Tying Two to Two

I have been thinking today about a Greek word I encountered a few weeks ago during my daily Bible reading.  It is found in Matthew 13 and Mark 4, shortly after the Parable of the Sower, and it is the word συνίημι ("syniemi"), which means literally "to send, bring, or set together."  In a metaphorical sense it also means to "put two and two together," that is, to understand the meaning and implications of a thing.  The passage in which this word appears reads thus:

For the heart of this people has become dull,

and with their ears they scarcely hear, 

and they have closed their eyes, 

lest they should see with their eyes, 

and hear with their ears,

and understand (σῠνῑ́ημῐ) with their heart and return,

and I should heal them.

Here we have a picture of a people who were diseased - and who indeed were suffering from their diseased condition - yet who were doomed to remain in their suffering because of their refusal to put two and two together.  Consider the many forms of suffering that arise from this willful refusal to put two and two together - a refusal that is one of the hallmarks of addiction or of cultic thinking.

And consider those nations which have historically identified themselves as the Global North.  Note how the cultures and political discourse of so many of these nations has been hijacked by the ideology of predatory laissez-faire free-market capitalism, the worship of wealth, white supremacy, and the selfishness of "libertarianism" and "conservatism."  Those who promoted this hijacking have loudly and insistently preached the message that there should be no limits or restrictions placed on the "liberty" of individuals for any reason whatsoever.  They failed to mention that they are most concerned about preserving the liberty of those individuals in a society who have the greatest economic and political power, who are thus free to indulge their selfishness by stepping on the toes (and any other convenient body parts) of all the rest of us.  Yet what is both noteworthy and tragic is that so many of the rest of us have bought the same message and drunk the same Kool-Aid which is sold to us by the wealthiest and most powerful members of our society.

But in recent decades, a number of crises have emerged as a result of this thinking.  I will consider only two of these today.  Let me mention that both crises could have been mitigated or avoided entirely had our society held a more collectivist mindset - that is, had we been the sort of people who value the common good above the unrestrained exercise of individual "liberty".  The first crisis is that of manmade climate change.  Yes, I said "manmade."  Other accurate phrases or terms would include "anthropogenic" or "human-caused."  We have known for decades that industrial activity was altering the earth's atmosphere in ways that would alter the climate - yet the defenders of "liberty" have loudly and insistently denied such knowledge.  Why?  Because to admit the impact of human industrial activity would have forced these people to confront a moral choice.  They would have been faced with the choice of "understanding with their hearts."  And that choice would have cost either a numbed conscience or possibly lots of money.  The Global North does like its money, doesn't it?  (The white American Evangelical/Protestant church really loves its money!  Must be why so many of its members and leaders can't seem to put two and two together...)  And in addition to the numbing of conscience, these nations chose to continue the destructive chasing of economic gain because many of their citizens told themselves that the consequences of their choices would never fall on them.  They said, "What do we care about polar bears?  Or about poor island people drowning in rising seas?  That's so far from us!"

Except that now it isn't far away at all.  Last year was the first year of my life in which I lived in the midst of a widespread, potentially lethal climate event.  It was an event for which to escape, many of us would have had to travel up to a thousand miles to the east.  It was an event during which the amount of free oxygen in the local atmosphere dropped to such levels that dangerous levels of carbon monoxide were produced.  And it was caused by wildfires that raged from Southern California to southern Canada.  We are about to experience another potentially lethal climate event, as daytime temperatures over much of the American West will exceed 100 degrees for several days, and nighttime temperatures will not drop below 70 degrees.  (See this also.)  Moreover, there will be few places to which to escape, because much of the rest of the United States is also experiencing climate crises including severe weather.  And both the heat and the severe weather are likely to recur several times this summer.  Would you like a little fire with that order?  Or maybe you have enough money to escape to Europe for a while.  Except that Europe is enduring its own heatwave (especially Eastern Europe), and parts of Russia have turned into a bit of Hell.  (See this also.)

There is also the ongoing crisis of the coronavirus pandemic.  What is noteworthy about the United States is the large number of people who have not yet been vaccinated - especially in southern "red" states - as well as the number of people who continue to refuse to wear masks in public.  I ran into one such gentleman this morning when I made a quick dash to buy some groceries.  I pointed him out to one of the store clerks, who told the man to put on a mask.  He protested, saying that he had been vaccinated.  Then the man looked at me and announced that he had been to Afghanistan.  I don't exactly know what reaction he hoped to get out of me - he was fat and had gray hair, and if he was really a vet, it was obvious that it had been a long time since he had graduated from the college of violent knowledge.  I just looked at him.  Had he caused trouble, he would have been able afterward to boast that not only had he been to Afghanistan, but he had also been to jail.  He did put on a mask.  People like him are the reason why the United States is so slow in returning to any semblance of a pre-pandemic "normal."  

The United States ignored for a while the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a result, the American economy was badly damaged even as our leaders prioritized profits above dealing with the crisis.  The United States is now no longer the strongest nation on earth.  The Global North has ignored the implications of climate change until now, and as a result, the differential in power and wealth which the Global North has built with respect to the rest of the world is eroding.  Could it be perhaps way past time for some of us to start putting two and two together?

Repost: Fighting With Broken Weapons

This blog, The Well Run Dry, started out to be a blog ostensibly about resource depletion.  I have to admit that it has morphed into something of a social commentary on the tantrums being thrown by a certain demographic of the Global North (and of the United States in particular) in response to the inevitable and irresistible shifting of their place in the world.  For a certain key segment of this demographic - namely, those aligned with white American evangelicalism - the tantrums have been spectacular.  Just this week a former policeman in Texas was arrested after running an air conditioning repairman off the road and threatening him at gunpoint.  Why did he do it?  Because he erroneously believed that the air conditioning repairman was smuggling fraudulent ballots.  Yet another cop goes to jail.  And if you want to see more criminal behavior, note that U.S. taxpayers were forced this past year to support "struggling" megachurches whose revenue took a hit due to the coronavirus pandemic.  Thank Donald Trump for that.  I'm glad we the people of the United States were able to put a smile on Joel Osteen's face.  Otherwise, he might have thrown a great big tantrum.

All this has me thinking of a blog post I wrote over a decade ago concerning the difference between the supposed mission of the white American evangelical church and its actual aims - the aims sought by the politicians whom white evangelical pastors tell us we must support.  Here is a link to that post.  Enjoy.

