This week I have three things to share. First, I'd like to introduce you to Walk On, a blog written by Jesse Curtis. Mr. Curtis is currently a PhD student at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His research focus is American history, and the roles which American exceptionalism and racism have played in that history. He has particular insights into the role which American evangelicals have played in fostering and maintaining that exceptionalism and racism.
I am glad to have discovered his blog, because I believe that an accurate understanding of the present-day dysfunctional mainstream American mindset must of necessity include an accurate understanding of the ways in which white American evangelicalism and its leaders have contributed to the creation of that mindset. I am a Christian - a Biblically orthodox Christian - and yet I hereby declare my belief that present-day white American evangelicalism is deeply dysfunctional, and that in many ways it amounts to no more than a patriotic cargo cult. (One of these days, I will explain the ways in which the term "cargo cult" accurately describes American evangelicalism - unless someone wants to beat me to the punch.)
The nature of American evangelicalism and its impact on American society explains not only the dysfunctional ways in which the U.S. interacts with the non-white and the foreign-born. It also explains why the U.S. is responding in such a dysfunctional way to the limits now being imposed on it by resource depletion and environmental degradation - the original subjects of my blog. Along those lines, I present you with two reposts of articles describing the collision of national narcissism and unforgiving nature: "The Congress Created Dust Bowl," and "The Death of the Central Valley." Enjoy.
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Saturday, August 8, 2015
Busy as a Cat With A Long Tail...
Blogging is hard work, if it is to be done right. What is required for an intelligent blog is strong subject matter, well-thought, well-researched and well-presented. This takes time.
Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of time right now, and won't have that kind of time for the next several weeks with the possible exception of the end of this month and maybe Labor Day weekend. So unfortunately, posting will be a bit light while I finish a graduate school project. (Also, I gotta work and pay my bills!)
However, I can offer you some reposts of essays and interviews I have done over the last few years. If you haven't seen them before, I hope you enjoy them. Also, I've noticed a number of visits from people outside the U.S. To those of you from Russia, China, Kenya, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Britain, a big "Thank You" for your readership.
And now for this week's re-post, I have selected, "An Inmate's View of Federal Prison." The subject matter, while grim, should be informative.
Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of time right now, and won't have that kind of time for the next several weeks with the possible exception of the end of this month and maybe Labor Day weekend. So unfortunately, posting will be a bit light while I finish a graduate school project. (Also, I gotta work and pay my bills!)
However, I can offer you some reposts of essays and interviews I have done over the last few years. If you haven't seen them before, I hope you enjoy them. Also, I've noticed a number of visits from people outside the U.S. To those of you from Russia, China, Kenya, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Britain, a big "Thank You" for your readership.
And now for this week's re-post, I have selected, "An Inmate's View of Federal Prison." The subject matter, while grim, should be informative.
Friday, July 3, 2015
What Are Police Made Of?
The ongoing unraveling of American society is like a play written by a criminally insane person. As such, it can provoke strong emotions in those who are forced to suffer through it. Yet one way of coping is to look at it as a play, and at yourself, the observer or unwilling participant, as an entertainment critic of sorts. Then it becomes possible to cultivate the detachment necessary for a calm, objective critique of the play, the various actors, and the roles they fill. Such a perspective can also guide you in exploring ways to escape the part that has been forced upon you.
This week's post will examine the role of the police in present-day American society, and will give you some idea of how likely you are to be cast as a bad guy by them, try as you might to fill another role. Such information might be of interest to readers, since as of today, July 3, 2015, police in the United States have killed 558 people this year, not to mention those who have been non-fatally maimed or injured by police, among whom is Walter William DeLeon, a middle-aged construction worker who was shot and critically injured by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department last month when he waved a towel at a patrol car in order to flag it down. This is, of course, in addition to the numerous well-publicized stories of police murders of unarmed citizens, especially citizens of color, in 2014 and earlier, and the ongoing police terrorizing of unarmed citizens in places like McKinney, Texas.
So what, exactly, are police made of these days? What kind of person is it who gravitates toward police work? What kind of job do policemen have? What sort of person does the typical police job produce? In his book, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, M. Scott Peck described the link between characteristics of individual humans and characteristics of groups formed by individual humans. He wrote, "For many years it has seemed to me that human groups tend to behave in much the same ways as human individuals - except at a level that is more primitive and immature than one might expect. Why this is so - why the behavior of groups is strikingly immature - why they are, from a psychological standpoint, less than the sum of their parts - is a question beyond my capacity to answer..." My post today will not attempt to answer that question definitively, but will hopefully illuminate some key elements of police as a group, and of what is known as "police culture" here in the U.S.
What kind of person is the typical police recruit? The answer to that question depends on whom you ask. In Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force, authors Skolnick and Fyfe write, "However skeptically police may be viewed by outsiders, police often identify themselves as a moral force, protecting innocent and productive members of the public...The typical police recruit is white, physically fit and agile, of the lower-middle or working class, male, in his twenties, and with some college education..." However, what attracts potential recruits are often advertisements and videos which increasingly glamorize legal opportunities to use lethal violence rather than serving as a "moral force" in one's community. (See this also, where a former cop says, "...if anyone says they didn't get into law enforcement to drive a police car fast, with the lights and sirens, and come screeching into a parking lot sideways and jump out and tackle a guy, they're lying to you...")
When a person becomes a cadet, what kind of training do they receive? Again, the answer depends on whom you ask, but it seems clear that mediation and nonviolent conflict resolution isn't very high on the list of things taught. In fact, Dallas Police Chief David Brown publicly admitted that "Sometimes it seems like our young officers want to get into an athletic event with people they want to arrest. They have a 'don't retreat' mentality. They feel like they're warriors and they can't back down when someone is running from them, no matter how minor the underlying crime is." By contrast, Dale Brown, who is not a policeman, has founded the very successful Threat Management Center in Detroit, whose specialty is "...tactical psychology, tactical law and tactical skills, to teach communities and corporations how to properly manage human threats and create non-violent outcomes..." (Emphasis added). The Threat Management Center has been in operation since 1995, and boasts an impressive string of accomplishments.
