That Silent Certainty

          For those of us dwelling on the side of reason, biblical prophesies of eschatology stir no fear of armies of angels descending to destroy the human race and cast into hell all nonbelievers, though those same prophesies used to provide potent imagery for reasonable men and women who once rallied against the U. S. and the Soviet arms race as it escalated during the Reagan years.  Jonathan Schell, in The Fate of The Earth, exhibited for readers some of the ghastly apocalyptic horrors nuclear war would inflict on those who survived the initial blasts.  His depiction of tormented “souls” milling about and waiting for nothing but radiation poisoning to finish them off imagines a Dantesque realm of destruction and suffering that should convince even the most militaristic hawks to eliminate nuclear weapons before they one day exterminate the human race.
        However, this Saturday, May 21, we can all look forward to the beginning of the end of the world, courtesy of California preacher Harold Camping who has been broadcasting that date as the day the “rapture” will whisk heavenward those sufficiently faithful and consigned to eternal flames those undeserving and wicked.  It’s not clear what time of day the event will kick off, but the date is signed, sealed, and all but delivered according to Camping and his followers.  Their certainty of belief has driven many of them to forsake their own well being and their children’s.   For instance, National Public Radio reported that Adrienne Martinez, a Camping faithful, gave up her plans to attend medical school, and with her husband travelled to New York to hand out fliers urging sinners and lost souls to repent.  In New York, another Camping follower, Robert Fitzgerald, has used his entire life savings of 140,000 dollars to fund campaign advertising on subway and train station placards the approaching Biblical event.
       It’s bad enough when grown-ups believe such lunacy; but when they teach it to their children, or worse indoctrinate them with the creed that argues non-believers can only look forward to eternity spent roasting in hell, someone should rescue the young from the stupidly wicked notions of their parents.  Some kids might be able to shrug off their parents’” end of the world” fanaticism, but the burden put on them by their parents must be overwhelming.  A case in point is the Haddad Carson family.   As reported in the New York Times, Abby Haddad and her husband, Robert, stopped saving money for their kids’ college and visited New York last weekend to spread the word about the end of the world.  Grace Haddad, their sixteen year old daughter, told a Times’ reporter that her mother had informed her that she would not be going to heaven when the rapture began on Saturday.  Grace admitted that it was “upsetting at first,” but also suggested that what her mother “honestly believes” is legitimate and acceptable concept for a parent to teach to her children.  Grace’s fourteen year old brother, Joseph, has been affected by his parents’ behavior.  He expressed his mortification about them and noted that he does whatever he can to keep his friends “as far away from them as possible.”  It is bleak to see him wither in the desert of his parents’ obsession with “no motivation to figure out what he wants to do anymore,” since his parents care about nothing except the approaching rapture.
          The need to believe in a deity that envelops the faithful in a “rapturous” afterlife no doubt springs from the yearning to escape the painful and quite terrifying prospect of our inevitable death and subsequent decay once we are swallowed by the earth.  But where does the desire to see others tormented for eternity by the most gruesome, and infinite tortures come from?  Certainly, everyone wants justice to dispose of anyone whose crimes have warranted a just punishment.  But the biblical literalists who aver that people who never heard of Jesus and others who question his divinity will experience unfathomable and infinite suffering betray simultaneously a sadistic and obsequious mentality that worships a totalitarian authority whose omnipotence and omniscience perpetually menace the faithful with threats of eternal torture.

Economic Woes

                                            Economic Woes


      Class warfare has been declared in America, though the usual suspect is not the one we have come to expect - the Democrats.  Democrats have used class conflict effectively to influence the working and middle classes to vote for democratic candidates in the past.  That strategy began to backfire during the Reagan eighties as more and more Americans entered the middle class.  During the same economic expansion, government programs grew and debt and deficits ballooned.

     The government began to run surpluses in the late nineteen-nineties and some economists predicted that the modern economy had vanquished recessions for ever.  This myopic notion was used to justify George W. Bush’s refusal to raise revenue to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Disregarding the financial strain from two wars and his tax cuts, Bush increased spending even further with his Medicare prescription drug plan. Just as his term of president ended, Republicans began prophesying the downfall of America if the federal government was not purged of its profligate spending addiction.