A Bad Place To Lie

These days, I find myself battling a recurrent addiction - the addiction to reading the news.  This morning I know that I have a ton of things I need to do.  Therefore, I will most definitely stop Web surfing in a few minutes, grit my teeth, and get on with doing what I need to do.  No more binge surfing.

Yet in my semi-compulsive news browsing, I have discovered a few things.  First, it appears that Trump has finally stopped blocking the Biden transition (even though he still falsely claims that the election was stolen, which it wasn't).  Second, it appears that Biden is picking a capable and competent leadership team to assist in cleaning up the monstrous mess left by Trump.  Third, it also sadly appears that the United States remains deeply divided.

As I wrote previously, this division is the result of America's original sins combined with the engineering of a right-wing social movement over the last 45 years - a movement aided and abetted by a powerful right-wing media machine exemplified by the media empire of Rupert Murdoch.  And one of the sharpest evidences of this division is the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  By now, the states known as red states all have higher levels of COVID-19 infection than those states classified as blue states.  And the most conservative of the western or prairie or mountain states have the highest levels of COVID-19 infection in the nation (and in the world).  (See this also.)  These states also contain populations whose flawed notions of liberty make them the most resistant to science-based guidelines for reducing the risk of infection.  

Some of those stories of resistance to science are truly breathtaking.  We have Republican governors finally, grudgingly, mandating that people in their states start wearing masks.  Yet these mask mandates have so many loopholes that they are effectively worthless.  We also have public health officials in a town in Wyoming who were shouted down by angry residents during a recent meeting in which these officials were discussing ways to limit the explosive spread of COVID-19.  We have widespread regions of the United States in which the wearing of a mask is seen as a personal affront to "conservative" values.  We have a U.S. Supreme Court whose newest member has helped to eviscerate the ability of states to impose limits on religious gatherings in order to limit the spread of COVID.  We have an upstart right-wing "news" network (a network that is even farther out in fantasy land than Fox News) which was recently suspended from YouTube for falsely claiming a "guaranteed cure" for COVID-19.  And we have people in red states who are dying right now in hospitals, yet who refuse to believe that it is COVID-19 that is killing them.  According to a South Dakota nurse interviewed by CNN, "They tell you there must be another reason they are sick.  They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that 'stuff' [personal protective equipment, or PPE] because they don't have COVID because it's not real.  Yes.  This really happens."  There are nurses in other parts of the country who tell similar stories of being harassed (and even coughed and spit on) by Trump supporters and other right-wing types who are hospitalized.

And that last item reminds me of the power of cultic thinking.  For it appears obvious by now that the people who identify as members of the Global Far Right or who are aligned with white supremacy or whose worldview has been shaped by right-wing media have all the hallmarks of people who have been indoctrinated into a cult.  One of the hallmarks of a cult is that it convinces its members that the cult is good even while the cult is actually killing them.  It boggles the mind that there are actually patients in hospitals in the rural U.S. right now who are insulting the doctors and nurses who are taking care of them because these doctors and nurses actually dare to wear PPE.  It's almost as mind-boggling to read of patients who are dying of COVID-19, yet who refuse to acknowledge this fact.  A deathbed is a bad place to tell lies.

2nd Repost: The Libertarian Lifeboat

COVID-19 continues to march through the "Land of the Free," leaving a trail of death, joblessness and bankruptcies of small and large businesses.  The United States of America is reaping the fruits of having allowed itself to become "Murdochified."  And in case you are one of those people now suffering hard times who thought a few months ago that it could never happen to you, I've got a story for you.  The story will help you to figure out what it is that you bought when you made a deal with the Devil - that is, the devil of libertarianism, greed, hatred of social safety nets, and selfishness.  This story will also be of benefit to those of us who have had to put up with a Murdochified country for the last three and a half years.

The version of the story which I am linking here is actually its second incarnation.  If you want to read the original version, click here.  And I will have a more research-heavy original post this weekend, God willing.

Nihil Nixed

I must admit that many of my most recent blog posts have had a strong spiritual tone.  This may have been a bit of a turn-off to those who are uncomfortable with the spiritual as I define it, or to those who want me to write essays that are focused solely on the observable, quantifiable physical and economic processes of the ongoing decline of the Global North.  While I don't apologize at all for the spiritual element, I promise that today's post will not be just another sermon.  I also promise that in addition to the spiritual, today's post will contain the empirical.  But before you can have your dessert, you must first eat your dinner!

*   *   *

Let's begin by studying a word: nihilism. The first page of a Google search of this word reveals the following definition at the top of the page: "the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless." According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, nihilism is "originally a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism that arose in 19th-century Russia during the early years of the reign of Tsar Alexander II," although the Encyclopedia acknowledges that the concept pre-dates 19th-century Russia. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (woo-hoo!), a product of the University of Tennessee, Martin, states that nihilism is "...the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated." The IEP also states correctly that nihilism as a cultural phenomenon was examined by Friedrich Nietzsche, who concluded correctly that nihilism is the inevitable product of the rejection of the belief in a personal God who gives meaning to the universe, as corroborated by another Internet powerhouse created by a high-powered university, namely Stanford. Nietzsche foresaw the destructive effects which nihilism would have on European and Euro-centric societies which had hitherto relied on Christian ethics and morals as a guide to right action and a restraint against wrong action. His solution therefore was to propose the emergence of an Übermensch (or perhaps a collection of them) who would form a new aristocracy imposing its will on the rest of humanity, thus becoming the creators of the system of values by which the rest of humanity would be obliged to live - often without realizing this obligation. In other words, in the place of God - the Übermensch! These individuals would be able to thus reign over the rest of us by virtue of their more finely developed "will to power", and by means of the power thus conferred by that more developed will.

Now, time for full disclosure: the above paragraph is the result on my part of a rather brief study of nihilism and Nietzsche.  A full study would require weeks, months, or even years of time and the possession of a brain possessed with enough reserves of working memory to untangle really long and knotty philosophical arguments.  I know I don't have the time (mowed the lawn yesterday, need to plant more soybeans in my backyard and finish cleaning the house), and I'm not sure I have even a tenth of the mental firepower needed for such an effort.  But let me break down the above paragraph into a set of propositions.  Nihilism (and Nietzsche) involves the following:

1. The belief that there is no intrinsic master of the universe who imposes meaning and values on the universe;
2. The need to save human society from the anomie that results from Statement 1 above by the emergence of an Übermensch or aristocracy of such individuals who by their own finely developed will to power gain the power to impose that will on the rest of us.
3. The rejection of the notion of impartial treatment of all men (and hence of the equality of all men).  Note that this equality is specifically taught by the New Testament - a source which is rejected by both nihilism and Nietzsche.

