Author: Adriel

Why So Many Crazies

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

I sent something like this to The Boys last week: The zoom discussion was why so many voters are true believers in all of the Trump craziness and despite his obvious villainy still voted for that fat fraud. There will always be many authoritarian voters for despotic leaders. But 74 million !?  WTF? So Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland:  How America Went Haywire, a 500-year History provides some answers.  Anderson writes that USA is uniquely given to waves of powerful but crazy beliefs, many of them enhanced by powerful and crazy religious beliefs.  The Puritans seeking God’s paradise, the witch-trials, the missionaries, P.T. Barnum who, like Pres. Drumph was well aware of how much of a manipulative money-grubber he was.  There is a long list, The Great Awakening, the speaking-in-tongues-ers, Manifest Destiny, Joseph Smith and the engraved plates (where the hell are they anyway and how much would they fetch on ebay?), there was Fr. Coughlin the no-nooky-nites Shakers, the end of time millenarians, the Scientologists, of course Jim Jones and on and on or as the King and I King Mongkut said etceterah, etceterah, etceterah.  The book is not about religious beliefs but it makes the point that beliefs of the kind that defy any common sense need to be propped up and supported by the powerful elixir of a god of some kind.  So now the QAnon guy is apparently a religious figure or is being seen as one, and then there are the followers of Pres Drumph who are much animated by evangelical religious leaders and especially the, what do you call them, the charlatan preachers who preach that if you believe then you will become fabulously wealthy.  What could be more American than that?  In other words, how do you get people to literally drink poisoned Kool-aid if the leader is not some cultish authoritarian who promised afterlife salvation. Several reporters have pointed out that Drumph rallies are like tent revivals and Drumph himself inspires religious fervor among the most ardent supporters. So yes, I think the Boys are right in saying it’s tribalism and emotion but I think that we have to acknowledge that crazy religious beliefs are the glue that holds much of this together.  For me the Anderson book provides some answers but not the whole answer.  Why so many millions?  It will always astound me. There is of course the powerful motivator of racism.  Every thoughtful person can see that the whole birther thing was plainly racist and that was the real kickstarter for the whole Trump cult. I think there was racism but also right-wing fear. I met a birther in the flesh, for real.  This nutcase woman was in charge of a federally funded social program during the Obama administration.  She was a highly paid lady from Louisiana managing a project created by the Bush administration to help strengthen small nonprofit charities particularly church sponsored groups.  (Yes, and I managed to grab three-quarters of a million dollars worth of this stuff and before you say it was government grift, it helped both with cash grants to Sustainable Berea and New Opportunity School etceterah, etceterah.) So this nutcase from New Orleans started in on me at a conference in DC.  “Obama was not born in America! He was born in Africa!  He is a Muslim.  He will turn us into a Muslim country.  Muslim!  We will all have to be Muslim.”  I got the hell away from her because she was clearly out of control.

Two things about the 70 plus voters.  They all knew about their holy hero, his racism and I believe they all are animated by fear of an imaginary enemy. Black presidents, Muslim takeover, atheists, liberals, immigrants, speakers of languages other than English with Southern accent. Sorry to go on like this and if you read so far you may wonder why I have thus expounded at such length.  I am on the injured-list, baseball fans. Well, I have a mild stomach bug or something (let’s hope that’s all) and Number 1 granddaughter wanted desperately to come over so I am in lock-down.  Upstairs, and they bring me my food and coffee while I type away on this mierda. 

But wait, don’t go away yet.  There are two other good books that may help us understand, you know, those voters.  One popular and very impressive more or less pop social psychology book by Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.  He explains such things as how tribalism and religion both binds us together and drives others out and, most importantly, how liberals can tolerate crap smells better than conservatives. Or rather that potty-smells evoke more right wing opinions (yes, believe it, it has been tested, it is science). The other book I just started so I can’t say much but it is Liar’s Circus by Carl Hoffman.  Hoffman spent some of the Trump years traveling to the nutter rallies and studying the wild inhabitants of these insane shindigs.  The rallies themselves may explain a lot about the 74 million voters.  There are rally followers who travel all over and attend yes every single rally anywhere and compete with each other for truest believer.  Just let me end by saying the last book by Hoffman is his sort of anthropological journalism titled Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest. So maybe the many, far too many voters, in the right-wing tribe would fit in both Hoffman books.

