Everybody Knows

One of the things about studying hypnosis is that you come to realize that people pick up everything. They don't miss a thing. It's all in there. You hypnotize a few subjects and you can be absolutely astonished at how much people know, how much they have in their heads, from even back into their childhood.
 

I remember being with my father once in his old age when he came out with one of his startling and memorable observations on life. Those were such golden moments. This time he said: “People pick up on everything, more even than animals.”

This is currently on my mind because of my recently having read a book on how “dumb” “Americans” are. There are a lot of these books around now. You are probably familiar with Jay Leno's “Jay Walking” segments where he goes out on the streets and interviews people who can't identify the name of the U.S. President or Vice President. They can't locate New York on an unlabelled map, never mind locate Canada. Stuff like that. People who voted for Bush the second time. People who watch TV an average of more than eight hours per day.

But you find when you get to know such people that they know far more and are way more intelligent than meets the eye of anyone who likes to feel superior to them. I think it's never fair to say that people are stupid, much less the whole United States.

The book I just read, Why America Failed, by Morris Berman, says things like this:

What possibly can be done to save a culture that thinks iPads represent 'progress,' while everything humanly valuable is going down the drain?

(Quoting de Tocqueville): '...the least reproach offends it, and the slightest sting of truth turns it fierce; one must praise everything, from the turn of its phrases to its most robust virtues...Hence the majority lives in a state of self-adoration....'

No. I think the same kind of arrogance is behind the “banality of evil” explanations of Eichmann et al. The traditional view of evil, that it was clever in the extreme, is surely true. People are sharp, clever, knowing – even more than animals.

The Jerry Falwell Biography

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I finished reading last night the new, “long-awaited” biography of Jerry Falwell, Michael Sean Winters' God's Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right.

Falwell was an important figure in recent U.S. History, particularly with his TV preaching and appearances, his “Moral Majority” organization, his Liberty University and his role in electing U.S. Presidents. Winters' book seems to me to be comprehensive, truthful, objective, balanced – a good book, although perhaps a little dry at times to my own taste. It's an important portrait of an important person in U.S. History.

I remember when Falwell's “Old-Time Gospel Hour” from Thomas Road Baptist Church first appeared on TV. He said some good stuff, no doubt about it. But then something crept into it that increasingly alienated me.

One of my first doubts about Falwell arose from seeing him in a debate at Oxford in the UK, when a young British twit spoke disparagingly of Falwell's “redneck followers.” Falwell, who was a skillful debater, as are his Liberty University debate teams, just destroyed the British twit. He said, for example that he and his followers had given these large amounts of food to starving people in central Europe – Falwell and his followers did a lot of “good works.” And then he says: “And what have you done?”

Yes, yes, Falwell “won” the debate with the British twit, but did he lose the central message of Christ and thereby undercut what was good in himself? Satan tempts Christ during His forty days in the desert with talk about turning stones to bread, which Christ rejects. I know it's a complicated issue, and one that is quite at the center of US historical and cultural life.

But I myself feel Christ more in the following words to Pontius Pilate than I do in winning a debate or eating or surviving:

To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

And then there was that time when I heard Falwell say, perhaps on Fox News where he frequently appeared, that if it helped George W. Bush win the election, he, Falwell, would say that he was against Bush. It was clever, personable, self-effacing in that it acknowledged that many people disliked him, and effective – but it was also a minister of Christ promoting deception for political purposes.

Winters writes of this problem, moderately, in several places in the book and notes the paradoxical effects, such as an increase in the US of people rejecting organized “Christianity” and even in political degeneration. Winters quotes impeccable conservative Barry Goldwater as saying that “Every good American ought to kick Jerry Falwell in the ass” and that he was “sick and tired of political preachers...telling me...that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, or C.”

The Grimms' Snow White

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I bought a copy of the Grosset & Dunlap Grimms' Fairy Tales last week. It's definitely my favorite book in all the world. I've owned copies of it before but have given them away to various people who I thought would love it as much as I do.

So last night, as the winter is coming on and the days are getting shorter and the nights colder, I opened up this treasury and read Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs before going to bed. It was all new to me once again despite my having read it so many times over the course of my life.

Thomas Kinkade, Snow White Discovers the Cottage

This time I was more aware than ever that she represents the pure heart, the pure-in-heart, perhaps from having written about it recently, as well as more experience since I last read this story.

