Speaking Truth to Power

One of the surprising things about being "old, alone, and at the edge of death" is a new redeeming perspective on telling truth to power.

The powerful do not like having truth spoken to them, as anyone who has ever tried it knows only too well. Solzhenitsyn cites an old Russian proverb at the end of his Nobel Speech which goes: one word of truth can change the world. Tolstoy says similar things in many places, in one of which he says that the rulers of the world know this very well, so they zealously guard against its emergence.

They say things to you like “You'll never work in this town again,” in its many variants but probably they just do their destruction on you long before you know a thing about it. A favorite twist on it is to threaten your family.

Some contemporary truth speakers who come to mind are Snowden, Greenwald, Assange, Manning and Ellsberg.

I just loved McGovern confronting Donald Rumsfeld at a lecture that Rumsfeld had just given in Atlanta. McGovern took up Rumsfeld on his lie that he knew where Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were – north, east, south and west of Tikrit and Baghdad. The audience started getting physical toward McGovern for being such a rogue, so impolite, as to confront Rumsfeld on an obvious lie. You know just from the way Rumsfeld cited each of the four directions, that he was pulling it out of his butt. They started going for him physically and he said “Hey, this is America!” It was a brilliant thing to say to such people, and it worked.

That little bit of truth speaking may have saved far more lives and had a bigger effect on the world that was first apparent. The reaction of the crowd was just everything I despise. A courageous, truthful man speaks the truth and thereby does untold good, and “Real Americans,” patriots, wannabes and hangers-on-to-the-system and apparatchiks and the arrogant try to stop, even to murder him with their mindlessness. If you try some truth-speaking you will likely get death threats, and when you go to the police for protection on these occasions you find out very quickly who side they are on. The police told me on one such occasion, “Well, if I were you, I would get out of town for at least three days.”

There were many times over the course of my life when I spoke truth and received that response. A big one was my refusal to participate in the Viet-Nam war. Another instance, perhaps even more dramatic in its clarity for me, was when I addressed the faculty of the community college where I had taught for about ten years. The community colleges where visionary, progressive, hopeful places when they first started, but as usually happens with such vision and hope, they became sclerotic, mind-numbing inferior copies of the same old repression that they were designed to overcome or at least ameliorate. A great vision soon becomes co-opted into its exact opposite: what was once a great movement accrues people who are really after money and respectability or ancient ego or hidden malice and they destroy it.

So I spoke to the faculty of this college about it, citing the implications of Plutarch's description of the mind as a fire to be kindled rather than a receptacle to be filled. I was, of course, vilified and voted down for telling the truth. I resigned the job, relatively well-paying and having tenure, at the end of that semester. There were only one or two faculty out of a hundred that supported me, and a third person said,”you are right, but I have a family to support.” She herself had tenure but she was still full of such fear and already so corrupted as not to come out openly in support of me. The anger at me over the meeting was so intense, and faces so red, that I felt things could have gotten physical, although they did not.

So now, in my old age at the end of my life, and having paid the price for truth-speaking, I have come to the realization of redemption. It's easier than ever for me and other old people to speak the truth – you're going to die any day now anyway, so it doesn't really matter even if they come shoot you in the heart, destroy your ability ever to get job again, or lock you in solitary for the rest of your life. That is actually true for anyone, taking anything like a large perspective. Life passes so very quickly.

I can now see with thanks and delight how good it was for me to have stuck with it despite the price, and I see, without any gloating or vindictiveness, what happens to those who do not stick by it. They become so debased and corrupted that they are incapable of redeeming themselves. It's much too long a task - I would say impossible - if they have a massive load of lies they have lived on and under.

There have been late-in-life “conversions,” at the death bed, and all that. But William James would say that such conversions are not immediate acts, but have been in preparation for a long time previously, on the subconscious level particularly.

Every word I have written here is the truth, and I know that there are people out there in the USA who would gladly kill me for writing it, but it doesn't bother me now, yes because I've had ”a glimpse of the promised land,” but also death will definitely happen any day now.

Let's Be Logical Now. Rational.

One of the best descriptions that I have read of the limitations of the “Let's be logical, now,” mindset just seemed to jump off the page at me from a paragraph in Swedenborg (Coelestia Arcana, vol. 2) last night. The context of this piece is his explication of Sara laughing upon being told that she is going to have a child, Isaac (“laughter”), in her nineties. Her husband is 100. “Shall I truly bear, and I am become old?” She laughs. I guess it didn't seem very logical to her.

