Stockpiling Lies and Judas Kisses

Last week, in our monthly salon group, a conversation spontaneously kicked off about the "balloon boy"--the wild story of Richard Heene and his son, Falcon, that had been gripping the media for several days. At that point, it was known that Falcon was not in the balloon, but it had not yet been established that the whole thing was a hoax designed to get the family a gig in a reality TV show. Everyone in my living room that night agreed, however, it was likely that the Heene family had probably made the entire nation their dupe.

Which led us then to an interesting discussion about hoaxes and about what it means to be duped. One saloneer, Bill, told us about how his brother has been making mysterious trips to England for the past year or so. After some Google sleuthing behind the scenes, Bill had discovered his brother was an active member of a psychic organization there that holds seances. He described being nonplussed when his brother asked him if he would like to have a conversation with a former U.S. president. The president in question turned out to be not someone living, but Thomas Jefferson. Bill described how his brother wept when talking about these conversations, and how they have changed his life. So, what do you say to a brother who has become obsessed with having conversations with dead people? Bill wanted to know.

The salon then zoomed on to Bernie Madoff--how did he manage to fool so many people? Did his family know what he was up to? And I brought up my old experience with psychic surgery, which I had witnessed years ago in the Philippines. Did that doctor's hand really penetrate deep inside the woman's stomach and pull out some diseased matter? I was watching him "operate" in his clinic, only about five feet away from the table, and I even took a couple of photographs. It certainly looked legitimate enough and real. But was it a fraud? What is "real" anyway? I have always tended to think that "real" is somehow equivalent to the truth of things. But these days, the truth of things is so hopelessly scrambled, it has become like a collection of useless, mismatched shoes.

Yesterday I woke up to warnings on NPR about counterfeit cures for swine flu being sold all over the Internet. Today it was news of students in Afghanistan protesting the desecration of a Koran by U.S. troops; the accusation was totally denied by the U.S. military, which claims that the event never happened but is a rumor being perpetrated by the Taliban to stir up hatred against the U.S. All summer long we had to endure attempts to derail health care reform by fabricated stories of "death panels," and protests by Medicare recipients demanding that government stay out of health care. These events were followed by two major fraudulent elections, in Iran and Afghanistan. This morning it was a report of toxic dry wall imported from China that is destroying the infrastructure of many houses and undermining owners' health. Everyday we hear about more banks failing, while those that were bailed out are suddenly making outrageous profits again.

I could of course go on and on with examples of the sinister way the world is moving from near nervous breakdown, to nervous breakdown. Whenever I think about what this breakdown might actually look like, it strikes me that maybe it won't be malign buccaneers arriving at the front door in the middle of the night, or global pandemic, or wandering the roads and eating grass. Maybe it will look more like the extinction of truth under a fire-hosing of fraud and deceit: a stockpiling not of nuclear weapons but of treachery, bad faith, lying, double-dealing, hoaxes, and unrelenting dishonesty.

A friend of mine wryly pointed out the other morning over brunch at my favorite restaurant that all my sentences seem to end in apocalypse. Yeah, I agreed, but pessimists tend to be right, although optimists probably live longer. Truth is, I really don't want to live in a world without truth: a world in which every single thing becomes an object of suspici0n. Admittedly, I have trust issues. But what's a girl to do? It just isn't a whole bag of fun watching the human race exterminate itself with a steady stream of Judas kisses.

Taliban Dreams

Interesting dreams have never been my forte. Usually I'm lost in a foreign land, can't remember the name of my hotel, and so I can't find my way back to where I came from. Sometimes my wallet's gone as well, and I have no money and no ID. Or, I return to where my car is parked, only to find that it's not there. I don't seem ever to have those luminous, revelatory dreams in which you meet up with an archetypal angel, or a Himalayan master who offers helpful advice.

Last night I dreamt I had a brush with the Taliban. I was with a good friend in an apartment building much like the one I grew up in in New York years ago. We knew Taliban were in the neighborhood because we had seen them. Despite the middle-sized green armchair (similar to the ones in my present-day living room) we put up against the door to block their entry, they showed up and managed to capture my friend while I was somehow outside in the hall bathroom. My friend yelled at me to run, and somehow I succeeded in getting on the elevator. "The Taliban are here," I said breathlessly to the elevator man. "Yes, I know,' he answered quietly. I hurried into the street to find help, even while I understood that this was impossible because it was already too late. Then I woke up, shaking.