The implications of these three attitudes are that if you happen to be one of the fortunate few who can act as an Übermensch,  you can set the rules of whatever part of human society you control according to your own tastes.  And more than likely, the chief goal of your tastes will be to maximize your power as much as possible, even if it means a diminishing of the power of others.  ("Let's divide up the world fairly between us.  One for me, and one for me.  Two for me, and two for me...Heads I win, tails I win...")  You can get away with it, because there is no intrinsic master of the universe who can impose his standards on you - standards which may well contradict yours.

*   *   *

At first blush, the tradition of thinking embodied in traditional American religious fundamentalism and white American evangelicalism would seem to be the farthest thing from nihilism and from the concept of the Übermensch posited by Nietzsche as the antidote to that nihilism. After all, the rallying cry of American Protestants has historically been Sola Scriptura. And if you're going to cry, "Sola Scriptura!" ("By Scripture alone!") you have to accept Bible passages such as the Book of Ezekiel, which I am currently reading. Ezekiel's prophecy is the polar opposite of nihilism, as seen in quotes like this:

Then He said to me, "The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is very, very great, and the land is filled with blood, and the city is full of perversion, for they say, 'the LORD has forsaken the land, and the LORD does not see!' But as for me, My eye will have no pity nor shall I spare, but I shall bring their conduct upon their heads." - Ezekiel 9:9-10

In other words, by crying "Sola Scriptura!" white American evangelicals have stated their belief in a moral universe, a universe ruled by an impartial moral standard imposed externally on it by a Creator who Himself rules over the universe He has created, and who is angered by and ready to punish the violation of His moral standard.  Therefore, this moral standard is not the creation of any mortal man, but rather of the God who created the universe.  Indeed, according to C.S. Lewis, the mere fact that humans appeal to a moral standard at all - even when the standard to which they appeal is of their own making - shows that humans acknowledge the existence of independent moral standards.  This argument is beautifully set forth in Mere Christianity.   (By the way, white American evangelicalism seems to love C.S. Lewis - at least from what they say about him.)

Armed with this recognition of a moral standard that is independent of man and which originated outside of man, white American evangelicalism has branded itself a warrior in behalf of this moral standard to impose this standard on everyone, whether they want it or not.  Thus from the late 1960's until 2016, prominent American evangelical voices such as Charles Colson, Franklin Graham, Francis Schaeffer, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, et al, have spoken tirelessly against the disappearance of Christian ethics and culture from the broader American culture, as well as warning against the rise of popularity of other religions and the loosening of American sexual mores.  I must say that I think they have been partly right to speak out against things which the Bible speaks against.  But when it comes to the fulcrum - the center of gravity - of the New Testament, they have been unaccountably silent.  For Christ Himself (whom they claim to believe and follow) said, "Therefore, however you want people to treat you, you too, do so for them, for this is the Law and the Prophets."  He also said that next to the greatest commandment, namely to love the Lord with all one's being, the second greatest commandment was to love one's neighbor as oneself.

Plenty of other people have explained quite well how it suited American Protestant and evangelical churches to ignore the Scriptural duty each human being has toward his or her fellow human beings, since after all, white America made itself great by trashing, robbing, enslaving and oppressing everyone else on earth.  Under such an arrangement, it would have been highly politically inconvenient for the mass of evangelicals to condemn what Ezekiel would call the gaining of material wealth by violence.  (See Ezekiel 22.)  Indeed, if I might editorialize for just a bit, the Scripture frequently uses sexual imagery to describe the relationship between the God of the Bible and those who call themselves His people.  The true Church is therefore called the Bride of Christ, while those who call themselves God's people and yet are unfaithful to Him are frequently called harlots or unfaithful wives.  In this context, the white American evangelical church has for a long time made itself the spread-legged harlot - the serving wench - of secular, earthly economic and political power, and not the Bride of Christ.

They did so first by teaching that a Christian man's duty to love his fellow man applied only when the two men who needed to love each other were white.  Then they taught that since the rest of us were defective, they could exterminate or enslave us at will, as if to re-enact Israel's conquest of the land of Canaan.  The only problem with this is that they posited that we their intended targets deserved our mistreatment because we were more wicked than they.  (That accusation has since been abundantly proven false!)  And lastly, they redefined evil as being confined simply to certain sexual sins and piety as being confined merely to private observance of religious devotion - thus giving them license to systematically break almost every commandment of God that addresses how people are supposed to treat each other.

I know what effect such teaching (and the treatment I received from white churches who taught it) had on me at first - there was the self-doubt, the questioning, the wondering whether it was actually true that God had created me to be the trash can, the vomit bucket, the toilet bowl, the punching bag of a select subset of humanity, and whether there really was nothing I could (or should) do about it.  One of the things that saved me from that self-doubt and questioning has been that over the years, I have watched the ways in which the leading voices of white American evangelicalism have failed to uphold their own standard.  For they can't even keep their own rules; therefore, they have lost all rights to claim that they are better than me in any way.  So they say that sexual morality is the only kind of morality that matters?  Maybe - but what about the many flag-waving Republicans who voted for Bush, who lost all their retirement savings in the 2008 financial meltdown?  What about the patriotic American soldiers who were killed in the 2003 Iraq invasion which the United States performed to remove weapons of mass destruction that never existed?  These are by no means the only true believers who have suffered from the failure of man to do right by man.  And regarding sexual morality - why is it that the Republicans and evangelicals who were so strident in impeaching Bill Clinton have rallied around Donald Trump?  You who are ready to punish my imperfection, you who accuse me of being a violent thug ready to rape women because I am an African-American male, why have you not stoned Dennis Hastert to death for his sin?  Or Mark Sanford?  Or Josh Duggar?

