Listen closely, Pandemonium is Optional

Can You Hear Over the Whirl of Marine One?
Listen closely, Pandemonium is Optional

His level of unhinged really has taken on new dimensions, hasn't it? We currently live in a failing reality TV show and desperation for ratings is the tawdry underbelly of the current leader of the "free" world. The Amazon (the real one) burns, Greenland melts (can you buy it on Amazon?), and of course many people are talking about it, like you've never seen before, because fake news. Nevertheless, we must persist.  The way out of this is through this.

Chauncey Gardener meets King Lear? The malignancy and mental illness this insinuates would not be nearly as dangerous if we weren't talking about an imbecilic anarchist who is also the current President of the United States. We'd have many of the same problems but we'd feel a whole lot differently about them. So, are we doomed?

We might be but don't fret. Not that help is on the way. Democrats running for president have a plan for that or know that it's all just an abberation soon to resolve in bi-partisan fealty. If you doubt both, that would make sense to me. We can hope that the candidates' circular firing squad does not resort to live ammunition. That might be asking too much given all the abundance and availability of things we don't need and perhaps too little of what we do. If you think we need a dose of truth, that might be asking too much. We're going to need something far more potent.

You see, things that are true are not necessarily as helpful as you think. I'm not advocating solipsistic narcissism even if that's the current fad. There is an alternative and to put it in the vulgar it goes something like this: try not to lose your shit. At least for the next 515 days, some 17 hours, etc. If things go south before then, well, feel free to lose your shit.

But let's return to the problem in the meantime. Wittgenstein always helps in a pinch. I kid you not. Well, maybe a little.

Take, for example, the following indisputably true sentence: If pandas eat fish, then pandas eat fish. You don't have to know anything about pandas to know that this _sentence_ is true. It looks like fake news of the real variety. That is, If you know anything about real pandas then you've likely already stopped reading.

But logical propositions are true no matter the content. (Think about that for a moment.) And what your experience tells you about pandas tells us nothing about the truth of the proposition, which may be empirically vacuous---as it is in this case. The lesson from your Pedantic Professor is this: we need truth, we gots to have it. But it's more than truth that is at stake. We need sanity in these utterly insane times. Never mistake logic for experience. Things can be true and still meaningless in the world that tests your sanity. The task to sustain sanity never abates.

But just because true sentences can be as ridiculous as current presidents of the United States, doesn't mean that you are entitled to a reality wholly of your own making. That too, technically speaking, is called "losing your shit." Everything is not just _your_ opinion. Don't do that. Don't go there. Reverting to "that's my experience" or "that's just someone's opinion" is giving in to the fake news just as much as believing in fish eating pandas that eat fish.

This means that when it comes to experience make sure you don't rely solely on _your own_. You can be mistaken even if you aren't mad as a hatter or dumb as Trump. A more honest strategy---and forgive me for getting all serious about this at this late stage in the game---is to remind yourself that, yes, we really are in this together. We're going to need each other's sanity to use both logic and experience to keep us from _feeling_ too crazy, too distraught, or too traumatized to act. Think but be wise. Feel but don't give in.

Now you can ask sanely, what happens to America if the market crashes, the Russians decide the Balkan states are theirs, or ISIS manages to do some hurt on the homeland, and we still have The Chosen One as President? Yeah, we're screwed, fersure. I am not the paranoid sort unless there is reason to be and we should resist doomsaying to honor the language even when it fails us logically. Thank you, Wittgenstein.

But we should not forsake pandas, our best assessments, and how we make them _together_. Now is not the time to double face palm unless you are as wise as Jean-Luc Picard and have someone watching while you take that break. We've 515 days of this nightmare left, if we are lucky enough to break the spell. Pay attention. Or enough to get through it.

Like you, I don't underestimate the stupidity of the people who did this to us in the first place, including those who decided not to participate in preventing it. But let us not distract ourselves with the near-past. Any viable future (okay, okay, let's assume) depends on embracing this paradox: we're going to have to stay the course of sanity to change the course we're on.