Bear Belly

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The delightful Anu Garg, who writes Word-of-the-Day offers today ursiform, having the shape of a bear. I easily guessed this one, not because of all the church Latin I forgot, but because of Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation. I think of the roundish belly of a teddy bear (yes, named for the President Teddy). Garg also offers a comment on those who love teddy bears, who are arctophiles. But wait, arc is from the Greek form of of L. ursa which was arctos. So that led me to the Arctic, certainly not literally. The Arctic, is the land of the Great Bear, Ursa Major, which circles around in the northern sky. So the Arctic is named for a bear, but not the polar bear which lives up there but for the bear who lives up there in the sky. The southern polar region is the Antarctic, sort of anti-arctic, opposite of the northern bear and there are no polar bears down there either. You might call the Antarctic the nether region, because nether is unrelated to north but refers to down below, like the nether regions down below your belt. And as for Teddy Roosevelt, he was not an arctophile, rather he liked to shoot real bears. He passed on shooting one particular bear who had been tied to a tree by the president’s companions and thus begat the teddy bear toy, a symbol of kindness and sympathy.

The Pope and the Jews

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It was long after Adriel’s mom trotted the children down to St. Juliana’s church to have us Christianized. My mom had married her handsome Jewish soldier at the conclusion of the war and in Cincinnati we all lived in a home across the street from the Jewish Center, a kind of JMCA and neighborhood park (long gone now). I recall the mezuzah on the door frame announcing a Jewish home to neighbors and maybe God himself. The marriage was on the rocks by the time I was about five or so and finally crashed after Mom took the three kids to her own parent’s home in Florida. We were left penniless and with little prospect of a the kind of quality education that would turn around our destitution.

So I have long thought our baptism was partly, maybe mostly, an attempt to get the children into the high quality Catholic school in West Palm Beach. We were admitted as “parish students,” that is, the poor kids who were enrolled without tuition. I am grateful for that and for the good schooling I received, but the sting of the exclusion from the wealthier, truer Catholic kids was felt deeply and lingered for years. I can still recall the essay contest (which I won) on the topic of “why become a priest”. It was pointed out to me that if I had any personal aspirations of that kind, that I would have to apply to the Rome for a dispensation because my father was a Jew.

But that was some time after the death of Pius the XII. (It’s “Pius” not “pious”, same thing only Latin.) Upon the pope’s demise, the church next door to the school was draped in black and all students were enlisted in an extravaganza of prayers and masses (missae defunctorum) for the deceased pope. We lit candles for Il Papa and prayed for a swift restoration on the cathedra of Peter. BTW: I have no middle name but Peter is a name assigned to me as a middle name by the good sisters at St. Ann’s school, because, well, I guess just because. Years later, Pius the Sixth began the canonization process of Pius XII initiating the steps toward sainthood for the pope who collaborated, before his Papacy, first with the Nazis and the Fascists and later as Pope cooperated or at least tolerated the genocidal Third Reich. After seeing photographic evidence of the horrific slaughter of the Jews, his holy silence rings out diabolically then, today, and forever. So far, Pius has reached the status of Venerable, a person Catholics should admire and submit prayers for his eventual sainthood.

No need to list the sins of the terrible Pope Pius. While most people know of his negligent dismissal of the crimes against the Holocaust victims, a cursory look at his early writings and actions as the Vatican diplomat reveal a deeply anti-semitic man. Newly released Vatican documents are beginning to show the breadth of the church’s hatred of the Jews. After the death of Pius, the liberalizing Vatican Council rejected some of the historical Catholic enmity toward Jews and sought a reconciliation. The process of beatification followed by canonization as a saint continues. Beatification is the acknowledgement of the “blessed’s” holiness and residence in heaven. Christians have license to pray to the beatified to ask for intercession with God, who is presumably now accessible to the newly appointed beato. But most of all, and in the case of Venerable Pius most sadly of all, Catholics are to admire the blessed one and use his or her life as an example of holiness.