        For the republicans and their Tea Party allies, the solution to the debt and deficit crisis is to “defund” discretionary spending programs.  Of course, their goal is to destroy not only economic programs they hate, but also the social ones that offend their hypocritical sense of morals. These cost too little to have any effect on reducing deficits and debts, but that does not keep Republicans from being obsessed with cutting money for Planned Parenthood and funding for Public Broadcasting.

     Of all the Republicans, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis) has been praised most lavishly by conservative pundits (David Brooks, NY Times, April 7,2011) for offering a bold and courageous approach to deficit and debt reduction.  It is impossible to believe Ryan’s sincerity when he puts forth a plan that decimates social programs for the poor and middle class while at the same time cuts taxes for the wealthiest Americans.  Thus, the political party, who serves at the behest of the wealthy, has interpreted the results of last year’s mid-term elections as the vindication of their political and economic philosophies and have decided they no longer have to hide from middle class Americans the true allegiance to the wealthy and their contempt for the rest of Americans.

     If one needs confirmation for the Republicans’ contempt for all but the wealthy, then consult a few important facts.  Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proposed a ten year budget plan that would cut taxes for the wealthiest down to twenty-five percent while cutting from Medicaid hundreds of billions of dollars and by turning Medicare into a voucher system in which Americans can purchase private insurance that in effect will not be enough to cover their medical costs.  This plan also cuts money for veterans benefits, education, and transportation, all programs that help the poor and middle class.

     The argument that cutting taxes for the wealthiest will stimulate the economy in such a way that prosperity will trickle down to the ninety-nine percent of Americans who occupy the middle and lower classes does not stand up to scrutiny.  Over the past decade when taxes were lowered by George W. Bush, the middle class watch its wages and income stagnate.  In fact, the top one percent continues to see their wealth and income grow at rates far faster as middle class purchasing power diminishes.  A quarter of a century ago, the top one percent of Americans took in about twelve percent of the nation’s income and control about thirty-three of its wealth.  Today that one percent captures close to twenty-percent of the country’s income and possesses forty percent of the country’s wealth.  According to Joseph Stiglitz, over the past ten years the top one percent of Americans have enjoyed an eighteen percent increase in income while the middle class  incomes have declined.

     In his essay in Vanity Fair, (May 2011) Stiglitz identifies a few facts that should make Tea Party members reconsider the logic of some of their positions.  Almost all U.S. senators and the majority of house members have incomes that are in that top one percent.  Moreover, when they leave congress, many of these elected officials will be rewarded with lucrative jobs by corporations whose agendas they have promoted.  Congress has steadily become an institution of the wealthy for the wealthy.

     A feasible way to pay down the debt and deficit would be to cut spending and increase revenues.  Congress has read the report of the Bowles-Simpson Commission, which has devised a formula of spending cuts and tax increases that could reduce deficits by an estimated four trillion by 2020 and “stabilize the debt by 2014.”  But rather than implement a sensible combination of cuts and taxes, which would spread more fairly among us all the burden of our economic woes, the Republicans would prefer to shield the wealthiest Americans from even the slightest inconvenience, since by serving them they can, in turn, serve themselves.

The Trouble with the Truth

 

The Trouble with the Truth

     These days the art of lying seems more brazenly practiced than it was in the past.  Of course, that’s not true, but we tend to see the past more idealistically than the present and believe that the people who lived then had an innocence they really didn't.  A rebroadcast of "Nixon" on Channel 13 cleared away my naive nostalgia.  I watched Nixon addressed the nation about his innocence regarding Watergate thought how his deceptions soured the air with the words that dripped from those sweaty jowls.  How easily he lied.  When behind closed doors with his advisors, he was crudely frank about how to use lies against adversaries.  Lying for him was never a question of right or wrong, but one of practical and political utility.