It does seem like the madness is winning. We can be mad about that. But we can't lose the plot, pandas do not eat fish, and we gotta trust enough in goodness to be good. There is no goodness but what we make. That means the whole mess is up to us. You're worse on your own, you know that. There may be irredeemable and incorrigible stupidity and evil in the world. Personally, I have no doubt about that. But we can be good, do good, and survive this. Whether or not we ever truly flourish as we could, that might have to wait for better days.

Why Honest Journalists Take the Bait, Or What the Actual Fuck?

It's so easy to snooker the "objective" media. It's as if they can't not take the bait. And of all the candidates and voices who understand this, I think Beto really called it out best. I'll get there in a second but let's understand first how the non-Fox world of the True Fake Media plays rope a dope with itself. In the process they fail America miserably.

The news that's fit to print is supposed to be honest and so look to create a non-partisan representation of points of view. They are there to report different opinions. However, the press is also supposed to declare what it understands to be the facts. This creates a self-destructive stupidity that gives Republicans exactly what they want.

Because Republicans are shameless liars frauds and liars, they understand perfectly how to wind this first idea around the second. First, they make their declarations---sometimes willfully ignorant, sometimes dissimulating purposefully, and always with an eye on their audience so they will nod, wink, and grasp their real intention. Enter racist white supremacy politics, including efforts to suppress and gerrymander the vote, intimidate people of color, and pass every kind of law that puts non-white men at some disadvantage.

The establishment racist Republicans don't want the violence to interrupt their policy objectives, which are overtly racist. The list goes on. The evidence that Trump has emboldened, encouraged, and _fed_ the racist delusions of his white nationalist followers is indisputable. Shall we add to that the entire ecosphere of Fox, particularly Carlson and Hannity who have repeatedly asserted that immigrants make the country "dirtier" and express their own anxieties about "multiculturalism"?

The Party of White People is rallied to "conservative" causes that legitimize their bigotries using whatever cover-ups and dog whistles they need. Trump just feeds them the red meat. The press takes the bait because there are so many racists, so many pathological Republicans that they have to "normalize" their views. It's like talking about Mormon theology _as if_ it weren't insane. Have you read the Book of Mormon? Even a little? But because they own the State of Utah and act like Romney, we don't say to them What the Actual Fuck?! Legitimacy is the facade that disallows honest questions.

And then no less than Anderson Cooper will ask with a straight face if the president is a racist and then _follow up_ with "Why do you believe that?"---to satisfy his own (and the network's need) for the objective performance media bias. The right wing has so cowed, so intimidated the mainstream with accusations of being biased that matters of _fact_ must be treated _as opinion_. Cooper knows, he's not stupid. But he gives the "both sides" nod _in spite of the facts_ and just to hear it out. This is a serious mistake.

It is a _fact_ that Trump has demonstrated in his long history of racist behaviors that he has passed the test. It waddles, it quacks, it's got the right feathers and looks like all the rest of them: it's a duck. So asking if the racist is a racist is either a kind of professional self-soothing so as to meet their own emotional standards of professional objectivity or it's just being used by those who know that the reporters and their networks are stupid enough and effectively bullied and brow-beaten to do their bidding.

So on Saturday a reporter asked Beto O'Rourke as he was walking to his car Sunday: "Is there anything in your mind that the president can do now to make this any better?" Really. This was a question. Beto replied, "Members of the press, what the fuck? It's these questions that you know the answers to." Yes, what the actual fuck: can we instead ask questions about how to respond Republican complicity in racism, or just anything a little more honest? Does this reporter believe that after three years and a lifetime of racism that Trump, who owes his entire career to these vile sentiments and uses them everyday to create discord, to fear-monger, and inspire hate, is somehow going to change?

These reporters are smart people, well some of them, and so it's more interesting to ask why they act in these reprehensible ways that pander to the needs of their misinterpreted professional "responsibilities." Such horseshit but in fact it's actually worse than that. You see, most Americans have no attention span, don't read, and have been taught for more than a generation to distrust and hate their government, especially "Washington." No one gets elected as an insider professional, that being a sure way to lose. Notwithstanding, the press by failing to _start_ with the facts does the Average American a very serious disservice.