The process of sainthood for Pius has proceeded and Pope Francis has allowed this awful veneration of a hateful man. Francis has made waves by opening up the church to gays and divorced persons. He has taken action against the sexual predators in the church. He speaks of tolerance and the dignity of all persons. But he has allowed the continued beatification path of Pius even in the face of growing anti-Semitic attacks in globally. Francis has said that the canonization would not go forward due to lack of evidence of miracles but has not formally removed Pius XII from the saint-making process or the Venerable Servant of God status itself. In large measure, the whole sainthood business is symbolic and inspirational. Even if more dubious Catholics have reservations about saints and heaven itself, the sainthood process is meant to inspire Christians to a life of love of neighbor and unselfish living. Its a badge of honor, a medal pinned on the life of a saint. That’s the worst of it, that Christians are supposed to admire and emulate a pusillanimous man who defaulted on his office.

The United States has suffered murderous assaults on Jews and the rise of anti-Semitic hate groups that have been tolerated and even encouraged by the president and his cultish followers. European Jews have witnessed attacks and vicious rhetoric in Germany and France. Jeremy Corbin in England has flirted with Jew hating groups. Even peaceful Canada has recently witnessed growing hatred of Jews. Across the world, Jew-baiting, fire bombings, and vile rhetoric is exploding. Many political leaders have been deaf to this menace, but religious people had ought to expect leadership from the Pope.

Above all, Pius XII is known for his silence and inaction. It is time for the new pope to speak out and act.

Bitter enders and dead enders

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Ok, so Adriel has, in the past, so many times checked the meaning and history of the word bitter end that I may as well write it out before dementia takes hold. The better term for a Trump hold out is dead ender but bitter ender applies as well. The bitter is not the bitter taste left in the mouth after hearing a MAGA bitter ender bemoan whatever loss his leader has sustained. The bitter that tastes like rich, dark coffee is probably related to the word bite (BTW: a sense of bitter taste is genetic I hear, some people can’t taste bitter). The bitter in bitter end probably is related to bit, as small piece. A bitter is a post on a ship or other sailing vessel or on a dock. A rope is tied and wrapped around the bitter and used to belay, that is, to tie something down like to fasten the ship to the dock. So if that rope plays out its length, the very last end will be at the bitter. The bitter end.

I am getting much of this from https://www.etymonline.com/ because I know zilch about seafaring. I do know I’ll hold out for Barack Obama’s brilliant legacy to the bitter end.

Pastoralism and Heartland by Sarah Smarsh

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Yes it’s a word. Perhaps urban folks have idealized the rural life ever since Hector was a pup. During the Romantic era, poets and musicians and artists of all kinds wrote and sang and painted the pure and sweet rural lands and country folk. Highborn ladies liked to play-act the shepherding life. And of course, pastoralism is the ism of pastoral, from L. pastor, a shepherd. Modern pastors a shepherds of the soul, according to Sister Estelle, who was Adriel’s principal at St. Ann’s school.

In the ancient Greek world, stressed-out urbanites longed for the restful world of rural Arcadia. Arcadia became the idyllic dream of Renaissance and, later, Romance Period poets and artists. In the New World, the yeoman farmer became the staunch hero figure of the emerging West. The backbone of America. Even while settlers and ranchers drove away the indigenous people they still idolized the “noble savage” living off the land.

And yet there is always the patronizing of rural dwellers that speaks in romantic tones of rural life while dismissing the rural population as provincial idiots, but wise idiots. Hayseeds. This contrast is inherent in the many stories and jokes about the local yokel outsmarting the city-slicker.

