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Drinking the Kool-Aid

My memories of Vietnam and Saigon inevitably are drudged up on Memorial Day.  I can’t say they are completely unwelcome memories because they are not; I had it easy in Vietnam and have many good memories — there was more violence in Chicago during the summer of ‘68 than in Saigon, a relatively peaceful war torn city.

If drones had been in our arsenal back in those days, we would have targeted “suspected militants (Viet Cong)” in Saigon right and left.  And there were plenty of Viet Cong in Saigon, mind you.  One night a handful flagged me down.  I’d borrowed Preston Cluff’s motorcycle (Preston was a sports anchor on AFVN Television) to return home to the Plaza Hotel (yep!) after a party petered out.  Luckily, the VC recognized me from TV and waved me on.

Others didn’t have it so easy.  Over 58,000 U.S. service men and women were killed during the Vietnam War, including a few from AFVN (American Forces Vietnam Network).  The vets who made it back generally were welcomed home with apathy or outright hostility; we were not war heroes like the returning vets from the Middle Eastern Wars.  The politics and public relations of war (propaganda) have improved over the years along side the machinery of war.  In Vietnam, weaponry was crude.

American forces targeted South Vietnam’s rural food supply with Agent Blue in an effort to kill rice and drive peasants into urban areas — to deny the Viet Cong their civilian support base. Agent Orange, manufactured for the war primarily by Monsanto and Dow Chemical, was used to deny the Viet Cong their canopy of cover in the dense jungles.  Both worked: there were over 1.5 million impoverished Vietnamese peasants living in Saigon’s slums.  Similar situations existed in Da Nang, Pleiku and Chu Lai, plus other South Vietnamese cities.  

Agent Orange left a legacy of birth defects and cancers, among other maladies.  My friend from AFVN, David Esch, wrote on Facebook this morning, “It (Memorial Day) is a reminder of the struggle to move because of the pain in the joints and lower back and difficulty breathing because of exposure to Agent Orange or shrapnel or an amputation. It’s a reminder that a claim has been stonewalled or denied in spite of multiple tours in Afghanistan or Iran (sic) or Vietnam because we have to reduce the deficit.”

David corrected the typo Iran, but I wrote him back that in several months it might not be read as a typo.  The U.S., I believe, is committed to Perpetual Oil War.

Contrary to public opinion, Perpetual Oil War has little, if anything, to do with preserving the cherished liberties and freedom protected by those killed and wounded in earlier, more noble conflicts. No, two stark realities necessitate Perpetual War: It is war for the sake of war itself, for the big business and economic benefit of waging war; and oil, a non-replenishable resource being depleted at an alarming rate when worldwide demand for oil based energy is rising.  

When Perpetual War ends, it most likely will be vanquished by a cataclysm that decimates the existing world order, such as a dislocation of financial markets — stocks, bonds and commodities such as oil.  Meanwhile, the profits of Big Oil and Big War trump the political will to prepare for such an eventuality.     

Today we have no strong political leaders, we have empowered bankers and pawnbrokers.  Our Washington politicians, products as much of auctions as elections, are like enriched bank clerks with super benefits. Obsequious admirals and generals who legitimize and prosecute the business of Perpetual War are equally obnoxious.

A great Army general and president with principles, Dwight Eisenhower, the noblest of noble men, issued a stern warning to Americans in his farewell address:

           ”In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” 

At the heart of the military-industrial complex are giant, multi-national corporations whose only goal is to rake in greater profits. Today it and its corporate allies control the “councils of government.” Where are the MacArthurs, Pattons and Eisenhowers, the generals who hated war?  What became of the Lincolns, Wilsons and Roosevelts, politicians of vision who masterminded America’s destiny?  Obama, whose name I reluctantly include in this paragraph, is the unmatched king of campaign fund raisers.  ”The king is in the counting house counting out his money.”

Eisenhower, in the same 1961 address to the American people, mentioned the importance of a “knowledgeable citizenry.”  But an informed citizenry requires a truthful, independent media. The media today are barefaced mouthpieces for the military-industrial complex, the Perpetual War machine and America’s corporate overlords.  In other words, corporate media is a well disguised, super-efficient propaganda machine designed to turn truth inside out, to distract, entertain and goad Americans into acquiring stuff they don’t need, preferably by using their bank credit cards.

Some Americans are convinced the U.S. Central Bank, known as the Federal Reserve System, is a department of government.  It’s not.  It’s a privately owned unregulated banking cartel. America presently owes this cartel over $15-trillion.  Since we the taxpayers don’t have the money to pay off this debt, we constantly roll it over (refinance it) and then borrow even more from future generations, since a balanced U.S. budget in the foreseeable future is all but a pipe dream.  The interest on our $15-trillion debt, interest that must be paid, costs taxpayers over $450-billion annually.

What Henry Ford termed “inextinguishable debt” is America’s most formidible enemy, not a nebulous group of “suspected militants” holed up in some crude sandscape where the oil patch is.  Oil, as informed citizens know, will hit its peak in 2015, if it hasn’t already.  Peak oil occurs when production rates begin their interminable decline.  As the supply of oil contracts, the price rises. As the price of oil rises, economic output falters.  Depressions happen.  The Republic, and indeed life as we know it, are therefore unsustainable and yet Americans party on while cataclysms loom.

If anyone still wonders why America conducts Perpetual War in forbidding sandscapes like Iraq and Afghanistan (and I think soon in Iran), it’s because terrorist evildoers, we’re told, threaten the homeland.  In fact, radical Islam is a threat to Middle East oil markets.  Any destabilization in the region could skyrocket the price of oil without recourse to the theoretics of Peak Oil. Peak Oil, incidentally, occurred in the U.S. in 1970.  The only place Peak Oil has not occurred is in the Persian Gulf region, and even that assertion is dubious.  No one knows for sure because the Saudis consistently lie about their reserves.

So what’s a girl to do?

I have no idea. As a guy who, by nature, can warm to war as much as the next fellow, I shall drink the gender-charged Kool-Aid and stop fretting.  I call it the Dr. Stangelove remedy for the politics of reality.