While the Bush administration was busy conflating the Iraq War with the "war on terror," al Qaeda and the Taliban were busy regrouping and revving up in an ungoverned region on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, biding time while they watched America bleed its military and its economy over a misbegotten war in Iraq. Recovering at the time, myself, from a serious bout of illness, I spent a lot of time reading books about global Jihad, trying to understand what radical Islam was really about. That was when I learned they actually want more than to get rid of us--to get the West out of Muslim lands. Just as the U.S. wants to establish free-market democracies around the globe, Islamists have a similar ambition for 7th-century Sharia law to gain ascendency worldwide. They despise democracy. As I came to understand the real danger brewing in Waziristan, I would mention it to friends. Invariably I got the same response: "What's Waziristan?" And so I would joke back, "Have you gotten yourself a burka yet?"

Now President Obama has openly designated the border region as "the most dangerous place in the world," and by doing so, risks beating the hornet's nest with a baseball bat. Everyone has become aware of what Waziristan is, but, as a friend pointed out, we have only a not-very-large green armchair at this point with which to defend ourselves. It isn't working. Suicide bombers are currently fanning out all over Pakistan and only 37% of Americans, according to the most recent poll, are in favor of continuing this war.

After the U.S. had driven the Taliban out of Afghanistan, Bush's strategy for the threat emanating from Waziristan was to ignore it, and to rely on his "ally," then President Pervez Musharraf, also commander of the Pakistani army, to keep a lid on the "Islamofascism" breeding in the area. Unfortunately, it was a Faustian bargain, given that Musharaff's success depended on his hands-off policy: namely, we won't bother you if you don't bother us. It was always clear to Musharaff (and to me) that if ever he tried to go after the crowd in Waziristan, death-dealing insurgents would come after him and chop off his head. They would also begin suicide-bombing Pakistan. So, under his live-and-let-live approach, the danger continued to lurk and silently grow, like a toxic tumor in the body of the world. Bush considered the problem solved, and continued his war with the wrong enemy in the wrong place.

Now it seems we are stuck with yet another war--one that requires building a state, defeating the Taliban, defeating al Qaeda, and bringing economic activity to a country where there is none, except for international aid and the production of illegal narcotics. As Rory Stewart--the Scottish-born professor of human rights at Harvard who has lived and worked in Afghanistan--explains in his essay entitled "The Irresistible Illusion," this policy rests on "misleading ideas about moral obligation, our capacity, the strength of our adversaries, the threat posed by Afghanistan, the relations between our different objectives, and the value of a state." Is a centralized state, he wonders, even an appropriate model for a mountainous country with strong ethnic traditions of local self-government and autonomy? Besides, Osama bin Laden (as far as anyone knows) is hiding in Pakistan, a country that does have a strong central state government--one which has already made clear that it won't have its sovereignty violated by us, probably the main reason Osama prefers staying there.

Our attempt to modernize feudal, fundamentalist societies through building democratic nation-states has proved to be a thankless, witless task, especially in the face of adversaries who want, themselves, to remake the world through spectacular acts of terror. Just as technology can't stop climate change, it is proving impossible to stop a world network of terrorists with outposts in regions that no state controls. However, it is equally hard to accept that there are problems at the heart of American security that might have no solution. All of which brings me to precisely the point that I am hardly the first to make: in this new kind of unconventional war that is now being fought, THERE IS NO PROSPECT OF VICTORY. We are not winning now, and we are not going to win in any imagined scenario in the future.

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble or that a mission is impossible. Continuing the fight in Afghanistan is as much about the need to avoid being labeled a loser as it is about winning. No politician, as Stewart underscores in his article, wants to be perceived as having underestimated, or failed to address, a terrorist threat; or to write off the blood and treasure that we have already spent. Certainly they do not want to be the one to admit defeat. "The language of modern policy does not help us to declare the limits to our power and capacity; to concede that we can do less than we pretend or that our enemies can do less than we pretend; to confess how little we know about a country like Afghanistan or how little we can predict about its future; or to acknowledge that we might be unwelcome or that our presence might be perceived as illegitimate or that it might make things worse."

