Daily Revolution: Your News, Steroid-Free (September, 2005)

...because the unexamined news is not worth reading...

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September 1, 2005: "Nature is so Cruel"

Someone said it to me today, and I would bet you've been hearing it too the past couple of days, just as we all heard and read it time and again last December: "Nature is so cruel."

It's a vapid statement that is intended more to gloss than to explain, but we have to deal with it nonetheless if we are to learn anything constructive and life-furthering from the tragedies of our lives and times. The one thing we can't afford is to stare at it in a kind of My-Pet-Goat vacancy, like my friend in the picture here.

I've written on this theme before, and in my book as well. Then, it was the tsunami disaster of 2004. The same urgency for action, healing, and reflection applies to this situation as to that other. As for action: if you can give money, then use the link at right to help the ARC do its best to bring relief to those affected. If you have a skill or a resource to offer, then let your heart guide you in that. I happen to be a counselor, so I've volunteered to provide free counseling for those affected.

As I write now, the last vestiges of Katrina are arriving here in the Northeast. The air is pasty with humidity, and there will no doubt be a storm or two—nothing more. So here we have time to reflect a little: this is part of the healing experience that will help us all through this. Because when we don't stop to ask questions of events like these; when we don't pause to learn, such things tend to recur, leaving us just as weakly-prepared as for the last one.

So one good question to ask is of that statement, "Nature is so cruel." Is it true? Well, to judge by appearances, it sure can be: last year in Asia, over a quarter of a million people died from the tsunami. Today, the Governor of Louisiana is estimating that the toll will run into the thousands once the bodies have been found and counted. Texas Two-Iron himself decided to abbreviate his five-week vacation by two days, and contributed the following expert assessment: "We are dealing with one of the worst natural disasters in our nation's history." (Meanwhile, unnamed city officials in Biloxi and New Orleans were asking, "um...where's the National Guard when we need it?").*

I'm always amazed by the fact that the "Nature is so cruel" judgment usually comes from folks who are devoutly religious. When you ask them why a benevolent God would create and administer a world of "cruel Nature," you will get blank looks and then maybe something like, "well, God's ways are unknowable, we can't pretend to know His ways..." But He and his nature-agents are cruel nonetheless.

I can't tell you any more than the next fellow what Cosmic meaning there might be to such an event, any more than I can tell you exactly why, in the most prosperous country in the history of civilization, the poverty rate went up last year, to more than 12 per cent.

But I can tell you that Nature is not cruel. Even humans are not, by nature, cruel. Evil is not about something we are, but something we have done—a critical mistake in judgment or perspective about our place within the universe. And frankly, a lot of our trouble with Nature in particular comes down to poor planning and bad management. Take a look at from nearly four years ago, which reviews the Federal Emergency Management Agency's assessment of the likelihood of a disaster like the one we've witnessed in the South. Here's a quote:

The New Orleans hurricane scenario may be the deadliest of all. In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city's less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water. Thousands of refugees could land in Houston.

Well, we don't know the exact death toll yet, but we do know that much of the city is under 20 feet of water; that over 200,000 people were stranded; and we also know that many of the refugees are being bused to Houston as we speak. Science, when it is well done, can be more eerily prophetic than any Moses or Muhammed or Nostradamus that you can cite.

So, what did FEMA get for its prescience? The blind eye and deaf ear of a government that didn't give a damn. Oh, and their budget got cut, too. (I'm not placing all the blame on the Bushies, because state and local governments also ignored the warnings).

This is not a time for assigning blame, anyway: there will be plenty of time and louder voices than mine to do all that later. We can do what we can, each of us, to help; we can also pray for those affected by the hurricane. But if you're going to ask god for its help in healing the human damage done, wouldn't it make sense to begin by trusting that the universe is not "cruel"? Just a thought.

Meanwhile, ask questions of yourself and of your beliefs about the meaning of an event like this. To help you get started, here's a selection from , which deals directly with the kind of self-examination that may apply to a situation like this.

How strange and anomalous is our relationship with Nature! We strip and rape our planetary Home, mindlessly subjugating and destroying its creatures, materials, and resources; and we continue our depredations even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the effect that we are relentlessly digging our own graves. How can this be? Is it mere stupidity or selfishness on the part of corporate and governmental leaders? This may be part of it, but I suspect that the source of the problem goes beyond simple ignorance or greed. Again, it is not the fault of individual people, but rather a problem with the beliefs that people often carry, below the level of conscious awareness. This brings us to the really weird aspect of our relationship with Nature-our assumption of Her limitless abundance, Nature's unending capacity to serve our species as the bottomless Well of power and provision-no matter what we do to or take from Her.

The essential assumption underlying this strange relationship we have with Nature involves division or splitting: we are not one with, but instead apart from, Nature. The relationship is, again, hierarchical-one between a Master and an obedient Servant: Nature must bow in servitude to the technologies and demands of humankind, because since we are separate, we assume that one of us has got to be in control. Thus, we are able to allow Nature a mysterious Power, different from our own, even as we continue our subjugation of Her creatures and resources. We persist with this ideology of division even to the definition of our own human nature. Our Power is intelligent, calculated, and masterful; Nature's Power is wild, uncontrolled, and void of intelligence except that which we as humans force Her to adopt through the technologies of progress. Our nature is human; the nature of animals is “bestial.” Though some scientific theories may posit a remote and primordial animal origin of humanity, we presume that we are far beyond that now, if it was ever so-therefore, we are increasingly separated from that animal origin, that animal nature; and we assume that this is a very good thing indeed.

This is the cultural framework, the architecture of belief that informs and supports our relationship with Nature. It is evident in the behavior of corporations, governments, our mass media, and even many of our sciences. The costs of this ideological splitting of Humankind and Nature are becoming more and more painfully apparent to many in our world, even if some of our leaders of business, church, and state choose to remain in denial.
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*The National Guard, by the way, is in Baghdad, of course—fighting a useless war at a time when its homeland desperately needs its help and protection.


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September 2, 2005: It's Another Accountability Moment

If you have your eyes and your mind open—not wide, but just ajar, let's say—the reports and images coming out of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans in particular are enough to make you weep openly, not caring who sees or what they think. And again, given just the smallest opening of awareness, the realization of the government arrogance, corruption, and ignorance that helped make this desperate moment in American history, is enough to make you vomit copiously.

Perhaps you can begin by reading William Rivers Pitt's piece, which puts the entire horror into a nutshell of awful accountability. Then go to TO's environment page and find out how the Bushies have been intimidating climate scientists who have unwelcome news about the probable causes of the increasing pace and destructiveness of natural disasters, , and you'll see how pervasive the decadence of this putrid government we have in Washington really has become.

Science has been forcefully shackled and pushed into a dusty closet of religious propaganda; reason has been dressed in the stone garments of an ideology of shrill deceit; and plain human feeling has been suppressed in favor of an icy emotional rigidity that murders, enslaves, and oppresses human beings while praising God and glorifying His presidential priests of earthly Power.

It is time for a global, resounding, . I wrote this piece (Word document) for the World Wide Renaissance project; and now seems an appropriate time to post it here. As always, I welcome comments, questions, and criticism: use the Feedback link above. Meanwhile, let us continue to each do what we can for those who suffer, and work toward a better day, a clearer future, a fairer and more responsive government.

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September 6, 2005: The Incompetence of Tyranny

A theme that is often overlooked by both historians and newspeople is that of the fundamental incompetence of tyrants, such as those currently in power in Washington. Yet from Nero and Caligula, all the way to the various Communist emperors of the 20th century and the Saddams and Bushes of the 21st, the defining mark of tyranny—its solipsistic arrogance—has made for bumbling, stupid, destructive, and inevitably self-destructive, government.

Industrial age and contemporary corporations bear the same mark: the incompetence that derives from the petty self-absorption of imperialists. Their obsession with the veneer of self-imagery and the drab array of the superficial creates a myopia that increasingly blinds itself, until there is only vision for what is no longer there. Thus, tyrants will always miss the sickening effects of their depredations, until some event or combination of events so disrupts the tower of ashes upon which their power rests, that even they will be forced to take notice.

For George W. Bush, the moment has come. To borrow a metaphor from a wonderful parable on tyranny by Dr. Seuss, , the little fellow at the bottom—after years of patient support and groaning oppression—has burped.

And the rest of us are ready to throw up. It doesn't matter what color state you're from anymore, or what animal's silhouette appears on your voter registration card, or who you voted for last year, two years ago, or in 2000. None of that makes a difference anymore: as I indicated , America is not as divided as the pundits recently thought. Mack the turtle, having suffered for some five years the forced division, oppression, haughty contempt, and arrogant duplicity of its so-called leaders, has burped. And now it's time for a little Constitutional Maalox—Article II, Section 4 style. Even the media are starting to catch on; but we will have to lead the way for them, as long accustomed as they have been to serving as the slavish mouthpiece for tyranny. Let us once again show the world, and ourselves, how a free people flexes its muscles—in a Daily Revolution upon tyrants and their reptilian blindness.

Mr. Terence McKenna rejoins us now with a few thoughts on recent events. As you read, notice that Terry has independently arrived at the same insight that the sage New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, expressed (Terry e-mailed me his piece the day before the Krugman column appeared).

Hurricane Katrina has reduced New Orleans to third world squalor, and coastal Mississippi is not far behind. The disaster is so widespread that Alabama, which was also hard hit, has gotten almost no news coverage.

What amuses me, though, is to find out that after all of the rhetoric about the free market as a problem solver, everyone is expecting the Federal Government to solve this crisis. Not just Democrats, but everyone. Of course they are right, the free market has no useful role here (except to make gasoline prices spike) but all the same, despite years of saying we want smaller government, here we are asking for a big helping of federal aid.

Yet the Bush administration (which, after all hates and fears effective government) has not been equal to the task. The under funded levies failed. And FEMA, which was supposed to have contingency plans for every possible disaster also failed. It has taken four days to rescue people stranded in New Orleans - how is that possible. And what about the information age? In an era where people are accustomed to getting news on cable TV and the internet, those in need have been reduced to bull horns and rumor.

The President remains an embarrassment. He finally toured the disaster area today (Friday). But there is nothing he can do that will take away what is a big shiner. This failure will become part of his legacy.

But let's go back to the private sector - the free market. The free market is not of much use now. Nor for that matter are tax cuts. What is needed now are firm decisions and cash. And cash equals tax revenue. But after a series of aggressive tax cuts, the taxes that will rescue us are coming not from corporations or the wealthy but from the likes of regular folks - middle class wage earners.