These days, meaningful choices are slim pickins. By my calculus, there’s no salient difference between the two political parties unless, in these times of unparalleled peril, your ultimate concerns have to do with gay rights and abortion. But even civil liberty spats are canards that fool Americans into believing there’s a real political choice between Obama and Romney.  I don’t believe there is.  Do you?

The probable winner in this year’s election, as in the last election, will be the candidate who is the most convincing liar.

House, Bernadette and the C Word

As if Mondays were not already the most ponderous day of the week, the final episode of House, an exceptionally good TV program, aired Monday. House will be missed by many; the program provided loyal legions with at least one good reason to look forward to Monday. For 8 seasons, it was one of TV’s best, if not its very best. House won 2 Golden Globes, 5 Emmys and over 30 other awards.

The last few episodes of season 8 portrayed terminal cancer and death with honesty and gravitas.  Cancer and death are the subjects of this brief composition. We’ll return to House shortly, but first to the healing waters of Lourdes, France, and Saint Bernadette.

Since I’m writing about religious beliefs and practices, a spirited confession seems, well, seemly. I am a heretic, a fallen away Catholic (in truth, I jumped) who for many years studied Mariology, which is the theological study of Mary the mother of Jesus.  I am not a monotheist, although I believe in a non-theistic other — in a Ground of Being rather than in a personal God. My significant unseen other is an impersonal, universal supra-intelligence eternally evolving upward from the quantum consciousness of all things, a consciousness that connects me to you, past to present, and seen to unseen.  With it we are co-creative.  You could call it, God, I suppose, although that hypothesis has been gunked up with so much preposterous Sunday School, Yeshiva School or Koranic Madrasa claptrap it has become, to me, impious. 

As I confessed, I’m a heretic.

Lourdes is the site of Marian apparitions in 1858 where the Virgin Mary purportedly appeared to a young girl, Bernadette Soubirous, 14.  Today, as many as 5-million pilgrims, most of them ill or infirm, visit Lourdes annually hoping to be healed by its water, which the faithful believe contains miraculous properties.  It flows from an underground spring unearthed by Bernadette as instructed by the apparition.

There have been some 67 church-documented miracles at Lourdes since 1858; 4 of them since 1978.  A cottage industry of miracle-makers touting supernatural intervention has sprung up in the region in recent years as Christian Evangelicals (mostly Pentecostals) set out to compete with the Catholics for a slice of the lucrative pilgrim and tourism pie.  The Catholic bishop of Lourdes recently lowered the standard for declaring miraculous cures.  His numbers are a bit paltry.

The spirituality of Lourdes as a pilgrim shrine holds far more life-giving, life-affirming properties than does the water, which tests indicate contains nothing special. Water, however, is an ubiquitous religious symbol that for centuries has honed faith and made it tactile.  We humans can impute miraculous properties to most anything.  The spirituality of Lourdes, the spirituality of pilgrimage, is defined as the act of leaving one’s home and comfort zone, if for only a little while, to endure a few hardships with humility and a sense of purpose; it requires the willful act of letting go of control and personal ego, which is extraordinarily difficult to do. Ask any Buddhist. 

A spiritual pilgrimage mimes the familiar metaphor, “Going up to Jerusalem,” as the Jews were commanded by God to do 3 times a year. However a person prefers to contextualize the spirituality of pilgrimage, it heals and enlivens the soul, a prerequisite to healing the body.  A journey on the “Road to Jerusalem,” a.k.a. the Road Less Traveled, is a universal metaphor like the Quest for the Holy Grail: all seek spiritual growth and self-awareness.  I am a firm advocate of pilgrimage.

On pilgrimage, whether secular or religious, you learn a great deal about who you truly are, an incremental but indispensable step toward higher consciousness and self-awareness.  The Greek word for the essence of pilgrimage is kenosis (self-emptying). The term surrender is also used and means essentially the same thing. The idea behind kenosis is simple: if you’re full of yourself, there’s no room for anything else, certainly not for transformative energy whether you believe that energy comes top down from God or bottom up from quantum consciousness.

[Spoiler alert] The final episode of House was titled, “Everyone Dies.”  Wilson, House’s best friend and favorite foil, took his best medical shot (a near lethal dose of radiation and chemo) to combat his terminal cancer and, as a doctor of oncology, was then able to make an informed choice when the treatment failed.  He chose to spend his remaining five months Living the Dream rather than spend a year or two enduring the agonizing pain of chemotherapy, “Laid up under florescent lights in a hospital room where everyone comes by and lies about how good you look.”  For the coda of his life on earth, Wilson chose quality over quantity, pleroma (self-fulfillment) over kenosis (self-emptying); he chose life by dictating to death his non-negotiable terms. Everyone dies. House remarked, as he and Wilson noisily rode off into the sunset on motorcycles to end the series, “Cancer is boring.” [End alert]

It is boring and we should discuss it more but don’t know how. Perhaps it would be instructive to put ourselves in Wilson’s shoes.  Given the agonizing dilemma he faced, to self-empty or surrender, paradoxically, was to cling to life on death’s terms, a threadbare life reliant on dripping tubes, capricious gods and prayer circles, while the opposite, self-fulfillment, was to stare down death’s sting in defiance and with a swansong of symphonic living. 

Yet (false) hope-mongering to the ill and infirm is big business. The worst of the snake-oil charlatans, I think, hawk religious credulity, although Big Pharma runs them a close second. A frail, elderly pilgrim at Lourdes inquired of a shrine priest, “What is it, exactly, I am supposed to do (to be cured).”  He had no answer for her because there is no answer.  His saccharine response was soothing and bewildering.  ”It’s a mystery. Pray unceasingly.”

Personally, I don’t particularly like being asked to pray for someone.  I consider it a perfunctory and facile practice.  Intercessory prayer, according to credible studies, only benefits an individual if he or she knows they’re being prayed for. In other words, it provides a fleeting placebo effect lacking permanent efficacy. Indeed, it’s a Sunday palliative for everyone concerned.  Then Monday comes.  The same result has been observed time and time again at Lourdes and other healing shrines: temporary health improvements are noted, backsliding soon follows.  

