"Cradle of the Best and the Worst" USA

The first two days of this week were so inspiring to me that I'm still in a bit of shock.

Sunday, there was Gail Collins' article in the New York Times about the effort to have a woman's face on the new US twenty-dollar bill to replace Andrew “Indian Fighter” Jackson. She mentions some good possibilities – she herself would like to see Gloria Steinem there – and her readers/commenters suggested many others. Emily Dickinson – my first choice – was mentioned a few times, and Helen Keller. Could you just imagine Emily Dickinson on the twenty-dollar bill? With a line from her poem 788?

      But reduce no Human Spirit

      To Disgrace of Price.

Then there was Monday, and the appearance of Seymour Hersh's article in the March 30, 2015 issue of The New Yorker, entitled The Scene of the Crime: A Reporter's Journey to My Lai and the Secrets of the Past.

Hersh is the reporter who first disclosed that particular crime on March 16, 1968. This present article in The New Yorker is a sort of review and update forty-six years later.

Hersh relates here how he subsequently gave a speech at a college where Hubert Humphrey was teaching:

After my speech, Humphrey asked to talk to me. “I’ve no problem with you, Mr. Hersh,” he said. “You were doing your job and you did it well. But, as for those kids who march around saying, ‘Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?’” Humphrey’s fleshy, round face reddened, and his voice grew louder with every phrase. “I say, ‘Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em.’”

Humphrey's resentment has pretty much epitomized the United States as I have personally known it over the course of my lifetime and as I have come to understand its history. It has committed these almost unimaginable crimes and slowly but surely the awareness of them has increased. The Viet-Nam war was one big My Lai, one big crime, so egregious that only a very few openly now deny it. But there is some level on which perhaps half the country is still repeating Humphrey to those of us who have fought the long fight for this awareness. Facing up to the reality takes a long, long time, particularly for those who have derived so much financial and other self-interested benefit from it.

But here we have the Collins article and people actually suggesting, openly, in the NY Times no less, that someone like Emily Dickinson or Helen Keller should replace the old Indian Fighter on the twenty-dollar bill! Elizabeth Warren? This is possible in the USA, but even if we do not succeed, it has been a priceless privilege to participate, and yes, a joy despite all the horror.

I can not embed the YouTube video of Leonard Cohen singing his "Democracy is Coming to the USA" but here is a link to it.

“Our Stupid Infantile Press”

Bill Maher's recent reference to “Our stupid infantile press” has stuck in my mind during the past week since he said it. I immediately feel skeptical these days of harsh words like that but I also felt immediate agreement with this thought.

I can not now remember the writer's name but I also recently read a journalist's defense of the “despicable press,” using the phrase sardonically. His reference was to Patrick Kennedy's famous indictment, “The press is despicable.” I remember our stupid infantile press responding to it at the time with “Patrick has a drinking problem” and I thought they had forgotten it, but I now see they have not forgotten it.

One of the reasons this has been in my mind so much is the perspective that comes from being near death, from which you can more easily see the trivialities for what they are, since acknowledging them as trivialities and idols of the tribe no longer endangers your ability to survive.

I've also just read Nicolai Gogol's Dead Souls, which seems more annihilating of such things than anything else I've ever read.

You read Gogol, then flip through the TV channels before you turn out the light to go to sleep, and you're struck by the stupid infantile newscasters trying to appear as if they  were otherwise. It's really draining just to watch them try to do it. It also seems as if every other, non-news, channel at that time of night has films with a lot of murders and gun-fire and pointing of guns at people's heads.

"...In That They See Strength"

Leo Tolstoy wrote a lot about war but there was one short passage that held special meaning for my entire life, beyond anything I would have expected.

I first read it at the time I refused to participate in the Viet-Nam war, but have thought of it many times over the fifty years since then. I lost the original source in Tolstoy's writings but was very pleased recently to find it in his “Two Wars:”

"The people of our time, especially the scholars, have become so gross that they do not understand, and in their grossness cannot even understand, the significance and the influence of spiritual force. A charge of ten thousand pounds of dynamite sent into a crowd of living men--that they understand, and in that they see strength; but an idea, truth, which has been realized, has been introduced into life to the point of martyrdom, has become accessible to millions--that is according to their conception not force, because it does not boom and you do not see broken bones and puddles of blood. Scholars (it is true, bad scholars) use all the power of their erudition to prove that humanity lives like a herd, which is guided only by economic conditions, and that reason is given to it only for amusement.  Governments know what it is that moves the world, and so, from a sense of self-preservation, unerringly and zealously monitor the manifestation of spiritual forces, on which depends their existence or their ruin."

