by Don Hynes
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| Vantage Point | Culture and Politics by Don Hynes |
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"No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong.
He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so,
the prejudice will be gone." - Tom Paine
August 25, 2003 Made in the Image The key advance in the hope of 20th century peace was the development of depth psychology, the understanding of the hidden drivers in the individual and collective human psyche. This new awareness allowed humanity to see prejudice in a new light, to fathom the inexplicable dementia of previous generations, to realize that the forces that created the aberrant distortions of apartheid and genocide, of oppression and war, of inequality and bigotry and all the cruel and destructive forms we’ve known, could be clarified or at least addressed within the individual, and with sufficient momentum and education be healed in the larger setting of culture and community. At least that was the optimistic view a few years ago, before the psychological and social advances of the last four generations were marginalized by the increasingly myopic and juvenile psychology of present U.S. leadership. America bears many images for and to the world, but one of the more prevalent today is of an adolescent male, inebriated on the delusions of invincibility and immortality, recklessly bearing down on the international community in a powerfully destructive machine. The most delusional part of our collective psyche is the addiction to image. When the President made his appearance on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, dressed up in the costume of a fighter pilot, he drew applause from those who supported the image and derision from those who opposed it. What I felt was a kind of implosive dread. Could the man who was occupying the most powerful position in the world be so personally insecure as to need this phony image to bolster his identity? Could the man who had gone to great lengths as governor of Texas to disguise and delete his record as a National Guard reservist be so personally unconscious as to find satisfaction in portraying an outright lie before service men and women who were actually in harms way? The President is not alone in this addiction to image. You only have to surf the cable channels to be aware of the deadening repetition of what kind of human being you and I are supposed to be, or more clearly, to appear like; the image we are conditioned to project and be identified with. We describe our mercenary army in Iraq as our “nation’s finest” hiding from the reality of civilian atrocities and the apocalyptic reality of our invasion and occupation. A newspaper in Portland Oregon headlined “Mission Accomplished” to welcome President Bush to this City, apparently ignorant of the chaos of the Iraq mission (whatever that actually was or is), or worse, delusionally willing to repeat these comforting phrases, assuring us about the place we imagine we occupy as proponents of freedom rather than squarely face the chilling reality of the political and military violence that serve as our primary national export. The Brittany Spears pre-teen mystique and tabloid non-sense of the grocery line seem harmless enough until they become the national pantheon. The born again are entitled to their personal saviors and cherished belief systems but when they become the enforcing tools of the Departments of Justice and Defense the country is in dire jeopardy. We can absorb a delusional rich boy who couldn’t or wouldn’t grow up in a personally authentic manner, who preferred to inherit an identity rather than become what his innermost template summoned, but can we afford that level of gross immaturity not only in the dummy seat of a jet fighter photo opportunity but at the controlling lever of government? As a people we cannot face these issues with sarcasm, or further projection about them and us, about the poor benighted in the next pew or that other neighborhood cross-town. The evildoers that satisfy our fears are the projections of what we have not faced within our individual and national boundaries. The wars we carry on are the violence of our un-integrated emotions, our unresolved prejudices. The idealism of our intentions grows ever disparate from the reality of our actions as George Monbiot writes for Z-Net: “Paradise is the founding myth of the colonist. Unable to contemplate the truth of what we do, we extract from our fathomless collective guilt a story of primordial innocence." The real action is on the home front, the only real hope and healing our ability, individually and collectively, to look deeply within and act in accord with the resultant vision. “To keep your character intact you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time.” - Katherine Hepburn Iraq Today reports: “Iraqis have complained bitterly about the near lack of security in Iraq. Last Tuesday, international terrorists brought those concerns to the world's front door.” The attack on the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was a signal for entrenched militarists like Senator John McCain and Chief of Occupation Bremer to request more troops, U.S. and foreign (what are we, chopped liver?), but as Pepe Escobar writes for Asia Times: “the bloody attack on the "soldiers of peace" who work under the sky-blue flag, is the culmination of a coherent sequence: sabotage of water pipelines, sabotage of oil