The Conservative Mindset, pt. II

¡Hola! Everybody...
Every once in a while, the online/ offline mewling from the right compels me to post the following.

Edmund Burke promoted the worldview that informed modern conservatism: That people are essentially evil and need a strong controlling force to prevent them from acting out their evil nature (that is, unless you’re rich). Such a force, continued Burke, should (appropriately) come from those have inherited wealth or lawfully obtained wealth, religious, or political power. In addition, Burke believed that a permanent underclass with little power and a permanent power elite with great power would produce the greatest social good because it will ensure social stability. Conservatives want to conserve the status quo. Or as that fabulous racist, William J. Buckley, once implied: conservatives “sit athwart history.”

My observation is that no one is fully conservative or liberal. We tend to fluctuate according to different situations. However, conservatism comes from somewhere -- it is founded on a certain worldview encompassing notions of the origins of human nature. What follows is an attempt to peek behind the curtain.

* * *

-=[ The Conservative Mindset, pt. II ]=-

“Contempt is not a thing to be despised.”

-- Edmund Burke (1729–1797) “Father” of conservatism

In 2003, a group of researchers published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003) that caused an immediate shit storm. Because some government grants were involved in funding the research, conservatives, who at the time controlled all branches of the US government, took an immediate and unfriendly “interest” in the paper. It would seem that they did not particularly care for the results of the research, and threats were made about preventing further “waste of government money” to fund research into the conservative mindset.

[Note: The papers are posted on the internet: click here and here to access PDF versions]

The study was “biased” against conservatives, they insisted! As usual, right-wingers went into their feces-flinging act, outraged that anyone would dare quantify the obvious and actually show they are an emotionally unstable group. ::grin::

Well, it’s not as if we didn’t suspect all along that something was wrong with the likes of Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Lush Rimbaugh, that Michelle Bachmann twat, Sarah Palin and the rest of the Flock of Fools.

The study, funded jointly by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Institute of Mental Health at the National Institute of Health (NIH), examined a mindset that the authors were polite enough to refer to as political conservatism. What they were really studying were the right wing wackos who had taken over the GOP and in the process threatening to turn America into a third-rate fascist state (stuff like torture, shredding of the Constitution, spying on US citizens, etc.).

Sensing that their study might cause a slight discomfort among the more sensitive of our conservative brethren (really: they lit up like rabid chimps going ape on considerate neighbors) went to great lengths to reassure one and all that they weren’t calling right wingers a bunch of psychotic, destructive nuts. Obviously, they weren’t studying the right-wingers we see most often on the internets. Essentially, the researchers culled through 50 years of research literature on the psychology of conservatism and reported that at the core of political conservatism is resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror management

The authors wrote, “Our first assumption, too, is that conservative ideologies -- like virtually all other belief systems -- are adopted in part because they satisfy some psychological needs. This does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled.”

Still, that didn’t stop right-wingers from losing their minds and screaming for the scalps of the researchers. Right-wing radio hosts howled and frothed at the mouth, demanding an immediate investigation into the funding streams, and they were accused, with no regard to rhyme nor reason, of being anti-American and anti-Christian and probably for gay rights, killing babies, and gun control to boot.

OK, let’s try to forget Beck and Lush Rimbaugh for a moment. Sure, there are conservatives who aren’t sadistic amoral sociopaths. Shit, in real life, I know some. I even have conservative friends, although I did warn my sister not to marry my former brother-in-law.

On a serious note, what the researchers were looking at were what could be termed “political fundamentalists.” They tend to be reactionary, paranoid, authoritarian, intolerant, and contemptuous of rules that don’t suit them. While there are left-wing examples, the authors found that they generally gravitate toward fascism and call it conservatism, even though it’s usually better described as radical reactionaries. In any case, the researchers found that left-wingers are less likely to exhibit these traits.

The authors define the two core principles of conservatism as resistance to change, and acceptance of social inequality. Conservatives, they argue, cling tightly to a status quo (“traditional values”), real or imagined, and regard society as hierarchical. Not unsurprisingly, they tend to believe they have inherited and/or merited preferential positions in this hierarchy.

The authors address what they call the “conservative paradox” of radical reactionarism (e.g., Hitler, Mussolini) by pointing out that their calls for extreme inequality in the social order were superimposed with promises to lead the country back to an ideal past, one in which “traditional” values and morality reigned It occurs to me that our present-day right-wing reactionaries continuously evoke a traditional America that never existed: where everyone was a god-fearing generic protestant, people with accents lived in the poor part of town and never bothered folks except to mow their lawn, and women and blacks knew their place. The code for this is embedded in the current caterwauling from teabaggers who want to take their country back.

This goes with what I believe is a hallmark of the fundamentalist mindset: the ability to subsume a philosophy to suit personal needs. In Christianity and Islam, for example, you have religions that place high premiums on respect for fellow humans, peace, and personal integrity. Yet fundamentalists are frequently the most violent, dishonest, and intolerant people around. Furthermore, they often use their religion to rationalize their repulsive behavior. In conservatism, you see people who champion the Bill of Rights, “small government,” and a laissez faire approach to economics, while loudly cheering for a gross militarism and tax structures that have been shown to benefit only the richest five percent of the population.

This emotional and intellectual contradiction is how conservatives are able to condemn what they perceive as dishonest and immoral behavior on Obama’s part (i.e., “tax cheats”) while at the same time accepting that Bush lied his way into a needless and foolish war while declaring that he was “fighting a war on terrorism.” It’s how Republicans can damn Democrats as being fiscally irresponsible even while they ignored Bush’s disastrous conservative fiscal policies that drove the global economy to an economic collapse the likes of which has never been seen. One need only point out conservatives’ vilification of Obama for a deficit that he didn’t cause while ignoring Bush’s reckless tax cuts to see this paradox at work.

