Some Meta Remarks, Particularly on The Generals and Norman Morrison

The ending of the Old Year and the beginning of the New Year is always a special time for me. There is the excitement of wondering what the New Year will bring, wondering what presently-unimaginable thing I will be looking back at exactly one year from now.

Perhaps I can post more articles on this blog during the coming year than I did during this past year. I would like to do that.

The reason I didn't post very much during this past year was that I was out upon the land most of the year, in the USA and Canada. I rented out my home in Ohio early on, then took off, at seventy-seven years of age, to see what I could see for a year, while I was still able. I saw a lot, connected to a lot, and survived it so remarkably well that I am going to try it again for an other year.

Helen Keller said: “Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing.”


There are just so many topics that have preoccupied my mind recently that I need to write about some of them, particularly the subject of psychopathy (generally meaning sociopathy, anti-social personality disorder and even malignant narcissism) and the subject of Near-Death Experiences. I have been reading recently in these areas and am just astonished at how much has been done in them in during the last twenty years, never mind forty years.

I have also been astonished to see that two of my blog postings over the past year which have received the most “hits,” the most read around the world, have been my review of Thomas Hicks' book, The Generals, and my article on Norman Morrison.

I wrote those two articles right out from my soul, very much expecting that there might well be only one single soul out there in the rest of the whole world who would read them or understand them. I knew that I spoke the truth.

I also did absolutely nothing to promote them, nothing to draw attention to them. And yet they are two of my most popular, most-read, articles.

Amazing. Provoking.

“Fear: Trump in the White House” by Bob Woodward

I was travelling, camping, talking with people across the Canada, when Woodward’s book came out in August of this year. Every bookstore I visited was sold out of the book. “It’s freaky,” said the bookseller in Owen Sound, “We sold out the first day.”

There was great interest, due to Woodward’s

reputation as a truthful, informed and courageous reporter. He uses a tape recorder, and has “access.”

But what I was looking for even more than the reporting and quotes was his insight into Trump himself. He uses a March 31, 2016, quote from Trump at the beginning of the book just before the Note to Readers:

“Real power is – I don’t even want to use the word – fear.”

He draws his title from it and uses it a couple times later in the book, but does not seem, to my eyes, to develop much of that insight into Trump. Perhaps in his wisdom he just assumes that ordinary people like me will be able to see from all the reporting in the book that Trump works and plays with fears.

But where I could really see what he thought was in the last paragraph of the last page of the book, where he writes of John Dowd’s resignation as Trump’s lawyer. Dowd, very experienced and astute, supports and likes Trump and was aware of his limitations, resigned because Trump would not take his advice.

Woodward’s last paragraph reads:

But in the man and the presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweetings, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”

It’s not clear to me that this fatal flaw directly relates to the”Fear” of the tile, but it may. Woodward reports two pages earlier Dowd as saying something that gets a little closer to the fear idea. He is telling Trump that he doesn’t have to worry about being impeached and says:

They’re not going to impeach you. Are you shitting me? They’re a bunch of cowards, the whole town. The media, the Congress. They’re gutless.

So perhaps that was the fear that Woodward was referencing – the fear, the true cowardice, within not just Washington but the US public itself.

Canadian Comfort

I’ve been in Canada for the last three months, taking a break from my life at home in the USA. Certain realities catch my notice quickly here.

The first thing I notice when I cross the border into Canada, which I do several times per year, is that my body feels more relaxed here.

I also feel hopeful. It’s as if the very fact that there is a place so close by which is not Hobbesian, not basically violent, reaffirms that feeling.

What I call “the Hobbesian view” brings a sense of urgency and doom with it, and a dismissal or diminishing awareness of the fundamental power of love and cooperation.

I notice here at least twice a day, every single day, some act of helpfulness or kindness, whereas I almost never see such things in Dayton, Ohio.

These observations may seem naive at first, and I am very aware of stereotyping and the weakness of national character studies. But the reality is nonetheless there and cannot be dismissed.

I’ve given a lot of thought over the years to the game of hockey, which I myself consider to be brutal, yet here seems to be considered honorable or even symbolic of the country in some way. I admit that I haven’t figured it out, that it seems anomalous to me. Even mature women here admire the game. Perhaps it’s one way of dealing with the inevitable reality of brutality in life, in the world. 

