which praise be, he did NOT), could, “without asking for permission,” declare Trump the winner. Subsequently, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Subsequently,</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Eastman also “co-wrote</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/john-eastman-2020/" style="color: #954f72; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;" target="_blank"><span style="color: black; text-decoration: none;">a blueprint</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">for how Trump could use the military, the police, and criminal gangs to hold onto power after a disputed election” (Lindsay Beverstein, “The Evidence We now Have is Utterly Damning,”</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Raw Story</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">, Nov. 18.) The Jan. 6 insurrection followed.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Even more astonishing than the collusion of Trumpistas, is the collusion of almost the entire Republican Party. Every member of that party in the current Congress, with a few glaring exceptions like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, as well as thirteen outliers who took the risky step of voting recently for the Infrastructure package sponsored by the hated Democrats (earning them vilification and death threats), has genuflected at the altar of Trump to follow his lead. This includes that arch-hypocrite, Senate majority leader McConnell, and House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy. How is this possible? What of the party of Lincoln? What of the alleged conservative commitment to Constitutional originalism? It’s as if we’re in the topsy-turvy world of <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>, and makes one wonder: Have any of these people ever read the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Let’s quickly review those two revered documents. The Declaration has these words in its second paragraph:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11pt;">We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…<span class="apple-converted-space"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">This does not say “some men” or “only men of noble birth or white skin color.” It says <i>all.</i> Jefferson goes on to enumerate all the violations committed by the British King as reasons why “these sovereign states” are cutting their bond with him—essentially because of his behavior as a dictator who considers himself superior to common settlers, e.g. the people of America. In other words, the polar opposite of a leader in a democracy. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">As to Amendment XII of the Constitution, reflecting Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 3, it says:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><i><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed… </span></i><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><i> </i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">That is about as clear as it gets, and means exactly what it says: the president of the Senate, that is, the then-sitting Vice-President, Mike Pence, must open the votes from the Electors of each state, and count them. The entire Congress—not the president, he is <i>not</i> a King—then certifies the election. This is its Constitutional duty, as it was Mike Pence’s duty, which he faithfully carried out on Jan. 6. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But, the Constitution notwithstanding, Trump has continued to express his rage at Pence, the same rage that his minions expressed by screaming “Hang Mike Pence” as they invaded the Capitol on January 6. Though he was protected by the Secret Service, and escaped lynching that day, it was clear that the Vice-President of the United States was shaken. Trump, meanwhile, has continued to complain (as if he <i>were</i> King) about this alleged betrayal by his Vice-President and supposed ally in not following John Eastman’s script. The latest twist in this nearly-unbelievable episode of a president turning on his own vice president, is his expression of approval of the insurrectionist behavior in an interview conducted in March by Jonathan Karl of ABC news. In Karl’s rendering of that interview, to appear in his forthcoming book, <i>Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show</i>, he quotes the former president as follows:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">“It’s common sense, Jon. It’s common sense that you’re supposed to protect…How can you, if you know a vote is fraudulent, right, how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress?”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">What this means is that Donald Trump defended the invaders’ chants of “Hang Mike Pence” during the Jan. 6 attack, saying it was “understandable” because they were angry that the legitimately-conducted election hadn’t been <i>overturned</i>(quoted by Jesse Rodriguez and Rebecca Shabad, “Trump Defends Jan. 6 rioters’ ‘hang Mike Pence” chant in new audio,” nbcnews.com, Nov. 12, 2021.) One comment about this, among many, is that of CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, who said on Nov. 12:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">"Big picture: first of all, this is a constitutional nightmare. This is a constitutional worst-case scenario. The utter madness of a president… who is endorsing, supporting these people who are attacking his vice president.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">As if the unhinged behavior and comments of the former President were not enough, one of his former principal advisers, Steve Bannon, has added to the fire. Bannon, like many of Trump’s inner circle, refused to honor a subpoena from the House Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Assault on the Capitol (the committee had asked Bannon for documents and testimony). Charged with criminal contempt for defying the subpoena, he was taken into custody by the FBI, defiantly alleging that <i>his</i> people would take action. But even before being charged, Bannon had clearly stated, on his <i>War Room</i> podcast (the <i>war room</i> is what the Willard Hotel meeting on the eve of Jan. 6 among Trump conspirators, including Giuliani, Bannon, and Eastman, is also called), what he and the right-wing Trump minions were trying to do: <i>do away with democracy</i> to reverse the results of the Trump loss in 2020:<o:p></o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">“‘We’re taking action. We’re taking over school boards. We’re taking over the Republican Party with the precinct committee strategy. We’re taking over all the elections,’ Bannon said.” (Peter Wade, <i>Rolling Stone</i>, Nov. 12, 2021)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Not content with that, Bannon added to this defiance when he was taken into custody by the FBI: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="background-color: #fefefe; color: #262626; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: #fefefe; color: #262626; font-size: 11pt;">"I'm telling you right now, this is going to be the misdemeanor from hell for Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden," Bannon told reporters after the hearing, swearing his team is "going to go on the offense." (cnn.com, Nov. 15, 2021)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">How much more offensive the Trumpers can get is not immediately clear. But it is clear that Donald Trump and his minions have little regard for either the law, or democracy itself. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> One more element has recently surfaced. Tom Boggioni writes that Max Boot, the conservative military expert, referenced a memo to Donald Trump “making the case to fire Defense Secretary Mike Esper” as evidence that Trump wanted to find some other head of the military whom he could control. The said memo, written by Trump’s director of personnel, Johnny McEntee (formerly his baggage handler) was “both sinister and ludicrous.” It made the case for getting rid of a Cabinet officer because of “insufficient loyalty to the president.” Boot goes on to say that Trump “appears determined <span style="background-color: white;">to turn the military into his <i>personal goon squad</i>.”</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "PT Serif", serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 20px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">Further, if he manages to get another term as president, “Trump would want to ensure that the ‘guys with guns’ are on his side”</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "PT Serif", serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 20px;"> (<i>Raw Story</i>, Nov. 15, 2021). </span><span style="background-color: white;">In short, Donald Trump has had no compunctions in the past, and certainly would not in the future, about using the U.S. military (before him, mostly kept from use as a political actor) to compel domestic compliance with his dictates—very much like the kings and dictators he admires most.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="background-color: white;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Enough said. The former president seems to take pride in breaking with America’s most hallowed traditions, up to and including behavior that seems, and, in my opinion <i>is</i>, treasonous. That he has been able to get away with this, so far, is an indication of how far the United States has strayed from the democratic republic that was once the envy of the world. And also, how huge portions of the public seem totally unaware of the danger that inheres in that departure, and/or how little they seem to care. Let us hope that the danger is forestalled before it is too late—before, that is, a <i>real</i> dictator steps on stage. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-80430537619577457692021-09-18T11:51:00.003-07:002021-09-18T11:51:51.901-07:00When Things Collapse<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Wednesday was a trying day for me. First off, I was working on my new book, having recently put it into an <i>Indesign</i>“Book”—a very powerful app on Adobe’s Indesign program that paginates all chapters consecutively and makes them ready for delivery to the printer. I had just finished the chapter I was proofing (for the nth time), the second-to-last one in my novel, and closed it with some satisfaction: I was very nearly done. Then I went to close the “Book,” and suddenly—it disappeared. A little panicky, I went to my documents, found the “Book” file, and clicked to open it. Nothing. <i>It would</i> <i>not open</i>. Now I got really panicky. Where the hell was it? I kept trying to open it in different ways (on the task bar, on the Indesign home page), and each time came up empty. Then I went to my backup hard drive, and it wasn’t there either, nor was it available on Mac’s Time Machine—supposedly backing up everything automatically. Now I was beside myself. All my work on the damn novel gone? Then I decided to create another “Book” file, and re-enter all the chapters that I had earlier formatted with <i>Indesign</i>. It was laborious, but I thought I had to do it, though I knew I’d have to go over each one again to make sure it was formatted with the new corrections. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">And then, something happened. I tried opening the “Book” one more time (like a dog going back again and again to an empty dish), and it opened. I had no idea why, or whether it was the new one, or the one that disappeared, but I didn’t care. It was back, and after trying it several more times, I was satisfied that the “Book” had somehow returned—with all the crucial changes I had made. Whew. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Then I ate and got ready to go to my doctor’s appointment at the local clinic, scheduled for 2:45 pm. After some errands (rushed), my helper got me to the clinic a bit early, left, and I told the desk attendant who I was and sat down to wait. Then came the second blow: the attendant said he couldn’t find an appointment for me with my doctor for today. He said the only one he saw was the one on September 21, next Tuesday, at the Point Reyes clinic. ‘Yes, I said, I know about that one, it’s in Point Reyes because they have the frozen nitrogen there to take care of the blemish I want removed. But the advice nurse had previously made an appointment for today for the follow-up my doctor wanted.’ No dice. There had been a glitch somewhere, I was not on the computer’s calendar, and I could not see my doctor today. Perhaps on Tuesday, he said, you can make an appointment for the follow up. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">I won’t go into further details, but want to emphasize what this really brought home with a vengeance: How the world, <i>our</i> world, can suddenly collapse when our expectations about how things will work are suddenly dashed. In the one case, it was expectations about how computers and reliable design programs can suddenly fail or abort; in the other, how what we are sure some human has scheduled turns out not to have been. In short, we are totally dependent on millions, trillions of little automaticities, both human-created and natural, continuing to work as we expect, in order for our lives to continue to function. And when one or more do not, then we suddenly lose our certainty, our bearings, our faith that the world, the universe will, on its own, continue to support us, but instead seems determined to crush us. I did indeed lose faith yesterday, worried that it was the beginning of another of those periods in my life when nothing goes my way (especially worrisome at this time, when my crowd-funding campaign to publish my novel was hitting its stride), and braced myself for the coming shit-storm. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">As it turned out, my loss of faith was exaggerated and somewhat premature. But again, that isn’t the important thing. The issue I’m pointing to here is, again, the myriad of silent operations that we depend on, utterly, and <i>must</i> have faith in, to keep going. Take our blood circulation, wherein it, the heart, has to keep doing its taken-for-granted task of steadily pumping blood through our arteries and veins to keep us oxygenated and alive. If it fails, or slows too much because of age-hardened arteries, we can have a stroke that impairs our brain, or a heart attack that can kill us. Or the uptake of glucose into our bloodstream, the one that manufactures energy in each of our 724 trillion cells. Interruption in that complex process can spell loss of energy, and even death. Or the billions of bacteria in our gut that process and break down our food to provide that glucose, without whose indispensable work, again, we would be doomed. And that’s just a tiny glimpse of what goes on in the body, automatically, all beneath our consciousness, some well-understood by scientists, some not. We also depend on the planet rotating at the same speed for night and day to appear. And for the planet to keep traveling in its orbit around the sun (I have never understood what keeps these two circular motions going—some sort of inertia that’s left over from the original Big Bang 13 billion years ago? it seems preposterous), so the seasons keep succeeding each other, according to our calendars. And for gravity and angular momentum to keep us at just the right distance from the sun so we don’t either burn up or freeze. And for the climate to maintain its “goldilocks” balance so that we don’t, as now, suddenly find ourselves struggling with global warming because of too much fossil-fuel-burning by humans over the last centuries. Or for winter rains to fall so that the grasses and trees and plants don’t dry out for lack of water (as is now happening in the Western U.S.) and our whole way of life, our very lives, are threatened. And on and on. We rarely, except in a crisis, think about these things. But these and a gazillion more events (traffic lights working, drivers observing the rules of the road or pilots the airways) and regularities and conditions are absolutely necessary for our continuing functioning as human beings. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In short, we humans like to think we’re independent, sovereign creatures who keep ourselves going, and the world under control with hard work and self-discipline and intelligence. Mostly on our own. And those qualities are important, yes. But the larger truth is that we depend on countless other beings and actions, both organic and purely physical, to maintain the vital conditions that keep us moving and growing and nourished and healthy. And it is only when one of those actions falters or fails that we truly notice our utter dependency. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">That is why there may actually be hope in the massive failure that is global warming. Yes, we are all in peril. Yes, the planet, or more specifically, life on the planet—especially human life—is going to change drastically and suffer enormously, and perhaps die off in horrifying numbers. But the one element that is going to be gained, is already being gained, is human awareness of our dependency, our interdependence with all other life, with all of creation. We will all find out, through bitter experience, that we humans cannot act with impunity, cannot disregard the well-being of other humans no matter where they live or what they look like, and more, cannot disregard the well-being of other animals, or the oceans—and the sea creatures that inhabit them, or the plants and soil we depend on for food, or the trees that provide most of the oxygen we need to breathe, or the countless other beings and non-beings throughout the universe, including even black holes, that must continue to circulate and procreate and self-destruct and energize the whole thing. For if we continue to do so, we do it at our peril, which means <i>all of us</i>. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">And what makes this even more difficult is that the more we know, the more we don’t know (which is probably a good thing, our not knowing, because if we really knew about all of it, we’d be paralyzed with indecision)—about the amazing, incomprehensibly-complex inter-relations among all the single bits of existence with whom we are engaged in this thing we call “life.” But we are learning; and, as I found out recently, those happenings that seem like bitter failures are often blessings in disguise; for they teach us in the only way we seem willing to learn, that we are all floating on this precarious, nebulous, but miraculously-dependable-and-balanced web, that <i>does</i> support us, whether we deserve it or not. And all of us probably need to be more thankful and aware than we usually are that it is there, that it is always changing well beyond our puny attempts to control it, but that it still always operates because we need it, and thus need to respect it more than we will ever know. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-87417556926267593182021-08-16T12:27:00.000-07:002021-08-16T12:27:40.193-07:00It Is to Laugh<p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">With the plethora of bad news these days—global warming accelerating and whole portions of the globe on fire; the Covid-19 Delta variant running rampant through the population of anti-vax states and overwhelming hospitals; Afghanistan being overrun by the Taliban, and threatening to become another Vietnam-evacuation fiasco (today’s news confirms this); Congress mostly in gridlock and unable to address most of the crises besetting the nation, including the rampant inequality keeping whole sectors of the public in poverty (to mention only the major calamities besetting us)—it is easy to sink into despair and outrage. But it’s also easy, and far more preferable for one’s health, to see the humor in all this; not that tragedy is laughable, but that the idiocy emanating from politicians making these tragedies worse, is nothing if not hilarious. We have major figures who might qualify as standup comics if they weren’t so serious, so oblivious of the absurd nature of what they’re saying—which only makes their pronouncements that much funnier. So let’s just start listing some of the commentary by these buffoons; or perhaps begin by listing the buffoons themselves. Beginning, of course, with the Buffoon-in-Chief, ex-President Donald Trump. Then the governor of Florida, Ron De Santis. Then the women who have come to the fore in numbers in recent years: Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, and Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. And other idiots too numerous to name, but including stars like Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, and Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, and even the minority leader in the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. But enough of the lists. Let’s get to the humor. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Pride of place must go to Gohmert, who recently tried to warn about Democrats’ attempts to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which, he said, would fund “dangerous” solar power plants. And wherefore dangerous? Because, said Gohmert in an interview on One America News, “when the birds fly through, if they survive the windmills, then they hit that magnified sun, explode in flame, and down they go, <b>bird guts all over the mirrors</b>.” An epidemic of exploding birds! Proving, vowed Gohmert, that this “green stuff is out of control” (rawstory.com, Aug. 12). The mind reels. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Next up must be MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an avid Trump supporter, who famously predicted that Donald Trump would soon be reinstated as President, because Americans would realize that he <i>did</i> win the 2020 election. Lindell actually predicted the glorious date of this ‘second coming’: (“By the morning of August 13, it will be the talk of the world”), though he tried to hedge his bets when August 13 came and went with Biden still President. Still, Lindell happily urged supporters not to despair, Reinstatement Day would surely happen sometime in September, once he finally submitted his (nonexistent) proof that the 2020 election was rigged to the U. S. Supreme Court! The people would thereupon be ecstatic, urging the government to “Hurry up! Let’s get this election pulled down, let’s right the right. Let’s get these communists out.” One has to ask: Who <i>are</i> these people? Who opened the Nut House? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">It appears that someone with connections to the Republican Party did it, because a recent survey reveals that nearly half (49%) of all Republican voters believe, bizarrely and dangerously, that: <span style="color: #1d2228;">“a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” The same poll found that an even bigger group of Republicans (55%) say that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast <b>we may have to use force</b> <b>to save it</b>.” And the same poll (by George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs) found that Republicans don’t trust elections, 82% of whom said it's “hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.”</span><span style="color: #1d2228; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 20px;"> </span><span style="color: #1d2228;"> In other words, those damn people of color! Such results are nothing but ominous in any polity, but in a so-called “democracy,” they seem near-fatal. As does, by the by, the apparent determination of Republican state legislatures to pass laws limiting the opportunities and rights of Americans, people of color mainly, to vote. Wasn’t that supposed to be the point of this republic—to abide by the will of the people, which requires as many as possible to actually vote? Gee, I guess not. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="clay-paragraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 15pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But I digress. Let’s get back to the idiot parade. I particularly like the humor, macabre though it may be, of official responses to Covid-19 and the mask mandates and vaccines associated with it. Masks (along with social distancing) have proved to be remarkably effective at limiting the spread of this killer virus. So have vaccines, the best of which have been tested rigorously to be 90% to 95% effective at either protecting the vaccinated from getting the virus at all, or rendering its seriousness and lethality minimal. And yet, the response to attempts to mandate mask-wearing in enclosed places like school classrooms has been absolutely mind-boggling. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is probably the type case. In a <i>NY Times Magazine</i> article on Aug. 10, Gov. DeSantis’ rulings on mask wearing were summarized—to wit, that any school administrator or even school board that orders mask-wearing in his/their school, stands in violation of the Gov’s Executive Order of July 30, 2021 banning any such rules, and can and will have his/her salary withheld. While there are multiple lawsuits challenging the Gov’s order, he remained defiant, saying, “We can either have a free society or we can have a biomedical security state…And I can tell you, Florida, we’re a free state.” A ‘biomedical security state,’ and worse, one that seeks to save lives? Hilarious. His Executive Order is equally hilarious (and dangerous, especially in view of the fact that Florida is experiencing a surge in Covid cases, particularly from the lethally-transmissible Delta variant), insisting that masks have not been proven effective, and that they can cause serious breathing problems in children, not to mention “violating Floridians’ constitutional freedoms,” and “parents right under Florida law to make health care decisions of their minor children.” The stupidity and arrogance of this order is breathtaking, particularly in view of the Delta surge causing, in Florida, upwards of 20,000 cases a day and record numbers of hospitalizations and deaths, including among children. In short, this is hilarious but definitely not funny, constituting as it does a death sentence for many. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="clay-paragraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 15pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Now let’s look at that champion of morons, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (whom I call Mrs. Pruneface, of Dick Tracy fame). On July 19, she tweeted this: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="clay-paragraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 15pt 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">“The controversial #COVID19 vaccines should not be forced on our military for a virus that is not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65. With 6,000 vax related deaths and many concerning side effects reported, the vax should be a choice not a mandate for everyone.”</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Controversial vaccines? A virus that is not dangerous? 6,000 vax-related deaths? Where do these people come from? Twitter apparently wondered the same thing, and promptly banned Greene from its platform for 12 hours for “misleading statements.” Not long afterwards, in an August interview on the right-wing “Real America’s Voice,” as reported in <i>Rolling Stone</i> on August 13, Greene went full-on wackadoo. She predicted that “<span style="background-color: white;">Once the vaccines are approved by the FDA, we’re going to see the mandates for vaccines ramp up far more than they are right now,</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 27px;">” </span><span style="background-color: white;">and, “I fear they’ll become law in some cities and some states. Biden would love to make it the law of the land.” Not content with this paranoid idiocy, she went on to claim that if hospital waiting rooms were full, it was <i>not</i> because of Covid but also because the waiting rooms are full of all kinds of other things like “car accidents” and “cancer,” as if somehow the government had an interest in hyping up fear of this harmless virus (over 600,00 deaths in the U.S. alone). And anyway, she ended, “we all have to die sometime.” Ah such wisdom. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">One could go on citing Greene’s moron-isms—In May, she claimed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to maintain the mask mandate on the House floor was “exactly the type of abuse” that Nazis inflicted on Jews; <i>exactly</i>, saith the prophet. And she later compared the President’s campaign to encourage all Americans to get vaccinated to “brownshirts.” Our Mrs. Pruneface seems to have a liking for Hitlerian imagery. Her attack on Nancy Pelosi started much earlier, as well, when she ‘liked’ a Facebook post that suggested taking out Pelosi with a “bullet to her head.” And finally (the mind wearies of this madness), in arguing against <span style="background-color: white;">what she called “the Anti-Police bill” she tweeted in January that “The FBI won’t be able to tweet pics like this or of teenagers they are pursuing, who walked through the Capitol on 1/6.” Oh, so that’s all it was: the January 6 invasion was really just a bunch of teenagers walking through the Capitol. On a school tour, no doubt. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Does anyone actually take such ridiculous statements seriously? Are there real people who actually vote for such a moron? Apparently, in Georgia, there are. Again, the mind reels. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">I will end this tour with that great Representative from Colorado, Lauren Boebert, she of the gun-lovers lobby (who has tried several times to enter Congress with her pistol; pistol-packin’ mama indeed.) In that regard, <i>Newsweek</i> on August 15 reported that Boebert, on Twitter, had written—just hours before a shooting in Orange County, CA that resulted in four people dead, including a child—that Gun control was ‘anti-woman.’ She wrote, among other things: “<span style="color: #222222;">The only way I'm safe to walk around any dangerous liberal city is with an equalizer. Gun control is anti-woman.” Oh, those gun-toting, woman-hating liberals</span>! And Boebert, who mouths off every chance she gets, started supporting gun-toters even before she formally entered Congress this year. The Congresswoman-elect actually led a tour of the Congress Building (she said it was to show her family where she worked), which some believe was a reconnaissance tour in preparation for the Jan. 6 invasion. The tour actually happened (as videotape proves) on December 12, 2020, in conjunction with a “Stop the Steal” rally in DC which Boebert attended. She is also seen with her mother in another video taken the morning of Jan. 6, <i>before</i>the invasion. According to Zachary Petrizzo of salon.com, <span style="color: #222222;">January 6 organizer Ali Alexander can be “seen directly behind Boebert in the clip.” Moreover, at about 8:30 a.m. on that fateful day, Boebert<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span>went on Twitter to announce: <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">“Today is 1776.” Did she actually think, and does she <i>still</i> think, that the January 6 invasion was some sort of Independence Day? i.e. the day to re-impose on America, by force of the arms she so loves, its rightful president, Donald Trump? And I keep having to ask: where do these people come from? And who in their right mind votes for them? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">The un-funny fact is that these sample cases (which by no means exhausts a very large list) indicate something very serious going on, something as serious as death. Which brings me to just one more example. CNN reported on August 13, that the very week before school opens, three educators “have died within about 24 hours of each other from Covid-19 complications.” Not surprisingly, all three were <i>unvaccinated</i>. All three were teachers in elementary schools, where large numbers of parents and teachers are still unvaccinated. This in a district where the school board, trying to prevent exactly this (to no avail it seems), had voted to maintain its mask mandate, approved last month. School board chair Rosalind Osgood said, about the Board’s reasons for defying Gov. DeSantis’ executive order banning such mandates, that “the eight of us on our board are adamant that we cannot have people in school without masks, because we are living a backlash of people dying of Covid.” She added, “We strongly feel that the lives of our students and staff are invaluable, and we’re not willing to play Russian roulette with their lives.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">That a governor could see this stance as violating some bizarre concept of freedom is laughable, on one level, but ultimately deadly serious. Because this is actually about elected officials in this nation playing “Russian roulette” with the lives of children. As Greta Thunberg is fond of asking, “How dare they?”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Lawrence DiStasi</span> </p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-32564805429000450392021-08-01T11:05:00.003-07:002021-08-01T11:18:14.245-07:00Vaccines and Resistance <p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Like many others, I have been fascinated, and often horrified, by the resistance of large percentages of Americans to being vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus. Though this resistance seems to be most widespread in rural areas—especially in the South and Midwest, so-called ‘Trump country’ dominated by white, rural conservatives and Fundamentalist Christians—it is by no means limited to those areas. I have family members living in Vermont and Colorado who have so far refused to get the vaccine. There are pockets of resistance in urban areas as well, especially in minority communities. As for me, I am in the high-risk age group, and was vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine as soon as I could get it in late January. The decision seemed elementary to me, and even to most people I know, including my children. After all, this virus is deadly, especially to older people, but it has also begun to infect and kill younger Americans, including some children, once thought to be essentially immune. Now, with the spread of the very dangerous and highly transmissible Delta variant, the danger is even greater for the pandemic to become a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” So why would anyone fortunate enough to live in America, where the vaccine is readily available, refuse this protection?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">My sense is that too many people have no idea what the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines consist of, and so are wary of getting infected from the very medication meant to protect them. That is, they think that the mRNA vaccines used against Covid-19 employ the same technology as the original vaccine developed in the nineteenth century to immunize people against smallpox, or later against polio. That is, those vaccines normally inserted a weakened or inactivated disease germ into our bodies to stimulate the immune system, which then created antibodies to fight off the invader. Effective, yes, but for some people, the idea of actually injecting the germ into their bodies conjured up terrifying images and fears of getting diseased by the very injection meant to protect them. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">However, a quick research hunt on the web would reveal that mRNA vaccines do NOT use this method—that’s why they are considered much safer. That is, the mRNA vaccines actually “teach” our cells to make a protein (teaching cells to make proteins is the basic function of mRNA, where the “m” stands for messenger) that mimics the so-called ‘spike’ on the surface of the Covid-19 virus. That harmless protein, or piece of protein, then triggers your immune system (which recognizes that the protein is an invader that does not belong) to create specific antibodies to fight the virus. And those antibodies protect you from getting the virus if it later enters your body. Importantly, after the protein piece is made, the cells break down the instructions and discard the spike protein. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The vaccinated body, its cells, in this way are taught how to make antibodies to fight off future infections from Covid-19. And these vaccines have been proven to be very effective—not 100% to be sure, but close—against the virus, especially against the dire outcomes and deaths typical of Covid-19, and its new variants as well. And again, the great advantage of mRNA vaccines is that no potentially harmful germs need be injected into the body. This last advantage should be of critical importance to those who oppose vaccinations in general. This is because one key and historical objection to vaccines is that, by using a deactivated portion of the actual germ, there is a perceived risk of mistakenly infecting the vaccinated body, rather than protecting it. This is simply not an issue with mRNA vaccines. Nor is the objection about mixing animal and human bodily ‘fluids,’ that once formed the basis of objections to the smallpox vaccine (which was made from deactivated cowpox from cattle.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">So then, why, in the United States, are we nowhere close to ending this pandemic (though whether pandemics are ever truly over, is another question; apparently, the 1918 flu continued to infect people for years after it disappeared from most people’s consciousness)? And even less so the effects of so-called “long covid,” or <span style="background-color: white; font-family: Nocturno, serif;">“post-acute sequelae of COVID-19,”—a condition that most often affects younger people, and can involve long term damage to the heart (increased chance of heart failure), the lungs (breathing difficulties), the brain (strokes etc.), and usually involves persistent symptoms or new symptoms that develop, generally speaking, at least four to eight weeks after the initial infection with COVID-19.</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Nocturno, serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;"> </span> The truth is that, even in the face of such critical outcomes, vast numbers of people resist vaccination. So, with large pockets of resistance to the vaccine, achieving ‘herd immunity’ with 75 or 80 percent of Americans vaccinated, will be extremely difficult since, at this point, we are perhaps at 60 percent, and worse, large areas of the nation have concluded that the crisis is over, and they can get back to “normal.” Hence crowds of people are again gathering in crowded bars, restaurants, and other enclosed areas. But the crisis, driven anew by the Delta variant, seems to be revving up for another round, another huge surge—especially in states like Missouri and Florida where resistance to any measures, especially vaccines, to stop the spread is very high. So the question becomes, what is the basis of that vaccine resistance? <o:p></o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">A look at why people have been resisting shots is both hilarious, and deeply disturbing about what Americans of all sorts will believe. Much of the vaccine resistance seems to come from posts on Internet sites like Facebook and Twitter and TikTok, or right-wing media outlets like Fox News, Newsmax and others. This is not to say that reasonable concerns about the gross profit motives of pharmaceutical companies aren’t at issue; nor concerns about the rush to certify vaccines without time to properly test outcomes. But more resistance, it seems, derives from lunatic beliefs and social pressures. An article from the July 31 <i>Washington Post</i>, for example, notes that in Arkansas, Governor Asa Hutchinson <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">“has traveled the state to combat the widespread idea that the shots are a “bioweapon.” A bioweapon! Even more specifically, 12-year old Shanuana Alcantar of Los Angeles, when interviewed, said her hesitancy about the vaccine had to do with reports she saw online that “it would make her arm magnetic: </span><span style="color: #333333;">‘I was really scared seeing all of those TikToks of the metal spoons and the magnets hanging from people’s arms, she said.’ Good grief! If this kind of nonsense weren’t so dangerous, it would be the stuff of laugh-out-loud comedy. Then there’s 25-year-old Chelsah Skaggs of Arkansas, who said she feared reports that the vaccine would make her <i>infertile</i>. And 18-year-old Tyler Sprenkle, who worried, once he got the vaccine, that his friends “would look down on me, say I was turning into a liberal or a raging Democrat” (this illustrates the widespread community-approval type of resistance.) Not to be outdone, 57-year-old welder Tim Boover, hesitated for months both about Facebook posts claiming that the vaccines had “bad side effects,” and also reports that “vaccines contained microchips that could be used to track people.” Vaccines with microchips? I suppose all these might be considered within the realm of possibility, but really? People actually believe this nonsense?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #333333;">The good news, however, is that all of these people eventually decided to get the vaccine. The above-mentioned Chelsah Skaggs finally decided to do her own research, and concluded that though “skepticism is a good thing…to be ignorant is a different issue.” Well, thank god. For Boover, it was the Delta variant, which killed his childhood friend, that has scared him, like many others, into getting the shot’s protection. In Boover’s case, too, designing and forging the urn for his friend’s ashes, helped turn the tide for him: “This morning, I had to seal her in a box, weld that shut over her ashes,” he said. “It was rough. Then I made my mind up: I’m gonna get that shot.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #333333;">That fear-driven action pattern seems to be a major hope now. Vaccine resisters, who have been virtually impervious to reason or evidence or appeals from government officials, or public health and contagious-disease experts, are now responding to death—the possible death of their parents or grandparents, or even themselves. Accordingly, the same July 31 <i>Washington Post</i> report noted that “More than 856,000 doses were administered Friday, the highest daily figure since July 3” and that “This was the third week that states with the highest numbers of coronavirus cases also had the highest vaccination numbers.” <span class="apple-converted-space"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #333333;">Though we would prefer it if people came to see that getting vaccinated actually helps everyone (because without “herd immunity,” the virus simply keeps finding new bodies to infect, and hence the numbers to evolve new variants, meaning <i>no one</i> is safe until everyone is), death will do. When all else fails, that is, good old Dr. Death can and does do the trick. And though it is terrifying to reflect that this—people dying in large numbers—is the only way to convince skeptics that they may be wrong, it at least comforts us to know that <i>something</i> can cut through the long trail of bullshit that has prevailed in right-wing enclaves up till now. Perhaps it will even succeed in saving a few lives, and, ultimately, the lives of us all. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="color: #333333;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></span></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-90715507928269747352021-07-26T11:38:00.000-07:002021-07-26T11:38:11.162-07:00On Belief<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0in;">Most of us have to make decisions almost daily about what to believe. This is due to the fact that our modern world is too complex and multi-faceted to allow each of us to rely on personal experience or what happened in the past to support most of our beliefs. We cannot be everywhere, nor experience everything that requires us to make decisions—such as whether a virus is lethal, or whether the universe is really as big or particles as small as physicists say they are, or whether the evidence for global warming is really conclusive, or that human use of fossil fuels is really the cause, or whether government officials are right about a country that threatens us, and on and on. And so we, most of us, have to trust those who seem to have the credentials, the expertise, and/or the moral authority to inspire our trust. If they say something is true, we are inclined to believe that they are telling us the truth based on the best facts available. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In most eras before ours, this problem of trust did not constantly arise. Most people believed that their past experiences could guide them in the future: that government representatives generally but not always told the truth, that scientists had no motive to misrepresent their discoveries, or that church officials like the Pope would prevaricate or could even be fallible. Now, however, we have all had to become more skeptical. I am of the opinion that papal infallibility is a joke. That when government officials swear that another government has threatened us—as in the alleged attack on our warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, or the possession of nuclear capability by Saddam Hussein—these officials often engage in elaborate lies to justify our pre-planned aggression. I am also personally skeptical of allegations about UFO sightings, or government collusion with the Arab terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center in 2001, or a host of other conspiracy theories. But that said, I, for the most part, do not believe that <i>all</i> government assertions are thereby false. That Covid-19 is a deadly and contagious virus seems beyond question to me, given the 600,000 deaths from it in this country, and the more than 4 million dead worldwide. Indeed, it seems to me that many governments, such as the one in India, have more reason to <i>undercount</i> the deaths from Covid than to exaggerate them. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Why, then, do so many people vehemently disagree with the science, especially as conveyed by government officials, and disagree with the idea that a vaccine could protect them against the worst outcomes from Covid-19? Why do so many Americans refuse to take recommended protective measures like wearing a mask? Why do nearly as many believe that global warming is a hoax cooked up by Democrats or by scientists looking for grants from government? Or that the moon landing in 1969 was not real but staged here on earth? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Personally, I am mystified by this tendency to disbelieve almost everything emanating from government. On the other hand, there is a history to which we can attribute much of this skepticism, especially from the right side of the political spectrum. Though anti-government-ism actually started earlier, Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address in 1981 certainly cemented this conservative position when he famously said, <span style="color: #1a1a1a;">“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; <i>government is the problem</i>.” One presumes that he did not mean, nor did people take it to mean, that all government activity was problematic (especially that which provides for corporate welfare); but his attack on government attempts to level the playing field through progressive taxation, or to regulate industries to prevent them from harming masses of people, or to provide a helping hand to those in need or those traditionally shut out of government largesse (like alleged “welfare queens”), was unmistakable. And the effects of this attack on government’s alleged “interference” and/or infringement on Americans’ so-called “freedoms” have had long-term effects. Nor would all this have had so lasting an effect without the underlying American ethic which holds that each individual is solely responsible for his/her own welfare, and that government’s only legitimate role is to protect the nation from harm originating outside our borders. In other words, to create a military that is so strong that no nation would even contemplate an attack (which position is, by its very nature, extremely profitable to the industries supplying weapons to that military). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Of course, this is a position that ignores the mandate in the U.S. Constitution that government is also to see to the general welfare. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution states:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #212529; font-size: 11pt;">“The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and <i>provide for</i>the common Defence and <i>general Welfare</i> of the United States”…</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #212529; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #212529; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0in;">This would seem to imply that the “general welfare” of the United States could include anything that would be beyond the ability of individual citizens to afford or undertake, but is definitely in their best interests—from building roads and bridges and transit systems, to regulating industries with a monetary incentive to<i> </i>engage in harmful activities, to warning the public about broad dangers such as global warming, to making sure that buildings are built to withstand fire or sea rise, to helping sections of the country devastated by natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes, to maintaining public order on the roads and highways (with traffic lights and speed limits) and in cases of insurrection (such as the invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021), and to more contentious tasks like making sure that every individual has the right to adequate healthcare, or adequate housing, or many more provisions that other nations take for granted as government mandates. Including writing a tax code that assesses citizens based not on the influence their wealth gives them in government, but with an eye to ensuring some level of equality of opportunity. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">And yet, we now have millions of citizens who refuse to abide by almost all government mandates that allegedly infringe on their “freedom.” The position goes as follows: ‘I am a free American and therefore no government can tell me to a) protect myself by getting a vaccination or b) protect myself and others by wearing a mask and staying away from large indoor gatherings, or c) credit the contention of government agencies that Covid-19, and its more transmissible variants, is really any more dangerous than the common flu.’ Despite current information that cases of the disease are rapidly increasing in places with low vaccination rates, that the pandemic is now a <i>pandemic of the unvaccinated</i>, these opinions have only hardened as cases spike and more people die. And as increasing infection rates from those refusing vaccination threaten to prolong the pandemic and infect far more Americans and people worldwide than ever before—in short, <i>threaten the general welfare</i> for which the government is indeed responsible, but which individuals, prating about their “freedom,” about their scorn for “government interference,” seem quite content to ignore. The idea seems to be: ‘To hell with others; no government can keep me from doing whatever I please.’ <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Why is this so? One would almost think that life itself were at stake for those who cling so stubbornly to such beliefs. And indeed it is, for if one’s belief that Covid-19 is not serious, or that vaccines have dangerous side effects and are the result of government plots, that belief literally puts one at risk of long-term debility or death. Similarly, if people believe that global warming is a hoax, despite the increasing occurrence of heat waves or storms that threaten our very existence as a species, then they will simply scorn government attempts to induce them to curtail their use of fossil fuels. How can we understand this? Psychology helps. For what seems to be the case is that beliefs literally become “impervious to the facts in a process psychologists call <i>cognitive immunization</i>” (<i>Psychology Today</i>, “A mind convinced is immune to logic,” Ekua Hagan, March 28, 2016.) Part of this process is that “our minds <span style="color: #2c2d30;">automatically neutralize clashing information” (ibid.) They also “</span><span style="color: #2c2d30;">avoid any information that contradicts a strongly held belief, while seeking out information that strengthens it” (ibid.). </span>There are several other techniques that serve mainly to protect believers from outside challenges to their beliefs, including isolating themselves from those with different beliefs, anchoring one’s beliefs to powerful emotions, either negative (roasting in hell) or positive (bliss in heaven), and repeating one’s beliefs over and over. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The question is, how or why did such elaborate techniques come about? Presumably through evolution. As psychologists now explain it, <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="color: #2c2d30; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">…minds did not evolve to evaluate what is or is not the truth. Our minds were equipped through evolution with an impulsion [impulse? compulsion? ed.] to create, transmit, and defend beliefs that are useful, whether true or not (ibid.).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="color: #2c2d30; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0in;">That is to say, if a belief is <i>useful</i> to us, whether psychically or emotionally, it matters little whether it can stand up to the scrutiny of facts, or the opinion of others, or major authority figures. Or even, it seems, whether such a belief is helpful to our own health, or even deadly to the point of killing us. If we have somehow become convinced of such a belief, of its usefulness, it becomes literally “immune to logic,” or accuracy, or fact. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">So this is the serious situation we now find ourselves in. Most people now have all kinds of “alternative facts” about any issue or policy, conveniently available on the internet with the click of a key. They can also find allies on web sites to confirm their beliefs, often public figures who reinforce those beliefs, no matter how aberrant. We need only think of Donald Trump, the President of the United States, encouraging people who believed that the election was stolen to storm the Capitol on January 6, and stop the Congress from doing its Constitutional duty to certify Joe Biden as the winner. The horde of supporters then did exactly that (though they did <i>not</i> stop the certification process), breaking in and creating mayhem and death in the temple of democracy—all based on their delusional belief that the election had been stolen. That is to say, not even death or the threat of death can stop aroused people from acting on a cherished belief. It is one reason that governments at war try to instill in their troops the belief, often manufactured, that the enemy is the devil incarnate. Those who believe in the evil of the enemy and the righteousness of their cause can be led easily to suspend any civilized behaviors that would normally prevent them from the mass killing of strangers that war requires. Their beliefs insulate them from normal inhibitions. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In sum, beliefs are powerful drivers of behavior, to put it mildly. And what we are learning more and more each day is that, contrary to what we might have thought, beliefs are not necessarily anchored in truth, or in fact, or in logic, or in the sought-out opinions of the best and brightest. On the contrary, they are often anchored in the flimsiest and most laughable assertions (think of the QAnon conspiracy theories about Hollywood stars sexually abusing and eating little children; or the recent rant by Britisher Kate Shemirani <span style="background-color: white;">about Nuremberg-like trials where doctors and nurses could be hanged for administering the coronavirus vaccines</span>), and/or in comforting emotions that, though useful to the believer, remain impervious to fact or logic or proof. And the saddest part is that we are all susceptible to these convenient and reassuring shortcuts because, again, no one in our time can test every belief in the annealing flame of personal experience. All of us, in the end, have to test our beliefs against whatever logic and research we can muster, and then rest them in whatever standard we have learned to trust. Or, in the final analysis, to whether we survive or perish because of them. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0in;">Lawrence DiStasi <o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-42746330287352617482021-07-16T10:54:00.000-07:002021-07-16T10:54:37.627-07:00Viruses Here, There and Everywhere <p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Viruses; viral growth. We’re surrounded by them these days. And it’s not just Sars and Covid-19 and all its variants like Delta that are spreading more rapidly and lethally by the day. It’s the viral growth of ignorance in the body politic, the viral growth of belief in what Hitler himself referred to as the Big Lie, the viral degradation of any received standard of truth. In short, we in the foremost democracy in the world are in trouble because of viral growth on both the physical and socio-mental level. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> Take the virus that has already killed more than 4 million humans worldwide, and has now mutated into its most transmissable form yet, the Delta variant. This mutation developed when India was in the midst of its recent surge (a surge being an increase in cases that allows any virus to multiply infections and thereby have many more opportunities to mutate). This, in turn, means that the Sars virus and its mutations have demonstrated to all who can read or listen that the world is now irrevocably interconnected: what infects the people of India must soon come to infect the human population of every other nation on the planet. In short, no one is truly safe from this virus until <i>everyone</i> is safe, because no matter what percentage of Americans or Europeans gets vaccinated, there will be many who are not vaccinated or protected—as is now being demonstrated by the surging numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in states like Missouri, Nevada and Mississippi, and in nations like England. Nor is this all. The surge of cases in African nations, and in Latin American nations like Brazil, means that new variants will likely emerge from those hotspots as well. And with new variants come new and increasing danger for the wealthier nations, even those that have high vaccination rates. For again, viral growth means that the chance that mutations will develop to circumvent the vaccines now protecting so many is increased. That is what viruses do, why they have survived for so long: they change in direct response to the weapons that humans marshal to cut them off. Thus, the more of them that find a human to infect, the more they can evolve variants to skirt around our evolving defenses. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">This physical threat from Covid-19 would be bad enough. But the socio-mental threat may be even more serious. For there are still people who simply deny the virus’s reality, like Linda Edwards from North Carolina: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">"I thought I was healthy enough and that I could escape it. Really, it was the most frightening thing I've ever been through in my life…It was devastating. I had no dreams of ever staying that long. It's the longest I've ever been in the hospital (two weeks)…I was there hoping and praying my son was okay here because he had tested positive, too…<span style="background-color: white;"> It's changed my whole life. I'll never be the same.” (www.</span>rawstory.com, 7/13). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;">Or this from the recent CPAC conference where idiots like Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado vowed fierce resistance to alleged nefarious government efforts to vaccinate, and thereby infect the population: <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">“We’re here to tell government, we don’t want your benefits, we don’t want your welfare, don’t come knocking on my door with your Fauci ouchie,” Boebert said, referring to Biden’s top medical adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, her voice rising as she paced the stage and shook her finger. “You leave us the hell alone!” (<i>Washington Post</i>, “Vaccine hesitancy morphs into hostility,” 7/15/2021).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="color: #333333;">In response, veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz, ominously observed: <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">“Now decisions are being made not because of evidence or facts or statistics, but strictly on political lines. And now people are going to die.” (ibid). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Or consider what has happened in a U.S. court recently. In the District Court in Michigan on July 12, Judge Linda V. Parker expressed her astonishment at the dozens of affidavits submitted by Trump lawyers as putative evidence of the vast conspiracy to fraudulently steal the 2020 presidential election from the former President. Calling the claims “fantastical,” Judge Parker went so far as to allege that <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">“The court is concerned the affidavits were submitted in bad faith” (msn.com). Judge Parker was referring in particular to one affidavit claiming fraudulent collusion between Democratic election workers and Postal employees, an affidavit signed by someone who claimed to have seen “a young couple deliver several large plastic bags to a postal worker.” This witness said only that it was “odd” and that the bag “could be” ballots. Judge Parker’s comment on this affidavit is worth quoting in full:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">“I don’t think I’ve ever really seen an affidavit that has made so many leaps. This is really fantastical. My question to counsel here is -- how can any of you, as officers to the court, present this type of affidavit? Is there anything in here that is not speculative?” (msn.com). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">It is important to emphasize Judge Parker’s words—that the Trump lawyers who presented the affidavit are “officers of the court,” that is, legal professionals, “having </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040;">an absolute ethical duty to tell judges the truth, including avoiding dishonesty or evasion about…the location of documents and other </span><span class="hvr"><span style="color: #404040;">matters</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040;"> </span></span><span class="hvr"><span style="color: #404040;">related</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040;">to<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span class="hvr"><span style="color: #404040;">conduct</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040;">of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span class="hvr"><span style="color: #404040;">the</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040;"> </span></span><span class="hvr"><span style="color: #404040;">courts” (thefreedictionary.com).</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 20px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040;">She clearly meant that these lawyers, including the infamous Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, had been derelict in their duty as court officers obliged to investigate and fact-check the claims made in their affidavits. Detroit attorney David Fink, referring to the “lies spread in this courtroom…that helped trigger the deadly assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6,” suggested that all the lawyers involved should be punished. Judge Parker has suspended, to a later date, the question of punishment for this unethical behavior, but Attorney Fink made the important point that “these lies were put out into the world, and when they were put out into the world they were adopted and believed.” In other words, the lies submitted by lawyers, and of course by ex-President Trump, have had widespread and deadly consequences. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 15pt; text-indent: 0.5in; vertical-align: baseline;">This brings us to the source of these socio-mental viruses: Donald Trump, of course, who has brayed his outrage over his election loss (he calls it a steal) ever since November 2. But new reports from a book by Carole Leonnig and Richard Rucker assert that it was former-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who actually initiated the Big Lie. The book, <i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">I Alone Can Fix It</span></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">,</span> reports that Giuliani had set up a separate “command center” inside the White House on election night, and when Fox News declared that Joe Biden had won Arizona, driving Trump into a profane frenzy, Giuliani tried to get the then-President to go on national television to deliver a victory speech<i>. <em><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; padding: 0in;">“Just go declare victory right now,” Giuliani is said to have told Trump, “You’ve got to go declare victory now.”</span></em> </i>In fact, Giuliani is reported to have been pushing the “Big Lie” all night long. <span style="background-color: white;">When questions arose earlier that evening about the key battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, Giuliani is reported to have said to Trump aides, <i>Just say we won</i>. And that is exactly what Donald Trump began to do, and what he has asserted with varying degrees of vehemence and pretend outrage over “unfairness,” ever since. </span><o:p></o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 15pt; text-indent: 0.5in; vertical-align: baseline;">That Big Lie, in turn, has become a virus that has infected the entire Republican leadership, and virtually the entire Republican Party. From Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy, to the entire gaggle of spineless Senate Republicans, through Republicans in most State Houses, to the vast majority (74%) of Republican voters—all have echoed the Giuliani-Trump Lie: <i>we was robbed</i>. <i>The election was stolen. Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.</i> And some have even asserted (like pillow magnate Mike Lindell) that, despite the election results, Trump will be reinstated as President this August. The most rabid of Trump supporters, of course, took part in the invasion of the national Capitol on January 6, 2021. Driven by President Trump’s assertion in a speech earlier that day, they invaded the Congress in the attempt to “stop the steal”—that is, to prevent the U.S. Congress from doing its constitutional duty to confirm the results of the election, to wit, that Joe Biden had won and was the new President of the United States. Even to this day, after more than sixty lawsuits in several states have been dismissed by various courts as having <i>no basis in fact</i>, the majority of Republican voters believes, or seems to believe, that the 2020 election was marked by fraud, was somehow stolen, and that Biden is an illegitimate president. And they cheer wildly each time Donald Trump appears in public to re-assert his claim that the presidency was stolen from him. All with <i>zero evidence</i>. <o:p></o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 15pt; text-indent: 0.5in; vertical-align: baseline;">The question then becomes: what induces all these millions to believe the Big Lie? Indeed, what has led so many to believe all of Trump’s lies from the very beginning? It is, to quote Winston Churchill, a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Before the Trump era, one supposed that most Americans would base their ideas on facts—in this case, on the ruling of every court that fraud had nothing to do with Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, and, in the case of Covid-19, the reality that 4 million humans on the planet have already died, and that vaccines actually have been proven to help prevent infection and death. But none of these truths, also including the almost universally-accepted truth of climate change, all backed by evidence and statistics, seem to matter. People who are Trump zealots seem to believe that storming the Capitol to stop Congress from doing its duty was a reasonable action to take. That every indication that the election was fair and legitimate was “fake news,” or part of some monstrous plot by nefarious liberals/socialists. That widespread movements to stem the tide of virulent white supremacy have been fomented by some violent group called “antifa.” That their children are endangered by a secret cabal of Hollywood perverts who have secret orgies involving underage girls. That climate change is a hoax. And on and on. Nothing, it seems, is too outlandish to believe. And the only “proof” necessary is the loud and conspicuous outrage voiced by personalities on Fox News or some ridiculous Newsmax TV or radio program that pretends it is purveying not opinion (which it obviously is), but actual news (which it obviously is not). There is no longer a Walter Cronkite or a good housekeeping seal of approval” for real news as opposed to opinion, much less for “reality.” People seem to regard “alternate reality” as a perfectly legitimate category. And with the internet presenting every manner of twisted and fantastic “inside” scoop (opinion), the ability for the average person to sort through the information overload to focus on what has been vetted and more or less proven, has reached abysmally low levels. When added to the idiocy spouted by elected government officials—like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, or Laurn Boobert (mispelling intentional) of Colorado, or Matt Gaetz of Florida, or even Republican Congressional leaders like Kevin McCarthy of the House or Mitch McConnell of the Senate—the partisan mix of lies and innuendoes becomes more than partisan. It becomes toxic. Toxic to the very bedrock notions of Democracy upon which this nation was founded, and which constitute its very DNA. For without an agreed-upon notion of what the Constitution mandates that the Congress do (such as verify the results of an election), or some minimal concept of proof concerning allegations of fraud, or the facts about a virus’s lethality or a vaccine’s prophylactic efficacy, a democracy—the government that responds to the legitimate will of the people—simply cannot function. That’s because the will of the people, of millions of people, becomes distorted, corrupted, and hostile to the very notion of a common good, to the concept that the people in its collectivity can be reasonable, and responsive to agreed-upon facts. Aside from the disagreements that always occur, and should occur, a democracy, that is, depends on the idea that a majority of a population will agree on the facts that appear to work for the common good, if not immediately, then over the long run. Without that minimal level of agreement, a democracy cannot function, but must descend to the level of dictatorship—where facts are mandated from above, where the agreement of the many yields to the forced obligation to accept the “truths” handed down by one powerful leader or group of leaders. <o:p></o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 15pt; text-indent: 0.5in; vertical-align: baseline;">That is the situation the United States now faces. Will we succumb, as the Republican Party seems to have succumbed, to the viral delusions of a single man insisting that only he is right, above the law, and the only one competent to make literal life-or-death decisions for millions? Or to the consensus of every reasonable court and opinion in the land that this imposter lost the election, that the Covid-19 virus is lethal, that vaccines to combat the virus <i>do</i> work, that climate change is real and human-caused and getting worse by the day? <o:p></o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 15pt; text-indent: 0.5in; vertical-align: baseline;">It is astonishing to me, and to many many others I know, that the fate of this nation hangs on the answer. <o:p></o:p></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 15pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><o:p></o:p></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Lawrence DiStasi</span> </p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-88219835072722125052021-06-25T11:21:00.002-07:002021-06-25T11:23:00.999-07:00What Makes a Place Sacred?