You see, all Average American will hear is "both sides do it," "it's ALL just partisan the SAME partisan bullshit," and that there are NO facts. They have been taught and deeply encouraged by the Right to deny ALL facts but the propaganda because the Right can count on the press to "report", "ask fair questions" for both "points of view," and NOT go to the facts first. Average American thinks it's a food fight when it's really the press giving the Goebbels-Fox Team the win. The same thing happens with guns. As if the idea that weapons suited for _war_ can be brought OPENLY into Walmart LEGALLY so long as they are not used---and this IS the law, normal then for America. We are okay with that?

One side wants to question that, the other wants to make sure this remains exactly the way it is. There are not two sides. There is a right side and a wrong side. Of course, NOTHING will happen in Congress because one side will make sure nothing will happen. But the press will report that "Congress has done nothing" and Average American hears that it's just partisan bickering. The press participates wholly in the delusion and the Right laughs all the way to the gun show.

Thoughts and Prayers, Or Why Power Defines Ideology and Actions

We know what everyone is going to say before they say it. I make no claim to illumine so much as attempt to further the human pursuit of understanding. "Understanding" is one of the ways we try to make "order" in a world that refuses to give what what we believe we want.

In a world of powers our ability to use power defines human success and failure. Greatness as the question of value---is it worth it? That will have to wait for now. We must come to terms with the instruments of power and that means violence must come first.

We want security, pleasure, and above all meaning because we suspect in a deeper sense that the world could be meaningless when we know there is no way to sustain order.
Order means what we think it means: our needs, desires, and interests are addressed. And since there is no way to maintain all we want we often resort to supernatural claims like God knows or the more nondescript spiritual "mystery" and use whatever we can to console, bypass, or just hold on for one more minute.

Modernity complicates the problem because we can no longer force everyone to agree that our God is the one true God: the ultimate is no longer as coercive or as compelling a source of stability as it once was. We are plural now but no less factionalized about who _should_ be in charge of what we know cannot be managed by mere human efforts.

Religion always asks for the impossible and demands it. Enter the Right. "Spirituality' admits a measure of impossibility and claims its understanding leaves us to ponder further as we sort it out or "wake up" to a "deeper truth." Enter the Left. Both predicate solutions to the irresolvable, which is why both invoke in some way the need for "thoughts and prayers."

We want what life will not offer but as humans will insist upon. Ambiguity and uncertainty is the greater threat to order that both sides abhor for fear that it is the deeper truth. It may be the unholy truth that we having only as much certainty as being human allows. However uncomfortable that makes us feel we must learn to be uncomfortable if we are to come to human terms.

Truth that depends on the provisional and the incomplete and yet nonetheless capable of taking us to the moon and beyond is not what we _really_ want. Giving up the delusion of what is impossible is felt to be defeatist (the Left) or heretical (the Right), depending on how you deal with the facts of human limitation.

The Left will now tepidly suggest reasonable gun measures with some qualification about "supporting" the 2nd Amendment. The Right will, of course, talk about threats to the 2nd Amendment, invoke the thoughts and prayers distraction, and claim anyone deviating from the talking points is unseemly. We can't talk about taking human actions when God is involved and the dead are still being actively mourned. It's all too familiar and insidious. The irony that not talking about the sources and instruments of violence is political is ignored on the Right. God is a reason for whatever they want.

On these same matters I would suggest too that a modern trope works like emblem for Left and Right both. This appears as the "spiritual" vs. "religious" claim for meaning-making. The Left wants to be "spiritual" about the issues, appealing to feelings of commonality and then turn as quickly as possible to some practical, humanist solution. What are we going "to do" comes post haste. The Right finds this unseemly at best but in fact heretical.