What kind of person does a typical cadet become once he or she is hired to a police force? Here again, it depends on whom you ask. However, there is a large number of independent studies of various issues among police officers, issues which would be called crimes or serious dysfunction if they were observed among the general population. For instance, at least 25 percent of police officers are alcoholics. (See this and this also.) Of these, a substantial number drive while intoxicated and on duty. Between 25 and 40 percent of police officers are guilty of at least one incident of domestic violence (OIDV) against their spouses or children. (See this, this, this and this.) In many cases, the domestic violence is ongoing. Here is a link describing officer-perpetrated domestic violence from the point of view of the victims and their children. Please read it carefully and note how difficult it is for women abused by police husbands to do anything about their situation. Note also how right-wing politicians have recently made things more difficult for the victims. Lastly, illicit drug use other than alcohol is a growing problem among law enforcement officers - especially the use of performance-enhancing athletic drugs like steroids. (See this, this, this, and this.) No comprehensive, liar-proof studies have yet been undertaken to quantify steroid use among cops, but there is a flood of anecdotal evidence. And some authorities have proposed a link between the use of performance-enhancing drugs and aggression or unprovoked rage (AKA "'roid rage"). (Remember that the next time Officer Friendly pulls you over.) Note also the widespread accounts of sexual assaults commited by police. (See this, this and this.)
The police response to the exposure of such symptoms of dysfunction falls into one of two categories. First, there's the attempt to excuse such behavior by protesting that police work is inherently very dangerous, and that police are just reacting to the stress that naturally comes with the job. However, a look at actual statistics reveals a very different story. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund Preliminary 2014 Law Enforcement Officer Fatalities Report, there were 126 law enforcement fatalities in the United States in 2014. Of these, 62 fatalities were the direct result of "felonious incidents," while traffic accidents claimed 49 officers. 27 officers died of other causes, including 24 heart attack deaths. However, there are now more than 900,000 sworn police officers in the U.S. You do the math, but when I did, I found that a police officer has less than one chance in 10,000 of being killed by a criminal in the U.S. Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not even list police work among the occupations with the highest fatal work injury rates in 2013. So we can't blame dysfunctional policing on the "inherently dangerous and stressful" nature of police work, because there really isn't much danger - especially if a police officer is not a hothead or loose cannon.
The second response to dysfunction is to try to cover it up, to sweep things under a fraternal rug of police secrecy. This is an inherent part of police culture. Many of the links I have cited, including especially the links to scholarly PDF's, document the ways in which secretive, fraternal police culture is a huge impediment to dealing with problems like substance abuse and domestic violence among the police. The very culture which is created to shield police from the repercussions of their actual mission prevent police from being held to account when they harm people outside of their actual mission. The very mindset created to enable police to carry out their actual mission in American society is so powerful that it can't be easily turned off or toned down by police once they are off duty.
What is the actual mission of American police? Again, I will cite M. Scott Peck and People of the Lie. In the chapter titled, "My Lai: An Examination of Group Evil," Peck describes the American soldiers who carried out the 1968 My Lai massacre as a self-selected group of "specialists". They were self-selected in that they were all in Vietnam during a time in which Americans who fought in the Vietnam war were all volunteers. My Lai happened in 1968, over a year and a half before President Nixon instituted the draft in order to supply fresh American combatants to Vietnam. They were specialized in their training and mission, which was to kill and destroy Vietnamese people who did not want America in Vietnam. They were under stress, being in a foreign country many of whose citizens were at best ambivalent toward American involvement, and finding themselves part of a larger military machine which was beginning to suffer serious failures as a result of failing to grasp the realities of the situation on the ground in Vietnam in 1968. Their specialization had been deliberately engineered by their superiors to make them cold-bloodedly destructive, to make them regress to childish reliance on the approval of those superiors, and to insulate them from seeing the larger picture of what they were doing to those human beings targeted as "the enemy" by their superiors.
In this, these soldiers were very much like the typical members of a police force, of whom Peck wrote, "One does not become a policeman by accident. It is only because particular kinds of people want to become policemen that they apply for the job in the first place. A young man of lower-middle-class origins who is both aggressive and conventional, for instance, would be quite likely to seek a position on the force..." Of such specialized groups as volunteer soldiers and police officers, Peck writes, "From these examples, we can discern three general principles...First, the specialized group inevitably develops a group character that is self-reinforcing. Second, specialized groups are...prone to narcissism...Finally, the society at large...employs specific types of people to perform its specialized roles..." One of those specialized roles is to attack those who are different from the idealized image of society at large which is promoted by the leaders of society. For those who differ from that idealized image pose an intolerable threat to that image by their mere existence. Peck says, "Evil ...[is] the use of political power to destroy others for the purpose of defending or preserving one's sick self." That is why police in McKinney, Texas threatened to use deadly force against a pool party of African-American pre-adolescent girls last month. That is why one newly graduated police cadet said that he would have shot the girls had he been present. But if you are reading this and you are not Black or Latino, do you think you're safe? Consider the 70-year old White woman who was slammed face-first into the ground by a Florida policeman. The police in America have turned into one of the outworkings of the damnation of this country.
This week's post will examine the role of the police in present-day American society, and will give you some idea of how likely you are to be cast as a bad guy by them, try as you might to fill another role. Such information might be of interest to readers, since as of today, July 3, 2015, police in the United States have killed 558 people this year, not to mention those who have been non-fatally maimed or injured by police, among whom is Walter William DeLeon, a middle-aged construction worker who was shot and critically injured by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department last month when he waved a towel at a patrol car in order to flag it down. This is, of course, in addition to the numerous well-publicized stories of police murders of unarmed citizens, especially citizens of color, in 2014 and earlier, and the ongoing police terrorizing of unarmed citizens in places like McKinney, Texas.
So what, exactly, are police made of these days? What kind of person is it who gravitates toward police work? What kind of job do policemen have? What sort of person does the typical police job produce? In his book, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, M. Scott Peck described the link between characteristics of individual humans and characteristics of groups formed by individual humans. He wrote, "For many years it has seemed to me that human groups tend to behave in much the same ways as human individuals - except at a level that is more primitive and immature than one might expect. Why this is so - why the behavior of groups is strikingly immature - why they are, from a psychological standpoint, less than the sum of their parts - is a question beyond my capacity to answer..." My post today will not attempt to answer that question definitively, but will hopefully illuminate some key elements of police as a group, and of what is known as "police culture" here in the U.S.
