Tag: Friday Night at 8

This week, oy vey.

As in blogging oy vey.

So I’m really writing to myself tonight, just to get it into words and then forget about it.

You love Obama?  You  hate Obama?  You are indifferent to Obama?

Fine with me and any permutation in between.

What excites me about the political times we live in are the citizens.  Politicians are citizens, but you’d never know it with our present system.

So I’m interested in the citizens.

And not everyone is a citizen, not in my subjective view.

As buhdy and others have said, there are citizens and there are consumers.

Citizens are annoying and politicians wish we’d just shut up and go away.  They are willing to spend a great deal of money to distract us!  Please, please, just shut up and go away!  Can’t you see how difficult my job is?  I have to please everyone all the time and I can’t!  There are more important things than your concerns!  

Constituents.  Ha ha.  To the politician we are the audience.

Unless we yell.  And then they pay attention because that’s their job, that’s something they can understand.

Sometimes while prowling back alleys you find things that don’t bear the light of day, brass ritual cymbal turns out to be a trashcan cover, exotic seafood dinner is really rotten fish guts.

Yet perhaps there’s some truth to these lies.

Here in NYC the sun has gone down.  That’s the time to prowl.

You’re in kindergarten and some strange large being is telling you about reading and showing you something called an alphabet.  And you go with the flow and recite all the letters and hear how they’re put together and daydream and look out the window and listen some more and sneak candy from out of your desk and make faces at the other children when the teacher’s not looking and take naps on mats.

And then one day you can read.  You look at a page with black squiggles on it and all of a sudden they’re not squiggles any more, they’re words and you can read them.  You’ve taken the leap.

It’s fashionable now for even the right wing to invoke how wonderful Martin Luther King was, now THERE was a nice gentleman!

I remember at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, the talking heads on the teevee were aghast at the Reverend Lowery’s eulogy where he dared bring up … gasp! … politics!

A brief example:

“She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar,” Lowery said. “We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew, and we knew, that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor.”

I remember the discussions at the orange about this and was shocked when there were many who agreed Lowery was out of line saying such things at a funeral.  Propriety was important.  This did our cause no good.  Etc., etc.

Of course, Martin Luther King didn’t hesitate to call folks out at a eulogy he gave for the young girls killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing:

And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.

See, Martin Luther King won his struggle, in the sense of changing the frame of how Americans view civil rights.  I’m not saying the struggle is over, but the moral force of his message is such that even the most bigoted folks will give lip service to respecting him.

But it wasn’t so clear at the time.

I’ve been spending quite a while following certain events, news, and writers on the issue of torture.  I’ve written some essays, poems and comments as well, but looking back there’s a real beginning for me on this and that was getting involved in the Special Prosecutor Project and the view I got from that, way more than anything I’ve written.

Seeing Bob Fertik post a question at Obama’s .gov website and then seeing George Stephanopolous ask Obama the question on teevee.  That was quite an amazing experience.

This effort was driven by so many different groups of people, from all areas of the political spectrum.  From my corner of the liberal world, I paid particular attention to the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, and, of course various bloggers who educated me on not only the facts but the politics and political strategies of confronting the issue of torture.

This week there’s been an explosion of traditional media attention on this issue.  From Nancy Pelosi’s involvement, dragged into the fray by the Republicans and the CIA, to the Whitehouse Judiciary subcommittee hearings earlier this week where I had the interesting experience of seeing Lindsay Graham literally speaking out of both sides of his mouth, to the controversy over Obama deciding to fight the release of the DOD torture pictures, everyone’s chattering now.

I’ve also seen this issue covered very differently in the diversosphere, where torture is not the top story for those who have had to face this kind of behavior by the USA for generations.  That view is stunningly different.

In some ways the moral high ground on this issue is clear — torture is wrong.

In other ways, the moral high ground is bitterly contested.

Do you know what it means?  Old Buddhist question, do you understand the words and do you understand the meaning?

The great Indian prince Naropa was tops in his field, of high renown, and everybody granted him great respect and obedience, no one wanted to tangle with him because he was the greatest of the scholars at Nalanda University and he would decimate their puny arguments, yeah, he had proven himself a great scholar and great teacher, all that.

One day he was sitting in his room and a really ugly woman appeared before him.  He was revolted by her, she was that ugly!