Recently I saw a section of the PBS documentary "Obama's War" as shown on Frontline. Stranded in the outer reaches of Afghanistan, our stalwart soldiers there function as "bait." Every day they get up and go out in search of an enemy they almost never get to see. They wander the streets and talk to ragtag bands of Afghans, who look at the them with mildly mocking smiles of curiosity, while the soldiers try to win them over and convince them that we are there to "help." Meanwhile, however, the Taliban have made it clear that anyone seen with the Americans should expect certain death, so I don't see any "Anbar Awakening" (like the one that took place in Iraq) happening in Afghanistan any time soon.

Obama's "Yes We Can" mantra may still be very much a work-in-progress in the U.S., whose final outcome is not yet clear. In Afghanistan, however, I don't think the phrase has much resonance or chemistry. It's more like when Tonto said to the Lone Ranger, "What do you mean 'we,' white man?" In this case, it really doesn't matter that our president is black, because the question still stands.

Rogue Elephants

"Someone on the Huffington Post has invaded your territory," my friend Hakuin told me while I was getting massaged last Sunday. Seeing my perplexed look, she explained that one of their bloggers had used the Thesaurus as the basis of a post about Sarah Palin's forthcoming memoir, "Going Rogue." After searching out the various meanings of "rogue," the writer (whoever it was--I couldn't actually find the piece) declared that if Palin had really understood what the word refers to, she would never have used it as her title.

I was intrigued, and decided to check the situation out on my own. After all, I have the most extraordinary Thesaurus on the planet, acquired about four decades ago when I first began living in London. The book is falling to bits, is without its cover, and its pages have become practically like lace; but I am in love with my Thesaurus-with its Introduction to the original edition, dated 1852, still intact. No other more current Thesaurus I have ever seen is a match for this one, which manages, all on its own, to unfurl whole worlds about almost anything that comes near, and to peel away layers of a situation until it gets you to the core of its truth. So, in case you don't believe me, just test-fly this drop-dead portrait offered up of the former governor of Alaska (who resigned from her job on July 4th) when I investigated "rogue":

"Deceiver, shammer, hypocrite, turncoat, two-timer, trouble-maker, confirmed pathological liar, mythomaniac, fibber, yarn-spinner, imposter, cuckoo in the nest, boaster, bluffer, pretender, charlatan, quack, fake, fraud, phoney, hoodwinker, quick-change artist."

Having read Levi Johnston's tell-all interview in Vanity Fair last month about the vicissitudes of living in the Palin household for almost a year during the campaign period, when he was publicly displayed as Bristol's boyfriend, none of the words above seem forced or contrived or inaccurate. The biggest shocker revealed by Levi in the Vanity Fair piece was that Sarah Palin doesn't even know how to use a gun. So much for the colorful mythology of aerial wolf-hunting--and the cherished image of her racing home from the governor's mansion to grill up mooseburgers for the kids. Not happening. According to Levi, Sarah almost never cooks. On returning from work, she would, often as not, lock herself in her bedroom and soak for an hour in the bathtub. She and Todd, he claimed, did not share the same bedroom. According to Levi, Palin relentlessly tried to persuade him and Bristol to give her their baby, so she could pass it off as one of her own.

But my trusty Thesaurus was not ready to leave it at that. There are still more relevant aspects of "rogue":

"Mischief-maker, little devil, disturber of the peace, bad egg, bully, bad influence, bad example." Remember those infernal campaign rallies when she would insist that Obama palled around with terrorists and would stir the crowds into yelling threats of "Kill him"? It was at that time Sarah Palin seriously began to make herself "public enemy number one"-- a "hell hag, she-devil, wild-cat, tigress." However, once in the animal sphere, I confess it was the term "rogue elephant" that got my attention. The elephant, as everyone knows, is a symbol for the Republican party. A rogue elephant separates from the herd and roams alone, becoming wild and vicious. It will send clouds of dust into the air to signify that it is feeling aggressive. Under Bush, the U.S. government became the rogue elephant of international law and politics. Recently I found this comment by Jack Tworkov, a Polish-American artist born in 1900, that "under Reagan, it's America that has become the greatest danger to the world, not even less than what Hitler was."