So if intercessory prayer is perfunctory and facile, what “quantum consciousness” metaphysics, if any, actually can help?  The answer, I believe, is a different kind of communication.  Its potency is derived from plenary passivity and silence not incessant chatter.

Family, especially family, and friends, especially long-time friends, can actively aid someone’s quest for wellness or acceptance with the silence of a communal act of kenosis.  I myself prefer candles and incense with no visual or mental distractions.  A photograph of the ill person can be helpful.  You can ritualize it anyway you like, just treat the inevitable, intrusive thoughts of silence like little fishes and allow them to swim by without hooking or admiring them.  Give it 5 or 10-minutes.  Answers and permanent consolation will follow.  Its source is unimportant.

House, the character and the program, were not for everyone.  House himself was, to quote Wilson, “A bitter jerk who liked making people miserable.”  Dr. Gregory House was indeed a manipulative, navel-gazing narcissist.  An real ass. A walking sheet of sandpaper who saved a lot of lives.  But one selfless act by him in the final episode, with a literary wink to Sherlock Holmes, laid bare a superb example of kenosis. It was an act that meant Wilson could spend the final few months of his life on the Road to Jerusalem in the supportive, caring company of his best friend forever.

It’s even possible that Wilson’s choice may have improved his health and stiffened his body’s resistance to the cancer gnawing away at it.  Who’s to say? It certainly made him happier. L’chaim!

Buses Are a Comin’. Oh, Yeah.

Like many puffed-up high school seniors soon to be shrink wrapped and relabeled as paltry college freshmen, Tuscaloosa High’s graduating class naturally was preoccupied by many things in the summer of 1961.  But racial equality wasn’t one of them, that would be left to others braver than I.  Accordingly, we hadn’t the slightest inkling of the gathering storm around us, a storm destined to uproot our insular southern worldview and turn it inside out. 

The storm was similar to Orwell’s pronouncement on Animal Farm: It would be “a storm of judgement” that would wash away the existing social order and a way of life the Deep South had dearly, even desperately, clung to for almost 100 years.  It was called segregation.  Even today the word leaves a smarmy aftertaste that makes you want to spit.  

Segregation was an ignoble cultural disease expediently concealed from society’s collective conscience by a farcical placebo sold as “separate but equal.”  Whether a person focused on the disease or the placebo depended, for the most part, on skin color rather than on any rational, overarching belief system concerning social justice and equality. Clearly, in the South some were more equal than others. “Now nature was washing away the disease,” wrote Orwell, but its scars and stains lingered on.

Southerners, generally averse to change, were incurious about segregation and therefore most white folks didn’t cotton to nature’s stormy judgement.  Notable among these were the storm’s primal lightning rods, the governors of Alabama and Mississippi, John Patterson and Ross Barnett, two of the shallowest minds in the sorry history of racial oppression; Bull Connor, the psychotic chief of Birmingham police who, when tailored with swatches of racial hate, fits the epithet “the South’s Heinrich Himmler” like an SS glove, and Tuscaloosa’s very own Robert Shelton, the Grand Wizzard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.  After the thrill of beating up Freedom Riders was gone, his rabid, cowardly bunch firebombed Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, killing four black youths aged 11-14.

On May 14, 1961, the storm stuck without warning in Anniston when a regularly scheduled Greyhound bus bound for New Orleans from Atlanta with Freedom Riders on board was firebombed (photo) by the KKK. The Freedom Riders were savagely beaten as they tried to flee the smoke and flames engulfing the Greyhound.  

The Freedom Riders were men and women, blacks and whites, adult and student activists strictly committed to non-violence and to the radical notion that blacks were human beings and that the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution applied to them.  

Later, when another group of Freedom Riders arrived at Birmingham’s bus terminal, they too were badly beaten by an enraged mob of angry white men.  Connor guaranteed the attackers, led by the most violent group of Klansmen in Alabama, 15-minutes of impunity during which they could beat, maim or kill the Freedom Riders before troopers would move to disperse the melee.  

At Montgomery another incensed mob coiled to strike, even though Gov. Patterson assured President Kennedy he would protect the protesters.  That day, the Klan first attacked reporters and cameramen with vengeance and then beat the riders with iron pipes and bicycle chains. The attack on journalists sent the story viral, as viral was in those days.  The foreign press, the Soviets in particular, had a field day munching on the inexplicable events occurring in the Land of the Free.

The next stop was Jackson, Mississippi. Governor Barnett made a hushed deal with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who feared the Freedom Riders would get themselves killed in Mississippi.  Instead, Barnett had them arrested for defying segregation laws and then jailed at the notorious Parchman Farm State Penitentiary.  To irritate the jailers and simultaneously lift their own spirits, the Freedom Riders resolved to sing.

Buses are a comin’.  Oh yeah.  Buses are a comin’.  Oh yeah.

They weren’t joshing either. More Freedom Riders boarded more buses headed to Jackson. They too were arrested and jailed at Parchman, a maximum security facility.  The tormented Mississippi prison guards threatened to take away their mattresses, but they sang on.

You can take our mattresses.  Oh, yeah.  You can take our mattresses.  Oh, yeah.

Greyhound and Trailways buses across the Deep South now drove during daylight hours with headlights on.  This signaled police and Klan alike that no Freedom Riders were aboard.  Even so, more protesters bused into Jackson and were arrested.  In a final, futile attempt to keep them quiet, the guards seized their toothbrushes. 

You can take our toothbrushes.  Oh, yeah.  You can take our toothbrushes.  Oh, yeah.

The exasperated warden soon gave up and returned the confiscated items.

