October 31st, 2008 by Hoopleton

I really hate Sarah Palin, I can’t stand people I don’t know knocking on my door and I absolutely loathe Halloween, so in many not insignificant ways today is the worst day of my life.

It’s Halloween (and if you’re just learning that now you may want to stop butchering prostitutes in your makeshift basement dungeon long enough to glance outside), traditionally this Pagan, turned Christian, turned consumer mess of a holiday has always brought me nothing but bad luck (and you thought Houdini and I had nothing in common). Sure, bad things have happened to me on other days of the year. When I get into car accidents, fights, legal problems, and financial disasters, when I’m broken up with, caught in a flood or injured, it doesn’t always take place on Halloween, but if you take into account that all these things have happened to me on one of the twenty-eight preceding October 31sts, you’ll excuse me if I don’t start reading into things.

Despite being my own perfect personal karmic storm Halloween is also just idiotic for anyone over the age of twelve. If you’re an adult who is not an international man of mystery whose ability to save the world hinges on his being able to sneak into an evil mastermind’s secret lair undetected, then the only time you should be wearing a costume is when you and your partner have already gone through bondage and tickle play and have nothing better to do on a Sunday night. Past the age of puberty, if sex isn’t involved and you have a costume on then you should probably be required to get a special license for the purposes of breeding.

Maybe the whole “let’s dress up and make believe that Halloween isn’t just the most pathetic excuse yet to go drinking” thing wouldn’t be so bad if people could come up with some original costumes now and then. A little creativity isn’t that much to ask for once a year.

Oh, and putting on a Barack Obama mask or painting yourself like Heath Ledger from the Dark Knight is not original, it doesn’t make you clever, it only serves as a painful reminder of what a slave to trends you really are. And no, no, putting on Tina Fey glasses and telling everyone you’re the governor of Alaska isn’t clever or funny either, in fact all it says about you is that you have not one creative bone in your body and you have exceptionally bad taste.   Do you have any clue of how many Sarah Palin costumes are out there tonight? Good, now multiply that by 10,000 and you get an idea of how boring you really are. Current events or recent pop culture references are about as creative as women who wear nighties on Halloween so that they can pretend to be slutty so that they can, in fact, be slutty. Also, if you’re a man and you use this holiday as an excuse to dress in drag, then all you are saying to the world is that you secretly long to dress in drag. And before you get any ideas, being Joe the Plumber is even stupider than dressing up as Sarah Palin as Joe the Plumber is probably the only man who is actually stupider than Sarah Palin.

I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me that I’m no fun, that I’m a year-round scrooge or that I’m demanding too much from a culture in which every original idea has been done, redone and done again. Maybe you’ll even say that my strange personal irrational disdain of Halloween is based on a string of bad experiences that were somehow, consciously or subconsciously of my own making. All those may be valid points, but at least I’m not going to be the schmuck in a Sponge Bob Square Pants costume puking all over himself at a lame bar party at three in the morning. I may not be that much fun, but I’ll at least have my dignity.

October 22nd, 2008 by Hoopleton

Although I don’t think the numbers are accurate, given Barack Obama’s growing appeal in individual swing states (and even in traditionally Republican states), I am surprised that the polls are beginning to tighten in the race for the White House.

Partly this electoral squeeze is due to the panic of Election Day approaching in less than two weeks. Partly I am sure this has to do with, as Roger D. Hodge writes in this month’s Harper’s, the spineless incompetence and mindless corruption of the Democratic Party. But I also wonder if it is simply due to fear brought on by paradigm shift.

Honestly, I have little hope that Obama will be able, or even willing, to really deliver the sort of practical, nuts and bolts change necessary in our political and economic structures. Despite being relatively new to the national scene he is hardly new to politics or the mechanics that it employs. He is from Chicago after all, and if this city knows anything, it’s machine style politics. However, there is no denying that an Obama presidency would shift the very fundamentals of how America is perceived, and really how it perceives itself. Not since Kennedy does a candidate for the Executive have so much potential to realign generational and cultural norms.