But I am not here today to editorialize.  I have a larger point to make - first, that the white American evangelical church (and by extension, the entire Republican party) have come to me to be the perfect embodiment of nihilism.  Nihilism in the sense that while they say they believe in an impartial moral standard that originated outside of themselves, they act as if there is no such standard and that the only standard to which they need to submit is the standard which they themselves create and have the power to enforce.  They are the Übermensch aristocracy, whose philosophy is captured in this quote attributed to an aide of former President George W. Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

So,... what's the point of all that I have written so far?  As I said a few sentences ago, I am not here to editorialize.  Nor am I here to try to appeal to the better angels of the people now in power in this country.  Frankly, I am tired of that kind of editorializing (although today I found a particularly fine example of it here).  To me it's a waste of time to tell people who do very bad things that they are in danger of thus making themselves very bad people once you see that they want to be bad because they find badness to be ego-syntonic.  My question is much cruder.  Namely, it is this: how long can a society get away with murder before there are consequences?  For the universe is not nihilist!  After all, the Bible does not just appeal to our better angels; it also promises consequences to those people who do not have better angels.  And the consequences are not just that such people will become icky.  The Bible promises that God will break things in the lives of those who continue in evil.  "The soul that sins shall die." - Ezekiel 18:4.  "The wages of sin is death..." - Romans 6: 23.  "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap." - Galatians 6:7.  In other words, I am looking for the propagation of the outworkings of damnation in a society that ought to be damned.  Moreover, I am looking not only as a Christian, but as an empiricist, a person who has received a technical professional education and earned a technical professional degree and who is familiar with the scientific method.  And this weekend, I think I've found some evidences for the propagation I've been looking for.

*   *   *

Consider again the white American evangelical and Protestant establishment as the spread-legged harlot - the serving wench - of secular, earthly economic and political power, and not the Bride of Christ.  Consider that church as a key pillar of the power base of Donald J. Trump, and consider that this is so because of the leaders who have risen to prominence in the evangelical ecosphere.  Now consider what is happening to that church in the age of COVID-19.  I leave you with the following citations:

• Survey: 65% of Churches See Giving Decline During Pandemic
• Why Are Your Online Attendance Numbers Suddenly Dropping? 5 Reasons
• When Your Church Reopens, What Will Be Left and Who Will Still Come?  Some Thoughts
• Sunday Slump - The Virus Is Accelerating Dechurching in America

I therefore hypothesize the emergence of a much smaller evangelical presence in America over the next several months, and the diminishment of American evangelicalism as a potent and controllable force in American politics.  (Disclaimer: I am not a prophet, and have not been officially certified by any state or government board as having any sort of gift of prophecy.  Take what I say with a grain of empiricism - YMMV.)  I also hypothesize the emergence of a cohort of jobless pastors!  This decline of evangelical power is, I think, one of the biggest reasons why Trump is so hot to remove social distancing restrictions on large indoor gatherings.  It is also why the Trump administration has extended COVID-19 financial aid to evangelical churches (in violation, some would say, of the Constitutional separation of church and state).  

Trump's use of government resources to prop up cronies leads me to the consideration of other propagations of the outworkings of damnation.  These considerations overwhelmingly involve the effect on American secular power.  But you'll have to wait until my next post to read them.  It's way past time for me to do other stuff...

I Am Not Going To Church This Sunday

So I hear that Donald Trump has made the following statement:

"The president just demanded places of worship reopen for in-person services and he talked about guidelines being issued for “communities of faith”. 

He wants them open “for this weekend”. Called upon governors to life quarantine restrictions relating to religious gathering places.

“If they do not do it I will override the governors,” he said.

He then turned on his heel and left the White House press briefing room without taking any questions.

Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany then brought up Deborah Birx, response coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, to the podium for an expert briefing."

 - Quotes retrieved from the Guardian, 22 May 2020.

I've got news for him: I'm not going to church this Sunday.  I will not be celebrating Memorial Day in crowded places.  (I will not be celebrating the 4th of July at all.)  I will not be going to indoor, sit-down coffee shops (like the Starbucks near my house which opened its doors today for the first time in several weeks).  I will not go to restaurants.  I will not go to national parks.  I will not attend sporting events.  I will not join in this idiot's pretense that life is normal.  Because it's not.  Due to Donald Trump's malignancy and incompetence, we have the following situation:

• A pandemic has dealt (and continues to deal) a crippling blow to our economy.
• The people who to date have borne the brunt of the deaths resulting from that pandemic are people whom Trump and his white Republican murderers have targeted for destruction.
• There is not yet a viable, proven vaccine available for COVID-19.  (Yes, I know that a certain American biopharma manufacturer is boasting of optimistic results - but their data have not been rigorously peer-reviewed.)
• There is not yet a viable, proven antiviral drug that is effective against COVID-19.  (Yes, I know that the manufacturers of remdesivir have boasted of minor reductions in disease severity and length of hospitalization - but many doctors and scientists have questioned the methodology of the U.S. remdesivir study. (See this and this.)  And yes, I know that Donald swears by hydroxychloroquine, but I suspect that not a drop of it has passed through his lips.  How might the world look if he did really overdose on some fish tank cleaner!)
• There is not yet any kind of widespread testing available for coronavirus infection.  A Washington State-based group that had developed a free, accurate test kit that could be used in people's homes was asked this week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to halt the use of their tests.  On the other hand, the FDA has granted authorization to a Texas firm to provide in-home test kits - but those who want a kit must jump through a few hoops first.  Why am I not surprised?  Donald Trump has already made it abundantly clear that he is opposed to widespread testing because of the possibility that the test results will indicate that the United States is experiencing a crisis for which the Republican Party has no answer.
• Those states and regions which have ended social distancing restrictions are now seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases.  As a result, there will be further spikes in death rates.  Again, not surprising.  Throw lit matches into a dry meadow in the middle of summer, and you will have fire.

In calling therefore for churches and other places of worship to open this Sunday (and in threatening to force them to open whether they want to or not), Trump shows not only his ignorance of the Constitution, not only also his ignorance of the Bible (Matthew 4:7, "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test"), but most importantly, his ignorance of the realities of trying to reopen a nation and its economy without dealing with the issues that forced it to close in the first place.  Those realities are excellently explained in an article by Jonathan V. Last titled, "We Cannot 'Reopen' America."

On another note, I've noticed that Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic is not just an isolated case of insanity.  Rather, he is typical of all of the global Far Right leaders who have come to power (many of them with the help of the Russian government) over the last several years.  Thus Boris Johnson's Britain became an outlier among those nations which consider themselves in any way European, in that Britain came to have the largest number of COVID-19 cases of any country in that part of the world.  And Russia, which has long aspired for a return to greatness, now has its wish for greatness fulfilled in a sense, in that it now has the largest number of COVID-19 cases of any nation on earth except for the United States.  (We're still No. 1 - Go, USA!  Or let's not!)  Moreover, both Putin and Trump seem to be reading from the same playbook in that their national health response to the coronavirus has been characterized by scapegoating of foreigners, political posturing, and chaos.  One way in which Putin's government differs from Trump's is that Trump merely bullies and browbeats medical experts who contradict him.  Putin, on the other hand, seems to have lost a few dissenting doctors who mysteriously fell from windows over the last few weeks.  They didn't slip on their tea, did they?