If nature’s 1961 Storm of Judgement failed to blip Alabama’s radar, the Kennedy administration didn’t see it coming either.  And although the Kennedys were genuinely concerned for the safety of the Freedom Riders, the administration more than anything else just wanted the politically inconvenient protest to go away.  Important foreign affairs issues topped their 1961 agenda, not civil rights.  Diane Nash, a student at Nashville’s Fisk University and an unsung heroine of the Civil Rights Movement, didn’t see it that way.

Robert Kennedy’s emissary to Alabama, who flew in hoping to diffuse the danger and convince everyone to return home, found her irrepressible.  Nash, who recruited additional Freedom Riders and traveled to Birmingham, explained to the Attorney General’s representative that mob violence would not be allowed to defeat a non-violent movement, especially not one that occupied the moral high ground.  ”We will not stop. There is only one outcome,” she told him resolutely. 

The outcome was triumph.  That summer, 300 Freedom Riders rode the storm out behind bars in Mississippi and waited for Washington.  Robert Kennedy eventually insisted that the Interstate Commerce Commission enforce a 1955 ruling long ignored in the Deep South that banned “separate but equal” facilities under their jurisdiction.  The forthcoming ICC decree was a defining moment in the struggle for freedom and equality and the Civil Rights Movement. Other discriminatory Jim Crow laws were later overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  

Retrospectively, for Tuscaloosa’s senior class of 1961 the Freedom Riders wrote an expressive epilogue to the salad days of our youthful innocence as well as a prescient prologue to the tumultuous decade that followed; a remarkable decade of political upheaval and social revolution that would define not only us, but our generation and the 1960s when history was written.

Peace.

“One day the South will recognize its true heroes.” Rev. Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

“The walls have now fallen, the scars have healed, and life goes on.” — Revised ending to Animal Farm, 1999 film version.

Oprah’s Tribute to Freedom Riders (2011), includes a few video links and additional information.

V-E Day!

Late in October 1942, the British war effort, until then maimed by one humiliating defeat after another, notched a solid victory over Axis forces at El Alamein. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill waxed optimistically about that success with trademark eloquence and wit:

     ”Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.  But it is,       perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

This piece is a V-E Day tribute to two great leaders of two great nations who rescued Western Civilization from the brink: Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the above photo, two British children celebrate V-E Day.  The younger of the two was close to my own age at the time.

And so it was that Churchill’s quip was a nod to Roosevelt’s pledge that U.S. combat forces would join the battle, signalling a new phase of the war — the end of the beginning. Although WWII started in the Pacific in 1941, U.S. military assistance to the Allied theaters of Europe and North Africa for a year had been limited mostly to goods and materiel provided by Roosevelt’s brilliantly conceived Lend-Lease Program.  America, isolationist and opposed to involvement in yet another European war, manufactured ships, planes, tanks, arms and munitions for the European Allies; she manufactured uniforms made in America to be worn by Russian troops who smoked lend-lease Chesterfields.

Two and a half years later, the war neared its end with the D-Day invasion of Normandy on the Western front and concordant Russian offensive on the Eastern front, both launched in June 1944.  In a year’s time, these two armies would converge on Berlin to inflict ignominious defeat on the Nazi-led scourge of Western Civilization.  That event occurred on May 8, 1945, some 67 years ago today — V-E Day.  Churchill remarked, “In all our history, we have never seen a greater day than this.”

Estimates of the number killed in the war’s European theater range upwards of 40-million souls. The majority were civilians.  Some of them were targeted directly by combatants while others were incidental casualties.  All were innocent.  Victims included entire families from cities such as Hamburg, Dresden and Warsaw, and from Stalingrad, Leningrad and Kiev.  The war reduced these and other cities to smoldering rubble.  

Americans living today who still relish memories of V-E Day, along with those who grew up captivated by firsthand narratives, now approach the inevitable evening of their memory. Lamentably for others, tales of the war’s end, or even of the war itself, seem to have been cast into history’s dustbin with other classroom fragments judged irrelevant. But WWII history is a rich and valuable history never to be sidestepped or forgotten.  Millions did not die during a time animated by great heroes, great leaders, great sacrifices, great feats, great stories and by greatnesses of all sorts only to become forgotten fragments of history.  

WWII history, and that of the worldwide Great Depression preceding the war, is a treasure trove of fortune and misfortune as America, often by fits and starts, sought to redefine and revitalize herself.  In times of trouble, we revisit these treasures not for want of palliative indulgences conferred by sentimental nostalgia, although there is that aplenty, but rather for the wisdom of experience to see us through those times.  Although some say history teaches us nothing and that successive generations must relearn its hard lessons for themselves, it’s also said that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Some history buffs believe America risks repeating history; that she entered into a new time of troubles some years ago when the lessons of the Great Depression and World War II were set aside.

For example, the Depression taught us that government must temper free market greed and excess through enforced regulation and legislation.  That it must provide safety nets for the most vulnerable members of society and safeguard the liberties and civil rights of the common man and woman.  We learned that liberal democracy becomes a sham if it derives power from any source other than its citizens, who exemplify and extol the common good.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood down such a challenge to democratic principles.  By the beginning of his second term in 1936, he had put 6-million Americans back to work.  The production lines in Detroit again produced as many automobiles as before the Great Depression.  He restored hope where there was despair, confidence where there was defeat and purpose where life had lost meaning.  He redefined America and held highest the hopes and aspirations of the common man.  Yet the banks and captains of industry, who Roosevelt collectively referred to as “organized money,” hated him.

Roosevelt embraced them with glee: “They are unanimous of their hate of me and I welcome their hatred,” he said. They hated him because he ramrodded programs and regulations through Congress designed to rein in abject greed and avarice.  On the other hand, everyday Americans were united in praise of their populist president, reelecting Roosevelt in 1936 by the largest popular vote margin in American history.  In 1932 he returned America to the people. In 1936 he aimed to keep it that way.

America on this 67th anniversary of V-E Day no longer belongs to the people but to corporations and banks who effectively own the Congress and the White House.  After the war’s end, Roosevelt’s “organized money” nemesis began to morph into a corporatocracy that now firmly commands the towering heights.  Its generals are unelected plutocrats — the glib CEOs of (mostly) multi-national corporations motivated solely by profits while remaining indifferent to the common good.  Noam Chomsky said their goal is, “to be as inhumane as possible.” 