In the book by Sarah Smarsh, Heartland, A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke on Earth, she tries to show the reality of rural life. Families working hard but staying poor, lack of health insurance, the dignity and relentless hope of rural families who are both adulated and scorned by urban sophisticates. Unlike some memoirs of mountain people and poor family upbringing, she does not revel in a delusional self-made success story. In fact, she credits librarians and teachers and her own parents for her success as a social scientist, professor, and writer. And importantly, Smarsh blames the poverty of rural folk, especially the women, on a failed economic system that discounts the work of women and laborers. And I might add that this cruel political and economic system not only exploits rural women and men, but also falsely praises them as bedrock Americans.

When Adriel and Paula moved to Paint Lick, Kentucky (don’t you love that place name?) one of the locals at Jeanette Todd’s general store told me that he knew I had been to college by my speech. “You talk educated.” Paint Lick was our pastoralism sojourn that last about 12 years and 2 births. I think everybody intuitively understands that speech is a give-away of background and status. Linguists study prestige dialects and levels of dialects in sociolinguistics. When I hear Sara Smarsh speak, I hear only a faint echo of here Oklahoma farm childhood. The rural dialects always are less prestigious in any country. One of my linguistics profs spoke of the Bostonian elite or Kennedy-esque tones as being the highest prestige dialect. While any rural “twang” carries a low-prestige dismissal of the speaker, there is also the pastoralism-chic of South Carolina landed gentry speech. I once read of a couple who met at an Eastern Ivy-League college who drove to the South on a meet-the-parents trip. The young girl complained that the further southward they drove her boyfriend’s speech also sounded more southern. I think she began to wonder if she was going to “marry down.”

The romantic notion of the pastoral life in all its natural beauty and solid characters is like a sort of rural slumming. Rural people are both admired and disdained, loved and despised. The rural/urban divide was in stark contrast during the Trump debacle. The urban, educated voters openly despised the rural less educated and the hatred was returned in full. Each side expressed great pride in their own values. In Kentucky, there is a fierce Appalachian pride and any hint, joke, or criticism of mountain culture is resented. When it was revealed that an acting school in Prestonsburg was teaching the young students the measured tones of the Standard American English dialect, proud intellectuals in Kentucky waxed livid in their defense of the mountain kids and claimed there was a kind of cultural killing going on in the acting school. Of course, this was nonsense. Actors more than anyone need to well, act. To speak like the the character they must portray. Personally I love to hear a mountain born friend talk. But there is also an understanding that Eastern Kentucky dialect is not a prestige dialect.

We do love the shepherd tending his flocks, maybe playing a quiet country tune on an old guitar. But the farmer is equally loved, taken for granted, and resented.

Bertie

~ Adriel ~ Leave a comment

A reminder from Adriel: this ain’t an academic paper so I don’t document, cite, or follow the MLA stylesheet. So here is something from one of my favorite philosophers:

Bertrand Russell once said, “An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

Helping Hands

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So Adriel had just turned 50. I went for lunch at a crowded restaurant in downtown Lexington. The hostess (is “hostess” not allowed anymore, ok, maybe “greeter”?) a young woman, maybe a college student at nearby UK. No, we didn’t have reservations, but she would seat us anyway. She gave me a once over, and said “just follow me, young man.” Young man! What? I was pissed. When college age girls first start greeting you with “young man,” you know you are over the hill. Spent. Ancient.

Now that I have just turned 70…okay, 71 actually, I went to Home Depot and bought three pavers. These pavers are gray concrete, 16 inches square, weighing maybe 30 but not more than 35 pounds. I wheeled them out on a cart to my SUV and opened the hatch. Suddenly there appears a lady, about 35 or maybe 40. She reaches down and grabs a paver, saying “oh, let me help you with that,” graciously omitting the “old man”. I just let her load them and thanked her. I thought when someone wants to do a good deed, you should accept it gratefully and let them feel good about themselves. And then I knew I had entered geezerhood and looked the part.