    Like Nixon, many politicians will lie liberally as they try to manipulate the media and deceive the public.  They fool few, yet resist unrelentingly telling the truth. Other politicians tinker with facts in order to mischaracterize an opponent or promote an agenda.  Habitually and naturally mendacious, politicians lie as a matter of course.  However, I shouldn’t castigate politicians without admitting that everyone feels occasionally the irresistible urge to lie.   It’s easy to think of examples when my conscience surrendered custody of the will and a lie or two suited better (I thought) the situation I faced.  Who hasn’t tried to lie, mislead or obfuscate his way out of trouble? Who hasn’t stretched the “truth” to serve some purpose hidden from family, friends, and acquaintances?

     Two insouciant liars came to my attention this week when I read Stanley Fish’s blog post, “So’ Your Old Man,” and in Bob Herbert’s op-ed column, “The Sports Needs to Change,” (New York Times online: March 14.)

     Fish’s blog considers the logical flaws in Leonard Pitt’s recent column in The Miami Herald, in which Pitt excoriates Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour for not “denouncing” a proposal to honor “Nathan Bedford Forrest by issuing vanity license plates bearing his name.”  When asked by the NAACP to “denounce” the proposal, Barbour stated, “I don’t go around denouncing people.”

   Pitt’s logic might need shoring up, but his conclusion is no less valid.  Barbour has claimed not to be a racist (especially as he now runs for president), but when he tried to burnish his bona fides as a good old boy of the south and sidestep the racist implication of supporting the Forrest license plate by feigning to be a man who eschews denouncing others, he betrayed instantly his propensity for deceit.  To no avail, Barbour tried twist his way around being labeled a racist while simultaneously scoring points with those in Mississippi possessed even today by an inexorable racism.  Subsequently, Barbour learned that it was better politically to oppose the Forrest license plate proposal, and announced his plan to not sign the legislation honoring the K.K.K. leader if it reached his desk.  Is Barbour a racist?   When he refused to take a stand in the first place, was he lying to the racists who proposed the plate?  Is he lying now that he has taken a stance against it and, in fact, is really for it?  Racist or not (I think he is), at least we can count on him to lie regardless of his beliefs; though I’d think with so much practice he could become more adept at it.

   In a different story, Bob Herbert looks at the effect of the destructive violence in professional football.  Herbert tells the story of Dave Duerson who shot himself to death in February this year.  At the time of his suicide Duerson was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (he thought he was, but did not know for certain) which symptoms include memory loss, dementia, and depression.

   More and more retired football players have been reporting symptoms of dementia, memory loss, and depression, but the NFL, until recently, did what it could to hide from the public the irreparable brain injuries caused by the physical collisions unavoidable in football.  In October, 2009, NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, testified before the House Judiciary Committee and would not admit a connection between “football and cognitive decline among retired N.F.L. players. (“N.F.L Scolded Over Injuries to Its Players” Alan Schwarz New York Time October 29, 2009)

    Goodell’s testimony is another illuminating spectacle of lying.  Of his testimony, committee member Linda Sanchez noted that Goodell reminded her of the tobacco companies when they used to argue that there was no connection between smoking and lung disease. (Schwarz, New York Times, October 29, 2009)

    Since that hearing in 2009, Goodell and the N.F.L. have begun to admit a connection between football and brain damage. They have even urged states to pass legislation protecting young football players from concussions.  How many fans will view this admission and their efforts to help youth avoid damage from head injuries as sincere?  How many will forget all the years they intentionally obstructed the truth about brain damage incurred from playing football?

   The lies told by the pro football establishment about the dangers of head injuries shouldn’t be forgotten.  But even if they aren’t, the fans will continue to fill the stadiums and stare at their oversized television screens while lovely autumn days recede into winter.  Millions of dollars will flow into the coffers of advertisers and corporate sponsors.  And commentators will incessantly yap on about the game that’s greater than all the rest—a lie too many will believe or deceive themselves into believing.

College Made Easy

“Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but — more troubling still — they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment.”
         

