Category Archives: culture wars

Trump Inauguration is Upon Us!

1 Reply

The inauguration of Trump this week, and the multitude of problems that are already attending his presence on the stage has me really alarmed.  And the greatest concern I have is his supporters who have chosen to be oblivious to his mental instability and lament re people like myself, “Why don’t you just stop being “sour grapes” and get behind our new President”.  Some of them even have the audacity to then describe him as “elected fair and square,” completely disregarding the overt chicanery that went into getting him elected.  Ordinarily, “sour grapes” would be a legitimate complaint and I always do feel it myself when my “pony in the race” loses.  But his supporters have overlooked their own recent contempt of Trump and recognition of his mental instabiliand expect the rest of the country…and world…to do the same.  Now all of us are “conflicted” as in having a few “bats in the belfry” and that is certainly true for myself.  But Donald Trump has given us so much insight into his flawed psyche that it is apparent to anyone willing to be honest with himself that he is seriously mentally ill.

Last weekend Saturday Night Live skewered Trump on life television again.  It sunk in on me that they are humiliating him as are most of the other comedians and that is so easy to do as he is such an humiliation to my country and to the world.  We are being laughed at and should be.  But what I realized as I watched the comedy sketch is that the ridicule only exacerbates the problem as his supporters who even catch a glimpse of the ridicule will then feel ridiculed and humiliated themselves making it even more unlikely that they will lessen their support for him.  For, when facing ridicule and humiliation, it is human nature to defend himself rigorously, staunchly defending what to others is his lunacy as the pain of humiliation, of being “wrong” is more than the ego can bear.  Yes, have been there, done that!  Trump’s absurd refusal to acknowledge that he has made a mistake, to utter the words “I was wrong” reflects why he is the choice of so many people in the country who, I allege, cannot acknowledge themselves being wrong in critical dimensions of their life.  And, it is no accident that early in the campaign Trump, even as he vied for evangelical Christian creds, admitted that he had never felt the need to ask God for forgiveness.  His shame base is so intense that on that note he flunked the “Christian test” as he has consistently done…though evangelical leaders have continued to fawn over him and evangelical Christians have lined up behind him religiously.

I’m not for sure what ridicule accomplishes other than exacerbating the cultural divide that is now so apparent.  It makes people like me appear contemptuous and arrogant.  And anyone with my latent insecurity certainly is not free of those qualities.  But what can one do?  Write a meaningless blog post like this and “piss into the wind.”?  Well, that is better than reasoning with Trump or his supporters as “reason” has nothing to do with this matter and at least tossing this blather into the cyber void gets it somewhat off my chest.  Why in the hell can’t people just set down and be reasonable like myself?  Chuckle, chuckle!  Once again, this is not about reason.  Perhaps that is something we could realize from this mess, that there is a dimension of human experience that is beyond the grasp of mere reason.  However, those who most need to learn this are the least likely to know and experience it.  It would be too scary to experience and it is easier for them to scream their platitudes and certainties a little louder and blame Obama or “them” a little more.

(Here is the link to an hilarious spoof of Trump’s inauguration.  https://qz.com/885900/saturday-night-live-the-last-snl-before-trumps-inauguration-of-course-featured-alec-baldwin-in-the-cold-open/)

Thoughts about the Election 2016

4 Replies

This election yesterday which will bring Donald Trump to the Presidency of my country in January has taught me so much, not just about my country but about myself.  This is because I now pay attention much better, not only to what happens “out there” in my world but what happens “in here” in my subjective experience.  No longer do I have the luxury of merely coasting by on my convenient set of preconceptions.

The American people have clearly voted for a more conservative direction in our country, politically and culturally.  Their insistence on a return to conservative values was so emphatic that they were even willing to vote for a candidate that most of them did not like, many of whom even found it embarrassing to vote for him.  And I feel passionately that a conservative presence in any culture is needed; but it is sad that the Republican Party could not come up with a candidate who represented their values and didn’t bring Trump’s unsavory qualities to the table.