It is clear that the only institution capable of managing during a major disaster is government - and a government made up of well staffed agencies that stand at the ready for every contingency. However weak the current government is (crippled by budget cuts, and stifled by anti government Bush appointees) nonetheless, the recovery will be driven and funded by government. Highways, local roads and all manner of damaged infrastructure will be rebuilt. We also need to rethink our approach to flood control. Over the past 40 years, environmentalists have warned us that rivers should not be contained, but be allowed to flood - that development along rivers (and along the seashore) needs to be controlled. Perhaps now we will listen - though for Bush to do so would alienate his Republican base. Still, don't look to the free market for wise decisions. Given an opportunity to control the agenda, it would build on any and all available land - and to hell with the consequences.

And what about the poor souls who were trapped in New Orleans. The free market doesn't give a tinker's damn about them. I would hazard a guess that their lot has not improved much despite the improved GDP. And if you asked them, I bet they'd rather have a job in manufacturing than the benefit of cheap goods from China (that we traded manufacturing jobs for).

In an earlier era (the 40's, 50's and 60's) we looked to government to solve everything. We were wrong, but now we've come to an entirely different conclusion, that societies function best with very limited government. That turns out to be wrong too. Now that time has come to move back to the reasonable middle.

Terence McKenna

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September 7, 2005: Badgley for President

This just in...all Arabian show horses that had been stranded in the city of New Orleans have been successfully rescued. You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie.

I just wanted it to be a matter of record that we do report the feel-good events of our times here at Daily Rev. And as we all heave a great sigh of relief at this welcome news (just as the horses must have relaxed once Brownie got fired from the job of attending to their care); let us consider a very meaningful and important topic, which this nation will inevitably have to face in the coming months.

For once the impeachment hearings have been concluded, and the White House has been successfully cleared of the pestilence currently (well, occasionally) infesting its western wing, we will have to make a choice as to who is optimally qualified to heal this nation and set our course back to a forward-looking path.

This suggestion comes from the archives of the Bard Observer, my undergraduate alma muttha's student newspaper, courtesy of the arduous research of Ivan the Gentle, who in fact did the photography for the piece detailing the character and exploits of our first nominee for leading us out of the post-Bush era—Donald Badgley. Just download the pdf file and turn to page 6. Don also seems to have attracted the students of nearby Marist College (open the link in the graphic for more).

He's got the campaign experience, having run for the office in the past; he has clearly won over the youth vote once before and can be bet on to do it again; and he has that oh-so-American, Walt-Whitman-meets-Moses look about him: a perfect fit for this retro age of ours.

His politics are unerring, and his plain-spoken candor is sure to feel like a refreshing breeze after the super-heated Rovespeak spin of the Bush era. What's not to like about a man who clearly perceives that "all laws are lies"? And the Christian right should find him quite to their liking, based on appearance alone.

All right, I suppose he's probably dead now. But wouldn't that be a point in his favor, after all? Think carefully before you answer....


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September 8, 2005: Nature: Do We Belong?

We have already dealt with the question, "Is Nature cruel?" Perhaps now is a good time to ask a related but perhaps even more critical question (in terms of our future survival on this planet): "do we belong?" That is, are we a part of Nature, or are we Her separate and unequal Master?

I have written about this very question, and the possible consequences of our arriving at what I suspect is the wrong answer to it, in my book (see graphic at right to order). Further along, I'll present another quote from the discussion of Nature in that chapter, but first I want to present a couple of links that will provide some very topical context to this question.

The first comes from a New York Times editorial published last week and written by Mark Fischetti, a contributing editor to . He had written an article in Sci-Am some four years ago in which he presented validated and compelling scientific evidence of the cataclysm to come in America's Gulf Coast, with a plan on how we might avert disaster. In that piece, he had recommended that we adopt a model based on successes in the Netherlands to protect ourselves from natural disaster by working with the forces of Nature. Fischetti reminds us, "The conceit that we can control the natural world is what made New Orleans vulnerable."

Fischetti's piece is worth reading primarily as a reminder that, as Einstein repeatedly urged us during his lifetime, humility is the energy from which true insight upon the world and the universe blooms. When a scientist begins from the perspective of humility—that is, the realization that we are not the Masters of the Universe, but rather unique components of a vast natural diversity—then the scientist's work becomes a synergy of knowledge and feeling, otherwise known as wisdom. Needless to say, this is the condition under which the greatest and most enduring scientific insights are realized, from which the most beneficial and practical advances arise. In short, when in humility we honor our place within the cosmic whole, then the benevolent purpose of science is advanced in its work, and the forced division of knowledge and spirit dissolves.

It is to support this understanding that I've posted the link in the sidebar (right) for PETA's animal advocacy campaign to assist in the rescue of pets and other domestic animals stranded by the flood waters of Katrina. It is not a question of whether saving people is more important than saving animals: if we are to consider ourselves an essential and equal part of Nature's great web of diversity—as I think we must if we are to hope to see our species survive—then we must consider the value of all of Nature's creatures, and the fact that all have suffered from the arrogance and ignorance of those governmental leaders and cultural demagogues who have drawn a fixed and violent line of division between ourselves and our natural source. So take a look at the PETA site and see if you'd like to join in its petition to urge FEMA to support the rescue of all the creatures stranded by this disaster, and offer them whatever other support you can.

So here's the excerpt from :

Most of us in this culture have been trained to believe that our animal nature is a part of our “lower nature,” our “baser self,” to which is ascribed all our evil, taboo, primitive, and ungodlike impulses, such as deviousness, violence (“bestiality”), and sexuality. This, again, is the ideological divorce that I referred to earlier: could it be that many of the more familiar (and manifestly painful) divorces of our lives are somehow related to this divorcing of ourselves and Nature? From our earliest childhood, most of us are subjected to this form of conditioning, until it becomes so deeply and insidiously programmed into us that it seems a part of our nature! As we grow up, we learn to make compromises with our animal nature-to tame it, train it, and channel it into socially-acceptable forms of expression and indulgence. This is the compromise that is embodied in all the dominant religious ideologies of the West, in many of our codes of governmental law, and in much of our science, such as the Freudian canon of psychology.

Perhaps there is also an evolutionary lesson contained in these circumstances surrounding the tsunami disaster: we are being called back to a living relationship of equivalence with Nature and her creatures. Evolution is not the linear, survival-of-the-fittest, exclusionary movement from primitive-to-civilized that has often been drilled into us. No: evolution is probably more accurately conceived in that more transformative of geometric shapes, the circle . It winds through overlapping arcs and ripples of growth, none of which can be identified as definitive or superior.

Could it be that we humans are on one such arc of transformation, wherein the limitations of intellect-in-isolation are coming to be generally realized-a period of return to a broader perspective on ourselves and our planetary neighbors? For several millennia, we have pushed our forebrains naked and alone out onto the stage of life, in an ever-increasing isolation of aggrandizement and distortion, only to discover-on a deeply visceral, maybe even a genetic basis-that we can't truly survive or endure this way. Are we in the midst of an evolutionary ripple that is taking us, through the developmental shocks of crisis and tragedy, into a more intimate and equivalent relationship with Nature-with the animals and plants, rocks and soil of our world-that will lead us back from the delusion of the monarchy of intellect, toward the complete and regenerative experience of ourselves as individual threads in the eternal fabric of Being?

I do not know the answers to those questions, yet I feel deeply that if we can recover a sense of our animal nature, of our equal and living relationship with Nature, then we are very likely to find the humility that will lead us toward a renewal in all the other relationships of our lives. Such a movement of “personal evolution” will lead us out of the estrangement and inner divorce that so often poison our relationships with co-workers, spouses, lovers, and perhaps most crucial of them all, our children. I also feel that if only some of us can take that developmental step in the recovery of a feeling-awareness of our animal nature, then it will in turn contribute toward a transformation in our social structures that may help in the preservation of our planetary Home.

Note: many thanks to and his readers for linking to us in his Altercation weblog.

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September 9, 2005: Half-Fired

Well, when you've been fired, you're Black—but when you've been half-fired, you're Brown.

Sorry about that. Really I am. But there it is, no taking it back now. Anyway, FEMA chief Michael Brown , sent back to Washington by that far-seeing supervisor of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff (now there's a guy who missed his calling—that's an undertaker's face if ever I saw one). Brown said he's being sent back to Washington merely to return to his normal role of doing absolutely nothing; so don't let this guy talk you into a "little something to make it interesting" if you meet him on the golf course.

The only scary thing about this is that Brown added that he'd be overseeing the planning for dealing with hurricane Ophelia. So if you happen to be in Ophelia's path, flee now, or if you must stay, then may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Sorry again, a little Shakespeareian humor there. It's from Hamlet—you know, the play. Ophelia is one of the characters...commits suicide. By drowning herself.

All right, then: let's get serious here. Put yourself in Mike Brown's place, or maybe put Mike Brown in your place—your job where you work. You have earned your job through bald nepotism and craven fealty to a crooked and tyrannical executive; since your appointment, you've done positively nothing, added nothing of value to your unit—not a widget or a dollar made, not a single thing accomplished beyond keeping the towel boys at the company gym and the waiters at that pricey Mexican restaurant rather busy.

At last, through a series of unpleasant events—poor timing more than anything, you know, on the part of Fortune—your cover is blown apart, and some half-truths and certain disingenuous claims made on your resume are revealed. It looks like you'll have to duck and cover, and skip town ahead of the Turk chasing you down the hallway.

Of course, in your line of work, I expect, no one will have died as a result of your smiling neglect of your work, and no cities will have been blown into annihilation because you were too busy at the 19th Hole to check some forecasts back at the office.

But lo—a miracle: you are not fired, just reassigned. The paychecks keep on coming, and you're hidden in another office where you can be safely out of sight and mind after a while. You can get that third SUV you've had your eye on; and there will be no need to deny yourself a fresh set of woods and irons to replace last year's model. You accept the slight gratefully and tell the boss that you will indeed keep your nose clean and your mouth shut.

Now let's get even more serious for a moment: Mike Brown, Chertoff, and even Karl Rove are not, after all, the only, or even the first tomatoes that must be crushed in this pot. The New York Times headline, , got it completely wrong: how can a guy being kept on the payroll while being sent back to his plush D.C. office be called a "casualty"?