Update: I need to add another country currently being trashed - er, I mean, ruled - by a far-Right leader: Brazil.  Jair Bolsonaro has just earned the dubious distinction of leading his country to overtake Russia in COVID-19 deaths and confirmed cases.  That means that Brazil is the new global No. 2.  This confirms my hypothesis that everything the Far Right touches turns to used toilet paper.

The On-Line Airing of National Dirty Laundry

To those who may have missed blog posts from me over the last several months, I offer my apologies.  There are things in realspace which have demanded my attention, and there are only 168 hours in any given week...

But I thought I'd post a few links to information that reveals the extent to which mainstream American culture has become blatantly evil.  First, the Fullerton Observer has kindly rendered a good public service in posting summaries of the key findings of the Mueller Report On the Investigation Into Russian Interference In the 2016 Presidential Election.  At the end of their final summary, they have also kindly provided a link to audio recordings of a reading of the entire report.  This means that anyone who wants to know what the report says can get it all straight from the horse's mouth - even if they don't have time to read it all.

Secondly, there are a number of new reports exposing the hypocrisy of the white American evangelical/Protestant Church, which continues to staunchly support the presidency of Donald Trump.  Here's a small sample:

• New Study Exposes Hypocrisy of the Religious Right
• "Someone's Gotta Tell the Freakin' Truth": Jerry Falwell's Aides Break Their Silence
• Her Evangelical Megachurch Was Her World.  Then Her Daughter Said She Was Molested by a Minister.
• Haggard's Law  (Note: in posting this link, let me emphasize that I am a Bible-believing Christian.  However, I object to using "God-talk" to try to gain political leverage to elect candidates to office who use the power of the State to murder dark-skinned people - or to rip the children of these dark-skinned people out of the arms of their parents in order to throw the children into cages - er, I mean, "detention centers.") (A second note: Vladimir Putin may himself be a case of Haggard's Law in action.  Several years ago, during a photo op with Russian citizens, he lifted the t-shirt of a pre-adolescent boy and kissed the boy on his stomach.  You can watch it here.  Recently that boy, who is now a man, stated that he liked the kiss, but if you look at the linked photo, the boy seems to be surprised and slightly revolted.  Maybe he decided that he liked saying he liked it more than he liked the possibility that he would be forced to drink a polonium cocktail!  Putin as Катехон?  Ha, ha!)

Revelations such as these should arouse the kind of moral outrage that should sweep evildoers from power - except that the supporters of these evildoers no longer care about truth or justice or anything else except the naked exercise of power over their fellow human beings.  They have always been like this, but for a few decades between the 1960's and now, they were wolves in badly-done sheep disguise.  At least now they're being straight-up about being wolves.  And no, I don't expect them to listen to the Mueller Report.

One side note: remember all the supposed "terrorist" incidents involving so-called "Arab extremists" in Europe and the United States during the last decade?  These incidents had the convenient effect of turning public sentiment in Europe and the United States against immigrants - especially dark-skinned or non-Christian immigrants.  Many of us wondered at the time who could be behind these attacks, because we considered them to be false flags.  Having examined Russian propaganda over the last few years, I've come to a certain conclusion - a conclusion informed by the fact that Russia actively sought to build a network of regimes in the world's richest countries that worked to exclude the world's dark-skinned and/or non-Christian peoples from the wealth of these nations.  Russia has also become well-known for "hybrid warfare."  You draw your own conclusions...

When The First Amendment Is Revoked

A troubling development has surfaced in the preparations being made by the Trump team to seize the White House which they "won" in a rigged election this past November.  It appears that the Trump team issued a list of 74 questions to Department of Energy personnel, asking them to identify which employees and contractors worked on climate change initiatives under President Obama.  Among the items in the questionnaire are the following:

• "Can you provide a list of all Department of Energy employees or contractors who have attended any Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon meetings?  Can you provide a list of when those meetings were and any materials distributed at those meetings, emails associated with those meetings, or materials created by Department employees or contractors in anticipation or as a result of those meetings?"
• "Can you provide a list of Department employees or contractors who attended any of the Conference of the Parties (under the UNFCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change)) in the last five years?"
• "Which programs within DOE are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama's Climate Action Plan?"
• "Can you provide a list of the top twenty salaried employees of the lab, with total remuneration and the portion funded by DOE?"
• "Can you provide a list of current professional society memberships of lab staff?"
• "Can you provide a list of all other positions currently held by lab staff, paid and unpaid, including faculties, boards, and consultancies?"

These questions are being asked by the transition team of a President-elect who has vowed to dismantle Obama's climate action policies and who has publicly said that "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."  It is therefore understandable that the scientists in the Department of Energy are looking at the questionnaire from the incoming Administration in the same way that a flock of chickens might look at a fox who is asking for each chicken's name and address.

However, the point of my post today is not to argue whether climate change is real, or whether, if real, it is being caused by human activity.  (On these two points, the science is indisputable.  As to the consequences we are now reaping, see this, this, and this for instance.)  My point is, rather, whether the scientists who are seeking to do objective, fact-based work at the DOE have good reason to be worried about what a hostile incoming Administration might try to do to them.  For it is well known that Donald Trump is a classic narcissist, and we can also be reasonably certain that most of his inner circle shares his disease.  One of the rules for survival in proximity to a narcissist is this: Don't ever disagree with him.  If you break that rule, be prepared for retaliation.  And if the narcissist not only controls your employment, but also knows all your professional associations and positions held outside of your regular employment, he can majorly ruin your chances of finding any kind of employment in your particular field.  There are many stories around just now of people whose careers were ruined by narcissists or bullies. 

So it will be interesting to see how dissenting scientists fare in the DOE under a Trump administration.  That will tell us how the Trump administration will respond to dissent in general.  Early reports are not encouraging, as seen here, here and here, for example.  I think that it is very likely that we will have to endure an extremely thin-skinned President who is determined to live in the narcissistic bubble of his own fantasy, a President who will explode in narcissistic rage at any fact, reality or person who dares to burst that bubble.  He will be Nixon on steroids.