What kind of person is the typical police recruit? The answer to that question depends on whom you ask. In Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force, authors Skolnick and Fyfe write, "However skeptically police may be viewed by outsiders, police often identify themselves as a moral force, protecting innocent and productive members of the public...The typical police recruit is white, physically fit and agile, of the lower-middle or working class, male, in his twenties, and with some college education..." However, what attracts potential recruits are often advertisements and videos which increasingly glamorize legal opportunities to use lethal violence rather than serving as a "moral force" in one's community. (See this also, where a former cop says, "...if anyone says they didn't get into law enforcement to drive a police car fast, with the lights and sirens, and come screeching into a parking lot sideways and jump out and tackle a guy, they're lying to you...")
When a person becomes a cadet, what kind of training do they receive? Again, the answer depends on whom you ask, but it seems clear that mediation and nonviolent conflict resolution isn't very high on the list of things taught. In fact, Dallas Police Chief David Brown publicly admitted that "Sometimes it seems like our young officers want to get into an athletic event with people they want to arrest. They have a 'don't retreat' mentality. They feel like they're warriors and they can't back down when someone is running from them, no matter how minor the underlying crime is." By contrast, Dale Brown, who is not a policeman, has founded the very successful Threat Management Center in Detroit, whose specialty is "...tactical psychology, tactical law and tactical skills, to teach communities and corporations how to properly manage human threats and create non-violent outcomes..." (Emphasis added). The Threat Management Center has been in operation since 1995, and boasts an impressive string of accomplishments.
What kind of person does a typical cadet become once he or she is hired to a police force? Here again, it depends on whom you ask. However, there is a large number of independent studies of various issues among police officers, issues which would be called crimes or serious dysfunction if they were observed among the general population. For instance, at least 25 percent of police officers are alcoholics. (See this and this also.) Of these, a substantial number drive while intoxicated and on duty. Between 25 and 40 percent of police officers are guilty of at least one incident of domestic violence (OIDV) against their spouses or children. (See this, this, this and this.) In many cases, the domestic violence is ongoing. Here is a link describing officer-perpetrated domestic violence from the point of view of the victims and their children. Please read it carefully and note how difficult it is for women abused by police husbands to do anything about their situation. Note also how right-wing politicians have recently made things more difficult for the victims. Lastly, illicit drug use other than alcohol is a growing problem among law enforcement officers - especially the use of performance-enhancing athletic drugs like steroids. (See this, this, this, and this.) No comprehensive, liar-proof studies have yet been undertaken to quantify steroid use among cops, but there is a flood of anecdotal evidence. And some authorities have proposed a link between the use of performance-enhancing drugs and aggression or unprovoked rage (AKA "'roid rage"). (Remember that the next time Officer Friendly pulls you over.) Note also the widespread accounts of sexual assaults commited by police. (See this, this and this.)
The police response to the exposure of such symptoms of dysfunction falls into one of two categories. First, there's the attempt to excuse such behavior by protesting that police work is inherently very dangerous, and that police are just reacting to the stress that naturally comes with the job. However, a look at actual statistics reveals a very different story. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund Preliminary 2014 Law Enforcement Officer Fatalities Report, there were 126 law enforcement fatalities in the United States in 2014. Of these, 62 fatalities were the direct result of "felonious incidents," while traffic accidents claimed 49 officers. 27 officers died of other causes, including 24 heart attack deaths. However, there are now more than 900,000 sworn police officers in the U.S. You do the math, but when I did, I found that a police officer has less than one chance in 10,000 of being killed by a criminal in the U.S. Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not even list police work among the occupations with the highest fatal work injury rates in 2013. So we can't blame dysfunctional policing on the "inherently dangerous and stressful" nature of police work, because there really isn't much danger - especially if a police officer is not a hothead or loose cannon.
The second response to dysfunction is to try to cover it up, to sweep things under a fraternal rug of police secrecy. This is an inherent part of police culture. Many of the links I have cited, including especially the links to scholarly PDF's, document the ways in which secretive, fraternal police culture is a huge impediment to dealing with problems like substance abuse and domestic violence among the police. The very culture which is created to shield police from the repercussions of their actual mission prevent police from being held to account when they harm people outside of their actual mission. The very mindset created to enable police to carry out their actual mission in American society is so powerful that it can't be easily turned off or toned down by police once they are off duty.
What is the actual mission of American police? Again, I will cite M. Scott Peck and People of the Lie. In the chapter titled, "My Lai: An Examination of Group Evil," Peck describes the American soldiers who carried out the 1968 My Lai massacre as a self-selected group of "specialists". They were self-selected in that they were all in Vietnam during a time in which Americans who fought in the Vietnam war were all volunteers. My Lai happened in 1968, over a year and a half before President Nixon instituted the draft in order to supply fresh American combatants to Vietnam. They were specialized in their training and mission, which was to kill and destroy Vietnamese people who did not want America in Vietnam. They were under stress, being in a foreign country many of whose citizens were at best ambivalent toward American involvement, and finding themselves part of a larger military machine which was beginning to suffer serious failures as a result of failing to grasp the realities of the situation on the ground in Vietnam in 1968. Their specialization had been deliberately engineered by their superiors to make them cold-bloodedly destructive, to make them regress to childish reliance on the approval of those superiors, and to insulate them from seeing the larger picture of what they were doing to those human beings targeted as "the enemy" by their superiors.