The fear bating from McCain/Palin in recent weeks is not so much the sign of a desperate campaign, as much as the panicked outcry of a people horribly afraid of a new world. Obama represents the other, not only in terms of race, but also in terms of temperament, philosophy and priority. He is representative of a new American paradigm, where old-world ethnic and class distinctions are set to be rearranged and even pulverized. In many ways his ascendancy is not merely the legacy of Martin Luther King and the African American community, but of immigrants, the poor and the disenfranchised. Even if he sits on his hands for four years, his election would force the United States to look inward and reassess its image and identity.

Let’s face facts, the media brand that was John McCain as maverick is a thing of the past. The man who is running at the head of the Republican ticket today is unstable, angry, probably senile and full of the same sort of ignorant bile that has demonized Islam and made America into the new evil empire in the eyes of much of the world. His running mate, Sarah Palin, is a moron, a complete and utter insult to the feminist history that she uses as justification for her place in the national spotlight. I have no doubt that if Palin was alive eighty years ago she would be outraged at the prospect of Suffragists attempting to enter the grime and filth of masculine party politics.

We have lived through eight years of complete incompetence. Eight years of lies, secrecy, corruption and abuse. We have seen America’s stature collapse. We have seen the national debt skyrocket. We have seen cronyism and wanton destruction. We have seen national tragedy transformed into the rhetoric of intolerance and hate.

Although the McCain/Palin ticket offers policies somewhat different from Bush/Cheney, the behavior of the Republicans in recent weeks has seemingly done the impossible, it has proven Obama’s charge that a McCain presidency would represent four more years of the same we have already endured for the last eight. As McCain plays up the fear of the other, asking voters how much they really know about Barack Obama, a man vetted constantly in the media over the last two years, and as Sarah Palin speaks of two Americas, the good represented in the small towns and the un-American represented in the large cities, they only continue the sort of myopic and gravely divisive language that men like Joseph McCarthy first invented over fifty years ago. In order to win an election they are actually willing to tear the nation apart (one only has to listen to the crowds at McCain/Palin rallies, calling for Obama’s death to see this in action).

On most days I really truly have faith in that the American people do make the right choice when it all comes down to it. However, I am still fearful. The United States has never before faced such an astounding realignment. Will there be a paradigm shift, or will the forces of the old guard use even extreme methods to guarantee the continuity of the status quo?

One thing is for certain, Election Day 2008 is only the beginning. If Obama is elected the forces of opposition may become even more desperate, even more reckless. If McCain wins (perhaps by Electoral count, but with no hope of carrying the popular vote) America may slide first into Constitutional crises, and then even into open social unrest. Such is the power of new ideas.

October 21st, 2008 by Hoopleton

As October winds down and we find ourselves in the cold days of fall, less than two weeks from the Presidential election in the midst of what is a historic, if not incredibly divisive campaign, as things cool down in the forecast and heat up in the media puppet theater, I am left to look back on other defining moments in the quadrennial spectacle that is the electoral process. So, I offer you this short list of some of the most important elections in US history.

1. 1800. The infant American Republic was barely eleven years old when a major crisis developed in the hotly contested election between incumbent John Adams of the Federalist Party, and his chief rivals, Thomas Jefferson and John Burr of the Democratic-Republicans. The short and long of it was that John Adams was a bit of a douchbag who, by supporting Britain over the wildly popular France (yes, times have changed), championing the Alien and Sedition Acts, which denied Americans the freedoms of speech he helped secure, and his genius capacity to say the wrong thing whenever he opened his mouth (okay, so maybe things haven’t changed) resulted in not only his near landslide defeat, but put him and his party in the fantastic position of having to chose between Jefferson and Burr for the highest office in the land after a tie in the electoral college. Yes, back then the Electoral College was even a greater insult to democracy as electors were free to vote for whomever they wanted. As there was a tie the decision went to the House of Representatives dominated by Federalists who couldn’t decide which of the two Democratic-Republicans were the lesser evil. Through political wrangling, Jefferson was able to peacefully secure the election on the 26th ballot and the result of the whole mess was the 12th Amendment, which instead of just eliminating the Electoral College, instead merely stipulated that electors had to make a distinct choice between President and Vice President, thus perpetuating a broken system and setting up the United States for a slew of future Constitutional crises. Hazzah!

2. 1824. It didn’t take long for the Electoral College to cause yet another clusterfuck when in 1824 the one-party system of the Democratic-Republicans (the Federalists dissolved after 1800) was thrown into upheaval when none of the four major candidates for President secured a majority of electors. Despite the fact that Andrew Jackson won both the popular vote and the larger portion of the electoral vote, that wonderful institution, the Electoral College, requires a clear majority, not a plurality in order to name a winner. So, for the second time in America’s brief history the election was thrown over to the House of Representatives. As most of Congress couldn’t fathom a mere plebe like Jackson ascending to the highest office in the land, John Quincy Adams was voted into the Executive on the very first ballot. When Adams, the runner-up in the actual election, named fourth-place finisher Henry Clay to the cabinet, Jackson accused the President-elect of conspiracy. The result of so much inherent corruption and undemocratic behavior finally led to the reform of the American electoral process. Just kidding! That’s crazy talk. But there was one major result of 1824: four years later Jackson became the first President not born of privilege to be elected under the banner of his newly formed Democratic Party. And as we all know, two parties is much more democratic than one, well, at least more democratic than Communism.

3. 1860. Although having no real political experience and having the kind of charisma that makes dogs angry and babies cry, Abraham Lincoln, arguably one of the greatest Presidents in United States History was elected to the highest office in the land on a platform of abolition. Yes, this backwoods lawyer from Illinois had this ridiculously crazy idea that slavery was bad somehow. Despite not even being on the ballot in nine Southern states, Lincoln managed to score nearly 40% of the popular vote (not that it means anything) and 180 points in the electoral vote, in a four-man race (152 points needed to win). The inauguration party was short-lived for the newly established Republican Party however, as the South seceded before Honest Abe even took office, beginning the American Civil War. The historic significance is clear, as the election of 1860 served as a declaration that the land of the free had to actually guarantee some freedom. And only a hundred years after the American Revolution. What about women, you ask. As Lincoln himself famously stated, “this hour belongs to the negro,” so, get in line!

4. 1912. The election of 1912 is historic if only because it was the only time in America’s past that a third party candidate finished in second place. In 1908, Teddy Roosevelt, the famous progressive man’s man who liked saving animals as much as he liked to hunt them, had decided not to run for a third term thus allowing his portly Vice-President, Howard Taft to waddle into the White House. After four years it became clear that Taft was a big-business loving lush and so in 1912 Roosevelt decided to run again. Despite having won more primaries, Taft’s GOP machine delivered the nomination to the incumbent, thus causing Roosevelt and his progressives to walk out and form the Progressive Party. The Presidential election that year was as close as America has ever come to real choice in party politics. On the Left was Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party and Roosevelt, both calling for more government regulation, worker’s rights, universal suffrage and government protections for poor and elderly Americans. In the Center but leaning slightly Left was Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic nominee who ran primarily on a platform of keeping America out of any foreign war and black people away from the ballot box. And on the Right was Taft, promising to eat his weight in taffy while juggling two Filipino prostitutes and a bull terrier (if you ask me his prospects were shaky from the start). The campaign was bitter, divisive, chaotic (at one point Roosevelt was even shot twice in the chest) and ultimately shone real contrasts in American politics. In the end Wilson won the election in an electoral landslide, despite having only gotten 42% of the vote. Oh, Electoral College, you’re so darned fair.

5. 1960. In one corner you had the Vice-President of the United States, Richard Nixon, a man of vast experience as Eisenhower’s number two for eight years. In the other corner you had the young and relatively inexperienced, John F. Kennedy, promising a new era in American politics. Let’s call it “change.” The 1960 campaign was one of the closest in American history. Kennedy was constantly criticized for his youth, lack of experience and his allegiance to that Italian dictator in the Vatican. Nixon on the other hand seemed to make one mistake after another while constantly coming off to the American people as bitter, angry and inhuman. But in his defense he was an asshole. However, what made the 1960 campaign so historic was the fact that it was the first time that image played a vital role. The 1960 election was the first time that the candidates squared off in a televised debate. Kennedy, rested, tanned and Adonis-like made a splash, while Nixon, looking like, well, Nixon, failed to impress anyone, not even his own mother (that part’s actually true). And so it was that JFK came into the White House on a platform of charisma, good looks and optimism. Though the fact that the mob stuffed the ballots in Chicago might have helped. And of course he did get shot three years later. But, oh well… such is politics.