The most persistent and astonishing reflection that I have had over those fifty years about the “broken bones and puddles of blood” has been about how many people love and defend war. There was such widespread joy and celebration when World War One broke out – an almost inconceivable catastrophe. I think that anyone who takes seriously the stopping of war, very quickly has to face that reality – that people just love it and bring up every excuse they can to go for it and see strength in it and accuse you of weakness and cowardice and lack of perception and wisdom and lack of concern for your society's existence and future.

Truth Spoken by Elizabeth Warren: A Poem

She might not have conceived it as a poem but it is a poem. When the truth is spoken cleanly, simply, thoroughly, thoughtfully, it becomes a poem.

This jewel from Elizabeth Warren appears in an Huffington Post article, with a link to its origins, and with some excellent, well-worth-reading comments on it:

I'm worried a lot about power in the financial services industry and I'm worried about the fact that basically, starting in the '80s, you know, the cops were taken off the beat in financial services. These guys were allowed to just paint a bull's-eye on the backside of American families," Warren said. "They loaded up on risk. They crushed the economy. They got bailed out. What bothers me now, they still strut around Washington, they block regulations that they don't want, they roll over agencies whenever they can.

Still Alice, Still Steiner

Rudolf Steiner had a great appreciation of “the Easter mysteries” and always comes to my mind around Easter. I read him a lot at one time in my life and still find him very helpful in the spiritual quest, despite there being certain things he writes about which are difficult for me to understand, such as the bits about re-incarnation, the etheric body, and Atlantis. Still, I think that a study his life, works, and writings is well worth the time and effort, and I have kept coming back to him over the years.

I recently read Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and some Steiner commentary on it in The Mysteries of the Holy Grail, from Arthur and Parzival to Modern Initiation, Compiled and edited by Matthew Barton, 2010.

Here is a nice sample of Steiner:

“When someone becomes cleverer and cleverer, in the sense in which it is fashionable to call people clever today, he develops certain forces in his soul which, in this incarnation, may render him very acute when discussing materialistic ideas; yet certain vital forces necessary for the human organism are worn away. And when such a person has only absorbed these, typical, dregs of modern education, in his next incarnation he will lack the forces required to build up the human organism. The 'cleverer' a person is by the standards of our day, and the closer his intellectual attunement to them, the more of an imbecile he will be in a later incarnation. Those categories and concepts which relate only to the sense-perceptible outer world and the ideas which constitute it, set up a configuration in the soul which may be ever so fine intellectually but lack the force to work intensively on the brain and to make use of it; and to be unable to make use of the brain while in the physical body is to be an imbecile.”

I think it is possible to get a lot out of his statements like that, even if we use the word “incarnation” to mean just a particular phase of our present life on Earth. In fact, we often do use the word in that sense, such as when I myself refer to my previous life as a bookseller or as a sociologist.

But there is another reason that Steiner was in my mind today: I saw the contemporarily highly popular film entitled “Still Alice.” Alice is stricken with Alzheimer's Disease in the story, and we witness her decline from being highly capable and intellectual to basic incompetence, not to say imbecility.

But her daughter relates a spiritual vision to her in the last scene, the essence of which is that this isn't all there is, that we are spirits, and that we still exist beyond this. “Nothing is ever lost,” the daughter tells Alice.

I walked home from the theater in bright sunshine, with harbingers of spring all around, the first buds on trees, with Easter on its way, thinking of my dear old friend, Betty Stocks, whom I lost to Alzheimer's not long ago. Those last words just felt right, rang right, in every way!

"This God-damned Dog and Pony Show"

My father was very angry at the way he was treated in his last few days before his death at the Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, New Hampshire, and referred to the situation as "this God-damned dog and pony show.”

An article in the NY Times, "Doctors Strive to Do Less Harm by Inattentive Care," and the comments on it this morning remind me very much of his experience.

Dad's vocabulary was dated, and it could easily appear to the unperceptive that he was being harsh, due to his being under stress, rather than as being truthful regardless of the consequences on the occasion of death.

But I think he was precisely, validly, on the mark. The comments on the NY Times article are in today's vocabulary and emotionally "careful," but clearly confirm my own serious experience of this last year with the medical industry.

The comments on articles and letters to the editors are usually the most interesting and helpful parts of newspapers for me, although not always.

Here is one comment on this article:

Paxinmano

Rhinebeck, NY

"... and I will take care that they suffer no hurt or damage." This from the oath all doctors swear, the Hippocratic oath. Or was that the hypocritic oath? Ah close enough. You can see how they might have gotten it confused. This is 2015 and doctors are finally thinking from "the patients perspective" instead of their own perspectives. Well, wonders will never cease as my grandmother used to say...

What goes through my mind now is that the horror of the last forty years of programmatic societal selfishness has been so extreme and relentless and radical, that people are being forced to face it and to rethink it. The fact that the NY Times has been running a series of articles like this one brings hope that this might be true.

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.