          The quotation, which comes from Bob Herbert’s column (http://www.nytimes.com/), would make one suspect that those who fit this description either have great difficulty getting a degree or graduate with very low grade point averages.  However, his column reveals a different trend: students who are ill prepared and poorly motivated, and who advance little or not at all in the critical skills their education is meant to impart, not only get their degrees, but also leave college with averages between B and B-plus.  

That many colleges make it easy for many sub-par students to attend their schools and complete a degree is quite well known these days. That they set absurdly low standards, and offer vapid courses within intellectually vacant degree programs so students can navigate four years of learning without learning anything might make some parents upset.  Yet, if colleges were to uphold standards or impose rigor, they would be forced to turn away or flunk out too many students necessary to their revenue and existence.

The “attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors…at odds with academic commitment” that define college students have been planted and cultivated by the American public school system.  By the time kids reach college, this system has fully conditioned them to value leisure, fun, games, and just about anything else other than academic work.

When kids begin school as elementary students, they enter a system that pressures them with excessive homework and yearly tests.  Piling homework on elementary kids predates the Bush era’s “No Child Left Behind” policy, which has driven the testing mania for the past decade.  Although “No Child Left Behind” was badly conceived and implemented, its goal of challenging students by testing what they had specifically learned in each subject in the elementary grades was laudable.  Unfortunately, too many states hastily developed exams and reduced too many classroom lessons to mind numbing drill work that ended up replacing intelligent educational practices.

After the stress of elementary grade testing, students reach middle school, and are prepared to face more academic rigor.  Ironically, it is at this point that school begins its slide toward academic and intellectual anemia. In middle schools, the philosophy, and thus primary objective, is to nurture the emotional growth of kids rather than propel their intellectual progress.  In line with this approach is a policy of social promotion.  Students quickly discover that they can never study, fail five or more subjects and still proceed to the next grade.  By the end of two years, the middle school experience has eroded the academic commitment and work ethic initiated in the earlier grades and necessary to foster further academic and intellectual growth.

In high school academic discipline loses even more ground.  Students enter an environment that is obsessed with sports, clubs, bake sales; they are forced to attend assemblies, countless meetings with guidance counselors, appointments with social workers or and psychologists.  These, and endless other distractions, dominate a school’s tone and reduce class work, homework and studying to secondary importance.

Herbert’s thesis that colleges permit (maybe even encourage, I would think) students to skate through fours years of school without exerting themselves, and then reward them with respectable B-plus or B GPA’s only exposes the tip of the problem.  For six years prior, schools provide a smooth and easy way to flow toward college with little effort or concern.  To expect colleges to buck this momentum of academic sloth and negligence, especially at great financial cost to themselves, is wildly naive. So, things will remain as they are, as the few who labor and learn continue to leave behind those too foolish and indolent to know what they will have lost.

The Church and Its Abuse

        “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but he whoso confesseth and forshaketh them shall have mercy.”  Proverbs 28:113


        “The sins of the common, untutored people are nothing in comparison with the sins that are committed by great and high persons that are in spiritual and temporal offices.”
                                           Luther, Table Talk




        Stories about members of the Catholic clergy abusing children continue to appear in the press.  A Sunday’s New York Time Magazine article (February 13, 2011) featured a report by Russell Shorto, “The Irish Affliction,” detailing the sexual abuse (I believe more accurate terms are “sexual assault” and “rape.”) of children perpetrated by priests throughout Ireland. 
       Besides the thousands of cases in Ireland, which makes that country only second to the US in the number of cases, Shorto cites reports of clergy sexual abuse in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, Britain, Italy, Spain, France, Malta, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, Kenya, the Philippines, and Australia.  Though this list might seem shockingly long, it does not report all the countries that have experienced abuse by Catholic clergy. 