But that kind of passing stupidity doesn't matter, either; because even calling for these people's heads is itself a half-measure that will only allow the real demons in this hell that our nation has become to escape once more. Call your Congressman, your Senator, and talk to your neighbors, shouting it far and wide until all these suntanned gavones just back from their month-long vacations hear it loud and clear: IMPEACHMENT NOW.

If you had cancer, the surgeon would not snip off a few peripheral bumps on the tumor: he would do his damndest to cut out the entire thing, along with some of the affected tissue around the malignancy. That's what needs to happen in our country now: the tumor in Washington must be thoroughly and permanently removed; and it wouldn't hurt to zap the entire area with a cleansing blast of ethical radiation, just to give the political body a clear ground upon which to start new growth.

We will close for the weekend now with a quote from a wonkish but fascinating piece on the importance of a city whose value has been traditionally prized by wiser leaders than the ones we have now. The complete article, by George Friedman, is on the site, and can be viewed by registering for a 7-day pass. (Thanks to Shady Acres Mike for the tip).

During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.

Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.

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September 12, 2005: The AWOL Administration

Terry McKenna returns to the blog today with a firm response to the wheedling rationalizers such as the NYT's David Brooks. For the bazillionth time this past week, Brooks has served up the same pabulum that's been going around the right-wing circle-jerk club.

I think Terry's analysis compares favorably with that lame-Brooks approach, and in fact even with the vitriolic bitterness betrayed in Michael Moore's recent In particular, compare Terry's optimal timeline with the actual timeline revealed by

In short, any way you slice this entire situation, you are left with the same lesson we discussed last week about the incompetence of tyrants. It's not merely that they "fall asleep at the switch"—it's more that they're never at the switch to begin with—as Mr. McKenna will now explain.
 

The president's failure over Katrina is not being swept under the rug this time, hard as conservative shills are trying. Bush's defenders are right to point out that both parties share the blame for placing FEMA under Homeland Security, but so what. They are also right when they point to mistakes made by local authorities. But again, so what? Yes, New Orleans could have put its buses to better use, but even if they had, and maybe evacuated 10,000 more people (the story goes that approximately 250 city owned buses were destroyed by the flooding) the city still would have been destroyed.

And what about the other towns shattered by the storm, towns like Biloxi and Gulfport? After they were destroyed, there was no local government to help. Period. So the feds had to step in.

And yes - as David Brooks has said in his Sunday column, government tends toward bureaucracy and inefficiency - so (I'm extrapolating here) no government would have done any better.

Nonsense! What we have is a failure of management. Let me explain what a competent manager would have done when presented by a hurricane. By the way, most pundits know no more about management than the president, but my career has been in business, and so I have been part of disaster recovery plans, and seen how effective managers resume operations after an emergency.

Had the president been a genuine hands-on executive, he would have cut short his vacation, and arrived home Sunday morning. He also would have cancelled his engagement in San Diego on Tuesday.

Then he would have held an emergency cabinet meeting (including FEMA officers). He would have made sure that each department was aware of the potential for damage, and that everyone was prepared to go full out to manage if disaster struck. By Monday morning, he would have started receiving regular updates of the storm's destruction. These updates would have become more frightening as the day went on. And of course, FEMA would be demonstrating full command. By midnight Monday (the president would still be up) it would have become clear that New Orleans was in deep trouble and that across the gulf coast local communications had been wiped out. By Tuesday morning, rescue ships and trucks would have started bringing in generators, fuel, water and soldiers to set up base camps. Satellite communication networks would have begun to replace shattered local communications. And by Wednesday morning, local emergency managers would have again been able to direct rescue and recovery.

Had this been done, by Thursday morning, the Superdome and Conventions Center would have been emptied out and - whenever he chose to visit, the president could have gone into the crowds and would have received well-earned acclaim. Of course, that's what would have happened with competent management. But we all know what did happen.

—T. McKenna

Finally, a word or two on 9/11. The mass media's obsession with celebrity remains unabated, it would seem. This year's ceremony in New York was the usual parade of dense, saccharine sentiment and bluster: Mayor Bloomberg talking, former Mayor Guiliani talking, Gov. Pataki talking, Condi talking...well, you get the idea.

The trend was somewhat balanced, at least, by the now-traditional reading of the names of the dead by family members—a part of the ceremony that got some attention in terms of airtime. This was encouraging, because it showed me that the media could give voice to ordinary people when it wanted to, and that these folks could reveal an amazing eloquence that far surpasses anything that the politicians can muster in their finest moments. Under the shadow of Katrina, the mood and deep urgency of these people remembering those they had lost four years ago was especially poignant and intense.

I was reminded of a verse from the I Ching's 24th Hexagram, Return: "Repeated return. Danger. No blame." The politicians somehow believe that it helps us all to hack formulaically at the same notes of nationalism and sacrifice, while quietly perpetuating the poverty of awareness—this is the repetition and the danger that the I Ching refers to in its metaphor. But the people who pay the ultimate price of loss for the bumbling inattention of politicians—the ignorance of a memorandum ("Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."); the inability to plan for future contingencies or the stupid dismissal of published scientific evidence of impending catastrophe in the Gulf Coast—the ordinary folk who pay that price of unending grief, they carry the message that bears our greatest hope for recovery and transformation. We owe them our attention, our straightforward and sugar-free compassion, our unstinting and undemanding support. We owe them and those they mourn the free expression of our will that their loss shall have been our lesson, that never again should the careless and grasping self-aggrandizement of myopic political leaders be allowed to force needless and brutal sacrifices upon the innocent, the poor, and the powerless of our nation.

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September 13, 2005: Through Gleaming Teeth: Compulsive Lying

Well, Brownie, we hardly knew ye—but what we did get to know we could have done without. But how would you like to have Scott McClellan's job—Executive Director of Deceit? (Or is that Karl's title?) Here's what Scotty had to say in tribute to the departing FEMA head today:

"The president appreciates Mike Brown's service," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters on board Air Force One. "This was Mike Brown's decision. This was a decision he made."

No kidding, Scott—can you say that again, with a straight face and the colored contacts out?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of what psychiatrists call compulsive lying. It is considered common in Borderline Personality Disorder, Conduct Disorders, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), the various strains of psychopathy, and Antisocial Personality Disorder. Once it has been thoroughly studied (and baby do we have plenty of case studies out there in the public eye now), compulsive lying will no doubt be found to have a neurochemical substrate, just like depression, chronic anxiety, and the psychotic disorders. Obviously, we already know that a liar can sometimes symptomatically reveal certain involuntary signs (increased heart rate, electrodermal activity, or blood pressure) during a polygraph examination.

How lying becomes a personal lifestyle choice is a matter that's fairly well studied; but how it becomes an institutional identity is somewhat more of a mystery. Keep in mind, we're not talking merely about the characteristic and occasional lies told by people of various classes—children, married people, politicans, or married politicians (sorry Bubba, had to get that one in—but if you run for Mayor against Bloomberg, I'll retract it and work on your campaign).

No, we're talking about lying as an image, the repetition compulsion of a coherent group and all its members. The evidence, of course, is everywhere: pick up the newspaper on any given day and you'll find illustrations in abundance (for starters, check out in the Times). Follow a casual anecdotal review of the Bushies' five year trail of deceit, and you'll come across so many that you'll need a database to track them (which is exactly what the created—check it out and spend a half-hour or so with it).

Individual treatment for compulsive lying runs a gamut of options: an antidepressant drug such as Anafranil—which has a good track record in OCD—can be administered. Hypnosis and biofeedback have also been tried on liars, as has behavioral or cognitive-behavioral therapy. Freudian and post-Freudian psychotherapies have had generally poor results with liars. But damn it, liars are hard to treat—how do you tell when they're cured? They might be lying. Or worse still, they might be religiously certain of the truth of their very delusion. Some say that this is precisely the pathology that Mountain Bike Flash is laboring under. I remember a psychiatrist friend of mine telling me that the trouble with personality disorders is that the folks who have them don't think they're crazy—they just drive everyone around them crazy. Or, as Nick the Geek asked me today after work, "how many lines does it take to make an infinite loop?"

Nevertheless, there are treatment options out there for lying people. But what about a lying institution—hundreds and maybe thousands of powerful people under a single star-spangled banner, who tell falsehoods by the dozens on a daily basis—who probably lie in their sleep—who lie and lie and lie until The Lie surrounds them like a black, foggy aura?

Well, perhaps mere identification would be a start: expose the lies, the liars, and the media mouthpieces who reinforce the liars with airtime, fame, and profit. Next, we could borrow a page from the behavioral therapist's handbook and remove the reinforcement. Try adding an element of fun to this step: next time you watch the evening news or read the morning paper, play your own governmental version of the popular corporate pastime, . Insert terms into your bingo card that you associate with lies told by the Bushies—here are a few examples to get you started (and send me your own favorites):

WMD / weapons of mass destruction
weapons-grade uranium
axis of evil
compassionate conservatism
mission accomplished
making progress
mixed messages
free elections
helping the enemy

Then, when you've completed a row on your card, don't just stand up and shout "Bullshit!" (though that's a very good start). Turn off the TV, put down the paper, and pick up the phone, open a compose message window in your email client, or type a letter to the editor of your local rag, telling your Congressman, Senator, President, other elected official, or your local media outlet that you've played and won, and you are now waiting for your prize—the opening of impeachment hearings in the Congress of the United States.

Meanwhile: Brownie, you've done a heck of a job. Don't let the door hit ya on the way out.

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September 14, 2005: My Bad

In my world, insubordination is a virtue; unquestioning obedience is slavery. Would you trade the truth that you have, for a lie you can spend? Make glory your goal, and you will die a thousand times before your body finally succumbs.

Among the inwardly dead, remorse is the first sign of resurrection. I look for such signs every day, and ask the cosmic breath of the universe to send the healing energy of remorse to those dead madmen and power-brokers whose hearts are stiffened with ideological granite.

And so it was with eagerness and hope that my remorse-radar went up today, at the news of the President's acceptance of responsibility for the innumerable and irretrievable failures of himself and his government in the preparation for, and response to, the Katrina disaster (among other things).

The answer I received, once I'd read his remarks in detail, was not encouraging:
 

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government, and to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Mr Bush said at a news conference. "I want to know what went right and what went wrong."

Well, Flash, the answers to your last need-to-know comment are, "nothing" and "everything," respectively. That's as simple as I can make it, partner.

The bottom line here is this: a man who is ready to accept responsbility and hold himself and his cronies accountable does not hand off blame to other levels of government, other unnamed individuals; as he apportions out his own acceptable dose of responsibility.

