Month: August 2015

I was forced to watch CNN today in a restaurant, and they were, of course, talking about how Trump might be alienating the Hispanic vote.  What if this gets him the WHITE vote?  There are still a lot of white people in this country, and a lot of them have seen their real wages go down as a result of the competition with Mexicans.  As far as that goes, so too have blacks, in all likelihood.  Would it make a Leftists head explode to contemplate that there can be differences that matter other than white heterosexual Christian men, and everyone else?  

Trump’s plan is bold, and I literally cannot recall a viable candidate in my lifetime who proposed ANYTHING bold.

And here is something I’ve wondered about: we can expect Democrats to try and rig this election.  There is no doubt there was cheating in the last one, although it remains unclear if it swung the election.  Do you think Donald Trump is going to accept that like the very amiable loser Mitt Romney did?

Political Correctness is oppressive.  It is anti-Humanist.  It is anti-Liberal.  It is intended not to help people but to lump them into groups to build power for an elite that will allow them to TREAT them as groups.  It is anti-individualistic.

Trump is the only candidate I can remember, other than the Paul’s, who I honestly think consistently speaks the truth as he sees it.

Now, he is of course an egotist and opportunist, and he is clearly not deeply principled.  But the problem of illegal immigration is a big problem.  It is hugely costly in terms of money, lost opportunities for American citizens, and crime.  And he is the only one who might actually do something about it.

To get anything done that matters in this current climate, you have to not give a shit, and it certainly helps to be rich.

We may have to get used to looking at that hair for a long time. If he does nothing other than address border security, it would be worth electing him.

I find myself insensibly adopting the written affectations–indeed the very manners–of that very assiduous and unaffectedly zealous scholar, who filled his volumes with the most erudite, unprepossessing, and noble sentiments, such that the unconcerned reader cannot but find his mind bent towards an eager and even enthusiastic pursuit of, uh, the purple.

I needed to work specious in there somewhere.

Sorry.  I really do find myself listening to phrases from his book running through my head as I go to sleep.  I think on balance it is a good thing.  He is a master of snark.  One phrase I remembered was “if we are to believe the accounts of antiquity, chastity was far from being her most conspicuous virtue”, on Severus Septimius’s wife.

I am getting a lot more of his subtle humor because the reader is quite astute at turning phrases.

I started a post on Athanasius, and the persecution of the Christians by the Christians, but I think I am going to defer until tomorrow.  Long day.

I do feel, though, that the influence of this book on my own prose will be permanent.  That was the entire reason I started it, although I am unexpectedly learning a LOT about Christianity that I had not known.

And I will say again that there really is a qualitative difference between reading a book and listening to it.  You process them differently.

It occurs to me that a big–perhaps key–reason Trump continues to lead the field is that it is a way for exasperated conservatives to tell the complicit media to go fuck itself.  We GET that they don’t like him.  We GET that the reason hit piece after hit piece shows up in our news feeds and as headlines everywhere is that they want him gone.


Their hate becomes a reason to support him, regardless.  And why not?  Despite all the negatives about Obama, his media stuck with him through thick, and now several years of thin.


And I ask you: what major public figure other than Joe Arpaio had the balls to call bullshit on Obama’s birth certificate?  Maybe Michael Savage.  But Glen Beck wouldn’t touch it, and Fox sure as hell wouldn’t, and of course all the rest simply laughed it off.  Birthers.  Crazies.  Neither Romney nor McCain touched it, despite the fact that the FACTS were plainly, clearly, unambiguously on their side.


And as far as him being a Democrat, the Democrats have not always been dominated by anti-American socialists.  There was a time they ACTUALLY gave a shit about the Little Guy.  There was a time they ACTUALLY loved America.


Here are some relevant quotes from Norman Lear, widely known as a “liberal” and lifelong Democrat: 


“Everybody knows me to be a progressive or a liberal or lefty or whatever,” the 93-year-old Lear said, according to Entertainment Weekly. “I think of myself as a bleeding-heart conservative. You will not fuck with my Bill of Rights, my Constitution, my guarantees of political justice for all.

I’ve never read this book, but I’ve always like the title.  In an important sense, ALL love is love in a time of cholera.  The thoughtful see that everything and everyone we love must pass away.

And it would seem that we only have two options: we either deny this, and are surprised when the inevitable happens; or we fail to love at all.  It seems to me the path of the Stoic is largely to suppress emotion, which helps avoid pain, but also suppresses joy.