<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">After hearing a talk during my zoom Zen meeting recently—a talk which included accounts of pilgrimages that the speaker had taken to Buddhist and Hindu sites such as Mount Kailas in Tibet—I was intrigued by the obvious question: do certain places on our planet actually have a palpable, perceptible “spiritual” presence? And if so, to what is the alleged “spiritual” feel of a place due: its site, its geology, its appearance, or the simple historical fact that humans have chosen it to be significant?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">None of these questions is simple to answer definitively. But a great deal of work has been done over the years to try to answer them. It turns out that I have several books dealing with the so-called “spirit of place,” and so I consulted one in particular, James Swan’s anthology, <i>The Power of Place: Sacred Ground in Natural & Human Environments</i>, (Quest Books, 1991). And what I found on re-reading a few articles there was fascinating. In the introduction, Swan himself gives us some history about the concept of <i>geomancy</i>, an ancient practice first made notable by Pliny the Elder when he supposedly met some Persian magi able to divine the right actions for a specific place by studying the configuration of stones tossed on the ground. As to the term itself, its essential notion is that “some places have more power and presence than others” (1). As examples of such places, Swan cites Chartres Cathedral, Stonehenge, and Mount Fuji. He also mentions the one described by our speaker, Mount Kailas in Tibet, describing it as the “ultimate sacred mountain,” one identified as the cosmic axis of the universe, or <i>axis mundi</i>. Now what’s interesting about this latter concept is that many, if not most traditional, shamanic cultures have designated their own <i>axis mundi</i>—symbolizing the center of the world, where heaven or the sky connects with the earth. According to the <i>New World Encyclopedia</i>, the <i>axis mundi</i> symbol can be a mountain, a tree, a vine, a column of smoke or fire, or even something of human production—a staff, a tower, a ladder, a maypole, a cross, a pillar, a temple and so on. It can be feminine (an umbilical cord) or masculine (a phallus) or neutral (the <i>omphalos</i> or navel.) In Japan, it is Mount Fuji; in China the whole country, but especially Mount Kun Lun; the American Sioux said the Black Hills were the <i>axis mundi</i>; and for the ancient Greeks, both the oracle at Delphi and Mount Olympus were considered sites of the earth’s <i>omphalos</i>. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">So what does this mean? How many <i>axis mundi(s)</i> can our earth have? Is this all based on outdated magic and self-centered hallucination? Perhaps; but perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss geomancy. In another article in Swan’s anthology, James Beal marshals evidence that, though ancient shamans did not know it, their sense that certain places were special may well have been due to their location at “dipoles,” which he describes as “nodes in the earth’s magnetic fields” (280). Apparently, the ability to “sense” magnetic fields is common among many species of plants, animals and birds. In pigeon brains, scientists have found tiny deposits of magnetite that seem to act as a kind of compass; and such magnetic sensors have been found in “nearly thirty species,” <i>including humans</i>. Beal goes on to say that <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">deep within the earth the circuits of subterranean streams had formed a pattern which in turn generated changes in the earth’s local magnetic field, and are associated with improvements in positive electrostatic field strength and negative ion concentration….Shamans did not know these things…But they sensed them in the excited electro-chemical processes at work in their own nervous systems, which in turn triggered inspired firing of neurons and synapses in the circuits of their own brains…the place felt special and magical, spiritual…(280-81).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">As a side note, Beal’s article asserts that both a positive electrostatic field, and negative ions are associated with positive emotional feelings in humans. In short, it could well be that the feeling of “spiritual” leading to the special-ness of many places had (and still has) an actual material basis. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Elizabeth Rauscher in a subsequent article, “Working With Earth’s Electromagnetic Fields,” expands on this idea of human sensitivity to magnetic fields. Rauscher focuses mainly on the sensitivity of humans and other animals to magnetic fields set up by planetary activity, such as earthquakes and volcanoes. While human brain wave activity in the range of .01 to 10 Hertz is associated with relaxation and creativity, the onset of volcanism gave off a signal of 2.8 to 4.2 Hertz when measured. Rauscher then connects this to the electrical activity of the human heart:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">I like to think of a 3.2 Hertz reading right before a quake or volcano as a little like a heart arrhythmia, following the Hopi idea of the “heart of Earth Mother” as being a viable model of reality (300).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">In other words, Rauscher is suggesting, like Beal, that some humans are sensitive enough to detect electromagnetic signals from deep within the earth, especially concentrated around mountains—possibly explaining the long human predilection for “sacred” mountains. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Whatever we make of this “scientific” information about what may have influenced human decisions about special or sacred places, it does provide some basis for what might otherwise seem like rank superstition. Which, given the plethora of sacred or special places that appear in almost every traditional culture, with the <i>axis mundi</i> attributed to so many disparate places over the globe, I must confess, activates my innate skepticism. After all, how many world navels could there be? And so, for this writer, the power of place tends to make more sense if viewed as a product of human choice— ‘this place is sacred, so we will name it the center of the earth and surround it with ritual to reinforce its sacredness.’ This is basically the thesis of Thomas Bender in “Making Places Sacred.” Bender begins with several italicized principles:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">What is significant about sacred places turns out </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">not<i> to be the places themselves</i>. <i>Their power lies within their role in marshalling our inner resources and binding us to our beliefs</i> <i>(323)</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">In holding a place sacred, we grant power to a place and acknowledge that power of the place (324)<b>.<o:p></o:p></b></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">The inviolability of sacred places is essential (324).<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">In short, whether or not we “feel” something special when we enter Chartres Cathedral or when we circumambulate Mount Kailas may depend more on how many centuries humans have venerated and conducted rituals at such places than on the places themselves. This is not to say that the choosing of such places originally had no basis in material fact. Shamans may well have been people especially attuned to magnetic or other forces present there. But the main reason we now “feel” the “spirit of a place” may be due more to tradition and the culture that held it sacred, than any inherent spirituality. And, we should add, to the long practice of keeping it inviolable. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">This last consideration may be something we should all take into account. For with modern mass tourism—now said to be the largest industry in the world—it is becoming almost impossible to maintain this inviolability. As Bender notes early in his essay, given that “all places live through the reverence with which we hold them,” the fact that masses of tourists flash their bulbs and gawk without reverence, without giving, with, rather, the desire to acquire something for themselves, constitutes the “root destruction of tourism” so prevalent in our time. In short, nothing sacred—not Delphi, not Yosemite, not Mount Fuji—may be able to withstand the assault of mass tourism which we modern humans have unleashed. Not to mention the weakening of our ability to sense the grand symphony of magnetic resonance to which we were once adapted and attuned, and which may be responsible for more of our well-being than we had thought heretofore. In sum, whether we believe it or not, the places which our forebears have designated as “sacred” may require our best abilities (if we value our sanity, and the genetic endowments not always obvious to our acquisitive cameras) to keep them more or less inviolate. For what would our world be if, as it is so fast becoming (think the ubiquity of shopping malls, fast food outlets), every aspect of our world had the same disneyfied, dismal look as every other; the entire world a street filled with cheesy Las Vegas replicas. That would be a loss, indeed. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-48587508358274945212021-06-18T11:26:00.016-07:002021-06-18T12:16:06.089-07:00The Matter of Matter<p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">We are all, if we’re honest, still mystified by death and what it means. By what the difference is, specifically, between a body that is alive and one that is dead. Indeed, now we have different categories of dead: brain dead, which means that the body may be still alive and functioning, but the brain functions are gone so there’s no voluntary movement; and paralysis or locked-in syndrome, which is the opposite: the body cannot move, but the brain still functions and is conscious. Both of these are variants of the “death” we usually mean: in one case the body, in the other the brain, no longer functions. What makes this even more confusing is that we seem to be told by physics that even when the body is “dead,” the matter that composes it, the meat and bones, still have that irreducible sign of life, movement—the electrons making up these corporeal elements presumably still spin and travel in orbits around some nucleus, and cells are presumably still capable of change. So the matter itself isn’t “dead,” but the organization of the particular matter called a human no longer functions as an independent whole. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Of course, in the old days, the way this situation would be described to nearly everyone’s satisfaction, was to say that the “soul” had left the body. I’m not sure if this same image was used to describe what happens to an animal, say, when it is slaughtered. But the situation, outwardly at least, seems the same. Once alive, and capable of functioning as a whole, integrated organism, a cow when slaughtered becomes only meat, with different cuts serving as different dishes for humans. And then serving as nutrients for those same humans, whose gut breaks down the cow flesh and transforms it into energy and thereupon part of its own matter—its cells, its muscles, its bones and tendons, its hair. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">What this “soul” actually was, was never quite clear, but it was said to be both immaterial and immortal. That is, it did not die with the body. It survived, and could live in eternal bliss in someplace called heaven, or in eternal torment in someplace called hell. The important thing here, though, is that it was seen as the entity that animated flesh, matter (‘soul’ is <i>anima</i> in Latin, hence our word “animate”). And when it departed, that once-animated flesh or matter became “dead,” inanimate, lifeless, meat merely. To be sure, this satisfied the inquiring mind, because when one sees someone pass from being living to being dead, it certainly seems as if some animating spirit has departed. The animation so obvious when living becomes instantaneously changed, as if something vital has gone, fled. And now that we have mostly gone beyond concepts like the immortal soul, we are at a loss—I am, at least—to understand what happens when life changes to death before our eyes. The change is excruciatingly obvious, and anyone can recognize it instantly. But we seem to have no tangible concepts to explain it. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Except this, perhaps. We, like all other matter and energy in the Universe, are governed by the Law of the Conservation of Energy. No energy or matter (they are said to be interchangeable) is ever lost; the sum total of matter/energy in the Universe remains constant. Therefore, when you die, the matter and energy that you are is simply transformed, or redistributed. As physicist Aaron Freeman has put it, in death <i><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;">According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly </span></i><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;">(cited from </span><a href="http://www.futurism.com/" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;">www.futurism.com</span></a><i><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;">) </span></i><span style="color: #555555; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;">To expand on this, Jaime Trosper writes: <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="color: #404040; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">In death, the collection of atoms of which you are composed (a universe within the universe) are repurposed. Those atoms and that energy, which originated during the Big Bang, will always be around. Therefore, your “light,” that is, the essence of your energy — not to be confused with your actual consciousness — will continue to echo throughout space until the end of time (futurism.com, “The Physics of Death”).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="color: #595959; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="color: #404040;">There we are, then. Physics has our answer. We are immortal, after all. Nothing of us is ever lost. All that happens when we die is that our atoms and our energy are transformed, “repurposed” to be used elsewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #404040;">Of course, physics does concede that you are “less orderly.” And for me, there’s the rub. What is meant by “you?” And what is meant by “less orderly?” The answer science seems to provide us is that “orderly” here has to do with organization. When matter and energy are “organized” in certain specific ways, we have life. When that organization is interrupted or lost, we have death. Here is how Ralph Lewis, MD put it in a recent article:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="color: #2c2d30; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">Monism maintains that mind is an emergent property of matter and energy <u>when matter is organized </u>in particular kinds of complex ways. Moreover, matter achieves this immense complexity through spontaneous unguided processes of <u>self-organization</u>, further sculpted in biological organisms by powerful evolutionary forces. (Ralph Lewis, <i>Psychology Today</i>, July 18, 2019, read online). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="color: #404040;">He goes on to say that when the brain loses “its exquisitely synchronized organization,” consciousness is lost (brain death, presumably), “</span><span style="color: #2c2d30;">and the unique organization of matter that constituted that individual's personhood, self or essence ceases to exist.” So Lewis maintains, with most of the scientific establishment, that “organization of matter” is precisely the essence of consciousness and also of life itself. That organization is what distinguishes living matter from dead matter. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">This is nice. But does it really explain things? Not quite, for me at least. That’s because other things display organization as well—such as computers, or workmen building a house. We don’t call a computer an organism, nor do we consider carpenters building a house an organism either. They are directed, both of them, from outside—the computer by a program written by a human programmer, and the carpenters by a blueprint designed by an architect. So the organization comes from the outside; it is what organizes random elements into systems, <i>from the outside</i>. But there are systems that are <i>self-organizing</i>, and this seems to be the key. And we should note here that the words ‘organism’ and ‘organize’ are intimately related: <i>organize</i> means “to form into a whole with mutually connected and dependent parts,” while <i>organism</i> means “an organized or organic system.” Therefore, we can deduce that <i>an organism is an organized system</i>. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">To return to self-organizing systems, we should note first that there are many levels of these, from whole galaxies (which self-organize via physical properties alone) to cellular structures (which organize via physical properties <i>plus</i>genetic ones that have developed over time by means of the evolution of properties that benefit the organism). It is the latter that we are interested in here. So we begin with a definition of self-organization:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><i><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">Self-organization is a process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely from numerous interactions among the lower-level components of the system. Moreover, the rules specifying interactions among the system’s components are executed using only local information, without reference to the global pattern</span></i><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">. In short, the pattern is an emergent property of the system, rather than a property imposed on the system by an external ordering</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 15.333332061767578px;"> </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">influence (</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">from </span><a href="http://www.assets.press.princeton.edu/" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">www.assets.press.princeton.edu</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> ).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">The important point here is that self-organization <i>emerges on its own, </i>and often unexpectedly<i>, </i>without outside direction. And it is understood to emerge “using only local information.” A fish swimming in a school, for example, uses only itself and the position of its nearest neighbor as guidance; it does not have information about the overall pattern (the whole school) to which it contributes. And since it is a living organism, it probably is also directed by genetic information about where to go and how to swim in coordination with its nearest fellows. But there is no outside leader fish directing the formation of the school. It apparently self-organizes.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Most scientists now believe that all living organisms are not only exquisitely organized, but that they, and life itself, are <i>self-organizing</i> systems. That is to say, life emerges, according to this view, not via direction from some outside deity, nor by means of a vague entity called a “soul,” but via self-organizing processes that organize cells and organs and whole parts into, ultimately, all the various living organisms, including the human animal. Genetics, to be sure, plays a key part in this self-organization, but <i>not</i> outside controlling entities. Self-organization is the scientific key to understanding many systems, but especially those we call living organisms. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">That brings us back to the dead as opposed to the living. We recognize a dead system, and especially a dead human, instantly and intuitively. Whether we can articulate <i>how</i> we know this is another matter. But with the information we now have, it is likely a matter of organization. We recognize disorder, death, when we see it. Instantly. That we are natural pattern seekers must help. Shakespeare has Othello say in Act 3, Sc 3, “Chaos is come again.” The whole quote indicates that his no longer loving Desdemona is a sign to Othello that ‘Chaos is come again.’ Meaning that his whole world, once orderly and organized and making sense, will no longer when and if his love is gone. Historically, mythically, primal chaos is the image of the world before creation. Now, though, most of us no longer image the world of Chaos as existence before God brought order to it. We image it as the world without order, without organization, without self-organization. What would this be like? I can think of images I’ve seen, electron-microscope images, of plastic. Plastic displays none of the order and organization of organic matter; the fibers are chaotic, as in these images: <o:p></o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpBGs7UpazxrSItl99BfqY_4027JaRmkPCvBNsMzpVgLrKYVxUen30LpNUDdGL28bgnUsVbBidMdksFe3f62cE6ZLclQZGEhVjsrkiy7-Pik6K9Ljd7F9uJsAnLOi1NX83zGIrZKW1aSU/s503/Scanning-electron-microscope-SEM-pictures-of-plastics-found-in-Nephrops-norvegicus.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="458" data-original-width="503" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpBGs7UpazxrSItl99BfqY_4027JaRmkPCvBNsMzpVgLrKYVxUen30LpNUDdGL28bgnUsVbBidMdksFe3f62cE6ZLclQZGEhVjsrkiy7-Pik6K9Ljd7F9uJsAnLOi1NX83zGIrZKW1aSU/s320/Scanning-electron-microscope-SEM-pictures-of-plastics-found-in-Nephrops-norvegicus.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Compared to the electron microscope image of any organic structure, or even the orderly structure of a crystal, this chaotic structure of lifeless matter gives us the idea of non-organization very well. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Which is to say that Nature somehow self-organizes. And we recognize this self-organization intuitively in living matter (i.e. we don’t need an electron microscope). And we also recognize the absence of organization as the absence of life. What seems to depart, therefore, in death, is organization, pattern. Organized energy, perhaps. And we would surely prefer it if there were something more tangible to hang onto, something we could more easily identify, and identify with. But perhaps that is all we’re going to get, now that the soul no longer seems a viable entity. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">As a writer, I have to admit that I would much prefer thinking of a soul with little wings, than a concept such as “organization,” even “self-organization”—even self-organization that seems more than a little miraculous. Because, after all, how do we imagine a “self” that organizes itself before there is even a self? At least with a soul, we have something to begin with. But that comforting, initiating image, that comforting story, appears not to matter to matter at all. Which seems, according to our best science, to just go about self-organizing from the very beginning—whatever that turns out to be. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-64048764397374606412021-05-28T11:35:00.000-07:002021-05-28T11:35:25.023-07:00It's Strictly Business<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">The title of this piece is probably known to most Americans, since it comes from that classic of all classic films, <i>The Godfather</i>. And actually, there are several iterations of the line in the film, whose characters repeatedly insist that “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” The “It” of course, refers to murder—which is always said to be done not for personal reasons, but only for business reasons. This theme may be one of the reasons <i>The Godfather</i> was and is so popular: it encapsulates, in vivid form, the dominant American paradigm—the primacy of business over all. “The business of America is business,” said Calvin Coolidge in 1925. And that paradigm has never varied. In the United States, equality—of opportunity, of access, of legal rights—may be trumpeted more loudly and get the most press, but the real ethic that defines everything is business. Business in its rawest, and often most deadly form. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">My thoughts have turned in this direction because of an incident that occurred a couple of weeks ago, and was then brought home forcefully two days ago. The initial event took place when my remote to operate my Insignia TV suddenly stopped working. I immediately figured that it was a problem with the batteries (though I’ve had the TV for less than a year, so I was a little dubious that they could wear out so soon). The problem was that I couldn’t see where the batteries were hidden: there was no obvious cover to lift off, though there was a kind of latch. But when I tried to manipulate that latch, nothing happened, and, moreover, I could not see an opening or edge to lift. So, next day I went to Google, and keyed in ‘problem with remote for Insignia TV.’ I figured that the manufacturer’s website would come up and afford me some help, or at least a look at the manual (which I’d lost). But the very first entry Google presented was this: <a href="https://www.justanswer.com/insignia-tv/troubleshooting" style="color: #954f72;">https://www.justanswer.com/insignia-tv/troubleshooting</a>. Not looking closely, I figured this was connected to Insignia, so I clicked on it, and got justanswer’s website, which led me to fill in some personal information (I should have stopped there, but was eager for a solution), and then offered me instant help via a chat with one of their “experts”—for one dollar. That seemed reasonable enough, and I agreed to have $1 taken from my PayPal account. They also offered me continuing help for $46. a month, but I declined that. Then the guy they gave me on chat simply wrote, ‘remove the batteries and replace them.’ But of course, that didn’t solve my problem at all; I couldn’t <i>find</i> the removable cover to access the damn batteries. I kept trying to convey this to the “expert” but he was impervious to my pleas, finally offering me the phone number for Insignia’s tech help. That was more like it, so I signed off justanswer and called Insignia. Within minutes, a very helpful woman talked me through the removal of the cover (it’s the whole back of the remote, the openings being very smoothly hidden) and I found the batteries, with a now-simple solution. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">So my problem was solved. But two days ago, a week or so after my actual problem, I got an email from PayPal, saying that my account had paid the $1, which was fine, and that $46.00 was being deducted monthly from my bank account!! WTF?? I had expressly indicated that I did NOT want the monthly service. But this scam operation, Justanswer, had somehow slipped the monthly service into active mode, and got me on their monthly service plan. Bastards. I realized that there was no use trying to argue with these swine, and that I needed to get in touch with my bank to stop payment (this after making sure no charges had been paid yet). So I called the bank, and after objecting when they said it would now cost me $31. just for a stop-payment order (I explained loudly that if they charged me, a long-time customer, for that service, I would cancel all my accounts. They quickly found a way to do it free of charge), I got them to issue the stop order to prevent Justanswer or PayPal from billing me through my bank. Then I called PayPal (can’t reach these guys either, so I started a chat), and after much manipulating, found a page to cancel the justanswer order. PayPal subsequently sent me emails to say that they had found in my favor and would reimburse me for any charges (there weren’t any.) I then rested; but after a little reflection, I decided to go back to PayPal and transfer the small amount I had out of there and to my bank, figuring there was no sense leaving anything for the bandits at justanswer to try to steal. I have since received numerous emails from both PayPal and justanswer apologizing profusely for any inconvenience, and wanting me to rate their service! My response has been a repeated request for them to go fornicate themselves.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Now, what I am still left with is my discontent, no, my <i>outrage</i>, at the casual way Google routinely enables this larceny. Because it was Google, in the first place, that made most prominent the Justanswer solution to my problem. Placing this option first led me to believe that I was being sent to the manufacturer, or its agent, to solve my remote problem (and by the way, I have since used the Duckduckgo search engine to ask my remote question, and the first response they offer is a link to Insignia; so it’s by no means necessary to place ads first). This means that Google, because these Justanswer fools <i>pay</i> them for advertising, gives their scam prominence and pride of place such that the unwitting like me tend to go there and get bilked. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">I have posted angrily about this on Facebook, and they, too, are complicit. Because what Facebook did was turn my angry rant into an opportunity to dominate my post with a huge visual of a Justanswer mechanic working on a car. So my complaint is turned into favorable publicity for the very scam I was complaining about! Both these giants—Google and Facebook—are thus in the business of serving not you and me, but their ruthless advertisers (and using you and me as fresh meat for these vultures). What’s more, several friends who saw my post have patiently explained to me that, usually, the first option that Google posts in response to a request for information is—you guessed it—an advertisement or two from one of their paying customers. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span> <span> </span></span>Now rather than this explanation mollifying me, it got me even more pissed. What is happening is that those who “know” how the internet works are cautioning me to be careful, to ignore the first answers from Google, because they’re usually ads. But this is not just an explanation; this is <i>rationalizing</i> what Google does—<i>It’s just business</i>, after all. I say, bullshit! This is larceny. It’s a way of taking advantage of those who don’t look too carefully. It is saying, “this is how America works.” It is implying that since the system works this way, the burden is on the consumer to be ready, to be wary. <i>Caveat emptor</i>—buyer beware: there are always sharks in the waters, and you have to assume that this American-business axiom means that the buyer is solely and exclusively responsible for the condition or quality of what he buys, and that the company is <i>not</i>.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But what I want to know is: where is the outrage? Where is the demand for regulation? Have Americans been so brainwashed that they readily accept that fact that they will always be fleeced if they don’t have their antennae raised to protect against crooks? That business is essentially a form of larceny? That one must always assume that every business is always looking for the opportunity to make a killing? And that, in fact, the ethic that pervades <i>The Godfather</i>, and organized crime, is not some foreign outlier, but really and truly the dominant ethic of America, the natural way, the homegrown and time-tested way of doing business? And that the guns and the enforcers we see in <i>The Godfather</i> are only metaphors for normal business practices? That Coppola’s masterpiece is really not about organized crime as perfected by Italian immigrants at all, but about the <i>real</i> America—the America of ruthless, anything goes, cutthroat capitalism. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">It’s actually what my father, himself an Italian immigrant, used to say regularly: “The only thing that counts in this country is the almighty dollar.” No one cares about quality (he was especially concerned about this because, as an expert hairdresser, he saw rivals, who turned out inferior work, thriving due to their lower standards and prices), but only about how much they can put over on a gullible public to make the most money. The cheapest, shoddiest products are the ones that sell, and make the most profit. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">And I am beginning to believe that he was pretty much right. That Google, and the internet itself, both of which started with high ideals to extend communication and information more widely than ever before, for <i>free</i>, have become mere money-making machines, perfectly adapted to that still-reigning American ethic that absolves every crime: <i>It’s strictly business</i>. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-71325431478897544512021-05-13T13:42:00.000-07:002021-05-13T13:42:27.057-07:00Fascism For Real, II<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Just before the 2020 election, I wrote in a blog that the stage was being set for a real outbreak of fascism in these United States. This was prior to the January 6 assault on the Capitol, i.e., the Trumpers’ attempt to disrupt the normal (Constitutional) congressional certification of the election results—i.e. that Joe Biden had won a convincing victory over Donald Trump. Now, that assault has developed and led to a further outrage against democratic rule. The Republican Party has just voted to remove Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her post as chair of the House GOP Conference, where she has served since 2019. Cheney, of course, is the daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney—one of my least-favorite government officials of all time. His daughter, a representative from Wyoming’s at-large district since 2017, is not all that different, it seems, from her father. But she has proven, since the advent of Trump to the presidency, that she is, in part at least, a conservative of the kind we used to see more of in Washington: a conservative with a kind of minimal conscience and respect for the Constitution. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Anyone who has looked at Liz Cheney’s career knows that she is by no means liberal or even moderate in her conservatism. From her earliest years as a government operative in the State Department, she has focused on foreign policy in the most hawkish fashion, advocating regime change in Iran, and founding with William Kristol a nonprofit organization called “Keep America Safe,” and partnering with the likes of the nefarious Elliott Abrams, and Richard Armitage of Iran-Contra fame. Some of her initiatives have been severely criticized for plotting covert actions against both Syria and Iran. As a card-carrying neocon, and a western free-land zealot advocating greater freedom for ranchers, she has fomented movements against environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the NRDC, up to and including asking the Justice Department to investigate such groups’ supposed support by China. So for someone like this writer, there is very little reason to like or respect Liz Cheney. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But when it comes to Donald Trump’s attempt to invalidate the 2020 election, to promote the fiction that the election was illegal due to massive fraud, and thereby needed to be overturned, she has been a rock of integrity. The turning point for her seems to have been the assault on the Capitol when the U.S. Congress was attempting to fulfill its constitutional duty. After that devastating and wholly illegal assault, Cheney went public in blaming Trump, without mincing words:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 6pt 0.5in;"><span style="color: #202122; font-size: 11pt;">The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. <i>There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution</i> (emphasis added). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="color: #202122;">Powerful words. And Cheney followed that statement with a vote in favor of Trump’s impeachment, one of only ten House Republicans to do so. In response, the Trump Freedom Caucus of the Republican Conference, led by that rabid attack dog Jim Jordan, attempted to censure her, and remove her from her leadership position in February of 2021. It didn’t work. Cheney survived that attempt when many Republicans, still aghast at what had actually happened at the Capitol, voted to keep her as a leader. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #202122;">But more recently, the agitation and calculation by the House Republican leadership that they could not regain the majority without Trump and his die-hard supporters, and Cheney’s repeated statements condemning Trump’s “Big Lie,” have led to yet another attempt to drum Cheney out of her leadership position. Led by Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy (who originally agreed with Cheney and others about Trump’s role in fomenting the Capitol invasion, and still, even after the vote, claimed that Republicans do NOT dispute the election and Biden’s presidency), House republicans have coalesced around support for Trump and his Big Lie that he is the rightful President, and censured Cheney on May 12, 2021, ousting her from her leadership position. Rather than use a recorded vote—which would put Republicans who voted against Cheney on record—the Republican leadership employed a voice vote, so that individual votes would go unrecorded. Covering their cowardly asses as usual. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #202122;">The fire between Cheney and Trump, and with him the craven Republican leadership, has not gone unrecorded, however. Cheney’s statement upon her removal continued her defiant stance: <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11pt;">“I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office,” Cheney said. “We have seen the danger that he continues to provoke with his language. We have seen his lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution and I think it's very important that we make sure whomever we elect is somebody who will be faithful to the Constitution.” (rawstory.com.) <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Like most of what Cheney has said, these words seem commonsensical and appropriate, even for a rock-ribbed conservative and neocon. Trump, on the other hand, relished his certain victory over someone who, heresy of all heresies, wanted the <i>truth</i>—of his clear election defeat, of his culpability in the attack on the Capitol—to be acknowledged. He released this statement, full of his usual vituperative comments about an opponent, just before the vote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11pt;">“The Republicans in the House of Representatives have a great opportunity today to rid themselves of a poor leader, a major Democrat talking point, a warmonger, and a person with absolutely no personality or heart.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Vintage Trump. And now the Republican Party, or most of it, has not only confirmed its fealty to this fraud of an ex-President and his Big Lie about the 2020 election, but has cemented it by deposing one of the few politicians on their side to call it out for what it is: the biggest lie ever perpetrated about an election in American history. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">This, folks, is no small matter. One of the two major political parties in the United States has now fully committed itself to a falsehood that is obvious to nearly everyone. <i>The Big Lie</i>. The one that Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels is said to have described as follows:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it…It becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">That, indeed, seems to be the current Republican position. Someone like Liz Cheney, in a leadership position, who has the temerity to not only tell the truth but keep telling it, is an <i>enemy</i> who must be judged unfit to hold that position in the Republican Party. The truth, in this case, is poison because it conflicts, publicly, with the constantly reiterated “alternative truth” of the big leader, Donald Trump. Trump, that is, is specifically following what the website Meidas Touch calls “the rules of the demagogue.” Such rules follow the time-tested method of “manipulating” the “weak-minded” masses by 1) <span style="color: #1d2228;">establishing a common enemy, 2) telling simple stories “with no regard for the truth,” 3) attacking democratic institutions and the media, and 4) cultivating a cult of personality. We have seen all of them in Trump’s four years of behavior. But now, the Republican Party has gone beyond these simple Hitlerian rules. Now we have a major American political party—one that, irony of ironies, began as a radical party combating slavery—so fearful of opposing its putative leader, that it must silence and excommunicate Cheney for her unforgivable ‘sin’: telling the truth. Calling out the big man’s Big Lie. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">This strikes me as no less than astonishing. Have these people no shame? No sense of honor, or even simple logic? Do they not see—does Kevin McCarthy not see that censuring and removing Cheney for contesting Trump’s lie in one breath, and then asserting that he and Republicans accept the 2020 election in the next breath—does not make elementary sense? Does he not see what even a 4<sup>th</sup> grader could see: that his two positions conflict directly with each other? Apparently not. Evidently, the House minority leader now thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to assert one “truth” for breakfast and assert the polar opposite “truth” for lunch. Which means that “truth” for Republicans now means whatever seems most expedient at the time. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">And that, friends, is the beginning of fascism. Authoritarian rule. Dictatorship. For that is what dictatorship essentially is: ‘Truth is what I say it is. Don’t give me your bullshit need for evidence. For proven facts. For the integrity of the process of arriving at your facts. <i>Truth is what we say it is.</i>’ And anyone who disputes that what we say is truth is persona non grata. A heretic. Excommunicated. And, if need be, burned at the stake. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Nor has all this proceeded without internal dissent—precisely what leader McCarthy has said he was ‘only’ trying to stifle. Organized by Miles Taylor, formerly with the Trump Department of Homeland Security, a group of over 100 current and former Republican officials and office-holders is threatening to form a new political party if the current Republican Party does not change its pro-Trump-at-all-costs stance. Apparently these officials—including former PA governor Tom Ridge, and former NJ governor Christine Todd Whitman—have agreed that the cashiering of Liz Cheney is the last straw. The preamble to the statement released by Taylor briefly outlines their grievances:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">“When in our democratic republic, forces of conspiracy, division, and despotism arise, it is the patriotic duty of citizens to act collectively in defense of liberty and justice…” (<i>NY Times</i>, May 11)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Taylor himself added: <span style="color: #333333;">“I’m still a Republican, but I’m hanging on by the skin of my teeth because of how quickly the party has divorced itself from truth and reason…” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #333333;">That pretty much sums up the problem. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #333333;">The question now becomes how far this accelerating drift toward fascism will go. </span>Are Republicans so intimidated by this demagogue, so fearful of losing his idiot supporters, that they are willing to turn their backs on dignity, truth, integrity, liberty and justice to win another election? With the move to sacrifice Liz Cheney, who has been called Republican “royalty,” it appears that they are (not to mention their willingness to deprive millions of their right to vote). And though we may find it hard to believe that men and women who have sworn a sacred oath to uphold and defend the constitution could actually make such decisions, perhaps we should not be so naive. This nation has always harbored a vicious undercurrent of hatred towards its outsiders, its poor, its people of color, its aboriginal inhabitants, and has never been particularly shy about expressing and acting upon those hatreds—so long as they could be hidden beneath some legalism, some rational pretext. Now, however, with the arrival of Trump and his moronic minions, the need for any pretext has all but withered away. Now, it seems quite acceptable to many lawmakers for legions of overt racists and white supremacists to storm the very temple of democracy in a violent attempt to make the Big Lie a reality (GOP Representative from Georgia Andrew Clyde recently called the riot “a normal tourist visit”). Fortunately, Trump’s legions were thwarted this time. But with the blessing of one of the two major parties in the United States, they may not fail the next time. All right-thinking Americans should work and pray that the next time does not, can not happen here. For if it does, none of us can safely predict whether a nation “so conceived and so dedicated,” and now, so assaulted by the forces of hatred, cynicism and ignorance, can any longer “endure.” </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 22px;"> </span></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-2773803079626628822021-04-29T16:19:00.004-07:002021-04-29T16:19:49.696-07:00Idiot Culture<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">It happened to me Tuesday. I had just taken part in a tribute to poet Diane diPrima, and it had gone beautifully, beyond what we had hoped for. And I got a message about her son Rudi spearheading a petition to get a park named after diPrima, which I agreed to sign, and then re-post on Facebook so other people could sign too. I did that, commenting that we had just done this lovely zoom tribute to Diane diPrima. Then this morning, I opened Facebook on my stupid phone (which is what I call my smartphone), and saw my post. And what it said was: <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">“We just did this lovely tribute to diorama.” <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">What-t-t? And I realized: I had been sabotaged once again by stupid, which, in its zeal, makes everyone else look stupid. By the spell check, that is, that employs some idiot algorithm to check all words it “thinks” should be simpler words, and apparently saw Diane diPrima, didn’t recognize her—she’s only a poet after all— and substituted what it “thought” I meant. And the closest it could come was “diorama.” <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> This spell-check algorithm is supposed to help us, make us smarter and more educated than we are. But in this case, it made me look stupid—like itself. And I go through this stupidity all the time, increasingly. Any time I’m writing on my computer, using Microsoft Word or composing emails, or on my “smart” phone composing posts or text messages, or anywhere where these damn algorithms come into play, I have to constantly watch to make sure a hard word or a foreign one—god forbid—doesn’t fall victim to a spelling correction that totally garbles my meaning. It drives me mad. And I realize I’m not really the person these “aids” are designed for. They’re meant to help the “average” person—the illiterate, the grammatically-challenged, those in the majority now, who are either mentally defective, or so badly-educated that they require some computer aid to help them write or add or spell or think. In short, we some time ago entered the <i>Age of Idiots</i>: a culture which takes for granted that Joe and Jane Average can no longer perform the basic tasks that any fourth-grader could have done forty or fifty years ago—when I myself taught fourth graders. And so, the modern “geniuses” who design and program computers, do those tasks for them. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">As you can see, I’m totally sick of this coddling. This dumbing down of everything. And have been for some time. I think the first time it hit me was when I worked for Harcourt Brace in their schoolbook division. I had already taught in classrooms from fourth grade to college and, therefore, more or less knew what teachers did. And how very hard it can be. But when it came time to create Teachers’ Manuals to go along with the fairly progressive texts we had written, the editors responsible for these manuals displayed what I thought was an alarming contempt for classroom teachers, and what they did. So they made everything over-explicit, not only designing lesson plans, but scripting every word the teacher was to say in presenting them. And when I would complain that teachers didn’t need this, and would probably resent it, I was ignored. Teachers, they claimed, now needed this hand-holding; this clear and precise direction. They were simply not able to think on their own. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">That contempt, and that determination to guide and shape and correct the most basic aspects of our lives, has now become ubiquitous. Spelling and grammar checkers on computers are only one aspect of this phenomenon. Hand-held calculators are another, now so universal that even among students, there are few who can add or subtract, much less divide or multiply, on their own. And this translates to check-out registers in retail stores, where everything is done for checkers. In fact, as everyone knows, they simply have to scan the bar codes and the price is entered automatically, and the total calculated, with taxes and discounts, all without human input or thought. What this means, of course, is that corporations no longer need to hire clerks possessed of intelligence and basic skills; they can use the most elementary labor available, and could just as easily use robots—which are coming soon to a store near you. And that, in turn, means (naturally) fewer personnel and lower salaries paid out, and more profit coming in. The same goes for almost any job that once required skills. Like editing the newspaper or even books. Editors no longer seem to understand basic grammar and syntax, much less the flow of a piece of prose. And the composing job—what was once hand-assembled by skilled designers and paste-up artists—is now done on computers. The robots are taking over, in short; and where they haven’t, the skills required (in warehouses like Amazon’s for example), have been reduced to an absolute minimum. Only a warm body is required. And the ability to go long hours without breaks; one is competing with robots after all. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Where all this is heading is not hard to imagine. Robots will be more valuable than people (perhaps they already are). Most people will be valued mainly for their need to buy ever-more useless “stuff” (no ‘perhaps’ about it—they already are; though where they’ll be able to earn the money to afford “stuff” is beyond me.) And the ones who still know how to perform what were once routine tasks? They’ll be looked upon as dinosaurs, luddites, pimples on the blank face of “progress.” Preoccupied with details that no longer matter. Spelling. Adding a column of figures. Constructing a cogent and intelligible sentence, or knowing what agreement between subject and predicate is, or a verb ending, or a subjunctive. Fussy guardians of a correctness that has been outgrown. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">So I’m mostly annoyed these days by this mindless interference in nearly everything I do. Mostly my writing, since I’m one of those “dinosaurs” from another era, who does, in fact, remember how to compose a sentence, does know the difference between “like” and “as,” and can still write with reasonably legible handwriting and add a column of figures. Not that I haven’t been corrupted like everyone else. I have; there’s no escaping it. I use a computer program to design my books. And a calculator to do my taxes. But when it comes to spell-check programs, I often find myself with the urge to smash my computer to bits. Or perhaps find out who, precisely, has designed the programs driving me to distraction, and find some way to consign that person to whatever circle of hell there is that stores all the rotten, simple-minded prose that person has been responsible for. And which recycles it endlessly before his or her eyes, blaring a screeching, unbearable alarm for each stupid, mindless change. Forever—as Hell is wont to do. But of course, that won’t change a thing. The stupids, along with their idiot culture, are here to stay. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-10752486948766984602021-03-16T11:18:00.000-07:002021-03-16T11:18:23.720-07:00Uncertainty<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">I was made aware recently of just how difficult it is to stay with the fundamental uncertainty of life as it really is. I was sitting in our zen meditation group (via zoom), and one of the participants had some computer problem (I guessed) that was causing the light on the screen to brighten and darken every second or two. It was disturbing because I could perceive the recurrent flashing in my peripheral vision. My impulse, of course, was to do something: either alert the person vocally that her screen was flashing, or write a chat message, or otherwise try to take care of the problem. But I could do none of these things without interrupting others and making the problem worse. As I sat there, I became aware of how often this happens. I am constitutionally committed, I realized, to procedures being followed, to order being maintained, to being on time, to things going as they’re <i>supposed</i> to. And when they don’t, I register upset to one degree or another. The same is true of my expectations about sentence structure in a newspaper, and/or grammar or spelling in an online article, and so on (I’ve been trained as an editor). Or the way people drive. Or dress themselves; or groom themselves; or behave in public; or a million other actions or circumstances that we wish to conform to our expectations of what is “right.” We use the word “appropriate” these days, of course, to avoid the appearance of being a moral ‘auntie’ trying to enforce standards of “right” and “wrong,” or “good” and “bad,” but the moral judgment is usually what we mean. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The source of this discomfort soon became apparent. Like most other humans, I have little tolerance for uncertainty; for disorder; for chaos. “Chaos is come again,” says Othello, referring to the time when he shall not love Desdemona; and we understand that, in his mind, his love for her and hers for him is what keeps his world orderly, from dissolving into chaos. Like Othello, we all insist on some sort of order to keep our lives afloat, and we also tend to insist that the amount or degree of order that we demand is not too much or too little, but just the “right” amount. And, of course, we get into endless trouble by insisting that ours<i> is</i> the optimum amount, and that others, if they knew anything, would insist on that same amount of order for themselves. In fact, the whole of what we call “civilization” is fundamentally the assertion and implementation of various degrees of order imposed on the randomness of reality. But a little reflection shows us that there is really no optimum balance between our preferred order and the chaos, or uncertainty, or randomness of life as it unfolds. And there is no way, either, of making certain that our expectations for order will be met. We want order and predictability, basically so we can be prepared for what’s coming, i.e., to control our world. We demand this “right” order, and if we cannot get what we want, if too much collapses, we tend, like Othello, to despair about continuing our lives in any reasonable or “respectable” way. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Nor is it just weak or unintelligent humans who feel this way. The classic genius we all acknowledge, Albert Einstein, was so put off by Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” as it relates to the quantum world, that he, Einstein, spent most of the rest of his life trying to prove how wrong that principle was. Heisenberg’s principle, that is, asserts that one cannot know both the speed and the position of a given particle at the same time—indeed, that the more we know about one, the less we know about the other. In response, Einstein retorted with statements like: “God does not play dice with the Universe.” What he meant was that chance cannot be the governing principle of the universe; that there <i>must</i> be some way to calculate both the position and the momentum of elementary particles, but scientists just haven’t found the right formula or solution or hidden order yet. But almost a hundred years later, Heisenberg’s principle stands on firmer experimental ground than ever, and Einstein appears to have been wrong. So perhaps we lesser mortals should not despair, or judge ourselves too harshly.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">On the other hand, most of us would like to, if we could, have an accurate picture of <i>real</i> reality. At least I would. And the truth seems to be that we’re all, to one degree or another, deluded about reality. That is, we all demand that our view of the world include some kind of reasonable and knowable and predictable order. We like calendars and we like clocks for this reason, and take ever greater pains to be certain that they are correct: we now have atomic clocks, for example, giving us ever more accurate ways to measure time. But do they? Clocks are, after all, arbitrary impositions of order on what we call the passage of time. And what about Daylight Savings Time? Does it really save time? Does it have any effect whatever on the amount of sunlight that hits our part of the world? Not a bit. It affects only us, and the arbitrary time on our clocks we choose to get ourselves into and out of bed. The same is true of calendars: does the New Year on January 1 correspond to anything like a beginning in nature? Not at all. It doesn’t even coincide with a solar event like the solstice. It is an arbitrary starting point that we then imbue with all kinds of meaning—drunken celebrations, bidding goodbye to a bad year, hoping for a better year, resolutions for us to keep in the new year, and so on. In short, we humans seem to need these arbitrary markers in our lives to give them shape, to keep them from seeming formless, chaotic, without definition, and essentially infinite. For infinity terrifies us (which may be why death terrifies us as well.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But if we are at all attuned to the world as it actually is, we realize, at least philosophically, that the world and its events have very little of the order we impute to them. Yes, the earth regularly revolves around the sun in roughly 365-1/4 days, but even that is subject to variation and change. As is the tilt of the earth which gives us our seasons. Yes, we rise at roughly the same time each day, but only because our clocks tell us to; if we set our schedules to the sun’s rise and set, our work days would vary with the seasons. Which they no doubt did in the past, e.g., in our hunter-gatherer days. We would also see—and this is one of the things zen training is meant to make us aware of—that many of our expectations of what will happen in any given moment, or what a person will do in a given situation, are simply mistaken. We base them, perhaps, on what might have happened in the past, but when we do, we remain oblivious to the fact that everything changes second by second, and nothing ever happens in exactly the same way twice. Much, if not most, of our discontent stems from this clash between what we expect to happen and what actually occurs. We want “good” things to happen in the same way, again and again. But if they did, if we could somehow influence life to conform to our expectations or desires, life could not go on. For one example, if we could get the DNA of dreaded viruses or bacteria to stay the same, to stop mutating and infecting us, or any organism’s DNA to remain fixed in the way it suits us, that would be the end of life. All life depends on mutations to adapt to always changing conditions. That is, in a nutshell, what life is. Stop mutations, stop change, and you stop life. The entire world, indeed, is like this. We might want the sun to stop burning—because we know that in four billion years or so, its fuel will run out, and it will first expand—incinerating us and all the planets—and then explode into a supernova or a black hole. In either event, this development of the sun will put an end to earth and to human existence. But would we really want to stop that? Would we really want the sun, or any other entity to freeze in place, to stop providing us with heat and light, stop developing as it must to be what it is? Would we want a tree or an animal or ourselves to freeze in place, to stop developing and remain permanently as we want it to at some moment in time? And which moment would that be? And would there even be any moments after that? And, most important, would we really want quantum uncertainty (which amounts to the underlying uncertainty of all reality) to not operate in our world?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">A June 12, 2012 article in <i>New Scientist</i> reports on two scientists who have explored this question: “Sorry Einstein, the universe needs quantum uncertainty,” by Jessica Griggs. The scientists, Stephanie Wehner and Esther Hänggi of the <span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">National University of Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technology, report that, with two bits of information (as analogues to the position and momentum in a quantum particle) encoded in the same particle, one cannot decode both bits of information. If you get more information about one, you get correspondingly less from the other. They then tried decoding information from both simultaneously (like measuring both speed and position of a particle), and concluded that this comprises more information than went in in the first place, thus violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which states that closed systems always move in the direction of more entropy, or disorder in the system). The article’s summary concludes:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">Being able to decode both of the messages in Wehner and Hänggi’s imaginary particle suddenly gives you more information. As demonstrated by the piston, this means you have the potential to do more work. But this extra work comes for free so is the same as creating a perpetual motion machine, which is forbidden by thermodynamics.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">In short, quantum uncertainty is necessary in order to preserve an even more fundamental principle, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. And if quantum uncertainty is necessary, then so is the general uncertainty of the world. As corroboration, we might also think of the mysterious <i>imbalance</i> between particles and anti-particles that allowed the material world to come into existence in the first place. As noted on the cern.com website, “The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe.” And if it had, since matter and antimatter particles annihilate one another, the universe should “contain nothing but leftover energy” (ibid). But it <i>does not</i>; it contains more, including us. Somehow, and the mechanism is still not understood, some small portion of matter survived the expected annihilation of matter meeting antimatter, and now, “everything we see from the smallest life forms on Earth to the largest stellar objects is made almost entirely of matter” (ibid). As has been noted in many places, “the origin of matter remains one of the greatest mysteries of physics” (wikipedia). Imbalance and uncertainty, in short, allow us, indeed seem<i>necessary</i> <i>for us to be</i>. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> So, much as we might long for certainty in our lives, in our world, it seems that the forces that refuse to accede to our desires “know” best. What humans want most may be (and, as we are finding to our peril, often <i>is</i>) precisely that which would not only nullify us, but all other life, all other forms of existence as well. We should be grateful that our fondest, our most persistent desires (especially for certainty) do not, and cannot ever be realized. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-71249524258542799692021-03-03T13:46:00.001-08:002021-03-03T13:46:38.810-08:00Freedom or Liberation<p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">“Freedom,” in recent years, has become even more of a rallying cry than usual in the United States. Conservative Republicans, and, in particular, those devotees of our last President, but also those who hearken back to the ‘good old days’ of Ronald Reagan, have used the cry for ‘my freedom’ as a cudgel to bludgeon opponents and justify their own intransigence in the face of what they call ‘government tyranny.’ Especially higher taxes, or government demands to wear face masks to protect oneself and others from Covid-19, or to abide by social-distancing requirements for the same reason, are seen as unwarranted and oppressive government intrusions—outrageous limits to the “freedom” that every American is guaranteed. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"> “Freedom to” people also tend to deny the second important freedom category—“freedom from.” This freedom includes the freedoms aimed mostly at less-well-off or impoverished people: the freedom of low-wage workers <i>from</i>exploitation by rapacious businesses; the freedom of African Americans <i>from</i> slavery—a freedom that even a violent Civil War was not able to guarantee; a freedom that thousands had to fight for, even after that war, to get it enforced, and which, to this day, has never been fully implemented; the freedom of every American, including children, <i>from</i> hunger, <i>from</i> homelessness, <i>from</i> grossly deficient and costly medical care, <i>from</i> food deserts that lack access to nourishing and healthful food; and freedom <i>from</i> industrial corridors which pollute—with carbon emissions, toxic chemicals, poisoned earth and water sources—the very air that people must breathe, and the water they must drink. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">We should also note here that another significant word for freedom in our history is “Independence.” Enshrined in perhaps America’s most famous document, Thomas Jefferson’s <i>Declaration of Independence</i>, this idea of freedom declared the right of the American colonies to be free from the tyranny of English kings, thereby setting America on its ‘sanctioned-by-nature’ independent and democratic course. But it did more. As its preamble states,<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><i>We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, </i>Liberty<i> and the pursuit of Happiness.</i><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Of course, most of us have realized in recent years that the grand notion, “all men are created equal,” omitted significant chunks of humanity: women, who comprised half the population, and all those slaves brought from Africa, and immigrants from certain countries, and so on. So it seems that the Creator, in the minds of the founding geniuses who adopted this document, endowed mainly white men of property with those “unalienable Rights” to life and liberty (yet another word for freedom) and happiness. All others need not apply. And being deprived of this right was a big deal, since the idea of independence became the pre-eminent American ideal. The quintessential American, that is, believes himself not bound or connected or beholden to anyone; believes himself to be (or has the right to be) absolutely self-sufficient; able to provide for self and family, with no need for help from, or interference from, any government, domestic or foreign. And we teach this ideal to children almost from the day they take their first step. ‘You can do it yourself.’ The same goes for the nation as a whole: we insisted on being free of British taxes; free of all interference by any outside nation; and free from reliance on anyone: any other nation; any union of nations; any outside maker or grower or armed defender of anything. We independent Americans are said to have all we need right here, including millions of lethal weapons to defend ourselves, once we ‘make America great again.’ Free again. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Without getting too deeply into it, of course, anyone with a modicum of knowledge about how things actually work can see that this notion of total self-sufficiency is, perhaps, the most dangerous and damaging illusion of all. Why? Because it relies on a complete denial of what we know about human social relations, botany, biology, and physics. No single entity, that is, has ever been, or ever can be totally free and independent. From the very beginning of our lives, we must rely on others: our mothers first, and our fathers, and families, and, in the very recent past, our tribe members, or our neighboring villagers, or, in today’s complex societies, our neighbors and fellow citizens—depend on them to abide by common rules such as stopping at traffic lights, or picking up their garbage, or contributing to the roads and bridges we all rely on, or not stealing into our houses at night to ransack them, or not playing loud music at three in the morning. Countless observances like these are required to make complex societies work. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">And this does not even begin to take account of the myriad inter-dependencies we have with the non-human world: the plants that supply our world with the green matter that serves us as food, and the oxygen that allows us to breathe; the bacteria that supply our soil with nutrients, and without whose presence, in our gut, we could not even digest our food; the trees that form the soil we depend on to grow crops, and which manage the CO<sub>2</sub> that is overwhelming our planet because so many have been removed to profit a few; the oceans that supply fish and countless other nutrients and life itself, all of which are now at risk due to over-fishing and pollution and global warming and acidification; the rivers and aquifers that supply our drinking and irrigation water, that in many places has begun to run out. One could go on almost indefinitely, but the point has perhaps been made: no human being could survive for a second without the prior help of the organisms and natural elements that are the necessary precursors and support of us all. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Large portions of our lives, in short, are built on illusions, the predominant one being the grand illusion of independence. And this brings us to yet another, deeper, and diametrically-opposed definition of freedom, of <i>liberation</i>: the one propounded by Gautama, the historical Buddha, nearly three thousand years ago. Gautama spoke about liberation in his most fundamental teachings. But the liberation he promised was <i>not</i> freedom from all earthly constraints or pains, but rather <i>awareness</i> of them, and thereby, of liberation from <i>suffering</i>. Because, as he expounded it, there was a <i>cause</i> of suffering, and it was due mostly to the clinging and attachment to the very things that those deluded by <i>independence</i>value most of all: the idea that they themselves are substantial and permanent; that everything they desire is similarly substantial and permanent and can be owned, kept, hoarded from others; and <i>will not change</i>; in short, delusionally attached to notions that the world and its objects can be controlled for their personal benefit, and separated from the nexus of relations in which they are embedded. This is what the Buddha realized himself, and then taught: that all this self-ishness was due to ignorance—the first of what he called “the three poisons” (the other two being greed and hatred.) For when he awakened, he saw that there were no “things” in and of themselves. Rather, every thing that appears to our minds as independent (including our very selves) is, in reality, <i>dependent</i> on all else. He called this “inter-dependent co-arising:” meaning that nothing comes into existence on its own; everything co-arises in cooperation with some other thing or many other things. In short, nothing IS on its own. Everything depends inherently and ineluctably on other “things” that co-arise with it. This<i> interdependent co-arising</i> is how real reality actually works. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">One has only to think of oneself. In order for one to be born, one’s parents had to come together by the agency of countless other conditions and events, social, biological, global. But even that hardly scratches the surface of what is involved in the forming of even one human being. First comes the biology of human growth from that initial fertilized cell, all of which is controlled not by anyone, but by evolution—e.g., the pre-ordained processes of cell growth into organs and blood and the billions of cells that we are. Most of these have been developed over eons via organic evolution—the chemical processes by which cells produce energy, how those cells come together to produce all the organs necessary for life, and how the female body nourishes and gives birth to that life. And how it grows. All done without human will or control. But even beyond that production of life from apparently nothing, the survival of that living entity, once it emerges into the world, is dependent on thousands of other constantly changing events and processes. That is to say, aside from the mostly instinctive nurturing that it requires, no organic being could survive without the work of plants upon which it relies for food, animals that can digest plants indigestible to humans to supply it with protein nourishment, and bacteria within its gut that make it possible to digest what it eats. This is not even to mention the plants that turn sunlight into green matter, without which animals like us would not have appeared in the first place. And trees and soil bacteria and fungi that produce the soil upon which plants depend. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">And yet, most humans insist on clinging to their own misguided notion of independence: their supposed freedom to ignore all other entities to accumulate and own and do whatever they wish to whomever they wish, without regard for the embeddedness of every thing in everything else (the results of this ignorance are now coming back to haunt us). The three poisons of greed, hatred and ignorance are what Buddha called the source of this grand illusion. And the freedom or liberation he offered involved seeing this embeddedness, seeing it and letting go of the illusion of independence. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In short, the freedom, the liberation the Buddha offered was the exact opposite of what the conventional meaning of freedom and independence offers to the average American—and to people of most other advanced industrial countries, especially western ones. Whereas the conventional idea of freedom offers more and better access to the apparent goodies and delights of this world, Buddhism offers a path by which to see through these illusory and temporary satisfactions, and find true liberation. And that true liberation involves not the desperate and doomed-to-fail immersion in always-changing comfort and security, but rather a way to see that this immersion, this endless craving is precisely what leads to suffering (I want it; I deserve it as much as that person; why can’t I have it?). And that the way out of suffering involves seeing, and then the long practice of giving up on all those attempts to change and control life and make it work solely for <i>my</i> benefit, and instead, accepting<i> real</i> life, life as it truly is—good, bad or indifferent. And more than that, not resting in the self-satisfaction of having liberated myself, but rather working to liberate all others mired in the same delusion, by helping them to see the same thing. This last is fundamental, stemming as it does from the realization that no one achieves liberation alone; all liberation comes only in communion with the whole—the whole of sentient life with whom we are embedded, bound, connected, and which, in truth, we are. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-91308030996165864002021-01-19T16:04:00.000-08:002021-01-19T16:04:20.559-08:00Danger in the Military<p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">I have just read this morning that two of the National Guard troops that are supposed to be providing security for Biden’s inauguration have been removed because of their ties to white supremacist groups. This is precisely what I’ve been thinking about lately: the danger to this country that comes not from outside groups like ISIS, but rather from deep within both our military and our local police forces. The PBS Newshour had a segment on precisely this issue last night, and it was not reassuring. The upshot of the piece was that since National Guard commanders do not have as much contact with those under their command as military officials in a regular army outfit might, they wouldn’t be likely to know the background of those who have plans to disrupt something like an inauguration, or guarding a State House. As a result, the higher-ups are very nervous about this inauguration, and the parallel threats to disrupt state capitols around the country. The FBI’s disqualifying of the two guardsmen proves the point; and we can only hope that the FBI has truly vetted all 24,000 soldiers who will remain on duty in DC. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The larger point, however, and the greater danger comes in the future. Why? Because once the current threat is over, we will still have a very active, and determined group of crazies who will be looking for more opportunities to “liberate” their nation and bring it back under white control—i.e. what they understand by Make America Great Again. And these groups and so-called militias are a) armed to the teeth, and b) actively recruiting current military members to join them, either covertly or overtly. They judge, and they are probably right, that the men who join the all-volunteer military these days are heavily drawn from rural and southern states. That means they are more likely to be sympathetic to white supremacist appeals, if not already actively engaged in, trained in white supremacy and racism. This brings up what I have long considered the defect of the all-volunteer military, which has been the direct outcome of the distaste of well-educated and urban men for military service. This was proven in the Vietnam war era. Indeed, when I was a member of the Army Reserves in late 1959 through 1965, the bulk of my fellow soldiers were serving reluctantly, mainly to avoid the draft. But the presence in these reserve units of many such men who were older and well-educated meant that few of them were susceptible to the foolish rewards or chauvinistic inducements that attracted younger troops. That alone put a damper on calls to spit polish and adopt the “motto of the bayonet” (kill, kill) and so on. It made, in my opinion, for a more balanced and intelligent and thoughtful army, not just in the reserves, but in the regular army as well.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">No more. The all-volunteer military attracts mainly high school grads looking for a way to enliven their dull lives, to escape from smalltown or depressed-urban life, and for something to give them a wider perspective and experience (perhaps abroad) that they would never achieve on their own. By this self-selection process, the military now tends to gather inexperienced men (and women) who are more likely to have narrow views of what society should be like, and, at the extreme end, of how whites should be able to regain the privileges they believe they should continue to have by right.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Thus, the military proves to be a prime recruiting ground for militia and white-supremacist groups (they’re often the same) to strengthen their ranks. The fact that those who’ve been in the military are trained in the use of various kinds of weaponry and other ordnance like explosives is an added bonus. The same incentive pertains for local police departments. Former military members are a natural fit for police departments that have increasingly become occupation forces. These departments gladly take advantage of Pentagon sales and donations of military equipment like armored personnel carriers to make them feel safe when engaging in riot control, or hostage situations or civil unrest generally. The end result is that police departments, like the military, find themselves with a good percentage of men who are predisposed to see black or Hispanic men, especially in cities, as the natural enemy, and white militias as more or less like them, and deserving of consideration as normal citizens. This was demonstrated in the recent invasion of the U.S. Capitol, where several instances were documented of Capitol police literally welcoming the invaders into the Capitol, and generously escorting them out when they were done. Not all, certainly; but enough to make the point. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The other crucial factor in this looming danger is the alarming ease with which citizens in this nation can procure guns, from handguns to the most lethal automatic weapons available. This has been demonstrated with sickening regularity in recent years. Real psychopaths have been able to arm themselves with an arsenal of weapons fit for a war, and massacre civilians almost without limit. And many of the militia types arrested in recent years have been found to prize most of all their cache of weapons, which they always claim they have assembled for “self-defense.” They routinely claim as their most precious right their Second Amendment ‘right to bear arms.’ No other advanced industrial nation allows its citizens this kind of access to lethal weaponry. The fact that the possession of such arsenals is considered “normal” in the United States speaks volumes about both the mental health of this nation as a whole, and the danger such a widespread distribution of heavy weaponry represents to the general welfare. If millions of men armed to the teeth ever manage to assemble with a common purpose, they would present a formidable challenge to any force trying to control them to maintain civil order. And since many of them, with origins in the military or local police forces or both, have been thoroughly trained in the use of these weapons, as well as the optimum tactics for deploying them, the danger they present is only multiplied. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Is there a solution to this dilemma? I can think of several, but any solution, in my opinion, must begin with getting a lot more information on who these militia groups are, and on the people in the military and the police forces are who have affiliations with these militant groups that espouse white supremacy. What the FBI is allegedly doing with the National Guard deployed for Biden’s inauguration is a good start, and needs to be extended throughout the country. Second, this nation has got to get a grip on the widespread possession of firearms among many of its citizens, and put a limit on what arms a civilian may possess, and the number of weapons which are reasonable for any one person to have. It is insane, first, for the Supreme Court to have interpreted the second Amendment as applying to “all persons,” when its language clearly was meant to apply to “well-regulated militias,” that is, to citizens’ armies organized to protect the nation from outside invaders. Whether or not the genie—well over 300 million weapons in the hands of crazies—can be put back in the bottle is an open question, but the attempt for more reasonable gun laws must be made. Finally, statutes can and should be enacted that can control both the language and the intent of armed groups. Militias that openly announce their intention to foment a civil war or a race war, like the so-called boogaloo movement, cannot be allowed to operate freely. Curbs must be placed on these groups to prevent just what happened in the U.S. Capitol two weeks ago. And anyone who argues that such behavior is protected by either the First or the Second Amendment needs to be disabused of those notions, by pre-emptive action if necessary. The clear and present danger must be faced by authorities like the FBI, acknowledged, and acted upon. Fast. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Otherwise, this nation is headed for its final days as a free society, as a Republic, and as a functioning democracy. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Lawrence DiStasi <o:p></o:p></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-33582406529052415582021-01-13T12:23:00.000-08:002021-01-13T12:23:06.823-08:00Using the Military to Uphold the Law<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">The apparent immunity and impunity of the rioters in the national Capitol on January 6 has sparked numerous questions about why the military, and indeed any competent force to prevent entry into the Capitol, remained missing for so long. The National Guard eventually did show up, but it was some three hours after the building was already breached, and damage to people and property had long since been perpetrated. Five people lost their lives, including one Capitol policeman who was apparently struck on the head with a fire extinguisher. Members of Congress, fearing for their own lives (and, apparently, some of them were targeted), had to be rushed out of their offices and chambers and into a secure room. And several members of the Capitol police force were seen not only giving the rioters free entry, but taking selfies with the rioters and helpfully escorting them on their way when they were done. The pleas for National Guard help, both by Capitol police and by Governor Hogan of Maryland (who wanted to activate his State Guard) were refused by the Pentagon until the crisis was basically over. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">This raises the fundamental question: in a situation this threatening, why were military forces—who are trained and equipped to handle events like this—not called in? Why was the reduced Capitol force left to control this situation alone? What is the precedent for calling out the real troops in situations similar, but in many ways less daangerous, than this one? History does, in fact, provide us with many examples of Presidents calling out the military to control precisely this kind of defiance. Looking at some of them may give us a better idea of how this one might have been controlled, and why it was not. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">I was a late teenager when the first of these situations took place in September of 1957, a few years after the landmark Supreme Court decision of 1954, <i>Brown v Board of Education</i>, outlawed racial segregation in public schools. The school board of Topeka, Kansas, and all other schools in all other states, were informed that racially segregating schools, even if the schools designated for blacks were supposedly equal, was unconstitutional. The ruling was understood to apply not only to “separate but equal” schools, but also to many other supposedly ‘separate but equal’ public services as well. These racially segregated public services and schools had been sanctioned in 1896 by the notorious <i>Plessy v. Ferguson</i> ruling, thus making the South’s “Jim Crow” laws legal. Brown v Board overturned Plessy and all other laws that pretended that equality under the law was satisfied by “separate but equal” facilities. Brown v Board ruled that they did <i>not</i>, and were not equal at all. As part of the decision, courts and school boards were directed to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In 1957, however, even though the Little Rock, Arkansas school board had voted to desegregate its public schools, Governor Orval Faubus refused to implement the order in Little Rock, and especially at Central High School. In refusing the order, he used the ploy of calling out his state National Guard to allegedly protect black students, when in reality the Guard <i>prevented</i> black students from attending Central High School. Tensions rapidly flared, pitting jeering segregationist mobs against the black students who were determined to get their constitutionally-mandated education at Central High School. After several days of a standoff between students trying to enter and the taunting, racist mobs that gathered to oppose them, then-President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10730, which did two things. First, it federalized the Arkansas National Guard, placing it under federal authority. Second, it deployed federal troops—the 101<sup>st</sup> Airborne—to Little Rock to enforce the desegregation order. In the face of screaming, spitting crowds of white supremacists, the students, known as the “Little Rock Nine,” were escorted to and from school by armed soldiers. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">In short, in the face of what he considered an insurrection defying a Supreme Court order to desegregate schools, President Eisenhower, a Republican, sent in federal troops to put down the insurrection and enforce the order. Though he withdrew the federal troops fairly quickly, leaving the National Guard to maintain order, the show of force by the ex-Supreme Allied Commander made it clear that the federal government was not about to tolerate resistance to the integration of public schools that had been mandated by the highest court in the land. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">This same determination was exhibited by President Kennedy about five years later, although he made numerous attempts to limit the use of the military until the situation became lethal. The controversy started when James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran, attempted to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Even with more than 120 federal marshals to accompany him, as well as troops from the Border Patrol ordered by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a violent crowd opposed Meredith’s entry. Adding fuel to the flames, Governor Ross Barnett expressed his and Mississippi’s undying resistance to integration:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #202122; font-size: 11pt;">We will not drink from the cup of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide" style="color: #954f72;" title="Genocide"><span style="color: black; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none;">genocide</span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11pt;">... </span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #202122; font-size: 11pt;">No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor!</span><sup><span style="color: #202122; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></sup></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><sup><span style="color: #202122; font-size: 8.5pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></sup></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 6pt 0in;"><span style="color: #202122;">When mobs of segregationists swelled into the thousands, President Kennedy ordered in Military Police from the from the </span>503rd,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/716th_Military_Police_Battalion" style="color: #954f72;" title="716th Military Police Battalion"><span style="color: black; text-decoration: none;">716th</span></a>, and<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/720th_Military_Police_Battalion" style="color: #954f72;" title="720th Military Police Battalion"><span style="color: black; text-decoration: none;">720th Military Police Battalions</span></a>, the already- federalized Mississippi National Guard, and elements of the 101<sup>st</sup> Airborne Division. By September 30, Meredith, still under federal protection, was allowed to register under escort, and in 1963 became the first black graduate of the University. But not before <span style="color: #202122;">a third of the federal agents, 166 men, were injured in the melee, and forty federal soldiers and Mississippi National Guardsmen were wounded</span><span style="color: #202122; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 21px;">. </span><span style="color: #202122;">In addition, two civilians, one a French journalist, and one a jukebox repairman curious about what was going on, were murdered in execution-style killings (Wikipedia.com).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 6pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #202122;">One other case, also concerning integration, deserves mention. Taking its cue from what had happened in Mississippi, the University of Alabama in June 1963, refused, in defiance of a Federal Court order, to admit two black students—Vivian Malone and James Hood. The segregationist Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, flanked by Alabama state troopers, sought to publicize his defiance by literally standing in the door of the auditorium where registration had to be completed, blocking it to the two black students. President Kennedy, again, acted decisively: he issued Executive Order 11111, which federalized the Alabama National Guard. After having previously ignored the Deputy Attorney General’s order to step aside, Wallace yielded to the National Guard General’s command to obey the court, and in short order, the two students were allowed to complete their registration. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 6pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #202122;">Wallace, of course, was not done. In September 1963, he again attempted to block school desegregation (his famous motto being “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”) at Tuskegee High School in Macon County. The whole county had been ordered, as the result of a lawsuit, to integrate its schools, and thirteen black students were selected to try to integrate Tuskegee High School on September 2. To prevent this, Governor Wallace, by executive order, had state troopers surround the school, thus preventing the black students from entering the school. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 6pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #202122;">Once again, President Kennedy refused to treat this lightly, and federalized National Guard troops to enforce desegregation of the school. Governor Wallace was once again forced to yield to the federalized troops, and Tuskegee High School was integrated. Even though throngs of white students withdrew to attend private schools which the Governor himself helped finance, neither they nor the governor could maintain segregated <i>public</i> schools in Alabama.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 6pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #202122;">We see, then, that where Presidents are determined to enforce the law (one of the prime duties of the Executive branch), insurrectionists, regardless of the support they receive from public opinion, cannot defy the considerable power of the federal government. The federal government, that is, always has the option to call on the military—either the federalized National Guard, or the armed troops of a no-nonsense unit like the 101<sup>st</sup> Airborne—to back up its rulings with force. Whether or not they understand and respect legal court rulings, or statutes, or the Constitution, rebellious citizens, armed and organized into so-called ‘militias’ or not, understand the power of the U.S Military, and are rarely willing to defy it. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 6pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #202122;">This military might, and the willingness to use it, is what must be demonstrated (first in the upcoming inauguration of Joe Biden) to the right-wing crazies that Donald Trump has encouraged over the past four years. From his remarks after the Unite-the-Right rally in Charlottesville VA (in which one person was killed and the President saluted the “very fine people” there), to his urging of the heavily-armed Proud Boys to “stand back and <i>stand by</i>” in September of this year, to encouraging his minions at the January 6 rally, not just once but several times, to march to the Capitol and <i>fight</i>—the word is repeated several times, as in “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and, “You have to show strength and you have to be strong”—Donald Trump has given the most radical of his supporters license to be his personal shock troops. And on January 6, this culminated in the President issuing a call to arms to a large crowd, many of whom had already committed themselves, prior to the rally, to violence. That is, the President of the United States was inciting his most rabid supporters, many of them armed, to ‘stop the steal;’ by which he clearly meant for them to stop the United States Congress and its members from doing their constitutionally-mandated job to certify the 2020 electors from all fifty states. And to do so not by simply demonstrating, but to do so with strength, to <i>fight</i> what he repeatedly called an illegal election, to not allow Congress to “take the presidency away from him,” but rather to use force to overturn the most fundamental act in American democracy—the vote in an election that had been validated and certified dozens of times by states and by the courts. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 6pt 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #202122;">Thus, rather than use the military to control an unruly mob acting illegally, Donald Trump attempted to use the mob to literally <i>overturn the law</i>. It is a breach, a violation of the most basic kind in a democracy, and as has been said over and over, it cannot, must not be allowed to go unaddressed. It must be aired fully for all to see and understand, and demand, as a consequence, that all those involved be held accountable—beginning with the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 6pt 0in;"><span style="color: #202122;">Lawrence DiStasi<o:p></o:p></span></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-84677910717500721842021-01-07T14:32:00.000-08:002021-01-07T14:32:08.096-08:00Invasion at the Capitol<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Like most thinking people in these United States, I was appalled by what took place in our nation’s Capitol yesterday at the hands of rabid Trump supporters inspired by their “heroic” leader, Donald Trump. With four people dead, and many Capitol offices and hallowed halls in shambles, the depradations of these thousands of invaders will surely leave a permanent scar on this nation, and a lingering suspicion that this nation is headed in the fatal direction—down—of most democracies before it. Rather than accept and take part in the peaceful transition of power that George Washington made the hallmark of American democracy, Trump fed his gullible minions a constant diet of lies, conspiracy theories, and incendiary rhetoric about how he actually won the 2020 election in a landslide, but had been robbed of his victory by some vague cabal of the deep state in collusion with every major media outlet and state government (most of them controlled by Republicans). Therefore, his supporters should invade the capitol and put a stop to the validation of the electoral college vote taking place there. And they all believed, and did exactly that. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">The other major event that took place yesterday was the amazing victory of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the Georgia Senate runoff elections. Democrats were hoping and praying that this would be the case, but such an outcome was anything but a sure thing. The President made more than one trip to Georgia to try to build enthusiasm among his base of supporters for a large Republican turnout. He knew the stakes couldn’t be higher: if even one of the Republican candidates won, the Republicans would retain their majority in the Senate, and be able thereby to thwart most of President-elect Biden’s legislative initiatives. If, on the other hand, the Democrats won, Biden would have the luxury of being able to work with majorities in both houses of Congress. With the win by both Democrats, therefore, a sweet double victory was achieved. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">However, that victory hardly had a chance to sink in (it did in my little town, where someone was playing on a car radio, at full volume, “Georgia,” by Ray Charles), before the riot began at the Capitol. I watched most of it on CBS News’ Special Report, and it left a knot in my stomach that has still not entirely dissolved. To see these mostly white guys (and some women, including the Air Force veteran and rabid Trump supporter who was shot dead) pushing back the barriers outside the Capitol, and then overwhelming the unexpectedly-flimsy Capitol police presence to race and climb and otherwise penetrate a building that is normally well-guarded and -protected, many of them armed, most of them carrying flags on poles (often used to punch through windows), was sickening. Then to see them violating offices like that of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (at least one had his boots up on her desk) and ripping pictures and documents from her office, added insult to injury; which was itself ratcheted up to worse horror as they burst into the House chambers from which most Congressmen and women had to flee to an undisclosed bunker for safety. And the question that kept flashing into my consciousness was: Where is the National Guard? How are these yahoos getting away with this? Where is the 82nd Airborne? If this were a BLM protest (which we saw this summer), or any protest by people of color, how many of these assholes would already have been shot? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">My rage over the kid-glove treatment accorded this horde kept increasing as reporters interviewed many of them, to record them gloating about their victory (it’s a revolution we’ve started), their sense of entitlement (we’re just protesting, which is our right), and their glee at having followed the wishes of their adored commander in chief, Donald Trump. Even when a 6pm to 6am curfew was declared by the DC mayor, they continued to mill around, shouting slogans, and waving their Trump flags, one of which they managed to hang on the Capitol to replace the American flag, even as they shouted, USA! USA! True patriots, all. And the appellation that kept coming to mind was the one Hillary Clinton was excoriated for using in the 2016 election campaign: “deplorables.” Yes; that’s what they were, most of them: losers and abysmally ignorant believers in the bullshit peddled by perhaps the biggest bullshit artist of all time.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">But most of that is probably already known to many. What I want to emphasize is that, despite the violation—to the nation, to its institutions, to democratic traditions most of us hold dear, to the sacrosanctity of the Capitol which has never been similarly violated—something <i>great</i> happened yesterday. Donald Trump made the most catastrophic blunder of a presidency that has specialized in blunders. He publicly urged his followers, in a recorded speech at the rally preceding the riot, to “walk to the Capitol (“I’ll walk with you” he promised—which he, characteristically, did not, choosing to be whisked away in his limo to the safety of the White House where he watched it all on TV) and “cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women (the Republican zealots contesting the electors on his behalf), and <span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #333333;">we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them — because you will never take back our country with weakness.” In other words, ‘you will have to be strong, you will have to be determined to bull your way in to stop the validation, you will have to be pushy and threatening and violent.’ And that is exactly what they did. And it’s all on the record. And that record, those words of a President inciting a mob to sedition, finally turned the craven Republicans who had supported this wannabe fascist’s every other disgusting action, every other piece of his inflammatory rhetoric, to turn away. To withdraw their support. To condemn this action and this President’s clear incitement to riot, to, in effect, destroy democracy. As the craven Lindsay Graham said on the Senate floor, “Enough is enough. I’m done.” And the chorus of those who have also had enough continues to grow, several White House officials and Cabinet members already having resigned, and more contemplating an abrupt departure with less than two weeks left to go in Trump’s term of office. In addition, several officials are openly considering invoking the 25<sup>th</sup> Amendment to force Trump to leave office over the fear that the most powerful man in the world could do untold damage in his few remaining days, considering his deranged mental state. Whether the heretofore toadying Vice President, Mike Pence, can be persuaded to take or initiate this step remains to be seen. But at least one Republican, Representative Kinzinger, of Illinois, has already called for the enactment of that Amendment. And Trump himself, hearing the revulsion throughout the government and the nation, has just today said publicly that he will oversee a peaceful transition to the new Biden government. It is the first time he has acknowledged that Biden has won, which means acknowledging that he lost. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #333333;">What we have, in short, is a kind of revolution, but not the kind that one female supporter (identified as Elizabeth from Knoxville) went on record to proclaim, when asked why she had taken part in the invasion. “This is a revolution,” she said gleefully, as if she had been part of the storming of the Bastille. She was right that it was indeed a revolution—but she seemed not to know that this revolution involved the final downfall and humiliation of both her hero Trump, and Trumpism. He is finished, like most dictators, because of his inability to refrain from embarking on self-destructive, even suicidal missions (like Hitler invading Russia; and it is always puzzling why; and one thought that occurs to me is that these ‘strong men’ never quite believe that they’ve actually pulled off their usurpation, and need to keep pushing to convince themselves that they really have, against all odds, made it to the top.). And having done so, he will never again be able to disturb the body politic and the world. And his banishment from the world stage may, if we are lucky, be cemented by his arrest and trial for countless crimes committed both before and during his presidency (the state of New York is preparing its case against him, which cannot be set aside by presidential pardon), not least of which was the public urging of his minions to sedition on January 6, 2021. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #333333;">So my take on yesterday is both dismay at what happened to this nation, and grim satisfaction at what it has relieved us from: the twin plagues of Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader, and Donald Trump as the most unfit, the most ignorant, the most disgraceful President in the history of this republic. And while it is true that we may not be free from the idiots who still make up his army of millions, without their idiot leader to egg them on, the fake courage they’ve displayed to publicly try to take down our institutions may well fade away like fog on a sunny day. All we can do is be vigilant and urge the Biden administration to not, under any circumstances, coddle these white supremacist thugs any longer. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #333333;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #333333;">Lawrence DiStasi <o:p></o:p></span></p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8647794974156245885.post-37738559974970564152020-12-21T11:44:00.000-08:002020-12-21T11:44:48.560-08:00Angels Singing?<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Has anyone ever heard angels actually singing? To judge by the Christmas carols we sing routinely, one would have to say ‘yes.’ Here are just a few carols that mention angels singing:<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i>Adeste Fidelis</i> (2<sup>nd</sup> verse: Sing, choirs of angels…)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i>It Came upon a Midnight Clear</i> (that glorious song of old, of Angels bending near the earth, to touch their harps of gold…)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i>O Holy Night</i> (fall on your knees, O hear the angels’ voices..)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i>Hark the Herald Angels Sing</i> (Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king..)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i>Joy to the World</i> (And Heaven and Angels sing, And Heaven and Angels sing…)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i>Angels We Have Heard on High</i> (Angels we have heard on high, Sweetly singing o’er the plains.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i>Silent Night (</i>Even this all-time favorite gives us a second verse that goes: Heavenly hosts sing alleluia...)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">So what’s going on here? In fact, there’s a rather substantial literature about this phenomenon, or, we might call it, Christmas miracle. Or perhaps we should follow Yuval Harari in his book<i> Sapiens</i>, where he points out that one of the abilities that set Sapiens above all other primates was the ability to invent fictions—such as god, or corporations, or justice—and then get millions to believe in them, and thereby cooperate as if such legal or corporate fictions were real. But either way, how is it that so many millions, perhaps billions of us, believe in and celebrate in song this idea that angels sing? What <i>is</i> angel singing anyway? What does it (or would it) sound like? And where does the notion come from?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Most people point to the Bible as the source for the concept. Passages in the New Testament, such as Luke 2:8-20, where angels announce the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, are prime referents. Then there’s Job 38:7, where the Old Testament says that during Creation, <span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #303030;">“the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” But as Ryan Fraser points out in the <i>Jackson Sun</i> of Mar. 6, 2015 (</span><a href="http://www.jacksonsun.com/" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">www.jacksonsun.com</span></a><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #303030;">), “the text mentions morning stars singing, but <i>not</i> angels.” Fraser goes on to debunk each biblical reference in turn (including Luke 2:820 which reads that the angels were “saying” not “singing”) and reaches his conclusion: even according to the Bible, <i>angels don’t sing, </i>and actually can’t sing; only humans can do that. In contrast to this, however, we see Youtube posts that purport to be recordings of angels really singing. For example, this one below, which even has commentaries by people who cite their ecstatic responses to this heavenly music:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjvx_yI1drtAhUKS6wKHZX-BfwQtwIwDXoECCAQAg&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D_x-Ta47DvJs&usg=AOvVaw3JCVrkGQf6CQ4fFcatOQAh" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="color: #660099; text-decoration: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></a></span></p><h3 style="break-after: avoid; color: #1f3763; font-family: "Calibri Light", sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b><span style="color: #660099; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt; line-height: 23px;"><a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjvx_yI1drtAhUKS6wKHZX-BfwQtwIwDXoECCAQAg&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D_x-Ta47DvJs&usg=AOvVaw3JCVrkGQf6CQ4fFcatOQAh" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="color: #660099; text-decoration: none;">Angels singing Heavenly Music for you - YouTube</span><span style="color: #1f3763; font-family: "Calibri Light", sans-serif; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></a></span></b></h3><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><cite><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.100000381469727px;"><a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjvx_yI1drtAhUKS6wKHZX-BfwQtwIwDXoECCAQAg&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D_x-Ta47DvJs&usg=AOvVaw3JCVrkGQf6CQ4fFcatOQAh" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="color: #202124; text-decoration: none;">www.youtube.com</span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #5f6368; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none;"> </span></span><span class="dyjrff"><span style="color: #5f6368; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none;">› watch</span></span><span style="color: #660099; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; text-decoration: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></a></span></cite></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #202124; font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0in;"><em>And one of the many responses:<b></b></em><em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0in;"><em><b>“</b></em><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #030303; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.100000381469727px; padding: 0in;">Aw God bless this beautiful music I am not scared because Jesus is with me </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=comments&stzid=UgyhNWrgPpn6Nrf-cfl4AaABAg&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbndZbGlHb0syWHZ6MUNOOVpVSS1hcHJmR0lLQXxBQ3Jtc0ttNkRCbzBBNW9HZTB0bnNjOXNRZEMyUmJBc2pkQ2FhZUJxWEJycjdqWmJNb09IVWtiaE95NUdmMDZJNWlUMzBJRXR3ZGdTQ1I0M0lFSnhRZl9HU1lLLTJPYUM4OHRXRFgyZ3ZnMkdOR1d4XzRtVnVRMA%3D%3D&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwe.re%2F" style="color: #954f72;" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.100000381469727px;">we.re</span></a><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #030303; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.100000381469727px; padding: 0in;"> all going home soon I'm so excited.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #030303; padding: 0in;">In addition, one can find detailed explanations about the experience a person may have with such angelic sound, and why it’s not what you might expect. For example, Whitney Hopler, who claims to be a “religion expert,” wrote this Twitter post that made its way to the website learnreligions.com:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #030303; padding: 0in;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">Your </span><a href="https://www.learnreligions.com/your-own-guardian-angel-123820" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">guardian angel</span></a><span style="color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> may send you a </span><a href="https://www.learnreligions.com/angels-singing-1728235" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">message of sounds</span></a><span style="color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> you can hear audibly while you're contacting </span><a href="https://www.learnreligions.com/are-angels-male-or-female-123814" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">him or her</span></a><span style="color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"> through </span><a href="https://www.learnreligions.com/what-do-guardian-angels-do-123811" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">prayer or meditation</span></a><span style="color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">…Since angels often transmit information to you through </span><a href="https://www.learnreligions.com/angel-colors-light-rays-of-angels-123826" style="color: #954f72;"><span style="color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">electromagnetic energy</span></a><span style="color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">, you may hear a ringing sound in one or both of your ears during prayer or meditation with your guardian angel…It’s a high-pitched sound because angelic energy vibrates on<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> a high frequency. The information that angels send is contained in energy that must be slowed down for humans to understand its message…<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #464646; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #464646;">Interesting, and authenticated with scientific-sounding paraphernalia (‘electromagnetic energy’ which ‘vibrates on a high frequency’), though it still doesn’t confirm that angels sing. At least not in a way that we can hear. So perhaps we need to investigate the nature of angels a little further. On a website called christiancourier.com, there is a dialogue between a professor and some students leading to a piece called “Why do Christians believe in Angels?” (part of an overall article, “What Does the Bible Say About the Nature and Role of Angels?”) by Wayne Jackson. There we learn much technical information, such as that the word angel “</span><span style="color: #212529;">derives from a Greek term which suggests the idea of sending a message.” Thus, angels would seem to be primarily <i>God’s messengers</i>. We learn further that angels are “created beings,” and, as such, are not immortal, as only God is. The Bible suggests that along with the universe, they were created in that frantic first week of divine creation. Their nature seems to be that of “spirits,” and they are held accountable by God for their actions (some of them actually ‘sin,’ like that rebellious old Lucifer.) Finally, they are very useful beings to God:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #212529;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 18.399999618530273px; margin: 0in 0in 5pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="color: #212529; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.866666793823242px;">… the Lord indicated that at the time of the judgment angels will be used to<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><strong>gather evil persons</strong><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>out of God’s kingdom (Mt. 13:41). It is significant that at the time of Christ’s return, He will be accompanied by “all the angels” (Mt. 25:31).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="color: #212529;">OK. So now we know what angels are and usually do, but we still don’t know why they’re depicted as singing around Christmas time, nor what they sound like. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #212529;">What, then, can we conclude? It seems to me that many Christians—and Muslims and Jews and others—have a felt need to believe in some sort of supernatural beings, whose voices are so pure that they evoke the idea of that place of purity, Heaven, or Valhalla, or whatever your place of eternal peace and innocence might be called. Our language is replete with metaphors of “angelic singing,” most commonly, “she sings like an angel.” And to judge by the sample on Youtube, that would be a soprano accompanied by organ music, perhaps singing in a pristine forest. Or perhaps a boys’ choir would be a closer fit. Clear boy voices would evoke the idea of innocence—before puberty, and all it implies, leads to a big change in the male voice and behavior. The depiction of angels by painters (<i>putti—</i>the winged infant child in Greek and Roman art) would seem to confirm this; all are youthful, and innocent, and apparently pure, fluttering about on gossamer wings. And all this is prior to, we assume, the corruption and decay of earth and earthly life spoil the ideal creation we suppose the Creator meant. Were it not for humans, and those rebellious angels, who spoiled it all. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #212529;">This is what, presumably, angels are singing about in all those carols: the Savior has come to redeem the world, e.g., to make its pre-lapsarian purity and innocence possible again. And he does it accompanied by choirs of angels, or via the announcement of messenger angels, who come to bring the good news to, among others, the virgin who will innocently and without the earthly stain of intercourse, give him birth. So they sing, these Christmas angels, even though singing is not in their nature. And we in the millions sing about them, absent-mindedly giving credence to the altogether preposterous existence of angels themselves, and of their ethereal singing. After all, it makes for a nice story. And for the lovely Christmas carols we all love to sing. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #212529;">Merry Christmas, everyone, and merry singing. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 24px; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #212529;"> </span></p><p><span style="color: #212529; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0in;">Lawrence DiStasi</span> </p>Lawrence DiStasihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15157094158947307057noreply@blogger.com0