The Ties That Bind

 

When I was in graduate school in the 1980’s, I had the opportunity to do an internship in an art museum in a mid-size southern city. I started out as a curatorial assistant, and my first assignment was to learn how to accession items into the museum’s collection. One of the donations I worked on was several pieces of Fiestaware, an inexpensive Art Deco china introduced by the Homer Laughlin China Company in 1936.

Fiestaware, characterized by bold solid color glazes and curved shapes, was instantly a success when it was released in the midst of the Great Depression. As I saw and handled it for the first time, I was struck by the shapes and colors, and immediately felt why this bright, affordable tableware must have appealed so greatly to so many in a dark time in our history. Much like our ancestors who were drawn to this simple, accessible way to brighten their homes in a time of want, I began to slowly purchase a few pieces of Fiestaware, mostly at antique malls.

Over the years and through two marriages, I managed to put together a fairly complete collection. I have packed and moved it probably a dozen times, twice stored it in one of those places, and put most of it in the same Hoosier cabinet wherever I am living at the moment. All this time, it has managed to accrue in value.

I have of late been moving into a new place in my life, where I am looking objectively at how I live. I am redefining my purpose, my values, my lifestyle – and there have been profound shifts in what is important to me. One of the most quantum changes has been in the values of what I am connected to in a deep way. I have come to believe that the entire universe – all of creation – is connected. The smallest, most seemingly insignificant thing can ripple through time and space and have profound impacts and create incomprehensible change.

I also believe that every moment of our lives is a choice. We can go in several directions at any time, and it is how we choose to react to people and circumstances and things that determine the next step on our journey through life. There is not really an Us or a Them. There is only We. The good news to me is that I get to determine the strength of each cord that ties me to anyone or anything.

There are many things that I have chosen lately to free myself of, by setting those things free. Some of them I have gladly tossed aside in an instant, with the only emotional reaction being one of gladness and gratitude. Others have been almost unbearably painful, and have required time, diligence, acceptance and ritual to release. These things and people will always be a part of me, and of the definition of who and what and where I am. Each of them has taught me valuable things, made me happy and mournful, healed and wounded me, and are precious gifts to me that will never be forgotten as I walk down my path.

All cords are not all personal. We as a culture are tied to old self images and discredited ideas and false, myopic ideas about our collective past. We look to the sitcoms of the 1950’s and 60’s and, as has now become our almost universal reaction, confuse entertainment with memory and reality. No academic takes the philosophical ideas of Ayn Rand seriously, and despite her loathing and ranting regarding Christianity or any sense of societal empathy, she has become an ideological darling of the evangelical right. I recently had a conversation with an addiction counselor that has come to believe that the paranoia, the constant drumbeat of hatred and impending cultural collapse, the sense that their imaginary idea of our nation is under assault by “those people”, has become a real and serious pathology. We are so invested in our self-perception as the City on the Hill, so married to the hubris of American Exceptionalism, that we can’t see the where we as a nation have and continue to far too often fail our own citizens and the planet as a whole.

A person or a people cannot free the bonds of what holds us back without honestly opening our eyes and our minds to the reality within and around us. You cannot see what you do not look at. Each of us owes it to ourselves and our siblings of God to open our eyes and our souls to what is real, and determine what nurtures us and harms us, and choose a path forward that leads us individually and collectively to a better place. Our choices are our legacy.

The collection of Fiestaware I carefully amassed over the years has brought me great joy, and in many ways the doing of it over a long time is one of the greatest of those joys. It is time to let go, though, to repurpose this resource to new things that have grown more important to me. I am grateful for the happiness and experiences I amassed in collecting this colorful and pleasing thing. If, however, I am to grow and move, I must set these this thing free and hope it brings the same gladness to someone else it gave me.

Good bye, Fiestaware, and thank you for not only what you have given me, but for the next thing that you are helping make possible.

---

 

An Autopsy on American Democracy

There is a lot of noise in our society these days about income inequality. Interestingly and predictably, those that have just don't see what all the fuss is about, and invoke their delusion that those exponentially less well off than them are guilty of class envy and waging class warfare, as if their nemeses had the weapons to wage such a war.