As I heal, I feel faint whisps of hope, and I am very conscious how tender, how frail they are.  It is like a small breeze blowing into the future, open, unsure, unclear.  It is formless and changing.

And I feel how much more comforting in some respects are the certainties of despair.  If you hope for disappointment and heart break, you surely will not be disappointed.  You can make people hate you.  You can be certain of feeling fear, and pain and grief.

And I wonder if the lust–as we say–for power is not really an emergent property of the need–the decision–to avoid pain? Power is of no use to any of us.  What we really need is the presence of love, flowing in and out of us.  What we call power-seeking may merely be the psychological artifice covering a life-long retreat from grief and lack of love.  The logistics of power seeking occupy the mind, and the fact of power “outsources” as I have said the sense of pain.

I think this is close to the truth: Goodness is an emergent property of accepting and learning to process pain, and evil–power seeking–is an emergent property of avoiding pain.

But returning to the topic, I am increasingly conscious there is a much more interesting game: loving precisely BECAUSE it is evanescent, and deriving MORE joy from the fact that it will pass.  What we clearly get from time to time are moments, and it seems to me that as my grief digestion system improves, I will be able to string more and more of them together.  This is the task, the path, of wisdom.

This is the path of playing with Death, in the spirit of a child.

I never hang up the phone with either of my kids without saying “I love you”.  They never go to bed without hearing “I love you” twice from me.

And it occurred to me that if it is an organic, natural, appropriate thing to do, it is a useful idea to try and let them hear “I love you” 10,000 times before they are 20.  That is 500 times a year, which is less than 2 times a day.  That is doable.

You cannot give your kids a gift greater than a sense of their own worth and value, which is what love does.  My parents tried to beat rote conformity into me, and didn’t get it once I was able to leave.  What I am going to get is kids who listen to me because they love me and know I love them.  And they know I want for them what is best for them, and that in the end, that has to be their decision, and that I will support them no matter what.

My oldest asked me how I would feel about a nose ring.  I told her I don’t like nose rings, but that she is of an age where it is up to her, and that I would support her no matter what.  I think it is likely she will not get a nose ring, but it will be OK if she does.  The important thing is that she feels the freedom to become who she wants to be.  That is what I want for her, and she knows it.

And I would add, too, that “parenting” is not like an industrial process.  There are not steps you can follow.  This “I love you” idea only works if you mean it.  Otherwise, it will alienate your kids.

I truly believe that you cannot do anything more productive than working on yourself, on your own unprocessed and latent emotions, if you want to be a better parent.  All of your judgment, all of the vibes you give off–verbally and much more importantly non-verbally–stem from who you are and what you are feeling.  You cannot hide in an emotional space as small as a family, and there is no point trying.

And if you have unprocessed emotions, admit them.  Admit your flaws, in age appropriate ways, so that your kids do not blame themselves for your fits, and so they don’t grow up thinking their parents were perfect.  They will find out eventually anyway, but if you tried to set yourself up as an ideal, their eventual discovery will be quite damaging to your relationship.

As should be obvious, a consistent intention of mine is to “go deep”, to focus on an emotion or idea with concentration long enough to penetrate far past the surface, to where I can get to the root, the basement, the bottom, and see how things actually work.

So often we are concerned with the evanescent, the surface.  An important reason for this, in my view, is that the depths are where the dragons are.  It is not only possible, but increasingly common, for people to enter physiological maturity never having had to truly face the truly important tasks of life, most notably the process of individuation, of forming some standing sense of self which is not blown about easily.

People hide in their electronics.  When face with stresses they don’t know how to handle, they start playing video games, or texting, or surfing social media.  They don’t build actual emotional intelligence. They don’t learn to process their own emotions, and don’t build true empathy for the emotions of others.

This is a root cause of the increasing effectiveness of propaganda in our current day.  People, especially young people, do not know who they are, and have no plan or path for figuring it out.  They feel existential angst and don’t know why.  And this makes them excellent targets for propaganda, because what it feeds on is a need to belong, to feel a sense of moral certainty, to know what to do, and through all these to feel a sense of self and purpose, to feel like one is “living”.  That one is a dupe never occurs to someone who NEEDS these emotions.  How could it?

As I have said often, I have a deep sense of connection to what I would describe as the twin processes of Breathwork and Kum Nye.  Both work to build a sense of connection with one’s self, to go deep.

