Category Archives: politics

The Real God of Congress–Getting Re-elected

The following is a copy of a letter I will send to one of my state’s senators, Mark Pryor:

I was disappointed with your vote on the gun legislation earlier this week. I have no doubt that you are a good man, a “good ole Arkansas boy” like I am, like your wonderful father raised you to be, but I feel strongly that you have surrendered to the god of, “What will get me re-elected?” I know as well as you do what the right thing to do was but you caved in as many good men and women did. If I’d been in your position, it would have not been easy to “do the right thing,” as the pressure must be immense. But the real pressure comes down to that God that most of Congress bows to, “What will get me re-elected?”

But, I will not vote for you again. And a lot of friends of mine will not vote for you again. I don’t know who we will vote for but it will not be for you. I will even vote for a Republican if he/she demonstrates conviction and ability to thwart that demon of “re-electability.” We need people who believe in something and “re-electability” is absolutely nothing.

The best example I have seen of this courage was demonstrated by a Republican governor last fall. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey jeopardized his entire political future to accept the assistance of President Obama in the aftermath Hurricane Sandy, right on the brink of the Presidential election. He has not been “crucified” yet…at least not fatally. But many in his party vehemently oppose him as he did not bow to political pressure on that issue and was seen on video and in photo’s “palling around” with the man Republican extremists hate with a passion. I will never forget the demonstration of courage that Governor Christie offered.

I hope that you serve out your term with more integrity than you demonstrated on this issue. And, given your parentage, I know that you have it in you. I know the pressure is immense but we pay you to handle that pressure. And you know what the right thing to do is. Let me re-emphasize that I’m sure you are a good man. You would have to be given who your father is. But good men and women do not always do “good” things. But you and your colleagues are in a position where “the good” needs to have priority in your motivations, not something as lame and immature as re-electability.

My Venture into the Dark Side

In Praise of Jimmy Carter

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Jimmy Carter is still going strong as he approaches his 90^th birthday! He is incredible! And, he appears more lucid and coherent and “together” than does “literarylew” on occasion! Though I would not deign to “pile on” and diminish his presidency, the real work of his life has taken place in the 33 years since he lost the 1980 election to Reagan. And, I know this loss must have been a devastating experience for him. He must have suffered immensely. And, to make it worse, his presidency is often described as “ineffective” or as a “failure.” But, he is holding his head high and is doing very important work with the Carter Foundation and with Habitat for Humanity. In a video clip I will post here, he discusses with Jon Stewart his work in Africa in almost completely eradicating the Guinea worm.

I have suffered disappointment and even failure in my life. And, I never just completely caved in and wallowed in despair…too long. I too have pulled myself up from the floor and persevered. But, if I had been in a position like Carter’s and had suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of the American people, I don’t know if I could have gotten up off the floor.

But his life is a demonstration of faith, an embodiment of the New Testament observation that “Faith without works is dead.” And though he has dissolved his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, I’m sure his faith is very “Baptisty” even today. (And, I might add, so is mine!) I conjecture that he has found that his traditional Southern evangelical faith can withstand the scrutiny of a critical, intelligent mind and has even flourished as a result.

God appeared to me after this interview and told me that in a short time Jimmy will cross the river Styx and will find a very handsome golden mansion awaiting him. And those streets will be embellished with an additional layer of gold. And the angels will fete him as will the other humans who have preceded him into that celestial domain. And he is going to give Jimmy a real hearty “Atta-boy.”

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-april-9-2013/jimmy-carter-pt–1

Why Did the Jews Kill Jesus????

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David Letterman used to have a little routine he would do on his show called “Brush with Greatness” in which he would pick a person from his audience who had encountered a luminary at some point in his/her life in some totally casual manner. That person would tell of that chance encounter and then David would hand him/her the “writer’s embellishment” to read which would be a fantasy account in which that encounter made a monumental impact on the life of that luminary. Well, in 1980 on Good Friday I had an encounter with a true luminary, an eventual earth shaker indeed, and here I will share about that encounter and then provide a “writer’s embellishment.”