Swedenborg has a lot to say about this Sara-to-Sarah story but here is the part ( §2209) that was so striking to me last night:

As regards the rational in general, when it thinks about divine things, especially from its own truth, it cannot possibly believe that there are such things; both because it does not apprehend them, and because there adheres to it the appearances born from the fallacies of the senses by which and from which it thinks; as is evident from the examples adduced above; to which the following may be added by way of illustration. If the rational be consulted, can it believe that the Word has an internal sense, and this is so remote from the literal sense as has been shown? And that the Word is that which conjoins heaven and earth, that is, the Lord's kingdom in the heavens with the Lord's kingdom on earth? Can the rational believe that souls after death speak with each other most distinctly, without the speech of words, and yet so fully as to express more in a minute than a man does by his speech in an hour? And that the angels do the same, but in a speech still more perfect, and one that is not perceivable by spirits? Also, that on coming into the other life all souls know how to speak in this way, although they receive no instruction in so speaking? Can the rational believe that in one affection of man, nay, in one sigh, there are such wonderful things as can never be transcribed, and yet are perceived by angels? And that every affection of man, nay, every idea of his thought, is an image of him, being such as to contain in a wonderful manner all the things of his life? Not to mention thousands upon thousands of such things. The rational, which is wise from sensuous things, and is imbued with their fallacies, when thinking of such things, does not believe that they can be so, because it is unable to form any idea of itself except from such things as it perceives by some sense...

This is all definitely “nonsense,” non-sense, the exact word used, to logical positivism, linguistic analysis, operationalism, etc.

The increase in love and humility that can come with age, though - the burning away of ego-centrism - seems to make it much easier to understand what Swedenborg is saying here. No joke!

Recovery of the Castle

A 15-year-old boy, whom I know very well, was a student at Concord-Carlisle High School in Concord, Massachusetts, at the time. It was the day before the annual Thanksgiving Day football game between Concord-Carlisle and Lexington High School and there was a “rally” occurring in the school auditorium. Concord and Lexington are old, historic, educated, expensive suburbs of Boston that are considered to have superior schools.

This ceremony consisted of the members of the football team being introduced, one by one, as each ran up on onto the stage, to great applause, punching on their way a hanged effigy of a Lexington High School football player having ketchup on its jersey to simulate blood.

My hero, the 15-year-old boy, was disgusted so he left the auditorium and went downstairs to the metal-working shop. The Vice-Principal soon appeared and asked my hero what he was doing. My hero replied to him that he thought the rally was really stupid and so he had come down to the shop to work. The Vice-Principal then said, “Do you mean to tell me that everyone else in the school is stupid and you are the only smart one?” He then sent my hero home from school.

Now, I have related this true story since it happened many years ago to a number of people whom I judged to have the courage and honesty to face it, to understand it. Old Frances Yates just laughed and giggled when I told her. My most recent hearer was a nurse who replied “I would have told the Vice-Principal, 'Yes, they are all stupid and you are the worst of them.'”

This football rally incident in these two classy USA towns strikes

me as almost worthy of fairy tale status, because it does all work out correctly in the end. The true-at-heart eventually strikes the fiery dragon in just the right place, deflates the bloated pest, recovers the dragon's ill-gotten gold and historic hoard, marries the princess, and they become King and Queen, the laughing green leaves come back out on the trees, the castle reanimates, and they live happily ever after.

Hospital Observation

There is a massive modern hospital just across the street from where I live in Dayton, Ohio. I had occasion last week to be in there for fairly serious surgery, and what struck me most about the experience was the contrast between the high-quality, experienced, older caregivers – mostly women – and the younger, arrogant, insolent, staff who lacked even the remotest sense of compassion or humanity.

I've reflected often since then as to why the contrast was so striking to me, and the issue that seems most important to me is whether one sees the human being as a collection of particles, atoms, molecules, electro-chemical entities or whether one sees the human being's essence as a love, a soul, or spiritual entity.

I hold the latter view, and the way I sometimes express it is that we are spirits having a physical experience in this world, rather than physical objects without soul or spirit. I think immediately as I write this of Wordsworth's “Ode: On The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” particularly of it's ending lines which go:

   Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

William Wordsworth

   Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
   To me the meanest flower that blows can give
   Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.



That is actually a hard-earned position, given the nearly universal view around here that electro-chemical particles are all there is, that money is the measure of value, that technological wizardry represents progress, that humans are essentially computers, and forty years of Ayn Randian selfishness, greed and exploitation have been good.

The worst offenders seemed to me to be the arrogant, contemptuous, male, rich weasels. And it seemed nothing short of miraculous that the mature, decent, capable and kind women were even able to survive in such an environment.

Grief Books

The first Kushner Book,When Bad Things Happen to Good People, has been one of the most popular books to give someone who is grieving since it first came out in 1981. Another has been the C. S. Lewis book, “A Grief Observed.” I suppose everyone has his or her own special book for solace during the dark night of the soul, and I am always interested in such books.

I remember turning to the films of Ingmar Bergman during a particularly devastating period several years ago and finding solace in the truthfulness of them. I ordered and watched every single one of Bergman's films at that time. There is another Swedish film titled Elvira Madigan that I have seen about twenty-times that has given me untold solace because of its truthfulness. There is something very comforting about seeing the truth in a difficult, complex situation, the truth which is being avoided and denied by almost everyone around you.

A person I respect recently recommended that first Kushner book to me in support of a book I am currently writing, so I re-read it for the first time in thirty-five years. It never really rang my bell and I have wondered what I missed in that first reading so many years ago. It is always intriguing to me when millions of people see something valuable in a book or film or game or country or whatever, and I just don’t see much of anything in it.

Kushner does make some cogent comments on the Old Testament book of JOB, particularly on the three friends who seem to mean well but who actually do Job more harm than good. His wife would have him just curse God and die. That’s just about where Kushner leaves me after my recent reading of his book.