It seems as if the panel in Norway who awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama gave it to him because he has tried to reverse this image of America as a rogue elephant that has become the greatest danger to the world. Depending on what you think, this was a big, or merely a tiny but awkward spritz on those aggressive clouds of dust kicked up by past and present rogue elephants. Obama got the Nobel Peace award not so much for what he has done, according to Robert Fuller in the Huffington Post, but because of who he is: an exemplar of "dignitarian politics." Obama has brought dignity back to the political arena. "Dignitarian politics," Fuller writes, "means not condescending to Americans or citizens of other countries. It means not treating political opponents, whether at home or abroad, with indignity. Globally, Obama's politics of dignity makes Americans safer, in contrast to policies that, by humiliating others, leave us vulnerable to retaliation. .. President Obama understands that part of a strong defense is not giving offense in the first place. He realizes that in an interdependent world, muscular exceptionalism is a losing strategy."

But just as the rogues cheered and howled last week when America failed to win the Olympics for Chicago, only because they thought it was egg on Obama's face, they are now ridiculing his receiving this prestigious award as "no achievement at all." You could almost see Michael Steele's face go green with envy. "Revenge raids" on the President are becoming more and more tiresome, ridiculous, and all too predictable. Even David Brooks, usually one of the few sanguine conservatives out there in the elelphant pack, when asked for his response to the award, said he thought it was "a joke," and proposed that the best thing Obama could do would be to give it back. Maybe he thought kicking up some dust in the panel's faces would be a good way to go. Things have come to a sorry pass when even the honor of receiving the most prestigious international prize in the world is a pretext for launching ever more disrespectful and savage attacks. My friend Ciel put it well when she wrote me that "our country has gone mad: totally madly unhinged."


"From now on," offers scallywag Virgil, "it'll be all about the toxic chemistry between feral, nihilist rogues and the delicious but disliked dignitarians. I suggest you spackle over your despair and just enjoy the manic mayhem. Remember that when God is giddy, she separates the light from the dark, and then does two loads of laundry." While I go do laundry, please read this postscript from talkingpointsmemo.com:

The GOP's New Foreign Policy: Undermine American Diplomacy
Eric Kleefeld | October 2, 2009, 2:04PM

"An interesting pattern has been emerging in the Republican Party's handling of foreign policy: Individual GOP officials are now making a regular point of not only formulating an alternative foreign policy, to be presented to the American people and debated in Congress -- they're acting on it too, and undermining the official White House policies at multiple turns:

• Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is visiting Honduras in order to support the recent military coup against a leftist president, which has been opposed by the Obama administration and all the surrounding countries in the region. (Late Update: DeMint's office says he is not taking sides during his visit to the current Honduran leadership, denying the New York Times reports that this was his intention.)

• Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) will be going to the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen, bringing a "Truth Squad" to tell foreign officials there that the American government will not take any action: "Now, I want to make sure that those attending the Copenhagen conference know what is really happening in the United States Senate."

• House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) traveled to Israel, where he spoke out against President Obama's opposition to expanded settlements. He also defended Israel on the eviction of two Arab families from a house in east Jerusalem, which had been criticized by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

• Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) boasted in June that he told Chinese officials not to trust America's budget numbers. "One of the messages I had -- because we need to build trust and confidence in our number one creditor," said Kirk, "is that the budget numbers that the US government had put forward should not be believed." Since then, he has declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate."

Weimar Moments (4): Enemies of Humanity

No matter how you slice it, I'm no Jewish mama, but I confess to being worried sick about my boy, our President. To state what I am feeling in the most idiomatic way, I'm absolutely scared shitless he's gonna get killed. Reading Thomas Friedman's column this week in the New York Times did not exactly allay my rampant anxiety, which just happens to be high right now anyway.

In his column, Friedman likened the ugly mood in this country to the one he encountered in Israel in 1995, when he paid a visit to then Prime Minister, Yitzak Rabin. Right-wing extremists were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin and question his authority, as he moved toward finalizing a peace agreement via the Oslo Accords. The wingers accused him of treason, created pictures of him as a Nazi, and shouted death threats at rallies. Same old, same old, you might think, or wink. Except that shortly after that, Rabin was assassinated.

"The parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach," Friedman says. He only chose to write about such an untouchable and unthinkable subject because it disturbs him hugely that, at a time when "we" have such huge problems in this country--the deficit, the recession, health care, unwinnable wars, unemployment, climate change--there is no collective "we" at work anymore trying to solve them. Instead, there are vicious attacks on the President and efforts to delegitimize him coming even from inside the White House by members of Congress--the latest being yet another Republican, Trent Franks from Arizona, who called Obama "an enemy of humanity." The words hang in the air like a funeral wreath. (Later on Franks claimed that he really meant to say "an enemy of unborn humanity.") We now have, according to Friedman, "a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians." It means we can no longer discuss serious issues or make decisions on the basis of our national interest.