Minsky and Me and Steve Keen on The Turning Point – 1966

Steve Keen is a dissident economist who seems to have the large perspective that I like, although I myself do not fully understand the details of his discussions.

Steve Keen

He contends that mainstream economics does not understand what money is. That just rings so true to me. One of my colleagues, an economist, told me candidly many decades ago that economists do not know what a dollar is. It seems incredible but it fits with everything I know about symbolic interaction.

Steve Keen was one of the very few economists who foresaw the 2007 collapse.

Here is another matter that I have thought about for over forty years, which he mentions in his classic, 2011 book, Debunking Economics –Revised and Expanded Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?He writes on p.339: 

“Minsky himself identified 1966 as the time at which America made the transition from a productive to a Ponzi economy.”

Nineteen sixty-six was the point at which the US decided it was all right to kill people in Viet-Nam even though everyone could see that there was no valid reason for it, that the war was false and unjustified. Even children knew it was wrong. It was a conscious decision by the country that what it did in Viet-Nam was justifiable, that the war was legitimate, that murder was acceptable. The Senate walls dripped with blood, said George McGovern, and the electorate showed him what they thought of his truth speaking – he lost every state (except Massachusetts) to Richard Nixon, an obvious criminal.

I remember 1966 very well. Viet-Nam, the USA’s invasion of Viet-Nam, was the big question, and the nation’s refusal to stop doing it, after everyone, including the government, knew it was immoral, was the disconnect point from any attempt to be true and good. That was the breaking point for the US – socially, morally, economically.

Chicago Democratic Convention in 1966

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley in 1966

What Minsky and Keen are saying is that 1966 was the point at which we overtly shifted from a productive economy to a Ponzi economy, and what I say is that it was also the point at which the USA overtly became selfish, irredeemable, consciously criminal. After 1966, and particularly after the events at the Democratic National Convention that year, it became openly understood and acknowledged that the USA is a murderer and no one is going to do anything about it.

I read recently an elite academic who referred to “the carefree ‘sixties.” That’s a good indication of how far the country is lost.

Steve Keen does not talk about Viet-Nam specifically, as far as I know, but there are many good clips on YouTube in which he talks of what has been going on economically since then, and what he sees in the future. Here is a relatively short and understandable interview:

Galway Bay

The 1947 “Galway Bay” is one of those songs which I’ve heard many times, sung by many respected singers, such as Bing Crosby. But it wasn’t until quite recently, in my seventy-sixth year, that the depth of its mythic quality was brought home to me, and then by a young woman named Chloë Agnew:

She sings of the ladies digging praties (potatoes) in the uplands who speak a language that the strangers do not know and the play of the gossoons (garçons). She sings of the possibility of life hereafter, of the land across the sea, about dehumanization, all that good stuff which is missed by the standard academic, analytic, scientistic, best and brightest, respectable worldview. It has got “England” vs. Ireland in it, too, and the closing of our days.

The closing of my own days is now, to me, given how quickly time is flying. And that has to be why I am now able to be so appreciative of Chloë’s Galway Bay, beside which the other renditions seem so jaded in contrast. But I think also it was necessary for me to live through the absurdities and horrors of the “standard academic, analytic, scientistic, best and brightest, respectable worldview” - for several decades.

It’s as if it were all right there right before my eyes all the time, but that I had to experience hell in order to appreciate it.

Galway Bay

If you ever go across the sea to Ireland,
Then maybe at the closing of your day;
You will sit and watch the moonrise over Claddagh,
And see the sun go down on Galway Bay,
Just to hear again the ripple of the trout stream,
The women in the meadows making hay;
And to sit beside a turf fire in the cabin,
And watch the barefoot gossoons at their play,
For the breezes blowing o'er the seas from Ireland,
Are perfum'd by the heather as they blow;
And the women in the uplands diggin' praties,
Speak a language that the strangers do not know,
For the strangers came and tried to teach their way,
They scorn'd us just for being what we are;
But they might as well go chasing after moonbeams,
Or light a penny candle from a star.
And if there is going to be a life hereafter,
And somehow I am sure there's going to be;
I will ask my God to let me make my heaven,
In that dear land across the Irish sea.