One of the more interesting issues in the paper is “The Theory of RWA ,” in which the authors consider the Authoritarian Personality. They state, “harsh parenting styles brought on by economic hardship led entire generations to repress hostility toward authority figures and to replace it with an exaggerated deference and idealization of authority and tendencies to blame society scapegoats and punish deviants.”

Angry, repressed, passive-aggressive, with an overwhelming desire to punish those who don’t conform.

Yup, sounds like our boys!

This may not stop people from growing up to be right-wingers. Many people can no more choose to be conservative than they can choose their sexual orientation. But hey, you can't say I didn't try.

Coming up next are treatments on black conservatives, and the genetic foundations of personality and political affiliations.

References

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339-375.

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003 ). Exceptions that prove the rule -- using a theory of motivated social cognition to account for ideological incongruities and political anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas (2003). Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 383-393.

Sunday Sermon [Mass Psychosis]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Sometimes, not telling the truth is an act of moral cowardice...

* * *

-=[ An Open Letter to Thinking Americans ]=-

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Neoconservatism is fanaticism; a political fundamentalism poisoning the intellectual vibrancy essential for a functional democracy. For the last 30-40 years, America’s anti-intellectual tradition has been magnified by a new species of mindless anti-rationalism. A fanaticism feeding on and fed by an ignorant demographic addicted to an avalanche of video images and an echo chamber of noise that leaves no room for reflection and logic.

Reason being the first fatality of fanaticism, one cannot successfully reason with a fanatic. Eventually, one comes to the inescapable realization that you cannot describe the universe to an individual who still thinks in pre-Copernican terms. While there should be room for reasoned social policy debate, the facts remain: the earth is round, the sun does not revolve around the earth, and, at least for people with relatively large forebrains, the theory of evolution is a foregone conclusion. Similarly, our singularly expensive and ineffective market-driven healthcare system has been an utter failure -- by any measure.

Neoconservatism is a mass psychosis masquerading as a political movement. A part of me always knew this, but I always left room to compensate for my own biases. A part of me held out hope that the angry, mostly uneducated whites, who comprise the spine of the movement, would somehow wake up to the fact that they are unwitting dupes in a class war that steals from them as much as anyone else. A class war headed by a minuscule fraction of our population: the ten percent that owns almost all of the wealth in this country.

The people of this movement, driven by fear and hate, will never wake up.

There is no reason to take the Republican Party seriously. It has become a parade of one political folly after another. The GOP is the developmentally challenged child of a warped political movement. My less politically radical friends like to talk about historical context -- how what goes for conservatism today really isn’t conservatism. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it was American conservatism that has spent nearly four decades throwing open the doors to the asylum. Beginning with the Goldwater campaign in 1964 through the Reagan campaigns and presidency; the NCPAC campaigns of the same era; the marriage of cynicism with religious idiocy; the barrage of think tank junk science; the madness of Newt Gingrich’s contract on America; the various and sustained stupidities aimed at Clinton, all of culminating in the embarrassment of Bush the Idiot. All of this and more was and is modern conservatism taken to its illogical conclusion. Want to know neoconservtism? Look no further than the financial and social debris of the Bush II administration. Shit, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s a little late for sensitive conservative intellectuals to reflect how it was that all that monkey shit ended up on the walls.

Want to get an idea of the GOP’s “leadership”? Look at Dick Cheney, a moral coward of historical proportions, explain once again to a cowed media that one free mass casualty attack doesn’t count. Why hasn’t one journalist challenged Dick that by his own standard, every two-term president kept us safer than his guys did? That’s a lot like closing the barn door after the horses have gone.

Intelligent or even serious people don’t lead in that party, and the leaders of it (Michael Steele? Sarah Palin? Newt Gingrich?) are not serious people. It is a major political party run now as an elaborate public spectacle completely in the service of fanatical radio talk-show hosts. Why do serious political journalists take the out-of-control train wreck that is the Republican Party seriously, ignoring the evidence plainly in front of their own eyes? Even more baffling, why does a Democratic president, and an overwhelmingly Democratic congress, both elected at least in part because the country had determined that the Republicans had gone completely round the bend, care what these people think about anything? Why does a party led by people who think the president is going to hypnotize schoolchildren with his magical homosexual-loving-Socialist eyeballs scare the living shit out of the democrats?

The perfect should not be the enemy of the good?!! Shit! By my reckoning, the good has many legitimate enemies. Evil is the enemy of the good. Greed is the enemy of the good. Ignorance is the enemy of the good. Cowardice is the enemy of the good. How about we all worry, for once, about those enemies of the good -- all of which are evident in the campaign to make sure we never reform the morally reprehensible and criminally negligent manner in which we deliver healthcare in this country?

Instead, we get goobers advocating against their own self-interests on behalf of the same entities that will most likely deny them proper healthcare. Oh yeah, watch The Dems sign off on a castrated health reform bill and then run in 2010 on their support of what will amount to a massive giveaway to the insurance companies -- a group of institutions whom everyone I know hates. Of course, the corporate press will then deliberate incessantly on why the administration couldn’t work with “serious conservative voices” on a “bipartisan” plan, as though they even exist. The Glenn Beck “Socialism! Fascism! Communism! Nigger!” batshit cocksuckers will be conveniently forgotten heard in the background dutifully yelping, “We’re No. 1! We’re no. 1!”

Fuck them: you can’t reason with fanatics.