For those of us who watch these matters with unaccustomed attention, what is happening can no longer be dismissed as just rude and disrespectful infringements of decency. What we are witnessing, I believe, is nothing less than the unraveling of our government's ability to actually govern. Next will be a full-frontal breakdown of the daylit world we thought we knew. Andrew Sullivan is very concerned about this as well:

"At the same time, you see the right urging a coup, while all but beating a drum for the assassination of the president, an event that would tip this country into a near civil war. In this climate, establishment conservatism for the most part is fanning the flames and pouring on the gasoline.
I always thought it would get worse before it gets better. But I never thought it would get this poisonous this soon," he wrote recently."

Hardly a day goes by that I don't ask myself "What is wrong with us anyway?" It's our one and only last chance (if indeed it isn't too late already) to pull things out of the fire, with a president who finally "gets it," and what are we doing? Trying our damndest to destroy him. And I have to wonder why--why is this happening? How can it be that a fistful of ignoramuses like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are able to hold us all hostage with their apish antics, to the point where nothing will grow anymore in our stone civilization? How can they have such a stranglehold on people's minds? I ask myself these questions daily, and then I look for clues under the bed, like Sherlock Holmes. David Brooks claims the Republicans are beholden to this wing of the party because the GOP leadership is "bamboozled." One clue I found as to why arrived yesterday, while I was reading a book called "Straw Dogs" by John Gray, a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics:

"New technologies do more than transmit information. Not only does everyone receive information faster than before, the mood it creates is far more swiftly contagious. The Internet confirms what has long been known--the world is ruled by the power of suggestion." Contagion and hysteria and suggestibility are all magnified by these new communications technologies. "In evolutionary prehistory," Gray states, "consciousness emerged as a side effect of language. Today it is a by-product of the media."
Wow! it's not the economy, stupid. It's hypnosis. These guys are HYPNOTISTS. Sometimes I receive information like this as flaming darts.

I expect we are about as likely to shut down this aspect of our poisoned media as we are likely to stop driving cars. Sometimes I ponder Eckhardt Tolle, and how he sat for two years on park benches (with no job, no home, no socially defined identity), and what he experienced, he claimed, was a state of INTENSE JOY. In the upside down world of today, personally I don't know what to think anymore--everything seems just ever-so-slightly beyond my comprehension. So, by what right do I put forth ideas as a contribution to society's discussion of its life? Rest assured, it's none at all. But I expect I will continue forever to roll my stone to the top of a hill and watch it then roll down the other side, because it seems that this is our fate.

Our Final Evolutionary Exam

What follows here is a text composed of reconstructed reading notes culled from a recent notebook. I noticed that the way they happened to fall together seemed to provide a set of provocative test questions as to whether or not the human race is likely to survive. I would suggest that people reading the questions answer them (giving a single point to each "yes" and to each "no"). Then add up each of the two separate scores, and report the final verdict back to Virgil.


A time of troubles and crisis points can make or break a civilization. At this juncture in history, our major crises--climate change, economic breakdown, and terrorism--can't be managed alone. They are systemic threats that demand global resolutions. Our success will be measured not by money or power, but by resilience: the ability to change and adapt. The line between our personal lives and the world has become ever more permeable. We are in a profound crisis that is going to demand radical changes, and require engagement, action, and personal responsibility. And the outcome is uncertain. Conformity to old ideas is now lethal; only radical rebellion can change the planet when everything that we cherish is under threat. Two hundred years of growth economy has destroyed the "steady state" of the ecosphere. Will we continue to recklessly pillage and not listen to our own warnings?

Democracies have often gone to war with totalitarian states, but never with each other. But is democracy in the U.S. now at war with itself? Democrats always break their word, and Republicans lie to begin with--but they stick to that lie and thus seem more honest. Are compromises crippling? Is compromise beyond a certain point a deal-breaker? Are the balance of forces biased against significant reform?

The essential skill of the next fifty years will be crisis management in an age of limited resources and instability, uncertainty, and unpredictability. These are the ideas on which we must base our policies if we are going to match conditions in the world around us. The qualities needed will be preparedness, readiness, alertness, vigilance, and the ability to teach ourselves to see differently. Do we have these qualities and are we likely to use them?

