* "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master": Ideations without Borders

A friend asks me to write on "How civilization needs to outgrow religion".
As I would not be a slave of religion, so I would not be a master.


Since I believe religion is a form of primitive psychiatry emerging from the collective unconscious, I think civilization needs desperately to keep religion not abandon it.

Without the Ten Commandments (The Ten Ideations) for instance in the Judeo-Christian world, our world would be in a thousand times greater chaos than it is presently. (see Nov. 26 post:"Bring Hell Back--- On Steroids")

At least, the criminals who engineer war (and I include white Yale graduates in this group) will always wonder (and worry?) in a tiny corner of their tiny minds if they are going to be punished for their slaughters, thanks to that old time religion.

Lincoln worried outloud, and came to this religious rationalization: "For every drop of blood from the lash, a drop of blood from the sword."

In other words, Providence (Lincoln was reluctant to use the word "God") is punishing us with war in exact and equal proportion to the torture and death we created with slavery.





















I don't think civilization needs to "outgrow" religion, but perhaps it needs to cut it back to its roots and "regrow" it

Or better still, maybe civilization needs to reinterpret religion. And perhaps that's what's beginning to happen with what we call secularism today where the Ten Commandments are being reinvented or reimagined as what I call the Ten Ideations or The Ten Mirrors (see December 15 post: "Tiger Woulds: The Ten Mirrors.")

This secular seepage would have the advantage of not being confined only to followers of the Big Oldies: Judaism and Christianity. In fact it would be a kind of secular religion: Not Doctors without Borders; Not Clerics without Borders; but, Ideations without Borders.



















Divinity doesn't needs cathedrals and trinities and pantheons to manifest itself.

As Emerson believed (and Dylan Thomas said), it manifests itself a billion times a day: "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my soul"; or as Thornton Wilder believed, "Every baby born into the world is Nature's attempt to make a perfect human being."

But I'm not sure Albert Schweitzer's "reverence for life" (a religious philosophy which subsumes Emerson, Wilder and Thomas) is a sturdy enough structure for "civilization." It hasn't shown itself to be, anyway.




















So to avoid incremental anarchy (AKA disorganized crime), I'm all for religion: let it be the emperor's old clothes, as long as we get a new emperor who's not too proud to notice his own nakedness: who wants us to be neither slave nor master.

* Killing Oeddy Loman with Tweets?

Bowling alone may have been replaced by Tweeting together, Facebooking forever, and MySpacing myself.

The great Oedipal shadow of competetive isolation which has hovered over manhood in our country for more than half a century may be being defeated (or disguised) by a digital "hall of mirrors".

The American male used to be lonely: Willy Loman even said it , "I've got no one to talk to...". His "phoney dream" in Death of a Salesman is hissed over his grave by his phoney son, Happy Loman :"It's the only dream you can have: to come out number one man."

Ask Tiger.

Or now, ask Hillary.

Her recent angry response in Korea to a reporter's question ("What does President Clinton think . . .") indicates that the frenzy of becoming number one is no longer gender specific. Here is how madame Secretary replied: "My husband is not the Secretary of State, I am . . . I am not channelling my husband . . ."

Harold Bloom's great theory (all literature is Oedipal) applies here.

All capitalism is Oedipal.



The competitors (now not only the "sons" but the Hillaries of the world) are trying to overshadow whoever they perceive to be the shadow-throwing "father", the Laius they subconsciously want to kill.














To that end, the Mercantiliacs are constantly tallying their status these days: Number of Friends on Facebook (in the thousands!): Number of tweets in a day; Number of text messages in a month. These softwear solutions to loneliness are called "social networking."

Social?

Its really narcissism, consumerism and competetivism dressed in Digital Drag.


The Secretary of Education has even institutionalized this Oedipal phenomenon with his multi-billion-dollar carrot: the "race to the top". Now not only students can be lonely and self-absorbed, but institutions they inhabit can be so too.

For Mr. Duncan's information there is only one race: "the race all runners come" as A.E. Housman says in To an Athlete Dying Young and everyone finishes alone.

Everyone finishes last and Number One. There are no others in this race.

Garrison Keillor is the modern Sophocles who has outfoxed the Oedipal world of Harold Bloom, Willy Loman and the Tiger: Lake Wobegone has no competition at all: All the children are above average.















All.

And, as any parent knows, there's a truth beyond Twitter in that statement:

The truth of the heart: the truth which beats, not races.

* Safe Text? Move Yale to Vermont.

The world is a whore, and I don't want a social disease.

This has been my attitude for the last 25 years (since I left Yale) and the sole reason for my reformer-pen's silence for that quarter century. All that time, I have written nothing to try to change the world, after my preceding twenty years of activism at Ithaca, Kent State and Yale, 1964-84.