In this, these soldiers were very much like the typical members of a police force, of whom Peck wrote, "One does not become a policeman by accident. It is only because particular kinds of people want to become policemen that they apply for the job in the first place. A young man of lower-middle-class origins who is both aggressive and conventional, for instance, would be quite likely to seek a position on the force..." Of such specialized groups as volunteer soldiers and police officers, Peck writes, "From these examples, we can discern three general principles...First, the specialized group inevitably develops a group character that is self-reinforcing. Second, specialized groups are...prone to narcissism...Finally, the society at large...employs specific types of people to perform its specialized roles..." One of those specialized roles is to attack those who are different from the idealized image of society at large which is promoted by the leaders of society. For those who differ from that idealized image pose an intolerable threat to that image by their mere existence. Peck says, "Evil ...[is] the use of political power to destroy others for the purpose of defending or preserving one's sick self." That is why police in McKinney, Texas threatened to use deadly force against a pool party of African-American pre-adolescent girls last month. That is why one newly graduated police cadet said that he would have shot the girls had he been present. But if you are reading this and you are not Black or Latino, do you think you're safe? Consider the 70-year old White woman who was slammed face-first into the ground by a Florida policeman. The police in America have turned into one of the outworkings of the damnation of this country.
Friday, June 19, 2015
Resilience Counterpunches
Many of my recent posts have chronicled the bad news that is the unraveling of the mainstream American psyche, and the ways in which certain elements of mainstream America are taking out their dysfunction on minorities and people of color. But all is not bad news. In minority communities, there is a growing awareness of steps which these communities can take to become more resilient. I'll give just two examples.
First, there is the educational clinic about which I wrote several months ago. I am one of the tutors for that clinic. We (the tutors) are planning a solar energy science activity for the kids at the apartment complex we visit. Specifically, we are planning to build solar ovens. Our aim is to provide enough materials so that kids from five or six households can construct the ovens. As for the ovens, they are not just some science-fair craft that is good for nothing more than melting chocolate. Rather, these ovens will be the real deal, capable of cooking some serious food. The design for these ovens was invented by Maria Telkes, an appropriate technology pioneer of the 20th century. We obtained the design for the ovens from Engineers Without Borders. We are planning to build the ovens over four sessions with the kids. Next to their apartment complex is a large vacant lot with plenty of sunshine where they can try the ovens out. I'll try to take and post some pictures or video of the project as it progresses. We will also teach the kids the theory of operation of the ovens and use that teaching to further strengthen their math skills.
Second, there is the Detroit Water Brigade, a grassroots organization which has arisen in response to the Detroit city government shutoff of water to tens of thousands of Detroit residents. Not only is the Detroit Water Brigade involved in providing water bill assistance and collection of drinking water, but they are also teaching residents the basics of rainwater harvesting. Such efforts are geared toward enabling large numbers of Detroit residents to adapt to life without a utility system which is not only aging and increasingly unreliable, but which has been turned into a weapon against them. If anyone wants to help, you can send donations to them, or to the Detroit Water Project.
I am sure that there are many other initiatives springing up, but I haven't had time to research them all. As I hear of them, I will keep you all posted. Stay tuned...
First, there is the educational clinic about which I wrote several months ago. I am one of the tutors for that clinic. We (the tutors) are planning a solar energy science activity for the kids at the apartment complex we visit. Specifically, we are planning to build solar ovens. Our aim is to provide enough materials so that kids from five or six households can construct the ovens. As for the ovens, they are not just some science-fair craft that is good for nothing more than melting chocolate. Rather, these ovens will be the real deal, capable of cooking some serious food. The design for these ovens was invented by Maria Telkes, an appropriate technology pioneer of the 20th century. We obtained the design for the ovens from Engineers Without Borders. We are planning to build the ovens over four sessions with the kids. Next to their apartment complex is a large vacant lot with plenty of sunshine where they can try the ovens out. I'll try to take and post some pictures or video of the project as it progresses. We will also teach the kids the theory of operation of the ovens and use that teaching to further strengthen their math skills.
Second, there is the Detroit Water Brigade, a grassroots organization which has arisen in response to the Detroit city government shutoff of water to tens of thousands of Detroit residents. Not only is the Detroit Water Brigade involved in providing water bill assistance and collection of drinking water, but they are also teaching residents the basics of rainwater harvesting. Such efforts are geared toward enabling large numbers of Detroit residents to adapt to life without a utility system which is not only aging and increasingly unreliable, but which has been turned into a weapon against them. If anyone wants to help, you can send donations to them, or to the Detroit Water Project.
I am sure that there are many other initiatives springing up, but I haven't had time to research them all. As I hear of them, I will keep you all posted. Stay tuned...
Saturday, June 13, 2015
A Replacement for the "War On Drugs"?
I found out this week that two Georgia women have recently been charged with violations of newly enacted state statutes restricting abortion. One of the women was the woman who had the abortion; the other was a nurse who allegedly provided an abortifacient drug to the woman who had the abortion. In addition, a woman in Indiana was recently sentenced to 40 years in prison (see this also) for allegedly taking an abortifacient drug which resulted in the termination of her pregnancy. This happened in spite of the fact that the toxicologist for the state where she was tried testified that he could not find evidence of abortion drugs in the woman's system.
Neither of the women charged with aborting their pregnancies is white.
I must confess that upon reading their stories, I was struck by mixed emotions. In describing those emotions, I think I may wind up writing a post that will offend just about everyone who reads it. First, however, let me say that as a Christian, I am obliged to follow the orders of my Boss. His Word says that the unjust taking of a life is murder. Therefore, I am opposed to abortion.
However, I see another side of the story in the case of Purvi Patel. Whether you believe abortion is evil or not, if you're a decent human being, you must admit that convicting women of crimes they didn't commit and throwing them in prison for decades afterward is also evil. The fact that women in certain states are now being threatened with such a prospect is unsettling. The fact that two women who recently became showcases for this threat are nonwhite is more unsettling. I am thinking that in the Midwest and the South, the "war on drugs" - currently being de-fanged by the passage of laws in various states which decriminalize drug use - may be replaced by a war onmiscarrying women of color - oops, I mean, abortion. Women of color who miscarry may thus find themselves targets regardless of the circumstances of the miscarriages.