Eddie

Sunday Sermon (Easter and the Promise of Spring)

¡Hola! Everybody...
On Good Friday, my grandmother, a devout Catholic, would not allow any electronic gadgets to be turned on. That meant no music or TV. And the women would prepare a huge meal consisting of Puerto Rican-style escabeche -- a marinated type of fish dish. We weren’t allowed to eat meat or do much of anything on Good Friday, which was a huge drag for the teens.

On Saturday, “The Curse,” as I used to call it, was lifted and music and life would seep back into our household. My mother would make this shrimp dish that’s to die for and we would eat it with real Italian bread, so fresh and hot, it burned your hands holding it.

As a teen, Easter Sunday was a huge holiday. We would beg our (mostly working poor) parents to buy us new outfits and we would all go to Coney Island. In fact, when we were on welfare (which we did several times while growing up) my mother sometimes used welfare money to buy us new clothes! I know many of you don’t like this shit and that’s why I’m putting it out there.

Tens of thousands of teens from all over The City would meet up there to usher in the warmer weather, the promise of spring like a new song in our young hearts.

* * *

-=[ The Promise of Spring ]=-

“All isms end up in schisms.”

-- Huston Smith

I have little patience for the people who lump all of spirituality or belief systems into the same category. I find this with many modern-day atheists. They tend to throw out the spiritual baby with the bathwater. Their favorite refrain is that religions have been at the center of much suffering in the world. In that, they are correct. However, I can level that accusation to any human endeavor -- politics and science, for example. Science, while yielding many fruits, also has been at the center of much hardship and danger. Scientism (which is a form of corrupted science) is just as nasty as any organized religion. I would argue that neither science nor religion is at fault. It's human beings that have corrupted both.

Big fucking difference.

The Easter holiday is one that most resonates with my way of thinking because, like spring, it promises renewal and new beginnings. It’s a story that tells us that we can put together again our fractured lives; that we don’t have to be slaves to our past mistakes. It’s a powerful message. I would submit that the world’s sacred narratives help us make sense of our existence. The problem is that when interpreted literally rather than symbolically, the spiritual essence of religion loses its creative energy and becomes instead a destructive force.

Fundamentalists of any faith are drunk on a rapture of certainty, secure in their righteous belief of an exclusive covenant with God. In that way gay human beings become an abomination. And please spare the bullshit "hate the sin, not the sinner" hypocrisy. In fact, we can say our world today is embroiled in a clash of fundamentalisms as predicted by the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell.

Such thinking exists not only in religion, but in all of us -- whether left wingers, scientists, and secularists alike. We all have an inner fundamentalist right there in our amygdala, the tiny organ in the midbrain that triggers the fight-or-flight response to danger. It also originates from the tendency to attempt to split thinking and feeling that exists throughout the brain.

Which brings me to my Easter story of this year. I write it down now, as I prepare to address a group of worshipers at a local church.

Several years ago, I was having a very rough time at a community meeting. I was trying to educate a group of people on the effectiveness of alternative to incarceration programs. For me, it was a no-brainer: treat the root causes and crime decreases. Treat the addiction and it has a double effect. It’s more effective and cheaper than incarceration which is extremely expensive a tragic failure. Address education -- invest in smaller classroom size and make the schools friendlier to parents and we prevent crime before it ever begins. I had the charts, the facts -- in short I had everything I thought I needed to help people see that locking up millions of individuals (mostly young people of color) wasn’t a very smart or effective way to create a moral and just society.

Man, was I getting beat up that day! LOL

At one point, during an intermission, this young white man came up to me and asked if he could address the audience briefly. I don’t why I trusted this individual, I had never seen him before, and I had had it to here

::grabs dese nuts::

... with angry white men. However, inwardly acknowledging that the meeting couldn’t possibly get any worse, I shrugged and told him, “Go ahead, finish putting me out of my misery.”

He got up and told of how two men brutally murdered the woman who raised him, his grandmother -- the only family he had. He told of the agonizing pain and hardship; the anger he felt -- how he wanted those who took his grandmother’s life to be punished -- possibly to have their lives taken also. Then he spoke about something that floored everybody. He spoke about his journey from a heart filled with vengeance to forgiveness and compassion. In the process of speaking of that healing process, he managed to do what all my facts and charts didn’t: he opened people’s hearts to the possibility of a different community; of a different society. A society based not on revenge and killing -- an “eye for an eye,” -- but a society predicated on empathy and compassion and equality. I was never so moved as when I heard this man speak so openly about being torn down only to be arise again. What a lesson! And, no, he wasn’t a religious man, at least not in a rigid sense.

I think this man was able to touch upon the essential nature of vengeance and forgiveness. Vengeance comes from desire -- a desire to make aright, no matter what the expense. If you killed mine, then I must kill you. And in the short term, vengeance serves to alleviate our pain. But in the long term the desire for vengeance -- like all unskillful desire -- erodes our humanity. It eats at us from the inside until we become empty of anything even remotely resembling an enlightened species. Compassion and empathy comes from the part of the brain that triggers love, creativity, collaboration and, physiologically, it releases chemicals and responses that heal -- that strengthen the immune system and encourages fellowship.

I would suggest a different form of spirituality: one that recognizes a universal energy in everything, the humility to admit mistakes, one that promotes flexibility instead of rigidity, and a willingness to tolerate differences.

And isn’t that a story that mirrors any kind of resurrection? Couldn’t such a shift be an evolutionary quantum leap? In fact, this is where we stand today: at the precipice of an evolutionary and spiritual chasm, and leap we must or become the first species to make ourselves extinct.

Love,

Eddie

The Conservative Mindset, pt. II

¡Hola! Everybody...
As promised, today’s post attempts to look at the conservative mindset from a historical and empirical perspective.

