Category Archives: Trumpism

Ursula La Guin, the Imagination, and Awareness

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Science fiction is a literary genre that I’ve not spent much time with.  I really liked Robert Heinlin’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” decades ago and recently I’ve come to value Ursula Le Guin.  Here is a quote from one of her books that I must obtain, “The Dispossessed,” which emphasized the danger of taking commonplace distinctions too seriously, “We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else,” she declared.

Le Guin believed we came into our world empty handed, without the rigid grip on things that the ego would come to demand, and we would eventually leave the same way; she saw the value of discovering this “empty-handedness” during our lifetime, a discovery which her teachings recognized was death in a very real sense.  This is the death of the ego, of attachment to the “clinging to maya” in the Buddhistic sense, or to “things”, even abstractions like words. John Masefield noted in one of his Sonnets, the blindness of humans and their tendency to behave like a “lame donkey,” perfunctorily covering their eyes by,  “daub(ing) ourselves that we may never see, like the lame donkey lured by the moving hay, we chase the shade but let the real be.”  In my culture our “daub” often consists of words, giving us an “ear to hear, but hear not; eyes to see, but see not.”

With Le Guin’s statement we have “no nations, no, no premiers…no landlords, no wages, no charity…” she points out that these distinctions we take so real in our daily life are not as real as we think though we live in a world, and must live in a world where they are taken for real; and failure to do so would be catastrophic.  Leguin recognized the limitations of boundaries, even those of linguistics, and explored the mysterious realm that she discovered beyond them.  From early in her life she had an active imagination and gained confidence in her ability to frolic there and spin remarkable yarns which revealed so much about the unimaginative world that most of us called “reality.”

Here is the context of the quote from “The Dispossessed”:
We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.―Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

We Have A “Splinter in Our Brain” but Won’t Admit it.

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As individuals, things occasionally go awry. Our life tosses us a lemon and the making of lemonade out of it does not seem possible. We encounter loss, or a career setback, marital conflict, “acting out” children, or an illness and it seems like impending doom is near. Something akin to this was underway with Emily Dickinson when she coined that expression, “a splinter in our brain” which I use so often. In my clinical background I worked with clients who could be described as having one of those “splinters” wreaking havoc, or at least some distress in their life. They, or their parents, or the school, or the legal system noted something awry and referred them to me for counseling. But what would often stand in the way of any resolution was an unwillingness to acknowledge, “Houston, we have a problem here.” For, blaming someone else for our woes is a common human response; in some sense our culture teaches our children to resort to this avoidance mechanism.

“Houston,” my country “has a problem.” I could then immediately blame Trump and his disciples but I recognize he is but a symptom. Here I will not focus on the Republican Party, for which he is the mouthpiece of all they refuse to acknowledge; but, this can also be said about our entire country. Our country has allowed a “cancer to grow in the White House” just as in the Nixon era but we are stymied from a simple extirpation of the cancer. In the Nixon Watergate drama, it was Nixon’s own Republican Party who had the courage and patriotism to go to Nixon and tell him, “You gotta go.” There is no one in the GOP that has the courage to confront this tyrant though, and the GOP acts as a deterrent for any Democratic intervention. Consequently Trump is doing as his niece recently said he would do after losing the election, spending his time “breaking things.” That is a common response for any two-year old who is being denied any of his baubles, especially the comfort of thinking, “the world is my oyster.”

This tragedy has helped me to realize that my country’s narcissism and arrogance is being put on display for the entire world. This is not to trash my beloved country, but simply to recognize the very human-ness of our history and the present-moment we are living out. We humans have a tendency to think “it is all about me” even if this arrogance might be camouflaged in religious piety, aka “hypocrisy.” It is very challenging to allow this truth to sink into one’s heart, especially if piety has been his modus operandi most of his life–“c’est moi,” I confess! I am currently reading Barak Obama’s marvelous new book, “The Promised Land” and he is very open in sharing about the dark side of his ascendency to the world stage. This is because he has the humility to permit “internal dialogue” with himself, that quality which Hannah Arendt in “Life of the Mind” explains was egregiously absent in people like Adolph Eichmann. This “internal dialogue” with oneself makes it possible to engage in dialogue with other people, even those with a different perspective on life, and seek common ground. A brickbat is thereby thrown at the tyranny of certainty. And those of us who have to confront one of those “splinters” in our brain will often live through the experience of “brickbatting.”