And for that reason, I think it is prudent for those of us who will have to live under such a President to consider two of Gene Sharp's Methods of Nonviolent Action (from his book How Nonviolent Struggle Works), under the heading of Social Intervention: creating alternative social institutions, and creating alternative communication systems.  What is more, these alternative social institutions and alternative communication networks must be tough, survivable, and able to function even when they are denied access to the resources available to official institutions and communication networks.  It might be a very good idea to ask how you would form a network of people you can rely on when your power to form networks is being interdicted by the State.  It might be a good idea to ask how you can communicate with a wider audience or an audience spread over a wide geographic area when you can't use Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Blogger, or any other electronic Web-based social media - either because access to these media is denied, or because dissenters who try to use them might wind up getting arrested.  Message in a bottle, anyone?

A Brief History of COINTELPRO in America

Another week, another mass shooting in America.  (Actually, there were several, but only one managed to be selected as worthy of national news coverage.)  I overheard a couple of co-workers yesterday talking about what happened in Dallas on Thursday night.  They were eyeing me during their undertone conversation, so, having no TV and blissfully unaware of Thursday's events, I strolled over cheerfully and asked, "What's up?"  They proceeded to tell me, and to offer a number of opinions regarding how American society should view both Black lives and police lives.  My next words must have shocked them.  "Have you ever heard of a false flag operation?" I asked.

From the looks on their faces, I could tell that this was not a possibility they had considered, even though one of them acknowledged that he knew what the term means.  I consider this to be a shocking failure of our outlets of culture and media to inform adults who have the right to vote, who live in what is supposedly the "most powerful country on earth," and who therefore should be much better informed.  Consider this post to be my attempt to rectify this deficiency.

I want to begin by introducing a potentially unfamiliar term to you.  According to Wikipedia, COINTELPRO "was a series of covert, and at times, illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations."  The COINTELPRO operation was conceived under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.  Note the words, "discrediting" and "disrupting."  If you read the Wikipedia article, you can see the United States from the 1950's to the 1970's as a nation whose favored members enjoyed the greatest privilege the world had ever seen - yet that privilege was built on the backs of those peoples of the world who had been violently oppressed in order to build that privilege.  So the favored members of American society lived in a great deal of insecurity and felt horribly threatened by the presence of any voices challenging their privilege and the oppression on which that privilege had been built.  They were frightened by those voices which were asking for a more equitable life for all.  COINTELPRO was designed by the FBI and others as a way to discredit and neutralize the voices of those who protested the oppressive order set up by the United States and other First World nations.  Read how COINTELPRO especially targeted the leaders of the Black Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's.  One of the tactics of COINTELPRO was the use of agents provocateurs, paid police agents used to attempt to incite protest organizations to engage in illegal activity so that law enforcement would have a justification for arrests.

One thing to note: there is at least one case on record of undercover police being implicated in staging violence by protesters against police during a political rally.  I am sure there are many more cases that can may be discovered by an enterprising researcher.  I leave that as an exercise for the reader.  (You might start here, here, here, here, or here.  Goodness gracious, I think I've done a lot of the work for you!)

Now a funny thing happened in the 1970's.  In 1971, the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI managed to break into an FBI office, and stole several files which contained records of the COINTELPRO operation.  (See this also.)  They then dutifully leaked these records to the press.  Many press outlets refused to publish the leaked documents, but they eventually were widely circulated, and the FBI was forced to ostensibly "end" COINTELPRO.  But like many things that are evil (including sewage leaks), the basic mechanisms of COINTELPRO never really ended.  They just went underground.  (See what was done in the 1980's to environmental protest groups, for instance.)  Indeed, the Wikipedia article cited at the beginning of this post shows that from 1980 onward (and especially during the presidency of George W. Bush), there has been a sharp revival of COINTELPRO-like operations.

As far as the Dallas sniper incident, note the following details:

• Not only were police shot, but protesters as well.  (How very similar to what happened in Maidan in the Ukraine just before the Western backed coup that plunged that country into civil war.)  
• Initial reports stated that several snipers were involved, and a number of Black men were arrested.  However, the official police story against these men fell apart, and the official narrative was changed to implicate only one man, who, of course, "died in a gun battle with police" after managing to fire on police from several positions in a superhuman feat of mobility.
• Police responders and media were conveniently on scene to provide an instant high-drama "response" to the incident.
• The man who has been implicated as the lone sniper is conveniently very dead right now, and therefore cannot stand trial.
• The dead man was implicated in less than 24 hours after the incident, in contrast to the many unreported mass shootings (defined as shootings in which four or more people are hit), in which police don't find a perpetrator for days or weeks. 
• The dead man's race and supposed political ideology were used to attempt to implicate and scapegoat entire group of people in order to justify the ongoing oppression and violence practiced by a dominant majority against this group.

In the details of the list I have presented are similarities with a number of high-profile incidents over the last two years, including the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Paris Massacre, the San Bernardino shootings, and the Orlando nightclub shootings.   The official narrative of these incidents has been mercilessly picked apart by a growing spectrum of people who are tired of being oppressed and especially tired of a dominant society which seems bent on finding ongoing excuses to continue the oppression and scapegoating.  So it is not surprising that one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement is identifying the Dallas shooting (and similar incidents which have taken place in other parts of the United States in the last two days) as a false flag operation.

I agree with her.

The Case Of The Moth-Eaten Inverness

"Then He said to them, 'Watch out, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.'" - Luke 12:15

Back when I was a kid in what my generation called junior high school (that's middle school for you who are now kids), it was the job of the English teachers at our school (who would now be called "language arts teachers" in most places in our country) to pour what our society called "culture" into our pubescent brains, by means of making us read "literature" whose origins were almost entirely British or American.  This "literature", packed into 7th and 8th grade anthologies called "readers", contained a large assortment of the kind of stories that would bore most 11 to 14 year old boys to tears.  However, these books did contain a few inclusions from more spicy authors.  (As an aside, I remember one English class in which we were told to read a slow story about a complicated adult situation and to analyze the feelings, emotions, and responses of all the characters.  I just couldn't bring myself to be interested, so I flipped ahead to a Mark Twain story, and spent the rest of the period trying to stifle frequent snickers and chuckles while the rest of the class wondered what was wrong with me.)

One of the more spicy authors included in my "reader" was Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories.  These stories naturally appealed to me, as they involved danger, solving mysteries, and catching bad guys.  But there was a side effect to these stories which I did not notice until many years later.  For Sherlock Holmes was presented as the sort of heroic character which one might naturally expect to be produced by British society, a society which was itself presented as the most refined, intellectual and "civilized" society on earth.  Thus were the tastes, customs and culture of upper-crust British society presented as the pinnacle of human development.  And Sherlock Holmes became a pinnacle of civilized fashion (at least when he was out in public), as a representative of the British gentleman class.