Can art help? In our compromised world, can art still be a catalyst for change? The economic boom times are over, and capitalism is flat on its face. But art is still trapped in the "dead objects" paradigm: "Damien Hirst's pickled shark nets $17 million in art auction." Changing our ways is proving difficult for mankind. Given the intensity of economic and environmental collapse, can art do anything in this, Barack Obama's, new "age of responsibility" to make itself more relevant? Certainly the path out of the crisis cannot be a return to the status quo. Or can it? The problem is that we do not look at the consequences of our acts until it is too late to deal with them. Will this ever change?

Is the human race a flawed species? Is the human race doomed? Is it fit to survive? Will our proclivities toward greed and fear do us in? Is there still any possibility left for not heading off into utter disaster? Can that "Green New Deal" for the twenty-first century save us, or will the credit crunch, the oil crunch, and the climate crunch lead to collapse? Does humanity have the will to reverse the damage it has done to the world--and is that damage even reversible any more?

Buckminster Fuller: "We are facing our final evolutionary exam."
Ronald Reagan (in 1981): "A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high."
Norman Mailer (in a letter to his wife, Beatrice, August 8, 1945): "Really, Darling, the vista is horrifying...I believe that to survive the world, cities of tomorrow will be built a mile beneath the earth."
Morris Berman: "I am no longer convinced that the institution of some new paradigm can really save us."
God: "Please don't ask me to come down there."

Applying the American model of freedom and democracy to other cultures and religions outside America has very real limitations. To think otherwise is politically reckless. Anti-Western Islamism has only grown stronger because of our occupation of those lands. We have failed to win in these countries, and we will go on failing to win. Sending more Americans to die will not change that painful reality. Occupations are inherently humiliating. People prefer to run their own affairs. Keeping our troops in Muslim countries is the problem, not the solution. Our motives for being there are seen as suspect and predominantly imperialistic. Would it be better to spend less time on manipulating the world and more on appreciating it?

True or false? Science makes progress, humanity does not.

Weimar Moments (3): White Supremacy Is Out of the Closet!

There was something really strange in the air last week. Former President Jimmy Carter took to the air waves and denounced the vitriolic attacks being launched in President Obama's direction, declaring them mostly driven by racist feelings that an African-American should not be in the White House. Asked about his reaction to Carter's statement, Obama refuted it, saying he did not agree that this is what is motivating people. What is prompting so much unrest, Obama suggested calmly, is a historic, age-old disagreement about the proper size and role of government in people's lives. It's to be expected, he said. It's always been the case, especially over health care. Well, maybe.

But I was mystified, all the same. Not racism? I was feeling like a bit actor in the middle of a movie called "A Perceptual War of the Worlds," spitting against the Waste Land's implacable wind. My mind kept racing back to that memorable moment in August when Barney Frank said to a woman at a health care rally who was screaming in his face about Obama being a Nazi: "What planet are you living on, Madame?"

Hasn't he seen those placards? Is the President sleeping with the enemy? Or maybe a victim of Stockholm Syndrome? I love this man. As do most of the folks I know. I/we want to make sense out of everything he does. But denying the blatant racism? Will he be denying the Holocaust next? Everyone I know is on the edge of their seats about the extremeness of the racial hatred and threats towards Obama now rearing their ugly head:

"I just read your latest blog and printed it out for James," writes my long-time friend, artist, and activist, Margot McLean. She is married to James Hillman (post-Jungian, archetypal psychologist and writer). "Jimmy Carter, who seems to be the only one who is willing to tell it how it is, is absolutely right. It is about racism. It's as clear as black and white...The most frightening thing to me is that everyone seems to want to "move on" about race in this country, but we haven't even entered into facing it yet. How can we move on? As James has said more than once 'Americans always want to move on. It's our psychopathy--ignoring the past. No remorse. No learning.'..James also said when I showed him the protest sign on your latest blog "That's great. At least we can see it. It's much worse when it's hidden."