W. R. Rodgers and Rumi On Language

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Language is my forte.  To a fault, in some sense, “too much of a good thing” at times.  But I’ve learned that words can be hollow, merely formulaic to manipulate people into mirroring my performance-art of an inauthentic life.  The W. R. Rodgers poem excerpt I shared yesterday so elegantly described how language can decay and even die, becoming what is called a “dead language.”  And Rodgers singled out politicians in the cited poem, accusing them of falsifying language to accomplish selfish ends: 

Words are “now they are the life-like skins and screens 

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae, 

To terrify or tame, cynical shows 

Meant only to deter or draw men on, 

The tricks and tags of every demagogue, 

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys, 

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells 

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep 

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards.” 

(PLEASE NOTE, AM HAVING TROUBLE WITH EDITOR; COULD NOT ITALICIZE ABOVE QUOTE)

This morning I discovered relevant wisdom from the 13th century Persian mystic Rumi who emphasized the importance of living a dual life, abiding in and respecting the “false” world that Rodgers had in mind and another where authentic moments are available here and there.  He described this “in-between” residence as a “small market between towns.”  He presents a solitude that one will find there, which the mystics and many artists are very familiar 

A small market between towns 

There’s a town where the soul is fed, where love hears truth and thrives, and another town that produces lies that degrade and starve love. Your voice is a small market set up between the two towns. Goods arrive from both directions, flimsy, fake items and honestly made, wholehearted tools and wares. Some travelers immediately know which is which. Some voices open a shop and spend sixty years cheating customers, gossiping when they leave, and flattering women to get their attention. Others weary of the marketplace altogether and rarely go there. 

Rumi 
Version by Coleman Barks, in “The Soul of Rumi” 
HarperCollins, 2001 

Another Take on, “That Giant Sucking Sound”

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“That giant sucking sound” is often less intense than it is with Trumpism. That “sound” is just the noise that happens when an ego, individually or collectively, is ripe for a needed change. God is up to his mischief, trying to nudge us into changing our perspective about the whole of life, including ourselves. Sometimes Her nudging is not adequate and She will hit us up the side of the head with a bat such as ..this twin-headed pandemic, Trumpism and Covid-19.

As explained yesterday, that “sucking sound” is merely the void/Void trying to get us to recognize and respect that dimension of life which is beyond the pale of reason. That heart of us lies beyond the representational world that we take for granted, offering us darkness and light simultaneously. This was what Goethe recognized when he told us, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.” To word this less philosophically, this Divine intervention seeks to make us aware of the unconscious and give us some appreciation for its role in life. ‘Tis so much easier to deny this, cling to our illusions, and dismiss any challenge with a stock response such as, “He was just kidding” or “he was just joking,” or even a non sequitur like, “It was Obama’s fault!” Seriously, our unconscious has to “nudge” us lest She is forced to, “get Medieval on our ass.” For in that depth of our Being lies a potential which cannot emerge without “birth pangs.”

I’m Hearing, “That Giant Sucking Sound” This Morning!

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Step outside this morning and, if you listen carefully, you will hear that “giant sucking sound” of Trumpism and its abysmal ugliness returning to the void from which it emerged.  That experience, which inspired Edvard Munch to paint “The Scream” is a human tragedy. Donnie is just a little boy like I am, fumbling about on the “granite skirt” (W. H. Auden) of this lovely little speck of cosmic dust.  But, in his early childhood his soul suffered irreparable damage, leaving him without the ability to “play well with others” on the beautiful playground that we call home. He can’t handle the anguish of “I, too, will pass” as in the famous advice of an African-American radical from the 1960’s, “This too shall pass.” (I can’t remember his name.”)  I take hope in the astute wisdom of Voltaire, as the day breaks here in Taos, New Mexico, “Gentlemen, tend your own garden; or as” Eckhart Tolle put it more recently, “Be Here Now.”

Stymied by Fear in an Arkansas Chicken Pen…by a Duck!!!