In short, this is not remorse—it is rationalization. I'm not fooled by it, and I hope you're not either. And here's a prediction—watch now as the Mayor of New Orleans, the Governor of Louisiana, and the dogcatcher of Biloxi, Mississippi are prodded to the front of the media stage to publicly make their own Mea Culpas, and thus clear away some of the mud from the Crawford Shrub's gleaming blue lapel.

This is a man who has lived his entire life without accountability—how could I have been so naive as to have expected remorse from him? Why can't he just say, "I'm sorry" without a hint of rationalization or excuse? Because he has probably never had to; never learned to—just review what about the victims of this catastrophe. I remember reading those comments the other day and thinking, sort of like Brit Hume after the London bombings, "Time to buy...Pepto-Bismol."

So Mountain Bike Flash thinks that this is all like a friendly two-on-two in golf or basketball. You miss the putt for the team or lose your dribble, give yourself a virile slap on the chest and go, "My bad," and everyone chuckles at your steely manhood as the game goes on.

This is a man so adrift from reality that he may as well be dead. And indeed, he already is, to the core. So for about the 40th time in this blog, I repeat: Impeachment is the only answer.

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September 15, 2005: High Crimes Enough

Criminally negligent homicide—is that grounds for impeachment? This is the case that events have proven, that must be kept before the public eye, and that must be fully prosecuted in the courts and the Congress of our nation.

For an excellent piece on this issue, see , from which I'll present a quote:

On Tuesday, one day after the storm, as Bush played golf and attended a fundraiser, foreign leaders sought to mobilize a relief effort to quickly get help to the submerged city. Russia offered to send planes of food to New Orleans. Cuba, which was cited by the United Nations as providing a model for hurricane response, offered to deploy 1,100 doctors and 26 tons of medical supplies—with the first 100 doctors arriving wherever they were needed within 24 hours, with the rest following within 72 hours. The feds, however, prevented Cuba, Russia, Venezuela and a host of other governments from mounting relief efforts which could have reached survivors well before American National Guard troops were deployed....Five days of depraved indifference to human life on the part of the Bush administration, coupled with obstructionism, has now cost thousands of human lives. Victims who survived and died alike were treated as though they were less than human—left to wallow in some of the most atrocious conditions humans have had to survive in this country since the days of slavery.

Niman points out that Cuba has an outstanding record of emergency response, and that even where they experience vast destruction from hurricanes—as from Hurricane Ivan last year—they manage to protect their people, both the rich and the poor, in time.

Think about this as you listen to Injurious George recite his Rovespeak prepared statement on Thursday night. As you listen to his word-salad of nationalistic platitudes and empty promises, think to yourself, "If I owned a business (perhaps you do, and that will make it even easier)—and I had an employee who had walked away from the store at a time when it was clearly threatened from without, with the result that there was irrecoverable loss and damage to the business—would I want that guy working for me the next day, let alone another three years to come?"

If your answer to that question is the same as mine and that of many others in this nation, then open the flag graphic above and learn what you can do to terminate this irresponsible, destructive, callow, self-indulging, and indeed criminal employee.

George W. Bush and his handlers and cronies—Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of that degenerate core—have committed criminally negligent homicide, viz.:

criminal negligence - (law) recklessly acting without reasonable caution and putting another person at risk of injury or death (or failing to do something with the same consequences)

It is long past time that they paid the price for their crimes.

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Must-read of the week: A new essay by Bill Moyers on the decadence of faith-based government, .
 

Must-see video of the week: Jon Stewart interviews Kurt Vonnegut, .

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September 16, 2005: Death, Lies, and Duct Tape

Looking back over the past ten days' entries, it is clear to me that we've done as much with the matter at hand as could be hoped of this small space. As it happens, there is some sense of continuity, at least: I had been planning a week's worth of entries on the topic of the economy, money, and materialism.

And look what we have heard tonight: a man with the blood of hundreds reeking in his nostrils, surrounded by the devastation caused by his own malignant indifference, proposing to bury his criminal negligence beneath a mountain of lucre. It is vile.

He promises to "rebuild this great city." But even he, the most powerful man in the world, and with a personal earpiece connected to the Holiest of Holies, cannot resurrect the dead. Nor can he turn back time and start over again; and he certainly lacks the insight to perceive his own incompetence and hollow incapacity to meet a terrible moment with great and natural leadership. He also lacks the ability to truly admit wrongdoing and accept the cost of his grievous and irremediable error. In short, he can't lead, doesn't even follow very well, and he won't get out of the way.

The rest of us will have to insist on his doing that, with the impetus of the Constitution. Meanwhile, we have to attend to the lessons of these events, these horrible losses to humanity and Nature. We owe it to the hundreds who have needlessly died; to the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—who have suffered and will suffer; that some great sea-change of insight and activism will grow from this mud of ignorance and sloth, and lead us toward a more democractic nation with a more responsive and responsible government.

We must rigorously question authority—question its most hallowed presumptions and most rigid projections made upon our minds and souls. It is a task that much wiser people than I—Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, and Bill Moyers come to mind—have urged upon us. For example, in 1977, Chomsky wrote about the insidious dangers of propaganda within a democratic state, in the wake of the end of the lost war in Vietnam; his message still resonates in this very moment:

Here we have a marvelous illustration of the functioning of propaganda in a democracy. A totalitarian state simply enunciates official doctrine—clearly, explicitly. Internally, one can think what one likes, but one can only express opposition at one's peril. In a democratic system of propaganda no one is punished (in theory) for objecting to official dogma. In fact, dissidence is encouraged. What this system attempts to do is to fix the limits of possible thought: supporters of official doctrine at one end, and the critics...at the other...But we discover that all share certain tacit assumptions, and that it is these assumptions that are really crucial. No doubt a propaganda system is more effective when its doctrines are insinuated rather than asserted, when it sets the bounds for possible thought rather than simply imposing a clear and easily identifiable doctrine that one must parrot—or suffer the consequences. The more vigorous the debate, the more effectively the basic doctrines of the propaganda system, tacitly assumed on all sides, are instilled. Hence the elaborate pretense that the press is a critical dissenting force—maybe even too critical for the health of democracy—when in fact it is almost entirely subservient to the basic principles of the ideological system: in this case, the principle of the United States to serve as global judge and executioner. It is quite a marvelous system of indoctrination.*

Fairly eerie stuff, considering it was written nearly 30 years ago. Perhaps it reminds us of the resemblance between the administration currently in power and the one that Chomsky was recalling in these remarks—that of Nixon and his criminal cronies. Both of these nests of power were conceived in the complacency of aggression; perpetuated amid the spin of falsehood and the obsession with appearances; and ultimately undone by those very same inner forces of egomaniacal deceit, arrogance, and faith in the invinciblity of money, a program of lies, and the depredations of power.

As Barack Obama pointed out last week, the people of New Orleans and the entire Gulf Coast were abandoned by this nation's leaders long before a President decided to continue a vacation of bicyle riding and golfing rather than looking into the management of an impending catastrophe in a corner of his realm populated largely by the same destitute masses who had been driven into the depths of poverty by his own administration's policies of malignant neglect. Throwing money in their direction now may cause Barbara Bush to pursue further Marie Antionette-musings on the good fortune of indigents who are dumped by a violent Nature onto the golden doorstep of Power. It will also further enrich corporations and their contractors—many of the same which have profited from the excesses of the Iraqi occupation. But will it restore life to the innumerable people who had been left to a living death by the same imperial forces that now pretend to resurrect them?

Maybe there is no other practical response now; maybe with all that has happened, there is no other recourse but to spend what is necessary to heal the appearances of this disaster. But if that's where we leave it, then the suffering, the death, the poverty, and the negligent homicide of this administration will continue—in another place, at another time, amid other tragedies of man and Nature.

While the story of the Katrina disaster has been told through the images, sound bites, and printed columns of our mass media (and, it must be said, with considerably more truth and courage than we have been accustomed to getting from them), hundreds more have been killed and maimed in Iraq—a continuing carnage of inconceivable horror and human waste. At the same time, more lies, hypocrisy, and posturing have been wrought within the United Nations (see excellent op-ed on this in the Times); while the suppression of evidence on Karl Rove's crimes and the imperialistic designs revealed in the Downing Street Memo continues in Congress.

All of us must make the effort to expand our awareness of all these crimes of negligence and deceit, so that this nation's leaders are forced by the will of a free and conscious people to dispel the insanity of arrogance and deception that has brought us to this shameful and agonizing moment in American history.
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*Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility (1977), in (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 38-39.

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September 18, 2005: Why They Call it Surfing

This morning, I was seeking a break from what had been a fairly vituperative week of writing. The confluence of recent events, and their manifest relationship to the incompetence and corruption of the corporate entity presently ruling America, came to a head with a certain bitterness. The tragedy of it all, of course—the occupation of Iraq, the destitution of America's middle and lower economic classes, and the Katrina catastrophe—is that it all could have been easily averted (and in the case of Katrina, vastly mitigated in its effect) with just a little foresight, judgment, managerial acumen, and humility. This is a point that delivers in his column today: if there had been a less-than-total cronyism on the part of Bush and his handlers, so much of this pervasive tragedy would never have been. These guys finally got tangled in their own spin, and as long as we continue to demand that they be held accountable for that, they will fall amid their self-induced tangle, too.

So anyway, I was seeking a diversion this morning from that tension, and I found myself surfing blogs. It's easy, thanks to Google's product: you just connect to one blog in their network, click the "Next Blog" on the toolbar at the top of the Blogger window, and see what you get.

I spent about half an hour at this sport, and found several photography blogs from international tourists; a few others in languages I couldn't read; one from a fellow who makes dummies for ventriloquists (now there's a guy who would make some hay in the political arena today); a porno blog or two; and finally , which is a U.K. blog called Deficient Brain. So far from being deficient (of brain or anything else), there's some remarkable stuff on this blog—from a story about the Brits' fear of being trapped in the Iraqi quagmire to a transcript of President Chavez's recent speech at the United Nations. There are also some excellent links on Deficient Brain's sidebar, such as that to a film called "Orwell Rolls Over in His Grave" (which is about mainstream media), and a new song by an unknown musician about the nightmare in New Orleans. It also led me to a site advertising a delightful little product called —a universal remote that turns off television sets. The site also contains some quotes and statistics on TV watching that are alarming, such as that Americans spend on average 7 years of their lives in front of the box (I've presented similar stats ). Sure, we all have our veg-out moments and predilections, but that 7 years figure got my attention.