She asked him, “Do you understand the words and the meaning of what you are reading?”

He answered, “I understand the words,” and stopped there.

An amazing thing happened!  The woman began to laugh and suddenly she transformed in Naropa’s eyes to not being ugly at all, yeah, she looked rather beautiful all of a sudden.

Naropa thought to himself, “This is amazing!  If she’s this happy with my answer then I should make her even more happy!”

And he said to the woman, “AND, I understand the meaning!”

Now another change occurred.  The woman stopped laughing, the corners of her mouth turned down, and she began to weep, and she became even more ugly than before.

Naropa was perplexed!  And even more perplexed when the woman accused him of lying, the reason for her sadness.

Long story short, Naropa realized the woman was right.  He left Nalanda University, left his high seat of prestige and sought a teacher who could help him understand the meaning.  Well that’s a whole other story, Naropa’s meeting with the crazy Tilopa.

That is a saying my mom used to use a lot.  Or maybe she didn’t, and it was my brother who said my mom said it.  Being the youngest of six children, well I don’t always have the facts straight.

But I could picture her saying it, as she had a tough life, yet always appreciated anything to be optimistic about.  Granted, she wasn’t a credulous person, so we couldn’t just make stuff up and lift her spirits.  But she was always ready to acknowledge a sincere effort.

I was fortunate to have her live long enough for me to be a comfort to her — when I was in my 30s.  For most of my childhood and adolescence, we were at loggerheads and it was a frustrating time for both of us.  But eventually I broke free of her authority (a story in itself) and when I returned on my own terms, we had so much to say to each other.

She loved it when I’d use stories from what we called “the Blue Book,” Jewish Wit and Wisdom, edited by Nathan Ausubel.  She loved stories, and there were some very wise stories in that book.  I could actually feel the light going on in her head when I’d apply one of the parables in the book to whatever situation she was talking about.  Made me feel good.

My mom was not in good physical health by that time, and yet she had a lightness of spirit in her later years that was never evident during the difficult years when she was struggling to raise six children with a problematic husband and no money.  (Not to diss my father, because he was quite an interesting character, but this story’s about mom.)

She told me once her biggest fear was not of suffering misfortune, but becoming bitter over it.  I thought that was very wise of her and was glad to see she won that struggle.  Her ability to find the light in the darkness increased even as her body wore out.

Anyway, her birthday would have been Sunday, May 3.  She would have been 93 (born in 1916).  She died in 1992, doesn’t seem that long ago, but time is funny that way.

Happy Friday to all.  It’s raining here in the Big Apple and I’m still taking the subway … so there, Joe Biden!

Wrote an essay a while back entitled Yin.  Definitions:

Yin originally meant “shady, secret, dark, mysterious, cold.”  It thus could mean the shaded, north side of a mountain or the shaded, south bank of a river.

Yang in turn meant “clear, bright, the sun, heat,” the opposite of yin and so the lit, south side of a mountain or the lit, north bank of a river.

From these basic opposites, a complete system of opposites was elaborated.

Yin represents everything about the world that is dark, hidden, passive, receptive, yielding, cool, soft, and feminine.

Yang represents everything about the world that is illuminated, evident, active, aggressive, controlling, hot, hard, and masculine.

Everything in the world can be identified with either yin or yang. Earth is the ultimate yin object. Heaven is the ultimate yang object. Of the two basic Chinese “Ways,” Confucianism is identified with the yang aspect, Taoism with the yin aspect

I think we are now in yang time, hard power, conflict in activity, aggressiveness, and most of all a fight for control.

Control of the narrative, we are seeing that both in the blogs and in the media.  Control of our national priorities.  Control of the moral high ground.

We’re receiving a great wave of information about torture, but that information is also about how power was exercised and control taken in the most brutal fashion.  The information we are receiving illuminates far more than the past eight years.  A lot of chatter has resulted.

Hard power.  Yin and yang are not separate, cannot be separate.   As the image shows:

Well I don’t usually do this, but I’m just going to whine tonight.  I thought I’d warn y’all upfront about that.