When this gentleman class (and its American cousins) deigned to look at members of other cultures, it was usually with extreme disdain - disdain especially at the tokens which those other cultures used to honor those members whom they deemed to be worthy of honor.  Thus the civilized Anglo upper crust despised the feathers of the headdress of many Native American warriors, and refused to learn the meaning behind that headdress or the significance of the honor it represented.  This disdain extended to the art and music of various African tribes and nations, the food and religion of many Latin American countries, the rites of passage experienced by Australian aborigines in their cultures, the rituals of respect and honor of elders embodied in many Asian cultures.  After all, why was there any need to respect these?  The Anglo-American culture (and its European cousins) had conquered all, and in conquering all, had shattered the soul and identity of these other cultures, producing generations of people who no longer knew and who were therefore not comfortable with who they actually were.  The most these "lesser" peoples could hope for was to somehow learn to become a feeble, dark reflection of Sherlock Holmes, with his trappings of civilization: his Inverness cape, his cravat, his briar pipe, his various habits.  Or, to learn to be the 20th-century reboot of Holmes, namely, James Bond or any of the other macho spies with expensive tastes and really cool stuff who were spun off from him.  Or, failing that, simply to live large like the Anglo-Americans and the Europeans who had managed to fill their lives with really cool possessions.

And this is what I began to realize many years after my exposure to Sherlock Holmes: that Holmes, and the smug, upper-crust society he represented, were guilty of the very things they had despised in the cultures they conquered and subjugated.  And this guilt extended far beyond the veneration of the tastes of a couple of glorified fictional Anglo action-adventure heroes.  How was the fixation of 19th and 20th century British upper crust on their fashions any different or better than the reverence of any other culture for its tokens of honor?  To call one such reverence idolatry would be to automatically condemn the other reverence.  Who says that the tastes of a violent British spy who likes his martinis shaken, not stirred, are any better, more refined or more "civilized" than the tastes of anyone else on earth?

This leads to a larger question, namely, why anyone should consider the culture of Europe or the Anglo-American empire to be any better or more special than any other culture, especially when that claim to specialness rests on nothing more than having acquired more stuff than any other culture.  European and Anglo-American claims to specialness have come to rest on the possession of more, better and cooler "stuff" than anyone else has come up with, and this possession of "stuff" has even produced class consciousness and social stratification within European and Anglo-American society - a social identity based on creating a material paradise for one's own class while excluding everyone who is deemed to be beneath one's class.  But as the Good Book says, "...we brought nothing into the world, and we certainly can't carry anything out."

And even in this life, those who have based their identity on their stuff can lose it all, thus losing their identity in the process.  That has already begun to happen to the Anglo-American empire and to Europe.  The process is driven by the cold, hard limits to the global industrial economy which I mentioned in a previous post, and which others have explained in depth.  (See this, for instance.)  There is nothing that can be done to stop it.  The loss is striking at many who are, no doubt, very surprised at the losses they are suffering, as seen in the following links:

• "Nationwide Layoff Watch: Biglaw Firm Cuts Headcount; Attorneys Among The Victims," Above The Law, 14 January 2016
• "Nationwide Layoff Watch: More Lawyer Jobs Slashed Due to Weak Market," Above The Law, 28 October 2015
• "21st Century Fox Looks to Cut $250 Million In Film, TV Staff," Variety, 1 February 2016
• "Catholic University Turns to Buyouts and Layoffs to Cut Spending," Washington Post, 16 April 2015
• "Cal Considers Sports Budget Cuts, Layoffs To Close Big Deficit," SFGate, 10 February 2016
• "Declining Enrollment At University of Phoenix Suggests Much Leaner Apollo Ahead," AZCentral, 5 October 2015
• "The Demise of Private Schools," The Atlantic, 2 September 2015
• "The End of Middle Management?", BBC, 25 June 2015
• "Mergers and Layoffs Strike The Semiconductor and Wireless Industries," IEEE Spectrum, 31 July 2015
• "More Bank Layoffs: Barclays Is Reportedly Cutting 20% Of Its Investment Banking Staff," Business Insider, 4 December 2015
• "Layoffs Watch 2016: If You Work At A Bank, Gird Your Loins," Dealbreaker, 14 December 2015

There are many sources like these which describe the recent and increasing vulnerability of people who are in professions formerly considered to be immune to economic troubles.  Many of these people face a future in which the tokens of honor which they have collected will be forcibly taken from them, and they will be stripped to a level of nakedness which will shatter their souls and identity.  For it will destroy all they thought themselves to be.  (I could post some stories of the newly homeless, if I had the time.  Some of them never imagined that they'd be in that situation.)  What is Sherlock Holmes without his Inverness cape?  What is James Bond without his martini, shaken but not stirred?  If you can no longer afford an upper-class life, then welcome to the ranks of the permanently embarrassed millionaires.  Now you look just like the rest of us.

The Drama of A Special People

Here is a link to a post I wrote a year ago, in which I described the religious and psychological roots of the grossly oversized American grandiose self.  By reading it, you can gain a bit of insight into the desperate crash that may come when that grandiose self is taken apart, and you can understand the desperation of the leaders and many of the common people of American society as they try to keep that grandiose self intact.  (That grandiose self is being taken apart both domestically and internationally, as I and others have been reporting for a while.)

For Those Who Want To Take Charge Of Their Own Growth

I am very busy with grad school just now, so I won't be able to write a new post this week.  However, grad school (and self education in general) line up nicely with a post I wrote a few months ago, a post which I have decided to share again with interested readers who are trying to improve themselves in the midst of a society that is trying to scapegoat and destroy them.  Here then, for your enjoyment and edification, is Not Someone Else's Bonsai.

The Sunk Costs of Stinkin' Thinkin'

Certain characteristics are common to all families who are characterized by substance abuse and addiction.  The central character is, of course, the addict, whose addiction and behaviors regularly cause damage to himself and to his family unit.  The pain of the damage caused is the sort of stimulus that would cause reasonable people to try to get to the root cause of the damage and to effectively fix it.  However, a family marked by substance abuse is not reasonable, for as the addiction of the addict progresses, so do his efforts to "train" the members of his family to avoid squarely and honestly facing the root cause of the damage.  Instead of looking for an honest, effective remedy, the family is therefore trained simply to try to control the damage caused by the addict while ignoring the root causes.

