Posts from — January 2008

“They’re just people, they watch telewision.”
—Chris Matthews, of the Kennedy’s, endorsing Barack Obama

YOU KNOW YOU LIVE IN A GREAT COUNTRY when a hairballing wanna-be-wag with a speech impediment can get a job addressing millions of people through television without having to blow a network executive.  Betchew a dowwar he doesn’t get canned anytime soon either.  That’s powitics.

IN THE FUTURE, presidential candidates should be required to file psycho-environmental impact statements on the potential harm their damaged psyches can inflict upon the rest of us.

In W.J. Stuart’s classic si-fi novel Forbidden Planet (loosely based on Shakepeare’s The Tempest and later a 1956 movie), a rescue mission is sent to find out what happened to the crew of the spaceship Bellopheron, lost 20 years earlier after landing on the planet Altair-4. The rescuers, led by Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen) discover that there are two survivors, Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his sexy young daughter (Anne Francis). Morbius’ warns them to stay off planet, claiming that the rest of his crew had been destroyed by a malevolent, alien force that is still at large.

They land anyway and conflict ensues. Soon, a semi-visible monster starts wrecking things and killing members of Adam’s crew. After one of the crew hooks himself up to the IQ Doubler (a Biblical metaphor for the tree of knowledge, of good and evil), it becomes evident that the Beast is really a psychic projection of Dr. Morbius’ evil id, brought to telekinetic life by the alien gizmo, called “the plastic educator.”

When Morbius realizes that he is the source of the alien beast and its destructive power, in an act of true human reparation he kills himself. Order is restored, the Commander gets the girl, and they leave the planet and (presumably) live happily ever after…

I was reminded of this quaint little morality tale recently as I was reading Justin Frank’s Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President and came across this disturbing line:

“Genuine reparation must involve accepting that responsibility cannot be evaded simply by wishing or joking it away, or by destroying reminders of what one has or hasn’t done, or by numbing one’s awareness with alcohol or prayer. Unburdened by the standard laws of cause or effect, action and consequence, intent and responsibility, Bush seems bent on pursuing his personal psychological agenda…[T]racing the evolution of this mind set over time has offered a coherent and credible theory that goes a long way toward explaining the psychological function it serves him- and toward helping us appreciate the scope of the psychic burden his position requires us all to share.”

The office of the US presidency is the most powerful in the world to effect political and economic change. Occupied by a psychologically damaged individual like George W. Bush, it also becomes the ultimate means for exteriorizing one man’s most destructive impulses. Exhibit One: Iraq and Afghanistan. Exhibit Two: The US economy. Exhibit Three: What’s left of the Constitution and the right to individual privacy.

Bush is like the ape in the zoo that flings his shit at the rest of us as we pass by, daring us to force upon him the accountability that he has spent a lifetime avoiding. In his early years, Daddy Bush had to make a separate career of bailing Junior out of trouble, from the frat house he left in ruins, to serving in Vietnam, to his multiple business failures.

Today that role is performed by a supine Congress unwilling to exercise their constitutional duties of oversight and control over everything from the budget, to declaring war. Whether it was Bush’s violations of FISA, his current demand that his telecom partners in crime receive amnesty for spying on anyone his rotten little heart desires, his legislative signing statements, his ordering the rendition and torture of suspected terrorists— all are actions consistent with an emotionally arrested adolescent who considers himself above the law.

The damage that Bush has done, and continues to do to this planet, is incalculable. But the early indicators surely place him in first place as the 21st century’s greatest evil doer. Unlike Dr. Morbius, Bush believes he’s on a mission from God and thus incapable of admitting failure. With nearly a year left with him in control of the “plastic educator,” I fear the worst is yet to come.

Never hesitate to admit failure. Make no attempt to hide failure under deceptive smiles and beaming optimism. It sounds well always to claim success, but the end results are appalling. Such a technique leads directly to the creation of a world of unreality and to the inevitable crash of ultimate disillusionment. —The Urantia Book

Tammy Johnson of RaceWire writes: Barack Obama “. . . is not a scary black man. He won’t make white people confront racial inequities, deal with issues of privilege or the structural racism that undergirds this country.”