It all makes me think of the following quote from People of the Lie: "[The narcissism of the evil]...is a brand of narcissism so total that they seem to lack, in whole or in part, [the] capacity for empathy...We can see, then, that their narcissism makes the evil dangerous not only because it motivates them to scapegoat others but also because it deprives them of the restraint that results from empathy and respect for others. In addition to the fact that the evil need victims to sacrifice to their narcissism, their narcissism permits them to ignore the humanity of their victims as well. As it gives them the motive for murder, so it also renders them insensitive to the act of killing. The blindness of the narcissist to others can extend even beyond a lack of empathy; narcissists may not "see" others at all." In quoting M. Scott Peck, I realize that I may turn the stomachs of some of those who are familiar with the failings of his private life. To such I apologetically offer the following suggestion: Regard Mr. Peck in the same way that you might regard the prophet Balaam, or the donkey on which Balaam rode - flawed instruments whom God used to deliver a message that perhaps the messengers had not conceived. In this quote, Mr. Peck hits it out of the ballpark in describing the role which scapegoats serve for the narcissist.
The current leadership of the American right wing is accurately characterized as narcissistic. Unable to face their own evil, they look constantly for scapegoats on whom they can project their own dysfunction. This is seen in the punishments meted out to the scapegoats for their "transgressions" - a kind of justice not meant to restore or to heal, but to destroy. So if a woman of color has a miscarriage, or even an abortion, the aim of white supremacist justice is not to heal or to restore, but to destroy with draconian punishments - even as the supremacist leaders give themselves a pass for their own evil behavior.
As they used the "War on Drugs," so the narcissistic elite may use a "war on abortion" as a means of continuing to scapegoat the nonwhite, the non-English, the foreign-born. And in many parts of the United States, those doing the scapegoating won't even be that sophisticated; they'll simply continue to send the police to storm homes where people of color live, in order to shoot unarmed people of color without cause. In this year alone, the body count has reached 506 people. In this year alone, an impressive number of murderers in police uniforms have escaped becoming victims of the criminal justice system of which they are a part. Among them is Joseph Weekley, a Detroit SWAT officer who shot a 7 year old African American girl to death as she was sleeping in bed when he sprayed her house with submachine-gun fire.
Neither of the women charged with aborting their pregnancies is white.
I must confess that upon reading their stories, I was struck by mixed emotions. In describing those emotions, I think I may wind up writing a post that will offend just about everyone who reads it. First, however, let me say that as a Christian, I am obliged to follow the orders of my Boss. His Word says that the unjust taking of a life is murder. Therefore, I am opposed to abortion.
However, I see another side of the story in the case of Purvi Patel. Whether you believe abortion is evil or not, if you're a decent human being, you must admit that convicting women of crimes they didn't commit and throwing them in prison for decades afterward is also evil. The fact that women in certain states are now being threatened with such a prospect is unsettling. The fact that two women who recently became showcases for this threat are nonwhite is more unsettling. I am thinking that in the Midwest and the South, the "war on drugs" - currently being de-fanged by the passage of laws in various states which decriminalize drug use - may be replaced by a war on
It all makes me think of the following quote from People of the Lie: "[The narcissism of the evil]...is a brand of narcissism so total that they seem to lack, in whole or in part, [the] capacity for empathy...We can see, then, that their narcissism makes the evil dangerous not only because it motivates them to scapegoat others but also because it deprives them of the restraint that results from empathy and respect for others. In addition to the fact that the evil need victims to sacrifice to their narcissism, their narcissism permits them to ignore the humanity of their victims as well. As it gives them the motive for murder, so it also renders them insensitive to the act of killing. The blindness of the narcissist to others can extend even beyond a lack of empathy; narcissists may not "see" others at all." In quoting M. Scott Peck, I realize that I may turn the stomachs of some of those who are familiar with the failings of his private life. To such I apologetically offer the following suggestion: Regard Mr. Peck in the same way that you might regard the prophet Balaam, or the donkey on which Balaam rode - flawed instruments whom God used to deliver a message that perhaps the messengers had not conceived. In this quote, Mr. Peck hits it out of the ballpark in describing the role which scapegoats serve for the narcissist.
The current leadership of the American right wing is accurately characterized as narcissistic. Unable to face their own evil, they look constantly for scapegoats on whom they can project their own dysfunction. This is seen in the punishments meted out to the scapegoats for their "transgressions" - a kind of justice not meant to restore or to heal, but to destroy. So if a woman of color has a miscarriage, or even an abortion, the aim of white supremacist justice is not to heal or to restore, but to destroy with draconian punishments - even as the supremacist leaders give themselves a pass for their own evil behavior.
As they used the "War on Drugs," so the narcissistic elite may use a "war on abortion" as a means of continuing to scapegoat the nonwhite, the non-English, the foreign-born. And in many parts of the United States, those doing the scapegoating won't even be that sophisticated; they'll simply continue to send the police to storm homes where people of color live, in order to shoot unarmed people of color without cause. In this year alone, the body count has reached 506 people. In this year alone, an impressive number of murderers in police uniforms have escaped becoming victims of the criminal justice system of which they are a part. Among them is Joseph Weekley, a Detroit SWAT officer who shot a 7 year old African American girl to death as she was sleeping in bed when he sprayed her house with submachine-gun fire.
Saturday, June 6, 2015
The Demise of The Right Cross
Now we come again to a theme which we have explored in previous posts on this blog, namely, the role and purpose of American civil religion in American narcissism. This week's post will compare that religion with the thing for which it is often mistaken in this country, namely Biblical Christianity. I will be quoting a fair amount of Scripture, and I'll get a bit theologically “heavy” at times, so if some of you feel like bailing out on this post, I'll not take it personally. But hey, you've come along for the ride this far, so why not ride a little more with me? (Some may wonder how my posts of the last several months are related to the original theme of this blog. I'll get around to explaining that sooner or later.)
Let me begin by quoting the New American Standard translation of 1 Peter 1:1 – “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who reside as aliens, scattered...” The King James Bible renders the verse thus: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia,...(etc)” In my opinion, the King James rendering is rather sleepy. The wording of the New American Standard translation is here more evocative: “To those who reside as aliens, scattered...” In other words, a chief characteristic of those whom Peter is addressing is that in the earthly places where these people reside, they reside as aliens – as a people apart, a culture apart. This is a chief characteristic of such people wherever on earth they reside. They are “expatriados” (Spanish, RV 1960 translation), “extranjeros” (foreign, alien) (1 Pedro 2:11), “пришельцам, рассеянным” (1-е Петра 1:1). Among the meanings of рассеянным are “dispersed,” and “broadcast” (as seed). This lines up quite nicely with the way the Lord characterizes His people as seed sown in diverse places in His parable in Matthew 13:24-43, and the way in which the lifestyle of the Lord's people is to be a declaration that they are strangers and pilgrims on earth, as stated in Hebrews 11:13-16.