I slowly began to understand the President's weird response to all the irrefutable race-baiting after reading this cogent commentary by Ta-Nihisi Coates (who happens to be a black man as well), a regular blogger on theatlantic.com:

"Barack Obama, bourgeois in every way that bourgeois is right and just, will not dance. He tells kids to study--and they seethe. He accepts an apology for an immature act of rudeness--and they go hysterical. He takes his wife out for a date--and their veins bulge. His humanity, his ordinary blackness, is killing them. Dig the audio of his response to Kanye West--the way he says, "He's a jackass." He sounds like one of my brothers. And that's the point, because that's what he is. Barack Obama refuses to be their nigger. And it's driving them crazy."

That's it! I thought. I finally got it. Obama isn't dancing. He refuses to be "their nigger." Wow! This became even more clear on the Sunday talk shows when he was being interviewed. Obama does not intend to let the race-baiters--or the media--pre-empt the conversation about health care and turn it into one about race, or for that matter, about him. Like I've said many times already on this blog, this man's greatest teaching to our species is HOW NOT TO TAKE THE BAIT.

No sooner had I written this, then James Hillman, ever the maverick, e-mailed me his comments. I add them here with gusto:

Dear Suzi,
Mocking the upsurge of the "crazies" and exaggerating their sudden danger to res publica is altogether the wrong move. Exult! Show them off! Don't you see: white supremacy is fully out of the closet. They parade in the nation's capital, announcing their ideas on placards, their hidden hatred and fear and desperation in full view—no longer hidden behind small town sherifs and good old boys at Shriner's conventions and local Lion's clubs of business men, their confederates who murder in the dark and on the sly, burn churches in Mississippi, and drag gays to an ugly death. And, don't forget they do have a grievance: our system has always abused the ignorant and the poor. All their beliefs have capsized: the shibboleths of church honesty, the ideas of free market and equal chance to fulfill the American dream, the loyal breadwinner husband and the faithful wife. It crumbled and they know it; they just don't yet get who's really at fault. They still haven't seen through the hypocrisy of carpetbagging, freebooting capitalism that has been strangling their honest impulses ever since Nixon and Reagan and their cynical cohorts turned them into Republicans, and their religion offered salvation only in another world.
James

I expect there is a good case to be made that "sunshine is the best disinfectant!" But where is all this headed?

"I think we have two countries," writes my friend Bill Rutherfoord. Certainly that seems to be more and more the case, but surely it is an alarming prospect. How will it end? The closest thing I've found to a meaningful answer comes from an anonymous commenter on the Huffington Post:

"Everyone I know agrees, Obama's problem is his race. The Regressives ain't even trying to cover it up. Obama's biggest endeavor probably won't be health care or the wars. It's going to be leading our country through a cultural change, which will end up either isolating the bigots and their leaders or, the bigots will win--and the Republicans will continue to ruin our country."

Anyone care to place a bet?

Weimar Moments 2: "Obama Derangement Syndrome"

We delude ourselves in this country if we think we're in the middle of a really nasty debate over health care. What is really happening is some sort of freak phenomenon that somebody has rightly called "Obama Derangement Syndrome." When, inevitably, we find ourselves looking back over all the unsavory events of this frenzied summer of 2009, I think Joe Wilson's disruptive "Liar!" moment will be recognized as the tipping point when (as Frank Rich put it so aptly in last Sunday's New York Times), "the inmates took over the asylum."

Catalyzed by hate, a Republican member of the Senate unexpectedly gives his secret audience an official "thumbs-up"--which declares that it is perfectly acceptable not only to derail the President, but also, by his own dramatic example, to show disrespect to the U.S. government and its institutions. This "liar!" moment was hardly the "spontaneous" welling-up of anger Wilson later proclaimed it to be. It was timed and aimed precisely as the words "undocumented immigrants" passed through the President's lips. And it signaled to all the growing "patriot" brigades out there--those groups whose vision of America is of an exclusively white, Christian country and who protest because "We want our country back!"--that the time has come for concerted, vehement action. The very next day, ordinary people took to the streets in Washington D.C., holding up signs that said "Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar!" affixed to pictures of President Obama. And, believe me, this was only the half of it.

Vicious invectives like these are being attached to political blogs everywhere:

"Nobody is afraid of the CIRCUS CLOWN Community Organizer."
"You're stupid if you take this BIG EARED AFRICAN FREAK seriously."
"Nobody. His stupid smile and his coa-coa skin just doesn't cause UTOPIA anymore."

Such slurs, resounding not just over the Internet but across Cable news and right-wing talk radio as well, are like an apocalyptic plague of locusts descending down upon the human race. They fill one with a tactile sensation of horror: an aspect of so-called "enlightened" society that has gone defiantly feral. And they are not going away any time soon.