Instead of raising hope high, the two most recent Washington administrations raised obfuscation and mendacity to levels not witnessed since the heyday of Nazi propaganda.  Bush and Obama, two monuments to mediocrity affixed to the same Hydra, ironically feast on the very fear Roosevelt warned the nation against when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” in 1933. Indeed, recent administrations do not fear fear, they manufacture and monger fear on a grand scale and then use it to curtail the freedoms and human rights of the common man and woman.  

They prosecute wars of reckless adventurism for the sake and benefit of War, Inc.  They privatize profits and socialize losses of infamous institutions of evil deemed Too Big to Fail, although business failure is an essential component of true capitalism.  They unwittingly undermine democracy and rend the fabric of society, as if the inevitable class warfare always begot by such myopic pretexts will somehow benefit Big Business and Big Brother, a thoroughly fascist notion.

True capitalism should be subject to the Rule of Law and strong Rooseveltian  governance. Instead, we endure governance by exalted robber barons who bounce from corporate boardroom to political sanctuary and back again (Matt Taibbi’s ‘Vampire Squid’).

If Franklin Roosevelt’s America turned left at a signpost back in 1933, the America of political hacks and lackeys from both parties turned right at the same signpost 48 years later when Ronald Reagan took office.  They subsequently dismantled many of the regulatory safeguards Roosevelt put in place, most notably the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.  Bill Clinton repealed it in 1999.  The bumper-sticker mantra of the time was, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and the greatest good to flow from such vapid tripe was, “Show me the money.”

This links to a transcript of FDR’s speech at Madison Square Garden on October 31, 1936. His remarks remain relevant today as homegrown greed and political corruption pose an imminent and even more sinister threat to our democracy, way of life and civilization than the Nazis ever did.

   

Ye Yeoman Warder Ravenmaster

The renown American novelist and historian Herman Wouk observed in War and Remembrance, “When an empire dies, it dies like a cloudy day, without a visible moment of sunset.”

Yet many days before ominous clouds obscure the sun foretelling the death of an empire, visible signposts indicating an approaching calamity, or a time of troubles, can be recognized.  But one must know what signs to look for and where to look for them.  Let’s examine several possibilities.  

Christian evangelicals, for example, watch (and  pray) for signs of construction activity on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.  They believe a third temple must be built as a harbinger for the End of Days.  The irreligious, on the other hand, might pay greater attention to strife and rumors of war in the Middle East, partly out of concern for the price of oil and its economic impact.  As for those good-natured Celtic pagans, they keep a good lookout on the ravens at the Tower of London and for good reason, as we shall see.  But first, the backstory.  

According to learned philosophers of history such as Toynbee and Spengler, and to prophets of doom such as the whacked-out author of the Book of Revelation and one exceedingly glum Mayan timekeeper, the Anglo-American Empire may soon face a day of reckoning.  And since our Western civilization gladfully pleads guilty to worshiping a false idol, one with a ravenous and insatiable desire for money above all else, we could convincingly argue that the money-world will oblige us with an unmistakable signpost when storm clouds gather.  Given the current predicament of the world economy, we may already have caught a glimpse of that particular signpost up ahead.

An old saw oft recounted in the gilded corridors of Wall Street and square mile called the City of London claims that no tree grows to the sky; that chickens eventually come home to roost. And conventional Wall Street wisdom firmly acknowledges the world economy is currently “at sixes and sevens” with itself, as previously noted.  Many fear we in the West are in a heap of trouble but aren’t being told we’re in a heap of trouble, a sure recipe for disaster.

Toynbee asserted that civilizations themselves are living, organic existentials; most undergo a natural cycle of life, death and rebirth, as do other organisms. Spengler, a proponent of historical cycles, held a somewhat similar view.  The more unfortunate civilizations become dormant (Eskimo) or go extinct (Egyptaic).  Others thrive.  

Our own thriving Western or Anglo-American civilization rose like the Phoenix from Greco-Roman ashes, which itself was the issue of its parent Minoan Civilization (ca 3000 BC) on Crete.  Accordingly, we can boast of 5,000-years of continuity (and counting). Furthermore, this timeline places the Anglo-American Empire in perspective and in proper historical context. The West will either merge with or subsume Islamic civilization, or one will destroy the other; this is the verdict rendered by the philosophy of history.

Many familiar symbols such as the spiral, a symbol of infinite, upward momentum and perpetual change, can be traced back to the Bronze Age Minoans.  Our government and the nation’s capital itself resemble, in both form and appearance, ancient Rome and Athens; and Hunger Games, the wildly popular book and film, borrows heavily from Greco-Minoan mythology: Athens shipped 7 boys and 7 girls to Crete every 9 years to be devoured by the dreaded Minotaur. These and numerous other correspondences in history infer a durable web that spans the ages connecting the past, present and future.  The metaphysical implications are astounding. 

So, what in the name of Pallas Athena has any of this to do with the Tower of London, the Ravenmaster or his Royal Ravens, those creatures of “forgotten lore from night’s Plutonian shore?”  Why, everything!  

As legend has it, if at least six Royal Ravens continuously roam the Tower Green, yet though the end may be near, the world will be safe a while longer.  But if the birds should ever flee the Tower of London, or some dreaded fate befall them, well, that would presage a cloudy day with no visible moment of sunset.

When I myself roamed the Tower Green several years ago (and was personally humiliated on the shoulder by a Royal Raven), I tarried for a time to ask the Ravenmaster more about this little-known legend, one that could signal a salient threat to Great Britain, the cradle of Western Civilization, and therefore by extension to the prevailing Natural Order of Things.  He detailed the chilling cautionary tale to me in earnest.

