NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2012: Barry Spector: Madness at the Gates of the City

Barry Spector November 18, 2012 at 10:54am

Yes, Terry. We could, from the mythological perspective, practically define America as having banished Eros, along with Dionysus and Aphrodite. The loss of these divine figures is a major contributor to what Campbell described as our modern, "demythologized" world. In such a world, we search desperately if unconsciously for replacements that temporarily assuage our hunger for meaning. The culture of celebrity is one way we do that. To me, it is the mirror opposite of fundamentalism.

Bill Denham November 18, 2012 at 10:26am

Looking to what you mention as hopeful signs coming out of our recent election, Barry,

Still, though, even a corporate-Democrat president and congress may feel enough public pressure now to agree on the necessity of contributing to some real, positive change.

it seems to me that we each need to figure out how we can, in our individual and outrageously privileged lives--privilege is not just defined by economic well being, at the core, the most privileged are the most conscious--how we can devote some portion of our creativity and energy and resources to increasing this public pressure on the power structure.

It is easy to expend more of our energies in talking among ourselves, as you say, to the choir, reinforcing our sense of belonging to this elite group of intelligent, thoughtful, caring people, than to devote them to figuring out what the hell to do next.

Certainly a part of that, for each of us, is to figure out how we can leverage our particular gifts and privilege to increase this public pressure for change toward a more humane and psychologically honest culture.

In my case, I'm focusing on the poems that came to me after Matthew's murder--poems that draw our attention not only to the tragic individual loss of this young life but to my own and our collective responsibility for the loss of our children's lives to street violence. Will this make a difference? I don't know but I seem to not be able to do otherwise. Maybe this process will move me out of the "choir" into the broader world. We'll see. Maybe this process will contribute to public pressure toward change--maybe help call attention to the cost of the myth of our own innocence, not just in war abroad but right here at home, a cost in young people's lives.

But Matt . . . Matt was hope

in the midst of hopelessness.

He was smiling and laughing

with his friends when he was shot,

from behind—one bullet to the head, one to the back—

by two masked kids in an act of retaliation

or initiation—who knows what?

Maybe some kind of turf war,

right here, not halfway ‘round the world

in Afghanistan or Iraq—right here.

from Matt's funeral

Looking for Matthew

I'll close with this one . . .

This I believe

I hear the voice of fear

and I am afraid.

I hear the voice of hope

and I have hope.

I hear the silence of the voiceless,

and I weep—

for I know that silence

is shattered time and again,

time and again by the sound of shots—

and my child, our child,

lies dead on the street,

my street, our street

and I weep, I weep

for that loss

of hope.

Yet, I live. I breathe and I speak

and though I weep

and though I am afraid

and lie awake in the dark of night,

I must not be silent.

My voice, quavering

as it sometimes may be,

must speak the certainty I know,

must be a voice for the voiceless,

must be a voice of hope.

This I believe.

10/9/08

Gunni-Britt Borden November 18, 2012 at 4:18am

Hi All! This is all so true, the same theme almost brought a good president down. I grew up in Denmark, and my friends there thought we were all mad at the time. I am musing though, about the oportunity for General Petreas to bring new meaning into his life. What looks to many like a fall, may prove to be a blessing. A chance to review a life dedicated to the madness of war. I am also wondering what can be done to turn this tide?

Britt Borden

Terry Ebinger November 17, 2012 at 5:53pm

Barry,

Beautifully said! I didn't realize, shockingly, that he had never seen combat. The latest distraction from depth and meaning, the latest temporary excitement produced by a media obsessed with meaningless drama... What a toxic replacement for Eros in the lives of Americans—the never-ending parade of the melodramas of an Eros which has been degraded into sex scandals!

—Terry Ebinger

Bonnie Bright November 14, 2012 at 11:15am

Barry: This is a highly astute assessment, and I'm most intrigued by your point about how scandalized everyone is about the sex aspect while we collectively turn our heads away from the elephant in the room: the issues of violence, war, mistreatment of women in the military (and at hoome), and also---not taking care of the soldiers we have programmed for battle, sent into the fray, and forgotten about upon their return. What do others here in the community think? I'd love to hear more.