The day after reading my previous blog (number one in an ongoing series of "Weimar Moments," which states that "socialist" is the new code word for "nigger"), my friend Jane wrote me:

"Last night I painted late into the wee hours, and I found an Atlanta radio station with Michael Savage, the late-night Rush Limbaugh. "Socialist" was the most composed word he used. He insinuated that Obama would soon gather up the Republican opposition into camps where they wouldn't be heard from again (genocidal maniac) and that he would dilute our national masculinity until, as he put it, we would all soon be "on all fours," praying to Allah...."

"I am hoping that the fearful brains of the furious men and women who see my President as a chimpanzee do not blow too hard with their blind force," she continued. "I am hoping that they do not flatten our landscape. But at the moment it feels like they are huffing and puffing at The White House (literally, protesters all but foaming in D.C. right now, castigating illegal immigrants, pro-choice supporters, gays, blacks, communists, socialists, Muslim sympathizers, god knows what other offenders). My painting is of a languid reclining Buddha with a turbulent indigo river swollen and racing behind him, and a downpour of rain and candy splashing against him. He seems to be enjoying the Candied Monsoon. Nowhere even in the background can you see those D.C. protesters in my painting. They have not gotten as far as this riverbank. They are never going to find some places."

Oh, how I wish my friend Jane was right! As far as I can tell, they are already massing in droves, quite near the riverbank. I've just finished reading the recently published "Intelligence Report" from the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose research indicates a radical resurgence of Klu Klux Klan and white nationalism movements. These groups are composed variously of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, teabaggers, tax protesters, Holocaust deniers, Oathkeepers, "birthers" (who question the legitimacy of Obama's citizenship), Swiftboaters, Survivalists, "Sovereign Citizens" (who declare themselves outside the jurisdiction of the police and the courts), and anti-government "Patriots" (who believe the Feds have set up 1000 internment camps and are storing 30,000 guillotines and caskets for when the government finally declares martial law and moves in on dissenters). Many of them are now banding together via the Internet and forming coalitions. These groups are well-funded and well-organized, and their goal is to push our entire society into a ditch and start a race war.

After their disappearance from public view for nearly a decade, there has been a huge and worrying uptick in these outlaw militia organizations and their propaganda, creating a milieu "where violence is a likely outcome," the report states. On the Oathkeepers' website, for instance, you will find the declaration "We will not fear our government. They will fear us." And should you feel inspired by this, you can purchase a tee-shirt with their logo: "I'm a Right Wing Extremist and Damn Proud of It." (Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!)

Meanwhile, I seem to have acquired a new blogging companion-in-arms in cyberspace, one Tom Degan. Please dont fail to check out his website, "The Rant," at tomdegan.blogspot.com. I am now going to give the steering wheel over to Tom, and let words from his most recent blog finish this post and drive it home:

"The extreme right wing is at the moment having a collective, massive nervous breakdown. They just refuse to accept the nasty little fact that a black guy is now the most powerful human being on the face of the earth - and it is killing them....

Here's what's happening, boys and girls: The "party of Abraham Lincoln" (Imagine that!) has forever been exposed as morally and ethically bankrupt, and they are now in the process of implementing their "scorched earth" policy. In other words, if they have to go down, they have every intention of bringing the rest of us down with them.

If you thought for one minute that the loony right wing had lost all the marbles they could possibly lose - OH, BROTHER! - As the late Al Jolson used to say, "You ain't seen nothin' yet!" ...

Joe Wilson and the nincompoops on the far right have opened a Pandora's Box that may very well prove difficult to close. What they are now doing - consciously or unconsciously - is prompting their brain-dead masses toward violence and intimidation. And let's not forget the untidy little truism that a lot of these folks are armed and dangerous. Who can forget the asshole who showed up outside one of the president's Town Hall meetings in New Hampshire last month with a gun strapped to his leg? My biggest worry is that that little incident is merely a small illustration of worst things to come.

Listen, I really hate to be the bearer of bad tidings here, I really do. But if you can't foresee some kind of Timothy McVeigh-style domestic incident somewhere down the pike, you're a hell of a lot more optimistic than I am. Also, if you are not seriously alarmed by what is now happening to our beloved country, you're not paying attention."