With Hillary’s injection of Dr. Martin Luther King smack dab in the middle of presidential politics, it’s entirely fitting to note that Dr. King was hardly a “scary black man” either. And it’s illuminating to note that Dr. King usually found genuine ways— often through his eloquence— to make not just white people, but all people, “confront racial inequities . . . or the structural racism that under-girds this country.”

It’s not a stretch to believe that Barack Obama can too.

“. . .when white Iowans went into those voting booths they did punch the card for a brother. But was that a calculation that he was a safe bet?”

Of course it was! But in many minds, it was based on a willingness to trust and believe in the power of hope, not just in Obama, but also in our selves.

“In the minds of white voters, is Obama really Black?”

Let’s take it upstairs—
In the mind of God, is Obama really black?

No; he’s not black. He’s not white; he’s not half this and half that.
We can say with spiritual and intellectual confidence that God sees him the same way God sees all his children: as his sons and daughters. And that’s the way anyone who believes in hope should see him as well.

“Will Obama, the beneficiary of the struggle, push the party on key issues of race? Will he do what Shirley Chisholm was unable to do, and force the party’s platform to reflect the needs of all the people?”

Will he “push”? . . will he “force”? I certainly hope not. I “hope” not, precisely because that’s the tried and truly wrong way to bring about the confrontation that will cause a change in heart in those who are capable of changing their hearts; something we should have already learned through “the struggle”; there’s a right way and a wrong way to use the force of change.

“. . .will he play it safe and talk about racial unity with great eloquence, but very little substance? Jackson didn’t go there in his public speculation, but somebody should.”

Very well: Why does a writer consider that talk— words written, or spoken— hold “very little substance”? Was no one moved to action when the truth was spoken to power through the eloquence of Dr. King? Should anyone not recognize that Barack Obama’s eloquence in speaking truth to power has just begun to galvanize a new generation— and perhaps an old one— to action that can change the course of history?

The reason some maxims become clichéd and time worn is because they become the work horses of evolving insight. “It’s always darkest before the dawn” in one such maxim, and Jesse Jackson’s recent recitation of the factors of the “state of emergency in Black America” is yet another incident of the darkest days, now upon us, being exposed to our personal experience; and Barack Obama, unless I miss my guess, could be this nation’s living and breathing herald of that dawn so long awaited, our best “calculation,” our “safest bet” for the solutions of our nation’s multiple states of emergency, born on the wings of new hope and belief in our selves; not just in Barack Obama, or his eloquent plea, to do just that.

The emerging mantra of secular man-in-the-street is that ALL religious views are dangerous, not just the extreme ones.

The supposedly enlightened-by-science secular tools of modern arrogance and stupidity, are a lethal brew every bit as backward as antiquated fundamentalist religion.

The arrogant assumptions of secular science and subsequently the thoughtless secularism of the man in the street pretend to know the origins of the universe, life, and consciousness, when in truth they actually know far less about reality than a garden variety religionist who has actually discovered God— through living faith and personal experience— despite the numerous and often grotesque errors of their chosen theology.

Intelligent men should cease to reason like children and learn to use the consistent logic of adulthood, logic which tolerates the concept of truth alongside the observation of fact. Scientific secularism has gone bankrupt when it persists, in the face of each recurring universe phenomenon, in refunding its current objections by referring what is admittedly higher, back into that which is admittedly lower. Consistency demands the recognition of the activities of a purposive Creator.

Reason alone will never achieve harmony between infinite truth and relative fact, because God is the first truth and the last fact; therefore does all truth take origin in him, while all facts exist relative to him. God is absolute truth. As truth, one may certainly come to personally know God, but to understand, or begin to explain God, one must explore the fact of the universe of universes. The vast gulf between our personal experience of the truth of God, and our ignorance as to the fact of God can be bridged only by living faith.