But in any event, I highly recommend Deficient Brain, and encourage you to spend a little time with it, and perhaps bookmark it (as I have).

Although I've never spent a moment on a real surfboard (next lifetime, maybe), I suspect that's where the term arose: you go out into the shallows of the Net, and keep wading outward until the crest of a wave appears, which you can ride for as long as you feel it's fun and supportive. If that's my equivalent of life lost to television, then I'll accept the cost. For even at its worst, surfing the web beats reality TV—both for entertainment and, in fact, for reality.


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September 19, 2005: Middle Class Weightlifting

It has been observed, especially over the course of the last month, that our President is the most buff Chief Exec we've had in the White House in recent memory. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that he should wish the same level of fitness upon us, particularly the middle and lower classes of American society, that he enjoys.

The only difference, of course, is in the musculature being exercised. For while Jogging George prefers his workout on the bike trail or the golf course, he offers us a limited variety of economic weight training regimens. Stretch out those fiscal deltoids, America, because there's some big-league donuts being bolted to the bar right now. It'll be Big, but it won't be Easy. And while you're bracing yourself, tell your kids to shape up too, because there will be plenty of financial iron left for them to pump, five or even ten years down the road. (Don't believe me? Ask ).

Unless, of course, you're in that top 1% bracket of wage earners (and let's face it: most folks in that bracket are like Flash himself—they haven't earned a goddam thing in their lives). In which case, all you have to do is stand on top of the old Universal, because it's your weight, along with the Iraq war and the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast (courtesy of your friends at Fluor) that the working classes of this country will be hefting for years to come.

So we will begin this week of talking about money, the economy, and capitalism with a discussion from Mr. Terence McKenna, who has a friendly warning for us all. Oh, and by the way, the weight training class has already begun: Medicare premiums are in 2006. Don't forget: deep breath before lifting, and expel your air (from every possible orifice) during exertion. Mr. McKenna, start us off:

So, we won't have to pay for it. Or so I hear. Not for Katrina, not for the Iraq war, not for the ramped up Medicare, not for any of it. George Bush has told us, and so it must be true.

Oh yes, we will cut waste. That's better, whew...really had me going there for a minute, but now I know we can afford it all and with no new taxes. That's great!

But we sure do have a lotta debt, don't we? I know conservatives have been telling us that debt is alright, that we can afford the amount we've accumulated, but I think even they have begun to get scared. I looked at the Heritage Foundation's website and saw , and it is worrisome indeed.

I'm not saying that we are likely to crash soon—but we are living large, and if just one more thing happens—like if interest rates start to spike, or if the Chinese decide to sell their US debt; then it's possible the resulting crash could be the biggest in our history.

And why are we doing this? Who really benefits from the combination of free trade, low taxes and reduced regulation? Not factory workers, nor former factory workers—they don't suddenly become knowledge workers. Even so-called knowledge workers don't benefit. It seems even our jobs can be outsourced. For those who do have a job, wages are stagnant in real dollars; and the only reason we are more prosperous now than 30 years ago is that women are in the workforce—so most intact families have 2 incomes.

But for the investor class it's a different story. With large disposable incomes and the means to live anywhere (they don't need to live near where they work), they can move residence to low-tax states, and thus fully benefit from low federal capital gains taxes and from the elimination of federal state taxes (the rest of us never paid estate taxes anyway; I don't know how we got hooked into believing there was a death tax). The investor class also depends so much less on government that they can live in places that are unable to support good public schools or social services—places like Texas.

And how about corporations? With out-of-date minimum wage laws and with unions on the run (free trade killed union jobs), corporations can move work around for the greatest economic benefit to themselves and to their investors. But not to their employees, who have by and large lost old fashioned pensions and are burdened with ever more expensive health insurance costs.

So these two classes have benefited most from the economic policies of the past 3 decades, and yet now they pay the smallest share of their disposable income toward our shared expenses (see above: Iraq, Katrina—these are shared burdens, or should be.)

So wait a minute, why not tax them? Repeal the estate tax cut, and raise taxes on capital gains and dividends so that these are taxed similarly to wages. Also raise corporate income taxes, and cut loopholes that allow them to shelter income from taxes via paper transfers. And staff the IRS adequately so that tax laws are enforced.

Sounds like wise policy, but no chance of hearing it from Bush (not this one, anyway). Maybe now is the time to put in a store of gold and diamonds and to wait for the crisis to come.

—T. McKenna

Tomorrow, we'll continue a discussion that we started before (see and here), on what I call the "Trumpification" of America (which really has less to do with the Don himself than with what he has been made to symbolize for us). The point is that what applies to the examination of the war on terror; to politics, spirituality, and education also applies to our financial lives: we can't solve the problems that beset us socially and culturally unless we clearly address and discard the learned prejudices that we unconsciously carry. When it comes to money, there are plenty of those in most all of us. So just as we considered the possibility of having to "kill" the Osama-consciousness (and Bush-consciousness) within us, so we will have to face down and destroy the Trump-consciousness inside us as well, if we are to hope to realize true abundance, rather than empty excess (or the even more vapid Lotto-fantasy syndrome), in our lives. This will be our project for this week.

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September 20, 2005: Killing Your Inner Trump

One defining mark of a culture in decline is to be found in the confusion of cause and effect. We imagine that money—wealth—will bring us freedom. In reality, it's the other way around.

Have I mentioned this before? I've had it with being painted as a tree-hugging, sprout-eating, juice-chugging liberal freak who hates America, just because I prefer to look within myself for an intelligence that surpasses intellect. Maybe if we paid more attention to that broader intelligence, which draws energy from our whole being rather than just a bundle of neurons in our forebrains, we'd be able to ask the penetrating questions that could usurp the arrogance of authority, destroy the thrones of monarchy and theocracy, and kill the demons of Power that breed the Bushes and Osamas of our world. Not to mention the Enrons, Worldcoms, Tycos, and Trumps.

But for now, in this culture, I will have to live with that stigma of being a twisted lump of New Age frill on the lunatic fringe. And what is it that gives the self-improvement / self-development community such an ugly rep? What makes people think that money is the root of all evil? Well, let's start with these jerks: The Learning Annex.

For amid its courses in Kabbalah, Talking to Your Angel Guides, Strip for Your Lover, Magic for Beginners, How to Flirt, and How to Break into Hollywood, we have this: the Trump course in real estate. The bait is simple: "we're making millionaires—are you ready?" Here's more:

How much money do you want to make? Whether it's $5k, $50k, or $5 million, real estate is your answer! Real estate provides the highest returns, the greatest values and the least risk...We've put together an incredible line-up including every type of real estate expert imaginable. In just 2 days, they'll teach you what they know, and what you need to know to build a powerful income producing real estate portfolio.

In short, The Learning Annex is offering an orgy of venal opportunism—thereby promoting the same kind of me-first-and-fuck-everybody-else mindset that brought to a bitter fate today. This is not self-improvement or self-development; it is self-engorgement. It is the stuff that belongs in the realm of late-night infomercial TV. But look who else is buying into the Learning Annex lust-club of the pursuit of excess: Shakti Gawain ("Creative Visualization and Developing Intuition"); Joan Stewart ("Establish Yourself as an Instant Expert"); Masaru Emoto ("The Hidden Messages in Water"). That last one hurts, because I admire the guy's work.

There's a reason that we're naming names here, and it has to do with the overall goal of self-development teaching, in the hands of people who care. Self-development is about furthering the whole that is around you by uncovering and nurturing the whole within you. We have failed as a society only because we have failed as individuals—failed to value all of who we are. You are more than your forebrain, your bank balance, your social standing, the make and model of your car or the size of either your house or your penis (or breasts). Much more. In fact, when self-development is practiced with dedication and vision—that is, with professionalism and self-respect—then a beneficent cycle is set into motion, from the emanations of a single and ordinary vessel of consciousness (and you thought "cycles" only came in the "vicious" variety).

There is another problem with the Trumpification of the self in this pedagogy of the grab: it is, most likely, false. That is, deluded and misleading. Indeed, Paul Krugman has already pointed out evidence that the housing bubble is starting to lose air, and that there may be an exodus from the real estate rush in a matter of months. History supports his suspicion, as does common sense: wherever there is mania, there will soon be despair. Wherever there is a stampede, there will be tomorrow nothing but desolation.

One defining mark of a culture in decline is to be found in the confusion of cause and effect. We imagine that money—wealth—will bring us freedom. Indeed, this is part of The Learning Annex's shill for its orgy of real estate pedantry: "imagine having the extra money to do the things that you truly enjoy."

This is ass-backwards. The truth is, freedom will bring you money—that is, abundance. Because freedom is not about doing what you crave; it is about doing what you love. Freedom is not indulgence; it is the fulfillment of the self through responsible and effortless action. Joseph Campbell, in his justly-famous interviews with Bill Moyers, called it "following your bliss." It is not merely discovering what gets you ahead or what gets you rich—it isn't even pursuing what would do the most good in the eyes of your culture. It is revealing what you do best; what takes you out of the narrow realm of pursuit, accumulation, and servitude, and into the open air of the regenerative self making a continually transforming connection with its destiny. From that incipient point of discovery comes all the bounty of material rewards that flow in a perfectly balanced measure to one whose life is sung to the lyric of Nature.

I can't prove it to you, and I am not a believer in the cult of the testimonial, or anything else of the evangelical strain. You can prove it to yourself, however, without the assistance of marketing slogans or faith-based appeals. A good starting point in relation to our topic is to examine yourself and some of the beliefs that you are carrying like a leaden sack within you. They run the gamut from "Money is the root of all evil" to "Money ain't everything—it's the only thing." This same error often besets us in the training and nurturance of personality—elevating and obsessing over the cerebral cortex, our intellectual side, at the expense of feeling, intuition, and humility. We repeat that mistake in our material lives when we blindly pursue wealth at the expense of living. It puts an implosive pressure on the object of the obsession, be it a higher IQ or a greater store of assets and possessions. Nothing can withstand that kind of burden; thus we find that the very thing we most intensely desire so often retreats, the more we chase it, the more we worship its glory.

Anything placed at the inner distance of idolatry is sure to become separate and inaccessible: this is the problem of institutional religion in a nutshell. When God is out-there, up-there, high and powerful and infinitely distant, then It is not in-here, in this moment. The same goes for abundance: when money is transmuted into the realm of the superlative: the bane (or goal) of existence, the root of (or deliverance from) evil, the camel before the eye of the needle (or the beatific eye at the top of the pyramid); then it too is removed from lived experience, into a separate and foreign space within a leaden hell of want.