The year was 1980 and I was teaching social studies at a rural school in Northwest Arkansas. The young governor of our state was dropping by on a campaign swing, recently having started the campaign against Frank White. It was early in the campaign and it was a given that the governor would win re-election in this traditional democratic state against an unheard of opponent.

The handsome young Bill Clinton entered the packed gymnasium with a full entourage. The atmosphere was electric. Governors did not often stop by little rube communities like this and I’m sure this visit was because of some local small-fry dignitary that had pulled in a favor with someone. A question-and-answer session with the student body was to be the main part of the event and so we teachers had prepared our students to ask appropriate and thoughtful questions about the political issues of the day. Mr. Clinton made a few preliminary remarks and then opened the floor to questions from the student body.

Immediately, a gangly young early-teen female already well known as not being the sharpest knife in the drawer stood up and with a shrill, loud voice, shrieked out, “WHY DID THE JEWS KILL JESUS?” Well, the first thing I thought was, “Well, at least she is not a student of mine!” There was a pause, briefly, as everyone was stunned, realizing that the question had nothing to do with the moment even if it was Easter. But the governor did not miss a beat, being the skilled politician that he was. He did not smile, or chuckle in the least, taking the question with complete sincerity and responded with the standard-issue Baptist answer, that Jesus had died, was buried, and rose again for our sins. Please note that he did not answer the question at all, demonstrating that he already had the political skills to advance to higher office.

As he and his entourage left the gymnasium I happened to be in his path and got to shake his hand, making eye contact in the process. At this point I will begin the “Literarylew” writer’s embellishment:

I knew immediately that he and I were friends for life, BFF even before the concept emerged on Facebook. I could just tell that he could “feel my pain.” The encounter lasted only a half second but I knew that I would hear from him soon. Sure enough, that night he called me and said that he really wanted to be friends, to “pal around” from time to time as he could tell that I was really a special guy, even if I was just a scmuck school teacher in a rube Arkansas high school.

So, to make a long story short, beginning then we would get together every now and then and just “hang out.” And when he became President, he secretly used campaign funds to build a heli-port in my backyard and would just drop in a couple of times a year for a visit. As soon as he landed, we would head to my ’69 Chevy pick-up. While I was trying to start the engine, he would use a bungee cord to strap down the hood and then remove the plywood from the window that had been knocked out. We would then head to the local monster truck show, knocking down a six-pack of pbr on the war, tossing the empties out the window with impunity. He explained, with a wink, “Hell, Louie, if they stop us, I can fix it!”

(NOTE: Btw, Clinton lost that gubernatorial election in 1980!)

Change Means “Mangled Guts Pretending”

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Ann Voskamp, writing from a conservative Christian viewpoint, reflects great depth stemming from having endured great loss in her life. And she notes in her book, “One Thousand Gifts” that, “awakening to joy awakens to pain”, and describes joy and pain as “two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all those who do not numb themselves to really living…Life is loss.” She also interprets Jacob’s wrestling with God as an inner spiritual battle that we all risk if we desire to change into the expression of our inner essence that so many of us fear. She describes the quest for wells which hold living water, noting that these wells don’t come without first seeking them with desperation and that “wells don’t come without first splitting open hard earth, cracking back the lids. There’s no seeing God face-to-face without first the ripping…It takes practice, wrenching practice, to break open the lids. But the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt he is.”

But, now I want to share the same truth in the words of someone from a vastly different perspective, Tony Kushner, the noted playwright and author of “Angels in America” and more recently author of the screenplay for the movie, “Lincoln.” A character in “Angels in America” poses the question, “How do people change” prompting the following answer:

Well, it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out…and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. And then you up you get. And walk around. Just mangled guts pretending.