I was used to being invisible duriing the Bush years … I mean to the Democratic Party.  They were busy holding their powder and doing other secret things I just couldn’t figure out, and so I got used to never feeling connected, in the human sense, to my Democratic representatives.  It hurt, of course, but I got used to it.  Even after Katrina I got used to it — I was intolerably angry but I no longer expected my party to do much.  And they didn’t.

And I’m not talking legislation here, either.  I’m speaking of morale.  A silly thing, I guess, can’t quantify it, can’t even explain it all that well.  Just that feeling that someone gets it, on a visceral emotional level feels the way I do about what’s important.

And heck, I don’t style myself as the be all and end all of how one should feel.  It’s just that it got lonely, here I was, part of the Democratic base, and I felt so invisible.

Now, oh good lord, now it’s even worse.

(Gilbert O’Sullivan, Video courtesy of YouTuber Namikaze1028)

Every now and then I re-read all of Chaim Potok’s books.  I get in a certain mood, you see.

You may know Potok’s work from one of his biggest selling books, The Chosen.

All of Potok’s books deal with protagonists who eventually must confront the limitations of the touchstones they were given through childhood, their bedrock belief systems.  With the exception of Davita’s Harp, that touchstone is an Orthodox Jewish community.

In My Name is Asher Lev, we get to know Asher, the son of a man accomplished in the Jewish community, the right-hand assistant to the Hassidic Rebbe who is the highest authority in the community, a man who works hard to build yeshivas all over Europe, a man of integrity, all that.  And Asher, his son, is an artistic genius on the level of Picasso.  Long story short, Asher finds that his masterpiece painting expresses itself with a crucifixion as part of its form.  Needless to say, that causes a bit of a stir in his community, which already looks askance at his painting to begin with.  Add the family dynamic to that, and Asher is confronted with a heavy task.  And he is fully aware after he paints the picture exactly how much it will hurt his family, why it will hurt his family, and the kind of disapproval and anger it will draw down upon him.

We’re lawless now.  The only citizens of the United States who are subject to the law are those with no power … so it’s not really being subject to the law.  It’s being subject to power.

That’s dangerous.

We see the anger forming among the citizenry and we don’t yet know where that anger is going to ultimately land.  Right now the anger is directed towards the bankers.  But that could change rapidly given the big events we are confronting, from tent cities to climate change.  Round and round it goes and where it stops no one knows.  Unknown.  Danger and the unknown.

(Video courtesy of YouTuber UnivoxSuperfuzz – and sorry for abrupt cutoff at the end)

The danger, oh we are dangerous right now, all of us, we are dangerous and who knows what we will do when confronted by the unknown adventures ahead?

I read too many books that spoke of quests and fellowships and dangerous adventures.  It shaped the way I looked at things, sometimes to the point of absurdity.

I remember my first law firm job in New York City.  We had just gotten WANG stand-alone word processors.  I immediately went into Starship mode and began hollering out faux reports on how my work was going, “Deletion in process!  Stand back!”  That kind of stuff.  It was an adventure to me.

And now I blog about politics and the culture wars and such, and the same feeling grips me every now and then.

I guess they’re not called archetypes for nothing.

When I first got my own computer I started interacting on the AOL discussion boards, where there was no moderation.  I was amazed at some of the hate speech.

But then I started reading one fellow who was posting about the Valerie Plame case.

At first it was just fun being rude and argumentative to the hate-speech folks who were defending Bush.  Soon, though, I realized I had no real information and that became boring.  So I read some of the stuff this fellow was posting and it was fascinating to me.

It wasn’t long before there was a group of five or six of us researching the Plame case.  That’s how I discovered Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo.

I felt like Nancy Drew!

In that fellowship I learned how to retain focus amid all the noise of the chatterers.

So many of us have been writing about events that tear at the human soul, from hatred and ill treatment of our fellow human beings to the ultimate evil, torture.

I’ve learned so much of tragedy, from Winter Rabbit’s essays on how Native Americans and their precious culture are treated, to Robyn’s essays on having to fight to even go into the ladies’ room without fear of attack.  And those are only two examples.

Now there are going to be hearings this upcoming week on torture.

I wonder how I can stay human with such deep knowledge of the evil we can do to each other.

I think of what I hate.

And I believe in order to stay human, I also need to think about what I love.

I’ll tell you, sometimes it’s hard.  Sometimes I despair.

(courtesy of YouTuber SidewalksOfNY315)