Let freedom be the spiracle of your life, the organic and flourishing center of your being; and abundance will follow you. But pursue wealth in its Trumpian imagery, and you will collapse under the same delusion as Halliburton, Bechtel, Enron, Worldcom, and the $6k-shower-curtain men of Tyco. If you read this blog regularly, you probably want to see a world where greed and economic aggression are muted or even dispersed in government and business. In that case, the best advice I can give is what Gandhi told us once before: be the change you wish to see in the world.

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September 21, 2005: Bacon, Ham, and Chops

You would think that a government called the Bush Administration would be a champion of environmentalism and the vegan life. But names are often deceiving: the current dictatorship can be more correctly called The Pork Administration. Maybe he should just change his name: George W. Pork.

He wouldn't know a veto if one jumped up and bit him in the balls (he's never used it in his nearly five years in power); and his administration has spent more on wars, earmarked legislation, no-bid contracts, and inauguration parties than several of its predecessors combined.

The entire sorry tale of waste, mismanagement, and the vile demonization of capital is told by others better and more succinctly than I can—just check out some of the links listed below. Later in the week, we're going to present some exercises you can try to help you in clearing out some of the dead matter of belief relating to money, so that you don't get stuck in the same pigpen of contempt and waste as the Bushies have obviously found themselves in their rapacious attitudes toward capital.

posted the story yesterday of Don Young, the Alaskan Republican responsible for some of the worst economic depredations of the pork-laden Transportation bill. It's an almost incredible story, if you follow it to its roots and have a strong stomach.

There's been a new development in which bears on our topic, and the entire sordid tale of this Prince of neocon lobbyists is told in appearing in Mother Jones by Barry Yeoman.

President Hugo Chavez, who, as we have discussed , has received some recent and unwelcome popularity, gave a speech at the U.N. during the recent assembly of world leaders there. The entire text can be read , and the following quote is especially thought-provoking:

We the people now claim - this is the case of Venezuela - a new international economic order. But it is also urgent a new international political order. Let us not permit that a few countries try to reinterpret the principles of International Law in order to impose new doctrines such as "pre-emptive warfare." Oh do they threaten us with that pre-emptive war! And what about the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine? We need to ask ourselves. Who is going to protect us? How are they going to protect us?

I believe one of the countries that require protection is precisely the United States. That was shown painfully with the tragedy caused by Hurricane Katrina; they do not have a government that protects them from the announced nature disasters, if we are going to talk about protecting each other; these are very dangerous concepts that shape imperialism, interventionism as they try to legalize the violation of the national sovereignty. The full respect towards the principles of International Law and the United Nations Charter must be, Mr. President, the keystone for international relations in today's world and the base for the new order we are currently proposing.

And there is always the perspective of of the New York Times. Here are some links to pdf downloads of his prior articles.
 

The Can't-Do Government
The Chinese Challenge
Not the New Deal

And finally you can contemplate this message, also from the Times, on the "Trillion Dollar War." Note the figure of 6 billion dollars a month as you decide whether it would make sense to join the national movement to end this war in Iraq—either by continuing to put pressure on your local and national political leaders or by this coming weekend. Then think about what a billion dollars really means, with the help of a visualization once presented to me by our occasional correspondent, Shady Acres Mike:

Imagine a stack of hundred dollar bills, piled up until they total a million dollars. It would be about as high as your knees—about a foot and a half or so.

Now imagine a stack of hundred dollar bills, piled up until they total a billion dollars. You would have to make a pile to equal the height of the Empire State Building, and then keep going a few hundred feet more from there, until you finally got a pile totaling a billion dollars. Then multiply by two or three hundred for the war in Iraq, and start making some noise on behalf of your money and mine.

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September 22, 2005: Omens for the Equinox

The autumnal equinox, which occurs at 22:22 GMT tonight, used to be a time of great celebration, thanksgiving, and reflection—in short, a holiday: time to be spent with family, friends, and the simplest pleasures of life. In the old planting cultures, it was a harvest or pre-harvest celebration, and involved observing the passage of summer, the ripening of the crop into the food that would provide the coming winter's sustenance, and the semiannual occurence of equal periods of dark and light in the day (the other, of course, being the vernal, or spring equinox).

We pretend to be above all that now, too absorbed with getting and spending, too deeply under the spell of reductionist science to allow any account for points of seasonal passage and their symbolic or metaphorical meanings. Or else we have replaced these nature-symbols in our inner lives with harsh and rigid overlords and commanding deities who have nothing to do with Nature except to dominate or to conquer Her.

So is Nature sending us some sort of harsh reminder as to who's really in charge of the Earth? For here comes another angry female—this one named Rita—bearing down upon our Gulf Coast, currently toting winds in excess of 160mph. There have never been two such powerful storms as these—Katrina and Rita—in recorded meteorological history, so close together in the season and possessed of such destructive force.

Thus, the temptation is to see all this as a message from Nature to humankind. As water-cooler conversation in the office, perhaps it is to be tolerated. Otherwise, of course, it is bosh. But there is a far more salient message for us in these events—a message which we ignore at our own great peril. This has to do with the consequences of our human actions on the Earth, and our continuing institutional denial of their effect. These consequences are subject to validation according to both the instruments and methodologies of science, and the intuitive capacities of our animal nature—our feeling senses and instincts. At moments like these, we may find that, when we are open to both of these general approaches to communicating with our environment, they are indeed not as opposite or even divided as we might otherwise be led to believe.

Science tells us that there has been a warming trend in oceanic temperatures over the last half-century or so, which is tending to provide fuel to storms such as Katrina and Rita; and now even our mass media Our animal senses also have information about such events—their proximity, potential severity, and the best means of enduring their force. In , I describe how both animals and so-called "primitive" humans who were in the path of the 2004 Asian tsunami were able to attend to these natural messages flowing through them, and thus survive while "civilized" humans died in the thousands around them.

Is one way of knowledge better than the other? Most people in our culture would say that the scientific way is better—more reliable, sounder, more founded on the sure and stable ground of Fact. That, to me, is all a very pleasant rationalization—a quaint and well-spoken form of the Freudian defense mechanism known as denial. What the person dependent on the scientific explanation is saying, basically, is, "I am too far separated from that animal nature you talk about...there is no point in even talking about it—let's rely on what our dominant way of thinking is today...there is no going back to a primordial past and its instinctual abilities, even if we wished to (which we don't)."

That seems to be a fair representation of the thinking involved, and the thought itself appears quite reasonable. After all, we've lived in human civilization for a long time, and the idea of returning to some noble-savage origin seems rather naive, at best. But before we leave it there, let's do the same thing we always do here with political notions, spiritual beliefs, and cultural bromides: let's examine the assumptions that are underlying the statement.

The first thing we encounter is an assumption of separation: science and Nature—even our own animal nature—are divided, whether in their essence or via a process of what we might call ideological drift; and there is no bringing them back together, no reconciling these disparate paths to self-knowledge.

Further underlying this assumption is another, about the very nature of distinction itself: when two things or ideas bear defining marks of individual identity, then they must be separate (and sometimes opposite) to another. In fact, a corollary to this assumption is that, of these two separate entities, one of them has to be in control of the other—that is, to exist in a hierarchical relationship of Master to servant. Science, for example, is our primary ideological tool in the subjugation of Nature to culturally-defined purposes.

The problem here (or at least one problem) is that the greatest scientists in our history—from Pythagoras and Hippocrates all the way to Einstein—have consistently refuted these assumptions in the record of their personal feelings and the pursuit of their work. Pythagoras, for example, understood that spirituality and science "were not two separate departments between which there was no contact, but rather the inseparable factors in a single way of life."* As for Einstein, his entire life was a testament to the functional unity of feeling and intellect. In The World As I See It, he wrote:

How can cosmic feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it.#

Now, take a look at the graphic to the right: Can you understand, and feel it with your whole being, that the dark and the light are distinct, yet not separate—individuated, yet not divided? If you can, then your life is already a successful one, no matter its outer form or measure. Also consider the symbol for infinity, above—the figure 8 lying on its side: what does it tell you about how two things, two ideas, two creatures, two people, may connect and relate to one another in the functional harmony of union (even marriage!), while yet honoring and celebrating the autonomy of each member within the relationship? This symbol is further discussed in a marvelous book on the I Ching, by .

The point of this, which I hope has somehow gotten through my clumsy language, is that science and feeling; intuition and intellect, are designed to co-exist and collaborate—in the realms of academic study, government, commerce, and daily life. Neither is the whole, in the individual personality or in the social fabric: each must take its place and contribute its share for the whole to be and to flourish.

The book that I have recently published, Drinking From the Darkness: Living Completely in a Time of Estrangement, is a guide toward adapting one's life within an unbalanced world, tilted to the side of scientific or religious fundamentalism, and thus deprived of that wholeness described above; with the goal of rediscovering, in and through one's own lived experience, that natural harmony which Einstein described as "an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection." He added that, for the pure scientist, the deep feeling for this intelligence of Nature is "the guiding principle of his life and work."

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*This is from , G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, editors.
#The quotes from Einstein may be found in .

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September 23, 2005: Opening the Till (Within)

Belief is the seed of delusion. Delusion, of course, is false belief: in psychiatry, delusions are considered diagnostic signs of psychotic diseases, including schizophrenia.

The kind of delusion we talk about here is more of a societal delusion, or at least societally-mediated, or conditioned delusion. Belief, even when it begins from the ground of truth, tends to spawn delusion, or to transmute, through a process of decay, into delusion. The reason this happens is that belief tends to fix its feet into concrete; to take a position and refuse to waver or to seek fresh understanding beyond its narrowly defined, staked-out point of claim.

Take any popular statement of belief and see for yourself how this process works. For example: "I believe in one God," goes the well-known Credo of the Catholic religion. The boundaries of that belief are fairly well circumscribed by just this opening statement. What if a fellow like myself comes along and asks, "what if there were many gods—maybe even one for every unique individual in the cosmic whole—each god a world unto itself, yet enduring in an immutable web of interconnection with all the other innumerable gods that live within each life, each vessel of formed consciousness?"

Well, I think you can guess the answer to that: such a questioner would be either quietly shunned or loudly demonized as a "non-believer." He would be perceived as living outside the fenced-off land of true belief, and he would have to live with his outsider status until such time as he realized his error—his sin—and returned to the group-belief, in the appropriate attitude of contrition.