Wow, that is intense! “Mangled guts pretending!” Notions like this is enough to deter anyone from changing, to opt for the status quo, personally or collectively. Or, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, to, “cling these ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.” (Shakespeare, in Hamlet)

And I can’t help but apply this to our country in its current turmoil. As Bob Dylan sang decades ago, “The times they are a changin’” and it is producing great political and social turmoil. And one point made in the brilliant movie Lincoln was the tremendous social unrest that Lincoln knew the country faced when he broached the subject of the 13th amendment.

Epistemic Closure and the Republican Party

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I had my weekly cup of coffee with God earlier this morning. As we sipped our celestial Starbucks, he pointed to an open-air classroom nearby where young gods were studying, preparing for their future rule of various worlds. “Let’s listen in,” he suggested to me. I obliged readily, knowing of course who I was dealing with.

The “young gods” were being lectured to about epistemic closure, the notion of living in a bubble and assuming that one knows about everything when in reality he/she “knows” only through a small prism. The teacher then ran a video that I have shared here before from Saturday Night Life, illustrating the phenomena vividly. (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9yn49_mr-belvedere_shortfilms#.UUWfUDctU9U)

Then the teacher continued, “Now for a couple of days we are conducting a laboratory experiment in epistemic closure on an obscure little planet called Earth. We are very concerned about this cosmic poison for wherever it gains a foothold, it is almost impossible to eradicate; and it is the one thing that prevents us from accomplishing our Purpose. It is Satan’s favorite weapon.” He then pointed to the screen and zoomed in to a place called “The United States” and suddenly the din of the Republican Party’s internecine squabbling filled the room

Now laying aside my reverie…

Those of you who look on from other countries must be appalled at what you are seeing in the current performance of my country’s political circus. But, please note that the gods are giving you a lesson about what can happen in your own country if it, or any faction within it, draws its boundaries too narrowly and refuses to broaden them. Now I am wont to note at this point of this argument that this tendency is present with all groups, liberal and conservative. HOWEVER, let me note this time that the “open-mindedness” I advocate will never be found on the extreme right fringe of any group as people of that sort desperately hate open-mindedness and desperately cling to “truth” as seen through the narrow prism of their hate-filled heart. It is amusing on one hand to watch the ultra-conservative’s quest for “purity” in their own rank as it creates frustration and consternation within their own ranks. But on the other hand it is not amusing at all, but very sad, as we see in the Taliban what would happen if our culture did not have sophisticated structural limits.

But this boundary dilemma is part of the human experience and reflects a tendency that we have to watch for even in our own heart. With my government’s current impasse…and specifically the Republican imbroglio…we have an object lesson in the lunacy of the human heart, individually and collectively. We are our own worst enemy; as Pogo once noted, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The human temptation to create a cocoon…an Eden on earth…can be so compelling that it is counter-productive and can even lead to our own demise. As W. H. Auden feared, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

The answer is “self” awareness or “consciousness” which we can never acquire unless we first recognize that we don’t have it in the first place. In other words, the first step in seeing the light is realizing that we live in darkness just as Plato told us in the 5th Century BC and Jesus told us a few centuries later. And that is to name only two who have offered light in our darkness. Others certainly preceded them and many have come since and are even present today. “But Truth met him and held out her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.” (W. H. Auden)

Musings About an Identity Crisis

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I wish you first a sense of theater.

Only those who know illusion

And love it will go far.

Otherwise, we spend our lives in confusion

About what to say and do about who we really are.

This poem by W. H. Auden presents an essential quandary in our quest for identity. If you find yourself wondering about “who I really am” then you have already opened a can of worms and have an identity crisis in the offing. And please note that an “identity crisis” is often a luxury, one that millions of people cannot afford, being the urgency of the day-to-day grind of trying to make a living to provide for themselves and their family But for those of you who have this luxury, I’m going to share some thoughts about the nature of identity.