Furthermore, this election was an affirmation about a certain way of looking at the world, a worldview with very certain and rigid boundaries best illustrated with Trump’s brazen declaration to “build a wall” to keep out the Mexicans and even to make Mexico pay for it.  This “building of walls” is a metaphor for the whole emphasis of the Trumpian message to “Make American Great Again,” meaning to turn back the clock to the time when boundaries were very definite and “everybody” knew their place.  Yes, “Negroes”, women, homosexuals, foreigners of all stripes, and all expressions of diversity were frowned upon or persecuted.

When the basic assumptions that formulate the template through which we view the world are threatened, it is a very human response to want to revert to what has worked in the past to diminish or eliminate this threat.  This is true on an individual and a collective level.  But sometimes this need for the security of the “tried and true” of yesteryear can become too great and we will succumb to the temptation of making,  “for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  (W. H. Auden)  Life is inherently dynamic and with the dynamic flow of this spiritual process there is always some risk involved.  Without willingness to take risks, to change, we have retreated to a sterile and moribund world which leaves us bereft of spirit, existing only as the walking dead.

Bruce Jenner, Trans-Gender Identity, & Culture-Wars

1 Reply

Bruce Jenner, the former Olympic gold medalist and former husband of Kris Kardashian formally announced last week that he is a woman, explaining, “It is who I am.”  Our culture provides great liberty with declaring and acting on the choice to “be who I am,” a choice that is not available in most places and never has been.  And this is certainly the case when it comes to gender identity. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/arts/television/bruce-jenner-transgender-diane-sawyer.html?emc=edit_th_20150426&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=71726985&_r=0)

Culture has one primary intent—to perpetuate itself and the “certainties” that constitute its bedrock.  These certainties provide a culture’s children a template through which to view the world and this template tends to always legitimate the values of the particular culture into which one is born.  And one of the simple little “certainties” that one quickly learns is gender identity and this originates when the child learns that his/her “plumbing” distinguishes himself/herself from roughly half of the population.  Once that distinction is ascertained, the child then begins to learn what it means to be a “boy” or a “girl” in that culture and then has the task of following the mandate to “get with the program.”  Yes, early on there are some children who have “contrary” impulses with respect to gender identification but the cultural mandate historically is overwhelming so that they dutifully obey the “law of the father” and subscribe to “proper” gender identity, repressing any impulses that might be “contrary.”

But Mr./Ms Jenner illustrates a huge cultural shift in my country and in the West.  Certainties of the past are now often less certain, even those of gender identity.  We are learning that the distinction between “male” and “female” is more nebulous than we were taught as children.  And this is a frightening experience to those who cannot handle ambiguity and nuance and are accustomed to seeing things in black-and-white terms.  And for many of those in my culture they have an immediate contrivance to rely upon—“It’s of the Devil!”  It reminds me of the label ancient cartographers applied to regions of the map which had not been explored—“There be the dragons.”

 The unknown is frightening.  When faced with the unknown it is human tendency to retreat to what is already “known” and to “hunker down” with that little view of the world which one of my readers recently described as a “querencia.”  With this “hunkering down” mentality, one clings even more desperately to what one has always believed and often will merely affirm it with more vehemence.  This vehement affirmation often even leads to action, even violent action.  Change cannot be tolerated to a hyper conservative mind.

 Ultimately we must deal with human finitude and this gender aspect of our current “culture wars” provides us another opportunity.  We are finite, fragile little critters running around on this little ball of granite, our frantic activities amounting to nothing more than the Shakespearean “tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.”  But if we have the courage, and a healthy dollop of meta-cognition as Shakespeare was blessed with, we will be able to counter the nihilistic despair with the affirmation that, “There is a Divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”  In other words, there is always Hope.  But hope is not mindless clinging to the dogma we were brainwashed with as children but to truth that has withstood our heart-felt, Spirit-led, mindfulness-inspired self-scrutiny.