But here, we consider an alternative possibility: the understanding that being a non-believer is a natural and growth-enhancing way of living. I don't wish to endorse, evangelize, or even recommend this approach to the life of thought and feeling. That would be to promote yet another belief-system. I just like to see if people would be interested in thinking about it, and then let each person be guided from there.

Our topic for most of this week has been money and the economy; and it may appear as if we have strayed from that topic in yesterday's entry and so far today. But what I am suggesting now is that there are many different kinds of compensation for successful living; many varieties of prosperity beyond the limited signs defined by convention. Granted, we sure do need money, or appear to in this culture, anyway. I would only ask, "couldn't it live happily, though (and we with it), beside these other and less quantifiable marks of abundance?"

Yesterday, we considered the possibility of overcoming the pervasive sense of division that seems to surround and imbue our lives here in America. Both we and our money are trapped on this bipolar rod of extremes, the narrow field of division and conflict. Check out some of the characteristic language that is associated with financial affairs, in both personal and societal matters:

Mine and Yours
The Haves and Have-Nots
Rich and Poor
Developed and Developing
First-World and Third-World

These are some exceedingly narrow and even myopic expressions, yet they go commonly unquestioned and unexamined in our culture. Policies of both domestic and international economy are formed upon them; wars are started and fought in the name of such terminology; and most ominously, the education of our children is defined according to such terms.

If you are wondering whether I'm getting this right, just look at the record: some of the most baldfaced and frankly embarrassing lies of the enyclopedic collection told by this administration of President George have been spoken in the name of the economy— to see a few. It really is amazing, the imaginative lengths to which deceit can be taken by those who practice it as an institutional identity.

The facts, of course, are as plain and unequivocal as a negative bank balance (if you're like me most of the time). The rich are far more affluent and advantaged, in terms of both income and tax protection, now; while the poor and lower middle classes are becoming increasingly desperate. This is what we have to live with, until we can apply enough pressure together on the leadership in Washington to start the impeachment ball rolling in Congress.

But so far, not a single Senator or Representative has dared to breathe the word, in spite of such a collection of high crimes and daily falsehoods committed by this administration as to positively freeze any sense of credulity. This is why I have said before that this American failure of ours is no mere institutional failure: it is a personal failure that each of us must accept responsibility for in proper measure.

But not blame. For blame is the doorway to guilt, which is a burden that inevitably destroys its bearer. But responsibility tends to free the personality through a process of recognition and personal accountability. If I'm responsible in however small a portion for the failure of our American government and our society as a whole, then I am not a mere victim. I am instead an active agent for change—can you see the connection? If I can identify, within myself, the ways that I have implicitly—even unconsciously—contributed to the crimes, the wars, the murders, the incompetence, the spiraling debt, the social inequality, the lazy complacency of aggression; then I can also identify the potential for how the entire mess can be transformed through my influence, the exertion of my autonomy as an individual citizen, a spark from the fire of a nation and a people.

The spark and the fire are of the same substance, the same essence, and cannot be divided. We can do this—we can each of us recover our spark-being, by turning within and asking questions of ourselves. We will find that these are the very same questions that the members of the Bush administration and the Congressional hegemony (of both parties) have refused or failed to ask of themselves.

Tomorrow, perhaps I can offer some specific examples of the kinds of questions I'm referring to here. But I would encourage you to simply begin on your own, because what you discover for and by yourself will undoubtedly be deeper and greater than anything that I or anyone else could teach you. The insights that arise to you through such self-examination will reveal such an abundance, such an enduring prosperity, as no sum of either money or belief could deliver.

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September 24, 2005: Not My Bad

Well well, George may have had his moment of ambivalence following the damaging disclosures of incompetence and neglect over the Katrina disaster; but when it comes to the morass in Iraq, nothing is his fault. In fact, it's his predecessors who are to blame—all of them, going back to Reagan. All of them, of course, except Dad.

The message he delivered today on Iraq is a reprise of the same speech he gave on the day of the tragedy in the Gulf Coast. You may remember : he took a few moments out of his busy vacation to say a word or two in San Diego (where he had gone for the golf) about how his namby-pamby Presidential precursors had laid the groundwork for the fact that he now has America's feet planted up to its waist in the muddy sands of Mesopotamia. The only part he left out this time was the comparison between himself and FDR.

This is all beyond revolting. At a time when 60% of Americans are plainly against the continuation of this misbegotten and doomed venture of imperial occupation; on the point of a weekend when tens of thousands of his citizens will be descending on the White House to march and speak on behalf of those 60%; this fellow spits out a stomach-turning repetition of lies that the American people were not in the least distracted or dissuaded by the first time around.

His follow-up to this lame, used-car salesman jive is to skip town before the protests start and head for Colorado. Remember that old advertising jingle?—"Head for the Mountains of Bush...Beer!"

Meanwhile, Congress is having to down a stiff shot of fiscal reality, even though they do their best to lacquer it with a thick veneer of spin. One of the more hilarious expressions to come out of the corrupted halls of the Capitol is "," which basically amounts to paying the bill for the $200 billion reconstruction of the Gulf Coast by slicing and dicing programs designed to help the sick, the poor, and the lower middle classes of our society. What would you expect—a repeal of the sacred-cow estate tax ban? A modest increase in taxes for those top 1% of wage earners? Come on now, this is Congress: as Dick Cheney would say (and probably does, in fact), these people are bought and paid for.

Also in Congress, our buddy Bill Frist is in a hot kettle right now: it seems he'd been selling off some about-to-dive stock of his, and now . This, too, is a very funny scene, with Frist claiming total ignorance of what he was doing and how well (or perhaps ill) timed the transaction was for him.

If these guys are so stupid as to be utterly clueless about important and very lucrative personal financial transactions, how can we continue to endure them handling our tax money in matters of critical domestic and foreign policy? It's kind of like hiring a team of dogs to clean the town's fire hydrants.

So here we have constantly before us—in the behavior, language, and attitudes of our nation's leaders of law and government—the counter-example to what we have been attempting to clarify in this week's blogs on the economy and money. Once again, I'd like to recommend that you read Barry Yeoman's in Mother Jones. It's a story of a classic, right-wing Christian moralist's descent into financial debauchery. As you read it, pay attention to the language, specifically of Abramoff and his lobbyist cronies as they fleece their clients with usurious consulting fees and a typically corporate contempt.

This is the kind of inner language and attitudes that we need to clear from within ourselves, if we're to open a path of abundance in our lives. I know it seems like a stretch to say that discarding certain delusions about capital might actually promote prosperity. But face it: you've tried everything from climbing the corporate ladder to investing in whatever the grab of the moment happens to be to throwing your money away on Lotto or some other form of gambling. And it has all failed. Maybe you're ready to start listening to some of that self-talk that plays in the back of your mind whenever you're at the bank, paying your bills, passing the store window where that thing you've been wanting but can't afford still calls out to you, or reading the day's news of corporate scandals, government payouts, national debt, or the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots of this world.

"I ought to be happy with what I've got"..."A sacred life is one of poverty"..."There's no escape from the treadmill"..."Liars, crooks, and politicians get rich—the rest of us struggle"..."I'll always be this way—ignorant about finance and money slipping through my fingers"..."There's just no getting ahead"..."Money corrupts"..."Get it while you can, however you can get it"....

See what kinds of expressions form the core of your inner script on money, and then examine them. When you feel as if you're ready to discard them from consciousness, then consider applying the inner No method to them. Never mind if it doesn't seem to make total sense to you at the beginning—it's no farther off the wall than playing the Megaballs can be, and it will cost you just as little time and a lot less money (that is, it's free). For more on how to go about this inner brush-burning (or you might call it "Bush-burning" if you like), see or visit

the

.

Finally today, a tribute to the poet , who has a wonderful lesson for us on holding true to the one lasting source of prosperity in life—the integrity and deep clarity of the individual soul that is in touch with the most priceless abundance available to each of us. Ms. Olds' ability to turn away from selling herself out—to be presented with the proverbial "offer that can't be refused", and then to refuse it—serves as an inspiration to all of us who must face, in our own way, the daily temptations and moments of ambivalence amid the cult of division that seems to define this society and its yearning, fearful attitude of estrangement toward possession and capital. Whenever we can be as clear within ourselves, as true to our own living personal values as Ms. Olds, then we open a channel to a rich and enduring abundance.

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September 25, 2005: Site Notice: Daily Rev's New Home

This is a brief note to thank everyone who's visited Daily Revolution during its formative phase. Now, the blog will be residing at a dedicated domain: .

Currently, there's a partial rebuild of the blog as it appears here occupying that site. By October (next week, that is), I hope to have everything moved into a blogging/content management framework that will make maintenance a lot simpler (which will leave more time and energy for creating content, which is what the web's supposed to be about, after all). I'll keep the blog updated here for another month during the transition (and in case I realize I made a dumb mistake that has to be fixed).

Meanwhile, my gratitude again to all who visit and read (and especially to you three who hit the donation link). And as always, I welcome feedback of every kind: one of the core messages of Daily Rev is that it is not policy that moves us forward as much as questioning.
 

September 26, 2005: Lynndie—Criminal, Scapegoat, or Both?

Terry McKenna returns to the blog today, and boy, is he pissed. Let loose, TM, and don't hold anything inside, now:

I hate the law and hate lawyers. The law gives lawyers an excuse to pretend that there is justice, but there is no justice, only pretence. Why am I saying this? Why now? Because Lynndie England was found guilty. All because she was too stupid to lie.

You remember Lynndie England. Trailer Park trash (yes, really!) for whom the army was a way out of having to work at a chicken processing plant. Married at 20, divorced shortly thereafter. She fell under the spell of 35 year old fellow reservist Charles Graner and under his sway, modeled for those infamous pictures of herself and naked Iraqis in the Abu Ghraib prison. Of course she did it, and of course she knew that what she was doing was not very nice. But I doubt she knew it was wrong. She is reportedly very compliant with authority and at least learning disabled - maybe even a bit simple. I doubt my current employer (name withheld) would hire her for any duty more complicated than the mail room.

But what galls me are two things, the most important of which is that the brass has not been put on trial. Don Rumsfeld should go on trial, not Lynndie - but the Bush administration does not handle accountability very well.