Thus, those who call themselves Christians are to live as strangers in whatever society they happen to be embedded. They are to seek a Kingdom which is to come, having become citizens of a Kingdom which is not from here (from earth, that is) as it says in John 18:36. This is how the early Church conducted itself in the Roman Empire in the days from the first century until the day that Augustine conferred earthly secular political power on the Church. Note that I did not say that the Church is to have no effect on the society in which it is embedded. Rather, the Church is to have a profound effect, realized by the active doing of good in the larger society.
But according to Scripture, what the Church is not called to do is to try to build an earthly kingdom, using earthly, temporal power or laws to create a “Christian” nation. There are reasons for that, some of which I explored in a post I wrote many moons ago. I'll expand on one of those reasons in today's post.
If the Church is not called to create earthly “Christian” kingdoms by earthly, secular, temporal means, why do so many well-placed American evangelicals insist on trying to “baptize” Uncle Sam? Moreover, where did they get the notion that the United States of America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles? And are those who say they want to “bring the nation back to Christian ideals” saying that they want to take us “back” to a place where we've never been?
If you try to find the roots of the “Christian” principles on which this nation was founded, you will find that a fair number of the Founding Fathers were not orthodox fundamentalist Christians. Thomas Jefferson is a notable example of a non-fundamentalist, and late in his life he published a book titled, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, in which he removed all references to the supernatural or the Divinity and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In fact, Jefferson valued Christ only for His teachings and believed that the writers of the New Testament were ignorant and superstitious men. Jefferson was also on friendly terms with Joseph Priestly, the founder of Unitarianism. A solid majority of the Founding Fathers were against the use of the state to impose any religious creed, dogma or observance on the citizens of the United States. (See this and this.) Many of the Founding Fathers were Deists, and a significant minority of the generals and statesmen of early America were Freemasons.
It can thus be argued that in the early United States, there was very little effort made to cast this nation as a “Christian” nation. There are a few notable exceptions when it comes to those whom the nation wished to venerate as heroes. For instance, a number of larger-than-life stories about George Washington were the fabrications of a man named Mason Weems , whose account of Washington has been thoroughly debunked by a number of historians. It can also be argued that the United States of the 1800's was certainly “Christ-haunted” (but in a way that even Flannery O'Connor might not have imagined), yet certainly not Christian in the main. Later in the 19th century, there were efforts by denominational leaders to make the government and tokens of the United States more explicitly “Christian.” Thus, during the Civil War, the words, “In God We Trust” were added to American currency, among other minor victories.
But a Princeton historian argues that it was not until the early decades of the 20th century that religious activists in the United States really began a concerted push to cast the United States as a “Christian” nation. In his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, Kevin Kruse argues that the notion of the United States as a Christian nation founded on Christian principles was the product of an intense marketing and propaganda effort on the part of big businessmen and government figures from the 1930's onward, to produce a perception in a nation suffering the effects of the greed of these authority figures that patriotism was the same thing as godliness. They used religion as a weapon to stave off the welfare state (and to protect the wealthy from having to give up some of their riches to help the poor). In the process they enlisted prominent religious figures such as Billy Graham and prominent denominations whose de facto interest lay in maintaining a certain social and political status quo.
In the process, American fundamentalism (and the American evangelicalism into which it later evolved) became a sort of loosely organized, fractious, yet de facto state church. This state church performed (and still performs) many of the same functions historically performed by state churches in European history, namely, to bless, sanction and promulgate the imperial ambitions of the secular state that supports it. (You may not know this, but during World War 1, religious leaders in both Germany and England goaded their populations to slaughter – Germany with its “Gott strafe England!” and the Anglican Church with its calls for a “holy war.”)
As with all state churches, therefore, the current American evangelical church is called “Christian,” but does not look like 1 Peter 1:1. (If you bring me an animal that can't climb trees, but does howl at emergency vehicles, lifts its hind leg when relieving itself, barks and chases postal workers, should I believe you if you tell me it's a cat?) The American evangelical church has become merely another weapon of those who strive for secular earthly power. As a young adult, I once read a science fiction novel by Larry Niven in which one of two men in a brawl picked up a cat and attempted to use it as a weapon against the other man by swinging it at the other man's head. So Christianity and the Bible are being used today in the United States by people who want to maintain a last vestige of earthly supremacy, as they were used to build that supremacy and hegemony in the first place – sometimes by missionaries who were spies and servants of the earthly empires which sent them (see this and this and this for instance), and sometimes by missionaries who preached to conquered natives the duty of turning the other cheek and of not looking for rewards in this earthly life while the missionaries celebrated every holiday of their home countries in which their home countries refused to turn the other cheek.
To see the way in which American evangelicalism has become a dog whistle for those who seek earthly supremacy, we need look no further than the most recent evangelical scandal which has blown up like ordnance cooking off in a fire. Let me introduce you to Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their nineteen children. They are a wealthy white family who are part of a couple of rather wacky “Christian” movements in the United States, one of which is the Quiverfull movement and the other of which is the “Christian Patriarchy” movement. I'll leave it to you to look up the information on these movements, but I'll summarize them as movements led by men who want to restore white male privilege and domination over family life, and ultimately over both the United States and the world – “all for Jesus, of course!” Jim Bob is also actively involved in Arkansas state politics.
One characteristic of the leaders of such movements is that they always hold themselves and their families up as models of people who have done everything right, who have followed all the rules, and who therefore have earned the right to demand that the rest of us submit to them. So Jim Bob and Michelle used their family and their religious profession as a weapon, to the point of insinuating themselves onto network television with a “reality” TV series called “19 Kids and Counting,” which began airing on 19 September 2008. The only trouble with the series (and with their perfect image) is that in 2002 and 2003, their eldest son Josh molested (or is that sexually assaulted?) a number of underage girls, and that the Duggar family covered this up with the help of the Arkansas state police. Josh also sued the Arkansas DHS in 2007 to block their investigation of these incidents. And in 2013, Josh became the executive director of the legislative action arm of the Family Research Council, a conservative “Christian” organization founded by James Dobson.