Wilbur

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Wilbur

So Adriel was working in Frankfort, Kentucky doing human resources and budget control work for the crazily led non-profit. One fascinating character I got to know was a young fellow, Randy, who worked in the home energy conservation project. Randy was married to a highly paid medical professional who worked, I think, for the Veteran’s hospital. Her salary kept their little family quite well, but Randy’s work history was a little less than stellar. She was sort of a back-to-the-lander and healthy living enthusiast. The couple had no children, but for pets they kept a couple of farm dogs and an old pony. And Wilbur, the pig.

Randy liked to come in to work early, as did I, and he would come to my office to whine a bit and share his troubles. One day he did not report to work. No calls or messages came for a couple of days and then he appeared in the early morning looking a little worn. He had been tossed from home and had found a place sleeping in the barn on a nearby horse farm. The farmer had provided him with shelter in return for some work with the horses. Randy had something of a horsey odor about him. He said the worst of it was the fleas, but other than that he claimed his life was now better and he was content.

“She is such a hippie,” he complained. “I was cooking up supper when she came in and I told her we would have a nice pork meal for a change.”

“Oh my God, it’s Wilbur, she shouts and boots my ass out the door!” I asked if there was any chance for an apology and a reconciliation. He said no. “A man can only eat so much goddam granola.”

I always liked Randy and he was very smart about energy conservation and the environment. A little while after his home expulsion he stopped coming to work. I kind of miss him and I hope he found some more suitable accommodations. Perhaps he took my suggestion and went back in repentance. But maybe not. He sure couldn’t bring Wilbur back.

East/West Meditation

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So when Adriel retired from my position as the chief exec, I traveled to Massachusetts to spend a week at the Insight Meditation Society Center. Since I was there to deprogram, to cool-off as it were, it seemed that it was hellish hot in Barre, MA. Of course, Buddhists don’t have a hell so I suppose the IMS campus was a good substitute. No A/C, many mosquitoes. And any type of lotion or anti-bug goop was strictly verboten. I persevered nonetheless and made no complaint. After all, talking was not allowed. Yogis were allowed one speaking session in an interview with the meditation teacher. I was lucky to have as my leader the learned and thoughtful Narayan Helen Liebenson. Adriel had only one question for her. This was a metta or “loving-kindness” course. The guided meditation was designed to instill a kind of universal love and good-will toward all peoples and indeed all sentient creatures. My question was this: how does the meditation itself lead to that result, what is the connection, logically, between a calm and insightful meditation to the good of all living things. Well, Ms Liebenson insisted that loving-kindness necessarily follows metta meditaion like a valid syllogism. I remained in doubt these many years since.

Now I read an explanation that may be satisfactory. Prof. Paul Condon writes in Psyche:

Those in traditional contemplative cultures typically understand persons to be constituted by their relationship to others, as the historian David McMahan notes in The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008). As a consequence, practitioners first learn to experience themselves in meditation as empowered and supported by the care, compassion and wisdom of their spiritual ancestors and community. By contrast, citizens of the modern West often see persons as individual selves that exist prior to the community – atomistic individuals who choose whether or not to enter into relationships.

https://psyche.co/ideas/modern-mindfulness-meditation-has-lost-its-beating-communal-heart

It appears that this may be a matter of the perspective of the meditator. In Buddhist terms, there is no self. Everyone’s existence is contingent. Everyone is really a process, not an entity. This is puzzling to Westerners. So now I get it, Ms. Liebenson, somewhat.

Michael Sandel

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Michael Sandel has a new book out for 2020: The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? I’ll be sure to read this. I have read his books Justice, and What Money Can’t Buy. A few years ago I took his on-line lecture course on iTunesU (Justice) which is said to be one of the most popular free web based courses. Of the several courses I’ve taken, the lectures by Sandel are far and away the most clear, insightful and rewarding. Sandel’s view of public morality is communitarian. Some things are public and must be equitable and shared. Personal liberty and freedom of thought are just that, personal and this realm of justice has ethical constraints and choices that belong to that realm. It seems to me that Sandel thinks public or shared activities are of a different kind. We should think about how we value our community and act as if public ethics are as valuable as personal morality. When I think about Sandel’s work I am reminded of the ancient Greek philosophers who wrote about virtue largely as a measure of one’s relationship to others.