        More tales of horror will, no doubt, surface in the future (See Washington Post, L.A. Cardinal’s legacy tainted by priest abuse.” Saturday, February 26, 2011).  But how many victims have remained silent over the years and how many victims from centuries past took the abuse they suffered silently to their graves?
        One particularly disturbing story that has made its way into the news is that of Marie Collins.  Collins told the curate of her parish about a priest who sexually abused her when she was thirteen.  The curate listened to her ordeal and then informed her that she “may have tempted” the priest into “digitally raping” her. 

Other depositions and news stories have revealed that the church would sometimes pay off victims and then convince them to sign nondisclosure agreements, prohibiting them from speaking about what they suffered.  In other cases, church authorities transferred abusive priests to different parishes when complaints against them became too clamorous to contain. 

Worst of all, the Vatican frequently asserted it had legal jurisdiction over priests accused of abusing children in order to shield them from criminal prosecution. These tactics were part of a ubiquitous pattern of concealing the crimes being perpetrated by their priests. 
        Through its history, the church had been more interested in protecting its reputation and wealth than the lives of the young.  But now that the church is buried in an avalanche of public evidence, one would expect at least a trickle of mea culpa to emanate from the Vatican.  Nevertheless, Rome rejects responsibility for these crimes and dismisses the fact that it covered them up.  One wonders, what makes this self-proclaimed guardian of morals blind to its own culpability?
        The mendacity of the Vatican has persuaded all but the most docile and dogmatic supporters (The Catholic League for one) to see the church for what it is: an accessory to numberless counts of sexual abuse, sexual assault and rape. Though it might attempt more subterfuge, it can no longer disguise its history of obstructing justice and helping perpetrators evade punishment.
        To anyone with the most rudimentary moral sense, it’s astounding that an institution guilty of covering up thousands of sex crimes continues to censure society’s “immoral” culture and behavior.  Yet, as its own crimes pour out for everyone to see, the Vatican still tries to deceive the world about the rot circulating through its clergy body.  Rome’s duplicity reflects a controlling hierarchy trapped in an archaic system of beliefs, beliefs of an insular male culture that sees issues involving women, marriage, celibacy, sexuality and the contemporary world through a warped lens of a medieval theology and philosophy.
        If the church is to purge itself of their foul crimes, it would first have to launch itself into the twenty-first century by modernizing all of its positions on the issues above.  But that is more than unlikely, since it would require jettisoning an all male hierarchy that will never surrender its control and power.

Psychic Hoax

Sunday February 5, 2011

Psychic Hoax

“The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”

      Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks.  (New York) W. W. Norton. 97

    Throughout his life William Butler Yeats believed in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology.  His interest in these fueled his imagination with ideas and images that he employed in his poetry.  Even though W. H. Auden admired Yeats’s poetry, he found his idiosyncratic beliefs in Yeats’s poetry troubling.  He said that Yeats’s willingness to accept the occult as a means to know the future or a way to divine life’s mysteries was the “deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic.”  Of course, Auden is correct in this assessment.  Any grown man who believes the occult has fallen under some illusion of magic and mysticism. Nevertheless, Auden was spellbound by the beauty of Yeats’s poems.

   When writing poetry a poet steeps external reality in the world of the imagination and for Yeats that reality included the occult which he used to beguile the boundaries of the quotidian with mystical beliefs. The genius of his poetry and the need to satisfy his ravenous imagination make it forgivable that Yeats believed in the occult or worse, that he consulted astrologists to learn whether Maud Gonne would ever return his love.  In the twenty-first century, I would expect that all but the most credulous would dismiss such ignis fatuus for what it is.  Yet, even today many people read daily horoscopes and consult psychics with the hope that they might find answers to their problems and might communicate with dead relatives, friends.  In fact, many credit psychic readings with literally transporting from the grave the spirit of a parent, brother, sister, or friend into their presence during the course of a “reading.”

   Recently, a friend consulted a psychic and told me about the reading the psychic offered her.  At first, I thought her visit was for her amusement and the money she spent no more a loss than what one might slip into an Atlantic City slot machine.  To my shock, she credited the psychic with touching upon some personal matters in her life with an uncanny accuracy.  But more distressing was her willingness to believe this charlatan’s success at summoning deceased members of her family to join them at that reading.  Clearly, he manipulated her through her grief over the recent death of her brother.  Though I tried to wrest her from the grip of this sham artist’s illusions, she remained convinced that he had tapped into some special psychic energy that graced him with the power of clairvoyance.