A straight-up discussion of root causes is usually off-limits in such families.  These families are not marked by very much honest self-appraisal and self-reflection.  Such self-reflection might provoke an existential crisis, otherwise known as "decompensation," so it is usually avoided like the plague.  Instead, when the family experiences the pain of a fresh episode of damage, they are also trained to look for scapegoats on whom they may project their frustration and anger for the pain they are suffering.  When the family encounters any honest outsider who is willing to openly name the root cause of the family's pain, the family will often unleash a barrage of blaming, scapegoating, projection, and creation of drama in order to deflect attention from the actual "elephant in the room."  As the damage caused by the addiction increases over time, so energy spent in damage control and blame-shifting also increases over time.  This energy and effort represents a sunk cost, that is, it represents resources spent in an activity that yields no genuinely productive results, resources which, once spent, can never be recovered.  Sooner or later the cost of damage control increases to the point where it can no longer be sustained, where the cost of further damage control exceeds the necessary pain of repentance.  At that point, in many cases, both the family and the addict can be said to have "hit bottom."

America's addiction to guns and violence reminds me of the dynamics of a family controlled by substance abuse.  Our fascination with guns and violence springs from the original sins which led to the founding of the United States, sins which this nation has enshrined and glorified rather than acknowledging them as sins.  Moreover, throughout our history, this addiction has led to regular episodes of ever more frequent damage, and ever-increasing pain.  Yet the discussion of the root causes of that pain is off-limits for many members of American society, who will react by blame-shifting, scapegoating, projection and drama creation whenever the subject of root causes is mentioned.

So there was another mass shooting last week; so we also see the attempt to honestly discuss root causes drowned out in yet another flood of drama and blame-shifting by people who would rather die than give up the "freedom" of their addiction.  But there is no discussion of the sunk costs of that addiction.  Yet people who seek to behave as adults should be aware of those sunk costs.  And people who have adult responsibilities involving the safeguarding of life and property have to be aware of those costs.

I am thinking now of the vast number of people addicted to right-wing Kool-Aid in this country who even today deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change, who are unaware that some of the adults who care for them are required to take the effects of man-made climate change into account.  They watch Fox News and listen to their favorite talking heads in environments whose air conditioning was designed by members of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, and they don't realize that for the last few years, ASHRAE handbooks and design guides have begun to address design of HVAC systems for a changing climate.  Why has ASHRAE done this?  Because they are part of design teams who have to design built spaces to withstand the damage done to our climate by our addiction to materialism.  If their designs are inadequate, this results in legal liability.

In the same way, those who design the built environment have, for the last several years, been forced to begin to design built spaces which mitigate the effects of this nation's addiction to guns and violence.  This can be seen in certain building codes such as NFPA 72 (authored by the National Fire Protection Association), which, several years ago, added a section dealing with requirements for mass notification systems in service buildings used by the public.  There is also the increasing attention to architectural design responses to the growing "active shooter" threat (see this, this, and this).  If active shooter incidents continue to increase in this country, I am sure that we will begin to see changes to State building codes requiring explicit design measures for all buildings in which people congregate, whether public or privately owned.  Some of these codes will require expensive retrofits of existing buildings and structures.  There will also be the increased costs of insuring and indemnifying such spaces.  This will greatly increase the cost borne by your average Joe Sixpack as he undertakes a journey to any built public space in his Chevy truck with his Confederate flag flying from the bed and his NRA sticker on his bumper.  He will grumble at the increased cost of going to places (and especially of being allowed entry into those places), yet he won't be likely to make the connection between his enjoyment of "freedom" and the increased cost of that freedom.  Meanwhile citizens like him who live in some of the other "developed" countries won't have to pay such costs, because they aren't all armed to the teeth and most of them aren't unstable.

Perhaps the discussion of monetary costs might actually persuade the masters of our addicted society to take a good look at themselves, because the human costs of our addiction to guns and violence has not had any effect so far.

Give Me Some Delicious Reasons...

So, lately I've been in dialogue with a retired clergyman of a mainstream American church.  He and I have had, shall we say, a more than moderate difference of opinion concerning the revival of overt oppression of people of color in this country, and the appropriateness of the mainstream American evangelical response so far.  Those of you who read this blog know that I believe that the mainstream evangelical response has been rather lame, amounting to a non-response - which is why I can't really take mainstream American evangelicalism very seriously anymore, since I now view it as a tool of oppression.  He tends to think that the problem of oppression in this country is much less severe than the facts now indicate, and he tends to talk vaguely of a "race" problem which he assumes to be a bi-lateral grievance between two belligerents who are equally at fault.  The retired clergyman would rather I saw things his way, and our last face-to-face discussion was slightly hot in places.  But amazingly, at the end, he offered to let me write an installment of the weekly prayer email sent to the prayer team at his church.

So here is what I wrote for that week:  

"'Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are ill-treated, since you yourselves are in the body.' - Hebrews 13:3

"I am reminded of this verse as I consider a recent study I conducted in order to prepare for a discussion of ongoing injustice being perpetrated in the United States. One of the elements of that study was the failure of the criminal justice system, which has been guilty of sending many innocent people to prison (and in several cases, to death row). Here are links to some of the sources I read:

• 'Three black men, convicted as teens, exonerated in Ohio after serving 20 years in prison',

• 'Three black men released after 18 years in prison on wrongful murder convictions' (this group is different from the three in the first article),

• 'Exonerations in the United States, 1989-2012' (especially starting at page 30),

• 'Race and Justice: Wrongful Convictions of African American Men',

• 'Wrongfully Convicted African-Americans Wait Longer To Be Exonerated Than Others: Study',

• 'How Often Do Wrongful Convictions Involve Black Defendants?' (The answer is between 71 and 73 percent.)

"Minorities (especially African-American) make up a disproportionate number of those incarcerated or sentenced to death in this country, yet the available data seems to indicate that the majority of prisoners of color in the United States are innocent. It is a real challenge for the innocent to prove their innocence and to obtain release from prison, because the criminal justice system purposely makes it hard for convicted prisoners to prove their innocence. Indeed, in 2009, the United States Supreme Court ruled that prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence.

"Therefore, please remember the prisoners, just as the Scripture has commanded us. Let us remember them in our prayers. Let us pray for their release from oppression and unjust imprisonment. Let us also pray about how we might physically, materially 'show compassion to those in prison' and to their families - Hebrews 10:34. And let us pray for the repentance of the United States."

As I said, it's amazing to me that I was able to send these exact words to the prayer team at that church.  Now I guess I should visit a Sunday service to see how those words were received.  And as for the hard words I have already written about mainstream American evangelicalism (and about present-day American society), I'm praying for some more delicious reasons to eat those words.  We'll see...

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.