Idiot Culture

 

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: 

“We just did this lovely tribute to diorama.” 

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.” 

            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 Age of Idiots: 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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Uncertainty

 

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 supposed 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. 

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 is 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. 

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 must 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.

On the other hand, most of us would like to, if we could, have an accurate picture of real 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.)

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?

A June 12, 2012 article in New Scientist 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 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:

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.

 

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 imbalance 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 does not; 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 seemnecessary for us to be. 

            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 is) 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. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Freedom or Liberation

“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. 

            “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 fromexploitation by rapacious businesses; the freedom of African Americans from 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, from hunger, from homelessness, from grossly deficient and costly medical care, from food deserts that lack access to nourishing and healthful food; and freedom from 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. 

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 Declaration of Independence, 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,

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, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

 

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. 

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. 

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 CO₂ 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.  

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 liberation: 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 not freedom from all earthly constraints or pains, but rather awareness of them, and thereby, of liberation from suffering. Because, as he expounded it, there was a cause of suffering, and it was due mostly to the clinging and attachment to the very things that those deluded by independencevalue 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 will not change; 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, dependent 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 interdependent co-arising is how real reality actually works. 

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. 

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. 

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 my benefit, and instead, accepting real 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. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Danger in the Military

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

Otherwise, this nation is headed for its final days as a free society, as a Republic, and as a functioning democracy. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi 

Using the Military to Uphold the Law

 

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. 

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. 

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, Brown v Board of Education, 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 Plessy v. Ferguson 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 not, and were not equal at all. As part of the decision, courts and school boards were directed to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed.”

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 prevented 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^st 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. 

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. 

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:

We will not drink from the cup of genocide... No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor!

 

When mobs of segregationists swelled into the thousands, President Kennedy ordered in Military Police from the from the 503rd, 716th, and 720th Military Police Battalions, the already- federalized Mississippi National Guard, and elements of the 101^st 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 a third of the federal agents, 166 men, were injured in the melee, and forty federal soldiers and Mississippi National Guardsmen were wounded. 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).

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. 

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. 

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 public schools in Alabama.

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^st 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. 

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 stand by” 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 fight—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 fight 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. 

Thus, rather than use the military to control an unruly mob acting illegally, Donald Trump attempted to use the mob to literally overturn the law. 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.  

Lawrence DiStasi

Invasion at the Capitol

                                    

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. 

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. 

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? 

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.

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 great 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 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^th 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. 

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. 

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. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi 

Angels Singing?

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:

Adeste Fidelis (2^nd verse: Sing, choirs of angels…)

It Came upon a Midnight Clear (that glorious song of old, of Angels bending near the earth, to touch their harps of gold…)

O Holy Night (fall on your knees, O hear the angels’ voices..)

Hark the Herald Angels Sing (Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn king..)

Joy to the World (And Heaven and Angels sing, And Heaven and Angels sing…)

Angels We Have Heard on High (Angels we have heard on high, Sweetly singing o’er the plains.)

Silent Night (Even this all-time favorite gives us a second verse that goes: Heavenly hosts sing alleluia...)

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 Sapiens, 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 is angel singing anyway? What does it (or would it) sound like? And where does the notion come from?

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, “the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” But as Ryan Fraser points out in the Jackson Sun of Mar. 6, 2015 (www.jacksonsun.com), “the text mentions morning stars singing, but not 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, angels don’t sing, 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:

Angels singing Heavenly Music for you - YouTube

www.youtube.com › watch

 

And one of the many responses:

“Aw God bless this beautiful music I am not scared because Jesus is with me we.re all going home soon I'm so excited.”

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:

Your guardian angel may send you a message of sounds you can hear audibly while you're contacting him or her through prayer or meditation…Since angels often transmit information to you through electromagnetic energy, 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 a high frequency. The information that angels send is contained in energy that must be slowed down for humans to understand its message…

 

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 “derives from a Greek term which suggests the idea of sending a message.” Thus, angels would seem to be primarily God’s messengers. 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:

… the Lord indicated that at the time of the judgment angels will be used to gather evil persons 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).

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. 

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 (putti—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. 

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. 

Merry Christmas, everyone, and merry singing. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi