False Idols Falling: Hope for the Future?

Dear Fellow Humans,

Over the last six or so months, we have seen our world turned upside down twice.  First came Covid-9 and the sudden shutdown of practically  all societies on earth and a new lifestyle of fear and social distancing that  it brought  in its wake. Then came the worldwide anti-racism, anti-police brutality, pro-social justice protests sparked by George Floyd's cruel, tragic death in Minnesota. Both crises have exposed underlying weaknesses, contradictions and , I have constantly wondered where these twin global crises will take us in terms of how we regard society, the economy, the environment--really, EVERYTHING. Because everything seems up for grabs right now. We are at one of those rare times in history where difficult, indeed deadly events have stripped away all the superfluous fluff of daily life and focused worldwide attention on injustices and inadequacies that have been tolerated for too long by populations too beaten down, too depressed and dispirited, too apathetic, too self-absorbed or too distracted to actually consider the proposal that "just the way things are" is NOT the way things have to be. All the great rivers of the world occasionally change their courses over time, and it is the same with societies. The waters are rising.  The current is accelerating. The shores are losing their old definitions. Trees are being uprooted. The river of life is shifting. Things that seemed impossible six months ago are now regular topics of conversation.

I do not think that the outcry over police brutality and racism that resounded all around the world last summer, with continuing echoes still,  would have happened if not for the Covid-19 pandemic. The profound shock of seeing normal patterns of life abruptly halted and vast numbers of people sealed off in their homes for self-protection while other worked and sickened and died, with  rates of sickness and mortality replacing stock market averages and sport team results as the statistics of greatest popular interest, has given people time to think, reflect and feel deep things, troubling things, things they might have preferred to avoid in pleasanter times, but now can relate to much more easily than before, because we are ALL facing the firing squad of Covid-19. However, some get to lock themselves away in comfortable homes with plenty of space and comfort, but others do not, particular poor people, African-Americans, and other racial minorities. Others have to walk out into that viral hurricane every day to earn their daily bread and have to worry they when they come home to their families at the end of very long days at very hard jobs, they may be putting virus on the table along with that daily bread, with their loved ones partaking of both. Others are trapped in institutions for the elderly and the disadvantaged with totally inadequate staff and resources to effectively protect the most vulnerable among us. The spectacle of mass suffering, unjust suffering, unequal suffering has penetrated the popular consciousness and raised awareness that our social order is sick, unstable, and cruel.

Another spectacle, that of ignorant, incompetent leaders like American President Donald Trump, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Belarusian Alexander Lukashenko, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro,  blustering away on television, brushing aside the advice of medical scientists and the health professionals for us all to practice social distancing, ramp up our hand-washing and general hygiene, and keep coverings on our face to reduce viral transmission, has caused at least some supporters of  the aforesaid leaders to lose their faith in these men. When your country's people are dying in large numbers, and the head of your government proves to care much more about protecting corporate profits than  the population, you just might lose your faith in the man who you previously thought was so "entertaining," so "different," and so refreshingly "honest" with his free-flowing hostility toward minorities, elites and others and his seeming sympathy for "forgotten people" like you imagined yourself to be. Now  you can see that your Dear Leader may not quite be all that you thought he was and that all he has to offer you is more animosity toward this or that group, no real solutions, no real plan.

The collapse in the popularity of the aforesaid "leaders"--that word does seem a bit ironic in this context, doesn't it?-- is just one part of a much bigger domino effect, of false idols of many sorts crashing to the ground after bring struck with the twin thunderbolts of the coronavirus and what seems a new consensus about how sadly warped our societies are by racism ,and how poorly served we are by militaristic police who seem all too eager to use lethal force. We can also see crashing and crumbling the long-standing assumptions that businessmen and entrepreneurs are the real heroes of society, that the "magic of the market"  so much more efficient and reliable than government (see Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman for past advocates in this point of view); that  government is in fact a menace to "freedom;" that the government should never intervene in the economy; that the anti-government rhetoric of leaders like Reagan was just a bit of political sloganeering that would do no harm; that if people are poor or poorly paid, it is their own fault, and not something that should trouble the rest of society; that it is perfectly fine if many people have no health care or health insurance; that having large numbers of people homeless and in prison is acceptable; that even the most extreme inequality is part of  the proper functioning of the economy; that faraway peoples in other countries have nothing to do with us in our own home countries; that the needs of businessmen are more important than the needs of ordinary people; that public health and the natural world are less important than the health of the stock market and corporate profits.  Let's break this down a little more.

False Idol #1: Government bad, business good. When the coronavirus pandemic took hold in March 2020, governments worldwide struggled to respond, because in many cases health services had been stripped down and cut back in tandem with tax-cutting for the benefit of the business sector. Hospitals run like businesses failed to maintain stocks of personal protective equipment and medical devices like ventilators, because keeping large quantities of such stuff around when it was not immediately needed was anathema to the business mindset of keeping operations lean and relying on "just in time" supply chains. Well guess what, pandemics don't care about corporate business fads. People who really knew something about the threat of pandemics knew that it was important to have lots of supplies on hand, but the corporate types chose to cut things back. When the economy went into free-fall due to the need for shutdown of travel, guess who had to be rescued by the government? The very same businesses often so hostile to government. Not a few people have begun to see that the business sector is extremely selfish, expecting support for itself that it would be happy to deny to poor and struggling masses around the world

False Idol #2: If people suffer or are poor, it is their own fault, and no one should have to help them.  This pandemic has taken its most horrific toll on the poor and disadvantaged of the world. They did not ask to be poor any more than they asked to be exposed to the pandemic. With the fear of death that the pandemic makes universal, and the fear of extended poverty and unemployment that is now possible for large swathes of the population, including the formerly affluent, employed and comfortable, suddenly many who previously rejected the idea of government public assistance to the poor and needy are very interested in this very thing!  Fear of death and fear of poverty certainly do broaden the mind, don't they?

False Idol #3: Educated people, scientists and "elites" are suspicious people who cannot be trusted.  Donald Trump's coronavirus-update press conferences were a huge embarrassment, not only due to his verbal diarrhea of inconsistent, factually incorrect and self-contradictory statements, but also because he obviously did not like ceding the stage to more knowledgeable people like Anthony Fauci, who was studying infectious diseases back when Trump was still learning how to run a business empire based on bankruptcy  I think by now, most people realize that we need more people like Fauci in government, and far fewer like Trump.

False Idol #4: All that really matters is money. The Milton Friedman-Reagan-Thatcher-Trump neoliberal logic that the world is just an economic enterprise and that we all should just get with the program and seek to monetize everything and reduce all reality to numbers on the computer screens of financial analysts has certainly been blown to bits by the deep and limitless unfairness and suffering now on display for all to see. We need each other, we need a more caring and just society, not just a fat bank account. We need a world to live in, not a luxury mansion with walls a mile high. You can't hide from our common reality anymore. It could be a commonwealth, our common health, or a common hell.... We have to decide. It is up to all of us.

I  hope a brighter future is coming, despite the grim shadows all around us.  

May you all have hope and heart and strength for the time we are in now, and for going into the future. 

Remember to help each other. We are all each other's keepers. We always were, but maybe we forgot. Let us remember that now, and for the future and for always.

A Season of Silence, and Why

My my my...How the time flies. I can't believe it has been more than two months since I have written in this blog. This autumnal season of silence came about partly for the reasons one might expect: work life very busy, leading to exhaustion capped by a touch of illness. Tra-la-la! There was also a more pleasant reason for my inability to find the time or energy to write here. I had a trip to Lithuania to participate in a project aiming at promoting inter-religious tourism in Lithuania and Latvia, both of which are lands blessed with amazingly rich histories of religious diversity, from their Pagan heritage to their long histories of Jewish and Muslim communities along with varied Christan contributions. This was a great pleasure but also quite exhausting.

There is however, another reason for my persistent silence. I am finding the current state of American society and politics so depressing, so frustrating, that I feel a growing sense of hopelessness for this country of my birth. The forces of obstruction and ignorance are so many and so immense in our declining, divided, self-destructive nation. I can only compare our situation to scenarios imagined in mythology and religious prophecy, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that usher in devastation and destruction in the Biblical Book of Revelations, or the ten plagues that descend upon Egypt in Exodus, or the dark forces that take down the world in flames and flood in Norse Ragnarok, or the dread dance of Shiva that beats out its world-crushing rhythm when humanity has become so stupid, so cruel, so lost, so impervious to guidance or wisdom that the gods decide that the world must be put out of its misery and cleared away to make space for a new world yet to come.

We today in America are facing a really sinister and powerful combination of retrograde forces. These range from carbon-based energy industries that do not want to see any movement toward a greener, healthier planet and economy, to the gun lobby that refuses to even consider very modest measures to reduce the danger of guns and gun-related materials falling into the possession of mentally imbalanced individuals who go on shooting rampages or into the hands of immature youths who are eager to settle scores with bullets. The list goes on to include the greedy, self-important minority of super-wealthy plutocrats who do not wish to see higher wages for people at lower strata of our highly unequal and unfair economy, to the Tea Partiers and libertarians who do not want the government to do anything besides putting people in prison and maintaining a grossly oversized military whose continued existence and immense expenditures can only be justified by continual conflict and crisis and propaganda inflaming our fear and hatred against whichever foreign country is now top of our enemy-of-the year list. I fear that our interlinked military-intelligence-industrial-political sectors will keep pushing us to either use or threaten to use force overseas as often as possible, even though this may only inflames others against us. Then we have the disheartening spectacle of the Supreme Court that is gutting and discarding decades of Civil Rights progress and returning us to a time when state and local politicians could enact all kinds of barriers to prevent African-Americans or other disfavored social groups from having any voice in our supposed "democracy," which the Court has also damaged terribly by allowing more freedom for wealthy individuals and corporations to dominate the political process through unlimited political advertising and financial contributions to the causes that perpetuate their interest and privilege.

In the embattled world of academia, which I know from the inside, the forces of misguided "reform" seem to be pushing us in the direction of a standardized, bureaucratized, heavily managed and number-driven form of education in which teachers will have little autonomy or job security, and in which liberal arts education, which can waken people to higher visions of life and a desire to create a more equal and less cruel society, will be pushed aside by an obsession with job-training out of a mistaken belief that training young people with the right technical skills will somehow overcome the problems of corporations seeking to send jobs overseas to lower-paid workers, or to bring lower-paid workers to America to replace highly skilled workers here, so that the majority of college graduates, even if highly trained and skilled will have to compete for low-paying jobs in corporations that refuse to share their profits with their workers. If we do not change the rules of the economic game, simply training people will solve nothing. Since the 1970s, American workers have become more and more productive, but rarely been allowed to enjoy a fair share of the profits generated by their productivity, and unless we have a revived labor movement or some other mechanism to force companies to pay better, there seems little hope for the American worker.

And as for the media's favorite pipe dream that high-tech millionaires and billionaires will show us the way, let's not forget that it was great geniuses like Steve Jobs who sent so much high-tech manufacturing to countries like China and India. Entrepreneurs will never lead the way to a more equal economy. They often make their millions and billions from the hard labor of workers who are paid as little as possible. It will require some kind of external pressure to force the high-tech folks to share much with the common man and woman. The popular adulation of high-tech entrepreneurs as economic saviors is a joke. They are in it for themselves, not for us. And since our government is increasingly at the beck and call of consummately greedy and self-interested companies and corporations, not only the high-tech toy-makers but also the oil companies, the multinational banks, the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street financial firms and so on, I find it hard to escape the conclusion that we are entering a new Middle Ages, in which a small class of ruling elite will live in splendor, in beautiful mansions, surrounded by servants and flatterers, like kings and barons living in castles of olden times--and aren't our modern gated communities just an updated form of castle fortresses?--while the rest of us will eke out an insecure living through hard labor, deeply in debt, but unable to challenge our social superiors.

I am mentally and emotionally exhausted. That is why I am not writing much these days. I look for rays of hope, but see so very few. The advent of the Affordable Health Care Act, aka Obamacare, a modest attempt to re-structure our primarily corporate health care system to provide better care to more people, has only unleashed new ferocity among the various groups who oppose any kind of government activity apart from military action, and see any kind of social reform or even the slightest effort to provide assistance to the growing ranks of poor and needy persons in our society as a foul betrayal of freedom and liberty. I see anti-government zealots ready to cut food benefits to the hungry and who smile when 800,00 government workers are cut off from their salaries for weeks on end, and who don't even care if their actions push the international economy to the brink of financial disaster. I see the President mocked when he tries to negotiate peace with Iran.

The only comfort to me right now is the election of Bill DiBlasio to the office of the mayor of New York City. At last, a leader who speak about income inequality and rising poverty as problems that all society, and especially government, must address. His election is an answer to those who dismissed the Occupy Wall Street movement nearly two years ago as a silly, leaderless, rudderless social fad that would have no effect. It was the Occupy movement elevating the issues of financial institution greed and wealth inequality in New York that lit the spark that became the bright light of the DiBlasio candidacy. No doubt DiBlasio will not be able to satisfy all the hopes and ambitions of those who supported him, but I think he will at least try to push back against the trend toward plutocracy that is at the heart of so many of our ills. I am glad to see someone, somewhere, making some kind of stand and articulating an alternative vision.

But sadly...anyone who knows America knows that New York City is an anomaly in this country. I live some distance from NYC, and I know that many of my fellow citizens here believe the old Reaganite narrative constantly reiterated by right-wing media like FOX, but increasingly in evidence across the culture, that "government is the problem" and that cutting taxes, shrinking government, and "unleashing" business and entrepreneurship are the solutions, that the military is sacred and that we must "support the troops" and never question what the troops are called upon to do and why, nor the effects of those actions, and that if you are not a "success" in America--something measured primarily, if not exclusively in materialistic, money-making terms--that you only have yourself to blame. The alternate, liberal narrative of "we are all in this together," and that we could use government as a vehicle to share out resources to create a better life for everyone, not just the elite few, is not convincing to most people.

I am facing the reality that the things I really believe in may no longer have any place,or at the very best, only a very marginal,vestigial place in this sad, misguided, self-delusional and self-destructive country, this very dis-United States of America. The pendulum may someday swing back to more equality and compassion in this country, but I don't see it happening in my lifetime.

It is these thoughts that crush me into silence. Perhaps this will spark a renewal of my spirituality; I hope so. Maybe it is time to turn inward, and to seek refuge with other spiritual refugees in this very hard and fearful time, while no longer expecting the larger society to improve or change very much, at least not in any foreseeable future. The Buddha taught that the fundamental truth of life is suffering, and that this is the starting point of spiritual insight. Perhaps that is the crossroads that I am facing. I don't know. All I know is that it seems very dark outside indeed.

Changing the Conversation--At Last!

For a very long time,I have felt extremely depressed and dispirited by the state of American politics and society. My disillusionment goes back decades, in fact, all the way to the 1980 presidential campaign, when President Carter battled in vain against the rising tide of American conservatism which would deliver Ronald Reagan, with his promises of tax cuts, smaller government, and more "freedom" to the White House. Carter warned that the election of his opponent would result in a tearing apart of American society with an increasing division of rich from poor, black from white, and so forth. Boy, was Carter ever right, and was America ever wrong to follow the siren-song of Reagan's smiling, flag-draped conservatism, with its grim undertones of racism, greed and militarism.

In the three decades since President Raygun took office, the conservative vision of America has dominated our political life and determined some very important social trends. Accomplishments of this era including an ever-increasing prison population, with a disproportionately high number of African-American males incarcerated, with devastating social consequences for African-American communities; an ever-increasing gap between rich and poor, which has now become better and more widely understood thanks to the "Occupy" movement; stagnation in wages for most Americans who live through paychecks rather than stock portfolios and investment dividends; an ever-expanding and ever-more expensive military domination of the world, from Reagan's Star Wars fantasies to Bush's invasions to Obama's love affair with remote control political assassination by drone; and a triumph of anti-tax, anti-government, anti-regulation, tax-cutting-solves-everything rhetoric, typified by Grover Norquist's "No New Taxes Ever For All Eternity" pledge, now followed religiously by nearly all Republican Presidential candidates, the intention of which Norquist explained as "shrinking the federal government so that it can be strangled in a bathtub," with the result that apart from blank-check military spending, our government is constrained from engaging in any kind of large government programs that might actually improves the lives of average people, from infrastructure repair to mass transit development to more support for public schools to lower cost higher education to the development of green technologies. This is Reagan's "Morning in America," and it has had a good long run of 30 plus years in ruling the mindset of the vast majority of Americans and setting the parameters of American public life...UNTIL NOW.

Occupy Wall Street has blown this tired old set of ideas and assumptions out of the water, and opened up a whole new menu of questions and possibilities for Americans to ponder. FINALLY people are realizing that government is not to blame for stagnant wages, a crashed economy, and immense suffering grounded in extreme social and economic inequality: it is the financial and corporate elite who are most responsible, as they are the ones who have been reaping great benefits while raping the rest of us. They are the ones who have made great profits with every increase in oil prices, every rise in penalties and fees on credit cards and bank accounts, every ingeniously misrepresented mortgage, every foreclosure on the poor, every lay off of workers, every pay cut to employees, every movement of factories to China and other low-wage, low-regulation havens, every reprehensible trick in the book to evade taxes, deceive investors and reward their tight little incestuous circle of crony capitalists. We have all been told this was the only way it can be, that we must simply accept and obey that we are all doomed to sinking wages, rising debt,disappearing pensions and diminishing futures...but now there is an alternative.

Let the great struggle begin! Now is the time to make a new economy and a new society that serves human needs over corporate profits! OCCUPY wherever you are!

I have been waiting thirty years for this, through the initially promising but ultimately disappointing presidencies of Bill "The Triangulator" Clinton and Barrack "The Compromiser" Obama. I really hope that this time, some change is actually going to happen.

Keep the pressure on and the questions and conversations going!

Telling the Truth about Tucson

It is very interesting to see the reaction in the American media to the mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona last Saturday night (January 8). Some are taking the view that no one can be blamed for the actions of a clearly deranged individual. Others are saying that while the shooter was indisputably insane, both sides of the political spectrum need to take responsibility for heated political rhetoric in the last several years that may have inspired this demented young man to pick up a gun and shoot a politician, a judge and a number of others.

Bullshit. There is only one political party in America on one side of the political spectrum that has made a specialty of drumming up intensive hatred of the government and that has repeatedly encouraged people to consider taking up arms against the government. That party is the Republican Party, with its young Frankenstein monster the "Tea Party" movement never being told that it should calm down and be less angry and extreme. There is a very long trail here that simply has no counterpart in the Democratic Party or on the left-wing side of the spectrum.

Barry Goldwater, Republican candidate for President in 1964, made the famous statement during his campaign that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." This was in the same time period when peaceful Civil Rights activists were being beaten by right-wing supporters of racial inequality and in some cases killed by lynch mobs in the South. Goldwater made clear where he stood by voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was much appreciated by Southern opponents of Civil Rights and desegregation. The South was the one area of the country where Goldwater did well in the 1964 election, setting the trend of solid Southern support for Republican candidates for President in nearly every election since then.

Ronald Reagan, running for President in 1980, made his first speech after winning the Republican nomination at a site in Mississippi just a few miles from an infamous spot where Civil Rights workers had been brutally slain in 1964. He talked of restoring "states' rights," an unmistakable reference to right-wing, Southern opposition to the Civil Rights movement, which made clear that his choice of location for his first major speech as Republican Presidential candidate was no mere coincidence. Reagan was laying claim to the heritage of violent opposition to the Civil Rights movement, and saw no need to pay homage to the Civil Rights martyrs of that region. Reagan would go on to coin the phrase, "Government is not the solution; government is the problem," which has ever since been the mantra of the anti-government conservatives.

In the 1990s, Republican politicians often shared the sentiments of the anti-government, gun-crazed militia movement, which was in many ways a forerunner of the Tea Party movement. Bill Clinton,a Democrat and a liberal, was demonized with outrageous accusations by right-wing, conservative politicians, including the claim that he had engineered the killing of his friend and aide, Vince Foster. Among conservatives and militia members in this era, there was much paranoia directed toward the United Nations, which they feared was setting up a secret government that would soon enslave Americans and take away their liberties. The mood of anti-government hatred and the glorification of anti-government violence reached its peak in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murray government building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh in 1995.

Under President George W. Bush, right-wing hate and anger cooled down a bit, perhaps because Bush's continually expanding wars against Muslim nations provided an external outlet for conservative anger and paranoia. Though there was angry left-wing opposition to Bush's policies, especially his wars, it never led to the kind of mass cult of paranoia and violence that was typical of the Clinton era. With President Obama's election, there was a resurgence of 1990s-style anti-government sentiment and a renewed glorification of anti-government violence. Once more, wild, extreme accusations were made about a Democratic, liberal President, whose African-American heritage seemed to inflame conservatives into paroxysms of rage and paranoia. Sales of guns and ammunition skyrocketed. The right-wing media, which had been in their infancy in the Clinton era, were now well-tooled operations of mass propaganda and coordinated fear-mongering, and were able to terrify many Americans that the quite mild, liberal and pro-corporate policies of the Obama administration, such as a health-care reform effort that was quite disappointing to liberals and the left wing, were pushing the country to the edge of the apocalypse. The spring and summer of 2009 saw the rise of the Tea Party movement, with angry opponents of Obama and Democratic policies showing up at political rallies armed with guns and shouting out their paranoia and anger with red-faced fury. In Texas, an anti-government zealot flew a plane into a building. The FBI issued a warning about rising activity by right-wing extemists and militia groups.

Then came the 2010 election season. Republican politicians were eager to cozy up to the Tea Party, seeking to harness their passion and fury. Rarely did any Republicans, even those previously known as political moderates, speak out against the paranoid fantasies and violent rhetoric of Tea Party members and right-wing extremisists. Instead, they openly or implicitly endorsed such sentiments. Republican Congresswoman and Tea Party groupie Michelle Bachman urged her followers to be "armed and dangerous" in opposition to new energy policies under debate in Congress. Sarah Palin urged conservatives, "Don't retreat; instead, reload!," and placed gun-targeting cross-hairs on an internet map of Democrat candidates whose defeat she was advocating on a website. One of the candidates targeted on this map was Gabrielle Gifford, the Democratic Congresswoman shot in the head on Saturday night. Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Senator in Nevada, spoke approvingly of "Second Amendment remedies" and armed insurrection against the government.

In all of these ways, the Republican Party and its right-wing, militia and Tea Party allies have poured huge amounts of energy into creating mass hysteria, paranoia and anti-government, particularly anti-Democrat, anger. It is one thing to express opposition to policies, but it is something very different to give explicit or implicit approval to people brandishing guns and fantasizing about heroic violence against politicans and the government.

The Tucson shootings were aided and abetted by the Republicans and the right-wing in America. There is nothing equivalent on the Democratic or left-wing side of American politics. It is time to call a spade a spade and not pretend that there is equal blame to go around on both sides. There is only one side that is dedicated to pushing fear, hatred and violence. Those who have made their careers and even considerable fortunes by feeding these flames of fury, fear and violent fantasy need to be held responsible.

Furthermore, it is time to realize that the massive amount of violent fantasy and imagery in our culture is a sickness. It plays into a worldview that the only solution to any problem is through heroic violence. Consider how government is represented on American television shows. It is portrayed as useless, corrupt, evil. The only government agencies shown in a positive light are those engaged in violence: police and soldiers. Almost no other part of government is represented in an appealing manner, while violent vigilantes and brothers-in-arms are continually glorified.

So, if you were a deranged young person like the shooter in Tucson, you would find massive encouragement in American culture and right-wing politics for becoming a gun-toting, tyranny-resisting hero in your own twisted fantasy of violent manhood. We need to start speaking out and turning away from this. We need to start valuing our government officials and public servants, in contrast to the right-wing campaign now under way to villify teachers and others on the public payroll. They are not our enemies. They work for us. Are they perfect? No. Are we perfect? No. Do they deserve to die for trying to do their jobs? What do you think?

Peace. That is not a wimpy, foolish thing. It is sanity. We need it. Badly. We do not need more glorification of war, weapons, violence. We have already had too much.

Some Modest Proposals

Jonathan Swift, author of "Gulliver's Travels" once sardonically suggested in an essay entitled "A Modest Proposal" that the best solution to the proliferation of poor people in Britain was to give them a useful role in the British economy as a food source; that is, to eat them. Since in America, we are in the middle of the most severe economic recession since the 1930s, with our "deficit hawk" politicians in Washington refusing to extend the unemployment benefits that have been a lifeline to millions of unemployed workers, we need to think seriously, as Swift did, about how we want to deal with the reality that there are an increasing number of very poor people in our society. The simplest solution is just to kill them. This approach has the great virtue of being in tune with the American value of pure rugged individualism and the lofty Social Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest. If these people are unable to find jobs and take care of their own financial futures, if they have failed in the great America free market of competition, why should they be allowed to go on living? They are just taking up space that could be better used to provide luxury housing and retail outlets for those Americans who ARE good people and have proven this by becoming fabulously wealthy.

Furthermore, the extermination of the poor could be televised as a--naturally--"Pay Per View" program, to raise money for some worthy cause like medical research into the health problems caused by excessive wealth, in which super-wealthy Wall Street executives, oil company CEOs, multi-millionaire baseball and basketball players, pop music stars, and other examples of God-given success, are allowed to execute poor people in a manner of their choosing. Market survey research has proven that this kind of programming would be far more popular with the majority of Americans, including those who are sliding into poverty but prefer to think of themselves as "middle class," than programming that explores the actual circumstances of poor people.

Who needs the poor? Let them die. This would be somewhat embarrassing for our nation, it is true, but certainly far less shameful than forcing our government to go into debt to provide financial assistance to these worthless individuals. Given the choice between adding to the national debt by helping the jobless and simply exterminating them in a cost-effective manner, the choice is clear. It is the duty of every red-blooded, patriotic American to either become rich, or kill the poor.

***************************************************

The above is my attempt at satirical humor. My more serious thoughts on this subject are that we should absolutely take care of those who are losing jobs and falling into poverty in our society. I disagree with the way that this issue is being framed by most politicians and media pundits. According to them, the only way we can provide aid to the jobless and poor is by the government going deep into debt and driving up the deficit. There is another way to go. When a government budget faces a shortfall, the crucial choice is between cutting services and raising revenues. We have heard plenty of voices saying we must tighten our belts, we must cut back government programs, and so forth. I think we should consider the other possibility, of increasing revenues by raising taxes.

I know that the very phrase "raise taxes" is enough to mobilize a hundred million conservative Americans into an angry, frothing frenzy, but I persist in calling for this, because I think it is the only way forward without decimating services that are widely needed across this country. Let me add as an aside that not only are unemployment benefits on the chopping block, but many other government services from education to fire departments to you-name-it. Check out your local news to see how this is unfolding in your state or local community, as it is becoming nearly universal across the USA, with very few exceptions. I would also like to point out that there is a huge amount of research showing that from about 1980 onwards, with the Reagan tax cuts, the decline of labor unions, and other factors, the wealthiest 5% of Americans have seen an exponential growth in their income and assets, while the vast majority of Americans have seen their level of income and assets dwindle and diminish, while their level of debt has been rising dramatically and continuously. That is to say, there has been growing income inequality for decades. Since we now face a crisis that is hitting the most vulnerable members of our human community with brutal force, isn't it time for those wealthy Americans to give something back, to sacrifice a small amount of their vast wealth, to help those who are on the edge of despair and homelessness? It is time for the greedy to face the needy. We should move quickly to institute income tax increases on the top 5%. THEY CAN AFFORD IT. If we are unable to face this issue, then my joking proposal in the first half of this entry will prove to not be a silly joke, but a grimly accurate prophecy. Have we really become a "winner-take-all" country where the lucky few get to live lives of immense luxury, while millions scrape and struggle? That is pretty much the same as letting the rich kill the poor. It just not as direct and dramatic as what I mention above.

Though this blog entry is primarily one about American politics, it does also connect to one of my main concerns about American Paganism. I have detected--and please correct me if I am wrong--that among American Asatru believers, there is a general right-wing, conservative, or libertarian political orientation, that is totally opposed to the kind of tax policy I mention above. These are people who largely, in my experience, like to fancy themselves modern-day, Viking heroes, tough, independent, and not needing no help from nobody, least of all Big Government. Here is why I think their viewpoint is wrong, and here I must ask forgiveness of my readers for repeating a point I have made repeatedly in the early days of this blog. If we look to the homeland of the Vikings, to Scandinavia, we find that these societies have continued to evolve from medieval times onwards to embrace large, effective government, generous social programs including substantial jobless benefits, and progressive tax policies that require the well-to-do to pay high levels of tax to take care of the rest of society. The results have been spectacular: a healthy, well-educated population, much less of a gap between rich and poor, much less crime, and still, a very successful, thriving business sector, from Nokia to Ikea and beyond. It can be done, and the modern-day Vikings show how.

I believe that the most important thing in religion is to waken in ourselves our "higher mind," our greatest potential. I believe that the gods of any and all traditions represent the human attempt to symbolize and personify many different peoples' glimpses of that higher mind that speaks to us to beckon us to a higher level of awareness. In the Norse tradition, I see that higher mind symbolized and personified by Odin. I think modern-day Scandinavia is, in a certain sense, still listening to Odin and tapping into that higher awareness, and using that to create some of the most pleasant and equitable societies in the world. I wish America could do the same.

I regret deeply that my Asatru brothers and sisters in the USA seem to be only devoted to looking backwards, to trying to create some kind of fossilized version of tenth-century Viking heroism, combined with a particular brand of modern-day American "rugged individualism" wrapped up with love of the military and dislike of government. I think Odin has moved on, and they should too!

PS. We could also take money out of the military budget to pay for human needs in the USA, but I guess that is simply impossible. The military is sacred.

ADS: American Depression Syndrome

Hello friends. I have not posted in this blog for some time as I have been feeling increasingly disillusioned with the gutless, corporate-favoring tendencies of the Obama administration and the rise to prominence of the wacky right-wing "tea party" movement, which seems determined to replace all elected officials in the USA with members of the John Birch Society. I have long faulted Obama, supposedly the greatest political communicator since Reagan, for failing to offer a convincing counter-narrative to replace the one implanted in our consciousness by Saint Ronnie: "big government = bad; big military = good; military invasion = good; social programs to help the poor = bad; all hail the entrepreneur and the sacred tax cut."

Obama, like Clinton before him, continues to govern as if there were no possible alternative to the Gospel of Ronnie. Remember Clinton kowtowing to the Republicans and helpfully declaring, "The Era of Big Government is over?" Obama is no better. As with Clinton, we are going to see lots of small, positive actions by the government, things like improved civil rights enforcement, tighter environmental and financial industry regulations, all of which are welcome in themselves, but which fail to be supported and protected by any kind of overarching ideological framework. And so when Republicans attack Obama for increasing the size or role of government, he is unable to make a clear case for why in certain areas of society, it is GOOD to have "big government," unable to cogently explain why leaving things to "big business" over the last thirty-odd years has not really worked out very well, as evidenced by the growing gap between rich and poor in this country, the failure of businesses to raise the average worker's wages even when companies realize enormous gains in productivity and profit; and finally, the coup de grace, the collapse of Wall Street followed by the government bail-out of Wall Street.

I want a leader who is actually PROUD of our government and the liberal tradition of successful government programs from Social Security to the minimum wage to civil rights legislation to environmental regulation to Medicare and Medicaid to student loans, all of which were opposed by anti-government Republicans. I don't want a leader who apologetically whimpers, "Well, people, we're going to have to expand government a little bit to help with the current situation, but DON'T WORRY, it is only a temporary measure, and we will turn management of most things over to the wise management of the corporate sphere as soon as possible." With the huge problems we are facing, such as massive unemployment and collapsing infrastructure, to name but two of the most pressing, we really need a major government response, not just little tax cuts, grants and financial incentives here and there as the Obama administration is providing.

The unemployment and infrastructure problems could be simultaneously addressed by a massive public works program to rebuild highways, bridges, train tracks, sewers and public schools, all of which are badly in need of repair and renovation, the lack of which will seriously hamper our future economic growth if they are not attended to quickly. But is the Obama administration boldly pushing in this direction? NO. They are making some small moves, but nothing near to commensurate with the actual scale of need. One third of last year's much-maligned $787 billion stimulus program was TAX CUTS, a nod to the Republicans, who as you will recall, loudly and cheerfully commended Obama for reaching out to them in this matter. (Note: sarcasm.)

Since neither Obama nor the Democrats in Congress are boldly and expeditiously advancing programs to quickly put people to work and take care of other pressing needs like mortgage foreclosure, they are perceived, with some justification, as only caring about the financial elite on Wall Street, who did after all get very quick and thorough attention when they were in crisis, unlike the millions of Americans suffering unemployment and loss of their homes. This has given an opening to the right-wing Tea Party types, who may have no real answers to any of these problems, but do know how to articulate anger and frustration, play on fears of "big government," and throw in occasional racist allusions, to please the older white voters who were never entirely thrilled about electing a black president to begin with. Ugh! What a mess.

Why doesn't Obama step up and tell people the truth: that America needs to wake up and start catching up with the rest of the industrialized world, where government does provide universal health care, does maintain infrastructure, does support arts and culture, does provide a social safety net for the poor and unemployed such as we threw away in the last 30 years, and so on and so on. He won't do it because he is scared of the anti-government conservatives, who continue to rule the roost as far as the general American mindset regarding government's role in society is concerned. It would be a hard-fought battle to alter that mindset, to get back to a time when the American people trusted their government to do big things like send a man to the moon, instead of relying on the corporate world to provide space travel services, which is the latest news out of NASA under the Obama administration, incidentally.

It has been the dream of anti-government conservatives since the 1980s to so degrade and cripple the federal government that people would turn against it, and it seems they have succeeded. Coming into office on a platform of hope and change, Obama had a chance to re-write the narrative, to forcefully reject the anti-government mindset. At this time, it seems that not only has he has failed, but that he didn't even try very hard. His strange devotion to "bipartisanship" has been extremely regrettable, as it has played right into Republican desire for deadlock as "proof" of the evils of government.

I do despair. I fear we are headed for third-world status, to a society with mediocre schools and public services, where corporations rule what is left of the people's government, where the average person sits drooling in front of televisions and computer screens blasting sports shows, mindless "reality" programs, and endless variations on police and hospital dramas, and where the only areas in which America is truly #1 is in the number of people we keep in prison, and a bloated military endlessly invading and harassing other people around the world, predictably inciting vicious terrorist responses, justifying further U.S. invasions in the name of "protecting our freedoms" while in actuality only advancing the corporate interests of the military-industrial complex and swelling the ranks of those willing to take up arms against the American aggressor.

Welcome to the 21st Century. Remember, you (Americans) are living in the greatest country in the world. Everyone else envies you. Everyone around the world wishes they could come to America, shop in our shopping malls, experience learning in our fabulous schools, live in our ugly McMansions, which typify our famously high regard for architecture and aesthetics, enjoy the art and culture so generously promoted in every community, seek financial success in our wonderful casinos, and should they not find it, enjoy the full range of social services provided free of cost in our prisons. This is indeed paradise. Thank the Great White God that Big Government did not stand in the way of our attainment of perfection.