Barry Spector November 13, 2012 at 7:47pm

I just posted a short blog on the Petreus affair:

A Few Thoughts on the Petreus Affair

The corporate media (our mythic gatekeepers) have built up General Petreus' celebrity/warrior status for over ten years. In fact, this man has never seen combat. He made it to Brigadier General solely on his managerial skills, as essentially a corporate executive.

However, I am interested in neither his pseudo-warrior status nor his sex affair, but in the mythic implications. Modern culture long ago replaced the creative imagination with its the toxic mimic. It substituted reverence for the gods (within) with the culture of celebrity.

We have always had a profound need to see our deeper nature projected onto kings and queens, figures of "nobility" (which comes from the same Greek root as "gnosis.") A "noble" person is one who knows him- or herself. But these are archetypal images – and therefore they are images of perfection. When we project those images onto actual human beings, those beings, being human, inevitably disappoint us. This explains why their fall is so precipitous, and why we revel so gleefully in their downfall, when only yesterday we adored them.

What makes this “affair” so specifically American, however (in Europe, this thing wouldn’t make the second section of any daily newspaper), is the fact that it’s a sex affair.

The man who must take ultimate responsibility for two failed wars, the deaths of thousands, the waste of billions and a culture of torture and misogyny, where more soldiers die from suicide than from combat, where female soldiers are more likely to get raped than at home, where their assailants are almost never charged with a crime, has fallen because he cheated on his wife! Only a society steeped, like ours is, in a profoundly puritanical legacy can fail to see the irony in this story.

Bonnie Bright November 7, 2012 at 12:03pm

Hi Barry (and all),

It's been interesting to come back to come back and re-read your blogpost this morning now that the presidential election has been settled. I continue to be struck by how polarized our nation is, and how "right" we all believe we are, regardless of the side we're on. And how difficult it is to change anyone's opinion,--including my own. We are so attached to them, and they are so tied to our very identities.

One line that jumped out at me from your blog this time--and you repeat it essentially in the book-- is "The purpose of ritual at the level of the large, national state is to sustain the group by repeating, at various levels of intensity, the act of group creation." I'm thinking about how these two very different political parties have created and recreated themselves again now on the basis of last night's events---and wondering how and if the process of "creation" from a ritual such as this could ever truly be creative in the sense that it would allow us to transcend our attachment to beliefs, systems and parties and "create" a unified nation. Can you speak to that a bit? Would love to hear yours--and everyone's--thoughts on the subject as we go on living our myths....

Barry Spector > Bonnie Bright November 7, 2012 at 5:05pm

Hi all. On the subject of polarization, I think the notion has become a cliche, which means we haven't looked at it clearly. This country is NOT polarized into liberals and conservatives, except in the sense of the electoral map, which shows blue states on the coasts and red states in the "fly-over" areas. I believe that a much deeper polarization exists, a result of the breakdown of the system itself: the divide between the 50% of us who vote and the other 50% who long ago stopped participating in the democratic process. These people, of course, are for the most part poor, the very people who were once the backbone of the Democratic Party before it went corporate. If you check public opinion polls on almost any issue, huge majorities of Americans, including evangelicals, are far to the left of either party.

On the subject of changing another's opinion: A friend has "un-friended" someone because that person was saying deliberately provocative, right-wing stuff on FB. This led me to think about the notion of "provocation," which comes from the same Latin root as "evoke," "invoke" and "vocal." I myself love to provoke strong, opinionated response in conversations with friends and readers, people who actually want to try to arrive at the truth of something or other. However, what this guy was doing (and we've all heard or seen this kind of stuff) was deliberately trying to get people angry.

And here's where both psychology and mythology come in. He is probably one of the millions of angry white males who are now the backbone of the Republican party. They exemplify for me one of the great themes of both my book and American history as well: men who are objectively in positions of privilege (including, at the extreme, actual billionaires) who have been led to identify themselves as victims. Some can be openly angry; others do the passive aggressive thing and provoke others to carry their anger for them, so they can see it in others.