So we find the Fox meme that Democrats are "already" politicizing another mass shooting and insure that their do-nothing strategy gains its own momentum again. Their aim is to make sure they control the narrative such that the narrative cannot change: it is what "conservatives" want, they want to impress upon us that "order" comes from appeals to the orderly and thus to the Order Maker. "Religion" depends on claiming moral superiority, be that "freedom," "truth," or "patriotism." It's all about legitimizing the claim to power, that is, maintaining authority.

Thus, we humans are incapable of knowing the right thing and our actions need to defer to the Almighty. The mechanisms of human manipulation and control are never far from their agenda and when you decide God must first and last decide you have weaponized the ultimate in the service of the agenda. The agenda here is to maintain power, use the threat of power, and so invoke authority however possible to create the outcomes of power.

What that power seeks is control and when it spirals into anarchy it will use the claims of authority: the law, the heroic law enforcers, God, freedom conferred by God (in this case particularly the 2nd Amendment), and other claims to God-given, God-sanctioned power. That power is of course used to serve some social and political end because religion is not about individualizing feelings---that is the "spiritual"---it is always about putting them in structures of power and order such that people will do the bidding of the powerful.

The masks of religion have been temporarily torn off or perhaps not so temporarily. But the masks are real. Religion understands structural power and its manipulations and so the Right knows that control can be maintained with appeals to the supernatural and obedience.

When obedience fails then violence can be used to maintain order but violence as a threat and a tool is never far from the objectives of power. Those who disobey will be called "mentally ill" and the problem reduced to "derangement." When violence "breaks out" it disrupts the smooth claims of power: to enrich itself and maintain control.

The violence endemic to the structure must not be investigated because their God with wrath for the disobedient is one of "mercy" for the compliant. The threat of violence, like actual violence, is foundational to the structure of power itself, ultimate power is ascribed to God who is little more than those who wield it. Thus, the Republican politicians have preferred the threat of violence and, of course, don't fancy what happens when their sycophants assume the role of God which they assign to themselves.

At this point their religion is also nationalist, racist, and misogynist, and the goal is to keep power in the hands of white men---where it has "always" been. This is not only historically true but is part of the deeper purpose of religion itself: to _maintain_ order in a world that promises nothing because God's "mystery" includes the fact that all manner of unwanted things happens even to the God-fearing "compliant." Doing God's work means rooting out the cause and the sources of "evil "who are none other than those who threaten their white power. 

The "real" cause of evil, which is disorder not attributable to their "just" God, are those those who would take their power and rearrange the power to their disadvantage. Violence is the common recourse to those who prefer to make money from such threats to power---think McConnell, Trump, the NRA, the grifters, et.al.---and those who imagine themselves the stewards and keepers of order, that is particularly young white men with guns fueled by the threat of the other as the emblem of change, undermining their power, and so order itself.

Interestingly America as an ideal is built on values that treasure evolution and progress---we claim to pursue a "more perfect union."

If we can suspend for just one moment the venal hypocrisy that has always been the nation's shadow and its real sins then we can claim that our desire for order can take up imperfect means too. This is itself a threat to In God We Trust order because it places the burden of truth in reason and humanism.
We will have to allow truth to be on-going, flush with a greater awareness of what threatens us, and a recognition that our human desires must contend with being incomplete. But that will not happen if we fail to understand that power---white male power--will not relinquish its claims to absolute and ultimate control without violence as a threat.

Our ideals of plurality depend not on thoughts and prayers but on the recognition that power must serve conflicting values that may not recognize or reconcile with each other. The stakes are sustainable difference as a model of plurality in a society that makes access to violence as simple as ordering on the internet or shopping at Walmart.

Thomas Paine's Choice

Trump is a racist, a white supremacist, a moral catastrophe. He is unfit to govern and unfit to lead this nation.  If you can deny or excuse this I think there will come another time for you.  Who will you say you were when you supported his vile claims upon America?

Let Thomas Paine make the point for us: "Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated”

The true test of character, of the heart, and moral value is here. And how do you want to be remembered?