“The Royal Ravens — yes, they are wards of the Crown — are each named and proudly carry the rank of soldier.  They belong to a storied tradition as old, some say, as the glory days of Camelot and King Arthur’s Round Table.  Somewhere, just out there,” he told me, gesturing toward White Hill where the White Tower now stands, “the severed head of Bran the Blessed was buried facing the European Continent.  From there, Bran wards off all evildoers who would destroy our island.  He promised that as long as his sacred head remains buried on White Hill, the kingdom would endure all perils.”

Apparently, Bran, as well as Mrs. Thatcher, considered the European continent the origin of significant threats.  History bears out their concerns, of course.  Not only will Bran’s ravens predict imminent danger, they will also inform us of King Arthur’s imminent return.

“Bran the Blessed means blessed raven in Welch and Bran himself, like Merlin, is a heroic figure from Welch Arthurian legend.  Bran’s head and the Royal Ravens are symbolically inseparable.  They are one. During the springtime of a new Golden Age, or, say, the frigid winter of an Apocalypse, King Arthur will rise to reign again over Britain.  You may recall Malory’s famous pronouncement about Arthur — Rex Quondam, Rexque Futurus — our once and future king.  These ominous ravens and Bran the Blessed symbolize King Arthur’s prophets and precursors; his body and soul.

“As long as Bran’s head rests at peace on White Hill and as long as Her Majesty’s Ravens roam Tower Green, the Empire and Crown shall remain secure.  But should the ravens vanish, well, that won’t imply it’s all beer and skittles for Arthur, now will it?  That’s why we clip their flight feathers. They can’t fly far.  Besides, we take quite good care of them here at the Tower.”

I suspect feather clipping has more to do with tourism than with anything else, although it may hedge destiny as well.  Could life as we know it be grounded by clipped raven feathers?  I asked the Ravenmaster if there’d ever been a close call — a worried time, as it were.

“Yes, indeed. During the German blitz all but one raven disappeared.  And England came that close to annihilation,” he said, emphasizing the obvious parallel, “but Winnie (Churchill) hastily ordered more ravens brought in from Wales.  Whitehall, you see, takes these legends quite seriously.  Always has,” he concluded emphatically.

Perhaps we should too.  In any event, do keep a good lookout on Temple and Tower alike and always beware of Greeks borrowing Euros.

(Below: Raven Hardey with Ravenmaster Derrick Coyle)

A Woman Most Maligned

Holy Week is an opportune time to reflect upon the central role played in Christianity by its first Hallelujah Person, Mary Magdalene. And to debunk a church-sponsored myth about Mary that for the better part of 2,000 years has cast a dark shadow over the recognition and consideration she aptly deserves.

Since the Gnostic Gospels were discovered in 1945, many historians, and the odd theologian I suppose, have speculated on how Christianity might have evolved differently had the voice of Jesus’ most loved and arguably most reliable disciple not been suppressed and debased by the nascent church, for reasons we shall see.  

The Gnostic Gospel of Philip refers to Mary as “the companion of Jesus.”  Some translations use the word “lover” and go on to add that Jesus, “loved her above all the other disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth.”  Other Gnostic gospels portray Mary as his closest confidant.  Clearly, a credible alternative version of the teachings and sayings of Jesus once existed with Mary Magdalene as its primary protagonist.  Vestiges of it are still found in Glastonbury and in other spiritual centers of Northern Europe.    

Scripture reveals it was she to whom he first appeared on Easter morning. Consequently, she became known as “the Apostle to the Apostles,” a centuries-old title eventually affirmed at the Second Vatican Council. Scripture also discloses it was she who remained at the foot of the cross while the other apostles fled in fear of arrest.  And she was there when his body was laid in the tomb and when the stone was rolled away.  Yet one familiar incrimination was leveled against Mary Magdalene that finds no support anywhere in scripture. There is no scriptural reference to her as a prostitute.  None.  That story is unadulterated invention.

In 591, Pope Gregory the Great delivered a series of sermons that purposefully conflated Mary Magdalene with the sinful woman (prostitute) who washed Jesus’ feet with her hair (Luke 7: 37-50) and with Mary of Bethany, in whose home this or a similar incident purportedly occurred (Matthew 26: 6-13).  The Pope was in error.  The church officially annulled his contrived malice some 14-centuries later in a 1969 correction.  By then, Mary Magdalene’s reputation was irrevocably stained and her importance in the Christian narrative significantly diminished.

Pope Gregory’s purpose for smearing Mary Magdalene is no puzzle: first, she was a woman; a woman acclaimed by the early Christian community as a very important individual in Jesus’ ministry and even as a rival to Peter.  According to the Gnostic Gospel of Mary (Magdalene), Jesus actually taught an “interior spirituality” where an individual is responsible for his or her own spiritual transformation: neither a church nor any other intermediary was necessary for redemption or enlightenment.  Such views were anathema to the Church Fathers and judged incompatible with the evolving Christian mythos of “external spirituality” with substitutionary atonement as its focus. 

In truth, the early church, the church of Peter and Paul, never held women in high regard considering them vastly inferior to men.  Nor, for that matter, the Jews, who often were (wrongly) accused of being “Christ killers.”  Subsequently, women and Jews were maligned, subjugated and marginalized for centuries. Similar wrong-minded, agenda-driven Christian teaching continues today, albeit to a diminished degree. It’s a straight but too often blurred line from the influence of religious bigotry to centuries scared by untold human death and suffering, as any objective read of western church history bears out. 

A later Pope, the aged John Paul II, apologized in the year 2000 for the Church’s litany of wrongs against women, Jews, minorities, heretics, Gypsies and Native Peoples, et al.  His apology scandalized the Vatican power structure, infrequently given to admitting error or seeking forgiveness. You can read more about his apology here, should you like.

Centuries of Western Christian art inspired in part by Pope Gregory’s chauvinistic preaching, such as the lovely painting above by Frederick Sandys depicting Mary as the Girl with an Alabaster Jar; the dreadful Magdalene Houses and Asylums for “wayward women” located in both Europe and the U.S., but most notoriously in Ireland; recent over-the-top films by Martin Scorsese and Mel Gibson, plus years of other incriminating tommyrot combined to further malign and misrepresent the true and just nature of Mary of Magdala and her prominent role in Christianity, especially in the early church.

