More reasons to be pessimistic

I wish I could be more upbeat today, but I feel great danger all around us and what makes this danger real and pressing is our complacency. We Americans could meaningfully address many of our biggest issues, if only we took the time to inform ourselves and then focused our energy. But too many Americans don't take the time to inform themselves and can't bear the thought of prying themselves from their HD TVs. The result is that the social and corporate forces that are smart and organized will continue to quietly slink around picking our pockets on a massive scale; in the process, they will continue to insidiously demoralize us. Consider this: We have never before seen such income inequity in the United States. It is now even greater than it was during the Great Depression. Paul Krugman indicates that as of 2007, the top decile of American earners . . . pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages. He further indicates that "as a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth." These aren't just numbers. This disparity means real-life lost opportunities for real people, and I'm not just referring to the opportunity to buy an even bigger TV set. It means that month by month, this country belongs less and less to you and more and more to someone who doesn't give a rat's ass about you. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but there is no evidence for thinking otherwise. Which leads me to a stunning article written by Chris Hedges: "It's Not Going to Be OK." He starts by characterizing Barack Obama as "a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave." What is the concern?

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.

How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out.

The great danger is our massively widespread passivity at a time when we desperately need informed and focused action. Our passivity and our ubiquitous proud ignorance make us susceptible to the next demagogue to come around. And we'll probably be sitting around watching it happen on TV and convincing ourselves that it's not so bad and that it was all inevitable and who cares about those olden days when the rest of the world actually looked up to the United States? [Thanks to BJ for his link to the Hedges article.]

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John Yoo is haunted

Remember John Yoo, the Bush Administration lawyer who was willing to drag his Yale J.D. through the dirt by writing government memos that justified torture? If Yoo thought he could simply walk away from all of the commotion and hide out far away, he was wrong. Here he is (believe it or not) teaching law at Chapman University in Australia. During a recent class, Yoo was haunted by an old "friend" (the video is less than two minutes long): My question: Is this an improper disruption of a classroom, or is it just desserts?

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Knowing someone versus loving someone

When I was a teenager, I sometimes got annoyed hearing people getting all excited when they talked with their children about the Disney characters Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. I thought this was strange, because very few people could tell me anything at all about the personalities of these cartoon characters, other than what they looked like. In fact, I had seen a few old cartoons involving Donald and Mickey, and many of them left me unimpressed, bored or disturbed. Donald often flew off in a fit of anger. Not always, but often enough. Mickey didn't have the anger problem of Donald, but people who "loved" him usually couldn't tell me anything about him other than that he appeared in some cartoons, including "Steamboat Willie." Is he an exemplary character? Very few of the people who love him seem to care. I see the same phenomenon today. Tonight, I ran across this especially disturbing cartoon of Donald Duck, probably not one that you'll see featured at Disneyland. I can hear it now . . . "Hey, kids, look! There's a funny cartoon where Donald Duck commits MURDER!" I'm sure that most people don't care that Donald committed murder. They "love" him no matter what he has done. This cartoon goes to show you that people can think that they love a character without knowing anything at all about that character. We are really good at projecting, filling a knowledge void with good things (or bad things) about a character, a movie star or even a God. Case in point is Jesus, whom many people claim to know or love yet they know so very little about him. Or think of the people who insist that God loves us, yet they aren't interested in knowing about the many genocides committed by the God of the OT. Or consider a more modern example of a person who many people "love" or "admire" without knowing anything about her: Sarah Palin, who I've previously compared to "Helly Kitty." It turns out that many modern corporate characters are intentionally left empty, allowing the public to drum up their personalities in their imagination.

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Catholic Answers: don’t even lie in the same bed . . .

Is it OK for unmarried adults to lie in the same bed, even if they don't have sex. Quick answer: NO. That's the advice I got here, at the Chastity Q&A. It's a sexual catechism filled with all kinds of advice, such as how far you can go without committing a sin. Is foreplay wrong? Here's advice I had never before considered:

Perhaps the easiest way to find out if our actions conform to authentic love is to imagine God sitting on a nearby sofa watching us. If his presence would cause immediate shame or the desire to stop dead in our tracks, we need to ask ourselves why.

How creepy! Would a married couple have sex if God was sitting on a nearby sofa watching? And, BTW, isn't God supposedly omniscient? Aren't good Christians supposedly to always assume that God is on a nearby sofa? Is it OK for homosexuals to raise children? No:

The impact of a mother in her family is unrepeatable, and the same can be said of the father. Two moms don't make a dad, and two dads do not equal a mom. This is the way nature has designed it.

Oh, and don't bother using condoms, because they cause greater numbers of unplanned pregnancies:

The fact is, increased condom use by teens is associated with increased out-of-wedlock birth rates.”

You'll also learn that merely looking at women in swimming suits is akin to pornography and that "porn trains us to have mental polygamy." All of this advice was provided by spin-off ("Chastity") site linked to a Catholic website ("Catholic Answers") that provided so much Catholic esoterica that it left me disoriented in 20 minutes. Truly amazing that so many people are willing to discuss, as one example of many, the difference (if any) between the "holy spirit" and the "holy ghost." Here's another interesting question: Should rock music be allowed at church? Absolutely not, because "If you were before Christ being crucified on Calvary, truly there witnessing it, would you start up a rock band and clap and dance?" The argument seems to be that as Jesus was bleeding to death on the cross, he would rather have someone nearby playing solemn music on an organ. If you want to be more than simply a good Catholic, "Catholicy Answers" is clearly the site for you.

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