6. 2000. Dimpled chads, pregnant chads, hanging chads, massive electoral fraud and voter disenfranchisement. Yes, welcome to Florida! In what remains perhaps one of the most absurd elections in Presidential history, especially given what happened in the eight years to follow, Vice President Al Gore found himself in a recount match against former drunken frat boy and Governor of Texas, George W. Bush. The fact that Gore had won the popular vote by over half a million votes didn’t matter, all that did matter was that Florida’s 25 electoral votes were simply too close to call. The war of lawsuits, media attacks and good old American stupidity over the question of whether the state of Florida should do a mandatory, constitutionally required recount, dragged on for weeks and weeks. At the end of the day, however, it was the Supreme Court (voting along strict party lines) that gave the presidency to George Jr. and boy are we grateful for that. The lesson here, as has been the lesson from the start, is that no matter how people vote it just doesn’t matter, the system is designed to screw us over either one way or another. Three cheers for America! Hip hip…

October 7th, 2008 by Hoopleton

With every day more historians, political scientists and philosophers note that the American Empire is in decline. As the military fiasco that is Iraq continues to drag on, America’s status as a champion of good and freedom becomes ever more tarnished. As more banks fail, the status of superpower begins to fade. To say that things are bad would be overly optimistic. The United States is in a freefall. Military blunders, massive borrowing, the insolvency of the welfare state, the nurturing of a credit-based economy, is leading this nation toward ruin. Financial analysts and some in the Left point to the lack of regulation and poor leadership in Washington as the root causes, they are partly right, but what they don’t see and what is so painfully obvious is that the problems run much deeper.

Wall Street is seeing record sell-offs. The banking industry is frozen. Even the sunniest analysts are predicting massive unemployment and at minimum a year of difficult recession. To stem what some fear may become another Great Depression the government is borrowing another trillion dollars. This may soften the current problem, but it only exacerbates the larger concern. America is so far in debt, that even if a full economic reversal happens tomorrow and the United States enters a period of unbridled economic prosperity, not even a quarter of the national debt would be or could be paid off in our lifetimes. Yes, at best we could be in a long, protracted recession, at worst we could ultimately see the complete destruction of what was the United States.

But when you walk out onto the streets of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, or drive down to the local mall, you still see people happily walking out of the stores with bagfuls of purchases. Most probably bought on credit. You still hear people talking about the exploits of celebrities as they wait for their morning latte. There’s no fear in the streets. Americans seem completely disconnected. They watch the news, they read the papers, they may even feel a growing concern, but overall they don’t accept what is happening around them.

The American people once spoke of sacrifice, charity, thriftiness and self-reliance. But we don’t live in that America anymore. We live in an America that believes in the ethos of material wealth. An America where greed is good. Where it is our duty to live beyond our means, and consume what we don’t need. Where the worldly is given near sacred stature. Our holy duty, it would seem, is the attainment of prosperity. We have abandoned our innocent faith in the good of government, our beliefs in service and the tenets of equality, of restraint, and traded those once glorious virtues (empty virtues they might have been) for the pretenses of class. For the arrogance of false righteousness.

What’s most alarming about this disconnect between the realities of the economy, if not our declining American values as a whole, and what we do everyday of our increasingly empty lives, is that we still use words like equality, charity, freedom, even if all meaning has been drained from them. We still pretend to value principals we have discarded. We constantly remind ourselves how good and generous we are, while we push the poor further into the gutter and murder people in the name of salvation.

It’s not surprising then that we call ourselves a religious nation. We call ourselves people of faith. It makes sense that Americans attend church more than citizens of any other modern, industrialized nation. It makes sense that the disconnect between our supposed national beliefs and the realities of our actions has increased in the thirty years that has seen such a resurgence in “faith.” It makes sense because the same hypocrisy, the same contradictions are only as clearly visible when one looks at religion.