A slow-motion earthquake has been underway in the US for a while now and the fissure that has opened up continues to widen. On one side are the Americans for Prosperity and the Freedom Forum and their ilk - organizations with names extolling some of our most cherished popular ideals. The cruel truth is that the only freedom and prosperity they care about is their own.

Carl Rove, the man declared by James Moore and Wayne Slater to be Bush's Brain, pulled off one of the greatest feats in American political history - using social issues proposed by the fundamentalist right to scare people into voting against their own economic self-interest. The only thing that rivals it in our modern politics is the Southern Strategy engineered by Lee Atwater to propel Richard Nixon into the White House in 1968. Atwater's campaign did result in Nixon's election, which was after all Atwater's job. It also broke the solid south in terms of presidential politics, opening the door for the transition of the south from a Democratic to a Republican trump card in national elections in one generation.

One of the generals in Atwater's War Council was Kevin Phillips, a relatively young Republican political strategist that went on to write The Emerging Republican Majority, one of the most prescient books on American politics of the last century. Many years later, as he has closely observed and pointedly commented on the relationship between our culture and our politics, he left the Republican party and eventually published two books that incisively and damningly examine where we have headed since that fateful 1968 election. The first, 2002's Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, looks at the history of the influence of money in our elections and lawmaking. Phillips went on four years later to apply the lessons he saw from that study to our modern politics in American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. In this latter work, he has strong words for what he calls the "unholy alliance" of these three interests in corrupting our politics to serve their ends.

Phillips saves some of his harshest criticisms for Alan Greenspan, who he blames for what he terms the "financialization" of our country during his tenure as Fed Chairman. In a stunning irony, he outlines Greenspan's slavish devotion to the ideas of Ayn Rand, who the future quarterback of our economy literally studied at the feet of. What is mind-boggling about this is the seemingly cozy alliance between a financial class that benefitted from a largely discredited atheist "philosopher" whose major treatise was titled The Virtues of Selfishness, and the Religious Right that claims to represent a religion whose Lord declared that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. I have never been able to figure out if these people have very tiny camels or very large needles.

There is a point to all of this. What Phillips proves Greenspan is guilty of, the financialization of our economy to the disadvantage of all but what we now call the 1%, has now happened to our politics. At a time when virtually every rational commentator is trying to warn us of the corrosive effect of vast sums of private wealth on our politics, a Supreme Court majority appointed largely by a president installed by the Unholy Alliance first shot Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people and for the people" in the heart with the Citizens United decision, and then last week shot it in the head with the decision in McCutcheon v FEC, just to make sure it was dead.

The rantings of some among the wealthiest of the wealthy in this country about class warfare is one of the cruelest examples of blaming the victims we have ever witnessed. The class warfare they have waged is now largely in the mopping up phase. Lincoln spoke his words on a battlefield soaked by the blood of 50,000 dead and wounded Americans. No one could have imagined that 150 years later that government he described would perish without a single shot being fired.

There a lot of things the Grand Old Party is called, both in praise and in condemnation. The one thing it should never again be called is the Party of Lincoln.

Ignorance is Not Bliss

There is a growing trend in our society that I find profoundly disturbing. Throughout American history, there have been waves of anti-intellectualism. The crest of this current wave, however, is deep and troubling and is breaking below on the foundation of our republic, hitting our shore with waves of destruction rivaling a Southern Pacific typhoon.

In an article this week on Salon.com, Brian Buehler writes on what he calls the "GOP's bubble of ignorance.” He is referring specifically to the politics of half-truths and apocryphal stories that seem to be a part of all politics these days, but the idea of a bubble of ignorance has far wider implications on practically everything in our current culture.

We are in an age where obvious truths are under attack from ideologues from all directions. News media outlets are so scared of appearing "unbalanced", they are compelled to present what are charitably called opposing views to things that any reasonably-educated person knows to be true. Entertainment has become a news source. Half-truths and outright lies are fed to us all, supporting our already formed opinions, like infant birds waiting for mom to spew food into our gaping mouths. Rumors and falsehoods whip around the world at the literal speed of electrons, taking on a life of their own, while what would be obvious truths are cast aside like so much road kill. Jung's Collective Unconscious has been replaced by the internet.

Look at the politics of today. Climate Change and the degree of human impact on its ever-quickening pace is not disputed by more than a handful of reputable scientists, yet lawmakers at every level pretend that it is still unsettled science. Evolution is demonstrably true, part of the music of the universe. Yet we fight over whether to "balance" it in our public schools with religious dogma.