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When I was a little tyke, living in the sticks of Arkansas, I recall an innocent little moment when fear etched itself deeply into my heart so that I clearly recall the event six decades later.  I was in the chicken pen and apparently alone when suddenly I found one of my fingers inside the open mouth of a furiously squawking duck.  I guess object constancy had not sunk in with me at that early age…I must have been about two-and-a-half years old…for terror overwhelmed me as if this “crisis” was about to be the end of me.  And I don’t know how this “existential” crisis was resolved, but I faintly remember “momma” calling to me from the front porch.  At that point in development, “momma” was the solution of all woes!

This tempest in the young teapot that I was probably lasted all of a second and a half but I clearly recall it as if it happened yesterday.  Experiences at that stage of development when we are only beginning to “come on line” and find the comfort of an ego to protect us from moments like those that are very intense.  For “limits” are a very fleeting phenomenon then; had this “tragedy” presented itself to me in another year or so, I probably would have been grounded enough in reality to realize, “Hey, take your finger out of the damn duck’s mouth!”  But in that second I was immobilized, stymied by fear, without the comfort of what I would later learn to describe as “reality.”

And fear will do that to one.  At any age!  Fear is part of life but we have been given the capability of addressing our fears, even the fear of fear, but only if we have the maturity and humility to acknowledge, “I’m afraid.”  Failure to acknowledge this dimension of our human-ness will leave us crippled with maladaptive emotional and behavioral strategies than can be more deadly than the thing of which we are secretly fearful.

And this brings me to my favorite “whipping boy,” Trumpism and its raucous, shrieking mouth piece in the body of one Donald J. Trump.  The Republican Party is stymied by fear that it will not acknowledge, they have their “finger stuck in the mouth of a duck” and are so overwhelmed with the threat of this darkness that they can’t employ “the purge” that our Constitution offers.  They have dug themselves in over their heads, though they had and still have the levers of governmental process to set limits with Trump; though now it appears too late for them.  They are now trapped by their own inertia, an inertia that all of us has an element of, but one they have allowed to metastasize.   They are now enthralled with Trump and have placed their emotional, spiritual, economic, and political welfare is in his hands.

So often in my “day-to-day” Jesus comes to my mind now that His wisdom is longer mere dogma; and on this occasion it is, “Perfect love casteth out fear.”  I certainly do not, however, have “perfect love” as fear is a daily visitor to this dog-and-pony show that cavorts about in my skull.  But I do have confidence that this “perfect love” is present somewhere in my heart, and always has been…even back in that pen …and this allows me to face fears that I’ve avoided all of my life.  And this “perfect love” abides in all of our hearts, even in that of the Trumpster, though I don’t have any hope that he can find the humility to seek its comfort.  Seeking this Comfort would be tantamount to admitting a need, admitting that he is insufficient in the sense that all of us are, and that he needs forgiveness; he could then find acceptance of his internal haunts and fears and no longer have to lash out at the world.  And, btw, “forgiveness” is today an easy and almost meaningless word.  But I don’t see it as a judicial decree from some “Pillsbury doughboy in the sky” but a gift that is, yes, from “out there” in some sense, but simultaneously woven into the very fabric of our being.  It is something we have to evoke from the depths of our being, an evocation which can only occur with that Pauline “fear and trembling” that comes as we “work out our own salvation.”

Well, I’ve come along way here in this narrative, all the way from an Arkansas chicken pen in the mid-1950’s to the “insane” notion of “perfect love” here as the year 2020 beckons. And it is “insane” in the sense that there is no place for it in the “sane” world that we have allowed to descend into madness, protected from this realization by our preference for an illusory reality.   But this salvific dimension of human experience has been with us from our beginning, and even before, if one will here indulge me here, briefly, with the notion of a pre-existent deity!  And this same maddening fate would devour us all individually, and collectively, if we ever should ever lose the vision and experience of hope.

A CAVEAT HERE ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FEAR AND ANXIETY— PERHAPS THE FEAR I’VE ADDRESSED ABOVE IS ON A DEEPER LEVEL ANXIETY.  IN FACT, THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH FROM Samantha Harvey, in The Guardian a couple of days ago, MAKES ME FEEL THE NEED TO ADDRESS THE ISSUE OF “ANXIETY” RATHER THAN “FEAR.”  PERHAPS ANOTHER TIME!