pipelines, and now sabotage of humanitarian aid. Water, oil and the UN are the targets in a perverse scorched-earth policy designed to prevent any possibility of normalization in Iraq. In the minds of the attackers, as the American occupying force has organized and installed a durable chaos, now it's the time to tell the Americans: you don't, and you can't, control anything.” “The UN attack underlines America’s crumbling authority” according to Robert Fisk on the ground in Iraq, but though the situation grows increasingly dangerous every day the Administration advocates pay cuts for the American troops as a remedy to the budget disaster of this war, while the Department of Defense plays numbers games to obscure the U.S. casualties. Bob Herbert writes: “How long is it going to take for us to recognize that the war we so foolishly started in Iraq is a fiasco — tragic, deeply dehumanizing and ultimately unwinnable? How much time and how much money and how many wasted lives is it going to take?” We seem destined to repeat the lessons of the past that we failed to integrate, or as one Vietnam veteran writes, “have we forgotten anger in the eyes?” Iraqis describe the current system of justice as “punishment without trial” and the ultimately defeating link between the present U.S. occupation and the terrors of Sadaam past is being established through the increasing horror of daily life for the civilian population as poignantly reported by Ed Vuillamy for the British Guardian. “Freedom wasn't mean to taste so bittersweet” according to an editorial by Sarmad Ali in Iraq Today, as the real danger of Iraq “decomposing” into an irresolvable anarchy of militarized opponents was outlined before the international community by Dominique de Villepin, the French ambassador to the U.N. who was a voice of reason before the invasion that the U.S. chose not only to reject by to vilify with the ridiculous hubris of Beavis, Butthead and DeLay. We have the privilege of distance from the violence we are creating in Iraq, but for the people who live with this descent Salam Pax writes eloquently: “Maybe we Iraqis did expect too much from the American invasion, we did hope there was going to be an easy way. Get rid of Saddam and have the Americans help us rebuild. I don't think like that anymore. I am starting to believe that the chaos we will go thru the next 5 or 10 years is part of the price we will “have” to pay to have our freedom. This Beirut-ification is the way to learn how we should live as a free country and respect each other; it is just too painful to admit. It is too painful to have to admit that the [burn it down to build it up] process is what we will have to go thru.” Dangerous Religion Few voices within organized religion have written about the responsibility to oppose the distorted theologies posing as Christianity within the Republican right wing, but Jim Wallis writes brilliantly on this theme for Sojourner Magazine. The Washington Post put together a comprehensive review of the mass deception of the U.S. people and supposedly the U.S. Congress by the Administration push for war in this important article, while Scott Ritter writes about the unexplainable lack of U.S. military protection for Iraqi records concerning the WMDs. The Israel government continues to dissemble it’s remaining credibility about concerns for peace by destroying Palestinian communities in order to expand its version of the Berlin wall. The road map is a sad joke to those who have listened to these catchy phrases for years but watched the ongoing expansion of Israel, the destruction of what remains of Palestine and the increasing tragedy for both Palestinians and Israelis in terrorist violence by extremists on both sides. The simplest path to peace in Israel is obvious: STOP ALL U.S. FUNDING OF ISRAEL. Period. That would bring Sharon and his anarchic forces to a grinding halt and would pave the way for real negotiations. If you’re a regular on the Internet you’ve read Greg Palast’s summary of the whys and wherefores of the electrical blackout in the northeast. If not, here’s a morsel of fine investigative journalism from one of the few writers who knows the history of deregulation and the corporate government alliance to defraud and undermine the electrical power infrastructure of the U.S. Lastly, why wasn’t priest just publicly executed instead of being sent to his certain death in State incarceration? There isn’t a judge in America who doesn’t know the fate of child molesters in prison. Pedophilia is a destructive illness but is this the way for justice to be served or anyone involved to find healing? Can we learn something about the horrible violence that millions of men and women suffer in our criminal justice system, or will we be satisfied with the hypocritical prayers offered by the Boston archdiocesan spokesman. Who were the real criminals in this matter anyhow, the priest – pedophiles who were badly in need of real investigation and treatment, or the Roman Catholic hierarchy who protected their power and financial interests by hiding the truth and the perpetrators? Well of Grief by David Whyte Those who will not slip beneath the still surface On the well of grief Turning down through its black water To the place we cannot breathe Will never know the source from which we drink The secret water cold and clear Nor find in the darkness glimmering The small round coins Thrown by those who wished for something else. Peace. *** |
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