The second thing that bothers me is that a judge refused her plea bargain and forced her to submit to a trial that she was bound to lose. A rough summary of the facts is thus: some time ago she agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence. But the judge who received the deal was concerned that she didn't really think she was guilty. Come on judge, you must know that people cop pleas even when not guilty - that's why prosecutors tend to over charge.

So we put trailer trash to the test, and the well-heeled sit safely by the fire. Makes me proud to be an American!

—T. McKenna

While Terry's fur settles a little, let's think for just a moment about the context. Today, we learned, in addition to the Lynndie conviction, about yet who's had enough of the lies and incompetence of this Bush administration; we also read about , and about further questions concerning Bill Frist's financial games and his . Meanwhile, 9-Iron Flash is parading around the South, saying that disaster response should be an exclusively military matter, while back in Washington, .

So you want to tell me that Terry's over-reacting? OK, so tell me. That's what we're here for at Daily Revolution. As the unknown Chinese authors of the I Ching wrote some 5,000 years ago in Hexagram 49, appropriately titled Revolution: "on your own day you are believed...remorse disappears." But anger takes a little longer to dissipate.


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September 27, 2005: Putting the Fun in Dysfunctional

"And if I, Mike Brown, as an individual could have done something to convince them that this was the big one, and they needed to order a mandatory evacuation, I would have done it..."

Geez, Mike, it's not as if you were the leader of a massive federal agency with the power of the most warlike and aggressive leader that the so-called free world has seen in a generation or so behind you. I see now—you were just a puny and powerless individual without the authority or influence to sway the governor of an impoverished state and the mayor of a poor and crime-infested city to see reason.

Had dinner yet? If not, here's more: "I've overseen over 150 presidentially declared disasters. I know what I'm doing, and I think I do a pretty darn good job of it."

I'll stop there, because no one should have to be fed more than the smallest helping of this rove-shit. But I have to hark back to what Terry McKenna wrote for us yesterday—what if Lynndie could lie like this guy? Would she still be cashing US government paychecks and be asked to rejoin the Army as a "consultant"?

So suffice it to say that Capitol Hill saw more horseshit today than slaughtering day at the glue factory. Well, his name is Brown...

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Let's see if we can find anything appropriate for after-dinner reading...ah, I found

at Lakshmi Chaudhry's blog on : dolphins trained to kill by the US government are now missing—roaming free and dangerous somewhere in the waters off the Gulf Coast. Maybe they've shot up into space already and it's time the rest of us stepped out into the backyard and stuck a thumb up into the night sky, hoping to catch a ride on that spaceship where Alan Rickman dresses up as the Mr. Met robot. Don't panic...

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Listmania: here's I'd like to be on someday, or in a future lifetime. Maybe there will eventually be a "most banned blogs" list...

Being There: Kevin Sites—the war photojournalist who was deluged with both fame and damnation after he filmed the by Marines in Fallujah of a disarmed and prone Iraqi insurgent—is now touring the world in search of war and bloodshed; and reporting back via a site on what he's seeing, hearing, and filming.

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All right, still not the sort of thing you'd like to finish off a meal with...what can I say, times are tough. Here's a life worth celebrating, if you're older than 40 and can remember your childhood: , dead at 82. I remember Get Smart as one of my favorite shows during my childhood (along with Run Buddy Run). I also remember feeling the first rush of male hormonal entropy at the sight of Barbara Feldon—god, she was delicious. Thanks, Don, for walking into doors and talking into your shoe for us. "99, I'll meet you back at headquarters..."

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September 28, 2005: The Case of Runaway Arrogance

expressed some confusion today about the seemingly pathological lapse of judgment on the part of President George, specifically regarding a few points of institutional behavior that seem to defy intuition and common sense (I think what he meant was the guy's defeating his own self-interest). I'll list the ones that Keith noted, and will add a few that came to my attention as well:
 

• Arresting Cindy Sheehan on a laughably ridiculous technicality (she was sitting outside the White House instead of marching, which is what her demonstration permit stipulated that she'd be doing).
• Keeping Mike Brown on the payroll and hiring him back on with FEMA as a "consultant" to help the beleaguered agency figure out what it did wrong in allowing a city to be washed off the map and over a thousand of its inhabitants to be killed.
• Having his official mouthpiece, Scott McLellan, to declare the President's support for Tom DeLay after the latter's indictment for illegal campaign activities using corporate contributions: “Congressman DeLay is a good ally, a leader who we have worked closely with to get things done for the American people.”
• Speaking openly today about "the gains we have made" in Iraq (and then not naming a single one), while also warning of a likely increase in violence and killing among the insurgents (i.e., more U.S. deaths), as the vote on the so-called Constitution of Iraq approaches.
• Talking yesterday of the need for the military to take the lead in the management of future natural disasters. The Crawford Flash didn't bother to tell us where this military presence would come from, given that our military is already stretched beyond its limits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Canadian mercenaries, perhaps? Not a bad idea: rescue teams from Vancouver were on the scene in New Orleans before our own National Guard or FEMA got there.

So you can now easily perceive the cause of Mr. Olbermann's puzzlement. Why are these people in the Bush Administration saying and doing these things that would appear to further undermine an already damaged image in the realm of the public trust? Is it that they're stupid and incompetent?

The "stupid and incompetent" theory is very amusing, and it does earn some support when you consider the ancillary or residual figures in the Bush empire; but for the core of this operation, it doesn't hold an ounce of water. These people are very smart—intellectually, that is—and they know perfectly well what they're doing. They've proven their mettle in this respect, time and again.

But still, Olbermann's point is well taken: the Bushies' recent behavior seems anomalous, to put it mildly. This is exactly where you need the insight of a psychiatrist. Or, failing that, of a fellow like me, who has spent a fair amount of his adult lifetime studying psychiatric disorders.

In the DSM-IV (the current version of the American Psychiatric Association's 900-page manual of mental disorders), there is an entry for "Delusional Disorder," which seems to fit the bill. This diagnostic entity describes a situation where a person is operating under strange beliefs that do not specifically impair normal socio-cultural functioning—that is, you can't say the person is schizophrenic or psychotic (think of Nixon in the latter regard); only that he is acting very strangely under certain conditions or where certain sensitive topics are touched upon.

I'd like to take this definition a bit further and discuss the institutional profile of such a pathology. For what we are dealing with now, with the Bush Administration, is an institutionally-ingrained arrogance that has been successful in the past, in terms of advancing goals (getting elected President twice and winning a majority in Congress) and furthering a corporate agenda (enriching arms dealers, oil companies, domestic and world banks, and miscellaneous ultra-wealthy individuals). But now, the head of the snake whose tail the Bushies have ridden for five years has now made the circuit back to the riders.

Arrogance has a way of doing this—coming back to destroy you after you've climbed to a seemingly unassailable position through the use of its omnidirectionally destructive power. The problem, of course (as many psychiatrists who treat delusional patients will readily tell you), is that it is very difficult to retreat from arrogance, from a cult of inner and outer aggression. Not impossible—just very difficult.

Aside from the fact that arrogance is the fuel that has driven a cult like the Bush Administration to such repeated outer success, there is what Freud called the "repetition compulsion." Arrogance doesn't see a path of retreat or remorse, because it has never taken one—it doesn't know how to truly admit an error (grievous or otherwise) or a poorly-formed alliance. No: it has to "stay the course" (how many times have we heard that over the past three years?); it must insist that it is "making progress" when every objective indicator (that is, reality) reveals the length and breadth of the delusion. Arrogance simply doesn't know how to turn back, retreat, and make amends. And so, it inevitably begins to destroy itself as its delusory substance is increasingly made plain to anyone who encounters it (even the mass media). This is the way the delusion of arrogance works: it is a Penelope's loom of the psyche, repetetively and inexorably undoing what it has created. Those of us who care about how it all turns out cannot afford to watch lazily and enjoy the show, as entertaining or amusing as it may sometimes be. We have to insist that this snake of arrogance be stretched out in the public eye, its adherents removed from their thrones, and that the stolen, demonic energy that is arrogance be firmly dispersed from the consciousness of a free people.

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September 30, 2005: Five Knuckles for the Fourth Estate

Greetings, pilgrims. Tonight I'm asking that everyone gives the mass media another swift kick in the electronic shins, because it looks as if they're backsliding into that old habit of theirs, the obsession with the superficial.

Today, the news of moment is that DeLay's out (he's down, but by no means out yet); that Roberts is in (now there's a guy that knows how to fly under the radar); that Katie is checking in to rehab; and that the new ipod Nano—although it's very cute—scratches easily.

Meanwhile...

• Scores more have died horribly in Iraq and Afghanistan, including several more U.S. soldiers
• The at an alarming and premature rate for the season (i.e., more evidence that we're destroying the planet, but how many newspapers will that sell?)
• The genocide in Darfur continues, along with the wretched squalor and poverty
• The Bushies are moving to oppose a bill granting Medicaid benefits to Katrina victims
• Does anyone remember the

They're like children, these media types: they know what they're supposed to do, and they will do it as long as they're reminded. Just tell them firmly but gently that they have a job to do, and offer them a silver star on the fridge calendar if they'll just go ahead and do it. , I have found, is a terrific resource to use in this respect. There's a whole list of links to email addresses and letters to the editor forms that you can simply click through after having composed a brief, one-paragraph message. In fact, if you've got a little geek in you, try scripting a little program for yourself that hits several media outlets in one go. I can typically shoot out a letter to a dozen media outlets in under half an hour.

Don't worry that your letter isn't published: it's really the stats that matter. These folks have employees (and in some cases, automated systems) that go through the day's mail and sort them according to tone and message. If the stats show an overwhelming trend in a specific direction (such as, "do your damn job and report on the stories that mean something"), then the editor-in-chief or whatever grand poobah is there at the editorial helm will decide, "maybe we should."

Another good action link is : it's quick, convenient, and easily shared with friends. That will leave you some time to get outside and shake things up a little. In October, here in NYC, the will be held by Brooklyn Parents for Peace, and Cindy Sheehan will be there.
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Finally, a brief tribute to a man who brought millions of people toward an awakening of sorts. In a previous entry here, I mentioned that there is a big difference between self-improvement and self-engorgement. was a man who understood this difference, and tried to help us understand with him, each in his and her own way. He wrote, among other things, , and it has sold something like 10 million copies. He died recently, and his life deserves the honor of our remembrance and our continued effort in the work of awakening from the cultural sleep which threatens not just ourselves, but now our children and our planet.

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All original material copyright Brian Donohue, 2003-2005 Artwork and Calligraphy copyright Maria Donohue, 2003-2005