A Short Passage from Freud’s “An Autobiographical Study”

It sometimes seems to me that the most remarkable and astonishing mistake I’ve ever heard of is the belief that growing old is a bad thing and that youth is the best time of your life.

Yes, there are probably other whoppers like it, maybe even more absurd. Maybe the pretensions of the elites that are becoming more obviously tragic and deserved, have equal rank, but this particular one stands out for me now.

The immediate case before me is my recent re-reading of Sigmund Freud’s little book, “An Autobiographical Study,” and especially a short passage in which he recounts what he believes are his two contributions to the understanding of sexuality. The book as a whole is Freud’s 130-page reflection and summation of his life’s work as he approaches his end.

I’ve read this little book a few times over the course of the last fifty years, and paid attention to his other books which are necessary to understand it. And this particular passage below now seems to me to be so trivial, such a simple restatement of the longtime youthful delusion, that it’s a great joke – awful yet funny at the same time. Have a look, p. 70:

In the first place, sexuality is divorced from its too close connection with the genitals and is regarded as a more comprehensive bodily function, having pleasure as its goal and only secondarily coming to serve the ends of reproduction. In the second place the sexual impulses are regarded as including all of those merely affectionate and friendly impulses to which usage applies the exceedingly ambiguous word “love.” I do not, however, regard these two extensions as innovations but rather restorations: they signify the removal of inexpedient limitations of the concept into which we had allowed ourselves to be led.

It’s effectively a restatement of the reverse, upside-down, reality that entails Donald Trump as the President of the United States. It's the selfish, solipsistic, egotistic position and Freud used his life to refine and promote it. 

But I more deeply see as I grow older that this position is error and horror, and that getting out of selfishness is much more truthful and fun!

“The Unseen Presence of Victorious Corruption”

Sometimes there are words that make music, without sound or rhythm, just by the truth they present.

Joseph Conrad uses such musical words - “...the unseen presence of victorious corruption...” - in his story, The Heart of Darkness, when the narrator reaches the up-river station in the jungle and meets the dying station master, Mr. Kurtz. He describes his feeling about colonialist dehumanization, soulless science, commercial exploitation, slavery and murder as follows:

    “It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned to Kurtz for relief – positively for relief. ‘Nevertheless, I think Mr. Kurtz is a remarkable man,’ I said with emphasis. He [another corrupt company official] started, dropped on me a heavy glance, said very quickly ‘He WAS,’ and turned his back on me. My hour of favour was over; I found myself lumped along with Kurtz as a partisan of methods for which the time was not right: I was unsound! Ah! But it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares.

    “I had turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz, who, I was ready to admit, was as good as buried. And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night...”

This whole passage, even the whole book, is a masterpiece awe-inspiring art, but this phrase about the unseen presence of victorious corruption just rang my soul, seemed like it expressed my whole life.

Sven Lindqvist

I had recently finished reading Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide,” which treats of Conrad, the background at the end of the nineteenth century, and what happened in the next forty-five years. “Exterminate all the brutes,” are Kurtz’s words. Lindqvist had written:

    “And when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew…

    “Everywhere knowledge is being suppressed, knowledge that, if it were to be made known, would shatter our image of the world and force us to question ourselves – everywhere there, ‘Heart of Darkness’ is being enacted…

    “You already know that: So do I. It is not knowledge that we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions...”

Lindqvist mentions how Conrad, who was friends with H.G. Wells at the time, had just read Wells’ new book, “The Invisible Man,” as he was writing “The Heart of Darkness” and this resonated with the “invisible” aspect of the “vile atmosphere.”

I first read the Conrad story when I was in my twenties, and then again when I was middle-aged, but when I read it now in my old age I am able to see infinitely more meaning and music in it. England and France especially, the atmosphere of Triumphant Progress at the turn of the century, then World War One and World War Two, the U.S. invasions of other countries, and the whole wretched 20^th century are more known to me than before. My earlier readings now seem pathetically bleak.

Just this one phrase, “...the unseen presence of victorious corruption...” - strikes a dominant chord of my experience on this planet from the time I first went away to school right up to my contact this afternoon with the medical and banking industries.