In many ways the religions of the world have always been the authors of the worst form of evils. While speaking to love and compassion religions have killed millions, if not tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions throughout history. The Crusades, the burning of witches, ancient and modern terrorism are but only a few examples. People who would profess to embrace the love of God are the same people who would murder their fellow man for being gay, or bomb entire nations off the face of the Earth. People who could recite passages from the Bible about the meek inheriting the Earth construct gated communities and lead battles to gentrify what they consider “slums.”

In a nation where elected officials to the highest office in the land proclaim the validity of Creationism, where wars are justified as being in-sync with the will of God, where televangelists suck billions of dollars annually from their followers while spewing hate, where questions of faith inform our electoral process more and more with every cycle, it is obvious that extremism is not that far removed from the mainstream discussions of the day. The truth is that the extremists aren’t just those on the side of the stage, they’re running the goddamn show. Exceptions perhaps, but exceptions that prove the rule.

Sartre called terrorism “the atom bomb of the poor.” If the roles were reversed and it was Muslim troops on our street corners can anyone honestly say that it wouldn’t be the Christian Right detonating bombs in the marketplace? What are interventions like the war in Iraq if not religious crusades? What is our disconnection from the massive economic crisis if not born out of our seeming acceptance of religious hypocrisy?

In a world where we know that the biography of Christ is nothing more than an amalgam of the mythologies of dozens of earlier pagan gods. In a world where we know that the Earth is 4 billion years old and that dinosaurs never interacted with man, is it not surprising that ignorance is increasingly driving the debate? That we refuse to accept as truth the state of nation or the state of the world?

I can’t help but to think back to Philip Wylie’s brilliant collection of essays entitled, GENERATION OF VIPERS, first published in 1942. Perhaps one of the most thoughtful writers on the American character since De Tocqueville, Wylie lambasted the churches for teaching a perverted version of Christ’s true message. Wylie stated simply and clearly that Christ would be disgusted by the use of his character as an example for the ideal life, or to see his image elevated to mythological proportions. As Wylie wrote: “Christ had powerful flashes of insight into the deep nature of man’s consciousness and he used every device he could invent to try to reveal the process of that insight to those who would listen. He failed. The real meaning of his gospel was largely lost even to his disciples. Such of it as they salvaged, they set down badly, and they showed their incomprehensions in the way they wrote about their master.

“The one, great positive idea which Christ repeatedly tried to express was the thought that no individual human being could know himself unless his inner honesty was complete. The peace he talked of was an inner peace, and he said so, always. The way to it was through truth and through the abandonment of preoccupation with temporal matters – with worldly goods and with trade and gain. He did not overlook the necessity of objective living, but he admonished against considering a life oriented wholly out toward matter as a satisfying life.”

In other words, Christ’s central tenet was that inner integrity, the knowledge of the sum of a life, was essential to finding ultimate truth, to really knowing oneself and the eternal wisdom of the world. If you do not know yourself, how could you know other people or the reality in which you dwell? How could you recognize the larger processes at work? How could you see the flaws of your own life and the destruction you cause yourself as well as others? To put it yet another way, if you do not know your own mind it is impossible to think for yourself or even know what you’re thinking, satisfaction and clarity is therefore impossible to ever achieve. More importantly, you risk damaging and being damaged by those around you, as their flawed way of thinking, their acceptance of false paradigms and inability to know their own selves, creates a destructive cycle. Everyone following the same path, even if it leads to disaster.

Wylie concludes his essay on Christianity by going over the dangers of dogma as the decimation of complex philosophies into simple concepts that lose all meaning and insight and are then mangled and manipulated to justify the power relationships of a particular time, society. By pulling apart the tapestry of truth into easy to digest rules the meaning is lost. Without self-knowledge, the tenet against murder may seem clear, until one considers such ideas on a more subjective plane and realizes that murderers are actually all around us. Wylie writes, “They kill not with ax, but with psychical tools – cutting down their victims slowly by meanness, inconsideration, truculence, the willed but witless evil of their advice, and all other kinds of cruelty. These murderers, including myriad wives and husbands, follow their spouses to their graves weeping sorrowfully, thinking them to be dead of high blood pressure or a stomach ulcer, and not aware of one instant that they have murdered them through some spite or some wish for escape, as surely as if they had fed them arsenic.”