The seven small protectors, who work in a gold mine, try to protect her from her stepmother, the widower King's second, vain, wife. This woman's mirror has been telling her that she is the most beautiful woman in the world until one day it tells her that, no, Snow White is actually more beautiful, “a thousand times more fair.” Oh, geez. Now's there's hell to pay. The old baggage tells the huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and kill her. That doesn't work out. So she tries three deceptive ploys in the disguise of an old woman offering good things – tightened laces, a poison comb, and the poisoned half of an apple. Lots of other exciting stuff happens and at the end the wicked stepmother goes to the wedding feast and “was beside herself with disappointment and anger” that Snow White was a thousand times more fair, and then gets served her just deserts: “For they had ready red-hot iron shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down dead.”

The Grimms don't fool around. They tell it.

True Trucking Story: Meat Animals

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There was this “feedlot” cattle-raising business just west of Amarillo, Texas, that turned me off from eating meat. You could smell the place from about three miles away. Thousands of cattle standing in the muck in these pens, muck on their legs and sides, not blade of grass or dry ground. I imagine there were antibiotics and other chemicals and unknown animal byproducts in the “feed.”

I used to see these feedlot places a lot when I trucked around Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas. They were so thoroughly revolting to me that I don't buy meat anymore.

There were a couple other things that put me off meat that may seem small, but had a strong effect. There were nights when I slept in the truck out there under the stars, at truck stops, and there would be cattle trucks parked during the night right near my truck. I could hear the cattle clomping around all night, bleating, and there was that stench, that stink. I remember one morning I got out of my truck and there was this steer looking at me through a hole in the side of the cattle trailer next to me. There was a big round hole in the side of the cattle trailer and there framed in the middle of this hole was a big, black, terrified eye, looking right at me.

Oh, and the pigs. I remember one morning at a truck stop when some drivers were transferring a load of pigs from one truck to another truck. Man, those pigs were shrieking terror itself.

I've never even been through a slaughter house or read Upton Sinclair's, The Jungle, but I have seen film clips of some of the stuff that happens in the meat-packing industry. They are easily available on YouTube.

I used to love a hot dog every now and then, with a good mustard and relish, or a thick, juicy steak with maybe some onion, sauce or something, but no more. Seeing what little I saw out there trucking around the feedlots has just taken the delight out of it.

Finally, one of my students, a mature, level-headed, perceptive woman told me that her husband is a professional chef and he has seen such things in restaurant kitchens that he refuses to eat at restaurants anymore.

So last night I saw this video from Jenny Brown's Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in Woodstock, NY, where she saves mistreated animals, and I feel more appreciation for what she represents and is doing. This video is of some ducks she rescued from a “hoarder” who kept them in awful conditions. These ducks had never been in water and it just is thrilling to see them get into it for the first time.

Dealing with It

I mentioned in yesterday's posting the difficulties I had, among other things, of finding professional truck mechanics who knew what they were doing. And my dreams during the night told me that I was being bitter about it, which is an immature, inadequate response.

It isn't that the complaint is not true about the widespread incompetence of the professionals, the experts, the people whom we have believed to know what they are doing. I speak often with mechanics even today and almost all of them say that they themselves would never let another mechanic work on their own vehicles. No, the problem is real.

I was thinking this morning of some incidents of professionals' incompetence that cost me thousands of dollars and countless hours of wasted time. There is such a long list!

One example: I had the Western Star serviced in Wisconsin and the mechanics installed the air filters upside down, which cause the ducting system to collapse and hundreds of hours worth of dirty air to be drawn into the engine, and about a week of expensive downtime, as well as the aggravation.

Another example: The fan belt on the Mack wore out very quickly, and broke often. A good mechanic – they do exist – ultimately found the problem to be that the alternator bearings were seizing, making it extremely difficult to turn and thus wearing out the belts. This particular problem cost me untold hours of downtime, a roadside breakdown in Oklahoma, countless hours of sitting in dingy waiting rooms, car rentals to get me home, hotel overnights, enormous outlays of cash for incompetent mechanics who failed to find the problem.

I've written about the incompetence of the medical profession in a previous post about Lyme Disease. A recent book by Joe and Teresa Graedon, “Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them,” says that there are at least 500,000 US deaths per year caused by medical doctors themselves, “iatrogenic errors.” Those are just the fatal errors, not including the errors from which patients are lucky enough to survive. The cost of all this, especially to people who are most vulnerable, is just incalculable. I myself believe that my chances are greater that I will be harmed by going to a doctor than are my chances of being helped.

Then there are the bankers and financial speculators, who, on top of all the other damage they do, support the soul-destroying meme that somehow the amount of money you have indicates your “worth.” And so many more.

So what's to be done? Being bitter about it obviously is destructive, and particularly self-destructive.