One certainly does find dragons in the deep, but one also finds joy.  You cannot learn to love life without facing the terrors of life, the horrors of life, the untold suffering on this planet.  You cannot learn to love life without courage and depth.

if predators have all the same responses to traumatic stress that prey animals do.  Is there a “lion in the headlights” look? Or are they wired differently?  The interesting evolutionary thing about humans is that we have been both prey and predator.  We existed somewhere in the middle of the food chain for a long time, and still do, with some 200 people killed by lions in Africa every year, some number killed by tigers in India, Bangladesh and elsewhere, etc.

Is there a biological/physiological/neurological adaptation which deals with “prey animal” trauma, which is to say incompleted fight or flight responses, by adapting the methods and instincts of predators?

Interesting thought, at least to me.  This is a neurological question, and with regard to specific animals, an empirically testable idea.

Edit: I have the Tibetan Four Dignities on the walls of my room.  All four are carnivores: a tiger, a snow lion, a dragon, and a giant bird, the Garuda, with a snake in its mouth.  The centerpiece of all of them, though, is the Windhorse.  It alone is not a carnivore, and it alone contains both light and motion intrinsically in its image.

I was meditating on a picture of a tiger yesterday, and I really felt the violent energy in it.  When we think of big cats, we think of strength and power and grace and speed.  What those traits are used for is catching animals like gazelles and deer and goats and others, and killing them, ripping them to pieces, and eating them.
Then satiation, for a time.

It seems to me this is what sacrifice provides.  And sacrifice was nearly universal in the ancient world, and is still practiced even today in most Muslim nations (Id al Adha), and in places like Haiti, Nepal, and India.  For their part, the Romans offered sacrifices to all their gods.  Gibbon makes that clear, and the main reason they differentiated between the Jews and the  Christians–despite both rejecting polytheism–was that the former at least practiced an ancestral religion and offered recognizable animal sacrifices on altars prepared for the purpose.

We are not physically hungry, but there remains some primal energy in us which, unprocessed, brings out this cyclic need for aggression. I do think sociologically some wars are forms of mass sacrifice.  Aggression arises which seeks release in killing.  All that need happen for a war is for this energy to arise on both sides.

In some respects sacrifice checks this need, which is good, but it remains a bestial impulse, one unsuited to any higher spirituality.

Our physical bodies, with all their atavistic instincts and needs and drives, interact with our spirits–which recognize a different home–in ways we really don’t understand, but which are best approached from the side of traditional religious practices, through Humanistic psychology.

I’ve had dreams about most of recent Presidents, certainly from Clinton on, dreams which made sense to me.  I dreamed about Donald Trump last night, and my impression is that his mind is actually preoccupied with solving problems.  Real problems.  He really does think like a CEO. That does not make him perfect–obviously–but it does make it concerned with measurable results, and quite capable of demanding accountability and performance from people.

Here is a factor to consider: as a billionaire, capable of spending less than a third of his fortune and still outspending the Clintons, he is positioned, uniquely, to do without Wall Street.  For their part, they must view his present ascendancy with dismay, because he doesn’t need to be bought.

If we want a true qualitative outlier in the White House I think Trump may be our best bet.  My gut tells me that despite the honesty and capability of other candidates–I would be fine with Rand Paul, my favorite, Ben Carson or Ted Cruz, or Scott Walker–that the finances of Jeb Bush will finally decide the nomination.  The most money tends to win.

Our country is fucked up.  It can be brought down any time a power elite decides to do it.  We don’t need those beholden to, or members of, the power elite in the White House.  Barring sanity, we need chaos, in the sense of shattering all the old illusions and imbecilic consensuses about how to run a government.

I am curious whether or not it would be useful and practical to posit that all mental illness–from the very minor, such as pettiness, jealousy and irritability, up to major depression and even psychotic episodes–stems ultimately either from a lack of love and social connection, and/or organic nervous system defects, particularly in the brain.

I think so.

What makes this not obvious is that quite often the love needed was needed at a certain point, perhaps when that child was born, or when it was 2 or when it was 4.  Some children emerge into physical adulthood never having felt loved by anyone at all.  This has consequences, obviously, but they are cloaked in a myriad of ways, through manias, addictions, narcissism, physical illness, and others.

The question becomes, logistically, how can we allow the part or parts which are so thirsty to identify themselves in a social way, and how can we then provide the love which was missing?  This is a simple, but enormously important question, and one which cannot be answered easily.