What put the pen back in my hand (or the keyboard under my finger's) after all these years?

The surgeon's knife a year ago December 19th, and the real possibility that I might never have an opportunity to say what I want to again: I might have come out of anaesthesia paralyzed--or not come out at all.

That get's you thinking. So does turning 65.

Hence this blog with its 65 posts (now 66) since June, and my 12 other blogs (Click on My Profile in the side panel)brimming with stuff.

Even, if no one reads it, I want the satisfaction of knowing my stuff will outlive me and not simply wind up in a dumpster when my belongings are sorted through, although I suppose a collapse of the Internet could wipe it all out forever.

So I AM right: the world IS a whore, even the digital world.

And there is no truly "safe" text, just as in the world of actual red light districts there is really no truly "safe" sex.

True, some of my stuff is already in the May 4th Collection at Kent State University Archives and The Kent State Collection at Yale University's Sterling Library Manuscripts and Archives.

But Global warming could put Yale University 20 feet under water from Long Island Sound and the Atlantic's Connecticut shore.

Yale just bought a "West Campus" 15 miles from the present one. It would be smarter to move the whole campus to Vermont and leave Harkness Tower to its ultimate fate: a half submerged lighthouse.





















































And Ohio? Archives are no safer from global warming in the midwest. When I lived in Kent, the Cuyahoga River was so polluted with chemicals that it actually caught fire. (No exaggeration.)



















Even so, just on the chance that the digital world is not a red light district riddled with fatal viruses, I've turned one paper which collected dust in Sterling's archives for 30 years into a blog here: The Bound and the Unbound: Oedipus, Isaac and Jesus.


But I know the truth of Ecclesiastes: All will be dust in the wind, or flotsam on the sea, or digits in a cloud with no computer to summon them into being.



I have read The World Without Us.


Winter, the greatest metaphor, will wait, watchfully, then whiten.


Winter wins.

* Divorce: The B.M. degree

I used to say that divorce had become an apprenticeship for marriage.

Now, after a decade of a 50% divorce rate (one in two marriages ends in divorce) I'm going to change that to divorce has become a diploma from marriage:Yeah, I went through Marriage College, learned all I needed to know(including what NOT to do) and now, with the B.M. (Bachelor of Marriage) degree, I'm ready to enter a real world marriage.

Too bad for the discarded mate from the "artificial" marriage, which BTW took a real lawyer to get out of.

Too bad for the kids, if there are any, who may wind up with four parents or one parent.

Too bad for the grandmothers and grandfathers who don't know how to explain all the confusion to the kids.

Too bad for all the suckers who sent wedding gifts.

I've gotten to the point that I attend and do the gift thing for the FIRST wedding only: I'm not going to 'Play Happy' for the wreckage of other people's lives, even if it is disguised as a 'learning experince'.

Yes, I am a liberal Protestant by upbringing, but in a world of impetuous marriages (hormone marriages)I'm reminded of the wisdom of a church practice which my Roman Catholic friends had to observe when I was young, a practice which I thought was harsh and excessive:


Engagement had to last a full year minimally, with mandatory couple's counselling. Of course at that time there was no pre-marital sex; no pre-marital apartment (home) sharing.

The wisdom of that ONE FULL YEAR (even with sex and home sharing) makes perfect sense to me in 2009: Time to get bored with the object of your love; time to get bored with sex (maybe two years!); time to get bored with your self.

Then--and only then -- you really learn something and deserve a diploma.

And it's still a B.M. degree:

Bachelor of Myself * .

Now you're ready to work.

(Not play.)


* The advanced degree is the M.M.,
Master of Myself.

* Stopping the Underwear Bombers: It's the Poverty, Stupid!

If I understand the two experts on PBS News Hour tonight (one a former Ambassador to Yemen), the big problem in Yemen which makes it a fertile ground for terrorists (even rich, spoiled, post-pubescent, lonely ones) is not Al Qaeda, it is the failure of the Yemeni government to deliver services to citizens and elevate the poor to a level of greater opportunity. Poverty breeds anger,even poverty experienced vicariously by the likes of the wealthy underwear bomber.

In short: It's the poverty, stupid!

The ONLY thing that is going to lure young, post-pubescent fanatics away from the salvation and paradise promised by the terrorists, is the salvation and paradise
which money cannot merely promise but can DEMONSTRATE on the ground (not the heavens) to those who don't have money.

Enter Hillary (LAW '73), stage left!

The new concept of a State Department which engages not simply in diplomacy, but in economacy or diplonomics, is the mustard seed of hope in a government which is mired in generations of spending money the WRONG ways, from the money-bags-Defense-Department to the piggy-bank-Foreign-Aid-budget.