The danger of dogma, whatever form that dogma may take, is that it only prescribes rules on the most basic, physical plane. Such rules keep us from truly thinking. Without introspection these rules we follow in all things, the concepts we take as being natural laws of life and nature, cannot ever truly grapple with the inherent contradictions of human beings. Where we may follow the ideal of not killing in its most basic form, we visit all sorts of violence on each other in another. Whereas we may hold to the ideal of loving thy neighbor, we cannot conceive of intolerance toward those who are different as being in conflict with that belief. Although we may understand that American society is in crisis, we do not see how our behavior and indeed our proscribed role as consumers may be attributing to ultimate collapse.

Our lack of self-knowing, is exactly why we are blind to the flaws and dangers of not only our modern world but our very selves. To step away from the tenets of blind dogma, whether it be religious, cultural, political or economic, would mean accepting the brutal truths of those flawed belief systems, a painful destruction of all the things we held sacred. A recognition of all the problems we could never see and of all the warnings we could never face. This is why Christ’s teachings were so revolutionary and why they could never be honestly told. Because if we did as he truly taught, if we were able to face the cruel awakening of our souls, for the first time in history the gap between the powerful and the powerless would disappear for good. To really embrace Realism and to truly know oneself in every form, warts and all, would be to embrace freedom. True freedom.

The problem is that no church would dismantle dogma just as neither would our masters in government or business. To do so would be to invite dissension. It would mean that the disconnect between false and true reality would vanish and with it the shackles that keep us bound. In such a world popes, presidents, CEOs and kings would find themselves on the same level as the rest of us. They would find a global population no longer willing to play out their petty games of power.

So we come full circle. America’s decline on the surface is one of politics and economics, but on a deeper level it is a symptom to our adherence to false interpretations, if not outright manipulations, of genuine revelation. It is brought on by our inability to know thy selves.

Should we cling to the fairy tales of the past, or as Christ (by proxy of Philip Wylie) recommends, throw off our dogmas and begin to look inward for the fulfillment, clarity and freedom we so gravely lack? If we choose the former, I cannot help but be afraid that our time will shortly run out.

October 1st, 2008 by Hoopleton

October, 2008. These are interesting times. Elections. Economic crises. Global politics shifting. People are murmuring about the fall of empires. The season is fully turning into fall. The days grow shorter.

I seem to be caught walking in a dreamscape. As I glance around everything looks artificial. The shading seems pixilated. Reflections on rainwater seem crisp, but unnatural. Tastes and smells seem muted. Even the glow of sunlight is not as it used to be. These are all perceptions, I know, but even if these are just extensions of mood they may also be projections of what my soul cannot put into words. Symptoms of some undiagnosed disease. Subconscious manifestations of an awakening in my mind, whether for better of for worse.

The ancients believed that the afterlife was just a reflection of this world. People moved as phantoms, just out of the light of direct sight. It was an existence of shadows in which the dead were ignorant of their new reality. Going through the motions of living, the spirits of the departed could not and would not move on to find rest. They were trapped. Destined to dwell in toil for all eternity, forever replaying the lives they refused to let go.

More and more of the everyday seems like a mundane distraction. The pettiness of people appears clearer. The fury of politics, economics and all the things we deem so natural slips away into the deafening roar of static. I find myself stopping at random intervals on the street. I find myself noticing the stillness around me and I begin to wonder if perhaps I’m slipping out of time.

What am I waking up to? How long have I been asleep? Have I been staring at the shadows of the cave wall for the last ten years? Do I have the strength to turn and see the world as it really is?

For the Celts, October was the month in which the boundaries between the living and the dead would vanish. Two worlds would merge and all could pass freely between the gates. I don’t think this is the time yet. We still have a couple summers to go. But it’s coming. Events have been set in motion. The die is cast. And we have to decide if we want to keep sleeping. If the virtual reality is better than truth. If we want to remain just phantoms caught in the loop.