My own thought is that the first step has to be awareness of the problem and not to try to pretend that it doesn't exist, not to hide from it, and not just to “go along with it.” Perhaps the next step is to speak out about it, as possible, without being bitter. I also think that it is possible to achieve a sufficiently deep and wide perspective to be able to see humor in the situation.

The Mack and Western Star

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These two trucks were a great adventure. They allowed me, among other things, to visit the highways and byways, the cities and the remote rural places, all over the USA and Canada.

The first one was that single stack Mack with no window in the back. Just an astonishing truck. I had more fun with that. Funniest of all, almost everyone told me when I bought it, for $5,000 on a credit card, that it was going to fail - not only the truck would fail, but the whole venture of getting my own DOT authority, the expensive insurances, the fuel tax registrations and accounting, the customers, etc., would fail. I had all these people telling me that I was going to fail, people who had worked their whole lives in trucking, whereas I had been a driver for only a couple years.

I went everywhere with that old Mack. I just loved it. It had certain problems that required me to learn a lot about it as well as about the widespread ignorance and incompetence of the professionals, the experts, the people whom we suppose to know what they are talking about because they have been in the business their whole lives and make their living supposedly knowing about their field.

I traded the Mack in at about half way through the seven year adventure and bought the second truck you see here, a big, long-wheelbase, Western Star, a “premium truck.” The Western Star advertisements call it a “Serious Truck.” That thing had all the features, all the comforts, all the bells and whistles, whereas the Mack was just a plain old basic functional machine that did the job, pulled the load down the road.

I often look back on those years when I had my own trucks and wonder which of the two trucks I liked best. I learned a lot with both of them, made money with both of them, liked them both. But I think that, knowing what I know now, if I had it to do over again I would say that having that plain basic Mack fit better with who I am and what I see as important in life.

Observations on Ohio

I have met some of the most open-hearted, mature, decent people I've ever met in my seventy years since I moved here to Ohio eighteen months ago: my neighbors, a few friends whom I see regularly, and some souls I've met simply for a fleeting moment. I feel awe just in thinking of them.

On the other hand, my first impressions were primarily from the people with whom I was necessarily involved at first: real estate agents, banking officers, painters, plumbers, inspectors, utility company phone answerers, police, paint store and home center store personnel, pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves. They seemed to me then as they still do, almost without exception, to be corrupt to the core and incredibly incompetent.

A plumber who did some work for me said these exact words: “I can see right away that you are one of the good guys, but this isn't New Hampshire.” He obviously knew nothing about New Hampshire.

An exemplary problem I had to solve was to repair a water leak at the valve where the water pipe to my house joins the street main. The water department told me that the leak was on my side and that I had the responsibility to fix it. The fix cost me $2,600 and took three months, but in the process we discovered that the leak was on the city's side and so was actually the city's responsibility. The city inspector came by and said, yes, but “If you try to fight this you will lose.”

I happened last night to be reading in Jung's Children's Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940, which came out in 2008, and I was struck by a passage in which he asserts his explanation of “America,” meaning the U.S.A:

In America, a fusion of the lower part with the virginal earth – where primitive man lives – takes place. As a consequence, consciousness stays above, removed from the primitive functions: ideals on the one hand, primitiveness on the other. This explains much of what is absurd in America. The ground of the basement has sunk a few meters. There is no access: the door to the basement is walled up, the stairs leading down are missing, so the American is living in a world of reasonableness and idealism. It was an American who invented the League of Nations! If an American wants to go into his lower regions, he will have to make a leap into the dark. That is why often those “perverse” stories can happen...A person with warmth and blood is below, unconscious; above everything happens “correctly,” respectably. The person above does not see the person below.

That seems to capture a lot of what I see here and to fit in with what Hawthorne - “that blue-eyed Nathaniel,” D. H. Lawrence called him - says in The Scarlet Letter about that absurdity.

I often ask people when I visit a new place what the book is, especially a novel, that best describes the people who live there. The one suggestion I have received here was JamesThurber. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio seems to be highly regarded in literary circles but seems a bit damaged by the Freudianism of the times it was written. There is a poet named Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who lived  here in Dayton, who was very perceptive and articulate. Erma Bombeck, who lived just down the street from where I live, is funny, humorous, but she does capture something I see and feel here.

A word about “America” and “New Hampshire” before I go. It's very common in Europe to refer to the United States of America as “America,” as Jung did above, and I sometimes still hear that expression in the U.S. However, I became aware many years ago that people in Central and South America resent this usage, considering themselves to be “Americans,” too. The meaning that now comes to many minds by the phrase “the Americans” is “the indigenous peoples who have lived here since before Columbus.”

And New Hampshire, dear old New Hampshire. No one I've met here has ever visited it and I find they often confuse it with New Jersey.