Now I don't intend to get on a soap box to denounce Josh Duggar's sin. We are all sinful. But what really makes me angry is the way in which this hypocrite and his hypocritical family continue to try to use their religion as a weapon in what is actually very much like a barroom brawl, just as the cat was used in the story I mentioned. The de facto state church of America is a hypocritical entity composed of people who use religion to try to secure earthly dominion for themselves, yet they can't keep their own rules. They love the doctrine of justification by faith when they can apply it to themselves, but they reject the need of personal repentance in the same way that children will sometimes refuse meat and vegetables in order to chow down on dessert. But they are quite willing to shove all sorts of rules and obligations down the throats of the people over whom they wish to exercise dominion – among whom are all nonwhite people and all women.
The trouble for them is that they are now in decline. (See this and this.) Their leaders would say that this is because they haven't been effective in communicating their message, but they might want to consider that the reason is that they don't practice what the Good Book preaches. They are not the salt of the earth. They are unwilling to repent of their own greed and selfishness; therefore, they are unable to call a nation to repentance over its greed and selfishness – greed and selfishness manifested in oppression of the poor, the foreign-born, the non-white, the citizens of other nations; oppression also manifested in the endless calls to war so that the United States can “liberate” property (land and natural resources) which rightfully belongs to people other than Americans while destroying the earth with its outlandish per capita consumption. In short, American evangelicals have become distasteful people to be around. Thus their children are choosing to separate from them and their religion.
But this does not mean that the true Church is in decline or in trouble, or that Christianity is about to disappear from the United States. Rather, the immigrant church is quite strong here. And immigrant Christians, especially those from poorer countries, are much quicker than many American evangelicals to remember what it means to be a stranger and a pilgrim. Therefore, they have much to teach us. One immigrant Christian, a man named Soong-Chan Rah, wrote a book with a rather provocative title, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. His book caused a bit of narcissistic injury among some American evangelical leaders, but that's okay, they'll get over it.
If you are thinking of going to church tomorrow, you might therefore try out an immigrant church. Many of them have headphones and translators for English-speaking visitors. The Hispanic churches are friendly and welcoming, as are the Karen (Myanmar) churches. The Vietnamese churches can also be quite welcoming. The Ethiopian (Oromo) churches are good, although they can be very, VERY LOUD!!! (Dude, step away from the mic!) If you go to a Russian or Slavic church, they are more formal, so be sure to dress in your Sunday best, because for them, Church Is Serious. When you go, be sure to listen for the differences in worldview which exist between their preachers and the vast majority of American evangelical preachers. You'll be intrigued.
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Exodus As Survival
As I have watched the unfolding pattern of police violence, excessive force and murder against unarmed people of color in the United States, I have also been watching the protests which have arisen in response, and particularly the organized Black Lives Matter protest movement. I am encouraged in a small way by the protests; however, I am also deeply ambivalent toward them. It's not that I don't think that the murder of unarmed people of color should be quietly accepted. It's just that I don't think that the protests by themselves will accomplish anything.
The cause of my pessimism lies in the subject which has occupied this blog for almost a year, namely, the way in which an entire national culture has become personality-disordered. The particular personality disorder which I have discussed is malignant narcissism. One of the features of a malignant narcissist, whether that narcissist be a person or a narcissistic nation, is an overwhelming urge to abuse others. Another feature is that reasonable people cannot reason with the narcissist to restrain his abuse. The narcissist is unreasonable, and thus implacable. A reasonable nation would apply one standard of law enforcement to all of its residents, rather than playing “favorites.” The police forces of a reasonable nation would not murder unarmed Hispanic teens driving cars as the police in Denver, Colorado did to Jessica Hernandez in January. (They allege that the car she was driving was stolen. I did a Google search and was unable to find any evidence to support this claim.) The justice system of a reasonable nation would not throw the book at people of color accused of petty crimes while being lenient toward rich white offenders guilty of much more serious offenses. But the United States is not reasonable. The United States is a narcissistic nation now indulging in narcissistic rage. Therefore it is violently projecting its own dysfunction onto people whom it has tried to groom to be scapegoats and receptacles for its rage, targets whom it blames for its own dysfunctional behavior.
I have previously listed examples of scapegoating behavior, but here is a new example of scapegoating and “white-on-white crime,” a story about the Midwestern and Western towns and small cities which became boom towns during the now-expiring shale oil craze. As prices rose, a large number of Caucasian oilfield workers flooded these towns, bringing with them both lots of money and a sharp increase in crime. Now that shale revenues have fallen, oil patch towns and counties have fewer resources to fight the increase in crime that has resulted. But they haven't lost their ability to scapegoat, blaming, for instance, the sharp increase in drug use on “Mexican drug cartels.” There's only one problem with that accusation: the biggest drug problems in these towns are methamphetamine, prescription painkillers, and alcohol. You don't need to find a Mexican drug cartel to find these items. And meth is incredibly easy to make. The corruption in this nation's heartland is not the fault of Mexicans.
The wealthy and powerful, and those who enjoy American “white privilege” in this country are facing an existential crisis internationally, as the United States loses its place in the world. In their desperation to find some safe place where they can nurture and revive their identity of dominance, they are increasingly looking inward, at those victims within the nation's borders on whom they can dump their hostility.
One of the features of narcissistic abuse is that the protests of the victims actually fuel further narcissistic abuse. Why is this so? Because in the protests of their victims, narcissists see the reflection of their own power – so narcissists can say to themselves, “Look! I have power to inflict pain on other people. I have the power to make others say 'Ouch!'” If the only response of victims is to protest, the protest winds up feeding the abuser with "narcissistic supply."