The flight from Bristol airport passes over in a distant smear of sound. I switch on the light, get my laptop and Google I AM AWAKE. An article explains how fear and anxiety, often conflated, belong to different parts of the amygdala – fear arises in its central nucleus, which is responsible for sending messages to the body to prepare a short-term response – run, freeze, fight – whereas anxiety arises in the area responsible for emotions, a part which affects longer-term behavioural change. Fear is a response to a threat, anxiety a response to a perceived threat – the difference between preparing to escape a saber-toothed tiger that is here and now in front of you (because it’s always saber-toothed tigers in the examples) and preparing to escape the idea of a saber-toothed tiger in case one appears around the next bend. While fear will quickly resolve – you will run away, fight it or be eaten – anxiety has no such resolution. You will need to stand guard in case. Standing guard will make the perceived threat seem more real, which necessitates a more vigilant standing guard. Fear ends when the threat is gone, while anxiety, operating in a hall of mirrors, self-perpetuates.

 

(Link to Samantha Harvey Guardian article— https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/28/its-as-if-im-falling-from-a-50-storey-building-a-novelists-year-without-sleep

Does “It Take A Village?” Yes, It Does!

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“Families are to be from.”  This was a wry quip from a high school student of mine in the early 80’s when a sociology class discussion about families was wrapping up.  This young lady was grasping the complexity of family relationships even at her young age, recognizing poignantly that one needs to extricate oneself at some point in life from the familial orbit.  This is usually done with the normal developmental process as young people reach maturity, seek a mate, marry, have children, and begin a family of their own.  But sometimes even then the emotional ties with the family of origin will be inordinate and, one or both of the marital partners will not have “cut the cord” and complications will develop.

The family is a primary dimension of social life.  Family structure is the template in which a child finds his place and learns how to “find his place” in the family at large, i.e. the community, and eventually even in the world “family.”  The family is where connection is established, and explored, and the skills…or lack thereof…will be offered in the social body. The anchor of the family is the mother and father and if their relationship is not stable, or insincere, then the children will not have a stable basis upon which to find their roots in the family dynamic.  A college psychology professor of mine, decades ago, noted that for a child it is more important for a child to know that his parents love each other than that the parents love him.  For the connection between “mommy and daddy” provide an anchor for an inchoate identity and from that anchor will arise a knowledge of parental love that is not prosaic or formulaic.  The script always includes “mommy and daddy love me” but the nuances of the family dynamic, based on the connection between “mommy and daddy” often convey otherwise.

But let me close this grim assessment with a positive note.  The human soul is indomitable.  Most families provide what British psychiatrist Donald W. Winnicott described as “good enough ‘parenting’” (his term was “good enough ‘mothering’”).  If parenting were perfect, then children would get a naive impression life is about and would be ill-equipped to face that “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” And a facetious note is here in order.  My children are perfect!  That is because my “children” are only whims and fancies of what might have been, whims and fancies that I pine for, but have never experienced.  That is because I never had the courage to take that important plunge into the “dog-and-pony show” of this human endeavor and father children, trusting that Life is good and that all would be well.  But I firmly believe that “there is a destiny that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them as we may” and that all is well in the end.  Yes, even with this current political maelstrom that is gnawing at the soul of my country.

 

Michel Foucault and “Difference” in Contemporary America

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Difference matters to me.  I was raised in a conservative, American South culture with religion being the paramount dimension in my particular subculture.  But this upbringing in a rigid, highly structured atmosphere of “us vs. them” troubled me and in my early adulthood I began to acquire a more inclusive, less linear-thinking oriented approach to life.  Now, in the latter stages of my life, the issue of sameness vs. difference is a paramount concern of mine, especially given the political climate in my country and in the world.

Today I stumbled across a book in my library, “The Order of Things” by Michel Foucoult, heavily marked up from my “youthful” enthusiasm of decades past.  In the quote which I will share, Foucoult explores the relationship between “sympathy” (i.e. sameness”) vs. “antinomy” (difference) and the dialogic imperative of an interaction between these two complementary dimensions of the human soul.