Edmund Burke promoted the worldview that informs many of toady’s conservatives: That people are essentially evil and need a strong controlling force to prevent them from acting out their evil nature (that is, unless you’re rich). Such a force, continued Burke, should most appropriately come from those have inherited wealth or lawfully obtained wealth, religious, or political power. In addition, Burke believed that a permanent underclass with little power and a permanent power elite with great power would produce the greatest social good because it will ensure social stability. Conservatives want to conserve the status quo...

My observation is that no one is fully conservative or liberal. We tend to fluctuate according to different situations. However, conservatism comes from somewhere -- it is founded on a certain worldview encompassing notions of the origins of human nature. What follows is an attempt to peek behind the curtain.

It's been a hectic day, so I apologize in advance for the sloppy or disjointed writing...

* * *

-=[ The Conservative Mindset, pt. II ]=-

“Contempt is not a thing to be despised.”

-- Edmund Burke (1729–1797) “Father” of conservatism

In 2003, a group of researchers published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003) that caused an immediate shit storm. Because some government grants were involved in funding the research, conservatives, who at the time controlled all branches of the US government, took an immediate and unfriendly “interest” in the paper. It would seem that they did not particularly care for the results of the research, and threats were made about preventing further “waste of government money” to fund research into the conservative mindset.

[Note: The papers, written mostly in clear, jargon-free language, are posted on the internet: click here and here to access PDF versions]

The study was “biased” against conservatives, they insisted! As usual, right-wingers went into their feces-flinging act, outraged that anyone would dare quantify the obvious and actually show they are an emotionally unstable group. ::grin::

Well, it’s not as if we didn’t suspect all along that something was wrong with the likes of Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Lush Rimbaugh, that Michelle Bachmann twat, Sarah Palin and the rest of the Flock of Fools.

The study, funded jointly by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Institute of Mental Health at the National Institute of Health (NIH), examined a mindset that the authors were polite enough to refer to as political conservatism. What they were really studying were the right wing wackos who had taken over the GOP and in the process threaten to turn America into a third-rate fascist state (stuff like torture, shredding of the Constitution, spying on US citizens, etc.)

Sensing that their study might cause a slight discomfort among the more sensitive of our conservative brethren (really: they lit up like rabid chimps going ape on helpful neighbors) went to great lengths to reassure one and all that they weren’t calling right wingers a bunch of psychotic, destructive nuts. Obviously, they weren’t studying the right-wingers we see most often on the internets (<-- Bushism). Essentially, the researchers culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism and reported that at the core of political conservatism is resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror management

The authors wrote, “Our first assumption, too, is that conservative ideologies -- like virtually all other belief systems -- are adopted in part because they satisfy some psychological needs. This does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled.” Still, that didn’t stop right-wingers from losing their minds and screaming for the scalps of the researchers. Right-wing radio hosts howled and frothed at the mouth, demanding that an investigation should be made immediately into the funding these researchers get, and they were accused, with no regard to rhyme nor reason, of being anti-American and anti-Christian and probably for gay rights, killing babies, and gun control to boot.

OK, let’s try to forget O’Reilly and Ann Coulter for a moment. Sure, there are conservatives who aren’t sadistic amoral sociopaths. Shoot, in real life, I know some. I even have conservative friends, although I did warn my sister not to marry my former (and current) brother-in-law.

On a serious note, what the researchers were looking at were what could be termed “political fundamentalists.” They tend to be reactionary, paranoid, authoritarian, intolerant, and contemptuous of rules that don’t suit them. While there are left-wing examples, the authors found that they generally gravitate toward fascism and call it conservatism, even though it’s usually better described as radical reactionaries. In any case, the researchers found that left-wingers are less likely to exhibit these traits.

The authors define the two core principles of conservatism as resistance to change, and acceptance of social inequality. Conservatives, they argue, cling tightly to a status quo (“traditional values”), real or imagined, and regard society as hierarchical. Not unsurprisingly, they tend to believe they have inherited and/or merited preferential positions in this hierarchy.

The authors address what they call the “conservative paradox” of radical reactionarism (e.g., Hitler, Mussolini) by pointing out that their calls for extreme inequality in the social order were superimposed with promises to lead the country back to an ideal past, one in which “traditional” values and morality reigned. It occurs to me that our present-day right-wing reactionaries continuously evoke a traditional America that never existed: where everyone was a god-fearing generic protestant, people with accents lived in the poor part of town and never bothered folks except to mow their lawn, and women and blacks knew their place.

This goes with what I believe is a hallmark of the fundamentalist mindset: the ability to subsume a philosophy to suit personal needs. In Christianity and Islam, for example, you have religions that place high premiums on respect for fellow humans, peace, and personal integrity. Yet fundamentalists are frequently the most violent, dishonest, and intolerant people around. Furthermore, they often use their religion to rationalize their repulsive behavior. In conservatism, you see people who champion the Bill of Rights, “small government,” and a laissez faire approach to economics while loudly cheering for the Patriot Act and the tariffs Bush placed on steel and timber.

This emotional and intellectual contradiction is how conservatives are able to condemn what they perceive as dishonest and immoral behavior on Obama’s part (i.e., “tax cheats”) while at the same time accepting that Bush lied his way into a needless and foolish war while declaring that he was “fighting a war on terrorism.” It’s how Republicans can damn Democrats as being fiscally irresponsible even while they ignored Bush’s disastrous conservative fiscal policies that drove the global economy to an economic collapse the likes of which has never been seen. One need only point out conservatives’ vilification of Obama for a deficit that he didn’t cause while ignoring Bush’s reckless tax cuts to see this paradox at work.