IF we survive this---and that means if Trump is soundly defeated, the House remains Democratic, and maybe, just maybe the Senate turns too---then there's going to be a reckoning. It may take time. But William Barr is wrong about his Homeric destiny: his complicity in evil will not die when he does. Songs _will_ be sung. Infamy will follow all of them into death. History will know. Judge not, you opine? That's not what justice demands when we must answer to our humanity.

Who were you, where were you, and what did you do? You will be remembered because there are occasions when the stakes really are that high and there is a right side and a wrong side. It's not an opinion. It's about human decency. Did you "make a mistake" in 2016? There's still time to make amends and not a moment to waste.

I've lived long enough now to see how this goes. In 1965 you were with Dr. King's movement or you were not. In 1974, you were with Nixon or you were not. These were choices that revealed the human core. These were matters that cannot be dismissed as "mistakes that anyone could make." We've arrived there once again.

This is a moment in history now that can't just have confused you. There is no idle response. There is no neutral. You weren't just duped or taken along for the ride. The question is before you: where are you now that it's all plain as day? "These are the times that try men's souls," and Paine's anachronistic language notwithstanding the point remains.

You are with Trump or you are not. If you are with him, history will not be kind to your choices, your judgment, or your character. You will have chosen not only the wrong side of history but will have demonstrated a personal failure of character--- because this is an honest test of right and wrong.

If I am wrong then surely this experiment in democracy will be rightly over. We can leave America to the current brand of sunshine patriots. But if America decides for another, brighter and more honest future then we can lay claim to the word "hope" once more and begin to take stock of all the damage done.

An Accountability for Power Will Be Met With Fierce Resistance

An Accountability for Power Will Be Met With Fierce Resistance

Justice has no arch towards goodness. I steadfastly reject that "hope" as little more than wishful thinking.  It serves only to permit fictions of justice. Justice must be made and so it must first be imagined and considered---fantasies about goodness are nothing better than soporific consolations.  Indulge if you must, at your own peril.

But just can be made to bend if there is enough collective will and time. The Supreme Court be damned, there will be change. Today's ruling on gerrymandering effectively tells politicians that they can choose their own voters and make sure others, even the majority, have their place in the conversation. This is another victory for white supremacy but Republicans have become entirely shameless in that too.

Last night put Julián Castro on stage pursuing the US Presidency. He stands no chance. Not yet. Not this time. We are still in the strangleholds of Reaganism.

But I will say this about the courage and insight of Julian Castro last night. What he proposed was not merely "criminal justice reform" that carries on the usual strategy of merely running scared from Reaganism. That running scared policy reduced Democratic ideas to locking morm people up more humanely, throwing a stick at rehabilitation, better opportunities, and all the rest.

All we have done is traumatize our society and leave an entire segment of the population in abject fear for their lives by virtue of not being favored by the police (because they aren't white.) Castro grasped that perfectly, as did Booker. All I think but especially them.

Instead Castro was suggesting that we look at it from the other direction, turn it completely around and demand better police, better behavior from those who enforce the law, a clearer sense of the culture of law and its enforcement.

But I tell you nothing scares or angers the white status quo more than this inversion of the argument. Around here the meme is all about that blue line in the flags. What the locals, as unsophisticated as they are, understand is that if _they_ are held accountable as the police then their own abuses are in account and their power is challenged.

Trump will run on fear of immigrants but he will also code in a heavy dose of Nixonian law and order. What is changing is that the Democrats are _finally_ turning the tables and offering not a revised, kinder, gentler Reaganism but a new model. That model will be fiercely rejected and despised.

Castro told the truth and when is doing the right thing ever the wrong thing? But I do not think it is yet a winner. There are innumerable examples of the truth that demands this reversal, this turning inside out of the model but fear of otherness, fear of loss of power, these are all far too dominant in the narrative yet.

That Castro speaks with clarity and passion only makes him more dangerous. He can't win this election but I tell you, this issue will be used to try to defeat whoever is the nominee. Even Biden will turn this corner as quickly as he can because the Democratic electorate now stands wholly opposed to more of the Run from Reaganism that has failed everyone, and I mean that, sooner than even he thinks. He is nothing if not wanting to win and he will adjust and learn because they all must.