Dan Brown, in his novel “The DaVinci Code,” perhaps (unintentionally) approaches  the truth about Mary.  His Mary, married to Jesus and pregnant with his child, escaped the odious Christian-Jewish polemics and politics dividing the Jerusalem Church by sailing to the South of France with the Holy Grail.  Of course, this centuries-old legend should be interpreted allegorically; whether or not it’s based upon historical fact makes no difference to its instructive vitality and usefulness.

Any religion’s mission to instruct and inspire the faithful would be more affirming and productive if believers appreciated the power and beauty of spiritual allegory and symbolism. Without such an appreciation for the ambiguities meant to inspire deeply personal “interior” insights, religion devolves into theocratic, staid dogma of “correct beliefs” resembling “whitewashed sepulchers full of dead men’s bones,” as it was once put.  Truth is squeezed dry.

The allegorical and enigmatic Mary Magdalene who emerges from The DaVinci Code and numerous other texts is a strong woman of many personae.  She is Jesus’ loyal friend and partner, his disciple, a healer, a teacher, a prophetess, a priestess and even an archetype, to name a few.  I personally believe one essential truth of Mary can be discovered in the latter: as a Christian archetype of the mystical Sacred Feminine, which is equated in Jewish Kabbalistic tradition with the Holy Spirit and known as the Shekinah.  In that mystical anagogic sense, Mary of Magdala most assuredly could be embraced and glorified as the wife of Jesus. However, unlike in the Eastern Church, a robust mystical tradition never really caught fire in the West.

Yet one such mystical, gender balanced tradition stressing equality of the sexes, as taught by Jesus, was observed in the South of France by the ancient Cathars (Pure Ones), who were Christians — Dan Brown alludes to this history in his novel and the connection to Mary Magdalene. Nonetheless, the Roman church branded the Cathars — their spiritual beliefs and entwined culture — heretical and had them all massacred in the 13th century by the Albigensian Crusade, regarded by some historians as the first genocide in modern European history. Whatever actual proof the Cathars may have had of a more authentic version of Christianity, as they so claimed, apparently was lost with them but perhaps could suggest the motivation that led to their demise.

Yet not all the beliefs and traditions of the Cathars, who are appropriately described by some as “Western Buddhists,” were fully extinguished; eventually truth seeks and finds the light of day. In addition to the Knights Templar, who also were exterminated by order of the Vatican, we possibly have the world-loving troubadours to thank for spreading Holy Grail legends from France throughout Northern Europe, where such mythologies flourished — King Arthur’s Camelot and the Fisher King are among the most familiar.

Myths aren’t by definition untrue; they are stories that transport truth to future generations. The myth of the Holy Grail, whether it refers to a sacred artifact or Mary Magdalen’s womb, is all about the eternal journey — the spiritual Quest itself.  The rest is commentary and conjecture.

                                                                      ~

The picture below is of a stained glass window at Kilmore Church on the Scottish Isle of Mull. It lovingly illustrates a Celtic expression of an unfettered interior faith that evaded the tyranny of Rome.  Is that so bad?

Saints and Green Beer

They say that on St. Pat’s Day we’re all Irish, including us dour Scots, lowly Celts in exile who immigrated to Scotland from Ireland but by some hapless slap of history were denied full Irishness.

Fittingly, we can become a wee grouchy and heretical on St. Pat’s Day.  Especially on St. Patrick’s Day, when we put forward another of the Emerald Isle’s Patron Saints: St. Brigid.  Ireland has 3 patron saints — for the shamrock, no doubt — St. Columba being the third.  Never heard of him either, I bet.

Truthfully, St. Brigid never actually existed.  In olden days, when the Catholic church found it near impossible to stamp out a beloved pagan god or goddess, they customarily would concoct a legend of some sort, appropriate the pagan name and then canonize or, as in Brigid’s case, simply elevate him or her to sainthood by popular acclaim.  Voila!  Yo, St. Brigid.

Another case in point: St. Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland, it’s told.  Never you mind that there were never any snakes in Ireland in the first place, it’s a useful teaching tool.  The snakes he drove out, you see, were those frightful serpent symbols belonging to them frightful (pagan) Druids.  When converting pagans (simple, country folks) to Christians, it’s useful first to demonize their mythology.  (Something many now consider cultural genocide.)  The serpent (dragon), by the way, is a very positive, much revered mythological symbol in many cultures. But ever since that evil temptress Eve — well, you know the havoc she doth wrought. As a result of that bucolic myth, the institutional church (patriarchy) doesn’t care a great deal for serpents, or for women either, if truth be allowed.

Oh, what the hell, another aside to emphasize the point: In Jewish religious ritual, it’s the woman of the household who lights the Shabbat candles each Sabbath.  This gently reminds her that it was she, a daughter of Eve, who snuffed out the primal light.  Nice.

Now, again to Brigid the goddess.  Brigid’s Flame, pictured above, was tended around the clock by 19 of Brigid’s priestesses since time immemorial in Kildare, with each priestess minding a 24-hour shift.  The flame was a ritual fire, like a bonfire, meant to invoke the goddess’ protection for the herds and the hearth, which symbolizes the protective warmth and security of the home. Brigid’s Flame was maintained secretly after King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 16th century.  

In 1993, the Brigidine Sisters (Catholic nuns) officially restored this ancient and much cherished pagan tradition.  Brigid’s flame burns in Solas Bhride, the sisters’ Celtic Christian community in Kildare, and also, since 2006, in the Kildare Market Square (pictured), where Brigid is perpetually invoked for peace and justice.

Christian Evangelicals may appreciate this rekindling as it surely is yet another sign of the rapturous End Times.

Whatever. On St. Paddy’s Day let us entertain more pressing concerns.  Beer.  So hoist a Guinness, or green suds of some sort, to Lady Brigid of Kildare, the most important goddess-become-saint in the pre-Christian Celtic Church; the counter-cultural woman, the feminist, and the goddess whose flame would never be snuffed out in the advancement of “holy” patriarchy.