   Anyone who believes a psychic’s ability to summon their dead relatives and foretell future events has failed to consult the most rudimentary research that exposes how these swindlers scam unfortunately willing victims.  Psychics gull victims by using a series of techniques which include cold reading, warm reading, hot reading, “shot-gunning,” the Forer effect, and the rainbow ruse to name a few.   One source that can quickly disabuse one of the psychic’s “power” is The Skeptic’s Dictionary (Skeptic.com) which provides reasonable and logical explanations of how these methods work.  If you are tempted to visit a psychic, read this website first.

   It can be safely stated that many, like my friend, who consult psychics feel confident that they possess a strong faculty of reason.  Yet they accept answers to questions that categorically exceed human knowledge from someone who claims to have supernatural powers. Surely the imagination, as was true in Yeats’s case, conjures possibilities that don’t exist.  And surely the grief over someone’s death or the anxiety over what awaits us in the future can spawn in the imagination the idea that spirits exist in an afterlife from which they can visit us and to which we will travel once we die.  Perhaps these basic human feelings explain why so many fall for the obvious psychic hoax.  Or perhaps it is too painful and frightening to confront the simple fact that we know exactly where the dead are and the only other knowledge we have for certain is one day we will join them.  

Winter Lament

1/10/11

        At work today, I walked by two colleagues who, like so many, were discussing the forecasted snowstorm.  Already sick of winter myself I expected them to complain about the cold and snow.  Instead, both men descried the timidity of those lamenting the onslaught of snow.  I shouldn’t have been surprised; when nasty winter weather seizes our attention, we can predict at least two reactions.  One is how intolerable the conditions are.  The second, mentioned above, features stoicism, real or posed, acknowledging and accepting the obdurate facts of winter. There is a third, infrequently observed possibility, that comes from those who love the snow and cold; for now, I’ll leave that inexplicable group for another time.
        As for myself, I find it harder each winter to muster the stoicism I thought innate to my character and difficult not to bemoan winter weather the way I do (loudly) summer mugginess and heat.  I venture outside each frigid morning and tighten my jaw and stomach as the freezing air stings my nose and cheeks.  No one could believe such an early blast could be bracing and energizing, but there are some who actually claim this. In the afternoons I like to walk for exercise; a brisk twenty-five minutes in the cold, fresh air arouses me from the torpor that fills the mind and eyes in those initial post-meridian hours.  Despite being refreshed, I am relieved always to get back inside the warm house. 
        When I was young, I loved to watch snow falling through the dark night blanketing the tree boughs in white shrouds.  Something mystical or sublime seem to gesture to me with each lilting flake; something mellifluous like the rhythm and rhyme of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  Though a beauty still descends with each night snowfall, the numinous is absent.  To illustrate my point, here’s Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Snow Man”:


                                           
         

         One must have a mind of winter       
         To regard the frost and the boughs            
         Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
         

         And have been cold a long time
         To behold the junipers shagged with ice,           

        The spruces rough in the distant glitter
         

         Of the January sun; and not to think          
         Of any misery in the sound of the wind,       
         In the sound of a few leaves,
         

         Which is the sound of the land         
         Full of the same wind          
         That is blowing in the same bare place
         

         For the listener, who listens in the snow,         

         And, nothing himself, beholds          
         Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

          The “misery” evoked by the sound of wind chaffs any who expect to find the comfort or certainty of an Emersonian sublime in the poem.  Stevens offers is a state of “mind” that might ignore (“not to think”) the “misery” that sweeps with the wind across the landscape.  But however stoically one withstands winter, nothing can negate the ubiquitous cruelty of this season.  That would require some transcendent power the twenty-first century imagination can no longer conjure.  The best we can do is collect whatever peace can be found in the dark and cold.