Which leads to the second potential pitfall of protesting, namely, becoming entangled in the narcissist's response to your protests. Most of the time, that response can be summed up in one acronym: DARVO which stands for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.” The way it works is that the narcissist does something to injure a victim. When the victim protests the narcissist's action, the narcissist responds by Denying that he did any wrong, Attacking the victim's right to protest by attacking the victim's character or humanity, and Reversing the roles of Victim and Offender by casting himself as the victim of some imagined slight on the part of the real victim. In recent months, DARVO has played out thus: a crooked cop shoots an unarmed person of color under extremely questionable circumstances. When the victim's relatives protest, the cop Denies that he did anything wrong. Then the cop and his department, along with a bunch of right-wing talking heads, Asserts that the reason for his treatment of the unarmed (now deceased) person of color was that the cop was working in a high-crime area and the victim of his shooting – a member of a criminal race – somehow threatened the cop (even though a gaggle of witnesses denies this). Then the cop and friends Reverse Victim and Offender by protesting that “police lives matter” and that police work is very dangerous. "And besides, this entire ordeal has stressed out the poor 'widdle' cop, so let's support his feelings." For a sickeningly over-the-top example of an offender passing himself off as a victim, see this. For a more truthful look at the actual level of danger in police work, see this.
In interactions with a narcissist, DARVO too often leads to a response from the actual victims called JADE, which stands for Justify, Argue, Defend and Explain. The victims, still believing that the narcissist can be reasoned with, attempt to Justify the reasons why they deserve fair treatment. Then they Argue and try to verbally Defend themselves against the narcissist's ad hominem attacks. They waste their remaining breath on trying to Explain their point of view to the narcissist. While all this might work in dealing with a reasonable person, the narcissist will respond only by serving up a second helping of DARVO – along with a side dish of further abuse. Again, our recent societal troubles provide an illustrative example. After a crooked cop shoots an unarmed person of color, and after the ad hominem attacks from the cop and his allies attempting to justify his actions, there are usually protests. These protests provoke certain right-wing gasbags to get on television and loudly proclaim that aggressive policing is needed in minority communities because of the problem of “black-on-black crime,” yadda yadda. Then the victims of police brutality begin to speak up, citing historical examples and government statistics which prove beyond doubt that white people are at least as capable of serious criminal behavior as black people, that crime rates for certain stereotypical offenses are actually lower in Black and Latino communities than they are in white communities, and that White populations regularly engage in rioting and property destruction, usually for very, very stupid reasons. The victims then heave a collective sigh of relief, believing that now that they have told their side of the story, things will change. Except that they don't. Nor do the oppressors give the slightest sign that they have heard the victims.
If the Black Lives Matter protests are just a form of JADE'ing, and the response of “the powers that be” will only be more DARVO, then what is an effective response on the part of victims to the erosion of civil rights and equal protection under the law by the rulers of a narcissistic country? The answer is simple, but it is rather painful to put into practice, because the answer is No Contact. Why No Contact? First, because continuing to remain in contact with a society which wants to use you as its toilet bowl is not good for you. It can cause a great deal of psychological damage, not to mention damage of other kinds. (An unfortunate example: suicide rates among young Black American children rose sharply from 1993 to 2012. God damn America!) Second, as long as you remain in contact with a predatory system, you continue to feed the predator. This point leads to a discussion of what going “No Contact” with an oppressive society looks like.
“No Contact” takes place within three spheres: the economic, the cultural, and where necessary, the physical. In the economic sphere, we have seen historically what can happen when an oppressed minority withdraws its support from economic organs that are used as instruments of oppression. The Montgomery Bus Boycott is an extremely effective case in point. That boycott was characterized by people of color finding and devising alternatives to a system of transportation which was being used to oppress them. But the boycott was not without cost: in addition to suffering white violence, those who participated in the boycott had to endure the inconveniences of withdrawal from an oppressive system. And the boycott lasted 381 days before its goals were met. The Blackout Black Friday boycott was very little more than a symbolic action in comparison. We went back too soon to the system that is destroying us. (How many people of color shopped at Walmart after Black Friday 2014? Walmart is where the police in Beavercreek, Ohio shot an unarmed John Crawford to death last year as he was buying toys for his children.) No Contact may have to last a long time.
To see economic “No Contact” from another angle, here's a link to a 2013 podcast covering the urban adaptation strategy known as “Permaculture.” Permaculture is a strategy for building the household economy by smart agriculture and community building. The goal of permaculture is to make households and communities resilient in the face of the failure of large-scale commercial enterprises due to resource depletion. Many permaculturists are also activists with strongly leftward economic leanings, who oppose the destruction now being wrought by the present economic order. In this particular podcast, David Holmgren, a co-founder of permaculture, stated his belief that the task for permaculture activists is not to try to start a huge movement to reshape the dominant society, but rather to develop working models for resilience and self-sufficiency. His reasoning was that economic contraction would provide all the motivation required to get people to seek alternatives to a dominant and destructive system, and that they would naturally seek out people who had successfully created those alternatives. Once a critical mass of such people formed, their withdrawal from the dominant system would succeed in bringing down the system – or at least slowing down its destructiveness. This would be far more effective than shouting loudly in mass protests. The economic contraction of which Holmgren spoke is happening now. Can you teach yourself to get your needs met without giving your money to people who are trying to destroy you?
Cultural “No Contact” begins with throwing your TV into the trash. It begins with cutting yourself off from organs of mass media which are trying to poison your mind. It proceeds to home education of your children, thus saving themselves from an educational system which has been turned into a weapon of mass destruction. It also spreads to the people of your neighborhood, where you all get to know each other and learn to work with each other and celebrate each other without some intermediary trying to tell you all what you can and cannot do. In essence, you create a culture within a culture - a culture of health and support within and separate from a dominant destructive culture.
But sometimes economic “No Contact” and cultural “No Contact” are not enough. If a locality is physically threatening – if, for instance, it is like Ferguson, Missouri which has a large minority population, yet the local political system has been so screwed up by wealthy interests that there is no minority representation in the local government and almost no minority presence in the police force – and if the local government has become well-known for throwing many of its citizens in jail or slapping them with exorbitant fines for increasingly trivial offenses – then maybe it's time to move. Moving is traumatic, especially when you're poor, but it can be done. And it's better than remaining in place and losing your life.
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