One of the more interesting issues in the paper is “The Theory of RWA,” in which the authors consider Authoritarian Personality. They state, “harsh parenting styles brought on by economic hardship led entire generations to repress hostility toward authority figures and to replace it with an exaggerated deference and idealization of authority and tendencies to blame society scapegoats and punish deviants.”

Angry, repressed, passive-aggressive, with an overwhelming desire to punish those who don’t conform.

Yup, sounds like our boys!

This may not stop people from growing up to be right-wingers. Many people can no more choose to be conservative than they can choose their sexual orientation. But hey, you can't say I didn't try.

Coming up next are treatments on black conservatives, and the genetic foundations of personality and political affiliations.

References

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339-375.

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003 ). Exceptions that prove the rule -- using a theory of motivated social cognition to account for ideological incongruities and political anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas (2003). Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 383-393.

Lost

¡Hola! Everybody...
I have a headache and I never get headaches -- never. I’m going to turn off all the lights a just lay down....

* * *

-=[ The Lost ]=-

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore --
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over --
like a syrupy-sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
-- Langston Hughes

During the height of the Japanese occupation of the Pacific during WW II, there were tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers scattered over literally thousands of tiny islands. As the tide of war shifted, many of these island strongholds were defeated or overrun, but some were entirely missed. On some islands, small groups of soldiers or isolated survivors hid in caves in dense inaccessible jungle areas.

Eventually, the war would come to an end. But since these survivors had no way of knowing, they continued living as if the war was still being fought, maintaining military protocol, totally isolated, yearning for the day when they would be reunited with their command.

In the years immediately following the war, many of these soldiers were found by natives, or discovered when they shot at fishing boats. As the years passed, these discoveries became less frequent, the last having been found thirty years after the war had ended.

Try to put yourself in such a soldier’s position. His government had called on him to protect his country from an external threat, trained him, and sent him to a jungle island to protect his people. And as a loyal citizen he served this call and survived many battles through the hard years of war. When the war ended, he kept honoring this call, fighting a war that he didn’t know ended, surviving against great odds. Despite the heat, the insects, and the rains, he carried on, still loyal to the orders given to him by his government.

It would be easy to laugh at such a soldier and consider him stupid for continuing to fight a war that had been over for years. How should such a soldier be treated?

Whenever one of these soldiers was located, the first contact was always made by someone who had been a high-ranking officer. He would dust off his old uniform and samurai sword and take a military boat to the area where the soldier had been sighted.

The officer would walk through the jungle, calling out for the soldier until he was found. When the soldier was found, the officer would thank the soldier, with tears in his eyes, for his loyalty, for continuing to defend his country. Only after some time would the soldier gently be told the war was over and that his country was again at peace, so he would not have to fight anymore.

When he reached home, he would be given a hero’s welcome, with parades and medals, and crowds thanking him and celebrating his sacrifices.

Many of us would view these lost soldiers as weird and even crazy, fighting a war that had long been over. Yet who can deny their intention was positive – to protect and serve their country? Although they were doing the best they could with what they knew, and however useful their behavior may have once been, the war was over and it no longer served a purpose.

Laugh you might, but there are times we are all like those lost soldiers. We all have feelings or behaviors that once may have served a useful purpose when we were younger, and we continue even when they are no longer useful to us.

Some of us find ourselves still fighting battles with their parents long after they have died. We may find ourselves reacting in the workplace with behaviors developed to deal with an older brother, or the school bully. People who have been hurt sometimes learn to mistrust others so well that they have great difficulty trusting others who love them deeply. Some of us have been hurt so deeply that even saying the words, “I love you,” is a near impossibility.

All of us do things we sometimes consider stupid or limiting – things that get in our way. Sometimes we feel inadequate and angry when we think that’s a dumb thing to feel. How many of us also occasionally see our friends and relatives doing stupid, harmful, weird things. I think we tend to see it better in others than in ourselves. “Pfffft! They should know better,”we scoff.

We are the lost soldiers. Welcome to a war that has been over for a long time, my friends.

We usually respond to these behaviors by trying to get rid of them, criticizing ourselves mercilessly in the process:

“You ought to be able to stop smoking!”

“You should be able to lose weight!”

“You’re so stupid for not feeling more self-confident.”

“I get so pissed at getting these migraines!”

All we know is that these responses get in our way, that they serve no useful purpose, and only get in our way.

However, like the lost soldiers, all our behaviors at one time served a useful purpose. Cognitive linguists talk about “frames,” the mental structures we build in order to make sense of reality. These frames are very important to us and sometimes they’re not even based on evidence but values. I can talk till I’m blue in the face, showing you that what you view as a table really isn’t a table, but if you developed a certain “frame” for a table, you will dismiss the evidence and keep the “frame.”

For me, the key to effective change is to use reframing techniques. Maybe we can think of a frame as part of a map. We create maps early in our lives so that we can navigate the territory. But what happens when the territory has changed and our maps have lost their relevance? What happens mostly is that people keep the maps and mistake the map for the territory.

I see it all the time.

The most important part of this reframing method is making the following assumption: that every behavior or feeling you have, no matter how bizarre or stupid it seems, has some useful and important, positive function or intention. It may seem ridiculous but it’s a powerful assumption that makes inner healing possible. It helps us turn problems and limitations into assets and allies.

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon: American Taliban

¡Hola! Everybody…

Here’s hoping my Houston readers are well and safe. I have family in Texas (believe it or not) and fortunately, they are doing well. No one’s hurt and today they all have juice. Hope all those affected by Ike can say the same.

* * *

-=[ The American Taliban’s War Against Freedom ]=-

News Item: Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so. According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired.