Economacy? Ugly to the ear. Diplonomics sounds better.

Translate that to "Raising the poor out of poverty for Diplomatic Benefit to the USA": Giving people what they need and want and then advertising the fact and bragging about it, the way Hamas does to the Palestinians.

Or translate it as: Spending the same BIG BUCKS on making peace as we spend on making war; only, instead of being a Hamas, we'll be a U.S. Aid.

And we (not an Al Qaeda, or a Hamas) will become indispensable.

Sound too neat? Glib? Shallow?

Who's ever tried it.

Maybe the new millenia will be the BH and AH era( Before Hillary and After Hillary era).

It couldn't hurt to experiment.

And let's do it where the poverty, political dangers and inequity are worst. Put strings on that money----LONG strings---that ensure it gets into the correct pockets.

Easier said than done?

Ask Todd Beamer:

"Let's roll."

* Bullets and Booze

The Asymmetrical Law of Consequences:

With Malice Toward None;With Charity for All



It seems unfair that a tiny piece of metal smaller than half an index finger, stuffed with powder, is able to remove from civilization forever persons of great social benefit: Lincoln,Gandhi,Kennedy, King.

Just from the standpoint of physics (the relation of energy to mass, and vice versa), it seems too unbalanced: a tiny piece of metal propelled through the air can wipe out often in an instant a consciousness with volition, molded by decades of experiences, able to lead nations.















The scales are tilted to extreme--if not inverted--on this matter presented to Blind Lady Justice.

There is not even a semblance of symmetry: One bullet at Ford's Theater wipes out "with malice toward none, with charity for all" and ensures Jim Crowe and segregation for the next hundred years?

It's an Absurdist's world.



And so too do we have New Year's Eve, 2009/10 in which an entire nation jokes about a liquid which, when poured into a driver, turns a car into a lethal weapon.

Before I was born, my father's mother was killed by a drunk driver as she stepped off a trolley in West Haven, Connecticut at the age of 49.

My cousin's 16-year-old son was killed in 1979 by a drunk driver in Gaithersburg, Maryland while he walked by the side of the road.

And my housemate, Irene O'Malley, the 38-year-old mother of two boys and two girls, was killed in 1986 when a drunk driver (the 19-year old son of one of my co-workers) crossed lanes and plowed her station-wagon off the road, over a hillside in Bethel, Vermont as she travelled to her third-shift job as an obstetrical nurse at a local hospital. The 19-year-old boy was killed too. (see http://irenemother.blogspot.com/)


















Upper, right:
My grandfather (front fender), LeRoy Ward

Lower:
My grandmother, killed by a drunk driver at age 49, Hulda Bonhau Keane, 1878-1927


Unfair odds: that a bottle of liquid can remove a mother from the world; and a son too.

The physics of it is similarly unfair: A grotesque symmetry of life.

But in this case, the logistics seem unfairer still, since that liquid can be sold legally in stores on most streets in every state in the union.

Bullets?

At least nowadays you have to drive a few miles to buy them.

Bottles?

Everywhere.





















Flowers are
better
than bullets:

Families
better than
than funerals.

"A live dog is better than a dead lion."

Happy
New Year,
2010.

* Aging on the Sly: Dance to the Muses.

What is it about dancers? Especially women dancers?

When Martha Graham was 95 she was received at a tea in the White House by whoever the First Lady was then. I recall hearing her interview.

At 95 you can fake a lot with make-up and hair color and false teeth and eye shadow and costume, but you can't fake voice. And the amazing thing about Martha Graham at 95 was not her legendary energy and dramatic profile, but her smoothe, elegant, uncracked-by-age voice. It was YOUTH itself.

And now we have Alicia Alonso, in her 90th year, 2009. She danced well into her seventies (although legally blind most of her career--she uses lights on stage to locate other performers and objects).

Madame Alonso (prima ballerina assoluta) is a triumph of will and talent over reality, including turning her unique facial features into a work of art. Even today at 90 she looks like Picasso painted her fractured face into a thing of drama and remark.

Graham's voice; Alonso's face?

Are these simply theatrical tricks to coy age into submission, or at least remission?

I wonder.

Perhaps it is because they spent so much of their life off their feet, and I don't mean reclining: I mean IN THE AIR.

There may be something in dance itself--or music (ever notice how long musicians live: Rubinstein, Casals, Stokowski, each at 95 still performing/teaching)--- which defies the leadening inertia of the body and elevates one to the level of the spheres: a kind of atom-like weightlessness.

Maybe "ingesting" music retards aging.


































































It is December 27, 2009.

Tomorrow I turn 65.

Turn up the Muses please.

We shall dance.

You and I.


PK