The notion that “I am” assumes a whole lot. When I think about who “I am”, I am practicing selective attention as the question brings to mind only memories that are consistent with presuppositions about myself that I have been permitted and find myself comfortable with. Everything else has been excluded. But the “everything else” is still there and always beckons in the unconscious, coming to us in fears, anxieties, projections, and dreams, good and bad. Addressing an identity crisis is to realize that we have drawn the boundaries of our existence too narrowly and that the “crisis” we are now feeling merely is an opportunity to broaden these boundaries. It is to realize that our identity….the one that I’m presenting here as a false self, even as a charade in some sense…is very necessary and is not to be totally discarded. It is to realize merely that it is only part of the picture, only the surface of our real identity and for that identity to have meaning we must allow some of its excluded context to surface and be integrated into our sense of self. That “false self”, or “ego”, is very important. The problem lies only in our insistence that it be the whole of ourselves. Failure to recognize this is to find o living a very shallow life.

Let me illustrate with a snippet from another Auden poem in which he notes how that most of us “drive through life in the closed cab of occupation.” By this he meant that a person often, if not usually, sees the world through a template which is often best characterized by his occupation. Thus, a physician sees people through a medical model, an educator sees people as children needing to learn, a clinician (such as myself) sees people with the cold detachment of a diagnostic manual. But, Auden’s point was not merely about “occupations” but about a template, an ego structure through which all of us see the world, be it “occupational” or otherwise. This ego structure is our identity, our “false self” or persona, which always needs to be enlarged. And when this “enlargement” takes place, it does not invalidate the template…usually. The template usually serves a useful purpose. But we need to see the world through broader terms than we are wont to do when totally subservient to the template that with which we are so familiar and comfortable that we can’t even see it and are actually averse to seeing. (Emily Dickinson noted, “The mind too near itself to see itself distinctly.)

Let me illustrate with Mitt Romney. I think Romney was, and is, an intelligent, good human being. He had many qualities which could have made him a good President. But his worldview, his “template”, got in his way and posed some real problems in his campaign, best illustrated in the surreptitiously taped 47 percent speech to wealthy donors. His template demonstrated an extreme rigidity which often left him appearing very awkward and socially maladroit so that he often missed the nuances of personal and public interactions. For, Romney is a “corporate” person, a “corporate” mogul and persons of this cut do have a place in our culture, be that good or bad. He sees the world through the eyes of a corporate mogul and was not able to give this viewpoint pause on occasion and approach the public in more personal terms. It is not that he was “bad”. It is just that he was Mitt Romney and that “Mitt Romney” was, and is, a “corporate mogul.”

(An equally valid point is the “literarylew” is merely “literarylew” and sees the world through the template that comes across through his blog. Those who know me personally also see how clearly that “literarylew” is part and parcel of who I am, it is my identity, and yes, it really gets tiresome on occasion, or at least as annoying as hell!)

Jihad in America!

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About two years ago I had the immense pleasure of traveling in Greece and vicinity. My wife and I departed from Athens and took a cruise on the Aegean up to the Bosporus, down the coast of Asia Minor, to Santorini, and back to Athens. We spent a day and a half in the lovely city of Istanbul in April when the tulips were blooming in abundance. There were seas of tulips, and seas of beautiful people, beautiful buildings, delicious food, and marvelous Efes beer. Even in that brief time the culture captivated me and I basked in the experience of “difference”. I’ve always loved “difference” and travel has permitted to cater to that whim occasionally. And with the blog-o-sphere, and with reading I can also meet people of different cultures and appreciate the diversity which I feel is so vital in life. As a result of the delightful, though brief, stay in Istanbul, I have since read novels by two Turkish novelists, Orhan Pamuk (my favorite of his being The Museum of Innocence) and two novels by Elif Shafak.