I recently had to fire an employee for unethical behavior. In actuality, she was beyond unethical, she was demented. I will be conducting interviews for the now open position. I can tell you in full confidence that any job applicants listing “being tortured” as a qualification for the job will not be considered. In addition, any applicants claiming not to have any experience as a qualification will be similarly dismissed. I believe any readers who own their own business would behave in a similar matter.

Why then, do we accept these as “qualifications” for the most powerful office in the known universe?

::blank stare::

In the same way, I will not be entertaining any applicants who cite a holy mandate as a qualification for the job. Let me put it this way: if you ask why you should submit to my desire to sodomize you and my response is “God wants it that way,” would you then bend over? (If you r answer is yes and you’re female, please PM me right away!).

Why then, would you accept this from a politician?

About half the people who voted in the last elections (roughly 20-25% of the population) accept these as qualifications for the office of the presidency of the United States of America.

Would you allow a doctor who dismissed the most important, most concrete theory of biology to treat you? I doubt it. And whatever your “beliefs,” if a cure using evolutionary theory would save your child or loved one from disease, you would use it without thinking about it. In fact, most of us do benefit from such a theory everyday of our lives.

As a young man, I would read of the Dark Ages and wonder how such a world could exist. It was hard for me to imagine a world in which religious superstition would eradicate knowledge, discourage the technology of how to build aqueducts, construct indoor plumbing, and practice sophisticated herbal medicine.

Today, I not only can better understand such a thing -- I believe I am seeing it. As I write this today, science in the United States – once a leader in virtually every research field – is under an intense assault from the extreme religious right – the American Taliban.

No matter how broad the scientific consensus that fossil fuels constitute the principal factor in climate change, conservatives have applied enough pressure that the current administration wouldn’t sign the Kyoto Protocol. The conservative movement will most likely have succeeded in convincing you that oil-drilling in the Alaskan wilderness will be good for you (ignorance is strength). You will vote for that though it will have at best a negligible effect on your pocket and will continue our dependence on fossil fuels when we should be leading the world in alternative fuel sources.

In 2006, the National Institutes of Health budget was cut – for the first time in thirty-six years. As a nation, we educate fewer scientists every year, and we now import more high-tech products than we export. Pressured by wild-eyed extremists such as McCain, Bush administration policy dictates that one third of all government HIV-prevention spending – literally hundreds of millions of dollars – must go to “abstinence until marriage” programs, while government funding for programs supporting condom use have been gutted. This, despite the tragic fact that failure rates for abstinence only programs are many times higher than for programs that are more comprehensive.

The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have both been forced to take unscientific positions in order to please religious forces. For example, they have had to bow to conservative pressure on the “morning after” Plan B pill and on condom use, provoking a mass exodus of scientists from both agencies.

Evangelical CDC appointee and Focus on the Family co-founder, Reginald Finger has gone on record as saying that he would oppose an HIV vaccine if one were to become available: “With any vaccine for HIV, dis-inhibition [meaning freedom from the fear of sex] would certainly be a factor and is something we will have to pay attention to.” These same people attempted blocking approval for and successfully politicized a vaccine protecting women against a virus that causes caner of the cervix. His worry was that, “This vaccine may be sending an overall message to teenagers that ‘We expect them to be sexually active’”

At the same time, conservatives send anti-choice lobbyists as delegates to international conventions on women’s health, and pressure global conferences on AIDS to have religious zealots lecture on “faith-based solutions to AIDS.” I could go on and on: the religious right’s effect on stem cell research, for example, is notorious, despite the majority of scientists – and U. S. citizens, including evangelicals – supporting research that stands to have the largest impact on health in the history of humankind, particularly affecting research on cancer, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, and paralysis.

We like to look down our collective noses at societies that ruled by “obsessed fanatics,” especially those in the Muslim world. The talking heads of the corporate media tsk-tsk about these societies and our political nominees love to fall back on the talking point that “they hate our freedoms that’s why they attack us.

Fair enough.

But what about our homegrown literalist, fundamentalist extremists? In 1997, a man named Gil Alexander Moegerle held a press conference in Colorado Springs. A cofounder of the group, Focus on the Family, he had just written a book, James Dobson’s War on America. Apparently taking his Christianity seriously for a change, Alexander-Moegerle offered a public apology to all women, men of color, Jews, Muslims, homosexual people, and others harmed by the “actions and attitudes on the part of the Christian Right in general and James Dobson and Focus on the Family in particular.”

The book is the first insider expose of a major religious-right organization that uncovers how the corrupt Christina Right operates behind the scenes and issues a warning to the American people.

There was virtually no coverage of his press conference (though it is still available in full: click here).

Many Christians will respond to my critiques of religion by pointing out that it applies only to a small number of vulgar, literalistic fundamentalists. But this is at best wishful thinking. The majority of Americans accept the Bible as a literal history, for example. A history which no rational person should treat as anything more than metaphorical myths. For example, a study using several different surveys found that a percentage of Americans believed:

• Moses literally parted the Red Sea: 64%
• God created the universe in six days: 60%
  

And some of us wonder why our educational system is in disarray? We have extremists running for office who advocate the censorship of books and discourage the teaching of sound scientific theory! How is that different form Europe’s Dark Ages, or the behavior of “radical Islamic extremists” today?

The decade of 1991-2001 saw a marked increase in multiple attacks on U.S. clinics and medical personnel providing contraception and abortion services, leaving 8 dead and 33 seriously wounded. Additionally, there have been more than 20 arsons and attempted arsons, 10 bombings and attempted bombings, and multiple clinics in 23 states have received threats of anthrax and chemical attacks. In fact, the American Life League (a Catholic Organization) ran an ad attacking Planned Parenthood, declaring “Abortion as the ultimate terrorism.”