This is what leaves characters like Delaney and Jim Webb and others with no place to go---they aren't quite as vile as Republicans but can't yet fathom a genuinely different world. No one will leave themselves behind in pursuit of office who understands the invidious Republican agenda.  They will not long survive as a candidate for anything. Republicans aren't yet cowering---as Democrats have since Reagan---but they know the jig is up. They are going to need that gerrymandering more than ever.

As If We Needed More

As If We Needed More
More credible evidence the "leader of the free world" is a sexual predator, misogynist, and rapist.

More example of the bankruptcy of moral character with no further appeal but to profit that allows murder to go unpunished, worse, unacknowledged, denied, made into false equivalence.

More needless deaths of innocents fleeing oppression only to drown because there is no asylum because we have closed the "golden door" for those deemed too tired, too poor, too huddled in masses.

More pictures of caged children, hungry, sleepless, uncared for but by each other behind secret, guarded doors, fences, and waving flags.

Is this who we are? Most decidedly, it is.

Make no mistake those who do not wish this to change because they profit, because they revel in the cruelty, because they have been driven into frenzies of their own insecurity, self-importance, and fear for the loss of privilege, will do everything they can to deny or prevent that change. It matters no if they have been found out or reported. They have instruments of distraction and the weaponry of fear and anger and indifference.

There are no boundaries to the corruptions of power in this President or his sycophants to work their will. It is their work, God's work as they imagine that god. They do not seek nor require our consent. That refuse accountability as those who would hold them accountable wring their hands in fear of? Of what? Of doing the right thing?

Trump treats America the same way he treats women: with contempt, as a cowardly bully and whenever he can as a predator. How can Americans looking for justice ever be heard over the din of his infantile enablers?

None of us are innocents in this indecency or its usurpation. We elected this form of government and consented to put in place a system that treats our humanity with indifference and worse.

Yeats told us what could happen because he saw it plainly around him even then:


Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken solitary
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.


---W.B. Yeats from Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

The Chaos and Compassion

I have been thinking a lot and feeling a lot about the border crisis, about the children in cages, about their conditions, that photo of the father and child drowned.

First a few lines from Wallace Stevens' well-received Sunday Morning,

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

I have been wondering too how it is that Trump's Christians can only defend him. How cruel their remarks. How astonishingly inhumane. And I ask myself how did they get this way. It's almost my job to do that, I study religion for a living---or what passes as a living.

Below is a comment I made to a friend who made a similar observation citing an article in which a Trump Christian describes why she cannot feel compassion and why we must not feel empathy. Really. It is a study in pathology. And still how did this happen to such believers, why does their religion do this to them?

What is that religion now? It is how these people live clinging to sterile dogmas, superstitions, and insipid formulas because they cannot address their own lives with any care or seriousness. They use religion not to query, question, or explore but to assert, to solve, to claim their own superiorities, to tell the rest of us how certain they are. So how we can expect them to care for others, especially children.

Why is it that they fail the simplest tests of humanity? It is not merely because they are inept and cruel and stupid, it is because they hate the vulnerability they see because they refuse to see it in their own lives, in their lies, their own valueless religious nonsense that consoles their empty souls.

We live amidst "a heap of broken images," as Eliot put it so plainly in The Wasteland. We will not banish or exile religion because it's the easy way out, the way lazy minds and frightened hearts take so that they don't need to look at themselves.

I say we must affirm that heap of broken images and find our way into it. We must not stand on it but go into the crevices and spaces where the rocks and stones will hurt us, where we must stumble, and take care even to find our own footing. And then we must look for those broken upon those same images and give them a simple hand.

We may be faltering and stumbling too but their lot is far more precarious, in deeper need, and it'd be a good thing to remind ourselves that our shared humanity is our only true hope. I don't give a damn for god until we can see each other in that form.

Sorry for the sermon here yo.