I neglected to mention that St. Pat himself was a Brit — a Christian missionary come up from Cumbria.                                                      

The New Colossus

 Emma Lazarus was born in New York City in 1849 to a  prominent Sephardic Jewish family of Portuguese ancestry.  You  may not remember her name from history or literature classes,  but you are most certainly familiar with her poetry.

 I was reminded of Emma Lazarus’ contributions to American        culture while researching the roots of 19th  century Antisemitism in Eastern Europe, specifically in the Pale  of Settlement.  I was doing the research for a blog post that I’ll  eventually get around to writing.

 It was Russian pogroms that led to the mass immigration to the  U.S. of as many as 2,000,000 European Jews during Emma’s  lifetime, an immigration that both restored and reinvigorated her Jewish identity.  Russia, and most notably the Russian Orthodox Church, had falsely held the Jews accountable for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.  Years later, Hitler held the Jews similarly, and with equal absurdity, accountable for Germany’s defeat in World War I.  

Emma Lazarus was a poet, a feminist and a Zionist years before Theordor Herzl coined the term.  Her call for the establishment of a Jewish homeland was among the very first.

Below are the words from the sonnet “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, with which we are all familiar.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Theresienstadt

Tucked away in everyone’s psyche, I believe, abides a unique metaphysical affinity with certain historic events that occurred in the year of one’s birth.  Accordingly, I claim such an affinity with the year 1943 and the Holocaust.

In the year of my birth, history was being manufactured on a grand scale dominated, of course, by the Second World War.  I grew up hearing oft-repeated family remembrances of Victory Gardens (there was one in our front yard) and of having survived the hardship of rationing. I grew up admiring picture albums including me as an infant held safely in the heroic arms of our men in uniform, including my father and two uncles.  My formative years were filled with a child’s fascination of, and an admiration for, imposing war heroes like MacArthur, Patton, Doolittle, Churchill, Roosevelt and John Wayne.  And I grew up bearing witness to the emotional wounds of war, wounds escaped by very few families, I reckoned, however deeply they may have been interred in the human psyche.

As for the unspeakable horrors at the Nazi farce named Theresienstadt, I knew nothing.

In school in the 50s and early 60s, history class taught us little about WWII.  This is quite understandable: the recent past is history’s blind spot.  The flotsam and jetsam of history — its scattered, palpable wreckage — drift out there in the offing awaiting salvage. Some of WWII’s wreckage awaiting salvage found temporary solace in mass graves, some whiled away time hidden in secret documents and still more in yet unspoken testimony.  In due course, historians would sort this salvage, interpret it, write it down and confer upon it eternal salvation. 

Theresienstadt and its 140,000 Jewish inhabitants over the course of the war were among the Third Reich’s flotsam and jetsam, persistently lapping at the blood-stained shores of civilized humanity’s conscience anxious to reveal their shocking truths.  Anxious for salvation.  The world had paid scant attention to the Holocaust while it was happening.  But the world knew. Shamefully and silently, the Allied powers knew what was happening to the Jews of Europe.

By the hour of my birth in July 1943, the boys and girls from an orphanage in Prague, who sang in the chorus of the children’s opera Brundibar (Bumblebee), had  recently been transported in boxcars to Theresienstadt, located in what then was Czechoslovakia.  In September of 1943, this children’s opera premiered and subsequently was performed regularly in Theresienstadt over the coming months, including a special and final performance for the benefit of, and in hopes of duping, the International Red Cross in June 1944.

But when the final curtain came down, all the opera’s orphans, all the musicians, its composer, its director and all of those associated in any way whatsoever with the production of Brundibar were again herded into fetid cattle cars, transported east to Auschwitz-Birkenau and gassed immediately upon arrival, as were most other Jews who were  transported to “The East” between 1942 and 1944.  

Altogether, a total of 88,000 Jews from Theresienstadt, that sinister illusion proffered to the world by Hitler as a model “Paradise Ghetto” and as quarters only slightly more “luxurious” than other concentration camps where all Jews were, according to Nazi propaganda, treated “beneficently,” were, in fact, systematically murdered in the gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz-Birkenau.  In truth, Theresienstadt was a schleuse, another inhuman, death-infested Nazi transit camp; a grotesque gutter of a place channeling innocent lives to the dreaded East for “Special Action.”  Theresienstadt was the epicenter of monstrous Nazi hoaxes. 

Into this tortured backdrop of universal madness, of genocide and infanticide, we the children delivered into a world at war kicked and screamed. Today, some 70 years on, we have written and we have read the sorry and sordid history of our first years.  But of the Holocaust and the genocidal dust that permeat the salad days of our Earthly visitation, neither we nor anyone else could make any sense: The Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur — the unceasing screams.  The perpetual madness.  

Is it even possible for anyone to grasp, including the ever-faithful and dutiful Job, this problem of senseless evil in the world?

The Nazi pathology, the pathology of all genocides, demands a category of victims called untermenschen (sub-humans).  In the Third Reich, this wretched slur applied mostly to Jews but also to Slavs, to Gypsies, to the disabled, the mentally ill and to homosexuals.  It applied to Hungarians and to Romanians.  The lot of them were stinking untermenschen. Their children were stinking untermenschen!  Untermenschen, the anthem of racism and hate.  

As long as any population can be stigmatized as untermenschen, and whenever civilized humanity elects to remain deaf to it, the world shall never see an end to the scourge of senseless evil.  Indeed, we shall only see more of it.  

It is for this reason we observe Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Lest we never forget.

                                                                    ###

Only days after these pictures were taken, these children were transported to Auschwitz, stripped naked and gassed with Zyklon-B, a pesticide. 

 

(Above) A photograph of Jewish children in the Theresienstadt ghetto taken during an inspection by the International Red Cross. Prior to this visit, the ghetto was “beautified” in order to deceive the IRC. ~ Czechoslovakia, June 23, 1944. (Below) The original cast of Brundibar at Theresienstadt.