How would this be treated if it were Islamic terrorists doing the bombing?

It’s time for us to reclaim this nation (or, for some groups, claim it for the first time). It’s time to return it to its original “patriotic” values. The Founders, flawed men that they were, knew they didn’t get it right. They realized that issues would come up, changes and discoveries would make some of their views irrelevant. They realized, that United States of America was (and still is) an experiment. The reason people want to come here is not because they want to shoot caribous in the wild or even buy plasma TVs. They come here because they want to be a part of that experiment.

After the first Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what type of government the Founders had chosen. His reply is as striking today as it was then: “We have given you a republic – if you can keep it.”

So... it’s up to us…

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon [Consequences of Sexual Repression]

¡Hola! Everybody…
I won't be surprised if someone reports me today... I’m simply dumbfounded. Here we are in the 21^st century and there are still people out here (men and women) who fear nudity and sex? Almost 100 years ago, people were all upset because women chose (at a great price, I might add) to show more than ankles in public. “It’s the end times!” the religious fanatics yelped. Yeah right! SMDH…

Today's blog photo depicts former Bush staffer, John Ashcroft, speaking in front of the statue, Spirit of Justice. In case you're not aware, Ashcroft's major claim to fame before Bush was that he lost an election... to a dead man! (I'm not kidding.) Ashcroft eventually spent quite a sum of money to cover the statue's breast. My question to is what was more obscene the statue or expenditure of money at a time when a child was probably dying of hunger in these United States?

I have written versions of the following post, but apparently, people need to see it again.

* * *

-=[ The Consequences of Sexual Repression ]=-
“Repression is not morality.”
-- Anonymous

From birth we are taught to be ashamed of and fearful of sex – all of us to some degree are repressed ma’fuccas! Even those of us who claim to have been sexually “free” in the past, use language to describe that experience that leaves me wondering. In many cases, it’s a past in which remorse and “youthful indiscretion” plays a prominent role. This isn’t the language of sexual freedom, it’s repression personified. People make the error that sexual repression equates to less sexual activity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Repression is a way to push things out of our conscious awareness where they then gain total control over our actions.

I have traveled to many places and I have never come up against the sheer depth of sexual hang-ups that I confront in this society. We fear, loathe, and at the same time crave sex.

I have previously written about the two-thousand year Christian campaign against sex. Add to that the three centuries of Puritanism and – welcome to America. Eroticism is considered an outlaw energy in this culture. I don’t know exactly why – maybe it’s a reminder of the Goddess, or because of the sheer power of this energy, or maybe it’s because it made sense thousands of years ago. Whatever the reason, Eros is taboo and our society spends huge sums of its precious resources every minute of every year to undermine, co-opt, channel, manipulate, ridicule, and distort it.

And we all pay a price for this.

The consequence when a religion fails to recognize our basic human need for pleasure and uses its power to influence what is considered normal in order to repress our God-given right for nurturing and sensual and erotic pleasure is violence. When we reduce sex to the mechanical interlocking of sexual organs and ignore the vital sustenance we can draw from the sexual rainbow of playful, loving, and intimate union, we distort our human nature.

Numerous studies of child abuse, for example, indicate that parents who abuse their children were often deprived of physical affection during childhood, and as adults experience extremely unsatisfying sexual relationships. Studies of child-rearing practices across cultures, and evidence of neurological damage in anti social humans demonstrate that deprivation of bodily pleasure during infancy and adolescence and the repression of pleasure promote adult violence. A case in point is the U.S.: compared to other industrialized democracies, we have some of the most repressive legal sanctions against sexuality and yet we have the highest sexual crime rates. That’s a fact, not a belief.

Patriarchal religions (i.e., Christianity, Judaism, and Muslim) that emphasize a high God who actively punish deviations in human behavior commonly endorse anti-women, anti-sex and anti-pleasure value systems. As part of their anti-sexual values, these religions promote negative attitudes about the physical nurturance of infants and children. They also severely punish adolescents and adults who engage in erotic pleasures considered outside the norm.

Deprivation of body pleasure throughout life – but especially during the formative periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence – is very closely related to the amount of warfare and violence in a society. conversely, societies that promote nurturing in child-rearing, that are comfortable with the body and with sexuality and pleasure, produce adults who have little sexual dysfunction, who promote gender and social equality, and a society that does not glorify slavery or war.

There is a strong argument for the notioin that failure to celebrate the pleasures of the Divine presence in our erotic lives creates the compulsion to conquer and achieve pleasure elsewhere. One can see a clear causal link between patriarchal (Father-like) religions that deny the nurturance we draw from erotic pleasure and the anti-sex, anti-pleasure belief systems of religious fundamentalism and fascism.

Religious fundamentalism of any type relies on literal interpretations of texts by males who determine what rules guide human behavior and spell out punishments for those who deviate from those rules. Fundamentalism thrives when individuals become terrified of thinking outside cultural norms. For me, fundamentalism is patriarchy gone mad, fascism is the ultimate expression of father-dominance. Within this framework, moralizing and condemnation become more important than celebration and play. Self-centeredness and a preoccupation with power and laws become a substitute for adventure, pleasure, wonder, and a living spiritual ritual.

The repression of the erotic and pleasure makes for strange bedfellows. One only has to look at the Christian rationalization of slavery during this country’s shameful period. Christians used the bible to justify slavery, foe example. Want more proof? You can look at the early Christian support for Hitler who agreed on his attacks on contraception, pornography, and sexual permissiveness. Even more recently, Christians have supported neo-fascist attacks on gay bars, sex shops, abortion clinics and houses of prostitutions the world over!

But there is a change coming on and it terrifies many people around the world. There are fundamentalist forces clamoring for a return to the “good old times.” You know the good old times: the times when women were little better than property, where people of color “knew their place,” and gays were kept in the closet.

There is a culture war in full effect in these United States and there are those who want to drag us back to the Dark Ages where dialogues about sexual identity and alternatives to sexual monogamy didn’t exist. Fortunately, we can’t go back -- as much as these ignoramuses would like. We are in what the famous anthropologist Margaret Meade called a prefigurative stage. All the myths and symbols that gave meaning and direction to our culture have lost much of their significance (and with good reason), and we are only beginning to create a new cosmology, a culture that respects sex, pleasure, and sensuality, new myths and icons that provide relevant models for a new consciousness of ourselves and of the earth.

The other option, to cling to an outmoded book full of outdated myths, is to choose to destroy ourselves.

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon [Rick Warren]

¡Hola! Everybody,
Today, I rail against “undercover evangelicals.” I mean, if you’re gonna be a born again ma’fucca, the least you can do is be upfront about it so I can avoid you! LOL

* * *

-=[ Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life: Whose Purpose? ]=-

“”The bible teaches that since entered the world, way back with the very first human beings, we have lived in an imperfect, broken planet, and that causes hurricanes and tornadoes.”

-- Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life

Perhaps some of my readers are familiar with Rick Warren’s the Purpose Driven Life, the best selling hardcover nonfiction book in publishing history. What may not be as familiar is Mr. Warren’s purpose or agenda.

The Hawaiian shirt-wearing evangelical pastor of twenty two thousand at the Saddleback megachurch in Lake forest, California once collected $7 million in cash on one Sunday. His church services are so huge, babies checked in to the nursery are assigned bar codes in order to avoid losing them. His church provides several service styles, including gospel, guitar-driven, and even “hula and island style.”

None of this would matter if we didn’t live in a free society threatened by the agenda of the radical religious right. Unfortunately, we do live in such times and Warren is one of the most influential of the evangelical assault on freedom. While he denies not being part of the religious right’s agenda, good-ole Warren has gone on record as being “firmly a cultural conservative.” He believe opposing abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, human cloning, and euthanasia are “non negotiable” and “not even debatable” for people of true values. Now, before any “born againers” get it twisted, I’m not against people having their religious beliefs/ values. I just don’t like it when you try to ram it down my throat or make your beliefs law.

Warren went so far as to call the Terry Schiavo debacle “an atrocity worthy of Nazism.” The only thing atrocious about the Terry Schiavo case was the behavior of the religious zealots, who manipulated the tragedy to serve their own agenda. Oh yeah, Warren has compared homosexuality to having sex with a horse (where do these clowns get their material?!!)

Warren likes to say he’s not political, but that’s bullshit. Prior to the 2004 elections, he set up voter registration booths on Saddleback’s church patio and, most telling, he sent letters to 150,000 pastors insisting their congregations vote for Bush. So when Warren insists he’s not part of the Looney evangelical right, he’s bullshitting. Actually, he’s telling a lie.

Most recently, the pastor even joined forces with rocker/ activist Bono at Live 8.

No wonder latte-sipping libruhls, Volvo owners, and sinners alike are so out of the loop. Rick Warren is one of the most influential leaders in the country, yet most people outside of the church know next to nothing about him. The likely successor to Billy Graham’s mantle has ministered to leaders such as George Bush, Bill Clinton (talk about stealth conservativism!), and Rupert Murdoch and claims to have personally signed a copy of the Purpose Driven Life for Fidel! LOL!

Warren’s influence is puzzling for me. I mean, he really believes that David killed a giant with a slingshot and other biblical stories you are likely to catch on Xena: Warrior princess reruns. He also believes that Noah had never seen rain before The Flood, because in Old Testament times “God irrigated the earth from the ground up.” He believes and states all of the above and yet he has influenced millions. If I tried that shit, I’d be put away (again).

Warren’s Purpose Driven Life encourages people to discover their own God-given purpose through forty daily readings in order to achieve happiness in life. His “God is Your Buddy” preaching style (as well as his Hawaiian shirt collection) defines his God-given purpose. I always get nervous around people who think (and say) their doing “God’s work” because who the fuck knows if it’s true?!! LOL! You have a direct line to God?!! Seriously, being that absolute is, in my not so humble opinion, the root of 90% of the world’s problems. I get nervous when people start saying their doing God’s work because historically speaking that’s usually entails a lot of pain.

Warren’s true genius lies in marketing. He set out with the conscious purpose of seeking to bring sinners to his church. Employing focus group mentality and methodology, he’s one of the innovators of the “seeker sensitive” branch of evangelicalism: casual churches where sinners will feel comfortable. Seeker sensitive churches like Warren’s are in the business of marketing themselves to sinners. Pastors like Warren intentionally orchestrate the church experience to appeal to sinners. By the way, according to Warren, sinners are “unrepentant pagans.” So you ma’fuccan Wiccans leave that New Agey mumbo jumbo at home! LOL!

Church slogans at Saddleback promise “God’s extreme Makeover” and sermons can be watched in a variety of settings, including on-premises café equipped with live feeds of the service.

I call it “Corporate Christianity” and I doubt it resembles anything even closely remote to the teachings of a 1^st century radical rabbi who hung out with a bunch of losers and outcasts.

But here’s Warren’s true purpose in his own words (discussing the launching of his international PEACE Plan):

“Jesus said, ‘This Gospel shall be preached into all the world to every nation and then the end will come.’ He’s not coming back until that happens… The question is will we get to be the ones who get to be on it or not. Will we be the generation who says, ‘Let’s make this happen!’”

You should be scared…

Love,

Eddie