Reminders by Cenk Uygur, President Obama, and The Medical Industry

I woke up this morning with an old familiar question in mind: Why is it I so easily lose sight of how backwards, upside down, the situation is?

Cenk Uygur's column

Cenk Uygur

on Brian Williams and the Media a couple days ago is what caused the question to be in my mind during the night. His column is well worth reading. It's like President Obama's recent talk on the ghastly history and Pride of so many people who have considered themselves to be “Christians.”

The remarks by Cenk and the President are obviously and undeniably true. But, as Mark Twain put it, we are able to stumble over the truth, then get up and run along as if nothing had happened.

These two reminders of the absurdity, or whatever it should be called – the insanity? - are just the easiest examples that come to mind immediately right now. I've also been dealing with the medical industry during the past weeks, too, and have had to go through the reawakening for the umpteenth time to the reality that we are more likely to be harmed by it than helped by it.

I don't admire insanity, I don't like it, and I believe it's destructive to everyone who does it. Better just to go ahead and to die than to participate in it, I say, and then, at that very point, I become just so grateful and pleased that I have been allowed to live as long as I have, without having been killed or even being put in prison.

How Frugal Is the Chariot that Bears the Human Soul

This little poem of Emily Dickinson has had a big place in my mind since I first read it a couple months ago. I've thought of it every day since then.

     There is no Frigate like a Book
     To take us Lands away
     Nor any Coursers like a Page
     Of Prancing Poetry -
     This Traverse may the poorest take
     Without oppress of Toll -
     How frugal is the Chariot
     That bears the Human Soul -

I have seen, having been both bookseller and teacher for many years, how much a book can mean to a life, particularly the life of a young person.

That talk of “the human soul” brings so much light and mystery and hope. It rarely occurs in financial and material affairs, or in scientific and academic discourse, and is light as a feather.

The Glory of the World

Everything was sparkling and clear when the dawn broke over the snow this morning. It was as if it were a presentation of the Grail or heaven or something.

So I searched the Internet for various attempts at expressing the vision of the Grail, particularly through the visual arts, but nothing seemed simple enough, nothing seemed humble enough, despite such prodigious efforts and talents.

In fact, the heroic attempts to express it had the opposite result. How is one to express the face of an old friend, an old loved one, for example, by any human art? You get a sort of trespass instead. So I immediately stopped the search and was reminded of an old Alchemist from the fifteenth or sixteenth century AD, who had this to say in the Gloria Mundi:

“I will that all those who possess this book be admonished and besought for the love of Jesus Christ, that they conceal this art from all such as are puffed up, vainglorious, unjust oppressors of the poor, proud, worldly, scoffers, contemners, false accusers, and such unworthy folk, nor permit this writing to come into the hands of such, if they would escape the wrath of God and the punishments which he is wont to bring down upon those that are presumptuous and profane.”

Hard to Hide

I keep thinking of a TV documentary I saw during the weekend. It showed photos of US soldiers in Afghanistan, posing one to three at a time, kneeling behind their “kills” as if the “kills” were deer or game animals.

There are many similar photos available on the Internet to which I could establish links for you, but I know that you know already.

I realize that everyone knows about such things, but we still manage to go on with our lives.

I go on with my own life. But the hiding from them, the justifications of them, the acceptance of them, the suppression of the people who make such statements, and then the moving on as if nothing had happened, bothers me as much as the killers and the killed. It creates a self-perpetuating circle.

There is also some way in which such photos do stop us, inside. Our subconscious minds pick up everything and never let it go. There is, on that level, no hiding.

The almost inconceivable cruelties all around us just have to have a deadening effect on us despite our “moving on.”

We do whatever we think we can to stop them despite what seems like the futility of even trying. My own view is that the most effective action to take is to bear witness, privately and publicly, to the atrocities.

Aucassin and Nicolette

C'est Aucassin et Nicolete

I heard a narration of the story of Nicolette and Aucassin on the radio one night when I was young, about sixty years ago, and, remarkably, that one event became one of the most important facts of my subsequent life. I have often thought of the poem/song since I first heard it that night and found immense help from it in dealing with the fundamental issue.

The poem/song is in old French, from the thirteenth century, and has had translations into English that are debated. It has acquired an immense amount of scholarship that may or may not “get it,” interpretations in fine art, opera and music, and theater, but here are a couple phrases that capture the spirit of the thing for me:

- “God loves those who love each other.”

- “God loves all true lovers.”

- ”Journeys end in lovers meeting.”

It feels absurd, or even deeply or just outrightly criminal, to make any attempt to explain why it should be so powerful. It would be like trying to explain a fable or a dream or a myth to a particle-brained materialistic contemporary. God? Love? Lovers? What?

And yet, I think we all get glimpses that love is really the core of our lives, and that even knowledge itself, often considered to be separate from love, is dependent upon our ability to take the second, other, outside standpoint, perspective.

It has humor, fun, imagination, sheer beauty, yes, but it I think that the main reason it has lasted so well for eight hundred years is its spiritual-psychological truth.

Here is Andrew Lang's translation, at this link.

Chomsky on “Bob Dylan”

Every now and then someone surprises me by seeing Bob Dylan the way I see him. He has received such great praise, so many awards, so much money, and so much attention, yet is so empty and false, that he pretty much epitomizes the last forty years.

So I was grateful recently to find Noam Chomsky's observation in Wikiquote on his experience of Dylan:

Just the other day I was sitting in a radio studio waiting for a satellite arrangement abroad to be set up. The engineers were putting together interviews with [Dylan] from about 1966-7 or so (judging by the references), and I was listening (I'd never heard him talk before -- if you can call that talking). He sounded as though he was so drugged he was barely coherent, but the message got through clearly enough through the haze. He said over and over that he'd been through all of this protest thing, realized it was nonsense, and that the only thing that was important was to live his own life happily and freely, not to "mess around with other people's lives" by working for civil and human rights, ending war and poverty, etc. He was asked what he thought about the Berkeley "free speech movement" and said that he didn't understand it. He said something like: "I have free speech, I can do what I want, so it has nothing to do with me. Period." If the capitalist PR machine [term used in the question] wanted to invent someone for their purposes, they couldn't have made a better choice.

My Prayers for the Stolen

It's a cold January 1^st, 2015, this morning here in Dayton, Ohio, USA, and quiet. But there was a lot of celebration around the city in the middle of the night – fireworks, simple noise, etc. - as the clock passed to a new year.

I was half asleep at the time, so I was closely aware, both subconsciously as well as consciously, of the feelings of the people around me who hope for a better world. It was quite moving for me, in view of my increased awareness of just how deeply set the backwardness and barbarity are, especially in the case of what is widely called “the elite.” I had just finished reading Jennifer Clement's book, “Prayers for the Stolen,” before I went to bed.

There is no comparison, not even close, between the harm of the crime of the elite and that of ordinary people. Yet the elite's harm would not be possible if ordinary people did not consent to it, either passively or even actively. That problem will continue, I see, to be there during this coming year for me as centrally as it has been for many years in my past.

I have noticed in the last year or two that the problem has been mentioned, however briefly and ineffectively, in some films like “The Hunger Games,” for example, and some relatively popular writings on “economic inequality.” The problem has been acknowledged forever, of course, but I think there is some hope that the awareness that something can be done about it may grow!