Sympathy is an instance of the same so strong and so insistent that it will not rest content to be merely one of the forms of likeness; it has the dangerous power of assimilating, of rendering things identical to one another, of mingling them, of causing their individuality to disappear—and thus rendering them foreign to what they were before.  Sympathy transforms.  It alters, but in the direction of identity, so that if its power were not counter-balanced it would reduce the world to a point, to a homogeneous mass, to the featureless form of the same:  all its parts would hold together and communicate with one another without a break, with no distance between them, like those metal chains held suspended by sympathy to the attraction of a single magnet.

But then Foucault presents “antipathy” as the opposite life-force, equally necessary, which seeks to counter the otherwise stultifying power of the demand for sameness.  What he calls “antipathy” is merely a drive for difference, an innate desire to not be swallowed by the whole of sameness, a “whole” which would be merely a “black hole” without consideration of this “antipathy” or difference.  Foucault declares:

Sympathy is compensated by its twin, antipathy.  Antipathy maintains the isolation of things (i.e. the difference, the desire and demand for independence) and prevents their assimilation; it encloses every species within its impenetrable difference and its propensity to continue to being what it is.

This notion of continuing “to being what it is” is an essential dimension of identity, an ability to “hang onto” a core of what/who one is even when beset by the challenges of difference.  With maturity, i.e. “ego integrity,” one can hang onto a core of who one is even as he negotiates with difference, (i.e. “antipathy”) and knowing that he can survive…and even thrive…with the benefit of “difference” (i.e. something new) into its mindset.

Poet Stanley Kunitz offered wisdom re this inner-core, this essence of who we are:

The Layers
BY STANLEY KUNITZ
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.

 

Trump as an Instrument of the Good???

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The evangelical Christian support of Trump has been a sore point for me, given my background in fundamentalist Christianity and a continued emphasis in personal faith.  The evangelical trope, “The Lord has raised him up” to restore our country to greatness, (i.e. “Make America Great Again,”) has always been a really irksome bit of their rhetoric for me.  But, I now can certainly accept the notion of “the Lord’s” hand in “raising him up” as he has brought to the surface the full extent of our collective and personal shadow.  Here is a bit of wisdom from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) relevant to our collective unconsciousness’s intent in bringing this darkness to the light:

“We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do . For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with the columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent; his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil. For without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced. Nay, an honest man can do no good upon those that are wicked, to reclaim them, without the help of the knowledge of evil.”—Francis Bacon

This “knowledge of evil” is something we prefer to see in others, having a very human aversion to recognize that it lurks beneath the surface of us all.  This is particularly difficult for persons of faith to accept, especially the Christian faith, as being a “person of faith” often convinces one that he has “seen the light” perfectly and has clear judgment.  Trump has clearly shown all of us, even the whole world, just how impaired our judgment is; yes, even in the area of religion. W. H. Auden, in his narrative poem, “New Years Letter,” presents the, “Prince of Lies” as being a god-send as in spite of its evil intent, and often being necessary to, “push us into grace.” Trump is one of these opportunities for us if we could ever manage to pause that linear-thinking monstrosity of our collective Western thought and let it dawn upon us, in the words of Pogo, “Uh oh, we have met the enemy and he is us!” We could then be “pushed into Grace,” kicking and screaming every inch of the way.

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Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/

There’s Something to Say for Tedium!

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DOLOR by Theodore Roethke

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces. 

I’ve always liked this poem though it is so heavy-handed and grim, using mundane phenomena of day-to-day life to paint a picture of the relentless tedium of life.  Usually we don’t notice this tedium for we are acclimated to it and take it to be reality…and it is good that we do; for this “tedium” makes consensually-validated reality possible and we can trudge through the necessary pretenses of daily living.  But then Donald J. Trump stumbles onto center stage and we see just how “unnecessary” this sheep-like behavior is!  For example, why must we “make nice” every day, obeying rules of decorum and civility when we could easily just lay aside our inhibitions and say or do what we really are thinking?  Just one example comes to mind, last fall on the debate stage, when all but one of the presidential candidates were “making nice” with one another only to discover one of their members was playing by different rules.  Furthermore, Trump’s willingness to “tell it like it is” resonated with many voters who quickly fell in line with him, finding his disinhibition the perfect expression of their pent-up frustration which Roethke beautifully portrayed in his poem.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Thingsfall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.  (The Second Coming, by W. B. Yeats)