The world has become a progressively smaller place, first with sea travel, then with air travel, and now with an electronic web that connects everywhere and everything with everywhere and everything else. However, we are fighting an internecine war over whether to teach our children what they need to compete in this interconnected environment. Those inside the bubble of ignorance are forcing local school districts to indoctrinate our children with their beliefs, rather than allowing them to learn the basic collective human knowledge amassed over the last several millennia. Those with the beliefs and the means to do so have even managed to steal from the not unlimited resources of public education to create semi-private schools that are prone to ideological bents. Others school their children at home, lest the kids be exposed to something they themselves don't believe. This isn't education - it is indoctrination worthy of a Maoist re-education camp. To make matters worse, standardized testing on rote material hides the fact that we are neglecting to teach our youth - our future leaders and voters and citizens - to think for themselves, ensuring that in this cross-national world that every US child would indeed be left behind.

If I was prone to conspiracy theories, I would suspect that there is a coordinated effort afoot to dumb-down the American body politic to make it easier for us to be swayed into doing the bidding of the Kochs and Adelsons of the world. Requiring Boards of Education to counter universally accepted tenets in fields from science to history to civics to literature, to instill doubt where there is practically none, is slowly robbing our children, our culture and our nation of its future far more and in much more insidious ways than the national debt ever could.

There is one underlying irony to all of this, I believe. God gave us a wonderful world, and an amazing capacity to try to understand the majesty of ourselves, our world and our universe. He has allowed us to begin to understand how life itself adapts and grows and evolves. We have only begun to glimpse the incomprehensible vastness and glory of the universe. We now understand that time as we experience it is meaningless in the face of geological and astronomical time, and how we have only been granted an infinitesimal piece of the vastness of creation. To look at these things, to stand in awe of the reality of our world, and yet to deny the wonders of that creation that are right in front of us, using the gifts of comprehension and thinking and expression we are blessed with strikes me as an incredible insult to God. If he made all of these things, and allowed us to see some of the wonders of creation, to deny that is to express to God that despite what we say, we reject the reality of what He has given us.

We are also denying reality in our political and social world. Things have gotten so contentious, so ugly, so scrambled, that it is easier to bury ourselves in media and distractions and our own little cocoons than it is to look with clear eyes at what is happening all around us.

John Lennon, who I believe for all of his faults did see things more clearly that most of us, wrote of what he saw around him in 1970. His words only grow more prophetic with time:

They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV

And you think you're so clever and classless and free

But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see

A working class hero is something to be

A beginning on an average Thursday

I have been telling myself for a long time now that I was going to do this, and the only way to start, like with anything, is to start...

I have no pretense that I have anything profound to add to our collective understanding of where and how and why we live, but there are times when I feel that there is something to be said that I have not heard, be it regarding how we treat ourselves, our fellow travelers, our communities or our world. I find myself at times wondering if others see some of what is and goes on around us the same way I do, and I love intelligent dialogue with both those I agree and disagree with. If you don't listen to those with a different perspective than you, all you do is wall in yourself and you never learn anything you don't already know... and what you know lessens in value the less you allow out to be challenged. Like any muscle, an unused mind atrophies over time and eventually can only sustain what it already is. One of my desires in life is to have my last words to another be "I didn't know that".

I have been privileged to have been well educated and a little well traveled, and have so far lived a life full of unspeakable joy and unbearable pain, as have most of us. I am fascinated by history and what it means, by how we make and use places, by different approaches to and attitudes toward God, and by how we function as a society. I have been very active in the recovery community for well over a decade, am deeply spiritual but not religious, progressive in my social thinking, and sometimes open-minded to a fault. I am often adamantly wrong about things, but see ideas much like a scientist sees a theory... test it, experiment with it, look at the results, learn from it, and change or adjust as the evidence leads you.

I am not interested in just blabbing about what I see or think or feel about any given thing. My hope is that this will be a place for some insightful dialogue on whatever I see or wonder about, despite what I often see pass for conversation in this age of anonymous online ranting and intellectually gated communities.

This is a pretty thin beginning, I realize, and the next installment will hopefully get into some things I see going on around me these days that has me wondering about how we should and do treat those all around us.

Let the conversation begin...