I am currently reading Shafak’s novel, The Forty Rules of Love, which is a fictionalized account of the life of the Persian poet Rumi. And early in the book she makes an observation about Rumi’s perspective of jihad which is very relevant to world culture today and even to my country’s own “jihadists.” She noted of Rumi, “In an age of deeply embedded bigotries and clashes, he stood for a universal spirituality, opening his doors to people of all backgrounds. Instead of an outer-oriented jihad—defined as “the war against the infidels” and carried out by many in those days just as in the present—Rumi stood up for an inner-oriented jihad where the aim was to struggle against and ultimately prevail over one’s own ego, nafs.”

This resonates with an old refrain of mine, borrowed from W. H. Auden, “We wage the war we are” and relevant to Charlie Brown’s observation, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Though we must never withdraw and live in isolation, we must be engaged with the world and take purposeful action in this world, we must always remember that our primary enemy is always within. When the Apostle Paul lamented, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me,” I do not think he was talking about “them” out there in the world. He recognized that though he was a child of God, he still fought a daily battle with his inner haunts. Failure to recognize those haunts risks self-destruction and great harm to those around us. In my country, we have “jihadists” who are presently in paranoid fury with our government and even intimate taking up arms against this government. I really think they, and those who egg them on, should take a peak within.

I’d like to share another bit of Rumi relevant to this matter that Shafak quotes:

The whole universe is contained within a single human being–you. Everything that you see around, including the things you might not be fond of and even the people you despise or abhor, is present within you and in varying degrees. Therefore, do not look for Sheitan outside of yourself either. The devil is not an extraordinary force that attacks from without. It is an ordinary voice within. If you get to know yourself fully, facing with honesty and hardness both your dark and bright sides, you will arrive at a supreme form of consciousness. When a person know himself or herself, he or she knows God.

The Incestuous Nature of Political Extremism

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I am one of those guys who see both sides of any particular issue and, in fact, see multiple sides of many issues. That stance in life has become problematic if one is not careful as it leaves one wishy-washy, unable to take a stand, and given to be a “commitment-phobic.” And certainly it was no accident that I did not commit to marriage until I was 37!

So, on the current political morass my country is facing I do see the need of a solid Republican Party as well as a solid Democratic Party. And I do see arrogance on both extremes. HOWEVER, what is going on with the Republican extremists, more or less the Tea Party, merits the full brunt of my analytic knife.

Any group who lives in “the bubble” like they do end up feeding on themselves to the point of catastrophe. One classic example of this insularity run amok is an incested family, a family that has become so insular, so barricaded from the outside world, so deprived of external reference, that they do feed on themselves as demonstrated by sexual violence. And in so many of these families the poison does finally erupt into physical violence and murder and mayhem ensues. (An example of this occurred in my state in the 1980’s. You can google Ronald Gene Simmons and Arkansas if you are interested.)

Now if you interpret this to mean that I am accusing the Republicans of incest you are really not a discriminating reader. My point is that incest is an illustration of the poison that the extremists of that party are infected with and that poison has been allowed to filter out into the ranks of the party as a whole. This is best illustrated in how they have ostracized two of their on in the past year for merely demonstrating a willingness to fraternize with President Obama. I’m speaking of the ex-governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, and the current governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie. Christie deigned to accept Obama’s help for his state last fall when it was ravaged by a hurricane, was photographed with Obama, and was recording thanking Obama for his help. As a result, Christie is now persona non grata with the Republicans and last week was, like Rudolph the Red nosed Reindeer, not invited to participate in one of the Party’s “Reindeer games”—the Conservative Political Action Committee. And Crist’s mistake was warmly receiving Obama shortly after his election in 2008 and even being seen embracing the President.

These extremists do not want any outside influence. They know the truth and they insist that others accept that truth and these others will not have their approval unless they accept the party line. They have the obsessive need for purity which I discoursed about earlier in the week. This too is incestuous as the incest dynamic reflects a need for self-sufficiency, an unwillingness to “marry-out”, and an unconscious belief that the family unit can meet its own sexual needs and this in turn is ultimately about meeting one’s own spiritual needs without outside influence. This is evil. And our world has before us a glaring example of where this poison leads—the Taliban!

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