Bonnie, please say more about how you see the two parties have re-created themselves on the basis of last night's events. I'm not sure what you mean.

We need to look at our attachment to beliefs, systems and parties, I think, within the much larger context of our shared devotion to American Innocence. To me, the major difference between the parties at this point is in terms of whom they consider part of "us," the polis. Who is within the pale, and who is the "other?" While the Republicans are clearly the bad guys in this context, we can hardly identify the Democrats as the party of ultimate inclusion as long as a Democratic President continues to prosecute wars of imperial aggression and speaks of the middle class instead of poor people.

In the long run, the 12-step image is accurate: just like an alcoholic, the nation may have to "hit bottom," acknowledge the depths of our diminished lives and grieve deeply together before we can engage in the rituals of reconciliation.
Bonnie Bright > Barry Spector November 10, 2012 at 11:47am

Barry, thanks for a very powerful post. I totally agree with you about the shift in perception of polarization and the question of those who have "seceded" from the democratic process altogether. Who knows why? Are they just so fed up they don't want to participate, or do they feel so powerless that they don't bother to try?

Meanwhile,when I stated that the "two parties have created and recreated themselves again" after the election, perhaps a better word woud have been re-enforced. I meant they have re-affirmed their identities based on what they were before, added this new event of the election into the mix, and then re-organized beliefs to accomodate whatever just happened--whether their candidate won or lost. I think I meant this in the same way that you talk about the "myth of American innocence" in the sense that most of us who identify with a particular party believe this is how it is and we don't question the process or the underlying currents that took us there. Somehow, this myth that "our candidate" won or lost needs to be examined at it's root, rather than the collective simply justifying WHY this was so and not wondering WHY one lost and one won at all.
Barry Spector > Bonnie Bright November 11, 2012 at 1:08pm

Bonnie - I used to run a furniture moving company. Of the dozens of young, working-class men who worked for me over 35 years, I know for sure that hardly any of them had ever voted. From one perspective, I agree that their cynicism worked against their own best interests. But looked at from another point of view, it is possible that their self-indentified "outsider" status (in a very affluent city) allowed them to see the truth of our political system better than we "educated" people.

Noam Chomsky argues that the most educated people in our society believe most strongly in our mythic framework. Similarly (and perhaps against stereotype), opposition to the Viet Nam war varied absolutely directly by income.

Chomsky has also taught that,so long as our media gate-keepers agree to limit the range of acceptable debate, then those who argue with others within the pale can seem to be expressing a real continuum of ideas.

As for your second comment, perhaps the notion of cognitive dissonance is helpful. When belief systems (myths, if you prefer) are so strong and we confront facts that disprove our beliefs, we simply change the facts to conform with them.

But as always, I'm far less interested in the apparent polarity of beliefs between parties than in the broad, overwhelming mythic threads that connect most Americans. Clearly, there is much to celebrate about this election, not the least of which is the demographic shift that is itself an indication of major cracks appearing in the myth. Abortion rights will be ensured through future Supreme Court appointments, and perhaps Global Warming will once again become an important issue.

Still, all it would take to rapidly shore up our shared sense of innocence and denial would be another terrorist attack. Right now, Facebook is full of heartfelt posts honoring our veterans as well as references to the fact that the President apparently wept as he congratulated his campaign workers, even as his first official, post-election action was another drone bombing in Pakistan.

When it comes to the ultimate confrontation between "us" and "other," I'm afraid that most of us, Democrat, Republican or non-voter, if faced with a serious threat to our self-image, would still retreat into the comfortable, reactive space of rallying around the flag.

Still, though, even a corporate-Democrat president and congress may feel enough public pressure now to agree on the necessity of contributing to some real, positive change.

But I'd like to close this post by adding something completely different to this discussion. I had to do some business in one of the Oakland city administration buildings the other day. It was an ugly, soul-less high rise office building. But this building was different, because Oakland is an African-American city. It was two days before Day of the Dead, and the lobby had been decorated with four large, elaborate, beautiful shrines to city employees who had died in the previous year. People had brought soul into the building. It's little things like this that give me hope.

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NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2012: Barry Spector: Madness at the Gates of the City

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