Here are two sentences that just jumped out of Kushner’s book at me this time, waving red warning flags:

p. 28: “Sometimes, because our souls yearn for justice, because we so desperately want to believe that God will be fair to us, we fasten our hopes on the idea that life in this world is not the only reality. Somewhere beyond this life is another world ‘where the last shall be first’ and those whose lives were cut short on earth will be reunited with those they loved, and will spend eternity with them.”

“Neither I nor any other living person can know anything about the reality of that hope.” (My emphasis)

p. 29: “…since we cannot know for sure, we would be well-advised to take this world as seriously as we can, in case it turns out to be the only one we will ever have, and to look for meaning and justice here.”

Oh, wheee! There is a lot more of this kind of thing in the book which would not have been so offensive to me when I was fourteen years old but which now seems not only demeaning and patronizing and plain old dishonest, but horrifies because it comes from an honored, respected Rabbi who has sold it in great numbers to people who are in their weakest moments, to people who need truth, not disparagement, nor deception.

Whoever Owns a Yacht

A little two-year-old boy was crying this morning in a waiting room where I also happened to be. His father, who was “taking care of him” while his mother was in seeing the doctor, kept yelling at the child to “Stop crying!” The child's only word through his tears was an occasional “Mommy.” This went on for a half-hour, until the father took the child outside into the rain, muttering threats.

The father was hostile from the moment this little family came in the waiting room. Both parents were under twenty-five years of age. The mother was pregnant. The little boy was surprizingly sociable with two little girls who happened to be there waiting.

I found the scene just unbearable. Excruciating. There are several such incidents that have been burned into my memory over the course of my lifetime, particularly from the years when I lived in the UK. The UK scenes were so frequent that I sometimes wondered if there might not be something in the British culture that is particularly conducive to cruelty to children. It seemed to be some kind of joke there, to say with a smile, that Brits valued their cats more than their children, Ha. Ha. Ha. “We had a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals before we had a society for the prevention of cruelty to children.” More knowing smiles. But I have seen enough of it here in the USA and even in Canada. And I realize that I have only had the slightest glimpse. I have no knowledge of the statistics in “anglo” countries for cruelty to children, nor in non-anglo countries either, although I have no doubt that the statistics everywhere minimize its extent. The effects on children of the USA's “wars of choice” are particularly annihilating.

It's impossible to grasp the sorrow of children I've seen since I was born in 1941, but it has been enough to cause this thought often to go through my mind during that time: “Whoever owns a yacht or similar luxury in a society in which there is even one child suffering from lack of dental care, is wrong.”

Anne Sofie von Otter and the Erlkönig

The Erlkönig piece by Goethe, Schubert, Berlioz, and others, captures how a father doesn't want to see what his son sees. This point should be taken much more seriously than it is normally taken.

An excellent parallel translation into English can be found at this link, but the German, as in Anne Sofie von Otter's rendition, below, is incomparable. My reaction on watching this video clip was jumping joy that humans are capable of such things – singer, song, orchestra, and filming - despite the failure it describes. It is especially moving, given Anne Sofie von Otter's special consciousness of the German World War II experience.

Children do see how upside down the world is. They take it all in on some level. I see that in old lynching photos, in which  a crowd has killed a black person and you can see among the crowd the occasional face of a child, the face of a young white girl, who knows that true evil has been committed, that this is wrong. Such children definitely have my prayers go with them forever and ever.

Such a child has seen a lot by the time she is twenty. She can see it just in the way sensitive children are treated at school. I could see it as a child even in the way people drove their cars out of the church parking lot on Sunday mornings after having listened to all those fine Christian teachings about love. Or, take high school athletics heroes, and adults making a big deal over such heroes, throwing a ball through a hoop, when you know very well how admirable they are not: applause, names in the newspaper, jackets and letters, banquets, cheerleaders. You don't have to be a genius to see through all that, nor to see that the adults are pretending not to see what's actually going on. Albrecht Haushofer's Moabit Sonnet on the Olympics comes immediately to mind:
                                                  

The resulting horror, the “death” in the piece, is surely what is behind so much youthful suicide, as well as parental grief and loss. I often found in discussing suicide in my teaching years in sociology that as many as half the students in a class had attempted suicide. The NIH reports that there are 13.1 attempted suicides for every single successful suicide, but I am certain that suicide statistics, defined and collected for adults by adults, are great underestimates as well as that suicide has other forms than just death of the body. Surely, much of what is currently called autism is a withdrawal from what a child is seeing, a sort of suicide.

Can you imagine what it's like for a child to witness a typical high school, never mind a lynching, and then being taken to a psychiatrist because it depresses you and you have thoughts of suicide, and then have the respected doctor start talking about transmitter neurons, serotonin, brain chemistry or electric shocks? It's asking a lot of a child, especially if she has never met a single other person who admits to seeing what she sees, nor has read a book by another person who sees what she sees. She is much more likely to hear something like “These are the best years of your life. Just wait until you grow up and have to support a family. Then you'll know what 'having a problem is.'”